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Strange(r) Coordinates: Ben Jenkins

In this episode of Strange(r) Coordinates, Aydan Sarikaya and Robert Balog talk with Ben Jenkins about the signals, impressions, and contexts that drive creative work and shape how people experience brands. From the way we read meaning before we hear messages, to the role of culture in creativity, this conversation explores the messy, human side of brand building.

We discuss:

  • Why brands are interpreted faster than they’re understood
  • How ambiguity and creativity go hand in hand
  • What it means to make meaning in a world of noise and speed

If branding is about stories, this episode shows why you don’t always get to hold the pen.

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Ben Jenkins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensjenkins/

Okay Human on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/okayhuman/

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Subscribe to our mailing list: https://forms.gle/YH9y99y1d9ZVKNm28

Learn about our approach to Bot-Friendly Branding: https://www.weareterritorial.com/bot-friendly-branding

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Credits

Show art & design by Chris Allen

Editing by Steph George

Marketing by Billy Silverman

Episode music by Blue Dot Sessions

Video editing by Patrick Elmore: https://www.patrickelmore.co/

Transcript
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hello everyone and welcome to Strange Coordinates, a show where

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we use brands as compass points to lead to fascinating stories.

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I'm Robert Balog,

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and I'm Aydan Sarikaya, along with our partner Topher, Robert and I lead an

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ad agency called Territorial that helps brands find their place in the world.

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But we're not the only ones who love brands on Strange ER coordinates.

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We focus on a specific theme and bring a traveling companion

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along with us on the journey.

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and today we're really excited to dive into the world of what it means

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to be a human in a tech-driven world.

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Um, so we're all human as far as we know, uh, unless there's an alien out

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there listening, in which case, Uh, take me to your leader, and thinking about

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how and why we behave in certain ways.

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Is the foundation of the work we do in marketing, brand

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creative, and experiences.

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So whether we're taking the time to fully investigate why through primary research

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focus groups, et cetera, or whether we consume third party data sources, research

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is foundational to any strategy exercise.

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And we're not going to be exploring this idea alone.

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Joining us today is someone with a multifaceted background

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who has been thinking about humans and behavior for decades.

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He's a former brand strategist from the advertising world where he worked

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at big ad agencies, including BBH, Droga, Ogilvy, and McCann on brands

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like Ax Levi's and Johnny Walker.

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He left advertising to pursue the glamor of the startup world originally to launch

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a video co-creation app called simr.

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Two pivots later, he finds himself in the empathy business and back next to

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strategists and brands where his company has been enabling them to understand

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their audiences at a more emotional level.

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Please join us in welcoming Ben Jenkins.

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Hey,

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Hey,

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Ben, great to have you.

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Thank you so much for joining us on, uh, strange Error Coordinates

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as Idon clearly pointed out that we were playing with words there.

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made it real obvious.

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really, you're really did, um, really excited to have you here.

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We know that, um, you know, this has been a really exciting moment for

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you and your company, um, um, because you've recently gone through a rebrand.

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so I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that

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process, where you started, where you ended up, how you got there, and um,

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kick us off into that conversation.

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I love it.

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It's great to be here and thank you for inviting me.

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Absolutely.

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yeah, that's a good place to talk, especially if we're talking about brands.

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But it in a way, I think, I think I taught myself after being in this

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business for 25 years, I taught myself that and having never done my own brand,

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that brands are kind of important.

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Um, and in a funny sort of way, they're even more important when you've got

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a smaller company than a large one,

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mm.

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Hmm.

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can kind of add meaning to something that's kind of meaningless, like

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Apple or Google advertising.

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A small company, small, your name, your branding are doing so much more

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heavy lifting that if you've got

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Hmm.

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wrong one, it's sort of like an annoying younger child at the dinner table

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correcting you and telling another story while you are trying to tell your story.

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I think the, so the impetus for changing in the last few months was

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that, you mentioned, when we started out, we just kept the name of the

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old company, which was simpler.

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Sim was us talking about sampling pop culture.

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It was a kind of pre TikTok Previn, remember that app that was trying to

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get individuals to be more creative?

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So there's a little bit of a similarities that Thread has remained,

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but it was in the age of posting pictures, could people get better

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at videos was the original point.

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And we were like a simple way of doing sampling of pop culture, memes, g

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music, remixing other people's stuff.

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few years later, we did a pivot, um, into the world of empathy

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as we like to talk about it.

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But really it was

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Hmm.

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revisiting what I used to do as a junior brand strategist

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Hmm.

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or a mid-level brand strategist, which is starting the creative

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process by understanding human beings.

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the

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Yeah.

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of that has always been qualitative or ethnography or conversations or getting

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into people's homes and underwear, drawers and fridges and wherever else.

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It's kind of like inner worlds.

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simpler at the time was like, it doesn't really matter.

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know, I've been in branding for years that Google and Apple

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could do it, so it's fine.

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We don't need to change the name yet.

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what happened was that it coincided with an era of efficiency and simplicity and

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frictionless and all those horrible words that actually don't work with humanity.

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And so we accidentally, while we were.

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On about play and joy and fun and bringing out the weirdness of humanity

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and messiness, and brand was sitting there, it walks into the room before

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you, or you know, it sits on a call in a calendar before you get there.

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It then sits saying, simple, simple, simple efficiency.

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And then when you leave three months later when someone remembers, you know,

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should we get in touch with those people, name pops up and does its, stuff again.

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Um, so that was the impetus.

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It was like, our name is is not just not helping us, it's doing

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us a disservice at the moment.

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Yeah.

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So that taught me something.

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This in the last six months about brands I'd never really considered.

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Mm-hmm.

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And

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Yeah.

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so in your role as a brand strategist, you worked at places like Droga, you

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worked at Ogilvy, and many times you don't really get to engage on with brands

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at that level, at those organizations.

