[BEST OF] How to Blow Shit Up And Make a Difference

The Problem with Modern Advertising

Louis: So, Cindy, what’s wrong with advertising today?

Cindy Gallop: A lot, Louis, because the theme of your show is very close to my heart and it’s one that I spend a lot of time talking about in my business speaking and also consultancy. Let me go straight to the very heart of the answer to your question. Because for anybody listening per your intro, whatever area they work in, be it tech, be it marketing, be it advertising, this is really the absolute key if you want to transform marketing to make your business wildly successful, whatever it is, especially in tech. So think about all those millions of marketing and advertising messages that all of us receive every day, including those of us who work in this area. And then think about the messages within them that are the ones that go something like this, you can download this for free. If you just agree to watch these ads, you can make these calls free from your phone. If you just agree to receive these ads to it. Skip this ad subtext, you know you want to. And my personal favorite, the pre roll video announcement. Only 12 more seconds. Only 11 more seconds. Only. We know it’s horrible. We know it’s torture. We know you’re suffering. Hang on in there. What all of those messages are driven by and what they communicate is that advertising is a very bad thing. They communicate that advertising is a very bad thing and that people therefore have to be begged, bribed, cajoled, persuaded, tricked, deceived, and blackmailed into watching it. And therein lies an enormous problem. So years and years ago, I heard a gentleman called Mark Goldstein speak at an American association of Advertising Agencies conference here in the US back when he was the CMO of the ad agency Fanon. And he said something I’ve always remembered, he said, people hate advertising in general, but they love advertising in particular. And what he meant by that was, if you stop the man or woman in the street and you go, you know, what do you think of advertising? They’ll go, oh, I bloody hate it. You know, it’s everywhere I go. It gets in the way of all my favorite shows. But if you ask the man on the street what’s your favorite ad? They’ll go, oh, I really love that Nike ad, where. So people hate advertising in general, but they love advertising in particular. And my message to your audience is that if you want to maximize the power of marketing and advertising, you must completely shift your mindset to bloody love marketing and advertising in order to convince people that what we do can actually be good. What I say to people is, we need to move from a focus on making good marketing and advertising to making marketing and advertising good. And here’s why that mindset shift is so critically important. Whenever WhatsApp sold to Facebook, I think that was about three years ago. So I use a quote from Jan Koom, the founder of WhatsApp, when the media coverage went out about, you know, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion. Something extraordinary. And so Yankoon was quoted saying, don’t worry everybody, we’re still not going to run the ads. And this quote comes from an article that Adweek published about this. And the headline of the article was something like WhatsApp and seven other tech platforms that hate advertising, including Facebook. So the founders of every single one of the gigantic tech platforms that are, for many people, the future of advertising all have one thing in common. They bloody hate advertising and marketing. Now it’s interesting because they see it as a necessary evil. Because their exponential growth, enormous valuations and humongous IPOs are predicated on one thing only, advertising. They’re predicated on the assumption that every one of those platforms will be able to turn colossal human networks into, into advertiser funded, revenue generating behemoths. So Larry and Sergey, when they founded Google, originally swore they will never be advertising on Google because we hate it. Funny enough, today 95% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. David Karp of Tumblr was quoted saying he hated advertising. Mark Zuckerberg clearly doesn’t like advertising either. And yet everybody sees these platforms as being the future of advertising. The problem with hating advertising is that you will never, ever, ever leverage the enormous power technology has to transform marketing and advertising as long as you hate it. And an indicator of that is, and this never fails to astonish me. So take Facebook as an example, okay? Facebook has enormous cash reserves, phenomenal resources, the very best engineering talent in the entire world. And yet Facebook’s advertising proposition for brand marketers and advertisers is basically a new world order form of display advertising. All they sell is display advertising, when what they could be doing is, you know, the point I make is the future is not ad units. It’s ad products creating things of utility and value that delight consumers in the way that they’re delivered to completely transform your advertising business. And that is not happening. So when you ask me what is wrong with advertising, what is wrong with marketing, that lies at the absolute core of it? Because as long as you believe, marketers included, as long as you believe that what you’re doing is horrible and unpleasant and people hate it and just have to find ways to intrude on their consciousness as much as possible, you will never, ever, ever leverage the true power of TEC in marketing and advertising. Does that make sense?

