Mark Pollard: [00:00:00] Over the past decade. I think the hardest part of the job when it comes to insights is the way that a lot of us have had to get our thinking, quote unquote approved by people who don't deserve to have opinions about our work. And they'll ask things like, is that a data-driven insight or did you make it up?

My answer is yes. Most people who say words like that don't know what an insight is, and they don't know what data is, so what they're looking for is a statistic to prove the future. Or is that bulletproof? I don't know, is a joke Bulletproof? Is a song Bulletproof? What does that even mean?

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 Mark Pollard, also known as SweatHead. Mark is the Beyonce of strategy. He's done it all. He's worked on major brand campaigns. He's the author of Strategy Is Your Words, and he's [00:01:00] the host of the SweatHead podcast.

What I loved about my conversation with Mark isn't just his knowledge of different strategy frameworks or his insanely deep radio voice, but how deeply he pays attention to the details happening in the world around him. During our conversation, Mark and I explore the difference between loud and soft questions and how to gently probe for a confession when all you're getting are basic observations.

Mark also shares some of his favorite research projects and aha moments from the Viagra campaign that hinged on a doorknob to the guy who didn't feel accomplished enough to go bald. When I caught up with Mark, he was in the middle of one of his global strategy training tours, where he teaches marketers how to become better thinkers and more confident creative partners.

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Chris Kocek: You're like Taylor Swift on a world tour, Dubai, Mexico City, Prague. What are some things that have jumped out at you in one country or another when [00:02:00] it comes to little human behaviors that you find interesting? 

Mark Pollard: One of the reasons that I've started to do a lot more travel, and I've been more aggressive about it, is because I had these amazing experiences in countries like Brazil and Ecuador and Georgia and Turkey, where I felt happy.

Two years ago, I just saw these photos of me having fun around warm cultures and warm people, and a sense of openness that I was not really experiencing in the USA, and I experienced it a little bit in in Australia, but Anglo-Saxon cultures tend to be more independent, more individualistic, and increasingly more isolated.

And so that was an epiphany. I was like, oh, hang on. When I travel, I'm a slightly different person. I'm happier. So if I like that, how do I do a little bit more of that? One thing that is interesting is there are definitely cultures where you will go in and teach or do in an event that are, they're colder as a group. So for example, in Norway, I did two sessions, a hundred plus. People [00:03:00] came in, sat down, we'd run the session, they would get up and leave, and then I'm like, what do I do now? What's happening? Whereas in other cultures, people want to be out until, you know, midnight or whatever it is on a Monday night or a Tuesday night.

So that's an example of one behavior that's out there. 

Chris Kocek: So I lived in Mexico for a while and I remember the way people would often greet you or like if you were introduced to somebody, one thing people would ask me was tell me a joke. 

Mark Pollard: Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: It was such an interesting thing. 'cause like here in the States there's always this, what do you do?

Mark Pollard: Yeah, what do you do? 

Chris Kocek: But it was always like, you know. Like, tell me a little joke. 

Mark Pollard: Lemme talk to you about the Jakarta experience. So first of all, they can all vape inside. So everyone's vaping for four hours and I'm, I'm like, what is going on here? Because I don't vape. I've never even smoked a cigarette.

I'm not saying I'm morally superior. I just decided not to at a young age. And then about two hours in, so halfway in. People started to agree with me when I was talking. Uhhuh, Uhhuh, Uhhuh. I was [00:04:00] like, oh, what is going on? Like this whole room was, uh, Uhhuh, Uhhuh Uhhuh. That happened in Jakarta. It happened a little bit in the Philippines too, in Manila.

Chris Kocek: So it just took a little time to warm up, I guess. 

Mark Pollard: I guess so. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. Yeah. Your voice is so deep. I was gonna ask whether you smoke or whether that's just a result of giving so many talks. 

Mark Pollard: From the age of eight years old. I've had this voice. No, I, I think my voice broke when I was, I don't know, 12, 13. And I remember a couple of teachers pointing it out like you got a deep voice.

So, yeah, I've had a deep voice from the moment I could have a deep voice. 

Chris Kocek: Have you ever done, uh, radio commercials with your voice? 

Mark Pollard: I used to host a radio show. I've done cheap or free for me community radio ads, but I've never pursued anything to do with the voice. I never, I'm lying a little bit actually. I used to rap badly and I used to sing a little bit, but I never pursued anything creative in a professional way. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. Used to rap 

Mark Pollard: A little. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah, 

Mark Pollard: A little bit, yeah. When I was young and angry with a deep voice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. 

Chris Kocek: Are there [00:05:00] any tracks out there that we might find floating around on the internet?

