Transcript

Bennie F Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for an episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We hope to introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. 

Today, we have an incredibly special guest, the one and only Marcus Collins. Marcus is currently a Professor at the University of Michigan, and prior to that served as Head of Strategy for Widener Kennedy. He’s a recipient of numerous awards, including Ad Ages and Crane’s 40 under 40 leadership awards, and is an inductee into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame. Marcus began his career in music and in tech with a startup he co-founded before working on iTunes and Nike Sport Music initiatives at Apple, running both Digital Strategy for Beyonce and various other global brands. He served as a juror with the Con Lions International Festival of Creativity and leads a course with them this year. He’s also released his book, which is a best seller, which focuses on the idea of marketing as a cheat code entitled “For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want To Be.” Marcus, my brother, thank you for coming to the podcast.

Marcus Collins 

Thanks for having me. This is a blast.

Bennie 

It’s, you know, we’re going to start off. I’m going ask this simple question because you tend to defy the space time continuum. My friend, you are everywhere. Every moment all at once, and it’s been phenomenal to see. I naively said about a year ago when I noticed that we were always on the docket together that I would follow you around. I concede I can’t keep up.

Marcus 

It’s a blessing, man. I’m very, very grateful that the world has opened up the way it has to give me opportunities to preach the gospel. I I feel like I’m in service of evangelizing an idea that not only helps our industry, helps our discipline, but I’m naive enough to believe that that could actually help how we engage in the world as citizens of the world. So I counted all the blessings.

Bennie

I count a blessing on my end that I’ve got a chance to sit in the audience and be, and watch you have the conversations and see the people to the left and right front and back of me have that moment of aha, have that insight moment when they hear your stories, the data and the strategy come to life. And so this has been a global conversation. I’ve seen you speak all over the world now officially and watching audiences have that moment.

Talk about that, what it’s meant to be able to change the way marketers and business leaders are thinking about strategy in our world.

Marcus

I think that’s the most rewarding part of all of it. You know, I, for long had been a marketing practitioner only. It wasn’t until I did a guest lecture here in my alma mater where I teach now at the Ross school of business, university of Michigan, that it’s something inside of me awakened. You know, I remember doing a guest lecture for one of my professors, one of my favorite professors at business school, person named John Branch. He brought me back to give a talk and had like a 20 minute talk that I gave and just seeing the light you know, light up in people’s eyes. And I was like, oh man, like this is a thing. And I remember feeling so intrinsically rewarded, just as rewarded as I felt putting a new idea out in the world on behalf of a brand. I felt the same way putting people in the world. And I was like, this is a thing. And you know, selfishly, the better I got at that helping explain ideas, you know, in a way that’s digestible, but still keeps its integrity.

It’s not watered down, so it keeps its integrity, but it’s digestible. The better I was at my practice, I’d go, oh, this is the thing. Why am I doing more of this? One foot in academia, one foot in practice. And from that guest lecture back, and I think that was 2012, maybe 2013, perhaps, since then, I’ve been full tilt. One foot in both worlds.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Bennie

I think it’s incredibly powerful to look at, like you said, the practice informing the lecture and the lecture informing the practice. And go in and I think, you know, we’ve talked about this a lot at ANA about breaking out, you know, the silos that you’re either an academic or you’re practitioner or you’re a student. 

Marcus 

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bennie

When in reality, what you represent is we’re always all of these things. Right.

Marcus 

At the same time, in fact, the idea is that, you know, we take the concepts that are rigorously interrogated from a scholarly perspective and apply the so what to it, the pragmatism to it. And when we are in practice, the ideas think about what are the underlying physics that inform how and why these things operate so that we might be able to create interventions based upon what we know about humanity, what we know about science.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Mm-hmm.

Marcus

And if we stay in a student posture, then we’re always learning, right? It’s, it’s, it’s not until we sort of, adopt hubris that we go, I know it all that we stop learning is when we, when we adopt this idea that we know everything. Cause I’ve been a creative director for 20 years. I’ve been a chief strategy officer for 30 years. I know everything… In that moment, that is when you are in decline in that moment. 

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Mm.

Marcus

And what I credit my scholarly work to, my academic work to, as a student in particular, like literally as a doctoral student, is that I realize I know so little about this world, so very little, even with a doctorate, like I know a lot about one thing, but there’s so much more I have no clue about. So I stay in a posture where I’m constantly learning, which means you’re constantly getting better.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Bennie

Right. And as we think about that, that feeds our creativity and innovation, right? Cause you’re asking the questions why. And what I like to ask my team is, why not? Right. 

Marcus

That’s right, that’s right.

Bennie

It’s like, let’s, let’s break it up some more because you know, when we think about it, I had a friend of mine who worked at a big, big brand. won’t, we won’t say the name super creative, super known for marketing space in there. And he had the hardest job in the world. He was working on the innovation space. So he had to go up against past success and legacy.