Why Tech Founders Hate Advertising

Louis: Completely does. There is an interesting thing here that we need to discuss. There is a big difference between what people say and what they actually do. And people will absolutely always Say, I hate to be sold to. They don’t want to feel like they are being sold to. Yet millions, hundreds of millions are spent every year on super bowl ads. People are now looking forward to Christmas ads every year. And advertising does work or else companies would have stopped doing it a while ago. Right. So it does work. People just feel that they’re being sold to too much. Basically. I remember, I don’t remember who told me that. As a past guest, one of my guests said that basically Rand Fishkin from Moz said, you only notice bad advertising and bad marketing when it’s good. You don’t call it advertising, you just say, oh, I love this brand or I love what they do.

Cindy Gallop: No, you’re absolutely right, Louis. I mean, at my old agency, bbh, our creative philosophy was we don’t sell, we make people want to buy. And that’s what really great marketing advertising does. Now there’s another very important point about that that I want to make to your audience specifically as it relates to the tech world. Because, and I think this is partly due again to the way that many of the huge tech venture role models have grown, which is you have tech founders usually, by the way, and this is also a problem in this scenario. White male tech founders who build something they want to build, which really takes off and then they go at some point when they’ve taken enough funding and there’s now pressure and growth is, you know, then they go, ooh, now we need marketing. That’s a massive misconception. Marketing is not an add on and it isn’t even a separate thing. Marketing is something that you design into your platform from the ground up. You cannot separate it out from the absolute core of what you’re creating. At its most essential, marketing is why would anybody want to use or buy or be loyal to or talk about what we’re building? And so I really urge the tech world especially not to think about marketing as something you bring on later is completely separate are those folks who have no bloody idea what we’re really. That’s also a mindset you need to shift and particularly because, and I talk about this to my industry when I talk about how marketers and advertisers can take the brave new world of tech and turn it into hard headed commercial advertising and marketing reality. What you need to do is you need to have a shared vision of what you want to achieve that everybody in whatever discipline that they work in then works towards. And you know, I’ll give an example of how much marketers and tech platforms are not thinking like this at the moment. Marketing and advertising, in my observation, really suffers from shiny new object syndrome. And what I mean by that is, both on the client side, brands and on the agency side, I see a lot of people going, ooh, ooh, we need to be on Snapchat. Ooh, Snapchat’s a big thing. We need to be on Snapchat. Ooh, we must be on Instagram. Ooh, it’s all about VR. We must do something in VR. Whereas obviously what should be happening is everyone should be going, here are our business objectives, here is our brand vision, here is what we want to achieve now, what technology will strategically enable us to achieve that. And that isn’t happening, which results in a lot of very diffuse and very ineffective marketing strategies and campaigns and programs. Now, what I urge marketers and advertising agencies to do instead is because the principle I’m talking about here is the objective drive strategy. But even when people get that, they aren’t taking it far enough. So what I say to marketers is take the principle of objective drive strategy and then blow those objectives out well into the future. Blue sky it, quite literally go in five years time, what would we love to have happen? And when I say blue sky it, I mean literally sci fi it, magic it. Have no problem with not having you think that vision be grounded in reality. Literally go in a science fiction world in five years time, what would we love to have happen? Because no matter how magical and unrealistic, whatever you say seems, the technology exists right now that will enable that to happen. So, for example, imagine that five years ago you had been a marketer together with your agency or an agency going, conducting this blue sky exercise. What would we love to have happen for our brand? You might have gone, for example. Well, if we really engage in magical thinking in five years time, we would love our consumer to be sitting around at home, just chilling out, pottering around, and we would love them to suddenly decide they want our brand and we would love them to say out loud, ooh, I really feel like having some blah, blah, blah. And an hour later we would love our brand to turn up on their doorstep. Because you might have thought five years ago that was blue sky thinking, but today we have Alexa and Amazon Prime. So whatever you design, the experience you want your consumers to have around your brand. Because then you can take the technology that exists today and you can absolutely make that happen.

Blue Sky Thinking Framework

Louis: I have so many questions. All right, I need to put my thought together. No, this is great. And this is kind of a great framework for people to use and to understand that, you need to think for your people, for your audience as well. You need to imagine the world they want to live in as well. This is a tricky thing for a lot of people, and I talk to a lot of listeners, and I know this is tricky for them to do even tomorrow, because they are driven by quarterly targets. They are driven by profit. Instead of giving a shit about their customers, they are driven by building a product that tricks them into doing something. This is a great framework. I wanted to go back to one thing. I don’t know if you mentioned it, but in your vision of what’s wrong with the advertising world today, you’re saying that companies are data driven, and instead they should be data informed. Right. Can you tell me a little bit more about this particular aspect?

