Inspiring Futures: Recent Episodes
Ed Cotton
Inspiring Futures is a podcast about the future hosted by Ed Cotton. We live in the now, everything around us is increasingly real-time, so we are somewhat challenged to think about the future because it’s an unknown and takes discipline to think about. But what happens when we do we think about the future, when do we think about it, who inspires the futures we think about and what do we think the future will hold? Inspiring Futures is a podcast that talks to people from diverse backgrounds, careers and industries and talks to them about how they think and what they think about the future.
The market research forces a choice between speed and depth. Qualitative research is deep but slow, bespoke, and expensive to scale, while quantitative segmentation builds simplified models that brands mistakenly treat as exact reality rather than a starting point.
Dose of Reality positions itself as the bridge: instant access and deep human context.
Brands hide behind data to survive a culture of short-termism.
Three dynamics drive this: executives paralyzed by fear of making the wrong move under short-term KPIs; data used as a defensive shield to justify decisions rather than a window into real behavior; and agencies telling clients only what they want to hear, creating a race to the bottom that degrades creative work.
On top of that, the ad industry romanticizes a narrow, curated version of culture.
Real strategic advantage lies in the messy, unglamorous realities of everyday life, not polished inner-city aesthetics.
Synthetic AI respondents don't generate net-new insight; they recycle unvalidated stereotypes. Trained on things like internet forum posts, they echo and reinforce existing internet stereotypes while missing the texture of real behavior.
Algorithms can't capture physical space and stakes — the nervous body language, the context of a room, why the door gets closed during a hard conversation.
The "90% accuracy" trap: AI may predict ~90% of consumer responses by mapping predictable baseline demographics, but that 90% is table stakes. All competitive advantage, whitespace, and creative inspiration lives in the surprising, illogical 10% that models can't predict.
Traditional data measures binary answers and misses emotional intensity — the "Brexit effect," where polling missed major shifts because it couldn't sense the undercurrent that deep conversations detect much earlier.
Dose of Reality is a subscription platform giving brands and agencies on-demand access to thousands of hours of real, unfiltered human video, images, interviews, and observations, replacing the old bespoke, slow, cost-prohibitive ethnography model.
AI's proper role here is a sparring partner, not a synthetic generator: custom AI layers search, organize, and navigate massive multimodal human data to surface real truths faster, never to fabricate insights or fake humans.
Genuine research requires genuine empathy, which can't be coded.
The ultimate synthesis: moving brands from cold, metric-obsessed transactional entities back toward "brand benevolence," genuine utility and community support, the kind of brands that actually matter to people.
https://doseofreality.fyi/
In the wide-ranging conversation, we talk about strategy, creativity, and how the two work together. What you learn when you work for Mother. How good it is when you do all the strategy work with a ton of rigor and time. The challenges of what happens when the world of creativity comes face-to-face with the corporate world. We also talked about the WNBA and the music scene in Jersey.
Mike Lane sold dealer.com in 2014 after 16 years, 700 employees, billions in ad spend.
These days he's running Fluency, an operating system for digital advertising.
A single media strategist today has to run Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, CTV, each its own beast, while margins shrink and budgets don't.
Fluency pulls in a client's data, runs it through reusable playbooks, and sets up and optimizes campaigns across every channel automatically. Work that took eight hours becomes a button.
His bet: advertising is moving onto systems the same way stock trading left the paper floor for E-Trade and Schwab. Ten years out, doing it by hand won't be an option.
In the episode we also get into:
→ How creative is being pulled inside the media workflow. AI generates the options, testing picks the winner, but a human still owns the publish button.
→ Why "advertising engineer" is becoming a real job title
→ What clients mean when they say "I don't know what my agency is doing anymore"
Worth a listen if you build, run, or sell advertising.
Neil Barrie didn't take the conventional route into brand strategy. After studying modern history at Oxford, he spent six years trying to make it as a musician, a detour, it turns out, was a training ground for what came next.
As the co-founder of 21st Century Brand, Neil has worked with some of the most interesting companies of the last decade, including an early, formative stint helping build the Airbnb brand alongside Brian Chesky and Jonathan Mildenhall. That experience changed the way he thought about brand: not a storytelling wrapper, but the entire company as a creative canvas.
In this conversation, Neil talks about the craft of brand-building in an era of platform companies, AI disruption, and a marketing discipline under serious pressure.
Why strategists need to hear this
1. The clearest explanation of what separates brand consulting from advertising you'll find anywhere. Neil lays it out simply: great ad agencies want to get the client out of the way so they can make great work. Great brand consultancies put the client in the way because that's where the real brand lives.
2. A genuinely honest take on the existential moment for brand strategy. Neil admits he spent part of last year in crisis mode, asking whether brand strategy even has a future. What he found when he went and talked to a dozen CMOs is both reassuring and clarifying: intelligence is everywhere, but conviction and wisdom are in short supply. The role isn't disappearing, it's shifting, and he's specific about where the value is migrating.
3. Machine-readable brands This is where the conversation gets genuinely forward-looking. As LLMs increasingly mediate how people discover and choose between companies, Neil argues that brands need to be built for two audiences simultaneously: humans and machines.
4. Why the "durable and dynamic" tension is the central challenge of modern brand building. Platform brands like Uber and Amazon have made the old CPG playbook look quaint. Neil talks through how you hold a brand together when the business is expanding in every direction at once, and why archetypes and distinctive brand assets matter more, not less, when a company's remit expands.
5. What being a strategist means today. Crunching data into neat answers is increasingly commoditized. What's genuinely scarce and valuable is the ability to move a group of people toward conviction. Neil is refreshingly direct about what that means for the kind of strategist who thrives going forward.
Kaye Symington has spent 20 years in marketing, and right now she's working to keep one of the oldest media formats alive — the printed newspaper. As head of marketing at Newspaper Club, she's on the front lines of a quiet cultural shift: people are choosing ink and paper not out of nostalgia, but because something about it just hits differently.
In this conversation, we dig into what's really driving that, and what it says about how we want to connect right now.
Kaye shares the story of a photographer who sent a physical seasonal newsletter to creative directors instead of another email and landed a $50,000 campaign from it. The math on cutting through digital noise is more interesting than you'd think.
Newspaper Club has been growing since 2009, and Kaye's colleagues laugh every time the trend cycle rediscovers print. She explains why newsprint keeps finding new audiences.
People and organizations making newspapers include Ariana Grande. A Scottish anarchist gardening club. A symphony orchestra. A dating site for 30-somethings running classifieds. The range of people printing newspapers reveals something genuinely interesting about what people are hungry for right now.
James Nord didn’t just build an influencer marketing company.
He lived through the birth of internet culture from the inside. In this episode of Inspiring Futures, the founder and CEO of Fohr
It traces the path from early Tumblr obsession to building one of the most influential creator marketing companies in the world.
What makes this conversation compelling is that it’s really about much more than influencer marketing. It’s about the transformation of culture itself.
James explains what it felt like to be one of the first people to understand that “following” would become a new kind of currency, long before brands, agencies, or investors took the idea seriously.
He talks candidly about the brutal early years of educating clients, surviving on almost no money, paying employees with photography income, and slowly realizing that the internet was no longer a sideshow. It had become the main stage.
The discussion moves from Tumblr and Instagram’s early days into the modern creator economy, unpacking why brands still misunderstand creators, why legacy marketers struggle with internet-native culture, and why companies like Nike can lose relevance while brands like Skims instinctively understand the new rules of influence.
Along the way, James shares sharp insights on:
- Why internet culture fractured the monoculture
- How algorithms changed influence forever
- Why “momentum” matters more than total reach
- The hidden tension between marketers and creators
- Why great creators often outperform traditional advertising
- How influencer marketing evolved from experimentation into one of the most powerful forces in business and politics
There’s also a fascinating thread running through the entire conversation about “internet natives” versus traditional institutions. James argues that people who grew up deeply embedded online developed an instinctive understanding of digital communities that many large organizations still lack today.
If you care about culture, marketing, creators, the internet, or how influence actually works in 2026, this is a rich and revealing listen. It’s part founder story, part history of the social internet, and part field guide to how modern attention really moves.
This episode is really about how agencies evolve under pressure.
Ammunition began with deep expertise in home and building, a category defined by complicated purchase journeys, multiple decision-makers, long sales cycles, and considered decisions.
That gave the agency an early advantage.
But the more interesting part is how it learned from that advantage.
The lesson was not simply “we know this category.” The lesson was: “we know how to solve complex growth problems.”
That shift matters.
Because agencies are operating in a difficult market. Clients are under pressure. CMOs are being asked to do more with less. AI is changing the production layer. Channels keep multiplying. And there is more marketing activity than ever, but not always more progress.
In that context, Ammunition’s proposition, Growth, no matter what, becomes more than a line. It becomes a way of thinking about agency value.
Kelly and Chris describe an agency trying to stay useful by learning continuously: from clients, from research, from AI, from category complexity, from international expansion, and from the changing pressures facing CMOs.
It is a story about an agency growing not because times are easy, but because hard times force it to get clearer about what it is really good at.
AI and The Marketing Department
For a recent Inspiring Futures podcast, I had the opportunity to spend time with Mixtape Partners' Nirm Shanbhag, Andy Bateman, and Sarah Lent/
Mixtape is a management consultancy designed specifically for marketers navigating the AI era.
Between them, they've spent careers inside the big agency networks (Omnicom, WPP, IPG, Interbrand, R/GA), led innovation and customer strategy at Deloitte, and sat on the client side as senior marketers and CMOs.
They've been the consultants, they've been the clients, and they've run the agencies.
They started Mixtape because they kept noticing the same thing: most strategy work gets shelved, and the work that actually matters is the work that gets adopted.
In the past year, they spent some time researching what was happening with AI and marketing departments. They spent an hour each with thirty CMOs working across twelve industries.
Their main conclusion is the one nobody wants to say out loud: nobody has figured this out yet. Not the consultancies. Not the holdcos. Not the platforms.
What they did find is a set of moves leading marketers are quietly making while everyone else is still arguing about prompts.
Four core findings...
The customer you're designing for isn't one person anymore. It's three. Almost no marketer interviewed is ready for what that means.
There's a single decision a CMO can make in the next six months that quietly kills their AI transformation before it starts, and most of them are about to make it.
As AI takes over execution, the entire value of human work collapses onto one thing. Companies that aren't training for it are about to discover a capability gap that no amount of AI throughput can fix.
Your brand is now an iceberg. The part everyone's been optimising for is the part above the water.
Amy Carvajal grew up in New York, and when she was a kid she ran a little rock painting business. She'd grab rocks from the park, take orders from the neighbors, paint whatever they wanted, and deliver them herself. That's basically how she's worked ever since. Find the material, listen to the person, and care about how it turns out.
She spent the next twenty years in the big agencies. DDB, Ogilvy, the global brand world. She built campaigns for clients like IBM, learned how to hold an idea together across thirty different markets, and saw firsthand how often great work gets watered down by the time it ships.
Eventually she wanted to be closer to the work again, so she started Full Tank.
We get into all of it. Creativity, New York, what it takes to build something independent right now, and why she thinks the smaller shops are about to come out ahead.
For thirty years, the rules of branding felt settled. Find a story. Tell it loudly. Make people feel something. Repeat.
That era is over.
On the latest Inspiring Futures, Todd Irwin and Craig Bagno of Fazer walked through what's actually replacing it — and the sequence is what makes it land.
It starts with a flip. Brand used to be say, then do. Now it's do, then say. Customers experience the brand five times before they ever encounter the marketing, so the story has to be downstream of the truth.
Which means storytelling isn't the currency anymore. Solutions are. The brands winning right now aren't the ones with the best narrative; they're the ones identifying a real customer pain point and solving it better than anyone else. Todd calls this depositioning, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's how Apple beat IBM. How the iPhone beat BlackBerry. How Blank Street is quietly eating Starbucks while Howard Schultz keeps trying to rebuild a world that no longer exists.
And then AI enters the picture and accelerates everything. Buyers are starting decisions inside ChatGPT and Claude, not Google. The funnel is collapsing. The brand that shows up as the problem solver wins — and the brand that's just well-dressed gets skipped.
Underneath all of it is Craig's bigger theory: that marketing has only ever had three eras, defined not by marketers but by infrastructure. We're in the third one now, and most of the industry is still operating like it's the second.
The whole conversation reframes what brand work actually is in 2026.
Amar Chohan is the founder of Department of Creative Affairs (DCA), a venture built to map and champion the independent creative agency sector.
A near-accidental entrant to the industry, he trained as a lawyer before walking away from it, then spent almost 12 years at Contagious across two stints, rising to global commercial director. In this conversation, he reflects on that formative period, the thinking behind DCA, and why he believes the independent sector is the real future of creativity.
Six themes from the conversation.
1. An accidental path into the industry
Ammar didn't plan a career in advertising. He trained as a lawyer before making what he calls "the brave decision" to walk away, a move his parents struggled to understand. What pulled him toward Contagious wasn't the sector but the stage of company: "I just wanted to go in somewhere where I could make my mark… be the master of my own destiny."
2. Contagious as the defining chapter
He describes his 12 years at Contagious as "the defining stage of my career" before launching DCA. The experience gave him a rare vantage point, working with both agencies and brands. "There's no better place to understand the importance and the power of creativity in our industry," he says, crediting it with "a knack for seeing what's happening in our industry and what that evolution means."
3. The holding company distortion
This is the conviction underpinning DCA. Ammar's frustration is that trade press, awards, and search consultants remain anchored to holding companies that represent a sliver of the global market: "The holding company agencies represent 1%, a fraction of the entire agency market around the world. So why is that anchoring the mood and the coverage?" The downstream effect, he argues, is an ambient pessimism that paints the whole sector as struggling, when in reality the independent world contains "everything you could possibly need, whether it's a two-person studio or a 200-person global media planning and buying shop."
4. Editorial DNA carried forward
DCA inherits something essential from Contagious. Ammar calls the original print magazine "the most expensive business card on the planet," not profitable alone but the product that opened every door. What made Contagious trusted was editorial authority and curation, and that's the posture DCA takes toward a noisier market: "We've got to be the signal in a world of just overwhelming amounts of information."
5. Curation as the core product
He's firm that DCA isn't an open directory. "99% of creative businesses are independent, not all can and should be on the map. So our job is to discover and curate, and invest." A quality threshold matters because DCA's claim that clients should prioritise independents only holds up if every match produces great work. It also solves a real marketer pain point: "They know what they need is out there, but they don't know where to find it."
6. Visibility as the agencies' real problem
Ammar is blunt about why most independent agencies plateau. Word of mouth takes them only so far. "If a client doesn't know you exist, how do you possibly make your way into the consideration set?" He has no patience for agencies that neglect their own marketing: "The whole cobbler's sons' shoes thing is inexcusable today. We can't keep on using that as an excuse."
https://www.thedca.co/
Chuck McBride founded Cutwater in San Francisco. Before that he ran Nike at Wieden+Kennedy, sat alongside Lee Clow at TBWA\Chiat\Day North America, and was on the inaugural team that launched Got Milk? at Goodby, Silverstein. Levi's. adidas. Ray-Ban. Fox Sports. Hoka. Lexus. Feeding America. The work is in MoMA. The shelf has Cannes Lions, Emmys, Clios, D&AD pencils.
But the résumé isn't why you should listen. The ideas are — and the stories he uses to get to them.
Three things from the conversation I haven't been able to stop thinking about:
1. The idea is usually already in the room. Chuck describes himself not as a creative director but as "more of an archaeologist." The point of view is almost always already there — buried in the founder, the product, the way people talk about the thing without noticing they're doing it. He explains it through a dinner with a tech founder who didn't yet have a story for his own company, until the founder said one sentence and Chuck cut him off mid-thought: "Stop. You just said it." The line that ran for years was already in the room.
2. Risk is the price of memorable work. Chuck tells the story behind one of the most famous spots of the era — the one where the brief said, in plain English, don't kill the guy. The director killed him anyway. The spot ran. A client walked up to Chuck outside the building afterward and said something he has clearly never forgotten. The flip side, he says, is what kills most work in this business: "the death of a thousand cuts." The clients who freeze in the face of anything risky are the ones who guarantee the work nobody remembers.
3. The real story behind the work is rarely the public one. Chuck talks about one of the most beloved American campaigns of the last 30 years — and reveals the private nickname the team used for the spots, a nickname that would have horrified the client if they'd ever heard it. It reframes the campaign as something much darker and much funnier than the version everyone grew up with. And it shows how the real idea was never about the product at all.
There's also the moment that pushed him to open his own shop — which wasn't ambition, but the realization that once you do, the risk is entirely on you. "When you open your shop, it's your word now. There's nobody to bail you out."
He closes the conversation with a piece of advice from his very first boss — six words he's carried his whole career, and the closest thing he offers to a philosophy of the work: "Wear them out with good work."
Ace of Hearts is one of those rare new agencies that arrives with real heat around it. Not just because the founders come from serious places, but because it seems to answer a feeling a lot of people have right now: that creative companies have become too managed, too tired, too airless, and that something more alive is needed. Martin Beverly has come through AMV, Wieden+Kennedy and Adam & Eve, so he has seen three very different versions of creative excellence up close: the discipline of simplicity, the blur between strategy and creative, the power of pace, momentum and a distinctive creative handwriting.
What makes this conversation worth hearing is that it is not just another founder story. It is about belief. Belief in creativity. Belief in the people making it. Belief that a company can be ambitious without grinding everyone into dust. Martin talks about building Ace of Hearts around care, energy, shared success and a wider idea of what creativity can do, not as polish at the end, but as a force inside the business itself. He is very good on simplicity, on earning the trust of creatives, on what made John Lewis so powerful, and on why people do better work when they do not feel anxious, disposable or burnt out.
This is a must-listen because it feels like a small signal of something bigger: the return of hope, energy and creative belief in an industry that badly needs all three.
Australia’s indie agency scene feels on fire right now, and Hellions feels like part of that new wave.
With new work already out in the world for Figma and a fresh win with BISSELL, this is more than a start-up story.
In this episode, Hellions co-founder Mike Donman shares his story, and in our conversation, five lessons emerged that could be valuable for anyone thinking of starting a new shop.
- Create value, don’t extract it
Make the client better, not just busier. - Lose the grand reveal
Transparency and collaboration build trust faster than theatre. - Build a team with different strengths
The best founding groups are not clones. They’re combinations. - Make work that does something
Attention is easy. Consequence is harder and far more valuable. - Protect optimism
Cynicism drains creative businesses. Energy builds them.
This podcast is created and produced by Ed Cotton https://invernessconsult.com/
Nike's stock dropped 15% yesterday. Greater China is down for the sixth consecutive quarter. Their CEO told staff he's "so tired of talking about fixing this business."
This isn't a tariff problem. It's an identity crisis.
