THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Oliver Sweet [https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliver-sweet/] is an ethnographer who leads the Ethnography Centre of Excellence at Ipsos MORI. He has led research across 35+ countries for clients including Unilever, Tesco, UNICEF, and the UK Department of Health. He is a board member of the AQR, a published author, and an advocate for immersive, empathetic, and participant-led qualitative research. He has a great newsletter CultureStack [https://substack.com/@oliversweet]. I start all these conversations with the same question—a big one that I borrowed from a friend who helps people tell their stories. Because it’s such a big question, I tend to over-explain it—just like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in complete control. You can answer—or not answer—however you like.The question is: Where do you come from? You know, I think it’s the way you ask that question—the intonation—that makes it so good. Because I can interpret it in so many ways. Before I answer, I just want to point out the obvious: being asked that question in conversation—rather than reading it—prompts a completely different kind of response. So, good question. So, where am I from? I’m a Londoner living in London, which I take some pride in, because there aren’t that many Londoners in London anymore. Whenever I meet someone and they ask where I’m from, and I say London, they respond, “Oh my God, I haven’t met a Londoner in ages.” London is such a melting pot of diversity, and I think it was when people started reacting that way that I started to feel proud of being from here. I actually moved around a lot growing up. That constant moving is one of the things that shaped me. When I tell people we moved every two or three years, they often ask if my parents were in the military or something. But no—they were just restless. They got bored easily and liked new places. That restlessness probably rubbed off on me. I like new experiences, new environments. But still, yes—I'm a Londoner. I went through a phase when my parents moved to France during my teenage years. For a while, I claimed I was French. I enjoyed saying it—it had a certain comedy value. But then I met a few fluent French speakers, and that quickly exposed the truth. My French is pigeon French at best. So now I’ve gone back to identifying as a Londoner, which feels more genuine—and it seems to have some kudos again, which it didn’t always have. What does it mean to be a Londoner? People assume certain things about you, which is one of the fascinating parts of identity. It’s not just what you think—it’s what others project onto you. People assume you know the city, that you know its secrets and history, where to go and where not to go. Because London carries a certain cultural cachet, that assumption of being cultured gets projected onto you too—like, you must go to the theatre, attend exhibitions, that sort of thing. Ironically, if you’re a true Londoner, you probably don’t explore the city that much. It’s usually the visitors who engage more with the cultural side of London. Still, I enjoy being from here. I do know my way around. And I love the memories—different neighborhoods hold different chapters of my life. Visiting those places feels like opening up little time capsules. My experience is the opposite—I moved away. I’m nowhere near where I grew up, and I’ve had moments where I’ve felt the absence of that deep connection to place. It’s powerful—there’s something grounding about being able to revisit your past in a physical way. I think that’s true. Maybe that’s why, after all these years, I’ve returned to calling myself a Londoner. I grew up here, spent time away, and now that I’m back, there’s a renewed pride. I can access that history. I’ve heard you ask this question many times, but I’ve never heard you answer it. Nobody asks me. I appreciate the opportunity. I think my answer is: I come from the burbs. I come from the suburbs—a very ordinary American suburb outside of Rochester, New York. I often say every other house looked the same, they just smelled different. I have this strong self-image of being a very ordinary, suburban, middle-class American kid. And what kind of feeling does that bring up for you? Is it pride? Here is your cleaned and polished transcript section: Or is that sort of... probably a deep ambivalence, I think. A lot of my work has taken place in the suburbs of American cities. They're important places for many of our clients. So, I think having grown up in that environment gives me access to a mindset and worldview that a lot of research clients are actively trying to understand. That, in itself, is a powerful thing to know. That’s beautiful.I'm curious—when you were a boy, did you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up, other than French? Absolutely not. I spent years wandering around the UK, Europe, and other parts of the world trying to "find myself"—which sounds like a cliché. But really, I was just a bit lost, doing things I enjoyed without a clear path. The throughline was that I loved meeting people and having new experiences. No one tells you that there's a career in that. I only found my way into this work later—at 27. That’s when I became a proper researcher and ethnographer. And I realized all the things I’d been doing for fun—what I thought was just drifting—were actually meaningful. There was this thing called “insight.” All those stories from my twenties, from traveling and living abroad, turned out to have value. I thought I was just confused. But in truth, the world of market research tends to gather curious people who had no idea they were going to end up here. I’d love to change that, to raise awareness earlier on, but I haven’t figured out how yet. Before we go further into that, catch us up—where are you now, and what do you do? I work at Ipsos, a large global research agency, where I’m Head of Ethnography. I've held this role for about 16 or 17 years. Over time, I’ve had opportunities to take different jobs or pursue promotions, but I’ve turned most of them down because I genuinely love what I do. I run a team of over 15 people—ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, artists, documentary filmmakers. It’s a multidisciplinary group. We work around the world on client projects, digging into complex, often tangled questions. We do this by spending time with people, immersing ourselves in the cultures they live in. That’s what keeps me going year after year: the richness of cultural understanding we gain. Recently, we’ve worked in places like Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea to understand cocoa farming, and in various parts of the UK exploring how people do their laundry. The projects are varied, but the throughline is always this: how does culture shape behavior? Culture is this amorphous, fascinating force. It’s everywhere, it shapes all of us, and I never tire of exploring it. I truly love my job. Where is the joy in it for you? You've already expressed a lot of admiration for the work, but how would you describe the source of joy? The joy comes from two places. First, it’s about meeting people and learning how others live. It sounds a bit cliché, but it really is about stepping outside your bubble. You get to see how other people prioritize their lives—what matters to them, and how different those priorities are from your own. We live in echo chambers, both online and offline. We socialize with people who think like us, live like us. And that’s dangerous. The more you get out of that environment and into others’, the more you learn—not just about them, but about yourself. That’s the first source of joy. The second is intellectual curiosity. I love the process of sitting with a complex cultural question and pulling it apart over time. Something like: What does elitism mean today? Why is it praised in some circles and condemned in others? How does a new cultural narrative form that shifts behavior and identity? So yes—meeting people and indulging in intellectual curiosity. Those are the parts I love most. You mentioned it earlier, but when did you realize you could actually make a living doing this? I was very lucky. In my mid-twenties, after bouncing between seven jobs in four years, I realized I needed to find a real career. I used to tell myself I didn’t like those jobs—but if I’m honest, they probably didn’t like me either. At the time, I was working at Ipsos, doing survey research. It wasn’t a great fit—I’m not great with numbers—so I’m not even sure how I landed that job. But then someone from another department stepped in: Johanna Shapira. She had come from Ogilvy, where she ran an ethnographic group called Ogilvy Discovery, and had just started the ethnography practice at Ipsos UK. I was thinking about leaving, and she invited me to try this new work. She saw something in me, something I hadn’t yet seen in myself. She taught me how to be an ethnographer. I already had the academic background—social sciences, psychology, sociology, a bit of anthropology—but she showed me how to make that thinking relevant to the world today. She even helped me realize that those so-called "lost years" of travel had value in this work. That was about 17 years ago. I went from jumping between jobs to finding something I loved. And Johanna—she was one of those rare bosses who truly focused on you as a person, more than the business. In our appraisals, she’d make just two or three observations about my behavior, and I’d find myself in tears—because she was spot-on. She helped me grow, personally and professionally. So yes, I found this work through someone who believed in me, taught me, and gave me the room to become who I needed to be. In that time, how would you describe the changes you’ve seen in the understanding and application of ethnography? Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think ethnography has evolved in two or three distinct ways. First—and this is something I’ll never fully understand—in the world of market research, marketing, and innovation, ethnography is often seen as the “new and cool” thing to do. And yet, it’s probably the oldest discipline in this space—much older than surveys or focus groups. Despite that, it still carries this label of being fresh and exciting. As a result, a lot of agencies and researchers have tried to add value to their work by rebranding it as something ethnographic—“ethno light,” “ethno research,” or simply sticking a video camera in front of someone and calling it ethnography. I have a pet hate for the term “ethno.” To me, if you’re doing “ethno,” you’re not doing ethnography. It describes something incomplete. I think people shy away from the full depth and rigor that proper ethnography requires. About five to ten years ago, clients began to lose interest in ethnography because they didn’t see it as especially applicable or actionable. But as more clients adopted a global mindset, they began looking for answers beyond personality typologies. A lot of market research, especially segmentation, focuses on personality types. That’s useful—but only part of the picture. The other part is culture. Where you grow up—India, the U.S., Argentina, China—shapes you deeply. Your upbringing, the social norms, the structure of daily life—all of it plays a significant role in who you become. I’d go so far as to say culture shapes your personality to a large degree. Historically, marketing has favored the idea of comparable units—having a consumer segment in Brazil that maps cleanly onto a segment in the U.S. But that just doesn’t hold up. In the last seven or eight years—pre-pandemic even—there’s been a renewed desire to understand the cultural backdrop behind behavior. That’s led to a form of ethnography that’s less about producing glossy videos and more about understanding how culture influences us. Of course, there are ongoing pressures around speed and budget—everyone faces those. But ethnography seems to be having a resurgence. People need to understand culture now more than ever. And I think that’s only going to intensify as artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in what we do. AI, by its nature, tends to cluster around the mainstream. But ethnography is often about the fringes—those edge cases where culture is changing, where innovation happens, and where inclusion matters. The more clearly AI maps the center, the more we’ll need ethnography to explore the edges. What is a proper ethnography? For much of my career, that word wasn’t even said aloud. It wasn’t a thing, and now it’s become common—but often misused or misunderstood. So for you, what makes something truly ethnographic? What must be true for it to be valuable? I’ve often been accused of being a purist, which I refute—because there are academics who think what I do is a complete bastardization. So, there's a spectrum. The real question is: how much time and effort are you investing to truly understand why people do what they do? Ethnography can happen over a month, a week, a day—maybe even an hour or two, though that’s pushing it. The point is not the length of time but the depth of understanding. You need to connect several elements. You need a deep grasp of the culture someone lives in. That can be researched before you even meet them—understanding their influences, what they watch, where they spend time online. You need to know where they grew up, what their environment was like, their neighborhood, their social context. You learn a lot just by being with someone, observing the world they navigate. Ultimately, it’s about understanding how culture informs behavior, and how that shapes attitudes. Most non-ethnographic work starts with attitudes and then tries to deduce behaviors. I prefer to start the other way around. What people say is useful—but I want to dig into what that really means. Ethnography is about creating meaning. It’s about understanding the system of meaning someone lives within. And there are many valid ways to do that—even if you're not a purist. Not everyone listening may fully understand what ethnography is, even at a basic level. Can you share a story that really demonstrates what you mean by it—something that brings it to life? Yes, absolutely. That’s probably a good idea, seeing as I’ve been talking around it. The first ethnography I ever did is a great example. We were doing research in the north of England, in a fairly deprived rural town. One of the participants had taken part in a telephone interview. He said that he liked to go for a long walk each day, that he ate healthily, and that he often went to the park. That was the limited information I had going in. I also knew, based on how he was recruited, that he was clinically obese and had diabetes. So, I was really interested in understanding his situation, especially because, on the surface, it seemed contradictory. I called him and asked if I could spend the day with him for an ethnographic interview. At that point, I already had some understanding of Oldham, the town, from previous work, so I had a sense of the broader context. We planned to spend the whole day together—from around 9 a.m. through dinner. The idea was to see different points in his day: his routines, his interactions with family or friends, his meals, and his diabetes management. That’s what I’d call a solid market research ethnography—one where you’re fully dedicated to observing and understanding someone in their own environment. You put your phone away, forget about distractions, and just be with them. Within ten minutes of arriving, he told me he had to take his medication. He sat down in the kitchen, pulled down his trousers, and gave himself an injection in the leg. I wasn’t quite expecting that—not for my first ethnography. It caught me off guard, but it was fascinating. I asked why he was doing it at that moment, and he just said, “I don’t know. I do it morning and evening.” I asked if he needed to do it around meals or if he should be measuring his levels, and he replied, “I don’t bother with any of that. I just do it morning and evening.” So already, I was learning something meaningful about his relationship with his condition—far more than we’d ever get from a survey. Later, he said, “Let’s go for a walk. I need to walk the dog.” But instead of walking, he shuffled outside and got on his mobility scooter. We went for a four-mile “walk” through the park that way. So, the “daily walk” he had mentioned in the phone interview wasn’t really a walk at all. Then, at lunchtime, he grilled his sausages instead of frying them—that was his idea of healthy eating. These were the kinds of compromises he was making. He didn’t want to go out, but he had to because of the dog. He didn’t want to grill sausages, but he thought it was better than frying. These were real decisions he was making with the resources and knowledge he had. As we talked, I learned more about his background. He had been a truck driver for 25 years. When he developed diabetes, his eyesight began to fail, and he had to stop working. His entire social life had revolved around his job, and now it was gone. He became isolated in his community. The town itself had racial tensions and had experienced riots, and he felt confined—trapped. He had far bigger concerns than the health authority’s goals for improving his lifestyle. He was dealing with issues like neighbors occasionally egging his door. Spending the day with him revealed all of that. It was a profound window into someone’s world. And from there, we can ask: how do we support people like him—people in those circumstances? That’s beautiful. What kinds of conversations do you have with clients? When does Ipsos call you in? I always imagine it like the red phone from Batman—when does someone call Oliver? What’s that first conversation like? I love that image. I do actually remember having a red phone on my desk once. It was ridiculous—but kind of hilarious. I think the best time to bring in ethnographic research is when you know something’s missing, but you don’t quite know what it is. In a lot of traditional research, the process starts with clearly defined objectives: “Here’s what we want to find out—go and get the answers.” If you already know exactly what you're asking, ethnography might not be the right tool. But when the problem is murky, when you’re unsure of what the real question is—that’s the perfect time. That’s when I get most excited. Maybe the client has a target audience, but they don’t really understand what that audience does, let alone why they do it. There are too many unknowns, especially around behavior and meaning. We work a lot in consumer packaged goods. And every product that someone buys carries some kind of meaning. Even something as routine as buying laundry detergent has emotional and cultural weight behind it. It means they’re striving for a hassle-free life. Or it’s about taking pride in sending their kids out the door looking presentable. Or it’s the satisfaction of knowing something’s been done right. It can mean many, many things. But every single product—whether it’s laundry detergent, a chocolate bar, or a smartphone—carries meaning. And that’s what we’re always trying to decode. But I feel like I’m preaching to the choir here, especially since your newsletter is called The Business of Meaning. You understand—there’s purpose behind everything. Yes, but I was going to ask: what do we mean when we talk about "meaning"? I take a kind of perverse joy in going back to basic concepts I’m drawn to. So, what does meaning mean to you? That’s a great question. And it’s something I’ve been working through over time. I’ve developed a framework to explain how we think about meaning—what we call a cultural framework. It’s built on the idea that meaning is a system. When I conduct research, I’m always trying to explore three things. They’re deeply interrelated. When you find the connections between them, you begin to understand meaning more clearly. The first is identity: Who is this person? How do they express themselves? How do others see them? What are their stylistic choices, the signals they send? That’s the individual level. Then we look at community: How are they connecting with others? That could be at work, at school, with friends, or online. Identity and community are linked—it’s through community that identity is often reinforced or performed. The third piece is belief systems: What beliefs or values underpin that identity and community? This includes ideology, morality, personal values—all the stuff that gives shape to someone’s worldview. When you connect identity, community, and belief systems, that’s when you can really see what something means. And meaning is fluid—you can shift or reshape it. One of the early projects I worked on was about trying to engage young boys who were displaying antisocial behavior on the streets of London. The question was: how can we get them to go to the local youth centre? The youth centre was well-funded and had great facilities, but the boys simply didn’t want to go. What we discovered was that the boys wanted a space that felt unregulated—a place where they weren’t being watched. They wanted freedom to explore this emerging form of masculinity. That was their identity. In terms of community, they wanted to be in environments that didn’t feel sterile or restrictive. And their belief system was rooted in discovery—figuring out who they were, both individually and as a group. We looked at what the youth centre represented: different social codes, a different kind of order and structure. The meanings didn’t align. The boys weren’t rejecting the youth centre as such—they were rejecting the values it implicitly stood for. So, our suggestion to the youth centre was: don’t try to attract the boys directly through table tennis, computers, or football tables. Instead, attract the girls. Because if the girls go, the boys will follow. And then it becomes a safer, more vibrant environment for everyone. That became part of the strategy. So, understanding meaning through identity, community, and belief allowed us to unlock a more effective, culturally attuned solution. That’s wonderful. You mentioned earlier that ethnography had a sort of moment, or maybe even matured a bit in the years leading up to the pandemic. But the pandemic clearly drew a hard line across so many of these practices. How did you respond to that moment, and what impact do you think it’s had on how ethnography is done? I had to do the biggest U-turn of my entire career. For years, I insisted that real ethnography required being physically present with people. None of this “digital ethnography” stuff. I dismissed it as shallow, surface-level work. Then the pandemic hit. Flights were canceled. We couldn’t travel. We couldn’t go into people’s homes. I had a team of about 15 or 16 people, and none of us knew when—or if—things would return to normal. We were worried about our jobs. So we sat down and did some serious soul-searching. We acknowledged that digital ethnography was out there, but we had always resisted it. We thought it didn’t go deep enough. But we had no choice. So we asked ourselves: if we must do this digitally, how do we do it in a way that still honors the core principles of ethnography? And we realized something important. Digital gave us time. Instead of spending one or two days with someone in person, we could now spend two, three, even four weeks with them—because they were home, and available. We leaned into that. We also focused on reflection. It wasn’t just about getting participants to film themselves with their phones. We set up regular interviews—weekly or even more frequent—and encouraged people to reflect deeply on their own lives. It became less about capturing “natural” behavior in a single burst, and more about creating a space for participants to observe themselves, to articulate and process what they were experiencing. And that turned out to be rich in a