Today we’d like to introduce you to Graham North
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
A sage friend said to me the other day that life is a bunch of side quests, until you wake up one day and notice that you were main questing all along.
Which helps me justify the absolutely ragtag multi-act journey that led me to start an ad agency rooted in kindness and honesty.
I was born in Nova Scotia, one of six kids, to a father who mediated sticky conflicts for a living. I spent most of my childhood on a one-track path to becoming a lawyer, but my dad’s sudden death when I was 21 — just a couple of months before graduating — shook me into a series of yolo life experiments to push my curiosity and see the world differently so that I could figure out more about who I really was.
My 20s were peppered with a bizarre smattering of very loosely-related but amazing experiences — using theater and sports to teach kids about HIV prevention in Botswana during the peak of the AIDS epidemic, training pre-school teachers in Zanzibar, a stint as a travel writer throughout Southeast Asia and Africa that included corresponding for BBC World News during the Egyptian uprising, founding an edtech startup to help liberal arts grads plus-up their degree and actually get jobs, and a CMO stint for the creative summer camp where Pixar directors send their kids.
Eventually, I landed in San Francisco, where a friend got me to come work at one of the world’s most storied ad agencies — Goodby Silverstein & Partners, who are most famous for “got milk?” but have launched and grown some of the most iconic brands like the NBA, Doritos, Cheetos, BMW, One Medical, and many more. It’s a creative playground for kind, talented misfits who are obsessed with making things that people want to pay attention to. The founder, Jeff Goodby, one referred to the ethos of the place as “art serving capitalism.”
While there, I was noticing the degree to which creative projects were getting killed at the end for the wrong reasons. It was almost never because of the actual creative expression, and almost always because of some lingering doubt from the C-Suite that never got surfaced. So I started a thing called Brand Camp, which brought me all the way back to my dad’s mediation skills — getting the most powerful decision-makers into the same room and helping them voice their most uncomfortable truths, so that we could make the hard tradeoffs early, align on the ambition, and get out of the way of the creative process.
That little change became the entire ethos of the company I went to go build with my unhinged, visionary, one-of-one co-founder Laura Petruccelli.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Is any road smooth?
But seriously, I’d be lying if the biggest struggle wasn’t my dad’s unexpected death. I was 21, deep in my thesis-writing era two months from undergrad graduation, blinded into one of those solipsistic “this is the entire universe” modes.
And then I got the call that the doctors had caught a staph infection just a little too late, and his blood began to poison him, killing him almost instantly.
It was an early-but-important lesson in grief… that bizarre anything-but-linear process that repeats and jump-scares and shows up in the worst and funniest times.
But it was also an incredible practice in bravery, resilience, and the dissolving of an image of what you’re “supposed to be.” We all go through life with this invisible sound system of how loud risks seem, and there is something about the death of a parent that really turns the volume down on all of it.
Pick up and move to a different continent? Throw all your money away on backpacking? Change careers? Start and fail a company? None of these felt nearly as scary as they did growing up.
And when you combine that risk-welcoming audacity with a deeply values-driven company, it feels like you can try more, learn more, and change more.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about nice&frank?
nice&frank’s values are right there in the name. We’re a kind, honest creative company that digs for the truth in unexpected places, and tells the truth in unexpected ways.
In a world where less than 9% of people trust advertising — and they trust ad people literally less than car salespeople — we’re trying to bring honesty into the C-Suite decision-making boardroom, so that the actual creative work feels like something people can connect to and trust. It’s one of those simple-sounding ideas that requires a lot of tough emotional work to actually pull off, but it’s working. AdAge named us Newcomer Agency of the Year in 2024.
From a process standpoint, I’m proudest of the way we’ve infused experience design to make it more fun for everyone to listen like they’re wrong and wade through uncomfy convos. Corporate America isn’t exactly built to nudge people to speak their truth, but with some thoughtful design, you can override the power dynamics and defaulting the opinion of the highest-paid person in the room, and actually bubble up the truth.
From a work standpoint, I’m proudest of how quickly we’ve earned the trust of such a comically different range of brands — from launching Häagen-Dazs’ first-ever Super Bowl ad, to bringing the mental health benefits of working out into the fitness world with Les Mills, to helping confront skepticism in the driverless vehicle world with Amazon’s Zoox. Honesty works in any industry.
And from a culture standpoint, we’re majority Queer-female-owned and 75% female in a world where less than 1% of agencies are founded by women.
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
Too many people to count.
My co-founder Laura Petruccelli is a daily/hourly source of creative inspiration, deep kindness, belly laughs and Australian accent. Ask anyone — she is truly one of one.
We’ve gotten silly lucky with our first two years of nice&franklettes… a mix of top-tier talent, spectacular listeners, and all-around inspiring people who challenge and grow what it means to be nice and/or frank.
I’ve had mentors galore in my zigzag journey, but a couple stand out. Andy Grayson gave me a model for what it means to be a great leader-doer — as both a master of the craft, and a thoughtful designer of systems that help people thrive. Bonnie Wan taught me how to interrogate from within, and to constantly reassess the true nature of what’s going on inside of you so that you can actually grow vs. trying to suppress and move on.
My mom taught me many things, but most importantly, to never get too important to drink cheap wine.
And, of course, my dad. Who taught me that legacies are about how you make people feel, and somehow manages to keep doing that 19 years after he left us.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://niceandfrank.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nice.and.frank/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/niceandfrank/
