Commerce Is Culture: Muses, Archetypes, and Visions With Phillip Jackson

Phillip Jackson is the Co-founder of Future Commerce, a media company helping retailers and e-commerce companies understand the future of commerce and culture. With an engaged global audience of over 100,000 executives, his reach spans seven retail and digital commerce-focused content realms. As a writer, speaker, and marketer, Phillip has spent decades shaping brands and e-commerce businesses, guiding them from $10 million to $100 million and beyond.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:46] Why Phillip Jackson defines commerce as culture
[5:19] The concept of brand archetypes and their significance in commerce
[14:06] How brands drive culture
[19:15] Maintaining relevance in a trend-driven market
[24:27] How do trends reflect shifts in consumer attention and brand positioning?
[34:15] An exploration of Buy Nothing groups and their counter-cultural impact on consumerism
[39:40] The shift from a passive audience to active participants in a monoculture
[55:28] Phillip addresses the decline of the humanities and how e-commerce can bridge the gap
[1:15:44] How diverse life experiences have impacted Phillip’s career path and personal mission

In this episode…

Brands are vying for consumer attention online, but trends have become relative to specific audiences. As consumers are overwhelmed by purchasing choices and brands seek differentiation, holidays and other cultural events have become perpetual marketing campaigns. How does this relentless pursuit of relevance impact culture and commerce, and how can brands contribute to this discourse?

With diverse cultural experiences under his belt, Phillip Jackson recognizes the relationship between culture and commerce, maintaining that e-commerce brands shape societal culture and consumer behaviors. He says to embrace this fusion by incorporating cultural motifs into your branding strategy to resonate with consumers and foster a stronger connection. You can also leverage archetypes to craft engaging brand narratives. Since culture has become commoditized, structuring marketing campaigns to align with societal changes and cultural movements is crucial to expanding your influence.

In the latest edition of the Up Arrow Podcast, Phillip Jackson, the Co-founder of Future Commerce, joins William Harris to discuss the dynamics of commerce as an integral part of culture. Phillip shares how to maintain relevance in a trend-driven market, how e-commerce can reignite the humanities discipline, and how Buy Nothing groups impact consumerism.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"Commerce is actually worthy of the same kind of examination as other cultural exports like food or entertainment."
"Humans consume; it's part of our human nature. We consume food, ideas, and commerce itself."
"Creating seasons around marketing strategies becomes a complex game where holidays become always-on campaigns."
"The most expressive and culturally important musical instrument of this era is undoubtedly the guitar."
"Brands are actively trying to shape the world, and we are participants in that conversation."

Action Steps

Embrace a mission-driven approach to brand development: It heightens the brand's impact, aligning with Phillip Jackson's belief in creating platforms that benefit others.
Explore brand archetypes to define your brand's identity: This provides a framework for consistent and resonant branding.
Analyze cultural and historical trends impacting consumer behaviors: This Enables strategic decisions that resonate with customers, highlighting the interconnectedness of commerce and culture.
Leverage technology and media to actively participate in cultural narratives: This taps into brands' potential to lead and shape societal dialogues.
Integrate humanities into technology roles to enrich e-commerce experiences: It nurtures a more profound understanding of human behavior and communication, fostering innovation and empathy in business.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey everyone.

William Harris 0:16

I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds and e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million. To 100 million and beyond, as well as help you up barrel your business and your personal life. I'm excited about the guests that I have today. Phillip Jackson Phillip co founder of Future Commerce, is a writer, speaker and marketer with an engaged global audience of over 100,000 executives across seven retail and digital commerce focused content properties, including digital print, audio, video and immersive events. I love immersive events. We might talk about some of that stuff a little bit later. Phillip, I'm excited to have you here.

Phillip Jackson 0:51

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, and it's good to get to know you. William, likewise,

William Harris 0:56

I was trying to think about who introduced us. And I don't know if there was a formal introduction, but if I was going to credit somebody, I would probably say Aaron Orendorf, because he actually had a an article that he wrote on Future Commerce about the best podcast, and he included mine in there. And that's when I really kind of discovered you and everything that you guys were doing,

Phillip Jackson 1:14

yeah, well, and you know, he's kind of a wizard with that and sort of surfacing folks that he feel like I deserve a bigger platform. And one of the things that I had been noodling on when we first met him was how we can get outside of our little bubble of our content. And you know, we're, we've been building this media brand now for eight years, Future Commerce. And I like to say that we're like a digital magazine. We're we explore the intersection of culture and commerce. And so we're very heads down focused these days. And I'm like, what are the, what are the good content outlets who's creating very specific content for folks in our ecosystem now? Because it can't just be us, and we've, you know, I think we have seven podcast properties now, and, you know, video and all the rest it's, a lot to produce, and so my head's just not in it as much anymore. So thankfully, we have these connections to folks like yourself. Yeah,

William Harris 2:07

no, I appreciate it, and shout out to Aaron for introduction here. So today we're going to be talking about how commerce is culture, whatever that means. We'll get into it, muses, archetypes and visions. But before I do, I do want to announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that I appealed recently. You can learn more on our website@elumynt.com which is spelled Elumynt.com that said, honor the good stuff. Commerce is culture. What the heck does it even mean? Well, I

Phillip Jackson 2:46

think at its core, I think the way that people engage in commerce is sort of fundamental to our human nature. By nature, humans consume, we consume things, right? We consume food, we consume ideas. And so if you look at cultures, especially ancient civilizations, ones that had no knowledge of each other, they all independently created and fostered communities where commerce was at the center right, trade and cohabitation. You have something I need. I have something you need, and we can create an ecosystem or a marketplace around that. And I have a bigger idea that commerce is culture and that we often glamorize other cultural exports, like food or entertainment. I think commerce is actually worthy of the same kind of examination.

William Harris 3:35

I love it. It's like, oh, this, this pasta is actually from Italy, therefore it is better. And it's like, maybe, like, you know, glamorizing just the fact that it was from another country, precisely. Oh, I

Phillip Jackson 3:47

mean, and there's like, deep rabbit holes, you can go on that's like, oh, what dye is it? A brass dye that, you know, extruded this pasta. And what do you what's the the gluten content? Like, there's, there's some things that become matters of taste and subjectivity. And I think we are at a place, at least in the digital commerce ecosystem, where those matters of taste and form, even like the stores and the brands that we shop at, you see this a lot in the DTC ecosystem, where people will only shop at small SMB DTC founders brands because they want to support them in their cause to celebrate commerce, entrepreneurship, for instance. And all of these things, I think are interesting human behaviors. And I love to tell stories about those and to talk about them. And sort of what's interesting is like, I think there are really interesting psychological and philosophical impacts that all of these things have on the way that we buy and belong. So that's what Future Commerce is about.

William Harris 4:42

That makes sense. And I hadn't even considered it. Like you said, you go back in history, it makes a lot of sense. And so, I mean, even what salary, like we get our word salary from salt, basically, which was the form of money. I mean, like you said, commerce was cultured, is permeated it. And I. Ever considered that in the present day and what that means. And so I'm excited to dig into more of that. You also were talking about archetypes. So on your website, you have archetypes and you have, like, I think it's like this whole magazine here dedicated to it. Tell me a little about what archetypes is in reference to Commerce's culture. Yeah.

