Sweathead, A Strategy Podcast

To start 2023, we're running a fast series on trends worth paying attention to in The Sweathead Trend Bender Series. Over five episodes this week, you'll get to hear 25 trends that people who get paid to find trends are highlighting for their clients. In this episode, Vayner's Olayinka Ajibola and Hayley Grant take us through their trend highlight reel. The trends come from The Vayner Constellatio...

To start 2023, we're running a fast series on trends worth paying attention to in The Sweathead Trend Bender Series. Over five episodes this week, you'll get to hear 25 trends that people who get paid to find trends are highlighting for their clients. In this episode, Will Poskett breaks down five trends he's seen across all those trend reports everyone is gouging on. These are called Meta Trends....

A big thank you to the Sweathead team and all the speakers for making The Sweathead Get-Ahead happen on January 20, our five-year anniversary.  We have so much planned for 2023, including a week of trends this week on the podcast (The Sweathead Trend Bender) and a live workshop with Reddit's Matt Klein on 16 meta trends on Feb 3. RSVP to the workshop here: http://bit.ly/3XOjJ7f ** Next strate...

Justin Graham runs M&C Saatchi Group in Australasia. He started in management consulting then moved to Leo Burnett Sydney as an account planner. I sat next to him there, or at least in arms' reach. Like, I could annoy him if I wanted to without using my arms if I felt like it. After Leo Burnett, Justin moved to BBDO in New York to run Gillette before returning to the Australian offices of Droga5....

It's not every day you get to hear two strategy leaders compare and contrast their agency's Gold IPA Effectiveness Papers. But Senior Planner at Brave Michael Kates suggested it on Twitter and Leo Burnett's London Head of Planning Tom Sussman and Wieden+Kennedy's Group Strategy Director Tass Tsitsopoulos said "yes". So here we are–a rare day. Tom takes us through a 15-year case study of discipline...

Friends, Sweathead celebrates its fifth anniversary on January 20, 2023, with a live event called "The Sweathead Get-Ahead". RSVP at http://www.sweathead.com. It's free and open to all and it features... 1. Elizabeth Paul–CSO, The Martin Agency Adage CSO of the Year and Chair of the 4As Strategy Committee 2. Andy Nairn–Founding Partner, Lucky Generals The UK’s Planner Of The Year in 2021 3. Tahaab...

Thom James is Head of Strategy at One Green Bean, part of the Havas network, in the UK. Recently, he was hospitalized due to deteriorating mental health. He Tweeted about his experience in a very frank and vulnerable way. Most people will directly or indirectly deal with a mental health crisis during their lifetimes. But it does seem like the creative industries are home to a lot of people with ch...

Santi Pochat is Vice President of Marketing at LinkedIn and he believes that beautiful ideas can come from the worst ideas. And this is what we discuss in this episode. Santi has spent over ten years at Edelman across two stints. He's also worked at Verizon and Google. He's strategic but loves making things and I'm excited about what he's about to unleash for LinkedIn, a company he recently joined...

In this episode of Sweathead, James Hankins discusses two big topics: marketing concepts he's infatuated with and how he published his way through–then out of–a redundancy.  We discuss concepts such as market share, contribution margin, and incremental revenue. And we discuss how writing can provide a sense of rhythm and mission when life throws lemons at us. James is Global VP Marketing Stra...

In this episode of Sweathead, I discuss cross-culture kids with Sean Choi. Cross-culture kids are people who grow up between two or more cultures. These "kids" are fast becoming a large population in the USA and, because of this, they are increasingly working in advertising and the audiences of advertising. Sean currently calls The Martin Agency, AdWeek’s back-to-back Agency of the Year, home.&nbs...

Tahaab Rais has won over 750 top-tier regional and global awards across Cannes, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Jay Chiats, Andy's, Clios, LIA, New York Festivals, WARC, Loeries, Dubai Lynx, among others, including a record of 340+ Effies. He's the MENAT CSO of Publicis Groupe. That's Middle-East-North-Africa-and-Turkey, a region with hundreds of millions of people in it. Some conversations I feel at home...

In this episode, we look at five insights about insight hunters as suggested by strategists. You can find the deck here: https://bit.ly/insighthunters ** THIS WEEK ONLY: You can the coupon code HOLIDAY22 on the Sweathead website to get 20% off plus free shipping of 2 or more copies of my book "Strategy Is Your Words". You can find out about our membership at http://www.sweathead.com. We'll be anno...

