Questions Are the Future: Redefining Creativity in an AI World
Hi, everyone, and welcome to human centered. I'm Nick Brunker, a managing director of experience strategy at VML and your host for the show. Thanks for giving us a listen. Today, we're exploring a critical point, the transformation of human creativity in the age of AI. As AI rapidly becomes marketing's new operating system in many ways, we are facing profound questions.
Nick Brunker:Will it amplify meaningful work or simply accelerate distraction? How do we redefine creativity beyond engagement driven tactics to drive and create real human impact? To guide us through this conversation, I'm so excited to welcome back Jason Gajkowski, who's VML's chief transformation officer and cochair of the 4A's CX Council. Jason recently delivered a provocative keynote actually at the 4A's decisions twenty five event called Beyond Creative, transforming the impact of human creativity, which as we'll talk about challenges our industry to rethink its fundamental relationship with technology and creativity. Jason, welcome back.
Nick Brunker:Good to see you.
Jason Gaikowski:Nick, thanks for having me back. So good. Always, always a pleasure to spend some time with you, my man.
Nick Brunker:Likewise, dude. Before we dive in, I know there's been a lot of stuff going on in your space. And as we talked about off the top, you recently spoke at, that decisions event in Atlanta. What inspired the theme of your keynote down there?
Jason Gaikowski:Well, I mean, you know, the forays, they always do such a wonderful job, and the decisions event is is one of my favorites every year. You know, inspiration, there's obviously so much going on in the headlines, our industry and and other industries, about the impact of AI. And in fact, I'm part of a team here at VML that's charged with helping our agency accelerate its adoption. So this has put me in a position to think pretty deeply about how this particular technology development may may impact relationship with tech and and and, frankly, with creativity. Right?
Jason Gaikowski:And so, you know, I think you know that one of my one of my sort of go to analyses when I reflect deeply, you know, is to think about have there been similar kinds of events that have happened in other industries or at different periods in time? And, you know, this to me seems quite similar to the digital revolution, the industrial revolution before that, the enlightenment before that. You know, and what you what you see over time is we have these moments where developments happen. It profoundly changes our relationship with creativity, or perhaps better said, it profoundly changes what we are able to accomplish using creativity. And so I thought it was really, really worth considering not incremental changes to what we currently do, but how this technology might radically alter the way we think about human creativity and and our relationship with technology.
Nick Brunker:I've said something similar, to a few of our different guests. We talked to Brian Yamada weeks and weeks ago now about the the similar idea that we are we are witnessing potentially that industrial revolution like moment. You described that moment as as not a fork in the road, but as an event horizon, a world changing moment. What makes this particular technological shift so significant?
Jason Gaikowski:Well, I think that, you know, I think that you can already see it. And, you know, I think that it's a combination that, you know, can be thought of sort of as gravity, the weight of the change
Nick Brunker:Mhmm.
Jason Gaikowski:With acceleration, the rate of the change. Right? And so, you know, if we think about the industrial revolution, the change that happened to culture and society unfolded over many decades. Right? When you go from free industrial society to a post industrial society, That happened over, what, four, five, six, seven, eight decades.
Jason Gaikowski:And, you know, even the even the even the digital revolution, you know, I would argue has happened largely within the span of my career, which is a little bit longer than I'm comfortable talking about these days. But, you know, like like, if you go back if you go back to, like, the late nineties, man, broadband penetration was less than 50% in this country. Mhmm. Right? The iPhone didn't even come on board until the middle two thousands, and so the the rate of change, was still took a couple of decades to unfold.
Jason Gaikowski:And I and I think that what we're seeing right now with the emergence of generative AI, I think that the changes will be at least as profound, but a heck of a lot more rapid. So that's where I think this notion of an event horizon is, really enlightening as a as a kind of metaphor.
Nick Brunker:Yeah. It's fascinating times to live in for sure. There are a few big themes that, you had in the keynote that I kinda wanna unpack one at a time. The first one is about creativity and and the creative crisis that might be happening in in marketing. And in the keynote, I thought there was really an interesting section and some powerful language you used around engagement addiction and describing algorithms as the the new cartels, engagement as the the marketers' drug of choice.
