Creative Belgium presents Creative Voices, the first leadership conference to inspire change.

Creative Voices
Conference Brussels
March 5th, 2020

Inspiring change through Creative Leadership

Our first leadership conference for all who have a role to play in shaping our creative industry. Check out keynotes and personal talks from international creative leaders in our industry. Learning outcomes include: why to give female leadership a chance, what ‘inclusive creativity’ brings us, how to create high-performing teams, how to promote healthy masculinity and equality in the workplace, why older creatives keep companies young, how to be an authentic leader, etc.

This was 2020

Talks

Speakers

Cynthia Augustine (USA) Chief Talent Officer
FCB

As FCB’s Global Chief Talent Officer, Augustine sees empathetic listening as a central aspect of her work as well as her identity. At the same time, she operates with constant strategic acumen, astutely envisioning the bigger picture and bringing top talent together in FCB’s diverse, high-performing, award-winning teams.

Augustine creates and implements programs that develop and fortifies her colleagues and creates meaningful cultural change. In her first year at FCB, she developed a day-long workshop on implicit bias, helping company leaders understand how assumptions can affect hiring decisions, workplace culture, and the creative product. She followed this with workshops designed to boost inclusiveness at FCB globally. Augustine also brought developmental and learning programs for all levels of the organization, instituted groundbreaking programs, like flexible time-off and helped recruit the first woman to hold the position of Global Chief Creative Officer in a major ad industry network.

Augustine's eclectic experience, including as an employment lawyer, President of a Broadcast group, as well as leading HR and Talent Management, has helped companies including The New York Times, Time Warner, Scholastic and FCB deliver against strategic goals.
Laura Jordan Bambach (UK) CCO
Mr President

Laura is Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Mr President. And co-founder of SheSays.

For over 20 years, Laura has brought her fresh and experimental approach to the creative industries. Combining technical exploration with passionate storytelling, she has won numerous awards for her commercial work and been recognised globally as an innovator and industry leader across communications and design

One of the world’s few female CCOs, she is former president of D&AD, has been named one of Britain’s most influential people with Debrett’s 500 and been awarded an honorary doctorate from UAL.
Frederic Bonn (USA) Creative Director
iCrossing

Frederic Bonn, Executive Creative Director of iCrossing (Hearst) is tasked with leading the development of transformative ideas and fostering a unified creative culture. He is led by the belief that technology enables endless expressions of creativity and can help brands create seamless and engaging experiences that deliver value to users, regardless of channel or platform.

Frederic joined iCrossing from Mirum & J. Walter Thompson Company. Throughout his career, Frederic has worked alongside high-profile brands to create innovative projects such as the Louis Vuitton Journeys global campaign and the Mercedes-Benz Tweet Race. His work has been recognized many times over with awards from The One Show, The CLIOs, The Webby Awards, Effie Awards, Art Directors Club, Eurobest, and the London International Awards.
Thierry Brunfaut (BE) Creative Director & Founding Partner
Base Design

Based in Brussels, though active in all studios, Thierry is both Base Design founding partner & creative director. From projects ranging from visual identities to ad campaigns, Thierry imparts a philosophy of graphic and conceptual simplicity that emphasizes concise communication. “Don’t design for designers. Design for people” is one of his mottos. Thierry believes in the power of words in design, creative autonomy, teamwork and pleasure through ever-changing processes. Thierry has led landmark Base projects including MoMA, Maison Michel, San Francisco Art Institute, Fondation Yves Saint Laurent, Institut Français de la Mode, Bozar, Hotel Missoni, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Haus der Kunst, Maison Dandoy, Delvaux, The Olympic Museum and La Monnaie Opera. He is also the author of the renowned “5-minute poster series”, creating 50 typographic works, each dedicated to a short bit of wisdom on design, a professor and a regular speaker at design and branding conferences around the world. Thierry bears a striking and seemingly contradictory resemblance both to Moby and Kermit the Frog.
Vera Claes (BE) Secretary General
Zij-kant

From 2006 until 2014 Vera was president of the Belgian Federal Institute for the Equality of Women and Men. This Institute promotes the equality between women and men and fights against any form of gender discrimination and inequality based on gender in all aspects of life through the development and implementation of an adequate legal framework, appropriate structures, strategies, instruments and actions. Today, she still acts as a board member of the Institute. As secretary general of ZIJ-KANT, Verra introduced the first Equal Pay Day in Belgium in 2005. Today, the yearly Equal Pay Day campaign is a household name in Belgium and famous in and outside Belgium for its creative filmspots, made by mortierbrigade.
Liesbeth Dillen (BE) TEDx Speaker, Business activator
Former IKEA top executive

Liesbeth beliefs in leaders that help create a more People Positive new world. She helps brands & agencies to get leaders who create the big New and grow in uncertain times. She also works with brands, like IKEA, to go beyond business as usual. Training their teams on getting sharp strategic marketing planning, business planning, on mission, on positioning and on combining global with local.

Liesbeth offers inspiration and coaching for new ways of thinking and acting. She introduces diversity thinking as a path to innovation. A 360° approach. Her “SHE” method pioneered in IKEA Country & Global. She has been working at and with IKEA globally +30 yrs. Her Scandi touch combines humanism, people and planet thinking with getting results.

