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In this episode, Gordon sits down with David Jacobson, Global Senior Director of Segmentation and Culture Insights at The Coca-Cola Company. From his early days handing out flyers for a Portland bar to helping shape the cultural footprint of one of the world's most iconic brands, David shares a fascinating journey through storytelling, innovation, and insight.An expansive conversation on how advertising has shifted from placing ads to crafting experiences. David shares insights from his time at Publicis Sapient, ChiatDay, and Coca-Cola, reflecting on the industry's transformation from standardized campaigns to platform-specific storytelling and cultural engagement. They dive into the evolution of experiential marketing, the rise of influencer collaboration, and why creating content fit for platform and fit for audience is more crucial than ever. David also discusses the importance of loosening brand control to allow authentic, creator-driven narratives to emerge—without losing sight of values and strategic guardrails.From early digital campaigns to the future of AI-powered personal assistants, this episode unpacks what it means to stay relevant in a world where behavior, technology, and media consumption are constantly shifting. Plus, hear how mentors and creative leaders like Lee Clow, Adam Morgan and Darren McCall shaped David's thinking around brand, storytelling, and strategy.Tune in for a refreshingly human take on marketing in the age of machines.
Al Scornaienchi is the President and CEO of Agency59, an independent advertising agency based in Toronto specializing in creative solutions for its clients. Under his leadership, Agency59 has maintained its relevance and competitiveness against larger multinational firms, serving prominent clients like Mercedes-Benz and Labatt. Al began his career at J. Walter Thompson, famously working on the Pepsi account during its Michael Jackson era, and he later helped establish the Vancouver office of Chiat/Day. In his tenure at Agency 59, Al has focused on fostering a strong company culture and planning for succession, ensuring the agency remains innovative and adaptable in a rapidly changing industry. In this episode… Have you ever wondered what it takes to run a successful advertising agency in a world dominated by large corporations with deep pockets? What makes a mid-sized independent agency nimble enough to stand out amidst industry titans? How does such a company adapt to the rapid changes and trends within the advertising world? Al Scornaienchi is a seasoned professional who has witnessed the evolution of advertising from the age of Pepsi campaigns through digital transformation. He explains how his agency has navigated the competitive landscape of the advertising world, embracing change by integrating technology, digital marketing, and a forward-thinking approach to creative direction and succession planning. By sticking to what Agency59 does best and cultivating a culture of flexibility and open communication, the agency retains talent and keeps clients satisfied. In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Al Scornaienchi, President and CEO of Agency59, about thriving as an independent agency in a competitive market. Al discusses how Agency59 thrives amid advertising giants, the evolution of its services, how saying “no” to some projects can safeguard relationships, and tips for productivity, recruitment, and retaining top talent.
Wendy Parr, The Holistic Artist Coach + Founder of The Parr Method has spent 30 years in the entertainment industry empowering recording artists to develop their authentic voice with consistency across every platform. She empowers recording artists Melanie Martinez, Regina Spektor, Sara Bareilles, Ballistik Boyz, PVRIS, Qveen Herby, Marc Bassy, + took A Great Big World from 1st vocal session to a GRAMMY. Compass, her 6 month artist development program takes pro + emerging artists on a deep dive into who they are empowering them to lean into and layer their weirdness, passions, and skills to create a magnetic and authentic brand. Wendy excels at bringing out the truth of the artist, the heart of their story + Uses her coaching skills to elevate, expand and take the artist somewhere new vocally + artistically. She has been featured at the largest TED community, TEDx Gateway, NAMM, Jump Global, CLIVE DAVIS Institute, NYU, Chiat Day, CD Baby DIY Conference, and MusiCares. We will get to hear more about her programs and courses and basically a crash course 101 on living the life as a potentially successful artist.
Desmond Marzette is a sports, lifestyle, and entertainment marketing expert with over 20 years of experience working with the biggest names and Brands in the industry: Gatorade, Levi's, Corona, Jordan Brand, Beats, 2K Sports, EA Sports/Fifa (Hispanic Market), Nike, Old Spice, Target, Coke, and many more. He now sits as Executive Creative Director at ChiatDay Los Angeles. Desmond gains the most satisfaction from creating epic pop culture moments for the world to enjoy and be inspired by, just as much as he does.
Welcome back to another episode of The Barber's Brief. A segment where we cover news that caught our eye, a marketing moment where we highlight a case study, and our ad of the week. We hope you enjoy the show! Our Hosts: Marc Binkley - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbinkley/ Vassilis Douros - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vassilisdouros/ Follow our updates here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sleeping-barber/ In The News Ad Age: American Airlines Fired Exec After a Marketing Change Aliented Corporate Clients Link: https://adage.com/article/marketing-news-strategy/american-airlines-fired-chief-commercial-officer-vasu-raja-after-marketing-strategy-change/2562716 Paul Worthington Newsletter - Off Kilter - Oops, AI did it again Looking at some of the failings of AI Link: https://www.invencion.com/off-kilter Fast Company - How Amazon created a winning streaming formula: shows based on airport books for dads Link: https://www.fastcompany.com/91134058/amazon-prime-video-streaming-airport-books-for-dads-james-patterson-cross P&G's Chief Brand Officer Mark Pritchard talking about inclusivity Link: https://wwd.com/beauty-industry-news/beauty-features/marc-pritchard-on-serving-all-and-each-to-drive-market-growth-1236389828/ Marketing Moment - The Power of Positioning // Apple - The Turnaround Background Back in 1997 - Apple was in big trouble They had just lost $800m Low market penetration and market capitalization of $2bn Michael Dell - when asked how he planned to fix the organization, he was planning to shut it down and give the money back to shareholders. Steve Jobs returned to re-focus Apple, and there was a lot of anticipation In August of the same year, Jobs addressed the future of the company at MacWorld 1997. Brand Positioning and Strategy Before getting to the Think Different campaign, they defined the new positioning of Apple, where they identified three core tenets. Simplicity Creativity Humanity These three tenants became core to Apple and were a major part of the brief that went into the brief to TBWAChiatDay, which famously led to the iconic “think different” campaign. Revival and Growth Why was this so powerful? It comes back to the three tenants: It was a simple message It was about creativity And celebrated at its core, humanity Due to its simplicity, it also worked well across media channels (print, TV, OOH etc.) The Think Different campaign bought Apple time and got them out of trouble. Due to this newfound mental availability and the constant product innovation (see iPod) by 2003, Apple had an evaluation of $8bn. However, because they wanted to grow globally as well, they re-brief Chiat/Day for a global iPod campaign was when “silhouettes” was born, which leaned again against the three core branding positioning tenants. By 2006, Apple had turned a corner. Now worth over $70bn, it returned to its core product, computing. Going after Microsoft who had dominated for decades the space. The campaign, “Get a Mac” was born. Why did this campaign work? Apple created an “enemy” highlighted Apple's simplicity and creativity Positioned against Microsoft's complexity What Lessons can we date from this example? Simple positioning always beats complex positioning - It is important to be clear, and consistent with your brand positioning, Differentiation is possible through positioning because it can also help with price volatility helping you to drive profits Links: Mark Ritson on the power of Apple's brand positioning (youtube.com) Ad of the Week - Heinz Ketchup Fighting counterfeiters of people refilling Heinz ketchup bottles with different brands of ketchup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-TkRINrr4A&t=92s © 2024 Sleeping Barber
Mani Schlisser is Director of Strategy at OBERLAND in New York. He's had big comms planning roles at Ogilvy, Mekanism, and Chiat Day. In this chat, we talk about Comms Planning 101 but also get into the daily challenges facing anyone creating advertising right now: - What's happening on the social media platforms, and - What agencies are getting wrong, You can find Mani here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manischlisser/ Find out about our upcoming masterclasses at http://www.sweathead.com You can find Mark here: http://www.instagram.com/markpollard
Apple's "1984" commercial, the Energizer Bunny, and the launch of Air Jordans all have one thing in common. They're all creations of legendary ad man Lee Clow.As creative director of Chiat/Day, Lee spent decades making work that transcended advertising and became cultural icons. He shared a close relationship with Steve Jobs, and his Think Different campaign revitalized Apple, transforming it into the brand we recognize today.As someone whose career started in advertising, Lee's a hero of mine, and I was thrilled to sit down with him. He shares the entertaining stories behind his most iconic work and some insights into Steve Jobs's leadership, his rare ability to fearlessly embrace creativity.This...is A Bit of Optimism.For more on Lee and his work, check out:Apple's "1984" Macintosh commercialLee in the Creative Hall of FameSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On today's show we're talking to the irrepressible Cameron Day, Creative Director and Copywriter extraordinaire and author of Spitting Chiclets, his second book in a trilogy about the triumphs and tragedies of the advertising business. He'll share his motivation for writing the books and some of the extraordinary lessons he learned from his father, legendary adman Guy Day, the Day in Chiat Day. Cameron has some great stories, including watching dailies for the most famous TV commercial of all time. Hint: it was in 1984! We'll also talk about lessons he had to learn on his own, the hard way through a storied career that has taking him to some of the biggest agencies and personalities in the advertising universe. This is an amazing conversation and a history lesson featuring a who's who of the business. You're going to have Google at the ready to look up some of the names mentioned in the show if you don't already know them. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cdconfessions/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cdconfessions/support
Hats Off To This Week's Contributors: @RyanMorrisonJer, @geneteare, @mgsiegler, @spyglass_feed, @saulausterlitz, @ClareMalone, @benedictevans, @mikeloukides, @ErikNaso, @kateclarktweets, @finkd, @mattbirchler, @imillhiser, @jaygoldberg, @ron_miller, @btaylor, @sierraplatform, @eladgilContents* Editorial: * Essays of the Week* AI Leads New Unicorn Creation As Ranks Of $1B Startups Swells * Behold: The Sports Streaming Bundle* 40 Years Ago, This Ad Changed the Super Bowl Forever* Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?* Video of the Week* AI and Everything Else - Benedict Evans from Slush* AI of the Week* The OpenAI Endgame* OpenAI Sora– The most realistic AI-generated video to date* I Was Wrong. We Haven't Reached Peak AI Frenzy.* News Of the Week* I tried Vision Pro. Here's my take* The Quest 3 is better than you might expect* The Supreme Court will decide if the government can seize control of YouTube and Twitter* Arm Results Set The World On Fire* Startup of the Week* Bret Taylor's new AI company aims to help customers get answers and complete tasks automatically* X of the Week* Elad Gil on AIEditorial: And The Oscar Goes to SoraOpenAI teased its new video creation model - Sora - this week.In doing so it released a technical report and several examples of prompts and outputs.Cautious to not over-state the end game the company said:We explore large-scale training of generative models on video data. Specifically, we train text-conditional diffusion models jointly on videos and images of variable durations, resolutions and aspect ratios. We leverage a transformer architecture that operates on spacetime patches of video and image latent codes. Our largest model, Sora, is capable of generating a minute of high fidelity video. Our results suggest that scaling video generation models is a promising path towards building general purpose simulators of the physical world.All of the videos are incredible, albeit only a minute or less each. My favorite is the Dogs in Snow video:Although the ‘Closeup Man in Glasses' is also wonderful.I mention this because the speed at which AI is addressing new fields is - in my opinion - mind-boggling. Skills that take humans decades to perfect are being learned in months and are capable of scaling to infinite outputs using words, code, images, video, and sound.It will take the advancement of robotics to tie these capabilities to physical work, but that seems assured to happen.When engineering, farming, transport, or production meets AI then human needs can be addressed directly.Sora winning an Oscar for Cinematography or in producing from a script or a book seems far-fetched. But it wasn't so long ago that a tech company doing so would have been laughable, and now we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV Plus regularly being nominated or winning awards.Production will increasingly be able to leverage AI.Some will say this is undermining human skills, but I think the opposite. It will release human skills. Take the prompt that produced the Dogs in Snow video:Prompt:A litter of golden retriever puppies playing in the snow. Their heads pop out of the snow, covered in.I can imagine that idea and write it down. But my skills would not allow me to produce it. Sora opens my imagination and enables me to act on it. I guess that many humans have creative ideas that they are unable to execute….up to now. Sora, DallE, and ChatGPT all focus on releasing human potential.Google released its Gemini 1.5 model this week (less than a month after releasing Gemini Ultra 1.0). Tom's Guide has a summary and analysis by Ryan MorrisonGemini Pro 1.5 has a staggering 10 million token context length. That is the amount of content it can store in its memory for a single chat or response. This is enough for hours of video or multiple books within a single conversation, and Google says it can find any piece of information within that window with a high level of accuracy.Jeff Dean, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist wrote on X that the model also comes with advanced multimodal capabilities across code, text, image, audio and video.He wrote that this means you can “interact in sophisticated ways with entire books, very long document collections, codebases of hundreds of thousands of lines across hundreds of files, full movies, entire podcast series, and more."In “needle-in-a-haystack” testing where they look for the needle in the vast amount of data stored in the context window, they were able to find specific pieces of information with 99.7% accuracy even with 10 million tokens of data.All of this makes it easy to understand why Kate Clark at The Information penned a piece with the title: I Was Wrong. We Haven't Reached Peak AI FrenzyI will leave this week's editorial with Ryan Morrison's observation at the end of his article:What we are seeing with these advanced multimodal models is the interaction of the digital and the real, where AI is gaining a deeper understanding of humanity and how WE see the world.Essays of the WeekAI Leads New Unicorn Creation As Ranks Of $1B Startups Swells February 13, 2024Gené Teare @geneteareFewer startups became unicorns in 2023, but The Crunchbase Unicorn Board also became more crowded, as exits became even scarcer.That means that 10 years after the term “unicorn” was coined to denote those private startups valued at $1 billion or more, there are over 1,500 current unicorn companies globally, collectively valued at more than $5 trillion based on their most recent valuations from funding deals.All told, fewer than 100 companies joined the Unicorn Board in 2023, the lowest count in more than five years, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows.Of the 95 companies that joined the board in 2023, AI was the leading sector, adding 20 new unicorns alone. Other leading unicorn sectors in 2023 included fintech (with 14 companies), cleantech and energy (12 each), and semiconductors (nine).Based on an analysis of Crunchbase data, 41 companies joined the Unicorn Board from the U.S. and 24 from China in 2023. Other countries were in the single digits for new unicorns: Germany had four new companies, while India and the U.K. each had three.New records nonethelessDespite the slower pace of new unicorns, the Crunchbase board of current private unicorns has reached new milestones as fewer companies exited the board in 2023.The total number of global unicorns on our board reached 1,500 at the start of 2024, which takes into account the exclusion of those that have exited via an M&A or IPO transaction. Altogether, these private unicorn companies have raised north of $900 billion from investors.This year also marks a decade since investor Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures coined the term unicorn for private companies valued at a billion dollars or more.In a new report looking at the unicorn landscape 10 years later, Lee said she believes the unicorn phenomenon is not going away, despite a sharp downturn in venture funding in recent years. She expects more than 1,000 new companies in the U.S. alone will join the ranks in the next decade.Unicorn exitsIn 2023, 10 unicorn companies exited the board via an IPO, far fewer than in recent years. That contrasts with 20 companies in 2022 and 113 in 2021.However, M&A was more active in 2023. Sixteen unicorn companies were acquired in 2023 — up from 2022 when 11 companies were acquired and slightly down from 2021 with 21 companies exiting via an acquisition.December numbersEight new companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in December 2023. The highest monthly count last year for new unicorns was 10 and the lowest was two.Of the new unicorns, three are artificial intelligence companies. Other sectors that minted unicorns in December include fintech, cybersecurity, food and beverage, and health care.The new unicorn companies minted in December 2023 were:..MoreBehold: The Sports Streaming BundleIt just makes sense. Sports was the last thing holding together the cable TV bundle. Now it will be the start of the streaming bundle.That's my 5-minute reaction to the truly huge news that Disney, Warner, and Fox are launching a new sports streaming service, combining their various sports rights into one package. Well, presumably. The details are still quite thin at this point. Clearly, several entities were racing to this story, with both WSJ and Bloomberg claiming "scoops" by publishing paragraph-long stories with only the high level facts. I'm linking to Varietyabove, which at least has a few more details, including (canned) quotes from Bob Iger, Lachlan Murdoch, and David Zaslav.Fox Corp., Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney are set to launch a new streaming joint venture that will make all of their sports programming available under a single broadband roof, a move that will put content from ESPN, TNT and Fox Sports on a new standalone app and, in the process, likely shake up the world of TV sports.The three media giants are slated to launch the new service in the fall. Subscribers would get access to linear sports networks including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, ABC, Fox, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, TBS, truTV and ESPN+, as well as hundreds of hours from the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL and many top college divisions. Pricing will be announced at a later date.Each company would own one third of the new outlet and license their sports content to it on a non-exclusive basis. The service would have a new brand and an independent management teamYes, this is essentially running the Hulu playbook of old, but only for sports content. No, that ultimately didn't end well, but Hulu had a decent enough run before egos got involved.1 Here, the egos are once again being (at least temporarily) set aside to do something obvious: make money. Sports is the one bit of content that most people watch in one form or another, live no less (hence why it was keeping the cable bundle together). And increasingly, with the rise of streaming, it was becoming impossible to figure out what game was on, where. You could get access to most games online now, but it might require buying four or five different services. And again, then finding which one the game you wanted was actually on...More40 Years Ago, This Ad Changed the Super Bowl ForeverAn oral history of Apple's groundbreaking “1984” spot, which helped to establish the Super Bowl as TV's biggest commercial showcase.By Saul AusterlitzPublished Feb. 9, 2024Updated Feb. 10, 2024Four decades ago, the Super Bowl became the Super Bowl.It wasn't because of anything that happened in the game itself: On Jan. 22, 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated Washington 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII, a contest that was mostly over before halftime. But during the broadcast on CBS, a 60-second commercial loosely inspired by a famous George Orwell novel shook up the advertising and the technology sectors without ever showing the product it promoted. Conceived by the Chiat/Day ad agency and directed by Ridley Scott, then fresh off making the seminal science-fiction noir “Blade Runner,” the Apple commercial “1984,” which was intended to introduce the new Macintosh computer, would become one of the most acclaimed commercials ever made. It also helped to kick off — pun partially intended — the Super Bowl tradition of the big game serving as an annual showcase for gilt-edged ads from Fortune 500 companies. It all began with the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs's desire to take the battle with the company's rivals to a splashy television broadcast he knew nothing about.In recent interviews, several of the people involved in creating the “1984” spot — Scott; John Sculley, then chief executive of Apple; Steve Hayden, a writer of the ad for Chiat/Day; Fred Goldberg, the Apple account manager for Chiat/Day; and Anya Rajah, the actor who famously threw the sledgehammer — looked back on how the commercial came together, its inspiration and the internal objections that almost kept it from airing. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.JOHN SCULLEY On Oct. 19, 1983, we're all sitting around in Steve [Jobs's] building, the Mac building, and the cover of Businessweek says, “The Winner is … IBM.” We were pretty deflated because this was the introduction of the IBM PCjr, and we hadn't even introduced the Macintosh yet.STEVE HAYDEN Jobs said, “I want something that will stop the world in its tracks.” Our media director, Hank Antosz, said, “Well, there's only one place that can do that — the Super Bowl.” And Steve Jobs said, “What's the Super Bowl?” [Antosz] said, “Well, it's a huge football game that attracts one of the largest audiences of the year.” And [Jobs] said, “I've never seen a Super Bowl. I don't think I know anybody who's seen a Super Bowl.”FRED GOLDBERG The original idea was actually done in 1982. We presented an ad [with] a headline, which was “Why 1984 Won't Be Like ‘1984,'” to Steve Jobs, and he didn't think the Apple III was worthy of that claim...MoreIs the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press's relationship to its audience.Clare MaloneFebruary 10, 2024My first job in media was as an assistant at The American Prospect, a small political magazine in Washington, D.C., that offered a promising foothold in journalism. I helped with the print order, mailed checks to writers—after receiving lots of e-mails asking, politely, Where is my money?—and ran the intern program. This last responsibility allowed me a small joy: every couple of weeks, a respected journalist would come into the office for a brown-bag lunch in our conference room, giving our most recent group of twentysomethings a chance to ask for practical advice about “making it.” One man told us to embrace a kind of youthful workaholism, before we became encumbered by kids and families. An investigative reporter implored us to file our taxes and to keep our personal lives in order—never give the rich and powerful a way to undercut your journalism. But perhaps the most memorable piece of advice was from a late-career writer who didn't mince words. You want to make it in journalism, he said? Marry rich. We laughed. He didn't.I've thought a lot about that advice in the past year. A report that tracked layoffs in the industry in 2023 recorded twenty-six hundred and eighty-one in broadcast, print, and digital news media. NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast—the publisher of The New Yorker—all made significant layoffs. BuzzFeed News closed, as did Gawker. The Washington Post, which lost about a hundred million dollars last year, offered buyouts to two hundred and forty employees. In just the first month of 2024, Condé Nast laid off a significant number of Pitchfork's staff and folded the outlet into GQ; the Los Angeles Times laid off at least a hundred and fifteen workers (their union called it “the big one”); Time cut fifteen per cent of its union-represented editorial staff; the Wall Street Journal slashed positions at its D.C. bureau; and Sports Illustrated, which had been weathering a scandal for publishing A.I.-generated stories, laid off much of its staff as well. One journalist recently cancelled a networking phone call with me, writing, “I've decided to officially take my career in a different direction.” There wasn't much I could say to counter that conclusion; it was perfectly logical.“Publishers, brace yourselves—it's going to be a wild ride,” Matthew Goldstein, a media consultant, wrote in a January newsletter. “I see a potential extinction-level event in the future.” Some of the forces cited by Goldstein were already well known: consumers are burned out by the news, and social-media sites have moved away from promoting news articles. But Goldstein also pointed to Google's rollout of A.I.-integrated search, which answers user queries within the Google interface, rather than referring them to outside Web sites, as a major factor in this coming extinction. According to a recent Wall Street Journalanalysis, Google generates close to forty per cent of traffic across digital media. Brands with strong home-page traffic will likely be less affected, Goldstein wrote—places like Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Daily Mail, CNN, the Washington Post, and Fox News. But Web sites that aren't as frequently typed into browsers need to “contemplate drastic measures, possibly halving their brand portfolios.”What will emerge in the wake of mass extinction, Brian Morrissey, another media analyst, recently wrote in his newsletter, “The Rebooting,” is “a different industry, leaner and diminished, often serving as a front operation to other businesses,” such as events, e-commerce, and sponsored content. In fact, he told me, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the end of the mass-media era. “This is a delayed reaction to the commercial Internet itself,” he said. “I don't know if anything could have been done differently.”..Much MoreVideo of the WeekAI and Everything Else - Benedict Evans from SlushAI of the WeekThe OpenAI EndgameThoughts about the outcome of the NYT versus OpenAI copyright lawsuitBy Mike LoukidesFebruary 13, 2024Since the New York Times sued OpenAI for infringing its copyrights by using Times content for training, everyone involved with AI has been wondering about the consequences. How will this lawsuit play out? And, more importantly, how will the outcome affect the way we train and use large language models?There are two components to this suit. First, it was possible to get ChatGPT to reproduce some Times articles very close to verbatim. That's fairly clearly copyright infringement, though there are still important questions that could influence the outcome of the case. Reproducing the New York Times clearly isn't the intent of ChatGPT, and OpenAI appears to have modified ChatGPT's guardrails to make generating infringing content more difficult, though probably not impossible. Is this enough to limit any damages? It's not clear that anybody has used ChatGPT to avoid paying for a NYT subscription. Second, the examples in a case like this are always cherry-picked. While the Times can clearly show that OpenAI can reproduce some articles, can it reproduce any article from the Times' archive? Could I get ChatGPT to produce an article from page 37 of the September 18, 1947 issue? Or, for that matter, an article from the Chicago Tribune or the Boston Globe? Is the entire corpus available (I doubt it), or just certain random articles? I don't know, and given that OpenAI has modified GPT to reduce the possibility of infringement, it's almost certainly too late to do that experiment. The courts will have to decide whether inadvertent, inconsequential, or unpredictable reproduction meets the legal definition of copyright infringement.The more important claim is that training a model on copyrighted content is infringement, whether or not the model is capable of reproducing that training data in its output. An inept and clumsy version of this claim was made by Sarah Silverman and others in a suit that was dismissed. The Authors' Guild has its own version of this lawsuit, and it is working on a licensing model that would allow its members to opt in to a single licensing agreement. The outcome of this case could have many side-effects, since it essentially would allow publishers to charge not just for the texts they produce, but for how those texts are used.It is difficult to predict what the outcome will be, though easy enough guess. Here's mine. OpenAI will settle with the New York Times out of court, and we won't get a ruling. This settlement will have important consequences: it will set a de-facto price on training data. And that price will no doubt be high. Perhaps not as high as the Times would like (there are rumors that OpenAI has offered something in the range of $1 million to $5 million), but sufficiently high enough to deter OpenAI's competitors.