Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising

AI and The Marketing Department 
For a recent Inspiring Futures podcast, I had the opportunity to spend time with Mixtape Partners' Nirm Shanbhag, Andy Bateman, and Sarah Lent/
Mixtape is a management consultancy designed specifically for marketers navigating the AI era. 
Between them, they've spent careers inside the big agency networks (Omnicom, WPP, IPG, Interbrand, R/GA), led innovation and customer strategy at Deloitte, and sat on the client side as senior marketers and CMOs. 
They've been the consultants, they've been the clients, and they've run the agencies. 
They started Mixtape because they kept noticing the same thing: most strategy work gets shelved, and the work that actually matters is the work that gets adopted.
In the past year, they spent some time researching what was happening with AI and marketing departments. They spent an hour each with thirty CMOs working across twelve industries.
Their main conclusion is the one nobody wants to say out loud: nobody has figured this out yet. Not the consultancies. Not the holdcos. Not the platforms.
What they did find is a set of moves leading marketers are quietly making while everyone else is still arguing about prompts.
Four core findings...
The customer you're designing for isn't one person anymore. It's three. Almost no marketer interviewed is ready for what that means.
There's a single decision a CMO can make in the next six months that quietly kills their AI transformation before it starts, and most of them are about to make it.
As AI takes over execution, the entire value of human work collapses onto one thing. Companies that aren't training for it are about to discover a capability gap that no amount of AI throughput can fix.
Your brand is now an iceberg. The part everyone's been optimising for is the part above the water.

Amy Carvajal grew up in New York, and when she was a kid she ran a little rock painting business. She'd grab rocks from the park, take orders from the neighbors, paint whatever they wanted, and deliver them herself. That's basically how she's worked ever since. Find the material, listen to the person, and care about how it turns out.
She spent the next twenty years in the big agencies. DDB, Ogilvy, the global brand world. She built campaigns for clients like IBM, learned how to hold an idea together across thirty different markets, and saw firsthand how often great work gets watered down by the time it ships. 
Eventually she wanted to be closer to the work again, so she started Full Tank.
We get into all of it. Creativity, New York, what it takes to build something independent right now, and why she thinks the smaller shops are about to come out ahead.

For thirty years, the rules of branding felt settled. Find a story. Tell it loudly. Make people feel something. Repeat.
That era is over.
On the latest Inspiring Futures, Todd Irwin and Craig Bagno of Fazer walked through what's actually replacing it — and the sequence is what makes it land.
It starts with a flip. Brand used to be say, then do. Now it's do, then say. Customers experience the brand five times before they ever encounter the marketing, so the story has to be downstream of the truth.
Which means storytelling isn't the currency anymore. Solutions are. The brands winning right now aren't the ones with the best narrative; they're the ones identifying a real customer pain point and solving it better than anyone else. Todd calls this depositioning, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's how Apple beat IBM. How the iPhone beat BlackBerry. How Blank Street is quietly eating Starbucks while Howard Schultz keeps trying to rebuild a world that no longer exists.
And then AI enters the picture and accelerates everything. Buyers are starting decisions inside ChatGPT and Claude, not Google. The funnel is collapsing. The brand that shows up as the problem solver wins — and the brand that's just well-dressed gets skipped.
Underneath all of it is Craig's bigger theory: that marketing has only ever had three eras, defined not by marketers but by infrastructure. We're in the third one now, and most of the industry is still operating like it's the second.
The whole conversation reframes what brand work actually is in 2026.

