Secrets to Mastering Creative Strategy - The Knowledge Stacking Method

Phillip Jackson: So the title of this talk, uh, is called knowledge stacking. Uh, the secret to becoming a great creative strategist. I think that would suggest that I have a secret and that I'm great at what I do. Um, but I would say honestly, it's a work in progress and I don't know what I'm doing yet, but I hope to be really good when I grow up. Um, so I've retitled this. Uh, we're not going to use this title.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, and instead I'm going to call it five polymathic principles. This is so Future Commerce right now. I'm going to use big words.

Phillip Jackson: Five polymathic principles to help creative strategists just like you to think bigger. Cool?

So let's jump into it. Two seconds real quick. I'm going to tell you about Future Commerce.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, Future Commerce is a culture magazine for the e-commerce industry. So if people like you, uh, need to understand what's around the next corner. And we do that, uh, every day through, uh, a different, uh, through digital media and through physical, uh, immersive events.

Phillip Jackson: Um, but we all do it with this big lens that we believe that commerce is an unexamined export of culture. So let me give you, I think everybody would examp examine something like food or fashion and say that those are cultural signifiers. They're things that certain cultures create, uh, and they wherever humans happen to be, um, there's things like fashion and cuisine, uh, architecture, things that come out of the creativity of a very specific region or culture of people. But commerce is another one of them. Wherever people happen to be, commerce is as well.

Phillip Jackson: Um, and so we examine that every day and we do that in through, uh, various number of, uh, properties.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, so these days our brands at Future Commerce are Visions, which is a summit series and, uh, we have one coming to LA. If you're in the LA area, uh, Visions is a summit that helps you understand what changes are coming in the world and give you a higher mode of thinking. Uh, and that's October 10th, by the way. Uh, if you want to come check it out, futurecommerce.com/visions. Uh, we have archetypes and muses, which we'll examine a little bit here today as well as some of our content properties. And then always on media, uh, through Future Commerce learning, uh, our newsletters, uh, in insiders and the senses and podcasts as well.

Phillip Jackson: Um, we also have a burgeoning and growing print, uh, medium where we are exploring, uh, the world of e-commerce and, uh, the ecosystem that we're creating through, uh, printed material.

Phillip Jackson: Um, but I don't want to just tell you about it. I want to show you. So I'm going to quickly show you a video of how Future Commerce brings all of these areas of, uh, exploration together, uh, in one roof once a year during Art Basel at Miami Beach.

Phillip Jackson: And we're back. Uh, every year at, uh, Art Basel, we put an event together that, uh, combines all of what we do under one roof. And I'm going to tell you how we do that. Um, and it's with these five principles, okay?

Phillip Jackson: Um, and I think it really begins by understanding first, why would you ever want to be something called a polymath?

Phillip Jackson: That sounds like a thing in Boston that they wrote about on The Cut the other day where a bunch of people maintain a list of, uh, lovers. No, no, it's not, it's not a polycule, it's a polymath.

Phillip Jackson: And, uh, what is a polymath? Well, it goes by many names. It's, it's being polymathic is really being, uh, curious and omnivorous about the things that create inspiration in the world.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, polymathic individuals in the past have been people who have created new feats of engineering, discovered new scientific principles, created prolific works of art.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, polymathic people are actually all around us all the time. They've, they were hard to find, uh, in the pre-enlightenment era, but today we have a window into the world of polymathic individuals everywhere through algorithmic media. Um, what is a polymath? It's really just someone's ability to take all of the knowledge and all of their inspiration and their incredible taste and to use it to create change in the world.

Phillip Jackson: Um, now this is not just the field of, you know, old, uh, oil paintings of dead white guys. Uh, polymaths are found in every age of society and people across all of history. Uh, people like Srinivasa Ramanujan who, uh, theorized black holes, uh, during his time at Oxford, uh, purely through, uh, imaginary number exploration and mathematics. But it is also the Isaac Newtons of the world, Benjamin Franklins, people who, uh, make contributions across various, uh, efforts and across various functions in the world, um, from artistic to engineering pursuits. Um, so they're imagining a world that doesn't exist yet. And they're curious by nature.

So, okay, that sounds like a lot of creative strategy.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, people that are creative strategy have to, in creative strategy have to understand what's happening in the world and then use a lot of things like visual media, art, uh, partnerships, technology and tools, and then understand a world that doesn't exist yet and bring it into being.

So how do we do that?

Phillip Jackson: Well, I'm going to give you five keys. The first of which is we have to do it on purpose. And I spent, uh, I don't know, I've been in the e-commerce industry since 1998. I'm an old guy. And I have been playing from behind for most of my career. I was playing catch up, uh, while most of you were still in, in elementary school. Um, we didn't have tools that helped us manage, uh, you know, all of the, uh, various pursuits that we have today, things like calendar management tools. And I, we even when we did have the tools, I wasn't so great at using them.

