Crafting Financial Success Through Creative Innovation with Emma de la Fosse

Mike (01:34.702)
Emma, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast. Great to see you.

Emma de la Fosse (01:42.286)
Yeah, bro. Fabulous. Yeah.

Emma de la Fosse (01:59.332)
Hi Mike, lovely to be here.

Mike (02:01.066)
So, do you want to just talk about your background, Emma? Kind of what do you do, what's your background and anything unusual about yourself you'd like to tell the audience?

Emma de la Fosse (02:09.662)
Sure. So I have a rather grandiose title. I'm the chief creative officer of Edelman UK, and Edelman is the largest, most successful PR company in the world. We're also independent and we're founder owned, and our founder is still very much involved in the business. I've got quite an unusual background in that I started off in brand advertising. I then, as a creative director, I then moved into direct and digital.

I ran a digital agency for four years and my latest incarnation is as the Chief Creative Officer of Edelman, which basically means as Chief Creative Officer, I am responsible for all of the creative output of the business, the creative profile of the business, setting the creative standard and driving us forward creatively. So anything that's got creative in it or about it, the buck stops with me.

Mike (03:03.246)
Excellent. Well, that's nice and clear. Something unusual about yourself, Emma.

Emma de la Fosse (03:05.294)
That's okay. Sure. Well, after I'd just left advertising college, I went to art school. So I went to Chelsea Art School and then I trained in advertising. After that, I specialised, I also specialised in copywriting. But like many students, I couldn't get a job immediately. So I managed to get myself a part-time job as a PA. And I was a PA to the chairman of the holding company that owns Aston Martin called Coventry Hood Industrial Holdings.

And I was the most useless PA, I really was. I couldn't work with telephone system. I couldn't work out how to switch on the computers. I mean, I was absolutely useless. I really was. All the other PAs used to roll their eyeballs at me. But for some reason, the chairman decided that I had something in me, which he thought would make me a great tax accountant. And he was trying to desperately persuade me.

to stay with them, to train, to not go into the creative industries, but to actually train with them as a tax accountant. I know I cannot think what on earth he saw in me, but anyway, I wasn't tempted by that particular carrot that he was dangling. And so I became a creative in the commercial creative industries.

Mike (04:06.208)
Wow.

Mike (04:21.118)
interesting. It means that he probably saw the obviously the left and right hand hemispheres of our brain work differently. He obviously saw something that you could use both very creatively, which is good.

Emma de la Fosse (04:33.635)
Possibly, either that or he thought, Jesus Christ, that poor woman is never going to make it as a PA, I better try and give her another career.

Mike (04:37.591)
You

Anyway, thankfully you've ended up in extremely senior roles in creative. Um, so, um, let me just like, we prepared a few, uh, just like prompts to talk through on the podcast. So let's just start off with, um, how do you buy creativity without killing it in the kind of negotiation process? And I kind of borrowed that a bit from, uh, Blair ends has got a podcast called. 20%. So if anyone's listening and they haven't subscribed, they should. Um, but yeah, how to buy creativity without killing it in the negotiation process.

Emma de la Fosse (04:45.253)
Mm-hmm. Go ahead.

Mike (05:10.158)
What are your thoughts?

Emma de la Fosse (05:13.338)
There's kind of two... You can buy creativity in several different ways. So if you're pitching for a piece of business and dealing with procurement people, at that stage you might not actually know what the creativity in inverted commas is that you're negotiating. So it's just one thing to bear in mind there is that you actually don't know what product it is that you're negotiating about. And then there's the other type of...

Mike (05:30.764)
Yep.

Emma de la Fosse (05:41.686)
negotiation around creativity, how to buy creativity, when you do know what creativity you've got. So for example, you already have a suite of or an idea, and you know that you're going to want to reach a particular audience, you want to use certain media, etc. So they're both quite different types of buying processes, one where it's invisible and the other where it's visible. I would say that...

One thing to bear in mind, certainly with the former, is that when you're going into a negotiation process, say between a brand and an agency, and you're pitching for their business, and you're dealing with procurement people, the way that we work now, and the way that creativity works, is very different to how other types of businesses work. So creativity, particularly today, in this era of globalization,

Mike (06:30.71)
Right.

Emma de la Fosse (06:37.47)
is a complex business. And I'm sure we can unpack this a little bit more during our conversation, but creativity is a complex business. Now, that doesn't mean it's a complicated business. So complicated business, yeah. So a complicated business is a business where you have many different moving parts. You know, it's very complicated how they all interact together.