Marcus 

Mm.

Bennie 

And which is probably even more challenging because now you got data and sales for 50 years. And he’s going up and going, I get that we were successful for this, but tomorrow is that.

Marcus 

That’s right. That’s right. You know, there’s- there’s an economist in the 1940s, German by the name of Joseph Schompeter. And he brought forward this idea of creative destruction. And his idea was that the only way that you can prepare for the future is to destroy the present. It’s sort of like you only have so many Lego pieces. 

Bennie

Yes. Mm-hmm. Right.

Marcus 

And if you make a whole castle, you use all the pieces, but you don’t want to make a ship. Well, you don’t have enough pieces. So you got to tear down Lego pieces that make up the castle and use them to make up the ship. And that’s how it goes when it comes to innovation, when it comes to future casting. We have to sort of burn the boats in many ways, destroying where we are to get to where we want to be.

Bennie 

Right now that idea of creative destruction is a really great metaphor and a really great creative crisis moment for many brands because naturally the structure of brands had been these are things that we build. Now we know that brands are living entities like anything else. If they’re not growing, they die. But so much of our language around brands is a stationary. I’ve built this castle to go over your metaphor. Now I built this castle. Now what happens when the world changes?

Marcus 

Yeah. Yes.

Bennie

My consumers are more empowered. My consumers are younger.

Marcus

And the thing is there’s so much to learn from creatives about creativity. No artists worth their weight in salt, no artists that we respect and love and revered ever stayed stagnant. 

Bennie

Mm-hmm, right.

Marcus

They always moved. They always ventured. They always subverted. You know, of my favorite producers is Pharrell Williams. Pharrell at a time when the Neptune’s were dominating the airwaves… 

Bennie 

Right.

Marcus

He decided to change all the sonic aesthetics of the Neptune’s production changed the way they thought about approaching music, changing the beeps and bips that were known as the Neptune sound, completely abandoned it. Because he said that we have to subvert ourselves to get to the next level. And at first people were like, what are you doing, Pharrell? What are you doing, Chad Hugo? But out of that, we got, Drop It Like It’s Hot. We got all this music that has lived far beyond the media window that was the time the single was launched to be a part of the cultural zeitgeist today, 20 years later.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Marcus 

Pharrell wouldn’t have gotten there if he didn’t change. Michael Jackson wouldn’t have gotten there if he didn’t change. Prince wouldn’t have got there if he didn’t change. Like it requires subverting ourselves to get to new territories.

Bennie

And it’s really powerful in that space in there because artists have everything to lose and nothing to gain if you’re looking at it from the outside. But if you’re creating it from the inside to your point, it’s actually the reverse of that. Staying in one spot is death. Not trying.

Marcus 

That’s right.

Marcus

Exactly. That’s right. That’s right. And it is creatively stagnant. You know, if, if I, if my job is to create, if I am doing the same thing, am I being creative? Right? Am I like Dan Wyden was on record for saying this, that creativity is subversive, that it is by definition taking what is reworking it, contorting it, recontextualizing it, reimagining it, right?

 It’s this subverting what is orthodoxical to get to something new. So if you are an artist, by its very nature, you are subverting the orthodoxy until you become the orthodoxy and then have to subvert yourself, which goes back to Joseph Schompeter’s idea about creative destruction.

Bennie

Right. Right.

You have to, there is a quote that I love in a conversation that someone had with Miles Davis. And he was like, if you see me playing like the old music, meaning Kind of Blue, which is, you know, best album ever, right? If you see me playing that live, I’m already dead. Right? In that type of space, right? That you flip greatness on its head.

Marcus 

Mm. Yes, exactly.

Bennie 

Now we think about that in our creative space, we get these examples and get excited about it, right? Because it’s always great to talk about it once we know the first drops of Drop It Like It’s Hot and anyone pops up. It still amazes me that my kids who weren’t even born when Drop It Like It’s Hot was out there, if they hear that, they know exactly what, it’s over, right?

Marcus

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Bennie 

And you know what? I’m a bad parent, so I didn’t play it. Which is, I always say that because this draws the line. I’m either a bad parent for not playing it, and I’m bad parent for playing it. So either way,

Marcus

Well, there’s the clean version. It’s a clean version. And honestly, my youngest, my five year old Ivy. She knows as, as soon as the drums hit, she knows the Drop Like It’s Hot because she loves the piece by piece Lego movie from Pharrell. So she knows it. And it’s the clean version. So feel like, look, it’s cool for Lego. It’s cool for my kids.

Bennie

But what you got of the the Lego statue that the mantra that’s on their offices throughout the country that blows me every time. That’s only the best is good enough. So if it’s good for Lego. It’s good for me. 

Marcus

Good for me

Bennie

But, you know, how do brands deal with this? Right. Because we’re seeing the throughput. So the story is we’re telling the success of the story once you’ve gone through the jump. But it’s in that messiness of the jump in which markets, a brand manager- I want to keep my job in which the marketplace think about these brand destruction moments. 

