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What Culture Looks Like Across BBH’s Teams
I DEEP DIVE INSIDER PROFILES
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BBH has spent more than four decades building around creative difference. The more interesting question today is how that belief shows up when different teams actually have to work together.
BBH has always had a clear idea of what it wants its work to do: find the zag when everyone else is zigging.
What matters inside the agency is how that instinct gets created in practice. Great creative work rarely starts and finishes inside one department. It develops through conversations between people looking at the same problem from completely different angles, and BBH has increasingly treated those relationships as part of the culture itself.
The underlying belief is straightforward. People should bring a point of view strong enough to improve the work, while being open enough for somebody else to change it.
That makes culture at BBH less about everyone thinking alike and more about creating the conditions for different disciplines to challenge each other productively. A strategist should make a creative idea sharper. A creative should push the strategy somewhere less predictable. Client leadership should protect the ambition of the work while making sure it survives contact with the real commercial problem.
That interaction has become particularly important as BBH thinks about what its culture needs to look like for a new generation of the agency.
In 2025, Bobbie Gannon and James Rice were promoted into newly created joint client managing director roles with an explicit brief that included nurturing BBH’s culture alongside growing the business. Gannon described creativity, clients and culture as deeply connected, with the quality of the work feeding the environment people want to be part of.
Their own partnership offers a useful example of how that works. Both have talked about the value of having another person around the table who will see the same question differently. Rice described it as having a “second brain” when looking at bigger decisions.
You see the same dynamic deeper inside the work.
BBH London’s Chief Creative Officer Felipe Serradourada Guimarães and Deputy Chief Strategy Officer Saskia Jones have worked at the agency for around 15 and 13 years respectively. Their creative-strategy relationship has sat behind work for brands including Tesco, Burger King and Paddy Power, and BBH continues to put significant emphasis on that point where strategic thinking meets the creative response.
That matters because “zag” only stays useful if it influences more than the final execution. BBH has long argued that different thinking needs to start upstream, while the problem is being defined. An unexpected campaign becomes much harder to produce if every decision that came before it followed the most conventional route. The agency’s own leadership writing has described part of the strategist’s job as giving people enough confidence to pursue an answer that might initially feel less obvious.
There is a cultural expectation inside that. People need enough conviction to put an unusual idea into the room, but not so much attachment that the idea cannot improve once other people get involved.
That is also why BBH’s culture cannot sit exclusively inside its creative department.
Its Homegrown programme gives early-career talent experience across the agency rather than introducing them to one isolated part of it. The six-month paid internship has included rotations through different disciplines, giving people an early understanding of how the agency actually comes together around the work.
Barn takes a different approach. The advertising school sits inside BBH’s working creative department and pays students the London Living Wage while they learn. BBH expanded the programme in 2025, with CEO Karen Martin describing investment in young talent as important to the future of the industry.
Both programmes reveal something useful about the agency’s view of culture: it is easier to understand the work when you can get close to the people actually making it.
The same principle applies to inclusion.
When Guimarães spoke about developing creative talent, he made the connection directly to the stories advertising produces. If an agency wants those stories to feel authentic, he argued, they need to come from people with different experiences and different ways of seeing the world.
At BBH, bringing different people into the building only solves part of that problem. The harder part is creating an environment where those perspectives can actually influence the answer.
That is where the everyday culture between teams matters.
A strategy meeting where one person can question the premise. A creative review where an unfinished thought is given enough room to become something stronger. A client team willing to protect an idea that does not look like the category norm. Those interactions are difficult to turn into formal culture initiatives, but they determine whether an agency built around difference can continue producing genuinely different work.
There is also an important degree of realism in BBH’s approach.
Advertising is a pressured industry. Teams work against deadlines and client expectations, and disagreement is part of the process. The goal is not to remove that tension. It is to make sure the tension improves the work rather than simply making collaboration harder.
BBH’s current leadership structure reflects that idea. Gannon and Rice have shared responsibility around clients and culture. Guimarães’ expanded role across the UK and Ireland includes shaping the creative team as well as the output. Strategy and creative leadership remain closely connected because one is expected to influence the other.
The agency is also thinking about that culture at a moment when AI is changing how advertising gets made. BBH’s leadership has been clear that technology can improve the process, but original thinking remains the part it wants to protect. Rice has described human creativity, craft and taste as central to what BBH contributes, with technology serving that work rather than replacing it.
If ideas are the thing BBH wants to compete on, then the environment around those ideas matters. People need to feel able to disagree. Different disciplines need access to one another early enough to change the direction of the work. Junior talent needs enough exposure to understand how the pieces connect. Leaders need to protect difference without turning “zag” into something people repeat because it is written on the wall.
After more than 40 years, BBH does not need another definition of its culture.
The more important work is keeping its original belief useful: putting different people around the same problem and giving them enough confidence in their own perspective to make the answer better.
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