Great Ideas Come From Anywhere

Jennifer sums up her operating model in a phrase: all roads lead to humans. A digital agency holds an unusual breadth of skills, strategy, media, data, creative and technology, and the temptation is to organise around those departments. She organises around people instead, putting both her own talent and the client at the centre and pulling the right specialists to the table for each problem. The breadth, in her view, is what gives the agency infinite potential, but only if it is convened around a human need rather than a functional silo. Structure, for her, follows the problem and the people, not the org chart.

One of Jennifer's proudest mechanisms is also one of the least obvious. Through the Next Tech Girls programme, Digitas ran workshops with up to a thousand young women, handing them a real client brief. On one gaming brief, the girls' response showed the agency that the insight it had planned to build on was the wrong one. The work was redirected toward school-age children and their parents in a way the team had not seen, and a social-impact programme quietly produced commercial value. It is, for her, proof that widening the room changes the answer, and that the next generation is a source of insight, not just goodwill.

Jennifer is relaxed about AI because it had been running quietly in her media, data and technology teams for years before anyone called it a revolution. What interests her now is the grassroots use, the small, practical applications her people invent for themselves. Her favourite example: a creative technology director, heading off for three months of parental leave, built a digital twin of himself so the team could keep asking him questions while he was away. The formal AI labs matter, but moments like that, she argues, are where adoption actually takes root. The technology becomes useful when individuals reach for it without being told to.

For Jennifer, the product of the agency is not a campaign but impact, and impact has two halves: commercial and cultural. Her teams begin at the end, co-creating with the client both the outcome they want and the way it will be measured, rather than fitting metrics to finished work. She describes pitching a client who asked for a brand experience and an app; instead of taking the order, the agency asked what they were actually trying to achieve, ran the analysis, and arrived independently at the same incremental revenue figure the client's own analysts had. That, she says, changes the conversation, and puts both sides' skin in the game. Cultural impact she is careful to separate from purpose: it means being relevant, of the moment and legitimate to consumers, and bringing them real value.