In the first of a new series, B&T is spotlighting the women behind Badass Bitches In Brand (BABIB), 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.
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.
From career detours and client disasters to burnout and self-doubt, BABIB makes room for the less polished parts of professional life, as well as the achievements.
In the first instalment, Saunders spoke with with Nicole Jauncey, creative co-founder of ABEL, to discuss her career, the decisions that have shaped it and the lessons picked up along the way.
1. You’ve spoken about being laughed out of the room as a young female creative before going on to build a successful agency. How did you deal with those early knockbacks, and what kept you going?
High-octane spite and a point to prove were my biggest motivators when kicking off my ad career at 19. I thrived on proving people wrong and establishing my worth as a creative.
I realised early on that if old-school execs are laughing at your vision, you’re either completely wrong, or onto something that truly frightens them. I bet on the latter.
That attitude and those very traits that were dismissed (being young, female, and non-traditional) became part of the foundation of our agency’s secret weapon today. We back ourselves, whether that’s winning global brands like Red Bull, pulling off multinational campaigns for Just Eat, or going head-to-head with the world’s best agencies across the globe.
We aren’t about fitting into culture; we’re interested in shaping it, and bringing that energy straight into the work.
2. How do you learn to separate useful criticism from other people’s lack of belief in you? For someone who has been rejected, overlooked or told their ideas aren’t good enough, what practical steps can they take to rebuild their confidence?
“If you’re not in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.” — Brené Brown
This quote is the perfect summation of my thoughts on feedback. When someone offers notes, look at what they’ve built. Useful feedback comes from people in the weeds, creating the work you ultimately want to create and leading a team in a way you desire to work.
If their portfolio is filled with safe, beige, uninspired work, their lack of belief isn’t an evaluation of your talent, it’s an admission of their own creative ceiling.
Listen to the people who are in the positions or careers you actually aspire to reach, and stop taking directions from people who aren’t going where you want to end up. But most of all: believe in yourself, be different, think wildly, have an edge and don’t ever conform.
3. You made the leap from creative to CEO when you co-founded ABEL. What has been the biggest lesson in backing yourself when you’re doing something you haven’t done before?
The biggest lesson has been trusting that the exact same strategic creative problem-solving skills I use on ideas apply just as strongly to running a business.
When launching ABEL and stepping into a CEO-like role, the realisation hits fast that there’s no safety net coming to save you, you literally are the safety net. Backing myself in uncharted territory meant learning to apply the skill I’d honed as a Creative, to every corner of the business – whether that’s troubleshooting operational bottlenecks, navigating cash flow, building team culture, or steering high-stakes client relationships, strategic problem solving is everything
As a co-founder, I have to also wear a commercial creative hat: someone who fights fiercely for wild, bold ideas because I know exactly how they’re going to hit our client’s business objectives, but also someone mature enough to listen, pivot, and push forward together if a client feels the work isn’t quite hitting the mark.
Clients don’t just pay for pretty ideas; they pay for outcomes, and at the end of the day, it’s their budget. True partnership means holding the creative brief in one hand and their financial targets in the other.
4. Can you share a moment when things went seriously wrong or you questioned whether you could keep going, and what you learned from it?
In a rapidly changing landscape, the hardest moments haven’t been about pitches or PR, they’ve been the times we’ve had to make tough structural calls to protect what makes ABEL different: being direct-to-creative, nimble and fast.
As agency founders, my co-founder and I learned early on that traditional exec frameworks and heavy corporate layers don’t fit our mould. Trying to force a traditional agency structure onto a creative business only stifles energy, breaks morale, and slows down the work. We’ve had to make tough decisions along the last 7 years to strip away layers, restructure our team, and ensure we’re staying true to the core values we believe in and that our clients want.
Holding on to bloated systems or the wrong roles just to avoid uncomfortable shifts isn’t kindness, it’s bad leadership.
Getting back into the weeds sharpened our focus and reconnected us to our core DNA. It proved to us that a business is only as resilient as its culture, and a truly strong culture isn’t static – it’s agile, creative-led, and brave enough to evolve.
Listen to the full BABIB podcast episode featuring Nicole Jauncey HERE.
