In this episode of Lykken on Lending, we dive into the art and science of building brands with Andrew McLean, the creative force behind the award-winning Angel AI identity. From his early start in advertising at just 14 years old to shaping campaigns for Disney, Citibank, and Unilever, Andrew has spent decades refining the craft of connecting people to brands in ways that inspire trust, love, and loyalty. Together with host David Lykken, Andrew reveals how empathy—not just data—drives true innovation in branding, why consistency and simplicity matter more than ever, and how Angel AI is transforming financial services by making them not only more accessible but more human. This is a masterclass in building brands that resonate deeply, create cultural relevance, and ultimately drive meaningful growth.
[David]: Listeners, we’re in for a real treat today because we’re talking today with a true marketing genius. This is someone who has been instrumental in creating the brand, brand awareness. I mean, everything to do with the angel AI brand, which is brilliant. And I’m so excited to have him on and he’s even more fun because he’s got a British accent, and so he talks so proper. And we’re gonna have him on with us. Andrew, so good to have you, your friend.
[Andrew] That’s very kind of you. Thank you. Most uh Disney characters who are evil have British accents, that’s probably the positioning of it. You know, think of Scar in the Lion King.
[David] Oh, yes, Scar, well, yes, but so I mean also we have some beloved characters. I mean, James Bond and so many others, but you’re bond. So with that, anyway, we’re gonna it’s still good to have you here on air. And I’m really excited because you have over 25 years of deep expertise across the marketing and advertising, PR, television, digital, out of your home print. You name it, you have done it all, and you’ve worked with some pretty significant brands. I could tell your story, but I’d rather have you tell our listeners about yourself and your journey to where you’re at today, my friend.
[Andrew] Well, that that’s very kind of you. I think that that I would have to say that it’s better to be lucky than good sometimes. I guess I was a little strange in that I don’t think there’s too many 14-year-old boys who actually know they want to be in the advertising business at that age.
[David] And that’s when you found out that’s when you figured out?
[Andrew] Absolutely. I grew up in what I would call the golden age of television, but not only television, incredible posters, incredible magazine ads, you know, I could go back to sort of some of the work that people knew about Volkswagen over here and great TV ads from around the world. And I was fascinated by it just at that early, early stage. And I think, you know, again, we do like to say that the British, whilst we may not have invented advertising, was clearly invented here in the US, probably by Procter and Gamble or other soap companies, but I think that you know, there was a golden age of advertising, and I was very fortunate to grow up in it and be very heavily influenced by it, so you know, my father worked for Kodak for many years, so he that visual nature of media was something that I grew up with very clearly. So at 14 years old, I was subscribing to the equivalent of ad age and consuming it. So knew from a very early age that that this, you know, as I say, you know, I don’t really class this as a job is because for your very kindness, because for over 30 years, this has been a passion and still is.
[David] Well, and and it shows up, it shows up with the quality of your work, Andrew. And I think anyone who’s looking for someone as a branded bass, or more than that, I mean, it’s just anything, literally from soup to nuts, beginning to end. You your passion and care and concern for what the outcome of it is, is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. And when you so obviously you you say you had this as a desire since you were 14 years old. How did you hone your craft? How did you develop your craft to get to be as good as you are today?
[Andrew] Yeah, like everyone I think in in business that has longevity and enjoys what you do, you start off at the very bottom. And I trust me, I started at the very bottom, you know, basically as the T-boy or the equivalent of the post boy in the mailroom, but I was very fortunate the first agency that I went to was Lintas, which again sadly doesn’t exist, but handled Unilever. And Unilever, at least in Europe and the UK, built some incredible brands. And I was very fortunate to work on these incredible brands like Purcell and like Dove soap and all kinds of things, and the great thing about Unilever is they used you know what we would now think as you know very standard, they used lots of different types of media, they realized that the way people build their relationship with brands is not just through one thing. There was a great uh guy, Jeremy Bullman at JWT, who said that people build brands like a bird builds a nest. They take strands and they take twigs and they take material from lots of places and they build this nest. And if you think of a brand as a nest and the completeness of a brand story, you have to be in lots of different places, and you have to be consistent. And that is as true today in 19 as it is today. So I was very fortunate, so Unilever was great, but here’s where my, if you like my sort of career in financial services started, way back when we were just an agency that all we did was Unilever and then all of a sudden, through a sort of a weird acquisition, we ended up with Barclays Bank, which back then was the biggest bank in the United Kingdom. Obviously now has a has an offering over here as well, but Barclays was you know regular bank like Chase here. It was of that kind of stature. It was absolutely and I managed to basically blag my way onto the launch of this new service for Barclays, and we did something very interesting way back then, which was to take a very different approach and realize that people, unfortunately, don’t necessarily view financial institutions as their best friends.