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You're dealing with brands that are well established,

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they've been around for years.

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You're not really looking at what is kind of like core to that,

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that you know, what's deep, deep, deep at the nucleus of that.

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You're, you're dealing with decades of and brand equity that have built up over time.

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And so you actually had a, an ability to probably, it was a new exercise

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for you because there's just not a thing that anybody ever asked you

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necessarily at, uh, you know, when you're serving, um, a large brand like that,

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I mean, I think I actually did a very old fashioned process to get to this.

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So, so the

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Hmm.

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new thing was doing it on ourselves, so having me as the client and the strategies

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at the same time, which was a nightmare.

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Yeah.

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the new thing was doing it on myself.

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It's like a, you know, a doctor vaccinating himself.

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Mm-hmm.

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really difficult.

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The, going into the who, the consumer core

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emotional.

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That wasn't any different.

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In fact, I even stole Unilever's brand key process.

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Have you ever come across that?

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I, I worked on for years to start the process because it's a, you

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know, and, and Diageo's Dwe process.

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And so I even started with some nerdy old tools that, that these big brands use.

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And I had worked on inventing new brands at BBHI, I ran a division

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called Zag, where we invented, we brought up brands from scratch and we

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had a process there called the brand lag process, like where there was a

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sort of white space for something.

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Oh.

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so I had done this, but I, it, and it starts with research, you know,

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so I, we ate our own dog fruit,

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Sure.

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With, in the B2B world, which is essentially what we're, it's harder,

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but actually I sort of bucked the trend a little bit and, and thought

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about, and this is why I think we've got to a place that's resonated

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with people we thought about.

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What is the emotional state that our big clients are in?

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And they sort of bifurcate a little bit.

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They,

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Mm-hmm.

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people like you, you're one of our clients, you know.

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Um, so strategists, the cooler agencies, to be honest, if I'm really

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honest, like the BDAs, as I call them, probably think that they have these

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big data streams and they need to like, be talking to the, you know, the IT

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people at their, uh, client companies.

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but then it's the, the CMIS at the big organizations.

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Yeah.

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cases they have emotional needs as well.

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They both need to look smart,

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Mm-hmm.

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um, and invent things in record time.

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So

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Yeah.

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there was, an emotional part of this, which is how do we stay?

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and it sort of comes back to humanity.

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How do we stay a useful human in the room, in this world that has so much

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technology and so much data, by the way.

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Um, that and, and keep people interested.

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What gives us a role to be in the room?

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And so of triggering people's humanity and their creativity was the necessary.

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Was it sort of, it fell out of that identification of consumer or customer?

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Mm-hmm.

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And I guess you could say that there's potentially also a shift in terms of

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market research and data and the way that people have been talking about it, right?

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In recent history, it all went into everybody needs to

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own their first party data.

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Now everybody's adding in all of their AI tools so that they can actually ingest

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all the data that they've never integrated for the past 15 years or what have you.

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Right.

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Um, so are you also seeing a shift in terms of how your customers of simr

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are using your data and your services?

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Yes.

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and I think that shift has happened.

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been two during our time.

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and that's I think why we got sucked into the world of

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simplicity and efficiency in the

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Yeah.

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And this really is the sort of enemy we've been fighting against, which

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is when I came back into advertising where I'd sort of like left, you know,

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for best part of a decade I looked and some of my favorite clients,

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Unilever was one of my best clients I worked on acts for, for several years.

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And we did some really cool ethnographic stuff in order to understand like for, you

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know, for the ax effect and or, you know, Batali where we understood aging and,

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and around olive oil or Vaseline, where we understood, you know, deep workers.

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And, um, they, I noticed when they came back were like, we

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don't need qual anymore, school.

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We we're just gonna plug all these data sources in, the process that creates

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an unintended consequence, which is all the people you are then bringing into

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organization on who's really good at operating machinery and you know, who's

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really good at operating machinery, people that are a bit like machines.

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And so all

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right.

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sudden you've got.

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A bunch of machines, drones, robots in your organization,

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right.

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and no one's bucking the trend.

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No one's looking for the anon anomalies.

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So very proudly they're flaunting the size of their data how much, and

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how quick and how, you know, cheap.

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It's, you know, but no one's talking about any new ideas.

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And another example here of, of the opposite, like I spoke to the CEO

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of V, not V ccb, they're another good one, but F CCB the other day.

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And I was like, why are you winning all these creative awards?

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FCB didn't use to be one of these

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Right.

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companies.

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And they're like, yeah, that's why, because we were

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digital before everybody else.

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We spent a few years before everybody plugging in the data.

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so while the big cool agencies were doing playing catch up, they took

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their eye off the creative board.

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So they brought in all these people essentially.

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Started outranking creative, and this is me being sort of like

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deliberately provocative, but

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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No, that's,

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Ogilvy for a very short period of time for this reason, but they had an elevator

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system, 11 floors, and it was ranked, your status was where, where you sat.

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Do you remember this?

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was on 11, of

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The factory.

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It sat at the bottom, at the bottom and you look, you'd look at people

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in the elevator who got out first.

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You're like,

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Right.

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you, and it was, it is sitting on the 11th floor a little bit too much these days.

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mm-hmm.

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because, and then, and partly because given the job of data

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Yeah.

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understands the difference between insight or epiphanies

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or creative inspiration data and

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Yeah.

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can house your data with it.

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Thank you very much.

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But please don't sit in on debriefs.

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Unfortunately for the last 10 years, that's what happened.

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So the impetus for us was to go, how can we bring that deep, creative inducing, um,

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you know, um, even instinct using form of human understanding back

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into the core of the business.

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Because without that, you're just all gonna be saying the same things.

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You might as well all just run everything off.

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MRI, Simmons and, and, and Mintel.

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so that was our impetus to, to start in the first place.

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And I realize we haven't actually said where you ended up.

