Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising

The advertising agency business has changed dramatically. Agencies once relied on their reputations, relationships, and a fairly steady stream of pitch opportunities to grow. The phone rang, you got invited to pitch, and if you were good enough, you won the business.

That world is disappearing. Today, agencies have to work much harder to find new clients, build relationships, and create opportunities, often long before there's a brief or even a budget.

And that's a problem because most agency leaders have spent their careers learning how to make great work and win pitches, not how to go out and find business. Suddenly, having conversations with prospective clients has become a regular and essential part of the job.

But when they finally get that meeting, something strange happens. They fall back on talking about themselves, desperate to make an impression and convince the people across the table that they deserve to be there. They talk about their credentials, their capabilities, their awards and their work. And in the process, they often fail to find out what's actually going on in the client's business.

So how do you get these conversations right? And how do you turn them into relationships that eventually lead to work?

That's what we're exploring in this episode of Inspiring Futures with Simon Wylie and Neil Mullarkey, founders of Stop Selling, Start Solving.

Simon is the former CEO of Contagious Communications and Managing Director of Xtreme Information. He's spent decades in the advertising and marketing world, helping agencies understand their markets, win clients and grow. Today, he advises agencies on growth and business model transformation, including through his work with Caroline Johnson at the Business Model Company.

Neil has a rather different background. He's a former president of the legendary Cambridge Footlights and a founding member of the Comedy Store Players, where he worked alongside Mike Myers and Paul Merton. For more than 25 years, he's also been teaching improvisation and communication skills to business leaders.

Together, they've developed an approach that combines Simon's understanding of agency new business with Neil's expertise in improvisation and human communication.

We talk about why selling can actually get in the way of winning business, why listening is so difficult, how to prepare without becoming a prisoner of your presentation, and how storytelling and improvisation can completely change the dynamic of a meeting.

We also get into the commercial realities. How do you know whether a prospect has a problem worth solving? Who actually makes the decisions? And how do you avoid having lots of lovely meetings that never turn into anything?

It's a fascinating and very practical conversation about something that has become increasingly important to the survival and success of advertising agencies: how to stop talking about yourself and start having conversations that lead somewhere.

Everyone agrees the world is uncertain. Far fewer ask what that means for how we plan. On the Inspiring Futures podcast, futurist Joana Lenkova (ex-Disney, founder of Futures Forward) made the case better than anyone I’ve heard. Here it is in four lines:

1. The past is no longer a reliable guide. Spreadsheets tell you what happened. They can’t tell you what’s coming.

2. Not acting is still a decision. Skip foresight, and you’ve bet on “tomorrow looks like yesterday” without checking the bet.

3. Uncertainty is also an opening. Foresight lets you shape the future instead of just reacting to it.

4. It only works if it’s tied to decisions. Insight nobody acts on is just an interesting report.

That last point is the heart of Joana’s new book, From Foresight to Action: Your Strategic Decision-Making Playbook (Wiley, August 2026). It’s built to close the “Decision Gap” between knowing what might happen and choosing confidently today, through five standalone Strategic Future Labs that work like flight simulators for decision-making and feed into a complete Futures Strategy Canvas.

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/shop/general-introductory-business-management/from-foresight-to-action-your-strategic-decision-making-playbook-p-9781394425884

What does the agency of the future actually look like?

My latest Inspiring Futures conversation is with Lior Eldan, co-founder of Moburst.

Lior started Moburst in 2013 as a specialist mobile marketing agency. Today, after five acquisitions, it's a 150-person global business with a dramatically broader offer.

But what's particularly interesting is how AI is driving its next transformation.

It's not simply about making existing services faster or cheaper. Moburst is rethinking entire workflows, building its own AI capabilities, investing in new skills and moving into areas such as AI transformation for clients.

A few interesting questions emerge from Lior's experience:

• What happens when an agency stops defining itself by a particular marketing discipline?
• How do you decide what capabilities to build, buy or reinvent?
• What does an agency actually sell when AI can perform so much of the work?
• And what kinds of people become most valuable when the work itself is constantly changing?

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the agency of the future isn't how it uses AI. It's how AI changes what the agency becomes.

Six things I learned from Ben Schott

Ben Schott is a hard man to pin down. He's a writer, designer, former photographer, and collector of wonderfully obscure information. He's best known for Schott's Original Miscellany, a little book that started life as a Christmas gift and became a publishing sensation, selling millions of copies around the world. He's since written bestselling books, contributed to The New York Times, and built a remarkable career out of curiosity and doing things his own way.

We had a wide-ranging conversation on Inspiring Futures about creativity, curiosity, AI, and how ideas happen.

Six things stayed with me.

1. Only do what only you can do. Find your distinctive way of seeing the world. Look for the holes only you can fill.

2. Constraints set you free. Forget thinking outside the box. Start inside it. Limitations can be the greatest stimulus to creativity.

3. Pay attention to what catches your attention. The unexpected connection, the strange thought, the idea that won't go away.

