Inspiring Futures Ed Cotton

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. 

Last month, I sat down for a conversation with Ian Murray- the co-founder of Burst Your Bubble. Ian has no shortage of contrarian views on everything from media and the current vogues in marketing to what strategists need to be doing in their work.

To give you a flavor of the conversation- here are some soundbites.

On Media

 "TV still produces the strongest signals in terms of what we call fitness, which is things like signaling a brand's quality, reliability, financial strength, and success."

"Young people have the same response pattern on signaling as older generations. So they're watching less TV, but it has no lesser cultural impact for them."
Findings from research conducted for Essence   

The Problem with Niches

 "How do you build culture through these incredibly fragmented, personalized niches? You've no idea if anybody else is seeing the same thing you."

People Want to Conform

"It's not driven necessarily by niches. People aren't always looking to stand out and define themselves as different from others. They are, but it's not necessarily the dominant thing they're doing. A lot about what the mainstream are doing is they want to belong, they want to be the same as other people.”

Strategists- Look More Closely at What's Around You

"You are stepping over the stuff, you know, that you're ignoring on your way to the agency in the morning, you know when you're waiting for your street food at lunchtime in the market. You don't have to go 500 miles to see it's right in front of your eyes."

The conversation is full of interesting perspectives on what the industry should be doing and how we can do our strategy jobs with a level of integrity.