The Recipe for McCann’s Atomic Soup: Comfort Food with Explosive Potential

In every agency, there are the formal processes – the strategy decks, the creative reviews, the rounds of feedback. And then there are the unofficial spaces where real creative energy ignites. At McCann, that spark began life not as a framework or a methodology, but as a kind of renegade creative underground.

Long before Atomic Soup became a recognised cultural engine in the network, it existed in embryonic form under a very different name – one that speaks to its unruly, oversized ambition. As Jonathan Brown, who leads Atomic Soup, remembers it: “It started from a creative epicentre probably eight or nine years ago called King Kong. It was then McCann London ECDs Rob and Lolly’s proactive creative incubator, trying to find cultural problems to solve with radical creativity.”

Wait, What’s Atomic Soup?

If King Kong was the DIY garage band era of McCann’s cultural experimentation, when it became Atomic Soup it went on a world tour. What emerged from those early idea kickabouts has evolved into something far more intentional, and far more strategically important for the network.

Today, Atomic Soup operates as a kind of open strategic and creative engine: part cultural observatory, part strategic provocation feed, part inclusive ideas lab. It’s where McCann’s people, from planners to account handlers – and increasingly, clients – come to test thinking, share lived experiences, and unearth the truths that shape culture and behaviour. For a network of McCann’s scale, where ‘Truth Well Told’ is both philosophy and operating system, Atomic Soup has become the place where those truths are forged.

Jonathan, McCann London’s head of strategic product (Atomic Soup is just part of his role), captures the alchemy of the format in the most literal sense. “The vibe is one of safety and comfort in the soup, but then atomic is the creatively inspiring spark bit, hence Atomic Soup.” Confirmed: it’s nothing to do with how lentil broths can lead to flatulence.

The structure is simple – a weekly themed session, a collective exploration, a moment of open conversation – but strategically powerful. It provides what many clients increasingly want from agencies:

• Cultural intelligence, not just category understanding
• Inclusive, representative viewpoints, not top-down assertions
• A way of surfacing hard truths before they show up in research or social listening dashboards
• A space where creativity is sparked by reality, not assumptions

And for McCann teams, it’s become a rare thing in modern networks: a space where hierarchy falls away, curiosity leads, and ideas can come from anywhere: McCann’s cultural R&D lab disguised as a weekly conversation. A place where truth meets creative ambition, and a surprisingly large number of award-winning ideas begin their life.

How It Works

For an agency ecosystem as sprawling as McCann, any ritual that reliably brings hundreds of strategists, creatives, producers, client leads, and global teams into a shared headspace is already a strategic asset. Atomic Soup doesn’t attempt to replicate the traditional planning cycle or creative review – instead, it creates a parallel rhythm inside the network: a weekly cultural heartbeat.

Jonathan describes the shift from ad-hoc inspiration to a deliberately engineered creative system. “We then codified it, so we deliberately have a conversation about a different topic each week, rather than just randomly what's interesting this week. And those conversations and topics are selected carefully to be things alive and bubbling up in culture, or things we know will be important in six months’ time… or if you've got a project you really want to light a creative fire underneath.”

From the different ways that accents can affect how we’re perceived, to the changing face of football fandom or the business ethics of AI, these are the kinds of good chats that we all want to be having. Big talk, not small talk. Participants bring a ‘truth’ and a short presentation (or ‘provocation’) and then the chat opens up to anyone who has an insight to share. It all takes place remotely, on a video call.

Rather than innovation theatre or a brainstorm disguised as culture, it’s a system for prioritising the truths that will matter to brands next. It forces a network the size of McCann to continually look outward – to behaviours, shifts, tensions, and sparks – rather than backwards to last quarter’s performance indicators.

Those weekly rituals create consistency; a rhythm that cuts across borders, disciplines and account teams. But they also create openness: the sense that anyone in the network can throw their perspective into the soup and watch it interact with dozens of others.

Even the small mechanics matter. The truth presentations, the cross-market participation, the pen-emoji mechanism for contributing silently, the squid-emoji mechanism for challenging harmful language, the open discussion that follows. These aren’t gimmicks – they are the social scaffolding that makes a multi-national network feel like one creative brain for an hour.

Inside McCann, Atomic Soup functions as a psychologically safe chamber for discussing topics that are often left unspoken in agency settings: pain, race, gender, AI ethics, modern fatherhood, sexuality, micro-cultures. And yet the connection to commercial creativity is immediate and traceable, not theoretical.

That social design – light-touch, behavioural, symbolic – is part of what lets people share insights that would otherwise stay dormant. And those insights, often deeply personal, become the raw material for work that resonates commercially.

Externally, McCann’s own DE&I Year in Review for 2023 described Atomic Soup as a space “where we share our diverse lived experiences in a psychologically safe space to ignite ideas with Conscious Inclusion at the core”, a framing that positions it not as a CSR exercise, but as a driver of creative excellence and effectiveness.

Internally, participants describe it as the “best hour of the week” (although Jonathan admits that’s just what he hears), a moment of honesty in a global organisation that can otherwise default to speed and surface-level alignment. For clients, especially those invited into bespoke Atomic Soup sprints, it becomes a radically transparent window into how McCann thinks – and how creative ideas are born.

For all its cultural depth and psychological safety, the true power of Atomic Soup is its conversion rate – its ability to turn a raw, human truth into a brand idea, a platform, or even a new business practice.

Nurofen, From Open Discussion to ‘See My Pain’

One of the clearest examples comes from the years McCann spent working on Nurofen. Jonathan describes how Atomic Soup was repeatedly used to unearth truths about pain – truths grounded in lived experience, not desk research.

