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OhHello - Scott Hess (Part 1)
31 Plays1 year ago
OhHello!! It's episode 60!
Big thanks to Scott Hess for recording this 3-parter a wee bit ago. I had been saving these gems for when both the OhHello.io platform and OhHello.io 🌞☕️ community were a bit more mature.
Today is the day.
Part 1 of a 3-part series...
As the hashtag#chiefmarketingofficer hashtag#cmo of Publicis Media, Scott opens up as an advertising executive who reflects on his journey and offers advice for young professionals.
🔥 Scott emphasizes the importance of perseverance and faith in finding your path, even if it's not linear or rational.
🔥 He encourages trusting your gut and showing up as your authentic self, rather than trying to fit into someone else's mold.
🔥 He draws on his own experiences to illustrate how embracing his true self led to professional success and joy.
🔥He continuously acknowledges the value of mentorship and the importance of being patient with yourself as you navigate your career.
Overall:
This conversation is a heartwarming and insightful reflection on life, career, and finding your place in the world. Scott Hess's honest and relatable approach offers valuable lessons for people of all ages who are searching for their own unique path.
Recommended
Transcript
Enthusiastic Greetings
00:00:06
Speaker
Okay. Alright. Oh! Hello, Scott!
00:00:21
Speaker
Hey Jeremy, how are you? Such energy. So much energy going into this. You know, when you hear that mashup, not having energy, like I can go maybe an hour or two without caffeine. If I hear that, it just perks me up. Also, having the opportunity to speak with you, to have you on the pod and VOD, a legend in our ecosystem, a legend within the... Oh, I saw your lips just go...
00:00:49
Speaker
I have the pleasure of knowing you. It was so wonderful seeing you a couple times over the past couple of weeks. With that said, who are you?
Self-Reflection and Humor
00:01:02
Speaker
Why are you here? So anybody that is crazy enough to want to ask me questions about myself,
00:01:11
Speaker
Usually, I have to pay a therapist to sit still and listen to all my BS and enable me to sort through all of my stuff. You're offering to do it for free. Who am I? I'm just some guy at this point, an old guy trying to figure out what the heck we're doing here.
00:01:36
Speaker
really attracted to beauty, but I'm also attracted to a lot of ugly and I like making stuff. I majored in poetry in school. I had no designs on a business career. I still don't. So yeah, I'm just each day trying to figure out what's interesting, what's cool, and what the point of all this is, truly.
Career in Advertising
00:01:58
Speaker
I appreciate that for our viewers that are watching a poster listeners. You don't know what I actually do. Yeah, yeah. Can you can you explain what you do a little bit more but also because that background that well I can see shadow. So it looks like that is a real background filled with a plethora of literature, some tunes to your left. Yeah, that's a little bit about what you do when you're not reading and when you're not jamming out. And
00:02:27
Speaker
There we go. That's real. That's real. That's a real book. This is called life at its best. I don't know what it is. I just thought the cover looked really cool. That's amazing. That's a great cover. So tell us about life at its best. What does life at its best to Scott has mean? So I assume at some point, there's some kind of titling somewhere that says what I do. I have a job in advertising. I work for publicist media. I'm a responsible brand and culture of all the publicist media agencies. So
00:02:56
Speaker
I think it's one of those jobs that's sort of virtually impossible. At some point you get old enough and you get a role that is really, it's not something that any person can achieve. And the older I've gotten and the more I've ended up in these big roles that sound like massive, that should take like a team of 30 people, you start to realize
00:03:16
Speaker
So I've learned to fit the jobs to myself. I can't possibly carry that job on my back. It's too big and it's too many people. There's 23,000 people in 50 countries that make up publicist media. So what I've tried to do as I was the CMO of Spark Foundry and that was an agency that we grew within publicist media. Now I'm across publicist media is to try and, this is amorphous, set a tone for the agency
00:03:46
Speaker
and how the agency and its people move in the world, what it would feel like to interact with the agency. There's that book, Yuval Hariri, or I think is how you say his name, called Sapiens, the beginning of Sapiens. Yeah, he talks about the idea of one of the things that differentiates humans from animals is our ability to make and imbue meaning in myths.
