Jeff Greenfield:
Orlando would thank you so much for joining me here today on this as attribution. So excited to have you here.

Orlando Wood:
Wonderful to be here. Jeff.

Jeff Greenfield:
I am just blown away. I was turned on to your book lemon by Dave Morgan, Dave Morgan was, had started reading it on LinkedIn and, and got so excited about it. He started posting about it and this book from the IPA lemon, how the advertising brain turned sour. So I purchased a copy. I have to be honest, I’m not used to buying books that are $60, but when it does show up the quality that’s here. And I mean, that is typical for, for books or research books coming from the IPA. But when I picked it up, I couldn’t, I couldn’t put it down. It is just absolutely positively incredible. But before we get to that, cause we’ll eventually get to that. Thank you right now. My pleasure, please. You’re the chief innovation officer at system one group. But if you go back, you’ve got a master’s in research methodology, you studied 17th century literature. I’d love to hear. Yeah. I’d love to hear about your journey and, and, and how you got to where you are today and what it is that you do day in and day out. I’d love to hear.

Orlando Wood:
Well, thanks very much. No. Well, wonderful to hear, to hear how much you’ve enjoyed the book, and I really appreciate your, you know, your, your comments. Well, where did it, where did, where did life all begin? Well I as you rightly said I didn’t start off you know, you didn’t, I didn’t start off in advertising. I suppose if you go back to my kind of education and the things that I studied you know, at school university, I’ve always been very passionate about music, languages and and, and art actually as well, and changes in, in cultural I suppose, change shifts in culture. And that’s one of the things that, of course lemon talks about is, is a shift in culture that we’ve over the last 20 years or so.
And I suspect another one happening right now, but perhaps we can come onto that later. And what are the, you know, where, where did this all come from? Well, you know, I, I studied, as you said, 17th century French literature as a master’s degree, a master’s in research methods. And one of the things I did was looking at the changes in literary style that happened in the 17th century in Paris, because I studied I studied French and in fact my father was a, was a French professor. And there’s a lot of him in the book I must say. And he so, so studying this, what I was able to do to this lesser known chronicler, you know, someone who collected gossip and weird and wonderful poetry from, from the salon of the period.
Whereas over a period of about 50 years, I’d say his manuscript collects all these things. And you can, you can sort of discern in this changes in society changes in tolerance towards religion his own life changing, you know, in this period converts eventually to Catholicism. And you know, there’s, there’s a, there was this, there was this change, this shift, which actually was, I found fascinating at the time, but who would have thought that many years later I would be tracing the same shift or similar sort of shift in advertising today from, you know, a kind of advertising that had depth and warmth and humanity to an advertising that’s become very flat and didactic and reliant on the word and that’s you know, that’s sort of a precursor to to, to, to life now and it foreshadowed it in many ways.
And so, you know, I mean, I eventually, I, I sort of I didn’t pursue 17th century French literature as a, as a career. And I took up a sort of research market research an interest in marketing. And in my early days in market research, I was interested in, I did it I had a role which was forecasting you new product launches, and, you know, how we might apply sort of research to the bit business of prediction and predicting outcomes. And then I joined system one or BrainJuicer as it was then, and took on a kind of R and D role at the company. And that’s essentially, you know, my role now is to do research on advertising and understand, you know, how it works, what kind of work works well, what kind of creative connects with people?
And in my time at system one, I’ve you know, become very interested in in psychology, in how the brain works in how the brain attends to the world. You know, many years I was looking at behavioral science and its implications and, you know, recently the work of in McGilchrist a brilliant scientist, psychiatrist, neuropsychologist, really who looks at the way the brain attends to the world and make some pretty startling observations that when you read his book, the master and his Emissary, it’s just like scales falling from your eyes. And I just felt compelled to, to write something. And, you know, I was I was watching, I mean, I’ve got, I’ve worked with the IPA for a number of years and have headed up their you know, the sort of creativity and effectiveness research over the last few years.
And one of the things that I’d been looking at in the last two or three years in particular is the loss of characters that we’ve seen in advertising. You know, where, where have all the break characters gone. I used advertising used to have, you know, loads of these things, characters and human situations that are repeated again and again, through a campaign. And, and I, I both showed that they were extremely effective, but also that they you know, that they sort of, I’ve gone completely out of fashion. They’ve almost totally disappeared. There are a few examples left the Geico gecko over here in the UK. You know, you’ve got things like the the mere cats, but, but really they’re few and far between, and I couldn’t really understand this. And I was, you know, sort of lost end of, well, 2018, I was, I was just watching some ads on television and I thought, what is, what has happened?
You know, why are there so many words everywhere? Why are things got so flattened sort of abstract? And I was, I was reading the work of Ian McGilchrist at the same time. And of course I’d done all this work on a disappearance of characters and suddenly it just came to me and I said, we’ve got to do something about this. And I’m in a unique position to write this and to do this and to pull all these thoughts together. And then I embarked upon the research and you know, the rest is kind of well in the book. So I hope that gives you a sense of kind of how things have panned out.

