Rob and Lolly Are Making ‘Cultural Power’ More Than a Slogan at M+C Saatchi

Just over six months into their global chief creative officer roles, Rob Doubal and Laurence ‘Lolly’ Thomson are still in discovery mode – but not in a passive way. Every day, they say, reveals something surprising in the M+C Saatchi ecosystem – a project, a platform, or a creative instinct that’s already culturally alive. It’s what drew them in. And it’s what they want to help supercharge.

When M+C Saatchi unveiled its new proposition, ‘Cultural Power’, in December 2024 and followed up with an official rebrand launch in March 2025 to coincide with the agency's 30th anniversary, global chief executive officer Zaid Al-Qassab set the stage with strategic clarity. “‘Brutal Simplicity of Thought’ describes how we do things,” he told LBB’s Zhenya Tsenzharyk, “while 'Cultural Power' is what we do for clients.” With the agency’s branding out of the blocks and advancing at pace, the baton passes to the agency’s creative leaders to bring the concept to life.

In a year where audience fragmentation, media distrust, and AI-driven content overload are reshaping what brands mean to people, and in the backdrop of a restructuring phase, leadership turnover, and global market unpredictability, M+C Saatchi knew it couldn’t afford to coast. Creative consistency had become its hallmark, but external feedback and internal reflection revealed a truth: without re-energising the brand culturally, the agency risked becoming ‘quiet’ in an industry that rewards momentum. Add to that the improving financial performance and renewed investor confidence in early 2025, and the conditions were right to push for a more vivid creative future.

Rob and Lolly were appointed as global joint chief creative officers in April 2024 and officially joined M+C Saatchi later that year. Their job was clear: to inject fresh energy, creative resonance, and a bit of mischief into a brand that already carries decades of cultural weight.

Having cut their teeth at Wieden+Kennedy and gone on to lead bold, culture-tapping campaigns at McCann – including Xbox’s ‘Survival Billboard’ and the launch of a perfume for a video game – Rob and Lolly have long been known for questioning the obvious, bending the media plan, and finding cultural hooks that brands can genuinely own. It’s that combination of audacity and clarity that makes them the right creative pairing for this moment at M+C Saatchi.

And while the proposition is new, they’re keen to stress that it’s not a departure from M+C Saatchi's DNA. It’s an evolution. “Brutal Simplicity still remains a really useful and powerful reminder of our strategic approach to things,” says Rob. “And actually, the nice proof point is that it was ‘Brutal Simplicity of Thought’ which led to ‘Cultural Power’.’” As an operating principle, it allowed the agency to figure out what it has always offered clients – something that they need most at the moment.

The answer was ‘Cultural Power’. Rob goes on to give his personal definition: “It’s about making work that really resonates with an audience. And then it gets interesting, because audiences can be niche or mass – and in most cases, you're trying to reach both.

“If you're making work that really resonates – that changes behaviour or inspires or excites – then that piece of work can be said to have cultural power. Because you've got people looking at it, engaging with it, interacting with it.

“If a brand creates work consistently with cultural power, then that power transfers to the brand. And once that brand has cultural power, the sky’s the limit. It can have agency – because suddenly it’s on everyone’s mind. It can set out new behaviours, or take on what it wants to.”

Cultural Power-nomics

For all the strategic clarity that Cultural Power provides, what brings it to life is tone – how a brand shows up in culture. And few brands embody that better than Aldi – a supermarket brand that defined much of Rob and Lolly’s career in recent years.

“Let’s talk a little bit about that North Star – working out what your tone of voice is, how you turn up as a brand in different places,” says Lolly, recalling a pitch from 2017. “Like when we worked on Aldi in the past, we basically said, ‘Well, you're Robin Hood, right? Everyone else is the Sheriff of Nottingham’.”

That guiding analogy made everything else fall into place. “You have a 5p carrot as your hero – not a £95 penguin,” he says. “So you know how to turn up in social because you can have a voice. So if you're taken to court because your cake looks a bit like another cake, you can go, ‘Oh, this is a bit ludicrous, isn’t it?’ And actually put that conversation in the public’s mind, and the public will talk about it for you.”

It’s the kind of culturally fluent, quick-witted thinking that turns a legal nuisance into a national talking point. For Rob and Lolly, this is exactly where creative craft meets modern brand-building – showing up in a way that people not only notice but want to engage with.

