Call To Action

This week we spent all our time pressing the flesh (until finding out we’d misunderstood what that means and getting very firmly asked to leave Subway) all in order to win the approval of this week’s guest, the master networker Oli Barrett MBE.  Blessed with the ability to bring together the right people with the right ideas at the right time, Oli has built a reputation for being the nation’s ulti...

This week we tried (unsuccessfully, messily, hauntingly) to mate a canary with a cockerel – all in a bid to impress our guest, former Norwich and Tottenham footballer, turned performance psychologist, Paul McVeigh.  Having played more than 270 professional games, as well as earning 20 caps for Northern Ireland, Paul kicked ball with and against some legendary players, earning a few trophies, a few...

This week we made our way through twenty rolls of ‘Word a Day’ toilet paper – not (entirely) because of tummy trouble, but in order to impress one of the world’s greatest wielders of words, copywriting legend Tim Delaney. An advertiser who made all of advertising try harder with their adverts, Tim is of course the founder of the famous Leagas Delaney agency as well as being one of the all-time gre...

This week we’ve been out every night, committing crimes (twocking Nokias, cussing at ducklings, stealing the dust caps off your dad’s tyres) all to attract the attention of South-London Batman himself – and this week’s guest – Kazeem Jama.  A comedian so entertaining he almost makes you hate yourself slightly less for being on Instagram all the goddam time, Kazeem has been liberally lubricating th...

This week we rented the top 3 maths movies of all time – A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game and 3 Men and a Baby – all in order to be mathematically competent enough to share a pod with one of the world’s greatest number nibblers, Marcus du Sautoy. So highly acclaimed and awarded, we could have filled the entire podcast by listing out his many achievements, Marcus is perhaps best known as a Prof...

This week we broke a golden rule and crossed podcast streams with a pair of excellent guests, Richard Shotton and MichaelAaron Flicker, hosts of the Behavioural Science for Brands podcast and co-authors of the soon-to-be released (and definitely-to-be brilliant) Hacking The Human Mind. Richard is, of course, returning for a record third appearance on Call To Action® although we have respectfully h...

This week we tucked in our shirt, straightened our tie and resisted the temptation to nip off for a quick vape behind the pickle-ball court, all in order to suitably impress our guest, one of the world’s greatest marketing academics, Professor Byron Sharp.  A man who would need no introduction (if we weren’t contractually obliged to provide all our pod guests with one) Prof Byron is one of the wor...

This week we’re pushing our withered hamstrings way beyond their wretched limits, all in order to win the attention of our guest, sport and brand marketing super-baller Lisa Parfitt.  In a career that has been, figuratively, one top bin after the other, Lisa has done more than most to give women’s sport a serious platform, particularly when it comes to those all-important commercial relationships....

This week we made difficult phone-calls to Ant & Dec, Torvill & Dean and, accidentally, the Neville Brothers, all in order to explain that the nation now has a new favourite double act – the joint chiefs of Pablo, Harriet Knight and Hannah Penn. Not content with leading Pablo to the very top of the creative charts in agency land – scooping up the Global Campaign Indie of the Year award on...

This week we tried to arrange a VIP brand event for Call To Action® fans in an abandoned toilet brush factory, all just to prove our cool credentials to Charlie Copsey, the founder of Underground Fan Club. Having conquered the media mountain earlier in her career – working in TV, radio and film with the likes of Johnny Vaughan and her good pal Colin Murray – Charlie realised that her next great mi...

This week we kept shouting things like HIT ME! TWIST! GO FISH! WHAT’S A SPADE? In order to win the professional attention, and personal sympathy, of Jo Living – founder of ‘poker for business’ consultancy Aces High. Having noticed that poker was less about bluff and bravado and more about strategy, empathy and teamwork, Jo realised it could be the perfect game for teaching people how to make smart...

This week we donned a smelly neon bib, distributed some tiny cones and shouted things like ‘THAT’S NEVER A PEN’ all in order to win the attention of Karen Dobres, one of the sporting world’s most genuine game changers. Advocating for equal budgets, facilities and recognition in women’s sport with all the tenacity of a crunching, shin-pad obliterating tackle, Karen is the co-founder of Equality FC...

This week we kept on adding more and more and more irrelevant attachments to our so-called brief, in order to earn ourselves a swift rebuke from the marketing world’s Brief Batman – Howard Ibach. Inventor of the Creative Brief Mastery program, Howard is on a mission to make marketing briefs more meaningful. An advocate for clear thinking, proper collaboration and the single minded-proposition, How...

