For over 20 years, Laura has enhanced the advertising industry through her fresh, pioneering spirit. Combining technical skill, with her innate human understanding and passion for storytelling, Laura is recognised globally as an innovator and industry leader.

 

Laura is a former president of D&AD who has been twice named one of Britain’s most influential people within the Debrett’s 500 annual list and recognised as Individual of the Year at the Dadi Awards. She was also honoured in Campaign UK Female Frontier Awards for Championing Change.

 

A true champion for diversity, Laura is a co-founder of The Great British Diversity Experiment and is also a co-founder of SheSays: this world-famous volunteer network works to encourage more women into the creative industries.

 

Laura lectures around the world and has written creative curriculum for the RCA, UNSW Art and Design and Westminster University.

 

I’ve been a contrarian and a feminist since I was a little kid and the notion of being comfortable with the uncomfortable defines my approach to life and work.

 

Growing up in Australia, I was a math geek and football mad. I fought hard to be allowed on the boys’ football team at school and not wanting to be in the Girl Guides, I got my dad to petition the local council to get me into the Boy Scouts instead.

 

I went to art college despite being a real geek at school. While other students focused on making their work as beautiful and perfect as possible, my art was always provocative and political. My favourite piece from that time was my giant knitted wall hanging of a pixelated clitoris, a statement about the objectification of women on the internet.

 

At art school I was studying digital media and coding and working part-time with GeekGirl magazine, a cyber feminist zine. It was the early 1990s, the dawn of the internet, and I realised I could make good money with my tech skills. So, while still at university, I founded my own digital agency, Joystick Digital Media, doing ninja design and coding for the web for ad agencies.

 

In my first agency role, at digital shop Deepend, my colleagues and I felt like pirates of the digital world - hacking, experimenting and playing with formats at a time when the rules hadn’t even been written yet.

 

At a later job, as head of art at glue (now Isobar), was where I realised my true superpower lay in bringing teams together, building a culture and making everyone else shine.

 

Championing women and making the industry more diverse and inclusive is my biggest passion. Starting out, I could see that no women were applying for jobs in the creative industry yet 50% of creative students were women. In 2000, being a feminist and starting conversations around bias was not considered cool. But I was comfortable with asking awkward questions around the absence of women in the creative sector. To help change the game, I co-founded SheSays, the global creative network for women.

 

When my co-founder, Alessandra Lariu, and I first launched it, we were told that there wasn’t enough female talent to fill a speaker stage once a month. We called bullshit on that. Now, fourteen years since its launch, SheSays is still going strong around the world, with over 70,000 members in 53 cities.

 

I’ve never let imposter syndrome get in my way. When I first became an executive creative director, at LBi, I felt uncomfortable initially because it was a massive step up. But those uncomfortable steps are the ones you need to take because they show you what you’re made of. I went on to create some of my favourite work, including the Infi-Knit for cancer charity Macmillan, which turned a standard government petition highlighting the issue of fuel poverty for cancer patients into a joyful knitting robot – and it ended up changing the law.

 

I launched my own agency, Mr President, in 2012 because I saw that, as more money was being invested in digital, the work was becoming boring and overly rational. I wanted to put the magic back. After achieving my mission with Mr President, I found myself once again looking for a challenge that would put me outside of my comfort zone. The top job at Grey beckoned and, despite starting in the midst of a global pandemic, I know I’m in the right place at just the right time.

 

My whole life, my route to creativity has always been through the digital world, so, for me, there has never been any separation between creativity and tech. Now that the industry is moving beyond advertising to the consumer journey, product, experience and new spheres, like gaming, the borders are falling away. And that gives us an exciting opportunity to go back to being pirates, experimenting, creating, playing and rewriting the rules.