David Proudlock: 'Everything feels up for grabs'

David Proudlock, who has just joined The Gate a CSO, has spent more than two decades moving between strategy, creativity, culture and the business of making brands matter.

Now, having spent the past two-and-a-half years as CSO at Forsman & Bodenfors, he has reunited with CEO Helen James for a third time, replacing Kit Altin who has moved into a MSQ group role. Proudlock and James previously worked together at both Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Forsman & Bodenfors.

It is a career that has taken Proudlock from planning roles at WCRS and Cake to co-founding cultural communications agency Inkling, before its acquisition by Cubo Group in 2016.

At The Gate, Proudlock arrives at a moment when the traditional distinction between brand, customer experience and performance is becoming increasingly blurred. The agency is looking to extend its ideas beyond individual campaigns into longer-running customer relationships, while Proudlock has also been exploring how AI can accelerate both strategic and creative thinking. His brief, therefore, is not simply to make The Gate's strategy sharper, but to help define what strategy needs to be when brands have to operate continuously rather than simply campaign periodically.

Creative Salon caught up with Proudlock to talk about his new job.

What excites you most about the industry right now?

Change. Everything feels up for grabs. There’s so much negativity around at the moment, but I take the opposite view. We’re incredibly lucky to do this job, and we’re at an inflection point where we genuinely get to write what comes next. That’s much more exciting than endlessly repeating the past.

What attracted you to the new job at The Gate?

The Gate feels at the point where it takes the next step up. We’ve got brilliant, iconic British brands. Effectiveness awards. Creative awards. An amazing team of humans who make things happen. And the breadth of expertise clients need today.

So, it’s all in place, and I joined because I felt I could make an impact on the business, on the work and on where we go next. Working with Helen again was a nice added bonus as well.

You and Helen James clearly make a potent team – how would you describe your relationship, and how do you think CSOs and CEOs work best together?

Ha! I’ve never thought of us as “potent” before, but yes, it’s great to work with someone you trust both professionally and personally. We share a lot of the same values in life and in the work. We’re very open and collaborative, but equally respectful of what each brings to the table that the other doesn’t. But mostly it’s a shared love of a “potent” spicy marg.

How did you get started in the industry?

I met a guy at a party in Newcastle. He’d just come back from London after a placement at Leo Burnett and wouldn’t shut up about it. I indulged him over the course of a year and he decided I just “got it”. He moved to London and continued to nag me to move down. Eventually I gave in and he pushed me into, and helped me get through, the Saatchi & Saatchi Summer Scholarship. A proper sliding doors moment.

What are the main skills you think a modern CSO needs to succeed?

Empathy and vision.

Empathy for clients, the brief, the audience and your team. Get outside your own head and see the world through someone else’s eyes.

And vision for what comes next. The same, safe and familiar isn’t going to cut it. I think a modern CSO needs to get their hands dirty and build for the future, not just think about it.

What is your main aim or ambition at The Gate as its CSO?

To win. For our clients and for ourselves.

Winning creates momentum. It gives you the confidence and opportunity to make bigger, better work, attract brilliant people and define your own future. Ultimately, I want to look back and say, “I helped build that” and feel like it’s genuinely got my fingerprints on it.

What has been your proudest moment, so far, on the way to becoming CSO?

That people I’ve worked with in the past want to work with me again in the future.

Anyone can claim anything on LinkedIn or wherever. But there’s no hiding from the people you work alongside in the trenches every day. If they see, feel and recognise the value and usefulness of having you around, and want to do it all over again, that’s a pretty good measure of success in my eyes.

And which campaign are you particularly proud to have been involved with in your career?

A long time ago I came up with an idea at my own agency, Inkling, that ended up as front-page news. Getting on the Tube and seeing it reflected back at me from the front of the newspapers was pretty surreal. Media outlets started recreating their own versions of it too.

We talk a lot about “culture” in this industry, but that felt like becoming part of it.

And I got to work with Sir Peter Blake on it. Not a bad way to make a living.

If advertising never existed, is there an alternative job or career that you would have liked to have taken up? Why?

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial streak and there are a couple of things I’ve come pretty close to launching since selling my agency. So probably rolling the dice on something scary of my own.

I’ve also got an unfinished kids’ book sitting on my hard drive. Must get back to that actually.

But if I’m really honest/dream scenario: football pundit. Getting paid to wang on about the footie. Can’t be bad.