Jeff Greenfield:
No, it’s, it’s incredible. I just wonder though, as I sit back and I look and I read through the book and I see what’s happened, why is it that advertisers and with all of their teams of, of agencies and experts whose sole job it is to, to market and advertise and deem what’s effective, and what’s not why haven’t they figured this out?

Orlando Wood:
Well, it’s, it’s I mean, one of the themes of the book is that we’ve become very analytical, very narrow and goal focused in the way that we do things. And we’ve kind of lost our sort of broader, big picture you know, sort of holistic ways of seeing the world. And we’ve all got caught up in our own specialisms and things have become increasingly specialized in recent years since the digital revolution. And we’re kind of, we’re kind of not seeing the big picture. And it’s sort of one of the things that I think the book tries to do is, is to show the big picture and draw on other changes in culture in recently, no, in other periods to show how, you know, people will look back on this period as almost like a new reformation, you know, a kind of a flattening of things that if you look at the work of, in the period in art, in the period, there’s a, there is a flatness to to the artwork of the period.
There’s also an over Alliance on the word. There is abstraction, you know, so you’ve just see sort of bits of things, the visual repetition, there’s no sort of sense of the whole, you know, characters disappear in the saints. You know metaphor goes, everything’s treated very literally, you know society becomes kind of very polarized and brittle in its thinking and you’re either right or wrong, or, you know, you’re either factually correct, or you’re a liar, you know, these sorts of ways of attending to the world, which have their root in the brain and the left brain, as I explained are, are, you know, what’s happening today. And so we, we’ve lost this sort of broader sense of, of, of what’s going on. And that’s, that’s what I’m, that’s what I try to do in the book as to, to give that, to give that sense. And in fact, you know, I think what, with everything that’s happening in the world at the moment, you know, as we sort of all go into lockdown and isolation the book is kind of more pertinent than ever. And you know, w we’re going to, we kind of going to need to be, be thinking more urgently of how some of the themes, and as, as we go into the next few weeks a month, yeah.

Jeff Greenfield:
We’ve seen a, a fascinating trend that’s happened over the last two weeks because of what’s going on in the world. We’ve seen a lot of advertisers pull back and, and some have actually stopped advertising, which historically in times of war and in times of crisis brands that stop advertising over the long run, lose significant market share. I’ve talked to others who have said that this is a time where it’s less about advertising, and I think it’s bill Harvey, who said that you don’t want to abandon your constituents and their time of need. So, based upon what I’ve seen in your book, based upon your research, what would you think, what, what should brands be looking to do right now from a messaging perspective?

