Grace, Grit And Golding: A Leadership Legacy

It takes a particular kind of leader to help shape an agency’s legacy and its future in the same breath. Sarah Golding, the former global partner of T&Pm and one of the industry’s most proven and high-profile figures, has always known that transformation isn’t a moment – it’s a movement. And for more than two decades, she was driving it with grace, conviction and an unmistakable sense of fun as part of the leadership team at T&Pm. So when she announced this Spring that she was stepping down from the agency, it marked a real moment for reflection.

T&Pm (née Clemmow Hornby Inge/CHI/The&Partnership) has always been a creature of reinvention. The agency has grown from a London hot-shop into an international model of modern marketing. It is a £120m global integrated network combining media and creativity, with AI harnessed by world-class people at its heart, and now owned by WPP. This success is built on a phenomenal bench of loyal talent, including founder Johnny Hornby, alongside Golding, Nick Howarth, Neil Goodlad, Christian Hinchcliffe, and many more who have served at the agency for decades.

Golding joined as a founding partner in 2001, was promoted to CEO in 2011 and then global partner last year. Her sharp, creative instinct and rare fluency in people – how they think, feel, buy, and how they can be inspired to do their best work – quickly became touchstones for the business. Her fingerprints are all over some of the agency’s most significant moments – from leading integrated work for clients like NatWest and British Gas, to pushing the agency towards smarter, more data-driven creativity without ever sacrificing soul.

But it’s not just the client work that defines her contribution. It’s the culture. Golding championed equity, inclusion and kindness long before those became boardroom buzzwords, helping shape a generation of leaders and lifting countless women along the way – often just by showing what’s possible.

When she became IPA President in 2017 – only the second woman in the role in its then 101-year history – she used the platform not to take a victory lap, but to challenge the industry to be braver, to embrace ‘The Magic and The Machines’. She launched initiatives to inspire a new wave of talent into advertising and spotlighted the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership – all while continuing to run one of the most commercially successful agencies in the UK.

There’s a pragmatism to Golding’s brilliance. She knows that creativity is a team sport, and that leadership isn’t always about making the loudest call – sometimes it’s knowing when to pass the mic, when to protect the magic, when to call out the nonsense. And when to remind the room to have a bit more fun. In a business that too often eats its own past, Golding remains both a standard-bearer and a restless futurist. As T&Pm continues to shape what the modern agency looks like, feels like, and delivers, Golding helped keep its compass true.

As Johnny Hornby says: “Whilst the agency may have initially been called Clemmow Hornby Inge, Sarah was in every sense a founder, her passion for our business, the quality of the work we do, and how we go about doing it was a passion born of a founder’s mentality. And Sarah kept that mentality from the day she joined to the day she left. Beyond that Sarah was a winner, a winner for our business, a winner for her clients’ businesses, representing our clients and brands as if she worked for them. It’s an attitude that over more than 20 years Sarah has instilled deep in the culture of this place and whilst we will miss her - her spirit, her tenacity and can do mentality remain in the fabric of T&P.”

To mark this new phase in her career, we sat down with Golding to reflect on her work and the changes in the industry.

Creative Salon: You’ve spent most of your career in a really entrepreneurial environment, how has this shaped you as a leader and an innovator?

Sarah Golding: If you are part owner in a business and/or you are part of that start-up team, your approach to work and also leadership can be very different. For me, it meant I was willing to take higher risks because I felt more empowered – that a decision I made, especially if it was a big call, could make a real difference.

And it was an environment that only ever seemed to make the big calls and the big audacious moves, and I learnt a lot of that from the founders.

I was emotionally invested, so I think that translates into caring more, so really not accepting less or average, and pushing for the best creative answers for the clients.

CS: You've been responsible for overseeing and nurturing some of the longest standing and most successful agency-client relationships in the business. What's the secret to the sauce?

SG: I know that this sounds like a very whimsical thing to say, but I actually really like clients, and I think that makes a difference. I always wanted to work hard for them and make them proud of the agency, the team, and the work we did for them.

I also think I treated them like I would anyone else in my life – that meant I had tricky conversations with them, and sometimes had even pretty heated arguments with them, but I was always honest and respectful.

