Kate Stanners: “I’m still working at my age because I bloody love it”

Kate Stanners surprised the industry last September when she announced she was leaving Saatchi & Saatchi for PR giant Edelman, ending a 20-year tenure at the creative agency.

Her hiring was a well kept industry secret, while her newly-created job title – chief creative officer, international – sees her leading the agency’s creativity across EMEA and APAC.

Sitting in a conference room after a full day of judging at D&AD, Stanners speaks with clarity and openness throughout the near hour-and-a-half conversation – a rarity in this day and age with time a growing commodity. 

And it’s evident that despite having a career traversing a wide range of job titles, both regional and global, her passion for both the marketing industry and creativity hasn’t wavered; “I’m still working at my age because I bloody love it.”

Making the move

‘Why Edelman?’ is, of course, the conversation opener – something she has yet to discuss publicly. 

“It's been a very specific move to somewhere that’s allowing me to utilise all my experience and apply it to a space that wants change,” she begins. “Last October, I hadn’t ever stepped foot in Edelman, and when I did, it felt like coming home.” 

During her two decades at Saatchis, she took on roles including CCO for London, global CCO, and chairperson – and it’s a place she still “loves and adores”. The appeal of working for a private, family-owned and run business, however, was “extraordinary”, she states.  

“Edelman is unique. Saatchis was part of a much bigger organisation, and I have huge respect for what Maurice [Lévy, former CEO of Publicis Groupe] and Arthur [Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe] have done, but it's vast, and there's so many machines at play – be that the production machine or the media machine. The creative – you'd like to think it's quite central – is definitely not necessarily the everything nowadays; we recognise that increasingly.” 

She notes that Edelman was an agency always on her radar, having worked with it in increasing amounts while at Saatchis, enjoying the “diversity of solution” the team always brought. 

“Often we would have the same brief. They would approach it differently. I'd always say to the team, ‘Bloody hell, they've done that? That's brilliant. Why haven't we?’”

Stanners recalls meeting Edelman’s CEO, Richard Edelman, for the first time, and immediately finding intrigue in the project. 

“I've always loved advertising, and I loved making ads. I loved it more making ads that people talked about,” she outlines. “What I realised when I first met Richard was all the work that I pushed for and loved was actually Edelman-type work. Work that really tried to instinctively and naturally create conversation to the right audience.

“Meeting him was the reason for joining. It wasn't that I wanted to leave Saatchis, but after a period of time, I felt there’s still something quite interesting to do somewhere else, and now's the time.”

The power of earned media 

Stanners describes herself as a “quasi-planner creative”, having always partnered with and enjoyed working with planners. She namechecks Sam Wise, Richard Huntington, David Hackworthy, – and now Jay Gallagher and Anna Vogt. 

“I used to do a lot of work with the Labour Party, and you'd go into meetings and there were ministerial aides sitting there, talking about how everything is working. You’d get to feel quite small,” she says. “But actually you see how everything is connected, and how you’re trying to earn your place in culture.” And a big part of doing so, she believes, is the power of earned media. 

She refers to her early career at Gold Greenlees Trott, a powerhouse [agency] in the 80s and 90s, and lessons about the power of social and earned media.  “Dave Trott [co-founder] would talk about your currency being the conversation in the pub or the playground — and so much of that has always informed my version of what good looks like.

“I'm sitting here judging D&AD Awards, but for me it’s the power of the work and the impact it has in the world. Great to win an award, but it's not the reason to do it.”

With 99 per cent of Gen Z consumers wanting to skip ads, and over 60 per cent using ad blockers to avoid online ads, Stanners suggests that says a lot about the types of ads being made. 

“They say that the ideas and stories people receive through earned [media] are between two and a half to six times more trusted. If I'm a marketer, what am I going to do? Am I going to spend my money where I don't really know if someone has watched it?

“As a human, if anyone ever told me I had to do something to get to what I wanted, did I really care enough in the first place?” she adds. “In the end, it's hard to make an idea born of paid into an innately earned idea. You can make an innately earned idea very powerfully paid.”

When asked ‘Is tech killing earned media?’ she doesn’t even hesitate before answering: “No – the technology of the audience, which might be Large Learning Models (LLMs) or even a bot, means your audience is different if it’s non-human. 