I sat down with Falk Fuhrmann, who has led strategy at TBWA, DDB, and Saatchi's for 25 years. Ran P&G's strategy across Asia and Greater China. Now runs Huí//Lüè, a brand consultancy in Shanghai with over a decade spent on the ground.
His take: Western brands learned all the right tactics in China — the platforms, the KOLs, the e-commerce playbook. But they optimised their way into meaninglessness. They can execute in the ecosystem but they've lost the thing that made anyone care.
Chinese brands aren't winning on national pride. They're winning because they understand their consumers better. BYD doesn't beat Mercedes because of patriotism. It beats it because it builds what consumers actually want.
And the deeper shift nobody's discussing on earnings calls: the psychological contract that powered Chinese consumption is broken. Before COVID, every middle-class consumer assumed luxury was inevitable. That assumption is gone. No Western brand has figured out what to say to a consumer who no longer believes tomorrow will be better than today.
The trade war makes headlines. The real war is for relevance.
What happens inside a $20 billion creative technology operation when AI changes the speed of everything?
When designers start coding?
When two-week sprints compress to one?
And what does that mean for the clients who are trying to navigate the same transformation?
Bill Shea has spent decades building digital products inside Accenture Song, larger than any agency holding company in the world.
In my conversation for the Inspiring Futures podcast, he talks openly about both sides: how the operation is reorganising around AI, and what he's seeing across the enterprises they serve.
The collapsing role boundaries. The compressed timelines. The unexpected flywheel where speed isn't shrinking the work but multiplying it.
He also discusses where the real risk lies.
The difference between human in the loop and human in the lead.
Why brands are losing their own narrative to models they haven't engaged with. And why the companies that come through this won't be the ones that moved fastest, they'll be the ones that knew what to hold onto while everything else changed.
Lucinda is the founder and head of strategy at Sibling, a culture-led strategy studio.
In this episode, we track Lucinda’s unconventional path into strategy.
Originally an aspiring journalist, she spent her early career in the editorial departments of London fashion magazines—at one point completing six months of back-to-back internships while living on her sister’s floor.
Her career progressed through brand-side roles at ASOS, Farfetch (during its startup phase), and Stella McCartney, with a three-year stint in Berlin’s luxury e-commerce scene in between.
Lucinda explains why she eventually left the fashion world: a recurring tension where "the perfect image" was consistently prioritized over "the actual strategy."
We discuss how this background gave her a unique lens for identifying brand blind spots and why she views her Substack and research-writing habit not as side projects, but as the core of how her strategy is made.
Lucinda argues for a version of the craft that is more cultural, observant, and human, and significantly less reactive.
Barry LaBov started as a rock and roll musician, then accidentally fell into running a full-service ad agency when a client convinced him to buy their marketing department. That unlikely path led him to become one of the foremost experts on brand differentiation, what he calls "brand archaeology."
On the Inspiring Futures podcast, he shared how he helps companies uncover the hidden genius they're already sitting on.
Discovery
LaBov's team doesn't create differentiation; they discover it. Through "technical immersions" in factories and labs, they routinely find innovations that companies take for granted. The Audi Quattro story is a perfect case — a $50 million technology that nobody in sales was even talking about.
Where The Insight Is
Marketing departments often have a surface-level understanding of what makes the product special. The real insights live with the people designing and building things. LaBov learned this the hard way when a head of sales gave him a useless plant tour; he now insists on having engineers and manufacturing leads present.
Post-Founder Companies
LaBov calls post-founder companies "sleeping giants", sitting on gold mines of differentiation but no longer leveraging them. Successors streamline away the very things that made the company special, while competitors quietly hope they never wake up.
Different Isn't About Category Norms
Harley-Davidson doesn't have the fastest bikes or the cheapest maintenance. But nobody else has their sound or their owner community. Differentiation is about character, not winning every category. LaBov uses the Cindy Crawford analogy — her mole was the thing that made her iconic, and removing it would have left a scar.
Difference is Protection
LaBov sees companies lazily accepting AI-generated messaging without asking if it sounds like them. The antidote isn't rejecting AI; it's knowing your differentiation so clearly that no algorithm can accidentally erase it.
This is an interview with Erin Emmerson, CEO, Founder, Kelsey Croos, President, Founder and David Young, Global Executive Creative Director of Tower28.
This is how they describe themselves on their website.
"Like the Santa Monica lifeguard tower we’re named after, we provide guardianship for our clients as they navigate the wondrous waters of localization. Founded by long-time international advertising executives, we set out to democratize the global agency network of creative industry professionals by offering all brands and agencies the opportunity to scale with high-caliber global and in-market talent by their side — without having to pay the premium for infrastructure and full time. To us, there are no foreign markets."
Three major themes emerged from our conversation.
1. Transcreation is far more than translation
Tower28 positions itself not as a translation shop but as a full-service local agency in every market, with strategists, creatives, producers, and insight specialists on the ground. They emphasize understanding the creative and strategic intent behind work and adapting it culturally, not just linguistically. As Kelsey put it: "We're translating culture, we're not just translating language, we're transcreating a feeling." Erin reinforced this by noting that localization is often treated as an afterthought , "everything's done and dusted and baked, can you guys just translate this and ship it out?" and that Tower28 was built specifically to push against that mindset by getting involved upstream.
2. Their AI tool "Gail" and curated global network are key differentiators.
The agency built a proprietary AI-powered platform called Gail that can take in a brief and recommend the ideal team from their network, as well as run a first-pass cultural assessment on taglines, scripts, and content. That output then goes to local experts for human validation, creating what Erin described as "a flywheel of assessment, validation, assessment, validation and Gail gets better every single time we run it." Kelsey added that this proves "you don't have to choose between speed or scale or cultural nuance. We have it all in one place."
3. The holding company model is fracturing, and independents like Tower 28 see a major opportunity.
The team sees the current industry upheaval, what a colleague of theirs calls "the great unholding" as a chance to offer brands a more flexible, effective alternative to traditional multinational agency networks. Erin noted: "You don't have to just go to one of the top four or five just because they have global presence. There's a different way to do things." Kelsey described their flexible retainer model as a selling point: "We build the ship for the client's needs, our client doesn't have to get on our specific ship."
This week on Inspiring Futures, we sit down with Justin Herber.
He's a chief brand officer, consultant, and former screenwriter whose career has moved between Hollywood and the brand world.
Justin got his start working for Michael Bay, spent five years helping scale Tom's, won a writing assignment to adapt Mario Puzo's final novel for television, built Hot Wheels into the number one boys' toy brand on YouTube, and led Tractor Beverage Company from a proof of concept to a national challenger.
Justin thinks about brands the way showrunners think about television: start with a theme, build a world, and design systems that keep generating stories over time. Here are three ideas from the conversation that stayed with us.
Start with theme, not positioning.
Most brand strategy starts with how you're different from the competition. Justin starts with the deeper tension the brand exists to explore — the same way a great TV show is built on a dramatic question, not a plot summary.
"We didn't just pitch plot, we pitched theme. Succession is about generational power struggle. Breaking Bad is about moral decay. That's how I build brands too — what are we doing beyond product? What's the deeper theme that we're exploring?"
Build story engines, not stories.
Justin doesn't make one great piece of content and hope it travels.
He builds repeatable systems that keep generating stories — the way a show format can run for seasons.
At Hot Wheels, that meant a scalable content format. At Tom's, it meant employee giving trips that turned every team member into an advocate.
"A showrunner is like a chief brand officer. You're setting the conditions that teams can align to, creating the world you're playing in, and building the frameworks that keep you on message and moving the plot forward."
Belief systems aren't messaging — they're operating systems.
At Tractor, the belief in a cleaner food system wasn't a campaign line.
It shaped supply chain decisions, partnerships, a foundation dedicating 1% of revenue to helping farmers go organic, and an employer brand built around soil health education.
His test for whether a belief system is real is simple.
"If you take away the belief system from the company and the company still exists, you never had a belief system."
Gigi spent seven years at Google before leaving to start a research company.
Pai isn't any old research company; it specializes in the creation of "digital twins".
These are digital replicas based on real consumers.
Pai interviews these consumers and builds digital versions of them. The real respondents get paid every time their digital twin is used, and the real consumers are interviewed regularly so the digital twin can be constantly updated.
Gigi imagines a world where every marketer has their digital twins available to them 24/7, so they can be questioned as part of the overall workflow, vs. a separate and time-consuming exercise.
In the conversation, we cover a ton of ground
The "Say/Do" Gap
The core business problem is not a lack of data. It is the gap between what people say in research and what they actually do in the market. That is framed as the founding problem Pi is trying to solve.
Grounding in Truth
Digital twins only work if they are grounded in real, high-quality data: interviews, category context, and purchase history. Without that, the whole machine turns into a cardboard dragon.
The AI Needs to Apply Moderator Craft
The AI interviewer who interviews the real respondents needs to replicate “the best interviewer we know” by probing, challenging, and reading for inconsistency.
Research Reports Come Alive
Instead of letting segmentations and old research rot in decks, turn them into something teams can query, simulate with, and use in day-to-day decisions. Static deck becomes a living customer base.
The Challenges
Bias, drift, memory limits, and context windows are real challenges that need to be solved.
Elle is the perfect person to talk to if you want an understanding of strategy inside organizations.
She started her work life selling punk fashions in London's Camden Market, but found her way into adland, landing strategy roles at Karmarama and BBH in London.
Elle then moved over to the US with BBH, then onto BBDO- where she led the agency's pitch for the global Ford account.
Her client experience includes time at EA, PayPal, Ford, and she's currently at McCaffe.
Our conversation talked about her experience and her learnings on the agency side, and what it takes to bring strategy into an organization- how to operationalize it. Which often means handing it over to others to make it their own and action it in their own way.
We also talked about removing the term brand from every deck.
Japan has one of the world’s deepest running cultures and at the center of it sits Ekiden: the long-distance relay that becomes a national obsession every winter.
In this episode, I’m joined by Jeremy Kuhles, a translator, writer, and runner who’s made it his mission to share Japanese running culture with the world through creative storytelling. Jeremy has lived in Japan for two decades and is immersing himself from the inside, training alongside the Tamagawa University women’s Ekiden team and running with RETO Running Club under Hakone Ekiden legend Daichi Kamino.
We get into what Ekiden actually is, why it’s “beyond a race,” and why the outside world often collapses the entire culture into one event: Hakone Ekiden. Jeremy explains why that’s a problem, how it funnels talent geographically, and how it shapes the career path for runners across Japan.
We also go where the conversation usually doesn’t: women’s Ekiden. Jeremy shares what he’s hearing directly from athletes, and why greater parity and awareness matter when sponsorship, media attention, and money disproportionately flow to the men despite equal work and sacrifice.
About Jeremy Kuhles
Jeremy is a translator, writer, and runner focused on bridging the language and cultural gap between Japan’s distance-running world and a global audience through interviews, essays, and social storytelling.
John is an ECD at Digitas and the author of a new book, "Zombie Brands."
In our conversation, we talked about his book and the why, what, and how behind the rise of the Zombie Brand.
Some of John's quotes from our chat.
On the state of advertising:
"No one went to, no one got into advertising to make a banner ad. No one got into advertising to make a Facebook ad."
On the shift from craft to quantity:
"The bragging rights have been we're working with Ridley Scott on this 60-second Super Bowl spot. Now it was we're spending five cents."
On viral marketing's false lessons:
"We spent zero in paid media and just gamed the system to draw lots of attention to this stunt that doesn't really have much to do with the brand itself... I think it was actually terrible for the industry in terms of the lessons taken away."
On performance marketing:
"I think a lot of this is hamsters on a wheel. I don't see the evidence that all this activity is leading to growth."
On the attention span myth:
"If people really did have no attention span, like every planes would be crashing all over the place... You just said no one pays attention anymore and then you watched like 37 hours of TV."
On the zombie brand concept:
"Zombies are not quite human, right? They kind of seem human, but they're not. They're hollowed out. They all kind of look alike. They all sound alike. They all grunt kind of the same few phrases. And yeah, they sort of maniacally roam the earth like looking for clicks."
On Starbucks destroying its brand:
"The whole brand, when I worked on Starbucks at Ogilvy, find the brand as fostering connections between human beings. It wasn't about coffee at all... they've completely killed the goose."
On the data-driven optimization problem:
"They had beta tested their way into basically a big subscribe button. That's all it was. It was a button for people who already had made up their mind to subscribe."
On short-term thinking and performance marketing:
"You're robbing future Peter to pay present Paul. I might not want you now, but maybe I do in a year, maybe I do in years."
https://zombie-brands.com/books/zombie-brands
Tom Garland founded Edition Partners, a London-based creative growth studio, in January 2023.
His career spans record labels (Sony, Warner, Universal), Red Bull's experiential marketing peak, and seven years at Highsnobiety where he became Senior Director and Head of Strategy, working with over 100 brands before the Zalando acquisition.
Edition emerged from research with 52 brand founders struggling with growth strategy.
The studio has worked with Lacoste, Marni, Nike, Burberry, and the Rolling Stones.
Tom recently wrote this incredible piece where he goes into detail on the launch of Satisfy's first shoe.
https://edition.partners/articles/satisfy-therocker-footwear-launch-interview
Here are some of the main themes and quotes from our conversation,
- The Street as Pre-Institutional Culture
Tom reframes "the street" not as a place but as culture before commercialization — where hip-hop became luxury fashion, skate became brand language, and grime became generational uniform:
"Instead of thinking of it as kind of low culture, which pre-Virgil Abloh was how it was viewed in certain spaces, it's better to think of it as pre-institutional culture, where new meaning is created before the world catches up and spins it into a meme."
- Sport as the New Cultural Operating System
Just as streetwear defined the 2010s, Tom argues sport is now the dominant platform for identity-building — creating opportunities in micro-niches from desert running to golf:
"Sport is the new streetwear... Sport is now the platform for people to create their own subcultures, their own identities. People are switching out this idea of being a pretty influencer for being a trail runner, or indeed just finding their own hero stories."
- Culture is Built, Not Borrowed
Brands cannot parachute into communities and expect credibility. Tom points to Red Bull's sustained investment across music and extreme sports, and Nike and ASICS's multi-year journeys earning legitimacy in skate:
"You can't just parachute into skate or music or anything and expect credibility. It's those who commit long term."
- Product as Strategy
In a world of infinite choice and AI-flattened creativity, Tom believes differentiation comes from restraint and proof — not more content or collabs:
"In a world where we've got infinite choice, the most powerful brand signal is just to have the best products, and that requires no advertising."
- Ask What Still Matters
His framing for 2026: stop chasing trends, start building institutions with a genuine point of view:
"We need to desperately stop asking what's next and start asking what still matters... the next few years won't reward the loudest. It will reward the clearest."
Introduction
Justin Rashidi is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at SeedX, a data-driven marketing and business consultancy approaching its tenth year. In this episode of Inspiring Futures, he talks about his unlikely path from biochemistry student to entrepreneur, the tutoring company that taught him everything, and how SeedX grew from freelancing for a dairy farm to working with Fortune 500 clients.
Key Themes
1. The Tutoring Company: An Accidental MBA Waitlisted for medical school, Justin moved to New York, worked as a busser and bartender, and started tutoring affluent families. That side gig became his real education—lead generation, CRM, sales pipelines, hiring. He sold the company, which he now regrets: "I wish I never sold that company... that was a great company." Everything he does at SeedX traces back to what he learned there.
2. Problem-Solving as Growth After selling, Justin and co-founder Jacqueline freelanced for anyone who'd pay—starting with a dairy farm. "It wasn't like I set out to start this company. You solve enough problems, and then I found myself here."
3. Quality of Revenue He prefers longer sales cycles with larger clients who think in five to ten year terms. "The quality of the revenue is better. These people want to work together for five years."
4. Lead Generation as Core Competency Unlike agencies that wait for the phone to ring, SeedX actively generates leads. "I love when referrals happen, but I don't rely on referrals... we're out here generating the next lead tomorrow."
5. Systems Thinking Justin calls himself a "systems kind of dude." If it costs $20,000 to acquire a customer who pays $50,000 a month, the math works. "I don't care if it costs $2,000 to get a meeting."
6. Hiring for Passion He looks for people who read about SEO on Saturdays because it makes them happy. "What you actually want to hire for is people who want to be there."
7. AI Realism He pushes back on AI as a silver bullet. "You're going to save 50%? That's unrealistic. You still need people."
Neil Perkin is a consultant, author, and self-described polymath working at the intersection of strategy, digital transformation, emerging technology, and leadership.
With roots in media transformation at Time Inc during the dot-com boom, Neil has spent the last 16 years helping organizations navigate change.
He's authored three books on agility and transformation, and now writes extensively about how AI is reshaping the practice of strategy.
In this conversation, Neil shares his perspective on what it really means to work with AI—not as a replacement for human thinking, but as something far more nuanced and powerful.
Five Big Themes from Our Conversation
- AI as a Genuine Thought Partner
Neil argues that the real opportunity with AI isn't automation—it's augmentation of human thinking through continuous dialogue.
"How you can really use AI as a bit of a thought partner... it's like fully integrated into a strategy workflow, or any other kind of knowledge or thinking workflow, in ways where you're going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between human and machine."
"Ideally what you are aiming for here, of course, is you're getting to places that you couldn't have got to on your own. And that's the possibility with AI."
- The Danger of Cognitive Outsourcing
Neil warns against the temptation to let AI do our thinking for us—what he calls "cognitive outsourcing"—and the hidden costs of "work slop."
"This whole idea of cognitive outsourcing is a potentially big problem because if you are able to get the AI to do your thinking for you, you don't need to do any thinking, and thinking is hard."
"It's a big temptation because it's good enough, but it's not good. And so the person, the recipient has to then redo the work and it takes longer to actually do that."
- Think, Prompt, Think
Before rushing to the AI, Neil advocates for starting with human clarity—a simple framework that changes everything.
"Think prompt think, basically. So the importance of actually just starting with humans. Before you go to the AI engine, just thinking about what it is you're trying to do, what good looks like... So you start basically with your perspective."
"Starting with you and then you having clarity and much greater depth with how you're then going to the AI... means that you're actually integrating it in a way which is not cognitively outsourcing or not disengaging your brain."
- Five Roles AI Can Play
Neil offers a practical framework for understanding where AI fits—from full automation to human-led illumination.
"There's a model which I come back to a lot, which is just kind of like five sort of key roles that it can play... automator... decider... recommender... illuminator and evaluator. And they sort of balance human AI to different extent."
"The illuminator part is where the AI is augmenting your thinking. It's illuminating things in a way that actually you hadn't seen things before."
- Don't View the New Through the Lens of the Old
Drawing from his transformation experience, Neil cautions against the natural tendency to apply old mental models to revolutionary technology.