$1M is not, in and of itself, a terribly high price, and the Times reportedly thinks that it's way too low; but realize that OpenAI will have to pay a similar amount to almost every major newspaper publisher worldwide in addition to organizations like the Authors Guild, technical journal publishers, magazine publishers, and many other content owners. The total bill is likely to be close to $1 billion, if not more, and as models need to be updated, at least some of it will be a recurring cost. I suspect that OpenAI would have difficulty going higher, even given Microsoft's investments—and, whatever else you may think of this strategy—OpenAI has to think about the total cost. I doubt that they are close to profitable; they appear to be running on an Uber-like business plan, in which they spend heavily to buy the market without regard for running a sustainable business. But even with that business model, billion-dollar expenses have to raise the eyebrows of partners like Microsoft.The Times, on the other hand, appears to be making a common mistake: overvaluing its data. Yes, it has a large archive—but what is the value of old news? Furthermore, in almost any application but especially in AI, the value of data isn't the data itself; it's the correlations between different datasets. The Times doesn't own those correlations any more than I own the correlations between my browsing data and Tim O'Reilly's. But those correlations are precisely what's valuable to OpenAI and others building data-driven products...MoreOpenAI Sora– The most realistic AI-generated video to dateERIK NASOOpenAI Sora is an AI text-to-video model that has achieved incredibly realistic video that is hard to tell it is AI. It's very life-like but not real. I think we have just hit the beginning of some truly powerful AI-generated video that could change the game for stock footage and more. Below are two examples of the most realistic AI prompt-generated videos I have seen.Prompt: A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with warm glowing neon and animated city signage. She wears a black leather jacket, a long red dress, and black boots, and carries a black purse. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick. She walks confidently and casually. The street is damp and reflective, creating a mirror effect of the colorful lights. Many pedestrians walk about.Prompt: Drone view of waves crashing against the rugged cliffs along Big Sur's garay point beach. The crashing blue waters create white-tipped waves, while the golden light of the setting sun illuminates the rocky shore. A small island with a lighthouse sits in the distance, and green shrubbery covers the cliff's edge. The steep drop from the road down to the beach is a dramatic feat, with the cliff's edges jutting out over the sea. This is a view that captures the raw beauty of the coast and the rugged landscape of the Pacific Coast Highway.Prompt: Animated scene features a close-up of a short fluffy monster kneeling beside a melting red candle. The art style is 3D and realistic, with a focus on lighting and texture. The mood of the painting is one of wonder and curiosity, as the monster gazes at the flame with wide eyes and open mouth. Its pose and expression convey a sense of innocence and playfulness, as if it is exploring the world around it for the first time. The use of warm colors and dramatic lighting further enhances the cozy atmosphere of the image.Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user's prompt. OpenAI SOra states they are teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction...MoreI Was Wrong. We Haven't Reached Peak AI Frenzy.By Kate ClarkFeb 15, 2024, 4:16pm PSTAfter Sam Altman's sudden firing last year, I argued the chaos that followed his short-lived ouster would inject a healthy dose of caution into venture investments in artificial intelligence companies. I figured we'd finally reached the peak of the AI venture capital frenzy when a threatened employee exodus from OpenAI risked sending the value of the $86 billion AI juggernaut almost to zero. There was plenty of other proof that the hype for generative AI was fading. Investors were openly saying they planned to be a lot tougher on valuation negotiations and would ask startups harder questions about governance. Some companies had begun to consider selling themselves due to the high costs of developing AI software. And an early darling of the AI boom, AI-powered writing tool Jasper, had become the butt of jokes when it slashed internal revenue projections and cut its internal valuation after having won a $1.5 billion valuation in 2022. I forgot that everyone in Silicon Valley suffers from short-term memory loss. After a week sipping boxed water with venture capitalists from South Park to Sand Hill Road, I'm convinced I called the end of the AI frenzy far too soon. In fact, I expect this year will deliver more cash into the hands of U.S. AI startups than last year, when those companies raised a total of $63 billion, according to PitchBook data. Altman's fundraising ambitions will surely boost the total. A recent report from The Wall Street Journal said Altman plans to raise trillions of dollars to develop the AI chips needed to create artificial general intelligence, software that can reason the way humans do. Even if that number is actually much smaller, talk of such goals lifts the ceiling for other startup founders, who are likely to think even bigger and to be more aggressive in their fundraising. Investor appetite for AI companies is still growing, too. These investors claimed last fall that they were done with the FOMO-inspired deals, but they're pushing checks on the top AI companies now harder than ever...MoreNews Of the WeekI tried Vision Pro. Here's my takeThe Quest 3 is better than you might expectPosted by Matt Birchler13 Feb 2024Alex Heath for The Verge: Zuckerberg says Quest 3 is “the better product” vs. Apple's Vision ProHe says the Quest has a better “immersive” content library than Apple, which is technically true for now, though he admits that the Vision Pro is a better entertainment device. And then there's the fact that the Quest 3 is, as Zuck says, “like seven times less expensive.”I currently own both headsets and while I'm very excited about the potential in the Vision Pro, I actually find it hard to fully disagree with Zuck on this one. I think a lot of people have only used the Vision Pro would be surprised how well the Quest 3 does some things in comparison.For example, the pass-through mode is definitely not quite as good as the Vision Pro's, but it's closer than you might expect. And while people are rightly impressed with how well the Vision Pro has windows locked in 3D space, honestly the Quest 3 is just as good at this in my experience. When it comes to comfort, I do think the Vision Pro is easier to wear for longer periods, but I find it more finicky to get in just the right spot in front of my eyes, while the Quest 3 seems to have a larger sweet spot. And let's not even talk about the field of view, which is way wider on the Quest to the point of being unnoticeable basically all the time. I kinda think field of view will be similar to phone bezels in that you get used to what you have and anything more seems huge — you can get used to the Vision Pro's narrower field of view, but once you're used to wider, it's hard to not notice when going back.The Vision Pro has some hardware features that help it rise above (the massively higher resolution screen jumps to mind), but I'm just saying that if you're looking for everything to be 7x better to match the price difference, I don't think that's there.Beyond this, the products are quite different, though. As Zuckerberg says, the Quest 3 is more focused on fully immersive VR experiences, and while the Vision Pro has a little of that right now, it's not really doing the same things. And when it comes to gaming it's not even close. The Quest 3 has a large library of games available and that expands to almost every VR game ever made with Steam Link.On the other hand, the Vision Pro is much for a “computer” than the Quest ever was. If you can do it on a Mac or an iPad, you can probably already do it on the Vision Pro. And I'm not talking about finding some weird alternate version of your task manager or web browser that doesn't sync with anything else in your life, I'm talking about the apps you already know and love. This is huge and it's Apple leveraging its ecosystem to make sure you can seamlessly move from Mac to iPhone to iPad to Vision Pro. And if you can't install something from the App Store, the web browser is just as capable as Safari on the iPad. If all else fails, you can always just bring your full Mac into your space as well. I will say the Quest 3 can do this and has the advantage of working with Windows as well, but if you have a Mac, it's much, much better.This is more words than I expected to write about a CEO saying his product is better than the competition's (shocker), but I do think that Zuck's statement is less insane than some may think it to be...MoreThe Supreme Court will decide if the government can seize control of YouTube and TwitterWe're about to find out if the Supreme Court still believes in capitalism.By Ian Millhiser Feb 15, 2024, 7:00am ESTIan Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.In mid-2021, about a year before he began his longstanding feud with the biggest employer in his state, Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation attempting to seize control of content moderation at major social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter (now called X by Elon Musk). A few months later, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, signed similar legislation in his state.Both laws are almost comically unconstitutional — the First Amendment does not permit the government to order media companies to publish content they do not wish to publish — and neither law is currently in effect. A federal appeals court halted the key provisions of Florida's law in 2022, and the Supreme Court temporarily blocked Texas's law shortly thereafter (though the justices, somewhat ominously, split 5-4 in this later case).Nevertheless, the justices have not yet weighed in on whether these two unconstitutional laws must be permanently blocked, and that question is now before the Court in a pair of cases known as Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton.The stakes in both cases are quite high, and the Supreme Court's decision is likely to reveal where each one of the Republican justices falls on the GOP's internal conflict between old-school free market capitalists and a newer generation that is eager to pick cultural fights with business...MoreArm Results Set The World On FireFebruary 13, 2024 · by D/D Advisors · in Analyst Decoder Ring. ·Arm reported its second set of earnings as a (once again) public company last week. These numbers were particularly strong, well above consensus for both the current and guided quarters. Arm stock rallied strongly on the results up ~30% for the week. These numbers were important as they go a long way to establishing the company's credibility with the Street in a way their prior results did not.That being said, we saw things we both liked and disliked in their numbers. Here are our highlights of those:Positive: Growing Value Capture. One of our chief concerns with the company since IPO has been the low value they capture per licensed chip shipped – roughly $0.11 per chip at the IPO. That figure continued to inch higher in the latest results, but critically they pointed out that their royalty rate doubles with the latest version of their IP (v9). This does not mean that all of their royalty rates are going to double any time soon, but it does point very much in the right direction. Critically, they noted this rate increase applies to architectural licenses as well.Negative: The Model is Complex. Judging from the number of questions management fielded on the call about this rate increase no one really knows how to model Arm. The company has a lot of moving parts in its revenue mix, and they have limits to their ability to communicate some very important parts of their model. We think that at some point the company would be well served by providing some clearer guide posts on how to build these models or they risk the Street always playing catch up with a wide swing of expectations each quarter.Positive: Premium Plan Conversion. The company said three companies converted from their AFA plan to the ATA model. We will not get into the details of those here, but these can best be thought of in software terms with customers on low priced subscription plans converting to Premium subscription plans. This is a good trend, and management expressed a high degree of confidence that they expect to see it continue. They have spent a few years putting these programs in place and seem to have thought them through. This matters particularly because these programs are well suited for smaller, earlier-stage companies. The old Arm struggled to attract new customers in large part because of the high upfront costs of Arm licenses. Programs like AFA and ATA could go a long way to redressing those past wrongs.Negative: China remains a black box. Arm China is of course a constant source of speculation. In the latest quarter it looks like a large portion of growth came from China which does not exactly square with other data coming from China right now. It is still unclear to us how much of Arm's revenues from China's handset companies gets booked through Arm China as a related party transaction and how much is direct. Investors are confused too. There is no easy solution to this problem, digging too hard into Arm China's numbers is unlikely to make anyone happy with the answers, but hopefully over time it all settles down.Positive: Growing Complexity of Compute. Management repeatedly mentioned this factor, noting that this leads to more chips and more Arm cores shipping in the marketplace. Some of this is tied to AI, but we think the story is broader than that. It is going to be tempting to see much of Arm's growth as riding the AI wave, but this does not fully capture the situation. The AI story is largely about GPUs, which are not particularly heavy with Arm cores. But those GPUs still need some CPU attach, and AI accelerators can sometimes be good Arm targets.Negative: Diversification. Arm remains heavily dependent on smartphones, and we suspect the return to inventory stocking by handset makers is playing a big role in their guidance. When asked about segmentation of their results the company declined to update the model provided during the IPO. We hope to see some diversification here when they do update their figures later in the year.Overall, the company did a good job in the quarter. They still have some kinks to work out with their communication to the Street, but this was a good second step as a public company...MoreStartup of the WeekBret Taylor's new AI company aims to help customers get answers and complete tasks automaticallyRon Miller @ron_miller / 6:36 AM PST•February 13, 2024Image Credits: mi-vector / Getty ImagesWe've been hearing about former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor's latest gig since he announced he was leaving the CRM giant in November 2022. Last February we heard he was launching an AI startup built with former Google employee Clay Bavor. Today, the two emerged with a new conversational AI company called Sierra with some bold claims about what it can do.At its heart, the new company is a customer service bot. That's not actually all that Earth-shattering, but the company claims that it's much more than that, with its software going beyond being an extension of a FAQ page and actually taking actions on behalf of the customer.“Sierra agents can do so much more than just answer questions. They take action using your systems, from upgrading a subscription in your customer database to managing the complexities of a furniture delivery in your order management system. Agents can reason, problem solve and make decisions,” the company claimed in a blog post.Having worked with large enterprise customers at Salesforce, Taylor certainly understands that issues like hallucinations, where a large language model sometimes makes up an answer when it lacks the information to answer accurately, is a serious problem. That's especially true for large companies, whose brand reputation is at stake. The company claims that it is solving hallucination issues.Image Credits: SierraAt the same time, it's connecting to other enterprise systems to undertake tasks on behalf of the customer without humans being involved. These are both big audacious claims and will be challenging to pull off...MoreX of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thatwastheweek.substack.com/subscribe
El anuncio ‘1984' de Apple es un hito en la historia de la publicidad. Fue presentado por Steve Jobs durante la keynote de 1983, y se emitió a nivel nacional en la noche del 31 de diciembre de 1983 y luego durante el Super Bowl el 22 de enero de 1984. El anuncio fue dirigido por Ridley Scott y producido por la agencia de publicidad ChiatDay. En él, una atleta corre a través de una serie de hombres sin emociones y finalmente arroja un martillo a una pantalla que muestra al Gran Hermano, una referencia a la novela distópica ‘1984' de George Orwell. El anuncio concluye con el lema: "El 24 de enero, Apple Computer presentará Macintosh. Y verás por qué 1984 no será como 1984"2. Este anuncio marcó un antes y un después en los anuncios de los Super Bowls y se considera uno de los mejores anuncios de televisión de todos los tiempos, El impacto del anuncio fue enorme, Apple reportó ingresos de hasta 3,5 millones inmediatamente después de la emisión del anuncio en la Super Bowl1. A pesar de las pruebas iniciales que indicaban que la gente odiaba el anuncio, logró tener un gran impacto en la cultura y en Apple. En resumen, el anuncio ‘1984' de Apple es un ejemplo de cómo una pieza publicitaria puede convertirse en un icono cultura "Podéis contribuir al mantenimiento de nuestro podcast por Paypal israeledison20@hotmail.com " //Donde encontrarnos Canal Youtube https://www.youtube.com/c/ApplelianosApplelianos/featured Grupo Telegram (enlace de invitación) https://t.me/+U9If86lsuY00MGU0 Correo electrónico applelianos@gmail.com Canal Telegram Episodios https://t.me/ApplelianosFLAC Mi Shop Amazon https://amzn.to/30sYcbB Twitter https://twitter.com/ApplelianosPod ( (https://twitter.com/ApplelianosPod)https://twitter.com/ApplelianosPod ) Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/applelianos-podcast/id993909563 Ivoox https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-applelianos-podcast_sq_f1170563_1.html ( (https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-applelianos-podcast_sq_f1170563_1.html ) https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-applelianos-podcast_sq_f1170563_1.html )
Eric Ng, Senior VP of Marketing at Two Chairs, has an agile mindset which has enabled him to keep adapting to the significant changes brought about by technology developments in the marketing discipline—including many new channels, formats, and granular measurement tools. Eric shares insights about screening for a flexible mindset when building teams, and how trust, empowerment, and co-creation are key for nurturing growth. Eric explains how his flexible attitude has allowed him to adapt to new hybrid/remote working arrangements. KEY TAKEAWAYS [02:58] Seeing the Apple 1984 commercial in grade school, Eric knew he wanted to do marketing. [03:30] At college, Eric co-founds Student.com with friends which goes well, he learns a lot when his second start-up fails completely. [05:01] Eric joins Apple's advertising agency Chiat/Day which was a dream job for him. [06:27] Marketing is about resource allocation or figuring out how to make (increasingly informed) bets. [07:24] Flexibility is essential in an ever-changing industry—mixing testing and iterating with renewed use of broad-based ideas to drive fame. [10:02] Eric reflects on his experience building teams, and how screening for mindset is paramount. [11:27] Eric's methodology to consolidate his team's learning is that they must teach others in turn. [13:02] Working for a mission-oriented organization makes motivation, branding and recruiting easier. [15:30] Two Chairs offers a diverse group of therapists to serve market requirements as people's needs and relationship with therapy evolve. [16:37] If connection with your therapist—the therapeutic alliance—is the best predictor of success, having a diverse therapist offering increases potential matches and outcomes. [19:02] The pandemic reduced mental health-related stigma along with willingness to be vulnerable. [20:12] Eric never worked remotely prior to the pandemic, but his perspective has shifted significantly. [21:05] Rethinking many aspects of work in hybrid situations, including how to recognize people's successes. [22:18] The dial tone, a remote version of the high-five! [24:24] Meetings are important, they just need to be well thought out. [26:09] Shifting your mindset to manage distributed teams starting with trust and empowerment. [27:20] Empathy is essential to understand who each person is, what they are doing, what their needs are. [29:00] Cultivating trust requires a safe space, time to adjust, and guardrails to avoid the worst. [30:24] People do best when they can discover on their own and co-create. [32:30] Eric sees potential of simplification in the future, especially in healthcare which can be overcomplicated and confusing. [35:00] Eric asks Sophie what excites her—understanding better how we each work, how we can come together effectively as a team, and what we learned by about what we are capable of under pressure. [36:55] Technological and societal changes are bringing additional layers of diversity we can address in different ways. [40:16] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: If adapting with an agile mindset becomes overwhelming, take one small step that you haven't taken before and explore the new experience. RESOURCES Eric Ng on LinkedIn Two Chairs website QUOTES (edited) “I think that's one of the things when you're growing where everything seems to be going well if you don't hit a roadblock, you don't grow.” “I'm hoping that the team members who are learning are also going to teach others. It gives them that opportunity to solidify the things that they're thinking about and really learn. There's nothing like teaching something in order to learn it!” “That connection with your therapist — this idea of a therapeutic alliance — is perhaps the best predictor of having successful outcomes for mental health. So if you match really well, you end up having a great outcome. I'm obviously interested in user experience as a marketer, but in this case, the actual outcomes for a patient or a client really, really matter.”
In the early 90s, cutting-edge advertising agency Chiat/Day announced a radical plan, aimed at giving the company a jolt of creative renewal. They would sweep away corner offices and cubicles and replace them with zany open spaces, as well as innovative portable computers and phones. A brand new era of “hot-desking” had arrived. Problems quickly began. Disgruntled employees found themselves hauling temperamental, clunky laptops and armfuls of paperwork all over the office; some even had to use the trunks of their cars as filing cabinets. Soon, the unhappy nomads had had enough. Bad execution was to blame for the failure of this “playful” workspace. But Chiat/Day had made another mistake here, too – one that was more serious, more fundamental and altogether more common. For a full list of sources for this episode, go to timharford.com. Listener questions Tim is taking your questions. Do you have any queries about one of the stories we've covered? Are you curious about how we make the show? Send in your questions, however big or small, and Tim will do his best to answer them in a special Q&A episode. You can email your question to tales@pushkin.fm or leave a voice note at 914-984-7650. Please be aware that if you're calling from outside the US international rates will apply.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In Episode 45 of The Bad Podcast, we welcomed Cameron Day, an award-winning ECD and copywriter, and the author of two books, Chew with Your Mind Open and Spittin Chiclets. He's also advertising royalty, being the son of Guy Day, co-founder of the inimitable Chiat/Day. Cameron shares his experience of the blessings and challenges of following in his father's footsteps, which business sectors in advertising can trap a copywriter and how to overcome them and a few thoughts about how to treat clients. Episode Links: Cameron Day's WebsiteBuy Spittin Chiclets: The Advertising Survival Guide - Stage Two: the Messy Middle YearsThanks for ad'ing a little Bad to your day ;) now follow us on Twitter dammit More Links: Pod SiteBrian's BookEric's InstagramAmelia's Book
In this episode, our guest is Susan Lee Colby, the co-founder, and co-CCO of LA-based Grace Creative, the first agency focused on activating the buying power of women over 50. Grace Creative's clients include ultra-luxury cruise line Seabourn, Golden Door, the #1Destination Spa in the World, and work for P&G's SeeMe Beauty and Gennev Telehealth for women in the second half of life. Over Susan's award-winning career, she has brought her instinctive creativity to some of the World's most prominent brands - including Honda, Apple, Pizza Hut, and Yamaha. After stints at RPA, ChiatDay, Della Femina, and BBDO, she launched "Crazy Cat Lady," an upscale retail pet business featured widely in newspapers, magazines, and national television. Susan has raised two daughters, given birth to two businesses, and delivers the kind of thinking for her clients that win major awards like One Show, The Clios, and Communication Arts. Grace Creative: https://gracecreativela.com/ _____ E-mail Us: asiansinadvertising@gmail.com Shop: asiansinadvertising.com/shop Learn More: asiansinadvertising.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/asiansinadvertising/support --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/asiansinadvertising/support
Chris DeNinno is the kind of Creative Director you want to drink beers and eat burritos with. He's cool, down to earth, accessible and super insightful. It's no wonder he's enjoyed an incredible career working at some of the best agencies in the world like FCB, Y&R, Chiat Day and David&Goliath just to name a few. And what makes him even more special is his contagious passion for teaching the next generation of Creatives through his side hustle as instructor at the Book Shop For Ads Portfolio School in LA. This is a must listen for anyone looking to break into the ad biz. Learn more about the book shop here http://thebookshopads.com/ And don't forget to pick up my new book here https://mybook.to/whatsthebigidea
My guest this week is Wonderhood Studios chairman and former C4 CEO David Abraham. David's career straddles the advertising and broadcast industries and he has been in the vanguard of changes in both businesses, from his early days at Chiat/Day and then St Luke's advertising agencies; his move to Discovery and then TLC in the US; his role as CEO at UKTV; his tenure running UK broadcaster C4; and now with Wonderhood Studios, which brings those disciplines together under one roof. Enjoy!
Follis began his career working for major advertising agencies such as FCB/Chicago and DDB Worldwide in New York. In the mid-1980s, his entrepreneurial career began with freelance work for such major New York shops as Chiat/Day, Della Femina and Kirshenbaum & Bond. His work on the Kenneth Cole account resulted in awards and national press.In 1988, Follis co-founded Follis&Verdi, with clients such as The American Stock Exchange, No Excuses Jeans, Solgar Vitamins and Sorrell Ridge Fruit Spreads—a case taught at the Harvard Business School and featured in Forbes. In ‘93, Follis/DeVito/Verdi won 9 ADDY Awards making it the second most awarded agency in New York. That same year Follis formed Follis Inc to include a focus on non-traditional and online marketing. In 2003, in response to the shifting media landscape and to provide an alternative to the traditional ad agency model, Follis created "Follis Marketing Therapy". And, in 2006, Follis created "The Follis Marketing Report" blog and "The Marketing Show with John Follis" podcast syndicated on iTunes. How did you get started in advertising and marketing all those years ago?Well, first of all, thank you for having me on your show. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. So yeah, I started a while ago and I was always good creatively growing up as a kid. The question was how to question was how do I apply that creative talent to a career? And I was probably halfway through college when I got pulled aside by an instructor who was teaching a graphic design class and she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. And when I said I wasn't sure if she said, Well, I think you are to really seriously consider pursuing something either in advertising or communication arts or some kind of media because you're really really talented. So had it not been for that instructor? I'm not sure I would have pursued that. But you know, that helped a lot. And after she gave me that idea, I transferred to a university Syracuse University that had one of the best advertising programs in the country. So that's how I started on that track.Where are you in Chicago first or New York first.John's response:So I grew up in Connecticut, and I was I was going to school in upstate New York and Syracuse and then after graduation, I didn't feel I was ready for New York City, even though that is the mecca of advertising as some of your listeners may know. They call it Madison Avenue. But I was I was a little intimidated by New York so did not go there. Like many of my classmates did it and started out my career in Atlanta, Georgia, two years in Atlanta. Then I got felt that wasn't fast enough for me. So I moved up to Chicago, spent three years there and after that, I felt like I was ready for the for the big leagues and moved to New Yorkhttps://www.follisinc.com/therapy.htmhttps://www.youtube.com/c/JohnFollisBIV
The amazing planning story behind Fallon's win over Chiat Day for the Citi account: one that resulted in the best un-bank-like advertising ever. And it would never have happened if not for two guys on a speakerphone.
