Christopher Owens on Strategy & Teaching

Christopher Owens is the Head of Brand Strategy at TRG in Dallas, Texas, where he has worked for almost 25 years. He also leads the Strategic Planning Boot Camp at Miami Ad School and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. He joined The Richards Group (now TRG) in 2000, where he helped reshape the agency into a nonprofit-owned creative collective. His award-winning work spans major brands like Alfa Romeo, Dr Pepper, and The Home Depot. I met Christopher at Stratfest NYC, and was super excited to speak with him and hear more about his story.

About halfway through the conversation, I get my facts wrong. I’m so excited to tell the story of the role of planning & qual in the Apple Super Bowl ad, I mess it up. Christopher, saint that he is, does not correct me, but gently directs me to the facts, which Ed Cotton provided:

"Account Planning Panel: The Role of Planning Through the Ages.”

”MT Rainey on the iconic Apple '1984' Super Bowl ad and her career as a master planner.”

Christopher, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.

Thank you so much for welcoming me onto your podcast.

Yeah, so I know that you know this is coming, but I start all my conversations with this question that I borrowed from my friend who helps people tell their story. It's such a big, beautiful question that I use it, but it's so big I over-explain it now. So before I ask it, you are in absolute control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

The Midwest. Both the geography and maybe the, let's call it psychography. It's a state of mind. But I think it put me in a position in my life early on, I'm going to say middle school, so we're going to go back to the mid-80s. It gave me one of those cultural clash moments where I started to realize who I'd like to be. And so when I think of the current state me, I go back to that. And I know that moment wouldn't have happened had it not been the Midwest.

So when I was transplanted from Columbus, Ohio, down to Plano, Texas, in the North Texas area during that period of time, my parents being of the, you know, always very trendy, keeping up with things. And there's this thing that was going on in the late 70s and 80s, maybe you heard about it. It's called divorce.

It's a very trendy thing. And my parents decided it's another thing to jump onto. And so I ended up my parents separating and my mom getting married to an electrical engineer who got a job opportunity at Texas Instruments down in the North Texas area.

And I remember learning that we were moving to a place called Plano, P-L-A-N-O, Texas. And back then it was famous for being on the front cover of Time Magazine for Teenage Suicide Capital of the Year, in addition to Hot Air Balloon Capital of the World. So I don't know if there's causation or correlation between those two things.

But I remember at one point reading about this, there was a wonderful little, terribly dark, humorous passage about, listen, if you're a teenager in Plano, everybody's in the garage for probably one of two reasons. You're either in a band looking to be the next greatest, whatever it might be, or you're sitting in your parents' car with the car running and the door shut.

Oh my God. This is just Plano humor?

This was just sort of outside journalistic humor reflecting on what they probably considered a kind of behind the times version of Plano, but Plano was definitely trying to become something more than it was. And Plano was just blockbuster video stores, soccer fields, and just flat concrete, nothing for kids to do. And me coming down from the Midwest, culture shock of Southern Baptist culture in this suburb of North Texas that was trying to grow into something.

And you just had all this pent up youthful energy. This is when I started to kind of see who I probably was and wanted to become given the version of me that was not fitting in to the version of the place that I had just been repopulated to. And I think sometimes for some people, they discovered themselves in moments of collision or clash.

And when you feel that division and you feel that otherness, I think it gives you that dynamic range to then experience maybe who you really are and who you really want to hang with and who you would really call your crew. And that was that moment of time. And there's still a version of me today that very closely ties back to that collision.

And so none of that would have happened without the Midwesterner in me sort of being conflicted with something going on there in the very starkly Southern Baptist North Texas area.

How old were you when you landed in Plano when the clash happened?

Yeah. So actually it would have been after London Calling. So if you want to take the clash reference a bit further, this probably would have been actually just post Rock the Casbah days as well.

So this probably was about 1985, 86. So straight into the new wave period. And I think if I had to go back to one of those quiet moments that you have in your room and you start to realize the music that you're being turned onto and whatever.

And I was always been a big Laurie Anderson fan. So if you're familiar with Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, all the different ways to describe her philosopher and some kind of therapist, was the partner of Lou Reed late into his life. But there is an album.

I want to say 86, 87 is a live album called Home of the Brave. There's a film concert film about it as well that I think she even directed. It's amazing. I had that VHS. I had that record there. It was music that just completely enthralled me, the storytelling, the rhythms.

