Ogilvy — a short, sharp stretch at the top of the craft.

There are a handful of houses that set the standard the rest of the industry measures itself against. Ogilvy is one of them. Taking a Group Account Manager seat there was a conscious stretch — to sit inside that standard and see how it’s actually held, day to day, rather than admire it from outside.

How a legendary craft culture keeps its bar high at scale — how thinking, not just execution, is defended through every layer of a large, senior organisation.

It sharpened my sense of what ‘good’ costs to protect. Craft at that level isn’t an accident of talent; it’s a discipline that has to be led. That lesson went straight into how I’d later build an in-house team that refused to lower its bar.

The stretch did its job quickly — and when a bigger, business-building mandate opened up, I took it. The craft standard came with me.