Drawing lessons from aviation and ancient systems of Roman discipline, Andrew Tindall outlines why January is the best and perhaps only time marketers can make smart, long-term decisions.
Adobe Stock
In the early 1970s, the highly trained crew of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 became distracted by a faulty landing-gear indicator light. While three experienced pilots focused on the tiny technical problem, no one noticed the aircraft was slowly losing altitude. The plane flew straight into the Florida Everglades, killing more than 100 people.
The accident became famous. Books were written. Films were made. But its most important legacy was procedural. It gave aviation safety the Sterile Cockpit rule.
During takeoff and other critical phases of flight, all nonessential conversation must cease. No multitasking. No distractions. Focus narrows to only what matters.
The idea isn’t unique to flying. Any serious strategic system understands that when decisions matter most, noise must disappear. The Romans formalised it. Dies Fasti were designated days when public decisions were allowed, and others when they were not. Monasteries still begin the year in silence, not out of mysticism but out of discipline.
January is exactly that moment for marketers. It should be our sterile cockpit.
After a couple of weeks off, the noise briefly recedes. You’ve forgotten what Scott Galloway said last. You’re not staring at CTRs and CPAs. You’re not pretending AI has rewritten your entire strategy or convincing yourself that a rival’s organic post represents an existential threat.
Advertisement
For a rare, fleeting moment, modern marketing nonsense loosens its grip.
If you’re lucky, half the team is still on leave, and your top customers are too full of cheese to manufacture a crisis. It’s the only time of year when judgment has a fighting chance against activity.
It’s your moment to take control.
Pull a small group of trusted allies into a room and declare a sterile cockpit. No tactics. No project updates. No new ideas. No performative metrics. The job is not to look busy. The job is to make sure the marketing function can deliver over the next five years, not just the next quarter.
Done properly, this habit will put you ahead for the rest of your career.
So before the chatter resumes, here are the eight sterile cockpit checks every marketer should run at the start of the year. They are unfashionable, unglamorous, and permanently worth your time.
I’m a big believer that if it can’t fit on one side of A4, no one can actually do anything with it. Brands are no different.
On some very famous, very large FMCG brands I’ve worked on, the “strategy” is still a soup of made-up insights, personas, growth drivers, 20 associations, and five conflicting decks.
The sterile cockpit gives you permission to create a better alternative.
Get on to a page: your category definition and growth ambition (behaviour-based, not vibes). Your broad customer target and when the category is bought. A real competitor list. Where you play that they don’t. A positioning sentence. Ideally, the emotional role your brand plays. And your distinctive brand assets.
If you genuinely get that on to one page, you are strategically ahead of most brands.
Distinctive brand assets will be the marketing topic of the year. I’d bet my collection of niche aviation books on it.
If you’re lucky enough to have it, drag up all the DBA tests you’ve ever commissioned. You need to gather all the assets and chop it down to a tight list of four to seven, depending on brand size and age. If you aren’t lucky, you need to choose them now anyway.
I shit you not, I’ve had literal rainbows presented back to me while doing this task with clients. Ten colours. Choose with conviction. Otherwise you don’t have distinctive assets, just a load of ass-ets.
This one is a pain. But it changes everything.
Rory Sutherland discusses how most honeybees follow a reliable route to pollen, while 10% take a random one. That 10% might find a new supply or save the hive when the old route dries up.
Your marketing investment should work the same way.
70% on proven, scalable activity that returns profit. 20% on experimentation that might become the next 70%. 10% on insane stuff that might change the game or even save the hive. Doing this properly requires honesty and competence. Exactly why it works.
Binet and Field’s famous 60:40 long: short split hides an important nuance. The more a category relies on physical distribution and product differentiation, the less advertising explains growth.
Advertisement
There’s plenty of detail about it in their 2016 paper, but sterile cockpit time isn’t for reading research. Just pull your last few years of spend, split it into brand and activation, and be honest about how channels were actually used (all media channels could be used for “long”, execution and creativity matters). This calculator from Tracksuit will quickly tell you how you brand: activation splits fair in your category.
Anything you’ve called “performance” must perform. It must have positive ROI and deliver sales. Otherwise, pause it and see if anything terrible happens.
I did this on a large drinks brand. Amazon display spend had crept into marketing’s budget. The revenue was less than the media spend. We paused it. Revenue didn’t move. Nothing terrible happened.
If your performance stuff doesn’t perform, stop it. I bet you have cost lines that are doing this and you could cut this week and spend it on activity that matters instead.
It’s time to upgrade from awareness to mental availability.
Define how people enter your category. List the category entry points (CEPs). Identify which ones matter, which competitors own them, and which you realistically can.
Decide two or three actions from this exercise. You’ll probably need to give a CEP up that another brand owns too well. That’s the point. Now, ensure all your ads reflect your new CEP strategy.
Some agencies charge £200,000 for this. You can get surprisingly close in an afternoon if you focus (and have worked out how to use AI already).
Advertisement
Now the uncomfortable bit. Assume at least some of your metrics are lying to you. Not maliciously but comfortingly.
Dashboards reward busyness, not effectiveness. They flatter channels that are easy to measure and punish the ones that build future demand.
January is the moment to ask awkward questions. What decisions does this metric actually inform? What behaviour does it incentivise? And if we turned it off for three months, would anything bad happen?
If a number only exists to reassure people that work is happening, it doesn’t belong on your metrics dashboard. Try to get a few leading and lagging metrics, with a select few of actual behaviour metrics your marketing has a chance of moving.
This is the hardest one. Which is why most brands skip it.
Every strategy deck is full of new things to do. Very few are honest about what will stop. Yet strategy is deciding what not to do, and what to keep doing again with that resource instead.
List the activities, channels, pet projects and “we’ve always done this” initiatives that dilute effort. Then kill at least one of them on purpose.
If everything is a priority, nothing is. Take that freed-up resource and double down on what already works. Keep the TV ad running. Back the creator that actually delivered instead of making more creator assets. Support that new SKU that actually did well in Tesco. My research shows this kind of consistent commitment compounds profits over time.
Done properly, these eight checks in a sterile cockpit gives you something rare in modern marketing: clarity. You’ll add a huge chunk of marketing value over a couple of days.
And I’m serious about all industries and serious people having sterile cockpit moments. Even my dad. The second he starts reverse parking, he turns round and shouts “shut the hell up” at everyone in the car. No opinions. No distractions. Just focus until the job’s done.
January deserves the same respect from us marketers.
Andrew Tindall is a senior leader in the advertising industry and SVP of Global Partnerships at System1, where he champions creative effectiveness and evidence-based marketing. Known for his sharp thinking on out-of-home, emotional advertising, and brand growth, he’s become a go-to voice on how creativity and data can work together. With experience across major brands like Diageo and Bacardi, Andrew now helps global agencies and marketers make better ads that actually work, contributing regularly to panels, podcasts, and the occasional punchy LinkedIn rant.