Brands are the engine of the world. Inspire the people first, and the revenue follows. Science and magic, never one without the other.

It started with a market stall at university and a school full of creative people or the children of creative people. Somewhere between loving selling and being surrounded by creativity, Rudaizky wanted to get into advertising. It was a choice between the city or advertising, and he chose one of the most exciting professions you can dream of. Saatchi at the time was the rock and roll agency, and that was the one he wanted to join.

In the end, for him, brands are the fuel of the world. Whether commercial, people or political, brands are the engine of the world. Tomorrow is always a new day in brands, they are continuously evolving, and being part of that is what attracts him.

Rudaizky believes it's an and, not an or. Technology lets us accelerate and engage more, it's a new set of tools. When digital first arrived, people said it was the end of creativity. It wasn't, it was a new format, a bit like a caterpillar reinventing itself. The magic for him will always be the marrying of the science and the magic. AI means everyone can get there faster with more tools, but the creative people who harness it with their human insight will dominate.

Rudaizky has always loved big, meaty challenges, and this was a strange move many questioned before the rise of the consultancy in business. He met phenomenal people, and the chair and CEO at the time, Mark Weinberger, outlined a massive ambition to double the size of the business with distinctive brand at the heart of it.

When Rudaizky said advertising and brands drive growth, Weinberger stopped him and said, inspire our people through the brand and the revenue will follow. That has driven every piece of work since. Everything is tested against one question: will it work on our people first? If it inspires the people, the revenue follows.

It started with questions of Rudaizky's own. EY was ahead of its time launching a purpose, building a better working world, and he was hired to work out what to do with it. He wrote on a Post-it Note what it meant from pitch to broadcast, in a client conversation, from a brand point of view, and how to create a single organizing idea across EY's range of services. He had parked a draft book on the power of questions written at WPP, and hearing EY's consultants talk about the questions triggered the idea that every question solved in the right way helps build a better working world.

Working with Steve Dunn and Dave Allen at Brand Pie, they landed on the better the question, the better the answer, the better the world works. It endures because it reflects EY at its best, and it has been tweaked to the better the prompt, the better the answer, because the question of today is the prompt of tomorrow.

It starts with working for great people who believe in the brand, then framing it properly: explaining the value, finding the insight and organizing idea, and selling it passionately. Rudaizky's WPP experience of enrolling competing companies set him up for EY, where you enroll people positively and build ideas with them. Then come the fundamentals: brand frameworks, the right talent, freedom within a consistent brand, and clear KPIs. A former client CEO told him a brand is what a brand does it says it does, so it is about the experience you create every day as much as where you play externally. He also had to persuade people that investment in advertising works, an argument many CMOs still face.

B2B has come of age. Rudaizky argues B2B brands are more emotional than consumer brands because who you choose to work with is your career on the line, your mortgage, your home. It's a lot harder than buying a detergent, and bringing his consumer experience into B2B has worked.

When Rudaizky arrived, EY was one of the first with a purpose, building a better working world. He realized it was a business strategy, not an external marketing campaign. If you have a purpose, make it meaningful, and let it shape the way you do business rather than acting as a wrapping on the outside. Purpose is critical for the total stakeholder community, and young talent want a sense of purpose larger than profit. It morphs over time, and the new strapline, shape the future with confidence, was born out of a strategy change under CEO Janet Troncalli.

Purpose spans sustainability and social equity, measured across people, clients and society, with programs like EY Ripples impacting millions of lives, often helping impact-driven startups to accelerate. Ultimately brand is about storytelling, and the basics haven't changed: what do customers need to understand about you, and how do you tell them in an inspiring, compelling way. The job of anyone in marketing is to translate the stories of what the business does to its audience.

The job is infinitely more complex, given the breadth of how people engage with customers. Ten years ago it was more outward-bound marketing; today it is deep experience connection. EY Studio Plus was launched to help clients navigate to an experience-based direct relationship with customers, a move from push to engagement. It's a team sport, but the enduring truth is deep customer insight, and creating the most inspirational engagement with your audience remains the defining differential.

The best CMOs are at the boardroom table because engaging with customers has changed and a brand's growth driver spans the whole organization. Successful ones understand the financial context. Going to EY was like an MBA in the other side of the boardroom, surrounded by deep experts from enterprise transformation and cloud through to tax. CMOs also need a degree of humbleness about what they don't know, and to learn from the experts who do, because just as they contribute to the board, the board contributes the other way.

Rudaizky thinks AI will fundamentally change everything. It will drive efficiency and let teams do more: more personalized, more engagement, faster prototyping. There will be an elevation of the average, because anyone can suddenly do better. But the greatest creative people will come to the fore. At photographer Rankin's exhibition Fake, Rankin used average tools brilliantly; Rudaizky tried to copy him and produced a complete failure. In the hands of a magician the same tools create magic. He is in the camp of infinite possibility, and the people that embrace it will harness it.

The creator economy still excites him most, because it has radically changed how brands engage with people and is still evolving. There are issues of trust between an influencer and traditional media, and the role of the creator may rise as people look for the authentic human behind the work. He wonders whether anything using AI will eventually carry a disclaimer, noting the indie film industry proudly says it used no AI at all. EY uses creators all the time through independent agencies, and its film Generations, about the questions children are asking of boardrooms, shows that emotion sells even where B2B has traditionally been a rational sell.

Rudaizky is still learning; leadership is a never-ending process across different styles and cultures. It comes down to building confidence and belief in the ideas you create, and passion goes a long way. Inspiring creativity in large organizations is a mix of discipline, talent and pure passion. You're only as good as the people around you, and it is easy to settle in a big organization where there is always resistance to new ideas.

We are living in an age of authenticity, so brands that stand for something and are clear about it will succeed. The idea that AI is over-hyped is wrong: it's real, and the people who succeed spend huge amounts of time learning. And the one capability every marketer needs is courage, because every new idea splits opinion, and confidence is a deep-seated need for anyone bringing new ideas to an organization.