Ed Cotton: [00:00:00] I worry that people are afraid to leave the office. They're afraid to go outside. They're afraid to talk to strangers. They're afraid to ask questions, and they sit back in their security, relying on what they know and relying on the data that's being pumped at them. I think it's a pretty dangerous place to be.

Chris Kocek: Welcome to any insights yet the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. On today's episode, we talk with Ed Cotton, Award-winning Chief Strategy Officer, photographer, an introspective explorer of human nature. For the past 25 years, Ed has been at the helm of strategic planning, leading strategy at McCann Erickson in Seattle, and then later at Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners.

In his career, he has worked with a wide variety of brands, including Amazon, Apple, Chipotle, Nestle, Nike/Converse, Unilever, and Walmart just to name a few. [00:01:00] Despite all of his experience, though, Ed continues to approach his work with an elegant combination of curiosity, intentional naivete, and a willingness to accept that he doesn't always know the answer.

During our conversation, we talk about some important lessons Ed learned early on in his career and the ways young planners try to prove themselves in high stake situations. We also discussed the surprising disconnect between big data and insights and how advertising is not always the most effective solution to a brand's biggest challenges.

To get things rolling though, I wanted to start by finding out what kinds of projects ED is most excited to work on. Are there any brands that you can't wait to wake up and work on that you just bolt up right in the middle of the night and say, “man, I got an idea. Can't wait to flesh this one out and see where it goes?”

Ed Cotton: To be honest, I find most strategy assignments to me are pretty exciting. There's always [00:02:00] that sort of, what am I gonna discover here, or what am I gonna uncover? There's always, to me, optimism and positivity and opportunity. To be honest, half the battle with these things is for strategists, and I think it's a bit of an unwritten thing, that you are the cheerleader. Somehow, you have to get people excited, and I think that's a lot of time when agencies don't win, it's because they don't have the excitement, and two, that hasn't driven them to a single-minded idea, so they don't have the confidence and the conviction. They go, “you could do this, you could do this, you could do this, or you could do this,” and I just don't believe that's a winning approach.

Chris Kocek: You mentioned being a cheerleader. Are there other things that you think you've always been good at since you first started working in strategy? 

Ed Cotton: Curiosity, at the end of the day, I think digging until you find something and not giving up curiosity, persistence, access are pretty important. A willingness to accept that you don't know the [00:03:00] answer.

I think I've seen a lot of people who jump to conclusions really quickly and they think they know because their grandmother did it this way, and that personal experience makes it impossible for them to understand that the world could be actually different. Just because their grandmother did it that way doesn't mean the rest of the world does it that way.

Chris Kocek: Do you remember at any point working with someone and you thought that's a really good technique, or that's a really good question or was there something like that where there was something there that you could adapt or adopt for yourself? 

Ed Cotton: One of the problems for strategists and strategy as a whole is the expectation that comes with it, that you are the smartest person in the room.

And so some people believe that their job is to prove that they're the smartest person in the room, and maybe they prove it with 150 page decks and maybe they [00:04:00] dominate the conversation. And I think that's something that happens to a lot of people. Why in strategy? Because it's such a weird job.

It's not like you have the clear delineation of exactly what you do marked out in some kind of bible or guide like that explains like it would for a project manager, for a client service person, or for a creative, for an admin managing director. So there's a lot of overcompensation that people who don't really have a lot of security tend to compensate by thinking, “oh, I've got to do this.”

I would probably put myself in that camp in my earlier years of my career. You've gotta prove yourself. How do you prove yourself? It's by showing that you're smarter. And I think that's probably something you learn over time, that maybe it's the art of making other people smarter. That's probably a better way to go.

But when [00:05:00] you're young and you feel like insecure, you try to overdial that smallness. 

Chris Kocek: It takes a while to learn that less is more. 

Ed Cotton: A lot of arrogance in advertising and humility and humbleness. It's almost like a contradiction. You get in a room and you've got the stage right? It's very much, you wanna sell and you want to persuade so humility and humbleness are the antithesis of those things. 

When you are walking into a client in a $30 million pitch, you are on stage, you're on show and the expectation of the client is we need to feel that these guys are rock stars, that they're gonna wow us here. I think that pushes away from like the softer listening.

I just put out a podcast yesterday with an interview with a small agency owner. He said, my secret is telling my perspective clients what we're not good at. It's counterintuitive to what you think might be the last thing you'd wanna say, tell someone. 

Chris Kocek: With a [00:06:00] good Scottish accent, you could say my deck is smaller than your deck.

Ed Cotton: Yeah, exactly. 

Chris Kocek: So what else is different to between planning today versus planning 20 years ago? 

Ed Cotton: The problem for advertising strategists is that you fall in love with the idea that you are welded to advertising as a solution, and you fall in love with a process of creating advertising. Where actually, your opportunity and your skillset give you permission to go higher up. And so it's getting harder and harder to impact change at scale when you're working as a strategist in an ad agency. 

Chris Kocek: So do you think it's better to go client side so you can be closer to the source of decision making? 

Ed Cotton: That's definitely one route.

So if you decouple yourself from advertising, you can use all your disciplines to do other things. It's just, the world's got so much more complicated with this blunt instrument of [00:07:00] advertising, a new CEO could come into United Airlines and say, “I've done my 90 days, I'm gonna do an agency review. Here's what I think, I wanna find an agency who can crystallize my vision, and I'm gonna write a check for $200 million and we're gonna go full bore and launch a new United Airlines.” 

And that stuff happened. It happened on a regular basis. If it wasn't United Airlines, it was a cable company. If it wasn't a cable company, it was AT&T.

People spent big money using advertising as the driver of change. It's just that tool to drive change doesn't exist. So you have thousands of other things you need to do that all add up to change, but may not have the as powerful and as dramatic immediate effect as the change that happened that you could do through big, let's call it big advertising.

Chris Kocek: So do you think the big idea still exists or do you think it's just a bunch of small ideas [00:08:00] attaching to each other? 

Ed Cotton: People who are quite successful driving some coherence between these small pieces, they have some kind of linkage to a bigger idea. So maybe they don't have the budget to go big with the big idea, but the big idea works as glue to connect all these small pieces together.

Hilton is a good example of this. You got a kind of a core brand idea, which is about the stay, the fact that we're focused on making your stay great as a sort of a commitment to hospitality. 

Chris Kocek: I was watching a Seth Godin video the other day where he was saying if Hilton or Hyatt or one of the big hotel brands Marriott were to make a sneaker brand, we would have no idea what that sneaker would look like or be like. But if Nike decided to make a hotel brand, we would have a very good idea of what that hotel brand would be like and feel like. Do you agree with that? 

Ed Cotton: I was contemplating on writing something about hotels, hotel [00:09:00] branding, and I was looking up some stats on it. The three or four top players in hotels own about a hundred brands.

But what's interesting about hotels is they don't own the properties. They're selling a brand to a developer who is going to put a name on a box. I remember seeing one set of two identical buildings, but one was like a Holiday Inn and the other was something else, but they looked exactly the same. Except Godin is exactly right, these brands, except some of the really prestigious ones, don't have a lot of depth to them. But what they do have is some kind of idea, familiarity and the security that makes them better than the competition that's unbranded, and that's all they need in that category. 

Chris Kocek: So when you're getting started on a project, are there a couple of questions that you really like to ask to get to the heart of the problem or to really break things open?[00:10:00] 

Ed Cotton: A lot of the time, for me, it's part of understanding their business or how they actually make money, but it's also about understanding if they know who they are, do they even know who their customers are? Surprising, a lot of brands don't know who they are and they've lost sight of who they are. They got lost. It's almost like they had a really good map, but then that map doesn't work anymore and they're wandering around like headless chickens and they want someone to give them a map again. 

Chris Kocek: How do you give them their map? Where do you start? 

Ed Cotton: You do all these things that everyone's done for decades and then you find this intersection that is that signpost to help them move forward. What's interesting, I think, and why it's so challenging right now is now you've got a thousand things you can do, the temptation is not to have the big idea anymore 'cause it's almost why do I need that? 'cause I can just do all these little experiments and just work my way there.

If I dunno who my target audience is, I can [00:11:00] just test and learn my way. So there's sort of a world where there's less desire to make decisions and more desire to have decisions made by testing and learning, almost like a product management technology mindset. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned earlier there's this sort of fear of commitment, and let's face it, $200 million is a pretty big commitment.

So for more and more companies who are either cash strapped or over leveraged in other ways, they say, “look, why should we invest in a big idea when we can just test and learn,” but then that doesn't really mean that they have a perspective. They're just going wherever the data goes. But then there are companies that say, “hey, look, we take a data-driven approach, that's a good thing, isn't it?” Go where the data tells us. 

Ed Cotton: Yeah, I find it extraordinary. We've got more and more data than we've ever had, but we don't necessarily have insight. And what worries me is you get that left brain mindset. You just rely on the data and you [00:12:00] just never end up knowing why. You know, people do certain things, but you don't know their motivation, you don't really understand why they're doing that. 