Phillip Jackson 5:19

So let's actually talk a little bit about, like, the structure of a media brand these days, because I was in the commerce ecosystem. I spent 10 years building direct to consumer brands when it was hard. So you're talking the era of, like, officially started my e-commerce career in 1999 and I did that in small businesses and scaling e-commerce startups until about 2012 and then I moved into sort of agency strategy world. So I have a little taste of engineering, a little taste of, you know, agency and big agency work. What I discovered is that there's always a framework, right? There's there's a framework for everything. Media businesses have a framework. And it wasn't until, I think my first, I think I just celebrated my first year full time at Future Commerce, because it was, you know, like everybody has a side hustle in the modern day, building this media brand was sort of a side hustle. And I had a podcast, and it blossomed into a bunch of things. But it took me about a year to realize that wasn't in e-commerce anymore. It was actually in the media business. And there, there are frameworks to creating very specific types of properties that address certain segments of your market or go after growing new ones. And so just as you might expand your categorization, in in your in your merchandising, in your business, there are ways to do that in the media ops industry. So one area that we felt was underrepresented or underserved in our existing field of content were folks who were engaged in branding and brand building. And where did those people spend time? So this is we started from thesis like, started working backwards for like, what are the things they care deeply about, and what are the tools that they use in their work, in design and brandings and brand systems, brand architecture, how do they develop customer personas, for instance? And it turns out, you know, there's a, you know, there, are tools that we've been using for hundreds of years to develop these brand systems, and one of these are based on personality archetypes, or the word archetypes that was used by Carl Jung and these Jungian archetypes are seen all throughout storytelling in history, right? So you have these Jungian archetypes that make their appearance in The Odyssey, for instance. So Homer writes a story that's the hero's journey. Well, doesn't every brand want to be a hero to their customers? So as you start to look at each of these archetypes, there are very clear examples in the modern day of both how brands look at their customers in archetypal fashion, but also how customers now force brands to become archetypes that they want them to be. And I think that's a really interesting dynamic. So we and it's probably tells you a little bit about how we think about problems and how we want to solve them at Future Commerce we think, Hey, you want to attract a Brand Builder, you have to build a brand. So we built archetypes as a brand. We built it as a media brand. We built a fashion brand around it. We used that brand building as content. We did a live stream series for for 2022 as sort of a build up into this effort. And then we launched that brand at where, well, where do brand people and design people hang out Art Basel Miami Beach, so we launched this at Art Basel in 2022 with a big party and a print book. So that's the other thing. When you're building this media business, we have to get other ways for people to engage with the content. So rather than being left unread in your inbox or a PDF that sits on your desktop for four or five months of some piece of content that we worked very hard on. What if that piece of content could live physically in your physical space, on your coffee table for a few months, next to other prestigious works, like a book from asoline or a book from Taschen, this is a work of art. Why can't we memorialize our deep writing, our bigger essays and more thought provoking pieces, and maybe the punchier ones, and put those into a physical book. And turns out, that was really exciting and paved the way for a bunch of new other content that we created sort of annually at Future Commerce.

William Harris 9:39

I hadn't thought about it that way, but I like the way you worded this, just even the idea of branding being art. And obviously it's art, and so it's like, I get that, but I never thought about it being art is in the idea of, like, at Art Basel or something like that, right where it is. It is a very interesting type of art. I was at, um. Like a flea market of sorts, or something with my wife this past weekend. And if you want to talk about art that has, let's just say, had a big shape on culture. A lot of this is the branding and logos of designs and companies that people fell in love with, or the archetypes of these companies. There was this John Deere thing that was being sold that was really old. There was a lot of coke bottles that were, you know, old and being sold. And it's just interesting that it's like, there's, there was artwork that surrounded this archetype of this brand that people fell in love with, to the point where they keep it forever and ever and pay significant money to buy old versions of this, where there's the usefulness of it is long gone, and it's really nothing more than art at this point in time.

Phillip Jackson 10:42

What's interesting about the you talk about, sort of the frameworks generational so we have a framework for, like, sort of ranking brand value or brand cultural importance. I think the most it's like some criteria. I won't bore you with all of it right now, but I think there's sort of two large echelons of brands that make big cultural impacts. One we call a generational brand. And these are brands that have existed so long that you sort of take for granted. And those generational brands are typically, they can be CPG brands. They're the cereals you grew up with, right? They're the it could be Maxwell House or Nescafe. Maybe they don't have a ton of brand equity, but they have high recall. You remember them. You have nostalgia around them.

William Harris 11:30

I still sing the folders one, right, exactly, right.

Phillip Jackson 11:34

But what's another one? What's the next session on up? There's ones that shape culture. So how do you become, how do you go from a generational brand to one that actually shapes culture? And McDonald's is a good example. There's the I'm loving it, right, like the the I'm loving it. Of it all is it could be that you occupy a new place in in tastemaking and in and in memory making, where it's not just the context of one person, like I remember sitting at my my breakfast table as a kid reading the back of a cereal box. No, it's It's that Oreo has decided that they want to create moments in the world that everybody should remember through brand partnerships. So when you think about those sorts of things, it comes back to the framework. The framework is, I think, that brands are actually actively engaged in trying to shape the world. And how do they do that? It's not just through earned media. You have to have something to sell and where you sell. It's really important, the way you sell. It's really important. In fact, what's really, what I think is really interesting is that there's more people now than ever before who have a lot of critique about the way that people sell things, especially online. They have a rule book that they consider to be some sort of like sacred text, maybe baymard or some other, you know, institution is the one who publishes that rule book. And so we've we, we're all contributing to a discourse around the behavior of brands. So it's not just that brands exist, it's not just that they utilize art. It's that they're actively trying to shape the world, and we are participants in that conversation. But that's what's really interesting, is that Future Commerce, we cover so much ground, it could be, hey, you know, glossier changed their website, and their web redesign is worthy of critique, but it could also be, you know, some, you know, more esoteric topics around some art critic who had something to say about the way media shapes the world that we live in,

William Harris 13:35

interesting. Do you? Yeah, it's unavoidable. When you paint it from that perspective, there are pros and cons to corporations shaping our culture. But to your point, I think that it just is like you're, I guess I'm, I'm becoming a believer. Commerce is culture. There's, it's unavoidable. What are some of the pros versus the cons of brands corporations being the ones that are creating culture. Oh, okay,

Phillip Jackson 14:06

now you're asking the right question, pros, I think that we is very human and especially Western, especially because we don't have very collectivist society, very highly individualized. We crave new things, right? We want something new. And when you have lots of organizations and new brands launching all the time, that that adds to the variety and the novelty of having something new all the time, we love new. So on some level, there's something deeply satisfying it to live in a world where someone is always creating something new to consume. We all understand that this like there's the other side of that coin, which we create a lot of waste in the world too. We consumption. I have this saying. You know, any strength overextended can become a weakness. So you can consume. I think that's our nature. Maybe part of becoming a more a more complete person, or maybe having some, like, higher aspirations of of a state of being, maybe, like, it's a facet of spiritual development is curbing your nature, and that's not something we talk about a whole lot. But in order for us to solve some of the problems we have in society and for brands to undo some of the problems that we've helped to create in the world, is so we're going to have to exercise some self control. Can we do that through corporate governance? Can we do that with can can brands be a force for good in the world? Well, there's some clear examples of brands that step up and and do some good. One piece that made the rounds, right? You know, during the middle of the covid lockdowns was, you know, there were direct to consumer brands, and I think Starbucks was one of the first ones in on the corporate enterprise side that stepped up and, you know, enforced social distancing and store closure policies before local jurisdictions acted. So brands can actually lead the way in a lot of cases. And like, taking charge and saying, like, culturally, we can, we can make an impact. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Here's, here's, here's here's a challenge. Sociologically, I don't know that we can handle as many relationships as brands are demanding of us. And so how many brands are in your feed every day, or how many brand relationships can you realistically balance at any given time? I think sociologically, this is a hot topic like 100 200 1000 we have so many things vying for our attention now and now, brands are not just competing with, you know, with each other for shelf space. They're now competing for share of mind, for mind share, living rent free in your brain, along with the guy on Tiktok who asks you how much you pay for your apartment in New York City? Sure. So, yeah. So these are all things to think about. The

