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I'm a Cyber Nettie Organism living this show about metal and the skeleton. Laying Tim, Faris, Show. Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Faris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Faris Show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease out the habits, routines, techniques, favorite books, so on and so forth that you can apply in your own lives. And I interview people from all different disciplines.
And guests could be from all different disciplines. They could be from the military. They could be from business. They could be from entertainment. They could be from academics, research, chess. In this case, I would say the creative arts. Now the guest Chris Beresford Hill is best known as a creative leader in advertising. He's an admin. He's a very, very good admin.
He's tough as an unpaid intern. The journey is wild. His techniques highly effective. But he's not just an admin. This conversation is really about coming up with good ideas. How do you come up with original and good ideas that not only can say sell product, but also change narratives, change stories, change the stories people tell, change culture on some level.
And I loved this conversation. So let me get to the bio and then I will give some teasers. Chris Beresford Hill is one of the most sought after creative leaders in advertising and his lead brands with a combined market cap of over $1 trillion. He was recently named Chief Creative Officer of the Americas, BBDO. Previously, Chris served as North America president and Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy and Chief Creative Officer at TBWA Shiet Day.
His work for clients like Guinness, Mountain Dew, Dove, Workday, Adidas, FedEx, McDonald's, HBO, and Foot Locker have driven sales while putting dent after dent into pop culture. But it's not just these huge brands. We also get into the early stories of how cold email to Mark Cuban changed the game for him completely. So we do talk about the super scrappy bootstrapped very, very novice days when he made a mark and slowly built his trajectory up to the stratosphere back to the bio.
Christmas teams have won every award for creativity and effectiveness many times over. They even have, and I didn't even realize this was a thing, five campaigns in the permanent collection at MoMA is been named to AdWeex list of best creatives, AdWeex Creative 100, business insiders most creative people in advertising and the ad aid.
And you can find Chris Barrett's Ferd Hill on LinkedIn. That is the best place to connect. And we'll link to that in the show notes at Tim.log slash podcast. But it is LinkedIn.com slash I N slash Chris Barrett's Ferd Hill, the E R E S F O R D L I L. And this episode touches on just about every aspect of creativity and also using positive constraints. How do you operate with positive constraints to make yourself more unorthodox, more effective?
How do you find sort of the gap in what is right in front of you to see what other people have not seen to create something that takes off that goes viral? How do you do this? How do you develop a reliable toolkit for this? So we not only talk about the ad game, pre-advertising, Super Bowl ads, that type of thing.
We also talk about Metallica, we talk about Conan O'Brien, we talk about South Park, we talk about every possible medium, we also talk about my long standing interest in effective copy, which goes back decades, and how do you use a swipe file and so on. So that's enough preamble. Now without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation, a very practical conversation with Chris Barrett's Ferd Hill.
Chris, welcome to Austin. Nice to see you, man. Nice to see you too. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So we are going to Bob and Weave and do some improv jazz in this conversation. We're going to wind all over the place. Let's start with Hey Basic, which is how did you land your first job?
My first job was at a very cool, very trendy ad agency in Boston called Modernista, and I convinced them to let me be an unpaid intern because they were so small they didn't know how to say no to me coming in and offering to work for free.
So I just graduated college and I got really lucky because there was kind of no high speed internet or anything. I just found them in the phone book literally and I walked around and it was this cool office. And so I kind of by virtue of that, I found my way there and they let me be an unpaid intern and they let me write website copy, very web 1.0 copy for general motors for the Hummer truck when that was brought back with the H1 and the H2.
And I decided this was my dream, maybe write a ton of web copy and that was making me really excited, maybe do a print ad back when there was magazines everywhere, maybe put an idea on the back cover of a magazine and that would really be massively fulfilling. So as soon as I got that internship, I just I had to figure out how to get hired, but they weren't hiring. It was very at the time to go from unpaid to paid barely paid.
But at that time, and we could touch on this, it was much more competitive to get into the ad biz because there just you know there weren't as many creative options for career. So we had an assignment for the Dallas Mavericks 2000 and two NBA program like the magazine that people would buy when they went to Mavericks games.
At the time, Mark Cuban was was this very besides just being Mr. Shark Tank, he was this very outspoken NBA owner, he was always criticizing the league and the officials and he was always getting fined and it was that was a big theme. So I wrote an ad and it wasn't a particularly good one, it was okay, but I wrote even Mark Cuban has nothing bad to say about it with a picture of the truck, which I thought was clever.
I don't know if it's going to really stand in the test of time, but I knew the getting a billionaire to give you the rights of their name was probably something that had to be thought through where there's probably some people that would weigh in on that. And I remember this urban legend again very like web 1.0, which was that Mark Cuban had an email address that if you could find it and you emailed him, he like wrote everybody back.
So I kind of put together a very short concise email pleading my case, I'm an unpaid intern. This would mean so much if you would let me put this ad into the world and I made a little PDF and I attached it and like fruit a magic about an hour later. So he just wrote back and just said go for it, dash M and so some in the genie, he was you know, who's right he was there for it. Maybe it was because it was that about his way.
Yeah, maybe there was other emails he didn't want to write back to maybe this maybe this worked for him. And sorry, I remember I printed out the ad and then I printed out the email from him and I put it underneath and I showed my boss Lance and he laughed at that ad and then said, you know, the requisite like we're never going to be able to do up but thanks kid.
And then you know, he turned the page and there was the email and I think that you know more than any creative idea I'd ever shown him and I was doing my best to show him everything I think I showed him that I was going to solve every problem with creativity not just the assignment. And so we ran that underwhelming ad but that was enough for him to give me a job offer for 22 and a half thousand dollars a year, which was the best job offer I ever got.
So many follow questions. So the first is and he may not recall but give any idea what the subject line was or the gist of the subject line. You know what I don't remember the subject line but I'll tell you this I think it was good and considered because I to this day I receive a lot of email that's not from people I'm looking to hear from and I know the power of a subject line.
So I think very hard on these things because everything is the communication. So for example when I worked at TBWA shy day I would sometimes cold email clients we'd have an idea for audible an idea for IKEA and I would find the client and I would reach out and I figured out the perfect email subject which was high from apples at agency because TBWA apples at easy and my response right on that was killer.
So I've definitely learned that you know your first impression is kind of your own impression so maybe I appeal to his kindness maybe it was desperate on paid intern I don't know I don't know what but maybe you appeal to his level of get shit on any you. Yeah, you appreciated the the hootspa and I hope so it would seem to be the case if you give your permission so if I ever see him I'll say a very big thank you.
He may end up hearing the podcast so coming back to the phone book becoming an unpaid intern yeah why did you choose to focus because the phone book has a lot of entries that's a lot of different types of businesses yeah why did you choose to pursue this particular company or at least sector everything's luck you can be prepared for it you can have some gifts but you're an idiot if you don't think that chance in fate and all those things.
Because there were a number of at agencies in Boston and I was sure I wanted to be an advertising creator person but again you googling wasn't a thing to do like the computer with the internet was at the library you know and I think I think it was like yellow pages dot com.
And I think modern is still is the name of the agency so that's like kind of in the middle that's not like the first one I think I tried Arnold advertising in Boston and they didn't want to meet with me I think I just work my way down and I think they were just the right place right time where they were like yeah we'll take free labor.
You couldn't look up what the client lists were but you have a pitch or was it I will do anything if you let me in the door or was it more specific it was I will do anything because I had nothing to offer and I think later I would get my second job and I would go to someone and now I'm a copywriter and I would say I will write on your accounts in my spare time if you want I would you got offer whatever you have but I started out with nothing to offer so I think I knew I was free labor and I said I would get coffee and I did and I got a lot of coffee.
We may come back to that there's a lot of power in being willing to do the small things because a lot of folks feel like they're too good for it or too qualified but we may come back to that I want to ask you for the program and maybe you already said this and I missed it coming up with the even Mark Cuban has nothing bad to say about this particular car.
Did they give that to you as an assignment or is that something you just did of your own volition. I think I graduated from website copy to the smallest of creative tasks and so I think there was you know you could write the welcome signs for the GM convention and try to make that clever so there's all kinds of like little things that weren't the big brand stuff and they weren't the big TV spot or any and that's kind of where all the focus was and you kind of had to work you out those things.
You said that you have to consider a lot compare phrasing here which is of course true there's certain things you can do to increase your surface area for luck to stick to borrowing that concept from somebody else I don't know the attribution and you didn't get a yes from the first few spots or the first few companies you contacted did modern needs to end up being a particularly good fit or particularly influential in a way you could not have predicted.
So interestingly when I kind of found you know my own quote unquote voice modernista was one of these at agencies that was very stylish very European everything was very cool and they would put out work that was very avant garde I think I later became a little bit more mass a little bit more comedic in the work that kind of came out of me but what I got at modernista is the owner was a guy named Lance Jensen and he for any ad nerds you know exactly who that person is because he had written one of the best advertising.
The best advertising lines of all time which is on the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers drivers wanted for VW and so he had created that campaign while working in Boston at an agency called Arnold and he'd done all these famous ads I don't know if you remember there's an ad I don't know what the name was but it's that da da da song and a couple guys just killing time driving around in their VW golf I think they pick up a chair and they drive around a little further they realize the chair smells because they picked up off the street and they let it back out and they drive around.
And the line said you know the VW golf everything you need for your life or your complete lack there of things like that so there's always you amazing ads and there was years and years of them and so he had struck out on his own and opened this ad agency unbeknownst to me modernista.
So when I walked in they had a crew you know there may be twenty twenty five people there but I didn't know that I was going to effectively be in turning for you know one of the best most poetic writers in the industry ever.
So that was dumb luck but what I got out of that is the one thing you cannot quite step back and get from the start is your taste level you know at the end of the day it is a skill it is a muscle it is an ability but ultimately you're making choices on the ideas you're coming up with and the ideas you're approving and putting forward and that's all on taste and I don't think there's anyone on the planet that says they have bad taste everyone thinks they have good taste sure so I literally stumbled on the doorstep of just one of the most thought for me.
So I learned my taste from him and I learned the bar and the standard and I learned what was acceptable and making everything feel brand new and interesting you know he could write a line about a car and it would make a car we know what a car is but he could make a car sound like this really exciting thing that you really needed to get one of and that that's the art of it so I learned that from him and the best gift you can ever get is a first boss that has great taste or high standards.
