(00:01) Hi and welcome to another episode of Humans aren’t Robots, a series of conversations with designers and creative thinkers, uncovering the human elements of teams and modern business practises. In today’s episode, we speak to Cormac Sheehan, who I met last year live at PauseFest. Cormac has a background in music. He grew up in Ireland and was involved in the punk rock scene there, that took him around the world, Mexico, London. We talked about his primary business, which is Purpose Communications, which he sees as an ethical marketing agency. We talked about what that means to be an ethical marketer in 2020 2021 now, and we talked about some of his passions. So he is involved in an organisation called Green Planet, which is a cannabis education and advocacy group. And we talked about the legalisation of cannabis, the uses of the plant outside of just a medical use or recreational use, among some other topics. We also touched on media narratives, talked about some of the things that potentially separate us as cultures and as generations and how we can bridge that gap. One of Cormac’s, I think threads that runs through everything he’s done his storytelling through music through the work is doing with his marketing agencies.
(01:58) So we’re just talking about Stephanie Winkler, right from Vice. So she was on the podcast last year talking about some of the insights they got, but you just mentioned that joy was one of the highest rated I suppose, and click throughs, whatever from the content they were posting.
(02:18) What she was talking about was, when they looked at the data from the last five years is that stories about joy were really highly outperformed ones about anger, sadness, rage and so on.
(2:42) That’s brilliant, I think you mentioned that Vice is sometimes culpable for Clickbait headlines, I mean they’re a media company today. But one thing I think they do very well is actually create content that is engaging for all these different types of niches. Actually sort of just free form and authentic
(03:36) Well, that’s what they’re doing And they’ve done since the nineties.
I think their success as a company is down to the fact that they keep reinventing themselves and presenting those new ideas and tend to be pretty up with things on new trends and so on.
(04:15) It seems like you sort of worn many hats throughout your professional career. Currently, what’s your main focus?
(04:28) My main focus at the moment is Green Planet, which is all about the cannabis industry focusing on advocacy and education, trying to get more people involved in it. A lot of people would have been following what was going on in North America over the last decade or so, also here in Australia, wondering how they can get involved in it. But they tend to be focused on medical cannabis, which is just one very small part of the whole story. The whole plant has so many applications throughout society. And you know what’s going on here in Australia, with the fires and sustainability and so on, hemp and cannabis is a really good answer to that. But at the moment we see these medical cannabis companies that are basically just a bad photocopy of the pharmaceutical industry. On the other side, we’ve got hemp companies that are still stuck in the seventies.
And there’s not much in between. I’m interested in trying to promote an idea that cannabis is everything and people can get into it, whether it’s industrial, food, clothing, medicine, recreation, entertainment, all sorts of different things. So that’s the main thing I’m focusing on. There’s no money in that. That’s just a passion project, to be honest. So my other main thing is Purpose Communications, which is my own marketing agency slash consultancy.
(05:40) In regards to the hemp industry and the cannabis industry, I don’t know a lot about the history, but at the turn of the century the hemp industry was huge in North America, right? This was a booming industry that essentially got shut down due to fairly conservative and short sighted politics.
(06:04) Yeah, a lot of it was racial politics, it was after the Mexican American War. And there was a huge amount of displaced Mexican people who moved too
(06:12) Back in 1890’s?
(06:14) Yeah, from then onwards. Then it became a bit of a scare, the same old story, the same tactics they’re using today, blaming it on the immigrants. It’s a creative substance, so it was of interest to people in jazz and blues and so on, and so then they’re like, look, we told you those black people are trying to corrupt white youth. So at the same time that intersected quite nicely with people’s industrial interests. It’s a much better material than cotton, much better source of paper than cutting down trees. And those industrialists financed these propaganda campaigns.
So it was just this crazy state where for millennia people have been using it for all sorts of things. Then for the last hundred years a prohibition started out and now people are thankfully rediscovering it.
(07:30) How do you think we’re going to go as a global culture of changing that story or rewriting it? Do you think we need to go about actually retelling it or changing the way we talk about cannabis and the plant and its uses?
(08:05) Well, something really interesting from the Australian perspective, is that Australia is one of the highest consumers of cannabis in the world. 35% of people over the age of 14 admit to having smoked weed, one in 10 people consume it regularly. Well, you don’t talk about it because there’s a lot of stigma.
It is just story telling to remove the stigma. I’m not saying it fixes everything and it’s not good for some people. But, it’s mostly safe and it’s mostly harmless. People are discovering that. The highest consumer group for it in North America is women over 50. It’s one of the only things I’ve found in my life that lets me stop thinking about the past, stop thinking about the future and just be where I am. It’s very mindful as a substance. I think that’s why people are getting into it.
(10:02) But a lot of that is just around the stigma because it’s illegal at the end of the day. And so changing that conversation is great, right? It’s actually giving people some experiences that they should be having, that they just can’t based on culture and politics.
(10:58) Yeah, there’s a great opportunity for people in the older generations to go, well, actually, no I have tried it and it’s fine. I’m really not into this okay boomer type thing. It’s part of again the media narrative that sets us all against each other. And at this time, we need unity, we don’t need separation from each other. And that’s one thing that has been pretty great about the boomer generation is that all through the sixties and seventies they tried cannabis and they found out that it wasn’t a big deal. And they’re some of the biggest consumers and biggest growing consumers of it, too.
(12:10) It’s a plant that I think for that kind of a generation, that kind of age group, like you said, does give you a sense of mindfulness and can also maybe take away some of the indoctrination that you have as a human living in this world we live in now for 60 years. I think people get that age and often feel as if now we’re on a trajectory towards the end, right? Where it shouldn’t be like that every day could be fun.
(12:40) Yes, yeah, they find that it works very well with people in cancer sufferers or other people in end of life management who are scared of death, and so on, it helps them a lot with that.
(12:53) In the US in California, Colorado where recreational use has been fully legalised, how is the other industries, the hemp industry and textiles and other manufacturing, is that booming there as well? Or is that more of a focus on recreation?
(13:10) Well, US just legalised hemp for industrial cultivation last year, so that’s starting to happen now. But actually a really good place to look is China because they’ve always had an industry going there, they have the infrastructure. And that’s a bit of an issue with Australia, we don’t have the infrastructure because you can use every part of the plant. The stalk is great for building materials but you need an expensive piece of machinery.
The other thing is the luxury and premium end of the market that’s exploding in the US and there’s some really cool stuff happening. Having the premium end of the market is introducing a lot of people to it in a way that feels safer and more welcoming.
(14:28) I was in LA over the holidays. I was going into some dispensaries and it’s like going into a high and wine store. You’ve got really knowledgeable people being able to sort of guide you on this crazy assortment of different ways of consuming it or smoking it. And it’s so far removed from the bottle bong as a teenager. It’s a different world.
(14:56) Yeah, that’s a great comparison, actually, because the way it’s traditionally been getting some cannabis from you don’t know what source. You don’t know what you’re getting. And that’s the great thing about those dispensaries in the US, you can go in and you can tell them how you feel.
They’ll tell you what’s a good strain, because we’ve all had that experience.
(15:44)And not knowing what you’re getting, right?
(15:58) Yeah, I think that’s where a lot of people’s negative experiences have come from.
(16:02) 100% and just the process of having to buy it off the street. You’re essentially having to deal with people that you don’t necessarily want to on a day to day basis. Whereas it’s so civilised to go in and actually purchase it, it changes the whole game.
(16:31) So delving back into the marketing side of your life. So how did you get into digital marketing? What’s been your career trajectory from that perspective?
(16:39) That’s a bit of a long story. I’ll be talking about it in my speech today. Essentially I started about 12 years ago, I was living in Mexico.
I had finished my master’s degree in English and I’d been working as a teacher and a music journalist. I went on tour with my band in Mexico, didn’t really fancy going back to Dublin. I couldn’t find a job, couldn’t find a place to live so staying with friends after a month or so I gave up and did a trade with the language school in Oaxaca. I learned Spanish intensively five hours a day for a month until I was semi fluent and eventually found myself working on a water irrigation project in Chiapas with on Indigenous Group. And at that point, my background is in the hardcore punk scene, business was the worst four letter word for me was one step away from capitalism and everything. But this scenario haunted me after I left there, so I decided I needed to learn business skills.