Humanizing Big Data

Cindy Gallop: Sure. So, yeah, you’re alluding to the fact that I talk a lot about the need to humanize big data, because big data is not statistics. Big data is people. And it’s very easy to lose sight of that. And in all of this, Louis, you know, I’m essentially talking about humanizing every aspect of this in a way that people often forget to do. So, you know, the really important thing about data is, you know, so obviously today, consumers are extremely conscious of the fact that pretty much every tech platform is a data gathering exercise. And people are extremely nervous and worried about that, not least because obviously we have regular data breaches manifesting in all sorts of areas. So I talk about the need to humanize how you analyze big data, know, how you view it generally, but also very importantly, how you go about gathering it. And the analogy I draw is, you know, think about how in life generally, you know, you might be, you know, trolling along and you meet somebody that you like, okay? And this could be a person, any range of contexts. You know, it could be somebody that you meet and you think, oh, we get on really well. I’d love to be friends with this person. It could be, you know, you meet a new colleague at work and you think, oh, this person is terrific. You know, I’d really love to work with them. Or it might be somebody that you fancy, you’re attracted to. You think, I would like to date this person. So what you want to do in all of those circumstances is you want to find out more about this person. And so what you do is in order to get them to share more information with you, you begin sharing information about yourself with them in order to establish a context in a relationship of trust, intimacy, confidence, liking, and in that scenario, the more you open up to that person, the more they feel able to open up to you. The more you find out about them, the better the relationship you build until you reach the point where that person is thinking of you. I want you to know me. That is exactly the humanized process that brands and marketers should be taking with data gathering. In order to get consumers to share data with you, you need to open up to them. You need to say, this is what we stand for. This is what we’re all about. We’re opening up to you because we would love you to share information with us. Because within that process, you make it very clear what the benefit to them is. You know, in the analogy I just described, the better relationship you build, the more the other person sees how beneficial it is to them in your working relationship, as an employee, in a great friendship, you know, in a romantic relationship. And so equally, when it comes to data gathering, the more you make it clear by opening up, there is a benefit to the consumer in the relationship you build and in what you were able to deliver to them because of the information they share with you, the more they will want to share that information until you reach that situation with the consumer whose data you would like access to, where that consumer is saying to your brand, I want you to know me.

Louis: This is a fantastic analogy, and I actually hadn’t heard that before in the concept of big data and in more general, there are a lot of brands nowadays that are being more transparent and openly honest with their consumers. They would share their revenue. They would share how they make their product. They would share how they hire. They would try to be more diverse and hire people other than white males in their 30s. They would try to really open up. But I also know that a lot of companies are really struggling with this idea. They understand the concepts that you just said, but they really struggle with the idea of being vulnerable as a brand, this brand in their ivory tower that has to control everything. How do you convince those executives, those leaders, to be more transparent, to be more open?

Building Vulnerable Brands

Cindy Gallop: There’s a very simple answer to that, Louis. And the very simple answer is that your audience, your consumers, must be your team. And by that, I mean your team must be made up of the people to whom you are selling, and the people to whom you are selling are the whole of humanity. And what I’m talking about here, obviously, is diversity. But I don’t like the word diversity, because it’s not about diversity, it’s about humanity. And I can tell you, especially in the tech World that the way to enable brands to be vulnerable, as you say, that’s a great word to use to consumers for business benefit, is for your leadership and your team to be the people who are vulnerable themselves and understand vulnerability. And those are women and people of color. Those are not the leaders with white male privilege. You know, at the most basic level. First of all, you know, women are absolutely critical to everything for a couple of reasons. Women buy, we are the primary purchasers of everything and the primary influences of purchase of everything, including sectors that have historically been thought to be male. And by the way, if you look at any tech sector, I mean, women are bigger users of social media than men. More women download mobile apps than men, more women download, more women pay to download mobile apps than men. But what is really also very important in that scenario is that women share. Social media is simply a whole new methodology for us to do what we have been doing since the dawn of time, which is sharing the shit out of everything in a way that men don’t. Because we are the gossipers, we’re the chatterers, we’re the talkers, we’re the sharers, we’re the ambassadors, we’re the advocates, we are the recruiters. So much so that I say to brands that think they’re targeting men talk to women, because women will influence men more than men will influence other men. And so not only are we the primary consumer audience for virtually everything, we are also absolutely audience you want to talk to to spread your message. And in the context you asked about, that is why your audience must be your team, must be your leadership. Because we also understand and you know, within this, as I said earlier, I place diversity drives innovation. When I talk about diversity, again, I prefer not to use the word, I prefer to use the word humanity, but I’m talking about diversity of everything. Not just gender, but race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age. And when I cite that spectrum of diversity, those are all people, women included, who are vulnerable and who understand about opening up and sharing to collectively and collaboratively get to a better place together. That’s the answer. You know, if you start any business today with an all white male founding team, you will never own the future. If you build any business today with an all white male team, you will never own the future.