I'm going to back to taste almost certainly but I'm going to bookmark that I'll say a few things and this is context you did not have before started recording but as I began to explore entrepreneurship almost all of the books that I first read were on copywriting so capals and all of the classics I also bought as many books as I could possibly find an afford on print advertising because at the time this is let's call it
2001 print was still a thing yeah and it is still a thing to a lesser and lesser level but I was going to be doing a lot of direct response advertising in magazines so I had swipe files I had a three ring binder where I collected various advertisements I also bookmarked a lot of advertisements one of which was the VW campaign that you just mentioned yeah and I am endlessly fascinated by copy because it's effectively at its best
I think so poetic mind control the idea that I'm making these sounds that are coming out of my face that are instantaneously registering semi instantaneously through your senses into your brain and then facilitating thought is pretty wild when you sit down and think about it and no I'm not on drugs people at the moment just to be clear so I suppose my next question is actually bridging the book ends of where we started which is this cold
email to Mark Cuban and then an email that you sent to my team and the reason I think this is perhaps fun to unpack is that a friend of mine asked me earlier today she said how many guests have you booked who have cold email you and I thought and I said I honestly can't even think of three yeah but your email worked which one would hope given your track record right now I was like okay so like this guy knows how to play the
game and knows how to get my attention knows how to get it surfaced at least to my attention and now we're sitting here so when you thought about that email how did you think about crafting that or any email like it honest answer yeah I think I have the muscle memory now so I don't think I had to really sit down I think I made the connection I thought boy I really I really want to talk about this with a broader audience and I want to get more people thinking about
advertising and I want people to think about it as a career so I had that thought and then I found my way to you via our mutual friends Zach because that's that's part of it but you know the muscle memory for me is not only coming up with ideas the other
muscle memory is actioning and executing them it's one thing to have all these great thoughts I know people that are so much smarter and more interesting than me but it's also pairing that with this knowing how to do it so I hope I had a good subject line and I hope I was
brief and didn't oversell because no one likes that and I think that's probably what I would have stuck to I think I was kind of doing what I do I have your email from me so let me share my perception of my read of the ingredients first thing is you get to the point it's not six paragraphs of me
and I'm not sure if you're interested in the first two sentences of me and I'm not sure if you're interested in the first two sentences and you mentioned very quickly your credibility so 21 years chasing the dream too much success and far more failure okay what kind of
failure right you're prompting sort of questions immediately sizzle real of some of my career highlights short sizzle real which you can say is by the way it could just be a few bullets but like credibility upfront in other words and then thanks for
entertaining this like here's some macro topics we can talk about so like immediately getting into topics which prompt questions in my mind including several that I would want answered not just for my audience but for myself as I would say establishing
credibility yes you have the connection but that actually is just table stakes right right and particularly if I'm extremely close to the person making the introduction if it's someone close I know they're putting their social capital at risk with me so it gets in some cases elevated by someone on my team but this is it's very rare that something like this will convert but I was interested in exploring as you led to in the second paragraph of your email not just the successes but also the
failures sure but first we're going to look at the nurturing and development of your ability to get things done on the execution side well before that by the way I think in that email and maybe the big thing about it because we also when we pitch as an agency we show up with ten people on a hundred page deck and our capabilities and the ideas we're going to bring forward but the thing you never can lose sight of is whomever makes their idea easier to buy will sell their
idea whoever makes their product easier to buy so I think anytime either I position the work or company or myself I try to give you a couple of reasons for a yes rather than relying on someone else to put together my Cinderella story for me.
Yeah I mean you had different headings to macro topics and then later on techniques truths etc and these were very well thought so in fact you made it easy to say yes but I like okay you've done fifty percent of my research for me in a sense which makes the yes easier that's right there we go and by the way folks number one this is not an invitation for thousands of people to call the email because trust me it's not going to work I'm giving you the exception to the rule but what I
would say number two is that and then we're going to go to father son trips that's going to be next step so I'm going to say that by preparing this and maybe you have discussed some of these bullets before in talks or in pieces you've written but the work that you did even if I had not said yes would be useful in other places thinking about your career your history the techniques that you've used is not lost if the first person says no or the second
person or the third person so I'm just pointing out that it was well crafted and a good investment. All right father son trip to California I'm going to use that and let you run with it.
Yes this is something I it is a formative experience that I only really put together a couple of years ago on father's day when I kind of felt like I wanted to tell my father how inspiring he is for me because you know your dad's your dad your mom's your mom I don't often take a step back and let him know the things he showed me when I was young how much I value them and how much they helped shape me so when I was ten years old we took a
father son trip to California and it was the first time I'd ever been to the west coast my father's a teacher it probably would have been a family vacation but I think maybe it was like a let's just send the two of you and on the docket was we were going to go to universal studios and then we were going to go to a water park and then we were going to go to the beach or what have you and obviously the universal studio so it was the
big ticket item because those were really expensive and that was the highlight so we go to universal studios and I my mind was blown I you know grew up a little bit of a shy reclusive kid so I did kind of if I wasn't outplaying with the other kids I was watching TV I was watching movies so so that world was extra important to me as a child and I'd never been anywhere near where these actors were where these things happened and so we took the tram tour
and I saw you know the actual house from psycho and the real Mill Valley town center from back to the future my favorite movie ever and and even the empty water tank that was you know I still remember this
that was also cross-purposed as a parking lot but had a giant painting of an infinite ocean behind it and that's where they filmed the water scenes for jaws and it does another movies and you know all this stuff so I was so excited and I just never in many ways I've been kind of chasing that rush
to production and to sets and to where it's happening ever since but I mean the guy walking past the tram with the paint bucket I wanted to be him because he was doing something so anyway just it just blew my mind I hold re at the time it's probably nine or 10 so blew my mind so we go home we go to the hotel and call my mom and report on the day and I said look I know we can't go back but I would give anything to go back and then that was that and I appreciated it and then the next morning
my father wakes me up you know maybe at five or six a.m. which is really early to a nine year old it's pretty early for a lot of people. And we get in the rental car and I don't really know where we're going and we drive 20 30 minutes and we wind up in some kind of a strip mall and we go into like a storefront and I remember this and there's like a row of chairs and like an old school projector I guess the the time it wasn't old school it's just a projector because it was 1990.
It's like overhead transparency or something like that stuff like the sheets and it was a four hour time share meeting for a new development in Anaheim and they started was a hard sell I mean they were coming in they were talking about these are going to go fast and people would raise their hand and get up and buy into it and then after they left the room they would like lower the price and I mean it was really I was worried my I didn't know what was going on
I was worried my father was going to buy one of these things and so after this whole four hours is over we go to the front to sign out and you know we were rewarded with two super crisp day passes to universal studio so my father figured out that that was another way to get access and so we burned rubber, got to the park and we rode the back lot tour like until they literally kicked us out of universal studios.
I think that was what we're getting at with this story was this is my father kind of taught me the definition of creativity which is really just looking at any situation and finding another way because he didn't overextend himself and buy tickets
he couldn't afford he didn't get mad or upset that he couldn't get them he bypassed all of that and he was just always going to figure out another way and that's who he is and that's how he lives his life and my father is is a guy who kind of has never let his situation
ever determine where he was going to go it rubbed off on me and in a number of other ways it kind of made me a little audacious or precocious and so I was this very shy kid you know I was very little and we moved around a lot so I was kind of every couple years I was the new kid why did you move around a lot my father is a very ambitious teacher and he became a headmaster and became a professor and he pursued a doctorate so we kind of would move around every couple years to wherever fit
but it made me you know it kind of made me I think I wasn't a great athlete I wasn't a great student I was small so I felt like okay I'm not going to kill it in seventh grade so I'm going to buy my time so I probably spent a lot of time observing people which helped me as a creative person
but what happened is I lived this double life where at school I was this kind of quiet nice invisible kid and then I would chase my passions and take these moonshots in my personal life so I love the New York Knicks they were great in the 90s I don't know if you're an old school hoops fan
I remember that I started Mason Oakley you know I mean they were that was an incredible team and I'd never been to a next game but I love them and I never missed watching one so as I watched it I absorbed everything so when Marv Albert would reference that the Knicks had a big day of practice at SUNY Purchase before the game I banked that and I happen to have a friend that I would go see and I noticed that the SUNY Purchase was on the way to his house
so I convinced him to hitchhike there and then we wide no internet we walked around the campus until we found a giant beige building with like eight Mercedes in front so we're like I think this is where the Knicks are doesn't look like student transfer doesn't look like student transfer giant Mercedes and we staked it out and when people started walking out like trainers they had those exit only gymnasium doors I grabbed my friend and we ran for it and we slipped in and practice was just ending
and you could see people were filtering everywhere and a few Knicks were like staying like maybe to work on some stuff and I don't know what possessed me but I grabbed a ball and I started dribbling it and I kind of figured okay maybe they're gonna think I'm like a trainer's kid or something
and so my friend who I'm coaxing with me because he's my friend Stephen did not want to do this so we start shooting and then I swear on my life Tim maybe it wasn't as like pronounced as dramatic as this but in my memory I heard a ball slap and I turn around and it's Anthony Mason and John Starks who were the heart and soul of this Knicks team at center court they go to on two and so we played you know a five minute game the day before they were playing it straight out of a Disney movie
straight out of Disney movie the day before they were gonna be facing off against Michael Jordan the Chicago Bulls and Matt Sussquare Garden and so I go to school Monday and I'm sitting at the lunch table everyone's talking about that game and I can't even tell them because they wouldn't even believe me that I played basketball with them the day before but my parents supported that they thought it was great I know you've had Todd McFarland on before I'm a huge image comics fan
I grew up loving him and my favorite was Rob Liefeld who I don't know if you know of who we have young bloods but he actually famously created Deadpool month you know many great characters that would come home from school every day
and I found out that the image office I will remember this was in Venice California and so I called 41 and I got the number and I came home from school every single day and I called the number and a woman would pick up and say image comics and I said hi my name is Chris I'd like to speak to Rob Liefeld and she said okay Chris let me take your number and I'll give him the message and so I did that and then the phone would ring and it be my mom's friend it was never him
but I did it every day because I just wanted the off chance maybe that receptionist was going to be sick one day maybe she'd have some mercy maybe he'd pick up the phone himself but I was had to talk to him just for the contact high I just needed that so later that year we went to the Jacob Javits Center for the New York Comic Con which is a very big deal and this must have been like 1990 or 1991
and instead of just you know going in with our tickets I had to enhance my surface area for something magical to happen so again my poor friend Stephen I don't talk to them much in the voice of Steven who has shackled Steven God bless you out of control I think we could this I think it was my parents it's time to drive us in early and we with like a few like maybe 10 or 20 people who went to the service entrance of the Javits Center
where there was some barricades and at this time comics were big limousines were showing up and these guys were you know getting out with their teams and so I was here for it I wanted that chance to see them and you know lo and behold like the image crew roll up and at this time they were really the you know Marvel was the old school and image were these these bad boys and they'd all exodus and it was Jim Lee and it was Todd McVarlin
it was Rob lifeholt or whatever so they all walk out so I start yelling to get attention just like everyone else and I swear to God Tim this woman walks up to me because I'm yelling and she goes are you Chris and I was like yes and she was the woman that had answered the phone there with the patients of the same with the patients of a saint and this is when I said I was like little she like lifted me over to the barricade
and they brought me in and I got to sit behind the table with those guys for the whole morning and Stanley came by you know and I got to visit from the God you know yes so all that stuff I found out where the Dave Matthews band recorded their albums and I would send a self a letter and a self-addressed envelope to make it really easy for them to say yes and right back then he became a pen pal for a couple of years
but then I would go to school and I'd have my two big backpack and be a mediocre student but I kind of was living this world where you're superhero in your own way well yeah I just felt like I was able to create the life of my dreams even if the day-to-day reality didn't totally match it and that was fine by me.