Mark Pollard: I hope not, but my, my teenage years in my twenties, I was very much in the hip hop scene. I, I set up the first full color hip hop magazine in the Southern hemisphere. I did a radio show every week that I inherited from someone. It was for a long time, one of the main, if not the main hip hop radio show in Sydney.

So yeah, I was interviewing Flavor Flav. How old was I? 20 Ice Cube. A lot of famous statements, but our world was a little bit more underground. 

Chris Kocek: What are the learnings that you took away from just doing all of that, that you now bring into your strategy work? 'cause it's a lot of work to publish something.

Mark Pollard: Well, I mean, in my late thirties when I decided I did not belong in corporate America, I basically recreated my life in my twenties. I was doing radio, so now I do a podcast. I was making a magazine. Now I write on the internet a lot more and I, I've published a book and, you know, I used to put on events.

Now I put on events, but I'm often the one on the stage. So I've literally gone back to the things that I love to do. And so that's been the main, the, the main lesson there. 

Chris Kocek: So when you think back to, [00:06:00] you know, when you're doing strategy or, or when you're doing any of these workshops, what's one of your favorite aha moments, whether it's client related or something more personal?

Mark Pollard: I'll give you one of the ones I've been struggling with the most, which is I have two kids. I was away when we decided to move to DC. It was just after my son went to college. So he is, he is in just finishing his first year there and I realized that in him leaving home I was getting a few abandonment issues being triggered in me.

Like my, my dad left when I was six or seven. I don't even know. He was a lovely guy. I still remember the day and for quite a while I was getting angry little voice in my head. Or another, another person's leaving you, which is crazy 'cause he's been with us for 18 years, right? I have those thoughts all, all the time.

And they're quite frustrating as well. 'cause like there's self-awareness that can be useful and there's self-awareness. That maybe is not useful. And I don't know, some of my dark, darker thoughts I don't always find very useful unless I can turn them into content [00:07:00] or unless I can, you know, eventually write books about a lot of this stuff.

So that, that's an example. Uh, and then from work point of view, we did a project for Viagra, one of the Pfizer brands. We were talking about how there was this thing that people called the door knob or door handle conversation, and it was described like this, that a lot of guys who might have erectile dysfunction would accrue a few symptoms that had nothing to do with erectile dysfunction so that they could justify going to see the doctor. They would see the doctor talk about everything else, a sore shoulder or a runny nose or something. And then they would get up, hit the doorknob and say, can I have Viagra? So that's an interesting behavior for a few reasons.

Or one is just traditional heterosexual male mindset, turning things into projects, trying to avoid getting help, trying to avoid those sort of vulnerable things. And this was. You know, 15 to 20 years ago now. The other thing that's interesting about that is at the time Viagra and Cialis were [00:08:00] competing in, Cialis was starting to do really, really well.

It's, they have different product formula. Viagra is essentially wham bam. Thank you ma'am. Cialis, I believe, can last for a couple of days, so it's, it's seen as being a little bit more romantic, a little bit more about intimacy rather than just screwing. So when someone hits the doorknob and they ask for a drug by name, there's a risk there.

There's a risk that they ask for the other drug and you don't actually get to talk about it because they don't want to talk about it. So we, we built this whole very simple campaign around awkward conversations. They're the sorts of things I love about the work that we get to do, just. Who would've thought about that unless, unless they had to.

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's one of my favorite things actually, is awkward conversations or how do you make it less awkward? Do you have any techniques that you like to use to help put people at ease? If you're about to broach a subject that most people probably wouldn't wanna talk about, whether that's digestion or erectile dysfunction or anything that has to do usually with the human body, 

Mark Pollard: I don't have anything that's [00:09:00] gonna be amazingly revelatory. I think there's a big power in listening. This was an epiphany I had a few years ago where I'd done a piece of research where I was interviewing about 40 people for 45 minutes each in a week or two. I was doing it next to a window in New York as it got cold and I'm like, oh, I have nowhere else to do this.

So I got sick after doing that, and there were a few interviews that I did. Where I was like, oh, I have a feeling that I was probably the only person that they had spoken to that week, and probably the only person who'd actually listened to them. 'cause we are terrible at listening. So one of my tricks is listening.

The other thing, especially in the US that I bring in is I have an accent. So people are often curious about that. And then whether I'm on stage or on a phone call, I'm relatively deliberate about stating or gently building the culture that I want in that interaction. There are three things that I'll do, and also I think a combination of what I would call loud and quiet questions is good.

Mm. There are loud questions which you might load trying to get, [00:10:00] uh, trying to get them to feel and an emotion so that they can give you an answer that's really provocative. And then you've got those soft questions like why? What do you mean by that? When did that last happen? How did that make you feel?

