The Class Conversation We Keep Avoiding

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0:46Lisa Thompson: I'm Danny Whitesgorn, and this is Behind the Title, where leaders show up differently. Lisa Thompson, managing partner at WPP Media, joins us to talk about classism and her organization, Common People. Common People is a group committed to making common people more common in the creative industries. The reason it's important is that in the UK 39 % of the population are from a working class background and only 19 % in the creative industries are. The more diverse the industry is the better work we'll do and the more effective we'll be and I think the more fun everyone will have at work. We'll also be talking about if there really is a north-south divide and how we can embrace the brilliant talent from anywhere in the country.

1:29Lisa Thompson: Lisa, amazing to see you. Welcome to Behind the Title. It's, I mean, 10 years, no, it's five, seven, eight years it's been since we saw each other. Oh God, when would it have been? Maybe, I feel somewhere between six and ten, I would have. Yeah, it's been a while. Obviously we spoke a couple of weeks ago, but it's amazing to have you here. Thank you so much for joining Behind the Title. I guess for people listening, it would be good if maybe just do a bit of an intro about yourself, your role, and why it was important for you to come on to the podcast today. So I am Lisa. I am a strategy and planning partner at Wavemaker North.

2:08So you can probably tell by my accent. And I am also the co-founder of a group called Common People, which is about tackling class diversity in the creative industries. And one of the things we're trying to do is talk about that more. it's obviously good to have an opportunity to chat about it i'll be honest i um had a chat and then looked at the people on it and the things you talked about i was like oh god i'm not sure i'm uh qualified to do this but i thought we'd come and have a catch-up and it'd be lovely i don't i i

2:38Lisa Thompson: totally disagree you know it's funny there i i see and i follow lots of people on linkedin people that i know and i'm quite quite tuned into what's happening on the platform there's certain people that I take an interest in and I I guess have been blown away by your career because you know I think you're part of Bloom I think you're part of many other different initiatives um I think you are someone that has almost built from the ground up you know coming from a working class background um and you're you've built a pretty seasoned and decorated I would say career and I think you are advanced when it comes to your IPA qualifications.

3:28Lisa Thompson: So let me just set the record straight. You are more than qualified to sit there. Anyone is, but especially I think given the topic that I guess we're going to talk about today, which is classism. Let me start with a direct question. Yeah. Is there a north-south divide? And do you think that within our industry, there is an elitism maybe placed against the South versus the North? Because I actually think there's some incredible talent and businesses up North, maybe some better than down South. So I'd love to hear your point of view. It's a tricky one is that because I think it will depend who you speak to.

4:13But I think part of the challenge is sometimes the kind of industry titles and maybe clients looking for work don't acknowledge the brilliant work that comes out of anywhere but London. I think it's definitely changed in recent years. there's some amazing independents in manchester who are competing um with the kind of big london agencies i think the way i've been a wave maker oh god 15 years that's terrifying um and definitely we as a company work much more cross um cross agency now like i'll work on pictures with the london team they'll work with us on our clients it feels much more aligned than it ever did um i still think that there is a perception among people that in order to progress or in order to do brilliant work you maybe need to move to london um i never really wanted to move to london um when it's really expensive um and i wouldn't have been able to afford i'd have had to pay for things myself i wouldn't have been able to afford it um i like the fact that my commute is half an hour and I can be somewhere close.

5:25And also...

5:25Lisa Thompson: Do you get a car or do you public transport? I get the tram. Okay. Every day. I've passed my driving test, not driven since. It's for the best. I don't go in the woods. And I think there's some really promising things that are happening. So Madfest came up north last year. And I don't know if you came. It was amazing. There were many people who worked at London agencies or clients who were like, can we move up north? Like this is way better and way more fun. So I think the steps in the right direction. but what I my ideal would be that actually we don't have a conversation about north and south divide and you just pick the best agency and the best talent for what you work and you forget about you forget about it and it's there's lots of different things that people will ask for about north and south about and I think it's really important that you judge it based on the merit of the work but I think in order to do it properly the um the trade press need to come up north a bit more um I don't believe campaign or any of the titles currently have anyone regularly right that isn't from um London um and we did a common people event actually um a couple of years ago oh actually maybe 12 months ago it was amazing event we did it with the social mobility foundation and we had um oh god Terry Schumacher the guy who wrote um the Martin Freeman should know the answer the martin freeman program where he's a police officer i know with a scouse accent yeah yeah the responder um and um we had a celeb we had like a really great venue we had plenty of notice and we didn't get any trade press come up to the event and i remember jed who i did common people with going i think if it had been in london someone would have got themselves there so um i think the industry need to acknowledge that it's a national industry and not just But it's an important point because, you know, campaign were hugely supportive of this and they did write an article and I invited them to come to the launch event.

