The five components of interesting (with Jeffre Jackson and Dave Nottoli)

So I'm discussing an upcoming trip to Chile one day with two fine-up standing colleagues at work, and one of them comes out with the most interesting line about travel I think I've ever heard my life. Oh, this 20-something colleague says. I was tear-gassed in Santiago once. It was in a sushi restaurant. There was a little beat in between those two sentences. A timing was perfect. Now I mean, how can you not want to know more about that story? It's so intriguing, isn't it? First, that this apparently respectful member of society had got us all tear-gassed in Chile, but what particularly, that it was in a sushi restaurant? I mean, what kind of breach of Japanese raw fish etiquette would warrant them actually tear-gassing you for it? Two guests today would say that it's the incongruity of that statement that makes it so interesting. A double incongruity, in fact, that the first that this particular person could be tear-gassed and second that it should happen in a sushi restaurant, and incongruity is one of five factors in a model that they've developed about what makes something interesting. A model they've been working on together for over 20 years. Jeffrey Jackson and Dave Natoli both worked at the advertising agency Wyden and Kennedy together in the US before setting up with two others, the Open Intelligence Agency, an international brand, and communications consultancy. Jeffrey now works in Amsterdam for reasons he'll come on to talk about, and Dave is the teaching assistant professor, College of Media Communication and Information at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Together, they're writing a book about why they believe interestingness is so important today, and the five-part model that they believe constitutes it. I think their model is fascinating, as we'll come on to see, both for its coherence and its precision, and actually they bring some of the themes to life in a great piece of video which Jeffrey produced a number of years ago as a link to it in the episode notes. Jeffrey comes on to screen in a white collage shirt and a dark jacket, and begins to talk to camera to us about interestingness and white matters. After about a minute, his phone goes a strange ringtone of somebody whistling. He looks down, checks it briefly, apologises to us, and then keeps talking. A little later there's a different kind of bell off camera, so he steps out of frame, and when he comes back again, he's in a white t-shirt, the college shirt and jacket are gone, and he has blood all over his upper lip, and the top of the t-shirt is stained with blood as well. But he makes no comment on any of this, and keeps talking about what it means to be interesting. After while another buzzer goes, and he goes away and comes back holding a small cactus, again no immediate explanation, although it does arrive later on. And so it continues. It's well worth watching as a piece of film, and it's about 20 years old, as I say, they've both been thinking really deeply about interestingness for a very long time. So we're going to begin the conversation today with discussing how they became intrigued by the whole topic of interestingness, why it's very personal for them, and the five key components of their model. The first time really that I kind of saw at least one of you was in a post day that you've done of Jeffrey talking, I think in about 2005-2006, about interestingness. And it's a fabulous piece of film where Jeffrey you're talking to camera about it, and these strange things happen, you're interrupted by phones with strange kind of calls on them, you disappear off stage at one point, and come back again, and you've been very smartly dressed, and you're now kind of in a t-shirt with blood smeared across your face, which you never comment on at all. You just go on speaking to camera, tell us a little bit about that video, and your introduction of interestingness to the world. How did the two of you come together to produce that, and how do you get interested in the first place? Russell Davis, who you've spoken to, started a series of conferences called Interesting, and we were working with him, and we did our own conferences as well all around the world, and one of our colleagues, a woman named Emily Reed, did one in Asia, and she asked us all to produce a video, and I decided that the thing to do was to describe interestingness while displaying the characteristics of what I was talking about, and the things that you describe, the different ringtones, the walking away, it's all about getting across the notion that incongruity is interesting, leaving gaps in people's understanding that they have to fill in is interesting. That's how you get people's attention and keep it. And how did you two know each other at this point? You hadn't exactly worked together at the same time that life? Well, we did work together at the same time. We were in Portland together. He was working on Microsoft while I was working on Nike, and things were very siloed. You never really worked cross-brand. I focused exclusively on Nike, and he was focused on Microsoft, but Russell and Jeffrey were working on Microsoft together, and they're working on a brand that wasn't doing very interesting advertising, and they're in the same building as we were working on Nike, he was doing extremely interesting advertising, and Jeffrey's curiosity just said, "What is it that they're doing on the Nike brand? It's not just sports that makes their advertising so interesting. It's what they're doing in the advertising that's making it interesting." So his curiosity, and Russell's curiosity took off and said, "Well, what are the components? What are the qualities of what Nike's advertising is doing, and is it about that makes their ads so much better than what Microsoft was producing at the time?" So that's where we started crossing over, and then once we both were out of widening Kennedy, we had this sort of loosely connected consulting company called Open Intelligence Agency, and we just started talking about whatever our principles and what did we really value and what did we really think about advertising and brand-building, and interestingness was one of the core components of that, and so that's when we really started talking about, "Well, what is it, and how do we figure out what its qualities are?" And so then we started thinking about, "Well, how would we figure that out, and why don't we go to the source? Let's go to the creatives that made those ads and talk to them because they must know what they're doing." So that's what started on our journey, and that's when I got on planes, and started interviewing all those creatives that we worked with at mostly widening Kennedy and asked them about their advertising and what was it that made it so distinct and different than most advertising that you see out there. And Jeffrey, it feels in talking to you that it's become much more than a sort of an intellectual exercise. There's a kind of deep passion in you around this topic, and since we've got an identification with it. Yes. Tell us about that. Why does it speak to you so profoundly? There are a number of reasons. One is I'm a person of aspergory and tendencies. I like detail, I like understanding the way that things connect to one another, and the notion of understanding why I personally am interested in different things, so deeply is one that I've been concerned with even before I was in an advertising. The second thing is I have always had a problem with American culture. One of the reasons that I live in the Netherlands now is that I've always believed that American culture is to a large extent hysterically focused on simple positive thinking, and I always felt out of place even as a small child. I felt out of place and say, "Well, am I missing something?" An interestingness to some extent is a continuation of my efforts to understand what is it that drives me and why I felt out of place in that environment and advertising to a large extent and marketing as well. In some ways are very American in that regard. Even around the world, to a large extent, there's very much a sort of almost hysterical focus on positivity that I've always found off-putting. I like thinking, "I don't think