Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising

The latest Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Caroline Johnson- Co-Founder of The Business Model Company. Caroline worked at Grey but then worked at KPMG as a consultant. The Business Model Company advises agencies on how to evolve their business models to generate value for their clients and increase revenues and profitability for themselves.  She was called in to help with the transformation of IPG's Huge, a process that has been documented in Michael Farmer's book "Madison Avenue Makeover" https://www.amazon.com/Madison-Avenue-Makeover-transformation-redefinition/dp/1911687646Here are a few of the highlights from my conversation with Caroline. How Do You Define a Business Model?"A business model is very simply three parts. If you think about three corners of a triangle, those three points are completely codependent. At the top, you've got how you create value for your customers in the market, for your clients, that is your positioning, your proposition, how you tell the story of your capability. But critically, it's also the neighborhood that you live in."Why is "Neighborhood" an Important Concept? "We're not thinking about the neighborhood that we live in. And we're also not thinking about innovation and applying creativity to the operating model and the commercial model. So as a creative industry, we have creative sophistication and sometimes confidence. But we are really critically underdeveloped and have a lack of sophistication in our ability to adapt our operating systems and also to develop any form of commercial model for the whole industry."The Advantages of Moving and Upgrading Your Neighborhood"If you're building your house and investing in your house in the service industry in that neighborhood, which has been commoditized, then you're likely to suffer from bad landlords, declining property prices, noisy neighbors. And from a corporate advisory point of view, the multiple that's applied to those types of commoditized service businesses is sort of between six and nine. But if you repackage those businesses into a program business, a product business, and a more consultative offering or a platform business, then the multiples that are used to value the EBITDA of those businesses start at 12 and go up to 24. So you can double, if not triple." The Future of the Agency Network"The classic traditional network agency model of being a one-stop shop. Not only a one-stop shop for all services and capabilities, but also for every market and locality in the world has been a very successful model. But I think it's gone now. The idea that classic advertising and traditional communications are going to take the lion's share of a marketing director's yearly budget is just not going to happen. Its significance and its ROI are rapidly declining. There are much smarter ways of being able to sustain and promote brands and scale brands. So I think the bricks and mortar traditional agency network that you refer to is over."  

Andy Nairn co-founded Lucky Generals- an ad agency with offices in London and New York.  Beyond running an agency, Andy has written a best-selling business book "Go Luck Yourself" and has just completed his first novel- "Trail of Blood" a murder mystery set 500 years ago on the border between England and Scotland. Some quotes from our chat. On Pitching "Some agencies are good at going through the grind of pitching and winning things that they don't feel passionate about. But I think for whatever reason, the three of us realized that we're not good at, you know, we tend to all three of us, put our feelings on our sleeves and show whether we're interested."Category Conventions"Originality is incredibly important, but also think about category conventions as well. Well, sometimes we throw away the convention. people think I'll convince the boring but I mean for instance when you come to cover I found that really interesting briefing a designer on your book cover. In our world, you might want to be unlike any other cover in the market. The book designer just went "No you're mad my friend yes, of course, it's got to be unique and different and interesting but you've also got to tell very quickly what sort of genre this is."What Makes a Strong Planner/Strategist "If you hone your skills at being interested and listening to and being curious about human behavior and all its weird illogicalities and quirks, then you won't go far wrong. You won't be beaten by a robot you'll be able to use technology to help you develop those insights."“When someone says their favorite book is advertising-related. I'd sort of be a bit disappointed. I want you to sort of tell me about, you know, your amazing fashion sideline or your photography or, you know, sport or other stuff. It's so true."The Lack of Storytelling Tension in Advertising "I feel like a lot of advertising is cats sitting on mats there's nothing nothing is happening there's no tension there's no through old Jeopardy, nothing can ever go wrong."The Threat of AI"I'm sort of genuinely optimistic about all of those sort of existential threats and challenges as long as we hang on to, you know, our creativity and our sort of, you know, just our open-mindedness and our curiosity,”Pitching a Novel"I used to joke that it's kind of like with Go Luck Yourself, it was almost like saying it's like Harry Potter meets the Bible, which I didn't do, but you've got to pick two things that are unbelievably successful and collide them together."Building Novels from Worlds"I started thinking of it as a little brand and I wanted to create a world, not just a one-off story. I feel like this is kind of an interesting world, this world of outlaws and warlords and an odd part of the world that people don't know exists, you know, this borderlands and this time, I feel could be my sort of place, my world where other authors are not really sort of in that sort of space."