William Harris 17:11

sociological aspect I really appreciate, because I feel that way even, let's just say brands aside, modern innovation has made it so that way, there's almost this requirement to keep in touch with everybody you've ever known in your entire life, and that can be overwhelming, and that can be hard, and every every acquaintance you've had, but to your point, then it's not just every person you know, every brand entity that you've ever engaged with or might engage with, and and I'll admit that there are times where I still appreciate going to a store instead of buying online for the sheer sake that somebody has already done some of the research. And that's right, three options to pick from, and I don't have to waste 1000 different options totally well. I

Phillip Jackson 17:50

So, you know, the the word usually used here is Dunbar's number, right? Dunbar's number, you know, might be your personal relationships, but what if brands are vying for that that same type of relationship with the customer? And the fact is, is that while every brand wants to believe they have a relationship with their customer, that their customer thinks about them like, if you're really honest with yourself, I want you to, want you to think about the last time that you seriously sat around and thought about your a brand, right? Like, generally, we don't spend a lot of time thinking about brands. Most brand operators or marketers will think more deeply about a brand than any given person will ever think about all of the brands in their life, ever. So those have some really interesting impacts, right? Yeah.

William Harris 18:42

I going to switch up just a little bit, because there's some things that you have on your website that I really appreciate that tie into this, and I want to dig deeper on some of these things. So there's a great article on your website about the pursuit of cool. This one was not written by you, but I believe you had a heavy hand in editing. It was written by Edmund Lau and Alexa Lombardo, and the title was, how do you stay relevant when relevance is relative? What does that mean?

Phillip Jackson 19:15

Well, let's, let's first talk a little bit about the what's the big idea at the center of the piece. Because I think there's a million ways to go about trying to talk about the thing I want us to be talking about is philosopher and and, you know, as always, it kind of started this all goes. It always starts with a philosopher, someone's big idea. That's not a thing that I had to come up with, because there's nothing new under the sun. But Paul Virilio has written a lot of books about state of being. He's a French cultural theorist, and I think culture theory is a really interesting area of like study and media study. Something's really interesting to us, but he talked about. Sort of the speed of media and how culture is kind of like a highway. And the more that you try to shove onto the highway, like you can widen lanes only so much eventually, if something stops a little short, you have a traffic pile up. And he, he likened this to sort of like a he called it a static pile up. So we have this cultural highway, and maybe the internet makes that highway a little bigger. Maybe algorithmic feeds makes each content feed its own little two lane local road. But generally there's there are tubes, and there's pipes in which only so much can go through at any given time. And there's a theory that you reach a critical mass where nothing more can flow, because everything is coexisting at the same time. It's rush hour, but you're in gridlock forever. And so the idea is, what do you do if you're trying to maintain some some facet of cool, if you're a brand who is trying to capture this idea of cool in an era where cool is stuck in celebrating all eras of cool simultaneously. So how do you define a new era of cool? Everything, everything's derivative because everything's already existed in the world that we live in at the moment, everything feels like it takes inspiration from some other era. So how do we totally stand out in a world that everything coexists simultaneously? It's not really a trend anymore. All trends are trending. So it's what this piece Alexa Lombard is a CMO of a company who I think is doing a really good job of trying to stand out in a crowded marketplace they face. Gym has this line of products and beauty and personal wellness products and a and like actual experiential boutiques where you can get a facial with these products, and it's very Instagramable. Why? Because part of the facial massage is like actually massaging inside your mouth. And for some reason, people love to share this absurdity. So, you know, in order to stick out and stand out in a in an era where, well, there's all kinds of ways to get facials, there's Is there a brand around facials? There's lots of brands around facials. But how do you stick out in an era where an era where Sephora and Ulta and the people that create content around that affiliate partnerships exist, you have to sort of lean into something that is absurd and try to rebrand that as cool. We made a little bit of a viral two by two on this where some people had a lot of thoughts about what we said was cool and what was not cool anymore, or what's mass and what's not mass anymore. And that just goes to show you that everybody has their own perspective based on their feed and their immediate network as to like what is niche and what's not, what is mass and what's not, what is cool and what's not, what's played out, what hasn't broken out. I think it further solidifies the point.

William Harris 23:04

I think it's wild. And to your point, earlier, you talked about how we crave new, just as a human species, and so sometimes what's new is actually old that's just being rediscovered. And there's a lot of things that have been rediscovered as well. I see even with my daughters, they're you know, junior high and high school, and some of the things that they think are amazing and cool, it's just that they've just discovered it for the first time and already thought it was cool, and then thought it was LAME. And they're just like, all right, I guess I can get behind you on this, but I actually, I don't think it's cool anymore. But to your point, everything is trending in some area, like, everybody has perspective, everything is cool. But some brands have hit that mass coolness factor. And I would say one that really did that recently, or a couple prime went from nothing to what, you know, over 200 million, I think, in their first year, like, that's a massive like, that's a mass cool. There was even just the Stanley mugs or whatever went from being a something that your construction guy was using to every teenage girl had to have one. And so there is this way that people are tapping into what's cool is it is it intentional? Is it accidental? If it's intentional or accidental, how did they break out in that type of a thing? Do you have any thoughts about that?

Phillip Jackson 24:27

Well, yes, I have lots of thoughts about this. Actually, sure. For in the Stanley case, if you were to examine that a little bit like in order for Stanley to have a breakout success, they had to be in business for 107 years first. So there's a pretty consistent story that we're seeing nowadays with things that become viral. I don't know virality itself is cool, but the faster that something peaks, the more uncool it will be after the viral moment has passed. So what is the job of a stamp? Right? Prime is a great example, right? Yeah. It is the job of a brand who's the target of virality, to capture all of the the commercial demand while they can. That is the job. That is the job to be done. Your job is not to try to tamp down the virality. You lean into it because it's going to go away. But that doesn't mean that your brand goes away afterwards. It might be uncool. There's a lot of uncool stuff in this world that becomes phenomenally commercially successful. Crocs used to be uncool. So, so here's like, I think there you can sort of cross a chasm to where uncool is itself cool, because, you know, it's uncool. So what's, what's an interesting trend that's happening at the moment? I think being purposely hard to discover is kind of cool at the moment. So you're seeing a lot of there's a couple ways that I see this being expressed. For instance, local restaurants that name themselves sushi near me, that's the name of the restaurant. So if you ask me, that's super uncool, but it's meant to be there for desirability or for discoverability. Why? Well, because we use certain channels like Google for discoverability, what happens, though, when you have a brand that sort of takes a similar approach, but has not but they're purposely obfuscating what it is they do. A good example of this would be the apparel brand, online ceramics, so they make apparel, and they're they're typically, if you ask me, I don't love the esthetic, but they're sort of a tie dye esthetic. They've been around since like, 2016 they're easy to find now, because I'm the kind of a person who doesn't search for ceramics online. I'm the kind of person that searches for apparel, and especially like brands that have sort of cult like followings. So also things like algorithmic shopping feeds and Google Shopping and paid ads and paid search make these things a lot more discoverable, because people will bid higher amounts of money for a $200 t shirt in Google Shopping than they will for the local ceramics and pottery classes near you, but intentionally naming yourself in a way that is misleading, so it tamps down the ability to share it, or to be able to discover it without having to purposely search for it. I think is itself really interesting, because that's it's a it's a social it's socially unacceptable to try to appear like you're searching to be cool. So how do you not be cool? You do the opposite of trying to be found, right? Yeah, that's

William Harris 27:58

interesting. Something else you wrote about, and I'm going to read the whole quote here, and it's long, but it's good. It's about holiday marketing. And I thought this was very interesting. So I want to see what you have to think about this. This was on your website too. Have you noticed that holiday marketing for brands has become an always on affair this year? I made note that Valentine's Day candy overlapped with Christmas and New Year's in our local shops, human attention is a finite resource, and its scarcity is what causes this elongation, where one day events become build up campaigns and eventually turn into seasons thanks to algorithmic feeds. The easiest way to stand out from the crowd is to seem to be leaning deeper into if you know, you know, cultural references continuing the meta trend of trends and culturally relevant marketing that adds lore and depth to a brand story, which I think goes along with what you're saying. But so how does this relate to just holiday shopping and what you were just saying?