[David] That’s true, that’s so true and sometimes it’s the least friendly relationship, yeah.
[Andrew] Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And adversarial with all the kind of compliance and everything there, and we kind of, you know, again, smarter people than I, but I was able to help them execute a plan where we were trying to be unbank-like. And in doing that, we did a huge amount of research about the customers of Barclays Bank and of other banks as well, and we started to find these sort of truisms, so to speak, about people’s relationship with financial services. Now I was sort of bottom of the totem pole. and I soon after that I moved over to work on Procter and Gamble at DMBNB. And between Unilever and Procter and Gamble, there is no better training. But I was getting very pigeonholed in consumer packaged goods, and I was very fortunate that that my boss at the time realized that I was probably you know running out of steam doing ads for um uh toothpaste and soap powder. And he gave me, he knew that I loved movies again. I’m a huge movie fan, and I worked on 20th Century Fox films, and then by an accident of fate, I ended up being asked to join the Walt Disney Company as their in-house advertising and media person for Europe, and so that was when I started to spend a lot of time in the US. I’d come over for meetings and we’d start to see the early stages of films. My one of my you know proudest moments is that we launched Toy Story around.
[David] Were you involved in that one?
[Andrew] And I saw Toy Story on some servers in a room with all these huge servers, which probably you could now squeeze onto your phone. And we saw Woody and we heard Tom Hanks, and but we all we saw was this sort of wire character type structure. But we knew it was this was new, you know. We worked on classical animation as well, like Pocahontas and Hercules and all these kinds of great classic animation, but like all things that can evolve, we went from classical animation to digital animation. And I at that time was spending a lot of time in America, my then girlfriend who who at during that time became my wife, she was spending time here as well. And I thought…
[David] You became a US citizen.
[Andrew] I’d love to I’d love to move to America, but unfortunately Disney said, we want you to stay in Europe. And so I was like, oh my goodness, but then I got headhunted to come to New York to work for what was then Young and Rubicon, which was a great storied agency that was looking to evolve into a more forward-thinking operation. Two years later, we’re acquired by an English company called WPP, where it’s better to be lucky than good. So I was the quintessential American in New York and went on to work one of the first accounts I worked on was Citibank, which I worked on Citibank for about a decade.
[David] Wow. Wow, what a journey. And it’s so interesting to see how the different paths we take in an early career contribute to where we’re at today. You’ve been so instrumental in crafting the vision for Angel AI and for Pavan. And that has been it, it’s a work of genius work, especially coming up with the logo. But I got to give you kudos. We’re recording this before the announcement’s been made, but we’ll be releasing this the day after the Fast Company award was given to Pavan and Intelligence and Angel AI. As well, you tell us about the award. I mean, this is this is the work of your hand. Pavan tells you this was exalted.
[Andrew] And you know, this we literally found out last night that we’ve been awarded the Fast Company Award for Innovation by Design.
[David] And I think that that is very interesting. That is such a significant award. Fast Company is recognized as one of the most credible, one of the most highly regarded awards you could get as a publication. They really do that. It’s not just one of those pay-for-play type things. This is a deeply research award. And so how did that come about? That’s amazing.