completely different way. To really understand someone’s belief system, you have to have a deep conversation. You have to ask lots of “why” questions to get beneath the surface. So, we also decided to do a lot of cultural research beforehand and use that to pose hypotheses to people—to give them something to reflect on and respond to. We took a big gamble. We recruited around ten households in each of five different countries—so fifty households in total. Then we told our clients, “Look, we know you’ve canceled all your planned research work, but we’re going to launch a new syndicated study. The cost of entry will be very low, and in return, we’ll send you a report every single week about what’s unfolding during the pandemic.” The plan was to ask participants to film themselves using their mobile phones, to have regular conversations with us, and to let us explore the cultural and political context they were living in. And we followed through. We produced a weekly report for about nine months. It was exhausting. But we sent that same report to six different clients who had signed up, and honestly, it was a lifeline. At the time, we had zero other work. It was also a way for us to learn—fast—how to do digital ethnography well. Because this wasn’t just people showing us their homes and saying, “This is my kitchen.” It was about getting them to reflect deeply, to have meaningful conversations within their own households. For example, we’d ask them to talk to their families about food: Has it become more exciting? More boring? What’s changed? And what we saw was an emotional rollercoaster. In the early weeks, people fell in love with food again. They wanted something to do with their hands. They baked bread, played board games, got into crafts. When you strip away the distractions and give people time, you realize they’re innately creative. They want to make things. They want to do something. That explosion of creativity lasted maybe six or seven weeks. You saw it in the rainbows in windows, the clapping for carers, the singing from balconies. And then... it all became tiresome. People got stir-crazy. They missed each other. The novelty wore off. But that’s when something else kicked in: reflection. When you’re stuck at home, you have time to reassess your values—your priorities, your work, your family. People started to realize that the lives they were living pre-pandemic didn’t really align with who they wanted to be. They didn’t want to spend two hours commuting every day. They wanted to be at home with their kids. The move to remote work changed everything. Now that we’re trying to shift back to hybrid, no one wants to go into the office five days a week if it means losing that precious time. Our values were fundamentally reassessed. Take the murder of George Floyd, for example. That wasn’t the first instance of racial violence, but because the whole world was at home—re-evaluating their moral frameworks—and because the footage was so raw and unfiltered, people responded differently. It was a turning point. It wasn’t just that event; it was the context. People had the time, space, and emotional capacity to reckon with it. And that was fascinating to watch unfold. Exhausting, yes—but also deeply meaningful. I can’t imagine doing that while also going through your own pandemic experience. Exactly. That was the other layer—processing our own lives while documenting everyone else’s. So, how would you describe the state of ethnography now—especially when it comes to digital versus in-person? Where do you stand now, post-pandemic, as a former purist? I think I’ve found a way to frame it that works pretty well. What we’ve learned is that digital ethnography—when done properly—can be incredibly confessional. Yes, it’s amazing to meet someone in person. But when someone is alone, with their phone, and reflecting on their own life, that solitude can create a powerful space for honesty. Some of the work we’ve done on obesity in recent years—people recording their thoughts alone—has been incredibly raw and revealing. They’ve told us things they could never say to their partners, or even to us if we were sitting across from them. That requires trust, of course, which is why we don’t just do a couple of “mobile diary” entries. We build that relationship over two, three, even four weeks. And the emotional depth we get can be profound. On the other hand, face-to-face ethnography—when done well—delivers surprises. It allows you to follow people, go where they go, see what they see. That’s when you discover things no one expected. And it’s a harder sell, because clients always ask: “What kind of things are you going to find?” And the honest answer is, “I don’t know.” But that’s the point. So, I’ve come to think of it this way: digital ethnography gives you confessions, and in-person ethnography gives you surprises. That’s a useful way to think about the strengths of each. That’s a beautiful distinction. And it ties back to something you mentioned earlier—that your favorite kind of brief is when the client doesn’t quite know what they’re looking for. How do you describe that sweet spot—the mindset of a client who’s willing to go on that kind of discovery journey with you, into the unknown? So it can be quite tricky. But this is actually, I think, the role of thought leadership. Ipsos is an enormous agency, and we do a lot of research all the time. My team is always out talking to people, spending time with them. And we start to notice patterns—things that repeat across studies, even when we’re not looking for them. Three or four years ago, someone on my team said, “This whole notion of masculinity is getting weird—it’s warped, it’s difficult.” And they wanted to dig into it. We brought the idea to a couple of our beer clients at the time. They were mildly receptive—“Yeah, maybe, whatever.” So we said, fine. We’ll look into it ourselves. As a piece of thought leadership, we set out to explore toxic masculinity, modern masculinity, changing role models, and how all of this plays out online. The insights were eye-opening. And much of what we uncovered is now part of everyday conversation. But we were looking at it years ago. About nine months after finishing the work, we brought it to clients and said, “This matters.” And suddenly they got it. They came forward and said, “OK, now I see what you mean.” We had a similar experience with health care—specifically, the experience of women in health care. We observed that women were being treated very differently. At first, clients responded with the usual hesitation: “Maybe... sure, if you say so.” But when we did the work, we showed how women were often labeled “hysterical” for symptoms that were, in fact, common and valid. The language, the treatment—it all needed to be reexamined. Pharmaceutical companies started coming to us saying, “Yes. We need to address this.” Right now, we’re working on a study about elitism. Everyone assumes that’s a political topic—something to do with populism. But it’s much broader than that. Businesses don’t have political immunity anymore. Everything they do is under scrutiny. Being labeled “elitist” can completely shift how the public sees your company. And often, you don’t get advance warning. Suddenly you’re tagged with this label, and your corporate reputation is at stake. So that’s the focus: how does politics enter the business sphere? And how does it influence corporate reputation? I see this as a call to arms for the industry. We can’t just follow the client. Yes, of course—we follow their needs, their questions. But we also have a responsibility to look outward and say, “Here’s what we’re seeing across the world. Here’s what we believe matters. Here’s what you should be paying attention to.” We can lead—not just respond. Yeah, it’s amazing. I feel like the power is sort of hidden. You said you were looking at this three or four years ago, and now it’s everywhere. So this kind of work gives you early notice. Can you say more about that? It feels like the value of this work is that it gives you a perspective on what’s coming—long before other methodologies can. But maybe it’s hard to articulate that. It’s true, but not always true in the moment, if that makes sense. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I do know what you mean. It’s crucial to look at the fringes of society. That’s where the early signals come from. The masculinity example is a good one. It started when someone on my team heard her daughter come home from school and say, “I don’t want to go to school—the boys are being such dicks.” She kept hearing similar things: “The boys are so annoying,” “They’re shouting at the teacher,” “They’re saying things like, ‘Miss, make me a sandwich.’” She thought, “This is strange.” So we started listening more closely to these signals. When we get a research brief, it’s easy to focus on the mainstream—because that’s what clients usually want. They need to understand their core audience. That’s fair. But we should always include someone from the fringes, because people on the margins often give us a preview of what’s coming. There are many ways to do this. For example, this same researcher started looking at masculinity across different projects. We’d ask, “What does it feel like to be a man today?” People would say, “Oh, it’s great. Obviously, being a man is great.” But then they’d follow with, “But, you know, it’s women’s moment right now. Equality is moving forward.” Still—we didn’t quite believe them. There was something in their tone. Was it really great for them? There were early warning signs in the way people talked. She did something simple but brilliant: she created a dummy Instagram account. She named it something like “The Real Bob,” and she started following a network of male influencers. These were guys promoting a very specific version of masculinity—talking about how to care for yourself, how to make sure your woman respects you, and how not to let her “step out of line.” By following who they followed, she went deeper and deeper into this network—what we now call the “manosphere.” It was a dark, self-reinforcing world that was easy to miss unless you were looking. But it was there. And it was growing. Social media echo chambers make it easy to overlook what people are really consuming. But with the right strategy, you can uncover it. Set up a dummy account. Use keywords that align with your topic. See what emerges. Follow the threads.It can be researched. It can be done. And I’ll say this: in nearly all of our projects, we should be looking at the fringes a lot more. Yeah, we're kind of near the end of time, and I've got two questions at war in my mind. One is about AI, and the other is that I want to hear more about the confessional benefit of digital ethnography—what happens there. And then, I don’t know, maybe some tricks of the trade? Having spent as much time as you have in conversation with other people, how do you think about what it means to ask a question or to listen to somebody? Ah, good question. The thing to do—or I have found, anyway—is that you get some confessional stuff in face-to-face ethnography as well. I think at the end of a day spent with someone, you often find they say, “You know what, I’ve not necessarily had this experience before... I’ve just realized that you’ve focused on me the whole time.” It feels wonderfully indulgent for the participant. They’ll start to open up: “Let me tell you a bit more about me... I’ll tell you a bit more.” And I think that’s such a lovely thing to do. So fundamentally, whether you’re working face-to-face or digitally, you need to gain someone’s trust. And to gain that trust, you need to be absolutely authentic about who you are. Tell them stories about yourself. There’s this idea in research that we shouldn’t share anything about ourselves because it might bias the process—but that just keeps it surface-level. It prevents you from establishing genuine trust. You need to be fully transparent: who you are, what you know, what you don’t. People will feel comfortable with you—even if you're completely different from them—if you’re being real. Then, give them the attention they deserve. That part can be exhausting. I’ve come out of a day of ethnographic interviews feeling completely wiped out. And it’s not like I’ve done all that much—just asked a few well-timed questions. But mentally, you're hyper-vigilant. You’re observing everything they do, everything they say, how they say it. You’re listening for repetition—"They’ve mentioned this three times, so it must matter." You’re noticing not just what’s present, but what’s absent. You’re asking, “Why are they doing this... and why aren’t they doing that?” It’s intense, even though it feels relaxed in the moment. That’s how you establish trust in a face-to-face setting. It’s harder online. One of the tips and tricks we always share is this: when you’re asking participants to film aspects of their life—for instance, if you’ve done a Zoom interview and now ask them to show parts of their daily routine—you need to model it first. So if you ask, “Can you show me how you do breakfast?”—you show them your breakfast. Say, “Welcome to my kitchen. I really like this space. Here’s where I store everything. This is what I do in the morning.”You’re giving something of yourself. Because why would they keep giving you something meaningful if they’re not getting anything back? Yes, they might receive a monetary incentive, but that’s not enough for an authentic exchange. You need more. That’s what we’ve learned in our digital work—we need to work even harder to give participants something. We send them video tasks. We don’t just post a question on a bulletin board and call it digital ethnography. That won’t yield confessional responses. So, I think it’s about giving something. Beautiful. Oliver, I want to thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun, and I really appreciate it. I’ve loved this conversation. It’s been a very real conversation, so thank you very much.And thank you for inviting me to this chat. I’ve followed your newsletter and your work for some time—so it’s a real privilege. That’s very kind. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Cyril Maury [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cyrilmaury/] is a Partner at Stripe Partners [http://www.stripepartners.com/], where he leads strategy and innovation work for global technology clients including Meta, Microsoft, and Spotify. Based in Barcelona, he specializes in integrating social science and data to guide product strategy and business model development. Late in our conversation, we discuss these two pieces: “When place matters again: strategic guidelines for a splintered world [https://stripepartners.com/viewpoint/when-place-matters-again-strategic-guidelines-for-a-splintered-world/]” from May 2025, and ”Interpreting Artificial Intelligence: the influence and implications of metaphors [https://stripepartners.com/viewpoint/interpreting-artificial-intelligence-the-influence-and-implications-of-metaphors/]” from Sept 2023. I always start these conversations with a question I borrowed from a friend—someone who helps people tell their stories. It’s a big, beautiful question, and I love it so much that I tend to over-explain it before asking. But before I do, I want you to know you’re in complete control. You can answer however you like, and there’s no way to get it wrong. The question is: Where do you come from? I come from France, which is the obvious answer. But there’s more to it. My mother is Vietnamese, and my father is French, though with roots in Algeria, another former French colony. In many ways, I’m an unusual product of colonialism—a strange outcome of its complicated legacy. Maybe because of that background, I became curious about the world early on. I grew up in Grenoble, a provincial city in the French Alps, and I quickly became interested in history, geography, and people. I wanted to see how the world looked beyond my immediate surroundings. As soon as I could, I pursued exchange programs through university. In France, the typical path is to move from the provinces to Paris. I did that, and once in Paris, I realized there was even more beyond France itself. I spent time in the U.S., doing a year at UC Santa Barbara—an incredibly beautiful place—and then spent a few years in Latin America: São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Bogotá. Eventually, I moved on to the Middle East, to Iran, eager to explore still more cultures. During that journey, it struck me: what if I could make understanding people my job? What could be better than being paid to do what we all enjoy—being curious about others’ lives and stories? That realization led me into the world of research and consulting. I started my career in Spain at agencies focused on understanding behavior and helping companies develop better products based on that understanding. After Spain, I returned to France. About five years ago, I joined Stripe Partners, a decentralized agency headquartered in London. We have people working everywhere—from Hong Kong to Edinburgh to Berlin. I’m currently based in Barcelona, which is where I’m speaking from now. Growing up, I was very aware of the absence of my mother’s Vietnamese heritage in our home. She was born in Saigon, when it was still a French territory. During the war, she left for France. I was born a few years after she arrived, in the early 1980s, a time when France emphasized full integration into the Republic. That meant speaking French and adopting French customs. My mother followed that path. She never spoke Vietnamese to me or my brother—not a single word. I speak English, Spanish, and Portuguese, but I can’t say anything in Vietnamese. She had very few Vietnamese friends. We would hear her speak Vietnamese on the phone occasionally—mostly with family in the United States—but she would always close the door. It created this strange feeling: a culture present only in its absence. I grew up knowing that something was different, even if I couldn’t name it. As I got older, I came to understand it as a consequence of colonialism, but as a child, it simply felt... odd. As a kid, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to be. What I did have was an intense curiosity—about people, about cultures, about how things worked elsewhere. That curiosity led me, step by step, to where I am now. I studied political science to understand ideas and ways of thinking. Then I went to business school to learn the more practical aspects of the world. Along the way, I kept seeking opportunities to live and study abroad. Toward the end of business school, I met someone—just a friend of a friend—who had started working at an innovation consultancy in Spain. He said, “This seems like something you’d enjoy.” And he was right. On paper, it made sense. That was almost twenty years ago, and I’ve been doing it ever since. And tell me, catch us up. You're in Barcelona. Tell me a little bit about what you're doing and the work that you're, what are you working on? Yeah. So I'm based in Barcelona, a partner at Stripe Partners. What we do at Stripe Partners is, largely, we have a number of methodologies and tools that help us surface and understand people. Originally, what we're known for is ethnography. Some of the founders are PhDs in anthropology, and we really started by trying to leverage that set of tools as much as possible. As we grew as a company, we added other tools to give us different lenses on human behavior—primarily data science. We now have a healthy and cutting-edge data science practice. The last pillar of what we do is design. We also have designers who do design research and all kinds of work to, one, understand user insights in different ways, and two, ensure that the understanding we develop can be used to inform digital product strategies in the best possible way. We also have the tools to ensure that we use these insights to create something that will help stakeholders understand what it is—the human truth—we're trying to make visible. So that's what we do as a company. Within that, my personal role involves a lot of work on technology projects, because I would say about 75% of our clients are technology companies. That means a lot of projects for Google, Meta, Spotify. In the last couple of years, much of that has focused on AI. Some of the projects that I found particularly interesting have been about understanding how people engage differently with AI solutions in different markets. It’s fascinating, because there are so many layers of complexity to unpack. First, the solutions themselves are difficult to understand—even for the people who design and build them. They're the first digital tools that are probabilistic, not deterministic. So that’s one layer of uncertainty. The second layer is that their behavior depends on the users themselves. Different users can interact with the same AI solution, and it will behave differently for each of them—and even differently for the same user over time. There's this almost dialectical path between the AI and the user, which is hard to understand at scale because it’s so context-dependent. The third layer is how users make sense of these experiences. That interpretation is shaped by cultural beliefs and narratives. As we've seen in our projects, this is deeply local. Someone in Germany, someone in India, someone in Brazil—they’ll interpret the same interaction differently because they come with different expectations. So, long answer, but that’s the AI work: a lot of global-scale AI deployment projects. The other major area I’ve been focused on is healthcare, which I’m helping to develop at Stripe Partners. We’ve done—and I’ve done—a lot of projects aimed at understanding what we call disease areas or therapeutic areas. These projects are especially interesting because they require understanding multiple layers: the biology of the disease, how particular drugs work, how people experience and make sense of their conditions, how they interpret treatment, and how it all fits into their lived experience. And then, you add the complexity of the healthcare system itself, which differs dramatically between the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. Some of the areas I’ve worked on recently include Alzheimer’s disease and dementia—which is absolutely fascinating. Also haemophilia, which is more niche but still quite complex. And we’ve been doing a lot in obesity and weight management—trying to understand how that space is shifting culturally. One of our clients there—this is public—is Novo Nordisk. We help them make sense of the cultural shift happening now around weight loss and weight management, which feels quite unprecedented—maybe even historic. Amazing. I'm just going to ask the question: what is Stripe Partners? Yeah, it’s a good question. That's perhaps the hardest question so far. I was going to preface it, but I figured I'd just go right at it. No, for sure. So Stripe Partners is what I would call a strategic consultancy, which really is focused—laser focused—on one thing, which is developing robust, robust, robust understanding of human behaviors, again, like through as much as a variety of lenses and methods that we can. And then like what we do is we take this hopefully novel insights, new way to understand humans, and we link that with the business strategy side of one of our clients. So let's say that it's—I'm going to take an example here—let's say that we work for Google, for example. We do a lot of work with them in different markets—so in India, in Brazil, in Japan, right? As any of those tech companies, they have a really good, usually, understanding of U.S. users. They understand quite well—well, because it's their first, their largest market, it's their oldest market, it's the market that individually has people they're the closest to—but they usually have like a very poor understanding of anything else. So they have a poor understanding