Phil Adams on Strategy & Simplicity

Phil Adams is a brand consultant based in Edinburgh, Scotland, practicing what he calls Lowfalutin Strategy. He has over 20 years experience as an account manager, planner, and managing director in the advertising business. He was Planning Director at digital agency Blonde, and then Managing Director at The Leith Agency. He has a wonderful newsletter here. I reached out to him because of this: “Mixtaping my metaphors.”

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Beautiful. So, Phil, thank you for coming and being a part of this with me. I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I tend to overexplain. I borrowed it from a friend of mine, who’s an oral historian. She helps people tell their stories. It’s a big, beautiful question, but because it’s so big, you can answer it any way you want. The question is, where do you come from?

Yes, well, thank you for that. Forewarned is forearmed, because I knew it was coming, so I had a chance to think about this. Rather than giving you a standard personal life story, I think the best answer is that I come from two places: one called mischief and the other one called creativity. Looking back now, with hindsight, I think those are the places I came from.

Tell me a little bit about mischief.

Okay, well, something that stuck with me from an early age, and I try to stay true to this, is what my maternal grandfather once said: "The thing about Phil is he always has a twinkle in his eye." He meant that I’m always on the lookout for fun and mischief. I’ve never forgotten him saying that, and I try to live by that ethos—having a twinkle in my eye. I think that’s probably why, despite studying engineering at university, I made a sudden turn into advertising. It suited me more as an environment—a sparky, fun environment. That was the idea. I didn’t know much about it going in, but it turned out to be exactly that.

So was creativity the other place you came from?

Yeah, again with hindsight. Looking back on my childhood, there was a lot of creative mischief. For example, I used to play with Scalextric racing cars. I stripped the wires from the transformer and used it to run science experiments, like copper plating things. My mum freaked out once when she found out I was running experiments, like putting a lit candle in my cupboard and timing how long it would take to burn all the oxygen and go out. So, with hindsight, a lot of my play was mischievous but also quite creative.

Did you ever have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Not really, no. It was all quite predictable, I think. I was a pretty good student across most subjects, with a slight bias toward the sciences. My dad’s a scientist, so with his encouragement, I narrowed down my subjects to maths, physics, and chemistry at 16. Not surprisingly, I ended up in an engineering degree, but not with any strong vocational drive to be an engineer. I’ve always liked understanding how things work, and that’s served me well in advertising as well. But I didn’t have a vocational drive until university, when I suddenly decided that advertising was what I wanted to do. That was at age 21.

What happened at 21?

I was in the changing rooms after a soccer game, and one of my teammates, who was studying chemistry or geology, decided he wanted to be an advertising copywriter. He was putting together a portfolio of ideas to show, and it looked really interesting. I’d always had a fascination with ads—my sister and I used to play a game where we’d guess the brand behind the ad quickest. So when I saw his book and Campaign magazine, it all looked really glamorous, and something about it appealed to me. I decided I wanted to go into advertising, not as a copywriter, but just in the industry. I had to re-engineer my CV, managed to get on a Procter and Gamble marketing course during an Easter holiday, and then worked for nothing in a small agency over the summer. By the time of my final year at university, I could demonstrate some enthusiasm for advertising. I applied to all the top agencies in London, got maybe five first interviews, and one job offer, which happened to be at BBH. So I landed on my feet, and my football teammate went on to a glittering career as a creative, including being executive creative director at BBH in the end as well.

Oh, wow. Were you together at BBH?

No, he was there after I was.

And where are you now? What’s the work you’re doing now?

OK, so I worked in advertising for about 18 years. I went through account management, account director, head of client services, and ended up as the managing director of an agency. In 2006-2007, I helped co-found our sister digital agency. I liked the guy we’d hired to run it so much that I jumped ship and joined the digital agency, effectively recruiting my own boss and reinventing myself as a strategy person. Most digital agencies then were run by technical people, so it was quite unusual to have a brand person in a digital agency. I did strategy in a digital agency until 2020, then jumped ship again to go freelance as an independent brand strategy consultant. Now, I work mostly with B2B and service organizations.