"I learned a lot about not looking at the new through the lens of the old, the need to kind of reinvent and redesign as well as use technology to optimize."
"The first kind of versions of things were always kind of skeuomorphic... online magazines were like literally scans of pages of printed magazines. I think probably we're going to see a lot of that with AI."
Find Neil:
- Substack: onlydeadfish.substack.com
- Blog: onlydeadfish.co.uk
- Named after the Malcolm Muggeridge quote: "Only dead fish swim with the stream"
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It's always interesting to see what a network agency in a local market is capable of, especially at a moment in advertising history when geography matters less than it ever has.
A few weeks back, I got a chance to sit down with Havas Chicago's Chief Strategy Officer, Chase Cornett, and Chief Creative Officer Frank Dattalo to talk about the change they're implementing as a leadership team that includes President Kat Ott.
Our conversation was wide-ranging and covered their approach to thinking about the new duality of marketing today- a concept they call "High/Low", the importance of building brand, treating talent with kindness, and recognizing the power and the limitations of AI.
1. The Leadership Triad
In 2025, Frank Dattalo joined President Kat Ott and Chief Strategy Officer Chase Cornett to rebuild Havas Chicago's creative, strategic, and cultural core.
Together, they're positioning the agency as a modern, independent, culture-driven hub within the Havas network.
Chase: "It's been great to come back to Chicago and reimagine what Havas Chicago can be, a modern agency with the freedom to build what's needed without red tape.
Frank: "We knew what we didn't want to be, slow or rigid. We wanted a nimble, modern marketing approach with culture at the forefront.
2. The 'High–Low' Model — Think Like a Brand, Act Like an Influencer
Havas Chicago's creative philosophy pairs strategic brand thinking ("high") with the speed, fluency, and emotional immediacy of creators ("low"). Inspired by fashion's high–low aesthetic, it merges rigor and agility to create culturally resonant brands.
Frank: "Our north star is thinking like a brand but acting like an influencer or content creator.
Chase: "This isn't agency fluff. It changes how we hire, how we make, and how we operate."
3. Breaking Down Silos — The Feed as the New Brand Canvas
Havas Chicago rejects the traditional divide between social, brand, and performance teams. Culture, not channel, drives brand growth, and the feed is where that happens.
Chase: "Brand building starts and ends in the feed. If it's not in the feed, people aren't talking about it.
Frank: "Networks separate social and strategy, we're building an agency that does both."
4. Reclaiming Brand Building — Escaping the Performance Trap
Cornett frames the 2010s as the "gold-rush era of performance marketing," where brands traded long-term equity for short-term metrics. The new Havas model rebuilds meaning, pricing power, and emotional value.
Chase: "Performance became the buzzword, and brand was painted into a corner as arts and crafts." "If you follow the efficiency train, you're racing yourself to the bottom."
5. Culture, Kindness, and Creativity — Building a Human-Centered Agency
The trio's internal philosophy blends high creative standards with genuine humanity. They aim to make Havas Chicago a place where talent thrives, not just performs.
Frank: "It's not about being nice; it's about being kind. Be hard on the work, kind to people."
Chase: "We've created mandatory maker hours; no meetings, just making."
6. AI as Tool, Not Savior — Protecting Creativity's Human Core
Both leaders embrace AI for speed and efficiency but reject its overuse. For them, imagination remains the irreplaceable differentiator.
Frank: "AI is like a bionic arm; powerful, but it doesn't have a creative point of view."
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A few months ago, in the middle of summer, I got a chance to sit down with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, to talk about his brand new book, "The Running Ground." We got to talk about the book—what inspired it, how he approached it, and how he managed to create a compelling narrative. So this is a podcast episode about running, but it's also about writing and about the challenges of telling a good story.
Nick's journalism career started at the Washington Monthly when he was around 24 or 25, working as a political journalist. From there, he moved to Wired magazine as an editor, then to the New Yorker, where he eventually ran the website, learning the business side of journalism. This led to his role as editor-in-chief of Wired before becoming CEO of The Atlantic, which was founded in 1857.
But Nick is also a serious runner. In his mid-40s, Nike reached out to him as part of a program pairing non-elite runners with elite coaches. Through this process, he discovered he had talent he hadn't tapped into—his coaches realized that part of his problem was a fear of running fast, a mental block about what he could achieve. They had to "trick" him into going faster. The result was dramatic: he dropped his marathon time from 2:43 to 2:29, and eventually set an American record in the 50K at age 45, running 3:04.
The book was originally going to be structured like a marathon and, of course, it was going to have 26 chapters, but then the chronology made no sense. The advice he got from a writer friend is that he needed to take the reader "deep inside the mind of the runner," and importantly, another bit of advice: "you have to make us care" and "you have to make us care about you." Where he ended up is an original and intriguing concept where he manages to weave his life, his father's life, and five other running characters together into a story. Once he had something, there was a process of editing out the unimportant stuff to focus on what mattered.
The spark for the book was his father's death—on a plane back from his funeral, he wrote a 5,000-word letter to his three kids telling the story of their grandfather. This became the starting point, but he ended up telling his dad's story, his story, and also the stories of the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, his coach who had a story of addiction and recovery, his running partner who was homeless at one point in pursuit of her dream, a runner who developed Parkinson's, and another runner who has won a 3,100-mile race nine years in a row.
As the Washington Monthly wrote in its review: "The Running Ground crackles with big ideas about intergenerational inheritance, the power of love and forgiveness, the inevitability of aging, the mind-body connection, and the value of hard work. The memoir's intertwined stories—Thompson's relationship with his father alongside Thompson's own journey as a marathon runner hitting his stride midlife—are compelling narratives."
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Brandon runs strategy at Trade School which is the creative agency which was born out of 22squared in 2020.
The agency's clients include- Makita, Home Depot, Shark Ninja, Publix and Advent Health.
Brandon's experience includes time at Campbell-Ewald/Detroit after which he joined West Wayne in Atlanta, which became 22 Squared.
In our conversation, we talked about the evolving role of marketing, the importance of brands and brand meaning, and how AI is shifting and re-shaping the shopping journey.
Here are some of Brandon's soundbites from the podcast.
“We are a dopamine-driven ephemeral society. That is very difficult for brands. And I think that's why you see a lot of brands chasing attention.”
“Brands are having a hard time creating memory structures because they're chasing attention. People just don't remember any ads at all. I think only 4% of ads are recalled three days later.”
“Our agency spends a lot of time, and it's probably because we've, we, we work with a bunch of complicated, multiple-location, retail-type brands, but from hospitals to banks to grocery stores to home improvement stores. We spend so much time doing the internal work, the alignment, the branding campaigns internally, getting people rallied around the heart of the brand and how they live it.”
“The whole product and brand discovery process is getting completely changed by AI. We're going to have to re-engineer our journeys and what we invest in and our technology in terms of it's no longer about search engine optimization. It's about content. It's about making things discoverable for AI, all these things, right? But the thing that I think will matter more than anything is going to be the brand meaning.”
“For a long time, we've associated brand with frivolous type advertising and communications that are a luxury to have. Brand is an operating system for companies. It’s not a new thought, but it's a true thought. A mental organizing form for action, which is how people think about the world and about the category you're in and about the actions that they take and what it means for them.”
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5 Things I learned from talking to Kelsey Hodgkin- CEO-Special US
In my conversation for the Inspiring Futures podcasts that spans London, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles, Kelsey Hodgkin — CEO and Partner at Special U.S. — maps out how a strategist becomes a leader without losing her strategic soul.
Founded in 2007 in Auckland, New Zealand, Special Group began in an old cinema and is now an independent global network with offices in Auckland, Wellington, Sydney, Melbourne, Los Angeles, New York, and London.
Below are the 5 things I learned from our conversation.
- Working in Turmoil Teaches Resourcefulness
Working in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s economic turmoil taught Hodgkin a counterintuitive truth: when money becomes meaningless, creative output becomes everything.
“It’s sort of this two-year experience of what it’s like to actually live somewhere where money and capitalism isn't the driving force. It’s much more about the creative output. You have to be really resourceful.”
- She Reframes Strategy as Living Beyond The Brief-Writing Machine
While some agencies treat strategy as a creative-brief factory, Hodgkin articulates a more ambitious vision.
“Strategy at its best is either upstream — really understanding the commercial side of the business — or downstream in the media complexity… being able to turn a big idea into an even bigger idea.”
- She Named the Real Challenge: ‘
Our clients are in a "washing machine"
Instead of complaining about client chaos, Hodgkin sees opportunity in the turbulence.
“The unpredictability, the uncertainty… having strategists that can really understand that commercial reality… being able to be in there with them every day.”
- She Makes The Case For Agencies As Counter-Culture
At a time when agencies increasingly mirror their corporate clients, Hodgkin argues for resistance.
“The job of agencies is to be countercultural — questioning of the mainstream and contrarian… if it becomes part of the machine it’s trying to change, then it’s less valuable in being able to change.”
- She Redefines Leadership As Creative Curation
Hodgkin sees the planner’s superpower — pattern recognition, empathy, orchestration — as the foundation for modern leadership.
“As a planner, my strength was more curation than creation — helping greatness happen through others. That’s what leading an agency is.”
In a challenged ad agency world, Hodgkin offers a roadmap: be resourceful, stay close to the chaos, protect creativity from corporatization, and lead by shaping the conditions for others to do their best work.
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While most of us are obsessed with the creative and strategy side of the business, the harsh reality is that agencies succeed or fail based on their operational competence.
For this recent episode of Inspiring Futures, I spent time talking to Nick Avaria.
Nick has owned his own agency, and he also buys agencies and consults with them to help them improve operations.
Here are some of the highlights of our conversation.
The agency landscape has transformed.
Where generalist agencies once dominated through geographic proximity, today's winners are specialized, systematized, and financially disciplined.
The Numbers that Matter
Agency finances are simple: Revenue minus pass-through costs equals Agency Gross Income (AGI).
People costs should consume maximum 45% of AGI (30% billable, 15% admin).
SG&A should range 20-25%.
This formula yields 30-35% profit margins—increasingly achievable in today's remote-first environment.
According to Nick, most agencies fail by providing "Michelin star service at McDonald's prices."
The solution isn't cutting quality but is all about being able to align price with value.
Specialization to Survive
In 2012, only 20% of agencies were specialized; today it's 70%.
Specialists command premium pricing because they deliver results in weeks, not months.
They skip expensive discovery phases, leveraging "institutional knowledge"—accumulated expertise that becomes an unassailable moat.
The agency handling only Google Ads for personal injury lawyers doesn't need three months of strategy.
They know what works. This expertise enables premium pricing while reducing delivery time.
The Operations Gap
Most agencies are "relationship driven, not systems driven."
Every handoff fails.
Every project reinvents wheels. Results: inconsistent quality, evaporating margins.
The fix requires two feedback loops: systematized client experience (onboarding, expectations, education) and standardized delivery (dashboards, SOPs, training).
These unglamorous systems separate scalable agencies from those that implode.
What It Takes to Be Sold
For maximum valuation: maintain 30-35% profit margins while growing AGI 30-35% annually.
Achieve $1M+ EBITDA for 6-9x multiples.
Build 2+ year client retention. Create owner-independent systems.
Winners have transformed from creative shops into operationally excellent businesses.
They've chosen their lane—vertical, service, or both—and built expertise others can't match.
What it Takes
Today, rewards neither generalists nor operational chaos behind creative brilliance. Success requires specialized expertise, systematic delivery, positioning, and financial discipline.
Agencies can't thrive on talent alone.
They need systems capturing talent's impact, positioning commanding appropriate pricing, and discipline ensuring every dollar builds a sellable asset.
Creative magic still matters, but it has to be wrapped in a sound business model.
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The latest Inspiring Futures podcast on better briefs and creative development featured a different format - instead of a typical one-on-one conversation, I gathered together an expert panel to examine and explore the issue.
Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler - From Better Briefs. Former creative agency strategists with two decades of experience working on thousands of briefs. They've published studies on brief writing and idea assessment, and now work with BetterBriefs, helping major brands create more effective briefs.
Jeremy Diamond - Worked at major London agencies before moving to New York in 2000 to join Ogilvy & Mather. In 2004, he founded Distillery, a brand strategy consultancy, and has worked on a myriad of clients, including Diageo, Campbell's, Cox Communications, IHG, Holiday Inn, American Express, and AON.
Tom Noble - A highly experienced global marketer and advertising strategist with extensive experience as a senior marketer and agency exec. Tom's experience includes Nike, adidas, BMW, MINI, AFL, Jeep, Alfa Romeo, and Fiat.
Why this particular group?
Matt and Pieter-Paul don't just theorize about brief problems - their research for the World Advertising Federation exposes the serious disconnect between clients and agencies, and they're in the trenches helping brands fix it. Tom and Jeremy have felt this pain firsthand across agency, client, and consulting roles.
The combination gives us both the data on what's wrong and the real-world knowledge on how things could be better.
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Mary Lou Bunn is the CEO and founder of the agency Flower Shop.
This is how the agency describes itself on its website.
"Ad Age’s Small Agency 2024 Newcomer of the Year. That’s right, we’re a creative agency. We may be based out of a former florist’s on the Lower East Side of New York City, but we sell sneakers (or spirits, or non-alcoholic beer, or women’s sports teams, or energy drinks for athletes, or trading cards) rather than bouquets. We like to look at things from a fresh angle, with a twist. So we may not bring you flowers - sorry - but we can promise beautiful campaigns that are undeniably famous and will grow your brand."
In our conversation, we discussed her background in hospitality and architecture, and how it influenced her perspective on the agency.
Her agency experience, the story behind the origins of Flower Shop, its philosophy, and the opportunity for a nimble small agency at this moment in time.
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From digital media planner to Chief Strategy Officer - and now she's on a mission to democratize strategy for everyone.
This is a podcast interview I did with Lucy Barbor, a strategy consultant and educator who's flipping the script on how we think about strategic thinking.
After rising through the ranks to become CSO at PHD UK and Global Strategy Partner at Dentsu, Lucy made a bold move: she decided to take strategy out of the boardroom and into the hands of anyone hungry to learn.
Her philosophy? Strategy shouldn't be this mysterious, gatekept discipline that only a select few can master.
In our conversation, we dive into:
- How she approaches teaching strategy to make it truly accessible
- The biggest misconceptions people have about strategic thinking
- What she learned climbing the ladder in competitive agency environments
- Her framework for breaking down complex strategic problems
If you've ever felt intimidated by strategy or wondered how the best strategists think, this one's for you.
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David Aaker is widely regarded as the father of modern branding. Over a five-decade career, he transformed brand from a communications tool into a strategic asset. His groundbreaking concept of brand equity, introduced in Managing Brand Equity (1991), reframed how businesses understand value — not just through products, but through perception, loyalty, and meaning. He followed with Building Strong Brands (1996), which introduced the Brand Identity System, and later with Brand Leadership (2000), co-authored with Erich Joachimsthaler, which cemented the idea of brand as a driver of business strategy.
Beyond his role as a professor at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Aaker has shaped practice as well as theory. As Vice Chairman of Prophet, he’s advised global brands on identity, portfolio strategy, and brand relevance. His frameworks — from signature stories to brand architecture — have become foundational tools for strategists around the world. In 2015, he was inducted into the American Marketing Association Hall of Fame for his lifetime contributions to marketing thought.
Among those deeply shaped by Aaker’s work is Scott Galloway, who studied under Aaker at Berkeley in the 1990s and later co-founded Prophet. Galloway has said, “There would be no me without David Aaker,” a testament to Aaker’s profound influence on the next generation of brand thinkers. What Aaker pioneered — brand as belief system, as organizing principle, as strategic lens — remains more relevant than ever in a time when differentiation is fleeting and cultural resonance is everything.
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Rachel has spent over a decade at Work&Co. In the episode, we discuss the company's unique origin story and how it has evolved alongside the transformative changes in the world of technology.
We talk about..
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The importance of carving out space for creative risk, which clients demand because they find it challenging to accomplish in their environment.
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How constraints increase the odds of innovation.
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Why is simplicity hard? Because it requires a combination of iteration and bravery.
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Experience matters- be a user, feel and find the frictions- go to the edge and experience those use cases because innovation comes from trial and immersion.
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AI is transformative, but now is the time to get deep into the sandbox and play.
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Christine Olivas began her career by hand-delivering 50 resumes to San Francisco startups, which resulted in one startup hiring her.
Her entry into agency work came when an owner heard a webinar she produced and was impressed enough to bring her aboard.
At this agency, she excelled by running two departments and contributing to significant growth.
After years of success there, she transitioned to a strategy role at a New York agency before going freelance.
When client demand exceeded her capacity, she built a team, evolving into her current thriving business (No Single Individual) that provides agencies with talent across multiple disciplines.
Christine's journey illustrates the power of hard work, risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and market understanding.
Our hour together revealed not only her remarkable path but also her insights on how agencies have the opportunity to be more flexible and adaptable with talent in today's challenging environment.
A shift that's creating new opportunities thanks to the breadth and depth of freelance talent.
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Tara is the Chief Creative Officer at Rethink NY.
She has extensive creative experience from agencies including Y&R, BBH, Mother, and Droga (x2).
In our conversation, we discussed her experience at Miami Ad School, where she was forced to think seriously about funny- to an approach and perspective on being sensitive enough to find funny in the world around you.
We discussed her experiences and challenges at the different agencies she's worked at.
How Rethink throws has a unique West-Coast culture that's designed to make working in a New York agency less like a hot house.
How clients still want great work
But this all depends on the relationship and how Rethink has a unique way of making this work from the get-go.
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The latest Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Pip Bingemann- the co-founder of Springboards.ai
As strategy departments grapple with how to use AI, this podcast seems timely.
Pip is an agency strategist who embraced AI from the early days, learned basic code, and built a model that attracted the attention of several agencies.
Fast-forward two and a half years, and Springboards.ai has funding, sales, and customer service teams in multiple countries, as well as a bench of tech talent that includes a 17-year-old math genius.
Pip is doing something different with AI- recognizing that strategists need partners to help them bring their ideas to life, Springboards.ai is designed to be fun and creative. Its focus is on delivering variance vs. the typical AI model, where output is about conforming to an average.
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The latest Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Michael Miller and Chris Nobile- two of the three founders of consulting group Consiglieri.
Before the founding of the consultancy, Michael and Chris worked together and helped build T-Mobile's in-house capabilities.
In our conversation, we talk about what they learned from the T-Mobile experience and how it informed the development of their consultancy.
We discussed the pieces that matter, like the power of asking why certain things are happening, building operational competence, and doing things that help turn legacy marketing organizations into modern ones.
In a complex and complicated marketing world, Consiglieri exists to help CMOs build and operationalize their marketing function, allowing the CMO to manage the day-to-day.
