In this episode of The Digital Edge, host Mark Reed-Edwards sits down with Amy Crowther, President, Americas for Incubeta, to explore the evolving landscape of digital marketing. The conversation dives deep into the intersection of AI and humanity, discussing why true digital transformation requires moving beyond silos toward total connectivity. Amy explains how brands can navigate the “messy starting point” of AI integration by focusing on systems, road-mapping, and foundational data.
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Mark Reed-Edwards: This is the Digital Edge from Incubeta. I’m Mark Reed-Edwards. This podcast is about how you can balance technology and humanity. How, as AI eats the world, you can integrate efficiency with empathy. We’ll talk with leaders from Incubeta and across the industry as we traverse the digital edge into tomorrow’s world.
On today’s episode, we’re joined by Amy Crowther, President, Americas for Incubeta, a position she just started after being Chief Client Officer and Managing Director. She says her focus is building an agency and team fit for the future: integrated, AI-powered, and relentlessly centered on clients and profitable growth.
Amy, welcome to The Digital Edge.
Amy Crowther: Thank you, Mark. Great to be here.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Can you share a bit about your career journey and how you came to Incubeta?
Amy Crowther: Definitely not a linear path, I would say. So I started out back in the UK. Didn’t go to college. Didn’t know what I wanted to do and fell into market research and finance at the time, which was a little random. A lot of working with brands on focus groups and just understanding why people do what they do with advertising and choose certain things.
That was kind of where I got started. I moved to Australia and it was my first role in the media industry, at a media agency. I joined Aegis Media, which then became Dentsu, predominantly working across some of their creative agencies from a finance and business perspective. And then, working with media teams, I could see that it looked a little bit more fun over there, the media side of the industry and strategy and what was going on.
I quickly dived out of finance and into the media agency. I started working on some brands locally in the Melbourne market, some government accounts, which was really amazing, and then moved into a strategy role. So I started digital trafficking campaigns all the way through to doing the strategic planning for some of these brands.
A really good learning curve and insight into a lot of behavior change campaigns. And I still believe Australia is one of the best markets to learn. At the time, 24 million people, so not huge budgets. You really learn how to use it effectively to get the result that you need.
Moved into that and really helped brands either launch in the APAC market or launch in Australia. So it was a really good learning curve across a few different categories. And then I moved to the U.S. and I joined IPG, where I got my first taste of really building an agency with Reprise Media, exploring how we could build a performance agency into more of a direct agency and scaling that globally. So I led strategy and media there and we won some big accounts globally, which was great. And then I really liked that kind of “build” aspect of things in the industry. I gave independence a try, so I moved over to Jellyfish, which at the time was really finding its footing in the U.S., with some big global brands. And we built out their strategic practice there and the media planning practice to go and win some really large clients and eventually to the point where Brandtech bought them, which brings me to Incubeta.
I got introduced to Incubeta and at that time thought, “Oh, I’ve got one more build in me.” It was at a really interesting stage as an agency and had all the right ingredients and a really good team and culture. Yeah, I’ve been here almost three years now.
And a lot of change over that time. I’m excited for where we’re headed.
Mark Reed-Edwards: What a journey, literally around the world.
Amy Crowther: Yeah.
Mark Reed-Edwards: The name of this podcast is The Digital Edge, and I like to ask people: How do you set yourself up to have a digital edge?
Amy Crowther: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think my answer is really: I surround myself with smarter people than I am, really smart people, for a couple of different reasons. I think, one, just the pace of change in digital and AI and innovation in the work that we do is just so fast and so advanced now that the depth of expertise that you need, it’s no longer just about media or creative.
It really is about systems and connectivity and foundations of a business. A lot of the work we do is as much organizational change as it is advertising these days. And so you need deep expertise for that. And I don’t have that, and I would get very tied up if I tried. I’m a strategist at heart and I connect the dots and think holistically. And so having those people around me that can think deeply to be able to see where we’re headed and add that value is, for me, really critical.
Mark Reed-Edwards: It’s not a go-it-alone kind of thing, right?
Amy Crowther: Definitely not. It’s just too much.
Mark Reed-Edwards: You need a team and you need cooperation and teamwork to get anywhere these days.
Amy Crowther: You really do. I think that the combination of expertise that you need on any client project or initiative today just far exceeds where it’s ever been. And so really being clear about where your skills are and where they end and where you need somebody else is a really key element in doing things successfully.
Mark Reed-Edwards: You mentioned the term we all hear these days, AI, and I’m interested in your take on the secret to success for an AI-enabled organization and how Incubeta supports that strategically.
