What does the future of branding look like, and why do creative leaders need a stronger voice in the boardroom?
In this episode, Jacob Cass & Matt Davies sit down with Ekaterina Solomeina, creative director, TEDx speaker, co-founder of Future London Academy, and host of Creative Capes, to explore how branding, design, and creative leadership are evolving.
As AI accelerates execution and businesses face more complex cultural, technological, and commercial challenges, the value of creativity is shifting. It is no longer enough for designers and brand leaders to simply make things look good. The real opportunity is to connect creativity to business value, strategic decisions, customer trust, innovation, culture, and growth.
Ekaterina shares her perspective on what separates talented creatives from true creative leaders, why many businesses still underestimate design, and how creatives can better communicate their value in language executives understand.
Together, Jacob and Ekaterina discuss the future of branding, the business value of design, the skills creative leaders need beyond the portfolio, and why more companies would benefit from having creative representation at the highest level.
If you want to become a more strategic, commercially valuable, and future ready creative leader, this conversation is packed with insight.
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding. Branding has always been about more than just logos, campaigns, or clever taglines. But right now, the role of branding is changing fast. As businesses face AI disruption, cultural shifts, talent challenges, and more complex markets, the creative leaders who thrive won’t just make things look good. They’ll connect creativity to business value. So what does the future of branding look like? And what role should creative leaders play in shaping it? That’s what today’s conversation is all about. And today we’re joined by Ekaterina Solomeina. And Ekaterina is a creative director, a TEDx speaker, and co-founder of Future London Academy, an executive school for creatives. And over the past 20 years, she’s worked as a creative director. And in 2013, she co-founded that Academy to help creatives connect, learn and lead at a higher level. So today we’re talking about the future of branding, the business value of design, and what creative leaders can bring to the boardroom. It would be great to hear a little bit of your backstory and how you started Future London Academy and anything else you’d like to share.
Thank you for having me. And yes, it has been quite a journey. I’ve been in branding and creative industry for quite a while. As my official profile mentions 20 years, that’s probably about right, might be a bit longer. And I worked as a creative director and I worked across branding, advertising, anything from traditional branding, rebrands. I was very lucky to work with Michael Wolfe, the founder of Wafolins, absolutely legendary person within the creative industry, who is turning I think 93 this year. So he is the one who one of the, I suppose, legends and figures and branding who inspired me when I was starting within the industry. And now he has his own book as well that I would recommend to everyone because he is just a marvellous and genius person. And yeah, I’ve been working across a variety of design and creative fields from shooting commercials to digital product design or back then multimedia design, whatever we called back then. And I had quite a fun career. I worked with the Nutella Versace, I worked with really cool brands, big campaigns, whatever anyone dreams about. I’ve done it, won awards. But I think one thing that kind of started feeling throughout reaching probably 15 years or something like that, is that you get to this point where you’re already very good at what you do, you won your awards, you established yourself as a brilliant creative person, brilliant branding person, and you’re invited into these boardrooms with CEOs and CFOs and people who make bigger decisions, talk about strategic values of business. You feel like you lack this language to communicate with them. In general, there are less and less places for yourself to learn. I think that’s across any industry, but specifically in the creative industry, the further you go in your career, the less new information you can find that is actually helpful and practical. I think when you’re very junior, you can go on YouTube and literally learn anything from scratch, the more senior you get, the less useful information you can find, but also the less time you have to find it. That was basically my personal pain that started Future London Academy. I wanted the place for myself to learn, I wanted to progress, I didn’t think that my career stops after I’ve done the biggest campaign or whatever, take the boxes that I needed to take as a creative director. I wanted to learn, I wanted to be better. Again, speaking of Michael Wolfe, who still works and was working his whole life, he never retired from doing branding. I saw him as who I want to be, I didn’t want to stop doing my creative work, I wanted to continue to be inspired and also to feel fulfilled by the work I’m doing because if you do the same project, the same type of thing every day and you kind of, you know the recipe, you know how to do a good campaign, you know how to do a good brand, it becomes very repetitive and boring. So I was thinking, how can I continue being inspired, continue learning, continue be the best I could be? And yes, that’s what started Future London Academy. And it has been quite a ride since then. We obviously won awards. Actually, just last year we won the Norman Award for impact on education industry, which is especially important because I feel like we wanted to change not just what we do, but the industry overall. And the Norman, obviously another legend and father of modern design, who wrote Design of Everyday Things. So specifically getting an award from him meant a lot for us. And now all the top creative directors, heads of design come to study on our courses and programs, whether it is from Apple or Netflix. All top companies trust us as the best place to learn about branding, leadership, strategy, business, and all these topics that creatives and designers rarely taught. So I feel very grateful, very privileged, and also excited about what the future is, because there is so much more that will be happening in the industry in the next 10 years, that it excites me to wake up every day.
