When the strategy is clear, the sandbox from the outside looks small, but once you're inside the sandbox, it's enormous. And it allows us to channel our creative energies and to hit a target. A lot of times in our side, when we get the creative brief, we're like, "Oh my god, who paid for this? This is terrible."
>> Imagine sharing a strategy in three words or one word. That's pretty confident. You're not rewarded for confidence in a corporate career. I was a head of strategy of an 800 person agency in New York and I work with some of the biggest companies in the world. I see their documents and it's all just ridiculous language that nobody would use on the streets because we're trying to trigger an emotional reaction with our communication. So, if we're not triggering it with each other, we're not going to be able to trigger it in public.
>> Oh, I like where you're starting to take this now. I can see something happening.
>> We're going to get cancelled [laughter] off YouTube. Cancel the stream, bro.
>> Stop flirting with me.
>> God, getting back to something that you said, which which kind of tickled my brain a little bit.
>> The four points are problem, insight, advantage, and strategy. the problem. What I'm looking for is the obstacle or the barrier that's preventing people from doing or buying something. One of the reasons I do what I do is because we need critical thinking. We need creativity. Creativity creates economic value. There are some serious topics at play here, but I was happy to flirt with you today. [laughter]
>> I thought I was just giving you space to finish your thought.
>> I know. I thought I was giving you space to finish your thought. Well, we're not.
>> Hey, welcome to the world of creative, everybody. Mostly we're here because of the gentleman sitting to my left. As often as possible, we're going to be doing these conversations in person in studio with a live studio audience because I think conversations with real humans and the energy that we feel in the room makes it special. Mark was on my radar because during the clubhouse days, that's where I remember you from. He was popping in and out of rooms and I became really curious about who this human being is. And I went and got the book, Strategy is Your Words. And this already is interesting to me and there's lots of things to unpack. But Mark, welcome to the studio. Thanks for being here.
>> Awesome. Super surreal, too. Are you scared? I've been trying to scare you to see how unhinged I can make you cuz I know you're usually really comfortable, but you usually you're in control. And in my world, usually I'm in control. So, this is going to be a fun battle.
>> Okay. Well, I I will Let's see how this goes. And I like that there is some possible tension about who's in control. And I'm going to just warn all of you. We're going to go into a lot of places. I am going to describe this to you as we're going to be driving in the middle of the night with no lights on, no seat belts, and no guardrails. We'll see where we wind up.
>> Holding hands.
>> Yes, of course.
>> Yeah, we did just do a thirst trap. That was your first thirst trap. [laughter]
>> I didn't even know that was a thirst trap, but we'll we'll get into that. You're using the term
>> if you're taking photos in a mirror in a bathroom, that's a thirst trap, Chris.
>> But our clothes were on.
>> Don't you have to show a little bit more flash?
>> This is what I'm learning. Okay, we're not doing advanced first traps. Okay,
>> we're doing beginner first traps. Yeah.
>> All right. U Mark has a very interesting story background and it goes all over the place. He's a man of many talents. I don't say that lightly. So, so Mark, people don't know who you are. Please introduce yourself.
>> Oh, okay. Uh my name is Mark. And one way to traumatize an Australian in the US is to ask them to do a self introduction. Thank you for not asking me to do a fun fact as well, cuz I only have sad facts, Chris.
>> Okay.
>> I only have sad facts. your Americans are so optimistic. Um, I mean from a professional point of view, so I'm from Sydney. From a professional point of view, uh, published what was the first fullc coloror hip hop magazine in the southern hemisphere. Was doing community radio for 5 years, interviewed lots of people such as Raqqa and Flavor Flave and Ice Cube and Company Flow and all kinds of people, graffiti ass, etc. So that was really my life. Wrote for a lot of magazines. Still remember when Vice in Canada gave me $50 for an interview with Flavor Flave before they were really, really big. but also happened to work in agencies and in my 20s largely doing information architecture and user experience under the title producer because we didn't have many other titles back then and was doing marketing stuff but also really complicated I guess product planning such as uh 300page functional specifications for an Audi online training program for mechanics and an e-commerce platform too was always writing through then um and then in the agency world in the advertising agency world when I was 28 I joined joined Leo Bernet in Sydney, which I now realize was my peak advertising experience.
>> Uh,
>> you peaked at 28.
>> Well, I've been thinking about this a lot. Sometimes you happen to be sitting in a room next to some of the best people you'll ever work with, but you don't know that for a while.
>> And when you leave, sometimes you think you can help recreate that and it's really, really difficult. There's just something in the in the air and the climate in some of these companies and it might last for 10 years, 20 years and then disappears. So that was all in Sydney and then 14 years ago moved to the US, worked for a few other companies for 5 years. Realized that I really do not like corporate America. Don't like it. Don't like it. So I left and set up my own company and now I mostly have an education company teaching strategy around the world.
>> Okay.
>> There's a couple other things that you forgot to mention that we
>> my love of reggaon. What?
