AdNews: The Guidance Gap

Research Team

Jed Simpfendorfer

Overview

This month in AdNews, we asked: Why aren’t Australians asking for help?

There’s been a lot of talk about the rise of the “manosphere” and where younger men get their views on gender roles. But when we looked closer, the story wasn’t really about men. It was about guidance, and who we turn to for it.

Through T garage’s Culture Cast research (100+ qualitative projects and 3,000+ Australians surveyed), here’s what we found:

• Only about half of people, male and female, have someone they can turn to for advice on careers, money, relationships or health.
• Having someone isn’t the same as using them. Even those who do have someone rarely sought guidance in the past 12 months.
• Same story with money. Only about a third of Australians hit by a negative life event actually reached out to their service provider for help.
• Life hasn’t gotten simpler, but trust in the institutions we once relied on for guidance keeps declining.

As one of our researchers put it: “It’s as if we’ve normalised that you shouldn’t ask for help.”

That’s the real gap. It’s not that guidance doesn’t exist, it’s that people don’t feel comfortable asking for it.

For brands, especially in financial services, this means waiting for people to ask isn’t enough. Guidance needs to show up where people already are, through tools like gamified financial literacy apps (Zogo), relatable creators, or human-centred spaces like Virgin Money’s entrepreneur events in the UK.

Technology can scale access. But people still want proof there’s a human on the other end who understands them. The future isn’t people or technology, it’s combining the two.

Read the full article in AdNews.