So then we flash forward you're getting coffee for people yeah that modernista then you catch break with this amazing email that you get back from Mark Cuban what is the next sort of quantum leap moment which might have been at the time
seemingly small but some moment some experience some smaller big win where you're like okay here we go I think I can be really good at this or something that sort of marked as a milestone after that does anything come to mind doesn't need to be sequentially immediately after that
but something that ended up being an inflection point whether you recognized it as such at the time or not it's a good question I play golf with my father-in-law I just learned it so I'm terrible at it I don't know if you play terribly yeah but it's a nice place if you're on a golf course in the morning life's not bad but I was taught that when you put if the hole is 20 feet away what you do is you measure 10 inches in front of the ball
on the path to the hole so you don't aim for the hole you aim for that spot 10 inches in front and I think that advice landed well with me because I think I kind of had a sense of my dreams but I was only really looking at the incremental of okay I made a Mark Cuban Dallas Mavericks ad
now what I really want is to write something that's going to be in the back cover of GQ you know and that was everything so you had a clear idea though and it was incremental I knew that I was not going to do the Super Bowl you know my first year I accepted that but every time it was okay now I'm regularly writing print ads and print headlines okay now I really want to do a TV production I really want to go learn that and do that and that's bigger
and that was that gave you more weight and as I did that you know I slowly accrued a body of work and that's the beauty of this industry is you know you can have a resume and you can say whatever you want about yourself but you actually have a basket of your ideas and you can be appraised on those so I'd built up just enough to get a job in San Francisco it could be Silverstein which was I think that was my big break because that was you know I was learning my craft in Boston
but I didn't realize that when I went to Goodby that was a then and now is still one of the greatest creative ad agencies in the world they came up with Got Milk for God's sake so you know doesn't get that much better than that but when I got there
what I realized is I had learned how to write in the modernista style and that taught me a great lesson which is that it's not totally about you like as an advertising writer you've got to be a chameleon you've got to understand you're not everything can be your voice it has to be the correct voice
I want to come back to San Francisco so bookmark for a second but I made a promise earlier that I've not forgotten which is coming back to taste and I think this may tie into the modernista style so could you say a bit more about what characterise the modernista style
and just a little bit more about being introduced to good taste because there seems to be this is an overstatement but a religious divide among creatives where on one side you have people who think that taste can be taught or cultivated
and on the other side it's like that is nature and not nurture you either have good taste or you do not now that might be like two people with different definitions of God debating the existence of God which is going to go nowhere because they're talking about different things
so could you tell us a little bit more about modernista style what is that and then good taste well the first thing I'll say about it too is I don't know the nature nurture answer but I have personal thoughts but I think Lance who's still in my life now by the way
still he was a great first boss but someone I still talked to regularly he had a good way of saying he's very self-effacing like many many really talented the most talented person is usually the person that's you know least boastful and least sure of anything
I've definitely learned that over time and also radically open-minded versus and Lance would say that the modernista style was kind of you put an idea out there and the vibe of it is like that's cool they really did know how to do one of the hardest things
which is cool is is or isn't and it's hard to convince of cool but there's just a way of writing you know there's an ad for the big H2 Hummer truck at a three quarter angle that made it look like almost like a piece of jewelry and then the line on it said perfect for rugby moms
but it was smart but it was just kind of badass kind of sexy kind of those things that was succinct also yes very very succinct you know it was very art and copy it was very tight writing and it was beautiful art direction and that was the hallmark
and that was the box there and if you came with something that was too wacky or too dry or too intellectual too much like maybe like the economist or too much like a big broad Super Bowl I had it just didn't fit into the kind of clients that were attracted to modernista
and that modernista service very well so I really learned how to find that voice and write in it and then when I went to goodby the four ends of the box just fell down and I realized like okay you could go to Jeff with something that makes someone laugh out loud
or you could go to him with something profound and the color palette there because of who Jeff and Rich are and because of the amount of the scale and size of the agency and the amount of talent they had through the halls over the years the aperture was just wide but at that point I think some level of taste some level of maybe standards game of like it has to feel fresh it has to feel interesting it has to be succinct like those kind of lessons were learned
and then you could apply them to goofy things and profound things but I think it's like the taste and the skills kind of were merged just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by wealthfront there is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now a lot that's an understatement are we in a recession is it a bear market what's going to happen with inflation
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part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation we were talking before we started recording or you asked me rather like what would you be interested in or what do you think an audience be interested in hearing and we discussed a few past podcast guests who are very iconic classic and have
sort of painted a unique path for themselves with seemingly very few constraints like recruitment would come to mind one of a kind and part of my answer was creativity within constraints because the reality for most people and the reality for me more than a lot of people would assume is that I'm operating with a team or with contractors or with deadlines I have constraints I think a lot of good creativity flourishes with constraints
but when you have a team when you have a boss when you have clients you have to navigate a whole host of different hurdles and challenges then if you're a solo operator trying to be a creator on say Instagram or TikTok
which has its own challenges but they're very different and I thought that would be fun to explore so one of my questions as somebody who doesn't know the business at all really are very little as you're building the portfolio you could have a portfolio that doesn't pull its weight after a few years
there's the possibility you assemble a portfolio that doesn't get you to the back cover of GQ it doesn't get you to Super Bowl ads how did you think about and I'm not sure how much agency you have with this I guess pun intended building a portfolio that would get you closer to the whole it's like okay you can measure 20 inches out for that put or whatever it might be how did you think about portfolio construction and making progress towards bigger and more interesting things
I suppose it's what you're attracted to and what you love and I'm not here to say that all of advertising when you drive past a billboard or flick on Instagram or turn on TV it's mostly not good and in fact most of it is not even ideas I think oftentimes it's just information
so there's a lot of it and I think for whatever reason my interest in the industry latched on to somewhere in the top 20% you know because I don't think I wanted a job in advertising I think I wanted to express myself in an interesting way and I wanted to put provocative or interesting ideas into the world so I think I was obsessed with the best of the best and so I would in my early years spend time with award show annuals and look at what the industry said with the best
and I'd form my own opinions and I would say okay I think that's okay but I love that you know so I started to shave where I wanted to go with it and then of course you figure out okay well what are the places or who are the people that are doing that and how the hell do I get near them
and are those people who are on the creative side or those clients or those both how much control do you have over what you do next one thing you said surprised me was you came up with an idea for a client and then sort of pitched it to a client who is not already signed with the agency
so I was like oh okay that's interesting so I would assume in a big agency it's like we have these clients and like here's your assignment sure so I don't know how much control you have and sort of forging your own destiny with new clients being around new people
you know like anything I think it's if you are being challenged and if you have all the opportunities under the sun in your current roster or whatever your workload is then you give your all to that but if you're feeling like maybe there's a lower ceiling on some of the things in front of you
then naturally I think you've just got to get proactive because again at the end of the day when the clock runs out or when the year is over whatever you made is what you have to show for it so if things start to go south I mean sometimes there'll be maybe a host of great clients
but maybe the CEO has very questionable taste doesn't like ideas that are too big or bold or creative and you've got to account for that and you've got to kind of hedge on that you've got to have a lot of irons in the fire and when you're feeling like things are stagnating you're going south you've got to almost invent your own opportunities so it's a mix how did you get your first super bowl ad? how did that happen?
it's a little bit of the it may be a nature nurture thing as well the nurture is my dad who kind of figured out how to remove obstacles to where he was going to get a super bowl brief is and was a very big deal but I think maybe 10-15 years ago things were much more hierarchical
today it's not uncommon to give big opportunities to all levels of creative people or any strategist or account people, anyone in the agency but back then it was very hierarchical and I went and again this is like the most one-a-thing but I went and I asked for the assignment can you place us in time like where are you?
so this would be 2005 in San Francisco it could be Silverstein Partners and the previous two years they've done a super bowl ad for emerald nuts and so I went to the creative retro of it and I said I very much love this campaign it's one of the reasons why I was so excited to be here
if you would have me it doesn't even have to be formally assigned I would just give anything to work on it that was it that's a smart way to word it make it an easy yes if you make it an awful lot that's not gonna be formally assigned that probably simplifies the political slash approvals
that's right and it gives that creatively I was scoped for two teams I just found a third writer so I did that and I was fortunate it was a guy named Steve Simpson who worked it was him and Jeff could be together and we got the brief and the brief was when the super bowl ad meter
and that means you know to win the popularity contest so we've peanuts are parity so just do our peanut ad and make it amazing and I remember we were sitting in a conference room on the sixth floor and everyone kind of funneled out and I felt like I was so close to this
chance to do a super bowl ad that I just needed it I had to give myself the best shot to win so the strategist was one of the last people to leave the room and the strategist are the ones that work with the client and they align on like what needs to be communicated what are the core elements
and what do we know about our audience and that kind of stuff so this is not to diminish the role but it's kind of like an account manager like they work with that specific client to translate their needs and preferences and so on to the in-house creatives that's right
to kind of translate the ask from the client into something that might be inspiring in a brief that would get the creatives thinking and it was a guy named Matt Herman and I remember I kind of grabbed him and he was a nice guy and I knew him socially and I just said he'd tell me is there anything
that I could put in this that would make the client like it even more and he had said well you know we're having these conversations about maybe thinking about peanuts as like a source of energy not just like a snack but something that can give you like a pick me up and so I took that and then I ran
and I wrote 20 scripts but every single one of them had the peanuts as this source of energy that gave you something that got you out of something that protected you from something but I made them feel like more of a utility you know and as a result I kind of gained the system
and then all the ads I wrote were the ones that went forward because they just did more and if table stakes or table stakes if you can in anything creativity or whatever your job is if you can figure out one more thing that what you're being asked to do could do and you cover everything and that
you're more attractive you're more appealing always and I want to highlight also that first you have to have the chops like you have to have the ability the spills set to execute but so much is left on the table by not asking targeted questions you asked the question which is like the spell
that provided you with the information you needed to use the hook that the client would respond to all right what does the approval process or production process in brief look like all right so you send off these 20 different scripts for what is the chance I don't know how long the spot is
30 seconds 30 seconds so it's you know fits in a page the average 30 seconds spot is like three quarters of a page in a script how much does a super bowl add cost these days these days oh boy oh boy I want to say like a 30 is like six or seven million six or seven million I think a 60 is somewhere
in like the 10 to 12 at this point I think super bowl was the super bowl but I think it was like $8 million in 2005 2000 and $6000 non trivial though I mean this is a big bad also reputationally a big deal for people within the client company so 30 seconds spot obviously huge investment
for the company if not in capital certainly in reputation or what happens so I wrote a lot of them and we can chat a little bit later about the techniques but I spilled my brains and I wrote the trick when you're coming up with creative ideas I think everyone has lately different techniques
but I think the one consistent thing is you have to cajole yourself to release every possible thought you can and get it all out of your head and then when you think you're empty you have to trick yourself into coming up with more ideas you've got to mine yourself you've got to say
what is the ad I think we should make what is the absolute wrong ad to make what is the worst ad to make what is the ad my hero David Fincher would make what is the ad Peter and Bobby Fairly would make my friend Jason has one where he says what would I do if the laws of gravity
and physics were not in place like you have to fuck with yourself and it's almost like trying to make yourself vomit basically I've never said it that way before but you've got to get it all out and then essentially when you're a babe when you're young you bring all that raw material
and a creative director tells you what's good that's how you learn some taste good creative director so these three are the interesting ones as you get better you start to be able to sift your own material but you've got to get all the material out now 20 plus years in I think I can vomit in my head
and extract the bits but I think the journey is get everything inside of you out and then in the beginning someone tells you what it is in the middle you get it out and then you work through it yourself and then in the end you can have your private vomit but anyway so I wrote all kinds of them
and the one that went through I trapped myself to write it and a few years ago I was reading something or I saw an interview the artist's cause K-A-W-S I'm sure you have seen his stuff he does those big kind of vinyl like Disney looking characters with the X's for eyes I'd have to check it out
yeah or I got it it's really good pop art and he sometimes uses these crazy color combinations and I think someone I must have been a written question someone asked how do you make sense of these colors he kind of reverse painted himself into a corner he would start in a corner
with a bunch of colors that didn't make sense and then he used the rest of the canvas to make sense of it so he forced himself to make sense out of what he did here all the way here and that I learned later but that was just something I would do to myself so I started writing a sentence
and I didn't know what the end of the sentence would be and I would do that to myself a lot just to force myself I would start in the answer without knowing what the answer was and then I would so how would you pick the beginning?
