Bite BIG - Boss Women Leading Big

What does it take to give a brand its voice? Not a tagline. Not a campaign. A genuine, distinctive, ownable way of being in the world through words.

In this episode of Bite Big, recorded live in London as part of our UK creative leadership series, Amber Bonney sits down with Vikki Ross, the woman described by Creativebrief as "the UK’s leading tone of voice and copywriting expert."

Vikki has spent almost 30 years shaping how some of the world’s most iconic brands talk. Sky. BAFTA. ITV. IMAX. And most recently, Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar, four distinct British luxury vehicle brands, voiced simultaneously, from scratch.

But what makes Vikki’s story worth leaning into isn’t just the portfolio. It’s the philosophy. Her mantra, trust the process, or more accurately as she reframes it in this episode, trust the journey, isn’t a slogan. It’s how she has navigated an entire career built on happy accidents, open doors and the discipline to wait and see. No grand plan. No career ladder. Just curiosity, craft and an absolute refusal to let brands sound like everyone else.

In this conversation, Amber and Vikki get into the real mechanics of brand voice: what it takes to find it, how to protect it, and why AI can execute copy but can’t replicate the soul of a brand. They talk about the Jaguar rebrand pile-on (Vikki was in the room; she has thoughts), the growing sea of sameness that AI is accelerating, and why she rewrote her entire approach to brand guidelines so that non-copywriters could actually use them.

Vikki also gets honest about the nervousness behind her public confidence, the side hustles that didn’t pan out, and why the best advice she’d give her 16 year old self is the same thing she tells her clients: just wait. It’ll all happen.This is a conversation about words. But it’s also about conviction, patience and the underestimated power of sounding like yourself.

Follow *The Edison Agency* and *Amber Bonney* for more electric conversations with boss women leading big brands.

Links:
Vikki's LinkedIn:  https://uk.linkedin.com/in/vikkiross
Vikki's X Account: @VikkiRossWrites
Vikki's podcast: A word with... https://open.spotify.com/show/01cSW2BAMhVFptse468Xp1?si=cf231118d07a4a26
Refuge Web: https://refuge.org.uk/
Bite Big Instagram - @bitebig.podcast
Amber's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberbonney
Amber's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amberbonney
The Edison Agency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-edison-agency
The Edison Agency Instagram: @edison.agency

Credits:
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio

In Episode 5, Amber sits down with Amy Kean, social psychologist, bestselling author, CEO and Creative Director of Good Shout, and one of the most credentialed and unconventional minds working in creativity and brand. Amy spent 17 years inside global advertising networks, from Mindshare APAC to Havas Media Labs to Starcom's global creative and innovation team and she left with both the receipts and a responsibility to do something about it.

Amy's personal mantra is Eleanor Roosevelt's famous line: 'Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.' And this conversation goes deep on what it actually costs to live by those words, from being told by a recruitment consultant that her Essex accent was 'too common to be around important people', to losing her confidence at the top of her career in Singapore, to writing a bestselling picture book for adults called The Little Girl Who Gave Zero F*cks as an act of reclaiming her own voice.

They talk about the sociology of voice, why women in their 30s, 40s and 50s get quieter, not louder, and why that silence is never irrational. About the advertising industry's shamelessness, brilliant with words, catastrophic with action, and why Amy doesn't believe it will ever have its Me Too moment. About the perils of likeability, likability labor, and why older women, bless perimenopause, are statistically the group that cares least about being liked.

And about Good Shout for Girls, Amy's charitable initiative to give teenage girls public speaking skills before society gets the chance to take their voices away. Because Amy wrote The Little Girl Who Gave Zero F*cks for women who'd already lost their voice. The charity exists so the next generation never needs the book.

This one is sharp, honest, funny and genuinely electric. Two women who give zero fucks about what anyone thinks of a conversation that needs to happen.

Follow *The Edison Agency* and *Amber Bonney* for more electric conversations with boss women leading big brands.