Yeah, like I've interviewed thousands of people and I have techniques, but um, a lot of them are just about listening and then trying to ask a question depending on the role of the interview, if it's for public content versus market research, trying to ask people questions that would just get 'em to think a little bit differently.

Chris Kocek: When you're first starting to work with a client, are there two or three questions that you typically like to ask to help you understand what the real problem is? 

Mark Pollard: Well, I usually define the words I use, so I define the word problem and then I would dig into the problem. Right. And it depends how much research they have.

I largely run a training company now I, I do some consulting. A lot of the consulting I do, I try to turn it into a [00:11:00] training interaction because I love to teach and it's so hard. I've, I've just found in the US it's so hard to. Kind of come in, make any difference that's meaningful. But yeah, there are obviously different kinds of problems, but if it's about advertising, then I'm trying to understand an obstacle or a barrier that's preventing people from buying the product or from donating money or whatever we're working on. So if they've got research, then in a conversation, I'm gonna go back and forth on why don't you think they're buying your product? And here's the main reason, and then we'll dig into that using something like the five whys.

We'll, just by, digging into the problem to try to get to the root cause so that we're not just solving a a symptom. So that's pretty common, I think, dealing with really senior people. One of the challenges that I've found is, first of all, you don't know which senior person could be the most useful in a company I've interviewed like CFOs or head heads of ops, who were drawn to working in a particular company for a really powerful reason, and they were really, really useful.

So you never know who's going to be [00:12:00] the most useful. Second is, will senior people open themselves up? Will they protect themselves? I interviewed a CEO of a big news organization in France. I used to be fluent in French. I've been around French culture a little bit, but about 20 minutes in he, he just said to me, these questions are not for me.Why are you asking me these questions? I've interviewed thousands of people. 

That's the only time someone has ever said that to me. And I was taken aback actually, 'cause I wasn't a baby, you know, let's, let's call it forty, forty one. I was like, wow, okay. Maybe now I understand what the problem is here. [Laughter]

The third dynamic that I've found interesting when it comes to internal stakeholder interviews is at what point is the person giving you real content versus quotes from a TED Talk or a book that they've seen?

I do have a list of questions that I'll use for internal stakeholders just as kickoff points, and sometimes if you understand their media diet a little bit you have to say, was that from [00:13:00] you or is that from a TED Talk you've seen recently? So there are three dynamics that I found to hover around that internal stakeholder interview, uh, interaction using big words.

Chris Kocek: It's funny, I heard you say that you felt like in companies in the US it's hard to make a difference. Why do you think that is?

Mark Pollard: I have a lot of theories. I think it's a conservative country, right? And so they bring in people from Australia and Brazil and even England, and a lot of us have culture shock.

It's an individualistic country, so individuals want to be seen to be the hero. Well, along with the hierarchy here, and there's research about how the US. in business acts like a democracy, but most decisions get made behind closed doors, right? So that there's just like this gaslighting that's embedded in the business culture here because people, you know, they'll talk about democracy and you'll be in a meeting and maybe they'll go around the room like P&G were famous by asking the youngest [00:14:00] person for thoughts on the agency's work.

And then they go around and that's really good training, but it's also gaslighting if nothing actually becomes of the stuff that people who are not the most senior person says. So there are lots of little riddles built into US corporate culture. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. To that point, you've talked about the hazards of the job, of the job, of strategy, and, and you've said the biggest hazard of the job is that finding and loving problems will make you the problem in people's eyes, and I think, you know, a big part of our job is to ask questions and challenge assumptions, and that can often cause friction or lead detention with people in the organization because if the client doesn't know the answer or if the account manager or the creative doesn't know the answer, then you're putting them on the spot.

So how do you challenge assumptions or highlight problems without pissing people off? 

Mark Pollard: It depends on the context. So let's talk about the messenger effect. So the messenger effect is really about how you could have a particular message, but [00:15:00] if it comes from one messenger versus another, it's very, very different.

So if, if you're in a room and the police enter and they say sit down, that is very different from if you're in a room and a little baby says, Hey, sit down. There's also. There’s also, when I get brought in, as I get older, people are bringing me in 'cause they know my vibe, like they're not naively bringing me in. So that fixes a lot of stuff.

It's a bit of a truism that if you know, you need to attract the things that you want or that represent, uh, what you're about, right? And so like from an agency point of view, if you've had three years of just putting up really boring work, you're not probably gonna get a client walking in asking for the best work in the world.

So I think all of those things come into play, and if they respect you and they know that you are trying to do something positive for them, hopefully they relax there. But I have a lot of plays that I can run in these various situations. Uh, my accent lets me get away with a lot of stuff, though [00:16:00] 

Chris Kocek: [Laughter] The accent, it's, it's a powerful, powerful tool that, uh, not everybody can leverage.

