April, 2026.- In a 2026 where the advertising industry struggles to break free from the cycle of commoditization, Lotta Malm Hallqvist’s move to Multiply.co marks a turning point. With three decades scaling powerhouses like McCann, Mother, and Cheil, Hallqvist has watched strategic trust between brands and agencies erode under the weight of operational efficiency and volume-based procurement. Her diagnosis is bold: clients stopped paying for thinking because thinking became invisible. Now, from her role as Chair at Multiply, Lotta proposes a technological rebellion where AI is not used to produce more digital junk, but to absorb mechanical tasks and give humans back the time for creative conversation and strategic instinct. Her vision is clear: technology must amplify the human signal, not substitute it.
In this exclusive interview with Roastbrief, Lotta breaks down how Multiply’s infrastructure is allowing groups like NoA and Together Group to scale without homogenizing their cultural essence. Furthermore, she candidly addresses the gender gap in tech leadership, noting that while female representation on tech boards remains low (barely reaching 20-25% globally in C-suite positions), her responsibility is practical: to sponsor and open doors. Hallqvist invites female leaders not to “translate” themselves into tech-speak to be taken seriously, but to force tech to learn the language of business value and craft. This is a leadership lesson on protecting the creative heart of an industry while embracing the most fundamental change in its history.
Q1. From Agency Executive to Tech Chair: What drew you to Multiply.co, and why now?
I’ve spent nearly 30 years building, selling, and scaling creative businesses. When you co-found an agency, sell it, then spend a decade in global growth roles across McCann, Mother, MDC Partners, Cheil, and – and then move into M&A advisory – you develop a particular instinct for where value is actually created in this industry versus where it’s simply assumed.
Multiply sat at that exact intersection. It’s not a technology company that’s discovered advertising. It’s a company that genuinely understands what makes agencies valuable and is building the infrastructure to protect and amplify that.
As for the timing: when a technology shift is this fundamental, you either help shape it or you watch it reshape the industry without you. I’ve been on the sidelines of too few moments to sit this one out. What Rasmus and the team are building is the rare thing – technology that starts from craft, not from efficiency metrics.
Q2. The Agency-Client Collaboration Crisis: What’s the root cause, and how can AI repair rather than worsen it?
The root cause is the erosion of strategic trust – and it happened gradually through a perfect storm of procurement-led commoditisation, fee compression, and the rise of in-housing. Clients stopped paying for thinking because thinking became invisible. What they saw were decks and deliverables, not the intellectual work behind them. So they started treating agencies like vendors.
The honest answer is that agencies sometimes enabled this by focusing on output volume over strategic depth. Both sides bear responsibility.
AI can worsen this – if it’s used to produce even more output even faster, you just accelerate the race to the bottom. But Multiply takes the opposite approach. When AI does the laborious work – the desk research, the synthesis, the brief analysis – it frees up both the agency and the client to do what actually builds trust: think together. The platforms that survive this moment will be the ones that give people back time for genuine creative conversation.
Q3. AI Enhancing Human Craft: How do you keep the human craft central?
My test is simple: is the AI doing the work that nobody wanted to do, or is it doing the work that only humans can do? Research synthesis, competitor mapping, first-pass briefing analysis – nobody went into advertising to spend their Friday afternoon on that. That’s where AI earns its keep. The cultural read, the strategic instinct, the creative leap – that’s ours.
AutoCAD didn’t kill architecture. It freed architects from technical drafting so they could spend more time designing. We’re at that same inflection point. My philosophy is that AI should amplify the human signal, not substitute for it. The moment it starts flattening judgment, averaging instinct, or rewarding the mediocre – which is what happens when you let it run unchecked – you’ve lost the very thing that clients actually pay for.
Multiply is built on this principle. The agency’s strategic voice, its way of thinking, its creative personality – these are encoded into how the system works for that specific team. It doesn’t produce generic output. It reflects and extends what’s already great about the agency using it.
Q4. Scaling Creative Businesses Internationally: What lessons will you bring to Multiply?
The first lesson is that local culture always defeats the global template. Every agency I’ve watched scale successfully – and I’ve watched a great many fail – did so by treating the creative heart as something that must remain local, while sharing infrastructure and institutional knowledge globally. The ones that tried to clone the head office just produced expensive mediocrity in new time zones.
The second lesson is that the thing that made you great in your home market is rarely the thing you lead with in a new market. You lead with the problem you solve, not the heritage you carry.
Multiply is already getting this right. When Together Group is now rolling it out across its 14 agencies, or when NoA Group integrated it across the Nordics, what they were adopting wasn’t a British or Swedish product – it was a way of working that each agency could configure around their own way of thinking. That’s how you scale without homogenising. It’s a significant advantage.
Q5. The Entrepreneurial Lens: What does your entrepreneurial experience add to Multiply’s growth strategy?
The thing an entrepreneur sees that a purely agency-bred leader can miss is the difference between growth and scale. Growing means adding clients, headcount, revenue. Scaling means the unit economics improve as you grow – the marginal cost of the next customer is lower than the last. Those are very different businesses. I had to learn this when I took my first company public. The discipline of building for investors while protecting the creative core is one of the harder balancing acts I’ve faced, and it shapes how I think about Multiply’s trajectory.
I also look for three things in any company worth backing: a genuine problem – not a manufactured one – evidence of product-market fit that isn’t just press coverage, and a founding team with good judgment under pressure. Multiply has all three. The client-agency collaboration problem is real and longstanding. The traction with networks like Together Group and NoA isn’t speculative. And the team has the intellectual honesty to build the tool they wish had existed when they were on the agency side.
Q6. Gender Equality in Leadership: What responsibility do you feel in the tech space, and what advice would you give?
A decade ago, I was on the Ad Age Women to Watch Europe list. While things have moved on, they haven’t moved nearly fast enough, particularly at board and chair level in technology. The data is still bleak. So yes, I feel a responsibility. Not an abstract one – a practical one.
Being visible matters. Talking specifically about what worked, what didn’t, and where the systems need to change matters more than inspiration. Bringing people with you – actively sponsoring women into rooms they haven’t been invited to yet – matters most.
My advice for women moving between advertising, entrepreneurship, and tech leadership: your commercial and creative experience is not a liability in tech – it’s a significant advantage that most tech leaders simply don’t have. The traditional tech pipeline is crowded. The cross-disciplinary path is wide open, and it’s where the most interesting problems live. Don’t translate yourself into tech language to be taken seriously. Make tech learn the language of craft and business value. That’s what the industry actually needs.
