How did you discover your interest in strategy and develop the skills necessary to enter the creative field? I was actually a radio and broadcast copywriter when advertising was a discrete thing. I met Mary Mills, a strategic planner at JWT, and thought her job was the coolest in the world. She always brought impressive insight and emotional intelligence to our work; she was so smart and dreamy that I wanted to be more like her. Mary Mills, if you’re out there, thank you for this curse.

As a young kid, I continuously took things apart and put them back together. I’m not sure how many clarinets my parents paid to be reconstructed, but bless their patience with my brain—I called these things “projects” from the age of two, so I give my parents a ton of credit for tolerating and even encouraging my incessant deconstruction to be “practice.” I suspect this behavior is partly hard-wired, a nature versus nurture cognitive thing.

What do you do in your current role as vice president of strategy and innovation at global creative agency Marks, and what do you enjoy about it? The thing that’s most energizing about my job is Gen Z, straight up. Managing young people who are smarter and faster than I am can be tough, because there are definitely things they can learn from you—the what and the why of our practice—but their “how” is an impressive mystery to me. Their brains are different. They’ve internalized technology in a way that I can’t, and their synthesis skills are absolute sorcery. They’re wonderful to collaborate with, as an inventor-mind, especially in the innovation space.

Most people are going to AI to help them invent better, to create elegance from complexity. I go to our young strategists. They’re probably going to AI in turn, but that’s OK because they’re more fluent in its application than I will ever be.

What have been some of your favorite projects that you’ve worked on at Marks? There aren’t categories that I’m preferential to, but consumer and culture work are incredibly rewarding. Understanding the way that cultural insight can fuel the work, break through and go viral—it’s all about relevance. And relevance is tough in this landscape of complexity, where there are no straight lines, channel is hopelessly fractured and brand engagement isn’t a unilateral relationship. This is what keeps me connected to the work.

Additionally, spaces where consumers are underserved because of cultural power dynamics are both fascinating and really rewarding when you crack it. The social scientist in me recognizes that these places are where the algorithm of capitalism is rubbing up against an emergent need state that isn’t being recognized. Women in the healthcare space is a great example.

Tell us about your experience of being diagnosed with autism as an adult. What advantages have you discovered in being neurodivergent that you think other creatives can benefit from? I want to be careful with this question because the current US administration has created a climate where any cognitive diversity can be pathologized and, as of recently, institutionalized. I’m not American; I live in a country where both human beings and employees enjoy profound protections, but I’m concerned for neurodiverse people in America.

That said, this diagnosis was like the last puzzle piece slipping into place. Suddenly, a lot of things made sense: I was the kid with straight As who was always in detention. I’m terrible with hierarchy; I’m not good at “managing up,” so I’m fortunate to have a boss who I feel understands and respects me.

The flip side of this challenge is that, because I have a high capacity for risk and really can’t lie about things, I sometimes take on the role of a truth-teller in a corporate environment. Anyone who shares these qualities will understand that this can be a double-edged sword. Corporations often don’t appreciate the inconvenient truth of a situation—it’s like a ghost in their machine, a glitch. But, having a high capacity for risk is also great fuel for more powerful innovation outcomes. When you aren’t emotionally attached to an outcome, when your objective is truth, you often cut through the human foibles that can be a barrier to uncovering the best answer.

As Gen Z becomes the dominant younger audience in the market, what would you say makes them different from previous generations? Gen Z will not take your shit. Brands have no secrets from them. They aren’t passive consumers in the sense that if a brand is being inauthentic, they will burn you in ways you won’t even see coming. They’re the generation of shade. Because of their ability to synthesize information, they not only consume meaning but reshape it, invert it, deconstruct it and pay it forward in ways with which Boomer and Gen X brand owners can’t keep up. They are a living, breathing Marshall MacLuhan theory in that they’re both consuming meaning and making their own. They are both medium and message: the signifier and the signified. They’re the stick in the spokes of a model of capitalism that isn’t working anymore. The rebel in me finds them deeply inspiring.

Brands need a culture-first way to understand what’s happening, and our challenge is that this new way can’t be led by data alone. Data requires longer leads to pattern recognition. New approaches to strategy require one part social science and one part sorcery. You need to leverage agility, nimble pattern anticipation—not just identification—and cultural fluency that taps into the gut. It’s a more intuitive ability to connect dots, and you either have it or you don’t. I would argue this skill is hardwired into younger people. It takes both humility and courage to recognize that the old ways aren’t working and to acknowledge that they can do things we can’t.

With the advent of the internet, we’ve seen an emergence of cross-generational pop culture and shared values across social media. Do you think that generational lines are blurring, and if so, are generational insights no longer useful? The reality is that generational insight is dead. Brands are struggling to find new ways to codify consumer understanding, and this is because generations are collapsing: a 22 year old and a 27 year old have almost nothing in common.

This is why a shift away from conventional segmentation is crucial. We need to be considering young people not as consumers but as niche cultural audiences with tribal connectivity that is continuously shifting. Back to MacLuhan, they are both medium and message. They are the receiver, the transmitter and the signal itself. They don’t fit our models, and I have never seen our industry more in denial of the paradigm shift that’s needed to understand this new consumer landscape.

In our practice at Marks, we’re currently remaking the way we understand human beings. This culture-first imperative has been successful in hacking our approach to relevance and fueling great work that’s iconic and memorable. However, that also embeds the creative flexion required to respond to a cultural landscape that doesn’t stand still. This is a two-way conversation that we need to listen to, instigate and participate in. As brands, we don’t lead this conversation unilaterally anymore—those days are long gone.

How is the rise in technology helping or hurting the brands you work with? There’s a professional answer and a personal answer to this question, and because I cannot tell a lie, I will give you both. In the short term, technology like large learning models and AI pursuits in creativity are shiny, sexy toys that can enable us to do more, stretch our thinking, inform and visualize in ways we couldn’t before. Unfortunately, we measure this success in capital because that’s our paradigm—it makes us faster, more proliferate, more efficient. But, are these the right metrics? And are these noble pursuits? More pragmatically, are they even smart pursuits in the long term? In my opinion, this kind of ruthless efficiency can make some people a lot of money in the short term, but it’s setting us all up to fail when we take the longer view.

Personally, I’m worried that this is already a race to the bottom scenario: how fast, how cheap and how efficient is the wrong yardstick in a landscape demonstrating a deep disconnection from human-centricity and analog, felt human experience. This isn’t a radical perspective, but much like any problem of complexity, we need a more nuanced, careful view that capitalism doesn’t have room for. I have grave concerns that AI will become an existential problem before climate change does—and I’m what some people would consider a climate doomer. Again, this is my personal view; I’d love to be proven wrong.

Do you have any advice for Gen Z creatives just getting started in their careers today? I would simply tell them to tap into their superpowers and trust them. They see what others don’t see. They connect dots that other people can’t. They are superior systems thinkers: they see the difference between the causal and relational quickly and intuitively, without the need for long studies. They speak the languages of both culture and channel. In a landscape where we are being crushed under the weight of our own complexity—our self-created, catabolic threat—they might just save us. No pressure, Gen Z. You’re just built better. ca