The best ideas can come from anywhere. The best agencies are built for that.

I sat down with nearly all four hundred people one-on-one to understand what was working, what wasn't, and where we needed to focus. We've rallied around a North Star, which is being the leading strategic partner for our clients, harnessing the power of connection to create positive impact every day.

It's hard to take direct credit for change in a year and a half, but we have momentum. Getting everyone rallied around the same vision was the first thing. In an agency with so many diverse skill sets and mindsets, having one North Star has been hugely valuable. The line that struck me from a colleague is the music grounds us; every time the agency comes together, the music is what grounds them, and the North Star plays that role in the day-to-day.

A great idea can come from anywhere. In an organisation like ours, some of the younger team members know far more than I do about the latest technology. So allowing them to thrive is part of the strategy. The Future Ready Board is twelve people across the agency nominated for a year. They bring values and ideas to the executive team and to the wider agency. The aim is more voices, more access, more opportunities, more diversity, on the working assumption that this will produce the best work of our lives and create opportunities for more people.

One of the things I was particularly excited about coming into the UK was the range of entry-level routes available. Apprenticeships were not a tool I'd had in the same way in the US. Under Digitas Next we have a number of partnerships. Multiverse for apprenticeship-style workshops. Generation for career transition into tech and data through skills bootcamps. And Next Tech Girls for bringing more girls into tech early.

The impact is real. We have a stronger gender mix and stronger BAME representation through the entry-level intake than we would otherwise. And on the work itself, the access these initiatives give us to a younger audience changes briefs. The Next Tech Girls workshops bring up to a thousand girls into a client brief at a time. We took a gaming brief through one of those workshops and at the end of the day realised the insight we had been pushing on was the wrong one. The work that came out was directed at school-age children and their parents in a more meaningful way than the original brief would have produced. We also brought the cohort into the F1 Academy work so they could feed back on the experience.

All roads lead to humans. The operating implication is that the model places our talent, and through them our clients, at the centre of everything we do. The agency has infinite potential because of the range of skill sets we have inside it. The discipline is bringing the right people to the table for the problem the client is trying to solve, including our entry-level talent. They add a perspective on the work that nobody else in the room has.

We've been doing AI in the media, data, and tech teams for years. We formalised the AI labs during the pandemic in 2020. The interesting work is the embedding of AI in the day-to-day, whether that's prototyping in client conversations, or the moments around the edges. Our Creative Tech Director went on parental leave for three months and left behind a digital twin we can ask questions of while he's out. At Christmas one of our creative technologists built a virtual Digitas mark on the front wall of the building at 43 Lane, so anyone who held a phone up could see the brand appear. The small moments of joy happen all the time.

CMOs now have to understand tech. The infrastructure they build, how they think about data, how they design customised experiences, all sit inside a tech architecture, and the data-privacy and responsibility implications mean they have to understand the risk environment as well. They also need to understand brand and performance together, and how each runs across all channels. Some of my friends in CMO roles came up purely on brand and lacked the performance discipline, and vice versa. The expectation now is for both, alongside the metrics that hold each side accountable. The pressure on the role has increased materially.

Impact is our output. We talk about commercial impact and cultural impact. The discipline is to start at the end. We co-create what the vision is and what the measurement needs to be up front. We had a recent pitch where a client wanted a brand experience and an app. We asked what they were trying to achieve. The answer was loyalty and growth. Our business analytics team modelled what that meant in incremental revenue over the next five years and the number matched what the client's internal analysts had produced. That gave us a real conversation about what we were really trying to achieve. Both sides have to put skin in the game.

The marketplace has never been more confusing for clients, and consumers expect more than ever from the brands they buy from. We wanted to explore whether commercial impact and cultural impact really are inseparable, whether clients and consumers genuinely expect both, and what gets in the way. Net net, more to come, but the early signal is that both matter and that the line between them is thinner than the industry has historically assumed.

A separate definitional point. Cultural impact should not be confused with purpose. Cultural impact is being relevant and of the moment in the right way, legitimate to consumers, and adding value. It is not about world-changing positioning every day.

The first thing was the right leadership team. My first appointment was a Chief Creative Officer, deliberately out of market, who brings big concept thinking but understands digital complexity and innovation. The Chief Data Officer and Chief Talent Officer were elevated because data and talent are critical to everything we do. The Chief Operating Officer was a long search, because the model needs to break down silos across our talent, create inclusive spaces for talent and clients to collaborate, and innovate while it runs. We organise portfolios around clients. Client service and delivery leads run those portfolios and tap into the wider skill set as the brief demands. The fruits of that work are only just starting to show; speak to me in 2025.

The longstanding relationships are striking. We've worked with Formula One for twenty years, building out their platform, technology, and fan experience, and most recently the F1 Academy work that brings more women into driving and the fan base around it. We re-launched the EE brand and built Learn Smart, the digital experience that gives children additional access to education. We also did Capture the Store, a gaming campaign where gamers protected the store and customers got to take them on. Gaming is the hot category, but reaching the audience while being seen as legitimate is genuinely hard, and the feedback on Capture the Store was unusually good. There's also the first DTC e-commerce release for an auto client just a couple of weeks ago, with the impact landing from week one. And H&M, where the work started in SEO and has flipped into SEO, commerce, and data in service of building out their digital shelf, with the agency now informing and predicting trends to their business strategy team.

Two. The first is AI, specifically the personal agent capabilities, which open paths to democratised education and democratised therapy alongside the lighter cultural applications. The second is women's health. More information, fewer taboos, more agency. The agency has been talking about normalising periods, which 50% of the population have but the industry rarely discusses. There are real innovation and technology moves coming alongside that conversation. And the Unicorn Lab, our incubator, is the third piece. Six months from now I'll know where we've landed; that's the point of running it.

Always be curious. You don't have to have the answers. You don't have to know the end point. Just keep learning. It will all fall into place.