FMC Fast Chat: Finding Your Superpower

This is the Fast Chat on creativity, innovation, and finding your superpower. Our featured guest is Abigail Posner, Director of Google's Brand Unit. As a thought leader, author, manager, and corporate executive, Abby inspires people to view business challenges and everyday behaviors through a more human lens that celebrates the multifaceted aspects of the individual. Take a listen and be in the know in 30.

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement. Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Here's the deal. You're different, but you're my kind of different, because when I look at your background, it doesn't make any sense on paper, but somehow it all comes together today. So you went to Harvard University.

Yes.

You studied anthropology.

Yes.

But you're working for a technology company. You blog about beauty and you have a YouTube series. So all of these things seem rather disconnected.

Yeah.

But yet they're not. So how are you making this work? And what does this mean, especially for life today?

Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me on this show. I am so inspired by you, Jaci. So this is gonna be a fun conversation. You know, none of this was done in a premeditated fashion. when I think about my career trajectory and then what I do.

Mm-hm.

Really, it's all about really what I love. But there is a through line. There is a leitmotif. And I would say it started way before college, but then I found my home in college where I found this thing called social anthropology. Actually, I was fortunate enough to study a subset of that called economic anthropology. But that's a conversation for another day. But really, if you break it down, Social anthropology is all about trying to understand why people do what we do.

Mm-hm.

Why we eat what we eat or wear what we wear, or in the case of economic anthropology, trade what we trade, right? And so it was so fascinating to me to dig into these whys, because people often forget it, or they think it's frivolous, or who cares why we wear what we wear? But if you actually dig deep, you reveal so much about our culture and our values and really what makes us tick. So that, quest for understanding the why of human beings just kind of stayed with me and I couldn't get it out of my system. After a horrible stint in management consulting, my fault, not theirs, I moved into advertising and I was a brand strategist. In that field, I had to kind of do the same thing. I had to understand what makes people tick. I had to understand why people buy what they buy. Everything from Cheetos to financial services to insurance. And the answers to those whys were often profound and game-changing, leading to so many new product ideas, communication ideas, brand ideas. And then while that was happening, I did a piece of work for a beauty company.

Okay.

And the question was, well, what does beauty mean? for women in the United States? In other words, let me restate the question, 'cause literally the question was, how are American women seduced by beauty? It was asked by a Frenchman. I said, well, that's like a 5,000-page dissertation, but I will go at it. And so for a year, I dug into what is it about our relationship to beauty that explains why we have this, you know, polarity of, um, of feelings about it. We both— we, we demonize it, but we idolize it. And what does it mean if you're this age or that age, or if you're male or female, or come from this part of the country or that part of the country? And I just kind of really dove in. And then I had all this wealth of knowledge about why people feel the way they feel about beauty, and it is profound. Right? I mean, people are still having beauty contests.

Mm-hmm.

Why? Why do we still have beauty— what is going on there? Now, you could say, oh, people are having beauty contests. They're so stupid or frivolous. Or you can say, hmm, no, there's something going on here and let's dig underneath the surface and try to understand it. Right? But anyway, I'd done all this work and then the beauty brand didn't know what to do with it. So I said, you know what? I'm gonna capitalize on this and I'm going to blog about it. Because there was no voice around this. There were voices around like what you can get on, you know, for sale at Sephora, but there were no voices around really what is going on with beauty. And the seemingly frivolous always gets me excited. The seemingly banal always gets me excited because I know underneath it you will find some real depth of understanding of human beings and how— ingenious they really are.

Okay.

So fast forward, and I got out of advertising and said, I want to do something different. I landed at Google.

Mm-hmm.

And I had to kind of figure out what I was going to do there. And I really felt like an imposter, quite frankly, because I didn't know a ton about tech. I mean, I wrote this blog, but I knew— I came because I had an understanding of the advertising community and particularly the role that I was in. But still, when you join a place like Google, or so many companies for that matter, you can't just do the job. You've got to figure out how you're going to make it really impactful and influential. And so I jumped into this thing, and I didn't really know what I was doing. But then I saw an opportunity. And it was that at the time, and maybe because I was so much of an imposter, At the time, there was a lot of information, great information, about what people were doing with the digital space. So how often they were looking on their smartphones, or what crazy videos they were watching on YouTube, or all the social media sites they were playing with, right? But nobody was trying to understand why.

Okay.

