Pat Murphy
Hi and welcome to the MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising for the future, and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Rishad Tobaccowala, my favourite futurist and well-known industry figure. He has over 40 years-worth of experience, worked across almost every area of marketing and strategy. He’s a pioneer in digital marketing who helped create one of the first interactive groups and digital agencies 25 years ago and has helped launch a series of initiatives over the years, from groups focused on gaming, social, mobile and search engine marketing. He was also named by Time Magazine as one of five marketing innovators. He was also called Advertising Legend by the Advertising Club of New York. He has a newsletter subscribed by more than 30,000 people around the world called The Future Does Not Fit Into Containers of the Past, where he talks about various industry issues, and also his own podcast called What Next?

Rishad, if I read out all your accolades, it’d be time to wrap up the podcast. Thanks for being here today. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you!!

Rishad Tobaccowala
Thank you for having me, Pat. It’s fantastic being on your show.

Pat Murphy
You’ve had a long, distinguished and diverse career in marketing and strategy, Rishad, how has the marketing landscape evolved over the years? What are the most significant changes you’ve seen?

Rishad Tobaccowala
I believe there are three sets of changes that we have seen. The first is the biggest change in many ways is that power has moved from marketers to people they market to. So I often remind marketers that they should not use the word ‘consumer’ or ‘customer’ because they narrow people to being just consumers and customers of the brand and therefore they don’t necessarily understand them as people and they don’t necessarily see the real threats and opportunities that are coming. Because most brands, their greatest threat or opportunity comes from outside their category. The automobile companies benchmarked against each other, but it was Tesla and Uber. And Schick and Gillette benchmarked against each other, but it was Dollar Shave Club. So that’s number one.

But, as importantly, because we have now all these modern technologies, we may not even be only marketing to people, we may be marketing to the gods. If you and I talk to each other about what was possible today versus what was possible 20 years ago because of things like smartphones, this is long before AI and a whole bunch of other things we’re marketing to the gods and we keep thinking we’re marketing to consumers and that’s the big mistake. That’s number one. That’s the big shift.

The second big shift obviously has basically been that the world of advertising and marketing has become far more complex.

40 years ago I built the case, along with some of my colleagues, for a brand new medium called cable television, and the shock of going from three networks to more than three networks was considered to be fragmentation. Today we’re living in a world of such hyper-personalisation that this morning I read an article by someone called Rex Woodbury who basically says – there’s a whole group of people on TikTok and apparently Gen Z likes bean soup, so some Gen Z people said, ‘OK, this is bean soup, but what if I don’t like beans, then what soup is it for me’? So today people basically expect everything to be hyper-personalised, and that creates its own challenges whether you can build a brand in a world of hyper personalisation. How do you market and make profits in a world of hyper personalisation? So that’s the sort of second shift, so technology basically going and making things particularly hyper-personalsed.

The third shift is actually one of the ones that I believe that businesses will both have the greatest opportunities and will struggle with is – Talent has changed. And to me, an industry’s health is based on whether it can attract and keep a disproportionate share of world-class talent and for many, many, many years. But that’s changed again, thankfully. I believe that marketing – broadly I’m not just talking about advertising – but marketing was haemorrhaging talent, right to everything from finance but, more importantly, to platforms like Google and Meta, etc, and at some particular stage I was almost worried that most clients were basically auditioning for a job at those places rather than actually running their own brands. Right? And that was true also on the agency side. That has thankfully changed and I believe that the marketing world it has started to get its mojo back, in part because marketing has become far more important, because customers are so much more important.

Pat Murphy
Staying on that subject of finding the right talent. Do you think that the advertising world –  not marketing necessarily and marketers, but in the advertising community, do you think that is attractive enough for great talent to come into the advertising world right now? Or it certainly was a time when everyone wanted to come out of college or out of university. They wanted to go into advertising. Do you think that still is the case?

