Marc Rust – Consequently Creative

Marc Rust – Consequently Creative

What role can creativity and branding play in driving real business growth?

In this episode of the Radical Global Marketing Podcast, Steven Proud is joined by Marc Rust, Managing Director of Consequently Creative, to explore how brand, creativity and storytelling can help businesses navigate transformation, build stronger cultures and ultimately create greater value.

Marc's own relationship with marketing started at an early age. Moving to France at nine without speaking French, he found himself drawn to the advertising he saw on the streets, in subway stations and on television. Advertising became a window into both the language and the culture, and sparked a fascination with what Marc describes as the "magic" marketing can create.

That fascination eventually developed into a career spanning both the creative and financial worlds, including roles within agencies and major financial institutions. Today, Consequently Creative brings those two worlds together, working particularly closely with private equity firms and their portfolio companies.

Branding through business transformation

A major theme of the conversation is what happens to a brand when a business itself is changing.

Marc introduces the idea of "acquisition turbulence", the uncertainty that can spread through an organisation following an acquisition. While the financial case for a deal may be clear, employees can suddenly find themselves questioning what the change means for their roles, their company and its future.

Without effective communication, that uncertainty can quickly affect culture and talent retention.

Marc argues that this is where branding and marketing have a much bigger role to play than simply communicating a new name or visual identity. By explaining why a company was acquired, celebrating what made it valuable in the first place and creating a clear story about where the combined business is heading, marketing can become an important part of the transformation itself.

In this episode...

Steven and Marc discuss:

• Marc's unconventional introduction to marketing and creativity
• Why finance and marketing need to work more closely together
• The role of brand in private equity and portfolio company growth
• How businesses can navigate "acquisition turbulence"
• Why internal audiences are critical during periods of transformation
• How organisations can uncover and amplify what makes them different
• Why creativity can thrive in finance and other highly analytical industries
• How storytelling and shared values can help bring different company cultures together
• Why brands need to be continually nurtured and evolved
• How AI is changing the creative landscape
• Why human ingenuity and taste could become even more valuable in an AI-driven world

Marc also shares a fascinating example of a technology company facing a significant identity and cultural challenge following an acquisition. Through workshops, listening and storytelling, his team helped uncover the disconnect between how employees viewed the organisation and where the business was actually heading, and helped create a story that people could understand, believe in and get behind.

Don't be lazy with AI

The conversation finishes by turning to a subject no marketing podcast can completely avoid: AI.

For Marc, the opportunity isn't simply about using AI to produce more content, more quickly. In fact, he warns against allowing automation to replace thought, creativity and judgement.

As AI makes it easier to create work that is technically competent but increasingly predictable, Marc believes there is a growing opportunity for people who can bring genuine ingenuity, originality and human perspective to their work.

He uses legendary music producer Rick Rubin to make the point. Rubin's greatest strength isn't technical proficiency, it's his ability to recognise what matters and know what to amplify.

In other words, taste matters.

And in a world where everyone has access to increasingly powerful creative tools, it may matter more than ever. 

Transcript

Audio file

Mark Rust Audio Only.mp3

Transcript

Speaker 1

Welcome to the Radical Global Marketing Podcast. In each episode, we go deep with the world's leading international marketers and discuss the ideas and processes that make their global marketing strategies a success. Let's get radical.

Speaker 2

Hello everyone and welcome back to the latest episode of the Radical Global Marketing Podcast. My name is Stephen, one of your regular co-hosts and today I'm delighted to be joined by Mark Rust. Mark leads Consequently Creative where he focuses on driving brand-led growth for businesses aiming to scale, secure investment and increase valuation. As managing director, he oversees branding and marketing transformations that bring together strategy, creative execution and business objectives to deliver measurable impact. With a background in steering global rebrands, digital innovation and complex creative operations, Mark's built a career around shaping brand experiences that resonate, creating the kind of meaningful connections that fuel growth and elevate marketing perception. Whether working with PE backed companies or high growth challenges, Mark's approach is all about crafting brand systems that support real ambition. Now Mark's going to tell this way better than I can in just a second, but as ever, first we have a quick word from our sponsor. The Radical Global Marketing Podcast is proudly produced in partnership with Brandigo China. For nearly 20 years, Brandigo's brand of local insight and international marketing expertise has helped multinational brands cut through the noise and succeed in the China market. The radically relevant China marketing approach brings together research-driven strategy, bold creative and seamless execution across all major China channels. If you're looking to build your brand, accelerate demand or simply understand how to connect with Chinese audiences in a meaningful way, the Brandigo China team is ready to help. Lean more at brandigochina.com or reach out directly to the team at any time and we'll We'll put all the relevant contact details in the show notes. Mark, good morning. How are you?

