Sweathead, A Strategy Podcast

In this episode, we discuss mediocrity and why some people need it plus I answer nine questions while walking through New York City. The questions include: 1. What can I do when I feel a lack of interest cause every project looks the same? 2. How to approach building a team for the first time 3. Why are we moving backwards as a country? 4. Are the traditional strategy-creative roles in agencies re...

Freelancing can smell like freedom but it can also reek of fear. “I can’t wait to be my own boss…but what if I can’t manage myself?” “I’m so excited about finding my own clients…but what if nobody wants to work with me?” “I can’t wait to choose how I spend more of my days…but what if I spend them in ways that set me back?” In this podcast recording, freelance strategist Lydia Taylor hosts a conver...

For this episode of Sweathead, VMLY&R's Kevin Brockenbrough collects a few of his favorite minds to share their experiences as black strategists working in advertising in the USA: Simone Pratt (Ogilvy), Deadra Rahaman (Huge), and Emanuel Basnight (Power Twist). This episode is from a live recording. Kevin was due to host the whole session but had some technical challenges so you’ll hear his powerf...

Sharing a creative brief with creative teams can be scary, right? Well, how about presenting strategy to a Chief Creative Officer and an Executive Creative Director? Four Sweathead students recently did this with Wunderman Thompson CCO Jill Applebaum and Leo Burnett ECD Kieran Ots.  This is a rare public experience that's often full of trepidation and excitement in equal measures. You can fin...

Maria Van Buskirk is Head of Strategy at Media by Mother. Mother is notorious for its creativity. So you'd expect Media by Mother to be notorious for its creativity in media.  But how does it all work, especially in a city like New York that can make creativity feel so corporate and where big budgets and a fetish for efficiency can dull many creative spirits? In this episode, Maria shares wit...

For details about the Sweathead Strategy Summer Camp, go to: http://www. Sweathead.com

We all want to feel good about our work but does some of the marketing industry take itself too seriously? In our personal pursuit for meaningful work and a sense of nobility, can we completely overshoot the whole point of marketing? What if marketing doesn't need to be noble? What if "brand purpose" isn't a useful concept? What if marketing is just to sell? These are questions that Anthea Foyer (...

Nathan Brown is Global Chief Strategy Officer for UM in New York. We worked in the same building on William St in Sydney about 15 years ago. Nathan was a breath of fresh air. He built teams that expected to do creative things with their clients’ media buys. He was a good coach and easy to collaborate with. He’s still all of these things. But many years have passed since we worked together so I wan...

Jo Lepore is Global Foresight Leader at Mars Wrigley. She moved to the USA about a year ago and works out of Hoboken, New Jersey. In this episode of Sweathead, Jo takes us through how she approaches her work, the work of a snack futurist. This kind of work might be of interest to a few agency strategists and Jo helps us understand how to make it work that the rest of a business will want to engage...

Archana Mahadevan is VP, Director of Strategy at DDB Chicago. Archana was born in India and came to the United States to attend college. She has been here ever since. While in India, Archana was obsessed with advertising, and wanted to prove to everyone that she could do it. So she combined her need to start over, her desire to work in advertising, and her urge to leave her country and grow profes...

Picture this: you have a yearning to do strategy but you’re in an account management role. Maybe a job switch has been promised. Maybe you're simply doing multiple roles. Either way, on your mind is this question: "How do I do strategy full-time?" The transition isn’t always easy. The thing you want can put stress on your current company. But how much of that is a ‘you’ problem versus a ‘them’ pro...

Within a matter of minutes, the pandemic went from freaking out everybody about keeping their jobs to unfurling a ton of new opportunities. Agencies and brands alike turned to strategists to help them navigate the ambiguity and confusion and frustration. And now many strategists realize they have more options than ever. But what’s a strategy boss to do? In this live session, we ask: 1. What are th...

Rodolfo Estrada is a fresh new planner at BBDO in Guatemala. He recently took The Sweathead Strategy Accelerator, our 6-week strategy course. And I thought his work was worth sharing. In this episode, Rodolfo takes us through his response to a hypothetical brief. The task was to get heavy drinkers to consider Vivitrol as a way to cut down their drinking. Vivitrol is a monthly needle in the butt (a...