Phillip Jackson 28:53

Okay, well, where do we this is? This is such an interesting challenge because the seasons are also defined not by, like, actual holiday seasons, greeting card seasons. Those are sort of what I would describe as, sort of like monocultural, generational and often religious, spiritually centered holidays, right? But we have a lot of greeting card holidays, so there's a lot of things that brands have to balance all at one time. What you will start to notice is that the brands need to participate in both the sort of calendar affairs of products that are merchandised or cleverly created just for the sake of a holiday activation or campaign. Often that means, nowadays, I think the official kickoff that I cited in that piece, the official kickoff to holiday marketing for you know, the q4 holidays used to begin around Singles Day, but. It Amazon Prime Day, I think kicked in on the ninth. So Singles Day, for those on who aren't aware, is 1111. Which is Alibaba, created this holiday in China as its own, like sort of Amazon Prime Day, but to celebrate people who are single, and it's become a globally celebrated sales holiday. But that keeps creeping backwards, and so Prime Day beginning on the ninth or forecasted to begin a day earlier each year for the next few years, means eventually we cross into Halloween marketing, like we're doing lots of things simultaneously, and I start to believe that it cannibalizes actually the the amount of value that you can deliver to a customer that's based around what they need and when they need it. You're either pulling demand forward that would have been caught anyway, and you're paying for that either in your time or attention, your brand investment, or maybe in promotion. You're discounting it away, giving away margin. Why? Why do it? Then, why do we do that? So here's an interesting cultural behavior, because brands also engage in their own culture, signaling you have to do what your competitors do, because there's a share of wallet to go to get. So you can either consciously opt out of it, and you can be a brand that says we're not participating in the culture. You could be like Patagonia and says we're not doing Black Friday. In fact, no, we're closing our stores on Black Friday like we're gonna opt out of the culture, which, by the way, is participating in the culture, because it's participating in the discourse. But that's a whole other conversation. The challenge here, though, is it is the job of a brand to sell products and to to grow the bottom line and create, you know, more opportunity for itself in the marketplace. And I think that this is fundamentally at odds with the pressures of the marketplaces that you're merchandising into. So if you if you want to be discoverable, then you have to be on Amazon or Google Shopping or Tiktok shops, and you're at the mercy of the of those marketplaces and those ecosystems to do what they do and lean into how, how you get priority when those events are happening. Same thing happens in this case, when, in the piece I wrote, you have no control when Walmart target, Costco start merchandising for holiday 2024 Costco will begin holiday 2024 in August this year. You have no control over that. The only thing you can do is to work, to be prepared to capture the demand when it starts to trickle in. And that means that if there are buyers at Costco who are trying to merchandise for holiday 24 you're or you've been working on it since February. That's right, and that's you're at the mercy. Really, I don't think you have any control over that in in isolation. Now, there are things that can shift that I think big resets, like, I don't know, financial stress in the system could actually undo some of this, but I think until then, we probably have, you know, a long way to go in the consumer culture of celebrating all holidays simultaneously. Wouldn't that be nice?

William Harris 33:18

I mean, it does feel like it's getting that way. And I I'd say that there is, like, some absurdity to it, and a call for rationality among humans as well as brands. And I think about, let's say Patagonia opting out of Black Friday. Did it hurt them? Did it actually hurt their sales? And let's say, if it did hurt top line, did it hurt bottom line? And I don't know the answer to it. So I'm just posing a hypothetical here, because the similar thing happens, let's say with Chick fil A, they're closed one day a week. It's a very counter cultural thing to do, and it hasn't hurt them in the least, from what we can tell, comparatively. So I would wonder if there's, and I don't know if anybody's listening, and has some specific data on this one way or another, on whether ending that has helped or hurt. I'd be curious to know, because I think there is something about a return to sanity that's that's welcome, right?

Phillip Jackson 34:15

But, but this is the, this is a a deeper question about what makes people happy, like, like, how do you achieve some sort of feeling of contentment and being in the Commerce Industry, you're sort of, you're stoking discontent most of the time. That's what we do. How do we solve a problem? And I know that in isolation, every brand can say that they've helped their customers, and most customers would report that they're very happy with the things that they bought. But the fact is, we have to buy more every year to maintain some level of stasis in the way that we feel this contentment. Generally, I think we. Be probably better off, and we'd feel better about engaging more in the way that Patagonia is saying, like we're actually going to opt out. And there's always a social movement around this. Something we studied last year. You know, there's Buy Nothing groups. I'm sure you've seen these, like Facebook. Buy Nothing groups is, is a thing where you can trade. It's still about con it's still about acquiring of goods. It's still about you're trading, though, or you're just getting, you're picking up other people's stuff. But there is a a long time, um, tradition of buy nothing as a sort of way of life, as its own CounterCultural Movement. We wrote for Future Commerce last year about Buy Nothing Day, which is always celebrated on Black Friday. Buy Nothing Day has been around since, I think, the 70s, as a reaction to, you know, the AD, AD laden, ad driven culture, back when magazines and newspapers were the things that were driving people into stores and glorifying purchases, and that that actually was a pretty violent movement. There were people that blocked the doors to stores, and it wasn't just a passive, you know, social flex and signaling, but I do think that some brands engaging in activism around buying or not buying is actually an attempt to earn media, which, to me sounds like an attempt to be part of the conversation. Maybe it helps the world, but I

William Harris 36:28

think it helps them too. Sure, right? Their intent was still to increase the sales of Patagonia, but just different means.

Phillip Jackson 36:39

Example, Can I make one? One little side note, I think Chick fil A post. So the big culture shift around Chick fil A and its stance on gay marriage during, you know, during the early aughts actually created an interesting social discourse around Chick fil A. There's two things that came out of it, I think that are really interesting. Number one, Chick fil A had all of its sort of toy licensing and brand partnerships fizzle away practically overnight. People said this is going to hurt the brand. What they actually did was they they don't do that anymore at all. They have pretty cheap activations, like kids toys that they put into the the bags. Now I don't want to, I don't want to perpetuate a falsehood here, but I believe around the same time is when they started doing this trade up so you can bring the toy back, give it back to the cashier, and they'll give you an ice cream cone instead at Chick fil A. This is a thing that I don't think is advertised anywhere. It's not a sign necessarily, I think in stores, but it's something that everybody knows you can do, especially kids. So to some degree, like they've turned this negative into a positive, in that they're saving money, saving time, on brand partnerships. They're not giving away margin and trying to attract a lot of like big name activations or tie ins to movies or things of that affair, which is definitely a driver culturally for brands like McDonald's. But I think becoming more focused actually can make a business a lot more lean and take an area of distraction off the table. Also, it sets them apart tremendously from competition. On the other side, people justify going to Chick fil A because of the quality of the service and the food and the speed of service. People will say, hate their politics, love their chicken. And they justify to themselves that there's an ironic behavior around they know that it's countercultural for them to go there, especially around their system of belief, but they're going to do it anyway. I think that's really interesting. Now you can't the marketplace can't sustain 25 of those types of brands. Sure, there can only be a few. But anyway, that's a total aside,

William Harris 38:59

and that's true for all positioning statements, right? Like, I've always appreciated that about brand positioning in that idea that it's like you get one that's going to be in that market at that position, and anybody else, they're just become either a second rate or just a forgot. Yeah, you hinted at monoculture a little bit. And something else you mentioned that I thought was interesting. As you said, monoculture is multiplayer. What do you mean by how is monoculture multiplayer?