Speaker 3

Excellent. Great to be on the podcast. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2

No, it's a pleasure. I was really excited when you said you'd take part. So whereabouts in the world are you sitting at the moment?

Speaker 3

We're on the East Coast of the United States in Boston.

Speaker 2

It's a cool city. We've got a sister company in Boston and I'm looking forward to the next time I get to visit. It's a really fun town.

Speaker 3

Yeah, it's awesome. There's a lot of agencies here, a lot of opportunities for companies and a lot of industries seem to be very focused on Boston.

Speaker 2

That's interesting. Okay, well, I'm sure we're going to get into that in just a second, but let's just start with a little bit on your own journey. Can you give us a kind of a snapshot in how you got into creativity and the branding world?

Speaker 3

Yeah, sure. I almost didn't have a choice in a way. As a child, well, my mother's French and my father's American, and I had to move to France at the age of nine. And I didn't speak a word of French.

Speaker 2

Oh, wow.

Speaker 3

I had never experienced the culture or anything. So it was really being thrown in there. And yes, I went to bilingual schools and stuff, but it was really tough and I wasn't a particularly good student. But one thing that really spoke to me was the advertising in the streets. and in the subway stations and the commercials on TV. So much that when my mother would watch TV shows, she would call me into the room when the commercials would come on. And I would look at the advertising. And that really taught me French. It taught me how to, and it taught me about the culture. And those are things that really fascinated me. And little by little, Steve, I started falling in love with the magic of that marketing can create. And what I mean by magic is the juxtaposition of elements such as a great headline with fantastic video or a fantastic image, a jingle, some music, acting, a scene is set. It's something you can't ignore. And it's also something that you can really understand no matter what the language is.

Speaker 2

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3

So it provided context for me and I was like, I just loved it. And so that's what I'm doing.

Speaker 2

Fantastic. So then With that in mind, and with all of that kind of creative influence, because I know the artwork style that you get in France is always fascinating. It's got a really distinctive style to a lot of the creative that you see there. What then lets you to focus on sort of helping the private equity firms and the portfolio companies that you work with more today?

Speaker 3

Well, that's fast forwarding years and years ahead. But I, well, I've always had this interest in marketing and advertising, obviously. But I also had strong interest and a lot of my career was working for financial institutions. So I have somewhat of a background in understanding finance and how the complication of finance needs marketing to explain it. And there's a few key industries that will always work hand in hand with marketing and finance is one of them. So that really led me into understanding that there's a courtship that can really happen between marketing and finance. And then finally, as I built my own loan agency, consequently creative, we started working with private equity companies. And these are companies that traditionally buy a company through an acquisition and then nurture it and find a time to sell it down the road. Well, come to find out, there are a lot of branding ideas and branding things that should come into practice are often overlooked in the world of private equity. So we step in and we take that off of their plate and we take care of it because believe it or not, private equity changes when you apply branding and marketing to it because all businesses need to evolve, right? And what we do is we take care of the cover of a book because you judge a book by its cover, right? We take care of the positioning of that brand, how it it relates to its audience, etc. And ultimately it helps and it's a big driver in increasing the valuation of a portfolio company or a private equity firm.

Speaker 2

Absolutely. I love that you got that quote on your website as well. Let's keep judging books by their covers, but let's make the covers. tell the story about it. I love that. So Mark, just to take it back a step, because I did fast forward quite a few years, not that I'm suggesting that you're older than me or anything, but were you always in the financial services industry? Were you always working in finance before you founded the agency?

