Ep. 230 - Ty Montague, Co-founder of co:collective and Author of True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Ty Montague co-founder and CEO of co:collective and author of True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business. Ty and I talk about his career in advertising and his pivot to a new framework for how companies should be approaching a changing landscape, customers, competitors, talent, and more.

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Interview Transcript with Ty Montague of co:collective

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Ty Montague. He is the co-founder and CEO of co:collective, which is a creative and strategic transformation company. Serves clients like Google and YouTube and IBM and MoMA. And the list goes on and on. 

Ty's also been named one of the 50 most influential creatives in the past 20 years. One of the top 10 creative directors in America, as well as the top 10 creative minds in business. Ty, you also wrote a book called True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business. So welcome to the show Ty 

Ty Montague: Brian. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I was super excited to have you, because I want to talk about the transformation and the things that you've seen in this whole world of advertising. If I understand correctly, you've had an illustrious career in the advertising world, but about five or 10 years ago, you made a pivot from that world of classic advertising. And so maybe we can start there. Can you tell us a little bit about that shift from what you were doing in the past, in the advertising space, and where you are now? 

Ty Montague: I used to call myself a storyteller for businesses, helping them craft their story, and then tell it using paid media 30 and 60 second television commercials primarily.  But about 15 years ago, I started to notice that it was getting harder to tell stories using traditional paid media. And I also noticed what seemed to me to be a new kind of company being born. These companies had a story, but they weren't telling it using paid media, they were actually doing it in their customer experience.

First one that I remember noticing because I was still in advertising at the time was Starbucks. You know, there's a moment that all of us I'm sure had where you wake up one morning and suddenly there's a Starbucks on every street corner in America, but there was no Starbucks advertising anywhere. And I couldn't figure out, I was like all other things being equal, right, the Starbucks way of building a business has got to be more efficient. 

And so I looked into it, and I started collecting lists of companies that seem to be operating in this new way. And about 10 years ago, once I realized that they actually did operate in a very different way, I decided to leave traditional advertising. I was the co-president and chief creative officer of a big agency called J. Walter Thompson in North America. At the time, my partner and I decided to leave and launch co:collective. And what we do is we help more traditional companies begin to function in this new way. 

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about that thesis. Can you unpack this quest that you see companies going through and who's good at it and let's start there.

Ty Montague: We have two theses at co:. First to be successful today and increasingly in the future, companies need to be pursuing a higher purpose. We call it a quest. It is something that transcends merely creating shareholder value. Making money is a great result of having a quest, but it's not the point of having a quest.

There needs to be generosity to a good quest. It needs to be something that inspires your customers and your employees to engage with and come along and try to achieve it with you. And so, we help leadership teams define and align on this quest, this higher purpose. And then we help companies actually enact that quest.

In other words, the quest isn't a communication strategy. It's an action strategy for the company. You take your quest and you put it to work in your customer experience. Defining innovative experiences that you make to make your quest real and tangible for people inside and outside your company. And 10 years ago, we had no idea whether that idea would float at all. And fingers crossed. It's a much more popular idea today than it was 10 years ago. And we're excited to see the world pet in our direction.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about framework. Can any company embark on a quest and what's that framework to do so?

Ty Montague: We have a process that we've developed. It's been iterative. As you mentioned, I wrote a book and published it in 2013 that's really about the process. And it hasn't changed massively since then, but there've been a few tweaks to it. So, we basically look for four truths for a company as we look for inputs into how to develop your quest. We look for a truth about the protagonist and this is all story language, right?

Ultimately, we consider the protagonist to be the company itself. So, what is your true state of play today? And we do a lot of desk research. We do a lot of internal interviewing at these companies to define, like, what is the truth about your current state today? We then look for a truth about the stage.

And by that we mean the stage that the story is playing out on, what's going on in culture. What's going on in your competitive set, what's going on in technology that you need to pay attention to. We look for truth about the participants, the people that you actually want to serve in your business. Your customers would be another way to put it. We think of them as participants though, because if you're on a good quest, they want to come along with you and help you achieve it. 

And then we look for a truth about the antagonist. So, it's not enough and know what you're for. We believe you need to know what you're against. What is the dragon that you're trying to slay when you get out of bed every day? And a good antagonist can be extremely motivating. 

And then we take those inputs, and we work collaboratively with the client to develop their quest, usually with the whole leadership team. Often, including the CEO. From there, we take that quest and we put it to action both in again, four quadrants offer, your identity - so the products that you make and then, you know, your identity including communications, your community -internally like internal stakeholders in the company, and then capabilities. Because if you have a good quest, a good quest is ambitious over time it may require you to add capabilities to the company, which can be done through acquisition or by hiring new kinds of people. 

Brian Ardinger: Is this something that pretty much any company in any industry can go through and take part in? Or a...