Trendsettrs: Joe Burns
A deep dive with viral LinkedIn creator and Strategy Lead at Quality Meats Creative. 🥩
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Trendsettrs: Joe Burns
Trendsettrs is a Pollinatr column about marketers blazing their own trails. They’ll share tactical advice from the front lines that will help you be smarter at your job.
Meet Joe!
Joe is a strategy lead at Quality Meats Creative and an ex-Mother and BBH strategist, who just picked up their first Cannes Grand Prix for the GoDaddy Super Bowl Campaign. 🏆
I happened upon Joe through his truly amazing and very impressive content on LinkedIn. It’s chockfull of insights with zany, distinctive visuals and such a fun voice. Given that my day-to-day job is to live and breathe LinkedIn for Duolingo, I’m constantly brainstorming new ways to write and make eyec-atching, impactful content. It’s very inspiring when you find someone doing it really well and have a format that they are known for. He has 38k followers and counting, and his content often goes viral, getting upwards of 300-500+ comments for each post 🤯. On LinkedIn that is very good.
He has an awesome background doing all sorts of strategy for all sorts of brands. He started out in media planning then shifted to comms planning and ultimately moved to brand planning, which is literally my exact same career path, so we obviously had a blast chatting with each other about strategy of all shapes and sizes.
The team at Quality Meats Creative recently just won a Grand Prix at Cannes for their GoDaddy work, which is SO GOOD (seriously PTL that B2B is finally getting a much-needed dose of creativity 👏🏼). He did a breakdown about the strategic work here.
Our convo below covers:
😴 How his kids waking him up at 5AM made him famous on LinkedIn
🔥 Why agencies should take their own medicine and ideas to get you started
🤖 Tricks for using AI as your creative partner
Michelle: Tell us about your career journey and a career highlight / something you're most proud of?
Joe: So I actually started off as a copywriting placement in a digital agency just near Old Street roundabout in East London, but then the 2008 global financial crisis came along and that agency went bust.
What followed was a year working in a fashion studio, which lasted until I got sick of the ‘devil wears prada’ culture and living on friends' couches - so I moved into a media agency.
In media I was shocked by how jankily everything was done, people would still be printing off media plans then hand typing information back into reports or using calculators - mind blowing stuff - so I built a nifty excel macro that essentially automated my job, then I cosied up to the comms strategy team and pestered them until they took me under their wing.
A couple of years later I got a job offer from Mother London, who at the time were the best creative agency on earth, you could argue that they still are, but at the time there really wasn’t much of a debate.
I worked at Mother in London for about a decade, then moved to Mother NYC, then I jumped over to BBH and was Head of Strategy there for a while.
After that, Quality Meats came along and I felt they were doing something quite cool and also quite smart in cutting out all the bloaty bureaucracy and swirly nonsense that gets in the way of good ideas - so I decided to jump ship and join this motley crew.
Michelle: Tell us about Quality Meats Creative, about your role, and about some campaigns you've worked on.
Joe: At Quality Meats we do all the things a big creative agency can do, without all the shenanigans that very often get in the way of doing great creative work.
The biggest difference between us and any other agency is probably the degree of entrepreneurialism and hustle - we’re a group of people who like finding ways to do things and make things.
Naturally, we like working with clients who have a similar mindset. If you’re looking for a dozen junior account handlers, big ‘Ta-Dah’ meetings, and 300 slide waffling fluffy strategy decks… then we’re probably not right for you. If you prefer to text each other, have honest conversations, and get to great work together - then we’ll be a good fit.
We’re offering something distinctive, and creating distinctive work.
Michelle: Hot take about advertising agencies?
Joe: Advertising agencies hate taking their own medicine. Agencies should be the best at marketing and advertising themselves. Agencies want their work to advertise for them, but I don’t think that's possible anymore because:
Media has become so diffuse and fragmented. No one sees all the same ads anymore and everyone’s algorithm is different.
The problem a lot of agencies run into with LinkedIn is you have to provide the user with something valuable that they want to engage with. For example, you could say “look at what we did with x client - maybe you have a similar problem, here's how you solve it”, vs. just “look at this cool work we did”.
So much of what ad agencies do is really fundamentally built on the get out of jail free card of media dollars. Aka, I am going to force you to watch this ad. I’ll make it entertaining, but we're paying money for you to see it. Media investment has allowed ad agencies to get sloppy - paying money to guarantee scale has let agencies rest on laurels.
Michelle: Tell us all about your journey with LinkedIn and becoming the LinkedIn documents guy?! What's your motivation for doing this, how'd you get started?
Joe: I started posting on my paternity leave - babies have this funny habit of waking you up at 5am and then going back to sleep 30 minutes later - so I found myself in this strange liminal headspace with nothing to do but write - first essays, then decks, eventually these idiosyncratic little flipbook strategy-zine type things which have really taken off and are have become quite an emulated style.
