Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising

Kaye Symington- Head of Marketing- Newspaper Club

Kaye Symington has spent 20 years in marketing, and right now she's working to keep one of the oldest media formats alive — the printed newspaper. As head of marketing at Newspaper Club, she's on the front lines of a quiet cultural shift: people are choosing ink and paper not out of nostalgia, but because something about it just hits differently.  In this conversation, we dig into what's really driving that, and what it says about how we want to connect right now. Kaye shares the story of a photographer who sent a physical seasonal newsletter to creative directors instead of another email and landed a $50,000 campaign from it. The math on cutting through digital noise is more interesting than you'd think. Newspaper Club has been growing since 2009, and Kaye's colleagues laugh every time the trend cycle rediscovers print. She explains why newsprint keeps finding new audiences. People and organizations making newspapers include Ariana Grande. A Scottish anarchist gardening club. A symphony orchestra. A dating site for 30-somethings running classifieds. The range of people printing newspapers reveals something genuinely interesting about what people are hungry for right now.

James Nord- Founder Fohr

James Nord didn’t just build an influencer marketing company.  He lived through the birth of internet culture from the inside. In this episode of Inspiring Futures, the founder and CEO of Fohr [https://www.fohr.co/?utm_source=chatgpt.com] It traces the path from early Tumblr obsession to building one of the most influential creator marketing companies in the world.  What makes this conversation compelling is that it’s really about much more than influencer marketing. It’s about the transformation of culture itself. James explains what it felt like to be one of the first people to understand that “following” would become a new kind of currency, long before brands, agencies, or investors took the idea seriously.  He talks candidly about the brutal early years of educating clients, surviving on almost no money, paying employees with photography income, and slowly realizing that the internet was no longer a sideshow. It had become the main stage.  The discussion moves from Tumblr and Instagram’s early days into the modern creator economy, unpacking why brands still misunderstand creators, why legacy marketers struggle with internet-native culture, and why companies like Nike can lose relevance while brands like Skims instinctively understand the new rules of influence.  Along the way, James shares sharp insights on: *  Why internet culture fractured the monoculture  *  How algorithms changed influence forever  *  Why “momentum” matters more than total reach  *  The hidden tension between marketers and creators  *  Why great creators often outperform traditional advertising  *  How influencer marketing evolved from experimentation into one of the most powerful forces in business and politics  There’s also a fascinating thread running through the entire conversation about “internet natives” versus traditional institutions. James argues that people who grew up deeply embedded online developed an instinctive understanding of digital communities that many large organizations still lack today.  If you care about culture, marketing, creators, the internet, or how influence actually works in 2026, this is a rich and revealing listen. It’s part founder story, part history of the social internet, and part field guide to how modern attention really moves.

Ammunition- Kelly Heilpern Chief Strategy Officer and Chris Shadrick Director of Strategy

This episode is really about how agencies evolve under pressure. Ammunition began with deep expertise in home and building, a category defined by complicated purchase journeys, multiple decision-makers, long sales cycles, and considered decisions. That gave the agency an early advantage. But the more interesting part is how it learned from that advantage. The lesson was not simply “we know this category.” The lesson was: “we know how to solve complex growth problems.” That shift matters. Because agencies are operating in a difficult market. Clients are under pressure. CMOs are being asked to do more with less. AI is changing the production layer. Channels keep multiplying. And there is more marketing activity than ever, but not always more progress. In that context, Ammunition’s proposition, Growth, no matter what, becomes more than a line. It becomes a way of thinking about agency value. Kelly and Chris describe an agency trying to stay useful by learning continuously: from clients, from research, from AI, from category complexity, from international expansion, and from the changing pressures facing CMOs. It is a story about an agency growing not because times are easy, but because hard times force it to get clearer about what it is really good at.

AI and the Marketing Department- Mixtape Partners

AI and The Marketing Department  For a recent Inspiring Futures podcast, I had the opportunity to spend time with Mixtape Partners' Nirm Shanbhag [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#], Andy Bateman [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#], and Sarah Lent [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#]/ 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- Full Tank

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.