Orlando Wood:
Well, I think there are some, some, you know, quite, quite important implications from the book. I mean, perhaps it’s worth me just sort of explaining the basic premise of the book. First of all, and then I can, you know, sort of explain what we, you know, w why it’s relevance and greater relevance. Now the book, the book looks at the work of Ian McGilchrist and his work on the brain and the two hemispheres of the brain. And for the last, you know, sort of 40 50 years, there’s been this sort of idea and popular psychology that the left and the right brain do different things. You know, that once once sort of does emotion and the other one does reason, and that’s all been shown to be rubbish. They both do, you know, both, both things. It’s not, they do different things, it’s that they do things differently.
They have different takes on the world, different ways of attending to it, different priorities. If you like, you see it in people, you see it in mammals, you see it in birds even. And the left brain likes to sort of, it has a very narrow and goal. Orientates the tension, and it breaks things down into smaller parts. It likes to categorize things. You know, you sort of see birds doing this when they’re packing up grains of food, you know, very narrow goal-orientated attention, picking up the grains of food and, and identifying and categorizing them, you know, what’s right to eat and what isn’t and the right brain, all the while has a much broader and more vigilant set of new type of attention. And it, and it looks broadly and widely, and it’s vigilant it, making sure that it doesn’t become someone else’s lunch.
And so the right brain is broad vigilant. It’s in control of sort of divided attention sustained attention of the five types of attention. Basically, psychologists agree on the right brain is responsible for four of them. Only very narrow goal-orientated attention is, is what the left brain really is principally interested in. And the differences don’t sort of stop there. You know, the left brain is very sort of literal and believes in linear cause and effect. It likes sort of tools and things and, and you know, likes models of the world represents the world through models and, and and so forth. And symbols as well, and left brain is in charge of sort of language in the, in the sense that, you know, the sort of the business of communicating whereas the right brain does control parts of language.
But it’s, it’s, it’s got a, be a more subtle and nuanced sort of relationship with it. So language is one of the left brains tools with which to manipulate the world. And the left brain is also about power and control. It’s also very dogmatic. It’s often overly optimistic in the way that it sees things. It’s it laterally angle lateralizes to the left as well. Anger is tied up with power and control and the loss of it. And then also you know, it’s very rhythmic. So it can’t really understand and you know, kind of music, but it does have a very basic sense of rhythm and rhythm and repetition and things that are familiar or things that the left brain prizes and cherishes the right brain is this different sense of consciousness has a broadened veterans’ tension. It is interested in people and the living and, you know, sort of characters and people what wraps around the words.
So people’s facial expressions, their intonation, their, their body language, their accents, all of these other things, you know and then it’s sort of also it’s responsible for sort of empathy. It’s responsible for depth and perspective if, and our sense of live time, in fact, and it’s also responsible for you know, if, if you, if, if, if we, if we, the left the right brain can sort of believe that to control control, contradictory thoughts can both be true at the same time. So it’s, it’s, it’s what helps us to understand that it’s a four and humor and, you know, those things and music as well, actually, it’s sort of this oral depth as well as visual depth. So, so quite different in what they pay attention to. And the left brain and the right brain are joined by this thing called the Corpus callosum in the middle.
And the Corpus callosum is is actually it’s a bridge, but it’s actually there to sort of suppress one brain or the other at any given time, according to the task. And the left brain has a greater suppressive effect on the right than the right does on the left. And so gradually, you know, certain periods of history, you see this sort of left brain drift and society, people, individuals, and you see it in culture, you see it in art become very left brain dominant. Society becomes Bristol angry and polarized know emphasis on things being right or wrong. And so on. We see it today. And you see it in, in art. So things get flatter in these periods, reliance on the word you get things become quite rhythmic, repetitive. They become abstract. Ideas about the thing become more important than the thing itself.
We lose a sense of connection, mixed feelings, a sense of, or which is parent [inaudible] more balanced brain times, whole brain periods, like the remake of the romantic period or the Renaissance. And we sort of lose the sense of connection and with time place with each other and relationship with the past. And what we’re seeing today, I think, I think is a bit of a right brain reset because everyone is, you know, looking up and around them bringing this broad and vigilant attention to bear on the world that the right brain you know, can, can, can give us it is helping us to sort of understand what’s important to us in the world. It’s on alert, it’s quickly processing this new environment and trying to make sense of it. Drawing, looking back at the past, it’s, it’s, you know, quite nostalgic the brain and trying to draw parallels and draw lessons and comfort from things that have happened in the past the second world war, for instance.
And all of that, all the while, you know, the left brain has been rather slow to react to what’s going on. It has had an unfounded sense of optimism been rather dogmatic and sort of operates in a kind of fixed world with a fixed model of the world, but, you know this, this right brained this is going to be, I think, a reset for the, and there’ll be more of, you know, as we’re seeing it already, right, brain spontaneity, altruism humor, these are things that are associated strongly with, with the right brain. And there’s going to be, I think a bit of a mental reset its legacy will be you know, that the right brain reset and that’s that’s has real implications for advertisers, but also for, for broadcasters. And, you know, you’ve, I mean, various things are happening.
So first of all, people are watching more TV, more radio you know people are places where advertising appears. So this is it’s pretty important for anyone trying to trying to advertise that, that, you know, you’re going to reach more people and more quickly as they’re looking for kind of entertainment and also foot for news. You’re also, you know, as you said, you know, it’s, it’s a good idea for brands not to switch the, advertise their advertising in this period. We’ve learned this from other periods of crisis. You know, because, you know, if you cut back your spend in this period you know, and if everyone is cutting back their spend, you know, your, your, your week and your week and your position, whereas if you continue and others cut back their spend, you know, you’ll strengthen your position your extra share of voice and, and, you know, the harder you cut as well the longer it will take to recover and, you know, it may not be immediately apparent, but it will, it will harm you and you’ll take you longer to get back from it.
