Member Interview with Mathias Upton-Hansen

We are delighted to bring you a Member Interview with Mathias Upton-Hansen, Co-Founder and CEO, BLACKLIST

What’s your golden rule?

Make work that people remember tomorrow. Because if no one is telling a story about it the next day, it may as well not have happened. he work that actually moves culture is the work that lives in memory, is experienced in real life, shared online, and talked about long after the campaign ends.

Who has been your biggest influence?

Sounds cheesy, but my dad. He taught me early that the most important thing in any room is the human connection, that people work with people they like, and that how you treat someone on the way up is how they will remember you on the way down. Twenty years in this industry has proved him right every single time. The relationships I have built with clients, collaborators, team members are the foundation everything else sits on.
Never burn your bridges is not just good advice. In a people business, it is the whole strategy.

What is your most hated business expression?

"Make it Instagrammable." It is the single most reductive brief in the industry. It reduces an experience to a backdrop, a moment to a metric, and a creative opportunity to a selfie opportunity. The experiences worth making are not the ones designed to be photographed, they are the ones people cannot help but photograph because they genuinely cannot believe what they just saw.

While we are here I am also not a fan of “disruptive"! Every agency deck promises disruption. Every brief asks for it. Every campaign claims to have achieved it. The truly disruptive thing at this point would be to stop saying it. No brand has ever disrupted a category by announcing that they were about to.

What’s the smartest business idea you’ve ever had?

We’re building Rook inside BLACKLIST. It really came from ten years of creating experiences that genuinely moved people, and then sitting in boardrooms watching clients struggle to justify them because the industry never really had a language for measuring real-world impact. Rook changes that. It’s our own prediction engine, built on a decade of campaign data, that generates a score to predict the likely success of an activation before a penny is spent. It means we can get into the room earlier, at a higher level, as a strategic partner rather than just the execution partner.

Which leader do you admire most and why?

There are so many leaders I admire, but one of my favourites is Ole Kirk Christiansen, the Danish carpenter who founded Lego, and someone I feel a particular connection to as a Dane. There's a specific idea he pioneered that I find genuinely compelling. The logic was always there in the brick itself. A brick isn't a story, it's the beginning of one. And because the world-building was always in the hands of the audience, the brand has been able to travel further than almost any other, into films, theme parks, video games, and some of the most successful licensed collaborations in entertainment history. He never thought about audiences, he thought about fans. And fans don't need to be sold to, they recruit others, they build the brand for you. That shift from pushing messages at people to pulling them inside a story is the most interesting problem in marketing today, and it's exactly what great brand work should do.

What is on your mind the most right now as a marketing leader?

The gap between what people actually respond to and what the industry keeps building. Brands spent a decade chasing social feeds, shorter, faster, cleaner, until everything looked the same and disappeared the same way. The shift that is happening now is profound: physical presence has become premium again. Showing up matters. The work that cuts through is not the most targeted, it is the most memorable. My job is to keep pushing that argument and building the work that proves it.

That gap between what marketing could be and what it too often settles for is what still gets me out of bed after twenty years.

Why is being part of The Marketing Society important for your career?

Because the best thinking happens in rooms where people challenge each other. The industry is at an inflection point, the brands winning now are the ones investing in depth over scale, story over stunt, emotion over exposure. The Marketing Society brings together the leaders driving that shift, and being part of that conversation matters more as you get more senior, not less.

Why does marketing matter to you?

Because at its best it's not communication, it's culture. The campaigns that stay with people don't just sell something, they create a feeling that becomes part of how someone remembers a period of their life.

Every brand has a true story. Finding it, protecting it, connecting it with people in a way that feels real, that's the job. We're custodians of something that belongs to the people who love it, not just the business that owns it. Get that wrong and you erode something that took years to build. Get it right and you make something that outlasts any single campaign.

Tell us something that’s not on your CV

Straight out of university I faked a BBC letterhead to get an Access All Areas pass to the Cannes Film Festival. I spent the week shooting a behind-the-scenes documentary of what A list Hollywood celebrities actually get up to after dark, sneaking into luxury hotels, knocking on random doors, conducting spectacularly ill-advised drunken interviews. I sent the tape to MTV. They were so impressed by the audacity that they gave my friend and I our own show on their new channel Viva Plus. The following two years, we produced 166 half-hour episodes of a show called “London Calling". They did tell us never to show the original documentary to anyone, or we would be sued into oblivion. We have not.