Latest / Disengaged / Protecting the Potential of the Idea with Dylan Soopramania

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Protecting the Potential of the Idea with Dylan Soopramania · Disengaged

• Dylan: Alright guys, there we go. And like I said, if you'd like the intro. I'll just check your levels. Sure. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. One, two, three, four, five. Yeah, whenever you're ready. Like I said, just talk to this camera. Okay. Get a little intro. And then just get into it. Alright, let's get it over here. So, this one has discussed. Okay. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Disengaged podcast. The first podcast to carry the new branding, Disengaged. And my guest today is the wonderful Dylan Supramania. Dylan. is a creative director and consultant and his work spans the UK, Australia and North America. He's worked with brands such as Coca-Cola, EA Sports, ⁓ KitKat and many others and he's also the brains behind almost everything I've done in terms of look and feel. So he's designed the covers for all my books, he's designed the new artwork for this podcast so I wouldn't be very much without him. So Dylan? Welcome to Disengaged. Wow. Thanks. Thanks for having me. ⁓ What an intro. I should start that, get that little snippet and I should play that to myself as a daily affirmation for each morning to start the day. I it was good. how much you do. You kind of just do things and it seems normal to you. Well... I think maybe I appreciate him but I don't hear it enough from others. Thank you for that. Yeah well we wrestle with that as well you know the ego can only be so big. But yeah no thanks for having me and like you say it's going to be an interesting episode probably something a little bit different for maybe your series. Ten, but I'm sure we were friends in other lifetimes before that, but yes, yeah. But before we get out, because you're a little different, because you're on the creative side of work, and lot of the people that listen to the podcast are more in the non-creative side of work and the getting things done side. So I would love you to talk through what you do in your own words. I was going to record an intro about what you do, and I realized I can't really express it. So I'd rather you explain what is it a creative director does, and how does your job work, and how does it work with companies? There's a bit of a known saying, I think when you work in advertising, particularly as a creative, what you do is basically your parents don't have no idea of what you do, right? And so you kind of get to that point and it's really hard, I would say it's it's connecting brands to people in a meaningful way, whatever that might be. it's, if... picking on the tone of voice, you want to give them the reason to exist in people's lives. So from a literal point of view, that happens through copy and art and design. in a look and feel. ⁓ but then there's a lot of like sentiment that comes with that personality. If everything we do in this day and age is branding, right? So everything has a tone of voice, like I said before, but everything needs to be consistent and you build that and that's what people want to connect with. So as far as like the day to day of what I do, ⁓ it's oversight of campaigns, ⁓ depending on what the brief is, the brief might be for a TV ad, a brand campaign which might be a brand reset on social and digital and in the last couple of years it's been more leaning towards the world of sport. But my disciplines, I started as a graphic designer. ⁓ I've always loved the kind of visual interest of communications and crafting on that. ⁓ And then once you bring that all together, then you obviously have the words as well, which I've been working on in the last couple of years. So yeah, in short, a creative director's responsibility is to look over the creative campaign for brands and connecting them and turning up in people's lives with meaning. And I like that because I think also he probably would have seen your work as well. What's amazing to me is that when I was in school, I was like... to do math and physics and biology and stuff and you were just sort of drawing. Is that a fair character? Yeah I mean to me it looked like you were just drawing. Yeah in a literal sense yes and it probably explains for many know Secret Santa gifts from yourself I've just received Crayola. Crowns are great you know so yeah I couldn't turn my nose up at that. Yeah always sketching I think ⁓ probably I mean we're talking 30 years ago aren't we where you could say, there's kind of weird person in the corner who's just, you know, doodling and sketching. Different corners, but still would gravitate. We'd walk away from the corners and talk to one another. Right. So there's sometimes there's some history there that comes through. Yeah, that's, think, an expression, right, of how I try to get what was out of here and then here down onto some sort of paper and it be an art form. So always drawing. was have never been great at kind of the academic side. obviously excelled at that. Or you seem to, convincingly, you seem to portray that you've excelled well at the maths. Yeah, it's all a farce. It's all a farce. We'll it out. That's it. That's it. So yeah, I mean, that is a fair estimation. And then through that, I mean, art and graphic design, it became graphic design. started it didn't know what graphic design was but just expressions of ⁓ emotions and what's going on through ⁓ colors and crayons and Crayolas was what I did yeah. So you've kind of had your key an evening. Yeah, for sure. I do think there's bit of a cheat code that how many people say find what you do for work. doesn't come work right. It's a passion. It's generally it's It's great what to find that so early on and go, OK, well, the way that I. can convey what's going on. then the art, think that comes with that. The difference of pure art and advertising is it's art meets business. So you have to be able to go short, getting out an expression of yourself onto a medium through photography and all. But no, actually what you're doing is you're doing it for someone else's brand. So once you learn how to do that, that's when all the business stress comes in. So, but in back to your question, yes, the... the expression of producing art is great. And you're very good at it. So when I started writing, I immediately came to you and said, I need a book cover. Actually, no, said I've done a book cover. What do you think? what do you think of my official Well, yeah, it was amazing. I didn't need any work. But well, firstly, thanks for saying I'm good at it. When it comes down to I think again the difference of art and graphic design. So we have art and business and art and graphic design. Art is like everything, it's purely subjective. So to say if it's good or not, it wasn't right. The interrogation is it communicating what you want it to communicate. So when you first came to me with that, it probably didn't deliver on a brief. It I actually got a physical copy. It like all of the physical drafts and I thought I liked it. I look at it now compared with the later versions. I've no idea what I'm doing now. It's good to keep a reminder of how far you've come. And how much you need to know. comparison though, now we have closed the gap. we've got a couple of copies here. So I love this one. But the process for coming up with it was really interesting because... Because you kind of asked me loads of questions. So before you all start, you asked me loads of questions. Give me a one sentence summary of like, with all the books that we've done. Give me a one sentence summary. and you're asking these kind of questions. And then a lot of the time you were saying, just leave it. So this is why I'm not used to them. I'm used to getting things done. I always want to finish things. I wasn't gonna get to the end of it. But what you said was write some ideas down and just leave it for a bit. I go away, do something else. And that's kind of the idea is originated. You come up with an idea and you say, okay, let's think about that and let's leave that to one side for a minute and then let's come back to it and see if something else. That was a really interesting process. It took me a while to kind understand the need for patience and time with that process and sometimes I probably push a little bit too hard to get things done quickly because I'm to get this done but with this book I sort of learned my lesson and I said okay just you know we've got plenty of time here so just figure it out so I want to ask you so this like I'm holding up towards that camera there so I really love this design and got something clever going on the back as well but You told me through, how did you come up with this idea? And I can't remember what I told you about this initially, but how did you come up with the initial concept of this? I mean, good question. don't know. We should just end. I remember getting it. You being in the car when you sent me a draft of it. No, it was a weird joke. I was making it. I do remember, just to make clear as well, the knot for resale is pièce de résistance on there. So we might scratch that and put a proper one on there in post, right? Fix it in post. We'll fix it in post. Yeah, it does come down to, I think, when you do learn the process of How do you tell someone or how do you work with someone who's intrinsically creative, inherently creative, and you go, OK, we'll throw that all together. And then you do need guardrails. overall, comes down to a topic that you talk about a lot is trust. So there's trust with yourself that you'll deliver something. And then you have to build trust with the person you're working with to make sure that they give you enough time. So the first book, if we go back to that. We have trust as friends, I'd like to think. Maybe, maybe not. But trust is great when you throw money on top of it, so that's probably where the trust comes from, And I could sense you needed to get it done. And from my side, I wanted to help, but I don't think we were probably, I recognize that you weren't really in that space. But by the time we got to the second, and particularly in this case, the third book of Close the Gap, It deserves it, it deserves that time. So when you're asking about hitting these deadlines, deadlines are important, setting yourself tasks are important, but I don't think you didn't have the appreciation of how long it can actually take. But it's not only the time, it deserves it, right? If you're doing anything in life, just give it the time it deserves. And of course you haven't worked a lot with creators within that field, or many fields. So when it arrived, you're kicking around a few names of titles of the book. And what we always try to go back to when you're working with brands or just within creative, the purpose is a brief. And I didn't really have a brief from you. There's a literal brief, right, which can be good is ⁓ it's a book cover. It's my third book. It needs to be in these dimensions. And then the brand, well, watch your brand as well. That was a big thing I was asking. Like, where do you think you are? And that took a step back. I've known you for 30 years. I have a perception of you, but is that necessarily right or wrong? You have a perception of yourself and you know yourself well, but we started there and some of the questions were based around like keywords. Emotive words and what was quite interesting is when I was asking you those you're coming back with quite analytical words and almost data points and science and that's that's great and I was trying to pull out just emotional words like joy again happiness trust or sadness, whatever it might be and Brilliant, it sounds amazing. When we got to something, that was one area, right? To go, we're starting to build a tone now. ⁓ And something that jumped out for me was, which I resonated with, and I always think that helps, particularly when we get into creative. ⁓ And then that process is taking that identity, and the identity that jumped out for me was a little bit of a misfit, a little bit of a punk. Right. And someone who doesn't conform, someone who doesn't fit into certain, you know, boxes and, is seen in a certain way. So I looked at that and I said, well, yeah, let's, let's own that. Right. So what about this idea of taking the old fuddy duddy in our heads? We're a bit older of 1980s corporate, ⁓ North America. ⁓ and I think we pushed it kind of into the early 2000s and the final aesthetic and go, well, screw that. If someone took that playbook and put their own spin on it and throw it out and. That's where we start to get through actually a contrarian, but for the right reason, someone who challenges conventions, who pushes against the norm. But does it with a smile on their face in a polite way ⁓ as well, of course. But that ethos and that mentality has come through. That's what I tried to get through when we were designing this book. And then the Graffiti and the Sickles, and that one just popped into my Because you had the idea of the, so I'll hold up again. So this is very soon. So we've got like an old school employee handbook in the background of the cover, which has got policies and procedures. think we played with different versions of this. Yeah, many, yeah. And then it's just kind of got this protest stamped on the front of it. So I assume that just kind of came naturally. There's a lot of this. There's a lot of graffiti going around, Yeah, and it comes down to that. What you try to do is shorthand. If you're going for a punk mentality, a bit of a rebellious, going against the grain, rage against the machine, whatever you want to call it. Graffiti does that, right? The point of it is the canvas can be anything, and our canvas was our enemy in this case. So the canvas being the old kind of corporate employee handbook. And then the graffiti was just a natural step beyond that to go, well, Let's not make it if your enemy is something that's very formed and structured and placed in. ⁓ Graffiti is the opposite of that. It's it's it's still considered of course and like, you know There's an art in and a lot of making something that looks freeform Feel freeform you have to still form it but the graffiti came through on that and even the small personalizations of going let's try your name with the graffiti tag and then for me it goes back to the Crayola gift The high-quality got from you when I was, you know, still too old to have it in my early 20s but that's that's what it was in and and It does come back to the expression of taking a brand and giving purpose into someone's life. And this is a very short way of doing it, of I'm going to walk past, I'm looking on Amazon, I'm walking past a bookstore. Does that jump out and grab me? It does pop, doesn't I do love the color palette as well. Yeah, I noticed, so I was, when we've been talking about it for like a week or something like that, and then you send me a message and said, I can't remember what you said exactly. You said like, Be patient with me. So it's something like that. Don't react immediately. Let us sit with you. Which is clearly coming from someone that's had to present novel ideas to people before and expecting some degree of pushback. But I saw it and immediately I was like, yeah, that's it. That's the one. But I saw it and I like, that's my brand right there. I saw it But clearly, when you present ideas, you've got the new idea. Presumably, you're always wondering, is that person going to see it the same way? Or are they going to be open-minded enough? sort of understand what they're doing. Yeah, great question and great observation as well, because it took us three books to get to that for you, right? It did. yeah, going back to work, that's where it's come from. You're exactly right. It's really strange, what we do as creatives is we're presenting illogical or rational, sometimes, ideas to very rational people. And that's. there's no point or blame in that. It's just a fact of what it is. And what you tend to find is that with the rational people, they measure things by data and they have measurement tools. And what I try to do and it's... even internal processes, right? When I'm working without even presenting to a client and working with the internal team, be it strategists and account directors and account managers. And a lot of them are great and fantastic, but what you want them to hold onto is that first initial emotional reaction. So. it's it's it's it comes from trust again is the more you do that and you don't have to get it right all the time because you can't right but if you can get it right consistently maybe seven out of ten times that's really going to help you that's where it's come from and there's a lot of setting up and setting up but there's also a balance in that setup if you go too too big with it too much what he delivers is underwhelming. So the work should speak for itself, but the main thing to hold in even the biggest client presentations fits from the Googles, the Coca-Cola's to... ⁓ working with smaller brands and whatever the projects might be, just hold onto that initial reaction. And it's quite strange, but you have to ask marketers and your clients to not be clients and marketers and be human people first and go, because we all are, how did