Ed Cotton is a Chief Strategy Officer based in Brooklyn. His newsletter, PROVOKE, is wonderful. He spent 20 years as Chief Strategy Officer at BSSP, an award-winning advertising agency. Previously, he was Head of Strategy at McCann-Erickson in Seattle. Since 2019, Ed has been running his own consultancy, Inverness Consulting LLC. He helps brands, agencies, and marketers with strategy development across various industries, from insurance to luxury travel. Ed's expertise includes new business pitches, brand thinking, and inspiring creativity in strategy teams.
Okay. All right. So I think you probably see this coming, but I start all these interviews with the same question, this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine, who's an oral historian. She helps people tell their story and I borrow it because it's such a beautiful question, but I over-explain it because it hits really hard. And so before I ask it, I want you to know you're in total control and you can answer or not answer this question in any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?
It's a great question. I've always thought of myself as... first of all, I think you can't escape national identity. Being English, you can't really disguise it. As much as I try to speak American, it doesn't really work. I think people know I don't come from this country.
At best, it confuses them and they say you're not really English. You're probably Australian or South African, but we're not really sure. But no one's saying to me, "I'm an American." I've been here over 20 years. So I haven't fooled anyone. Yeah, I think where I come from is quite important to me.
And it's a very interesting relationship because I haven't lived in that country for over 20 years. So I'm not a nomad, stateless really. I don't really feel like I'm an American and I certainly don't feel like I'm really truly English because I haven't spent time there. So I'm in this nomad land which we call "caught between two cultures," taking a very literal interpretation of the question.
But is it quite an important thing? I think that... it sounds like an uncomfortable place to be, but I think it's actually quite a good place to be because I do think that the outsider perspective is always interesting. I do think you have something, you can see things that others can't 'cause they're too close to it.
And when I first came here, you are a tourist for a number of... even though you moved to the U.S. and I talked to people who've recently moved to the U.S., I'm like, you're still a tourist. You're probably going to be a tourist for five years. Everything's going to be new.
And then there comes a moment in time where there's a sort of normalization. I remember very clearly the sort of story of, I'm living in Seattle, I've probably been there a week and there's an earthquake. Most of us know that earthquakes... Yeah, they may happen everywhere. We had one in New York the other day, but the major earthquakes like to happen in Seattle. Anyway, the word "earthquake" went through the news organizations. And there was this, I remember this scene that was on the night, it was on the evening news and it was, they were broadcasting live from a grocery store on the outskirts of Seattle, where a newscaster, a news reporter was going through a blow-by-blow account of how a bottle of ketchup may or may not have fallen off the shelf and smashed on the ground, as the only way they could dramatize the earthquake. And it was just like a classic hyperbole that in an American sense that I knew so well from being in the UK. And I've been... it's been mocked and ridiculed and used as cross-satire or I was witnessing it myself.
But over time that sort of stuff has become quite normal to me. I don't react the same way that I used to. So yeah, going back to that question, I come from the UK, I think I come from England and actually even deeper than that I'm a Londoner, so I was born in London, which is rare. It's like being born in New York City. And I think that means another thing, that cities are quite important to me. I have lived in San Francisco. Everyone loves this idea of San Francisco that is a world of these two cultures, the yin and yang, the sort of restful, mindful state can exist in the national parks that are on the doorstep. And you can also experience some of the best food in the world in the city. So this is one of the few places where you can experience that dual existence. But I actually, at the end of the day, prefer a true city. And I think New York is a true global city. And that's, again, a big part of my identity. I think that being a citizen in a city sense is really important, and important to me. I value it a lot.
Yeah. Do you have memories of what you wanted to be when you grew up? As a child, did you have an idea what you wanted to be when you grew up?
When I was in my early teens, 11, 12, I think... yeah, for a lot of my teen years, I was quite interested in animals for some reason, and I don't know why, and I think it came from my dad. My dad spent a lot of time... he's a, he was a horse rider. He owns horses, spends a lot of time in that world. So I did at one point want to be a vet. Only to discover that my math is just terrible. I could do biology. I can do chemistry to a degree, but math, it's just... if you have any desire to pursue anything scientific and you're not good at math, you really have trouble. But I did for some... I did work with racehorses. I worked in a racing stable. I got to know a lot about it. At one point I knew a lot about horse breeding, as in more like the sort of data behind horse breeding. Like, how you could trace lineages. Actually, racehorses can really go back to, there are actually three horses or four horses, Arab horses that every racehorse is descended from. If you are really nerdy, you could actually trace every horse's pedigree back. And so I... I wasn't, I went through a phase a couple of years of just being really obsessed with trying to understand what breeders, how breeders bred horses. Looking at pedigrees, why you, the mare and the stallion, what would they, what could they bring as resources to creating a new resource?