Rishad Tobaccowala
It’s starting to get back to being that. It isn’t where it was at all in the 80s, 70s and early 90s.
So when I came out of business school at the University of Chicago, companies like Leo Burnett would actually come to the business school at the University of Chicago and they would get you know people and they would compete for that talent with people like a Goldman Sachs and a McKinsey and in the 80s Leo Burnett was considered to be the equivalent in its industry as a Goldman Sachs or a McKinsey. It was a hard job to basically get and they attracted folks. Over time, I believe what began to happen is talent was increasingly seen and it’s since seen across all industries – was basically seen as a cost and an expense versus being a asset.

Pat Murphy
And both of us actually are Leo Burnett alumni, right? I think you were in Chicago, I was in London.

Rishad Tobaccowala
Yeah.

Pat Murphy
What was that phrase? Reach for the stars…

Rishad Tobaccowala
Yeah, ‘If you reach for the stars, you may not touch them, but you won’t come back with a handful of mud either.’

Pat Murphy
Exactly, I’ve always lived by that, by the way!

Rishad Tobaccowala
Absolutely, and that basically is to me the most important thing of any culture is excellence. But excellence, I basically believe, is a threefold thing. You need excellent clients, otherwise you can’t do things. You need excellent people, and when you have excellent clients and excellent people, you get excellent financial results and, primarily because of those two, you get excellent advertising, which then gives you excellent financial results.

So that clearly weakened a lot, probably between 2000 and 2015, 2017. What has changed a little bit is both inside the industry and outside the industry.

Outside the industry, especially in the last two or three years, the large competitors that are not necessarily the advertising business, but companies like Google, Meta, etc. Have become less attractive. A year ago, they did significant layoffs between 15 to 20%. They become less attractive because, in many ways, they become 150, 200,000 person companies that actually are run to avoid risk because of potential litigation and monopoly and other kinds of stuff and, as a result, it’s a little bit less fun. If that makes sense, and at the very same stage, what people are also beginning to realise is marketing has always been about this unique combination of math and magic, or what I call story and spreadsheet, and part of what happened is our business tilted too much towards the spreadsheet versus the story, and my concern was, if you’re going to make a business that is technology and quantitative oriented, you are going to drive the best people to where they’re comfortable with that, which is in the world of finance and technology.

So you need actually to have this fusion again, and I think we’re getting back to this fusion, in part because of AI, in part because of a lot of other things, and our business, which is actually a combination of plumbing and poetry, became too plumbing driven. It wasn’t a fun business that much anymore. Right, and obviously business should have some fun. I’m not saying business is fun, but business is no fun. That in effect. You can might as well go and work for where you maximize your revenue or maximize your income.

Pat Murphy
Exactly.

Rishad Tobaccowala
And that has started to change because the poetry is coming back into our business. It is becoming plumbing and poetry. The challenges are becoming bigger and, to a great extent, it’s starting to happen and, more importantly, the business has become far more… It looks like it’s consolidating, but, yes, the big guys get bigger or the big gals get bigger, but there’s much more fragmentation. You can have many more choices of where you can work and how you can work. But I think the single biggest thing comes back to talent. I truly believe and this is what most board of directors don’t understand is power has moved to talent, away from management, and it has only just begun. It has only just begun and part of what people are struggling with is they don’t know how to manage. They know how to boss and, as you know, I’ve written about the age of de-bossification, and so the bosses are in panic and usually when there’s this eclectic, crazy bohemian time, it’s a great time for advertising and marketing.

Pat Murphy
You mentioned telling stories. I’m a great believer in telling stories in every situation if I possibly can. I find that we are in the business of communication and many people are actually truly terrible at telling stories. What can people do to be better at telling stories to inspire or influence or change minds? What can they be doing to make themselves better?

Rishad Tobaccowala
I would say that there are four things that people should do. First of all is they should understand they themselves are moved by stories rather than by facts and data, so the senior most people sometimes I have to go into like very senior groups of people when I start this way, I basically say ‘hey, look, number one, how many of you all in this room are wearing a watch’? So almost everyone, puts their hand up, even if it’s an Apple watch? Second is, how many of you all drive an automobile that is more expensive than the equivalent of, let’s say, a Toyota Camry would be in your country, and a lot of people put their hands up because these are senior people.