of Europe, they have a poor understanding of India, of Brazil. And typically what would we help them try to understand? We might try to help them understand how users—people—want to interact with and what they're looking for, what are like the mental models that are behind any form of trying to plan for entertainment in general, right? So that's like from going to the cinema, to the restaurant, to travel—and this again is really culturally rooted. I'm just going to take one example, which is really quite simple to express and transmit. We've done this project in Japan, in India, in Brazil—same project, same research question—really trying to understand these behaviors linked with entertainment and, in this case, going out for dinner. In Japan, going out for dinner alone is something that is absolutely common and that people of all, you know, walks of life do very commonly. And the reason they do it—there's many reasons, right? But it might be because they want to create that liminal space between the office and a very cramped house, right? For example, it might be because the experience of food is for them something that is quite unique and that is best experienced, if you will, alone, right? So you need to try to understand all of this and see what are the motivations, the cultural models behind it. But that's only one part of what we need to try to do. Then what we need to try to do is—we need to try to understand what are the implications for Google from a business perspective. And here, what do you need to understand? Well, you need to understand that in Japan, the whole system of the digital journey—at the center of which you have eating out—is incredibly distinct from the one that you have in the U.S. It starts from this very odd-for-us system of booking restaurants with points that are really quite odd, where you need a lot of precise information in order to go and book. And then you have the whole payment system, which is completely distinct again. It's not like in the U.S., where you basically have your credit card and you pay. There, you have this points system—again, very intricate. You need to go to Japan and really spend a lot of time to try to understand that stack. And you need to, as well, then understand that side of things to then put the two things together and say, okay, so what happens here at Google is that first, you have these different behaviors, and second, you have these different tech ecosystems. The business opportunities are here, here, and here. And in order to leverage them, you can try to develop this particular UI, this particular user experience that will be better suited for this local usage of, for example, eating alone. But just understanding the user need is not enough. You need to then be able to understand the business side of things. How does that translate operationally? Very quickly, we usually have two main types of stakeholders. You have the UXR—so UX researcher—within the companies we work with. Their main role is to understand the needs of the users, this cultural thing. They're usually very passionate about that. And then they have a different stakeholder themselves, who we often interact with—who's like the PM, that we call the PM in the tech companies—and it's someone who's in charge of the business product decisions. You need to understand those two in order to then provide recommendations that make sense both from a user side and from a business side. That's basically a very long answer to say that the heart of what Stripe Partners is, is bridging the gap between these two needs—these two stakeholders that speak usually a different language, that have slightly different needs. What we do is we try to create an alignment between the two and provide value to both. It's amazing. What do you love about it? Where's the joy in your work for you? That's a good question. It is not in making PowerPoint slides. Some of my colleagues would say that it is, and I could say it, but then I would lie—which I think would not be very useful. What did you say? It's not in what? It's not in making PowerPoints. It's not PowerPoints. It's not Google Slides. No, I think for me—and that's probably something that you hear a lot in those conversations—it's just like being able to go to these places that I would never have otherwise. Some of them are in countries and places that look amazing on paper. I was in Tokyo last December for Google, but a couple of months ago, I was in Cincinnati, in Ohio, which is a place that I don't think many people go to for tourism. But it was unbelievably interesting to be there, spend a week there, see a place that I would never have gotten to see otherwise. What's really interesting to me—I'm going to take an analogy here, which I think is quite funny. I don't know if you ever played video games. I used to play video games when I was a kid. I played this video game called Warcraft and Starcraft. The way it works—and lots of video games are like that—you have a map, and this map is all dark at first. You don't know anything, and then you drop somewhere and you start to see something. Based on that information, you infer a model of that world. You say, okay, so there's trees here. It's probably a place with a lot of trees. Then as you walk, what's dark becomes light. You have these pockets of knowledge that you develop. You see, well, actually, that's really not a place with a lot of trees. There's trees, but there's also some lakes and also some other things. The way I see it is you can look at anything, at any layer of complexity. What we do is always—we move from not knowing anything to knowing more things. As you learn more things, you can reframe, re-evaluate your understanding of the whole thing. For example, I've been to the U.S. many, many times. I've been a lot of time to Chicago, to the coast, whatever. I've never been to Cincinnati. Now that I've been to Cincinnati—I spent a week there—that's a thing that used to be dark, unknown, that now I know. That reshapes my whole understanding of what the United States is. That's what I'm passionate about. That's what I want to do more and more in my work. I think that as researchers, what happens is we are incredibly lucky to be in situations where there is a common understanding between the people you're going to go to and talk to. We do a lot of ethnographic research. I would go to this suburban place in Cincinnati, and here there's a family of a guy I would never have even interacted with in my whole life. Then I spent three hours at that guy's place. Five minutes into the conversation, we're talking about the most intimate things in his life—his health. He's opening up because there is this shared understanding that this is a researcher that comes in. There is this exchange, this unspoken agreement that I'm never going to see this guy ever in my life. I'm going to tell things to him that I don't even tell to my wife. That's a true story. For example, for some of these weight management projects, we had a discussion about weight with someone who was obviously a little bit overweight. She was like, "I have never told my weight of when I was really overweight to anyone. You're the first people I tell it to. Even my husband—I never told it to." That's because you created that space where she feels safe. That's largely a function of the process, not of anything we do. I think that's what's unique about our jobs. What you've described—I couldn't agree more. It's thrilling to be in that space. The questions that come for me here are: What's the value of that? How do you articulate the value of that to your client? How do you create the space for that kind of exploration? That's the thing. What makes that so vital? How do we talk about what makes that vital? Then what's your experience? You clearly have success in creating the permission to make that space. I'm always wondering—how does that become possible? Creating that possibility—that's the whole thing. Yes. Those are hard questions. The first one is about the clients. Here, very practically, we have two types of clients—clients who are usually from large tech companies and clients who are not from large tech companies. The way to talk to them and to ensure that they see the value of this type of deep, usually slow, ethnographic research process is distinct. When it's the tech company, a lot of the time, our clients there are themselves people who come from a background of social science in academia. They already know the value of that. Then they make trade-offs between how complex or foundational is the question I want to answer versus how tactical it is. You don't need to walk them through what the process is, what the benefits are. They're seasoned researchers. They've done that a number of times. That is, I think, very unique to these very large tech companies. That's Meta, that's Spotify, that's Google. There's probably 20 companies in the world that have that level of maturity and which, for better or worse, have understood—I think very early on—that their business model is predicated on them being able to understand people. That's what they probably do too well already. They're willing to invest in that in many different ways. That's why a lot of those projects also have a data science component to it. Really, they know that the foundation of a successful product that they can then monetize is a very, very fine understanding of human behavior. That's for these types of clients. Then you have the other type of client, which is 25% of our revenues. That's going to be legacy companies. That's going to be a telco company. That's going to be an FMCG company. That's going to be, for example, in my case, a healthcare company. Here, you usually have more of a job, which is a job of bringing the stakeholder and the client with you on that journey of understanding—first, what are the different methodologies that exist; two, what is each of these methodologies best for in terms of what type of research question you will tend to try to get an answer for with this method; and three, how they can then translate that into business decisions. Those processes are usually longer. The sales cycle, to be very precise and very concrete, is longer. What you need to try to do here, in a sense, is really go at length to help them see and give concrete examples of what is a type of insight that can only be surfaced with these slow ethnographic methodologies and how that can unlock business value. It's in this showing of the actual outcome that you get, usually, the best response. I would say—to summarize—really two distinct situations: you need to really adapt to who the buyer is. You've been at this a while. How would you describe how it's changed—the openness to this approach or the fluency in these methods? That's also a good question. I think that for me, I'm always... Let's take the tech world first, which is the one that I've been immersed in a bit more over the last five years. Here, I think even five years ago, the level of sophistication and understanding of the stakeholders was already very high, but they were more open to do what we call foundational work. They were more open to fund a three- or four-month study where you would try to go into different markets and understand—for example, I'm going to take a concrete example—how music in general can be used by people to create meaningful connections. That is a question that is a very difficult question—a question where you don't really instinctively at first see what are the business implications of that. You need to really invest in order to develop that understanding, particularly if it's in distinct markets. Those foundational projects—I think they were more common five years ago with the tech companies—because the tech companies were, to a degree, still in a phase of real growth, and their product was changing quite fast. This particular example I took is from Spotify. If you go back in time and you think of Spotify five years ago, they were still tweaking their product. It was still what we call a growth-phase company. Because of that, they needed to understand the unknown unknowns. You move five years forward into the future—to today. Basically, what happens is that all of these tech companies—and now we're going to talk about AI on the side, because that's a different thing—but right up to, let's say, one year ago, when AI was still not as central as now, all of their products were basically very mature products. If you think of Spotify, it hasn't changed much in the last two or three years. Even a more telling example—I do a lot of projects for Instagram. Five years ago, Instagram was still something that was changing fast. It was still adding users.Now, Instagram doesn't add any more users. If anything, in Western markets, it is losing users. Instagram is a product that is incredibly mature. There's so many features on Instagram. If you try to think meaningfully about how Instagram has changed in the last two or three years, you can't think of anything. Basically, there's so many layers of complexity and features, and so many teams that are, to a degree, competing—but also trying to obviously collaborate—that it has become such a very large thing that any meaningful change has so many second- and third-order consequences that it's actually not implemented. The research that these large companies tend to commission is much more tactical—even if they have the understanding and the sophistication internally to commission foundational work. The foundational work that is still commissioned now, from what I see, is about 90% in the space of AI—because AI is the big unknown. Who says “big unknown” says it's okay to spend money to try to understand what we don't know—to try to understand the unknown unknowns. That's a great thing, I think, for foundational and strategic research companies like us, because as we've seen the share of foundational strategic projects going down for anything that is not AI, what is now going up is anything that is AI. That's where you really need to position yourself, I think, if you're an agency that wants to do strategic work with tech companies. I hear in the background—tell me if I'm right or wrong— this quote I always attribute it to Donald Rumsfeld, the kind of the known knowns and the unknown unknowns. Is that true? Is that correct? I mean, that's where I've heard it. It's the name of the documentary, right? I think it's the guy that did The Thin Blue Line, I think. That's right, it was Errol Morris. Yeah, Errol Morris, exactly. He did a fascinating one. Well, he did like one on McNamara, which was incredible. That's The Fog of War. Ah, yes, of course. Fascinating, fascinating. And then like later he did that one on Rumsfeld. I think the documentary itself, it might be called The Unknown Unknowns, which is this quote of one of the briefings that he gave, shows that it's okay to even be curious about the very evil people. And, you know, we don't need to agree with them to steal some of their thoughts. Yeah. So I want to—you've written wonderful pieces, and the Frame newsletter that you guys put out is pretty amazing, just sharing the theories and the concepts. But you've written a few, and you talked a little bit about AI already. But I'm curious—the one you talked about metaphors and AI and the role of metaphors and how we think about AI—and I would just love to hear you talk about, I mean, you know, metaphors maybe to begin, and then how do they help us or hurt us as we try to figure out what's going on and what AI is and could be? Yeah, no, that's a very good—that's, I think, an important thing to try to understand. I wrote this one like a few months ago. But I think what was the starting point here is, it was like the beginning of the Gen AI explosion, right? So you had the first LLMs that were getting more and more used—I think GPT-2 or 3. And a lot of the discussion was around trying to understand what was the best way to make sense of what it was that they were doing with knowledge, right? I think everyone instinctively understood that it had to do with knowledge—it had to do with processing knowledge in some way. And the debates, right, like the tension really was in trying to see how much of it was a—how much new knowledge was it creating as it processed all of the knowledge that already existed, right? And one way to understand that is the technical way. The sad reality is that there's maybe one person out of 10,000 that actually can have a decent understanding of, this is—technically speaking—what is happening here, right? And I think, obviously, us as—you know, working in that space—we try as much as possible to get to some level of that technical understanding. But here again, like the unknown unknowns are just like extremely vast. And so what helped me to make sense of that is to try to latch on and to understand some of the metaphors that some, you know, smarter people than—people smarter than me—were using to make sense of them. And I remember one, which I think probably had a lot of impact on anyone who's read that piece in The New Yorker—I think it's Ted Chiang who used that metaphor—of it's like a photocopier. Like in a sense, these LLMs—what they do is that they are a way to process information where you never see what wasn't there in the first place, right? So what's a photocopier—like what does it do? Well, it's in a sense something that takes a certain amount of information. And then like that information is processed, and what you get out is something that is always a little less than what was before, right? So there is always like some level of information loss in that process. And to a degree, I think that that's one way of understanding these LLMs and Gen AI. And what metaphors do is that—I think none of them, by definition, will be able to show you the whole truth. Because, you know, obviously that would be like a one-to-one analogy. And here, like without getting into the details—because I can't even remember myself—but there's like some very good writing of Douglas Hofstadter. I can't even remember, like how—I don't, I never know how to pronounce his name. But he—yeah, he wrote like Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is a very good book. And then he did a lot on trying to understand analogies. And when does it make sense to use an analogy and when it doesn't, right? By definition, an analogy is always something that isn't a complete one-on-one mapping with what you're trying to understand—because otherwise it's not an analogy, it's just a copy. So what it does, obviously, is that it sheds light on one of the properties—one of the dimensions—of the thing that you're trying to understand. And the way it does it is that it links it to something that you know from the past, right? And so metaphors are basically a way—I think a very useful way—to leverage what people already know in order for them to understand something that is new to them. Now, it is only useful insofar as you're grounding them on some understanding—some cultural understanding—that is shared within a certain population, right? Because you use the metaphor so that we are better able to talk about the new thing—in this case, the LLMs and the Gen AI solutions. If you don't have the same cultural knowledge that I have, then the metaphor becomes a little bit more—it’s less useful, because we basically cannot ground it in that same cultural context. And so that is, at the same time, the usefulness and the limits of these metaphors. They help to simplify by leveraging common cultural knowledge, but they also limit people—and I don't want to say jail people—but they limit people within the scope of people who have the same cultural context as they have. And so that's why they need to be used with caution, if you will. And so, yeah, the idea was to really try to understand what were the different metaphors that people used to make sense of these LLMs—these AI solutions. One, in the cultural discourse—so that's straightly what the Ted Chiang metaphor was. Two, and perhaps more importantly for us who work with these companies—the people who are designing these solutions also have their own metaphors that they draw on, but that are not explicit. So that leads them to make some design choices, some strategic choices that often they're not aware of. So I think that what we wanted to show in the piece is that a process of helping these people and these organizations surface what these metaphors are and interrogate what these assumptions or orthodoxies, if you will, are when you're designing these products could be really useful for a number of ways. But one way it could be useful is, if you think about it now—it's probably like a year since I wrote that piece—and there are many more AI solutions. They all have developed in some way, but they're all very much the same. If you think of it, someone might prefer Claude and someone might prefer ChatGPT and someone might prefer Gemini. And if you are in the same circle as I am—which I'm sure you are—then you have these discussions about, "No, but Claude is better because of this and that," and "Gemini is better because of this and that." I mean, this is like really 2% of a difference, but 98% is exactly the same. The way that they interact with you is through exactly the same type of interface, which is a chat-based interface. The way that they infer words is exactly the same. The way that you're able to fine-tune and control how they actually process the information that you give them is exactly the same. And so why is that the case? It's obviously not by chance. It is the case because all of the people who are designing these solutions come from pretty much like the same square mile in Palo Alto somewhere, and they all have the same assumptions and methodologies. And so I think that this is what we've been trying to engage these companies with: all right, even for your own business purposes, if you want to create a solution that will be distinct from the others—and hence you will have more market share, hence you will not be commoditized—the only and first thing that you need to try to do is, instead of spending just like billions and billions and billions in making the model a little bit better in performance with these benchmarks that no one cares about anyways, like the F1 score or whatever, it's like 5% better at this and that, spend just like a thousandth of that money to challenge your own orthodoxies and to try to see what could be. To retake—just like one last time—the Rumsfeld metaphor: the unknown unknowns. Try to see, is it really the case that all of the assumptions that you're making when designing these solutions are the right ones? And what we've seen already is, when we do this project—when we help these companies deploy these solutions throughout the world—we see that where the true innovation comes is the global south, right? It's like the edge cases of these AI solutions are in rural India. They're not actually in Silicon Valley. And why is that the case? It's because in rural India, people who are using AI do so because they have no other choice. And because they have like so many real problems to solve, they need to use it in whatever way works, right? And this is what we're seeing: unexpected ways to understand and to interact with and to use these solutions. And so what we're trying to now tell our clients in Silicon Valley is: let's leverage that knowledge. So then you can start to challenge your own orthodoxies and design solutions that will be like a little bit different from anyone else's. Yeah. How has the time you've spent exploring AI—how has it changed your idea of what AI is? What are you carrying around in you that the rest of us don't? What do you see that we maybe don't see—that we've been out there watching how people use it? I think that just one thing is—I think it's one of those objects that, for whatever reason—and I think those reasons actually are very understandable—is very sensitive