Phillip Jackson: So I understand more than most how you need to create margin in your life. In the same way that we create margin in our businesses, right? We're, we're making strategic investments that return exponentially on the investment that we've put forward. We need to do that with our time as well and our focus. I think in a creative capacity, if you are not planning to be creative on purpose, it's not going to happen. Now, we all know that, right? It's really trite to say, but if we don't start here, where do we start? Creative growth really depends on you having the capacity for creative growth.

Phillip Jackson: Um, I was really inspired, uh, by a, uh, art project, uh, that became the subject of the third chapter of Jenny Odell's book from 2017 called How to Do Nothing. Um, How to Do Nothing is an exploration in the capitalist tendencies and natures of the attention economy. But she had this really incredible piece, uh, a case study that came out of a Frieze, uh, art project from a performance artist when, uh, she linked up with Deloitte. And Deloitte allowed her to come and perform in their office dressed as an employee for a week, uh, back in, I, I believe 2008. And, uh, what this performance artist did was she would come in dressed for work and she would not work. She would sit at a desk for a full day for eight hours and stare out the window or stare at the back of the desk for eight hours. And when approached, people would say, what are you doing? And she would say, I'm thinking.

Pregnant pause. Uh, of course, it didn't take long before a lot of complaints started to roll into HR. Uh, this person's not working, or she's riding the elevator a lot up and down to various floors. She's not actually working. And my, my gut instinct here was, I think it's kind of gross to put people on blast in their business for holding the culture of the business accountable to each other. But my second instinct was, why is it socially unacceptable in our organizations to create space for thinking?

It's a question, right? I don't know that I have an answer, but we, we don't protect enough time for us to think.

Phillip Jackson: I'm going to make an educated guess that among the thousands of people that are watching right now, that you've never been so bad at managing your calendar that you got sent to calendar management school. But I have. In 2017, I was, uh, struggling in maintaining an executive role at an agency. We'd grown to about 120 people, um, up from 20 when I first started. I'd been at the agency for almost a decade. Um, and I was in this new role and I was just failing to keep up. Just flat out failing to keep up. So they sent me to calendar management school and they made me read this book called The Five Choices to Extraordinary Productivity. And the first two days of this, I rolled my eyes, um, and I, you know, used my phone and played, uh, you know, I don't know, I think what were we playing back then? Uh, Angry Birds, probably, um, under the desk. But something really stuck out to me, uh, in this presentation. And it was that thinking freely requires margin.

Phillip Jackson: And they did this exercise where they had us write down all of our job titles in our life, not just the one in your career, which mine was chief commerce officer. That is a title, but I'm also dad, right? And I'm also a husband. Uh, I'm also a person who thinks of themselves as an intensely creative being. I'm a musician. I spent six years as a, a musician. I was touring with a band. It's how I met my wife. Uh, I spent 50 weeks a year for six years on the road. Um, I lived on the road as a musician. And as I started to write down all of these job titles for myself, we then put it on a radar graph like you see here. And this is not mine, but it's a good example of one. And I started to realize where are my time investments going? And the reason I feel like I'm not the person I want to be is because I'm over prioritized in some areas and there is no prioritization at all in others. And so being really intentional about trying to become the person I want to be became a real focus of my life.

Phillip Jackson: So I couldn't impress it on you enough to, if you want to be creative, if you want to deliver creative strategy, you can't just be repeating things that you think look cool that are in your feed. You can't just be taking thousands of, uh, data dump that's some lead gen list that's put out by some agency out there in trade for your email address. That is not creativity. It is a function of your job. It's important, but that's not where creativity comes from. We have to make time and we have to be intentional about being creative. So, protect it furiously and those, uh, small wins add up.

Phillip Jackson: Number two, I believe in challenging yourself.

Phillip Jackson: Um, I like to run. Uh, it's a big part of my identity. I love getting out on a trail and getting lost and, um, almost getting eaten by alligators here in Florida. But if you're not challenging yourself, you don't have to challenge yourself like that, but you need to challenge yourself in some way. I think a really tactical way to challenge yourself is do something you're bad at and do it on purpose.

Phillip Jackson: Um, something that we do every so often at Future Commerce as a team exercise is we'll have like a little art project. We sent watercolors around to a bunch of our team members a few, uh, months ago and we just watercolored for an hour as a team get together. Now we're a remote team. Um, and that was a fun exercise. I'm really bad at watercolors. You know what else I'm bad at? I was a guitarist and a keyboard player. I'm really bad at making electronic music. And being bad at making electronic music on purpose is a wonderful way for me to unplug and know that I'm going to fail. It also gives me, and maybe I need to give permission to you, but it gives me permission to spend silly amounts of money on new gear. Um, staying on top of what's happening in industrial design, like with Teenage Engineering, which is I think a really creative company, um, allows me to remember that making sounds that go bleep and bloop is not my strong suit. But I love doing it. And creating time and blocking time out specifically for like a weekend a month for me to just do that is key to my identity. I'm bad at it. You're never going to hear it. It's not content. But I like to take pictures of me doing it.