I would start logically so I thought about the brief I got to with my friend Matt was there's an afternoon energy slump and peanuts are a good pick me up so I wrote around 3pm when your blood sugar and energy are low and then I sat there and then I wrote Robert Goulet appears
and messes with your things and I didn't have that idea I just started a sentence and I said finish it fucker and so that was again one of a bunch of ideas but that was the idea was basically to turn Robert Goulet the now past but the iconic crooner and singer of the impossible dream
to turn him into an afternoon poltergeist and so basically I think I had also seen that incredible fat boy slim spike Jones video with Chris Walken yeah you know I think many of us saw that and went oh my god I want something like that so I kind of had the the sentence I wrote and then I thought
let's make this like a weird kind of dance around an office where everyone's asleep and Robert Goulet is pouring coffee on keyboards and taping people to chairs and just doing whatever so it's written and I think another thing obviously I show my bosses and it's Steve and Jeff could be
and Jeff could be in the advertising world one of the Mount Rushmore kind of figures so I also learned if he's 10 times better than me don't try to sell him on anything he knows so I you know so I read it I didn't let him judge for himself yeah okay this one's crazy oh you're going to
love this no I just I just said okay here yeah yeah pro tip don't ever say that to no it's it's true it's you're going to love this no don't do that don't have to heart your own jokes at the time either so they liked it I don't think they you know I think they liked it
and they're like okay this cool and then you know what ended up happening again is you know the craziest ad ideas are really highly highly rational strategies brought to life in highly highly surprising memorable ways because when we went to the client with it and it was a guy named Andrew Burke
who was the the CMO of Emerald not at the time we had a very literal idea we had an idea about a little Mick from Rocky kind of coach that would keep you awake in the afternoon and then you know that was a little bit on the nose but to his credit he didn't see this weird poltergeist thing
he's like oh I get it we're going to show people that there's actual danger in being sluggish in the afternoon and we're going to make up what that is and we'll position ourselves so he immediately saw past the kind of insanity of the execution to the strategy and that you know
ultimately a great client does that and great work does that and I was talking to my friend Eric and Craig who did the old spice the man your man could smell like and that is also you know a completely batshit idea but the strategy was we make body wash for guys but they're lady friends
buy it for them and they said great we're just going to have a hot guy talk to ladies about it and again and then they made it entertaining but it's almost like there's a rationale behind it yeah and it's simple and it's own simple and then the creativity and the surprising connections you make
and the surprising things are that's the magic but it's always magic on top of something very simple and easy to understand it has to be so to go back to this so we go through it so it's sold and I will say to this client's credit it was not over researched or heavily researched
so what they did is they put it in to some quantitative research to show the storyboards we made some storyboards and a moderator you know shared it with a panel of people and it was not panel meaning almost like a focus group yeah yeah yeah like people they're like and they were kind of
read the script it wasn't performed as read by a third party and instead of saying the dreaded do you like it which is how many a great idea gets unravelled they just said okay so what did you see what did you understand from it what did it make you understand about peanuts and you know
what do you think of Emerald Nuts now was very again it was asking customers the right questions yeah I think sometimes when you you know the Henry Ford asked people what they want to do is to tell you what it should be you get a lot of mirroring but when you make the conversation about
what are you getting from it then you can give them something unexpected and you can push yourself so we did that kind of research thank god those are good questions it makes me think of something that is maybe the only tangentially related but something Kevin Kelly who's friend of mine
who's been on the podcast who's very wise in a lot of ways and I believe that's the thing that I think of lessons learned on his I believe 68th birthday to give to his kids and one of them was if people tell you something is wrong they're almost always right when they tell you how to fix it
they're almost always wrong but people have a gut sense so these questions pair well with that insight I think those questions are asked for a story it was again because they got a natural energy message when they had convinced their board they were just going to entertain so it was
it was already in the bonus round so it was so it was favored and that gives you that lift so you can move through so then we hired a director it was a duo called the Perlorean brothers out of Toronto canada amazing name I don't know where it eat in my stomach acrobatic act we got into it
and we did a call with Robert and his wife Vera we can talk a little bit about celebrity advertising because this was my greatest experience because normally celebrity is very they're very specific on what they will and there's always some pushes from their team but Robert just wanted to know
if he could choose his own wardrobe and we said it sounds good so we filmed it in Toronto over two days and it was very fun again the client was very happy and I think sometimes clients become so creative that they mirror the job but sometimes the best clients are let the creators be creative
and you're there to say like I think this is okay I'm not comfortable with this here's a note on why making this change would actually be more effective but our client andro was just there to supervise and make sure that we were getting the right stuff in the can protecting his investment but giving us a liberal room to play so it was a magical shoot it was right before Christmas us after February inside aX and so so about аже beside it or the area road you know as area almost solid
bait in at it. But because you're doing things in the time-final cut, you can try anything. You can make it, you can ready fire Am. You can make it backwards. In some ways, it allows you to explore anything, but maybe in other ways it takes some of the thinking out of it, which could be a shame. But anyway, we go through a couple of days where we try a whole bunch of different things, we try some different music, we change the order of this little afternoon mirage experiment.
And then when I've learned with Ian, because I've now been working with him for 15 years, ultimately, we start to feel really good about it. Me and the art director I was working with. How much of that was the product changing versus your psychology adapting to the fact that perhaps nothing could live up to the swirling dream of perfection in your mind?
It's the latter. It's the latter. Yeah, you're exactly right. And what I've learned with Ian, and I just, for a Super Bowl ad we made this year, I brought a young team for the first time to work with him. So I've held fun. I've seen them get to do what I did 15 years ago. And the advice I gave them, as I said, just know whatever Ian shows you first is going to be closest to where you end. Because that's what I know about it. So we kind of walked around the moon with him.
And of course, it was like maybe some music tweaks, maybe a little bit of, you know, tightening up a few moments here, but it ultimately had it. But we had to get our brains to catch up with reality. And of course, you know, at the end of the day when someone has never seen it, they're going to kind of see the best version of it by you torture it. Editors are magicians. So they, I mean, the good editors in any medium are so important yet so
frequently semi-invisible. I think I am getting this roughly right enough. But I believe, if you look at Stephen Spielberg's films and his greatest hits, the greatest constant I believe is his film editor yet. How many people could name his name? I wish I could name his name. I've read the story. I've researched this guy. And he is one of the masters at work again and again. More happens in the edit than people think because it's not lining it up in order. You know,
it's speeding up shots. It's arts and crafts. It's punching in. It's the amount of raw stuff we do in the avid where we'll split the screen, take this take from that. And the amount of experimentation that happens there. And that's really, you know, in many ways like that's the most important moment. So we walked with this edit. I showed it to Jeff Goodby and Steve Simpson and they liked it.
And it was good. And then a very interesting thing happened. I had the quick time on my computer and I showed a couple people in the office and I played it for a couple of people and they went, huh. And I distinctly remember this. I showed two or three people. And by the way, like, you know, I think some people respond as professionals. They immediately think what they would have done with the opportunity maybe or I don't know what. But for some reason, and I don't know why,
it didn't bother me at all. And in many ways, I started getting a little excited by the fact that people didn't get it. And I've not really unpacked this. I'm talking about this kind of long form for the first time in a long time. But I kind of felt like there was something more special happening if it wasn't an easy get for people. And I started to think that it might be more original. And I think that was the case. And I kind of learned a great lesson there, which is once you take feedback
and definitely share your ideas. But once you've kind of locked in and you're sure you're good with it, you really don't have to look back. It didn't rattle me. I'm glad it didn't. And I think to this day, if there's something that I believe in, if I get a look result, it just does not phase me at all. And usually you'll find your audience. People will like it. People will respond differently than your inner circles. What happened when the ad came out? It did well. It did really well.
It was the ad age the next morning, ranked it number one. They had an ad critiquer named Bob Garfield. He's like the syscolony route of the ad. He was. And I feel like Jeff could be in him had went head to head a few times. And Jeff wasn't a big fan. But he liked it. And I think it was, you know, kind of early days of YouTube. And I think it was like for a day or two is like the number one comedy video on YouTube or something something crazy like that. So it so it worked and salesman up.
