Beth Bentley on Risk & Culture

Beth Bentley is a brand strategist with 20 years' experience advising major brands. She founded Tomorrowism consultancy after serving as Chief Strategy Officer at Portas, SVP Strategy at VICE Media's VIRTUE, and Executive Head of Strategy at Wieden + Kennedy, where she led work for Nike and Honda. Her Substack Pattern Recognition is amazing.

So I have a question. I start all of my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. And it's a big question, which is why I use it. But it's because it's big. I tend to over explain it like I'm doing now. And the question is, and you can answer any way, answer or not answer in any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

It's just a good question. Well, I on a very simple level, I come from Wales. I'm from a tiny town near the Welsh coast that no one's ever heard of. And I'm from a family of obviously Welsh descent, but also Irish descent. Many people from my part of Wales originated in Ireland.

So, yeah, very Celtic, I suppose, is my background. Certainly not a metropolitan city, living sort of childhood in any way. In terms of the family that I come from, it's a very book-loving family culture.

It's not really the best way of thinking, in that there were books everywhere for me growing up. I remember being little and looking up, you know, and you look up at bookshelves, like in a bookstore in someone's house or in a library and thinking how massive the bookshelves were and how huge the books and how would I ever be good enough at reading to read them all and what were they all about? And I've always just, you know, found myself surrounded by words. My parents' walls were always lined with books.

They still are, actually. They stayed with me last week because it was half-term holidays in the UK. And I have two little girls, so they came to look after them for me while I was busy working. And they still, it's so cute, they start every day with a few rounds of Scrabble. Every single day, they can't not. They are so into it, into like linguistics and words and everything.

My mum was a journalist, so it obviously comes from there. And so am I, actually, by trade, as it were, back in the very beginning of my career. And actually, the first time I ever went anywhere unaccompanied by my parents was to the library. I remember my mum, my brother, who's a year old, and my mum gave us the library tickets, the old school pieces of paper. And we walked hand in hand to the library, which was one street away from our house, thinking about it. Maybe that's why they bought the house there in the first place.

But that was my first sense of freedom, you know, that was the thing that was worthy of my mum, like, you know, white knuckling of being scared that her two babies were being left, but she let us go to the library. So, yeah, that's my family background in my world.

But I suppose where I'm from in my life now, like in the industry, I'll tell you where I'm not from. You know, I'm not from, as I say, this kind of London creative industries culture. I had no connections at all to any of it. I didn't literally didn't speak the language of ad agencies, creative agencies, creative industries, brands at all.

And growing up as a young planner, I was a strategist forever in agencies. I was always quite conscious that I didn't look or sound like a lot of the other planners. In my day, it was very male.

It's quite a boys club, maybe a lot of the guys were older than me. I didn't speak or look in any way like they did. You know, I probably ruffled a few feathers, I'm sure. But I had amazing mentors, great bosses, and I learned from the best. So I suppose if you ask me where I come from professionally, I would probably say I grew up at Weiden & Kennedy. Like I am very much of the diaspora of the people who've passed through the doors of that place, you know.

But I spent time at Adam & Eve DDB, VICE, Portas. I spent a couple of days in Whitehall as a strategist. So I've had a bit of an unconventional journey. But yeah, my, I was very lucky to have formative years on and off for 11 years actually at Weiden & Kennedy London as a baby grad and then growing all the way up into an agency leadership team member. So that's where I'm from professionally, I would say, as a practitioner. Yeah.

What does it mean to be from Wales?

To not be centered, literally. I mean, our country is so little, but we don't have really any major commercial centers. We don't have any great commercial, sorry, cultural hubs, really, in terms of creative industries or film or music and that kind of thing.

Of course, there are umpteen creative individuals from Wales and the rest have been. But we don't have a focal point commercially or culturally, I would say. It's very dispersed. It's rural. It's beautiful. Some parts are very old fashioned and disconnected from the fast moving consumer culture that I live in now. But yeah, you're not from the center. You are literally from elsewhere. You're not from the margins, I would say, culturally in the UK.

Are there moments where you feel particularly Welsh? What your Welshness appears to you? Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Well, my accent will go more Welsh when I'm hanging out with my dad or other people. I will do that in the family. But my husband and I, we have a camper van that he renovated. It was a film production van that he turned into a sleeping thing, an old sort of black VW thing. And I feel very Welsh when we go out in that. And we go all around the coast. We take the surfboards on the roof. We pop the top. Our kids go out in the waves, in the wetsuits. We cook on campfire. We like going mostly to South Wales, actually, and Cornwall and Devon and all those places that maybe some people might have heard about in the UK.

And do you remember as a girl what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yeah, I think I wanted, I was so intrigued by the books and the writing. And I so, my mum and dad were very young when they had us. They met when they were 17 and 19 and then got married when my mum was 21, my dad was 23.

And then we came along very quickly, my brother and I. And so my mum was still quite young in her career when she was, when I was conscious and cognisant of what she was doing. So I would be being shushed in the other room while she was interviewing somebody on the old school phone and like taking notes in shorthand and transcribing quickly. And then filing her copy over the phone.

I would see that stuff happening. So I mean, she was still is. They both are my heroes. And I wanted to write like her and I wanted to write a book and I wanted to deal with words and be paid for my opinion and my ability to write and stuff. And so that was what I double down on. I've got double English lit English language degree.

I'm obsessed with this stuff. You know, you can tell from, you know, my living environments, my office, you know, I very much kind of got that gene. So I think when I was a little girl, I didn't know what it meant, but I wanted to write somehow for a living, I think.

Yeah. What when you say that you're obsessed with words, what do you what do you find? What do you find there? Like what I mean, I share this obsession with words. I remember there was a moment in a dark moment in my life, I found some weird comfort in a dictionary. Do you know what I mean? Like I enjoy words in a way that seems a little abnormal. When you're when you say that you're obsessed with words, what are you pointing at?

I don't know. I think it's my way of understanding the world. I think being from somewhere that's so rural and so perhaps in some ways disconnected culturally from kind of the center of things and the center of the action.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s in the UK, at least, I think that reading there's that phrase is now I'll probably butcher it, but that you can experience a thousand lifetimes through reading and actually understanding other people's experiences. Helps you to understand the world. And so I think I was just reading the world from the kitchen table in Wales in the middle of nowhere, I suppose.

As I grow older and I did which university did my English language and so on, everything that we learned was about that piece of writing, whether it was the poem or the book or the play or whatever it might be. It's a cultural artifact.

It could not have been written by that writer in any other way than it could have been in the cultural context that they're writing in. And this, for example, in post-colonial literature, this thought about writing back to the center and being in the margin, you know, like there was there was a way of thinking that informs a way of writing. And so now obviously that's in on a whole life of its own and into my sociological rabbit holes that I go down, of course. But yeah, I think it was about trying to make sense of the world through how other people made sense of their worlds, I think.

And sort of catch us up. Where are you now right now? Where are you and what are you doing? What keeps you busy?

Well, now I have stepped away from the agency, well, the kind of corporate, like I think we would say in the States, and I'm now an independent.

So I think it was maybe three, three and a half years ago, I stepped out of a chief strategy officer role and set up my own practice, my own strategic consultancy, which is called Tomorrowism. It's now evolved into a brand strategy and brand design c