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When people use hand gestures that visually represent what theyre saying, listeners see them as more clear, competent, and persuasive. Thats the key finding from my new research published in the Journal of Marketing Research, where I analyzed thousands of TED Talks and ran controlled experiments to examine how gestures shape communication. Talking with your hands Whether youre giving a presentation, pitching an idea or leading a meeting, you probably spend most of your prep time thinking about what youll say. But what about the ways youll move your hands? I grew up in Italy, where gesturing is practically a second language. Now that I live in the United States, Ive become acutely aware of how cultures differ in how, and how much, people move their hands when they talk. Still, across contexts and cultures, one thing is constant: People do talk with their hands. As someone who studies communication, Id noticed how some speakers seemed instantly clearer when they gestured. This made me wonder: Do gestures actually make communicators more effective? The short answer is yes, but only when the gestures visually represent the idea youre talking about. Researchers call these movements illustrators. For example: When talking about distance, you might spread your hands apart while saying something is farther away. When explaining how two concepts relate, you might bring your hands together while saying these ideas fit together. When describing how the market demand is going up and down, you could visually depict a wave shape with your hands. One video included in the study provides an example of a TED speaker onstage gesturing as he presents his talk. [Photo: YouTube/TED David Agus: A new strategy in the war against cancer] To study gestures at scale, my team and I analyzed 200,000 video segments from more than 2,000 TED Talks using AI tools that can detect and classify hand gestures frame by frame. We paired this with controlled experiments in which our study participants evaluated entrepreneurs pitching a product. The same pattern of results appeared in both settings. In the AI-analyzed TED Talk data, illustrative gestures predicted higher audience evaluations, reflected in more than 33 million online likes of the videos. And in our experiments, 1,600 participants rated speakers who used illustrative gestures as more clear, competent, and persuasive. How hands can help get your point across What I found is that these gestures give listeners a visual shortcut to your meaning. They make abstract ideas feel more concrete, helping listeners build a mental picture of what youre saying. This makes the message feel easier to processa phenomenon psychologists call processing fluency. And we found that when ideas feel easier to grasp, people tend to see the speaker as more competent and persuasive. But not all gestures help. Movements that dont match the messagelike random waving, fidgeting, or pointing to things in the spaceoffer no such benefit. In some cases, they can even distract. A practical takeaway: Focus on clarity over choreography. Think about where your hands naturally illustrate what youre sayingemphasizing size, direction, or emotionand let them move with purpose. Whats next Your hands arent just accessories to your words. They can be a powerful tool to make your ideas resonate. Im now investigating whether people can learn to gesture betteralmost like developing a nonverbal vocabulary. Early pilot tests are promising: Even a five-minute training session helps people become clearer and more effective through the use of appropriate hand gestures. While my research examined how individual gestures work together with spoken language, the next step is to understand what makes a communicator effective with their voice and, ultimately, across all the channels they use to communicatehow gestures combine with voice, facial expressions, and body movement. Im now exploring AI tools that track all these channels at once so I can identify the patterns, not just the isolated gestures, that make speakers more effective communicators. Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Southern California. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
A meeting drags on. People are talking, but no one is saying the thing that needs to be said. Direction is unclear, the energy dips, and everyone is waiting for someone to speak with authority. When you finally do speak, the words come out softer than you intended: – Maybe we should consider . . . – I think it might be good if . . . – Sorry to interrupt, but . . . One of the biggest challenges leaders face isnt just what they decide, its how they communicate it. Clarity, confidence, and authority are what set the tone for the room. If you tend to soften your tone or worry about sounding pushy, being more direct can feel uncomfortable. I coach leaders through this all the time, and heres what they learn quickly: Directive leadership isnt about being harsh. Its about being clear. And clarity is what builds trust, drives ownership, and gets results without raising your voice. Your words signal your authority or they undermine it. From Apologetic to Authoritative One of my clients, a senior director at a biotech firm in South San Francisco, was brilliant, respected, and deeply collaborative. But she had one blind spot: Her communication was consistently too soft. Her requests sounded tentative, her decisions felt optional, and her team often left meetings unclear on priorities. She told me, I know what I want to say, but in the moment, I dont want to sound demanding. In one meeting, a project was slipping. She needed to make a call. Instead, she said, Maybe we could try moving the deadline? Im not sure, what do you think? The team debated for 15 minutes with no direction. We worked on one shift: aligning her language with the authority she already had. Not louder. Not more