How a kebab stand in Amsterdam's Red Light district helped W+K work with Silicon Valley

[Music] hi there so I'm the guy that's hopefully going to make this pivot that you just heard about it's interesting it's a really great reminder of the importance of context being up here just listening to the wonderful presentation by Laura at Greenpeace about an organization trying to save the planet and then to be followed by an organization that's responsible for exploring beyond our own planet we have NASA up next I'm the guy that decided to write a presentation making a joke about kabobs so again funny when we were writing up interesting sitting in front of a room of people before NASA speaks so we're gonna hopefully pivot and tell a little bit of a story about how a traditional advertising agency has become a relevant partner to some of the world's biggest new economy companies so without further ado let me introduce a little bit the company that I work for I'm the managing director of white and Kennedy Amsterdam and when can be as a an advertising agency we're founded in Portland Oregon in the US and we've been in Amsterdam for 25 years we work with clients like Nike like like PNG like a bee InBev and and we work with a lot of technology companies these days as well were perhaps most famous for writing the tagline just do it with Nike but there's a whole load of advertising stuff that we do and and yeah so you know we've we've been around for a little while with an independent creative company and we've had you know some successful years and and yet for a moment it seemed that the world was changing very quickly the advertising space as with any industry was subject disruption and change and anxiety as to what its relevance was in the world and and it looked for a moment that you know an outside observer or maybe an even in inside observer would wonder as a company like ours relevant anymore is an industry like ours relevant anymore and the reference point I bring up for that is the companies that have dominated our lives and captured our imaginations over the last 10 to 15 years have reached the success levels that they've reached for the most part without any advertising so if you look at Google they went 12 years before they ever ran an ad about themselves and they had a two hundred billion dollar market capitalization at that point Facebook eight years a billion users Instagram seven years half a billion users uber seven years zero ads so these companies are making huge strides without the need for any ad agency without the need for television advertising without the need for talking about brand in the way that it had been spoken to up until the point that these these types of companies arrived and and then things changed in certain areas but they were kind of like people were clearly not entirely committed to that change so when Google ran its first its first ad about itself and the Super Bowl Eric Schmidt was clearly hedging his bets a little bit maybe not entirely falling in love with the idea that advertising could be a part of our business growth so so why is this well I think there's lots of reasons but one of the reasons is that if you can hard code being useful into your product you can also hard code being interesting into your product and they have the example of the Google doodle up there but there's any number of examples where design can play a role in making the user experience more engaging it can there are ways that design and engineering can bring people back to an experience can bring new users into an experience so there's lots that can be done to make that experience more interesting without the need for advertising there's also the the expression that you hear a lot from technology companies if you need advertising you have a great product you know you can you can invest money in in creating ads to tell people to buy your thing or you can make your thing better than it was before better than anything else so you know it feels kind of old-fashioned if you could invest your time and energy making you're making a product new your platform better why would you go out and be you know giving your sales stump just make the product you so this is something that's also you know pretty common common thought in Silicon Valley and then you know the other factors that venture capital favors good storytellers any person that is building a you know a multi-million user platform has gone through the process of pitching for money they've gone through the process of pitching to get the best talent to come along board and work with them so they've had to hone their story they've had to hone their pitch so the people that are leading these these new exciting companies are fantastic pitch women and pitch pitch men so so you already have storytelling baked in to these companies from the get-go the other thing is that the people that are building these companies typically not watching ads they're working engineering their product and they're opting out of advertising because that's an increasingly easier thing to do so it would feel like your gut reaction would be how do we grow our business do we go do something that I don't ever see that my friends don't ever see the early adopters I don't think really are watching either you know the gut instinct would probably be the advertising maybe isn't maybe isn't a particularly important thing so you know if customer acquisition and retention can be addressed through engineering and growth hacking then why advertise at all like it seems from what we've just heard like there would be no clear reason to go ahead and do that so no growth hacking this kind of stuff so you know if you're if you're trying to get to your next hundred million users on whatever platform it is you know your engineering teams can engineer the alerts the algorithm the discover feed the Frant recommendations all of these things are tools in the toolkit of a growth market or performance marketing team that doesn't require you to hire an agency doesn't require you to create a an emotional moving film there are lots of tools in the toolkit to activate growth without that so what are the potential reasons to advertise well one pretty obvious one is when choice enters a category then the brand can help you direct yourself in in the direction of being chosen so when snapchat became a very large player that suddenly meant that Instagram had content with the fact that there were a significant number of young people that were choosing to use the snapchat application as opposed to the Instagram application so certainly you have competition in the category then your brand starts to play more of a role secondly you might be finding yourself in