For the ones leaving. For the ones staying. It is not easy for anyone.

Two weeks ago I sat down with Robin Bonn for The Immortal Life of Agencies. No slides. No script.

At some point he quoted Shawshank at me. “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

We talked about both.

Fifty-five, after a long career, means I do not face the financial pressure so many now do. A massive difference. But the loneliness - that, I now have some experience with.

Excerpt from The Immortal Life of Agencies Podcast

If you are leaving, or you have just lost your job - the start of the conversation is for you.

I tried to be honest. It is slightly uncomfortable to listen to.

I spent an entire career being told to perform strength. I believe the opposite. Authenticity - not as an excuse, but in pursuit of excellence - is the most powerful way to bring people along.

How the leaving actually began, and what a coach named Angela tried to teach me about detaching a heart from a job - I tell that story in the episode. I failed at it. Totally. Still the most important skill for anyone in a job too hard to say goodbye to.

Then the decision. And a first, ridiculous thought about my wardrobe - the certainty I would end my days in sweatpants. A thirty-year identity. Three people I loved. Gone. The 3am waking. Night after night.

Then the part I hope helps. I read a book - Theo of Golden - about a man who returns strangers’ portraits in exchange for their stories. I remembered that making people feel seen had always mattered. It did not have to stop.

So I wrote. Learning. To write. To Substack. To LinkedIn. To pivot. From. To. Not a business, a brand, a team. Me.

If you are still in it, and you love it as much as I do - the rest of the conversation is yours. Real suggestions, not a pep talk.

I have written before about the industry’s real problem. I said it to Robin in one line: nothing wrong with the product, something wrong with the go-to-market. A value problem, never a creativity problem. AI switched the lights on a three-decade-old faulty plug.

So Robin and I got practical. Five steps, roughly, for agencies to reinvent themselves. We walk through them properly in the episode.

One example. A growth-stage brand spends on influencers and cannot tell whether any of it sells. The service answer: engagement, content, the latest names. The solution: a proprietary model that ranks influencers by modelled sales contribution. Named. Repeatable. Positioned as a performance tool for activating in-market consumers. Priced as the product it is - flat fee, licence, subscription. Anything but hours.

The shift from services to solutions is simple to list. Hard to do. Because it demands something most of us lost: understanding marketing science - how a brand actually grows, and what our work contributes. We mastered our craft - the brand campaign, the social media program, the TikTok shop - but somewhere along the way stopped being able to explain our role in the total marketing value chain. Every discipline got brilliant at its fragment and crap at the map.

Because all change happens in increments. As true for an industry as it is for a life.

Recording all this was one thing. Playing it back was another. I heard the conviction. I heard the woman still finding her feet. Both are true. Both, I hope, are useful.

Have a listen. Robin is a generous host - sharp, warm, genuinely rooting for agencies. Then go back into his catalogue. It is full of agencies figuring it out.

Years ago, I was at home.

Lyllou was small. Three, maybe four. The working mother’s tax I wrote about before was already running. On the road a lot. And even when I was home, I wasn’t really. Long days. Closed doors. Tired by the time the door opened again.

Pierre brought me a drink. And a snack. During a call. As he had done a million times before, since Lyllou was born. The bigger share of parenting was his.

I said thank you. As I always did. As you do.

That evening I asked him to sit down. I told him I needed to say something. He is a calm man. A gentle man. He has been with me long enough to know that sentences beginning with I need to say something rarely end well.

I took my time.

The cold drink on the long call. The dozens of small daily things. And the larger ones. Holding Lyllou’s mornings together when I could not. Putting her to bed when I was on a call to New York. Solving the guilt I carried about a small girl who deserved more of her mother than her mother could currently give. The list was long and I went on for quite some time.

He became, visibly, bigger. Brighter.

Not because I told him he was wonderful. Because I told him I had seen it all. Which meant I had seen him.

Something shifted between us that evening. Subtly. Sturdier than before.

I have spent the past thirty years inside an industry now living through one of its largest transformations.

The mistake being made is one I recognise from every transformation I have ever been close to.

The focus is on what is broken. The energy is on what needs to be cut, replaced, restructured, retooled. The talent that has been holding the place together for years - doing the eight out of ten things that are working - gets left behind. Not because anyone means to leave them behind. Because everyone’s attention is on the two that are not.

Oh yes, there are grand thank yous for keeping the business going. But they feel performative. Part of the agenda. None of them specific.

The result is an organisation in which most of what is working goes entirely unacknowledged. The people doing those things have no idea whether anyone noticed. They comply with the change. They do not commit to it.

Worse, they continue to feel unsafe. The most terrible of feelings. I know.

Doug Conant understood this at a scale most leaders will never attempt.

He had a two-hour commute. He had just become CEO of Campbell Soup. The year was 2001. The stock had fallen by half. Engagement was among the worst in the Fortune 500. The culture had been described as toxic.

He used those two hours to write thank-you notes. Ten to twenty a day. Handwritten. Specific. You delivered the quarter by X. You beat the launch timeline by a month. Eight out of ten things, he later said, were being done right in that company. Nobody was talking about it.

Over ten years he wrote more than 30,000 notes to 20,000 employees.

In 2009, Conant was in a serious car accident. While he was recovering in hospital, get-well notes began arriving from employees across the globe. His wife sat beside him and read them aloud.

What you put into people circulates. It does not disappear.

By 2010, Campbell’s cumulative shareholder return for the preceding six years was 64%. The S&P 500 had returned 13% over the same period. Engagement had moved from the bottom of the Fortune 500 to consistently among the best.

The notes were not the only reason. Conant has always been careful to say so. But they were not decorative either. They were a daily, deliberate, scaled correction to a bias most leaders never examine in themselves.

This is also why most corporate recognition programmes fail to do what Conant did. Gallup’s research is unambiguous: the all-staff email signed with gratitude, the company video with the right words but the fake smile, the annual recognition programme for the happy few produce almost none of the effect of a direct, personal acknowledgment.

Conant’s notes were not a programme. They were a leadership practice. The hardest step in any transformation is the one most programmes skip - getting each individual person to decide, themselves, that this is worth their time. The fastest way to build that decision is to prove you have already been paying attention.

I started doing this more purposefully when I became CEO in the Middle East.

Not as a strategy. Just more deliberately than before.

In a culture of considerable reverence, where authority was still formal and directness landed strangely, a specific thank you delivered to a specific person produced an effect I had not seen elsewhere. People stood differently afterwards. So I kept doing it. Not on a schedule. At the right moments.

Then later, as CEO EMEA, at one regional leadership meeting, I thanked each of our market leaders out loud, in front of the rest. For something specific I had watched them do.

It was awkward. People shuffled. Some did not know where to put it. It went long.

What I noticed is the thing I now think matters most.

The thank you did not just make them feel seen by me. It made them feel seen by the room. They saw each other differently afterwards too. The trust it built was not vertical. It was horizontal. Between every leader in that room.

That is the more important outcome. And it is the one most leaders never aim for.

A real team is not a group of people who trust the leader. It is a group of people who trust each other. A thank you said out loud, in front of the room, is one of the few things I have ever seen build that trust quickly.

It is part of why a book called Theo of Golden spoke to me when it did. An elderly man returns pencil portraits to their subjects.

There is a scene where a woman looks at the portrait Theo has bought of her. The picture in her own head does not match it. She has spent her whole life seeing herself as a little girl in too-small clothes in a rundown trailer park.

