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- [00:00]
Fergus O'Carroll
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O'Carroll in Chicago. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. This is actually the 14th time I have recorded this intro. I'm not kidding you. For whatever reason, I can't seem to get it. So sometimes I type out a script. Most of the times I just wing it. And today's one of those days when I'm winging it and I'm not winging it very well. So let's see what happens. We're going to be recording live in Sydney, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand next month, which I'm sure super pumped about. We are so lucky that Ogilvy is hosting us at WPP's Sydney campus, which is an amazing space and I'm excited to see it. We're going to be there on Wednesday evening, April 16th from 6 to 8pm and you can get tickets on our website. On the homepage there's a tab, a live tour tab. You can get tickets there. You can also get tickets there for our Auckland, New Zealand show, which is a week later. That is Wednesday evening, the 23rd of April. And we are super excited to be hosted by Colenso bbdo. We're going to be at their offices, so grab your tickets for that. Really excited about it. We have great panels for both locations and there'll be more information as we get a little bit closer. I'm really thankful to our live tour sponsors, Tracksuit, the Effie's and WARC for making this all possible and for our hosts of course, which really are are wonderful to have as a part of all of this. So thank you to all of them and we're thrilled of course to announce we did it this earlier this week that we are now the official podcast partner of the fes. There's going to be some great new content coming out throughout the year. We're going to be, which I'm super geeked about, we're going to be live at FE Award Gala nights in various cities recording content. So that's gonna be new and as a result probably super exciting. So very much excited about that. Here is a clip from today's episode.
- [02:08]
Marcus Collins
I've always found myself gravitating towards the ambiguity in an organization. Like I go, no one's paying attention to this, but this is really interesting. We should be looking at this. It was like, well, we're not built to sort of scale that. And by the way, everyone we've hired in the building isn't meant to do that. They don't have the skill set nor the capacity or the interest or curiosity to do that. And I go, well, I want to do it, so I'm gonna do that with my job and then do it. I feel like everywhere I've worked, it's always been that. I've always gone to the ambiguity, the ambiguous, the gray stuff, the gray area. But that's where the interesting things reside. Me as planners, we know this whatever is very clear, black or white. You go, that's already, people already trotted that, that, that, that road. We've seen that before. It's obvious. It's the gray, the gray area where the interesting things reside. And I just found myself wanting to do more of that than the black and white.
- [03:04]
Fergus O'Carroll
That is Marcus Collins. He's former chief strategy officer at Wieden and Kennedy and author of the book for the Culture, and he's a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan. He's joined by Suzanne Powers and Gareth Kay. Suzanne Powers is former chief strategy officer and president of the McCann World Group. Gareth Kay is former Chief Strategy officer Goodby. He's now part of the Intangibles, which you'll hear more about in the show. This is Episode two in our Planning on the Outside series, which in essence is Life After Agency Life. We were interested in learning about the way different talent that have come out of agencies are applying their planning skills in new roles and in new ventures. There'll be another episode in this series coming out in a couple of weeks that'll feature Britain Taylor, Tom Morton and Lisa Prince. So I've really enjoyed these conversations. I suggest you pour yourself a cup of warm coffee, pull up a chair and really enjoy this. It's a great, great episode and I appreciate the three of our guests today for taking part. Enjoy. So it is great to have this talented group to join us today and talk about this topic that matters to all of us. There are an awful lot of people who have stepped out of the big agency world for various reasons and have done some great things that are a great inspiration to other people out there. So that's what this entire series is about, is understanding what people are doing, why they're doing it, and what they think are the great opportunities out there. And then maybe one of the things that's most important that's come out of this is there's a lot of things we need to be doing before we leap, because a lot of people are leaping without being prepared. So I think in this series we're beginning to hear voices that are sort of warning people of that and to make sure that whatever you're doing, you're prepared in advance to take that step. Because stepping out is a financial risk. And for those of us where finance is important to making a leap, that's a topic that needs to be probably talked about and discussed more. I want to welcome Suzanne, Suzanne Powers. It is great to have you on the show for the first time.
- [05:18]
Suzanne Powers
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [05:20]
Fergus O'Carroll
Marcus Collins is coming back for his second visit. We had Marcus for the launch of his fantastic book for the Culture. I think everybody's read that book. I mean, come on, man. You have become the famous, famous, famous dude in the last three years.
- [05:35]
Marcus Collins
You're far too kind. And I credit it all to our podcast.
- [05:39]
Fergus O'Carroll
So must be that. I mean, I, I don't turn, I don't. I open up any website today, any webpage, and you're on there. You're on it. You, you are featured on some stage around the world. Well deserved, been a phenomenal success. You, you brought a whole new angle to a topic that people thought they knew and they didn't know it. I don't think they knew it in a rounded out way. So you're to be absolutely credited for that. And Gareth Kay is back again. Great to have Gareth back. He is being part now of a new venture that we're going to be hearing a lot about. It's called the Intangibles. Gareth, welcome back.
- [06:16]
Gareth Kay
Fergus, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be on the panel. Marcus, your book is terrific. Thank you for writing it and sharing it with the world. And Suzanne Greater be on a panel with you again. It's been a long time.
- [06:28]
Fergus O'Carroll
I mean, it has got to be tough, Marcus, to write a book because I struggle to write a memo. I mean, how long does it take? How long did it take to write that book? Let's just talk about it for 30 seconds.
- [06:40]
Marcus Collins
You know, I had an 18 month window to write it from the publisher, but I think it took me about 14 months because the first four months I was like, I'll get to it. But I'll get to it. I get to it. And I sat down to write it. I was like, oh my God, I don't know what I'm writing. I don't know. I don't know how to even approach this thing. So it took me a while to sort of get the gears moving. And to be very honest, like, I, I don't find writing to be very enjoyable is actually quite painful for Me, I don't like writing, but I love to have written. So I write.
- [07:11]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah, I got to imagine you went through about 10 or 15 panic attacks as you had early drafts. And you're like. Cause that's the way I am with decks. I write something and I'm like, I have nothing. I've been writing for a week. I have nothing. I mean, did you go through that sort of panic and imposter syndrome?
