Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising

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.