Mike (06:49.966)
Uhhh...

Emma de la Fosse (07:03.442)
But generally there are repeated processes. There are patterns that emerge, okay? Thing to remember all the time about creativity is you never quite know what's coming. It's a whole bundle of surprises and one small change that is seemingly insignificant, inconsequential will actually have a massive ramification or knock-on effect. So what you're trying to negotiate or buy really is a process that allows that

creativity to happen without the actual process killing it by saying, well, no, actually, you didn't put these people on the scope sheet. You didn't say you needed this many hours. Because we don't know. So really what you're aiming for is you're aiming to buy a process or agree on a process that allows that creative creativity to flourish.

Mike (07:45.898)
Right. Exactly.

Emma de la Fosse (08:01.438)
flex and change so that you can get to the best possible result for the client, for the brand, without the process actually kind of enforcing itself in a really negative way upon it. Okay. So that's what you do. That's how you.

Mike (08:17.95)
So having not worked on the creative side, obviously I've worked on the procurement side. So that feels like it's a void of discovery with lots of unknowns. Is that true or is it, if you follow the process and you have the right people with the right experience, you tend to get the right outcomes? Is that what's going on?

Emma de la Fosse (08:20.646)
Yeah. Yep.

Emma de la Fosse (08:41.334)
I think you will always get to the right outcome with the right people and the right experiences, but bear in mind that you don't always know at the beginning of that process who the right people are going to be and what the right set of experiences are. Because again, you might, part of creativity is actually about defining a problem properly.

Mike (08:57.399)
Yeah.

Emma de la Fosse (09:05.37)
Was it Einstein that said something like, yeah, if you gave me more time, I wouldn't spend it on the answer, I'd actually spend it on the problem. I think for the right solution, you need to be able to spend enough time unpacking the problem rather than rushing to a solution. And unfortunately, when we talk about efficiencies, efficient processes, we don't often allow enough time to unpack problems. We're in a...

Mike (09:06.119)
Einstein. Yeah.

Mike (09:20.258)
Couldn't agree more.

Emma de la Fosse (09:31.954)
desperate rush to get to a solution because that's a very efficient way of behaving. But that's when the problems start because we're so focused on what's the solution? What's the solution? We may have ended up with incorrectly casting it with the wrong set of experiences and one thing compounds the other and very, you know, without a lot of time, you know, spending a lot of time on it, you suddenly find yourself in a bit of a pickle. So...

That's what I would say really is you're looking for a process or you're looking to sell something that enables that unpacking of a problem to happen.

Mike (10:11.682)
So how do you, so that's very interesting. So just recapping complex and complicated for a second. A complicated business, no matter what scale, eventually you can, long as you understand the context, you can work out the moving parts. As you said, it's repeatable. You can put in place systems and processes to make that complicated system work. And you can keep tuning it, but it will basically be a set of repeatable things that you do.

Emma de la Fosse (10:17.616)
Yeah.

Emma de la Fosse (10:35.855)
Exactly.

Mike (10:40.578)
Whereas in creativity, you're saying it's a complex problem. No one solution is the same, but there are processes and principles you can apply.

Emma de la Fosse (10:51.15)
Absolutely, there are processes and there are principles, and we can work within those. But again, agreeing with your point, you have to allow for surprises, and efficiency is not very good at allowing for surprises. That's the main point. One of the things I do is when I'm scoping a project, when I'm looking to cast a project properly,

Mike (11:04.939)
Yes.

Mike (11:09.954)
Correct.

Mike (11:17.378)
Yeah.

Emma de la Fosse (11:20.322)
I like to leave a space in that sort of line up, if you like, with a question mark on it. Now I know that sometimes worries people because they want to know, well, exactly how many planners should I have, exactly how many writers, exactly how many account people, et cetera, et cetera. But in order to allow some flexibility within that, you have to allow for the unknown. You have to be able to say with confidence.

Mike (11:33.407)
Yeah.

Emma de la Fosse (11:47.322)
At this point in time, I don't know what I don't know. So what I do is I like to leave a space or two with a question mark on it. So I don't know what this role is going to be yet. I don't know who this person is going to be yet. And that allows us to actually swap different types of skill sets into and out of that space without people suddenly saying, well, I haven't got job code for that person. And then you spend a day and a half trying to sort out a problem which you actually have created.

Mike (12:10.548)
Exactly.