4. Let people complete the idea. The best creativity leaves something for the audience to discover. 

5. Learn the secret language. Every community has its own words, codes and expressions. Understand how people talk, and you'll get closer to understanding how they think.

6. Make things because you love making them. Ben's first Miscellany was created to amuse himself and his friends. It became an international bestseller. 

Perhaps the thread connecting all six is this:

In a world increasingly obsessed with making tons of stuff, Ben reminds us of the value of noticing more.

In this episode, I talk to Sean Akaks, Co-Founder and CEO of SonderCo, and Jessie Mash, Co-Founder and President.

SonderCo sits between brands and the increasingly complicated world of celebrities, athletes, creators, entertainment, and culture, helping companies work out not simply who they can get, but who actually makes sense.

And both Sean and Jessie have unusually good backgrounds for doing it.

Jessie began her career at The Oprah Winfrey Show, before moving through Edelman, television production, and the brand world, eventually leading partnerships at Monica + Andy. 

Sean came from a very different direction, moving from nonprofit work and recruiting into MasterClass, where he helped structure and negotiate more than 200 talent deals involving everyone from Serena Williams to former presidents. Together, those experiences became the foundation for SonderCo.

The reason this conversation is worth listening to is that influence is being rewritten.

A creator can matter more than a movie star. A celebrity can become a founder. A YouTuber can become a brand owner. Brands have more people, platforms, and cultural moments to choose from than ever before, while somehow everybody still seems to chase the same names and turn up in the same places.

Sean and Jessie work right in the middle of that collision.

So if you want to understand who actually has influence now, how brands decide who is worth betting on, and why the obvious choice may increasingly be the wrong one, this is a very useful conversation.

Interesting story here about a recent program they did for HabitBurger

https://www.buzzfeed.com/business-news/habit-burger-sonderco-chef-residency-platform-jessie-mash-jack-lettenmair

The market research forces a choice between speed and depth. Qualitative research is deep but slow, bespoke, and expensive to scale, while quantitative segmentation builds simplified models that brands mistakenly treat as exact reality rather than a starting point.

Dose of Reality positions itself as the bridge: instant access and deep human context.

Brands hide behind data to survive a culture of short-termism. 

Three dynamics drive this: executives paralyzed by fear of making the wrong move under short-term KPIs; data used as a defensive shield to justify decisions rather than a window into real behavior; and agencies telling clients only what they want to hear, creating a race to the bottom that degrades creative work. 

On top of that, the ad industry romanticizes a narrow, curated version of culture.

Real strategic advantage lies in the messy, unglamorous realities of everyday life, not polished inner-city aesthetics.

Synthetic AI respondents don't generate net-new insight; they recycle unvalidated stereotypes. Trained on things like internet forum posts, they echo and reinforce existing internet stereotypes while missing the texture of real behavior.

Algorithms can't capture physical space and stakes — the nervous body language, the context of a room, why the door gets closed during a hard conversation.

The "90% accuracy" trap: AI may predict ~90% of consumer responses by mapping predictable baseline demographics, but that 90% is table stakes. All competitive advantage, whitespace, and creative inspiration lives in the surprising, illogical 10% that models can't predict.

Traditional data measures binary answers and misses emotional intensity — the "Brexit effect," where polling missed major shifts because it couldn't sense the undercurrent that deep conversations detect much earlier.

Dose of Reality is a subscription platform giving brands and agencies on-demand access to thousands of hours of real, unfiltered human video, images, interviews, and observations, replacing the old bespoke, slow, cost-prohibitive ethnography model. 

AI's proper role here is a sparring partner, not a synthetic generator: custom AI layers search, organize, and navigate massive multimodal human data to surface real truths faster, never to fabricate insights or fake humans.

Genuine research requires genuine empathy, which can't be coded. 

The ultimate synthesis: moving brands from cold, metric-obsessed transactional entities back toward "brand benevolence," genuine utility and community support, the kind of brands that actually matter to people.

https://doseofreality.fyi/

In the wide-ranging conversation, we talk about strategy, creativity, and how the two work together. What you learn when you work for Mother. How good it is when you do all the strategy work with a ton of rigor and time. The challenges of what happens when the world of creativity comes face-to-face with the corporate world. We also talked about the WNBA and the music scene in Jersey. 

Mike Lane sold dealer.com in 2014 after 16 years, 700 employees, billions in ad spend. 

These days he's running Fluency, an operating system for digital advertising. 

A single media strategist today has to run Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, CTV, each its own beast, while margins shrink and budgets don't. 

Fluency pulls in a client's data, runs it through reusable playbooks, and sets up and optimizes campaigns across every channel automatically. Work that took eight hours becomes a button.

His bet: advertising is moving onto systems the same way stock trading left the paper floor for E-Trade and Schwab. Ten years out, doing it by hand won't be an option.

In the episode we also get into:
 → How creative is being pulled inside the media workflow. AI generates the options, testing picks the winner, but a human still owns the publish button.
 → Why "advertising engineer" is becoming a real job title
 → What clients mean when they say "I don't know what my agency is doing anymore"

Worth a listen if you build, run, or sell advertising.