- [07:26]
Marcus Collins
So the book required. I had to deliver 85,000 words. I wrote about 5,500 words and said, I'm done. Got nothing else to say. I literally, in my mind, I said, I said it all. I had nothing else to say. And I had to really sort of invest in, you know, what do I really want to. What can I contribute to the discourse? What can I contribute to the literature that had been so, well, you know, articulated over the years, Centuries, you know, so it took. It took a lot of introspection to get there. You know, they say that if you want clarity, write, my lord. Like, it's just. It's the. So true.
- [08:02]
Fergus O'Carroll
So, Gareth, an equally famous dude in the world of planning, I gotta say, I credit you with sort of elevating my understanding of planning far above where it used to be. And you, you always were able to put out completely fresh perspectives on a constant basis. So, I mean, I owe you an awful lot in inspiring me to understand what planning can be, because it isn't. You don't always learn it in the right way, and I think that. So I personally want to thank you for that. But tell us about how you got to where you are today. A love journey, of course.
- [08:42]
Gareth Kay
That's incredibly kind. I'll try and make a long winding road feel as short and maybe sensible as possible. I mean, I guess, you know, at college I got my degree in politics and philosophy and economics, and I guess I did that because I was interested in understanding why people do what they do. But I kind of quickly realized at college I was probably not smart enough, or Marcus, to your point about writing a book, probably self driven enough to be an economist. So I took a weird left turn. I was a failed musician for a very short time, a failed A and R person.
- [09:16]
Fergus O'Carroll
There's an awful lot of people in our industry that have that same story. Like you, Rob Campbell, are all, like, fans of music. I mean, you are a nut for music, by the way.
- [09:25]
Gareth Kay
I'm obsessed by music. Music, way too much money. I go to too many shows. But for me, that's something I find to just be Incredible release and something I still enjoy, you know, in my life. But I kind of stumbled into advertising because in the late 80s and early 90s advertising, when I was growing up, it felt culturally influential and commercially vital. You looked at all the data and I saw these kind of surveys when I started in the industry. The majority of people in the UK would say that the ads on TV were better than the TV shows they were part of. And there were lots of really interesting businesses like St. Luke's and Hal Henry. Yeah, they talked about being professional radicals or safe looking people with dangerous minds and they were building new types of businesses like the employee owned Trust business that St. Luke's had. It felt exciting compared to so many other jobs. There was a chance to work on a wide range of different problems, different industries and it was full of really interesting, brilliant Misfits. So for 20 years I had an amazing time working with incredibly talented people, especially now when I kind of got to my last advertising job at Goodbye Silverstein. But despite loving the industry, I just increasingly had this growing nagging doubt that we were specializing ourselves into irrelevance. And when we did the big thinking that I think strategists are so good at doing and enjoy doing so much, far too often I was kind of finding clients who were often not that interested or unable to act on it. And that perhaps wasn't surprising when it was kind of the freebie we're giving away with half a pound of quote unquote content they were coming for because that's what the shop sold in their eyes, were coming into the conversation too late. And as a result, towards the end of my time, I kind of sat in too many meetings where you'd be given a brief and it was basically an exercise in something like paint by numbers. And too often I wasn't sure the picture was right and I was damn sure that painting wasn't actually the right activity. Now that may feel like a rather dramatic broad brush generalization. And there's definitely exceptions like uncommon or Colenso BBDO where Rob Campbell is in New Zealand, or perhaps how you hear maybe Nanc Reyes and Chris Barrisford Hill talk about the ambition that lies at the heart of what they're building at bbdo. But I think these are few and far between. And at best I feel there are exceptions that prove the rule. So are the.
- [11:54]
Fergus O'Carroll
Are the. Except the exceptions tend to be the clients within the agencies or the agencies themselves, because nobody gets it right all the time.
- [12:02]
Gareth Kay
Yeah, that's a good question. I think there is Something about the DNA of certain agencies that helps them really push into a kind of a bigger space, an ambition that lies at the heart. And they look at kind of like what Neil always talked about and Lucy and Matt talked about at Uncommon. When you can like think about what BBDO has done historically over time under, you know, Nick Worthington's leadership, I think there's something in the DNA, but definitely they attract clients and those clients become the engines for, I think this kind of bigger, braver thinking. I think you very much, you know, you, you attract the clients you deserve in many ways. I left Goodbye. I started my own kind of what I felt was a new type of creative studio with my partner Neil Robinson called Chapter that was obsessed with trying to find the real problem to solve and then applying creativity to solve it in whatever form that took. I kind of ran to a brick wall there where I began to realize that actually offering the advice I really wanted to give to clients was really hard to do from the outside. So I decided to go and take a turn working inside client organizations. So I spent some time working as a CMO at a digital health company called Twil and working with Team, most recently at Coinbase. But that led me on a path towards joining the crew of the Intangibles. It's a fresh proposition, I think, with a big point of view that I believe in with people I've got enormous respect for and who I love working with, who want to provide honest, unbiased advice.
- [13:28]
Fergus O'Carroll
So we, we'll come back and pull that apart a little bit. But Suzanne, tell us about yourself. Tell us how you got to where you are today.
- [13:35]
Suzanne Powers
So I did a lot of different things. I was a preschool teacher. I worked in entertainment pr, writing press releases for the likes of Carrot Top, not kidding. I did retail marketing where I was on site in shopping malls and counting foot traffic, lots of different things. And then one day realized as I got to my second cycle of retail marketing, because it is all cyclical and seasonal, I realized I didn't want to do something that was that, that much of a routine, I guess I would say. And I called in sick to work and there was an ad in the good old fashioned Ad Week magazine that you would go to the newsstand to pick up. And the ad said, we've just, we've got a role for a junior account planner. Our account planner left. She's got very big shoes to fill. And me being thinking, I'm so creative. I drew a shoe and I wrote my whole note and CV in the Shape of a shoe. And I sent it to this agency. And that agency was Lord Dentsu and Partners, and believe it or not, Adrienne Ho, who you've had on the show before, he also. It was the two of us, and we were these two young planners learning to do our thing from really great people. And that was my first foray into doing this thing called account planning and advertising. I thought I wanted to be in media because I was very fascinated with trying to help people think differently. And I thought that that's what media people did, because when you place the thing here and you're on your way to work and you see that billboard, you're starting to infiltrate somebody's mind. And having done a little bit more research, I realized that probably wasn't what media was, but was more around this planning notion that was very new in the United States at the time. Very new. So I. I took a lot of the research background that I had from retail marketing, applied that to this hunger for understanding the whys, and that led to figuring out that account planning might.
