Our guest on this episode of The Persuasion Game podcast is Stephen White, Senior Vice President, North America at Diageo.

He is an expert in transforming teams, brands, innovation pipelines and businesses and has spent years working in different markets, all around the world, doing just that.

Stephen shares stories and learnings from across his 20+ years leading teams at Diageo including: brand turnarounds; managing global and local dynamics; and transforming underperforming teams.

One example Stephen shares is how a short film starring Robert Carlyle helped reframe the iconic whisky brand Johnnie Walker “we spent the amount of money we would’ve spent on an external film, on an internal audience, we then subsequently had 9-10 years of consistent growth.”

Johnnie Walker “The Man Who Walked Around the World”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ6aiVg2qVk

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This is an 18Sixty production for The Forge.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:00) Key Innovations at Diageo

(09:32) Building Trust and Empathy

(14:29) Breaking Down Organisational Silos

(20:31) Leveraging AI and Future Trends

The Persuasion Game is available on all your favourite podcast apps: https://link.chtbl.com/PersuasionGame

Episode transcript:

Stephen: I was always lucky in the first few instances of arriving into a problem as the new person to the problem. You have objectivity. You’re able to see clearly what the problem is. When a problem creeps up on you or a need for transformation arises while you are in the role, that’s a harder ask.

Adam: Welcome to The Persuasion Game, The Forge’s podcast about growing brands and persuading consumers in the modern age. Hi Laura. How are you?

Laura: I’m great, thanks. How are you doing?

Adam: Well, so you know that LinkedIn post we saw the other day from Stephen White, the Senior Vice President North America at Diageo.

Laura: We’re always LinkedIn stalking. Yes, I do.

Adam: Yes he was talking about transformation and we’ve only gone and got Stephen to join us on the podcast today.

Laura: This is very exciting news. We have so many clients who are going through all sorts of transformations, some of which are driven by really exciting factors like the advent of AI, some of which is about really managing tough and turbulent conditions.

So actually speaking to an expert who has lived many lives across Diageo, from global to local roles, always with an eye to transformation feels like it’s going to be really exciting. Some sort of key principles and some kind of nuances to look out for as well.

Adam: Yeah, he’s described himself as a go-to person for transforming different teams or brands or situations that he finds himself in the business, and we’re going to unpick some of those stories today.

Laura: Let’s get stuck in!

Adam: And just before we hear from our guest, a quick ask from us. We’d love it if you can tell one person about this podcast in the office or on a call today, or leave us a five star review in a rating wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay. Here’s the interview.

Okay. Welcome Stephen.

Stephen: Hi!        
                                                                                                                               Adam: Lovely to meet you. Thank you for joining us today. So I thought we’d just start by getting an idea of your background. You’ve had obviously a long period of working at Diageo, but if you could just share the bit that came before that, and then your time at Diageo and the different kind of roles you’ve had.

Stephen: Absolutely. Yeah. So I originally came out of university working for the Boots Group, big pharmacy business as it was then, I had a lovely healthcare business I worked in and I worked in a variety of sales and marketing roles through there.

I joined Diageo in an innovation function, having no idea what innovation was, and it was everything that I wanted it to be, which was great brands, the iconic campaigns of kind of Guinness and Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker. Brands that I really wanted to work on as a marketeer. So when they came knocking, yes please. And, not regretted a moment of that. So I’ve spent 20 years, 21 years working all over the world. So lived in Amsterdam, lived in Singapore, now live in the States, but also travelled extensively with Diageo. So working at almost all of our markets and doing a variety of roles.

So I’ve been in innovation two or three times. I’ve also been a global marketeer. I’ve been a managing director of various bits of our business as well. So just a lovely, rich experience and get to touch very different consumers. You know, you feel like you’re joining one big business. The company’s going to be the same in every place, and it’s quite different.

Laura: What was your favourite innovation?

Stephen: Oh! Very good question. So Johnnie Walker Double Black was one I’m particularly proud of, not least of which because it helped Johnnie Walker in a key moment, kind of take the next step forward and did a great job of both speaking to loyal consumers, but also bringing in a lot of new consumers to the brand as well.

Laura: Yes, it’s kind of like the amplified Johnnie Walker, isn’t it?

Stephen: It’s that, the smokier version of it.

Laura: Yes.

