Best thing about a new job? The people.

I’m six weeks into a new job at media, content and tech mega-agency Wavemaker. Wavemaker is BIG. 8,500 people in 90 countries and packed full of brainy people, 900 of whom are in London. Fresh from nine years as CCO and Editorial Director of the lovely SevenC3, a European content specialist with a Clerkenwell team of 150, I knew it would be different. Creative-first to media-first, medium to massive, European to Global. But speaking about ‘Content & Commerce’ at the CMA yesterday, one thing was very much the same.

In my deck were diamonds, a little blue pill that can save your sex life, and mobile networks for Gen Z. I’ve loved retailing since my first holiday job at Selfridges aged 15 (my Nana pulled some strings) so talking shop about Tiffany, Viagra and Vodafone was a real buzz. The work was awesome, some of it beautiful, but best of all was the familiar joy of talking about real people.

I worried -(a bit) that my new agency might be so smart and data-driven it would eschew the mucky business of real life.

But it was all there. Beautiful human insight, only made better, sharper, more surprising by those data mountains (actually referred to as lakes, if you’re interested). For Tiffany the revelation that young luxury shoppers don’t build brand bias the old way, through glossy TV ads and glossier celebs. But through people ‘almost’ like me, modest social influencers just a little bit out of reach. For Viagra the painful fact that men wait an average of two whole years to get help for what is a treatable medical condition. And for Vodafone VOXI, a GenZ audience who may just be the most talented multi-taskers we’ve ever seen.

Here’s to us humans, in all our messy, lovely, endlessly interesting lives. A Prufrock pit-stop with two of my favourite humans from SevenC3 afterwards. A cuddle, a coffee, and back over Blackfriars Bridge to the business of being new.