Andy Nairn- Co-Founder- Lucky Generals

Andy Nairn co-founded Lucky Generals- an ad agency with offices in London and New York.  Beyond running an agency, Andy has written a best-selling business book "Go Luck Yourself" and has just completed his first novel- "Trail of Blood" a murder mystery set 500 years ago on the border between England and Scotland. 

Some quotes from our chat. 

On Pitching 

"Some agencies are good at going through the grind of pitching and winning things that they don't feel passionate about. But I think for whatever reason, the three of us realized that we're not good at, you know, we tend to all three of us, put our feelings on our sleeves and show whether we're interested."

Category Conventions

"Originality is incredibly important, but also think about category conventions as well. Well, sometimes we throw away the convention. people think I'll convince the boring but I mean for instance when you come to cover I found that really interesting briefing a designer on your book cover. In our world, you might want to be unlike any other cover in the market. The book designer just went "No you're mad my friend yes, of course, it's got to be unique and different and interesting but you've also got to tell very quickly what sort of genre this is."

What Makes a Strong Planner/Strategist 

"If you hone your skills at being interested and listening to and being curious about human behavior and all its weird illogicalities and quirks, then you won't go far wrong. You won't be beaten by a robot you'll be able to use technology to help you develop those insights."

“When someone says their favorite book is advertising-related. I'd sort of be a bit disappointed. I want you to sort of tell me about, you know, your amazing fashion sideline or your photography or, you know, sport or other stuff. It's so true."

The Lack of Storytelling Tension in Advertising 

"I feel like a lot of advertising is cats sitting on mats there's nothing nothing is happening there's no tension there's no through old Jeopardy, nothing can ever go wrong."

The Threat of AI

"I'm sort of genuinely optimistic about all of those sort of existential threats and challenges as long as we hang on to, you know, our creativity and our sort of, you know, just our open-mindedness and our curiosity,”

Pitching a Novel

"I used to joke that it's kind of like with Go Luck Yourself, it was almost like saying it's like Harry Potter meets the Bible, which I didn't do, but you've got to pick two things that are unbelievably successful and collide them together."

Building Novels from Worlds

"I started thinking of it as a little brand and I wanted to create a world, not just a one-off story. I feel like this is kind of an interesting world, this world of outlaws and warlords and an odd part of the world that people don't know exists, you know, this borderlands and this time, I feel could be my sort of place, my world where other authors are not really sort of in that sort of space."