Jan
07
CCO Search: an interview with Bud Caddell (Part 2)
By
This is a transcript, lightly edited, of an interview conducted in New York City December 22, 2009. For Part 1 of the interview, go to This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, January 4, 2010.
Grant McCracken: You’re making it sound as if you just happened…this is just a piece of good fortune, but if you do it often enough it’s not good fortune, it’s you consulting…what?
Bud Caddell: It’s about conducting a thousand tiny experiments every year.
Grant: Oh, and some of them work and some of them don’t.
Bud: Some of them work and some of them don’t. And it’s about constantly reading and constantly staying on top of different conversations and taking the temperature of many, many different people. And asking them their opinions on wide-ranging things. So as I wrote my report, I asked many of Henry Jenkins’ researchers questions about the topic. And I sought out everything written about fan-fiction, transmedia, and content creation I could and some I used and some I discarded.
It seemed like what was going on with conversations around trans‑media really made sense with what was happening inside fandom – and the consortium kids at MIT knew this and were already blurring the line.
And there seemed to be these merging subcultures, all going towards the same place. And I tried.‑‑and what I wrote was trying to pull these together and say, "We’re all going to the same place here."
Grant: Right, and that’s an academic place, or do you mean a cultural place?
Bud: Right. More of a cultural place.
Grant: Right.
Bud: Fueled by those small academic groups. They were the ones asking really interesting, tough questions. I mean a lot of times it’s frustrating because they are such unanswerable questions. But they are really puzzling moments. I think if you put enough of them together and experiment with them, really interesting things could happen.
Grant: Yeah. So you do experiments that draws other people in, or drives them out, but whatever happens that is all grist for the mill. That’s all kind of data you can use to take the temperature of the moment.
Bud: And I can use that later for anything else I’m doing, because I’m testing a few of my hypotheses. Another example is a site I built that allowed anonymous strangers to exchange secrets via email, At Your Secret Service. I had watched these overlapping groups of friends go from visiting PostSecret every week to posting a personal on Nerve.com. And for some reason, those two behaviors together interested me. Maybe it’s because my best dates have always involved spilling way too many secrets to a total stranger…
But I thought, how can I build something that start that interaction? And what happens from there? Like if I just get two balls going down the same hill together, how do they collide? And a lot of things I wondered with that was just about peoples feelings about anonymity online, and the security of personal information. It’s like a big thing to play with, before I go and talk to a major brand who might want to put money against a kernel of an idea. It’s good that I have experimented with it before, and I understand people’s reaction to it.
Grant: So sometimes it’s instrumental but sometimes it is just a brute curiosity.
Bud: Right.
Grant: What will happen if…?
Bud: So painting YouTube videos was just extreme curiosity. Because it’s also one of my hobbies that I enjoy, painting, because it’s a hobby that I have that I don’t obsess over. I can just be completely awful at it and it’s important to have a few of those. Because everything else I do I trying to be better than myself at. But that was one I could just be like, "it’s time I can unwind and not obsess over this." But now it’s become that, simply because of the success of that painting. But that was really just me saying I don’t think there is a lot of difference between our shared experiences watching the same videos on YouTube as it was painting animals on the cave walls. I know that sounds kind of ridiculous but a shared experience that we had with one another and things that we talk about. So I was thinking, "What if I painted those? And could I sell them online?" Just enough to recoup the canvass and the paint. And it ended up being‑‑selling for $1000 and the canvass and the paint cost me $50. It is just amazing the way that just happened to work.
Grant: So this is kind of your world as a laboratory and you try different things. It sounds like you welcome inspirations, you welcome new ideas when they’re inspirations, and you are not doing a careful serving process where you say, "Yes, this is a good idea because it will accomplish this goal, or give me this kind of data, or speak to this clients need." Something comes in over the transit, just, well‑‑you tell me. It doesn’t seem like you are doing a careful auditioning of these ideas. Many ideas come over and how do you recognize the ones you want to follow up on?
Bud: It’s a bit of questioning how labor intensive these things are. How quickly can I execute a very, very small nugget of my curiosity? Just to see what it will turn into. Can I build it from there, and that’s exactly what I tell my clients to do as well. Find that speck of dust that could turn into a pearl and just see what happens, meaning measure the hell out of it. Instead of aligning every bit of resource that you have in your agency and your brand to execute a single idea; Do a thousand tiny small experiments, and the ones that actually start to catch on fire, start putting wood on them and see where that goes.
