Joe Burns: [00:00:00] The truth is, it's far easier to post-rationalize a great idea than it is to pre-rationalize a great idea, you know, it's just easier to go back and like, “okay, this is great for these reasons” and I just wanna really importantly call out that it's not that you don't use those as stimulus and inputs to get to that great idea, it's just that the great idea comes to you when you're in the shower, not when you're looking at the Excel file.

Chris Kocek: Welcome to any insights yet, the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. My guest today is Joe Burns, an award-winning strategist and typography aficionado from Quality Meets Creative. Joe has done lots of strategy, including but not limited to, brand strategy, creative strategy, communication strategy, and design strategy.

He's also been the head of strategy at Mother, BBH, and Quality Meets where he is helped brands like KFC, [00:01:00] Heineken, Puma, Amnesty International, Benecol. Meta and more. These diverse experiences and strategy have helped Joe connect the dots in the most interesting and unexpected ways. But as you'll hear in our conversation, Joe believes his true superpower isn't just finding insights, it's creating the right conditions for those insights to grow. 

During our conversation, Joe shares his secrets to winning new business pitches and his musically inclined methods for getting into the right mindset. We talk about semiotics, epistemology, typography, and ciabattas. 

Our conversation begins in an unexpected place when Joe was working on a project for Money Supermarket, and he had an “Aha!” moment while watching The Simpsons.

Chris Kocek: When we were talking the other day, you mentioned that there was this one time when you were working on a project and you had a bit of an “Aha!” moment while watching The Simpsons. How did a scene in The Simpsons end up affecting your thinking and how did that [00:02:00] end up affecting the work? 

Joe Burns: First thing that I'd love to say there is that the Simpsons is just really, really saturated with fantastic insights, and I think this is probably the biggest campaign of my career that I worked on was for Money Supermarket.

We already had the big insight for the campaign from the pitch that we were still working with, which is that you feel better finding a $20 note in your pocket than you do earning it. It feels good to find money you didn't know you had. And the ideas all told a little story around a character who saves money with money supermarket and celebrates in some bombastic larger than life way.

But over the years and the different executions within the campaign, we kind of built up all this baggage of how we told those stories and they became very complicated. And I think what we wanted to do is kind of wipe the slate clean a bit, and just really pair things down to a very singular way to tell those stories, to make it much more simple and distinctive and cut through.

And we we're just trying to unlock what that might be and [00:03:00] I was actually watching an episode of The Simpsons, and it's the episode where Bart gets a girlfriend, which is a good episode. And actually Meryl Streep voices Jessica, the love interest for Bart in the episode. But anyway, Bart asks out on a date and she says yes, and then Bart feels great.

So I'm the hit there and I'm looking for this, well, what's the expression of feeling good that's gonna be really singular. And Bart has this line, which is, “there's only one thing to do in a situation like this strut.” And that was like, “ah, that's the unlock for me.” Just the physical embodied movement of feeling good in a strut, that's what we need to capture. 

So I included that in the brief to the creatives, and they then now did their own. And I think the thing that really made it stand out, which was they kind of mashed together the idea of a businessman and Beyonce, and there was a giant prosthetic booty that the guy [00:04:00] walked as he strutted down the street.

It was all slightly surreal, but really took off and became a phenomenally culturally impactful even campaign, you know, so that The Simpsons has got all the answers if you know where to look. 

Chris Kocek: That's great advice. That's something that I actually talked about with Alex Smith in season one, we were talking about single word strategies, that if you look at certain brands like Dove beauty, right, Dove campaign for real beauty. KitKat break or give me a break, things like that. And you landed on this idea of strut or strutting. Which really kind of unlocked or provided a breath of fresh air for the campaign and, and the creatives then took it and they mash it up into something else.

And something you said the other day was you tend to think of your job as creating fertile environments for insights. What did you mean by that? 

Joe Burns: Yeah, I think what I'm getting at there when I'm talking about like a kind of fertile soil, [00:05:00] people get obsessed with causality, I think, with these things, and I think this is just a bias that businesses have.

People wanna be able to say, this person said this and this thing happened, like, I don't experience life in that way and I don't think anyone actually does. This kind of neat, linear chain of causation. Your brain, I think, when looking back, tends to erase a lot of the chaos and make it palatable. Do you know what I mean?

