Edward Boches

Chief Innovation Officer
Mullen

Edward Boches is chief innovation officer at Mullen (www.mullen.com), an independent full-service agency within the Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG). Mullen integrates disciplines from creative to digital marketing, public relations and social influence, media planning and buying, mobile marketing, direct response, and performance analytics. Mullen specializes in what it calls an “unbound” approach to marketing, a term that Boches pays homage to with the name of his blog, Creativity Unbound. Boches has been with Mullen since its early days, working in the creative department, ultimately as chief creative officer. Mullen clearly provided Boches room to soar as it ranks among Advertising Age’s Agency A-List and Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies.

Boches created the role of chief social media officer and later, chief innovation officer, as he sought to inspire change and encourage people in the agency and industry to embrace new technologies, platforms, and consumer behaviors necessary to create cool and relevant ideas for clients. He proudly says, “Somehow I’ve survived for 30 years in a business that typically eats its young.” In this interview, he shares a rare glimpse into the story of Mullen in its early days and a look at where, having learned many lessons from the advertising industry, his life is headed.

Tracy Tuten: What led you to advertising as a profession? Did you grow up wanting to work in this field?

Edward Boches: I grew up wanting to be in the media in one way or another. Even at an incredibly young age, like seventh grade maybe. I loved the printed page, newspapers, magazines, and everything about it. I was a bit of a news junkie, even back then. I also was interested in film, starting probably about early high school. By high school, I decided, well, I want to be either Walter Cronkite or Orson Welles or somebody who is making something out of the media to perform, persuade, influence, and entertain other people.

I liked the idea of being a creator of popular culture and ideas that mattered. I started college as a journalism major. I went back and forth between film and journalism. I actually thought I wasn’t a good enough writer to be a great journalist, which may have been a premature conclusion, and then I also thought the idea of becoming a famous Hollywood director seemed slightly elusive, and I ended up majoring in a hybrid: public communication.

My first job was as a newspaper reporter for a weekly newspaper. I then went into PR, later became a corporate speechwriter, and then I ended up in advertising. It was sort of circuitous route, but it still seemed to be connected and related to my first love, which was [working] with the printed page and creating ideas and content where nothing existed before.

Tuten: I think you must have been an unusual high school student to already know—as others have reported—who Bill Bernbach¹ was.

Boches: Well, I knew the work, anyway, from all those great ads appearing in LIFE and LOOK magazines. I probably had seen pictures of him at the ad agency. I was certainly familiar with VW and Avis and Alka-Seltzer ads. I just seemed acutely aware of all of that stuff.

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And what’s also interesting is the first serious film I ever saw. I saw Citizen Kane when I was maybe . . . fifteen years old.

The whole concept of the auteur in cinema really intrigued me as well. At that time, I was making Super 8 movies. When I was in high school, I had a Super 8 camera, and I had the Moviola,² and I had editing slicing systems. In those days, you had to do everything with glue and cement and wait for the film to come back. I made political films that were either protesting against companies that polluted, or oppressive school systems, or whatever.

I guess I was a little radical, too, although I didn’t think that at the time. I founded a newspaper in high school, a student-run newspaper called The Mad Hatter. It got me thrown out of school. I think I was only a junior in high school—I know I didn’t have my driver’s license yet—and I got featured on some Boston news station for being one of the more active high school radicals at the time. So all of that sort of went together: being political, subversive, creating content, writing, expressing yourself. Advertising in some ways was the easy way out because it was fun. It was filled with instant gratification. You could be clever and irreverent even though you were selling stuff [to] people. It was a more attainable career than, say, being a filmmaker.

Tuten: All of those characteristics that you just named seem like they are still very relevant for you today.

Boches: In some ways, yes. I once said to somebody that social media was invented just for me because it sort of combined all of my interests. I actually got really bored with traditional advertising if you will—with things like print or outdoor or television. I got bored with just delivering other people’s messages to other people’s audiences with other people’s money. It sort of lost some of its appeal over time. I’ve been doing this a long time. Now I don’t quite have that passion for making “an ad” that I may have had when I was younger. I still have the passion for media and connecting people and generating ideas and finding new ways to influence. But the original thing that got me really excited was, “Oh, I can come up with an idea and put it on that blank piece of paper, that two-dimensional plan, and have it be something magical.” After doing that for a number of years, it wasn’t quite as exciting anymore.

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Tuten: Is that what led you to the role of chief innovation officer?

Boches: Yes. I guess basically what happened was two things. It became apparent to me that all the changes that were going on were going to dramatically affect our business. We frankly had failed a couple of times to really evolve as quickly as we needed to in the digital social space. Part of that reason was because we always brought somebody in from the outside. We did that because he supposedly was or allegedly was an expert in digital or interactive. Those people never could quite fit into our culture or make change from the inside.