there's anything wrong with it." Yet, in our overarching culture from Hollywood movies to advertising and politics, there's always a big, big focus on stick to the positive message. K-I-S-S, keep it simple, stupid. I've always found that offensive. Tell us how you define interesting and then let's talk about the different dimensions of it that you've observed and perhaps look at some good and bad examples of it. Our "putting on a small car definition" is appraised as worth thinking about, and praised as worth thinking about. Okay, the notion of appraisal is important because one thing that people might think is that interesting is something to either interesting or it's not, and that's, of course, not true. Interesting is always interesting to someone and understanding the kind of patterns that people have in their head and the way that they make that particular appraisal is really important. So it's an appraisal. It's an individual judgment. The second thing is worth thinking about, and this is the thing that trips up, I think, a lot of the people that we've interviewed because it sounds very cerebral. It sounds as if we're not talking about emotion, but of course, as Dave alluded to, neuroscience. The work of Damasio among others has told us that thinking and feeling are not separate things. The notion, the making and appraisal is a cognitive exercise. So when we say thinking, what we're really talking about is processing. One of the areas that we look at is in educational thinking and neuroscience, and one of the things they say is what we remember is what we think about. It's not like a bookshelf where you put a book on the the shelf and its there when you come back. You have to process it. That's what creates a memory structure. structures. You have a very interesting model of the 5 key components of it. What are the 5, and then the straps go through them one by one? They are incongruity, significance, mixed emotion, authenticity, and detail. Incongruity means there has to be something for people to think about, something to fill in. As Gossage said, I think quoting somebody else actually that, you know, when you're making a mouse track, remember to leave room for the mouse. When people make connections themselves, when they have to think in order to make connections, and the thinking does not mean a big scratch in your head process. But when there's something that doesn't quite make sense, that doesn't quite fit the patterns that you're used to see, that's incongruity. And there are all kinds of incongruity. There's Gushdal, there's Mystery, there's simply things, again, that don't seem to make sense, given what you expect. There's the violation of expectations. All of these things are forms of incongruity. So incongruity, Dave, tell us about the estimation. I wrote a post recently on LinkedIn talking about the 95% emotion rule that seems to have deeply entrenched itself in advertising, is actually misleading advertisers into very one-dimensional advertising. And it's based on system one, system two, idea that decisions are made 95% emotion. And so what advertisers have done with that is they've taken that and said, therefore, what we have to do is trigger emotion. What we have to do is stimulate emotion and get some sort of emotional reaction. And then on top of that, they really narrow down the range of human emotion, mostly around happiness. In the the television show, Mad Men, Don Draper stands up in front of a client, giving a presentation once and says, advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And I think advertisers have taken that literally and build their advertising toward trying to drive an emotion around happiness or trying to trigger happiness or saying to people, essentially, if you buy this, you will be happier. And that's only one dimension of humans. There are far more emotions than happiness, but clients are afraid to tap into those emotions. Because it's risky. Because it's risky. But of course, all great stories require negative emotions. We know psychologically there's a thing called negativity bias where we tend to pay more attention to things that provoke negative emotion. Story, as great screenwriters will tell you, involves the interconning of negative and positive emotions. That's why we say mixed emotion. We used to say negative emotion, and that was reacting to the overwhelmingly positive emphasis with an advertising. But really, it's more about having a range of emotions. Few people, few brands have done this better than Nike. One of the things that makes them great is they're not afraid of triggering negative emotion. Did that courage to talk about negative emotion? Is that within the client or within the agency or within the client agency relationship? Where does that come from? It has to be both. They have to be holding hands. One thing that I really want to say here, though, is that it very much comes down to the client because it's ultimately the client who has to say yes or no and who has to pay for it. And one of the reasons why we like the notion of interestingness is because it gives a justification for risk. It tells the client, yes, we are taking a risk, but here's how we expect it to work. So being allowed to be interesting. Okay, so we've been called routine mixed emotion significance, time that significance. You talked with one of your previous podcast guests about Murray Davis, who was a sociologist and academic who wrote a great paper called That's Interesting. And he defines interesting as things that have the potential for deep and wide ranging effects. And that's what we mean by significance as well. Not trivial. There are cynical ways to do that. And there are more authentic ways that people recognize. I think it's authentic to touch on things that are of significance. So talking about brands, then I love that idea. And at the same time, I think that's one of the major frustrations a lot of people work in hypnotizing, which is it's an almost fun, but there's not a lot of significance to it. And if you're working on fish digs, for instance, it's hard to attach a lot of significance to fish digs. Right. So do you think actually that's just not true? Actually, a stay-at-home parent trying to feed their children every night, actually fish digs are quite significant. Thanks very much indeed. So you're trivialising them at your peril, really. Am I getting the right direction here? Absolutely. And again, the way that David and I talk about these five things is that you don't want to slam all five of them 100% every time. You can go overboard with them, particularly if you go overboard with a lot of them all at once. You end up with kind of a mess. We think of them. It's like notes in a cord. Can say a few seconds. Exactly. You can't. You just can't do that. Again, I think one of your previous guests said something about, you know, well, look, there's only four things. And if you get two of those things, sex and death, then you're done, kind of. And I laughed when I heard that because I thought, well, yes and no. You don't want to hit it too hard. And again, it's like a cord. And there are, you can play lots of different chords. Some chords have three notes, intervals have two notes. And it really is an interaction of these five factors, not necessarily all five. Lots of different ways to combine them to different degrees. And that's what we're saying. So Dave, tell me about authenticity. Because authenticity is one of those words which as a planner, I've sort of shut it out for a long time because it's just banded around so much, isn't it? A the authentic denim company. What you just think is just a substitute for strategy, really, in some kind of way. But you clearly understand it at a much different level. Tell us about what you mean by authenticity. So when I was interviewing Jim Rizzwald recently in Portland, famous copywriter from Wyden Kennedy did all that fantastic groundbreaking stuff for Nike back in the 90s. I brought up the topic of authenticity. And he has the same gut response to it as you. He says, this sounds like a buzz word. And I think all buzz words should be shot. But we, I think what advertising, when advertising people talk about authenticity, they talk about, you know, nothing more than a gritty, real filter or using real people in