- [15:35]
Fergus O'Carroll
Be the thing that seemed to me to be the introduction to planning that a lot of people in the US had. And I don't think it was a good thing from a certain point of view. They came in as researchers rather than as planners. It feels like it came in with. It was a part of what's needed, but maybe it steered a sort of a younger market to come up with this sort of butchered sense of what planning is or what it originally wanted to be. Because I fell victim to that, too. When I started, I was like, what am I supposed to be? Am I supposed to be doing research? Or am I supposed to be bringing simple understanding? And they're very different things. Markus, overall, in what you need to deliver, you've had a fascinating journey. Tell us about how you got to where you are. Because you've come out of CSO roles, you've come out of roles in music you talked about earlier.
- [16:29]
Marcus Collins
Yeah, I started as an engineer. I studied materials engineering because I thought the polymers were super cool. Now, I wouldn't describe polymers as cool today, but I was interested. I just wasn't. Well, it was interesting. I just wasn't interested. So I finished my degree in engineering, which I didn't want to do, but I did anyway because my parents forced me to. And much their chagrin, I went right into the music industry. I was writing love songs. I wasn't terribly successful, but I was doing it. So I went back to school to get my mba because the music industry sucks. And I went to go work at Apple and then did digital strategy for Beyonce and then found myself into the agency world. And my first foray into advertising, I was an account guy. And I realized.
- [17:14]
Fergus O'Carroll
Me too.
- [17:15]
Marcus Collins
I realized that it wasn't for me at all. Like, I remember someone saying to me, why are you so happy? And I was like, because my client canceled the meeting. And they're like, that's not a good sign for an account person. My favorite part of the day was when a meeting got canceled.
- [17:28]
Fergus O'Carroll
It's like, no, dude, I don't have to write an action report now because it was canceled. Jesus.
- [17:33]
Marcus Collins
Exactly. So when I end up going. So my first, like, agency role was at Big Fuel, which got acquired by Pulisis, is a pure play social agency. And the next. The next gig was at Translation with Steve Stout, and I was building the social practice and lateralizing across all of our clients. And it sat in the strategy group. And while running Social at Translation, I had strategists report to me, as well as analytics copywriters, creative directors, and media folks. Like, I had, like, an agency inside the agency. And so I was sort of acting not just as a department head, as sort of an agency head. And I just leaned very, very close into the strategy side, to the planning side of the world. And to your point, Fergus, about having sort of research chops, but realizing that there's still a delta between doing great research and actually devising schemes that get us to get people to adopt behavior.
- [18:37]
Fergus O'Carroll
But what's interesting about you is that there are a lot of professors of marketing who take the Ritson perspective, which is it's all about the four P's, the five P's. But you've kind of zeroed in on a very specific space about the importance of culture and its fitness in the way people think, the decisions people make. So do you. And that sort of fits into your roles over time. So did you find yourself being just fascinated with one dimension of marketing, therefore a huge dimension of planning, or have you always had a very broad interest in marketing?
- [19:20]
Marcus Collins
Well, for me, my interest in marketing just came as a creative expression. I was a songwriter, and marketing felt like the most creative discipline in the world of business. And I was running my own company before going to business school, so marketing just felt like the. The right thing to do. And that word culture never really entered my lexicon until I started working with Steve Stout. And Stout would always talk about, you know, ambitious brands thriving in culture. And I'd be like, yeah, totally. Culture.
- [19:45]
Fergus O'Carroll
Culture.
- [19:46]
Marcus Collins
Culture, culture, culture. And as I started to invest myself more into the social sciences, I realized that I had no clue what culture was. And then I realized that most people didn't know what culture was either. So I said, I should probably understand what this thing is that I keep talking about. And as I started to invest myself into the social sciences, I got really, really curious, and the work got much, much better. So in my mind, I said, this is the biggest cheat code. If we invest ourselves in sort of the scholarship and not necessarily, like the academic work, but the understanding of the underlying physics of why a thing happens, then it empowers us to create interventions, manipulate it, change it, in an effort to get a certain outcome right. So while Mark Rinson would make look at, like, the four P's, those are just the levers that we pull in an effort to get people to adopt behavior, which I would think is the core function of marketing. So the scholarly side, the academic side is sort of tapping into the engineering. In me, it's understanding the mechanism that makes something work. Why do things work the way they work? And as a practitioner, I feel much more empowered, much more confident to actually to put things in the world that get things to move.
- [21:00]
Fergus O'Carroll
So, Suzanne, for you coming up and going through these various shops, because you have also been at great shops like Crispin, TBWA, you're a president and chief strategy officer at McCann World Group. Coming through all of that, what did you learn about yourself?
- [21:17]
Suzanne Powers
Yeah, I learned about my insatiable curiosity, if not even annoyance. Like, I was annoying to the teams that I worked with and to the organizations I was within because I was pushing new models. And I was never really satisfied with how everything was just kind of working, they said. I even had somebody say to me at one point, like, you know what? You just have to simmer down a little bit. We're fine. Like, everybody's happy here. We're fine. And I was just like, but we're not. Like, we're not making the work we could be making. We're not pitching the ways we could be pitching. And that sort of. Of restless nature in me, I didn't realize at the time was probably quite entrepreneurial. I really didn't realize that that was a thing that maybe I should take outside of the system, because I was so busy trying to change within the system. So all of those different roles led me to. And similar to what you're saying, Gareth, I had this niggle in the back of my mind for a long time about, there must be a better way to do things. There must be even better comp models. Right? Value comp models. And what do I do with that insatiable desire to change things? Well, that was really being an entrepreneur and figuring it out and creating it from scratch myself.
- [22:25]
Marcus Collins
I think the connection there to what Gareth was saying, I think is just so, so strong that by our very nature of being planners, of being strategists, we're constantly trying to optimize, which requires us looking at where are there deficiencies, where is there anemia, where are there greater opportunities? And we start to look at the perverse incentives that are at in place inside of an organization. You go, oh wow, we're actually built to sustain the orthodoxy, even though the orthodoxy isn't right. Right. There's a level of risk that the organization doesn't have an appetite to take because doing that is like pulling at the string that could unravel the entire, the entire quilt. But this is what we're meant to do, this is what we're built to do, is what we're trained to do, is to look at the road and go, why is this happening? What are all the sort of elements that are at play and what are the relationships between them and how might we optimize them? By moving something in a different place and seeing how it creates this sort of reverberating effect that has these different outcomes. And for us as strategists, as planners, our job is to sort of make predictions about the world based upon the world today and the relationship with the world in regards to the interventions that they may bump into.
