April 30, 2025 • 44 mins
The question on every working person’s mind: how do I reinvent myself to stay relevant in this fast changing world? Surprisingly, one of the most erudite thought leaders on this subject says he personally hates change! - but it’s better than the alternative.
In fact when it comes to navigating the business world and the impacts of technology, no one has navigated a more balanced view about how to embrace it while keeping a soul than Rishad Tobaccowala. Bringing the best of his writings into this conversation, Rishad shares with Marisa and Steven wisdom for brands, and careers. A couple of our favorite nuggets:
- the future is NOT all about data, it’s (still) about storytelling
- trade thinking about your “tech stack” for thinking about your “customer experience stack”
- don’t compete with AI, complement it
For so much more, including Rishad’s take on the 6 skills that the future of work will need most, tune in now!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello, and thanks for joining us on Brand New from
the iHeart Podcast Network and Brand New Labs. I'm Marissa Bahlberg.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
And I'm Stephen Wolf Pereida and Marissa. It's another week
being on the road. I've been in DC this week.
There's a lot of interesting stuff, but I think it
was really just profound just to hear a lot of
the folks at the Semaphore World Economy Summit. Very interesting
where it was for the past couple of days. Yeah,
(00:34):
how about you.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I was in New York for a couple of days.
Back in Charlotte. Back on the road tomorrow, actually, but
I'll tell you you're you're in DC. I feel like
we're living through the lens of getting intel from DC,
you know, managing retail businesses right now in the frankly
the chaos of the economy and the changing winds of tariffs,
(00:56):
and it's really hard. I give so much respect to
my colleagues who are really trying to figure out and
adapt with regards to things that are not easily changed,
like sourcing, supply chain, products, vendor relationships. So it is taxing,
pun intended taxing our companies in ways that I think
(01:19):
were highly unanticipated, And this is my friendly shout out
to my own peers and colleagues as well as everyone
else who's really really trying to do their very best
with it.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
The theme running throughout the whole Semaphore event, and shout
out to to Justin Smith and Ben and Rachel and
the team over at Semaphore, one.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Of our earliest guests in brand new.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Absolutely, they really had, as you know, just kind of
the consistent threat has been VUKA, right, so volatility, uncertainty,
complexity and ambiguity and that kind of framework. You heard
it consistently from all these different CEOs, politicians, regulators, you know,
the CEO of FedEx, you know, the CEO of Landa
Lake's Beth CEO of Carlisle Group. I mean, they had
(02:00):
Ken Griffin, you know, from Citadel, like just consistently the volatility.
And then you heard from the Minister of Finance from
France talking about the EU and how the just A
relationship with the US is radically changed. And then you
had Ian Bremer talking about how just I don't think
people understand that the past seventy plus years of the
(02:20):
Breton Woods kind of system that we've had is fundamentally
over and we are truly seeing the rewriting of history.
We are entering this brand new phase. Yes, and our
relationship just you know, as the United States of America
is radically changed with places like Europe, like you know,
obviously places in Asia. But you talk about trust, and
(02:42):
you know, I know this is a theme that has
come up a lot, but you talk about our brand
as America, we have been the reserve currency, We have
been the stable, you know, kind of force in a
world where people can rely on us, and we are
now not viewed as reliable, not kind of the steady partner.
And so it just opens up this can of worms
about like where do you go now? And do people
(03:05):
now start to go more towards China or they look
for the EU as a safe haven? Like everything is
being shifted right before our eyes. And it's just it's
very telling with the recent speakers that we've had around
entrepreneurship or just you know kind of what we're going
to talk about even today. So I'm just excited to
see how we navigate this time.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Well, let's just get into it. What do you think
because I know we're going to have a free flowing,
great conversation So, Steven, you want to share who's joining
us today.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
So we are joined by someone whose perspective we think
is so valuable, especially now when brands, businesses and leaders
are all grappling with just incredible change. So Rashad Tobakawala
is a legendary strategist, author, and advisor known for helping
companies and people reinvent themselves to stay relevant in a
very fast changing world. He has spent over forty years
(03:55):
I don't know how that's possible, forty years at Publicis Group,
rising to the roles of Chief Growth Officer and Chief
Strategy Officer, and today he advises global organizations and how
to grow by balancing technology with humanity. He's the author
of acclaimed books such as Restoring the Soul of Business,
as well as their recently released book Rethinking Work, Seismic
(04:17):
Changes in the Where, When and Why, widely read Voice
on Leadership, Innovation in the Future of Work. Oh and
also he is the newly minted inductee into the American
Advertising Federation's Hall of Fame. Rare Shot. Welcome to Brand New.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Thank you very much, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Marissa and Steve welcome, I mean we're shot honestly, Like,
where can we begin. I mean, first off, how do
you spend forty years in the same place, Like I
feel like that is just you know, something that does
not happen anymore.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I will give you three reasons, all of which are
actually true and valid, and it's the second one that
people find most surprising. So the first one is, I
actually don't like change. I've always written the chain sucks,
and so I preferred not to change. And I've often
told people outside of working in the same company for
(05:10):
forty I actually worked for the same two bosses for
twenty five.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
In Secrets, which was Jack Lues and Maurice Levy.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
And I've stayed in the same city of Chicago for
forty four and I've known my wife for fifty three years.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
So you're looking at an anti change person. So that's
one reason.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
But yet you deal have changed all the time.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Pretty interesting, right as a reinvention expert.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
Yeah, I tell people, you know, change sucks, but irrelevance
is even worse, So you have to change. So I've decided,
so minimize the stuff that you have to change and
then focus on those. So I haven't changed. Fortunately, she
hasn't kicked me out. So I have the same wife,
I live in the same city, and I work for
the same company.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
The second, which people find surprising and it is true,
is nobody gave me a job off forever.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
Okay, in my entire career, I've never received HB outside
of the first job offer I got, the only job
offer I got, which is from the Leobnet company.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
How how is this possible.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
I don't know, but nobody has ever. It's absolutely true.
I have a resume d aid in nineteen eighty two
and no one has ever given me a job offer.
So one is I stayed because I hate changed. The
other is I had no option. So those are two
very good reasons. And then the third, which I can
make it sound very strategic, but the first two are
also true, is when I stayed in the same company.
(06:30):
I have worked for fourteen different companies over the years.
So I joined what was the Leobnet Company, then I
moved to leobnet Direct Marketing is to Leobnet. Then I
launched one of the first interactive agencies called Giant Step.
Then I helped spin off leobnet Media and to Starckcom
while launching a digital operation called Starcom. Might be then
(06:51):
they got merged, we got we merged with Medias it
was Starcom Medias Group, and then Publicist brought us and
I ended up working for stock Coom Media Essence and Adoptomedia,
which is Publicist Media. We launched a unit, one of
the first sort of audience and demand units, called Viviki.
I launched a futures company called Denu. Then built the
(07:14):
case we needed to be more digital than we were,
so we bought Digitas and razor Fish. I ended up
being chairman of Digitas and Razorfish, and then I became
the chief strategist and chief growth officer of the Publicist Group.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
And then in between, you know, when we were at
some particular stage on the GM business, I had a
card that said GM plan works and a bunch of
other things.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
So maybe a little false modesty on the I've never
been offered a job. You just continued to reinvent and
blossom and grow and be a thought leader.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
Exactly, so there's never a reason to leave. So one
of the few people I think in the industry who's
worked across every aspect of the business which I've worked
in creative agencies, media agencies, digital agencies, retail agencies, every
type of agency. I've worked both starting companies from zero
and grown them to two hundred people giant step in
(08:06):
stocker might be, and once smaller which is done. And
I've done overseeing ten thousand people at Raise Efficient Digitus,
and then I've been a staff person as a chief strategist.
So in an interesting way, what are the reasons after
I left Publicses? So I stopped working there as an
employee six years ago.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
But everyone thinks that you still work there, shut.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
All right, Well, the reason people think I still work
there is for a couple of reasons. One is I
continue to be a senior advisor to the group six
years later. And it's very clear that probably is a
real senior advisor, because you know, sometimes when you leave
a company for about six eight months, they call you
a senior advisor. But why are they doing this for
six years? Unless I've got like some pictures and somebody,
(08:49):
why are they doing this for six years? So I
actually do some very specific things, but more importantly, my
key card works and my email works, and that can
uses people that I just can walk into any building
on any floor and just walk right in and you
can send me an email, and I'll respond to any
of the right So that's the confusing thing. But I'm
(09:10):
not an employee.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
I'm basically a ten ninety nine versus.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
You're truly an advisor.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
I'm truly an advisor, and with the exception of one
or two things, I'm free to do whatever I want. So,
like I've done stuff with anything that's built around my
own intellectual content, which is my books, my writing. I
do stuff because so many of the leaders of different
even agencies used to work with me.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
So I've done stuff with Ages and Omnicom and WPP
and everybody, But it's about my content.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Can we get to that intellectual content? Because I don't
say this just to flatter you because you're on the podcast.
I mean, there are a lot of voices in our industry,
and I genuinely mean it. Whenever I read something from you,
I'm struck by just how thought provoking it is and
how beautifully articulated it is. And I know I'm not
(10:01):
the only one, because you have a substack called the
future does not fit in the containers of the past,
and I know you've got about thirty thousand readers just
of that substat So what containers do you think brands
are clinging to today that are holding them back?
Speaker 4 (10:22):
So today brands are basically clinging to the following three
or four that are holding them back, and they're not
clinging hard enough to one that will take them forward,
because there's also something that they should actually do more of.
