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Published by Ed Cotton
Inspiring Futures pulls back the curtain on the minds reshaping advertising and marketing today. Host Ed Cotton, former Chief Strategy Officer at Butler Shine and Stern & Partners, engages industry visionaries in raw, unfiltered conversations about their career pivots, creative breakthroughs, and strategic innovations. No canned responses. No PR filters. Just honest insights about navigating the complex world of brands, creativity, and agency life. Each episode delivers actionable wisdom from those who've mastered the craft and aren't afraid to share their failures alongside their successes.
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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.
Neil Barrie didn't take the conventional route into brand strategy. After studying modern history at Oxford, he spent six years trying to make it as a musician, a detour, it turns out, was a training ground for what came next. As the co-founder of 21st Century Brand, Neil has worked with some of the most interesting companies of the last decade, including an early, formative stint helping build the Airbnb brand alongside Brian Chesky and Jonathan Mildenhall. That experience changed the way he thought about brand: not a storytelling wrapper, but the entire company as a creative canvas. In this conversation, Neil talks about the craft of brand-building in an era of platform companies, AI disruption, and a marketing discipline under serious pressure. Why strategists need to hear this 1. The clearest explanation of what separates brand consulting from advertising you'll find anywhere. Neil lays it out simply: great ad agencies want to get the client out of the way so they can make great work. Great brand consultancies put the client in the way because that's where the real brand lives. 2. A genuinely honest take on the existential moment for brand strategy. Neil admits he spent part of last year in crisis mode, asking whether brand strategy even has a future. What he found when he went and talked to a dozen CMOs is both reassuring and clarifying: intelligence is everywhere, but conviction and wisdom are in short supply. The role isn't disappearing, it's shifting, and he's specific about where the value is migrating. 3. Machine-readable brands This is where the conversation gets genuinely forward-looking. As LLMs increasingly mediate how people discover and choose between companies, Neil argues that brands need to be built for two audiences simultaneously: humans and machines. 4. Why the "durable and dynamic" tension is the central challenge of modern brand building. Platform brands like Uber and Amazon have made the old CPG playbook look quaint. Neil talks through how you hold a brand together when the business is expanding in every direction at once, and why archetypes and distinctive brand assets matter more, not less, when a company's remit expands. 5. What being a strategist means today. Crunching data into neat answers is increasingly commoditized. What's genuinely scarce and valuable is the ability to move a group of people toward conviction. Neil is refreshingly direct about what that means for the kind of strategist who thrives going forward.
Kaye Symington has spent 20 years in marketing, and right now she's working to keep one of the oldest media formats alive — the printed newspaper. As head of marketing at Newspaper Club, she's on the front lines of a quiet cultural shift: people are choosing ink and paper not out of nostalgia, but because something about it just hits differently. In this conversation, we dig into what's really driving that, and what it says about how we want to connect right now. Kaye shares the story of a photographer who sent a physical seasonal newsletter to creative directors instead of another email and landed a $50,000 campaign from it. The math on cutting through digital noise is more interesting than you'd think. Newspaper Club has been growing since 2009, and Kaye's colleagues laugh every time the trend cycle rediscovers print. She explains why newsprint keeps finding new audiences. People and organizations making newspapers include Ariana Grande. A Scottish anarchist gardening club. A symphony orchestra. A dating site for 30-somethings running classifieds. The range of people printing newspapers reveals something genuinely interesting about what people are hungry for right now.
James Nord didn’t just build an influencer marketing company. He lived through the birth of internet culture from the inside. In this episode of Inspiring Futures , the founder and CEO of Fohr It traces the path from early Tumblr obsession to building one of the most influential creator marketing companies in the world. What makes this conversation compelling is that it’s really about much more than influencer marketing. It’s about the transformation of culture itself. James explains what it felt like to be one of the first people to understand that “following” would become a new kind of currency, long before brands, agencies, or investors took the idea seriously. He talks candidly about the brutal early years of educating clients, surviving on almost no money, paying employees with photography income, and slowly realizing that the internet was no longer a sideshow. It had become the main stage. The discussion moves from Tumblr and Instagram’s early days into the modern creator economy, unpacking why brands still misunderstand creators, why legacy marketers struggle with internet-native culture, and why companies like Nike can lose relevance while brands like Skims instinctively understand the new rules of influence. Along the way, James shares sharp insights on: Why internet culture fractured the monoculture How algorithms changed influence forever Why “momentum” matters more than total reach The hidden tension between marketers and creators Why great creators often outperform traditional advertising How influencer marketing evolved from experimentation into one of the most powerful forces in business and politics There’s also a fascinating thread running through the entire conversation about “internet natives” versus traditional institutions. James argues that people who grew up deeply embedded online developed an instinctive understanding of digital communities that many large organizations still lack today. If you care about culture, marketing, creators, the internet, or how influence actually works in 2026, this is a rich and revealing listen. It’s part founder story, part history of the social internet, and part field guide to how modern attention really moves.