Stephen: And I think originally we thought we would speak more to Johnnie Walker adorers, people who love the brand, but what we found was that kind of smokiness appealed to a wider footprint of consumers and, and brought in a lot more.

Laura: Oh, that’s interesting!

Adam: We had Sally Smallman come on, obviously from the European portfolio.

Stephen: Yep.

Adam: And yeah, I mean we learnt so much about like, start with your core and find different occasions and different consumers and just keep innovating, innovating until you’ve unlocked as many possible people as possible and brought them into the brand or the category.

Stephen: Yeah and it’s doing that in a disciplined manner. And Sally’s a great exponent of that, which is innovate where great marketing can’t go. If you can answer it with a great marketing program or activity, recruit people through that. It’s a much more efficient way of bringing people into the trademarks.

You innovate where the existing range can’t get to. And yeah, Sally’s a great exponent of that, but that’s fundamentally what’s powered Diageo’s leadership in  drinks innovation- it has been that kind of searching for the areas that are genuinely fresh to the portfolio.

Laura: When we talk to you and Sally, it’s very clear there is that kind of alignment and sense of strategic intent behind what Diageo does, but today we’re actually talking about the transformations that are involved to get there. You’ve kind of come into lots of different situations and had to help manage the way through them often turn things around. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Stephen: Yeah. I kind of really started in, back in the first role I had, in the Boots group, so I took on a sales role. The reason I took over, unfortunately the person before me had defrauded some of our customers, and it was like the first proper sales job carrying the bag into the outlet. And it’s like, get out of my store. I never want see you again! Oh, this isn’t going well.

Yeah, I quickly worked out that I had to build trust. I had to build confidence in our business and me personally. And so it kind of set an agenda around, actually I need to change the way that our business is seen by these group of customers. And that started with building kind of both heart and mind connection with the people. But I loved it because it was a real challenge you could lean into. And actually what I subsequently found was, I was quite lucky in my first few years of my career I moved quite quickly through a series of roles, but each one was solving a problem.

So I got a reputation for being the person you would put into a problem area to go and fix, which kind of built up a skillset for me of being able to do that. You know, not having to think too hard about it. Some of the areas around that kind of heart, hearts and minds, the clarity of what it is you’re trying to solve for. The ability to kind of disassociate yourself and some of the emotional side of that so that you’re able to kind of map out what you should do with the problems.

Laura: We’ll dig into that for sure.

Adam: And Steve, this interview actually came about because we saw your LinkedIn post on turnarounds and transformation and you had a really brilliant story in there about some work that you were doing with a business in the Seychelles was it?

Stephen: Yeah, so worked in the Indian Ocean. We owned up until recently, Seychelles Breweries. It was a business that was on the smaller side. It was ancillary to a lot of our activities, but it was really important to the Seychelles. You know, it’s their beer. It’s our beer, it’s our national pride.

And it was at a point where over time we just hadn’t invested enough in the facilities. And so it was beginning to show in the product. So my job coming in there really was to get hold of the problem. What was it that needed solving? Convince the business, the rest of the business, to invest enough money to fix that problem.

And then actually get our team, who work on the business to proudly talk about it. We’re putting the money in, we’re investing. You will taste it in the beer that’s coming out the door and holding ourselves accountable for making that happen. So it is like, rather than just words, it’s the deeds that also matter there.

So making sure that the beer tasted great, that you were sharing it with your friends and family proudly. So really infusing the audience around it. And the Seychelles are a relatively small island, set of islands, relatively small population. So you can make a difference quickly when you get it right, but equally they’ll hold you to account if you get it wrong. So it’s kind of leaning into that challenge.

Adam: And how do you capture the attention around something like that? I’m just imagining it being quite a small part of the overall Diageo business. How do you kind of draw attention to it and say, this is where we want to be focused and something to do?

Stephen: Yeah, in part, sometimes you can do it intellectually, a cold-hearted conversation with somebody very rational. There are other examples in the transformation journey where people don’t want to hear the message either because they’ve got a load of other priorities or they’re invested in the current situation. And in those moments, you’ve got to kind of speak to heart and mind again about that. So it’s both helping them understand the facts of the situation, but also making them feel some of the either hurt or dissatisfaction with that moment.

And it’s, again, painting the picture of what could it be? So if we fix this, where could we get to making that as attractive as possible? So it’s a bit of storytelling that kind of brings that to life that, again, captures the hearts and minds to help people see what the problem is that you’re trying to solve for, but also the benefit of fixing it.

