Agency Land

Bec Sands believes keeping your work to yourself is a disservice. If you’re not putting it out there, the person who needed it at that exact moment never gets it.

She spent twelve years making other people famous before she started on herself. Agency PR first, then in-house at JLL and Knight Frank, where she ran communications and her team took home a Golden Target. In 2019 she walked out and started her own thing, and she’s just published her first book, What You Came Here to Create.

We get into the agency years that wore her down, the manager who rebuilt her confidence, and why the women she mentors always think they need one more degree before they can be seen. Plus the books that changed both our lives, why you can get addicted to feeling bad, and what it takes to finally get comfortable being visible.

Connect with Bec https://au.linkedin.com/in/becsands
or find out more: https://www.becsands.com/

Got a question, topic or guest suggestion? [email protected] or visit youregoodgetbetter.com. Special thanks to DOUBLESTAR.CO and thanks to PhaseOne and Fat Cat Music for the use of their track Crash & Burn feat. Northlane.

Ian Rumsby has a theory on judgment that cuts against everything you've heard about experience. Most people assume tough situations sharpen your judgment automatically. Ian's spent decades watching that fail: plenty of people go through brutal experiences and come out the other side with terrible judgment anyway.

His read: judgment is sensory. Not taught, not earned through hardship alone, but built through exposure, curiosity and a level of self-awareness most people skip. "Judgment is the habit of making good decisions," he says, and he means habit literally. Something you practise, not something that happens to you.

We trace how he got there: four years in the Royal Navy, twenty years inside Weber Shandwick from the ground floor to Chief Strategy Officer APAC, his own consultancy AEIO built during COVID, acquired eighteen months later, then Chief Client Officer Southeast Asia at APCO. None of it planned. All of it, he says, came down to judgment calls made one at a time.

Agency Land is a podcast about advertising, ambition, and the lies we tell ourselves to survive both. Hosted by Jye Smith, part of the You're Good, Get Better platform: coaching, consulting and content for people in advertising, PR and communications who want to get better at the work without getting worse at everything else. This episode is brought to you by DOUBLESTAR.CO.

Music: "Crash & Burn" feat. Northlane, by PhaseOne. Used with permission of Teamwrk Mgmt and Fat Cat Music.

Design: Jarra Naughton. Art direction: Carla Martin.

After 26 years inside the network, Darren Burns is back on the outside, asking what comes next.

Darren Burns has spent more than two decades building and leading agencies across Asia Pacific. From a one-year plan to study Mandarin in Taiwan to leading major PR operations across China, Singapore and the region, he has worked through the boom years, the hard decisions and the constant change that comes with agency life.

In this conversation, Darren talks about moving from a directive leader to one who listens, influences and builds real buy-in. He reflects on why culture matters more than margin, why bad leadership needs to be dealt with early, and why the best agencies still combine high standards with basic decency.

He also gets into the bigger shift facing the industry. Holding companies are stripping back, independent agencies are finding new momentum, and the old idea that one career path fits everyone no longer holds. Darren makes the case for senior people who keep evolving, younger people who have options, and agency cultures that can handle different points of view without turning into an echo chamber.

It is a proper Agency Land conversation about leadership, resilience, China, ambition and why, despite the stress, agency life can still give you more than it takes.[Attachment]

Got a question, topic or guest suggestion? Visit youregoodgetbetter.com.

Follow Jye on Instagram and X at @jyesmith. You can also find more at doublestar.co and jyesmith.com.

Special thanks to Carla Martin and Jarra Naughton from DOUBLESTAR.CO, and thanks to PhaseOne and Fat Cat Music for the use of their track “Crash & Burn” featuring Northlane.

Nobody knows exactly what they’re doing. Some people are simply more comfortable moving before they have the complete picture.

For Nichole Provatas, confidence is not certainty. It is knowing what you know. Knowing what you don’t. Then getting on with it.

Now Managing Director, Australia at Sling & Stone, Nichole joins Jye to talk about saying ambition out loud, becoming a beginner again and the luck, trust and discomfort that polished career stories tend to leave out.

She also makes the case for a different kind of communications practitioner. Influence no longer sits in one place. It moves between mastheads, creators, newsletters, Reddit threads, podcasts and AI search. The job is no longer simply to broadcast. It is to understand culture well enough to make the right match.

A conversation about confidence without certainty, and why good leaders listen before they change anything.

Got a question, topic or guest suggestion? [email protected] or visit youregoodgetbetter.com — Special thanks to DOUBLESTAR.CO and thanks to PhaseOne and Fat Cat Music for the use of their track Crash & Burn feat. Northlane.

Stanley Johnson has spent more than three decades in advertising, from writing commercial-real-estate ads and mastering the discipline of hundreds of headlines, to leading creative teams across agencies, technology businesses and brand transformation projects.

