Q™ User Spotlight: Eric Zuncic, DDB CSO, Talks Creative Bow Ties

Eric Zuncic is the Chief Strategy Officer at the ad agency DDB and a power user of our cultural intelligence platform Q™. We had a chance to sit down with Eric and dig into his approach, how he leverages Q™ week-to-week and what cultural trends he’s keeping a close eye on. 

Thanks for speaking with us Eric, can you tell us a little about your focus at DDB?

So when I joined DDB, 3 and half years after working in a wide variety of both client and agency roles, I was excited to lean into their legacy of unexpected creative work that breaks through and changes consumer behavior. In order to do that kind of work, I believe we need to think of creativity like a bow tie. We need to broaden the aperture of the inputs to creativity, so we can broaden the aperture of the outputs of creativity. To me, that looks like a bow tie, with creativity at the center of the knot. And these days, it can’t be a skinny one, it needs to be one of those big, fat bow ties that Brad Pitt wears to The Oscars. My focus is to help synthesize all that data down to a singular point (the knot of the bowtie) and then help the creatives explode it back out the other end.

So what does this look like for you day-to-day?

It’s really three things. First, it’s making sure we have the broadest set of perspectives possible to feed into the strategic process, casting the widest net possible. Second, is knowing which perspectives are most useful at finding the right business problem for creativity to solve. That’s what the narrowing of the bow tie really is for. And finally, it's about helping creatives turn those perspectives into a broad canvas of actions to solve that particular business problem.

How does Q™ help you in this process?

The breadth and the reach of the Q™ platform, as well as the simplicity of the interface, make it so that you can go in and explore categories, brands, and cultural movements pretty quickly and get a real read on where the conversation is now and where it’s likely going. For me the two most valuable features are 1) Forecasting, because that chart kills with clients, and 2) the Zeitgeist Map that instantly shows what signals are most related to any given topic. Those two images alone help every strategist do their job better and more quickly in the earliest phases of any project.

It has fundamentally changed the way work internally. It inspires and validates our hypotheses and allows us to identify what trends are cresting that we can proactively jump on top of to fuel conversations with our clients.   

Last question, what right now in culture are you keeping your eye on?

I feel like athletes and musicians have finally found their platform and the power that they have over culture and business blows my mind. This isn’t just as influencers or spokespeople. Talent has a bigger platform than ever with culture-shaping, agenda-driving, even politics-influencing opportunities. The ability for people with cultural cachet to change the course of things way outside of their area of expertise, because they have a platform, is redefining the way society works.