How Chris Lowery led indie agency Chase Design Group through loss and global growth
Plus: FTC restrictions for Omnicom and IPG, falsified Cannes entries, and DEI pullbacks at Ogilvy
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Hello and welcome to Agency Business for the week of June 30, 2025. Episode 28 is available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Follow Agency Business on Instagram.
Inside this week’s episode
Chris Lowery had worked alongside legendary designer Margo Chase for nearly two decades when she died suddenly in a 2017 aviation accident. Overnight, Chris became the person responsible for leading Chase Design Group—through a moment of grief, a leadership transition, and ultimately, global expansion.
This week on Agency Business, we talk about what came next. Chris shares how the agency preserved its creative center and grew from a three-person studio in Silver Lake in 1998 to a global design firm with offices in L.A., New York, and London today. We also talk about succession, founder culture, creative consistency, and why he believes you can’t just step out of the work and into management.
News of the week: Discussed in Episode 28
MW: This was very much in line with what The New York Times already reported, and so it’s not much of a surprise. However, it’s still somewhat shocking that the FTC would effectively limit the First Amendment rights of a business. On the other hand, whether or not any decree were in place, it’s likely that agencies—not only Interpublic and Omnicom—were already treading very carefully in the world of brand safety over the last few months, and so the decree probably doesn’t have much of a practical impact relative to where the industry was already going.
It’s also important to put some global context on this matter: agencies operate in countries around the world where their actions and ability to “speak” are constrained by governments. So it’s not as if a compromise of this nature is out of character for these companies. We’d further argue that companies should stand up for the issues they truly believe in or rely on, but that doesn’t mean they will stand up for every issue. For publishers of content and law firms, freedom of speech is existential. But if we see agency holding companies as the supply chain–supporting, business-process–outsourcing marketing services that they are, whether they can freely make company-wide brand safety recommendations or not is not the biggest issue.
FFM: This is a massive deal. This FTC stipulation seems entirely related to what went down with GARM earlier this year. It’s important to understand that IPG and Omnicom have denied “boycotting” partisan advertisers in the past. One of the FTC’s conditions is that the combined Omnicom-IPG entity can direct money to partisan platforms if the client requests it—or hold back their investment if the client requests it. Ostensibly, this is how it’s been operating so far. So…Why did the FTC include this condition?
If a client comes to an agency and says, “Hey, I want a block list—I don’t want my advertising to end up on Breitbart,” for example, that’s something the agency acts on and will continue to act on. But what’s important to remember is that programmatic advertising happens so quickly that it’s very hard to control where your ads end up if you don’t have a block list in place.
Block lists don’t exist because they’re strongly partisan in nature. They’re to keep brands safe. You don’t want your ad appearing on a fake news organization or a terrorist-run website. Of course, the agency is usually the one creating the block list, and I wonder whether the FTC’s stipulation will prevent them from doing so in the future. Must clients now create their own—and what might they accidentally leave out? My cynical take: I think the outcome of this will be even more misinformation online, funded by ad dollars—and a lack of control for advertisers.
Ogilvy eliminates global DEI function amid broader holding company pullback
MW: The de-emphasis on DEI at agencies is similarly unsurprising in the current—and likely ongoing—political environment. There was a real rationale to have a global DEI function when a company is managing a unified global brand, appealing to global clients and attracting global talent. But most companies who operate in the U.S.—especially those who have or want to have business with the U.S. government—increasingly have to choose between operating with a DEI policy or operating in the U.S.
As with the freedom of speech issue, agencies have to ask themselves whether or not diversity is critical to their operations. Our view is that it is critical—as any agency that can figure out how to make the most of a talent pool in terms of attraction, retention and ongoing career success is at a significant commercial advantage relative to another agency who is less able. But is a formal DEI function the only way to accomplish this goal? Probably not.
FFM: We had a conversation many episodes ago about how a single-P&L, single-brand model can be tricky for global agencies—because cultural expectations are just so different in the U.S. right now compared to other countries.
What’s interesting about the Ogilvy situation is that they’ve said, ‘No, no, we’re not dismantling DEI—we’re just moving it down to a regional level so we can be more intentional.’ If that’s truly the case, maybe they believe having folks closer to the ground in each market allows for more tailored implementation.
But the fact that it’s happening in the midst of a broader pullback on DEI does seem, in my view, pretty damning. To be clear, I fully support diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and think the agency world—already set back by its legacy of white, male leaders and the kind of antics we saw on Mad Men—will suffer if we don’t prioritize them.
Fake ads win awards at Cannes (again)
MW: Keeping our cynical streak going here, the idea that fake, scam or “ghost” ads are still winning awards at Cannes seems a lot like being surprised that there was gambling going on at Rick’s Café in Casablanca. One would think that the Lions would want to ensure the integrity of their awards by making sure this sort of thing never happens, but on the other hand, the event depends on maximizing award submissions. Evidently the offending agencies—or at least the “professionals” behind them—see some advantage in doing so as well.
Are we too cynical to suggest that perhaps clients don’t mind this sort of behavior, at least in aggregate? Here’s a great run-down of some historical fake/ghost/scam ads from 2001–2013.
FFM: This is so disastrous. There were two instances within the DDB family called out, and both are pretty troubling. One of the campaigns included a fake news segment in the case study that never happened. It makes me wonder if that was created using AI—like someone used Midjourney or another tool to produce a case study and didn’t fact-check it closely. I say that because I’ve had language models make up really convincing stats and scenarios before. If you’re not checking every detail, things like that can creep in.
Then there’s this other case study that bragged about using one-second snippets of popular songs without licensing them. It’s a clever creative idea—but why highlight the part where you ignored the rules? That just seems like a big no-no. And it makes me wonder: who’s approving these things?
Up next on Agency Business:
We’ll be off next week for the July 4 holiday. Back Monday, July 14, with Emma Armstrong, CEO of FCB New York. Watch for the episode at 6 a.m. Eastern.
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