[Andrew] Well, I look, you know, I think that that a lot of people have become very familiar with uh Angel AI, maybe over the last you know, 12 months, 24 months, you know, our association, our the story for us began six years ago, in fact, a little over six years ago. And at that point there was a vision, and Pavan had that vision, and over that time to achieve that vision, there were some things that we agreed on very early, and things that you know we brought to the party, and one of those was radical simplicity, is that financial services by its very nature is incredibly complicated and incredibly difficult, and is a and oftentimes, like you said, related to the Barclays, it doesn’t have the best relationship with the consumer and regarded well.
[Andrew] Yeah, and so and so at every step of the way we’ve I think held each other accounts, and I would say that one of the brilliant things, and even though you know I’m maybe in the back 9 of what I’ve been doing, this has been one of the most incredible experiences of my career because it’s such a tight-knit, genuine team, everybody is moving in exactly the same direction. There is no…
[David] And it’s with such clarity and a purpose and a focus, and I mean, and it’s such an altruistic value. I mean, lifting and making it easier for consumers to do anything across the financial system, lift themselves up out of the credit issues for the credit repair all the way through to blockchain and virtually all aspects of financial services.
[Andrew] I’m really we took a lot of cues from Apple, I think, as a lot of people do, because of the simplicity, you know, simplicity of design, radical simplicity. And it was and again, Pavan is always very, very good at this. So we will often come and look at things and maybe be a little word wordy, and he will say, you know, distill it, bring it down. What’s the essence of what we’re doing? And very early on, we kind of came up with this whole concept that we’re not selling mortgages, no, we’re selling the feeling of home and everything it stands for. And when you think about that, there is an implied or there is a simplicity that goes with that. So the Innovation by Design Award sounds great, and it sounds like we’re sort of very apples-que, but it isn’t that. It is about the fact that we’ve always said we’ve got to be so different, we’ve got to be different from everything else, and we’ve got to make it simple because if we make it simple, you will make it more accessible. If you make it more accessible, more people will achieve the dream of home ownership. And it doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, home is what is you know one of these things which you cannot ever change that feeling of home. And so and so everything we do, whether it’s a developer, of which genius developers who just work so hard, whether it’s you know, people inside the organization, whether it’s the anyone who touches, anyone who’s been involved in this, is all in on this. And so the innovation of design, I think it you know is a recognition. You know, Pavan and I went and to a Fast company conference, I think two years ago, and we talked there about what we were doing, and it’s kind of like that sort of you know, culmination of we were talking then a little bit more about a vision, and now we’re here delivering it to hundreds of thousands of people, soon to be millions of people. And the thing is that it’s grounded in a truth, and but it’s brown, it’s grounded in the trust that we will deliver with this product, and the accessibility, and again, and every step in the way, we’ve always said is that you know marketing can often do things, but if there is no underlying truth in what we’re doing, this won’t work, and it’s the fact, I mean, again, we count ourselves very lucky to be able to just play a small part in bringing this fantastic product to as many people as possible because we genuinely believe it’ll make a difference. And that you know, with the best will in the world, toothpaste is toothpaste, dog food and dog food. Yes, but giving people letting them achieve the dream of home ownership.
[David] Or financial independence, I mean anything.
[Andrew] And creating generational wealth.
[David] Yes, it’s that is that’s something to get excited about. It is something how do you find your what is the keys to building a brand that people do trust, not only for their current situation, but a relationship that’ll last well into their future and even possibly beyond their finances, Andrew?
[Andrew] Well, I think you know the first thing is we’re a huge believer in what we call brand love, and brand love comes from an understanding of the person you’re communicating to at the moment. At the end of the day, you know, we make no bones about it. We are trying to change people’s behavior or instill a new behavior, which ultimately we think will help them, but we can’t assume that. So, the first stage is when you understand behavior and human behavior, we have a psychologist that we work with who’s brilliant at this, when you understand behavioral change, you can make a step forward, and behavioral change begins when your customers or potential customers feel seen and potentially safe and trust you. And so, as we can see from the very earliest instance of Angel AI six years ago, its objective, its mission was to guide people, not just inform them, it was to guide them and then to empower them to take control of their financial futures with the confidence that this is all being underwritten, not by some faceless public company with a million call centers that keep you on hold, but with something that gives you instantaneous answers to even questions that may not may be tangential. So that trust is earned through the behavior and not just branding. You know, angel AI must really be consistent and must show up, even in moments of vulnerability. So let’s say you have got a credit issue, we’re gonna be there to help you and solve that issue, not maybe, and not in a superficial way, we’re actually put stable.
