Founder & CD at White Bear 🐻‍❄️ | Top 22 Female Founder 2022 ⚡️| Small Agency of the year 2022 🥇| CP Top 5 Agencies in UK ✏️ | Speaker and Host 🎤 | 16x Award winner 2022 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

Kelly Mackenzie is a two-time founder, creative director, and unapologetic brand obsessive. She leads White Bear, the award-winning creative agency with studios in London, Dublin, and South America, recognised as Agency of the Year 2022 and winner of multiple DBA, Transform, Pent, Mobius, IDI, Creativepool, and Red Dot awards for work with brands like Red Bull, Netflix, Bold Bean, Tom Parker Creamery, and The Kerry Group.

She’s also the founder of People Like Me – a growing community for women in marketing to make real, meaningful connections in person, cutting through the algorithm and digital noise to create friendships, share challenges, and help each other shine.

Named one of Startup Magazine’s Top 22 Women of 2022 and a Creativepool Leader of 2023, Kelly is passionate about design thinking, education, and championing women in leadership. She has lectured at IADT and NUA, served on the board of The Big Idea, and mentored start-ups with Bethnal Green Ventures, Enterprise Nation, and SeedLegals.

Her philosophy? Build unforgettable brands, disrupt industries, and make people feel something – and have the craic while doing it.

Learn more at 
http://www.whitebearstudio.com
http://www.peoplelikeme.io


Subscribe to our newsletter at: https://mailchi.mp/whitebearstudio/newsletter
Or contact me directly at kelly@whitebearstudio.com

Kelly Mackenzie 🐻‍❄️

Founder & CEO of Quantum - a brand experience marketing agency. 

I founded Quantum in 2002 to create an agency where bold ideas and behavioural thinking lead the work. 

Since then, we’ve grown into a 50-strong team, creating campaigns that connect with people emotionally, culturally and commercially. Everything we do is designed to make people feel something and then act on it. 

We’ve partnered with some of the world’s most recognised brands, including Peroni, Heinz, Takis and more. And we’ve built a culture that prioritises smart thinking, relentless creativity and a standard that challenges how we do everything - to change the way people think, feel and act. 

I’d love to chat: 📩 debbie@wearequantum.co.uk | 🖥 wearequantum.co.uk

Debbie Wheeler

A pop-up that only serves one coffee and tells you to f*ck off if you want anything else - genius 👏

It might sound provocative, but I think it’s a brilliant response to how exhausting choice has become.

We’ve reached a point where brands think more options mean better service. But instead of feeling empowered by choice, people just feel tired.

Flat White or F*ck Off does the opposite. One product, no debate, no decision fatigue. The brand takes responsibility, and it becomes one decision made on your behalf and one less thing for you to think about.

It’s decisive, and it shows they’re clear about what they’re good at and confident enough to stand behind it.

Take it or leave it. It’s definitely not subtle, but it’s very clear.

Founder & CEO at Quantum | 20+ years creating brand experiences that change the way people think, feel and act.

Quantum has officially joined Worldwide Partners, Inc. and I couldn't be prouder 👏

We've joined a global network of 95+ selected agencies to give our clients local intelligence and global scale and collaborate with the best independent agencies worldwide.

The last few years at Quantum have been relentless in the best way. Bigger ambition, braver ideas and higher expectations of ourselves and each other. And today feels like a moment that recognises that.

Joining WPI is our commitment to playing bigger, thinking wider and raising the bar for our clients, whilst we continue to challenge convention, shift behaviour and rewrite the ordinary.

I'm excited to see where this takes our work, the team and the brands who trust us 🚀

Dr Pepper just turned a TikToker’s viral jingle into an actual campaign and then paid her for it.

This might be one of my favourite brand moments I’ve seen in a while, because it was unplanned and completely chosen by the people, and Dr Pepper understood that their only job was to recognise the moment and stand behind it.

No polishing it or recreating it in a boardroom with layers upon layers of approval. Just moving at the speed of culture and giving credit where credit was due.

And that takes a level of confidence that a lot of brands still don’t have.

But part of what modern brand ownership looks like is knowing when to let someone else be the hero of your brand.

What makes the Lacoste padel court activation in Courchevel so compelling isn’t just the setting, it’s the intent behind it.

Putting padel courts on the side of a mountain is, on the surface, a striking juxtaposition. But this is less about novelty and visual shock value and more about reframing heritage in an unexpected but entirely credible way, and I think it's absolutely brilliant 👏

Lacoste hasn’t parachuted into Alpine culture to chase relevance. Instead, it’s embedded its own DNA into a new context that mirrors the brand’s evolution: technical, premium, confident and comfortable operating at the intersection of sport, fashion and lifestyle.

