In-house Essays: Up and to the Right

Being the in-house team that runs a brand is great fun.

We work fast with a deep knowledge of our products, and our creative ideas and processes can influence the rest of the organisation.

But it’s important for us to remember that creativity is a Business Function, not a Business Purpose.

At what3words, our mission is to become a global standard in addressing and our business ambition is to be worth billions of pounds.

The most important chart in the company shows usage and revenue plotted over time as a line.

It's a very simple graph that shows how all the work we do accumulates value, and the CEO needs the line to go up and to the right.

The in-house team must contribute to that line moving in the right direction.

As business leaders we need to fully understand the company's strategy and then translate that into a brand story that inspires and enables our colleagues, partners and customers.

As an example, every few years we make sure the what3words Brand Principles are correct to help the team create more of the work we believe will help us achieve our goals.

We discussed our key objectives, looked at which of our recent campaigns are working best, decided what we need to do more of, and then checked if the existing brand principles were still fit for purpose.

We decided to sharpen two of the three principles: an evolution, not a revolution, but necessary.

We’ve also found a Brand Strategy that is made as practical as possible is much easier to accept and execute by the whole business.

It’s orders of magnitude more impactful when everyone in the company can use the Brand to help them create value every day.

From UX, to Tech, to Sales, we can all deliver a great brand experience that helps the line go up and to the right.

At what3words we design the brand and in-house team to achieve our business ambitions.

That’s what the CEO of every organisation needs.

And of course, the ability to create a great brand is key to that success.

In-house Essays: The Ego Adjustment

I joined what3words after a career spent at a few famous advertising agencies where I was a global creative director. I believed awards were really important, spoke in a peculiar language of acronyms, and had the unfortunate habit of thinking advertising was more important than it actually is.

What I didn't have was any experience of working outside of my industry, and felt I needed to prove myself over and over again.

what3words was created by a musician, a mathematician, and a language expert, with business development people and software engineers.

Their working culture was quite different to what I was used to. It’s more of an iterative, engineering process rather than leaps of logic and selling the big idea.

Of course, I had noticed I was working at a tech startup, so I had tried to change my approach to fit in.

But not long after joining what3words, a few of us with advertising agency backgrounds were duly informed that we were perceived as having unjustified pride.

Our egos were apparently a bit much.

That was hard to hear since it didn’t match how I felt I was behaving. But in branding, perception is everything.

As a marketing leadership team, we decided to accept the truth of it and change our behaviour and reputation. We improved over the years by being sensitive to our ego habits and supporting each other with honest feedback. I think we’re all much better business leaders and colleagues because we learned to listen.

I’ve spoken to creative people inside all sorts of businesses about this idea of losing the creative industry ego. It comes up again and again as something that needs to happen to have productive relationships with other departments.

When we change industry environment, we need to adapt how we work, not what we make. When that change doesn’t happen the inhouse creative team can be sidelined, or in some cases I know of, retrenched.

This is now the advice I give anyone who joins what3words: leave your last job at your last job. You don't have to justify yourself, and the fact that you are here means you're good. No one wants to keep hearing about what you did somewhere else, what matters is what you create here, today.

It's advice I wish I'd been given and hope I would have been smart enough to take.

In the beginning of what3words the marketing leadership team was seen as a clique, that we spoke over people, that we surprised key stakeholders with our solutions, and we weren't open.

Now we’re trusted, create meaningful business impact, and have seats at the main table.

For me personally, learning to adapt to the culture of what3words, and learning how to add to it, has been creatively empowering.

We’ve built a wonderful brand together, which is why we came here in the first place.

In-house Essays: Creativity Will Emerge

It took me awhile to figure out that most people really don’t think about Creativity the way I do.

I worked in advertising as a Creative Director and naturally everything I did was focused on being Creative.

We thought Creativity could solve any of the world’s problems. You just needed a big enough idea.

Unfortunately, that’s not what the world thinks.  

When I left advertising with the idea of helping companies become more creative, I found it was a very hard sell.

