When good ideas go bad | Ashley Vinson, myTomorrows | OnBrand '17

[Music] hello yes we're gonna do American energy now right anything's possible america fuck yeah all right wanted to start off that way so hi my name is Ashley Vinson I am the chief marketing officer of a lovely company here in Amsterdam called my tomorrows where it where's where my employees oh there we go all right now you'll get a raise first of all I want to say thank you so much to on-brand for bringing me back I don't know if any of you were here last year but yes you may recall that I was famous for my amazing dancing and it looked a little bit like a lane and since that wonderful time I was working for Twitter last year and here's a picture of me at work and I've spent a career actually pitching ideas to clients trying to win a work so even when I was at Twitter my whole job was to sell creative concepts so they would want to use Twitter and I've worked at bbo I've worked at DDB I've worked at tribal here in Amsterdam of course and now for the first time in my career I'm actually on the client side Oh God and and and you feel it and it and it's awesome it's awesome to get the position of a CMO and this is kind of how I feel about being a CMO [Applause] you got your dancing that was the whitest dancing ever but at the same time you're a CMO and it also stands for chief mistake organizer and so you look the pressure is on us for us for those of us in marketing there on client side there's huge pressure and if you look at just what's happening with the tenure of CMOS it's gone down just already two months from 2015 to 2016 because so many companies are looking to marketing to solve their problems and if you aren't solving their problems than you're out of there and so there's all this pressure for you as the marketer how do I do this how do I drive sales how do I make my company successful and then on the flip side of course are the agencies my god is someone who comes from the agencies there's so much pressure not only on just costs but trying to get the relationship trying to win work trying to keep the clients and if you think about it what is our greatest fear what is it and this year I think it was no one wanted to be the one who had approved or came up with the idea for the damn Pepsi ad so the pressure is on all of us to perform and and that was really the inspiration for this speech was how do we keep the good ideas from going bad or the original working title how to totally not screw the brand and lose our jobs so when we're talking about keeping ideas good there's really three areas I would focus on which is being good keeping it real and of course staying focused so talking about being good the first thing to understand and this is very interesting as someone who's worked on both sides is that knowing that both the client and the agency are responsible for the work there isn't one person that takes all responsibility it's a collaborative effort and part of that is starting with a good brief now I could certainly show you a good brief but you know it's a lot more fun to show a bad brief and this is one that was actually done a friend told me about and it was was a British client that briefed their agency on coming up with a campaign for Christmas okay great so if we looked at the brief the client phone store awesome great their objectives drive sales at Christmas okay pretty big but alright their target all people who buy gifts at Christmas okay and then the key message was our phone store is the place to buy all your Christmas gifts the unique selling point they wanted to emphasize that we have Christmas gifts for everyone so and and to even make this brief better they defines success as everyone in the United Kingdom buys all our Christmas gifts at our store for those that you may have missed this they wanted to get everyone in the United Kingdom that buys Christmas gifts to buy all other gifts from the phone store now hearing about this brief I figured they left out a few things they also forgot to ask for the ability to fly maybe win the lottery while we're at it and of course transform water into wine now what's scary right now is there's people sitting in this audience going you know wet and they're talking like a Californian you know what that wasn't such a bad breeze I mean why aren't we reaching for the stars why don't we push our agency let's let's see what they can come up with and the reality is is that to reach for the stars means reaching for success and that means first of all knowing your own brand and its limits your a phone store you can only do so much you can only add so much value so asking to be the go-to place for all of things isn't realistic delivery for your brand and the next thing is being precise in your brief so many of us get these targets target all customers that buy Christmas gifts target to target them all and for most of us very few brands have the budget or the ability to actually do that type of thing so doing this type of target doesn't even make sense it's not being precise and last of all ask for realistic outcomes expecting that the only way the agency is going to succeed the only way this campaign succeeds is when you can say everyone bought your gifts from your store for Christmas isn't realistic and a lot of times we put this in because we think oh we're gonna push them but that isn't actually helping you and that's setting them up for failure so be realistic about your outcomes now building on this it's important that you're collaborative and honest and as Trump has Illustrated time and time again it's important to tell the truth and with this UK phone store one of the greatest things about the story was that the account person from the agency told the client that they were cray-cray that this wasn't going to happen that the outcomes the targets none of that worked and that was the best answer that client could have ever gotten