Co-Founder, Oshun · Co-Founder, JAW Studios

Boring is Expensive 
Joe Welstead put electrolytes in a pump bottle because it was convenient, not to cause a stir. The internet called it chaos packaging, but Joe calls it common sense: make something people want to talk about, and everything else in your marketing gets cheaper. 

He learned to think like a champion in a Scottish pool, where a coach’s prediction got him out of bed at 5am for four straight years, and a promise to outwork everyone carried him onto Team Scotland. These days, he still works hard, just not for long. With a hard stop at 6pm when his kids get home, Joe is proof that a balanced life isn’t the opposite of ambition. It’s the secret to success.  

Cultural Strategist & Experience Architect | Indifference-Slayer

Your Framework Is a Receipt
Vanessa Toro once put "Give all the damns" on a clothing line, and after nearly twenty years in advertising she's still giving them. She's just got less patience for jargon, for decks mistaken for thinking, and for anyone who says AI is inevitable.

She’s a strategist, a speaker, and a public observer of the strange things we all do while chasing attention, approval, and belonging. Stop polishing the receipt. Go do the thinking.

Founder, Rare Beast • Co-owner, Swell

Serve as Well as Sell 
Theo Erasmus has been a soldier and a conscientious objector, a prosecutor and a crime reporter, a strategist for Google and Johnnie Walker and a quiet ally to conservation groups and arts organizations.

Now he's here to make the case that marketing doesn't have to keep killing the patient it promised to cure. 

Founder, Spring and Atlas · Fellow, Royal Society of Arts · Honorary Fellow, The Marketing Society Scotland

Perspective Collecting at the Crinkly Edges 
Lisl Macdonald spent a decade inside BT, Ogilvy, and Virgin's biggest brand machines, sat on the management team through a London Stock Exchange IPO, and just walked a graduation stage at 58 to collect an LLM with Distinction. So when she talks about where the real insight in an ecosystem actually lives, she's speaking from decades inside different rooms, not a theory about it.

She calls herself a perspective collector, someone who deliberately lives at the "crinkly edges" of communities instead of the center. It's a phrase she uses to describe everything from why disability gets left out of access conversations, to why founders mistake customer interviews for recruiting supporters, to how a "priest class" has quietly formed between startup founders and their investors.

Perspective collecting is only half the episode, though. Lisl's also currently researching conflict for a PhD, with a working theory that founder fallouts, not bad products, are what actually kill startups.

Bonus material: a poem from grade school that became her lifelong mission to age disgracefully, and a hard-won case for why curiosity travels better than confidence. 

Founder, Meet the 85% · Co-Founder, Dose of Reality

You Can't Feel Data
Mark Hadfield's proof that the truth about a brand's customers lives in their kitchen, not their spreadsheet, and the fridge won't lie, even when the person does.

Mark spent 25 years in agency planning before he walked away to go sit in living rooms across Britain and watch what people actually do, not what they say they do in a focus group, and his conversation is a gut-punch for anyone who's traded real people for a dashboard.

You can't feel data. Unless that data is time spent with real people. No matter what part of the planet you live and work on.

Grammy-nominated composer & musician · Creative Director, Audio Content Lab · Content Marketing Manager, NinjaCat · Host of the What Gets Measured Podcast · Founding Member, Marketing Accountability Council

Cheap Genius: Why Nobody Wants to Pay for Creativity 
Jake Sanders wrote the theme music for this very show, scored a documentary on a shoestring budget, and once turned a law firm's marketing department into a full stage musical. So when he talks about the gap between what businesses ask creative people for and what they're actually willing to pay for, he's speaking from the trenches, not a keynote deck. 

The theory he's built around it is called Cheap Genius, the idea that when a client says "let's get creative," what they usually mean is "let's get it for free." It's a phrase Jake picked up mid-negotiation on a real scoring gig, and it's become his lens for everything from client pitches to why so much modern advertising feels hollowed out. 

Cheap Genius is only half the episode, though. Jake's also an audio illustrator who gets into the actual physics of why a sound cuts through a room of a thousand voices in a way a logo never could.  

Bonus material: a hip-hop verse broken down bar by bar, and a scapegoat god named Blamo. 

Founder, Heirloom Brand Consultancy · Author of Brand Naming and co-author of Designing Brand Identity, 6th Edition

Brand Naming is a Risk Mitigation Strategy
Rob Meyerson wrote the book on brand naming, literally, and he's here to remind us that picking the perfect name has a lot less to do with inspiration than it does with knowing exactly who might sue you for it. 

Rob teaches us that what looks like a small, obvious task (to pick a good name) is actually the tip of an enormous amount of unglamorous, disciplined work, and that work only gets learned by doing it and by people who were generous enough to teach you.

Brand Voice Lead & Managing Partner, Copy or Die

Shorten the Gap
Mel Barfield turned "just a career advisor with a knack for words" into a Women in Marketing Award, a copywriting agency, and a LinkedIn following that recognizes her in the wild. Her whole playbook fits in three words, and it's the reason people hire her before they've even met her.

Host of The PO Show!

Why “The PO Show!”
Before the first guest ever shows up, our host makes his case for the podcast, the name, and why good marketing needs both a sprint and a marathon to build a brand people want to buy.