Theo proposes a trade. Give me the old picture, he says. Take this new one home with you.

They mime it. She lifts the old image from her temple, drops it into his palm. He closes his hand around it.

Then he taps the portrait. You, never forget. A work of art.

I woke up one night, worried about the future. And I decided I would tell 300 Giants they were a work of art.

Which brings me, reluctantly, to my own inbox.

The week my exit was announced, the messages started. LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp, Teams, phone calls. Specific ones, mostly. Qualities named. Moments recalled.

I have thanked everyone. I have not properly read them. I scroll. I save. I tell myself I will go back. I don’t.

There is something specifically uncomfortable about feeling seen when you are also feeling uncertain. Both things at once turn out to be a lot.

Pick three people today. Not five. Not ten. Three.

Tell them, specifically, what you have seen them do.

Watch what happens.

Most of what we are looking for in change management is hiding behind a thank you somebody never said.

It’s Pierre’s birthday today. Sixty. A milestone. I am so incredibly grateful for the generous man he is. And I will tell him tonight over dinner. At length.

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Photos by ACC - St-Canneke 2026

Last Wednesday, I went to a beach in Antwerp.

Yes. Antwerp has a beach. Nobody knows this, including most of Belgium. It’s called Sint-Anneke - a strip of sand on the left bank of the Scheldt, plus the swaggering Antwerpian conviction that a river counts as seaside.

For me, it’s holy ground. My mother, whom I lost twenty years ago, loved that beach. Every year, at the first ray of sun, the entire family was marched to Sint-Anneke to eat mussels. First sun. Mussels. No discussion.

So when the ACC, Belgium’s agency association, invited me to that beach for its Sint Canneke celebration of this year’s Cannes winners, they had me at the pun.

I spoke that evening. About judging Creative Strategy at Cannes in 2024. About Stanley. The hundred-year-old cup that went from $70 million to $750 million by reinventing everything except the product. About believing we can thrive again if we reinvent ourselves too. Stop selling services, start selling solutions. Stop charging for what we do. Charge for what we are worth.

And I felt it happen. Sitting on that chair, being interviewed, I got properly passionate. I could feel the room. I wanted them to hear - not the argument, me. How much I love this industry. How desperately I want this solved.

Afterwards, a young man from an event agency came up to me.

“I’m quite disillusioned about my job,” he said. “But your passion spoke to me. I felt my heartbeat again.”

Then he told me why the heartbeat had gone. Reducing budgets leading to lost teammates. Endless pitches to come in second. Clients who instruct instead of brief. Scopes that change mid-way. Work valued as execution, and paid accordingly.

“Can’t they see,” he said, “how much more we can do.”

All that talent reduced to executing, when it could be lifting the impact of everything it touches.

One evening. One beach. The echo of my entire career. The whole industry in miniature. So much talent. So much love for creativity. And so much of its value captured by no one - not the brands it could grow, not the people who create it.

I went home worked up, poured a glass, and fell asleep in front of Robin Hood, the Russell Crowe one. And whether it was the mussels or the man with the heartbeat, that night I dreamt of a Magna Carta.

Stay with me. It’s a better analogy than it sounds.

“Image property of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Featured for non-commercial commentary and review purposes.”

Every Robin Hood story has the same villain: Prince John - the thumb-sucking lion, if you grew up on the Disney one. The real John eventually got the crown, and got worse. He lost his empire in France, taxed England to breaking point to win it back, and lost anyway. He came home humiliated and broke.

The barons who confronted him were no heroes either. Landowners, furious about their money. Self-interest with swords. They took London, and the broke king had to talk. They met in a meadow called Runnymede, halfway between his castle and their camp, where nobody could ambush anybody.

And what did they write there? Not a brief. Sixty-three clauses, almost all about money. Taxes. Inheritance fees. Fish weirs in the Thames - I promise that’s real. A convening agreement between all interested parties to revive their broken country.

The king sealed it - and had the Pope annul it within ten weeks. Civil war followed. John died a year later of dysentery, having first lost the crown jewels in an estuary. You couldn’t write him better.

The charter won anyway. Long after everyone at the meadow was gone. Kings kept reissuing it, generation after generation, whenever they needed what the other side had.

And that’s not all. Buried inside sixty-three clauses: “No free man shall be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgment of his equals. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay, right or justice.”

This became the seed of due process, the jury, the presumption of innocence, and eight centuries later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A bunch of self-interested parties got something very very right.

Now read that story again as a marketer.

We have a broken industry. The ANA (USA) counts $26.8 billion wasted in programmatic every year - up 34% in two years. Of every $1,000 invested, roughly $439 reaches an actual human being. Marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of revenue, down from 11% in 2020. Thousands of jobs lost in the last eighteen months.

We have the barons: us. Marketers and agencies acting, let’s be honest, out of self-interest. CMOs who need budgets defended in the boardroom. Agencies that need to be paid for the value they create. Good. Self-interest is what makes charters real. Nobody sealed Magna Carta out of idealism.

And we have a meadow. We gather on one every June. It’s called the Croisette. Sometimes on smaller ones, like a beach in Antwerp.

What’s missing is the parchment. So here is what I would put on it.

Five clauses. Not about money, but about value. Call it the Value Charter.

If you think industries don’t seal charters anymore, ask Hollywood. In 2023 the writers - a creative profession told it had no leverage left - walked out and came back with AI guardrails, streaming-data transparency and success-based residuals, in a binding agreement. Measurement, value sharing, and the machines. All three. Sealed. By makers like us.

The LinkedIn posts from the Croisette passionately wrote creativity will make brands sail the sea of sameness to the safe harbours of growth. They said the sailors won’t be the robots, but the swearing kind of flesh and blood, with the robots pulling the oars. From the beach in Antwerp, I agree. I mean, I read the headlines on digital killing creativity twenty years ago. AI won’t either.

But the stakes are higher and have a face. In Australia, the IAB counted that entry-level roles in digital advertising have collapsed to 1% of vacancies. The first to count, but I’m sure a sign of the times.

The young man on the beach - the one who felt his heartbeat again - is this industry in ten years. Or he’s gone.

I know what you’re thinking. Nobody is going to unroll parchment on the Croisette. Probably not. Then again, the barons didn’t think they were founding eight centuries of law somewhere between lunch and the fish weirs.

That is the point of a Magna Carta. It doesn’t have to hold to win. It has to be written. Sealed by enough of us. In how we brief, how we buy, how we measure, how we charge. And reissued by the generation after us.

We don’t need the meadow. These five are principles to run a marketing department by. Or an agency. How you fund. How you buy. How you speak. How you measure. How you pay and get paid. Nobody has to wait for the representatives. Live by them inside your own walls, and you’ve already sealed it.

That’s what I dreamt of - not one grand signing, but a thousand quiet adoptions.

Sixty-three clauses. Three survived. One line became humanity’s law. Our charter is smaller - five clauses.

Value: Created. Multiplied. Connected. Measured. Shared.

And if only one line of ours survives the annulments, let it be this one - written to outlive every new machine:

My mother took us to Sint-Anneke every year, at the first sun. A ritual, repeated, until it defined me. That is all a charter is.

See you on the next meadow. The mussels are on me.

Data also sourced from Gartner, Annual CMO Spend Survey, 2025 - Kantar BrandZ, Most Valuable Global Brands, 2025 - WARC, The Multiplier Playbook, 2026 - NIQ creative effectiveness research - System1, eatbigfish and Peter Field, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, 2023.