Phillip Jackson: Um, if I have a Roman Empire that I think about every day, it's a podcast I heard from Malcolm Gladwell sitting down with Rick Rubin. Now, this is before Rick Rubin became a creative guru. Malcolm Gladwell, uh, and he had a podcast called Broken Record. And a number of years ago, I believe this is like 2018, maybe 2019, in season one, they had a season one finale that was talking about the music of Tom Petty. Um, now that's a musician from my era. I listened to a lot of Tom Petty when I was growing up. And there was a record that came out that Rick Rubin produced that was entirely made of discarded B-sides from Tom Petty that came out posthumously after his death. And I will never forget this. I never read a slide, but I'm going to read this one to you. Malcolm Gladwell said something that absolutely smacked me up the side of the head. He said, this is the thing about musicians versus writers that I've never understood, that the amount of wastefulness in the music process compared to writing is incredible. If I write a sentence, it will be printed somewhere. I don't waste sentences. Every single thing I have ever written will see the light of day somewhere. And to me, this is the stark contrast between creativity and productivity. They are, they go hand in hand. You cannot be Malcolm Gladwell without being intensely creative. But there's a difference between artist, right, and a creative or a creator.

Phillip Jackson: But they're also intrinsically linked. If you want to be a prolific artist, you have to create a lot. And that means you're creating a lot of waste in the process. Um, just Googling a little bit, it doesn't take much Googling of, uh, if we use Google anymore, of Picasso to realize that there's a ton of Picassos that you'll recognize as a Picasso, but it's not one you've seen before. There's hundreds of them. Um, the same for Salvador Dali. I'm really fascinated with Auguste Rodin, who's a sculptor, and we'll talk a little bit more about him in a moment. Um, but every single artist produces waste. I used to have a boss who would come around in the first startup that I worked for and he would check my waste paper basket. By the way, this is why return to offices is so scary for people like me. Um, he would come around and he'd check your waste paper basket. And I'd say, what are you doing? He says, oh, productive people produce waste. Uh, I didn't work there for very long and I don't think you would have either. But it stuck with me.

Phillip Jackson: Um, if you're in strategy, I was in strategy at an agency for a very long time, so I love making a two by two, so forgive me. Um, I think that there's a spectrum here and I don't know that I've fully solved it, but I think this helps to sort of memorialize it for you. If productivity were a continuum from wastefulness to efficiency, and if creativity were a spectrum from repetition to exploration, I think that there is useful time investments in each one of these quadrants that every one of us could spend time in to be more creative in our jobs. So, you can be a little less creative and a little less productive and that is considered to be artistic. It's artistic waste. I'm not trying to be intensely creative and I'm also not trying to be intensely productive. I am just doing something for the sake of doing it. Uh, something I've found myself doing is sketching more in a sketchbook. I'm really bad at it. I produce a lot of waste, but I'll tell you what it does is it gets me off of the hell box that is Twitter. So, I need ways to unplug and this gives me a tactile way to do it. Where I think the zone of creative genius exists is people who have done enough of the other three quadrants to spend more time than not in the exploration efficiency quadrant. You become so good at exploring brand new modes of thinking and be and you're so efficient at it that your output becomes higher and higher and higher. And that is what I challenge our team to do at Future Commerce every day is to be omnivorous in the way that we find things that give us inspiration and become highly exploratory and highly efficient at putting that out into the world so that people like you are inspired every day to create on a higher level.

Phillip Jackson: So, just to wrap that piece up, I think that failure is key to growth. You can't grow if you're not failing. So why not fail at something that's low stakes? Um, practice failing. And I think that the practice failing can be artistic in nature.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, every single person here who has to use a creative tool or creative suite in some way will, will have an aspiration or a thought in the back of their head of a creative project that they want to make for themselves. You're not going to make it until you get in there and start working on it. Uh, if you're tracking with me here, uh, I just going back to our poll, I think most people, uh, agreed that no, you're not intentionally blocking time. Um, uh, but and many of you said that, uh, you would, but it's often interrupted. Here's, here's what's so encouraging about this crew right here right now is that only 14 of you out of the hundreds that voted, uh, said that it would be controversial in your organization. So I believe that this is something that we're going to start moving towards, uh, in this industry and in our businesses. Whoops, I accidentally reopened the poll, forgive me. Um, in our businesses to become more creative. Okay. Number three, let's talk about boredom. Um, I am a person who is by nature never bored. I have found something to occupy my time 100% of the time. Now, my wife of 21 years, um, we're, uh, very opposite. She is exactly the opposite to me. She's the person who can just sit and stare off into space and I'm like, what are you doing? She's like, I'm just, I don't know, it feels good to stare. And I'm like, well, I, I have to be productive every moment of the waking day.

Phillip Jackson: And that's why I think that this is such an important part of being intentional around trying to stoke creativity in your life, which will help you both in your career and personally, is that we are overstimulated in our world right now. And what I have found, I spent 10 years in engineering as a developer, and I found that when I put in 14 hour days trying to solve a problem for six of those hours, when I finally gave up and slept on it and woke up the next day rested, my problem was already solved before I sat back down at the keyboard. And I feel, I feel like getting away and opening our minds to more passive problem solving is what's necessary for us to be more creative.

