Advertise on podcast: Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising

If AI can produce the consensus view in seconds, your point of view is the job. That’s why I think this episode of Inspiring Futures with Mike Mallazzo, General Manager at Alephic, is worth your time. Mike went from investigative journalism into tech, spending time at LinkedIn, Dynamic Yield, and PayPal’s agentic commerce team, and he has a sharp, often contrarian take on what brands need to do now that AI agents sit between them and their customers.  Why it’s worth a listen:  Brands now have two audiences. Mike argues that marketing leaders have to decide how much of their job is marketing to people and how much is marketing to agents. He calls it the biggest platform shift since social. A POV is your protection. LLMs drift toward consensus. Mike's test: if you never break the rules or hold a contrarian opinion, you’re easy for AI to replace. Generic insight is dead. AI will always beat people at “view from nowhere” summaries. What’s left for us is original reporting, lived experience, and taste. Strategy’s roots still apply. We get into how 1960s account planning thinking is shaping frameworks for marketing to agents, and why journalists’ instinct to find the real truth makes for great strategy. Unwritten brand knowledge meets AI. What happens to brand judgment when agents start making decisions that used to happen in meetings?  These are also the questions at the heart of BRXND, the AI and marketing conference Alephic is involved in, in New York this November.https://www.brxnd.ai/

The advertising agency business has changed dramatically. Agencies once relied on their reputations, relationships, and a fairly steady stream of pitch opportunities to grow. The phone rang, you got invited to pitch, and if you were good enough, you won the business. That world is disappearing. Today, agencies have to work much harder to find new clients, build relationships, and create opportunities, often long before there's a brief or even a budget. And that's a problem because most agency leaders have spent their careers learning how to make great work and win pitches, not how to go out and find business. Suddenly, having conversations with prospective clients has become a regular and essential part of the job. But when they finally get that meeting, something strange happens. They fall back on talking about themselves, desperate to make an impression and convince the people across the table that they deserve to be there. They talk about their credentials, their capabilities, their awards and their work. And in the process, they often fail to find out what's actually going on in the client's business. So how do you get these conversations right? And how do you turn them into relationships that eventually lead to work? That's what we're exploring in this episode of Inspiring Futures with Simon Wylie and Neil Mullarkey, founders of Stop Selling, Start Solving. Simon is the former CEO of Contagious Communications and Managing Director of Xtreme Information. He's spent decades in the advertising and marketing world, helping agencies understand their markets, win clients and grow. Today, he advises agencies on growth and business model transformation, including through his work with Caroline Johnson at the Business Model Company. Neil has a rather different background. He's a former president of the legendary Cambridge Footlights and a founding member of the Comedy Store Players, where he worked alongside Mike Myers and Paul Merton. For more than 25 years, he's also been teaching improvisation and communication skills to business leaders. Together, they've developed an approach that combines Simon's understanding of agency new business with Neil's expertise in improvisation and human communication. We talk about why selling can actually get in the way of winning business, why listening is so difficult, how to prepare without becoming a prisoner of your presentation, and how storytelling and improvisation can completely change the dynamic of a meeting. We also get into the commercial realities. How do you know whether a prospect has a problem worth solving? Who actually makes the decisions? And how do you avoid having lots of lovely meetings that never turn into anything? It's a fascinating and very practical conversation about something that has become increasingly important to the survival and success of advertising agencies: how to stop talking about yourself and start having conversations that lead somewhere.

My guests on the latest Inspiring Futures podcast episode are Leslie Stone, a former Ogilvy Chief Strategy Officer who has helped giants like American Express, Walmart, and IKEA, and Gabrielle Tenaglia, a San Francisco agency strategist turned startup marketing leader at companies like Omada Health and Lyft. Together they now run Throughline. A few months ago, they talked with marketers to ask about their unmet needs at work. In their conversations, they couldn’t get to the work. Leader after leader wanted to talk about how they felt, and what came out was grief: for trust, for time to think, for the craft they fell in love with. On this episode of Inspiring Futures, we talk about the thing nobody in marketing is naming, why your company probably won’t fix it, and what can be done to move through it.