Carpe Diem. Seize the day. The Cameron Day. This week we've snared industry legend, author, and birthday boy, Cameron Day, for a chinwag. Creative Director, writer, and chainsaw enthusiast, Cameron has been crafting ads and shape-shifting brands for over thirty laps around the sun. Pile your paper plate high with topics including the influence of his father Guy Day (of Chiat/Day), writing his Advertising Survival Guides, hiring the quietest person in the room, patience, jargon, trying to pitch a naked lady ad, and tons more. And the icing on the cake is a side-splitting story involving a power cut, an unfinished joke, winning the Land Rover account, too much sushi, and a fart that nearly brought down a plane. Party on. ///// Follow Cameron on Twitter and LinkedIn Check out his website Here's his interview with Luke Sullivan, David Baldwin, Thomas Kemeny and Nancy Vonk Cameron's Advertising Survival Guides Chew With Your Mind Open Spittin' Chiclets Timestamps (02:06) - Quick fire questions (03:20) - First ever job (06:32) - How his dad, Guy Day, influenced his decision to go into advertising (15:49) - Why he's never tried to prove himself because of his dad's name (18:27) - His experience of big versus small agencies (21:42) - Writing his Advertising Survival Guides (26:43) - Why it's so hard for creatives to leave work on time (30:17) - Spittin' Chiclets (34:38) - Cameron's disaster story that'll leave you in stitches (43:37) - Pitching a naked lady ad (46:00) - Listener Questions (including one from Luke Sullivan) (55:46) - 4 Pertinent Posers Cameron's book recommendations are: Junior by Thomas Kemeny Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan The Belief Economy by David Baldwin Pick Me by Nancy Vonk Well-written and red by Alfredo Marcantonio /////
Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director, Citizen Group (San Francisco, CA) Inspired by Marc Gobé's book, Citizen Brand: 10 Commandments for Transforming Brand Culture in a Consumer Democracy, Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group, started his agency in 2006 to work with entities committed to meaningful and measurable pro-social impact. His agency's proposition is that organizations build brand value when they “walk their talk” and operate in ways that enhance society for their employees, shareholders, and consumers. Robin notes that the rise of social media has created a window on organizational operations . . . companies have a harder time projecting a “corporate mirage” that “everything is okay” when people can now see what is going on, assess practices, and ask the tougher questions. Clients today include for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, municipalities, cities, and trade associations. Working with Amnesty International and other NGOs while he was at Chiat/Day early in his career, Robin became aware of two operational economies: “the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around (half a million for a 30-second spot)” and the $15k budget for creating a nonprofit PSA environment. Gobé's book identifies the trend toward citizen branding as a convergence between these two economies. At his agency's inception, Robin worked with Walmart's sustainability effort and explored how big-box retail stores needed to change their operational practices to support sustainability, creating “a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, (and produce) less waste” and a model for future initiatives with other organizations. Brands get a lift from doing the right thing, he says, both for society and for the environment. In his early adulthood, Robin says he didn't know that people had human rights. He says the 30 articulated in the United Nation's post World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights made a big impact on him. Citizen Group is involved in a diverse range of projects. It is working with: Sports apparel retailer Lids on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative (They Gave Us Game) to recognize and honor early Black sports leagues. A group called Leading Age on the Keep Leading Life campaign to showcase the variety of caregiving and expert services available to people who are aging. With close friend Jordan Harris, Robin shares a concern about the need to promote electric vehicles. Citizen Group commissioned a study to investigate the feasibility of shading California's 4,000 mile aqueduct system with solar canopies to reduce evaporation, conserve water, reduce algal growth, and generate power. Annual water savings for a complete end-to-end system were estimated at 63 billion with the solar array along the aqueduct system's existing utility corridors rather than taking up working land. A spinoff company, Solar AquaGrid, will be working Audubon Society to study environmental impacts and with the state and irrigation districts to plan the first demonstration project, and break ground on the pilot (proof-of-concept) project this fall. Robin can be found on his agency's website at citizengroup.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group based in San Francisco, California, with some other fascinating interests as well. Welcome to the podcast, Robin. ROBIN: Good to be here, Rob. Thank you. ROB: Excellent to have you. Why don't you start off by telling us about Citizen Group, and what is the firm's superpower? What are you all known for? What do you do well? ROBIN: Well, I started Citizen Group in 2006, and it was really inspired by a book of the same name called Citizen Brand. This is where I can give a shout-out to an author by the name of Marc Gobé. I was really moved by the book, written in about 2003. The thesis of the book is: sooner or later, all brands will have to behave as citizen brands. That really caught me because it was like the spear in the chest moment in terms of the societal challenges we face and the responsibility brands and corporations and civil society have. It also predated, presaged, the rise of social media that has made the rise of citizen brands possible. We expect more from the brands we purchase and are loyal to. If they're not walking their talk, it can be a liability versus when they can really take the initiative and operate in a way that enhances society for their employees, for their shareholders, for their consumers. Then that builds brand value. That was the proposition. So I started Citizen Brand, and we've been working since that time with a variety of entities, for-profit companies, nonprofit orgs, municipalities, cities, sometimes, trade associations. But what they all have in common is some commitment to have pro-social impact that is meaningful and measurable. ROB: Let's pull into that a little bit. Give us maybe an example, if you can, of a client, of the sort of work you've done together, of what this looks like in action. ROBIN: Well, in the early going, roundabout 2005-2006, I had the opportunity to work with Walmart's sustainability effort. Those were two words that didn't necessarily go together at the time. It raised a lot of legitimate skepticism. But in fact, under the tenure of their CEO at the time, Lee Scott, they really saw the future as it pertains to big box retail and how they would have to change their practices, be it in terms of packaging, creating a packaging scorecard – they created more of a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, less waste. And many other initiatives. In fact, they formed 13 sustainability committees in their transportation, their energy, their seafood. That's been the model. I've also done a lot of work with what is now called the Great Sports Alliance, but it started with the nonprofit NRDC and the interest on the part of professional sports – the venues, the arenas, the teams – adopting sustainable practices, again, throughout their supply chain. Energy, waste, water, transportation, how they procure goods. That story needs to radiate through their internal supply chain to their external stakeholders to their consumers. So having meaningful initiatives that then you can start to develop stories that really show the impact and the lift that brands can get from doing the right thing – that's the common denominator. And those were two stories, ongoing, that started around the time we started Citizen. ROB: That's early, and I feel like some of that has not even arrived yet. Something I feel like we're starting to hear a little bit about is measuring the environmental impact of a business and the different layers of measurement. You're probably the expert on this and not me, but some people will say, “All of our power consumption is green energy.” It's like, okay, but – you mentioned the supply chain, you mentioned suppliers, you mentioned up and down the organization. So outside of the stick that may be coming on that, whether it's in public markets or whether it's regulatory, how do you get businesses to think about the carrot when in their own initial reaction they might say, “We do the right things here,” and it's true in maybe the first or second order effects, but when you get to the third order effects, there's a lot more to work on? ROBIN: No doubt there is. And it can be challenging. But creating an initiative that you can build the sociopolitical will for, and then building on that, creates the momentum. Creating a coalition of the willing that this is the trajectory that the company or the organization wants to take is fundamental. And it's not just environmental, by the way; it's social impact, fundamentally. ROB: Yeah, which now we have acronyms around, again. But there's a material difference, I think, between – you can check a box, you can have an ESG statement, you can have committees. It's something else entirely, I think, to not just have a committee and to actually execute. How do you think about ensuring that those committees, that those initiatives have meat to them and are not just window dressing or greenwashing or whatever else we want to call it? ROBIN: So much of it is susceptible to greenwashing, and perception is a whole other thing in reality between half-empty and half-full. Walmart took a lot of spears early on, but people have seen the credibility that has come from meaningful adoption of practices. And it's happening across the corporate world, albeit not fast enough. I'll give you a case in point. There was a vote taken yesterday on compulsory board diversity – in other words, more women, more people of color on boards – struck down because, ironically, it was perceived as discriminatory. [laughs] Here in California, where we lead, we've gone in recent years from like 17% to some 30% women on corporate boards. That's a good gain, but it ain't anywhere near 50%. We're a country that doesn't like regulation. It's something I struggle with a lot because we can talk a good game about law and order, but law and order requires rules of the road, and it requires a well-governed society to be a healthy, functional society. In the meantime, corporations run the roost. The common good is crippled under the weight of corporate good, which quickly can curdle into corporate bad. I'm talking about Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Plastic – something I'm very concerned about. That implicates Big Beverage, the Coca-Colas of the world, the plastic, the fossil fuel industry, that has a responsibility to take care of the crap they put out there. Not to mention the downstream health effects. So, you need to look at it all, and we don't have claim to the answers writ large, but we take on initiatives where there's bounds and outcomes that we can point to. ROB: Right. Sounds like you've got a lot of work to do, is what it sounds like. ROBIN: There's no shortage of work for all of us to do. ROB: That's right. ROBIN: I guess it may sound kind of schoolmarm-ish, but I really believe that – we talk about the experience economy and this and that economy; what we need right now is the responsibility economy. It's time for grownups to be grown up. ROB: Robin, you did mention the genesis of the firm. Let's talk for a moment, though, about the pre-genesis of the firm. How did you decide to start in the first place? You've mentioned the inspiration, you've mentioned the book, but what made you jump off the cliff and start Citizen Group in the first place, coming from where you were? It's not always the easiest way to live. ROBIN: No, it was a reckoning, but it was a convergence that I'm really grateful for. My story was I came up as a copywriter, a writer. Came out of journalism, music. Went into advertising and had the privilege to work at some excellent shops – Hal Riney here in San Francisco and ChiatDay. As a writer and creative director, learning the potency of storytelling, visually and verbally, in short form commercials, and even pre-internet, before we had branded content – but it was still getting you to read the printed page, telling a story on television. I had done a lot of work since the 1980s when I was in New York at ChiatDay with Amnesty International, a leading human rights organization. I got exposed to Amnesty's work because of the rock events they were putting on at the time – the likes of Springsteen and Sting and Peter Gabriel doing world tours, promoting this concept of human rights. As a twenty-something, I didn't know from human rights that we have human rights, and there's 30 of them that are articulated in the International (sic., Universal) Declaration of Human Rights created after World War II. It really struck me. I continued to do work on behalf of Amnesty and other NGOs, and I realized that two economies were operating. There was the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around. Half a million for a 30-second spot was not an uncommon thing at that time. And you might have $15k to put against creating a PSA on behalf of a nonprofit org. Really two different economies. And what was more important just didn't follow in terms of where we place our value. The Citizen Brand book really said there's a convergence going on here. Like I said, I had no idea that a few years later, the rise of social media would accelerate it to such a degree that companies had to walk their talk. They couldn't simply put on a corporate mirage and pretend everything was okay; people were going to look more closely at their practices and interrogate, in a healthy way. And that created the impetus for what we see more of today. ROB: You've been doing this thing for a little while. What are some of the lessons you've learned in the process of building the firm? What are some things you might go back and tell yourself to do differently if you had that chance to talk to yourself? ROBIN: Lessons learned. I might've applied more focus to social impact earlier, even though I've been doing it for a while now. I think about years – I won't say wasted. They were not wasted. Great experiences, and learning the craft of advertising is part of my skillset. But having the lightbulb go off sooner in terms of applying more of my working years to making a difference in terms of social outcome is something that if I could rewind the clock, I would put more years in that quadrant than the fun and games I had when I was youthful and indiscreet. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] You wouldn't have been as youthful and indiscreet if you had done otherwise. But I hear you. There's those corners we turn where we realize in some way or another – we get more serious; we discover a path that we can run well on, and we certainly wish we had found it sooner, had started that impact sooner, because we get so much better as we keep going. So I completely understand that. As we mentioned at the top, you are a man of many talents and many thoughts and many ideas. Something that I wasn't really aware of that you mentioned was the Solar AquaGrid. Tell us about that. I don't think those words naturally go together in most people's minds, so unpack this for us. What's going on here? It's intriguing but momentarily confusing, and I think it'll all make sense through your words. ROBIN: Yeah. One of my closest friends and dearest collaborators, Jordan Harris, we've done a lot of work together for Rock the Boat and other social causes in relation to promoting the rise of EVs, the EV revolution. It was his genesis – we both travel up and down the state, from Northern California to Southern California, seeing these open aqueducts that convey our water, and year on year, the increasing drought we have here in California. It got him scratching his head because he lives part of his time in France, where the canals are tree-shaded. They're tree-lined and shaded canals, whereas here our canals are open and exposed, and we couldn't help but think: how much water are we losing each year in terms of evaporative loss? Because heat rises. ROB: How much? ROBIN: Well, we commissioned a study. We started a project first at Citizen to commission a study. We sought out the best researchers we could find, and they're based in UC Merced, which is the home of University of California- UC Solar and UC Water. We commissioned a study that said up to 63 billion gallons of water could be saved annually if all 4,000 miles of California's canal system, aqueduct system, were covered with solar canopies. And many other compounding advantages, because when you cover the canals, you're producing obviously clean energy, renewable energy that can be used locally by the communities. We're going to need a lot more renewable energy on tap if we are going to shift towards an EV-driven economy. And then there's the avoided land costs, because rather than taking working lands, farmlands, to put solar farms, solar arrays, why not have these existing aqueducts, these existing utility corridors do double duty for us? The more we got into it, we discovered that there can be reduced maintenance costs because the solar shade over the open canals, the open rivers, reduces aquatic weed growth. So there's less dredging up of the algae underneath. And it has waterfall implications, rather than dumping more chemicals into the water. Long story not so short, one thing led to another and we started to examine holistically all of the potential advantages of such deployments. We developed a company, a spinoff that is called Solar AquaGrid, where we're consulting with the state and working directly with irrigation districts – most notably with Turlock Irrigation District in the Central Valley – planning the first demonstration project. We were successful in getting state funds to do pilot. So we expect to break ground in the fall. I'm quite excited about that because now we can really put these premises to the test. The whole idea is to study in order to scale, because you only gain the advantages of this idea, a big idea, a rather obvious idea – we weren't the first to come up with it – but now we're on a path where we are very fortunate to be able to study and build on the findings. ROB: California is a big state, lots of people, lots of opinions; are there any particular groups you're concerned about having concerns about this? Are there impacts on wildlife? Are there impacts on other things that people would worry about? It probably can be mitigated, probably a net positive, but what's the group that's going to fret about these? ROBIN: We talk about that a lot. We are inviting naysayers to come with their questions because the whole purpose is to interrogate this proposition and learn, where are there holes? We want to be mindful not to replace one problem and create others. That's not our intention. We set Solar AquaGrid up as a for-benefit company that is predicated on public, private, academic cooperation. To that end, you raised the issue of wildlife; we have enlisted Audubon Society as a research partner because we do want to learn, what are the effects, the unforeseen potential consequences of covering large swaths of the canal? So we're going to learn all this. If you want to do another podcast in about – call it 24 or 36 months, we'll have more to talk about. ROB: That'll be fascinating. The next thing that comes to my mind also is, you talked about France, you talked about their waterways. You get into some interesting questions. They have waterways. They're tree-shaded, so you could cover them with solar panels, but the trees are going to make not as much solar. Is it potentially beneficial enough to where you take down trees to put the solar over it? Because the trees are there, they keep it shaded somewhat, but it's still uncovered. It's still evaporative. ROBIN: Beautiful. There's beauty in complexity. These are the questions in terms of net positives and net losses regarding, in that case, biodiversity. By the way, we here in the U.S. are not the first to deploy solar arrays over canals. It was first done in Gujrat, India, where there are projects we've actually gone to school on and have learned from those past deployments – both what to do and what not to do. ROB: That's fascinating. We have a business partner whose primary office is directly in Gujrat, so I am familiar with it. I have looked at it. In their case, they chose to set up there because what I've learned is that India's all one time zone, and Gujrat is the farthest west you can get, just about, so you get the best overlap with the U.S. if you're there. So that was interesting. We ended up alongside an outsource team, and then we started asking why they were there, and that turns out to be the why. ROBIN: I did not know that. That's cool. ROB: I imagine the same thing applies to – I think China's also on one time, so who knows where that leads. But speaking to your journey, speaking to Citizen Group, speaking to the type of work that you do – we've talked about some things already that you're looking forward to, but what's coming up for Citizen Group? What's coming up for the type of work you do that is exciting for you? What else is next, beyond what we've already spoken about? ROBIN: It's the range of projects, the diversity of them, that makes it fun. Challenging and fun. There's so many ways to make impact, and there's new ideas to think about every day. But one of the projects that has been exciting this spring is in the area of – it goes by another acronym, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. The sports apparel retailer Lids has developed an initiative to recognize and honor the history of the early Black leagues: the Negro Baseball League, the original Harlem Globetrotters, what was called the Black Fives; before there was the NBA, there were the Black Fives. These were leagues and teams in the era of racial segregation. These are the players that invented the modern game. In fact, the name of the campaign that we've developed is called “They Gave Us Game.” It's been a blast because I'm a sports fan, particularly basketball, and going back, the whole tree of influences in terms of – much like music, how every generation is influenced by the generation previous, and how the moves and skills developed in one era that proved successful and now you can see in the game of our players today. That's been fun. So they've come up with this apparel collection called They Gave Us Game. We've also been working in the area of services for those among us who are aging. Which is all of us, right? But there are more Americans that are living longer, and as a result, there's more services available that most of us don't necessarily recognize the variety of caregiving and expert services. So we've been working with a group called Leading Age to create a campaign called Keep Leading Life that showcases the range of services available to people. ROB: Got it. We'll look forward to those things as well. Robin, when people want to find and connect with you and Citizen Group, where should they go to find you? ROBIN: We have a website. It's called citizengroup.com. ROB: That's a good website. That's easy to remember. Very appropriate. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for all the work you're doing for all of us, and for sharing a little bit about it along the way. Grateful to hear your journey. ROBIN: Thanks for your interest. It was fun talking to you. ROB: Excellent. Have a wonderful day. Take care. ROBIN: Take care. Thanks. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
In 2019, the brand went through TBWA's Chiat Day's “Disruption” planning process, which attempted to realign enterprise-wide activities around a refreshed expression of the brand's platform. This is the strategy story.
Hello, #adnerds and welcome to another episode of The A-List, the podcast that asks the world's top advertising professionals how they got started in the business. Tom Christmann has been busy starting his new job as ECD at Vayner Media and being co-dean at Adhouse Advertising School. (And getting COVID) (he's okay now). But he promises to start dropping episodes more regularly, starting with this conversation with Cameron Day, author of the new book Chew With Your Mind Open. Cameron is a second-generation advertising man. His dad, Guy Day, co-founded Chiat Day. And he's spent the last quarter-century working at agencies big and small, practicing what his dad taught him. The way Cameron tells it: “I've had a hand in building some damn fine brands, contributed a few nice ads along the way, and made a handful of treasured friends.” Listen as Cameron and Tom discuss Cameron's story including a fascinating deep dive into how one award-winning Rolling Stone campaign came to life. IMPORTANT: Cameron's book is great and you can get a signed copy with some neat swag at iamcameronday.com. -------- ADHOUSE CLASSES START IN FEBRUARY. THERE'S STILL SPACE. RESERVE YOUR SPOT AT ADHOUSENYC.COM Host/Editor/Engineer: tomchristmann.net Music: Duotoneaudio.com
Don Peppers is a best-selling author, blogger, widely-acclaimed keynote speaker and global CX authority. He speaks to us about how "Life is not a contest, no one takes “first place” ", how "You learn the most when you know the least", and why "Learn to live with yourself first ". Hosted by Duff Watkins. About Don Peppers A marketing futurist and accomplished trend spotter, Peppers has educated and motivated audiences worldwide with presentations and workshops focused on how businesses can compete in a dynamic, technologically fast-moving world. His latest book Customer Experience: What, How and Why Now (2016), provides insights and “how to” recommendations for building and maintaining a truly customer-centric business. Peppers has written nine books with business partner Martha Rogers, collectively selling well over a million copies in 18 languages. Most recently Extreme Trust: Turning Proactive Honesty and Flawless Execution into Long-Term Profits (Penguin, 2016) uses real-world examples to show how rising customer expectations in a more transparent age have permanently altered the competitive landscape. And Managing Customer Experience and Relationships (Wiley, 2017) is the third edition of their graduate-level textbook, originally published in 2003. Peppers' and Rogers' first book, The One To One Future (Doubleday, 1993), put forward a paradigm-shifting idea about the business implications of interactivity that soon evolved into the global CRM movement. BusinessWeek said their book was the “bible of the new marketing,” while Tom Peters chose it as “book of the year” and Inc. Magazine's editor-in-chief called it “one of the two or three most important business books ever written.” Now, Don and Martha have once again joined forces to form CX Speakers, designed to deliver keynote presentations, workshops, and thought-leadership consulting focused exclusively on the customer experience and its related topics, which range from digital technologies, disruption, and innovation to customer metrics, social selling, customer success, customer advocacy, trust, and corporate culture. Prior to founding Peppers & Rogers Group and then CX Speakers, Don served as the CEO of Chiat/Day's direct marketing unit and was a celebrated ad agency “rainmaker” – exploits he celebrates in his entertaining book Life's a Pitch: Then You Buy (Doubleday, 1995). Graduating from the U.S. Air Force Academy with a B.S. in astronautical engineering (seriously!), Don claims he was the only actual rocket scientist in the advertising industry. He also has a Master's in Public Affairs from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. An avid runner and father of five, he is happily married. Episode Notes Lesson 1: Life is not a contest, no one takes “first place” 03m 20s. Lesson 2: Forgiveness is relaxing 04m 22s. Lesson 3: Learn to live with yourself first 08m 12s. Lesson 4: A job delivers a pay check, a career delivers a purpose 15m 00s. Lesson 5: Bank favours, generously 24m 05s. Lesson 6: You learn the most when you know the least. Be curious.25m 54s. Lesson 7: Think Large: ask: “Will the world be better off if I do this?” 29m 17s. Lesson 8: Temper your Temptations: Resist urges to cheat or game the system 34m 00s. Lesson 9: Do the Existential Math! 37m 43s. Lesson 10: Keep a few $10 bills on you at all times 41m 24s.
— The factors governing success in personal relationships are complex. It's not simply a matter of whether the other parties in the relationship are “right” for you. It's recognizing the multitude of factors - ranging from the personality types of those with whom you're in relationship to their embedded notions of what's most important in those relationships: affection? — emotional support? shared vales? security? etc.). Becoming aware of these factors, and making adjustments that better align you with your relationship partners (whether in work or in personal life), Is key to more success in navigating them and having them serve as motivators rather than as demotivators. Valeria Teles interviews Jim Weinstein— A Life And Career Counselor, Marriage And Family Therapist, And Speaker Brought up in the New York suburbs (Eastchester), Jim Weinstein attended Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut where he majored in Political Science. Graduating magna cum laude Phi Beta Kappa Jim was accepted to Harvard Business School where he concentrated in marketing. He graduated with distinction and thereafter began working in New York for one of America's largest ad agencies, Benton and Bowles, as an account executive. Jim rose quickly in the organization, being named Vice President four years later. In the subsequent 15 years he worked at several other major agencies, including Wells Rich Greene as Executive Vice-President and Chiat/Day as Director of Account Management. Among the clients he serviced were Procter and Gamble, Sony, Coca-Cola, Bayer, Mitsubishi, Fisher-Price, and Energizer (the bunny was developed under my tenure as the lead account manager). In his 40s, Jim embarked on a process of inner work and exploration that led him to move from New York to Los Angeles and to ultimately discover the path of his current career. It started with Jim running a community-based clinical trials organization, Search Alliance, and then co-founding the internet's first psychotherapist search site, 4Therapy.com. He enrolled in Antioch University's clinical psychology program, earning a Master's degree and accumulating 3000 hours of internship training, after which he opened a successful private practice in Beverly Hills. Missing the seasons and the intellectual environment of the East, Jim moved to DC in 2005 making a professional pivot to emphasize career guidance. In the time he had been there he has been fortunate enough to build a thriving practice working with a very diverse, motivated, and intelligent group of clients. Jim is proud to have helped many hundreds of clients to dramatically improve their career and life satisfaction. To learn more about Jim Weinstein and his work, please visit: dclifecounseling.com — This podcast is a quest for well-being, a quest for a meaningful life through the exploration of fundamental truths, enlightening ideas, insights on physical, mental, and spiritual health. The inspiration is Love. The aspiration is to awaken new ways of thinking that can lead us to a new way of being, being well.
Description: Jayzen is excited to welcome his old friend and colleague, Matt Atchity to the show. As the self-proclaimed “ultimate film nerd,” Matt has been a pioneer in the world of websites for the entertainment industry. He led the team that brought Rotten Tomatoes and the Tomatometer into the lexicon, making it a household name. He shares a ton of insights into his personal brand and leadership style, all rooted in having fun and having a passion for what you do. Matt has been seen in local and national media as a movie expert and is currently the General Manager of Moviefone. Guest Bio Matt Atchity General Manager Moviefone Matt Atchity has over twenty years of experience managing and building websites that cover a variety of entertainment categories, such as movies, TV, music, celebrities and video games. Matt has been the General Manager of Moviefone since 2018, and prior to that he was Head of Programming at TYT Network. For ten years, Matt led the team at Rotten Tomatoes that made the brand a household name. As Editor in Chief, he was responsible for the overall direction of editorial content and the brand. As part of that role, Matt's movie previews were seen and heard by nationwide audiences. He made weekly appearances on Good Day LA, FoxNews.com and Adam Carolla's podcast. He is an acknowledged expert on movies and TV, and has appeared multiple times on national outlets such as Nightline, ABC News, CBC News, and CNN. Previously, Matt's been a Senior Content Producer at Yahoo!, and a producer for Chiat/Day, Warner Bros. Online and America Online. Links To learn more about Lead With Your Brand and the Career Breakthrough Mentoring program, please visit: LeadWithyYourBrand.com To book Jayzen for a speaking engagement or workshop at your company, visit: JayzenPatria.com
A true legend of the industry, Rick Boyko joins Great Minds to discuss his career. From his early days at Leo Burnett and Chiat/Day, to his time at Ogilvy and as Director at VCU Brandcenter, to present.
Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands by Drew Neisser About the Book: Marketing has become ridiculously complicated, but yours doesn't have to be. With decades of hands-on experience, expert strategist and writer Drew Neisser has witnessed the dramatic evolution of business-to-business marketing. Working alongside giant brands like IBM, as well as start-ups and midsize companies, and interviewing over four hundred top practitioners, Neisser uncovered the top four characteristics that all successful marketers have in common: they are Courageous, Artful, Thoughtful, and Scientific (CATS). These four characteristics form the basis for the framework in Renegade Marketing. Over the years, Neisser created a twelve-step formula to radically simplify B2B marketing and build an unbeatable brand. In his book, he shares the stories of marketing CATS as he gives you the tools to: Walk through a highly refined discovery process that culminates in finding your brand's purpose Define your company's purpose in eight words or fewer Build team support for new marketing initiatives while establishing your unique brand story, voice, and design Assemble effective marketing plans that engage employees, inspire customers, and attract new business Drive perpetual growth by creating a culture with metrics, marketing technology, and experimentation About the Author: Drew Neisser is the founder of Renegade, a strategic boutique for B2B innovators, and CMO Huddles, a membership organization exclusively for B2B CMOs. He's also the host of Renegade Thinkers Unite. Ranked among the top B2B influencers, Drew has been a featured marketing expert on ABC News, CNBC, CBS Radio, and Tony Robbins's podcast, among many others. Besides his long-running Ad Age magazine column, he's contributed articles to FastCompany, Forbes, MediaPost, and CMO.com. Drew's first book, The CMO's Periodic Table: A Renegade's Guide to Marketing, published in 2015, features interviews with sixty-four marketing leaders at top brands, including American Express, Dow, IBM, and SAP. Drew started his advertising career at Wells Rich Greene, and later moved to J. Walter Thompson, and Chiat/Day, and then founded the agency that became Renegade in 1993. And, interesting fact – he's obsessed with (and a bit of an expert) on American founding father Benjamin Franklin! Click here for this episode's website page with the links mentioned during the interview... https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/renegade-marketing-drew-neisser
"I think in a funny way, my dad programmed me to be a slacker with a work ethic" Imagine your parents not only knew what your job in advertising was, but deeply understood the business and the barriers to doing the best work possible. In this extended and insightful interview, Cameron Day (yep, from that "Day" family. His dad is ChiatDay co-founder Guy Day) shares wisdom learned from both his father and over 25 years of ad experience. Whether you're currently an advertising 'creative', aspire to be one, or are just a fan of the industry, this is a MUST LISTEN episode. Cameron's new book "Chew With Your Mind Open (The Advertising Survival Guide)" has been touted as a "MasterClass in advertising" and uses enlightening and entertaining stories to provide creatives with practical ways to not only survive, but thrive in their careers. Get More From The Disruptor Series: Subscribe to our Newsletter: "Dose of Disruption" Visit our Website: www.DisruptorSeries.com Follow us on Social Media: Instagram LinkedIn Credits: Host - Rob Schwartz & Asha Davis Intro/Outro Voiced by Sophia Barnett Producer - Matt DePaola Executive Producer - Asha Davis Audio Engineer/Sound Design - Corey Bauman
Tescia Deák is a Creative Director at the storied Los Angeles agency, Chiat/Day. Her portfolio is full of brilliant, purpose-driven work that would make the most cynical creative at Weiden & Kennedy envious. Like a widget that makes the whole internet more equitable. A downy commercial that ran so long it essentially sent the main actor into royalty retirement. Passion projects like a mentorship program that connects women to one another and to a support system that's unprecedented in the boys club of advertising. And much, much more. Today you'll get a front-row seat at her journey—the ups, the downs, and the philosophy that fueled her ascension into ad stardom. Thanks for ad'ing a little Bad to your day ;) now follow us on Twitter dammit More Links: Pod SiteBrian's BookEric's InstagramAmelia's Book
Richard Hackenberg is a retired captain in the US Naval Reserve active duty for 3 years and 21 in the reserves, and WWII converted destroyer escort for 3 years.Richard is a results-oriented, marketing executive with diverse experience in advertising, public relations, direct marketing, sales promotion, and new media. He has a strong background in goal setting and strategic thinking. He is a bottom-line oriented problem-solver who believes that success is the result of creativity and team-building based on individual competence, mutual respect, and clear communications.Some of Richard's career highlights:§ Developed led marketing teams at leading search, retail, and B2B sites.§ Led marketing department at a Top 5 Internet company.§ Established the Interactive Advertising Group at a Top 20 Agency.§ Reorganized and led a 57-person agency services division at a major database marketing company.§ Ran direct marketing units at three major advertising agencies.§ Founder and principal of a $12 million advertising agency.Specialties: Strategic marketing planning and program development, marketing department leadership, advertising, and public relations agency management.Previously worked at BIGWORDS.com, Geocities, Chiat Day, and a number of agencies in Chicago and LA. Connect with Richard on LinkedIn.
In the Episode #3 of Off-Road Marketing, host Janet Carlson sits down with Cameron "Cam" Day, one of the most talented copywriters in advertising and the son of Chiat/Day co-founder, Guy Day. In Part 2 of this episode, we discuss Cam's insightful, game-changing and truly off-road work on the Wyoming Anti-Drinking campaign, and the Land Rover Campaign, and insights from his epic book, "Chew With Your Mind Open" that every advertising/marketing person should read, whether you are new to the business, or you've been around the block a few times. Tune in every other Friday, because seriously, the world needs more marketing that is unforgettable and has impact. For our listeners, there is adult language, so be advised.
Make It Matter: Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses Owners to Have More Impact
In this episode of the Make it Matter Podcast – today we get some wisdom from some true experts in our field. And by field, we mean a literal field full of dogs. Seriously, don't underestimate a dog's brilliance. Chiat Day is one of the most successful agencies in the world, and they live by this motto: "be more human (and if in doubt) be more dog." What can dogs actually teach us about the right way to live and do business?
In the Episode #2 of Off-Road Marketing, host Janet Carlson sits down with Cameron "Cam" Day, one of the most talented copywriters in advertising and the son of Chiat/Day co-founder, Guy Day. In Part 1 of this episode, we discuss Cam's incredible, truly off-road work on the Wyoming Tourism campaign and the 7-11 campaign, along with thoughts on how to approach a client with an off-road idea. Tune in every other Friday, because seriously, the world needs more outside the damn box kind of thinking! For our listeners, there is adult language, so be advised.
Bryan Edward Hill is an American author, screenwriter, musician, comic book writer, and graphic designer. Hill has acted as a consultant on popular culture, narrative communication, and media consumption to PepsiCo, JP Morgan Chase, M&M Mars, Unilever, and Chiat/Day. Hill has written articles for the Thinktopia: NewIdeas Blog.On June 27, 2018, Hill took over as writer for Detective Comics, for the DC character Batman, for a five issue arc titled On the Outside. This arc set up for a new volume of Batman and the Outsiders written by Hill, to be released in December 2018, starring Batman, Katana, Black Lightning, Cassandra Cain, and Duke Thomas. Bryan has also written for Marvel with titles like What if..? and Fallen Angels..But for now we are onto HBOmax's Titans talking all seasons and characters including red hood, nightwing, Beast boy and more!A HUGE Thank You To All My Patreon, Members, & Subscribe Stars! I Love You All!Simon BarnettRaymond CandelaGPSpectorDavid LDaniel GuitronTKnotatpostJohn LeAuthenticity SeekerBrian KMAY BE MEDocHollidayFrank the Redsatchell78RC ScottThe dukeMarcos R.Razor-sharp Though...Alexander LeonardWelcome To The SH!T ShowJason JohnsonJobustifyMAGAirMike PorterJeffery CarnesRobert WillingCaligula BearP MoneyKenny GSwany RiversLisa DonahueMuddledMessJasValin RookAlazmat FilmsAlexander Trapp Waelse1Raymond CandelaThe Killing JokeBeau ScottBrian KBiggles Macy RRob LynchMathew DrewJohn LeBrandon AllenAlyssa Annette Ybarra Brian HawkinsChris David Raiford B LRyan DeckertMizen Barbarossa Jerm Debo Ruakar-McTwizz-Jade Wheatley Zach Richmond JDthecomicotakuMighty PawsKato Rone Steve Glaskar Dav RozTimothy French Mike Buckner BruceyJeffrey Alan Carnes Anne HolydayNitrosgal 2Sylvia La ChivaJD2981 GPSpectorJ ThreefingersBjörn PerssonSimon Barnett Lil Poetboy2nd Street Marvel Let me know what you think!
Hello Adnerd. This is the A-List Podcast. The podcast that asks the world's top advertising professionals how they got started in the business. Your host is Tom Christmann, creative for hire at tomchristmann.net. And one of the Head Adnerds at Adhouse Advertising School. Today you'll hear Tom's conversation with Sariah Dorbin, Executive Creative Director at Quigley-Simpson, an independent, female-owned agency in Los Angeles that unites brand and demand for results that matter. Sariah found photography in high school, a passion that led to her becoming an adnerd pretty early on. She worked at some great agencies from back in the day. Adnerds will recognize Dancer Fitzgerald San Francisco and Della Femina LA. She finally got her dream job at Chiat Day Mojo, but sometimes achieving yourdreams isn't all it's cracked up to be. (There's a reason they called it "Chiat Day and Night" back then.) Sariah and Tom talk about interpreting feedback, the importance of guidance when you're just starting out. And the three keys to a great book: (Be yourself. Have an attitude. And say something interesting.) Oh and there's a very funny story from Sariah's Della Femina days involving a stripper. (The Mad Men era lasted well into the 80s and 90s.) The A-List is brought to you by Adhouse Advertising School, where you get 10 weeks of Zoom instruction from a working creative pro for one low price. To apply, go to adhousenyc.com. Music by Ross Hopman at Duotoneaudio.com
BGBS 056: Tamer Kattan | Comedian | Listening Is the Cost of Being Heard Tamer Kattan is an internationally touring stand-up comedian who performed for U.N. Troops in Afghanistan, for protestors at the American University in Cairo (during the Egyptian revolution) and for the really dangerous crowds at The Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland. He's won many comedy accolades over the years, has TV & radio credits on the BBC, SkyTV, Fox, HULU, Netflix, Amazon, and truTV, and was even featured on Seth Rogen's Hilarity for charity event with Todd Glass and Hannibal Bures. Tamer is currently the co-host of Nice2MarryU on Youtube and you'll learn in this episode that before it all, he began his career in advertising and worked with past guest Shawn Parr from Bulldog Drummond as a brand strategist. Tamer is an Egyptian-born American with a Muslim dad and a Jewish mom. Always bearing many identities, Tamer has considered himself a “hyphenate” and finds solace in being neither part this nor part that, but a complete thing in the middle—although it wasn't always that way. Growing up in Southern California, Tamer needed to address how people treated him for being different, and comedy was his tool to do so. He finds the connection between comedy and branding is human nature, which can only be tapped through aggressive listening and captivating storytelling. That same humanity and emotional intelligence are what motivated Tamer to write his resume on a foam butt, pop it in a donut box, and rocket launch his advertising career until he found his way back to his roots in comedy. Above all, Tamer teaches us the power of making other's feel heard, which bears the question, how will you listen more aggressively today? Quotes [10:59] I'm not American. I'm not Egyptian. I'm this thing in the middle, and being an Egyptian American is very much another thing. It's a thing into its own. I'm not half of this or half of that, I'm a complete thing, and it happens to consist of two halves. [14:51] It's not like I wanted to be funny, it was just a thing that happened. Inevitably it ended up becoming a tool against bullies, but I didn't realize it until this kid came up to me—it was a bully that bullied me every day—and finally, one day, I had enough and I started making fun of him because he had pretty big ears. Apparently, he was sensitive because he said, “Hey, if you stop making fun of me, I'll stop beating you up.” And that's why I went, “Oh, wow. Comedy is powerful. It can be powerful.” [49:36] I think being a good listener makes you a better storyteller. And I love being able to listen aggressively until I hear things and see things that other people don't see. Like in my comedy, the thing that brings me the most joy is not when people laugh, it's when people say “Oh my god, that's so true.” That's my favorite. [54:07] I think that's what it means to be a human being. We're parts of multiple tribes and multiple groups. And I think if you break the ridiculous stereotypes, people become people again. Resources LinkedIn: Tamer Kattan Instagram: @tamerkat Twitter: Tamer Kattan Youtube: Tamer Kattan – Nice2MarryU Website: tamerkattan.com Podcast Transcript Tamer Kattan 0:02 I wrote a resume through a typical template. And I looked at it I'm like, This is absurd. I just have skate shop and surf shop experience. Why am I even setting this to an ad agency? So I said, Well, if I can't show my creativity through the experience that I've had, maybe I can shoot show it, and how I express that experience. So because it was around Halloween, I went into this Halloween shop and they had those foam butts that you could tie around your waist and make it look like you have a naked butt. And I wrote my resume across the butt cheeks. And I wrote Cal Poly senior willing to work as a software internship. And then I went to a donut store and bought a pink box for $1 it was such a ripoff. And then I put it in the box and I mailed it to Shai a day. And three days later, they called me and asked me and I heard that the HR lady kept the butt on her wall for like a year. Marc Gutman 1:00 Podcasting from Boulder, Colorado, this is the Baby Got Backstory Podcast, where we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like big backstories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman, Marc Gutman, and on today's episode of Baby got backstory on how an Egyptian American immigrant climbed to the top of the advertising agency world only to quit 40 become a successful stand up comedian. Today we are talking with Tamer Kattan. Before we get into my conversation with Tamer, If you like and enjoy the show, please take a minute or two to rate and review us over at Apple podcasts or Spotify and apple and Spotify use these ratings as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on their charts. Better yet, please recommend the show to at least one friend you think will like it, and maybe one enemy will like it too. And cross the aisle in a bipartisan effort to bring all podcast listeners together via the Baby Got Back story podcast. Today's guest is Tamer Kattan. Tamer is an internationally touring stand up comedian, who performed for UN troops in Afghanistan for protesters at the American University in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution. And for the really dangerous crowds at the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland, where he received three four star reviews from international press. He was most recently featured on Seth Rogan's hilarity for charity event with pod glass and Hannibal Burress won the World Series of comedy, comedy knockout on true TV, best of fest at big pine Comedy Festival, and three weeks later won the Portland Comedy Festival. He is the co host of Nice 2 Marry You YouTube, and has TV and radio credits on the BBC and sky TV in the UK as well as in the US on Fox, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and Tru TV. He's also worked as a strategist at some of the world's biggest and best advertising agencies in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. And what you're going to hear today is there's probably not a whole lot that Tamer really can't do or isn't good at. And I was connected to Tamer via a previous guest on the show, Shawn Parr of Bulldog Drummond, and no disrespect to Shawn, but I wasn't clear on why he thought I should talk with Tamer. Well, Shawn's a smart guy, and Tamer, Well, I'm going to save that for today's show. What I will say is I'm crushing hard on Tamer. He's smart. He's worked at the coolest agencies on the biggest brands in the world. He left it all behind to pursue what really made him happy. Stand up comedy. Tamer drops all sorts of insight and wisdom in this episode, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Oh, it makes sure to listen for the your dog is sticky story. I loved it. I'm excited to introduce you to Tamer Kattan. And this is his story. I am here with Tamer Kattan. Tamer actually happens to be in Spain and I'm in Colorado and even though we've been doing this for decades, at this point talking over the internet, I'm still amazed that this works in real time and that we can do this it's like still blows my mind, but that's true. Tambor, welcome. Welcome to the Baby Got Backstory Podcast. It's, it's great to have you. Tamer Kattan 4:45 Thanks for having me, Marc. It's nice to be chatting with you. It's nice to see an American face. Marc Gutman 4:51 Sometimes, right. It's been a tough week here in America, so maybe, maybe not so much. But at tamp. Tamer is an internationally touring stand up comedian. He's perfect. For him at the UN, with before troops in Afghanistan, for protesters at the American University in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution, we'd love to hear about that. And that's not how we know each other. You know, I'm a big fan of comedy. I love comedy, but I was actually introduced to Tamer through a, another brand professional. Shawn Parr over at Bulldog Drummond. And interesting enough, Tamer got his start as a brand strategist. And so, Tamed, I'd love to get into that a little bit. But like, more than that, I want to know, you know, when you were young was little Tamer, were you like, was it like almost like the two you know, the two little angel devil on the shoulder was like one of brand strategists and one a stand up comedian or like, would you want to be when you were a kid? Like, like, like, did you do you think you'd end up here? Tamer Kattan 5:53 Oh, man. Bipolar would be easy. I mean, I've been I've been divided for a long time. And I have a Muslim dad, a Jewish mom. So like, the whole I like, I've always just been a mixed up kid, I had people telling me I wasn't a real American, I wasn't really Egyptian. I wasn't a real Jew, I wasn't a real Muslim. So like, I've always kind of been a hyphenate as a type. As a person. I've always been comfortable being a hyphenate. And for me, quite honestly, like when I look at, I've always tried to sort of anticipate the direction of things. And I think even when I first got into advertising, I didn't get into it, because I loved commercials. I got into it, because I love storytelling. And I see the big umbrella is storytelling, and I see brand strategy and, and comedy, both fitting under that larger umbrella. So for me, it wasn't that different. You know, it's like being a wrestler that becomes a UFC fighter. It sounds like two different things, but they're kind of related. Marc Gutman 6:48 Well, absolutely. And I agree but I think you articulated very well that, that storytelling is a broad umbrella. I think a lot of people run around talking about being storytellers. But you still have to have that specific discipline, whether it be advertising, whether you're telling stories through comedy, whether you're telling, you know, different channels. And so I know myself, I made that mistake early in my career, I was run around telling everyone I was a storyteller because I was but then it becomes really hard to find work because no one knows where you fit. But where did you grow up? Like what was what was childhood like? For you mentioned that you had this bifurcated family? And you never really fit what we're we're where'd you grow up? And what was that like? Like what your parents do and stuff like that? Tamer Kattan 7:34 Um, well, we were in Egypt when I was a kid. And my dad left first and he came to America, he went to Southern California, Santa Monica. Although initially, it was easier to get a visa in colder weather states back then. So he originally got a visa for Utah. And, and then we were in Egypt. And you know, we're talking about technology right now, how blown away we are, about how great it is to be able to speak across the world. And when my dad first immigrated to the States, I had these very vivid picture of my mom tracing my hand on a piece of paper to show my dad how fast I was growing. Like it was, it was wild. And it was also a strange thing, because at a very early age, it was kind of the reverse of an animal priming on something you know, like when it when a cat gets adopted by a Labrador. It was like I got unglued from my dad for almost a year and a half where he was in the States. And my mom and I were in Cairo. So I was I was born in Cairo. And when I was around six, my dad left the states. And at eight years old, we reconnected in Los Angeles. So I grew up for the most part in Southern California. And the first place we live was a very Mexican neighborhood in East LA, which was the best place an immigrant could start in America, because they were very accepting. And they said, Hey, you look like one of us. You got pyramids, we got pyramids, youre in. They accepted me. And then from there, you know, it's really strange being an immigrant, sometimes you get to experience society in a different way. Because you you start at maybe a lower socio economic class than you're used to in your home country. And then you kind of move pretty quickly, vertically up sometimes, maybe, maybe do more jumps than you would have if you're a native born person. So we had a pretty interesting view of America at a pretty early age. Marc Gutman 9:27 Yeah. And was it all positive? Or was it tough? I mean, one thing I can share with you is, you know, I grew up in Detroit, and I have a Jewish father and a Christian mother and, and I had a lot of those same challenges that I never really felt like I fit and I never felt like I was really accepted by the Jewish side of the family or the other side. And, you know, you know, I was always kind of using like shape shifting a little bit and code shifting code switching as I say to my advantage, but there's also a lot of disadvantages. I remember being like I'm not Jewish and like hiding, you know, like From fights and stuff like that, and but that, you know, that didn't matter to the to the the kids that wanted to brand me with that label. I mean, was it hard for you like being irreverent and also just trying to figure out what your identity was? I mean, I think it's cool now to be like, yeah, I'm like, that was split. That was awesome. But at the time was a hard. Tamer Kattan 10:20 Oh, definitely. I mean, it was I had so many times I remember uttering the phrase, I just want to be normal, which is like, as an adult, that's the last thing I want to be. But as a kid, I just kept feeling like I'm, I'm abnormal, you know, even even the word they give immigrants is alien. So I always felt like I was kind of floating in space, you know, but just like, you know, emotions are just like physical pain, sometimes, like it hurt. I think I was. So I took so much emotional abuse, that I finally built a callus, which I welcomed with open arms. And once that callus was there, then I learned to embrace the fact that Yeah, I'm not American, I'm not Egyptian, I'm this thing in the middle. And being an Egyptian American is very much another thing, it's a thing into its own. I'm not half of this, or half of that I'm a complete thing. And it happens to consist of two halves. But it took it took a lot of a lot of crappy things heard a lot of racism a lot of, and not just from Americans, from other Egyptians, from Jewish people from from everybody. So it was a it was a wild experience. Marc Gutman 11:28 Yeah, I mean, I remember as a kid coming home crying because I just I wanted to have a communion Catholic communion. Because that's what all the kids, the kids are, do. And I was like, why can't I have? Besides, I was like, thinking a lot of money. That's cool. But like, really more than that, like, I was like, they're all doing it. And I want to be like, just those normal kids. And so I can totally relate where you're coming from. Did you like was there a big Egyptian community in Southern California? Were there I mean, I, I spent a lot of time, you know, I lived in Santa Monica for a while and things like that. And I just don't, I don't ever remember it. So like, and I could just be because it's just, you know, something I'm not looking for. But was there? Was there a big Egyptian community when you were there? Tamer Kattan 12:10 I think there is. But it's funny, you know, a lot of these communities start to form, especially these immigrant communities start to form and they're usually based on spirituality or religion. And so there's definitely an Egyptian community, but it's kind of forked. And on one side, there's the Muslim Egyptians all kind of have the mosque as sort of the home base of their social life. And then you've got the Coptic Christian Egyptians. And for us, we didn't fit into either. So even though I was aware of an Egyptian community, I was very much an outsider to it. Marc Gutman 12:44 And so what was life like for you as a kid in terms of school, like were you into? Did you know from an early age that you were going to be a storyteller of sorts? Tamer Kattan 12:56 You know, it's funny that you say that, because it's not it wasn't conscious at all. I, you know, I spend a lot of time alone. And, you know, back in the 80s, it was really cool. You know, I was a latchkey kid, I was one of those kids, you know, that had the house key tied, you know, the string around my neck, and my parents both had to work two jobs. So there were times where I'd wake up in the morning, and to an empty house. And I'd come home from school to an empty house. So I had a lot of time just to think. And I think that's that was the foundation of becoming a storyteller was just having a lot of time to yourself and to thinking. I really got into Dungeons and Dragons at a really early age. So my, my, my vocabulary of weapons, and monsters and mythology grew. And when we started writing, for this creative writing class that I had in elementary school, the teacher called my parents at home and said, Hey, I need you to come in, we have to talk about Tamer and about the stories that he's writing. And they came in, they say, and he said, Look, I love these stories, but they're a little bit violent. And I'm, I'm either gonna see his name on the front of a paper at the end of a movie, and I wanted to make sure that it's the ladder. And but he didn't know about Dungeons and Dragons, and that's why I knew so much about weapons is because that's silly game. Marc Gutman 14:11 You knew everything and nothing about weapons, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. about what you do from Dungeons and Dragons. But were you a funny kid. At that time? Are you? Are you leaning into humor? And you know, and I've talked to a lot of people and who either have tough childhoods, they don't feel like they fit they've been maybe sometimes bullied. And humor is typically the defense mechanism. It's what they use to Yeah, you know, keep people on their heels or just survive a bit. I mean, it was that it was that something for you? Or was it something different? Tamer Kattan 14:41 Yeah, in a very big way. And again, it's just so bizarre because because I am kind of a control freak, I think at times, and there was no design. It's not like I wanted to be funny. I desire to be fun. It was just a thing that happened. It was just something where they said oh, you're just like your grandfather and Inevitably it ended up becoming a tool against bullies. And but I didn't realize it until this one day when this kid came up to me. And he said, it was a bully that bullied me every day. And finally, one day, I had enough and I started making fun of him because he had pretty big ears. And, and apparently, he was sensitive because he said, Hey, if you stop making fun of me, I'll stop beating you up. And that's why I went, Oh, wow. comedy is powerful. It can be powerful. Marc Gutman 15:25 words have power. And so yeah, I mean, were you doing stand up routines in high school? Like, were you at the talent show? And are we getting into this early? Tamer Kattan 15:34 No, not at all, we had this really interesting thing. There's a, there's actually Detroit made this famous and Eminems movie Eight Mile, battle rapping came from a thing called playing the dozens, and playing the dozens just you just make fun of each other, back and forth. And it came from slavery, when they used to sell slaves one at a time unless there was something wrong with them. And then they would sell them as a dozen in a cage. And those dozen slaves would make fun of each other. And that's where all those jokes like your mama jokes came from. And like, it was really harsh, almost like, you know, even if we look at roast battles like that, that environment was the foundation for that. So in the neighborhood I lived in, we had Hello cat, there's my cat in the background. We had, we played the dozens. So it was a pretty poor school. And we had a 10 minute break before lunch called nutrition, where the government would give you milk and trail mix. And I was always just people would jump on me during those sessions and start just making fun of me and sort of attack me with words. And you know, just like with any other type of battling, the more you get beat up, the better you get on the offensive. So I just naturally became pretty good with words. Marc Gutman 16:49 And were you a good student? Tamer Kattan 16:50 I was Yeah, it was funny. There was some cultural things I had to I had to stop doing like I was in the habit of raising my hand to answer a question then standing up to answer it. And that usually ended with me getting beat up at recess. Marc Gutman 17:06 You learn quickly not to do that. And then So, I mean, what did your parents hoped for you? I mean, they're working their butts off. They're doing two jobs. They're immigrants. I mean, I have to imagine, it's a bit of that American dream that they're hoping for a better life. They're hoping for something great for you. And what was that? Tamer Kattan 17:25 Well, for it's really interesting, because my dad, because he was the one who felt like he was absorbing most of the risk. And the one who probably out of all of us, he's probably the one that felt like he was, you know, walking a wire without a net, because we were in America without a family without friends. And I think he felt like you always had to have a job. And that job was what protected you from homelessness or, like a terrible life. So he didn't care what I liked. He just wanted me to do what was safe. So in his mind, the ultimate job was doctor, lawyer, engineer that that was the three but I didn't want to do any of those things. I I ended up going to university for kinesiology for it, I didn't even know what I was going to do with it. I was like a strength and conditioning coach or something like that. But I basically took those classes just so my dad thought that I was doing pre med, but I wasn't. And it was my my junior year where I, I interned as a strength and conditioning coach, and I'm like, Oh my god, I'm not gonna wear these polyester shorts for the rest of my life. And a friend of mine said, Hey, you know, I'm a marketing major. And this ad agency is coming to Cal Poly, and they're going to show their commercial real. And I heard that it's really great. These are the guys that invented the Energizer Bunny. And so I'm like, Oh, that sounds cool. So I went with him. I watched the reel, and there was so many funny commercials. And you know, and she kept talking about the woman, Nancy Ali, I still remember her name. so crazy. Nancy Ali said that comedy was most disruptive form of storytelling, because you didn't need to know anything. You could watch a stranger fall down. And it's funny. But if you're trying to do a drama in 15 seconds, good luck. So I watched that reel. And I was impressed by it. And I thought to myself, Oh, wow, here's where to get paid for being funny. And I went up to her and I spoke to her and I said, you know, my major is not marketing she was doesn't matter. I recommend you buy this book called inventing desire. And it was a book where a journalist actually lived in the offices of Shai a day, at the time was just one office, but it's an amazing office. And I literally borrowed four more dollars, so I could buy the book that night. And I read it in one night and fell in love with the idea of working in an ad agency. Marc Gutman 19:39 What about that book spoke to you? Tamer Kattan 19:42 The honesty. I was I always thought that, you know, when you work in a corporate environment that you couldn't be yourself anymore. I felt like it was constrained. And in the book, she was sort of showing the type of conversations people had and they were cussing. And I think as a kid, I was like, Oh, well These adults are cussing. And it was just real and they were passionate. And they were creating something. They're creating stories. And so I got really excited. And I remember I did the craziest