forceful. Just clearer. Two weeks later, when another deliverable slipped, she said, This is a priority. Were keeping the original deadline. I need everyone aligned. The room settled. People nodded. The project got back on track. Afterward she told me, It felt clear, decisive, and grounded. I felt in command rather than trying to keep the peace. This is what leadership is supposed to feel like. What the Best Leaders Do Differently Think about the leaders who command respect in your organization. Listen to how they speak. – They dont hedge. – They dont apologize for having an opinion. – They say what they mean. And heres the part many leaders get wrong: This isnt about personality. A significant number of the leaders I coach are introverts. Theyre thoughtful, measured, and often worried about coming across as too direct. But directive communication doesnt change who they are. It simply changes how clearly the room understands them. Ready-to-Use Leadership Language If being directive doesn’t come naturally, you need the actual words you can use in real situations. Set clear expectations I need you to . . . This is a priority. Please focus here first. This needs to be done by Friday. Let me know if theres a barrier. Give direction confidently Heres the plan were moving forward with. Ive decided well handle it this way. Im asking you to take the lead on this. Own your authority respectfully Im making this call. Let me be direct . . . Im accountable for this outcome, and I need your partnership. Hold people accountable This didnt meet our standard. Lets discuss how to improve. What we agreed on didnt happen. Lets get back on track. We missed the mark here. How do you plan to fix it? Notice what’s missing from all of these: apologies, hedging, and room for endless debate. The Leadership Mindset Shift These aren’t just communication techniques. They reflect a deeper shift in how you see your leadership role. Youre moving from: Seeking permission Providing direction Hoping for consensus Making decisions Avoiding discomfort Addressing issues directly Clarity gives your leadership weight. Your team doesnt need you to be louder. They need you to be clearer. They don’t need you to wait your turn. They need you to step forward when direction is required. Put It Into Practice Pick three phrases from the lists above that match what youre dealing with right now: an unclear deadline, a drifting project, or a team member who needs firmer expectations. Then choose one upcoming situation where you tend to get soft. Prepare your words in advance. Practice them out loud once or twice. Then use them in the moment. The shift is immediate. People stop debating. They start executing. And you feel the difference between managing the conversation and leading it. Because when you speak with clarity and authority, people dont just listen, they follow.
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E-Commerce
It’s been an unprecedented and brutal week for the advertising industry. The finalization of Omnicom Groups $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) (the biggest takeover in advertising history) is affecting tens of thousands of workersmost immediately the 4,000 expected to be laid off by the end of the year. Both Omnicom and IPG own many different ad agency brands, all of which will be profoundly impacted by the merger. Omnicom is retaining only McCann from the IPG roster of agency networks, while folding FCB into BBDO, and both DDB and MullenLowe into TBWA, in order to achieve Omnicom Chairman and CEO John Wren’s goal of $750 million in synergies. These are more than just a collection of acronyms, though. They are major agency brands, built over decades and generations, that will now disappear as their parent holding company fights to grow, survive, and remain competitive. You’d be forgiven if you think the ad world is an alphabet soup of who’s eating who. But there is another side to the business that’s steering clear from the publicly traded drama. Independent agencies are growing in number, and in the scale and scope of work theyre being assigned by major brands. It’s a trend that has been bubbling up for years. According to an Ibis World report, the number of U.S. ad agencies grew 2.2% from 2019 to 2024. Even anecdotally, there has been a surge in new creative shops. Isle of Any, for example, was launched in January by former Droga5 execs, and has already done work for The New York Times, A24, OpenAI, and Coinbase. Part of the indie boom is undoubtedly a cultural correction to the mess that is major ad holding companies, as talent flees corporate bureaucracy for greener, more creative pastures. But it’s more than that at this point. In recent years, major brands have shown an increased willingness to work with these small shops despite (or because of) their size. For years, independent agency Rethink has been winning industry awards and getting business results for Heinz. Mother, an agency founded in London 30 years ago, has a range of big clients, including Buick, Uber, Cheerios, and Stella Artois. And, of course, independent agency Wieden+Kennedy is known for its work for Nike, McDonald’s, Ford, and Michelob Ultra. Amid all the ad world chaos, I spoke to indie agency execs at award-winning shops Rethink, Tombras, Joan Creative, Haymaker, and Mother about what the ad industry landscape looks like from their vantage point at this moment. As technology, data, and, in particular AI, levels the playing field in so many ways, these independents see a distinct competitive advantage in the combination of original creative and strategic thinking. Most crucially, though? They see clientsnot investorsas their primary stakeholders. Holding company drama The massive consolidation of IPG-owned ad agencies is the latest in an ongoing trend among publicly traded advertising companies over the past decade to boost profits and efficiency. In 2018, holding company WPP combined