This week we have been exclusively watching 'Magic Mike', shaking a Magic 8-Ball and listening to '24k Magic' by Bruno Mars (which is just awful) in order to win the slightly nervous attention of Adam Ferrier, founder of Thinkerbell; the thinkers, tinkers and practitioners of ‘measured magic’.  A psychology brain sat on top of some sturdy strategy bones, Adam is a rare voice of reason in the large...

This week we went around slurping muddy water from puddles in order to win the sympathy of Shane Stewart – brand man, running man and fizzy drink saviour. Chief brand brain at XOXO soda, Shane has built his career around launching and marketing drinks that do good stuff for your innards, while looking extremely cool on your outtards. Before shaking up the canned drink business with XOXO he helped...

This week we positioned our most powerful fan at the rear end of a corpulent bull in hopes of snaring the attention of legendary bullshit fighter, Alex Smith A strategist who’s set himself the mountainous task of extracting all the nonsense from business strategy, Alex is very much a breath of a fresh air in a field that can, at its worst, smell a lot like somebody’s done a poo… on a dead crab… in...

This week we released AI from the punishment cupboard in which we’ve been keeping it in order to win the approval of author, marketing super-brain and AI believer Paul Dervan. As the Head of Brand Marketing at Miro, Paul has been busy bolstering his reputation as one of the industry’s smartiest pant-wearers when it comes to marketing effectiveness. Miro is just the latest stop in a marketing caree...

This week we shredded our vision board and fed it to some ornamental carp, purely to win the approval of author, critic and quite possibly the world first demotivational speaker, Patrick Freyne. Before becoming the enormously popular columnist and critic for the Irish Times, Patrick spent his 20s chasing the rock star dream. But while the life of big hair, hard drugs and tight trousers wasn’t to b...

This week we deliberately trapped ourselves in a cartoon like the dude from A-Ha in order to cross paths with marketing’s MirthMaster 3000, Tom Fishburne aka The Marketoonist. Apart from your CEO accidentally getting trapped in his own futuristic private bathroom over the bank holiday weekend, the funniest stuff in marketing usually comes from Tom’s brain. The comic genius behind The Marketoonist,...

This week we shrank ourselves down to Dennis-Quaid-in-Inner-Space micro proportions to catch Spencer LaVallee and Graham Douglas, the co-founders of mega-successful micro creative agency Gus. Spencer and Graham lead a creative crew leaner than a wildebeest that got banished from its herd last Tuesday for repeatedly messing around. But size means little when you have big ideas, and the agency regul...

This week we stopped writing 80085 on our pocket calculator and started doing proper sums in order to catch the mathematical eye of one of the world’s leading financial and marketing thinkers, Moira Creedon. If there’s a fancy, famous and highly respected teaching institute in the world, then Moira has almost certainly been there, sharing the stuff in her enormous brain with students, leaders and...

This week we strapped on a Motorola pager and stole a briefcase off our dad in order to look businessy enough to chat to the Batman of the B2B world, LinkedIn legend and co-founder of Evidenza, Peter Weinberg. Peter Weinberg has effectively grabbed B2B marketing by the ankles and dragged it out of the dull and dreary hole into which it had buried its head. World famous for his time in charge of th...

This week we very tentatively clambered on top of our desks to bellow ‘Oh Captain, my Captain’ to the most inspirational educator in advertising, Ally Owen. The brains behind one ad-lands most invaluable teaching programmes, Brixton Finishing School, Ally has done more than literally anyone to help young, multicultural and neurodiverse creatives find a way into advertising – kickstarting hundreds...

This week we pulled on our most dramatic tights and tried not to mumble our lines in order to catch the attention of one of the theatre world’s most charismatic – and mischievous – characters, Christian Edwards. The comedy genius behind one of Twitter’s greatest spoofs – the mysterious West End Producer – Christian eventually pulled back the curtain to reveal, with glorious theatrically, that it w...

This week we deliberately kept standing on rakes and getting repeatedly thwacked in the face in order to lure out the king of creative nonsense, Mr Mark Denton esq. The creative hero that advertising needs, but doesn’t entirely deserve, Mark Denton is the once-in-many-lifetimes imagination behind more than 500 commercials – scooping up so many awards he could spend all day throwing them at passing...