Emma de la Fosse (12:17.21)
yourself inside the company with your own systems. So sometimes by leaving things a little bit more flexible and giving people a parameter, but not dictating exactly what should happen inside that parameter, I think you often get to where you want to be faster and with a better result. But it's a very different way of doing business. And the last couple of decades, we haven't run things that way. We've been...

Mike (12:17.23)
Correct.

Exactly.

Emma de la Fosse (12:46.078)
quite obsessed, I think, as an industry with optimising processes and going for efficiency all the time and actually sometimes using efficiency as a goal won't actually help you achieve efficiency, ironically.

Mike (12:51.982)
Correct.

Mike (13:01.57)
No, and I think procurement haven't helped themselves because as there are more tools and there's more awareness about how marketing works and how creativity works, I think, and there are no generic truths about any human being. There are themes. One of the themes in procurement is we like to drive, well, how does this process work and how many steps are there and how long will it take typically to run that step?

Well, if it runs, if it takes you 100 hours to run that step and I could introduce some technology, would that make you more efficient? Could you do it in 50 hours? Well, we might be able to do it in 80 hours. Well, let's, let's call it 80 hours then. And there's this constant drive towards, can I get the number of hours down? Cause I understand hours as a measure of, um, of cost associated with a rate. And that I think can be very destructive.

Emma de la Fosse (13:57.032)
Yeah, it can be. And then, you know, actually, what we're doing then is we're selling time. And that's a bit bad.

Mike (14:03.242)
Yeah, which is, I've always thought it's ludicrous. I think it's, no, I think it's crackers. I've always thought buying time is not a good way of buying creativity, of buying, you should be buying outputs and outcomes, not buying activity wherever possible. There's times when you need to, I get it, but yeah, what are your thoughts on buying outputs, outcomes and activities?

Emma de la Fosse (14:17.071)
No.

Emma de la Fosse (14:23.154)
Thank you.

Emma de la Fosse (14:30.922)
I'm a big proponent of buying outputs. And one of the reasons why is because, and this freaks quite a lot of procurement people and financial people out, is that actually ideas don't occur in those hours that you're paying for. They very, very rarely occur in those hours. Creativity occurs in the subconscious. Ideas happen when you're not thinking about the task at hand. So it's what I always call the bed, bath, or bus moments.

Mike (14:56.926)
Yeah. Yes.

Emma de la Fosse (14:59.494)
You'll be sitting on the bus and then suddenly, oh, hang on a minute, I've had a thought about that, or chatting to a friend. It's those kind of, to use a bit of a cliche, those water cooler moments. It's a chance encounter with somebody else, a conversation sparks another thought. It's very, very rare that idea will occur in the two and a half hours you've been allotted by the resourcing person in a creative company. That's fine for doing stuff like, oh, I'll write a piece of copy.

Mike (15:24.083)
Exactly.

Emma de la Fosse (15:28.494)
I'll art direct this thing, I'll draw up the storyboard. Those things can happen in that time that you're paying for. But that amazing kind of creative leap, that way of solving a problem in a way that's totally unexpected, a lateral leap that nobody's ever thought of before, that will, you know, that's hugely valuable for your organization, who knows where that's going to occur. So actually, you can pay for hours.

I don't think anybody should be under any misapprehension whatsoever that the ideas occur in that time because they don't. So I think that it's much better for the company and it's much better for the client that we're working for if we can pay for an output because then what we're valuing is the product. We're not valuing the hours that we spent creating it.

Mike (16:13.259)
Yes.

Mike (16:19.23)
Correct. And, you know, there's a whole topic on this. But, you know, buying hours is like, well, there's all the experience that goes behind it. So a procurement person would go, okay, so I'll pay a premium hourly rate. It's like, well, it's not just one person, there's like 20 going to work on this. All right, well, I'll pay an increased premium hourly rate. And then the procurement person starts to go, hang on a minute, this is going to cost me a lot of money. So

Emma de la Fosse (16:29.327)
Mm.

Emma de la Fosse (16:33.939)
Mm.

Emma de la Fosse (16:39.213)
Mm.

Mike (16:48.454)
how do I value experience? And how do I value someone that's had 30 years of creative experience that can solve a problem that was ill formed and that comes up with an amazing campaign that delivers a fantastic ROI? You can't buy that by the hour.

Emma de la Fosse (16:59.46)
Mm.