And linear and like, okay, this is this, then this, then this and this. And actually, I think one thing that you can do if you're in a strategic role and in a creative environment is kind of accept that there's very little direct, linear stuff that you can almost do. What you can do is create the fertile ground for ideas to happen in and sometimes it is very direct. You know, you'll say a word like strut, and then the ad will have a man strutting. And in other times, it's much harder to isolate the direct link [00:06:00] and causation that led the creative team off your brief to come up with a great idea. I think it's probably good for your continued employment to be able to point to the successes that you've had and your input in them, but never let yourself get confused that that's really what you're doing.

That's just justifying what you really do, which is. You know, I like the analogy of mise en place from cooking, where it's about preparing the ingredients and kind of handing them over to the creative and say, “oh, what can you produce with this? Where does this take you?” And a lot of that is actually about not discounting bad ideas. You know what I mean? Or bad thoughts that you might have and still including in them. And maybe with a preface like, this might be terrible, but maybe there's something in this. And again, that's the thing that I think business is a little bit biased against. It doesn't like people saying bad ideas. It likes all the ideas to be good. Unfortunately, I think the truth is to get to good ideas, you need a good two dozen terrible ideas to, kind of like, pave the way for those a lot of the time. [00:07:00] They want just the straightaway to get to the good idea, and it just doesn't work like that. 

Chris Kocek: Right, and I mean, sometimes a bad idea is just an idea that needs to be shined up a little bit, 

Joe Burns: Indeed. Crystallized into something good.

I use the metaphor of going down the mountain. I like to think of ,like, ideas as almost altitude, like the quality of an idea is altitude in this metaphor. And you're in a mountain range and your job is to find the highest altitude. The mountain that's tallest, but the mountain range is just covered with mist.

So you need to be prepared and ready to walk down the mountain you are already on in order to find a taller mountain. You know what I mean? That's a big part of what creativity is to me and what the role of strategy in creativity is. It's like you can never have a perfect one-to-one scale map, but you can maybe be a little bit of a Sherpa and understand the lay of the land enough to say, well, I know we're going down right now, but I'm sure it leads to a valley, and [00:08:00] eventually we'll go back up.

Just because of the way these antelope are running. I can kind of tell that that means there's a big mountain over there. 

Chris Kocek: How do you go about creating those fertile environments? How do you lay the land or prepare the soil? 

Joe Burns: I think it, to be honest with you, unfortunately, it makes me sound a little bit odd, but to me, a big part of it is like not trying to do too much in your conscious mind and letting your subconscious do a lot of the work for you. So engaging with studies, information, research, there you should be thinking critically and really living in that conscious part of your head. But I think, just as important, is like, getting away from that and giving it time to percolate and using your hands to do something practical or putting some music on and listening to that.

I think actually your subconscious brain is much more effective at coming up with those insights and ideas than your conscious brain is 'cause in a way, I think ego is often the thing that stops you from going down the mountain. [00:09:00] You don't wanna look stupid or you don't wanna do something that's risky or you think maybe I'll get told off if I go over there.

Chris Kocek: Well, and there's a lot of pressure, you know, time pressure from clients or deadlines you never want to tell somebody the creative process is messy, the strategic process is messy. 

Joe Burns: No, no, no. That's precisely it. I love the analogy of the Panama Canal for this 'cause if you're traveling, let's say from east to west to traverse the Panama Canal, you have to go from west to east because the thinnest part of Panama, where they built this canal actually kind of loops over a little bit, and I think that to me, you could not ask for a more perfect kind of geo-engineering project that's an analogy of like not just what insights are, but the way you have them, which is exactly that. It's having the ability to go, okay, we want to get from this ocean to this ocean.

In order to do that, we need to cut a bit of land in half effectively and, like, build this canal, which means going through [00:10:00] natural lakes, et cetera, et cetera. But to do that, we actually need to turn back on ourselves and cut this way rather than cutting from east to west. We need to actually cut from west to east. And yeah, I think you've got it exactly right. It's like there is time pressure on, and you've gotta resist the kind of, I don't wanna just call it the dumb part of your brain, it's the biased part of your brain, which is like, “oh no, buckle down, think consciously about everything you do, maintain maximum control over this process and this way of operating, try and get it perfect first time.”

