What Universal Human Truths Can Marketers Tap Into?
David Rock's SCARF model says five drivers shape behavior from childhood onward — status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness — and L...
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The Overthinkers
From big strategy questions to everyday marketing life realities, The Overthinkers is a weekly, 20 min conversation between two ex-marketing strategists: Rachel Mercer (@rachelmercer - co-fo...
Episodes
20 of 213 episodesIs AI Showing Us We're Optimizing The Wrong Things? With Jennifer Fuqua
Jennifer Fuqua has spent twenty years inside innovation — at frog, at Fjord, at Ogilvy Consulting, and now as Senior Director of Innovation...
What Should Marketers Learn From History? With Mark Rukman
Mark Rukman joins Shann and Lynette to argue that marketing keeps overlooking its most useful lens: history. Drawing on cultural topography,...
Why Are We Still Debating Distinctiveness Vs Differentiation?
Why is the marketing industry still arguing about differentiation versus distinctiveness, a decade after Sharp and Ritson first drew the lin...
How Do You Get Better At Changing Behavior? With Heather Watson
Heather Watson has spent her career walking backwards through the behavioral funnel: attention and consideration at Ogilvy, the use phase at...
What's Worth Changing, And What Changes Us? With Tom Goodwin
Tom Goodwin joins the show, and for someone who's built a career as a "futurist," he spends most of the hour arguing for the things that ref...
What Does a Pastor Know About Desire That Marketers Don't? With Michael Rudzena
This week we sit down with a very atypical guest: Michael Rudzena, founding pastor of The Good Shepherd in Gramercy Park. The conversation w...
Should Strategists Be Generalists?
Shann has a strong take on this one: strategists should never specialize by channel, and why a "TikTok strategist" makes him wince. Lynette...
Should Marketers Cultivate Their Personal Brand?
Jonathan Mildenhall, former CMO of Airbnb, recently argued that your personal brand is your proof of concept — if you can't market yourself,...
Should Marketing Lean More Into Reality To Sell Nowadays?
Most marketing is still selling the SUV driver racing across open terrain, while the actual buyer is dodging potholes in Brooklyn. In this e...
Does The Ad Industry Have A White Savior Problem? With Marvin Miranda
Marvin Miranda — Global Head of Brand and Creative Strategy at Accenture Song — joins Shann and Lynette to ask a question the industry doesn...
Why Should Marketers Favor Storytelling Over Statistics? With Dali Adekunle
Dali Adekunle — SVP Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi Health, Stella Adler conservatory graduate, and former director of patient relati...
What Weird Skills Can Help You Be A Better Marketer?
Acting, screenwriting, gaming, dance, gardening, running a volunteer website nobody got paid for. Shann and Lynette swap notes on the side-o...
Startup vs Big Brand: What Did Katya Kotlyar Learn Switching Sides?
Katya Kotlyar has moved through this industry in ways most people don't from small to big agency, some freelance, co-founding a cross-border...
Maxing: Danger Or Trend?
Is maxing just self-improvement with a rebrand — or something more sinister? Shann and Lynette unpack where the trend came from (hint: the m...
Can You Be A Marketer And Be "Anti-Capitalist"?
Can you work in marketing — a job literally built around driving demand — and honestly call yourself anti-capitalist? Shann and Lynette try...
What Makes People (And Us) Feel Significant?
We all want to matter. But in a world where the average person has 700 followers and every brand claims to be meaningful, what does signific...
Is AI Going To Kill Your Marketing Job?
Anthropic's latest report says 65% of marketing tasks are headed for AI replacement — making us the fifth most disrupted profession out of 8...
How To Transition Out Of An Advertising Career? With Rachel and Lynette
Nearly 200 episodes in, The Overthinkers is turning a page. This is Rachel Mercer's final episode as co-host — and the debut of Lynette, a f...
When Do You Say "Enough"? With Rob Campbell
This wonderful episode was recorded over a year ago with the legendary Rob Campbell, CSO at Colenso in Auckland. Rachel and Shann were plann...