Nick Brunker:Let's unpack that metaphor for us, if you will.
Jason Gaikowski:Well, I mean, you know, as you and I both know, when we when we look across industry, the the addictive metric of choice is in is engagement. Mhmm. Right? And and, of course, if people aren't paying attention to something, that's really, really problematic from a marketing perspective. Now, inconveniently, what we've learned both through both through the study of behavioral science and behavioral economics, but also through real world try and trial and error is that the things that the human mind is wired to respond to, danger, anger, outrage, salaciousness.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? Like, I I I talked to I talked to another colleague of ours in the industry who has a a social media job as his responsibility. And he's like, yeah. What really gets engagement is being unhinged, being salacious and unhinged. And, you know, the algorithms have caught on to that.
Jason Gaikowski:And right? So so very often and and, you know, Scott Galloway and others have talked about how giving our attention to social media interactions gives us a little bit of hit of dopamine. Mhmm. Right? And so we've got we've got addiction on two sides of the table.
Jason Gaikowski:We've got marketers who are addicted to a metric called engagement, and then we've got people who have become addicted to the dopamine rewards that they get from engagement. Now this is problematic for a variety of reasons. Number one, human attention inconveniently does not scale. We are already beyond content infinity, and so there is more and more content competing ever harder and ever harder for a finite amount of human attention. Mhmm.
Jason Gaikowski:And that means that the cost of acquiring attention will only go up. Right? And it's not gonna go up linearly. It's gonna go up algorithmically. Now when you plug AI into that equation, like, the promise of highly personalized, highly individualized content delivered at scale, right, that becomes true.
Jason Gaikowski:But then marketers are gonna have this trade off between engagement and reach. Right? And and mathematically, where that leads to is reach approaching zero and engagement approaching one for every individual piece of content. Now on the other side of the equation, we already see that this DOPA fueled addiction to engagement, it does in fact tickle the bottom of the brain stem. It does appeal to humanity's worst instincts.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? Rage bait is a thing. Mhmm. We already know that it creates divisiveness. It creates polarization.
Jason Gaikowski:It creates a fracturing of any sense of shared reality, and it leads to a place where people occupy smaller and smaller, more lonely, and more isolated individual experience filter bubbles. Yeah. Right? And that's rather problematic, not just for consumers, but for the brands that that want to do business with them.
Nick Brunker:And what's fascinating and scary about that is you you compound that reality from a technological and behavioral perspective to the fact that we are still, you know, a handful of years just, you know, what it would be five years technically post pandemic going through a pandemic where quite literally we were being forced to isolate. So not only is the technology in a place where, you know, the signals and and the way things are wired are actually potentially doing us as humans a disservice, but we're we were also in a in a societal problem, a societal mess with being forced to, you know, stay stay in homes and stay behind the screens, and even still we're recovering from that. I I think about how the you were pulling on the threat of the attention economy and the the idea that there is the the literal dopamine hit of likes and shares. And you referenced it at I thought it was fascinating. Junk food for the soul.
Nick Brunker:So if likes and shares are the junk food for the soul, what nutritional value were we missing in our creative diets as we we think about marketing in in the future?
Jason Gaikowski:Well, I mean, I think there's I think there's really I think there's really wonderful work that gets done. And, you know, what I find fascinating is if you look at if you look at examples of the most elevated and celebrated work that our industry produces, it tends not to be this extremely hyper personalized, individualized social content to scale designed for designed around engagement.
Nick Brunker:Mhmm.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? It tends to be work as an example, some work that that our our organization was part of, I will always be me, which, as I'm sure you were aware, uses technology to preserve the voice of people whom, due to medical conditions, will soon be voiceless. Right? And it does so through the the design of a really easy to read family friendly fun story. This allows a person to essentially bank their voice so that when the time comes that they have lost their voice, they now, through technology, have the ability to communicate with friends and with loved ones using their own voice.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? I will always be me using technology to give voice to the people who will seem to be voiceless. It's a wonderful, wonderful piece of work. Right? Another example that, you know, I have so much admiration for is called magnetic stories.