Creativity wasn’t seen as business critical, or even vaguely important, it was a fun team building exercise, or some design stuff that the marketing team dealt with.

It turns out that most industry leaders think “Creativity” is for someone else to do.

Research (by George Land) shows we are all born with imaginative problem-solving skills and life teaches us to be uncreative. We lose our skills as we grow up due to rules and regulations, judgement, fear, criticism, and even brain development.

As you get to adulthood, being labelled as “creative” implies you aren’t realistic or responsible.

You need a thick skin to be creative in public.

This means the vast majority people in organisations don’t have the confidence or space to innovate and share their thinking.

Once you’ve had a few nice ideas shot down in flames you learn not to offer them up again.

It’s such a waste.

Like every major business consultancy out there, I know that organisations that are more creative are more valuable. The short version is that they return more revenue to their investors because they adapt and innovate consistently.

Luckily, while we were taught to be uncreative, we can also learn to be creative again by doing it.

Creativity is the most generally applied of human traits: we improve our communities, tell motivating stories, express the world in mathematical formulas, fix dinner with improvised ingredients, and anything else you could think of. It’s wonderful.

Just don’t mention Creativity at work.

When I joined what3words it was still a startup, and I had the belief that creativity could add a huge amount of value to the business. Otherwise, what was I doing here?

Part of our strategy to fit into the business culture was to avoid the C-word wherever possible.

Which may be self-defeating since I’m the Chief Creative Officer.

Another thing we’ve always done is explain the what3words brand in the context of building value for the business.

We also invite everyone to help create the brand experience, and we give them the tools to do it.

To learn to be creative, we must practise.

I’ve found that by being as broad as possible with the definition of who and what is creative, and not having a creative department, more people at what3words are involved in building a great brand experience with their own skills.

Our CEO was a musician, our CMO studied Industrial Design, our COO writes quiz questions, not to mention the coders, designers, linguists, writers, editors, economists, and marketing managers who all solve interesting problems every day.

By quietly building out a Create Function (which is just like a Finance or Sales Function) by applying good processes and practices, and by inviting everyone in, we seem to have positively influenced the business culture of what3words.

It’s hard to tease out individual strands that make an organisation’s culture successful, but I think avoiding the C-word has helped us all be more open to innovating, sharing, and listening to ideas that will help us achieve our mission.

It seems, with space and encouragement, Creativity will emerge.

It’s funny that way.

In-house Essays: Watch Your Language

You know when someone speaks at you and they're just wording? It sounds like it should be meaningful so you nod along but nothing is sticking in your brain.

Now imagine you're the one doing the talking and your audience are nodding along but haven’t understood a thing you've said.

This was happening to me all the time without me realising it. Inevitably I learned that the only way to help people understand what I was saying was by changing my language, because the concepts I was describing aren’t complicated, my delivery was.  

Like all specialists, inhouse marketing and creative teams bump into this issue on a regular basis. The trick is to hear yourself as someone else might.

Marketing, advertising, and design are full of gobbledegook.

The 4Ps, Brand Strategy, Marketing Mix, Design Thinking, Quant and Qual, Funnels, you get the idea. And some terms are shared by Tech, Product and Growth but mean different things, and we all think we’re right.

Our ambition was to create a great brand experience, but for that to happen we had to learn how to talk to everyone at what3words.

In 2018, the marketing and studio team started talking about “the what3words way”. It was an attempt to adjust the language and processes we were using so they were more commonly understood by as many people in the business as possible.

We needed to work in ways that were fit for purpose, not just comfortable or familiar.  We took inspiration from our colleagues across what3words and reused language and concepts that were working for them rather than forcing them to adjust to us.

The next step was to make the creative process easy to understand, so we invited everyone in.

Creative work can sometimes feel like it's your baby, you don't want to show it to the world until it's fully formed and has the best chance of surviving the critics. Part of that protective instinct is also about protecting your job. If you're a copywriter or a designer, criticism can feel like a personal attack and poor feedback can make the work awful.