And then I basically say okay, you’ve just proved to me that you only made two decisions that make no sense. Your phone has a better watch than the watch you currently wear, and once you start going beyond the quality of a Toyota Camry for every dollar you spend in a car, you’re not spending it for utility, you’re spending it for telling a story, identity, showing off design, comfort, and that’s because people choose with their hearts and may use numbers to justify what we just did. So you all have just proved to me that you’re not driven by that, so don’t talk to me about all your data driven stuff. But, more important, if this is all about data driven stuff and, as you probably know, I have an advanced degree in mathematics right and an MBA in finance. I said why is it that, while I appreciate data, I actually run away from any job that is very data driven? It’s because the machine will take away your job.

Pat Murphy
Quick question on that then – do you think that more clients, more marketers should take decisions based on gut instinct instead of the data that’s they’ve been given?

Rishad Tobaccowala
I believe that what tends to basically happen is data is like electricity you should not make decisions without it, because it illuminates the way and otherwise you are in the dark. But tell me a company that differentiates on how it uses electricity. So it’s an ingredient, but eventually what matters is judgment. It may not be gut judgment, experience, risk-staking, and if you can’t do that, and as anybody, you basically say this is what the spreadsheet or the math told me to do, you are out of a jobs soon. The machine will be able to do it much better, right?

So, in effect, I come back to the idea of stories by very simply saying A you are driven by stories. B the world’s greatest brands whether it’s Apple or Louis Vuitton or anything else, the most valuable companies, right, are about design, storytelling, provenance. They have data, they have utility, but that’s not where the differentiation happens. So if you’re in the marketing business and you aren’t in the storytelling business, and you’re in the wrong business.  In fact, I believe, and I’ve always basically believed, every single person is a salesperson and a storyteller, because without that, we would not have found the partners we have. We had to tell them a story.

Pat Murphy
Totally agree. I love your podcast called ‘What Next?’ As the host you’ve spoken to a whole wide range of leaders and an array of subjects A couple of recent ones that I’ve loved that have really resonated with me. One was Alan Adamson of Metaphors, about staying curious to be innovative, and I always think that curiosity is such a big driver towards incredible innovation and also Democratising Happiness was a great listen too. You always managed to bring a very human element into all the themes that you discuss. Is this the basis of all your approaches?

Rishad Tobaccowala
It is and my first book was basically called Restoring the ‘Soul of Business – Staying Human in the Age of Data’, and, interestingly, it sold really well, but it’s selling even faster now because people are actually rewriting the second line, the subtitle, in their minds.

I began to realize that what they’re reading is, yes, ‘restoring the soul of business’, but they’re not reading staying human in the age of data, but they’re reading is staying ‘human in the age of AI’. That’s what they’re beginning to sort of look at, and the book actually, even though it came out three and a half three years ago, has chapters on AI right, and chapters on distributed unbundled work, when there was no distributed unbundled work, which we call remote-hybrid, because it was so clear what was happening in the future, and so, to me, the big differentiator will basically be people and that is primarily because that’s what makes us us. Otherwise, we’ll just be the bot, we’ll just be the AI, and, in effect, the people orientation is what with, obviously, the data and the math and the technology is what significantly differentiates the marketing and advertising business from other industries.

So I said, the further you run away from people, you become like other industries, so you don’t differentiate the industry. How can we help our clients differentiate their brands if we cannot differentiate ourselves?

Pat Murphy
My dad was an officer in the Royal Navy so I really appreciated the other podcast you did with with Colonel Kevin Farrell on how business leaders can learn from military leaders. Would you say that military strategy or behaviour is relevant for our world, the world of advertising?

Rishad Tobaccowala
Parts of it are, and parts of it that are very important are things like discipline, making hard decisions, looking for the other perspective, which is one of the key things, like sort of the feedback and things like that, so those are very important, including, by the way, that you have to practice your craft. I believe that we’re in a business of craft, whether you’re in the production business, whether you’re in the creative business, whether you’re in the outside of probably accounting, where you don’t want to be too creative right Without going to jail, but otherwise you want to be. We, all of them are basically in the business of craft, and part of being in, you know, the, the armed forces besides the discipline and everything else is, is craft.