And it will also lead to greater price sensitivity amongst customers, which means, which pushes you down the route of price, promotions, and so on. So a bad idea from that point of view. But then, you know, you asked about creative implications and that this is the sort of final sort of implication is that as the kind of world closes off all the many things that the right brain cherishes, you know, between this connection relationships with other people you know, yes, the digital digital connectivity will help enormously, but, you know, I mean, thank heavens for that, but otherwise, you know, we’re pretty, I’m going to be pretty isolated. The right brain is going to be yearning for this, for everything that it’s lost, the living characters between this humor music, you know, a clear sense of place, altruism, metaphor, all of these things are going to become extremely important.
And they’re going to connect with people very, very strongly. And, you know, brands I think are going to the ones that succeed in this period are going to have to demonstrate a sense of, you know, right. Brain spontaneity, humility, self awareness, but also, you know they’re going to need to perhaps make people smile. In fact, we’ve just got some data back in the, you know, we’ve been asking, we’ve got various sort of trackers running on this and also monitoring response to advertising and how this is this, this might be changing in this period. And actually there’s no, there’s no re results so far suggest that, you know, overall people are connecting with, with advertising in pretty much the way that they were before, but, but some of the, but the right brain elements seem to be improved, seems to be connecting more with people in the left brain elements, you know, even less than they were before.
So, you know, all of these sort of right brain things nostalgia might become important. You know, looking back at other times in history also for broadcasters, you know, the programming that they’re going to they’re going to, to, to have to be concerned considering, you know, cause they’re not be able to create new programs. But actually what people want on films. We’ve got some data on this, you know, sort of or they want films, they want entertainment. They want comedy in these, in these times. And the same is true for trim trying to same as true for advertising, I must say. And it also happens to work much better by the way. So that’s, that’s kind of my, my, my sort of response. And in the book, I show how these right-brain ads that have these right-brained elements are more likely to connect ads that have the sort of left brain, you know, this sort of flatness, the abstraction, the words blazoned on everything. They connect less that this has happened. This switch to the left brain has happened over the last 15 years. And that in that period, of course, we’ve seen this incredible drop in advertising effectiveness, and I hope that this, this awful devastating virus will you know hopefully may get cause a mental reset that pushes us all back towards the things that matter and the things that work and, and more right. Brain work.
Yeah. A hundred percent, this, this concept of a right brain reset is I’m loving it. I think I’m going to borrow that and use that from this point forward because that’s, that’s really what this is. I’m wondering though, because when you talk about this shift in culture, when we moved from right brain to left brain and this flat, very reliance upon the word, it really does describe the shift in this over reliance, on digital, from a messaging stand point of view for brands. I just keep picturing the, the someone’s scrolling and, and, you know, just scrolling through their feed, whatever feed it is, Facebook, Instagram, whatever, and just their ads just showing up there. So there’s a lot of brands that are not in traditional media, which has that capability for that creating characters, any thoughts or any recommendations for brands that are solely digitally focused?
How do they, how do they, how do they even start moving from, Hey, here’s my call to action. Here’s my, here’s what I’m selling by this. Now at this discount to more of a, of a right brain approach, how do they even start to get into that mindset from a creative perspective? Well, I think the you know, the heart of your question is, is, is, you know, how does attention work in these environments? And, you know, as I said, that the right brain is responsible for presenting the world to us and the left brain then sort of represents it back to us and tries to manipulate our surroundings and, you know, to, to, to, to make change to things. And that the right brain is there for you know, it’s, it’s, it’s what’s attention. It’s, what’s responsible for, for alertness, for vigilance, for sustained attention.
If we want, if we want our work, our advertising to attract and sustain attention in a, in a digital environment, then we need to do the sorts of things that will be of interest to the right. Right. And that’s to say, yes people characters between us something slightly out of the ordinary, something I suppose, unusual, slightly novel that you know, animals, creatures, monsters, these are the sorts of things that attract the right brains attention. And all the while of course, we’ve been going completely the opposite direction with most digital work. And so what we, what we need to do, if we want to build a brand, if we want to attract attention is to, is to display to the right brain. And in fact, I’ve been doing some interesting experiments on this, looking at the you’re looking at advertising, which has sort of left brain dominance, if you like, so highly rhythmic soundtrack, you know, reliance on the word over, you know, sort of people, characters, animals a scene unfolding.
And what you find is that not only to, of course, to, to do the sort of people, characters, animals generate a much stronger emotional response than the, than the sort of flatness and abstraction of word based stuff, but they also considerably more likely to attract and sustain the tension through the spot. And so, you know, I find it quite defeatist when people say, well, you know, attention spans are very short. We’ve got, you know, and you’ve got a few seconds to attract people’s attention. Therefore, you know, your work needs to work in a few seconds. It’s actually, you know putting the, the medium before the work and if we got the work right. And if we created work that people actually wanted to see that entertained people, that amuse people that attracted and sustain their attention, we wouldn’t have to go to those shorter lengths.
And the, you know, that’s, that’s the obvious implication for me is to put the work first, rather than the platform or the, or the, you know, the pipe work as it were, put the work before the pipe work and, and make the work better. So that it, that it does work. You what you find in it’s so much, you know, you look at your Facebook feed, anyone’s Facebook feed is the advertising tends to be flat in these, in these you know, sort of contexts that it’s often about making things, you know, so you might have recipes being made on a counter top viewed from above these, this is what the left brain loves, but it’s not what attracts and sustains attention. You know, you need to entertain in those environments to relevance. There’s not enough, you know, there’s been we’ve shied away from being brands and being interesting and entertaining. We’ve sort of worshiped at the alter of relevance for too long and relevance. Isn’t enough. You need to entertain if you’re going to get your work seen and, and and remembered