We give everyone access to copy docs and presentation decks as standard practice.

What we’ve found is that we get to better solutions, much faster, by working openly and asking project stakeholders to participate in the creative process early.

The side effect is that everyone becomes familiar with our jargon and realises the work isn’t that easy.

Don't make the mistake of thinking what3words is a democracy, someone still needs to make a decision about the work, but all stakeholders have had the chance to come on the journey, give comment, and understand why the final choices were made.

It’s quite rare for us to redo a piece of work because of miscommunication.

And finally, we also coach everyone on how to give useful creative feedback.

After all, it’s not just the marketing and studio team who have an obligation to make themselves clearly understood.

In-House Essays: Creative C-Suite

I think it's useful to understand what a Chief Creative Officer does before I explain how I got the title.

There's the day-to-day operations of the studio and marketing team, which involves the amount of work we make, the quality of the work, staying on budget, people management, etc.

Another aspect is managing the brand experience of the company; how we’re perceived in all the touchpoints we have with users, customers, and internal stakeholders.

There is the strategy aspect; what are we aiming for, what is the vision, and how do we translate the company's ambitions into day-to-day actions that help us achieve our goals.

Then there's the cross-team aspect of the role; educating the business about brand experience, and giving everyone the tools and help to achieve their goals with copy, design, marketing, etc.

And the final one is being a supportive and trusted member of the leadership team with the company’s best interests at heart.

When I took on the role of creative director at what3words this wasn’t my official job description, but I did think the role should exist.

I felt it was important that a company, or any organisation, should have a Chief Creative Officer who sits next to the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Product Officer, or the Chief Technology Officer.

If brand experience is valuable to the company, it only makes sense.

Any business that competes on customer experience should treat the Create function equally to Finance or Tech.

But of course, I’m biased.

During my career in advertising, I became interested in how organisations work. I was ambitious to lead and read a lot of business, leadership and management books, and did as much training as I could get access to. I understood that to make bigger, more impactful creative work, I needed to understand the business. I educated myself about things that people in creative studios generally avoid, aren’t included in, or feel intimidated by.

When I joined what3words I had the space to try a new approach with the marketing leadership team. We learned how to translate the codes of brand experience and marketing into a what3words language that makes sense to all the departments, whatever their discipline.

I’ve always understood my role as helping everyone in the company create the brand because that builds value. It's also much more efficient and satisfying to create a brand story as a team.

A Chief Creative Officer helps to lead an organisation, not just their department.

In short, how do I get this title?

In my case it took a plan, five years of work, belief that this role should exist, and trust from the leadership team.

Brand Story Coaching

How do we help more people create a brand together? Good story coaching.

Our simple definition of a brand is that it’s a collective story that helps a group of people achieve a common goal. 

Organisations should be consistent with that story when they communicate with the world and themselves, and express it beautifully wherever they do their work.

As brand coaches we help organisations understand the stories that already exist within, make them visible to everybody, and get alignment and agreement on what their core story is. We then enable people to tell that story themselves in the best possible way with the help of creative tools.

In coaching one of the core objectives is to build accountability, and if you coach teams it’s all about building shared accountability. 

If you translate that into brand coaching it’s about building shared accountability around one story, one brand. Not relying on one department and asking them to tell that story to a client or audience, but being able, comfortable and confident to tell that story right here and now yourself.

The biggest change moving from brand experts and consultants to a methodology of coaching and co-ownership of the brand is that everyone understands the core story, and owns how they share that story. It could be how they represent the brand in a service, or how they introduce themselves to clients, or how they react in social media.

• We’ve discovered that brand coaching enables our clients to get down to the core, to cut down all the noise that is around things. 

• It’s vital to first unearth the stories that already exist across the organisation, let everyone hear them, and then craft them into a brand story.

• Brand coaching helps create accountability, and gives people permission to do things themselves and own them. In an organisation or a product team, you do that collectively. We all have shared permission, accountability, and responsibility for the brand. 

Which is really exciting because suddenly its your brand and the story belongs to you.

