brandLingual // ep8: What Paul Feldwick has unLearned

Описание: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗣𝗮𝘂𝗹 𝗙𝗲𝗹𝗱𝘄𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝘂𝗻𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱

This episode (number 8) sets our guest format... and rasies the bar moving ahead.

For our first guest on the brandLingual podcast, we didn’t want a highlight reel or a victory lap. We wanted a thinker who could talk honestly about what had to be *unLearned* over a long career in advertising.

That’s why we invited Paul Feldwick. Strategy enthusiasts already know him.

But if you don't, Paul is a former global planning director at BMP (The Home of Planning), author of The Anatomy of Humbug and *Why Does the Peddler Sing?*, and one of the rare figures who has both shaped advertising practice and then stepped back far enough to question its deepest assumptions.

The premise of this conversation is simple: every practitioner learns a set of beliefs early in their career, then slowly discovers, through practice, that many of them don’t quite hold. Growth comes less from adding frameworks than from letting some of them go.

In this episode, Paul reflects on what he had to unlearn, including:
• The idea that every ad must communicate a clear proposition
• The belief that persuasion is the primary mechanism of effectiveness
• The assumption that advertising works one mind at a time
• The comfort language agencies and clients use to avoid harder questions

From there, the conversation opens into bigger territory: fame as a social phenomenon, advertising as something closer to culture than communication, and why so much of what “works” in practice doesn’t match the stories we tell ourselves about how it works.

This is the template for future brandLingual guest conversations. Not expert opinions. Not frameworks on parade. But reflective practitioners thinking out loud about what experience forced them to rethink.

If you’re interested in advertising as it actually behaves in the world, not just how it’s explained in theory, this episode is a strong place to begin.

Some ideas are useful to learn. Others are useful to unLearn.

0:00 Intro - We regale our first guest on brandLingual
2:34 What Paul Feldwick Has unLearned
9:33 The Message Myth in Advertising
13:30 Do You Even Need a Brief at All?
17:02 Fame vs. Memory in Advertising
26:00 What's the Most Harmful Theory Today?
31:10 What Language Should Replace Persuasion?
36:37 Agency-Client Relationships
44:10 Beliefs Paul Might Still Unlearned
48:40 Closing Thoughts