an ad, right? But that's not, if you go to the definition of authenticity, that's not what authenticity really means. What we mean basically comes from how Martin Luther talked about authenticity. When he stood there and say, here I stand, I can do no other. That is what we mean by authenticity, is you can do no other. It means being compelled or almost unchosen. What you have to say, because that's who you are deep down in your character. You cannot be anything other than who you are. And that's what we mean by authenticity. You actually say what you mean. You're not putting on a marketing skin. You're not talking in a way that you think consumers want to hear. You are saying what you really truly believe deep down in your character. And I think brand characters, one of the things that most marketers today overlook is, what is this brand really think? How do we talk? What's our tone of voice that's different? And what's our point of view that's different than other brands in the world and in our category in particular? With clients, when we talk about authenticity, we want to explore what the true character of the brand is. And that's revealed in everything the brand does from its PR to its actions to its communications, is it's revealing your true character. And it has a huge impact on audiences because people can feel when somebody is coming through as what we would say is authentic versus inauthentic or people can sense when people are being marketed to or when somebody is just saying what they truly believe. And what they can't help saying authenticity is what you can't help being. It's almost a constraint. I'm really interested in that idea of a friend who did a lot of improv. And he was saying that there's something that they sometimes do, let's imagine what we're about to go out in front of an audience. And we take a story that's true of one of us. It's actually happened to Dave when Dave was younger. The first time he ever bought a nice screen when he was four and his mum gave him some money and he walked across and bought a nice screen from a nice screen runner, came back again and spilted on his shirt on the way back. So we all tell that story to the audience because if it's ours and you would, it's have to guess whose story it really is. And it's really easy to guess whose story it really is because Dave has a sense of all the things that really happens and the little girl that smiled at him that caused him to lose his balance and trip and do that. You know all those things in a way that we don't and a much deeper way that Jeffrey and I did. So therefore the audience can tell that. And really excited by the fact that you mentioned improvisation because improvisation, we think a lot about improvisation and brand improvisation, improvisation to some extent is being your self-under pressure. And when you're under pressure, when you have to do something quickly and people know that you're doing it off the cuff. Yeah. That's when the real stuff leaks out. Again, it's one of your previous guests. The reality show producer said it leaks out when people know that you're improvising. So detail, finally. Tell us about detail. And it's Interestingly, I don't know if you listen to this. There's a revisionist history episode where Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant are discussing stuff, and then they just briefly stop and say, "So what do you think is definitely interesting?" And one of them, like I mentioned, one says it's about detail, and the other one says it's about basic pricing. So both of them are much, much shallower, you know, diffusion than you are. But so tell us about detail, and why it's so important. Detail is the fuel of pattern recognition. Jeff Goodby talks about the first god milk ad, which was Aaron Burr, and he says, you know, that ad would not have been what it was without Michael Bay. A very young Michael Bay was the director, and he insisted on putting all of these little things on the shelves behind him and dressing the space as if this guy was real. And it's those details, actually, that hold your eye, that make it seem more realistic than it would be. And it's detail that drives pattern recognition. People are pattern recognizes, we're not evolved to focus on single ideas, we're evolved to notice patterns and variations in patterns, and detail is what makes up those patterns. Charles Eames has a great quote around details. He says, the details are not the details. They make the product. And I think that's true of advertising as well. The depth of advertising comes through based on the depth of details and the intricateness of details. And we talked to John Jay at Wyden in Kennedy, and he talks about fighting for that 0.1% sound design that they just need to have in the ad, even though 99% of people will not recognize it. But the 1% of people who do will notice that they took the care and the time to put that in there because they knew someone cared, they knew someone in the audience cared, and that makes better connections between brands and consumers. And well, everything from politics to advertising, people want to know that there's somebody there. And a lot of the time advertising comes across. I honestly, I was 30 years old when I got to advertising and I was genuinely surprised that people wrote all of it because so much of it seemed absent of consciousness. I just kind of assumed, well, you know, a lot of this isn't written by real people, right? There's nobody home there. And people really respond to the notion of there's somebody home. There's actually an actual person there. Yeah, I love that sort. And so if I'm in preparing for this, I was thinking all sorts of five areas about detail. And I was reminded of this is the pretentious bit of the podcast. You know, if you've read Roland Bartz, three levels of meaning essay. So he takes a scene from Ivan the Terrible, an old black-and-white film. There's just a still from the film where Ivan the Terrible is on a kind of dais in his kind of throne room. He's got a throne and peasants are all around the corner of the room and he's kind of tripling gold coins through his hands. And Bart talks about his three levels of meaning in the sea. And so the first is the actual thing that you see. There's a king, there's a throne, there are poor people around the outside. The second is the symbolic one, which is obviously represents greed. You know, here are people indeed. You have desperately poor. I'm not food to eat. And he's just using himself. I've been running coins. But the third level, I can't really cause it. I have to dig it out, which is about detail. It's that's about the expression on the person in the corner's face. It's the very, apparently small, apparently incidental things that actually significantly shape your relationship with what you'll see. And I'm really into about what he's saying because that interpretation of it, that's almost executional, right? That is Michael Bay thinking about, I want, you know, the third surf to look like this. But actually, in the point of strategically making things more interesting, it sounds like you're being more intentional about how strategically you can bake in detail. So tell us a little bit about how does your work as strategists help brands express and build in more detail to what they're doing. Comment on your role in Barth's comment. My wife went to graduate school in film theory and the one thing that she told me that I remember is that film theorists say, look for the unmotivated shot. Everything that the filmmaker wants to say is in the thing that you think you're not supposed to be paying attention to, whether that's a background detail or a shot that you think, why is that there? That's not advancing the story. And it goes back to what we were talking about about improvisation. I think that's the way, again, we perceive things in patterns. And when you see something that doesn't quite fit the pattern, you zoom in on it, and you want to make it fit the pattern. And one of the things that we say to people who are making ads is spend time thinking about the meander, spend time thinking about the thing that is going to catch people's attention because it is not related to the direct selling message. And use that, use the attention that the unmotivated shot that the