Why were they on their smartphones so much, really? Or, why were we watching these crazy videos? Are we just stupid? I didn't think so. Or, why do we need to be on so many social media sites? Isn't one enough? And so by digging into the why, I felt like we could reveal really what was going on here, what was so powerful about these different places and spaces, and then ultimately how my clients, who were advertisers, could leverage these different digital experiences to make them as powerful as possible, to really tap into what was meaningful, and then hopefully help Google continue to develop these platforms in a way that befitted how people were actually using them and the benefits from them. Because people may think of a phone as a very functional piece that Gives me the time and the day, and I can make calls, and I can take pictures. But then what we do, because we are so ingenious as human beings, is then take them and reimagine them to really fit what is so core to us. And so I said, well, let's go and hire some anthropologists and go into the field and truly understand why we have the relationship to this technology that we do. And what's this all about? And they literally went into the field like they would do an academic study and came back with so many fascinating insights. So you see the through line is really just always trying to understand why we do what we do. And as I said, the seemingly more banal, the better. And it really opened people's eyes to like, what is this all about? And that this is not some crazy, weird, techy space that I can't wrap my head around. There's actually real kind of humanness to this. And we ended up calling the series Humanizing Digital. And so, fast forward to today, and part— I run a team of multi-teams. And one of the first teams I started—

Mm-hmm.

—that is now part of this overarching team goes into our data sources and tries to understand why people think about certain issues or products or brands the way they do. So again, it's always about trying to understand the why. And because YouTube is one of our key platforms, I thought, hmm, maybe I should learn how to be a YouTuber, right? Instead of just talk about it in theory and have teams that develop advertising ideas for that space, which is what we do. So I started a series during COVID I was like, what am I going to do? And I started a series called Decoded, where I interview folks and really try to get underneath the skin of why they do what they do and who they are, and really try to reveal, you know, really the humanness in all of us, whether you're a ballroom dancer or a colonel in the Army or a public advocate, and the list goes on. So that's always been my interest. is the understanding of who we are. And so, I took it with me all the steps of the way. And I truly believe that if you love something, you should follow it. The term I use is follow the love, right? Because it will reap rewards. And the other thing I learned over time too, which I've adapted into my life, but I didn't realize it until later on, that There's actually— I'm actually doing something in particular, is that, you know, very young I realized I needed to cope. I needed to have a strategy, a survival skill, 'cause I never really felt like I was smart enough. I never felt like I could compete against my siblings who are so smart, compete against my fellow students who were wicked smart. So I said to myself, like, you know, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna have to tap these different sides of myself. Maybe it's my love of fashion, right? Or beauty. Or maybe it's my background, my Jewish background. I went to Jewish schools. I studied Talmud and Torah and Jewish philosophy. So I'd always tap these different sides of myself and incorporate them into what I was doing to give me some kind of edge, to give me some kind of story that was unique to me and that I kind of understood and I knew. And so as I started growing up and I left college and then I— again, this story of my beauty blog, even though my client didn't want it, right? Didn't know what to do with the information. I mean, they liked it. They didn't really know what to do with it. I thought, well, there's this thing called the internet and there's this thing called blogging and I probably need to have a voice.

Mm-hmm.

So why don't I combine that with my love of beauty and my love of human beings? Hence, I created this blog. And when I got to Google, similar story. Okay, I'm an imposter. I don't belong here. I'm not smart enough. But you know what? While I may not know a lot about technology, I know a ton about anthropology. And no one was really combining these sides together to come up with a new concept that was going to open the eyes of our clients in a new way.

Right.

And as I started realizing that I do this, I started looking at other innovative people that I admire, and I realized they're doing the same thing. They're combining their different sides. And so what I used to see as a survival skill became a superpower, and I call it embracing our expansiveness. So, you know, I feel like, well, I never thought about this until now. There are themes in my life. My love of human beings and understanding who they are, and my sense of passion that I just can't throw it out the window for something else. I have to hold on to it. The fact that I love these different things and find them interesting is a good thing. Don't worry if it doesn't fit the brand that you're supposed to be fitting into.

Mm-hmm.

Because ultimately, what's more important is how you use your sense of creativity to find connections among them to give you a unique story and give you a unique voice. And that's really at the heart of creativity. Creativity and innovative thinking is about bringing unlike notions, concepts together. Like, think Star Wars, you know? Sci-fi meets Greek tragedy coming together.

Yeah.

That's what so much of innovation is. So the fact that you can tap these different sides, you know, cultivate them, tap them, find a connection point, or as I say, look for the link, Wow, you can then pursue something that is so unique to you that you're passionate about. All comes together.