you, how did that make you feel? Now the art, which we talk about a lot, you and I have spoken about, and it's good to talk about this day is there's a certain responsibility you have of setting up that trust but what you deliver can manipulate my emotions as well because it should do or let's say maybe not manipulate but it's to evoke an emotion. And I think I'm just understanding how the human mind works as well. Like you can't be naive. Like we are complex, unpredictable people to some degree, but we know that if you catch people in the wrong state of emotional mindset, they're not going to react positively to something. So timing and words and then all of that. plays a role in how you do these things. And you have to do that more than, I think, more than most, because your entire job is creation. So for most of us, we have elements of creation in our job. And then everyone has elements of creativity and control and all aspects of work. But for you, your entire brand and what you do is creation. But you've also got to reconcile that with people who have deadlines, have stresses, have expectations, have budgets, and have preconceptions about what it is they want. So when you said that to me, was like, this is someone that's had to deal with pushback and just be very thoughtful about how you present ideas. Yeah, I think there's a lot. to go into that and there's different structures of ⁓ where does it start with a good brief or a bad brief. I want to talk bit more about Brisbane because a brief, what is a brief? So what exactly, what do you get? What's your starting point for most people? Yeah, not to have as a cop out, but a brief is, it changes slightly depending on what the brief is for. But the golden rule of a brief ⁓ used to be, it has changed more slightly and I would say the last. ⁓ five or six years, it's an objective that I applied on the page with clear context as well. So a good brief would be concise and should be a platform that the creatives can take and springboard from. A bad brief is exactly like you said, is someone who knows exactly what they want and everything is contained and there's no room to kind of play. You have to get things wrong a lot of the time. And there's examples of good briefs and bad briefs. And sometimes a bad brief can actually lead to a great solution. And a good brief actually might seem great. And then when you get into it, it falls flat. The difference is, and I think that's where a great ⁓ trust in partners comes in, so client partners. And then strategists. So strategists, brand strategists in particular, work on briefs for a long amount of time. And they would spend weeks on it, sometimes months. where the balance has become is because we spoke about the rational thoughts being the people who measure success of creativity. a data-driven brief and they all are now, but the purest briefs would be something that's based off human emotion and human insight, a cultural insight. That's where I think all art forms, but particularly in advertising and marketing, it becomes very exciting of connecting unexpected cultures to different areas of other cultures. So for instance, there was a project I did for Hellman's mayonnaise. Yeah, was trying to, was all about food awareness and ⁓ food waste awareness, I should say. And we had to educate the younger, gen Z, which is a term in itself, which is marketing is grouped. But people, to who are younger, who need to be slightly educated on it, which they're getting a lot of education from them, so it's quite hard. So how do get them to care about it? We turned up in a different area of culture, and we said, we're spending a lot of money on fashion and clothes, so why don't we create a pair of sneakers made from food waste? and call them 1352s and the code name is the price point of the average a North American would waste on food within the market at the time which was in Canada. that's the brief for that was we want to get our message across of make taste not waste. this is quite an open brief, but the client had a very particular idea in their mind of how to do that. And that's partnering with celebrities and influencers, which is often used a lot and taking the best practice ⁓ responses. So that would be social first. We do banners. We might work with the chef, right? And a bit of an educational tool. So what you always have to do when there is a brief, I think it's our responsibility. as an agency and as partners and even more for working you on this is show them what they've asked for and then show them what they actually need. And showing them what they asked for is fine. And we're great, we've done this and that would be irresponsible just to go after something that's a bit mad. But then when you come back with actually we want to create these sneakers or trainers made from food waste, leather and materials, then they go, okay, well maybe we need to actually do that. So yes, I think that's one point of the good bad brief. I that was quite a few questions in the initial. But yeah, I really like this because what you're doing is you're playing with human psychology in the right way if you came back and said I didn't like the brief I See behind your brief and my bigger question I've got a better answer to it that comes across as condescending dismissive like you haven't listened even if the idea is brilliant That's not going to go anywhere and I think in the working world This happens a lot and I've been guilty of this many times, but I think I know best a lot of the time. So I'll come up with an idea and I'll say, okay, there isn't what is what you should do instead. Now it doesn't matter how good that idea because you will have lost the client or the colleague at that point. So what you do is, you know, there's a couple of psychological effects in there. I mean, there's a foot in the door technique going on, give them back what they want, show them that you're on the same page with them, like get them nodding along with you, get them to be friends basically before you bring something else on. So you're not going in cold. So like you said you've given them what they want and you're getting agreement and you're building that relationship that's required for trust and then it's almost Wait a minute, yeah And I think that's kind of amount we've gone into this other question I had, which is how do you balance that romanticized idea of creativity, the idea that Don Draper in a bar coming up with an idea out of nowhere. with the realities of working with people, large groups of people with many different opinions. And I think you've kind of answered it. You've got to respect those tensions. Yeah, I think the idea of the Don Draper is... It should be buried. It's gone, right? ⁓ Sure as a show in itself, I mean some of it was slightly problematic but as as the idea I In itself that the Advertisers changed so much and creativity as right. I think back then you could say Brands used to inform popular culture right brands used to tell people what was cool with the iconic Coca Cola ads and sure right so and and and I see the classic Coca-Cola branding or machines or whatever. It's got a sense of warmth, like it's Americana. Yeah, well that's, I guess when that Americana and that the American dream is what they encapsulate and that's why Coca-Cola worked for so many years and it still does is you're essentially buying 70 or 80 years of cool on a can that's very affordable and accessible. So sure, exactly that. the contents inside is good for you or not, let's move past that. I still want to work with them again in the future. So you did work with them, didn't you? Yeah, within last year. they're moving into, which they've had a heritage in, but most brands are moving into sport, right? So that partnership has been there. So I worked with them on the Premier League sponsorships. That was interesting. We can get into that a little bit more, but going back to, I think that the change from Mad Men to the realities of where we are, which is... We jump around a lot, right? I actually think we've managed it quite well for us. It has to asparagus is just a weird thing. Why do we always have that? There's a problem. There's a problem. I feel sorry for the for the seller. the PRs behind celery were so great in the early 2000s that it to have dropped off now. It's as asparagus has become. Yeah, ⁓ madmen. Madmen. Back to the madmen. So what I was saying was that, and it's just observations, right? It's not right or wrong. It's probably wrong. But my observations would be advertising and marketing used to inform what was cool. And that was during that whole, the 60s, probably up until the mid 2000s, where advertising and marketing held a mirror up to society. And now, and I would say the growth of creators and talent influencers and social media, culture informs marketing. Right? So you can always say there's context to it. So you're talking about timing and how do you know when to push back and get the foot in the door and go back with the response. that big shift has happened because before you probably could just be the Don Draper type and arrogantly walk in and go screw that. You know, this is bad. This is what you need to do. You can't, you should never have had to do that. But now we are in more service of actually a brand could go straight to a creator and they often do. ⁓ and they go, well, actually we can work directly with them. And the biggest shift would be, it was a quote from Mad Men, but it did used to be used a lot in marketing. from what I hear, we're not old enough to be around from the 60s, is that if you didn't have an idea you used to celebrity, whereas now... Well, yeah, well, I just think it's changed, right? I don't think it's necessarily lazy. It can be used in a smart way. And there's some amazing examples of celebrity. But the point being is that that's the shift from advertising used to inform culture, but culture informs marketing now. and that's the flip is fine. It's finding your place and your reason to turn up. to probably answer one of the original questions, knowing when to push back. It's you'd say in a safe space right and clients wouldn't like hearing us, but it's is Is the juice worth the squeeze is this worth the fight? Because it does take just as long to make a good piece of work as a bad piece of work Right the at the effort is the same and then there are more so in this day and age and we see it with film and Music and other art forms. It's timing as well. You could create something where you go. It's gonna be great And the day before it goes live, we've got a fantastic idea about a talking egg. An egg has lived a very short life and it's very meaningful. And a giant egg has a mishap in Scandinavia and it falls over. A giant egg. And it's laying an egg and it's all over the news. Supernatural well an existential crisis this was what we're going for right, but my point is a bad analogy But what I was trying to say is that? There you go right, okay, let's go with that There we go there we The client speaking the client hat on is there there we go because that that fear There's things you can't factor for and then there are equally an idea or campaign you might get out there and go It's gonna be fine Do alright, and it just blows up And you go, wow, we didn't expect that. We didn't expect it to go as big as it could. you think they knew that that was going to blow up as much as did? Do you think it was deliberately played to get that reaction? Yeah, yeah. I think the line that they used, they knew it would be controversial. Yeah, I think you have to be. That's the other thing. And I find that a little bit cheap sometimes, is going after producing a campaign, which is tongue in cheek, but they knew that the the rhetoric around it, like all of the conversation around it would be a good thing for their brand. Yeah, so as a metrics, did work and then you get into, it's bravery, it comes down to bravery. I think that's a big thing to talk about. talked about trust, but how brave do you want to be with the work you put out there and with your clients? Just to probably go off on another tangent, I would say that my role is protecting It's protecting the potential of the idea. And what I mean by that is even when we did this, I had a vision in my head. What usually makes out when you do creative marketing campaigns, it's about 70 % if you're lucky of what you had in your mind. And usually that just comes down to partners that you're working with, maybe they don't deliver on the craft, maybe it was in your head, you misjudged it. Sometimes it's other factors, it might be legal, you can't say certain things, right? And then we're from the spoken, we've spoken about, but the thing that I think is most important for creative leads. whether you're a freelancer, wherever you're working for, global international agencies, ⁓ is you protect the potential of what the idea can become because it can be so quickly be dismissed by one conversation. You protect the potential of what the idea can become. really like that. Yeah, and I think it's just a truth because if you kill it off too early, Right, then obviously we don't know where it could go and it could be, there's a lot of conversation that happens internal and when I say internal by the way, to be clear, it's before it's just being presented to a client. So it's with your internal team, right? Your partners, within the same agency where you've got something great or you've got the potential of something great. That should always be the potential. And there's just too many comments, there's too many people and too many cooks do spoil the broth, but it... it just takes it to an area where you go, we're over-complicating this. And I think the role of a creative lead should be just cut the noise out, ignore the noise and focus on what matters and retain that. And then the counter, not counterpoint, the points that add on top of that. So the points add on top of that would be push the idea as far as it can go to the point where you feel uncomfortable, to the point where your trusted partners feel uncomfortable. See where we get to because if you stay in the same zone if you if you don't push yourself out of that comfort zone Within the potential of the idea You won't stumble on anything new. won't find anything new. There's a few things in here so I really like so so although a lot of people listening won't work in creative I think they face similar challenges it's very easy to say let's do more of what we're already doing. I don't think I'd love to hear. Yeah. participative workplace of a creative workplace and a lot of psychological safety, psychological safety come back to again and again. But the idea is that in any project within Pixar, you have this brain trust, which is a collection of people, voluntary group of people. There's no titles or seniority, it's flat. And the idea is they're just there to provide ideas. They're not there to provide opinions that need to be incorporated. And directors will be on, or ex-directors will be on that. And the director of the film will be on that as well. And the idea is you just keep sharing ideas continually because When you're making movies like Pixar do you can't make like an hour of footage and then scale that's how you just spend the entire budget on something You don't want to use you can't like shoot and then reach you've got to get it right. Yeah, right So the idea is that it's a psychologically Safe place where ideas can be shared, but it's not but it's not decision-making The idea isn't you take an average of all the opinions is that the direct the director or directors as is often the case with animation Can hear all of that and feel safe? to change their ideas, not protective over what they initially had, but just a place where they can go to in a safe place. But that's different to getting consensus. I think a lot of companies and lot of environments struggle with the idea of consensus. Well, they said that, so you should probably do a bit of that, and they said that, so we should do a bit of that, and you end up with an average. And an average has never been a challenge, that space that you mentioned. And the other related idea, I just love the visual of the Overton window, and the Overton window is that there's a range of possibilities for anything. Some are going to be extreme and different, different sides of it. And there's a range that are acceptable right now. But when, what you mentioned a second ago about testing the boundaries, you're stretching that window. Every time you find the limits of what people are comfortable with, you stretch the possibilities of what they might appreciate and respect the next time you suggest something. So I think even if an idea is crazy, it's sometimes worth suggesting just to stretch the potential for what people might see. And even in HR, if you've got an idea, And like in my world, a lot of people are wed to the idea of pay for performance and control and bonus mechanisms, all this kind of thing. If you just, if you say, well, let's just delete it all, you know, let's try it again. That's a crazy idea, but it offers the opportunity to stretch people's imaginations a little bit. So the next time you come up with an idea, maybe they're a bit more primed to listen to that new thing that's off them. Yeah. I mean, that's great. And it's