The location of the courts being on a mountain matters because Courchevel signals performance, elevation and exclusivity, so by placing padel there, Lacoste is subtly signalling to its audience that the sport doesn't belong to one surface or season - it belongs wherever excellence does.

And what I think is particularly smart is the restraint. There was no big over-explanation or gimmick to compete with the landscape, the idea is strong enough to let the environment do half the work.

For me, it’s a brilliant example of how modern brand experiences win:

- By relocating heritage instead of borrowing culture
- By earning presence instead of shouting for attention
- And by placing ideas better instead of trying to do more

It's such a great example of how the best brand activations feel less like a marketing moment and more like brand truths, just expressed somewhere new.

I’ve seen a lot of brands switching things up recently with new campaigns or aesthetics, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But sometimes I think it overlooks one of the strongest influences on consumer decision making…

Familiarity.

Because in high-pressure, high-choice environments, consumers don’t always gravitate towards the ‘best’ or ‘newest’ option, they gravitate to the one they know.

That’s the psychology of familiarity bias. And for brands, that plays a role in getting a head start when it comes to who gets chosen and who doesn’t:

→ Kraft Heinz hasn’t touched their label design in decades. That green ketchup era? It didn’t last because people wanted the red one they grew up with.

→ Nike has evolved its product range and spokespeople, but it’s also been saying ‘Just Do It’ since 1988, and it still has the same effect.

→ McDonald's has introduced new menus and rebranded stores, but they never messed with the golden arches. They’ve even cropped the logo in half for some campaigns and still own it. That’s how hard familiarity works when you earn it.

Compare that to when Tropicana changed its logo in 2009 and sales dropped 20% within two months because people didn’t recognise the product on the shelf - that’s $30 million down the drain.

Choosing to stay familiar taps into one of the most powerful behavioural triggers we have for consumers because it tells our brains: you’ve seen this before, trust it, go with it.

The lesson isn’t to avoid change, you just have to make sure that you know which bits you can afford to change and which bits you can’t afford to lose.

Consistency 

Experiential marketing is one of the most powerful tools in a brand’s kit, but it’s also one of the hardest to prove ROI on.

That creates tension, because you can create something unforgettable, but without hard metrics, it’s harder to sell than other channels. And for a long time, brand experience has been seen as something that’s ‘nice to have’. A bold idea that might win a few awards, but it’s also the first to get cut when the budget gets tight.

That only changes when you can show it performs like any other media channel.

And that’s exactly why we built our own measurement tool at Quantum - ‘Return on Experience’.

And it gives clients the kind of data they can take into the boardroom, because:

→ We built a matrix that measures real consumer behaviour.

→ We used media benchmarking (like cost-per-view) to give experiential moments equivalent value.

→ We proved that live experiences can compete with digital on conversion, and outperform it on memorability.

It’s helped us turn brand activations into brand investment decisions, and it’s helped our clients defend their budget in boardrooms that care about returns.

The best ideas will stay ideas if you can’t prove their impact.

HelloFresh turning Waterloo Station into a working family kitchen is one of those ideas that looks simple, but is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Because in this moment, commuters are on autopilot. Headphones in, eyes down and their brain running through emails, dinner plans, logistics and everything else.

And right in the middle of that stress loop, HelloFresh drops in the one thing almost everyone is thinking about but hasn’t dealt with yet - dinner.

The activation features a real family cooking and eating together, a contrast that completely interrupts the station's routine and replaces it with something recognisable and human.

You don’t need to explain the product, and there’s no hard sell because the offering is playing out right in front of you.

It’s a really clever combination of tech and human experience in a relevant and disruptive way, and although it would have been easy for them do something way more obvious, this one absolutely nailed it!

A brilliant example of brand behaviour that shows up with the right idea at the exact moment people are most open to it.

🔗 We've broken down this campaign, along with a few others that caught our attention. Get the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/ewwVE5n3

Most people I know could sing the Go Compare jingle off the top of their heads. But could you name their last campaign?

Most campaigns rely on being seen. But jingles are built to be remembered with your eyes closed.

Sound is one of the strongest sensory triggers we have. It embeds into our memory in a way that visuals alone can’t.

It taps straight into our long-term memory through the emotional and associative parts of the brain, and becomes muscle memory to the point where you don’t have to try and remember it, because your brain has already logged it.

And yet, lots of brands still ignore it in favour of fighting for visual space in some of the most crowded and oversaturated channels on earth.

It’s not to say that every brand needs a jingle. But it does mean they should be thinking about how they sound.

Even if it’s just the sound associated with a certain brand interaction, sound is one of the most underused tools for memory, emotion and recall.

And when the competition is forgotten the second someone scrolls, that’s a serious advantage.

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The Battle

Kelly Mackenzie 🐻‍❄️

Debbie Wheeler

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Debbie Wheeler's LinkedIn Performance

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