Phillip Jackson: Now, don't take my word for it. This has actually been studied quite a bit. Um, I read an article about 10 years ago, in fact, it, I think it's 10 years ago to the month, um, about the creative benefits of boredom. Now, this is before Tik Tok. This is 10 years ago. And this HBR study, or HBR write up was based on a number of scientific studies that were repeated. I encourage you to go look at it for yourself. Uh, but in one particular experiment, I think might resonate with some people here, uh, priming yourself with boring tasks that are menial and repetitive, set up the focus group in the study to be more creative with a task that required them to have a, a, uh, a unique mode of thinking. In this case, it was finding, uh, and generating unique uses for a pair of plastic cups. So, uh, the control group just went right into listing out hundreds of reasons, uh, ways to use two plastic cups in a novel fashion. But the highly creative group spent some time in boredom before they did so.

Phillip Jackson: Um, I have found that when we have done creative retreats in prior roles and organizations and at Future Commerce, that a lot of the time that we spend is time just being out in nature and walking around or going out and going for a walk or a hike. And I am a huge fan of taking the creative, uh, pause and take taking the creative break. It reminded me when I was putting this together of a talk, um, and then a passage in his book, but it was all spurred from a web cartoon that he made almost 20 years ago. Randall Munroe had a web comic called XKCD and then wrote a book called What If. Um, I think he's a highly creative, very intellectual individual who has a unique way of making, of instigating thought in the world. Um, and he's an engineer, uh, and a software architect. And but he's really well known for art and web comics. Um, but he had this comic that I've sort of highlighted a few sections here is that getting away from the internet is a feeling that many, many people have. I would it's almost universal at this point is unplugging from the machine is a desire that a lot of people have. But when you're unplugged from the machine, the only thing you can think about is getting jacked back into the matrix. Um, or how you could turn that non-productive time into productive output. And this, I think is very culturally relevant right now for all of us is that it is our job to create content for people to have this feeling.

Phillip Jackson: So, do with that what you will. Uh, now if we were all to get bored all at the same time universally and unplug from the matrix, that might be lead to huge economic disaster. So I don't know how feasible this is for everybody all the time, but I do think it's more necessary than ever. I'm going to give you a couple practical ways to do it. Leave your phone at home when you go to the grocery store. Um, if you're just going out for a few minutes, put the phone aside. You'll be okay without it. If you aren't, I'm so sorry. Um, hopefully nothing bad happens. My grocery store is a mile away. I can walk there. Um, and so maybe going for a walk, unplugging, engage in some physical activity that you're capable of doing, allow your brain space to wander.

Phillip Jackson: Okay, that's all very, I think doable. Everybody might agree with some of it. I think this one might be a little tougher for us. And because it's highly subjective, and it's something that I'm going to call cultivating taste. Cultivating taste.

Phillip Jackson: Um, I highlighted a contrast between myself and my wife earlier. I'll keep using my family. My sister and I grew up in the very same household. Um, we ate the same five meals a week for 18 to 20 years of our lives. Uh, we somehow became very different people in that I am very, very, uh, like I, I like to explore food and I like to find new tastes and I like to try lots of different things. And my sister is the is exactly the same as she's always been. She loves ranch and chicken nuggets, and I love that for her. I'm not that way. But I wouldn't say necessarily that we should be drawing a contrast between good taste and bad taste. Um, but I think that that's something that often comes up in this conversation. So let's be careful with that. What I will say about cultivating taste is it requires you to try to understand not just that you like and you don't like something, but to be able to articulate why. And to put yourself in the shoes of somebody that might like something that you do not have taste for. I think that is what cultivating taste is all about. And we've had a lot of people at Future Commerce who have, uh, contributed over, especially to our summit series called Visions, uh, over the last couple years who have had similar things to say.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, one of which, uh, is a artist, activist, and cyber ethnographer and professor of media studies, um, at NYU, uh, a gentleman named Ruby Justice Thelot, uh, who wrote a piece that I just can't get away from recently. Um, wherein he said, if you hate something, find out more about it. Ask, what is this? Who made this? Who is this for? Um, I think being intensely curious is the beginning of this, but also pushing into your own aversion to something requires you to flex a muscle that many of us don't actually have a lot of practice in. So I, I would encourage you the next time that you say, I don't understand modern art, maybe dig in a little bit more and kind of figure out why. Is there something about it that seems simplistic? Maybe you could turn that into something that you're trying to recreate for yourself. Maybe you can find out why it was tough to create. Or maybe you can figure out the cultural context in which it was made and why it was countercultural at the time. It seems like simplistic squares. But maybe there's something deeper there. So lean into it.