“We used it on a regular basis to mine for insights and explore different truths about pain. It was obvious at the time, in retrospect anyway, that women’s pain was being overlooked. That was one of the inspirations for ‘See My Pain’.”

Those sessions reshaped the agency internally too: “As a result, McCann launched an internal pain policy called the McCann Pain Pledge. It was a nice way of showing end-to-end internal and external impact,” reflects Jonathan.

Marketers often talk about “brand purpose”. This is what it looks like when it grows out of genuine human insight, rather than asking a chatbot for cultural talking points.

Ramadan for Aldi

Another story, especially relevant for brands serving diverse markets, is Aldi’s integration of Ramadan into its retail planning: “We ran a session exploring five truths about Ramadan,” says Jonathan. “Aldi have updated what they stock, how they approach Ramadan, how they market Ramadan – all based on truths which were discussed live and in that session. It really helped.”

This is the commercial value of cultural fluency: When a retailer gets Ramadan right, it’s not a PR exercise – it demonstrates relevance, shows respect, and leads to a return on investment.

Durex & ‘The Afterglow’

Atomic Soup can also open creative doors into uncomfortable or taboo spaces that brands might otherwise struggle to navigate.

Jonathan describes a session held for Durex. “We ran a number of sessions on 21st-century intimacy, sex and lubes. One of the ideas that came directly out of that session was the afterglow idea – that sense that after you’ve had amazing sex you have that sort of sense that lasts for quite a while.” A session intended for exploration ended up directly shaping a global pitch.

McArthurGlen – The Shopping Playground

Creatively, some of the most elegant outcomes come from the way cross-market participants stress-test each other’s truths. For McArthurGlen, this led to a positioning reset. “Think about these places more like Disneyland than a shopping centre: you’re not a discount retail centre, you are a shopping playground. Off the back of that we got to our creative platform of ‘Welcome to Destination Joy’.”

What’s the the emotional charge of these live insights:? “You get these sort of… goosebumpy moments going: oh my god, I can’t believe that’s a thing – what should we do about it?”

If Atomic Soup provides the raw cultural fuel, McCann’s AI layer is what turns that fuel into momentum. For marketers, the value is simple: Atomic Soup compresses the time between a human truth emerging and a creative idea being made from it.

Jonathan explains this relatively recent shift as he sees it: “Let's accelerate the accelerator with AI. I’ve been using and training my different tools to understand how Atomic Soup works, so I can then help others create the content with me and then harvest afterwards to be of use to everyone.”

Commercially, this translates to:

• Insights surfacing faster. Hundreds of truths, comments and chat logs are captured, structured and re-usable.
• Ideas form earlier. AI-generated canvases allow teams to explore creative implications minutes after a discussion ends.
• Sprint sessions turn Atomic Soup discussions into training data, prompting fresh activation ideas that transform live conversation into innovative sparks almost immediately.
  
• The network becomes smarter. Every session contributes to a deep, searchable knowledge base McCann teams can prompt against.

Atomic Soup Gives McCann Better Truths

The AI infrastructure gives McCann faster, clearer, more actionable leaps from truth, to idea, to finished execution.

Jonathan spells out just how wide the orbit of Atomic Soup has become. Over the years he’s added people from across McCann to the distribution group. People from Germany, Spain, and the US join often. New York has its own ‘Gotham Soup’ and Romania even runs its own version.

This breadth matters for effectiveness. When insights and ideas are shaped by multiple markets and perspectives, they avoid the blind spots that often limit global creativity. A truth surfaced in Paris might sharpen a pitch in London. A session in Bucharest might reveal something relevant to a brief in New York.

It also strengthens McCann’s core promise – Truth Well Told – by giving the network a weekly mechanism to locate those truths more inclusively and more often.

Atomic Soup is, in many ways, McCann at its most McCann: a network searching for truth, debating it openly, and turning it into ideas that move people and markets. What began as a rogue creative incubator now functions as a global cultural engine – a weekly ritual where colleagues bring lived experience to the table and see what sparks.

Its value lies in the sheer range of thinking that comes from the generosity of all the people who choose to get involved. Over the years, so many McCann-ers have shared their truths, hosted sessions, contributed provocations and thrown themselves into the energetic group discussions. That collective spirit is what makes Atomic Soup special — a living example of what Lewis Hyde describes in The Gift: creativity as something that grows when it’s shared. In that sense, Atomic Soup is a communal pot, fed by many hands, where different perspectives, experiences and ways of thinking collide in surprising ways, and where those contributions enrich the work far more deeply than any single viewpoint ever could. It’s often these sideways or surprising contributions that give planners and creatives new frames through which to approach strategy, provoke ideas or unlock platforms clients haven’t yet imagined.

As Jonathan puts it…

“Atomic Soup works because of the collective. Its strength comes entirely from the generosity of the people who take part — the ones who show up, share openly and build on each other’s ideas. The ones who message to say they want to run a session on Death or Disunited States or Decolonisation — and then follow through and give us all goosebumps. As Lewis Hyde writes in The Gift, creativity thrives through exchange and the giving of your creative spirit. When you give, you get back in spades. That spirit of giving and building together is what makes Atomic Soup feel alive, and what makes the work better.”

For brands, the benefit is simple. Atomic Soup surfaces the human truths that make effective marketing possible – the overlooked pain, the cultural nuance, the emerging behaviour – long before they turn into briefs. And with Jonathan’s AI layer turning those truths into concepts in minutes, McCann has built a system where cultural intelligence flows directly into creative output.

In a high-pressure world demanding faster, sharper, more resonant work, Atomic Soup gives McCann something rare: a recipe for turning interesting discussion into applicable commercial ideas.