What’s the weather got to do with it?

I was sat at a dinner party the other night my parents roped me into — part of our standard Von Trapp routine. Luckily, they left out the singing on the stairs this time. But over my third glass of red something, chatting to a retired banker, I heard a story that felt like it could weasel its way into one of the Dave Trott books stacked by my bed.

I read somewhere that Dave’s stories make him sound like the most interesting bloke you know down the pub — so the setting here kind of checks out.

Dave often talks about getting upstream of a problem with creativity. One place you rarely hear that happening? Investment banking. Thankfully, the banker didn’t drone on playing FTSE or the six screens on his desk (that scale only belongs in an Odeon). He was an energy trader — which, according to Google, means:

A trader who buys and sells energy commodities — oil, gas, power, carbon — to make money for the firm and its clients.

Simple, right? Not quite.

Back in the day, even when these traders got everything “right” — analysing supply and demand, pricing properly, using historical data — they’d still get rinsed by randomness. If winter was 2°C warmer than expected or summer dragged on a week longer, the market could tank. These “random failures” were wiping millions off trades in the 90s (hundreds of millions today).

Finance hates randomness. So they had to get creative — they had to get upstream.

One night, someone at the firm (probably watching the news) clocked it: who actually can predict the weather? The weatherman.

So they hired meteorologists. People who’d been tucked away reading charts suddenly became million-pound hires. They could now forecast how hurricanes would affect commodities overnight, or how a wet summer could crush retail, travel, or agriculture. Weather became a competitive advantage rather than an unpredictable hindrance.

Turns out, they weren’t losing because they were bad at finance. They were losing because they were blind to the one variable that moved everything else.

Not knowing the weather, it turns out, was more expensive than being wrong about it.

That’s creative thinking.

And maybe there’s something in that for our own industry.

AI’s moving fast. Audiences flip quickly. Agencies are adjusting to a pace that keeps changing.

What the finance lot figured out is this:

You don’t need a crystal ball — just a clue about what actually shifts the game. The one variable that moves the rest.

That’s what getting upstream looks like.

And it might just be the edge we need.

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