Do you think COVID really kind of opened organizations' eyes to the fact that your kind of background, or people with disjointed backgrounds, can bring a lot to the table that they otherwise would have dismissed? Like, once upon a time, if I got an accounting degree, I went off and I became an accountant, you know, no surprise there. But, but now it's seems like people with accounting degrees can become lots of other things. And it's not a bad thing anymore. It's not that you failed as an accountant. It's that you realize you have value other places. And I'm wondering, based on what we're seeing on headlines today, with basically every industry saying we need to be more innovative, if there's one thing COVID told us is we're not innovative enough, not only in our daily existence, but for what we're going to need to be doing in the future.

Yep.

So is that how this all starts to fit together?

You know, you, you could— I, I couldn't say it any better than you. That is literally the, the way I kick off my speeches now, right? Because I speak about innovation and creativity not in a technical way. I talk about it in terms of how can we be as innovative as possible, because that is our currency now. Absolutely. And if COVID taught us anything, it's that at a moment's notice, you're gonna have to innovate how you talk to your clients, how you teach your children, how you entertain yourself, right? I mean, everything. And so I can't stress enough how important— and by the way, this is something that was important to me prior to COVID, but now it's just kind of I think risen to your point, to the surface, how at the end of the day it's all about coming up with ideas. And ideas, as I said before, at the heart of creativity, ideas stem from really combining unlike notions and concepts. I used to do this with my clients to come up with ideas, and it doesn't take that long. That's the amazing thing. It's not like you have to spend 5 months secluded in an idea lab to come up with ideas.

Yeah. You can do it in a matter of minutes.

In fact, don't let your brain overthink because it'll probably kill an idea. Our brains are hardwired to want to make connections. Those are the synapses in our brains. And in fact, the more random the stimuli, the better, right? So first of all, we are all hardwired to want to be creative. So no one should think, oh, well, I'm, you know, I— I'm not creative. whatever, I'm an accountant or I'm something that's not creative. I'm not a musician. Absolutely not. We are all hardwired to want to do this. Our brains want to make connections. They want to synapse. Right? Leonardo da Vinci discovered this centuries ago. He said, the human brain cannot fathom a series of unrelated objects, items, images without our brains trying to connect them. We cannot not make connections. So that's great.

Mm-hmm.

The thing is, is we have to be open. And this is where this conversation comes in, right? We have to be open to lots of stimuli that we may filter out and be willing to make connections that may seem bizarre at first. Anthropology and technology? You know, beauty and thought leadership? Right? I mean, all these things. Jewish philosophy in my studies in college and anthropology and economics? What? Right? You have to be willing to make these connections that may seem bizarre at first. But it's these connections that bring forth something new and powerful. So absolutely, this is the time to be innovative. And I think it's exciting because it doesn't mean you have to become somebody you're not. Just the opposite. What is it that you have within yourself that is going to be a powerful source of innovation, right? It's all these different sides. You have. So, Jaci, like, back to you. What are your— just name different things that may seem totally disparate, but yet you figured out a way to connect them.

Let's see. Well, probably my writing and my dancing, which, okay, they're both creative, but they're different totally on some level, but they're also the same on another level. Because when you write, there's a rhythm to it. When you dance, there's a rhythm to it. Yeah. And Now I can write about my dancing. So it's a different thing to write about.

Totally.

So that's how that comes together.

And you just did that in like a minute.

Yeah.

I put you on the spot.

You did.

No prep for that. You know, um, and so imagine what you can do when you say, okay, I— my love for fashion, my mothering— I'm a mother of 3— my, um, interest in my Jewish background, um, the fact that I love to be on stage, a ham for the I mean, all these things start coming together. No wonder I'm a public speaker and I bring these things together to share them with the world. Because not only do I love to learn about how amazing people are, I love to be able to share it with others and see how they can go, yeah, you're right. I am pretty— that is amazing. We are amazing as human beings. So it all comes together.

Yeah. So I want to backtrack a little bit though to ask you about some of the whys. So we seem to be in a very serious relationship with technology now because of the pandemic. It's our way to connect when we can't see people physically. Why are we so attached to technology? What is it within us that we have this love-hate relationship? And I also, before I forget, I do want to know why do people like Cheetos?

That to me, you know, is one of those great mysteries of life. I don't remember the Cheetos. I did work on, on Hot Pockets. But that, that all answer, you know, if we get to it. But look, I think if we go back in time, human beings have always been on the quest to progress. And we've always been striving to develop that technology to help us progress. Someone discovered fire, right? A long time ago.

Mm-hmm.

