Strands of Genius: Martin Bihl + Security Predictions 2024
featuring: an interview with our guest editor and a research report
Welcome to the Bonus edition of Strands of Genius! On Fridays, we’ll be publishing interviews from our guest editors, and sharing a research report. Thanks for being along for the ride. Oh and by the way, you look great today :)
:: STEAL THIS THINKING | RESEARCH REPORT ::
Will generative AI take security jobs? The short answer is yes, some of them. But that’s not a bad thing. Splunk’s recent CISO Report revealed that 86% of CISOs believe generative AI will alleviate skills gaps and talent shortages. There simply aren’t enough skilled cybersecurity professionals to meet the mounting and increasingly rigorous demand. Security analysts are stretched thin performing routine and tedious tasks, often at the expense of ones that could.
:: DIVE IN | THE INTERVIEW ::
MARTIN BIHL, CREATIVE DIRECTOR: 7419 & EDITOR: THE AGENCY REVIEW
>> Martin Bihl guest curated Strands on July 11th. Read it here.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what keeps you busy. How did you end up doing what you’re doing today?
I’m a copywriter-creative director-strategizer guy and lately I’ve been keeping myself busy with some thinking about how agencies work (and don’t work) and what that could mean for the industry. I know, democracy is collapsing around us and I’m thinking about advertising. What a maroon.
But I grew up in this business and my father and grandfather were in it, so I’m sort of genetically predestined to think about it. Plus I’ve taught it to both undergrads and grad students, and written about it around the world, so yeah, it’s always on my mind. Though as I said, lately it’s been on a more active burner than usual.
So, start with the idea that the business is broken in some pretty basic and obvious ways – which I know, is not news. But if I start from there, there are a couple of things that have occurred to me about how to pivot it – if not just plain re-think it - in the context of both the way people use media now and the value advertising has traditionally provided (yes, I said “value” in the context of “advertising”; go ahead and laugh) that are leading me to some, well, unusual models.
How unusual? Well, unusual enough that when I’ve shared them with a few folks they’ve said “that doesn’t look like an advertising agency”. Which to me is exactly the point. If it looked like anything that already existed, it would probably be just exactly as broken, right?
Connected to these thoughts are some experiments I’ve been trying – one’s a little more client-focused, one’s a little more creative focused (sorry account folks). They sort of test out some of these ideas a little bit. If you’re interested in playing, well, ping me and we can discuss.
Oh and also, I’ve been keeping busy freelancing because earlier this year I lost my job. I know, hard to believe right? Wait until you read the rest of the interview, it will become significantly more understandable. That said, of course, ping me if you need anything.
What excites you most about what you do?
As a writer I would like to say it’s writing something great, but frankly i find the process exhausting and stressful and not enjoyable in the least. As someone in advertising I should probably say something like “when we produce a campaign that really drives results for our clients”. But if I’m being honest with myself, it’s not really that either. It’s this:
Sometimes you’re in a room brainstorming with folks, and someone will say something, will come up with the idea or say the line or describe the concept or whatever, and you’ll feel this … I can only describe it as an energy ... in the room. Like in an old video game where you finally did the sequence correctly and the door opened. Except it’s not a door, it’s an energy. I know, it sounds crazy. The only thing I can compare it to is when I was a kid, my uncles would take me sailing on the Chesapeake and when the boat really caught the wind, it made this deep “thrum” sound (it had something do with the way the hull was cutting through the water or something. I don’t know. I’m not a sailor. When it first happened I thought the boat was coming apart and we were all going to die. That was fun). Anyway, when that happens, when someone comes up with the answer and you can all feel it because of that energy – man, that’s the best. It’s the thing that gets me out of bed every morning to keep doing this – the pursuit of that high. If you’ve experienced it, you know what I mean. If you never have, well, you should consider another line of work because all the other compensations in this business are tawdry and fleeting in comparison.
What beliefs define your approach to work? How would you define your leadership style?
I don’t know that I have an approach to work, per se (other than to just do it, all the time, and then do it some more). But I do have an approach to leadership. Or rather, two.