[David] Substantively gonna make a difference, yeah.
[Andrew] Exactly. And the other thing is that we all we from the very beginning said that the whole story and the whole basis for angel AI had to shift from transactional messaging. You know, we’ve all seen it, we see it every day. Here’s your rate, here’s your rate, you know, to a more transformational storytelling. You know, here’s how we’re gonna help you find the home of your dream. And so this means that you actually have to embed education, advocacy, emotional intelligence into every strand of communication that you put out there, so it’s we are a little, we are a little obsessive, and Pavan will tell you sometimes that that that I will tell him off and go, that’s not on brand. That’s not how Angel ai speaks, works, operates, etc.
[David] And I gotta speak to that relationship you have with Pavan. Because you mean because it it’s been times they have a saying in NASCAR. If we ain’t rubbing, we ain’t racing. In other words, there’s another saying, it’s iron sharpeneth iron, so does the friend sharpens friend. I think there’s so many. I mean the relationships that sometimes are respectfully contentious. I don’t know if it’s contentious of the right word, but challenging each other, but with the basis of respect and Pavan has profound respect for you, and you push back on him. I mean, no, we’re not doing that. No. And I can’t wait to get to the best.
[Andrew] It’s all it’s always out of love, complete love. He’s a genius, and so look, I don’t I don’t know. I never met him, I never interacted with Steve Jobs, but I can only imagine it’s similar to adversarial.
[David] It’s not adversarial in the sense with like what with Jobs. Pavan’s you’re all aligned on the same goal and objective. And I mean, one of the things he talks about, you touched on it earlier, and I want to make sure we weave this back in, is the empathy that he’s building into the product. Was this your idea? I know Pavan was raised with like that with his dad. I knew who I knew very, very well.
[Andrew] You know what? It’s like all the great things. I don’t think it was any anyone’s idea, it was natural. It came out of Pavan’s vision, which was if we don’t understand, how can we deliver how you know we don’t have that empathy, and you know, and you know, before we got involved, you know, decades before, Pavan realized that there was a power in machine learning, but there was also a potential negative, which is that people do don’t feel listened to and don’t feel understood, and particularly people who financial services have never talked to directly before. And that’s you know, that was something we got so I think you know, we whilst we sort of came up with empathetic AI, it was so long before that. I mean, empathy is in the heart and soul of this brand.
[David] And the people that build it. I mean, it’s really true in Pavan. It’s so true of his dad, who I again who’s passed and what this family is about. You meet his family, they all care deeply. They’ve done very well for the family.
[Andrew] Yeah, I mean, I mean you would never know it. It’s funny because we don’t kind of think about it, it’s what we do. We go, well, of course that’s what you’re gonna do. And it’s funny when you sit and look, and we often do this, we sort of go and pull everything else that’s going on in the marketplace and look at the competition or what have you, and we go, you know, where’s the heart and soul? Where’s the emotion? and that you know, look, it’s easy. You know, I do believe that if you look at empathy, you know, empathy is really just being inclusive.
[David] Yeah, actually. I watched you operate in in Las Vegas. You rented a studio, we all flew in. There was the celebration, it was the release and the announcement of the token that was released, and you were parked in a studio, and I watched Pavan flew consumers in who had their lives touched, powerfully touched, and you interviewed them and you drew out that story, which is a brilliant how you did that. So, I mean, I wish we had the time to tell a story. There’s got to be a work. In fact, we’re gonna put links to some of those stories on the show notes here because you were there. I got to be behind the scenes and draw some things out, but you did a brilliant job of directing that, Andrew, and how you drew those consumers were first time they’d ever been on camera, first time they’ve been under bright lights in a professional studio. You drew out also…
[Andrew] It was easy because they were genuine people. They have great stories to tell. I mean, I do think this is you know, it really wasn’t that difficult. would love to make it out that it was more difficult than it was because you just…
[David] Well to get the story told in a way that you did, honestly, it was good. I mean it’s a brilliant editing these brilliant stories into 30 seconds or a minute was a bit more challenging. Yeah, but and you know the thing is these are real people. We always talk about real people, real stories, real business.
