Why more strategists are going independent

0:09Hello and welcome to The Walk Podcast. My name is David Tiltman and today we are talking about strategy and in particular the continued rise of the independent strategist. Now, big fans of the WALK podcast will remember that a year ago here in Cannes Lions, we had Suzanne Powers, Tom Morton and Faris Jacob. And they named themselves the Rebel Alliance, all former agency strategists who'd moved at various times into the independent space. And they gave us a candid take on what they saw as the state of the strategy discipline and where they saw sort of opportunity. Now, 12 months on, we decided to get them back in the studio.

0:52No Ferris this time, but we do have Suzanne Powers, founder and co-CEO of AllAnne, and Tom Morton, who is founder of Narratory Capital. and we're going to be talking with them about, well, how they're getting on, a year on, how is life, where do they see opportunity and more importantly, what does that mean for the rest of the strategy discipline? Where are there opportunities for strategists to lean in harder? Now, this is a video pod as well as an audio one so if you'd like to see this then please head to our Walk YouTube channel. I'll bring on Tom and Suzanne in a moment but first a word from our sponsors.

2:01contagious event to find out more.

2:07Suzanne, Tom, welcome back to The Walk Podcast. A year ago, we were in, well, a slightly sweatier room than this with a samba band outside and with Faris as well. But we wanted to bring the two of you back. We had such a great discussion last year about the rise of independent strategy, the sort of opportunities you were seeing in the market and essentially life uh outside the the sort of traditional agency structures that you you both served in for so long so we wanted to get an update a year on and see how you're doing and and and you know sort of also it's been a difficult year for strategy and strategists so you know we want to make sure we have some positivity going into uh going into the next 12 months.

2:54So I guess to start with, let me get an update from both of you on what's actually happening in your worlds and your network's world. So Suzanne, kick us off. Yeah. So first of all, we're still doing it. We're still going, which is great. We're still going. Last year at this time, I launched a second company called Alland, which is strategy based, but everything from, you know, fixing brands to growing brands to flexing them and partnering brands. And what, you know, we have found through that work in the last year is a lot of brands want and need a lot of that. And that's very optimistic and very positive.

3:33And Tom and I have talked quite a bit, we always talk, but we talk quite a bit about how there is just a wealth of opportunity, whether it's smaller brands that are, and I'm going to use a phrase, that are needing to be a bit adulted and wanting to be a bit adulted as brands. Adulting? Adulting. Adulting some brands. Structed just to be adults in the room. Who knew that would happen, but it has. Or whether it's, you know, some of the larger organizations that have deep complexities that we can apply our strategic expertise to. So there's lots of range of stuff, which is quite exciting. We'll come on to talk about this more, I'm sure.

4:05But I mean, a point we made last year, we made it in the Future Strategy Report last year as well, is the range of strategic needs. I mean, there's never been more need for good strategy in the current market. Yes. That seems at odds with the state of the strategy nation that we've been hearing. Tom, how have you been getting on? It's been good. So I'm two and a half years into the business. Narritory Capital specializes in future-facing strategy for media, technology, finance, and creative economy brands. and we're having a good time. This has probably been the, commercially probably the best six months since we started.

4:49I'm bringing in strategy talent from the States and from Asia to help on global projects. You're hiring, are you? So you're always at more to the contract basis. Bringing in. I mean, I think a lot of these, a lot of the new gen companies are working more as collectives. Yes. Small number of FTEs, people brought in as and when it's needed. But it feels good to be a kind of dining table multinational. It's a real thing. Micro multinational. And you obviously talk a lot with other people in your networks. Is this a sort of common feeling? Is business okay? Business is good. And maybe the biggest story is that when you talk to people who are doing similar things, you've set up indie strategy businesses in the last few years, the real story that you hear is actually one about people reclaiming their power.

5:42So knowing that I was going to be on this and also wanting to make sure that I'm representing well. We're two people in quite a big ecosystem and there are people who have bigger businesses and more established businesses. So I wanted to be respectful of that. So I want to check in with about a dozen people I know who are running indie strategy businesses in Europe and in the US. And just ask them, just level with me. How are things? Are you making more or less money? Are you learning? What are you doing? You didn't expect. The biggest stories I'm hearing, universally, everyone just talks about discovering they're much more capable and much more business friendly than they thought they were.