So one is they often basically believe that brands, while
(10:43):
being important, are still being built the same way, and
they aren't. The big difference is brands are no longer
being built by companies. They're being curated by companies. They're
being built by people, the customer, the influencer, the shopper.
They're the ones who are building the brand. They're the
(11:05):
ones starting the campaign, and marketers are actually responding. You know,
in the old days, it was like we will have
a campaign, it'll stop this state, it will stop that day.
Today I could start a campaign and you'll have to
react to it. So that's one second. Is an underlying
basic belief that the future is about data, okay, which
(11:26):
it is not. Just in case your audience believes I
have no clue about this, I have an advanced degree
in mathematics.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
I ran the data strategy for what.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
Is now the most valuable holding company and board companies
like Epsilon.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
So I would assume that I have some idea of that.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
I'll speak for your data credits for shoting. You know
a thing or two about data.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Okay, So I believe that while data is important, so
I'm not saying it isn't that I really believe. It's
the other part, which is storytelling, which is the differentiation.
And what I remind people is that if it was
all about data, there would be no brands. If it's
all about data, you make data driven decisions. A data
driven decision would not make a mazed Louis Vuitton, Moyt,
(12:07):
Tennessey and Apple the most valuable companies in the world
because the reality of it is, no one would wear
a watch because you have a phone that has a
better watch. It wouldn't buy a car in most places
you do uber, you wouldn't buy a car where you
needed a.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Car that was more expensive than a Toyota Camri.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
And if you actually think about it, what is a brand?
A brand is everything from craft, storytelling, craftsmanship, provenance, history, right, experiences,
and we reduce it down to data. So that's the
second one, which is like this is so ridiculous. Okay,
So that's the second thing that I find very strange.
(12:44):
The third one is a very odd belief that you
could actually build a brand without keeping your employees happy.
So my basic belief is I actually think net promoter
scores is a good idea, but a more important is
net promoter or net employee promoters score. So if your
(13:04):
employees are not content but happy and thriving, that's how
you basically create ideas because of innovation is people thinking fearlessly.
You need that if your employees are happy, they basically
are going to satisfy your clients and customers better than
(13:25):
the people are not going to be happy as importantly
who people actually believe employees of a company more than
they believe anybody. And I believe every company should recognize
that every employee is a media brand, whether they have
no audience or a good audience. So that's the third
strange belief. Again, list others, but those are three, which
(13:47):
is focus on employees as much as you focus on customers.
Data is important, but for God's sakes, in most cases
not a differentiator. And you're curating a brand, it's actually
being built outside you, and you're just putting up some
of the scaffolding. The thing that people are not holding
on hard enough to is the reality. At it's very
(14:07):
old school that brands are trust marks. So I truly
believe that brands are going to be more important in
the future because the two things that are going to
be the most important in the future are trust and integrity.
And there are three reasons for it, which are very,
very different. But once I tell you what those three
reasons are, it's so obvious, and I keep wondering, like,
(14:28):
why are people missing this?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Biersadi, You're hitting us something so important? And when you
frame these three reasons, have one eye towards the past,
which I think you're really summarizing so importantly all the
kind of things that brought us to this point. But
we're obviously entering the intelligence era, and so how do
you kind of frame the three things for where we're
(14:50):
going exactly?
Speaker 4 (14:51):
So what basically happens only two things, So what is
what people are not holding on to? And then how
they should think about broadly where we're going. So when
they're not holding on to this is the whole idea
of trust integrity. One of the reasons is important is
in an AI age, you won't know what to believe, right,
every video will look like a real video, every person
will look like a real video. So you're going to
basically say who can I trust? And in many ways,
(15:13):
brands are the trust devices. I could pay more than
Procter and Gamble to introduce Rishad's tooth based on Google
in search, but they won't buy it because who the
hell knows Richard and who knows his tooth based and
so what tends to basically happen is that's one. The
second reason is that trust is important in effect what
a brand is. It's a promise and if you can
trust a promise, you can trust it. And the third
(15:36):
reason is trust is an emotion, which is a data
driven emotion, and I think the future is data driven
storytelling and trust is one of the key things, which is, yes,
it's an emotion, but over time you need supporting data
as to why I should trust you, right versus I
(15:56):
just trust you. I trust you because other people trust you.
That's a good way to start. But then you know
why can I trust you? So that is what it is.
So I would say hold on to trust a lot.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
There is a key assumption in this whole thesis, which
I think both actually Marissa nodding her head vigorously like
versus loving every single thing that you just said. But
let me play contrarian here. Yeah, And the key assumption
is that you're talking about people. You're talking about emotions
that people have. What do you do when you actually
(16:28):
have agents? What do you do when you have all
the automation? What do you do when you actually have
an agent for a consumer talking engaging with another agent
on the behalf of the brand, and you actually remove
the emotion, you remove the person's decision making into that.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
And all of that's happening.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
So, for instance, I recently wrote a piece and one
of the talks I'm giving is how does marketing and marketers.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Change in at AIGE?
Speaker 4 (16:53):
And I sort of wrote about it three four weeks
ago on substack. It's called Reinvented Marketing and I said,
he has the ABCDE of marketing, and I say, years
of audience is changing, years of brands are changing, years
of content is changing, and under audience I mentioned exactly
what you mentioned, even what happens when you're basically talking
to an agent. So we send out agents and they
(17:13):
send out agents. So what happens there? And then the
other idea, basically to a great extent, is how does
content get created? Because now increasingly it can be created
on the fly in different ways. So I actually believe
that it's actually why in this age, HI will be more.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Important than AI.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
And what is HI?
Speaker 4 (17:33):
HI is four or five different things. Most people refer
to it as human intelligence, and I refer to it
as human imagination, human inventiveness, human intuition, human insight. What
basically will happen is, I'll give you a very simple thing.
People often ask me, all the stuff that you write
is so cool, and you don't charge anything. There's no advertising,
(17:56):
there's no affiliate marketing, right, And I said you can't
because I said, we are moving into a world where
content is free. And I said, by keeping the content
out that way. A common friend of our speed Black Shaw,
who runs right dot AI. So he did one of
those things on me. You know he does it on
brands to show how brands have got issues. He did
(18:17):
it on me and he said, I've never seen something
so strong ever. He said, I know you. But he says, like,
how did that get done? And I said, because I
give the machines all my content to read. So I'm
actually influencing the machines and they're like reading me, if
that makes sense, and they're reading everything of me.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
You're training the model.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
I'm training the model.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
So that is what I call my AI thing. I
have to train the dam machines. So I'm feeding the
machines because the machines are now So what am I
doing there?
Speaker 3 (18:43):
As a brand?
Speaker 4 (18:43):
I have to be as transparent, put out as much
of my stuff as possible, be least dubious as possible,
because the whole idea of like the arbitrage of information
and the arbitrage of data disappears. So you have to
change so that a gum comes back to trust. Put
out everything as much as you can.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Now.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
Very interesting is while my content is free, and even
my books, I mean, you know, it's like twenty bucks
or whatever it is because Hypercolus isn't going to give
it for free, and I get three dollars every time
a book sells, so it's you know, I can't even
buy a coffee, Okay, So everything I do in the
content world is free. You know, my podcast is free.
I'm going I'm going to show on my future of
work as free, and I keep it even add free interestingly,
(19:23):
but when I show up at a client, it's not free, okay,
because now they're paying for me. They're human right there.
And so that's what I and so my whole basic
belief is what you're going to have is the brand
is going to show up in different ways. And that's
one of the key things. So everyone keeps talking about
this thing called an advertising stack or the technology stack
(19:43):
or the marketing stack. I think we should be talking
about the experience stack. How does someone actually experience a brand?
And some of it will be through an agent, some
of it will be through places, some of it will
be through the product and services, some will be through
the people, some of it will be through the employees.
So I agree with you, But then you have to
think differently, which is you've got to both feed the
(20:04):
agents and complement the agents.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
So I take away from that what you're saying is,
and of course, because you are ahead of this, a
big part of what your thought leadership has been around
embracing technology without losing the human soul. You know, it
is funny the yin yang of even how Stephen and
I talk like I'm probably the one that's still out there, Champion.
It's still ultimately about the story, which is why I
(20:29):
was nodding vigorously, And it is about the humanity. And
Stephen is like out in the forefront of trying to
make sure companies and boards really understand what is happening
with AI and how it's transformative and agents, and in
a sense what we probably all agree with is both
are true. The hard part is figuring out that integration
(20:50):
of the two. Yes, and I think what you just
said about the experience tech is an interesting way of
thinking about it. Yes, And how can brands our companies
think about that? How do you star through what becomes
augentic versus what becomes human? Where does trust then live
in that world?
Speaker 3 (21:06):
It's complicated, It is very complicated.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
But that's the reason I think both marketers and strategists
and other.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
People get paid right.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
And if it was just easy and can be done
through machines, we would be sort of replaced for some reason.
I'm like, one of the things I'm doing is I'm
sort of sharing an AI council for brand innovators. I
gave him a homework, and my homework was, can you
please put in this prompt on open because you know
open ey has got terrible names. But this is like
for their three model, which is their newest model. So
(21:36):
put it in open three. And I said, put this prompt.
And this prompt was actually by Ethan Mallick, who writes
one Useful Thing, So I said, put in this thing,
but instead of using this particular prompt, replaced the word cheese.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
With your brand.
Speaker 4 (21:50):
So he basically said, I'm starting a cheese store, and
problem something like, I'm starting a cheese store in this
particular place, and can you give me a competitive analysis
of other cheese stores. Can you basically create logos for
my cheese stores? Can you create a financial plan?
Speaker 3 (22:07):
And you can you create a website?