The two things from the armed forces that I would basically say probably do not work very well. So my stuff is you want to learn from the armed forces is the discipline, the craft, their courage, their ability to lead versus boss right. Make decisions under court fire, which can be sometimes your client yelling at you or something going wrong with production. That all is important. What people take away from it, which is also very important in the world of the armed forces, but not that important or increasingly less important and get you into trouble is hierarchy and fixed ways of making decisions. And, again, you’re beginning to see some interesting struggles, including with the world’s Western armies, including the United States. So the United States continues to spend huge amounts of money much more than they need to on aircraft carriers and there’s a huge amount of data that proves that that’s not going to work in the future. In a world of asymmetrical warfare, AI and drones an aircraft carrier is a sitting duck, but the process right. The politicians, the lobbyists are still funding yesterday’s news. And that is the biggest problem that we currently have, which is our senior people like myself, or what I call experienced or seasoned people, like all our seasoned you and me seasoned we have to, in addition to learning new stuff, need to unlearn, and this hierarchy of our way of the highway is BS. That’s part of why this struggle to return to the office is happening.

The difference between Gen Z’s mindset and Baby Boomer’s mindset, which is how my second book begins. Right, I’ll give you three numbers that will explain to you why army-like orientation doesn’t work in some ways. Number one these are US numbers, they’re not global. 66% of Baby Boomers in the United States believe in capitalism. 22% of Gen Z believe in capitalism. Right, when we were young, that number was 40% for us. So this is like these people are obviously going to grow up from their wood stock days to our days. That’s number one. Number two 76% of Gen Z want to work for themselves, right.
66% of Gen Z who have a full-time job have a side hustle or side gig, in part to make ends meet, in part to maximize optionality. So they aren’t under the power of their leaders and their bosses. But here is the single biggest thing. They are basically asking ‘what does their boss do’? They basically say our understanding is you monitor, delegate, allocate. We want to create, build and make. Can you teach us how to create, build and make? All you’re doing is you’re allocating, monitoring and delegating. Get out of my face, right, and this is the exact language. They won’t say it to their management, but because I happen to be an impoverished, unemployed, one person company and I’ll hear that and my old stuff is that doesn’t work. That part of the Army stuff, it’s my way, this is the way it used to be. I don’t care the way it used to be. Hey, the way it used to be. We used to have typewriters and before that we used to have tablets and we used to have scribes. Forget about it.

Pat Murphy
And post-pandemic, of course, in your own words, it’s not where work takes place, but where work fits into life.

Rishad Tobaccowala
And that is the biggest thing, my old stuff, actually one of the guests we had. I’ve had a series of guests. One of them basically said hey, the whole idea used to be work-life balance – how do I fit life into my work world? Now people are saying how do I fit work into my life? And, by the way, all those signs were happening, just what happened is some combination of modern technology, the way we started working, plus the mindset difference which you say life is short that came post-COVID has changed people’s mindset.

The line I use is all of our minds are like champagne corks. They’ve come out of the bottle and now we’re trying to put it back, but when the champagne cork comes out of the bottle, it swells. It no longer fits. And we’re trying to fit into, by the way, a model that did not make sense in 2019. We were using 2009 technology. Similarly, I basically ask people in a world where every company talks about personalisation, data-driven marketing and accessing technology, isn’t it an irony that a company like Amazon that created cloud-based marketing, that is data-driven, that almost invented personalisation not invented, but obviously leveraged it is a company that basically is mandating all their employees to come back three days a week, regardless of where they happen to basically be, with no data to support it and one size fits all.

Pat Murphy
Brilliant yeah!

Rishad Tobaccowala
Right, and this is where it is, which is the difference between the idea and the reality, which is what’s the right thing to do, and what you do follows the shadow, and the best managers figure out how to reduce the shadow.