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The latest Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Ali Burton.
Ali is Head of Incubator at Gate One in London, which is a Havas-owned start-up incubator.
He's also in the process of growing his own start-up Catch.
https://catchcameras.co.uk/
The idea of Catch is to lean into the movement for people to appreciate the analog, enjoy waiting, learn new skills, and build IRL communities.
In our conversation, we talked about what he's learned from working with start-up founders, how he's thinking about and growing his business, and what it was that drove him to develop the company.
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The latest Inspiring Futures episode is all about "Futures".
My guest is Donna Dupont, Chief Strategist, Foresight and Design at Purple Compass.
As the Founder and Chief Strategist in Foresight & Design for Purple Compass, Donna Dupont brings skills and insights developed over 20 years working with leaders in healthcare, emergency management, government public policy, strategic planning and program design. She has facilitated a range of foresight and design activities for clients in healthcare, emergency management and military.
In the conversation, we talk about the world of "Futures" what it is, what it isn't, the skills required, the approaches, and some of the challenges involved.
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The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an excerpt from a webinar I hosted with Brent Vartan of Bullish. Brent began his career as a strategist at shops that included- BBDO and Deutsch.
Bullish was founded in 2016 with the promise of bringing ad agency expertise, including strategy, to the start-up world.
The company describes its approach as "blending capital, consulting, and creation to design the most remarkable businesses in the world."
In our conversation, I spoke with Brent about the pivotal role that strategy and strategists play in this space.
It's a world where strategists work upstream, partnering with CEOs and founders to shape their brands in ways that are aligned with their vision and expedient to their needs and culture.
We dive into what this entails and what it takes to get it right.
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Mark is the co-founder of Squint Consulting.
Before Squint, Mark was an experienced Head of Strategy working with clients like Nike, Netflix, Samsung, and Diageo. His career spanned New York, London, and Amsterdam and he spent his formative years at R/GA, the world’s leading digital innovation firm.
In our conversation, we talked about his experience at R/GA, why he wants to be a "brand," not just a "freelancer," working with companies that, after 5-10 years, are finding they've reached the "plateau" with performance marketing and now need to think more deeply about their brand, his work with Olipop and how happiness is an important new space for brands today.
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YAMA Group was founded in 2009 and has steadily built a reputation as one of the leading small, independent pharma shops in the world.
It has worked on brands including Botox, Humira, and Keytruda and works with Takeda, AbbVie, and Pfizer.
It's a highly creative agency that works across all aspects of pharma marketing including efforts to reach specialists and has developed its unique products for these interactions involving the creation of "digital patients.
In my conversation with Martin and Michelle- we discuss the world of pharma marketing, look at what matters in the space, and how the agency differentiates itself and has created its own unique culture.
This is an agency that grew its revenue an astonishing 67% in 2023.
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My latest Inspiring Futures podcast episode features an interview with Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel.
Anastasia is a cultural theorist, writer, social critic, and strategist specializing in inclusivity within marketing, media, and tech.
She earned her doctorate in cultural studies from Duke University and is now using her expertise to help brands ignite cultural innovation and leverage the power of media for good. Dr. Gabriel is the author of Cultural Intelligence for Marketers, published by Kogan Page in March 2024.
She has consulted for the world’s largest brands at research and creative agencies like Wieden+Kennedy, Dentsu Creative, McCann New York, Kantar, and Canvas8 and been featured by the American Marketing Association, the Association of National Advertisers, the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Advertising Week, Campaign US, Teen Vogue, and others,
In our conversation, we talked about her early years and upbringing in Latvia and her school experience in Hong Kong.
We talked about what culture means to her, how she thinks about it, and its importance.
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The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with Julianna Katrancha- Group Strategy Director at Johannes Leonardo. This is one of my favorite interviews because Julianna dives into the learnings from her journey from a media planner to a senior strategist. She talks about her periods and moments of doubt, and how committed and focused she is on carrying the practices and principles that deliver strategies with impact. We talk about what those are. How you cope with the challenges agencies face today and some thoughts on what it means to manage teams.
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The latest Inspiring Futures episode features an interview with Allen Adamson of Metaforce.
Allen is a seasoned executive with experience client side at Unilever and in the agency world with the likes of Landor, Y&R, and Ogilvy.
He has taken his extensive experience in both worlds to build his own consulting company that's focused on helping clients solve their problems but does it in a very different way to the classic ad agency model.
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The latest Inspiring Futures podcast is a discussion with Joe Nash and Patrick Kizny about the current and future state of creative services and creative studios. Joe was formerly the Director of Business Strategy at Buck and the co-founder of Slate. Patrick runs Futurecrafting which provides strategic advisory services to brands and companies and has an extensive background as a creative director, art director, and technical/software specialist. In our chat, we talk about the evolution/revolution that is taking place and how companies need to think about and prepare for the future.
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The latest episode of the Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Lori Bartle of Cultivagency.
Lori has over two decades of experience in Account Management although she much prefers to call it Account Leadership.
In our conversation, we discuss some of the challenges the discipline faces and the critical importance of a role that brings a deep understanding and knowledge of a client's business to the table.
As you will hear, Lori is an extremely passionate advocate of the discipline.
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The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with Tom Suharto, Global Strategy Lead at Forsman & Bodenfors.
Tom started in market research (quant) worked with Hall and Partners and helped to establish their office in Shanghai and then on to Wieden in Shanghai to work on Nike, Disneyland, and then to the Portland office to work on Nike and Samsung.
He's been at Forsman & Bodenfors for four years.
In our conversation, we talked about his learning journey; his experience working in China, the culture and DNA of Forsman, and how he's developed the strategy practice at the agency.
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When Hyphenated was awarded Silver, West Coast in Ad Age's Small Agency of the Year Awards the publication wrote the following introduction.
"When William Esparza and Kelli Robertson left their roles at R/GA in 2019 to establish their own creative agency, they chose the name Hyphenated to reflect the agency’s aim of bridging the gap between brands and the multicultural audiences whose spending power continues to climb in today’s “fiercely hyphenated world.”
I first talked to Will and Kelli four years ago when they were just a baby and now they are growing up, evolving and responding to the dynamic changes in the marketplace.
We got to talk about the changes, the challenges, their beliefs, what makes them tick, and what makes them different.
The latest Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Jonathan Wise one of the co-founders of the non-profit Purpose Disruptors.
Jonathan was once a strategist at JWT, but quit his job to study for an MBA in Sustainability.
In the episode, we discuss his journey and transformation, what Purpose Disruptors is, and how it is trying to impact and create change in. behaviors, mindset, and business models in the UK ad industry.
https://www.purposedisruptors.org/
The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with Dr. Grace Kite, the founder of Magic Numbers, an analytics-focused consultancy that helps companies and brands understand how they grow.
In our conversation, we discussed the challenges and importance of being strategic when understanding the factors behind growth, the difficulty of brand-building for performance-focused brands, the compounding impact of "brand patience," and more.
We also talked about the importance of training, and Magic Numbers offers a couple of courses: "Scaling Up," which is all about helping marketers balance their performance and brand marketing efforts, and "Data Works," which focuses on using data compellingly and persuasively.
Both courses can be found here.
https://magicworks.training/
The latest Inspiring Futures episode features an interview with Beth Bentley the co-founder of consultancy Tomorrowism.
Beth's experience includes-
Deputy Head of Strategy- Adam & Eve, London
Executive Head of Strategy- at Wieden&Kennedy- London
SVP Strategy Virtue at Vice.
She is also the author of a best-selling book, was the Chief Strategy Officer of Portas retail consultancy, and a Communication Strategy Advisor to the Secretary of State in Whitehall.
In the pod, we talk about how her experience as a journalist gave her the right tools to think about brand strategy, the issues that brands face today, why culture matters to brands, why strong brands are more important than ever, the transformation of the ad biz, and more.
The latest Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Caroline Johnson- Co-Founder of The Business Model Company.
Caroline worked at Grey but then worked at KPMG as a consultant.
The Business Model Company advises agencies on how to evolve their business models to generate value for their clients and increase revenues and profitability for themselves. She was called in to help with the transformation of IPG's Huge, a process that has been documented in Michael Farmer's book "Madison Avenue Makeover" https://www.amazon.com/Madison-Avenue-Makeover-transformation-redefinition/dp/1911687646
Here are a few of the highlights from my conversation with Caroline.
How Do You Define a Business Model?
"A business model is very simply three parts. If you think about three corners of a triangle, those three points are completely codependent. At the top, you've got how you create value for your customers in the market, for your clients, that is your positioning, your proposition, how you tell the story of your capability. But critically, it's also the neighborhood that you live in."
Why is "Neighborhood" an Important Concept?
"We're not thinking about the neighborhood that we live in. And we're also not thinking about innovation and applying creativity to the operating model and the commercial model. So as a creative industry, we have creative sophistication and sometimes confidence. But we are really critically underdeveloped and have a lack of sophistication in our ability to adapt our operating systems and also to develop any form of commercial model for the whole industry."
The Advantages of Moving and Upgrading Your Neighborhood
"If you're building your house and investing in your house in the service industry in that neighborhood, which has been commoditized, then you're likely to suffer from bad landlords, declining property prices, noisy neighbors. And from a corporate advisory point of view, the multiple that's applied to those types of commoditized service businesses is sort of between six and nine. But if you repackage those businesses into a program business, a product business, and a more consultative offering or a platform business, then the multiples that are used to value the EBITDA of those businesses start at 12 and go up to 24. So you can double, if not triple."
The Future of the Agency Network
"The classic traditional network agency model of being a one-stop shop. Not only a one-stop shop for all services and capabilities, but also for every market and locality in the world has been a very successful model. But I think it's gone now. The idea that classic advertising and traditional communications are going to take the lion's share of a marketing director's yearly budget is just not going to happen. Its significance and its ROI are rapidly declining. There are much smarter ways of being able to sustain and promote brands and scale brands. So I think the bricks and mortar traditional agency network that you refer to is over."
Andy Nairn is the co-founder of Lucky Generals- an ad agency with offices in London and New York. Beyond running an agency, Andy has written a best-selling business book "Go Luck Yourself" and has just completed his first novel- "Trail of Blood" a murder mystery set 500 years ago on the border between England and Scotland.
On Pitching
"Some agencies are good at going through the grind of pitching and winning things that they don't feel passionate about. But I think for whatever reason, the three of us realized that we're not good at, you know, we sort of tend to all three of us, put our feelings on our sleeves and show whether we're interested."
Category Conventions
"Originality is incredibly important, but also think about category conventions as well. Well, sometimes we throw away the convention. people think I'll convince the boring but I mean for instance when you come to cover I found that really interesting briefing a designer on your book cover. In our world, you might want to be unlike any other cover in the market. The book designer just went "No you're mad my friend yes, of course, it's got to be unique and different and interesting but you've also got to tell very quickly what sort of genre this is."
What Makes a Strong Planner/Strategist
"If you hone your skills at being interested and listening to and being curious about human behavior and all its weird illogicalities and quirks, then you won't go far wrong. You won't be beaten by a robot you'll be able to use technology to help you develop those insights."
“When someone says their favorite book is advertising-related. I'd sort of be a bit disappointed. I want you to sort of tell me about, you know, your amazing fashion sideline or your photography or, you know, sport or other stuff. It's so true."
The Lack of Storytelling Tension in Advertising
"I feel like a lot of advertising is cats sitting on mats there's nothing nothing is happening there's no tension there's no through old Jeopardy, nothing can ever go wrong."
The Threat of AI
"I'm sort of genuinely optimistic about all of those sort of existential threats and challenges as long as we hang on to, you know, our creativity and our sort of, you know, just our open-mindedness and our curiosity,”
Pitching a Novel
"I used to joke that it's kind of like with Go Luck Yourself, it was almost like saying it's like Harry Potter meets the Bible, which I didn't do, but you've got to pick two things that are unbelievably successful and collide them together."
Building Novels from Worlds
"I started thinking of it as a little brand and I wanted to create a world, not just a one-off story. I feel like this is kind of an interesting world, this world of outlaws and warlords and an odd part of the world that people don't know exists, you know, this borderlands and this time, I feel could be my sort of place, my world where other authors are not really sort of in that sort of space."
Maz Karimian heads up strategy at ustwo an employee-owned product design company that brings emotional game-inspired thinking to product design—some key quotes from our conversation below.
About ustwo
“Monument Valley is the game and the game series That was so successful that usTwo games was split off as a sort of a separate sister entity, still under the usTwoi umbrella. But yes, that's been something influential, I think, on, well, frankly, the type of talent that we attract. But also the mindset we bring, that more playful, more emotion-centric approach to product design that has served us well.”
What He Does
“A lot of what I focused on has been the opportunities at the intersection of product design and game design thinking, what we call play thinking. And that's emphasizing the capacity and the importance of product design to incorporate a focus not just on functional outcomes, but emotional outcomes and explicitly target the certain ways that we want users to feel sort of before or during and after engaging with an experience that we've created.”
On Tech Overload
“We talk about ourselves as social creatures, which we are, but the society to which you belong, the community to which you belong, was never the entire world, and all the information in it. And I think that in many ways, we're seeing just various symptoms of overload.”
AI Transformation and Promise
“I don't think day-to-day transformation happens until it's usefully embedded in products and services that we already use and or integrated into products that we end up adopting.”
"The promise of AI, like all good technology, is to free up humans, time and energy, both physical, and especially mental energy, but to free up humans to be more human. "
Working with Clients
We have a workshop, which we call “the user as player workshop”, where we essentially reimagine your product as a game, and your user as a player of that game, which is handy for cracking open and dusting off that emotional lens,
In the case of iRobot and the workshop, it’s the opportunity to ask questions like..
How do we want people to feel about this robot in their homes 30 days after purchase?
How do we want them to feel about it?
Daniel Groh heads up brand at Satisfy Running.
In this interview, we discuss the transformed state of the running category and Satisfy's place within it.
How the brand leans into personal expression and appeals to those who want to express themselves beyond the traditional players and the traditional running silhouette.
How it's leading the charge in sustainability, recycling, and repair.
How runner insights matter to product development.
How the recent brand film shot in LA was made.
How the company thinks about distribution
Plans for loyalty
It's approach when it comes to athletes
And more....
Here's a key quote from the interview.
“I think the biggest difference is for people that look at performance, there are brands for that. I think for people who look at the pleasure of running in the purest form, we're a brand for them. What's beautiful about where kind of running is today is that people are transforming it into what it means for them. There's a great crew out of Austin made up of restaurant workers. There's a crew in Paris that are all electronic musicians. It's nice because, you know, I think it's not cookie-cutter anymore. It feels like people are turning something that was once quite boring, into something a little bit more exciting and turning into themselves. I don't know why this happened, but there was always a dissociation between how you express yourself in daily life and how you express yourself in sports. I think that line is gone.”
The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with John Geletka. John owns and founded Geletka + - a small agency located in the West Loop of Chicago
The agency was founded five years ago.
John's an artist by training but has done several different jobs in his career including corporate marketing, but he's also an entrepreneur at heart.
It was fascinating to talk to a small agency owner and get his thoughts on the market and the business today.
On Starting an Agency During COVID
"We had a, we had like a really good start. And I think I attributed it to a couple of reasons, right? We looked at our engagements a little bit differently and it wasn't, it's not a big shift. A lot of people do it. So it's nothing innovative, but, during a time like COVID where there's rapid uncertainty, we would take up, let's call it a 50 to a hundred grand project and we turn it into a retainer and break it up over six and 12 months. So we were always, we're able to like run the discipline, help our clients out financially in uncertain times, and then run the business with a level of discipline."What Clients Want
"What clients and complex industries don't want is something, you know Some hotshot coming in and just telling them what to do and what's cool They want somebody to sit down and learn the business. Empathize with them go all in and learn about their customers they've known for 10, 20, or 30 years. And that takes like that takes time. They're also looking for that outside perspective I think a lot of folks are welcome to it as long as you sit down And understand them."
What He Wants from Talent
"I mean, there's a sort of a roll your sleeves up graft aspect here that is required. And there's a danger with the prima donna with the attitude of "that's kind of beyond me".
Why the Interest in Web 3
"There's an awesome art culture that's in there, There is a gaming culture that's... that's kind of the next layer of the art. I call it a subculture because you got all these little mini-cultures. And they sort of interact with each other a little bit, right?Integrating AI into the Process
"We buy the big chunk of our organization seats on Mid-journey and GPT. And we give them access and range to use it as a tool, right? AI, from my perspective, is a great accelerator. It is by no means a replacement for great creative. It is by no means like here is just a machine that we're going to produce AI-driven content or copy, but it is like, you know, for a team, it can, it can help storyboard faster, it can help do research faster, it can help round out headlines, it can help they can help do things. But it can't do, it's not a replacement for a writer. It's not a replacement for a designer."The Importance of Honesty "We're not afraid to say a few things that we're not doing well in the first conversation. So that level of just being as candid as I can in early conversations has served us well, not only in the sales process but when we get to work because people know what they're getting."
The latest Inspiring Futures podcast is an interview with Eliza Yvette Esquivel.
Eliza has worked both on the agency and client side. She's had senior brand management roles at Mondelez and Microsoft and as a strategist and CSO at several different agencies, including Barbarian, Future Brand, DDB, JWT, Wieden and Kennedy Amsterdam, and TBWA.
In our conversation, we discuss what she's learned from her experiences on the agency and client sides and how she's applying that learning to her coaching, leadership, and consulting businesses, which are underpinned by protean thinking.
Some quotes from Eliza from the interview.
Moving from Agency to Client
"The first thing when I went client side was I was surprised at how little they knew what they were doing. I had this perception when I was in the agency world that the clients were buttoned up and, you know, everything was very certain and, you know, they had it together, and we didn't understand."Agency Understanding of Clients "The other thing is just how little we know about our client's businesses on the agency side, how little we understand about how they make money and what the center of gravity of each organization is. And then, therefore, what role does marketing play as a consequence?The Challenge for Marketers inside Corporations
"There's a fundamental lack of understanding, especially with marketing, of what marketing is and how it works. So if you're a good marketer and get into these organizations, you must sort of play along with some antiquated misconceptions while you''re trying to, you know, educate and persuade to a more sophisticated approach."How to Make Brand Matter Inside the Corporation "I did this while I was at Microsoft: I connected brand metrics to business metrics. And it was hugely impactful. All of a sudden, they paid attention to the brand, and I used my research budget to show the contribution that the brand made to the business when I restructured the way we collected the data about brand metrics. So I think that, you know, it's either having an evangelist or you yourself going in and creating the proof that has not existed up until that point. "The Importance of Creativity "if clients understood the value of constantly exercising that kind of creativity, and, and valuing advertising agencies' ability to sort of bring that to the table, their businesses would probably be thriving."The Protopian Future "Protopia is basically the understanding that we create the future incrementally by making it a little bit better and a little bit better in steps. But we're always pointing toward that better direction. And so that's really what protopianism is all about. It really has sort of like the pillars. It's got some pillars within it of sustainability, inclusivity, and these human-centric values. It's about a future where technology and ethics sort of walk hand in hand."
