Transcript 0:00 Writing, creating songs and music is less an act of creation and more an act of discovery. 0:05 [instrumental music] Hello and welcome to Creative Crush, the podcast in which marketing's smartest minds step away from the brand and talk about the creative crush that they keep returning to. 0:24 And today, I'm really, really excited to be talking to, all the way from Austin, Texas, Russ Summers. Hi, Russ. Huw, how are you doing? 0:34 It is great to be here, and I will do my best to live up to the marketing smartest minds that you threw out there, raising the bar for us all. But I love it, thank you. I'm very good. How is Austin today? 0:44 I've got to say, my only experience of Aus- Austin happens 'round about middle of March every couple of years, um, when I'm there for South by Southwest. How is it today? It's a lovely rainy day. 0:57 The ground is getting soaked. The rivers are being recharged. It's actually very nice. 1:01 And next time you're here for South by Southwest you need to let me know so we can hang out and grab some beer or barbecue or something. Oh, 100%. 1:08 And, uh, maybe you can take me to somewhere where I can get to experience some of your creative crushes, which we'll come back to in a moment. 1:18 But first, for our listeners, can you just talk a little bit about who you are, what you do, and some of the companies that you've done it for over the years? Sure thing. Well, my name's obviously Russ Summers. 1:31 I am a serial CMO, as we sometimes say. 1:34 I grew up through the data and analytics area of marketing, which is why coming into the creative side as I grew through my career was such fun for me because it was a whole new area to jump into. 1:45 And I've run marketing as VP or CMO for companies like TrendKite, TrustRadius, Litho, most reas- most recently Quantified, and that's kind of what I do. 1:56 [instrumental music] As we say in this podcast, this is about giving, uh, marketing's smartest minds a chance to step away from the brand talk and lean into their creative crushes, the things that they keep going back to time and time again. 2:10 And I don't think it will surprise anyone by looking at your backdrop what your creative crush is. Russ, what's your creative crush? [instrumental music] My creative crush is guitars, guilty as charged. 2:22 [laughs] Welcome to the Zipper Club, where no one wants to be. Except it beats a living hell out of that other possibility. [laughs] Welcome to the Zipper Club. We hope you stay a while. The food, it ain't that great. 2:38 But the gowns have sure got style. [laughs] Full moon style. I need to know, uh, where did your love of guitars start? 2:51 Can you remember the very first time you heard a piece of music and it, you know, your- your ears focused on the guitar itself rather than the whole song? What a good question. 3:03 I have to go very far back to being a very small child because my mother was a classical guitarist and taught classical guitar, as well as being a folk singer and singing protest songs and such. 3:18 So those two things, I would sit and listen to her, and she would play these intricate classical pieces, uh, very Segovia inspired. We listened to a ton of Andrés Segovia in our house growing up. We just did. 3:31 And she would go back and forth between these very complex and beautiful Segovia pieces and sort of rabble-rousing folk songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, et cetera. 3:42 And so that gave me sort of this balanced picture of this precision and beauty on one hand, and ability to drive a powerful message home on the other hand. 3:53 And so with that, how could I not fall in love with the guitar, Huw? How could I not? [instrumental music] Can you remember what was the first tune that you were able to string together on a guitar? 4:08 Well, my mother, of course, taught me initially, so the first was Go Tell Aunt Rhody, which is, you know, G, G7 and C, I think. And that was just to practice changing back and forth. 4:19 But the first song that sort of I would want to play for people or that made me went, wow, I learned a song, was Dead Flowers by The Rolling Stones. Right. And what- what was it about that- that song? 4:31 I mean, I could never... 4:33 I tried many times to learn the guitar, but I never got further than the bassline of, you know, Transmission or Walking on the Moon by The Police, or things that were just so ridiculously simple my fingers could get 'round it. 4:46 What was it about that track? Just every so often, I don't know that this happens to everybody, it happens to me, I will sometimes hear a song and I will just become obsessed with it for a few weeks. 