Sweathead, A Strategy Podcast

What shapes can a strategy career take? This episode was a livestream from the Sweathead Facebook group. In it, we discuss what shapes strategy careers can take.  Our guests: 1. Serena Berra is a strategist based out of Miami. From being a planner to director of marketing to teacher to co-founding her own IOS application, she is now back freelancing as a strategist and enjoying it. https://www.lin...

What if you think you're a strategist who happens to write but you're really a writer who happens to do strategy? Claire Strickett is a senior planner at one of the world's best agencies adam&eveDDB. In London. She writes all day every day - research debriefs, workshop agendas, presentations, and creative briefs. But she just co-wrote a book with Bert Blaize. It's about food and wine and it's call...

What are your desires, goals, and cravings? In this episode, Libby Swan takes over as host and brings four of us together to discuss our desires. Grace Steite is Head of Program Management at Square’s Creative Studio and has recently been working from Ireland: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gsteite/ Anjali Ramachandran is the Director of Storythings and Co-Founder of Ada’s List: https://twitter.com/a...

What do the 15,000 people in the Sweathead Facebook Group think about working in advertising and dealing with each other online? 2020 managed to infect the community with rage and frustration so, a few months ago, Stephen Yap helped coordinate a research project for Sweathead.  One hundred people in the group got together and ran discussions about the advertising industry as well as the Sweathead...

How do you help a brand stay in someone's mind by going through their ears? Steve Keller is Sonic Strategy Director at Pandora. Pandora has over 60 million active users per month and is worth a few billion dollars. Steve sits in Studio Resonate, a small part of this few-billion-dollar company in Oakland, USA. At Pandora's Studio Resonate, Steve works with brands on how to appear in people's ears -...

Why are networks for women in advertising needed and how do they work? Anita Schillhorn van Veen is Director of Strategy at McKinney LA. Anita is also on the leadership team of Ladies Who Strategize, an online community for women-identifying strategists.  We discuss: - Ladies Who Strategize and creating networks for women within the advertising and strategy world - Writing and being creative in st...

Can companies change? If so, how? Hilton is VP of Marketing at Cognitive. He was born in Zimbabwe but he's worked in the UK, the USA, and Canada. And he was a founding member of the Account Planning Group (APG) in Toronto, Canada.  After a long career in advertising, Hilton wanted to get closer to business problems. This led him to exploring company culture and change management. In this episode,...

"Should I work in advertising or marketing or something else?" In this episode, we discuss what it's like to shift from advertising to marketing - and back. Challapalli Kalyan Ram is based in Mumbai, India. From project/account manager to strategist to a consumer planning and research manager in Diageo and back to strategy, Kalyan is now running his own shop Wolfzhowl where they specialize in bran...

How do you get clients to shake shit up when the world already seems shook up enough? Chuck Welch is CSO of Rupture Studio, a company he runs with his MBA-awarded wife Nandi. It's a mom-and-pop business that helps the couple do the work they want to do while also helping them spend time with each other and their children. Chucks' early years were spent at companies like Def Jam, Naked, and McCann....

What does the journey from doing strategy for other people's brands to making your own product look like? Brooklyn's George Crichlow made $250,000 selling bamboo hats in high school. This bought him a ticket to the elite Georgetown college and it made George the first person of his family to go to college - most of his family had not stayed in school beyond the fifth grade. After college, George r...

Do creative lives happen in straight lines? Carolyn Hadlock is Executive Creative Director at Indianapolis's Young & Laramore. She does creative work but, as part of doing that creative work, Carolyn also does ethnography. She likes to go deep into people's lives to try to understand what's going on inside their minds. It's an unusual combination–a creative director who does ethnography–and it's l...

What do strategists do and where do they fit in a large digital agency? Based in New York, Grant Owens is Global Chief Strategy Officer of Critical Mass. He's had the role for over five years and that's after an eleven-year stint at Razorfish.  In this episode, we discuss: - Organizing strategy activities in a large agency - How to effectively use "open office hours" You can find Grant here: https...