The first is, if you want your people to be honest and reliable and, well, great, then you have to be those things too. If you want your people to go to the wall for you, they have to see that they can count on you to go to the wall for them. Sometimes this means fighting with senior management, sometimes it means rolling up your sleeves and writing copy or doing layouts, sometimes it means showing a client some work that will terrify them but that we all love. Sometimes it means calling someone out when they’re half-assing it. And sometimes it means just not being an entitled jerk.
You also have to give people enough room to fuck up. Now, that’s not really news because lots of people have talked about the value of failure and the idea that if you don’t give people room to fuck up they’re never going to really push the boundaries of what’s possible. So here’s the second part, and it’s the part that most people don’t do: you have to give them enough room to fuck up so they can feel comfortable coming to you and saying that they fucked up and so you can both figure out how to unfuck things.
That second part is insanely hard, not only because we work in a world that demands “efficiency” (read: an answer faster and faster, whether it’s right or not), but because you’re likely also dealing with office politics which will absolutely, 100% not understand why this is important. You’ll have senior management crawling down your neck because you’re perceived as weak and you’ll have other departments gossiping that you don’t have control of your people. Well, fuck them.
Let me man-splain why this approach is important even though you probably already get it.
There’s the thing I alluded to above about if people don’t feel free to fuck up, they’ll always work within the known, and great innovations rarely come from within the known.
But it’s also important because you should hire people who are really great at shit you’re not any good at and if you manage them this way you’re not hamstringing them with your limited understanding of their genius. Look, I’m not a designer, but I’ve worked with some brilliant ones who said “I’m gonna try this and this and this” and my reaction was (simple copywriter that I am) “well that’s not gonna work” but I let them do it and guess what? I WAS WRONG. They came back with something amazing that I never would have thought of. Which is exactly why I hired them in the first place.
And here’s the second part of why it’s so important – it works both ways. You create a culture of respect for talent. So that eventually you’ll say “I think we should try something like this…” and their first reaction will be “well that’s not gonna work but okay” but they won’t say it, because they know you trusted their genius so they’re going to trust yours. And guess what – you may be right and they’ll be excited by this new thing you did that they couldn’t have imagined.
All of this is essentially an effort to minimize the ego in this highly personal business, and to instead focus on the genius and the talent.
Now, all this said, I am entirely aware that this leadership style doesn’t work for everyone. A lot of people want to be told what to do, collect their pay, and see you in the morning. And a lot of other people will use the room and space you’re giving them to fail to just fuck off. So what do you do? You get rid of those people. Let them find the leader who leads the way they want to be lead and more power to them. No harm, no foul and best wishes that they produce great stuff elsewhere. Honest.
But me, I believe that ultimately leadership is about relationship. And relationships are built on trust and when you don’t have that, then in the final analysis, you’re fucked. Whoever you’re talking to.
What has been the most rewarding project you’ve worked on and why?
If I were a good person, I would say that the work I’ve done for a small hospital network in New Jersey was the most rewarding, because it literally saved lives and saved jobs. But fuck that shit. I’m not a good person. So I’ll tell you this story instead.
We were invited to pitch a client in the glamorous world of dental insurance, a category in which we had no real experience. So we pitched our ability to solve problems and that got us to the next round, where they asked us for a bunch of stuff we didn’t have, so we politely bowed out. But they said, well, don’t bow out, so we didn’t, and eventually, somehow, we won the business. And miracle of miracles, our new client actually wanted us to produce the campaign strategy we’d very lightly sketched out for the pitch (which, as you know, rarely happens). And then, about two weeks before we were going to show them three new and fully fleshed out executions of the campaign across all the media the media department had built their plan around – COVID hit. And then the client called and said “we don’t think we can go with this campaign during COVID. We need a whole new strategy and campaign and media plan. But we still need to go live with everything on the same timeline as before”. So me and the copywriter and the art director had to start over. With these additional obstacles.
First, we were brainstorming in April and the campaign had to go live in September – who knew what the state of America would be like in September. When we were brainstorming, all the ads were drones flying over empty cities – remember those? Is that what would be relevant in four months? And where? On the east coast (where we were working at the time), we were up to our necks in COVID, but in the Midwest it was all still mostly theoretical and abstract. Would that have changed by September? (Spoiler alert: yes)
Second we had to figure all this stuff out remotely because the three of us were spread across three states. All while account service periodically messaged us “Have anything yet?” No. “Well when do you think you will?” I don’t know because we have no strategy, no new direction and too many god damned variables. “Well what should I tell the client?” [response redacted]
So we did. We sat on Teams for long silences and stupid jokes and random interruptions (you know, like we would in the office), over and over again for hours and hours until we figured it out. And it was something new and interesting and it scared the bejezus out of senior management and we had to fight tooth and nail to push it through.
Now, right there, that was very rewarding. Because this was a big ask for a small team and I was – and still am – really proud of what we managed to do under those ridiculous circumstances (plus it won some awards and drove numbers for the client which also was nice).
But that’s not the rewarding part. The rewarding part came later, when we presented to the clients. Because they really thought they were screwed when they told us to scrap the original campaign and strategy. They thought there was no way we would come back with something good and that could be produced on time. No. Way.
And when we presented this new strategy and campaign to them and they loved it, they discovered they suddenly weren’t screwed. I mean, you could literally hear the relief in their voices (because, yeah, it was still COVID so we had to present over Teams)
That was really rewarding.
Because usually you’re just doing little incremental things. Or you’re working with people who don’t think advertising really does much so they don’t really care. So a lot of what agencies do gets dumbed down and castrated. You present stuff and the client says “that’s cute, now run along while I do some real business stuff.” This wasn’t that. And that’s what made it rewarding.
Oh and it was rewarding for another reason. Because remember, this was our first real creative interaction with that client – so it really set the tone for the entire relationship. A tone in which we were really partners, in which they saw us not just making funny little ads that didn’t mean anything, but doing things they could not do to make their business more successful.
That also didn’t suck.
We are big believers in diversity -- Not only because we believe in equality, but because we also think it’s better for business. How do you frame these kinds of conversations, both internally and with clients? Is there an emphasis on action, or are the conversations really more about communication?
When questions of diversity come up, I launch into a longwinded explanation of networks and 1960s Boston. It goes something like this:
In the 60s this researcher at MIT was exploring networks and specifically the value of “strong bonds” (where people had lots of shared connections, for example) and “weak bonds” (where they had very few). And for reasons I still don’t understand, he decided to talk to factory workers in the Greater Boston area. All these factories were filled with extended families – fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, sons, on and on. In network parlance, these would be nodes with strong bonds, okay? But this is Boston in the 60s and a lot of the factories were closing, so he asked these workers about how they found new jobs when their factory closed – expecting the answer to be something like “the strong bonds I have with my family found me a job”.
But no, they’d say things like “I got this job because of my neighbor’s girlfriend’s cousin. He was working here and he told her, who told my neighbor, who told me. And then I got in here and I told my brothers and that’s how we wound up here.”
What the researcher figured out from this was that all the strong bonds, the brothers and fathers and uncles, they only really knew each other and they were all at the same factory, so they weren’t going to know about opportunities at other factories. But a weak bond – like the neighbor’s girlfriend’s cousin - that person was by definition connected to a whole other universe of options. And that’s the strength, as it were, of weak bonds.
Or, said another way, diversity.
Look, with “strong bonds” – people with whom you share not just actual bloodlines, but culture, ethnicity, geography, gender, class, language, politics, whatever – you’re necessarily working in a bit of an echo chamber. “I love that idea, George! In fact, I was just about to say the same thing!” But with people with whom you have “weak bonds” you’re not. You’re giving yourself the opportunity to experience new ideas. Or at least, the opportunity to react to something different.
Now, all that takes lots of confidence which is probably exactly why it’s so hard. You have to have confidence in your own abilities when dealing with people who aren’t just like you. You have to be confident that you can look at something you’ve never thought of before and work with it. And you have to be confident enough to talk to people you don’t know and not melt down.
Another word for all that is friction. But Hideo Yoshida, the guy who made Dentsu into a world force was right when he said “Be not afraid of friction – for nothing moves without it.”
The problem is, most agencies – hell, most people – don’t want to move at all. Oh well. Better for the rest of us.
Switching gears a bit, how do you find time to balance personal interests with your career? Do you believe work/life balance is possible? Anything you’ve implemented that you recommend that others try?
