For most of my career, I have been in the business of telling stories. Not my own. Stories for brands trying to connect with consumers. Stories designed to persuade, sell, launch, reposition or transform perceptions. Stories that began in meeting rooms, travelled through countless PowerPoint slides, and eventually found their way onto billboards, radio stations, television screens, and social media feeds.
Author: Yvonne Acheampong
For a long time, I thought creativity was the most important thing in advertising. After all, creativity is the part everyone sees. The campaign. The idea. The social post. The commercial.
The longer I've worked in this industry, however, the more I've realised that advertising isn't really about creativity. It's about people.
Behind every campaign sits a collection of individuals trying to achieve something together. The account manager keeping multiple priorities aligned. The strategist challenging assumptions. The creative fighting for an idea they believe in. The client navigating pressures nobody else in the room can see. The young executive hoping they're doing enough to earn their place at the table.
The work matters, of course.
But in my experience, the success or failure of that work is often determined by human factors rather than creative ones. Trust. Ambition. Ego. Relationships. Leadership. The ability to bring different perspectives together in pursuit of a common goal.
Over the years, I've had the privilege of experiencing agency life from different seats around the table. Early in my career, I was focused on learning the craft. Later came the responsibility of managing teams, developing people, and helping grow a business. With every new role, the view changed.
What struck me wasn't how much the work changed, but how differently people experienced it. The junior executive worried about getting it right. The manager learning how to lead. The business leader balancing commercial realities with the desire to produce exceptional work. Everyone looking at the same situation through a completely different lens.
And yet, for all our conversations about performance, growth, and innovation, we rarely talk openly about the emotional realities of professional life. What happens when success feels different from what we imagined? How much of ourselves should we give to work we genuinely love? What happens when ambition, friendship and insecurity find themselves in the same meeting room?
The most valuable lessons of my career have rarely come from campaigns. They came from people.
From brilliant thinkers and generous mentors. From difficult personalities and quiet problem-solvers. From ambitious newcomers trying to prove themselves and experienced leaders still figuring things out as they go.
Perhaps that's why I've become increasingly interested in the stories behind the work. Because long after the campaign ends, it's usually the people I remember. The conversations. The relationships. The lessons. The moments that reveal something true about who we are when nobody is looking.
Those observations eventually inspired Please Find Attached, a collection of fictional short stories exploring ambition, identity, workplace dynamics, and the wonderfully complicated people behind professional life. The characters are fictional. The emotions behind them are not.
Because whether you work in advertising, finance, technology, or any other industry, one thing remains true: Work has always been about people. And it probably always will be.
