Over the course of his three-decade career in advertising, John Mescall’s experiences have run the gamut from heading up his own indie agency Smart in Australia to becoming global ECD of McCann Worldgroup and president of its global creative council. While working for global networks has given him an unwavering appreciation for the power of collaborating at scale, it’s also led him to become increasingly frustrated by the reality of an industry model that exists largely to satisfy shareholders rather than make great work.

“When we think about all the big holding company agencies, they all started life with creative people running and owning them – JWT, BBD, Ogilvy – and then somewhere along the way that stopped happening because they went publicly listed,” Mescall tells CR. “The best work always happens when the people commissioning the work have a direct relationship with the people making it. These things make perfect sense but, when you’ve got a large business that by definition is going to be bureaucratic, you get enormous distance between the people making the work and the people buying the work.”

Having left McCann earlier this year, he is hoping that his new role as creative chair of By The Network may end up providing the best of both worlds. “What really attracted me to this opportunity was what if we could actually do both – the creativity of independents but the scale of a network,” he says. Launched in 2020 by former Grey Group global creative chairman Per Pedersen, who passed away earlier this year, the founder’s original vision was to upend the traditional network model through a global collective of leading independent creative agencies.