Hey friend – Rob here.

You may notice some, er, aesthetic changes around here.

That's because i am rebranding Salmon Labs and Salmon Theory!

(Massive shoutout to Nicole Tan for being excellent to work with.)

I'm super happy with where we got to, and still forever tinkering with new brand applications.

What else is going on?

Oh yes:

Week 4 of consulting at Droga5 London.

Working on one of their biggest clients as global brand strategy lead.

Absolutely loving it.

Smart team.

Smart clients.

Nice people.

Creative potential.

Collaborative vibes.

Super cool office.

And oh my goodness, the level of snackage in this place is quite excellent.

I may have eaten my weight in Nakd bars by the time my current contract ends.

(Though hope not, because i've been really good with my nutrient intake.)

Something else i'm quite proud of?

I got published on Warc.com!

I co-wrote a piece with my former mentee Luke on the long and short of neurodivergent teams.

Super proud of it, and thankful to Luke for all he's taught me (reverse mentoring yeah?).

Particularly love how we end on super practical ways to create neurodivergent-friendly environments.

​Go read it and share with your boss or team if you can.

Last but not least...

The grief continues.

Of course it does, because this is now part of me.

But receiving kind emails and messages from readers, and even a postcard from clients, it extremely helpful.

So thank you for the thoughtful words, for which i have some thoughtful words to offer right back at ya.

Intro over, let's get into the (fish) meat of the newsletter.

💌 This week on Salmon Theory

• All we hear is radio dada
• The marketplace for meaning is messier
• The dividends of dumb stuff (and the faults of "fearless")
• Skits versus shows (and why you need to be more Simpsons)
• A two-letter framework to frame the role of AI
• There are no silver bullets
• Integration minus the insanity

📻 All we hear is radio dada

Next time you wonder why memes are so popular, consider dadaism in the 1910–20s.

The quest for illogic (or a-logic?) in a world that's gone too logical.

The lo-fi or burned aesthetics in a physical world gone a bit beige.

The vicarious emotions that counter our screen-empowered numbness.

A coping mechanism to handle a system that might not know how to handle itself.

Or, if nothing else, a solid meme makes you feel seen and, therefore, less alone.

(This one came from a Gen Z'er i used to work with, so i'll take it as credible!)

I'm not a historian, but other strategists i know resonate well to this metaphor.

Tell me you don't sometimes feel like this image, anyway:

🪠 The marketplace for meaning is messier

Author Luke Burgis is onto something here:

Having done my fair share of therapy and now coaching (so many limiting beliefs!), i reflect a lot on this.

And as a strategists specifically, i wonder if we're conditioned to see the world more vicariously than needed.

My logic is as follows:

1. Strategists are trained to know what the market, audience and brand wants
2. Which means our MO is not to default to "i like this", but "this is useful to solve a job at hand"
3. (Or it should be, it does rile me up when strategists say they like something; our taste is besides the point!)
4. But the consequence of this is we might value things for how useful, or needed, they really are
5. And as a result, we forget to flex the muscle that helps us know what to want

And as work occupies more of our lives, this muscle gets flexed less, and the cycle continues.

Of course, many of us have enough self-awareness to know what they want out of life.

But my bet is that the doubt lingers all the same:

• Is this something i want? (i like playing games)
• Or is this something i need? (playing games gives me insight into gaming culture)

Send me your take on this!

🙃 The dividends of dumb stuff (and the faults of "fearless")

Two wise takes from this interview with Liquid Death's Andy Pearson:

1. Dumbness pays off
2. People misunderstand "fearless" thinking

Dumbness pays off because one of two things will happen.

It either is so dumb that it will capture people's imagination.

(Hence the equally wise title in the aforementioned episode.)

Or it's dumb enough to provoke the next thing in someone else's mind.

Dumbness is contagious and generative and therefore valuable for creativity.

What about the problem with fearless?

A simple nuance: being fearless is not being reckless.

Being fearless is doing something outrageous that is right for the brand.

Being reckless is doing something outrageous without considering the brand.