5:01 And when I heard that song, I literally, and back in those days, 'cause we're old, Huw, you had to pick up the needle and set it back at the start of the track if you wanted to listen to it over and over. 5:11 And I would just sit there and listen to that song over and over, which perhaps is a little bit spectrum-ish, but I might be a little bit on the spectrum. And I've had that experience with that song. 5:21 I've had that experience with, uh, what was it? I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones. Songs that I'm just, this sounds different than anything else. And so I became obsessed with it. 5:32 I truly can't explain why other than it just, it hit the monkey nerve. We all have a monkey nerve. We all have things we respond to instinctually, and I responded instinctually to that song. 5:43 Yeah, there's something really sticky in those moments when something comes along that just feels like it's- it's of its own. 5:50 And more often than not, it's not of its own because you'll go down a rabbit hole and you'll go, "Okay, I understand where this came from now." 5:57 But when you hear it for the first time and you don't know its history and you don't know, you know, what influence of that guitarist or that songwriter or whatever, it's just such an incredibly po-... 6:07 powerful feeling to introduce someone to something that feels so fresh and new It's discovery, it's surprise, it's, "I discovered America. Nobody knew it was here before." Obviously, it was here before. 6:21 When you dive in, you discover people lived here many years. 6:24 Just as you dive into your favorite music, you discover, oh, this goes back to delta blues and whatnot, but initially you have that rush of, "I am planting the flag." 6:33 [guitar strumming] So, um, can I ask you about three of your guitars? Sure. Is that okay? Okay, the first- That's wonderful [laughs] The first one I want you to talk to me about is your sunburst Fender Coronado. 6:49 Is it Coronado? Coronado? It is indeed Coronado, and it's this one right over here, so frying pan shape. It's a beautiful guitar. Like stunningly beautiful, isn't it? Thank you. What, what, what do you love about that? 7:04 So many things. Um, one is the sound, and one is the history. The sound, I love 12-strings. 7:12 I love things like The Byrds, Tom Petty, where you get that ringing 12-string, which often is done on a Rickenbacker, but not always. 7:20 The Coronado has that sound too, and just for shimmery, chimey guitar, and I know you and I were talking about Johnny Marr earlier, who does a lot of shimmery, chimey stuff. 7:32 There's nothing like a great 12-string for that. So nothing really sounds like it, and few things look like it, although the history is interesting. 7:41 If you look at it next to the Coronado 4001 base, or the, I'm sorry, Rickenbacker 4001 base next to it, the black one, although one is a Fender and one is a Rickenbacker, they were designed by the same person, Roger Rossmeisl, because in the '70s, late '60s, early '70s, Fender was losing market share to Rickenbacker and Gibson over hollow bodies. 8:02 So they recruited Roger from Rickenbacker to design the Coronado line, which proved to be a failure ultimately. 8:09 It was canceled after only a few years because the detailing, the rich things like the inlays on the F-holes, very on par with Rickenbacker culture, and Fender culture was a mass production culture. 8:22 And it was like, "Why are we having to do this extra work that can't be easily automated or scaled?" 8:27 So even though it was sort of a cultural failure, it was an artistic success, and not to turn everything back to marketing, but it's worth thinking about any time you've worked with integrations of acquired companies, anythings like that, sometimes the cultural elements are the hardest that make things succeed or fail, and so that aspect of the Coronado has always stuck with me. 8:49 And am I right in thinking there was a feedback issue with it as well? Didn't the hollow, the hollow shell create some feedback? 8:57 Oh, you are so right because if you look at how Gibson and Rickenbacker were executing, they were doing semi-hollow bodies with a block down the middle. The Coronado, the original line, did not have that. 9:07 It was a true hollow body, which I think was the designer saying, "Hold my beer. We're gonna try something," but it makes it a little bit of a problematical guitar for live settings. 9:16 [guitar strumming] Let's move on to, uh, your 1978 black Rickenbacker. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Sure thing. 9:23 That one is just a sort of sweet personal history, but I had had a blonde one of that vintage, 1978, for many years. It was my first... 9:35 My second serious bass, I guess, and I was a stupid punk kid in the late 1970s, early 1980s. I wanted it because of how it looked. I did not like the sound. I did not like the lack of sustain relative to a Fender. 