Inspiring Futures

Warren Berger is an author and journalist who has spent the last 25 years writing about the worlds of design, advertising and innovation. Back in the day he got a feature story about Weiden and Kennedy into the NYT Magazine and he wrote the book "Advertising Today" that was published by Phaidon,.
For the past 10 years, he's been focused on the world of questions and questioning- from which sprang the book "A More Beautiful Question"- which celebrated its tenth anniversary with a new updated edition.
Here are some quotes from my interview with Warren.
It was designer Bruce Mau who inspired him to think more deeply about questions.
“Bruce Mao had a thing about questioning where he said, one of the most important things a designer can do is be the person who's willing to ask stupid questions.”
"So I realized when you talk about how designers think, they often start with questions and that's kind of the, they're trying to figure out the right question to ask that will address a problem or a situation."
He also understood that it was questions that lay the foundations for the new disruptive startups.
"They're only ten years old or whatever and if you went back to the origin of them You could usually identify a question there was usually a question that Reed Hastings was trying to answer or that the three guys who started Airbnb."
Questions are everywhere"I was there with the arts, of course it's there with science, you know, scientists are always working on questions. So what I realized is it's, you know, it's everywhere. It's in basically any discipline that's trying to solve problems, is trying to do problem solving, is focused on questions because the question is how you articulate the problem."

In the updated edition of the book- he explores the idea of AI and questions
"Do we does it mean that this question become more important in the age of? AI, or does it mean that we really don't need to do any of this stuff anymore? Because AI is going to take care of all the thinking for us?"
"We have to get sharper with our questions to get more out of AI. But also, we have to use the questioning of a analytical questioning, critical thinking questioning, to question what comes back to us from AI."
https://amorebeautifulquestion.com/

The latest episode of Inspiring Futures features an interview with John Graham- Head of Strategy at Cartwright. John has had an amazing strategy career - starting off working on Dos Equis at Havas, going to BBH and getting to work on the Axe account and the famous "Susan Glenn" campaign, and then 7 years at 72 and Sunny where he rose through the strategy ranks and worked on numerous accounts including - Activision, Starbucks, and Sonos.
John is now at Cartwright in LA.
The agency was founded by Keith Cartwright and part of the WPP family with clients that include- The NBA, P&G, and CBS News.

Vasanth is a polymath- he's a creative director, but he's also an author, he has an engineering background is a graduate of computer engineering and started his career as a digital consultant.
Somehow he saw the light, transitioned to copywriting, and has held numerous jobs with JWT, Wunderman, Edelman, and Sapient-Razorfish. Vasanth also spent time in the halls of one of the most respected creative departments on the planet- BBDO NY. He worked on the likes of P&G (Gillette), J&J (Splenda, Lactaid), GE, Mars, and Emirates Airlines.
For the past four years, he's been running his shop, The Sunny Side, which aims to disrupt large agencies and make the combination of quality, speed, and price work.
It seems to be paying dividends as the agency has picked up business from Sephora, Castrol, Novartis, and P&G.
In our conversation, we talk about his background, career, his work at BBDO, the similarities and differences between Asian markets, and bringing speed and skill to some of the biggest clients in the world.

Wayne Chang is the General Manager of Saatchi Art. Wayne is an emerging artist himself but also has significant experience in the web and e-commerce space- starting with Newsweek and with stints at Photobucket and DogVacay.
Saatchi Art is the world's largest platform for emerging artists with 1.4 million artworks, from 94k artists, representing 110 countries.
In our conversation, we talk about what emerging art and art are exactly, how the site functions and works with both collectors and artists, the emerging NFT space, and Saatchi Art's efforts, and how Saatchi Art connects with its live event brand 'The Other Art Fair" to bring new collectors to the art market.

This episode features an interview with Gerard Crichlow, who heads up Global Strategy on the Unilever brands- Axe/Lynx at IPG.
Gerard collaborates with several IPG entities worldwide to ensure the Axe/Lynx brands connect to their consumers and cultures.
Some quotes from Gerard from the episode.
"And for me, if we're in the attention game, who does attention best, and that tends to be entertainment companies. And so I've always tried to look at how do we shift from interrupting people to providing entertaining content."
"There is no more monoculture, especially for younger people. So you have to be able to entertain in order to get people's attention."
"I kind of start from the premise that no one gives a shit about your brand. So I almost like take the brand hat off. Of course, we're doing it for brands. And so we. we then first look at what is the landscape, what are the signals, what are those conversations or topics. And then we then put our brand hat back on and then look at are any of these topics related to the brand's point of view.
"If you fan like a fan, you almost take your brand hat off and you speak like the fan, you're interested in what they're talking about, you like the same songs, the same tracks, you know the backstories, all of those things."
"It's like a muscle. You post a lot. Some things will fly. Some things won't. But the things that do fly do really, really well. And from what we see is we keep a small team, meet every single day, post, get that muscle going. And then when things fly, and we think the engagement and the conversation is scaling. we begin to provide value. "
"It has so many more implications, not just social. It actually is trickling itself from the ground in the social conversations into bigger pieces of work, like the above the line work. So what are the sort of types of conversations that people are talking about What influencers or musicians do they relate to? Those are partnerships we then go after. What do they want because Axe as a fragrance brand? What do they want from fragrances? How do they react to each other?"