This episode is really about how agencies evolve under pressure . Ammunition began with deep expertise in home and building, a category defined by complicated purchase journeys, multiple decision-makers, long sales cycles, and considered decisions. That gave the agency an early advantage. But the more interesting part is how it learned from that advantage. The lesson was not simply “we know this category.” The lesson was: “we know how to solve complex growth problems.” That shift matters. Because agencies are operating in a difficult market. Clients are under pressure. CMOs are being asked to do more with less. AI is changing the production layer. Channels keep multiplying. And there is more marketing activity than ever, but not always more progress. In that context, Ammunition’s proposition, Growth, no matter what , becomes more than a line. It becomes a way of thinking about agency value. Kelly and Chris describe an agency trying to stay useful by learning continuously: from clients, from research, from AI, from category complexity, from international expansion, and from the changing pressures facing CMOs. It is a story about an agency growing not because times are easy, but because hard times force it to get clearer about what it is really good at.
AI and The Marketing Department For a recent Inspiring Futures podcast, I had the opportunity to spend time with Mixtape Partners' Nirm Shanbhag , Andy Bateman , and Sarah Lent / Mixtape is a management consultancy designed specifically for marketers navigating the AI era. Between them, they've spent careers inside the big agency networks (Omnicom, WPP, IPG, Interbrand, R/GA), led innovation and customer strategy at Deloitte, and sat on the client side as senior marketers and CMOs. They've been the consultants, they've been the clients, and they've run the agencies. They started Mixtape because they kept noticing the same thing: most strategy work gets shelved, and the work that actually matters is the work that gets adopted. In the past year, they spent some time researching what was happening with AI and marketing departments. They spent an hour each with thirty CMOs working across twelve industries. Their main conclusion is the one nobody wants to say out loud: nobody has figured this out yet. Not the consultancies. Not the holdcos. Not the platforms. What they did find is a set of moves leading marketers are quietly making while everyone else is still arguing about prompts. Four core findings... The customer you're designing for isn't one person anymore. It's three. Almost no marketer interviewed is ready for what that means. There's a single decision a CMO can make in the next six months that quietly kills their AI transformation before it starts, and most of them are about to make it. As AI takes over execution, the entire value of human work collapses onto one thing. Companies that aren't training for it are about to discover a capability gap that no amount of AI throughput can fix. Your brand is now an iceberg. The part everyone's been optimising for is the part above the water.
Amy Carvajal grew up in New York, and when she was a kid she ran a little rock painting business. She'd grab rocks from the park, take orders from the neighbors, paint whatever they wanted, and deliver them herself. That's basically how she's worked ever since. Find the material, listen to the person, and care about how it turns out. She spent the next twenty years in the big agencies. DDB, Ogilvy, the global brand world. She built campaigns for clients like IBM, learned how to hold an idea together across thirty different markets, and saw firsthand how often great work gets watered down by the time it ships. Eventually she wanted to be closer to the work again, so she started Full Tank. We get into all of it. Creativity, New York, what it takes to build something independent right now, and why she thinks the smaller shops are about to come out ahead.
For thirty years, the rules of branding felt settled. Find a story. Tell it loudly. Make people feel something. Repeat. That era is over. On the latest Inspiring Futures , Todd Irwin and Craig Bagno of Fazer walked through what's actually replacing it — and the sequence is what makes it land. It starts with a flip. Brand used to be say, then do. Now it's do, then say. Customers experience the brand five times before they ever encounter the marketing, so the story has to be downstream of the truth. Which means storytelling isn't the currency anymore. Solutions are. The brands winning right now aren't the ones with the best narrative; they're the ones identifying a real customer pain point and solving it better than anyone else. Todd calls this depositioning, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's how Apple beat IBM. How the iPhone beat BlackBerry. How Blank Street is quietly eating Starbucks while Howard Schultz keeps trying to rebuild a world that no longer exists. And then AI enters the picture and accelerates everything. Buyers are starting decisions inside ChatGPT and Claude, not Google. The funnel is collapsing. The brand that shows up as the problem solver wins — and the brand that's just well-dressed gets skipped. Underneath all of it is Craig's bigger theory: that marketing has only ever had three eras, defined not by marketers but by infrastructure. We're in the third one now, and most of the industry is still operating like it's the second. The whole conversation reframes what brand work actually is in 2026.
