Agency Life, 
a love letter to agencies.

Gen Z. Who are they? What drives them? And what do they want from your agency? At 24, Carolyn McMurray is the boss of Word Tonic, a community of 10,000+ Gen-Z copywriters and creatives. For its 2,000 paying members, Word Tonic also organises masterclasses and challenges with big brands like Puma, Bumble, Lego and Spotify. Carolyn is the perfect person to answer a big question: how can agencies best work with and for Gen Z?

In the creative hub of South Africa, Pepe Marais is catalyst. With Joe Public, he has won many local and international awards, and the advertising and communications group is one of the largest on the continent. What drives Pepe? Creative excellence, a hunger for knowledge, and a positive attitude – unless it's about that awful ‘billable hour’ or ‘the digital tsunami of cr*ppy advertising’. Still, he puts positive spin on that as well. “Globally, there's a bit of darkness in creativity that's maybe needed for us to start refocusing on what we bring to the world.”

‘The anti-bullshit copywriter with massive fingers’ is perhaps the most apt meta description ever for Dave “The Word Man” Harland, founder of boutique agency Copy Or Die. You may know him from his playful LinkedIn posts taking on online scammers and AI gurus, gathering an audience of 95,000 followers. His clients know him as a freelance B2B and agency copywriter, specialising in transforming corporate lingo into words people really want to read. We interviewed him about humour, freelance work vs agency work, and getting so good at your craft that your work speaks for itself.