And whenever I tried to share this music with anyone new that I was meeting in this part of the world, hit the culture collision. That's what takes me back to confirming that was that period of time.

That particular record. In fact, there's a track, on her record, Mr. Heartbreak, she performs it live on this album, but she actually has William S. Burroughs as the voice on this particular track.

And then she performs it with this cool vocoder that shapes her voice and in a really digital way, waveforms it into something that actually sounds William S. Burroughs. But there's a phrase where it's "deep in the heart of darkest America."

And you go "home of the brave. You already paid for this. Listen to my heartbeat."

And then does this thing with this interesting violin she made with tape for the bow and this tape, there was a zero and a one, and she put it over a tape head and just goes. This to me was the fricking coolest thing ever.

You're trying to share it in the lyricism and then the performance of the video and the album and William S. Burroughs and discovering all that with these people I'm meeting and nothing is working.

And anyway, once you experience that, you start to realize, okay, so I am wired a little bit different way and that's okay. Let's let that street flag fly. And it kind of still guides me.

Yeah. Do you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up? In that moment, did you have an idea of what?

Yeah, I was asked this recently and it's in this order. First thing I wanted to be was a cartoonist, first grade, talent show project. I had a photo album where with my little Crayola markers drew each of the key Hanna-Barbera characters one after the other, after the other. And kudos to my mom in that she, in some of the instances, to be honest, she penciled them out and I traced over in those areas, but she saw that I wanted to be a cartoonist and really wanted to support that.

Then I wanted to be an architect because I got really into mechanical drawing and thought these really cool Stettler German mechanical pencils are very cool to own. And there was tools and kit around it. And then it was music, in some ways from the age of 15 for the rest of my life.

Still, it's a big part of my life drummer. And then my goal was to be a jazz studies major. And that's when I went to university, I started off that way.

And then I switched to language and communications and that then began this sort of creative misfit lifestyle that I have today that eventually took me in advertising and strategy, et cetera. But in some ways I'm still all those things.

I feel brand design brand architecture is about architecture and finding the spatial and mental relationships between things. When it comes to drumming and jazz, I mean, so much of this stuff is very jazz-like to me.

I think that's one of the things we talked about when we met at Stratfest two was I'm "wait, you live in Hudson, Hudson Valley, back D Jeanette, that's where Larry Grenadier, a lot of really cool jazz players. Tony Levin, there's a whole group of people that live in that area that just, I always imagined it being an area where a super group could be formed at any moment, any cafe, probably very romantic notion. But in some ways it's all that to me.

Still, I think a lot of strategy and a lot of what we do has these sort of jazz-like architectural vibes about it. People on the outside, they think of jazz as just people just making things up. When in fact, what I learned is you know the song so well, you know the chord changes, the key changes, the breaks, the bridge, you know them so well that you can dance over top of them in prop style because you know exactly where it's all going so well.

And so it seems someone's making things up, but in fact, no, it's because you just know the composition so well, you can glide over top of it. And I feel those flow moments when you feel you know a category, a consumer and a brand so well, that's when you can get into these interesting kind of creative diversions off of that. So in some way, all those things that I'd wished I could be are all things that I kind of still mash together.

Still a clash mash.

So tell me, where are you now? And what are you doing for work?

I'm one of those rare monogamous agency practitioners that's been an agency for almost 25 years, an agency called TRG. It's an independent agency out of Dallas, Texas, formerly the Richards Group. The agency's been around about 48 years. I've been there for exactly half of it. So next year will be my 25th anniversary. But I've always had side hustles and interests.

I've also been a lifelong educator. I'm one of those people that started teaching as early as I possibly could, because I just realized loving to learn and being a lifelong learner was a big part of who I've been. And it's impossible for me to separate the concepts of being a strategist and being a teacher in that they're very similar.

You learn into things, you guide people with that learning, you become cognizant of your gaps, and then you learn into those gaps and you keep teaching out and out. And so strategy is very similar to teaching. So I've been teaching strategy at the Miami Ad School Strategy Bootcamp for the past 19 years.

And now I'm lead of the program for the past two years. I was alumni of the program back in the late 1900s when it first started. So I got a chance to learn from Jane Newman.

You were being cute. And then I'm thinking, wait, no, that's actually, you can say that. That's real.

It's very real. But yeah, I got to learn from some great first wave OG planners Jane Newman, Douglas Atkin, a lot of the core people that were trained directly by Stanley Pollitt or Stephen King. And so that was a key part of my upbringing.

