While most know Edward Norton from his success as an award making filmmaker, he’s also a serious and accomplished entrepreneur, environmentalist, and investor — including successes in Uber, CrowdRise/GoFundMe, Kensho (acquired by S&P Global), and in 2015, Edward co-founded EDO.
Edward was a guest on Learning from Leaders, a top business podcast by and for employees and alumni of P&G, the world’s largest advertiser, where he spoke candidly about his creative process and passion for innovation — with inspiration ranging from David Bowie to data science — and how his creative interests led him to co-founding EDO to solve a very real problem facing the media and advertising industry.
Read highlights from the conversation below, or listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
On choosing what (many) things to do with limited energy and time (and taking inspiration from David Bowie) (7:23):
“The equation of balance in anyone’s life is one of the great challenges of living. I saw the documentary about David Bowie, ‘Moonage Daydream.’ It’s a spectacular sonic experience. It’s a kaleidoscopic kind of experience that bounces between the phases of his life, but you get this incredibly robust portrait of him. And there’s this one part where you’ve been watching this, just this unbelievable waterfall of work that this guy did, not just his, you know, his records and things, but his touring and his painting. And he was just an unbelievably productive kind of volcano of creativity. He lived the creative life, in all dimensions of his life at all times as a traveler and all this stuff. And there’s a point at which it kind of talks about a pause, and he says, ‘you know, it’s actually a nice feeling to get to your mid-30s.’ And we just burst out laughing, we were like, ‘he’s in his mid 30s at this point?’ It feels like you’ve watched like three lifetimes of work, like, you’ve watched more phases of incarnation and productivity and creativity and everything. And then he drops the bomb that he’s in his mid-30s. At that point, you’re just like, ‘Oh, my God.’ But to your point, I think that he was ahead of the curve in recognizing the shape of the modern world, and that it was changing, I think intellectually Bowie’s an incredibly, incredibly sophisticated observer of cultural dynamics. And he recognized that there was this atomization and fragmentation of what had been kind of the unity, or at least the veneer of a heterogeneous culture, you know, that everybody was bonded up in and he realized it was all splitting apart. And he kind of personified that and created these iconic, almost like, expressions of it. But I also think he did always stand for as a person who, by liberating himself in so many ways, he liberated the space in which he could work. And you look at him, and you do look at him and go, it’s possible to do a lot in life.”
On how we can each make the choice to do more and “parallel process” (10:17):
“Everybody within themselves, within their own internal conversation is aware of not just their dualities, but the multiplicities that are within them. The multiplicities that are in you, that are in each person that may or may not get their full expression.
They’re there. And a lot of the challenge in life is, Figuring out how you can carve the lanes in which you can find expression for all those things within you. When you choose, kind of, the unstructured path of doing creative work. There’s lots of things that are fraught in that, because there’s uncertainty and you have to create your own structures of discipline and work motivation and all of it. But the upside if it starts to work for you, or if you find that lane, is that the truth is creativity ebbs and flows. I mean, writing, making music, making films, acting, painting, these things, it ebbs and it flows.You go through producing, and then refining and then putting out and then pause, and you can’t do it relentlessly, you know?
And it turns out that there’s a lot of room, you can make room in space and time, especially if you don’t let your ego consume your focus on the scorecard of how other people are looking at it. I think there’s this supreme irony that you succeed outside the straight world outside the nine to five world. And then you just turn yourself and people turn themselves into careerists. Literally, they turn themselves into career slaves. There’s a lot of people I admire. But I really admire ones who use the freedom that’s available within the unstructured or self-structured, creative life to seize on the opportunity to realize other parts of themselves.
For me, my own scorecard is much more to do with whether I’m getting to exercise muscles in myself that I’m interested in developing, that don’t have to do with films or anything like that. And if I can find the room, and the time to do more than one thing is actually more satisfying than an extra measure of fame or celebration for the one thing, you know what I mean? Because it’s a richer life.”
On embracing risk, and how everything is really a widget – from brands to Batman (16:20):
“This is actually true in corporate cultures as well. And I run some of my own companies, and you do have to unshackle people.
It’s hard to create cultures in which there’s a sense of opportunity and risk. Everybody at the end of the day, whether it’s data science, or software or soap, everybody’s making a widget eventually, you know what I mean? Movies, too, by the way. Once something creative, like Batman becomes a brand. It’s a widget, I don’t care who’s directing it. I don’t care who’s doing the new hipster skin on it. It’s still a widget. You know, we’ve got three Spider-Mans with four films each., I mean, if that isn’t a widget, I don’t know what it is. And it’s really hard to reinvent a widget once you’re making a lot of money selling it.
I don’t know if there’s a formula for it. One thing I’ve observed, it’s kind of a consistent truth between the creative process of let’s say, making a film, which I’ve done a lot with, you know, the early days of building a company, which is also creative. Even if you’re the “creator,” you’ve got to have a certain humility, in the sense that a complex process or a complex thing is going to reveal itself. Not that it takes on a life of its own. But you have to have the humility to let go of presumptions you had about your early idea of a thing and where it’s going to go and what it’s going to do.
And most really good things develop out of an iterative process of application of a certain amount of confidence and certainty, and then stepping back and paying attention to what’s actually happening in a way, like, what’s the feedback? And what’s the adjustment that we make off of that, I mean, people sort of are very cynical about, say, test audiences, right. But like Rian Johnson, who directed Knives Out — and I just did the second one — he and I were just talking about how, with that kind of a movie, in particular, and audience, in your process of putting it together is really critical. Because if you’re the author or in the movie, that’s a murder mystery, you lose perspective on the mechanism you created.