Maz  Karimian heads up strategy at ustwo an employee-owned product design company that brings emotional game-inspired thinking to product design—some key quotes from our conversation below. About ustwo“Monument Valley is the game and the game series That was so successful that usTwo games was split off as a sort of a separate sister entity, still under the usTwoi umbrella. But yes, that's been something influential, I think, on, well, frankly, the type of talent that we attract. But also the mindset we bring, that more playful, more emotion-centric approach to product design that has served us well.”What He Does“A lot of what I focused on has been the opportunities at the intersection of product design and game design thinking, what we call play thinking. And that's emphasizing the capacity and the importance of product design to incorporate a focus not just on functional outcomes, but emotional outcomes and explicitly target the certain ways that we want users to feel sort of before or during and after engaging with an experience that we've created.”On Tech Overload“We talk about ourselves as social creatures, which we are, but the society to which you belong, the community to which you belong, was never the entire world, and all the information in it. And I think that in many ways, we're seeing just various symptoms of overload.”AI Transformation and Promise“I don't think day-to-day transformation happens until it's usefully embedded in products and services that we already use and or integrated into products that we end up adopting.”"The promise of AI, like all good technology, is to free up humans, time and energy, both physical, and especially mental energy, but to free up humans to be more human. "Working with Clients We have a workshop, which we call “the user as player workshop”, where we essentially reimagine your product as a game, and your user as a player of that game, which is handy for cracking open and dusting off that emotional lens, In the case of iRobot and the workshop, it’s the opportunity to ask questions like..How do we want people to feel about this robot in their homes 30 days after purchase? How do we want them to feel about it?

Daniel Groh heads up brand at Satisfy Running.In this interview, we discuss the transformed state of the running category and Satisfy's place within it. How the brand leans into personal expression and appeals to those who want to express themselves beyond the traditional players and the traditional running silhouette. How it's leading the charge in sustainability, recycling, and repair.How runner insights matter to product development.How the recent brand film shot in LA was made.How the company thinks about distributionPlans for loyaltyIt's approach when it comes to athletesAnd more....Here's a key quote from the interview.“I think the biggest difference is for people that look at performance, there are brands for that. I think for people who look at the pleasure of running in the purest form, we're a brand for them.  What's beautiful about where kind of running is today is that people are transforming it into what it means for them. There's a great crew out of Austin made up of restaurant workers. There's a crew in Paris that are all electronic musicians. It's nice because, you know, I think it's not cookie-cutter anymore. It feels like people are turning something that was once quite boring, into something a little bit more exciting and turning into themselves. I don't know why this happened, but there was always a dissociation between how you express yourself in daily life and how you express yourself in sports. I think that line is gone.”

The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with John GeletkaJohn is the owner and founder of Geletka + - a small agency located in the West Loop of ChicagoThe agency started five years ago.John's an artist by training but has done several different jobs in his career including corporate marketing, but he's also an entrepreneur at heart.It was fascinating to talk to a small agency owner and get his thoughts on the market and the business today.On Starting an Agency During COVID"We had a, we had like a really good start. We looked at our engagements a little bit differently and it wasn't a big shift. A lot of people do it. So it's nothing innovative, but, during a time like COVID where there's rapid uncertainty, we would take up, let's call it a 50 to a hundred grand project and we turn it into a retainer and break it up over six and 12 months. So we were always, we're able to like run the discipline, help our clients out financially in uncertain times, and then run the business with a level of discipline."What Clients Want "What clients and complex industries don't want is something, you know some hotshot coming in and just telling them what to do and what's cool. They want somebody to sit down and learn the business. Empathize with them go all in and learn about their customers that they've known for 10, 20, or 30 years. And that takes like that takes time. They're also looking for that outside perspective I think a lot of folks are welcome to it as long as you sit down and understand them."What He Wants from Talent "I mean, there's a sort of a roll your sleeves up graft aspect here that's required, there's a danger with a prima donna with the attitude of "that's kind of beyond me".Why the Interest in Web 3?"There's an awesome art culture in there, There is a gaming culture that's the next layer of the art. I call it a subculture because you have all these little mini-cultures. And they interact with each other a little bit."Integrating AI into the Process"We buy the big chunk of our organization seats on Mid-journey and GPT. And we give them access and range to use it as a tool.  AI, from my perspective, is a great accelerator. It is by no means a replacement for great creative. It is by no means this is the machine that we're going to produce AI-driven content or copy, but it can, it can help storyboard faster, it can help do research faster, it can help round out headlines, it can help they can help do things. But what it can't do, it's not a replacement for a writer. It's not a replacement for a designer."

The latest Inspiring Futures podcast is an interview with Eliza Yvette Esquivel. Eliza has worked both on the agency and client side. She's had senior brand management roles at Mondelez and Microsoft and as a strategist and CSO at several different agencies, including Barbarian, Future Brand, DDB, JWT, Wieden and Kennedy Amsterdam, and TBWA. In our conversation, we discuss what she's learned from her experiences on the agency and client sides and how she's applying that learning to her coaching, leadership, and consulting businesses, which are underpinned by protopian thinking. Some quotes from Eliza from the interview. Moving from Agency to Client"The first thing when I went client side was I was surprised at how little they knew what they were doing. I had this perception when I was in the agency world that the clients were buttoned up and, you know, everything was very certain and, you know, they had it together, and we didn't understand."Agency Understanding of Clients"The other thing is just how little we know about our client's businesses on the agency side, how little we understand about how they make money and what the center of gravity of each organization is. And then, therefore, what role does marketing play as a consequence?The Challenge for Marketers inside Corporations"There's a fundamental lack of understanding, especially with marketing, of what marketing is and how it works. So if you're a good marketer and get into these organizations, you must sort of play along with some antiquated misconceptions while you''re trying to, you know, educate and persuade to a more sophisticated approach."How to Make Brand Matter Inside the Corporation"I did this while I was at Microsoft: I connected brand metrics to business metrics. And it was hugely impactful. All of a sudden, they paid attention to the brand, and I used my research budget to show the contribution that the brand made to the business when I restructured the way we collected the data about brand metrics. So I think that, you know, it's either having an evangelist or you yourself going in and creating the proof that has not existed up until that point. "The Importance of Creativity"if clients understood the value of constantly exercising that kind of creativity, and, and valuing advertising agencies' ability to sort of bring that to the table, their businesses would probably be thriving."The Protopian Future"Protopia is basically the understanding that we create the future incrementally by making it a little bit better and a little bit better in steps. But we're always pointing toward that better direction. And so that's really what protopianism is all about. It really has sort of like the pillars. It's got some pillars within it of sustainability, inclusivity, and these human-centric values. It's about a future where technology and ethics sort of walk hand in hand."