Marcus

Mm-hmm. Right.

Bennie

Let’s take CVS is a great example. When they knew that to get to health, they were going to have to let go of nicotine and nicotine made so much a part of their business that this had to be a concerted effort that we’re all in to make this jump. You know, that’s a scary business meeting. That’s a scary board meeting. You know, we now know on the other side of it.

Marcus 

That’s Yeah.

Bennie 

What a breakthrough for CVS Health and the industry in the category. And that’s as a society, right? But what advice do you have for those who are in the mix like Marcus and Vinny? Yeah, I gotta present the strategy. And they want the old version. They want the space that goes in there. They want what has been. How do we break that addiction?

Marcus 

Yeah. Well, it’s so there there are there are pervasive and perverse incentives that keep us from doing that. There is a constant look at the stock price. There’s a constant reminder of our quarterly reports. There’s a constant reminder of the 10K that says I am being constantly evaluated. And these evaluations, they don’t factor in time.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Marcus 

They don’t factor in the time horizon as necessary for new ideas to take root for new ideas to, take shape. So I empathize with contemporary brand managers because this is a great challenge. the other hand, as much as I empathize, I also say you got to jump because the only thing keeping you on the shore and away from where you want to be is a body of water that you’re afraid to swim through.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Marcus 

And the question becomes like, what if I fail? What if I don’t make it? What if you do? This is all a matter of perspective. And when I think about, for the culture, the book that I wrote, I think about, you it’s been two years this May since the book came out and had the great benefit of being able to evangelize the thinking across the world and different companies, different institutions, different entities, different categories, different contexts.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Marcus 

And what I find is that the most powerful thing is perspective. It’s just the way that we see the world. It literally is just the way that we see the world. For some, a cow is leather. For others, a deity. For others, it’s dinner. Which one is it? Depends on who you are and how you see the world. For some, you know, they’d say that taking this risk can mean my job. For someone else to say taking this risk could mean not winning. And that’s not acceptable.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Mm-hmm.

Marcus

I remember being in my MBA program, having been in the music business before I came back to school to get an MBA. And I really want to work at Apple. The fact that’s the only company I want, I really want to work with is Apple, want to work for Apple. And I remember someone saying, you know, well, are you recruiting other places? I’ll go, no, why would I do that? I want to work at Apple. And they were like, but like, what if you don’t get Apple? And I was like, well, that’s just not a choice. I mean, you’ve got to be delusional.

It’s healthy, professional delusion that allows you to see it. And when you see it, you now allocate all of your energy to getting there. But if you’re constantly looking back, well, we know what scripture says about looking back. You turn into a pillar of salt and you stay exactly where you are. And that’s not where you want to be with Lot’s wife. You want to be looking forward because that’s where opportunity exists.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

Right? And the old adage that you don’t see a timid trapeze artist. Right? You’re either all in, you’re either all in or you’re not.

Marcus 

That’s right. That’s right. You got to burn the boats, man. You’ve got to burn the boats if you want to win. And that’s the difference between those who, who tend to do great things, those who tend to do average things and those who do nothing, right? It’s the doing nothing that gets you to failure every time. This full stop. You do nothing. Failure is a barrel.

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

Marcus 

But those who sort of maintain a status quo, maintain the orthodoxy, then you are just statistically going to be average. So you go, well, why isn’t my brand not winning? Well, because you are doing, you’re regressing to the mean. Why isn’t my category expanding? Because you are moving exactly where the category is. You’re regressing to the mean. It’s until someone says, no, I want to do more. I’m going to jump.

Bennie 

Yeah, because you’re right. You’re not playing to win. You’re just playing not to lose, which is a different space. 

Marcus

Exactly. Exactly.

Bennie

So I’m going to extend that a bit. How do we as executive marketing leaders get our teams from doing the work to great work?

Marcus 

That’s hard. Because getting people to move from doing D work to B work is much harder than going from a B to an A. Because D to B are really big things you gotta change. Just do this, do that. It’s like, know, they say when you’re overweight, you can lose weight faster than those who are just a little bit overweight and just wanna get thinner. Like, that’s harder to do. Those smaller things are harder to accomplish.

Bennie

Yes. Right.

Bennie

Right. Right, right, right, right.

Marcus 

So that B to A, going from a B plus to an A requires meticulous, meticulous attention and attentionality in the decisions that you do because those small little things that seem fringe, that seem like it doesn’t make a difference, those are the differences. Those are the differences that get you from good to great. They get you from B to A. So how do you get your team there? The first is that they got to believe it. You got to believe it, right?

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Marcus

The literature talks about organizational culture being sort of shared assumptions that we have in the organization that help us inform how we see the world, then ultimately how we navigate through the world. So your team has to believe that it’s possible. What are we in service of? What are we trying to get done? And how are we going to do this? 

