Pete Case on How Enduring Client-Agency Partnerships Build Better Brands

Pete, after all these years in the industry, what's the one thing that still excites you? And what's the one thing that you think we've lost sight of?

You got me at all these years, which means I've been around for too long.

Well, the one thing that excites me is I honestly get excited waking up every day and jumping in to solve problems.

In the end, we are a business that solves problems, and that excites me, small or large.

We're not in the business of creating art.

We're in the business of solving business problems with a blend of creativity and technology and strategy.

So I think that's what really excites me, and the most difficult problems, the best for me.

In terms of what we've lost sight of, I miss having the extra buffer of time.

I don't think it's something we've lost sight of.

It's circumstance.

I think that we've allowed over the years through circumstance the shrinking of the amount of kind of additional time that our agencies had built into them for us to work on kind of our own agenda and our own thoughts and our own technology advancements and innovations and everything else.

We're mostly fully aligned and a horrible word that everyone listening will probably reel at, but being cost covered by clients, we're all cost covered.

So yeah, I miss that era where we had a little bit of time to build ahead of the curve rather than just build what clients or the circumstances are currently asking us for.

So that's a difficult space for us as an industry right now.