Chris Kocek: So the data can reveal certain things, but the data can also mask certain things. 

Ed Cotton: It's like working in Disney and working on theme parks, and you're changing the color on the banners and you're changing the offer and you are looking at upticks in performance based on sort of micro improvements on tiny little, little things.

But ultimately, if you were to uncover the whole thing, theme parks are in a terrible shape, but you're lost in the day-to-day, short term, looking at banner metrics. And looking at traffic when you know, you're just avoiding discussing the deeper issues because the deeper issues aren't necessarily surfacing, you're just looking at benchmarking data points against old data points.

So I worry that people are afraid to leave the office. They're afraid to go outside, they're afraid to talk to strangers. They're afraid to ask questions and [00:13:00] they sit back in the security relying on what they know and relying on the data that's being pumped at them. I think it's a pretty dangerous place to be.

Chris Kocek: They're not getting outta the office, they're not getting away from their computers. And AI, of course, is driving that even further. Let's just talk to the AI, let's talk to synthetic consumers and get their insights into things. How have you been using AI to help you with your strategy work?

Ed Cotton: It's so powerful in terms of you got this thing you can put stuff into, and stuff comes out in a way that we didn't have before. It was. You have to go find this stuff. It was really good at finding the stuff. Then you had to look at it and you had to read it and you had to analyze it. So this thing now does this all and more.

So yeah, it's an irresistible temptation to use it. I did something the other day and I just created a synthetic focus group and [00:14:00] I thought long and hard about it just, okay, what's really going on here, and I could have been a lot more rigorous about setting it up and really insisting that these consumers had like a depth and a breadth to them.

But I was, I just did it quickly and it was quite narrow. But what I will say is if you look at agencies and focus groups, a lot of the time people are just looking for a moment of inspiration, a moment when, can you just repeat what you just said?” That's all you are looking for, that sort of, “wow, that's a really interesting way of saying that.”

Most of the other stuff you hear, once you hear it, you, it becomes sort of pattern and it's the sort of same predictable stuff. If you have some sort of fundamental hypothesis about how people feel about a certain category, you're pretty much guaranteed that you're gonna hear those hypotheses played out.

What you're looking for is sort of an anomaly. Something that contradicts these hypotheses or something that's [00:15:00] unusual, that forces you to reframe or rethink. So, doing a synthetic focus group on it is fast, it's cheap, is it accurate? Who knows? Could it yield a thing that might force you to think about something differently?

Yes. If I'm now faced with the decision of doing synthetic focus groups or real focus groups, I now have to look at my real focus groups and go, what am I gonna do here to make sure they are 50 times better than what an AI is gonna give me? So I'm gonna ratchet up my thinking, my approach, not just say, “oh, naturally they're real, they're gonna be better.” But make a real judgment call and say, “how am I gonna guarantee, or how am I gonna make sure that I'm gonna get something out of this other than the fact these people are real?” That's gonna be a multiplier effect better than what I could have done, whether it's today or tomorrow, you're gonna be able to call someone, they'll say, “I'll [00:16:00] put three groups together for you tonight, it'll be 50 bucks.” So I'm gonna be faced with going to a client or hearing from a client. Why should we go at the expense of doing this when I can do this. I think we're just gonna have to think a lot more deeply about everything we do. 

Chris Kocek: Do you have an answer for them? If someone says, Hey, why, why don't we just do this for 50 bucks? Do you have an answer for them yet? 

Ed Cotton: I don't necessarily have an answer, but I think you're gonna have to think of a pretty good one. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. On that front, when you said earlier that you're looking for that one moment that that spark and most of what you're going to hear is the same old kind of thing, I'm paraphrasing, what do you do to break out of that calcification?

Or out of all of the usual suspects or the things that people are most likely going to say, are there certain questions that you like to put in the center of a focus group, a little like a grenade, and kind of see if you can break things open? 

Ed Cotton: Again, it's coming in with these hypotheses and then [00:17:00] trying to test them.

I had mentioned to you on the precall about working on Black and Decker. That was my first job as a junior planner. I sat in a lot of Black and Decker focus groups listening to guys talk about power tools, and it occurred to me there was something like a social construct about getting guys in a room and getting 'em to, to brag about the power tools they had, that wasn't real.

So I did work on another project on home improvement, and my recommendation was to do friendship groups with the wives. It was a totally different experience because there was a more of a reality check. Getting the guys in the vacuum was not a true reflection of how DIY happened in the home. Almost underestimated the role that women played in home improvement.