7:25Lisa Thompson: And I think that certainly the premise behind the title is something that the industry hasn't seen or hasn't been in existence up until now. right having senior leaders come and talk about either taboo subjects or you know areas that aren't always openly discussed yes businesses support it and yes there are some amazing initiatives out there but actually creating a conversation with people that are trying to change things I think is hugely valuable we obviously know it because we work together and we said it before we came to the studio we worked on a pitch together and and actually what I loved about when I got the opportunity to work on that pitch and that was quite early in my career I came up north and I stayed up there I think on and off for a couple of weeks and I loved it I used to spend a lot of time in speak in in in just just not far out of Liverpool for a client and I I just always embraced that there was a real kind of I guess community spirit right and I don't mean communities in like do good community it's just everyone lent in and there wasn't a there wasn't any agenda and there weren't egos that's not to say in London there are I don't want to generalize but we had such a laugh on that pitch and and we talked about it a second ago and and and the experience that I had was it they were some of the best people that I worked with yeah there's brilliant people yeah um it was it was amazing um we should have won that we should we were robbed we were absolutely robbed that was stolen from us yeah you know it's a you know that you've been robbed when all of the ideas you presented happened to uh yes they did they did um they did so um uh explain to me a bit about uh before we get into explain to me a bit about common people and and what you've kind of uh designed and what it's uh i guess enabling for you know working class so common people is a group that almost started a little bit by accident so i first started talking about class and i did the ipa excellence diploma and um if you're not familiar with it your kind of final piece is to write a i think it was two and a half thousand word essay on the future of what you think the future of brands is and mine was about um in order to have a thriving industry we need to kill the elephant in the diversity room which is which is class so no one was talking about it it wasn't on any ipa census data um and actually if you what's really weird about class as a diversity metric is if you if you go back um to like the 70s and 80s advertising had tons of class diversity might have all been men white men from a class diversity point of view but the routes into advertising people would start in the post room and work the way up and then probably around the um late 80s early 90s we started to like um almost like professionalize it so it started to be that you needed a degree to do it and so actually over time class diversity really kind of went away but if you look at like the golden age of like advertising it it was when you had that class diversity and my essay was actually marked by so I got the John Bartle award for it so wow one of the BB yeah yeah I had a very like fangirl couple of emails with him and he said in that actually BBH was founded by someone who went to a grammar school someone from a working class background and someone from a private school and actually that combination of their different brains made them do brilliant work and like their first iconic campaign was the Levi's ad which we still talk about today so I did the excellence diploma wrote this essay and it's weird when you're doing the excellence diploma it's quite full-on so I was looking at it probably through a really like academic lens I don't really think I'd acknowledge that it was quite personal to me um um did my essay I submitted it in Feb like March 2020 and the plan was we were supposed to do the essay and then a TED style talk then a Viva panel but then COVID happened so it was just that and the Viva panel and I met Jed Hallam who um I well I met him because he weirdly marked my essay and then was a judge on my Viva panel um and it turned out he'd been talking about class to various people for and sorry just for those on who don't know who Jed is Jed at the time was I think the CSO of initiative so he marked my Viva panel we'd had a little bit of chat and then um I decided you know when Twitter was a thing like after I'd won this award I was just going to I was like wrote a little bit about it thought I should do something and actually got a huge response from it like loads of quite influential people in the ad industry being like this is amazing completely on board with it and was like oh I've kind of cottoned on to something did a few little bits of follow-up work and then about a year about nine months later um after lots of things Jed randomly did a tweet that was like um a group of us are talking about class wanted to get a group together to chat more who wants to join thinking you'd get like eight or nine people it wouldn't be a thing um turns out that overnight we filled a whatsapp group with people being like i've had i really am interested in this i faced so many barriers because of my background some horror stories of things that had happened to them and we were like oh there's something in this let's uh organize ourselves so over the kind of next 12 to 18 months and it's a funny group because we're all working full time.