very good to hear. obviously I think it's a rule that can be applied. no matter what field you work in, but also just kind of in your life as well, which is always probably the best rules is it's building that trust. But why wouldn't you show that? Because what I think with the examples that you said, I think a lot of people live in a fear of if we show the thing that might not be right, it pushes it, it closes that window. That might retreat. And sometimes they might, as well, because the environment's not right, I think. Break some windows. Break came in with things that get quite wild. I think that the examples that you do use. looking up window insurance on the laptop. I do think the examples that you've given and the great theory behind it, it should be applied and applicable. that why if we're not inventing or reinventing or looking at evolving our ways of thinking. To me, it feels like we're then again one of the creatives I work with and the structures that we have. They are all, I don't to say it, all, a lot of them are outdated. And the people's desires, the people's desires, the creative desires that what their needs are, that's that friction I was talking before of... the art versus the business, right? The business hasn't caught up with the fact that it tried to, I think, tried to monetize and that's what the pay is for, right? I use that line in this book actually, that's what the money's for. I love that because that's the implicit bargain in many workplaces, which is that we pay you and you leave that complicated, irritating human side of yourself at the door and deliver the results that we want. And we know, well, we don't know, but we should know that. That aspect of humanity, that unpredictable aspect is the thing you need for creativity and you are there's that passion. You don't get one without the other. You just want a bunch of drones coming in and setting the desk to any numbers. But first of we might as well automate that with AI at this point. yeah, that implicit deal, that's what the money's for. There's such a good moment in Men. This is turning into a Mad Men themed episode. Well, let's say Mad Men. Let's say it's Mad Men. ⁓ people because I think the madman can be. We shouldn't say that there's a lot of madmen that we don't know indoors. No, hell of a lot of it. I think if you aspire to be a Don Draper you should probably be working in 2026. But the whiskey offices, I don't mind that. A little whiskey in the office. that idea of what you said of getting the... you say it was it was about bringing in i would articulate as in this bringing in with the weird of you and trying to iron that out and flatten that out your whole self right yeah like it's and you we've spoken about this before as well you know when you're hiring and you get this as well and you're for your business but cultural fit comes up a lot when you're hiring it's a very dangerous very risky thing to say when you're hiring for culture because what you're essentially saying is then you're hiring people that look and sound like me essentially what saying for that which is a very dangerous place to put yourself in because yes I know if you get people with different styles and backgrounds and cultures it's a bit of work to integrate how they think but equally if you don't do that you are just going to end up with homogeneity so I prefer the expression I can't remember who said this it might have been Aaron Dignan and Brave New World but it's about where you want your culture to be, not where it is. So you should be hiring for where you want to go. And if where you want to go is the same, then sure, hire people that look and sound like you from the same place. But if where you want to go is a place that is more creative and more innovative with newer ideas, which is what everyone should want, because no one ever gets anywhere by staying the same, then you do need to hire people that look and sound different, which means different places with different backgrounds. But I assume you see this and advertising as well, like any industry, it's very, the temptation is to hire people that, you know, do what you do. Yeah, I think there's a few things, a few things there that are accurate and so I'm part, but the vision of where you want to be is right, right? It shouldn't be where we are right now because everyone should always be evolving and changing. I like the agencies and setups of places of, they have a rough idea, but they don't really know. And I think, Brands have a masterful ⁓ idea as well. They'll spend a lot of money on that, but something will happen where they react, and they need to almost change and evolve and grow their culture. Otherwise, they become outdated. Now, down to the personnel, we're talking about the creative you hire, and again, within the world that we're in. I like to hire and I like to go for different, almost like again, the misfits, the people who don't really belong in the heavy corporate environment. And the corporate environment has grown so much and the bigger, I would call traditional agencies without naming names too heavily, they do incentivize by well... we'll pay X amount here, or you have the opportunity to be working with a name like us, right? So that's gonna be good. And you go, well, actually the true creatives and that's where, know, there is business and we do need to make money and we need to survive. But if you didn't pay them, they would still be creating. So why wouldn't you allow them more opportunity to create? Because all we do as creatives is brands and agencies just rent out on a voice. That's all they're doing. And I mean that from a, collective, but an individual. It's why when you get a certain brief and you go, actually, we've got a sports brief, which is going to be with ⁓ the women's Euros and football, there's going to be a group of creatives who are better. set to answer that brief versus a kind of very heavy automotive, you know, brief that might be delivered in Asia. And that doesn't come down to race or, you know, seniority or vague, it just comes down to a fit, a cultural fit for that brief. So when we're looking at that, as people who are hiring or setting up a culture or you'll be in part of that, and I'm on both sides, right, because I've been in places to set up. ⁓ actual departments and lead departments, but I'm also now as a freelancer exposed to lots of different cultures as I go in for sometimes short, very short week contracts as a consultant or long term for a year or so. And what you see is that the culture, it does become flattened out and homogenized because everyone's... trying to be the same. And I really like the places that have a strong, it's a single voice, it's a leader's voice that will trickle through, but they have to be open to go, actually, we don't have someone who can do this. We don't have someone whose brand's tone of voice might be X. We have a lot of Y. Let's bring that in. ⁓ And where the balance is, is making sure that that person doesn't, you know, become too conformed. Exactly. They need to retain that. So they need to not feel that they should. I come back to psychological safety. I think when I was growing up, particularly when I grew up in accounting, everyone has to look and sound the same in accounting. Everyone's wearing suits and the literal uniform to make them look and sound the same. So I think there is this legacy of the business world that we should have the business version of ourselves. Yeah, why why like why should we be told like that's the right thing to wear or I mean when I very first started out cover up your tattoos. Yeah. You know, many times. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't been for 15 years or so, but cover up the Dodo tattoo probably sent them over the girl. Why have you got an extinct bird and you're bringing it back man. Like probably a good time to actually say we're both of Mauritian heritage, which is why we talk about the Dodo a lot. But I, I, I, I'd like to say, I think, ⁓ in the last 20 years it has changed. And what, and why I say it, what has changed? The acceptance of being more who you are and that weird, when we even say the word weird creative, the outsider, that's more embraced. there are a lot of places that still take that out of people. And that comes down to something you were asking before about the measurements of how do you get to the work, right? If you've got deadlines, if you've got time sheets and you're... You know, you're working in a space where with creatives, it isn't a tap. You can't just turn it on and go, great, I'm going to be creative now. I'll turn it off. I'll go for a walk. I'll come back onto another brief, turn it on and turn it off. You can't do that. Creativity is what you have to find is what works best for you. And that changes as people change, right? know, other factors in life. might have kids, a partner. a very demanding egg at home next to an asparagus and you go, okay, well, yeah. It always comes back to that bloody, do you know why? It just comes back to that. But the idea is you find what works for you. So I've worked with creatives where they actually only work best in the mornings. There's some in the evenings. then you get back into wider where you go, you're talking about the literal sense, some who actually work on weekends, late nights, then you find the tone, like some who only can work on social led briefs, some who work on big TV ads or whatever it might be. So when I don't want to take that out of them, I just want them to be able to find it. And I've found it myself and that's changed over the years. But when you're asking people to conform and they have to slightly because of the constraints of the business. So It is a service business. We are in service of our clients. I think the best examples of partnerships that work, and it's not just with your clients, it's with your, from an HR point of view, your hirements sit on one side of tables, right? We're not talking against one another. We're on the same side here. It'll be really interesting to hear from yourself, like the observations within. don't have any exposure, my exposure to your world is you. So as far as like professionally as well, where do you think the direction in last 20 years has changed as far as the acceptance of how people want to work? Because the difference with creativity is it is still subjective. Ultimately, you're presenting something and that emotional feeling, whereas, correct me if I'm wrong, what you're doing is still very much placed in this works and this doesn't work. think the, you know, I always try and let us zoom out quite a lot in terms of where we are. If you look at the world around it, it depends very much on the company, but a lot of companies are still built around systems of control. which is kind of what this book is intended to dismantle. And it all comes from, if you look at the typical company hierarchy, CEO top down, that comes from predominantly two places, the Catholic church and early ⁓ military setups. And it got inherited into the modern company and then that got used to factory work when you've got quotas and tithes and productions and someone decides it and then you share that out across the group. So for a company to still operate in that model, to me, you've got to think about it for second. of life do we still think and act the way we did a hundred years ago. If we sat here now dressed and talking the way people did a hundred years ago, people would think we're even stranger than we actually are. It's not normal. Nothing's normal. Like the way the coffee, nothing's the same as it was, but the format of the workplace still kind of is. So to me that is just a relic, but... It offers people a sense of objectivity and control. And HR in particular, that comes from what's called the Oric model, which is where you have divisions and centers of excellence across the entire organization, which by definition needs to be top down. If you're gonna do things the same way across the whole company, it has to be top down. You can't have your own mini HR departments in that model. So to me, but it is changing. So the employee relations movement started in the early 20th century and that had wonderful thinkers like Rensis Leikhaar, like us and Abraham Aslow and many others. ⁓ I can't think of a other names, there's a group of people then that said, well, maybe we should assume that people want to work and work from that assumption rather than assume that they need to be controlled and then build everything else within them. So that started a good hundred years ago at this point. But if you look at how long it takes people to change and move towards slavery ⁓ was once the norm. The idea of physically making people do the work you want to do, physical coercion, that stayed the norm for hundreds of years and it took hundreds of years for that to go away and there's still existence on parts of the world. We are very, very slow at social adaptation and there's a lot, particularly when people have their welfare, hinging on a certain model, it takes a long, time for people to extricate themselves. So to me, that was one big revolution, the revolution away from physical control and I think we're now in the midst of a revolution away from psychological control and the assumption that we need to psychologically control people and give people goals and objectives and all this kind of thing. So your question was like, what is it like? And a lot of companies, think, are still trapped within these systems of psychological control. But unfortunately, within HR, the current model, you're kind of told to do that. The job of HR is to control it, to protect the company, to protect the company from... ⁓ lawsuits from unfair dismissal to protect the company from spending too much money, from hiring too much, from promoting too much, from all this, fear-based really the system of HR. So I think it needs to reinvent itself. And whether you can do that within existing systems of control or just doing it with new companies is the question. It's much easier to do it from scratch. And you've got wonderful companies that have built themselves up from scratch, like Buurtzorg is an example I use in the book. ⁓ Steel is a great example in America. ⁓ handles banking as well, which I include in the appendix of this book, all companies that were existentially threatened or started from scratch and did it from a different set of assumptions about how people work. But I do think to go back to our initial question, you remember at this point, I think if you are in HR, in this world of HR right now, it's difficult to envisage a path to a different operating system, as Aaron Dignan would call it, a different assumption, different style of assumption. So to go to your example, You've got to start testing limits at some point so you could stay complicit and say well I'm just doing what I'm told yeah Or you could say that's how some fun here like we spend one third of a working life doing this job If you don't like what you're seeing you can see these systems of control not working and you can see these disengaged people everywhere Test the limits try something so experimentation is what humans are so good at Experiment with something take a corner of the business is really unhappy and say well, let's try and think differently. Let's try and reset Let's with first principles and everyone wants to good work. Everyone wants to do good work. So let's assume everyone wants to do good work. And then there's things like what you said, let's figure out what people want to do. Stop telling them what we need them to do. Let's figure out what they want to do and try and reconcile the needs of the business with what's going to get the most out of those people. So this is the challenge I think people in HR faces. It's difficult to break away from that way of thinking. The reason I asked it, great answer. I don't know how this has happened, but I'm asking you the questions. I sort of think, there we go. That's the creative mindset to flip it. But it is control, right? It's the fear of not having that control. And also, there's a lot going on in the world where people go and fear comes in of the loss of little literal job. Like if I try something, it doesn't work out. But going back to ask the creative process, the literal point of that. is we don't really know where it's going, but we have the potential of protecting the potential of where it could go. Kind of want to take that model and adapt it again. And one's very rational side of HR and these things work and that they're proven. What we're doing now is we're actually starting to question, were they proven? Were they right? We can dispel them. We can question them. We should be able to question them. And it's good to be afforded the opportunity to do that. That's one thing that we should be talking about as well. or recognize at least. But if there's learnings to be taken from the creative process of there are some, you know, a brief and process, you talk about good brief, a bad brief, there's still things placed in of internal catch-ups and reviews and client presentations. Often what we're doing as creative leads is we're constantly pushing and fighting to have more time to better it, right? So the time that comes into it, again, you know, on the other side is, well, we