The Pace of Change

We are living through one of the most exciting times for the agency world—perhaps only comparable to the era when the very first agencies emerged and the business model gradually took shape. For decades, advertising agencies remained remarkably stable in their structures and ways of working. It wasn’t until the arrival of the internet that this stability began to unravel. Today, the entire industry feels caught in a constant swirl of change.
The pace of transformation brings countless opportunities to learn. It has consequences for how organizations are run, but it can also serve as a powerful incentive to take all that accumulated experience and channel it into founding something new. That’s exactly what Guido Woska did, as he explained when I spoke with him in episode #111.

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After selling the strategy and design agency Designit in 2015, Guido Woska first moved to the client side, joining Lufthansa. At the end of 2019, together with former Designit colleagues, he founded the strategic design consultancy Manyone, where he now serves as Chief Client Officer. The founding team also included David Fellah, Designit’s co-founder and former CEO, who is now Manyone’s co-CEO.
The idea behind founding the strategy-driven creative agency was the belief that there’s a market for a relatively balanced combination of design-led strategy and execution. For pragmatic reasons, Manyone was founded in Copenhagen—but from the very beginning it launched with global ambitions. Today, the agency has grown to more than 300 people across 15 offices in 10 countries, five of them in Scandinavia.

Manyone’s global outlook is rooted in the conviction that the agency needs to be wherever clients and talent are: as global and as diverse as possible, in terms of both cultural background and market access. The aim is to build the most attractive platform possible for talent—one that offers personal growth, broader responsibilities, challenging projects, and new knowledge.
That platform isn’t just defined by workflows and processes; it’s equally a matter of culture. This is where Rasmus Møller Sørensen, Manyone’s Chief Experience Officer, comes in. The cultural building blocks range from everyday interactions to a shared understanding of responsibility and leadership, as well as sparring models designed to foster and support talent development. At its core, it’s about a framework of values and a growth path that employees can clearly see and experience.

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That also includes transparency around the growth strategy and the benefits it brings—both for individuals and for the team. Manyone reinvests all of its profits directly into growth, since organic expansion, like growth through acquisitions, ultimately needs to be financed. The same principle applies to investments in people. Manyone prides itself on investing heavily in its talent—a commitment reflected in low turnover. In this sense, the growth of the company and the growth of the individual can go hand in hand.
Since its founding just four and a half years ago, the company has also expanded through a series of acquisitions. Most recently, it added Mano, a Copenhagen-based marketing agency. In 2023, Manyone acquired the design studio Questtonó Brooklyn in New York and strengthened its Scandinavian presence by acquiring Topp, a Swedish studio specializing in design, innovation, strategy, and technology. On the management side, Søren Lehmann Poulsen oversees M&A activity.

It’s not uncommon for key people to leave a company after an acquisition. The founders of Manyone know from their own experience just how crucial cultural fit is. Does the team align? Does the agency—or company—match in terms of values, people, and vision? Is there shared understanding on financial matters and on people & culture? Only when these questions can be answered with a yes does Manyone move forward with an acquisition.
What makes a target interesting are either skills the agency doesn’t yet have, or a presence in a market where Manyone is not yet active or wants to strengthen its position. More than once, however, they have pulled out of acquisition processes because the cultural fit wasn’t there. And since M&A, when carried out with the necessary diligence, is a complex undertaking, two people on the extended leadership team handle it day to day. After all, integration after an acquisition requires just as much attention.
Manyone has a relatively large partner board for a company of its size, with partners holding stakes in the agency. The aim of this model is to tie key people to the company—beyond the founding team itself. The result is a broad and diverse understanding of growth at the leadership level, enriched by different motivations and goals.

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Guido explains the balance between strategy and execution with the example of an employer branding project for Austrian Airlines: more than 80 percent of what was ultimately implemented had already taken shape during the strategy phase through prototyping. This gave the client an early, tangible sense of the strategic direction, enabling faster and better decisions.
These kinds of agile working methods are familiar from software development or under the buzzword Lean Startup. With ongoing digitalization, they’re now spreading into other fields. The more digital the outcome, the simpler and more efficient prototyping, testing, learning, and iteration become. Stronger prototypes lead to better decisions, because abstract strategies become far easier for client management to grasp once they’re supported by concrete designs

The thinking behind this is that strategy and design can no longer be separated from the execution of a product, service, or brand. One cannot succeed without the other. From Manyone’s perspective, this is also what the future of client–agency collaboration looks like. It marks a break from the old waterfall model, where a strategy was first developed, debated, and formally approved by management before finally moving into execution.
At today’s pace of change, by the time that process is complete, the strategy is already outdated. That’s why strategy, design, and execution need to move closer together. This also forces strategy consultants out of what Guido calls the “comfort zone of irresponsibility.” If strategy is separated from execution, each side can always point the finger at the other: Was the strategy flawed, or was it simply poorly executed?
Which brings us to measurability. Clients increasingly expect agencies to reduce complexity, address the pressure of time and budgets, and ultimately deliver measurable results. Simply billing for hours worked will no longer suffice. New KPIs will soon replace the old, familiar compensation models.