Laura: So you’ve got a lovely journey there of the route you want to take people on, but we all know that actually delivering against that is not linear. What kind of principles do you have in mind for how you take on those kind of transformations? You’ve got your what, and then it’s kind of like how you actually implement it.

Stephen: I was always fond of sticky points of view. And what I mean by that is having an outcome in mind that you’re trying to shape to, potentially a solution to that outcome, but inviting others to build it with you. And the reason I talk about sticky is if you just go with the wind, then people don’t believe that you believe in it.

Whereas if you’ve got a confident point of view around where it is you’re trying to shape. But you invite others in to participate and shape that with you and then you move with them, but at the right pace, then actually it feels like you’re owning the journey together and you kind of co-opt them into solving and it becomes part of their story.

Adam: That’s excellent. I mean, I think it’s probably easier said than done, kind of fostering that collective momentum around something, especially when you’re talking about the sort of global and local potential challenges there. How do you go about that then? When you’re a hundred miles away, a thousand miles away in London and you’ve got a market that you’re trying to move in the right direction?

What sort of strategies do you have for that global tension?

Stephen: I genuinely believe you have to be in their space, at least in the first instance, to build a rapport. Taking the time working on one of our big global brands, something like Johnnie Walker. I know the brand really well. I know the story, the history, the heritage of it.

I know it in its global context, but I don’t know it in their context. And I don’t know who they’re competing with or what else is there underneath. I also don’t know what else is going on in their business. And you can get a bit of that online, on a call, you don’t really get the grit of it. And so when it’s material issues, then you have to spend some time with people face to face.

And in as curious a way as possible. So don’t come in with the answer, but you know, you’re going to come in with a toolkit of things that could be the answer, but really what you’re trying to do is understand their context, what’s actually happening, where’s the pressure coming on for them? And that’s both in terms of finding the right solution, but also ensuring that the solution you’re going to put in place will stay. So if your answer is we need to spend $5 million in this market, but you know that they’re under profit pressure, then that answer’s not workable. So you need to find a different answer. And so understanding all of those things allow you to build a solution that’s right with the market.

So kind of collaborate together. The bit that I always strongly felt, and I felt that our best global leaders do this consistently, is contracts around that. So it’s a, I’m going to do this to help and you are going to do that in return so that together we hold each other accountable for delivering this. That contract is formed initially in the start, when you first arrive, here’s what I’m here to do, to look and understand. Then as you leave, this is what I saw. This is what I feel we need to do together to do this, and this is how the next six months are going to play out so that we hold each other to account.

Laura: I think what’s super interesting listening to you talk is there’s a lot of empathy there and a lot about the importance of really understanding other people’s perspectives. And you’ve mentioned, you know, hearts and minds along the way, but you’ve also said there’s some times where you’ve got to be incredibly rational and put things to one side, and there’s other times where you’ve got to really play into that emotion. How do you judge that?

Stephen: I think it’s more instinctive.

It’s partly a problem solving framework that you’re running through your head as to what’s actually going on. What’s the real issue? Framing, hypothesising, what might be answers to the challenge you’re facing, the penny drops. I think once you start talking to people as to where the likelihood of the solution coming from, is it a fax problem, as in there is something broken fundamentally here we just need to give the solution? Or is it actually belief? Do people not believe in where you’re going?

I was reflecting on, you know, I was always lucky in the first few instances of arriving into a problem as the new person to the problem. You have objectivity. You’re able to see clearly what the problem is. You can then diagnose the solution. You need to take people with you on that. But you’ve kind of got that kind of cold, rational point of view around it because you’re fresh into it.

When a problem creeps up on you or a need for transformation arises while you are in the role, that’s a harder ask. And actually, and I think…

Adam: Especially when you might be part of the problem potentially.

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. Your frame of the problem might well be the issue and there’s a little bit of listening to the uncomfortable noise in your stomach, or in your head around this isn’t quite working. Why isn’t this working?

And being able to kind of self-analyse yourself. Because normally I think our people have been in business long enough. Their instincts are pretty good. They kind of know when something’s not quite right. What tends to happen is you double down on the model you’ve got. It’s like we just need to work harder.

Adam: Yeah.

Stephen: When you’re pushing and it’s still not moving, the question is how long are you patient for before beginning to move.