to people. I think it touches something about people's identities. And the perspective that people usually have on AI is quite loaded. It's a strong perspective. Some people will tell you, "These things are just like... it's the stochastic parrot and it's never going to do as much as you think it is. And it's all like smoke and mirror anyways." And some people are like true believers, and they tell you, "Wow, I mean, you actually were underestimating how much they will change, and you will have like AGI very soon." And it's like you're either a believer or a detractor. And what I would say, by having engaged with them and trying to see how we can try to make them more useful to people, is that—quite obviously—the reality is in the middle. And I think that the way to see them is that they can be quite good at quite some specific things and not so good at a lot of other things. And so what I would say is—it's important to... but things are changing very fast, right? Like, the models are indeed improving quite fast. Without getting technical, there's like nothing almost that you... Basically, the last model that you can use now—like, if you use the paid version of ChatGPT, which is, I think it's like O4—and what O4 has, it's a completely different thing to the previous one, which is like 4.0, whatever. Like, they have like huge problems with naming anyway. But what the previous model was really bad at doing, the new model can be actually quite decent at doing. But you need to really try to understand specifically what is that thing that you're trying to accomplish. And I do think that it is important for people in our industry to try to engage with them and see what works and what doesn't work, and keep an open mind about what they are, what they can do, while still having in mind the basics, which is: they can only know about what is already knowable, right? So what they do is they do inference based on data that is already existing somewhere digitally, right? And that's a good lens to try to see—that there are some things that, within this paradigm, they will never be good at doing, right? But there's a lot of things that, staying within that paradigm, you know, they can be quite good at doing. So very, very concretely, I think they're much better at doing business and market analysis than they are at doing human understanding or human research analysis. And why is that the case? It's because there's already like so much data that exists about, you know, the financials about a particular company, how that particular company is represented in a market, what are like all of the different products that are competing against that market. So this is data that already exists. Then the value from that data—when you ask, like, no financial analyst is—well, they need to make sense of it with Excel and with processing and with understanding that data. The LLMs can do that very well, right? Now, if you're trying to surface human truth about how a particular person is thinking, right—like, why is it that they're doing something—still the best way to do that is to ask the person, right? You can try to infer it from whatever comments they've put online and you're going to get somewhere, but the main choke point here is to actually get more data that is more directly answering your question, not doing better analysis on data that already exists, right? So that's a bit like the easy heuristic way to see: what are LLM and AI solutions good for? Well, they're good for doing analysis on data that already exists, right? They're not so good at inferring stuff from data that doesn't exist. With a little bit of time we have left—because you have, I think this just came out, or no, last month—about place. This was your idea, yes? I would love to hear you sort of articulate the "splintered world" hypothesis—is sort of the return of place the proposition you're making? Yes, yes, yes. Thanks for asking that one. So that one is more recent—something we put out, I think, about like a few weeks ago, right? And here I think that the logic is the following: it is very clear, if you look at geopolitics, economics, politics, that we are entering into a new era, which is an era where you have more boundaries, more barriers, more frontiers in different domains. So obviously, it can be the economic domain, it can be the political domain, but it can also be like the technological domain, right? And the cultural domain. And this is something that lots of people would say is inherent or started with the Trump administration, but that's actually not the case. It actually started before. I think it started—like, I would personally say—after COVID. And if you think of the Biden administration, they did a lot to re-industrialize the U.S. as well. Like, there was the CHIPS Act, U.S. CHIPS Act, and so on. And so I think that tells us that this is a longer, more significant trend. It's not something that is linked with just the Trump administration and will go away. I think I'm pretty convinced it's something that is a new era and not a new moment, if you will. And the reason for that is also because, obviously, when you start to have that change at the political level, that creates second-order consequences. And so now we're having second-order consequences, which is: the European Union, for example, is waking up and they're trying to be a bit more like self-sustainable and their own tech ecosystem and so on and so forth. So place—which I think is something that we tended to forget in the '90s. And we saw everything from afar, and you had all these companies that were really seeing the world as their playing field. And they had little interest in trying to understand the specifics of a place—culturally, in terms of regulations, geographically as well. I think that era is—we might have thought for a minute that that was the new normal—but that's not the case. And now we're moving, to a degree, back to a world, a paradigm, where place does matter. But with one difference: the pace of change is a lot faster than it used to be, in terms of the technological advances. As we've seen—you think of the innovation cycles of all these AI companies….What was true two years ago, one year ago, six months ago, isn't true now. And so you have this confluence of these two factors, which is: one, things are changing increasingly fast. So technology really is an accelerator of change. But for the first time, change is not converging toward a similar place as it used to in the '90s. Again, when you had more globalization, the end goal—culturally, technologically, and economically, if you will—was more coherent, and it was more around fewer regional differences. Now it's the exact opposite. You have, I think, these poles—regional poles—culturally, economically, and technologically, that are increasingly distinct. And technology will just increase the pace at which these realities start to differ. And here, one thing that is quite dangerous to think about is: as people see reality through the prism of technology more and more, I think it will be the case that people from these different regional areas—so in the article, we say, you know, someone in Beijing, someone in Russia and Moscow, and someone in the U.S.—their actual belief around what reality is will be increasingly distinct. Because it will be mediated by, to take like a concrete example, these AIs—these LLMs—which, as we know, are machines, to go back to the analogy of the photocopier, to process reality and shape it around a particular narrative, right? That's what they do. And it would be insane to think that the process through which they shape and they form that narrative—so how they transform data into stories—will not be culturally rooted and will not be influenced by geopolitical and economic imperatives. And I think that's the world we move in. And it's going to be quite all right. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Well, it seems an ominous place to end our conversation.This piece in particular—I found really powerful. I'm so glad that you, that I had a chance to meet you. And I really appreciate you sharing your time and your expertise. So thank you so much. No, thank you so much, Peter. It's been like a real pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Arielle Jackson [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariellerjackson/] is the Marketing Expert in Residence at First Round Capital, where she advises early-stage startups on brand and positioning. She previously led product marketing at Google, launched hardware at Square, and headed marketing and communications at Cover, a mobile startup acquired by Twitter. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it's such a big question. I use it, but because it's so big, I kind of overexplain it—the way that I'm doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. It's impossible to make a mistake. The question is: Where do you come from? All right, well, I come from LA. I was born and raised here. I'm back here now. So, it's kind of this full-circle thing. I grew up in a pretty normal, loving household in a very normal neighborhood in LA. I grew up in Palms. My mom and dad are both Jewish people from New York who kind of did better than their parents did—they went to graduate school and, I think, surpassed the expectations of their parents, who had surpassed the expectations of theirs. So, I grew up with a pediatrician dad and a therapist mom, which made for really interesting dinner conversations and a strong focus on education. We were doing fine by American standards. I’d call it middle-class, upper-middle-class. But I went to a very fancy, progressive private school. That was really important to my parents—they made a lot of life choices to send me and my sister there. It was really instrumental in my upbringing. One of the reasons I moved back to LA about six years ago was to send my kids to that school. Oh, how sweet. Yeah, so my kids now go to that school. I have so much to say about that. One thread is my parents—Jewish New Yorkers who came to LA in the late '70s for my dad's residency at Children's Hospital LA and never left. We have a loud, loving family that's all up in each other's business. Very classic New York, I think. And that felt really normal to me. I loved learning. I loved school. I kind of did a lot of everything. Yeah. There's so much to say about this whole upbringing thing. I know, it's hard. There's a lot there, of course. Yeah, and then I think the other part that I would just pull on is I also come from kind of a weird insider-outsider relationship to the tech world. I've worked in marketing and tech my whole career. I thought I was going to be a psychologist. I did a master's in psychology but decided research wasn’t at the pace I wanted to move. Seven years of researching something that four people in the world cared about didn’t seem appealing. So, I stopped after my master’s, didn’t do a PhD, and went to Google of all places—kind of did a hard pivot from psychology to Google in 2003. Cool. Well, I want to stay back in LA. As a young girl, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yes, I wanted to be an artist. I was always drawing, painting, and making books. My mom saved a lot of this stuff. I have books and books that I wrote and illustrated when I was little. I also loved to read and write. At some point, I became kind of argumentative. People would say I should be a lawyer, but I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Yeah. And I’m curious about the school—you moved back for the school that you went to as a child. What was it like to encounter it as a parent? Yeah, it's really interesting to come back to something where you’ve changed, but it's mostly still the same. It changed a little, of course—it’s bigger, has a nicer campus. It's great. I love it there. I’m trying to find words to describe it really succinctly. It’s a place that’s really full of joy. The way I experienced going to school—I still remember every teacher I had. Some of them are still there and remember me. Now they’re teaching my children. Wow. So, it’s pretty special. I'm curious, because I grew up in the burbs in Western New York, and Los Angeles is always at least partially mythic. Do you know what I mean? So, what does it mean to you to be from LA? What is that like? LA is such a big place. I spent 18 years here, then 18 years in San Francisco, and now I’m back in LA for a while. It’s so big that saying you’re from LA doesn’t really mean that much. If you grew up in the Valley or near the beach or somewhere else, you’d have a very different experience. LA has a million tropes—it’s the butt of a lot of jokes, and all those things are somewhat true. But LA is just so big. There’s so much sprawl, so much culture, so much of everything. Probably the way New York City is, although more compact. You can choose your own adventure and make it what you want. I live in Santa Monica now and don’t really leave Santa Monica very much. You have a very different experience if you’re in this little bubble of the world. The traffic’s so bad that I could either go to the East Side to visit a friend or make it to San Francisco in the same amount of time. Yeah. So, catch us up—tell me, where are you now? What are you doing for work? What are your days like? Yeah, so now I work as the—it's a really silly title—but the marketing expert in residence at First Round Capital, which is a seed-stage venture fund that invests in founders often when all they have is an idea. We like to think of it as the "imagine if" stage of company building. My job is to help founders—usually pre-product and pre-launch—figure out how to talk about what they're doing in a way that resonates with customers. Larger brands spend a lot of time on that. We try to do a quick-and-dirty version that fits where these founders are, so they’re set up to find product-market fit faster—or pivot, if it’s not the right thing. Yeah. I’m curious—you pointed at the title. You seem to have a conflicted relationship with it. I quite like it. Can you tell me more about it? Maybe the story of why you feel the way you do about it? Yeah. So, First Round—I’ve been working there for over 10 years. When I first started, it was an experiment. I had been the marketing person at a company that had been funded by First Round. That company was acquired by Twitter. I decided not to go to Twitter with the rest of the team and started emailing people I’d worked with at Square, Google, and other places, saying, “Hey, I didn’t go to Twitter. I’m ready to help you. If you need marketing help, let me know.” That was my foray into freelance world. It just so happened that First Round didn’t have a platform team—kind of the people who help post-investment with companies. They were just starting to think about that. Long story short, I did this experiment where, for three months, they were one of my clients. I spent one day a week in their office, helping their founders and seeing if I could do some of the work I used to do as an in-house marketer—but in a more consultative way. I think that's where the title comes in and why I find it kind of weird. It sounds very transient to me. "In residence" usually implies you’re doing something for a year while figuring out your next full-time move—like starting a company, joining a company, or becoming an investor. Ten years in, I’m still “in residence,” and that just seems funny. And also, the word "expert" is weird. Are there really experts anymore? It feels strange to call yourself that. How would you describe the relationship between—well, there’s a lot packed in here—technology and marketing, the culture of tech businesses and their relationship with marketing, and then how venture capital views it. The name of your role seems to reflect a bit of that tension, or confusion, maybe. Or maybe I’m projecting. Never thought about it like that. Maybe I’m making that up. Okay. I think there are three questions in there: technology and marketing, venture capital and marketing, and then maybe the intersection of the two. Is that fair? It comes from this place of—well, I invited you here because you had highlighted Jesse Caesar’s work in qualitative research. You’re someone I see as an advocate for principles I align with. And you’re operating in environments that, while not hostile to those principles, don’t exactly feel native to them. So I wonder what it's like for you—being a marketer inside a venture fund, in tech culture. And maybe I’m just exposing all my prejudices. No, I think a lot of those prejudices are right. Technology—this comes from so many tech people believing that if you build a good product, people will come. We don’t need to do marketing. If we just build something great, people will want it. That’s the marketing—the product is the marketing. I started my career at Google, and that was kind of the ethos. But what they really meant was advertising. As in, "We don’t advertise." But marketing isn’t just advertising. Marketing is figuring out what to build, how to talk about it, making sure the right people hear about it, and ensuring it solves a problem and means something to them. I think the allergy that the tech industry has to marketing is more about not wanting to advertise. You’ll hear founders in interviews say things like, "We did no marketing and grew by X." But when you look into it, they did so much marketing. It's just this kind of posturing—especially from people with engineering or product backgrounds—where they say marketing doesn’t matter. But it actually matters quite a bit. With the founders I work with, they often equate marketing with advertising, and they don’t want to do that yet. So we focus on all the other things that will help them reach the people who have a need that their product can meet. Yeah. How—oh, go ahead. No, you go. No, you had more to say. Oh, I was just going to say: in some ways, I feel like an advocate for really fundamental, basic stuff. The kind of thing anyone who works in qualitative research, brand strategy, or communications takes for granted. It's like the air we breathe—but not for everyone. Yeah. So things like: when you say everything, it’s not clear what you’re saying. What are you saying first? What are you saying second? That’s part of marketing. Or understanding the competing alternative you’re up against—who can be your "bad guy" when you're storytelling. Those things feel basic to us, but if you grew up learning to write code or build product, they’re not so obvious. How would you say that’s changed—the role of marketing or fluency with these concepts—during your time? Honestly, I don’t think it’s changed as much as the rest of technology has. The fundamentals of marketing—understanding your user, understanding the magic of what you’re bringing into the world, and connecting the two—have always been what it’s about. That’s the part of marketing that excites me. What has changed, especially in the last two years, are all the AI tools. Everyone thinks they’ll change how the work is done and who can do it. And there are real changes happening, but they’re recent. I think the fundamentals still apply, no matter what. That’s what gets me excited—understanding what makes people tick, understanding the real magic of a product, who it’s for, why they should care—and making that so clear that what makes it unique truly stands out. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you? I think it's twofold. One is connecting the magic. Early in my career, someone taught me about positioning—about understanding the essence of something and then finding the language to describe it so that it resonates with the right people. That often starts with understanding the people first, building something that meets their needs, and then describing the magic to them. Some of it is that process, which is a mix of sleuthing, uncovering, talking to people, and figuring out what makes something different. And then it’s almost like an act of sacrifice: what can we let go of—the things we don’t need to say, the table stakes, the things users don’t care about, or the things everyone says—so we can focus on the one thing that is the magic. I get really excited when we figure that out. It feels like a light bulb moment. I also get excited about the people aspect of this job. Some part of me finds it a little therapeutic. I do a lot of one-on-one meetings and conversations like this—talking with founders, getting into their motivations, their origin stories. You start to pull out their passion. I’ve had people cry. It feels really human. So, the combination of the aha moments, the human connection, and the variety. I usually work with about eight companies at a time—everything from vertical AI to skincare, to consumer hardware, to healthcare. It’s all over the place. It’s fun to know a little bit about a lot of things. Yeah. I’m curious—I’ve got two questions, which is always dangerous. First: when do they call you? I imagine a red phone at First Round. When do they pick it up? Yeah. So, who is “they”? Right—good question. There are two answers. Let me tell you the most common, and then the occasional. Most of the time, it's right after we invest in a company. We’re often the first money in—usually between one and ten million dollars. That’s the first big check these founders are getting to start and grow their business. As part of that, there’s been a lot of diligence and getting-to-know-you between the partner leading the investment and the founder. So, when they onboard to First Round, we usually already know, “Okay, these folks are going to need help with positioning. They’re going to need a new name. They want to launch soon.” We’ll have an onboarding call and figure out what to help them with first. So it's usually very early—day two kind of thing. Sometimes, I’ll even talk to them before the check closes, just to get started. Sometimes, the help we provide—not just marketing, but support from our other experts—is one of the reasons people choose First Round. It’s not the reason, but one of them. One of my side projects has been figuring out how to tell First Round’s story. I recently redid the entire First Round website. Venture capital is such a commodity, so figuring out what really makes us different was fun and interesting. We hadn’t done it in ten years. It was a big refresh and a collaborative effort. But the idea is: one of the things that makes First Round different is we do the work with you. It’s not just, “Here’s someone who can help,” or, “You’ll be fine,” or, “Here’s some advice.” It’s not armchair quarterbacking. We get in there. We’re in the Google Doc with you. We’re on the customer calls with you. We’re really in it with the founders—almost like an extension of their team until they build their own. Eventually, hopefully, they hire a marketer. I’ll help interview them, and then I’ll work myself out of a job. Yeah. I’m just curious—when you sit down for that first meeting, maybe even before the check is closed—what are you thinking about? How do you approach that conversation? What are you looking for? What kinds of questions do you ask? I’m just so interested in how you engage in that first moment, how you create a conversation. Yeah. So, I start by trying to get a little educated about the company so I’m not going in totally cold. I’ll read their investor deck, their website—if they have one. Just a very cursory look. Often, there isn’t much yet. If it’s an industry I’ve worked in before—like all humans—I relate the unknown to what I already know, and try to fill in the gaps from there. If it’s something I know nothing about—like this week, I’m working with a company in the freight trucking space—there’s a lot of lingo, and I have no background in it. But I’ve worked on other marketplaces, so I’ll bring in what I know and get up to speed quickly. That first conversation is very diagnostic. It's like, where are you? What do you need help with? Is this