13:01So we're kind of doing it. And we have a mission to make common people more common in the creative industries.

13:08Lisa Thompson: Creative and media or just creative? Creative and media. So anything that would be classed as a creative industry. So the kind of strands of that we do, we try and talk about it as an issue because I think class is a weird diversity metric in that people can feel a bit awkward about it and it's not as binary as other things. so it's quite hard to do um so we kind of campaign we also one of the big challenges you've got with class is in an industry that um has a lot of people from predominantly very privileged backgrounds people join industries and there's like really weird like cultural cues that people aren't familiar with like um people talking about where you went to school or skiing every or various things so we kind of try and break down those barriers and within advertising and within all creative industries there's a really high proportion of people who got in because they knew a family member and what that means is if you you know what media agencies are like you look at the website don't really understand what they're saying you go to an interview you don't know how to prep for it but if you know someone they can tell you what to say and how to research and then the other issue that we are working on currently is the economic challenges so um there's a real issue in creative industries with how little people pay junior talent and if you're wanting people to live in london even if you pay you should be paying a real living wage even often that's not enough and also in a lot of um the creative industries you often need things that you can't get unless you have access to money so you might need a portfolio or you might need to have kind of tech on your computers to do it so we about 18 months ago um was it 18 months ago we soft launched this fund with a brilliant organization called commercial break who um work with young people and getting them into industries um and we did that because it's a hassle to set up charities and they had something so um we set up a fund that um we got through like various speaking engagements we sell merch that's quite cool um commercial break they uh very kindly um they put like certain amounts of money to it from their work um the brilliant andy nern at lucky generals his book he actually also marked my essay and wrote a book called um his lucky book and he donated all these proceeds to commercial break and as a result that goes into the fund amazing um and we soft launched it mainly because we didn't know how it would work and the idea is i think the maximum we ever pay is 500 pound it's got to be for something that helps progress your career so you have to write a really short application we purposely don't field it too much because we don't want people to feel awkward about the information they have to give um so it's gone people who might need um a cost to cover them entering a competition or to get an adobe license um and so we did it we were like ticking along without publicizing it properly and we're at a point now where we've kind of run out of cash so we're kind of trying to make sure um that we can do it but our hope is to get that up and running so that when people need that bit of help we can give them the help to help them progress in the industry um and yeah there's about a group of eight or nine of us of core a massive whatsapp community i'll be honest sometimes like the chat is a lot like there's like a work chat where people can ask work advice there's just an everything else chat um sometimes if you're busy you have to mute notifications because it's a lot but it's a really lovely community and it is one where it almost goes against the like the old boys club of advertising so if you've got a work question you can ask it so we've had people go I'm going freelance like how do I set rates or um I'm free I'm um I'm going on my leave like how do you have that conversation or I feel like I'm getting discriminated in my job what can I do and we've got like this like really lovely community of people who always like chipping to help so it kind of started from an essay and then went forward um but yeah it's um something I'm very passionate about um and I feel like I've just talked a lot at you for five minutes no I think I think at the very least people that listen to this podcast who believe in the same values that what you know I guess what common people represent I'd be surprised if you didn't have people reach out to you say how can we get involved because uh I think you know part of this initiative and and that passion that you have there is the same passion that I have when I wake up in the morning today to come and do this because I believe very much certainly in my journey I need to give away what was freely given to me when I got sober 17 years ago and that comes in all shapes and sizes so um you know hearing that I think is really important and I think it grounds probably you know I guess where we go next because because you know working class uh I think can represent and and create a barrier there's possibly stigmas that are associated with it um you've been in an organization since you started as an apprentice um so great so i finished uni in 2010 and started yeah that's a long time ago well yeah but that's why i think it's important the next question is during that time have have you found that there's been a moment where you know uh on the outside everything was fine but on the inside you were possibly not feeling particularly great and I'm asking the context of both uh your day-to-day but even maybe