Jason Gaikowski:Now as you may or may not know, experiencing an MRI is not a particularly pleasant experience. And it turns out that when a child has to go through an MRI, that experience as it is can be somewhere between terrifying and traumatic. And the work of magnetic stories, what they did, is they designed an immersive children's story, an audiobook. And it incorporates the noises that the MRI machine makes into the characters and into the context of the story, suddenly transforming this necessary medical procedure from an experience that is traumatic to something that is engaging, enjoyable, memorable, right, even fun. Right?
Jason Gaikowski:And and, you know, even on a even on a less lofty or less less noble kind of plane, work that we have done with Tennessee tourism, six degrees of Tennessee. Mhmm. Right? We can use technology to help music lovers explore the DNA and the roots of the music that they love to discover that it's very, very likely that they are closer to Tennessee than they are to Kevin Bacon. And this is where I get really excited about what the potential of AI and the creativity and the talent of our industry might deliver.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? The question that to quote Kevin Kelly, who says that with AI, answers are cheap. Questions are the future. Right? Which begs me to urge our industry to ponder what kind of questions are we gonna spend our creative talents on.
Jason Gaikowski:Mhmm. How do we get more impressions or engagements, or how do we make real and lasting improvements in the lives of the people that we and our brand partners seek to serve?
Nick Brunker:It's a great segue to the next theme, which is redefining what creativity means in this AI era. And one of the the other things that I think you were pulling on there is the idea that creative departments turning out personalized content isn't the future. It's more about democratizing creativity and, you know, using technology to do it. What does that democratization look like in your mind?
Jason Gaikowski:Well, for me, I, you know, I think that it it really creates an opportunity for a profound shift in the role of a creative leader. Right? Sometimes and I'm and I'm sure you've heard some of our colleagues talk about the need for creative control because we're trying to get to a certain, level of creative product. And I think that in many instances, that will still be true. But I do see the opportunity for a broad democratization of creativity beyond the boundaries of a creative department so that the most senior creatives begin to operate more as creative teachers, creative coaches, and creative mentors than they are as individual creative craftsmen.
Jason Gaikowski:Now in, you know, some of the research that our colleagues did with the future 100, they talk about a future where creatives will begin to operate more like curators, that much of the much of the craftsmanship can be outsourced to technology, particularly in the digital realm. Right? Our colleague Brian Yamada, who you talked about earlier, you know, he and I talk about how AI will open up new avenues and new mediums for stories and storytelling. Right? And I think that's also true.
Jason Gaikowski:But I think the really exciting thing is that it broadens the pool of who gets to participate in and who gets to contribute to this thing called creative and creativity. Right? What we what we see in the industry right now is that agency to agency, on average, creative staff represent 30 to 50% of total agency headcount.
Nick Brunker:Mhmm.
Jason Gaikowski:Why not 80? Why not 90? Mhmm. Why not 95? Right?
Jason Gaikowski:If we take if we take the power of AI and we use it to create more efficiency and automation around the person manning the front desk, we'll always want someone manning the front desk. Mhmm. But why not how why not harness the power and potential of their creativity? Right? The people that work in accounting and finance, why not harness some of their creative potential?
Jason Gaikowski:Mhmm. Right? They have the ability to think about ideas differently. And I think that there are untapped contributions throughout the people of our industry that AI is gonna give us a chance to tap into.
Nick Brunker:That's been one of those interesting dynamics when you think about the the concept of, well, what's gonna be useful from somebody who is in the front desk perspective? This goes back to, ironically, the human centered design mindset that you've been championing over the many years. Is getting to the the root of, well, what's what's the right question? What's the problem we're trying to solve for them? What are their jobs to be done?
