Sue Foll is a photo-journalist. She has been taking a picture everyday during 2009, Libertine's first year. It's a pretty eclectic mix of shots from the everyday to the big events: there is even a picture of my Dad in there.

The private view is on Tuesday 26th January from 6 pm to 8 pm. It's called "One" and is worth a visit.

When bad things happen like wars, recessions, plagues and pestilence people get understandably nervous. And when people are nervous they tend to become more risk averse.

People (and businesses) tend to fall back on what they know and trust, they are less experimental, infact more closed-minded generally.

Recessions have a double impact because we all have less money and less appetite for risk. So nostalgia and the staus quo generally dominate, people are less likely to move house, less likely to experiment with the new and more likely to look for brands that they trust and have been around for a while. Businesses meanwhile tend to fall back on the things that they know work avoiding risky innovation and experiment.

So if the recession is coming to an end then hopefully the appetite for risk should come back: braver creative work and more experimental with media.

Maybe 2010 will be the year that we can all open our minds again and start thinking about the future rather than the past.

When faced with an idea people seem to fall into two camps. Those that see the big picture, get excited by it and try to make the idea bigger. And those that pick away at it and slowly watch it get smaller until it withers and dies.

I am not just talking about the advertising and marketing business here but every walk of life.

Closed minds, a pessimistic outlook and aversion to risk never achieved much in life.

So my top tip for 2010. Open your minds and when presented with a 'big idea' try and make it bigger not smaller.

I visited my parents this weekend. They live in a village in Warwickshire in the same house that I grew up in. With all our children and pets, we don't get out much so I hadn't been for a couple of years. Watching my kids play in the house where I grew up was rather nostalgic. It really struck me what had changed.

In summary:

I had.......... 3 TV channels to choose from with very little worth watching for kids, a box of toys ( subuteo being the big one ), a few books ( that I never looked at ), a garden, some fields with a football pitch and a wood...and everything was closed at the weekend.

They have....... 1000 TV channels and rising, dvd, sky +, home cinema, the internet, laptops, computer games, real books, digital books, more toys than you can count; things that bleep, flash, jump,fly...... the garden, the football pitch, a playground straight out of Startrek, a local farm that has now turned into a kind of rural Disneyland, an electric garage door, a jacuzzi bath plus lots of Grandma's strange ornaments to demolish.

What is interesting is that kids now have to develop a new skill that I didn't need ; the skill of deciding what to do from an ever expanding list of options. While I had to find stuff to do, they have the opposite problem...too much stuff and not enough time.

And that applies to all our lives. Technology, globalisation and a culture of choice means we all have to deal with the same problem..too much stuff and not enough time. And that is in essence why business and marketing have changed. We don't have to put up with things anymore, we don't have to make do. If we don't like a programme on TV we flick, if we don't like ads we can fast forward them, if we don't like shops we go to the internet or our kids school or the local hospital or anything else you care to choose from.If it doesn't do it for us we exercise our right to choice.

So brands need to wake up to this. To be accepted in people's busy, over-supplied lives we need to give people a good reason to be part of it. It's not good enough to just shout the same tired old sales messages from the roof-tops.

And don't believe that the solution is always the latest technology. In a short experiment this weekend (based on my kids) - demolishing Grandma's strange ornaments won, hands-down.

This week a new Account Handler joined team Libertine, Monique who has just arrived from New Zealand... and delighted we are too.

She expressed surprise that while out at a restaurant most of her fellow diners ordered Sea Bass rather than Cod. In New Zealand this would be considered idiocy as Cod is obviously far superior. Interesting eh? Or maybe not? But it did get me thinking.

Cod's problem (in the Northern Hemisphere) was there was loads of it and it was easy to catch. The result was it became oversupplied and underpriced. We all grew up neither appreciating its quality or valuing it properly. In the short-term it fed lots of people and the volume suppliers made lots of money. But in the long term nobody won. The Cod themselves certainly didn't benefit; there are hardly any left and we have all ended up deluding ourselves that Sea Bass is better.

Is there a lesson in this? Well it is a reminder that brands that oversupply and underprice need to be very careful in the long term. It is not easy to avoid, particularly in the current climate but brands should fight tooth and nail to avoid becoming commoditised, discounted and obsessed with volume rather than margin. By maintaining some degree of exclusivity and premium pricing the whole brand experience can be transformed. The Sea Bass example proves it: we actually believe that Sea Bass is better than Cod even if those from The Southern Hemisphere think we are all mad.