Awesome. Ekaterina, kudos to you for setting up. I mean, it’s not easy to set anything up, but to do it with such success is incredible. I just wanted to ask you about something you just said. So you mentioned you wanted to change the industry or have that impact. What was it like before? And then what’s the change that you’re making and looking to make in the sector?
Great question. So one thing, there are a few structural things. We as a society, as a, I don’t know, educational industry are set up in a certain way. We go to school, we go kindergarten school, then university, then maybe someone will do a MA or PhD or whatever. And if you do it back to back, which is what a lot of people do, you finish at the end of 25 with your degrees and everything. And then the rest of the life, you’re supposed to figure everything out on your own. So on one hand, you need to make these big decisions of who you want to be, when you grow up, what you want to do at the age of 18. And then for the rest of your life, you have to stick whatever you chose, and not learn in any shape or form, which is ridiculous considering how fast the industry changes, how much exciting innovation going on, and also how cool creativity is, and how much there is to learn from each other. So I always found that setup ridiculous in the first place. So we believe in never stop learning, and this is as Future London Academy our motto, never stop learning because it is true, and especially as a creative, you literally can never stop learning. The second thing that personally was confusing to me is what do you need to learn? Okay, you’ve learned the design, you’re good at design, you practice design, branding, whatever it is, creative skills. You kind of feel confident, I nailed it. I know what I’m doing. What do you learn next? How do you pick the subjects that you need to learn? What would be helpful to help you with your career? And that’s not a linear and easy question. And I personally, and we as a team, spend a lot of time trying to understand, okay, what do you need to learn at this stage in your career? Let’s say you have 10 or 15 years of experience to get to the next level. What are the skills you are missing? Or what skills that have been missing through your education, whether it was formal education through university, or whether you are self-taught designer and creative, who kind of learned everything by doing, what are the things they’re missing? And the answer is business. No one teaches designers business. No one teaches designers strategy in a broader sense. No one teaches designers leadership. And all creatives and designers at some point become leaders, whether it is leaders who manage big teams, or whether it is leaders, meaning people who influence them, even if you’re still one person team, you have a lot of influence. Or how do you influence people? All these things stop creatives and designers from growing further and actually achieving more, which is very sad to see when kind of everyone has this incredible journey until the age of 30, 40, 45, and then kind of gets this confusion point and midlife crisis because what am I supposed to do next? Like I ticked all my boxes. So, yes, that’s what we are trying to change and have been successfully changing for the past 13 years. So it’s a lot of fun.
That question of creative leadership is amazing. Like I do a lot of work with creatives and I do a lot of consulting with creative agencies. And I’ve seen this in my career. I ran a business, creative business for nearly 10 years. And then I went in house at a corporate and ran a creative team. And one of the things that I observed and have continually observed throughout my whole career is that what happens is you get a great designer who’s got a great personality, they’re brilliant, they do great work, and then they get promoted, right? So they go up the ranks and eventually they’re given a team, right? So here’s your team. Now, they’re a great designer or a great marketeer, but they’re not necessarily a great leader. And I see this a lot where that can either people can say, oh, actually I kind of like leading a team or they see it as a real drag because they don’t get to do the work that made them great. So courses on leadership, I think, are really, really kind of key. I wonder if you could share anything like any kind of key tips to anyone perhaps who is just taking on a new team or been promoted into an area that allows them to kind of hire into their team. What sort of tips might you point to to help them?
Sure. And I just first of all want to echo what you just said. This is exactly what happens to the majority of creators. But on top of that, I feel like right now it’s even harder because of the remote work and a lot of people not being in the office. That learning curve of you used to step up as a leader after observing your manager or your boss or whatever, your creative director managing other people for the past five years. So you roll a bottle on it or against it depending on how good your leader was. But you at least know what leadership could look like. Now with a lot of people having flexible and remote work, you might not see what this leadership looks like. And by leadership, I mean this in between conversations, how someone gave feedback, how another person reacted to feedback, what happened next. All these tiny micro-interactions that you see how someone deals with stress, how do you deal with difficult clients? All these things are now hidden behind zooms and homes and conversations that are private. And therefore, you’re right, when a new person steps up as a manager, as a leader, it is a very confusing place to be because you don’t really know what good looks like or what even bad looks like. You haven’t seen anything at all. You might have seen versions of it on maybe TV or maybe worse, TikTok, which do not learn anything from TikTok or rather definitely check your sources when you’re learning anything from TikTok. But it is a confusing place. On top of that, for any new role, you need practice. The one is to know what good looks like and then actually go in and practicing it and making your own mistakes and falling flat on your face. That’s part of it and also being okay with that and knowing that it’s okay. There are lots of micro things that just much harder now than ever before. This is why it’s even more important for learning to provide that support where someone doesn’t burn out when they become a leader. Someone doesn’t quit and feel like, I can’t do it, this is not my thing, like I’m really bad at it.