[David] Yeah, oh and I wish we could we could get into the story.
[Andrew] There is a real danger, and we do it all the time, and you know, Instagram and TikTok, and you know, giving an artificial view of your world or what you’re doing or whatever, and I think that that can be problematic in the long term, it gives people a sort of a misguided view of the world, and they think that everything comes easy and everything, and it isn’t, you know, life is hard and there’s…
[David] There’s harsh realities, yes.
[Andrew] Yeah, particularly when it comes to trying to you know get onto the ladder of home ownership when there aren’t enough affordable houses and interest rates are at the all-time highs, you know, for the last 20 years. And so I think that what we try to um focus on is that if we can hold a mirror up to people and say here’s somebody like you, or here’s somebody whose life hasn’t gone completely smoothly and hasn’t gone from you know the yachts to the island to the Hamptons to the shore, whatever. You know, everyone has problems with credit. we’ve got we’ve got celebrities that we work with who’ve had issues with credit. And then people go, oh, so and you can help me as well because you helped them, that’s where you get that. Yeah, we’re an enabler. Yeah, we’re gonna we’re gonna help you get on the ladder and then you’re gonna fly.
[David] Sugar Shane Moseley is a great story there.
[Andrew] Yeah, I mean, but there’s hundreds of them. There’s hundreds of them. And I think if you hold that mirror up every now and again.
[David] it’s a good way to put it. Holding a mirror up, that’s a really good way to put it. And how you frame things out. I want to get into the story of the creating of the ballerina, the logo. That is one of those ones Pavan wasn’t initially for and you I would love to tell that story because anyone who owns a company whose developing a brand, you caught something here with a graphic artist that you are hired. Tell that story and how we brought that about because I have now fallen in love with that because it’s the elegance. I mean, especially when you go from machine learning to a ballerina.
[Andrew]Yeah, yeah.
[David] And how the ballerina comes out of the TV and helps the consumer is just brilliant stuff.
[Andrew] It’s evolved, and again, I take zero credit.
[David] No, no, no, no, no. You’re not getting off of that. You take a huge amount of credit. You should, because Pavan gives you the credit.
[Andrew] Which is which is very kind of him, but we go and we work with brilliant people and we’ve we have great talent that that works with us, and we’re blessed to have that talent. So the story of the logo first, and we have to go back a little bit because the first part of this, which was the fact that originally, you know, this was like an answer engine. And so, you know, we were looking at this and the sort of the way it was being envisioned was that you know very early on we talked about making the complex simple, and that wasn’t ever a tagline, but it was like an ethos that we had. And so as we started to kind of go down this route, we realized and we spent a lot of time with the developers and with Pavan, and we said, Well, so how are you doing this? And look, I am not a techie guy, yeah. I know enough. And he said, Well, what we’re doing very quickly. I’m like, and he’s talking about the hundreds and thousands and millions and of lines of code, yeah. All this stuff, and we’re going, okay, there’s no story there, and what have you, and we looked at all the logos. For financial services companies, and they were all terrible, and you know, it’s one of these things where we asked, a wonderful girl, Tasha Reifeld, who was actually here in the US but was often based and lived in Perth in Australia. And we talked about the complexity and you have to brief. And one of the things that you know again it looks like the swan on top, and underneath you’re paddling like this. It’s all about the brief. And what you tend to do is you give a designer like way too much information, and you know throw all this stuff in, and we talked about this. What were things where you had a very complex thing that looked elegant and brilliant? And you think about swans and you think about all these kinds of things, and we landed on this thing a ballerina. So I suddenly was there, I had pictures of ballerinas and what have you like that, and it just wasn’t the brand at all. And she went away, and she came back and with a design that she started to draw in front of us, sort of doodling it and it was it was this vision of a ballerina in a arabesque pose. But it was in and we had we’d actually had another person give us the arabesque part, and so she started, but she still kept drawing lots of lines, and the lines were the complexity of the code.
