Season 2, Episode 9: Scott Hauman
Scott believes that the most revered brands of tomorrow will be the ones that embrace and embody strategic valor, creativity and imagination, today.
As the head of Insight & Strategy at Integer Dallas, Scott’s role is to provide leadership, inspiration and senior-level perspective on commerce-driving strategies that raise the level of agency work across all clients’ brands. He is accountable for the performance, development and integration of The Integer Group’s Insight & Strategy department and providing leadership to the special commerce-driving units within the department: shopper marketing planning, data & analytics, ecommerce, experience strategy and retail strategy. Additionally, he is responsible for advancing the IP born out of the Dallas, LA and Bentonville offices.
Every day, he and his proven team of curious and adventurous planners (20 and growing) help companies transform their brands to take advantage of what lies ahead through the seamless interplay of research and strategy.
Transcript
Dan Klyn: Scott, it's so great to see you. And I've just learned, we were talking before I hit the record button that, uh, You are not an expatriate, a Midwesterner that you are back in Dexter, Michigan.
Scott Hauman: I am.
Dan Klyn: But before COVID happened, you were spending a fair amount of time in Dallas, Texas in a tall building full of agencies. And you're in one of those agencies called Integer and you are doing brand strategy. Leading that up for the organization. How am I doing? Am I right?
Scott Hauman: You're absolutely right. But so much more than brand strategy. You know, it's been four years now since I've been with Integer and it's amazing. So four years in Texas, I was commuting for about a year and a half nonstop from DTW to DFW, and then I convinced my family to come with me back to Texas. They spent two years then they said we miss the trees. We miss the water. We want to go back. I'm like, okay, let's go back to Dexter. That's our place. So the family moved back. I stayed in my apartment and then all of a sudden Covid hit. And I remember just going up for the weekend, just a quick little trip. I mean, I'd packed nothing. I just brought my briefcase cause I was flying back and my boss says you don't need to come back right now, uh, may, maybe in a month. Oh. And then look now it's, I don't know when I'll be back. Fascinating.
Dan Klyn: Amazing. And so you're not just a, and I shouldn't say just because, uh, it's hard to be a strategist of one. When I worked in the same orbits as you back in the day, Scott, you were in smaller agencies in the Ann Arbor area and you were the expert on naming and brand marketing. And you did all of it. And now you've got a team and you’re used to being with them co-located, and now you're everywhere. How's that working now?
Scitt Hauman: It's working. I mean, we have great people, smart people. They can figure things out. They're problem solvers. Right now I have the privilege to work alongside and help guide about 20 strategists, all different subject matter experts across data and analytics, shopper planning, e-commerce, retail strategy because Integer is - we're not an advertising agency. We're considered, what's called a commerce agency. Our promise is to help accelerate transactions. So, we're at that intersection of branding and selling. So my work now is, is it's so experience driven and helping clients maximize those moments of impact. You know, everything is connected. Everything is data driven, everything is fueled and informed by culture. And so our strategists need to reflect that diversity of skill sets.
Dan Klyn: Help me picture the model? Is it, you are spores and you go out into other teams and the strategist is helping set the course? Do strategists, double, triple, quadruple up sometimes?
Scott Hauman: That's a great question. And I'm pretty proud of our agency because we've taken more of an agile lean approach. We work in these small hives, so you'll have a strategist, you'll have a designer. How it always should have been done. Right. And tackling problems in small sprints. Yet when we have a need for a subject matter expert, like Vanessa Daily, who's our cultural strategist. We'll bring her in. We have a behavioral scientist. There might be a data scientist that we bring in, depending on the champion goes shopping
Dan Klyn: You can go shopping for people with capabilities and go I need to have that. It'd be awesome if we could have some of that for the next two weeks or what have you?
Scott Hauman: That's exactly how it rolls. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: I'm interested that you say that's the way that it should work or should have been done. Trying to figure out if I should agree or disagree with that. And one of the things that we luxuriate in TUG and perhaps it's why we've not yet attained great success, commercial success, is we'll double, triple, quadruple up three, four information architects on a problem. And that is amazing because, as I was saying before, I hit the record button in your building with agencies stacked at each floor. If I was somehow able to sneak into your building with a rock and I could hit the information architect on any floor. Uh, how many floors - can I hit one on any floor in a Omnicoms stacked agency, intensive role?