6:20People are discovering powers they didn't know they had. That's a great story. Or they forgot they had. Yes, it's true. I think this is the strategist trap. One of the great things about the agency system that used to hold strategy talents and doesn't anymore, it was a very good way of people would bring you exciting problems and you would solve them. And if we're really honest, even if you're pitching a lot, you're often at one stage of remove from what is the real problem, who is the approving client, how exactly are we going to tackle this. and what that often means is you are you're not ultimately going to be the person who's deciding how we do this or you're not going to be the person who's really like commercializing and creating the value of what what you're doing with your head and of course once you're in your own business that that's exactly what you do that that's the only thing you're doing and it was really interesting just hearing you know people who would have probably had you know account handlers doing a lot of the grant work really doing it themselves and not only that but enjoying it and seeing the value and the power of winning the business, owning the relationship, pricing the thing, deciding how they're going to deploy their time.

7:31And so as well as having a paycheck and a future and doing interesting work, the real story I think right now in the indie strategy world is a lot of people rediscovering the power and the value of what they do. That's really interesting. And are they making more money as well? With one exception, everyone I spoke to, their business in the last 12 months was doing better than it was in the previous 12. Oh, fantastic. It's not a massive sample, but it's definitely indicative of something working. You know, yeah, can I build on that? Because last year, and we started thinking of that as a bit of the Rebel Alliance, right?

8:10And that was a beautiful phrase that Tom used last year, and I love it. And at that time, we were very much like, okay, we've left the, I don't want to say Death Star, but we've left the bigger things. And we're forming a rebel alliance where we're kind of fighting the good fight for strategy, et cetera. There's a model issue that we think comes up when it comes to our people making more money. And we did talk about this last year, so I'm not saying anything new. There's a challenge in the broader industry for charging for things like strategy. Yes. To state the obvious. when you set up a strategy indie shop.

8:45The whole gift with purchase thing. Absolutely, yes. Correct. Gift with purchase in a larger company. Cost of doing business, way of doing business. When you set up an indie strategy shop, that is your business. So these are different models. You can't give it away for free. You cannot. Absolutely not. You cannot. Like even, you know, you just have to be careful with even some advice that you give because your advice is currency. The intellectual expertise and capital that you bring is very important. And that is high margin work that for a long time has been gift with purchase in these larger organizations.

9:14So it's related to we're making money because we're probably valuing what we do and charging appropriately for that. And in terms of, I won't ask your day rates, but in terms of the way you have those conversations, because that's going to be a very different type of conversation that you'll have with a client. um are they surprised that they have to pay for this or are they coming to you knowing that they've got a problem with a budget that they they that they want to use to solve that problem yeah the the latter um and an understanding that they are paying for the expertise they are they are in need of that as they would with any other form of strategy that's correct so that's correct it's It's not like the way strategy is approached in the ad world is identical to every other form of strategy in terms of charging.

10:12Because consultants charge an awful lot of money for strategy. So in some ways, this is normal. This is more normal than what we've seen elsewhere in this industry. That's right. Yeah, I think it's very normal. and especially when you look at all the other professional services that our clients are buying in, the idea of like I have a problem and I either don't have the internal resource or the time to fix it, so I'll bring someone else in, it's a very natural model. And I think one of the advantages we have is because what we sell, the value we create and what we sell and what we charge for are pretty much aligned.

10:54It's just a more honest conversation. Yes. yes and there's more people moving into this space i mean i think in the last 12 months martin beigel of widen and this is london specific but also um richard huntington of sarches the so we're seeing more and more kind of senior strategists moving in this direction are you finding i want to about a word more competition or more people in this space that you're sort of coming up against or is there plenty of room i think we're at the stage where we're we're seeing we're seeing more activity in the space it doesn't necessarily feel like competition yet yeah it's it's a it's a big world out there now maybe there will be a point at which the world doesn't the the broader marketing world doesn't have room for you know a thousand strategy studios i don't know we're not at that stage right now i think the spirit is still come in welcome in and it's interesting the level of supportiveness is very high there's lots of there's lots of people who've got referral arrangements where if you you can't tackle something or something's more of your specialism you can you can direct to them it's the sense of community because we're all building something and actually have something to gain rather than something to lose that we've got to protect is still is still really positive yeah and i would Let's say, you know, in a world of, I was about to not say AI this whole time, but I'm going to.