Emma de la Fosse (17:07.622)
Um, yeah, I agree with you completely. I'd add that you probably can buy it by the hour because you do, but...

it's that deep, deep knowledge and that deep, deep value. So Malcolm Gladwell, the behavioral psychologist talks about something called thin slicing and you've probably read his book. So if you're talking about thin slicing, so your brain is a computer as we all know, and it builds up knowledge from all the different experiences that you've had over your entire life, but in particular in this

Mike (17:31.742)
I haven't touched your nose. What's thin slicing? I haven't touched it now. Ah, interesting.

Emma de la Fosse (17:49.202)
case, your career. So when you ask me a question, and I've worked in this business for 30 years, so when you ask me a question, I can probably get to an answer much, much more quickly because what my brain will do is it will take a slice all the way through all of those different experiences and learnings that are in my brain and come up with an answer much, much more quickly. So if you, then if you ask something, say with three years experience.

Mike (18:11.086)
Uhhhhhh

Mike (18:15.47)
Correct.

Emma de la Fosse (18:18.834)
you're only able to slice three years worth of learnings and experiences, knowledge, et cetera. Whereas with me, you've got a whole host of things in there. And that's why sometimes what we call a gut, a gut reaction, a gut thought, when you're talking to a very experienced person, that gut thought is pretty likely to be right. It's not guaranteed to be right. No, there are no guarantees. It's not guaranteed to be right.

Mike (18:41.502)
Yes.

Emma de la Fosse (18:47.026)
but it's more likely to be right than if you're going on the gut instinct of somebody who's inexperienced in the role. So somebody who's got three years in the role. That's just because my brain is doing like a test, like a test dipper, if you like, a thin slice through all of that learning and going, it's this, or it's somewhere in this area. And so, yeah.

Mike (19:04.127)
It is.

Mike (19:13.967)
that's fascinating. So, and like all these things, this isn't quite what we prepared. But, um, what's always where the fun is.

Emma de la Fosse (19:22.869)
It's demonstrating the case in point, right? So you had a list of questions you wanted to ask me, but you fastened on something you think is interesting, and now we're going off piste a bit. How are you charging for that, Mike? That's the question. Where will it lead?

Mike (19:25.834)
It is. Yeah.

Mike (19:33.63)
Exactly. And where would it lead? Precisely. Because one of the things that... So I believe in niches. So I believe that as an expert, as a practitioner, just me doing what I do, I like to go narrow and very deep. So I focus on a particular problem area. Yeah, my problem area is I work with marketing agencies, I help them improve RFP win rates, improve average order values, and negotiate better contracts.

all through the eyes of an procurement director. And what that allows me to do is take 30 years of commercial experience as buyers and sellers within a very particular sector and help clients solve that problem. So I had the client yesterday say to me, what we actually love is we love talking to you about problems that we've got that are ill formed. And they said, you have a knack of getting to an outcome, an output pretty quickly. And it's normally pretty on the money.

And I haven't thought of why naively, but it's the thin slice. Whereas if I was a generalist, oh, I can help agencies improve their top line growth by doing all sorts of things. I don't have that depth of experience. So my answer would be potentially a bit more superficial.

Emma de la Fosse (20:39.344)
No, absolutely.

Emma de la Fosse (20:53.63)
Kind of depends, I think.

Emma de la Fosse (20:59.174)
I would say, if you're a generalist, that means that you've had experience in lots of different areas. And that in and of itself can be really useful because then what you're able to do is have a look at a problem from different perspectives. You're able to come at it from different angles. I sometimes say, you know, it's that hoary old chestnut to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I'm not looking for a man with a hammer.

Mike (21:11.434)
Yes it can, yes.

Mike (21:21.898)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Emma de la Fosse (21:24.73)
I'm looking for a man with toolbox with lots and lots of different tools in it. Providing though that this is where the analogy goes a bit wonky, but providing though that man with the toolbox has been walking around with his toolbox for quite a number of years. That's great. What I'm not looking for is somebody who's, you know, not got very much experience in this area. Yeah.

Mike (21:40.238)
Correct.

Mike (21:48.622)
Three years out of college, who's picked up the toolbox and says, there's some very interesting tools in here. I wonder what they can all do. That's not of any use to someone like you.

Emma de la Fosse (21:58.418)
Yeah. Now what's interesting about the advertising business is it's one of the very few areas where seniority and experience is not actually valued very highly. Okay. So conversely, yeah. So conversely, that person is three, isn't it, three years out of college, is sometimes much, much more attractive to some people in ad agencies, because we value the new, we value the different, we value the fresh, we value that, oh, nobody's ever done that before.

Mike (22:09.014)
Really?

How bizarre.

Mike (22:22.828)
Right.