Speaker 3

Not, no, not at all. I think I have a healthy mix. I worked for agencies and advertising companies as well as financial companies like JP Morgan. So it's kind of something I dabbled in and went in and out of through my career.

Speaker 2

It's just, I think it's a really interesting niche. So I think. My perception is private equity can be quite complex and a bit of a numbers driven world. So what makes it such an interesting or challenging space for brand and communications work in your mind?

Speaker 3

Because I think these are things that are overlooked. And you mentioned that as a niche. Yes, it is a niche for us because we can really provide a lot of solutions for this industry. When a company, so If I walk you through a little bit of the process of how private equity, they acquire a company. And usually when you acquire a company, it's under the cloak of secrecy. You can't tell people, hey, we're going to acquire you in a few weeks because that would affect valuations. It might affect if it's on the stock market, there might be insider trading, all sorts of stuff. So it's done under the cloak of secrecy. And typically what they do is they bring people into a conference room and they say, hey, everybody, we've been acquired. We're no longer longer ABC company, now a DEF company. Well, that can be quite shocking. Communication is an issue right there, right? And you have to do a lot of effort in order to communicate effectively. And the company goes through something that we've termed as acquisition turbulence. And acquisition turbulence compared to plane turbulence, which for some people, everybody experiences this in a very, very different way, right? For some people, they'll be on a plane and there's turbulence. They might be reading a book, watching a movie, listening to music. They have to stop everything they do and they have to focus their mind on hoping that this plane doesn't go down. Other people are okay with it and other people know that it's going to pass. Well, when it comes to a company and it comes to acquisition turbulence, it is vital that you actually communicate effectively to all of those audiences. If you don't, you have people that start brushing off their resume and thinking, oh my gosh, what am I supposed to do? Should I leave? Should I get a new job? Oh, I'm sick and tired of this place. Oh, they've done this before. I don't want to be in this environment anymore. So it really kills the culture of the company. But if you work hand in hand with a marketing company like ours, what you get is you get a partner who's going to take care of that portion of things, communicating effectively celebrating the company that was acquired and actually telling them why they were acquired, why they're remarkable, and why they should stay. In many, many cases, companies get acquired because of the top talent within that company. And if that top talent jumps ship, well, then we have a problem, right? So there's always going to be a need to communicate effectively to celebrate the company, to start telling the right stories at the right time so you can nurture that brand and really help with the business transformation that will be in line with your institutional goals.

Speaker 2

That's fascinating. So, please go ahead.

Speaker 3

I just wanted to add that financial types and private equity people are really, really good at the numbers game and at evaluating the numbers. They're actually very, very poor at marketing.

Speaker 2

For sure.

Speaker 3

So there's a need for us to work together.

Speaker 2

For sure. And I think as when I interrupted, it's fascinating because. It sounds that the internal audience, both from the acquiring company and the company being acquired, are just as important in terms of target audiences for the work that you're doing as any external audience seems to be. Is that a fair assumption?

Speaker 3

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 2

It sounds as well as though there's a lot of core principles to good communication and good marketing. That's the basis of what you guys do as well, which translate very well to marketing in all of its forms or wherever you're looking to be successful. Are there any specific lessons that you think marketers in other industries can learn from how you kind of translate this, what could be quite a complex relationship into kind of clear human stories?