Phillip Jackson: Um, developing taste is not just about learning to like everything. It's learning to be very specific about what you do like. Uh, Scott Belsky had an amazing tweet that I also can't get away from is that I think we're, and I, it resonates with me, that we're moving into a time where taste may overcome the ability to have a skill. Let me explain that. We just saw in the prior presentation a suite of tools with AI that makes everybody an expert photographer, expert flat lay, uh, expert at creating a flat lay, expert at staging a, a shoot, expert at writing a, a script, makes everybody a lighting expert. In a world where everybody's an expert in everything all the time because the tools allow us to be that, taste is the only differentiator. Give that a think for a minute. Um, offloading the hard parts of the skills that it takes to do all of those things is going to the machine and that cost of creative is trending towards zero. So the cost of taste requires your time and time is the only thing which we can't replace. Give that, just think about that.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, I don't know that you need to agree with it, but I'm becoming convinced of it. Okay. Uh, a friend of the pod, Daisy Alioto, uh, founded another media brand called Dirt, uh, highly recommend. It's a culture magazine as well. Um, we're B2B, so we're focused on people that are executives, decision makers in e-commerce marketplaces and retail. Um, she's focused on consumer. And she has this big idea that we're entering a time that she's calling the taste economy. So if we were in the creator economy before, uh, we are now moving into the taste economy where things like your own particular taste can now find audiences that share that taste or that you can now have algorithmic capability to shape their tastes for them. And that could never be monetized unless you were a very specific type of a person. If you were Steve Jobs, your taste could be monetized. But now we're moving into a time where Daisy says that we, our tastes are the only thing that can be monetized because of this, uh, this new capability we have with AI.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, Kyle Chayka also, uh, spoke at our Museum of Modern Art, uh, Visions Summit back in June. And he said that, uh, look around the world, go to an Airbnb, go to a coffee shop, they all look the same now. I've, I've issued this same challenge. Pretty much most websites look and function identically to each other these days. Um, there's something really powerful about that, but there's also something really boring about that. And whenever the world becomes very homogeneous, we have wild, uh, reactions that will undo that homogeneity for us. So, you want to know why we have a Cybertruck? It's because we have a lot of gray, you know, formless blobs that drive around on the streets now. Every car looks the same, you're going to get the Cybertruck. It's we didn't ask for it, but that's what we got now. The wild overcorrections in culture and design emerge when things become boring. And people with good taste would say Cybertruck is terrible, right? Maybe some people have a taste that's different than that.

Phillip Jackson: Um, cultivating that taste is important and more important now than ever before. Uh, how do you do that in algorithms? Okay, I don't know. Uh, set up a Finsta, question mark. Don't let the algorithm shape, uh, your worldview for you and shape your presuppositions for you. Uh, you need to be shaping it back. Here's another thing, here's this is a strategy for you. Um, you may not be able to define your tastes, but your algorithm might define it for you. We play this game in our dinner salons sometimes where I'll ask the person next to me to show me their algorithm. And they're very often hesitant to do so. Why? Because almost nobody on planet Earth would ever say, I really like watching motorcycle crash videos. Nobody. Is that your taste? I don't know. It's a question. It's a question. Um, I think also being, this idea of being omnivorous with the content you consume and the experiences that you have is so important. So just say yes. Um, say yes to everything. Uh, there's a synthesizer noise sound bath at the local, you know, uh, music, yeah, I'm going to that. That sounds awesome. Let's do that.

Phillip Jackson: Um, at least you'll know you don't like it. Okay, principle five, study the classics.

Phillip Jackson: This one, um, if you wanted to buy something, I'll give you something to buy. Um, study the classics. Okay, this one I'm really working hard on because I, I feel like we came through an era of technology, like everybody in this industry, where this was a trade that was learned. Um, and there were a lot of people that were technologists that were required in order to, uh, create the ecosystem that we have right now. Um, but I found that a lot of those folks lack a degree in the humanities or understanding of how humans work. And it's really the thing that I feel like has become very resonant with people that have found and fallen in love with the content we produce at Future Commerce is that it is rooted in technology, but also in humanity. Um, and so understanding how people work and understanding, uh, behaviors. I believe what you buy is who you become. That's just me. Uh, so why not, uh, make a purchase that will help you to understand things that have existed forever. Uh, by the way, none of these ideas that we have are new. If you think nostalgic marketing is new, um, we need to go back a few thousand years because I think Plato and Socrates talked about all of that already.

Phillip Jackson: Um, if you want a really pretty aesthetic way to read some classics, uh, hey, this is a great way. Uh, Penguin Classics has these really beautiful cloth-bound, uh, novels. It's already all pre-selected for you. You want to read something, read one of these. I think that's pretty cool.

Phillip Jackson: Um, I love physical objects. I love picking up a book and flipping open to a random page. There's something about randomness that you just don't get from searching on the internet. Stumble upon didn't do it for me. The algorithm, you know, just doesn't do it for me. There's something about picking up a book on a shelf and flipping through it that does it for me. If you want a cheaper option, uh, hey, the abridged versions, the Little Black Classics box set right now, 80 books for just a little over a buck a piece. Um, on sale 30% off on Amazon Prime. No affiliate link because I don't believe in those.

Phillip Jackson: Um, so why study the past? Okay, um, I think I just ticked everybody off here. Uh, can't, don't hate on affiliates, Phillip. Um, why study the past? Uh, because I believe that we humans, uh, change on a much slower time frame than fashion. And I believe that we, we are very much the same people now as we were a thousand years ago. How we think, how we act, how we respond to things requires context and understanding context requires understanding culture. So we should, we should study culture.