In this conversation, Stan unpacks the difference between being a good creative and being a creative leader; why a creative director’s job is to help make ideas happen; the internal doubt that can keep you sharp; and what burnout taught him about choosing clients, culture and work worth doing. He also talks about MYOB, @BrandDNA, AI as an intelligent assistant rather than artificial intelligence, and why agencies need to rebuild their commitment to nurturing young talent.

With special thanks to Carla Martin and Jarra Vreman-Naughton of DOUBLESTAR CO for their support and contribution to the production of You’re Good, Get Better.

Music featured in this episode: “Crash & Burn” featuring Northlane, by PhaseOne, courtesy of Fat Cat Music.

Oliver Weidlich has spent decades years inside every major shift in how humans and computers talk to each other, from triple-tap Nokia keypads to Palm Pilots, from the iPhone moment that finally made UX matter, to spatial computing years before Apple Vision Pro existed. He built Contxtual (formerly Mobile Experience) not to scale into an agency of hundreds, but as what he calls a “lifestyle company,” small, specialist, and deliberately built around the work he wants to do rather than the work that pays. In this episode, Oliver traces his path from psychology undergrad to UX pioneer, explains why empathy is a teachable skill rather than an innate gift, and gets candid about the hard, unglamorous grind of building an independent practice with no big brand behind him. He also lays out where spatial computing is headed, and the very real ethical dangers, from pupil-dilation tracking to advertiser access to biometric data, that come with computers that finally understand the physical world around us.

Thanks to Carla Martin, Jarra Vreman-Naughton and DOUBLESTAR CO.

Special thanks to PhaseOne and Fat Cat Music Group for the use of their song, “Crash & Burn” ft. Northlane.

Stop Asking Your Client To Do Your Job For You!

Strategy Hotline is back. Sophia Brockman returns with real questions sent in from agency people, brand side, freelancers, and consultants around the world, and Jye answers them live, no prep, no mercy.

This one covers building in public (and when not to), whether to take the podcast ad partnership, what to do when a client hands you a brief for "everyone 25 plus," and a new closing segment where Jye puts Sophia on the spot with zero warning. Her answer might come back to haunt her.

Thanks to
PhaseOne
Fat Cat Music — "Crash & Burn feat. Northlane"

Jayden Garcia did agency land backwards. Studied finance and law, worked at Westpac, then started a run club with his two best mates called Runday. The content took off, so they quit their jobs, started a production company, picked a name so safe it meant nothing, then rebranded to Pool Party. Now they run a creative studio and music venue out of Erskineville and never asked anyone's permission to do it.

This one's about looking good as a strategy, friendship as the foundation and the liability, and why you should get out and do it before you talk yourself out of it.

Hosted by Jye Smith

Special thanks to PhaseOne
Fat Cat Music — "Crash & Burn feat. Northlane"

Alex Adams was a brand manager at Red Bull, did a year in PR she hated, then built a career most agency people only talk about. Ms Darlinghurst, then the food blog Eat Drink Play, grew to over 100,000 newsletter subscribers. Secret Foodies, running secret location dinners across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. A partnership with Diageo. And now Darling Crackles, a specialty hospitality marketing agency.

She got married and divorced in the same month last December, married to her husband, divorced from her business partner. She talks about why Secret Foodies matters more now than ever in a loneliness epidemic, why she'd never tell her younger self to change a thing, staff cost ratios, scope creep, and the handwritten note that's guided every business she's built: make it clear to avoid awkwardness later.

Follow Alex: @msdarlinghurst
Secret Foodies: @secretfoodies
Eat Drink Play: @eatdrinkplaysyd
Darling Crackles: @darlingcrackles

Got a question, topic or guest suggestion? [email protected] or visit youregoodgetbetter.com — Special thanks to DOUBLESTAR.CO and thanks to PhaseOne and Fat Cat Music for the use of their track Crash & Burn feat. Northlane

Gary Bertwistle has never run an agency, never held an agency title, never sat on an org chart. He's still spent more time in agency rooms than most agency people ever will.

This is the episode about the gap between the career you're supposed to build and the one you're actually for.

Gary takes Jye from his Austereo days running promotions in the rock and roll era of radio, to the keynote speaker who walked out of a senior corporate role with no fallback plan, to the founder of the Ideas Vault who sold it to his own barista, to the operator who built a ten person agency and then shut the whole thing down to become just himself.

Along the way: why creativity needs a deadline and a repository, why marketing breaks when you chase the medium instead of the message, the two questions every room is silently asking you, and the four questions every leader should put to their team.

He's the rare guest who has seen agency life from the outside in. It might be the most useful seat in the house.

Gary's website
Gary's LinkedIn
Listen to The Mojo Sessions

Got a question, topic or guest suggestion? [email protected] or visit youregoodgetbetter.com -- Special thanks to DOUBLESTAR.CO and thanks to PhaseOne and Fat Cat Music for the use of their track Crash & Burn feat. Northlane.