Phillip Jackson 39:32

I'm like defining a lot of terms the monoculture, well,

William Harris 39:35

I like it. Well, okay, because I could explain it, but you're gonna explain it better. How about that? So, okay,

Phillip Jackson 39:40

I know I love I love it. Just it's making me very self conscious about the headiness of the type of thing we do every day, monoculture. So you might say, depending on how you define this, you could say monoculture in the modern sense, are big, uh. A big affairs, typically, event based that everybody is aware of and participates in the Super Bowl is probably the canonical example. But there's a million of these. Monoculturally, everybody knows Taylor Swift was on a tour last year. I think most everybody could say, could name say it was the eras tour, and they probably heard about it or saw it somewhere, whether they wanted to or not, they don't go in search of it, but they're hearing about it somehow, by some means. So we do still inhabit a world where this kind of thing becomes pervasive in the culture, meaning most everybody is aware of it. These also can have, you know, the the the Palestinian conflict and the war in Gaza can be another example of that, because it's part of the cultural discourse. Now, some of these things come with, like, okay, systemic risk. We are worried about things like hurricanes in Florida, but that's not necessarily monocultural, because I'll be honest with you, like you may hear, if you live in the Pacific Northwest, you might hear that a hurricane hit Florida. I hear that it's coming for 10 days before it does, because I live here. So yeah, these, I think there are fewer and far between today. But we used to live in a world, in the world I grew up in, I don't know how old you are, William, but I grew up in a world where there was five analog channels on TV. There were, there was one newspaper, and there were maybe five radio stations that came in clearly on my FM dial, and those were the only channels by which I received information. And all, all people in the Western world have the same experience. They saw the same TV shows, they experienced the same songs on the radio, they read the same articles in the same magazines. And that is itself a form of monoculture, is that there were tastemakers or gatekeepers in the way that information was given like delivered into the world. You could say that we still have that today, that there are tastemakers. It's just much more algorithmic. It's Tiktok controls the information that goes to everybody, versus the one, the niche information that goes to just a handful of people. Isn't it curious? This is an interesting thing, isn't it curious that everybody got the Tiktok CEO saying, we're fighting for your rights and for your platform, and it wasn't algorithmically generated. That was only to people who cared about the nature of the Tiktok platform and creators. No, it went to everybody like they have control over delivering a message to everybody, but those are fewer and far between today, especially as we all have our own content feeds. So that's the definition you want to, like, respond to some of that and give your context before we roll into it. Yeah, I

William Harris 42:45

do, because, okay, so what's interesting about this is, to your point, and I appreciate this, we a lot of things have become more bubble to fight. It's not a word, but we're going to make it up right now, where it is very easy, where you get stuck in your own cycle of content and feedback, and because you engaged, then it continues to show you more of that. You almost can't get out of that loop if you tried. It's a very interesting thing, right? These feedback loops that happen, and I would even say, potentially dangerous. I've been very intentional about, like, manicuring my feed, if that makes sense, where I intentionally try to program it the way that I want it to be. And it's a very positive feed that I have on Tiktok. But there were, there are still things that break out. As I would say, monoculture, like you were saying, but I can see the easiness of it in times past. I think we're about the same age. Maybe we'll talk about that later, but I'll be 40 this year, so I think we're I think we're similar. There was Oprah. Was a good example of somebody who had, like, this almost immediate opportunity. And this is something that Neil Patel and Eric Sue talked about recently on their podcast, where we don't have another Oprah. It's very difficult for anybody to be able to, be able to, like, get that much attention, because it was just almost given there were only so many sources of it, back when print magazines were the thing that created a lot more opportunity for everybody reading the same thing, whereas now you have an unlimited amount of things to read. That said, I feel like there's still a lot of opportunity for monocultures to develop quickly, but I think they die just as quickly. I'd say that would be me, the thing that I see skivy being one of those right, where it's like it just jumps out of nowhere. But, you know, as fast as they rise, they die, whereas I think maybe they were, it was monocultures or things like that that existed were longer lasting back then, because it was just still the same person that was perpetuating it, or the same entity, or magazine, or whatever that was.

Phillip Jackson 44:44

It's so funny, because if you know, just following on that thought i i was making the same argument 10 years ago that we'd never have another Michael Jackson. We'd never have another global pop star, somebody who has the ability to. Or globally, in stadiums and in pack stadiums and have people you know crying when they see them. That was a thing that I felt like just could never happen again. And yet, here we are. We have that. We have Taylor Swift. It's not the one I would have chosen. It didn't come about the same way. But I do think that there is a it has a parallel and on the Oprah Winfrey side, I think that daytime talk show is probably not as exciting or new anymore. But somehow, despite the odds Drew, Barrymore seems to be sticking around forever. She's here, and there's nothing we can do about it. So, I mean, maybe, if we maybe give her another 20 years, and she'll have a magazine too. Actually, I think she does have a magazine. She has a collection at Walmart. So there's an interesting maybe there's a parallel there, but certainly not to the, you know, the it's not as much of a cultural touch point, for sure. Yeah. Now let's talk about the multiplayer piece. Okay, yeah, so how do we participate in that? So it used to be that we just consumed it before, right? Or we would glom on to these things, and we'd, we'd all remember them, and we all have, you know, a similar the moon landing, all right? My dad watched the moon landing, and he was like everyone else on that same day, where they all watch the moon landing, right? And they all experienced it the same way they typically experienced it through a black and white television. But that's not how we participate in a monoculture. If we do experience these big event based and world events or maybe like brand moments, I think in particular, something interested in, it's usually participatory. So we're no longer just consumers. We're not just experiencing it or talking about our experience of it in the subjective form we're contributing to it. And how is that possible? Well, the bar for participation is really low now, uh, tick tock has a button that you can hit. And so does YouTube, so does Instagram, where you can make that story that you just saw your story too. We're being willingly invited into co creation in the culture. So you know, when you are Travis Kelsey and you're yelling at Andy Reid, we're not just remembering that and seeing it on the news the next day and armchair quarterbacking it and waiting for the am radio guys to talk about it and talk about, you know, how that was poor behavior on the, you know, the part of somebody who's otherwise beloved in real time, three seconds after it happened, there's memes that are going viral over it. So who makes those well, maybe there's a branch strategist that can help to manufacture those moments, but generally it's the public. It's people like you and me who are being invited to be participants in the monoculture, and it's really interesting when you watch how this plays out in in wild and weird ways. For instance, I think there are some canonical examples, the wisdom of the crowd or the or the we should be probably fearful of the crowd, because they can bully organizations into doing things. One thing I talk about a lot is a very notable moment where Warner Brothers gave in to an online troll community who were talking about Zach Snyder, who was the ousted director of the Justice League movie that came out, I believe in 2015 or 2014 somewhere around there, and Warner Brothers, you know, gave into this online rumor that wasn't true, that Zack Snyder himself fed into a little bit to finance the creation of a direct to streaming version of this film that was four hours long. That was, if, I think, was 180 100 $60 million that they put into creating this film that they said, that they said does not exist, but we're going to the crowd willed it into being. There's a name for this. You know, this, this, this phenomenon. And we actually wrote about it in a book called The multiplayer brand. The multiplayer brand.com it's, I'll give a plug, shameless plug there, but, but being able to to will these things into existence is a thing that I think brands are going to participate in now is giving their customers tools to do that. That could be we see that in small scales, like worlds that like Nicki Minaj created a Roblox experience and asked her fans to come in, like make up lore in that universe. I think that's interesting. But we are multiplayers in these moments now, and so that is the multiplayer monoculture. In fact, we actually we have an event at a. The Museum of Modern Art on June 11 that will examine this in in detail. But I don't know. It's everybody has their own way that they bring themselves into that moment. Because again, like our voice is important, I think we, we all have to have something to say.