Amy Crowther: Yeah, it definitely is the word of the moment. Success in this space really comes from connectivity, first and foremost. I think there’s been this pendulum swinging for decades now between silos and integration, things being pulled apart and then put back together again.
And I think that’s stopped and we really are in a moment of integration. For any organization to use AI in any meaningful way, it needs to be looking at something that makes sense. The inputs, the foundational elements to it have to be there. And I think it’s such a messy starting point for so many businesses. So that’s really where we are focused, is on that journey, getting brands out of that starting point. I think so much of the conversation can be around the shiny things and how you can move at speed and create a million assets and do things faster, but there’s a reality that if the right hand isn’t talking to the left hand, everything will fall over pretty quickly.
We really focus on that journey and with marketers that acknowledge that it is a journey and are really looking just for help in how to get out of that starting gate and connect their media agency, their data agency, their creative, their in-house teams, everything everywhere.
That needs to be brought together in some way before they can really accelerate. So definitely the place where we’re leaning in.
Mark Reed-Edwards: That first step is almost the scariest part, right? And then once you’ve taken that step and you’ve committed to the journey, it doesn’t get easier, but you know where you’re going.
Amy Crowther: Yeah, exactly. Then it really does become systems thinking and roadmapping, and I think it’s easy to make that start. But what comes next? There’s always something next. So roadmapping to see progression over time is the key.
And a lot of the work we do, we try and show that to marketers and have them make that really visible. That’s what guides their conversations with their CEOs and CFOs for long-term investment in some of these programs.
Mark Reed-Edwards: The word silos came up and we see that throughout business, on the agency side, on the corporate side, that there are silos that have been built up over years. One area where we see it is a tension between data and creative and they’re two separate operations often.
What’s the best way to get them to work well together?
Amy Crowther: Yeah, it’s definitely a challenge of the moment. I agree, there is a tension. Creative has actually always been data-driven in a way. You think about research and insights that guide creative work, but before that was often done with a question in mind, a hypothesis. And now I think what we find is it’s just data. There’s just so much data, so many metrics, everything we can measure. Just in a conversation with a client and feature-level data that you can look at around soundtrack and AI voiceover. And unless you’ve got a question to begin with and a hypothesis, it’s just noise.
So I think the direction, at least my perspective, is using data in the creative space as an extension of strategy and as a feedback loop as well. Because otherwise it’s just too much. It’s funny actually, I also think it’s more important for media to adapt than it is for the creative space with the data signals that are coming through. The three things coming together, that’s really where you can see some progress. So it’s an interesting space.
Mark Reed-Edwards: I often think of this DIKW pyramid: data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. Data is great, but make it into information and it’s contextualized, and then knowledge gives you an understanding, and then wisdom is the ultimate goal, right?
Amy Crowther: Yeah, it really is. I try a lot not to get sucked in too deep in those kinds of thoughts and conversations, both internally and externally, honestly. I think we have so much access to that information today but it can overwhelm everything.
And I fundamentally believe that marketing hasn’t really changed. How humans behave and make decisions, that hasn’t shifted. How advertising is bought, how we meet people, how we show up, all that’s changed. But getting people to do things and decide and think of you a certain way fundamentally hasn’t.
There’s a grounding that we need as marketers to remember that and not get too overwhelmed, and really actually find where that wisdom is versus just the information.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, people make decisions based on visceral feelings inside their chest.
Amy Crowther: Exactly. And habitual things and things that are familiar and nostalgic, those things that drive us in everyday decisions haven’t changed at all and won’t. The mechanics of how we do things as advertisers have massively shifted, but how the human brain works hasn’t.
So there’s a truth to that, that I think is meaningful to remember when we’re in our world of looking at dashboards and data feeds and signals.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, that on the other end of that, there is a human being making a decision.
It’s not just ones and zeros. The way in which we communicate, the advertising medium has changed, but the way people react hasn’t, and the ideas are still there.
Amy Crowther: Yeah, the ideas are critical still. That is what drives profits for brands, establishing in the minds of consumers in their decision-making. I don’t know about you. I was watching, I won’t call out the streaming platform, but last night, and some ads are terrible. And you can see that they’re AI, you can see that they’re probably data-driven.
But they just lost all this proven research of storytelling and how you connect with a human being and things that have been built into the creative process and have proven to be true for the past hundred years. It’s a risk that we lose some of that, especially where AI and so much data can come into creative. It’s about using that in the right places and not losing the things that are meaningful to brands and consumers.