Everyone agrees the world is uncertain. Far fewer ask what that means for how we plan. On the Inspiring Futures podcast, futurist Joana Lenkova (ex-Disney, founder of Futures Forward) made the case better than anyone I’ve heard. Here it is in four lines: 1. The past is no longer a reliable guide. Spreadsheets tell you what happened. They can’t tell you what’s coming. 2. Not acting is still a decision. Skip foresight, and you’ve bet on “tomorrow looks like yesterday” without checking the bet. 3. Uncertainty is also an opening. Foresight lets you shape the future instead of just reacting to it. 4. It only works if it’s tied to decisions. Insight nobody acts on is just an interesting report. That last point is the heart of Joana’s new book, From Foresight to Action: Your Strategic Decision-Making Playbook (Wiley, August 2026). It’s built to close the “Decision Gap” between knowing what might happen and choosing confidently today, through five standalone Strategic Future Labs that work like flight simulators for decision-making and feed into a complete Futures Strategy Canvas. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/shop/general-introductory-business-management/from-foresight-to-action-your-strategic-decision-making-playbook-p-9781394425884

What does the agency of the future actually look like? My latest Inspiring Futures conversation is with Lior Eldan, co-founder of Moburst. Lior started Moburst in 2013 as a specialist mobile marketing agency. Today, after five acquisitions, it's a 150-person global business with a dramatically broader offer. But what's particularly interesting is how AI is driving its next transformation. It's not simply about making existing services faster or cheaper. Moburst is rethinking entire workflows, building its own AI capabilities, investing in new skills and moving into areas such as AI transformation for clients. A few interesting questions emerge from Lior's experience: What happens when an agency stops defining itself by a particular marketing discipline?How do you decide what capabilities to build, buy or reinvent?What does an agency actually sell when AI can perform so much of the work?And what kinds of people become most valuable when the work itself is constantly changing?Perhaps the most interesting thing about the agency of the future isn't how it uses AI. It's how AI changes what the agency becomes.

Six things I learned from Ben Schott Ben Schott is a hard man to pin down. He's a writer, designer, former photographer, and collector of wonderfully obscure information. He's best known for Schott's Original Miscellany, a little book that started life as a Christmas gift and became a publishing sensation, selling millions of copies around the world. He's since written bestselling books, contributed to The New York Times, and built a remarkable career out of curiosity and doing things his own way. We had a wide-ranging conversation on Inspiring Futures about creativity, curiosity, AI, and how ideas happen. Six things stayed with me. 1. Only do what only you can do. Find your distinctive way of seeing the world. Look for the holes only you can fill. 2. Constraints set you free. Forget thinking outside the box. Start inside it. Limitations can be the greatest stimulus to creativity. 3. Pay attention to what catches your attention. The unexpected connection, the strange thought, the idea that won't go away. 4. Let people complete the idea. The best creativity leaves something for the audience to discover.  5. Learn the secret language. Every community has its own words, codes and expressions. Understand how people talk, and you'll get closer to understanding how they think. 6. Make things because you love making them. Ben's first Miscellany was created to amuse himself and his friends. It became an international bestseller.  Perhaps the thread connecting all six is this: In a world increasingly obsessed with making tons of stuff, Ben reminds us of the value of noticing more.

In this episode, I talk to Sean Akaks, Co-Founder and CEO of SonderCo, and Jessie Mash, Co-Founder and President. SonderCo sits between brands and the increasingly complicated world of celebrities, athletes, creators, entertainment, and culture, helping companies work out not simply who they can get, but who actually makes sense. And both Sean and Jessie have unusually good backgrounds for doing it. Jessie began her career at The Oprah Winfrey Show, before moving through Edelman, television production, and the brand world, eventually leading partnerships at Monica + Andy.  Sean came from a very different direction, moving from nonprofit work and recruiting into MasterClass, where he helped structure and negotiate more than 200 talent deals involving everyone from Serena Williams to former presidents. Together, those experiences became the foundation for SonderCo. The reason this conversation is worth listening to is that influence is being rewritten. A creator can matter more than a movie star. A celebrity can become a founder. A YouTuber can become a brand owner. Brands have more people, platforms, and cultural moments to choose from than ever before, while somehow everybody still seems to chase the same names and turn up in the same places. Sean and Jessie work right in the middle of that collision. So if you want to understand who actually has influence now, how brands decide who is worth betting on, and why the obvious choice may increasingly be the wrong one, this is a very useful conversation. Interesting story here about a recent program they did for HabitBurger https://www.buzzfeed.com/business-news/habit-burger-sonderco-chef-residency-platform-jessie-mash-jack-lettenmair