don't really want to have more time because that means we're losing our profits and we've obviously time sheets that come into that. But if you can, if you're brave enough and you've built enough trust with your partners to say, give us another day, give us, you know, it used to be the overnight test. Now it's probably the over lunch test because it moves quickly. But if you can build that trust to experiment and it's not experimentally recklessly, there is a truth and we can use this as an example. We're both really happy with where we've got to. We did need a deadline, but it's my responsibility and it would be as the agency partners of clients to actually go, we think we've bettered it. We're about to go live with an ad. And I've seen this happen a few times with the sort of stronger best agency, client relationships and trust that have trust. We are at the 11th hour. We've shot the ad, we've delivered the work. We think we've bettered it. So. Do we have enough trust? Can we break and have that, you know, there's a fear there. Yeah, yeah, I've seen this happen before with agents. I've had it on work with the KitKat work was an example of that. Yes, yeah, it's a good example. Exactly, yeah, it's a great example where you got, actually we've bettered what we've come up with and we'll get through the process of that. We had scripts written down, we had directors on board and we pivoted. And when you pivot, at that last moment and there's enough trust between you, the client and everyone involved, directors. There's so many people, You're touching out. So a lot of different, sorry, you're hitting a lot of different touch points where there's people's jobs on the line, it's their income. But you have the trust to do that and the work is better. with the challenge in that process, challenging the norm is what creators have to do. They have to challenge what they kind of know. That is something that can be adopted, I think, in many different disciplines of going, let's push out of this sense of kind of control, this fear of not knowing. do you know what, as well, it's not for everyone. I'm not saying that everyone needs to do that, because that's not fair. But it's certainly on the leaders and the people at the top to actually question that, I would say. It's their responsibility. It's also more fun, isn't it? If you just constantly deliver what's expected of you or someone else, there's not a great deal of joy to that. And I think what people need. You I would say you spend one third of your life at work. right, one third of your waking life you're going to spend doing work. Are you really willing to accept just doing what you're told? Is that a good way to spend your waking life? So why not push back? Why not test? mean, if nothing else, it's interesting. Right, exactly that. But again, it's not for everyone, but everyone has the opportunity to do if they want to. Right, so some people. certain times in your life when you just don't have the room to do that. The kit cap then, so I remember once in the catapult one, right? This is the catapult, yeah. What was the original? It's spelled with a K. Because I don't know what the original one was. Yeah, well, so I mean, can talk through the actual, the full briefing process maybe as an example to go from a good brief. And what I'll do, by the way, I'll put in the show notes a link to the YouTube, but it's really cool. Yeah. So if anyone's listening, it's worth watching this. This is one of my favorite ones by the Nice. This is good. at the time I was working, shout out to Stephen Ho. ⁓ So, you know, Steve, yeah, Steve's a friend. So it's actually a process, a part of process we haven't spoken about and often gets lost is you need your dance partner a lot in creativity. It's quite hard, I think, ⁓ to be isolated and come up with these ideas. But then that takes years and some people get there very quickly. And I think as creative leads, you can do that. But you always need a good... dance partner. So traditionally the way the creative model works is you have a copywriter and art director to take care of both sides of the discipline of producing work. So I started off as an art director, Steve was a copywriter and we were a team for 11 years I think it was. So we moved to Australia to get it. Yes, exactly that. We moved from London to Sydney. We were working in Australia at the time at an agency that had the KitKat Global account. And the brief came in and it was to give a new campaign. So was produced a new campaign that took the have a break, have a kick out. And it's always really wonderful to be able to work with a brand that straight away has some things tied to it. It's got a base, right? But it's more than a base as well. It's synonymous. So there's lot of places you can go with that as well. There's those few ones that can take in lot of different directions. Exactly that. like you say, there's a wealth of history there. So you kind of know what it stands for. And it was just to produce a modern day campaign, which was at the time I think in 2016. I it was 10 years ago now. But give it some sort of sense of purpose. And what we asked ourselves, and the brief actually started with this in a really strong way, and it's the point of a good brief, is how do we set up, have a break, have a KitKat with a memorable scenarios or series of feelings that gets the product at the heart of it as well. So have a break is in there. but they wanted something else that a device or a name for this campaign that can deliver on that as well. And something that was unearthed from a really great strategist was, you're not going to have a KitKat. there wasn't heavy data and insight as far as market research placed into this. There wasn't heavy data and market research that was placed into this. It came from great cultural and human insights. You're not having a KitKat if you're told your house is just you know, you're about to lose your house or you know, you get a phone call of some horrible news. You're not gonna have a break, have a Kit Kat, right? It's something that you have when you just need a bit of a five, 10 minute break. So what we stumbled across to answer that was first world problems. So that took a couple of days of just going around. Actually, it's just small little issues, but they're very big at the time, but you know, I just need a bit of a time out and just have a break. So we were kicking around a few lines and we stumbled across Snap Out Of It. So there's obviously a few double meanings there, but there's a literal sense of you break snap out of it as well. So there's a product role. So it became a state changer moment to have that. So where we started was first world problems of just, know, I've got to put the bed in back on, ⁓ you know, really mundane things. Especially for the sheets that drive me nuts. It's terrible, isn't it? It's like it's. Yeah, think, well, yeah, we should be closing the gap on own, on fitted sheets. Yeah, that's what it should be. So we'd written this ad, which we called the Four Corners of Hell. And it was the fitted sheets, you know, being placed down. Everything was normal. then ping, one would just fly off. And we liked all of this space, right? So it was taking these problems and then just dramatizing them through cinematography and then using the KitKat to kind of reset. And the client challenged us. They liked it. The client said, we just think it can be better, but bigger. ⁓ And we had directors on board. had these scripts written. I mean, we must have written 34, 35 different scenarios. that's always a strength of just first of all problems, right? And you start reading them off and be it Zoom calls or Google Maps or trying to find a podcast studio for the day that we're trying to get to. And we end up driving to a farm. Thanks, Ben. ⁓ So we were going around those and there's a lot that you can have, right? And the client challenged us and we had directors all lined up. We had shoot days locked in. We had global presentations, right? Because we're an Australian market and we have to present up to the UK being global. And then we challenged ourselves and said, well, if we just took these ordinary situations and set them in an extraordinary world, what would happen? And one of the scenarios we had was flatmates putting together flat pat furniture. It's going to cause problems. It's going to cause first world problems. It's going to cause stress in the moment. Certainly have a break, right? think Ikea has a lot to answer for when it comes to divorce rates and just general marriage failings because there's nothing more stressful than putting together flat back furniture. Yeah, the Swedes. It was all the master plan, wasn't it? They definitely have a flat-pack divorce in a package. It's perfectly planned, isn't it? It's just like there's no words on images, which actually became one of the gags in the spot. So what we did is we took the frustration of flat-pat furniture and two mates putting it together. And we said, well, what happens if it was, and we had a few different ones. But we said, well, about two guards of the night, ⁓ soldiers set in medieval times putting flat-pat catapult together. And they did. And we really played with the gag. we shot it in it. And from that idea, there's something very rewarding from that being in your mind to three or four months later with a great client who said, yes, we love that and fought for it as well. Because there are some things you have to deal with global clients and global agencies because there's competitiveness. There's jealousy that might come in of we don't want them to work on that. which is a natural thing that you all of these things that you have to that are barriers again preserve the potential right so we've got to keep the potential going exactly that it's yeah protecting the potential always protect that potential of what the idea could become and to be fair to a great client partner and a great brief and a great agency that we worked with everyone wanted to protect the potential of what it could become. And there's moments where you're going, and it's going, okay, well, we shot it in Romania. We ended up going over there, right? So we fly from Australia to Romania, and it's not like it's just a mad story because we get snowed in for two weeks in this small little village. Yeah, so we're in this small village where actually the inspiration for Beauty and the Beast, it's Saniya, I believe it's called, and we got snowed in. and they built the catapult and we had all of these amazing director partners, production teams and units and all of the things you need to make the creative happen, right? Because if you just leave the creators alone, we'll just be up in the clouds all day and we need the producing side. you you need the left arm to the right arm to meet. And yes, we got to a point where we... You we built the catapult, you write the gags, like all of those little Easter egg kind of gags, those, those. And the other thing is to, you know, to reference the importance of, with the creative mindset, we spoke about the structures you had. If the creative mind isn't happy, if it isn't being fed, right, it's not going to do that. But then one thing, you know, you say to, I tried to say to a lot of the creatives is just get out there and watch as much film, read as many books, go to as many exhibitions, theatre shows, listen to as much like music as you can, because you're just a sponge. And what you're doing is applying that. So what we did was essentially a bit Monty Python. I was about to say it did make me think of the Holy Grail. Like modernizing the dark ages a little bit. modern problems into the dark But you grow up watching all of that. It's going to be in there somewhere. And that's fine. That's not like plagiarism. That's honor. It's a homage to doing it. I think... Yeah, so we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Yeah, exactly. We don't have to be the first person to come up with the idea to put graffiti over something that's corporate, right? But the expression of it with the words that are involved, the time that it's here, the ingredients that you mix together ⁓ when the dish is served, that's what's important. So that became a series. So the catapult spot became a series. we did lots of, within that same world, we had the frustrations of taking a selfie. But it's a oil painting, right? That takes three days. And the person's kind of still standing there. And then we had the frustrations of delivering a message, right? It was over text, but it's for a crow. It kind of keeps getting lost on the way. And then if it actually, you know, we don't get the red check marks because there's a crow's raven flying around. You must be really happy because then you think all these different places you could apply the same. Yeah, and I think that's the strength of a really great campaign I like I think some of the best campaigns is probably competitors to that is you know you when you're hungry for Snickers It's just hangry. It's just very smart But it's a human truth and again a cultural truth of being hangry Everyone can resonate with it and then there's a million scenarios that you can come up with which they did And so the the example of KitKat as you get in there. Sorry back to the catapult And since then ⁓ they had made, under the same campaign, two cowboys who were out on the frontier. ⁓ who got lost through their Google Maps, right? So they've got their physical map out and they, ⁓ it's this way, it's that way. And then two wizards who are having a Zoom call issue through, you know, the novel. Yeah. So again, another test of that strength where it can go on. But the point being there is that there has to be an environment. to allow the creatives to keep pushing, but the trust that's earned from the client, from everyone involved to go, we could go bigger here. We could do something different. Not every brief is going to be like that, but the ones that are, the ones that you remember, and that's kind of why we keep doing it. Because I think the other thing that I've noticed, the thing that I've noticed is that creatives are eternal optimists. Like they might present as glass half full, and I think that's, you know. It is within a lot of creatives to, but the point is they are internal optimists because they keep trying. Right. You've got to keep fighting for the idea. You've got to keep going. I see this because you always know there's another idea in there. Because you've been doing it enough. There's always another idea and you don't know where it is, but it's there somewhere. Yeah. Maybe in that literal, sorry, maybe in the sense of, are you saying that you can rely that on there as another idea there? when you can't see the path ahead, it's quite unnerving. You don't have that certainty. And creativity requires a lack of path ahead. It requires dead space, negative space. And I think when you come up with that journey to that idea was not an easy one. It took time and it took getting things wrong or least trying different paths before we figured it out. But. So I think once you've done that a few times, you know that with some time and some inspiration, something's going to come to you and you don't know what that could be, but you trust your creative process to find that for you. that's difficult for people outside of the creative place to accept, I think, because it really does take a trust in yourself. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, again, it goes to the wider conversation of like control. Like, do you stick to what you know or how do you say to someone, we don't know what it is. I don't know what it's going to become. don't know how long it will take, but I will deliver something. when I say I, we mean the agency, right? We're in the team, the creative is involved in the same process happened on the book. But I think you have to be an optimist because of that. Because if you're a realist and you tell yourself that, will definitely get you all drive yourself mad because you don't know if you're always going to deliver in it. And the key is when it comes to marketing and business is you've just got to do it seven out of 10. times, right? You can't always do it because I can't always guarantee that the team involved will, you know, hit out of the park every single time. But what an agency and a partner to a client will do is get enough people involved that those percentage are higher. Right? ⁓ free enough to come up with those ideas and he knows something. And everyone has a window, everyone has a shelf life and you have to keep reinventing and with creative that's, mean we see it with Chris Nolan, which has made one of the trash films I've seen in a long time and everyone's fawning over it and it's style over substance, right? Like he had his window. I mean we agree on this and this is going to be an unpopular thing. Well I don't know, I mean. Yeah sometimes I feel you can be a contrarian for being a contrarian but we've got, let's marry. It was okay. It was okay. Yeah, I wanted I needed a nap. So, you know, it was nice to have a three hour nap. Probably that's an example of how you get canceled with your first podcast appearance. Right. But that is probably is a very good example of subjectivity. And that window of time. So we're talking about a 60 second advert Kit Kat. the KitKat Catapult, it's a process of about nine or eight or nine months from start of briefs actually the production being made and then going out you're at another couple of months. So just over a year. Anything you put out there, particularly when... And it's right, if it's creative art and artistic merit involved, it's open and it should be open to criticism. the biggest distinction within creative and the people we work around again and working with is everyone's a critic, but not everyone's a creative. And it's really, really hard to break away sometimes. And I think that's where a lot of creatives suffer. to go everyone I'm presented into is a critic and that's fine but can they do the creative as well? I think it's for until you've been in some kind of creative process and I don't do much but you know we both do creative writing to some degree until you've tried it's very difficult to get an appreciation of how difficult it is to do to find those creative sparks and you know that classic line I like to do that you see something simple like you or your Kit Kat that's a relatively simple idea, I like to find. Could you do an original idea that's that evocative and that conveys the brand identity as well as that? Well probably not or certainly not immediately would take you some time to take everyone's attention, but until you've been there, you don't appreciate how long the mind, the subconscious has to work to kind of generate those ideas and the failed party have to take them. Well, that's the other thing about being the eternal optimist is that that was just one, that wasn't the only idea we presented, right? Before we even got to like the snap out of it campaign line, you're coming up with and dismissing yourself, but you're coming up with 15. 