Speaker 3

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, listen, everything grows in the world from a plant to a human to a child, a business, an industry. Things change. We can't predict the future, right? But one thing we do know is that things are going to evolve. So if you have a company that is doing well and then you don't take care of that company and you don't nurture it, and what I mean by taking care of it is specifically how does your audience relate to you and how are you communicating to that audience? What are you saying? If you're not nurturing that, then you're losing out and things are over time are gonna get old and they're gonna get stale. I mean, I'm sure that a lot of the people listening to this podcast, they should honestly ask themselves right now, when was the last time I changed the headline on my website? Or does the headline on my website today make sense? Is there something we can do? Probably. Okay, well, what about below that headline? What else are we saying? What are we saying about our products? What are we saying about the industries we serve? Maybe it's time you get up and actually go and walk over to your sales team and ask them to give you the sales pitch right now. If you're not doing that and nurturing it, then you're missing out because we can always do better. You know, there's a quote that I absolutely love and it's always like kind of driven me throughout my career. And it's a quote from a 1960s furniture designer called Harry Bertoia. And it goes along the lines of, The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living. Okay, because somehow, there's always a better way to do things. I love that quote because I take good design and I can replace it with anything. The urge for better food is the same as the urge to go on living. The urge for better finance, the urge for better construction, anything you want, right? But there should be a passion around what you're doing and you should nurture your business and it will ultimately become better.

Speaker 2

Absolutely. So I don't want you to give away the secret sauce or anything like that, but I'm interested in just for the next couple of discussion points, focusing a little bit on your process and focusing a little bit on how consequently creative sort of approaches the projects and the briefs that it receives. So in looking at some of your content, you often talk about amplifying A company's voice and a person, I beg your pardon, and its purpose. Could you just speak to that in a little bit more detail? How do you kind of work with them to uncover and express that purpose in a way that they might have not thought deeply about themselves previously?

Speaker 3

Well, there's so much to say there and we do have a secret sauce and I don't think I'll be giving it away. But first off, the definition of branding to me is what you stand for in the minds of the people you're trying to reach, influence, and move into action. So if my brand I stand for in your mind, then it's not really something I own, right? So we help our clients realize that first off. So that means that you need to nurture it. That means that you need to influence it. And we set out to give people the tools so they can influence their brand. You know, what you say, how you get people excited about it, the stories around your brand, the energy that you portray around a brand, right? And then having clear communication, clear goals. If you have everybody within your company aligned to the same goal, well, then they're going to convey that in a certain way to the audience. Their sales are going to convey that as well. And things are little by little going to influence and you'll be able to have more of a finger on what you stand for. in the minds of the people you're trying to influence. So that's the first thing. And then the other thing as far as like energy goes and the excitement around a brand is that basic branding, and there's a lot of definitions for branding, but I'll give you another one, is how are you different from your competition? And let's amplify that, okay? That is going to help you stand out. So we do that as well. So we try to really help people have a unique voice above their competition. The more you do that, the more effective you're going to be and the easier your audience is going to be so they can identify you and choose you and raise their hand and say, hey, you know what? I want to go with this company. Because you're giving them all the tools to choose you.

Speaker 2

Must be, though, a lot of the clients that you're working with are going to be with a very analytical background. They're going to be working in very high pressure situations themselves. Are there any sort of challenges in kind of bringing them along? with you when you're talking about some of the concepts that you and I as marketers, we work day in and day out with this, but this might be not something that's a bit out of their comfort zone, for example.

Speaker 3

Yes, it's absolutely out of their comfort zone. In the world of finance, you will find people that marketers do not get along with at all, people who do not understand marketing and don't want to. That happens in any industry, in any job. And yes, it is a challenge. You have to find the people who can lean in with you and who share this passion. But if you are successful at explaining why these things matter and how people choose companies and products, then you're more likely to move this very financial type, let's say, to understanding. We're all human and we're all emotional. So even the Scrooge has emotions and we need to tell stories that resonate ultimately. But when it comes to approaching a private equity firm and working with them, yes, you need to identify the people who have an understanding of marketing. If they don't have that understanding, then you need to educate them and show them the value. And sometimes, we've come across some people who have never felt that they're creative, but they discover that they are actually through our process. And they get very, very excited. Not to divulge our process too much, but we have a series of workshops that we run people through. And those workshops help people understand how to build a brand foundation and then how to have the fertile ground necessary for growth. That's fascinating.

