Inspiring Futures

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. 

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. 

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. 

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?