And so by doing this, we understood there was this really interesting interplay and exchange [00:18:00] between husbands and wives. And we heard time and time again there was like, the list, a great power tool, but you, you haven't done X, you haven't won Y, you haven't done Z. I think, again, it's just about thinking about applying some creativity and some thoughts that challenge, 'cause the problem with focus groups, it's gotten very predictable. You're gonna go to these facilities that all look the same. You're gonna recruit these people that are professional respondents. You're gonna do a discussion guide that's two hours long. It's gonna look like every other discussion guide.

And guess what? You get predictable results. Same as with AI. If I'm looking for jumping off points for a creative brief and the AI is coming up with them, I've gotta be better than that. That's the bar, that's the, sort of like, the benchmark bar. What can we do to bring our humanness to bear and our originality and our creativity that is gonna go beyond the obvious.

Chris Kocek: It's interesting. So I like to suggest to people that they do what's called a conflict group and what you just [00:19:00] suggested with men and women versus a bunch of guys in a room, you could get conflict from guys in a room, obviously, but having people who can basically antagonize each other in an interesting way to get them to reveal something, some truth that nobody's ever seen before or picked up on before. Do you find that technique works really well? 

Ed Cotton: There are some categories that are just toxic for focus groups. 

Chris Kocek: Like what? 

Ed Cotton: Health insurance. If you get straight into talking about the category, it's despondency and doom. You have two hours of negative thoughts. And you, and you can't raise it up. So you've gotta change the whole thing around.

I learned this the hard way. So you have to change it around, and it has to be about life. It has to be the role that health plays in life. And then it has to be turning your respondents into entrepreneurs or innovators, or creators as they think about potential [00:20:00] blue sky ideas for what something that helps people with their health could be like.

Chris Kocek: Before we get to the speed round, what's one of your hobbies that you feel somehow spills over into your strategy work? 

Ed Cotton: I do a lot of photography. I've been doing with this friend of mine, Dino, these boot camps for strategists on photography. I just think it's the opposite of everything we've been talking about, which is fine to screen.

And we are working with a computer. You have a camera, some of them are digital, some of 'em are not. But you'll actually, you have, sort of premeditated idea of wanting to capture something. And, you know, sort of this way of approaching, investigating a topic or seeing what's around you is really powerful.

It's a way of going about the world with your eyes open. It's a way about noticing things and noticing how people behave, how they interact. 

Chris Kocek: What's a topic that you're investigating with your photography right now? 

Ed Cotton: I've just made a magazine a few days ago, like a [00:21:00] little zine, like on, on the wealthy parts of New York and the wealthy people up in the sort of around Park Avenue, but I'm thinking of what my next project's gonna be. It's a well-known story about an environmental disaster, but no one's calling it environmental disaster. All these toxic chemicals have spilled into sort of the groundwater in the soil around a certain part of Brooklyn, it's well known, but no one talks about it on a daily basis, but I am thinking of going there and doing some work, talking to people and photographing people who live around it and this idea of this invisible threat, but it's all around them, but they try not to go by their daily lives trying to not think about it. 

Chris Kocek: That almost sounds like the beginning of a film plot, The Invisible Threat. 

Ed Cotton: Yeah. Have you've seen Annihilation.

Chris Kocek: I haven't seen Annihilation. 

Ed Cotton: That's really interesting because this kind of like this area cordon off. There's this big fog, and [00:22:00] then they send military teams into this area to try and find out what's going on and they never come back. And then the film is about this, they send a female team to go and investigate, and it's about their experience and what happens.

The idea is sort of basically this sort of alien force that's changing the world in a way that it's not like martians in flying saucers, 

Chris Kocek: So I should put it on my list? 

Ed Cotton: I liked it. I thought it was pretty good. I think the book's probably better. 

Chris Kocek: What's another movie that you know you nerd out on? Because it's just different and unusual and you don't know where it's gonna lead.

Ed Cotton: The Zone of Interest movie about Auschwitz. It's a very simple idea, which is this family have convinced themselves, they're living in paradise, that really they're living in hell. And so the film is about playing down the hell that's obviously there and playing up the paradise, which makes them look completely delusional.

Chris Kocek: What we're capable of convincing [00:23:00] ourselves of. 

Ed Cotton: Exactly. 

Chris Kocek: All right. Speed round. What was your favorite subject in school?

Ed Cotton: So I liked biology, believe it or not, 

Chris Kocek: Why? 

Ed Cotton: I was brought up around a lot of animals and my dad was super into horses and horse riding, and that became, just became something I was, I did a lot of weird science projects working out how old trees were by like measuring their circumference and collecting moths.