Phillip Jackson: Um, what I say, you want an even cheaper option? I'll give you one more cheaper option to get in touch with this, you know, esoteric idea of studying culture. I went to Goodwill. I found this box of art books from the 1950s, I believe, uh, for $5. It's amazing actually. We, we pull these out. I have very expensive art books in my house. Uh, my wife is an artist. So I pull these out.

Phillip Jackson: Um, I flip it open. What does Rodin have to say, uh, from 1847? Uh, well, he says something that I feel like everybody who works in algorithmic media could say today, which is when you're preoccupied with pleasing the million-headed monster that is called the public, one loses one's personality and independence. I know very well that I must fight because we live in an age of contradiction. Um, the thing that Rodin is feeling here is that as a sculptor, the way you made your living was to pitch municipalities, uh, cities, counties, states, governments to build monuments. And he kept making ones that really scared people. He wanted to be an artist. But he had to find a commercial avenue to celebrate his art. I feel like a lot of people could identify with that. And that's, by the way, that's hundreds of years ago.

Phillip Jackson: Um, and we're finding truth in that today. Um, so I wouldn't have found that if I didn't have a book to pick up and flip through. I think it's really important. Um, so become curious. I think that's really important. Um, don't think you know everything. Keep an open mind. Uh, we need to stop leaning on technology for understanding people. Uh, I think our future success will be not just understanding the tech, but understanding the people behind it.

Phillip Jackson: Everybody still with me? All right, I'm going to show you how we put this to practice with Future Commerce. I'm running just a hair long. So, let's get into it real quick. Um, I will show you things that we've built. So I opened with the Archetypes video of a, uh, this experiential event we built, uh, back in, uh, for our journal launch in 2023. Um, I'm going to show you the inspiration where it came from.

Phillip Jackson: So, Archetypes.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, in 2018, I attended, um, against my will, a modern dance performance put on by a local modern dance company called Demetrius Klein Dance Company. Um, the person that you see all the way on the left with their hand up is, her name is Kristen Wenzel. She goes on to become the, uh, artistic director at the Demetrius Klein Dance Company. Um, she also has now been working for Future Commerce for five years. And something about this fusion of art, um, in their company and the way that they bring art to public spaces was really interesting and inspiring for me. Also caused me to question why I felt so weird in the space. Like, why does this, like I had, I felt like I was watching The Office. Like I had second-hand embarrassment. I'm just being really real with you guys. I'm like, I would never dance in public like this. And it kind of challenged me.

Phillip Jackson: Um, they invited me to come to another show. Uh, this one wasn't against my will. They called it 7 by 7. And it was seven dances for seven minutes in seven spaces. It was a docent-led experience, meaning we were moved around these spaces every seven minutes. This made such a profound impact on me. One of the dances you'll see on the right, uh, was in a dark kitchen looking out the window at someone in another room doing a dance synchronized to music in my space. And immediately I went to the technology and I was like, how did they do that? And they said, well, the dancer learned the dance. And I'm like, but they were synced up to the music. They're like, yeah, no, the dancer learned the dance. Like, oh, wow, that's amazing, actually. The technical proficiency and the artistry, like, sang a song to me.

Phillip Jackson: Um, at the same time, I was at a local Barnes and Noble and I came across something called Emergence Magazine. And, uh, Emergence is a, a journal, about 300 pages, that studies ecology, culture, sociology. Um, it's beautiful and it's heavy, and it's really expensive. And I was like, I, why don't we have something like this, uh, in the e-commerce industry? There's so many stories to tell, there's so many profiles, there's so many brand wins. I have so many ideas and perspectives.

Phillip Jackson: New magazine alert, Ray Henry. I've got one for you. I made that magazine. Why wait for someone to make it when you can make it for yourself? So we created that. It was called Archetypes. Uh, archetypesjournal.com. And Archetypes was an exploration of brands and the stories they tell.

Phillip Jackson: And so we created Emergence, but we created it for our space. And this is, uh, about 280 pages, uh, of gorgeous heavy print. Uh, and it's full of poetry, uh, custom commissioned photography. If you were to bring the Jungian archetypes to life, what would they look like? Well, we found a photographer who commissioned a bunch of, uh, portraits that imbued the archetype of the hero, which is the person you see on the left, his name is Nate. Um, or the ruler, take on the archetype of the ruler, that's the second from the left, or, um, the creator, right? Or the magician. So these archetypes were things that we used every day in brand strategy frameworks. I would create a brand archetype study. I would deliver that.

Phillip Jackson: But how can we bring that to life in a visual medium? Um, and how if I were to tell stories about brands and stories of the internet and stories of how we've shaped human behavior through things like technology and the internet, what would that look like for me? If it's, if it's going to be in the Archetypes journal and we write, you know, 15, 20, 30,000 words, what does that look like for our industry?