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Marcus 

And once you identify where we’re going, the idea now as a leader is to inspire people to pay mind to the small things. Inspire them to pay mind to the technical little things that seem so trivial in nature, but in aggregate, they are massive.

Bennie 

It’s so good to say, hear you say that it expresses something that I’ve been talking to my team about. And it’s one of the moments that I love as a leader. When you see everything start to click and it’s not when you win the big championship… It is when you see it click and you see the belief come in and you’re like, wait a minute. They believe that we can now do this. You see the fear go away. 

Marcus 

Mm-mm. That’s right.

Bennie

You see the belief, you haven’t won anything yet, but yet you can see that change and you’re just waiting for that next rent. Like, wait until they see us next time.

Marcus 

It’s all, I mean, it is all belief. You know, like, I study culture, so I’m always thinking about all the ways in which culture is observed, religion being one of them. And we just see so many close associations, you know, in theology, you know, it talks about faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. And through it, elders obtain a good report. It’s the not seen, but believing something is on the other side.

that you step out confidently, boldly. And when you are there in unison, when you are locked in, the unimaginable seems possible for the unimaginable. Right, look, I’m from Detroit, I’m a Pistons fan, obviously. And when I think about the Pistons in their heyday of winning, it wasn’t because we had the best players in the planet. We didn’t have- Isaiah Thomas was a monster, but we didn’t have Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. 

Bennie 

That’s it.

Marcus 

We didn’t have super teams as they have today. We just had people who believed, collectively believed and played because they believed. They played like they believed and they were able to take down giants.

Bennie

Well, I will add to your Detroit love and give you my DC connection into it. Talk about belief. Your last championship, four of the five starters all played for the Washington Wizards Bullets and people said they couldn’t play together. But then skip ahead a few years, they all rally back together and they’re in Detroit and they win the championship. And it’s always blown my mind because it was the same exact guys that the critique was they couldn’t play together. But your last ring.

Marcus

Just what I’m talking about. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. But they believed they believed they had to shared assumption about the world. I I think about, you know, when Isaiah Thomas was with the Pistons and everyone said the Pistons really play thuggish basketball and they were, you know, they were gangsters and ruthless and very physical. Yeah, yeah. 

Bennie

Rasheed.

Marcus 

And Al Davis, who was the owner of the LA Raiders, he told Isaiah, lean into that. He’s like, yo, they’re call you, they’re calling you a bad boy, be a bad boy. That’s what you guys are. That’s how you see the world. We play tough because we mean business. And it’s that unifying idea that brought a ragtag group of folks together to play unbelievably well. The same thing with, you know, 2004 Pistons, right?

Bennie 

Yes. Right.

Marcus

Rag-tagging with people is like y’all you, you guys okay you guys have misfits… Island of misfits but here they are playing under one belief we’re gonna go to work we’ll go to work

Bennie

Which is incredible in this space. I look at now contemporary brands and contemporary brand leaders who are embracing this space, right? And they’re going in and they’re up against the challenge and they’ve got less than one, right? They’ve made it through the first time, but we know as difficult as it is to win the championship once, it’s even harder to run it back.

Marcus

Well, check this out. There are leaders and there are few of them that not only have not only ran it back for a back to back run, a three Pete, there is a brand that has had, I’m not mistaken, 23 quarters of consecutive growth under the same leader. And that leader is Corey Marchesoto, the CMO of Elf. She is a monster.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. My goodness. Yes. Yes.

Marcus 

Why? Because she is relentless about what this brand believes. It believes in democratized access. And it’s not only present in the products that they bring to market, these prestigious products that they enable to be consumed at not just a Sephora, but also at a CVS, right? At a C store. They ensure that everyone in the organization has access to shares, ownership in an organization. This is a publicly traded company that everyone, if you are janitor, or the CEO, everyone owns this thing, democratized access.

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm. Right.

Marcus 

And they look at the world and say, yo, that’s not democratized. People don’t have access to that. Let’s poke it in the eye. Take their look on their board. They realize they have an extremely diverse board of directors and realize the rest of the corporate world, public traded world does not. So they do a campaign not about beauty, not about cosmetics, but about access.

They realized that I think it said 70% of people on boards are white men named Richard, Rick, Ricky, or some, some, some permutation of that. So they had a campaign that said so many Dicks, not enough for everyone else.

Bennie 

Hmm. Hahaha. There it is.

Marcus 

Brilliant, 23 consecutive quarters of growth. That doesn’t happen by happenstance. That doesn’t happen by luck. That is by design. And that happens because Corey and her partner, the CEO, Terrain, they are maniacal about what they believe. And everyone who works at Elf, Elf, they are believers. And they bring their collective brilliance to the table to help Elf realize what they set out to do.

Bennie 

And it’s incredible in that story that that buy-in is fully integrated and we’ve throughout, right? Whether you’re working on supply chain, on a marketing ads, on social, or you’re a scientist in the space, you’re all committed to the direction that ELF is going. 

