10 things we learned from Sara Bennison

Sara Bennison is a marketer who uses her platform to stand up to hate. A softly spoken, humble and good-humoured leader, she credits her success to her team and confronting problems with optimism.

For Sara, advertising is all about storytelling - and with an expansive career in the industry, she had plenty of personal insights to share. Here are just ten of our favourites:

1. When there’s change, there are opportunities - marketers possess the creativity to turn problems into something good.
2. For Sara, the defining moments were built around the teams she worked with. Having teams that coalesce, work well, produce outstanding work in a short amount of time is what you feel proud of and remember
3. Don't undersell marketing. Include it in your job title. Together, if we create a high standard across the industry, it will create value in board rooms and enable us to form the conditions for work that not only powers the business, but you can also be proud of.
4. The crisis has shown us that digital strategies are lifelines, but what we miss most is community. After lockdown, the interplay between digital interaction and physical closeness won’t be as binary as some people expect.
5. A strong brand propels a business forward day-to-day. What is a brand if not performance? 
6. The technical expertise of marketing changes over time, but the fundamental tools that make people good marketers - determination, optimism and lateral thinking - remain the same.
7. Things only feel like failures within the moment - if you helicopter outside of your embarrassment, you’ll always learn something - a vulnerability, a new idea. With hindsight, mistakes simply become part of the story.
8. In these challenging times, brands need to look to small businesses who have adapted quickly and thought outside the box.
9. Self-serving behaviour isn't sustainable. Go slow, be kind and earn the respect of the people around you.
10. Marketing is about getting the business, the economy, society and people up as quickly as possible and it’s our important role as an industry to be the force the forges forward.