Links:
Amy's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amycharlottekean
Guest Instagram: @amyckean
Good Shout Web: goodshoutcommunity.com
Good Shout for Girls Web: justgiving.com/crowdfunding/amy-kean
The Book: The Little Girl Who Gave Zero F*cks — available via goodshoutcommunity.com
Bite Big Instagram - @bitebig.podcast
Amber's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberbonney
Amber's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amberbonney
The Edison Agency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-edison-agency
The Edison Agency Instagram: @edison.agency

Credits:
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio

In Episode 4, Amber sits down with Rania Robinson, CEO and Partner of Quiet Storm, the independent, B Corp certified, employee-owned London creative agency that has been starting storms since 1995.

Rania’s personal mantra is “Filercely Independent,” and in this conversation, she proves it isn’t a slogan. It’s the architecture of everything she’s built.

Rania came to the UK from Egypt at three years old, started school without a word of English, and left at 16 with no conventional qualifications. What followed was anything but conventional. She moved through music publishing, video distribution, shopper marketing, and culture-driven experiential work before walking into Quiet Storm to help on a pitch one day and never leaving. Reluctant CEO. Best move she ever made.

In this episode, Amber & Rania get into what independence really costs and what it gives back. Rania is candid about the trade-offs: saying no to private equity, no to Interpublic Group, and yes to converting Quiet Storm to an Employee Ownership Trust, a decision that put every employee in as a stakeholder and left not one regret in its wake.

They also go deep on the state of brand creativity in 2026, why consensus culture is killing the best ideas, why brands keep abandoning the fundamentals that actually work, and why original work will always make some people uncomfortable. That’s not a problem. That’s the point.

On female leadership, Rania brings a rare honesty: the cost of advocacy work when you’re also running a business, the subliminal message that absence sends to women coming up behind you, and her practical, no-nonsense advice to any woman who’s feeling like she doesn’t belong in the room: look for the evidence. It’s already there.

Follow *The Edison Agency* and *Amber Bonney* for more electric conversations with boss women leading big brands.

Links:
Rania LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/rania-robinson-01b68511
Quiet Storm LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/quiet-storm
Quiet Storm Instagram: @quietstormagency
Create Not Hate: https://www.createnothate.org
Bite Big Instagram - @bitebig.podcast
Amber's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberbonney
Amber's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amberbonney
The Edison Agency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-edison-agency
The Edison Agency Instagram: @edison.agency

Credits:
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio

There are very few people who can claim to have started a revolution. Lesley Gracie is one of them.

In Episode 3 of Season 4 of BITE BIG, Amber Bonney travels to Girvan on the southwest coast of Scotland, and into one of the most extraordinary creative spaces in the world, The Gin Palace, to sit down with Lesley Gracie, Master Distiller and the pioneering creator of Hendrick's Gin.

Lesley's story is one of the most unlikely in business. A Hull chemist who started her career making medicine taste less awful. A woman who moved to Scotland in 1988 to marry her husband (always called 'the current husband') and walked into a job that, twenty-something years later, would change the way the world drinks gin. Inspired by her dad's lifelong advice, 'if you want it, go for it', Lesley has spent 38 years at William Grant & Sons building something that simply didn't exist before she made it.

In this episode, Lesley and Amber get into the real story behind Hendrick's, the vague brief ('make something totally different'), the months of failed botanical combinations, and the day the marketing team revealed a short, black, dumpy bottle that looked nothing like anything else on the back bar in 1999. Lesley's response? 'What?'

They go deep on what it actually means to hold a brand's core identity steady while letting innovation run wild at the edges, and why Lesley believes the consistency of Hendrick's is one of its most powerful assets. The recipe hasn't changed. The bottle hasn't changed. And yet every limited edition tells a completely new story, built from her botanical obsessions, from greenhouse experiments, from a cacao flower garnish on a cocktail in Mexico that sent her down a months-long rabbit hole.

Lesley Gracie has received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Hull. She's been inducted into the Gin Magazine Hall of Fame. She's one of only four people in the world who knows the full Hendrick's recipe. 

Strip away the titles and the accolades — what Lesley Gracie most wants to be known for is this: she enjoys what she does. And it shows.

Follow The Edison Agency and Amber Bonney for more electric conversations with boss women building big brands.