Warren Berger is an author and journalist who has spent the last 25 years writing about the worlds of design, advertising and innovation. Back in the day he got a feature story about Weiden and Kennedy into the NYT Magazine and he wrote the book "Advertising Today" that was published by Phaidon,.
For the past 10 years, he's been focused on the world of questions and questioning- from which sprang the book "A More Beautiful Question"- which celebrated its tenth anniversary with a new updated edition.
Here are some quotes from my interview with Warren.
It was designer Bruce Mau who inspired him to think more deeply about questions.
***“Bruce Mao had a thing about questioning where he said, one of the most important things a designer can do is be the person who's willing to ask stupid questions.”
"So I realized when you talk about how designers think, they often start with questions and that's kind of the, they're trying to figure out the right question to ask that will address a problem or a situation."***He also understood that it was questions that lay the foundations for the new disruptive startups.
"They're only ten years old or whatever and if you went back to the origin of them You could usually identify a question there was usually a question that Reed Hastings was trying to answer or that the three guys who started Airbnb."Questions are everywhere "I was there with the arts, of course it's there with science, you know, scientists are always working on questions. So what I realized is it's, you know, it's everywhere. It's in basically any discipline that's trying to solve problems, is trying to do problem solving, is focused on questions because the question is how you articulate the problem."
In the updated edition of the book- he explores the idea of AI and questions
"***Do we does it mean that this question become more important in the age of? AI, or does it mean that we really don't need to do any of this stuff anymore? Because AI is going to take care of all the thinking for us?"
"We have to get sharper with our questions to get more out of AI. But also, we have to use the questioning of a analytical questioning, critical thinking questioning, to question what comes back to us from AI."
https://amorebeautifulquestion.com/***
This episode features an interview with Gerard Critchlow, who heads up Global Strategy on the Unilever brands- Axe/Lynx at IPG.
Gerard collaborates with several IPG entities worldwide to ensure the Axe/Lynx brands connect to their consumers and cultures.
Some quotes from Gerard from the episode.
*"And for me, if we're in the attention game, who does attention best, and that tends to be entertainment companies. And so I've always tried to look at how do we shift from interrupting people to providing entertaining content."
"There is no more monoculture, especially for younger people. So you have to be able to entertain in order to get people's attention."
"I kind of start from the premise that no one gives a shit about your brand. So I almost like take the brand hat off. Of course, we're doing it for brands. And so we. we then first look at what is the landscape, what are the signals, what are those conversations or topics. And then we then put our brand hat back on and then look at are any of these topics related to the brand's point of view.
"If you fan like a fan, you almost take your brand hat off and you speak like the fan, you're interested in what they're talking about, you like the same songs, the same tracks, you know the backstories, all of those things."
"It's like a muscle. You post a lot. Some things will fly. Some things won't. But the things that do fly do really, really well. And from what we see is we keep a small team, meet every single day, post, get that muscle going. And then when things fly, and we think the engagement and the conversation is scaling. we begin to provide value. "
"It has so many more implications, not just social. It actually is trickling itself from the ground in the social conversations into bigger pieces of work, like the above the line work. So what are the sort of types of conversations that people are talking about What influencers or musicians do they relate to? Those are partnerships we then go after. What do they want because Axe as a fragrance brand? What do they want from fragrances? How do they react to each other?"*
This latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with the CMO of Depop.
Depop is one of the most interesting brands in the fashion space since it's all about reselling and ultimately about transforming the way we shop for fashion.
Peter has a fascinating background with experience on the agency side with both Anomaly(where he worked on the Converse brand) and VCCP and client side at Google in Creative Lab.
In a wide-ranging conversation we talk about his early experience as a writer and how that's core to his work today, building a cohesive brand, the importance of culture for brands, how community needs to be balanced by the brand and some of the challenges of growing the brand beyond its core.
In this episode, I talk with Tass Tsitsopoulos, the Global Strategy Director of McDonald's at Wieden + Kennedy. We discuss his early life in London, studying politics at LSE, his accidental journey into advertising thanks to Jeremy Bullmore, his life as an Account Guy at BBH, and his leap into planning. We also get to talk about his journey in the US with BBDO and McDonald's at Wieden + Kennedy.
Last month, I sat down for a conversation with Ian Murray- the co-founder of Burst Your Bubble. Ian has no shortage of contrarian views on everything from media and the current vogues in marketing to what strategists need to be doing in their work.
To give you a flavor of the conversation- here are some soundbites.
On Media "TV still produces the strongest signals in terms of what we call fitness, which is things like signaling a brand's quality, reliability, financial strength, and success."
"Young people have the same response pattern on signaling as older generations. So they're watching less TV, but it has no lesser cultural impact for them."
Findings from research conducted for Essence The Problem with Niches "How do you build culture through these incredibly fragmented, personalized niches? You've no idea if anybody else is seeing the same thing you." **People Want to Conform
"It's not driven necessarily by niches. People aren't always looking to stand out and define themselves as different from others. They are, but it's not necessarily the dominant thing they're doing. A lot about what the mainstream are doing is they want to belong, they want to be the same as other people.” Strategists- Look More Closely at What's Around You**"You are stepping over the stuff, you know, that you're ignoring on your way to the agency in the morning, you know when you're waiting for your street food at lunchtime in the market. You don't have to go 500 miles to see it's right in front of your eyes."
The conversation is full of interesting perspectives on what the industry should be doing and how we can do our strategy jobs with a level of integrity.
Jae Goodman is unique. He worked on Madison Avenue. He has a deep understanding of brands. He knows Hollywood, and he understands the power of culture and celebrity. Jae has experienced these worlds throughout his career, which spanned the likes of Wieden and Kennedy, CAA, and the creation of his agency- Observatory, and now his consulting company, Superconnector Studios.
In our conversation, we discussed the similarities between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, the importance of relationships and community in Hollywood, the changing landscape for brands and communication, and what creatives and strategists need to focus their efforts on today.
We also briefly touch on proprietary tools that allow his clients to see the intersection of brands, culture, and celebrity.
The latest Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Amy Daroukakis, a cultural strategist. Our conversation stretched far and wide from the creative emergence of crisis to the importance of curiosity as a lifestyle to get you out of your comfort zone. The idea is that Cultural Strategy is a more significant thing than understanding Youth Culture. The fact is the future is now and isn't passive, but it's about trying to answer the big question, "Where are we and where is the headed?" which is a question most people would love to know the answer to, even if they have no idea what cultural strategy is. The importance of being human in a world of increasing AI, when all people want to do is to replace their juniors by loading 200 trend reports into an AI and pressing a button. But with no one with any judgment or experience holding the wheel- how do you know the value of the output? In short- how to live and be a cultural strategist.
Peter Spear started his career at Tattoo in San Francisco, where he fell in love with qualitative research and has been a practitioner ever since. We discussed the importance of talking to people to learn the hows and whys that data can't explain. How, in recent times, talking to strangers has become a challenge, and how to overcome those challenges.
In short, this episode celebrates the art of qualitative research and advocates for it in a world that is seemingly becoming more data and machine-obsessed with less time and interest in understanding people and their thoughts, values, ideas, and motivations.
Last December, I recorded a podcast with Keely Adler, who heads up Futures at Dentsu Creative.
This was before the agency's huge T-Mobile win, in which Keely played a huge part. In this conversation, we talked about how she sees the discipline of "Futures" (what it is and what it isn't) and its role in strategy and for clients. Keely is also on the core team of the RADAR group, which is a fascinating group of futurists and those interested in the future. It's a DAO, which makes it somewhat unique as an organization, and its purpose is to promote "futures" thinking and to create reports on the topic.
The most recent RADAR report is "Our Centaur Future" which RADAR describe as..... "At the convergence of man and machine lies Our Centaur Future. But what shape should that convergence take? Yes, this is about AI... but we’re going well beyond that. In the now, the near, and the next, it’s clear that we’ll be living (working, playing, learning, and creating) with more human-like technology than we’ve ever dealt with before. What does this mean for our relationship with technology? For our relationship with our humanity? For how we think about the physical, the digital, and the spaces in between?"
Back in November, I had a fascinating conversation with Laura Hutlfess, the co-founder of FlyteVu.
FlyteVu is an entertainment marketing agency based in Nashville.
Laura has a talent management background and worked for CAA before branching out independently.
In our conversation, we talked about her background, the type of work the agency does, the importance of agility and nimbleness, her perspective on talent, working with start-ups, and what it means to lead as a founder.
FlyteVu's clients include- Amazon, Jack Daniels, Bumble, and Victoria's Secret.
A few weeks back, I got to talk to Neal Mann.
Neal has had a fascinating career. Working in the literal frontlines of journalism, he got to experience the pressures and realities of getting stories out to the world before your competitors. He was an early advocate and power user of digital platforms like Twitter and understood the transformations happening to news and journalism. He spent time helping News Corp and Dow Jones with their digital transformations and at Anomaly, where he was Director of Content and Global Head of Transformation.
Neal has recently relocated from the US to Portugal, where he now works as the co-founder of NOAN, a start-up that uses AI to empower millions of small business owners to compete with the big guys.
Joe Carter spent time working in independent ad agencies in the UK, landed a sales job at Contagious, became enamored with Colenso BBDO, arranged to have lunch with the agency MD, brought a one-way ticket to Auckland, got a job in new biz at Colenso and then went on to be a co-founder of a company that makes cast pans- The Ironclad Pan Company.
In the podcast, I talk to Joe about his journey, what he's learned, and his plans for the future.
It's a required listen for anyone working in advertising who wants to take a shot at building a brand and business from scratch.
The latest episode of the Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Katie Dreke.
Katie has spent time with the likes of 180, Wieden Kennedy, Droga5, and Nike (7 years), and three years ago, she embarked on her journey as a consultant, which was when we last spoke.
We talked about her biggest learnings over the three years- such as unpacking and understanding her skills and capabilities and what she can offer her clients.
Her fascination and interest in "futures" work and how it's become more relevant these days. Understanding that the future will be complex, we must look to the positives, technological advances, and the opportunities it presents.
How can brands navigate their way to this new future?
How can they be the authors of their narratives?
It also took us into the world of "Unknown- Unknowns" as the place to think about and where you can explore the most exciting questions and opportunities.
And how a strategist has the power to look and poke through the system/ecosystem of pieces to find the "lightbulb that needs to be changed to make the world brighter."
We also touched upon awards shows and how agencies should think beyond them to offer their core capabilities to solve problems meaningfully, and perhaps it means competitive agencies working together.
There was also some discussion around the analogy of the contemporary brand as "the body"..........
....some parts need to move past, some parts need to move slowly, some parts need fixing, and some weak empathy muscles, etc...
All in all, it was an inspiring and fascinating conversation with lots of food for thought.
The latest Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with George Prest.
George started his career in the creative department of BBH and moved on to creative director roles at Lowe.
He was early to understand the power of digital transformation and was Global Executive Creative Director at R/GA and, most recently, a partner at the Brandtech Group.
In the podcast, we discuss his career trajectory, embrace of digital, and fondness for strategy and creative problem-solving.
His most recent experience as a consultant has included thinking about the issues around brand purpose, which we discuss in the episode, and how it became a springboard to his involvement in local politics in the UK.
The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with Sophie Ayles. Sophie is one of Australia's most experienced strategists.
She started her career in the Disruption group at TBWA Paris and has spent time at JWT, BBDO, co: collective, and M&C Saatchi (where she had several different roles, including Regional Chief Strategy Officer -APAC).
In the episode, we discussed Sophie's journey and experience along that journey- what makes for a good strategist, how strategists can make an impact, and what specific aspects of strategy she most enjoys.
Most of our conversation is focused on her recent work at M&C Saatchi/Greenhouse, a unique client: agency transformation unit and team established to help transform one of Australia's biggest retailers, Woolworths.
Woolworths operates over 2,000 stores in Australia and has a 36% share of the Australian grocery market.
In the latest Inspiring Futures podcast, I spoke with Dan Gardner, the co-founder of Code and Theory.
A 22-year-old- digital-first agency that states its philosophy as "Our intent isto be unclassifiable in a cluttered agency landscape.
We discussed the origins and evolutions of Code and Theory, how to think about technology correctly, the importance of discourse, what keeps him inspired, the power of the internet giants, why all websites look the same these days, and many other things.
Ivan heads up Redscout and is the CEO of the consulting company. Founded over 20 years ago, Redscout focuses on "making change real," using strategists and designers to make this happen. Ivan has a strategy background and has been with Redscout since 2015. His client experience includes- Best Buy, Google, PepsiCo, and ADP. Our conversation was wide-ranging, covering his career progression, the state of marketing and brands today, brand and performance marketing. talent, skills, and what it takes to succeed at Red Scout.
Kyle is the Strategy Director of BBH Singapore, where he works on a roster of great brands, including; Heineken, Nike, and Riot Games.
The podcast discusses his background, including his time at BBDO in Germany and his award-winning work for the WWF (World Wildlife Fund).
We also talk about the importance of how work gets developed that's culturally resonant and is likely to capture attention and go into some detail on the sneaker idea BBH created for Heineken.
In many ways, Kyle represents a breed of strategists at creative agencies where their understanding of culture and, importantly, how word gets out in culture plays an integral role in helping to develop great work.
Way too many months back, I had the chance to speak to Evie and Tyler at the Escape Pod in Chicago. It was an excellent opportunity to talk to members of a strategy team at a small agency. Tyler runs the department and Evie is a brand strategist on the team. Since Evie came into the industry from academia, we had an interesting discussion about what she brought to the team from her learnings on personal branding and entertainment. As a student, her dissertation was 350 pages on "Real Housewives." Tyler's experience includes Wieden, 72, and R/GA, and he has been at the shop for four years and was brought in as part of a team to create version 2.0 of the agency. We discussed the importance of building a strategy team and an overall agency culture where everyone can contribute and feels comfortable doing so. We also talked about golf grips.
Craig Mawdsley and Bridget Angear are Craig and Bridget - brand strategy consultants based in London. They started a couple of years after spending time as joint Planning heads at AMV BBDO, where they worked on a portfolio of impressive brands and picked up a trophy case full of awards. They were named top strategists by Campaign Magazine six years out of eight. This podcast is a follow-up to one I did when they had just started their business. Two years on, we discuss how their business has evolved and developed, why strategy is still fundamental to brand and business, how they work, the importance of words, and much more. It's an essential listen for those thinking of starting their strategy practice and for those who need reminding how essential strategy is to business and brand.
The Inspiring Futures podcast has been on hiatus for the past few months. In that period, a few recordings made last year never made it out into the public airwaves, which is an absolute disgrace. One such recording was an interview I did with Sophie Ozouz, the co-founder of Kin.
Kin is a purpose-focused agency with offices in NY and Los Angeles. Sophie founded the agency with a former colleague Kwame Taylor Hayford.
In the interview, I discuss Sophie's background as a strategist, her experiences working at Sid Lee, their motivations for starting her own shop, their work at Kin, and some general discussion on brands and purpose.
Kin was named Ad Age's Purpose Agency of the Year in 2022
Vasanth is a polymath- he's a creative director, but he's also an author, he has an engineering background is a graduate of computer engineering and started his career as a digital consultant.
Somehow he saw the light, transitioned to copywriting, and has held numerous jobs with JWT, Wunderman, Edelman, and Sapient-Razorfish. Vasanth also spent time in the halls of one of the most respected creative departments on the planet- BBDO NY. He worked on the likes of P&G (Gillette), J&J (Splenda, Lactaid), GE, Mars, and Emirates Airlines.
For the past four years, he's been running his shop, The Sunny Side, which aims to disrupt large agencies and make the combination of quality, speed, and price work.
It seems to be paying dividends as the agency has picked up business from Sephora, Castrol, Novartis, and P&G.
In our conversation, we talk about his background, career, his work at BBDO, the similarities and differences between Asian markets, and bringing speed and skill to some of the biggest clients in the world.
A few weeks back I was fortunate to chat with Neel Williams - Group Creative Director at the Martin Agency.
Neel runs all things creative on the massive GEICO account.
I couldn't beat the brilliant intro Neel has on his website, so I decided it was simplest to just cut and paste it.
"I am a copywriter by trade, Group Creative Director by title and gumbo-lover by birth. I graduated from Yale University, majoring in Art History. After attending The Creative Circus and working in Atlanta & New York, my wife and I moved to Richmond, Virginia.
Since then I’ve made a lot of fun stuff at The Martin Agency, helped write two nationally published books, invented a high-five machine, grown two mediocre moustaches, fathered two outstanding children, founded a modern fairytale podcast, and sang lyrics about Irritable Bowel Syndrome with Boyz II Men."
In the episode- we discuss Neel's early motivations to be a strategist, how he shifted into the creative domain, the importance of inspiration, improvisation with boundaries, the importance and role of strategy on the GEICO account, and the challenge of finding new ideas when you've already done most of the ones that are available.
Bonnie Wan has been working at Goodby since 1998.
In 2022, she was named Advertising Age/Creativity Chief Strategy Officer of the Year.
She started her career at Weiss, Whitten, and Stagliano in NY before becoming Adam Morgan's first hire at TBWA Chiat Day LA followed by stints at FCB and Hal Riney before joining GSP to work with Jon Steel.
In the conversation, we talk about the shifts and changes in the strategy discipline with leaders moving from gurus to guides. Higher stakes for clients and a wider remit in terms of media expansion.
She describes her approach to strategy is to work and think as a "team"- "it's not about being the smartest person in the room", but "making the whole room smart" and that requires a spirit of generosity.
The department culture is key for Bonnie- it's all about her bench and her team and making alchemy happen between the members of the team.
When it comes to philosophy around the process of strategy, she highlights the need for always-on, constant monitoring of culture and of consumers and the practice of always asking the smartest questions to ensure you arrive at a really interesting place.
Bonnie talks about her development of "Brand Camp" which is a 6-week strategy sprint that gets clients to an "organizing idea" and involves workshops with GSP strategists and the client C-Suites. This has served to bring new non-advertising clients to the agency and codified in detail the strategic process.
For emerging talent- she's created a 15-week training camp that teaches the fundamentals of Strategy.
We also talk about her upcoming book- "The Life Brief" - where she applies the strategic thinking and framing used for brands to life. Which is something she applied successfully in her life, Bonnie has just signed a book deal with Simon and Schuster
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This podcast episode features an interview with Stevie Archer- ECD and Kevin Skobac-Managing Director, Strategy- SS+K
SS+K is part of the M&C Saatchi network and has been around for 30 years.