One day I just said, “Maybe I’ll do that job. Maybe I’ll be the person who tries.” I don’t know a whole lot about digital. I didn’t know anything about social at the time. This was maybe three years ago. But I said, “I know an awful lot about our company, our clients, and our standards, and maybe I’ll go and learn that other kind of stuff and try to become an evangelist for it.” What happened was I actually got into it! I got into every aspect of it— Twitter, and blogging, and fast-generated content, and the power of conducting research via the Web, and so on.

I’m more interested in that and I started to find ways in which I could get clients excited about it. As that happened, I said, “Shoot. Maybe we should get somebody else to pay attention to ‘the advertising part of things.’” I ended up hiring my replacement, who is probably a better creative director than I was.

At that point, I started really pursuing all of the new platforms and digital technologies. I’ve defined my job as I’ve gone along from being someone who actually made advertising to somebody who tries to inspire people to try to embrace new ways of thinking to the creation of more modern forms of advertising. The simple way to look at it was this: for a long time, we made ideas out of words, pictures, and stories. And now ideas are also made out of technology and applications and utility. Trying to get a company to think in those terms has been interesting and fun. It’s fun to try to make that transformation happen.

Tuten: How much of your effort is spent on work that is Mullen’s development in a specific area versus how much is spent on specific client work?

Boches: I don’t do that much direct client work anymore. I run an internal innovation lab that tries to experiment and be a catalyst for new ideas. I write and speak about trends as a public face for the agency and its innovative thinking. I generate an awful lot of content that we use in new business that helps show clients and prospects new ways of looking at things.

And I spend time trying to generate things for Mullen. They range from a crowdsourced Gen Y blog that I incubated, called “The Next Great Generation.” It really runs completely and totally autonomously and has recently become the Gen Y content provider to The Boston Globe. I work on smaller things like playing with new platforms, social digital participation, and that sort of thing. We just launched something with boston.com called “The Pulse.” It combines content from The Globe, content from blogs, social media, data, and analytics, Twitter participation, geo-based access to content, etc. It sort of takes the user, the reader, the professional content, data, and a branded advertising platform and puts them together in a new kind of media content.

I think it’s important to be playing around with those kinds of things for a couple of reasons. One is they could become new sources of revenue over time. They could set examples or be experimental laboratories for the creation of new things for clients that make a statement about the agency being progressive in its thinking. These activities help raise awareness, which helps with the recruitment of both clients and employees. So it’s a new sort of unchartered territory that a number of agencies are paying attention to—like Wieden+Kennedy³ with its incubator, or BBH Labs.⁴ It’s about agencies inventing their own brands and products. I don’t know if anybody knows where this is going to go, but I think there’s a sense that it could be important and we should be playing in those spaces.

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Tuten: How big is your team there, the innovation team working with you at Mullen?

Boches: There are really only a couple of us. It’s me and percentages of other people. I tap into existing developers, technology people, project managers, mobile people, media people, and a few Gen Y content generators. Almost all of them have other roles and responsibilities. One of the reasons for doing it that way is to make the lab somewhat virtual. You’re more likely to spread the thinking and the practices and the technologies into other areas of the company rather than keep it off to the side as a completely contained department.

Tuten: You’re not a silo. You’re integrated.

Boches: Some silo and some integrated. If you’re doing things for the agency and not the clients, those things by definition are siloed. If you’re doing things with people who work on client business, they’re bringing that information, that thinking, that inspiration back into the rest of the agency, and it will inevitably affect the client one way or another.

Tuten: What’s a typical day like—if there is one?

Boches: A typical day is a combination of staying connected with people outside the agency via social platforms. I think another important part is bringing ideas and content in from the outside. I generate a ton of content. That’s the second part of my day. Blogging, speaking, writing, appearances, and generating content for those things takes up a fair amount of time. Let’s say it’s a fifth of the time that I might be actually working on projects for the agency. Some of the things that I refer to that we might be trying to create or invent. The rest of the time might just be ad hoc. I’m dragged into meetings, or I’m asked to consult or counsel on something, or to meet with a client, or make a contribution to a pitch. And then, I work on a couple of clients who are aligned with the kind of modern things we’re trying to work on.

Tuten: You are one of the founding partners of Mullen. What was that experience like?

Boches: Mullen was founded by one guy, Jim Mullen, but three additional people became partners in the very early days. It was actually awesome. Joe Grimaldi, who’s CEO, came here before me. I joined a few months later. At that time, the agency was already eight or nine years old and had about twelve or thirteen employees. Joe and I became partners along with Paul Silverman, my predecessor as chief creative officer.

