By Zoe Eagle, CEO, Iris London
You cannot change a business without changing its culture. What I've come to believe is that managing change itself is close to the whole job of a creative agency CEO these days, because in the current business environment, change has become the only constant we can rely upon.
Culture isn't a values poster. It's the sum of how people behave: what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, what gets quietly punished. Announce new values as often as you like. If the system keeps rewarding the old behaviours, the old culture wins.
Cheil's Iris London is a useful case study for agencies everywhere, and especially for the wider Cheil network, because we've all been dealing with the same thing lately: real economic, cultural and technological change happening all at once, with very little precedent to lean on. I've spent the last 20 months leading that kind of change here, built around a simple transformation plan: Rebrand, Reshape, Rebuild.
Rebrand
We started with the most visible layer: a new identity, and a rallying cry, Participate or Perish, aimed as much inward as outward. It mattered more than it sounds: a level-up in confidence, and a clear answer to what kind of business we intended to be. But a rebrand is the easy part. The real work came next.
Reshape
The organisation we inherited at Iris London had taken shape through day-to-day necessity, rather than any deliberate plan.
My view is that you should work out what a business is already best at, and shape from there. We used the two best pieces of work already in the business as the blueprint.
Samsung Skate found a white-space opportunity in the client's own metrics, turned into a disruptive campaign that won conquest share with an audience they were losing. Beiersdorf's Nivea uncovered a significant missed opportunity in uncaptured search traffic, winning Performance Marketing honours at the UK Marketing Society Awards and a Grand Prix shortlisting. In both cases, we'd found a data-validated issue and opportunity, then used genuinely incisive cultural insight to meet it. The creative approach in each case was driven by the solution, not the channel, pulling capability together from across the business to create disproportionate impact. In short, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. These two examples showed us exactly how to shape a business that could actually deliver Participate or Perish: impact through an integrated approach, rooted in culture, with the creative flair to be unmissable.
So, we rebuilt the leadership team to be genuinely integrated across every discipline rather than channel heads protecting their own patch. Data went into the centre of strategy, and we invested properly in creative capability itself: design, creative, social, PR, building both the thinking and the performance behind it.
While structure and shape are vital, they're all in service of what actually makes agencies valuable: our ability to nurture creative talent that produces brilliant, provocative, unmissable thinking in the first place. So across all of this, we were careful to embed a culture of psychological safety, experimentation, curiosity, fun, and permission to fail.
Rebuild
Rebuilding meant relearning our pitching approach and being honest about where we were strong. What became undeniable was that we were winning by integrating capability across disciplines. Every pitch Iris London has won this year has been won on that basis, which showed us where to double-down. We don't beat specialists at their own game. We change the game.
Reward what you want repeated
None of this holds unless the system rewards the behaviour you want repeated. We rebuilt our Talent Review systems around three principles. Passion: real drive to change the outcome, not just follow instructions. Proactivity: understanding the vision well enough to pursue it unprompted. Performance: getting honest about impact. The business had valued longevity and loyalty above almost everything, so we needed to pivot immediately to focus on impact and quality. Our new KPIs focused on client revenue growth, product excellence and productivity.
The leader has to change too
My hardest lesson has been personal, as in times of transformation leadership itself has to evolve. Early on, a CEO needs to be directive: making calls, creating clarity where none exists. Left unchecked, that behaviour becomes the thing holding the business back. I ask myself constantly what the organisation needs from me now, and whether the way I'm leading still builds the business I want.
Other leaders are vital here. In my case, the broader Cheil community has helped me keep changing in the way the organisation has needed, through fresh ideas and real support. Often the best thing a leader can do is simply ask for advice.
Culture isn't what you write down. It's what actually happens. My job is to build the structures, the momentum and the permission that let the business move the way I want it to, and then keep re-embedding that culture into every behaviour. The change isn't stopping any time soon, and neither can we.