Mark Pollard: I know, I know. I feel like all strategy courses should start with a section on how to have an Australian or English accent in the US. 

Chris Kocek: So I was just interviewing Tracy Lovett from BBDO about this. She was my, uh, department director at BBDO New York, and, and I asked her some questions about the accent.

I'll ask you the same question. Why do you think people let Australians or British people get away with so much stuff? Or, or say, like you can say things - the exact same words, but because you've got the accent, it comes across as smarter. So why, why do you think that people automatically think, I'll just go with with the British accent for a second.

Why do you think people think the British accent is so much smarter? 

Mark Pollard: Well, what Americans say to me is that they think everyone else is better educated. But in our industry, if you add that onto the fact that someone's got a big title in a big company in a major city, and [00:17:00] they've made it here from another country.

There's a stack of reasons to believe that that person might have something interesting to contribute. But at its most fundamental level, and this has been said to me in places like Minnesota, Texas, et cetera, is like, we just think English, the English are better educator than us. And a lot of Americans think the Australian accent is a little bit like the British accent or very, very like the British accent.

So we benefit from that as well. 

Chris Kocek: Can you give me your best Texas accent? 

Mark Pollard: Oh, I can't, I don't think I can do that. Oh my God. 

Chris Kocek: Come on now.

Mark Pollard:. Let's hear it. You. Come on. Let's come on now. Come on now. I don't know. I don't know 

Chris Kocek: what y'all going do today. All right. 

Mark Pollard: I feel like that's like more southern than Texas.

I know. Texas and South and that, that's getting like Louisiana, like Lou, yeah. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. It's, it's tricky. It's, it's hard for me to figure out the difference between the Texas accent and the Louisiana and the Alabama. You have written so many interesting things. First of all, mark, and I'm not just saying that to make you blush.

[00:18:00] Okay. But, uh, I'm a big fan of your work and you've said “seek confessions, not easy observations.” Yeah. And I really, I really love that expression. What's an example of an easy observation that you've come across in research, and what's an example of something that feels more like a confession? 

Mark Pollard: Yeah, and this is really around talking about insights, which to, to me, there are obviously lots of different kinds of insight, but in my work, I borrow the phrase unspoken human truth. I like to focus on people and their, their private lives. Other people are really into cultural insights. I don't mind them as well, but I, I watch a lot of standup comedy and so I'm very much into that private, what's going on in that person's mind. So if, if I take you back to one set of interviews, I can give you an answer to both of those questions.

I was interviewing men about losing hair and I was doing small group virtual interviews about a decade ago, and a couple of them were wearing hats. That's an easy observation. 

Laughter: Mm-hmm. 

Mark Pollard: Guys wear hats, caps, [00:19:00] as you might say in the US when they're losing their hair, when they're not that happy with their hair.

Okay. But also in that call, the guy said to me, and I do use this one all the time, he said, I don't feel accomplished enough to be bald. 

Chris: Mm. 

Mark Pollard: And he was joking with me. But we have these two topics coming together around accomplishment. Baldness or going bald. And so from a writing point of view with an insight, I'm looking for two topics that don't always sit together in an easier, obvious way that make us wonder what's going on there that maybe make us laugh a little bit and then cry a little bit, you know, at the, at their most profound as if that happens in my strategy work, but whatever.

That's my dream. And so, you know, we talked a little bit more about that. It's pretty obvious that didn't wanna be invisible. Right? So you just didn't feel like he, he was famous enough to go bald. And I, I love that phrase. I'll never forget that phrase, but there there are two examples. Where an easy observation is a lot of guys who are losing their hair or [00:20:00] are embarrassed about what's happening with their hair, they wear a cap deeper.

Confession. I don't feel accomplished enough to go bald. 

Chris Kocek: So how do you. Pry those kinds of moments out of people like, I mean, you mentioned here, here's the observation, but I think what this is getting to is the power of the follow-up question. How do you dig deeper in a way that is useful and and reveal something new?

What do you think that you do there to be so successful? 

Mark Pollard: Again, it starts with the listening. If, if people don't think you're listening to them, they're just gonna hold back. And then I think it's useful to have some of the those loud, loaded questions mixed with those soft questions. Also, I think there's a shift for a lot of people who do this work where if you're doing interviews when you're starting out, you'll write a discussion guide.

Then sometimes you'll do an interview with someone, but really you're filling in the discussion guide as if you're filling in a form on their behalf. Right? Oh, what's your favorite [00:21:00] color? Blue. Blue. Okay. I'll write that down. Do you like beer? What kind of beer do you drink? Okay, I'll fill that in. As opposed to knowing you might need to use some of those questions, but then just slowing down and asking loaded questions such as, what's something you've never told anyone about this topic before?