Amar Chohan is the founder of Department of Creative Affairs (DCA), a venture built to map and champion the independent creative agency sector. 
A near-accidental entrant to the industry, he trained as a lawyer before walking away from it, then spent almost 12 years at Contagious across two stints, rising to global commercial director. In this conversation, he reflects on that formative period, the thinking behind DCA, and why he believes the independent sector is the real future of creativity.
Six themes from the conversation.
1. An accidental path into the industry
Ammar didn't plan a career in advertising. He trained as a lawyer before making what he calls "the brave decision" to walk away, a move his parents struggled to understand. What pulled him toward Contagious wasn't the sector but the stage of company: "I just wanted to go in somewhere where I could make my mark… be the master of my own destiny."
2. Contagious as the defining chapter
He describes his 12 years at Contagious as "the defining stage of my career" before launching DCA. The experience gave him a rare vantage point, working with both agencies and brands. "There's no better place to understand the importance and the power of creativity in our industry," he says, crediting it with "a knack for seeing what's happening in our industry and what that evolution means."
3. The holding company distortion
This is the conviction underpinning DCA. Ammar's frustration is that trade press, awards, and search consultants remain anchored to holding companies that represent a sliver of the global market: "The holding company agencies represent 1%, a fraction of the entire agency market around the world. So why is that anchoring the mood and the coverage?" The downstream effect, he argues, is an ambient pessimism that paints the whole sector as struggling, when in reality the independent world contains "everything you could possibly need, whether it's a two-person studio or a 200-person global media planning and buying shop."
4. Editorial DNA carried forward
DCA inherits something essential from Contagious. Ammar calls the original print magazine "the most expensive business card on the planet," not profitable alone but the product that opened every door. What made Contagious trusted was editorial authority and curation, and that's the posture DCA takes toward a noisier market: "We've got to be the signal in a world of just overwhelming amounts of information."
5. Curation as the core product
He's firm that DCA isn't an open directory. "99% of creative businesses are independent, not all can and should be on the map. So our job is to discover and curate, and invest." A quality threshold matters because DCA's claim that clients should prioritise independents only holds up if every match produces great work. It also solves a real marketer pain point: "They know what they need is out there, but they don't know where to find it."
6. Visibility as the agencies' real problem
Ammar is blunt about why most independent agencies plateau. Word of mouth takes them only so far. "If a client doesn't know you exist, how do you possibly make your way into the consideration set?" He has no patience for agencies that neglect their own marketing: "The whole cobbler's sons' shoes thing is inexcusable today. We can't keep on using that as an excuse."

https://www.thedca.co/

Chuck McBride founded Cutwater in San Francisco. Before that he ran Nike at Wieden+Kennedy, sat alongside Lee Clow at TBWA\Chiat\Day North America, and was on the inaugural team that launched Got Milk? at Goodby, Silverstein. Levi's. adidas. Ray-Ban. Fox Sports. Hoka. Lexus. Feeding America. The work is in MoMA. The shelf has Cannes Lions, Emmys, Clios, D&AD pencils.
But the résumé isn't why you should listen. The ideas are — and the stories he uses to get to them.
Three things from the conversation I haven't been able to stop thinking about:
1. The idea is usually already in the room. Chuck describes himself not as a creative director but as "more of an archaeologist." The point of view is almost always already there — buried in the founder, the product, the way people talk about the thing without noticing they're doing it. He explains it through a dinner with a tech founder who didn't yet have a story for his own company, until the founder said one sentence and Chuck cut him off mid-thought: "Stop. You just said it." The line that ran for years was already in the room.
2. Risk is the price of memorable work. Chuck tells the story behind one of the most famous spots of the era — the one where the brief said, in plain English, don't kill the guy. The director killed him anyway. The spot ran. A client walked up to Chuck outside the building afterward and said something he has clearly never forgotten. The flip side, he says, is what kills most work in this business: "the death of a thousand cuts." The clients who freeze in the face of anything risky are the ones who guarantee the work nobody remembers.
3. The real story behind the work is rarely the public one. Chuck talks about one of the most beloved American campaigns of the last 30 years — and reveals the private nickname the team used for the spots, a nickname that would have horrified the client if they'd ever heard it. It reframes the campaign as something much darker and much funnier than the version everyone grew up with. And it shows how the real idea was never about the product at all.
There's also the moment that pushed him to open his own shop — which wasn't ambition, but the realization that once you do, the risk is entirely on you. "When you open your shop, it's your word now. There's nobody to bail you out."
He closes the conversation with a piece of advice from his very first boss — six words he's carried his whole career, and the closest thing he offers to a philosophy of the work: "Wear them out with good work."