12:24But in a world of AI, we are. 10 minutes in if anyone's counting. But we are human beings. So there are human beings creating these indie strategy shops. We are, some of us have similar expertise. Some of us may have similar backgrounds, the type of brands we've worked on or sectors or markets. But we are different humans. And we approach problem solving differently through the flavors and the perspectives and the lenses of those different human beings. So I would say there's plenty of work to go around because different types of brands in different situations need different flavors. They need that kind of different thing that somebody would bring.

12:59I mean, Tom operates differently than I do. We also love to try to work together once in a while. But, you know, there's different things we're bringing to the party. So, so far, that's a good thing. Well, I guess that segues into my next sort of topic, which is about the actual types of work and the actual, yeah, what are you actually sort of delivering? I mean, Suzanne, have you got some examples of this and what are you seeing in the work you're doing now that maybe was different from the work you've done before? Yeah, you know, I have a wonderful business partner who is a former CMO. And that creates, again, as we're talking about, a different flavor of our offering.

13:37You know, we can look at something from both an agency expertise perspective and a client expertise perspective. So the types of things that we are doing, some of which is very different to anything I've done, and I get to apply strategy to that, which I love. And I'll give you one example. You know, we do some work with, you know, for lack of a better word, catch-all phrase, celebrities, you know, musicians, actors, et cetera, who want to be thought of as a brand and who want to figure out what their brand is. We call them human brands because they are. Yeah. And so the combination of our expertise, because Jennifer in her past life did so many music deals and so many things where she was really capturing the essence of these performers and figuring out how that fit with her brand, has helped us develop this whole practice around brand partnerships, human to brand.

14:22So that's one area that I didn't anticipate that's really fun and interesting, highly strategic and should be more strategic. And a lot of times it's not. It's a deal made somewhere. So we apply it to that. But, you know, the other flavors are, as I mentioned before, there are certain types of organizations who are founder-led that have, founders have created these wonderful, beautiful brands. But they're now ready to go broader. They're ready to scale. They're ready to grow. They need different expertise. That's a common thing. Absolutely. Founder culture is such a big thing. Absolutely. So, like, what's the next stage of that?

14:56And that's hard. That's hard also when it's your baby and you're a founder. So we're finding quite a lot of opportunity in that area. And then the third bucket is, you know, these larger legacy brands where fresh ideas and fresh thinking is required, even when there's a very beautiful, robust agency roster. Yeah. And we are brought in as part of that roster with very specific assignments to add that freshness into the mix. And that will be freshness around? Strategy. Creative strategy or brand positioning? All of it. Even, you know, even a brand narrative, even, I mean, as Tom does a lot too, even just, you know, business strategy, operational implementation, because we come from both sides of that house.

15:37So figuring out how to make those systems work better. Tom, what about you? I'm really looking at a lot of work in two different areas. so the first one is businesses and brands that need to set some kind of future direction whether whether they call it a north star or an operating system for their brand but something something big has changed in their world you know a new company strategy a global expansion a new ceo and and it feels like a fork in the road moments that they need to set like a a future facing direction that will win customers and be relevant in a new world. So that's one level.

16:17I can be doing that for a small, recently funded fintech or up to an interbrand global 100 brand. The other one is the thing that Suzanne described, where you've got a client, you've got, let's say, a CMO or equivalent, and they've got a specific problem they need to tackle in a strategic way. we want to get to this kind of vertical we have this problem yeah a tech company that was starting to realize that it couldn't reach um all of its desired customers by itself what would be a partnership strategy and what how could we work that through and so often it's those moments where you just need to apply some kind of clear clear and inspiring framework that gets you to answers that are new and make sense and are board ready.