[David] Yes, I love that.
[Andrew] There are 27,000 lines in the logo, and so the logo, and all those lines are connected, it’s again you’ve got this lovely, elegant logo, and again, she’s you know, it’s an arabesque pose, which I do very badly, but she’s pointing forward. Yeah, the other thing is if you really look at it, she’s actually leaning forward. Yes, because we’re gonna take you forward, we’re gonna take you forward, and of course, the other thing is because we all know this to be true, is you know, Angel AI, of course, you know, she had to be a woman because a woman’s gonna actually get shit done.
[David] That’s so true. We know that in the mortgage industry. If you want to look at what really gets done around here, its true. And so Jennifer, look at we interviewed Jennifer. You saw the interview I did of Jennifer, and it I mean Pavan always points to it.
[Andrew] You know, Pavan, it it’s not that he didn’t get it, but he didn’t get it straight away. He didn’t get it right away, no, he didn’t like the idea, he’s he rejected the idea.
[Andrew] But his incredible wife, Pretti, and his mother, I believe, got it straight away. You know, once he’d had time, and once we’d explained it and gone through it, he was this is this is brilliant, this is genius. This is you know, so that logo is now five, well, four and a half, five years old, and has been such a NorthStar, and you know, we can use it in different things, you know, originally we were very protective of certain elements and colours and things, we’ve now realized we can do more things with it and we can stretch to it, and out of the logo came animation. Because another thing that is incredibly complex, but when it looks, it looks simple, was our animated ballerina and she now has appeared in every TV spot that we’ve worked on so far. She’s walked out of televisions, she’s walked into Copper America and football matches or soccer matches. Um she’s you know, she’s great, she’s incredible, and so we’re on this journey. We’re on this journey. We’ve and I call that the craft skills. So we’ve been very fortunate to work with animators, designers, we’ve worked with great directors, camera crews, setups, every place. We deliberately go and tell people the whole story of Angel AI before they start working on it.
[David] And they go and buy them and they it takes the work to another level. It just takes the work to another level when you get people buying it. One of the things that also you’re responsible for is the color. Well that’s the color of the app, what’s going in there? And what’s so interesting, have you seen the new iPhone that’s out there? I mean, Pavan’s showing me that new iPhone. It’s the color, it’s the it’s the color that of the angel AI app.
[Andrew] I’m going, I know how much money that cost me to get, you know. Tim Cooke, you know, came to us and said, what color should I use? And we said orange. Yeah. I go back to it’s better to be lucky than good. You know, go back. No, but it’s side, if and I trust me, I did not come from this world, but if you study design as I’ve sort of done a bit later on, there are certain colors that associate with different things. And you know, the most well-known one is blue. Every bank, every bank and financial institution has blue or red in it. So one of the things we said is no blue, no blue. No blue at all. Be unbank-like, be unfinancial institution like, you know, with and the orange, you know, and again, we’re not 100% orange, but the predominance of the orange is that it’s a warm color, it’s welcoming, and you tend to find it’s associated with various positive traits. You know, there was a power brand in Europe for many, many years called Orange. It was a telecom brand. Orangina is one of the all-time great soda brands. Uh so you know, the color Orange Fitness.
[David] I’m thinking about Orange Fitness out here in the world.
[Andrew] Yeah, absolutely. So it for us, it was kind of like so one part of it was nobody else is orange, so we’ll be orange. But the other part was it worked with everything that we were doing, and so the colors that we had, and again, not only are there 27,000 lines, but there are over 800 colors in this. But we created a colour palette again five and a half years ago, and we have never deviated from that color palette. Consistency. So that’s the other thing I would I would say to people is you know, when you know you’re right, stick with it and be consistent.
