You say you want a revolution

One of the fun parts of my past five years has been working on a ton pitches — mostly on the agency side or as a partner to a media sales lead, but a couple on the brand side too. A common feature of those briefs, usually penned as leaders change or as category crisis finally hits, is a big ambition. It comes from a genuine belief that things need to change and that the old ways won’t get new results. So why do brands so seldom make pitch work, much less truly ambitious work?

I think a big part is cultural, or a function of big company norms. A few years ago a mentor, Katie Dreke, offered the insight that brands and agencies have different metabolism. I was working at Mattel at the time and experiencing the ultrarunner metabolism of a large organization for my first time.

Last week Bud Caddell had a post with a related take, writing, “What I find are a set of leaders who themselves, personally, have a deeply ingrained fear of failure and shame spiral for their own mistakes. They fail to lead others to take risks because they won’t permit themselves to try anything too new.”

My natural metabolism is much more like a sprinter. I grew up professionally in agencies, with stints in startups before that. Getting an MBA in between was as much an aberration as an accelerant.

So when I get a brief with a juicy ambition, I lick my chops as much as the next person. I want to make work that makes people feel simultaneously confronted and comforted, seen and felt. I deeply resonate with this quote from Jon Steel’s Truth, Lies, and Advertising:

A creative team has to believe that a great campaign is possible before they can begin to create it. Perhaps the most important task of the brief, arguably more influential than the strategic and creative direction itself, is the creation of the belief in the team that they will be able to do their very best work on this one assignment.

When agency teams get an ambitious brief, we see it as a sign that a client is DTF, because we are. The reality is much more that they’re open to dating after a long, serious relationship. That’s because those plans live in a system. I’ve been playing with the idea of 3 P’s (rhetorical planner habits die hard) to help think about the environment in which ideas come to life: plans, process, and people.

Plans are what agency people are used to making. A brand has a problem to solve, we have strategic, creative, production, and media plans. They can be safe or they can buck logic in favor of magic, to borrow from Rory Sutherland.

Process is how those plans move through functions. A client brief has already gone through the approvals and budgetary ringer before the time a pdf has been shared with prospective agencies, but a lot more has to be done to get ideas approved. Brand functions have finite political capital that they need to use judiciously with teams like sales, product development, or performance marketing. What clients are to agencies, stakeholders are to clients. All of that process-ing can wear down the prickly edges of an ambitious vision.

People execute the plans and the process. The brand-side attracts people who thrive in those slower metabolism environments. Winning tomorrow is significantly more valuable than winning today. That can lead to a culture of not being wrong, and when it starts at the top, like in Bud’s example, make even a simple process with risky plans turn very safe.

What to do about it:

1. Give it time. The first pancake, the beta, the soft launch… call it what you want, but set expectations for when and how (e.g., on social or with creators first) you’ll make world-breaking work with a client, and know that it might not be the first spot.
2. Find their perspective. Ask clients early and often how to support selling in spicy work to more linear thinkers. Ambitious people in brand environments can feel (and are) exposed when their work lacks some rational basis.
3. Keep coming back to shared goals. Agencies are comfortable with different kinds of risks than clients are–we don’t mind making a leap, they don’t mind waiting for the right time. What we share is a desire to make work that significantly changes their fortunes over time, and for all parties to participate in that upswing.
4. Refine your bets. The future is not a thing but a thing we shape and shape again. As Annie Duke writes in Thinking In Bets, “Decisions are bets on the future, and they aren’t ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ based on whether they turn out well on any particular iteration.” We get to keep tuning our bets to (hopefully) help our work meet our ambition.

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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben