Ali Marmaduke: How to Break Rules and Create New Realities
Ali Marmaduke’s career path has taken him to exciting and unexpected places. Images: c/o Ali Marmaduke.
There are very few straight lines in creative careers. A stint here, an unexpected turn there, maybe a wild detour that took you in a completely new direction or influenced your most meaningful work.
Strategy Director Ali Marmaduke’s career path doesn’t fit into the conventional box, and yet looking back, there are clear threads that connect the chapters: An Oregon native who worked as a journalist in Yemen; an altruistic thinker who moved to conflict zones in South Sudan and Sri Lanka to work for an NGO; and, in his previous role at Bulletproof, leading brand strategy with clients such as Heineken and Booking.com. Don’t forget the part where he was named as a spy (more on that below).
These career chapters increasingly got Marmaduke interested in understanding the forces that move and motivate people, and how to change their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Marmaduke, who is now an indepedant strategist, shares why his career took so many twists and turns, how the importance of curiosity and storytelling connect them, and how he applies his studies in behavioral economics and persuasive communications to the world of brand strategy.
Ali Marmaduke in an earlier career chapter in Sri Lanka.
Tell us about your background.
My mother is from Oregon, my father is from Yemen, and I was born and raised in Portland. I moved to Yemen for two years when I was very young but then I got really sick. My mother took me back to Portland to recover and receive medical treatment, which wasn't available in Yemen at the time. After that, she couldn't imagine taking me back to such a dangerous country, so we stayed in Portland and my father stayed in Yemen. I grew up feeling pretty out of place.
You eventually did go back and became a political journalist in Yemen, before joining an international NGO in Sri Lanka at the height of their civil conflict over there. How did that career chapter come to be?
Being an Arab Muslim in Portland, I always felt like I had insight into a culture that was alien to most Americans. Most people didn’t take any particular interest in the Middle East until September 11 happened. That’s when being an Arab Muslim in America suddenly took on a whole new layer of meaning and complexity.
In university, I started learning Arabic and I decided to study journalism because I wanted to shine a spotlight on a deeply misunderstood region. My big belief was that if you gave people good information, they would make good decisions. I thought my journalism could change the world.
I resisted the recruitment attempts by the American Central Intelligence Agency and decided to go to Yemen to be a journalist. But very quickly I realized I was bad at pretending to be a neutral observer in a situation like Yemen, which was ruled by a corrupt dictator. I had strong opinions—I still do—and decided I wanted to make the news rather than report on it.
Where did you go to do that?
I joined an American political NGO called the National Democratic Institute (NDI). It’s based in Washington D.C. but has offices all over the world, with the aim of promoting democratic governance. I was hired as a strategic communications consultant because I had contacts in Yemen and understood how the media landscape worked. I promoted our work and got key messages into the media, and I enjoyed it.
But Yemen started getting really dangerous. There were mortar attacks on the US Embassy. I met my wife in Yemen, and after being there for two and half years, we decided to leave. We moved to South Sudan. It was like jumping from the pan into the fire. It was when South Sudan was on its way to becoming a new country. I was still working for the NDI and my work was aimed at informing the population on what it means to be a citizen in a democracy – their rights and their civic responsibilities.
At what point were you thought to be a spy?
That was in Sri Lanka. South Sudan was hectic, so when my wife was offered a job in Sri Lanka, we took it. I continued to work for NDI, whose mandate there was to promote peaceful co-existence between ethnic groups. The civil conflict had gone on for about 30 years, but a right-wing Buddhist extremist government was elected on the platform of ending the conflict by any means necessary. They were done negotiating with the Tamil Tigers and they resorted to extreme violence. They surrounded a large part of the island and killed around 150,000 people, most were civilians. It was horrific. And here I was trying to promote peaceful coexistence.
After the government had defeated the Tamil Tigers, they didn’t see any need for peaceful co-existence. They already had a strong dislike for NGOs or any kind of foreign intervention. They knew who we were, and I was on their radar. Rather than saying that I had to leave the country, they named my team and I as spies in the local press. It felt like a different kind of danger than the danger in Yemen and South Sudan. It was hostility on a state level. I left quickly after that.
How did you move from that career chapter to working in Europe on creative and brand strategy?
In Sri Lanka, I was trying to change state policies and laws. Yet I had no understanding of human psychology. I could meet people, report, and write stories but I didn't know how to actually change people's attitudes, beliefs and behavior, which was really what I was trying to do.