thing, it was around Halloween. And I heard that they got something like 400 resumes a day for internships, and I wrote a resume through a typical template. And I looked at it, I'm like, This is absurd. I just have skate shop and surf shop experience. Why am I even setting this to an ad agency? So I said, Well, if I can't show my creativity through the experience that I've had, maybe I can shoot show it, and how I expressed that experience. So because it was around Halloween, I went into this Halloween shop and they had those foam butts that you could tie around your waist to make it look like you have a naked butt. And I wrote my resume across the butt cheeks. And I wrote Cal Poly Sr. willing to work as asof for internship. And then I went to a donut store and bought a pink box for $1. It was such a ripoff. And then I put it in the box and I mailed it to Shai a day. And three days later, they called me and asked me and I heard that the HR lady kept the butt on her wall for like a year. Marc Gutman 21:10 Did you end up getting the internship? Tamer Kattan 21:12 Yeah, I got the job. Yeah, Marc Gutman 21:13 That's amazing. Tamer Kattan 21:14 And it turned into a job too. Marc Gutman 21:16 Oh, that's amazing. And so how long did you work for Shai day, what was forget that let's back up a second, like, so you're a young kid, you're like, I'm gonna go to the preeminent advertising firm in the world, you you impress them, you do a great job. And that's one of the things I do love about advertising, marketing, branding, it's like talent speaks, you know, and so you you got their attention and that and so like, I was the first day like, Tamer Kattan 21:42 It was funny, and to underpin your point, the people who worked, and they told me, Listen, we don't have an opening and creative, but we have an opening and broadcast. And the people there liked my resume so much, because everything else, they seemed like they were bored of the other resumes they were getting. So they they primed me to interview with Richard O'Neill, who is the executive producer on like, the George Orwell spot, 1984. And I guess, he said, I refuse to accept an intern here who's not in film school. And so they basically told me, you're gonna lie, you're gonna say that you're in film school. And I remember like, being like, Oh, my God, I can't lie. I was a kid. And I'm like, Can I lie to this man, but they told me you're gonna lie. And if you have to go to film school aid, and we'll send you to film classes at night, but we want you here, you want to be here. This is the this is the last gatekeeper. And we're going to tell you what you need to do to get the job. And yeah, it was pretty wild. Marc Gutman 22:40 And so you walked in, and I mean, what was it? Like? I mean, was it cuz I remember when I was in California, passing the building in Venice, and it had the big, kind of like, binoculars, binoculars, right? Yeah, giant binoculars out fry. It just seemed like, I never went in and it just seemed like the place where really cool things happened. You know, we're really cool things were created. And I had this like Mystique in order to me. I wasn't even in the advertising business. I was in the film business. I was like, that looks really really cool. Yeah, like, what was it? Like, when you got in there? I mean, like, like, a certain, Tamer Kattan 23:15 You know, that song? Eye of the tiger from the 80s? Yeah, it was like walking into that song. Like, everything, I just my heart rate just started going up. You know, we went in, I remember my first little tour. And as you know, they they welcomed interns, just like real employees. And we got like, a tour of the place. And they gave us a coffee mug that said, innovate or die, you know. And then they had like, and then added another, that was the coffee mug and a T shirt said who wants to be an effing ad agency. And just the logo was like a skull and crossbones. And it was, you know, all about disruptive thinking and breaking conventions. And it was, it was just sexy, you know, a really sexy thinking and really sexy ideas. And they had punching bags in the office that have management heads, on screen printed on the punching bags. See? And I'm like, this place is so cool. It was it was like nothing I'd seen before. And I felt like I was home. Marc Gutman 24:13 Yeah, and rock and roll culture. But yeah, so the culture is cool. And you're looking around, but like, what about the work? Like, what was going on? Like, what did you get to work on? And what were some of your first experiences? I mean, Tamer Kattan 24:25 I was greatly intimidated when I started. And you know, the work Initially, I was just a broadcast assistant. Actually, I was an intern at first. And what was happening is it was really interesting when you're an intern at a place like that, because there's so many interns and, and so many of them go in and out that a lot of times people don't spend a lot of time getting to know you. So I did very menial tasks in the beginning but I went out of my way to show that I wanted more than that. So you know, I would do all the typical things like get coffee, pick up food, photocopies back when that was the thing to do. Do But then I'd go up to the the guy who was the video editor at the time it was on an avid system, you know? And I'd say, Hey, can I go to lunch with you? And can I buy a piece of pizza because it's all I could afford, you know, and, and ask you about editing? And I think that they were, it's so funny because it's such a simple thing. And I remember as a kid looking at this grown man, and going, Oh, he, it brought him joy, that I took a real interest in what he was really passionate about. And I remember feeling off balance a little bit, that I was this young guy that kind of touched this older person, it was sort of a role reversal. In my mind, I thought, so I think I didn't have the sexiest job, but because I kept because I stayed passionate the whole time, because I didn't let the menial labor, get me down. And I ended up getting hired after the internship was over. And then, you know, I immediately was working on Nissan Gatorade, you know, zema at the time, really big stuff, like really big, high profile accounts. And even though I was, you know, the tiniest, the tiniest part of the totem pole, it still felt great to see my fingerprint, you know, on on these things. Marc Gutman 26:15 Yeah. And it's, you know, even talking about the avid editing machines, I remember those, they were like, it was like the dawn of like, nonlinear editing. And it was such a big deal. And they were like, yeah, you know, $100,000 or $60,000 for a machine. And I just remember, you know, you had a bay of them. And I just remember thinking, like, who could ever only the craziest people could ever edit on a computer, you know, like, how, yeah, how does that happen? And then in the process of transferring the film, the digital was something that was my first job, actually, I would drive the film to the processing studio. And so I knew a lot about it, but it was just crazy. And so but I also, you know, I had a similar experience. And then I was a young person living in Santa Monica and living in California. And it was tough. You know, it was expensive. It was competitive. Like, how did you fare like, I mean, you loved it, and you're working on these accounts, but like, how are you getting by? Because I'm guessing they're not paying yet? Tamer Kattan 27:11 Yeah, I mean, I think it was 18,000. That was my first salary. And then they gave me like an American Express corporate card. I don't think I understood how to use that card. So I would use it not realizing, oh, shit, I gotta pay this immediately. You know, I wasn't very smart. You know, I was I lived on electric Avenue in Venice, when Venice was still I mean, Venice. To this day, there's a coffee shop that has kind of the unofficial slogan of Venice Beach, which is where art meets crime. And, and that's what Venice was like, I lived on electric Avenue. And there was, you know, there's a lot of crime, you hear gunshots at night, I live not too far from Shai day, but it was scary at night. And, you know, it was my first time living on my own. And I struggled for sure to, you know, figure out how to pay bills and how to be organized. But I love going to work. And so if there was one part of me that was acting like an adult, it was the part that went to work. Marc Gutman 28:09 Yeah, it's so interesting to see Venice today and how it how it's changed. I mean, my first my first apartment was on Navy street in Venice, right on the border. And I was so excited cuz I had this like, I'm not kidding. You like a two inch sliver view to the ocean. You know, being a kid for Michigan. I was like, I'm on the ocean or whatever. But I mean, it was Yeah, awful place. And it was super tiny. Like a studio I shared with somebody, but I was like, No, you'd be in Venice. And once the sun went down, I'd be I'd be scared. So I get it. And it's tough. And so you're you're working to shut it down. I mean, is this, you think this is it your future? This is all you're gonna do for the rest of your life? What's where do you go from here? Tamer Kattan 28:48 No, you know, it's funny. I I'd never worked like that before. So and I didn't really pace myself. I felt like Shia Day was a marathon and I sprinted as fast as I could. And I'd say about a year and a half in, I'd had enough. And I kind of, I heard a friend of mine, started an outrigger canoe school in Hawaii. And I was like, boy, Does that sound good. And he invited me to work with him. And I remember the day I quit, there was a woman named Elaine Hinton, who is the vice president of broadcast I'm not sure she's still there. And she was an amazing woman. And she basically looked at me and said, Are you crazy? What are you doing? And I said, I'm going to Hawaii. She goes, you're leaving shy, dare to go to Hawaii to paddle canoes. And I go, you know, I gained weight. I was sitting in these cold editing rooms. It just, and I wasn't I didn't know how to pace myself. You know, so I burned out. And I left I went to Hawaii, and she tried her best to, to put some wisdom in me. But it was it was the right thing for me at the time. I ended up working at Shai de two more times in the in the future. So I always went back. I still I just spoke to rob Schwartz the other day, who's the chief creative officer at Shai day in New York. Well, Ashley is the first creative that became a CEO of Shai day. And, you know, we still talk, you know, and he, I retweeted a post and he said something like, once a pirate, always a pirate, you know, and it felt great, you know, because shy it was more than an agency for me, it became a part of my identity, you know, as did Bulldog Drummond when I worked with Shawn, you know, he was definitely another sticker that I had in my suitcase, a big one. Marc Gutman 30:30 Yeah. And so you're in Hawaii, you anything major come of this. canoe school, outrigger canoe school. Tamer Kattan 30:38 The biggest thing was boredom. Oh, my God. It was so I didn't realize what Island living was like until I remember going shopping and seeing this cool shirt, you know, and I'm like, oh the shirts great. And I was excited about wearing it to a nightclub and meeting a girl. And I went into the nightclub under like six other guys with the same shirt. And I'm like, I'm getting out of here. This is Marc Gutman 30:59 Not a lot of choice on the island, right? Tamer Kattan 31:03 I lasted about six months in Hawaii. Marc Gutman 31:05 That's awesome. You came back to California? Tamer Kattan 31:08 Came back to California. I ended up I did a little bit of a left turn where I worked in the fashion industry for a little bit my family. On on the Jewish center garmentos, talk about a cliche, right? And so I ended up working for this big fashion trade show called Magic was the men's apparel guild in California. And I learned a lot about the fashion industry. But I always still identified as an ad person as someone who understood brand. And always thought, Oh, that's going to hurt the brand. You can't do that. You know, whenever we talked about sales versus sales goals versus communication goals, I'd always be the person who's trying to do my best to protect the brand. So even when I was at these other industries, I still felt a pull back towards working at the brand level. Marc Gutman 31:52 Is that when you got back, went back to ChiatDay? Tamer Kattan 31:54 Yeah, I ended up going back to back to ChiatDay years later. I worked at Deutsche at Chiat, young and Rubicam. So I kind of did a little tour. I even worked at Leo Burnett in Chicago and also in Dubai. Marc Gutman 32:07 I mean, is there any a list agency you didn't work at? Tamer Kattan 32:11 Yes, Saatchi and Saatchi is the one I haven't worked at. Marc Gutman 32:15 Love marks is that there is that their book? Love marks. Tamer Kattan 32:19 Yeah, I love it's funny too, because I love that book. And I remember reading that book and going, Oh, I really want to work at Saatchi. But you know that the timing wasn't right. And I always had, you know, other things popping up. So I No, I've never worked at Saatchi. Yeah. Marc Gutman 32:32 Yeah, there's still time. There's still time. But like, at what point did you become what you would consider a brand strategist? Tamer Kattan 32:41 I think, you know, it's funny because I got the label of brand strategist when I first started working with Shawn. And it was because there was two ways into brand strategy, I thought at an early age, which was, I always knew I wanted to get into brand strategy, but I was I was pretty young at the time. And I noticed that a lot of them either had British accents, or Ivy League educations. And so I said, Alright, I don't have experience as a strategist. So this is me going back to the type of thinking I had when I gave them the foam butt right, where I said, I have to start thinking about what they want, what's gonna disrupt their thinking, What's going to be different. And so when I was approaching Shawn, I said, I don't want to approach the client approach him and say, Hey, I can be a strategy for the clients you have now. I'd rather say, Okay, I'm not a strategist, yet. I don't have experience as a strategist. But what I do have is a tremendous amount of experience and action sports. And so even though I'm not a strategist, I have the type of instincts and understanding of the culture that drives these categories that you're I don't care how British the strategist is. I don't care if he went to Harvard. He doesn't know more about skateboards and surfboards and the community than I do. And that's the way that I positioned myself. And Shawn ended up hiring me to pitch Airwalk. And at the time, Airwalk was pretty big business. And I remember when we wrote one that pitch, there was an article that came out and they referred to us as you know, David and Goliath, the little agency that beat all the big agencies. Marc Gutman 34:13 Was it boulder ball Bulldog drummond at the time? Yeah. So I have two very good friends who both appeared on this podcast who were principals in the marketing at Airwalk. On the snow side, one guy by the name of Steve Nilsen, who goes by Stix. I don't know if he ever ran Tamer Kattan 34:29 Oh, yeah, I remember Stix. Oh, my god! Marc Gutman 34:32 you know, he was on the podcast now. He actually works. He's doing marketing with liquid death, the water company. I don't know if Tamer Kattan 34:39 it's fun. I just saw them on LinkedIn the other day and I was I was checking out the brand. That's as soon as you said Stix, it clicked Marc Gutman 34:45 And Mike Artz and it literally he was right before this call texting me about Linda Nilander and who you may have worked with as well and airwalk who was a marketing principal, but anyways, That's crazy. That's crazy. So, Tamer Kattan 35:02 Yeah, Marc Gutman 35:02 you went you got airwalk and I think weren't they doing a lot of work out here in Colorado? Weren't they like they were, Tamer Kattan 35:08 We were in evergreen almost every week. And at one point I was living in, in Denver. Okay. And commuting to was evergreen or? Yeah, I think was evergreen. Marc Gutman 35:18 Yeah. Genesee right like, I think it was, it was technically Genesee wood right next to evergreen. But yeah, we're the office was. Yeah, that's, uh, that's crazy. And so. So that's how you got got on Shawn's radar? Tamer Kattan 35:33 Yeah, kind of and I knew, you know, I, I started reading a lot of books I At first I thought, Oh, the way to be a strategy is to to get mentored at an agency. And it was, it was tough to find a mentorship strategy side. So I ended up just reading tons of books lovemarks was was one of them. Me, the pirate inside, there are a lot of books that really kind of steered my thinking. And ø Marc Gutman 36:40 And any other books that influenced your thinking at that time that you remember, Tamer Kattan 36:45 oh, yeah, there was a book on archetypes that just, I remember just blew my mind open. I think it was the outlaw, cowboy and outlaw or something like that. And it was about, you know, the 13 different archetypes and storytelling. And yeah, it was it was a lot of those things. And what I ended up doing as well, as you know, I noticed agencies of the time, it was really popular to put case studies on their websites. And even when they filled up filled out case studies for effectiveness awards. And as you know, a lot of people ignore these, but what a great education to read, how different agencies deconstruct their pitches and how they found their insight. And what the insight was that they found whether it was quantitatively or qualitatively. So I just started digging into entries for competitions from different ad agencies and digging into case studies of different ad agency websites. I've always been a big fan of sort of macgyvering knowledge, you know, and figuring out smart ways of gaining information quickly. Marc Gutman 37:49 This episode brought to you by Wildstory. Wait, isn't that your company? It is. And without the generous support of Wildstory, this show would not be possible. If a brand isn't a logo, or a tagline, or even your product or a brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company. It's what people say about you, when you're not in the room. Wildstory helps progressive founders and savvy marketers build purpose driven brands that connect their business goals with the customers they want to serve. So that both the business and the customer needs are met. And this results in crazy, happy, loyal customers that purchase again and again. And this is great for business. That sounds like something you and your team might want to learn more about. Reach out @ www.wildstory.com. And we'd be happy to tell you more. Now back to our show. And then So at what point, you know, you mentioned that you were bestowed the title and I have a very similar I remember, like, my very first jobs, I was a story editor and you know, to studio, it's a really big job. But when you're a production company, it means a lot of different things. And I was way over my head, you know, I was doing, you know, script analysis, but also picking up dry cleaning as well. And, you know, at what point did you actually feel like you were a brand strategist, you know, versus having that title, Tamer Kattan 39:18 I think, I mean, there was one moment where I felt like I wasn't trying to prove I was a strategist but I actually brought something that was different. I brought I felt like I was a very good strategist. And it was a moment when we were I was moderating a focus group. Actually, no, I take that back. Somebody else was moderating. I was behind the glass. And sometimes I think a lot of agency people at times will get bored. It's it is it's tedious work to watch someone else moderate a focus group. And it was for Mitsubishi at the time, I think. And we're watching all these SUV people that were intending to buy an SUV Within six months, or within a year, and you know, there's a typical discussion guide, which is so full of questions that it actually doesn't create a discussion. It's just question answer. And there's a moment during focus groups where moderators come into the room and ask the people behind the glass, do you have any more questions you want to ask? And when the moderator came back, I kept watching the people, because I was interested. And when I was watching them, I noticed people showing each other pictures, and they were pictures of their dogs. So I said to the moderator, Hey, can you ask how many of them are dog owners? And he looked at me and said, What? And I'm like, I'm just curious, the number of people that buy SUVs, I'm curious if they're dog owners, so he went in and asked me was something like seven out of 10. And we were like, Whoa, that's a pretty big percentage. The next group was only five. But then the next two groups were like eight and nine out of 10. So then we did it. It was like a survey monkey thing where we quantified it and said, Well, we have something there's something really interesting about there's definitely a correlation between people who buy SUVs and people who are dog owners. So we approached Mitsubishi and said, Hey, you know, you've got competition with all your competition when they create packages for the various SUVs, they've got technology packages, they've got luxury packages, they've got all these different sort of pack, but nobody has a dog package. And and there were these Japanese business guys are pretty intimidating to pitch to. And they started clapping. And it just, it made me it just tickled me man, I was just in one of them gave us this Hunter S. Thompson quote, he said, I don't believe the truth is ever told between the hours of nine and five is what people connect between nine and five was certain things in common. But the things after five o'clock are stickier. So and your dog is very sticky. And it's more sticky than these other things. And I was like when you had the guy on the brand side, convincing his own team of the inside. I was like, Okay, I'm proud of myself. I get myself pat on the back on that one. Marc Gutman 41:59 That's so awesome. That's great. And so, during this time, it sounds like your career is going pretty great. And you're you're making a way for yourself. Are you practicing comedy at all? Or is that something that's yet to come up? Tamer Kattan 42:13 No, actually, you know, it's funny, it's, uh, it went a little. It was a little dark period. For me to be honest. Like, you know, Robin Williams used to always say, cocaine is God's way of telling you, you're making too much money. And I was like a single guy making a lot of money. And I just started partying a lot and going out with friends. And I kind of slipped after I reached a point where I'm like, yeah, I'm proud of myself. I'm a great strategist. And then I just became the worst strategist for about three years. And I, all of a sudden, I think the worst thing, the worst label they've ever given strategist is the smartest guy in the room. I think it's detrimental to have people think that that's what they have to live up to. And I didn't ask as many questions because I got a little bit of a little arrogant, and I stopped being happy with advertising I wasn't is as excited anymore. And then my dad passed away. And when my dad passed away, I had this really weird moment where I realized everything that I was doing was to try to make my dad proud of me. And it was the first time where I said, Well, what makes you happy. And I'd never really done that. And I sort of had this big cleansing period where I stopped drinking, I started, I learned how to learn Transcendental Meditation. I just kind of grabbed the steering wheel back. And, and I was, you know, I was shocked that, you know, 3940 years old, I'd never really known what makes me happy. What was the driver for me? And so I ended up saying, hey, I've always wanted to do comedy. And, but I was afraid to do it, to be honest, because comedy for me was an identity. You know, and I really didn't have that I was always not fully Egyptian, not fully American, not fully Jewish, not fully Arab. But I was funny, and everyone agreed I was funny. So I was afraid to try to be a comedian. Because what if they told me Oh, you know what, we are also not funny. And then I would have just been floating in space. So I didn't know what I was going to do. But I had a friend of mine who ended up marrying Dick Van Dyke. Believe it or not, she's a girl. She was my girlfriend in high school, and then fell in love with Dick vandyke. And now they're married couple, and there's, they're amazing together. But her brother and I were both the funny guys in high school. And she bumped into me at a supermarket and said, Hey, john is doing stand up. Do you want to go see him? And I'm like, Oh, my God, are you kidding me? And I remember getting really excited at the thought of someone so close to me performing stand up comedy. And not only was he good at the show, he blew every other comic away. And at that point, I thought to myself, well, if john is that much better than everyone else, and john and i were the funny guy In high school, if I could just be a little bit if I could be even close to as good as he is, I, you know, this will be fun. And I didn't think it was gonna turn into anything else. I thought it was just going to take one class and get on stage once and have it be a bucket list thing that then professional comedians started approaching me and saying, Hey, you got something. And I did the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland. And I won Best New International act under two years and had a manager assigned me and I came back to the states and quit my job and advertising and sold my house and sold my car and moved to England and lived in a box for four years doing stand up. Marc Gutman 45:38 And how, like, how was that? Was that great? Tamer Kattan 45:40 Or was it it was the best. I went from driving a fancy car living in a house in the Hollywood Hills with a view of the Hollywood sign to literally living in an apartment with no windows, right. It was owned by the comedy club. When we showered It was me and another comedian that live there. Whenever we showered, we had to open a skylight so that the house wouldn't turn into a sauna. Like it was terrible. And we live behind a chicken shop with a really high fence. So people thought behind the fence was a dumpster. So every night I'd come home, there'd be a bag of chicken bones at my doorstep. So I mean, I went from top of the world to bottom of the world in terms of residents, but I was the happiest I've ever been. Marc Gutman 46:19 What? You know, it's so crazy. Like, how did you have an find the courage to make that decision? I mean, you said you're like 3940 years old things are going good. I mean, it's got to be scary to enter into. I mean, I can't believe there was one and I've done stand up. I can't believe there's one stand up comedian that said, Hey, kid, this is easy. This is an easy life, right? This is both easy business and an easy life. I know. It's hard. Like, like, Where did you find that strength to pursue that dream? Tamer Kattan 46:49 You know, this is gonna sound so silly. But it you know how I said, when I was a kid, I didn't even know what made me funny. Just something that kind of happened. I think I've always just been drawn to that I think we're all supposed to do something. And I didn't want to give up looking for it, you know, and I felt like advertising was very, very close to it. And I still I still love advertising, I still actively read about ads and case studies, I think it's brilliant. Like, it's literally To me, it's our version of carving hieroglyphics on a pyramid. It's the digital version of doing that. And I think it's a privilege to work with some brands for sure. But for me, I think I was at a point where I didn't have much to lose, I was single, I didn't think I was going to get married I I was, you know, I wasn't happy. At my advertising job. I was in a situation that was tough for everyone, it was a digital ad agency that wanted to go full service, which is everybody in advertising knows is one of the toughest Growing Pains culturally, for an agency to go from just digital to, to full service. Even if it's digitally lead, it was really hard for them to embrace strategy. So it was a hard job there. Especially as you know, you get the title of change agent change agent. And you think it's nice, but people don't like change. And so I had a tough time going into an office where I felt like a lot of people didn't like me, and then going onstage at night. And I had people coming up to me and hugging me and saying, Hey, you know, your joke about child abuse, my dad beat me too. And then I get a hug from a guy that looked like he was in Sons of Anarchy. And I'm like, Hey, this is really spiritually spiritually fulfilling. And so it was a pretty easy decision at the end. Marc Gutman 48:33 So what's funny about brand strategy and advertising. Tamer Kattan 48:38 It's you It's it's the human nature. You know, like, I feel like I said this to one of my friends. And he always asked me about religion. I go, No, we don't know why we're here. It's like we're on level one of an escape room. And instead of working together to figure out how to get to level two, we all just started fighting in the escape room. So I like figuring things out. I like I, I love using my emotional intelligence, especially because I feel like that's something that us men have an it's an underdeveloped thing in us. You know, like, I think women have always been told to, to grab on to intuition. And men have been told that we don't have that. And women grow up with these impossible physical standards. And then men are told things like, boys don't cry. So we have impossible emotional standards. And I think I saw how much that hurt me when I was younger, to not talk about problems to not, it feels. I like being an observer. I think being a good listener makes you a better storyteller. And I love being able to listen so aggressively, to listen aggressively. Until I hear things and see things that other people don't see. Like I in my comedy. The thing that brings me the most joy is not when people laugh. It's when people say oh my god, that's so true. That's my favorite. Marc Gutman 49:58 So speaking of that, do you have Or can you recall a joke and you don't have to do line for line? Maybe it's the kind of the premise that you just love and you think is so insightful, but others don't. Tamer Kattan 50:11 Oh, yeah, I had a, you know what, I love the joke that kind of changes people's minds a little bit and gives them perspective. And so I said, I was in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I'm an Arabic comedian, you know, and Little Rock, Arkansas while Trump was running. And some somebody yelled out, he's Arab. That name is Arab. And I go, Oh, yeah, but you don't be afraid of me. I should be afraid of you. All, because cowboy hats for me are like turbans for you. I'm old, and this room is full of a bunch of cowboy hats. And I go, and let's be honest, he ha is just white people for Allah Akbar. And then they all started laughing. And once I said that, they all started laughing man. And it was it was really nice. And it was it showed the power of comedy, you know? And as a boy, its hooks got me after that. Marc Gutman 51:05 I mean, do you do you face that a lot? Do you face a lot of racism and a lot of people heckling you while you're on stage, because you're ever. Tamer Kattan 51:15 I mean, I'm pretty lucky. I have a pretty high number of laughs per minute. I'm a pretty punchy comic. And I think sometimes that helps you manage hecklers. And too, you know, I was a comic in New York for a long time. And people are pretty vocal in New York. So I'm pretty good at managing hecklers. But the number of people that come up to me after the show, when Trump was running, I got three death threats. And that was shocking. That's the first time that's ever happened. So it was it was scary. It was a little bit scary. When that happened. I didn't, I didn't expect it. But then there were. It also taught me a lot about human beings. You know, like, I thought I really understood America because I worked at these ad agencies in New York and Chicago and Miami and LA. And I'm like, Oh, I know America. And I didn't, until I became a comedian and started going to Little Rock, and and you know, Wichita, Kansas, and, and then I started doing America. But it's, I also realized, I remember going on stage one night and getting booed really badly, because I was introduced as an Arab comedian. And then I thought to myself, you know, and the owner of the club said, Listen, I'm really sorry, we have good people here. We have bad people here. But sometimes we get bad people. And I understand if you don't, if you want to leave early, and I'll pay you for tonight, and I'll I'll feel the other night. And I, he goes, I'll let you think about it. And I said, Okay, and I went home, and I said, No, I'm not, I'm not gonna quit, because that's not right. And I said, I don't like the way I was introduced. So let me manage this. Right. And I remember my grandfather used to say this thing that I had above my desk at my ad agency, which was listening is the cost of being heard. And so I needed to show them that I would, that I listened I needed to show them. And if they think that I'm on their side, then I'm going to be different than the Arab that they perceived. So I told the guy don't say I'm an Arab, just introduced me as a guy from LA. So he did. And when I went up on stage, I said, Hey, this is my first time in Oklahoma, Oklahoma City. I'm on site. This is a really beautiful place. It's really pretty here. And I didn't know because people in LA talk a lot of crap about you guys. Did you guys know that? And they're like, yup, yup. And they started agreeing with me. And I'm like, That's crazy. How could they talk? And this guy said to me, You, if you're gonna go to Oklahoma, you better watch out. They're really racist over there. And I'm like, you mean, they're gonna judge me without even knowing me? And he goes, Yeah, I'm like, wow, you ever been to Oklahoma? And he goes, No. And I'm like, What an asshole. And the whole audience laughed, and they all clap their hands. And at that point, they owed me. I stood up for them when they were the minority. I was in the big city, defending a small town from big city people. So then when I became an Arab in front of them, they started managing themselves. When somebody tried to