Speaker 2

We in the day job, we do similar things with some quite complex B2B audiences. And it's the same. You always, I love the workshops because there's always somebody that surprises you, whoever. there's always somebody that you don't peg as being the creative type, but they'll come out with something completely profound or have a really interesting take on stuff and they really get into it and always find that hugely rewarding. We did an interview recently with a gentleman called James Killer. from the Mission Control. And he, again, he works in an industry specializing in similar to work to what you guys do, but specializing in very ******** bioscience and pharmaceutical clients. And he kind of talked a lot about how creativity can thrive even in these tightly regulated industries like sciences. And I think there's quite a lot of parallels between what you guys are doing within the private equity space in terms of how this creativity cuts through complexity, but more importantly to what you spoke about earlier, building that trust with both the internal and external audiences as well. Is that a fair assumption to make?

Speaker 3

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you can find creativity everywhere. You just need to ignite it in a certain way. And I use the word ignite because I really believe that it's contagious and you start a spark somewhere and it really can help change the culture of a company. In the cases of private equity and acquisitions, often you're bringing two companies together that obviously have a very, very different culture. What do you do? How do you make that work? The way you do is by building relationships and finding similarities between these two teams and actually celebrating what they do and then showing them that the merging of these two companies or two groups is creating something even better than the sum of its parts, right? But I do want to say one thing about creativity in an industry that isn't particularly marked as a creative one. When you want to be really good at your job or you want to stand out, you want to be noticeable, you want to be remarkable, this doesn't happen by accident. I think that this happens through education. through appreciation of different things and through a wider understanding of things in general. And I know this very cryptic what I'm saying, but I'll get to it. If you look at somebody like Albert Einstein, who is a remarkable physicist, he was also a virtuoso violin player. And he brought his violin everywhere he went. And he was very, very often invited to play at with symphonies. So this isn't a guy that dabbled in violin playing. He was an excellent, excellent, remarkable violin player. And I would argue that the reason why he was such a good scientist is also because he was such a good musician. Those were parallel and went hand in hand, right? So that creativity is important and If somebody is not creative today, I would argue that they need to balance their life out. If they did something a little creative, they would actually be better at their job. They would be better at finance, for example. So you're really opening the door to being more aware of different things, being interested in different things, and ultimately being interesting yourself. right? I mean, if you, we've all, maybe you've been in situations where you've had to hire somebody and you've interviewed 20, 30 people and one after the other. And after a while, candidates all sound the same. They all say the same thing. And I think a lot of them make a big mistake in believing that they need to prove to you why they can do the job, which is not the case. You wouldn't be invited to the interview if you couldn't do the job. Your resume says you can do the job. I don't need to go your resume during the interview. I don't need to ask you how you could do the job. What I do need to do is I need to find out if you're interesting, if I'm going to want to work with you, if you think in a way that's going to complement my team, and if you're actually going to lift us up, right? So if somebody comes to you and says, oh, I've got a fantastic story. I like cooking, and this is how I cook, and I can make the best scrambled eggs in the world. All of a sudden, they're saying things that you're never going to forget, number one. And #2, they're showing you that they're creative and interesting and that they're different. In the beginning of the, we just talked a little bit about how branding is, how are you different? Let's amplify that, right? Same thing with an individual. The interesting people are the ones that we want to work with. So All of that's very, very important. You need to go out and do different things. You should be creative, you should be artistic, you should be analytical, you should read books, you should do things that make you feel uncomfortable, et cetera, et cetera. Is that what it is?

Speaker 2

I love that. Absolutely love that. I'm going to ask you then to see if we can, and I don't want you to name any names or anything like that, but it'd be interesting just to hear your take on a recent project that you actually kind of worked on and what were some of the moments that you're most proud of, but where that creative work made that real impact on the company's trajectory or was maybe the driver of that business transformation, not just in terms of marketing, but actually had that impact. Would you be able to take us through some examples? Like I said, I don't want you to name names, but it'd be interesting to hear some of this applied in the real world.

Speaker 3

Yeah, sure. And I'll try not to name anything.

Speaker 2

We can beat them out in the edit or something like that.