Dear Simon,

Thank you. For another extraordinary week celebrating the best ideas in the world.

It’s nearly twenty years since I presented at Cannes, sharing an Ogilvy house with Rory Sutherland and learning, under some pressure, to make a properly mean cup of tea. Ever since, this has been the week I tune in. Live, or from a distance. To celebrate the work — and more than the work, the talent behind it.

My favourite moment was never the meetings. Not the talks, the rosé, the parties. It was the smallest thing. The truest. The face of a winner the instant they realise. Tears. Smiles. Pure joy. The hard work, the thousand frustrations, the never giving up, the protecting of an idea and crafting it to life — seen. Finally seen.

This year I watched from the virtual Croisette. LinkedIn. Normally that’s the clever option: all the work, all the content, most of the vibe, none of the heat. Not this year. This year home was hotter than the Croisette, and I spent the week in the only windowless room in the house, scrolling and liking.

It put me in a slightly mad-woman frame of mind. Mad as in the heat, obviously. Mad as in Mad Men, the age we’re all a little nostalgic for. And mad as in furious — at watching the talent you’ve just spent a week celebrating left worried about their future, by the thousand.

So here’s my pitch. To help this struggling industry you’ve just honoured so beautifully, with a signal too big to ignore.

A strategic reframe really. Like the best ones I watched in that dark room in your basement, judging Creative Strategy, two years ago.

One of my favourites from that room was Stanley. Same steel cup. Dead by 2019. Then 70 million dollar to 750 a year. A whole new way to sell it. I wrote about it here.

That is what our industry needs. And the signal that starts it can be yours to send.

From celebrating the craft to celebrating the multiplier.

Don’t blame me. Blame Andrew Tindall.

Whom I slightly stalk on the virtual Croisette. Not because he’s half my age. Because he’s so wonderfully English — provokes smartly, with humour, backed by mountains of proof.

Asked which Cannes buzzword would be dead by next year, he picked creativity. “Nobody knows what it means,” he said. “We throw it around like cake at a party.” (I laughed out loud.) “If we want to keep using the word, we have to define it.”

Andrew, per usual, calling a spade a spade.

You’re familiar with the challenge. WARC, part of your own group, has just coined it. The “say-do gap.” (The report is excellent. Here’s the link.)

Since digital arrived, the C-suite has privileged what is immediate and measurable - performance, the audience in-market today - over the brand equity that builds future demand and multiplies that very performance. Despite the evidence sitting right there: Kantar's strongest brands have beaten the S&P 500 by 83% over twenty years — what Kantar itself calls irrefutable proof of marketing's value. Despite AB InBev taking your Creative Marketer of the Year not once, not twice, but three times — Marcel Marcondes accepting it with words that echo loud in my head: “Creativity that drives business results. Means and ends. Record revenues to close 2025, creativity built into how they work, the world over.”

And it could get worse, because when the macro turns, the dashboard always wins. I read the rest of your report in that windowless room, getting hotter by the page. It’s merciless.

Read that last line again, Simon. You can help!

And I know Cannes was never only about advertising. Thank God. It’s about how creativity multiplies every path to brand growth. There was proof of that all over the Croisette this week. Less of it around the world, where budgets have swung to media and execution and away from creativity itself. (NIQ’s 2026 CMO Outlook says it plainly: marketers are undervaluing creativity - even as great creative lifts sales by up to 50%.)

No wonder the creative industry is reeling. An industry that, let’s be honest, has never been able to charge for what it’s worth. We never priced our value.

Commission masked it for a century. When media unbundled in the nineties, we didn’t build a value model - we borrowed the lawyer’s billable hour. Paid for input. Never for what the input creates.

AI isn’t breaking that model. It’s exposing it. The moment execution gets cheap, the only thing left to sell is the value, and we never learned how. Ritson, this week, on Anthropic’s own data, put up to 65% of marketing tasks in the line of fire.

An old bill, finally due.

The fix is the one we’ve dodged for decades: tie what we do to value.

Because here is our oldest habit — we describe ourselves by what we do, not by what we're worth.

And the tell sits in plain sight, at the biggest creative festival on earth. The Lions are sorted by craft and discipline. Film. Outdoor. PR. Media. Direct. Every category answers how it was made, and who made it. None answers what it was worth.

The category list is the industry’s self-portrait. Activity, not value. I know — we purposefully left value to the Effies. But isn't it time to reconsider that?

It's the same thing I'm now telling agencies, supporting VoxComm and the EACA. Stop selling services - strategy, content, social, influencer. Crafts and disciplines. Generic, and so cheap. Start selling solutions - the unique, repeatable thing tied to the business problem you solve, priced for the value, not the hours.

So here's how you can help.

A mad pivot. A shortcut to our industry's problem, with disproportionate results. Which, as it happens, is exactly how I always described a creative idea to graduates. So this is one.

Imagine reading that list as a CEO. You’d see your own objectives looking straight back. Not a production line.

And craft and discipline lose nothing: they’re judged within each Lion, the way industry sectors already are, with winners across all of them. Believe me, I know they matter - ask any creative I’ve worked with about the joy, or not, of celebrating every single phase and shape of an idea coming to life with me.

I’ve tested the new Lions with colleagues and friends across the industry. The reaction was… well, dramatic. The idea is dramatic. But every conversation ended the same way: this is long overdue!

If Ritson is right, and most of our talent is exposed, the stakes could not be higher.

And the solution sits with us. Oui, nous! Our job is to make the C-suite finally see the evidence of our value.

You know this already. It’s why, over the years, you’ve built effectiveness into the festival - in categories, in jury instructions, in the seminars and the speakers and so much more.

But Andrew was right this week: define creativity, or stop saying it.

So here’s my definition. Not a sentence. A beacon. Ten Lions that say what the work was for.

Call it my way of calling a spade a spade. But only you can play the hand.

Written with nothing but respect for the passion I know we share — you, me, and an entire industry.

And for the moment I still love most. The face of someone who has just realised their work was seen.

Let’s make sure there’s a Croisette full of those faces next year.

Respectfully,

Patou

He’s dead. Let’s kill him.

That was the thinking. Not in those words. But close.

David had been gone more than a decade. Leaning on a dead founder was called sentimental. Not modern enough. So the Ogilvy red became just an accessory - to pink, to blue, to yellow. The photographs came down. The quotes dropped to a whisper.

It didn’t take.

Today David Ogilvy would have been 115. To uncountable Ogilvyians, past and present, the man is very much alive.

I have spent thirty years championing something I could never prove. That culture - the most elusive thing in a business - is also the most powerful.

Two levers make a company high-performing. Strategy and culture.

Strategy is the formal one. The goals, the plan, the choices. Rewards if you hit them, consequences if you don’t. Strategy is built for effectiveness.

Culture is the bigger one. Values and beliefs - but also what people do, repeat, celebrate. The rituals. The heroes. A way a whole company behaves, together. Culture is built for velocity.

Activate it and you unlock the energy of the collective - and of every person in it. The strategy accelerates.

Most leaders walk past culture. They think it is intangible. Not important. At best, something HR runs. Or worse - sentiment. The founder’s photograph on the wall. Nostalgia.

So they arrive, impose their own voice and values, and leave the engine that could carry the strategy switched off.

The best leaders do the opposite. They switch it on. Shape it. Reshape it as the business changes.