Louis: So I think we painted the situation pretty well. What’s going on today in today’s world and the biggest issues that marketers and companies are facing at the minute and at the start of this episode, I really started to talk about the fact that as a listener you might be a marketer, you might be losing your way or feeling that you’re losing your way. Don’t really know where to go. You like to blow shit up. As you say it a few times, you want to make a difference. And maybe you’re part of a company that wants to make a difference as well, that truly want to disrupt stuff in the right sense of the world, not as a buzzword of disruption, but truly make a difference, truly disrupt things. So together, even though you’ve started, I think, to talk about a few actions there together, I like to come up with a sort of a step by step, a sort of method, a framework that people can use to say, you know what? Fuck that shit, let’s blow shit up together, right? So first step, let’s take an example of a digital agency. Because there are many, many digital agencies or consultants or freelancers working in digital marketing who are a normal business, I would say they are making money, but not crazy. They have a few clients, but they’re not really happy with it. They want to do things differently. They want to own the future and to plan for the future. What would be the next step to changing this?

The Five Step Method to Blow Shit Up

Cindy Gallop: Sure. So I’ve already talked about the first two steps in this podcast. Step number one, change your mindset. Basically move from believing that what you are doing is a horrible, evil interruption to people’s lives. Move to absolutely loving and believing in what you do because you will never be able to leverage the power of it until you do that. Then I talked about the second step, objective drive strategy and the opportunity to blue sky that to come up with truly extraordinary, apparently sci fi, apparently futuristic, apparently magical experiences that you can actually make happen with technology. Okay, here’s the third step. Rebalance the power equation.

Louis: Let me stop you right there, because this is an important concept. The step two, and I think you mentioned a few things, I’d like to go a little bit more direct into the actions within that. So you said, for example, five years ago, you could have come up with the idea of what if people were thinking of your brand? And what if after thinking about it and deciding that they want this brand, but an hour after that they’ll have whatever product in the front door, like somebody knocking, delivering this. How would you advise people to go and come up with those sort of ideas and conclusions? What are the typical ways for people to think about this?

Cindy Gallop: It’s very simple. It’s what I said earlier, Blue sky it. All you need to do is ask yourself, what would we love to have happen for Our brand five years in the future. No matter how sci fi, no matter how magical. That’s it. That’s it.

Louis: So do you put people in a room and brainstorm?

Cindy Gallop: No, I don’t get into that because that’s a function of whatever your context is. You can sit in a room, you can go somewhere, but you can be one person. But just ask yourself, it’s very simple. In five years time, what would I love? What would we love to have happen for our brand? That’s all you need to ask.

Louis: Great. Okay, step three.

