The Customer is the Constant, with Chris Hood – Episode 452 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Digital strategist, author, and entertainment industry veteran Chris Hood talks about his award-winning work with films like Jurassic Park and Apollo 13, one HUGE missed opportunity with the Power Rangers, why even the worst leaders you know can be mentors, using the cloud before the cloud existed to develop the first known music streaming platform, why all businesses are the same business, the overhype of AI, the evolution of streaming versus cable, the fastest way to identify your target audience, and why entertainment is entertainment.

About Chris:

Chris Hood, a keynote speaker, strategist, and thought leader in customer-centric cultures, artificial intelligence, and innovation, boasts over three decades of experience in business development. The author of ‘Customer Transformation,’ Chris, provides a roadmap to customer alignment and business value, articulating a transformative seven-stage strategy. As the Founder and CEO of Synsible AI, Chris spends his time helping businesses leverage AI and reach 10x thinking. Former roles include heading Google‘s Digital Business Strategy, crafting transformation programs for Fortune 500 companies, and developing storytelling technologies at Fox Broadcasting & Disney for popular shows such as Glee, American Idol, 24, and Gotham. Currently, Chris shares his insights on ‘The Chris Hood Digital Show’ and ‘Customer Transformation Live,’ helping businesses worldwide accelerate their digital potential and alignment with customers. As a co-founder of Blind Squirrel Games, his influence stretches across multiple industries. Beyond consulting, Chris imparts his knowledge to Southern New Hampshire University students, bridging the gap between business and technology.

Learn more at ChrisHood.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
Hello, Action Catalyst listeners. This is your host, Adam Outland. And today we have our guest Chris Hood joining us. Chris is the digital strategist, speaker and author with over 35 years of experience in business development, digital strategy consulting with the largest companies in the world. Previously, he worked at Google as the head of business innovation and strategy. He’s also spent time at Fox, Disney, Universal, and Electronic Arts. Chris, great to meet you. Listen, I know, there’s all kinds of interesting questions to ask you about what’s going on here. And now for you, but I know your bio talked about being the best professional at popping popcorn in a movie theater before working in the movie business a little bit. Could you maybe color that in a little bit?

Chris Hood
Yeah. Well, when I started my career path when I was 16, 17 years old, of course, we’re all faced with what do you want to be when you grow up, I had two real strong passions, I had a passion for movies. And I had a passion for technology. Now I was a typical teenager sitting in literally in my basement playing video games on my computer, all the way back to 1986. So before computers really became a thing. And so clearly, when presented with the question about what do you want to be when you grow up, and I had the choice between movies or computers, the choice was obvious, go be in the movies, because there is really no such thing as computer careers. So I solely pick the job where I could get in and see free movies. So go work at the local movie theater, sell tickets, make popcorn, clean, theaters really embrace that idea of, well, this is my first step into being in the movies as being your customer first. Yeah. But that grew at the beauty of it is the passion of movies grew. And then later in my career, the impact of technology and the evolution of where we are today with technology definitely collided. And that convergence of loving technology and loving movies is really what was the sweet spot. And I was able to get into some great companies like Disney universal Fox Broadcasting to continue to leverage that foundation that I had all the way back when I was a kid. How do we bring technology into entertainment? And how do we take entertainment and make it more interesting, using technology? And that’s really stayed with me all the way up until today.

Adam Outland
Yeah. And so what was the first break in?

Chris Hood
Well, when I was at the theater I, I started to do marketing did some really incredible things for films like Jurassic Park and Apollo 13. And some Disney films. And that marketing effort earned me recognition, I, I won some international awards for marketing in the theater business, I began to get more recognition. And obviously, I was able to continue that, to start working with some great companies. What was interesting, though, is in between that I had, I had a slew of crazy opportunities that I, I don’t know if I regret them. Or if I just look back and say what if, but as an example, I started to do a lot more work in 3d design, or computers. And so I was presented with an opportunity to go to a studio, it turned out to be a job interview, although I wasn’t told it was a job interview. So I show up to the studio, they’re showing me special effects and what they were trying to build, and they thought, like you would be great for this job. And it turned out to be special effects artist, or the Power Rangers. Now, again, at the time, I was like, Well, what is this silly show the Power Rangers and this special effects like they were literally drawing animations in like fire on the screen. And I’m like, I don’t get it. Like I do get it, but I don’t get it. Anyway, I laughed. And then five years later, is I should have done that I really should have done that. That would have been a huge opportunity. I should pay closer attention to the trends of industries. Because I think, and again, as I fast forward, where we begin to see innovation materializing it becomes clear when you understand what those trends are, and can make those connections.