Pat Murphy
Bringing the conversation back to the creative process just a bit. There’s a ton of conversations along with nervousness and fear on the part of our clients at MCA anyway on the use of AI in the creative development process and also production execution of ads. That might include, you know the way it’s used for AI voiceovers or creating music, or even the kind of streamlining of the production process. What are your top tips for clients when they have these challenging discussions with creative partners using AI?

Rishad Tobaccowala
I would say the following: first is, AI is for real and will continue to advance significantly every four to five months. It’s doubling in capability every four to five months. So understand it, embrace it, leverage it, use it. And it’s relatively simple compared to other things. I mean not simple in how it works, but simple to utilize. So number one is you must embrace it and use it yourself, versus being told by experts. There are no experts in this space. The day before yesterday, I was having a meal with probably one of the leading experts in AI in the United States and there’s a book behind me which is called Artificial Intelligence for Science and he is the editor of that book. And he was basically telling me hey, Rishad, do recognize that you’ve all these companies who are providing expertise, like McKinsey and Bain and everyone. They said nobody was talking about this til November when chat GPT came out.

Pat Murphy
It’s true.

Rishad Tobaccowala
How come they’ve got expertise in eight, nine months? There is no expertise and, by the way, that model is being replaced every four, five months with the new model.

Pat Murphy
Yeah.

Rishad Tobaccowala
So you have to use it yourself. Don’t expect some PowerPoint deck to show up. That’s number one, right. Number two is this is a more complex, much more sophisticated and much more interesting potential version, but not completely different from what you know. Photoshop, right and other things sort of brought you know to the world.

Pat Murphy
I agree.

Rishad Tobaccowala
What I basically understood is every advance in production capability places a premium on superior talent. Okay, so I’ve got SubStack, I got all kinds of stuff right. So I use SubStack, I use all kinds of modern technology. I think I know to write a little bit, but you put me with all my technology against Ernest Hemingway with his pen and paper. He’ll still write better. Now you give him all of my technologies. He’d leave me in the dust, right. And so I basically believe that the production business plus AI would be better than AI itself. So, if you’re talented, if you’re a client, anything else. Now, a lot of people look at the efficiency part of this. There is clearly an efficiency part, and you know, if you spend 25 hours and technology allows you to do it in 25 minutes, you should leverage it! But everybody will have that, and one of my guests that I had was a leading professor and entrepreneur on one of my podcasts and he’s based in Cambridge you know, near neck of the woods and Dr Mansur Ahmed Rejek is his name, and he basically said the following three things, all of which have to do with the production business.

He said number one – at the end of this year, you will not be able to tell the difference between a fake photograph and a real photo. By the end of 18 months, you will not be able to tell the difference between a fake video and a real video. But then this is the surprising part he basically believes that every company, every production house, every client and every brand will have access to exactly the same technology, and then what will become the difference is basically the storytelling, the craft, the talent and what you do with it. So I truly basically believe that this is will costs come out and will we have to do things? Yes, differently.

But I always said there’s a three step process. One is embrace it – use as much of it. There’s no excuse not to use it. For god sakes its so easy parts of it. So that’s number one. Number two is adapt your organisation, your cost structure, to this new world. This is a new world, right, you’re going to have to do some strange things which, by the way, may include, you know, re structuring a company, bringing in new talent, hiring new talent, bringing in new skill sets. All that’s fine. But third is then compliment. So embrace, adapt and compliment. What do we do well, relative to the others? And, as you know, and I do believe that the production business is this. The production business has always been AI plus HI, right, but AI has always basically been some sort of automated intelligence plus HI was human inspired. Now it’s artificial intelligence plus human inspired.

Pat Murphy
One of the things that Andrew Robertson mentioned to me the other day when I was talking to him about AI, is he said that we’re all going to have to be brilliant, prompt engineers in the next couple of years and the technology we’re going to be using is going to be as familiar to us as Microsoft 365. Do you think that’s true?