I was reflecting on it there, there’s almost a change curve mentality that comes in of kind of like angry first, you’re frustrated it’s not happening. You’re then disappointed. You feel lost that this thing’s not working. And it’s when you get to that point of acceptance, it’s like, ah, okay, I just need to move this on. And actually part of that is clearing my head, helping others clear their heads to think cleanly about the problem, and then use the brilliant veins that we employ either within our own businesses or in our agency partners to reframe the problem and think about how you might solve that differently.

Adam: I love what you’re saying there about like the step change or clearing your heads as you called it. I mean, what are the things that we can do to help that along, especially when leading a large team of people.

Stephen: The job of the leader is to get back to the objectivity, to help frame the problem. It’s giving yourself space and in some cases giving yourself a little bit of space from the problem. And the coaching I was giving to somebody, which I think was the start of the post actually you guys saw, was around that, was helping somebody who was caught in a situation that it had developed through their tenure and helping them just take a step back.

And so they were using me as a sounding board to kind of bounce back around that.

Adam: Getting beyond the, I guess that’s the personal side of it. Whether you’re the leader trying to clear your head, or think through the problem or helping others in the teams do so. What about the more structural things in a turnaround? Silos or people not talking to each other or politics or like, there’s some of the stuff that I think kind of does get in the way ultimately.

Stephen: I think any big organisation’s going to have those, particularly over time. They tend to calcify. So if you have people who’ve long serving, great experience, but they’re in their roles for a substantial amount of time without constant intention, there’s a tendency for that to calcify. They kind of only see it through their lens of whether it’s supply or sales or marketing.

You only see it through your lens, and I think the goal in a transformation situation is actually to break down that calcification, to help others understand what other people are facing in the problem and develop empathy. Kind of reconnect with the person, not the job title.

And the moment you can get people reconnecting around what are you actually here for? What are we all striving for? Then you have a greater chance of being able to get to a vision or a higher end outcome that you’re trying to shape to which benefits all and that may require, as part of that, some sacrifices around individuals, but you want to be able to have a conversation with that person to say, actually you are not losing power in this moment. You’re gaining greater authority in the bigger solution.

And so helping reframe their role in answering it and confidence that great leadership in those moments will benefit everybody and them specifically. So you kind of take the personal risk as far as you can out of it.

Laura: It’s interesting what you’re saying about calcification, because one of the sort of counter discourses we hear is, you know, churn.

I don’t think that’s particularly what Diageo is known for, but there are a lot of FMCGs where brand managers might have, you know, two year cycles, three year cycles on their roles. And so there’s an idea of I need to make my name with something new. And I can imagine that would be quite challenging, especially when you’ve got really well established brands, strong equity to build over time.

Stephen: Yeah, I think the calcifications broken down by growth mindset. So if you are leaning into constantly learning and growing your influence across the business and you are broadening your understanding so I’m not just the marketing person, but I’m actually a business leader working on behalf of the business.

Then I think you continue to grow for a longer period in those roles without getting stuck in your own solutions. And so I genuinely think there is value in people staying in a role for longer, but you need a growth mindset while you’re in there. Otherwise, if you are repeating the same tricks and actually not growing, actually that’s when you begin to stagnate and you begin to go defensive.

I think the calcification is the thing you’re fighting against. But the more you can get people kind of staying in the role and growing within the role, the better that is.

Laura: And that leads so nicely into something we talked about before the podcast, which was about the Johnnie Walker internal communications and that kind of building a powerful story about what the brand is all about.

The spirit of Keep Walking. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey and how sort of engaging hearts actually galvanised that?

Stephen: It was an amazing moment actually. Diageo as an entity kind of formed in the early two thousands. Johnnie Walker was the backbone of that business and very much the poster child of the new Diageo business.

So the Diageo way of marketing was brand building, was kind of brought through and it was really the centre of it. And so for seven or eight years it was on a fantastic story, a fantastic growth, fantastic story. The Keep Walking campaign. When I arrived in 2008, it had stopped. It stopped growing. It just started to stagnate.

Adam: Unrelated.

Stephen: Unrelated, probably, probably. But yeah, it had just stopped. It kind of reached a natural moment. And actually what was tending to happen were other brands were doing exciting, interesting things and were asking for money. So the narrative was becoming, Johnnie Walker’s kind of reached its plateau. We need to think about a different investment cycle for it, which effectively meant less money for it.

