A speculative Advertising Experiment

Herring did not begin with a production brief. It began with a question.

What happens when advertising stops waiting for products to exist and instead uses its tools to imagine them? Not as fantasy, but as a disciplined form of speculation.

The starting point was a real observation. A Sardinian shoreline where umbrellas regularly lose their battle with the wind and moments of rest dissolve into small frustrations. The beach is not just a place people visit. It is a place they temporarily claim, protect, and try to make their own.

Most of the objects designed for this environment rely on force. Heavy stakes, brittle plastics, improvised fixes. Herring reframed the problem.

What would an object look like if it cooperated with the beach instead of resisting it? The humble herring peg became a conceptual anchor. A familiar logic of stability and restraint that allowed us to explore form without excess. From there, Herring was developed as a fictional but plausible product, using AI as a speculative design partner rather than a production tool.

This project was conceived as an experiment to explore how far AI could take advertising thinking. Not to automate creativity, but to interrogate it. AI was used to generate, challenge, and strip back ideas, allowing us to focus human judgement on intention, meaning, and experience rather than execution.

Within this speculative framework, Herring took shape as a clear and readable proposition. A sculpted anchor designed to hold space with calm confidence. Its imagined form, colour, and material logic were treated as narrative decisions rather than manufacturing claims.

Sustainability followed the same logic. Recycled ocean plastic was not presented as a supply-chain solution, but as a conceptual consequence. If the beach is the context, its waste becomes the material. An idea, not a production promise.

But Herring was never about creating a product. It was about testing a belief.

Can advertising use speculation to argue for better design, better behaviour, and better relationships with the environments we occupy? Herring exists as a thought experiment. A fictional brand designed to surface real tensions. A way to explore how AI, when guided by restraint and strategy, can extend advertising beyond communication into imagination.

It does not claim to exist.

It exists to ask what should.