Speaker 4 (22:08):
And I said, put those in this wait for one
hundred and twenty seconds and see what happens. At the
end of one hundred and twenty seconds, you get twenty
logos with the recommendation the HTML code, and then which
you can preview and change for your entire website, a
five year business plan, a complete competitive analysis for which
you've basically paid twenty dollars and that's monthly subscription. And
(22:28):
my old stuff is justify your job after this that's
my question. To some CEO who doesn't know anything, will
basically say, what do you do?
Speaker 3 (22:37):
This thing?
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Just did exactly that, and I pay twenty dollars. Why
am I paying you so much? And what you end
up saying is this is a value I will add.
So the big thing is to understand that what the
machines do, get the hell out of the way. Severn
an entire thing about how you future proof your career,
and yesterday actually it was talking to a.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
Bunch of cmos.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
These are level just below CMO is the best way
of saying it. Middle manager about to be a cmount,
And one of their big pressures is is there a
role for mental management because people are saying they suck,
et cetera, and they're trying to get rid of them.
So I said yes, and these are the reasons. But
one of the big things was I kept encouraging them
and reminding them.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
That, look, I hope to keep working.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
But let's suppose I didn't need to pay attention to
future proofing my career because maybe my career is in.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
The past, which it isn't.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
But let's suppose I said, like I fell asleep, but
I said, I haven't fallen asleep. So my whole stuff
is like, Okay, in this world, how the hell do
I future proof of my career? Now?
Speaker 3 (23:30):
What is?
Speaker 4 (23:30):
I could go around and say, well, you know I
have arrived, so therefore a future proof. That's stupid. You
haven't ever arrived. So the whole idea is, okay, how
do you? So I basically say to everyone, including marketers,
you need to a clearly understand that AI is, even
today significantly under hype.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
I literver heard a piece about that last week because
that was literally the speech with doctor erk Schmidt.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Right, I said, we are in a world where knowledge
is free, and we're all knowledge workers, that this particular
thing is doubling its capacity every seven months, and a
lot of what we can do, it can do faster
and better.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Not everything, but a lot. So don't try to compete
with it. So you've got to figure out what you
compliment it with.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
And those are some of those HI terms, But in
building those, I can't say, okay, go build Chi. So
my whole thing is how do you build Eachi? So
I would say that there are six skills. Three are
about you yourself, which is better me, Stephen and our audience,
which is cognition, creativity, and curiosity. So cognition is spend
an hour a day learning, because my whole basic belief
(24:33):
is if I'm still learning and I'm now on god,
I'm Medicare I understand why you aren't like to most people?
And I said, if you don't learn, you're getting out
of date. So you have to spend an hour and
a day learning. Second is curiosity, And I said, if
you don't know what curiosity are, ask simply these two
questions every time somebody tells you something, which is what if?
Speaker 3 (24:51):
And why not?
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Just do those two? And the third is creativity, which
I talk about connecting dots in new ways, So expose
yourself to lots of dots. But we don't work by ourselves.
We work with other people and we work with other
alien life forms, which is what you know. Most of
our Selema Mustafa is basically called AI.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
It's alien intelligence because we don't understand.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
It intelligence and human beings, right, so it calls that.
So if he says so, so, how do you collaborate
with other human beings? So collaboration skills you need, convincing skills,
which basically comes back to selling and storytelling, which is
if everyone's got the same data, what's going to differentiate
you is how you sell, how you tell a story,
how you convince. And interestingly, the most important skills are
(25:36):
communication skills, learning how to speak and write, because you're
going to have to speak and write better than the machines. Otherwise,
the machines, I mean the machines speak and the machines.
Right when I wrote my own books because I have
figured out how to sell it to Harper Collins, and
part of the selling it to Harper Collins is you
have to have an agent, and you go with the
agent and you pitch a thing. And when they realize
the first time around that it was a new author,
(25:57):
I said, I also am writing my own book, but
I have this guy called it book Coach, and the
book Coach is a world renowned ghostwriter. But he wasn't
ghostwriting my book, so they knew him and they said,
you're not ghostwriting, and then he said he knows how
to write. I'm just going to coach him. And therefore
they gave me an advance really to help pay him,
because he was like a first line editor. It's the
best way of thinking about it. So I wrote my book.
But what he would basically do is he would say, Richard,
(26:19):
chapter one. Remember we said this is chapter one. You
don't write the chapter. Please you write out the answers
to these eight questions. So you give me your knowledge,
you give me your voice, you give me the way
you write, give me those So I would do that.
I guess what for my second book I had. I
had Claude, and I had CHATJPT and i'd Chemini. So
I put those questions in there. I read the answers
(26:40):
and then I started writing. I then sent him and
what he does is he takes my answers for first
book and he sends me back a chapter which is
all my words. But he says, you sent me ten
thousand words.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
We only need five thousand. These five thousand suck.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
Or sometimes he says, you need to talk more about this,
write more right. So it was that this time I
sent him both the AI answers and my answers, two
different folders. I said, you need to read both, and
let's put this together. The book is not a single
line of AI. He says, after you read the AI,
you wrote much much.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Better than the AI. So I wasn't competing. I put
it in.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
It gave me thoughts and ideas I did not have before.
I did some more investigation and then I started writing.
But what does AI do even you know Grock, which
tries to have attitude.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Grock is great again for folks that don't know, this
is Xai elon Musk's platform.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
Grock has attitude. That is an attitude. It's just stupid, okay.
But Grock itself is good. Its attitude is not necessarily good.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yes, yes, wow.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah, and it's very very good. It's very very good.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
But what basically begins to happen is most of these
things don't have points of view.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
I love that they don't have.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
A human touch.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Now, at some particular stage, which is what people are
going to try to do. Is it going to train
on my voice? Yes, they're going to train, and then
they're going to get better and better. At some stage
maybe they'll be better. But my old stuff is I'm
reading them after I asked them, and then I say, okay,
how do I upgrade what I just read? Right? Which
(28:14):
is a big part of what this part is. So
that is why you need to write and speak and present.
So this whole idea of convincing and storytelling, and a
lot of people basically say, you know, this whole idea
of storytelling and brands, it's all going to disappear on
this agentic Ai age. It is going to be all
math and machines. And I say, okay, I'm very old.
(28:36):
So I was born during the age of fire. Okay,
when fire was invented, I was around.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I didn't see you in the Museum of Natural History
or shot. I see you more in the future, my friends,
I was.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
There in the age of fire. And let me tell
you what we did with fire. You want to know
what we did with fire? We kept warm, we cooked
our food, and we could stay up in the night.
But what the hell could we do when we stayed
up with the night? So we gathered around the fire
and we told each other's stories. Okay, And that's how
stories began. Then a little later on, as I got older,
(29:06):
we invented the wheel. And what did we do with
the wheel? Well, with a wheel, different people came into
our places, and we went to different places. Every single
story in the world begins with a stranger comes to
town and someone goes on a journey. Okay, Every advance
in technology places a premium on talent and superior storytelling.
(29:29):
I can prove it year after year after year. So
get a grip on yourselves to people who think that.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
This is going to be about machines and men.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
By the way, every technology company, because again I met
Rasad does to date myself when he was at starcom
IP when I was recruited to join, and you said this, Versad,
like every technology company has followed this path where it's
the product, it will sell itself. We don't need people
to then, oh, we actually need to engage clients. We
need people to then focus on storytelling. So it's just
(29:58):
so funny how every company follows that journey.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
It's exactly and what happens is what we don't know.
Speaker 4 (30:03):
What we don't know, and those are things I'm not
bright enough to have the answer. One because I don't
have the answer sectors, I probably am not bright enough
at thirties.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
I don't spend enough time thinking about it.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Is what are some of the new ways you build
brands with AI right outside of these broad themes. I
haven't got the exact thing, and that's primarily because I'm
still interested, but I don't have either the skill set
nor am I hired by anybody to do that? And
if somebody hired me to do that, I'd say, that's
too late. I don't want to do that anymore. But
one of those key things, I'll give people broad ideas
on how to think about it, but the whole idea
(30:34):
is in many ways if you ask some of the
right questions, including one of the biggest things that I
believe is the biggest opportunity for brands with AI, which
is could it be that the real opportunity for companies
with AI is to reimagine their entire category? Okay, So
(30:55):
I'll give you an example. And all of us are
old enough to remember sort of the digital age in
nineteen ninety three with the right so way, I look
at it as, yeah, there was AOL. I was big
on AOL and Prodigy. But let's say it started in
nineteen ninety three with Worldwide Web. You know, I said, hey,
by the way, I started on the first interactive agencies
thirty years ago.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
So I don't understand what this digital thing is, Okay.
First of it also shows you it takes time for
things to happen. But more importantly, in this world of
sort of digital ages. One of the you know, the
big things that we always.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Keep sort of thinking about is that there's no space
for people, there's no space for everything else.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
And we found all of that was not true, right,
if that makes sense.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
Where we're going is in this sort of new age,
we're going to have to ask some of those sort
of same, you know questions.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
But the example I'm giving you is this.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
Initially everybody said, how do I use digital to make
my current business model more efficient and effective?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
That sentence is hilarious.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Okay, just imagine if the New York Times company had
decided that that's what they were doing. Instead, they actually
put a bunch of people together. It was called and
they wrote an Innovator's Report, And if you read that report,
I'm one of the people who was involved in that.