Um, I sort of don’t believe in a work/life balance. I know that’s not a popular opinion, and I also understand that it’s not healthy. But for me, being curious about why things are the way they are, and then trying to make sense of them, is kind of how I’m wired whether I’m working or not. Fortunately, I’ve been able to make a living thinking that way (except, well, see above), but unfortunately, it means it’s difficult to draw a hard line between work-time and play-time.
For example, when I’m sitting in a bar arguing with friends about Edward Hopper, I’m not working, right? What about if there are things about Hopper’s paintings that end up informing some work I do later? Now, what if my friends make their livings the same way I do? Working or not working? Or take it the other way – what If I’m learning about some nutrition advancement for a food client I’m working on, and that gets me to change my diet – is that work or should I just pretend I didn’t learn that stuff and keep eating circus peanuts for breakfast? (Fun fact: both of those examples were drawn from life, so, yeah, I dunno).
For me, there isn’t really a wall between the thinking my brain does for work and the thinking it does for life. That said, it’s not like I read Proust just so I can use it for work (Hold on. Let me think about that for a second. I did write a new branding pitch to a senior residency facility that specialized in memory care and suggested the name “The Madeleine” once. So maybe I’m full of shit. I dunno.)
Perhaps it’s the nature of this business. We work with the culture, and the culture informs our work. The same culture that our friends and family – even those not in the business (you know, customers) – swim around in. Perhaps that mixture is what makes it harder for us to separate work from play than it is for other people. Or maybe that’s just how I justify being an asshole.
I dunno. My old man was in this business and he used to say “the brain is a muscle you can’t stop using” and I think he may have been right about that. Or at least, right about it for some of us. Take that for what it’s worth.
What’s your media diet? Where do you find inspiration?
Everything I know comes from my dog. Which is why I’m the go-to person for information about squirrels, sticks and birds.
Well, that’s not exactly true.
Look I know you’re expecting something like “I ready the Economist” or “I never miss an issue of esoteric AI newsletter” – you know, something specific and tangible that you can subscribe to or learn something from. But I just don’t have that in me today.
I was raised in the 19th century, so I read books. Hardcovers, paperbacks, even the occasional e-book (though I demur the latter, and all manner of pre-publication proofs by the way, where the-agency-review.com is concerned – a site I run that reviews books relevant to advertising). I like their mass, I like their heft, I like the sound they make when I fling them across the room after reading a particularly ridiculous passage, I like the way they just stare back at me after I read something brilliant as if to say “yeah, smart guy, that’s where the bar is.”
I like looking at the ones I’ve finished on my bookshelves where strange bedfellows sit cheek by jowl with authors that would make your head spin, I even like the fact that I don’t have bookshelves in this new house (yet!) and that 95% of my books are in bins in my basement. I like carrying them back from the library, I like flipping through them to see how they’re laid out, I like being able to look at what other people are reading on the subway (and of, course, judging them as I know they are judging me). I even like people telling me “you should really get an e-reader, it’s so much more convenient”, so I can practice being falsely agreeable and saying things like “oh that’s a good idea, I’ll look into that. Thanks!”
Books. My diet is books and they’ve been inspiring me since before I could actually read.
What’s the best piece of advice/knowledge you’ve stolen, and who/where’d you steal it from?
When I was a kid there was this great baseball manager named Whitey Herzog. Whitey took the Cardinals to the World Series three times (winning in 1982) and led the Royals to the ALCS three years in a row (76-78). I never got a chance to meet him (he passed away in 2024) so what I stole from him I learned by watching him manage. And it’s this – sometimes you just don’t got it.
I mean, sometimes you’d see him in the dugout managing a game and you could just tell from the look on his face he was thinking “oh well, try again tomorrow.” Now to be clear, I don’t mean Whitey was a quitter. Far from it. What I mean is, that he had been through enough baseball to understand that sometimes, in some situations, it’s just not your day. Doesn’t matter how much you yell and scream at your players, how much data you analyze, how many elaborate strategies you whip up in your panic – sometimes it’s just not your day. That’s how life is. So play out the string, do your best, learn what you can while you’re failing, and come back tomorrow and try again.
