Badass Bitches In Brand (BABIB) is a podcast created by Stacey Saunders, general manager at Houston Group, to give more visibility to women working across Australia’s advertising, media and marketing industries. Through a series of conversations, Saunders explores the career stories that rarely make it into the industry spotlight.
Frustrated by the way International Women’s Day conversations often stop at symbolic gestures, Saunders launched BABIB to get into the career stories that rarely make it into the industry spotlight. With women accounting for around 60 per cent of entry-level roles in the brand industry but just 29 per cent of senior positions, the podcast looks to give emerging talent access to the experiences, setbacks and lessons of women who have forged their own paths.
The women making their mark across media, marketing and advertising. Meet this year’s winners here.
Last week Saunders spoke with Nicole Jauncey, creative co-founder of ABEL. This week she caught up with Lea Walker, chief executive of Bear Meets Eagle to discuss the qualities shaping the next generation of creative talent and what it takes to build a career in an increasingly unpredictable industry.
Celebrating the women shaping Australia’s technology sector. Enter NOW!
1. When you’re looking at creative talent today, what separates the people who stand out from those who are simply good at their jobs?
The ones that really stand out, for me at least, are the true creative souls. The ones that live creative lives. The ones watching the world, searching for inspiration and developing their own taste.
Some creatives are performing creativity as a task at work. There are a lot of people that have creative jobs that live worryingly uncurious, uncreative existences, so their well of resources to draw on is limited and therefore their output can feel pretty meh. Just homogenized ideas built in a google doc.
I will always gravitate to the ones that want to talk about a film in an interview vs the ones that present me a perfect case study.
2. As the industry heads into 2027, what skills, qualities or mindsets do you think will become more valuable to agencies and clients?
The next few years are going to be pretty gnarly. What the industry ‘sells’ is evolving daily. Agencies we would have previously held up on creative pedestals are basically selling systems now. The industry of 2030 will look unrecognisable to the one many of us spent our careers in.
So what skills, qualities and mindsets will be valuable as a result – for me, the soft skills – the things the machines can’t do – tenacity, resilience, empathy, taste, experience – I think these will become the qualities we value, certainly in leadership. For the masses – agility, adaptability, and entrepreneurial skills will all become increasingly important to ride the wave.
But more than anything, I think we each need to be crystal clear on our own values and what version of the industry we want to participate in.
I’m watching a lot of people become victims of their circumstances, rather than having a clear enough sense of themselves to know where and how they want to even participate. Mindset wise, this is key for me.
3. What are the biggest mistakes you see creatives making when trying to land their next role or take the next step in their careers?
Some young creatives – actually, I take that back, some old creatives too – fall into the trap of playing the ‘award game’. They pick one project, often a charity brief or a proactive idea, and go all in on that, hoping it will ride the global award circuit. It often does – to the detriment of the industry in my opinion.
Make great work on real clients. Do great things on hard briefs. That’s the proof you’re clever. Sure, some tenacity is required in selling a proactive idea or some financial sacrifice in charity projects, but let’s be honest, it’s low hanging fruit. I am often sceptical of books filled with this kind of work. Even if it’s super heavily awarded.
4. With AI changing how creative work is produced, what will make a creative genuinely indispensable? What can’t be easily replicated?
What will obviously be easily replicated is versioning and personalisation etc. Efficiencies are and will obviously be found in the low to mid funnel output, but I still believe you need humans solving business problems with creativity at the front of the process. Will those humans have to get better to be genuinely indispensable? Some of them, yeah. But I believe the cream will rise to the top and great creatives will be more in demand than ever. As will great craft. And quite frankly, if they’re not, then stop the train, I will get off.
5. What advice would you give someone who feels uncertain about their place in the industry right now, and how can they future-proof their career without chasing every new trend?
I would be concerned if someone wasn’t uncertain about their place in the industry right now. That would show a naivety that would worry me!
The industry is volatile. As is the economy. So, we should all be considering how to take care of ourselves in these dynamics.
My advice is to get clear on what is important to you, what you are good at, and who you have relationships with.
There is every chance you will end up independently employed at some point in the coming years. Either by choice or by force. So be in control of your own destiny. Know how you can make money and who you could work with / or for before you have to. But please don’t assume you will be safe in some hierarchy for the foreseeable future. Those seats will be increasingly limited. You want options and choices. There will be work, it just might not look how you expected it to in the future.
This might sound all doom and gloom, but I don’t mean it that way. I just think we are heading for a more globally entrepreneurial creative economy. The work will be project-based, and the needs won’t be full-time. We will each have multiple revenue streams and more control over our time and our relationships and our output. But creative people are problem solvers, we will work it out.
Listen to the full BABIB podcast episode featuring Lea Walker HERE.
