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Of all the idioms and analogies that you might come across in the world of advertising, those connected to sport might be the most overused. A quick trawl through LinkedIn is enough to prove this: “AI is keeping [company] ahead of the game”, trills one post. A sponsored message in my inbox cheers that an MBA course will give me “a head start” on my “competition”. Your team may well have ‘hit it out of the park’ on their latest campaign. And did you get my last email? I’m keen we don’t ‘drop the ball’ on this. 

But in all the ways we do think about sport, there are a couple of others that we maybe don’t think about enough. Specifically, a sense of fair-play that’s associated with sport only when it’s at its best - a combination of integrity, work ethic, and leaving it all on the field. And it’s in those ways that, when I meet with Audrey Melofchik, VML’s global chief brand experience officer and former CEO of Wunderman Thompson, I can’t help but think about sport. 

“I grew up in the great state of New Jersey, in the western part, where there’s about one stoplight per town,” she begins, describing a quintessentially American smalltown upbringing. So much so that, with some irony, Audrey wasn’t able to join a sports team since “girls’ sports weren’t as popular as they are now”. To make up for it, she became a cheerleader and colour guard captain (“the head of the baton-twirling squad”), and a student council leader. “I was a joiner,” she admits. “I had fun.” 

And she’s still having fun. Today, it would be hard to describe Audrey’s life and career as particularly ‘smalltown’ - a New York-based part of the c-suite for one of the industry’s biggest companies in one of the planet’s most creative industries, on the back of a career in which she’s held leadership roles at BBDO, DDB, Wunderman Thompson and many more. Yet it doesn’t take long in conversation with Audrey to see those sporting and human qualities come through. It’s like a warm handshake on the top floor of a glass skyscraper. 

The journey here, she recalls, began with an interest in journalism and a desire to be part of a team. “I went to Syracuse University’s Newhouse School to study journalism, and started work at a local radio station,” she says. “I had to get up at 5am to do grunt work - loading promotional cartridges for the DJs during the drive-time slot. To be honest [and she inevitably is], I didn’t love it.”

What the experience did do, indirectly, was spark a love of advertising and communication. “I took some advertising classes and had a wonderful professor. She encouraged us to see advertising as a mix of team sport and creativity,” she explains. “She embraced the advertising community in such an inspiring way that I switched my focus to the industry and haven’t looked back since.”

Something that has endured since those days in journalism, however, is an interest in the zeitgeist - a reflexive curiosity for where culture is and where it’s headed. And that, Audrey notes with a glint in her eye, is a particularly interesting place at the outset of 2025. 

Ode to Joy 

“We’re at an interesting moment, having come through some of the most challenging and hardest times, not least because everything has been so divisive”, she says. “What we’re picking up now is a growing sentiment to move past acrimony and embrace joy - that’s really clear looking at popular culture. We haven’t had enough joy in the past five years or so, and you can feel people yearning for it now”. 

To find an example of that yearning in popular culture, you don’t need to look far. In 2024, Audrey posits, the Hallmark Channel released 32 new holiday movies to its 80 million American viewers (in other words, an entire Marvel cinematic universe over the course of the last 12 months alone). “But Taylor Swift’s Eras tour is probably the most clear and obvious example of this,” she adds. “You could feel the joy and celebration radiating out of every clip and picture taken from those concerts. It was like watching a festival of happiness. That’s the zeitgeist - it’s where we’re headed, even if it may not feel like it from reading the headlines.” 

Those headlines are part of another phenomenon that Audrey has noticed, one that every brand needs to contend with in its efforts to connect with people: Overwhelm. In fact, this is a particularly pressing problem for brands and marketers - especially those who think the answer to over-saturation is simply to pump out more and more content. “Culturally, we’ve reached a point where the proliferation of digital content is overwhelming. When we look at WPP’s BrandAsset Valuator™ (BAV) data, we see brand equity declining while content increases,” she says. “This tells me that people are overwhelmed - not just by the sheer amount of content, but also by the negativity that saturates it.”

