How to research cultural signals without going generic
I'm still kinda not believing I'm gonna be a speaker at this year's Cannes Lions, but here we are. Details here. It's a panel type event where each of us brings 3 signals, presented in 3 slides, in 3 minutes.
I. Love. These sorts of constraints. In the same way I love it when we need to prepare a 5-page thing for a CMO, or when we only have a few days to get to a coherent point of view. Just cuts through the BS.
As part of my preparation for Cannes, I wanted to share how I've been thinking about how to find those signals and make sense of them. I think I may have a found a way to mix breadth and depth, without going all "AI is making people very worried right now yo".
Here's broadly how I approached it. And it's probably a workflow you can copy and paste and twist around in the ways that suit you best. Or maybe you're just reading this because you're a voyeur. It's ok.
First, I started by going to my swipe file, which is hosted on Google Drive, and ask for 10 emerging cultural signals based on, er, my 'Cultural Signals' folder. This works because I've been maintaining this thing for years, so anything I find noteworthy ends up there. It's a curated search engine.
Because it's hosted on Google Drive, it now has Gemini built in, so it does a half decent job at finding things that it considers emerging. I'd say that the ratio is like 90% ok-ish, 8% fine, 2% good. So off we go and ask again. I probably asked it for three or four sets of 10 emerging signals in total.
I wrote down the headline of the ones that felt interesting to me. Stuff like hosting as a status signal, glitch goth, closure rituals, patientsplaining. Right now I don't know which one is most useful, they just feel broadly interesting and novel to me.
Once I got to a list of 6 things, I went back to my Gemini chat with my Culture Signals folder and asked it: ok, here are the things I think are good. Give me a summary of the core ideas for each of them, and a link to the files you got all this from.
So now Gemini created an exec summary sort of list of the main themes, with a link to the files I PDF'd and added (why PDF? Because web pages are perishable, URLs die etc). This is not the end result, it's but a start. Now the fun stuff begins.
I created a new Claude project, copied/pasted the summary Gemini gave me, and asked Claude to do a more in depth research on these topics to help me prepare for my panel. I trust Claude deep research more than Gemini. Just find the outputs more digestible and accurate and interesting to read.
Claude is now investigating those topics (as we speak! Yes, really! This shit's written in real time yo). It was smart in how said it was gonna do it: finding cultural antecedents, tensions, provocations, examples. Now I have a deeper body to mine.
I can now play around with this deeper body of thought to find the truly interesting reference points and tensions worth discussing. I also want to bring them back to what I do for work (comms and content strategy for B2B, finance, healthcare and tech brands) so it closes the loop on why me, why now.
I will probably let the report stew for a couple of days in my head and let the subconscious brain do its thing. I don't want to get into slideage or artefact making yet, I just want to let my body process what I now know about these things and swap notes with people who are more knowledgeable on it too. In my experience, usually the headline-y stuff emerges over time.
And then, once I feel ready and definitely before the deadline (please don't chase me Amy, I'm legit, promise), I will have a more intellectual but also instinctive feel about what feels interesting and memorable enough to write down on a slide.
And that's about it. I can't tell you yet what my contribution to the panel will be because a) haven't gotten there yet, b) don't want to spoil the reveal now do I, but I hope the above workflow helps you get some ideas for how you can do research in more fun ways too.
P.S. If you want access to my swipe file, among other perks like our private community, member events and deals, join the Salmon Crew.
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