Brain Food

People Insights, laughter, and Chat - What Inspires MediaPlus UK's strategy chief

Outlining what makes him tick is chief strategy officer, Will Hanmer-Lloyd

By Creative Salon

27 May 2026

Talking to as many people as possible

Books, studies and trend reports are brilliant for understanding people theoretically. But I think you only really develop instinctive empathy by spending time with lots of different kinds of people and hearing how they actually experience the world. What they worry about. What annoys them. What they’re optimistic about. What they secretly think but probably wouldn’t post online. How their lives are changing, and how they're staying the same.

For all its potential downsides, I genuinely think in any given UK city, town, or village the pub is one of the best places to get this. There’s something about it that strips away polished versions of ourselves. You hear the language people naturally use. The stories they repeat. The little status signals they care about. The frustrations bubbling underneath everyday life.

I think strategy is partly analysis. But also, part developing a feel for people, what they care about, and what will connect with them.

And I don’t think you get that just sitting in meeting rooms talking exclusively to other marketers.

Behavioural science

I’m endlessly fascinated by people. How they work. What they care about. Why they make the decisions they do. What influences them. Which parts of human behaviour are constantly changing — and which parts stubbornly stay exactly the same.

Fortunately, that’s also fundamentally the job of a strategist. To properly understand people. To work out how we genuinely deliver what they want, how we find new things to excite them, and how we influence behaviour without disappearing into marketing clichés.

Behavioural science gives me the best lens for understanding all of that. It explains why familiarity matters so much. Why habits overpower logic. Why emotion nearly always arrives before rationality. The more I read, the more I realise how irrational and beautifully inconsistent people really are.

And honestly, I just find it fascinating in its own right. There’s always another book to read, another study to disappear into, another strange human truth that suddenly makes the world make more sense.

Stand-up comedy

I used to do stand-up comedy, and I think it shaped how I think about, and approach, strategy and communication more than almost anything else.

Great comedians can take something every day — commuting, group chats, office politics — and suddenly frame it in a way that feels insightful and obvious at the same time. Or think about big societal changes and reflect it in ways that connect to the everyday. I think strategy at its best does something very similar. It gives people a fresh perspective they can instantly recognise as true.

It also teaches you how important storytelling is. In stand-up, one person walks onto a stage with nothing but a microphone and somehow holds an entire room on the edge of their seat using only words, timing and delivery. That’s always fascinated me.

Because in strategy, developing the right answer is only half the job. The other half is standing in a room and getting everyone to buy in it.