That’s pretty cool.

Alex Mecklenburg is a creative business and leadership coach at Consequential CIC, a fellow of the RSA, and storyteller in residence at SIX, the Global Social Innovation Exchange.

Ivan Pols is the creative director of what3words. Together they are the co-founders of Truth & Spectacle, creative consultancy coaches.

How to practise gentle creativity

When Alex and I started working together it was with the shared belief that people are more creative than they imagine.  

We assumed that being ‘creative’ was something that teams and organisations wanted to be, but we quickly learned that it wasn’t that straightforward. 

To many people creativity is a ‘gift you’re born with’, for others creativity evokes stories of ego, genius, loudness or elitism. 

This style of language and approach means a lot of very creative people in an organisation don't participate.

We'd like people to experience creativity as an inclusive, more gentle force.

Here are 8 things we practise:

• Be more gentle with other people's creativity - it’s always personal

• Open your eyes and listen harder - because people can share ideas in unexpected ways

• Be aware of the metaphors and language you use to describe creative: workshops, big ideas, brainstorms -  are they inspiring or terrifying? They’re just words, use different ones

• Create space for leaps of logic - be aware of designing out surprise

• Being creative in a group is incredibly hard - find ways for everyone to participate

• Use questions and gentle provocations to help people make new connections

• Help people maintain co-ownership of ideas over time with a well designed and maintained workflow

• Be fair - lots of ideas are mediocre, you can acknowledge that with grace

If you're interested in this idea of gentle creativity, we discuss it in episode 7 of our podcast:  listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher. (24 minutes ⏰)

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We also asked for any other ideas from friends on LinkedIn. We had an amazing response and here they are in full.

Group wisdom about gentle creativity

Ann Wixley

1. The way we talk about people with creative in their title and people without it but who are, by virtue of being human, creative; is to say that creatives have to come up with ideas on days they don't feel like it. It's their job day in and day out. This helps take out the intimidation factor so those without it in their title see it as a job like their own, and bring it down to size. This helps to open creativity out to different ways of seeing which is invaluable, but retains the creative's accountability. (Pixar's Brain Trust principles are a good reference - it relies on encouraging honest feedback but with the final decision still being in the hands of the person accountable for the final product - Ed Catmull's Creativity Inc book).  I, for one, am a big fan of a brainstorm or informal creative chat with lots of different people in small groups of four. Just hearing how people play back the brief in their words is useful and often brimming with insight. I've never walked out of a brainstorm without new useful stimulus. 

2. Start by messing around and laughing. Show people how different they are and how useful this is. My current favourite is to make up a word and get people to come back with a made-up definition. Never fails to reveal their creativity and differences to themselves and each other. No one can be wrong. 

3. Creativity can be about self-expression and taste (eg: executional, art world) but it's also about problem-solving (eg: engineering, innovation, strategic creative, lateral thinking). Dave Birss talks about creativity as 'applied thinking'. Sharing this definition helps people see what they can offer 

4. We use Pixar's Dream it Build it Critique it as a 3 stage/ mode framework which enables everyone to identify their safest place within the process and feel useful - as one needs all three modes/ stages. It also helps people avoid 'crossing the streams' i.e. jumping from Dream it to 'Bin it' without giving something new and unfamiliar a chance by getting the right 'Builders' in the room.  

5. I always try to get people to put their idea out away from them into the centre of the room - often physically on a piece of paper on the floor - and encourage people to walk around it as if looking at a statue to observe objectively what could be better, what they love, what questions need answering to move to the next stage, new builds or possibilities - which helps with not taking it personally, and when an idea is still fragile. 

6. It's not a sprint, but a relay - no one nails it in one. Or if they do, it still requires patience, humour, tenacity and support to get it finally delivered. So it helps to frame the process as a journey. Neither is it hierarchical - it's a chain with each link as important as the other. 

AJ Coyne

• 100% it's all about providing a supportive and nurturing environment. In my world, we encourage everyone to become cheerleaders and rally around and support each other. Then take everyone on the journey and see solutions vs. obstacles. 