We basically built this agency from nothing. We were in a house on the North Shore in the middle of nowhere. We were thirty miles from Boston and a million miles from Madison Avenue. We were smart and we balanced each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We sort of knew what we were doing, but not really. But it was a lot of fun because we had the challenge of building something. We were doing it for ourselves. We were experimenting as we went along. We could decide what we wanted to be and then how to be it. Anyone who’s ever worked in a start-up company when it was small and you were struggling and you were trying to turn it into something would say that was the most fun. The journey to get big was more fun than being big.

We successfully created a culture that was inherently entrepreneurial, that embraced change on an ongoing basis, and that was rooted first and foremost in creativity. Those qualities served us well as the world changed around us.

Tuten: Do you miss that now?

Boches: We try to create that to a degree whenever we can in pockets of the company, or on certain projects, or on certain pieces of business. But I do miss it. I do. There are benefits to being large, having more resources, being surrounded by professional, talented people who are good at specific things. In those days we had to figure out everything for ourselves from the most basic stuff like traveling and faxing, to how you did new business pitches to how you prospected for new clients to how you produced a TV commercial. Anything we were doing for the very first time. But at the same time, it was closer to rock and roll, like being in a band that nobody ever heard of and taking the show on the road, hoping to find an audience.

Tuten: Like you have a dream and you just work every day a bit towards the dream.

Boches: It was also at a time when there was nothing—there was no technology. We didn’t have computers. We didn’t have web, e-mail, internet. We had IBM Selectric typewriters and landlines. I can’t even imagine that now. It seems like it would be so much easier today because you don’t even need office space. You need a cell phone and an internet connection and people can work from wherever they are. You can set up a company. Back then you needed an office because you had to congregate someplace. You needed Xerox machines, you needed a little bit more capital expense than you need today. It should be a hell of a lot easier to do it today than it was then.

Tuten: That sounds like it was an amazing experience.

Boches: It was. It was great. I hadn’t really thought about it for a long time, but as you ask these questions, I’m starting to get flashbacks.

Tuten: Anything specific? A special story you want to tell us?

Boches: Oh, there are some great stories. Oh God, I could tell you a story that was amazing. We had the biggest pitch of our lives. There were fourteen of us in the company. This must have been twenty-nine years ago, so this would have been 1982, ’83. We were going up against the biggest agency in Boston, which at the time was HBM [Humphrey Browning MacDougall], and against J. Walter Thompson in New York. It was for Apollo Computer, which was a very, very hot workstation company that was on its way to being a Fortune 1000, if not a Fortune 500, company.

Joe and I were basically doing the whole pitch. He was running the deck and the presentation, and I was doing all the creative with my partner. We had a pretty cool campaign. We were writing every single word of copy to try to be as perfect as we could be. We knew that we had a great way to position these network workstations visually and verbally and with a level of confidence that rivaled BMW advertising. We were the dark horse, for sure. The local ad trade publications at that time, like Ad Week New England, said it was a joke that we were even in this pitch with these big agencies.

The night before the pitch, Joe gets a call that his mother had died. She was in Florida and she’d passed away. It wasn’t expected. I think she had a heart attack or stroke and died. This is maybe six or seven o’clock at night a day and a half before the pitch. All I remember is Joe stayed up and worked through the night. We worked from seven p.m. straight through the next morning till dawn. We finished the presentation. We finished the deck. I finished the copy, and then he had to leave to fly to Florida. And he was the senior guy. We had to go and do the presentation without him. It was just one of these crazy, intense, dramatic things. We did the pitch, and we blew them away, and we won! It was a big local and national advertising story. “Who the hell are these guys in Beverly Farms in the middle of nowhere that no one had ever heard of?” We had just beat the biggest agency in Boston, and a giant New York agency. It was empowering.

Here’s another. It was ’87 maybe. We were in this magnificent building. We had renovated William Randolph Hearst’s private estate into an impressive office space in Pride’s Crossing atop a hill with a view of Boston and the tip of Cape Cod out over the ocean. I was in New York getting ready to do a new business pitch. I get a call that morning from Joe telling me that the agency had burned to the ground, just totally burned to the ground. Nothing was left. First I thought—it was April 2 and I had my dates confused—I thought it was April 1, and I thought the entire thing was a joke. It turns out it wasn’t a joke. There had been a small fire that had started inside the building. There was a volunteer fire department in that town. A couple of mishaps happened, and the next thing there are some explosions inside that building and the building burned to the ground. So we lost everything—every file, every computer, every desk, every piece of furniture, every document, every deck, every piece of paper, everything—there was literally nothing left. Not a pencil, not an eraser, not a paper clip—nothing. But, you know what? We were up and running as an agency the next day because people didn’t ask any permission from anybody—ever. They just did what they needed to do.

