Sandy Thompson has been a strategist and leader in the ideas and advertising business for 20 years, 13 of which have been in offices around the world for Saatchi & Saatchi, the Ideas Company. Thompson worked with Saatchi & Saatchi Canada before transferring to Asia, where she was Planning Director across 12 different markets. Today, Thompson is Planning Director of Saatchi & Saatchi New York and Canada, and has been heavily involved in many of the recent $100 million-plus new business account wins that have marked Saatchi’s success in 2006.

Sandy Thompson has a degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Western Ontario, which proved a perfect springboard for her natural curiosity about people and their stories. This in turn has helped create powerful consumer connections for her clients’ business and brands.

Sandy believes that knowledge is nothing without understanding. To understand, you need to get out from behind your desk, your computer screen and the one-way viewing mirror of the focus group lab; instead, spend some time in the real world and really start to understand how people feel and what they want from life.

During seven years in Hong Kong, Sandy pioneered the revolutionary research methodology called ‘Xploring’. It’s a technique that goes far beyond the data points and the focus groups, and into the real lives, aspirations, and passions of everyday people. The insights generated by her travel that she integrated into her work life helped Saatchi & Saatchi to become the most awarded marketer and advertising agency in the region.

Her success is based on the belief that knowledge is nothing without understanding. And true understanding stems from hard work: she and her team travelled over 50,000km in China by van, for instance, as part of the initial research for her clients – research that formed the basis for One in a Billion.

Sandy’s devotion to understanding people and how they interact with the objects and products in their everyday life gives her a simple and unique outlook on the advertising business, one that’s firmly rooted in the human focus of her world view. "Say what people want to hear, not what you want to tell them. To create loyalty beyond reason, you have to fixate on what people care about."

Sandy and her teenage children, Riley and Brin, reside just outside of Toronto, but have the pleasure of enjoying the energy, pace and excitement of New York each and every week. Sandy has also recently become the head of Saatchi’s new childhood ideas laboratory, Youth Connection.