Adam Outland
And I’m just mad at you because the power rangers would have been so much better with a different animation. You know, it still did pretty good as a show. But you know, one of the things that a lot of our guests have in common is some really impactful mentors along the way. And we often don’t learn our craft from nothing. And I was kind of curious if that was the case for you. If you felt like early in your career, you were lucky to have a couple of key people and who they were and what you learned from them.

Chris Hood
Yeah, my first manager at the movie theater, I still keep in touch with her today, we have a great relationship. And I learned so much from her in terms of toys and communication styles and management, inspiration, a lot of the foundational things that I learned at 18 still apply today. But I will say, I think we all learn even when you have bad leadership, there are countless examples of really awful managers that I’ve had over the years that I can still point to and say I learned something from that experience. And I think anybody who can do that, that the great mentors of our lives are one thing, but the negative experiences are learning moments, bad leaders, bad managers, a toxic cultures can teach you, one where you don’t want to be and to how you could potentially do it better.

Adam Outland
Is there one in particular, when you share that lesson that stands out in your mind?

Chris Hood
Yeah, definitely. And the biggest one is probably the one we are all familiar with. We’ve all been in roles, we’ve all had jobs, we’ve all worked for companies, where the culture is toxic, where people are stealing each other’s ideas, throwing people under the bus, that type of toxic attitudes inside of your workplace, create environments that no one wants to be in. And I have had countless managers, unfortunately, countless managers, who would come to me and say, you know, we really need to fix this, what do you think we should do? You would give them the idea. And then they would go off and take all the credit for it, or some problem would happen. And then they would come back and say, Well, that’s all Chris’s fault. I remember one example, where I had a manager say, What do you think we should do? In this particular situation? It doesn’t really matter what the situation is. And I gave them some suggestions. And they said, No, I don’t like that we’re going to do it this way. We’re going to do it my way instead. So they went, we were in executive level meetings, they expressed everything that we were going to do, and said that, you know, Chris gave me some of these ideas, which I didn’t, because it was completely against what I was suggesting to do, the thing failed miserably. So who of course, was the first person to get the blame? While they were all Chris’s ideas, I told him, We shouldn’t do this. And that attitude at work, destroys cultures. And we are all familiar with it. And yet we see it constantly happening. So in everything that I do, in terms of my leadership style, and how I approach cultures, is to ensure that that type of toxic behavior is eliminated. But we know and we see it, that when companies are able to remove that toxic culture and align themselves more towards a positive, innovative and customer first experience are more successful. It’s in the facts. It’s in the research. And yet, we still have at across the country.

Adam Outland
With your career path, you’ve done quite a bit it you switch gears from digital multimedia advertising, technology platform over to the music industry for a period of time. And in 2003. You did it was a raucous network. A couple of questions there. What gave you the feeling of opening and exploring whole new application of your skill set a different environment when you add success somewhere else? And then what was it like leading a team in that space?