17:07Yeah. And so those kind of things where literally we need someone to be strategic about this thing is a field which a lot of brand owners have. Not because they've got a lack of expertise. They've just got a lack of personnel or a lack of time. Time. Time. And where we can come in and help. And also because we can probably come in at a price point or a level that let's say the management consultancy that's helping your board or the Holdco creative network that's servicing you can't touch. And so for me, it's business at those two kind of levels and those two kind of use cases is what I see a lot.

17:51There's kind of interesting things you said I just want to sort of pick up on because I think it sort of helps at least me sort of visualize the sort of the sort of opportunity here is like companies at a fork in the road moment and there must be a lot of those at the moment given the state of the economy the you know whether it's the k-shaped economy or in europe we're pretty much a i don't even know what we are but like a hyphen economy or something but um you know there's a lot of uh there's a lot of challenge just in finding growth there's a lot of companies at that point and from a brand point of view I mean it's just a sort of theme across the festival where uh we're really struggling with what it takes to be big at a time when everything is so small and and you talk about like uh narratives and and things like that really feels there's something interesting there to push on so the other thing I think is very interesting that you said was the um making things that are board ready yes because that that must be a sort of really uh killer piece of what you you guys can bring that that that ability to whatever it is that you're you're producing something that could be put straight in front of a ceo or cfo is that is that fair is that a fair assumption i think i think that's fair especially if you're doing my actual brand strategy you're doing something for an organization and alignment matters and does this yes can every can all the parts of the organization see themselves in this can they work with this yeah that kind of stakeholder that kind of creating i don't want to call it a strategy as a whole enterprise it sounds like it's about to get very boring what it actually is it's about making the brands kind of big and understandable enough it's going to be real in the organization it's going to get used rather than here's a fancy thing the CMO has bought.

19:50Because I think all organisations are looking for the enterprise-wide application. Usually the flip is, what does this mean for customer service experience and innovation? What does it mean for communications? What does it mean for our decision-making? What does it mean internally? It's usually a version of we're going to need to cover those four. And just making organisations, they need to know, is this thing rooted in truth? Is this a thing that we can stand behind? Is there advantage here it's that that that beautiful phrase about um strategy is the art of creating power yes it's kind of a lawrence friedman yes it's still still the best definition but that idea of is this foundationally true and if we did this across our organization would we be more successful and actually those are really those are really fair questions that that organizations ask and designing around that becomes really important.

20:48And I think, candidly, I think there are some organizations, especially in the legacy creative world, where that's kind of annoying because the money is going to be made from a media buy or it's going to be made from a campaign. And could we just shortcut this process to like, here's a really good one-line thought that people get excited about or when's this going to become a buy? I can't necessarily answer that question immediately. But that's not my role. The organization is trying to find a thing to stand around. And you have to accept that that's actually the end goal. And that's the thing that you're there to serve, rather than that's some kind of boring hump you're going to have to get over before you go buy some GRPs.

21:34I would just say yes and without alignment, there is so much waste. Yes. But this is huge now, isn't it? I mean, we've found this in like brand and performance teams not aligning or marketing and customer experience teams not aligning. It's everywhere. These silos pop up and everything gets worse. There's replication of efforts. There's a waste on resource. There's making things that you don't need to be making. So everything Tom just talked about is absolutely right. And it starts with alignment. If you can align an organization behind an actual strategy. that is true to that organization, it becomes your operating framework for everything.

22:17So we're doing a lot of work similarly. I mean, we've been brought in by a couple of boards to actually do growth strategy. And I go, okay, great. You want a growth roadmap. Great. To get that, you first need this. You first need this alignment around what is that thing that we do? How do we serve our customers? And how do we organize the relationships between them and across the organization to deliver that through everything we do? From the products and services we deliver to the way that our culture exists inside those big organizations where people can be very misaligned and siloed, to your point.

22:47And when we get to that magical place and we can pull it through the organization, you can think of that as, I think we used to call that like living your brand. But I think of it more as like you're manifesting your strategy. You're operationalizing from a strategic truth and a strategic place, as we're talking about. That's an art of both efficiency and excellence when you do it right. Yeah, well, I think that kind of an alignment is a precursor to growth. Yes, absolutely. And that old cliche, the thing that often in creative strategy that people would kind of grade your work and say, oh, your briefs are showing.