Yeah, I’ve seen that.
Yes, exactly because you haven’t seen other managers and leaders struggling with the same thing. It’s not easy. No one said it will be easy. But if you haven’t seen that struggle, you’re seeing there’s something wrong with me. I’m not supposed to do this. I’m not built for this. I don’t have skills for that. So equipping people with skills and confidence that they can do it and then support if they need to learn something new, how do you go about it? It’s very important. Now, practical tips. What new managers and new leaders can do? I suppose there are plenty of things and depending of what level of leadership we are talking about, because being a first-time manager leader, there is a lot that you need to understand about yourself as a leader, as a person, your leadership style, and how you can give the best value to your team. I think one just very random tip that I remembered from talking to actually Sir John Huggerty, another legendary person in design and advertising. He was saying, when you give feedback to your team or to any team member, you need to make sure they live with less work rather than with more work. I think it’s such a simple tip, but it’s actually quite profound if you think about it. And finding this balance where what you say, we have lots of ideas, I think. And as a leader, you have many opinions of someone else’s work. But what you say really defines what this other person will do. So how do you plan what you say and how do you provide feedback in a way that will be the most helpful? And one way to go about it is they need to do less work than more work. And it is a really good mind game that you can play before any meeting. Like what is the most helpful in this meeting? What kind of feedback should I provide in this meeting that will move the project further? And then as you progress throughout the career ladder, it’s about your personal skills as a leader, then it becomes about team dynamics. When you become manager of managers, you can’t really see every single person. So it becomes more about influencing people through other people, creating the vision that is compelling, that people can follow, understanding when to step in and where to step out. Again, the bigger the team grows, you can’t be in every meeting. So really understanding the process. We actually have a course on creative leadership that is taught by brilliant person, Matt, who was creative director and head of design of HUGE, which is an iconic creative agency. And he had the highest retention rate in his team. So way above industry average, way above, I forgot the exact number, it was something over 10 years or something. So people who worked for him, stayed with him for a very long time. And again, this is your role as a leader. We know that people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers. So your job becomes about retention, about creating the culture, the fosters, creativity, how you create conditions for creative work to be done. And then how do you know micro-manage? Like, how do you maintain the quality of work that you set, that you know this is what good looks like, but also not be in every single meeting. And Matt actually has this wonderful way where he describes it, kind of looking at the full process of creative work end to end from first initial briefing, getting everything to the end point and sending it to print or publishing or whatever, or is it digital then going live. Which points are the most crucial for you as a creative leader to be in and which ones you don’t need to be? And really being very strategic about that, because we all know the situation when we are too late to give feedback. It’s already going to print. You giving 10 pages of feedback about everything needs to be changed is not going to make anyone happy, not going to make a difference. It actually will create tension in the team and actually probably will produce worse work because now people will start changing things. There will be more mistakes. The final product will be even worse. So how do you think strategically about this overall journey of the project and where you can be in and out of it and where you can be the most helpful to the team, where they do need your opinion, where they do need your support, versus when you step out and let them fail, let them experiment, let them figure things out, but you gave them the criteria of what it looks like. So it’s a tough one. But then the most exciting one is when you go over and beyond that. So now you’re not just managing creative work, you’re managing business. And that I’ve seen the hardest. If the ones that I’ve described, I think there is nothing new, they have been happening throughout generations of creatives. You can read old books on that and there is wisdom in every single one of them and it’s the matter of practice and actually looking at it through the frameworks that someone can provide you. The last step is the hardest because when you get to Chief Design Officer, Chief Creative Officer, or whatever is the highest title, creative title within your organisation, your work stops being about just design, creativity and branding. It becomes, it starts being about business. And leaders within your business expect that you understand that. But a lot of creatives unfortunately don’t make this shift. It’s not natural to us. I don’t think that is natural to anyone to do creative work their entire life, join the industry because we love creativity, because we love doing branding. And