Links:

Lesley Gracie LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lesley-gracie-62a64423/
Hendricks Web: hendricksgin.com/
Hendricks Instagram: @hendricksgin
William Grant & Sons Web: https://www.williamgrant.com/
William Grant & Sons UK instagram: @williamgrantuk
Guide Dogs UK: www.guidedogs.org.uk/
Bite Big Instagram - @bitebig.podcast
Amber's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberbonney
Amber's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amberbonney
The Edison Agency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-edison-agency
The Edison Agency Instagram: @edison.agency

Credits:
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio

What does it look like when a working-class girl from the UK with no money, no models and no road map builds a global discipline from scratch? You get Dr Rachel Lawes.

In Episode 2 of Season 4 of BITE BIG, recorded on location in   London, Amber sits down with Dr Rachel Lawes, social psychologist, futurist, author of two landmark books on semiotics, and founder of Lawes Consulting, to get under the skin of the woman who turned an academic discipline most   people can't pronounce into a commercial superpower used by Unilever, P&G, LEGO, Diageo, Warner Bros. Discovery and more.

Rachel's personal mantra, Read, Create, Give Thanks, sounds   deceptively simple. But as this conversation reveals, it's a survival strategy, a creative practice and a daily act of courage, all in three words.

From the semiotic field trips she took clients on through Christmas fairs and airports, to teaching a large language model to read visual emotion the way she does, Rachel brings a rare combination: intellectual rigour, commercial   instinct and a refusal to let either get boring.

This episode covers the power of courage in branding, the dangerous brilliance of 'shittification',   why consistency edges out uniqueness, and the real cost of brands that chase change without conviction. Rachel is also bracingly honest about what it's like to be a woman in a field that defaults to male expertise, and her strategy for building loyalty, lifting others and designing a career on your own terms.

And then there's Elizabeth. Rachel's sister. Breast cancer   survivor. Sahara trekker. The very human heart behind the Give Thanks in her mantra.

This is one of those episodes that makes you want to go on a  semiotic field trip, rethink every brand you've ever touched, and call your sister.

Follow *The Edison Agency* and *Amber Bonney* for more electric conversations with boss women leading big brands

Links
Dr Rachel Lawes LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rachellawes/
Lawes consulting Web: lawes-consulting.co.uk
CoppaFeel Web: coppafeel.org
Bite Big Instagram - @bitebig.podcast
Amber's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberbonney
Amber's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amberbonney
The Edison Agency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-edison-agency
The Edison Agency Instagram: @edison.agency

Credits:
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio

In Episode 1 of Season 4 of BITE BIG, recorded live in London, Amber Bonney sits down with Vanessa Sanyauke — Founder and CEO of Girls Talk Global, a community marketing agency that has connected over 60,000 women across 37 countries to brands who want to reach them in ways that actually matter.

Vanessa's personal mantra is "Failure is not an option." And yet her first social enterprise ran for five years and failed. What she did next is what makes this conversation genuinely worth your time. She didn't reframe the failure, she used it. Got a Masters. Built smarter. Launched Girls Talk from scratch, doing free events in city venues, asking people to speak for nothing, growing a community purely on the value of connection, before a product, before a revenue model, before a pitch deck.

Two years in, the women in that community were turning to Vanessa and asking, "Can you work with my company?" That movement became Girls Talk Global. Brands like Apple, Meta, Visa, Zalando and Beats by Dre have since activated with her platform delivering up to 9x ROI on event activations. Because when you build trust first, commerce follows.

In this episode, Vanessa and Amber unpack the messy reality of entrepreneurship, the feast-or-famine cashflow, the toxicity she experienced inside UK Parliament, the colleague at a global bank who told her she saw her as competition (in the DEI team, of all places), and why Vanessa thinks the companies rolling back DEI commitments have already lost, they just don't know it yet.

This is a conversation about power, community, conviction and what it means to keep going when failure feels like the only option on the table.

Follow *The Edison Agency* and *Amber Bonney* for more electric conversations with boss women leading big brands.