[David] Yeah, it’s so fortunate. I mean, the the definition of luck is preparation met with opportunity, and you guys have done so much preparing, and it’s if the opportunity was presented to you. And I’m just I love what you’ve done. There’s one of the things you and I talked about is the difference between tension and growth and authenticity, the tension between growth and authenticity, especially when you’re dealing with rapid expansion, you’re scaling a brand up. Talk a little bit about what you mean there.
[Andrew] Well, I think this is goes back to growth being intentional, not just exponential. And I think that what that means is that every step that you take requires you to go back to those values or that mission. And this is what Pavan is so good at. Is that if every now and again we’re getting a little, he’ll say, okay, what are we doing here?
[David] By the way, to hear Pavan in the background, he’s hitting me right now constantly with the with a WhatsApp app. I think he just finally got to watch the video. So I’m getting if you hear the pings in the background, let’s say. Yeah, that’s what’s up.
[Andrew] I mean I look, I will say that that I think that that I calculate that on average, I get 20 WhatsApp messages a day.
[David] Oh yeah, easily. Easily.
[Pavan] So over the life is and its but it’s incredibly efficient. So we share, you know, constantly. And so there is never any there’s never any lack of clarity. The feedback is instant. And craft people, people like us, we crave feedback, negative, positive.
[David] Any feedback, yeah, get it.
[Andrew] Because it is a process of reminder. So, you know, that point of how do you continue to grow, but being true to this ethos and is the intentionality. And I think that look, you know, if you look at why we use quite a few athletes in things that we do, you know, athletes and great athletes represent discipline, perseverance, and personal triumph. And that’s kind of a bit of a metaphor for what we’re trying to do. So the other part of it is we can’t dilute the messaging. Right. So we’ll often have people say, Hey, why don’t you come and do this? And we go, because there’s no emotion in it, and there’s no cultural relevance in it. You know, there are places where Angel AI will probably never show up.
[David] Give me an example of what you mean by that.
[Andrew] We’ll never be in NASCAR or potentially you know, we’re never gonna be in somewhere where we’re just a badge. You know, we have to mean something. You know, the fact that when we’ve connected with sports and athletes is because of their personality.
[David] That’s true, that’s true.
[Andrew] Not that they are in a piece of machinery that’s right 100 miles an hour. We love working with the you know, we have some incredible athletes, some of them are struggling over adversity, you know, but they’re on surfboards. Yes, they’re not in you know, 800 horsepower cars, yeah. And so it’s the relevance that is part of that, and I and I think that there’s this thing I often talk about, which is our permission to be in a place must always be down to the emotional and the cultural relevance.
[David] That is really good.
[Andrew] That then allows you to help and be seen as a behavioral change agent. So we always anchor it in the brand purpose, we always anchor it in this home affair lending, you know, that we are empathetic AI, and we want to do that. And if we if we drag that anchor, then that’s when Pavan and I think our customers and our consumers will hold us to account.
[David] Yeah, you’re talking about empathic power brand, and you have been so instrumental helping craft that message where it brings intimacy and mastery and sensuality, even with like with the with the ballerina. I mean, it’s just it’s brilliant. And how you pulled this all together. What is the what where is this all going? Well, give us some. I mean, if we gotta wrap this up, we got to do another interview here coming up. But I could talk to you. This is one of my favorite topics. I want to just continue to just interview you as this evolves, because you’re gonna be at the core of this thing and into where this is all heading. Where are we heading with Angel AI from your perspective for the journey that you’ve been on so far with this?
[Andrew] I genuinely think, and I know I’ve said it a couple of times today, but this dream of home ownership. I always remember when I was able to buy my own home, and I was very fortunate that I got a leg up, at least in the beginning, you know, from my parents who couldn’t afford much, but they knew that home ownership was really important. Yes, and there are many and there are millions of people who don’t have that opportunity. And I think that we are gonna write our own story, and Angel AI will write the narrative through those stories, you know, as we get people who’ve been able to get into their own home because they’ve overcome maybe you know, barriers, some of which are intentional from financial institutions. Let’s be very clear. There has been a practice which has discriminated, and we can clearly break through that, there have been issues where you know unfortunate issues or just bad reporting by credit agencies have put a barrier. We can push through those, we can break through those. And then when you see the stories, and Pavan is brilliant at this, wherever he goes, he’s always trying to record whether it’s loan officers, realtors, customers, telling the story. And and I think that that again, what we will do is we will launch, we will promote, we will make people more and more people aware of Angel AI, and then we’ll let the customers, the consumers, the new home buyers write the next chapter.