Scott Hauman: You might skin the knee of maybe two folks. Uh, that's about it. I mean, what, what agencies have done and, and even us, I mean, We're lucky that we have teams of UX desingers so that's awesome, but we don't go far enough. I mean, in the perfect world we need information architects and UX designers. you know, so bravo for us being at least one step in the right direction, but we should have true information architects on staff, billable across,
Dan Klyn: But we don't Scott and you're already doing good work. So, what did they, what the fuck man.
Scott Hauman: well. I mean, companies and agencies can't continue the charade. I mean, I mean, let's face, I mean, IA has always been invisible. Therefore it's hard to buy. Now being in the experience.
Dan Klyn: Let me tell ya. Yes. Hard to sell. Hard to buy,
Scott Hauman: But the day now in this experience economy, right, you have CMOs that have sort of, uh, because they're obsessed with CX. Now, things are changing a bit. And I truly feel because. You know, the days of this, “hey, we're going to create just some sort of shout advertising campaign. And then we're just going to push it down some basic funnel.” Those days are gone.
It's about systems. It's about systems design. It's about service design. It's about connecting complex experience journeys, and wow, that's a completely new set of skills that are required.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. And design is something, it's a word and part of what you do that I'm so jealous of is naming as you know, not something incidental. Oh, by the way, I just came up with a brilliant name, but like, no, that that's a job. Yes, the name of design, putting that on things, makes it possible to put it on the building that you're in and putting the name architecture, especially information architecture. Um, so I don't know. Do we need to be rebranded? Do we need, uh...
Scott Hauman: Wow. Well, you know, I remember us having this conversation at Q you were, you were the champion, the pioneer of this constant wrestling.
Dan Klyn: I think what we decided back then is that what we should be selling is design because it's the practitioner's trip about architecture. It's this - you have this different way that you need to think about and do it. And if you can come to an appropriate way of recommending through that path, good on ya. And colleagues and bosses at Q who'd be like, okay, yeah, whatever you need to call it, buddy. Um, but when it came to what they sold, ultimately, Q has been in business for 35, however many years now because they sell something that people know what it is, which is communications design, communications strategy, design strategy.
Like these words in combination all work. And then my friend Dan Ramsden at the BBC said there's something about the word arc-chi-tect-ing. There's like something wrong with the consonants. It feels staccato and rigid. I don't know, help me out. Does it need a new name? What do we need to do?
Scott Hauman: I think that would be an awesome project that we should take on. And see what kind of trouble we could get into. And maybe we do it in a crowdsource way virtually, you know, we can bring some of our naming exercises into the play here and see what we can do.
I don't know I'm up for any kind of challenge like that. You have to shake things up. And right now, uh, there's so much. I know everyone says this and probably every person, every guest on your show has said, you know, the change, the change is just happening. It's numbing and we are fast followers now, and we are chasing, chasing more than ever. And it's fascinating to watch even agencies like Omnicom are still chasing.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, well maybe that's part of it is that I'm thinking about one of the most satisfying pieces of work that I got to be involved in on a project and it was explicitly set up at the start with the stakeholders to own that fast follower was the way of doing and that the new thing, that we could measure. We have that intention modeling tool that we use. And they own “yes our strategy has been to be a fast follower because we don't want to put our hand out there too far cause it'll get smacked and what we need to do in order to be good is we need say that we're going to define what a product experience in this space is. And in order to do that we're going to need to use architecture as the way to get there.” And so it was just like this, Oh my God. Finally, uh, the client gets it and we've got explicit. Uh, our remit here is to do architecture, which is not to take you to next door to where you are. It's to say do there still need to be doors and what we'll get to next, what's everything that got us to where we are already. And that's what we did is we came up with something that is profoundly different than what you could get to iteratively using a design process. And again, here we are, did good work, uh, a lot of people who have worked them with them have done good work. It's just that we were able to get this really dramatic change of strategy through architecture and we know it and they know it.
But again, here's a rock. Get anybody around this who understands that this wasn't design thinking that got us there. It wasn't a user centered design process. It was the process of architecture.