And I was there 24/7 on holiday, at night, fixing often the impossible

And simple as that is, I think that was the sauce.

CS: You became a female leader at a time when there were far fewer of them. Do you have any advice for people who want to lead businesses in our industry, and any specific advice for the female leaders of tomorrow?

SG: Don’t listen to the naysayers – be a positive force of optimism. It is that that makes great leaders.

Lead from the front – be the best practitioner, work hard, champion the team, the work and the industry.

Always support other women – they are the people you need on your side, and they have proved to be the greatest allies.

CS: During your time as IPA president, you identified technology as a crucial enabler of commercial creativity. What’s your prognosis for how ‘the machines’ are going to change our industry now that AI is here?

It already has, and I think its impact, as I said then, can be a force for good provided that it is seen for what it is, and used in the right places. That requires us to give some jobs up to the machines – let’s face it they can do a lot of the research and process better than we ever can.

But don’t over-rely on it or overplay it or be over-terrified of it. I sat on the AI Exec team at T&P, I am fully trained up in WPP Open, and it is brilliant and a very clever investment decision by Mark Read.

But all AI tools have their limitations. LLMS needs humans. We need to edit and curate, manage those machines, and bring the illogical and imaginative to bear on all it does.

That is where you find the brilliant.

CB: And how content are you with how the industry has embraced the relationship between magic and the machines?

I think there is sometimes, at the moment, a tendency to say the answer must be AI, now what’s the question? As I said in 2017,and I still believe today, the answer will be human intelligence and AI, magic and machine.

CS: You described people who work in advertising as "the magicians". Where do you see the future cohort of magicians coming from, and what magical skills will they need?

SG: Another benefit of all that AI brings to the industry is the need for more varied talents. We need tech people as well as brand people, we need prompters as well as copywriters and that to me will force our industry, which let’s face it, has been made up of virtually the same shape and colour and background of person for decades, to change and adapt quickly.

We need to hire from other industries, other countries, and other backgrounds, so that we can manage the machines and make more and more relevant magic with them. Magic that plays out in more challenging, hard-to-reach spaces in people’s hands on their phones and in their lives.

CS: T&Pm has been at the forefront of some of the real step-changes in the industry, from in-housing to the re-integration of creativity and media. What are the key ingredients of being able to anticipate shifts like this and being able to move quickly?

The secret is not just to respond to clients but to think like one. Being a client is hard. The marketing landscape is rapidly changing all the time, embracing new channels and avoiding expensive or PR pitfalls is imperative.

Agencies shouldn’t wait for clients to tell them what they need or how to support them. We have to think like we are in their shoes. What would help us with the myriad decisions our clients have to navigate, and so how can we help them?

As I said, I like my clients, and we, as with any agency group, are very close to our clients and their businesses. And so, we try to anticipate their emerging needs and engineer our skills and processes to proactively serve them.

CS: Do you think the industry is in better shape now than when you started out?

SG: I don’t actually. We don’t attract the best and brightest talent, we don’t make creativity and campaigns that get noticed or talked about like we did, we don’t make as effective work as we did, and we don’t have the fun and powerful cultures like we did.

To paraphrase Jeff Daniels in the epic 'Newsroom' speech…’We are not the greatest industry in the world… but we should be…’ We have more channels, tools, geographical spread, and diversity than ever before (and of course we can go a lot further with that last one). We get to work with more great brands and encourage more meaningful social behaviours. We have unparalleled and intelligent technology helping us every day. And we can choose to talk to millions of people at a time, or just one, directly to their face on a device held in their hands

What’s missing is the swagger we used to have. The self-belief. The knowledge that nothing changes the world like an idea, and our ideas can be pretty brilliant.

I still get goosebumps when I see something I contributed to on a poster, or TV, or in my feed, or mocked by my daughter, but I’m not sure enough of the rest of us feel that way anymore.

CS: If you could wave your magic wand, what one thing would you change about the industry?"

SG: Its own self-belief.

CS: And what are you most looking forward to in your next adventure?

People and creativity, and fresh challenges.