• Lastly don't waste time striving for perfection, nothing is ever perfect. Press print if something is 80% there. It’s far greater to have 10 ideas go live and learn vs. wait years to perfect 1. 

Roanna Williams

• Something I’ve been grappling with for years. It is so very hard to find that safe space. You always have to fight for the idea. I try to offer an environment where I protect the creative process. This is the safe space where anything is invited to the table and nothing is judged. I prefer just the creatives to be involved in this process as we all know what the process is about. You have to voice all the ideas before you can get to the fight one. 

• Another learning I have had is to only comment on what’s good about an idea and not go into the negative. But that’s the creative process. 

Katriona Fraser

• Creating a supportive culture where people aren't afraid to fail is also key. And encouraging discussions as a team around any 'failures' so as to learn and move forward.

• I've also personally always believed that a creative idea can come from anyone, so building the right teams packed with a diversity of skill sets is important to ensure that people don't feel that the 'creative' is the only person with the answer!  

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Look after yourselves wherever you are and keep creating. 

Ivan & Alex

Digital Leadership in Uncertain Times

Just as conferences moved online, Alex talked with Glenn Wallis at his Success ID Club. She quickly changed her presentation and discusses how leaders can adapt themselves, and help their teams adjust, to the “new normal”. It’s a great discussion, full of provocations, good questions and interesting approaches to working in digital teams. Alex covers acknowledging grief, signalling, digital responsibility and taking breaks.

S4Ep3 Alex Mecklenburg leads this month's webinar on Digital Leadership. With full slide deck and an audio recording of the webinar content.

“As we all head into uncharted waters with the current global pandemic (as at March 2020) it was both re-assuring and enlightening to have Alex Mecklenburg come and share her experience and expertise in the space of Digital Leadership, mindful of the current backdrop. ”

— Glenn Wallis

Turn strategy into action

An Amish barn raising by Randy Fath - Unsplash

There’s a basic duality about new strategies: people require space and permission to understand them and their relevance, while they’re under pressure to maintain the day to day business.

And if the process is badly managed new strategies are ignored and inevitably forgotten. 

Opening creative conversations

Truth & Spectacle recently ran a Provoke game session with a large organisation who had just launched a brave new strategy. The players came from across the country and had been selected as future leaders for the company.

With their Learning and Development, and Leadership team, we decided to use their new strategy as the Big Question for the game. In Provoke, the Big Question is the focus of the game and is usually framed as, “How can we (insert strategic objective)”. It’s a simple and well practised method of opening a creative conversation.

Dedicated space and time

Through creative play in a safe environment teams explore the Big Question as thoroughly as possible, with the objective of creating their own questions that can lead to better answers. 

Provoke is as much a game as it is a practise which allows for dedicated space and time to have conversations and insights that can lead to better business. 

During the process, this large group of future leaders, many of whom had just met for the first time, came to understand they weren’t alone in feeling confused by the brave new strategy. 

Many of them weren’t sure what it meant for their teams, or how to implement it.

Curious collaboration 

What was amazing to see though, was how a questioning mindset and creative play quickly opened the conversations up and kept them open rather than jumping straight back into solutions and answers. One person remarked, “Provoke showed me how to keep conversations open and diverse for as long as possible”. 

The questions swiftly moved from “why” to “how”, which is what new strategies are actually for - making things better.

The players quickly helped each other understand the possibilities of the new strategy, both positive and negative, and create meaningful questions their teams would answer later.

Collective understanding

Over the period of 4 hours we observed how teams built shared understanding and a change of perspective.  People were really surprised about the diversity of thought amongst people in similar roles and how a better question, a second question is sometimes all that’s it takes for abstract ideas to start making practical sense. 

Turning strategy into action. 

Provoke Good Question cards with the all-important workshop coloured dots.

How to ask better questions

Great teams know how to ask the right questions at the right time. So how can we help teams ask better questions?

Over the last 24 months, I have had the pleasure to work with brilliant teams and leaders who are all weathering change and transformation.