9:51 The tuners were different and weirder than what I was used to. So I remember sitting there with it sort of chopped up on my kitchen table. I had taken the tuners off and bought new ones that I had to drill new holes for. 10:02 I had taken off the bridge, and I was putting in a bridge that was designed for a Fender Precision, Precision, which meant I had to chisel out a portion and lay in a block of walnut wood, and I just had this profound moment of two things. 10:15 Number one, it's really cool to be doing this. I love working on guitars, and I'm never gonna stop. I have a workbench in the garage still. 10:22 And number two, I am so in over my head right now, but I loved it, and it worked out to be a wonderful guitar that years later was stolen, and this black one came into my possession just about a year ago when sadly my brother-in-law passed. 10:37 He was also a musician. 10:38 He had some excellent guitars, including that one, and what I really love is he had stickers by the tone knobs where his settings were, so I can set it to get exactly the sound that he preferred, and that's just kind of a sweet little moment of family connectedness to go, "I am playing with Brett's tone." 10:56 Wow, that's incredible. Thank you for sharing that story, and sorry to hear about your brother-in-law. 11:01 Um, but there is, like, something in that which is really interesting about, um, when you said you were so over your head in it, in it. 11:11 It would be very easy to, uh, not take guitars apart or build guitars and do all those things, or it would be very easy, you know, just to go to an AI tool and kind of 11:23 see if the A- AI tool can explain to you some of the problems, but there's something really beautiful about, about the way you talked about that process that screams that the process is everything. 11:37 The process is the joy, the f- the fiddling with it, the taking it apart, and I think that's something that we l- we can very easily lose in today's make things quickly culture. 11:48 Let's use tools to overcome hurdles, AI tools to overcome hurdles. 11:55 I think that's fair, and as much as I use digital technology, I have a, um, project I've built to help me service my tube amps because the number of people that actually know how to service tube amps is rapidly declining. 12:07 So I need to pull that knowledge together. When I was rewiring a Telecaster the other day, I used both ChatGPT and Claude to troubleshoot some issues. But- 12:17 You can get that assistance, but building or maintaining a guitar is a resolutely analog experience, and that gives me great pleasure. Uh, you mentioned that your bass guitar was stolen. 12:29 Have you seen, um, the documentary about Paul McCartney's missing bass guitar, his stolen bass guitar? I haven't seen that yet. There was a similar one about James Jamerson from Motown that I... 12:43 And I need to see them both because those are fascinating stories of where an instrument goes and where it ends up. Was that one ever recovered, do you know, Hugh? It was recovered. 12:52 It's a really, uh, there's a documentary if you have access to the BBC iPlayer, which you probably won't being in America, but I'm sure VPN might help you around that. 13:03 Um, but there's a really, uh, it's, it's on the iPlayer, and it might be in other places for you to find. But it's a really, really fascinating story about what happened to it and, and yeah, how it was recovered. 13:16 [guitar strumming] Guitar number three, your Gibson SJ-100 Extra. Is that in the background? Yes. Can you point to that one? It is this one right behind me, 13:27 and it has that place of honor because it is really my main workhorse at this point. It is my main ax for writing, for working out new pieces, for performing live when I perform solo. 13:42 It was made in 2003, the same year my daughter was born. 13:46 And as a platform, the SJ-100 is very much, other than finish detailing, it is the same as the SH- SJ-200, which was used by Elvis, Pete Townshend, and so many other great people. 14:01 So it's just very inspirational to play because for just a moment, I feel a fraction like those guys when I play it. [gentle music] Is there something about it that makes it easier to write on? What a good question. 14:18 I think just the familiarity. 14:20 I mean, if you and I were partners, Hugh, and we were collaborating, it would take us a little while to hit sort of a pace where you and I could collaborate fluidly, whether we were working on a song or a marketing campaign or everything else, 'cause you have to get past being too nice and differential and get down into the guts of it in order to collaborate effectively. 14:40 And at this point, that guitar and I know each other well enough that we can instantly get to the difficult stuff when we collaborate, and it's far from my easiest playing guitar. I have other six strings that play. 14:51 That one I actually have to fight a little bit, but something about it just feels right, and we have a good collaboration rhythm. That's really interesting. Do you... So, um, we mentioned Johnny Marr before. 