Allegra Spender's Story

Marketing has never offered more possibilities or made it harder to know what to do next. With AI changing how brands are discovered, creators reshaping how stories spread, and audiences scattered across more platforms than ever, what should leaders focus on in 2026? In this bonus episode of StoryWork, Matt Jones returns from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity with a fresh perspective on building brands, creating demand and finding clarity in an overwhelming marketing landscape. His central idea? Story has never been more important, but brands can no longer control how it gets told. Matt’s conversation with brand strategy expert and creator Eugene Healey on the Cannes boardwalk centres on the way brands need to be built as a world, but that now the job of sharing that brand world is increasingly happening through third parties...enter the creator economy.

Anouk Darling has had one of those careers that makes normal CVs look a little underpowered. She has worked in luxury at LVMH, helped reinvent Oroton, led the agency Moon, worked in private equity and now runs Scape Australia, a business with around $17 billion in assets under management and more than 20,000 student apartments. But what makes Anouk interesting is not the scale. It is the way she thinks about what business Scape is actually in. This is not, in her telling, simply a property company. It is a business about experience, belonging, safety, community and the small human interactions that determine whether people feel seen. In this episode of StoryWork, we talk about why Anouk still believes leaders need to stay close to the front line, why she has very little patience for invented customer personas, and how watching real customers behave has shaped decisions throughout her career. We also get into Scape’s “hello effect”: a deliberate attempt to create environments where strangers feel able to connect, and how something that sounds soft and emotional can feed very hard commercial outcomes such as retention, advocacy, conversion and lower acquisition costs. Anouk explains how Scape designs “collider zones” into its buildings, why laundries, karaoke rooms and shared spaces can matter to brand, and why the company treats every material, light fitting, interaction and service decision as part of the customer experience. We also talk about culture: values that are actually used in the business rather than laminated onto walls, why the best brands can be painful to work with because they know themselves, and how leaders stop the small things slipping as organisations get bigger. It’s a conversation about brand, but also about taste, scale, human connection and the discipline required to use culture to drive commercial outcomes and success.

Adam Spencer has spent decades making difficult things feel accessible. Through his sextuple threats of maths, science, technology, AI, public speaking and comedy he has developed a rare ability to move between worlds, explore frontier topics and somehow take people with him. That made him a particularly interesting person to talk to at a moment when artificial intelligence is beginning to change not just what we can do, but what expertise itself looks like.

Stephen Connor runs Volvo Cars Australia at a particularly interesting moment. The automotive industry is being reshaped by EVs, software and an influx of new brands, while Volvo is trying to evolve beyond the idea that has defined it for generations, safety. Stephen’s own career has involved a fair bit of reinvention too. After senior roles in the UK and Dubai, he arrived in Australia without a job, living with his in-laws and taking whatever work he could find. It was a period where he left behind the status and ego attached to his previous career and gained a much clearer understanding of what he could contribute. Our conversation ranged from that personal reset to the practical work of building a storied brand in a brave new world. We talk about why Volvo’s designers spend time in Swedish forests; the challenges of handing your brand experience over to independent dealers; and Stephen’s unusually disciplined view that selling more is not always the same as succeeding. For Volvo Australia, he believes there is a point beyond which greater volume could diminish the brand, hurt dealer economics and ultimately damage the customer experience. It’s a conversation about the stories we tell ourselves about brand, leadership and change. Perhaps most of all it’s about knowing what you’re really trying to preserve while almost everything around you is changing. storywork.com.au

Blaise Witnish started life as a kids' party host and working in bowling alleys. Now she's the CEO of Funlab, where she has spent more than two decades turning the joy of bowling, mini golf and competitive socialising into national (and now international) brands including Strike, Holey Moley and Hijinx Hotel. In the process, she has helped take Australian ideas about fun, irreverence and hospitality to the world.