23:21Brilliant. That's great. That's a win. So true. It's so true. It's so interesting what you're saying because earlier this week I was presenting with a CMO. uh uh you won't mind me naming him uh tarik hassan who used to run marketing at mcdonald's and for that petco and he was saying that he's in his view one of the big opportunities for cmos is to find the um the points within the business where they can apply their skills to deliver value and that is not always uh that does not always end obviously it doesn't always end in in an ad campaign or a creative thing he was we talked a lot about um customer experience and how uh that the gap between uh sort of communications and experiences is huge thing but again it's one of one of alignment it's one of um uh you know the the customer data sitting over here and the the the creative team or the strategy thing there but it sounds like you know from the CMO's point of view, this is exactly the space they want to be getting into and they're going to need support to do that.

24:34So it feels like this should be a fertile area. Yeah, very much so. Well, I think especially, as you say, when it's about where are we going to apply our skills, I think almost every strategy we're creating right now is based on what are your strengths, what are your superpowers. I think one of the advantages of doing strategy deep dives that you can do when you're being paid to do it rather than when you're knocking out in a full night. You're watching the clock before you can turn it into a brief. And you know what you have to get to. I've got to get to a brief to make a thing, right? But when you do that, when you go deep, the thing you always get into is what are your real strengths?

25:12What are your super? You discover stuff. I think every kind of project I've worked on, we've found some kind of hidden strength. We found a thing that you don't have to invent or fabricate. There is something in the organization you can build around that would, if you bet on it, would start unlocking bigger future. Yeah. And I think that's also another source of alignment because there is a model of consulting which is like an outsider comes in and tells the client they're wrong, which I think is probably as well as bad etiquette. I don't think it's a very good way of working with brands because ultimately we...

25:46I'm not sure McKinsey will ever hire you with that attitude there. No. Oopsie. Oopsie. I will carry on being the dining table multinational to see where it goes. But that's what you get when you go deep. But you're also hitting on, I know we're going to think about and talk about optimism a little bit. Yeah, let's go. You find these things because you are optimistically excited. And what I used to call, used to always say to my team, like, I want you to be the fascinators. Not the fascinators. Very different. The fascinators. The ones who are fascinated by things you find. and when you are that way you are looking at things with these i'm making the big eyes right now you're looking at things with big eyes that are fresh that go deep and you find surprising things and you have to be open to that and i think it's very hard to do that when you're coming from an agenda or a perspective of what you know you have to make at the end of the day right yeah yeah and there is every time we ask a sort of strategy leader or the most important thing they look for in a strategist it comes down to some some formulation of words that means they look for people who are like just perpetually interested totally yeah just they're just fascinated by the world the way the world works and we're more liberated i think to do that outside yeah yes right yeah yeah um you talk about sort of optimism i've been looking forward is it more the same or do you see sort of emerging spaces that you think actually that that could turn into something i've got an answer to that oh well there isn't the this is a story of two models and they're both interesting that neither is right or wrong when i spoke to the folks who have set up strategy studios in the last few years one of the questions asked is are you are you are you productized is there is there is there is there a method or is it more freestyle and the split in the camp was about 50 50 that there are some people who are very deliberately creating products and so like yeah you can buy per product and so it'd be like a productize their their thing like you can buy my uh deep dive framework or absolutely yes and in some cases it's just so that you're a more buyable object you're an easier line item in some cases it's because they're creating something that can be part automated or might allow a layer to scale and sell.

28:18And there are some where, let's call that the strategy business. Then the other half is probably more in the world of strategy practice where we're going to come in, we're going to diagnose, we're going to solve this. Now, it doesn't mean that is completely freestyle. There will often be repeated methods. You find a formula. You have ways of doing this. because so you're actually you're working on your kind of compound expertise but that's a bit of strategy business versus strategy practice is is a thing at least i'm seeing i don't know how you no i agree and i would say um which side are you on i i'm gonna say i'm on both as usual i'm doing both yes and i'm yes anding um and the company's called all land so we should be um but you know it's it's it what's interesting to me is because we are eyes wide open and discovering things What we often find is a client needs something pretty specific.