Grant: So you want them doing a thousands things?
Bud: I do. And it could align and it should align with their overall strategy. So if it’s a Pepsi, it’s the idea of multiplicity. The idea that they can create these diverging messages and diffuse them out to the world. They should be doing an enormous amount of things at once. And trying to create meanings inside different communities. Because that really fits their brand. They’re not continuity, like Coke would be. They have the freedom to express themselves like an artist.
Grant: Totally. Totally. But however many ideas you have, not all of them‑‑and even after you’ve said, "Can I execute this quickly?" You still have more ideas than you can execute.
Bud: Absolutely.
Grant: How do you sort?
Bud: I sort by keeping a really engaging group of people around me that I can bounce ideas off of. That’s step one. Ideas tend to vomit out of my mouth, too. I don’t hold them or keep them precious. I don’t keep anything to myself. I talk to anyone I possibly can that’s around me and say, "I have this idea." Or "Do you think this is interesting, too? Maybe we can do this?" And their reaction to it, I gauge if they find it interesting. If this incredibly bright, diverse, and interesting group around me finds this interesting, there might be something to it afterall. And then I think about things like, "How quickly can I execute? Can I execute it by myself? How many more people do I need to involve in this to make it happen?"
And sometimes an idea requires an army. I’ve tried to launch a website plannerreads.com, that grabs all the aggregated shared items from all the planners that I could possibly find on the Internet. And just accumulate them and say, "these are the most shared topics right now. These are the articles everyone is reading."
That was just something where I needed to get an army of people together to make that happen. But that benefits all of us, because now there is a resource out there where you can go and find this all. And see, here we are, and this is what were interested in.
Grant: And where is that?
Bud: It’s plannerreads.com. It’s constantly broken, and I’m constantly trying to change things. And I’m not exactly sure what it will evolve into but there it is. Step One. I also come into ideas because I notice behaviors that are shared among like‑minded people. There’s just so many of us inside Google Reader and there are so many of us who express ourselves by sharing things, sharing different advertising topics that we’re currently reading. So what can I do with that behavior? And what can I do with that data?
Grant: I love that idea of people just streaming with data. I know when I was reading your Slideshare deck about now. I like the idea of people sort of streaming through a "now." And then I like the idea of, I don’t know quite‑‑the visual is something like, you know what I mean? Like if you do the visual that shows‑‑that shows, I don’t know. Anyhow, sorry. I just like that idea of everyone giving off data.
Bud: It’s like a comet’s tail, right? And it’s just there waiting to be looked at and tracked and understood. And also what we’re really missing is how does that data change over time? And what can we learn there?
Grant: Yeah.
Bud: What are my behaviors now that I didn’t have six months ago?
Grant: Yeah.
Bud: How are my behaviors changing? And we could track most of that. It’s sitting out there. Dormant. But at the same time, brands are fine spending millions of dollars for research with focus groups of a hundred people. I’m making it sound too easy – it’s a monumental challenge, collecting that data, and extracting insights from it. But it’s there. The opportunity. The oil’s there, we just have to drill for it.
Grant: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m interested in how guilty I am of a kind of amnesia where my ideas are changing and I’m not fully aware that they’re changing. So it’s only when I stumble upon an old email that I think, "Man!"
Bud: [laughs] Right.
Grant: "I don’t think that!" But obviously I once did and I somehow quietly concealed the transition from the old idea to the new idea. So it’s useful‑‑I like the idea of something imprinting function. It’s like stamping, you know? So you have that stream that’s passing through you. And if, just to get an imprint at some interval. It would be interesting just for individuals.
Bud: And making guesses. I like to make guesses and just write them down. Where do I think…? A lot of people seem to be using Foursquare. When do I think Foursquare will hit 300,000 users? And I’ll write that down, and come back to it later.
Grant: Huh!
Bud: You know? And just try to make guesses about how these new things that are popping up on the Web, what will exactly happen with them. Or, like, where Lady Gaga will be a year from now? It will be interesting. Interesting question. How many actual records will she sell of her next album? If Apple releases the fabled Tablet, will the stock go up or down? Stack up your assumptions, make a guess, write it down, and figure out where you went right or wrong.