>> Well, that
>> Brazil funk.
>> That you were also a radio host.
>> I was a radio host. Yeah. and that you were going to pursue a career in law
>> uh when I was 17. Yeah, I got the grades to study law and someone put a little thing in my ear about doing music law cuz I was writing really bad raps at the time and I liked music and then I still remember one of the first classes of tors to rs and they said only 60% of you will finish this degree and I was like oh I worked so hard to get here and I was like yeah I'm out. I was making hip-hop websites, putting on dance parties.
>> Wait, wait. When I hear 60% of you will make it, I consider myself part of the 60.
>> Same. And I got three years in, I'm like "No no."
>> Okay. So, you became part of the 40.
>> I became part of the 40. Yeah.
>> I was doing some night nightife stuff, you know, getting extorted by the main heroin gang in the world and stuff like that, Chris. You know, just normal stuff that happens when you're 18.
>> Okay. Okay. [laughter] Pretty wild ride. And you also write lyrics.
>> I've started to write lyrics again.
>> Yeah. And are these lyrics for hip-hop songs? What what are these lyrics for?
>> So most of what I listen to is like Latin music like and Dembo and Brazil funk. So we have a new genre. I'm going to call it future paro soul. It's very central regon and uh it's about things I encounter or hear about in my travels, but very sexy.
>> Okay. And I just want to also just acknowledge the fact that you flew in yesterday. I believe you were having a Asia tour. Many stops. We saw the photos on Instagram of crowded rooms, hundreds of people.
>> What are they there for?
>> Uh for cuddles mostly. I think for cuddles. Yeah. Like so I went through 10 cities and I sort of base the bets on could we get about 40 people to come and I've done I think three or four tours this year. It sounds so pretentious to say tours but they are tours. Yeah. And we had about 700 people come through. So the biggest event was in Malaysia. We had 170 people, 40 people on a waiting list. And then the smaller events probably 40 to 50. Uh what do they come for? They come to talk about strategy. They're largely agency strategists. They could be marketers. They could be in-house teams. Uh their needs are often that they're trying to do something creative, but they don't have the tools or the language to do that. They're looking for clarity. They're looking to feel stimulated because a lot of people are not that happy in their jobs right now.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. So, for people who don't know what strategy is, most of our audience are designer creative types.
>> That's a weird word, strategy. What do you mean?
>> The main definition that I fall back on, which is only a partial definition, is that strategy is an informed opinion about how to win. But I need to stack a few other concepts on that. Okay.
>> So, if we're working together and I say something like what's the strategy? I mean, what's the idea in the strategy? What's the organizing idea? By that, I mean, what are the two topics coming together that we can build a lot of our tactics, a lot of our maybe design around? And I'll give you an example to show you what I mean. Um, one of the joke examples I use is for the New York Knicks, right? And so when we do research, we find that a lot of people until recently have been very frustrated by this basketball team because they've not done well since the 1990s. The joke strategy based on that is to try to sell them as anger therapy, right? So that would be the organizing idea in the strategy that we're going to sell the New York Knicks as anger therapy because we're not fixing the product. And if you have that organizing idea in place, you can work out your tactics for communication and advertising and also then design. Okay, I like that a lot. I think later in our conversation, we're going to dive into how one arrives at that organizing idea. But let me just recap here. So, a strategy, it's not just like we want something magical to happen. It's not just having an opinion about what has to happen, but it's having an informed opinion. And so, we use strategy to get there. And we work with strategists to get there
>> potentially. Yeah. I mean, strategy is a set of acts that anyone can do. I work a lot with strategists. But the point of the informed opinion part of that sentence is you need information otherwise you're just making stuff up. But you need to have a strong opinion and management consultants might pretend that they don't have opinions but everyone's guessing the future.
>> If you have opinion without information it's a bit reckless. So those two things have to come together and it's typically about improving your chances of success in the future. And it doesn't have to be all high and mighty business stuff. It could be you're in a tribe, you're under threat, you need food and water. What are you going to do about it? organizing idea could be go east,
>> right? And then the tactics could be at what time of day you're going to travel, who in what formation you're going to travel, how you going to eat and drink along the way, right? So these things don't have to be high and mighty. And one thing that I feel like is a little bit of my teacher insight is just trying to close the gap between the stuff I teach, which is super practical, and what people see and do in their real lives. So for teaching insights for example, I want them to pay attention to things, content, sentence structures that have affected them in their lives and to apply these techniques to their lives because it'll make them a better strategist.
>> Right.
>> In your time at agency in the agency, did you do the strategy work?
>> Yep.
>> Okay. And so did you So for people who don't understand the sometimes complicated world of advertising, how does it work? like what we we see the ads on on on TV on the billboards and then we were like how did this come to be?