29:11You apply that strategic expertise in a bespoke way to that specific problem you're trying to solve. And you do need to answer that with a framework or a methodology or something that helps answer that question. Lo and behold, what keeps happening to us is about two months later, another client calls. It sounds oddly familiar. And it's not surprising because the context of the world and the pressures that clients are under is quite similar. So my policy is when a second one asks and then a third one, we are creating a repeatable approach. Now, it's always bespoke to that client's business. It's always confidential.

29:46We don't share client information. But there's an approach that clearly the marketplace is asking for. So you're kind of building the plane as it's flying. Absolutely. And you get a couple of use cases and you go, okay, that's a thing. That's a methodology that we should put into our practice, back to practice, and make sure that we actually, you know, really kind of keep growing it and keep iterating on it and make sure that it's uh that it really can be scalable and even repeatable i think it's a model that exists in the world um i just spent the day at google's demo day and one of the interesting things we're seeing this is this is creative technology so it's like you know it's an adjacent field yeah a lot of the ways they're developing their ai now is basically um the designers and uh and technologists they work with they encounter a problem they create a tool for it they create something for their workflow and now you've got something.

30:36And that's not because you're trying to like rufously automate or take the human out of the machine or take the discovery away. It's just, it's pattern recognition about making things you get better at it. So I think expertise is not a random quality.

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31:37i mean let's let's look at briefly about ai i mean is that a i don't know quite quite how you see it obviously lots and lots of businesses are trying to find those use cases for ai they're trying to pinpoint points in their workflow where i either a new tool they can develop to solve it or something they can buy in could solve it. Does any of that create opportunities for your sort of company in terms of helping people through their AI journey? Or is that just sort of a completely adjacent field with completely different people? Yeah, you know, yes. Because first and foremost, when you start a business, you don't start with 15 ,000 people in 60 markets.

32:21Yes, of course. You start with, hey, here I am and I'm going to start a business. and there's all this amazing technology that's going to help me start and create something that I never would have been able to create before. So the personal usage, the personal sort of learning you do with AI is critical and how you build that into your own business is critical. What we find when we work with clients, they don't have a blank page. So they're a little bit like, I know I should be and where do I? But you can analyze the workflow and the work process and you can really help them figure out where can you optimize?

32:53And that's probably a hint. Yeah. And where do you need to do things, not just optimized, but faster with a base level of intelligence? Where is the human piece needed more than ever? And how do you actually fuse that together to whatever business you're in? So we do advise clients on that. It is part of growth strategy for us. Yeah. Tom? Yeah, I think you're right. You can build your own stack is one of the first things. And some of the folks you speak to, that's been like one of the guiding principles from day one of their business. That I need to create a business. So I need to create a stack.

33:28I need to, so myself or my crew can show up bigger. And so some of it is about, as you say, about creating that kind of asymmetry. That's right. So you can compete. About the power again. Completely, yeah. So that's one piece of asymmetric competition you can do. The other one, which I'm increasingly seeing, is one of the elements of the demand for brand strategy is we need to be really clear who we are and what our behaviors are because we can then feed those into the client's LLM. Yeah, that's interesting. Because as they're all working out how do we automate our workflow or our customer service or our product creation, being really sharp on what makes you different, what makes you special, in a way you can articulate.

34:17And actually, it's not just that kind of generic personality list. It's actually a series of prompts. That's right. It's the protocols of we always do, we never do. That becomes really advantageous. Is that like the context layer? I think a lot about this sort of new context. Yes, because you don't need to. Once again, I think this comes down to asymmetry. An individual person or a small crew can help an organization figure out what are the brand behaviors. And then that becomes a thing that that client can then scale through their organization or through the AI relationship they've got with some of their bigger vendors.