even the right time for me to help you? What do you know? What do you not know? Then I walk them through a menu of things I could help with. The repeatable pattern I see with almost all founders is they need help with positioning, messaging, brand identity, a website, and eventually a launch. Those things don't always start right after that first meeting, but that's the usual sequence. Yeah. And how do you talk about positioning with them? I'm always fascinated by how people communicate, especially around first principles. I'm curious—do you have ways of explaining it that help people with no experience in this world? How do you help them understand why this stuff matters? Yeah. Often, the first meeting is them talking at me for 30 minutes, telling me about their business—what they do today, and where they're going. And then I say, "Cool, so if you had to give me the 30-second version of that, what would you say?" They usually stumble. And that’s when I explain, “That’s what we’re going to work on.” Oh, wow. They know their business; they just don’t have a succinct way of describing it. So our work becomes that process of excavation and sacrifice to get them to a place where I can say: “Company X is a Y that does Z for [customer segment].” Make it the truth, but make it the truth that sounds good. Yeah. I love that you give them the experience of trying—and failing—so they feel the gap. I believe in that a lot. I also have some worksheets I give them. If I sense they need help distilling their message after that first conversation, I send them an article and a worksheet. The worksheet is really simple: Who’s your target customer? What’s their problem? What are they doing today to solve that problem? How do they feel about that? Just basic questions. I always ask them to take a first pass on it on their own—homework before we engage. Then I have something to work from, and I can gauge whether this needs 10% refinement or if we really need to go talk to some customers. I believe in having them do it once themselves. That way they can see the difference: “I was here, and then we did three or four or five workshops, and now I’m here.” They feel better. They can see how their website will come to life. Yeah. You were at Google for a while. Do you have other stories from those experiences—working with these giants—that you still carry with you? I feel like you were involved in some monumental projects and product launches. What did you learn through those? Yeah, that’s a big question. When I joined Google, there were just over a thousand people. So it was already big, but it felt small. Part of that was because there were maybe eight or ten people in marketing—maybe twelve. It was small. I learned so much. Google from 2003 to 2010 was awesome. When you ask where I come from, a lot of what I learned there I thought was normal, but it was actually just company excellence. I didn’t know any different—that was my first real job. I’d worked since I was 15, but that was my first job at a company. Google did a lot of things right. Some of them I think they still do right. I left in 2011, so my experience is a bit outdated, but it was a rocket ship. You got to be a smart, young person with potential, and you were given great managers, mentors, and responsibilities—probably more than you should have had. You just kept proving yourself and getting more. The people and the early culture were really excellent. And it came from things I took for granted at the time but now realize were special—like having a purpose statement you knew before you even started. Everyone could recite: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” You understood the work you were doing and how it connected to that purpose. That’s rare. It seems so obvious—why don’t more companies do that? Yeah, that’s beautiful. I’m curious—you mentioned you just refreshed First Round’s messaging. Is that the right way to put it? Yes. We refreshed our messaging. Refreshed your messaging. What did you learn about venture capital? What's the state of the category that you addressed? I'm curious about that experience and what you learned. I mean, you're constantly addressing where you fall within a category when you offer a product in that category. First Round, twenty years ago, was really the first seed-stage investor that focused on companies at a very early stage. But over the last twenty years, the category has grown significantly. Now there are angels, pre-seed investors—it's gone even earlier than seed. There are so many general partners a founder could raise money from: individuals writing checks, semi-angel funds, pre-seed funds, seed-stage funds, multi-stage funds. Even the big multi-stage investors are writing seed checks now. You can raise a seed round from a firm that also writes Series C or growth-stage checks. What’s unique about First Round is that we’ve always focused solely on the seed stage. That’s all we do. So when we talk about sacrifice—it means we’ve chosen to only support this phase of company building, from the very beginning through the first two years. First Round has done that across a huge variety of industries—consumer, B2B, healthcare, AI—but it’s always that early stage. And it’s rare to find that combination: deep focus and a full set of services tailored to help founders at that moment. You can get money from firms that focus on seed but don’t offer much support, or from firms that invest across stages but don’t really care about the seed phase. They treat it more like an option: “If I invest $5 million now, maybe I’ll invest $100 million later.” But you're not important to them until you're big. Yeah. So part of our job in this messaging refresh was communicating that, and also this idea that we do the work with you. We used to say, “We’re called First Round for a reason”—that was the line on our website. We changed it through this process of talking to lots of people: founders, employees, people who took our money, people who didn’t, those who worked closely with us and those who didn’t. We came up with the new line: Where imagine if gets to work. That’s now the core of the website. We take your “imagine if”—and we wrote an "imagine if" statement for every company we've invested in. If you go to the site, the companies page is made up of those statements. I actually tried to use AI to write those, with my colleague Jesse—not Jesse Caesar, a different Jesse who works at First Round. Unfortunately, that didn’t work very well. So, we wrote them all by hand—for hundreds of companies. But the idea is: you have this “imagine if,” but it's only as good as what you do with it. And we’ll fill in for you—support you—until you’ve built the team to carry that forward. Wow. What is the role of research—qualitative or otherwise? How do you go about learning? When does research show up in your work? A lot of the work I do with First Round founders involves secondhand research—meaning, the founder is doing the actual research. We believe the founder should be the one talking to potential customers—doing the calls, the interviews, gathering insights from their target audience to understand what people need. We have a program called PMF Method—Product Market Fit Method—where we teach founders how to do high-quality customer discovery, especially with a focus on revenue. We call it dollar-driven discovery: will people actually pay for this? That’s especially important in B2B. My ability to do my job—especially positioning—depends on the founder’s understanding of their customer. If they don’t understand their customer and can’t communicate that to me, then I can’t do my part. In those cases, we go out and talk to customers ourselves before we can do any real positioning work. That said, I usually rely on founders to do this work just because of the volume—I'm working with eight companies at a time, and they’re rotating every six weeks. I can’t do the research justice in that format. Outside of First Round, when I do consulting, I get more involved in primary research. I often include qualitative work—sometimes I do it myself, sometimes I bring someone in. But the principle is the same: start with the customer. What’s working? What’s not? How do customers understand you—or not? How do non-customers perceive you? That’s always the foundation of good messaging. Yeah. Again, I'm curious. Oh my God, the question just vacated my mind. Oh—the product-market fit method. What can you share about how that informs the qualitative side of things? So that program is for founders who are even earlier than the ones we typically write seed-stage checks for. Often, they don’t even have a clear “imagine if”—they're still just thinking through an idea. The first step when you don’t have a solid hypothesis is to make one—and then go test it. A lot of that program is about validating that a real problem exists, validating that there's a specific persona who has that problem, and validating that you have a promise which, if fulfilled in your chosen market, could support a venture-scale business. Sometimes it starts with a founder saying, “I have this unique insight into the world,” either from a past experience or from going unreasonably deep to learn something. It could be, “Oh, there’s this security gap—I used to work at a security company, and I see a new way to solve it.” Then it’s like: Who is it for? What’s their problem? What’s the promise you can make to them? And is the market big enough to support a venture-backed business? There are steps for all of that, and we think of it in levels. The first major milestone is: can you get five really, really happy customers? Build something and get five truly happy users. That’s a big step. If you can’t get five people who are thrilled, then one of the elements—product, promise, persona, or problem—is off. From there, you adjust. What kinds of conversations do you have with founders around their understanding of customers? How open are they to the idea of research? They’re generally very open. Sometimes they just need help structuring how to do it. Founders need this skill—they need to be able to talk to people and understand their problems. If they don’t have that skill, we help them build it. And in some cases, we’ll do it for them—we’ll go talk to ten potential customers and come back with insights. What is the skill? How would you describe it? It’s the basic stuff of qualitative research: asking non-leading questions, digging into “why” without using the word why, finding the thought behind the thought. If someone’s unclear, you reframe the question until it lands. It’s basic—but foundational. Stuff that, for you, is like air and water. Yeah. But I love making that explicit. The way you casually listed those principles—that’s so cool. I don’t think enough people ever encounter them laid out like that. Well, tell me what you think about this—and I’m interrupting your response, sorry—but I often feel that qualitative research is invisible when done well. You can watch someone doing an incredible job applying all those principles and not even realize they’re doing anything beyond being friendly. That’s why I loved how casually you laid those ideas out. Yeah. I mean, that’s mastery. I don’t know that any of our founders get to that level of proficiency. What comes to mind is the founder who thinks they’ve done customer discovery because they pitched their product to ten people and asked what they thought. And those ten people said, “Yeah, seems pretty good. Come back when you have something.” Then the founder walks away thinking, There’s something here, I should build this. But “Come back when you have a product” isn’t a strong signal. The response you actually want is, “Oh my gosh, when can I sign up? This is amazing.” A lot of it is shifting from pitch mode into discovery mode—uncovering problems, understanding how people have tried to solve them, learning where the budget lives, and getting smarter so you can build something better. Then, when you return with that better product, people say, “Oh my God, it does that? When can I sign up?” That’s the reaction you’re aiming for. I remember early in my career, I did a lot of validation work—lots of different types of projects with Unilever. One of them was for Lipton Cup of Soup. I think they were re-engineering it somehow. The line that stuck from that project was, “It would be great for camping.” How do you feel about the new Lipton Cup of Soup? “It would be great for camping.” Like—no thank you, kind of, right? Yeah. When you asked, "Where do I come from?" I didn’t mention this, but I’ve pretty much always been in tech in various ways. One of the reasons I still sing Google's praises from the early days is that while I was there, I did an exchange program with Procter & Gamble to go through their Associate Brand Manager training. That was so awesome—an amazing experience. I relate it to Paul and my experience there. At Google, a lot of our research was user testing: you’d have people click around while you sat behind the glass. You could test messaging that way too, but it was mostly UX. At Procter & Gamble, it was so different—and so cool. I got to do a Febreze shop-along. And I learned from the guy who did the Old Spice campaign that blew up in 2007. He had also been the brand manager for Tampax, and we talked about Tampax Pearl. It was such a great crash course in excellent qualitative research and in brands built entirely on customer insight. In those cases, there's some product differentiation, sure—but the brand is 90% of it. In tech, I think that ratio is flipped. The product is a much bigger part of the value, and brand is more like the icing on the cake. But it’s not just icing on the cake. Yes. I feel so vindicated that we’ve uncovered this P&G moment. I was always curious—do you feel like you carry what you learned at P&G with you? Does it help in the work you do now? I think that’s really amazing. How impactful would you say that was on how you think about marketing and your work now? I think that organization is run by marketers in a way most tech companies are not. A tech company is usually run by an engineer or a product person. I had this friend I worked with—he was the product manager for Gmail when I was the marketing manager. His name’s Keith Coleman. He now runs Twitter’s Community Notes feature. Oh wow, wow. Anyway, he used to say: “Product’s job is to make the boat. Your job is to paint the boat yellow and let it sail.” That’s how he saw it. And there was a fun tension in that. In some ways, it was like, yeah—tell me what the product does and let me paint the boat yellow. We had a lot of fun painting different parts of Gmail yellow and letting it fly. We got to do cool stuff with Gmail’s marketing early on that now sounds kind of blasé, but at the time it was amazing—collaborative YouTube videos, stuff like that. I’m talking 2007, 2008, 2009. We did all kinds of crazy stuff. We made keyboard shortcut stickers for our biggest users and mailed them out. You had to send us a self-addressed stamped envelope to get them. It was very community marketing—before that was even a thing. So we had a lot of fun painting the boat yellow, but my experience at P&G taught me that it’s not just about painting the boat yellow. It’s about figuring out how to build the boat in the first place. And that’s how P&G does it. Yeah. I’m so excited we uncovered that. I feel like I sensed some unnatural wisdom in you—especially for someone operating in tech. But again, that’s my own bias. I feel like in the tech world, especially with lean startup culture, qualitative research is often treated in a very mechanical way. It has different objectives and feels like it approaches the experience so differently from how I learned. Does that resonate with you? I mean, I’m letting my bias show. Well, I think there is an ethos in tech—it’s very much the “users don’t know what they want” thing. Don’t ask them. They’ll ask for a faster horse. Build it and they’ll come. Move fast and break things. Throw spaghetti at the wall. That’s a big part of the tech mindset. And yeah, some of it is true. But there are also people who build products really thoughtfully and have a natural tendency to bring in the customer voice early. It’s just the exception—not the rule. At a place like Procter & Gamble, it’s the rule. It’s codified. It’s what you do. Yeah, yeah. And I think for me, my experience was mostly just feeling left out of these organizations that were being built a different way—these brands that were being built a different way. You know what I mean? I don't think it's wrong, though, in a lot of ways. If you think about a product like air freshener—which was my follow-me-home, shop-along project for Febreze, some kind of new form factor—I don’t remember the exact details, but that’s a commodity product, right? The insight that brand was built on, and I remember this really clearly, was that people didn’t use Febreze to mask bad smells. They used it to signify that their home had been cleaned and was ready. That was the insight: "I just finished deep cleaning, and now I’ll spray Febreze as a sign that my home is clean." It wasn’t about spraying to fix something that smelled bad—it was a signal. That was a deep insight. They had whole campaigns—probably even Super Bowl ads—based on that. And it was really cool, but they needed that kind of insight because the product itself, in isolation, was just a nice-smelling spray. Whereas in tech, sometimes the product is so fundamentally different—something you couldn’t have done before—that marketing’s job is just to clearly explain what it does. You don’t necessarily need a super deep insight if the product is already mind-blowing. It's just, “Wow, you couldn’t do this before. Now you can.” Yeah. I remember—maybe this was a colleague of yours—I always reference an article about Gmail positioning, this idea of “discoverable benefits,” like “come for X, stay for Y.” Does that ring a bell? Yeah, that vaguely rings a bell. The Gmail positioning story is kind of interesting because it launched publicly on April 1st—April Fool’s Day—and we said, “We’re giving everyone a gig of storage,” and people thought it was a joke. Oh, wow. Really? Yeah. It sounded too good to be true. A gig of storage at the time was insane. Yeah. That was probably a whole new metric, right? Had anyone had a gig of anything? Yeah, exactly. The idea that you got a gig was mind-blowing—and it was a message that could spread. People were saying, “Did you hear Gmail gives you a gig of storage?” People were buying invites on eBay. It became this whole thing once people realized it was real. All the messaging was about: “You can search your email because you have a gig, and we’re Google, and we’re good at search. You never have to delete a message again.” That was the primary hook. Then there were sub-messages: “It’s fast,” “There’s no spam,” and so on. But those weren’t why you came. They were why you stayed. And I think a lot of products are like that. What’s the hook? Especially in tech, where it’s so easy to try something—and just as easy to abandon it. What’s the thing that makes someone try it? What’s the thing that makes them stick? The marketable benefit is usually the differentiator—the “wow” thing that makes you tell your friends. The retention benefit is what keeps you coming back. Yeah. Yeah, it’s awesome. I totally agree—there’s no right or wrong. I think I was just being territorial and prideful about my consumer qualitative background. How would you say the role of research has changed over the time you’ve been working? Has it changed at all? I think it’s similar to what we were saying about how marketing has changed. The fundamentals haven’t really changed. The tools might have. For example, it used to be hard to go find the user persona you needed—say, people who run hedge funds, or women looking for fertility services. Conducting those interviews used to be really hard. But now, with Zoom, it’s so much easier to recruit and run them. There’s less excuse not to do it. More recently, there’s been interest in things like synthetic users, which I haven’t fully bought into yet. But they can give you a good first pass. I was working on something recently where I needed to understand a “day in the life” of a veterinarian. I just needed to know: What do they do? How much money do they make? What are they worried about? Who employs them? What are their incentives? What's the business model? AI made it really easy to get that basic, high-level understanding. But I still believe that real, face-to-face conversations give you a much deeper understanding—just like they did 20 years ago. Yeah, that’s funny. This is a bit of a tangent, but I’ve had conversations with people in the political world who are questioning how they’ve been learning. They’re so tied to polling and surveys and are starting to open up to richer, deeper qualitative methods—like ethnography—which we would take for granted. Have you seen a shift toward ethnography or deeper qual approaches? You mentioned changes in tools—has there been a shift in the types of tools people are choosing? And I definitely want to talk more about synthetic users because I find that fascinating. Yeah, I don’t think there’s a ton of ethnography happening with the founders I work with. I think there's some good one-on-one qual being done. Sometimes it's basic, but sufficient. And then there are times where it's very basic and not sufficient at all. Part of my job is to say, “I don’t think you understand this user well enough.” I’ll give you an example. I’m working with a very early-stage founder who is trying to be everything for everyone—hasn’t really chosen a clear direction. The mindset is, “Anyone who does this can use it.” But the reality is there are ten other companies going after that same broad market. One way to win is to lean into the features and benefits that apply to a subset of that market—where you’re uniquely strong. So, we’re pushing this founder to niche down, to narrow the audience. That way, the things they’ve built will really shine. It’s hard for her, because she’s essentially saying, “I’m going to sacrifice some of my current users.” She’ll still keep them, but she won’t go after more of them. She’s shifting to fewer, higher-value deals, where her product will be stickier. That’s a tough move—but when she went back and talked to those customers, she realized, “Wow, these people see me as the best-fit product.” For everyone else, there are lots of other tools that could meet their needs. That understanding came from those customer conversations. She had that experience. As you were talking, it reminded me of my own—taking out new concepts and products. You know very clearly when something clicks with someone—or doesn’t. When it doesn’t, you struggle. But then you find that one person who gets it, and it’s like, “Oh my God, here we go.” The sun is shining, the sky opens up—it’s a real moment. Yeah. I mean, we’re still in process with that founder, but she’s definitely had glimpses of that experience. And like we were saying earlier—you can’t always ask, “Why do you do that?” But you can get to the why behind the why. My own career went from Google to Square to a very tiny startup. I kept going smaller and smaller. The last company I worked at had seven people. It was a seed-stage company building an Android app. This was around 2012–2013. At the time, Android was totally underserved. This was before usertesting.com and tools like that. So, the research we did was: we posted an ad on Craigslist—I'm sure you’ve done this too—saying, “Do you have an Android phone? Meet us at a Starbucks and talk to us for 10 minutes. We’ll give you a $20 gift card.” We did this all around the Bay Area—Oakland, Palo Alto, San Francisco. That research made the company, I have to say. The first part of the interview was just: “Show me your phone. What apps do you use? Where did you get that phone? How did you choose it?” The second part was mockups—getting them to react to prompts and possible app store designs. The insight we got was powerful. It wasn’t just about how to position the product. What we learned—though no one ever said it explicitly—was that people felt kind of ashamed of their Android phones. They’d say things like, “Yeah, it kind of sucks,” or “I got it because it was cheaper,” or “Yeah, I know it’s not great.” You could sense the shame. So, we leaned into that. We positioned ourselves as an Android-only company: “We’re building an app you can only get on Android, because iPhone doesn’t let you do this. But Android does.” That shift—owning the platform and making users feel proud of it—was a game-changer. All of a sudden, they were like, “I’m not ashamed of my phone anymore. My phone’s cool. It can do cool stuff.” And tapping into that emotional ethos—that’s when the product really took off. Wow. That whole experience of sitting in those Starbucks—again, it wasn’t perfect research. We only did it in the Bay Area. There were a lot of flaws. But it was enough. Yeah. How do you describe what happened? What did that kind of face-to-face qual actually do for you—what only that kind of interaction can do for a team? It gave us real confidence in how to talk about the product—both from a features and benefits perspective, and from the “your iPhone can’t do this” angle.It validated assumptions we had, and it just felt like, “Yeah, I’ve talked to 20 people—and if 20 people all tell you the same thing, you don’t need to talk to 20 more.” You know what I mean? Like—we’re good. Yeah, we’re good. Beautiful. Well, listen, I want to thank you so much. This hour has flown by. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation and sharing your experience. It was really great. Thank you so much. Thanks—I feel like we could keep talking for another hour. I looked up and thought, “Wow, it’s already been an hour.” I know, it’s true. I’ve got a bunch more questions, but I just checked and we are at time. So—maybe another time. Lovely. Thank you, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