What do different roles such as user experience designer, strategist, and managing director have in common - and what's the real work involved with doing these roles well? Jess Mireau is a strategy and agency leader. She started as an animator then she moved into user experience then strategy then strategy team leader then managing director. The last role she did in Hong Kong on behalf of her Broo...

How do you get people with power to talk? Vince and Max host the podcast Son Of A Pitch from Sydney, Australia. Vince works as a strategist in advertising; Max used to. They've interviewed many agency leaders and we found ourselves discussing the power of naivety and dealing with power dynamics in interviews.  We also discuss: - Whether advertising is a compelling career - Making podcasts - Austra...

If you wanted to tell the truth to a group of students eyeing advertising careers, what would you tell them? Vanessa Toro is Group Strategy Director at Digitas North America. She's based in Atlanta. She loves both her chosen city and her agency And, often, she loves her industry but she knows it can do better, especially for the new batch of students trying to get into it. In this interview, we di...

Strategists can take many shapes but what do those shapes look like outside of a full-time agency? This episode is from a livestream in the Sweathead Facebook group. It features Ian Crocombe, Jackie Crynes, and Carlos Hermida.  We discuss: - Things that make people leave agency life - What people hope to find after agency life - How "qualified" is "qualified enough" - Perceptions hirers have of ag...

What happens when a creative career leads to a self-destructive life? Philip Slade went from Mac Operator at famed music magazine Smash Hits to art director at Saatchi & Saatchi then to creative director and planning director roles and, eventually, to managing partner of Crispin Porter + Bogusky London. But along the way he had to reckon with his relationship with drugs and alcohol and himself.  W...

What's it like to freelance? This episode is from a livestream in the Sweathead Facebook group. It features Tasha Prados, Lexie Perez, and Greg Donnelly. We discuss: - The mindset shift from being an employee to a freelancer - Working with agencies - Working with entrepreneurs - How jobs appear Tasha Prados is a multicultural strategist who's worked out of Washington, D.C. but was in Hanoi, Vietna...

How do you graduate from "doing social" to doing strategy? Blake is a digital strategist from New York who entered advertising after a brief flirtation with neuroscience.   In this episode, we discuss the  evolution made by many people who start out as social media workers. They go from trading on their youth and knowing the platforms because they use them to making recommendations not just becaus...

How does the Strategic Planner of the Year think? Andy Nairn co-founded Lucky Generals in London seven years ago. The agency has grown to ninety people in London and now has twenty people in New York. Their work is consistently exceptional. Andy's contribution to it was acknowledged by Campaign when it named him Strategic Planner of the Year 2020. We discuss growing an agency from scratch, establi...

What does it feel like to take a stance about a difficult topic and to let it rip in public? Jenny Chang is a comet roaring through space–a comet that likes the wind in its face. That's how her prolific publishing feels. Only four years out of college, Jenny has dropped stances on the Cardi B and Mega Thee Stallion song "WAP", TikTok, and the stolen history of New York. She writes with a fire that...

What if account planners get paid for their confusion and clarity is fleeting but just a bonus?   Richard Huntington is Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi London. He's also a writer of many classic account planning articles that you can find on his blog Adliterate http://www.adliterate.com/  In this episode, we discuss the confusion and vagueness of the strategy career, the a...

How do you know you're ready to freelance and how do you make it work?  In this episode, we speak with Colleen Berg, Lani Dourado, and Willem van der Horst about what it means to freelance, the ups and downs, getting clients, and pricing.   Colleen Berg is based in Toronto and the Director of Strategic Insights in the Palmerston Group. She specializes as a human insight consultant and has over a d...

It’s been a minute but here’s a ramble from an Upper West Side bedroom about discovering yourself. PS My book just came out - http://www.sweathead.com

What if you know you have something to offer to the advertising industry but the advertising industry isn't set up for you?  Jennifer Ekeleme runs JennZen Co-Creation Studio. She is a brand and creative consultant as well as a diversity, equity, and inclusion facilitator.  In this episode, we discuss burn out in an early New York advertising career, depression, being a highly sensitive person, and...