The three of us in New York finished our pitch and flew home. Somebody else went out and bought new equipment. Somebody else did this or did that. We returned to the little building that we had been in prior to renovating the estate, now with three times as many people. We put four people into an office. We were crammed on top of each other. We still went to work the next day. At the end of that year, we had lost no business, we lost no clients, we missed no deadlines.

In fact, I think we grew twenty-five percent. At the time, we probably had, say, maybe forty employees—my numbers could be off a little bit. What was interesting is we had a culture of “collective entrepreneurialism.” It was a term that I coined years ago—collective entrepreneurialism, which was the idea of “we’re in this together, but we’re behaving as a unit of entrepreneurs.” That kind of stuff was challenging and trying, but man, it was joyful at the same time. That aspect of our culture still permeates the place today despite that there’s probably only—out of six hundred people—there’s probably only four or five of us who were here when that happened.

Tuten: Do you tell these stories to your current employees so they can have that sense of culture?

Boches: Not really. It’s kind of the classic story of mom and dad telling you they used to walk uphill both ways to and from school. I think it’s in the lore, but the fire is actually one story that I don’t think we make a big deal of.

Tuten: How do you keep the collective entrepreneurship alive?

Boches: That is a combination of things, I think. First of all, we’re big believers in rights and responsibilities, so we actually give people more rights and decision-making authority than they might get at the same age or with the same title in a lot of companies, as long as they’re willing to embrace the responsibility that goes with it. That’s one thing.

I think a second piece of it is it’s almost just inherently in the DNA of the company. It’s one of those things where you couldn’t get rid of it even if you tried.

The third thing is, as a result, it attracts a certain kind of people. We never, ever attract people who want to be tenders or who want to maintain the status quo. We tend to do a really good job attracting people who want to take over, who want to build things, who want to make stuff, who want to assume that level of responsibility. That kind of person perpetuates the culture. I think we would make an argument that one of the most valuable assets that any company has is that [type of] culture.

I was looking at growth charts with my partner a week or so ago. It’s significant. We’ve gone from a $2 million agency [income] to a $110 million agency, whatever the numbers are. If you look at any time we’ve had a down year, we may have lost clients. One year we lost BMW and Timberland in the same year. Another year we lost Nextel, which was our biggest client by two or three times, so that year was obviously a dip in our income than our previous year. But if you look at the company, we have never, ever had two bad years in a row. In the three or four times in the history of the company we’ve had a down year, the next year was an up year that brought us back to close to where we had been previously. That’s a cultural thing that permeates how we work and what we believe we can do. We call on that without even realizing it.

Tuten: How do you see Mullen changing in the future?

Boches: It’s interesting because there’s a big debate going on. It’s been going on for a year or two now. Are we in the middle of an incredible transformation when it comes to advertising, which includes branding, yes or no? More people seem to think yes than no.

There’s a question as to whether traditional media will become less important in the future than it’s been in the past. Most people will say yes, but when you look at the actual numbers in terms of where dollars are spent, there’s a tremendous amount still spent on traditional media and no real sign of it diminishing.

Then the third question that comes up in this debate is where is the industry going. Will clients of the future be more inclined to want integrated agencies that do everything well? Or will they want best of breed, specialist agencies that do social or digital or something else?

We may be at odds with the majority of people who think the specialists are still the way to go. But we believe that you can’t be best of breed if you’re not completely, totally integrated and you don’t have convergence because everything is interdependent. How do you have traditional advertising that doesn’t have social media, that doesn’t have digital, that doesn’t have platforms, that doesn’t have apps, that doesn’t have mobile, that doesn’t have all of those things naturally working together?

So, when you ask where Mullen will be in the next four or five years, we’ll still be in advertising. We’ll still be an advertising agency. We will still be rooted in creative ideas. We will apply those ideas to more new places and platforms, to mobile and social and community kinds of things. The way in which we [create] will be more informed by creative technologists and developers and programmers, not just writers and art directors.

I personally am a big believer, even though some people don’t agree with me, that the future creative person is going to come as much from other areas as they do from the traditional writer, art director, and the crafts. In fact, if you look at the biggest cultural influencers of the last three or four years, who are they? They’re the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, right? Programmers and nerds—not necessarily who we consider traditional communicators.

Tuten: Right.

Boches: They’re Ev Williams, they’re Steve Chen, they’re the guys who are inventing things like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. They aren’t writers and art directors. They’re programmers. They just happen to be creative.

Tuten: But we’re still going to have to have content created, too.