George Nguyen [https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetgeorgenguyen/] is the founder of Untapped [https://www.untapped.work/], a youth culture research and brand consultancy in Brooklyn. Through participatory research he has helped companies like McDonald’s, Nike, Jordan Brand, Gatorade, and HBO uncover insights from Gen Z consumers. Early in his career he held senior strategy roles at R/GA, Translation, and Saatchi & Saatchi. So I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It’s a big question, which is why I use it, but I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now, because it is big. Before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer however you want. It’s impossible to make a mistake. The question is: Where do you come from? Yeah. I was reading a couple of the other responses, and funny enough, this is probably the question that makes me the most nervous. Mostly because I don't have a clean answer. But in some ways, that’s the foundation of who I am. My parents came here in 1975 as refugees from Vietnam. Looking back, I now understand how unsettled they felt. I was born in Colorado. I’ve lived in California, Oregon, did high school in Seattle, some university in Boston, then New York, Southeast Asia, Toronto. I don't think I went to the same school for more than two years at a time until university. So to that end, it's funny—I had a friend once say to me, "You can't cheer for every baseball team, George." And I said, "I don't. I cheer for all the teams in the places I've lived." That was part of what made this question tough. I don’t have a clean hometown answer. But that instability made me comfortable with chaos. It shaped how I work now—especially as a microagency founder, constantly doing business development, always looking for the next project. That feeling of being prepared for instability comes directly from never knowing where I’d be going next. It’s touched so many parts of my life. So the cleanest answer I have for “Where do you come from?” is everywhere and nowhere. You said you now understand how unsettled your parents felt. What were you thinking about when you said that? As an adult, and now as a parent, I have much more sympathy for them. As a kid, I kept wondering, “Why do we have to move again? Why do I have to go to another new school?” I got really good at introducing myself and standing in front of the class every couple of years, all through grade school—something I wouldn’t wish on any child. And like any child, I blamed my parents. But in hindsight, I understand they’d been ripped out of their country. They were trying to figure out where to settle. Now I realize they were looking for the same things I was—and probably felt even more lost than I did as a kid. I had them. They didn’t have anyone. In 1999, after I graduated from university, I went with my mom to Vietnam. The country had only opened up in the mid-80s. We saw where she went to high school, her childhood home—now occupied by other people. She went up to a random house and rang the bell. She told me, “My best friend lived here.” She didn’t know if the friend was still alive or had escaped Vietnam. The door opened, and they recognized each other. They hadn’t seen each other in 25 years. There wasn’t a going-away party back then. It was: “Tanks are rolling through the cities—get out.” That moment gave me perspective. Everyone is just doing the best they can. As a kid, I thought, “Why did you do this to me?” As an adult, I see they were trying to put down roots in a world that had been pulled out from under them. My dad eventually settled in Orange County, where there’s a large Vietnamese population. He tried to recreate something familiar. My mom kept moving and didn’t settle until much later. She was consistently searching for something—some place that felt like home. Yeah. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up—like young George as a kid? I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a copywriter. I really loved commercials. I’m that odd person who went into marketing and advertising having actually graduated with a degree in advertising—and with ambitions to go into it. Strategy and planning was unexpected. That path came more from laziness, frankly—luck, circumstance, and laziness. Tell me about the laziness. What do you mean? How did you end up in strategy and planning because you were lazy? Pretty much. I got out of school, and my mom said, “You have to get a job. You can’t just hang out at home.” My plan had been to hang out at home for the summer, look at grad schools, and figure out the next step. But I had no idea what I really wanted to do. I'll be the first to admit I felt woefully unprepared for the world after university—especially with a liberal arts degree. I’d been trained to think critically, but I didn’t walk out with a practical, applicable skill set. If I’d studied a skilled trade—where you learn how to physically do things, like plug A into B or turn the right bolt—I might’ve felt more ready. Instead, I graduated without a clear sense of what I could actually do. Is there anything you feel you missed the most? If you could time-machine back and plug something into that education, what would it be? A roadmap. That’s something I’m still seeing today in my work with young people: there’s a lack of clarity, of a consistent and understandable, measurable roadmap. No one gives you KPIs for a liberal arts degree. There are no defined success metrics, let alone a clear career path. And then, coming from a traditional Asian family, there’s that extra layer. Those jokes about becoming a doctor, lawyer, or engineer? They’re rooted in something real—those are practical, comprehensible careers. The idea of a degree, let alone a career, in the creative fields was completely foreign. My university had two major schools: agriculture and communications. I wasn’t going to be a farmer, so I went into communications. Like I said, I had aspirations of being a writer, maybe even a copywriter, and ended up in the advertising school. But I graduated unsure of what to do. So I came home, planning to hang out and figure things out. My mom wasn’t having it. She said, “You can’t just hang out on boats and go swimming all summer,” which, to be fair, was great when I was 16. Honestly, even now in my 40s, I think we should be allowed summers where all we do is go swimming. You mentioned being drawn to advertising and commercials early on. What role did ads or TV play in your childhood? I had a similar experience—I just loved ads and TV. Why do you think that was the case for you? It modeled what I thought life in America was supposed to be like. My parents had no idea. And even though I was born in this country, you'll hear a lot of first-generation and second-generation kids say the same thing—our home life didn’t reflect what we thought life in America was going to be. Every child or teenager probably thinks their family is the weird one. But when you add in cultural differences—like bringing food to school and other kids saying, “What’s that? What’s that smell?”—it’s even more pronounced. At home, I’d be like, “Can I have a corndog?” And my mom would go, “A corndog? No, we don’t eat dog.” And I’d be like, “No, no, it’s a hot dog wrapped in a pancake.” And she’d say, “Why would you do that?” So advertising, in its 30-second snippets, became my window into what I imagined as iconic, idealistic American life. You're too young to watch late-night television, so you get bits and pieces—but ads are everywhere. They're intrusive, unavoidable, and always full of joy. They're designed to make you want something. And as a kid, I didn’t just want the product. I wanted the entire lifestyle they were selling. Then I realized—oh, you can actually sit around and make these things and have fun doing it. All right, so catch us up. Where are you now and what are you up to? I ended up going into advertising. So that first summer—when I talk about laziness—my mom said, “You’ve got to get a job.” I was sitting with some friends at the time and said, “I need to find something.” One of them, Colleen, said, “I just got an internship at DDB. They’re looking for more interns—want one?” I said, “Yeah, I’ll go meet them.” I got an internship in the media department. Thirty days in, they offered me a job in the strategy group. I said, “Sure, why not? I’ll check it out. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s just an internship.” I got hired out of that internship, and one thing led to another. Fifteen years later, after working in agencies around the world, rising through the strategy ranks, and even opening and running offices overseas for the TBWA network, I came back to the States. About ten years ago, I decided to strike out on my own. We saw a gap that existed right between the personal and the professional for me—helping young people as they leave school and figure out their next steps in life, and, at the same time, improving youth market research and trend work. So we created Untapped as an approach to youth market research. But instead of using young people as traditional respondents—where you put them on a panel, ask questions, and pay them for answers—we built infrastructure that empowers them. We hire young people to be our cultural reporters—photographers, videographers, storytellers. They go out, conduct research, and bring back insights. Then we work with them to interpret that research and shape it into brand strategy. It closes the gap between brands and the audiences they’re trying to reach. Over the last ten years, we’ve done everything from conventional market research to ethnographies—often using innovative ways to enter people’s homes and lives. We’ve co-created new product ideas for Nike, helped Google understand why young people prefer social media scrolls over search bars, and worked on UX and UI projects. What we’ve found is that this methodology gives us a uniquely deep perspective. It cuts through traditional assumptions and helps uncover insights that lead to more interesting and effective brand solutions. Can you tell me a bit more about how you work with these reporters? What does that process look like? The process itself is actually quite conventional. What makes it different is who we work with, not how we do it. When a project comes in, we review the subject matter and look within our network—which was built through partnerships with NGOs—spanning across the country. We identify the right group for the project, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative, and then we give them a brief. We think of this more like casting than simply selecting respondents. We ask: “What kind of personality are we looking for?” And usually, someone will say, “Oh, I know someone just like that.” This diverges from the traditional approach where a CMO might say, “Well, I talked to my neighbor’s niece, and she says all the kids are into Skibidi Toilet. So let’s build a brand strategy around that.” That introduces bias. Our approach is grounded in an academic framework called community-based participatory research. Unlike traditional ethnography, which is mostly observational, this model involves entering communities and collaborating with them rather than simply studying about them. The difference in our approach is that we hire a young person as a cultural reporter to go interview their friends, their parents, their family—to really understand something from the inside. What they bring back is a much richer perspective. One of my favorite scenes was from a project we did for e.l.f. Beauty. One of our reporters, Zoe—she was 13 at the time—had filmed this incredible moment. I’m watching the footage, and she’s berating her friend, saying, “Look, I know you have a TikTok. I know you tell your mom you don’t, but I know you do. Just tell me what it is and how you use it.” She was getting right to the heart of it. And what we learned from that project was really eye-opening. The numbers on platform usage weren’t telling the whole story. The kids were watching TikTok content on Pinterest. So Pinterest’s engagement numbers were inflated, while TikTok’s were deflated. They were using Pinterest as a workaround during school hours—still accessing the content, just hacking the system. I want to go back. When did you first discover you could actually do this kind of thing for a living? We’ve been doing this for ten years now. I wouldn’t say it was a single discovery—it was more of a realization. When I was with TBWA, I got sent to Vietnam after they opened a new office there. They asked, “Who wants to go?” and I jumped at the chance. I didn’t want to go to a traditional market like Europe, Hong Kong, or Singapore. I wanted something more raw—Shanghai, Jakarta, or, ideally, Vietnam. I wanted to connect with my roots, not as a tourist but by actually living and working there. And what I realized—something I think I always knew but had to confront fully—was that everyone is talented if you give them the right opportunity and the right environment. The key is letting go of rigid expectations about what the output should look like. After Vietnam, I moved to Canada to run TBWA Toronto. I expected a leap in the quality of work because I had come from New York. But that leap didn’t exist. The thinking, the creativity—it was all on par. Maybe the polish or “fit and finish” differed, but the raw creativity was just as strong. And now with AI, even those craft differences are being flattened. That was the realization: talent is everywhere; the barriers are what hold people back. My co-founder in Untapped—who’s since returned to leading Stoked Mentoring—shared the same conviction. We’d sit around asking: how do we help kids who’ve aged out of structured NGO programs or school systems? When these kids graduate, the infrastructure disappears. Some thrive. Others don’t. And often the difference isn’t the kid—it’s the tools they were given. If a kid succeeds in college, it’s likely because someone at home emphasized education from day one. I’m a good example. I always knew I was going to university. That expectation was clear from the beginning, reinforced by a family that deeply valued education. So I had structure, support, and tools. But many of these kids didn’t. So the idea behind Untapped was: How can we artificially create that kind of infrastructure for them? How do we give them the tools they need to succeed? And what’s the one job where a young person can outperform any adult? Being a youth market expert. What kind of training do you need to describe life as a 16-year-old? You are the expert. As for me, the older I get, the less qualified I am to speak to youth culture. My job is to facilitate and support. Steve Stoute used to say, “Look for the guy in the leather jacket at the party—that’s your guy.” Mine is: look for the guy in the khakis with the tucked-in shirt. That’s the person who recognizes, I’m different from the audience I’m trying to reach. I’m not pretending to be young and cool. I’m here to build the bridge. So, to your question—how did we know this could be something real? It was the realization that youth don’t need intermediaries to speak for them. They need platforms and tools to speak for themselves. Before we even started, we knew this could be a viable business model. The talent was out there—young people who were hungry for opportunities. And brands were desperate for authentic, real-time feedback that helped them understand what their audiences actually wanted. How many times have you and I sat in a meeting where someone confidently says, “This is what the audience wants,” and then you go out into the world and think, You were so off base. Did you actually talk to anyone? And more importantly, did you listen when you talked to them? Going back 10 years, thinking about the kinds of clients you dealt with and the research they relied on, how would you describe the conventional approach you were walking away from with Untapped? It was box-ticking. That’s really what it was. The core issue we were trying to solve was that young people weren’t invested in the responses they were giving. They’d say whatever they needed to get the $100 or the gift card. “Oh, these people are here from Pepsi? I love Pepsi.”“These people are from McDonald’s? Big Macs are my favorite.”Just tell them what they want to hear, grab the money, and move on. It became a game. Ask them if they’ve participated in research recently, and they’ll say, “Of course not.” But meanwhile, they’ve already done five studies that month. And if you’re a parent who hasn’t been scammed by your kid—let alone by a recruiter working a phone bank—you’re the exception. Everyone’s just trying to fill quotas, hit the number of interviews, tick the boxes. And the kids are looking at each other going, “Here’s another $100.” So we flipped the model. We said, “We’re going to pay you a living wage for this.” One of our points of pride is that we pay our reporters more than the New York Times pays for freelance articles. When I found out what the Times was paying, I thought, Okay, how do I beat that and pay a fair, decent wage? And beyond just compensation, these young people know their work is being taken seriously. They've worked with major brands. They get excited—and they start holding their peers accountable. They know they’re going to be in a conversation where someone from the brand is actually going to listen. So they don’t pull any punches. One of my favorites was sitting in a session with McDonald’s. One kid said, “I hate this stuff. It’s garbage. I’m not eating that.” And his friend shot back, “Really? Because at 4 a.m., you seem to like it a lot.” It completely changed the tone of the conversation. So, how is your approach different? The methodology isn’t new. We’ve always done dyads, triads, friendship groups. What changed was how we shifted the input—and how we engaged with the sources of information. You call them “reporters.” How strategic was that label? And this idea—community-based participatory research—is that what you called it? Actually, I was sharing the idea with a friend, and his wife—Dr. Kenwell Kaleem, an academic—overheard us. She walked in and said, “That’s a great idea. There’s already a term for it.” Then she sat down and schooled me on it. She explained this academic framework—community-based participatory research. It's not just observing; it’s co-creating with someone from within the community. You're not studying them; you’re working with them. You’re in the tribe. I had always struggled with how marketing latches onto academic terms. Like “ethnography”—which is technically observational. But when have we ever stopped at just observing? So no, none of it was strategic. The only intentional decision we made was: they’re not respondents. They’re associates. They’re partners. They’re co-creators. And one of the first things young people ask us is, “Can I put this on LinkedIn?” Absolutely. You should put this on LinkedIn. You should put this on your résumé. You’ve done market research for major brands—e.l.f. Beauty, for example. The work you’re doing is no different from what I was doing as a junior planner when I was 25. Why shouldn’t you get credit for that? We actually stumbled onto the term “reporters” because one of our first big, ongoing clients was Nike. We started working with them through a trend newsletter, and that’s when the idea of cultural reporters really clicked. Interestingly, it was essentially ongoing qualitative research—but disguised as a newsletter. We’d send it to them, and they would circulate it widely within Nike. Our day-to-day client would always follow up with an hour-long session, sitting down with four or five of our reporters to talk about the articles they wrote and why they wrote them. That monthly check-in turned into a kind of panel—a recurring touchpoint. It became his secret weapon. What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you? I feel good about it. That’s the simplest way to put it. Over the past 10 years, the most powerful, most memorable projects are the ones I feel good about. I didn’t always feel that way. I mean, I’ve stood in plenty of rooms pitching fabric softener. Sure, I could sell it—I think any of us could in a pitch—but it didn’t feel meaningful. This does. This is authentic to me. I’m trying to create opportunities for people. I don’t mind asking for projects or asking for funding because I know where that money is going. Someone said something to me recently that really stuck—it was probably the biggest compliment I’ve ever received. They said, “Your superpower is that you genuinely want other people to succeed.” That summed it up. It’s not self-interest. The entire business model, our whole approach, is built around creating opportunity. Yes, it's a business. It’s put food on the table for my family. But it also builds something real. It creates long-term relationships with people who may not be “young” anymore, but who started with us years ago—and who still reach out. I’ve written graduate school recommendation letters for a few of them. That’s what makes it special. When people come to Untapped, what are they really looking for? What’s the core question they need answered? The questions vary. But what they really need—what they’re looking for—is access. For example, with e.l.f. Beauty, they wanted to understand young people’s first experiences with makeup and skincare—those early rituals and how they differ across audiences. We’ve worked on a wide range of questions. One of my favorites was with Google. They wanted to understand why they were losing young people to social media platforms. For a long time, the assumption—especially from developers and engineers—was that it was just about frictionless access. Their thinking was, “Well, they’re already on TikTok or Instagram, so of course they’re searching there. It’s not a better