little background detail adds because, again, or pattern recognition machines. And so think about your brand, think about your ads, not as a direct communication, but as something you want to linger, something you want people to continue process because it's a pattern. And at the same time, Dave, I mean, a lot of this what we were talking about, it involves taking these more slowly, thinking about them more deeply. I mean, it's the opposite of the current trend towards efficiency and I've only got pecs hours to spend against this. Do you find that tension in your work? I mean, because you are doing strategic work, I imagine that they're buying you because they like the theme of interestingness and they're up for it. But that and the balance between the much greater degree of depth that this suggests, that you're not only you do yourself, but you're inviting the client to spend, right, thinking about their brand, do you finally push back on that? Do you find there's something to say? I don't want that. I just, I need just, I need a fish to extract it. You know, talk to me about detail, frankly. How does it go down? Well, again, it depends on the client. As Jeffrey mentioned before, there are certain clients that will buy into this idea of interestingness. And then there are other clients who just want to go home, you know, at the end of their eight hour shift, they're not interested in crafting something that creates long-term memory, right? And this is the challenge that advertising has had that Bennett and Field have pointed out is the short-termism that is running through the ad tech world and is now, you know, sort of infected advertising in clients is they're going for the short-term sales hit. And all they want is to get across the message about why you should buy something and buy it right now. But, but as we know, and what their data has shown is that the long-term effective advertising is where you get the majority of the efficiency, the majority of the impact. And that comes from long-term building long-term memories. And the details really help build long-term memories because there are things in there that you have to think about. There are things in there that consumers will want to think about, why did they add that there? Why is this here? And those kind of things are they're not just aesthetic and they do appeal to aesthetics and emotional impact. But they also convey something that's really hard to convey. And that's another topic we talked about authenticity. Passion, you can tell when people are passionate about what the ads that they're making because you feel it. They've gone through the time to think everything through. And that passion is a part of authenticity. And it feels like, again, like Jeffrey said, somebody is home. Somebody really cares about this and the audience can feel that. In talking about let's make this more interesting in the podcast, we've been exploring quite broad brush strokes so far. But one of the things I find fascinating about Jeffrey and Dave's model, as I say, is its precision. It's a very clear definition of what interestingness is, the five key components of it honed by those 20 years of researching and refining it. In congruity, significance, mixed emotion, authenticity, and detail. I think it works really well. And I really like the way they talk about the real value of interestingness too. That it's not just to hold attention, rather than simply gain it, but also to build long-term memories. And the contrast that they make with what they call the empty spectacle of much of the Super Bowl advertising for instance. And the second part of the conversation, we're going to start talking about Nike and what makes the great Nike advertising so interesting. I should say, if you don't know that Wyland Kennedy, the agency they were part of is the agency that's produced so much of that great Nike advertising. Along the way, we'll talk about a couple of very specific iconic Nike ads, and I put links to those in the usual place as well. We'll go on then to talk about the book that they're working on, putting all this together. But this not along the way for their sense, but why there is so much dull content being produced at the moment. Why are so many smart, well-intentioned people in the communications business and the content business producing such dull stuff? My collaborators on the custom dull side of the project and I have a view that it's what we're calling the Four Horseman of the Dullock Lips, performance, optimization, averaging, and procurement. Dave and Jeffrey, though, have a different view that it all comes down to the ballplex. So, let's talk about Nike, because that's what I mean, Nike's had obviously many, many, many, many brilliant days and it also has the occasional off day as well. Tell us about sort of Nike at its best and how it exemplifies what you're talking about. Well, so I worked on Nike in the 1990s and I'll talk about some work that was before my time there, that Jim Rizzwald did, who I mentioned earlier. But let's take role model. Charles Barkley, I'm not a role model, for instance. Most sports advertising and sneaker and apparel advertising is about elevating the athlete and getting us to look at them as gods and particularly their physical qualities and the amazing things that they can do. But what Jim Rizwal did in his advertising was something really different. He wanted to play the race car with Charles Barkley because that's who Charles Barkley was. This is authentic. This is how he felt. He felt like the sports world's sports broadcasting world commentators were saying, "You know, Charles' behavior on the court is abominable and he should be ashamed of the way he behaves on the court." And Jim wanted to respond to that because the volume was just getting turned up and up. And that's what the conversation at the time was and he came out and said, "I am not a role model with Charles Barkley," and Charles was not going to apologize for his style of play. Charles was a very physical, somewhat violent player and he wasn't going to apologize for it. In the ad, he says, "I don't get paid to be a role model. I get paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court and don't put your impression of what an athlete should be on me. That's not what I get paid to do. I get paid to play basketball in the way that I know how to play basketball." And this is who I am and I do it very well. The last line of that ad is just because I can dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids. He turns around the responsibility and the accountability to the parents and that ad in particular has all of the qualities of interesting. It's incongruous, right? How we see what the role of an athlete is to be a role model. He's turning around and saying, "No, hang on a second, it's not that. This is my job. Don't tell me how to do my job." It's got negativity or what you call mixed emotions. He's saying, "I'm not going to raise your kids. You raise your kids." It's got authenticity because he's saying, "This is who I am. This is how I really and truly feel." And you can tell, even in the way the spot is directed and obviously in the casting, it wouldn't have had the same effect with Michael Jordan. It has the effect with Charles Barkley because of his style of play. It's got the details, the close-up shots of Charles' face looking straight into the camera in a sort of almost confrontational way. All of those things add up to a spot that is really interesting and has so much depth that you really have to think about it and it forces the audience to rethink what they thought about athletes and what they thought athletes' job was in the role that they want athletes to have or at least they thought athletes. It makes them rethink their assumptions and that's these long-term memories that this thinking about, that we keep talking about it in interestingness. That's what it generates in people as it forces you to think. Wait a second, I have to rethink what I thought about this brand and what I thought about my own assumptions or you hate it. Barkley said, "I'm probably the only person in America who's ever gotten hate mail for saying parents should take care of their children." He also points out that the response was overwhelmingly positive that people