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

The joy in the work is that it’s both an intellectual and a creative discipline. You kind of jump from one to the other, almost seamlessly, when you’re working on a problem. That suits me. The work I do now involves that constant combination of logical and creative thinking, one informing the other. That’s the joy that sustains my interest. People keep asking me, "When are you going to retire?" I have no desire to retire because I’m enjoying the work. Working for myself now, I can pick and choose who I work with, so I keep the joy of the work and lose some of the negatives that come with working in an agency. It’s great. And actually, the joy also comes from the fact that I feel I’m doing the best work of my career now, at age 58—work I couldn’t have done even when I was 50. I don’t want to sound overconfident, but I do think there’s been a blossoming in my late career. There’s joy in that as well.

Yeah, and how do you mean? In what way are you doing things that you couldn’t have done before?

I think it’s a new level of confidence. Not overconfidence—I hope I approach my work with humility—but I feel comfortable having conversations with founders and CEOs, having the confidence to price according to my ability, and to decline pitches where I’d have to give away intellectual property for nothing. I’ve either learned these things in the last five years or just reached an age where I’ve had to. I feel quite different from how I felt even five or six years ago.

The name of your company is fantastic, and it feels like it has a "lowfalutin" strategy. Is that right?

Yeah, that’s not the name of the company. It took me four and a half years of consultancy work to finally figure out who I am as a consultant and what my style is. I think I’m good at keeping things simple, pragmatic, and unpretentious. "Lowfalutin" was just an idea I had to describe that style, rather than being another consultant who talks about pragmatic solutions. It’s a slightly pretentious way of saying unpretentious, and I like it for that. It’s not the name of the company, but I did trademark it as my signature style. It’s wonderful. It’s a good filter because you have to know what "highfalutin" means to get it. And I guess I don’t want to work with people who don’t know what "highfalutin" is.

Well, I don’t know when I signed up for your newsletter or when I started seeing your stuff on LinkedIn, but you had this amazing post you called a "mixtape of metaphor." You really went deep and gathered all of these beautiful nuggets about metaphor into one post. That’s what inspired me to reach out and invite you here. So, talk to me about metaphor. Why create a mixtape of metaphor, and what’s the role of metaphor in your work?

Well, I’ve been collecting them for quite a while. I don’t know why I’m interested, but I do a lot of writing. I get great joy from writing, though I wouldn’t say I’m brilliant at it. But I’m interested in communication, professionally, and metaphor is a powerful tool. When you subconsciously read or watch something, you’re not aware of how prevalent metaphor is in our language. It was only after I wrote that post about metaphor that I realized I was unconsciously using other metaphors to write about the ones I was consciously using. They’re a prevalent form of communication because they’re so powerful. I’ve always had a fascination with them. I have an online repository of stuff I find interesting, and I’ve had a section called "Metaphor" where I’ve been collecting them over the years. It was only recently that I decided to pull some of those greatest hits out and put them together into a single article called "Mixtape," which itself is a metaphor.

Metaphor all the way down.

Yeah, exactly. And in terms of using metaphor professionally, quite often a creative idea, an advertising idea, can be a metaphor. Another example is that if you want to use a celebrity as a spokesperson for your brand, it works best when the thing for which that celebrity is best known is a metaphor for what your brand stands for. That works really well. So, metaphors are a frequently used and powerful tool, not just in language generally, but specifically in commercial creativity.

I want to return to the idea that you’re a simple and pragmatic communicator. What are the challenges when working with clients to make things simple? How do you do that?

I think it’s an attitude, and I do think it’s one of the few benefits of getting older. Learning to keep things simple, not being afraid to keep things simple, and knowing how to keep things simple are skills that get better with age. I don’t have a fixed brand framework—no brand house, brand key, or brand pyramid. That just gives you boxes to fill in every time, most of which are superfluous for a given client. It makes more work for me because I do a bespoke thing for each client. But the philosophy I bring to every gig is that the strategy will have the best chance of working if it has as few moving parts as possible. So, I don’t have a set framework, but I do have a philosophy of keeping the number of components in a brand strategy to a bare minimum to do the job. That helps, although it does create more work each time.

Yeah, that’s wonderful. I’m curious about your shift from account management to strategy and then doing strategy in digital. How has the strategy changed? How has the advertising challenge changed? How would you describe how things have changed?