Grant: Right.
Bud: And record as many of those as possible I think. Because if you don’t know your hit or miss rate, it’s really easy to buy into this idea that you understand what’s going on. Because that’s the dark side of digital, is that you can surround yourselves with only people who are like‑minded. So you could constantly have this feedback saying, "Yes, we’re all correct, at all times."
Grant: Right, yeah, yeah, no. exactly. And then there’s that terrible kind of self‑congratulation that people have, ’cause they’re all in the know.
Bud: Right. Yeah.
Grant: But you’re not very different from somebody who doesn’t have a clue. They have a little noise‑making contest in this room, every‑‑just about this time. So…just making a racket. Yeah, very good.
Bud: I think it comes, my idea of experimentation just comes from being a coder. Growing up, playing with code. But I was never really trained in how to program. But the idea of, "I think I can make this because I see something over here, and I see something over there. And I think I can do something with that."
Grant: Yes.
Bud: And teaching kids that, I think, is really important. Teaching them to experiment with possibilities, not just code and code structure. But just, can you make that happen? What’s the possibility of that?
Grant: Yeah. Yeah. Listen, we’re going to get driven out of here. How are you doing time wise? It’s 3:00.
Bud: I’m fine. I’m actually off today.
[the interview moves from one room to another]
Grant: Ah, so where were we? This is an amazingly uncomfortable couch, isn’t it?
Bud: It is.
Grant: So you cast the net wide, in terms of listening, you were saying, to 400 blogs, reading 400 blogs.
Bud: Right. Right.
Grant: And how do you choose those 400?
Bud: I try to choose them based on some kind of diversity. I don’t want to read too many social media blogs, I don’t want to read too many advertising blogs, I try to make sure that they are written from different points of views, written by and for completely different audiences, I subscribe to five or ten, you know, just image‑sharing sites.
Grant: Mm.
Bud: Where people can kind of post what they found across the Internet and I watch what is trending there, that to me is just as interesting as what’s going on right now.
Grant: Sorry, what was that, where do you see the, where are you most interested in seeing stuff trending?
Bud: In image‑sharing sites?
Grant: Right.
Bud: So those are sites where people have an account where they can grab images from across the web and say, "this is what I’m sharing right now."
Grant: Yep.
Bud: And you’ll see, you know Britney Murphy, the actress who just died?
Grant: Right.
Bud: And before I read that on the New York Times or anywhere else, her photos just took over all these photo sites. Like people were just cataloging like every movie she’s ever been in, every shot that they could find about her, across the Internet, and I saw this slew of them, so I knew something must have happened.
Grant: Right, right.
Bud: You’ll see Johnny Depp trend on certain days and you’ll wonder why or what new story about him has caused that to happen. It’s just a really interesting way of looking at a different kind of output. And, and, wondering why those kind of interactions are taking place. And I try to grab from as many different sources as possible and I’ll always to keep it if it interests me, you know, in any way, even if it’s just purely curiosity’s sake, it’ll stay on my reader for awhile, and I’ll kind of demo it and if it doesn’t really fit or if I’m not getting as much value from it, I’ll kick it out.
And I’ve tried to, you know, I’ve tried to weed that reader down to maybe 200‑300 blogs. My ability to make it through my Reader is dependent on the work that has to get done in my email box, though, of course.
Grant: Mm‑hmm. Mm‑hmm.
Bud: And I go through my reader at such a fast clip.
Grant: You must.
Bud: I do.
Grant: And you must, I sort of, I guess it’s just me, but I sort of have to sit and then think, look at something and then read it and then sort of think about it, so I’m really slow but it sounds like you just sort of blast through.
Bud: I burn through it and I look for things that stand out to me based on topic, based on what I’m seeing and I’ll save those posts to go deeper on later.
Grant: Right.
Bud: But I go through it so fast, I want a foot pedal for my computer. One that so I can just keep tapping my foot to go to the next item while I’m eating or writing or anything else.
Grant: Right. And are you good at framing? I mean, I’m kind of good at, I see what I see, but it takes me a lot longer to go, well, what is this? You see a glint of something in a blog post and you think, oh what is this. I’m like an old fashioned Hollywood camera. it’s takes forever to break down and set up. But it feels like you’re pretty nimble in that regard.