Chris Hood
So yeah, in the early 2000s, I had an opportunity to be involved with a startup called ruckus network. Now this service was basically a counter to illegal music and file sharing that was prevalent on on campuses and all the way to the point where the recording industry started suing students for illegally sharing music. So raucous was an alternative that allowed you to still get music for free, but be able to do it in a legal way. And we had basically student licenses so that you can download and listen to music. Eventually, ruckus turned into the first known streaming music platform. And then it got acquired by Universal Music. We were using cloud when there is no concept of cloud and to give the listeners a perspective on that. Today, as an example, if you were to go and create a playlist, you could, in theory, create a playlist on your mobile device, and then be able to still access that exact same playlist on any other devices across your entire framework network that you have, right so you could go into car and the same playlist would generally be available in the 2000s there is no concept of that if you wanted to create a playlist you would have to create a playlist on your phone, you would have to create a playlist on your iPod, you would have to create a playlist on your computer, you would have to replicate that because there is no way of sharing that same playlist across multiple platforms. And so we were developing that technology. And again, first streaming cloud based platform to do it. At the time, I was also playing, literally playing in the video game space, I have a pretty maybe it’s not a unique perspective on this. But every business is really the same business, every business. And I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of people out there who will disagree with me that, especially in entertainment, whether it’s movies, or television, video games, or music, they’re all storytelling mechanisms. They’re all entertainment vehicles, they’re all things that we engage with to separate ourselves from life and, you know, explore different worlds. So that’s a fairly easy conversation I have entertainment is entertainment, no matter what the vehicle of that entertainment is. So for me, I just looked at it as just another way of exploring another part of entertainment. But when I look at businesses, I would argue that healthcare is really no different than the movie industry. And the movie industry is really no different than retail. And retail is really no different than the video game industry. Businesses are businesses. And there’s really, you know, main factors that are involved with that, you have customers and you have a business, and you need to connect to those customers. And usually, that is done through some level of storytelling, which we typically call marketing. And there is a sales process. That’s it, that’s business. And when people come and say, Look, my business is different, we do things differently. We don’t do it that way, which again, a lot of toxic cultures do. They say, oh, oh, I get it. You’re different. You don’t have customers? Oh, no, no, we have customers. Okay, oh, I got it. You’re different. You don’t care about the security of your customer data, right? No, we care about the security of our customer data, okay, you don’t have anything to sell. And when you ask these basic principle questions, you realize that really no company is different. They have differentiations, in terms of what their product and services are, or in terms of their culture, and how they produce and deliver that. But at the root core of every single business, you have a customer and you have a service, and you’re selling it. And so for me, raucous, and the music industry was just a different way to sell music to a different audience. And it was very successful.

Adam Outland
You brought up earlier about like the Power Rangers example of looking at something that’s an add on if you want to be a part of that. And specifically in your area, what are some of those trends even right now that you’re that you’ve trained yourself to pick up on? What’s been your process for keeping up with staying ahead of trends?

Chris Hood
Well I’ll blow everybody’s minds in terms of what we look at in terms of trends. And what you think is going to be successful than not successful is a mind blower. It’s not AI. AI is a buzzword right now. It’s overly hyped. It’s the shiny new object, and we’re already seeing a decline in the consumption of AI. Obviously, businesses are using AI AI has been around for 30 plus some odd years. We have all used AI in one way or another and don’t realize it so you know, translate that I look at AI similar to how I look at 3d movies, 3d movies was created, you know, back in the 1900s, it had its ups and downs. 50s at reemerge 1990s. It emerged like 2000s and 10s that reemerged like it’s got these moments that is going up and down. AI is acting in the same way. It’s it’s got these ebbs and flows of popularity. It’s just become more accessible for a company like open AI and chat GBT, where people can actually engage with it, and they find it interesting. It’s those trends that you have to pay attention to. And you have to recognize, right, most people are coming into the AI scene right now and saying, Well, we see AI going up, up, up, up, but they don’t realize that it was up at one point in time, and then it went back down. And now it’s coming back up again. Right? So there’s these trends that you have to pay attention to. And there’s a lot of ways that you can do that. You can go and just read statistical analysis, you know, where was AI in the 1980s? Heck, if you really want ask chap, GBT, where was AI in the 1980s. And it will come up and and tell you where it was that you know, and then there are some trend reports from industry analysis companies that actually will show you what the hype, and what types of technologies are trending. And those are usually 510 years out, and you can start to see, you know, where are we at? And so a good example of this would be like 3d printing. So I think research is one of the big things, but really, where we get into understanding what to focus on and how to innovate It still ultimately goes back to consumers, it goes back to us goes back to what are we engaged with. And when you begin to understand what problems are out there, because that’s all it really is, is we’re trying to solve problems, you have to recognize those problems, and then be able to apply something to the problem. A lot of business ideas, like a lot of the AI ideas out there are nothing but a, we’re going to create a company on AI. Well, it’s not really solving a problem. And even if you think you’re really solving a problem, you’re probably not. And so you’ve got to start with a customer and what their problem is, and then begin to analyze what you are going to do or build to solve that problem. And then worry about the technology that is going to help you enable it, the technology usually comes last.

Adam Outland
I don’t know if you have an opinion or a thought on this particular problem. But this is anecdotal. I’m not sure if I’ve got all my my information, right. But I know that one of the switch to streaming is since he worked with Disney and others meant it in a lot of ways no ad revenue to support it the way it did in cable. And so from your perspective, what’s the answer to no ad revenue and the streaming services and a lot of ways not having that conduit to prop up their business when their investors start looking at their piece of the pie? What are your thoughts there?