- [23:43]
Fergus O'Carroll
We'll be right back. Want always on brand metrics that deliver value to stakeholders. This episode is brought to you by Tracksuit, a beautiful, affordable and always on brand tracking tool that helps consumer marketers and agencies answer the question. Is what we're doing working? A not so secret fact is that companies pay $100,000 or more for brand tracking, which is out of the question for many modern brand whose budgets are under pressure. Tracksuit provides enterprise level brand tracking without the big price tag. Their in house research experts do the heavy lifting using best in class practices to craft and launch your survey and get you results fast. Tracksuit is fast becoming the common language for marketers and agencies to measure and communicate the value of brand building. Check it out@gotracksuit.com that's gotracksuit. Now back to the show. Gareth, for you. It's tough to be an idealist in this business and I think for many of us who have gone through many shops there's gotta be something, a common thread within us that we have to discover and learn about ourselves before we ultimately find the right spot for us.
- [25:05]
Gareth Kay
Yeah, I think you're right. I think a lot of of what both Susanna and Marcus just talked about really resonated with me. I think there's that challenge we always face, which is as an industry, we're very good at telling our clients we need to be disruptive, they need to be distinctive, they need to go and do things differently. If someone like Bill Bernbach walked into an agency today, he would feel completely at home because not very much has changed. We're still trying to do the same things. We still basically have the same playbooks, even though the world has changed so dramatically outside. And I think it's really hard for strategists because it might be idealism. I don't think it is. I think it's a sense of always looking for a better way to go and do things, being relentlessly curious. And I think as well, we tend to be kind of generalists in the way we go around the world. Kind of curious generalists. And we have an industry, but like specialists, because that's what we charge for, that's what we think the kind of magic lies in. And yet we like to go and stick our little kind of like, you know, noses in and go, what if we thought about doing the work this way? What if we build in a certain way? What your point, Suzanne? What if we picked in a certain way? And I think that can be quite disruptive because I do feel that unfortunately a lot of the industry can be quite risk averse. We are trying to preserve our status quo because we don't actually know where to go. And I think unless we are prepared to experiment to try and find a better way of doing things, nothing's gonna change. And we're not gonna be able to offer and deliver on the advice we give our clients, which is the right advice, which is to look for a better way of doing things, to be true to yourself, to cut a new path. We just don't do that enough of our medicine.
- [26:56]
Fergus O'Carroll
So for you, Gareth, though, Cause you've been client side, you've tried the agency side, you've tried independent. And what are you trying to find.
- [27:06]
Gareth Kay
The real problem to solve? I think most of the time it's like, what's really. How can we really help create value for a business to go and drive it forward? And that's kind of the commercial value, I think. So Marcus would be much better on this than I would. But the kind of cultural value that you're kind of creating around a business, that's what I look for is what's the real problem they're going to solve. And I think far too often we end up looking at advertising sized holes, then we look at marketing holes. And the reality is, I think to be successful you've got to be prepared to go and bust silos and look at brands and businesses as these kind of holistic, interconnected things. And the thinking has to be able to go and work across the whole of that surface area.
- [27:52]
Fergus O'Carroll
Because when I look at a guy like you, right, who as I was coming up, you were coming up, you have been a great inspiration. As I mentioned earlier, if a guy like you who can't be happy within the agency world, who can, man, I mean, you were defining what it should be and yet you chose, I don't know what the circumstances were, but you jumped out. Is it irreparably broken?
- [28:20]
Gareth Kay
Look, heck, I don't think it is irreparably broken. I think it is a brilliant place to actually learn about business, to learn a bit about culture, to learn about people and what makes them tick, to learn about creativity. I just got to a series of decisions where I decided I wanted to apply what interested me in a slightly different way. But I would never have got there without that. 20 years of working in agencies and doing what is still work I still really believe in and I think is really valuable. I just felt there was a bigger stage that we could play on. But I couldn't have got there without doing that first 20 years. So yes, the model is really challenged at the moment, the economic model is challenged, but there's still amazing people inside agencies. I think it's a case of you graduate, as in all things in life, you just go and find what you in particular are passionate about, where you want to focus. So I think you can be satisfied in an agency. I just got to the point where I needed something new, probably because most of us were quite restless and you're just looking for.
- [29:33]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah, maybe that, maybe that's what it is.
- [29:36]
Marcus Collins
That resonates with me. That definitely resonates with me. I've always found myself gravitating towards the ambiguity in an organization. Like I go, no one's paying attention to this, but this is really interesting. We should be looking at this. But it's like, well, we're not built to sort of scale that. And by the way, everyone we've hired in the building isn't meant to do that they don't have the skill set nor the capacity or the interest or curiosity to do that. And I go, well, I want to do it, so I'm going to do that with my job. And in doing, I feel like everywhere I've worked, it's always been that. I've always gone to the ambiguity, the ambiguous, the gray stuff, the gray area. But that's where the interesting things reside. As planners, we know this. Whatever is very clear, black or white. You go, that's already, people have already tried that, that, that, that road. We've seen that before. It's obvious. It's the gray, the gray area where the interesting things reside. And I just found myself wanting to do more of that than the black and white. So leaving the agency world, I mean, I still, to Gareth's point, I still use all of those skills 100%. I rely on them so much and I'm so grateful that I've had so much time to develop them and sharpen them. But it's just the problems that I'm solving, they're not bound by advertising. And in many ways, the outcome isn't a 30 second spot or some out of home or art and copy, like sometimes none of that, none of that exists. It's a different sort of solution. And if an organization isn't designed to build that, to create that, then that's not what they're going to do. And they're always going to lean towards where they have a core competence, where they have a business model that benefits from it, and where the people in the building are most likely going to want to create something. Something. I've heard this so many times before, particularly in the strategy arm of an organization, to say, look, we're not consultants. We don't want to be like Bain or Accenture, or we don't want to be that. We want to create things. And I go, well, okay, now you've just totally identified the kind of business you're in. You're in the business of creating things, not in the business of solving problems. Because it's not about the label you affix to it. It's what are we here to actually do and where do we find the solutions. To me, it's not in the black and white, it's all in the gray.
