Sweathead With Mark Pollard

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 Constellation: 2023 Trends Forecast. They include New Americana, Gen-less, and Revenge Living. You can find Olayinka Ajibola here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olayinkaajibola/ Hayley Grant is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hayleykgrant/ ** Join a live Meta Trend workshop with Reddit's Matt Klein on Feb 3 here:   http://bit.ly/3XOjJ7f Next strategy training: Lucky Generals Cofounder Andy Nairn teaches a masterclass (Feb 23) The Sweathead Strategy Accelerator (March) Details: http://www.sweathead.com. ** Sign up to our weekly strategy newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dscjW5 ** Sweathead is a support group for strategists

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. They include Coping Through Creativity, The Power Of The Past, and Recover In Reconnection. You can find Will and his deck about these trends here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-poskett-%F0%9F%94%A5-62942716/ ** Join a live Meta Trend workshop with Reddit's Matt Klein on Feb 3 here: http://bit.ly/3XOjJ7f Next strategy training: Lucky Generals Cofounder Andy Nairn teaches a masterclass (Feb 23) The Sweathead Strategy Accelerator (March) Details: http://www.sweathead.com. ** Sign up to our weekly strategy newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dscjW5 ** Sweathead is a support group for strategists and account planners

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 strategy training: Lucky Generals Cofounder Andy Nairn teaches a masterclass on planning superpowers (Feb 23) The Sweathead Strategy Accelerator (March) Details: http://www.sweathead.com. ** Sign up to our weekly strategy newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dscjW5 ** Sweathead is a support group for strategists and account planners around the world. We host conferences, online courses, live events, and podcasts. We also train companies. Find out about our company training here: https://sweathead.com/teams/

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. He always struck me as a very intentional decision-maker so,now that he's running things, I wanted to find out how intentional he was, how set on becoming an advertising agency CEO he'd been when we worked together, and what he's learned along the way. I think this is the first interview I've recorded face-to-face for Sweathead. Out of 400+.  We recorded this in Sydney at the M&C Saatchi offices. You can find Justin there most days of the week and also here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinalexandergraham/ ** Sweathead celebrates its fifth anniversary on January 20, 2023 with a live event "The Sweathead Get

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 disciplined brand building for McDonald's in the UK. Tass shares the “Famous Orders” campaign with us. It's a refreshing discussion that will help you understand how each agency approaches their work for McDonald's, attitudes towards celebrity, making a global brand work locally, and more. Big thanks to Michael for suggesting the chat. Links below: Tom: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-sussman-59892719/ Tass: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tass-tsitsopoulos-ba44551/ Michael: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-kates-484b4843/ ** Sweathead celebrates its fifth anniversary on January 20, 2023 with a live event "The Sweathead Get-Ahe

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 Rais–CSO MENAT, Publicis Groupe One of the world’s most awarded strategists 4. Ambika Pai–CSO, Mekanism Former Partner at Wolf & Wilhelmine and Adjunct Professor at Parsons 5. Aisha Hakim–ACD, 72andSunny Art director published in Sweeney’s…tasty 6. Rodrigo Maroni–CSO, Wunderman Thompson Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes and various Best Agency Awards Sign up to our weekly strategy newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dscjW5 ** In this episode I run through our plans for the year, 7 strategist affirmations you can use to talk back to your brain, and a list of first principles I'd encourage you to keep in mind as you do

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 challenging mental health situations. Yet we rarely hear real talk about it. And this is why I wanted to speak with James.  We discuss depression, hospitalization, social anxiety, ADHD, agoraphobia, and how he went through this with his family–then Twitter–watching on. If you're going through tough times, please reach out to a specialist for help. Pandemics, war, recessions, and broken families are leading to a lot of challenges out there. Seek help if you need it. You can find Thom here: https://twitter.com/ThomJames **

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. You can find Santi here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spochat/ **

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 Strategy and Planning at SAGE. He's also Founder of Vizer Consulting and the Co-Chair of the IPA Share of Search ThinkTank. In the past, he's worked at Manning Gottlieb OMD, Vizeum, and MEC. He's worked on two of the most successful smoking cessation campaigns in the world (Quit Kit and Stoptober for the UK's NHS) as well as IKEA's "The Wonderful Everyday". He created the "Hankins Hexagon"–a new model of the path to purchase, and "digital availability"–an addition to the availability canon. He also works with JP Castlin writing about e-commerce, modern retail and corporate strategy implications. You can find James here:

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.  He takes pride in quite literally ‘breaking into’ strategy as a late bloomer but brings along his background in Talent and Culture from Apple and freelance photography.  Aside from fully believing “New York or nowhere,” Sean is a proud Korean-American committed to being a megaphone for the marginalized.  He’s spoken at events hosted by the likes of the 4As, AIA, and 3AF, crafted thought leadership picked up by Adweek, and is the the curator of an industry-wide cultural moments calendar. You can find Sean here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanrichardchoi/ **

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. And this is one of them. In this interview, we discuss the ingredients that go into an agency being able to do award-winning work. We discuss the obvious stuff (like working with exceptional people) as well as the stuff that's only obvious when you no longer have it (like agency leadership that will fight for your ideas). We also discuss a campaign his team and client have been winning awards for lately: “James Jefferson: A Fraudster, Created by a Bank, to Reduce Financial Fraud” for Emirates NBD. You can find Tahaab here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahaab/ **

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 announcing tens of events and masterclasses in 2023 soon. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend and give it a kind review. **

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 give it a kind review. **

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 the brand. However, where comms planning really comes to life is when the campaign idea and how the brand turn up rub off on each other, channeling the same theme. For instance, if a brand wants to talk about intimacy, it might choose places that desperately need it or that have a lot of it. This can make the campaign more effective. In this episode, Eden takes us through the handful of key decisions that led to this effective campaign. The decisions each pushed back on the original brief. They challenged the original audience focus, the message, and the channels the client expected to use. You can find Eden here: htt

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 mention for Nonprofit Strategy at the 2022 Jay Chiat Awards.  In this episode of Sweathead, we discuss how it came to be–from why the campaign was needed to how the team arrived at their approach as well as the involvement of their clients. You can see the campaign here: https://borislhensonfoundation.org/unspoken/ Amina Colter Jones (SVP, Health): https://www.linkedin.com/in/amina-colter-jones-94545512/ Dinah Douglas (Senior Strategist): https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinahdouglas/ Laura Goldsmith (Head of Strategy, LA): https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauraseidengoldsmith/ **

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 third set of words showing the real reason someone is traveling, such as "Because the weather sucks" and "Remission". The campaign was made by the profuse Uncommon Creative Studio with MG OMD handling media. It's one of those campaign that has excited agency folk with industry writer Tim Nudd declaring "British Airways' New Ads Will Make You Love Copywriting Again". However, the campaign has also come in for criticism from the marketing effectiveness community and some experienced marketers. I wanted to use the campaign as a way to bring both sides of the house together to discuss why some people love this work and

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 self-harm.  I recently heard of research that suggests that if you give people a trigger warning they're more likely to feel triggered but I don't know what to do with this research as I publish this episode. Mental health crises can hit any of us at any time. In fact, a real crisis will hit most of us directly or through people we know at some point in our lives. Unfortunately, when we are hit directly, we withdraw, we isolate, and we struggle to reach out for help. If this describes you now then you will hopefully benefit from John's story. Please reach out for help. Millions of other people are confronting s

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 science in the campaign, especially the distinctive brand assets it deploys, and - How Tourism Australia selects its agency partners. You can find the campaign “Come and Say G’Day” here: https://www.tourism.australia.com/en/resources/campaign-resources/come-and-say-gday.html You can find Susan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susancoghill **

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 showing people that hotel rooms can be used in many more ways than just for couples romances or for on-the-road business trips.  You can find Mayur here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayurhola/ ** The Sweathead Do-Together will take you through ten hours of strategy conference October 18-20, 2022. The Sweathead Strategy Accelerator is 4 weeks of lively strategy training and starts Oct 25, 2022. Find out more at http://www.sweathead.com. **

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 the messaging. You can find Tim here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timgingrich/ ** The Sweathead Do-Together will take you through ten hours of strategy conference October 18-20, 2022. The Sweathead Strategy Accelerator is 4 weeks of lively strategy training and starts Oct 25, 2022. Find out more at http://www.sweathead.com. **