Jeff Greenfield:
You think with the left brain loving that type of content, that the whole concept of the scroll and the Facebook and the Snapchats that as we move into these new times of the right brain reset, that there could be a shift where those are not as favored as much as they are now,

Orlando Wood:
Maybe, maybe you know, it’s I think we’re going to see interesting you know, the, these, these, this time is going to I think brands that do well in this time are going to be the ones that sort of a generous and creative and this period is going to force people to think about things in radically different ways. And we’re going to see, you know I think we’re going to see a huge, very creative period, you know, ahead of us as people adjust and try to work around the constraints that have been put on us all. And I think you might see you know, sort of new things appearing new, new groups, new ways of exchanging information, new ways of showing things, new ways of, of, of kind of doing things. And you know, I mean, it’s, it is that sort of mentality that’s required which is of course, reliant on the right brain, making connections and, and making things you know, sort of making things things happen. So I think there’s, I think you might, you might see that I hope I hope we do, you know, I hope we do see some new and interesting things ideas emerge. I’m sure we will. I think we’re already seeing,

Jeff Greenfield:
I agree. I, I think this is a, it’s a challenging time, but also a very exciting time in terms of what what’s going to happen as the world comes together to solve something and works at it together, it creates incredible amount of innovation. And it’s almost as though your, your your book here was almost four told that there was about to be a shift that had to occur, especially in the advertising space. And, and it’s interesting when I’ve gifted this book to a lot of executives, what I’ve said to them is I’ve said, listen, you’re going to start reading this and you’re going to want to finish it immediately. I said, don’t take this into the office, keep this at home, read it every morning with your coffee and read, read a chapter at a time, just one chapter. And you’re going to find that that chapter is so fascinating, and it really doesn’t have much to do with your work.
You’re actually going to enjoy discussing it with your family, with your partners. And and, and the feedback I’ve gotten from folks that I’ve gifted this book to have said, yeah, it’s great. I’ve been talking to my wife about it. I’ve been talking to my husband about it. It’s been incredible. And that’s what I found is that I only read one chapter a day. It only took me five or six days to finish it, but I just, I loved it, but the ability to be able to share it. So even though it’s a, it is incredibly well written and well researched and, and applicable to the work that we do. I found that people that weren’t even in the field really enjoyed the content. And the book again, is lemon just incredible how the advertising brain turns out and Orlando, anyone this is available on Amazon. Is there any other places or any other websites where people can go to