- [31:58]
Gareth Kay
Yeah.
- [31:59]
Fergus O'Carroll
So Suzanne, for you is part of the advice for people who are listening to think about agencies as just part of their journey that you're really not about. I want to have a career at freaking McCann, but I'm serving an interest. I have in the moment while I'm at McCann, but it's just part of my journey.
- [32:23]
Suzanne Powers
Yeah, I mean, I never. I don't think I started my career thinking, and eventually one day I'll have my own business, so I have to add this and that to the repertoire. But I do think one should look at every single opportunity in a way to stretch themselves, make themselves uncomfortable, and to learn and to add to that repertoire. So what I would say is, you know, and I was not that person who, again, had this end goal. I just kept seizing every opportunity that came my way, and I kept diving, diving into it. And I think, similar to what Marcus is saying, the gray areas were always more interesting to me, you know, like, how do you apply strategy to organizational design? How do you apply strategy to talent management? All those different pieces are not things that traditionally strategists do, but they maximize your learning and they stretch your strategic acumen in such different ways. So therefore, then, oh, voila, you start a business, and you suddenly have a whole different set of expertise that you can apply to that. So advice to anybody in any of these jobs is use every single moment to just learn and grow. And the more uncomfortable you feel, that's probably the bigger stretch. And I just would never shy away from that.
- [33:30]
Gareth Kay
You know, Suzanne, I was going to ask you, I mean, Marcus and I have probably spent most of our careers in, I guess, what you call kind of creative independence, or want a better phrase? And obviously, you've had this experience of working at this, certainly from the outside, what looks like an incredible place like McCann World Group, where they have so many different specialties, so many skill sets there. What was the journey like for you when you got there, suddenly had all these new toys that you could then use as part of your toolbox. And what were the frustrations that perhaps made you go even of all these tools? Maybe I want to go and do something on my own, or there has to be a better way.
- [34:06]
Suzanne Powers
Yeah, I think I joined and the agency was. Or the agencies within World Group were at a point where they needed some. Let's call it modernization, but also just a boost of confidence. You know, there was a lack of creativity in the organization, of no fault of anybody there, because there's brilliant people all over the world. It was. And I think, Marcus, you could probably write a whole book on this. The culture of an organization does drive the creative output incredibly. And this was a company that, you know, probably wasn't as confident about its abilities and maybe had lost track a little bit of what it was making. So, yes, Garetha had all these toys, but the toys were probably not in the right positions. So there was a lot of reshuffling. There was a lot of just confidence giving, like, we can do this. Let's go do this. And then one of the biggest things that I think made a change was just modeling behavior from the top. You know, I had a creative partner. We all know who he is, Rob Reilly. He's great, you know, and we make each other better. And we had a CEO who said, creativity is the most important thing we do across world group. There you go. That's like sort of on a silver platter. Okay. It's time to take all these toys and all of these different specialisms and apply them towards that. And, you know, so that created the confidence, it created the Runway. And then you add to that process, people, you know, all the sort of things around product excellence, and it's off to the race as you go. But it was. It's. It's. It's a fantastic chapter of my career. And I learned so much from different ways to create, but also just how to. To operate in something that's 15,000 people in 100 countries.
- [35:43]
Fergus O'Carroll
You guys have all left some of the most prestigious agencies in the world. Why did they allow that to happen?
- [35:53]
Marcus Collins
I think it's a problem with different modalities, and therefore there are different reasons that drive this. In some cases, people want more financial opportunities. Some cases, people want to solve different problems. Some cases, people want different creative outlets. Like, if you asked me two years ago, I thought I was going to retire at Wyden Kennedy, like, I would be totally fine. Like, I. Like I was. I felt like I was being creatively challenged from. As a leader, I was being challenged. Like, you know, I was being. I was being intrinsically rewarded. But when I wrote the book and I saw the impact that the book was having outside of, like, the way Gareth put the confines of an agency, I was like, oh, man, I just can scale my impact. I could just do more things. And then you sort of, like, just sort of a bit clairvoyant there. I'm actually writing my second book, and my second book is all about organizational culture. Two years ago, there's no way I would even thought about that being a thing. But having the opportunity to go work with other companies not as part of an agency, but just as Marcus applying my scholarship to their work, I see new problems that my years of experience, my years of scholarship can help solve. That's awesome for me to expect Wynne Kennedy or translation, who I deeply love. For me to expect them to satiate that part of my professional curiosity, that's just, it's not realistic.
- [37:27]
Gareth Kay
Gareth, I agree with everything Marcus said.
- [37:29]
Fergus O'Carroll
I think you came out of Goodby and people were like, jesus, why would Gareth leave Goodbye? At what seemed like the best part post John Steele, the best part of the agency's history.
- [37:42]
Gareth Kay
Yeah, it was an amazing place to be. Again, it came down to, I think, always that kind of relentless urge to find a better way to do something. I think it was just something where I had to go and scratch an itch to go and, and try something different. And that's why I always said to Rich and Jeff when I left was, I'm not going to go and do another ad agency. I'm going to try and do something different. It's because of you guys I'm doing this. And in many ways they take, you know, they get over the grumpiness of you leaving and they go, actually, you know what, that's a, it's a great legacy to have. But I do feel one of the talent things we have to accept is there's a generational thing going on here which is the way people nowadays relate to their time at work is just very, very different to perhaps it was when we entered the industry. And people aren't looking for that singular career, let alone singular employer for life. They're looking to build these portfolios of experiences and they don't feel beholden to any one company or any one industry. And I think we have to get better at building the way we attract, manage talent and get our own fair share of talent that can lean into that and actually accept that people may be, don't want to be employed nine to five, five days a week by one employer. Maybe it's about thinking about how do we get a bit of time with the best people each week. I look at some of the best folks who we had at Goodbye and some of the most interesting people we had at Goodby came from the worlds of places like standup comedy. So I had a bunch of people that came from this comedy troupe called Killing My Lobster and we got them to join the agency as writers. I think nowadays getting them to make that jump where they had a full time job be really difficult. But I think thinking about where you could have got some of their time and therefore able to attract more people like them into the industry would only be a good thing. I've just got to let go of the sense of ownership that we have of talent nowadays and think about how can we attract some of their time and get the most out of some of these people and actually raise the diversity in the most broad sense of the types of folks coming into the agency world? I think that's just a different type of world I think we're in nowadays.