Mark Reed-Edwards: And it’s interesting, there’s so much media to consume now, whether you’re on YouTube or listening to podcasts. I think some of the most effective advertising is the host-read ads, where the context isn’t broken. And it’s just interesting to hear the perspective of a host read an ad for whatever it is. They sound good, but are they effective?
Amy Crowther: Yeah, I agree. That’s a fundamental principle of media planning: context and content and consumer, those three things aligned make for a good experience. I fully agree. And some of the simplest ideas are executed like that.
Top of mind yesterday for me was the Calm app. Their media strategy goes for high-intensity sports events, and they interject the ad with a moment of calm, seascapes or rain or something like that. I’ve never worked with that brand. I don’t know the media strategy. But that moment of cut-through in a context that’s really true to that brand, that feeling of seeing that ad for me just because it cuts through, it really does matter.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Some ads can cut through the clutter, but then when it’s over, you’re like, was that for a car company? You don’t really know sometimes.
Amy Crowther: Memory is everything. Trying to establish the brand in the minds of consumers, that takes time, it takes repetition. The idea of ad fatigue is a contentious one. Some of the best and most successful brands in the world have used the same ad for the past 50 years.
Building memory and cutting through, I think just as things do get more, just more media, more noise, as you said, that becomes even more important, frankly.
Mark Reed-Edwards: So when you bring data and creative together, what’s the discussion like? You’ve got Problem A, some company that’s trying to break through. I don’t know what it would be. What’s the initial discussion? You’ve got some data points. And you’ve got creative champing at the bit to do something creative, obviously.
How do you bring them together to attack one problem?
Amy Crowther: We make this our starting point. Some other agencies do this, but it’s a little different from some others where you just hand over access to everything. We really start with that: what is the hypothesis, what’s the test before you do it?
Because otherwise it’s just data for data’s sake. An example that we had with a client at the end of last year, that in their ads, a really successful campaign, and it was for a luggage brand. And they’d had this ongoing debate internally between their creative team and media team of whether to, obviously it showed a person holding the bag, whether to have their face in it or not.
If their face came in, would it distract the user? Did it add to the ad? Did it not add to the ad? And, great hypothesis, really good starting point. And so we focused on that. We looked at eye tracking across a number of different ads and the actual performance from a media response and leading indicator perspective, to see what happened.
And after a test we ran for a couple of months, we were able to answer, yeah, the minute you put a face in the ad, all attention goes to the person, not the product. And it had a direct impact. It was an eight-times drop in actual response from a click or an engagement perspective.
Guardrail set: no faces in ads, only hands and using the luggage as they go.
Mark Reed-Edwards: So then creative takes that. And do they then test different kinds of compositions around the photography or the video?
Amy Crowther: Yeah. So we did that within the testing. That is one of the really good uses of AI and AI-enabled production operating systems, that you can scale something like that quickly. So we took their standard assets, some of which had faces, some of which didn’t, but all on brand.
And we scaled that out within these testing parameters to have very clear version one through 10, let’s say. And then rolled those out in media to get live feedback on the ad. We have a tool, a creative index tool, that allows us to do that. You can see in real time what the response is to that campaign and adjust the ad composition based on that.
But all intended to answer this one overarching hypothesis, which for that brand we have then proven out has a direct impact on the effectiveness and the efficiency of their media buy. That as a testing parameter becomes really important because then it feeds back into their creative team, and that was an external partner that they had.
Mark Reed-Edwards: It’s really fascinating. Does this kind of work ever surprise you? Like you think that’s the obvious choice, and then you look at the results and you’re like, oh, it’s something that we didn’t expect?
Amy Crowther: Yeah, it definitely does. There’s something recently that has been not a huge surprise, but I think is interesting when I articulated it to some of our clients. When we start down the journey of data-driven creative and connect it to media, one of the first places we start in how can we make some incremental improvement is just bringing the consistency of the brand across all of their assets.
It sounds like an absolute no-brainer, right? That a brand would have the same look and feel across all of their ads, that is a 101 in consistency and, as you said, attributing the ad to the right car brand or the right healthcare brand. And so one of the things that we do, we often find that’s not the case when we can see everything, and that’s one of the first places we start, is just addressing that.
So we make everything consistent. What are the distinctive assets of the brand? What are the codes that are memorable? And we embed them in everything and then we push everything back live again. And just that action, consistency, has a four-to-six-times impact on media performance immediately, just from that small thing.
There’s so many things we can do and we can test, but even just being able to see the direct impact of doing something small like that is really interesting now that you’ve got this connectivity that’s happening and you can see actual real-time response.