between the south and the north I don't know if I ever kind of felt it work but I think when I of reflected on going to uni so I went to Manchester uni and um in my kind of best friend group 50 % of that group went to private school which is way above the average and there was a few times at uni I remember being like oh this isn't for me um I actually think now I would do an apprenticeship like I think that's the way in like I like working I like routine I like structure the kind of uni world of having like three hours of lectures a week I don't think worked and there was a few things one I was one of few a few people that I was around on my course that seemed to have a part-time job worked in the bookies William Hill yeah and I they used to have um like a Wednesday afternoons at uni was always like sports and like rugby union was like the big thing and I'm from Yorkshire like it's rugby league like if you I mean I'm a football girl but if you're gonna do rugby do rugby leagues I found that bizarre and I just remember getting to uni and kind of like at school I was always I'm a bit of a swot like is doing it and I found academic world quite hard like I feel I remember one of my friends at the time saying to me I was struggling getting marks on essays and she was like thing is at private school you get taught how to pass things so you get taught how to do it which is a different way of thinking um but what I do know is even though I might not have felt like this and this is one of the reasons why I want to talk about it is there's so many people who I've come across in common people who've had awful experiences um of people making comments about the amount of alcohol they put in a glass of wine and it being common or um not knowing certain cues Jed won't mind me sharing this but Jed said that um there's two stories he told me then and he's told me this I've spoke about this on his behalf of events but he said he remember in his first job going out for a lunch and it was I don't even have to say dauphinoise potatoes and he called them dolphin nose potatoes and everyone laughed because he'd never come across it which now he's like it's quite silly it's a bit funny but he said he remembers going on a night out with clients and people he worked with and them asking him if he if they could go if he could go and get drugs for them and um apparently um one of the people went oh you're a bit of rough you'll know how to do that and like lots of biases that you don't hear about so I think I've been really lucky where I work that I haven't felt it has held me back I think in any workplace being a young woman there's definitely things that all companies need to be aware of but yeah I I think there's a lot of it going on I do feel like if I'd have gone to London I might have had a different experience I've got quite a broad Wakefield accent in a lot of places they kind of I'm a strategist and a planner there are lots of very very academic very posh sounding people I don't know if I would have like fit in in the same way but yeah I think it's important to talk about because a lot of people are having a hard time and don't feel like they can chat about it and and it sounds like you've been supported very well throughout your career and through your kind of personal network has there been an experience you've had where you've either felt uncomfortable or you wish you would have said something, you know, you wish you would have, and it might have been on behalf of someone else where, you know, either you've been in a room, in a situation, in a circumstance, you know, I remember on the last series, Michelle Sarpong from The Seven Stars talked about her experience um with racism um when she was at Cannes and someone actually advocated on I guess her community but her behalf so I'm I'm intrigued to know if you've come across those experiences where you've needed to or you felt you could have spoken up but you didn't I think there's probably situations I have heard about that have made me try and speak up in different ways in a more like formal setting so um a couple of years ago I was um I was president of Blue North and so there were a few things that I did that I thought were really important one I made sure any event we did like had the dice charter guidelines so like the right percentages that were representative of the UK because I think it's important that you get to see all different kind of people um and we did an event actually that was we started an event series about like breaking taboos in the industry and we had three people talk we had nabs come and talk about the issues of people not feeling safe at industry events because of um like you men um we had we talked about things like periods in the workplace so i don't know if there's ever been a really personal um i don't know if it's ever been a really personal one where like i wish i'd have said something in that moment so i've tried to reframe it and do it in that in that way one of the things that i do quite a lot of is mentoring because i think sometimes you can start to plant the seeds early on so um when i mentor i now regularly tell people to learn to have a conversation about pay um because it's important um or or we'll do that and people find that uncomfortable right yeah i mean i still do but it's really important like chat about pay like you you've got to and i think the other the other times i think i'd though actually there was one moment where um we went through a period of pitching and we used to get this pitch consultant in to like do it i don't know if you ever came across the pitch you did there's there's many of them but I'm sure.