I remember I had these huge dossiers and all kinds of stuff. And I went to meet somebody very high up in the bloodstock industry. And they were like, "I can't believe this kind of, this is just unseen, unprecedented nerdism and we want to offer you a job." At 16, I think they were offering me a job to be like an apprentice bloodstock agent. What a bloodstock agent does is they buy and sell horses, mainly buy horses for wealthy owners. So you travel the world and you sit in an auction ring as these young horses, one-year-olds usually, are paraded around and you're putting bids in. It's an incredibly interesting world, incredibly exciting, but at 16, I was just way too young to make a committed decision. I'm like, "This is going to be, I'm going to have to go to college. I'm going to go and train and this would be my life and if it fails, I don't really have a fallback position.
What was the nerdism? What was the fascination?
I don't know really what, it was... I don't know where it came from really. It was just, there was... I don't, it was like just a phase I went through and it was just this incredibly analytical and really disciplined... You can only go so far. The thing is there are thousands of races every day around the world and there is no way an individual can keep up with all of them. And those races are the data that you use to calculate the value and the worth of a certain horse, certain stallions suddenly start... They start and their children start racing and there's, it's just, it's a whole really complicated world that you could just like a wormhole or rabbit hole. You can just dive into it and get completely lost. And I didn't go as far as I could have done. I've really scratched the surface. And even then, yeah, it was a lot 'cause you're doing it and working out what's going on. I remember I had a file, but it was like the internet wasn't around. So it was all like press cuttings. I'd get the newspapers be like, "Okay, this horse won this race by how many lengths," blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so that was just a phase and then I didn't end up pursuing that and got flipped the other side and got extremely nervous and thought I was going to go and work in a bank
Tell me now, catch us up. So now you're living in New York.
I live in New York. I've been in the States over 20... 24 years. I came here to work at an agency called McCann Erickson. Instead of going to the New York office, as most people do, I went out to the Seattle office which is brilliant. I got to work on a mixture of global accounts like Powerade Globally, Coca-Cola, and local accounts: local banks, local lottery, a local Apple commission, a bunch of local things in a town that I didn't really know much about. I actually don't think America knows much about Seattle, to be honest. A lot of people, I think, probably think it's in Canada. It's a very interesting place. It was a great place to... I'm glad I came, that I went there first rather than being in New York. I think it just gave me a richer understanding of what the breadth of America is about, that you can easily get lost. You can easily just believe that New York is America, which it's completely not. So yeah, I did that. I was there for a couple of years and then I went to work for what, at the time, was a small agency called Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners. And I basically stayed there for a long time, a couple of decades, as the head of strategy, chief strategy officer there. And it was a fascinating journey, but incredible growing an agency from 20 people to at one point about two, close to 200 with a San Francisco, Sausalito office and a New York office and having a big team of people working together on strategy side. Yeah. And then five, five and a bit years ago, I left and set up on my own, do consulting as like everybody who leaves advertising sets up as a consultant. Yeah, that's what I've been doing.
Yeah. What do you love about it? Like, where's the joy in the work that you do?
I would say working in advertising as a strategist is a pretty privileged position, I think. I did a podcast last week with somebody who was a liberal arts major, a history major. And talking about it's this one thing where a lot of people who just didn't think they could get a job because they didn't have a business degree suddenly find strategy where sort of this intellectual pursuit, you know, "Oh, I like philosophy. I did a, I majored in sociology or anthropology. This is actually a commercial thing I could do. I can use my skills." So I think it attracts, I'm not one of those people. I'm definitely curious. I didn't, I studied business. But I think that's the beauty of it. It's you don't have to slot into a political infrastructure like corporate, most of corporate America does. You have the luxury of solving problems versus a massive to-do list of getting stuff. We're the thinkers. It's very... and I think that's a bit of the problem of the discipline, which is it can be sitting in the clouds a little bit versus people rolling their sleeves up and making things happen.
Yeah, I think it's, I think a lot of people are attracted to it. This guy I spoke to was John Steele's book, he just read it and he just couldn't believe that someone had a job doing this stuff and how exciting it was and how fun it was. And I think that's true. It's the things you get to do, the places you, the people you get to meet. The canvas you get to work with. Yeah, it's pretty incredible if you're that type of person. And that's what you enjoy. The idea that someone can throw a problem at you and you've got to solve it. So it's... I've heard it, it's been mentioned a bunch of times, but it's part investigative journalism, it's part detective work, part forensic scientist, part lawyer because all those things and plus it helps to be enthusiastic. It helps to be curious. It helps to have a naive mind and be open to seeing things differently. All those things fall into place and make it a very good vocation for somebody who has those particular traits.