When was this was probably in early two thousands, and
(32:14):
I got sort of involved when Martin Nissenhols, if you
remember him, the first New York Times digital So he
got me. He was trying to get people to understand
that this wasn't about only efficient and effectiveness, so he
would call me in and talk to people.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Then we did this innovator.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
Then there's this called this Innovation Report, which eventually changed
in the future. There were lots of contributors, hundreds of people. Well,
one of the things that was interesting is this wasn't
necessarily about that. It was amount different. So imagine the
New York Times had decided that digital technology will make
their printing presses more efficient and how their trucks rolled
(32:51):
around delivering newspapers more effective, when the real opportunity and
what they ended up doing is that this was about
existential risk and existential opportunities which most companies aren't taking seriously. Okay,
which is the future isn't about the newspaper. The future
isn't about printing presses. The future isn't about news. Right,
(33:14):
one third of their revenue comes from non news resources.
And everyone basically says, I'm making my current business model
more effective inefficient. So I said, you're making a pathetic
business model more effective inefficient. How is that going to
get to the future?
Speaker 2 (33:25):
But you're effectively doing the you know, kind of the
classic analogy of everyone from Henry Forward to Steve.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Johns the horse, Yeah, oh.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
You got to get a faster horse, right, as opposed
to coming up to the automobile. Right, But bring us
home because we have to get to cooler. Cringe, because
we definitely need to get your point of view and
some of these things. But you know, just to kind
of land this where we are right now, I feel
like it is truly this existential threat to marketers. I'm very,
very curious about your perspective now to share you know,
(33:55):
kind of my thesis of you're seeing the true collapse
of what we say is pre sales, which is marketing,
point of sale which is sales, and then post sale,
which is customer service and support, and that it's fusing
into one unified customer experience because you will have an
(34:17):
agent that can do all three of those things. It
will market to you, sell to you, and support you.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
Yes, which is one of the reasons I put forth
with experience stacks right right, including how an agent experience?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, but what happens to a marketing team then, right,
like when you think about where these things are going,
you know, for Morrison, all the folks that are listening,
whether you know, at the brand side, of the agency side,
wherever in the ecosystem, how does this function actually evolve?
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Because let's go back to his sixties. We only got
to five, so can you wrap us with a six.
Speaker 4 (34:57):
So it's creativity, curiosity, and cognition is the first three,
and then collaboration.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Convincing and communication.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
So communication is a final, but it's convincing, which is sales.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Those are human skills.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
Those are all human things. Youre going to build those
now years a key. There's a thing of call what
you do, why you do, and how you do. How
you do is going to be blown apart. So if
you consider yourself to be someone who practices a craft,
which is only how you do, that's going to be
a problem.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
But what you do and why you do.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
It, those become very interesting and in effect, what you're
really trying to basically do is find a way to
create a customer who can basically give you both a
premium price and loyalty, and ideally they become a media
company to get you other customers.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
That's what you're trying to basically do.
Speaker 4 (35:53):
Once you think about that, and you also think about
good old Peter Drucker who said the reason a company
exists to create customers, I actually believe marketing is more
central to most companies in the future than ever before,
because almost all the other things are all left brain, accounting, finance.
They're all basically much more machine law. They're much more machine.
(36:15):
This one it's got machines and it's got this stupid
thing called human beings. And human beings are very complex.
They have moods, they have weird things, Okay, And basically
I truly believe that people choose with their hearts and
they use numbers to justify what they just did.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
But the assumption is still people. It is people, and
again I would challenge it. I don't know if it's marketing,
it's about customer experience. I think you nailed it right
on the head. But the idea of just marketing is
not going to be sufficient so long as.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
You don't think of marketing in the old way you
thought of it.
Speaker 4 (36:47):
I basically believe that the entire firm is a marketing company.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Or is it a customer company or a storytelling company.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
I would actually call it a people influencing and resonating
with people company, right, even like the word customer because
in affair, customer defines your category. See here's one of
the other things. The reason I'm asking people to think
very broadly. I wrote this piece and I took only
some of it without this particular line in my advertising
Hall of Fame. So I try to make mine not
about like a whole bunch of thank yous. So I
(37:16):
just did a little bit of that and I talked
about other things.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
You won't get my talk.
Speaker 4 (37:20):
You'll get the theme of it in tomorrow's substack, which
I'm going to write later today, which is called chances,
choices and changes, which is that a career is built
on and life is built on chances, choices and changes. Okay,
And in many ways sometimes a brand is built on chances,
choices and changes or people deciding that. But with that
being said, if you think about it, I'd say, hey, look,
work in the future world. You need to think like
(37:42):
an immigrant. I didn't use this particular word there. I
did not use that light. So here's why. So I said,
if you think about immigrants, and first of all, I said, look,
twenty seven percent of the US is first or second
generation immigrant. But I actually believe we're all immigrants, including
Native American Indians, because we're immigrating into the future, okay,
which is a new country. It's an undiscovered country called
(38:04):
the future. And when you think about what immigrants do,
what do they do Number one, they think like outsiders.
So stop hanging around with people like yourselves. Stop hanging
around with people in your category, because the biggest opportunities
and risk to your category come from outside it. The
automobile category did not see Uber or Tesla, right, So
(38:25):
think like an outsider.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
That's number one.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
Number two, think like an.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Underdog, okay.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
And the reason that's important is while you sit in
your brand as a CMO and a CEO, but if
you think in a brand, you know you're sitting in
your castle surrounded by your moat.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
Everybody talks about I got my moat.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
Okay, So I basically say, as an immigrant, I don't
see your castle in a moat. I basically see the
moat as a source of water to drown you in
the castle. I actually will use your business model against you, okay,
which is think like an underdog.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
That's my internal mantra in my role right now for real.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
And the third is for God's sakes, Immigrants basically take
pain in the short term to build brands in the
long run or to build their families in the long run. Yes,
you have to deliver your quarter, otherwise you would have
a job. But if that's all you deliver. That's not
a future oriented thinking, right, So think like an immigrant
and what basically I dropped the think like an immigrant
for this particular talk. I basically said, hey, you know,
(39:24):
my advice to people as you'll move forward is think
like outsiders and think like underdogs. One of the things
is if you think like that, you can actually, to
your point, Stephen, rethink stuff, right, which is like, okay,
we're out.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
So let's rethink core cringe, because we are ready. This
will be super lightning round because again we could talk
to you forever reshat so core or cringe agency holding company.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Models, it's actually cringe.
Speaker 4 (39:54):
And the company I work for the company, we're.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Just an executive advisor now, not an employee.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
Well, no, the reason is the company I use, I
still advise, it doesn't call itself.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
A holding company. It ran away from that term long
time ago.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
It initially call itself a platform and now it calls
itself something different.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Okay, why cringe really fast?
Speaker 4 (40:14):
The reason basically being is a holding company is a
top down financial model in a world which is bottom
up and people in talent model.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Nice nicely said, all right, here's another one. Companies having
a Chief AI officer cool or cringe.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
So I believe it's coolly cringey. Here's why.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
In the near term it might be cool because just
like you needed to have a chief Digital officer right
to basically write, but over time you will eventually need
everybody to be AI. But in effect, because this field
is changing so fast, you are going to require some
core people to stay on top of that. And so
(40:56):
initially I think it's going to be necessary. Over time
the chief digital there's been less and less of it,
So it'd be like that.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
I couldn't agree more and I would make my plug
for having it be a business person or business behinded
person does not need to be a technical person.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Love love that, Steven last one, Yeah, last.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
One core cringe. AI agents as co workers.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
Very cool, and AI agents are only going to be
co workers, but AI agents for many, many people.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
And recently there's Rex Woodburry.
Speaker 4 (41:25):
He's written in an article they're actually going to be
friends in a country where people both are growing old
and fifty percent are lonely, and they're getting better and better,
and it's kind of interesting. The movie Her was set
in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
It was so prescient. Everyone has to go see that movie.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Yeah, Rashad, you know it's funny listening to you talk.
I keep thinking of a keynote that I've started to
give called everything is different, everything is the same as
you've been talking. That's what I keep thinking of, starting
from the beginning of our conversation, where're like, I hate change,
and yet you're driving us into change. So thank you
for the most interesting, meandering, smart, brilliant, fun, thoughtful conversation.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Thank you for having me on board.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
And this was because of the way you ask questions.
As they say, you know, sometimes the right questions is
more than half the answer.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
It's all about the prompt.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
If you notice the prompt engineer job has disappeared a
porting to the Wall Street Journal exactly.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
I love that for shod Thank you always, and everyone
go read a substack. It's brilliant than you.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Okay, and now it's time for what's on your mind?
And we have a question, which I love came from
listening in Claudia. She asked Marissa and Stephen if you
could pick any brand or product to rebrand, which would
you choose.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
This is a great question, Claude, It's so good. I'll
keep it quick, even long, and you know winding conversation
that we had with for Shad which sparked so much inspiration. Yeah,
I feel that the branding and I think back from
a product perspective, the whole naming convention of what open
ai has done with chat GPT and now they're reasoning
(43:05):
models of one and they skipto two because that's actually
a different company. So now they have three and they're
working on four. Like it is just all over the map.
And I know Kevin Wheel the chief product officer over
at OpenAI, him and Sam Altman, they all agree with this.
So I would really try to rebrand and integrate all
those models into one unified brand and make it easy
(43:26):
for consumers to understand.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah, well here's my answer, and frankly, I probably would
have come up with a different one, but you spark
something at the very top of the episode, and I'm
going with it. Gosh, I would desperately like to rebrand
the United States of America. Yeah, and get it back
to the brand of trust and integrity and compassion and
(43:50):
all the things that it's meant not just us to
our citizens.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
It is being rebranded right before our eyes.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
It's being rebranded right before our eyes. That is true,
and not in positive ways as we all know. And
if we look at all the metrics of brand, it's
not going in the right direction, so that would be
my wish.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Good news is the future is not set in stones.
