Culture, Community, Creativity.
Mark Lainas is President of Coolr US, the American arm of the UK’s leading social-first agency. A creative leader with senior roles at BBDO, Ogilvy, and CANVAS United, he brings a conviction that brands which shape culture rather than react to it build something no algorithm can replicate.
“Great social is not about reach. It is about being in the right culture at the right moment.”
Mark Lainas is President of Coolr US, leading the agency’s expansion into the American market from New York. He has spent his career at the intersection of creativity, technology, and brand, holding senior roles at BBDO Worldwide, Ogilvy, and CANVAS United before joining Coolr in 2025.
Lainas joined Coolr in September 2025 to lead its US expansion, bringing a background spanning global advertising, innovation, and digital transformation. At BBDO Worldwide, he served as Chief Innovation Officer for Mars Inc across Europe and the Americas. At Ogilvy, he spent five years as Chief Innovation Officer in London before moving into the managing director role at Ogilvy Change.
His conviction is that the agencies and brands winning right now treat social not as a distribution channel but as the creative medium itself. That inverted model, where the idea is conceived for the social environment rather than adapted to it, produces fundamentally different creative output.
“The agencies winning right now treat social as the creative medium, not the distribution channel.”
“You are not chasing the cultural landscape. You are shaping it.”
The best creative work does not follow what is already trending. It creates the next thing others will follow. Lainas’s career across BBDO, Ogilvy, and Coolr has been shaped by this conviction: brands with the most enduring equity show up in culture before they are invited.
“Real change cannot be confined to a separate innovation unit.”
The lab model produces interesting work and then gets shut down. Lainas saw this repeatedly as a Chief Innovation Officer. The approach that actually changes organisations distributes innovation capability across teams rather than isolating it in a skunkworks. His work at Ogilvy, BBDO, and CANVAS United was built on that principle.
“Social is not where you put the ad. It is where you create the idea.”
Most agencies use social as a destination for content made elsewhere. Coolr’s model is inverted: the idea is conceived for the social environment, shaped by the culture of the platform, and then extended into other channels. That distinction produces fundamentally different creative output.
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