a situation where you need to enter a new category strategically you need to have a foot in the hardware space so suddenly if the only ever experienced people have had of your company is through software then perhaps you need to explain yourself a little bit more perhaps you need to be people to be able to get over the hurdle of paying money for a product that otherwise they've just downloaded onto their phones and never had to hand over cash for so these are situations where a brand plays a role we also have perception and I think this is perhaps more prevalent in Europe than than anywhere else but you know a lot of these companies as they become at first it's great that you are able it feels kind of magical you remember the first moment when you downloaded I mean choose you know you're the first app that comes to mind and you used it and it feels like you were able to do something more simple and what easily than than ever before it feels amazing and over time you get used to it and over time you start to depend on it and when you depend on anything you resent it so they it comes down to how much do I trust the people that are doing this that are making this thing that I now is now a part of my life so perception is a real issue and if you don't turn up then it's hard for you to have a voice in how those perceptions are formed and then finally Trust is also an issue as the world changes and you continue to use a service whether or not you trust this service is really important and Trust is not formed just by facts it's not formed just by terms and conditions that have you know through legal processes painstakingly tried to do the right thing for users it's not just that it's the gut feeling of wait are they taking over are we all going to have to do this so the the trust issue is really important and a reason for branding so perhaps there is a case for advertising but if you must advertise then do you really need to use an advertising agency because haven't those people always just been making TV commercials and part of the old way of thinking and you know these companies have large creative departments so surely they should be able to do the advertising themselves maybe this the the Pepsi example is an incredibly convenient example for anyone working in the kind of job that I'm working in to point out and say see it doesn't work when you do it yourself it's not really a fair point to make and it's not it's not necessarily true because there are examples of internal creative teams making really great creative work that's very effective for a business and Dollar Shave Club would be a good example but there are more so so you it's a legitimate choice you could work with an internal team you could also work with any number of new companies that are entering the advertising space there are consulting firms there are production companies that will now come up with a big idea in addition to producing it there are influencing organizations through which you can access talent directly there's any number of ways that you can create advertising so with that it seems like and I don't really think this was by to much design but widened Kennedy's ended up working with a whole load of these types of companies so I've tried to figure out a little bit why that is so that I can explain why that might be today so that's the next part of this presentation and the kebab comes so we'll get there we'll get to the command so how has white and Kennedy changed in order to be variable to like these types of new economy companies well some things we haven't changed at all so we are as I said at the beginning an independent creative advertising agency and and and that hasn't changed so some of the things that we do as a creative advertising agency and the same that they've always been so one of those things is we were pretty good at telling the truth in 2011 we were approached by Chrysler and we were told that they were making a new luxury car that Chrysler 200 it was two years after the automotive industry bailout in the US and the client said we have this new luxury car we want you to help us sell it to America it's manufactured here in Detroit and we told the truth of no one's gonna believe you like no one's gonna believe that there's a luxury car that comes from Detroit but that truth is interesting so you can actually grab people's attention with that truth you can actually start to tell a story about what it means to have pride and where you're from and this car represents that pride so that's an interesting story so telling the truth is sometimes difficult but I think it's a habit that we've gotten ourselves into over the years and in the case of working with Facebook and when we work with them in Germany we realized that there were lots of uncomfortable truths in trying to figure out how to how to talk to German like to German Facebook users or facebook haters of which there are many in Germany so the truth the uncomfortable truth that we told Facebook was if you don't acknowledge that people hate you they're not gonna believe anything you say they're not even going to be willing to listen to you is the concerns that they have about Facebook extremely real and if you don't acknowledge that then they're not going to give you the time of the day and white and why should they so the advertising campaign we ran was all about these acknowledging the reasons why people hate Facebook and then showing that there are solutions to those things but that sort of candor from that brand was really good and I think wouldn't have happened unless there was somebody that was willing to just soar point to the really uncomfortable truth in the room and and do that so that's something that we sort of not changed at all another thing that we've not changed at all is just focusing on what is the problem that we're trying to solve hold on a moment let's see that finger move again so you know there are many complicated issues that you might want to try to solve when you're working with a technology breath when you're working with any brand I don't think there's new news to anyone here but I think we're very good at focusing on at the end of the day what's the one thing that we have to do and in the case of working with Instagram the one thing we have to do is convince people to click on the Instagram app as opposed to any of the other apps so so that's clear our mission with that brand is it's super clear so those things are not changes that fingers moving here so the other so there are however some things that we've changed a little bit we've always worked with data any advertising in any advertising industry company has worked with some degree of data and we're no different but the