Nick Brunker:So in the example you're giving and just kinda pulling on the the front desk person's example, there's gonna be a lot of things creatively that with technology support, they can come up with some pretty creative ideas from their perspective and really have a unique flavor so that if there is an additional, you know, creative team that needs to sink their teeth into something, I I would imagine the insights and the opportunity areas become significantly more broad as you leverage technology to bring in, you know, whether it's verbatims, whether it's interviews, whether it's, you know, learned or shared experiences to be able to feed the machine literally and figuratively that allow creativity to really come from all angles. And I think what's interesting about that is you think about how in human centered design, we're shifting from, like, being production arms and and creative producers, content generators to really solvers of problems. So when you think about the the angle that you just you kinda went down, what types of problems should our creative teams or marketers that are in the strategic area like myself and yourself, what types of problems should we be focused on as we get into this new world?
Jason Gaikowski:You know, that's a that's a great question, Nick. And, you know, just to just to reinforce your last comments, you know, you've heard it said in the industry and certainly our company that a good idea doesn't care where it comes from. Mhmm. Right? A good idea can't care where it comes from.
Jason Gaikowski:And even when you even when you go and talk to the creative teams that have produced some of the most remarkable creative ideas and you talk to them about how did this happen, the story that you hear again and again and again is we were just one big team. Nobody cared about roles or departmental boundaries.
Nick Brunker:Mhmm.
Jason Gaikowski:And it was just all of us contributing different ideas, and no one cared where it came from. Right? So what we see is that behavior already exists. It's just not necessarily encoded into the processes, quote, unquote, of how things are supposed to work.
Nick Brunker:Right.
Jason Gaikowski:Now, you know, the question of what what kinds of questions should we be spending our time on, there are so many worthwhile questions that create value for a business by enhancing and advancing the lives of their customers. And, you know, I was listening to a podcast just earlier this week, and I and I forget which one. You know? But it was another big giant thinker in business that said, look. The game of business gets really, really simple.
Jason Gaikowski:Like, are you making your customers' life better?
Nick Brunker:Mhmm.
Jason Gaikowski:And if you are making your customers' life better, that's called sustainable value. That's value for them that you get to participate in, and your participation in that value creation is the engine of profit. Right? That's very consistent with Michael Porter's thinking around why engine or why business is more suitable for addressing social problems than philanthropy. Because business can solve the problem in a way that creates value, which generates profit, which allows which allows the solution to scale.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? So, you know, you've been working on the Ford business for a long time. There's all kinds of problems to be solved around freedom of movement.
Nick Brunker:Yep. Yep.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? I'm working with Children's University Hospital right now. There's all kinds of problems to be solved about how do you make the health care experience better for sick kids and their families and caregivers and for the employees. Right? The central question that I think every brand has an opportunity to wrestle with that is gonna be a wellspring of creative inspiration is what are all the ways that we have a that we as a business can make a positive impact in the lives of people?
Jason Gaikowski:How do we make their lives better? And those are the kinds of questions that we will have the time and that we will have the opportunity and that we will have the ability to tackle if we can just break the DOPA addiction.
Nick Brunker:But it's hard because that is scientifically, like, part of part of the the brain. Right? So so we're tapping into it. I even think I've I can't remember who I was talking to about this, but the the idea that even the mechanism by which you refresh your email in Outlook or you refresh your Facebook or Instagram feed is the same mental and physical mechanism as it is to pulling a slot machine. Like, our culture has wired us Right.
Nick Brunker:To be addicted to, alright. I'm gonna miss out on something. And maybe maybe this time I'm gonna see something really interesting. And it it when you get out of the the theoretical and more like, no. That is quite literally what is firing neurons in your brain.
Nick Brunker:There there are interesting questions then that come up to say, alright. Well, how do I how do I do everything you're suggesting? How do I start asking the right questions and potentially putting myself into a place where I can start creatively answering them with AI as a tool while also balancing the the path forward in in being ethical and using this technology for good so we don't find ourselves, you know, fighting off these dark patterns that have existed and probably will continue to exist in a lot of ways. And that's kind of the third theme I wanted to unpack with you as we have time is talking about, alright, what's next? What's the path forward?
