Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising

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...

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 bui...

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&a...

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...

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 c...

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 inno...

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 agenci...

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 experienc...

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, th...

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&ap...

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...

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. C...

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 Grea...

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.  I...

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...

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 geni...

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...

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 on...

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 inte...

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 cl...

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 i...

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 s...

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 s...

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...

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 extensivel...