What was I going to say? Oh yeah. How do you talk about what you do when you meet a new client? What do you, how do you describe your work and how things are supposed to be done? I appreciate that distinction. I'm... I think you know me well enough. I'm happy to be a thinker in the clouds, making that distinction between sort of indulgent intellectualism and sort of practical marketing and brand building and communications. How do you talk about what you do?
Yeah, I think it's... every... what is... I think you look at it as the right, you could look at it like the Russian doll thing. I talked about this sort of Russian doll you keep opening these and there's more stuff that keeps being more. And maybe leaving an agency, the sort of Russian doll set gets even bigger. Because the original doll sets focused on advertising and now you've got an even bigger world to work with because your assignments can really come from everywhere. I've had and sometimes I just... sometimes I dabble in some... I have taken to some intellectual pursuit.
So that is... I say it in a very arrogant way, but I spent a bit of time pre-pandemic thinking about what I call the conditions for creativity, and it was based on this idea that if I could start all over again, what do I wish I knew. And I think one of the things is that people who work with creativity and creative people tend to black box it. It's "we can't really tell you what we do. It's a dark art. And if we told you, it would ruin it." And you end up as a strategist, as a planner, you're working with these creative people all the time, but you don't have any sort of... you know all your stuff and what you're supposed to do, but the interaction that's the most important interaction, which is with these people, you're told it's all about relationships.
And so you don't get a manual of how to work with creative people, you get thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool and get... they don't like you, tough... you're probably not going to have a good career. So understanding creative people and the creative process. I was, okay, maybe you could actually provide some kind of manual, maybe you could actually look at like how artists work and maybe you actually look at something called neuroscience and how the brain actually works.
So I did that. I did my little one-month MBA, wrote a piece, presented it to the... presented to a few agencies as well, quite well. Like they, it was just before COVID struck. And then I actually went into PepsiCo and it became a workshop. And it was interesting because for them, it was a way of reframing, galvanizing their internal agency, because I think they'd started quite small. And a lot of the things I talked about, they'd actually done, but as they forgotten about those things. So it was like a reminder of this... it's actually a discipline, but what tends to happen is it's just a sort of group of people put into a very competitive environment, and there's a leader and there's... You know, it just becomes setting goals and giving your people, giving creative people the best conditions to do the best work.
I don't, it's often an afterthought in an ad agency. It's like they have to, it's not like the creative department accommodates and makes this happen for people. Individuals have to make their own worlds. They're not made for them. And they either survive or thrive depending on how good they are at doing that.
All right, so I wanted to talk to you about the state of planning. You had this amazing conversation with Steve Walls on the "On Strategy" thing. And there was a moment in there where you both were talking about the shift from traditional planning to digital planning and that a lot of research and cultural insights are happening through a screen, in a way is how I interpret it. And if you're spending time in all these digital spaces and in digital culture, you're doing the work of planning that you and I, at least for me, I grew up assuming had to happen in some sort of conversation or physical space. I just wondered what your thoughts are about how planning has changed and the state of it today. If you're a 28-year-old coming into the planning world, what do you think the job is?
Yeah, it's a great question. I think I was talking to somebody the other day, and it's going to be another podcast probably. I don't think we quite... I've been outside the business. I'm definitely working for agencies, but I'm not inside the business in the sense that a full-time CSO or full-time strategist is today in August of 2024. And I don't know if we really appreciate exactly what's going on inside agencies right now. It's the intensity and the pressure and the limited time and resources that everyone gets.
We talked earlier about picking up John Steele's book. That seems like a century ago. It is a century ago. But literally the luxury of time that, "Hey, we're going to do a milk deprivation study. It's going to take a few weeks. We're going to put cameras." People just don't have the time to do it. And I think it's riding a bicycle. I think the less you do of this, the more you get into another sort of... you hack your way through to some kind of strategy instead of it being originally a sort of deliberate, methodical discipline process. It becomes whatever you can do, it's a scramble, really.
Basically, I do think that we make the mistaken assumption that everyone lives their lives digitally 100 percent of the time. And I think if you're not going to go outside and you aren't going to go and talk to people, then you can easily make that conclusion, and you're going to be missing a lot. And part of it is, yeah, you've grown up digitally, you have a digital life, you have these multiple personas. It's just strategy, as a young strategist, you're experiencing things, you may even be on TikTok, putting TikTok videos, but that's not truly representative of what everyone is necessarily doing. But it is an easier way, it is an important part of the way people live, for sure, but it's not the only way people live.