At the end of interviews, I will usually ask this question, did you hear yourself say something for the first time before today? What was it and how did it make you feel? It's like leaving the camera on in an interview, and sometimes people will say really, really interesting stuff with leaders or people who are very influential in their own company.

I'll ask this very long. It's bad English, but I'll ask this question. What's one thing that makes you angry that your customers don't know? I'll use the word anger. It's a very long sentence. That's bad English. My favorite answer to that, or the answer that's always on my mind is, oh, I was talking to a guy who runs an accounting firm for creatives, and he said this, he said, what creatives don't realize is this, if they don't take [00:22:00] care of their taxes.

That’s Topic A, it can cost them their creative freedom. That's topic B. So we have taxes and creative freedom coming together. And I was like, oh yeah, that makes complete sense, but tell me more. And he said, well, if they don't take care of their taxes, they might have to take on a project that they don't wanna do.

And then they might work on that project for six to 12 to 18 months. They're not making their movie, they're not doing their standup comedy, they're not writing their book, and then all of a sudden they're six months, 12 months behind in the work that they really do want to do. So some of it's about those questions and some of it's just about not letting one answer go.

Like, what do you mean by that? Tell me more about that. Oh, that's interesting. Silence. It's trying not to over-engineer the moment, I think. 

Chris Kocek: loud and loaded questions. You mentioned one of the loud and loaded questions. 

Mark Pollard: What is something that makes you angry that your customers don't know? 

Chris Kocek: Hmm. What is something that makes you angry that your [00:23:00] customers don't know?

You mean about the the category or the situation, or what do you mean? 

Mark Pollard: Exactly. So I don't over engineer it. I just see what comes out now. This is an answer that's on my mind. It's not that it makes me angry, but I'll connect it to training of strategists. This is a little bit of a mean take, but I think it makes a point, which is this, that strategists who try to sound like strategists are probably the worst strategists to work with.

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. 

Mark Pollard: It's an example. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. 

Mark Pollard: Why do you think that might be true? 

Chris Kocek: Oh, well, I mean, I've, I've definitely worked with strategists who use a lot of big words, or the bigger the deck the more powerful they feel. But yeah, there's a lot of ego and insecurity happening in strategy and probably in advertising at large.

Mark Pollard: And, and some of it's because of the education system. You know, especially people going through university or college are taught to respond to essays with particular language. I wish everybody got to learn about [00:24:00] creativity and writing at college. Like everybody should learn those things, but I don't think it happens very often.

So, so some of it's just about bad habits, but strategists who try to sound like strategists, they often don't have a clarity of, of meaning. They hide behind big words and behind all these decks they're performing, they're focusing on things that are, are not useful to focus on. So yeah, that's really where that answer comes from.

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. And you mentioned, uh, you like to watch a lot of comedians, and I love comedians as well. Someone was telling me recently that Australian comedy is quite different than American Comedy. Let's just start with an easy one here. Do you have any favorite comedians? 

Mark Pollard: I mean, from an Australian point of view, you know Jim Jeffries, he's similar hair to me, similar age. Anthony Jeselnik… 

Chris Kocek: I haven't heard that name before. 

Mark Pollard: Yeah, like he just, he does all this deadpan, savage stuff about how cool he is and how messed up everyone else is. He's got this bit, and it starts with this. Have [00:25:00] you ever held a baby to completion? And then he just talks about how easy it is to drop a baby and like, how could you not drop a baby? And it's like, damn. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah, no. If they make you laugh, they make you laugh. One of my favorites is Sebastian Maniscalco. He talks about your travel bag in your twenties is very different from your travel toiletry bag in your forties. 

Mark Pollard: Yeah. What is, what's keep going? 

Chris Kocek: He just, he talks, he talks about how in your twenties you've just got like a small toiletry kit bag.

That's like, because you don't really need much, you're just on the go. You're, but when in your forties you've got ointments, you've got all these different things because you're in your forties and you just need like all these additional things. 

Sebastian Maniscalco [Comedy Clip]: But when you're in your forties and you go on a vacation, a lot different than when you're 20.

When you're 20, you don't even carry a toiletry bag. Everything's loose. Just gel. Hairspray, cologne just lives with your clothes. You're 40 and [00:26:00] toiletry bag becomes the focus of the trip. It's so big when you unpack. You gotta hang it. You hang it on the back of the door, you unzip it, and it just unfolds.

No more hairspray. There's no more gel. Nobody's got hair. It's propecia antidepressants, stool softener.

Chris Kocek: Can you think of any other situations where you got someone to share a, a confession to you that was really eye-opening for you or for a brand you were working on, or maybe it was as part of one of your training sessions? 

Mark Pollard: In the training sessions, we get them all the time because we have this section on insights.