Amar Chohan is the founder of Department of Creative Affairs (DCA), a venture built to map and champion the independent creative agency sector. A near-accidental entrant to the industry, he trained as a lawyer before walking away from it, then spent almost 12 years at Contagious across two stints, rising to global commercial director. In this conversation, he reflects on that formative period, the thinking behind DCA, and why he believes the independent sector is the real future of creativity. Six themes from the conversation. 1. An accidental path into the industry Ammar didn't plan a career in advertising. He trained as a lawyer before making what he calls "the brave decision" to walk away, a move his parents struggled to understand. What pulled him toward Contagious wasn't the sector but the stage of company: "I just wanted to go in somewhere where I could make my mark… be the master of my own destiny." 2. Contagious as the defining chapter He describes his 12 years at Contagious as "the defining stage of my career" before launching DCA. The experience gave him a rare vantage point, working with both agencies and brands. "There's no better place to understand the importance and the power of creativity in our industry," he says, crediting it with "a knack for seeing what's happening in our industry and what that evolution means." 3. The holding company distortion This is the conviction underpinning DCA. Ammar's frustration is that trade press, awards, and search consultants remain anchored to holding companies that represent a sliver of the global market: "The holding company agencies represent 1%, a fraction of the entire agency market around the world. So why is that anchoring the mood and the coverage?" The downstream effect, he argues, is an ambient pessimism that paints the whole sector as struggling, when in reality the independent world contains "everything you could possibly need, whether it's a two-person studio or a 200-person global media planning and buying shop." 4. Editorial DNA carried forward DCA inherits something essential from Contagious. Ammar calls the original print magazine "the most expensive business card on the planet," not profitable alone but the product that opened every door. What made Contagious trusted was editorial authority and curation, and that's the posture DCA takes toward a noisier market: "We've got to be the signal in a world of just overwhelming amounts of information." 5. Curation as the core product He's firm that DCA isn't an open directory. "99% of creative businesses are independent, not all can and should be on the map. So our job is to discover and curate, and invest." A quality threshold matters because DCA's claim that clients should prioritise independents only holds up if every match produces great work. It also solves a real marketer pain point: "They know what they need is out there, but they don't know where to find it." 6. Visibility as the agencies' real problem Ammar is blunt about why most independent agencies plateau. Word of mouth takes them only so far. "If a client doesn't know you exist, how do you possibly make your way into the consideration set?" He has no patience for agencies that neglect their own marketing: "The whole cobbler's sons' shoes thing is inexcusable today. We can't keep on using that as an excuse." https://www.thedca.co/
Chuck McBride founded Cutwater in San Francisco. Before that he ran Nike at Wieden+Kennedy, sat alongside Lee Clow at TBWA\Chiat\Day North America, and was on the inaugural team that launched Got Milk? at Goodby, Silverstein. Levi's. adidas. Ray-Ban. Fox Sports. Hoka. Lexus. Feeding America. The work is in MoMA. The shelf has Cannes Lions, Emmys, Clios, D&AD pencils. But the résumé isn't why you should listen. The ideas are — and the stories he uses to get to them. Three things from the conversation I haven't been able to stop thinking about: 1. The idea is usually already in the room. Chuck describes himself not as a creative director but as "more of an archaeologist." The point of view is almost always already there — buried in the founder, the product, the way people talk about the thing without noticing they're doing it. He explains it through a dinner with a tech founder who didn't yet have a story for his own company, until the founder said one sentence and Chuck cut him off mid-thought: "Stop. You just said it." The line that ran for years was already in the room. 2. Risk is the price of memorable work. Chuck tells the story behind one of the most famous spots of the era — the one where the brief said, in plain English, don't kill the guy . The director killed him anyway. The spot ran. A client walked up to Chuck outside the building afterward and said something he has clearly never forgotten. The flip side, he says, is what kills most work in this business: "the death of a thousand cuts." The clients who freeze in the face of anything risky are the ones who guarantee the work nobody remembers. 3. The real story behind the work is rarely the public one. Chuck talks about one of the most beloved American campaigns of the last 30 years — and reveals the private nickname the team used for the spots, a nickname that would have horrified the client if they'd ever heard it. It reframes the campaign as something much darker and much funnier than the version everyone grew up with. And it shows how the real idea was never about the product at all. There's also the moment that pushed him to open his own shop — which wasn't ambition, but the realization that once you do, the risk is entirely on you. "When you open your shop, it's your word now. There's nobody to bail you out." He closes the conversation with a piece of advice from his very first boss — six words he's carried his whole career, and the closest thing he offers to a philosophy of the work: "Wear them out with good work."