Rishad Tobaccowala
Here’s what I believe. I believe that – and this is how fast this world is changing, so anything I say right now in 15 minutes will make no sense. But let’s try!

What Andrew Robertson said made a lot of sense till about two weeks ago. Now you can have GPT-4 write a prompt for Dali 3 to give you the image that you need.
So the prompt engineer job was a hot job for about six months!

Pat Murphy
That’s crazy!

Rishad Tobaccowala
Right, and this is what I’m trying to get people to remind them – you are going to have to both embrace the new technologies but go back to the well on the old ways. I’ve always basically said the old craft, the old rituals, and modern technology is the combination. It’s not either or. So I always basically believe successful individuals, firms and companies combine roots and wings. Roots matter, but so do wings. The problem is too many people are too rooted or too wingy and therefore they get blown away.

Pat Murphy
In the creative side of things, AI for me – and this is just me personally Rishad – is that I don’t want AI to be a fun killer. Right? Actually something very satisfying with struggling to come up with a story or to create something, rather than have ChatGPT or another kind of Mid-Journey or whatever to create some thing. For me, I think there’s something very satisfying and fun in creating things from scratch.

Rishad Tobaccowala
So one of the earliest forms of production, if you think about it, and how our industry began was with the word. So JWT, newspapers, all of that was basically with the word, and so words and writing words – forget about video and pictures, and multimedia is a basis part. So yesterday I was talking to a gentleman his name is Josh Bernoff, who spent 16 years at startups. He then spent 20 years at Forrester Research. He had a lady called Carlene Li about 15 years ago wrote a groundbreaking book on social media called Groundswell. Eight years ago he decided to basically become just a full time book coach. He’s written eight books and his most recent book is about how to build a better business book.

And I was talking to him yesterday, so he was my guest and he just was fixated on this AI thing and his basic belief is that what AI will do is because I was being like is there a room for books? Is there a room for writers? Is there a room for like? Are we all like obsolete by this? And he made the case that AI will replace writers, but it will replace the hack writer And part of it is because AI looks backwards.

So, similarly, the gentleman that I spoke to yesterday who’s the elite, one of the leading AI scientists in the world, said ‘hey, Rishad, you got to remember when you basically say, write the story in the voice of Shakespeare, there has to be a Shakespeare’. Write this voice in the style of Pat – there has to be a Pat! And so part of it is – this actually makes us more unique and that allows us to scale our uniqueness in different ways rather than something else. So the world of writing is going to come in. In fact, some of the problems really tends out to be human, and this is what this gentleman mentioned. The real interesting premium will be on the individual, or what we bring to it and how we leverage the tools, than anything else, including writing, and as I’m writing my new book, one of my chapters is on AI in the future of work.

So I basically had GPT-4 write my chapter and then I wrote my chapter and I write my own book. But I have a book called sugar is the first editing. So I sent him all the stuff and he just said, ‘okay, here’s what actually should go into the chapter’. And he did not use a line of GPT-4. Not one right. And he says it sounds like a Goddam machine, anybody can tell who’s good. So part of it is we’re going to have to be increasingly sensitive to a finer shade of differences, which, by the way, is the craft of production.

Pat Murphy
Absolutely. But do you think, as it gets better and better…

Rishad Tobaccowala
So my thing was – what if the thing starts trading on my voice? So I have not banned people from learning on my SubStack, right? So if people basically crawl my books, crawl my YouTube videos, will they like get my sort of voice? And yes, it’s very possible. But I would say it’ll do a couple of things. One is it’ll basically be an advertisement for me. So people might say, ‘okay, can we get the original thing’.

But here’s the other one whoever told you that my voice does not grow? And to this whole idea of curiosity, a lot of people basically ask you’re fixated on humans, you’re fixated on talent. What should we hire for? So I said you should hire for what I used to hire for and has never, ever changed. I’ve been working in the city technology space for 30 years. So I quickly figured out what was important. And to me there are six C’s that you hire for, and three of the C’s happened to be about the person and three of the C’s is about how that person works with other people.

Pat Murphy
Can you explain those for us? That’d be great!

