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 and Magic Works, 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, LondonExecutive Head of Strategy- at Wieden&Kennedy- LondonSVP 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/1911687646Here 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 co-founded 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. Some quotes from our chat. 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 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 distributionPlans for loyaltyIt's approach when it comes to athletesAnd 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 GeletkaJohn is the owner and founder of Geletka + - a small agency located in the West Loop of ChicagoThe agency started 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. We looked at our engagements a little bit differently and it wasn't 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 that 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's required, there's a danger with a prima donna with the attitude of "that's kind of beyond me".Why the Interest in Web 3?"There's an awesome art culture in there, There is a gaming culture that's the next layer of the art. I call it a subculture because you have all these little mini-cultures. And they interact with each other a little bit."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.  AI, from my perspective, is a great accelerator. It is by no means a replacement for great creative. It is by no means this is the machine that we're going to produce AI-driven content or copy, but 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 what it can't do, it's not a replacement for a writer. It's not a replacement for a designer."

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 protopian 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."