Emma de la Fosse (22:28.142)
Now, so that person with three years experience is also very important. That skill set, that sort of fresh new look on the world is very important too. It's just understanding though the likelihood that person will be so-called right as opposed to somebody who's got much more experience. So the person with three years might come up with a whole load of things I haven't thought of, as in terms of new media and bits and pieces like that.

the ability to actually unpack a problem properly, you're going to be much better off speaking to somebody who's had many, many years of experience doing it. So both, you know, sort of newbies, exactly, newbies and those much more experienced people have their place, but it's just, you wouldn't go to the person with three years experience to properly really unpack a problem, you'd go to them with a different sort of question.

Mike (23:06.945)
Exactly.

Both have their place.

Mike (23:22.113)
No.

but you might go to them with a very specific sub question of that big problem statement to bring creative thinking to that particular aspect. Yeah, very good.

Emma de la Fosse (23:30.034)
Hmm, absolutely. Complete, yeah. Yeah, something a bit more tactical perhaps, absolutely. Yeah.

Mike (23:39.222)
So in the time we've got, so about kind of like four or five minutes, can I just focus on the kind of like one of the backend questions that we talked about, which is not only are you the chief creative officer, chief creative officer, but you're also the MD of a profit center. What does that bring in terms of your ability to see a client's problem with a potential way of solving it?

Emma de la Fosse (23:55.486)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (24:08.714)
and doing it in a profitable way. How do you bring that doing it in a profitable way lens and balance it with the best creative solution? Because sometimes those two can be at odds is that the best creative solution sometimes can be unprofitable for the agency. How do you kind of square that circle?

Emma de la Fosse (24:21.53)
Mm.

Emma de la Fosse (24:32.491)
It is tricky and...

I think, just to go back to the beginning of your question, so what benefit does that give me, sort of being the MD and also being the creative director? I think it gives me the ability to control where we put money and where we spend money within the creative department, how I kind of move the money around, the skillsets that I can choose to invest in, where I think the business is growing, where I think we're doing less work, where we're doing more.

trying to nurture and grow areas of the business that I think could be exciting or I think could be profitable for us, ensuring that I'm able to have informed conversations with other people in the business about how to use their budgets on creativity. Whereas when a creative person actually isn't involved in those kinds of conversations, you're almost infantilized. It's like...

Mike (25:26.828)
Yeah.

Mike (25:34.496)
Yeah, yeah.

Emma de la Fosse (25:35.334)
They're the creative people, they're doing the finger painting bit, they're not actually business people. Whereas actually creative people are business people, well, when they work in this area anyway, we have to be business people because we're solving business problems. I always say that's what I do, I come up with creative solutions for business problems if anybody sort of says, what's a creative director? As different and distinct from a creative director on a film, say, as in that this is what I do. So that's...

Mike (25:38.642)
Right.

Mike (25:43.715)
Correct.

Mike (25:48.994)
Correct.

Mike (25:59.47)
That's my spot on, definitely yeah.

Emma de la Fosse (26:01.914)
That's really, I think, what the benefit is. It's treating creative people like grownups. It's saying, okay, this is your money. It's up to you to balance the books. How are you gonna spend this money? Where are we going to place it? What sort of things do you think we should be investing in? What do we dial up? What do we dial down? So that's what it is, really. And also when people then come and say, oh, well, the revenue's looking like X, Y, and Z. We think we need to...

I'm going to be honest with you now, you know, cut a head count or whatever. I can then pull up all the figures and say, well, no, actually, look, if you look at how the money's been spent, you're using the right data, but to come to the wrong conclusion. Actually, it's this and thus I can protect the creative product better.

Mike (26:38.847)
Exactly.

Mike (26:43.073)
Yeah.

Mike (26:48.162)
Exactly. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think when you're talking to clients, we haven't got time to go into the whole working versus non-working. And I think it seems to be more of a thing in the US. I don't know if that's true. That working versus non-working seems to come up a lot in the US. Seems to come up less in the UK, as far as I can see. But that might just be people I talk to. Don't know. But yeah, that idea about sometimes for an agency, you've got to push back and go.

Emma de la Fosse (27:02.747)
working with us.

Mike (27:17.302)
that's not gonna work for us because we can't make any money. And you need that commercial brain to be able to say that creative approach isn't gonna work for us. Might work for you as a client, but it won't work for us.