Boches: Oh yeah, absolutely. But what is content going to be? Is content going to be a platform or an application? As I said earlier, I think future stories are going to be made out of technology and code and APIs [application programming interfaces] as much as they are out of words and pictures.

Tuten: So for my students now, or for your students next semester at BU,⁵ what would you tell them about how to best prepare for being a creative technologist?⁶

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Boches: Well, I don’t know if they need to be creative technologists. I think what they [each] need to do is have a specific skill and have it really well developed. They could be a writer. They could be an art director. They could be a designer. They could be a developer. They could be a UX [user experience design] person. They could be a videographer. All of those skills are still completely and totally necessary. The difference in the future is that you need to have a much broader perspective than just your specific skills.

So you’ve probably heard of the expression, “T-shaped person,” which is almost becoming a cliché.⁷ Look at any project these days—whether it’s Nike Plus or Garmin Connect or a Facebook app, or a mobile game, or a social experience, whatever kind of project that you look at—the team that makes that stuff now is much broader than it used to be. The people that you have to have in the room are well beyond what used to serve as a core creative team. There are now four, five, six, seven, eight roles maybe. Somebody who really knows social, someone who knows mobile, someone who can actually do front-end development, and so on.

The real challenge now is, how do you get all of those people to work really, really well together? In fact, how do you stay open-minded enough to believe that the idea that everybody is working toward may not be an “advertising idea,” or a concept that emanates from a television script, but may be something that transcends any one medium or execution. The skill that everybody in that room has to have, even if they all have a specific skill—the second skill that they all have to have is to be a T-shaped person. In other words, they must be able to see and understand, appreciate, and leverage the value of every other person on that team. They must understand their relationship to the holistic thing that they’re trying to do. That is way easier said than done.

I actually remember the days when art directors would refuse to put URL addresses in a print ad because it would ruin the layout. You would have one person who was building the web site saying, “Well, if you don’t put the URL in the print ad, no one’s going to know the web site and people aren’t going to go there.” The art director’s attitude was, “Yeah, but you’re really fucking up the layout.” At the time, I actually engaged in those conversations. It was, “No, we don’t want to put the URL in the layout. It’s really going to look stupid.” You look back at that and go, “Oh my God. That was the most ridiculous thing.” You had two people who had no appreciation for what each other’s contribution was to the project. The web people thought that all that mattered was the web, and the print people thought that no one was going to go to the web. Consumers were only going to read the print ads. Yet both the web person and the print person could make a remarkable contribution to the overall project. I guarantee you there’s plenty of people in the business who remember those idiotic arguments.

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Tuten: Now they’re saying that about the little Facebook icon.

Boches: Exactly. Now we’re forwarding to a thing where you have a user experience person telling somebody else, “I don’t really think the way you have that hierarchy in the navigation is really working at all.” Someone may say, “But it looks beautiful,” but the UX person may say, “Yeah, but we need usability here.” Even beyond that, the question may be, “what is it we should actually be making and creating? Should it be a platform? Should we actually be inventing something worth being advertised rather than simply advertising?” What I would tell students is, “Okay, develop a skill and master it to the degree possible, but then learn how to apply that skill within the context to where all these other rules are as fundamental as yours.”

Tuten: Given what you just described, what does a creative brief look like these days?

Boches: That’s a really, really good question because the creative brief probably looks as stupid as it did twenty years ago. The brief says, “Okay. Who are we talking to? What’s the problem we’re solving? What’s the message we should deliver? What are the executional guides?” Here we probably have multiple briefs and the briefs depend on whether or not we’re creating advertising, whether or not we’re starting from scratch and trying to solve a problem with something that may be beyond creative execution.

I think the brief ought to start with the problem that we’re trying to solve. The problem, by the way, may not be an advertising problem. It’s what kind of problem are we trying to solve that would make our brand of more value to this consumer?

I think the second thing it has to address is the use of media, technology, content, and community by the users, customers, or target audience or community members. Thinking about how somebody interacts with stuff beyond just the brand and the category is really important. I would actually go so far as to have every brief basically say, “You can’t solve this problem with an ad. You have to solve this problem with an idea that isn’t an ad.” Then you get to invent this idea or creative that might be worth advertising, right? I think another way to look at it is to really figure out the problem behind the problem. The problem can’t be, “Oh, we want know about this product.” The problem might be, “Well, what problem do these people actually have that we could solve?” And maybe solving it and actually doing something of value in the world of social media, etc., might be the reason that gets them to pay attention to us and might turn them on to the product we want them to know about. That’s almost coming at it from an extreme perspective in order to fight the inclination to solve problems with a TV commercial.

Does that make any sense?