00:04:10
Speaker
So I try and actually put some meat on the bones of what it means to work with publicist media, work for publicist media, to make publicist media more attractive for people that might want to work there and people that might want to work with us.
Self-Discovery at 57
00:04:25
Speaker
Beyond that, I'm a father of two boys, 18 and 21. I'm 30 plus years married. I have two rescued dogs. I have all kinds of biographical data I can share with you.
00:04:36
Speaker
But I'll tell you what's interesting is the moment that I'm talking to you right now. I have spent, as most parents do, the better part of the last 21 years, very much thinking of myself in relationship to my kids and my wife and even my extended family. And sometimes I think of myself also as a neighbor and a friend. What's really fun, I'm gonna turn 57 tomorrow. Happy birthday, my friend. Thank you.
00:05:03
Speaker
I feel like I'm being afforded this moment as my first child is a junior in college my next one's about to leave for college that empty nest moment. I'm very much for the first time ever without guilt or shame really thinking a lot about who I am and what I'm doing in this in this moment and it's.
00:05:19
Speaker
So you say, who are you? Like, I think, and you asked that question several months ago, I would have deflected by telling you all the things I am to other people. I'm an employee and a neighbor and a boss and a dad and all that shit. I'm back to thinking of myself as a dude in his basement with a bunch of books and some guitars and a keyboard, trying to figure out what's going on. And
00:05:43
Speaker
A nice thing about being 57 is when I went to college and I decided to major in philosophy, I assumed, as long as I stayed focused, I took religion and philosophy classes, that I would eventually reach an answer. This is what's going on. Here's the meaning of life. I now know that I'm very unlikely to arrive at an answer given that nobody's done it yet.
00:06:05
Speaker
But the journey of all this fucking crazy writing in my notebook and playing songs and even trying to create a culture at work, there's real joy in that if I do it authentically. And if I do it as myself, for myself, mindful of how that impacts other people.
00:06:27
Speaker
So I don't know of enough people that are almost 57, spend enough time saying it's pretty fucking great being almost 57.
Early Career Struggles
00:06:38
Speaker
I have a sense of like of joyous detachment from things like my sense of self isn't completely up for grabs at any moment based on external circumstances. It's so it's I don't know that so I'm showing up today as an almost 57 year old guy that's that's in a kind of joyously selfish moment if that makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense. Especially with one in college one about to go to college. You're in your basement surrounded by books and music literally in my basement.
00:07:08
Speaker
Yeah, truly. So you are the master of your domain. You have been in the advertising media marketing realm for the vast majority of your career. You worked with lots of different people. You said that you, knowing that you went to Miami, Ohio, but also understanding some of just who you've been throughout your life in a very succinct CliffsNotes version from you.
00:07:37
Speaker
going back and referring to the book Sapiens, just as someone who read it years ago, it just put a smile on my face too, because we're all just living, breathing, figuring ourselves out. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I've decided to build this platform in this community is because nobody knows the fucking answer. No. Yeah. And so part of what I think would be valuable is
00:08:04
Speaker
Understanding, obviously, explain who you are and what defines you.
00:08:10
Speaker
understanding some of the secret sauce that got you those 56 years and 364 days thus far a day away and by the time this this this is listened to and watched you'll be maybe a month or so into being 57 but why don't you tell us a little bit just about how you would characterize your secret sauce your skill set what
00:08:35
Speaker
What has gotten you to who you have become, how you've become that person? And as a mentor to so many people within the advertising marketing media realm, there's a lot that you have experienced maybe just because, you know, you've got some of that cool silver hair, you wear the black shirts, but in all seriousness, you're just a good, wholesome person. Tell us a little bit about what got you to where you are.
00:09:06
Speaker
So first I will say thank you. I have been working on accepting that I am a decent person that does try and show up to help other people. The word wholesome, I think, could be a bit of a stretch. Yeah, a second tongue in cheek. I mean, if I just think broadly, professionally, but to me, I don't have a lot of separation between professional and personal. I came to Chicago. I got a degree at Miami University in Ohio.
00:09:37
Speaker
It wasn't my first choice, but it was affordable, and one of my best friends was going there. I ended up there. And I graduated with a 2.5, and I ended up with a degree in creative writing with a focus on poetry. I left college. I went home, and I worked for my mom managing her second TCBY store.