>> Yeah. And there's lots of different kinds of strategy and strategists as well. And so I often show this slide with all the ideas and sometimes also all the different kinds of strategists. It's a mess. And so the way that I get people to think about this is like just clarify the language you're using. clarify the roles because every company's there's like a cold war where everyone's competing with, oh, we've got a brand strategist, a com strategist, a media strategist, a PR strategist, a UX strategist, a design strategist, all this sort of stuff. And most of it's nonsense. What we're talking about really is critical thinking and creativity and having being able to find evidence, being able to form an opinion, having rationale that helps people take simple actions. It's not about complexity. So, when it comes to the advertising process, I can give you a quick example. What's going to come to mind? I was working on a launch for Kleenex, Kleenex wipes for babies. And so, we did a little bit of research. So, don't please don't call yourself a strategist if you don't do research. You need to do some research. And, you know, I would just do simple stuff. I'd be mind mapping consumer reviews or interactions in online communities. And we landed on this, we'll call it an insight. We landed on this insight that before you become a parent, you don't realize to what degree we and poos and bums and other things will dominate your life, right? And so that led to this campaign called Escape from Poo Poo Island, which is the first time Kleenex had ever used the word poo or poo poo in public. But essentially, you're doing a lot of divergent thinking, coming up with a lot of stuff. That's the easiest part of all of our jobs. The people who get paid the most are very good at convergent thinking according to the to the research. So the research exposes you to the behaviors and the attitudes that are out there. But then the strategist needs to simplify what we can do with that sort of stuff. And a lot of full-time strategists, let alone people who are not full-time strategists, but a lot of full-time strategists struggle with that, especially in the US, because there's this culture of having a lot of information and showing all your work as opposed to I've done presentations where I've handdrawn the presentation in front of people or I'll come in and go, there's no slide today. I've just printed out this one piece of paper. That's our presentation. US is all about showing your work and having a lot of information and a lot of data. That usually is not very useful.
>> Okay. a lot of things to try to figure out here. So, if um I'm Kleenex, I believe there's a marketing director on the other side. Yeah. They reach out to the agency. Let's just say your agency of record is going to happen anyways.
>> They're going to talk to you. Are you the account director?
>> Yeah. It might not strategy or head of strategy, but I can pretend to be the account. Would you like to you like
>> But you're the main point of contact at this point and the two of you are locked and saying, "We need to do this." And you're like, "Let me figure it out." If it's a pitch, they're going through like the new business team or the business development team and there typically be an account director who would lead the interaction.
>> Strategists, I want them front of office
>> as in talking to the clients, becoming you friends or whatever acquaintances in large agencies especially in the US. My experience has been that people treat the strategist as like a back office like internal service provider.
>> I was a head of strategy of an 800 person agency in New York. I would have people come to my desk going, "Uh, my boss has sent me down to get an insight." And so I would say, "Would you like fries with that?"
>> And I wouldn't even be allowed to meet the client.
>> That's not what I believe in. But typically, there's an account director leading the relationship. Okay.
>> And they might work with project managers or producers to sort of set up everything else internally.
>> Okay. So when you do the research, do you have researchers or you are doing the research?
>> Uh, if it's my own company, I tend to do the research. So my situation is if if I'm consulting and I don't do as much of that right now that most clients that I've worked with say they have too much data or data and they'll have five decks with the word strategy on them and they're like we have we don't know what it is.
>> Yeah.
>> So the way that I work is I'll usually come in and I'll do 10 to 40 interviews. I'll write a discussion guide. Um I'll type up the interviews as I'm doing them because I I'm a words person. I have to feel the words. It's so weird. I'll do a simple debrief and then I'm developing like these four working with this thing that I call the four points framework and then they're little sketches. I'll get some reactions to them from the client and then I'd write these onepage things that I call strategy stories which is taking the framework stuff that I've filled in and trying to turn it into a tighter argument and that's a belief in the act of writing helping like that I believe that the act of writing will help me think better
>> right and that what that's trying to solve is the way that I see a lot of younger strategists work where they'll just open up a creative brief template or a powerpoint whatever it is and they'll just fill it in mindlessly whereas I try to work in a way that's like really true to me I don't do a lot of presentations like the one pages are enough. That's how I would work if it's me.
>> Okay.
>> In a bigger agency, you're going to have access to more people which can be problem. The uh problem of abundance where people are spoiled with a lot of stuff. But yeah, you might be doing surveys and polls and have access to databases as well.
>> Okay. Client signs off, Kleenex or baby wipes are like, "Okay, we never used this word before. Escape from Pooh Island. Sounds great. Sounds pretty radical. What happens to that strategy story? Where does it go? How does it get turned into something that we, the consumer sees?
>> So, first of all, the strategy story to get turned into a creative brief.
>> Okay.
>> There'd be a briefing with a creative department. If it's in a more traditional advertising agency, that team might have a week or two, a day or two, no, a week or two to respond to the brief. And then the way that I like to work is I like to separate a lot of the tasks into smaller discrete bits. So for example, rather than developing a 50 slide deck, let's just go in with a few a few ideas, put them up on the wall. That that can be called a tissue session as in writing on a you know tissue piece of paper,
>> right?
