Jo Arscott is a true pioneer. When she started in advertising she was a teenage girl of colour. And that was back in the 1980s, when the planet was a lot less woke (as the kids say) than it is now. Then she paved the way for ‘Integrated’ work long before ‘360’ became an adjective. Then she worked everywhere from Arkansas to Qatar. And she’s now a walking diversity debate who doesn’t think there should be one. So she’s had an advertising career unlike any other, but met every twist and...

Last week I had the idea to interview a client. Come on. Haven’t you always wanted to know what they hell they’re all thinking? So I put the word out and found one: an automotive client for a big brand that works with a good agency, so he knows what good ads are and has been somewhat responsible for bringing them into the world (he also wanted to remain anonymous). I actually found this to be one of the most revealing chats I’ve had, possibly because it was a window into a world I knew...

Here’s my chat with my old AD, Cam Blackley. Looking at his awards haul since we worked together, you could make a good case for the fact that I was just holding him back: D&AD Gold and Silvers, Titanium and Gold Lions etc., along with a rocket-like career trajectory that has seen him go from AD to CD to ECD to CCO. Thankfully I’m not in the least bit put out by this, because Cam is such a good bloke. Check out his many excellent ads, along with our chat, which touches on the...

Like most episodes of ITIAPTWC, my chat with Hugh offers many thought-provoking lessons on creating work, doing your best for different bosses and working out what to do next. In addition, Hugh started around the same time I did, so I found the parallels and separations between his career and mine an interesting lesson in how you can choose many different paths in this business. So we discuss that, and… Watford. Journalism. Teaming up with Adam. Trudging round Soho. Making Harley...

Here’s my 6th, and hopefully not final, chat with Dave Dye. It’s the story of DHM and the various occurrences that created the excellent work at the bottom of this post. As always with Dave, there are many excellent lessons for anyone who is either running or starting an agency, including… Temporary time with Paul Silburn. Looking for new partners (trust). The name: Thingy? Not Thingy. Alphabetical order. The Publicis breakaway that wasn’t. ‘Commissioning editor’. New...

This week’s guest is the lovely and excellent Mr. Dan Germain, whose name almost looks like ‘Dangerman’. His involvement in advertising, writing, branding and design has almost entirely been in the service of Innocent, which is now a big, global company with plenty of funny writing on the sides of the bottles. So he’s basically created all the stuff that you love about Innocent beyond the mixture of some bits of fruit. To find all about that and the following, click on one of the links...

Libby Brockhoff is the current CEO/Founder of the agency Odysseus Arms. You can read all about them here. We discuss how that agency came about, but we also discuss how Libby became one of the founders of Mother. It was a somewhat circuitous route, but when it finally happened she was just 27 years old. I think that’s pretty amazing: to have started the most revolutionary ad agency in living memory (and given it the name which then spawned a million other agency names that weren’t actual...

I sent Ben an email a while ago to ask if he’d do the old podcast. He kindly and politely declined, saying he’d done a few already and didn’t want to repeat himself. So I waited a bit then asked him if he’d do a more start-up based conversation and he even more kindly said yes. We had a delightful chat, after which Ben revealed to me that he’d just done Dave Dye’s podcast. Darn, I thought. Dave’s podcasts are much longer than mine, so he’s bound to have covered everything I did, and...

A bit of a different chat this week: it’s not a start up and it’s not an ad person, but it is someone who is deeply embedded in a conversation we all need to have right now: how do we do what we do in a such a way that it has a positive impact on the planet and the people on it? That’s an enormous and complex question, but if you’d like to explore it, this episode might be a good place to start. Jay is a very successful businessman who built sportswear company And1 to $250m. You can find a...