That was a technology that we did not have before. And that technology allowed us to see, At night, allowed us to make food, you know, cook food, allowed us to sterilize. I mean, so on and so forth. Was it also harmful? Can you burn down a house with fire? You can. But throughout culture, we have developed these technologies, figured out ways to use them we never even thought we could or needed to do, and we also learned how to navigate them. So that we can mitigate the challenges that come forth with it. Because there are always going to be challenges. That's human nature, that we'll see something that we can use for good and we could use for bad. And the human species generally, I believe, wants to progress. That's kind of the mindset of an anthropologist. Like, the reason people are doing seemingly weird things is actually because it has value, right? Not that they're weird.

Okay.

So when you have that mindset, You recognize that, for the most part, we use fire for good things. We don't use fire for bad things. Okay, so let's go through, you know, history. Metallurgy, another technology, which, thank goodness, we have because now we can cut meat, right? And now, did people also make swords out of it? Yes, right? So there's always going to be those, those two sides. The printing press, something I'm sure you feel very passionate about.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That changed the entire universe. We could now be educated. It could also print Mein Kampf. So should we say the printing press should now be destroyed because something like Mein Kampf can be printed from it?

Right.

Right? So there's always things that we as a society have to do to ensure we're using that technology in the most powerful, meaningful, uplifting way. So, you know, I don't— so I don't think, you know, it's the last 20 years or the last 50 years. years with IBM that we started getting interested in technology. We always have. It's just how it evolves has changed. And so I think particularly now during the pandemic, we have a heightened sense of, for the most part, goodwill towards technology. Of course, there are issues around privacy. Of course, there are issues around— I mean, the story— you see the headlines. But for the most part, how would we have gotten information about where to get vaccinated?

Right.

How would we have been able to educate our children? How would we have been able to have meetings? How would we have been able to, as fundamental as it sounds, entertain ourselves without the technology that we are using right now to enlighten each other? Right? And so I think there's a lot of headlines. People— there's some people who just love to live in fear, and there is that. And sometimes it's warranted. I get it. But we often don't realize how powerful and uplifting and enlightening and edifying the technology we use every day is because we take it for granted, or it's not sexy to tell stories about that. And so when I bring anthropologists in and reveal And help us understand and see really some super meaningful ways we're using technology and don't even realize it. All of a sudden we go, oh yeah. And it's not so much, oh, therefore I love the technology. No, the ultimate goal is to say, oh, therefore I love human beings.

When you talk about expansiveness now, yeah, is there any kind of boundary to it?

Just like with every type of brainstorming session, some, some of your brainstorming sessions are stinky and some of them are good. As long as you do enough of them, right, you'll come up with something good. So for example, to help my clients come up with marketing ideas, I would say, okay, get into a group. We're going to spend 10, 15 minutes and we're going to try to combine different stuff together, different variables together. A consumer truth.

Mm-hmm.

Human beings love the taste of strawberry soda. Okay? A cultural truth, diversity and inclusion. A product truth, the soda is all-natural. And then something about a— and then combine it with a, let's say, a platform.

Okay.

See if we can find the connections among these different things. Spend 20 minutes doing that, move on to another brainstorming session. And then you change up the variables, right? In certain cases, you're going to have ideas that really resonate, and certain cases, you're going to have ideas that don't. Certain variables mixing together will work, and in some cases, they won't. But you don't know. I don't know. So when you say limits, I think it's that maybe it's not about combining every single side of yourself to solve a challenge. I think certain challenges will really benefit from combining certain sides, and other challenges will benefit from combining other sides. So for example, going back to humanizing digital, Google. That was the combination of tech meets anthropology. I didn't have to bring in my Jewish background there. There's no reason to. I didn't have to bring in necessarily my love for beauty.

Mm-hmm.

Didn't, you know, that didn't have a role. When I started doing Decoded on YouTube, then I started bringing in other different facets of myself because I wanted to show that you— that everybody, no matter their background, has something interesting to say. So I would bring a fashion designer who's now a good friend of mine, a stylist to the stars. And then I had another interview with someone who is a business leader and wrote a very serious book about business. And you're like, wait, what's the common— what's the connection? The connection is that we all have depth of stories to be shared. And they too combine different sides to get to the opportunities that they have in front of them.

One of the things you brought up is how you started on YouTube as a way to actually experience what you would otherwise be theorizing in the office.

Correct.

So what did you learn from that? Because I think that's interesting because a lot of people just don't do it. You know, it's like the CEO that never visits a customer or a client and really has no idea how his or her organization is actually performing?