And I think my experience has taught me that that is always the most inefficient way, trying to do it in that highly conscious way. You never get into that fluid flow state where you can really crack things and think differently. 

Chris Kocek: Now, you worked on a yogurt brand in the UK called Benecol.

Am I saying it right? What did they come in thinking they should [00:11:00] do and how did you and your team help reframe the situation? 

Joe Burns: Yeah, so the Benecol project, I think this was one of the first things I actually led as a pitch and piece of business myself. I was fortunate enough that my manager went away on vacation at the same time this pitch was on, I think he maybe forgot about it. He was like, Joe, can you just do this? So I ended up getting to lead the whole pitch myself as when I was younger. And the clients had come to us and we were like, we really wanna talk about the efficacy of our products. The thing about Benecol is it lowers your cholesterol.

So there's a margarine style spread and there's yogurts and then drinkable Kefir style yogurts. And basically they help you manage cholesterol. And they were like, we are the most effective functional food at lowering cholesterol. I was like, indeed, you are. But you are nowhere near as effective as statins, the medication that does that, which got basically no side effects.

And we did some chats, interviews with real people who had high [00:12:00] cholesterol, and we really wanted to reframe the problem from being like, okay, rather than saying how effective we are, because in efficacy terms, there's something over here that beats you hands down. We needed to find another way of talking about the product.

And what we actually realized was this came up in the conversation with one of the interviewees. We were like, okay, this really works. And he's like, “oh, that's amazing, that's great, it's incredible.” And we were like, well, if this is so good, like why wouldn't you use Statins? And he was like, “well, I don't want to take a tablet every day.”

I was just like, that's really, really interesting. He doesn't wanna take a tablet, a medication, every day but he's happy to put an edible, functional food on his toast every morning. What's the difference there? And after prodding it a little bit, he was just like, “well, having toast is normal every day, but taking a tablet every day, that's what old people do.”

And it just completely allowed us to reframe, we think, what we were able to think about what the [00:13:00] product offers people because yes, it does lower cholesterol, but the real benefit was actually without making you feel old, without making you feel like you need to take a medication every day and have one of the things with the Monday, Tuesday, I think like that image of the daily medicine, that was something that people just wanted to avoid having to do because it made 'em feel older.

So yeah, that led to the insight that the real benefit of this product is actually, it's helping people stay feeling young. 

Chris Kocek: Is there a secret to new business pitches when it comes to getting to that place, that “Aha!” moment more quickly? 

Joe Burns: To me, the important thing in new business is what I call, like, understanding the epistemology of the clients.

It's kind of separate from the world of insights, but it's just understanding. I'll just zoom back a little bit here. Everyone likes to think that everyone believes things because they're real or not. You know what I mean? And that's just not how [00:14:00] things work. Some people believe things because there's consensus around that being right. Other people believe things because credentialed people, boffins, academics say that that's what's right. Other people might look to religion, other people might use intuition to guide them. And I think understanding not just what the organization believes, but the epistemology that exists within a client's organization, to me, that's the number one thing to do before you start anything else in a new business process.

It's like understand who decides what is true and what isn't and what's the framework of that, you know? Is it based on research studies? Is it based on case studies of other brands that have done it before? Is it informed by fear? Is it informed by a very powerful board or demanding shareholders? Once you've done that, you kind of know a few things.

You know the way you've gotta construct a narrative. You know the kind of information that [00:15:00] you need to provide to back up the things that you're gonna do. So, that to me is almost like getting things ready to go and work and being really comfortable that that's what you're gonna do, because that's gonna inform the curation of those resources.

If you've got a client that's really a gut instinct one, you're gonna go out looking for insights in places that hit in that way, you know, that's the kind of insight that you need. If you've got one that is really into academic research, you go there. So to me that helps, to like, narrow the playing field 'cause the number one problem as a strategist is always infinite choice of what you can do with a problem, you know? And narrowing it down to the right problem to solve. So I think that's my big tip and big bit of advice. If you're looking to speed up a pitch and get to something faster, it's just like, decide what doors should be closed as you go out in searching of, of interesting ways of doing things. 