35:01partners so in some ways it's that that strategy deliverable can be embedded into a company in a way that it probably couldn't before because you're adding to that completely yeah embed yes embedded yeah it's how it can be encoded into it yeah totally fantastic one that's an amazing that's an amazing reason for optimism i love it um tom while uh you're in can you are very kindly hosting a strategist meetup on the terrace here with the headline, Reclaiming Optimism. So I know you want people to come with reasons for optimism. What are you hoping to hear from the Strats and the festival? I'm hoping to hear something I don't know.

35:45And the reason behind this is we're in a difficult time. The recovery is K-shaped. There's a lot of very turbulent, difficult things in the world. And the truth is, the difficult truth that we face is it is high status and you can get likes and clicks from pessimism. Much easier. Much easier. Yeah, absolutely. But the challenge is that pessimism does well in the feed, but the addressable market for pessimism is zero. That's the quote. The addressable market for pessimism is zero. It's all the reasons to say no, right? Yeah, pessimism has an audience but zero buyers. And what's also related to that is I think the more projects you do, well, probably one of the joys of our job is we're probably working on more clients and more problems than we have before.

36:39Every time you go into an organization or you go deep dive into customers or you go work in a country or a sector you weren't filled with, you find cool new things. You find people are smarter than you think. People are more resilient than you think. There's a field of human endeavor that is going better than you think. I'll give just a dumb example. One of the clients I was working with, trust is a very important metric for them. And, of course, the narrative around trust is trust is we're in a zero trust world. Everything is really bad. Go to the Edelman Trust Barometer and look at the global levels of trust in brands, businesses, institutions.

37:16at a global level it's actually been static for about a decade and a little higher than it was in the early 2010s actually turns out there is a crisis of trust once again the opinion that it is fancy to have in social media and the evidence are not it turns out, never mistake your Twitter feed for your country as someone once said whatever you're working on, you find things I figured we have a global gathering, people who work in so many different flavors of strategy, different countries, different sectors, actually are gathering together. What are you seeing in the world? What are you seeing in your world gives you cause for optimism?

37:59Because everyone's got something. And especially, I think, once you get out the Anglo echo chamber of planning and look, remember, we're going to find things. I would love, whether it's 10 people, it's 100 people. I'd love everyone just to leave just in their back pocket a little piece of optimism that they got from a stranger about a new thing they're seeing. I love that. I mean, can I just say anecdotally, I feel like this is shifting. It is so much easier to find what's wrong versus what's right. But I'm watching people, when you get into a narrative of what's wrong, jump in and say, stop that.

38:40Stop that. Actually, you know what's good about this is, but, but, but, but, but, but. I think we're starting, maybe it's just me, but I'm starting to see and smell a swing for people defending optimism. I've heard similar. I don't know exactly how that will play out in terms of, you know, the issues within agency lands that we've talked about. But I hear the same as well. And, you know, we're busy sort of just about to launch our future strategy work for this year. And, you know, the conversations we've been having are exactly that. It's so easy to come out with some pessimistic data points and drive engagement.

39:22But actually, we need this year to be really focusing on the reasons for optimism and where the actual, you know, where the actual opportunities are. Because, you know, you guys have found that they're out there. And it's not about being a capitalist shill or a Pollyanna. No. It's actually about there are things that if we are informed and we are the fascinated, as you were saying, we should care about. I mean, if you work in health care right now, there's a GLP-1 revolution. There's a load of exciting. There's a second order effect. I mean, that's not health care. And then in the last couple of months, lots of incredible breakthroughs in how cancer is treated.

40:03It sounds like pancreatic cancer. There might be a cure. it turns out cervical cancer in young people who've been vaccinated has almost fallen to zero. Like we're in, we might be in this moment. Age of miracles. We might be, yeah, an age of miracles. It is within our parents' lifetimes, the 1950s, there were ticker tape parades when they discovered a cure for polio. We might be in that next stage. That's a thing to be optimistic about. That's a thing to work with. Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. Suzanne, Tom, thank you so much. That was such an inspiring podcast and I'm sure our listeners will get a lot from it.

40:41So thank you both. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Suzanne. An amazing discussion there. That is all we have time for in today's Walk podcast. If you like what you heard, then please do follow us on your podcasting platform of choice. And if you really liked it, please do leave us a review. Until next time, thanks for listening.