“In a world moving towards ad blockers, you've got to create work that people seek out,” says Lolly. “Artefacts that people want to engage with and talk about. That’s what we’ve always been about, but that’s what we’re definitely going to bring here [at M+C Saatchi].”

Prior to their tenure at McCann, Rob and Lolly collaborated at Wieden+Kennedy London, where they contributed to notable campaigns such as Coca-Cola's 'Yeah Yeah Yeah La La La' and the 'London Ink' installation for The Discovery Channel. At McCann, where they served as joint chief creative officers for the UK and co-presidents of McCann London, Rob and Lolly led Nurofen's ‘Pain Labs’ – a programme that combined science, sound, and cultural insight to reframe how the brand showed up in the world.

“When you’re just kind of messaging outwards with ‘Here’s what our pill does’ – we switch it around and say, ‘What’s going on in culture?’” says Rob, of the project that was covered on national news for discussing the pain-killing power of swearing (we all know how that feels from when we’ve stubbed our toe).

They’re also clear that ‘Cultural Power’ isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s a growth engine. “When a brand builds cultural power, it earns autonomy,” says Lolly. “You can have more conversations, in more places, more of the time.” That ability to stay front-of-mind, they argue, makes creative work more effective – not just famous. “Clients don’t just need ads anymore – they need connection, traction, and credibility,” says Rob. “Cultural power helps them earn that, rather than buy it.”

Brutal Simplicity Blooms

While Cultural Power might be the new headline, Rob and Lolly are clear that it’s not a rejection of M+C Saatchi’s foundational philosophy – it’s a natural continuation.

The relationship between the two ideas isn’t binary – it’s organic. “Think of it visually as a stem and a flower,” says Rob. 

That budding is reflected not just in thinking, but in the feel of the place too. “You can feel it, right? In the agency,” says Lolly as we sit in the corner of the middle floor in the London headquarters, with a view along Carnaby Street in one direction and all the bustle of a creative business in the other. “There’s more colour, there’s more vibrancy, it feels alive – which is really great, I think, to come to an agency that’s buzzing.”

This shift in tone and spirit – from black-and-white certainty to something more open, energetic and culturally curious – mirrors what brands themselves need.

Cultural Power Tools

For all their creative flair, Rob and Lolly are adamant that cultural power isn’t just a feeling – it’s something that can be diagnosed, tracked and improved. That’s where M+C Saatchi's tools come in.

We’re quite lucky at M+C to have a consultancy and data practice,” says Rob. “They’re really useful. We wrap all the data up into M+C Intelligence, which allows anyone in the group to go, ‘M+C Intelligence, what’s going on from a data point of view? Show us the numbers and the matrix and what behaviours are happening.’”

To dig deeper into what actually drives cultural power, the group has built two proprietary tools. “Cultural Forces is a good way of understanding the cultural forces for a specific audience or a mass audience,” Rob explains. “It’s saying, OK, what’s going on in there? How are people behaving?”

But the more complex tool is the Cultural Power Index, an AI-powered diagnostic system that analyses billions of data signals – everything from social chatter to search behaviour – to measure brand desire, influence, presence, and the moment, helping brands harness cultural power to drive growth. “By taking a study of 50 brands, we could then extrapolate what those brands were doing well to have cultural power,” says Rob. From there, it becomes a creative roadmap. “Then we can go and say to the client, ‘Maybe we need a bit more presence, a bit more influence.’ And underneath that, there are loads of ways to achieve that – which are proprietary. So if I go down to that level, we’re giving it away...”

Lolly jumps in with a smile: “You might need a bit of branding or design help here. We've actually got the expertise to help clients, brands, and organisations deliver that – which I think is pretty good from a creative point of view. It opens up a load of briefs, a load of insights that you don't necessarily get just from a normal brief.”

They both love the way that the group has grown with an entrepreneurial spirit as specialisms have grown over the years. “Obviously our cultural job is to join all those together,” says Rob. “And for us, that is such a treat – spanning from talent to data to government to advertising to PR to sports and entertainment and consultancy. For us, that’s a dream.”

Lolly sees a metaphor and has to voice it: “Expanding a swim lane to a swimming pool.”