Marcus

That’s right. That’s right.

BREAK 

Bennie 

So, you know, one of the things that, you know, I really love that you get a chance to do is you get to be this observer of great cultures in space. And you’ve had a chance to serve in kind of you know, executive, scholar and residence roles. So let’s talk about what that means for you and your practice, because you get a chance to be an elf one day and tick tock the next, right?

Marcus 

Yeah. Yeah. It’s it. I mean, I am so unbelievably fortunate that I get to not just be a practitioner, because I’ve always done that. And I just be a scholar because I’ve done that over the last decade plus not just do those two things together. So I’ve done that for the last decade plus. But the last couple of years, I’ve been a part of the team, not as an agent or agency.

Bennie

Right.

Marcus 

not as this sort of outside voice, but sort of an outside invoice. So one minute I’m in the mix with the folks at Converse thinking about what is the future of the brand and how it’s going to tell this rich, rich legacy that it has in a way that is compelling through a contemporary lens. On the other end, think about TikTok. This is an environment where culture is being negotiated and constructed on their platform ad nauseum. How do they tell that story? 

Not to the outside world because they know it, how they tell it to their customers, the brands that advertise on TikTok, how they communicate that in such a way that they too understand it. And then be able to get on the phone with the folks at McDonald’s to talk about fandom. It’s it’s unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable what I’ve been able to learn, what I’ve been able to glean as a scholar, as a researcher, as a practitioner.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Marcus 

But also, you know, as a writer, you know, I get to author sort of the connecting points that seem disparate, but actually tell kind of a holistic story. And it’s really about the power of culture, not just the consumption culture, but the culture inside the organization that makes a tick and ultimately helps it win.

Bennie 

Right, right. Well, it’s beautiful to think about this metaphor as kind of a universe and these gravities, gravitational pulls that you’re coming in. So you’re going in and out of these alignments, but if culture is the sun and the solar system all moving around, you’re getting a chance to experience it from different points. We’re doing our space.

Marcus 

Mm-hmm. Amen.

Bennie 

Cause you think about it, McDonald’s and Elf are still dealing with a larger macro culture that’s affecting each of them.

Marcus 

That’s right. That’s right. And it’s, and it’s because of this, it’s because of these sort of shifts that they experience that I’m able to engage with them in a way that informs the other. So when I’m talking to McDonald’s, you know, can say, Hey, you know, here’s what I learned from the folks at Elf. When I’m talking to, to, Tik Tok, I can say, here’s what I learned at the, from the folks at Walmart. 

Bennie

Mm-hmm.  Right.

Marcus 

Collectively, they just allow me to, to, to moving space that normally wouldn’t be able to be in and to do things that normally wouldn’t be able to do.

Bennie

It’s really, really powerful. So I’m going to throw in, we have all these variables that change and adjust and speed and slow down. I’m going to throw into you your thoughts on time because you brought up Converse as a brand. And I’m thinking about that as kind of my own life experience that I full disclosure was not in the Converse brand universe growing up, right? That wasn’t, that wasn’t my space in there, but you know what I just bought my son… 

A pair of black and white Converse, that he asked for, that he sought out, that he wanted as a part of a brand. And I love the fact that a generational swing within a brand that was around there, but wasn’t in my cultural context growing up, but now is. And the generation before that, Converse was the cultural context.

Marcus 

That’s right. And this is sort of the beauty of culture that it sort of ebbs and flows. Things become, you know, they go in trends. That’s when we rely on the people only to decide what is acceptable and what’s not. What’s, you know, legitimate, what isn’t. But that’s when brand marketers really are in their bag, that they see the waves that are happening and they interject with interventions to keep it in the zeitgeist.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Marcus 

They contribute to the conversation in such a way that even though things are changing, the waves are moving, they stay on top of the waves, not because of what the product is, but because of the way the brand sees the world and the brand weighs into the discourse through its point of view that gives it reason to be relevant today, right now. I think that’s really, really powerful.

Bennie 

So much so, so in keeping with the notion of other things moving around, since things go so fast, tell me a time my friend where you messed up, but you still won. You know, because we have these, you get the very real, talked to marketers like yourself all over the world and there’s always a subtext offline of the fear of not just failure, but fear of big failure. Right, right? Cause you can mess up a little bit, but…

Marcus 

Hahaha. Yes. No, I, yeah. yeah. I talk about this in the book. it, you know, it’s with a Sprite and Obey or Thirst. One of my favorite campaigns ever made. And I had a chance to work on Sprite in the, the early 2010s and re-invigorate obey or thirst. And we had this great campaign that we thought was great. That was going to, you know, play with the words a little bit. So it’d like Sprite only for the thirsty.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Marcus

Unfortunately, know, Thirsty used to meant, you know, go after what you cared about, like trust your instincts. But by the time our campaign came out, the word Thirsty meant something totally different, you know, thanks to a song called Mercy. Exactly. Exactly. Thirsty meant pathetic. And so even though that was happening, that was the context in which our campaign was coming out. You know, we were like, God, no.