Links:
Vanessa's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/vanessa-chiedza-sanyauke-9b41171a/
Vanessa's Instagram: @vanessasanyauke
Girls Talk Global: girlstalklondon.com
The Vanessa Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-vanessa-podcast/id1810074161
Refuge: refuge.org.uk/
Bite Big Instagram - @bitebig.podcast
Amber's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberbonney
Amber's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amberbonney
The Edison Agency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-edison-agency
The Edison Agency Instagram: @edison.agency

Credits:
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio

If there's one woman who has built an entire career on not giving a damn what anyone thinks, it's Cindy Gallop.

In this episode of BITE BIG, Amber Bonney goes head-to-head with one of the most fearless, sharp-tongued and unapologetically disruptive forces in global advertising and tech. Cindy Gallop studied literature, built a powerhouse advertising agency in New York, worked on iconic brands including Ray-Ban and Coca-Cola,  and then walked away from all of it to build something the industry had never seen before: MakeLoveNotPorn, a platform designed to end rape culture by role-modelling what real, consensual, communicative sex actually looks like.

Seventeen years in, Cindy is still fighting against algorithmic suppression, investor conservatism, and a financial infrastructure that punishes "adult content" regardless of its mission. She's now also launching MakeLoveNotPorn.academy: a global aggregator for sex education content that is being blocked, censored and de-platformed everywhere else. She calls it, deliberately, the Google of sex ed.

This is not a polished corporate story. This is a woman who will tell you that women are over-mentored and underfunded, that the only way to live your life is to not give a damn, and that "the market of human happiness" is the biggest market of them all and that investors should be funding the fuck out of it.

Cindy also gets into: how the UK campaign "Yes, Sex Please, We're British" is pioneering a national conversation about sex education; why female solidarity on social media is one of the best things to come out of the internet; and what she'd tell any woman who feels invisible at 40.

Buckle up. This one bites big.

Want More?
Listen to the full episode of *BITE BIG* with Cindy Gallop on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Follow *The Edison Agency* and *Amber Bonney* for more electric conversations with boss women leading big brands.

GUEST LINKS
Cindy Gallop — LinkedIn
Cindy Gallop — Twitter/X @cindygallop

ORGANISATIONS
MakeLoveNotPorn — Website
MakeLoveNotPorn.academy — Website (early beta)
Yes, Sex Please, We're British — Campaign
Dear Cindy — Substack

AMBER & EDISON
Amber Bonney — Instagram
Amber Bonney — LinkedIn
The Edison Agency — LinkedIn
The Edison Agency — Instagram

CREDITS
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Social Assets – The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio

In Episode 18 of BITE BIG, I sat down with Astrud Burgess, Group Chief Marketing Officer at ANZ, to unpack the mindset, mantra and marketing savvy behind her powerhouse leadership.

Astrud’s journey from the retail floor to the C-suite is anything but typical. Starting as a graduate at ANZ, her path has spanned continents, industries, and disciplines, from media and telco in London to transforming customer experience, brand, and data strategy back home. Now, as Group CMO, Astrud is proving that creative instinct and commercial impact are not mutually exclusive.

Her mantra? “Optimise for joy.” A deceptively simple philosophy that drives how she leads, how she works, and how she stays sane in a high-pressure world.

👑 Boss Takeaways from Episode 18 with Astrud:

• “Optimise for joy.” It’s not about chasing happiness, it’s about choosing the work that energises you, builds momentum, and lets you play to your strengths.
• Embrace job kleptomania, mindfully. Astrud owns her love of saying yes to big opportunities, but with one caveat: it has to serve joy, not just busyness.
• Creative empathy is a leadership superpower. Whether leading data teams or developing brand platforms, Astrud blends logic with intuition and consistently backs her team with trust.
• Longevity in agency partnerships pays off. Her 12-year relationship with ANZ’s creative agency proves that trust, listening, and curiosity lead to bold, effective work.
• Brand is your trust engine. Especially in industries under public scrutiny, brand isn’t fluff, it’s foundational. And when done well, it lifts every other comms piece in market.
• Intuition = a personal data set. For a leader driven by evidence, Astrud still champions the value of gut instinct, because decades of experience is data, too.
• Help women take up space. From mentoring young marketers to advocating for financial literacy, Astrud is helping more women step up, take risks, and thrive.