And one of the questions I use to get people to think about insights is, what's something that you've learned in the past few years that's led you to change how you live? [00:27:00] And so every training session I do, I get three or so answers to that. I had a good answer a few weeks ago at Netflix in Mexico, and I don't believe there's an issue in me solving this 'cause I think it's a beautiful answer.

The leader of the group was talking about how when he went home he would sometimes get frustrated when he was playing with his child. 'cause his child want, would wanna move on from one toy to another too quickly. And he just wanted to sit there and play like, why don't we just sit here and play? But the child was moving around a lot and so his realization was this dad is toy. Dad is

Topic A. Toy is topic B. Would I write an insight like that on a brief? Probably not, but I would start a presentation with language like that because I like to mess with the English language. What does it mean? It means that he realized if he comes home and he sits with his kid and his kid's moving around, as long as they're playing [00:28:00] together, that's all that matters.

'cause the father is the toy. 

Chris Kocek: You love words. You are a word nerd. I am. Where does that come from? 

Mark Pollard: I've written since I was a kid, I was taught to read and write at a very young age, and I was always sent for tests when I was like, really, like two, three years old. I don't know why. Both sides of my family, I realized like, uh, into words.

My mom used to write very long letters to people. She's very verbal. My dad is less verbal in public, But he, you know, he's in his nineties now. He's from England, but he write journals with him traveling around on bikes around Europe and things like that. And he took me to Disneyland when I was five. And there I am riding postcards to everyone.

I'm riding a journal. So from a very young age, I was sending postcards to a lot of people. I had pen pals like a lot of us did. My longest running pen is my auntie rest in peace. But I sent her, you know, multi-page letters and postcards. Probably for 10 to 15 years I wrote poetry that [00:29:00] turned into rap, published a magazine. I'm, yeah, I'm all about the words. I love 'em. Mm-hmm. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm.

Mark Pollard: I love understanding where words come from. I love understanding differences in, in culture, even in Latin America. They're teaching me how to say, I think I'm getting this right, like posh in Argentina. I think it's. And Inga and in Right, just means like posh.

I hope I got that correct. Mm-hmm. And oh, and then, you know, Dominican Republic, they're teaching me Poppy versus Wah Wah Wah. Poppy meaning like a, a yuppie or a posh person. And w Wawa meaning a bit more street. So you're either Poppy or your W Wawa. I, I love it. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah, I mean, I, I lived in, in Mexico for a little while. I lived in Oaxaca and I lived in Guadalajara for a while, and one of the places I was living, the, the family, I woke up this one morning and they asked me how I slept and I said, I slept pretty well, but I didn't know the word for Rooster. So I was like, but there was, you know, una ave, dice Cockadoodledoo. And they were like, okay.

They wanted to know what does Cockadoodledo? And that was like an epiphany for me. Yeah. That roost roosters in Mexico, say Kikiriki. And that led me on this journey to understand what Roosters say in multiple different languages in Turkey they say uuruuu.. They say in Japan, I believe they say Cokecoko. 

Mark Pollard: Perfect. I love that. I started to study Spanish about a year and a bit ago, uh, because I was doing these talks around Latin America.

I'm like. I need to learn the language. Mm-hmm. I speak like a drunk baby, but I can talk at about this pace, about a few topics and it's, it's awesome. I was doing Duolingo, which was okay, and for six plus months I was working with a teacher down in uh, Mein and I found it better than therapy. You know, because it gives you a rhythm to your week, your learning growth mindset.

And also she would talk to me about life and business. 'cause she's actually, she's work in marketing and I'm like, oh, this is way better than therapy. 

Chris Kocek: Is there a word in Spanish that [00:31:00] you've come across that you feel like, wow, that is the perfect word. Like we don't have the equivalent in English. It's such a beautiful word.

Mark Pollard: No, I don't think I'm that advanced. I've got, I've got one in Korean for you though. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. 

Mark Pollard: It's, uh, it's two words. I think it's written in, or maybe it's written as one word. Dong chi dong chi. D-O-N-G-C-H-I-M. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. 

Mark Pollard: And what it is is. You fold your hands over each other and then you stick out your index fingers as if you have a gun and then you poke someone in the butt.

It's called poop needle. Well, the translation is poop needle, but a lot of people do it to each other. Kids do it to each other. Kids do it to teachers. And uh, that's something that I, I don't know if that really has a name. I guess in English we have things like wedgie, but that's not a wedgie. That's like two fingers poking your butt hole.

I love that one. I, I, I think I own dong chim.net. Maybe not.com. I bought it probably 20 years ago when I was laughing one day. [00:32:00] It's one of those domain names that I've held onto A lot of them I just got rid of. Yeah. Do you have one in Spanish? 