Again, people are just like, you know, that's nice for you to know about, but I really don't care.
Scott Hauman: Too bad. You didn't have a film crew that was filming that whole experience. And you made that into a world premier movie, and then you showed the world how it's really
Dan Klyn: At last. Somebody said that they wanted something a half a year of work happened and then out came a thing that was recognizable as that, which was asked for. Yes. Maybe that has never happened before in the history of mankind. It felt like landing on the moon for us, just like, wow.
Scott Hauman: You know what I love so much about information architecture is that it uses cognitive psychology. Right. I mean, you're talking mental models, you're talking understanding cognitive load. You're talking about recognition patterns and visual hierarchy. And then you experts then apply that to labeling wireframing and taxonomies. But now what's working in the world of data modeling, too. I'm learning a ton right now, just in the last three years, I've been baptized in the world of AI. What's really interesting is that we have a team of data scientists who are fantastic at the voodoo of developing algorithms, but when it comes to the data visualization in the storytelling of all of those not so much. And, and that's where, wow, what if we could pair our data scientists up with an information architect? What could we do to get in front of the CMO now in a completely different way? That's exciting.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. And, and as you're saying that I was playing it out in my mind's eye cause there are information designers. You give them the dataset and they might take some liberties in order to have it show up in a way that aesthetically delivers on what is known to work in the world of aesthetics. Information architects aren't so much known for that. If they're good at that, that's often a bonus, not a core thing.
And so the core thing is what you just described for me of where the information architect plays is in the structure of the story. It's like Kurt Vonnegut's master's degree work. There's a diagram, there's a line. It's happy or it's not happy. There's a basic structure of a guy in trouble, get them out. And there you go. And so what is the shape of your wiggle and what are you trying to accomplish?
So if I've got somebody who understands brand, what are the points on that wiggle? And what are the ones we own? Like let's tell a real story. And so some of those points on the path are more important than others from a brand standpoint. And my gosh, is there some way that I could be responsible for the structure of the story and you could be responsible for dialing it into the way that the brand likes to touch people and then somebody else can decorate it later. And I realized, you know, no that’s not how it works.
Scott Hauman: Wow. I knew I would walk away from this talk being inspired and nervous at the same time. So thank you, Dan.
Dan Klyn: I try. That's the brand promise that I have here is I'm sorry. And your welcome. That’s my brand promise. Always in that order too.
Scott Hauman: Yeah. You know, I am forever hopeful that agencies, when you do line up and have a rock in your hand that you will, you will start to hit folks with it. You know, you will start to see it. There's so much splintering now going on. There's so many agencies are just...Look at RGA. I mean, the firm that I have looked up to, uh, my whole career is going through some foundational changes.
Dan Klyn: They are addressing anti-black racism at the core of their business. And I think Bobby Greenberg is a really wonderful person for...It's not just him. Is that what you talking about?
Scott Hauman: Well, just that their top three senior leaders are leaving and starting a new consultancy because of some foundational changes. Of course it was a very cryptic Ad Age article to hook you in but it is interesting what's happening. Between the overlap between brand marketing and customer experience and how
every agency now is on a race to develop some piece of AI software, that's going to drive outcomes and that's what's happening right now.
Dan Klyn: IAre you, are you, is your business being expected to have something like that?
Scott Hauman: Absolutely, man. You should see it. I can't go into details, but we lost a major, major piece of business because somebody had a shiny object that promised outcomes and, some level of prediction that was crazy, but that's what people are buying. Right? And so now our agency is having big talks about how do we match that? How do we compete with that? We have to go out and build our own? Do we license IBM? What do we do...so all of that.
Dan Klyn: God and the outcomes for you in your space because the way you described it being focused on commerce and driving transactions, that's an outcome everybody can understand. Is what you're describing also a demand in the more nebulous space of brand outcome? Give me the big data solution too brand loyalty. How vast are these expectations for the magic box? Do you shake it and out comes a better tagline than Scott could do?