I grew up in one. The early days, when David was still alive and the culture was blazing. It formed me.

It made scary new jobs in six foreign places familiar.

It made a life out of a career.

I ran the training meant to pass it on, which meant making people feel it, not just think it. The final session was always at Touffou - David’s château on the Vienne, where Herta - David’s wife - tended six hundred years of stone and the whole Ogilvy story with it. (I wrote about her here - Herta Ogilvy.)

And I watched it deliver. On every strategy we ever handed it. Growth by expansion. By diversification. By simplification. By focus - global clients one year, local the next. Different goal each time. Same culture every time.

The strategy changed. The culture didn’t.

That is what leaders underestimate. A strong culture does not box strategy in. It carries it - whichever one you pick. So when a strategy stalls, they go at the culture and starve it. The one part still burning.

I felt the fire again on Saturday. A retirement party in Paris.

Benoit. Thirty-nine years at Ogilvy. Old guard - the real thing. Benjamin said it perfectly in his speech. Élever.

David had a line for it.
”Raise your sights! Blaze new trails!! Compete with the immortals!!!

Benoit did all three. He raised us. The work. The joy. Our sights.
And became a legend - gloriously alive, to every one of us he raised.

Fifty or so at the party. Some had left Ogilvy thirty years ago. They came anyway. Ogilvy is the bond. Benoit tied it.

That is culture. Not what hangs on the wall. One man raising people’s sights for thirty-nine years - and a party that crossed a city, and in my case a country, to tell him so.

People ask how you define your culture. Never mind build, cultivate or fix it.

I have an answer. Three parts. What the organisation believes - the essence. How that is brought to life - the expression. How you embed it - what actually gets measured and rewarded.

Eight questions, give or take. The meaningful work I want to do next. But that is another article. Theory can wait.

Because forty years ago, David did the job in a letter. A man writing down what his company believed, to his CEO Bill, because someone had told him Ogilvy had the only real culture in the business.

He was right.

Here it is. Take your time. It’s long. But every word a gift.

(Bar one - 'gentlemen with brains.' He'd have updated that by now.)

Happy Birthday David. Et merci Benoit.

Virtual coffee time. I don’t drink coffee but I do do virtual. Especially for this CEO. Once a product manager, now a CEO and a decade of periodic text messages about packing and unpacking suitcases in strange new places that bond us.

We don’t often talk shop. He never seemed interested in my brand stuff, as he called it. But this time was different.

“We need to be in the AI answers. Someone asks ChatGPT for the best in the category, that has to be us. There’s a whole thing now - Share of Model. My team’s building a dashboard.”

He said Share of Model. I took a minute.

Why does this matter so much to you, I asked.

“Because that’s where the buying happens now. The machine recommends, the customer buys. If it doesn’t name us, we don’t exist.”

He’s right. I told him so.

He looked pleased. I wasn’t.

Because what he wants the machine to do – bring up his product first, most often, when someone asks – is what he always waved off as my brand stuff. It never showed up in his dashboard, so it never made the budget.

Now a chatbot needs it and there’s a budget by Monday.

How does the machine pick? Fair question.

Sometimes it searches the live web and cites pages. Often it answers straight from memory. Either way, what it brings up first is whatever sits most strongly, most consistently linked to the need in the prompt across everything it has read. Ask for a good running shoe, back comes whatever’s been tied, again and again, to running and performance.

Which is exactly how he picks too. And you. And me.

Memory works the same way, and we’ve known it forever. Concepts as nodes, joined by links. Think bacon, eggs turns up uninvited. Cheat day, and the fries (Belgian, not French - I’m tempted to start a troll farm just to make the AIs admit it) fetch the Heinz. Something has to be across a border by tomorrow, DHL arrives before the alternatives do. The more often two things are paired, the faster one fetches the other. Collins and Loftus wrote it up in 1975. Aristotle got there two thousand years earlier.

It’s how brands work too. A need, a moment, a node - and the brand linked most strongly to it is the one that arrives when the moment does. Build the links, keep them fresh, get bought more often.

His dashboard and his shelf run on the same engine. The prompt is the moment. A person in an aisle does exactly what the model does, minus the subscription.

His panic is not misplaced. Search is still where most buying starts. Nearly half of all website visits, the biggest single channel there is.

But the clicks are leaving. Put an AI answer at the top of the results and the click-through more than halves. The trackers are all saying the same thing - organic click share down double digits, across every sector. People still search. They just don’t click through.

So a new industry has stood up around it. Generative Engine Optimisation. Share of Model. Tools that tell you whether ChatGPT names you, where Perplexity ranks you. Real work, and necessary - the structured pages, the clean data, the signals that help a machine read you. Skip it and you’re invisible. The same way SEO was for Google.

But all of that gets a machine to read you. None of it gets a machine to pick you. Picking runs on memory, and memory is the one thing you can’t engineer overnight. My CEO friend is about to pay good money to rediscover it under a newer name.

Winning the machine’s answer is obviously only part of it. Brand matters far beyond one new channel. But it gave me the excuse I’d never had - to finally explain the stuff I do.

I could have given him the vocabulary. Mental availability. Category entry points. Distinctive assets. Being frank, the foundations most of the industry has stopped practising. The ones Ritson and Tindall never shut up about, hurray.

I gave him the plain version instead.

“The machine doesn’t suddenly love brands. It picks the way people pick - the way your customer picks in the aisle, reaching for the name she already knows before she’s read a single label. None of this arrived with ChatGPT. It’s how choosing has always worked.

Building that link is the job. Not overnight. It takes clarity, consistency, craft. A bit of love. Lots of love. It’s the most precious asset you own - what decides whether you get picked, by a person or by a machine.

You know. The brand stuff.”

He smiled. I thought for a minute he was going to say why didn’t you tell me all this before.

He didn’t.

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Cannes. June 2024. I was judging the Creative Strategy Lions.

I sat in a dark room for days and watched the industry argue with itself. With snacks. Bliss.

Hundreds of cases. Most good. A few undeniable. One of them was a cup.

Stanley. The tumbler I didn’t know existed, then it turned up on my daughter’s wish list. And on Pierre’s. We gave it a Silver Lion.

Stanley is not a new company. A steel vacuum flask since 1913. For a century, a thermos for men. Campers, builders, the green bottle on the worksite. The tumbler launched in 2016 and flopped. By 2019 they had stopped restocking it. Dead.

Then, in four years: from about seventy million dollars a year to seven hundred and fifty.

And the part that was undeniable — they barely touched the core product. Same steel, same seal, same cup.

They reinvented everything else. Who it was for: women, not workmen. What it meant: a lifestyle, not a piece of kit. How it reached them: cultural presence over advertising, creators over campaigns, colour drops with the urgency of streetwear, a newsroom fast enough to replace a customer’s car when her Stanley came through the fire with the ice still in it.

Same cup. A hundred new reasons to buy it.

The product was fine. The reinvention was the go-to-market.

I was so taken with it I did something slightly mad. At the start of budget season, I sent every one of my regional leaders a Stanley, name engraved. The note made the case Stanley made for me: focus where the new growth is. Fund it by letting go of what we can live without. Make the bold choices. Don’t iterate.

Reinvent. That was the ask then. It is the job for the whole industry now.

Because the part everyone is fixing is the wrong part. The obituary writes itself. AI replaced us, procurement won, creativity is over. Cut costs, cut people, bolt on AI, wait for the storm to pass. Iterating an agency model that has been showing cracks for a decade or two.