Bud: I think it just comes from empathy. I try to assimilate or try to understand people’s point of views quickly when I encounter them.
Grant: Mm‑hmm. Mm‑hmm.
Bud: And I try to dissect how they see their world. And it helps that I’m just a really good sponge. If you put me near someone, and near someone who has talent or ability or interests that I have no idea about…
Grant: Mm‑hmm.
Bud: I really try to glom onto it and figure out how it works.
Grant: What is that? Where’s that from, you figure, in your case?
Bud: Well, it’s funny because you know, like I said, my father is a contractor.
Grant: Right.
Bud: And he has this amazing ability to take apart any machine and put it back together and watching him do that as a kid was amazing and unfortunately, I got none of that ability myself. You know, my brother and my sister can take apart anything and put it back together, my sister took apart an Apple IIE when we got it as kids and put it back together and she was six.
Grant: Whoa. Whoa.
Bud: And so my, I have that ability to kind of disassemble things and reassemble them, but for ideas or point of views – I think that’s the manifestation of my father’s gift. And so when I meet people, that’s what I really do, I try to "suss out" their motivations, their filters, in order to see the world they see.
And literally I’ve collected so many different kinds of people over the years – it’s an amazing tool to use to see things from different perspectives; like trying on new eyes, how would Aaron see this? How would Jamie see this?
Grant: Nice. Nice.
Bud: And how can I understand all of it in the context of what I’ve seen before.
Grant: Yep. So you have, you have a set of pattern recognitions, depending on people you’ve worked with, whose characteristic pattern recognition you now sort of decoded and internalized.
Bud: Right.
Grant: And, that you need Aaron’s pattern recognition, that just happens, I’m assuming, just when you’re engaging with a problem that’ll just swim in.
Bud: Right, right.
Grant: It’s not because you, you’re not in fact canvassing possibilities, that stuff’s purely intuitive, unconscious.
Bud: I feel like it, right. Like when I’m reading something or when I’m seeing a new headline, you know I really do, it bounces in my head almost in his voice.
Grant: Mm‑hmm.
Bud: He’s in my head dissecting it for himself.
Grant: Nice, nice. And so a lot’s coming in and it sounds like you’re not always having to reach an opinion about what it is you see. That’s you read some stuff without reaching a conclusion and it, it has a kind of latency, is that the term people are using now? It exists in your pre‑conscious mind and you’ll call upon it later, if and when it’s useful.
Bud: Yeah, I definitely try to reserve my point of view for things until I, because when I’m at this, my behavior when I’m going through my reader is such a fast‑paced behavior, that I don’t want to subject things that I’m seeing to a direct point of view at that kind of speed. Especially because, you know, I’m dealing with very subjective topics when it comes to culture itself.
Grant: Mm. Mm. So you’re moving back and forth from the microscopic to the macroscopic?
Bud: Right, right. And it’s‑‑it really is a frenzy of attention splitting and then a very, very, deep dive on it later. I’d love it if I could say it’s a very conscious switch on my part but it really is just part of my process at this point. It happens when it happens – usually when something repeats something a friend has said, or a colleague questioned, or I’ve seen from the past.
Grant: Mm‑hmm. So you’re casting the net wide, you’re taking lots in, oh are you using any particular software to keep track of, to tag things and sort them and keep them?
Bud: I use Google Reader to burn through a standard set of sources, the 300+ blogs. I use Delicious to catalog things that I’m actually going through and find some value in bookmarking for later consumption. I use Twitter to bounce through what my social graph is sharing at the time and to also throw out nuggets of ideas myself. See that’s another thing, I test my point of view of things, by sharing the link and attaching only a sliver of my point of view, where I’m kind of headed with it, and I send that out to, you know those 3,000 people that follow me on Twitter and they echo back to me such a splintering of their opinions and their takes on things.
Grant: Right. And is that truly a splintering or do you end up seeing that there are three different points of view, or there are three points of view but only one of them interests you and you discard the other two, or… How do you organize the public’s reactions?
Bud: I think I… Right. I think I see extremes. I think that’s how people want to express themselves there. And that’s the trap we find ourselves falling into, I suppose. You know I’ll get back three extreme points of view based on what I just shared, and I can weigh those against each other and say, "Where in the middle of this does this actually lay, or is it one of these extremes?"