I did all kinds of nerdy science projects when I was a kid, but ultimately, I was so bad at math, I couldn't really pursue biology. I went to school to do business, but I ended up, my A levels were like history, biology, politics, and economics, which is just bizarre. What the hell is biology doing there? It should have been biology, chemistry, physics and math. 

Chris Kocek: That's the spark. That's the non-intuitive thing that's in the middle of all that. 

Ed Cotton: Yeah. I love history. I think half the thing is who's teaching you and can they make it interesting. [00:24:00] 

Chris Kocek: What's one of the most interesting jobs you had before you became a planner?

Ed Cotton: I worked in a record store. That was really my first job. I had this idea that I was gonna work in a record store and then I was gonna be, in three months, I was gonna be running the marketing. But after a week, I realized like the manager who was super smart and was at least 15 years older than me, was there pinning up posters at nine o'clock at night.

And I was like, “oh dear. Something's wrong here. There's no such thing as career progression. You're just gonna be in a quagmire of a $7 an hour job or something.”

Chris Kocek: I was just about to ask what was a life lesson you learned from that, but I think you just revealed that. Is there a brand whose work you admire or that you think to yourself, I really wish I'd come up with that?

Ed Cotton: I think the Airbnb Belonging thing is just a sort of really powerful thought. It just encapsulates exactly who they are and what they're about, and just works on so many different levels. I wish they did [00:25:00] more with it. It seems like it's something that you want to see the company live up to, and I don't think they can actually live up to it and I think that's the problem. 

Chris Kocek: It's interesting the juxtaposition that you, from what you had said earlier, with hotels that people trust places that they know essentially, and yet Airbnb is the exact opposite of that. You don't know anything and yet they're promising you the feeling of belonging.

Ed Cotton: That's where the brand sits. It's solving those tensions of, I wanna do something new, but I don't want the insecurity. So Airbnb becomes the trusted way of doing something that you could never have trusted before. 

Chris Kocek: It's fascinating. What's the most recent good book you've read? 

Ed Cotton: This book is called Anomaly.

It's a French book. It's pretty cool sci-fi, but it's got a lot of other elements. And basically someone's worked out how to clone things and so they clone a [00:26:00] plane, so it is, they figure out that the same plane has landed before, and all the people who were on that plane are a set of duplicates of them. It's a pretty cool premise. 

Chris Kocek: Should I read it in the original French or is there an English translation? 

Ed Cotton: There's an English translation. I'd highly recommend that unless you're brilliant, I see that you’re really good at French. 

Chris Kocek: Okay, I'll check it out. And then finally, what's a piece of advice someone gave you that you still remember to this day that influences your work and strategy?

Ed Cotton: When I first started working in an advertising agency, a very high powered creative director came into my office area and made this address and said, I don’t know if any of you're interested, but I'm giving a talk on Japanese advertising. This creative director had worked in Japan for maybe a decade or something like that.

And if you want to come along, blah, blah, whatever. And I think people just ignored it. I think it was my second week or something [00:27:00] and I went along just eager to hear, and the next day when I came into the office, there was a book on Japanese advertising with a card that said, thank you so much for showing up. I don't think there's enough of that. That's kind of a class act, 

Chris Kocek: The handwritten thank you note. 

Ed Cotton: Yeah, just the thought, his thoughtfulness. This guy, he was just like an absolute legend in the business. He had no need to do that.

Chris Kocek: Yeah. Be kind. A little more kindness in the world could go a long way.

You have been so kind with your time today, and thank you for sharing your insights, your experiences, and your stories. 

Ed Cotton: Oh yeah, been a pleasure. Thank you so much for the questions and the opportunity.

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, Ed Cotton Strategy Consultant and Jedi Master of compelling creative briefs and connecting the dots. If you want to connect with Ed, you can find him on LinkedIn. Where he regularly shares thought provoking content, including overlooked data points, counterintuitive [00:28:00] comparisons, and the complexities of contemporary marketing.

If you're looking for even more ideas and inspiration, be sure to check out my newsletter Light Bulb at chriskocek.com/newsletter. Every Thursday, I share three “Aha!” moments that are guaranteed to inspire your next project, creative briefing or campaign, or check out my latest book, any Insights Yet. Connect the dots, create new categories, transform your business. 

If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us five stars on your favorite podcast platform and share it with friends, family, clients, colleagues, even your enemies. Special thanks to Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios for producing this episode. And thank you to Megan Palmer for additional editing and production support.

Until next time, keep looking for patterns, finding contradictions, and asking “what if?” more [00:29:00] often.