I saw it back then. I remember seeing it. It was weird because it got sent to me. Yeah. And it was on YouTube. I recall this. Oh nice. Very very specifically. So I want to unpack a couple of concepts slash lessons from a few different people. And I want you to explain them. And then we're going to go to lying to the CMO of Adidas. That's the right way to put it. That's what we call Cliffhanger after this commercial break. No commercial break. But the first is from David
Lubars. I'm getting that right. And I'd love for you to share what advice or lessons you took from him. Now one that I have in front of me, which could be a starting point or maybe it is the point, make as many decisions as possible. I'm not clear on what this means, but it does peak my curiosity. So who is David? And what does this mean? And any other any other lessons learned or principles? So David is the worldwide chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO. I worked for
him for eight years. And I've kind of not shy of saying he was the best boss I ever had. He was the best boss I ever had because he he was very clear and he was very consistent. And that's what you need in leadership. And so you could show him a bunch of work and he would tell you what he liked and what he chose right away. And that was that. And he didn't need to split hairs. He would he
would come give you his response. And he knew that he would make a bigger impact in this giant company by going around and saying, I think this is the most right thing, the most creative thing, the most interesting thing and just go and do that and not be afraid to make decisions, create progress. And by the way, you know, if he picked something that was wrong, what'd he do? We'd have to go back and do it again. Or maybe we had one that wasn't as good as it could have been, but he never
inhibited progress. He always facilitated progress by doing that. Meaning sort of catalyzing some type of forward motion. Exactly. He never would say, let me take this back. Let me think about it or let's pull more people into it. He would just give you these gut reads and it always gave you permission to go forward. And it really taught that someone who's really pushing everyone and keeping everyone in motion just happens to always be at the center of so much. And that's why, you
know, for that eight years, I mean, the agency was one of the most awarded in the world. And there was my little corner of the universe, but there was all these other corners and he just amplified himself by empowering his people and saying a lot of yes. Sometimes I know, but he was, you know, he was always game to move forward. Were you able to emulate that at the time in some small way, or is that something that you were only able to implement later as you had more and
more direct reports or I used it. I used it then because BBO at that time was David's place. So which David said to do it, David said, let's go. I don't think we ever got to look at an org chart or reporting structure. I don't think we ever knew that that carried mustard, but a lot of us loved the decisions he was making. And so enough of us would constantly say, that's what David wants. And so whether or not that was be all end all, it became be all end all. And so we were all
emboldened to make moves by myself. Couldn't there wasn't much I could do. What is the type of making your own decisions? No, no, I was kind of probably working through my own process, but it was invaluable later because you do see people that in a high creative role, you've really got to make things happen. And you will see some people in very senior roles that
really gilded the lily and that really obsess over such a great expression. It is. And by the way, the building the lily of someone who's looking at a two-minute case study for an award show and changing the mix on the music eight times and you're like, listen, it doesn't really matter. And there's times to craft the hell out of it, but there's also this step back. And I think in our industry and in creativity, fast decisions are really stepping back, you know, as opposed to
getting in the weeds. Can you say more about that? What I'd like to hear you riff on a little bit is how you think about fast decisions. This is a source of constant fascination for me. It's something I really visit a lot. To what extent do I prioritize like speed and just catalyzing things happening versus honing, minimizing mistakes? I think that's what it comes down to for a lot of people. It's like
what error rate are you willing to accept? Right? Is it 10%? I know it's hard to track these things, but is it like you're willing to accept a kind of breakage of making the wrong call 10% of the time because the speed net net over time is just a huge competitive advantage and good for what you're doing. That's a long question, but with the fair amount of lead up, how do you think about that? I remember that at the end of the day, it's subjective. It's not mathematics. It's not mathematical.
And so, you know, I've learned to trust myself and I've learned that if you AB something too long, you're lost. So, I think the more I get stuck in something, the more I realize I need to make a fast decision because I don't think obsession when you're really deciding, go, no, go, good idea, bad idea. Excited about this, not excited about this. I don't think time is your friend. I think time pulls everything. It slows everything down. It takes the energy out of it. So, I think
sometimes you just got to let it fly. And then by the way, you can correct and you can change as you go. I mean, I've approved ads that wound up being completely different ads that we're really proud of. So, that's the other thing is that nothing is totally fixed. It also strikes me that there are so many things just pulling from my own experience that get worse with time and more deliberation. Like deals and just deal structures, right, and negotiating
often in my experience. It's like the longer it takes, the more that is a harbinger of pain to come, right? Or just a bad wasteful outcome that ends up stalling out. There are so many things like that, where it's like, okay, if there's in some speed to this, likely the outcome's going to be worse. For sure. Time kills all deals. Yeah. For sure. And it kills momentum and it kills energy. And it takes people. So, if you've got people going, if you need to take something offline for
yourself, just know that their muscles are going to cool. They're going to take a break and they're going to restart. And many times, the wrong decision can become the right decision. If it's actually an okay time, I'd love to tell you a little bit about a Mountain Dew Super Bowl. Still, we did because it started out as one thing and it became something totally different. And there's kind of a beauty in that sometimes the non-linear way it really works.
So, this would be, I want to say, it's like 2018 and we are Mountain Dew's agency of record. I'm working at TBWA Shiet Day. At the time, I'm the Chief Creative Officer and I have these incredible executive creative directors named Amy and Julia that run the Mountain Dew business. So, we got the Super Bowl brief and the idea we landed was something about how it was for Mountain
Dew Zero Sugar. And this is like the zero that they really got right. Like, this one tastes so close to the original that we needed to do something that was going to cause like a real reappraisal. And so, I jotted down before we started talking. I was like, that's right because I couldn't remember what it was. So, our original idea was it's impossible taste. So, that was like the core thought we were executing against. And Amy and Julia had this really gutsy idea. And the idea,
and I'm caveatting here, this idea never happened, was never purchased by PepsiCo. So, I'm just just behind the scenes in our house at the agency. We had the idea that for this impossible drink, we were going to do the impossible Super Bowl ad. And so, what we were going to do is we were going to announce a mega press release, billboards, you know, front page of variety that Daniel Day Lewis had agreed to star in Mountain Dew Zero Sugar's Super Bowl ad. And we're going to do it without
telling him. And so, he quote, continue. And, you know, for sure he would say go away if he acknowledged it and for sure he would probably cease and desist if not sue. And our whole idea was going to be, we were going to let this play, but we were going to stay because this Mountain Dew Zero Sugar was so impossibly good, you deserve an impossibly hard to make Super Bowl ad. So, we're going to do it. And we were going to even have like a live cam of a limousine parked in front of his last known
address on the day of the Super Bowl. And we're going to have the set ready. And we were going to basically film and live stream like, is he going to come and do it? So, as I'm working with Amy and Julia on this, we're loving that we're having fun. And this is when the best ideas are when you're like, we can never do this. We're going to get in big trouble. This is so wrong. When you feel that, you've got to stay there. You absolutely, that's where all the interesting stuff happens.
So then we started saying, okay, well, what, so what happens when he doesn't show? And so, we're talking. We're like, okay, we made this up. We were going to the whole pre-campaign, all the buzz, Dana De Lewis, Su's Mountain Dew, because he doesn't want to be part of this. He's not going to participate, but we still had the TV ad. So, a camera kind of winds through a set from like in there will be blood and finds its way into this chapel and finds the back of this cloaked character.
And it's Daniel De Lewis's character. Turns around. And it's Will Ferrell in a mustache and a hat. And he does the beautiful performance piece of like, I take my straw and I drink your milk. And he just goes nuts yelling about how I take my straw and I drink your Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. And I drink it up. So then the rug pull becomes insane. So he's not going to do it. And then Will Ferrell does an insane Daniel De Lewis screaming about Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. So we know it's probably
a long shot. But we go to Pepsi. We go with a bunch of ideas. And we go and the client was a woman named Nicole and there's the CMO Pepsi guy named Greg Lyons who's been there a long time. And he's great. He knows creative. Again, when you talk about the kind of clients you can work with that. Understand creative people, but also understand their own business and can bridge that. That's why Pepsi marketing has consistently been so strong. And so we show Greg and Greg's like,
I love it. I love it. There's no way we can do this. And he goes, but he says, but you know, but I'll bring it to our legal because look, I love it. I just know we can't. I love it. And sure enough, and I won't even get into the myriad of reasons. But basically, there was like a potential legal precedent that would have been like, would have altered Pepsi stock price forever if we pissed off Daniel De Lewis or whatever. So it was it. It was a whole whole.
That's too tan alive. It's okay. It's just a little bit. Let me I'll give it. Because nothing happened. Yeah. Nothing happened. So I think there was a case that perhaps if this went wrong, he may be entitled to a royalty on every Pepsi. No, I sold forever and see why legal would push back. I'm talking about like a bag of freedom, ladies and bang cock like is like still De Lewis gets money. What if the best thing that ever happened? You'll, but anyway, it's like
that guy who had a phone thrown at him by Russell Crowe. That's right. Man, on the lottery. And if he put that money into Apple stock, now how good is he doing? I'm okay. But anyway, it's illegal. It's like I love it. We think not. So we think not. So this is how it really happens. So we go back to the office and we're kick it. There's new ideas and stuff. And we're sitting in the three of Amy and Julia are great. They're working with their
teams and then we would get together for an hour or two. And we're saying, you know what? There's just something about that weird ass scene with like the wrong actor just screaming about Mountain Dew that we just loved. We just loved it. So then you just go, okay, I don't know how you'd ever get to that without the Daniel Day Lewis thing. But let's cut off the Daniel Day Lewis thing and make sense of this. And so then we said, okay, well, what if it's about Mountain Dew's Euro
Sugar is like almost as good as the original? Or what if it's like as good as the original, if not better? And then we, that's our idea. And we put the wrong person in an iconic scene and have them go nuts and make it because we knew that when we saw the Will Ferrell idea, we're like, I just want to see that. So then we knew, okay, if you have something you people want to see, don't leave it. So then we said, okay, maybe, maybe it's cast away, maybe it's, there'll be blood,
maybe it's the shining. That's how we landed the shining where we've recast with Brian Cranston and Tracy Ellis Ross remaking the shining. But again, he's just, he's ranting and looning about Mountain Dew's Euro Sugar. And so that's how we got to that. But we would have never got to that if we didn't just go on a weird journey. And stay creative the whole way. I want to come back to something you said in passing that I'd love to hear more about. And maybe
you have another example. And this ties into Jeff Goodby. Make sure you always feel like you're doing something vaguely naughty. So that feeling of like, oh, we're never going to get away with this. They're like, ah, you use slightly different wording. But could you tie these things together because that type of indicator, I want to understand what that feeling is and how you actually use
it. Because for instance, this is not 100%. But for me, there is a certain like physiological quickening that I experience have experienced before almost all of my best investments. There's an obvious signal that I've learned to tune into. It's not right 100% of the time, but the hit rate is very high. So what is this? Well, I mean, it's, you know, how do you use it? Any way you want to tackle it. The thing I love, by the way, about asking people advice is they
give you advice, but the people tell you who they are when they give you advice to. And that's Jeff. You know, Jeff is a super smart guy who went to Harvard and wrote for the Harvard lampoon. And he, he happened in advertising, but he is just a viby, really smart guy. And I think he kind of behaves like he wants to fuck around. And he's a serious businessman. And he can talk to the CMO and CEO of any brand he works with and totally explain why he's doing what he's doing. But he has this way
about him where it's going to be fun. And some days you go to work and it's, you know, your deadlines are tough and the client pressure is tough, but he just always behaved like it was fun. Like he was having fun, whether he was or wasn't. And that kind of vibe is great. And that doesn't bold in you to say, okay, we should be thinking about this as a form of play. In the day to day, you don't. It's about engineering and it's about we have to get this just right. And we have to hit this timeline.