25:01And I think I remember, I remember once we'd done a run through and I wasn't very good.

25:09And I feel like he kept like telling me to stop saying erm or like slow down or it was one of those ones where he was trying to make it really like structured and I'm not a very like a structured presenter. And one moment that has kind of stuck in my head was after that run through, Emma, who you'll know well, rang me and was like, are you all right? You didn't see myself. I was like oh I don't know what I'm doing and she was like just be yourself like just do it how you want to do it like don't worry about him and we did another run through and I actually got a message from our CEO at the time being like that was excellent so I think one of the things I now try to do or think is really important is tell people to be themselves when you're presenting or when you're doing it because if you're not being yourself you're not being as good as you can be yeah and it's an issue so I think that's a bit of a bit of word of advice that that I pass on

25:58Lisa Thompson: I struggled for a long time with pitching. In fact, actually, I think that the one, the pitch that we did together was probably the most fun I'd had doing pitching. And then I think I went through a period of feeling uncomfortable. Like I'd have people say to me, oh, yeah, but you're a natural, you know. And I'm like, I can do it, but I'm more off the cuff. Yeah. Quite organic, quite natural. and you know a colleague that I worked with um would make a joke I was about a couple of years ago well we know that Danny doesn't like rehearsals you know because I just I couldn't I couldn't turn it on in rehearsal because you know for me it's what do I feel in that moment you know and I can I can sometimes get kind of caught up with that however I have learned over the last couple of years the benefit of rehearsing but rehearsing in a way that works for me yeah um and so I've learned uh that I need to write things down a couple of times and shorthand shorthand shorthand which has helped me but it's not easy when it feels like it feels like a live job interview pitching like it feels like you're you know you're you're pitching for your job you're not pitching for the business you're pitching for your job and and I think that But I couldn't agree with more with just be yourself because that's what people buy.

27:29Yeah, they do. And they can tell when you're not being yourself. And also equally, if you're yourself and they don't quite like you, it doesn't really matter. You can't be everyone's cup of tea and that's okay. And I think that is a really... And it's also like I was doing a pitch actually in May with... and you know like how some people keep talking about being off script like I don't really get why you can't have notes in front of you like I get make them look nice have a cue card I remember saying to Grace one of our planning managers um have your notes in front of you like like if you feel comfortable and you're going to be better do it I remember saying like do you remember when Kelly Parker our brilliant CEO CEO who we all love comes she has notes in front of her like make it work for you so I think that's one of the things that um I hope I would continue to do is like advocate particularly for junior people helping them be themselves and not get because I also think one bad pitching experience can it can turn you off it and actually it's really fun when you

28:29Lisa Thompson: do it properly are there are there triggers in the workplace that set you off because because my trigger is is is pitching I've got a lot better at being able to manage it and it's not the pitching it's the rigid structure that some people need you to follow because that's how they work um but it's also this belief that you know I must uh recall everything yeah you know that I said in a rehearsal one that gets me annoyed all the time is uh when we tell girls that they're too emotional and drives me up the wall like I think if you've cried yeah if you're crying every week yeah maybe not but sometimes you have a cry at work and that shows you care and it's a good thing and don't try and dampen your emotions I um I can be quite direct but also I'm quite sensitive so um I can overthink things quite a lot and I think one of the things I'm kind of I think about a lot is like in a more senior position is like people respecting you and liking you but sometimes you need to be direct so I'm kind of working on myself to um not overthink too much and like worry and actually sometimes you might tell people something that they don't like and that's okay um and then the other um thing that I think what I realize and I think this is why I kind of do a lot with like common people and blue is we I did some training um called empower and it was a um it was a well group m at the time wp media training program for women at a certain level that was about developing leadership skills it was really brilliant and i realized my number one value is fairness like if things don't feel fair that's the thing that like winds me up the most so actually um i need to work in an environment where things feel fair and equitable and we're like reflective of it so yeah do you think do you think that do you think that stems from classism do you feel like it's not always fair or do you think that's just the values that you got brought up with probably a bit of both probably the values probably from the background from like i like an underdog but i like people to feel like they're getting the what they deserve from the work that they put in like it bothers me when it really bothers me when you see people in a position you will have seen people who aren't where they should be for the role but seemingly got it i think it probably is part of like my background like being fair and doing things maybe it's been a leeds fan because we're very unfairly treated um but yeah i think fairness is something that i've just always had i don't like it when things don't feel fair do you ever find yourself standing in front of the mirror metaphorically physically and having to pep talk yourself oh god all the time like literally um and i feel like there's loads of people who don't say that they do that or they don't tell people that they're like having a hard time and they're like struggling constantly.