Rishad Tobaccowala
Yeah. So the first three C’s are number one – you hire for curiosity, especially in our business, but in any business. And why curiosity is important is because it’s asking forward looking questions.

The third one is cognitive skills, and my basic belief is you need a certain amount of like computing power in your mind to figure out what the hell’s going on. So I look for smartness, curiosity and creativity, but we don’t work by ourselves. Even if you’re a writer sitting in a room by yourself, you don’t completely work by yourself, but most in our industry we have to work with other people. So then they’re the other three, which is your ability to collaborate, your ability to communicate and your ability to convince. And you hire for that because in the world of HI plus AI, maybe we’ll be collaborating with machines, but eventually we are going to convince or not be convinced by machines and we’re going to learn how to communicate. And that’s the only place where I give away my seasoning and my, I guess, age right? I was stored like crazy on how to write, how to speak, how to present, how to interact. Those are going to be so important in the world.

And a lot of people said ‘I want my kid to learn Mandarin, I want my kid to learn code’. I said, ok, I’m great, I got a child. Mandarin is great, code is great, but here’s the deal. Today there are modern devices. You can use your Airpod Pros, put this particular device on your phone, speak in English. It automatically translates into Mandarin and speaks in Mandarin.

It then listens to the Mandarin and automatically translates into English. There’s bunches of stuff on GitHub which allows coders to write code automatically and AI is writing code. So, just like the prompt engineer has been replaced, the code person will be replaced, the Mandarin expertise will be replaced, but curiosity, creativity, convincing communication, collaboration will never be replaced.

Pat Murphy
And you mentioned cognitive ability. Is that what you mean by mental operating system when I was looking at your workshops?

Rishad Tobaccowala
Mental operating system. So one of the key things is this I don’t know what you use, but whether we’re using Samsung or Apple, or Android or Apple iOS phones, they keep getting upgraded. So two weeks ago, the Apple moved to its 17th operating system for iOS and its 14th operating system for Mac OS. But let’s look at iOS. So 2007 is when the Apple iPhone came out so in 17 years, it’s upgraded its operating system 17 times.

I ask everyone around me how many times have we upgraded our mental operating systems in the last 17 years?

And a big part of what I believe and you and I were talking about why I get up so early.
I start operating from 4.30 in the morning and you know, today I’m all by myself, unemployed, sitting by myself, right? But I still do that. And the reason, basically, is I spend the first hour and a half every day learning, and I strongly recommend to people if you don’t spend an hour learning every day, you are falling behind, you’re faking it. You’re using buzzword bingo, and we have to spend time to upgrade our mental operating system, which is the cognition part, because – in effect, if you don’t, how are you going to keep up? And do not believe you can fake it and do not believe some consultant can give you some deck that you can use. Those days are over. It’s you. You can try it and you can obviously guide the consultants only when you know a little bit and you can’t do it without getting your hands dirty or, more important in this particular case, whatever it is.

Pat Murphy
You talk about learning at four o’clock in the morning… what kind of resources do you tap into?

Rishad Tobaccowala
So I believe it’s easier to learn today and I’ve always had the learning habit, but I find it so much easier relative to 15, 20 years ago. So first is we have the library of Alexandria on our fingertips. It’s basically called a Google or Bing or now ChatGPT or GPT4, so you can find anything. You can find mentors that you want on YouTube. You can go and sign up for any kind of courses that you want. You can get the best course from Harvard on Justice for free, on Happiness, from Yale for free, whatever you basically want. So I use a lot of different resources, but I use some of the dark old resources. So if you see behind me, like I have lots of books, I read lots and lots of books, but what I tend to do is the following my learning regime is relatively simple.

I allocate 10 hours a week for learning. The way I would say. It says every human interaction teaches you stuff. Every day you learn stuff. But I put it with 10 specifically hours to learn, of which I allocate five of it to reading books. Or like I’m just reading, like yesterday, what is considered to be probably a masterpiece by, David Claus, who’s basically you know, who’s an amazing graphic artist, who’s brought out a book called Monica, which people think is amazing. It came out yesterday. I’ve got it and I started reading it. It’s a graphic novel. So we say why, why? Why are you reading a graphic novel? Because it’s a classic graphic. It’s supposed to be a masterpiece. I should read that!