I think, can I start by saying what hasn’t changed? My favorite advertising maxim is McCann Erickson’s idea of "Truth Well Told," which goes back to 1912. I still think that’s as good a definition of advertising or commercial communication as you’re going to get. It’s deceptively simple because you have to identify what that truth is from many options, and then you have to decide the best way of telling that truth. So, it’s simple, but it’s not easy. That fundamentally is still the same. The things that change are more surface-level, like delivery mechanisms. The advent of the internet and social media was a radical change in how commercial messages are delivered, but they’re still doing fundamentally the same job—telling the truth in the best way possible. Some people get fixated on surface changes at the expense of the core discipline. The fragmentation of media channels, both online and offline, presents new challenges. It’s harder to achieve reach, which is important for building a brand over the long term. That’s more of a challenge and may have contributed to the discipline of advertising feeling a little less important than it did when I was working in it. But that’s easy for me to say from the outside looking in now.

What’s the role of research in your process? I’m a qualitative researcher, so I’m always interested to hear how people value it and use it.

It’s fundamental. One of the values I apply to my consultancy work is what I call "dealing directly," but access is a shorthand. One part of that is having access to my clients’ clients or customers to do primary research. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll take a project on unless I can talk directly to their customers. One of the reasons I specialize in B2B and service businesses is that they both involve deep, ongoing relationships with my clients, and the relationship matters. They know about my clients and care about my client doing a good job for them. As well as buying the product or service, they’re also buying into my client’s culture. Part of my job is to understand the culture behind the brand, and I’m quite good at that because I’m really interested in it. Also, because my clients’ clients or customers know my clients really well, they’re often going to give me the answer I need. It happens so often that what my client thinks they’re selling is not the same as what their customers are buying. Somewhere in that tension is the answer to the brand strategy problem they’ve set me. I couldn’t do the work without doing the primary research with those clients or customers, to the point where I won’t take the work on. It’s absolutely essential to the work I do.

Was this something you learned coming up, or how did you develop as an interviewer, a researcher, someone who asks questions?

I’m not someone who feels the need to impress with what I’m saying. I much prefer to listen, think, and then speak. That natural inclination to let others talk and not try to impress them with what I think is a solid foundation. I’ve always had that. The more you do it, the better you get at asking good questions. I’ve always been pretty good at listening, and as you know, you don’t just listen with your ears—body language is a huge part of it. It’s not just what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it. Being receptive to when there might be something else they could say if I just leave a pregnant pause for them to fill often leads to the most interesting insights. I enjoy the back-and-forth of those conversations. Usually, I’m talking to people who want to say nice things, who want to be helpful, so that helps too.

You mentioned learning how to ask questions. What have you learned about what makes a good question?

I guess keeping it open-ended is important—inviting someone to share their opinion. It’s a difficult one to answer because I do this naturally now. When you’re writing a discussion guide, the first pass might not be that great. What I do is, and I do this for meetings as well as for qualitative research interviews, I don’t just write the discussion guide—I imagine myself having the conversation. When you do that, you can imagine how it will go and whether they’ll open up or if the question will shut them down. That’s a good discipline, not just for qualitative research but for preparing for any meeting. I’ll Google the people I’m going to talk to, watch videos of them presenting, and get a sense of who they are. Then I imagine the conversation and whether a particular question will work or if it needs rephrasing. So, that imaginative approach would be my overall method.

Yeah, it’s awesome. I think about this stuff way too much, of course, but there’s this amazing quote I always return to. A woman named Harleen Anderson, a therapist, said, "How could you possibly know what questions to ask somebody until they’ve said something for you to be curious about?"

That’s useful, yeah.

Isn’t that nice? I felt like I saw that in you too.

Yeah, totally. You reminded me that part of my opening spiel when I first meet someone to interview is that I’ll say, "My discussion guide is over here on this screen, so I’m not checking email. I’m just seeing where we are. But I’d be delighted if this conversation very quickly goes off-piste, depending on how you lead it." I know the outcome I need from the conversation, but I don’t need to slavishly follow the questions to get it if they lead me in a more interesting direction. Having the experience and confidence to go with the flow and not be tied down by set questions is important.

Yeah. How do you know when you’ve gotten to the strategy? You’ve talked about getting to the strategy with as few parts as possible. How do you know when you’ve arrived?

