• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, March 2, 2017

So what's a top ad executive to do between gigs when his non-compete stipulates he must do something other than ad agency work for a while? If you're former Grey London Chairman and CCO Nils Leonard, you launch a coffee pod business, of course. But not just any coffee pod business. Nope. Leonard's pods will be the first fully compostable pods.

While Leonard plans to launch a new ad agency when his non-compete expires, he will, in the meantime, launch and run his coffee pod business which he has named Halo. Halo pods will work with the Nespresso machine but will cost three times as much as the competition’s pods. The coffee in the pods is said to be of a superior quality, hence the increased price. In addition, the pods, made out of bamboo and paper, are said to decompose completely within 90 days.

Of his interim endeavor, Leonard told Advertising Age Advertising Week, "The best brands are the ones you can imagine launching any product and you would know how it would feel – like if Audi launched a vacuum cleaner. We wanted Halo to feel good. It's super simple and behaves like a premium brand. After 20 years of looking after everyone else's brand, it's terrifying creating your own...there wasn't an amazing coffee capsule, and existing capsules are killing the planet. We've solved those problems."

Leonard having an advertising background, the brand already has an ad campaign in the market. One element of that campaign is a large digital billboard inside London's Euston Station. It's an image of thousands of empty pods with the headline, "This is the amount on non-biodegradable capsules the world is putting into landfill. 13,500 capsules. Every minute."

A possible offshoot of the brand is the development of a new coffee machine.