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Where did you land for your new brand?

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Oh yeah, I haven't said, um, so we, this was the hardest point.

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The naming was the hardest point.

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And actually, even, even the name itself almost, you can

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almost feel that drudgery in it.

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We've ended up going, okay, human, and the, the tone with which you say it.

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Adds so many different layers of meaning.

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There's

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Mm-hmm.

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human,

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Yeah,

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uh, which is my favorite, you know, which is you can walk up to anyone,

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go, okay, mustache, I see you,

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Uhhuh.

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you know, and it, that's the most important part, which is so much,

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especially because of tech mediation.

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We don't see each other.

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We're sitting here now in 2d.

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I'm, you know, trying to figure out based on your bookshelf and your, uh,

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and your background and, you know, and, and your, you know, facial topiary.

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Um, and I'm trying to, you know, and I spend a lot of time doing

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that, trying to read humans.

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Mm-hmm.

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data doesn't, data doesn't care about humans.

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It cares about the tags on the humans.

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Yeah.

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what we were trying to do is read all the other stuff we want.

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get them into, into that place so that we've got more stuff to read.

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So we want to be as silly as hell.

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I remember I was in a, um, famous but won't be named, um.

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Um, uh, professional coaching, uh, uh, place, uh, for a couple of years.

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And one of the things they taught us was that you don't want to, you need

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to take the alcoholic into therapy

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if you are only bringing the person who doesn't want to be an alcoholic.

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Therapy is no use.

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it's the

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Mm.

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in qual research, IDIs or ethnography.

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You want all of their crazy in the therapy seat.

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otherwise what you talking to, right?

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The people making

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Yeah.

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are irrational, crazy, loons.

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so we don't wanna be talking to the rational ones in research, and that's

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the problem with data and quants and surveys and social listening.

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Well, you find crazies on social listening as well.

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Um, it's a specific type of crazy.

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They're performatively crazy or outraged.

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Mm-hmm.

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or perfect.

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Or they're a certain type of crazy, which is, doesn't

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matter, you

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Yeah.

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the guilty pleasures kind of crazy.

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Not the vulnerable, not the, not the non performatively vulnerable.

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Anyway,

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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so that's, so that was sort of what Human is about.

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And there's other ones, you know, it was either's, the, the Radiohead reference.

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There's the, everyone's talking.

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Okay.

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Ai.

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Okay, Google, okay, computer.

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But has anyone stopped to say, okay, human again, we're kinda, we're

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kinda racing ahead without them.

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And the final one is sort of what there's others.

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The other is just, it's okay to be a human.

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In fact,

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Yeah.

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necessary to be a human right now.

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Uh, the, the ones that remain and hang onto it and bring more of it might

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actually end up keeping their job.

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Yeah,

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that's actually a really interesting discussion I've gotten into

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recently with some of my friends.

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Um, we've been talking about how AI has been implemented into their organizations.

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So a few of my friends work at, um, you know, some of these big technology

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organizations and there are a lot of requirements in terms of utilization

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of AI in your daily workflow.

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And this person sits at kind of the mix of technology and creative.

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They're in a UX product position, right.

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Which I think is like the perfect blend of technicality and creative.

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And they were talking about how they were struggling a little bit

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with how forceful and how much.

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Requirement has been on the AI side versus actually the human validation and the work

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that you go through as a UX researcher to understand that design that you're

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putting forward, all of that additional, additional thought and testing that

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you do was essentially being bypassed because the AI was spitting out, you

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know, a prototype or whatever it might be.

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Um, so given that you guys are in a technology space and you've made this

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move back into humans and empathy, but AI is very much of the moment, can

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you tell us a little bit more about how you all are balancing AI and, and

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that conversation and your workflow?

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Yeah, because a lot of my at the moment is sort of trying

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to, is more on the rebalancing.

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You know,

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Yeah,

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like had a decade and a half before AI that came in and kind of like, know,

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Yeah.

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us into the robots.

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So before the real robots

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yeah.

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need to kind of remember how to be human.

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Um, but I think there's a role for AI in that as well.

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In fact, there is, and we're doing it across the entire process.

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So.

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One of them is, and I, I was talking to someone this morning who's exactly

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my age, and I, and I feel as though I grew up in a really privileged time

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where it was the beginning of the 21st century when I started my job

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Hmm.

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I worked in a company that told me to carry on being a big kid.

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you know, though it was in their interest and mine to stay childlike.

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And I think I just got, and even though it was a.com boom, I just got

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in under the radar before tech kind of beat out all of our humanity and

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forced us to be just as machine like.

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Have you ever worked with a coder where you're like, don't talk to me like that.

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Don't talk to me.

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So laterally tell me in epics and stories, please.

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And

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Yeah.

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I

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Yeah.

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you.

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You're like, oh.

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And I feel like while we're not all working with coders, we are working

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with things that are forcing us to talk in these tiny machine-like ways.

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Mm-hmm.

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think I'm just lucky enough to have had spent a large part of my early

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career sitting in, you know, creative offices with unhinged individuals,

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trying to be more unhinged than they're,

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Yeah.

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I got a chalk drop for it.

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I got a gold star.

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They're like, well done, keep going.

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just before the, the great robotization of the workforce happens,

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I grew up and was like, okay, I don't need to change necessarily.

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And, and so while I think my brand almost changed and became, that

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almost became SA automated and scale,

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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I, I didn't, and so what we're doing is trying to remind people

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that those nearly forgotten skills, so right from the briefing, uh, we

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don't want it to be a brief brief.

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So for kind of, you know, police officers and, you know, and lawyers, um, we wanted

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to start a conversation because the very first thing you talk about is the

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first moment of the creative process.

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Mm-hmm.

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Everything should be a bit unhinged.

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How you conceive of the challenge, you should be starting to think

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laterally from that first moment.

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So we've got AI in there, like nudging people into that.