The market research forces a choice between speed and depth. Qualitative research is deep but slow, bespoke, and expensive to scale, while quantitative segmentation builds simplified models that brands mistakenly treat as exact reality rather than a starting point. Dose of Reality positions itself as the bridge: instant access and deep human context. Brands hide behind data to survive a culture of short-termism.  Three dynamics drive this: executives paralyzed by fear of making the wrong move under short-term KPIs; data used as a defensive shield to justify decisions rather than a window into real behavior; and agencies telling clients only what they want to hear, creating a race to the bottom that degrades creative work.  On top of that, the ad industry romanticizes a narrow, curated version of culture. Real strategic advantage lies in the messy, unglamorous realities of everyday life, not polished inner-city aesthetics. Synthetic AI respondents don't generate net-new insight; they recycle unvalidated stereotypes. Trained on things like internet forum posts, they echo and reinforce existing internet stereotypes while missing the texture of real behavior. Algorithms can't capture physical space and stakes — the nervous body language, the context of a room, why the door gets closed during a hard conversation. The "90% accuracy" trap: AI may predict ~90% of consumer responses by mapping predictable baseline demographics, but that 90% is table stakes. All competitive advantage, whitespace, and creative inspiration lives in the surprising, illogical 10% that models can't predict. Traditional data measures binary answers and misses emotional intensity — the "Brexit effect," where polling missed major shifts because it couldn't sense the undercurrent that deep conversations detect much earlier. Dose of Reality is a subscription platform giving brands and agencies on-demand access to thousands of hours of real, unfiltered human video, images, interviews, and observations, replacing the old bespoke, slow, cost-prohibitive ethnography model.  AI's proper role here is a sparring partner, not a synthetic generator: custom AI layers search, organize, and navigate massive multimodal human data to surface real truths faster, never to fabricate insights or fake humans. Genuine research requires genuine empathy, which can't be coded.  The ultimate synthesis: moving brands from cold, metric-obsessed transactional entities back toward "brand benevolence," genuine utility and community support, the kind of brands that actually matter to people. https://doseofreality.fyi/

In the wide-ranging conversation, we talk about strategy, creativity, and how the two work together. What you learn when you work for Mother. How good it is when you do all the strategy work with a ton of rigor and time. The challenges of what happens when the world of creativity comes face-to-face with the corporate world. We also talked about the WNBA and the music scene in Jersey.

Mike Lane sold dealer.com in 2014 after 16 years, 700 employees, billions in ad spend.  These days he's running Fluency, an operating system for digital advertising.  A single media strategist today has to run Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, CTV, each its own beast, while margins shrink and budgets don't.  Fluency pulls in a client's data, runs it through reusable playbooks, and sets up and optimizes campaigns across every channel automatically. Work that took eight hours becomes a button. His bet: advertising is moving onto systems the same way stock trading left the paper floor for E-Trade and Schwab. Ten years out, doing it by hand won't be an option. In the episode we also get into:  → How creative is being pulled inside the media workflow. AI generates the options, testing picks the winner, but a human still owns the publish button.  → Why "advertising engineer" is becoming a real job title  → What clients mean when they say "I don't know what my agency is doing anymore" Worth a listen if you build, run, or sell advertising.

Neil Barrie didn't take the conventional route into brand strategy. After studying modern history at Oxford, he spent six years trying to make it as a musician, a detour, it turns out, was a training ground for what came next. As the co-founder of 21st Century Brand, Neil has worked with some of the most interesting companies of the last decade, including an early, formative stint helping build the Airbnb brand alongside Brian Chesky and Jonathan Mildenhall. That experience changed the way he thought about brand: not a storytelling wrapper, but the entire company as a creative canvas. In this conversation, Neil talks about the craft of brand-building in an era of platform companies, AI disruption, and a marketing discipline under serious pressure. Why strategists need to hear this 1. The clearest explanation of what separates brand consulting from advertising you'll find anywhere. Neil lays it out simply: great ad agencies want to get the client out of the way so they can make great work. Great brand consultancies put the client in the way because that's where the real brand lives.  2. A genuinely honest take on the existential moment for brand strategy. Neil admits he spent part of last year in crisis mode, asking whether brand strategy even has a future. What he found when he went and talked to a dozen CMOs is both reassuring and clarifying: intelligence is everywhere, but conviction and wisdom are in short supply. The role isn't disappearing, it's shifting, and he's specific about where the value is migrating. 3. Machine-readable brands This is where the conversation gets genuinely forward-looking. As LLMs increasingly mediate how people discover and choose between companies, Neil argues that brands need to be built for two audiences simultaneously: humans and machines.  4. Why the "durable and dynamic" tension is the central challenge of modern brand building. Platform brands like Uber and Amazon have made the old CPG playbook look quaint. Neil talks through how you hold a brand together when the business is expanding in every direction at once, and why archetypes and distinctive brand assets matter more, not less, when a company's remit expands. 5.  What being a strategist means today. Crunching data into neat answers is increasingly commoditized. What's genuinely scarce and valuable is the ability to move a group of people toward conviction. Neil is refreshingly direct about what that means for the kind of strategist who thrives going forward.

