Coworking with Raqib Sheikh

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Raqib Sheikh is chief strategy officer of Super Nice. He has also worked at Dagger, VML, and R/GA.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? Before creative folks come up with the ad you’ll see out in the world, I get to figure out why you’re going to care. Because I do that, you’ll believe you chose that brand, rather than the other way around.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Working on Walmart and P&G meant I got to do a lot of in-home ethnographies of shoppers across the country. For an immigrant, third-culture kid, it was an amazing experience to see firsthand how a homemaker knew the price of ketchup at Walmart compared to Kroger off the top of her head because her family was saving for their dream home. That balance of the practical and the dream stayed with me. It’s when I realized great strategy is always an act of brutal empathy.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Of all things, it’s a 20-year-old print campaign for a Portuguese news magazine, Grande Reportagem, called “Meet the World.” (So snobby, I know!) Each ad is a full-bleed national flag with a legend in the corner assigning a stat to every color. Some examples: on the US flag, red means “in favor of the war in Iraq,” white means “against the war in Iraq,” and blue means “don’t know where Iraq is.” I’m a sucker for a brilliant visual or copy solve for a deeply researched topic. Honorable mention goes to The Economist’s headline-only campaign, with lines like, “Lose the ability to slip out of meetings unnoticed.”

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: My middle name is Mohammad Ali. Not after the Muhammad Ali, but once you’re named that, it’s a guarantee you’ll get obsessed. As an Indian kid who grew up in the Middle East with a British education, I didn’t learn about Black American history until I came to America almost three decades ago. Ali became the lens through which I understand a lot of what is both regrettable and remarkable about America. I live in Atlanta now, and I drive past the cauldron he lit for the ’96 Games on my way to work. That, and I know far too much about ’80s–’90s WWE. Don’t get me started on the WWE/WCW Monday Night Wars of the late ’90s.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Most: Creatives are acting like cosplaying engineers. The best ones I work with now walk in asking, “What can we make that adds real value?” They’ve figured out their careers ride on the brand problems they solve, not the awards they collect. The ones who care about the context and interface of brands (show me the funnel, where does it leak, what can we test?) are the most fun to jam with, and they make strategists better by refusing to accept a vibe dressed up as an insight. If AI is flattening the output, the pressure has to come from somewhere, and I’m happy it’s coming from people with a penchant for making stuff.

Least: The gold rush to “rank in AI search.” Every third LinkedIn post is a playbook for getting your brand into ChatGPT’s answer, and almost none of them are about being a better answer. Lauren Leek’s piece “Temperature Zero for Culture” explains why that scares me. Prediction systems hedge toward the average, so the things that look average get surfaced, get chosen, and get surfaced again until the weird stuff starves. Marketers optimizing for the model are feeding that loop with their own hands. The irony is that solving a real problem for people, distinctly, is still what those systems reward most. It just takes more insight and creativity, and nobody sells a course on that.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? @orenmeetsworld on Instagram. His trend breakdowns are usually grounded in physical objects and tactile experiences, which is a necessary break from all the “become an AI agency of one” content.