Emma de la Fosse (27:31.21)
Yeah, yeah. And clients have many different ways of wanting to work with agencies now. So for example, you know, splitting out the sort of creative process between the conceptual agency, but then asking a social agency or a media agency to start to develop that idea. That's a bone of contention. While I can see the benefits sometimes in doing that, there are often, you know, downsides to

Mike (27:49.409)
Exactly.

Emma de la Fosse (27:59.514)
siloing the creative process. I believe in bringing people together rather than splitting things up. And I do, sorry, you've got me on my hobby horse now, but I do think that one of the biggest mistakes that we ever made in the creative industries was actually splitting creative and media. Because actually creative and media go hand in hand, especially these days with digital media and the role that data plays. And yet we...

Mike (28:09.87)
Hahaha

Mike (28:18.731)
Yes.

Emma de la Fosse (28:27.15)
sometimes have two groups of people that sit there not really collaborating until the 11th hour. And then you find out that actually one set of people has been working to one set of KPIs and the media company has been working to another and you try to join them together. That's one big waste of time and money because it goes horribly wrong. So yeah, I'm...

Mike (28:41.07)
Correct.

Mike (28:48.814)
I think the same applies also, Emma, to creative and strategy. I think splitting strategy people from creative people, I think, is a mistake.

Emma de la Fosse (28:53.914)
Mm.

Emma de la Fosse (28:57.918)
I agree with you, but I haven't ever worked in an agency where that's happened. I've always worked very closely with strategists. Um, and yeah, I mean, that there, you know, we're kind of. Sort of not, not pees in a pod, but you know, we, we work together handing gloves completely, absolutely completely rather than a handoff. And the Edelman, yeah, Edelman's not a handoff. We, we, we work very, very closely with strategists on what we call our action briefs.

Mike (29:13.258)
It should be an integrated team. Exactly.

Mike (29:18.454)
Yes, precisely.

Emma de la Fosse (29:27.074)
And we work together when we're triaging work as well. So that means we have a look at a brief that's coming from a client and get a small perfectly formed team to look at the work and sort of say, okay, well, from a strategy point of view, what do we think we need from a creative point of view, what do we need? So then we can go back to the business and the client and say, actually this, you know, we've kind of analyzed your, your brief and this is the kind of shape of team that we think. So I'd highly recommend triaging.

Mike (29:42.156)
Yep.

Mike (29:51.253)
Exactly.

Emma de la Fosse (29:55.662)
And that's something that we've used to great effect here at Edelman.

Mike (30:00.514)
Brilliant. So Emma, I'm very conscious of your time. Let's draw the threads together. What are your kind of two or three takeaways for people that are listening, if they're agency leaders working in a kind of a creative industry, what are your kind of top two or three recommendations about how to successfully grow, not only your business, but your client's business from a creative perspective, as well as a commercial perspective?

Emma de la Fosse (30:03.425)
Mm.

Emma de la Fosse (30:26.75)
So I think it's quite interesting actually that when you look back, some of the most successful agencies, creative agencies, were actually run by creative people, or at least the creative director was in partnership, close partnership with the other leaders of that agency. So that those agencies were highly profitable.

Mike (30:53.037)
Yeah.

Emma de la Fosse (30:56.43)
and highly creative. And we know from the Kantar research that very creative work works well and helps clients make better profits. So I would just say that when people are having conversations about finance and about financial models within agencies, commercial models within agencies, creative people should be involved in those conversations as well, because we're the people making the product. And we can also come up with some great ideas.

Mike (31:05.622)
That's right.

Mike (31:22.922)
Yep.

Emma de la Fosse (31:26.394)
about those processes and systems. You know, we can use our creativity to help come up with unexpected and natural solutions for those as well. So if you really wanna get the best value out of your creatives in the creative department, don't just limit them to the creative department, involve them in the commercial conversations around your company, because actually they might just be able to come up with some really brilliant ideas to help you.

Mike (31:52.846)
Exactly. Emma, brilliant. So where can people find out more about you?

Emma de la Fosse (31:58.97)
Well, I'm Edelman in the UK. So yeah, please do find me on LinkedIn. I'm Emma de la Fosse. I have a complicated long French name. So there's only one of me. And so yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me at Edelman. What else? I'm at EDLF on Twitter, but that's my personal account. So yeah, look me up. Google me, Google me and you'll find me.

Mike (32:21.182)
Okay, very good.

Excellent. And though it's been a real pleasure, thanks ever so much for sparing the time to talk to me today.

Emma de la Fosse (32:30.627)
It's been an absolute pleasure to chat. Thanks, Mike.

Mike (32:33.154)
Thank you. Right, I'll stop the recording just to check that it should.