Nick Brunker:And we we could start with ethical standards, what you were hitting on business value, which we'll we'll come back to in a minute. But you mentioned the need to develop those ethical standards alongside AI development so that we're we're doing the things that are gonna work just to solve the the needs of our brain while also being able to to drive business forward. And and we think about that a lot when we talk about ethics and standards and guidelines. As a lot of in a lot of cases, businesses are are still kind of building the AI planes in their respective organizations as they're flying it. In your mind, what would these standards include, to to create good ethics alongside AI development?
Jason Gaikowski:You know, I think that I think that the emergence and adoption of AI, I think it is a remarkable opportunity, and it may also be a forcing function. Right? Because, you know, you talk about you talk about whether it's your email inbox or your social notifications tickling the same part of your brain stem as a slot machine. And Yeah. You know, obviously Tristan Harris in the Center for Humane Technology has talked about this for for a decade, maybe maybe a little bit more.
Jason Gaikowski:The the question that I think society is gonna begin to confront is, are we going to choose an AI powered path forward where we work for the machines or where the machines work for us? Mhmm. Right? Because and and you've heard me talk about many times throwing off the shackles of our Silicon Valley overlords. And, you know, if you and I and probably all of our listeners are, like, really honest, uncomfortably honest, in the present moment between the screens that dominate our lives, do we work for the tech, or does the tech work for us?
Nick Brunker:Yeah. Absolutely.
Jason Gaikowski:And I think that question is really uncomfortable. But if we can be really diligent about implementing AI in a very human centric, humanity forward kind of a way, it is easy to imagine that all of the work that we do, that 80% of the day to day operations of the business and of our work gets largely outsourced to the machines, which means that 80% of our time can be face to face using imagination and creativity to discern and define the questions that are worth tackling that create value for people and drive value for the business. Right? If ten years from now, people are still looking at screens eight to ten hours a day just with AI, we've done it wrong. Right.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? Because all we've done is scaled the worst part of work. Mhmm. Right? But, again, to reference Kevin Kelly, in a world where answers are cheap, questions are the future, that also means that knowledge is cheap, knowing is cheap, wondering is the future.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? That means creativity and imagination is the future because creativity and imagination time and time and time and time and time again is a root source of business value. Because anything and everything we have ever accomplished as businesses, as brands, or even as a human species, at one point in time was considered improbable, if not impossible. Right now, today, we pack people into an aluminum tube, hurl them across the sky burning dinosaur juice safely. We do that.
Jason Gaikowski:Oh my god. Someone has to imagine the future, And the way that we're going to do that and maximize shared value for business and for people is to just bring more human minds into the business of imagining future possibilities and then participating in creative ideas that we can then bring online and bring to life using remarkable technology, including AI.
Nick Brunker:How do you make a business case then in in the immediate for those who are skeptical of that sort of approach? Because I can imagine there's definite resistance to having that big of a mindset shift. I think there there's always the nugget of your point on maximizing customer lifetime value means you need to maximize value due to a customer's lifetime. I think that was what you had said in the keynote and generally what you paraphrased earlier. And so I think in that sense, it's like a relatively easy, you know, pushback in the business case to make.
Nick Brunker:But when literally most marketing organizations at some level are looking at the junk food, if you go back to that point or the the analogy earlier. How do you get somebody who's who's still kind of on the fence of of making that pivot to see the light beyond just this is gonna make profit? And maybe that the answer is that just tie it all back to that. But but if somebody's really pressing back or hesitant to make the jump, how would you how would you explain it to them, or how would you push them to kind of your frame of thinking?
Jason Gaikowski:You know the you know the folk wisdom of you can lead a course to water. Yes. Right? But, again, the the the technique that I find very effective is using what has historically already been proven to be true as a means of helping people understand that there is going to be some next. Mhmm.
Jason Gaikowski:The business model of Netflix was considered so insane and so improbable that Blockbuster's refusal to acknowledge that business model and to double down on what works caused them to go extinct.
Nick Brunker:Mhmm.
Jason Gaikowski:Nokia and BlackBerry's commitment to, the existing and proven business model did a very good job of helping them go extinct. Right? And, you know, I got an insane and ridiculous request from a client several years ago. I mean, just absolutely just that shit. They said this client wanted law.