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We've got it in the field work.

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So we communicate inside chat messaging, which affords us the ability to be much

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more silly because no one's in a room full of other strangers, no one's got a

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pair of human eyes looking back at you.

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Yeah.

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minute you're talking to grandma on Facebook messenger.

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Next minute we're talking to you about love and romance as well.

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So there's no code switching required.

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So as a

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Yeah.

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throw more fun and games at them probe and nudge and project and

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do all of those like art therapy and music, evocation and all that.

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All that used to be awkward as hell in focus groups.

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You know, or Id, like, oh God, you're gonna make dod, are you gonna make

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me do, uh, arts and crafts right now in front of all these strangers?

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Um, but here they're like, sure, I'll dress up in a lens of.

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A mouse and talk to you about cheese.

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In fact, it'll, I'll say much more about cheese when I'm, when I'm a

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mouse and I'll, when I'm a human.

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so we, that it, it helps there.

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But the biggest place it helps is in the, um, in analysis.

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So the

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Yeah.

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happens in a creative brief or a strategic unlock or a repositioning

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of a brand when you stop seeing what everybody else has been seeing.

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And for me, that always happens, you know, often in a taxi on the way home

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from, from a focus group or in on a on the train while doing, you know, traveling

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the world on, in, in ethnographies.

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Um, here it happens because we talk to so many more people.

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The, the downside originally was like, you talk to a hundred people

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and you, you know, there's like 50 questions and they all answer

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more than, much longer verbatims.

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How am I ever gonna get through any of that?

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Yeah.

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now using AI to not just.

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Do the efficiency stuff, but to ask the most crazy questions of it.

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And when you are that nosy like I am, and you keep probing and you

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keep probing, eventually the data will give up some inner truth about

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what people are frightened of.

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And if you don't trust it because you think it might be making it up.

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Ask it for 20 quotes that substantiate it.

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And so we grew up as strategists in I being very cynical,

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never kind of accepting.

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And if you are more qual minded, you have to be even more cynical

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because the qu people come in and go, well, we've got a thousand

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Yeah,

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exactly.

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not true.

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So you had to

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based on our statistical rel relevance, you know, not quite, right.

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Yeah,

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our our, creative, our critical thinking, uh, tools are sharper than theirs.

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now we've

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yeah.

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that could be lying to us and hallucinating.

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We're fine with that because we were always playing around with, with lack of

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clarity and the need for triangulation.

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So I think this is kind of reanimating us to be honest.

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Um,

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Yeah.

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you do need to nudge people to say, it's okay.

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It's okay, human, it's okay.

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You can, you can go crazy again on this stuff.

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It doesn't matter if you're wrong the first time.

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I think that's what we've lost in the last 10 years.

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We think that all these tools are so clever and right.

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Comfort with being wrong has, um, has eroded and

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Yeah,

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that's what we're

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silly.

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yeah,

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it's bringing the art back to the science.

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Yes,

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it feels like we also started to equate data volume with certainty and that if, if

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Yes.

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it was true.

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And that is just not the case.

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Um, I think there's something really interesting in what you were saying about

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kind of lateral thinking and, um, you mentioned play as being encouraged in.

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You know, the agency life of the two thousands and the mid two thousands.

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And I kind of, I was on the same timeline and I thought play was

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part of it, but also it was just a reminder that especially as a

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creative, you were the vehicle.

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You, if I was exposed to a brief about, uh, mutual funds,

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the creative was a result of me having a feeling about that thing.

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yes.

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so it passing through me and coming out as creative was the magic

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that was all there was to it.

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There was no science really.

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It was just, I read a brief.

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I, I remembered a time when I was a kid that I, I experienced this

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thing that triggers a relationship in my brain to something else

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that gives me a happy feeling, and that turned into a creative idea.

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And like you, as the vehicle was critically important, you could

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not be taken outta the process.

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I still think that's true, that

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I agree.

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remove the human from.

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That process of internalizing, connecting, associating,

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outputting, no substitute for that.

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There's just isn't any, anything that exists in technology that can do that.

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I, I completely agree and I think someday someone will decide that

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that is a science, actually,

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right,

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But yeah.

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What you're describing is the job of an artist from, you know,

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Shakespeare to, to Picasso.

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it was my job, and it still is to trigger those feelings because

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you can't always get out there.

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that's the thing that we stopped doing when we put too

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much machinery in the process.

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There's already a

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Yeah.

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this, but it's a human to human process.

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I, my favorite times was I, I took creative directors to Eastern Europe to

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study the mating rituals of, of Acts, consumers, you know, and it was so much

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more fun because there are no greater empaths than, than, than than creatives.

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They, they cared so much.

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It's a, it's anomaly, it's a myth that they.

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They don't like data, it's just the wrong data.

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This data that has been pedaled for the last 15 years real data, like the data

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that is like, oh, that memory that, so long as it's transmitted through poetry

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and metaphor and joy and play, that's the data that that triggers really good.

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art essentially.

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Yeah, a hundred percent.

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I also think it's interesting that like the AI debate, we're s we're

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kind of repeating the same patterns, uh, between like we're marveling at

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AI because we, you know, oh, look how well it, uh, replicates Hemingway.

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But at the same time, what we're really interested in is in, is the

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fact that it's compressed time.

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So, so much

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like what

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Yeah.

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at is, is the efficiency because it isn't doing anything

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that we haven't done already.

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It's just doing it in a timeframe that is so much faster.

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And so We're fetishizing efficiency again and forgetting about quality and the fact

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that it's not going to be, you're not gonna create an AI that doesn't exist yet.

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Whoever the next, you know, Hemingway is.

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It's gonna just sort of take from what we've done.

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Compress time and put it out faster.

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And so what, you know, I think that there's a little bit of that.