As we came on board, myself and a gentleman called David Gates, we looked at it and were like, no, we haven’t stopped growing at all. We’ve just, there’s so much more opportunity. We’ve just lost momentum here.

And in part that was investing in things that weren’t necessarily paying back in the way that we needed them to for the next phase. But also people just were starting to kind of dampen down their expectations of Johnnie Walker. So they were self-regulating themselves to a lower outcome. And so the thing that we did was created the Robert Carlyle Walk film, which tells the story of Johnnie Walker.

That’s an internal film. We spent the amount of money we would’ve spent on an external film, on an internal audience. And really what that was about was connecting everybody internally from their chairman down to the power of the story of Johnnie Walker and the belief that this story has more to walk, it has further to go.

And so we really doubled down on that campaign. What we also did, the business had implemented, with good intent, really good intent, kind of life stage model. So stage one to four, stage one is a nascent brand in a developing market. Stage four is a mature brand, you know, beginning to plateau and invested a certain level in each of those groups.

Life stage two, which was the brand’s well developed, but the market hasn’t fully accelerated yet, and life stage three, which is where the brand is on fire and is booming. There’s a massive value gain from getting markets from stage two to stage three. But our investment plan didn’t reflect that. They reflected retaining stage two and retaining stage three.

To get the brand to move from stage two to stage three required an extraordinary investment, but that investment pays out so you get that benefit for the rest of the brand’s life. And so we built the business case around taking 10 of our biggest stage two markets to stage three, and that was a rapid investment.

We wouldn’t be telling this story if it wasn’t a good new story. You know, we then subsequently had 9, 10 years of consistent growth in high single digit and north of that based upon smart investment and focus behind it.

Adam: I absolutely love that. For anyone that hasn’t seen the Robert Carlyle. We’ll put it in the show notes. It’s absolutely brilliant. And I’d love to ask you afterwards about how he remembered that six minute monologue. I mean, I know he’s a professional actor, but it’s truly astonishing.

Stephen: It was amazing.

Laura: So just thinking about transformation, sometimes it’s internal and sometimes it’s reacting to a changing context.

And one of the huge transformations that we’re seeing is obviously the boom in non-alc. How do you do things that help anticipate those kind of big transformations that are coming down the pipe whilst keeping an eye on what’s still a very profitable and important business?

Stephen: We were lucky, I say lucky, some very smart people within our business were looking ahead of emerging trends as they were kind of coming through. And one of the ones that we spotted was non-alc. We invested with Ben Branson on Seedlip well ahead of the curve, and really because we wanted a brand and partner that would actually help shift the kind of cultural context, particularly for the bartending community. What’s then subsequently accelerated that for us has been bringing in our power trademarks into those moments and it was a judgment call as to when to do that.

And we do employ quite a bit of what we call foresight, which is anticipating future trends and how they might play out so that we’re able to kind of have enough of a spread of the things that are likely to impact our industry, ahead of time.

Laura: And you mentioned, you know, the importance of actually being in situ, actually seeing people in the whites of their eyes, kind of really understanding the context, but often that’s quite challenging in today’s environment for all sorts of reasons.

How would you suggest that people do get that sense of immersion in a different context, perhaps if they’re not able to travel in person?

Stephen: There are a lot of tools out there that are able to do that for you. There’s a lot of agency partners. Agency groups are able to help you with that, kind of get you in contact directly with the consumer group, and able to talk to them.

So we do do quite a bit of that, whether it’s ethnography of different kinds. We also. candidly, we’re starting to use AI in different ways as well, to begin to anticipate where potential areas are going and to harvest information so that we’re able to aggregate it. Again, that helps us form hypotheses, which then we’re able to test in the real world.

So again, it allows you to kind of broaden up a set of options to a potential problem. quicker. Now that breadth isn’t necessarily an asset unless you’re able to research that number effectively. And what we’re finding is our new tools are able to do that. So we’re leveraging into the new technology to help build out more hypotheses and then narrow down through better research.

So less guessing, more informed, but it’s all kind of baked into having great input data or great input and insight from consumers directly.

Laura: I love that one conversation we were having earlier this week was about the importance of breadth, especially when you’re looking at like future value.

And if you can achieve that breadth early on with a relatively sort of low cost solution or low time investment solution, you can actually start to see some emergent interesting areas that perhaps you wouldn’t see, you know, differences across markets, for example, or like little emergent themes that are coming through.