William Harris 50:19

Yeah, speaking of brands caving to consumer pressure, I'm still a little bit disappointed that everybody hated the Apple commercial. I liked it. I thought it was very I thought it was creative. I I enjoyed it. It's like, oh yeah, we're taking all this goodness and we're squishing into this thing. And I get the counterpoint to it, but it wasn't that bad of an ad, so bad that they needed to remove it. So I think it should.

Phillip Jackson 50:48

Everybody has a, oh, everybody I follow on Twitter has an opinion on this. It's funny because it's one of those I see where people are coming from and why they don't like the app at the same time, I'm, I kind of wish that corporation, it's, it's, it's going to be the beginning, could be what we consider and look back as is like the beginning of the end of brands caving to consumer pressure and online discourse. And this is the the flip side is, this reminds me, actually, of the so mid journey came out, I believe in, which is a generative AI, image creation tool. And it was released, I believe in June of 2022 I want to say I might have that date a little off. About two months later, Nike announced their collaboration with Tiffany. Then so they had done an Air Force collaboration with Tiffany at some point in the past, and this was supposed to be big news. Also, you know, the heat on footwear drops had kind of subsided a little bit. So this was supposed to reinvigorate the Nike brand, but unfortunately for them, the traditional brand announcement campaign of a collaboration of that scale would require would have a press release or some sort of like interview with the creative teams teasing it, and then two weeks later, you would have the actual product would be shown for the first time, or a month later, the product would be shown for a first time. And that would have gone fine if they had done that in April or May of 2022 but instead they did it after mid journey had come out, and now you have hundreds of 1000s of people who have this tool in their hands to imagine what a really cool Nike and Tiffany and Co collab would look like, it can only lead to disappointment. In fact, the it's actually hilarious. The the imagination of these, you know, mid journey creators is unbridled. They can imagine whatever they want, things that could never be created, and you get these shoes that have insane amounts of embellishment that gets hundreds of 1000s of likes and tweets and shares on social media, go viral on Reddit. Some people mistake them to be the real thing, which is its own problem. But then when they do release the shoe, it's a solid black shoe with a Tiffany blue swoosh. That's it, and it leads to a disappointment, and Nike did nothing wrong. The only thing that happened here was that we have lowered the barrier to entry for creative visualization for a hungry and thirsty participatory audience. So who knows where that's going to head, scary and exciting. Like,

William Harris 53:43

yeah, I was gonna say, I like, I like the idea of of patent participation, which allows for more creativity. I do think that that is the key to a lot of the generative AI that's out there is that it's, I think it's gonna fuel creativity beyond our wildest imaginations.

Phillip Jackson 54:00

Have you played with any of the music generation tools that exist out there?

William Harris 54:04

Maybe a couple, but I can't remember any of them off top of my head. Not a lot. I've mostly focused on, you know, chatgpt, Gemini, stuff like that. But

Phillip Jackson 54:14

yeah, I think that this, you know, we're right at the very beginning of all of this. And, you know, talk, you know, there will always be a place for human generated, human creative, you know, capability. But I think that more it's becoming more accessible to more people. And as a musician, I remember just 25 years ago what it was like to create a piece of music and then create and then, you know, record that and distribute that. It was really hard. Now, almost anybody can do it with a few tools. I just think maybe we don't like wash it watching that get squashed by a hydraulic press. That's, that's.

William Harris 54:59

That's the picture. Yeah, I've got one more, let's say work related thing. And I want to get into the personal side of of who is Phillip Jackson, something that you said, that I appreciated, though you were talking about humanities are lost, that we don't have enough literacy and maybe the tech e-commerce ecosystems to bridge the human dynamics. What do you mean by that humanities being lost?

Phillip Jackson 55:28

Okay, so I'll just give the disclaimer up front that this is my own subjective experience, and I'm sure that others have different experiences. But what I have witnessed over the past 21 years, maybe 22 years in this, in the e-commerce ecosystem in particular, is that maybe in the very, very, very beginning, we had a lot of people solving really hard problems in creating technology. And so who are the people that solve hard problems in creating technology? They were people that like expressly studied things like computer science, right? They went after it, not just as a vocation, but it was an area of expertise and specialization. As those people created platforms, it lowered the barrier to entry, right? So coming back to this participatory culture, anybody can sell online. Now, there's various eras of this where it become became gradually easier over 15 or 20 years, but generally, like now, you can pay 30 to 40 bucks a month and be online and have the same tools that every brand on planet Earth uses, right? So it's become incredibly democratized. I think this is a good thing on the whole, but it also it speaks to a bigger challenge around the types of people that were over that period of time that created their career and their their their areas of specialization, expertise, because the barrier to entry kept getting lower and lower. It became more of a vocation than it was a area of like scientific study. And so you have a lot of homegrown talent, and especially a lot of people that made career leaps or cross trained into the e-commerce ecosystem that came from other areas. I see a lot of people from Creative Arts, again, my own subjective experience, probably the businesses that I've been in. But you know, as margins become harder to to preserve, and software becomes or software, you know, becomes easier to implement, but becomes the number of pieces of software that you need to implement in order to have a holistic e-commerce experience is its own challenge, like the budgets get smaller than headcount gets smaller around personnel that can actually drive those sorts of things. And so you look for people that have more vocational background than people that have like specialization at the when I first joined an agency, in year one at the agency, we were interviewing masters of computer science graduates from NYU, and in the 10th year that I got that I was at the agency, we were hiring people that hadn't even gone to Code School who could just pass The Code exam, and we were paying them a third as much as we were 10 years prior. So, you know, this is a progression in our industry, and I think that the progression in the industry net, net is been a positive thing, so I don't want to take anything away from that, but I also think that it has really interesting impacts on the maybe, over time, we have people with more diverse backgrounds and different educational fields of study that could come into it. But generally, technology has been created for the past 25 or 30 years in the e-commerce Industry, with people that were specialists and creating technology and platforms, and not people who had a background in the humanities and communication and human behavior, and we have hacked our way to understanding human behavior, and that's led to some really interesting fields of study, like conversion rate optimization, that's typically a more scientific pursuit than it is a behavioral analysis. And I think that we've generalized those because this is what, this is what the logicians in the room love to do, is they want to create a static framework that applies to everybody. And I think that, I think my perspective, is that that's led to mass homogeneity. It's led to one website to rule them all. It's led to one way of designing for the web that's made everything boring as well. It's the platform. Developers created a singular killer app platform for web front end as well. And we've now trained an entire populace and generation to have to use that and untraining An entire generation of how to shop on. Line would be really hard and hurt a lot of brands, and no brand wants to take the risk to do that on their own, outside of a few small activations Walmart realm being probably which is interesting, but I this is, I think that large language models might help to counterbalance some of this, because becoming really good at communication, yes and expressing things in ways that, or having at least some form of translation of things like requirements, may train this otherwise vocational industry to becoming much more human, Like humanities centric meaning, understanding the way that people belong in the world and like their psychological, motivate motivations, or philosophical underpinnings of the way that we create things like experiences, and how these are can be positive and negative forms of manipulation. Because the thing we should be trying to do, I think, is building brands that last for really long periods of time, right? We should, we should be. I don't know if anyone's going to be building an agency that they can hand down to their children or a website they can hand down to their children. I think it become very short term focused on like builds and exits. That's a whole separate conversation, but durability might be a thing that we need to focus on. And I think that having a different frame of thought around like the humanities in particular, is a thing that we desperately need. And maybe this new era of tech enables that for everybody, even the logicians and those who don't normally think and don't have, you know, classical training around that in this industry,

