Leadership Lessons with Ellie Farrugia, Managing Director at Kinsman & Co

Daniela Mamica, Head of Marketing UK at Hanson Search, spoke to Ellie Farrugia, Managing Director at Kinsman & Co. They discussed the in-housing trend reshaping the agency model, why AI strategy now means building, and the leadership principles that hold firm in a market under pressure.

Looking back at the last 12 months, what major shifts in client expectations or industry dynamics have most affected how Kinsman & Co operates?

Technology has been the biggest shift, without question. Marketing reinvents itself roughly every five years. When I started my career it was PPC; now it’s AI, and the pressure on everyone to be more efficient. As an agency, that means we have to be incredibly agile and willing to change our product offering.

It has also changed what clients want from us. Brands are in-housing at pace, and I understand why, I’ve done it myself. But you quickly realise you still need experts in certain areas. Our role has evolved: we’re integrated into clients’ teams, working across their technology, bringing best practice. Some of our clients now ask us to come in quarterly and audit what their in-house team and other partners are doing. That’s a very different relationship to the old model.

The way we resource has shifted too. Clients now want to speak to someone senior, instantly, with a considered response. That means more senior people around the clock, which is expensive to scale, so we’ve embraced fractional and freelance talent. Good freelancers are genuinely hard to find, and when we do, we look after them and pay them well.

What marketing trends have been defining 2026, and which ones are being overhyped?

Everyone talks about AI, obviously, but the more interesting trend underneath it is tool consolidation. Businesses are cutting subscriptions and looking for platforms that do several things well. We went through it ourselves and have cut down from around 60 tools to a few. 

Content remains a defining theme, but the conversation has matured from volume to systems. The platforms reward consistency above almost everything else. Quality weekly content, published on the same days at the same times, will outperform a scattergun daily approach, and poor content actively pushes you down. So we build content systems and calendars for clients rather than chasing output.

Websites are another big one. Expectations of user experience have risen sharply; with AI and tools like Canva, even small brands can deliver something premium, so when people land on a slow, dated site, they’re gone within seconds. 

As for overhyped, I’d say podcasting, with a caveat. For brands with a strong strategic budget, it’s brilliant. For smaller brands, it’s hard to monetise, unless you utilise the right resources, otherwise it can be expensive. It comes down to having the right objective and being aware that its a brand building exercise not instant revenue. 

The flip side of all this digital noise is that in-person events have become genuinely crucial. We’ve done pub takeover events where the room is full, there’s a waitlist, and people brand new to the brand walk out loving it. That emotional connection is very hard to replicate digitally, which is why we’ve brought event specialists in. PR has already merged into social; events and digital need to merge in the same way.

What are clients looking for in a marketing agency today, and how do you align Kinsman & Co to deliver this?

They want an in-house team experience without the in-house headcount. Brands cut agencies quickly when they feel they’re not getting people who live and breathe their brand, so we’ve had to shift how we work to deliver exactly that.

The other big change is that clients often don’t know precisely what they need. They’re not shopping for a PPC agency; most have decent results in channel and aren’t going to switch for an incremental improvement. What they need is a partner who can look across everything and say: are you doing this efficiently, do you have the right team, what will genuinely move you to the next stage. Most of the time the scope of work that emerges is completely different to the original conversation. 

We position ourselves as a growth partner, essentially an in-house marketing department. A big part of that is being honest about what clients shouldn’t buy from us. If a brand needs day-to-day social posting, we’ll tell them to hire a social media person. We regularly turn away work we’d have taken at the start, and we’ve had businesses come back a year later precisely because we told them we weren’t the right fit.

How has the role of an agency leader evolved over the past few years, and what core leadership principles do you believe never change?

The biggest evolution is that the leader has become the front of the sales effort and the voice of the brand. I never wanted to do founder-led content on LinkedIn, and now it’s at the forefront of what I do. With so much automated outreach flying around, people don’t want a message from a BD function; they’ll respond to a founder who clearly knows their world. Someone once pointed out that what I considered just honestly telling a client what I thought they should do was, in fact, selling. 

The second shift is towards an investment mindset. It is no longer enough to say, “let’s do more AI.” Leaders need to commit real budget to specific builds and accept that returns may take time. Sales cycles have also lengthened, so agencies need to build pipeline for the long term rather than hiring a salesperson and expecting results within two months.