31:32Like I have like, if I've got actually on the way down to this, like if I've got something that's like, I need to feel like I pepped myself up and I'll put some, usually Taylor Swift on. I've been watching girl bands forever. So I've had some girl bands on. I don't think I, when I present, I don't think it's like one of those people who were like really nervous, but I do. But if I know I've got to have a difficult conversation, and I'll give myself a pep talk. So yeah, I'm giving myself a pep talk all the time. There was something, have you been watching the Celebrity Traitors?

32:01Lisa Thompson: I haven't, but I watched the final, which would have been last night. There was a really funny meme that came from it with Cat Burns walking across this thing and she's talking to myself, being like, you're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're an adult. You're an adult. And often I feel like that. I'm like, oh, I don't really know what I'm doing. And also sometimes where you just get things wrong or you don't feel like you're doing stuff. But I also think it's really important to talk about that so people see that actually sometimes it's not going as planned and that's that's okay um and also um I'm also not very good at hiding what I'm thinking or like I'm going I'm going on holiday next week and I one of the things I've realized is I get to a point before a holiday where I'm very tired and I can feel myself like going a little bit my friend Izzy who I work with was like you look how I felt before I went on holiday so yeah I do I pep so I give myself pep talks all the time um I like to I feel like I then give people a lot of pep talks my favorite thing that I've been saying to people at the minute is uh big swifty is on her podcast with Travis she says um you need to think of your energy as expensive like don't give your energy to people who aren't willing to like pay for it so yeah I'm a big fan of a pep talk there's there's certain go to things that I use, whether it's music or movie clips.