After we left Sri Lanka, we moved to the Netherlands and I pursued a Master’s degree in Persuasive Communication, which is essentially the study of behavioral economics, at the University of Amsterdam. It gave me the foundation in psychology that I needed. I tested the effects of messaging on people's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. I learned about unconscious biases; what people bring to the table when they encounter a message and how that message can circumvent those biases, or leverage those biases to be more persuasive, or prevent persuasion by other messaging.
When I finished my degree, my wife and I had a child and we didn’t want to bring them to a conflict zone. So I thought about how I could use my writing skills and understanding of human psychology. Branding was the perfect place.
What have you learned about being an effective persuasive communicator?
Everything that we do in this industry is about persuasive communication—whether you're presenting to the client or developing communication for consumers. It’s all about changing how people see a brand in a way that will hopefully lead to some sort of behavior change.
This starts with understanding your audience and what they currently believe. Then it’s understanding what you want them to believe and finding a way to bridge that gap.
What I’ve learned from working in the creative industry is that persuasion is not a cold science. It’s also about emotion and intuition and instinct. It's about creativity. That part was always missing from my work in journalism and the NGO world. Creativity drives home the impact of messaging in a way that rational argument alone can’t.
How did you come to this realization?
When I got my first job as a strategist, I would bring all of my research and psychological information into my strategies, and my directors were always like, Behavioral economics sounds cool, but we're looking for the insight and the idea. We don’t need all that.
That was ten years ago, when creativity itself was the focus. Since then, behavioral economics has been embraced much more by the industry. I try to put the theory that I was schooled in into the practice of creativity to make our work more effective. Strategy has to bridge those two worlds.
What have you learned about human behavior over the past ten years and how might those learnings influence our creative work?
People are generally resistant to change and persuasion. That’s important for anyone in the creative industry to understand. Creative agencies always want to push for the boldest execution and radical change. But it's psychologically painful for people to change their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. They’re intrinsically tied to our ego. That’s why when someone says, actually, there's an alternative version of your reality that's much more true, it makes you feel stupid and incapable of finding the truth yourself. So you find ways to reject it and preserve your worldview, no matter how broken it might be. If people were persuaded by facts alone, then Donald Trump wouldn’t have been president, Americans wouldn’t believe that guns made them safer, and climate change deniers wouldn’t exist.
People are not thinking machines that also happen to feel, we’re feeling machines that sometimes think. Most of the time people don't want to be changed. And they really don’t want to think. So, brands have to use a softer form of persuasion.
We have to connect the deep truths of the brand to the deep needs of audiences. It’s not about completely reinventing brands; it’s about telling their stories in ways that resonate. It’s about finding what’s real and avoiding bullshit at all costs. People can smell marketing bullsh*t from miles away, and they hate it because it feels manipulative. The more honest and authentic a brand is, the more likely it is to be considered by customers.
You’ve made an important point. We might easily view the boldest ideas as the best ideas. Maybe they are. Or maybe the audience is looking for something else.
You need to understand the trajectory on which you want to take the brand and how large you want to make the leaps at each point of change. How much change will people tolerate before it becomes unrecognizable or untrue?
When you look back on your wide-ranging career steps, what threads stand out?
Curiosity and storytelling are the threads that bring it all together. I know that’s the biggest cliché: that strategists need to be curious. But I love to write, and even more than writing, I love to report. I love to learn new things about new subjects and have hypotheses to investigate, to prove or disprove, and then write compelling narratives that inform people or change their opinions about something.
That curiosity is what led me to go to Yemen, South Sudan, and Sri Lanka, but it also led me to think about problem solving differently. Once I moved from journalism to working for an NGO, it wasn't so much about writing stories or building a narrative, it was about the strategy. The strategy being: We are here now and we want to be there in the future. How do we get there?
What’s the real problem we have to solve that’s preventing us from getting there?
In a sense, strategy is like a story because you've got to overcome barriers and make new partnerships in order to achieve your goal. What I believed as a journalist was that if you give people the right information, they'll make good decisions. And what I learned along the way is that that's not true. People are much more complex. It wasn't until I studied behavioral economics that I realized there are all these other mechanisms in the human mind that you have to take into account.
If you could go back and give career advice to your younger self, what would you say?
In all my roles I’ve gotten paid to disregard rules and norms. To change the status quo. You have to say, This is how it is today, but it's definitely not how it should be, and have a vision of how you want to change it.
You’ve got to be willing to make people uncomfortable along the way. I care what my clients think, but I also don’t pull punches when it comes to developing my strategies. I will give them the brutally honest diagnosis of their problem because I want to help them win.
Ultimately, for anyone in the world of brand creativity, I would share this advice: If you want to be diplomatic, go into account management. If you want to break rules and create a new reality, then go into strategy.
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