Scott Hauman: It's about scale. And so how do you develop content quickly. Deploy it? Track it, learn from it, predict what's next. That's the machine of marketing now. That's okay. The pathway going forward. So it's interesting brand has become even more of a dangerous word because boy, before COVID hit, we were all in on brand purpose and we were trying to find brand’s new religion. And heck I wrote a book called brand stance on how to help people build a purposeful and thriving brand. And all of a sudden COVID hit, things stopped. The AI machine prediction addiction is way high now.
Dan Klyn: Wow. So it's not even to deliver the results. It's that the machine was able to predict it and, wow. Okay.
Scott Hauman: We were able to respond instantly in the moment, with an offer, with a piece of artificial compassion, uh, you name it
Dan Klyn: I’m thinking about Shane Hipps, who used to be a brand planner for Porsche before he became a Mennonite minister. He said to me on a number of occasions that the whole job is managing your client's emotions, ultimately. That there's good work to be done and there's applications that need to go out into the world. But really the, and I don't know if planning is even a thing anymore, but from that sort of thing, strategists are planners are strategists.
But the thing that he was really going to give the client ultimately was an emotional payload entirely, not even secondarily or along the way, it's like, that's it. And so if the prediction, so if you're saying I can get you 12% or double digit improvement, but I can't predict and then somebody else's like...
The value of the prediction seems to me the emotion of confidence in being able to know something in the world because we don't know things anymore. Like science, is it real who can say, right? Maybe that's maybe that's the emotional thing that they need out of these boxes. When I shake it what comes out it's okay. I am not afraid of tomorrow. I'm less afraid of tomorrow. Right. And then the performance used to make me less afraid because who doesn't want to squeeze my e-commerce thing and get more performance out of it. But it sounds to me like they are preferring the prediction even over the result. And that makes sense if emotion is really what's going on here.
Scott Hauman: Wow. Interesting.
Dan Klyn: I think we just figured something out about the world.
Scott Hauman: Amazing, right? I mean, because transactions can happen anywhere, anytime at any moment it has really shifted how content is created, how it's deployed, and it's become so systematic now. I mean, we're able to track so much. We have access to so many data streams now. It is, on one hand, quite interesting; a fascinating challenge. At the other end of it, I start to lose my passion for the game a little bit, you know? And that's just, once we get to that level, once Adobe and Salesforce start to really own everything, I mean, it's gonna be interesting.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, no, once they can dance on their own and here we are trying to cut in like, no, I don't really need you anymore. Um, We know everything about everyone. And as long as they keep clicking, we can protect the next thing that they're going to want.
Scott Hauman: We've been fortunate as an agency because we've always been rooted in retail. And so transaction now is becoming an important thing. That's why you see traditional advertising agencies wanting to get into retail marketing and try to have a voice there. Do everyone's coming in now because they can; they have the tools, they have the ways. So luckily we have some good client relationships. You know, we manage every experience in an ATT store. The large agencies now who we partnered with are going wait a minute and no one cares about what's happening outside anymore. We want to get into what you're doing. Cause that's where the real customer connection has done a lot, you know. Anyways, I'm kind of drifting off...
Dan Klyn: Oh no. That's helping me make a map of this territory because, again, we've not been so welcome in there. We really thought when we started up eight or nine years ago that e-commerce would certainly - if anybody can rationalize investments in information architecture it's retail. So I'm curious, do your customers, to the extent that they're e-commerce operators, do they have information architects and content strategists who are receiving strategic direction from you all and then implementing it?
Scott Hauman: To an extent partially, right? We develop more Amazon product pages than jeez..I mean, you can imagine how many Amazon product pages we design. But we're beholden to Amazon's systems. But what's interesting with this new crop of DTC brands that are going direct, right. We're having something else happening outside of Amazon and outside of walmart.com and that’s quite interesting.
Dan Klyn: And Allbirds who every touch point will be ours.
Scott Hauman: Yes. And so that's where your expertise, if you're looking for those interesting ways where your group was just so ahead of its time, Dan, I mean, it's almost like you could have just waited 18 years and then launched.