Ace of Hearts is one of those rare new agencies that arrives with real heat around it. Not just because the founders come from serious places, but because it seems to answer a feeling a lot of people have right now: that creative companies have become too managed, too tired, too airless, and that something more alive is needed. Martin Beverly has come through AMV, Wieden+Kennedy and Adam & Eve, so he has seen three very different versions of creative excellence up close: the discipline of simplicity, the blur between strategy and creative, the power of pace, momentum and a distinctive creative handwriting. What makes this conversation worth hearing is that it is not just another founder story. It is about belief. Belief in creativity. Belief in the people making it. Belief that a company can be ambitious without grinding everyone into dust. Martin talks about building Ace of Hearts around care, energy, shared success and a wider idea of what creativity can do, not as polish at the end, but as a force inside the business itself. He is very good on simplicity, on earning the trust of creatives, on what made John Lewis so powerful, and on why people do better work when they do not feel anxious, disposable or burnt out. This is a must-listen because it feels like a small signal of something bigger: the return of hope, energy and creative belief in an industry that badly needs all three.
Australia’s indie agency scene feels on fire right now, and Hellions feels like part of that new wave. With new work already out in the world for Figma and a fresh win with BISSELL, this is more than a start-up story. In this episode, Hellions co-founder Mike Donman shares his story, and in our conversation, five lessons emerged that could be valuable for anyone thinking of starting a new shop. Create value, don’t extract it Make the client better, not just busier. Lose the grand reveal Transparency and collaboration build trust faster than theatre. Build a team with different strengths The best founding groups are not clones. They’re combinations. Make work that does something Attention is easy. Consequence is harder and far more valuable. Protect optimism Cynicism drains creative businesses. Energy builds them. This podcast is created and produced by Ed Cotton https://invernessconsult.com/
Nike's stock dropped 15% yesterday. Greater China is down for the sixth consecutive quarter. Their CEO told staff he's "so tired of talking about fixing this business." This isn't a tariff problem. It's an identity crisis. I sat down with Falk Fuhrmann, who has led strategy at TBWA, DDB, and Saatchi's for 25 years. Ran P&G's strategy across Asia and Greater China. Now runs Huí//Lüè, a brand consultancy in Shanghai with over a decade spent on the ground. His take: Western brands learned all the right tactics in China — the platforms, the KOLs, the e-commerce playbook. But they optimised their way into meaninglessness. They can execute in the ecosystem but they've lost the thing that made anyone care. Chinese brands aren't winning on national pride. They're winning because they understand their consumers better. BYD doesn't beat Mercedes because of patriotism. It beats it because it builds what consumers actually want. And the deeper shift nobody's discussing on earnings calls: the psychological contract that powered Chinese consumption is broken. Before COVID, every middle-class consumer assumed luxury was inevitable. That assumption is gone. No Western brand has figured out what to say to a consumer who no longer believes tomorrow will be better than today. The trade war makes headlines. The real war is for relevance.
What happens inside a $20 billion creative technology operation when AI changes the speed of everything? When designers start coding? When two-week sprints compress to one? And what does that mean for the clients who are trying to navigate the same transformation? Bill Shea has spent decades building digital products inside Accenture Song, larger than any agency holding company in the world. In my conversation for the Inspiring Futures podcast, he talks openly about both sides: how the operation is reorganising around AI, and what he's seeing across the enterprises they serve. The collapsing role boundaries. The compressed timelines. The unexpected flywheel where speed isn't shrinking the work but multiplying it. He also discusses where the real risk lies. The difference between human in the loop and human in the lead. Why brands are losing their own narrative to models they haven't engaged with. And why the companies that come through this won't be the ones that moved fastest, they'll be the ones that knew what to hold onto while everything else changed.