So I love this, the scramble word. And as a hypothetical, let's say you get a brief, you're working with an agency team and you get a brief or an RFP, and it gives you basically five days, seven days to develop a point of view, develop a strategy, develop a brief. How do you spend this time? I'm totally stealing this question from the interview that Fergus did with the Nike guy. Hinsdale, Linsdale, I think is his name. Yeah, but it's very explicit. What do you do now? So this is the new reality. I feel like my instinct is to be a curmudgeon and be, "Oh, we used to do all this other stuff and now it's different." But okay, this is the reality. You got five days to try to deliver, marshal some human understanding, some true insight or truth, into a creative brief. What would you do?
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the classic place where people go really is you start off by looking at what's being done. That's easy, right? You can easily look at what, okay, you're pitching pet food. What does the category look like? That's almost the first place you go. The established players like Pedigree, they tend to do, you know, there's stuff like this and then there's these disruptors who don't believe that dog food is real food. They're the real food. They're food for humans, but for dogs. And so that's those guys. And then there's whatever it is. And you work out the space and I think that's where you start. You start looking at what brands are out there. And then you dig deeper based on that. Who are they talking to? Are they talking to the same people? Are they talking to different people? Is there a new breed of dog owner? What is the psychographics of that? And then you may, I feel like I'm repeating something I've almost done. I have a dog in Brooklyn. I can easily go out with my iPhone and I can talk to Gen Z dog owners about what it means to own a pet.
So I think what I would say is that where there was much more of a separation of these processes and there was church and state. It's like the planners went off, the strategists went off and did their thing and they had a certain amount of time to do it. It's a scramble because everyone's doing the same thing. In most of these cases, in fact in a five day scenario, you're not being asked to present work. You're being asked to basically tell their client who you are, but also give a point of view. It's a bit of an all hands on deck kind of exercise where everyone's simultaneously looking at things.
How do you know when you have a good point of view? What's the, when you say point of view, what's your, do you have a way of thinking about or talking about? Okay, now we're done. The job's done. We have a point of view. What has to be true about something for it to be an effective or compelling point of view in a brief?
I don't know what you're talking about. If you're talking about the meeting in five days' time or you're talking about a brief, I think they're two different things. I think to have a meeting, you're looking to have a good conversation. I think that's a success. You've got a five day turnaround. You got a meeting with a prospective client. You want to have enough stimulus in that meeting to create an engaging, interactive conversation. So you want to make sure that you got something to say that's reasonably interesting and that the likelihood is the client's going to be able to respond to it. Now, obviously you want to try and ensure that you're going to tell the client something they haven't heard before, and that's always like the bar. That's always the sort of pushback you get from people. It's "Yeah, but what can we tell them something they haven't heard before?"
And you never know. You don't really know until you're in the room, and maybe they have heard it before, but they just like the way you're thinking about it. So yeah, the bar is you want to be bringing fresh stuff in, but the reality is if these people are working in pet food 24/7, they much know it all. So hopefully you can come up with some really interesting and maybe it is a wild card that they didn't see, which is "We saw this brand in Australia that's actually doing X, Y, and Z," and then they might go, "Wow, we never heard about that." And then you could do a whole... so it's really like the scramble is you're scrambling because it's all people together and simultaneously working in parallel.
And you also, I think scrambling... I remember talking to this, we like to say there's a sort of you, you go on and you follow a guide and that guide is a journey. And if you follow the journey, you get to a certain point. But I think you've got to, I think that the truth and reality is that is randomness, right? You've got to be open to potentially anything. It could be a random conversation. It could be a trip to a bookstore where you pick up a book. I'm like, "Wow, this guy's been studying the evolution of dog eating habits over time. And he's just published this book." And it's like a consult. You don't know what you're going to stumble across or find. And sometimes these random things can just be such a shortcut. They're a hack to get into something that's interesting. So you can follow a disciplined process and hopefully that can get you somewhere, but you got to do a mixture of both. You got to have some kind of "I'm going to do" approach. And then you've got to open yourself up to some kind of randomness. Yeah, so that's I think that's for the five days to get to a meeting with a prospect.
