Mark Pollard is coming to DK. One of the most influential strategy mentors working today — and not because he makes strategy sound nice. Depending on who you are, words like framework, tools or strategy either light you up or put you straight to sleep. Pollard knows that. And he also knows the problem isn’t the words — it’s how we use them.
I don’t like doing traditional keynotes, he says. I like building material around the audience. That approach runs through everything he does. After years of calling out lazy thinking, fake depth and strategy theatre, Pollard has built a global following by doing the opposite: insisting on clarity, responsibility and real thinking. Over 1.3 million people listen to his Sweathead podcast for exactly that reason — no polish, no shortcuts, no pretending.
His path into strategy wasn’t exactly conventional. He almost became a lawyer. Then dropped out, because making hip-hop websites was more interesting. That led him into advertising, where he went on to do strategy work that, in his own words, left imaginations stretched and brains forever poked. Brands like Facebook, Twitter, The Economist and Mozilla keep calling not for vibes, but because Pollard’s thinking permanently ruins bad work. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
This won’t be a polite keynote. And it’s definitely not a neatly packaged framework. In Strategy On You, Pollard builds the session live, around the people in the room, using strategy the way it was always meant to be used: as a thinking tool, not a performance. The focus isn’t on brands or case studies. It’s on how you think, how you define problems, and how you turn messy ideas into something that actually connects.