“Uniqueness is quite powerful versus blandness in a world that is not search anymore. People talk about AI as an answer engine rather than a search engine — and therefore specificity and uniqueness maybe become more powerful.”

She continues: “Trust becomes incredibly important, and I think that's one of the values of earned media. The reason it has impact is because people do trust the messages that they get through an earned media experience more than a paid advertising experience.”

Creativity isn’t at threat due to AI, she believes; the human instinct is still the arbitrator of taste, style, the power to connect, but the tools help a person do that at speed and at scale, with more input, more research going into it.

“If you look at paintings, are those going to become more important to us?," she asks. "To go and see things that have rawness and mistake and power in them? And does that translate to other things?"

New wave of creativity

Looking at Edelman's creative output over the last six months offers a glimpse into what attracted Stanners to the business.

Much of the work can be described as unconventional – from edible billboards to an office printer printing out a billboard campaign. It’s a comment that makes Stanners laugh, but she’s quick to agree; they're built around a principle she's long championed: creating ideas that people actively want to talk about.

“There’s more freedom in terms of what solution looks like at Edelman,” she says. “In advertising you can control your own environment a bit more because you're paying for it. Whereas when you're working in culture, if you hit a moment right, you’ll get more traction than if you're hitting the wrong moment, or if it's just falling on deaf ears.”

Its edible billboard for Hellmann’s invited passers-by in King’s Cross Station, London, to try its ranch dressing, and was inspired by the social commentary of the condiment continually confusing Brits. 

And its work with HP saw an OOH billboard in Clapham homing a real HP printer in a perspex box that itself printed all 319 A4 pages of the poster site. 

“I've been blown away by the talent in the building. Jamie [George Cordwell] and James [Wood] are just fantastic creatives. The speed of the work – it’s not your nine months, it’s two or three. And speed is a craft. Being able to be responsive, reactive to world events — I mean look, one minute we're having a war here, the next minute we're having tariffs here — those affect everyone.” 

The industry as whole, she says, is sprinkled with “a lot of ingenuity”, and thinking needs to shift towards making data and dry policy information into something “people really want to think and care about”.

Leading as a woman

“The other day someone said, ‘You’re not diverse enough, you’re all women – we need more men,” says Stanners along with an eye roll. 

“When I started out I would literally always be the only woman in anything — in the creative department, in meetings with clients. Then I was the first female creative director that Saatchis ever had, and you never really thought about it because it was always just the way things were.”

Change, despite the opinions of some, is everywhere, she points out. And the attitudes from agencies for the needs of women are following suit, from better childcare and family support to parents to increased working flexibility. 

She discusses turning down the original opportunity to join Saatchis three times, having not long before given birth. “As someone who had always been 100 per cent on my work — it was everything — and sometimes I'd give up holidays, weekends, nights. It didn't matter because I didn't even think about it. And then when it came to that job, I thought that's what that person has to look like, and I've got an 18-month-old baby; I just didn’t believe I could give my everything because I had this baby that I wanted to give everything to. 

“And they made it work. It was incredibly empowering, and also I felt that it was ok to be myself, rather than trying to pretend I wasn't a mum or that I wasn't being highly emotional about something.”

And what's her advice for aspiring female leaders these days?  “You are never on your own unless you want to be. And I would advise not being.”

There’s a danger of feeling you have to do everything alone to prove yourself, she says, despite traditional leadership styles evolving around strength, power, command and control. 

“Sometimes female leaders were seen as the antithesis of that – weak, not acute or sharp enough, not driven enough,” she continues. “Now there’s a sense that galvanising a team, giving them the support to be strong and better, is not weak. It's not stepping back. It's actually stepping forward and stepping back to step forward.” 

She’s also quick to point out having a life outside of work is a necessity; while she may have a leading global job, it doesn’t define her as a person, highlighting that she finds joy in the small things, in spending time with her husband, son, Irish terrier, and wider family. 

“I had cancer about six years ago, and when you have something quite life-changing like that, I find it very easy to switch off in a way I didn't before.

“If it's raining, I’m more than happy to put my mac on and walk in the rain. I love seeing my friends, eating amazing food, cooking food, watching football, travelling — all the really normal things. I just want to make sure I’m consumed by life."