Claim OwnershipInspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising
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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.
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Sheila Sitaram’s first job was at Vogue, styling for Celine, Calvin Klein, and McQueen. Then she walked away to ask a question fashion couldn’t answer: why are all these decisions of taste made with no data? That question took her career through PwC, HashiCorp and MongoDB. Today, she's a product lead at MotherDuck. Her take: she never really switched careers, because art direction and product thinking are the same job. Now that AI lets anyone build anything, she argues taste is what separates...
If AI can produce the consensus view in seconds, your point of view is the job. That’s why I think this episode of Inspiring Futures with Mike Mallazzo, General Manager at Alephic, is worth your time. Mike went from investigative journalism into tech, spending time at LinkedIn, Dynamic Yield, and PayPal’s agentic commerce team, and he has a sharp, often contrarian take on what brands need to do now that AI agents sit between them and their customers. Why it’s worth a listen: Br...
The advertising agency business has changed dramatically. Agencies once relied on their reputations, relationships, and a fairly steady stream of pitch opportunities to grow. The phone rang, you got invited to pitch, and if you were good enough, you won the business. That world is disappearing. Today, agencies have to work much harder to find new clients, build relationships, and create opportunities, often long before there's a brief or even a budget. And that's a problem because most agency...
My guests on the latest Inspiring Futures podcast episode are Leslie Stone, a former Ogilvy Chief Strategy Officer who has helped giants like American Express, Walmart, and IKEA, and Gabrielle Tenaglia, a San Francisco agency strategist turned startup marketing leader at companies like Omada Health and Lyft. Together they now run Throughline. A few months ago, they talked with marketers to ask about their unmet needs at work. In their conversations, they couldn’t get to the work. Leader after...
Everyone agrees the world is uncertain. Far fewer ask what that means for how we plan. On the Inspiring Futures podcast, futurist Joana Lenkova (ex-Disney, founder of Futures Forward) made the case better than anyone I’ve heard. Here it is in four lines: 1. The past is no longer a reliable guide. Spreadsheets tell you what happened. They can’t tell you what’s coming. 2. Not acting is still a decision. Skip foresight, and you’ve bet on “tomorrow looks like yesterday” without checking the bet...
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