So I moved to London and started teaching at a place called London Institute of Technology in English and I was teaching business English. I realised that marketing was what I was good at and enjoyed. So then I started learning about that, moved to Australia and 2010, got a job with a chocolate company. I was just working on the factory floor and soon became a supervisor. There were less than 15 people working there, no one was doing their marketing, So I started moonlighting doing the newsletters and social media which grew very quickly. Soon I had a team of six people, I stayed there for five years. Left in 2015, was more than 70 people working there by then. Then I got a series of jobs, ethical recruitment, marketing consultancy, sustainability consultancies, all sorts of different things that are fair trade certification until I felt I had enough skills myself in 2017 to start Purpose Communications. That was with the lofty goal of being Australia’s most ethical marketing agency, which is perhaps a bit of a contradiction in terms because marketing is marketing. But wanting to work for purpose, work for meaning, do things which improve the world rather than just make money.
(19:56) I don’t necessarily think that marketing’s a dirty word, and I think advertising potentially is a dirty word. But I think marketing at its core is storytelling. How do you feel the DIY punk ethic has helped you in business? Because I see that as being actually a really good education for business.
(20:14) 100%. If you don’t like what you see, do it differently.
You know, if no one’s doing what you want to be out there, why don’t you do it yourself. That’s why I have very little patience with moaners and people giving out about things. Like, if you don’t like it, change it. And so DIY funk ethic forms everything I do.
(20:44) I often think that. I mentor marketing students in Adelaide and the stuff they learn at school is OK, but you’re better off actually going and starting something and make it happen, right?
(21:03) It’s a living growing discipline all the time. And every time people go, and no offence if you have done your education in marketing, but I think by the time you graduate it’s moved on. So the best way to learn is on the job. You know you can learn and that’s the great thing about the digital economy now, because I have again a love hate relationship with the internet and there’s so many great things about it. You can learn anything. You can publish anything, connect with like minded people and that leads to all sorts of amazing things. And that’s why we’re seeing such great creativity now in new ideas, which we’re going to need for this coming decade where people can address the problems and challenges we’re seeing.
(21:53) It’s such a strange time we live in, I think we’re a fairly similar age, but like the Internet was so exciting for me as a teenager because it was a door to worlds I couldn’t explore previously, right? It was this great kind of like wow tool. And it still is and in the last 20 years, the way it’s been where our attention is, where most people’s daily focus is, has come back to a few small areas like the Facebooks of the world, etcetera. But everything is still there and it’s amazing all these strange cultures that have grown out of the Internet. And it’s supposedly disappointing that we do put our focus into the negatives and have become seemingly more polarised. It frustrates me that the people have this negative attitude towards it.
(22:53) Yeah, I think a lot of that comes down to that generation X and millennials are quite cynical. That’s sort of in the fabric of the generation . But, Generation Z isn’t and are much more hopeful and they’re much more fluid in all sorts of ways. I think that’s going to be really interesting as they take over, because one of the things that they’re way more conscious of than we are is privacy, online privacy.
So I think we’re going to see new communities form online, which are gated communities and which are a bit segmented and sequestered away for the sake of privacy. I welcome disagreements because that’s how you get new ideas. We’re seeing a level of confidence in the newer generations around us, which is quite intimidating for people of our generation.
(24:30) Yeah, it is. The whole echo chamber thing is interesting that pre-internet we still live in echo chambers, right? People tend to sort of form tribes, right?
(24:55) Yeah, that whole idea that there’s only 150 people that you can have in your tribe and so on. I think that’s real, you know. But I’m from a small town in the middle of nowhere in Ireland, where it wasn’t much fun to be outside of the tribe there, and that’s where the Internet was so great. I could connect with people, first of all in Dublin and then around the rest of the world, and be able to see that there was other people like me. There was people who didn’t care about a conventional career, about going to church, about all these kind of things. That’s one of the best things that starts new communities you can form.
(25:31) I think there’s some really exciting stuff coming out of different parts of the world where people are indoctrinated. Travel, I think, is probably the number one way to get out of your bubble and expand your worldview.