- [39:55]
Marcus Collins
Amen.
- [39:56]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah. I remember coming up, I remember having various partners, either a creative partner or strategy partner, account partner, where things were just firing on all cylinders. It was like, so rewarding at that moment. And then that person leaves and you're like, feel completely deflated. And I see when people like.
- [40:24]
Marcus Collins
The.
- [40:24]
Fergus O'Carroll
Crew behind Uncommon, the crew behind the intangibles, and I always kind of think, well, did they just find their person?
- [40:35]
Gareth Kay
Yes, is your honest answer. Yes, you do. And it's a function of the time in the industry and trying as much as possible to mix with people outside your own company and be connected to that broader ecosystem of people. I mean, Suzanne and I have never had the chance to work together, but I can, like, know her. A note of her thinking because of having the chance to be on award shows or inside the kind of account planning group. You know, Marcus put a book out. I kind of feel, even though it's the first time I met him, I know him a little bit through that book. But I think being just prepared to build that network of folks that, you know, influence you, you spend time with. There was a magic piece of the Internet, I think something like some old man. It was a magic piece of the Internet 10, 15 years ago, when the blogosphere and the planosphere first emerged, and you're having conversations with people all around the world, you would not have been able to have. And I think that's sadly winnowed away a little bit. But it's about finding your people. And I think, you know, if you put yourself out there, you will find the people you want to spend time working with.
- [41:41]
Fergus O'Carroll
Because great work comes from a small amount of people. I mean, I don't care which agency you're in, you can generally walk down the halls and pick the three people who are making the most great work for that shop. So this is really about people finding the right people, Marcus. When they're starting to think about something, it means it's smart to is part of the human desire to find that great partner in business as it is a partner in life. And does that end up being what ends up being the solution is that you find that right coupling.
- [42:19]
Marcus Collins
We are social animals by nature, after all, so we do what we can to crash into each other. And we typically are attracted to certain kinds of people in moments in time, in context. You know, I think about some of my favorite partnerships that I've had over the years. In that moment in time. It was perfect. If I work with them today, it might not be the same, because I don't think the same. I see the world differently, and I love them and think about them so fondly. But that moment was that moment. And I think that when we find those people, we sort of. We create these. These special sort of memory tags that we go back to and go, oh, man, just finally think about it. Sometimes, you know, we. We sort of be nostalgic about being in the trenches and those late nights working together, but it's those people that makes that work, as meaningful as it is.
- [43:11]
Suzanne Powers
You know, One little thing I just want to add to that is having worked with some of the same people over the years, but in very different conditions, that's a. It's a huge unlock for me. And there are conditions that we can set up if we really put our minds to it, so that, again, those great people working together, they just flourish. And there's other conditions that get in the way with that. So obviously, Marcus, you're going to totally analyze that in your new book, I'm sure, but there, it's a. It's a truth. And working as hard on those conditions as making sure the right people are together I think is a very important piece of this puzzle.
- [43:48]
Marcus Collins
Suzanne, you are just basically taking everything in the book right now. It's so right. It's so true.
- [43:54]
Fergus O'Carroll
Is it the same on the client side? I mean, because you've got a. You can have a great team member on the agency side or whichever. Whatever your operation might be, but if you don't have that great client side person, I mean, it's all for nothing.
- [44:06]
Gareth Kay
That I was having a chat with Jeff Cottrell, the ex CMO at Converse, who's now at topgolf, and Jeff's brilliant. We were chatting the other day. He just goes, look, I mean, the reality is you're going to get the knock on the door in a couple of years, which is going to be that your time's up, time for you going to leave the company, whether you're pushing the boundaries or whether you're just maintaining the status quo. So why don't you spend those two years going, what if spend the time thinking big, trying to do something different, the bell's going to ring at the same time, pretty much by the law of averages on your tenure there. So why not make the most of that short time you have there? I just thought that was just such a wonderful way to think about ambition. And it's been really interesting in starting the intangibles because about half our partners actually come from the client side. They are CMOs, and they come because they have similar ambitions around getting marketing back on the front foot, having an agenda in the boardroom, which is around actually. We are able to drive so much value for a business, but just being able to be confident again and to actually, you know, just expand their remits beyond perhaps how they're perceived as being basically the communications person inside the organization. I think marketing's done a pretty awful job at marketing itself in some client organizations.
- [45:28]
Marcus Collins
What I think is so cool about all of this is that it really is magical. It's like it's alchemy. Think about every team, every musical band. All the right people had to be in all the right places and at the right time. I mean, it is very, very, very special. It's magical in nature. You can have the right players on instruments with the wrong producer and get a bad outcome. You can have the right five guys on the court or girls on the court and bad front office, and it just falls apart. You can have the best creatives with the best strategist with the wrong client, it just falls apart. And you need all the right pieces. And the job, I would say, of leadership is really about facilitating the conditions of the environment such that we increase the likelihood of being the best versions of ourselves. And sometimes that means that right now, this isn't where I could be the best version of me. So I gotta go find another environment where I can grow to the height of my. Of my potential. In some cases, they're people who are just. They're pillars. They're cornerstones of their organization. Like, I couldn't imagine Wyden Kennedy without Neil Arthur or without Carl Lieberman. Like, those guys are the guys. I couldn't imagine a translation without a Chaucer Barnes. Like, that doesn't make any sense to me at all. Those people are going to be the foundation in which those organizations sustain, but they'll be players that come and go along those years. And I think the point that I think is worth underscoring is that how do you maximize the time that they're there? Not how do I put handcuffs on to keep them longer, but how do I maximize the time that we're there? Get as many rings as possible. Get as many hit records. As possible in the moment that we have them, and then be thankful for the time we had together.
- [47:21]
Fergus O'Carroll
Suzanne, thinking about the journey that you've taken, any regrets at the different stages of those of that journey that people could learn from that, you can kind of go, just don't do that, or avoid this. Anything that you could share, I'm going to ask each of you.