Orlando Wood:
More information? Yeah. Well, good, good, good question. You can go to the IPS website. There is information about it there. So the Institute of practitioners in advertising in the UK there’s also one of the, one of the sites F works, EWF works site will give you some information about it. There’s also a video of me presenting it there back in October, or at least some of the implications of it’s not, not all of it by any means. And you know people have, people have to say a very very receptive to it. When I, when I talk about, in fact to your point, you know, I’ve been talking to you know taxi drivers about it, who say you’re absolutely right. There’s something you, you you’re really onto something here talking to, to all sorts of people who have just really connected with it and found it you know, just so refreshing actually you know, we’ve, we’ve kind of got stuck in a bit of a rut the last 10, 15 years culturally, and I’m thinking very narrowly and, you know, so it’s, as I joke, you know, but it’s not a joke, you know, it’s like, we’ve lost four out of our five tastebuds in the last 15 years.
In terms of the types of humor that, that are available the types of the types of shows that are available, the music around us, which has become repetitive and overly reliant on the vocal line. You know, so many things have sort of narrowed in their scope and interest that the kind of the world has been, I think, is crying out for change. And, you know, I hope the book kind of helps to, to, to articulate it in some way.

Jeff Greenfield:
No, I think it does. And, and, and I really believe that most people out there feel like that the last 10 or 15 years has been incredible in terms of technological innovation. Yes. But most people don’t feel is though that their jobs are easier. Cause technology is supposed to make our lives easier or better. And they also don’t feel like their lives are enriched, which is what you would expect from a cultural explosion. And as you were talking, it reminded me, I always have these quotes that I love for movies. And one of my favorite quotes is from Jurassic park, the original one where the professor Ian Malcolm says your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. So we’re, we’re now innovating at such a pace and, and no one is asking, is this actually helping us as a culture and as a world, that, how, how does it really help us? Yeah, no, I think you’re, I think that your book really tied into that. Hmm.

Orlando Wood:
Well, it’s, at times when it strikes me that you get this sort of left brain dominance at times when we have invented an important new tool, you know, the printing press you get the reformation sometime later the concrete and the Romans and the late Roman period. And Diocletian the ability to build large expenses of, of building very quickly and easily. You know, you’ve got your manufacturing and the enlightenment the ability to replicate things. And we’ve had you know, the digital revolution and, you know, all of our left brains have been sort of preoccupied and focused on, on how we apply this tool and how we make it, how we use it to manipulate the world, to make things quicker and easier to produce. A lot of the craft skills in the industry have been stripped away because of it craft in all walks of life actually has been sort of felt to be, to be less important because now have, you know, machines that can do things more quickly and more easily.
But you know, some of the joy goes out of things and new processes are put in place, which actually reduce the ability of you know, the possibility of spontaneity of accidents happening, you know, which are often at the heart of creativity. You know, I’ve talked about in the book, you know, some, some very famous, very memorable ads, certainly in the UK, I’m sure the same is true in the U S you know, have only happened because of a happy accident on the set, you know, a dog wandering in, or you know, an actor suggesting that you do it a different way and making it all the better as a result. You know, we’ve now got sort of rigidly stuck to processes, which, which don’t allow for that sort of thing, a kind of linear cause and effect in a sort of process that’s locked down early, you know, to avoid anything, getting in interfering through, through the remainder, a kind of manufacturing mindset, actually that’s all to do with sort of pipelines and replication and speed and efficiency, and, and that isn’t to do with nothing to do really with how you, how you build a brand over the long term.
And, you know, we’ve, we’ve incorporated sort of technology type terms in our, in our creative processes, you know, sort of sprints and all that sort of thing. When, when, you know, that’s not how that’s not how ideas really work, you know, we’re not designing to a formula where we’re in the business of creating a new or, you know, an, an idea that builds on something else or bringing ideas together, synthesizing ideas to, to, to create something new. And that’s, what’s at the heart of creativity really. So, so yes, I think you’re right. You’re right. I totally agree.

