This comes across in his writing as the voice of a friend with compelling ideas to share – it’s a tone you miss once you leave it. While many ad people are enthusiastic, few catch you quite as off-guard as he does. To speak to Conniff Allende in person is to find yourself carried by his enthusiasm. Don’t be fooled: despite the business experience that guides the book, this is no raw-water fuelled guru’s ramblings. His experience is one of constructive intellectual unpicking, an ability to step back and critically break down the assumptions on which one’s life is built. “Livity began as an experiment to discover whether ‘ethical marketing’ was an oxymoron,” he writes. Not only had he created Livity, he built a business around a question. He writes passionately about the strange and wonderful enterprise he helped to build, just as he leaves it behind.Ī couple of weeks after we first spoke, he sent out an email announcing his withdrawal from the agency he had helped to build, an agency whose entire reason for being was totally new. A co-founder of Livity, the south London-based socially-focused ad agency which feeds much of his thinking, he is articulating the thesis of his first book, Be More Pirate, in uncommon fashion. Sam Conniff Allende likes to build things by breaking down what came before. WARC’s Sam Peña-Taylor explores the arguments.

In his new book, Be More Pirate, Sam Conniff Allende, co-founder of Livity, outlines a model for a radical new way of organising with wide-ranging implications.

Be More Pirate by Sam Conniff