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The same thing happened in, you know, when we started to think about digital

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advertising and about using digital tools to create art in ways that it

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was, you know, used to have to cut out actual physical pieces of art

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and put them on top of each other.

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And, you know, we're, we're sort of repeating the same pattern again and

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forgetting that the kind of thing that holds it all together is that,

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that un know, that that spark we just can't capture any other way.

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I, I, I heard this great, um, podcast the other day about

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what us fetishizing things.

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And I think you're

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Hmm.

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right now it is that drives efficiency.

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Efficiency has been the underlying thing.

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We've fetishized since the Victorians maybe before that.

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But I blame the Victorians for most things.

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and the problem is what we do is we keep swinging from one

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thing to fetishize to the next.

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Like we need, you know, the enlightenment got rid of God to fetishize.

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So since then we've had to fetishize the latest, omnipotent

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powerful force Every now and then, that's humans again, you know?

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And then we kind of go, oh, you can't do that.

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You know, cancel them.

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Uh, one minute they're heroes.

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Next minute they're in prison.

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And maybe in some cases that's great, but can't we just call it a

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little bit on like needing something to kind of unthinkingly worship?

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Um,

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Yeah.

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somebody said this morning, I was on this call with, um, someone who

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found us because of the new brand.

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They're like, I, we really

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Amazing.

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And he said this quite early on, I loved it.

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It was, you know, we polished out inefficiencies in so many places

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that we've now left with the biggest one to polish out, which is humans.

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Uh.

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it's, it's scary.

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Like when you fetishize, um, efficiency, the logical end

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of that is you don't need us.

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Yeah.

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I just wanna point out also, this is maybe the second time we've mentioned the death

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of God on this podcast, and I think we're probably not making ourselves any friends

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amongst the, the religious community.

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But, um, you know,

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Well,

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in the, in the pursuit of intellectual,

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to be honest, I know I wasn't brought up, brought up.

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I wasn't even christened.

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But to be honest, maybe that's one of the solutions, you know, bring it back.

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Right?

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Yeah.

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Let's get all religious about it.

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Let's

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Yeah, I mean

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good old revival.

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it's coming, it's spirituality coming back in some ways anyway, but

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having some form of something else that's not technology to worship.

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You know, in along with all these things, maybe it will

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like dampen our need for this.

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You know, I, we need social apparently, and the sacral is the other one.

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We'll always need something to worship

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Yeah.

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when you take out God, you will have something and often that might be worse

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Yeah.

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Don't

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Yeah.

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your friend's wife.

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Were, uh, ultimately quite good

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Better than thou shalt not have a four day work week or, you know, whatever.

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You must work every weekend.

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thou.

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Yeah,

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Exactly.

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I think it's time for the segment we'd like to call off brand.

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So basically in this segment I'm gonna ask you three questions

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related to the work you do, in plumbing, the depths of consumer

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sentiment and, uh, consumer research.

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again, no.

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I'm not gonna say there's no wrong answers 'cause there's definitely wrong answers,

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but there's no penalty for wrong answers.

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Yeah.

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And I actually realized this first one's gonna be maybe a bit of a gimme because I

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didn't clock that you and I were at Ogilvy I think probably around the same time.

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So this was a, this was, I think, known to most folks at Ogilvy.

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Um, but it's a, it's a, um, it's a multiple choice question, so you've

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got a 33% chance of getting it right.

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Okay.

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Okay.

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So Canadian shredded wheat cereal brand Shreddies.

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Okay.

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You know, already created a famous campaign which they exposed focus groups

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to a breakthrough product innovation.

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What was that innovation?

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Was it a,

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hold on, let me, these are, I'm proud of these though.

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Hold on.

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Lemme just read through.

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A, was it gooey shreddies, which are filled with pockets of freeze dried

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maple syrup that dissolve into milk.

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Uh, B Diamond shreddies, which are the square shaped cereal turn 45 degrees c

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shredded confetti, which is a sprinkling of multicolored, frosted, shredded

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wheat that you can put over yogurt.

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your answer, sir?

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That's

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it's not because I worked at Ogilvy because I was only

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there six and a half months.

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Um, yeah.

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Uh, can talk about another conversation.

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but it was, um, it was Rory Sutherlands TED Talk.

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Oh, of course, right?

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Yeah.

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Rory.

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Yeah.

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Okay.

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So Idan, you may not, um, this was, this is a campaign from around 2008, 2009.

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Okay.

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This was, um, shreds was a heritage brand in Canada.

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They had, been.

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Um, experiencing massive market, share loss, people just kind of

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didn't think about them anymore.

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And so, um, the campaign that came out was essentially packaging

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the exact same product as Diamond Shreds, but it's just, it's a square

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and they just turned it sideways.

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And so the campaign was a series of focus groups that were exposed to regular

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shreds versus Diamond Shreds next to one another, and, and asked to give their

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impressions of the new product and what it made them think, what it made them

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feel if they thought it was better.

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And just across the board, people re responded to the Diamond

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Shreds as being somehow superior to the, to the original shreds.

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And so it just became this thing.

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They, they basically had this massive swing in, market share where they

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came back with like a 30% swing or something like that, and, uh,

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re-energized their business through basically repackaging the, and then

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they did like a mixed box that had

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It was the same dimensions.

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Right.

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shred.

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Same

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I, I,

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Okay.

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always thought this, this is a,

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Confirm.

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this is an exercise in postmodernism and breaking the fourth wall because

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I, because I truly don't think it's got anything to do with them believing it.

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I even in, in Canada, I truly believe that they, they were just like.

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Well done for like, you know, taking the piss out advertising

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Yeah.

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and we like you a bit more now.

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That's ultimately what we're trying to do, which is you're more likable

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now just exposed the bullshit

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Right.

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of all advertising and

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thought that, yeah, and you could also see in those commercials, you could

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see the pressures that we all kind of bemoaned in the focus group, which is

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sort of like group think, the, the, um, when you're being asked a question by

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a professional, you feel like you need to have an answer and you probably want

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the answer to be in the affirmative.