15:02 Um, sorry, I keep mentioning Johnny Marr because he's my favorite guitarist, but he, um- He's wonderful... he, he kind of believes that when he buys a new guitar, it comes with the songs in it, so to speak. 15:16 Now, yes, obviously he writes songs, but the song, the, the guitar shapes what comes out of him. You know, he feels like he'll just strum, and from that strum it leads to something. 15:30 Um, do, do you, do you ever get that feeling when you pick up a guitar? Do you feel that it has almost this power of its own in that it's shaping what comes next from you? I mean, I think that I do feel that. 15:43 I think that's innately very human in our relationship with the tools that we use. Let's use an example that is not guitar related for just a moment. 15:52 Hugh, imagine that you are answering an email from me, and now imagine two scenarios. In one, you're doing it on your phone, and in another you're doing it on your laptop. 16:03 Dollars to donuts, the laptop response email will be a little wordier, a little more complete, more paragraphed. The tool influences the output. It just does. 16:15 So that's sort of in my mind how the tool influences it on a pragmatic basis. But then let's get to Johnny Marr's statement, which is a little more spiritual. Are there songs in there to be discovered? 16:28 I do believe that because writing, creating songs and music is less an active creation and more an active discovery. You're finding something that's like an archeologist. You're finding the idea. 16:41 You're clearing away the detritus that doesn't need to be there. I'm a big fan of the idea of creation as the art of removing what doesn't need to be there rather than just adding what does. 16:52 [gentle music] I hope you don't mind me putting you on the spot here, but I was gonna ask you about your favorite... Well, I was gonna ask you about favorite guitar intros. 17:04 That might be a little bit hard, but- It's not-... let's do-... if you wanna go there... let's see if we can do a top three favorite guitar intros. Uh, so if you had a top three, what would your third place be? 17:17 Top threes always have to be done in reverse order. Sorry. You can't do them one, two, three. It has to be three, two, one. Nice. Nice. 17:24 Well, for, uh, for, for the number three, in the number three slot, drum roll please. [drum rolling] Um, I would put "All The Young Dudes" by, uh, Mott the Hoople. 17:34 ["All The Young Dudes" playing] Of course, you've got, I think it was Ariel Bender that initially played that part. Mick Ronson played it a lot of times subsequently. 17:42 Just something about that part is very hooky and memorable, and it's just a lovely, lovely little piece. Yeah. 17:48 If it's good enough to, to capture the attention of David Bowie and Mick Ronson in the way that it did, then it's clearly absolutely brilliant. And that's a- Absolutely... great start. 17:57 Number three, "All The Young Dudes." I'm liking it. Indeed. Number two in your top three rundown of favorite guitar intros. 18:07 In the number two spot, [drum rolling] coming in at number two, is "Talent Show" by The Replacements. 18:12 ["Talent Show" playing] They were one of my favorite bands of sort of the '80s, '90s alternative rock era, and that song is just a raw, naked, emotional song about putting yourself out in front of the world, knowing that the world may throw tomatoes at you, as it were, that you're playing at a talent show, and they may just Not respond. 18:35 And so you can feel all of that vulnerability as the song starts with just sort of acoustic guitar and drums on the riff before it kicks in. 18:43 It is so, so vulnerable, and I love that piece about it, and that's very, very on brand for The Replacements that were all about vulnerability when they weren't about getting drunk and fighting, which they were about 50% of the time. 18:55 Well, we do kind of have to be vulnerable. We have to put ourselves out there. We have to... As I keep hearing from some of my favorite people, um, you have to be cringe sometimes. 19:06 You have to develop, you know, thick skin to be able to pop things out that you might not feel will get the right reaction, but you've got to put it out there anyway just to kind of sense it. 19:17 And, um, yeah, I love that as an... I'm not familiar with The Replacements. I'm familiar with the name, but I couldn't place a song. 19:24 Who would they sound like if they were to s- if you were to have to compare them to another band, who would you put them next to? It's a good question. They... 19:33 I mean, they were very bar band-ish in their sound, and you had this interesting blend between very much a bar band sound and then these very vulnerable confessional lyrics. So I'll send you a couple of tracks. 