Stephen: I think that’s definitely right. Kind of the biggest areas are still going to come through in the way you might expect, but what you’re finding is more, definitely more breadth. Ideas that speak to specific audiences, that in themselves are big enough opportunities to go after that you might have missed because you’re always just chasing the biggest of them. We’re able to kind of flesh those out and that begins to be really important as we look at potentially people who are going to be influenced by the next wave in our industry. Next wave of drinks that are going to be chosen.

So, you know, LPA, you know, 21 year olds in in the US and above. Looking at the choices they’re making, how’s that going to play out and influence other consumers over time, particularly as you know, we’re about halfway through that age group coming into the market. So as more come on stream, what will, what’s going to be important for them? And they’re a generation that grew up in COVID. They had a very different set of experiences. They’re kind of learning their way into the world in a different way than others will have done. So trying to anticipate that is fascinating at the moment, and it’s allowing us to think differently about how we might access different opportunities.

Adam: I have a final question, just jumping off your AI point, you know, with AI obviously able to help so much now in that kind of upfront content generation, idea generation, even like the platforms that you might be innovating in. What are you looking for from your agency partners now?

You know, as AI takes on a lot of the skills that they previously would’ve brought to the table? What are you looking for now?

Stephen: Yeah, I mean, in large part leveraging what’s already theirs. So we’ve got a couple of partners who have been partners with us for a long, long time and have a lot of data about how we operate and what we’ve researched.

So working with them to go and I go, how do you leverage that data with AI and then anticipate what’s coming next? There’s very few off the shelf things that work specifically for us. So we tend to have some very bright minds in our group who co-create what we need. And so we’ll guide agencies into the type of tools that we need for our various challenges, in a way that gives us the outcomes that we want. But it requires investment on our side and it requires partners who are not trying to sell us something, but trying to genuinely partner in creating solutions for us.

I think the recognition is in our first forays into AI was kind of looking at every tool and kind of going, can I retrofit that in and make it work? And it’s like, no, actually we’ve got a particular way that we look at challenges, particularly around creativity and insight, that is really helpful for us. We want AI to help that as opposed to replace it directly, and so it’s kind of supercharging our skill sets rather than replacing it.

Adam: Steve, honestly, thank you so much for coming in. That was an absolutely fascinating discussion.

Stephen: Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Laura.

Laura: Really insightful. Thank you.

Adam: Laura, so much to unpack in that conversation. I really, really enjoyed that. Steve has clearly got an incredibly interesting perspective, having been around the world and seen so many different organisations and helped turn them around.

The thing that really stuck with me was this idea about seeing the others’ point of view. I think it’s so easy just kind of double down and push through when things aren’t quite working. And especially as we see with, with some of our clients, you know, with the global local dynamics, I think that that effort to really understand what the other person needs and then kind of building a solution that serves them. It sounds very simple, but I don’t think we do it as often as we should do.

Laura: A hundred percent. I wish I had heard of this notion of like a contract between, when I was a regional brand manager. You know, I think there was a lot of thinking about it as a zero sum game, which is obviously exacerbated when times are tough.

And I think that that ability to sort of get out of your own way, take a broader perspective and some of the tools you need to get through is absolutely critical.

What I also loved was, I felt like he was very astute in understanding the sort of emotional perspective of it, but actually the language he was using wasn’t just about emotion. He was talking about belief and sort of pride and all of that involved some kind of give from people as well. So people would say like, you know, if I really believe in this, I’m actually going to have to invest X amount. I’m going to have to put my money where my mouth is. And I thought that was a really interesting way of going it’s not hearts and their minds separately and hope you get there. It’s actually how do you find those sort of combined wins that really get people to unlock growth?

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. So much of this is just about great relationships and like how you build them and how you foster those.

Laura: You know, one thing that’s really interesting about this is no matter where you sit as a business, this idea of future forecasting is something we’re hearing more and more about, and that future could be a multitude of things.

So actually being in the right mindset to anticipate what change is going to be, thinking about how your team is going to be ready. This is all stuff that, you know, we are getting more and more briefs about. So it’s really fantastic to hear an expert’s point of view on it.

Adam: Really inspiring to hear about the way that Diageo have co-created their solutions to some of these things with their agencies.

And I think that’s some real food for thought for us, much to think about. Thanks, Laura. See you next time.

Laura: See you next time!