20 different ways in, you would call it, like different concepts and different territories and routes. And you have to work together and you dismiss some of yourself and you work with your client partners, your agency partners. So you are constantly fighting for the potential of the 1 % that makes it through. And one talk about, obviously, the ideas and the craft that goes into that. And what I will say is that if you take one person out, even if it's from you know, a junior account manager to obviously a CEO or a CCO, the process does change, like the outcome changes. So you have to get it right on the people who weren't involved. And then the other thing you have to do is you have to keep everyone motivated as a creative lead and keep them optimistic as well, because it's just easier to go, let's just do what the client has asked for. And if you're just giving them exactly what they've asked for, I think we're failing them ⁓ in our partnership. ⁓ And I'm going to tie it back now because you said, I don't know what we're going to talk about, or I don't know why it's going to be relevant. But what you said is exactly the same set of problems in any business like creativity and innovation. These are two partners in crime. Do you need innovation as a business to survive in this day and age that the more time passes, the more you are open to just being outcompeted if you don't innovate, you don't constantly reinvent. So the things that you just said, you know, if you've got a team, you want them to keep coming up with ideas. You've got to give them the space and you know I've mentioned this earlier psychological safety is a huge part of creativity if people don't feel safe to express themselves and to generate and suggest ideas that might be shot down or to Suggest to someone something they might not want to hear then they're gonna play it down They're gonna do what they've done before or do what they seem for in the hope that that doesn't happen That's why I never engaged to suggest new ways of doing it because that's not worth it. It's going to impact my performance rating. I don't want to my head above the parapets. There's been a layoff a few months ago. I don't want to get noticed. I want to keep my head down and stay quiet and safe. Sure, if you have a company of people with that mindset, you are never going to get anything new. Why would you suggest something new if you're afraid for your security? That's kind why I wanted to chat with you because I feel like in a truly creative industry, it's more important anywhere else. to have that psychological safety and have an engaged workforce to get the ideas that are going to push you forward. Absolutely. But let's be honest as well. ⁓ There's an incredible amount of fear to do that. Because within advertising marketing, it's one of the most volatile. unstable because there are cuts like you said, there's mergers, there's people being let go left, right and center. So we're afforded the opportunities, creatives in that what we do, we are supposed to push and we are supposed to fill that safety. But if you take it out of the business world, and you just said to someone, ⁓ do you feel like you could say this to a family member? And if you say this to your partner, or your group of friends, that means there's not a safe environment for you. And the workplace, It should be a safe environment. Like people should be able to go in and feel comfortable expressing who they are. Yeah. Yeah. They'll try and bear it in the stakes or just not everyone's an adult, right? Like we should be able to go, ⁓ I messed up here. And you shouldn't have the fear of everyone pointing the finger at you. But when you do mix in, you know, the short timings, the stress, the long hours, the high budgets, the pressures of it's very competitive like most businesses, most fields are. There are lots of people who don't want to speak up and then you get a reputation if you speak up too much. You're a troublemaker, you're a difficult person to work with. So there is a balance of, and I think in the last 20 years I say I've worked in, started in London, been in Australia. North America within Canada and different stints of different cities throughout that. But those three ⁓ places of London, Sydney and Toronto being the main places. But what's changed over the time ⁓ is how comfortable people want to feel. And that's good. Like there's a priority and I want to feel more comfortable here. From a creative point of view, think what every generation would have said this, I'm sure, ⁓ because history shows that as is. Has the creativity been watered down? Have we become less brave? I think the criteria of what is successful or not is that the parameters have changed as far as marketing campaigns. But I think creativity is alive and it's well. I think you still say, I do think when I look at advertising, first of all, it's changed a lot from the idea of just telling people what to buy. And we shifted to a consumer-led environment. Steve Jobs and Apple were tremendous at this. It's not about telling them what they want, it's about imagining what they could want in the future. There's this classic line of, people don't know what they want because I haven't shown it to them yet. That takes imagination to figure out what it might be that they want in the future. So very few people have been able to do that effectively. But when you see mainstream advertising, I do see a huge amount of conformity. this is a tension I want to explore as well. competition often results in a race to the bottom in the sense that if you want to compete, that means you're agreeing to play by the same rules. Whether it's in sport or business, you're playing by the same rules. But if you look at the companies that are truly innovative, they didn't agree to play by the same rules. Apple never agreed to play by the same rules when they came up with the iPod or a whole screen device with no keyboard, they broke the rules to do that. And I wonder if it's the same with advertising as well. I feel like you see a lot of adverts that are just the same playbook over and over again, it's same thing. And I imagine you have to fight against those instances to say, ⁓ we want something that looks like that. That kind of idea about, I've seen what I think I need, we just want a version of that. Yeah, I think certainly at the start of the process you do, because even if we think we're going to end up there, why should we start there? And then we're not again doing ourselves service if we're going back with something that's expected or, we've seen all of our competitors do something like this. It's interesting what you say about the brand and that a sea of sameness is an enemy, but I can also see how it's got there because it's driven quite heavily by data and market research. ⁓ Yeah, of focus groups and you know, so I think they're the devil. Asparagus is is is why is is why I think of it. Look, it can be useful. It comes down to this is probably me. You're more the professionals. I'd have of course it's useful and we have to listen to it. We can't remove it, but nothing good came from a focus group. I'm sure there are examples that many things have come good from a person. Right. and, but you go into like film productions and like a production made film, you can tell, right. It comes back to the committee and listening too much to you. you've hired it. It would be the same as me, you know, buying the ingredients for an amazing chef and then taking it to them and going, get excited by the fact that Actually people prefer a McDonald's burger That's a few centimeters bigger. So just make that Well, why have you hired me then? I don't know because you've I can put your name to it because you're the best chef in the world, right? It doesn't make any sense It's a sea of sameness. It's like why why why are we replicating what's been done? Let's try something different. Let's throw away the bond. back to the workplace as well. Again, think a lot of workplace say, let's, what does the market do? There's a question I get, how much does the market pay? What does the market do? What's the market span of control? How many direct reports should you have? Let's get some market data, market data, market data. Yeah. ⁓ That's what you've done is offer a dollar more and they've got no reason to stay there might as well take that from them But if you are actually innovating your workplace, then that's much more difficult to replicate It's difficult to do and it's difficult to copy as well if someone goes to work places and why I'm really really happy here like it's working the way I There you go, yeah. Then you just get bodies in a room, disengaged bodies in a room. That's never going to get you anywhere. They might do what you ask them to do, but they're never going to give those sparks of creativity. So you would? Yeah, it's human nature. Why would you get up in the morning to live exactly the same day someone else has done for the past 20 years? And what you said there is it's really interesting. It's almost maddening. We've got all the data of what everyone else is doing. So why would we do the same? The data should be used to go, this is what everyone else is doing in the sea of sameness. let's do something differently. And to be fair, there are a lot of great agencies and people out there and strategists and creatives and designers and everyone in the process that that is their goal. But the issue is, is that when you only get to do that, 5 % of the time, because of the demands of the sea of same as the mid level work, the mid funnel work, right, the top tier work is where you get to do it. Big brand level thinking. Often when you get down into the delivery of social first work sometimes, I don't want to say all the time, lower funnel to mid funnel, but that will become automated. It is becoming automated now, right? So there is an opportunity more so than ever to push against what everyone else is doing. But ultimately it comes down to people. And I think there's nothing more rewarding in the job. And it's something I miss from... you know, leaving full time and going freelance is nurturing talent is working with talent and getting them really excited. Right. And just saying like, do things differently. Like, we don't always have to have a review sat in a cafe that's done at the office. Right. Let's get out there. Let's do something different. Like you said, we spend a third of our lives with the people we work with. So why wouldn't you want to make that fun for them? And again, if We look at ourselves like one thing we, we, you and I haven't spoken about on this podcast, but we've spoken about a lot in life. I'm a six foot four Mauritian, you know, background heritage guy working in predominantly a Caucasian industry. And I didn't even really recognize that because I don't think about it much, but it was a boss that I had a couple of years ago was like, ⁓ you're a bit of a lighthouse. What do you mean? there's a whole sea of people out there that isn't sea of sameness and they're different. And when we should talk to that and you go, well, okay, even just on like the optics, sure. But that mindset that can get like crunched down and smashed down as well. going back to culture and different fits, it's finding where you can be, well, firstly, it's finding what your tone of voice is and who you are ⁓ at the stage of career you're at. Then it's joining the place that. celebrates that or at least allows you to grow within it and be yourself within it and that's a big struggle as well and that's where the HR and the people in charge should look at it and go well do you want to take this person and like fit them into a box that works for us or do we want to allow them to you know as long as they're not infringing on people's rights and things like that, but like let's celebrate the fact that they are not in our box and And how do we basically allow them to have their own box whatever shape that might be? It's really important, and again, that's how you get good ideas. People bring themselves to work. That's how you get engaged people. It's got nothing to with the money, nothing to with the incentive, nothing to with the career path. It's are they happy? Are they enjoying their work? And I do think there is a tendency to look at HR as the solution to that. Whereas, to your point, You did that because you enjoyed it. think every person as a manager, yes, you could look at your job as a system of control. And I distinguish all the time between the factory supervisor and what I call the cultivator manager. The model of a manager in so many companies comes from the factory supervisor. And the factory supervisor's job was to make sure people clocked in at the right time, produced the right amount of output, and clocked out and got paid in accordance with that. And unfortunately, that remains a hangover of that industrial. Now you could, as a manager, if you are a manager, you could choose to conform to that version, which is you go and add your performance review, you go to give them a rating, you go to feedback form, you do a 360 and once a year you sit down and talk, or you can redefine your own job in a way that you know is gonna be more engaging. And as you pointed out, so much more fun to nurture talent. And to do that means abandoning control. It means freeing people up. It means asking them, what do you think? What do you want to do? Maybe I can help you with that. What do need to get out of this job? Do you want targets? Do you not want targets? Do you want freedom? What kind of work do want to do? And you can do that, whoever you are, and just recognize that that's the way to enjoy your work as well. So I always like to say we're citizens of work, not bystanders. sit around and wait for people to fix these problems in the workplace or do their own small part to change them. And I feel like you did that when you had people reporting in to you. You made it work better for them. Yeah, it was something that, again, it's a responsibility that you take on, but it could be, and with creative, some are people-focused and some aren't. But I think what you're talking about there is the responsibility of HR. I think all leaders within each department, they kind of need to be emulsifiers. Right? They need to make sure, okay, well, oil and water doesn't mix, but there's an emulsifier that can make it come together. That's how I kind of see the roles when you get to a point of kind of influence over ⁓ members of staff going up or down, right? If you're a middle management, senior management, or you're just looking to enter that, your responsibility is an emulsifier and it isn't to extract and take out. it's to fuse together the different personalities that it takes to produce. And that's that's that's success itself. Obviously, that's more of a tonal thing. Like you can't measure that maybe. Unfortunately, you can't measure it. That's the other problem, isn't it? People don't like things they can't measure. Like we have taught and coached from early formative years from grades to university placements to qualifications to job titles to performance ratings to levels to seniority that everything should be measured but that wonderful quote like not only can the accounts can be counted and not only can the accounts and many of most important things cannot be like you can loosely attach numbers to them but a lot of that you just can't measure. So how do you Well, I guess that's what the books do. Yeah, all the answers to all these problems are right here. So I think that the tension