[David] Yeah, it’s really exciting. One of my favorite testimonials is of Jodi Perry, who talked about how it is giving her, it gives her the ability to make money and still have her family. It’s giving her back her life and I think what this is doing, it’s giving people a life and giving back some of the people involved in this crazy business of mortgage lending and real estate finance and real estate acquisition, it’s giving back their lives. It is support. Andrew, I am so honored to have you here. I’ve gotten one of the benefits that I’ve gotten out of this is meeting guys like you, and I cannot compliment you enough. I do podcasting well, we do that well, but the overall what you do in messaging and branding, anyone who is looking to bring a product to market or anyone who’s exploring ideas, dear God, get a hold of Andrew. Get someone like this guy around you to help you help you craft your message. How can people reach you? What’s the best way for people? I know you’re pretty busy with Agel AI, but I mean, I don’t know.
[Andrew] No, no. I’m a pretty open book. You can always find me on LinkedIn, you can find my email, we can maybe drop the email. I love this is a passion of mine. I love speaking to people, we are particularly involved in helping uh businesses get going, you know and certainly we do a lot of work um in you know areas where startups need you know a little bit more sometimes. But look we have a brilliant network and team of talented people and uh we’re a very, very open book. Again, we just think that that if you can make the complex simple, you can usually have a path to growth. And growth takes care of everything.
[David] It does. So true, Andrew. What a joy to get to know you and meet you and developing this friendship that I hope will last for a long, long time. Tremendous respects to you. Kudos to you, my friend, and kudos to getting Angel AI with Fast Company.
[Andrew] That’s the big announcement that just innovation by design, and that’s a that’s innovation by design. You know, it’s not just innovation for innovation’s sake, it’s not just design for design’s sake, but thank you for shining a light on what we do, and thank you for all you do for this industry, you know.
[David] Thank you, Andrew, it’s great. It’s a passion at this point. I’m 75 years old and doing this, and it’s not for the money, it’s for the passion to make a difference. And it’s fun to find a product like Angel AI. I find a guy like Pavan, who I met when he was 11 years old. When I was selling loans to his dad, Hari, and how fortuitous it would be that I’m working with him 55, 56, 57 years later. So amazing. Thank you so much for being here friend. I appreciate the time. Listeners, I watch him. He is a genius at helping bring products to market. Thank you, Andrew, for being here friend.
[Andrew] Thank you.
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Andrew McLean brings over 25 years of deep expertise across marketing, advertising, PR, television, digital, radio, out-of-home, and print. He has planned and bought across every media type, building brands for advertisers ranging from emerging startups to global enterprises. His career spans nearly two decades at WPP and Omnicom in the U.S. and Publicis in the U.K., where he led strategic initiatives for clients including Citibank, helping evolve their brand positioning and media strategy in a rapidly shifting financial landscape.
In the 1990s, Andrew ran the in-house advertising and media operation at The Walt Disney Company, where he helped shape the brand’s storytelling across multiple platforms. In 2012, he founded Inventus Media to offer clients a modern, data-informed approach to marketing and advertising—one that recognized the growing influence of digital, technology, and performance media. Inventus clients span CPG, financial services, retail, pharma, and media, with active investments across both traditional and digital channels. After a brief integration with Mercury Media in 2014, Inventus returned to its roots, focusing on brand and brand-response media, with oversight of more than $800 million in marketing spend.
Most recently, Andrew has led the development of the AngelAi brand, positioning it as a trusted, empathetic guide in financial education and protection. His work centers on crafting emotionally resonant campaigns that advocate for minority empowerment, fair lending, and inclusive financial literacy—embedding advocacy and trust into every message AngelAi delivers.