heckle me, it was another person at a table next to him to say, Hey, man, shut up, let him finish. It was great. And I think I think that's what it means to be a human being. We're parts of multiple tribes and multiple groups. And I think if you if you break the ridiculous stereotypes, people become people again. Marc Gutman 54:17 Now what an amazing example of how to connect with someone that is different from you that might have different beliefs might even be against you upon first first impression and how to bridge that. That's just, I love that story. , Tamer Kattan 54:32 Oh thank you. Marc Gutman 54:33 Yeah, it's it's really great. Thank you for sharing that. I'm a little speechless, which doesn't happen often. timer, where can people learn more about you and your comedy, we're might be able to see you. Tamer Kattan 54:44 Well, until COVID. Right. But you know, I do a lot of zoom shows. Now. My Websites a great place, which is TamerKattan.com. And then I also have a YouTube series with my wife that we do every week. It's sort of a marriage. social experiment. We got married on the day we met. And, and so we do that that comes out every Wednesday. And that's a great place to follow. Follow us on Instagram to Marc Gutman 55:11 really quickly let's talk about that. Like, can you tell that story quickly about like getting married the day you met. That's, that's, that's awesome. Tamer Kattan 55:17 For sure. I mean, when I was a kid, I, I've always loved traveling. But when I didn't have money, I would use the internet to travel, like with videos and pictures and things like that. And so when quarantines started, I really miss traveling. So I found out that Bumble, the dating app had this feature called passport, where you could be in another city. And so I was in Spain. And I didn't think anything of it because it was you know, so far away, but I met this amazing Swedish woman. And we had so much in common, I was blown away and almost frustrated too, because I was like, God, we have all this stuff in common. And she lives 1000s of miles away. And what happened was, because she was so far away, we were almost like playing a game of chicken with honesty, and just being really brutally honest with each other about our flaws. Like even my profile was like, oh, I've been single this long, because I'm selfish. I used to have a drinking problem. I miss on that I basically did the opposite of what everybody else did in their profile. And then she sent me an email back that mimicked what I'd written about all of her flaws, and it became like a game with us. And so then I fell in love. And the laws had changed in Barcelona, and I already had COVID in March, and I had papers saying I had the antibodies. So I had this window to fly to Barcelona. So I flew in. And then when I got there, they changed the law when I was in the air, and they put me in jail in the airport, and I had to spend the night in jail. And she was 500 feet away from me. And we didn't meet and they flew me back to America. And I'm like, I'm not giving up. And then we did a bunch of research and we found out about Gibraltar, just tiny country that's on Spanish soil, that kind of UK property sort of, and they were allowing Americans in and it was also like the Las Vegas of Europe. And so I flew in there we met there, and I brought a ring and asked her to marry me that first time I saw her and she said Yeah, we got married. It's been six months and now we're in Barcelona until COVID zoning we'll figure out what we'll do next. Marc Gutman 57:21 Yeah, and that's an incredible incredible story and I can't wait to start watching your your YouTube show cuz like no, I really curious you set the timer. Yeah, Tamer. I mean, as we come to a close here, I mean, if you ran into that young Tamer, who is Tamer? I'm sorry that Tamer who was like nine years old and kind of figuring things out and obsessed with dungeons and dragons and being a latchkey kid, like, like, if he saw you today, what do you think he'd say, Tamer Kattan 57:51 oh, man, you're so insightful for saying that. Like I always. When people ask me, why did you start doing comedy at 40? I go, I didn't. I started at nine. Like, I'm not doing it for me. I'm doing it for him. You know, like, I think he'd be proud of me. It feels weird to say that, like I complimented myself. I think he would I think he'd be proud of me. I think the older version thinks I'm a silly and immature. But I think the little kid version of me thinks I'm like a male Pippi Longstocking and he digs it. Marc Gutman 58:23 In that is Tamer Kattan could have listened to Tamer stories for hours. And I'm glad he saved his story about marrying his wife. The day he met her till the very end. Tamer story really is one of the American dream that maybe we should be calling it the human dream. Because Tamer's ability to connect and empathize with people, even those who are initially out to get him or condemn him is admirable. And I think at this time in our country, we can all learn a lot from the Egyptian American kid from Los Angeles, who is now living in Spain, telling jokes for a living maybe we should just be a little bit more like Tamer. A big thank you to Tamer Kattan and Shawn Parr for the intro. I'm sure it comes as no surprise, but I'm a huge Tamer fan. And I'm guessing by this point, you are too We will link to all things Tamer Kattan, his website his YouTube show his socials in the show notes. And if you know of a guest who should appear on our show, please drop me a line at podcast at wild story calm. Our best guests like Tamer come from referrals from past guests and our listeners. Well, that's the show. Until next time, make sure to visit our website www.wildstory.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS so you'll never miss an episode. A lot big stories and I cannot lie to you other storytellers can't deny
James & John discuss eBay Finds: Mac icons mug, collection of Steve Jobs magazines, and Chiat/Day newspaper congratulations. James unveils The Macintosh Office, and news includes a tiny all-in-one Macintosh LC, Captain's Quarters II, and NanoRaptor creations. Join our Facebook page, watch us on YouTube, and visit us at RetroMacCast.
"Sans doute l'architecte par excellence de la forme, il s'inscrit à l'articulation de la quête corbuséenne des objets à réaction poétique et de l'art du collage, de l'assemblage, de l'accumulation... Un amoureux des ustensiles les plus triviaux aussi, comme Claes Oldenburg avec lequel il a souvent collaboré, notamment pour la paire de jumelles agrandie de l'agence Chiat/Day à Santa Monica. Une démarche ludique et décomplexée qui peut paraître très proche de l'art contemporain et dans laquelle l'espace architectural et urbain européen tend à l'atrophie pour mieux s'apparenter au vide d'une scène, à la blancheur d'une cimaise. Une démarche qui a su évoluer et subir de multiples mutations. Elle s'exprime aujourd'hui à travers des constructions qui s'apparentent souvent à des phénomènes naturels. Ainsi les soulèvements telluriques du Guggenheim qui surgissent de la vallée du Nervion à Bilbao ou les nuages de verre de la Fondation Louis Vuitton qui flottent au-dessus de la canopée du Bois de Boulogne." Richard Scoffier, au Pavillon de l'Arsenal en janvier 2016. « Formes : Franck Gehry » est le premier opus de l'Université Populaire 2016 du Pavillon de l'Arsenal qui poursuit l'interrogation initiée en 2014 sur les différentes« manières pour les architectes de construire des mondes ». Cette saison rassemble quatre figures de l'architecture contemporaine analysées de Richard Scoffier, architecte, philosophe, professeur des Écoles Nationales Supérieures d'Architecture.
Previous Episode 1721Drew Neisser is founder & CEO of Renegade, the NYC-based strategic boutique for B2B innovators. Uniquely wired as both strategist and writer, Drew has helped dozens of CMOs unleash their inner renegade and told the stories of over 350 marketers via the #2 podcast for CMOs called Renegade Thinkers Unite, his CMO Spotlight column for AdAge, and his 1st book The CMO’s Periodic Table: A Renegade’s Guide to Marketing. His 2nd book, Renegade Marketing: The 12-Step Playbook for B2B Innovators will be released in late 2020. Drew and the Renegade team have won just about every award imaginable for creativity and marketing effectiveness. Among Drew’s credits, naming the Toughbook for Panasonic which he helped grow to over a ½ billion in sales, repositioning a wide range of B2B brands including Case Paper, Cofense, Riskified, Tungsten Networks and Utak, conceiving the HSBC BankCab, a guerrilla marketing campaign that delighted New Yorkers for 11 years and crafting the enduring tagline, “Where Family Comes First” for Family Circle. Recognized among an elite group of B2B influencers by Gartner, IBM, Pega and Marketo, Drew has been a featured marketing expert on ABC News, CNBC, CBS Radio and Tony Robbins’ podcast among many others. A frequent keynote speaker and moderator at industry conferences, Drew is deeply passionate about the role marketing can play to make our lives a bit better if not save the planet. Diapered at Wells Rich Greene, trained at JWT and retrained at Chiat/Day, Drew founded Renegade in 1996. He earned a BA in history from Duke University and lives in Manhattan with his wife, two kids and a French bulldog named Louie. He currently sits on the boards of the Urban Green Council and the Duke Alumni Association. An avid Ben Franklin fan, Drew’s favorite aphorism remains, “Well done is better than well said.” Support us on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/12minconvosListen to another #12minconvo
It's time for your weekly dose of inspiration and strategy from the Advanced Freelancing podcast. Before I kick off today's episode, if you love this show and listen every week, please hop on over to iTunes and consider leaving the show a review. It helps other people interested in similar content be able to find this show and benefit from all of the great tips that you have already heard. Today's guest wants you to consider one question. What if you could determine who in your audience is your best client in 180 seconds? Juliet Clark is a dynamic and sought after speaker and podcaster, who has spent the last 20 years helping authors, coaches, speakers, and small businesses all over the world build expert platforms. She created a platform building tool that assesses audience obstacles, generates leads, and qualifies leads for businesses. And she says her simple technology can be used from the stage, on social media, and at workshops to create conversations that build long term relationships. She's also the host of the Promote, Profit, and Publish podcast which helps entrepreneurs understand how to use great tools in the coaching and small business spaces. So we're going to be talking all about lead generation, lead qualification, and how to make that process easier for you. This is a hot topic for a lot of freelancers. Juliet’s story on how she became so knowledgeable about lead qualification and lead gen. So I'm out of college. I started out in traditional publishing. And I went on to work in advertising on a couple billion dollar accounts Chiat Day. And from there I went to being a stay at home mom and lasted two weeks. It was really hard. That is a hard job. And so I decided that I could balance my time between there and real estate. And the one thing that I carried through all of those was that you had to prequalify before you worked with people. And you also had to build a really solid Avatar and test and validate that avatar over and over and talk to those people. So, in 2007, I was going through a divorce and I wrote my first book. It was a mystery novel. I killed my ex husband in it. It was very cathartic. But the “what” came from that experience, besides not having to wear a felony orange jumpsuit, because it was metaphorically killing him in a book was that. When I went to publish my first book, I found a self publishing model that was horrendous. It did not serve authors at all. So I started my own company and then within that we had entrepreneurs bringing us a book. And they had written the book because their products and services weren't selling. And someone told them that, “You know, the book is the answer. It's why nobody knows you.” And I kind of said, “No, that's not it. Yeah, this is going to be another failed product.” So we developed, we worked with it, I found a platform that I really loved, and we started developing assessment marketing that was also lead generation. And as we got better and better over time with it, we put components in with it that were also qualification. So that when the people are working with the assessments, they're actually pre qualifying themselves for your business. I think that is such an important thing to consider that you have lead qualification processes built in when people are coming to you. Both with they are landing on your website, your landing pages, they're finding you some other way, but also when you're doing outreach with them. Where do you think most people get things wrong with lead qualification? So my there's a couple of things. My experience when I was in real estate was there was always a couple guys in the office who'd be like, “I have 60 leads.” And they never closed anything. And I had a really great team of people, we were selling about 60 houses a year. And we pre qualified everybody. It was such a huge difference in what we closed every year. So I think that pre pre qualification, we go out and we collect leads, but we don't really find out how interested they are. So that's one of the one of the things. The other thing is, it's easy for you to explain what you do and develop a product. But if you don't validate it first and know who that audience is, you can't replicate it for lead generation. So you have to be able to not only build that avatar, but also validate it. How would you recommend that somebody validate it if they're like brand new to starting their business? How do you figure out that this idea you have, this service or product has legs? So this is the second time I've had to answer this today. One of the things, and I know with freelancers, they work with a lot of coaches, authors, speakers, and small businesses. And unfortunately, that business model is what I call “Bootstrap to Bankruptcy”. Because there are all these things that you need to be successful and one of them is not validating that product. So that's actually what we use the assessments for. We tell people that are brand new, like we're your first stop, you have an idea. Let's get you out on a stage or networking or wherever it is. Let's create this based on success principles and let them tell you if it's a valid product and if they would pay me money for it. Because you get a lot of lip service about, “Oh, I really love that.” And then nobody will pay anything for it. So I'd rather see you spend a couple thousand dollars and validate, then go out and hire that book coach and an online marketing coach and all of those things that are going to cost you anywhere from $10 to $100,000. I'd rather see you validate first. I see this a lot too with other authors. So I also do some freelance public relations work for nonfiction business book authors. And it drives me crazy how many of them come to me and say, “I published my book three months ago, and it's not selling at all.” And I'm like, “Why are we waiting until three months after the book is launched to think about these kinds of things? Did anyone even want to read that book to begin with? And how much opportunity we've lost by you spending a year two years of your life working on this thing?” And then it's the parts of it like did it ever have legs to begin with? Was it ever validated? And then also, how can we make sure that that follow through comes all the way through the process, right? We can't just stop when you created the product. You have to build in your customer service. And you have to build in your marketing. All those pieces have to be in place. I think a lot of people do struggle with lead qualification, too. Especially when you're doing something like cold outreach. That's something a lot of freelancers do. They say I want to work with Procter and Gamble, or whatever. So they go do their research. They dig for hours to try to find the CMOS email address, write this custom pitch, and get in there. Then they forget about that lead qualification process just because it was a big name or a cool company. They still might not be your right client. So can you talk a little bit about, especially on a phone call, because that's usually the next step for a lot of freelancers, what information can you be asking for or listening for on a phone call to determine if a lead is not the right fit? So you've done your base level of investigation about this company or person, you think there's possibility to work together. How do I make sure about that before we sign a contract? So a lot of what we do inside of enrollment conversations is really talking to them about what's worked, what isn't working, what have you tried to get it to work, and really diving into that? The reasons for those conversations, even though they seem a little invasive, is you're going to find out a couple things. And they may not actually verbalize those things.You have to get really good at listening. So to give you an example, when someone comes to us, we ask those kinds of questions. And we might find out that they're blaming it on somebody else they worked with. But when you really get down to it and do some heavy listening and dig, dig, dig, you'll find out that the person you're talking to didn't take action. They didn't follow through. And so you're really listening for those patterns when they're telling you about those experiences. Because they will tell you a lot. You'll find out if you have an action person or a blame person. You don't want that blame person at all. That's so true. I think it's equally important to be listening to hear the right things and logging away those red flags that come up in those early conversations. Because just like you were talking about, one thing I always tell freelancers is it's a bad sign if you're on the sales call, and they say, “I've hired 15 other freelancers before and no one could do the job right.” There is only one common denominator in those projects. And it was the person who didn't give good directions, didn't pay on time, or whatever it is that the client has done. So do you have tips for making that lead generation process faster for freelancers or any type of business owner? So that's actually what we use that assessment for, in depth, is we set the success principles of what we do and then you measure, as the potential client, where you're at in that. So we know not only how much help you need, but also you have an understanding coming into the call about how much help you need. Because sometimes I find that when we're pre qualifying, people don't realize how much help they actually need. They think they're doing better than they actually are. And for anybody, a freelancer, a business, that is a big red flag because their expectations may be much higher of what you're going to do for them than what you actually commit to do for them. It's definitely important to know where they're at and where they want to go. I use a loose form of pre qualification for the freelancers that I coach. I layout in the sales page this is the type of person I work with. These are the types of things we work on. And then I require that they do a brief phone call with me just to make sure that we're a fit beforehand. But I'm imagining that using something like a form where you ask questions could help pre qualify people to see if they're the right fit. But what do you do with the people where you read it and you say, “Hmm, this isn't the right fit” or you look at their information they've emailed to you? Let's say you got a lead through your website that says, “I want to hire you to do these freelance services.” But you can tell it's not a fit for you and they didn't really pass your pre qualification test. Where do they go from there? How do you respond to that professionally? Juliet’s response to this sticky situation. Usually, I try to be a connector. I will go back and explain to them, “Look, this is not really an area where we work well and I can see you need help here. I know somebody.” And then I give them a name and number and tell them they should contact them and see if they can help them a little bit better. That doesn't mean that you're giving bad leads to someone else. But you genuinely may not be the person to do that work. And most of the time, when we're referring, we're making a little bit of referral fee off of it as well. So it's not a total loss. But here's the thing about it, when you do something like that, and we just have this conversation in integrity, people come back and they send people to you. Because now they fully understand what you do. And they understand that you just didn't take their money and not deliver for the sake of taking their money. And that's huge when you're doing something like this. I think one thing that you might never know is the people who land on your lead qualification page who look at it and just in looking at it, realize that you two are not a fit and they don't even fill it out. So it's also doing a lot of that work for you. But people can self opt out and go, “This is like five questions long and I'm too busy to answer five questions.” If you're too busy to do that, we're never going to get anywhere on the project. Anything else in that lead generation process can definitely help people realize “This is right for me. This isn't right for me.” Now, one thing I see all the time, not so much in the freelance world, but in other businesses is this idea of buying leads. Now is that something that's still relevant? I mean, I would think it's worth the extra time to find your own leads and then pre qualify them. But then every so often, I do see people selling these lead generation services where they'll promise you a list of X many companies. Juliet on buying leads. So here's the deal. Business is all about relationships. And that is one of the things when you and I initially talked that I told you in this click world out there, what we've developed, is for relationship building. So when you go out and buy a lead, there are three different kinds of traffic out in the world. There is cold traffic, medium traffic, and hot traffic. Hot traffic is when you have referred somebody to me and you vouched for me. You really need this person. That medium traffic is somebody who kind of knows you, following you trying to figure out what you're doing, and you're nurturing them. Those cold leads, they didn't ask to become a lead, for the most part. Or if you're in digital, they click and they don't really know you. A lot of times they've just clicked a click. So those people are really, really hard when you buy leads. And a lot of times when you go out and buy those, they're spam. So they're actually ticked off that you're like, “Where did you get my name?” So now you have no chance of building rapport and relationships. You should always go out and develop your own leads because you're the face of your business. You're the person that they're looking at. Are you credible? Do you follow through and do what you say you're going to do? If I tell you when you hand me your card that I'm going to call you this afternoon, do I call you this afternoon? There's all of these things that they're evaluating that make it necessary for you to generate and pre qualify your own leads. It's such a great point, because I think so many people are looking for that magic bullet. The easy answer of, “Oh, well just give me a list of 10 or 50 companies that I can pitch.” And I always say that your odds of success are going to be so much higher if you make your own list of 10 companies you would like to work with and then do the research to see if on your initial review, they meet your lead qualification. It's just going to be so much more effective. The other thing I always wonder about those lead gen companies too is let's say they have a list of 50 companies, but 2000 people have bought that list of it, right? So now those people are really pissed off on that lead list because they're like, “Man, everyone under the sun is emailing me and I never asked for this information to come to me.” And that's such a great point because Juliet has a lot of clients who are trying to get into corporate workshops. And they think, “Okay, every corporation needs me.” Do you have any idea how many times a day that HR person is hounded for a workshop to come in? So the best thing you can do if you want to get into those places, is go to some place where you can network with those people. The fact is, if I am going to an event, and I want to meet the speakers or I want to do business with those people who have been vouched for that probably could use my services, I reached out to them on LinkedIn. And I say, “Hey, we're going to the blah blah blah event. I can't wait to see you speak.” And then walk up at the event, introduce yourself, “Hey, I reached out on LinkedIn.” And then talk to them. But here's the bigger tip. Sit next to them at the event because inevitably when you're sitting next to people conversation starts. Sit at their table or wherever, because that's where it all begins. That's where you get to make your first impression instead of an email or a solicitation phone call. Get out of the house and go network with those people that you really want to grab their business. And you may find out at those like, “Oh my gosh, that person's horrible. I really don't want to work there.” That tip about LinkedIn is so important because our email inboxes can get cluttered. But you can always do follow up on LinkedIn. You can do initial outreach on LinkedIn. And then if you sit next to that speaker at that networking event, and they post about having spoken, you remind them of who you are by commenting on that on their social media. You say, “Hey, you did a great job. It was great to meet you.” You want to keep staying in their world. And I think that that is really, really important. So let's talk about the beginner person who's just starting out realizing that they need to have a better process for capturing incoming leads, what would you say would be the first step that they need to take? Where I'm going with this is a lot of freelancers go, “Oh, I can't launch my business yet. Because I don't have my website.” A website that has no traffic to it is so useless. So just skip it. I always just tell them that they don't need that unless they have this massive following and they have massive traffic already. Then yes, let's optimize your website and make sure there's a place on there for people to hire you. But I would think it's probably not set up your website. I'm wondering if there's something else people can do to sort of be lead friendly. Juliet explains how people can be lead friendly. How about a landing page? It costs about $50 to put up the landing page. You add a little about yourself, your services, and let's set an appointment. So you can send people to that landing page. Also get out and start developing content. Let's say that you and I had a conversation or we were going back and forth on LinkedIn a little and you expressed an area you were having a little bit of trouble and you may not hire me today. But wouldn't it be amazing if I served you by saying, “You know what, Laura? I wrote an article about this topic. Can I share it with you?” Then leave the link and and just kind of start developing from there. You're showing them your value instead of telling them how valuable you are. And how many times do we see people doing the opposite? It is rampant on Facebook and LinkedIn. “Help! I'm launching a podcast. Does anyone have any good resources?” And inevitably 10 people respond. “Hi, I'm a Podcast Producer here. Here's my services page, go check it out.” And it's like, I don't know who you are, you know what I mean? If you were the person that left me the link that said, “Hey, here's this great resource I found, or I took this course. I read this book. I listened to this podcast and it was awesome.” And continue to build that relationship. I feel like we're interacting as to humans, rather than you just see me as somebody who can be pitched. And I think that that's really important. I always laugh how many people seem to think that it's as easy as, you send a pitch or you get on a sales, contract sign, you've got the money, the company is in the person. It still goes back to relationships. We live in a digital world. And digital technology enables us to do all that other stuff faster, but we still have to go back to relationships at the end of the day. Juliet’s upcoming book. So this spring, I have a book called coming out it's actually called “Pitch Slapped”, because that's what I feel like when I go and you do that to me. Especially those people who are on LinkedIn, you connect with them and they say, “Hey, I've got this brand new program. Would you like it?” And it's like, “No, I don't even know who you are.” And half the time they haven't even done the research to see what it is you do. I've had people pitch me investment banking stuff. I'm like, “Did you even look at my profile? Like, I don't need investment banking. I'm not looking to have venture capital.” My favorite though is that people who are subtly insulting with their pitch where they're like, “I know how hard it is to work out.” You're like, “Oh my gosh, you're calling me out on my fitness or my nutrition.” Not only have I been “pitch slapped” as Juliet says, but now there's like this undercurrent of like you have flagged me as your ideal lead because you think I need extra help. Juliet’s pet peeve. My pet peeve is men who email who tech. You go through Facebook Messenger and they say, “Hey, I have this great new meetup. I help women manage their money.” It's like when your husband tries to teach you how to play golf and tells you everything wrong. And you're not inspired by that. You want to hit him over the head with the club. It's so crazy that and this all goes back to that same topic of the proper lead qualification. Does this person want to hear your message? Are you reaching out in the most effective way to do it? Because maybe you do have some incredible supplement that burns fat, but there's a nicer way to go about it, or there's a more appropriate way to make sure that whoever you're targeting is the ideal person to hear that message. I might be willing to hear that at a networking event where they're just talking about their own experience using it. I actually have a rule that if someone does that to me on LinkedIn, I just remove the connection immediately. If the first message is, “Hi! I sell XYZ. Here's the link to buy it. I'd love to help you.” I'm like, “Okay, remove connection.” Because there is no connection between us because you didn't take the time to even get to know me or spend that time Juliet shares a story. So I love to share this story. Someone did that to me. They wrote me a birthday message and this was like in 2016. It was really nice message, “Hey, Happy Birthday. You deserve all the best in life. I’d love to help you get healthier in your next year.” And they signed it. So I wrote back, “Thank you.” Then here came the sales pitch. That would have been okay except 2017, they sent the exact same message. In 2018, I was at an event and the owner of this MLM said, “You know, my people are having a little problem with marketing. Do you think you can come in and talk to us?” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I have this great thing on social media. And guess what? I've got this messenger inside of my presentation that is what your guy keeps sending me every single year.” And he's like, “No way.” I was like, “Yeah, I use you guys as an example, in my presentation.” You don't want to be the bad example that someone is using to say what not to do, right? In my mind, it wouldn't take that much more effort for them to send you a personalized message that at least varies it up every year. He could log in a spreadsheet, pitched her in 2017 and didn't go anywhere. So let me not do that. Juliet pointed out that inside messenger, when you get that message, you can see the message above that's identical from the previous year. So vary it up. That's another good point. Because when you're doing this outreach to prospective clients, you want to vary it up. One of my most hated things with follow up is when a freelancer sends a pitch and then they respond to that message when no one answers and says, “Hey, just following up on this.” Don’t do that. Give the person a reason to read your message that they might not have seen initially. Always add a little bit of personalization. And that goes back to that human connection. When you see someone else in your space or in another space who is doing things well and owns their expertise, go look at how they do it. You want to learn how to make great email newsletters, get go sign up for somebody list that has a 40% open rate and a high close rate. You want to learn about lead generation and pre qualifying go look at how Juliet has set up her own pre qualification on the quiz. So you can always take lessons from other people who are doing things right. Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the advanced freelancing podcast. For more freelance advice, get a copy of my book Start Your Own Freelance Writing Business—available now! Buy it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and more. Connect with Juliet: Quiz: leadlogicquiz.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julietdillonclark/ Podcast: Promote,Profit,Publish http://superbrandpublishing.com/how-to-subscribe-rate-our-podcast-5-stars-on-itunes/ Facebook Community: https://www.Platformbuilders.com Websites: http://www.superbrandpublishing.com Call to Action: http://promoteprofitpublishquiz.com
David & Goliath founder David Angelo looks back at a three decade career that started as a junior art director at DDB New York, followed by stints at Chiat/Day and Cliff Freeman & Partners. We talk about what prompted him to hang his own shingle 20 years ago and how the industry has changed in the past three decades. David & Goliath, a creative independent shop, was bought in 2017 by Innocean, the agency created by Hyundai. He talks about life after acquisition, life in LA and his cause célèbre: bravery.