Speaker 3

Somebody can probably figure this out. But recently, actually this last summer, we had a situation where there was an acquisition of a new company and we were working with a company that worked on technology that could be applied to, it was video technology. that could be applied to the military. It could be applied to surveillance. It could be applied to a variety of industries from agriculture to finding things, analyzing video, etc. And it was a company that had... that was in the western part of the United States. And they had an identity that was just very, very close to nature. These guys were hikers. They were outdoors people. They loved the environment they lived in. They were very, very proud of it. We, the culture was really had taken a big hit and people weren't resonating with the mission of the company. And meanwhile, they were also acquiring another company that did AI to bring AI capability into. how they analyze video, et cetera. This was something where we went out, my team went out and we actually ran workshops to help nurture the culture of the company because this was a circumstance where things were starting to become very, very negative for this company and started to really go downhill. And the consequence around that is that people would leave, quit their jobs, stories would be told, Meanwhile, they also replaced the CEO. There wasn't a lot of resonance with this person and it was really difficult. So we went out and this was in Oregon and we ran workshops with as many people as possible, not only to listen to them, but to understand their story and what they stand for and why they stand for things. During that meeting, we found out from sales that 95% of their sales are for the military. And From the workshops, we heard that a lot of the people said, we don't want to work for the military.

Speaker 2

Oh wow, okay.

Speaker 3

So there was a huge disconnect. The CEO that they hired was an ex-military guy who was a remarkable man, just very, very smart, had a very clear vision on what this company should be, had a good understanding of the technology, but it wasn't resonating. There was a problem. So like drowning in the middle of the ocean, you need to make some vigorous movement in order to stay above the water and get out of that situation. And with marketing, with storytelling, with workshops, we helped this company. And we helped this company by really understanding their technology and then celebrating what they stand for and starting to tell specific stories about how What they do actually isn't about military. You think military, I think, oh, war, killing people, et cetera. No, we started crafting a story that said, you know what? Your technology is helping in a military situation, but it's actually allowing less soldiers to have to go out and fight on the ground, less boots on the ground. More lives saved. They had a pride that their technology allowed people to look at screens less and actually talk to each other more so they could strategize as to what to do. So this shift and this explanation and then saying, hey, we're bringing in AI into that and you're going to be on the cutting edge far above your competition. And that did happen. That's fantastic. Yeah, it was really great because you had these people that initially you felt like, oh my gosh, there's an identity crisis here. This is just not going to work out. And by really communicating and starting a relationship, you start having people reinforcing the same values. Ultimately, we're all looking for values, right? And if we have the same values, even though we're very different people, we can start to get along and we start building something together. So that's really what we try to do in that particular circumstance. Not something you would typically associate to a marketing company, but we don't like to define ourselves as just a marketing company. We're a company businesses transform. And by the way, businesses are always in the middle of a transformation.

Speaker 2

Yeah, for sure. If you're not and you're standing still, It's like a shark, right? Got to keep moving, keep moving forwards. We kind of segues nice then into the next thing that I wanted to get your thoughts on because you spoke very eloquently then about the technology in that case study that you gave us. You gave us a really nice description of the example of Albert Einstein about how we view people who aren't perceived to be creative have creative tendencies or should work to develop those. We're seeing kind of, finance, B2B and the creative world intersect more and more these days with all of the channels and the tools and the technology that we have. So how do you see what technology and AI in particular, because we wouldn't be a marketing podcast if we didn't mention AI at some point, but how do you see that changing what's possible or expected, I guess, in brand storytelling? How do you and your team kind of bring these tools into play, but whilst keeping that human and emotional side and the storytelling that you just mentioned alive as?