It has a history of working in the political arena - including working for Obama in 2008. That political experience translates into a philosophy they describe as "thinking politically and acting creatively".
In the conversation, we talk about the agency and how its philosophy manifests itself in the work and the discipline of strategy, how creative and strategy work together and discuss in detail their work for Icelandic Tourism.
Kierstin De West is the Chief Marketing Officer of Alpha Foods.
This podcast is the story of Kierstin's journey from ad agency strategist to brand marketer to running her consulting business and on to senior brand roles at Lululemon and Alpha Foods.
In the episode, we talk about what she learned along the way, what agency folks need to know about working client-side, why strategists make great marketers, and even how to market plant-based foods.
Nick Steel is the co-founder of the creative independent agency HarrimanSteel.
The shop has worked with the likes of Uber, Seedlip, Tom's, Nike, Girl Effect, FootLocker, Patagonia and more.
Nick founded the agency straight out of art school at 27 and was lucky enough to get Nike as his first client.
In our conversation, we talk about his approach to the business, the importance of agency culture, and how the pandemic has shaped his thinking and that of the agency.
The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with Nikita Walia- the founder and CEO of Blank.
Nikita studied at NYU and went straight to work as a "digital native" on the coalface of social media.
She's done stints at We are Social, Matte Projects,, King &Partners- before setting up her own agency.
Our conversation takes on the ambitious challenge of exploring the current state of social media from a variety of different angles and perspectives.
From the challenge of working in social media today, to the unrealistic demands and expectations of clients, to influencers and their current status, the emergence of new social channels, and the potential for new collaborative communities like DAOs.
The podcast episode features an interview with Thomas Papadopoulos who is the CEO and co-founder of the Paris-based innovation consultancy Possible Future.
Thomas spent 16 years in the consultancy industry, first at Accenture, leading the Accenture Interactive Digital practice in France, then as a Partner in charge of Digital Transformation at Infosys and finally as Managing Partner at Weave, developing the digital business practice to support the digital transformation of large corporations. His field of expertise covers multiple industries including FMCG & Retail.
Possible Future is a consulting company dedicated to bringing innovation to market by harnessing the skills of engineers, designers, and business strategists.
Its client roster includes- Richemont. Intermarche, Société Générale and it's part of the Cap-Gemini group.
Wayne Chang is the General Manager of Saatchi Art. Wayne is an emerging artist himself but also has significant experience in the web and e-commerce space- starting with Newsweek and with stints at Photobucket and DogVacay.
Saatchi Art is the world's largest platform for emerging artists with 1.4 million artworks, from 94k artists, representing 110 countries.
In our conversation, we talk about what emerging art and art are exactly, how the site functions and works with both collectors and artists, the emerging NFT space, and Saatchi Art's efforts, and how Saatchi Art connects with its live event brand 'The Other Art Fair" to bring new collectors to the art market.
Thomas Kolster is a former ad agency copywriter who when the climate conference came to his hometown, Copenhagen- asked himself some serious questions and went off to investigate how advertising could do more good.
The result was the book "Goodadvertising" which was a bold attempt to change the role of advertising from just selling to being able to promote good. In 2020,
Thomas wrote another book "The Hero Trap" which argues that brands need to understand how they can motivate people to change and become better versions of themselves.
Thomas is a globally recognized keynote speaker featured at events like SXSW, TEDx, Eurobest, D&AD, Epica, ad:tech & Sustainable Brands, a columnist for publications including- Adweek, The Drum, The Guardian and several other publications and a regular judge at international award shows.
Lidiya is currently in Lviv and up until a week before the war began was working as a strategist at TBWA in Kyiv.
In the conversation, we talk a little about her background and where her attention is focused right now- on the "Information War"- most advertising and marketing professionals who are not fighting are now working on the Information War and working together on specific assignments and issues relating to this war.
In addition, to this work, Lidiya mentions the constant barrage of requests for contacts that she receives on social media be this help for refugees in Warsaw or transportation help for people in Ukraine.
We talked about the help that those overseas can give she feels that obviously giving to help humanitarian efforts is critical, but she believes the biggest problem that needs the smartest strategic and creative minds to solve is communicating the real story to Russians.
She even mentions the challenge within her own family which has cut ties with their relatives over the war.
Proto is a consultancy that was founded just over a year ago by some of the leadership of R/GA.'s business transformation unit.
In the episode, I talk with Rachel Mercer- the Chief Experience Officer, and Mike Rigby- Chief Design Officer.
The conversation covers their background and experience, the types of work that Proto is involved with, and the importance of clearly defining your own brand and living its values.
It's a fascinating conversation that shows how creativity can move upstream in the world of consulting and how a valuable mix of skills and experience can help clients shift and transform their businesses for the digital age and beyond.
In a world where every marketeer is talking about purpose, it is interesting to find an agency that has been working in this domain for over a decade.
In this episode, I talk with Rob Holzer- the founder and CEO of Matter Unlimited.
Rob is something of a digital pioneer and was the co-founder of Syrup- a digital agency that worked with the likes of Puma and GE and got acquired by LBI.
Matter Unlimited works with a mix of non-for-profits, foundations and large clients and it's the experience they have on the ground with the non-profits that helps inform how they advise and the strategies they create and build for brands.
In a world of short-term projects, Rob is especially proud of his long-term client relationships including one that spans over a decade with Merck.
Connor Moore and Paul Amitai are the Executive Creative Director and Executive Strategy Director of Listen. Listen is a sound agency that helps companies and brands create and build audio and sound strategies.
Connor designed the sound of Tesla's Model 3 engine tone to a family of alerts and notifications for Uber's Drivers App. He helped define Google’s audio design language for Google Glass, Waymo, and Google Pay
In the podcast, we talk about both their backgrounds, the types of work they are engaged in, and the process and approach behind the work.
Ben Dietz led commercial partnerships at VICE Media and is now a consultant for media and consumer brands. He publishes the [SIC] Weekly newsletter and is the co-host of the Culture Club Showon Clubhouse on Wednesday nights.
Ben has spent time advising brands on how to reach into unfamiliar and potentially risky spaces through his work with VICE and youth culture.
In the podcast, we discuss his experience and what we learned from it, and how it applies to understanding the new worlds that are forming the foundational building blocks of the metaverse- as in bitcoin, digital currency and NFTs
Neil Parker is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of co: collective
Over a decade ago co: collective was born- founded by Neil, Rosemarie Ryan, and Ty Montague.
Rosemarie and Ty had run the NY office of JWT and Neil had been the global strategy head of design firm Wolff Olins.
co: collective's arrival on the scene caused something of a stir because it wasn't the typical start-up from senior ad agency figures- it wasn't an ad agency- it was a brand consulting company with a difference.
As I learn in the conversation with Neil he brought something very different to the table from a strategic perspective. He wasn't your classic ad strategist, his background was in management consulting- so he brought more of a business perspective to the world of brands and branding.
We talk about what this means, how co works, how it works with others, and discuss various developments that we see in the world of brands and branding in 2021.
One of the best things strategy-wise to come out of the last couple of years is the 30-minute University of Planning which was the brainchild of Dr. Gordon Euchler.
The university does 2 things..1- Connects mentors to mentorees 2. Organizes talks/learning sessions. This platform has allowed strategists from all over the world to learn for mentors and for mentors to learn from the mentorees.
We are in a world where in-house training and mentoring are hard to come by- not that this is a replacement, but it's a nice addition.
In this podcast, I talk to Gordon about his career trajectory, the challenges of strategy in Germany, learning from John Lowery, the origins of 30 Minute University, where it is headed, working at Deloitte with the opportunity to make ideas real businesses and Shakespeare.
Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler are freelance strategists based in Melbourne, Australia who have created a consulting service to help clients construct better briefs.
The idea is fueled by an extensive research project that found up to 33% of marketing budgets are wasted from the inefficiencies created by bad briefs- Matt and Pieter-Paul are on a mission to change that.
In our conversation, we talked about their backgrounds, the catalyst behind Better Briefs, the reception so far, the disparity between agencies and clients over briefs and where Better Briefs is headed in the future.
Lindsay Stein is the new chief of social impact at Havas in NY.
Havas has been making some big moves around social impact recently and Lindsay is freshly installed in the New York office with the charge to make a difference inside the agency and with clients.
Lindsay's started her career in sports journalism but has a deep knowledge of the US marketing communication scene from her stints at PR Week, Advertising Age, and Campaign US.
Her last role was with the non-for-profit organization- "Today, I'm Brave" which unlocks bravery in underserved youth around the world and helps them become our next generation of leaders.
Her role will encompass the breadth of social impact including diversity and sustainability and she is keen that this isn't seen as an opportunity to seize competitive advantage and plans to share learnings and findings with agency competitors and even host events on the topic.
These are clearly early days, she is less than a month into her role, so it will be very interesting to see where this goes.
As we discussed in the conversation this is about having a serious commitment from the leadership of the organization and recognizing that this is a long-term effort- things will not be solved immediately and there will doubtless be numerous challenges that need to be overcome.
Her take is to keep things optimistic and positive.
Rob Walker is a writer, teacher, and journalist. He studied journalism and started his career working for trade magazines.
In the early 2000s, he worked for Slate under the leadership of Michael Kinsley who suggested he should write a weekly column about advertising. Kinsley's perspective was advertising was a key cultural force but it wasn't understood or appreciated as such.
Rob found this somewhat of a challenge, being dismissive of brands and ads himself. However, eventually, he got hooked on the topic and he ended up spending a decade writing the "Consumed" column for the New York Times Magazine.
Rob is now focused on helping people find interesting ways of escaping the Attention Economy by seeking out new moments of opportunity and discovery which he started exploring with his 2019 book, the Art of Noticing, and has followed up with in his subsequent Subtack newsletter.
Nick is one of the creative leaders over at design and strategy company- COLLINS. We had a very interesting, but somewhat rambling conversation where we covered his background in music, his work for record companies, and the magazine Frank. To be honest, I talked a little too much - Nick was either interviewing me or I was interviewing myself. We did manage to talk about some of the work and process for COLLINS clients like Crane, Clubhouse, and Robin Hood. And we touched upon the old favorite of how we work and create together during COVID, which led nicely to a chat about their new space in Brooklyn.,
Design is tough to understand and that makes design strategy even tougher. In this episode, Paul Collins the Strategy Director of Elmwood does a brilliant job of explaining how strategy works in a design agency. What is there to do? How it inspires and how it works with clients. We also talk about boundaries, like- where design ends and advertising begins. Elmwood and Paul have a lot of interesting experiences especially with the Tecate beer brand which we discuss in some detail.
David is the Founding Partner at HUSH.
Hush is a unique experience design practice where they create experiences designed for physical environments that use digital technology and data.
Think of a space like the lobby at Uber's HQ and HUSH are the folks that bring that experience to life.
This requires a really interesting set of skills from architecture through to coding and finding the talent and getting them to work seamlessly together is a fascinating challenge.
So, in the conversation, I talk to David about the company- how it functions, how they use inspiration, how they create and present their ideas- plus how they've been managing to do this in the pandemic enforced virtual workspace.
The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with John Graham- Head of Strategy at Cartwright. John has had an amazing strategy career - starting off working on Dos Equis at Havas, going to BBH and getting to work on the Axe account and the famous "Susan Glenn" campaign, and then 7 years at 72 and Sunny where he rose through the strategy ranks and worked on numerous accounts including - Activision, Starbucks, and Sonos.
John is now at Cartwright in LA.
The agency was founded by Keith Cartwright and part of the WPP family with clients that include- The NBA, P&G, and CBS News.
The latest episode of Inspiring Futures is an interview with John Roescher- the CEO and co-founder of handsome in Austin, Texas. We got to talk about the genesis of the company, what designing experiences mean and are, how to manage to combine the advertising and design discipline under one roof, and we also talked about the future of a company that operates without an HQ.
Nathan Phillips is the co-founder of the NY agency Technology Humans and Taste. Prior to becoming a copywriter, he worked in the performance art world, starting out in the world of improv. These are the experiences he brings to his agency where strategy is all about opening up possibilities, rather than the traditional approach of a finely tuned focus and creativity is something that is always on and if creatives aren't working on client work they are developing ideas for the agency's content arm. One particularly interesting initiative is the agency's databank/database of truths which is part of an ongoing process to collect,(sessions every Friday) archive, and use.
Frank Rose started his career as a beat reporter on the NY music scene for the Village Voice and went on to write for Fortune and Wired covering the worlds of business and technology. Now he's a Senior Fellow at Columbia School of the Arts and faculty director of the executive education program Strategic Storytelling,
Frank has just authored a new book - "The Sea We Swim In- How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World" published by Norton. In the book, Frank argues that stories are the most powerful way of persuading people, but this idea has been ignored or rejected by everyone from economists to marketers.
What has changed is the way in which technology has allowed us to experience stories- either through streaming media with our Netflix "binge-watching" or perhaps, most importantly, our ability to immerse and interact with stories at scale.
The longer one spends in the industry, it seems it gets easier to get more skeptical and cynical about the ad business. However, if you want a different take- talk to people who are just embarking on their careers in the business and see nothing but positivity and hope. I recently interviewed Payal Pereira and Shannon Gerety who are recent strategy graduates from the VCU Brandcenter. I was taken aback by their maturity, pragmatism, and good old-fashioned enthusiasm for the business and craft of strategy. What impressed me most was their desire to be part of the changes that the industry needs to make and how well they understood the importance and potential impact of these changes. There's a lesson here for those in management- the world you see isn't the same one that your new employees see and it's therefore imperative that you listen and learn. Reverse mentoring can be a powerful thing.
Greg Hahn left the world of big agency advertising for what basically was a start-up and has kicked off with quite an incredible first year.
The agency was recently awarded Ad Age's "Newcomer of the Year" with the following soundbite " “Since Mischief officially hung out its shingle on June 1 of 2020, its ascent has been swift and storied, with each campaign living up to the agency’s name.”
Greg and I had a wonderful and wide-ranging conversation that included- what it's like to leave and start up something fresh, the appeal of his partnersNFA which is best expressed by its mantra "What would you do if you weren't afraid". the real origin story of the great Snickers campaign, NY as a source of inspiration, cat herding, Fallon, the power of great strategy and strategists, the importance of calling it a day- and not pulling all-nighters- plus much more...
Design is a phrase that's often used as a catchall for a lot of different disciplines.
This podcast is focused on the world of brand design- meaning crafting and creating the identity and look of a brand new brand or updating an old one.
To help me navigate through this complex world, the podcast features two guests- Christina Falzano - Managing Director of Conran Design US, and Ben Solomon- VP Creative Director.
We discuss how this work is done, what is required to make it successful, and importantly how you sell something that it's subjective in the extreme.
Lesley Bielby was part of the second wave of account planners who landed on US shores. She is currently the CSO of Hill Holliday- her second time in this role and has spent time at Digitas, Di Massimo Goldstein. MMB and a number of London shops.
She has just written a book - Super Strategist- The Art and Science of Modern Account Planning. It is designed to be a guide to Account Planning today, taking the core principles and craft from the origins back in the late 1960s and merging them with the new demands of data, science that come from the worlds of digital and social.
In our conversation, we talk about the evolution of the discipline and the challenges and new demands of it today. Lesley offers a ton of practical and pragmatic observations and insight about what a Strategy Department looks like and how it functions in 2021.
She takes a long-term view of talent development asking the individuals in her time to declare a major and two minors, a reflection of the evolution of the Planning discipline, and to ensure that everyone has the comprehensive set of skills required today.
Mo Said heads up the creative shop Mojo Supermarket which includes the likes of Adidas, Fenty, and Netflix as its clients..
Mo's story is an inspiring one- he literally clawed his way to the top of the creative tree in advertising after arriving in the US from Lahore, Pakistan as a 17-year-old.
He has worked on some of the biggest brands and created a number of award-winning campaigns during his stints at BBDO and Droga5 in New York.
His mission now is to develop a company with a truly creative culture- one that nurtures, protects, and inspires its creative talent and at the same time does brilliant, breakthrough, culturally relevant work that puts brands on the map.
Dan was one of the original team who helped established Innocent Drinks.
A brand born in 1998 on the whim of four friends who maxed out their credit cards and found a couple of investors to back them making fruit smoothies.
The company sold a majority stake to Coca-Cola in 2010.
Dan headed up all things brand at Innocent from its inception to 2018 when he left for Apple.
In the podcast, we talk about the genesis and genius of Innocent- what and who it took to build the brand, creating vs. managing, and the importance of teams and collaboration.
The episode features an interview with Tracey Follows who is a professional futurist.
Since the future is what the podcast is supposed to cover, it was fantastic to have Tracey on the show.
Tracey started her career in advertising and then moved client-side before taking on senior strategy roles at VCCP and JWT.
Most recently she has been working as a futurist and running her own consultancy. Tracey has just authored a new book that explores the future of the individual in the technological age. The book explores the themes of identity, the relationship between man and machine.
It's basically a guide to help people understand how to protect their autonomy when the world around them is transforming. From her perspective, we need to be armed with the knowledge to understand the personal and societal implications of bio-hacking, mind-clones, and even more contemporary, health passports.
Aaron Duffy is a director and the co-founder of the agency Special Guest. In the podcast, we talk about his journey from art school into the world of commercials and film direction. Getting his first break with BBH London who let him loose on an Audi ad that happened to win a Lion in Cannes. He is also one of the creative forces by the iconic Parisian Love spot for Google as well as the highly awarded Chrome Project work.
Alex Benett-Grant founded Amsterdam shop "We are Pi" when he was 28 and now 10 years later the agency is firmly part of the establishment of indy creative shops- especially after winning the Ad Age International Small Agency of the Year in 2019.
Mark Lester is the agency's head of strategy- having joined the shop from R/GA-NY - also in 2019.
Our conversation covered many topics from agency culture, working in Amsterdam, the changing ad agency landscape, managing through COVID, and more.
Bree Groff is a partner at SYPartners and an expert in change.
We first talked on this podcast in August 2019 where Bree talked extensively about her background in the world of change management and what it takes to get people to do the difficult thing and change.
Fast forward to February 2021 and it seemed like an opportune moment to reconnect with Bree to understand what she was both seeing and doing. This seemed to make sense given that many business analysts are talking about the pandemic moment as a period that has seen change accelerate; with developments that used to take years, now happening in a matter of months.
Given that Bree is on the frontline of helping organizations change- we talk about what she's seeing, hearing, and learning.
What she thinks are some of the fundamentals of how our working lives have changed and are going to change and her hope for the upcoming "Roaring Twenties"
Alexander Rae and I had the opportunity to interview Carolyn who is the executive creative director at Young & Laramore in Indianapolis.
We talked about Indianapolis, the new rules and definitions of creativity, why she loves strategy, and more.