You can’t have objectivity anymore about whether the trick is working, you have to watch it break over other people. And you may be sure to your core that it has to go A, B, C, but when you watch it break over other people and you realize they’ve got C before we’ve even gotten to B we have to take B out, you know what I mean? They’re getting ahead of it way faster than we thought they would or they’re missing that, that’s not landing the way we think it is.
So you’ve got to pay attention to what a thing is telling you.”
How this creative approach led Edward to co-founding EDO (19:32):
“The company that I started that works with P&G, called EDO. We’re a media analytics firm using advanced AI and machine learning (ML) technology applied to market data, right, advertising, monitoring and efficacy, all this stuff. But when we were building the company, my partner and I, we had gone through the building of his first company that I was one of his original backers, which was one of the most pioneering AI ML applications to financial market data and intelligence community problem sets, it ultimately got bought by S&P. And we knew we were when we started EDO, it was a very focused spin off of the same technological capabilities to a different problem set, which was the media analytics problem set, where we didn’t see AI and ML being applied.
But for a year, for the first three years, I would say, we had some of literally the top AI ML people out of Harvard, Stanford, MIT, all who wanted to work with Daniel, who’s a PhD in computational analytics from Harvard. When I say we had like the creme de la creme of AI, ML talent, we did. And yet, for nearly three years, we had the capability of doing all kinds of things. And we were working with NBCUniversal as one of our beta partners. And we were sure certain things we were building were gonna blow their minds. And sometimes it was like, ‘Nah, that’s not really the day-to-day thing we need to focus on.’ We had to humbly iterate to make sure that the talent leverage that we knew we had, that we were really paying attention to what problems actually represented a service, a help to people, either on the buy or sell side, of media analytics. And it was humbling. Humbling in the sense that you were like, ‘I’ll be damned.’ Like, we were sort of like ‘but look at this, look at what we can do!’ And it was sort of like, that’s not the way our workflow goes, it was like, Okay, we have to use our talent to build the solutions to the actual day to day needs. And it’s part of the reason I actually think as a company, we have phenomenally great relationships with our client partners, because we really listen. And we have unparalleled capability to build solutions almost bespoke to some of what they’ve requested, and what has made our product really good.”
Why EDO was founded (27:34):
“I said to [co-founder] Daniel, you realize that there’s an application of what you’re talking about…the way search indicates what’s happening in the world on an economic basis. This would be so valuable in media because this multi hundreds of billions of dollars of advertising spend is brokered around metrics provided by a nearly 100 year old company that notionally measures the number of eyeballs. I had to point out to him the dominant data player is establishing the rate card between over a half a trillion dollars in spend. What if we could give them a real-time, always-on EKG of how advertising is delivering actual investment-grade ROI back to their balance sheet as a function of the kinds of things you’re doing?
And that’s why we started EDO. And it flowed from a really specific observation on my part, which is movies. Let’s take an example like the Grand Budapest Hotel. In the post Netflix world where there’s no DVD revenues, creative people – me and Wes Anderson and all of our friends. When we make a movie for cheap and everybody works for scale, which we did on Grand Budapest Hotel, or Birdman, or whatever. We literally are compensated on post breakeven net profit formulas, and advertising dollars get recouped in front of artists compensation.
So literally, every dollar spent on marketing The Grand Budapest Hotel that has to be recouped is that much more behind the compensation for the artists. I really mean it when I say artists are compensated less than ever today, if marketing is inefficient. Artists in my industry are bound into the efficiency or inefficiency of the marketing spend. So the degree to which Fox Searchlight does a great job is literally how much Wes Anderson will make on the back end or not.
I participate in my own films and I would look at these things and say, ‘geez.’ Wes, and I used to talk about it and say, ‘We should tell the studio, we don’t want them to spend money on Oscar campaigns, because it’s just money down the toilet, it has no recoup, it doesn’t even go to ticket sales.’ The point is, I have my own specific observation that number one, how much artists get compensated is affected by what I would call the spray and pray model of advertising. That’s not good for us. But here’s the other thing – let’s call the studios, our allies, right, they back our work, they put it up. The studio’s appetite for making what they consider risky stuff is lower, if they don’t believe that they know how to market it. What gets made gets affected by the quality of the insights.”
Why TV remains a powerful and relevant space for advertising despite the current noise around digital (56:05):
“I think there’s this assumption, because of the growth of this new world of digital, that digital has overtaken television as the big space to advertising. And where that may be true for certain types of things. The bottom line is, most of the data says that between 60% – 70% of all major market advertising dollars still go to television.
Television is an extremely optimal moment at which to capture people with narrative, and creativity and identity. And that form, it turns out, still has a massive punching power.Digital catches you where you are and there’s an appeal to that. But it also means it’s white noise a lot of the time, and it never goes off mute. It’s a place where you’re not – metaphorically – the lights have not gone down and you haven’t settled in to focus, we all know the thing pops up, and we just click the X because catching me where I am, can actually be a pain in my ass. And I can come to resent it.
When I have settled into a headspace and a room, probably, or even in bed on an iPad with headphones on because everyone else is asleep. I’m in a different mental space. And if it catches me there, I’m kind of in the audience mode. And then good narrative, clever, funny, moving, whatever it is, it’s hitting me at the right time. And our point is that these days, when that happens, you’re connected devices sitting right next to you.
And so there shouldn’t be some narrative around what’s the new thing and what makes sense to do to drive our business. It’s increasingly scientific. And I think the whole point of this discussion is that we need to embrace that.”
Find Edward’s take on investment grade data intriguing? Read EDO’s whitepaper on how Share of Search leads to Share of Market results.