Grant: Yeah. And are you keen to find that middle position?
Bud: Personally, I like to view things first through as much of a black and white lens as I can to try to, you know… And see what falls into those accepted filters already. First and foremost, is this one of those rare occasions when something is black and white? But when it doesn’t fit that box, or it confuses me and I’m perplexed or puzzled, that means there’s obviously more nuance to it. And that’s when things‑‑alarm bells go off in my head and that’s when I know to dive deep into things.
Grant: Nice. I don’t know if‑‑but in the book, I talk a bit about working with my advisor at Chicago Marshall Sahlins, who stops and finds something in my paper, and that was not because it was a good paper, but because he’s seen something that he can’t make work. And that’s when you see him stop and say, "Is this something I already know how to think about or is this something new in the world for which I need new categories?" You know, "Is there something imperfect about my categories and how might I change them? And having changed them, what happens to the thing I think I have here?" Is that kind of what we’re talking about here?
Bud: I think, absolutely, that’s exactly what it is. And that’s when you’ll see me‑‑I think my coworkers will laugh about it, but that’s when you’ll see me just stare blankly at my computer and get up and go to an empty whiteboard and I’ll start drawing or diagramming things. That’s the moment when something does not compute with a very finite set of rules I’ve given myself to use as filters – and that means things can actually begin to get interesting.
Grant: Right, nice. So lots coming in with…in moments of examination and reflection, and then lots goes out in the hundreds, thousands of experiments a year.
Bud: Something, you know.
Grant: Whatever it is.
Bud: Something like that.
Grant: Yeah. But that’s you kind of almost taunting the world. I mean, I have this image of a child with a stick. [laughs] Forgive me now, I’m not diminishing you. [Editorial note from Grant: I have since apologized to Bud for this comparison, which looks diminishing. But I used it to express what seemed to me how randomized some of Bud's provocations are. He doesn't know what he needs to do to solicit a reaction. So he tries a lot of things.]
Bud: [laughs] No, no, no.
Grant: Yeah, but it’s almost like, "If I provoke the world, what will it do?"
Bud: Right.
Grant: Which is… Is it kind of like that?
Bud: Yeah, and I think that’s the route I take with blogging, too. I’ll throw out a point of view or specific topic with a really sharp point of view that I know isn’t really well‑formed or isn’t, you know. I know that it’s going to cause people to say something, and that’s the interesting part for me; being able to have people to respond to the things I write and say…And then also they bring me, not only different points of views but different research that I haven’t read yet, different work on the topic. Like today when I said, "Is social media plateau‑ing?" I said that to cause a reaction.
Grant: Right, and you got one from me.
Bud: Right, and I got… I checked my phone just now and I got someone who is arguing your same point of view, that it’s something that’s more known. But I know that when I say that, I’m going to call out two camps, and each camp is going to have their point of view. And it’s impossible for me to understand what they’ll bring to the table beforehand, but that reaction to it I find so interesting. I’ve actually talked to some successful bloggers and they tell me that they craft a blog post and then they take out the last two paragraphs. You know, they take out that resolution.
Grant: Brilliant.
Bud: They keep it in conflict, they keep people wanting to come back to it.
Grant: Right, that’s brilliant. And I always feel obliged to end with a punch line.
Bud: [laughs] Right.
Grant: And I like that idea of withholding the punch line. That’s really good. What should I ask you here? So it’s kind of like a distributed thinking. When you provoke the world with an experiment or with a blog post that is unfinished or deliberately, maybe, antagonistic, it forces the‑‑the world will, so engaged, reply, and that becomes part of the thinking you have at your disposal. So you kind of engage the world to help you think a bit?
Bud: Yeah absolutely, and I can do that in a lot of different ways.
Grant: Right, ’cause the traditional… you know the French, Classical model, it’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis, or something, and you’re kind of letting somebody do the antithesis and then you do the synthesis. But it’s kind of like it’s a distributed… Do you think…? Is that a… I find it a useful way of thinking, but I’m not sure you do.
Bud: Right. I also have a personal fear of following my own arguments too far down the rabbit hole. In college, if a professor asked for a ten page essay, I’d turn in 25 pages. And somewhere on that journey, I’d draw bizarre conclusion, bizarre even to me, and all too often, lose the plot. I didn’t need the starter’s pistol, I needed the bit of tape you break at the end of the race to say, "stop."