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And so people were just kind of like feeding that back.

Speaker:

Hmm.

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it was just a, and it was just an amazing campaign to begin with.

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It was phenomenal.

Speaker:

Um, okay.

Speaker:

Love it.

Speaker:

you're, uh, one for one so

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yes.

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Alright, this is the second question.

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This is, uh, also multiple choice.

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Lego launched the Lego Friends line in 2012, um, with the intent to create a

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line that was especially for girls, they had conducted a four year trial of market

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research that studied the play habits around 3,500 girls in their mothers.

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So prior to the release of the friends line, what percentage of children

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who played with Lego were girls?

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According to Lego's own internal data, it, a 9%, B 24%, or, c 18%.

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Okay.

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It is actually a 9%, so nine, 9%, uh, according not for

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girls for, for many decades.

Speaker:

Um.

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What.

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had a massive problem, right?

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So, um, they did this study.

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They, it was a global study.

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Like I said, there were 3,500, participants in the study.

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And kind of what they uncovered in this study was that, when girls played with

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construction toys, they thought a lot about the inside of what they're making.

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So it wasn't just about is the wall sturdy?

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Is it, what's the shape?

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It was more about what's going into this space, what is it like?

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they were also interested in the sort of details of the thing.

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It wasn't just about.

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Size, volume, mass.

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It was really just about details and relationships were super, super important.

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And so they released the friends line had a very, very different

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form factor than the regular Legos.

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Um, they have had massive growth.

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Um, they say in, in those demographics, they haven't re released the demo numbers.

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But, um, Lego, has, you know, leaned into the friends line for the last 12 years.

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And, they say that they've increased that, um, play dramatically amongst,

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uh, girls, which is like, you've got 9%, you got only one way to go on that.

Speaker:

Like, Jesus,

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Just gonna go up.

Speaker:

you know,

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That was the right, that was better answer because that's why they money on,

Speaker:

I mean,

Speaker:

that's a huge, that's that's a very small percentage that.

Speaker:

I mean, does it track, like anecdotally, does it track with, with y'all?

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Like

Speaker:

I played with Legos.

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We were, Legos Connects Playmobile.

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But then I was thinking about Playmobile.

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'cause that is very much like you're creating a scene, right?

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Like we had the surgeon's office,

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Yeah.

Speaker:

I don't know, you guys played with those and they had all

Speaker:

the little like, you know, tiny little like tools for the surgeon.

Speaker:

And I do remember really liking that.

Speaker:

So I guess maybe there's something to be said about around the, the

Speaker:

scene that you're building or like what's, what's happening inside

Speaker:

versus just this like external shape.

Speaker:

But no, I was one of those 9%, I was a Lego girl.

Speaker:

Amazing.

Speaker:

Okay, well, last question.

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Um, you're, you're you got one, you, you missed one.

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Um, this one is a true or false, so true or false.

Speaker:

Robert k Merton, who you may know as the father of the focus group, changed

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his last name from Skolnik to Merton because as a young man, he was a magician

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and he thought it sounded like Merlin.

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Is that true or is that false?

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I go with true.

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is true.

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Ding ding, ding, ding.

Speaker:

You are correct.

Speaker:

66% in my exam.

Speaker:

Amazing.

Speaker:

Yeah.

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That's pa that's passing right?

Speaker:

Isn't

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Pretty good.

Speaker:

Yeah, I think so.

Speaker:

That's a c plus.

Speaker:

Alright, so for for our listeners who Dunno.

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Uh, Robert Merton was an American sociologist who was basically

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considered the, the, uh, founding father of modern sociology.

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One of his, achievements is developing the focus group method that he actually

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created in the 1940s, when he was working with the US government to try

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to find an answer to Nazi propaganda.

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So looking to understand why people were responding to the way where they were

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to messages that they were receiving.

Speaker:

And so he developed this, what we account now know as the kind of focus group method

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to get people to sort of talk through.

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How they were receiving propaganda, basically, and how the US could

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better counter that propaganda.

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And so that led to, you know, me behind a two-way mirror, looking at how people

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responding to per ads, uh, 50 years later.

Speaker:

So

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yeah, and loads of m and ms, uh, and, you know, nodding, um,

Speaker:

knowingly and then kind of groaning when, when your work gets tanked.

Speaker:

But, uh, yes, but yes, he was a magician as a boy and then decided that he,

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he wanted his last name to sound like

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I love that I'm writing that both the Lego and this one down, because I think

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the, the fact that it was invented this whole field by a magician, which

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is all about, I think it really helps.

Speaker:

We, we just did a big, um, presentation in Berlin where it was all about the

Speaker:

Alice in Wonderland theme, which is what is missing and has been missing for the

Speaker:

last 15 years in this, in the process of brand creativity has been magic.

Speaker:

Well, we have one more game for you, Ben, um, before we wrap up.

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And this can go as far away from our theme as you wish.

Speaker:

so feel free to do something that we haven't even talked about today.

Speaker:

Um, but we're gonna play the omnipotent brand manager.

Speaker:

So you've been promoted to the most powerful brand manager in the

Speaker:

history of creation for the span of A single project you can do anything.

Speaker:

What brand would you work with and what would you do?

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um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use my Englishness here to come for something

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that if an American did it, they, they, they would upset everyone.

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So, because I'm, I wanna look at brand America, Um.

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not from, not from the perspective of because I don't wanna get into the,

Speaker:

so back to the, you know, a brand is about a series of perceptions.

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Um, and a brand exists in the minds of, of consumers.

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If it doesn't, it's not a brand.

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I, I was a consumer, I'm a, I'm a power user of America.

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That came

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up in the

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a.

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America for 17 years because that's how long I've lived here and I haven't

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gone back and it's done things for me that my own country couldn't have done.