Stanley did not survive by working out why the cup was dying. They survived by reinventing how it reached people. That is where the energy went.

This is where our energy must go now.

In March, VoxComm, the global federation of agency associations, published a guide by Brian Kessman. Redesigning the Agency Value Model. Ninety-five pages. If you lead an agency and you read one thing this year, read it.

I’ll be honest about the ninety-five pages. It is the most serious account we have of what is actually breaking. It is also a hard read. That is a compliment and a warning.

Boiled down.
We sell time. Time had been a shaky proxy for value for years. AI ended the pretence. So stop selling time. Sell solutions.
Name them, organise your agency around them, price them as things not hours. The Three Provocations I argued a few weeks ago is an example.
Ninety-five pages. That is the elevator pitch.

Then the paper proves how. Eight real agencies, what each one actually did.

There is even mercy in it for anyone frightened of pricing. Pages of mechanisms: outputs, sprints, subscriptions, licensing, royalties. You can translate the whole list into two questions. Am I selling access, or a defined deliverable? And can I take a slice of the upside? The rest is for your CFO.

Personal but passionate sidebar: the royalty is the dream. Paid for as long as your solution keeps working in the market. Every other creative industry already gets this. We are the only one that gave it away.

Anyway.

Solutions is the unlock. Seems simple enough. And it cuts both ways — a solution also tells the client what value they are actually paying for. Not cheaper. Clearer.

Here is the challenge. Ask most agencies what they do and you get a similar list. I definitely wrote a few of these. Visual identity, UX, social content, influencer engagement, reputation, sports marketing, brand strategy. All true. All generic. And generic is interchangeable, and interchangeable is cheap. Those are services. The what.

A service becomes a solution the moment you package it, name it, make it ownable. “Strategy” is a service. The Three Provocations is a solution. One is a commodity. The other is uniquely yours.

After Al Pacino, a few emails asked: how. So here is a way in.

Let’s start with the line. I drew it in the last piece, so I’ll be quick.

On one side, the Multiplier Machine: platforms, data, AI pipelines, the engines that turn six weeks into seven days. It optimises, scales, distributes, measures, and gets stronger every quarter.

On the other, the Creative Mind. The human scarcity the Machine amplifies but cannot become. Judgement, intuition, creativity, iteration, interaction, collaboration, taste, craft. Claude tells me to stop at three. My heart could go on infinitely.

The Creative Mind is the future of creative talent. Not one kind of agency. There are of course a few.

The Multiplier Machine scales the breakthrough. The Creative Mind finds it.

The Creative Mind takes seven shapes to market. I see them as the things clients will need, and pay for, when the Machine can make everything else. Each one rests on a scarcity. Name the scarcity that is most yours and you have found your heartland: what to build your solutions around, what to charge for, what to stop giving away.

Here they are. Not rigid boxes. An agency can be one, blend several, or spin a niche off one. Some already exist. Some are old shops refocused. Some are brand new. More will come. Yes, please.

Another personal sidebar — from this morning after it was published and a late-night debate, friendly, with Pierre: the point is not the seven shapes. They are there as a jumping off point to find your solutions! He said make it clear. I said with an exclamation mark.

What makes a solution yours? By now you know which of the seven you are. That tells you what your solutions are made of. Four things make them harder to copy.

• Package it as a process or an output, and price it as the one it is. A sprint, a hothouse — processes. A campaign, a platform — outputs. And the most ownable form of all: an output you own and license. IP. The mistake is selling a process as if it were hours, an output as if it were assets, or IP as if it were a one-off.

• Add measurement where you can: effectiveness, attribution, adoption. It is a solution in itself, and what makes performance pricing possible later.

• Price the technology as its own line. The agencies hiding their tech inside an hourly figure are giving away the one thing getting more valuable.

• And focus. Point one of the seven at a sector — financial services, pharma, B2B — and you do not change what you are, you raise what you are worth. Focus is a premium.

Those four make a solution hard to copy. Naming it is what makes it yours. A service describes what you do. A named solution describes what only you do, or how only you do it. Naming is the act of differentiating.

Which sends you back to the question most agencies skip: what is your value proposition? Not the industry’s shared promise to grow brands through difference. Yours. Get that right and the solutions name themselves, and come out ownable.

Back to those magnificently red Stanley tumblers.

Mine is on my desk. The rest went across the region. The pictures came back. Ben’s sits next to his cactuses.

I sent them as inspiration. Reinvent what we sell. Be bold. Move upstream, to what we can do that nobody else can. And let go of where we are no different from anyone else.

And I sent them for hydration. Because the work would take energy.

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(by Ludmila Joaquina Valentina Buyo - 2016)

The reading was in Brooklyn. November 2002. A friend had a spare ticket. I had no expectations.

St. Ann’s Warehouse. Small. Musty. Intimate.

Two scripts.

Al Pacino. Marisa Tomei. Salome by Oscar Wilde, directed by Estelle Parsons. A play reading. Actors with scripts in hand, no set, no rehearsed staging. I had never been to one.

Pacino was smaller than I expected. Then he started to speak.

For an hour I forgot I was in a building. Forgot it was 2002. Forgot Tomei was Tomei - and she was very good. No set. No costumes that counted. No accessories of any kind. Just two voices, two scripts, and a presence I had only ever experienced on a screen.

Pacino disappeared into the lines.

I walked out understanding why Al Pacino was paid what Al Pacino was paid.

It wasn’t for the hour.

I often think of Al Pacino. Mostly because nothing gets me out of my head like watching the Godfather. On repeat. Skipping the horse. But I thought of him more this week.

Last week’s piece on creative agencies was the trigger. Output got cheap, but difference got rare. Talent being the only thing that builds it. AI making it better. And the augmented creative solutionist as their future.

The DMs followed. En masse.

One question kept coming back.

If what we do matters this much - and we know it does - why does the industry feel like it is ending?

Across the holding companies, somewhere north of twenty thousand jobs have gone in the last eighteen months. More are signalled. Analysts modelling the industry expect further cuts well into this year and beyond. Agency brands with decades of equity, folded out of existence. Some had been around over a century. Accenture cut eleven thousand from its consulting side.

Reading those numbers in isolation, you would conclude this industry has nothing left to sell.

The clients I talk to tell me the opposite.

They believe brand differentiation is the job. They believe it needs emotion. They believe creativity unlocks the wide range of feelings that move people to act. They know the data is overwhelmingly on their side.

They struggle to get their organisations behind it. The organisation privileges performance marketing. The next quarter. The KPIs the CFO counts. The work of convincing the organisation to invest in emotion is hard. Slow. Never finished.

Emotion is not on the CFO’s list. Though it is where most of the premium lives.

We have never figured out how to charge for what we actually sell. Every other emotion industry did. We did not.

Actors get a fee for the work and residuals for as long as the work plays. They are paid for being themselves, on the night, on the stage, on the set. Plus a percentage forever.

Musicians get an advance and a royalty per stream. The royalty is small. The streams are not.

Visual artists sell the object. The gallery takes half. For putting the right buyer in front of the right work.

None of them charge by the hour. Not one emotion industry in the world prices its talent by the clock. The Pacino reading lasted ninety minutes. Pacino was not paid for ninety minutes.

We were. We still are.

We charged for time because once, a long time ago, procurement asked us how we charged for what we did and we did not have a better answer. Time was the most honest one we had. It was also the worst one we had. We have been paying for that answer ever since.