Tuten: Yes, it really does. But it also sounds like it’s a really hard process to go through.

Boches: I think it really depends on the people involved. We do this exercise sometimes where I’ll ask creative people, “Don’t you think you should learn a little bit more about technology? Don’t you think you should learn a little bit more about APIs or different platforms or whatever?” And often I’ll get an answer that’s something like, “No, I don’t need to do that.”

I’ll ask, “Well, why not?”

They’ll say, “Because I know that no matter what I think up, someone will be able to make it or produce it.” Which is true. There’s hardly anything you can think up that someone will not be able to do. Here’s the downside of that. If you’re not aware of the capabilities of technology and APIs and certain platforms, you may never think up the idea to begin with.

I think it was the day that Google did the Arcade Fire HTML 5 video⁸ that I had this exact same conversation with somebody. I dragged him in my office and I showed him the video. I said, “Would you be able to think that up?” His jaw dropped open. It was the first time he’d seen it. He was blown away. I said, “Would you be able to think that up? I’m sure someone could make it. Obviously, here it is. But would you be able to think it up?” The answer was, “Uhh, gee, uhh, yeah, actually, I, I, I couldn’t.”

I said, “Well, why not?”

“Because I would—I had no idea that something like that was even possible. I wouldn’t even know where to start.” These days, creative people need to be incredibly curious and interested in everything new that comes along.

We’re doing a project right now for Olympus where all of the content is being generated by users, and none of it by the brand itself, for a new camera. The campaign really just took a chapter out of Gary Vaynerchuk’s The Thank You Economy.⁹ We just gave out a thousand cameras to certain people who would be willing and promised to generate a certain amount of content. We then put in place an entire infrastructure using almost all open-source platforms—Tumbler and Google+ and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube—to generate, aggregate, collect, and spread that content all over the place. With a fraction of the cost of a media buy—of course, we still do some paid media—the social components make that paid media more effective. It takes a certain kind of person who will think that way and be open to thinking that way.

Tuten: You are encouraging your creatives to be aware of what’s possible and what’s new. But, what do you suggest that they do? What’s your approach for keeping up with all these new things?

Boches: Well, my approach to keeping up with things is to build a community of people who can help me keep up because I don’t think you can do it by yourself. I mean, we can all, with good intent, build up our RSS reader, fill our Pulse app¹⁰ with all the stuff we hope to or plan to read every day, or even organize our Tweet deck according to different topics and subjects, but that’s really hard to do on a daily basis. We can get good at using certain kinds of tools whether it’s Springpad¹¹ or all of the stuff we might use to save things or bookmark stuff. But I think what you have to do is figure out how to manage.

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I’ve got a certain group of people that I’ve developed relationships with offline and online around whatever topics I know matter to me—mobile, social, digital, education, brands, etc. So number one, I have people I can go to directly anytime I need stuff. Two, they know enough about what I do and what I care about and what I’m interested in that I’m pretty sure they’re going to send me stuff that matters to me. They’re going to filter content that’s for me. I can use my Google+ circles more efficiently that way. It still takes a little bit of an effort because you can’t simply just say, “Oh, okay, I’m just going to click on all these people and these names and just hope that they play that role for me.” You actually have to make the effort to give back and to develop a relationship with them and a dialogue and then hopefully that leads to that kind of quid pro quo with this community of people helping each other stay up on what matters.

Tuten: Content-management through relationships.

Boches: Yeah. I mean, you can also read your ass off, but that takes a lot of time.

Tuten: Not nearly as efficient. Now, you mentioned Springpad, and that was something that you helped to create.

Boches: Well, no, no. I’m on the board of directors. I didn’t help to create it.

Tuten: But it’s something that you believe in strongly.

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Boches: Well, I think that they have a lot of potential. They’re still a start-up and they’re pivoting from what they started-up being to what they’re doing now. They’ve added millions of users, but they’re a long way from being Facebook or Twitter. For me, being involved with companies like that, learning a little bit about how software companies think, is actually valuable for the advertising business. You can learn from hanging out with software start-ups the ideas of prototyping, AB testing, of being agile and putting stuff out on the marketplace when it isn’t completely ready, when it’s still in beta. Letting users define how to make products better.

Many of these things are in some ways like the antithesis to how advertising works, where we make our stuff so precious and we want it to be perfect and magnificently designed, and then we’ve got to produce it and then we put it out into the marketplace. That long, linear process might lead to something that’s gorgeous and finished, but it’s not always the best. In a world where things change daily and things are disposable more quickly, it’s not always the best way to do things. I think we’re going to see more convergence among and between marketing, advertising, and software and gaming-type companies over the next five years.

Tuten: Are you involved in any of that gaming work?