Kaye Symington has spent 20 years in marketing, and right now she's working to keep one of the oldest media formats alive — the printed newspaper. As head of marketing at Newspaper Club, she's on the front lines of a quiet cultural shift: people are choosing ink and paper not out of nostalgia, but because something about it just hits differently.  In this conversation, we dig into what's really driving that, and what it says about how we want to connect right now. Kaye shares the story of a photographer who sent a physical seasonal newsletter to creative directors instead of another email and landed a $50,000 campaign from it. The math on cutting through digital noise is more interesting than you'd think. Newspaper Club has been growing since 2009, and Kaye's colleagues laugh every time the trend cycle rediscovers print. She explains why newsprint keeps finding new audiences. People and organizations making newspapers include Ariana Grande. A Scottish anarchist gardening club. A symphony orchestra. A dating site for 30-somethings running classifieds. The range of people printing newspapers reveals something genuinely interesting about what people are hungry for right now.

James Nord didn’t just build an influencer marketing company.  He lived through the birth of internet culture from the inside. In this episode of Inspiring Futures, the founder and CEO of Fohr It traces the path from early Tumblr obsession to building one of the most influential creator marketing companies in the world.  What makes this conversation compelling is that it’s really about much more than influencer marketing. It’s about the transformation of culture itself. James explains what it felt like to be one of the first people to understand that “following” would become a new kind of currency, long before brands, agencies, or investors took the idea seriously.  He talks candidly about the brutal early years of educating clients, surviving on almost no money, paying employees with photography income, and slowly realizing that the internet was no longer a sideshow. It had become the main stage.  The discussion moves from Tumblr and Instagram’s early days into the modern creator economy, unpacking why brands still misunderstand creators, why legacy marketers struggle with internet-native culture, and why companies like Nike can lose relevance while brands like Skims instinctively understand the new rules of influence.  Along the way, James shares sharp insights on:  Why internet culture fractured the monoculture  How algorithms changed influence forever  Why “momentum” matters more than total reach  The hidden tension between marketers and creators  Why great creators often outperform traditional advertising  How influencer marketing evolved from experimentation into one of the most powerful forces in business and politics There’s also a fascinating thread running through the entire conversation about “internet natives” versus traditional institutions. James argues that people who grew up deeply embedded online developed an instinctive understanding of digital communities that many large organizations still lack today.  If you care about culture, marketing, creators, the internet, or how influence actually works in 2026, this is a rich and revealing listen. It’s part founder story, part history of the social internet, and part field guide to how modern attention really moves.

This episode is really about how agencies evolve under pressure. Ammunition began with deep expertise in home and building, a category defined by complicated purchase journeys, multiple decision-makers, long sales cycles, and considered decisions. That gave the agency an early advantage. But the more interesting part is how it learned from that advantage. The lesson was not simply “we know this category.” The lesson was: “we know how to solve complex growth problems.” That shift matters. Because agencies are operating in a difficult market. Clients are under pressure. CMOs are being asked to do more with less. AI is changing the production layer. Channels keep multiplying. And there is more marketing activity than ever, but not always more progress. In that context, Ammunition’s proposition, Growth, no matter what, becomes more than a line. It becomes a way of thinking about agency value. Kelly and Chris describe an agency trying to stay useful by learning continuously: from clients, from research, from AI, from category complexity, from international expansion, and from the changing pressures facing CMOs. It is a story about an agency growing not because times are easy, but because hard times force it to get clearer about what it is really good at.

AI and The Marketing Department  For a recent Inspiring Futures podcast, I had the opportunity to spend time with Mixtape Partners' Nirm Shanbhag, Andy Bateman, and Sarah Lent/ Mixtape is a management consultancy designed specifically for marketers navigating the AI era.  Between them, they've spent careers inside the big agency networks (Omnicom, WPP, IPG, Interbrand, R/GA), led innovation and customer strategy at Deloitte, and sat on the client side as senior marketers and CMOs.  They've been the consultants, they've been the clients, and they've run the agencies.  They started Mixtape because they kept noticing the same thing: most strategy work gets shelved, and the work that actually matters is the work that gets adopted. In the past year, they spent some time researching what was happening with AI and marketing departments. They spent an hour each with thirty CMOs working across twelve industries. Their main conclusion is the one nobody wants to say out loud: nobody has figured this out yet. Not the consultancies. Not the holdcos. Not the platforms. What they did find is a set of moves leading marketers are quietly making while everyone else is still arguing about prompts. Four core findings... The customer you're designing for isn't one person anymore. It's three. Almost no marketer interviewed is ready for what that means. There's a single decision a CMO can make in the next six months that quietly kills their AI transformation before it starts, and most of them are about to make it. As AI takes over execution, the entire value of human work collapses onto one thing. Companies that aren't training for it are about to discover a capability gap that no amount of AI throughput can fix. Your brand is now an iceberg. The part everyone's been optimising for is the part above the water.