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I, I, I love the uk.

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I love being British,

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especially in other countries.

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Much more fun being British in America than it's being in your own country.

Speaker:

but I haven't forgotten the that I felt about America when I was a kid.

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I think, again, maybe there's a privilege of growing up in that time

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when red, white, and blue, even though my own flag is red, white, and blue

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and France and Netherlands is as well.

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Everything was like, was cool.

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It wasn't British cool.

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It was America cool.

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It was from evil Knievel jumping over buses to Wonder Woman

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to, to really cool brands.

Speaker:

You know, Pepsi was like the attacking coke.

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And it was this uni ironic, unfettered, happy clappy.

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Positivity and shininess.

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Everything was shiny and, and it worked.

Speaker:

And it was big and it was fun and it was, but it it was necessarily naive as well.

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And so you know, I was a teenager, it was called to think America was ridiculous

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and, it carried on doing very American things and people still wanted it.

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You know, the dollar is still strong today, even though there's

Speaker:

been 20 years of everyone going, what's wrong with this country?

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And including from the inside.

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I, I had this, um, theory that I've never said in public before, so I'm gonna,

Speaker:

Ooh,

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I think yeah.

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Uh, called Post Ironic America and I, I don't wanna get too close to the bone, but

Speaker:

around about 2001, I think America found its irony and, you know, other countries

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have had it because they had periods of.

Speaker:

Feeling vulnerable, you know, de declined empires from,

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Right.

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the Greeks are cool as hell because they're like the granddaddies

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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of empire, but they're so far away from it that they've kind of just chilled.

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They're like the, you know, the sleeping line on the savanna.

Speaker:

No one can beat them at the kind of them and the Egyptians that the, how, know,

Speaker:

the, the British only lost it 80 years ago, really 90, a hundred years ago.

Speaker:

they've got that cynicism that they developed in the fifties and sixties

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and because they're like, there's no, we're not in touch charge anymore.

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America this childlike abul and positivity that when you put it in other areas

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of the world was really good for it.

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It's like the one person in that, the com, in the sitcom that was always

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just upbeat and cheered you up.

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Yeah.

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for me the moment, and I. I've always thought it was a good thing

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until I'm talking about this now.

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I was like, oh, I love it.

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Finally, America gets irony, you know, because the internet, you know, it's not,

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it's the long tail of the internet now.

Speaker:

People from marginalized communities can be famous.

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It's not just the man running media, it's

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Right.

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poking fun through memes and internet.

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I was like, that's a good thing.

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'cause I, my humor's finally in this country.

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But actually, it's not a good thing for your brand because you need that

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happy clappy, naive positivity at all costs, um, a flag that unites,

Speaker:

you know, it's a mammoth task.

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I know you've had your problems.

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Yeah.

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to, to this big a landmass this many types of communities.

Speaker:

You know, at one point there were people speaking different languages

Speaker:

in the same country and that yet they all rallied around, you

Speaker:

know, 4th of July and Thanksgiving

Speaker:

Right.

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felt like one entity.

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a really difficult task.

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Yeah.

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And it, it's the best thing America has.

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And the moment it invites in cynicism, I all brands need a bit of an enemy.

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Your enemy was monarchy.

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And in the absence of monarchy as an enemy, you'll, you'll attack

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other forms of authority and you can see that happening on the right

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with Anthony Fauci or whoever.

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also happening on the left with the right, you know, that that was the, a author.

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It's like, you need, we need to find another authority that you can rally

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around and agree on not liking.

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'cause I think cynicism doesn't fit the American brand.

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Um, however clever you are, do it in a different way.

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Leave that to the French and the Brits.

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Um, but America needs to be unequivocally optimistic.

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It's interesting 'cause you, you were, you got the eighties version of America,

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which was a very particular version.

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was obsessed with the fifties, so.

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If you remember that Happy Days was on Laverne and Shirley.

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The, the sitcom world was the world of the fifties.

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Um, so it was like a retelling of the fifties, which, which was held to be a

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kind of, you know, emblematic of the It was also, you know, Reagan jingoistic pure

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in terms of like good versus evil, right?

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And what's interesting I think, is

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Yeah.

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you're seeing now is that the time zone, the, the time that we're kind

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of re-imagining is the nineties now.

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And I'll be really interested to see what that re-imagining of the nineties

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in American culture does to us, our kind of culture moving forward.

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Because in many ways the nineties was a really great time to be in America.

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We are triumphantly, celebrating the fall of the.

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Wall.

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We had, uh, there were books written called The End of History and that we had

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kind of vanquished, the Hegelian dialectic that said we were gonna be struggling

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idea against idea from, for all time.

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And we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.

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And I'm curious how that's gonna inform, like a forward looking image

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about who we are as a, as a brand.

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What, what does that say about, you know, what we're looking

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for moving forward as a brand?

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I, I would argue that.

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Yeah, I've been thinking about the nineties a lot recently because it,

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when you look back at it, that's what sort of, when I came of age

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and it was like, we were so naive.

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We honestly thought we'd

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Jones, you know, like,

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so clever.

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yeah.

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I've been listening to nineties comedy and it's so smug how everything's fine now.

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Yeah.

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uh, it was actually missing some cynicism actually.

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But I think that on the RI mean, Trump is, is trying to redo the

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eighties more than the nineties

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Yeah.

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I don't think, I think that was his time, um, you know, with his, you know,

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McDonald's consuming tv, TV watching.

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Like he's obsessed still with mainstream tv.

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Uh, you know, by the

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Yeah.

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we'd sort of like moved into like late night, you know, um, we, we'd

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gone a little bit off the grid by the nineties and that's even before the

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internet came, got into full swing.

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So maybe the left is looking at the nineties a bit more.

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And I even then, I don't know if Gen Z would, would agree that.

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Much of was then, which was kind of all a bit too smugly.