Jason Gaikowski:Right? Like Moore's Law? Yeah. This client worked in technology. They're like, I want a law.
Jason Gaikowski:And I'm like, cool. They're like, I want you to design a law for me. I'm like, Jesus. God. Right?
Jason Gaikowski:So, like, I went I went, like, you know, deep into a cave and studied the mysteries of the universe for a while. And
Nick Brunker:As one does. You know,
Jason Gaikowski:what I eventually as one does, like, you know, how do how do you create a law? You have to, like, start observing things at an incredibly deep lay level, and then you have to, like, try and figure out how how to articulate this a a pattern, and it has to be something that no one else has ever said before, and that's freaking hard. And what I came back with, and what's interesting, is he left the job before, I delivered the work, so I was able to keep it. Yeah. And when you study things deeply, what you find is that any sufficiently efficient organization will optimize itself into oblivion.
Jason Gaikowski:And what you see is that for any organization to continue to prosper over time, counterintuitively, its first priority must be continuous reinvention. Netflix was able to make the leap from mailing DVDs to streaming Mhmm. Because they operate on the notion of continuous reinvention. And so, you know, for anyone that is wondering whether the business models that are most profitable and most reliable twenty years from now are gonna be the same business models that exist today, in many instances, that answer is gonna be no. And so for any business leader, like, you're gonna have to get really realistic, painfully honest with yourself and say, this is going to impact my business.
Jason Gaikowski:Is it just simply gonna make it more efficient? Because that is both a benefit and a risk because highly efficient businesses become rigid Right. Right. And vulnerable. Or is this technology going to allow me to create more resilience and adaptability?
Jason Gaikowski:And how is the way I think about my business model and my most important metrics and my path to profitability, how does that need to evolve along with the changes in the world and the changes that I'm implementing into the business?
Nick Brunker:And this may be a broader question than we have time to get into, but just bear with me on it. Imagine yourself at a larger company like many of our clients or or big business, and you mentioned it. As the scale and size goes up, the process and rigidity, you know, put another way, the red tape also tends to to increase.
Jason Gaikowski:The bureaucracy.
Nick Brunker:Yes. Right. What are practical first steps or early steps that marketers at this size of an organization, the larger size organizations, can do to maybe not as a forcing function, but just as a way of, like, staying fresh and trying to trying to move a major organization into the mindset of constant reinvention and basically unpacking what you just said, but in their daily lives, in their daily work. What's a good first step or set of first steps?
Jason Gaikowski:Go hunting for bright spots. Literally, every organization that I've ever worked with, somebody somewhere is doing something right and is modeling the way forward. You know, the saying the future is already here. It's not just very well distributed. Every single organization has bright spots that is is an indicator species of how the future may behave.
Jason Gaikowski:Don't feel like you have to invent it from ground zero. In your business, go hunting for bright spots, indicator species of the future. In adjacent industries, if you can, go looking for close analogs Mhmm. As indicator species for the future, and then look for opportunities to either invest in and scale those as tests, because predicting the future is really hard, you're a lot better off just running a lot of experiments. Right?
Jason Gaikowski:Right? Small scale experiments as fastly and inexpensively as possible to figure out what works and what doesn't. So go find the experiments that are already running and lean into them, or find experiments that somebody else is running and begin to experiment with them yourself. And that's gonna be your fastest and most reliable path to, like, figuring out how the future is gonna unfold for you in your organization.
Nick Brunker:So tell me, as we kinda round out this this section, what gives you hope that we can shift the industry in a more meaningful direction with all of the change, all of the speed in which this change is happening, and all of the you know, let's just call it scientific reasons why our brains are just gonna get in our way in certain ways. What gives you hope that we can we can shift to that more meaningful future that you were talking about in your keynote?
Jason Gaikowski:No. The threat of extinction is a really remarkable motivator.
Nick Brunker:Yeah. That'll do it.
Jason Gaikowski:It is a remarkable motivator. I mean, you know, several several years ago, alpha goes zero. And if you haven't watched the movie, watch it. And that was, you know, five or six years ago now. Yeah.