said, "Thank goodness somebody is saying this." The Tiger Woods ads too, when Tiger was first being introduced to the world through Nike advertising. They didn't just come out and highlight his amazing play. That would have been boring and that's one of the things I talked to Rizwell about was, "Why didn't you just talk about his championships and his amazing shot-making ability?" He says, "Because that's boring and you see it on Sunday when he's playing golf. For an ad, you want to appeal to a broader audience. You want to bring people in who are not just golf fans and who can be fans of Tiger anyway. You want to bring in new viewers. You want to bring in women. I am Tiger Woods wasn't just an ad about his playing ability. It was an ad about so much more than that, about identity and about diversity and about ambition and aspiration. There's a meditation on all those things." This is where we've interviewed almost 50 people now, including a lot of creative directors and so forth. I think this is where the natural insights of great creatives and creative directors intersects with the theory of people like Byron Sharp, Stacy Wall, who was a creative director and again in the Golden Age of Nike, had a Xeroxed, almost Sami's dot kind of set of instructions that he used to give to new Nike creatives called "Shill Knight Hades Advertising." One of the points in there is that you think your job is to come in here and get famous. No. Your job is to make it so that when somebody is waiting for the movie to start at the multiplex and they're wandering through the mall and they wander into a sneaker store because maybe they need to buy some shoes that they come in and they look at what's available and Nike sticks in their mind because they think, "Oh yeah. That thing where the guy said that interesting thing." Yeah, okay, Nike, yeah, I'm trying Nike kind of. And Byron Sharp talks about how brands grow. It's like you have to continually appeal to and refresh the memory and interest of people who are not fans, people who are on the edges and Stacy Wall and Jim Riss Wald and all those guys. They understood that intuitively. So, do you think the whole nation of the focus on attention then is misguided personally? But actually, it's to shallow concept. I would say the focus on attention is just and right. We should because focused attention, according to modern science, helps improve memory. What I think executionally is different when people focus too much on attention is spectacle, what we call spectacle. And that is something that is maybe shocking or maybe super entertaining, but leaves no trace. There's nothing to think about afterwards. They didn't say anything. I see. I have depth. And I think that's the difference. You're focusing on getting people's attention and getting them to focus their attention on what you're saying is job number one in advertising. But keeping their attention is the more important thing. Keeping their attention and making them want to pay attention over time. That's the key. And that's why interestingly we think is it's not the only way to sell things. It's not the only way to get attention. But we think of it as a particularly efficient and timely way to get people and hold people's attention today in a fractured media environment in which people need to want to come to you. You want them to want to think about it. This is why superbowl advertising. There's good superbowl advertising, but it really has degenerated into spectacle. It's kind of become this like, oh, what celebrity are they going to have in what kind of funny situation and what's it's gone? It's gone. Arguably. And you know, it's interesting, right? It's people taking positions on things once a year about we're supporting this particular issue. There's some kind of way. You never have to forget. They think, okay, and that's, you know, it's interesting, but it's entirely an authentic phenomenon. That's a good example. And I like your idea that I actually sort of, I'm spectacle with that nutrition effectively that it's kind of empty counter is really. You said, you want it for a bit, but it doesn't leave any residual benefit whatsoever. There's talk about the most recent Nike stuff and the price Olympics. And I probably should watch more. All I've seen is the stuff about winning and doing that, the Imperial winning. And it just seemed to me to be such an uninteresting way of expressing that athletic ethos. What's your sense of it? I'm really glad that came up. Dave and I were just talking about it yesterday. I think, well, I'll tell you the way I came across it was I saw a bunch of outdoor that was all focused on winning and, you know, I don't care about you. I don't respect you and I'm here to win and everything. I first thought was, didn't they do this in the Olympics in 1996 or 2000 or something like that? They've done this before. But then I was, I was out walking with my wife and she said, have you seen that new Nike campaign? It's really interesting. And I said, really? You think so? And she said, oh, you haven't seen the TV. Have you? And I said, no, I had not. And I looked at the TV and the TV starts off with a super, super interesting question. Am I a bad person? And then it goes on to answer it in a particularly boring way. That question, it goes right to the heart of competitive sport. It goes heart of what Nike is, power, the dynamic of Nike is that just do it is a combination of competitive at all costs, do what it takes, combined with an extremely supportive, just get off the couch and start running. And it's this unstable dynamic that really drives the brand. I think it makes it continue to be interesting and generative. And that question, am I a bad person? If they had just taken it in a different direction, it's an incongruous question, it's a question that raises mixed emotions, it's got everything. Just like the phrase just do it, I felt like that was a beautiful opportunity with a beautiful first step that we're on our own path. I like your point about the tension in the brand because it has to be the other one and I clearly, you are much, much, both much, much closer to it than I have been, but the other one I've always admired about Nike is a glorification and a humanisation that's constantly going on. So I always loved that thing and they did ages ago where he might have been there at the time as it was midnight. It's wasn't it, it was when I was at Shite in a day and they didn't add of the marathon run or was the time vomiting on their own shoes as they crossed the line. Yes. I love that ad. What a fantastic idea that was, you know, when that was really shocking, actually, I seem to remember, we thought, no, but you're about glorifying athletes and here is this incredibly human moment, which is heroic in its own way, you know, that you held it together until you got over the line and then your body just falls apart. But it was, it represented that other side that I liked so much of Nike and that's of sense of surprise, actually, and I mean, you know, what you talked about kind of earlier on in popularity, that's what that was brilliantly done, but you're right. Right. So there was potentially this latest Nike thing really just didn't play out intriguingly. Yeah. You know, Adam, I just wanted to piggyback on what you're saying about those two dimensions of Nike, the glorification and the humanizing. And that's one of the things humanizing athletes is what the job was for Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan was a spectacular once in a lifetime athlete. So the ads didn't need to demonstrate his athleticism. What they wanted to do was make him likeable to more people. And so they heard him with Bugs Bunny. They paired him with Mars Blackman, you know, Spike Lee and Spike and Mike. They made him a much more human relatable person. That appeals to a broader audience, not just hardcore basketball fans, but, you know, people who are on the fringes, people who are casual. This is why 80% of the product that is sold is sold to people who are not using it for sports purposes. They're using it to walk down the street and they can connect with Nike on a level of a different level, not just in terms of athletic performance, but they're saying are the things that I believe in. They have certain set of