Bennie

Hahaha!

Bennie

You don’t want to be in that category. That was just right. That was just right.

Marcus

Sprite’s been talking about thirsty way before this song became a thing. We’ll be just fine. And we put it in the world and it was disastrous. It was terrible. mean, like the verbatims coming from the internet when the campaign dropped, it was horrific. It was not great. The client had us pull the campaign, pull the TV 18 hours from when it had aired and we were unceremoniously fired two weeks later. 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Marcus

That was a catastrophic failure, but I learned so much from it. And you you say you learn from your failures and it’s so very true is that you’ve got to listen, man. You like you are operating in a culture, right? Or trying to engage within a cultural context. But that culture is happening inside of a broader culture.

Bennie 

Right, right.

Marcus 

And you have to understand, you know, if you are a will inside the wheel, like what’s happening outside the wheel that ultimately informs how your messaging, your product, your campaign is going to be digested, is situated in something else. And without understanding those relationships, that context, and you set yourself up to fail.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Bennie

Right. Definitely in that space. And we think about the metaphor in the solar system again and people spinning. What happens when the core of the culture changes dramatically and has a speed up? Right. There’s some things that we kind of get caught in and we’re like, okay, this is in this moment. This is in the general zeitgeist of the moment. And then the world changes a bit. I’m seeing some brands dealing with that where

They thought that their embrace with culture were all going, culture’s going 60 miles an hour, we’re going 60 miles an hour. All is good. But then there are moments that come and ramp up a cultural moment. And the culture’s going at 200, and we’re still at 60.

Marcus 

Yeah, you know what those things do happen and I think about it. The scholarship talks about it as fast culture and slow culture. Fast culture are the things that change. Normally pretty fast. The artifacts were done clothing, the behaviors that are normative right or mannerisms, even dance if you will. In our language, colloquialism, slang right again. Thirsty meant one thing in the 90s and it meant something different in the 2010s. Extremely different. Those things change even faster… 

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Right.

Marcus

Then they did back then because the media windows are so rapid and our access to information is so pervasive that things are just constantly shuffling in. That is the fast culture is unbelievably fast. And what was 60 today to your point was 200 miles an hour. But what changes far more slowly is the slow culture. And that’s the beliefs and ideologies.

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

Marcus

You know, like while our lexicon may change or what we wear may change, of the sort of long standing foundational beliefs stay the same. And that’s how it goes for brands. The manner in which we may show up, the mannerisms, the context, the aesthetics, those things may shift, but what the brand believes, how it sees the world, that’s supposed to stay anchored. 

Bennie 

Okay, right.

Marcus

It’s that belief system in which we’re able to scaffold new contemporary and contextually relevant expressions of the brand because the brand hasn’t changed, it’s just the context around it has.

Bennie 

Right. So I’m going to accordion or extend this a bit, you know, and think about a flat flattened more integrated space. There was a time in which we thought of ideas and cultural as a unidirectional space. Right. Remember at a time we were growing up, my friend, when a movie came out in the U.S. and it was like a two month head start for the rest of the world. But now the kind of flattening of everything launches everywhere pretty much at the same time, with the exception of some IP issues here or there. Right.

Marcus

That’s right. Mm.

Bennie

Pretty much the notion that I can see a movie opening weekend in New York and have it come out in London and have it be in Singapore at the same time. And that ideas and trends can come that way. Now we see a space in which culture and influence flows back and forth as well. 

Marcus 

That’s right. Yeah.

Bennie 

How do you encourage brands to stay relevant in that space where good ideas come from everywhere? All the time, right? How do get brands to be in tune with? I know my friends at Pepsi, I’ll give them a nod since we did Coke earlier. They have like 22 design centers across the globe. And so work on Cheetos is happening in Mexico City, but work on Cherry Coke is happening in London.

Marcus 

I go back to one of our early illustrations. I go back to the music industry. Back in the heyday, not even the heyday, like if you think of some of the most creative projects that came out in the world, it was at a time where there were multiple people working at the same time.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Marcus 

Studio A is Studio B, Studio C is Studio D. Artists will rent out an entire studio and every single workroom in there, everyone was creating. And the role of an artist sort of elevated from being I am sort of the vessel in which ideas are created and distributed, but instead it became I am a curator.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Right, right. 

Marcus 

And the curation of those ideas are then interpreted through my point of view. And I think that like that’s creativity in a modern day, that there’s so many workstations, so many rooms where ideas are being concepted, conceptualized and informed that you go, that’s interesting. And because I have a point of view in the world, I can say, that’s really interesting. Let me take that and let me translate through the way I see it, through the way I make meaning of it, through my own cultural lenses. 