Chris Kocek: Now you studied,[00:16:00] semiotics at university. Is that right? And what got you interested in semiotics in the first place? 

Joe Burns: Great question. It was one of the first times in my life where I felt like the fish who'd realized he was wet.

Do you know what I mean? I just was like, oh yeah, water. That's crazy. I was like, this is great. I love this. I think if I had to, you know, really condense it down into one thing, it was big thinking about small stuff, and Bart’s is the king of that, whether it's pro wrestling or advertising for ham or whatever it might be that he's writing about.

He's just applying a depth and rigor of thinking to something which you normally overlook and just resonated with me because I think in the UK especially, it's really just how you chat, but made much more academic. We're a nation of small talkers. Do you know what I mean? Like, [00:17:00] we like to just have silly conversations.

Like conversation is much more play oriented, and it felt like that attitude of like, okay, you're kind of playfully seeing what you can think, you know, and semiotics, I just immediately fell in love with it. 

Chris Kocek: Have you ever read the book, the Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker? 

Joe Burns: No. No, I have not.

Chris Kocek: Okay. I'll need to get you a copy of that.

It goes deep on life's small things, so it's just about a guy who is on his lunch break, but the kind of inception level thoughts that he's having as he's going on his lunch break. It's sort of an examination of all of these little minutiae in life. It's fascinating. It's very funny as well. 

Was there ever a point during your time at university where you started thinking about other subjects and thinking “maybe I should be studying that and instead?”

Joe Burns: I did do some, I mean, I wrote my dissertation on typography. And I actually wrote my dissertation on the capacity for typography to [00:18:00] change the connotations of what's said rather than the denotations of what's said. You know, just writing the same phrase out in various different typefaces and just seeing how people interpreted it as a warm statement or a cool statement, a friendly statement, or an unfriendly one, a confident one or not. And we found that there really was massive shifts between how people interpret a piece of language, like the actual words. The interpretation became really, really different based on the type face that it was written in. But yeah, so like graphic design, typography, and I think you probably see that in my thinking as a strategist in my work.

I hate binaries, hate that way of thinking. To me, it's always very reductive and I think a lot of the time this kind of rational versus intuitive and emotional, I don't buy into it all. I think that kind of gets in the way of a lot of good ideas and thinking and actually being far more productive. 

Chris Kocek: So how do you [00:19:00] tackle that when you're coming to a client who may be more on the data side of things or may be more of a binary thinker? How do you navigate the terrain of that conversation? 

Joe Burns: The truth is, it's far easier to post-rationalize a great idea than it is to pre-rationalize a great idea, you know, it's just easier to go back and like, “okay, this is great for these reasons” and I just wanna really importantly call out that it's not that you don't use those as stimulus and inputs to get to that great idea, it's just that the great idea comes to you when you're in the shower, not when you're looking at the Excel file.

And this is coming from me as someone who really loves getting their hands dirty with data. I'm really into data analysis, and I think it's something that I enjoy. I spent an early part of my career in a media agency building econometric models and budget setting tools on Excel and all of that kind of stuff.

So it's not that, I'm not, some kind of like “ultra” of like nothing can be [00:20:00] measured and optimized, metrics are pointless, data is noise, you know, I'm not that. I'm actually like, “no, All of that stuff's incredibly valuable.” As long as you internalize it and let your subconscious make sense of it, rather than the rational part of your brain trying to do it in the front room.

My philosophy on everything that we do strategically is that the conscious mind is just the PR department of the human experience, you know what I mean? It's like, just kind of gets the memos and then works out how to articulate them best, but the memos are coming from somewhere else that we don't have as immediate access to.

Chris Kocek: I love this, this is a new take on, thinking fast and slow. 

Joe Burns: Indeed. Yeah. You've got, you've gotta learn to eat it up and then comes back and the answer comes. 

Chris Kocek: So if what I'm hearing correctly is that the best answers come through regurgitation. No, I'm just kidding. 

Joe Burns: Just really getting the details correct. Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: Now you have a lot of experience in comms planning. For our listeners who [00:21:00] may not know the difference, what are a few key differences between comms planning and regular planning, and what's the secret to being a successful comms planner? 

