I picked friction in January.

I picked it because everything in our industry had gone soft. One-click checkout, autoplay, auto-reply, auto-caption. Frictionless payments, frictionless onboarding, frictionless content. Frictionless thinking. Ask the machine, paste the answer.

What I said on the Tuesday morning was that the effort is where the good lived. The reply. The phone call. The awkward hello. The draft you rewrote eleven times. The strategy that took three weeks instead of three prompts.

Friction isn’t the thing standing between you and the work. Friction is the work.

That was the theory, anyway. Then thirty-odd speakers who had never spoken to each other spent two days at Optus Stadium proving it from angles I genuinely did not see coming.

Here’s what actually happened.

Clare opened by naming the thing

Clare Pickens called it the great friction removal experiment, and then spent forty minutes taking it apart with data.

The line that stuck was about the promise the industry has been sold. We used to tell clients to pick two of good, fast and cheap. Now everyone expects all three. “I’m here to tell you that that’s absolute rubbish.”

She had the receipts. Companies quietly rehiring because token budgets cost more than the people they replaced. The Christmas advertisement that took over a hundred people to make and about as long as a traditional campaign would have. And the Marketing Week experiment that showed the same campaign to three groups with three different origin stories, where the version described as made by a specialist agency and an origami artist beat the one described as made by AI on trust, creativity and appeal. Identical work. Different perceived effort.

Then she gave us friction maxing, which promptly took over the entire conference. Sophie Winter opened her session the next day by saying she hoped it would stick. It has.

If you take one thing back to your team, take this: a Formula 1 race is not won by the driver who goes fastest. It’s won by the one who slows down the least.

Everybody found their own version of it

This is the part I keep thinking about.

Tim Duggan brought conflict, and pointed out that we spend more time teaching people Microsoft Excel than teaching them how to disagree. He gave us four terrains, a scoring exercise most people did quietly on their phones, and the most portable takeaway of the two days: “how” is the most powerful word in conflict, because it drags the other person into solving the problem with you.

Tess Palmyre drew the distinction I have wanted someone to make for years. When you’re asking people to participate, especially people with nothing left in the tank, your job is to remove friction. Do the homework. Pay them properly. Go to where they are. But inside your own team, friction is the point, because “a frictionless team can easily become a team where nobody challenges anything at all.”

Christina Garnett arrived and called out trust cosplay, which is the white-text-on-solid-background apology that carefully avoids apologising. She also refused to let anyone blame the bots. “We were dead first. We became the bots first, and then we trained the bots to be just like us.” Her homework question is now stuck to my monitor: when was the last time you posted something that wasn’t downstream of a KPI?

Jes Scholz told a hall full of social media people that they’ve been optimising for the wrong algorithm. Rob Campbell closed day one by asking us to be crooked trees. Saira Manns swapped the career ladder for a map. Jess Zafarris made a hall full of marketers care about etymology, then took us to puppies.

Nobody coordinated. That’s what got me.

The sessions that quietly changed people’s plans

Some of the most useful stuff wasn’t the keynotes.

Jamie Kho and James Jeffs walked us through what happens when a 125-year-old bank closes every branch, and the answer was that support doesn’t disappear, it just moves to social. Their line about visible help was the one people repeated at the coffee cart: one answer helps hundreds, and customers can watch you doing it. The trust becomes visible.

Ariel Bastian scared a good portion of the audience straight on privacy law, including the detail that the Commonwealth threshold now catches organisations most people in the audience assumed were too small to worry, and that the new WA Act commenced on 1 July. If you do work for a state or local government agency, go and check your contract. She was very clear about that.

Larah Kennedy and Kelly McParlane gave the most honest Reddit session I’ve seen anywhere, largely because most of it was about when not to post. David Stewart made trademark law funny, which should not be possible, and taught everyone the difference between a business name and an actual protectable asset.

Lizzie Young brought numbers from Cannes on what audio does to a campaign. Pamela Obeid made the case that creator marketing has stopped being a tactic and become infrastructure. Will Bal showed live what AI models do when someone asks them to recommend a supplier, which was the moment several people in the audience visibly reached for their phones.

Marc Fennell and Jenna Clarke closed the loop on the AI conversation on day two, and Marc’s warning about the vanilla-isation of culture landed harder because he’d made it about audiences rather than about us. People can tell. That was his point. They can already tell.

Jess Zafarris took the closing keynote and reminded us that the words we choose are the last thing that’s actually ours.

The bits that don’t show up in a session recap

The Lube Lounge was dimmer than previous years. That was deliberate. The curtains block the natural light and the whole point was somewhere you could actually stop.

The Confession Booth by Sked Social did exactly what we hoped, which is that people said things into a soundproofed box that they would never say on a stage, and then heard someone else’s confession played back at them, scrambled. Andrés built a bank of fifty prompts for it. People still went off script.

Barkout Session with Dogs Refuge Home landed on International Dog Day, which was a happy accident of the calendar. Thank you to everyone who put a gold coin in for a pat.

The Human Search Engine had no speaker, no slides and no recording. Just tables of people answering each other’s questions. It was the hardest session to explain in the program and the one I was most nervous about.

Rub Shoulders on day one put people at tables with others facing the same problem or working in the same sector. Every year the feedback tells us the conversations between sessions are the thing. So this year we programmed them.

Thank you

Nine years. Same venue. Same incredible AV team. Same woman who still doesn’t sleep in August or learn her opening remarks.

Thank you to Barry Winmar for the Welcome to Country, and to Robbie for being my buddy in this again.

To every speaker who flew in, wrote something new, and then stayed for other people’s sessions instead of leaving straight after their own. You know who you are and it does not go unnoticed.

To our partners, who back an independent conference in a market where that is a genuine choice rather than a default.

And to the eight people who pick up the phone, talk me off the ledges, tell me when an idea is terrible and then help me execute the good ones. This looks effortless because they make it look that way.

To everyone who came for the first time with no colleagues, badge on, phone out, pretending to read something important: I saw you, and I hope you found the helpers.

Next year

SOS27 is 24 & 25 August 2027 at Optus Stadium.

Year ten.

If you want to be first to know when tickets open, you know where to find us.

Thanks for a good one. Go and do something with it.