Rebalancing Power with Tech Platforms

Cindy Gallop: And by the way, I’ll just give another example for step two. So, you know, I have a gratifyingly big following and fan base. And what I hear regularly from them, especially from women, is, I really wish I had Cindy in my pocket. You know, I really wish I had you on my phone. You know, I would love to be able to get a kick of Cindy inspiration anytime I needed it. I wish I had Cindy on my shoulder as I look in the mirror every morning before I start my day to give me some of your kick ass inspiration to start the day. Okay. People have been saying that to me for years. Okay. But obviously, you know, I can’t live in your pocket, I can’t live in your phone. But now I do. So this is why I was so delighted when earlier this year, the digital agency RGA came to me and said, cindy, we have an idea for equal payday on April 4th. We want to turn you into a chatbot that will help women get pay rises. And they basically created Cindy Bottom. You can find Cindy bot on Facebook. It’s built on Facebook Messenger. Just go to Ask Cindy Gallup and message that page on Facebook. And this bot is absolutely brilliant because RGA partnered with the Muse, which is a millennial careers job site. They partnered with Reply AI, which is chatbot technology. They partnered with PayScale, which has a whole range of pay data. They partnered with Ladies Get Paid, which helps women get paid. They pulled all this data in. The team that built this bot researched the hell out of me. Literally. It was a guy and a girl, and the girl said to me, we’d be having meetings. And it said, I know you better than you know yourself. You know, we’d have meetings. I go, no, Cindy would never say that. So this is a bot that literally talks like me, swears like me, and you can ask it any question you like, and it will give you advice and it will base that advice on data, you know, So I will ask you so, you know, tell me what you know, tell me what job you do, and you might say, I’m an art director. And so I’ll go, okay, you know, where do you live? You give me your zip code and I go, okay, so in your area, the average art director’s paid. Blah. And then I say, but you’re not average, are you? So we’re going to go for more. And I give you advice on, you know, how to do that. But the reason I’m making this point, Louis, is because what I love about Cindy Bot is it scaled me. And before RJ had that idea, I didn’t know how to scale me. That’s what I mean by blue sky it. Okay, so step number three is rebalance the power equation. So I referenced earlier that huge tech platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. All hate advertising. But their enormous valuations and IPOs are predicated on the belief they can make a shit ton of money out of advertising. And yet I see our industry going cap in hand to these platforms, you know, and I’m talking about brands and agencies going, oh, please, please, please, Snapchat, please let us spend our money on your platform. Oh, Facebook, please let us work with you, please. And Snapchat and Facebook going, yeah, sure, we’ll take your money. Here’s what you get for it. I say to my industry all the time, rebalance the power equation, because they need us more than we need them. So in the last couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of reporting about, you know, Snapchat slowing growth, huge misstep with spectacles, piles of inventory that has to be written off. You know, share price tanking and very high monthly burn. And in all of this, and in fact, I pulled these quotes out for a presentation I gave the 3% conference about precisely this two weeks ago. Within these articles, journalists saying, however, Snapchat is projecting lots of advertising revenue growth to make up for all of this. There’s our opportunity. So what I say to digital agencies like the hypothetical one you’ve just described, and to our industry in general is don’t go cap in hand with the big tech platforms. Look at their platform and go, and again, blue sky it go, here’s what we want to do on that platform. Forget what their advertising sales team is offering. You go, what would we love to have happen for our brand using that technology? Come up with your own ideas, okay? Because they are desperate for those ideas, and because they hate and despise advertising, they’re not coming up with them themselves. Because you are not able to come up with a brilliant way that you can create a completely new form of advertising product on your platform when you fucking hate advertising. So come up with those ideas yourself and then go to them and go, you know, we’ve got this brilliant idea and we will license it to you. One of the things I say regularly to our industry is what’s your marketing business model? And by that I do not mean, you know, how does your brand make money? I mean literally, how does your marketing program make money? And one way to make money out of your marketing program is to come up yourself with the ad product. That is what Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, et al should be doing, but haven’t. To go and sell it to them and to license it to them and license it. The rest of the industry make a shit ton of money.

Louis: That’s a fantastic idea. Have you come across any companies who actually did it successfully in the recent past?

Cindy Gallop: No, because nobody else is thinking like I am. Seriously, have you ever heard anybody else say any of this Steve before?

Louis: No.

Cindy Gallop: Right. Okay. So that leads me to step number four. Step number four is productize. And by the way, I generally hate nouns that are turned into verbs. But in this case it seemed the best way to articulate succinctly what I mean when I say, as I said earlier, the future is not ad units. The future is ad products. The future is crafting and building things of utility and value that will utterly delight and surprise consumers in the way they’re delivered. Now, I mean, what I’m talking about here is an entire talk and presentation itself. But I’ll give you one example where of the kind of thing I mean, so historically notifications have been irritants, okay? You know, constantly being notified about something aggravating as hell. Except when those notifications are the ones that tell you that somebody liked your Facebook post, somebody retweeted your tweet, somebody shared this thing that you put out there. What those notifications then become. And I wish I could take credit for this next sound bite, I can’t. I read it years ago on somebody’s blog. I’ve tried ever since to find out who it was. I cannot. And if anybody ever, ever does find out, please tell me, because I’d love to credit them. But what those are, are not notifications. They are little pellets of love. Little little affirmations. Somebody likes you, somebody shared you, somebody respects you, somebody affirms you. Little pallets of love. Now imagine if a brand owned little pellets of love Imagine if you built something that enabled a brand to own notifications in a way that meant that when those landed, they were little pellets of branded love. That’s just one example of what I mean when I say productize. And then step five, which we already talked about, is, as I said, your audience must be your team. Don’t even think of selling to anybody if your team and your leadership doesn’t look exactly like people you’re selling to across the entire spectrum of who those people are.