in this book and what we're talking about, trust and control, control of one and trust of the other, control will... give you what you look for. If you say to somebody, I'm going to measure on this, this and this, they'll find a way to do this, this and this. And then they'll stop because you told them what the job can tell. But if you trust people, then you'll find a different version of something you maybe didn't anticipate. So to me, it's changing your assumption. The assumption in so many businesses starts with control first. Let's find a way to control. Let's set our targets. Let's set a manager. Let's set top-down goals. And then we're going to deliver everything we need to do, especially in PLCs when it's quarterly EPS targets and everything. But you've also got to recognize that that's never going to bring out the best in people. The research just says it won't. The more you try and control, the more you inhibit all the brilliant things that make people people. So I think that's a real challenge for CEOs and leaders is to reconcile. the need to perform to get results and the need to trust people to innovate what you really, really need if you want to sell that. It's no good hitting your EPS targets quarter after quarter after quarter if the next quarter you become irrelevant because someone came along and innovated your product for less money and in a better way. And that's only going to happen if people are free to do that. So I think when you look at the case studies of companies that have done this the best, you take control to the bare minimum. So we still need some control in our lives. Like when you go to the supermarket, you accept that you need to queue up to check out. That's a system of control. But it makes things easier. So we don't need no control. in the same way, if you go into a company and someone says, do whatever, you're a bit, okay, I don't know what to do now. It's some kind of goal. But to me that's purpose. Purpose is the most important thing company needs to have. need a North Star and then you can make your decisions around what best gets us that North Star. And even Patagonia I think is a really good example. Yeah, great, great brand. advertising campaign said don't buy this jacket. Yeah, it's amazing. Absolutely. Because that's their purpose. Their purpose is to reduce waste. So their advert was not about getting you to buy more. It's about what delivers on our purpose in a way that gets attention. So to me, if you've got a clear purpose and that cannot be profit, You care about profit but it's not exciting to work for profit. But if you've got a purpose as to where you want to be, the competition just really just drops away in its relevance to that. It doesn't really matter what they're doing. The question is are you conforming to your purpose? you doing that? And that is a form of control, but it's a good form of control that people can then adapt themselves to. the book designs were working on some other things of your branding as well, right? And where we're looking to go for is what is that ethos? What is that person? What's that mission statement? And whatever you want to call it, the thing you can articulate in one sentence and Patagonia you can do that. And sometimes like great brands do this where their purpose might be to not exist. Like I think a hinge, the dating profile or bumble, I have to remember which one it was. basically, their goal is they want you to delete their app. Right, so because they want to get there. So there you go. Right. So and those clear mission statements and that's where great, you know, the great balance of control, but I would call it purpose and a goal. comes in and then protecting that purpose and the potential of that purpose to come to life is wrapping together the both sides of the brain, which an agency needs to have both sides of the arms to work together to get there, right? This is a good tension as well. think people like to resolve tension and get rid of tension because it feels uncomfortable. But at same time, without that tension, there's no spark, there's no reason to do anything. So I think embracing and accepting tension rather than trying to hide it away through policy. and control is really important. There always needs to be attention. There's no attention, there's no fun. It's like in movies and books and anything, there's a few people watching a movie with no attention. Yeah, something has to be at stake. And not just medium rare, the thing about the good and bad brief, actually, which I don't think I actually touched on, always can't believe I haven't said this because most of the agencies I've worked at and the people would say that I'm... I'm a big supporter of this and I always try and push our strategists when we come up with briefs is what's our enemy? What's our tension? Right? So we always have to start with something and it can be a bit mundane, but that's where the magic happens. Right? So. how do we get to first world problems? Well, tension point is like, when would you need like, why do you need a Kit Kat? What's the point of that? What's the mindset? What state of mind are you in? And a Snickers would be, you know, hungry. So what's our tension? So attention and enemies are good things to have as long as it can be your North Star because it's your ultimate as human creatures. I think we're goal orientated and we need to. conquer something, right? ⁓ So we can't feel safer. You're either safe or you're some degree of unsafe. And you're either satiated or you're some degree of hungry. So your basic physiological needs can be satiated. The higher human needs cannot be. So we always want to be challenged in some way. We always want tension in our lives. We don't get it from work. We get it from our hobbies. We're always looking for ways to stretch ourselves, better ourselves, learn something new, interact with people in ways that challenge us. And then when we don't have those things, that's when people feel that sense of flat, COVID, a lot of people got that sense because they weren't interacting with people, they weren't challenged, had no attention. Yeah, really fine. were safe. had their food. They probably worked from home. This is great for a few days. And then you realize, but I've got nothing to stretch me. So going back to creativity, I think when you said ⁓ one of the things you asked about was the good brief, the bad brief, but you also asked about the process. If that output is the same, ⁓ that flatness gets felt. Right, so that higher purpose, high state, what was the term you said? The higher? think, I can't remember the exact term, yeah, the sort of upper, the psychological needs, I Yeah, so the upper psychological needs, if they're not met, we do fall flat. And I'm a big believer in that. The creative, the little creative teams, copyrights and art directors, they shouldn't be working on brands for more than a year. They should be cycled and changed through. because it keeps them, gives things more interest for them, for the brand and everything like that. So if you're doing the same thing over and over and you see it, you just see it in their eyes, right? They're getting on, it's like, ⁓ here's another briefer, X brand. they're just cool. And it might be the best brand and they might deliver the best work. there's a little bit of a problem with how that word works ⁓ awarded within the marketing world of being awards. And there's a whole issue with that, probably similar to the Oscars and things we can go through nowhere near. is important and there's anything although they like to think it is. Yeah quite have been fortunate enough to win ⁓ many of awards I'd have to go through my website but yeah yeah but you don't like to lead on that I think that it's just weird like it's because who's awarding it it's people within the industry awarding it and a lot of the time the work hasn't been seen by real people so the awards that You can argue matter of things like the effectiveness awards, the FEs, but even those are supposed to the FEs. yeah. But there's even those are starting to, there's just something strange in that the people who are awarding and they were the wards and select them are the people who are hating on the ideas as well. So it's this weird vicious circle. Yeah. ⁓ And in return as well? Yeah, I think so. mean, you could argue a strong case that for creative is currency, right? The more awards you have, the easier it is to get into the bigger places, more money to debate, to go over negotiations, to try and get more money and to, you know, change, climb the ladder as far as seniority because it is subjective. But what awards are doing is placed on there. A lot of people trace that. That's why they do this. I think a lot of the great creatives and the people involved just love creating work, right? And they're fortunate enough to, and I am fortunate enough to have an outlet of my artistic kind of itch that's inside me, where I can money for that as well, right? But it takes a long time to get there as well. But the point I was going back to before was if you have them working on the same things and you're meeting the needs of that higher psychological purpose, you can see the flatness come through. And that's why freelance for me is fantastic because the best part of the process, ⁓ no matter what the medium is, is starting with a blank page. So on the second but before you mentioned something that the flatness in people's face. I think one gigantic mistake that companies make is Seeing people do something well and asking them to keep doing it. It's like, okay Well, you're good at that. You should do more of that or and it comes in the promotions as well We want to see you do the thing before we're gonna promote you into that role Well, then you just take away all the incentive for someone to do better work because you take away all the challenge We're gonna hire you into a job that you've already done looking at the job that you've already shown me that you can do. What's the fun in that? There's no stretch, there's nothing to excite people. And I think, again, if we look at the traditional organizational setup, it's you've got little boxes and you need people to do those jobs and we're gonna pick the people that can do best for us as a company. But to your point, as a manager, can see the spark fizzle out. You've gotta be looking for that spark in people. If you see the spark, you're gonna get good work. But you're only gonna get good work if they're being challenged on a regular basis. So I think that's very important. of things like job architecture and leveling guides and this systematized version of what a career can be is that it sucks out the possibility to do things that do challenge you? Yeah, I think what comes down to a pattern that is known is that most creatives stay in a job for 18 months to two years and then they change their role. Yeah, and you do get bored because again the examples we're speaking about in the projects the KitKats the Googles the Coca-Cola's They're not every day right there one-offs they become the the 10 % of what you're actually doing But the the excitement I think more soon you get is to try and keep that spark going for a lot of the creatives and sometimes it's gone and they do need a change of environment. Sometimes it's external factors, of course, everyone can have a bad day. But if you can get a consistent base of enthusiasm ⁓ to creatives and get them working for themselves, that's the most important thing, right? It's not working for the person who they never meet, who's based in San Francisco and sat on some board and being a CEO, right? It's actually based with themselves and going, okay, I'm doing this for me. It's about, it's the work. The work is the thing that we keep overlooking. The quality of the work is the thing that drives people. We keep, and to use dance words, we keep assuming that work is a negative good. And it's something that each man, why would anyone want to do this? So therefore let's them, let's check them, let's incentivize them to do more because why else would they do that quality version of this? Because it's bad, it's a negative thing. Now at one point in the industrial world that was true. No one wanted to be a coal miner really. No one wanted to go down into the mines, no one wanted to go into a factory and stamp things. But equally there's so much work that can be enjoyable. And to anyone that thinks that's not true, I always say look at Tetris. Look at how addicted people were to Tetris back in the 80s. terrible. was black and white. But that really was a very, very dull type of industrial work. Yeah. Because it had the conditions for enjoyable work. got more and more difficult. So it kept pushing you. People could do it when they wanted to. People would sit around with Game Boys and compare their scores. So was very social. That's all it takes. Is it a few basic conditions rather than assuming work is a static and negative thing? That's complete digress there. No, no, no. It's good. That's a, it's, you found the work you like to talk about. So like, there we go. ⁓ freelance. ⁓ But you've worked in both freelance and in agencies. work with, it Ogilvy? Ogilvy, Ogilvy is probably, yeah, probably one of the bigger names as far as international. And you've worked in freelance. How does that differ being freelance or a contractor, as I might, know, something Sure, yeah, yeah, contractor. In-house, in the company? Yeah, it's also, it's changed over the years, I think. Probably within full-time and freelance, I've worked at maybe 18 to 20 different agencies. And then what you get within that is the multinationals like the Ogilvy, so a part of WPP group. And then you'll work with independents as well. So there's a distinction between that. But if you can separate it from full-time to freelance, that... desire that the spark that goes out the eyes, I think it happens quicker in full time than it does freelance. I'm a big believer that you're never as excited or fresh as the first day of work, right? And with freelance, I get lots of those first days. That's the nice thing. So you get to go in ⁓ and I do think it actually does help when you have had more experience and time because the downside is you don't have time to have context or a rapport. Nobody hires freelancers when things go well, it's when shit hits the fan, right? Why would you spend more money to get in resource? We go, actually we've managed everything, time sheets are looking good, scope of work, SOWs are looking good. let's bring in someone else. then they kind of like, no, you bring them in when there's PTO or cover needed or a pitch has come in or you go, wow, we just want lots of work. So you're often in that state. You've been brought into a state of the agency where they've gone or people where they go, shit, we need help. ⁓ Get someone in. And that's the key thing is that most of the time it's like, let's get someone in rather than, ⁓ we know Dylan, you know, and that takes time to build, right? You have to build trust and we go back to. But I do think the distinction is that the treatment and interaction is quite different. A full-time member of staff, and that comes down to maybe human relationships as well, is they know who you are. There's a level of respect, I would say, and understanding of what you might have going on in life. And you're here to do a job, and there's that rapport. But when you're a freelancer, I get the sense, and I don't want to get too heavy into example cases, but... Well, we're paying you to be here for the day, so we're going to chuck as much as we can at you. That tap that you can't turn on and off, we want you to turn it on and off now. We're not going to give you any context. I if you think about it, often, I spoke about the process where you have months of strategy and you're on that journey, or at least you have the background knowledge of who a client is and you're starting to build that. And that happens at the first day you go into work, right? With the freelance, you've got a 15 minute call in the morning, and they're going, right, the client is X. Here's 15 minutes of a conversation that is months and months of development without context, without time, but can you get it back to us tomorrow, And you're going, getting what back to you? And so you got a new idea for the very first time. The person you might not have even worked with before. And an immediate deadlock. And and immediate and you know this year there's there's multiple cases and they're soft and pitches but you'll be brought into a conversation at nine o'clock and They'll say ⁓ can we ever catch up at 2 30 or 4 o'clock? go well I catch up for what I need to catch up on the work myself right I need to read like the the the seven keynotes that you've you know sent me and so ⁓ You absolutely do and that's where you have to find if freelance works for you or not because if that is made too clear to your client, in this case it's agencies now and you still will meet a traditional client as far as a brand name, they don't like that. There's a sense of well, no you're a freelancer, you shouldn't really be going on a walk or a lunch break or like sure we can't say that but you can feel it, right? So that's where the seniority helps and I think the... it helps work and having worked in so many different