I’m right now reading four of the six shortlisted booker prize books. So those are part of it. Because what my basic belief is, if you want to learn how to story tell and if you want to understand human beings, you need to understand other voices and you need to understand fiction and a whole bunch of other stuff.

The other five hours, I work on the computer and most of that today tends to basically be built around AI or Web3.0. But part of what I do do which is kind of ridiculous, like on 6am to 7am every Friday. I have leading engineers and these are leading engineers at my old place of work Publicis across the world, who are teaching me the latest technology, right, and they tell me what they’re doing. I’m not a technologist, but they show me what they’re doing and they benefit!

I benefit from learning what they’re talking about and I ask them questions. They benefit because I take that stuff and turn it into English, which allows them to pitch clients with it. So my stuff is ‘okay. This is what you’re really saying’. So I add the story or the sizzle to their steak. Does that makes sense. That’s what I’ve been reduced to. They’re the steak on the sizzle, so I try to add that on.

But I learned. So I got people to teach you. If you are a senior manager in a company, people who are working for you can teach you a lot. Learn from them. If you don’t want to read, you don’t want to use the computer, but you can learn. And when you start learning, you get less scared about change. That’s what I’ve learned. Right? You are scared about change because you’re worried whether you can adapt. Every human being can adapt, but you have to learn.

Pat Murphy
Rishad, I could spend all day talking to you, but we’re gonna have to wrap this up in a second, you know.

Rishad Tobaccowala
Thank you for having me!

Pat Murphy
I’m gonna ask you one final question. It’s the one we always ask our guests…Do you have a favourite ad of all time?

Rishad Tobaccowala
I do have a favourite ad of all time, and it’s probably one that has come up before, which is the 1984 ad from Apple.

And for me, there are three reasons for it. One is obviously that is actually the one that basically underlines what I truly basically believe that the future will come from the slime and not the heavens, right? So I always take the side of the underdog, the outsider and the immigrant, because that’s what I believe is true and as, by mistake, I became very senior in an organization and one of the top five people in a hundred-thousand-person organization, I kept thinking as the outsider Right, and 1984 was basically the outsider.

The second is that at particular time, the production values were pretty amazing. People hadn’t seen anything like that and, what most people don’t realize, it only ran once, just once. So you know, people say you need reach and you need frequency and you need this. I said, look it ran once in the Super Bowl and it lived on long before there was YouTube and viral and tick-tock and memes about an ad, right? So people said, like you can live if you had great craft, great work. That was the second one great craft, great work. But the third is something else it tells you about hubris!

More recently, Epic games, in their fight versus Apple, made a different version of 1984 where, in this particular case, it’s not IBM that has to be brought down, but Apple has taken IBM’s place, right? And is, with its 30% tax and everything, throttling the small person. So that’s the other reminder.

So the first one, obviously, you know, is that it really there’s a craft part of it, right, but you know, in many ways it’s just this, this amazing storytelling, this amazing thing. But it’s also reminding you that in sort of every victory there is sort of the grain of defeat. But, as importantly, in our business, which is the marketing and advertising and production business, in every defeat there are the grains of victory.

Pat Murphy
It’s an iconic ad and it still stands the test of time and we’ll post it up again on theprodcast.com. Thank you so much, Rishad. Thank you for joining us here at the MCA’s Prodcast.

Rishad Tobaccowala
Thank you for inviting me.

Today we talked to Rishad Tobaccowala, author, speaker, teacher and advisor with four decades of experience specialising in helping people, organizations and teams reinvent themselves to remain relevant in changing times.

To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes.

If you’d like to feature on The Prodcast or have any comments, questions or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com. I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, where all the links in the notes for this episode will be. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks again to Rishad, my team at MCA and to my production team at What Goes on Media.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.