After stints at Leo Burnett and Droga5, Mara Rigney now helps brands work out what to do with Web3 at Accenture Song. "With Web3" is such a...non-specific thing. And, for those of us who've been around through Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, it's hard not to feel a little skeptical. Like, "Oh, here comes another Ponzi scheme." But, in this episode, Mara takes us through some of the fundamental concepts of We...

Austin Powers is currently in Phuket, Thailand. He recently burned out. In Phuket, he hopes to rekindle himself. Austin had been working in Taiwan as a Global Marketing Strategy Director. This was after working in Singapore, Beijing, and Hong Kong. He posted his exit strategy in the Sweathead Facebook Group. Many other strategists related...hardcore. So I decided to talk to him about what he's bee...

David Snell and Christopher Owens have worked at The Richards Group in Dallas for fifty years. Combined. That's a long, long time.  David is TRG's Head of Brand Strategy while Christopher is Brand Strategy Director. In 2020, The Richards Group hit a crisis. Words said by the agency's founder were reported to the media. The agency lost staff. The agency lost clients. David and Christopher stay...

Strategy bosses say it’s hard to find good talent right now.  Recent pressure on margins and growth has meant that many strategy bosses are torn between their roles in the management team, winning new business, and helping their teams to develop. The pandemic led to a lot of strategy job losses but, as soon as the economy came back on, it also led to high salaries and a battle for ever bigger...

It's not every day you get to launch a campaign at the Super Bowl. And it's not every day you get to speak to the people who did it.  This episode of Sweathead is an edited recording of a live panel we hosted for the Sweathead community, organized by Dot Jarantilla. In it, Chandreyi Davis (Global VP of Brand Marketing, Trips Brands at Expedia Group) and Melissa Peace (Senior Manager, Global Brand...

Strategy bosses are humans, too. It's true.  In this episode, we run through ten tensions that follow around most strategy bosses from an analysis of over 60 responses to a LinkedIn post. You can read the PDF of this podcast here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/markpollardstrategist_the-twisted-reality-of-strategy-bosses-activity-6926907852582268928-lGiT ** MASTERCLASS / WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT...

Strategists Karan Taneja and Syed Shozab Abbas recently shared a bunch of practice strategies online. In this episode, we look at five of them: Selling Playstation 5 to 45+ dads in a midlife crisis Selling Sleepwell mattresses to pregnant women Selling Woodland to stay-at-home dads Selling therapy to bodybuilders Selling Fastrack to grandparents Syed describes himself as a perennial ad geek while...

If you'd like to read this episode, go to this link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CdbxeOTpGg0/ My first in-person masterclass will happen in NYC on Thursday June 16. DM me for details or get them in your inbox with our newsletter soon. In this episode, we discuss Fearless Honesty and five ways a strategist can focus on sounding clear rather than emulating The Strategist Dictionary and trying to sou...

In this week's episode of Sweathead, we speak with Sahar Mehdi (Digital Strategist, WE Codeword) and Kate Endeley (VP, Multicultural Strategy Director, Edelman). We continue a conversation we started in person in Dallas in which we discussed some of the initiatives and titles agencies use to do, hint at doing, or pretend to do..."inclusion".   You can find Sahar here: https://www.linkedin.com...

Kavinda Welagedara is Chief Strategy Officer at Fudge, an eight-person agency born during the pandemic. He's based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, a city and a country in the grips of social unrest due to inflation, as well as corruption and nepotism within the government. We discuss all of this in this episode of Sweathead. You can find Kavinda here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/welewelagedara/ You can fin...

Over 100 people joined us for this panel about getting jobs overseas. It features: - Payal Pereira who recently got her first job in New York at Sylvain,  - Rodrigo Maroni, CSO of Wunderman Thompson NY, - Charlotte van der Vorm, a recruiter and founder of VDV Search in the UK. You'll also hear Dot Jarantilla who makes the Sweathead events happen plus members of the Sweathead community. -- 🔥 Strat...

Shoutouts to all the Dallas strategists who came down to Happiest Hour last night. It was great to be among people for many reasons including how the pandemic made that impossible for a long long time. In this walk around the Bishop Arts District, I talk about strategic rigor and try to re-explain a LinkedIn post about the job title “multicultural” strategist. 🔥 Strategy classes: http://www.sweat...