From Culture to Creativity: Making Great Work Happen

Justin Gomes, founder of ad agency Bananas, interviewed Gillian Rightford about building a creative culture in an agency, building better relationships between agencies & marketers to create better commercial creativity - the whys and hows.

Creativity isn’t just a spark—it’s a measurable business tool. Drawing on over three decades in advertising, Gillian Rightford shares lessons from helping to lead the transformation of Lintas into a creative powerhouse and her current work at Adtherapy bridging client-agency relationships.

She highlights how cultural change requires both structural reform and symbolic acts, why emotional intelligence and mental health support are critical in creative environments, and how short-termism undermines long-term brand building.

At the heart of her approach is the concept of “creative fitness”—helping clients and agencies build the skills, confidence, and trust needed to unlock stronger ideas and better outcomes.

For agencies and marketers alike, the message is clear: treat creativity as a strategic asset, invest in people and relationships, and the results will follow.

Neil Higgs is a veteran statistician, who has developed a new course and new framework to help marketers understand the why behind how people behave and what they do. Outline below.

Gillian Rightford, Founder of The School of Thought, a

Gillian Rightford, founder of Adtherapy and The School of Thought, an online knowledge-sharing talent-building community for marketing & advertising, sits down with Andre Vlok, a conflict resolution specialist, mediator, workplace conflict and disciplinary inquiry chair, author of Dangerous Magic and Hamlet's mirror, negotiator and all-round interesting human.

Gillian Rightford, founder Adtherapy and The School of Thought (a knowledge-sharing, talent-building community for marketing and advertising professionals), shoots the breeze with veteran Chief Creative Officer, founder of creative consultancy, Number 10, and self-confessed Creative Activist, Ahmed Tilly. We talk about the state of creativity, the Loeries awards, why clients don't buy better work when they know they should, the role of account management, and Ahmed shares a "secsi" framework to judge creative work.

Matthew Bull is no stranger to many of us, as a successful and outspoken Copywriter, Creative Director, ECD, CCO, CEO, Founder and Owner of various agencies over the years. He was named No 5 in the Top 10 global CCOs by Campaign and is no stranger to creative awards: as owner, CEO, Global CCO, more than 70 Gold, Silver, and Bronze Cannes Lions and he has been Judge and President of juries at Cannes, D&AD, the One Show and many other ad award festivals.

After working in, running and founding many agencies, (we were partners in Lowe Bull), he started a business called SoloUnion that aimed to help clients crack the big idea platforms – the heads without the overheads. This has morphed into an exciting role: that of his Clients' Chief Creative Officer: Global Chief Creative Advisor AB InBev; Chief Creative Advisor Kraft Heinz. Chief Creative Advisor Live Kindly.

It’s probably no coincidence that these companies are performing exceptionally well in the creative and creative effectiveness space.

AB InBev has received accolades for creativity: named Cannes Marketer of the Year for 2022 and again in 2023, the first brand to be awarded for two consecutive years; the Most Effective Marketer Worldwide by Effies and #1 Creative Marketer by WARC; Kraft Heinz named the 4th most innovative marketer in the US.

In this podcast, we talk about creative culture, processes and capabilities and how marketers can get better work out of their agencies. It's a subject close to my heart. Better creative works better and was the reason I founded Adtherapy, to help marketers and their agencies work better to produce better work. I was heartened to hear Matthew say that he believes this is an upwards trend, that CEOs and CMOs are starting to believe in (and see) that better quality creative communication is more effective, and they are looking at better ways for them to be structured, to brief and review work, with the right skills in the process. It's encouraging and frankly, about time.

In-house Creative Officers are not a new thing - but there is much insight and wisdom to be gained from listening to Matthew's interview.

A School of Thought: Gillian Rightford in conversation with Neil Higgs on his book about getting comfortable with maths in business. People sometimes hide their fear or feelings of inadequacy about the maths and data analytics skills they need in business. Neil, a retired research guru, has written a helpful and fun book that explains what can seem to be complicated equations in very simple terms. Do you have to do forecasts? Do you need to read research survey results and charts? All of us engage with numbers every day. This is a handy little guide to making sure we know how to read the stories they tell and how to communicate them clearly. Available for purchase: https://payhip.com/b/V9Ubi

Project leadership forms part and parcel of just about anyone in business with any degree of responsibility. And of course, the higher up the organisation you go, the more complex and the riskier the projects are. Much project leadership thinking tends to focus on the practical time-based, resource allocation type of detail. Yet to execute a project effectively, we need to get people - the right people - not only to back our idea but to stay with it until it is complete.

I've worked with veteran marketer and TedxSpeaker coach, Brain Rea, to bring his remarkable course Incite for Execution to life for The School of Thought. It's "the definitive Influencing Toolkit for  Project Leaders - How to Communicate and Influence Stakeholders for Better Project Execution and Outcomes". The Aha moment that led him to create the course, was when he picked up a book by Daniel Pink (How to Sell), in which he read that most middle managers spend 40% of their time on non-sales selling - ie. persuasion. That's 24 seconds in every working minute! And most are doing it without understanding the psychology and tools behind how to influence stakeholders effectively.

As Brian says in the course, "Communication is the lubrication of execution". This learning journey equips you to influence critical project stakeholders, team members and decision-makers for better project and transformation outcomes.

The course is primarily for people that lead diverse, multi-functional project teams; who want to get buy-in for an important message, idea or strategy or who oversee complex, sensitive or long-term transformation initiatives. 

I had a chat with Brian to find out more about his philosophy and the course: listen on your favourite podcast channel.

Richard is one of the most sought-after experts at the intersection of brands and behavioural science. For more than a decade now, he's been teaching marketers and advertisers how to craft their product and communications so that they work with human nature, rather than against it.

His best-selling book The Choice Factory can be found on the bookshelves of marketers, businesspeople and academics worldwide.

He has just launched an online Masterclass : How to Supercharge your Brand with Behavioural Science which is offering The School of Thought members a 10% discount (Discount Code on https://theschoolofthought.co/spaces/10726019?utm_source=manual)

The entire course is structured around the application of insights from behavioural science to the world of brands, marketing and advertising.

Richard goes through more than 130 years' worth of findings from behavioural science, case study data and his own research to present a practical guide on how we can use behavioural science to make our brands more resilient, improve our products and become better marketers.