Procurement has been pressuring the model for years. With AI arriving and accelerating the collapse of the hours, the model is collapsing. The work isn’t. The need for it has never been more obvious.

The Kantar BrandZ analysis lands on a number that ought to be on every agency wall as well as every CMO wall.

94% of a brand’s pricing power comes from Meaningful Difference. Salience drives volume - 6% of the premium. Difference is the whole rest.

Difference is made by talent unlocking emotion that makes a brand unmistakable in the consumer’s head. Emotion also shapes experiences that shape behaviour. Antonio Damasio’s neuroscience found that people with intact reasoning but damaged emotional processing cannot make decisions. Not big ones. Not small ones. Not even what to eat for lunch.

Brands monetise emotion. The CMO knows it. The organisation around the CMO does not. That is the slow-motion fight we have all been watching for years.

The problem under the pricing problem is a recognition problem. The CMO believes in emotion as a commercial force. The CEO does not. The CFO definitely does not. The agency has never sat with either of them.

That is what creative solutioning does. It reframes. It leaps. Often by understanding what people actually feel, not what the brief says they need.

Creative solutioning has never reached the C-suite. So the C-suite has never had a chance to value it. So the agency invoice gets challenged, year after year, by people who do not know what they would be losing.

The fix is not better invoices. The category we accepted - advertising, content, execution - is not the category that pays. The fix is to redefine the category. To position what we do as creative solutioning. Strategic solutions to business problems with disproportionate impact by unlocking emotion. And - this matters most - to prove it at the table where growth, not the next campaign, is discussed.

The obsession today is with the marketing system. Rightly so. The opportunity is massive. AI gets to run the Multiplier Machine - the data, the decisions, the content, the distribution, the optimisation.

Not enough are building the next thing creative agencies will be for. The Creative Mind.

Consultants stop at the recommendation. Agencies start at the brief. Nobody owns the space between - where strategic interventions bring creative intelligence inside the C-suite, clarify the direction, and turn it into action. Powered by Augmented Creative Solutionists.

The Multiplier Machine scales the breakthrough. The Creative Mind finds it.

The Creative Mind is what we should be paid for.

I am not the first to argue agencies have a pricing problem. Blair Enns has been writing the case for value-based pricing for twenty years. Michael Farmer has been writing it from a different angle - better measurement, smarter scoping. Every previous version of this argument could be ignored because the old model was still profitable enough. It isn’t anymore. That is what is different about now.

Pay for solutionist deliverables. Here is a concrete example, because so far it sounds like every consulting deck ever sold.

There are other solutionist deliverables. Ogilvy Consulting has been growing on this kind of work - thinking that gives a client confidence. Answers to the brief before the brief. The clients who buy this kind of work tend to grow.

This model runs on talent. It becomes enormously sharper when that talent is augmented. AI is not a separate model. It is what makes this one work. The Three Provocations document becomes possible quickly because the tools make the insights more visible and the iteration faster. The thinking that would have taken weeks lands in days.

It also needs specialisation. Consultants specialise - the senior partner walking into a CFO’s office knows the category cold. That depth is half of what the client is paying for. Creative agencies historically could not, because of the conflict rule. They stayed generalist. The solutionist agency has to get over that. Category fluency is the second thing that earns the price. Talent is the first.

Many talented people in this industry have time right now. They did not ask for it. The consultants, the holding companies, the technology companies handed it to them in pink slips.

The energy should not go into relitigating whether what we do matters. We know it matters. The neuroscience knows it matters. The 94% of pricing power that lives in Meaningful Difference knows it matters. The CMO who tells me, between meetings, that emotion is the whole job - she knows it matters.

The energy needs to go into the model that pays for it.

I ran Ogilvy EMEA inside this model. I did not solve it from inside. I am not sure it can be solved from inside.

The agencies that figure this out will not look like the agencies that did not.

That is the next chapter. It is being written right now by people who had a logo or a brand name they were proud of on their email signature. A title that opened doors. A salary that arrived on the same day every month. Many of them no longer have any of it.

What they have is everything that ever mattered.

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Voice I knew well. The question was new.

“If you’re leaving Ogilvy, it must be the end of creative agencies.”

He said it as a statement.

It made me really upset.

If there is one thing I have passionately believed in for thirty years, it’s creativity. And the agency as the ecosystem built to deliver it. And the agency’s capacity to transform - which, frankly, is what I have spent most of those thirty years doing.

So no. I didn’t agree with him. But I didn’t entirely disagree either.

I had written about this publicly a year ago. So I had a head start on the answer.

Why Think Alone?

Twenty-five years ago I built Truffles, Ogilvy’s first global intranet - a way to turn ten thousand people across a hundred and fifty offices into a single knowledge organisation.

The campaign that launched it asked one question: Why think alone? It worked because it answered the question every employee was already asking - what is in it for me?

That stayed with me.

So when AI arrived as the next great transformation an agency had to absorb, I knew behaviour wouldn’t change because we mandated. Or explained the features.

I made it about the same question. Person by person. Role by role.

May AI help you?

Snapshot of campaign developed by Thjnk - part of the Ogilvy Group Germany

An art director. A strategist. An account director. A finance manager. Each one shown becoming a sharper version of themselves.

And in the building of that campaign - role by role, person by person - I realised something larger than AI training. This industry had forgotten what made it different in the first place. The talent. The creative solving. The ability to build difference for a brand the way nobody else can.

AI was going to augment that. Beautifully. Necessarily.

But augmentation was not the destination. The talent was. The campaign about AI adoption was, underneath, a campaign about putting talent back at the centre of the agency.

That realisation is what I told the client, when he called. The version of agencies he thought was ending - yes, that one is ending. AI is going to finish what industry strain and procurement started. Content factories with strategy departments attached, scaling output for clients who measured value in volume. Over.

But what creative agencies were actually built to do is not over. We just forgot it for a while. AI has done us the favour of reminding us. And right now, in this exact window, there is a chance for creative agencies to double down on the thing that made them valuable in the first place.

Difference. That is the job. It always was.

Kantar’s BrandZ analysis, presented at Cannes 2022 and reinforced in the years since, lands on a single number that ought to be tattooed on every CMO’s office wall.

Meaningful Difference. Ninety-four percent of a brand’s pricing power.

Salience? Six.

Six.

Which means the entire commercial premium a brand can command - every euro of margin above the category average - comes almost entirely from being meaningfully different in the consumer’s mind. Not from being seen more. From being unmistakable.

Salience - the marketing term for how easily a brand comes to mind - still matters. It drives volume. It earns the buy today.

And salience needs creativity. You don’t get top of mind by being average. You get there by being memorable. Where AI helps is the volume part. The variants, the targeting, the frequency, the distribution, the optimisation - the modern salience game is fought across hundreds of touchpoints in ten markets in real time. The idea that breaks through is still the agency’s job.

Meaningful Difference is the other ninety-four percent. The pricing power. The margin. The premium consumers will pay above the category average. AI cannot deliver that. Because AI averages. Meaningful Difference is anything but average.

Klarna ran the experiment publicly for the rest of us. In 2024 they cut external marketing agency spend by twenty-five percent, compressed six-week image cycles into seven-day AI ones, and reported ten million dollars of savings. Bold. Visible. Real.

