Brand Stars

Building a team can be one of the most daunting, challenging and yet rewarding activities a manager can go through.

Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about the influx of small agencies within our industry. These companies – in 50-or-less team member range – are winning Lions at Cannes, closing million dollar deals, and are giving the likes of McCann, Ogilvy, and Grey a run for their money.

Your typical C-suite includes a COO, CFO, CMO and CIO working closely with the company’s CEO to manage the operations, finance, marketing and information systems to keep the company running and delegate higher up decisions to experts and leaders in each department.

When I am asked what qualities make for an amazing entrepreneur, a lot comes to mind.

Welcome to the realm of today’s advertising, where business models are crumbling, systems are failing advertisers and the fight for attention is slowly lost.

Earlier this year, an ad agency in Japan hired a robot to work as its new creative director. Why not? Virtually every other biped seems to call themselves one.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re at an agency founded by two women, where the executive leadership team is 50% women, and 60% of 140 employees are women.

Shape trademarks have recently hit the news again, with a decade-long battle over the registered trade mark protection for the shape of the Rubik’s Cube now set to come to an end.

While conversations about racial and gender diversity (and the lack thereof) have been had in agency hallways since the days of Mad Men, it seems diversity and inclusion in advertising doesn’t really get addressed until someone does or says something boorish and wrong about race or gender.