TAG interview: rewriting the rules of youth engagement

When Tumisha Balogun and Alvin Owusu-Fordwuo were studying economics in London, their career paths looked straightforward: corporate internships, blue-chip tech firms and eventually finance. But after internships at Google and the like, something felt off.

Recognising that creative opportunity was far from equitably distributed, and frustrated by the neat, limiting labels slapped on underrepresented youth, they chose to go their own way. A standard creative sprint at Google laid the foundation for what eventually became TAG, a youth-focused agency built from the ground up to support grassroots community projects.

Ditching the stereotype

TAG aren’t particularly reverent to the industry shorthand. Owusu-Fordwuo is openly critical of the marketing world’s obsession with forcing young audiences under a rigid, monolithic umbrella loosely labelled Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

‘Instead of forcing people into these broad generalisations, it comes down to fair compensation and actual knowledge exchange,’ Owusu-Fordwuo explains. ‘That’s how you build real resonance, not by trying to neatly categorise an entire generation.’

Making those collaborations work with big brands usually hinges on finding an internal champion: someone on the inside willing to back TAG’s unconventional co-creation process.

‘Often, if we don’t have someone in the brand that is a champion of the work that we’re building with the young people, it can essentially not make it easier,’ Balogun notes. ‘And at the end of the day, they care less about like, ‘oh, they’re working with young people and all these creatives’ and just about getting the work done.’

As for TAG’s own approach to gathering and championing insights from the younger generation of talent, they believe in the idea of co-creation. Essentially, their version of a focus group is taking people on walks through Epping Forest or running open conversations in Snapchat group chats to bypass traditional corporate walls.

From Spenny Report to V&A East

TAG applied that same grounding in real-world lived experience to The Spenny Report, an insight project examining how the cost-of-living crisis shapes young people’s spending, dating and social lives. For TAG, youth culture cannot be separated from economic reality.

‘People look at young people and just say, “Oh, that’s youth culture, it’s cool,”‘ Owusu-Fordwuo notes. ‘But when you’re sitting in a room with ten young people, they tell you straight: “You can’t talk to me about creative work when I don’t have a job.” There are real, systemic pressures affecting them every day.’

To capture those nuances without exploiting hardships, TAG hosted a collaborative vision board session in January 2023 centred on a single question: How will you dream in crisis? Rather than asking participants to dwell on economic anxiety, the session created an imaginative space for young people to connect, collaborate and share how their daily habits were shifting.

‘It was particularly timely,’ Owusu reflects. ‘Brands were suddenly forced to pause and ask themselves what value they were actually offering by pushing products to a generation struggling to eat, date or sleep properly. It gave them a realistic, empathetic lens on what young people were actually navigating.’

The report was published just two days before the UK was officially declared to be in a recession.

That community-embedded mindset and keen instinct was central to TAG’s recent work with V&A East, where the agency was tasked with developing the launch campaign for The Music Is Black, an exhibition celebrating 125 years of Black British music.

Since the subject matter has its own history that intersects cultural institutions and community work, TAG approached the brief by assembling a bespoke team of senior Black British creatives, designers and producers, many hailing directly from East London.

‘If you ask around the industry, people might assume a team like that isn’t possible or doesn’t exist,’ Owusu-Fordwuo says. ‘Us pulling that group together proved that the talent has always been there.’

The campaign’s direction was refined during a Saturday workshop at V&A East Storehouse with young Black creatives from across the UK. Rather than looking backwards, the participants challenged TAG to avoid easy nostalgia.

‘They told us that young Black British audiences would resonate far more if we didn’t rely on tropes they’d seen before,’ Owusu-Fordwuo recalls. ‘It pushed the entire creative concept forward, ensuring the work felt contemporary rather than purely archival.’

Keeping in theme with community, Owusu’s older brother even produced three original music tracks for the campaign films, drawing on his own roots in the East London grime scene.

An agile, purpose-driven model

Behind the creative output is a hybrid business structure: part standard agency, part Community Interest Company. For Balogun and Owusu, the CIC framework offers flexibility that standard charities lack – allowing them to turn a profit, apply for targeted grants and retain full operational agility while staying accountable to social objectives.

That agility extends to how the team runs day-to-day. They explain that relying on informal, flexible support networks yielded better results for young people without draining the core business.

Now that the traditional, often unpaid internship is thankfully close to dead, in big part due to the current generation entering the market refusing undue meekness, there is room for growth. TAG’s mission seems to be to teach a new generation to fish, so to speak.

‘Young people are creating their own opportunities. They’re creating their own platforms,’ Balogun explains. ‘They’re creating their own media outlets, and brands are now craving that community that young people have built. Before it was such a hard industry to break into… I just think with the state of the world, people can’t afford to do that now. So, they are building things for themselves.’

For major corporate clients, this authentic, self-built community seems to be attractive, being a large, translucent space whose barrier to entry lies in a sense of honesty and sincerity. It’s kept bringing brands like Spotify back to TAG year after year.

That kind of appeal, if not revolutionary, at least refreshing.