And we have to, you know, make everything neat and tidy. But it's really our responsibility to make it closer to art because that's what people respond to. People don't respond to tons of rational drivers. People don't respond to things that have been focused group to death. It's our job to sort of find the line and find like the edge and stay there. And that kind of attitude gives you that permission that like if you're feeling like this could be wrong, you're probably onto something.
And if it feels dead right, you're probably dead in the water. Other indicators for that. Right. So for instance, I'm making this up. But you're going blue sky. You're coming up with a lot of bad ideas, getting things out of your head so you can hopefully sift the vomit. Yes, sift the vomit. Exactly. That's a good commercial visual for you. So many vomiting into their own gold pan over a river. In any case, in terms of doing something wrong,
or that type of characteristic, it's a centrile for something promising. Right. What are some indicators? Is it that people around you are like, oh god, oh, we're like they break out laughing or somebody above you is like, oh, I love it, but I don't really want to say I love it. I don't know how to really express what I'm trying to ask, but I think you get what I'm grasping for. And there's
different feelings. I was a very good kid, but like sometimes when you're presenting an idea and you think you might get it through, if you feel like maybe what you think you'd feel like if you were shoplifting a Snickers bar, that's one tell is when you're like, oh boy, if I get out of this meeting. So if you know you're getting away with something, and if you feel that in your bones, that's something. If people are nervous and they start to scenario like we all love the idea,
but they scenario plan. The others, if you just can't get it out of your head, if you become a dog with a bone and like us creatives, you know, we are dying to get our best ideas into the world. And so if you, you know, we become insufferable when we attach to one, that actually is a pretty good segue to the Adidas story, if you want, because that's one where we got away with one. So we are going to get to the Adidas. I'm going to put one thing in between, which is,
and you may have to help me with the pronunciation here, Tor Miren. Yes, getting it. Yep. All right, executive at Apple, Apple CMO specifically has said what a world class agency partner does is quote unquote reduce things. Yes. What does this mean to you? Well, it's the case for creative agencies because if I'm a soap company, I could hire us, or I could just make our own ads, well, let's say all our soaps the best soap. Obviously,
and we put love into it. And our people, you know, you start to want to say everything, and you want to say your polyanna version of it. And I think in agency partners, you said Polyanna, I'm a version of it for a second. Yes. Polyanna version of it. No comment on polyanna. It's a whole other topic. We are in Austin. I'm a land of plenty. Anyway, continuing. But I think, you know, what an agency does is the clients come and say, we want to say this
in this, and we say, no, no one's going to care. No one's going to care that you think your soap makers are the best soap makers. No one's going to care that you're saying that everyone says the ingredient. Look, we show everyone says ingredients. So what you get from us is your jumble of all the things you want to do. And we strip it down to like the most compelling core truth about why your product or service or offering is compelling. So everyone adds. And really,
what you want from us is to subtract and come to you with the one thing. And passionately, and say, we know, and we know communication. And this is what you have to do to make your point. So it really is the art of editing and just down, down, down, down, down. Any examples that come to mind me, and this is not exactly a statement, you know, got milk is a pretty good. I mean, it's an attention grabbing distillation for messaging purposes, but do any
other examples come to mind of reducing anything good? I mean, anything good, I think. Thousand songs in your pocket. A thousand songs. I mean, talk about a brilliant way to get at the benefit. Nobody gives a shit how many megabytes. It's not about speeds and fees. It's about showing me what about this is magical. It's about finding the one magical bit. I think you can just look at any great execution or any great ad and say, okay, that was focused. That was reductive.
So no, I don't even I think it's kind of the difference in the good ones. In that one. Inherently present. Yeah. Where's the beef? We could go on and on. Yeah, exactly. Drivers wanted on and on. All right. Adidas. This is a good, this is like a good landing spot because it's like the mountain dew on it's a bit of a tail. Love tails here. Okay, good. And I'll say every bit of it as much to not get in trouble. Everything ended well for everybody. So start there.
We are given an Adidas assignment. Not the big brand Adidas assignment. That's there's Adidas works with a number of agencies on a number of projects, but we were granted an awesome opportunity to do something for tennis for the US Open. What Adidas calls heartbeat sports, which is like tennis, fencing, swimming. So we had this opportunity and we thought, okay, for our Motley crew, for our squad to get to do something for a brand like Adidas, we're going to
we're going to show up at our very best. So we invited the client and I'll refer to the client as the client and we invited the client to visit a capital T capital C. Yes. The client. 18 point and a good client. We had the client in and we brought our strategists. We brought a strategist from another region that worked on Adidas. We brought a creative team. You don't normally when a
client is going to tell you about a project, you don't normally bring the creative team. Normally, you kind of understand the project and decide what you want to do with it and then bring in the creating in the creative team. But we did. We kind of full core press. We went for the full core press. And by the way, another lesson, certainly in advertising. But anywhere is the more ground, you can cover in a room, the better because you start further ahead than if you constantly come
together and split off and come together as put off. So our intention was like, let's land a brief together. When we say land a brief, you're basically getting the gig. Yeah, getting the gig and also and the strategy and like what we want to do and what our objective is and the challenge
that we're going to meet with creative ideas. So we're having this day and we're talking a lot about how, and this, by the way, I think the statistic is still valid, but like something like 80% at the time of young girls would drop out of sport due to body confidence issues or you're not feeling like athletics were for them because obviously the kind of media biases towards male athletes. And so kind of an initiative not only with Adidas, but also with Nike and all these companies is
about keeping young girls in sport because it obviously has great benefits. Not only that they could go on to be professional athletes, but for confidence and all kinds of teamwork and all the great things that come with it. So our client was excited about the idea of like, let's do something about girls in sport. Okay, we're talking and then our client says, you know, we have Billie Jean King. You know, she's going to work with us and we're thinking Billie Jean King is awesome. I mean,
she's a total rule breaker trailblazer. She played the battle of the sexes. So how exciting. And so we had the very obvious idea like, well, okay, for the US Open, we got to take her blue-sweige shoes. We got to bring them back. We got to bring them back and sell them. So obvious, so done. And then as it turns out, it's a little more complicated than that. They've got to make that in a factory, somewhere else in the world and then ship that volume of shoes on a big slow ship. So that wasn't
going to happen. And so one of the creators we brought into the room is Nibb's Ricardo Franco. He says, why don't we just change people's shoes into Billie Jean King's shoes? And it was just that and we went, okay, that sounds like something I haven't heard before. And we didn't know what it meant. And we said, okay, so would we have like felt applications that we could stick on? You see if you came in, you know, wearing a pair of new balance, you could like fix them. And we
kept talking to him, so what about spray paint? What if we get like shoe artists? There's people like the shoe surgeon and all these people. So what if we got some of those people? And so we started saying, okay, maybe this is possible. We should figure this out. And even someone in the room said, well, God, imagine if someone comes in like a pair of Nike's and everyone was rubbing
their hands together, this was great. So a great lesson is when you get where you want, get out of the room, don't let the vibe dip and you start thinking about all the reasons why it might not work. Don't ever sell it. I've learned this lesson as many of us have and the scene didn't practice. So leaving the room, you know, normally we'd say, okay, we'll come back in two weeks, let's put it in a deck and let's draw out the comp. But in this one, we just knew that the more we
sat on it, time would kill this deal. Time would give people time to think about the pros and cons. So our team was just go do it. Just go, we've got money. Nancy, our president in New York, loved the idea. So we said, we just get like 10 grand to start paying people to test. Don't get client money. Let's just do it. So we started setting this whole thing up. That's an important point. Let's get a little internal money just to start jumping on. Yeah, let's make progress because
we saw Greenlight. This is not the kind of idea that gets Greenlight. I had a stolen snickers in my pocket. I wanted out of that story. And so we we start R&Ding it. We find someone that blends a cool kind of pearl blue paint and we make these stencils and we start doing these tests and we have so we're spray painting like Converse and Air Jordan's and we're doing them around the agency. They look awesome. I mean, anyone who sees them goes, holy shit, what is that? I want that.
I'm so into that. So we get, you know, maybe about a week and a half away from the US Open and this client didn't live in the States. It was a global client and the phone call comes and I knew the phone call was coming and we get on the phone and the client says, I just want you to know though that we can only have people wearing a D to shoes that we can spray any D to shoe you want. But we can only have people spray D to shoes. And so this is a moment where no, because then it
takes all the coolness out of the idea. But if I say no now, I mean, just got a week and a half to like lock us out of everything and, you know, this is the client and they hold the purse strings and they have the ultimate say they're the brand. So I can't argue it because if I lose the argument
it's over. So I lied. And so I said, absolutely. And I knew what I was doing and I knew that I was straddling a third rail where if you do something like this and it doesn't work out for you, it could be very bad for my network's relationship with that giant company. But there comes a moment where it's not even is it worth it? You say, okay, I understand lawyers
are there to avert risk. But in my gut, I know that when someone at Nike sees a shoe of theirs defaced to look like a Billie Jean King shoe, I know as a human being that that brand will not come after Billie Jean King's legacy or empowering young girls in sport. I just knew it. Now the lawyer would not sign it, but I knew it. So that's the moment where you say, fuck it. So our team is still
going and our client is not at the US Open. Our client is still in Europe. And so I'm in Beverly Hills at the Hilton at the Beverly Hilton with my partner Nancy, my president, and we're filming a big campaign for Hilton. And the morning of the first day of the US Open, my phone buzzes and Amy and Julia are sending me these shots of like we stacked the line with a pair of converse
all stars and Air Force ones and sock and ease. And with the first five or the things. And they took pictures of them and they sent them to adage and to hype beast and to sneaker freaker everywhere. That's the one where I didn't have the Snickers bar. I was like, I was going to vomit. But it was so good. And I knew it was not vomiting ideas. This is like actually like bio. Like it was like a bio one. So anyway, I go back and I sit down and I sit down and I show Nancy
and I'm like, these and she goes, oh, that's cool. Actually, she always says the word babe. She talks like a Hollywood producer. She goes, that's cool babes. And I was like, thanks. And then my phone rings. And I see the number and I say, I think I'm about to really get unloaded on. And she goes, good luck. And that's by the way, but that was the, she was in on it, you know? And I was like, okay, I got my anchor here. So I walked outside called the number back and the client said,
please hold on patching in our global legal. And I was like, here we go. This is it. And I got yelled at. I got screamed at. I got you were, you said that this wasn't going to happen and this happened. And how did this happen? And who would have done this and this and that. And I said, I told you, this wasn't going to happen. It happened. So I accept responsibility. I did not volunteer that I had endorsed it, but I accepted the responsibility. And I said, I will have our PR and the toothpaste
is out of the tube. Once it's in your net, it's done. So I said, I will have our PR reach out to all the publications and ask them to take it down because I know a thing or two about journalists and journalists will say, no, thanks. It happened. So I'm going to cover what I want. But I said, we're going to do that. And I said, I'm very sorry. And I understand you're very angry with me. So it happens. And then the little hype beast community love it. And then you know, and then it
all goes away. And there was no problem. And people thought it was really cool. And they got some tip of the spear cred for doing something really innovative. And all the hardcore sneaker nerds loved it. And they started going for thousands of dollars on eBay. And we made a great case study out of it. And that client was included in juries to evaluate the biggest brand ideas
of the year for notoriety for the highly disruptive Billie Jean King, your shoes idea. So the lesson there, or not even the lesson, but the thing about it too, is when you're in a position where you can gatekeep or put yourself out there, it's like driving a car or something where you've got a, you're going to change lanes in between two. And you got to say, I think I can do this. And sometimes you got to pump the brakes. And then sometimes you got to gun it. But really like,
it's a lonely decision. But you got to make it. And you got to have confidence that you're going to drive the needle. And that's the getting away with it. So to use the the racing metaphor, I mean, very few race car drivers who have consistency over long periods of time are routinely reckless. They do have to make those decisions, but they're not routinely reckless. And you don't strike me as someone who's routinely reckless. So what I want to ask you about this particular
decision, right? This calculus in your mind, if you did, how did you rehearse the worst case scenarios? We're like, OK, I'm going to make this decision. And you gave me a little bit where you're like, I don't think it seems very unlikely that saying like he's going to come after a campaign that is trying to foster youth women's participation sports. That's going to be a bad look. It's not a hundred percent. Nope. Right. But it would be a bad look. So how did you think about the calculus?