Jason Gaikowski:You know, an AI taught itself to play the game go. The number of possibilities in the game of go has more possibilities than atoms in the known universe. And it seems to me that the the question of the right message to the right person at the right place at the right time feels very solvable. That feels like a pattern that is very, very well suited to AI. And so the economics are gonna force the work of right person, right message, right place, right time.
Jason Gaikowski:Yep. That's just gonna force it to not fully automated, technologically run, but largely automated, technologically run with human oversight. So we need some other stuff to do.
Nick Brunker:Yeah. How else are you gonna spend your day?
Jason Gaikowski:Threat of extinction is a remarkable motivator for transformation.
Nick Brunker:I love it.
Jason Gaikowski:It is my favorite motivator for transformation. No company wants to transform if things are going super well.
Nick Brunker:But when you know the inevitabilities of, we've seen this pattern play out, maybe over a longer period of time, history repeats itself. Right?
Jason Gaikowski:Our industry is different than it was thirty years ago. Right?
Nick Brunker:Even five to ten. Like, imagine imagine how even when we think about what what got people out of bed in the morning in this industry ten years ago compared to what we're doing Monday through Friday and sometimes on Saturday and Sunday. I mean, it's it's nuts. And I I you can only expect if if, you know, back to a law, if Moore's law is any indicator, then that's not gonna stop. The problems are just gonna pivot.
Nick Brunker:There'll be something different to solve Yeah. And different tools to solve them. Right? Right.
Jason Gaikowski:The mid the mid century marketing industry is unlike the marketing industry of the eighty nineties, which was very different than the marketing industry of the early two thousands, which is very different than the marketing industry of 2025. So why would we think that the marketing industry of 3035 wouldn't be remarkably different than it is today?
Nick Brunker:No doubt. No doubt. That's why this industry is so much fun, and I know you have a lot of expertise and opinions on it. Before we we wrap up, speaking of opinions, you have recently launched a podcast and are participating with our our friends and partners at at BAV and the BAV Group. Tell me a little bit about that as a a kind of a side hustle that you've been working on these days.
Jason Gaikowski:Yeah. Fun little fun little project with my good friend Laura, CEO, newly minted CEO of BAV Group, which is a brand consultancy that uses data from Brand Asset Valuator, which is the world's largest, longest, and most authoritative longitudinal study of how people perceive the interactions that they have with brands. And, you know, I've gotten to know Laura over the past five, six, seven years. She's wonderful. And I actually used to work at BAV in the consultancy business, much earlier in my career.
Jason Gaikowski:I was fortunate enough to train with, some of the founders of BAV back in the day. And, you know, she she and I got to talking one day, and I'm like, man, there's an awful lot of mythology that floats around our industry that runs in contrary to the evidence. Let's maybe have some conversations where we we challenge some of the conventional wisdom or even bust some of the outright myths that seem to seem to be pervasive in the industry and see if we can have some fun doing so. So we we banked, I don't know, nine or 10 episodes. First one is out, and second one's out next week.
Nick Brunker:That's amazing. Well, we will link to the show in our podcast notes as well and, obviously, more exciting times ahead in in that conversation with with Laura. And maybe we'll have to have a have her on as well in in the coming weeks and months. But congratulations on on the podcast launch, and we'll be listening, my man. And thanks again for making time to do this.
Nick Brunker:I know you're swamped and busy as always, but, I always get a ton out of our conversations. I'm sure our listeners do too. Appreciate your time, and we'll we'll talk again soon.
Jason Gaikowski:Thanks so much, Nick.
Nick Brunker:And thanks to you all for listening to Human Centered as well. To learn more about VML CX practice and our approach to the work, you can check us out online at VML.com. We also love to hear your feedback on the show. Give us a rating wherever you listen to your podcast, including Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon, now YouTube, and many more. Have a topic idea or just wanna drop us a line?
Nick Brunker:Connect with me on x at Nick Bunker, or you can email the show. It's humancentered@bml.com. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.
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