#23: In defense of the "creative carbo-load"
And, on the staying power of science fiction
One of my first clients as a junior PR person was called FirstJob.com. The company was like a specialized ZipRecruiter for talent entering the workforce, and innovative firms looking to capture the best and brightest for their human capital war chests. The company proudly touted that a person’s first job defined their career. It set the bar. That a first job was a first step towards that future, attainable, beautiful career and identity that was yours for the taking, if you worked hard enough and started an account.
Looking back, it was a little meta that one of my first jobs was doing PR for a first job marketplace. But, looking back, it was my first “real job” taught me a lot. Being part of a global agency opened my world view. For the first time, I thought of myself as a person who really loved, understood and was excited about technology. Being a low-level person in a “technology practice” helped me discover an identity I didn’t know was inside me already: a lifelong Star Trek fan who loved customizing their MySpace page and one of the first to sign up for tumblr, The Facebook and Twitter.
One of the other ways that initial role really opened the world up to me was the exposure to really smart people; leaders in the communications industry. One of those people is someone I’m glad to have interviewed today, Phil Gomes. He talked with me about his approach to curiosity and why he wakes up at 6:30 a.m. on Saturdays.
Enjoy!
You started in IT (I think, according to LinkedIn). How did you get into PR/comms/marketing?
My IT job was a part time gig in the college library during the latter half of my undergraduate career. I had grown up around computers all my life — my father was probably the first to apply personal computing to the office supply industry and even wrote his own software to help run the business.
The college’s career center was a great resource if you wanted to go into business administration or accounting, less-so if you wanted a communications career. In the three-inch-thick binder advertising summer internships, there was a lonely sheet for a PR boutique that specialized in wine and food. I didn’t actually know what PR was. But I did like wine and food. Two interviews and some soft-pedaling about my age later, I got my first PR gig.
When it came time to figure out what I was going to do when I graduated, I figured that I liked PR and, through my library job, I liked technology. My next internship was at a CD-ROM publisher and they gave me a position with a truly odd title for the time: “webmaster.” I turned down an internship at Skywalker Sound for it. Everyone thought I was nuts, including me.
So, I then asked “Are there PR firms that specialize in technology?” That seems naive now, since this was the leading edge of the dot-com boom.
I always reassure younger folks that my college experience was an expensive, four-year exploration of what I didn’t want to do for a living. I went in wanting to be a professional philosopher. I exited school into a profession that I knew almost nothing about when I entered.
And why do you stay?
For me, it’s less about the marcomm trade itself than it is the access to the workings of multiple industries and the privilege of advising leaders on how to surface those stories.
Twenty-plus years of agency life has given me exposure to semiconductors, deep R&D, software, energy, pharma, consumer packaged goods, financial services, and so much more. It took something as transformative as crypto to pull me out of agency life. That said, even today, I regard my job as head of a “mini-agency” — Bloq has spinoffs in Bitcoin mining, decentralized finance (DeFi), metaverse gaming, NFTs, infrastructure, and other areas of crypto.
I am confident in saying that very few people have my job.
One of the things you’ve seemed to do throughout your career is learn new skills - including leading emerging tech practices at large agencies. What’s your approach to learning new skills?
Read, always. There will always be That-One-Thing that’s right in front of you from a to-do-list perspective, but you need to make time to consume content and ideas from outside of your field and industry. I get nervous if my Kindle isn’t loaded with a ton of long reads before a weekend. It’s like my creative carbo-load. I typically wake up around 6:30 a.m. on Saturdays to extend the time I have available to read.
Many people in PR and marketing have recently been laid off. Do you have any advice for them?
Assert your value. Too many companies are looking upon the current moment as an opportunity to scarf up top-level talent on the cheap. And, dear God, don’t let these companies extract free work (“homework assignments”) as a condition of continuing the interview process. Gigantic red flag.