Chris Kocek: I was fascinated when I learned that esperar is to hope to wait and to expect.

Mark Pollard: Yes. 

Chris Kocek: And that made me think very deeply about like the nuances between those three words. 

Mark Pollard: Also to look forward to like, uh, I'm waiting for that with interest. I was gonna say like, I think the interesting thing with Spanish is sometimes it makes more sense than English and I've had to unlearn some French rules and there are a lot of words, Spanish words that do a lot of work that you could probably use in any all conversations at all times.

And there is a, there's a simplicity at times, but it's hard because I'm still like a year in and so I'm, I get frustrated that I forget everything that I just learned and all of that, but that's, that is one of those words where I'm like, wow, it's quite flexible. It does a lot of work. 

Chris Kocek: I've been thinking a lot lately about this tension that exists in all organizations. Okay? [00:33:00] So some people in the organization want certainty. They wanna know that something is going to work. And of course, data can provide a feeling or maybe the illusion of certainty. And so that's why you've got all these spreadsheets and dashboards to help reassure those people in the organization. But at the same time, that same organization wants you to help them stand out.

They want you to bring something new, but if an idea is new, there's probably not gonna be a lot of data around it just yet. Right? 

So first of all, have you ever dealt with that kind of situation where people gi gimme the data so I can know to move forward with this? And if so, what did you say to help them embrace the uncertainty and the excitement of newness?

Mark Pollard: I think the easiest way to answer that question is gonna feel like a non-answer, but it's, it's borrowing from the main implication from the book The Innovator's Dilemma, which is attract the kind of people and clients that you want. [00:34:00] Because then you don't have all these questions. It's, I mean, that is a responsible question, the one that you, you put out there.

It's a responsible question, but I don't have a lot of patience for some of those questions because it's not that they're asked in bad faith, but often they're not asked in good faith. The way that I would work if, if I was, you know, running a brand is I would be looking at what's working on, on social media and trying to amplify the stuff that's working the best, have that fight, and then eventually maybe there's a piece of content that gets a lot of the money put on it.

So that's one way to, to sort of work with live data, which is what standup comedians do. You know, they tell jokes, they record themselves. They’re counting how many laughs there are per minute. That is probably the most honest way to do it. The rest is, it's difficult. You've gotta put your argument together and you are hopefully selling into an organization that cares about any of this, which I don't think is as common as it once was.

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. 

Mark Pollard: Right. I get quite frustrated with marketing riddles. That is a good question to [00:35:00] ask. 

Chris Kocek: Well, you've trained a lot of organizations to think differently and to be. More inquisitive about what they're actually doing, think more deeply about the words that they're using. What's your favorite part of the job?

What's your favorite part of building Insights? 

Mark Pollard: I just personally get a, a kick, like a dopamine hit when you land on a sentence, which maybe you've, you find, or maybe someone in the creative team says it. I don't know why, just. It's just I get a little poke in the brain that makes me feel a bit of joy in the same way that when I go and watch standup comedy, I, I get that kick as well.

I don't know what it's like these days, but a while ago, if you in an agency and your team came up with an insight with a client, sometimes you would keep that relationship for five to 10 years, you know, you could really build a career and relationship with people off a sentence or two. Again, I don't know what it's like out there right now.

In many ways it's probably more vendor. [00:36:00] Transactional, fewer long-term relationships. That's the sort of stuff that I like. I always like the relationships between the people who do the work and when, when they're better for the work or because of the work. I like that. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. And what's the hardest part of the job of building insights in your opinion?

Mark Pollard: Over the past decade. I think the hardest part of the job when it comes to insights is the way that a lot of us have had to get our thinking, quote unquote approved by people who don't deserve to have opinions about our work. And they'll ask things like, is that a data-driven insight or did you make it up?

My answer is yes. Most people who say words like that don't know what an insight is, and they don't know what data is. So yeah, what they're looking for is a statistic to prove the future. Or…is that bulletproof? I don't know, is a joke Bulletproof is a song Bulletproof? What does that even mean? I just got sick of all of that and, you know, they're powerful people trying to make people feel [00:37:00] bad about themselves, uh, through dumb questions like this that they couldn't answer themselves.

So I think that's been the hardest thing is, is trying to get fresh thinking, honest thinking through conservative groups of people with a lot of power who don't understand it and who don't display any desire to understand it. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. Well said. Alright. Speed round. Are you ready? 

Mark Pollard: Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: What's your favorite word in English or any other language?

Mark Pollard: I'm gonna go with a category of words. I call them Viking words. They're words that are probably Anglo-Saxon, or in my theory are, and I might get them all wrong now, but it's things like mouse, house, truth, there's a chewiness, a shortness to them. They're very concrete, they're very visual. 