way that we use data has has changed a little bit so there was an image on one of the earlier slides of a campaign we did for Old Spice that was the man you man could smell like the pretty famous campaign but that campaign idea came from the shopper data it came from looking at shopper data and realizing that the vast majority of male body wash is bought by women for their husband's partners boyfriends brothers fathers whatever so there was shopper data insight so we always use data but we've started to use platform data maybe a little bit more than we would done in the past so yeah and work that we've done for Spotify it turns out they're really interesting things that are going on on the platform and if you talk about those things it proves that you're interested not just in providing the technology platform but you're interested in in music culture and what it means and specifically what it means for the person that played sorry 42 times on Valentine's Day that's kind of weird it really is so another thing that we've changed a little bit is knowing what not to bring to the table so working with a company like Nike and you know it requires you to be really passionate and interested engaged in sport so you have to know sport but we've never we've always known that it's not our job to go and say you should sign Steph Curry right now they have Nike has the best people in the world to figure out which are the right athletes to sign and sponsor and that's not our job we create the advertiser and we know that so there's always discipline around what not to do when you work with a tech brand you need to rely --k you need to reaffirm that that discipline because there are lots of adjacencies you could come back with an influencer strategy you could come back with some kind of data analysis proposal you could come back with like in the case of Instagram like why don't we do this interesting instameets real-world version of Instagram the truth is these companies have the best people in the world at that job already doing that job so that's not what we need to do so as exciting as it might be and it is a creative opportunity and we are a creative company we want to do creative things we have to be disciplined around focusing on what's the one thing that we do do so those are the things that we haven't changed them that we've changed a bit and now there's some other stuff that we've changed a little bit more so one of those things is to modify our reaction when the client tells us they want a campaign life by next month so typically for a company that prides itself on its creative output you want to ensure that you have sufficient time to really think about the idea and then when you've got to the idea you want to let think about it a little bit more and then you want to really craft that idea and find the best way to bring that to lie that kind of goes out the window when you've got a platform that's changing every single day so we've had to find ways around that one of the ways that we found around that and we're slowly leading up to the kebab moment everybody is that the big idea that gets talked about in advertising the way that we get to that big idea has changed so in the past as I mentioned we would typically sit down and assign teams and we would work on trying to figure out what the big idea is for this for this brand or this product and then once you've landed that big idea you then start to write typically in the old old days TV scripts or print ads or lines or you would come up with ideas that would bring that big idea to life if you've got a campaign that needs to be on air next month because a competitive product is launched and you need to like stem the you know the loss of users whatever the reason is you're gonna have to find a way to move fast and sometimes the big idea you know technology enables you to create content faster than it has ever done before but it doesn't enable ideas to be made quicker than ever before so what that means is you can get to content faster than you can get to an idea so we kind of realized that was maybe an opportunity if we if we approach things differently so we would do more creative prototyping we would start going out and our creative teams as opposed to stroking their chins and thinking about the idea they would just start making stuff and see if it leads somewhere so this is a I'm going to show you a piece of content that was made by a creative team that was trying to figure out what is the campaign that we should be making for Instagram in 2017 and Instagram had launched stories and we were trying to figure out how do we tell the story of stories to a broader audience and the team that figured out that idea was struggling to figure out that idea so they've gone out with their phones and we're walking around and they found themselves in an area of Amsterdam and saw a kebab and when they saw the kebab rotating they thought it looks a little bit like a tornado and then they they made this that is the thing of beauty oh my goodness so they made that and then they kept going [Music] [Music] there's a lot lot more of those that I'm not gonna show you right now but but what that did was it led us to the the big idea of stories are everywhere so in the past Instagram was a platform where you would create very well curated photographs that were beautifully composed and they were only for the best moments they were your sausage legs on the beach or your lap a art or all the wingtips or whatever it was but stories changes what Instagram means to people and we were trying to find how to articulate that and in the end we just started using that product prototyping making things and realizing that in fact stories are everywhere so that feels true and truth is helpful in advertising so that's kind of where how we got to that so changing the order of getting to the big idea was a bit of a revelation for us which is why it's the title of the presentation there's no I'm not obsessed by cube maps in any way so another another thing that has changed for us a little bit is a call to action so call to action is the thing that you have to do after you've after you've figured out this beautiful idea that you're going to make into a campaign for your client at some point in the process someone somewhere is going to say but what's the call to action and it's kind of the blocking and tackling part of the job but that's changed because when you start adopting a prototyping mindset you stop seeing like jobs that you have to do and you start seeing creative opportunities that you're presented with so a call to action as a creative opportunity so the the gentleman on the airport travelator Airport traveler there is a copywriter in