Inspiring Futures Ed Cotton

This episode features an interview with Gerard Crichlow, who heads up Global Strategy on the Unilever brands- Axe/Lynx at IPG.

Gerard collaborates with several IPG entities worldwide to ensure the Axe/Lynx brands connect to their consumers and cultures. 

Some quotes from Gerard from the episode.

"And for me, if we're in the attention game, who does attention best, and that tends to be entertainment companies. And so I've always tried to look at how do we shift from interrupting people to providing entertaining content."

"There is no more monoculture, especially for younger people. So you have to be able to entertain in order to get people's attention."

"I kind of start from the premise that no one gives a shit about your brand. So I almost like take the brand hat off. Of course, we're doing it for brands. And so we. we then first look at what is the landscape, what are the signals, what are those conversations or topics. And then we then put our brand hat back on and then look at are any of these topics related to the brand's point of view.

 "If you fan like a fan, you almost take your brand hat off and you speak like the fan, you're interested in what they're talking about, you like the same songs, the same tracks, you know the backstories, all of those things."

"It's like a muscle. You post a lot. Some things will fly. Some things won't. But the things that do fly do really, really well. And from what we see is we keep a small team, meet every single day, post, get that muscle going. And then when things fly, and we think the engagement and the conversation is scaling. we begin to provide value. "

"It has so many more implications, not just social. It actually is trickling itself from the ground in the social conversations into bigger pieces of work, like the above the line work. So what are the sort of types of conversations that people are talking about What influencers or musicians do they relate to? Those are partnerships we then go after. What do they want because Axe as a fragrance brand? What do they want from fragrances? How do they react to each other?"

This latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with the CMO of Depop. 

Depop is one of the most interesting brands in the fashion space since it's all about reselling and ultimately about transforming the way we shop for fashion. 

Peter has a fascinating background with experience on the agency side with both Anomaly(where he worked on the Converse brand) and VCCP and client side at Google in Creative Lab. 

In a wide-ranging conversation we talk about his early experience as a writer and how that's core to his work today, building a cohesive brand, the importance of culture for brands, how community needs to be balanced by the brand and some of the challenges of growing the brand beyond its core. 

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

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

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

On Media

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

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

The Problem with Niches

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

People Want to Conform

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

Strategists- Look More Closely at What's Around You

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

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



 

Jae Goodman is unique. He worked on Madison Avenue. He has a deep understanding of brands. He knows Hollywood, and he understands the power of culture and celebrity.  Jae has experienced these worlds throughout his career, which spanned the likes of Wieden and Kennedy, CAA, and the creation of his agency- Observatory, and now his consulting company, Superconnector Studios.

In our conversation, we discussed the similarities between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, the importance of relationships and community in Hollywood, the changing landscape for brands and communication, and what creatives and strategists need to focus their efforts on today. 

We also briefly touch on proprietary tools that allow his clients to see the intersection of brands, culture, and celebrity. 

The latest Inspiring Futures podcast features an interview with Amy Daroukakis, a cultural strategist. Our conversation stretched far and wide from the creative emergence of crisis to the importance of curiosity as a lifestyle to get you out of your comfort zone. The idea is that Cultural Strategy is a more significant thing than understanding Youth Culture. The fact is the future is now and isn't passive, but it's about trying to answer the big question, "Where are we and where is the headed?" which is a question most people would love to know the answer to, even if they have no idea what cultural strategy is.  The importance of being human in a world of increasing AI, when all people want to do is to replace their juniors by loading 200 trend reports into an AI and pressing a button. But with no one with any judgment or experience holding the wheel- how do you know the value of the output?  In short- how to live and be a cultural strategist.