values that I believe in. They have the personalities in the brand I like. So I think that was really important for Nike to recognize that a long time ago. Jim and Stacey both said, "When we work with Nike athletes, we feel our job is to a large extent to find what's authentic about them and to bring that to the surface." And why is it that Nike can do it in a way that no other sports brand seems to be able to do? Because that's not a, I mean, I think that's true and really important, but it's not like a blinding insight. It's not like any other creative team working on added assault, Puma, or couldn't have thought about that. Nobody else does it in that way. This is the vein of my existence. People saying, "Can you do, can you give us some of that Nike star dust, Jiffrey and Dave? We want that on our brand." People used to come in all the time and say, "We want to do Nike advertising." And we would say to them, "You do realize what this means. It means one, risk. Two, you can't make the decision by committee. You can't ask everyone in your company what they think and then take a vote." It means that you're going to spend money, that your CFO is going to come to you and yell at you about, "Are you ready to do those things?" And 95% of them are not. They're not ready to do that. And do you think they know they're not ready? Because I mentioned the part of the danger is they say, "Yeah, I'm absolutely up for that." Actually, they're not ready several months into the process when they say, "Oh, you actually want me to approve that." I didn't realize I'd be having, I mean, there must be a bit of that going on, seemingly. Yeah, hugely, hugely. I remember when I started working at widening Kennedy, I was looking around on where is the magic? Where is the magic? And I'm not going to say that it's not in the creative directors, in the creatives, because it pretty much is. But again, I need to give a shout out to the account people and I need to give a shout out to a guy named Rob DeFlorio. Rob DeFlorio was the client, the Nike client who approved a lot of this. And I remember seeing him walking through the office and going, "That's the guy, that's the guy who's making this possible." Let's talk about mystery. I love mystery. I know you are very interested in it as well. I know it's a key part of your incongruity because you've mentioned that. Let's just a bit about why has mystery disappeared almost completely from brand building? And is there anybody doing it well that we can learn from? So mystery is what we would put it in our incongruity bucket. We talked actually a long time about this. Is it its own bucket? Is it a sixth thing? And we finally came to the agreement that it's part of incongruity because it's again about changing perspectives and having people look at different things in a different way. So what mystery does, if you study film theory and literature, Robert McKee, that the great teacher of screenwriters says, "You don't keep the audience interested by giving it information, but by withholding information." And that's a fantastic way of looking at what you're trying to do here. And there are some signs to back this up. There's a law of closure and this other thing called the Zagarnic effect, which is, and what Jeffrey talked about earlier, about leaving room for the mouse. People want to put the. They want to figure it out themselves. Maybe as humans, we have this drive for curiosity. And I think we underestimate that in advertising. We want to tell, tell, tell everything. What clients really want to do is just tell them about our attributes. Just tell them about the benefits. To tell them everything we can't shove it all in there to a 30 or 15 second ad. And they don't want to seduce. And part of advertising is seduction and mystery goes a long way in terms of seduction. And I think that's one part of it. The other part about mystery is, you know, it's a process of extended discovery. When a brand feels complete, the interestingness fades. And that's one of the things that Nike does well is you always feel like they're going to have something different to say, something more to say. But if your Folger's coffee or your Kellogg's cereal, you're just telling them about the, you know, the nutritional benefits, people are like, "Yeah, I've seen it. I'm going to go back to doing whatever I was doing before." They don't have to pay attention. But if you set the expectation as an advertiser, as a brand, that we're always going to have something new to say, you may like it, you may not like it. But we're always going to have something new to tell you. You become a much more interesting brand, something that you want to pay attention to. Markner's hate mystery. They hate it. They hate the unexplained, it's, it's kryptonite. There's a belief that if you aren't crystal clear, people will be confused and they won't do anything. But I don't think, I think they really underestimate people. And as Jim Rizwald told me, you know, if you treat your audiences if they're stupid, buy in large people don't like buying things from people who think they're stupid. And if you respect the audience, respect their intelligence to close the loop on their own, to figure things out and own, to have a little bit of curiosity, the opportunities are just endless. You don't always have to say everything and have to jam everything into every piece of communication. On a micro level that is on the level of individual communications, anytime you watch an ad, say a 30 second ad, and for the first 20 seconds, you have no idea what this is, that's mystery. You know, I remember the Cadbury Gorilla ad, I was in London doing research for something or rather, and I had insomnia and like 12 o'clock at night, this Gorilla came on and I was thinking, what is this? What's going on here? And it goes on and on and on and on. And then when it was finished, I immediately thought, okay, it's 12.30. Who can I call to talk to about this? Mystery makes you think, did I get this right? And you want to talk to other people about it. We've spoken to a couple of people at YouTube who have also said, yeah, there are different kinds of videos, some start off by saying, this is what I'm going to tell you. I told you, you know, here's what I told you, but once you have an audience, you should lean into having them think, what's going on here? That kind of mystery, like leaving gaps. But today, do you see anybody doing it well today? Those campaigns are obviously old. A recent iteration was, well, it's not that recent anymore, it was done by Droga. But Droga did a couple of really interesting things. One was the launch of Jay-Z's decoded book where they just ripped pieces of copy out of his book and posted them at different locations that meant something to Jay-Z's growing up, whether it was in New York or Miami. And they just left them out there in the real world for people to discover and to build the story themselves. And it became sort of like an online scavenger hunt where people were completing parts of this puzzle. And that was done really well. But Apple, Apple is the king of mystery too, at least when Steve Jobs was alive, you know, all of his secrecy, you got the whole world to wait in anticipation for his next introduction, those big conferences that he would hold and he would hold on to it to the very last minute and then pull something out of his pocket and say, here's what's next, right? He was just so good. I mean, you worked at Shia. when the 1984 ad came out, right? I mean, think about the line at the end of that spot. In that spot, there's all kinds of theater and then they never showed a computer. And at the end was the most mysterious line ever. On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. And they just left it hanging out there. Like, what are they talking about? Who is this company? And what is this thing called Macintosh? Brilliant, we'll love those examples. So let's go to the complete opposite of this, which is your idea of the poorplex. So Jeffrey, why are so many smart, well-intentioned marketers and communicators producing such dross? I think it's always been the case that people, particularly in organizations, don't want to stick their neck out. There's always been a tendency, a natural tendency when people get together of being