our office and he he just realized that we were going to have to run ads that would point to the the camera icon itself on that on the device so why don't we create some concepts around that they actually happened on this so so that kind of changed quite a bit and speaking of shoots shoots themselves have changed so we created a campaign for Nike in 2010 called write the future which was a super successful football campaign and this is a this is a photograph from the shoot so this was with an Oscar award-winning director in a reto and his DP and they created a four camera rig that you see here on a movable dolly with a phantom camera with 400 frames per second rate in all different angles for the cameras on this rig so it's probably one of the more complex camera rigs that certainly we had ever seen and it was you know resulted in some great work but this was the way that we did that work in 2010 so that was our 2010 right the future for camera rig and this is our Instagram stories campaign for camera rig so this shoot involves people doing this with their phones and filming footage because because you can so we were creating content in a way that means the like the the the emotional cost of making that thing in getting that right as it comes way way way down which is the reality and the economics of what's happened to content creation anyway so if you'll it just makes sense to embrace that change and start making the content which is what we've started to do - these people are from a production company that we would always hire and work with and then two of the people are our own creatives and everyone's just in it together making content so again that sort of prototyping and making mindset has really helped us and then I have this is a piece of content that we made that's the guy from the travelator and how he came up with the idea for the pizza it's not particularly high-tech so so there's there's several things that we've changed some stuff we've changed like that we haven't changed then some chain and some stuff that we've in between but then amidst all of that there's I think we it's helped us reaffirm it's help us think about ourselves a little bit and to consider what is it that we should really be doing and what's important to us and what's not because you know sharing a video that you shot on your phone of a kebab stand is not the way that anyone one can be used to present work to a client so it's changed and it's made us think well what's important to us in that case so one thing that has that we've reaffirmed is that we're very much a creative company I mentioned earlier our use of data so we we use data more and more to think about not only the the insights that might lead to a creative idea but also then the measurement of that idea and then the opportunity to optimize that idea that doesn't mean that we have just let go and hand it over to hand it over our fate to data and and letting that make the creative decisions for us so I'm gonna show you I'm gonna show you an ad that we made again for Instagram that when we presented there wasn't really a good like there wasn't really much data support for this idea so initially it got shelved but we felt so passionately about this idea and we were convinced that people were going to love it that we we ended up like working with a client and convincing them and in the end we got to make this thing so I'll show it to you [Applause] so the weather is a football player for you ventus and the con there was several concerns with this idea like so it was it ran in Italy and people that aren't events as fans in Italy are gonna hate this idea was one concern is this a relevant thing like was another concern there were lots of like lots of issues to think through for this but because we just felt like instinctively this is just gonna be fun like let's just go ahead and make it we did and of all of the content that we've paid for its game this is the most high-performing piece of content I know more even than the kebab stand that's incredible so I think the realization there is that we're not a content production company that uses data we're a creative company and as such we sort of live and die on our ability to come up with interesting ideas so so that was one thing that we really reaffirmed and then another thing that we've reformed is that that we need to be open to lots of people you know widened Kennedy was founded in Portland Oregon which at the time that it was founded had no advertising scene so the people that had to hire in the early days were people that there was some people were advertising backgrounds there were a lot of people that were just the people that were around at that time and I think as always there's a thing we say in the company about hire wrong and don't look for the person that's the cookie cutter profile for the particular role just try to bring in people of all backgrounds so we've tried to keep that would not try it's we've always kept that spirit alive and that's just something that we've reformed is incredibly important to us as we as we evolve so these are the people that have worked on the Instagram work but it's people from you know I mean it's it's very much an Amsterdam thing I think a lot of companies have this sort of profile but we have 32 nationalities in our office and the people coming up with the ideas that were run in Italy and Germany in the u.s. from you know those countries plus myriad others so so that's really helped us so yeah I mean in summary I was trying to think again like what are those things that have made a difference to us I think telling the truth has has always helped us and I think for companies that have that amazing self belief to make that new disruptive thing that they bring into the world being able to speak the inconvenient truth about some people might not like that some people might feel disenfranchised this interim intermediated by that that telling that truth is really important being open to change because if you don't embrace that then you're going to miss out on opportunities to be a part of it know what you are and then don't worry about what you're not I think there were you know we could have caught ourselves up in whether or not we're a digital company but it's actually an irrelevance because if you're a creative company then you know everything's an opportunity so not worrying about what we're not I think was helpful embracing technology because it's changing all the time so if you don't embrace it you're gonna you're not going to keep up and then staying creative so and speaking of staying I think I've stayed more or less on time I got like 30 seconds left so just leaves me to say thank you very much to you [Music]