Joe Burns: The key thing with communications planning is that it's all about how you serve up ideas rather than necessarily how you have ideas.

The analogy I always use is it's like being a really good waiter, you know what I mean? It's like how do you serve up those ideas to consumers and create those connection points? And I think it's getting more and more important as the world gets more and more complex, the kind of challenges and problems brands need to sell get more complicated too, and knowing when to show up and when to create those touch points and how we can kind of surround and scale up ideas is way more important than it used to be because you used to be able to just run a TV ad and you'd get 30 seconds of uninterrupted messaging it in someone's face. That's just not the case anymore. So communication planning is about [00:22:00] orchestrating the touchpoints that, you know, sit around a consumer to deliver the messages at the right place, to the right people, in the right context, alongside the right stuff and communication planning, you can do it different ways. And if you go into the discourse around it, some people are like, it has to happen after the creative idea. And I think the truth is, you can either do it before the idea, so you can identify, “okay, there's these audiences that have got this much money and we need to go after them in these spaces because that's where we're most relevant.” You can do it after the idea, which is to go, “okay, here's what the idea is.” You know, let's use an example that I didn't work on, but it's probably the one that everyone uses. But Snickers, you're not you when you're hungry. “Let's go after people when they're hungry and not acting like themselves.” “Oh, people misspell things. So let's do a spell check thing with Google and talk to 'em.” That famous one thing they did. 

And then I think sometimes, communication planning can be the idea. Do you know what I mean? It's [00:23:00] like the idea can just be as simple as, let's turn up in this space, in this way. I worked on a Samsung project back in the UK where we wanted to talk about smartphone photography.

Rather than make an ad, we made a music video and the music video was for a song that we got an artist to make that was inspired by a photograph taken on a Samsung phone.

And the insight that led to that was for Gen Z, it's not taking photos they care about, it's sending them. [00:24:00] You know what I mean? It's not what you shoot with your camera, it's who you send it to, what you do with it, what it becomes. It's like a, almost becomes a new vernacular for the generation. And that was the insight we kind of won the pitch on.

And then the creative idea was like “inspired by a real photo.” That's an example to me of where, like, the comms strategy is the idea, you know, let's make a music video based on a photograph. Do you know what I mean? Like it's, it's very different from traditional brand planner. 

Chris Kocek: Is there a brand or a project you've worked on where the client or other people on the team were ignoring certain data points or certain customer signals and you help them connect the dots in a surprising or counterintuitive way?

Joe Burns: Yes. There is a brilliant example of that, which is Access Sun Life. So Access Sun Life are a kind of a life insurance company in the uk. For decades, decades and decades, they were the people who'd get like a free kind of gaudy clock for the mantlepiece or a pen if you signed a life insurance policy [00:25:00] from it.

And the way they talked to people, it's called the AXA over fifties plan. They talked to over-fifties like they were 90. Anyway, so these guys kind of rocked up and came into us and were like, we need to start cracking Gen Z and millennials, maybe. I can't remember exactly. It was just younger people basically. We don't need to go after over-fifties anymore. We need to go after 25 year olds and get 'em to start saving for retirement now. And we sat in this meeting, it was like the initial chemistry session, and I was like, do we need to do that? Or do you just need to talk to 50 year olds like they're 50 rather than like, they're 80.

And it's not the bigger thing to do, to talk to the people who have money. They should be saving it with someone like you and you purport to talk to, but don't, and like the whole approach then pivoted from “let's build a product, an app based saving thing for,” which is completely out of [00:26:00] their sphere of expertise, to “let's create a campaign and do a load of research that helps us speak more appropriately to over-fifties because they're not the same as eight-five.” 

Chris Kocek: That's a great example. What else comes to mind when you think about the differences between traditional planning and comms planning?

Joe Burns: I think what we're talking about here is actually downstream of an enormous problem, think, feel, do, right?

And really what that kind of embeds into organizations is in a sense, start off with rationally what you want to say, then decide on what emotion you're gonna use to convey that message, then put it in front of people and interrupt what they're doing. And actually think, like where comms planning can really help is actually by going like, well, let's start off, what are people doing right now?

