Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising
Inspiring Futures pulls back the curtain on the minds reshaping advertising and marketing today. Host Ed Cotton, former Chief Strategy Officer at Butler Shine and Stern & Partners, engages industry visionaries in raw, unfiltered conversations about their career pivots, creative breakthroughs, and strategic innovations. No canned responses. No PR filters. Just honest insights about navigating the complex world of brands, creativity, and agency life. Each episode delivers actionable wisdom from those who've mastered the craft and aren't afraid to share their failures alongside their successes.
Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising
Tower28- Making it Easy to Go Global
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This is an interview with Erin Emmerson, CEO, Founder, Kelsey Croos, President, Founder and David Young, Global Executive Creative Director of Tower28.
This is how they describe themselves on their website.
"Like the Santa Monica lifeguard tower we’re named after, we provide guardianship for our clients as they navigate the wondrous waters of localization. Founded by long-time international advertising executives, we set out to democratize the global agency network of creative industry professionals by offering all brands and agencies the opportunity to scale with high-caliber global and in-market talent by their side — without having to pay the premium for infrastructure and full time. To us, there are no foreign markets."
Three major themes emerged from our conversation.
1. Transcreation is far more than translation
Tower28 positions itself not as a translation shop but as a full-service local agency in every market, with strategists, creatives, producers, and insight specialists on the ground. They emphasize understanding the creative and strategic intent behind work and adapting it culturally, not just linguistically. As Kelsey put it: "We're translating culture, we're not just translating language, we're transcreating a feeling." Erin reinforced this by noting that localization is often treated as an afterthought , "everything's done and dusted and baked, can you guys just translate this and ship it out?" and that Tower28 was built specifically to push against that mindset by getting involved upstream.
2. Their AI tool "Gail" and curated global network are key differentiators.
The agency built a proprietary AI-powered platform called Gail that can take in a brief and recommend the ideal team from their network, as well as run a first-pass cultural assessment on taglines, scripts, and content. That output then goes to local experts for human validation, creating what Erin described as "a flywheel of assessment, validation, assessment, validation and Gail gets better every single time we run it." Kelsey added that this proves "you don't have to choose between speed or scale or cultural nuance. We have it all in one place."
3. The holding company model is fracturing, and independents like Tower 28 see a major opportunity.
The team sees the current industry upheaval, what a colleague of theirs calls "the great unholding" as a chance to offer brands a more flexible, effective alternative to traditional multinational agency networks. Erin noted: "You don't have to just go to one of the top four or five just because they have global presence. There's a different way to do things." Kelsey described their flexible retainer model as a selling point: "We build the ship for the client's needs, our client doesn't have to get on our specific ship."