Yeah, that's so interesting. It feels like you would really, it reminds me of what you were, the work you said you had done on the conditions for creativity. Is that, are you referencing that stuff right now? And that I feel like in five days, if you have to operate in that kind of wrap in this crazy time constrained space, what does that mean about the kinds of conditions you need to create for creativity?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of parallels. Obviously, you're looking—I just—this is completely random. But I mean, you just—if this—like sort of point is an idea can come from anywhere, right? We've had these—one of the things in that Conditions of Creativity exercise that I did a few years ago was to look for these stories of artistic kind of folklore, the sort of famous anecdotes of how artists—it's the, the Keith Richards, half-awake at three o'clock in the morning, gets his guitar out and plugs his tape recorder in and starts playing his guitar. And it's "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." That's what the riff is—he's half asleep, but he has it in his mind, and then it's an idea in his head, and then he gets it down on paper, so to speak. The Dalí, the famous Dalí story, which I thought was really incredible—oh, Dalí's on like a diet of psychedelics. The guy's harvesting mushrooms. How else would he get to that kind of painting? Actually, when you go back and you research the history, Dalí, being a Spaniard, would have a siesta in the afternoon after lunch. He'd have a big lunch, and then he'd go to sleep, and he'd, and, but he'd sleep in a chair, and he'd had a spoon on his leg, and by his side was a notebook. So when the spoon hit the floor, he'd wake up, and he'd pick the notebook up, and then he'd write whatever was in his head into the notebook. There was usually some kind of dreams that he was having.
So he was a—it was a habitual dream recording mechanism. I think this should go way into the sort of power, the gap between—so what's strategy? What's creativity? Really, you could—one hand strategy is a sort of supposed discipline that sits in this neat box. It's got all these tools that's supposed to inform it. And then the creativity sits on the sort of other side. It's more on the Dalí side but somehow it's got to be a sort of a connective. So I think you got, you've got to be thinking of ideas—you've got to be thinking of how can you take what you've learned, and what does that mean as a hypothetical, so I'm not saying we should all be like having siestas, writing down our dreams, but I think you need to be as—I guess the best way of describing it is: You're, what, you're an investigative journalist, but you're also thinking of ideas, right? So while you're going learning, you're still thinking of, okay, what does this mean? What does, where does this look? What does, what's my conclusion here? What's the headline? Where's the story going? What questions haven't I asked? So it's this very organic process. And I think the smartest thing to tell clients is that you have had five days and this is what you've done. And you'd love to have more time and you'd love to do more. And I think that part of that enthusiasm, part of that is enthusiasm and part of it is the client saying, yeah, I respect that you don't have all the data and all the other things. In fact, that's the biggest barrier for a—it's not going to give you a thing.
Right.
They're not going to give a prospective agency anything until they know they're hired. So you are working with very little, from them. But you're looking to prove to them that you have the ability and the enthusiasm and the passion and the sort of what it—what the, what it takes piece to be able to bring them something new, fresh and original.
What's the role of qualitative in your work? I'm an advocate for qual. I'm a researcher, right? So I'm always—in a very self-interested way—curious how other people talk about it. Use it. What's your relationship with qual and—and how do you define its role in all of this and creative and strategy?
As you go along, whatever you—as an agency, you're in different stages of a sort of relationship with the client. And I think in the—I think it's very hard in these very initial meetings to do it properly if you don't have—if you don't have—5 days is pretty much what you just do get. And I don't think that's really enough time. It may be. If you have your ideas—if you work really quickly, you may be able to get to something, but usually it happens at the next stage where we've seen 10 agencies and one of the three, and here's a brief. So now you've got—okay, you've got the sort of a better framework. I think you can, and then you probably got a little bit more time. You can go out and do something.
Yeah. I am—I'm connecting with yours. The stories you told about Van Gogh and Keith Richards and this idea that the imagination is this really mysterious human thing, right? That's essential to strategy and creative and in my own struggle, like people have asked me to define the value of qualitative in the age of AI, and so I keep trying to articulate the role of qualitative. So I'm always struck by the fact that qualitative sort of—invisible—people talk about data and they're really only talking about quantitative. You know what I mean? So qualitative doesn't even really have a seat at the table in a, in terms of a, a serious business kind of methodology, maybe that's my own insecurity. Do you feel like that's—is what I'm saying true about qualitative?
Yeah. Look, 'cause the reality is people have got data at their fingertips—most companies these days have got multitudes of data and it's relatively easy to access. That data and those KPIs inside the organization are somewhat institutionalized and people are, if they don't have literal dashboards, they have mental dashboards. Yeah—and the A/B testing and there's just—there's so many—it's so biased towards data. But what you have is you don't have the whys—you just have a lot of okay, this is better than this. Yeah. But you don't really know why and it's only when, people go out and actually make the effort and what we are seeing right now, it's like this whole idea of unstructured data. What basically people are saying is we've got all this stuff that is actually qualitative insight. It's a comment that someone left in a chatbot that—to this, to that, and they all exist in these different places. And maybe if we could aggregate these things together and analyze them, it's a kind of a good role for AI, then we might actually have some sort of positive insight.
Right.
