The Human Edit: Standing Up at Teddy Swims

Last night, we took the kids to see Teddy Swims at Blenheim Palace.

We live right here in the Cotswolds, and we regularly joke about the kids not exactly "keeping it real" - a fact fully confirmed as we queued for overpriced festival food surrounded by a very polite sea of Barbour jackets and Boden knitwear.

Then Teddy Swims came on, and my three teenagers went completely feral.

They were up on their feet immediately. Arms in the air, singing every word, laughing, just completely living in the moment. It was brilliant to watch - until I looked around our section.

Almost everyone else was sitting down.

My immediate, ingrained reaction was panic. I desperately wanted to tell the kids to sit down, be quiet, stop blocking the view. I was stressing about being polite and following the unwritten rules of the room.

But then I caught myself. It's a live gig, not a library. We paid the same for our tickets as everyone else. Why should we dilute our experience just to avoid standing out?

So, I kept my mouth shut, stood up with them, and it felt brilliant.

As we were dancing, I looked back out at the crowd. Not only was everyone sitting politely - a huge portion of them were watching the entire concert through their phones. So busy trying to capture a perfect recording that they completely missed the raw, human thing happening right in front of them.

We are so terrified of getting it wrong, or being too loud, that we default to being relentlessly polite in marketing. We polish every campaign until it's perfectly safe, perfectly professional, and completely sanitised of any real personality.

We sit in our seats, blend in with the rest of the industry, and follow the unwritten rules.

And just like that crowd, we experience our audience almost entirely through a screen. We stare at dashboards and open rates and engagement metrics, trying to capture the perfect data point - and in doing so, we completely lose sight of the actual humans on the other side.

But here's the question that really got me, standing there dancing: If your customers stood up for your brand the way my kids stood up for Teddy Swims - uninvited, unselfconscious, completely in the moment - would your first instinct be to celebrate it? Or to tell them to sit back down and behave?

Because a lot of brands would panic. The comment would be off-script. The social post wouldn't be approved. The whole thing would feel out of control.

Sometimes we need to stop worrying about being the most polite brand in the room, put the screens down, and just give our customers something they actually want to stand up for. Then get out of the way and let them.