And then you ask, so what's the most appropriate way to interrupt what they're doing with something that's relevant? And I don't think it's about necessarily sneaking it in. I don't think I agree [00:27:00] with the idea of like, trickery involved in this, but its just being a little bit more humble and having a little bit less hubris that everyone wants to hear what your business wants to tell him.

You know what I mean? And I think one, one thing that we say a lot is, you know, no one really cares what you've got to say if you're a brand. Like no one is sitting around waiting for the newest widget from Brand X. I mean, I've worked in smartphones and tech for a big portion of my career, and one thing that's awful about that category is, there are a very small minority of people who are obsessed with what the next smartphone is gonna be. And those people occupy a huge amount of the mental real estate of the clients because they want everyone, they wanna universalize that sense. They're like, well, how do we get everyone to feel that way?

And it's like. I don't think we can get 90% of your buyers to really care. And like that is a challenge because it's a little bit about like, the prisoner's dilemma, you know? If you go into a pitch and six [00:28:00] agencies are all saying like, the product is the best thing that I've ever seen, like, you guys are brilliant, you've got it. All we've gotta do is say exactly what you wanna say. If you are the one who rocks up and like no one cares about your new widget, you know, it's hard then, but I think that integrity is important and good clients will gravitate to that. 

Chris Kocek: It's so true. Now, switching gears for a second. You make these wonderful PDFs that you share on LinkedIn.

I think that's actually how I first discovered you, and in this one PDF, you talk about the paradox of planning and how most people don't like paradoxes or ambiguity or divergent thinking. One of the things I often talk about with clients and students is the importance of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

That's actually a big part of our job, being comfortable with uncertainty. And you have this line in that PDF where you say, it can be hard to explain that your process involves looking at a spreadsheet for an hour [00:29:00] than meditating to a Mongolian throat chanting playlist. Is that really one of your processes?

Joe Burns: Playlists are not Mongolian throat chanting ones, but no, like music is huge for me. You know, I'm married, we've got two kids, and one of the things that really unites us as a family is we all like music and we are all very eclectic as well, but all of the stuff we like has this quality to it, which I can only describe as “it goes hard,” or some people call songs like that “a slapper” or “a banger.” It could be Abba, it could be Death Metal, but it goes hard and there is something about music that just grips you by the most visceral lizard part of your brain and forces you to move. To me, that's the most important tool I use in my career and life.

It's just like, I dunno if you've seen the film Baby Driver, but in Baby [00:30:00] Driver, this guy can do anything as long as he’s got the right track playing on his cassette player, MP3 Player, sorry. And it's a really intangible quality that some songs have and some songs don't. And the thing that's even crazier about this to me is the original Tainted Love, right, the original Tainted Love by Gloria Jones, there are three recordings that she did. There's one that goes hard and the others don't. And that's what I mean about this quality of going hard. It's like, some things just go hard. And if you've got a song that does that to you, you can harness that power to make your subconscious work harder and come up with good ideas.

I know I sound insane, I realize that, but like if you can have a playlist full of tracks that just really viscerally engage you, that to me is the most important thing. And the thing I love about this as well, I think kids know it and I've got one kid who's 14, 15 months and the other one is three and a great example of a track that goes [00:31:00] hard is Captain Sensible. The guy from the Damned What, right? I've listened to that song a thousand times because my 3-year-old, it's like one of his favorite songs and he'll put it on and just like the kids will go crazy. So like if you've got kids, just see what they start moving to when you are listening to whatever and it'll happen.

You know, “oh, that's, that can go in the going hard playlist.” It's like a classic eighties pop song. There's a broad eclectic variety of tracks that fit in there. 

Chris Kocek: That's so funny. I'll have to start working on my own “going hard” playlist. 

Alright, it's time for the speed round. What's your favorite word in English or any other language?

Joe Burns: Ooh, remarkable. You can make it say anything you want, just purely based on the intonation. It literally can mean anything, just dependent on how you say it. Something's good, you can say it's bad, just say [00:32:00] remarkable. You know what I mean? Like it's a multipurpose word. 