Liesbeth pioneered on gender diversity already 2 decades ago and is an inspiring international keynote speaker.
Ali Hanan (AU - UK) Founder & CEO
Creative Equals

Ali Hanan is an award-winning creative director who has worked in the advertising and marketing sector for the last 19 years. Over that time, she has worked for some of the world’s biggest brands, including Dulux, Guinness, Ford, IKEA, British Airways, MacDonalds (and more). Along the way, she has seen the impact of the lack of diversity within the industry, so in 2015, she set up Creative Equals as a ‘side project’, which has now turned an award-winning organisation with the backing of many of the largest cad ompanies. Her team pioneered a data-driven, people-powered model for diversity, the Creative, Digital and Media Equality Standards, now a series of recognized kitemarks, alongside an accreditation for recruiters. This has become the benchmark for the industry in UK, giving companies a review, rating and a road map for lasting change.
Philippe Meunier (CA) Chief Creative Officer
& Co-Founder SID LEE

After earning a Bachelor’s degree in design from the Université du Québec à Montréal, Philippe Meunier and his high school buddy, Jean-François Bouchard—fresh out of school and without a portfolio, clients or even any money—decided to start their own agency, Sid Lee. What Philippe and Jean-François lacked in experience, they made up for in vision; they set out to create a firm that went beyond the traditional and often limiting advertising agency model, by developing a multidisciplinary approach they came to define as Commercial Creativity™.

Today, more than 20 years later, Sid Lee is synonymous around the world with creativity and innovation. The Montréal-based agency now has offices in Paris, Toronto, New York and Los Angeles, with a multidisciplinary creative team from various backgrounds and cultures.

As co-founder and Creative Chief of Sid Lee, Philippe oversees all the creative output for major international clients including absolut, adidas and Cirque du Soleil. His diverse role also involves recruiting fresh talent from schools around the world. These experiences inspired Philippe to set up The Atelier—a multidisciplinary, commercial creativity school where students spend 10 days immersed in all things creative.

Collaboration is an essential part of Philippe’s approach to creativity, and is especially evident in the culture and ideology of Sid Lee. The agency’s core values are based on collectivism and the belief that the group is far stronger than the individual, so every idea and opinion is given equal value. The result is an agency where everyone works (and plays!) hard as a team, sharing both the workload and the rewards.
Emily Rammant (BE) Talent Coach

Emily Rammant (Solvay Business Engineer) has always had an outspoken interest in talent management, but gave up an academic career as HR-researcher in order to pursue her luck in advertising. She was attracted by the creative and innovative aspect of the industry.

Until November 2019, Emily was active in the field of film productions; she started out as agency producer of Duval Guillaume, she obtained considerate expertise in post-production at animation studio CC and in 2015 she was the co-founder of Wenneker.be, a new production house on the Belgian market. At agency FamousGrey Emily developed an in-house production facility from scratch, managing a variety of talents such as producers, editors and a sound engineers. From 2016 to end of 2019, the in-house productions of FamousGrey have stood out in every major award show, resulting in multiple Gold awards at the Creative Belgium Awards and 5 Cannes Lions.

During those years in leadership positions, Emily rediscovered her passion for people and talent development. Today her focus goes to agencies FamousGrey and Boondoggle where she operates as freelance Talent Coach.
Taha Riani Achhab (BE) Founder
Allyens

Taha Riani is Founder and Managing Partner of the Antwerp creative agency Allyens. For four years he has been building the - sometimes wild - road towards inclusive communication. In comprehensible terms? Allyens helps companies and organizations to align their messages and campaigns with the diverse society. It is a challenge, a mission and Taha's firm conviction that inclusion works and exclusion doesn’t.
People often reduce a person's identity to one particular label. Being a Muslim, Taha experienced this continuously. It was his frustration that prompted him to take action. He wanted to get rid of that stigma. April 1st, 2015 Taha launched mvslim.com, a website that breaks the stereotypical image of Muslims by sharing positive information. The site reaches 10 million people a month and the New York Times, the BBC and Al-Jazeera - among others - take over the articles.
That same year Allyens was born, with an identical mission: get to know your target group, omit judgements and adjust your communication by focusing on the similarities instead of the differences.
Allyens' approach turned out to be a hit, because the agency was noticed by the prestigious business magazine Forbes and ended up on the 30under30-list in the category media and marketing. The list rewards the most talented young innovators from different categories in Europe. Connecting people across differences: it pays off.
Only four years after Allyens' launch, the agency has convinced customers such as Unilever, Johnson&Johnson, Colruyt, Brussels Airport, BNP Paribas and many others that inclusive communication works.
Senta Slingerland (BE) Brand Builder/Co-Founder inVisible Creatives
Founder City.Shapers

Senta lives in London, where she consults on creative and innovation processes, brand strategy, and thought leadership development. She also curates industry events and books for a living. Her clients include Metro, Accenture Interactive, adidas, Tech Open Air, Serviceplan, This Is Beyond, Mesa and others. Until June 2017, she ran the European arm of Brazilian-born Mesa, a company that con- ceives, develops and prototypes solutions for clients in very short spaces of time. Hailed as one of the most innovative working formats in the world, the company creates game-changing in- novative products and services for clients such as Google, Nestlé, Globo, Fiat, Samsung, Coca- Cola and McDonald’s. Before that, Senta was the Director of Brand Strategy for Lions Festivals, organisers of in- ternational events including the prestigious Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativi- ty, where she helped transform the company from a week in Cannes for the ad crowd, to an in- stitution that is both a benchmark of, and campaigner, creativity globally.

In her eight years at the company, Senta launched numerous programmes and initiatives aimed at employing creativity and the creative community as a force for change, including The Glass Lion, See It Be It and Cannes Chimera. In 2013, Senta co-authored and edited the Taschen-published book Game Changers about ‘the advertising that changed advertising’. She also curated an accompanying exhibition. In 2019 she published her second book, City Shapers London, about the creative people in London who are changing the culture of the city.

Senta is a regular on the speaker circuit, talking about the value of creativity, diversity and the future of work. Previously Senta was Chief Editor of The Reel, a monthly magazine about advertising, and was a contributing writer for Contagious Magazine. Originally from Brussels, Belgium, Senta holds a Masters' degree in Linguistics and Literature from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.