12 Monkeys - How we build reality, then gleefully attempt to destroy it.

Having spent the last decade merely moonlighting with tech and engineering in the world of traditional brand building and advertising - being back in the guts of the machine is both refreshing and in equal parts terrifying.

The reason its terrifying? Monkeys.

Not metaphorical ones. Real ones. Digital ones. Specifically, one called Chaos Monkey, created by Netflix - a cheerful little gremlin whose sole job is to randomly break things in your system to test whether it survives the onslaught. You know, like tossing a raccoon into a server room and seeing if the building stays up. It’s not sabotage. It’s strategy.

Compare that to advertising, where the thought of engineered chaos would send the bean counters into existential meltdown followed by a round of passive-aggressive Slack messages about kerning.

That’s the first thing you learn when you re-enter the world of tech after years in adland: tech doesn’t fear failure - it rehearses it. Traditional advertising, meanwhile, throws a velvet curtain over it and hopes no one notices the smell.

In advertising, everything is presentation. It’s glossy. It’s “strategic.” It’s “on-brand.” You spend weeks crafting what is essentially a beautifully lit hallucination. Whole teams argue over whether the call-to-action should say “Join us” or “Be part of it,” as if that semantic distinction will cause a tidal wave of engagement. (Spoiler: it won’t. No one cares.)

Meanwhile in tech, we roll out a deployment on a Friday night with all the nonchalance of a man throwing spaghetti at a circuit board and muttering, “Let’s see what explodes.” Because the point isn’t to avoid failure - it’s to survive it. Tech is resilient by design. Adland in parts - I've realised is brittle and Botoxed.

And that’s not a dig. It’s a feature of the ecosystem. The majority of Advertising sells perfection. Tech tests for disaster. In one world, you win awards for hiding the cracks. In the other, you get back slaps for mapping where the next cracks will appear and automating the duct tape. If you talk to anyone who flies a plane for a living - most of the job is preparing for bad things. And having a plan. And a back up plan for that plan. And thats the way of anything that is engineered.

The psychological differences are just as stark. In adland, we dread the moment someone says, “Can I just play devil’s advocate?” because it usually precedes a soul-shrivelling brainstorm involving the words "AI", “TikTok” and “disruption.” In tech, the devil’s already in the room - he coded half the backend, goes by @lucifer.js, and thinks your framework is obsolete.

Advertising folk wrap meaning around nonsense. “It’s like Glastonbury meets a mindfulness app.” “What if we reframe this as a movement?” “We’re not selling dog food. We’re nourishing four-legged identities.” In tech, someone just says: “It doesn’t scale,” and the entire roadmap pivots.

And when things go wrong in advertising? Everyone pretends they didn’t. Brand lift reports are massaged like a hostage statement. Social sentiment is reframed as “polarising.” The idea that you’d deliberately crash your own campaign just to test its robustness would be treated like treason. Can you imagine someone in an agency saying, “Let’s delete this campaign mid-flight and see how the system handles it”? You’d be marched out by security and replaced with a Canva subscription.

Yet that’s precisely the culture in a well-run tech org. You build systems you expect to fail - because the world will throw weirdness at you eventually, and it’s better if you’ve rehearsed your panic in advance. It’s software chaos therapy. Controlled demolition. The digital equivalent of self-waterskiing through a minefield while taking notes.

Tech is like flying a plane - you test all scenarios, prepare for the worst, have protocol for how to handle things when they go wrong, comms and advertising is merely having the words to tell everyone when the oxygen masks flop out of the fuselage.

And therein lies the beautiful, terrifying truth: tech is honest about entropy. Advertising pretends it doesn’t exist. Im still adjusting 6 months in.

The illusion of permanence in brand work is part of its mythology. Legacy. Consistency. Immutable tone. Whereas in tech, the only consistent thing is change. And bugs. And Jenkins refusing to build your code at 5:59 p.m. on a Friday.

However - it can be argued both industries secretly want to be each other. And now more than ever need each other.

Ad folk fantasise about the raw thrill of building real stuff that actually functions and scales and does things. Tech people occasionally dream of being in a brainstorm where nobody mentions latency or containerisation and you can just say “Let’s make it feel like Blade Runner but funnier” and someone writes it down as a deliverable.

But ultimately, the fundamental difference is this: tech firms build things they expect to break. Advertising builds things to look unbroken, even when they’re quietly collapsing under the weight of seventeen stakeholder opinions and an ROI slide full of decorative maths.

So yes, being back in the belly of tech is thrilling. But it also reminds me that under the sleek interfaces and agile boards, there are monkeys with wrenches, gleefully yanking at the bolts - because if your system can’t survive a bit of chaos, it probably doesn’t deserve to run.

In advertising, the veneer is everything.

In tech, the veneer is optional. The chaos is not.

Finally - here is how all of my rambling converges back to here at ChaseLabs. We are building something special. Its that marriage of robust engineering tested by chaos and driven by the ambition of advertising perfection. We have built the product, broken it, built it again, set the monkeys on it, built it again… You get the picture. For example -

Take our observability stack, for example.

While it’s not quite as gleefully destructive as Chaos Monkey, it’s a defensive masterstroke – more like an early-warning system for when the monkeys inevitably break into the server room. We track the holy trinity of observability: logs, metrics, and traces, and we’ve baked unit tests right into the CI/CD pipeline like chocolate chips in a stress cookie. The result?
A workflow that’s not just functional, but resilient. It doesn't just look solid – it knows when something's off, and it tells us before the whole thing goes up in smoke. That’s not luck. That’s preparation. Monkey preparation.