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

Joe Burns: I'm trying to read the latest László Krasznahorkai book The Herscht 1, 5, 5, 4 or whatever. I dunno if you've ever read any of his stuff, but he just writes in one giant sentence for like 400 pages and it's one of those books where it's just a test of your like, suffering. How much suffering can I endure in the name of art?

Chris Kocek: What's a subject you recently got super interested in and just went down the rabbit hole on it because of unstoppable curiosity. 

Joe Burns: This is me to a T, like I will just go down those Wikipedia black holes all the time. It's probably the history of bread and baking. I love food history and like I'd say a good 50% of the rabbit holes I go down are food history.

It's a topic that really, really [00:33:00] fascinates me. Here's a great one, it’s either Ciabatta, it said Ciabattas were invented in the eighties. But you think Ciabatta, you'd think, oh yeah, that's an Italian classic that's been around for 500 years or whatever. No, they were invented in like, 1982. 

Chris Kocek: What's one of the most interesting jobs you had before you got into the work you do now that has helped you do your job better?

Joe Burns: I'm not sure if it helped me do it better, but I was a garbage collector for a summer when I was at university, like a garbage guy. It was horrible. Just truly, truly, it was just suffering. You'd be getting up at like four in the morning getting onto a giant mobile trash collection and sorting truck. I had to sit inside this giant truck trailer picking up glass bottles and sorting them into the colors. It was just a terrible job. So I wouldn't say it would necessarily help me other than just to kind of like think, “oh God, no matter how bad this meeting is, could be [00:34:00] worse, could be sorting bottles by color.”

Chris Kocek: What's a piece of advice that you got early on in life or in your career that you still remember to this day or that you think of often?

Joe Burns: There's plenty of these. There's some, the obvious career ones, keeping your gunpowder dry and like that kind of stuff. One that always sticks with me is “always give your enemy an escape route.” Always leave an escape route. And I think they're quoting Sun Tzu, the Art of War there, but it's just, for me, it's like you never ever want to back anyone into a corner in advertising like clients creatives, just never try and back anyone into a corner, always give them a way out. Always give people a way of exiting disagreement with dignity. That to me, is the most crucial thing to do. And I think that comes, especially for strategists 'cause strategists are always really clever people. Even the [00:35:00] ones who pretend to not be very clever, you don't get into this career unless you're a bit smart. And those kinds of people, I think often when they're in education, try and, you know, there's that kind of boisterous debating club mentality. But it just doesn't work very well, you know? It's like, the Aesop’s fable of the sun and the wind, the north wind, you know that one? Where it's like they wager and they're like, who can get the guy to take off his coat?

And the wind blows and blows harder, and blows harder, and the guy just grabs tighter, but the sun just shines and the man takes his coat off and the sun wins the wager. That is, it's not about being a great strategist, it's about being able to exercise and have impact on things and being a shiny sunbeam is always more effective. And I cannot in any way say that I've always been a shiny sunbeam. I can be quite grumpy sometimes as anyone can, but get frustrated like anyone else but it's a good thing to remember and keep in mind. 

Chris Kocek: Well, Joe, you have been a shining ray of light to me during this conversation. [00:36:00] Thank you so much for taking the time to share your stories, your processes, and your “Aha!” moments today.

Joe Burns: Thanks. Thanks for having me on and chatting, it’s a pleasure. It was remarkable.

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, Joe Burns. If you want to connect with Joe and get inspired by his wonderfully put together thought pieces, you can find him on LinkedIn. And make sure you check out some of our previous episodes, including my interview with Gordy Sang and Brian Siedband from Quality Meets Creative, or my conversation with John Gibson from the Martin Agency, where we talk about Oreo's brand positioning, and how they got there.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us five stars on your favorite podcast platform and share it with colleagues and clients who could use some inspiration. Just send them a link and say “You see? This is what I'm talking about, insights.” If you're looking for even more ideas and “Aha!” moments, head over to chriskocek.com

There you can find some of my newest online courses, [00:37:00] case studies, and creative exercises for building insights and breakthrough ideas. And while you're there, make sure you subscribe to the Light Bulb Newsletter. Every Thursday, I share three “Aha!” moments that are guaranteed to inspire your next project, creative briefing or campaign.

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 often.