>> And then we develop the um more of the the tactics, but at some point the media plan and maybe the PR plan, but the media plan needs to hit so that the creative team is developing tactics that will fit where the money is going to be spent. Around all of that also is maybe a data and analytics team trying to work out how to measure all of this and how to optimize it. To be simplistic, they're the they're the main steps.
>> Okay. There's a lot of people involved in the making of this thing.
>> Can be,
>> right? Because you were talking about somebody who does media strategy, media planning, buying, and I didn't even know that was a thing until I worked in advertising a gazillion years ago. And clients have a certain budget and they're trying to figure out the best places to reach people they want to talk to for the best bang for the buck. And so you're saying like there's multiple strategists or planners working together and at the center of that theoretically the copyright and art director have to figure out how to make that into something memorable cool that's on brief but solves all these problems right
>> totally totally like the main role of advertising the way I talk about it is the job is to get attention to get into the memory so that you have future cash flow so the role of the creative team is to get get people's attention causing an emotional reaction with with discipline with distinctive brand assets right I won't get too technical because I'm incapable of that. Chris, get attention, get into memory, hopefully trigger the memory when someone's thinking about buying something that you sell and then that will help you with future cash flow.
>> Okay. So, in the case of Escape from Pooh Island, once you write the creative brief, are you then on to the next strategy or are you still involved?
>> No, I mean I I want to be involved with the creative team. Every strategist is different. Every creative team is different but yeah you usually want to be you want to give the creative team space. Each department each
>> group of people have they have different incentives. The creative team they want to own the concept. They want to own the execution of the concept because if it does well then they their career will progress in a way that the strategists would but they need to say I did that.
>> And also um ego and creativity correlate as well. There's a little bit of research on that but narcissism and creativity correlate. So you need to allow the people with the egos to do the the stuff that's most egoic and most heroic. But usually want to be close. Um and then there are different kinds of strategists. This one's a little bit rare now. One's called a comm's planner or communications planner.
>> A media planner is usually more spreadsheet concrete logical in a media agency. A communications planner or a comm's planner to me they're like graffiti artists in that they'll look around any environment to work out, oh maybe a brand could pop up there. That would be really interesting. The main concept that I love about communications planning borrows a little bit from the philosopher Marshall McLuhan and it's this that when the theme of your idea connects to the theme of the media that you choose, the impact is more powerful. So an example, if you're going to talk about anger and you turn up in angry environments, it's more likely to get people's attention, which might help us get into the memory and therefore get a purchase later. If you're going to talk about intimacy, maybe you turn up in places that are not intimate. That sort of thinking is becoming rarer because of the focus on scale and efficiency and effectiveness and the algorithms but it's I don't know it's one of my favorite parts of all of this.
>> Okay. So commerce planning is a little bit more creative whereas media planning is a little bit more technical database driven. Okay. Traditionally speaking, when we talk about comms and finding the right medium for the message, is this what would be referred to as like ambient media?
>> Is that the wrong use of the term?
>> It could it could it could be. I mean, most of the budget these days is going to, if you're a big company, most of your budget is going to go towards the deals that big media agencies have already made for you. A lot of it will go into social platforms. Ambient media maybe. I mean, if I was trying to reach designers, I want to have photos of their desks and their their bags and what are they carrying and, you know, maybe we could do something that's interesting based on their existing behavior. So, maybe it's ambient. I'm not sure.
>> Okay. And and just so I'm using my terms correctly for audience to understand, my understanding of ambient media is like in the world the advertising lives, right? So, you might be at a pub and the coaster that your drink sits on is where the ad is and that's not a traditional place for it to live. Or you might be in a subway when and I've seen this done before where the stairwell of that subway is some ad for some exercise program. So it's integrated and it and they usually win awards. And I love this because it it crosses over from what I would consider as marketing and advertising into like exhibition design art and like installation design because it becomes one and the same.
>> So it can be that. But also one of my favorite campaigns and I've I've just forgotten the brand. It's from New Zealand. Special Forces Special is the agency. What they did is after so there's this television show in which people would die like every episode someone would die. Investigative television show and at the very end they brought the person back to life to talk about life insurance.
>> Super smart. Really effective. That's also an example of really good communications planning. Yeah.
>> That's that's pretty creative.
>> Yeah.
>> Wow. And and there are things like that that I would expect to see in different countries more than in the US. I think it's hard in the US because there's no real center of gravity here. Whereas if you do that sort of stuff in New Zealand, you're getting national media attention. It's a small country.
>> I remember back in the day Havayanas, the flip-flops, the thongs, the flipflops, they would put these big flip-flops in Bondai Beach in Sydney. They would get national attention. What is national attention in the US? Front page of YouTube or something? There's no real equivalent. And so I think that leads to less interest in some of this style of thinking.
