DDB Worldwide

His latest book, Lead With We, The Business Revolution That Will Save Our Future, was voted the McKinsey Top Business Bestseller on Workplace and Culture.

Simon started his career as a writer and creative director at agencies including DDB, Saatchi & Saatchi, Whedon & Kennedy and Ogilvy.

He's won awards at all major advertising festivals on clients such as Nike, Toyota and Motorola and has been named one of the top keynote speakers in the world.

He's a regular columnist for Forbes and in 2015 was a finalist for Global Australian of the Year.

And that was the start of the career.

And I did an internship then there.

And then I went to DDB Sydney.

And I went to Mojo in Sydney back in the day for a bit, Mojo.

But yeah, Ben Kay, if you want to read this, you can pause and read it.

But we also talked with Richard Brim, who spent a decade at Adam and Eve DDB, who worked on the John Lewis account for a long time doing the Christmas ads.

Talked to him in the newsletter today, What's Good, if you want to check it out, full conversation.

But he said, in regards of the ad, I think it's okay.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

The first year, I thought it was like chaos and, you know, a little bit of excitement, obviously, in the beginning, but then somewhat of, honestly, panic of trying to find... clients and accounts and the realization of you have to define the new high dive brand.

You know, we all had a brand at DDB and Leo and that those brands didn't carry over the minute you walked out of those doors and started high dive.

And we realized quickly that it's kind of a fresh slate and we had to define the high dive brand because you kind of didn't get credit for the things you did before that.

I like how we can draw people in.

Came back to Trinidad and actually got a role as the managing director of something called Tribal DDB Caribbean.

So DDB being one of the big four ad agencies in the world at that time, just around 2010.

They had a fully digital arm called Tribal.

And so I spent five years there really cutting my teeth on lots of different things.

I spent majority of my career in external agencies.

So 15 years, first in Melbourne and then lived in the States for five years and worked at lots of different agencies from sort of the big networks like DDB, BBDO and later Wunderman Thompson.

And then when I was in the States, I worked with a couple of Indies, so Mother and Big Spaceship.

Yeah.

He was in Wellington in New Zealand.

He worked for an agency called DDB, Donald A. Bernbach, great global agency.

And he was going to be off work for a few months.

And he couldn't touch me.

Today, I'm joined by Crystal Anderson, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at Three Headed Monster, an independent Dallas agency built to help ambitious brands wreak havoc.

Crystal cut her teeth at big shops like DDB, BBDO, and Publicis before betting on a scrappy startup agency.

Over a decade later, Three Headed Monster is a two-time ad age small agency of the year, working with Valvoline, Instant Oil Change, Freddy's, Q-Tips, and so many more brands.

In this conversation, we get into why her riskiest career move turned out to be her safest, why focus groups lie, and how brands can make faster, gutsier decisions.

Absolutely.

So typically how we get started with this is just love to hear a little bit about your background.

I know you came up through some of the biggest names in advertising, DDB, New York, BBDO, Chicago, Publicis, Dallas, Sapient Nitro.

What did you learn through that journey and how did you get to where you're at today?

Just do it.

Look, my experience with holding companies, I've worked at DDB, I came in at first born sort of around the sale to Dentsu and saw that company die over a number of years and i think the holding companies have sort of become a bit of a punching bag you know they're kind of the bad guy in the industry right now are there specific things like do you do you feel that sort of corporate model laid on top of let's call it creative people is just fundamentally a mismatch or do you feel like there are things that holding company model can do to evolve that would make those businesses more durable for the future and more relevant to to our buyers i

think There are aspects of it that make a lot of sense that I think are still needed and probably in the context of that moment in time made sense.

But I think the way that it's been executed hasn't made sense for the business that we're in or where the real value should be.

Omnicon, as a holding company, had a very light touch at the top.

Really let BBDO, TBWA, and DDB run their

own shops.

Interpublic, equally so.