Can change that by being engaged, so.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
I love it. Well, that's it for now. Thanks for
that great question, Claudia. Thanks to all of you for listening.
If you like what you're hearing from us, please don't
forget to subscribe and send us your questions. We obviously
love answering them. Just send us a note at ideas
at brand dashnew dot com. Thank you so much for
(44:38):
joining us, and we'll see you next time on brand
New
Hello, and thanks for joining us on Brand New from
the iHeart Podcast Network and Brand New Labs. I'm Marissa Bahlberg.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
And I'm Stephen Wolf Pereida and Marissa. It's another week
being on the road. I've been in DC this week.
There's a lot of interesting stuff, but I think it
was really just profound just to hear a lot of
the folks at the Semaphore World Economy Summit. Very interesting
where it was for the past couple of days. Yeah,
(00:34):
how about you.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I was in New York for a couple of days.
Back in Charlotte. Back on the road tomorrow, actually, but
I'll tell you you're you're in DC. I feel like
we're living through the lens of getting intel from DC,
you know, managing retail businesses right now in the frankly
the chaos of the economy and the changing winds of tariffs,
(00:56):
and it's really hard. I give so much respect to
my colleagues who are really trying to figure out and
adapt with regards to things that are not easily changed,
like sourcing, supply chain, products, vendor relationships. So it is taxing,
pun intended taxing our companies in ways that I think
(01:19):
were highly unanticipated, And this is my friendly shout out
to my own peers and colleagues as well as everyone
else who's really really trying to do their very best
with it.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
The theme running throughout the whole Semaphore event, and shout
out to to Justin Smith and Ben and Rachel and
the team over at Semaphore, one.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Of our earliest guests in brand new.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Absolutely, they really had, as you know, just kind of
the consistent threat has been VUKA, right, so volatility, uncertainty,
complexity and ambiguity and that kind of framework. You heard
it consistently from all these different CEOs, politicians, regulators, you know,
the CEO of FedEx, you know, the CEO of Landa
Lake's Beth CEO of Carlisle Group. I mean, they had
(02:00):
Ken Griffin, you know, from Citadel, like just consistently the volatility.
And then you heard from the Minister of Finance from
France talking about the EU and how the just A
relationship with the US is radically changed. And then you
had Ian Bremer talking about how just I don't think
people understand that the past seventy plus years of the
(02:20):
Breton Woods kind of system that we've had is fundamentally
over and we are truly seeing the rewriting of history.
We are entering this brand new phase. Yes, and our
relationship just you know, as the United States of America
is radically changed with places like Europe, like you know,
obviously places in Asia. But you talk about trust, and
(02:42):
you know, I know this is a theme that has
come up a lot, but you talk about our brand
as America, we have been the reserve currency, We have
been the stable, you know, kind of force in a
world where people can rely on us, and we are
now not viewed as reliable, not kind of the steady partner.
And so it just opens up this can of worms
about like where do you go now? And do people
(03:05):
now start to go more towards China or they look
for the EU as a safe haven? Like everything is
being shifted right before our eyes. And it's just it's
very telling with the recent speakers that we've had around
entrepreneurship or just you know kind of what we're going
to talk about even today. So I'm just excited to
see how we navigate this time.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Well, let's just get into it. What do you think
because I know we're going to have a free flowing,
great conversation So, Steven, you want to share who's joining
us today.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
So we are joined by someone whose perspective we think
is so valuable, especially now when brands, businesses and leaders
are all grappling with just incredible change. So Rashad Tobakawala
is a legendary strategist, author, and advisor known for helping
companies and people reinvent themselves to stay relevant in a
very fast changing world. He has spent over forty years
(03:55):
I don't know how that's possible, forty years at Publicis Group,
rising to the roles of Chief Growth Officer and Chief
Strategy Officer, and today he advises global organizations and how
to grow by balancing technology with humanity. He's the author
of acclaimed books such as Restoring the Soul of Business,
as well as their recently released book Rethinking Work, Seismic
(04:17):
Changes in the Where, When and Why, widely read Voice
on Leadership, Innovation in the Future of Work. Oh and
also he is the newly minted inductee into the American
Advertising Federation's Hall of Fame. Rare Shot. Welcome to Brand New.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Thank you very much, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Marissa and Steve welcome, I mean we're shot honestly, Like,
where can we begin. I mean, first off, how do
you spend forty years in the same place, Like I
feel like that is just you know, something that does
not happen anymore.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
I will give you three reasons, all of which are
actually true and valid, and it's the second one that
people find most surprising. So the first one is, I
actually don't like change. I've always written the chain sucks,
and so I preferred not to change. And I've often
told people outside of working in the same company for
(05:10):
forty I actually worked for the same two bosses for
twenty five.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
In Secrets, which was Jack Lues and Maurice Levy.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
And I've stayed in the same city of Chicago for
forty four and I've known my wife for fifty three years.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
So you're looking at an anti change person. So that's
one reason.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
But yet you deal have changed all the time.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Pretty interesting, right as a reinvention expert.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
Yeah, I tell people, you know, change sucks, but irrelevance
is even worse, So you have to change. So I've decided,
so minimize the stuff that you have to change and
then focus on those. So I haven't changed. Fortunately, she
hasn't kicked me out. So I have the same wife,
I live in the same city, and I work for
the same company.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
The second, which people find surprising and it is true,
is nobody gave me a job off forever.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
Okay, in my entire career, I've never received HB outside
of the first job offer I got, the only job
offer I got, which is from the Leobnet company.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
How how is this possible.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
I don't know, but nobody has ever. It's absolutely true.
I have a resume d aid in nineteen eighty two
and no one has ever given me a job offer.
So one is I stayed because I hate changed. The
other is I had no option. So those are two
very good reasons. And then the third, which I can
make it sound very strategic, but the first two are
also true, is when I stayed in the same company.
(06:30):
I have worked for fourteen different companies over the years.
So I joined what was the Leobnet Company, then I
moved to leobnet Direct Marketing is to Leobnet. Then I
launched one of the first interactive agencies called Giant Step.
Then I helped spin off leobnet Media and to Starckcom
while launching a digital operation called Starcom. Might be then
(06:51):
they got merged, we got we merged with Medias it
was Starcom Medias Group, and then Publicist brought us and
I ended up working for stock Coom Media Essence and Adoptomedia,
which is Publicist Media. We launched a unit, one of
the first sort of audience and demand units, called Viviki.
I launched a futures company called Denu. Then built the
(07:14):
case we needed to be more digital than we were,
so we bought Digitas and razor Fish. I ended up
being chairman of Digitas and Razorfish, and then I became
the chief strategist and chief growth officer of the Publicist Group.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
And then in between, you know, when we were at
some particular stage on the GM business, I had a
card that said GM plan works and a bunch of
other things.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
So maybe a little false modesty on the I've never
been offered a job. You just continued to reinvent and
blossom and grow and be a thought leader.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
Exactly, so there's never a reason to leave. So one
of the few people I think in the industry who's
worked across every aspect of the business which I've worked
in creative agencies, media agencies, digital agencies, retail agencies, every
type of agency. I've worked both starting companies from zero
and grown them to two hundred people giant step in
(08:06):
stocker might be, and once smaller which is done. And
I've done overseeing ten thousand people at Raise Efficient Digitus,
and then I've been a staff person as a chief strategist.
So in an interesting way, what are the reasons after
I left Publicses? So I stopped working there as an
employee six years ago.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
But everyone thinks that you still work there, shut.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
All right, Well, the reason people think I still work
there is for a couple of reasons. One is I
continue to be a senior advisor to the group six
years later. And it's very clear that probably is a
real senior advisor, because you know, sometimes when you leave
a company for about six eight months, they call you
a senior advisor. But why are they doing this for
six years? Unless I've got like some pictures and somebody,
(08:49):
why are they doing this for six years? So I
actually do some very specific things, but more importantly, my
key card works and my email works, and that can
uses people that I just can walk into any building
on any floor and just walk right in and you
can send me an email, and I'll respond to any
of the right So that's the confusing thing. But I'm
(09:10):
not an employee.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
I'm basically a ten ninety nine versus.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
You're truly an advisor.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
I'm truly an advisor, and with the exception of one
or two things, I'm free to do whatever I want. So,
like I've done stuff with anything that's built around my
own intellectual content, which is my books, my writing. I
do stuff because so many of the leaders of different
even agencies used to work with me.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
So I've done stuff with Ages and Omnicom and WPP
and everybody, But it's about my content.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Can we get to that intellectual content? Because I don't
say this just to flatter you because you're on the podcast.
I mean, there are a lot of voices in our industry,
and I genuinely mean it. Whenever I read something from you,
I'm struck by just how thought provoking it is and
how beautifully articulated it is. And I know I'm not
(10:01):
the only one, because you have a substack called the
future does not fit in the containers of the past,
and I know you've got about thirty thousand readers just
of that substat So what containers do you think brands
are clinging to today that are holding them back?
Speaker 4 (10:22):
So today brands are basically clinging to the following three
or four that are holding them back, and they're not
clinging hard enough to one that will take them forward,
because there's also something that they should actually do more of.
So one is they often basically believe that brands, while
(10:43):
being important, are still being built the same way, and
they aren't. The big difference is brands are no longer
being built by companies. They're being curated by companies. They're
being built by people, the customer, the influencer, the shopper.
They're the ones who are building the brand. They're the
(11:05):
ones starting the campaign, and marketers are actually responding. You know,
in the old days, it was like we will have
a campaign, it'll stop this state, it will stop that day.