“Fantastic,” Rob nods. “The ability to have global impact, but particularly in this country – to have that role as an agency – is something we were really drawn to, and we’ll continue to build off. Because M&C Saatchi (as it was) has played a role in British culture since the ‘90s, “as an agency that was pushing pure art through the Saatchi Gallery, the kind of work we’ve done for the government and the NHS – it’s inextricably linked to what actually goes on in this country,” he says. “It’s one of those brands that’s probably the closest to a household name in the country. You say ‘Saatchi’ and people totally know what it is. So it’s got a legacy of influence, sway, and importance in this country, to represent the creative industries.”

While Rob and Lolly are focused on building M+C Saatchi’s creative firepower from the group’s birthplace of London, the ambition is always global. ‘Cultural Power’ doesn’t stop at borders – and the agency’s recent work proves it can resonate far and wide.
M+C Saatchi recently helped launch the Pharrell Williams LEGO characters and movie. “It’s pretty bloody good,” Lolly says of the film. “It’s pretty good to see a documentary done in LEGO. I was like, man, this is awesome. I said to my kids, ‘Let’s watch it.’”
Rob was staggered by some of the impact the film had. “If you watch some of the interviews [Pharrell] gave afterwards, he was saying a lot of the impetus for doing the film was – because of his ethnicity growing up, he never expected to be in a position where people would want to watch a film about him. So that’s a really culturally powerful piece of content from that.”

Entering the group in late 2024 the pair were swept up in some of the work going on around the world by M+C Saatchi agencies. In Australia, M+C Saatchi’s ‘Plastic Forecast’ visualised the level of airborne plastic particles using the format of a nightly weather report – a striking way to surface an invisible threat. It made the environmental crisis feel urgent, local, and unmissable. 

One other piece of work that stopped Lolly in his tracks was the agency’s campaign for Dreams and Team GB; a project already underway before he arrived. The campaign, fronted by Gillian Anderson and Olympic swimmer Tom Dean, positioned quality sleep as a performance-enhancing tool, with Dreams beds cast as crucial to Team GB’s preparation for Paris 2024. For Lolly, it was a sign that M&C Saatchi was already doing the kind of creatively ambitious, culturally resonant work he was excited to build on.

"Just the idea of controlled sleep, with Dreams, for Team GB – I thought, 'Man, that’s a great idea.' So every day here, I’m still finding things that are really good examples of creativity,” he says. “When someone talks about effectiveness at an event, and you’ve got the biggest medal tally ever for Team GB… that’s a proper result."

These examples reveal what ‘Cultural Power’ looks like at scale: brand stories grounded in culture, identity, and shared global challenges. Whether it’s through music, sustainability, or playful formats, M+C Saatchi is showing how ideas that start in culture can stretch far beyond campaign timelines or postcode boundaries.

Creative Leadership with Open Doors

Cultural Power is something Rob and Lolly are determined to embed in the agency’s internal culture. And that starts with how they lead. As part of their effort to flatten hierarchies across the network, they’ve introduced Open Hour – a regular, open-door session where anyone in the agency, in any role, can speak to them directly.

It’s part of a broader, intentional approach to how they hire and nurture talent. “I think that idea of being slightly tenacious, asking, ‘Should we do that? Can we do that? Let’s do that,’ is a great way to be,” says Lolly. “So we look for tenacious individuals.”

But it’s not just about spotting talent – it’s about what happens next. “Our hiring approach is not, ‘What do we want that person to do for the network?’” says Rob. “It’s, ‘What do we feel the network can do for that person?’ You get a chance to join 2,500 people, globally connected. What could that do for your creative life?”

The Buzz of What's Next

Six months in, Rob and Lolly are still settling in but they’re already shaping the tone, the pace, and the possibilities of what M+C Saatchi can be. There’s excitement in the air, but no pretence. “We’re just pumped about the opportunity here – and what power that ‘Cultural Power’ really has,” says Rob. Behind the calm optimism is a serious sense of momentum. “We’ve got a future-fit agency that’s known as a brand around the world,” adds Rob. “That’s a real dream for us.”

Lolly’s thoughts from our conversation crystallise into something that he’s just jotted on a notepad: “Cultural power is earned through a mix of consistency, bravery and relevance,” he reads. The intention has been set. Let’s watch to see if M+C Saatchi’s new shape can deliver on that promise.