>> I think that's changed a lot over the last couple decades where it used to be we'd get our news entertainment from three channels. This is before the explosion of satellite and cable or newspaper. There was a handful of newspapers where you could say if you got there that's pretty much what everybody's looking at. Thursday night prime time on one of the three networks was what you wanted. Now it's just so scattered. It's a big country. There's lots of places to capture attention. Well, there's also lots of activism. So, if you get any of this wrong, you might lose your job, you might lose your business.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Getting back to Escape from Pooh Island, what was the creative that ultimately manifested from this?
>> Uh, it was largely videos that showed people in these moments, you know, like you're about to go to work and there's a bum looking at you asking you for you to wipe it right next to the door. It was those sorts of It was comedy videos. Yeah.
>> Okay. Wonderful. I I've worked very briefly in the world of advertising, but on the other side in terms of broadcast design, I would get creative briefs. I want to affirm what you're saying is correct. At least my experience of it here in America. I think they must be getting paid by the word.
>> They must have a stake in paper companies
>> because they print very long documents that when you read through mean nothing. It's word salad and it's crazy. And that's why I'm so drawn to the kind of insights that you share and the simplicity of the framework, which we'll get into in a second. I think it's going to be really valuable for everyone who thinks that they'd like to have an informed opinion about an outcome that they want.
>> So, really quick example. So, we just developed some characters for our brand, Sweathead, and I was in the Dominican Republic, which is a crazy country. Don't just go to Punana, get a Santa Domingo. It's wild. One of the noisiest cities in Latin America. Lots of amazing music. And I really love this music genre called DBO. And so I found some designers, illustrators in the Dominican Republic. And my brief to them was Strategy But Dembo. Create some characters for us, but Strategy But [snorts] one of the main characters that they created. So they gave us about five concepts. One of them was a highlighter with a head. And so now we have these and another was a kitty paw. Kitty paws are like these crazy sound systems that come out of cars in Santa Domingo and just super loud. So, we've got like a dog driving a kitty pole and then we have two highlights.
>> I don't even know what the word you're saying right now, Mark. You got to come with me, son. Jet lag. [laughter]
>> Kitty pole. K I T I P O.
>> I know you don't know it. How could you? You've not been to Santa Domingo.
>> Who? I even I understand half the words he's saying.
>> No one needs to understand this, but but als but also I'm trying to build this brand for people. I'm trying to build this international brand for people outside of the US.
>> Okay.
>> Okay. So anyway, we have this dog driving these massive speakers and then we have these two highlighters with heads and one of them's based on one of my favorite Dembo artist and another's this sexy lady character. The point is I needed characters and I just said strategy but Dembo and then they did the work and I work with some of the biggest companies in the world. But I see their documents and they're somehow able to turn two-page brief templates into 10 pages with 50 comments on every page and it's all just ridiculous language that nobody would use on the streets,
>> right?
>> And so it's useless.
>> And so I'd say to like your community, if you're receiving these things and you think they're useless, you're correct.
>> I think words are important, but not in the way that people think. Not the volume of words, but the economy of words that you use. Because every word you use, if you use only a few words, means a lot. and you're asking me not to do your work for you. So, a lot of times in our side when we get the creative brief, we're like, "Oh my god, who paid for this? This is terrible."
>> And I know they spent six months doing the strategy, uh, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars doing this, and there's nothing for me to pull from it. No.
>> And they're like, "What is the inside here, everybody? What are the communication pillars? I don't know. There's nothing here." And for some reason,
>> it's fooled people. I I don't just say corporate America. It's just in in corporate that this is the standard. This is the way you do things, right?
>> Yeah. Because they don't learn how to write. I can we can get into words as well. There's some word theory link.
>> I think we have to I mean
>> there's this thing called it'll change your life. It'll change your life.
>> Uh so regardless of whether you're a good writer, imagine sharing a strategy in three words or one word. That's pretty confident.
>> And you're not rewarded for confidence in a corporate career. I've interviewed a lot of people who worked in agencies and they went client side and they said largely speaking they did it because they wanted more control end to end and slightly less toxic toxic environments but they also would say that they would spend 80% of their time in politics. You're not rewarded for taking risk in corporate America. So you can't expect people you we have wrong expectations of people in these situations right?
>> One word, three words as a strategy. God, that's pretty risky.
>> Okay, so G getting back to something that you said, which which kind of tickled my brain a little bit.
>> You're talking about the New York Knicks is kind of hated by a lot of people because they haven't been winning in a long time.
>> And you were like, well, here's the insight. It's a form of anger management.
>> Yeah. The insight I use in that is to talk about how in New York you put up with everything until you snap,
>> right? And so there's articles by people like Joan Diddian and Moby, the producer, that I could use as evidence for this. I can find a ton of stuff on Reddit and Facebook, but essentially the way I explain this is like people move there and they're always really special. Special people move to New York. You have to be special and you're going to pursue your dream and then after like the fourth winter, the fifth relationship breakup, the second rent hike, you're like screw this, I'm moving to Mexico City, right? So that's the insight there.