Today I could start a campaign and you'll have to
react to it. So that's one second. Is an underlying
basic belief that the future is about data, okay, which
(11:26):
it is not. Just in case your audience believes I
have no clue about this, I have an advanced degree
in mathematics.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
I ran the data strategy for what.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
Is now the most valuable holding company and board companies
like Epsilon.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
So I would assume that I have some idea of that.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
I'll speak for your data credits for shoting. You know
a thing or two about data.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Okay, So I believe that while data is important, so
I'm not saying it isn't that I really believe. It's
the other part, which is storytelling, which is the differentiation.
And what I remind people is that if it was
all about data, there would be no brands. If it's
all about data, you make data driven decisions. A data
driven decision would not make a mazed Louis Vuitton, Moyt,
(12:07):
Tennessey and Apple the most valuable companies in the world
because the reality of it is, no one would wear
a watch because you have a phone that has a
better watch. It wouldn't buy a car in most places
you do uber, you wouldn't buy a car where you
needed a.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Car that was more expensive than a Toyota Camri.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
And if you actually think about it, what is a brand?
A brand is everything from craft, storytelling, craftsmanship, provenance, history, right, experiences,
and we reduce it down to data. So that's the
second one, which is like this is so ridiculous. Okay,
So that's the second thing that I find very strange.
(12:44):
The third one is a very odd belief that you
could actually build a brand without keeping your employees happy.
So my basic belief is I actually think net promoter
scores is a good idea, but a more important is
net promoter or net employee promoters score. So if your
(13:04):
employees are not content but happy and thriving, that's how
you basically create ideas because of innovation is people thinking fearlessly.
You need that if your employees are happy, they basically
are going to satisfy your clients and customers better than
(13:25):
the people are not going to be happy as importantly
who people actually believe employees of a company more than
they believe anybody. And I believe every company should recognize
that every employee is a media brand, whether they have
no audience or a good audience. So that's the third
strange belief. Again, list others, but those are three, which
(13:47):
is focus on employees as much as you focus on customers.
Data is important, but for God's sakes, in most cases
not a differentiator. And you're curating a brand, it's actually
being built outside you, and you're just putting up some
of the scaffolding. The thing that people are not holding
on hard enough to is the reality. At it's very
(14:07):
old school that brands are trust marks. So I truly
believe that brands are going to be more important in
the future because the two things that are going to
be the most important in the future are trust and integrity.
And there are three reasons for it, which are very,
very different. But once I tell you what those three
reasons are, it's so obvious, and I keep wondering, like,
(14:28):
why are people missing this?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Biersadi, You're hitting us something so important? And when you
frame these three reasons, have one eye towards the past,
which I think you're really summarizing so importantly all the
kind of things that brought us to this point. But
we're obviously entering the intelligence era, and so how do
you kind of frame the three things for where we're
(14:50):
going exactly?
Speaker 4 (14:51):
So what basically happens only two things, So what is
what people are not holding on to? And then how
they should think about broadly where we're going. So when
they're not holding on to this is the whole idea
of trust integrity. One of the reasons is important is
in an AI age, you won't know what to believe, right,
every video will look like a real video, every person
will look like a real video. So you're going to
basically say who can I trust? And in many ways,
(15:13):
brands are the trust devices. I could pay more than
Procter and Gamble to introduce Rishad's tooth based on Google
in search, but they won't buy it because who the
hell knows Richard and who knows his tooth based and
so what tends to basically happen is that's one. The
second reason is that trust is important in effect what
a brand is. It's a promise and if you can
trust a promise, you can trust it. And the third
(15:36):
reason is trust is an emotion, which is a data
driven emotion, and I think the future is data driven
storytelling and trust is one of the key things, which is, yes,
it's an emotion, but over time you need supporting data
as to why I should trust you, right versus I
(15:56):
just trust you. I trust you because other people trust you.
That's a good way to start. But then you know
why can I trust you? So that is what it is.
So I would say hold on to trust a lot.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
There is a key assumption in this whole thesis, which
I think both actually Marissa nodding her head vigorously like
versus loving every single thing that you just said. But
let me play contrarian here. Yeah, And the key assumption
is that you're talking about people. You're talking about emotions
that people have. What do you do when you actually
(16:28):
have agents? What do you do when you have all
the automation? What do you do when you actually have
an agent for a consumer talking engaging with another agent
on the behalf of the brand, and you actually remove
the emotion, you remove the person's decision making into that.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
And all of that's happening.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
So, for instance, I recently wrote a piece and one
of the talks I'm giving is how does marketing and marketers.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Change in at AIGE?
Speaker 4 (16:53):
And I sort of wrote about it three four weeks
ago on substack. It's called Reinvented Marketing and I said,
he has the ABCDE of marketing, and I say, years
of audience is changing, years of brands are changing, years
of content is changing, and under audience I mentioned exactly
what you mentioned, even what happens when you're basically talking
to an agent. So we send out agents and they
(17:13):
send out agents. So what happens there? And then the
other idea, basically to a great extent, is how does
content get created? Because now increasingly it can be created
on the fly in different ways. So I actually believe
that it's actually why in this age, HI will be more.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Important than AI.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
And what is HI?
Speaker 4 (17:33):
HI is four or five different things. Most people refer
to it as human intelligence, and I refer to it
as human imagination, human inventiveness, human intuition, human insight. What
basically will happen is, I'll give you a very simple thing.
People often ask me, all the stuff that you write
is so cool, and you don't charge anything. There's no advertising,
(17:56):
there's no affiliate marketing, right, And I said you can't
because I said, we are moving into a world where
content is free. And I said, by keeping the content
out that way. A common friend of our speed Black Shaw,
who runs right dot AI. So he did one of
those things on me. You know he does it on
brands to show how brands have got issues. He did
(18:17):
it on me and he said, I've never seen something
so strong ever. He said, I know you. But he says, like,
how did that get done? And I said, because I
give the machines all my content to read. So I'm
actually influencing the machines and they're like reading me, if
that makes sense, and they're reading everything of me.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
You're training the model.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
I'm training the model.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
So that is what I call my AI thing. I
have to train the dam machines. So I'm feeding the
machines because the machines are now So what am I
doing there?
Speaker 3 (18:43):
As a brand?
Speaker 4 (18:43):
I have to be as transparent, put out as much
of my stuff as possible, be least dubious as possible,
because the whole idea of like the arbitrage of information
and the arbitrage of data disappears. So you have to
change so that a gum comes back to trust. Put
out everything as much as you can.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Now.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
Very interesting is while my content is free, and even
my books, I mean, you know, it's like twenty bucks
or whatever it is because Hypercolus isn't going to give
it for free, and I get three dollars every time
a book sells, so it's you know, I can't even
buy a coffee, Okay, So everything I do in the
content world is free. You know, my podcast is free.
I'm going I'm going to show on my future of
work as free, and I keep it even add free interestingly,
(19:23):
but when I show up at a client, it's not free, okay,
because now they're paying for me. They're human right there.
And so that's what I and so my whole basic
belief is what you're going to have is the brand
is going to show up in different ways. And that's
one of the key things. So everyone keeps talking about
this thing called an advertising stack or the technology stack
(19:43):
or the marketing stack. I think we should be talking
about the experience stack. How does someone actually experience a brand?
And some of it will be through an agent, some
of it will be through places, some of it will
be through the product and services, some will be through
the people, some of it will be through the employees.
So I agree with you, But then you have to
think differently, which is you've got to both feed the
(20:04):
agents and complement the agents.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
So I take away from that what you're saying is,
and of course, because you are ahead of this, a
big part of what your thought leadership has been around
embracing technology without losing the human soul. You know, it
is funny the yin yang of even how Stephen and
I talk like I'm probably the one that's still out there, Champion.
It's still ultimately about the story, which is why I
(20:29):
was nodding vigorously, And it is about the humanity. And
Stephen is like out in the forefront of trying to
make sure companies and boards really understand what is happening
with AI and how it's transformative and agents, and in
a sense what we probably all agree with is both
are true. The hard part is figuring out that integration
(20:50):
of the two. Yes, and I think what you just
said about the experience tech is an interesting way of
thinking about it. Yes, And how can brands our companies
think about that? How do you star through what becomes
augentic versus what becomes human? Where does trust then live
in that world?
Speaker 3 (21:06):
It's complicated, It is very complicated.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
But that's the reason I think both marketers and strategists
and other.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
People get paid right.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
And if it was just easy and can be done
through machines, we would be sort of replaced for some reason.
I'm like, one of the things I'm doing is I'm
sort of sharing an AI council for brand innovators. I
gave him a homework, and my homework was, can you
please put in this prompt on open because you know
open ey has got terrible names. But this is like
for their three model, which is their newest model. So
(21:36):
put it in open three. And I said, put this prompt.
And this prompt was actually by Ethan Mallick, who writes
one Useful Thing, So I said, put in this thing,
but instead of using this particular prompt, replaced the word cheese.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
With your brand.
Speaker 4 (21:50):
So he basically said, I'm starting a cheese store, and
problem something like, I'm starting a cheese store in this
particular place, and can you give me a competitive analysis
of other cheese stores. Can you basically create logos for
my cheese stores? Can you create a financial plan?
Speaker 3 (22:07):
And you can you create a website?
Speaker 4 (22:08):
And I said, put those in this wait for one
hundred and twenty seconds and see what happens. At the
end of one hundred and twenty seconds, you get twenty
logos with the recommendation the HTML code, and then which
you can preview and change for your entire website, a
five year business plan, a complete competitive analysis for which
you've basically paid twenty dollars and that's monthly subscription. And
(22:28):
my old stuff is justify your job after this that's
my question. To some CEO who doesn't know anything, will
basically say, what do you do?
