Last year, Jason Bagley, the former Wieden+Kennedy creative leader who helped steer groundbreaking campaigns for Old Spice, KFC and Nike, realized he wasn’t having as much fun as he used to. Having spent 16 years at the agency, most recently as an executive creative director, he noticed that in the task of leading a growing 550-person office, he was increasingly being pulled away from what he loved the most. “I missed being closer to the creative process, to creatives doing the work,” he said. “That’s my passion. There are a lot of other super important things that creative leaders do, but the work just got to be too small of a percentage of it for me, and I found myself waking up and not being excited about the job anymore.”
That realization spurred him to take a break from agency life in 2020, but it also became the inspiration for his new venture—the Audacious School of Astonishing Pursuits, a virtual mentorship platform designed to provide young talents the skills they need to excel in the agency world—and have a great time while doing it.
The school’s first program, “Creative Megamachine,” consists of two weekly one-hour Zoom sessions with Bagley over the course of eight weeks, during which Bagley will be teaching creatives how they can, basically, make the best work of their careers.