Grant: Right.
Bud: It’s protecting myself from my own obsessive thinking.
Grant: Right. You’re the opposite of the guy I heard speak who was apparently a world‑ranking expert on Broadband. And he wouldn’t let people have the conversation they wanted to have. And people would ask him questions and the most obvious question was, well, "What’s…Where are you going with all of this?" You know, he kept sort of setting up these observations, and you think, "Great. The punch line must be coming."
Bud: [laughs] Right.
Grant: And it wouldn’t come. And so he was kind of stage managing…he was wrangling the conversation in the most annoying, least productive way. And it’s like you’re reaching out happily, provoking…What’s…? Yeah. I mean some people would say reading 200 or 400 posts a day, that’s a recipe for, you know, total intellectual chaos. But that doesn’t actually trouble you. It’s when you begin to assemble ideas and work them out and write them out, that’s when you… That’s the moment where… What? You sort of climb aboard this topic and take it where…go wherever it takes you. And even if that’s not a coherent, logical stream of exposition. Sorry, I’m just sort of babbling to myself.
Bud: Yeah. I’m definitely… It’s certainly, at times, reading this much can be disruptive to just trying to get something done, or trying to focus on a specific topic. But I think it’s really important sometimes. I have the great fortune to be paid to think, and so I should put myself in situations where I’m mentally uncomfortable. Where I am, you know, almost suffering information overload because that’s the time for me to make decisions.
When I have that much information coming at me, that’s when I can make a decision to limit, and that’s when I can make a decision to focus, and what to focus on – having to make that decision in my process is really important to me.
Ultimately, me saying the same things that I know, with a lack of information from the outside world, is boring. It’s boring to me, and I feel that it would be boring for other people.
Grant: And if what…If what your firm does is think for companies, for other firms, and if the world is maximally confusing, and various, and emergent, and hard to read, then you’re sort of precisely the embodiment of what Undercurrent is supposed to do. And to that extent, precisely what it is the corporation needs, to the extent they understand what they’re signing on for when they engage you. That’s the headlight on the locomotive, isn’t it? Somebody is kind of thinking, "What do I see before me? And can I think it? And if I can’t think it, what would I need to think instead?" The corporation lived a pretty simple world, and it had a handbook, and it wasn’t that complicated. Then we develop rules, we "routinzed’ the world, and now it’s just off. So unless you’ve got somebody doing what you do…
Bud: And taking it back to what a brand manager, these days, is responsible for is overwhelming. They’re responsible for all ends of production, all ends of actual delivery of product. They’re responsible for the advertising, for the marketing, for reporting. There’s just so much they’re trying to juggle at the same time, I think it’s too much. I think they’re overburdened with that. And then adding on information intake with that is frightening to them. Now they have to go read blogs plus they have to manage the normal day-to-day? It’s overlooked when we talk about what brand managers should be or shouldn’t be. Just all the other responsibilities that they’re forced, right now, to tackle
Grant: So every brand manger should be thrilled to have you or somebody like you in there on their behalf. But most brand managers, because they are creatures of some vanity, as we all are, like to think that they do the heavy lifting. That if something is going to be taken away from them, it should be the lower order intellectual activities, to free them up for the deep thinking. And in point of fact, how do you finesse that?
Bud: We were fortunate for a while that we came from the Internet. And the Internet is such a novel, strange, quirky place.
Grant: You knew they didn’t know.
Bud: Right. It was a known unknown. We could almost come in like Jack Hanna on late‑night TV, and show you an ocelot. Like this is what a kid looks like on the Internet. And as that becomes more known, I think we’ll be more challenged to provide added value with our role – which is spectacular, really. So I think it’s up to us to move higher up the food chain, honestly, and to come in at the CMO or CEO level, and to say "This is what’s needed for a real change across the organization."
And it’s up to us to show how an organization can benefit from digital technologies. Not just, "Let me tell you how small groups work on the Internet." But how can technology empower the small groups that already exist inside your giant brand that employs tens if not hundreds of thousands of people? And how do we use those people already using digital technologies in a really interesting, beneficial way? Take the idea behind PlannerReads, capitalizing on the shared behaviors of a group, and apply it inside your organization.