Dan Klyn: if we can hold out that long our day may yet come. I think with all of the COVID chaos that it's hard to see the landscape and know...Even if you're observing cause and effect. It's like I'm not sure that's what that is. Like a tree falls. You see a guy with a saw but now with, in this area, it's like, well, There's probably two sides to that though, right? So all of this uncertainty about the flat information world, I'm starting to become hopeful about the thing that Apple and others, but Apple in particular is about to purportedly, about to do, which is to enable the mapping of all of the pixels in the built environment around people, through the use of LIDAR in the glasses, the phone, the tablet. And so just like LIDAR can show us that in Tikal there was this urban development 5,000 years ago that is a mega city and we couldn't see it. Now that same technology in a room. So think of your ATT store, Scott. So now the built environment is an addressable realm. It is where information is situated for people. Part of what was so fun about that project that I was bragging about where we actually did something good. And it looked like what we said we were going to do, which is, not be a follower, but find something, part of the defining something was to say, okay, no embodiment, like up means something down means something left and right. Like we need to figure out what people expect. The handedness of this and, and put things where your body can expect things to be not just where it fits. And that was just like oh my God, yes. So when somebody adds a new feature, they'll know where it goes. Cause there are these rules that say, no, the nature of this means it goes over to the left and no, the nature of this means it goes over to the right cause with the one hand you're only gonna...But anyway, so now it's the whole room. now it's okay what's to the left and what's to the right and what's up and what's down. If every pixel is three dimensional and then you add time. It's four-dimensional... Uh, hi, I'm an information architect. I know how to situate information in space. Um, maybe the world we all walk around in is addressable by the pixel place. Uh, there'll be some more work for the information architects.
Scott Hauman: We didn't have that with second life?
Dan Klyn: No because it was flat. You know, Zoom, it's all flat fake background. It's neat, but it's...But what happens when we're in a place and can make some of the information be closer to use facially further away, uh, based on rules, about time and proximity and the right thing in the right place. My friend's agency was called Kīnāʻole. That's a Hawaiian word for the right thing in the right way at the right time. Like, it's just like this, chef's kiss. And, yeah, we can, uh, Apple's going to make that need to be a thing, right?
Scott Hauman: Wow. I mean, that's going to open up a whole new category...My mind's blown because you're taking venue analytics and spatial analytics to a whole nother territory.
Dan Klyn: Oh yeah. Back when we were learning this stuff, right? The science of shopping, the watching hundreds of hours of video and learning if the aisles brush a woman’s buttons like if something touches her ass, when she's trying to look on that rack, she's not going to buy anything. And Oh my God, the messy sweater pile. Like the gap, like don't tell the guys to not tidy, it's the messy sweater pile that sell sweaters, not the neat one, because we're wired to see evidence of other humans doing stuff and wanting to be a part of that game. And so, so yeah, so now it's every pixel in the whole damn space.
Scott Hauman: But what's really interesting too, is I just got a piece of research that talked about how our time in grocery stores is - just the dwell time has just dropped, right. Because of COVID right. Nobody wants to be there. So they're going in grabbing essentials and getting out.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, because the guy with the mask, not over his noses. No, I can't even be in here.
Scott Hauman: Yeah. It's changing the dynamics. We have clients that rely on engagement at shelf, and I'm telling them folks, you gotta let that go right now. There is no engagement at shelf right now.
Dan Klyn: I'm taking whatever's fucking there, man. They didn’t have corn. They've got a sign now that says due to manufacturing. Whatever, right. Like it ended up great though. I had to get the corn that had the peppers in it and it made - it was better, but, yeah, I don't want to be engaged. Like, I used to love it when I'm in the produce section and the sprayers are gonna come on and the thunder goes and I'm like, Oh, that's neat. Now all that sensory is an attack on my wellbeing. In February it was delightful. And in March it's an attack on my wellbeing.
Scott Hauman: Yeah. Yes. And so I had the responsibility therapy for clients on how to cope during this time and how their product fits in this new world. It's challenging.
Dan Klyn: Is there anything that you're allowed to share from the surprises in client land of either what COVID makes hard or what COVID makes easy? Any surprises in there with customers you're trying to help deal with?
