Inspiring Futures

My latest Inspiring Futures podcast episode features an interview with Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel.
Anastasia is a cultural theorist, writer, social critic, and strategist specializing in inclusivity within marketing, media, and tech.
She earned her doctorate in cultural studies from Duke University and is now using her expertise to help brands ignite cultural innovation and leverage the power of media for good. Dr. Gabriel is the author of Cultural Intelligence for Marketers, published by Kogan Page in March 2024.
She has consulted for the world’s largest brands at research and creative agencies like Wieden+Kennedy, Dentsu Creative, McCann New York, Kantar, and Canvas8 and been featured by the American Marketing Association, the Association of National Advertisers, the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Advertising Week, Campaign US, Teen Vogue, and others,
In our conversation, we talked about her early years and upbringing in Latvia and her school experience in Hong Kong.
We talked about what culture means to her, how she thinks about it, and its importance.

Bree has been an actress, teacher, innovation consultant, a researcher at E-Harmony, the CEO of NOBL and is now a principal at SYP. She has spent most of her working life involved in change- as a leader in the innovation wing of a school where she first came across people's resistance to change, to her studies at North Western in organizational culture and change, to her recent work at NOBL and SYP.
I had the benefit of using SYPs podcast studio, so the production is top-notch. for a conversation where we talk about Bree's journey into the world of change and discuss how organizations think about and approach change.

Bonnie Wan has been working at Goodby since 1998.
In 2022, she was named Advertising Age/Creativity Chief Strategy Officer of the Year.
She started her career at Weiss, Whitten, and Stagliano in NY before becoming Adam Morgan's first hire at TBWA Chiat Day LA followed by stints at FCB and Hal Riney before joining GSP to work with Jon Steel.
In the conversation, we talk about the shifts and changes in the strategy discipline with leaders moving from gurus to guides. Higher stakes for clients and a wider remit in terms of media expansion.
She describes her approach to strategy is to work and think as a "team"- "it's not about being the smartest person in the room", but "making the whole room smart" and that requires a spirit of generosity.
The department culture is key for Bonnie- it's all about her bench and her team and making alchemy happen between the members of the team.
When it comes to philosophy around the process of strategy, she highlights the need for always-on, constant monitoring of culture and of consumers and the practice of always asking the smartest questions to ensure you arrive at a really interesting place.
Bonnie talks about her development of "Brand Camp" which is a 6-week strategy sprint that gets clients to an "organizing idea" and involves workshops with GSP strategists and the client C-Suites. This has served to bring new non-advertising clients to the agency and codified in detail the strategic process.
For emerging talent- she's created a 15-week training camp that teaches the fundamentals of Strategy.
We also talk about her upcoming book- "The Life Brief" - where she applies the strategic thinking and framing used for brands to life. Which is something she applied successfully in her life, Bonnie has just signed a book deal with Simon and Schuster
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Zoe Scaman is the founder of her own strategic consulting company Bodacious and Global Head of Strategy at Ridley Scott Creative Group.
Zoe's experience includes Naked, Universal-McCann, Isobar, and Droga5.
In this episode, we discuss the current situation from a global and London perspective, focusing on how people and brands are responding and could be responding.
We also discuss how Zoe approaches her consulting assignments and her work with Ridley Scott Creative Group

This episode features an interview with Gerard Crichlow, who heads up Global Strategy on the Unilever brands- Axe/Lynx at IPG.
Gerard collaborates with several IPG entities worldwide to ensure the Axe/Lynx brands connect to their consumers and cultures.
Some quotes from Gerard from the episode.
"And for me, if we're in the attention game, who does attention best, and that tends to be entertainment companies. And so I've always tried to look at how do we shift from interrupting people to providing entertaining content."
"There is no more monoculture, especially for younger people. So you have to be able to entertain in order to get people's attention."
"I kind of start from the premise that no one gives a shit about your brand. So I almost like take the brand hat off. Of course, we're doing it for brands. And so we. we then first look at what is the landscape, what are the signals, what are those conversations or topics. And then we then put our brand hat back on and then look at are any of these topics related to the brand's point of view.
"If you fan like a fan, you almost take your brand hat off and you speak like the fan, you're interested in what they're talking about, you like the same songs, the same tracks, you know the backstories, all of those things."
"It's like a muscle. You post a lot. Some things will fly. Some things won't. But the things that do fly do really, really well. And from what we see is we keep a small team, meet every single day, post, get that muscle going. And then when things fly, and we think the engagement and the conversation is scaling. we begin to provide value. "
"It has so many more implications, not just social. It actually is trickling itself from the ground in the social conversations into bigger pieces of work, like the above the line work. So what are the sort of types of conversations that people are talking about What influencers or musicians do they relate to? Those are partnerships we then go after. What do they want because Axe as a fragrance brand? What do they want from fragrances? How do they react to each other?"