Warren Berger is an author and journalist who has spent the last 25 years writing about the worlds of design, advertising and innovation. Back in the day he got a feature story about Weiden and Kennedy into the NYT Magazine and he wrote the book "Advertising Today" that was published by Phaidon,. For the past 10 years, he's been focused on the world of questions and questioning- from which sprang the book "A More Beautiful Question"- which celebrated its tenth anniversary with a new updated edition.Here are some quotes from my interview with Warren.It was designer Bruce Mau who inspired him to think more deeply about questions.“Bruce Mao had a thing about questioning where he said, one of the most important things a designer can do is be the person who's willing to ask stupid questions.”"So I realized when you talk about how designers think, they often start with questions and that's kind of the, they're trying to figure out the right question to ask that will address a problem or a situation."He also understood that it was questions that lay the foundations for the new disruptive startups."They're only ten years old or whatever and if you went back to the origin of them You could usually identify a question there was usually a question that Reed Hastings was trying to answer or that the three guys who started Airbnb."Questions are everywhere"I was there with the arts, of course it's there with science, you know, scientists are always working on questions.  So what I realized is it's, you know, it's everywhere. It's in basically any discipline that's trying to solve problems, is trying to do problem solving, is focused on questions because the question is how you articulate the problem."In the updated edition of the book- he explores the idea of AI and questions"Do we does it mean that this question become more important in the age of? AI, or does it mean that we really don't need to do any of this stuff anymore? Because AI is going to take care of all the thinking for us?""We have to get sharper with our questions to get more out of AI. But also, we have to use the questioning of a analytical questioning, critical thinking questioning, to question what comes back to us from AI."https://amorebeautifulquestion.com/

This episode features an interview with Gerard Crichlow, who heads up Global Strategy on the Unilever brands- Axe/Lynx at IPG.Gerard collaborates with several IPG entities worldwide to ensure the Axe/Lynx brands connect to their consumers and cultures.  Some quotes from Gerard from the episode."And for me, if we're in the attention game, who does attention best, and that tends to be entertainment companies. And so I've always tried to look at how do we shift from interrupting people to providing entertaining content.""There is no more monoculture, especially for younger people. So you have to be able to entertain in order to get people's attention.""I kind of start from the premise that no one gives a shit about your brand. So I almost like take the brand hat off. Of course, we're doing it for brands. And so we. we then first look at what is the landscape, what are the signals, what are those conversations or topics. And then we then put our brand hat back on and then look at are any of these topics related to the brand's point of view. "If you fan like a fan, you almost take your brand hat off and you speak like the fan, you're interested in what they're talking about, you like the same songs, the same tracks, you know the backstories, all of those things.""It's like a muscle. You post a lot. Some things will fly. Some things won't. But the things that do fly do really, really well. And from what we see is we keep a small team, meet every single day, post, get that muscle going. And then when things fly, and we think the engagement and the conversation is scaling. we begin to provide value. ""It has so many more implications, not just social. It actually is trickling itself from the ground in the social conversations into bigger pieces of work, like the above the line work. So what are the sort of types of conversations that people are talking about What influencers or musicians do they relate to? Those are partnerships we then go after. What do they want because Axe as a fragrance brand? What do they want from fragrances? How do they react to each other?"

This latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with the CMO of Depop. Depop is one of the most interesting brands in the fashion space since it's all about reselling and ultimately about transforming the way we shop for fashion. Peter has a fascinating background with experience on the agency side with both Anomaly(where he worked on the Converse brand) and VCCP and client side at Google in Creative Lab. In a wide-ranging conversation we talk about his early experience as a writer and how that's core to his work today, building a cohesive brand, the importance of culture for brands, how community needs to be balanced by the brand and some of the challenges of growing the brand beyond its core. 

In this episode, I talk with Tass Tsitsopoulos, the Global Strategy Director of McDonald's at Wieden + Kennedy. We discuss his early life in London, studying politics at LSE, his accidental journey into advertising thanks to Jeremy Bullmore, his life as an Account Guy at BBH, and his leap into planning. We also get to talk about his journey in the US with BBDO and McDonald's at Wieden + Kennedy.