Replace "brand" with [whatever other things you value] and the same principle applies.

So, two useful questions for us all:

1. How is this dumb thought useful?
2. Am we being fearless or reckless?

To not consider them is the death of the artist creative salesperson.

Which is what we are.

(Don't @ me about "not everything is sales", it sorta is, the only question is the timeframe.)

And yes, this was also a pun about the aforementioned brand in the aforementioned link.

🎭 Skits versus shows

My role at Droga5 is to lead brand strategy on one of our biggest clients, but it's hard to forget our roots.

Namely, the fact that people still hire me to help with their social and content stuff.

(You can read more about my two-sentence pitch on each of those things here.)

And in recent conversations with the Matter Of Form crew, a cool analogy came up:

• Is your work like Succession?
• Or more like The Simpsons?

It's a simple analogy to explain whether something behaves more like a show, or a series of skits.

And i'd argue most brands should be more Simpsons than Succession.

Not because of the tone, although that is part of it (if they're laughing, they're buying etc).

But because of the format, where you don't need to have seen episodes 1, 2 and 3 to get value out of episode 4.

This is where a lot of brands get 'content series' wrong.

They assume it needs to be episodic, and once episode 1 is live, you never talk about it again.

When in fact, the reality is you can load up episodes 1, 2, 17 and 24, and let the ad systems do their own thing.

And the benefit of that is that you're feeding the machine with good stuff and let the algos do what they do well.

Find people who are willing to watch this, serve them more of that stuff, create media efficiencies along the way.

To assume that just because you've 'launched' something you never talk about it again is not only naive.

It's down right against the evidence for what works.

🤖 A two-letter framework to frame the role of AI

AI offers input to whatever process you're doing.

Humans offer instinct to judge what that input is useful for.

Chances are, 8 out of 10 things Claude offers back when i ask about audience truths is 'meh' at best.

But the two that aren't 'meh' may either be an answer, or spark a new line of inquiry.

And that inquisitiveness, the back and forth, is where the real value of AI is.

Imagine you judged a human being by how precisely they could replace you in one go.

You can't really do that, because there's context, learning curves etc.

And yes, AI is 10000x better at us at learning curves (none of us have thousands of GPUs loaded up yet).

But it's not (yet) as good at having the full context for things like:

• Is there precedent within a business for this line of thinking?
• What sorts of ideas or language have better odds of getting bought?
• Is this a tasteful thing to do?

One of the reasons i like aphorisms is they help me organise complex realities into useful mental models.

And while those models aren't perfect, they're sufficient to keep perspective when everyone seems to lose it.

So right now that's my mental model for AI vs plus humans.

AI brings input, humans bring instinct.

📝 There are no silver bullets

Apart, perhaps, from the bullet point.

Honestly, writing things down in bullet points has immense power in stress testing your logic and leaps.

Every time i struggle with a presentation, i close the slides and go back to the humble list.

And i literally start:

1. This is the brief we were given
2. This is the problem we've identified
3. This is why we have a right to tackle it
4. This is therefore how we'd approach it
5. Which leads to this type of work
6. Which we'd amplify in this way
7. And measure through so and so

It ain't rocket science, though sometimes it feels messier than that.

Because at least rocket science doesn't have creative and strategy egos and bias kicking in all over the place.

(Or maybe it does, because even rocket science needs to be approved by an organisation, so what do i know!)

The point is that bullet points can be way more powerful than most SaaS "do my strategy for me" tools out there.

And on top of being free, they force you to stay simple, which makes them priceless.

🖇️ Integration minus the insanity

Integration is like teenage s*x: everyone talks about it, but how many actually do it?

So let's talk about some basics of how to do integration, minus the insanity of it all.

If you cringe at "do some cutdowns for social" or "we'll PR the ad", this is for you.

Let's get into it.

​

🚨 Problem:

Integration is an exercise in architecture that's treated as a change in wallpaper.

​

💡 Solution:

Determine what's fundamental, fixed and flexible across the entire media mix.

​

🧭 Execution:

Let's look at each of those parts...

​Unlock the rest of this article here.