Chris Hood
No advertising today, but there is conversation going on about and it’s clear that this is probably coming down the pipe is that they will start to offer different tiers, what you’ll find is you’ll you’ll you’ll get a cheaper advertising tier or a premium, no advertising tier. And I think most people today are ok with some advertising prevea as an example, as a streaming platform that has a bunch of movies on it, you can typically find it on Amazon. And they do advertising in between it’s you know free to see a brand new movie but app with ads, but they’ve put like five or six ads in between, you know, every section of of movie, Disney is definitely talking about this. And they’re saying, Okay, well, you know, we could do like a 499 Tear with ads, or a you know, 1499 Tear with no ads. There’s a lot of people who would probably take that for 99 and be perfectly content with the ads. But I think the industry in general is evolving. And if it’s not advertising based, it’s definitely going to see a change even with how we package. I mean, this has been a conversation going on for quite some time, where you had cable and cable started to run, you know, all these packages, like you can get all of these services for one price. And what we found was, well, I don’t watch half of the channels, right? So we started to separate those. And then you started to see streaming. Well, now what we’re seeing is kind of the death of cable and the traditional packages, because they are struggling because all of the streaming services are demanding too much. And consumers don’t like that price increase. So they’re looking for alternative actions. And they’re ultimately coming back to services like Netflix, who they can get a wider variety. There’s still some shifting that I think is going to happen. But cable is definitely I think on its last legs, the movie industry is being challenged in terms of getting people back to the theaters. And streaming services, like Disney plus, are losing subscribers at an astronomical rate, not just because the content is bad, but because they’re also increasing the price. But they’re increasing the price because they’re losing people because of the content. It’s definitely an interesting field to look at.

Adam Outland
In a broader scope, what trends do you think business leaders in general should be prepared for when it comes to customer transformation, digital strategies?

Chris Hood
Well, companies have to get back to understanding who their customer is and what their customer wants. That’s the basics basis of everything. Ever since the dawn of business, there’s been a customer and ever moving forward, there will always be a customer and you don’t have a business if you don’t have a customer. So that’s the one constant that is not going to change. So if you understand that the customer is the constant and everything that you do, what we see now is that the customer has a stronger voice than ever before. Be that because of social media and word of mouth and being able to share opinions and experiences. I had a bad experience. I had a good experience. All of the videos that we’re seeing online about incidences on airlines like those things are all coming because customers are engaged with it. And customers have an easier ability today to move. They don’t have to stay with a streaming service. They can leave it they don’t have to stay with an insurance company. They can leave it they don’t have to buy pizza from the same company. They can they have choices. They have options. They have access. It’s easy to make changes. And so because consumer expectations are higher than ever before. Consumer demand is more critical than ever before. And consumer access and communication externally is higher than ever before. And that’s only going to continue to increase. Consumers today have more power than they’ve ever had. As a result, the businesses, the companies that directly align with what their customers want, are going to be more successful. And we see that in examples like Disney, who was losing drastic amounts of money and consumers, Bud Light, Anheuser Busch, who lost a boatload of money, it wasn’t necessarily a marketing fiasco, it was a leadership and an alignment fiasco. But when you are not aligned in the ways that your customer again, who are they buy, like clearly didn’t know who their customer base was, and what do they want. And Disney clearly doesn’t understand what their consumers want, you will lose business. And the data is what we have to make decisions, leveraging too often. And when when we go back to these toxic cultures, like the boss that I was sharing the story about, your decisions have to be rooted in what the data tells you. It cannot be open to interpretation, if this is what starts introducing biases. Again, I would argue that both Anheuser Busch and Disney two companies I’ve alluded to, they’re making decisions based on their own personal biases, the leaders biases, not what the data is telling them. They don’t really care what the data is telling them. And that’s the problem. So you have to take that data, you have to look at it, whether it’s good data or bad data, I actually just read something before we got on. And it said, if you get somebody to click on a search and comes to your site, odds are that your target demographic, right there, they’re actually we’re interested enough to click on something you have to say, we’ll figure out who that person is. That’s your target, and start to understand that start to look at it. And we can leverage this in both positive and negative. If somebody is clicking on your ad and coming to your site and engaging with you, there’s your demographic, if people are not that you are deliberately trying to target Well, that’s not the demographic. So both sides is data points that you have to look at understand. And definitely, you have to make decisions on.