>> But the framework that I use all builds around anger, feeling angry, anger management. And when I'm writing a strategy statement, I'm largely playing with two topics. So here we'd have the New York Knicks and I know something about anger. And I'm usually playing with nouns. I'm not playing with a lot of describing words like adjectives or adverbs cuz that's bad writing largely speaking. And strategy is full of three and four syllable adjectives, but I know I've got the New York Knicks and something to do with anger. I'm like, well, okay, we're not going to fix the product, so maybe people can come watch a game and feel less angry. What's that? Anger therapy. anger management. And so I'm just trying to work out how to put those things together in a simple sentence.
>> And if I were to get the brief and like, okay, the New York Knicks is a form of anger management,
>> so I'm angry. I'm going to go and watch the game so I don't have to snap. Is that the idea?
>> Yeah.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah. And then from an advertising point of view, maybe one tactic is you take the big photos of the players to one of the angriest street corners in New York. people can come down, throw a ball at the player that they think played like tried the least on the weekend and the player that gets hit the most doesn't get to play on the following weekend.
>> Right? So, we're looking for a thread from
>> at least from the idea and the strategy through all all the tactics and then from a design point of view, I'm expecting to see probably a combination of anger and peace.
>> I know you've done this for a lot of people. I I used to have um a boss and I would show him an idea and he's like that's not a concept Chris. I'm like um any help here and no it's just it's yes or no. So somebody who's working for you or in one of your workshops and like here's the inside mark how do you know if it's an inside it's not?
>> So there's a few ways. So we we have to define all of our words. Okay.
>> I I don't think I would have written this book if if I had not moved to the US. I had five years of culture shock. I was in meetings at the top of Rockefeller Center. Everyone was speaking English and I'm sitting there going, "What the hell are they saying?"
>> I was like, "What?" Sometimes I accidentally said that out loud, too, which is not a good career move. When it comes to an insight, the way that I define an insight is
>> Wait, does that does that make you angry?
>> What?
>> When people are blah blah blah in these rooms.
>> Yeah. Because I I write from a place of pain and anger. I've had teams abused in these environments. And so I can catch myself teaching and I'm like, I am so angry. I can tell that I'm really angry because I'm remembering
>> flashback. Yeah, the time that maybe my team wanted to quit because I were treated really poorly through language by a media agency or abused by you know one of the big like big companies in South Korea or something. So I I teach from a place of anger even though teaching is my love language.
>> So with insights unspoken human truth that's what I'm looking for. Um
>> unspoken human truth
>> unspoken human truth. There are different kinds of insight. So you could have a cultural insight, a brand insight, a blah blah blah. I just focus on insight. I use it once in a project and I want to hear an unspoken human truth. So, how do I know if there is one? First, I want to have a subjective reaction. Ah, I haven't heard it like that before. I want to have that reaction. I watch a ton of standup comedy and so I'm constantly like, "Oh my god, I'm just learning all this stuff." Right?
>> It's a subjective reaction. Second is mechanics. Mechanics is means I'm looking for two topics in a sentence. The insight that I usually teach around is I was interviewing guys about losing hair and a guy said to me, "I don't feel accomplished enough to go bald." So I look at that sentence.
>> Okay,
>> you're setting me up for my third point. I look at that sentence. I'm like, "Okay, achievement or accomplishment. Bald going bald. Great mechanics check." Third thing I look for is other people's reactions. So, if I hear a bit of a laugh, uh, giggle, some kind of sound, or I see the eyes go like that, I know they're glitching because we're trying to trigger an emotional reaction with our communication. So, if we're not triggering it with each other, we're not going to be able to trigger it in public. So, they're the three things at least that I look for. And so, one of I have strategy jokes. I don't know who I became to the point now, I have strategy jokes, but when someone says to me, how do you know if if you have an insight? My answer is by the distance people's snot travels in the room when you say it out loud.
>> The distance what travels [laughter]
>> the distance is he speaking.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll slow I'll slow down for you Chris. We'll do duolingo speed.
>> Please.
>> How do you know if you have an insight? By the distance that people's snot travels in the room.
>> Smart.
>> When you say it out loud, right? Because that's the glitch. And standup comedy is all about violating reality. So you take topic A and then you smash it with topic B and you're like, "Whoa, that just created new meaning for me."
>> Oh, okay. I see what you're saying.
>> So they're the main things that I'm looking for when it comes to an insight. Obviously, it needs to be relevant to the brand and the product, but they're the main things that I'm looking for.
>> Okay, that's very good. Clearly, you have thought about this a lot because you've explained it if I can understand the words very simply. Let's go back one at a time.
>> So an insight is an unspoken human truth.
>> Yeah. Do we need the word human?
>> I don't like the word human as an adjective, but I I will use it here. Yeah. Okay. Because that's set because humans talking about this.
>> I know. It's just weird.
>> It's one of those things. It's a vestage of
>> I wouldn't use it exactly like that right now,
>> but we like it. Unspoken human truth. So,
>> see, I know you're good with words because you've taken a very complicated thing called insight and you've broken it down to three words. Could even be two, but three words.