You can find this episodes on Instagram @markpollard. You can the coupon code HOLIDAY22 on the Sweathead website to get 20% off plus free shipping of 2 or more copies of my book "Strategy Is Your Words". You can find out about our membership at http://www.sweathead.com. We'll be announcing tens of events and masterclasses in 2023 soon. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend and g...

Eden Swanson is Group Planning Director at Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis. Her team picked up a Gold Effie in 2021 as well as a bronze in the Connection Strategy category of the 2022 Jay Chiat Awards. At its simple, communications planning (or, "connection planning"), seeks to reach its audience where they spend time and in ways that work for the channels in which they spend time as well as for t...

Edelman's Amina Colter Jones (SVP, Health), Dinah Douglas (Senior Strategist), and Laura Goldsmith (Head of Strategy, LA) were part of a team that helped The Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation launch a campaign to get attention for black student's mental health challenges. The campaign was called “The Unspoken Curriculum”. It recently picked up Gold in the Healthcare category and an honorable mentio...

British Airways has just launched a new positioning "A British Original" and a new campaign "Every Reason You Fly". The campaign breaks conventions by focusing on small moments that happen because of travel in their 15-second ads as well as the real reasons people travel.  Part of the campaign involves 500 ads which feature three radio checkboxes and the words "Business" and "Leisure" then a...

In this episode, I speak with John Lyons, a senior marketer who was recently at the LEGO Group.  John has been weathering a difficult few years. He's shared his challenges on Twitter–the loss of a brother, a marriage, a career, and more.  I wanted to find out more and to put a voice to his story. We discuss some topics that might be difficult for you to listen to–including depression and...

Susan Coghill is the Chief Marketing Officer of Tourism Australia. Susan and her team have just launched a new campaign with their agencies M&C Saatchi, UM, Digitas and many more. They are spending $125M over two years in an attempt to get tourism numbers back to pre-pandemic levels of about nine million visits per year. In this episode, we discuss: - How the campaign came to be - Some of the scie...

Mayur Hola is a former creative director who now runs India's OYO brand. OYO helps small- and medium-sized hotels sell their rooms. They've been winning a ton of awards for a campaign they made with The Script Room, including several at the 4As' Jay Chiat awards. In this interview, Mayur takes us through the key decisions that led to this campaign, one that attempted to increase hotel bookings by...

Tim Gingrich, along with his team at Edelman and his clients at Dallas Regional Chamber, recently picked up a couple of trophies at the 4A's Jay Chiat Awards. Silver in the Healthcare category, bronze in the Regional category. In this interview, Tim takes us through the thinking behind the initiative that sought to get over 600,000 North Texans vaccinated and why capitalism played a key role in th...

James Whatley is Chief Strategy Officer at UK agency Diva. Diva works with gaming brands but they also help non-gaming brands get into gaming. James is speaking at our upcoming conference The Sweathead Do-Together so I thought it would be good to speak to him about the work he's doing at Diva: 1. How does an agency that focuses on gaming work with brands? 2. How can brands get it right more often...

This Sweathead episode is a live workshop in front of a virtual audience of about 60 people. Working with the team at TEACH, we try to crack a strategy to get more people with bachelor's degrees to consider teaching STEM in high schools around the USA. You'll hear Jen Cooper (Senior Director of Content), Teresa Alexandru (Director of Growth Marketing), and Nancy Sylvan (Director of Programs) works...

Ever felt creative but uncertain about how strategic you were? What about the other way around? In this episode, we get into both of these situations. We'll discuss small shifts creative minds can take to become more strategic and help the strategy-inclined to understand their creativity. We also answer strategist questions: 1. How can I sell strategy without design? 2. What to do if your creative...

Sharing creative briefs with creative teams is intimidating when you're starting out. In this episode, I share some history, including "I didn't write my first creative brief until I was about 28", and at least 15 tips about how to do this.  Listen to this episode with CCO Jill Applebaum and ECD Kieran Ots as they give feedback to strategists: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/creative-bo...

In 2021, Derek Walker lit up our first ever strategy conference The Sweathead Do-Together.  His talk about fear in advertising sent chills through over one hundred souls.  We've heard that some people replay this talk to themselves when they need a kick in the pants. Having just launched this year's Do-Together, we thought we'd share Derek's talk via the podcast. He'll be back this year to light a...