Wunderman and J. Walter Thompson (JWT) into Wunderman Thompson, and VML and Young & Rubicam into VMLY&R. Then in 2023, it combined them all into just VML. How did that work out? WPP shares are down more than 60% year to date, and have hit a quarter-century low. Reports emerged last month that France-based holding company Havas was exploring an acquisition or stake in WPP. Havas has denied the reports, but it’s the state of the industry that made it so believable. Jay Kamath, founder and chief creative officer of Haymaker, says there’s nothing wrong with mergers if there is a strong vision behind it. These arent visionary mergers, theyre survival mergers. The model is aging, margins are shrinking, and they think scale is a life raft, says Kamath, who believes scale does little to really help clients. In reality, it’s speed, not scale that brands care about as they vie for customers’ increasingly divided attention. They need faster teams who bring sharper ideas and are accountable partners, he says. Dooley Tombras, president of Tombras, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based agency with additional offices across the U.S. and in Buenos Aires, sees holding companies as a model in managed decline. As holding companies continue to consolidate to compensate for a loss of top-line growth, the winners will likely be in the independent space. As they consolidate brands, offices, and people to deliver cost synergies to Wall Street, they will naturally shore up to protect the billion-dollar-plus clients, Tombras says. Many major national brands spending in the $50 million to $100 million annual budget level will get lost in the shuffle and look to make a move. And it will likely be to a scaled independent. Advantage: independent Tombras’s theory seems to be resonating. Geoff Cottrill, former CMO of Coca-Cola, Converse, and Topgolf, recently commented on LinkedIn: If I were still a CMO, Id be looking for creative partners outside these massive machines. So I called him up and asked him to elaborate. His answer should be encouraging to any indie agency, and to many of the impending holding company exiles looking to be hired. Marketing, as an industry, has kind of lost the plot, says Cottrill of the industry’s infatuation with data, AI, and money. He notes, If you’re a midsized brand trying to fight for attention, needing to get the right creative ideas, get the right service levels, account management, you’re better off with a smaller, more nimble creative shop like Wieden+Kennedy or someone like Opinionated (an independent ad shop out of Portland, Oregon, whose clients include Adidas, Panda Express, and Hinge). For Lisa Clunie, founder and CEO of New York-based Joan, being independent is a superpower. Brands want partners who can prototype, pivot, and produce without waiting for multinational approval chains, she says. This is not a new concept. Back in 2021, Domino’s took its brand to a small, 23-person indie shop called WorkInProgress. At the time, the pizza chain’s then-CMO, Art DElia, told Ad Age, I really feel that the independent agency model gives us more flexibility and less distractions. Tombras believes that brand and culture are at an inflection point given the proliferation of AI. Machine value will decrease, he argues, while human value is poised to skyrocket. The whole reason brands have gone to agencies in the first place is to get highly unique perspectives on how to solve business problems, he says. Independents are in an exponentially better position to attract talent because people are tribal; we want to play for teams. For Teri Miller, U.S. CEO of Mother, the holding company business model, and now consolidation, feels a million miles away from what is actually happening on the ground in the business of creativity. Its just a totally different vocabulary, rule set, body language, she says. Clients who have hired Independents as an antidote understand why: We know who we are, why we exist, what our strengths are. We arent trying to be everything to everyone. Creative advertising versus Public Company I’ve been covering brands and ad agencies in one way or another for almost 20 years, and I’ve seen that great creative work is not exclusive to independent agencies. Agencies owned by holding companies, including those being shuttered through the Omnicom consolidation, have produced incredible work over decades. In fact, McCann, FCB, the Martin Agency, and TBWA/Worldwide were all on Fast Companys 2025 Most Innovative Companies list earlier this year. Still, holding company agencies are facing bigger challenges, as the media landscape continues to fragment and the demands of clients have become more complex and immediate. In a media era that prioritizes cost and efficiency, the great work these agencies are making increasingly feels like it’s despite being part of a public holding company, not because of it. The global publicly traded conglomerate still has advantages in scale, particularly in media buying. But there is no discernible advantage in terms of solving business problems with creative ideas and strategy. Joan’s Clunie says creativity and public ownership aren’t enemies, they’re just bad roommates. While public companies optimize for shareholder value, independent agencies optimize for creative value. “When you need to hit quarterly targets, the easy moves are cost cuts, procurement deals, and operational tweaks,” Clunie says. “The risky move? Betting on a bold creative idea that might take two years to prove itself. Guess which one gets the green light at 11:59 p.m. before earnings? It’s not that public companies can’t do brilliant work, she says. It’s that their wiring makes the safe choice easier and the interesting choice harder. And in our business, interesting usually wins. Independence means we can take the long view. That’s not romanticit’s structural.
Category:
E-Commerce
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