Speaker 3 (22:37):
This thing?
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Just did exactly that, and I pay twenty dollars. Why
am I paying you so much? And what you end
up saying is this is a value I will add.
So the big thing is to understand that what the
machines do, get the hell out of the way. Severn
an entire thing about how you future proof your career,
and yesterday actually it was talking to a.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
Bunch of cmos.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
These are level just below CMO is the best way
of saying it. Middle manager about to be a cmount,
And one of their big pressures is is there a
role for mental management because people are saying they suck,
et cetera, and they're trying to get rid of them.
So I said yes, and these are the reasons. But
one of the big things was I kept encouraging them
and reminding them.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
That, look, I hope to keep working.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
But let's suppose I didn't need to pay attention to
future proofing my career because maybe my career is in.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
The past, which it isn't.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
But let's suppose I said, like I fell asleep, but
I said, I haven't fallen asleep. So my whole stuff
is like, Okay, in this world, how the hell do
I future proof of my career? Now?
Speaker 3 (23:30):
What is?
Speaker 4 (23:30):
I could go around and say, well, you know I
have arrived, so therefore a future proof. That's stupid. You
haven't ever arrived. So the whole idea is, okay, how
do you? So I basically say to everyone, including marketers,
you need to a clearly understand that AI is, even
today significantly under hype.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
I literver heard a piece about that last week because
that was literally the speech with doctor erk Schmidt.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Right, I said, we are in a world where knowledge
is free, and we're all knowledge workers, that this particular
thing is doubling its capacity every seven months, and a
lot of what we can do, it can do faster
and better.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Not everything, but a lot. So don't try to compete
with it. So you've got to figure out what you
compliment it with.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
And those are some of those HI terms, But in
building those, I can't say, okay, go build Chi. So
my whole thing is how do you build Eachi? So
I would say that there are six skills. Three are
about you yourself, which is better me, Stephen and our audience,
which is cognition, creativity, and curiosity. So cognition is spend
an hour a day learning, because my whole basic belief
(24:33):
is if I'm still learning and I'm now on god,
I'm Medicare I understand why you aren't like to most people?
And I said, if you don't learn, you're getting out
of date. So you have to spend an hour and
a day learning. Second is curiosity, And I said, if
you don't know what curiosity are, ask simply these two
questions every time somebody tells you something, which is what if?
Speaker 3 (24:51):
And why not?
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Just do those two? And the third is creativity, which
I talk about connecting dots in new ways, So expose
yourself to lots of dots. But we don't work by ourselves.
We work with other people and we work with other
alien life forms, which is what you know. Most of
our Selema Mustafa is basically called AI.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
It's alien intelligence because we don't understand.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
It intelligence and human beings, right, so it calls that.
So if he says so, so, how do you collaborate
with other human beings? So collaboration skills you need, convincing skills,
which basically comes back to selling and storytelling, which is
if everyone's got the same data, what's going to differentiate
you is how you sell, how you tell a story,
how you convince. And interestingly, the most important skills are
(25:36):
communication skills, learning how to speak and write, because you're
going to have to speak and write better than the machines. Otherwise,
the machines, I mean the machines speak and the machines.
Right when I wrote my own books because I have
figured out how to sell it to Harper Collins, and
part of the selling it to Harper Collins is you
have to have an agent, and you go with the
agent and you pitch a thing. And when they realize
the first time around that it was a new author,
(25:57):
I said, I also am writing my own book, but
I have this guy called it book Coach, and the
book Coach is a world renowned ghostwriter. But he wasn't
ghostwriting my book, so they knew him and they said,
you're not ghostwriting, and then he said he knows how
to write. I'm just going to coach him. And therefore
they gave me an advance really to help pay him,
because he was like a first line editor. It's the
best way of thinking about it. So I wrote my book.
But what he would basically do is he would say, Richard,
(26:19):
chapter one. Remember we said this is chapter one. You
don't write the chapter. Please you write out the answers
to these eight questions. So you give me your knowledge,
you give me your voice, you give me the way
you write, give me those So I would do that.
I guess what for my second book I had. I
had Claude, and I had CHATJPT and i'd Chemini. So
I put those questions in there. I read the answers
(26:40):
and then I started writing. I then sent him and
what he does is he takes my answers for first
book and he sends me back a chapter which is
all my words. But he says, you sent me ten
thousand words.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
We only need five thousand. These five thousand suck.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
Or sometimes he says, you need to talk more about this,
write more right. So it was that this time I
sent him both the AI answers and my answers, two
different folders. I said, you need to read both, and
let's put this together. The book is not a single
line of AI. He says, after you read the AI,
you wrote much much.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Better than the AI. So I wasn't competing. I put
it in.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
It gave me thoughts and ideas I did not have before.
I did some more investigation and then I started writing.
But what does AI do even you know Grock, which
tries to have attitude.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Grock is great again for folks that don't know, this
is Xai elon Musk's platform.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
Grock has attitude. That is an attitude. It's just stupid, okay.
But Grock itself is good. Its attitude is not necessarily good.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yes, yes, wow.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah, and it's very very good. It's very very good.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
But what basically begins to happen is most of these
things don't have points of view.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
I love that they don't have.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
A human touch.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Now, at some particular stage, which is what people are
going to try to do. Is it going to train
on my voice? Yes, they're going to train, and then
they're going to get better and better. At some stage
maybe they'll be better. But my old stuff is I'm
reading them after I asked them, and then I say, okay,
how do I upgrade what I just read? Right? Which
(28:14):
is a big part of what this part is. So
that is why you need to write and speak and present.
So this whole idea of convincing and storytelling, and a
lot of people basically say, you know, this whole idea
of storytelling and brands, it's all going to disappear on
this agentic Ai age. It is going to be all
math and machines. And I say, okay, I'm very old.
(28:36):
So I was born during the age of fire. Okay,
when fire was invented, I was around.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I didn't see you in the Museum of Natural History
or shot. I see you more in the future, my friends,
I was.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
There in the age of fire. And let me tell
you what we did with fire. You want to know
what we did with fire? We kept warm, we cooked
our food, and we could stay up in the night.
But what the hell could we do when we stayed
up with the night? So we gathered around the fire
and we told each other's stories. Okay, And that's how
stories began. Then a little later on, as I got older,
(29:06):
we invented the wheel. And what did we do with
the wheel? Well, with a wheel, different people came into
our places, and we went to different places. Every single
story in the world begins with a stranger comes to
town and someone goes on a journey. Okay, Every advance
in technology places a premium on talent and superior storytelling.
(29:29):
I can prove it year after year after year. So
get a grip on yourselves to people who think that.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
This is going to be about machines and men.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
By the way, every technology company, because again I met
Rasad does to date myself when he was at starcom
IP when I was recruited to join, and you said this, Versad,
like every technology company has followed this path where it's
the product, it will sell itself. We don't need people
to then, oh, we actually need to engage clients. We
need people to then focus on storytelling. So it's just
(29:58):
so funny how every company follows that journey.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
It's exactly and what happens is what we don't know.
Speaker 4 (30:03):
What we don't know, and those are things I'm not
bright enough to have the answer. One because I don't
have the answer sectors, I probably am not bright enough
at thirties.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
I don't spend enough time thinking about it.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Is what are some of the new ways you build
brands with AI right outside of these broad themes. I
haven't got the exact thing, and that's primarily because I'm
still interested, but I don't have either the skill set
nor am I hired by anybody to do that? And
if somebody hired me to do that, I'd say, that's
too late. I don't want to do that anymore. But
one of those key things, I'll give people broad ideas
on how to think about it, but the whole idea
(30:34):
is in many ways if you ask some of the
right questions, including one of the biggest things that I
believe is the biggest opportunity for brands with AI, which
is could it be that the real opportunity for companies
with AI is to reimagine their entire category? Okay, So
(30:55):
I'll give you an example. And all of us are
old enough to remember sort of the digital age in
nineteen ninety three with the right so way, I look
at it as, yeah, there was AOL. I was big
on AOL and Prodigy. But let's say it started in
nineteen ninety three with Worldwide Web. You know, I said, hey,
by the way, I started on the first interactive agencies
thirty years ago.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
So I don't understand what this digital thing is, Okay.
First of it also shows you it takes time for
things to happen. But more importantly, in this world of
sort of digital ages. One of the you know, the
big things that we always.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Keep sort of thinking about is that there's no space
for people, there's no space for everything else.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
And we found all of that was not true, right,
if that makes sense.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
Where we're going is in this sort of new age,
we're going to have to ask some of those sort
of same, you know questions.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
But the example I'm giving you is this.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
Initially everybody said, how do I use digital to make
my current business model more efficient and effective?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
That sentence is hilarious.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Okay, just imagine if the New York Times company had
decided that that's what they were doing. Instead, they actually
put a bunch of people together. It was called and
they wrote an Innovator's Report, And if you read that report,
I'm one of the people who was involved in that.
When was this was probably in early two thousands, and
(32:14):
I got sort of involved when Martin Nissenhols, if you
remember him, the first New York Times digital So he
got me. He was trying to get people to understand
that this wasn't about only efficient and effectiveness, so he
would call me in and talk to people.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Then we did this innovator.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
Then there's this called this Innovation Report, which eventually changed
in the future. There were lots of contributors, hundreds of people. Well,
one of the things that was interesting is this wasn't
necessarily about that. It was amount different. So imagine the
New York Times had decided that digital technology will make
their printing presses more efficient and how their trucks rolled
(32:51):
around delivering newspapers more effective, when the real opportunity and
what they ended up doing is that this was about
existential risk and existential opportunities which most companies aren't taking seriously. Okay,
which is the future isn't about the newspaper. The future
isn't about printing presses. The future isn't about news. Right,
(33:14):
one third of their revenue comes from non news resources.