00:09:58
Speaker
And so I hired 20 high school-ish kids, a couple of college kids to run the store, tried to figure out how I could do as little as possible so I could smoke cigarettes and go out with my friends and stuff like that. But I had a really tough start. I didn't have a good academic background. I didn't have a clear sense of vocation. I had friends that knew they wanted to be in consulting or accounting or this and that, none of that, none, like none.
00:10:23
Speaker
So seriously, I think I thought I would be an entry-level poet or something. I honestly thought I had spent no time contemplating how I would earn a living, where I would live, or what I wanted to do in the world.
00:10:39
Speaker
Eventually after that time at home and then I moved to Cincinnati for a bit, I eventually visited Chicago. All my friends in Chicago were having a great time. So like my third or fourth thing after college, you know, and this is all in about 18 months, I moved to Chicago and I moved to Chicago with $200. And I had stuff, had my stuff sealed in like moving boxes with like, you know, duct tape and shit.
Path to Success
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:01
Speaker
friends pick me up, I wore a suit because I thought if I wore a suit to fly to Chicago, that it would show that I was serious and I had an electric typewriter. So, you know, you said nobody knows anything, dude, I knew, I knew literally nothing. And then you ask, what's the secret sauce? I think before I say that, I just want to make it clear, like, I, some of my secret sauce has just been perseverance. Yep.
00:11:28
Speaker
Love that answer. Yeah, you just keep going. And so so when you get to a certain age, people are like, what advice would you give to your 25 year old self? So and the problem is that your 25 year old self can't hear the smart like, like I would say have faith and keep going. But that sounds horrible to a 25 year old. Like, they don't even know what faith is yet. Like I didn't. What I mean by that in a way that hopefully people could understand is
00:11:59
Speaker
So much of the suffering and the mistakes, which are just inevitable, do have a purpose and meaning. But it takes a long time. It's not like you
00:12:11
Speaker
go to a job and you learn something and then you pivot. It's not linear. It's not rational. It's just the faith is, faith is basically to believe in something where there's no rational evidence for it. So the faith I would tell people to have is literally the dumbest people that I've ever known with the least social skills over time are okay.
00:12:33
Speaker
And so if you're not the dumbest person with the least social skills, you have an even better chance. But literally, like everybody I went to college with eventually finds their path. So so everybody will find their path. I could say have faith, maybe the better thing is to say be patient, which is also horrifying to a 25 year old. And then literally,
00:12:53
Speaker
Nothing I did was linear or rational. And most of my friends that have been successful. It's the same thing. You just keep trying stuff. And beyond having faith and persisting, the biggest there are two other things that I picked up that again, I told you I figure shit out as I talked. Absolutely. One of them is how to trust my gut.
00:13:14
Speaker
So going through school, you get taught to trust your head. Oh, is this smart? I can make a spreadsheet, pluses and minuses, all this shit like that. Most of the time, the feeling I have in my body about something, whether I want to do it or I don't want to do it, is shockingly accurate. A friend of mine just said, well, you talked to my friend who's the CRO of a rising company about blah, blah, blah, business model, acronym, bullshit, and I feel like
00:13:39
Speaker
No, I don't want to do that. And I'm not going to enjoy it. And it's not going to be good for me or for him. I could just feel it. You said you want to talk about mentorship. That feels good. Okay. So getting to the place where you start to trust your body, because your body sends you all these signals is huge. And then the next thing beyond that is, is
00:14:03
Speaker
Don't be afraid to show up as your authentic self. So when I worked at Anderson Consulting out of school, I tried so hard to dress like an Anderson Consulting guy. I eventually had to get a haircut because they said my haircut wasn't Anderson Consulting. And I started trying to read the books that I saw the partners reading or even some of my peers that were sharp.
00:14:23
Speaker
read the Wall Street Journal, understand what trends are in management consulting. I just wasn't interested at all. And it was a period of a decade at least, where I started to realize that the kid that ended up studying poetry that was interested in philosophy and that was sort of laid up at night wondering why we were on the planet and being afraid of death, that guy could be compelling in a professional setting and in fact would be different than so many of the other people there.