Overview The Stevens Group is pleased to present a new podcast series that salutes the masters of public relations and revels in their observations, insights and advice to PR professionals. This new series is part of the ongoing partnership between The Stevens Group and CommPRO to bring to PR, digital/interactive and marketing communications agencies the wisdom of those who have reached the top of the PR profession. About Our Guest Marian Salzman, SVP, Global Communications, Philip Morris International (PMI) Marian Salzman, senior vice president, global communications at Philip Morris International (PMI), has been named one of the world's top five trendspotters and is among the world's most-awarded public relations executives. In recent years, she has been listed in PRWeek's Global Power Book and as a PR News Top Woman in PR. She is also the recipient of the She Runs It 2017 Changing the Game Award, has been inducted into the PRWeek Hall of Femme and Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame, and was on the Holmes Report Top Innovators List and on Business Insider's 25 Most Powerful PR People. In April 2018, Marian moved to Switzerland and embarked on her greatest challenge to date, heading global communications at Philip Morris International (PMI) as it embarks on its journey to build a smoke-free future. Charged with developing a proactive, multilayered communications program to accelerate PMI's vision, Marian is forging active and productive alliances with NGOs, advocacy groups, regulators and other parties involved in shaping the environment in which a smoke-free future can be realized. Since Marian took charge of global communications at PMI, she has made bold strategic moves to transform the function itself and how it sits within the company. Her goal: reintroduce PMI into, as she puts it, “civilized society” and engage that society in meaningful conversations about the future of tobacco. Reporting directly to Global CEO André Calantzopoulos, she is remaking the group—including directly overseeing a staff of almost 100 communications professionals based on three continents who are responsible for media relations, scientific engagement, content development, crisis management, internal communications, sponsorships and more. She is ensuring that PMI is positioned at the forefront of a new discussion about tobacco and the reduced-risk products (RRPs) available today and in development. Marian Salzman—A Globally Recognized Trendspotter Before joining PMI, Marian was CEO of Havas PR North America for nearly a decade, and chaired its global PR assets known as its PR Collective (networked but not a network). There, she reshaped the creative output, creating one of the most buzzed-about boutique agencies in North America and achieving top-five status at key U.S. and global awards shows. Marian also served on the Havas Worldwide general managers group and as co-chairman of the company's first international steering committee for its social media assets. In recognition of these efforts, she was named PRWeek's PR Professional of the Year for 2011. Prior to Havas PR, Marian was the chief marketing officer at both Porter Novelli and JWT Worldwide and the chief strategic officer at Euro RSCG Worldwide (Havas Creative). Her first international assignment was in the 1990s, as the Amsterdam-based lead of TBWA's Department of the Future. Marian was also an entrepreneur who launched American Dialogue (Cyberdialogue) focus groups in cyberspace back in the early 1990s, when the online world was seen as a place for geeks and oddballs, ultimately selling the company a few years later. Her business partner then was advertising agency legend Jay Chiat; ultimately, he appointed her Chiat/Day's first head of emerging media and consumer insights ahead of Chiat/Day merging with TBWA International.
Scatter Podcast interview with Matt Segal, Data Director at TBWAChiatDay, a global creative advertising agency based in Los Angeles, California. Chiat/Day's "1984" ad campaign for Apple, introducing the Macintosh computer, gave the agency global notoriety with their forward-thinking and disruptive ads. Matt discusses the benefits of agency life as a data strategist, shares several project examples, and covers several tools that his team uses for social web listening and analytics. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/segalmatt/ Other links: TBWAChiatDay: http://tbwachiatdayla.com Gatorade commercial: https://youtu.be/ZCEdBfBolWk Adidas Japan commercial: https://youtu.be/M1FOg-KHP28
“I am fearless about being rejected.” Marian Salzman ist eine faszinierende Frau. Aufgewachsen in einer kleinen Stadt in den USA war ihr schnell klar, dass sie ihr Leben dort nicht beenden wollte. Nach sieben Absagen von Ivy League Universitäten nahm sie die achte. Marian startete eine bemerkenswerte Karriere in der Agenturbranche, die sie zu Firmen wie Chiat Day, Young & Rubicam, J. Walter Thompson und zuletzt als Global Chairman von Havas Global PR Collective führte. Ihr Wechsel zu Philip Morris, wo sie heute globale Kommunikationschefin ist, fand weltweite Beachtung. Wir sprechen mit ihr über das Thema Alter und die Unterschiede im Umgang damit in den USA und Europa “Retirement is a european luxury.” Für junge Frauen, die am Anfang ihres Berufslebens stehen, hat sie eine klare Empfehlungen: “Stop thinking about starting a career.” Folge 127 unseres Podcast “On the Way to New Work” mit Marian Salzman, live vom Emotion Women´s Day 2019, hört Ihr ab Freitag um 6:00 Uhr auf allen gängigen Plattformen wie #SoundCloud, #iTunes und #Spotify SPOTIFY spotify.onthewaytonewwork.com SOUNDCLOUD soundcloud.com/onthewaytonewwork ITUNES itunes.onthewaytonewwork.com Und alle Buchtipps books.onthewaytonewwork.com mit Christoph Magnussen und Michael Trautmann
Leaving a lucrative advertising career for real estate investing in was a wise risk by David Coe. Learn how he survived the 2008 downturn, current thoughts on the real estate environment and lessons learned throughout the way. Enjoy! Show Notes: 5:30 - How David became a good cook. 8:50 -What David misses from his days at Chiat-Day. 11:06 - Switching from the advertising world to real estate investing. 16:15 - Thoughts on real estate investing in our current environment. 19:36 - "I love the idea of putting a deal together." 24:47 - Use education to conquer fear. 28:50 - The pain of 2008. 35:23 - Managing the loss of a parent while being self-employed. 40:12 - "Wear my helmet..." 41:33 - Accountability. 45:58 - "Treat all people fairly." How to reach David: Website | Instagram | Facebook Book Recommendation: "The One Thing" by Gary Keller App Recommendation: Noom App
On today's episode of the Not Real Art Podcast, Sourdough is joined by Kristin Juel, who runs Juel Concepts, an artist management company for musicians with an exciting small roster of youngish indie musical artists including Hamish Anderson andRuby Velle & the Soulphonics. Kristin and Sourdough actually worked together for quite a few years a while back at Kaiser Permanente and have been friends for more than 15 years! They chat about their history together, life in brand management and the commitment it takes to make it in the creative world today. They discuss the tools of the trade, her team at Juel Concepts and just how exciting it is getting to work with people with as much talent as her current artist roster. Kristin has strived to build a family environment with her company and close knit team, and she unpacks the challenges and rewards she has faced in this pursuit. The conversation also covers networking, promotion and why it is so important to be able to articulate yourself when talking about your own art. For all this and a whole lot more, be sure to tune in! Key Points From This Episode: Where the Sourdough moniker comes from. The work Kristin and Scott did together from 2004 to 2013. Brand strategizing with musicians and Kristin's eclectic career. The long and hard path to a successful creative life. Working with Hamish Anderson. Finding the right people to partner with Kristin's amazing, global team. Is it the best time in history to be an artist? The intangibility of most of today's music world. Transparency, honest communication and real time feedback. Kristin's work process and the flow of her company. Musical prodigies, hard work and the balance between practice and talent. Networking, self-promotion and explaining your craft. Building a strong peer-group and support structure. And much more! Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Kristin Juel — https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinjuel Juel Concepts — http://juelconcepts.com Kaiser Permanente — https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org Lyle Lovett — https://www.lylelovett.com Chiat Day — http://tbwachiatday.com Gary Clark Jnr. — http://www.garyclarkjr.com Hamish Anderson — http://www.hamishandersonmusic.com Ruby Velle & the Soulphonics— http://www.rubyvelleandthesoulphonics.com Jessica Childress — https://www.jessicachildressmusic.com Ludwig Drums — https://www.ludwig-drums.com Kii Arens — https://kiiarens.com Perry Shall — http://www.perryshall.com Slack — https://slack.com Asana — https://asana.com Man One — http://www.manone.com/ Man One on Twitter — https://twitter.com/ManOneArt Scott “Sourdough” Power — https://www.instagram.com/sourdoughpower/ Not Real Art Conference — https://www.notrealartconference.com/ Not Real Art on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/notrealartofficial/
A conversation about storytelling with Nick P. Ross, writer, producer and director for SoulPancake, BuzzFeed, Yahoo Studios, Chiat Day and Refinery 29.
Terry O'Reilly is the host of CBC's Under the Influence (formerly The Age of Persuasion), and he joins Ben this week on the podcast. They discuss Terry's advertising career, his book This I Know: Marketing Lessons from Under the Influence, his ceaseless curiosity, the counterintuitive insight of chickens painted purple, and the unrelenting power of an idea. Terry also gives Ben the scoop on an exciting new project! The full archive of Terry's Under the Influence is now available for free, wherever you get your podcasts. About the Guest Terry O'Reilly began his career as Copy Chief for FM108 Radio in Burlington, Ontario, where he discovered that with meticulous planning and attention to detail, you can still fall flat on your face. With that learning, he went on to become an award-winning copywriter for Toronto advertising agencies Campbell-Ewald, Doyle Dane Bernbach and Chiat/Day. He created campaigns for many of the top brands in the country, including Labatt, Molson, Pepsi USA, Goodyear Tires, Tim Hortons, Volkswagen, Nissan and the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1990, Terry co-founded Pirate Radio & Television. A creative audio production company producing scripts, sound and music for radio and television commercials, Pirate grew to a staff of 50 with 8 recording studios in Toronto and New York City. Terry has won a few hundred national and international awards for his writing and directing, and has worked with such notable actors as Alec Baldwin, Ellen DeGeneres, Kiefer Sutherland, Bob Newhart, Martin Short and Drew Carey. He even managed to create an advertising campaign for a group of nuns. (Good story there). In demand as a keynote speaker, Terry talks about key marketing issues all companies and organizations face – from the critical need to embed emotion in marketing, to why customer service = profit, to how to change a negative perception, to why smart marketers don’t outspend their competitors – they outsmart them. He served on the inaugural Radio Jury at the Cannes International Advertising Festival in 2005, and was named chairman of the following award show juries: The Marketing Awards (Co-Chair) Canada The International Clio Awards in Miami The London International Advertising Awards When he’s not creating advertising, he’s talking about it as the host of the award-winning CBC Radio One/Sirius Satellite/WBEZ Chicago radio show, Under The Influence, which is the follow-up to the hit series, The Age of Persuasion. The New York Radio Festivals awarded his show the Grand Prize as Best Radio Program in 2011 and again in 2012, and iTunes chose it as “Best New Podcast of 2011” and one of the Best Podcasts of 2015. Terry has been given the following career awards: Lifetime Achievement Award – American Marketing Association Lifetime Achievement Award – Advertising & Design Club of Canada Lifetime Achievement Award – Television Advertising Bureau Honorary Degrees have been bestowed on Terry from these great institutions: McMaster University – Honorary Doctorate of Laws Humber College Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning – Bachelor Degree in Applied Studies St. Mary’s University – Honorary Doctor of Civil Law He has also been honoured by Ryerson University with the following: Inaugural inductee to RTA School of Media Hall of Fame Alumni Achievement Awards 2015 He has co-written a best-selling book called The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture, published in Canada by Knopf, and in the U.S. by Counterpoint Press in Berkeley. He has written a new book titled This I Know: Marketing Lessons From Under The Influence, published in Canada, the U.S. and China. He has a wonderful wife and three lovely daughters. Who like some of his work. Learn more about Terry or follow him on Twitter (@terryoinfluence).
Nancy Reyes, president of TBWAChiatDay New York, joins us to discuss the retirement and legacy of creative icon Lee Clow. A pioneer of advertising's creative revolution, Clow led Chiat/Day to become one of the most celebrated ad agencies of all time—especially for its work on Apple ads like "1984." This week's panel is: • Nancy Reyes, President, TBWAChiatDay New York • Patrick Coffee, Editor at Large, Adweek • David Griner, Creative and Innovation Editor, Adweek See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Nancy Reyes, president of TBWAChiatDay New York, joins us to discuss the retirement and legacy of creative icon Lee Clow. A pioneer of advertising's creative revolution, Clow led Chiat/Day to become one of the most celebrated ad agencies of all time—especially for its work on Apple ads like "1984." This week's panel is: • Nancy Reyes, President, TBWAChiatDay New York • Patrick Coffee, Editor at Large, Adweek • David Griner, Creative and Innovation Editor, Adweek
On January 18, 2007 show zero was posted. Show zero established the RSS feed and let me get some of the bugs out of our workflow. We begin year 13 next week. Thank you for being part of the Software Process and Measurement Cast. SPaMCAST 530 features our interview with Justin McPherson. Justin and I talked about the role of the enterprise architect in agile. Organizations struggle with the role of the architect as they embrace agile methods. However it is not all about agile, the multiple layers of architecture such as solution, application and enterprise add to the confusion and the perception that people need to jump through too many hoops. Justin’s experience provides direction. Justin’s LinkedIn Bio: Executive consultant with 25 years of experience in IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture and Business Transformation leadership. Specializing in Establishing the Office of the Architect, Enterprise Architecture Design & Performance Management, Enterprise Architecture Platforms, Application Portfolio Optimization, Operating Model Frameworks, Business Transformation, Enterprise Risk Management and Information Security & Regulatory Compliance Contact Information LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/justinmcpherson Email: jmcpherson@eastrategy.com Re-Read Saturday News Re-Read Saturday News I have been vacillating between an intense discussion of Bad Blood and a terse and blunt statement about Theranos. In the end, I took a middle path. If you want to dive into the detail again, grab the book and the follow our re-read through it. If you want the later, check final thoughts to get the bottom line! Remember that we will re-read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell next (get a copy). Next week we will lay out our approach to The Tipping Point. Current Entry: Week 13 - Final Thoughts - https://bit.ly/2sAnBMr Previous Entries: Week 1 – Approach and Introduction – https://bit.ly/2J1pY2t Week 2 -- A Purposeful Life and Gluebot - https://bit.ly/2RZANGh Week 3 -- Apple Envy, Goodbye East Paly and Childhood Neighbors - https://bit.ly/2zbOTeO Week 4 -- A Reflection -https://bit.ly/2RA6AfT Week 5 -- Sunny - https://bit.ly/2AZ5tRq Week 6 - The miniLab - https://bit.ly/2rfmwJh Week 7 - Wellness Play - https://bit.ly/2rqUYk6 Week 8 - Who is LTC Shoemaker - https://bit.ly/2GkbWv0 Week 9 - Lightning a Fuisz and Ian Gibbons - https://bit.ly/2QR7poR Week 10 - ChiatDay, Going Live and Unicorn - https://bit.ly/2SrRpGv Week 11: The Grandson, Fame and The Hippocratic Oath - https://bit.ly/2FfSwp3 Week 12 : Chapters 19 through Epilogue - https://bit.ly/2RoSYZ3 Next SPaMCAST SPaMCAST 531 will feature our essay on Balancing Control and Self-Organization to Avoid Heat Death. Control and self-organization represent a classic Goldilocks and the Three Bears problem. We discuss whether there is a solution. We will also have a visit from Gene Hughson or Jon M Quigley.
SPaMCAST 529 features our essay titled Habit and Commitment. We are still early enough in the year to be pursuing new beginnings and the New Year resolutions you made a few weeks ago. Commitment and habits can be positively interrelated. Commitment is being dedicated to a cause or activity. Habits reflect a more or less fixed routine. We also have a visit from the Software Sensei, Kim Pries. Kim discusses nonlinear and analog thinking. Kim’s essay is a perfect counterpoint to Habit and Commitment Re-Read Saturday News I decided to complete the content portion of the re-read of Bad Blood this week. From a team-level perspective, I believe we can all recognize some if not all of the behaviors seen in Bad Blood, albeit on a far less sociopathic scale. If this were a business novel, it would be easy to assume that the behavior shown in the book is hyperbole used to make a grand point. In Theranos’s case, the supporting reading I have done suggests the book is somewhat understated. Why do people take the abuse? Why is money the only thing that matters to some? Why do some people say yes to doing work they know is ethically wrong? I am not sure this book answers those questions nor do I think my analysis can shed light on the psychological rationale of individuals; however, next week we will wrap up our re-read by reflecting on the impact of Theranos like behavior at the team level. Remember that we will re-read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell next (get a copy soon). Current Entry: Week 12 : Chapters 19 through Epilogue - https://bit.ly/2RoSYZ3 Previous Entries: Week 1 – Approach and Introduction – https://bit.ly/2J1pY2t Week 2 -- A Purposeful Life and Gluebot - https://bit.ly/2RZANGh Week 3 -- Apple Envy, Goodbye East Paly and Childhood Neighbors - https://bit.ly/2zbOTeO Week 4 -- A Reflection -https://bit.ly/2RA6AfT Week 5 -- Sunny - https://bit.ly/2AZ5tRq Week 6 - The miniLab - https://bit.ly/2rfmwJh Week 7 - Wellness Play - https://bit.ly/2rqUYk6 Week 8 - Who is LTC Shoemaker - https://bit.ly/2GkbWv0 Week 9 - Lightning a Fuisz and Ian Gibbons - https://bit.ly/2QR7poR Week 10 - ChiatDay, Going Live and Unicorn - https://bit.ly/2SrRpGv Week 11: The Grandson, Fame and The Hippocratic Oath - https://bit.ly/2FfSwp3 Next SPaMCAST SPaMCAST 530 features our interview with Justin McPherson. Justin and I talked about the role of the enterprise architect in agile. Many organizations struggle to incorporate enterprise architecture into agile practices, Justin’s experience provides direction.
SPaMCAST 528 features our interview with Allan Kelly. Allan makes his third appearance on the cast to talk about his book Continuous Digital (buy a copy!) and the state of agile. A great way to start the year! Allan’s Bio: Allan Kelly helps companies large and small enhance their agility and boost their digital offering. Past clients include Virgin Atlantic, Qualcomm, The Bank of England, Reed Elsevier and many small innovative companies you've never heard of. He invented Value Poker, Time-Value Profiles and Retrospective Dialogue Sheets. He is the author of "Dear Customer, the truth about IT" and books including "Project Myopia", "Continuous Digital", "Xanpan" and "Business Patterns for Software Developers". His blog is at https://www.allankellyassociates.co.uk/blog/ and on twitter he is @allankellynet. Re-Read Saturday News My intent is to complete our re-read of Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup in three more weeks. The book has 24 chapters and an epilogue, therefore there will be two more weeks on the book and then a wrap-up. We will re-read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell next. This week we tackle three more chapters in which we learn money is thicker than blood (something I learned working in a department store during college), and that people with a moral basis for ethics always have a breaking point (something I have only had to tangentially face). Week 11: The Grandson, Fame and The Hippocratic Oath - https://bit.ly/2FfSwp3 Previous Entries: Week 1 – Approach and Introduction – https://bit.ly/2J1pY2t Week 2 -- A Purposeful Life and Gluebot - https://bit.ly/2RZANGh Week 3 -- Apple Envy, Goodbye East Paly and Childhood Neighbors - https://bit.ly/2zbOTeO Week 4 -- A Reflection -https://bit.ly/2RA6AfT Week 5 -- Sunny - https://bit.ly/2AZ5tRq Week 6 - The miniLab - https://bit.ly/2rfmwJh Week 7 - Wellness Play - https://bit.ly/2rqUYk6 Week 8 - Who is LTC Shoemaker - https://bit.ly/2GkbWv0 Week 9 - Lightning a Fuisz and Ian Gibbons - https://bit.ly/2QR7poR Week 10 - ChiatDay, Going Live and Unicorn - https://bit.ly/2SrRpGv Next SPaMCAST SPaMCAST 529 will feature an essay titled Habit and Commitment. Commitment and habits can be positively interrelated. Commitment is being dedicated to a cause or activity. Habits reflect a more or less fixed routine. We will also have a column from Kim Pries.