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naive and perfect is anyway related to now.

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no, I mean it's the united Colors of Benetton

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yes.

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of

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Yeah.

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Mm-hmm.

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yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

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There's also the sense that, you know, I, I, I think Trump is trying to bring

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the eighties back, but I don't think he's being successful in terms of.

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Really capturing that.

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You know, he has his Golden Dome Initiative, which is

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essentially Reagan's Star Wars.

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He is trying to bring that back.

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Nobody gives a shit.

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Like, honestly, he can't get anybody to care about that.

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I don't, and I, I think the, the level of like existential distress

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that the eighties kind of had, which I know I, I'm sure you grew up in,

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it was just feeling like there was the real possibility of everything

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would be annihilated in an instant.

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I feel like we're, we're, everything's gonna be annihilated, but it's gonna

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take be long and slow and it'll look a lot like the last of us.

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You know what I mean?

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I think that's what we're dealing with now.

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Yeah, I think if, if anything, I feel like we might be revisiting a

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more sinister fifties of McCarthyism

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Hmm.

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that's starting to come in, versus.

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The happy, you know,

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Yeah.

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I think, I think you're right.

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'cause there is also, I'm a. Robert knows this about me.

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I'm big into theater and one of the biggest shows on Broadway this spring

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was, the stage production of Goodnight and Good Luck, which they also

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streamed on tv, which I also watched.

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Um, and that entire show, sorry, I'm also gonna give a spoiler so, you know,

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leave before this next five seconds.

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But, um, essentially that whole show is about McCarthyism and, you know,

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um, the, um, the news and how they kind of exposed, um, the lies and

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whatever, uh, that whole transition.

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But at the end of the show, they, of the stage production, they did do a video

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montage kind of over the past 20 years or so, and it has a lot of these really

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intense, very charged moments that we've had even just in the last election cycle.

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And I'm sure all of you can imagine some of the images that go up on

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the screen and it is this like.

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Smack in the chest a little bit when you watch it, and it, it helps to

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draw that parallel between what's happening today in the fifties.

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So anyway, a lot of art seems to be asking that question as well,

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interesting though.

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What, sorry Ben, go ahead.

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I, I

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No,

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gonna,

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you mentioned Hagel and I'm like, it really is.

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It's like.

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Invincible, it will swing back, you know?

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And the harder the swing in one direction, the harder, like job is to

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be just a bit more moderate each time.

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right.

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so that it's not as extreme.

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Exactly.

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the face.

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Oh,

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Yeah.

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course it gonna come back.

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I think the good night, good luck thing is really indicative of what Ben

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was talking about, which is that this sort of desire for a time in which.

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Was efficacy, like goodnight and good luck is about, um, Murrow standing up and

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basically, you know, saying, I, I'm gonna use this, this like platform to put it

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into this, you know, pernicious behavior.

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Yeah.

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it's just wish, it's a wishful thinking at this point.

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It's like, it's just not, we're not there.

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That's not the place we're in.

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It is like, go Gorbachev saying, or Reagan saying Gorbachev tear on that wall.

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It's, we're just, we don't have the, um, unanimity, unanimity of purpose

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to make that a possibility anymore.

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And I feel that like there's, um, it is a bit strange that Clooney is kind

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of like trying to resurrect that, which he did during the, wasn't it, wasn't

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it originally during the bush years?

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When that

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Yeah, I think that's when the movie came out.

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I think you're right.

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And it's

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I,

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get it,

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I, yeah.

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like that's just more boom.

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I, I've been talking a lot about boomer magic lately and how this is sort of like

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we try to fight boomer boomer magic with boomer magic, and I just don't, I don't

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know that boomer magic works anymore, and that to me feels very boomer magic.

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Yeah,

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Speaking of

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agree.

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Yeah, I mean, we we're Gen X I'm assuming you're as well.

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And so we we're all about,

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I'm a millennial.

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that's right.

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I assume that,

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We're the best generation.

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I actually think millennials have got more in common with

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boomers than, uh, gen be honest

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indeed.

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generation.

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Uh,

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I think we don't want boomer magic.

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We do want historical magic.

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Yeah,

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I think

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Mm-hmm.

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understanding that there's a certain, there's a mathematics to it

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eventually, that it'll swing back.

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Something will,

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yet, it's going to any moment.

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Like there's a, there's a beauty, there's a sort of beauty to the

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way things swing back and forward.

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And if you are recognizing it, it's gonna hurt you harder than if you do.

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So, if you are fascinated by history and you, you expect it to come back, then

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you're more ready for it when it does.

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Right.

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Well, Ben, we have really taken, uh, quite the journey today.

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We appreciate you, uh, going along on this with us.

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Um, it's fitting, we end on the, the mention of magic.

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'cause I think in many ways that has been a topic we've talked about throughout

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the day, which is sort of the, the magic of being human and the indispensable

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magic of, uh, a human feeling, something, processing something, communicating

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something, creating something.

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Um, so really, really excited that you were, were able to join

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us and talk about that today.

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It was a, a really great, great podcast.

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Even though I may have turned us down a cynical alley at the end.

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Yeah.

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I know.

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I know.

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And thank you so much to everybody for joining us To learn more about Territorial

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and how we help brands find their place in the world, you can visit us at our

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website at www.weareterritorial.com and follow us on LinkedIn.

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We will also link more about Ben and okay human in our show notes.

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we'll see you soon on the next one.

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Thanks

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Thanks.

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About the Podcast

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Strange Coordinates
Brands are compass points to unexpected places

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About your host

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Topher Burns

Born in Albuquerque, hardened in NYC, and rapidly softening in Portland Oregon. Former TV blogger, current tarot novice, and future bronze medal gymnast at the 2048 senior olympic games in Raleigh-Durham. Founded a branding agency for regenerative businesses. DM for pics of his cats.