Building Diverse Teams That Matter

Louis: So how would you go about. Let’s say you have a team, they’re all white males like me, with beards, with hoodies, and they are selling to a completely different market. How would you go about finding those people who are coming from diverse backgrounds? Because it’s quite tough, actually, to.

Cindy Gallop: No, it’s not. No, it’s not tough in the slightest. Anybody who says it’s tough just has not put the work in and isn’t prepared to put the work in. We exist everywhere, and we are extraordinarily easy to find. All you have to do is break the closed loop of white guys talking to white guys about other white guys. Break out beyond that and go and talk to women and people of color and ask them to spread the word, reach out their networks. It’s very simple. You say to your headhunters, you say to your recruiters, you say to your HR head of talent, only show me candidates who are. For example. I mean, and actually, what I was saying in this context, Louis, is, you know, in all of this, lead with that area of the community and talent pool out there that is the least represented, which is black women. Lead with black women. Say to your recruiters, find me candidates who are women of color with the potential to do the job. And the reason I make that point is, you know, there are. There are several barriers that are incredibly easy to break down that nobody’s bothering to break down. Barrier number one is exactly what you’ve just said. Oh, we really wanted women. We just couldn’t find any bollocks. Okay? You know, if you say that you didn’t put the work in and you don’t really want me, okay? So the moment you decide you want some, you’ll be amazed how easy they are to find when you go out there and do the digging. Barrier number two, there weren’t any good women candidates or people of color candidates. The reason for that is that men get hired, promoted, and funded on potential, and women get hired, funded, and promoted on proof. And by the way, black women don’t get high, promoted and funded, full stop. But to talk about the gender point, when you have an all white male leadership and they’re looking at young white guy, it’s really easy for them to go, oh, he reminds me of myself at his age. Oh, I can see myself in him. He’s great to have a beer with. Yeah, we reckon he can do the job with a woman. It’s a completely different set of standards. Well, has she done the job before? Has she done the job long enough? Has she done the job well enough? So all you have to do to change that is flip the equation. Hire, promote and fund men on proof and hire, promote and fund women on potential. You’d see a very different picture instantly. And as I said, black women especially get the sharp end of the stick on all of that. So lead with black women. Say to your recruiters, I want to see candidates, especially women of color with the potential do the job who may not have done the job yet, but have the potential to.

Louis: Thanks for being that honest and that directing your answer and that blunt. I appreciate it. And it is a nice reminder that we need all to do to do a better job at it.

Cindy Gallop: And then there’s a third barrier, which I also just want to make sure your audience hears which the third barrier is. And I will paraphrase this, as somebody at Google actually said this. Oh, diversity is great, but we can’t lower the bar. Diversity raises the fucking bar. I am really, really tired with how low the bar has been set in every industry by the dominance of white males. We have not even begun to see how high the bar can be set when we bring the talent and creativity and skills of women and people of color into the equation. So that’s the fantastic, successful future that every business has when you do that.

Louis: That sounds pretty good to me. Let’s move on to one subject that you have, I think, explored, but you haven’t directly talked about in our conversation yet is the values. And I very much like when you talk about the fact that you need to set up your own values to decide what your values are in order for you to find the right opportunities then and to reject the wrong opportunities as well. So this is exactly what happened with this podcast, right? And I have to do a better job at it to go even deeper in the fight against shitty marketing. But what happens quite a lot is I do receive a lot of emails saying, I love your show. I also know that it’s a yin and a yang scenario, meaning that I know that a lot of People hate it as well, but they don’t really care. They haven’t listened. They probably listen five minutes and then they hate it. Great. But it really enabled me to be connected with people like you who agree to be on this podcast because I’m fighting for something and I have values that are quite strong, and I’m willing to say no to a lot of others. So can you remind us the importance of setting up your values in order to get the right opportunities as a business, as a person?