Jeff Greenfield:
I mean, it’s okay for a company to be, data-driven it, you would anticipate that people on the finance side and on the analytic side should be data-driven,

Orlando Wood:
But

Jeff Greenfield:
Once it’s out there, it’s okay to be data driven, but not to start from total numbers, you have to have, and you talk about this in terms of the whole creative process and the creative brief, you have to have time for the ideas to ruminate to really, really get that spark.

Orlando Wood:
Yup. Yup. You do. And, and, you know, synthesis is a word that we don’t tend to use very often. I don’t think we really think about it very much, but, but any, any creative endeavor kind of requires you to draw from different sources and to build something new, the thing is the more data we have, the more risk averse we become you know, the, the less able we are to, to move anything kind of forward. And to, to, to go with an instinct of something that we think is right, and that will connect with people, you know, and in a data driven world you know, there’s this, you know, th th th the sorts of work that we see today are kind of like, they all look the same as if they’ve been, I mean, largely not all of them, but it’s as if they’ve all been through the same kind of wind tunnel, if you see what I mean. So everything has been shaped by the same sets of data and the same sort of same world the same processes. And, and, you know, you kind of, it sort of forces out any kinks, anything distinctive, anything interesting. You know, like, like many cars look the same today, you know, it’s the same sort of processes that have, that have made advertising look, look similar. I don’t know what you think about that for this kind of,

Jeff Greenfield:
And that’s a, that’s a great example. Yeah, no, that’s a great example because when you talk about cars and the autos and you look at Tesla and how different in his, the new Tesla truck that’s yes. That looks so different that everyone in the world wants to have one of those. So it’s, it’s almost goes back to the, to the Apple concept of thinking differently. Yes. Because if you want to get attention from the right brain, you have to be different. Yeah.

Orlando Wood:
Yeah. You do. You have to be different distinctive have a you know, I suppose have, have some, some inherent quality that, that isn’t shared by other things, and people, you know, you need to be in this to be, need to be interesting in some way, you know, on some level and, and, and provoke a feeling, elicits a feeling and that’s that’s where we need to be. So, so yes, you’ll, you know, totally, totally agree. And that’s that’s the, that’s, that’s what I hope the book, the book will help people to to, to, to see and to, to do. And you know many of the, in fact, even the working environments that we live in and work in you know, up to this point have been you know, all about driving efficiencies, open plan offices you know, sort of the left brain is rather paranoid and likes to see what its workforce is up to.
You know, and you know, sort of smaller spaces for efficiency you know, kind of, kind of large open expanses, large lots of lights coming into buildings that there’s a, there’s a creative eye who did the front cover actually Adrian Holmes brilliant creative also did made one of the ads in the book that I talk about. And he said that three things have changed in the last you know, in the last 20 years or so in advertising for creatives. First of all, there’s much less time. So, you know, you’ve got hours or days as opposed to, you know, the few weeks that you might’ve had before to come up with an idea. So that, that synthesis, if you like, the second is the lunch has gone. So there was a time when you might meet your clients, you might meet up, you might have a drink, you know, you might you know, you’d have a moment of right brain connection.
And between us and ideas would come through conversation and just little snippets of things you know, that you pieced together to create something new and brilliant. And the third thing he said was the door, the door has disappeared on the creatives office and what the door enables you to do is to have a safe space, to be funny, playful, irreverent, silly and to play with ideas until you kind of get it right. And I think that’s so true, you know, we’re all in open plan offices wearing headphones, you know, looking at screens, isolated you know, we probably connecting with each other more now on the, on, on teams or whatever it is than than in the office. So, so, you know, these, these these spaces to, to, to be to have original or interesting thoughts I think, you know, we need to engineer some of those back into our physical environments, too. That’s great advice. Orlando would your book lemon, how the advertising brain turns our you can get it on Amazon. It’s also available in more [email protected] and ipa.co.uk. Orlando. Thank you so much for joining us here today. Absolute pleasure, Jeff. Thanks very much for having me on the show.