Boches: I’m not doing anything myself in that space really at the moment. The agency’s doing some stuff, but I’m not. I’m not really there, personally. I support it, but I’m not working on it.

Tuten: You’re really active outside of Mullen. Things like the Springpad board and the content that you produce, and teaching with institutions, and giving industry talks. Which aspects of your work do you enjoy the most and why?

Boches: I think the one thing that ties all of those things together is sort of sharing what I know. If I’m helping a start-up company with ideas about how to think about marketing, or I’m teaching a course, or I’m lecturing, or I’m running workshops, or I’m blogging, what ties all of that stuff together is the idea of sharing. And I think that’s really interesting—there’s a real interesting benefit to doing that.

Number one is appealing to an awful lot of different people in communities, many of whom will gladly reciprocate. The second thing is it really helps you interact with people that you might not naturally interact with. Doing so exposes you to a lot more new thinking and ideas and platforms and conversations—all of which are fodder for your own learning and progress. All of which is stuff that you can bring back to the agency and package as examples, or information from clients, or content that helps with doing business.

The third thing that it helps is that by sharing knowledge, say if you have to give a speech someplace, you’ve got to really clarify your thoughts, and you’ve got to organize them, and you’ve got to write them down. You’ve got to develop a point of view. All of that makes you sharper as a content creator and a salesperson. These are incredibly vital skills when you’re trying to pitch and win business, or pitch and attract believers in an idea that you think would be good for the agency. I think everybody knows that really good creative people are combinations of idea generators and salespeople. I may not be making ads per se, but I’m applying certain aspects of creativity into some of these other areas.

Tuten: Do you have any rituals that are important to your ability to work creatively?

Boches: The only ritual I would have—and I didn’t even understand this until recently, but it’s become more clear—I would call it seeking collisions. I just read, and it might have even been a Steve Jobs’s quote, that when you ask creative people how they do what they do, many times they can’t actually explain or give a reason how and why they came up with ideas. His argument was what creative people inherently do is they combine things in different ways that create small explosions or that yield something that is an unexpected result of two things.

Also, if you read Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From,¹² you get that same thing. Johnson would argue, and others have argued, that cities are more creative than suburbs. [And he explains] why New York is more creative than Paris. It’s because Paris pushes the congestion of the new city out to the ring and they try to preserve the history of the old city, and as a result they have fewer collisions and, therefore, there’s nothing really wonderful and creative that’s emerging out of Paris compared to, say, Shanghai and New York, etc.

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You see the same thing in a way in companies like Pixar and IDEO and other creative companies that now work in these little congested environments. My ritual is trying to mash things up that don’t belong together, that come from different places, whether it’s literature and advertising, or physical space and theater, or sources of content from different disciplines, or even just the people that you try to interact with and engage. I think good ideas come from collisions. I’ll give you just a simple example, which we’re excited about. Am I talking too much or do you want to hear this?

Tuten: No, I want to hear it.

Boches: Okay, so I was at Google Zeitgeist,¹³ privileged to be invited. It was in Phoenix. I sat next to Sandra Day O’Connor.¹⁴ I talked to Robert Reich¹⁵ and Arianna Huffington.¹⁶ I saw the guys who did the High Line¹⁷ in New York and Pencils of Promise,¹⁸ the inventor of Angry Birds, and all this really, really amazing stuff.

Here’s the collision that happened to me. So Robert Reich talks about how the problem in America is that there’s an “us and them” going on, and I’ve used that expression before in some of my presentations—that our communities of concern are getting narrower. Congress doesn’t care really about unemployment because unemployment among college grads is only five percent and they’re closer to college grads than they are to high school dropouts, where unemployment is thirty-five percent. To groups with whom we have empathy and interdependency, we care about, and those with whom we don’t have empathy and interdependency, it’s easier for us to dismiss. Europe can basically now say, well, Greece isn’t really a part of them, so do they really have to worry about Greece? This thought about community really struck me as being an interesting problem that we have.

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The second thing is someone asked a question of Sandra Day O’Connor that was completely irrelevant to any of this. It was a conversation about juries and jury selection, and this thought of juries sort of popped into my head and I thought, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” Juries are people who are from different backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and juries work really well. People take responsibility, they’re incredibly diligent, they come to good decisions. Then I started to also think about what little I know about the military service, which is similar. Then I started to think about what I know about social media because all these things that we’re talking about vis-à-vis Robert Reich are ironic in an age when social media enables us to all connect to each other. But what do we do on social media? We connect to like-minded people.

One of the things that college students do before they go off to college is to search on Facebook to find someone to be their roommate. They search for someone who will stay in their comfort zone as opposed to seeking somebody who’s completely and totally different from another background.