They say you learn as much from your clients as your clients learn from you.

What I learned is that the best most successful teams and leaders are not the ones with the best answers but the ones with the best questions.

When you think about it, it makes complete sense. Having the answers does not necessarily mean you are asking the right questions.

But it is hard. Most of us are trained to be the ones with the best answers. Why do we need to ask more questions when we already have the answer? We have the experience, we have the expertise, we have the solution. It is an impulse reaction, but not one that serves us terribly well today.

To quote a friend of mine: “A lot of new products and services that did not make the mark have been developed because people solved the wrong question really well.”

To become the ones with the best questions, we need to re-train ourselves to break through the behavioural muscle that makes us want to jump right into the answer. There is a lot written about this but very little practical support and tools to help teams ask better questions.

So we made something. We have developed a card game that helps teams think creatively about questions.

We call it PROVOKE, because throughout the moderated play session we use provocations and challenges in a safe and playful environment to help teams get creative, ask questions and build practical creative leadership skills.

How does it work:

Our methodology is tried and tested in education and in industry and uses provocations to work through a real problem while developing creativity, critical thinking, and meaningful questioning habits. We allow teams to explore with play. Provocations encourage new connections with creative challenges and good questions about assumptions and habits.

The game is a catalyst to help break away from more conventional ways of thinking about projects and organisation in a safe and playful environment.

What do teams get out of it:

As teams work on a ‘live’ project question, we have seen teams walk out of the session with a much richer, accelerated understanding of the question, with new thinking connections and provocations that they bring back into the organisation. We have also observed the sheer energy and joy when teams allowed themselves to explore the question in creative, often non-linear ways.

We’ve been beta testing it over the last weeks and the feedback has been amazing. So we thought it was time to share it with you.

Let me know if you are interested to play.

Alex

When company values kill brand value

Values are key to company culture, but when customers can see through your walls they become your brand, too.

Josh Levine on Forbes.com makes the observation that it’s easy to tell when a company talks to it’s customers in a way that’s contrary to to their culture. The key to aligning that story is with useful company values that employees can understand and work with.

In my own experience of brands that are disconnected from their people, it’s always a losing game. Employees are dissatisfied and customers can tell something smells. The customer experience is the sum of all parts.

Read the article on Forbes.

BBC Analysis - Maintenance

BBC Radio 4’s Analysis show spends some time looking at Maintenance and interviewed Truth & Spectacle’s, Alex Mecklenburg.

As Chris Bowlby discovers, keeping our infrastructure in good condition is one of the most crucial and creative challenges we face.

They look at the creativity required in maintaining and improving the roads, bridges, buildings, and technology we already have and don’t look after properly.

Alex talks about responsible innovation and the role of maintenance and legacy in ensuring we make a better world. She makes the case for responsible innovators and says;

“You can maintain something in innovative ways. ”

It’s a really interesting look at getting maximum value from good ideas. Even if they aren’t your own.

David Edgerton (@DEHEdgerton) who teaches History King's College London had an interesting comment that helps contextualise the world we work in now;

“Most of us are imitators rather than innovators […] Creativity today means getting rid of the idea that we live in a radically innovative culture and to set about our world in new ways that may not be quite as dramatic as the false prospectus that is on offer.”

It’s definitely worth listening to if you work within an existing structure and have the responsibility of maintaining and improving it, whether it’s a bridge or a brand.

Listen on the BBC

MegaPops talk about their brand, the ad industry, and their passion for creating a difference

“Live in neon, not beige.” - Meg

MegaPops are Megan Egan & Poppy Cumming-Spain, a creative team working at Creature London. They’re recent grads of SCA 2.0 and have pretty much launched themselves into the industry on a rocket fuelled with positive energy. Alex met them while mentoring at SCA and was struck by their charisma, honesty and wonderful work.

We met them in Shoreditch in early May and talked about how they built their team brand, MegaPops, the work they rate and how they pursue truth. They also shared their opinions about the state of “purpose advertising” and the value of doing real things rather than talking about them. It’s a refreshing perspective from smart people whom we hope go far.

