The Overthinkers

Shann has a strong take on this one: strategists should never specialize by channel, and why a "TikTok strategist" makes him wince. Lynette pushes the conversation into David Epstein's Range , the split between wicked and kind environments, and why the deep-generalist path is its own kind of hard-won skill. They also get into the real career costs of staying broad, the hedgehog-versus-fox split, a...

Jonathan Mildenhall, former CMO of Airbnb, recently argued that your personal brand is your proof of concept — if you can't market yourself, you have no business marketing anyone else. Lynette and Shann don't fully agree, and they spend this episode working out why. They get into the real reasons people build a following (career resilience, testing your thinking, finding your tribe), the three bar...

Most marketing is still selling the SUV driver racing across open terrain, while the actual buyer is dodging potholes in Brooklyn. In this episode, Shann and Lynette dig into one of advertising's oldest questions: when does the fantasy work, and when does it backfire? They trace the line from menopause ads featuring 20-year-olds to period products using blue liquid, and argue that the answer has a...

Marvin Miranda — Global Head of Brand and Creative Strategy at Accenture Song — joins Shann and Lynette to ask a question the industry doesn't love sitting with: is there a bit of a white savior syndrome in our industry? They trace how Western agencies spread across Asia, what the knowledge transfer got right and what it calcified into, and why Asia's most consequential marketing evolutions (creat...

Dali Adekunle — SVP Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi Health, Stella Adler conservatory graduate, and former director of patient relations at NYU Langone — joins Shann and Lynette to argue the case for storytelling over statistics. The conversation covers the griot tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, why twenty years of pharma advertising has barely changed its visual grammar, and years work...

Acting, screenwriting, gaming, dance, gardening, running a volunteer website nobody got paid for. Shann and Lynette swap notes on the side-of-desk obsessions and unlikely hobbies that turned out to matter more in their marketing careers than a lot of formal training ever did. The conversation covers what an acting exercise about holding a cup reveals about observation, why Lynette sees every campa...

Katya Kotlyar has moved through this industry in ways most people don't from small to big agency, some freelance, co-founding a cross-border donation startup with her sister (raising $2 million), and eventually winding it down before coming back to brand and startup strategy—often both at once. In this episode, she joins Lynette and Lynette to work through what big-brand thinking actually survives...

Is maxing just self-improvement with a rebrand — or something more sinister? Shann and Lynette unpack where the trend came from (hint: the manosphere), why the algorithm is partly to blame, and what it all means for brands trying to figure out which side to stand on. From jaw maxing to nona maxing to the very real possibility of couch maxing as an Olympic sport. Ok, maybe not that last one...

Can you work in marketing — a job literally built around driving demand — and honestly call yourself anti-capitalist? Shann and Lynette try to find out. They start with definitions: what capitalism actually is, where anti-capitalism begins, and what gets lost when people conflate the two. From there it gets messier: the degrowth debate, whether brands like Ursa Major offer a real alternative or ju...

We all want to matter. But in a world where the average person has 700 followers and every brand claims to be meaningful, what does significance actually look like — and can it scale? Shann and Lynette get personal about where they've genuinely felt it, some pushback on the idea that brands should chase it, and make a case for why going smaller might be one of the most powerful things you can do i...

Anthropic's latest report says 65% of marketing tasks are headed for AI replacement — making us the fifth most disrupted profession out of 800. Lynette came in hot with a confession: she literally built her own AI replacement in her last role at Ogilvy. Shann came in skeptical of the "AI won't replace you, someone using AI will" line — and called it, diplomatically, a bit of a myth. We get into wh...

Nearly 200 episodes in, The Overthinkers is turning a page. This is Rachel Mercer's final episode as co-host — and the debut of Lynette, a former global strategy lead at Ogilvy, ethnographic researcher, insect farm co-founder, and current Vermont transplant who consults for small businesses at what she calls her "community rate" (sometimes paid in sausage). To mark the moment, the three of us tack...

This wonderful episode was recorded over a year ago with the legendary Rob Campbell, CSO at Colenso in Auckland. Rachel and Shann were planning to publish this as part of a last series of guests, but for a variety of reasons couldn't get to it. Together with Rob, they explore what satiety can look and feel like in a project (or your career). It ventures into some very personal stories for our gues...

With the demise of the cookie monster and the supreme reign of a few internet giants, a lot of brands placed their bets on building first party data. Is that really the way of the future, and can brands sustainably grow without a strong 1st party data strategy anymore?

“You’re Dead In 18 Months Or Less” - Scott Galloway's ominous predictions for CMOs last week brought about a slight disturbance in the force. In this episode, we discuss the argument made against CMOs as we know them, as well as arguments for their possible redemption.

As global consciousness of the world's climate challenges rises, the role of advertising is being increasingly scrutinized. With large fossil fuel companies still using our services to project a greener image, the reality is that decades of deception have made them questionable clients to support. In an effort to stop the support provided by advertising to the industry, Clean Creatives has been ra...

Social Media platforms are often put on the map by (young) generations, but ageing with them seems to prove a difficult exercise. Does that generational gap make it harder, and what might allow them more trans-generational success?

Strategic planning inevitably requires the ability to rationalize information, but does great strategy require the ability to think creatively about it?

If you had to launch an agency from scratch today, how would you do it? What strategy or approach would you use? How would you stand out from competitors? Would you try to stay small and niche, or try to create the next WPP? This week's question is courtesy of listener Ian Barnard.

On the heels of Twitter's catastrophic rebranding, we are joined by Co:Collective's Snr Strategy Director, Jessica Lehmann Ash, to discuss not only what went wrong there, but how and when to potentially get it right. Rebranding (or even renaming) should never be taken lightly, often costing valuable equity to companies, but as you'll hear on this episode, it doesn't mean there aren't valuable mome...

Brand, performance, social, programmatic, CRM, influencer, sponsoring, media, creative... There is a myriad of specialties in the world of advertising, and marketers are increasingly expected to be able to navigate any of them. Is it possible for them to be good at both the long and the short of it?

Threads has taken the world of social media by storm last week, growing in ways we'd never seen before. To discuss the platform's launch, its impact on marketers (and on Meta's product teams!), we're joined by Grace Freeman, Strategy Director and social media expert at Barbarian. The chance to share our hopes and fears for a platform that is breaking all sorts of records.

Barbie has been taking the film industry by storm - and the marketing community has noticed! This week we're joined by Moshe Isaacian, Brand Strategist, to talk about what's great about this campaign, and how it may rekindle a flame that has been somewhat lost in entertainment marketing.

A couple of years ago, Freakonomics discussed research that show zero to negative correlation between advertising and market effects. Apparently, marketers have been wasting all this money for nothing. During this episode, Rachel and Shann discuss the merits of the findings, and whether it approached the question in a way that does (or does not) capture the value of advertising for brands.

Between the loud voices of our industry and the stress of being judged for what you say, finding your voice on public forums can be intimidating for younger marketers. We're joined by John Lyons, Business Director at Gasp! to discuss how new voices can emerge, whether it be on their own or the support of more seasoned marketers.