Speaker 3

Well? I mean, first off, yes, we are human, right? And between humans, there needs to be a relationship that gets built. In order for that relationship to build correctly, you need to have somewhat of a courtship, right? It's like dating. It's, you know, you meet somebody, you listen, you interact with them, et cetera, and things go back and forth and they build and you try to find common ground, et cetera. The same thing happens when you choose a product or you work with a company. There is a courtship that happens and that courtship is really important. We've all been in situations where somebody's been rude and that courtship is. been broken or tarnished, right? That's very, very dangerous, right? And it most often happens when people don't understand that it's a relationship and that you need to build a relationship. So that's one thing. The other thing that is that, yes, the advent of AI has definitely changed every industry that we can think of, but we don't know where AI is going. We don't know how much it's going to influence things. Right now, I would say 90% of the people out there are probably using the, ChatGPT and such for creating content and using that content for generating some ideas, for using it as for research, etc. But a lot of it. we're starting to notice is that some things look like AI, some things feel like AI or sound like AI. Not in all situations. There's some AI there that is pretty amazing, especially in music. I've heard some recently where I can't believe that this is AI. But when it comes to businesses and when it comes to creativity, I don't think that there has been a better time we're actually using AI in a really thoughtful way. And what I mean by thoughtful is not thoughtless, okay? Don't be lazy with AI. Most people are being lazy with it. Write me an e-mail. Okay, I kind of read through it or maybe I didn't read through it and I just sent it, right? Or write me 10 blog posts on such and such a theme for my blog and I'm going to schedule those and I'm just paste them in and we go. That is not that's not being mindful in the sense that you're allowing, you're working in automatic. And any time where you're automatic and you sit back and don't drive the boat, there's potentially a problem that could happen. So that's very, very dangerous. And I think that it's going to, it can numb people and allow people to actually think, oh yeah, creativity is out the window, right? I've heard people come up to me and say, oh, logo designers are dead. You can do a logo with AI, there's no going back. That may be true for some things, but to me, at the moment, it's still creating things that are very, very bland and very, very predictable. AI is working on the knowledge that we have today, but we know that the technologies that we've seen or the movies that we've seen or the ideas or the music that really stands out are productions that are 100% original, that feel new, et cetera. So I don't think that there's a time that's been better for creative people than right now because we need to realize that As humans in a creative field or in a growth field or entrepreneurs, we need to use ingenuity as much as possible. We need to be creative. We need to keep on solving problems for people. We need to talk to each other, build relationships, and come up with new ideas. That's the focus, and that shouldn't be lost. And I think that in a world where so many people are relying on AI, oh my gosh, for those of us who are not allowing AI to drive innovation, then there's so much opportunity. I like to think about the producer, Rick Rubin. Do you know Rick Rubin?

Speaker 2

I do very well.

Speaker 3

He's a fantastic producer. He has created some of the most remarkable music over the last 20 and 30 years. Rick Rubin does not know how to play an instrument. He actually doesn't understand notes. And he most definitely does not know how to use a soundboard. But he has one thing that nobody else has, is taste. He knows what to identify and what to amplify. That's the focus. So in this world of AI, in this world of technology, in this world where we do need to still be creative, let's focus on ingenuity. Let's focus on taste, because those are things that are unique.

Speaker 2

For sure. Mark, that's been fantastic. I really appreciate you taking the time. We could have gone on and on about so many more topics and I hope that I can persuade you to come back on in the future and we do a follow-up episode, but that's been really valuable and I'm sure the listeners have really enjoyed it too. Just to wrap things up then, What's next for you? What's next for consequently creative and where can the listeners get in touch if they want to reach out and carry on the conversations with you themselves?

Speaker 3

Well, what's next is keeping on growing. I think that the world of marketing and agencies are changing. The traditional branding agency of 10 years ago doesn't exist anymore. It's changed. So what's next is really understanding more evolution. understanding nurturing, understanding growth. And I really look forward to what that is. I don't know what that's going to be just yet. I think that what's next also in the world of AI, we need to understand how that's going to change and grow. As far as reaching out to me, so my agency is Consequently Creative. You can Google that or you can Google my name, Mark Rust, and it's Mark with a C. And I think I show up. But I'd love, reach out to me on LinkedIn, reach out to me on Instagram or other socials and let's continue the conversation.

Speaker 2

And we'll put all of those links into the show notes as well so people can find them there. Mark, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for taking the time. I'm looking forward to speaking to you again soon.

Speaker 3

Thank you so much, Stephen. It's been an honor.

Speaker 1

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