Showmanship vs Salesmanship feat. Orlando Wood (Chief Innovation Officer, System1 Group)

In Episode 19 of The Indian AdGeek, we are joined by the man who is literally rewriting the repair manual for the advertising brain: Orlando Wood, Chief Innovation Officer at ⁠System1⁠ and author of the seminal works ⁠Lemon⁠ and ⁠Look Out.⁠ Western advertising is in a "crisis of effectiveness"—becoming flat, literal, and devitalised. But is India, with its love for music, dance, and high-context storytelling, the last standing fortress of "showmanship"? We discussed: * The Roman Empire to Reels: Why 15th-century art is the secret key to understanding why your IG Reels aren't working. * The WWE Analogy: Why great advertising needs a "slow-burn" storyline. * The India Advantage: Why the Indian film industry and cultural "masala" might be saving us from the creative "flatness" of the West. * Boardroom Battles: How to convince a sceptical CFO that "emotion" isn't a soft metric—it’s the engine of market share gain. * The AI Frontier: Why AI might struggle with "betweenness" and the implicit human communication that makes an ad a masterpiece. * The Perfect Ad: Orlando reveals the one ad that perfectly balances the left brain’s need for logic and the right brain’s need for soul. Orlando explains how testing can become a creative catalyst, why Indian advertising still has cultural advantages, how CMOs & CFOs must learn to translate emotion into measurable outcomes and the three hires to make if you were building a showmanship agency today.  The Indian AvGeek streams on all major podcast apps. More info on a.p.e. course here Vishal on X