Your Values as Your Filter

Cindy Gallop: Sure. So this is my most fundamental life and business philosophy. Everything in life and business starts with you and your values. And it’s astonishing to me how many people never stop to examine what their own values might be. And it’s really important that you do that for a couple of reasons. The first is, you know, all this exercise requires you to do is to just take a long, hard look into your own self and to say to yourself, what do I stand for? What do I believe in? What am I all about? You know, what? What must be there in, you know, what I do and what I interact with? That, that is absolutely true to me. And by the way, Louis, when you do this, it makes life and business so much easier because, you know, life will still throw at you all the shit. It always will, but you know exactly how to respond to in any given situation in a way that is true to you, and that really is the secret of happiness. Now, another reason to be very clear on what your own values are is that that then enables you to be your own filter, which is something I recommend very strongly to, I mean, everybody, but also to founders, entrepreneurs, marketers. So what I mean by that is you mentioned at the start of this podcast that I like to sum up what I do in a certain way. You know, I. You know, I’m an entrepreneur. I’m bootstrapping. So I support myself through paid public speaking and consultancy. I consult very selectively only for clients and brands who want to change the game in their particular sector. So you come to me for radical, innovative, groundbreaking, transformative. I don’t do status quo. And so that’s why I sum up my approach to business as I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business. Now, I don’t do that as a bit of fun or a bit of creativity, a bit of whimsy. I do that very deliberately, because when I talk about what I do in that way, it attracts to me the people who want what I do, and it repels the ones who don’t. And I sure as hell want to repel the ones who don’t because they’re a waste of time, effort, and money. So when you know what you stand for and when you project that out there, you will attract to you the people whose values synchronize with yours, the people who are on completely the same wavelength. And you will repel the ones who aren’t. And you sure as hell want to repel the ones who aren’t.

Your Default Throwaway Descriptor

Louis: How do you answer to a lot of people I know who are thinking it sounds good, but I’m scared of what other people will think?

Cindy Gallop: Well, there’s absolutely no reason to be scared of what other people think, because you know, the exercise I’m talking about results in other people being enormously admiring of you, precisely because so few people have really thought through what they stand for and then put it out there when. When people do, other people wish they could be like that as well. But there is also a very pragmatic, fundamental business reason for doing what I’m talking about. Because when you engage in this exercise and when you identify how to articulate to yourself and others what you stand for, you are doing something that is enormously valuable to you in life and in business. Because what that then generates is what I call your default throwaway descriptor. Every one of us has a default throwaway descriptor. We all have a personal one. And your default throwaway descriptor is what happens when two people meet somewhere, you know, at a conference, at an event, you know, in a social setting. One of those people knows you and the other one doesn’t. So those two people are chatting and during the conversation, your name comes up. You know, one person goes, oh, blah, blah, blah, you know Louis. And the other person goes, oh, who’s Louis? And the first person goes, oh, you know Louis. He bleh. That is your default throwaway descriptor. It is the way someone sums you up very quickly to someone who doesn’t know you when you are not in the room. And it therefore behoves all of us to consciously think what we would like that D4 throw descriptor to be and to manage it. So it becomes that. Exactly the same is true of business. I mean, both of you in a professional context, but also of your venture, whatever it is, the brand you’re marketing. You need to have your brand, your business, your startups. Default throw a descriptor because you need someone to go, I know what we should get, because they’re bleh. It’s your reason for being. And the more compellingly you articulate what you stand for and what your business stands for, the more the word will spread about you, the more people will want what you are.

Louis: I have a little tip around that. If you’re struggling to find your own values and what you fight for or fight against, is to actually survey your friends and colleagues and ask them the question on your behalf. And sometimes you get a lot of good answers. People will say, you’re very good at what you’re doing at X, Y and Z, and I like your values against, or what you fight against, blah, blah, blah. I think that’s something that could be helpful. Sometimes self assessment can be a bit tough, but asking for people around you who know you sometimes, as you mentioned in the past, better than yourself might actually help out.