Now all of a sudden, these three, four things crashed into my brain and I came up with an idea. The basic idea is “can mandatory social media service save America?” My thought is instead of having mandatory military service and mandatory community service, what if we had mandatory social media service? What if the basic idea was you get recruited and you get put into a circle, a Google circle if you will, with eleven other people from different regions, different ethnic backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, etc., and you get handed a problem? The problem could be obesity, or poverty, or unemployment, or the fact that young men get all their sex education from watching online porn. You get handed the problem and you have to solve the problem as a group, not unlike a jury. You have benchmark goal setting and procedure. There’s a proctor who pays attention to this thing and the result comes out and gets posted on a common web site, where legislatures and the press and academia and business can get ideas and begin to implement them.

Maybe we will solve problems and maybe we won’t, but the idea is that we’d have a pretty good likelihood of increasing empathy, interdependency, and an understanding of other people’s perspectives by having mandatory social media service. The service would not be that demanding since basically every eighteen-year-old in America is on social media already. And yes, there are three or four things we have to figure out, such as the multilingual thing, access to technology for everybody, and how to actually implement this thing. But it’s the best idea that I’ve had all year. Do you think it’s any good?

Tuten: I think it’s really interesting. I’m wondering how you would assess the effectiveness of it.

Boches: Well, there are probably short-term and long-term ways of assessing the effectiveness of it. That’s a very, very good question. I don’t have all the answers to that, but I could ramble off a couple from the top of my head. First of all, it could be the reaction of the participants and whether or not they, in a post-participation survey, had a different perspective of people whose opinions are different from theirs. You could measure the effectiveness by the number of ideas that got posted on this web site that resulted in new policies or proposed legislation across all of these issues. You could also look at the quality of the content that came out of it. You could subsequently look at whether or not any of those were ever implemented or were effective. And you could also look at whether or not there was an increased overall empathy among people who just seem to go at each other among their differences. I think you could set up ways to look at it short term and long term, short term from as early as six months, long term—five or ten years out.

Tuten: And even maybe a longitudinal study of the success of the people who participate?

Boches: Exactly. Now, the real point is that while there may or may not be merit in this idea, it certainly makes for an interesting conversation. But it’s an example of collision. Using collisions to generate ideas. So thank you for enduring that little spiel.

I’m thinking this idea will have to be seeded initially via schools or states, because I don’t think Congress is going to pass the thing and make it mandatory. There’s two points to that crazy little story. Point number one is collisions of ideas and thinking. If you seek them out or just make them part of your daily routine, you end up having interesting ideas. The second aspect is what kind of responsibility do brands have to fixing and addressing some of the social problems that are out there? At least in my own personal case, as I live in a new space, being influenced by so many new things and technologies, I become increasingly interested in things that are different, in things that are potentially more, meaningful than, say, advertising. There’s still a relationship to advertising, because I think that in a world where we’re connected to each other and we have things like social media to connect us, brands have a responsibility to addressing social problems. I also think it would be good for them businesswise.

Tuten: In terms of what it means to consumers or in terms of the growth it allows for the brand?

Boches: Both. I think that we will see brands that practice real social responsibility will actually do better profit-wise. They will do better, a) because they endeared themselves to certain constituencies and customers, and b) because they contribute to improving the world around them a little bit, which may actually generate better economic situations that yield more business. And then I think that they may actually learn what it is they should be doing. It might be less altruistic and less selfish and greedy. It has worked for certain brands. It’s worked for Apple and Google and Nike. You do see it in some cases.

Tuten: It just needs to become more prevalent.

Boches: Yes. Pepsi made a really great effort with Pepsi Refresh.¹⁹ I think at the end of the day, they’re not sure it actually contributed to business as much as traditional advertising. People who want to preserve the status quo will make that argument vociferously. I think that in the longer term, especially if you look at a younger generation, for whom this stuff may matter more, I think it’s already a good place to invest.

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Tuten: What’s next for you? What hopes and dreams and aspirations? Is it going to be in the area of creating collisions and social responsibility, or something more?

Boches: There are three things actually that I’m interested in. I would love to do a start-up or work more with start-ups. I don’t know if any of the ideas about mandatory social media service will materialize or turn into anything, but if they do, maybe that will be my start-up. If I get a presidential candidate to believe in mandatory social media service and he or she gets elected and wants me to come and help run that program, maybe I’ll do that. I’m still interested in changing this industry or helping it stay caught up and relevant. And then I also have become really excited about teaching, which has been a result of doing an executive-in-residence and running some workshops and lecturing in a bunch of classes. So I’ll learn more about the potential for teaching from my experience next semester at Boston University. Teaching is something I am really drawn to.