Adam Outland
Let’s maybe tie up with this last question if you don’t mind your wealth of information. And luckily, you’ve written some stuff that can allow us a deeper insight into your thoughts. But for this interview, I’d love to know, as you’ve moved into leadership, you’ve had to work through other people to accomplish goals, not just do it all yourself, and you’ve been doing this a long time through other people. I mean, you’ve been in a lot of leadership roles. If you’ve had to narrow it down to one thing that you feel, has helped you as a leader, what would you isolate as the most important thing you’ve personally learned and done.

Chris Hood
There’s really two and they kind of are synergy together. The first one is communication, you have to be able to communicate and express ideas, motivations, goals, trends, whatever it is, you’ve got to be able to communicate with your team, what’s working, and not be afraid to say what’s not working, and not take things. You know, oftentimes verbatim sit down with people talk, communicate, don’t avoid conversations. Sidenote, real quick story, the same manager that I was telling you about earlier, who threw me under the bus and took credit. He had this very interesting mechanism to talk to me. We literally sat in glass offices that were next to each other, and you could see each other. And yet, I would often get a message from him saying, are you there? Like, can we talk, I would turn out to be like, we just look over a course I’m here, it demonstrated an example of somebody who just didn’t want to communicate, who was afraid of communicating who was afraid of conflict, you’ve got to put that aside, you have to have communication. And and I think the second part is, is once you’ve established communication, and you’ve established what your goals and ideas and trends and things are, it introduces a level of trust. And that trust is critical because you have to be able to trust your team to go off and execute. You can’t micromanage. You can’t sit there and watch over their shoulder with everything they’re doing. You can’t ask them to turn in things for you to review. You can’t do that. So you’ve got to be able to trust that they’re going to deliver. And that trust again comes from building a relationship through communication and ensuring that they understand and recognize what the goals of the organization are. If you can do both of those things, then you’re going to be successful.

Adam Outland
I love it. I know I said that was the last question. But there’s some something else that tickled my brain as you’re talking about a book you recently read outside of your own. What are you reading right now that’s influential for you?

Chris Hood
The one that I just picked up and have has had been reading it again for the second or third time is drastic Park, believe it or not, what’s fabulous about this, I was I was reading through the opening of Jurassic Park, and it talks about bio engineering. And it goes into great detail about bioengineering and it being the, you know, the science of today. And if you actually go and pick up a copy, or maybe you can find the opening somewhere or audio book of Jurassic Park, listen to it, read it, and replace everything that it talks about from bioengineering perspective, with artificial intelligence, it literally is the same. It was crazy to me listening to this on both audiobooks. And again, I picked it up, and I was reading this passage, and I’m like, Oh, my gosh, you could just replace this with artificial intelligence. And it’s the exact same thing in terms of how companies are competing with each other for dominance in this space and how it’s revolutionizing the way businesses. It’s really fascinating.

Adam Outland
you know, we talk about business books a lot. But you know, one of the things I appreciate about science fiction from a variety of standpoints, is that I mean, that’s where so much of this stuff is created, write it in the shape of an idea in someone’s mind. And then some engineers decided to make it reality. I’m going back to your Isaac Asimov stuff and saying concept, you’re like, holy smokes. This is a long time ago that he wrote these books.

Chris Hood
Yeah, how much in Star Trek do we have today? You know, the flip phone, you know, the communicator with, you know, I mean, I’m sure people are out there trying to build teleporters. But I mean, a lot of what Star Trek was about was inspirational that has turned into technologies today.

Adam Outland
100% true. Well, thank you, Chris, for your time and attention. And if folks want to find out a little bit more about your, what you are doing now, and what you’re sharing with the world, where are they going to find that?

Chris Hood
The best place to get in touch with me. And to find out everything that I’m working on is my website, Chris hood.com. There, you can find my social media profiles, you can find my own podcast, you can find my blog and articles that I’m writing. And you can find a copy of my book, customer transformation. And if you want, you can buy it on my website, and I’ll even sign it for you.

Adam Outland
That’s awesome. And a fantasy adventure novel that’s coming up?

Chris Hood
Yeah, yeah, I’m working actively on getting a fantasy adventure novel produced. It’s already written. It’s already been edited, but going through some of the final stages to get it out and published.

Adam Outland
Well, you can send the galley copy right over here. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate your time today.

Chris Hood
Absolutely. Appreciate it so much.