Mark Reed-Edwards: That’s fascinating. It would be fun to do an episode where we just talk about that and maybe talk about some of the case studies, because I think that’s just really exciting to be able to make slight tweaks to change this, to change that and just see performance change so dramatically.
Amy Crowther: Yeah, there’s lots of them. I would love to.
Mark Reed-Edwards: I could go on and on about this, but for the next couple of questions, I want to learn a little bit about Amy the person. We learned a little bit at the start, but can you give me an example of when you failed and how it impacted your life?
Amy Crowther: Oof. Yeah. Trying to think on this one. One thing that comes to mind with this question that does stick with me is when I moved from Australia to the U.S. In Australia, I’d been with Dentsu and we already had a client and we were pitching to expand that client and it was a global pitch.
And it was one of the Fortune 100 brands. I was already working on the client and we’d already won the pitch locally in APAC. So when I moved to the U.S., actually my husband got recruited over to New York, so I was secondary in thinking about my career and just assumed that I would continue on and stay on this client.
I came to New York, and we had it set up that I was going to meet one of the U.S.-based clients on one of the brands. I went into the meeting and it just went awfully, 100 percent because I wasn’t prepared. I had no understanding or expectation around this brand and the legacy and the professionalism and the demand of this account.
It was really just a huge wake-up call. I didn’t get the position and I ended up going somewhere else. It was something that I had just taken for granted. Okay, I’m stepping out of one market into another market and there’s a huge learning curve with that that I need to get ready for.
Secondly, just how to approach things. I think being overly prepared for things has always stuck with me after that. But it just was a wake-up call in terms of how to approach things and especially the scale of the U.S. and what it means to work on some of these clients here.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Last time I was talking with Jonathan Greene and we agreed that self-awareness is really important. Maybe that one stumble, you’re aware of it so you can fix it going forward.
Amy Crowther: Yeah, I think that’s probably it. I never want to experience a meeting like that again. So I’m definitely aware of how that felt and carry that with me.
Mark Reed-Edwards: If you could share one piece of hard-earned wisdom you’ve learned over your career, what would it be? And maybe it’s related to what you just shared with me. But you have such a vast storehouse of knowledge and experience. I’d be interested to hear what you say about this.
Amy Crowther: Yeah, I think it is definitely related to that last question. I think it would really be, and this is not going to solve anybody’s imposter syndrome, least of all mine, but I think it would be: If you’re in the room, you deserve to be in the room. And I say that just because I’ve been in situations where you question your expertise or your experience on things and the people that are around you.
I think the more you’re exposed to, the more senior you get, obviously you get to meet and to do more and more heightened and high-pressure things. And I think that little devil on your shoulder that tells you that you’re not there or shouldn’t be in those rooms gets louder and louder in that.
In my day to day, I think back to all the experiences I’ve had and draw on those of when have I been in this situation before and how did that go? And I think remembering that you’re there and no one just goes and shows up at a meeting without being invited.
If you’re invited, it’s because you have something to add. Being self-aware and being genuine in those moments is really important, just as much as getting the experience of doing those things. I would say to anybody coming into the industry today, just go and try and do as many different things as you can.
Because the more experience you get, the stronger you are and the more you can hold your own in those moments as well.
Mark Reed-Edwards: I think that’s very profound advice. It’s something sometimes people don’t think of, that in fact you are there for a reason.
And your experience is the reason you’re in that room or doing that project. And we all have insecurities. But understanding that you’re there, you’re not just randomly chosen. You are actually there.
Amy Crowther: Yeah, especially today where it’s remote and no one just shows up on a video call unannounced. You get added to an invite or you get invited into a room. Taking that signal, that is the green light. You’re there because somebody else wants you there. And so remembering that gives you an air of confidence and just a bit of strength in your own approach to things.
Mark Reed-Edwards: I think that’s a wonderful way to close this out, Amy. I really appreciate you joining me on The Digital Edge.
Amy Crowther: Thanks so much, Mark. This was great.
Mark Reed-Edwards: We really dug deep with Amy on this episode. I was fascinated by her discussion of data and AI and how it can be an enabler for creative. Can’t wait to have her back to look closely at more case studies. AI is changing the game and Amy is leading the charge. On the next episode of The Digital Edge, I’ll be joined by Tom Williams, Incubeta Middle East and North Africa’s Creative Director. We’ll explore creative work in the age of AI, taking a closer look at new technology, output and performance, and how the human touch finds its place in all of it. That’s on the next Digital Edge. I’m Mark Reed-Edwards. I hope you can join us then.
Speakers:Â Host: Mark Reed-Edwards; Guest: Amy Crowther