Scott Hauman: I can't share a lot. It's just the nature of being a part of the one of these giants. But we have a great publication. We have shopperculture.com. It's a great place to go to. And we published this thing called the next normal and there's some great thought work there that talks about what's going on in the right way. Not just a reactionary piece. I can't show you. I love to show you a screenshot of something or a deck or to say...Everybdy wants to know that their agency is only seeing what they're. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Well, I'm curious. Play it for me two ways. There's so much chaos around the election in November and such a rise in the pandemic that we're not feeling so good. Then there's another way that it could all go. Right. Which is somehow a clear outcome and a status quo continues only a it's even more awesome. And there's a vaccine, the October surprise, right? There's a vaccine and it works, back to the kind of economy we had, let's say in January of last year, before all of this hit.
Scott Hauman: This is a dangerous question for me to answer. I mean, I look at it. There is a sense of new utility that has come out.
We lived in a world of just distraction. Well, let's just face it. I mean, consumption levels at ridiculous marks. And you can't sustain that, you know, brands were built for just short periods of sprint on these revenue chases and out. And we were just being hit but now I think you're seeing...You're seeing humans understand and appreciate what essential means. And I think that's going to pave the way for more thoughtful products, more thoughtful experiences. And that is I think a really healthy thing.
I think that across the wire. And if brands can, can kind of wake up a little bit yeah. And, uh, you know, help more, I think it's going to be a good thing. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: The ability among all of us to know more about what matters as a large scale, phenomena because we didn't have global. Like, wasn't that the thinking in your space, maybe before all of this is that where these fractured micro tribes and that water cooler moment of who shot JR is not going to be a thing. And here we are. Right. Interesting. Something happened to all of us at the same time, in a way that could allow us to understand better or do something that actually works damn well. We have one person hanging in with us here. I wonder if Joy has a question about a brand strategy or information architecture or would like to embrace or push back on that piece of optimism there? Cause I like that one. Yeah. If I could get, I didn't see that one before we were all, we all felt something at the same time on the planet together.
Scott Hauman: Right, right.
Dan Klyn: Maybe not.
Scott Hauman: Well, you know, you have children. I have children. They're entering a new space and time of a new kind of problem solving, which is quite interesting too. You know, they were hijacked by this, this distracted world of instant consumption, instant gratification. And now everything is sort of flipped and now they have to think a little harder. Now they have to kind of improv a little bit and, and kind of be in this sort of, you know, moving ship at the same time with everyone. And again, my optimistic lens tells me that those are some healthy life skills that they're going to kinda take on.
Dan Klyn: So who's the hardest kind of consumer for you all to understand?Can you say, is it so different every time that there's not an answer? Is that something that you have to do is find a kind of people to talk with about a brand or a product?
Scott Hauman: We do. We do a lot of that. We spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy, always trying to unearth those, those interesting triggers of groups of people.
Here is my big piece of advice. As somebody who has spent a lot of time in the heart and mind space of consumers. Consumers lie. They lie to themselves. We love to segment them and develop these kinds of personas that at least give us some sort of comfortable cage so that we can map our strategies to. But consumers of all demos, gen Xers boomers, gen Z, some millennials, they go back and forth like a pendulum all the time. And that's just the truth. I mean, you could sit with a group of folks and they'll tell you one thing. But you got to drill, drill, go deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper to get to that real, real driving truth. Because half of the market research being done is just a waste of time.
Dan Klyn: But you don't know which half.
Scott Hauman: Okay. Yes. Cause you know, you can torture the data to tell it whatever you want, torture it enough. It'll say whatever, whatever you need it. I see it everywhere in my world. You know, every deck that comes across, you know somebody selectively picked something out. Draw and calls it a quote insight. And it's not an insight. Yeah. It's just a biased observation. Right?