That provides a level of not only heterogeneity that leads to new solutions or more novel solutions, but also creates an opportunity for new cognitive space to be developed, to go, I never even thought about it that way. So because this thing is now being introduced to me, it widens the aperture of how I see the world and therefore make decisions in it.

Bennie

Right. It’s, you know, we’ve been talking about music in space before. It really speaks to that role of a songwriter. Right. So you’re putting down the song, you have the lyrics, you have a sense of music, but then you hand it off to an artist and they’re able to take it places that you only hinted at or never even thought about.

Marcus 

That’s right. That’s right. 

Bennie

I’ve seen songwriters or artists work through something and you’ve got it in your mind at one speed and it’s super fast and they come in and take it slow and you’ve changed completely.

Marcus 

Have you heard the demos for Thriller? 

Bennie 

No.

Marcus

So there’s demos of Michael. So Michael had his studio, that he had his crew that he would like demo and work through some ideas. And they worked through some concepts before they presented to Quincy. And then they presented to Quincy. Quincy go, ooh, I like that. I like this. I like that. And then he would add to it. When you hear the demos, you go, man, that sound really good by itself because Michael’s a monster.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Marcus

But soon as you get Quincy’s curation on top of it, you go, oh, okay. That’s the thing. And that’s how we get from good to great. It’s like, it’s that thing. And it may just be, you know, as the lore goes, according to Quincy Jones, rest in peace. You know, when they did, don’t stop till you get enough, Michael said, you know what? This line is like getting in the way of my groove. And Quincy’s like, what line? He’s like, the string line.

Bennie

Mmm. Mm-hmm. 

Marcus 

But it could seem like there’s no way we’re taking that off. Are you kidding me? You smoking crack? That’s going to stay on there because that is what’s making the song and Michael couldn’t see it. Quincy did. It’s having the two perspectives come together to create something great. 

Bennie

Right, right, right.

Marcus

Could you imagine? Don’t stop Till You Get Enough without that line. No way.

Bennie

No, no, no. Well, you know, it’s funny. It makes me think back to the Clive Davis documentary and they’re talking about Whitney Houston. And you have this all right. It’s just like, oh, I’m to put some music on the back end of that Clive Davis takes the track and goes, no, no, it’s good right here. We just, it’s going to start off with just Whitney and the voice. 

Marcus

That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.

Bennie

I don’t need anything else. You know, you hear that, that tension of like, no, it needs to be this other space. I, I.

Marcus

That’s right. That’s right. I mean, can you imagine an I’ll always love you with music at the beginning of that? No way. No way. 

Bennie 

No way!

Marcus

And that’s actually what makes the interpretive departure from Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You to become Whitney’s. It’s her interpretation through her creative, her creative translation. And Clyde being a curator to get that and fight for it.

Bennie

Yes. Yes.

Bennie 

Right. And that space that we can all take a shot at that. I was having a conversation the other day with my wife, who’s a huge Prince fan. And we were talking about Nothing Compares to You. And I was like, so Prince writes this and Sinead O’Connor kills it. 

Marcus 

That’s right. Murders it.

Bennie

Yeah, just, you know, not, we’re not even arguing that, right?

Marcus

Not even debatable.

Bennie 

But then Prince is like, that’s not how it should be done. Okay. And then he comes out. And a level of it was already brilliant and it takes it to that next to the next level and then… 

Marcus 

Yeah. Yeah. 

But that can only happen when you yourself are creative. I mean, otherwise you’re just repeating what you hear. Otherwise you’re just literally like I’ve seen, I’ve seen Pharrell, go back to Pharrell for a moment. I’ve, I’ve heard demos where Pharrell is referencing the track for the artist and the artist literally mimics every line, every lick, everything that Pharrell does. And you go, oh man, that’s not as cool. It would have been so much better if you would have taken the swing and had a point of view that is your own.

Bennie

Right, which I think is incredible advice for our brand leaders, right? To take the swing that is your own. We talk about these kinds of moments that we see, Super Bowl being a great example, right? So that’s when we all get to, in some respects, show our witty advertising wares. 

Marcus

That’s right. Yes.

Bennie

But it’s that moment of how do we find these creativity moments that take the swing?

Marcus

The thing that is reoccurring that I find in my work as a practitioner, putting ideas in the world, as a professor putting people in the world, and now as a professor in residence, helping companies put things, people and ideas in the world, it is a shared point of view. How do you see the world? What is your opinion on the world? And when we take that and juxtapose it to Super Bowl, what we get is a lot of people trying to hit a prototypical brief for Super Bowl. 

We had this many celebrities that does this thing, does that thing. Now you’re solving for an equation as opposed to having an opinion. There’s this great TikTok video that I saw a few weeks ago that I’ve been sharing with my students now at Michigan. And Tom Hanks talks about like an early time in his acting career where there was this really kind of curmudgeon like director.