So, how to fight back? That’s a question that Audrey is enthusiastic to answer. It comes down to the fundamentals of building brands - and she’s got the data to prove it. 

“It’s been hugely encouraging to see brand equity work yield results,” she begins. “Our industry’s biggest opportunity is to better quantify and communicate the impact of this work, especially in a world of AI. For example, with Hellmann’s at Unilever, we tackled declining brand loyalty among millennials and gen x by launching the ‘’ platform.”

“We avoided traditional recipe ads and instead used humour and creativity, like Super Bowl spots with Pete Davidson and stunts like banning mayo for a week in ‘A Town Called Toast’, she continues. “The campaigns increased penetration by four percentage points over four years with their target - significant for a big brand in such a large category.”

During her explanation, Audrey tells me that these findings came as something of a surprise to her and her team. Why? 

“It surprised us because you might expect people to be too tuned-out for brand equity to matter,” she concedes. “But time and again, quality brand equity work moves the needle. The mistake we make is not quantifying and communicating its impact enough.”

As a leader at VML, cheerleading for work that builds equity and moves the needle is set to be one of the themes of 2025 for Audrey. It’s the next step on a leadership journey that’s seen her grow throughout her career, learning from the right people - as well as the occasional “misstep” along the way. 

Follow the (Good) Leader 

The second part to becoming a good leader, Audrey, recalls, is following the role-models you meet early in your career. But the first, and arguably far more important, part of becoming a good leader is picking the right role models to follow. 

“Good leaders lift people around them up, and focus on what their teams need to succeed,” she says. “Leadership isn’t about people working for you; it’s about you working for them.”

To that end, she had a helpful knack for picking the right role models. “Rosemary Ryan, for example, was a force of nature at J. Walter Thompson in 2005-2006. She was real, transparent and approachable - just a human being, not someone trying to project perfection,” she says. “Wendy Clark was another. She was authentic and team-oriented, always figuring out what her team needed to succeed. Andrew Robertson was similar - a big personality but deeply committed to solving problems for his team and elevating them.”

From all those influences, Audrey has derived one key theme that underpins her approach to leadership today. “Good leaders are good human beings,” she surmises. “For aspiring leaders, conveying authenticity is about balancing vulnerability with a strong point of view. Authentic leaders can share personal stories - perhaps about challenges or mistakes - and transition seamlessly to offering direct, constructive feedback. That crucial authenticity comes about when leaders aim to be the best versions of themselves, not idealised personas. This leadership style is personified in how Jon Cook, Global CEO of VML and Mel Edwards, Global President show up to lead WPP’s biggest agency.  Despite our size and scale, we have down to earth, genuine leaders at the helm who set the tone for our agency every day.”

By way of an example regarding one of those ‘missteps’, Audrey reflects on a moment where she decided she needed to change her approach to client services. “My early approach of simply acting as a client mouthpiece to the agency was flawed,” she suggests. “I believed my job was to represent clients’ needs back to the agency without question. But over time, I realised the true value lies in reimagining client inputs to align with broader brand goals. Collaboration with creative teams became essential - understanding the brand's needs and presenting a unified point of view to clients.”

In other words, she became more of a translator between agency and client - an invaluable, inimitable skill that continues to serve her well to this day. And, to return to her earlier point, it’s going to help her make that case for re-establishing joy and brand equity as priorities in 2025 and beyond. 

“There’s always a pendulum swing, in culture and in this industry,” she says. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen it move towards data, micro-targeting and volume, which has allowed us to create huge amounts of content. But that won’t be the story forever. I was at a dinner recently where three clients all told me that ‘ideas are coming back’.” 

So now, Audrey believes, the pendulum is swinging again. Back towards joy, back to ideas, back to humanity. 

To indulge in one last tortured sports analogy, it might be the start of happiness’ cultural comeback.