Introduction
Thanh Catachanas has spent over twenty years building campaigns, leading teams and pushing organisations to take representation seriously. She has launched programmes that put Black, Asian and multiethnic-owned brands on billboards across the UK. And she was 41 years old before she could say, out loud, what her own values actually were.
That gap, between doing the work of leadership for two decades and only recently being able to name the thing driving it, is the real story here. Thanh's career took her from a childhood in a Vietnamese refugee family in Nottingham, through a university degree she quietly hated, into a decade at one of the UK's biggest radio groups, and eventually to JCDecaux, where she now runs Reach, a programme designed to make sure the billboards Britain sees actually look like Britain. Along the way she worked out, often the hard way, what it takes to build a career that doesn't cost you your sense of self.
The childhood that didn't feel different, until it did
Thanh's parents were Vietnamese refugees who travelled by boat to Hong Kong before settling in the UK, eventually landing in Nottingham. Both were chefs. Neither spoke much English. Thanh grew up straddling two worlds, eating exceptional Vietnamese and Chinese food at home while feeling different at school, not fully realising until later how much that shaped her.
What she did understand as a child was the work ethic. Her parents worked constantly, in restaurants and takeaways, on the understanding that their children would go to school, do their best, and not be a burden. That instruction, unspoken but absolute, shaped Thanh and her siblings into what she now describes as a family that has, in her words, done their parents proud.
Dropping out and doing it her own way
Thanh started a degree in medical material science at the University of Nottingham, largely because her older sister, who has a PhD in neuroimaging, had become her role model and guide. It wasn't until she was sitting in lectures with no idea what was being discussed that she admitted the truth to herself: this wasn't her path, it was one she had inherited.
She dropped out, took a job in telesales, and, once she was earning, bought a starter flat while mortgage rates and prices still made that possible for someone her age. With a mortgage to pay, she couldn't go back to university full time, so she built her own version of the traditional route: a business degree studied at night, three evenings a week for four years, alongside a full-time job. It was scary. It also, she says, felt like the right thing, which made it easier to bear.
The values she didn't name until she was 41
For most of her career, Thanh operated on instinct. It wasn't until she asked to become a mentee within MEA, a network for people from ethnic minority backgrounds working in media and advertising, that she did the work of naming what actually mattered to her. Paired with a coach and co-founder of Coaches of Colour, she went through an exercise that forced her to isolate the behaviours and situations that resonated with her, and the ones that didn't, until three values emerged: care, respect and excellence.
Once she could name them, she says, everything made sense retrospectively. She could feel it physically when someone was careless with her. Respect was instilled from childhood, rooted in the pecking order of an East Asian household, and became something she extended to everyone regardless of circumstance. Excellence showed up as a compulsion to do everything to the nth degree, because everything she produces feels like a reflection of her.
The value of the exercise wasn't the labels themselves. It was being able to say, out loud, when something aligned with those values and when it didn't, and using that as a decision-making anchor from that point forward.
Be brave, even when you don't know if you can
Asked how she navigated two decades inside large organisations, Thanh's answer wasn't a framework, it was a posture: be brave. If an opportunity comes up and you're not sure you can do it, try anyway. If someone has put you forward for something, it's because they already believe you can do it, so borrow that belief until you build your own.
She still gets nervous every single time she speaks publicly, including on this podcast. The nerves haven't gone. What has changed is her willingness to throw herself in regardless, because visibility, in her words, is the same principle that underpins advertising itself: reach as many of the right people as possible, as many times as possible, and the right opportunities and people will find you.
Building Reach: turning lived experience into a programme
Thanh now leads Reach at JCDecaux \[CHECK: company name spelling, transcript ASR renders it as "JC Deco"\], a programme built to improve representation of underrepresented communities through out-of-home advertising, billboards, bus shelters, train stations. The idea wasn't originally hers. It came from her director, who, after the murder of George Floyd and the wave of brand pledges that followed, wanted to build something more substantial than a seasonal campaign push. When her director floated the idea, Thanh put her hand up immediately.
The campaigns that followed include Afro Hair and Beauty Live, put on train station displays for the first time after the pandemic hiatus; a Soul Caps campaign that channelled £100,000 into Black grassroots swimming projects while showing Black people swimming on major billboards; a haircare brand campaign \[CHECK: brand name, ASR renders as "Rucker Hair", one of the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund recipients\]; and work with the Asian Leadership Collective, founded by Anna Chan, to improve representation of East Asian leaders in media and advertising.
Thanh is candid that the credit isn't only hers. It took her director's willingness to hand over resource and trust, and it took Thanh's own willingness to be brave enough to bring her lived experience, as someone who rarely saw herself represented growing up, into a professional space she had previously kept separate from her identity.
Why diversity in the room isn't a nice-to-have
Thanh's case for diversity is commercial as much as moral. She cites a statistic she uses often: ethnic minority audiences are worth £4.5 billion a year \[CHECK: figure and source name, ASR renders as "Black Power report" by "Alydia Amoah", likely the Black Pound Report\], and one in four people in England and Wales now identify as an ethnic minority. That is not a niche audience. It's a significant, growing part of the market that many organisations still fail to plan for.
Her argument for representation inside the room, not just in the advertising output, is that diversity creates stress-testing. A room where everyone agrees, because everyone shares the same background, never has its thinking properly challenged. She points to well-known advertising missteps as evidence: campaigns that would never have made it to air if someone with different lived experience had been in the room to flag them. She also points to product design failures, like early period-tracking features missing from health tech because the rooms designing them were full of people who had never needed them.
A phrase she borrows often, credited to a collaborator who works with Gen Z audiences, sums up her approach: create with, not for.
Excellence has to know when to let go
Thanh's excellence value could easily tip into perfectionism that exhausts everyone around her. What keeps it in check, she says, is finding a team where her particular standard is valued rather than resented, and accepting that sometimes good enough really is good enough. She applies the same principle to her children: the standard isn't a perfect result, it's whether they gave their best effort. If they did, that's enough, even if the outcome wasn't what they hoped for.
She ties this back to respect and humility. Respecting someone else's opinion means being willing to accept their version of excellent, even when it isn't the version she would have chosen herself.
Leading the next generation, at work and at home
Thanh is direct about generational shift. She sees Gen Z employees pushing back against the always-on, self-sacrificing model that defined earlier generations, and she reads that as progress rather than entitlement, drawing a parallel to junior doctors striking for safer working conditions rather than accepting a broken system as normal.
At home, she and her husband recently built a family version of a performance development plan, the kind of goal-setting exercise she runs with her own team at work, extended to include her children's voices about what they want from the year ahead. It has made her more accountable, including to her youngest son, who has, on more than one occasion, called her out for not living up to what the family agreed together.
Asked to define leadership, Thanh keeps it simple: empowering the people and teams around you to be the best they can be, and giving them the direction to get there.