- [47:40]
Suzanne Powers
Oh, my goodness. There's probably quite a few of those. I'm the eternal, sometimes irrepressible optimist, so it's hard for me to think that way, but I'm going to now. You know, probably twice there's two companies that I've spent 10 years in, and that was probably a couple years too long in both cases. And you start to feel these moments of, I'm just going to say fracture, because I don't know the right word, but it's like you start to sort of say, well, I'm over here working for this company and leading this company that I think is this way. And the behavior of the company starts to go a different way for many reasons, right? Maybe that's client change, maybe it's economic crisis, whatever it is. But there's moments when, if you're not paying attention, those things start to happen. They start to add up. So I think my thing would be just read the signs a little bit more loudly and listen to yourself a little bit more, because you might save a couple years or be ready to do something new that you didn't realize you were ready for. I mean, my big thing is I don't think I had a lack of capabilities along the way. I think I had a lack of kind of conviction and confidence to do my own something, right? So it's like, tell us about that. Save some time, you know.
- [48:55]
Fergus O'Carroll
Well, tell us about that confidence issue.
- [48:58]
Suzanne Powers
You know, I think you add to your repertoire, as I was saying before, you add specific skills, et cetera, but you don't necessarily, in our industry, add confidence. You're constantly being questioned. You're pitching and losing. Maybe, you know, somebody cracks something differently and you kind of go, oof. I wish I would have thought of that. We don't necessarily feed confidence to individuals. We can feed confidence to organizations because we can show them how to go forward. But I would say just as an individual, and this is me being incredibly, you know, vulnerable as I say this, I personally didn't have the confidence to go do my own thing. I was looking for a partner to do it with me. I was like, come on, check, Porter, do this thing with Me, Come on, Rob, do this thing with me. Like always, right? And they were like, that sounds really interesting, but I don't want to do that. So it took me a while and it took me some no's to actually realize I can do this. Like, I can do this without that sort of, you know, creative guru next to me. And that's going to be okay.
- [49:58]
Fergus O'Carroll
And then, and then at that point where you make that decision, when you have the confidence to make it, or you at least make it as confidently as you can, what leads to that? Is it, is it, is it like I'm just done or is that I'm inspired?
- [50:13]
Suzanne Powers
For you both, I think there's always a shadow to the light, right? So there was this. It's time. And I could see all of the signs hitting me in terms of opportunities, and a lot of us have talked about this already, which is applying the things that you've done far outside of things you would ever get to touch within your agency world is so enticing. And that becomes louder and louder and louder. And then the shadow of that is things start to feel less and less like it's your jam anymore. And you just kind of got to weigh those things and it's. It's time. It's just time.
- [50:47]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah. When it, when it, when it happened to me, I was working at, at an agency and I somehow got this freelance gig and that freelance gig turned into like a three year client. And so that freelance gig and the way it went for me, I felt that I was getting so fulfilled through this project and it was working out so well, like nothing was working out at the agency that I was working with. I was like, I'm out of here, man. And I could see, I could see the Runway ahead. The short to midterm looked pretty damn good, but if I did not have something to jump out to, I don't know anybody would ever jump out without having something to jump out to, but it kind of helps to have that. So, Marcus, how about for you, in terms of anything you'd regret that people might learn a lesson from?
- [51:42]
Marcus Collins
I had something in mind, but Suzanne just kind, kind of shook me a little bit there because I think that for a long time I felt like I was always looking for people's approval and that I felt like my manager was going to champion for me that if I just do the work, you put my head down, someone's going to say, you're doing a great job, Marcus, and they're going to give me my comeuppance. And do all the things that I hope that they would do that never really happened. It was always sort of me saying, kind of getting tired, getting fed up, and then pushing things forward. I wasn't thinking that earlier, but that's kind of what comes to mind. But my first thought when you asked the question was, I wish I would have fired people faster. And that sounds like a terrible thing to say. But what I realized, especially in the work that I'm doing now on the second project, is that you've got to have people who are ideologically aligned if you want to. To get to the promised land. It's like the shared cognitions are sort of the biggest part of all of it, that we have a shared assumption of the world, different perspectives of that assumption, but at least a shared assumption of the world that helps us work in such a way that we collectively get to shared outcomes. And there have been times that I've joined an organization and I looked at the roster and go, oh, man, got some good people there, there. They're talented, but they are not a good fit for what we're trying to do. And I just sort of try to. Let me just help. I'll try to make it happen. I'll try and I'll try. I'll try and, you know, try to convert. The truth of the matter is that when I realized they weren't going to convert, I should have popped them then. And not. Not to say they're bad people. They just weren't the right people for the environment I was trying to curate.
- [53:26]
Fergus O'Carroll
And so they delayed the achievement of that ultimate goal.
- [53:30]
Marcus Collins
You. Exactly. They just created so many. So many stumbling blocks that made it so difficult for us to get to where I wanted to get to. And if I look back with any real honesty, I would say, you know, they kept us from really fulfilling our potential. And I think that's a. That is a disservice not only to myself, but everyone on the team that put their trust in me to sort of lead us to the promised land.
- [53:52]
Fergus O'Carroll
Before we go to Gareth, I wanted to share something from my career. One of the things I regret not having was I never felt I had a really good strategic lead. And so for me, I would look out at the guys like Gareth and look out at Rob and look at John Steele and other people who are out there preaching a way to do this in a way that I was so drawn to. But then I would turn internally, and I wasn't feeling I was getting that from the person who was my boss. Now I'M not saying that I wasn't without flaws, because I have my flaws. I'm not saying I was wrong, but I wasn't getting what I wanted there. So I was sort of preaching the outside to the inside, and the inside didn't want to hear the outside. It wanted me to be a certain type of planner who worked against these certain types of client goals. And so they wanted to mold me to be the way that they wanted to be, but I wanted to be like those other guys.
- [54:58]
Marcus Collins
So you should have bounced. You should have bounced.
- [55:00]
Fergus O'Carroll
I should have bounced around, and I did eventually bounce, but I always struggled because I never got to work with a guy like Agarith. I never got to work with. I worked with some good people, don't get me wrong, but I never felt like, holy fuck, I am in the room and this person can shape and help me grow. I always felt I was fighting uphill battles rather than being part of the battle team and learning every step of the way. So that was a regret for me because I was espousing something that wasn't of the culture of the agency, and the agency didn't care for it, and that was because the agency was not the right type of agency for me.