19:47 They certainly in ways sound like Hüsker Dü, who were contemporaries of theirs in the Minneapolis scene. They have a lot of sort of Midwestern American rock qualities to them. 19:58 But with this, you don't know if we're gonna be brilliant and you're gonna be seeing something like The Clash in 1977, or if we're just gonna get drunk and fall on our instruments. 20:07 You did not know when you went to a show, and that was... I think the myth is probably more fun than the reality certainly to be in the band. I think it was probably a miserable experience. 20:17 But it was a tremendously human experience, which is what I relate to. Great. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing more of them. Uh, and finally, number one. In the top three- Yeah... guitar intros of all time, 20:30 what's your number one? Number one, number one cannot be denied, and I will try not to stand up and dance around the room. 20:37 But Can't You Hear Me Knocking by The Rolling Stones, where Keith Richards has it in his classic five-string open G tuning. I keep one of my guitars tuned to that because it's such a great tuning, 20:49 and nothing else swaggers like that. And any successful area in my life when I have a great marketing outcome, when I have a great outcome in my personal life, I just sort of feel that swagger. It's just undeniable. 21:05 And people can say Keith is nowhere near even the list of top 100 greatest guitarists because he does really one thing, but he does it exceptionally well. But that one encapsulates his swagger. It's just amazing. 21:18 Yeah, I mean, what is the greatest guitarist of all time? You can't... You know, it's a bit of fun coming up with a top three, but, 21:25 you know, every guitarist brings their own thing to, to the table, and there's no denying what Keith brought to, to The Rolling Stones or brings to The Rolling Stones. 21:34 So, um, they were clearly a big impact on your life, The Stones. Absolutely. I li- I still listen to them quite a bit, and it... 21:43 Again, not to analogize things to marketing because one of the fun things about this conversation is it's not, "Here's five things guitar taught me about B2B marketing." 21:52 But when you look at how a team works, it's less important that everyone be a virtuoso and more important that everyone knows their role and how it relates to the others. 22:03 And when you listen to The Stones and take apart the bass part, the drum part, Charlie Watts was so brilliant, the interweaving guitar parts, the way even they adjusted when they brought in Mick Taylor for a few years and then when they settled on Ron Wood as their permanent guitarist, they know each other's place, and they all work together, and the output is definitely greater than the sum of the parts. 22:26 I'm gonna finish with one question. Uh, we kind of say that we don't talk too much about marketing on here, but I just wanna go back to it to finish with. What is, um, really hard about B2B marketing at the moment? 22:43 What a good question. You and I have talked a lot about that element of surprise. We've talked about the courage to create. 22:51 We now have the opportunity as we embrace AI in marketing and learn to build with it and learn to do marketing with it. We can do one of two things with it. 23:00 Because we've discussed how with The Replacements being vulnerable, being naked, taking chances, making courageous choices is ultimately what makes messages resonate, and we can use AI to help us discover and craft those messages and take those risks. 23:17 Or we can say, "Hey, Claude, make me a sales deck that is safe, that looks like every other sales deck, that no stakeholder will object to." 23:28 And by the way, we know this as marketers when we have the thing that everyone looks at and agrees, "Oh, that looks like marketing," it is actually rarely good marketing. 23:37 Good marketing that resonates with people, that sticks, that you remember like any of these albums we talked about, it has to take some chances. So it's all on us to be... We are the captains of that. 23:50 We are the ones that will make the choice to make a courageous choice or not, and let's use this as an opportunity to grow creatively, not to hide behind, "I now have work output that no one will really question or object to." 24:05 Well, listen, Russ, thank you for bringing such a fantastic different creative crush to the table today. It's been an absolute joy, uh, talking to you about guitars. 24:15 Um, for all our listeners and viewers, thank you for joining us today. Uh, please like and subscribe and comment wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, tell your friends, and dive into our archive. 24:29 Uh, I think we're up to about show 13, show 14 now. There's some really, really brilliant conversations in there, uh, for you to discover. Russ, thank you for your time. Hugh, thank you. This has been wonderful. 24:42 Thank you. [outro music]