conservative. Most people, we prefer security. I do think though that it has been accelerated recently by what I think of as the hegemony of the Silicon Valley Wall Street mindset. One of my first jobs was working in IT for an investment bank. And the thing that those two groups of people agree on is efficiency above all. And I believe that because our economy right now is so driven by, on the one hand, finance and finance type thinking and tech and tech type thinking, despite the fact that they often want to pretend that they're, you know, we're completely different, bus coasties coast blah, blah, blah. Those are the two forces that, to a large extent, rule the economy and by connection, the world of marketing now. And that they both are very focused on efficiency. If you can deliver an ad for less money and faster and so forth, you do that. There's a great book called The Subprime Attention Crisis by a guy named Tim Plan, where he talks about this. He talks about sort of the meeting of minds that's taken place in how advertising business, particularly the world of online and programmatic advertising. It's taken finance and financial thinking directly as its model. And I think you can see that it's filtered down into advertising and marketing thinking, again, the emphasis on programmatic advertising, the notion of, well, we just want to get people when they're ready to buy. Think of this as that. Everyone wants to be the bear on the salmon ladder. Nobody wants to be the bear that has to go out into the water and find the salmon and bring them to the, everyone's like, we're just going to stand where we know they're coming and whack them. Because it's efficient. It looks very efficient to do that, to focus on the bottom of the funnel. The problem is one, everyone wants to get there and it becomes a lot less efficient. Everyone, when you have lots of people standing around waiting their turn, trying to get at the fish coming at the bottom of the funnel or at the salmon ladder, it turns into a ridiculous competition. Two is, again, going back to Byron Sharpen, so forth, you need to get people who are not yet ready to buy. That's where you actually, your brand grows. You need to get people who are not yet at the point of buying so that you can buy the keyword on Google AdWords and flash your ad in front of them. And so the boardplex is a mindset. It's a different forces of efficiency that are driving down the sim to the system eventually. The reason why we call it the boardplex is because as an individual working and advertising, it often seems as though the problem is that guy, that client, that board member, or this particular person and so forth, but that's not the way systems work. There's an overarching ideology, there's an economic system, then there's an ideology, and then very importantly, there's a limited set of motivations that are presented to individuals. That's what makes it a boardplex and not simply people who want to be boring. When you're only presented with a certain set of motivations and that those motivations are limited by, my boss's boss has to make his quarterly number. My boss has told me that I need to lower my budget. How am I going to do that? Well, I'm going to stand on the same ladder. Or as many brands have said recently, increasingly, I hear brands saying, we want to drive people to r.com and I think how are you going to do that? People don't naturally wake up and say, "Oh, I'm going to go directly to this." You have to put the message out there. You have to spread it more widely and that means being interesting. That means getting the attention, the voluntary attention of people who don't care about you, who don't even necessarily care about your product at this point. And the boardplex is the interaction of everything from the highest level the direction of the economy, where capitalism is at the moment, all the way down to you sitting across a table from your client and your client going, "I don't know. I don't know. Can't we just do a banner ad that says, like this shoe makes you run faster? There's a lot of lines connecting all of those things and if you don't realize what the true enemy is, then you will go off against particular things that aren't actually the enemy." So we don't want to say we disagree with efficiency. We think efficiency thinking is probably here to say, based on what the kind of economy that we live in now, that they're not going to stop thinking about efficiency. But real ROI, the way clients are measuring the effect of their advertising, comes from we think outthinking people, not outspending people. So what interesting does is it's a very efficient way to cut through and get people to think about your brand. It's a very efficient way to get people to remember your brand and especially at those moments as Byron Shark talks about it, purchasing moments. So interestingly, the business justification for it is about efficiency. And what interestingness does increases the efficiency of your marketing spend. It's more efficient to live rent free in people's minds than it is to keep reminding them daily through expensive media that you exist. If you make yourself interesting and as Jeffrey said, grab a hold of people's voluntary willingness to think about you. That's a much more efficient use of your money. So the book that you're working on together, which sounds fascinating, is that going to be primarily about brands and comms or would it have inevitably a slightly wider view? Who's going to be audience for it? Of course, work planners and marketers. And the people that we interview are at the majority of them are people who work in marketing in one way or another. But it is broader than that. Interestingness, it goes to everything from politics, to journalism, to data management. There are all kinds of areas where people need to be more interesting. Where interestingness can be of value. Well, to that point in politics, it's just interesting. We're talking just as the switch from Joe Biden to Kamala has kind of happened within the Democrats. It's going to be interesting. Exactly what you're talking about. And conversely, there was a fantastic headline in the Guardian about four months ago, where they were looking at the predicted turnout of the UK election. And headline said, lowest ever turnout predicted with quote unquote, "dollars ditch water." Stop, stammer and soonag. One dull politician is dangerous. Two dull politicians are very dangerous for a different reason, right? Which is people just to engage people. So they, I'd tell you, by the idea that there's much more bigger consequences about being dull out here. We need to pay attention to. We've got, in addition to speaking to the agency people, we are also speaking to journalists, to technologists, and lawyers, and again, other people for whom the concept, the need to be interesting is relevant. One of the most interesting areas, I think, is journalism. I spoke to a guy from the economist who he talked about. What does that first paragraph have to do? We talked about the way that media sources focus on that. And I remember the thing that I had heard from somebody else, a guy who works at Radio 4, Radio 4 is one of the icons of interestingness, as far as I'm concerned, who talks about the Malcolm, which is, of course, a reference to Malcolm Gladwell, and how that first paragraph has to do a number of things that add up to, I think, our five qualities of interestingness. It has to begin with detail. It was 4.30 AM, and Jim McDowell knew that he had a problem that he couldn't fix. That kind of thing. Generally speaking, it begins with some kind of negative emotionality, some problem, some incongruity that is not understood, and that you won't understand until you read the article. Authenticity, it's about a person. You need to know that person. One of the things the guy from the economist told me he was writing a story about defense policy and about young people's attitudes across Europe towards defense policy. And he made the decision early on that he was going to focus on the Netherlands and Sweden, because he knew that there was this really unexpected difference between the willingness of young people to fight for their country. You think of Sweden as like their passages. They don't want to get involved. But. the