On top of this, you have the explosion of AI. There’s a new 80/20 rule now: 80% of our work threatens to be gobbled up, so the value-add in that remaining 20% needs to be particularly insightful.
Many mid-career marketers/professionals are suddenly seeing their second, maybe third recession. What is your advice for them as they weather a changing job market?
After you’ve taken care of yourself and your family, be a resource for people going through a recession the first time. This knowledge and experience is invaluable and needs to be distributed widely if we’re to come out the other end relatively intact.
What’s often overlooked in a good peer/colleague, and a skill/trait you wish people would foster more?
Never say “I don’t know how to do that.” Instead say “This skill is not yet part of my skillset.”
What’s a big mistake you’ve made in your career, and what did you learn from it?
It’s a bit ironic, really. While it’s one of the things I’m most known for during my tenure at Edelman, the Social Media Belt System figures rather high in my regret analysis years later with the benefit of perspective. The Belt System was the firm’s first real self-paced education, training, and certification program. This was a project that I led from about 2008 - 2012 or so. It taught social media and online community principles, laid out as martial arts belts — white through black — and tied to promotion and advancement. Variations of this curriculum even became a revenue stream for the firm at one point. (I hasten to add that I worked with a lot of really smart people in the buildout of this system, from curriculum design to technical delivery; my rear-view assessment certainly doesn’t take away from the excellent work they did and the fun we had doing it.) But I also felt that the firm was satisfied with very little in this area. Similarly, there was a blockchain-related project that I co-led there toward the end. The firm has since ceded it to me, but who knows what I might do with it next. I really regret not pushing both a lot further. I call them my Unfinished Revolutions. I’m determined not to have a third.
Any predictions for the field - or in blockchain - for 2023 and beyond?
There is going to be a massive convergence between AI and blockchain technologies, and the latter will not only achieve its promise as better and more effective financial infrastructure, but as the security root of the new Internet. I’ve often talked about the importance of working from a single version of digital truth. These pieces are already falling into place.
Any books/movies/series you can’t stop thinking about? Why?
Well, like I said, I read all the time. In terms of staying power, though:
The Future And Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel, more than any other book, shaped how I feel about innovation. I’m reminded of it every day, especially as the U.S. government continues its (definitely insane, possibly illegal) persecution of the crypto industry, driving innovation offshore.
It’s Your Ship by D. Michael Abrashoff is the only leadership book I freely recommend. Abrashoff, then commander of the USS Benfold, blew the doors off of every operational and combat-readiness indicator. He did so by putting sailors and the mission first while gleefully flouting pretty much any rule or regulation that stood in the way.
The Pirate’s Dilemma by Matt Mason, like Postrel’s Future, influenced a lot of my thinking as well. My biggest takeaway — and there are many insights in the book — was that piracy should be viewed not so much as lawbreaking but rather an important signal that your business’s distribution mechanisms stink.
Nearly 30 years after I was introduced to it, I have started to re-read The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluh. It’s a story told in the first person through an advertising executive who must pitch Venus as a prime destination for colonists, despite its searing temperatures, sulphuric acid rain, and crushing atmosphere. That it hasn’t yet been made into a movie is most certainly one of Hollywood’s many crimes. Philip K. Dick’s Clans of the Alphane Moon falls into this category as well — a story of colonists of the Alpha Centauri star system who went insane due to space travel. Those inmates not only take over the asylum but, indeed, an entire moon. Society then spontaneously arranges itself based on everyone’s mental diagnoses. There’s political intrigue, paranoia, attempted uxoricide, and a telepathic slime mold named Lord Runningclam.
I just wrapped up The Peripheral on Amazon Prime and loved it for its depth and production design. Streaming has given us a kind of Second Golden Age of televised science-fiction and I’m definitely here for it.
Where can people connect with you?
At some point, I am going to restart my Substack, but there’s a good library of material there for readers to catch up on. Follow me at @philgomes on Twitter.