Chris Kocek: What was your favorite subject in school?

English. Did you have any favorite things that you read in English class? 

Mark Pollard: I won a Shakespeare award in my final year. I don't know if I really like Shakespeare. I remember WB Yates and his poetry affecting me quite a lot. 

Chris Kocek: Othello was one of my favorites from Shakespeare. Can't exactly explain why, but it was 'cause I read it so many times.

But how [00:38:00] would you describe what you do to a five-year-old? 

Mark Pollard: I write and I teach. 

Chris Kocek: What's the most recent good book you've read? Or it could be a movie or a TV show that you've watched. 

Mark Pollard: I just finished this Korean series called Weak Hero. It's a funny name. It's about violence in high schools in South Korea, a a genre that I'm, I'm quite fond of.

And I just started that new Apple show, is it called Friends and Neighbors. It's about like this rich stock trader getting divorced, his wife cheats on him and, and then he is got money issues and becomes a, a thief. And it's funny 'cause I've been around some of those environments, not in them, in them, but you know, through New York you tend to meet people.

So those two. I've taken a bit of my time lately. 

Chris Kocek: What's a subject that you recently got super interested in and you just went down a rabbit hole because of insatiable curiosity? 

Mark Pollard: It's, it's Spanish. If Spanish can be a subject, it's Spanish. I have committed hundreds of hours to learning it, and I'm really into regaton, Debo, and Brazilian funk.

Brazil Funk is obviously in Portuguese, but they're the things that [00:39:00] really, they make me smile. I feel happy that they're in my life. 

Chris Kocek: Speaking of Spanish, you know, as you go through South America or you're in Mexico or Central America, there are certain words that, uh, change a little bit as well as the pronunciation.

So like, I believe in Argentina, the double L, they would say like, Tortija. Yeah, ma jamo, yeah. Stuff like that. Whereas in Mexico, it's like me. Then in Cuba, I always felt like the Cuban accent was, um, it was like people were talking while holding water in their mouths. 

Mark Pollard: [Laughter] I love the Dominicans. I don't think people realize how big and powerful the industry and the city of Santo Domingo are.

I did a YouTube video about this a couple of weeks ago. It's intense and the way they speak Spanish, it's very. Often very nasal and really stacatto. So it's like, it sounds like a drill in the street, like da. And it's, I love it because I love Debo and you know, they have a lot of music genres out of, uh, the Dominican Republic, like meringue for [00:40:00] example.

And then I would say a word like ahorita, you know, right now. And I think in the Dominican Republic they told me they don't use that word. So it's funny what works and what doesn't work, especially when you're starting out and you, you get anxious about making mistakes, right? 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. So is there a brand whose work you really admire that you think to yourself, that is so good? I wish I'd come up with that. 

Mark Pollard: I've gotta give a shout out to Vacation Sunscreen. They were set up by a couple of people who worked in advertising, including a friend Lock Hall, who was an awesome comms planner for a very long time. He worked on this campaign with Naked a long time ago where they put a Banksy painting in a hotel to promote the hotel, and if you could get in and steal it, you got to keep it. Really, really cool thinker.

They're hilarious. Their whole brand is very. 1980s, Australia, Miami mustaches, weird swimsuits, and all of their products are really wacky and creative. They're now available through Target, I believe. So I'm, and I'm really proud of the work that they're all doing. [00:41:00] 

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

Mark Pollard: I don't recall getting a lot of explicit advice, but I remember one of my bosses, Todd Sampson at Leo Burnett, said something maybe to a group of us or maybe directly to me. They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. I don't think that's his quote, but it's, it's a nice one because I think a lot of strategists can get lost in knowing all the things.

But if you just come into a room with all of your knowledge. And you don't look like you care. You might alienate the room by patronizing people, by dumping information on them, by sharing things that everybody already knows. So I like that one. They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Chris Kocek: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a huge part to building trust with people. Um, and so you've gotta build that trust bridge before you can start sending knowledge down the bridge if you want to, [00:42:00] for them to even be receptive to it. Well Mark, muchisimas gracia por todo tu tiempo hoy.

Mark Pollard: Y tu tambien. 

Chris Kocek: [Laughter] And I really appreciate you taking the time. It's, it's really been a pleasure talking with you. 

Mark Pollard: Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, Mark Pollard. If you want to connect with Mark, you can find him on LinkedIn or at markpollard.net. 

If you enjoyed today's episode or any of our past episodes, I'd love it if you could leave a five star review on your favorite podcast platform. It really helps more people discover the show.

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As always, special thanks to Megan Palmer for editing, [00:43:00] sound mixing, and production support. 

Until next time, keep looking for patterns, finding contradictions, and asking what if more often.