“Ideas are the original renewable resource.”
01
Directing traffic
Nicole grew up wanting to make the adverts she saw on ITV and on the poster sites. Her father, the media man Mike Yershon, worked on the buying side. She wanted the creative side. So in the late 1980s she wrote a hundred letters and landed a single job, in traffic at GGT, the agency run creatively by Dave Trott.
Within two years she was running the department. Traffic made sure the right work got signed off and out of the door on time, in an analogue world where a poster took eight weeks. One senior creative told her to go away six or seven times when she needed copy for a newspaper ad by noon. She kept going back, and the seventh time he typed it while she stood behind him. In Rough Diamond she sums the job up: “Traffic meant everything to me because it meant doing everything, and that meant really doing it.”
In the early 1990s she joined Simons Palmer, then a start-up of fifteen people working for Wrangler, Nike, Sony and BT. Her dad went through the accounts to make sure they could look after her. There she ran creative services. Later she worked a three-day week there, and made it count.
When Simons Palmer merged into TBWA, chairman Paul Simons asked her to move the combined agency into Whitfield Street. Then Dave Trott rang. He had started Walsh Trott Chick Smith and wanted her for eighteen months on a three-day week. His words stayed with her: “Nic, your three days are better than most people’s five.”
02
The Lab that magic built
In January 2000 Paul Simons, by then chief executive of Ogilvy & Mather in London, called with a brief and no job description: bring the agency into the 21st century. Nicole found an agency at Canary Wharf still running on coloured slips of paper and a job book locked in a drawer. She put the paperwork onto digital systems, and in RedWorks Broadcast she turned shelves of reels into one digital copy of each.
From 2005 she brought new media into the creative work. Teams would ask whether something was possible and Nicole would ring round her contacts until it was. A climate brief flooded the online world of Second Life. A Fanta app used a tone that children can hear and adults can’t, and won at Cannes. Dave Trott later wrote that real creativity is making that kind of thing happen from nothing.
When the OgilvyOne board agreed a network of labs, with London leading for Europe, the money never came. She went home on the plane excited anyway. In the book she remembers her pitch: “I’m simply going to magic something out the air.” Suppliers lent the newest kit in return for a showroom, and Rory Sutherland’s speaking fees paid the bills. By 2008 Ogilvy Labs was up and running. It worked with clients including IBM, Amex, BP, Unilever, British Airways and JD Wetherspoon, with sister labs as far away as Beijing.
She also started The Rough Diamond, a real diversity programme with Ravensbourne University, which brought young people who would never have seen an agency into the work. It ran for ten years.
“Ogilvy and its actions didn’t so much let me go as fire me out of a cannon.”Rough Diamond, 2017
In August 2016 Ogilvy closed the Labs and Nicole left after sixteen years. She told Campaign that week: “I don’t have any negativity because I understand business.”
03
A timeline
From the traffic desk to Mansion House, as far as the record shows.
- Late 1980s
Joins GGT in traffic at nineteen, and is running the department within two years.
- Early 1990s
Joins Simons Palmer as a start-up of fifteen. Runs creative services, then moves the merged agency into Whitfield Street when Simons Palmer joins TBWA.
- Late 1990s
Eighteen months with Dave Trott at Walsh Trott Chick Smith, on traffic and creative services.
- 2000
Joins Ogilvy & Mather in London with the chairman’s brief to bring the agency into the 21st century. Digitises its workflow and broadcast archive.
- 2005
Starts bringing new media into Ogilvy’s creative work, from Second Life to a Cannes-winning Fanta app.
- 2007 to 2008
Gathers the work into the Ogilvy Digital Innovation Lab, which becomes Ogilvy Labs, the group’s innovation unit. Her title is Director of Innovative Solutions, Ogilvy Group UK.
- 2012
Made an Honorary Fellow of Ravensbourne University London, where the Rough Diamond programme found its students.
- August 2016
Ogilvy Labs is closed. Nicole leaves after sixteen years and starts out on her own, first as Lab For Hire and then as The NY Collective.
- November 2017
Rough Diamond: Turning Disruption into Advantage in Business and Life is published by Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press and becomes an Amazon number one bestseller.
- February 2018
Talks about the book in Nesta’s In Conversation series.
- September 2024
Keynote at the International Media Top Convention during Dutch Media Week, at Beeld & Geluid in Hilversum. Also runs a Jamming AI session there with the ethics and technology strategist Nicoletta Iacobacci.
- 2025
Becomes Chair of Creative Conscience, the charity that trains young creatives to use their talent for social good.
- April 2026
Joins the City of London Corporation as Campaign Convenor to the Lady Mayor, Dame Susan Langley. In June, during London Tech Week, the Team UK banners go up at Mansion House.
- October 2026
Leads a session on the intrapreneurial mindset for a CEDEP executive programme in Paris, with Liri Andersson. “I had become the case study!”
04
Rough Diamond
Nicole wrote the book in the year after Ogilvy, and she wrote it straight. The back cover calls it a book about disruption, personal and in business. Inside, she calls it “a manifesto for those who want to fly high above the ordinary.”
The story turns on the end of her agency career. Of the agency she says, “They cut me down at my knees,” and then, with hindsight, “The best thing that could ever have happened.”
The book also carries her father’s maxim, that unless you are moving forward you are going backward. Behind the stories sits the practical case for the intrapreneur, the person who changes a company from the inside. She turned that into an online course, Intrapreneurship, for 42 Courses.
- Full titleRough Diamond: Turning Disruption into Advantage in Business and Life
- Published7 November 2017
- PublisherLifestyle Entrepreneurs Press, 250 pages
- CourseIntrapreneurship, on 42 Courses
05
The NY Collective, and the City
The NY Collective is Nicole’s answer to the hundred-page strategy deck that never gets done. From her black book of specialists in brand, web, content, data, PR, events and AI she picks the right few for each problem and conducts them. Clients pay the specialists directly, with no mark-up, and keep the relationships when she steps away.
Clients have included Danone, Havas, Amex, IBM, BP, London Business School, EY, Accenture, Pfizer, Great Western Railway, GoCompare, Unilever, British Airways and Whitbread. For Havas Media Group UK she ran its lab, “18”.
With Nicoletta Iacobacci she runs Jamming AI, a digital twist on the hackathon. Her line on it: “If we are on the front foot, AI is the biggest tool in creativity’s toolkit.” She chairs Creative Conscience, and she works alongside Group Partners.
Since April 2026 she has been Campaign Convenor to Dame Susan Langley, the Lady Mayor of the City of London, on Team UK. In her words, its goal is to “replace outdated, negative perceptions with evidence-based confidence”. Getting its banners onto Mansion House, a Grade I listed building, took months of permissions. Her verdict: “Most worthwhile things look simple once they are finished.”
She is also Innovation Director at Stark Global Events. Asked what she does, she says she is a connector.
06
In her own words
“I hate being asked what I do. I always answer with hesitation, as no simple sentence or comparison with a typical job works.”
“I was raised to believe that comfort is the enemy of progress.”
“If you’re not attached to revenue you’re always in a precarious position.”
“Looking back I can describe my mentality in one word. Fearless.”
“It’s not about the tech, it’s about the people who imagine, use, or misuse it.”
“I’ve seen hundreds of these kids and know they are incredible and creative. They just don’t know it yet.”