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

Marcus

That was like ripping into everyone. And in one setting, he was so angry because someone said, you know, what’s my motivation? How do I like approach this, this, the scene? And the director said, that’s your job, not mine. Your job is to show up on time, know the text and have an opinion. And I was like, good Lord, that is it. That is it. When we are engaging in work, whether you are a student or you are a marketer or whatever the case may be.

Bennie 

Right. Yeah.

Marcus 

Show up, know the text, have an opinion. And I think that this is where brands tend to be anemic. We show up, we know the text, we know marketing, we are marketers, we know marketing. 

Bennie

Right. Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Marcus

We don’t often have an opinion. So when we do show up, it often falls flat or it feels route. It feels rehearsed. It feels inauthentic. It feels unreal.

Bennie 

It’s solid 78 average work, right? 

Marcus 

Exactly. That’s right. That’s right. 

Bennie

We talked before, it’s not, you’re gonna graduate, but it’ll be unremarkable, right? So how do you have that moment where you have that insight? I say sitting down there minding my own business during the Superbowl and having a moment when I looked up and I see Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara and I look up and I glance and I go, it’s a Bud Light commercial. And then I hear Rick Ross come in. And I had this moment on paper that probably doesn’t work on paper. 

Marcus 

No haha, No, no. 

Bennie

Doesn’t work on paper, but there’s something brilliant about it in a moment. And it’s the same thing we think about in this year of SNL’s 50th anniversary. So many of the greatest sketches don’t do well at the table read, don’t work on paper. But there are these iconic moments that we look back and you give one line or one space and we know in that moment.

Marcus

But you got to believe it. You got to believe you got you got to believe you got to say I think this is going to work. I believe even though everything says is not going to I am delusional enough to believe in this thing.

Bennie 

And I will tell you just in this moment, Marcus, I need more cowbell. That shouldn’t work, but you’re laughing.

Marcus 

I’m feeling a thing. Something’s missing. I need more cowbells.

Bennie

Yeah. I still to this point of this moment, ooh, we what’s up with that, should not work ever… 

Both (In perfect synchronization)

But it does

Bennie

And the look for our listeners, the pure joy on Marcus’s face when I just said those lines. I don’t have to say anything else. And it is the brilliance. But when I think about you know, in listening to standup comedians and talking about the kind of flow and space in there. They know that if you have to have a certain rhythm of jokes within a certain period of time in order to make a stage presence, in order to have an hour show, you’ve got to hit these punch lines within that space and you can monetize that. 

Marcus 

That’s right, yeah.

Bennie

And there’s a science behind that, that most people wouldn’t think about. And I often think about that as compared to that brief, right? If it’s like the C work is, well, I’ve got to have something weird to make me laugh.

Marcus 

Mm-hmm That’s right. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep

Bennie

In that space in there, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impactful to the work you have at hand.

Marcus

And this is where the science, there’s the scholarship and the practice become invaluable. Because while you can look at all the literature and go, the literature will tell us this, an ad needs to have these things to activate people’s emotions, to get them excited. So you have this, this, that and the third, great. And you put that in a brief and you solve for that equation. You go, here’s the thing on paper, it, it, passes Ipsos. It does all the stuff. And you go, it didn’t work in the marketplace.

Bennie 

Right, right.

Marcus

Because the pragmatism comes from having been on stage, having tried bits, having know what lands, what doesn’t land and go, that looks like it’s funny, but that ain’t funny. And putting the two together, that’s how you get magic.

Bennie

It’s an incredible space in there. So if we think about executive marketers as brands, as magicians, what’s the next trick?

Marcus 

Mm. I say that the most powerful brands today leverage culture as a way to project their identity, as a way to signify who they are in the world. The brands of the future are going to be the brands that are able to facilitate the community of those people. The trick for executive marketers in the future, the next trick are going to be those who are able to understand and facilitate community.

Bennie

Hmm. Hmm. 

Marcus

They’re to be able to say, I’m not activating a group of consumers, I’m activating Swifties. I’m not activating a group of voters in a political party, I’m activating the beehive. I’m activating people who believe. And when those brands who know who they are, they know how they see the world, they know they believe in democratized access, they’re gonna activate the elves who believe that also. Those are the executives that people are gonna be talking about and how do we do more of that?

Bennie 

I think that’s a perfect way to close our conversation with Marcus Collins, putting people in the world, putting ideas in the world, and putting people and old ideas in the world together. 

Marcus, it’s always a pleasure, man. I appreciate your brilliance and commitment and just helping us push through culture to the next.

Marcus 

Thanks for having me brother. This was an absolute pleasure.

Bennie

Likewise, thank you. And thank you all for listening to this episode of Marketing / And. I’m your host AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. We encourage you to reach out to the AMA at AMA.org for a sense of marketing community, for growth, development, empowerment. We encourage you to check out Marcus as he’s speaking and to pick up “For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want To Be.” Thank you.