Coworking with Monica Tailor

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Monica Tailor is chief social marketing officer at McCann and global co-managing director of McCann Content Studios. She was named Agency Executive of the Year at the 2025 Digiday Awards.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I’m responsible for all the ads that come up before the YouTube video you’re trying to watch. And you can replace YouTube with Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Most recently, it’s got to be a really fun campaign from McCann New York and New Zealand for Huggies, called “Expensive Sh*t.” It was a one-hour livestreamed event where 18 babies, known for their high-capacity pooping, crawled on nearly $500,000 worth of luxury items to test the product’s blowout protection. I love a campaign where it seems too hard to pull off, and you’ve got to love a high-stakes livestream. It was an incredible collaboration across so many people, which means it’s all hands on deck and so amazing to see everyone come together and build a great community engagement moment.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Nike’s “Nothing Beats a Londoner” was an incredible campaign which broke all the rules. At a time when everything was about short-form vertical video, this was over three minutes long, sound on, horizontal, and guess what? We all turned our phones to the side and watched to the end. It tapped into a community truth and bought the Nike brand into it. It might have looked like an accident, but it wasn’t. It was a brilliant creative idea, executed with craft and a level of orchestration that was unprecedented. So clever; a truly culture-defining moment.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: One thing that you can see on my LinkedIn profile is that I’ve been at McCann for a long time. I started as a digital account director in Manchester, UK, and now lead our global social and influencer capability in New York. But what I often get asked is the “why and how.” I love building, new opportunities, new capabilities. I’ve always worked in digital for this exact reason—there’s always something new. McCann (and the leaders here) have been an amazing group of people who have created and continue to create an environment that enables new opportunities to be born and take off. Building startups in corporate environments is undervalued. I think sometimes people think it’s easy, but it’s actually much harder; I’ve done both startups alone and startups inside corporate. Taking something from vision to reality needs skills in creating belief but also building the pipes. Being given the environment, space, and support to do that is something McCann has done well, not just now but throughout history.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? The focus on social media subculture or micro-communities is a good thing, and something we’ve been talking about for a few years now. Instead of taking a mono-culture approach or jumping on every trend out there, finding the right trends in multiple subcultures creates rich and authentic relationships.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend?

Like everyone else, I am enjoying the return of long-form writing with the rise of Substack. One of the best (and most recommended) Substacks for social right now is Link in Bio by Rachel Karten.