How to balance purposeful content with commercial bottom lines | Perspectives with Alex Bennett-Grant (We are Pi)
Perspectives with Alex Bennett-Grant
Co-founder and CEO of We Are Pi
Chaos, passion, and dreaming. A frenzy of excitement. A festival of new thinking. This is how co-founder and CEO Alex Bennett-Grant describes the early days of his agency, We Are Pi. He and his crew of pirate creatives never settle for business as usual, always ensuring diverse output and supporting ideas that move the world forward. And they have ridden this wave to great acclaim - We Are Pi has won small agency of the year three times running, and Alex has been honoured on the AdAge under 40 list. We talk to Alex about his swashbuckling journey, and what it is about Amsterdam’s creative scene that has caused him to anchor here permanently, in the latest episode of our podcast. Alex came from the cutthroat ‘dog-eat-dog’ world of London, critically different from the ‘sense of freedom and accessibility and community’ ingrained in Amsterdam’s creative scene that made starting a business here so exciting and liberating.
“We’re working our asses off, but you walk outside at the end of the day and it’s Amsterdam, you’re in this village. I discovered that you can call people or email them or LinkedIn them and you’re probably going to get a response.”
Alex is criminally cool and charismatic, and it’s easy to see how he fits into the more laid back scene Amsterdam has been favoured for. The essence of community is something he has learned to take full advantage of, something that becomes clear when we discuss the origins of the Before You Shoot Pledge, a project that emerged following the #BLM movement. Alex - as a business leader and person of mixed heritage - faced pressure to respond to what posterity may well mark as ‘the biggest cultural moment in modern history’. His story will be familiar to people of colour, who last summer found themselves juggling trauma with the exhausting task of educating an onlooking public. Alex turned an avalanche of ‘how are we going to respond to this thing? And what do you think?’ directed at him towards the global creative community. Soon, he was speaking with creatives far and wide about what could be done to make the industry more inclusive.
“We learned that people were very much ready for a change when making advertising. That people are sort of fed up with the coded languages that people use to try and avoid having to deal with these topics.”
The Before You Shoot Pledge has become a vanguard for change in advertising, a pirate Battlecry to radically transform media in terms of the talent, stories, and cultures being represented. Throughout our conversation, it’s clear that Alex is an astute cultural commentator who ultimately sees what needs to change in the advertising landscape to bring it forward, and is providing a platform for change with the diverse output he oversees at We Are Pi, which includes work for Lego, TedX, and the UK’s Channel 5.
“Agencies and creative businesses need to get closer to the customer because we’re real people. The closer you are to real people, the closer you are to real problems and real issues that you can be part of.”
Listen to the full conversation where Alex coasts through convoluted issues with enviable ease and good-humour - we discuss in depth the unexpected virtues of virtue signalling and how to balance purposeful content with commercial bottom lines. Check it out here!