Grant: Yes.
Bud: So all of us must grow our own skill set, I think, to survive. Make ourselves more uncomfortable.
Grant: It’s nice. It’s a co‑conspiracy of smart people, finally. And it’s people smart enough to know the real order of difficulty we’re looking at as we try to solve problems and the kinds of intellectual activities you’ve just described. To know that those are necessary, to know that there have to be moments when you don’t know and you put yourself in a state of real discomfort. What’s the famous line from George Bernard Shaw, "Most people would rather die than think. Most do."
Bud: Right.
Grant: Right? We get comfortable with our categories, we use them over and over again, and it’s that climbing out of that, it’s like getting out of a space capsule without your astronaut’s suit on. Right? It’s not pleasant not to think in the ideas that make thinking easy. It’s quite horrible in a way. Unless you’re pushed into it in a moment of inspiration. Just suddenly you have an idea, and you went through none of the the pain of transition, somehow it happened to somebody else, you don’t know, but you just got the idea for nothing.
Bud: Right.
Grant: You didn’t have to spend anytime in the world doing this. That’s all right, I’m just babbling.
Bud: For me, pain is often‑‑and pain and being uncomfortable are the best catalysts for thinking. Brands are too untouchable. Brands have amassed too much power for themselves. So they never really have to be uncomfortable unless they want to make themselves feel uncomfortable.
Grant: And in a weird way, maybe the CCO becomes the detonation box that you have inside the C suite. You have the person who is prepared to make themselves exquisitely uncomfortable so that other members of the C suite don’t have to, "That’s what we pay you for, to spare us that discomfort." [laughter].
Bud: The whipping boy of the organization.
Grant: Yes, totally. I still like the William James’ notion about the "routinization" of religious experience, and he says, you know by the medieval period, "If Christ himself had wandered up the steps of the Catholic Church in Rome, they would have said ‘There, there, thank you very much. Go, keep moving, we’ve got this under control. We know what religion is, we know what divine inspiration is, we know who God is, all of this stuff is mapped, thank you. We don’t want you.’" The corporation gets exactly there. It’s just this weird tension. It’s a kind of creative destruction thing going on constantly. You have to be absolutely certain about certain things to make your way on the world. Then you have to destroy that certainty to get to what’s, sorry, I’m blabbing.
Bud: It’s at the intersection to me. Like understanding how process works, how your products are made, understanding how people work inside an organization, those are the known knowns. Those are the things, as a brand, that you should have a clear point of view on. But where you interact with regular human beings, that’s the really interesting part –– if you can forget for a moment that you know how that’s supposed to occur, that’s when the real curiosity and the real insight can happen. But perhaps unfortunately, brands have agencies to sit at those points of intersection. And so the agencies may get smarter at times about intersecting with real people, but the brand itself has very little insight into that. They have retail agencies, they have digital agencies, they have traditional agencies that create and learn about these interactions.
That’s why I also think the future of the agency model is one that becomes a data hub or an insight engine for the brand, and they need to be able to come back to them with those insights in a really packaged and interesting way.
Grant: Yes, come back to the corporation?
Bud: Come back to the corporation and say, you know especially the AOR model, "We’ve been your agency of record now for two years. Where’s the data? Where’s the insights that you’ve gleaned from this data that say like, how you’re consumer is changing, or how your involvement with them has changed over time."
Grant: Yes.
Bud: And that just is missing.
Grant: Yes. Well I think I’m running out of questions, and it’s my fault. There are a million things to ask, but maybe we should call it a day. If I may, I’ll look through what I have, and see what else I need to ask you, if I could follow up.
Bud: Sure.
Grant: But this has been great.
Bud: Yes, thank you so much.
Grant: No, hey, my pleasure. Thanks a million.
Transcription by CastingWords
[editorial note. This was a noisy, complicated transcription and CastingWords did a flawless job. I recommend them highly.]
4 Comments
January 7th, 2010 at 1:07 am
[...] The second half of my interview with Grant McCracken is up over at his blog. [...]
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[...] Anthropologist and author Grant McCracken interviewed as a follow up to his latest book, Chief Culture Officer, see Part I and Part II [...]
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[...] I read an interview with Bud Caddell, who is on a shortlist of people I greatly admire and closely follow. He made the following [...]
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