- [55:41]
Suzanne Powers
I think you've hit on something that's super important for anybody who's in this career path. Go to work with the people you want to learn from, from. They either made something that blows your mind and you've got to figure out how they made that, or there's something philosophical that you're aligned with. But take. I took every job because I wanted to work with the people in those places. And it's. It. It's a. It's a big thing. Rather than taking a job for other reasons, because there are many other reasons to take a job.
- [56:11]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah.
- [56:12]
Marcus Collins
I went to work with Stout five years before I started working with him. I was like that guy that.
- [56:17]
Gareth Kay
That.
- [56:17]
Marcus Collins
I want to do that at some point. That's what I want to do.
- [56:21]
Fergus O'Carroll
Gareth, how about you? How about. What's your reaction to.
- [56:24]
Gareth Kay
To our diatribes that rang so, so true? I think exposing yourself to lots of different types of strategists in your career, particularly early on, is really, really important. Not getting blinded by the agency or blinded by the brand you might be working on, but working out who you'll be working with. And how is that going to be additive to your learning so far? Because that old Jeremy Bullmore saying around, you know, brands are built how birds build their nests. They're kind of built upon the scraps and straws they chance upon. And I think there is no one way of doing planning or strategy. There's lots of different ways. There is no right way to do it. There are interesting ways to do it. And the more likely way to build your ability to be an interesting additive strategist to an agency, to a business, to your own personal growth is through just working with a diverse group of people on different problems. I think going through that journey is so rewarding, it's so valuable. It was advice I got very early in my career from Lawrence Green in London, and it made a massive difference to who I am, and probably, frankly, any good I am is down to that advice. So I just encourage people to have a really broad range of experiences and never forget that it's more important to be interesting than it is to be right. I think far too often we're told that planning is, you know, the department of being right. It's about effectiveness. Yes, that is important. But the way you get to effectiveness is through being interesting. And I think the more you can do to boost the likelihood of you being interesting as a planner is so critical, particularly in a world where we're dominated day to day by this thing called the playbook. And are you following the playbook? It's a terrible concept or a thing like AI, which is going to be really good at doing the basic stuff. The magic is going to come from just being able to connect these random things together in new ways, and that's where your value's gonna come from. So I just urge you to do all you can to choose a path of interesting as much as you can do.
- [58:38]
Fergus O'Carroll
Last question is. For me, I found that this show has become sort of the. When I've peeled back the layers of what I loved the most about planning, I discovered that it was sort of the diagnostic phase. It was the interviewing stakeholders. It was sort of prowling around, it was discovering things, it was sort of getting underneath things, Right? And ironically, that's what this show is. In other words, I've peeled away all of the shit I never wanted to do or never enjoyed doing. And I've come down to just the core of it, the simplicity of doing what we're doing here. And I find that to be the most rewarding part of my career to date. And so my questions for you guys as we wrap up here is, have you sort of figured that out, Markus, that through your career that you've now discovered the essence of what you love, the component part, and you're now all in on the component.
- [59:47]
Marcus Collins
Oh, absolutely. I mean, and my. What gets me excited every day is helping people be the best version of themselves. And I get to do that. I get to do that in classrooms and do that on stages. I get to do that through pros. I get to do that in boardrooms. Like, I get to do that thing. I love the creative process. I love seeing the outcome, but I don't need to make it. I mean, when I think about myself in an agency, the thing I get most excited about is when we crack the brief. I'm like, BET did it. And all the people who were. Who were involved in making that happen, people were operating at their highest. Pedestrians, melody possible. Even the creatives that didn't make the brief were a part of that process. And we all were sort of just firing in all cylinders. That's the thing I get excited about. That's the thing. I mean, if I go back to, like, my days in music, like, it wasn't the mixing and mastering process, yuck. I didn't like that at all. Right. But I like the writing of the song, kind of figuring out the drum patterns, the chord changes, laying down the vocals, getting the harmonies just right. Like, that's what gets me excited. And I get to do that every single day. I think that if I were at an agency, that would be in Cumber with all the other things to your point, Fergus, that I don't necessarily want to do. So I'm grateful for the agency world allowing me to get to this opportunity, but I'm glad to be out of it.
- [61:02]
Gareth Kay
I say there's ever been, I don't think, a better, more interesting time to be a strategist, it just might be that it's even more interesting outside the world of advertising. As much as I love that industry and I learned a lot and I would go and do it all over again, there's so much interesting stuff that strategists are doing outside the industry. I think, Fergus, hats off to you for kind of having these episodes around this. I think it's just a really exciting time to kind of just do something new and different and feel really fulfilled and have. To your point, Marcus, real impact.
- [61:37]
Marcus Collins
And we're still A to Z adjacent. Like, I don't feel like I'm totally divorced from it. I don't. I don't work for an agency, but I still feel like I'm contributing to the work those agencies ultimately go out and create. So I feel sort of one foot in. One foot out.
- [61:52]
Gareth Kay
Yeah, totally.
- [61:53]
Marcus Collins
Yeah.
- [61:53]
Fergus O'Carroll
It is Marcus Collins, marketing professor, author, columnist, former chief strategy officer, Wynne and Kennedy in translation. His book is for the Culture. When's the next one come out?
- [62:06]
Marcus Collins
Not until 2026. So I got some time. Suzanne basically disorientated, right?
- [62:13]
Fergus O'Carroll
It is also Suzanne Powers as founder and CEO at Powers Creativity. She's formerly president and Chief Strategy Officer, McCann World Group out of New York. She's also a Crispin at twa. And Gareth Kay is a partner at the Intangibles, which is a relatively new group of impressive talent. He's formerly chief strategy officer at Goodby, CMO at Twil and founder at Chapter. Thank you three. I know I've gone over my allotted time here, but it was a real privilege to have you on. Thank you for being being here.
- [62:46]
Marcus Collins
It's a privilege myself.
- [62:47]
Gareth Kay
Thank you. Thanks for all you do. Thank you.
- [62:50]
Suzanne Powers
Thank you.
- [62:50]
Fergus O'Carroll
And we will see everyone on the next episode.