33:20Lisa Thompson: Um, it's, uh, it's amazing. The, the, the smallest mechanic can help lift me. Um, you know, I often, I often say, uh, you know, the, the serenity prayer, which is, you know, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Give me the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference between the two and I and I have to say that like 10 times over yeah uh there was a period where I'd have to have like two or three cigarettes yeah you know and and I don't I haven't smoked in a while but uh I just find it interesting everyone has to manage those moments differently um getting back to kind of uh the root cause common people because I think that that's that's a really important uh part of this um i heard something recently which is all about um uh diversity is about being invited to the party yeah inclusion is about being invited onto the dance yeah common people from where you are now uh to where you want to go how can people support or get involved or help with uh i guess the organization um if any um rich people listen to this and would like to fund our fund uh hit us up um no the um one thing that they can do is kind of look at the kind of processes that they've got in place so um make sure you're paying a real living wage make sure you're not expecting people to do work for free um the other thing you can do is think about when you recruit junior talent some of the barriers that I actually think often with class um I'm quite an optimistic person so I actually don't think people are doing things on purpose sometimes there will be a small group of people who are but um when you do like interviews for entry-level work don't make it a requirement to have a degree because I mean I'm not sure you need one um think about things that um will make sure people feel comfortable in so at Waymaker I helped design the Thrive program which is our entry-level program and one of the things we do is we share the questions we're going to ask ahead of time and we give people tips like um if you want to find out about our stuff don't bother with the website actually look at our instagram and our linkedin she'll get more of a feel we also tell people about the dress code because no one knows what smart casual means like i don't know what it means like it's different um so we will say in the office girls tend to wear like they'll wear dresser to trainers jeans and trainers trainers are absolutely fine um boys wear this so things like that that can just make it more accessible and actually if you look at the lens often um there's a really brilliant person who's part of um common people called emma jackson who heads up a production company and she's amazing you know the um the kevin's the ee ad where they land the plane in the living room yeah she produced that like her company and she said the thing that people need to remember is if you design things to make them inclusive you actually don't just help the people who it is intended for you make it better for everyone so she helped us at bloom write a neurodiversity playbook and she talked about actually if you've got neurodiverse people think about like being flexible in your office hours that in itself isn't just an accommodation that would help people who are neurodiverse it would help people who are like working parents so um if you design it with being inclusive you make it better for everyone so they're the things i would do if you want to learn more about common people or you want us to come and talk we have presentations we can come and give at companies to help um so get in touch with me um on linkedin um and also and commercial break who are the organization we do the fund with if you're like is our company good are they doing what they should um what they do that is amazing is they essentially used to just match working class talent with companies and do like schemes and they actually found it wasn't working because they found that people would bring them in would do it as like a tick box wouldn't work with them in the right way they had horror stories of experiences that people went through and um so they now before they match you will do like an audit of where you are um and it's they they charge for it so because it's a really big piece of work um but they will audit your business and say these are the things you need to work and help you measure it so i would do that um and um we have a sub stack we have a newsletter um it's been on a little hiatus but when that gets back up and running if people want to fund the um sub stack we you can donate so read about it and get up to speed and i think the other thing I would say is um if you think about the moments in culture we've talked about this year Oasis reunion adolescence those are all moments that have been created by working class people being in the industry so adolescent Stephen Graham talked about in his Emmy speech being a lad from a flat in liverpool like actually reframe talking about class as it being the right thing to do and you will get better work there's not been a better tv program than adolescence this year and that is the result of class diversity um i have been watching girl bands forever this week um i feel like your ref your kind of pep talks are much more like intelligent and deep than mine and what's really interesting is um atomic kitten they talk to people from atomic kitten and then been working class girls from liverpool and actually a lot of the big girl bands come from working class backgrounds and everyone likes a girl band banger whether you're cool enough to admit but if you didn't have girl bands in culture it would be a sad state of affairs so i would get i would ask people to be curious about where some of the culture is that they're um they're looking at and see the benefit of it uh just before i bring to close if you have you got does uh common people provide access to like a like a panel for instance if if clients want to understand more about you know uh working class backgrounds across the country yeah so we have um we have presentations that are ready to go we will come in and speak to people we're also really willing to like design stuff and like have a chat about it so yeah we're really we've spoke at like the ipa um we've done training courses uh for people so yeah we've got and even if what we what we did when we started common people is we we realized there was loads of brilliant organizations out there so let's not replicate it but if we can't have the answer we will probably have a good idea of of where to who has where to find it and who has um but yeah it's a good community it's a it's not a community it's always serious like there's lots of chat about which is the best bit being um a big debate of whether murder on the dance floor is a banger by sophie ellis bexter it is a banger um so yeah it's like a fun community and if you're listening and you're from a working class background and you want to get involved and you want to you want to kind of join the community just drop us drop us in it and as we as we draw to a close and honestly I'm fascinated I could I'm so it's so lovely to see you after so long um if you could give we talk about the permission slip um if you could give permission to people across the country whether you're north south east west um you know to kind of think feel or do when it comes to classism working class what would that be um I think a really important thing and what I try to do is like use your voice like you've got a voice so feel like you have permission to talk about things um I like speak up and do things and if um and that will help um but one thing I would say with using your voice one of the I got a bit of advice at uni in a very different context I did a drama degree and there was this like mad lecturer who always used to say um you've got to earn a shout so when you go on a play if you go and watch play and people are shouting all the time you've lost it you lose the ability to have the moment or the impact I would say if you're gonna do stuff and earn your shout so I believe most people want to do the right thing yeah there's some frustrating people around who are saying things and not doing or maybe talking about class for reasons that aren't about doing the right thing but I think see the best in people and then when you need to shout or you need to have a little bit of a kickoff you get away with it and then the other thing that I would do I would say to people is if you feel like you're in an organization where you aren't appreciated or able to be yourself leave that organization do like the reason I think I've done so well at Windmaker is I've always been like allowed to be myself um so yeah I think that's what I would say love that um Lisa thank you so much uh for coming have a fantastic holiday and I look forward to this episode going live because I think it's really going to impact a lot of people in the industry so thank you for coming absolute pleasure to see you oh thank you for having me

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