As for my motivations…
Part of it is looking at what is happening in the world and seeing the rise of influencers and creators - the overhead/cost of entry for building and making things is now really low, and the benefits of doing it are quite fundamental - though the ‘cringe factor’ you need to overcome is still there, especially challenging as a Brit!
The other motivation, and probably the bigger one if I’m being honest, is just having more autonomy. If you work in advertising then you’re working on client briefs you can’t really control, and there are always lots of chefs in the kitchen on the agency side too.
Most of the time things get watered down, or get really swirly, and when things go wrong you’re sort of left saying “I told you so, if we’d have just done it the way I suggested then this would have worked” - well - what I like about doing my own thing is that I can just make and do exactly what I want to do, if it works it works, if it doesn’t: I learn something. Praxis!
Michelle: Tell us about the process - how do you make them ? What have you learned? What are some AI tricks you can share for making this great content?
Joe: I usually start off with an extremely abstract intuitive feeling and vibe of what I want to say, then I listen to a lot of music and daydream a lot, maybe dance a bit. Then I come up with the title and play around with it in different typographic styles, then I try and capture the world and art direction, finally I actually write the thing. I always forget to spellcheck.
I use Midjourney for the imagery, which I prefer over ChatGPT. ChatGPT behaves like a tool, Midjourney acts like a psychedelic drug! Or another analogy I use is that ChatGPT is like a dog, Midjourney is like a cat... on hallucinogenic drugs.
I use images to prompt more than words to be honest - I’ll build mood boards and then use those images with more abstract prompts - here’s some images using the Rolling Stones ‘some girls’ album cover and the prompt ‘game’.
Michelle: Do you have any hobbies outside of work?
Joe: I love food and music. In winter I do a lot of savory pastry stuff - meat pies, sausage rolls - very classic British. But now the weather is getting warmer I’m doing more salads and dips. Let me give you my romesco recipe! I make a mason jar of this every week and then for a couple of lunches we’ll just spoon it out onto a plate and dip crudites in it. So for prep, roast a couple of bulbs of garlic drizzled in olive oil wrapped in foil, and a couple of red bell peppers - 90 mins at a low heat like 325 - then squeeze out the jammy garlic and stick the peppers in a big wide mouth mason jar, add a half a cup of hazelnuts, half a cup of almonds, salt, pepper, smoked paprika, pinch of sugar, splash of red wine vinegar - then just stick an immersion blender and zhuzh it up into a dip. Life changing.
Michelle’s key takeaways:
Re: Advertising agencies taking their own medicine. Joe and I chatted about this and I feel like I’m often beating a dead horse but TRULY, this is SUCH a whitespace for agencies. Your audience of potential future clients are there, it’s a platform that wants you to talk about work, and it’s a great place to attract talent. Read the post because it has some ideas to get you started!
Re: how Joe leverages AI as his creative partner. I had this epiphany talking to Joe that strategists speak in words and creatives speak in images, which often makes them talk past each other. Joe has found a very powerful way to speak in both words and images through his work. It makes me realize two major things:
Any brief a strategist writes can and should be WAY more visual now that we have these tools at our fingertips
Every person in advertising and marketing should be playing around with these tools and building their AI muscles. These toolsets will create a a competitive advantage for those who adopt them, making them much more valuable candidates/employees.
Re: Quality Meats Creative has such fun positioning and is creating some really impressive work. If I were looking for an agency partner, they would definitely make it on my RFP list. Also make sure to follow Joe on LinkedIn if you want to be served up “strategic cold-cuts in a world of lukewarm hot-takes”.
Thanks so much for giving us a peek behind the curtain, Joe!
What’s buzzin’
Tasty morsels to talk about at work 😋 aka trending content on social, post ideas you can try, and insights you need to know about.
👀 Marketing and agency LinkedIn creators to work with:
I asked my community on LinkedIn who their favorite marketing and agency LinkedIn creators are and they showed up! If you’re a brand looking to tap into this space, check out this list.
👀 Brand lessons to steal: One of my new favorite kid’s clothing brands is called Cadets. They’ve done an incredible job developing a visual, fun, and enticing world through their brand that parents want to buy into. I broke it down here.
🔥 The Labubu craze continues: Now people are doing their nails and there’s a new trending TikTok audio about Labubus from Lizzo “are you talking sh*t about me? You can’t even outdress my Labubu”. INCREDIBLE.
😂 Memes of the week: ICYMI, Anna Wintour is stepping down, and the internet is having a heyday, here and here. “The labubus were the final straw” killed me. 💀
🚬 Social trend of the week: Something to take the edge off - any brand could do this. It’s eye-catching and funny.
🧈 My fav post of the week: Butter girl summer? Nah butter babyyyyyy summer 👶
💖 Album of the week: Throwing it back for my Millennials again. Nicki’s Pink Friday is a banger.
Have a buzzy week!
🐝 Michelle