Category: advertising
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The New Agency Operating Model
I recently ran a morning session at the ICOM World Meeting in Porto on the new operating model for advertising agencies. ICOM is the global network for independent agencies and the room was full of agency founders and leaders from markets around the world. A big part of the session focused on a scenario modelling exercise where…
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The Future of Agencies in the Age of AI
Last week I spoke at the Google Partner Summit in Dublin about managing agency change in the era of AI, and then moderated a panel of exceptional agency leaders including Pats McDonald, Christina Lemieux, and Liam Wade. In my talk I spoke about the need to combine optimisation and efficiency focused efforts with transformational thinking to reinvent processes, workflows and…
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The Future of Strategists and Planners
The latest WARC Future of Strategy report is just out and makes for interesting reading. 80% of strategists think the discipline is at a crossroads. Agency jobs in decline, and yet client demand for strategy skills needed more than ever in a volatile world. There also seems to be a split on whether AI will erode the…
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Have we got personalisation all wrong?
Imagine this – It’s 7:12 a.m. and your phone pings. It’s your own AI agent asking if you’d like a summary of the day’s news stories as a two-minute audio brief while you boil the kettle. After you’ve listened to them your agent reminds you that your wedding anniversary is coming up and asks you…
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Integrating AI into the strategy workflow
I’m a big fan of the idea of AI amplifying human capability and have long been working to fully embed AI into my strategy work. For me it’s been a real game-changer. It’s not just about efficiency, although it is like having a mini-team of researchers always on hand which is amazing. It’s also that…
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Brands, and Latent Space
Reading Jack Smyth’s reflections on the recent BRXND Marketing x AI conference in LA I came across the idea of ‘latent space’ as it relates to brands and LLMs. I confess I’d not heard the term before so I did some digging to find out more about what it means, and I think it’s a…
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Building trust in client / agency relationships
Some months back I did a piece of work for the IPA that sought to understand how clients could build mutually beneficial and sustainable relationships with their agency partners. Called Partnering for Growth, the report captured the inputs of a broad range of industry and non-industry experts, academics and both client and agency-side practitioners. I…
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The cost of being dull
I loved the premise of Adam Morgan’s new podcast which is ostensibly about the cost of being boring, and in which Adam speaks to people whose job it is to make things more interesting. Adam is a planning legend, the founder of eatbigfish, and also a Google Firestarters guest (his Firestarters episode gives some wonderful…
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Google Firestarters: Leo Rayman on Green Growth
The latest episode of Google Firestarters has just been published, featuring the brilliant Leo Rayman (CEO of EdenLab) on the challenging but inspiring topic of achieving ‘green growth’ and real sustainability transformation. Leo has a good provocation for this episode about how marketing needs to step up – he talks about how most of the green debate is (rightly) owned…
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All New Google Firestarters
Adam Morgan discusses creativity from constraints in this episode of Think With Google Firetstarters