Sadly, she never told us she was also a podcaster. I guess we aren't getting invited onto any of her shows.
Craig Mawdsley and Bridget Angear are two of the biggest names globally in the world of Account Planning.
They have not only won every significant strategy award going- including multiple IPA Effectiveness Awards, but their day job was to co-managing the Planning Department at AMV-BBDO in London.
Interestingly, I learned that Craig majored in business and Bridget in economics- which is an interesting combo for a planning team at a creative shop, but clearly a nice advantage being able to speak the same language as their clients.
Just over a week ago, they left their full-time positions at AMV to start the Craig&Bridget Consultancy.
Our conversation was a little all over the place, but it the randomness allowed us to cover a wide range of topics including- the changing demands on strategy, the core skills that strategists need, the challenges brands face, data, and storytelling through to the future of business and life Post-Covid.
Chuck and Nandi Welch run Rupture Studio a consultancy that helps brands and corporations navigate the complex world the exists across the worlds of business, marketing, culture, and lifestyle.
They bring over 30 years of combined experience to the table- Nandi in brand management and Chuck from his work with media and creative agencies ranging from Mediavest and Naked to McCann and Wieden & Kennedy.
In our conversation, we talked about their experience, the benefits of running their own consulting company, the work they are doing, and some of the challenges involved in getting companies to get to grips with and understand the real world- be that outside or inside of their building.
With events of the past year pushing the diversity agenda to the forefront of the business agenda- Chuck and Nandi shared their thoughts on the smartest ways for companies to make meaningful progress on this critical issue.
Rishad is one of the smartest minds in the ad business. He moved from Bombay to Chicago to do an MBA in Marketing and Finance at the University of Chicago, got hired at Leo Burnett and stayed for his entire career. That's not entirely correct- he worked his way across and up to the very top of the Publicis Group becoming Chief Strategist and Member of the Directoire. He spent his career thinking about the future especially in media and digital- he had roles at Starcom and help created a number of companies and was Chairman of Digitas LBI and Razorfish.
He has a unique set of experiences that make him well-equipped to take observe some of the key macro trends and developments.
In 2020, Rishad wrote his first book "Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data" which was critically acclaimed with Strategy and Business naming it one of its top business books of 2020.
...he makes as thoroughly documented a case as I have come across for why the businesses that thrive are those whose leaders know that what made them great is their human resources. Tobaccowala singles out mighty customer- and user-focused corporations — Walmart, Starbucks, Domino’s, Google — that have “successfully reoriented their thinking on how to fuse technology and humanity,” while he warns of “data-blinded companies” that stumble when they do not correct such matters as “stifled employees [who are] not encouraged to contribute ideas or insights” and “poor customer service due to automated, robotic processes that cause frustration and hurt the brand.”....
In my conversation with Rishad, we talked about the book, what he has learned from his experiences, his background, and his thoughts on the business implications of the pandemic.
This was a pod recorded almost a year ago- right before COVID hit and somehow this recording got lost in the mix.
Brent Vartan left his high-powered strategy job at Deutsch to join a former colleague Mike Duda and created Bullish.
Bullish is a hybrid company that brings together a PE/VC company and a creative agency- the remit is as an early stage/angel.
The vision is to "own what they make" to get equity and ownership in the company's they work for.
They only invest in consumer categories- there are apparently 256 of them!!
The very first company they invested in was Birchbox in 2010....because they believed they need a brand and then they got introduced to Harry's, etc.
Bullish was also they were the first money in Casper and Peleton.
Their work is all about brand and providing thinking about how to build a brand, but also how to create a deep customer experience.
A big challenge is understanding what the opportunities and limits are of a newly minted brand.
Brett also talks about the differences between the ad industry and VCs and The Bay Area and NY and explains how hard it is to make this happen for an agency; you need brand strategists and MBAs and there also needs to be a willingness to risk your own money.
This podcast was recorded at Betaworks and was recorded by Alexander Rae, who also co-hosted.
Jason Harris is the CEO and Co-Founder of Mekanism.
In our conversation, we discussed the evolution of the agency in the past 15-years from a digital shop, to a viral agency, a production house, and now a full-service shop with 4 offices and 200 employees.
Jason is a firm believer in the importance of relationships and understands that at its essence, advertising is a people business. It's the reason Mekanism establishes offices close to its major clients. It's also the motivation behind a new book he has out called "The Soulful Art of Persuasion" which is something akin to a C21st version of How to Win Friends and Influence People. He acknowledges the big shift that has happened with leadership having to flip to understand concepts like empathy and purpose. What he espouses for human beings he also recognizes matters for brands.
Mekanism is also an agency with a strong internal culture guided by a fundamental set of beliefs and values. From the onset, this was an agency that celebrated together with trips to Mexico and Hawaii, the most recent outing in 2019 was a camping trip in California.
We also talked about the key-contributors to long-term success which he defined as being his fellow partners, a long-term legal council/business advisor, and his many connections in the ad industry who he has sought advice when needed.
Finally, like everyone, Jason is looking forward to Summer 2021 when the Mekanista (Mekanism employees) will return to their offices and the agency can reassert its culture and the development of ideas can be more organic and free-flowing and less of a process run by the demands of Zoom.
Seven years ago, Rob Baird, Seth Gaffney, and Krystle Loyland left Mother NY to set up their own shop- Preacher.
I got the chance to sit down and have a chat with Rob and Seth. I learned they made a deliberate decision to locate to Austin- partly because Rob wanted to head back to Texas, but also because they wanted to impact, connect, and contribute to a place with a diverse artistic culture. They added an art gallery to their agency space from the get-go.
In the conversation, we talk about the importance of having a point of view as an agency, the advantage of having skilled practitioners from different disciplines as founders, working with friends, and building a "family" culture that is strong enough to support a cast of 60 folks.
Importantly, they've learned from some of the best along the way, and instead of jettisoning some of that thinking- they've used it as a foundation to build from; they clearly have tremendous respect for their alma mater- Mother; they parted as friends, and the larger agency has consistently supported them from the sidelines.
Charlotte is the CEO of The Talent Business in North America.
She has a background in advertising having worked in the client services side of a number of agencies including - TBWA, McCann, and JWT.
For the past eight years, Charlotte has worked for The Talent Business in Los Angeles in New York.
In our conversation, we talk about the new energy around marketing talent and the desire for companies to find the right people to help them grow.
We discuss the qualities that companies and brands are looking for and how these compare to the leadership qualities of old.
In addition, we also talk about how the pandemic has accelerated the demand for change and has in some ways been a kind of incubator for a new breed of more vulnerable, open, and empathetic management.
Cindy Judge is the President and CEO of the Boulder, Colorado-based- creative collective that works across the areas of research, strategy, design, and communication for its clients.
SRG has expertise and a reputation for its work in the food and beverage space having worked with many of the leading restaurant chains and CPG brands.
The focus of the conversation with Cindy focused on food- what we are seeing in the pandemic, what are some of the broader trends she is noticing and how are Americans' attitudes to food changing.
Kristen Cavallo re-joined the Martin Agency as CEO 3 years ago.
The agency was in crisis and was in urgent need of rejuvenation.
She had spent 13 years at Martin in a variety of roles ranging from Planning Director to Head of Business Development but left in 2014 to join Mullen.
It was Kristen's first CEO job and she leaned in on her experience as a strategist- applying brand planning skills to the Martin Agency brand.
By going back to the origins, she unearthed the first principles of the agency and found they were still relevant today.
In 2019, she was named Ad Age's Executive of the Year.
Elizabeth Paul joined Martin from Mullen in January 2020 and has been instrumental in bringing new strategic thinking to the table- like the "Diversity Brief".
Having built a strong team-when the pandemic struck, the team's strength paid dividends since they already had such a solid working relationship.
Out of the gate- within days of the pandemic and the impending "work from home" IPG mandate, the Martin team brainstormed implementable ideas for every one of the agency's clients and was all in on getting these ideas made and ensuring there was no slow down or pause.
The change of leadership, the doubling down on the importance of getting brands talked about by consumers, and the commitment to diversity have all been strong transformative forces for Martin; not only has this helped to maintain the confidence of its existing client base, but it has also been instrumental in bringing in new clients.
Since the pandemic struck in March of this year, the agency has brought on seven new pieces of business.
In a wide-ranging conversation, we talk about the process of change, what the agency believes in, and why and how they managed to keep it all together working remotely and via Zoom
This episode features an interview with John V Willshire.
John has been running his innovation consultancy- Smithery for the past nine years- after graduating in Economics- he trained as a market researcher, worked for Viacom Out of Home, and then took on various roles at PHD- including separately - in the disciplines of econometrics and innovation.
Somewhat disillusioned with agency innovation offerings - he set up his own with the guiding mantra "Make Things People Want, rather than Make People Want Things."
Our conversation was broad and touched on his background in economics to building motivating narratives and onto the future of work.
We covered a lot of territory in the sixty or so minutes but looks like we are going to need to do a part 2 because we have more ground to cover.
In this episode, I talk with Tim Maleeny who is the President and Chief Strategy Officer at Havas- NY.
Tim has an interesting background which includes stints at Hal Riney when Hal was working there, Ogilvy, RGA, and Havas.
In our conversation, we talk about how the discipline has evolved and is evolving, the importance of department and teamwork, and how to run an agency and win business during a pandemic- which Havas appears to be doing OK at.
We also talk about the importance of being passionate about something else other than advertising because that fuels the day job.
Tim is the author of six almost seven mystery novels.
Many people from adland might be thinking that now might be a good time to start their own shop.
This episode features an interview with Meryl and Gaelan Draper who have been running their own shop- Quirk - for the past six years.
They have built a niche for themselves in the world of video advertising with a focus on delivering performance- this focus has attracted them to a host of DTC clients- including- the likes of Third Love and Keeps.
In the conversation we talk about their backgrounds- Gaelan comes from film and Meryl has experience in PR, but also ran the IBM global business for Ogilvy in Bangalore, India.
We also discuss how the past six years have been about how they have been continuously optimizing which comes from listening to their clients and really understanding needs.
Zeus Jones was founded in 2007 by former employees of ad agency Fallon. They wanted to do things differently and do different things- help clients come up with new ideas that could help their business, but those things were more action-oriented than word-based.
Fast forward to 2020 and the company has a new generation of leaders and in the podcast, I get to speak to the Creative and Strategy Leads Jason Zabel and Elsa Perushek.
We talked about how they work together as creative and strategist and how the company is driven by a collaborative work style and what that means for their roles and how they work with others.
We also discussed how COVID challenges these workstyles and what they have been doing to adapt their working practices.
Katie is currently the Senior Director, Global Brand Concept at Nike Women,
It is her 7th job at Nike in her 7 years at the company. In the episode, we talk about a lot of things from her unconventional route into strategy, to the changing consumer landscape and the importance of opening yourself up to new experiences.
Katie is unique in the fact she has worked at 180 and Wieden and Kennedy and both of their icon clients Nike and Adidas. She has also got out of the country and has had stints in Holland, Australia and Japan. Did I mention that she also worked for Droga 5?
She believes the secret to success is getting the money/business end of the strategy right, once you have that down, you will have permission to be rebellious and creative.
Kelli Robertson and William Esparza are partners and co-founders of Hyphenated which describes itself as a clandestine operation bridging companies and communities.
Kelli is a strategist and William the creative. They both have impressive and extensive backgrounds at shops like AKQA, RGA, Goodby, MAL and have worked on their fair share of amazing brands like- Nike, Beats, Activision etc.
They met while working together at R/GA and recognized the importance of the disciplines working together- seeing that it led to better work.
In the podcast, we talk about what this means and what it takes for a strategist to be a creative advocate, ally, and enhancer.
Ana was the first guest on the Inspiring Futures podcast and it was great to have her back on the show to talk about her new book- The Business of Aspiration.
The book is all about a new way for marketers and strategists to think about the interaction and intersection of brands and consumers. How brand value is now found in social good and the power of niches which serve as distinct worlds and cultures which create their own brands, but places where bigger brands need to connect.
We talked about the importance of curators as providers of knowledge for those consumers who want to acquire category and brand expertise.
When it came to specific brands, Ana mentioned Patagonia driving is brand strength not just from its environmental credentials, but also from the power it has within a diverse set of outdoor niches, Tracksmith for its dedication and focus, not just to running, but a specific type of runner.
The Business of Aspiration is going to be published October 27th
It can be pre-ordered on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Business-Aspiration-Cultural-Environmental-Capital/dp/0367554402
A few weeks ago Jeff was a guest on my podcast and we talked about his take on the agency landscape, through the lens of his role as a PR person and consultant to agencies.
At the end of the chat, Jeff mentioned to me that he also wrote books and had, in fact, written a couple.
Hence- the 2nd pod- where Jeff talks about the process of writing and we go into the weeds on how this stuff gets done- the late nights, the editors, the re-writes, dealing with publishers and the marketing piece of the puzzle.
It's a good listen for those who dream of writing the next great American novel or maybe just a book.
Rob Campbell is a planner who thrives on being in the thick of the creative process. When it comes to creative work he wants to enhance it, inspire it, and nurture it.
In the episode, Rob shares his philosophy on Strategy and some stories from his experiences which includes time spent at agencies HHCL, Wieden, and R/GA.
Rob started out as a session guitarist - so he knows the creative process first hand. He was working with leading artists when he was just 18 years old.
So, this is a must-listen if you are a strategist who is committed to inspiring better work and being intimately involved in the process.
Lucy Jameson is one the best UK planners of her generation and has featured on Campaign's list of top 10 planners multiple times.
She started her career at one of the founding agencies of the account planning discipline- BMP- where she stayed rising through the ranks for 19 years.
She was one of a handful of leaders hired by Grey to transform the London office and operation, a task she succeeded in winning multiple new accounts, Campaign's Agency of the Year, and many creative and effectiveness awards.
In 2015 she was made CEO of the shop.
Prior to starting her own agency Uncommon Creative Studio-in 2017 with Nils Leonard and Natalie Graeme- she worked as an intern at Facebook and spent time in a tech incubator.
Uncommon Creative Studio has worked with the likes of the WWF, ITV, Habito, and many others and is all in the business of building its own brands like Halo- a more eco-friendly alternative to Nespresso and a candle company which donates money to COVID related causes.
In the episode, we talk about her career trajectory, her thoughts on planning, brands, and the approach Uncommon takes to clients and business.
For the past 20 + years- Mark and Adam and the crew at Eat Big Fish have been helping brands to think like challengers, unlock the pirates inside and overcome constraints. They also happen to be the themes of the books that they have written about brands, internal cultures, and innovation.
This is a consulting company that believes in doing the research to back up and build its thinking, frameworks, and tools.
In the episode, I talk to Adam and Mark about how EBF came into being, how it thinks and works, and the purpose and role of writing and publishing books.
Given the moment, we give some time to a discussion about a book they wrote 5 years ago - called A Beautiful Constraint which is all about achieving things against the odds when resources and barriers are put in the way of success. It seems like now is a time when companies will find a myriad of barriers that can in the way of progress. Through fascinating examples and tools- EBF shows how these barriers can be overcome.
Tracey Faux Pattani is the recently hired CEO of BSSP.
For Tracey, it is a return to an agency she last worked in 15 years ago.
This is also her first agency CEO job - she joined the agency from Digitas SF where she headed up client service.
To overuse, the cliche- these are unprecedented times, and certainly if you are a new CEO you want to be able to meet everyone in person both client and agency-side, but COVID has made this an impossibility. Instead, she only had the luxury of a week in the office before shutdown- making her a CEO who is forced to lead via Zoom.
In the episode, I talk to Tracey about her experiences leading up to this position and what she has learned along the way from agencies with a variety of diverse working styles, cultures, and leaders like Lintas, Ogilvy, FCB, and Digitas.
We talk about leading during COVID - how she does it and how she has had to adapt and her plans for the agency moving forward.
Ad agencies have lots of skills but they rarely use them for the benefit of those who really could use them outside of their paying clients.
Over in the UK, Akil Benjamin worked with M&C Saatchi to create Saturday School a program that helped provide mentoring for Black-owned businesses.
Blackbusiness.mcsaatchi.com
He achieved a lot of success with that program and is now scaling it up on his own.
In the UK- agencies signed an open letter of solidarity after George Floyd's death and Akil's program provides a chance for them to put transfer this intent into action.
In the episode, we talk about his background, his work, and support from M&C and the idea behind his new program and the support it has generated.
Donate, volunteer and sign- up for the mentoring scheme
bit.ly/2XGHodm
John Dempsey is one of the founders of the digital shop Road Trip.
John got to experience the contemporary world of brand marketing while working on the KFC team at Wieden and Kennedy in Portland.
In the episode, we discuss his thinking behind setting up Road Trip, the worlds of digital and brand marketing, and what he learned from his experience on the KFC account at W&K.
Chas Edwards is one of the founders of Pop-Up Magazine.
The idea of Pop-Up Magazine started as an experiment with friends to turn a physical magazine into a live experience.
Word of mouth soon followed and Pop Up became something of a cultural phenom selling out venues like the Lincoln Center and rolling through the country on a national tour.
In the episode, I talk to Chas about his career trajectory- what took him into the magazine space and the secrets behind creating a compelling live experience for a generation who have a tough time putting their cellphones down.
Of course, we also talk about COVID and how Pop-Up has pivoted to creating its experience online and what the implications of this learning might be for the business in the future.
https://www.popupmagazine.com/
Jeff Sweat runs his own ad agency PR and consulting shop (Sweat and Co) in Los Angeles.
Having started his career as a tech journalist he then moved to Yahoo where he got the chance to interact with a number of ad agencies.
He then went agency side and had stints leading new business efforts at 72 and Sunny and Deutsch in LA before setting up on his own.
My conversation with Jeff involved asking about his career trajectory and what he learned from his different experiences and inside agency cultures.
We went onto talking about agencies today - how they have a unique opportunity to be real advisors to their clients and how important it is for agencies to practice what they preach to their clients by building their own differentiated and distinctive brands and cultures.
Jeff is also a podcaster himself and has a very successful series- with Agencies under Quarantine
https://www.sweatandco.com/quarantine
He is also a novelist which will be the topic for our next conversation.
https://www.sweatandco.com/
It has been 15 years since David Charles and I worked together at BSSP. David has since gone on to jobs at AKQA, 72 and Sunny, and opening the Los Angeles outpost for KesselsKramer. He started off in Brazil writing comic books before making his way into advertising with the dreams of becoming a filmmaker. At AKQA and KesselsKramer he got the chance to direct spots and hone his skills. This all was put to good use when he came across an amazing opportunity while working with the team at Airbnb. Post the Trump election the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus announced it would be protesting by touring the South by Bus. After winning over the chorus and Airbnb David went on to make the documentary Gay Chorus Deep South which has picked up a ton of accolades on the festival circuit including the audience award at Tribeca. The film was recently purchased by MTV. In the episode, we talk about David's journey from advertising to filmmaking and the process involved in making his first documentary. We also talk about how the film served to explain the essence of the Airbnb brand and the power of long-form filmmaking to tell brand stories.