William Harris 1:01:43

I think the need for Humanities, I also agree that a lot of the llms and stuff are going to push our need for better communication, which I think is found through humanities training and understanding studies. I've noticed, even if you try to give some kind of like a task to somebody on, on, let's say Upwork, you got kind of what you put into that task. And I think the same thing is true for a lot of the llms, where if you write a one sentence prompt that's very flat and basic, you'll get a lot of creative ideas, and it might turn out something very interesting, cool, but not nearly as well as if you have three paragraphs worth of a prompt that is just beautifully written. And what you're going to get out of that, I think tends to be significantly better as well. So I do think that there is a push for that, but I do think, to your point, a lot of this has become vocational, and I appreciate that there's somebody here. I'll, I'll go and plug next week's podcast, the one after years, because I'm recording it here in two days. Will leach marketing, the mind states ex Pepsi and did a lot of work around like, how he was looking at marketing to the mind state that the person was in. And your point. I think that there is some humanities that, at least at play it here that I think I'm excited about, though

Phillip Jackson 1:03:11

I am too I, you know, as in the, in the sort of Futurism bent I do. I think that we're at, we're kind of on the verge of a very big shift in disruption of the way that people find things and discover things in the world. And that could be really exciting for the way that we develop these, these new experiences. For instance, it doesn't just work in the way where it's okay, the the the technologists in the room now have tools to communicate with people that aren't technologists. It also goes the other way, where the technologists are becoming disintermediated by the tools that can take a sketch and and an abstract or a brief and turn it into functional code. That, to me, also seems like it's a big change in the way that we've actually developed things. It's an accelerant, for sure, but it also might make us a little more experimental, which I think, on the whole, could be really good. We kind of need a shot in the arm in the way that we develop user experiences on shoppable user experiences on the web.

William Harris 1:04:24

And like you said, glacier was a good example of somebody that tried to push the envelope and do something radically different in many ways, and kind of got dragged through the mud a little bit with that. But I really appreciated just even their attempt at doing something different, and that great stuff was exciting. All right, I want to dive into who is Phillip Jackson. I want to know about your backstory, because I understand that you that you weren't always in e-commerce. You there was a lot of things were doing before you were in Theological Seminary. Me, take me through your process of where you started and where you are now today, and kind of this, I don't know whatever part of the journey you want to share. Oh, wow.

Phillip Jackson 1:05:12

Well, I we don't have time for the whole story, but you know, I, I am. I've lived like four lifetimes, and I've had a lot of diverse experience. I'm sort of William. I'm in like, this place in my life where I wonder if I've just made, if I've sort of shaped Future Commerce into all of the into all of the areas that we've created, because of the diversity of my experience, so I brought it all together under one house. Or if maybe there's something more, maybe there's some bigger truth behind it is that I went on the journey that I went on that went through so many different iterations and variations of me and my interests and pursuits, so that I would wind up here. I'm not sure which it is, but you know, if you want to talk about the entrepreneurial background, I avoided entrepreneurship for my most of my life and career, because I saw my parents struggle with entrepreneurship. My I was raised in a bakery. My mom was a child of a baker who was raised in a bakery. And my whole life, my parents had physical retail stores and sold, you know, pastries and cakes and what have you. And my dad was the greatest marketer and salesperson, I think, that ever existed. He had the hustle culture before we knew what hustle culture was. The story I like to tell is that my mom would make gingerbread houses, big, ornate ones, like, like cake, Boss Style, massive pieces before anything like that really was, you know, viral, and before we had social media. So you're talking like midnight, mid 80s, late 80s, early 90s. And you know, my dad would have her make one in early October, talk about seasons and marketing. My dad would have her make one in early October. And he had the greatest sales strategy ever. He would take it to like the local grocery stores, and put it inside the grocery basket and wheel it around the store for an hour. And then people would say, did you get that here at this bakery? He's like, No, my wife makes them. But I didn't want it to sit in the car. Your wife makes these. Yeah, absolutely. And then he would, you know, book hundreds of orders for these big orders, gingerbread houses. And I think that, you know, they had incredible ingenuity, but they also had a lot of struggles. And owning a business is a tough thing, really, and so, but I feel like that I finally had to relent to it. Especially, as you know, I feel like I had this knock in my heart to have to, like, pursue something there. So certainly that's one aspect of me. But like you know, I also felt very strongly called to a to spiritual discipline, a spiritual pursuit, and having to feel like I needed to dedicate my life to helping others find their spiritual purpose. I was raised in the church, and I went to youth group and did all the rites of passage there, and when I graduated high school, I I felt like I could go like I had sort of a fork in the road, and I chose the path that I felt like was the right one. I attended a theological seminary. After two years, I realized that was probably not the right path for me, and I think it was more around the the idea that I wanted to have a bigger platform and make a bigger impact than a academic pursuit would give me. And it felt like it wasn't moving fast enough, and that I had this, like, really deep, and probably the the, you know, the thing that's driven me in my whole life is feeling like I was a little behind where I needed to be at that point in my life. And it was like, If I don't, if I don't go after something right now, especially something, you know, big, then I'll never do it. And I was playing in a band at the time, and it was like a Christian rock band was like, I'm what if I go on tour for the summer and like, then I'll figure out what I'm going to do after that, maybe take a gap year. And it was very fortunate for that to sort of blow up. And I spent five and a half, almost six years touring with my band, and that was we're on the road almost 40 weeks a year for most of that time, playing every kind of venue you can imagine, from like Miller Park to storefront churches to like little parks, and I did a lot of missions work in that time, really dedicated myself to trying to become a better musician and but these things were like, music industry's hard, and we weren't from an area where bands. Were being discovered, and we weren't really having the traction that we wanted to and anyway, long story even longer. I think the through line there is just also just not being content with the with a singular pursuit, and feeling like there's a lot of facets to my interests that I wanted to explore. And of course, I've met a lot of people William, that come from that same era of like, musical performance, and especially in having independent, like as an indie singer songwriter, as a traveling act, where you develop a lot of the same skills that you utilize in modern marketing. And so there's an element of, like, making something creative, testing that creative, honing it, re performing it, getting some feedback. And that loop is really addictive. And the and what's what's really interesting is like you become a generalist, because you have to do all of these things yourself. You have to market yourself, you have to produce your own music, you have to turn out your own crowds. All of these things tend to be really useful in e-commerce, but they become especially useful many years later, when you found a media brand and launching experiential, immersive events is a big part of what you do. So, yeah, it's, it's this really roundabout way of, kind of getting to the story where the job in e-commerce was settling just, quite frankly, like, I, I couldn't make a music career work. I dropped out of seminary, and I'm like, Well, what am I going to do? I have a computer. I'm pretty good with programming. It's a little thing I picked up on the side, and like many people in my I'm so sorry. I'll mute that. And like many people in this industry, I came about this through a little bit of part time work and a little bit of bootstrap side hustle and a little bit of grit and determination and reading a ton of computer books like HTML for Dummies, and then contributing back. And the thing I've learned the most is that communities have made the are. The thing that has been like the unifying piece here, is that I'm made better by the people around me. And having to find a group of people that are passionate and pursuing a specific thing has always been a the core of what I do. But like, I've lived so many lives, and I could tell so many stories, but I have to believe that somebody listening to this has had a lot of similar experiences, even if they're not like identical you could probably identify with a lot of that.