that was about being honest and collaborative they did not want to see the client fail and they wanted to be more realistic so and and for me I had this same experience with talking to a client and honest way with my first Dutch client here's a picture of him handsome gentleman and he had asked us to brief come up with all these ideas and what he wanted he said I want it I wanted printed out and a big glossy book on nice paper I want it bound so I can have this book of your concepts great so we we made this book we spent weeks and weeks designing all these different ideas based on his brief knowing he was gonna look at this book and focus on our ideas so when I rocked up to the client here in Amsterdam we brought the book we gave it to him and we started presenting ideas and he picked up the book he looked at it he turned Paige and he said I don't like that one he proceeded to flip the pages at a rate about 5 seconds per page telling it oh that's good oh that could work I don't know if I liked that one and I had to stop him and I had to say your role isn't to play the critic whether or not you like it or you think it's cool that wasn't your role and and we have spent a lot of time on this and I said to him I said let's go back through this deck let's spend the time that we need to to collaborate and actually come out with better outcomes because that is our job our job yes the client needs to be honest yes he can say I hate it I think it's stupid but let's talk about why let's collaborate to get the work to a better place and that's important the other thing is Awards oh my god Awards so many times we've gotten briefs I want to can award winning campaign yes I'm sure you do and we covet this we think oh this is gonna be it this is the key to our happiness is this and of course I mean who doesn't like award shows right because there's this but we're setting ourselves up for a vicious cycle and when you think about it as someone at the agencies right the brands are hiring us because some of the agencies they've won awards oh they must be good they've won awards and then the agencies are pushing to win awards to get the brands have we got to win awards because we're gonna then get business but then awards don't necessarily equal sales and the next thing you know the brands are firing the agencies for not increasing sales and so it starts again and again and again and and really what it means is that when we're focusing on awards we're not really thinking about how are we going to communicate to the consumer why awards are awesome and if that's the if that's the side effect of doing really good work that's great but if that's ever the focus then you're going to lose out because while all of us would love to be on the cover of Advertising Age we don't want to be on the cover of Advertising Age for this so being good is about having a good brief to start with about being honest and collaborating and don't chase awards so the next thing is talking about how do we keep it real how do we keep it real and and that starts with not believing the hype and as a former ad agency person myself I know all about the hype I know about the big presentations I know how important it is and I know how easy it is to fall in love with the pitch we'd love the pitch it's about the show and I was looking at a lot of different pitch decks and I came across this really amazing one and I thought it was a good example of how we actually can pitch and and because in America when we used to do these big pitches or clients we always did it in a British with British people because they're fancy and they make everything seem smarter I'm gonna horrify now the British audience members and do a British accent so let's do this a vision we have a unique goal in inspiration the exploration of the uncharted inspired by in referencing the five elements of the earth the actual experience exceeds all expectations this is something that's hard to put into words though we did in the slide now and then last of all this event will ignite that type of energy that type of power in our guests and we have a strategy as well our 360 methodology allows us to capture brand revenue in a unique manner first starting by understanding the brown goals ID aiding conceptualizing and then executing and you're sitting there as a client like oh my god yes I'm in oh is so amazing big words pretty people love it and you may recall the fire festival some of you it was it was an amazing festival that they were setting up to have on a on a private island in the Bahamas with musicians social media influencers even a mobile app and of course hot models if you recall this was actually what happened one of my favorite quotes that they put out on the event the day after were everything the shit hit the fan was yesterday was a very challenging day for us and our guests but we would like to fully explain what happened and and of course these disasters happened before and this one was an extra-big disaster but I think a lot of us get a bit intimidated sometimes by the agency because the agency is always way cooler than us I mean they're coming in like with cool hair and beards and ironic t-shirts and you just feel like my god they must know better than I do and and the truth is though just because they're so cool and their t-shirts are so witty doesn't necessarily mean that what's coming out of them is a good idea and and I found this online and I laughed because this is how it was when we would work on a pitch you'd get briefed he'd fuck around for a very long time doing research on YouTube and and very quickly you'd start to panic and then you'd finish the work drinking heavily crying doing drugs just to get to the deadline and then you'd be there to present to the client now that isn't to say that just because the deck was finished in a hurry and they were maybe drunk and high doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea but to somehow think that there's all this thoughtfulness and that there's this huge thought going into the pitch isn't necessarily true we're trying to sell work we're trying to get the work from you and when you want to love a pitch you want to love it for the right reason so of course obviously does the pitch aligned with your brief really really basic question but after you go through a big amazing pitch is hard sometimes to see that focus so going back to your wreath making sure to limes of course does the strategy make sense I've seen so many pitches where the center of it is a mobile app a branded mobile app whoa who the hell is downloading a mobile branded app if that's the strategy that maybe we need to look closer is this going to work and then of course is it trend dependent is there a lot of mention of the snapchats and the instagrams are we trying to be on trend so much that we forget about the core idea and of course is it doable can this be achieved in the time and budget and and that's always an important thing to do because at the creative agency of course we're always going to require that the beautiful advertisement is shot in Hawaii during the winter so knowing that this is doable as an important thing and last of all the audience will the audience actually like what you're presenting and I used it when I worked at the agency on a beer brand back in Chicago the target audience was pretty much interested in two things looking at sports online and pornography and and so every time the team would come up with a new digital concept I would say I'm like that's really great but do you think that your target audience would want to spend 30 seconds with this and tear themselves away from a sports site or some pornography and of course you do need to take a break from those things sometimes but was the idea good enough to do that and that was always the question and if it wasn't better than sports in porn I said go back to the drawing board so keeping it real don't fall in love with the pitch look for the substance over style and of course think about can it be done and last of all does the idea bring value to my audience and and the filter is always is it helpful is it relevant is it useful or is it really highly entertaining how can I bring value and the last thing is about staying focused and of course you could look at Pepsi and you're like kendall Jenner was giving a cop a Pepsi can I mean right there we knew his thought and and one of my favorite clips from this ad should have been assigned to whoever was approving this maybe they shouldn't approve and here it is [Music] Jesus Christ what was that oh there's my wig all my transformation moment I just realized Pepsi can make it happen now of course what happened someone had to see that cheesy ass scene and be like Kendall really just whipped off her wig and wiped off her lipstick to reveal another color underneath yes she did and the truth is nobody spoke up they had gotten so far down the line that even this insanity here where they said live bolder oh look we have a white guy with a guitar oh look black hip hard artists let's put the darker guy in the back oh token Muslim Oh than an Asian he's of course with a cello you would think you would think that maybe someone said do you think what man a bit cliche do you think maybe this is where you know cuz everyone got on the bad idea train and the truth is though Pepsi is not unique this is not unique just a pepsi screwing up and I had the most fun time looking through bad advertisements and I could only pick a few this is one of my favorites Ford wanted to show just how much stuff you can hold in the trunk I like the tagline leave your worries behind well there's a former prime-minister burst the loonie with some lovely women that he have gagged and put in to the back of his trunk Wow you really can't hold a lot three whole women and then of course there's this one totally looks like it came out of a female creative team doesn't it and then of course my all-time favorite I think it's always a strong move for a brand to align itself with incest there's definitely a target audience out there well done Jack Daniels living up the redneck dream and and this actually happened to me when I was at the agency so when I worked in Chicago I worked at an agency that we did a ton of Super Bowl ads so big deal a lot of us working in huge it's huge money huge media spend and and so they wanted me to work on this and actually they were bringing in me for the for the digital component and so they had all the ads made and they wanted me to work on it so I said well let's look at the brief first what was the original brief for this and they said well basically we want to create consumer awareness about the about the brand product because it's able to actually give the actual price of a car and in America you're able to negotiate with the price so by knowing the actual price of the car you can negotiate with the car dealer which gives you confidence so our product gives you confidence all right great this product will help you negotiate it will give you confidence so our answer to that was kind of clever we're gonna create a series of ads comparing how easy it is to use our service to get confidence to be able to negotiate with a car dealer versus using I don't know other less desirable methods and so it was a series of ads where they showed all these things happening on they would try to negotiate they would try to leverage him one way and one ad had come out on top this was the one they wanted to run so they showed it to me and and I'll show you kind of a storyboard ad and it was actually made so it started off with this man he's shopping at a car dealer right he's shopping he's shopping and he starts negotiating unfortunately he doesn't get the price he wants from the car dealer and so what he does is he calls a friend for some confidence and for