It goes back to the idea of "truth well told." Most of the projects I work on are for clients who don’t think they’ve ever found that truth, or they had it but lost their way. They haven’t got their story straight anymore. Most of the projects I work on are some version of finding that truth, working out how to tell it, and giving them a blueprint they can work with. As I talk to them, I get a sense of who they are, what their values are, what their culture is. Then I go and talk to their customers, maybe creating some stimulus material from the conversations with my client. I get a sense of what that truth might be. Once I know what the answer is, I think about the most appropriate way to structure it so it becomes easily digestible and pragmatic. I don’t like strategy as an intellectual exercise—it’s a means to an end. Someone has to execute the strategy, so I have to leave it in a place where it’s easy to follow. And if they give it to a creative person, it has to be a joy for that creative person to work with. So, it’s got to be precise, accurate, and inspirational.

To the degree you’re comfortable, can you give me an example or tell me a story about what that looks like? Is there a form that your strategy usually takes?

I don’t have a set form, but there’s an end result I always aim for, which is the client saying, "Oh my God, that’s us." That’s us in terms of what we’re saying, and that’s us in terms of how it’s being said. And because of the way I’ve done the work, it’s "that’s us" in a way that’s going to press the right buttons with the kind of clients or customers they’re trying to attract because it’s been informed by them in the process. That’s the outcome I’m always looking for. I’m so pleased when I occasionally get that verbatim, "that’s us," which is a deep joy. Often a client will say, "Thank you very much, you really got us," which is another way of saying the same thing. But that’s what I want—for them to see themselves expressed in a way that was missing before, in a way that’s going to attract the kind of clients they want. Does that answer your question?

Absolutely. There’s no such thing as a wrong answer. I totally connect with the victory of them seeing themselves in the work. It’s powerful and beautiful. I appreciate the lack of dogma in your approach.

Thank you. I’m happy with that. One common problem I encounter with service businesses, especially marketing services businesses, is that when you get down into messaging, you have to do three jobs: inform, enthuse, and reassure. Marketing services businesses, in particular, forget to do the "inform" bit and are all about trying to enthuse. You’ll see ad agency websites that say things like, "We connect clients with culture," and yet you wonder, "Do you do ads?" They forget that fundamental first line of the elevator pitch—what kind of company are you?

There was an amazing quote from James Bridle about AI in the metaphor mixtape. I wanted to ask, how would you describe your relationship with generative AI?

I don’t have one. Back in 2007, when social media exploded, I was advising my clients on whether and how they should use it, so I had to dive in and immerse myself in social media. Right now, I’m advising my clients on brand strategy, not on AI technology, so I don’t feel the need to dive into AI. Also, it’s moving so fast, changing so quickly, that I’m letting others make mistakes and learn for me. I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not making my own mistakes. For example, prompt engineering sounds like bad UX to me—it’ll get sorted out eventually, where I won’t need to be a prompt engineer to use this stuff. So, I’m not wasting my time on that. I also don’t want to outsource the hard work of wrestling with a problem. I don’t want to take shortcuts because my ability to know when something’s right and to talk it through with a client depends on me having done that hard work. I’m deeply skeptical of AI and don’t think I need it. The kind of work I do—talking one-on-one with human beings—if that ever becomes replaceable by AI, it will be one of the last things to go. I’m listening with my ears, eyes, gut, and a sixth sense, and I just don’t see how AI can replicate that. I’m skeptical and less inclined to dive in than others. I don’t think I need to.

You were part of the internet’s arrival, which was our most recent transformation. What was that experience like, and what did you learn that you’re applying here?

I worked with people who’d been on the internet from day one, so 2006-2007 was a long way after day one, but it was kind of the wild west when marketing people and brands suddenly realized they might have to think seriously about it. It was exciting. I learned a lot from diving in early to social media. I made a lot of friends and connections, which made going freelance in 2020 much easier. It’s been a huge professional boon to me, both in terms of meeting people and learning from them. But it also informs how I feel about generative AI now. Social media started as a beautiful, generous, open thing, but now we realize it can be a threat to democracy, exacerbates polarization, and has negative impacts on mental health, especially among younger people. None of that was foreseen back in 2007. So, I assume despite all the amazing use cases for generative AI now, we’re going to see similar negative impacts down the line. That’s my assumption—I don’t know what they will be, but I’m cautious.

That’s a good place to end our conversation. Thank you so much. I really appreciated speaking with you and enjoyed it. I appreciate you accepting my invitation.

Thank you so much for being interested. I’m deeply flattered, especially given some of the people who’ve gone before on this podcast—people I admire from afar. I was honored to be asked. Thank you.

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