By spring 2025 their own CEO walked it back. They had focused too much on cost, he admitted. The result was lower quality, and not sustainable. Customer satisfaction had dropped twenty-two percent. Brand voice, by then, was indistinguishable from any other fintech in the category.

The savings were real. The damage to the brand was also real.

Strategy without a path is a slide. A slide is not a transformation.

This is where consultants and agencies have been getting confused with each other.

Consultants give you a beautiful strategy. One hundred and forty-eight slides. A maturity model. A roadmap with workstreams. The CEO nods. The deck goes on the shared drive. Nobody knows what to actually do.

Agencies, at their best, do something different. They do the strategy, they do the plan, they do the solutions. The same people, in the same room, all the way through. That continuity is what agencies have spent the last fifteen years pricing away in the name of efficiency.

The most valuable people in this industry have always lived in that continuity. We have called them creatives, strategists, planners, account directors, designers, social leads. They should all be called solutionists.

Solutionist says what the person is for.

I made the word up. It’s not in the dictionary. That’s deliberate.

I have watched it happen a hundred times. A real solution, strategically argued, that the client can see come alive in the room. Practical. Emotional. Customised for the brand. Engaging to the audience. Stirring something. Moving the business.

Theory becoming real. That is what a solutionist creates. That is what creative agencies have always done at their best.

A solutionist starts with a real business problem. A solutionist ends with an idea that can be implemented tomorrow.

They borrow from culture, behaviour, data, technology. They iterate live. They bring people with them, including the client, especially the client.

Augmented by AI, every solutionist becomes a sharper one. Faster across the boring parts. More patterns spotted, fewer hours wasted defending the obvious. The technology gets better. The judgement matters more.

Become an augmented creative solutionist.

Become the best talent. Because that is what clients want. That is what the talent wants. We just have to remind everyone.

The agency is the differentiation. Or it isn’t an agency.

Positioning a creative agency as a home for augmented solutionists is meaningless if the agency works the way it does today.

Briefings should be collaborative and iterative. Client and agency in the room together. Not the agency disappearing for three weeks and returning with a deck.

Actually, briefings should not be waited for. They should be co-created in regular business sparring sessions. Yes business. Not marketing. Not comms.

Ideation happens in hothouses. Always. Multiple disciplines, compressed time, real solutions by the end of the week.

The expert in influencers and creators sits at the table from the start. Not bolted on as a media line. Contributing from the first conversation to drive the conversation.

The behavioural science expert is in the room from the brief. The best of them understand the real barriers and motivators of human decision-making — and almost always lead the team to the simplest solution. The one that makes all the difference.

Ideas do not arrive as scripts anymore. They arrive as partnerships, sponsorships, experiential moments, cultural events, services, customer programs. Creating genuine, brand human connections one at a time at scale.

Cultural pulse is shown continuously, as evidence the agency knows what is going on in the world the brand actually lives in. Not delivered as an annex.

The agency runs on the best AI tools available, and replaces them the moment something better arrives. Experimentation is constant. What works in one office is in every other office’s hands by the end of the week.

New joiners rotate through every capability in their first three months. Because the only way to grow solutionists is to make them touch every part of the problem before they specialise.

None of this is exhaustive. Some of it already happens - but usually only for a pitch, then disappears once the work is won. The point is not the list. The point is to be ruthlessly focused on demonstrating the value of solving with the client, not for them.

To design the whole agency experience around that.

Visible difference. Felt difference. Different enough to charge for it.

That last part matters. Premium pricing is not what agencies ask for at the end of a long process they hope went well. It is what agencies earn when the difference between them and the next team in the pitch is impossible to miss from the moment a client walks in.

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There is a belief David Ogilvy held about knowledge: “We prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles.”

He believed, from the very beginning, that knowledge was differentiation. Not talent alone. Not simply relationships. Knowledge - pursued, shared, applied. The discipline of it. The culture of it.

We just hadn’t figured out how to make ten thousand people feel that personally yet.

At the turn of the century, in the early days of what we now call knowledge management, Ogilvy had what most large organisations had: shared folders. Distributed, inconsistently used, differently structured across four global divisions - Ogilvy & Mather, OgilvyOne, Ogilvy Interactive, and Ogilvy Public Relations - each with their own P&L and their own ways of working.

Nobody was pursuing truffles.

When we decided to change this - to genuinely move from fragmented sharing to a single global intranet, to build the knowledge organisation David Ogilvy had always described - we knew where the work actually was.

Not in the technology. The technology was the infrastructure.

The transformation was getting ten thousand people across a hundred and fifty offices, in every timezone, across four global divisions with their own ways of working, to actually believe this was worth doing.

And to believe it not for the company’s sake, but for their own.

So before we launched, we made one decision.

We decided to name it Truffles. Named for David Ogilvy’s belief. And then we decided that before a single person logged in, we needed a promise. Not a product description. Not a corporate mandate. A promise that answered the question every employee was already asking, whether or not they would ever say it aloud: what is in this for me?

The long version of that promise was this:

Why think alone? Unlock the power of Truffles. Because people empowered by Truffles - and Truffles powered by people - drive powerful solutions for clients.

The short version was three words: Why Think Alone?

And then we ran a campaign. A proper one. With the same rigour, the same creative discipline, the same strategic intentionality we applied to any client brief. Not a launch email. Not a CEO announcement. A campaign - with a big idea at its centre, executed consistently across every internal channel we had, built to do the only thing that changes behaviour.

To make it personal.

There is a change management framework called ADKAR - Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement - developed by Jeff Hiatt at Prosci after studying change patterns across more than 700 organisations. Its barrier point research is unambiguous on one thing: Desire is the hardest element to build, and the most commonly skipped. Not because organisations don’t care about it. Because they misunderstand what it requires.

Desire cannot be trained. It cannot be mandated. It is, by definition, a personal decision. And the most common mistake organisations make is moving directly from telling people about the change to training them on it - skipping the step in between entirely.

People resist not because of lack of training. They resist because they don’t want to. Why Think Alone? was a solution to a Desire problem.

It worked not because it was clever, though it was. It worked because it was three things at once.

1. It was a corporate mission - Ogilvy as a global knowledge organisation, stronger together, greater than the sum of its parts, four global divisions becoming one shared intelligence.

2. It was a market differentiator - a network that genuinely leveraged shared knowledge, that could bring the best thinking from Singapore and Amsterdam and Johannesburg to the fingertips of every client, everywhere. The Ogilvy that David Ogilvy imagined: the good ones knowing more.

3. And it was a personal invitation - to every curious person in the building, every employee who had ever solved a problem alone that someone else had already solved, every person who wanted to be smarter, faster, better at their job. Why Think Alone? said: you don’t have to. Everything you need is here. And what you know is needed by someone else right now.

Most knowledge-sharing initiatives ask people to consume. This one asked people to contribute - and made that contribution feel like a gift rather than an obligation. Your knowledge has value. Someone in Mumbai needs what you figured out in São Paulo. Share it and you become, in a very real sense, the colleague who makes everyone else better.

Give every single person a reason to care. That is the step most transformation programmes skip.

The usage numbers moved. The intranet grew to over 3,500 knowledge documents - speeches, case studies, presentations, tools, templates, training publications in no time. Visits grew 700% in the first few weeks. Ogilvy went from fragmented folders to a living, shared intelligence, updated in real time, accessible to every employee in every market.

We made it worth wanting. That is why it worked.

Twenty-five years later, I watch organisations roll out AI the same way. The technology is extraordinary. The communications are about features, capabilities, efficiency gains, competitive necessity.