I cannot over emphasize how incredibly freeing this insight is. Because look, I’m a creative. I don’t know where my ideas come from. There’s no logic to it – not forwards and not backwards (Kierkegaard be damned). If there was, AI could come up with them faster and more cheaply. But I know the last thing I need is someone – especially me – climbing up my asshole screaming at me about why I’m not producing at that moment, telling me I’m not trying. That’s not going to help.
Some days you got it. Some days you don’t. Don’t sweat it. Move on.
A lot of people don’t understand this. And a lot of people make themselves and everyone around them miserable because they don’t understand this.
And I think that the reason a lot of people don’t understand this is because they lack confidence in their own ability or in those they’re managing. Whitey was confident in the fundamental ability of his players – he’d worked with them day in and day out and he knew they were quality.
(If you don’t think you’re working with quality people, if you don’t have confidence in their basic talent, well that’s a different thing. Get rid of them and hire ones that you do.)
That’s what I stole from Whitey and I try to instill it in every one I work with. Today you didn’t have it. Tomorrow you will. “Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further” as the fella says. So go get ready for tomorrow.
You work in advertising, where the failure rate is high – most of your ideas don’t get made, and the ones that do are often watered down and then who knows if they succeed or not. Plus everyone hates you – or at least, what you do. But also probably you. So how do you cope with failure?
Okay, so first, there are a lot of different kinds of failure, so you have to learn how to calibrate your management according to what you’re dealing with. Like, yes, a lot of the work we do gets rejected – is that failure? Sort of, I guess. But I remember what the sculptor Shaun Cassidy told me, that for an artist, nothing is wasted. You may not use an idea here, but invariably what you learned from it will inform future work. And to be clear, I don’t mean just recycling an old idea, I mean that ability to go “Oh, NOW I know how to make this work” because the new opportunity is a better fit AND because you’re better at understanding the original idea. So as a creative you have to be able to say “yes, the CD killed these ideas for this project today. But I’m gonna leave them in my head because I may need something about them next week/month/year.”
Then there’s the failure of your idea not quite making it to fruition. I mean, it does, but it’s been so altered and “improved” by so many people along the way that, um, yeah, it’s in there somewhere, but you really don’t feel like it’s what you originally imagined. That sure feels like failure, right? The only way I’ve been able to work around that is to make sure that the work I do in this business is not the only creative work I do, and that somewhere in my life there’s creative work that I have significantly more control over. So that my original ideas can see the light of day as I intended them. Or better yet, so that as I work on them and they modify, they do so in the way I want them to, for my reasons, not because the budget was cut halfway through production, or because my CCO’s partner likes the color blue, or because the production company thought “monkeys” was funnier than “mangoes” and it’s too late to go back now. (This also has the benefit of helping you be more objective about the work others are fucking with – because your entire self-worth is not wound up in the kerning of a mobile banner ad. As it were).
And lastly (though this is failure – I could go on for weeks about failure), there’s the sort of “uber” failure, the “nothing is working, I can’t figure this out, I’m a hopeless fraud” collapse that we all face at least once a week if not more often. A sort of existential failure. What do you do then?
You remember this thing that a scientist once pointed out to me: failure is the norm. Most of the species that have existed since the world began - are extinct. Most of the businesses have gone belly up. Most nations? Kaput. Most art – awful. That which survives, that which is successful, is the freak. Literally.
In other words, aiming for success – especially in a creative endeavor – is a fool’s game, because the odds are so stacked against you. So every day that you don’t fail, every thing you do that doesn’t shit the bed, well that’s a fucking miracle, innit? And sort of “fuck you” to the universe, right?
I think we tend to forget that, and I think it’s the nature of the people around us to encourage us to forget that because they think that’s how you make a business successful and keep creatives in line.
But they’re wrong so fuck them.
[Note: it occurs to me that there’s a lot in this interview about failure. I could chalk that up to the fact that I’m currently out of work, but anyone who knows me knows that’s not why.]
You can keep in touch with Martin on LinkedIn.
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie | your friends over at geniussteals.co
(still want more? @faris is still “tweeting” while @rosieyakob prefers instagram stories)