Phillip Jackson: And so we built that. And then we put it together with Kristen, she came along with us and we put together a modern dance show for one night only that was docent-led in four spaces, um, and five dances. And we celebrated the archetypes. Uh, all 12, I'm sorry, all, yeah, all 12 archetypes were represented, uh, in some way or fashion. We had a labyrinth artist that came in from out of town.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, while people were queuing outside, we created a study, uh, a survey to help them find their archetype.

Phillip Jackson: And then we brought the same photographer who did all of the portraiture for the gallery and for the journal, and we brought them into the space and we used your results of your study that you took, uh, the quiz you took standing in line to make you your own archetype.

Phillip Jackson: So we're creating layers and layers and layers of meaning, bringing art and bringing and fusing it together. But we're building worlds too. So I wanted a high-end experience around this.

Phillip Jackson: So we created a tapestry. Um, this tapestry, uh, celebrates the 12 archetypes through custom illustration.

Phillip Jackson: And we created, uh, custom drinkware because you want to wrap yourself in luxury and drink something brown in a glass while you read the Archetypes journal. Um, and of course we created, hey, like we, you got to make the merch, right?

Phillip Jackson: Um, I'm going to zip through the last of it here. Uh, the Muses case study.

Phillip Jackson: So this is the journal for this year. Muses is an exploration of muses, the Greek muses, but in a modern context.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, you want to talk about performance marketing? Um, this is the way to talk about it because I was inspired for Muses by a piece of performance. Um, there's a brand called Common Era and they have a jewelry line that is, uh, fashioned after the nine historical Greek muses. Uh, by seeing this ad, it got stuck in my brain. It was like December, I think, of 2023 and I just couldn't stop thinking about it. I was like, oh, the nine muses. What would the modern muses be?

Phillip Jackson: So, I didn't wait for someone to answer that. I told you, we came up with the modern muses.

Phillip Jackson: Um, we put that together in our second edition of the journal. Uh, we, uh, took some inspiration from, uh, Greek, uh, mythology, some literature.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, we put it together in sort of a brand strategy deck of like, how does a multi-day, so we did one night at Art Basel before. What if we did a multi-day experience for people in, uh, brand leadership? And what if we brought that together with an a full-on art exhibition, workshops, evening panel talks, and a full retail build out? What would that look like?

Phillip Jackson: And it looked like this. Uh, we found, uh, the historic 1100 Lincoln, uh, Avenue, uh, building was available. And so we went together with a, a friend of ours who does commercial real estate. Now, we're a small bootstrapped company with seven full-time employees. If we can do this, literally anyone can do this, okay? Um, it takes a lot of guts and a, like, it takes a ton of, uh, belief in what you're doing, but literally anybody can do this. Um, and we, we had to take out a, you know, a four or five week lease, I think, on this building to do the build out. We had fire inspections, we had egress studies, we did architecture diagrams.

Phillip Jackson: We built a full retail experience. Um, and we built a bookstore. Uh, we built a museum gift shop inside of this, uh, 10,000 square foot building. And we held performance art.

Phillip Jackson: Um, we brought dance back in a small capacity. And we built, uh, the Muses with the launch of our brand new journal. Uh, this, this one, I believe, clocked in about 230 pages. Uh, musesjournal.com if you want to read some of the content.

Phillip Jackson: And the Muses is an exploration, again, yet another framework. So we're taking all of these various ideas of inspiration and taste and we're bringing it and packaging it for our community. Last example.

Phillip Jackson: Um, the multiplayer brand. Now this one, I, I'm very proud of this one. Um, very accessible. We wanted to create a zine. Um, and a zine is something that I used to create in my band days. It was sort of like a culture, like a culture magazine, uh, for your little music scene. I was in a hardcore music scene in Clearwater, Florida. And we would go to Kinko's before a show. Uh, we'll like print off a couple sheets, you know, staple them together and, uh, sell them for like a buck outside of a show. What would a high-end elevated version of that look like? And I thought about this for years. How would we do this?

Phillip Jackson: Well, it's already been done. Remember I told you nothing new exists under the sun. Uh, Marshall McLuhan, who's a modern philosopher, uh, media theorist, um, he has an example of this that really resonated with my business partner, Brian. Uh, so Brian and I co-founded Future Commerce. I think of him as a true futurist. I feel like I'm just, I don't know, actually, I don't know what I am. I'm a content creator.

Phillip Jackson: Um, and the two of us kind of fell in love with this book. It is an art book that is in the style of a zine that was a creation between the futurist Marshall McLuhan and artist Quentin Fiore. It was called The Medium is the Massage. And it is a, sort of like a graphic novel in, uh, picture, apologies. Um, sorry, that was animated and it's moving a little faster. If you have, um, aversion to flickering images, please, uh, screen down for a moment.

Phillip Jackson: Um, but we sort of created this zine, uh, that gives you a, a bit of a taste of what a, uh, medium of the massage, medium is the massage for the e-commerce industry might look like.

Phillip Jackson: You'll notice that, you know, there's a lot of direct inspiration, but done in our brand voice.