So yeah, so I'm head of brand strategy at TRG. I'm also a practicing educator at the Miami Ad School.

Can you tell me a little about, you just really spoke to coming from a history of practitioners, a craft, right? You're telling me that is it provenance is the word that comes to mind. I always say that I was raised by wolves. I had no idea that I was part of, that this was a practice that had been handed down. You know what I mean? I learned that really late. I'm just curious, what was your experience of finding this work and then maybe realizing that you were part of something bigger?

Yeah. It almost kind of, in a way, it feels a continuation of my first answer to your original question, which is, I think, coming out of the Midwest too, someone I felt a little culture-less. I was also someone, I think one of the greatest gifts my parents provided to me is they did not indoctrinate me early on into any kind of organized religions.

My mother's point of view was, this is such a personal decision. You should make this decision when you're an adult, because if I guide you now, it's in some ways something you can't get out of your head. And so it set me on this path to where I maybe sometimes felt a little culture-less, particularly kind of thrown into sort of Texanistan in the North there, where things had a very kind of clear organized religion vibe as an undertone to everything.

So finding culture and other things and other interests and feeling you're part of something bigger, which I think is this human feature or flaw, something I think we're all susceptible to. But the fact that coming from the Midwest, things can kind of feel kind of bland. It's not there's deep, deep story up there.

I mean, there is. But I was not a sports fan until football and the religion that was Ohio State Buckeyes. So having this moment where I get into an advertising agency and only in it because I was essentially a musician who was not irresponsible enough to want to continue the life of a musician.

And so I didn't want to live in the back of a white van and I needed insurance. So I sold out and then essentially got into an industry where I saw a lot of my fascinations and fetishes just kind of naturally collide, art, film, music, language, communications, all that kind of stuff. And all of my music friends were designers and copywriters and art directors.

So they're "you should get in advertising." And so it's "yeah, this is not going to feel a job." So I'd got a foot in the door position at that sort of a medium-sized agency at that time, right at the dot-com days as an assistant account executive.

And three or four years in, just trying to get the lay of the land and just kind of being bored, an executive creative director took me inside and said, "I think you'd make a good planner. I think you'd make a good account planner." And I was "what do you mean by that?"

And so he discovered me when I asked, and this guy's name is Don Sedai - which sounds like Jedi, which in some ways is apropos given he helped me find my path. I started to discover it too. I was just being the me I always had been, hanging out with creative people, talking about the stuff I'd always talked about. But he saw someone that those teams would pay attention to, someone who spoke their common language and who they would be open to spending time with. This was different from a classic account person who would always tell you that you didn't have enough budget or crack the whip about timelines. I was more about opening things up, not shutting things down.And so I had a very superficial understanding of the basic rudiments of being a good strategist. But as I started to dig into it, I realized - yeah, this is commercializing a liberal arts degree. This is taking a fascination with interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary learning and mashing it all up and running with it, finding the edges and maybe going past them, getting to understand people. This is about being an interesting person who's interested in other people. At this agency though, I was the only person doing it - the only "planner strategist" in a shop of about 70 people.

And so very superficial understanding of the basic rudiments of a good strategist. But as I started to dig into it, I started to see, yeah, this is commercializing a liberal arts degree. This is taking some fascination with interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary learning and mashing it all up and running with it, finding the edges and maybe going past and getting to understand people.

This is about being an interesting person interested in other people. And so, but if I was going to do that at this agency, I was the only person doing it in the shop of about 70 people. I was the only quote unquote planner strategist.

So me looking for guidance then became the next thing. So what they then do, they bought me a box of VHS tapes from some APG account planning group event that had happened earlier in the nineties. And so my first boss, as I say, is this VHS tape that said Earl Cox on the side of it.

Earl Cox was the head of planning at Martin agency for a long time. And another VHS tape that said Douglas Atkin on it. And another VHS tape said Jane Newman on it.

And then there were some other ones too. I was learning from these VHS tapes as they talked about the art of planning, bringing it straight from BMP Boase Massimi Pollitt or from JWT. Then I started to feel I was part of something.

This was a period in the late nineties where, for a lot of agencies in certain regions of the country, planning had not become a thing yet. Strategy was still something that may have been practiced as a competency across different disciplines, but it really wasn't being championed. It was something that happened at the end of a very long day, after everybody had done all their calendars and budgets. "Okay, now let's actually think about the real human we're trying to connect with" - or just copy and paste from whatever the client said. That's not where good strategy comes from, but for agencies, it was a scarcity and supply-demand issue.