So that kind of support the data is. If you think about the interesting thing about AI, for example, is its ability to capture qualitative insight, you know, versus just the analysis of the numbers. It's—if I'm, if my main interface with a brand is a chatbot, and I'm going to have a 15 minute conversation with that chatbot, the potential is amazing. If 80,000 people a week are going and interacting with a bank chatbot, there's a hell of a lot of data in terms of qualitative data that chatbot is collecting. But look, I think the end of the day that the—yeah, there's got to be a motive. These are usually—qualitative is, it's a project. It's an—if you're going to do properly, it's an endeavor and it's a journey. And there's got to have a commit—there's got to be a sort of a commitment behind it. And people have got to be willing to, be patient and partake in a process and—but there's usually got to be some kind of catalyst to why—why are we going to do this? This is—there's something somewhere is going wrong or right, or someone's—there's got to be some catalyst. A new person has come in, a new competitor has come in. The consumers we once had have gone away. I—there's got to be this sort of desire to know why. I'm not saying that people don't go out and test—go and test an ad or do all kinds of things like that. But I think the richer, the deeper, the more interesting qualitative is usually has some kind of big motivational catalyst behind it.
Internally?
Yeah, internally. And—and maybe the agency convinces the client that it's needed because the client is too close to it and they haven't seen that there's a problem or whatever.
Yeah.
But yeah, usually I think there's some kind of—maybe it's the—maybe it's the brand wants to embark on a campaign and it's a, it's an area that they really feel like they need to—they haven't been out and talk to people for a long time. And need to go do it.
I want to shift gears. And talk about your photography as it relates to planning. I'm a person who grew up with a camera in my house. And so my dad had one—my brother had one. And so I just had a camera and I was always taking pictures. It was always something that I did. And so we have that in common. You've taken it and done some beautiful work. But what's your—when did you start taking pictures? And how do you think about—and you do these—the boot camps right that you've been doing. Is that what you called them? Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about your relationship with photography and then how it overlaps with the sort of the planning discipline.
I—it's—they've been separate things. Yeah, I—I guess I've always, I've never really thought much about photography until recently. It's always been there. I've always taken pictures, but I've never really thought deeply about it. A camera, going on vacation, I'll bring a camera with me or I'm going somewhere or there's this thing, I'll bring a camera. But not really purposely, like thinking creatively about photographs. And that was really just because I didn't really have the time—it was a time-intensive activity. So when I left my job, I embarked on what I called an MFA. A self-organized M.F.A. I've been on a ton of workshops with really good photographers all over the world. And—and that—the process was going—being humiliated and going from a sort of a completely naive state to being a little less—a little bit more learned and a little less naive. So yeah, it's been a very—fairly extensive and involved all kinds of things from, different—enabled being different projects as well. Some of them haven't been project-based, some of them just being more literal workshops. I did go to France and spent a lot of time photographing diverse communities in a town and in the South of France. And so I went to Athens and had four days to make photographs of the city. I knew nothing about because it was like a gallery show at the end. And then I did—I did a training at a school with SEVEN, which is a combat photography agency. One of my project was with Black Lives Matter during the protests. It's a pretty fascinating experience.
So yeah, so that's when I got into this—okay—each sort of turn I—I've seen, acclaimed photographers, established photographers, just my fellow students use photography in certain ways as an investigative tool as a—a human, humanistic tool—just as a way of getting closer to people—getting close to people, places, all those other things. So it's—what has happened is, as I've got more interested in photography and spent more time outside documenting different things. The strategy—the strategy has become a lot more internally focused and stuck behind a screen. Yeah. Sort of these—these sort of tensions really between, my interests and what's really happening with the discipline. They've met in the middle now.
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So yeah, Dino and I have been doing a couple of boot camps, we're going to do something else at the Strategy Festival in October. With just the goal of saying there's a—something, it can be deeply sophisticated and it can be integrated into your strategy practice, or it just can be a personal, meditative exercise. It scales from—actually you learn something about yourself and the world around you if you just maybe had a camera when you went and took your dog to the park—to, could you actually document, use a camera to document a consumer type, a cat—all different ways in which you can actually use it.
I think at the end of the day, when you start to, when you start to think about visuals, to me, that's the most, to me, that's the most compelling thought really is—we're so obsessed with like slides with so many words on them and whereas we're always trying to close, close arguments and we use the words and bullet points and narrative stretches to close these arguments. Whereas the visual—I think a visual is very powerful because it's much more open-ended. There's lots of interpretation to it. It has a lot of subjectivity. And then if you're bringing your visual, a visual that you made, that's even more powerful because it's—it's something that no—anyone can swipe an image from the internet, but if it's something you took and you're telling a story, you really are the author, right? If you're taking, if you've got photos of people's dogs in their homes that you took, it works on so many different levels, right? It's one of—you're—you're sharing, I don't want to say—you could make video. It doesn't really matter. But the fact is that you authored something that is original and because it's not just the output, it's what went into the output. That's really important as well. So that puts you, it puts you in a unique position because suddenly is someone going to say, actually, what did you learn from that? I could tell you what I learned. How did I do it?