some help negotiating fortunately this friend was nearby already kitted up as a full sniper on a roof near the dealership and so that friend puts some pressure on the salesperson in the form of a laser red sniper mark and then of course ad wraps up you know well and you know instead of may be threatening murder you could get confidence from using our product or as a tagline as confidence comes standard so this was an actual ad so after recovering from the shock I don't know if you know about America we have a small gun problem I had to bring something up and it was weird because like the SADS already made the Superbowl is coming and I said can I first talk about how did we get here how did we get from confidence come standard to murdering the car dealer and and so I looked at it I said okay confidence all right you want to get confidence so as is equals getting what you want okay great that's great okay the brand all right we give confidence because confidence helps you get what you want and to get what you want you use threats and bullets again American and the threats of violence of course but you can use a gun what's better than a gun to threaten violence and use a gun get confidence and this had been kind of the logic that had been distorted and now was contained in this ad we're about to go live to millions and millions of people on the Superbowl and when you looked at it it was really a recipe for bad decisions you know when I asked around everyone is in agreement yeah we think this is funny murders funny and when I said but you said there was research about this said oh yeah no the research is really super positive this is the one that came out on top and of course the game was soon we had to get an ad out there we couldn't not run an ad the media was bought so there was all these things that were coming in that makes it difficult difficult to speak up and of course speaking up is awkward telling the truth to power is always not the most fun thing and especially when you're that far down the line in production and so what I did is I asked questions I said are is everyone really in greement do we really think this is a bad idea or a good idea and there was a few people that's started saying well yeah maybe having a sniper threatened to shoot a car dealer isn't the best and the next thing when I that the research I said who was the research who did we talk to well we went out to this mall in the middle of Ohio on a Wednesday afternoon they're all unemployed and have some anger issues and they think guns are awesome and I'm like I'm sure so we had a small audience that we tested this on and the gun lovers loved it great and then of course the big game was soon as soon is this really our only option is this ad the only thing we had left and of course not we had made already four other ads so this reality that that maybe that we that we're all in agreement and that the research was solid and then we had to go with this wasn't true and by speaking up you can start asking the questions and look for alternatives before you head down that road and make a huge mistake and so when we talked about keeping url' again it's about speaking up and being brave so no matter where you are in the process even if that thing is supposed to launch tomorrow if you see it you need to say something and of course you want to describe the idea back to yourself do the idea map does it all add up and make sense and then of course tie the concept back to the brand proposition do they align is what the brand offering align with what the idea is illustrating and do they want to be associated with that so keeping ideas good it's it's about making that leap and we've talked about today about being good we talked about keeping it real and we talked about staying focused and the thing is when you think about advertising advertising is really an act of faith it's us saying this is what we think is the right thing to do because there is no amount of research there is no amount of great ideas of affirmation that's gonna let us know that we're doing the right thing and one of my favorite quotes has been attributed to many many different people this was the earliest attribution I could find is that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted the trouble is I don't know which half and if you think today even in the digital era the the numbers and as someone who worked at Twitter and ice looked at the numbers all the time we don't know how much about is real we don't know the true brand effect we're getting studies back from Nielsen who we actually paid to tell us how well we're doing so in reality a lot of the information which tell us that we're rocking it and our advertising is working isn't necessarily true and the truth is is that there's no 100% method there is nothing that is going to prove to you that this is going to work and that means we need to understand that yes our job is really hard our job is very difficult to do and that means that we have to have the brains to ask the right questions is this the right idea is this on brief am I making the right choice and then but part of that also is that even if you answer all those questions you have to have the guts to take the risks that's part of the job of marketing and last of all of course you have to have the strength to handle the consequences not every concept is going to work out not every plan you have is going to be perfect but if you really want to move the brand forward and you want to do good work you have to make those risks and I want to end on one of my favorite quotes from one of the founders of ddb bill Bernbach he says something I really really believe in and it's something that no matter when we do all the right things no matter how much we plan we need to understand this when doing our marketing is that I warn you against believing that advertising is a science thank you very much [Applause] [Music]