agencies that you can recognise the patterns. So you can quickly go, okay, and that tone of voice that gets rented out. They're renting yours out for a very short space of time, but I think with the freelance, you have to be very malleable to be able to go, actually, I need to fit into their tone of voice. And what you're working out very quickly is who's the decision maker here? You're taking yourself out of this because you're not. But is it more of a client led agency? Is it more of a creative led agency? Is it more of a running gun? Whatever it might be, you form these short terms that everyone has in themselves. You recognize those patterns. And then you say to yourself again, is it worth? Is this, it's not whether it's worth. You'll ask yourself, is this the type of place that is worth protecting the potential of the idea, pushing it as far as it can go? Do they need that or do they need different? Do they have different needs? So I think the treatment and the interaction is very different. And then as soon as you're out the door, see you later. never speaks again until two months later you're back in and everyone's like, ⁓ great to have you back. so it's kind of like the all, not that there's any positives I think to speed dating, but it's all of the hassle and horrendousness of speed dating with probably less of the sweating and the anxiety and less asparagus after you know. Well, it's the same, I mean, it's the same concept. about this is the labels that we apply to people. Human humans are very good at applying labels. So during the potato famine, the British called the Irish beasts. And you see right now in certain parts of the world, different demographics being most literally labeled as not people. and to a much lower degree that has happened in the workplace with titles and status. So one thing that's interesting to me is that we're clearly evolving to a new model of work. So again, to five, Monday to Friday, it comes straight from the factories. It's not really a sensible model. Like you don't always need to work nine to five and people... So to me a more flexible model of work involving, ⁓ like Gable works kind of interesting, not without its problems, but a more flexible notion of connecting work to the people, to the work they want to do. Again, if we talk about the work that people want to do and we talk about the rigid nature of jobs. Well, you're not always going want to do everything in that job, but someone else might want to try it out. And they might be internal, they might be external. But to me, it's quite tricky, but it does take time to build relationships. And without the relationships, don't have it. So full time work does help you do that, even with that sort loss of efficiency. then again, I seen this as well. As soon as someone's a contractor, they're an outsider, not one of us. Yeah. As someone else, immediately the human instinct is to treat them differently. Worse, essentially. Yeah, it is. Like you said, we haven't built that trust. So it's strange, isn't it? Because in yourself, and I'll use myself as an example, that's the best person to probably use, I know my capabilities and I know that I can answer certain briefs, but I can do certain tasks very well. And there's some that I might not be able to do, but the benefit of being a contractor is essentially in the last 18 months to 24 months in my time prior. Before that, it's a lot of sport work. I'm as heavily in football as being gaming and that's kind of, I don't know if I carved that out for myself. I think it probably got carved out for me, but I'm okay with it, right? There's a lot of work going there. But when you join, you have people, even creatives who... Well, why is this person being brought in? You know, and there's a natural balance that you have to play with that because their appetite is to go, well, I can do that role. I want that role because they're full time. They want to be a creative director and hats off to them. And so you have to meet a lot of that. have to sort of balance out the fact that you've got people that don't want you there and not based off you as a person. But what you represent is probably a barrier of where they want to get next. but you also have that with different departments as well. They don't necessarily want that, you dare to be pushing as hard as you do. Most of the time it's well received in the results, right? And the results being not measured, but just the work is out there and the works well, you can remove subjectiveness from it. It is a strange place to be in, but I'm very happy to be in it and I would... And I do encourage, and I think the market's going that way, I think it's all going to become collectives and there's less retained work now, right? There's RFPs and pitches that are placed out there for short-term projects. Back in the day, everything used to be, you know... 20 years like staying with one group and collective and an agency. It doesn't work in that way. So we have to get used to it. And at the same time, I can moan about it, but that's what the money's for, Particularly when there's contracts work. Yeah, it's some companies I think have figured out that... think when you start seeing people's skills as marketplace, both internally and externally, you can be much more flexible in the way that you do that. So some companies, ⁓ they've figured out ways to create marketplaces for their skill sets internally. Hire in China, for example, heavily decentralized company. But... they have an internal marketplace for skills and an acceptance that people will just move around willingly. I do think the direction of travel is less people in jobs and chairs and more a collection of ideas that need to be connected with problems when the time is right. And I do think AI can help with that as well. Like AI... gets to know you, like you go to Clawdon and say, me about you. It's pretty scary how much it knows about you, by the way, the things that you ask about them. So using AI to analyze what people like doing, but also what they might like doing and connecting that with parts of the business that could benefit from. And then externalizing that as well. The idea of applying for jobs and brighten the rest of society. just doesn't work. So I do think there's an acceptance that we need to see this more as a marketplace than a fixed set of jobs and kind of the issue to be followed. Yeah, I do think that collective of a marketplace is heading there because one thing we haven't really ever spoken about, but you get into the mindsets, neurodivergence, and some people want to be offsite. Some people do want to be in the office. Some people really struggle to fill out. job form or whatever it might be. So those different minds that are all coming together, we still we have to be more accepting of those and those personality traits and that collective wherever it lives. ⁓ I think it lives outside of nine to five. I would love it for literally live outside. And I think the dream would be and not to say it was, but it was close to it was was was working on on working with you for your covers and branding. Because all we would do is say well, Let's catch up in two weeks. And it was quite liberating. Yeah. I made an effort to give you more time. the previous ones I was like, where is it? need to get this done. Yeah, I know. And I kind of recognized that. this time I tried to just say... Did you recognize that when I just said, fuck off and leave me alone? Yeah. Yeah. No, it was, was the order was different. It was, yeah, alone or fuck. I need to use my own advice in my own book. I need to give you far less control, far less control, far more trust and give you concepts to work with and vague ideas and I know that you're going to do something good with that. And by the way, I really love the back of this as well, but I actually can't remember which one of us came up with this concept. Well, the benefit of a creative mind is you always remember when it's your ideas and who has those in this. And it was, but let's say it was ours together. But the idea was to take the... take a ⁓ CEO's letter and mark it up and graffiti up and replace the words. So that was, but you, you produce the craft for it. So, is great. I started mocking up the employee handbook. And I wrote it in the worst possible way, but also not wrong. But I just tried to figure out what do companies normally say and what do companies normally do. and how do you onboard, how do you promote, and I wrote it in the most horrible, controlling, typical, corporatey kind of language model, like performance improvement plans and ratings and the sexy stuff. Yeah. So I actually did this and I wrote out an employee handbook in that format. I thought, I don't know what I'm going to do with it. I thought maybe I'll sell it as an novelty item at Christmas or something like that. But in that was a welcome message from a CEO. So when you said, let's put something on the back, think said, let's put something on the back and mark it up and let's pretend that someone's just crossed it out. So said, I think I've got something that we could use for that. And it was a welcome message. I'll fit in the back cover of the book. I didn't want to do the quotes. lot of books have the feel for self-congratulatory. So I kind of thought with this. And then it took us forever to get this right. That was a process, yeah. It took way longer than the front. Yeah, but the concept matches up to the front and the back which is good is taking the base of something and then putting your personality or putting a personality that's distinct onto it which does come through obviously with your personality at the heart of it. But the thing with this process that we all get into and I actually think it works really well with creative in particular but probably a lot of other avenues is when you did leave me alone, right? I found myself wanting to work harder and actually you didn't have to say anything. You just kept the space there. I was tracing you because I was eager to show you. Versus if you're hounding someone, if you keep telling someone to... put the dishes away, put the dishes away, put the dishes away. They're probably not gonna do it. If you just give them space, they'll put the dishes away, right? It was really fun when you live by yourself. You're just telling yourself to do that and you go, yeah. But the point is when you give that space and that trust and you let a bit of the control go. you feel as a creative mind, you feel a sense of responsibility. So that idea of going, you know, protecting the potential and getting the workout, you do want to see through because it's not that you know that there'll be other opportunities and worse. That's that's that's yours. Like you owe it to yourself as a sense of a higher purpose to achieve. But there's a there's a responsibility that comes down to it. So when I would the more you backed off, the more responsible I felt. And ⁓ versus extrinsic. That's a great example of it. I knew you were intrinsically motivated, but I know you like what... So I knew that as soon as you had a spark of something you'd keep following it and I knew that and I know from the research as well as now just working with you the more I try and extrinsically ask you for something the more I'm gonna get in the way of that intrinsic drive which actually happens in studies and this happens in the workplace all the time if people have an interest in their work and this has been studied multiple times and you then try and control that interest you suffocate the intrinsic interest and people start performing to those external expectations Yeah, because that's Which is crazy manipulation, right? And that's the default and it's worked. And it stood the test time. But the point is it's worked. I'm not saying it's a good thing that it's worked. It's just been an example that the people who are in control will go, well, we'll keep doing that. But it's kind of self-fulfilling as well. It is, Because if you say to somebody, I want you to do x, y, and then they do x, y, z, see, it worked. I told them to do it. I threatened not to pay them if they didn't do it. And they didn't. Yeah. But that's yeah, they only like having the scrambled eggs. I've cut some scrambled egg every day. There's lot of egg and asparagus in this but the point the point is is that that intrinsic motivation is like the the tone of voice that you're renting out as well. Like when it comes to creativity, right? That's who you are, but you kind of look around and that's why I say there's a problem with the awards because a lot of the time the awards that are given to advertising campaigns, they're based off a very specific tone of voice and criteria. And often the biggest issue is most people in real world don't see that. piece of work, but you go, it's amazing. It's very creative, but you can tell there's it's been created to win awards. So that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. But what I find really interesting is a lot of the people you've had on the podcast and the people you're talking to when it comes to your target audience, to close the gap and the books you've done, the great work you're doing. You almost want them to talk to a lot of creative directors and designers and people who go, we're intrinsically motivated because of this thing we can only do in our brand tone of voice. Thing we can only do in our tone of voice for a brand. That's why we want to do it. But the examples that have worked in the past are the things that make us not want to work. So those two things are being pulled at extreme ends. what you're left to is, and it's sad to say, is who's the most mentally resilient creatives that can keep doing it. And that's why you sort of learned. You know that you have to defend your idea. And in that idea is your intrinsic motivation as well. If that idea isn't protected, then your intrinsic motivation for that idea is also not protected. feel a lot of people when they start a job, have that motivation. I said, there's nothing more exciting than starting a new job. And it gradually gets kind of eroded very, very sadly. And you sort of go, well, I didn't want to do told to do this, I guess I'm going to go and do that. Every time you as an individual agree to be externally driven, you sacrifice that. Yeah, that's why have to be an eternal optimist. Because it might be delulu, right? You might be a bit delusional just going, yeah, it's always going to work, but you always have to try. again, the more senior you get, you want the opportunity for, and it's one thing we haven't spoken about, I'm not sure we have the time, but. I will set up a lot of scenarios of proactive work to get that brand tone of voice, that intrinsic need across. And proactive work is, let's just try something that there is no brief for. You've got a great idea and it happens to be for a client that we have. Sometimes it's worth the idea and often it's not even for a client we have. Right? And we'll pitch it, but we'll pitch it to the client and you get a project. And I'll be honest in most of my book. is based off proactive work, right? The banana boat example where we created a kids book with UV reacted sunscreen. So, right, so it's Australia. So banana boat, obviously skin cancer is a horrendous problem in Australia and we were. looking to educate ⁓ skin application in the correct way to very young kids. So again, working with Steve, we came up with the idea of, let's create a kid's book, but we'll create a character that only appears when the sun hits the pages. So we had UV interactive ink. We wrote this book and illustrated it called Collin's Splodge and a Sizzle Dodge. And the Sizzle Dodge was this imaginary character that came to life, right? But that was proactive. There wasn't, yeah, that was, yeah, the book was out, the book's out. I think it sold out for that year and like we didn't make many copies. think Banana Boat, they recognized that it was a proactive idea. They didn't have a lot of budget for it. But the idea is that we did that because we weren't getting our needs met, right? And we weren't getting our awards met ⁓ from live work, as you call it. So I've been in many places, learned this like back in a day. is you set up something which I call the gold wall sessions once a month or every couple of weeks on a Thursday night when I used to be in the office, but you just say, bring any idea to the creative teams, whatever it is and then we'll review it if we like it, let's go pitch it. Right? And that... Sure when when you work with the the minds that need to focus on the profit that comes in with that you have to work with them and say actually this is a new business tool and it is a new business tool because you can get new partnerships as well as conflicts of interest and things that come into it but the reality is You've got these very creative hungry people that have been flattened out and they've lost that intrigue that need and they're going, well actually, you kind of, want to motivate them again, you want to get that spark. The biggest difference I've found is that in the last decade or so, they need, most of the time, they being the creators, is they actually need starting points to get there. Yeah, and that's a little bit of control. You need something. Just a little, yeah. Just little