product; it’s just convenience.” That made logical sense—if you’re spending 12 hours a day on TikTok, you’re naturally going to start using it to search. Same with Amazon. But our research revealed something deeper. And now that enough time has passed, I feel comfortable talking about it publicly. It wasn’t just about convenience. It was about trust. That insight came into focus when we talked to people with accessibility needs. One person said, “Sure, you can list something on Yelp or Google Reviews. But I don’t believe you. When I watch a TikTok video, I can see whether there are stairs in the back. I don’t have to guess whether it’s truly accessible.” Or they’d say, “You tell me this place has a vibe. But when I look at the people in the video, I know if it’s my vibe or not.” It wasn’t about search efficiency. It was about seeing it for yourself. That changed everything. And so that’s no different from how we looked at things 40 years ago, right? You want to see for yourself, but the mechanism has changed. I think that level of candor and perspective is what we’re able to unlock, and that comes from a different kind of access—a real, open relationship with the young people we work with. I was struck by the word access. Can you tell me more? You said the clients need access. Tell me more about what you mean when you say access, and why that’s important. There are some places—some circles—where it’s just not our place. Whether it’s physical or social access, guards go up, doors get locked down. I’ll give you an anecdote. One of the young people we worked with—he’s grown up now—one of his hustles today is hosting BDSM parties. He invited me to one. I wanted to be supportive and check it out. I went, and they gave me a very cute T-shirt that said something like “Punished for Dress Code” because I didn’t have the right attire—making it very clear I was a guest in their world. And it’s funny. I walked into this party that night and realized I was the wet blanket. I thought I’d be the one to walk into a warehouse full of S&M and BDSM and feel awkward. What I realized was, I made everyone else feel awkward. I had invaded their safe space. So everyone’s guard went up. I did not have access to understand that world. I’d love to hear you talk about how your approach creates access—or gains access. I don’t think we gain it. I think they give us permission. They take us in. They interpret their world for us. And they give us that permission in very conventional places. I remember, in our early days, we were doing research with kids. We were on interviews and getting tours of their neighborhoods. We walked into one home, and the grandmother came out and asked, “What are you doing here?” She asked our associate, the one who was taking us around and introducing us to young basketball players. The project was about identifying who might be the next great player. As soon as he explained, “This is my job. I work with this company,” everything changed. The tone, the energy, the conversation—all of it opened up. There was trust. They gave us a pass. He literally said, “I’m going to take you into my world.” And I think that’s what access means. Conventional qualitative or quantitative research tries to bring people into focus group facilities—we’re already taking them out of their environments. Nothing about it feels natural. And then we expect people to be authentic in the most inauthentic situation. You’ve been at this a while. How are things different now? What’s changed in your career—in what clients need, or in how people move? I love that insight about trust. That TikTok gives everyone visible evidence, so the standard has changed. I think there’s more accessibility for everyone now, across the board. There’s been a democratization of everything—access to young people, for example—and much more competition. We go up for projects and clients say, “Well, we used YouGov,” or “We went to Suzy,” or “We used a digital tool,” or “We did a social scrape to listen for sentiment.” I have competitors now who are using our same business model. That’s how the landscape has changed. But what’s also changed is the applications. People now understand what research, information, and insight can actually do. When we started, our work was very much geared toward advertising—that was the world I came from. A lot of our early jobs were new business pitches. They needed fast turnaround and real quotes, real insights, to bring into creative development. Today, we’re doing everything from new product development to trend hunting to conventional research. That’s interesting. Do you think that’s the case across the board? What you just said makes me think—this has been my experience too—that the need for human understanding first came through creative development and advertising… and then somehow spread through the rest of the organization. Does that seem fair? I might say unlocked rather than infected—only because I think there were people always doing this kind of work in different ways; we just didn’t have visibility into it. People working in innovation started saying, “Hey, this tool you're using is actually a really good one—let us talk to those people too.” We've done work for private equity firms trying to decide whether or not to make an acquisition. And I think that's part of the growing awareness of these tools. That’s the note about democratization. Now, it’s just a quick search. You might’ve seen an interview or caught me on a podcast, or someone forwarded something. Ten years ago, if you worked in private equity, you probably wouldn’t have even heard of us. Now, it’s easy—and people are quick to say, “I see how this could help my business.” I always want to talk about qualitative. What you do is qualitative, but you have a particular approach. What's the benefit of qual? I mean, you’re competing with non-qualitative solutions. How do you advocate for qualitative? What's the magic of it? How do you articulate its value? Perspective. We turn down a lot of projects where someone is looking for validation—statistically valid data. That’s not us. We’re your people if you’re looking for insight, if you’re trying to get ahead of the curve. If you're looking for a shift in perspective. We resonate with clients who are open to seeing what else is out there. That’s what it boils down to. And because we’re a different model—validated but not widely adopted—many still rely on quantitative data. Their decision-making is often based on what’s safe. And you can’t blame them, especially in this climate. But there are always those few who are open to trying something new, who want to understand things differently. Their decision-making process is built around what they want to accomplish with the information—not just defend a decision. How do you think about the work you do for clients? What would you say you do for them? I want to give a thoughtful answer. I think we shine light. We shine light into areas they haven’t explored. That’s the hope. It doesn’t always happen—sometimes the light lands in a brightly lit corner, and they say, “Well, at least we validated it.” But most of the time, our clients come with no expectations. They’ve hit a wall. They’re not getting the answers they want, and the answers they have don’t make sense. So they’re ready to try something different. Over time, we've built a client base that comes to us saying, “We think there’s something going on here, but we don’t know how to frame it or understand it.” Topics range from employment, to sex, to money. What’s different about kids? One of my favorite examples is from working with folks in finance and banking. They kept asking, “Why can’t we get young people to understand that if you open a bank account, you’ll save money on fees? It’s a no-brainer!” I thought the same thing—until we talked to the kids. Their answer made total sense: It’s a business decision. When you don’t have consistent income, you can’t maintain minimum balances. That means you’re hit with recurring fees. So they did the math: “I’d rather pay one bigger fee than constant smaller ones over six months—and at least with a check-cashing place, once the money’s gone, it’s gone. They can’t get back into my wallet.” Banks can. So they chose what gave them control. We’ve got a little time left. Looking ahead, what do you see? You mentioned AI earlier—do you encounter synthetic data? Any thoughts on the impact of AI on your work—on shining light? I think the impact of AI is different in my case because it’s not necessarily a competitor—it’s more about how it’s changed the landscape. Broadly, technology has impacted young people—and our generation as well—in that there’s no clear roadmap anymore. In an environment that lacks clarity about where to go and how to get there, insight and direction become so much more valuable. Take trends, for example. You can sit and talk with someone in a marketing department, and they can spend hours on Google and find trends of all kinds. But eventually, if you keep looking, you’ll find someone who says X, Y, and Z are great. So, how do you know what to listen to? How’s it being curated? That’s the shift. As technology opens up everything, we’re more and more in need of someone to curate the information and give us confidence that it’s coming from the right place—that it’s actually valuable and creates genuine connection with our audiences. Yeah. Beautiful. Well, listen, this has been a blast. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It was great to hear you talk more about your story and the work at Untapped. It sounds amazing. Well, I appreciate the invitation. I mean, I’m curious—I’ve got the same question. AI is affecting our industry so much. What are you seeing? How’s it affecting your work. Yeah, I don’t know. I never feel like I’m the kind of guy who knows how to talk about this kind of stuff—speculating about business and industry. But with synthetic users, I kind of had an existential crisis when I encountered the concept. There are huge chunks of work that are definitely going to meet clients where they want to be met—with synthetic personas or ridiculous oversimplifications. To your point, you talked about how a lot of the industry already treats people like answer-generating machines. So maybe it’s good riddance that some of that gets commodified into synthetic data. But, also, to your point—curation becomes more important. And I think all the interesting stuff is going to live on the fringe. I choose to think of it as an opportunity—a kind of permission to get wilder, more imaginative, more interesting, and honestly, more human. That last sentence maybe ended with less drama than I intended, but… you know what I mean? The synthetic stuff captures the big, fat middle. There will be so much agreement on so many things, I imagine. I don’t think that’s bland at all. I think it’s at the heart of everything we’re feeling right now—people are craving that connection. There was an article in The New York Times this morning about how young people feel like they’re the most rejected generation. Statistically, it’s true. Just look at the scale of things—you’ve got more university applicants, more job applicants. I think it’s something like 160 applications to get a job now. It’s become a volume game. So when they say they feel rejected, on one hand, it’s backed by data. But on the other hand, there’s the emotional side of it. When you say be more human, I think that’s the real opportunity for brands—to connect. I think about when we were young. McDonald’s wasn’t just fast food. It was your first job. It was someone from the neighborhood saying, “Hey George, look at you—you’re growing up. You’ve got a job.” There were layers of humanity in that. And I think the marketing, the communications, the products that have always resonated—historically—had that human layer. We've lost that. A lot of what I’m seeing from young people today is not just feeling lost—it's feeling overwhelmed. That’s the difference between a “lost” generation and today’s generation. There’s so much information, so much access. People look at them and say, “It’s never been easier to apply for a job. Why aren’t you applying?” But yeah—it’s easier. Which means everyone’s applying. They’re saying, “Let me talk to a person. Let me get a real interview.” And I think you’re landing on a much bigger issue. One we could unpack for days. It’s true. Well again, I really appreciate this.It’s good to see you. It was fun talking with you. Thank you so much. Yeah, let’s do it again soon. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Joe Burns [https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeathome/] is a Strategy Lead at Quality Meats Creative [https://qualitymeatscreative.com/] in Brooklyn, New York. Previously, he was Head of Strategy at BBH USA and Head of Communications Strategy at Mother. I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. And I haven't really found a better question for sort of starting a conversation out of nowhere. But because it's so big, I kind of over-explain it the way that I'm doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And it is impossible to make a mistake. And the question is: Where do you come from? Oh, that’s a great question. It’s sometimes tricky to explain here in the States, where I’m from, because I think the regionalism in the UK is a lot stronger. You know what I mean? Like, sure, it’s strong here too—there’s pride, people wearing their team kits and all that—but I don’t think Americans quite understand how, in the UK, just traveling 30 minutes in a car can take you into a totally different culture. I’m from the Midlands in the UK. And again, that’s hard for people who aren’t British to really get. You’ve got the North, which is culturally cool—a hotbed of creativity, very working-class, very grounded. Then there’s the South, which has always been the well-heeled, posh part—the Downton Abbey kind of vibe. And then you’ve got the Midlands, right in the middle. And if you look at the kind of characters that come out of the Midlands, they tend to be a little... tapped. A bit offbeat. Like Lemmy from Motörhead, or Ozzy Osbourne from Black Sabbath. It’s kind of where heavy metal was born—guys working in factories. It used to be very industrial, very working-class. That’s where I come from—same place as Ozzy and Lemmy. That earthy, middle-of-the-country kind of place. So yeah, I came from there, then went to university in Wales, and eventually moved down to London—kind of a Dick Whittington story. What is it to be from the Midlands? What does that mean for you? When do you feel most Midlands? When I’m eating Marmite on toast. I’m from the town where they make Marmite, so the whole town smells like it—which is a bit weird. But really, there’s something to it. It’s a bit ineffable, hard to pin down. We’re not as... you know—I’m sorry for all the tangents—but I got really into these old Roman accounts of Britain. When the Romans conquered Britain—defeated Boudicca and all that—it was a time when the “civilized world,” Greece and Rome, thought of Britain as a kind of mythical place. A lot of people didn’t even believe it existed—just this island on the edge of the map with white cliffs. Anyway, when the Romans finally went there, their accounts are hilarious. They describe swamp-dwelling, naked, blue-painted people—total savages—just sitting in bogs with nothing on but a spear or a sword. And honestly, I think there’s a bit of that mythical, swampy energy in the Midlands. I definitely feel like I’m a slice of that. I feel most Midlands when I’m in that kind of mindset—swampy, earthy, a bit wild. And do you have a recollection of when you were a boy—what did you want to be when you grew up? Oh, there were quite a few things I moved through, but it always involved ideas and creativity. At one point, I wanted to be a spin doctor for politics. I thought political PR would be good—like, you could combine storytelling with doing something positive. But maybe that was just youthful idealism. So I wanted to do that for a while. But my dream job—and you probably pick this up a bit in the stuff I post and write—was to write headlines for tabloid newspapers. I always wanted to do that. You get a bit of it here with the New York Post, but in the UK, the tabloids are massive. I had a paper route as a kid, and I’d always see the headlines—so clever, with wordplay and a wink. I thought it was brilliant. That’s something I miss about the UK and British culture. You walk down the street and every pub has a funny, well-written sign. There’s this deep appreciation for language. That was really what I wanted to do. Another dream job? I wanted to be the guy who wrote zingers for Arnold Schwarzenegger—not literally him, but for action movies. I was obsessed with those little one-liners: “Hasta la vista, baby.” I loved the challenge of packing so much meaning, cleverness, and humor into a single sentence. So yeah, that was the dream. Sadly, there aren’t many jobs in zinger-writing or tabloid headline writing these days. And catch us up—where are you now, and what’s the work you’re doing these days? I’m in Brooklyn now, part of the strategy team at Quality Meets Creative. We're remote—or distributed, whatever you want to call it—but basically a creative agency that stretches across the U.S. Everyone works remotely. We're small and lean. If you look at how much we put out compared to how few people are doing it, it's kind of surprising. That’s one of the things I love about working here—we’re all prolific. Everyone just loves getting ideas out the door. We’re also really focused on cutting the fat—hence the butcher metaphor in our name. The company was started by two creatives out of Chicago, and it’s still creatively led and founder-owned. That means a lot to me. And maybe this ties back to being from the Midlands—but I’ve always struggled to respect people who were given a title, rather than built something themselves. My granddad on my mum’s side ran a trucking business, and that left a big impression. So I’ve always seen this clear binary—especially in advertising agencies where everyone has a title like VP, SVP, Head of This or That. The way I see it, you’re either the founder and the boss, or you’re... everyone else. I really like being part of an organization where the founders are actually running it. It reminds me of something Tolkien once said—he described himself as an “anarchic monarchist.” I kind of believe in that too: one person at the top, and everyone else is free to get on with things. That’s basically how we work at Quality Meats. The leaders give a nudge—“do more of that, less of that”—but otherwise leave people alone to get things done. That’s my ideal system, and we’ve got something pretty close to it. When did you first discover that you could do this for a living—that you could actually make a living doing it? I had no idea. This is a funny one, man—I just had no idea how advertising worked. As a kid, I didn’t even realize there were companies that made the ads. I thought they just came with the TV shows, you know what I mean? I remember getting a bit older and starting to figure it out—probably did something at school about it—but honestly, I don’t think I knew I wanted to work in a creative agency until I ended up in one. I started working at a digital agency right in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. Before that, I’d graduated and was doing an internship—kind of a hybrid role, like a digital planner/creative copywriter. Then the recession hit, and the company folded. Everyone stopped getting paid, which didn’t affect me much since I wasn’t getting paid anyway—but no one else got paid that month either. After that, the guy who ran the agency also ran this fashion wholesale/PR/communications boutique. They moved me into that, and I did it for a year. But I really didn’t like the culture. It was very Devil Wears Prada. Even though I was working in menswear, it still had that vibe. I think fashion is one of those industries where the stereotype is actually kind of accurate. It’s a bit of a sycophantic game, and eventually I got tired of it. They paid me next to nothing, so I was couch-surfing—sneaking into the studio to sleep on the floor some nights, staying with friends. One of those friends was like, “Hey, we’re bringing back the grad scheme after a few years. You should apply.” So I did—and I got the job, this time at a media agency. And honestly, it was the best timing I could have asked for. That moment—2008 to 2010—was right when social media, mobile, online video, and the digitization of media were exploding. Especially in London, where the budgets were smaller, it meant more creative thinking was going into these new channels than into traditional TV. I don’t think that really happened in the U.S. until much later. I got a great education. I sat next to the guy who coined the whole “paid and earned” framework. We were doing some of the first interesting work with dynamic creative optimization—not just using it for efficiency, but to actually connect different data stacks. Like, we’d take review database imagery from one place and plug it into campaign assets from another. We were doing stuff that felt cutting edge—maybe even first-of-its-kind. And then one day, I was in a meeting with the creative agency we were working with for HTC—Mother. I impressed them in the meeting, and they said, “Send us your CV, we’ll give you a job.” Six months later, they did. And then I worked at Mother for 10 years. So, to answer your question—when did I know I wanted to work in advertising? I’m not sure I ever really did. Maybe I still don’t. What I do know is that I want to be in a job where I get to come up with ideas that have an impact. And I think creative agencies can do that. That’s also what frustrates me about advertising. People get caught up in the process—like, “We need this many assets and deliverables”—and they lose sight of the actual idea and the outcome we’re trying to create. When it becomes about outputs instead of ideas, it gets really boring. You devalue the work. I want to go back to something you said earlier—you mentioned it was “good for me” to arrive in the industry at a time of transition, from traditional mass media to digital. Can you unpack that? What did that shift do to how you think about creativity or solving problems for clients? Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think we should maybe park this for a second—you can edit it out if you want. But I think those moments of chaos and volatility, when things seem to be unraveling—paradigm shifts, basically—they’re actually fun places to be if you enjoy figuring things out for yourself. And I’ve always liked that: working things out on my own rather than just doing what people used to do, or what the textbook says is the “right” way. I like reading that stuff, engaging with it—but I’ve always been a little insubordinate, you know what I mean? A bit like, well, no, I disagree. I think it works like this. So yeah, it was a really helpful time to come up. And I think it gave me a very specific view on what creativity is really about. Because I think what that transition actually represented—and not everyone’s gotten the memo on this—is a move away from advertising as a kind of cottage industry. What I mean is: a creative agency could come up with an idea, and then spend tons of time, effort, resources, bureaucracy, whatever—refining it into some perfect platonic form. And then they’d stick it into this magical machine called TV. You’d just flip a switch, pour media dollars into the vending machine, and suddenly that perfected little thing reached millions of people—instantly, and with certainty. But that’s not how networked systems work at all. They call TV a “network,” but really it’s like a cloning machine for attention. And in actual networked systems—digital platforms, social media—you’ve got feedback loops, recursion. You can build something fast, put it out there, and either millions of people see it... or nobody does. And it’s all interconnected. So I think I’ve always struggled to think about things in a linear way, because I entered the industry at a time when everything was anti-linear, for lack of a better word. It was like: that old way is done. And yeah, maybe on the media side they over-egged the pudding a bit. I don’t think the creative side fully got it. But it really shaped how I think about creativity—about how it’s done. You’ve got to build things that work in networked systems. If you look at all the successful businesses, they’re the ones that harness network effects—not the ones that just polish one thing endlessly. You know what I mean? Yeah. And what do you love about your work? Where’s the joy in it for you? The real joy of creative work, for me, is examining the mundane—examining the everyday—and thinking about it deeply. Uncovering insights, if you want to call them that, or truths, or whatever. There aren’t many jobs where you get to spend your time thinking about the stuff most people ignore. That’s what I love—finding a new angle on something totally familiar. For me, it’s the opposite of what I think most creatives enjoy. A lot of creatives like novelty—they like making something new. But what excites me isn’t the new thing you make. It’s the old thing you’ve suddenly noticed in a new way. You know what I mean? That’s where the enjoyment is. Like, once you’ve worked on a toothpaste brand, you’ll never look at toothpaste the same way again. Yeah, so how do you go about doing that? Being a good noticer. There are lots of different ways to do it. I think some people are just naturally intuitive—they notice things and think about them without trying. But what I love about it—and this is something QM has kind of codified—is the idea behind one of our mantras: “Dumb in a smart way.” In a way, being good at advertising is about pretending to be a bit dumb on purpose. You know what I mean? It’s about stripping away your assumptions and the stuff you usually overlook, and just observing things with fresh eyes. That’s probably the most effective way to uncover insights. Then there's the other side of it—more relevant when you’re working with data or trends reports—where you have to really put the screws on and ask, What does this actually mean? That kind of rigor is missing in a lot of the industry. People often settle for a superficial read of the numbers. But you can be really good at data analysis just by better understanding what you're actually looking at. Like, if you're a marketer looking at a chart that says: Awareness: 70%. Consideration: 33%. Preference: 12%. Purchase: 5% —if you see that as just a funnel, that’s one read. But if you take a more rigorous, multidimensional view—thinking about the methodology, the exact questions asked, the sample size—you realize how much those details affect what those numbers really mean. To me, that’s crucial: understanding the difference between the map and the territory. Like, we’re looking at a map right now—but that map comes from 2,000 people answering four questions. You’ve got to keep both things in your head: the model and the real world. And maybe be a little skeptical of how well the model represents reality. That’s a hugely important skill when it comes to insights and noticing things. Yeah. How do you do research? Do you have an approach, a methodology, a philosophy? What’s the proper use of qual and quant? How do you begin a process of learning? Usually, I start with whatever I can do quickly. My approach to most things—research included—is based on the mantra: doing stuff beats thinking about stuff. Which is a weird thing for a strategist to say, but I’d rather spend $50 on a quick survey with 75 respondents and three questions, see what it says—then maybe interview three people and record it. I just think iteratively. This is something I think creative agencies still struggle with. When I entered the industry, there was a wave of startups—not just in advertising, but across tech and product. Even at Mother, when I was there, we were investing in a co-working startup space. My manager, the CSO at the time, said, “Joe, I want you to spend one day a week in there with these startups. Hang out, maybe help them.” I think the agency got some equity in return. So I spent a lot of time around startups. And I’ve worked with Facebook, Google, Amazon—all the FANGs except Apple—and until you’ve done it, I don’t think most people understand how much better iterative work is. Bureaucracies and management love to believe they can impose a rational framework on an organization that guarantees great outcomes. But I’m an ultra-fanatic for agile, iterative working. There’s study after study showing how much more effective it is—whether in creative work, knowledge work, whatever. Iterative beats waterfall. Every time. So I bring that to research too. If you’re a client, don’t spend $15,000 on one big study that takes three weeks just to write the brief. Spend $100 testing one thing. Spend $500 testing another. At the end, you’ll have ten times the quality of insight—because you didn’t try to plan your way to a perfect answer, you discovered it through action. Trying stuff. Making stuff. Doing stuff. It’s better than thinking about stuff—even when the goal is better thinking. That’s what blows my mind. Even for thinking, doing wins. So my approach to research is to bake in as much of that as I can. Make it agile. Make it iterative. Yeah. What was your first real interaction with the idea of brand—what it is, what it means? Yeah, that’s… I mean, it’s a tricky one for me because, like I said, I started out in a media agency—not just any media agency, but the global team of one. So I wasn’t even in the part that bought and sold media. When I first joined, I was basically collecting reports and media plans from different countries. Eventually, I moved into the communications strategy team—so more like coms strategy consulting. You know what I mean? Like, how should Nestlé, or Toyota, or L’Oréal—those were all clients I worked on when I was still pretty young—how should they organize their marketing investment? And I’m not just talking about creative assets here. I mean the whole thing. Like when we were launching L’Oréal Men Expert’s Touche Éclat competitor (which I worked on), we weren’t just figuring out where to buy media. We were thinking about shelf placement, what influencer partnerships made sense—all of it. So to me, I’m always a bit baffled when people talk about brand like it’s a TV spot or a logo from a design agency. To me, brand doesn’t exist in objects—it’s the residue of interaction that lives in people’s heads. That’s what a brand is. It’s the sum of everything you’ve done. And the point of brand thinking is really: What are the right touchpoints? Where do they need to be? And what do they need to do to create the kind of residue we want to leave in someone’s mind? What cracks me up is how people talk about TV like it’s inherently powerful. TV is great because of its scale. But on an individual level? If I get a crappy email from a brand with a broken discount code, my perception of that brand drops—more than a thousand TV ads could ever lift it. That’s something creative agencies often miss. TV works because it reaches everyone. But it’s not individually motivating. A bad store experience, a confusing website, a glitchy promo—those things do more damage than TV can fix. And on the flip side, if you walk into a hotel and they hand you cookies at reception? That can build more positive brand equity than a national ad campaign. But agencies and marketers focus so much on TV and paid media because it’s low friction. Everyone knows how to do it. It’s safe. The money goes where there’s the least resistance, not necessarily where the biggest impact is. That’s something we try to challenge at Quality Meats. We always aim to answer briefs in ways that maximize efficacy, not just ease of execution. We’ve done some fame-driving work for Kotex. We’ve done work for Duke Cannon, a men’s grooming brand. And yeah, there are visual assets and video content involved. But the focus is on creating something with real impact—not just something that’s easy to check off a list because it’s familiar. Yeah. What I’m curious about—well, let me ask it this way. You came into the industry during a major shift. And now, maybe we’re in the middle of another big one with AI. I know you’ve written about “the sloppening.” Tell me where you think things are right now—creativity, research, ideas, impact. What are the implications of AI, and how are you thinking about it? I mean, it’s huge. The shift is going to be tectonic. I always think of insights, trends, and forecasting as being a bit like looking at a London Underground map—you’ve got to pay attention to all the different lines and where they intersect. So I’ll give you a few of the big crossover points, the major shifts I see coming. Now, I love a debate—I don’t think I’m right about any of this. This is just what my body is channeling out of me right now. First, I think the economics of content—or, more broadly, the economics of “stuff to see” and “people to see it”—have massively shifted. What’s scarce now is attention. The cost of creating content has dropped dramatically, but the need to cut through and actually capture attention has become much more premium. So: attention has become more scarce, and therefore more valuable. Second, I think we’re going to see massive flattening in some parts of marketing—especially performance marketing. And here’s what’s interesting to me. Let’s say you buy into Zuckerberg’s claim that 95% of what agencies do is irrelevant. I don’t fully agree, but what could happen is that AI completely removes the barrier to entry for performance marketing. So what happens when everyone has access to the same tools and platforms and the playing field is leveled? It means that every other part of the system—especially the parts that have feedback loops or interact with performance—becomes way more valuable. We’ve seen this with a few clients. They’d been doing only performance marketing, but then started layering brand advertising on top. What happened? We saw performance efficiency improve. I remember working on a booze brand a few years ago—we tracked cohorts of people, and when we lifted brand awareness and consideration scores for that group, their performance targeting efficiency went up. So, brand and performance have this interplay. I don’t love the distinction between the two, but it’s a shared language. And when performance becomes cheap and accessible for everyone, the role of brand becomes even more critical. It’s your edge. It’s how you drive down acquisition costs. Brand, in that context, becomes the most important part of your performance marketing mix. That’s a big shift I think we’re going to see. Third, we need to consider what happens when you combine that with network effects—and the “nichification” of everything. In any networked system, you tend to get a “best and the rest” model. One musician dominates Spotify. One movie dominates the box office. You lose the middle tier. I think we’re going to see more of that with content engagement. In the past, everyone might sit down and watch Friends. Then there’d be this healthy middle tier—shows that didn’t dominate, but still reached a decent audience. Now? Maybe people watch one or two big shows from time to time, and the other 80% of their media consumption is fragmented—podcasts like this one, influencer content, niche creators. As a brand, that means you’ve got to be able to operate in that long tail. That’s where people live now. And I think AI is going to accelerate that shift. Let’s use this podcast as an example—what would a really smart brand partnership look like here? Five years ago, sponsoring a niche podcast wouldn’t have even been a realistic consideration for many brands. Now it is. That’s one of the big changes I see AI encouraging: brands playing smart in more fragmented, distributed, and nuanced spaces. But with AI, I think now it is possible. I think brands will be able to produce an audio asset and stick it in front of a podcast for what—$10 a month subscription or something like that? You get what I mean? The media cost will likely be lower too, because the viewership or listenership on that long tail is way lower than on big-budget HBO-type stuff. So there’s this massive widening of accessibility, and AI will teach people how to do it. So yeah, I think we’re going to see this strange “best and the rest” effect really take hold. And I also think that within a couple of years, we’ll start to see ad agencies getting into content production—monetizing that long tail in new ways. Honestly, it blows my mind that we haven’t seen this already. Maybe someone listening to this podcast will reach out and say, “Joe, let’s build this business together.” Who knows? But seriously—look at these agencies with great reputations, like Wieden+Kennedy or BBH (where I used to work). Why wouldn’t they be producing a MasterClass-style series for small business owners—teaching creativity, helping them apply it—now that those owners have tools to execute it themselves? To me, that’s the space ad agencies should be moving into. It’s a scalable solution to the old “cottage industry” problem. Agencies have always been limited by how much a client will pay for a project or retainer. There’s no scale in that. But if you move into content? That changes. I think people are starting to do it. I post a lot on LinkedIn, and I’m seeing CMOs at research firms with podcasts, agency folks building personal brands through content. I think we’re going to see more and more of that. It’s about personalities becoming more prominent—people getting over the cringe of being known on LinkedIn or Slack or wherever. And if BBH or Wieden+Kennedy or Mother or Crispin or whoever doesn’t move into that space—doesn’t offer a distributed, scalable version of what they do to serve the massive long tail of people now creating content—someone else will. And when that happens, they’ll lose out to someone doing something they could’ve done better than anyone else. So yeah, I’d be shocked if we don’t start seeing this emerge—either from agencies or from somewhere else. Maybe even something like this podcast is part of that shift. Do you get what I mean? It’s content that helps marketers—people who want to get better, learn from those with decades of experience. That’s the last big trend I’d call out. To me, it’s the one most people aren’t seeing coming. And agencies aren’t adapting fast enough to meet it. How would you describe what that is—the form you’re outlining here? You’re describing the conditions for a kind of not-yet-realized agency. How do you describe what that is? To me, it’s a mix of content and tutorials—led by recognizable brands or influential people from agencies. It’s educational content. It moves into the realm of learning. Think about it this way: I use a lot of tools—Adobe Suite, for example—to make the stuff I put out now. And I’ve learned a ton just by going to YouTube and watching tutorials. You could also pay to take a MasterClass or a course on someone’s website to learn something like InDesign, right? I’m talking about applying that model to creativity and ideas—aimed at people who could never afford a creative agency retainer, or even a one-off project. But let’s say you’re a small business, and now you’ve got Meta’s new AI ad tool in front of you. Would you pay $100 or $150 a month for something like “Saatchi Lite”—a creative service for small businesses? That might include access to a community forum, weekly video content, trend reports, and brand-building insights. You get what I mean? It’s creativity as a service. And I’m not saying it’s right for every client—but it’s perfect for the long tail. And it’s incredibly scalable. So the agencies that actually do it—and maybe only two or three will do it really well—are going to make bank. I'm curious about your experience with—are they called carousels? That format. I first came across your work through the carousels you've been creating. You’ve been really prolific, and to me, really sharp with all of them. What’s your experience been like? What drove you to start doing it? How has it been received? It’s been received really well—I’ll start at the end there. It’s become pretty popular. It’s been emulated a lot, which I actually kind of like. To be honest, it all started with a few things coming together. One was just putting that “maker mindset” into practice. Practice really is what it’s about. I’m a big believer that until you make something, you don’t really know what you think. You’re just guessing. So for me, it was about turning my thinking into something tangible. You know what I mean? Maybe not something you can pick up and hold, but something that exists—something real. I wanted to write a book. I wanted to produce things that condensed abstract ideas floating around my head into a concrete output. Essays can do that, of course—but they’re not really suited to how people engage with information now, which is mostly on phones. So I asked myself: what’s the equivalent of the essay for a phone? That’s where carousels came in. It was about understanding the channel and the reality of how people use it—which is: they’re just scrolling, diddling around on their phone. So the challenge became: how do I turn an idea into something you can swipe through, that makes you go, "oh yeah, that’s good." That was part of it. The other part was making strategy take its own medicine a little. Like, only a strategist would walk into a room and present 150 dull, dry slides where the big takeaway is: be distinctive, be clear, cut through, engage emotionally. You know what I mean? All the advice we give clients—but somehow forget to apply to ourselves. So this was just me doing that. Saying, okay, I'm not going to prioritize fidelity of thought here. Because essays and books? They’re great for fidelity. They're great for really scrutinizing your thinking and making it rigorous and deep. But with this format, I had to let go of that a bit. Instead, I prioritized distinctiveness. I tried to make the thinking have some snap, some emotional impact. I still like to write. I like talking in conversations like this, or rambling on a podcast. And there’s a place for that. But this is about understanding the medium—how people are engaging—and creating ideas that can live within that. The Achilles heel of the strategist is that we often want to be deeply understood. We want people to get all the nuance. But to succeed on social platforms, you’ve got to be willing to make some sacrifices in terms of fidelity or depth. That doesn’t mean the ideas are shallow. I’m just trying to get to the crisp part—the bit you can actually hold onto. Maybe it’s the tip of the iceberg. Like today, I posted one on Jevons Paradox. I wrote a 2,000-word essay on it. But is anyone going to read a long essay from me on how Jevons Paradox applies to AI and creativity? Unlikely. So I turned it into something they would read—and maybe that opens the door to more. Maybe more people will read it. What’s the paradox? Well, Jevons Paradox—he was the guy who realized that as coal made things more efficient, people didn’t use less of it—they used more. And that’s the link to AI. I think the same thing is coming for creative work. People are panicking about AI reducing the amount of creative work people can do. But if you look at Jevons Paradox, it actually suggests the opposite: AI is going to massively increase the amount of creative work that gets done. It lowers the cost and barrier to entry. Suddenly, you know, John’s Cupcake Store in Brooklyn can produce creative assets and maybe even put $500 a month behind them in marketing. That’s the long tail again—the demand for creativity is going to go up. The need for a big building with 200 people all working on one brand’s campaign—that might fade. But the aggregate demand for creative and strategic thinking? That’s going to skyrocket. Well, isn’t that the same as a concept from traffic engineering? Induced demand? Exactly that. Yeah—most traffic engineers are trained that when traffic is slow, you just add more lanes. But then more lanes create more demand. It’s self-reinforcing. Yeah, that’s exactly it. And the big thing with creativity is, there's potentially infinite demand for it. If you reduce the cost, why wouldn’t you increase supply? There's infinite demand for ideas. But what are the implications on the kind of creativity being demanded? Do you have insights you haven’t already shared? I think it just changes the shape—and the places it shows up. It makes it more worthwhile to think about more touchpoints, in more ways. Like, take my own carousels as an example. With AI, I can now create visual content that lives inside them. It’s not as good as hiring a human to go out and shoot original photos. Not even close. But for something with a 48-hour shelf life? That’s good enough. I’d never go take 15 photos for a post that people will scroll past in two days. But now I can—and I do. That’s what’s coming. Every nook and cranny where creativity can be applied and make something just a little better will start receiving it. And it gets interesting when you imagine the full tech stack getting involved. I use ChatGPT and Midjourney now. They're good—but imagine if one of the big asset management platforms—where brands store all their creative—trained their own AI. You could say: “We’ve booked an Uber for a client arriving from the airport—generate a personalized welcome message from our agency.” That kind of thing. A micro-touchpoint that would’ve been unthinkable before now becomes easy, personalized, scalable. That’s where this is heading. And the big insight I’m working on for a longer piece is this: communications planning becomes one of the most important, if not the most important, parts of what creative companies can offer. It’s always sat between creative agencies, media agencies, strategy groups—everyone has a bit of it. Sometimes it’s called comms planning, sometimes connections planning. But I think it becomes central. Why? Because it’s the one discipline that combines two things. Sophisticated understanding of systems. And the ability—and instinct—to throw a spanner in the system. In a networked world with more systems, and cheaper, faster ways to act in those systems, the comms planning skillset becomes incredibly valuable. It's the ability to say, “How do things work right now?” And “How can we disrupt that in a way that benefits us?” Take an imaginary example. Say you're a company selling stylus pens—the kind you use to draw on tablets. You might say: “People buy this when they start learning graphic design.” But then you realize: no, people buy it when they start any new hobby—music, writing, sketching. So you create a partnership with a music education platform. A creator from that world uses the pen for something unexpected. Suddenly, you’ve found a new user journey. You’ve disrupted the funnel. That kind of thinking—multifaceted, multidimensional, network-aware—is where I see marketing and communications budgets going. And I think the people who are best at that—at spotting systems, finding the leverage points, throwing spanners into the works—are going to be in huge demand. Or… do you say “wrenches” in America? Yeah. I’m just like—spanners. Throw spanners—no wait—throw wrenches into the system. Whatever it is, that’s going to be the skill everyone wants. Beautiful. Well listen, I want to thank you so much. We’ve come to the end of the hour. It’s been a lot of fun. Very nice to meet you. And I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. Thank you. No, it was lovely to chat. It almost felt like therapy in a way. That’s good. I think that’s a sign of success. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]