And so this thing called the Miami Ad School Account Planning Bootcamp was created by some of these first-wave strategists coming to the US, being brought over on visas. They were trying to hire departments and didn't have enough people to hire, so they coordinated with Ron and Pippa Seichrist down at the original Miami Ad School.

And they built this program to start to 'roll our own' in the US. I looked at this direct mail piece - it only happened once - and thought "this is where I need to go." All those people on these VHS tapes that I just knew as Sharpies on a sticker on the spine of a piece of plastic magnetic material - I could go meet the real beings and stand in their presence and ask questions and get to know them and vibe with them. And that's exactly what I did. I picked up all that learning and it really transformed me.

I really felt I'd become part of something and that I had a torch to carry. Some of these very same content slides that I got from them, I still teach in the program to this day. You feel you've taken in something, you're on the shoulders of someone and now want to pass it on and help other people know about it. I definitely feel that. I would not call it a burden - I would call it a gift, a happy passenger along with me that you get that inspiration from.

So here I was, a cultureless kid from the Midwest, a bit of a blank slate, kind of a square peg in a round hole, finding things where you feel you're part of a legacy. I may have been particularly susceptible to that.

How do you articulate what planning is and why it's valuable? Because I feel there's so much confusion about it, even after some time.

Yeah, it is kind of the tower of Babel that fell over, and then a million little splintered variations of strategy have gone off into the world. But we lay it out as principles. In the end, it's this goal of just trying to help someone, something, anything find a winning position - and realizing that is a garbage-in-garbage-out process. The quality or the fidelity of this winning position is often only as good as the input coming in.

Wow.

And then how do you lay out a set of tools in a toolbox that people early on in their career can start to get excited about? Know enough to be dangerous, learn enough to try out, fail with a safety net underneath, work directly with creative teams, work through that - and do that in about 10 weeks. The program used to be longer, used to be an entire semester. Now it's about 10 weeks, but how do you take them through that process with a really strong safety net underneath them?

And then just help them understand this diaspora of different strategic forms. They all have a common vibe. So again, almost back to the jazz metaphor, there's a rhythm section that sits underneath that's fairly common. But if you are a brand strategist versus a brand planner versus an account planner versus a digital strategist versus a connection strategist versus a cultural strategist - it goes on and on.

And over the course of our industry's birth, agencies get the nomenclature, the taxonomy they bring in to make their products and services sound sometimes more interesting than they actually are, adds to confusion.

And so it's something I confront students with, and then try to help them find what the common denominators are. And so in some ways the 10 weeks and then being active with the alumni, it's kind of a support system for a group of practitioners out there for whom what we do is still kind of gelatinous and moving, which I think is a good thing because brand in motion stays in motion, just like a body.

And so the more you're questioning what you're doing and whether it's good, right, or relevant, we're constantly having existential crises, every year at a conference, "is planning dead yet" and constantly getting storm of all the different points of view, you just kind of have to bathe in all of it.

And so the Bootcamp as well as other programs out there in the world too, I think really, we almost kind of become a support group for helping people kind of find their way particularly earlier in their career, where when I started, it was literally a pamphlet you mailed away from the four A's. And now you've just got a fire hose, this torrent of information across every social platform, every form of media about what strategy is or isn't, or how to do it, or this kind of golden magic wand frameworks that are supposed to solve for the perfect brief and all these crazy kind of witchcraft, some of it. But to be honest, I feel I'm still trying to represent the fundamentals without ignoring where it's going, which is the fun part of strategy anyway. It's all about where things are going. It's knowing about where they've been to know where they're going.

What do you love about it? Where's the joy in it for you?

And it's just constantly learning it again. I cannot separate the concept of teaching and strategy. They are synonymous in my life. And the thing that gets me most worried about is thinking I've got it all figured out. I think certainty is one of these things that I think we can't get too comfortable with in our industry.

I do feel we've entered this kind of golden age of marketing and advertising effectiveness, where we're starting to recognize that there are some law-like patterns and behaviors to how brands grow and things work. But oftentimes a lot of that's just kind of taking care of the plumbing, which then gives you the time to go off and do the things you'd rather do, which is worry about the drapery and the wonderful aesthetic designs of the different forms of creativity that can be wielded.