And just like, OK, worst, worst case. This is what happens. But like, I'm not going to get killed. Here's what I thought. The truth is, as you talk about, when it feels like to get away with it, it's like a dog with a bone. It was like, I just knew the idea was so good. And I just saw so much upside. And then the only question I asked myself was, could someone be hurt by this? So could you do something that would marginalize a person or a community or, you know, and no, it would have been
really pissing off a marketer. And that no one ever died from that. That was that. So swing big is a prerequisite for home runs, but it doesn't always work out, right? Babe Ruth. Yeah. A lot of home runs, a lot of strikeouts. So what would be a, for you, your personal Hall of Fame failure list? If you had to pick out one, it was important in some way. Whether it was just like a very strong lashing that you got that you learned from or maybe you
took something away from it. Maybe it set the stage for something later. Any failures come to mind? Obviously way more failures than successes. But I think by the way, you know, you just have to have a short memory. So I don't think about them very much. Actually, I was thinking about when I was coming to talk to you, I was like, we'll probably that will come up and I had to dig around, not
because I haven't had a million of them, but because I just, I wash them out. No, no, no, no, you learn what you can, you take that nugget, but going all the way back to that agency in Boston, modernista, we had Napster as a client. So for, bring your memory. Yes. So any of your listeners that are too young for this? So probably when Tim and I were in college, maybe you were just like finishing college and I was just in college. I was in college at some point. Yeah. And it was a
file sharing app or thing. I don't remember how the hell we got it. I guess it was like a plug-in or a, I can't even recall, but it was, I would say to my mind at least there may have been some predecessors or parallel tools like lime wire. But Napster was the first time that suddenly, at least in the popular zeitgeist, the people who get music for free. Yes. Including new music. And we, we were, and I'll, I, the statute of limitations has run out, but we were stealing. But what Sean
Fanning, the founder said is no, no, no, we're sharing. And that was the big sound bite. And that, we all remember that it was, he said sharing. And that was like it became a bit of a joke, but that way it was synonymous with that. So Napster turns out it maybe wasn't sharing. And it goes away. And then I think someone buys the naming rights or something and it relaunches a few years later. So it relaunches in maybe 2002 as a kind of a, like a way to ahead of its time streaming platform
where it was the proposition was $10 a month and unlimited plays a million songs. And it was a streaming database that you could subscribe to again way ahead of its time. So we had been given the assignment to work on it at Modern East End. Of course, we were a tiny agency and it was way too busy. So I got to take a big swing. And the idea we had that I had come up with as a 21-year-old
or 22-year-old was what if our campaign was instead of buying media, we share media. And what if we took a million dollars and we just put bounties and had regular people crash live broadcasts of every sort, wearing Napster shirts and holding signs. So it was called crashster.com. And you know, the bosses at Modern East loved it because they were kind of cool and subversive. So we, somehow, this is, you know, I'm talking 2002, 2003. This would have been pretty ahead of its time.
And we built a website with this cool design, crashster.com. We made a bounty list. And it was all the way from $250 for a local radio show if you said 1.5 million songs unlimited downloads Napster.com all the way to if you crashed a presidential address, you got a million dollars. And I think we had two and a half million dollars if you said that line during a live televised spacewalk. So and there was everything in between of like getting a sign on college game day or
doing this. So, so anyway, this was kind of crazy stuff. Lawyers were okay with it. I don't know. I know I know we just had something about lawyers, but this thing was done. We had insurance. We built the site. We had we even did an inaugural practice crashster where two interns from the company crashed a morning interview in Boston and interrupted a live interview with a little known comic named Bill
Burk. So, young Bill Burk was playing, you know, some crappy comedy club and was promoting it on, you know, good morning Boston. And we these guys came up with a big sign and they're like, what the hell's going on? They get a score to it out and then Bill Burk is like, what the hell's going to Napster sign? What are these guys doing? It worked like a charm. So, so this thing was going to go and it was like within a week going and you know, I'm 22 years old and this thing would have been
this overshot the GQ magazine cover that I dreamed of or whatever. So anyway, so the client has to go to the Napster board to give him a progress update and the Napster client is under no responsibility to share like launch ideas or activations this fell under. So the client goes to the board and says, okay, here's our strategy and we're going to go to market and we have a new positioning in this
and any other. And then he says, oh, one more thing we're going to do this next week and he brings it up and I'm not in the room, but this is the report we got back that he shares crashedr.com, walks through it and the chairman of the board just interrupts him and says, I mean, I'm going to interrupt you before you finish just to let you know we're not doing that. And that was and this thing could not have
been more firmly dead. But that was for 21. I learned that if you get what you need, get the hell out of the room, which has served me well, served many people well to not get into Lily Gilding and see what happens when everyone starts thinking about Linger. Don't linger. But the other great thing is the best thing for me because this industry is full of a lot of heartbreak and rejection. You have
a million ideas to sell one. And I think if that had happened for me, I would have been very successful at 21 or 22. And I liked my climb. I liked working my way up slowly and learning my craft and not doing something that might have made me very sought after and might have gotten me a bigger, better job faster. So it kind of, it was a heartache, but it kind of put me right on the path that I needed to have, which was the long path. So many what ifs in life, right? Like what if it happened?
What was that? What if someone died? You're glad we didn't do it? Because it could have been bad. It could have been messy. It could have been very messy. What was the, just like curiosity, if the lawyers, if legal had given the okay, do you know what the substance of the objection was by the chairman? It was so long ago. I don't exactly remember, but I think it was just I think he just did not want a
problem. He did not want it to either maybe it was because something bad could have happened or maybe because he was on other boards and he didn't want to like wreck NBC's, you know, or I don't know, I don't know who knows. But someone had to kill that thing. It was too, it was too scary. That was out there. Question for you coming back to process and technique. You mentioned a whole bunch of questions. What if David Fincher made this? What if I'm making this up? But what if, what's the
commercial? My mom would respond to whatever these questions might be. I think about questions a lot, not just in podcasting, but then certainly writing the nonfiction books that came before the podcast, interrogating myself when I'm journaling. I think about questions a lot and the power of questions seems to be a fundamental piece of creating creativity, right? Looking at something that a million people have looked at and seeing something different or seeing a way to position it differently.
Are there any books on the ad game, on creativity that come to mind if somebody were sitting in front of you like you're much younger, soft like, okay, this kid's got some balls, gender, neutral and is willing to step out of his or her comfort zone. Okay, I want to help this kid. What might you recommend? I have a prescription for that. There's a book called Hey Whipple Squeeze This. That's authored by Luke Sullivan. You know it? This is one of my books that I read.
So it is the most perfect one because it's... I got to go back and reread this now. It tells you what an ad agency does. Does it have a photograph of a roll of toilet paper? Yes. So Whipple was a grocer in like some 1970s campaign and I think he was selling toilet paper to
customers and so the logo is written on a double roll of paper. So I think it's a weird title but one you don't forget and Luke just lays out what an agency does, what every job is at the agency and then specifically as a creative what are the types of things you're being asked to do and what of those outputs look like. It's an amazing book. It explains to you what a headline writing assignment is and what headlines look like and why some might be better than us. So it's really... It's a really
smart micro apprenticeship. So I read it and I said I'll be damned if I don't do this because I read it and I was like I'm in. That's it. That told me what the job was and I said that's the only job I want to do. You know now I think these days people do ask to hop on and do informational interviews but people sometimes even these days ask you to like describe your job to them which I
always thought was a little crazy because I... You do want people to do some level of legwork where they might know what your job is and ask you a question about it but I just feel that constantly which is please go read this book and if you can't live without doing what's in this book then we'll get time. But that book is perfect. But then for like the creative journey or like even to understand what it's like there's three video bits of content. We were chatting about them earlier. Number one
South Park six days to air. You know looking at the pressure these guys are under to come up with and do a show. I don't know of it age as well I think because you know the humor can be so please don't judge me if the subject matters not PC you can judge me it's pretty funny. Judge Tim so that one goes to Tim because he likes that show too but it was but I will say that it's an amazing doc slash mini doc there are a couple of points where it drags a little bit but there are so many
payoffs there's so many payoffs. No but even just the thing of like when um which one of the blood ones that tray I can't remember he's like the the writer writer out of the two of them and once they've got the story down and he has to like write the script he has his assistant go get him
extra value meal from McDonald's because it's just so hard after all that to sit down and then hammer it out and you know as a writer and I know as a writer sometimes you're like I know I have to do but I don't want to so even watching him like bribe himself watching like one of the most dynamic prolific edgy writers like he has to fool himself into it and by the way sometimes when we make commercials we have to make little animatics like little boredomatics like rips that's considered
a chore that whole show is a boredomatic when you watch how they make it so it's so inspiring to see those two power through and there's just a ton of stuff that you can relate to the two other ones I love I love the Metallica doc some kind of monster because it gets into you know doing
creative within a team and chemistry and and how challenging that can be in that documents Metallica almost breaking up and and working out their shit as they come up with the black album and it's amazing and you don't have to like Metallica to love it to see are you more of a Lars are you more
of James who do you side with here you know so that's an amazing study on high performing creative team dynamics and then the last one and the most underrated is Conan O'Brien can't stop okay so he made after that really painful departure from the snite show he had a non-compete
so he threw a comedy tour and so he allowed it to be documented and you see that this guy is a creative animal that coming out of what he just came out of where you must be so damaged and wounded but he's throws himself right into another enterprise and they're writing bits and skits
and they're staying up late at night the night before a show to rewrite it and just seeing the obsession in the craft of it you're like I watch the thing and I'm like I do not work hard enough and you see the euphoria and like slap happiness around all of it when you really push yourself to that man
really pushes himself to his limits and you watch that and you're like I just want to go and write something after I see that those things they inspire me so much that I've just got a bank that's someone else will get something out of them can't wait to watch some kind of monster and can't stop
I've seen the south part doc and can you guess my favorite part where did I laugh hardest well Tim I don't want to be body but would it be the apple user agreement human centipede it was the voice over session that was related to that yes there's a lot of good stuff it's crazy stuff wow hey
wipple squeezes I haven't thought about that in ages I used to have that book when I was really cutting my teeth on copy and spending a lot of my own money yeah doing very expensive testing because they the lead time and the turnaround time for any type of quantitative feedback on
magazine ads I mean oh my god how painful yeah I had that book deliberately cover out on my shelf as a reminder of some of the contents it's been a very very long time but it's wild that that has now resurfaced in my life what fun when it comes to the prompts and the questions are there any
other questions that come to mind if you're stuck and you're just like man we've been banging our head against the wall we're not there yeah this is going to lead into some of the less glamorous maybe aspects of the job right where it's like okay you got to come up with x number of ideas
this is important and you're getting close to deadline you don't have it what do you do to mix things up and I suppose just broadly speaking what do you do in a situation like that well you know writer block doesn't really exist you think it's block but you clearly you can it really is
like a game of of tricking yourself so like say Sally is trying to come up with ideas Sally what are your five favorite movies or directors or writers okay what would each one of them do it's just coming up with a a new challenge or a new way to approach it that fools you into coughing something
up and then again I'll go as far as then what's the absolute right thing to do what's the absolute wrong thing to do what would I do if I thought this whole thing was a big joke if I wanted to make fun of it and again and then even the cause technique of just our writing sentences and finished
them but I think it's knowing yourself and knowing your interests and then using avenues so what what things you're into put it through that lens but it's just it's a forcing exercise and it's really uncomfortable it's really really uncomfortable because the more you get out you will find one
thing I have found and I don't think it's just me I've talked friends about it is that four hour five hour whatever your big dump is later you will have new ideas and things but the biggest treasure trove you'll ever have is when the challenges fresh when your brain is first trying to
put it together and the more you get out of that moment the more you paid back later what do you do when you're say overwhelmed or unfocused right because this is a game of creativity and we're all playing different games right so all of our careers on some level are games of different types of
rules some you can ban some you can break but endurance is important the ability to not just flame out burning the candle of both ends some people are superhuman and can bank all sorts of crazy work weeks and sleep four hours and I because they happen out there I'd genetic profile for that but what do you do when you're overwhelmed or unfocused?
