In a long interview with Roastbrief, our Chair Lotta Malm Hallqvist sets out why agencies have lost the trust of their clients — and how AI, used right, can give it back.
Roastbrief has published a wide-ranging conversation with our Chair, Lotta Malm Hallqvist, on the state of the agency industry and the thesis behind Multiply. Drawing on three decades of agency leadership at McCann, Mother, and Cheil, Lotta makes the case that the industry's biggest problem isn't AI — it's the slow erosion of strategic trust between agencies and their clients.
Her diagnosis is sharp:
"Clients stopped paying for thinking because thinking became invisible."
Commoditization and the pressure to ship volume have pushed strategic work into the background. Multiply's role, in her framing, is to give that work back its shape — making the thinking behind creative output legible again.
Lotta is clear-eyed about where AI fits in. Not as a replacement for human craft, but as a way to clear the mechanical work that has been crowding it out:
"Technology must amplify the human signal, not substitute it."
The interview also covers how Multiply lets networks like Together Group and NoA integrate the platform without flattening the distinct cultures and strategic voices of the agencies inside them:
"Local culture always defeats the global template."
The full conversation — including Lotta's advice to women working in tech — is on Roastbrief.