SPaMCAST 527, is our last podcast of 2018. We say goodbye to 2018 by talking about user story maps. User story maps are both versatile and an underused tool. Perhaps something that we can address in 2019? We also have a visit from Susan Parente. Susan brings her Not a Scrumdamentalist column to the cast to discuss agile risk management. Risk management is a requirement for any form of work. Why do some in the agile community feel it is not needed? Re-Read Saturday News We are re-reading Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2018 – Buy a copy and read along). This week we move through three chapters. These three chapters continue to show the same pattern of abuse of the truth and employees that we have seen in other chapters. Arguably, conflating Theranos’s mission with a religion (chapter 14) might take the story to a new level of crazy but it is only that, a new level. Week 10 - ChiatDay, Going Live and Unicorn - https://bit.ly/2SrRpGv Previous Entries: Week 1 – Approach and Introduction – https://bit.ly/2J1pY2t Week 2 -- A Purposeful Life and Gluebot - https://bit.ly/2RZANGh Week 3 -- Apple Envy, Goodbye East Paly and Childhood Neighbors - https://bit.ly/2zbOTeO Week 4 -- A Reflection -https://bit.ly/2RA6AfT Week 5 -- Sunny - https://bit.ly/2AZ5tRq Week 6 - The miniLab - https://bit.ly/2rfmwJh Week 7 - Wellness Play - https://bit.ly/2rqUYk6 Week 8 - Who is LTC Shoemaker - https://bit.ly/2GkbWv0 Week 9 - Lightning a Fuisz and Ian Gibbons - https://bit.ly/2QR7poR Next SPaMCAST SPaMCAST 528 rings in the new year with an interview with Allan Kelley. Allan makes his third appearance on the cast to talk about his book Continuous Digital and the state of agile. A great way to start the year!
On this week's edition of The A-List Podcast, Jamie Barrett calls in to the studio for an inspiring interview with host and DiMassimo Goldstein CCO, Tom Christmann. Barrett is the Founder and Executive Creative Director at barrettSF, an agency he launched in 2012. Before opening his own shop, Barrett made a name for himself as an esteemed creative, delivering world famous campaigns for many of the most renowned agencies in the industry such as Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Fallon, Wieden+Kennedy and ChiatDay. In this episode, learn all about Barrett's life before advertising, where he spent one summer teaching tennis and windsurfing in the French Riviera and the next at a Bootcamp in Virginia. Hear what he learned working under some of the most iconic names in advertising, why he views his job as a glorified hobby, the importance of great account people, and much more. Show notes below! • [0:00 – 1:27] Intro • [1:28 – 12:22] Barrett reflects on his childhood, talks about teaching tennis and windsurfing in the French Riviera, and talks about his experience spending one summer at a boot camp in Virginia. • [12:23 – 18:15] His time at Princeton University, aspirations of becoming a sportswriter, and the moment he realized he wanted to go into advertising • [18:16 – 29:42] Trying to break into the industry, being denied 15 straight times, and the awesome story of the dinner with Pat Fallon and Tom Mcelligot that landed him a gig at Fallon • [29:43 – 36:00] Barrett reflects on many of the amazing mentors he worked under before ultimately leaving Fallon to take a job a Chiat/Day in New York • [36:01 – 39:40] His short yet meaningful time at Fallon, and the transition between being a writer and becoming an Associate Creative Director • [39:41 – 50:00] Barrett talks about his different experiences at each of the agencies he worked at, and how they all helped shape the creative he is today • [50:01 – 53:56] The importance of great account people, the emotional intelligence required of good creatives • [53:57 – 1:01:26] Launching his own agency, why he doesn't shy away from the word “advertising”, and the meaning behind the agency's tortoise mascot • [1:01:27 – 1:04:14] What he looks for in young creatives. • [1:04:15 – 1:05:24] Outro “The A-List” is a podcast produced by DiMassimo Goldstein, an inspiring action agency, recorded at the Gramercy Post, and sponsored by the Adhouse Advertising School, New York's newest, smallest, and hippest ad school. You can subscribe and rate the show on iTunes or listen along on SoundCloud. For updates on upcoming episodes and guests, be sure to like the A-List Podcast on Facebook and follow host Tom Christmann on Twitter.
Lee takes a look back at Chiat/Day’s enduring relationship with Apple and the late Steve Jobs. From 1984, to ‘Think different,' to the introduction of the iPod.
Cameron Day is a Creative Director/Copywriter, and kinda the "post-Don Draper", having hustled through the late 80s/early 90s as an ad guy. He's also Guy Day's son, who founded Chiat/Day (if you know anything about advertising). Cameron still writes and creative directs as a freelancer, but he's got countless stories from the adworld grind as you can guess. He schooled us on how to NOT work 'till midnight, navigating business, and what to do if the power goes out during a client pitch with Range Rover. Scrrt!
In this season's premiere episode, host and DiMassimo Goldstein CCO Tom Christmann returns to the recording booth to interview John Patroulis, Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of Grey Global Group. Prior to joining Grey, Patroulis spent six years at BBH New York, joining as the agency's Chief Creative Officer before being named its first-ever Creative Chairman in 2015. Under his leadership, BBH became one of the most awarded agencies in New York City. Tune in to hear how Patroulis went from swinging a sledgehammer in Toledo, Ohio, to becoming one of the most decorated creatives in the industry. His adventure-filled career journey will leave you feeling inspired. • [0:00 – 1:26] Intro • [1:27 – 5:02] Growing up in Toledo, Ohio as the son of teachers, and having an early affinity for reading • [5:03 – 9:58] Patroulis talks about attending the Ohio State University without a “plan”, bouncing around different majors before eventually landing on English Literature • [9:59 – 17:39] Spending his college summers swinging a sledgehammer at a concrete pipe factory, and what he learned from boxing • [17:40 – 26:13] Patroulis talks about couch surfing after college, shares a funny story about being night watchman, and recounts his time working as a bartender at a punk rock club in Wrigleyville called The Cubby Bear • [26:14 – 38:51] How Patroulis developed a relationship with a famous NYC-Filmmaker Charles Lane while bartending at the Riviera Cafè • [38:52 – 52:38] The amazing story of how Patroulis met David Angelo, and how that friendship propelled him to get his book together, ultimately landing his first advertising job at N.W. Ayer • [52:39 – 1:01:26] Getting an offer from Chiat/Day, the importance of working on your craft, what he learned under Gerry Graf, and the responsibility of being irresponsible. • [1:01:27 – 1:02:40] How bad meetings can serve a purpose • [1:02:41 – 1:09:29] Moving to Chiat/Day's San Francisco office to work on Adidas, and how Chuck McBride taught him the importance of caring about every little detail, all the way to the end • [1:09:30 – 1:13:05] The story behind the famous Adidas commercial, “Hello Tomorrow” directed by Spike Jonze • [1:13:06 – 1:15:40] The difference between being a “doer” and a leader • [1:15:41 – 1:19:07] Co-founding his own agency T.A.G., and launching Halo 3 • [1:19:08 – 1:23:42] Going to BBH, and what he learned from John Hegarty's endless optimism • [1:23:43 – 1:25:09] Working at Grey, being confident in yourself, and doubling down on creativity • [1:25:10 – 1:26:47] Patroulis explains why he thinks it's a great time to be in advertising, and why he's so excited for the future • [1:26:48 – 1:28:30] Patroulis shares one piece of advice to young creatives trying to break into the industry – “care” • [1:28:31 - 1:29:35] Outro “The A-List” is a podcast produced by DiMassimo Goldstein, recorded at the Gramercy Post, and sponsored by the Adhouse Advertising School, New York's newest, smallest, and hippest ad school. You can subscribe and rate the show on iTunes or listen along on SoundCloud. For updates on upcoming episodes and guests, be sure to like the A-List Podcast on Facebook and follow host Tom Christmann on Twitter.
'The Explosion Expert'. This is my conversation with David Abraham of Wonderhood Studios in which we talk about taking calculated risks. Wonderhood is a startup - a modern media company built around a content and programming studio and a full-strength creative agency for major brands. David’s experience comes first from the London creative agency world of CDP and Chiat / Day. And most recently from seven years running Channel Four in the UK.
Today our expert guest is Joe Fairless, a full-time real estate investor who controls over $175 million worth of real estate and host of the longest-running daily real estate podcast, Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever. Joe took an unexpected route into the real estate world – he started his career working with toddlers, as a preschool teacher, daycare staff, and “manny.” Of course, this naturally segued into a full-time advertising job on Madison Avenue. Even as New York's most eligible manny and a project manager at Chiat/Day, making ends meet in the big city was hard. It was imperative that Joe honed his financial mindset. Joe started by reading, of course, Investing For Dummies. He quickly read more books and immersed himself in the real estate community – this was the key to his financial freedom. Getting Unstuck Like many of us, Joe felt stuck in a job that was, ultimately, unfulfilling – he wasn't contributing anything meaningful as an advertiser. If you feel stuck in your job, or just at this point in your life, Joe suggests sampling new life experiences. Take an improv class, volunteer, teach, play sports, etc. Just try to identify where your focus should be in this next phrase of your life. Crash Course on Investing Before you get into investing, or anything, you should do some research. Listen to podcasts, read books, and talk to people. Good places to start: Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever podcast Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! Real Estate Investing for Dummies Send an email to info@joefairless.com for a free single-family home guide. Buy for cash flow – not appreciation. Mitigate the risk Make sure you have cash reserves set aside for your purchase. Get a loan that isn't a “balloon payment” that comes due in a short period of time. Instead, get a 30-year loan (note that this applies if you are purchasing single-family homes, not commercial real estate). The Biggest Helping: Today's Most Important Takeaway “If you feel stuck, then start sampling life experiences. If you feel stuck, then get unstuck – go test some things out, go on Groupon, go to a class, go on eventbrite, go attend a meetup, go to a networking event. If you feel stuck and you feel like you want to evolve into something else, or at least see different things, then those are all resources that I recommend … In order to evolve, you need to have some context for what else is out there.” -- Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life. Resources: Learn more at JoeFairless.com Listen to Joe's podcast: Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Want to invest in single-family homes? Send an email to info@joefairless.com for a free single-family home guide. Read: Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever (Volume 1) Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever (Volume 2)
For Kate Hironaka, chief strategy officer of B-Reel in Los Angeles, hearing about the impact of iconic work while at the University of Oregon School of Journalism excited her about the industry. While the world went gaga over the creative commercial exploits of Apple’s “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” created by Chiat Day, Hironaka learned about the mother of a socially awkward 10-year old who wrote Lee Clow a letter thanking him for creating something that allowed her child to see the world differently, embrace his differences and say, “I think I’m going to be OK.” In Hironaka’s eyes, this was what advertising really could be, beyond just selling a brand — and in her career, she has embraced what she learned in Eugene at Wired, Goodby Silberstein & Partners, 72andSunny and now B-Reel. Level-headed and a pointing to listening as a great strength, Hironaka believes that getting to the point of staying on an even keel takes time, repetition and that, ultimately, it can get one to realize that the pace of the business doesn’t necessarily carry the “crisis” moniker and can allow the fun of the industry to shine through. Honest support is another hallmark of success, in Hironaka’s eyes. This emotional security allows people to be their very best, can create teams that far exceed expectations and let people say ‘the stupid thing’ without fear. Additionally, having that supper and being constantly ‘in beta’ affords people a journey to try things — some that work, some that don’t — and find unique ways to help improve the work. Another key factor in success, according to Hironaka, is getting out and really seeing and understanding how people really live and interact with the world. Additionally, she feels its important to not take the things that most consider mundane, for granted. Even in focus groups, a long-time part of the industry landscape, Hironaka finds new things that can make a real difference for clients and brands. Curiosity is also another skill that is important. By taking a genuine interest in people and their stories, empathy is built and new perspectives created. It can improve the way the industry sees its own stewardship in creating value for brands beyond just sales — and also inform the way the evolve inclusion and support the relationship that are built within the industry. Support of each other is a big part of Hironaka’s personal point of view and narrative. By consistency being champions for each other, even in the face of challenge and competition, positivity can emerge and engender a welcoming environment that allows for longevity and the best work possible.
In the fifteenth installment of the A-List Podcast, host and DiMassimo Goldstein CCO Tom Christmann is joined by Omid Farhang, the Chief Creative Officer at experiential agency Momentum Worldwide. Over the course of forty-five minutes, Farhang quotes the Wu-Tang Clan, talks about growing up as the child of an Iranian cowboy, and shares some of the most valuable lessons he learned working under and alongside the biggest names in the industry. Show notes below! o [0:00 — 1:36] Intro o [1:37 — 8:05] Farhang tells Tom about growing up the child of an Iranian cowboy, and the pressure he felt to become a doctor or a lawyer o [8:06 – 11: 53] How Farhang discovered advertising, and the emotions that ran through his head when he first walked into the Chiat Day office o [11:54 – 18:14] How the Honda “Grrr” spot inspired him to go into advertising o [18:15 – 20:55] Wanting to be a writer and going to ad school with a sense of purpose and urgency o [20:56 – 22:55] How the definition of titles are changing in the industry, what he learned from the Wu-Tang Clan, and how he has been influenced by comedy and hip hop o [22:56 – 27:25] Starting as an intern Crispin Porter + Bogusky, living in a basement, and the benefit of writing 200 headlines o [27:26 — 31:18] The lessons Farhang learned working as a young creative on Miller High Life o [31:19 — 36:12] Farhang walks us through his plea to Alex Bogusky for a full-time gig and why he dropped out of ad school without a job. o [36:13 – 38:37] The interview process towards becoming a first time CCO, Momentum Worldwide, and the power of an honest business relationship o [38:38 – 41:00] Working with the children of NBA superstars for SAP's “The Simple Report” o [41:01 – 46:00] The benefits of freelancing, releasing ideas into the wild and experiential advertising. o [46:01 – 47:50] What “Malicious Obedience” is, and how young creatives can avoid it o [47:51 – 48:45] Outro “The A-List” is a podcast produced by DiMassimo Goldstein, recorded at the Gramercy Post, and sponsored by the Adhouse Advertising School, New York's newest, smallest, and hippest ad school. You can subscribe and rate the show on iTunes or listen along on SoundCloud. For updates on upcoming episodes and guests, be sure to like the A-List Podcast on Facebook and follow host Tom Christmann on Twitter.
"It's a right of passage to know that you're good at executing, but also challenge yourself to understand that at the very root of what we do as designers—whether our medium is physical, digital, websites, billboards or t-shirts—at the end of the day, design is a method of communication, and the design is a manifestation of that communication." riCardo Crespo is a world-class creative director and he is very secretive online. In fact, you won't find much on him at all and he prefers it that way. Referring to himself as a "creative ninja" (he is an MMA fighter), riCardo has worked at global agencies Saatchi & Saatchi, McCann Erickson, Chiat/Day; and he was the global chief creative for Mattel and 20th Century Fox before starting his own shop, Th13teen. riCardo enightens us in this episode with his incredible experience on the differences between branding, marketing & advertising and where they fit together as a part of a venn diagram; as well as why it all starts with brand & purpose. Crespo has an interesting take on portfolios and he doesn't put much weight in them as he touches on subjectivity, explaining & communicating your work. He also discusses being courageous as a creative and how sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone, making a decision on your environment and whether you can find a diplomatic, respectful voice with marketing execs or if you need to find a new environment to collaborate & thrive. Lastly, we discuss the democratic culture of design today, why change for change's sake is bad and why if change is a good strategy then the brands need to suffer through the online criticism. Truthfully, this episode is so jam-packed with value it's hard to find quotes for. Get out your notepad & pen. Mentions Include: riCardo on Twitter Avatar movie Juventus FC rebrand by Interbrand "Designing Brand Identity" University of Cal logo controversy Miami Ad School talks "1000 True Fans" by Kevin Kelly EP45: MLC Panel '15 My next guest is Alex Center. Alex is a design director at Coca-Cola Co. working on Powerade, Vitamin Water & Smart Water. Checkout of some of Alex's work. Sign up for the weekly email newsletter for updates, discounts on future products and exclusive content for subscribers. You can also show your support for the podcast by joining the community and keeping it sponsor-free. Did you enjoy this episode? Then please rate and/or write a review of the show on iTunes. Also, be sure to follow show host, @TAdamMartin & @MakersofSport on twitter and Dribbble. ORDER NOW: Sports Designers United t-shirt.
Joel Babbit is the CEO of NARRATIVE CONTENT GROUP -- one of the nation’s leading content marketing companies. It creates, distributes, and publishes content for its own websites and in partnership with many of the world’s leading brands, including AT&T, Coca-Cola, Mercedes, Georgia-Pacific, Newman’s Own, SC Johnson, Delta Air Lines, and Bacardi. Websites owned by NARRATIVE include Mother Nature Network (mnn.com) – its flagship property, and the most visited for-profit site in the world for news and information related to sustainability. The company was founded in 2009 by Babbit and Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell, and its equity partners include CNN and Discovery Communications. Prior to launching NARRATIVE, Joel spent over 25 years in the advertising and public relations industry. He began his career at McCann-Erickson, where he worked on The Coca-Cola Company account, and was a co-founder of Babbit & Reiman Advertising (acquired by Gold Greenlees Trott) and 360 (acquired by WPP's Grey Global Group). He also previously served as President of WPP’s GCI Group and Executive Vice President of Chiat/Day. Following Atlanta’s selection as host for the 1996 Olympic Games, Joel took a leave of absence from the private sector and was appointed as the City’s first Chief Marketing and Communications Officer. He has been active in numerous civic and non-profit organizations including Young Presidents Organization, The CDC Foundation Board of Visitors, Management Executive Society, GCAPP, The Atlanta History Center, and The Anti-Defamation League. He is a Director of Primerica (NYSE: PRI), GreenSky Credit, and The National Health Museum. In 1992, Joel received the John Drewry Award for Distinguished Achievement in Journalism and was an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist in 1997. In 2015, he was awarded The John Holliman Lifetime Achievement Award by his alma mater – The University of Georgia’s Henry Grady School Of Journalism.
James and John discuss eBay finds: dollhouse Mac, Chiat Day 20th book, iPod socks, and iMac prop. Rick walks us through using Zip disks with classic Macs, and news includes Designed by Apple, Get A Mac, and top 15 Apple ads. To see all of the show notes and join our website, visit us at RetroMacCast
Lee Clow has been making this thing called “advertising” for more than 40 years. He started at Chiat Day in Los Angeles when there were 10 people and 2 accounts and has been there ever since. In This Episode: -Growing up adopted post WWII -Identifying his passion for art early on -The meaning of “applied art” -How the advertising agency shifted to mavericks leading the way -Looking for the things he could become obsessive about -Why he was drawn to advertising -How the idea originated for the Apple Genius Bar -Finding the romance in advertising, looking for the emotional center of a brand -From form to formless – having a disruptive nature -Working closely with Steve Jobs and why “impute” mattered -Why he’s most proud of the relationships along the journey -Behind the scenes of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign -Needing resiliency to overcome the downside of the advertising business -Finding ideas in listening
“You have to build marketing inside out today. It has to come from inside the company.” It’s this kind of hard work that drives John Zissimos, Chief Creative Officer for software giant Salesforce. His work includes growing a coherent brand and bringing a promise to life across a variety of channels online and off. We discussed all of this and more on this week’s episode of the On Brand podcast. About John Zissimos John Zissimos is the Chief Creative Officer at Salesforce. As CCO, John is responsible for building the Salesforce brand and crafting the company’s story around the world. He leads the creative organization across digital, strategy, interactive design, films, events, customer stories, and UX. Over the past 6 years, John has inspired a design-led culture and built a full-service, creative agency within Salesforce to inspire, innovate, and tell the story of the fastest-growing software company in the world. Prior to joining Salesforce in 2010, John spent over two decades as an advertising creative executive, film director, and photographer. John began his career in marketing at Chiat/Day and has held top creative leadership positions at McCann Erickson and J. Walter Thompson. John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Radio, Television, and Film from Temple University. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Pam, and daughters Alexandra, Ellie, and Katie. Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you’d like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. Subscribe to the podcast – You can subscribe to the show via iTunes, Stitcher, and RSS. Rate and review the show – If you like what you’re hearing, head over to iTunes and click that 5-star button to rate the show. And if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review. This helps others find the podcast. OK. How do you rate and review a podcast? Need a quick tutorial on leaving a rating/review in iTunes? Check this out. Remember – On Brand is brought to you by my new book — Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small. Pre-Order now for the best price and digital extras at GetScrappyBook.com. And finally a reminder that On Brand is brought to you by the Social Brand Forum. This premier digital marketing experience takes place September 22-23 in beautiful Iowa City, Iowa. Learn from experts like Jay Baer, Joe Pulizzi, and Gini Dietrtich in the heart of the heartland. Listeners of the show get the best rate when they register using promo code ONBRAND at socialbrandforum.com.
A long time ago, I was a copywriter. I was at Scali McCabe Sloves, Chiat/Day, Stein Robaire Helm, Borders Perrin & Norrander, and BBDO, along with a couple of other companies that I thought were ad agencies because of the creative way they were named after people, but that turned out to be accounting firms or something. Somebody told me that you couldn't be a director unless you went to school for it, so I took a bunch of film classes at UCLA, NYU, and SVA, and even though some people might tell you otherwise, I managed to learn stuff. Then I started asking people to hire me to direct their commercials and some of them did.It's been about twenty years now, of me wearing a hat, wandering around on the set, and saying "cut" without getting into any trouble. I must be really good at it, too, because sometimes people ask me to do it over and over and not because I got it wrong and they want me to try again until I get it right. I even got a bunch of certificates and trophies and stuff -- including a really ugly hood ornament from the London International Advertising Awards. And not just for commercials. I sometimes get to direct films -- which are just like commercials only they're longer and there's more talking and sometimes naked people in them -- and documentaries, which are just like commercials only the people you point the camera at usually know even less about how to make the film go than I do. Brian won Best Horror Comedy short film in Shriekfest 2002 and had a screenplay finalist in 2002 as well with his script "The Lakeside Slasher".
Steve Hayden is one of the most important figures of the late twentieth century advertising, leading creative teams at both Chiat/Day and BBDO on the Apple Computer account, where he and Lee Clow made advertising history as co-creators of the breakthrough 1984 Orwellian take-off campaign for Apple Inc. He has won hundreds of awards for creative excellence and dozens more for effectiveness (including the Grand Effie for the launch of the Apple Powerbook.) After helping Apple reclaim the industry lead from IBM and Microsoft, in 1994, Hayden moved to Ogilvy to head the IBM account and change the puclib perception of a brand many considered extinct, eventually propelling Ogilvy to a decade of growth and prosperity. Steve has contributed to award-winning work for such diverse clients as American Express, Kodak, Motorola, Dove, Cisco and SAP.
Mary Beth Garber: Queen of the Southern California Broadcasters Association On WIN Without Competing! Dr. Arlene will interview Mary Beth Garber, the President of the Southern California Broadcasters Association (SCBA) since 1998. Garber serves as a consultant for 62 stations in Los Angeles, the biggest radio market in the world in terms of dollars. Garber has been recognized as: “Broadcaster of the Year” by Radio Ink Magazine and received the Genii Award for Excellence in Radio by American Women in Radio and Television. She has also been named as one of the “20 Most Influential Women in Radio” by Radio Ink every year for the past 10. During her presidency at SCBA, Garber has co-produced, in conjunction with Arbitron, three behavioral studies about media usage. Garber has also created and produced “The Virtual Neighborhoods of Radio,” which she has presented to advertisers, marketing groups and broadcasters across the country. The Virtual Neighborhood concept has has changed the attitudes of programmers' and on air personalities' toward listeners and advertisers. Garber has been the keynote speaker for Chambers of Commerce and American Advertising Federation and for the American Women in Radio and Television Chapters nationwide, teaching them how to succeed through the creation of local Virtual Neighborhoods. During the last 10 years Garber has also trained over 600 radio sales people through her Southern California Broadcasters University courses changing how sellers position radio and prospect for clients. Prior to joining SCBA, Garber had a distinguished advertising and broadcast career in Los Angeles. She held senior media positions at Chiat/Day and Foote, Cone & Belding. Her radio experience includes local sales and management for CBS and ABC radio stations and at Interep Radio. To read more, visit...http://www.drbarro.com/.