Title Tentative: An Interview with an [Almost] Writer

Let’s start with stating the obvious: guys named Bud don’t come from anywhere but Texas - as is the case with this one, who spent his early days hoisting shotguns and lollying around Austin with a guitar and a mullet. Good thing that the band thing fell through, because if it hadn’t, Bud might not have gotten into advertising.

Currently Strategy Director at Boulder’s Victor’s and Spoils, and formerly of New York’s Undercurrent, Bud Caddell came to Colorado early this summer under the illusion that the shady streets and stoned (wait, toned) residents would help him unwind after a few years in the big city. But instead of settling down in front of Trident with a nice book, Bud decided to write one. And instead of going the normal route – procrastinating, that is – he put the idea on Kickstarter.

A few weeks, about $18,000 in outside funding, and over 200 backers later (including some of the top names in the industry), Bud is ready to get started. But is this 27-year-old really using the money to fund a book, or is he just planning the best vacation ever? We interrogated the kid to find out.

So, you're 27, you're in advertising, and you want to write a book. We’ve heard that before.

Is that a question? And I'm almost 28. And I started very young. I actually art directed this commercial for the Commodore 64 while still in the womb.

Fact check that.

Okay, fine - you're an almost 28 year old who likes Apple products, which is also wildly unpredictable. Aside from your obvious appreciation of retro technology and hair products, what else should we know about you?

Keep reading...

I started working on the web, as the lead developer for a VC funded start-up, before the first bubble burst. And I've spent the last 4+ years offering strategic consulting for brands such as CNN, HBO, FORD, BMW, GE, Pepsi, Mastercard, Xerox, and others. Also, I've painted Keyboard Cat. I've impersonated a fictional fictional character and turned it into academic fodder. And I guess I’m known for a venn diagram.

More to the point, why do you think the world needs another book about advertising?

Well, breathe easy – it's not an advertising book. For any of us that influence advertising, from strategy to execution, we can't be solely focused on the ads anymore. Our clients need our help to ensure that their organization is dynamic enough to let good work happen. So the goal of the book will be to help clients reshape their organization to be more interconnected, faster to respond to both consumers and culture, and better equipped to adapt to change. In short, the corporation hasn't co-evolved with its environment and it shows.

Broadly, we get that this is a real problem. But for the fat and happy here, can you share a more specific example of how the way things currently are, and why it's so bad?

I'll give a specific example from a past client of mine - which we'll just call Brand X. 2004 was a particularly good year for Brand X. A banner year, in fact. Sales had never been higher, and all future years are now measured against that remarkable year. In every excel file, brought into every meeting, this month's sales are compared to that month in 2004.

The really troubling bit is that even though 2004 is the measuring stick for all future years, no one at Brand X has a clue why 2004 was such a good year. This is partly the fault of an organizational policy where team members rotate positions constantly (ostensibly to collect more information), and partly because, like every other company, they didn’t have a system in place to record an institutional memory beyond the size of an ad budget. Culture is something we have to get better at capturing. In 2004, Brand X road the crest of some type of cultural wave – but no one was recording anything about the culture outside the building.

The book will largely be an interdisciplinary search for strategies to solve this type of problem. One avenue I'll pursue rather aggressively is artificial intelligence. To make a long story short, when we design algorithms to learn on their own, we focus on three equally important activities: making predictions about the future and the environment, collecting feedback about those predictions, and evolving through some process of adaptation and mutation. Just as a computer attempts to get better at chess, companies are attempting to 'improve' at generating profit, increasing shareholder value, etc. And yet, you can almost always find drastic deficiencies in these three activities among even the top Fortune 500 firms.

Interesting. Now, if you've captured anyone's interest so far, enough so that they start sniffing out more information on you and what you're up to, one of the first things they will uncover is that you're a social media douchebag.

I'm not sure where you're going with this.

Well, specifically, we're going to your twitter profile. Let's talk about how these 15,000 tweets - 15,000, I mean, Jesus - helped you land an editorial board that reads like a Who's Who of advertising.

What if I said I had that Memento disease where my short term memory is on the fritz, and I also have a paralyzing fear of needles? Twitter's my outboard brain. Wait, what was I saying? WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU!?

Kidding aside, my [twitter] network is full of the smartest people out there. I was able to raise over $18,000 for the book not because of who I am, but because of who we are. We live in interesting times when being completely open about ideas, rallying some likeminded folks, and making shit happen beats hoarding an idea, toiling away in secret, and never releasing anything. For the first time in a long while, an idea given air to breathe and an opportunity to grow support is far more valuable than that secret idea locked away behind a mountain of legal jargon and secrecy.

Spoken like a true crowdsourcer/Victor's and Spoils employee. But let's not beat around the bush; I wouldn't refer to this crowd you've sourced as a random sample - which is what the word "crowdsourcing" tends to suggest, albeit incorrectly. What is the average profile of the type of person that's gotten involved? Can you namedrop?

Well, this isn't a crowdsourced book. Let's be clear. And it was network-funded, I'd say, and not crowdfunded, whatever that might mean. But the difference is probably unimportant to most.

I was incredibly fortunate to rally so many influential and smart people among the industry. If people gave $100 or more, they're now a part of what I call the Editorial Board, a group of people that are helping refine the point of view of the book, suggest experts to interview, and case studies to pursue. Some members of the Editorial Board include: Johnny Vulkan (Partner at Anomaly), Faris Yakob (Chief Innovation Officer at MDC), Adam Wohl (Co-founder of MIR), Gareth Kay (Director of Brand Strategy at Goodby), James Cooper (CD at Saatchi NY), and a slew of other people that equally deserve their name in this list. You can see (and follow, if you do that) everyone that backed the project on Twitter, through this list.

You've got this idea, this funding, and this network of smart people. And the smart people are the reason for the funding. In other words, that few years normal people who think about writing a book take to actually start writing it is not in the cards - you're ball and chained. Are you ready?

I recently read that Threadless started building their business one hour after they baked the idea for the company. That's a good pace to keep up with, I think. And my network isn't a ball and chain, it's a badass jetpack with flames painted on it next to Lee Majors smiling and giving the "I'm the Six-Million-Dollar-Man, and you're awesome" thumbs up. Lens flare.

If this un-advertising book goes bigtime, it's safe to predict that we're in for another buzzword - so what's your purple cow? When our clients start slinging it at us, we wanna be prepared.

In the traditional publishing model I'd need my slogan, my predetermined point of view, an outline, a couple example chapters, and a few 'influencers' already locked down to write jacket blurbs all BEFORE I actually did any of the substantive research behind the book. I'd also need to be Gary Vaynerchuck level internet famous, too, since publishing companies don't want to spend the money to promote books anymore. Or don't have the money.

In the traditional model, I wouldn't get a shot at publishing and I don't think I'd want one (though that's easy to say now). I raised the $18k to fund the research behind the book and I take it pretty damn seriously. The goal of the book is to demonstrate how the corporation can better equip itself to meet the challenges and opportunities the networked world presents – and I don't want to offer one-dimensional, cardboard cutout answers to that serious challenge. Most business books are the equivalent of packing a framed photo of a life raft under your seat on the airplane instead of the real thing. I'd like to be useful first and catchy second.

Well, we appreciate the thoughtfulness. HT @bud_caddell.

Heh. Hat tip to you too.