What never changes is honesty and backing your own judgement. We’ve won far more from a direct phone call where we say, “here’s the thing, you need to do these three things, are you happy with that,” than from any beautifully designed seventy-slide proposal. People are overwhelmed; clarity wins.

How are you using and integrating AI in your business, and how is this affecting the marketing work you produce?

We’ve gone well beyond using AI tools and into building with AI. We’ve brought in AI engineers and now build products for clients, including dashboards that flag when creative performance drops and surface AI-driven insights. The barrier to building has fallen; you no longer need deep scripting expertise to create genuinely useful things.

The real unlock is agents. Tools like n8n and Make let you connect everything a business runs on and automate end-to-end workflows. We run our own business on them: one agent gives me my cash flow position every Monday, another flags overdue invoices, another compiles my LinkedIn topics. Work that used to need an operations executive is now automated, and the whole team is upskilling weekly on AI.

AI now also does the heavy lifting on proposals. We’ve built the back end so it pulls in brand guidelines, looks up the client’s site, and drafts from our meeting notes. I still spend time reshaping it, because you have to present it and own it, but it ensures we’ve hit every point. Copywriting is similar: at a basic level the tools are excellent.

The caution I’d add is twofold. Don’t let the muscle atrophy: I still write the emails that require real thinking, because you can spot AI-written copy a mile off. And personalisation has to stay human, especially in sales. We’ll openly say “this one’s not AI, by the way,” and people love it, because everyone’s inbox is drowning in automation. 

Where are you investing most heavily to prepare Kinsman & Co for future client needs and further industry change?

AI, unambiguously. Everything we make is being reinvested into the AI products we’re building, for clients and internally, so that we’re genuinely expert in the areas we sell.

People are the other big investment, particularly senior people, because clients stay with us for the individuals they work with day to day. And our podcast, where we’ve increased budget every year because it consistently returns.

In terms of demand, we’re seeing real momentum in skincare, health and wellness, and brands built around women and mothers. VC and PE backed businesses are an important focus, because we know how to scale them. Education and ed tech are a long-standing strength. If you’ve only worked with huge established brands, you know how to move numbers incrementally. Growth brands need you to build them from scratch.

How do you maintain strong, strategic relationships when clients are under more pressure than ever?

By being honest, even when it’s uncomfortable. We don’t tolerate bad behaviour from clients, and we’ve walked away from big names over it. Everyone thinks they know marketing, so client teams are constantly second-guessed internally. You have to be firm in your strategic opinion and back it with evidence.

Sometimes honesty means saying the hard thing. I’ve told clients questioning our work that the issue might not be the strategy, and that I’d happily point them elsewhere. As an Australian, calling a spade a spade comes naturally, and clients value it even when it stings.

The other side is simple humanity. The market is stressful and a lot of the people we work with are genuinely worried about their jobs. The rule in our team is no frustration, no sass over email, ever. Get on a call, ask how they’re doing. The relationships that survive pressure are the ones where you show up as a human.

If you could give one piece of advice to the next generation of agency leaders, what would you want them to understand about the business?

Back yourself. Stay true to what you decided the business should be, take feedback of course, but don’t flip-flop on other people’s advice. The decisions I regret are almost all the ones where I didn’t back my own judgement.

Beyond that, the people you hire matter as much as the clients you win. One wrong person can drain the joy from the thing you built, and the right people make you love the job even more. Treat recruitment as strategy, not admin. Hire for a clear purpose and let them shine at it.

And finally, don’t offer anything unless you can do it excellently. Building an agency is ultimately about relationships, and it demands most of your time. Clients want you in their offices again; this can’t be a flexible lifestyle business on the side. If you’re going to build it, be all in.

Whether you’re hiring top leadership talent or thinking about how the Employment Rights Act 2025 impacts your hiring plan, our team would be delighted to support you.

Daniela Mamica is UK Marketing Lead, working across senior and leadership level roles. She brings a wealth of experience, having recruited into the marketing space for over 11 years. Daniela previously worked with network media agencies (WPP Media, Omnicom Media Group, Publicis Groupe and Dentsu), successfully growing their paid and organic media functions. She also has extensive experience supporting independent media, marketing and digital agencies, finding sought-after digital marketing.

Hanson Search Group is a global talent consultancy providing executive search, recruitment and leadership advisory services. Built on more than twenty years of trusted relationships, we operate as a connected global platform of specialist practices with expert consultants embedded in key markets.