But there are basic things, foundations that need to be set, stages that need to be set for our creative to perform on, to be given a chance to be seen. So we're not just building cathedrals in the desert. And so there's a certainty that's coming into the industry that gives me some confidence. But it also helps me unlearn a lot of maybe some of the wooey stuff that I was perhaps raised on in the beginning that just was part of the oxygen.

Very few people in our industry are actually trained or certified. There's a stat, I think it's less than 20 some percent of marketers are trained. And yet if you're an accountant or a lawyer or a medical professional, you're certified, you're trained because lots of time and money can be wasted.

I mean, it's not to say that advertising practitioners are going to have loss of life in malpractice, but the amount of money that's being wasted on just advertising that does little to nothing, doesn't form a memory, doesn't last long enough. If you took those dollars being spent on all those wasted energy moments of messaging and took them and spent those on just dealing with the basic things like education and healthcare and things that are in our country, it'd be a different world.

So the idea of getting certified and trained and learning about sort of the gravity in our industry. I mean, architects show up to a new client gig. It's not like they have to describe gravity every single time they show up. I think this is a great Jeff Goodby quote I picked up once that he longs for the day when agencies can show up to clients and not have to explain gravity - how advertising works. Like architects and civil engineers don't have to, but we're still in that phase, but now there's some known maps for these territories. And this is something we can build off of.

That's amazing. What's the gravity for advertising?

I mean, this is where I would fall back on market-based asset theory. So this is where I start to sound like a total nerd from Ehrenberg Bass Institute out of University of South Australia.

This is the work of Frank Bass and Andrew Ehrenberg over the past half century that was really popularized by Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk and others from 2010 past and really writing books and just getting out some of the academic understanding of how brands grow. So the concept of availability theory to me, I think makes sense that essentially brand isn't going to grow if it's not known. So tell me a forgotten brand that grows. It just doesn't happen.

So this concept of mentally availability overlapping with physical availability, I love the way that James Hurman puts it. He's Kiwi over New Zealand. He's got this great master of advertising effectiveness. If you ever listened to Fergus's pod, you probably have heard his promo a million times. But this idea about making a brand easy to mind and easy to find makes a brand easy to buy. And that's how brands grow.

And I think it's a wonderfully simple way to think about the business that we're in, but that certainly brings some foundation that we can build off of as opposed to everybody having some made up kind of folk arty way of thinking about how it all works.

You mentioned that maybe there were some ideas that you had to let go of, maybe that you had picked up earlier in your career as the laws sort of came into place. Are there things that you abandoned or were you thinking about anything in particular?

It's "no pain, no gain." You have to feel that unlearned burn. There's one I still have separation anxiety with. And so that's the one that's the nerve ending I'll hit here.

I guess the first thing is, this coming up in the industry and this really actually got even worse during the 2010s with digital marketing, a lot of performance marketing is that you could grow off of a super micro niche group of people. That if you understood the nichiest of nichiest of nichiest groups, and just targeted them, somehow that's where growth would come from when literally it's by definition quantifiably a small population of people.

When you really look at the distribution of usage across any category, and this is where we get into a law-like behavior, it's super nerdy NBD negative binomial distribution by this dude Gillette that came up with this. And again, you can see it across industry.

It's the banana chart. The number of people who've never used a brand or not using the category is exponential. And the group of people that use it three, four, five, 10 times, it just swoops all the way down. Hence the banana chart. So in that instance, if you're ever trying to grow a brand based on a teeny little group of people on the right-hand side of that chart, it's just not going to happen.

That's where fandom can lie. And there's ways to use that fandom as a way to amplify and to create user imagery and kind of group in and out behavior that some people might be attracted to in certain categories, certain brands. But in order to accomplish that growth, it's always about taking people from the none to one club. I've never used it. And now I've tried it for the first time.

And that's where all the emphasis on ad investment should go is on penetration. And so this idea of just chasing niches as a form of growth and using that to spend all your advertising or using advertising to create quote unquote loyalty, there's really no evidence for it. In fact, it's a misuse of ad dollars.

Now, the part of it when I told you I have separation anxiety with is when they further lean into this concept that there's no such thing as brand love. And to be what's close to my heart in this is, I mentioned Douglas Atkin, who is head of planning at Merkley Newman Hardy for a while. That was the one agency in the US that actually had Jane Newman's name on the side of that building.

And again, I have a lot of love for Jane and there'd be no planners and strategists in the US if it wasn't for Jane. So she's kind of our matriarch and the six or seven wonderful lionesses of the US. They were all women in the beginning. All the original planners were, you know, Lauren Turner, MT Rainey, Robin Hayfits, Merry Baskin. Some of them came over too. These were the people that really birthed the industry.