interesting thing is and the thing that he started with was a specific young recruit in Sweden talking about his pride in his country and why he felt that was worthwhile to fight and why you had to sometimes fight and who knew that this would get people's attention because it's not expected, it's incumbent for us. And what do you have a title for your book? We like the word "interestingness" as opposed to just interesting. One of the reasons is and one of the things that we haven't spoken about is the word "interesting" needs to be rehabilitated. Even the people that we spoke to, people who we consider to be icons of interestingness, when you say "interesting" to them, they have a number of responses, none of which are good. One is they say "that sounds like thinking." We want people to feel, we don't want people to think, then we talk about how "look, thinking, feeling" are not the same thing, feeling is always based on an appraisal, a cognitive appraisal, thinking has to do with keeping in people's mind, etc. And then some people say "but that's what people say when they're indifferent." The guy from YouTube said to us like "interesting." Wouldn't it be better to say "I'm really psyched about it?" And again, we have to say "it's not dismissive." In fact, once you start paying attention to interestingness and you start looking for it and the things you read and the things you watch, look for where people use the word "interesting." Because often in conversation, it seems like it's dismissive. But it's really a heat sink. It's a heat sink for attentional worth. It draws in a number of diffuse things that people have a hard time putting together and they squish it into that word to say to whomever they're speaking to. This will be worth your time. They just can't quite tell you exactly why yet. They've has this great poster at his house that says "I love it. What is it?" That's one of the first things I noticed about interestingness was in focus group showing people ads and they get this look on their face. If it's a good ad, if it's an interesting ad, they get this look on their face, which is a combination of frowning eyebrows and smiling mouth as if they're working on something and they know it's going to be satisfying once they get to it. It's the same expression you see when people play video games when they're just about to beat the boss level. Psychologists like Paul Ackman and Paul Silvia talk about, you know, ask, is interestingness an emotion? Don't emotions all have particular facial expressions associated with them? I've seen this expression. It is an emotion. It's a strange one. It's an incongruous one because it has combines effort with pleasure that isn't about to be experienced but hasn't been experienced yet. But when you show people great advertising, that's the expression that they get on their faces. Three bits of advice. It says a little bit about how to help your clients will brand in and be more interesting. One, make a brief thematic. When I worked on Nike, Nike would often come in and say, we need to just do it ad. And there's a product, but don't worry about that. This needs to be an ad that expresses in a new, interesting way what just do it is all about. So I made an Excel spreadsheet and I really suggest this as a very concrete, practical thing to do for any brand is make yourself a spreadsheet where you just have a bunch of adjectives or words that could be associated with your brand. Run it across the top and run it down the side. And then in each cell, it says, this is that. This is that. This is that. So when I just do it brief thematic, it says, sweat is death. Music is winning. But dying is something fun. And it's mind blowing. It really is. One of the great things about being interesting is generativity. It's not just a matter of can you come up with an interesting communication today. You have to create an ongoing stream of unexpected things that are still within the brand. And this is a really mechanical, concrete way to do that. The first time I did it, I was astounded at how many of this else had already been done. Pain is music done. You know, hurt. Fantastic ad. So that's one thing. Make yourself a brief thematic too. Make sure that the people who work for you and your clients find the things that they're making fun, interesting, and worthy of a party conversation. It's easy to say, well, we just did. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't. No, it does matter. Better ads come when the people who are making them feel good about going to a party and saying, I work in advertising. And that when people say, oh, really tell me what you do. They're proud and excited. And they're having fun. It's easy to look at advertising as just a means to an end. That kind of efficiency orplex approach to say like, well, you know, all you have to do is make a work for them on it. No. When people are having fun, they're going to do better work. They're going to do more interesting work when they're proud of it, when they can talk about it. The third thing I would say is ask your clients, the pop-flop question. Ask your clients if we could create communication for you that would hijack people's minds and without their thinking at all would make them go zombie-like to the store and buy your product. Would you do that? And if they say yes, don't work with those people. Do you use that as a filter? Yeah. You do? Yeah, excellent. Work with people who say, no, I want to treat as Dave said earlier, I want to treat people as thinking human beings. And I understand as Mr. Couldby once said, people don't mind being sold to as long as you do it in a way that is authentic, that is human, and that delivers them some value. Yeah. Give them something to think about, something that will linger in their minds. Thank you very much indeed. Dave and Geoffrey, really enjoyed the conversation. We did too. No, thank you. Yeah, super fun to talk about. We've talked a lot about advertising in this, not least because of the fascinating experience they both had as part of Nike's advertising agency. But as they remark, this obviously is much broader than advertising alone. In Peter Biscuit's 2023 book Pandora's Box, The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television, Biscuit talks about how many of the characters and the new generation of television programs, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Weeds, Dexter and so on, were born from a creative freedom given to its program makers by HBO and a couple of the others. And the realization that being interesting as a character here was more important to the audience than being likeable. I think one can see a lot of Dave and Geoffrey's model in television today, really, that wonderful thought they reference of Robert McKee's about how you don't keep the audience interested by giving information, but by withholding information, delayed gratification, if you like. Well, I'm recording this at the same time, so I'm watching season three of the White Lotus, where, as you know, if you watch it, mystery and withhold information is a key part of what keeps us all grit. And talking of delayed gratification, I should probably just tell you what happened to my colleague in that sushi restaurant Santiago. She'd known since she said some people in the street when she went into the restaurant, but they hadn't been doing much and she hadn't paid much attention to them. But as she and her friends started eating, the powers that be on the streets of Santiago clearly decided that whatever those people in the street were doing, they didn't want them doing it anymore, and they started firing tear gas canisters at them. So what happened, I asked her? Oh, she said, well, the restaurant was open-sided with these big metal shutters, so the staff just pulled the shutters down, and we sat in the dark and finished our sushi, crying. It's the most wonderfully strange image, startling and funny, unique measure. Incongruity, details, maybe even some mixed emotions. For me, it fits a chord of Jeffrey and Doe's fascinating model pretty well. And as I think, it will be some book. Thank you for listening to Let's Make It More Interesting for the Epic Fish, and a very big thank you to Ruth Mideter, to Travis, my producer, at a tiny podcast. See you next time.