Dan Klyn: My 18-year-old son is in a new media design program and in their user research class, they had to make personas. I didn't want to be the asshole who’s smarter than your teacher but of course, you know, I'm going to do that. And it seemed to me like it was from the making shit up school. There's the Alan Cooper school of it's one person. The guy who invented the technique used to have a customer who used the software that he could talk with and then make the software better. And then after not having access to that person, invent persona based on real data. And then again, that is not a representation of some large swaths of people. That's one person and it's helpful, but it's one person and the going way of
if people do personas at all in UX, it seems to me it's really a segment. It's a broad characterization. It's a sloppy way to blanketly generalize
and at TUG we haven't done personas for customers in six years I want to say. And instead, what we've done is tried to use Jobs To Be Done and then clustering Jobs t=To Be Done to sort of abstract up to an archetype. And we try to protect ourselves by saying no, if you have personas, that's fine. We just don't want to see you. Yeah, because these, these archetypes, they're not about preferences and they're not about attitudes. They're just about behavior and intent. And we know that, uh, for bandaid co. There's the I'm bleeding archetype and there's the someday I may bleed and that we can work with that. Right. So I'm curious about personas and jobs to be done. Have you been, have you been, we were, uh, my team is experimenting with, uh, AI personas.
Dan Klyn:Oh,
Scott Hauman: Fascinating. Right. Unleashing a bot out in the web. Let that body digest, digest digest, start to build a profile and then use that group as a testing ground for content. Right? Fascinating. This is going to become the norm too. As we look to get confident about the content that we're deploying at scale.The days of tapping a consumer panel to test something costs so much money it takes too long. I have an incredible gen alpha. I have a gen Z bot. I have a millennial bot who has been tirelessly, consuming the web and getting sharper and smarter and faster. And I'm able to showcase content that they are able to select and parse and tell me which labels and words are the ones that are going to stir action.
Dan Klyn: We can feed them the real purchase histories of tax years worth of these kinds of people.
Scott Hauman: Yup,
Dan Klyn: Geez.
Scott Hauman: Yep.
Dan Klyn: And then if it worked, if the bot clicks on the thing on the offer above the fold, it's good. It's good for offers above the fold. Good. It'll be about Q Anon and uh, uh, pizza gate shit. Oh no. Oh no. Yeah. Wow.
Scott Hauman: That’s a cool stat for a Sunday. A Sunday brain tickler.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. No, I don't want that, but I can see why people want it.
Scott Hauman: Yep. I can see why big companies want it.
Dan Klyn: Is that jobs to be done thing, has that surfaced in your world, saying it that way?
Scott Hauman: Yup. Yup.
Dan Klyn: I so seldom get my finger in transaction marketing that all my little curiosities are straight coming out here. So, uh, maybe to a sense it's just us chickens here, uh, and winding down then. Um, if you were hiring people, cause I have people who are pretty good, they're masters students at an I school. So they're pretty well trained. Most of them are going to be in a UX job somewhere, but not all of 'em. Have you noticed anything about who succeeds? And, can you ever have a strategist who is fresh out of a master's program in anything?
Scott Hauman: Yes, I believe you can, really. I really do.
Dan Klyn: They don't need to have a real world thing. Well,
Scott Hauman: Well depends on what you mean by real world thing. I mean, that person who's just graduated is a consumer.That person has experiences. That person understands tribes within their circles and other circles. I think that worldview, those experiences are quite interesting. I would want to have folks like that. You know, join our sprints because they can, they're always going to see something very interesting.So, back to your question. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Like a common trait that when they succeed, when somebody good comes in, are there any hallmarks? 've asked this before and some people have said, yeah, the ones from Carnegie Mellon, like whatever they're doing there, they're doing it right? Cause these graduates are they capable and it's not any one thing. It must be.
Scott Hauman: This might come off as being kind of soft, but I don't mean it to. If somebody can in that first meeting first interview or whatever you want to call it, that first Zoom call,
Dan Klyn: It's going to be a Zoom call.
Scott Hauman: We'll stop and say, I don't believe so that can actually have the gods.
To push the conversation, to look at it from a different angle.That's the skill, that's the emotional intelligence that is needed. And those are the people I want. I want people to have the skill of being able to question everything, you have to have it. And so many people now don't have it.
Dan Klyn: Well being agreeable, getting along, especially on a first Zoom call to not disrupt the flow of the potential, the person who's going to hire you, you let them go on a tear and you don't stop them. And you're saying, Don't go along with all those.
Scott Hauman: Show me that you are going to look at this with a different lens. You know, that's the most precious skill.
Dan Klyn: I love that. Wow. Thank you. Of course. Yeah. Over, the answer has been with interns and new hires is the ability to project into a void. But that is really hard to evaluate during an initial Zoom call. And so to be able to have an eye on both sides, right. I'm thinking for my son, I'm going to be looking for that. Like did anybody audit? Yeah. And then if I'm the pitch man to disagree with the people I'm trying to get to buy. Wow.