(26:00) Yeah, massively, because you start to get an idea that people live and think and act in different ways everywhere. There isn’t a set way of reality. Something really interesting that Stephanie was talking about earlier in her talk was about, I think it was 60% of the world’s youth is in Asia, so that will be where a lot of the innovation and new thoughts happen.
Language, religion, culture, it really informs how we think. If there isn’t a word in the language, it is very hard to have that thought so easily and that is why German is such a great language, brilliant phrases that don’t exist in English. And so I think we’ll see a different point of view emerging from different areas in Asia, which challenge some of the preconceptions of Western mindsets.
(26:50) I feel like that’s the core of what our education process should be.
(27:35) Yeah, and I think a lot of people had the experience that school wasn’t all that pleasant and a lot of what you learn isn’t applicable to your life.
I think that we’re going to see a change and we have to see a change in the education system of how it enables people to live in this world because more people than ever are asking the really big questions. But what’s the point? What are we here for? What are we doing? It’s not just to work. It’s to try new things, to travel, to experience something else, talk to people who haven’t talked to before. I think that’s a lot of the depression we’re seeing at the moment is people who are very attached to the old world and people who are embracing the new world. There is a gulf in between them. So, like you said earlier, marketing is just storytelling, and the way to bridge that gap is storytelling. It’s very sad to me that there is no respect for older generations because wisdom comes from older generations. I think there’s room for everyone to have a voice.
(29:00) You wouldn’t want to get to a position where you’re 65 70 and just feel like you have no relevance in the world anymore because you’ve got all that experience behind we should be listening to our elders and incorporating them more into our world.
(29:29) Yeah, it’s such a huge difference between our parents’ generation and their relationship with their parents.
And there should be respect for new ideas and youth and there should be respect for old ideas and wisdom. Because, you know, it’s paraphrased that old saying: Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. And so there’s a lot to learn from going even beyond our parents’ generation, our ancestors and going very far back to traditional ways of doing things here in Australia. Land management, indigenous land management, that’s a way we could have avoided all this nonsense and a way we can avoid in the future if we start listening and bringing that in.
(30:24) I don’t know what it’s like in Ireland, the gap between I suppose the elderly and the young in Australia growing up is that it was very distinct, right?
(30:50)Yeah, yeah, definitely and even on a global level, we’re all living all over the world. We’re moving a lot and especially here in Australia, there’s so many immigrants that it’s just a couple of generations, if you’re lucky, that you have access to. A lot of us are on the other side of the world to our families. So it promotes this nuclear family way of living, which I think isn’t healthy for people. It’s not good for kids. It’s not good for the elderly.
(31:38) How do you feel about just in your own sense, like your kids growing up here and you’ve got grandparents back in Ireland, how do you bridge that gap? Does technology help?
(32:38) Things like Skype help a lot, email being up to share photos, Whatsapp, things like that. It makes you feel connected and it means that they can enjoy to a greater degree what their grandchildren are going through and how they’re developing.
People can have a connection to their culture. My wife is half English, half Indian. So my Children have a very broad cultural background that I want them to be able to access through their grandparents, through the great grandparents, through stories and technology can allow that to happen. A lot of our information sources were just print up to now, and that was only a couple 100 years as well. So before that, it was oral history.
(35:07) I think heritage is a really interesting topic.
(35:45) Yeah, it’s fascinating and a lot of the kind of conversation now is around not repeating the pasts of your previous generations, but that’s only one half of the story. I found out all these things about my family who have very similar traits and stories to myself, and to my family members and I’m going well, this rebellion streak or this inability to put up with unfair power, things like that. There’s a whole history of that in my family and I’m like I’m not a black sheep. I’m not a troublemaker. It’s my history. It’s in my veins.
People have been agitating for centuries for freedom and for liberation and it gives you a sort of personal mandate to go yeah this isn’t me just making trouble, this is me doing what I’m born to do.
(37:11) It’s in your blood literally. If people want to find out more about the things you’re working on where can they find you?
(37:21) Go to purposecommunications.com .au You can contact me there, I’m always happy to chat with people.