So that's what I, that's what we're trying to teach and get people to experience is that it's a sort of—I don't want to say a secret weapon. It's another string to a bow in, in the sense of—you look at a lot of people's, a lot of agency presentations and you look at a lot of trend reports and they're all saying the same thing. You look, if you're looking for a different take, and your own perspective, I think photography is quite useful.
The best photographers are the ones that break—put themselves into their work. It's really a—the reason someone takes a photograph of something is, there's an, there's, unless you really are just purely documenting, there's a motivation, right? There's some psychological motivation as to why that, you might not even know it, it might be so deep in your subconscious that you don't really recognize instantly.
But I've seen talks from really famous photographers who've talked a bit about that whole idea. They don't even, they don't even know why in a 200th of a second that they're taking this picture and it takes them a while to actually work out, yeah.
And I actually think there's—you're just going, thinking back to, to qualitative for a second. There's just, I think there's also a lot to be learned just from what the work of photographers—doing your own photography. So there's a sort of, there's the practical do your own photography piece, but there's also the art history piece of studying photographers and what they do. And actually they can really inform—there's two in particular. So I'll just give you those examples. Bieke Depoorter, who's a Belgian, I don't even think I pronounced her name right—she did, she went to Egypt in the Arab spring and she's a very, she's like the bravest strategist out there. She's a single woman who's going to Egypt and she's knocking on people's doors saying to people, can I stay with you?
And when she stays with them, she documents the family and everything. So it's a very incredibly risky endeavor personally. Putting her own safety at risk. So she goes there in time now to get lots of photographs. And she then—our mind goes—Oh, this is my point of view. It's a person from Belgium going to an Arab country. So she goes back with all these photographs printed out, and then she has people write on them. That becomes a project. I thought it was really interesting and—there's another, Jim Goldberg did this project in San Francisco called Rich and Poor. And it's—he's done a lot of really fantastic work. He's a really interesting photographer. But it's like the book is Rich and Poor, and one, when you turn it around, and you look through it, it's all poor people. And then you flip it back around, it's all rich. But he asks everyone to write a story. So if you think about applying that in qualitative research—you've got an image and then you've got a story.
And that's really like freaking amazing—just you've got these two really powerful things that you've got some written words that were written by somebody about themselves. And there's images of—some sort of book like that is incredible. So that's a long-term projects. It's like it could be years to do that type of work.
Yeah.
I haven't got years. I barely got days.
I'm curious. I'm—I want to—I love both those examples. I want—I'm—who do you become when you have your camera with you? I know this is true for me that when I—when I have my camera with me, I'm aware of the world in a way that's different. And I feel—is there something about the mindset or the, what it means to have a camera that changes how you are? Like, yeah, who do you become when you have your camera working on a project?
I think like each situation is unique. As I think I have—I really do have different modes. And I, and because I shoot a lot of different things. And that kind of is like almost a filter over the top. I do think like classic street photography, this is, again New York is the place to be a photographer. It's just because—it's the confluence of people in place and people who are pedestrian versus most other cities where everyone's in their car.
So this is 57th and 5th Avenue is a sort of a Mecca. I once went, I went, I think it was maybe last summer I went there and there were so many photographers there. I was like, wow, that was crazy. And there were a lot of young kids. And it's just this, it's literally an intersection where you've got these different people. You've got locals, you've got tourists, you've got the really wealthy, you've got the not so wealthy, you've got workers and executives, you've got people with dogs, and you've got people wearing the craziest stuff, and they all congregate.
And so you're looking for these incredible images where these, somehow there's, somehow these different pieces connect into some kind of image of, one image, one single image not a film, of, that brings all these different pieces together. And so it's almost—it's almost like a stage. There you're a stage, and you're like looking for these and you've got to have this—you've got to work incredibly, you've got to have eyes in the back of your head. You've got to see, you've got to see where this person is going to be coming, you've got to see where the light is—all these things that you've got to work out and you've got to have patience—you've got to be patient—some people like you've got to stand.
This famous, very famous or Henri Cartier-Bresson, the famous artist. The famous French photographer coined the phrase, a decisive moment. And there's just that boy with the wine bottles. He's looking down the staircase and there's a, you see the boy cycling and it's just a frame. It's just so amazingly framed, but you go—how long were you there for? About four, five hours waiting for one. He probably has hundreds of photos that he took. And there's only one that is that magical.