>> I'm borrowing some language there, by the way. I'm borrowing language there.
>> That's okay. Yeah.
>> Yeah. I love it. Okay. So, unspoken human truth.
>> So, if it's not true, you're not interested. So, they're like, "Oh, it's like X." And they're like, "No, you just made that up."
>> And it doesn't need to be fully true. What do I mean by that?
>> This is super slippery. Patula, are you here with me? [laughter]
>> Okay. I like this.
>> Doesn't need to be fully true.
>> I love this. By the way,
>> it doesn't need to be fully true.
>> Okay. What do you mean?
>> So, there's this infatuation, especially in the US with numbers and pretesting things, right? And so people who are not used to this work, they might say, "Well, does every man think that?"
>> Irrelevant.
>> Have you ever listened to a song and thought, "Wow, I don't agree with all the lyrics, but I really like the song." Have you ever gone to standup comedy and gone, "Wow, that's really funny." It's not me, but I relate to it enough,
>> right?
>> So, yeah, it doesn't have to be fully true.
>> I'm going to double click on that because I tell stories and then my children sometimes or my wife, that's not how it went. I'm like, well, first of all, I'm telling the story, so that's how it went down. It's not fully true,
>> right? But the expression is don't let facts get in the way of a good story.
>> A little,
>> right? So, mostly true.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. 51% true.
>> Are we good with that? Or higher? Is your threshold higher?
>> The thing is like it does everybody agree with that? So, when I'm saying it doesn't have to be fully true, what I'm saying is if you're advertising to men about losing hair, not every man needs to agree with that,
>> right? Okay.
>> Yeah. Then the next part is if it's true or enough people agree but we all have heard this already then there's no point. You have to surface something that we've all been thinking but no one has said is that why it's unspoken.
>> I mean I have I have high expectations so I want to land on something that we haven't heard before. But
>> you know let's take So George Carlin the comedian has this bit about how every driver on the road thinks every other driver is a bad driver. We might have heard that for decades, but in the right hand, someone could bring that to life with a new film or a new ad, a new piece of content in a novel way. [clears throat] I have a bias towards novelty, right? So, if I've heard it before, I think there's a George Orwell quote on writing which is like, if you've seen words used like that before, don't use them like that. There something like that. So, I have a bias towards novelty, but you could take something that's been around and dress it up a little bit differently. Uh number two is you said something about two
>> mechanics.
>> Mechanics. Why the what do you mean mechanics?
>> So subjective reaction is the first one. Mechanics is can I just look at it and see that there are two topics coming together?
>> Okay. Is it semiotics?
>> No. No it's not semiodics. I just mean the structure of a sentence.
>> Can you give us more examples besides I'm not accomplished enough to go bald.
>> Uh oh gosh. Now you're making me like go off track here. Um, let's get one out of you then. [clears throat]
>> Answer this question for me.
>> I'll be asking the questions. Sir, I noticed now you're full man spreading to me now. Is this a dominance position?
>> Yes, it is.
>> It's getting really awkward. No, you can do that. It's fine. I don't mind the view.
>> So, one one question that I like to ask you is what's something you've learned in the past few years that's changed how you live?
>> What's something that you've learned? I'm going to put you to sleep with my voice Chris.
>> Please. This is too hard. Let's ask let's ask the audience. Let's don't put me on the spot. See how I deflect? He deflected [clears throat] and I'm deflecting now.
>> Audience, people that are here,
>> what is something that you've learned that's changed your point of view?
>> Changed how you live.
>> Change how you live.
>> Anybody? Go ahead. Can we throw her the mic?
>> We got the mic working now. Gwen,
>> make it deep.
>> We got the mic working so you can use it.
>> Okay. I can use it this time.
>> Yeah. But close.
>> Closer. Okay. So, I lived through a fire, not the one in January here, but one in southern Oregon, and I lost everything I owned. What I have learned is that, okay, I'm going to get really personal here. I thought everything that I kept and saved was because my past was better than my future. But
>> but but
>> finish the sentence. Do a long sentence.
>> Oh, okay. So I thought, but that wasn't true.
>> Mhm.
>> And those those beliefs and actually those material things I don't need to keep to have a memory of what was good and it also allows space for something new to come in.
>> Perfect. Perfect. So a lot of insights rotate. Thank you for sharing that by the way.
>> Thanks Gwen.
>> Just using you for content here. I'm joking. Appreciate it.
>> So a lot of contents will a lot of insights will turn around a word like but or when, despite, even though, however, that's sort of topic A, topic B. So we had topic A and topic B. I would need to see those words just so I can go that's the topic and and that's the topic. But I do have a simple example as well.
>> Um I was doing a workshop in Mexico City with Netflix and an answer to that question from the head of marketing was that he would go home really stressed. He would play with his young boy and his boy would move from toy to toy to toy and he was like, "Oh, this is so frustrating. Why can't you just sit there and play?" His insight was this. Dad is toy. Dad is toy. No fancy business language.
