Are We Making Advertising for Algorithms or for People?

Bridget, we hear a lot about, you mentioned it earlier from the talk at the IMM as well, about advertising being set, almost set by category, like that if you remove the badge, it looks the same in a different brand, that it's less brave, that it's more forgettable, right? And in every single room that these decisions are made, there are smart people deciding to choose a route that feels safe, deciding to go with a route that feels less distinctive.

From a marketer's perspective, how do you decide that we are going with a route that feels safe or does it not feel safe at the time when you make a decision like that?

And I think this is where maybe way too many years of experience do play a role because you can intuitively see, you know, whether something suits your audience.

And also I've been doing this job on this brand particularly for a long time, so I can recite the brand print, you know, off by heart.

I think part of the problem is hidden in your question, which is there's a room full of people.

And I, you know, recently we were evaluating some creative work and I counted 10 Volkswagen people on the call.

I actually afterwards said, we need to make a smaller circle, three of us max, three, four of us maximum.

Because ultimately, you know, data or no data, at the end of the day, everybody's got an opinion about advertising.

Even my mother, you know, should she be weighing in on these decisions? Yeah.

A friend of mine, anecdotally, a friend of mine did tell me the other day about a CMO that they used to work with and he would take the work home every night to show it to his wife and then he would come back, you know, in the morning.

Yeah.

And I think part of the challenge is everybody does have an opinion.

So if you account for legal and compliance and your boss and your boss's boss and global and, you know, everybody and then throw in your spouse, you are going to end up with work that, I mean, safe, there's nothing wrong with safe work, but you're going to end up with very bland work that is not differentiated at all.

And the differentiation now, I think, is, in the, you know, the conversations that we're all having about long-term and short-term, that differentiation, that distinctiveness is so important.

And you're not going to get that from a committee of people weighing in on, you know, what I think about this color.

And, you know, I used to have a friend who said that and I didn't like him, et cetera.

It just, it just, it can't, it cannot work.

So you need a tight group of experienced people that have a deep understanding, not just of the brand, but also of the, surprise, surprise, the consumer.

And that seems like such an obvious point.

I can't tell you how often I need to remind people in the room, like, let's take this, let's stop navel-gazing, and let's put it back to the consumer.

And I think...

Part of the chaos that we find ourselves in in today's world is we're spending way too much time staring at screens and not enough time out there talking to people.

We did an exercise recently with the agency where we just went into a shopping center and we broke up into groups and then we regrouped afterwards and fed back what we observed.

I mean, it's so basic, but it was kind of enlightening because we could have been looking at PowerPoint charts about... you know, what people do instead of just going to observe it ourselves.

Obviously with the filter that it's, you know, one shopping center in Cape Town, et cetera.