Scott Hauman: Yeah, because what unearths is the art of listening and boy, you just are not very good at it anymore, you know, our clients, aren't our team, our teammates. It's something that we bring up a lot in our sort of puddles after post mortems and stuff. We always find out that we just didn't listen. Good enough early on. And it always comes back.
Dan Klyn: Well, it strikes me that being able to disagree well, you have to listen really well. Yes. And as an evidence of that, why are you, why, what gives you the balls to say, uh, nope. It could be your hubris. That you're just a bad ass if you've got a different point of view, but right now I think what you're meaning is no, it's the demonstration how good of a listener you are that you could pick up on something, stop the music, clarify or elicit the thing that you want to know. And then see what happened. That, that strikes me as that's a performance of listening capability as much as anything else.
Scott Hauman: Sure.
Dan Klyn: Awesome. Well, shit. I feel like I got all the assignments then as we close this class for today. Scott, you're going to think about LIDAR. Yes. The situating of information in the four dimensional pixel space of your clients' environments. And then maybe get back to me with what you find out about that. And I'm going to be thinking about the canary and the conversational coal mine of listening. Awesome
Scott Hauman: Deal
Dan Klyn: Deal. Amazing. I love talking with you. I'm so glad that you're back in Michigan. I didn't want to, I was going to tease the hell out of you about Texas, but I didn't have to do any of that. But to be fair, I love Texas and I especially love Dallas.
Scott Hauman: Really
Dan Klyn: I have a list of things that you need to see, which includes, the city hall. Yeah, you need to go in there and go underneath there's like a 3 million pound cement thing up above you in there. That is amazing, like the feel, the changes in yourself, the air pressure on your skin to be under something that heavy is just amazing. Wow. You have to go to Fort Worth to go to the water garden. Which is by Phillip Johnson. Lou Kahn's best building. Most people think is the Kimball museum, which is a small art museum, but the building is phenomenal. And there's an expansion by Renzo piano that is quite tasteful, uh, and a sculpture garden by a new Gucci, which is a amazeballs. Um, and then there's also another museum by fellow Johnson, right up from the Kimball. Uh, I forget what it's called though. Um, which is also great. So for those Fort Worth things, the interfaith chapel for peace and justice in Dallas, which was Philip Johnson's last building Thanksgiving square in downtown Dallas with that virally Warner by Philip Johnson.
Scott Hauman: And that was right by our office. And I would go in there. A lot just to reflect.
Dan Klyn: Isn't that a great space, usable space.
Scott Hauman: I loved it. And see the thing about Texas, it's so rich. I mean, for me, it was two years of even though use disruption for my children. Uh, we gained so much by seeing, uh, geography and these cultural zones, like Southwest, Texas down, when you get, I mean, seeing big Ben.It's one of the most, most beautiful national park and it'll change. The Carlsbad caverns and getting down to those territories and around Marfa and all that. Just beautiful. Just good for the soul. Good travel. Yeah. Yeah,
Dan Klyn: It's gonna be, it's gonna be too bad when the United States breaks up and wants to go to Texas. Cause that's an awfully nice place.
Scott Hauman: It is a nice place and nice people for sure.
Dan Klyn: All right. Um, have so many things to think about now.
Scott Hauman: Don't be a stranger.
Dan Klyn: Let's talk again, uh, sooner than later.
Scott Hauman: I'm going to share this with my folks. I think they need to understand the understanding group even more. So thank you for the opportunity to bridge back to you,
Dan Klyn: We should also get together with Christine. I know what we can do, you know, the, Sandhill cranes? Yes. I am going to find out when the density of their migration is predicted for. And I'm going to reach out to Christine and Keith and to you and a couple other Ann Arbor people. And we can socially distantly just enjoy it. I don't know if you've been there, but I was there once and it was the closest to being on dinosaur earth with pterodactyls. When I was a little kid that was the earth that I wanted to be on. And there it is. So please do that.
Scott Hauman: Okay. Awesome. Take care. Bye