🔗 Follow BITE BIG for more unfiltered stories from women who lead big—one mantra at a time.

Links:
Astrud LinkedIn
ANZ Website
ANZ Instagram
Orange Sky NZ

Amber's Instagram
Amber's LinkedIn
The Edison Agency's LinkedIn
The Edison Agency's Instagram

CREDITS
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Social Assets – Alyssa Payad, Intern, The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio

In Episode 17 of BITE BIG, we go behind the scenes of one of Australia's most successful luxury skincare brands, Rationale, with its trailblazing CEO, Shamini Rajarethnam. From navigating global expansion and regional relocation, to staying ruthlessly focused in a fragmented market, Shamini shares the story of building an enduring brand without compromising on values.

With a mantra passed down from her father, "Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care", Shamini's leadership style is deeply human, deeply strategic, and unapologetically clear on what matters most: purpose, people, and integrity.

👑 Boss Takeaways from Episode 17 with Sharm

• Leadership is caring: Sharm’s leadership mantra reminds us that empathy and connection are the real currencies of influence.I
• Curiosity builds capability - From digital marketer to CEO, Sharm’s rise was fuelled by intellectual curiosity, humility, and the courage to ask questions, no ego required.“
• Integrity is your strategy- Saying no to distractions and staying laser-focused on your North Star isn’t just brand discipline it’s brand leadership.
• Culture starts at the top You can’t delegate culture. Sharm leads her team with the same care and intention she brings to her customers.
• Bite big, but know when to stop- From global expansion to building a regional HQ, Sharm proves that knowing when to pivot or quit is as brave as pushing forward.
• DE&I drives insight - Diversity isn’t a checkbox—it’s a competitive edge. From packaging to policy, inclusive voices lead to better decisions and better design.

🔗 Follow BITE BIG for more unfiltered stories from women who lead big—one mantra at a time.

Links:
Shamini's LinkedIn
Shamini's Instagram

Rationale Skincare
Rationale Instagram
Rationale Facebook

Primed to Perform by Neel Doshi
The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins
Fight Parkinson’s

Amber's Instagram
Amber's LinkedIn
The Edison Agency's LinkedIn
The Edison Agency's Instagram

CREDITS
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Social Assets – Alyssa Payad, Intern, The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio

Episode 16 of BITE BIG features the brilliant Professor Jenni Romaniuk, Associate Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and leading voice in marketing effectiveness, brand salience and distinctive brand assets.

Jenni’s mantra, “Progress is more important than perfection”is the lens through which she approaches her life’s work: from developing world-first theories in mental availability to helping brands avoid the costly trap of vanity metrics. Her insights are as grounded as they are game-changing.

👑 Boss Takeaways from Episode 16 with Jenni

• Progress is more important than perfection – Jenni reminds us that great ideas come from testing many imperfect ones. Don’t wait for perfect, start moving and make it better as you go.
• Evidence VS Ego – Good marketers don’t just have opinions; they evolve with the evidence. The best ideas hold up under scrutiny.
• Distinctive beats different – You don’t need to be wildly different to win. You need to be unmistakably you. Distinctive assets are your brand’s true superpower.
• Don’t chase the loudest voices – Social media can distort reality. Make decisions based on balanced data, not Twitter tantrums.
• Big brands aren’t invincible – Size brings opportunity, but also complexity. Without visual consistency and evidence-led direction, scale can become a liability.
• Know what you know – Confidence comes from expertise. Jenni’s advice to women: anchor your voice in what you know best and let your impact grow from there.

🔗 Follow BITE BIG for more stories from women who lead big one mantra at a time.

Links:
Jenni Romaniuk LinkedIn
Jenni Romaniuk Books
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute web
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Instagram
Academy Of Social Sciences Australia
Catherine House
Amber's Instagram
Amber's LinkedIn

CREDITS
Host & ECD – Amber Bonney, The Edison Agency Founder
Producer  – Niki Beeston, Group Account Director, The Edison Agency
Marketing – Liz Archer, Head of Operations, The Edison Agency
Social Assets – Alyssa Payad, Intern, The Edison Agency
Post Production – Francine Toscano, 17th Street Audio