Cindy Gallop: Yeah, and the important thing in this, too, Louis, is, and I say this especially from a business perspective, when you identify what you stand for, what your brand stands for, what your company stands for, you need to sum that up in the most compelling way possible, okay? Because it’s very easy, you know, again, especially in the tech marketing world, for people to default to very standard vocabulary. One of the quickest ways to make people think differently about anything is to change the language around it. And so you want to make sure that your articulation is completely distinctive and unlike anybody else’s. And you want it to be something that is provocative and stands out, you know, which my own self descriptor does. So, you know, for example, I was. I was working with a tech company. This is a few years ago, but they. They were a software company. And, you know, I was talking to the CEO and the business development guy about, you know, how to position themselves and how to sum up what they did. And they were just coming out with a lot of very standard verbiage. And I was really pushing them on this. And I said to the biz dev guy, you know, listen, you know, forget what you say to your customers. Forget how you sell yourself, you know, you know, in your mind, what is it that you do? What do you do? And he went, we unfuck companies. And I went, that is bloody brilliant. Oh, my God. Yes. You unfuck companies. Because who want to. We. Who wouldn’t want to be unfucked as a company now, you know, obviously that. That cannot in itself be what you actually put on your business card, you know, but I said, that is a bloody brilliant way of summing up what you do. And now you just need to find a succinct way of articulating that. But in casual conversation, by all means, the moment you say we un. Fuck companies, people get it.

Louis: Yeah. That’s why in social settings or during events, what I try to say is, when they ask me what I do is I fight marketing bullshit.

Cindy Gallop: Yeah. I love it. I love it.

Louis: And usually people. And they question. So this is the thing. People tend to think, oh, but if I summarize my stuff, people won’t know exactly what I do. But this is the point. When you say I fight marketing bullshit, they’re like, whoa, okay, tell me more.

Cindy Gallop: No, exactly. The whole point is it’s a conversation starter.

Louis: Exactly.

Cindy Gallop: People really have lost sight of the power of mystery and intrigue in a world today that strips a lot of that out of everyday life. Your summation should absolutely be intriguing enough that people go, oh, my God, I want to know more. Exactly.

Louis: So, Cindy, what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next five years, 20 years, 50 years?

Cindy Gallop: I’ve just told you, I’ve just given you the five things they need to learn today. I’ve just done it. That’s what this podcast is about.

Louis: But I like that, because usually we talk in this podcast, we try to talk about principles that will not change in the next few years, but you managed to explain them in an actionable way while remaining first principles that people can use today. So this is fantastic. I was just making sure that there wasn’t anything else you wanted to say. What are the top three resources you would recommend anybody to read, to listen to, to consume, especially marketers in particular? Obviously,

Cindy Gallop: I’m going to answer that question with a principle. I would actively. I’m going to ask, you know, the people listening to this podcast. Go out of your way to read, consume, and follow women and people of color who are outside your realm of experience. Okay. And I say that for, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, all the reasons I’ve spelt out, but, for example, men recommend business books by other men. So, you know, I keep seeing, you know, business book lists from white men in advertising and in tech and in every industry that are lists of books all by men actively go out of your way to read business books by women, because we have a completely different perspective of everything. Go out of your way to follow people of color on Twitter. Black Twitter is phenomenal. Okay. You know, actively go out of your comfort zone to find resources and stimulus from people who are looking at the world, looking at business through a completely different lens to your.

Louis: Cindy, you’ve been absolutely fabulous. Where can listeners Connect with you and learn more from you.

Cindy Gallop: Sure. So you can follow me on Twitter indygallup. You can follow my Facebook page, which is Cindy Gallup on Facebook. I’m on LinkedIn. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I also have obviously my own startup, akelovenotporn, on Twitter. And you know, anybody who wants to hire me as a consultant, book me to speak, wants to invest in sex tech at Make Love Not Porn.

Louis: It’s [email protected] Is there anything listeners and myself can help you with in the next few weeks or days?

Cindy Gallop: Well, I mean, I’m constantly looking for sex tech investors for both Make Love not porn and the $200 million sex tech fund I’m raising. The world’s first and only sex tech fund. Because if nobody else is going to do this, then I will. But otherwise, you know, quite honestly, you, you can help me by doing everything I’ve talked about in this podcast to transform the way the world sees marketing and advertising, including actively going out there and giving opportunity to women and people of color to build a future that we all want to live in.

Louis: Cindy, once again, thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Cindy Gallop: It’s a pleasure. Glad to be on here with you. Thank you.

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