something. Just something, yeah. And it could be something as, hey, it's a prompt, right? Like what happens if... Hellman's did something for Halloween, right? What happens? Yeah, so there's examples that you can bring together just to prompt them but I do think that's just because the environment has changed so much because 20 years ago we No one needed a prompt like we were non-stop generating these thoughts and ideas and the and the best ideas are usually ones that don't make it to see the light of day, but You find a way that they still like someone sees it ⁓ Yeah exactly and he's great and we yeah you are you are an office file let's say yes but bottom drawer ideas is what you call them like put it keep it in the bottom drawer put it in the bottom drawer and ⁓ again the gold war sessions would be if it gets hung up on the wall it's good enough to get an award, a gold award idea. But the idea is, yeah there aren't good or bad ideas, it's just where they come to life and who they come to life for can be measured about good or bad. And what you did there, I mean, you basically did what many companies have figured out they need to do. Because those ideas are so fragile, or the space for those ideas to happen is such a fragile thing, it's so easy to infiltrate that with. the business expectations, you institutionalise ways to allow. Creativity to happen the best companies have found ways to do that 3m and yeah, I used in my previous book I didn't mention a brief in this one, but they 15 % and it was just that you know, that's gonna be a place where you do whatever you want Do whatever you want so that was the control was don't do what do what you want you can work with him you want on whatever you want and just see what you can do with some of the tools and Right. Yeah. Is that how Gmail started? from that? You can search for inbox. So if you want to find a little email, you just try to the date and scroll through it. He's like, we've got the search engine and we've got, you know, and then it's really easy to build an inbox. We designed a new email system and now it's something that five billion people have an email account. It's pretty successful for them. Yeah. is if you didn't have that free time, maybe that might have come about, but if all you did was say we're going to compete with search engines and you would never have that idea. I think the key for it and I, from what I observe when I see it, is when you give the free time or the proactive, it's never free time really, because you can't, I don't know if advertising agencies could actually survive off that model, but if you give them the blank canvas or the proactive opportunity, that spark just comes through. And so they might have got there at some point, but it's keeping what they're purpose alive. And then you often, as well, you see people who don't react. And you realize that maybe they just don't want to do that. Maybe they are happy because there's a lot of times we're talking to the creative freedom or your tone of voice and some people don't want to have that. And that's completely fine, yeah. She basically group people into three you've got people that have a job people that have a purpose and people have a coin and roughly an equal third across all industries. Some people do just want to do their job. And I had wonderful, Jesse's mom on the podcast, he's got a purpose in work. And her point is that not everyone has to be emotionally bought into your purpose as a company. There are plenty of people at different points in their life who'll find their purpose from their personal aspect of life, whether it's raising their children or... climbing a mountain or going cycling in France. People full-fledged purpose and just because their purpose is something important to them doesn't make them any less valuable to you as a business. that drives me nuts. they're clocking in at 9, leaving at 5, so what? They're doing a good job. doesn't matter. Yeah, I completely agree with that. to piggyback off the point that she made that you've just told me now, I do think there's an issue that when you get to, we kind of round and talk about this, but the C-suite, let's call them, right, they're at top. Most of the reason that they've got there most of the time is because they are a certain personality trait, they're interested in their selves, and then suddenly they're in charge of a whole. hundreds of people, sometimes more, sometimes a little bit less. But you can tell if they care about you or they don't. And so when you have that hanging over you, and sometimes that's a faceless organization and it might have kind of lost its way, and that happens a lot in advertising, particularly with big holding groups, let's be honest. You can see why that spark goes out. Because they don't, the creatives who started off and go, I want to produce the best work, I want to produce the things that give me my purpose, my sense, my call in my belonging. that's not being rewarded. And I can see that literally by these piece of shit, you know, CEOs that are after not just all CEOs, it's everyone across C suites just to be equal. Every single every single one has the potential to be an absolute C suite, let's call them. But the the you're seeing that being rewarded and you kind of get that beating out of you and you just think why. Identity protection comes into this. If your identity has been built on claiming the ladder by demonstrating results by growing the revenue, I mean this is what Jack Walsh did with General Electric. He got to the top of the ladder by being aggressive and selling and growing and numbers and numbers and numbers. So his entire identity was around all of these assumptions about human nature that they need to be pushed and incentivized and motivated and he brought that to General Electric. Yeah. No, ⁓ I've not. ⁓ Right. So everything has to be quantified. So business results, growth plans, headcount, everything. And if you deviate away from that, you are failing in some capacity. So as a manager, your job is pure control. And 3M hired a CEO leader that was just completely contrary. don't know why they appointed a CEO. I'm not sure what the board is thinking. Who wanted to go with six seconds. It very factual. Sounds nice enough, six seconds. And they hated it absolutely everyone. this is not part of our purpose. Our mission is to innovate. This is what we do as a company. come up with new ideas. Entire legacy as a company is innovation. So eventually they ousted them and went back to their model in different variations of encouraging. There's a strange lesson in this. It's important that they did that though to recognize that. Go back to who you are. Go back to what you know. but but reining it back into well. into the marketing brand in which everything is right. Everything in the world is marketing branding from from particularly today's point of view with social. But Nike have just gone through this right like they're really they've they've changed what they kind of stood for and the perception is and we talk about the C suite right. I will say we're within advertising we're experts we're supposed to be experts in communication and convincing and we we forget that we get sold that to ourselves and we join an advertising agency, right? Every agency you join, every place you join, yeah, we do things differently. We're all about the people, we're all about the culture. We wanna be the most brave ⁓ and ambitious leaders when it comes to producing work. But we're being sold what we sell to, sell it to the public and we forget that. And going back to the C-suite is they sell the same. And... It's really interesting that marketing and branding now has such a heavy reliance on talent in social media and creators and influencers because they're representative of that connection. are people, they become people of influences, but they're real and they're authentic. So you spend a lot of time going, okay, the representation of the people that we have for our brands is extremely important and it should be, but we don't put that same emphasis on the people we hire to be our C-suite leaders. And you go, something wrong with that. Yeah, they're just human beings. And sometimes it is fierce. And again, the cycle is often short, two years, often for a COO and a CCO, I should say, not COO. So two years for a CCO is the average lifespan. Exactly has lots of answer for they just released the latest report of exactly and largely because of one person in particular whose name you can probably guess it has gone up again Pay ratio is now back up at about 400 to one 400 times the average person now well away the few problems with this if you say one person your company is worth 400 times as much as your average person then that places so much emphasis on that one person. Yeah Second of all, is no, so they've studied this, MSCI studied this, the correlation between the size of the executive pay package and the quality of the results. there isn't. Yeah. You ask where to be specific is 0.03, which basically means there's virtually no correlation between how much you pay people and the results. So that disparity of pay, it's not becomes even more alarming, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. meanwhile. Mm. ratios and that's a much more healthy dynamic because even as a CEO if you were told you were worth that much how would you reconcile that with the need to be a good leader and think about the company's interest? You've got to justify that pay package. Well you do have to justify it but you've been awarded that pay package by doing the things that you've been doing which probably aren't right so why change that? and it's not to put much empathy but they are human beings let's remember but if you're told that what you're doing is right and ego comes into it. Everyone has an ego, of course. And then you're on a certain level where you should I be caring about the law? I'm told to care about everyone in the organization, but do I actually have time to do that? That's the other thing. Like where are they to do that? So I think a flat structure does make more sense. And my selfish agenda would be how do we implement a structure in the process that protects the creative's time? Because The only point of difference essentially, or it used to be, think you can argue that timings and costings come into it as well on efficiency. But the point of difference that sets you apart from your competition as I've read agencies is the work you produce, which is the creative thinking, right? And that tension will never go away. I think someone once said, to do good, we have to do well. If you're not succeeding and you can't stay alive as a company. then you can't do the good work. But that comes back to the role of profits. If profits should allow you to do the work that defines you as a company, it shouldn't be the goal of your company. And I agree, survival to get to that stage, you need the profits to get there to have that. But if you've lost your way, let's call it, and some people say survival just becomes purely based of profit, then I don't care about the work that's being produced. as far as the creative work that is made and sees the light of day. And you do see and feel that, like being at the different agencies from, we spoke about international or multinational agencies down to independent boutique shops, right? You want to maintain that boutique mentality. You want to have that within there and a boutique is just more of a collective, right, independent. And if you can have that with the benefits of scale of what a multinational brings, then you have your big client rosters like your Google. So the Google work, that one, the AdMiral Grand Prix was in, I think it was 2013, we'd worked on that. And we're an independent agency called The Hallway. Which really nice name as well from you know from one way to another actually came down which I fell to realize Far too late is that the owner and founder was called Jules Hall ⁓ Nice guy, but yeah, it's still still still a lovely name still works on love or levels, but we pitched on Google with the outsider and We'd won it and there were only There's a large team. I'm talking maybe six people and we produced this campaign that was so great and it won the effectiveness and Grand Prix's and won a lot of awards. But the idea behind that is that they managed to keep their ambition of doing things that were different rather than just surviving. if, and I say just surviving, it's obviously a huge part of it. You need to, the money to survive. But if they didn't have that ambition to go, actually we have a different tone of voice and we want to champion that. they wouldn't have won the pitch. the perfect result is you get paid lots of money for producing fantastic work that stands out. That can't always happen because if it was to always happen, it wouldn't be a point of difference. But you do get to a point where I think so more with the fear of AI driving things and automation. You don't want not to mention it. Yeah. Yeah, there's almost too much theory to talk about there. Like there's probably examples that you've had, when it gets to creativity, ⁓ I think there's just too much up in the air with it. We can predict. It should just be a tool, not the solution. And I think people were really worried and scared that it's the ultimate solution. there have been Coca Cola did the Christmas ad all made from it. I think Coca are amazing. I love everything they do. I want to work with them again. So let's move past that. I wasn't involved in it, but I don't know what it is you're talking about. But yeah, fancy Coca Cola? Yeah, we should get a Coca Cola after. You know what? Drink it in. as they say, open some happiness. Great line. Moved away from that a few years ago, but great line. I think they might be going back to it, but who knows? Maybe the time this goes out, that would be announced and I shouldn't be mentioning it. We have to be careful with Coca-Cola. But the, I can't remember the original point that we were talking about. There's something you mentioned actually, which first of all, I should do a time check. ⁓ wow, how long do we it How do you want to wrap? Well there's one more thing I want to do. we're going to wrap in a couple of ways here. First of all I want to say thank you for the work on this book cover because I absolutely love it. I really really love the design of this book and I could not come up with this myself. Thank you so much for your help. Pleasure. I got you a gift. ⁓ man. Semi wrapped. Okay. Is this I love the I love blank pieces of paper. Is this the gift? Yeah. Thank you. ⁓ wow. Okay. Amazing. Wow. If we look at that, there we go. Green Island Spice Gold Rum is one of the, believe, final rum. Hey, I'm not gonna, it's from the motherland and if our mothers heard us saying it wasn't, which they'll probably say, it definitely is and it pairs perfectly with a Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola today and have a Green Island. There we go. Thank you, man. That's really lovely. Thank you. That was great. So, before we go. Where can people find you? you are freelance now. people want ideas. That's what I wanted. If people want ideas, where can they find you? what do do? Yeah, so probably on LinkedIn or on a website, is soopramaniacreative.com, which I'll drop into the notes. I'm available to work as a hands-on creative director, which is basically come in. if you need any help with that or as a consultant for wherever it might be. Let's put these two together together in a way. They look nice as a real disaster if you actually recognize that I completely stolen the brand, but there's enough difference in there. And then on socials on Instagram, Dil dyl_soop ⁓ But available for just even and. Conversations and different time zones wherever it wants to wherever you are or you want to have it. I'm around Well, it's the first episode as the disengaged, isn't it? Well, yeah, yeah. So as you say, wrapping up, the very first episode of the rebranded disengaged podcast rebranded thanks to Bill. I think you came up with the name. So thanks very much, Dylan. And if you enjoyed the episode, if you stuck with us this long, don't forget to tell a friend that's the best possible thing you can do to help me get more guests like Dylan on the show. And like it and subscribe to it and all that stuff, because it really helps. And thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. One thing we should probably mention, your hair looks a bit different. We can talk about the hair. We can talk about the hair. I've known, well 30 years, and I've never known you to have a shaved head. I saw you two days ago. And it looks great. I'm not saying it doesn't. mean, your branding's changed. So all the branding that I've been working on, yeah, taking lots of beautiful shots ⁓ for this new branding that's coming out. Worked very hard for about five, six months on this. And a lot of it was based off the, know, Samson. It's great hair. The power that comes through for Seechurn. But it looks good, and it's for very good cause as well. say this for someone that's going through chemo and it's a tough thing to do on your own so it was a show of solidarity so for anyone out there anyone going through chemo just remember it it's only hair. Okay. I didn't realize we had gone for... ⁓