>> Three letters, two letters, three letters. What does it mean? It means that when he goes home and plays with his kid, he's the toy and now he can relax. So that's a simple example of putting two nouns together with the word like is. You can use words like but, however, despite, even though, although, they can keep going, especially when, especially not when, and you're twisting the sentences. And so, for people who want to get good at this, what I always encourage people to do is like if you're on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, pay attention to the people you already pay attention to because you are if you if you've taken words from someone talking about relationships, mental health, history, economics, I guarantee they're very good at putting two topics together. And it could be an insight or it could be an idea because to me insights are ideas that get you to reorganize your life.
>> Okay.
>> Dad is toy brings a smile to my face. That's the subjective reaction that you're looking for. Otherwise, nah, that's not it.
>> And then you're looking for two mechanics, two things to come together.
>> And is that also dad toy?
>> That is toy. Would I structure
>> I don't know if I'd write that on a creative brief, but I'd use it on a presentation. That is toy because it's memorable.
>> Yeah. Um, and it can be emotional, too, depending on how you look at it. Now, you you asked Gwen to share something, something she's learned in the last couple of years that's changed how she I forget the exact language.
>> Yeah.
>> What's something you've learned in the past few years that's changed how you live?
>> Changed how you live. And she said that I used to think I I have an attachment to things because it I was telling myself a story that the past was better than my future. Mhm. [clears throat]
>> But then she realized what?
>> Gwen, what' you say?
>> Stop filming. Be present with us, please. [laughter]
>> What did you say?
>> Actually,
>> just say but what? Just finish that part. Please land the plane.
>> Do you remember?
>> You teach like I teach. [laughter]
>> That's why we're going to get along.
>> I said but I that's not true. I don't have to have the material things. So I actually have fewer material things. I don't I don't have
>> true. So that's the behavioral change. So I don't have I have fewer material things. That's the behavioral change. Got it?
>> But it's going from I need to keep things to be able to appreciate the past because I thought the past was going to be better than the future to I don't need things from the past to actually enjoy my present and the future. It's very simple and we rewrite that a little bit as well.
>> Okay.
>> And then there's the so I don't have material things. That's the behavioral change. Insights interrupt existing routines.
>> Right. So act one of any story is the day-to-day. It's the routine. That's the habit. Then there's an inciting incident or incident. In this case, it's a fire. It could be a book, a TED talk. It could be 10 years of a bad relationship. Then there's an insight. And then the final part of this is the behavioral change.
>> Okay?
>> And and insights don't always have to be super profound and about the meaning of life, right? That could be about how you pick your nose, maybe. I don't know. Okay?
>> Right? But that's that's how they work on us. If we were going to write a brief and insight from what was just shared, how would you write that so simple?
>> Uh, what's the brand as well?
>> We need a brand. The brand is Gwen.
>> The brand is Gwen. So, I I love these techniques being applied to people. Uh, you're really putting me on the spot now. My brain is mine [laughter] is much better if I can see the words as well.
>> I'm with you, by the way.
>> Yeah, I know. Deflecting.
>> You're You're like a brother from another mother. You really are. You're a little wild, a little une. [laughter] You're increasingly so you you like to just say whatever's on your mind and there's an element of danger. You drink more than I do, but you know there's a lot of similarities here. So, we're going to get along just fine.
>> So, I'm just curious.
>> You know how I know a a pro You don't mind if I touch you like that?
>> I liked it.
>> Okay. Um, you know how I know somebody knows what they're doing is when they can just freestyle,
>> when they can improv. Because a lot of people are really books smart. They read the research and they can recite it word for word, chapter to chapter. But then I ask them one question, they fall apart.
>> Yeah.
>> I'm not saying I suspect this.
>> I'm not going to fall apart. I'm not going to fall. Let's keep talking. No, I'm joking. No, keep No, I mean I was saying I want to see the magic.
>> Well, it's much easier when I can see the words. I have a strange brain. Okay.
>> So, Gwen thought that probably Gwen probably thought that keeping objects in her house would keep her connected to the past, which would keep her happier,
>> but she's still able to be happy without those objects in her life. Something like that.
>> Yeah. Right? Because there's a there's a usually we go why and dig into it a little bit more and eventually start to simplify.
>> But obviously if you've got a lot of stuff in your house, either you have emotional baggage and problems with hoarding, like you're filling your soul in a way that other people might do with substances for example, but if there's a sense that the past was going to be better than the future and holding on to these things would keep you connected to the past, then losing these things and realizing you can be happy anyway is freedom. M. [clears throat]
>> So that's the sort of language I'd play with, but I need to
>> I like where you're starting to take this now. I can see something happening.
>> It sounds crazy.
>> Right. So it's just a little ember before and now might be a little spark there. Okay. So I think the I I'd love to talk to the room and everybody's included in this conversation if you want to participate which is this is that what is unspoken h