I love the—there's some real overlap in the scramble you talked about before and this eyes in the back of your head that we're very much just individuals in a chaotic environment trying as best as possible to just experience it all right—just try to—in, it seems to me just to be very aware and open to everything that's happening around you, but also really connected to your own. I love what you said about the idea. And this is my experience too, that there is something significant about the fact that I took a picture and I'm bringing it in and I'm showing it to you. I'm telling you the story of the picture. And that I always think the mandate to tell stories can be, feel cliche, but the story of a picture, and I've had this experience in my work, the story of a moment in a conversation is powerful, not because, partly because of the information in the story, but it's the story itself, which is the power. It's just, it's unbelievable force that delivers so much more information than just the content of the picture.
Yeah, and I think that and I think there's something—look I've got so many photos—looks, I've got so many, each of these. Each of these is incredible. This is—this is called Sea Coal by this English photographer called Chris Killip. These images are just remarkable.
Oh, wow.
What basically is happening is that this is a very poor community in northeast of England, and they're actually picking coal up off the beaches. So the horse and cart.
Yeah.
So this is on so many different dimensions. There's like a moment in time where you've got the industrial—these are like relics. These people are still living in a sort of an agrarian—in an industrial and agr—life in an industrial age. Yeah. And they're also an incredibly closed community that took him five years just to get, be allowed to take photos. So yeah, I think there's that kind of—there's a lot of stuff going on. There's a lot of randomness, I think randomness—it's a commonality. I, one of the, one of my teachers Anders Petersen is a very famous Swedish photographer. You're always walking around and he's—I'm walking down the streets of Paris and there are two identical twins, women. In their thirties, beautiful like models, and I—not take a photo.
Yeah.
And then he takes photo and then he arranges to bring the photo to them. So he has—that becomes a, it's a kind of, it becomes a relationship. Because he's taken a photo and he's—there's a sort of a transaction and then it becomes a conversation. So I, I think the randomness—it's basically a qualitative research. It's—everyone's guarded—anyone—they tell you what they think you want to hear, right? They don't tell you what they really think. They tell you what they think they want you to hear. Or you, they think, you think, they think you want to hear. And it's only when you break that wall, that the interesting stuff comes out.
Yeah.
When a moderator goes out of the room, something happens. The dynamic of the focus group changes. They seem relaxed. They stop talking amongst themselves. And then the moderator comes back in and there's a different—suddenly feels like the teachers come back into the classroom.
Yeah, it reminds me of—I always reference this quote, but that the plural of anecdote is data, which is—the truth, but the more popular version on the internet is—it has more links. Like Freakonomics did a—like a fact check on this, but there's 900 citations of the quote that says the plural of anecdote is not data. And that's the one that's most popular, but the fact of the matter is that the plural of anecdote is data and what we're talking about in a lot of ways, it strikes me that just the ability to gather—notice and gather meaningful anecdotes and make something of them, right? And share them in a way. I was really struck by, because I've never worked in an agency, but that imperative to say something that they've never heard before. That sounds extremely challenging. That seems like a tall order, and that would be very difficult to do, maybe.
Yeah. It's—you, I think it happens because you go through this learning curve—the thing about agencies is they don't, you don't have—you do have agency specialists, you do have health care agencies, but generally, most of the 14,000 agencies out there are generalists. They work across a different number of—the one time, one year they're doing insurance, the next day they're doing grocery stores, and then they haven't done insurance—they've either never done something or they haven't done it for a while. And so there's—and there's always a getting up to speed. So it always takes time to orientate yourself around a world. And then the temptation is just to tell people what that world is. If they're living with it 24/7, that's just nothing. So you, how do you take, it's a sort of, you've got to get beyond the learning curve into something fresh. Yeah—that's the challenge is when you're in a short period of time, it's sometimes it's like you want to pat yourself on the back 'cause you just, you managed to understand the category.
I find that really funny because yeah, but you've just—you've just arrived.
Yeah, you've just got yourself to the bottom rung of the ladder.
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**Peter Spear:** Yeah.
**Ed Cotton:** Of enlightenment—yeah, so that's the challenge. So yeah, that's why you do have to, you do, there's this kind of classic artistic thing where you, people say that you've got to, if you don't know the fundamentals, like if you don't know how a camera works or you don't know how to paint, Picasso could never have broken the mold of painting if he didn't know how to paint. It's kind of—there's the same sort of thing. You've got to know what it is before you know how to change it.
Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you.
Yeah. That's good.
Yeah.
Bit of a ramble, but I hope there's something useful in there.
Yeah, I think it's great.