But anyway, Douglas is close to my heart and you can watch on YouTube good old Byron Sharp use, interestingly enough from the Hidden Persuaders documentary, some excerpts of Douglas talking about the concept of brand cults and understanding that brands operate like cults and using that as a means to create and sort of propagate more users.

And he stands up there in Adelaide at a TEDx conference around about the time his book came out and plays one of my heroes and then makes fun of them in a group of all these Aussies. And I remember the first time I watched this, I couldn't watch it again. I thought "that motherfucker." And then I started to read and learn more about it. And I sort of put things in context.

But what he does, and it comes down to the weakness of words is when you say that someone really loves a brand, let's test this out. And the way he plays it out as the analogy is, let's say you go home to your partner that you love, and they simply aren't available that evening. Do you simply go to your neighbor and say, "we're married this evening"?

So he puts it up to the true human test that love is a concept that is experienced through human loyalty. And if you go to your favorite grocery store and you're looking for some bread and they simply don't have your brand, you just walk out with no bread? No, you get the next most mentally available bread that is physically available on the shelf and you roll with it.

And so it's really testing the limitations of the language that was being used and then goes to kind of prove how little loyalty brand loyalty there exists across brands that are typically used as the poster child for that - Harley Davidson or Apple and things like this that really don't have that per se.

So this concept of brand love for me though, is how I reconcile it is, and this is where people can test me on it, but I do feel that there are some people who actually probably do feel they love brands that brands somehow kind of complete them. It's just that they're never large enough populations in those user bases to provide additional growth.

So how you then use them is as a form of fandom, as a form of aspirational imagery that people around them might want to be like them and use that brand too, but that's not happening at the scale in which most commercial outcomes are graded on over time.

And so I feel I love some brands. And so this is where I fallback. There's another great thinker, Helen Edwards, who also teaches with Mark Ritson and London School of Business. And she has this APG talk that you can also watch online where she talks about, she takes it head on. She takes Byron Sharp head on with this concept and says, "You know what, love is the wrong term. Let's call it some kind of emotional something."

Let's call it some kind of emotional closeness that when all things are at parity, might that emotional closeness give you just enough more positive familiarity for that brand to then be chosen. And so that helps me kind of play both sides in those concepts.

And so yes, she agrees that the opportunity through growth is not through more frequency out of a smaller group of users. That's been disproven, debunked, no evidence there, but when someone is making a choice in a buying occasion and they simply have a little bit more emotional something for that brand, might that be the thing that tips them over?

So don't completely give up on that, but don't also think that that's where you should be spending all of your money to get everyone to have a monogamous relationship with the brand. We were very promiscuous when it comes to our brand consumption and we purchased based on repertoire. And so I still hang on to that one a bit in my team that I work with knows that I struggle and wrestle with this.

I feel I've read the Helen Edwards one. I haven't seen the Douglas Atkin Byron Sharp one, but I'm completely there with you. And for me, it's the word relationship. There's one level of relationship, which of course we don't have relationships with brands, but there's another one where we do have experiences with them over time that sort of accumulate into some kind of familiarity or emotional stuff. It's not a lie to say that we have a relationship with something that we maybe met when we were 15 and continue to encounter when we're 30 or 40. I think there's a big gray area.

And you need it together to kind of bridge you in a way that you don't have in other ways, but there's a way in which you are almost just trying to consummate your relationship. It's no different than that middle school, high school moment, when after the concert, you wear your t-shirt the next day into the cafeteria.

Oh, hell yeah.

People that didn't know, they see that you're wearing that and they're like, "oh, now you've got your scene."

Yeah.

I think brands provide this kind of social bridging for us and provide the kind of glue that we as humans, the safety in numbers, it was a fitness advantage for us evolving in small groups. So the more we can find ways to kind of bring others to feel they're part of our crew, the safer we feel.

And then the irony that I think we feel most individual when we can go find a thousand other people who are equally as individual. And that's what web 2.0 social media has definitely allowed us to do for better or worse. And so all that tribal behavior, our body being optimized for the Serengeti full of all these paleolithic emotions, still just trying to reach out and find other tribes to kind of garner and gather and hunt with. And now brands have become a big part of that wayfinding social wayfinding.

This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for the conversation.

Thank you so much. I look forward to listening to the next episode.

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