Ad Age Insider

Launched in 2005 in the ashes of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Walrus is a fiercely independent shop that's worked with such clients as Amazon, HBO, and Staples. Frances Webster — who co-founded Walrus with her husband, Chief Creative Officer Deacon Webster — has been outspoken about the need to train more women for agency leadership roles. She discusses the decision to offer media and buying services, reconciling programmatic with creative, and her clients' biggest pain points as marketers gear up for the ANA conference next week.

For the past 18 months, Andrew McKechnie has been building Verizon's in-house agency, 140. It's no easy task. Networks, unlike the smartphones that run on them, are tough to make especially sexy. Still, he comes by the gig honestly. McKechnie had most recently served as global group creative director at Apple, after holding creative director titles at agencies including DDB, Y&R and JWT. Andrew joins us to discuss the pros and cons of moving from adland to the brand side, the tension between creativity and technology, and the challenges specific to Verizon.

After a five-year stint at BuzzFeed and a brief run as the CEO of DailyMail.com the last thing you would probably think to do is start a TV network. From scratch. Yet that's precisely what Jon Steinberg did. The former President and COO of BuzzFeed launched Cheddar Inc in 2016, a new media company with the initial goal of becoming the CNBC for millennials. Two and half years in, Cheddar is a bona fide media concern, a live and on demand video news network that broadcasts weekdays from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ Marketsite, and the Flatiron Building in New York alone. Steinberg joins us to discuss the Cheddar business model, skinny bundles, the future of over-the-top streaming video and where he goes from here.

As two of the four co-founders of media and entertainment company Refinery29, Philippe von Borries and Piera Gelardi have used a pro-women, taboo-shattering ethos to build a behemoth catering to the interests and cravings of young women that reaches an audience of upwards of half a billion globally across platforms. It is an audience that brands love (and to hear Refinery's founders tell it, an audience that loves brands back). The couple joins the podcast today as their 29Rooms event packs up in New York and prepares to head to California in December. The two of them — who have also spent the last 13 years as a married couple — discuss the journey, working and living together, and what comes next.

"We're not in the advertisement business. We're in the engagement business," says Nick Brien, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Americas. The advertising company was formed in 2013 to manage parent company Dentsu's operations outside of Japan. Dentsu now generates more than half of its revenue — 59 percent last year — from outside its home market. Yet Dentsu and Dentsu Aegis Network are less known and less understood in the U.S. than the big holding companies WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and IPG. Dentsu, and therefore Brien, has a stated goal of becoming a 100 percent digital business by 2020. We get into that, his background in an industry that he says he loves, creativity (something Dentsu Aegis Network is not particularly known for), acquisition goals and why he's tired of the narrative of the big bad consulting companies infringing on agency turf.

Chances are, even if you are an avid consumer of short form streaming videos, you've never heard of Studio 71. But you've seen their work — or at least your kids have. From Canadian YouTube superstar Lilly Singh to vlogger Roman Atwood to Good Mythical Morning with Rhett and Link — Studio 71 is the media agency behind videos that generate a reported 9.5 billion views across platforms every month. The company, co-founded by Reza Izad, helps creators make money and grow their offering for advertisers, and through merchandizing and intellectual property. Izad joins us today to talk about the streaming media space, where there's been no shortage of sturm und drang over the past year or so.

When Hernan Lopez left his post as president and CEO of Fox International Channels in 2016 to launch a podcast company people asked him a straightforward question: Are you nuts? But he saw parallels between the nascent medium of podcasting and the cable industry of the early 2000s. The company he started is called Wondery, and today it produces premium podcast fare like Dirty John and Business Wars. Wondery's newest show is called Dr. Death. It was released just this Tuesday and is already topping the iTunes charts. Lopez joins me today as the podcast upfronts get underway in New York to break down the landscape as he sees it.

Michael Ventura wrote the book on empathy. Literally. The founder of the New York strategy and design consultancy Sub Rosa is a multi-hyphenate. When he's not advising a portfolio of Fortune 500 clients and progressive start-ups, he is running an experiential shopping venture called Calliope with his wife, running an art gallery and event space, publishing a newsletter called La Petite Mort — the french expression for orgasm — and running an eastern and indigenous medicine and healing practice. Now he's an author, too. His book "Applied Empathy" came out earlier this spring and aims to promote how empathy can be a competitive advantage in business. He joins us on this episode of Ad Lib to discuss empathy, what he means by it, how he arrived at it as a guiding principle and how it's won him some surprising clients, like West Point Military Academy.

When Terry Young founded the agency Sparks & Honey in 2012, it was billed as a "next-generation" agency that really gets culture. Last month the Omnicom shop announced that it was — you guessed it — repositioning as a technology-led cultural consultancy. If it sounds like yet another agency scrambling to maintain relevance with buzzwords, Young says it's an outward reflection of what they've been up to internally for years. He joins us on the Ad Lib podcast to talk about how the agency maps culture. Every day at noon everyone stops what they're doing for an hour for a briefing that distills the Internet's latest (and next) obsessions. We get into what frontiers fascinate him today – space and voice top the list -- and how a mid-career Peace Corps stint continues to inspire.

A zen koan for 2018: How, as a media company today, does one build both scale and trust? It might be easy to cultivate one, but it often comes at the expense of the other. The USA Today Network has managed to do both. With 109 local papers scattered throughout the country, the newspaper company has certainly cobbled together scale. And the journalists on the ground are putting the lie to the idea of "fake news," picking up three Pulitzers for the network this year alone. Still, news is a tough business. And local news is even tougher. USA Today Network has seen continued growth in digital revenue, but not enough to offset declines in traditional advertising. Tasked with solving that riddle is Kevin Gentzel, who joins us on the podcast today.