Update 2019: Meg & Pops broke up :(

We suggest you also look at Meg’s personal portfolio of illustration, street art and photography. She’s a talent.

How to add Spectacle: Where's the battle scene?

A dramatic reenactment of Spartacus fighting Romans.

⚔ When Stanley Kubrick was directing Spartacus, he said, "You can't make a spectacle movie and not have a battle scene in it."

Kubrick was referring to the fact that he’d inherited a film script that had missed the point completely. It’s a film about a slave army who battled the Roman army for their freedom, and there was no battle scene!

It’s human nature to become blind to a story when we’re working very hard to produce it day in and day out. For most of us, we’re telling stories about the organisations we work with and those can too easily become pointless.

I think speed and efficiency are key but generally easier to do since you’re basically removing obstacles to help water run downhill faster.

Spectacle needs more. It doesn’t matter whether you design vacuum cleaners or brief in sales videos, every now and then you should ask yourself the question,

“Where is the battle scene?”.

How to add Spectacle: The power of a lobster

Image from tate.org.uk. Art by Salvador Dali

🦞Salvador Dali understood the power of a lobster to make this dull telephone absolutely memorable.

Lobsters may not be your style, so think of a small element you can add to usually humdrum work stuff that will create useful cognitive dissonance (i.e. get some good attention). It can be as simple as a hit of colour in your PPT, or a well devised metaphor in a speech.

Courtesy of the artist Michael Keith Chapman

If you’re not sure where to start, Ivan gets his lobsters here.

Why the best advertising in history will always be made by CEOs

A poster from the iconic Apple “Think Different” campaign.

This is a good opinion piece from The Drum which points out that great advertising and memorable brands are intrinsically linked with the CEOs who love them.

If you want to make a name for yourself, work out how to make your CEO famous.

The Drum has an email signup, but they’re not pushy about it ;)

Katharina Wittgens uncovers the truth about fluffy towels, eye implants and brand purpose

Katharina is a Business Psychologist and the Managing Director at InnovationBubble. She chatted to Alex about the difference between truth and purpose, the importance of getting your values right from the beginning, how fluffy towels effect your travel plans, and eye implants.

The InnovationBubble are a business consultancy who use behavioural science to understand how organisations and brands really work.

She’s advised companies like Virgin Atlantic, Beauty Pie and Habito on finding the hidden psychological influences that affect their business strategies.

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Read more about Katharina and the InnovationBubble.

Creative Business Consultancy Truth & Spectacle Launches

The best bits from our press launch.

March 27, 2019 Marketing Communication News

March 28, 2019 BDaily News

March, 2019 Communicate Magazine

March 25, 2019 More About Advertising

March, 2019 Creative Match

Jonathan McKay from Girl Effect talks about using brands to create a better world

Jonathan McKay joins Ivan Pols and Alex Mecklenburg to discuss how Girl Effect use brands to improve the lives of girls around the world, and the role of truth and spectacle in reaching them.

Jonathan is the Senior Director of Create at Girl Effect, who were founded by the Nike Foundation in 2004, and today are an independent creative non-profit working from nine global locations and active in over 50 countries.

Apologies for the patchy sound quality. We’re still enthusiastic podcast amateurs. But in the spirit of getting an MVP done, we thought we’d share it.

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Visit Girl Effect for more detail about their work.

Silas Amos talks about cheering the world up with ink, remixing design, brand truths and lies

Silas Amos joins Ivan Pols and Alex Mecklenburg to discuss his ideas and experiences about truth and spectacle in design.

Silas is a designer and design strategist who has worked with Budweiser, HP, Eve Sleep, and Unilever. He does some wonderful collaborations with artists like Sir Peter Blake and the Yarza Twins.

Apologies for the patchy sound quality. We’re still enthusiastic podcast amateurs. But in the spirit of getting an MVP done, we thought we’d share it.

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See more work at silasamos.com.