And everyone basically says, I'm making my current business model
more effective inefficient. So I said, you're making a pathetic
business model more effective inefficient. How is that going to
get to the future?
Speaker 2 (33:25):
But you're effectively doing the you know, kind of the
classic analogy of everyone from Henry Forward to Steve.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Johns the horse, Yeah, oh.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
You got to get a faster horse, right, as opposed
to coming up to the automobile. Right, But bring us
home because we have to get to cooler. Cringe, because
we definitely need to get your point of view and
some of these things. But you know, just to kind
of land this where we are right now, I feel
like it is truly this existential threat to marketers. I'm very,
very curious about your perspective now to share you know,
(33:55):
kind of my thesis of you're seeing the true collapse
of what we say is pre sales, which is marketing,
point of sale which is sales, and then post sale,
which is customer service and support, and that it's fusing
into one unified customer experience because you will have an
(34:17):
agent that can do all three of those things. It
will market to you, sell to you, and support you.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
Yes, which is one of the reasons I put forth
with experience stacks right right, including how an agent experience?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, but what happens to a marketing team then, right,
like when you think about where these things are going,
you know, for Morrison, all the folks that are listening,
whether you know, at the brand side, of the agency side,
wherever in the ecosystem, how does this function actually evolve?
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Because let's go back to his sixties. We only got
to five, so can you wrap us with a six.
Speaker 4 (34:57):
So it's creativity, curiosity, and cognition is the first three,
and then collaboration.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Convincing and communication.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
So communication is a final, but it's convincing, which is sales.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Those are human skills.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
Those are all human things. Youre going to build those
now years a key. There's a thing of call what
you do, why you do, and how you do. How
you do is going to be blown apart. So if
you consider yourself to be someone who practices a craft,
which is only how you do, that's going to be
a problem.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
But what you do and why you do.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
It, those become very interesting and in effect, what you're
really trying to basically do is find a way to
create a customer who can basically give you both a
premium price and loyalty, and ideally they become a media
company to get you other customers.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
That's what you're trying to basically do.
Speaker 4 (35:53):
Once you think about that, and you also think about
good old Peter Drucker who said the reason a company
exists to create customers, I actually believe marketing is more
central to most companies in the future than ever before,
because almost all the other things are all left brain, accounting, finance.
They're all basically much more machine law. They're much more machine.
(36:15):
This one it's got machines and it's got this stupid
thing called human beings. And human beings are very complex.
They have moods, they have weird things, Okay, And basically
I truly believe that people choose with their hearts and
they use numbers to justify what they just did.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
But the assumption is still people. It is people, and
again I would challenge it. I don't know if it's marketing,
it's about customer experience. I think you nailed it right
on the head. But the idea of just marketing is
not going to be sufficient so long as.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
You don't think of marketing in the old way you
thought of it.
Speaker 4 (36:47):
I basically believe that the entire firm is a marketing company.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Or is it a customer company or a storytelling company.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
I would actually call it a people influencing and resonating
with people company, right, even like the word customer because
in affair, customer defines your category. See here's one of
the other things. The reason I'm asking people to think
very broadly. I wrote this piece and I took only
some of it without this particular line in my advertising
Hall of Fame. So I try to make mine not
about like a whole bunch of thank yous. So I
(37:16):
just did a little bit of that and I talked
about other things.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
You won't get my talk.
Speaker 4 (37:20):
You'll get the theme of it in tomorrow's substack, which
I'm going to write later today, which is called chances,
choices and changes, which is that a career is built
on and life is built on chances, choices and changes. Okay,
And in many ways sometimes a brand is built on chances,
choices and changes or people deciding that. But with that
being said, if you think about it, I'd say, hey, look,
work in the future world. You need to think like
(37:42):
an immigrant. I didn't use this particular word there. I
did not use that light. So here's why. So I said,
if you think about immigrants, and first of all, I said, look,
twenty seven percent of the US is first or second
generation immigrant. But I actually believe we're all immigrants, including
Native American Indians, because we're immigrating into the future, okay,
which is a new country. It's an undiscovered country called
(38:04):
the future. And when you think about what immigrants do,
what do they do Number one, they think like outsiders.
So stop hanging around with people like yourselves. Stop hanging
around with people in your category, because the biggest opportunities
and risk to your category come from outside it. The
automobile category did not see Uber or Tesla, right, So
(38:25):
think like an outsider.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
That's number one.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
Number two, think like an.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Underdog, okay.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
And the reason that's important is while you sit in
your brand as a CMO and a CEO, but if
you think in a brand, you know you're sitting in
your castle surrounded by your moat.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
Everybody talks about I got my moat.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
Okay, So I basically say, as an immigrant, I don't
see your castle in a moat. I basically see the
moat as a source of water to drown you in
the castle. I actually will use your business model against you, okay,
which is think like an underdog.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
That's my internal mantra in my role right now for real.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
And the third is for God's sakes, Immigrants basically take
pain in the short term to build brands in the
long run or to build their families in the long run. Yes,
you have to deliver your quarter, otherwise you would have
a job. But if that's all you deliver. That's not
a future oriented thinking, right, So think like an immigrant
and what basically I dropped the think like an immigrant
for this particular talk. I basically said, hey, you know,
(39:24):
my advice to people as you'll move forward is think
like outsiders and think like underdogs. One of the things
is if you think like that, you can actually, to
your point, Stephen, rethink stuff, right, which is like, okay,
we're out.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
So let's rethink core cringe, because we are ready. This
will be super lightning round because again we could talk
to you forever reshat so core or cringe agency holding company.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Models, it's actually cringe.
Speaker 4 (39:54):
And the company I work for the company, we're.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Just an executive advisor now, not an employee.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
Well, no, the reason is the company I use, I
still advise, it doesn't call itself.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
A holding company. It ran away from that term long
time ago.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
It initially call itself a platform and now it calls
itself something different.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Okay, why cringe really fast?
Speaker 4 (40:14):
The reason basically being is a holding company is a
top down financial model in a world which is bottom
up and people in talent model.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Nice nicely said, all right, here's another one. Companies having
a Chief AI officer cool or cringe.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
So I believe it's coolly cringey. Here's why.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
In the near term it might be cool because just
like you needed to have a chief Digital officer right
to basically write, but over time you will eventually need
everybody to be AI. But in effect, because this field
is changing so fast, you are going to require some
core people to stay on top of that. And so
(40:56):
initially I think it's going to be necessary. Over time
the chief digital there's been less and less of it,
So it'd be like that.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
I couldn't agree more and I would make my plug
for having it be a business person or business behinded
person does not need to be a technical person.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Love love that, Steven last one, Yeah, last.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
One core cringe. AI agents as co workers.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
Very cool, and AI agents are only going to be
co workers, but AI agents for many, many people.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
And recently there's Rex Woodburry.
Speaker 4 (41:25):
He's written in an article they're actually going to be
friends in a country where people both are growing old
and fifty percent are lonely, and they're getting better and better,
and it's kind of interesting. The movie Her was set
in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
It was so prescient. Everyone has to go see that movie.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Yeah, Rashad, you know it's funny listening to you talk.
I keep thinking of a keynote that I've started to
give called everything is different, everything is the same as
you've been talking. That's what I keep thinking of, starting
from the beginning of our conversation, where're like, I hate change,
and yet you're driving us into change. So thank you
for the most interesting, meandering, smart, brilliant, fun, thoughtful conversation.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Thank you for having me on board.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
And this was because of the way you ask questions.
As they say, you know, sometimes the right questions is
more than half the answer.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
It's all about the prompt.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
If you notice the prompt engineer job has disappeared a
porting to the Wall Street Journal exactly.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
I love that for shod Thank you always, and everyone
go read a substack. It's brilliant than you.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Okay, and now it's time for what's on your mind?
And we have a question, which I love came from
listening in Claudia. She asked Marissa and Stephen if you
could pick any brand or product to rebrand, which would
you choose.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
This is a great question, Claude, It's so good. I'll
keep it quick, even long, and you know winding conversation
that we had with for Shad which sparked so much inspiration. Yeah,
I feel that the branding and I think back from
a product perspective, the whole naming convention of what open
ai has done with chat GPT and now they're reasoning
(43:05):
models of one and they skipto two because that's actually
a different company. So now they have three and they're
working on four. Like it is just all over the map.
And I know Kevin Wheel the chief product officer over
at OpenAI, him and Sam Altman, they all agree with this.
So I would really try to rebrand and integrate all
those models into one unified brand and make it easy
(43:26):
for consumers to understand.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah, well here's my answer, and frankly, I probably would
have come up with a different one, but you spark
something at the very top of the episode, and I'm
going with it. Gosh, I would desperately like to rebrand
the United States of America. Yeah, and get it back
to the brand of trust and integrity and compassion and
(43:50):
all the things that it's meant not just us to
our citizens.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
It is being rebranded right before our eyes.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
It's being rebranded right before our eyes. That is true,
and not in positive ways as we all know. And
if we look at all the metrics of brand, it's
not going in the right direction, so that would be
my wish.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Good news is the future is not set in stones.
Can change that by being engaged, so.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
I love it. Well, that's it for now. Thanks for
that great question, Claudia. Thanks to all of you for listening.
If you like what you're hearing from us, please don't
forget to subscribe and send us your questions. We obviously
love answering them. Just send us a note at ideas
at brand dashnew dot com. Thank you so much for
(44:38):
joining us, and we'll see you next time on brand
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