What’s largely missing is the answer to the oldest question in change management: what does this mean for me, specifically, today, in my work?

Truffles was our LLM avant la lettre - a system built to put collective intelligence at the fingertips of every individual.

We learned then that the technology is never the transformation. The belief is.

And belief comes first. Before the rollout. Before the training. Before the governance framework.

Because from the moment they hear about a change, every employee is already asking one question:

What is in this for me?

Answer that question - honestly, specifically, in the language of their daily work - and the rest of the transformation has a fighting chance.

Skip it, and you have compliance. Which looks like adoption, for a while. Until it doesn’t.

David Ogilvy knew this. He just said it with a pig.

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I found an old interview recently.

2018. Four months into my role as CEO MENA, a journalist asked me what an agency would have to do to flourish in the years ahead.

One line stopped me.

“Nearly my entire career at Ogilvy has been about change management. But I never felt the need for change as much as I feel it today.”

I said that. I hadn’t figured out what I meant yet.

In those same first months in the region, I had been interviewing candidates for a Managing Director role at Memac Ogilvy in the UAE. Every one of them was accomplished. Operationally sharp. Strong track records. Good in a room.

Almost none of them had a real point of view on what the agency of tomorrow needed to look like.

Not because they weren’t capable. Because they were thinking about running the business. Not changing it.

A few years later I became CEO EMEA, responsible for thirty-five markets across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Different scale. Same pattern. The market CEOs who were growing - really growing, not just riding a recovering market - were the ones who thought their job was change. Who were deliberate about it. Who looked for it in every decision. The ones who weren’t, managed. Competently, often. But they managed.

Most people, when they hear “change management,” think of the big transformation. The restructure. The new strategy. The consultant-led programme with a steering committee and a comms plan. Something that happens to an organisation occasionally, from the top, announced with a town hall.

That is not what I am talking about.

I am talking about the mindset that every leader - of a global network or a team of five - should bring to the job every single day. The belief that your job is not to maintain the business as it is, but to move it toward what it needs to become. Through what you offer. Through how you work. Through who you are as an organisation.

Change is the job. Every day.

Managers optimise what exists. Leaders build what’s next. Both are necessary. Only one grows a business.

I have a litmus test for this. The performance review.

Specifically: the goal-setting conversation. If you have done your job as a leader - if you have explained the vision, the strategy, the direction clearly enough - then you should not be handing your team their goals for the year. You should be asking them to write their own first.

What comes back tells you everything. The leaders on your team will write goals that move something forward. That change something. That reflect an ambition for the business, not just the management of their existing responsibilities. The managers will write goals that describe doing their current job well.

Both sets of goals are perfectly reasonable. Only one set tells you who is going to grow your business.

(More on what great performance reviews actually require in another post. There is a lot to say.)

I learned this at a kitchen table on a Saturday.

In 2013, I brought a social media performance capability into Ogilvy - an agency within the agency, expert in not just social content and community management, but paid media and precision targeting in a way that most of the industry was not yet. Over the following years I was responsible for rolling it out across the network. In 2015, I was asked to bring Ogilvy and Social.Lab together in Belgium as a centre of excellence: the model for what a modern integrated agency should look like. Brand-building creativity on one side. Social media performance strategy on the other. Together, genuinely powerful. The first medium in advertising history, we believed, to combine the broadcast power of storytelling with the precision of direct marketing.

We had the talent. We had the ambition. What we did not have, when a giant pitch landed, was the story.

International brief. Major brand. The kind of pitch that, if you win it, changes the shape of what you’re building.

And we had no integrated proposition. A blank page where the strategy should have been.

Yves Baudechon, Social.Lab founder extraordinaire, and I sat at my kitchen table over a weekend and figured it out. No creative team. No budget for one on a Saturday. I called a friend. He was busy. Yves called a friend. He came through. What we built in those two days became the proposition that defined the agency for the next two years.

We won the pitch. Ninety percent of pitches after that. Revenue up fifty-five percent in two years.

Not because we had a transformation programme. Because we used a pitch - an ordinary, urgent, Friday-deadline pitch - as the moment to make real the thing we were trying to build. And use every pitch after to continue exactly that.

That is what change as a daily leadership mindset looks like. Not a strategy offsite. Not a governance model. Knowing clearly enough what you are building toward that when an ordinary moment arrives - a pitch, a hire, a budget conversation, a goal-setting meeting, a new workstream - you recognise it for what it also is. A chance to move the business forward. And you take it.

The managing directors I interviewed in Dubai were waiting for conditions to be right. For the organisation to give them permission. For the quiet moment that would finally allow them to think about transformation.

That moment never comes. The leaders who change organisations don’t wait for it. They use the next morning. And the kitchen table during the weekend.

Haiilo, a leading employee experience consultancy, puts the distinction simply: managers think “how and when.” Leaders think “what and why.” I would add one thing. Leaders think “what and why” every day. Not in a planning cycle. Not in a transformation programme. In every ordinary moment the job gives them.

I read that 2018 interview and recognised something I wish I had said more plainly to every candidate I met that year.

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Thirty-three years ago I walked into Ogilvy in Belgium. An intern with a giant appetite for learning and a mum who thought I could do anything. I wasn’t so sure.

It took me to Paris, to New York, to London, to South Africa, to the Middle East and eventually back to Belgium as EMEA CEO. Six countries. Three continents. Every role, every new home a pivot. Every pivot an education. None of it planned. I followed - curiosity first, courage somewhere behind, imposter syndrome alongside.

And now this.

PatouPivots is what happens when someone who spent thirty years helping organisations change decides it’s time to change herself. Now or never. In public. Without a playbook. Which is terrifying, if I’m honest. And the most alive I’ve felt in years.

PatouPivots is one story told in three time zones. The past - thirty years of people who shaped me. The present - what it actually feels like to leave and begin again. The future - everything I learned about leading change, finally written down.

Three newsletters. One pivot. All of it connected.

• The past - 30 Ogilvy Years, 300 Thank Yous.

Short stories about the many people who shaped those thirty years. The ones who challenged me, believed in me, surprised me, and occasionally drove me completely mad. I owe them everything. A genuine thank you is rarer than it should be. If we share one of these stories, I would love your version too. Email me at patou@patoupivots.com

• The present - Fifty-Five and Unfinished.

Leaving behind thirty years in the same company with no idea what comes next. What I do know is that this year I lost people I loved. Too young. Too fast. And grief is a brilliant editor of what actually matters. So what matters? That whatever comes next is worth every minute. Not impressive. Not logical. Meaningful. Humanitarian is the dream. I’m writing it down as it happens. Not the version I’d share on a conference stage. The version I’m telling my best friend Sylvie.

• The future - The Pivot Files.

Everything I’ve learned about leading change in business. The failures as much as the wins. What Kotter doesn’t tell you. What the boss needs to hear but rarely does.

Subscribe to all three. Or just the one that speaks to where you are right now.

You’re an Ogilvy giant, past or present and we have a story in common. You’re pivoting in life, in work, in whatever it is you’re not quite naming yet - and you’d rather not do it alone. Or you’re leading change somewhere, and you’re tired of the slides that describe the solution without getting near the mess of it.

Whichever. Welcome!

I built something called Truffles once - an intranet named after David Ogilvy’s belief that you should pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles. Its tagline became my operating philosophy.

Why think alone? Which is exactly why I’m here.

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