It's really hard. I have a lot of respect for the YouTube star. You know, I'm trying to get subscribers and I have to, like, you know, twist my son's arm to get his friends to subscribe. It's really hard. Just the setup. I learned how to edit. I'm not saying I'm a great video editor, but all the skills that are necessary to prepare and then to set up and then to— then you have to do a kick-ass interview and then you've got to edit it and then you've got to solicit and make sure people are— and advertise it. It's just a whole series of processes. So now I have so much more respect for the YouTube star and can learn and see things I didn't see before because I'm so thrust in the middle of it. But at the same time, I think I don't want people to be afraid of it too, because what did I know? I remember I was trying to pitch a TV show, totally different story. And then COVID hits and everything falls apart and I'm all depressed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And my buddy says to me, what are you doing? Get off your butt and do some kind of, you know, YouTube type show. Why not? And I thought, like, it's too much work. I can't do it. I mean, I know the platform, but I gotta buy the lights. I don't know what I'm doing. No, one step at a time, you can figure it out, and anyone can do it. And that's so cool, that really, like, if I can do it, anyone can do it.

Yeah. So what would you have in terms of advice for people today? Because everybody's into technology, everybody's trying to get their message out. Yeah. Everybody's trying to be remembered, which is really the hard thing now because we're all exposed to so much information. It's hard to remember anything anymore. Doesn't matter how old you are. No one remembers anything. So what kind of advice do you have for organizations that are using technology, but maybe aren't rising to the level of that human connection? How do you do that?

I, the one particular study that we did in our Humanizing Digital series was around social media. And what we found was that it was a very human place. There's like a certain lingo that— and the expectation is that you are vulnerable. The expectation is that you are open and honest. And sometimes more honest than you would be not on that platform. And we realized something, that if you are a company or— a member of a company or you're just a human being, you have to be authentic. It is— it just will not resonate at all. After looking at all the insights around how people are using this space, what we recognized was that actually what people were doing were self-making and self-making through others. And what I mean by that is it could be starting a company. It could be creating a video series. It could be getting a haircut, right? But what happens on this space is that you are vulnerable and honest, so there's no filter.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, yes, you filter your picture, but you don't necessarily filter what you're trying to share. You put it out there in an open and honest way. People then respond in an open, honest way. You solicit feedback and ideas. I mean, the whole notion of crowdsourcing, hive mind, is reflective there. And through that process, through the exchange of ideas and insights, sometimes negative points of view, sometimes positive points of view, you start learning about yourself and how you show up. So whether you like my haircut or not, or how you think I should style my hair, Mm-hmm. then makes me kind of realize how I, how I could potentially show up in this world. You're helping me self-make. Or if you have ideas about an article that I'm writing or a business that I'm starting, all of that allows me to self-make through others. And then people participate in that and then purchase it or then comment on the article or whatever it is. And that's a deeply human experience. And so If you're going to leverage these technologies, don't be afraid to be you. But what that means is you have to take a look at yourself and say, "Well, what is me?" Right? If you say everyone's 25, I can't do it. Well, just the opposite. That's why we need someone who isn't 25, right? People are craving real, and I know authenticity is kind of one of those throwaway words now. So you know, replace it with what feels right. But it's really who you are, and that's why. not only kind of understanding and being self-aware is critical, but that combining of different sides helps you there too, because you will have a voice and a story that is both vulnerable and real, but unique, 'cause you wanna be unique, right?

Yeah.

So, I mean, it all comes together, and we have to let go of being afraid of being real. Doesn't mean you have to look like a mess. Doesn't mean your lighting has to stink. I mean, that's what we learned. You got to upgrade the lighting. The sound's got to be good because people want to feel you and feel the real you. They want to hear the real you. They'll forgive you if a cat hops on the desk, but still, there's still an element of professionalism. But still, it's about your story, and that's what people are really craving right now.

I have one more question for you, a little bit off the beaten path, but it's one of the favorite questions according to the audience, and that is, What's the best part about being Abigail Posner?

The sense of adventure that I think I have. I'm a very curious person, and that sometimes is my downfall because I feel like I have to do all these things and meet all these people. But because of that, it also propels me. It propels me to travel to different places, meet interesting people. I have a hashtag in the back of my brain that I use all the time, which Just say yes. When Jaci calls me and says, hey, would you be on this webinar? Just say yes, which seems so basic, but so many people say no.

Yeah.

Right? Just say yes to meeting somebody you don't know. Just say yes to trying maybe a food you didn't think you'd like. Right? And all of a sudden the doors open. And because of that aspect of my life that I've just said yes, not without trepidation, But I have explored different, different sides of myself and different sides of the world. The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating for quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org.