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.
Episodes
178 episodes
Neil Barrie- Global CEO and Co-Founder- 21st Century Brand
Neil Barrie didn't take the conventional route into brand strategy. After studying modern history at Oxford, he spent six years trying to make it as a musician, a detour, it turns out, was a training ground for what came next.As the co-f...
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: peopl...
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
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 consi...
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,
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 w...
Todd Irwin and Craig Bagno - Fazer
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 w...
Amar Chohan- Department of Creative Affairs
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 fr...
Chuck McBride- Cutwater
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. a...
Ace of Hearts and the Return of Creative Belief
Ace of Hearts is one of those rare new agencies that arrives with real heat around it. Not just because the founders come from serious places, but because it seems to answer a feeling a lot of people have right now: that creative companies have...
Mike Doman- Hellions
Australia’s indie agency scene feels on fire right now, and Hellions feels like part of that new wave.With new work already out in the world for Figma and a fresh win with BISSELL, this is more than a start-up story. In this ...
Changing China and Western Brands - A Conversation with Falk Fuhrmann
Nike's stock dropped 15% yesterday. Greater China is down for the sixth consecutive quarter. Their CEO told staff he's "so tired of talking about fixing this business."This isn't a tariff problem. It's an identity crisis.I sat dow...
Bill Shea- Managing Director, Accenture Song
What happens inside a $20 billion creative technology operation when AI changes the speed of everything? When designers start coding? When two-week sprints compress to one? And what does that mean for the cli...
Lucinda Bounsall- Sibling Studios
Lucinda is the founder and head of strategy at Sibling, a culture-led strategy studio.In this episode, we track Lucinda’s unconventional path into strategy. Originally an aspiring journalist, she spent her early career...
The Business of Different- Barry Labov
Barry LaBov started as a rock and roll musician, then accidentally fell into running a full-service ad agency when a client convinced him to buy their marketing department. That unlikely path led him to become one of the foremost experts on bra...
Tower28- Making it Easy to Go Global
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 Mon...
Justin Herber- Scaling Brands and Hollywood
This week on Inspiring Futures, we sit down with Justin Herber.He's a chief brand officer, consultant, and former screenwriter whose career has moved between Hollywood and the brand world. Justin got his start working for Mic...
Gigi Grimes- Founder- Pai
Gigi spent seven years at Google before leaving to start a research company.Pai isn't any old research company; it specializes in the creation of "digital twins". These are digital replicas based on real consumers.Pai ...
Elle McCarthy- VP- brand, creative and product marketing- McAffe
Elle is the perfect person to talk to if you want an understanding of strategy inside organizations. She started her work life selling punk fashions in London's Camden Market, but found her way into adland, landing strategy roles at...
The Hidden Architecture of Japanese Running- an interview with Jeremy Kuhles
Japan has one of the world’s deepest running cultures and at the center of it sits Ekiden: the long-distance relay that becomes a national obsession every winter. In this episode, I’m joined by Jeremy Kuhles, a translator, wr...
John Long- ECD and Author of Zombie Brands
John is an ECD at Digitas and the author of a new book, "Zombie Brands."In our conversation, we talked about his book and the why, what, and how behind the rise of the Zombie Brand.Some of John's quotes from our chat.On the...
Tom Garland- Founder-Edition Partners
Tom Garland founded Edition Partners, a London-based creative growth studio, in January 2023. His career spans record labels (Sony, Warner, Universal), Red Bull's experiential marketing peak, and seven years at Highsnobiety where he...
Justin Rashidi- Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer SeedX
IntroductionJustin Rashidi is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at SeedX, a data-driven marketing and business consultancy approaching its tenth year. In this episode of Inspiring Futures, he talks about his unlikely path ...
Neil Perkin- Only Dead Fish
Neil Perkin is a consultant, author, and self-described polymath working at the intersection of strategy, digital transformation, emerging technology, and leadership. With roots in media transformation at Time Inc during the dot-com...
Re-Imagining Havas Chicago- A Conversation with Chief Strategy Officer Chase Cornett and Chief Creative Officer Frank Dattalo
It's always interesting to see what a network agency in a local market is capable of, especially at a moment in advertising history when geography matters less than it ever has. A few weeks back, I got a chance to sit down with Hava...