Valerie Bounds is co-founder, chief strategy and creative officer at creative agency Aurora.
Headquartered in Liverpool with an office in Toronto, the agency was officially launched in 2021 by Valerie Bounds and fellow co-founder Dawn Paine.
Bounds has created and delivered digital strategies for creative agencies and corporates for over 25 years. This has included building and leading teams for major agencies including Ogilvy, Code Computerlove, Music and Uniform. She has also worked with brands including Universal Music, ASOS, Man City Football Club, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.
At Aurora, the creative customer experience agency focuses on the entertainment, gaming and tech industries and already counts a number of global brands among its growing roster of clients.
Valerie Bounds shared all the lessons she has learnt.
Which single daily habit or practice could you not do without?
Running (not every day), Music, Coffee.
What’s been your luckiest break?
I’ve had different breaks at different points in my life and some sliding door moments. Each agency/company I’ve worked for has given me something new. Undoubtedly doing my Masters in Digital Publishing at City University in the late 90’s catapulted me into the early days of digital. It was only the second year that course ran and it got me straight into working for WPP agencies in the very formative days of their interactive wings.
Working for smaller agencies then opened me up to so many clients just as the first dot.com boom was kicking in… and working at Ogilvy was a completely different, integrated perspective. More recently starting Aurora with the fantastic Dawn Paine has been pivotal. I feel very lucky to have met Dawn at exactly the right moment.
What’s your best failure?
Oh, so many to choose from, ha! You have to be very resilient working in agencies, whilst also being super creative and emotionally connected to your work and caring about your clients. So that’s incredibly tough. My biggest failures have been when I’ve taken clients and projects and knew it wasn’t really right for me or them, but couldn’t say no. I hate letting people down as we all do, but it’s better to do it early than later when it goes wrong. It’s a strong lesson.
What is the best investment you’ve ever made, either financial or time?
Undoubtedly starting Aurora with Dawn during the pandemic. It’s been very intense, of course, but we are flying and it’s because we’ve put our heart and soul into it.
Which book would you recommend others to read and why?
This is where I should reel off some strategy books – and I do read a lot of them but they don’t often fill me with inspiration. ‘How Not To Plan: 66 ways to screw it up’ by Les Binet and Sarah Carter is certainly a favourite however, because it is so refreshing, frank and funny.
For some real prophetic, philosophical wisdom I’d go to science fiction. Isaac Asimov’s Foundations has it all – he started writing these as short stories in the 1940s and it became a series of 7 novels. Robotics & AI, feminism & equality, gender & sexuality, politics and power, climate change… he could be writing it today.
What one piece of advice would you give your 21-year-old self?
Go traveling now, work can wait.
Who or what has had the single biggest influence on your working life?
My mother and her two best female friends who were powerful women with big careers and a lot of sass. Very smart, big thinkers who always included me in the grown-up conversation as a child and made sure I knew I could and should get an education and have any career I turned my mind to.
Tell us something about you that would surprise people.
I’m a red belt in Tae Kwon Do.
How will the COVID crisis change work for the better?
It’s made people really question what was accepted as the norm, which I love to see. It opened the conversation around remote working and the logic of a daily commute. The tech was obviously already there but the pandemic necessitated its adoption. That behavioural change would not have happened without Covid. For Aurora. that’s been pivotal to allowing us to scale so quickly and grow a global client base.
It has also allowed us to work with clients and talent wherever they are in the world. We launched with a base in Canada as well as Liverpool. We call ourselves hybrid native; it’s been integral to Aurora’s values to be agile and flexible. Culturally meeting people in real life, and spending time in person with our team, is really important to us but with the ability to accommodate balance too.
What does success look like to you?
Proof of alien life. Teleportation. Time Travel. But, aside from that, Dawn and I have big ambitions for Aurora, so at the moment success looks massive; slightly intimidating – but entirely possible. And ultimately, like all of us in this industry, success is delivering genuinely groundbreaking creative work that has a positive impact on people’s lives. That, and proving Web 3.0’s not a fad.