Phillip Jackson: Um, taken from this. There, the ad that we, all the ad photography and all the product photography also had its own inspo, but I don't have time to go into it. Uh, you'll see some people here that you know and notice, but, uh, we all of this was built specifically for people like you in this industry.

Phillip Jackson: I am kind of running out of time.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, one more practical piece of advice. I'll give you a framework and then we'll bounce. I'll answer a couple questions. Uh, Michael Miraflor, friend of the pod, says, unfollow Instagram models and influencers. I think your jobs would be in danger if we all did that. Um, but I do think you could follow artists and designers. I think your life would change.

Phillip Jackson: Um, let's cultivate some taste. So, okay, let me make it real for you. Everyone's going to get these slides, so I don't need to hit this too hard.

Phillip Jackson: I'm going to tell you, manage your calendar. Okay? If you don't own your calendar, your calendar will own you. Beginning of every day, look at the next. Beginning of every week, look at the next. Beginning of every month, look at the next. Um, every year, look at the next. And I have some of my team members on this right now and they're like, Phillip, take your own advice. And I would say, yes, I need to take my own advice. Um, daily, spend 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day, I don't care what it is, give yourself permission to surf around and be inspired, but put a time box around it. Um, I am guilty. I use the screen time limits, but, um, I'll be honest with you, I often pause it. So, I got to get better at this myself. Um, but you have to stay current.

Phillip Jackson: Uh, what you can do that you're probably not doing yet, some of you said you would like to, is set aside some time every week. And you could do that in little chunks every day, 20 to 30 minutes a day to do this active intentional failure thing. Do something you're bad at. Play your guitar, pick up your ukulele, sing some karaoke, do something very specifically that's creative in nature, um, or deeply intellectual in a way that you feel sort of shy about.

Phillip Jackson: Monthly, I want you to spend one weekend a month trying to just get a little more comfortable with immersing yourself in something that's in classics and culture. Your local museum definitely has a talk series or a panel discussion coming up or an art after dark, and you should go and you even if you don't like that stuff. Uh, challenge yourself on, on that, uh, regard. If you don't like any of that, check out like the Theories of Everything podcast is amazing. Uh, you want to learn about how quantum mechanics and, you know, the theory of the mind and, uh, consciousness might shape the way we think about AI. Hey, I'll give you permission to do that. It's cross-disciplinary.

Phillip Jackson: Once a year, disconnect altogether. Algorithmic fast or a retreat of some kind, but you need to break out of routine. Um, routine is important, but we need to give ourselves permission to step away from it for a little bit. Um, so gain a fresh perspective and maybe, I don't know, um, we just like zoom out.

Phillip Jackson: Because I feel like the future is up to us, the people who make it in this room. And that's because, uh, at the end of the day, commerce is culture. Thank you.

Evan Lee: I feel like everyone in their homes just needs to do a standing ovation. That was incredible, Phillip. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Phillip Jackson: Thank you. I ran the clock all the way. I said 41 minutes and it was like 58 or something. I'm so sorry.

Evan Lee: I know, right?

Phillip Jackson: I was jamming with all of the vibes in the chat, so I'm just going to keep going.

Evan Lee: I know. I think we can try to squeeze in one question though, because like there's been a bunch of good ones. Um, everybody, I'm not going to pick the most upvoted because I've seen Phillip tackle that in those last couple slides there of how you can structure your days and weeks. The one that I actually want to pick is not related to work and what it's less related to self, more your environment.

Evan Lee: So I'll bring it up on screen here, but Alyssa has a question. How can I convince my workplace that increases in creativity are worth what they perceive as a loss in productivity?

Phillip Jackson: Um, um, I'll answer that in a bit of a story. I had the same challenge, okay? Um, it will be, this is going to, uh, originally I had planned to touch a bit on the concept of sales in this talk in that every job is actually sales at the end of the day. Your job is to convince people that you're right about something or to give you the opportunity to take a chance on it. And so your job is a selling job whether you know it or not. So here's how I did it. Uh, when I was, uh, you know, when I was just an engineer, I started a podcast on the side. They gave me the latitude to be able to do it. I was really faithful with it, and then I brought a ton of opportunity through the audience I developed on my podcast to that agency. So I made it work for all of us. And eventually, as I gained, um, trust with the organization and the organization's leaders, and then I became a leader in that organization, then an executive, and then sort of like a minority partner, like you earn it along the way. It's not just given to you. And so I think, um, we all could probably benefit from that a little bit. Um, I would say find a way to strike the balance between like just going and saying, Phillip needs to be us to block time on our calendar to be to just think and stare at the wall because that's what they did at Deloitte one time. Um, I think that would be a mistake. Uh, we're going to have to slowly shift the culture. By the way, uh, Evan, I, I meant to mention this at the front. Um, we have a mission statement at Future Commerce. Our mission is to change the the culture of the commerce industry. That is my job. Um, my vision is that we can change the culture with a big C through commerce. And so if we, that's the right question to be asking is how do we make more time to be creative in our organizations? That's my mission. So, I don't know, um, I'd love to jam more on that with whoever wants to talk about it.