Michael Arterberry is the Executive Director of the Youth Voices Center. His work involves working with high schoolers to get them to think beyond race and skin color and to understand their fellow schoolmates as people.
In a wide-ranging conversation, we talk about his life experiences, the work he does and his observations on the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd.
Justin Small is the founder and mastermind behind FSC- Future Strategy Club. Justin is determined to reinvent the agency model by creating teams for clients made up of the best talent possible,
FSC is not a no thrills remote network- it has an HQ, host parties, trains its members, and is even in the process of setting up a ventures arm.
Justin wants agencies to be great again and FSC is his attempt to make that happen.
https://futurestrategyclub.com/
Jay Chaney is a strategist and part of a crack team of Canadian advertising professionals who have gone and done something completely insane by launching an ad agency in the middle of the Covid 19 crisis.
Chaney has teamed up with Beverley Hammond, Todd Mackie, Carlos Moreno, and Denise Rosetto to create Broken Heart Love Affair
Chaney is no stranger to challenges has been part of successful turnarounds at both DDB and Cossette.
In the interview, we talked about Jay's interesting career that included time as a Canadian broadcaster, the inspiration for the new agency, the name, and what they are hoping to achieve. Plus, of course, the challenges and perhaps some of the advantages of launching during Covid.
George Olver is the co-founder of Movidiam.
Movidiam is all about changing how films get made.
It is basically a global network of skilled practitioners in the world of film production. The network allows production to be more efficient at a time when clients are short on both time and money. It also ensures a level of quality because the experience of individuals is fully transparent.
Think of it as a global production house at your fingertips which allows for both payment and project management.
In the episode, I talk to George about the evolution of the company and where it headed.
Jen Patterson is now a mom and a life-coach after spending over 20 years as a strategist. She started her career at Wieden and spent time at Deutsch in LA and at Wunderman in Seattle.
In the episode, we talk about her career trajectory - growing up at Wieden and then moving to Deutsch. About agency cultures and her thoughts on the magic part of the culture that make Wieden, Wieden, and how different things were at Deutsch. We discussed her time in Miami with The Community and the challenges involved in getting clients to understand the importance of the Hispanic market.
We also talk about her passion which is listening and learning from others.
Nowadays Jen has channeled her passion into life-coaching and motherhood. We talk about these two roles and some of the challenges. We discuss the way in which agency life and corporate life in general squeeze the self out of people and how the best advice she gives people is about getting centered around who they are and what they want is.
Her life-coaching practice is about paying close attention to you and developing a program which is, in simple terms. a gym for the mind.
Niclas is one of the most experienced strategic planners in Sweden. He began his career at Acne and had stints at the likes of TBWA, Naked and Grey, and in consulting. He now finds himself back at Acne- which is now owned by Deloitte UK.
In this episode, we talk about his career, the history, the evolution of Sweden's ad agency landscape, and talk a little about COVID-19.
What emerges from the conversation is a perspective on an agency landscape driven by creative entrepreneurs, where the integration of multiple disciplines is expected and demanded by clients and the working style is very open, collaborative, and transparent.
In March, creatives at R/GA Chloe Saintilan, Zach Roif, and Matt Woodward sold in an initiative to their agency leadership which was designed to help small businesses impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. The
The initiative called Merch Aid, which went live in early April, helps local businesses by selling specifically designed merchandise created by designers. The initiative started in New York but is expected to roll out to other cities in the coming months.
In the podcast, I talk to the team about the genesis of the idea, how it works, the challenges of making it happen, and what they have learned along the way.
13 years ago, Adrian Ho left his strategy job at Fallon to create a new offering for clients in the form of Zeus Jones. In this episode, I talk to Adrian about the evolution of the Zeus Jones business and what he has learned along the way. We also take a moment to discuss the Covid-19 situation, which given this was recorded a few weeks back, might be a little dated.
Shaun is the global chief creative officer of Iris Worldwide. He has been at the agency since 2008 and took on his latest role in 2016. Shaun has worked with a number of interesting brands over the years including the likes of Adidas, Guinness, Samsung, Domino's, Pizza Hut, Mini and Jeep.
In the episode, we cover his unique background which includes writing for theater and how his non-conventional career trajectory has served him well over the years.
The bulk of the conversation centers on Shaun's expansive view of creativity. He believes that creativity needs to be in service of solving a client's business problems and that solutions shouldn't be confined or limited by media choices.
Terry Young is the founder of Sparks and Honey an Omnicom owned company that specializes in helping clients understand potential futures. In this episode, I talk to Terry about his background and the development of Sparks and Honey as a company from the process to people. We talk about how the company combines people and machines to understand key trends and underlying themes. We also talk about what his clients are asking right now and what Sparks and Honey is telling them.
Matt is the founder of Green Stone- a virtual or rather an officeless agency that helps design experiences for brands. Matt started his career at R/GA where he was part of the Nike team. He then spent 8 years at Crispin Porter Bogusky as EVP/Executive Experience Director where he led a team of 25 experience designers.
For the past six years, Matt has been running Green Stone which obsesses about the customer journey and builds experiences around those journeys which create greater brand love and loyalty.
In our conversation, we talk about his 6 years of learning from building an agency that word and operates remotely. We talk about how you make up the physical distance and build things like culture. We also talk about companies and the digital experience and how there is still work to be done to get to true digital transformation and we also get to compare and contrast the work of experience design vs. advertising.
Zoe Scaman is the founder of her own strategic consulting company Bodacious and Global Head of Strategy at Ridley Scott Creative Group.
Zoe's experience includes Naked, Universal-McCann, Isobar, and Droga5.
In this episode, we discuss the current situation from a global and London perspective, focusing on how people and brands are responding and could be responding.
We also discuss how Zoe approaches her consulting assignments and her work with Ridley Scott Creative Group
Doug is the Senior Editor at Adweek where he covers the world of ad agencies. He has a background in the world of radio as a producer and DJ and currently is offering VO talent for free to anyone who could use it for a good cause. Our conversation covers his dream of a copywriting job at Wieden and Kennedy and his career in radio and onwards to the state of creativity, advertising, and communication, against the backdrop of Covid-19.
Dave has been an expert in Asian consumer culture for the past 20 years.
He was responsible for spearheading the development of McCann-Erickson's regional planning network for McCann and its processes and protocols.
For the past five-plus years, he has been consulting and developing his own own businesses- one focused on AI for market research and the other is a small consulting company based in Bangladesh.
In the conversation, we were focused on COVID-19 and discussed what we are currently seeing across the world overall, but Dave highlighted some of the specific nuances that are important to understand for the Asian market.
This podcast was recorded earlier in the week before Thailand went into broad lockdown.
Lucy Von Sturmer is a young entrepreneur based in Amsterdam. She runs, together with a partner, Humblebrag; a media communications consultancy focused on corporate and individual leadership around purpose and sustainable change.
Lucy has found her way to Amsterdam and this world via broadcast journalism, working as the head of digital communication for an NGO and was head of communication at MediaMonks in Amsterdam.
Our conversation covers her career trajectory, how she and her company and clients are coping with the current situation, the work she has done setting up Creatives for Climate and how despite the terribleness of the Coronavirus, the silver lining could be how it serves as a catalyst to a new more sustainable economy.
Orlando Wood is the Chief Innovation Officer of System 1. System 1 is a research company that has built its reputation in advertising testing and has a proven methodology that links emotional response to marketplace impact. Orlando is also the author of Lemon- published by the IPA, the book examines the world from left and right brain perspective and takes that learning into an evaluation of television advertising which Orlando proves and demonstrates has become a lot more left-brained in recent years. Building on the work of Peter Field and Les Binet, Orlando argues that this is leading to less memorable and less impactful advertising. In the episode, we explore the genesis of the idea, the research work that went into the book and Orlando's thoughts on why we have ended up with more left brain work and some thoughts on where all this might be heading. Sadly, Orlando's talk with the ARF at SXSW was canceled, so I am hoping those who planned to attend can listen to this and get and a very good idea of the great work that Orlando has done.
The book Lemon can be found here.
https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/lemon
Lindsey has spent the last 7 years on the frontlines of a changing marketing landscape. Through her work with Sunday Dinner, she has been helping clients navigate the complexities of modern marketing. Helping them with goal setting, measurement, organization and the orchestration and management of their agency and creative partners snd internal audiences. This work gives Lindsey unique visibility into this landscape and in the episode, she explains how she works, what she recommends to clients and what she feels are the new ways to work in this changing environment.
Amelia is one of England's sharpest strategic minds. Inspired to join the ad business by a personal response from a letter she wrote to Sir Martin Sorrell.
She joined the WPP fellowship program and worked directly with Jon Steel and from there built an amazing resume of experience including stints at Naked, TBWA, and VCCP where she was part of the team that won the ad account for the 2012 London Olympics.
Today, she is the co-founder of the Fawnbrake collective- a network of strategic thinkers that are deployed on teams to work on client projects. In this episode, we cover her career trajectory and the evolution of strategy from a discipline that mainly existed inside of agencies to one that is now thriving outside of its traditional confines.
This is the world of Fawnbrake, a world where everything and everyone is a brand and they all need strategic thinking even if they do no advertising.
Thas worked in strategy roles at Chiat, BBH, and Deutsch. She joined Omelet 4 years ago as the CSO and six months ago was promoted to CEO- a rare thing for a Strategist since CEOs usually come from the ranks of client service. Omelet is a 15-year-old- LA-based independent agency with an impressive client roster that includes- Google. in a wide-ranging conversation, we talk about her transition from strategist to CEO, about the importance of culture and creating an environment where employees can thrive and how important it is for the leadership to have an honest dialog about agency direction and strategy.
Alexander Rea and Christian Colasuonno are the partners of Aux- a company that brings together Alex's tech process and Christian's production savvy. For the past decade or so, ad agencies have grappled to find a place for technology in their output understanding its power and relevance, but unsure how to get it made and done. Aux are the guys who do that stuff- quite simply- they get the complex stuff done. They are not tinkerers, theorists, academics, but doers who love nothing better than making a creative team's brilliant idea come to life. Alex was an integral part of the Framestore team that helped make McCann's schoolbus for Lockhead/Martin become a believable mars mission. The rest of the story is history with this idea cleaning up in various awards shows across the globe. In our conversation, we talk about their backgrounds, the proposition of Aux as a business, how they like to work, their passion for the creative process and what new technology excites them.
Aux can be found at https://www.aux.works/
Global nomads since 2013, Faris and Rosie Yakob are a creative and strategic duo- who have served their time as creatives and strategic thinkers with the likes of MDC, McCann, and 360i.
In a conversation that covers a lot of ground, we talk about a shrinking world- one that appears ever more similar, but how you need to dig deeper to unlock local differences, the rise of creativity as a response to the growth hacking plateau, tourism and the idea that the world is getting full because everyone wants to go to the same places, trashvertising, banks making money but making brands less interesting, brand safety, the future of the agency and buying avocados.
Gary is a visual artist and an improv performer. For the past 21 years, he has been the leader and co-founder of a company called On Your Feet. As he explains in the podcast, this company helps companies find their humanity by using the dramatic arts as a tool for catharsis. In a world where wooly and fluffy language dominates the corporate world, he helps executives find their truth and the difference in the stories that lie beyond the language. In the podcast, we talk about the importance of parsing language, collaboration, and how the arts can help commerce.
Chris Riley is a planner who had senior roles at two of the most culturally significant brands of the past 50 years; Wieden and Kennedy and Apple.
In the podcast, Chris talks about his experiences inside of these two fascinating companies and his thoughts on why at his company Studio Riley, he believes ethics are the most potent and vital thing corporations need to consider right now.
Also, he shares ideas on how the other key piece in the puzzle is understanding the new majority- consumers in what we mistakenly call the developing world and understanding them taking a planning approach, which is about learning from, not talking to.
Bree has been an actress, teacher, innovation consultant, a researcher at E-Harmony, the CEO of NOBL and is now a principal at SYP. She has spent most of her working life involved in change- as a leader in the innovation wing of a school where she first came across people's resistance to change, to her studies at North Western in organizational culture and change, to her recent work at NOBL and SYP.
I had the benefit of using SYPs podcast studio, so the production is top-notch. for a conversation where we talk about Bree's journey into the world of change and discuss how organizations think about and approach change.
Dave has worked as a planner at some of the best shops in the business-Leo, Crispin and W&K. In this episode, he takes us on his career journey which starts at his family paint and body shop in Wisconsin and ends up at his business venture Shepherd.
It is a story of understanding how the agency and creative business is evolving and the new role data can play in the daily life of a planner.
At Shepherd, Dave and his partners are helping clients to grow their business by finding new audiences, but also to better understand those audiences by zeroing-in on their passions.
Heidi has been a copywriter, a planner and a business owner. She has done her time in places like FCB and BBH.
She has worked as a planner in London and New York and most recently was with the Zuckerberg Chan Foundation in the Bay Area.
Prior to her trip to The Bay, she established Wolf & Wilhelmine - a brand strategy firm with a unique perspective on business culture and strategy.
In this conversation we talk about her career trajectory, the impact of working with Obama and where she sees her future headed.
This interview was conducted before she launched her new venture- So We Hunt - which is designed to help people lead braver lives.
Michael Fanuele started his career in the political world in DC and shocked at what he saw and heard, moved to the advertising industry and Madison Avenue. Michael rose through the ranks as an Account Planner working for a range of different shops including- Mad Dogs and Englishmen, JWT, Havas and Fallon.
A few years ago, he took on a major client role as the Chief Creative Officer of General Mills which was on a transformative mission to be a new kind of food company.
He has spent the past 18 months working on a book on what it takes to be Inspirational. The book -Stop Making Sense is published by Simon and Schuster today - July 9th, 2019.
The podcast episode is a discussion I had with Michael a few weeks ago about the book- its contents, the process and the genesis of the whole project.
Lawrence is one of the iconic Bay Area thinkers and investors and helped to create- Oxygen Network, Wired Magazine, and Design Within Reach. He was President of Colossal Pictures which included oversight of Pixar.
In 1988, he co-founded Global Business Network (GBN), a strategic consulting firm (now part of Deloitte), in 1987 and served as President through 1998. Lawrence and GBN have been central to the development and spread of the Scenario Planning technique, an approach to addressing very large decisions and very long time horizons.
In the podcast, we spend the bulk of the time talking about Scenario Planning- how it came into being and even how to do it (so grab paper and a pen!). We talk about some likely futures or the forces on the future and why companies are thinking less about it than they should.
Katy is a UX and Product Designer based in Boulder, Colorado where she runs her company Two's Complement. Katy double-majored in Industrial/Interaction Design and Computer Technology at Syracuse. Her first job out of school was with NASA where she worked on a wide range of projects including the International Space Apps Challenge and Random Hacks of Kindness. She went on to form a 3-D printing company, funded by several high-profile Kickstarter campaigns.
In our conversation, we discuss many different topics, from the power of openness, based on her experiences with NASA and her printing company- how these open systems create possibilities that would not have been possible if the software is owned and its use restricted and limited.
We talk about how Design Fiction is a powerful tool to help us imagine and design for a potential future. The new level of importance for thinking and a consciousness about the design and engineering choices that are made - with the arrival of AI, but also the environment as a new and vital consideration for digital designers.
We discuss, her Five-Step Process for design thinking, that includes workshopping based on likely potential futures to find new solutions.
Throughout the conversation, we talk about the process of innovation, how big companies need to embrace the small and how the US has had a history of waves of change and is probably due for another Moon Shot-like wave to help solve the urgent environmental crisis.
Frank started his career with the Village Voice covering the emerging mid-1970s New York music scene centered around CBGBs. He has written numerous articles for the likes of Rolling Stone, Fortune, Vanity Fair and Wired. He has written books about Apple and in his book the Art of Immersion, he explored the changing nature of storytelling in Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Currently he is a senior fellow at the Columbia University School of the Arts, he is faculty director of the executive education program Strategic Storytelling, presented in partnership with Columbia Business School.
In this conversation, instead of looking forward to the future, we look back at past futures. A future proposed by the punk movement and the likes of Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren and trace a trajectory outlined by advances in technology that transformed the media and entertainment industry despite their best intentions. We end looking at the present day world of Google, Facebook and Amazon and suggest we have reached an inflection point, where it might be time to take a look at what has been created and where we might all be headed.
Mark is the founder of Mighty Jungle- he is a writer and a strategist and basically believes in the importance of the two things going hand in hand. He wrote a piece for VICE on hip-hop when he was in his teens and drifted in the Sydney agency world as a digital producer- who also wrote and produced. He moved in the US- 9 years ago and had strategy roles in a variety of different NY shops. In this conversation, we focus on the skills planners need to be good and devote a lot of time to discussing the challenges of being a risk-taker inside US corporate culture.
Colin Nagy is currently Head of Strategy for Fred Farid, an agency based in NYC, Paris, Shanghai and LA. Previously he was Chief Media and Strategy officer at The Barbarian Group. In this conversation, we talk about the souring of the tech boom and the arrival of a new questioning culture and the debate about the impact of tech on humanity. We talk about the push towards the real and how that is impacting physical spaces and our human desire for connection. We explore the growing importance of wellness, the challenges for global brands and how the short-term, quick-hit seeking CMO might be getting in the way of more profound business transformation.
The guest for Episode 2 of Inspiring Futures is Gareth Kay. and touches upon many things, including the future of advertising and the agency.
Gareth is the founder of Chapter-SF- which describes itself as a new type of creative studio focused on designing soulful brands that thrive in today's world of unreasonable expectations.
Our wide-ranging conversation-includes a discussion about Gareth’s background and experience, what he is trying to do with Chapter SF- versus the typical creative agency, the curse of specialization, the challenge of short-term thinking and pressures, the best client brief ever, our lack of human understanding, how he thinks about the future and the importance of timeless ideas and where we stand with digital technology in the communication and marketing space.
A conversation with Ana Andjelic. Named to Forbes CMO Next list, Ana is a strategy executive, writer, and doctor of sociology who specializes in the modern luxury brands. In this wide-ranging conversation- we covered the challenges of companies grabbling with the future, the importance of adaptability, whats is happening to brands, Tik-Tok and the challenges of the algorithm.
A conversation with Ana Andjelic. Named to Forbes CMO Next list, Ana is a strategy executive, writer, and doctor of sociology who specializes in the modern luxury brands. In this wide-ranging conversation- we covered the challenges of companies grabbling with the future, the importance of adaptability, whats is happening to brands, Tik-Tok and the challenges of the algorithm.