Lucinda is the founder and head of strategy at Sibling, a culture-led strategy studio. In this episode, we track Lucinda’s unconventional path into strategy. Originally an aspiring journalist, she spent her early career in the editorial departments of London fashion magazines—at one point completing six months of back-to-back internships while living on her sister’s floor. Her career progressed through brand-side roles at ASOS , Farfetch (during its startup phase), and Stella McCartney , with a three-year stint in Berlin’s luxury e-commerce scene in between. Lucinda explains why she eventually left the fashion world: a recurring tension where "the perfect image" was consistently prioritized over "the actual strategy." We discuss how this background gave her a unique lens for identifying brand blind spots and why she views her Substack and research-writing habit not as side projects, but as the core of how her strategy is made. Lucinda argues for a version of the craft that is more cultural, observant, and human, and significantly less reactive.
Barry LaBov started as a rock and roll musician, then accidentally fell into running a full-service ad agency when a client convinced him to buy their marketing department. That unlikely path led him to become one of the foremost experts on brand differentiation, what he calls "brand archaeology." On the Inspiring Futures podcast, he shared how he helps companies uncover the hidden genius they're already sitting on. Discovery LaBov's team doesn't create differentiation; they discover it. Through "technical immersions" in factories and labs, they routinely find innovations that companies take for granted. The Audi Quattro story is a perfect case — a $50 million technology that nobody in sales was even talking about. Where The Insight Is Marketing departments often have a surface-level understanding of what makes the product special. The real insights live with the people designing and building things. LaBov learned this the hard way when a head of sales gave him a useless plant tour; he now insists on having engineers and manufacturing leads present. Post-Founder Companies LaBov calls post-founder companies "sleeping giants", sitting on gold mines of differentiation but no longer leveraging them. Successors streamline away the very things that made the company special, while competitors quietly hope they never wake up. Different Isn't About Category Norms Harley-Davidson doesn't have the fastest bikes or the cheapest maintenance. But nobody else has their sound or their owner community. Differentiation is about character, not winning every category. LaBov uses the Cindy Crawford analogy — her mole was the thing that made her iconic, and removing it would have left a scar. Difference is Protection LaBov sees companies lazily accepting AI-generated messaging without asking if it sounds like them. The antidote isn't rejecting AI; it's knowing your differentiation so clearly that no algorithm can accidentally erase it.
This is an interview with Erin Emmerson, CEO, Founder, Kelsey Croos, President, Founder and David Young, Global Executive Creative Director of Tower28. This is how they describe themselves on their website. "Like the Santa Monica lifeguard tower we’re named after, we provide guardianship for our clients as they navigate the wondrous waters of localization. Founded by long-time international advertising executives, we set out to democratize the global agency network of creative industry professionals by offering all brands and agencies the opportunity to scale with high-caliber global and in-market talent by their side — without having to pay the premium for infrastructure and full time. To us, there are no foreign markets." Three major themes emerged from our conversation. 1. Transcreation is far more than translation Tower28 positions itself not as a translation shop but as a full-service local agency in every market, with strategists, creatives, producers, and insight specialists on the ground. They emphasize understanding the creative and strategic intent behind work and adapting it culturally, not just linguistically. As Kelsey put it: "We're translating culture, we're not just translating language, we're transcreating a feeling." Erin reinforced this by noting that localization is often treated as an afterthought , "everything's done and dusted and baked, can you guys just translate this and ship it out?" and that Tower28 was built specifically to push against that mindset by getting involved upstream. 2. Their AI tool "Gail" and curated global network are key differentiators. The agency built a proprietary AI-powered platform called Gail that can take in a brief and recommend the ideal team from their network, as well as run a first-pass cultural assessment on taglines, scripts, and content. That output then goes to local experts for human validation, creating what Erin described as "a flywheel of assessment, validation, assessment, validation and Gail gets better every single time we run it." Kelsey added that this proves "you don't have to choose between speed or scale or cultural nuance. We have it all in one place." 3. The holding company model is fracturing, and independents like Tower 28 see a major opportunity. The team sees the current industry upheaval, what a colleague of theirs calls "the great unholding" as a chance to offer brands a more flexible, effective alternative to traditional multinational agency networks. Erin noted: "You don't have to just go to one of the top four or five just because they have global presence. There's a different way to do things." Kelsey described their flexible retainer model as a selling point: "We build the ship for the client's needs, our client doesn't have to get on our specific ship."
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