William Harris 1:12:37

I can resonate with it. I mean, you and I talked about this. So I you already know this, but you know, I also, when I was going for college, whatever I said I wanted to be a rock star. And my mom was like, well, that's not a real career path. So I also got a degree in nursing. And at the time, my sole purpose for it was I can work three days a week, have four days off a week. I can still pursue being a rock star. So it's like, I still do that, right? So then I actually ended up working as a nurse for several years, and all of the skills that I learned in all of those different endeavors have led me to where I am now. Kind of to your point, and the character in the Bible that I resonate with the most in entrepreneurship, and I think you'll appreciate this too, is Joseph. Specifically Joseph in his his coat of many colors, there you were asking about whether or not you're, you know, the summation of these events kind of just happened, or whether there was a greater purpose that led you through those things, to develop those skills, to bring you to where you are, to do the thing that encompasses all of those. And I think about Joseph and what he had to go through, there was no way that he could have predicted this path, especially as he has this dream where he says, Hey, by the way, you're all going to bow down to me, right? And they're like, Yeah, thanks, little bro. And he's, he's a, he's a slave for years, not just a little bit, right? And I think sometimes we're very myopic about what we're going through. And there were times in my own career that I felt like frustrated, like, God, is this really, really what you want for me to be like, this, struggling a musician, to be this, whatever, right? I felt like you had something greater for me in store. And maybe there's a lie that sometimes we're told where it's like, you have to do something great in order for it to be great, right? But then it goes from that to being in prison, and again, not for a month, for years. It's a very long time. And then he ends up, after that, to being at the right place to interpret this dream for Pharaoh. So that way, he is essentially second in command of the known world at the time, basically in Egypt, there to save them from a famine. And this deliverance that he experienced wasn't where all of a sudden, he's like, great, I just get to sit back in the lap of luxury. He's got seven years now where he's going to work hard to gather the right amount of grain to save it, and that's totally ruling process, and then seven more years of giving it out, likely a lot of people frustrated with, you know, the amount and the decisions he's making. It was not easy. He wasn't delivered into this like. Push easy nine to five kind of job. And so I appreciate just looking at that where it's like, it's possible that God has called some of us to hard work, long hours, things like that. But to your point that I think was interesting, and I would gather to say, you're passionate about what you do now, and you maybe wouldn't have been before you knew it, but because you've done it, that's what's led to it. I think Alex or Mozi is the one that I appreciate who has said this a lot, which is passion comes from doing it. Like you do it, you get better at it, and because you get better at it, you become passionate about it. But it's not like you sat down and you're like, Hey, I am passionate about Commerce's culture that happened as a result of the more that you did this, the more that you discovered it. I feel like that's the same for a lot of things in my life. To become more passionate about it the more that I do these I I've

Phillip Jackson 1:15:44

been sort of threatening to, if I ever, if I wrote a book, it would be about the way that this, nobody's going to read this. This is a book for me, sure. It would be how, you know, commerce is actually Pivotal, pivotal to the story of salvation is that, you know, in the Bible, what we see is actually a transaction, and that, you know, we use a lot of like commerce centered parlance in the way that we talk about things like the concept of salvation, like a purchase right or a ransom and redemption like these are things that have Like colloquial meanings and in the way that we talk about, like, commerce centered culture, but they actually are fundamental and have, like, broader, more spiritually important meanings in the way that we realize spiritual spiritual discipline. So I, like, I could nerd out on that nobody would ever read it, but I could certainly probably make a better paper than it would a book. I so identify with that, too, William, my, my, my biggest concern is not fulfilling my own personal mission. And seven or eight years ago, I had a person who said something to me in passing, and I've since talked to them about it. They don't even remember it, but they said something in in passing to me after I'd read this book called Essentialism by Greg McCowan, and he's a big business writer, and it's one of those business books where you read the first chapter and you got the whole thing, but there is a in chapter seven, deep into the book, there is a piece about, like, adopting a personal mission statement, and how to write a good mission statement. And we were jamming on this idea. And this guy, James, who said in passing, he's like, Well, you know, maybe, maybe it's, you know, adopting a mission statement isn't about you. Maybe it's about others. Maybe your mission statement isn't about you at all, like what you do, it's about the effect that you have on other people. Maybe other people are just made better by you, like you're making your ceiling into their floor. And I was like, that's a freaking good mission. That's a great mission statement. Like, if I could make my ceiling, someone else's floor. Where can I put? What can I do to create I've always worked with platforms. What could I do to create a platform that other people can build on top of that feels like a worthwhile pursuit, no matter what I'm working on at the time, whether I'm building a business or whether I'm, you know, creating a Tiktok

William Harris 1:18:23

So Phillip, there are so many other things I wanted to get into on here, including a fun story about Jamie Foxx and ears. And there was, there was so much Blaze Pascal and music. I have to wrap it up, because I know that we've got a hard stop here, unfortunately, let me, let me end it with this question here, when what is your favorite instrument? Because you're a musician as well. I know you play many instruments, but maybe what's your favorite when you play, or just favorite one in general, or weirdest one, or anything along those lines.

Phillip Jackson 1:18:59

Well, I mean, the guitar is the most is objectively the most expressive and culturally important music instrument of this era. I it's hard to talk about music, and in my life, without talking about the guitar, it's the first instrument I played, but I think it's the one I have the most amount of time invested in and I, you know, I, I love to play guitar. It's so interesting to me that it's a great example of the kind of like, what a great, you know, a tool can be is that you put a tool, like a guitar into one person's hands, and that something completely different comes out. It can take on different tonality. It you get out of it, what you bring to it, like it's an amazing metaphor for the way that we use a lot of things in the world. Also, I you know, there's just so much of the modern culture too that I feel like has left things. Like the analog nature of a guitar behind that, it makes me actually more. Makes me love it even more. It's rare to hear one nowadays. Yeah, in

William Harris 1:20:09

music, yeah, I appreciate that. It's a much better answer than I was going to give, which would maybe be the sack, but only because it's funny,

Phillip Jackson 1:20:18

the the trombone style,

William Harris 1:20:20

yeah, got it. You know what. I'm

Phillip Jackson 1:20:22

talking about, the sack. But of course, I love a good sack, but

William Harris 1:20:26

doesn't All right, if people wanted to follow you or work with you, what is the best way for them to stay in touch?

Phillip Jackson 1:20:34

Yeah, it would be a pleasure for you to give us, and I would highly covet any attention that you would give to us, futurecommerce.com and futurecommerce.com we put out content seven days a week these days, and we're on all of this media channels, you can imagine, but we're pretty active these days on YouTube as well, and it's Future Commerce Media on YouTube.

William Harris 1:20:55

Amazing. Phillip, it's been so much fun talking to you and you sharing your wisdom and time with us, I really appreciate it.

Phillip Jackson 1:21:02

Thank you. Thank you, William.

William Harris 1:21:03

Thank you everyone for tuning in. Have a great rest of your

Outro 1:21:08

day. Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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