interesting that you bring that up because I I work with some of those people that are I don't know if they sleep and I am I'm sensitive and I need sleep and so I'm I'm very aware that I'm not like a full beast so there's two actually the question as you phrase that there's kind of two answers that
are different but I read a book I know you know this book called bird by bird oh so good so an amazing book and it's gonna some people will ignore it because it's intended at face value for fiction writers it does not matter it does not matter I had to read it at school so talk about
I must add a good teacher but whatever so I had to read it a gift I don't remember a single thing in the book except for the titular story and that story was and I you know I think about it all the time so the author's little brother had to write a report on the birds and he had books
open and printed out essays everywhere and he was in a full meltdown and pushed it off until the last minute he had all semester to do something like that that whole thing everyone has a version of that and he's there and I think in my version of the story he's like crying at the
table with all that stuff and then good old dad comes in and goes just take a bird by bird but but they say a bird by bird and you're like wow so I like I have an imaginary father that comes in and says that to me every time because that's just it's permission permission to stop thinking about
the totality of it and permission to do the littlest bit the other quotation that I love I don't have a ton of quotations but the great Arthur Ash said start where you are use what you have do what you can and that's so fantastically empowering because it's saying that you're in a good
enough spot and you're you're off the hook for anything more than that you know yeah but then the other part of it about being a beast and the constant pressure is I've figured out that I can't meditate it's something I'll get to later in life but I think I'm too bought I can't sit still
I can't be alone in my thoughts and so I discovered that instead of turning the dial down to zero I found also that hard fitness is another meditative instead of going down to zero it just puts me at a 10 and so every morning I go do a similar workout that gives me almost like an existential crisis
so that by the time I show up at work this whatever this kind of fog of anxiety that I used to live in it just burns it off and I just I'm so calm for the rest of the day because I've already been through something tough in the morning what is that it's a gym in New York City called
Tone House and there's just one of them and I used to exercise in college and I was in pretty good shape and then I got to doing a lot of writing and drinking beer and doing writing and I kind of let it slip and I think around 2015 back when people would upload Facebook albums the night after
you did anything I went to a New Year's party and there was like a picture of me on New Year's day and I was leaned over like a table of food and I sweared my head I looked like Alfred Hitchcock or something like it was like the way my jacket lapel was open it came out on this huge thing and I got
so upset that I looked up hardest workout in New York and then like being there was like this one one off gym called Tone House and I went that day on New Year's day they were open the founders a guy named Alonzo Wilson and he played D1 football and played a little pro football and when he
stopped playing he missed the practices so it's a lot of the way I describe it to friends is it's like a one hour underarmor commercial that you're in where you're just dropping the deck and jumping over stuff and banging ropes and the heart rate stays up the whole time and so the first time I did
it I stepped out of class after 10 minutes because the warm-up is really intense cardio and I vomited in the locker room and I stayed up at night staring at the ceiling being like I can't let this thing get me and so I came back the week later and the week later and I kind of pulled me in and now
you know me and a fairly regular group are there five days a week six days a week and then we do other stuff but that has been such a gift for me because I'm just you know I used to walk around in between meetings and I'm like should I run am I like am I using my time well like what I would just
ruminate on all the things I could be doing wasn't doing and something about really beating myself up in the morning I don't expend the energy worrying about all those things I just focus on what I'm focusing on so it's made me normal yeah you're inspiring me to double down I've recently
knock on wood largely addressed this kind of crippling lower back issue that has sideline me for the better part of the last year and I'm really excited to get back into serious exercise and this might sound strange because I'm not built like a border collie but it's kind of like if
you can't have a working dog and like put that dog in an apartment all day long the dog's gonna go crazy and I remember when I was training my dog Molly and taking it super seriously going like full deep dive on dog training and one of the lines is stuck with me is a tired dog is a happy
dog I think that is true not for every person but for people who have a certain hardwiring and it sounds like you're one of them I am certainly one of them if you're not putting that creature to work physically all sorts of strange things are going to creep out of the cracks
and not the best things people know because you want to get a lot done and you need to be tired out a little bit to be a little bit normal about it yeah because if you're going full energy you're doing what's in front of you and you're freaking out about all the other things you could
should might and when you're just a little taken back a little bit you're a more present it's great yeah I think a lot of kids end up getting into trouble in school because they have idle cycles they don't know too and they don't know how to apply those idle cycles when I remember in school
for me it's like I needed to draw non-stop in grade school I got very good grades that it really well but I would get so bored in class I had to draw all the time even though I was listening to exactly what the teacher was saying because I had to occupy myself and I was fortunate that I'd
somehow chance to pawn drawing but a lot of other kids were very smart got into all sorts of trouble got kicked out got suspended and I'm getting involved drugs because they didn't know how to occupy or consume those cycles yeah and exercises an amazing way to do it any other favorite books
that you have or put a different way books that you have gifted or recommended a lot to other people outside of what we've discussed already yes and I love this question because I find like those those are the things I always jot down when I hear what people gift to them one of them is called
the easy way to quit smoking by Alan Carr have you heard of this it's so weird all these things are coming up in this conversation I listened to a derivative of that but it's based on the same method the easy way to quit caffeine I listened to the audiobook somebody to recommend to me and I
stopped I went 30 or 40 days without any caffeine which is the first time I've done that since I was like God only knows 16 so please keep going but this is in my 20s I smoked cigarettes and I was hopelessly addicted to them and I don't know how I found the book but I read it and it told me
bit by bit all the reasons why I thought I had to keep or why I would hang on to it and it's spelled them one by one and it was kind of romantic and then there's like a chapter and it says go outside and have your last cigarette and I went outside and I did and then I finished the book
and I never smoked again and I talk about it sparingly because the easy way is kind of usually a red flag but that's what I love about it if you look it up on Amazon the reviews are in it is like five star for thousands but I'm giving it to like four or five friends and all four or five of them
just read it and never smoked again so that book is probably a life-saving book and then the other one that I love and I know you know this book but the culture code by Daniel Coil you know I know the book and I have not read it and it's been on my to read list forever I think you would not only
love the book but you would love talking to Daniel about that book because you know I don't like business books and especially when things become dense and theoretical I get lost but he went and spent time in like ten incredible high-performing cultures that are all different from like I do to the San Antonio Spurs to the Navy Seals and just identified what makes people feel like they belong in those and what gives people the psychological safety to do their best in those environments
and you read it and you'll you'll get confirmation by I said like I do that that's great or you're reminded I need to do that or there's things you never thought of that do you recommend this book to people who are individual contributors like operators on the front lines or do you give that
to people who are running companies like who do you give that to I think for leadership for sure so if anyone stepping into management but I also find it's good I would imagine I would have loved the book if I wasn't a manager just to understand the kind of culture that I want to be part
of you know obviously we're all students all the time so I think there wouldn't be any harm and imagining if you were to lead something or if you were to have total control what kind of culture you'd want but but definitely if you're in leadership or you're stepping into leadership or if
you're stepping into a new role you know there's just the simplest things you could do to show that everyone you meet that there's a long-term potential future there and that's like a thing you would forget to do but if you reference something in the future some minor things like that they're
like oh that can make all the difference and I understand having been on the receiving end of those kind of behaviors it's just great stuff but that one like that's one of the few things that I reread every year for the last two three years okay I need to read it and I will side note just because I
made a mental bookmark to mentions to people listening Conan O'Brien is so impressive to me the more I learn about that guy the more I see the more impressed I am so Conan if you're listening or friend of yours is listening would love to chat sometime publicly or privately there's a video that I found actually was sent to me because I went to Seoul for the first time recently became deeply enamored of Korea and the Korean people started learning Korean studying the Korean language and there's
a video called something like Conan O'Brien learns Korean and makes it weird which is like eight minutes long trust me folks find it on YouTube it is beyond hilarious I've seen it oh good it ends with him in the class he's in the classroom right and he comes with the teacher and he's oh yeah and
he's amazing he's so fast so fast on his feet unbelievable and another just quick side note because this is what I do Arthur Ash another legend an iconic figure on so many different levels and to take that word a step further levels there's a book called levels of the game by John McFee which is
about one tennis match single tennis match involving Arthur Ash but it becomes this study of the macro through the micro and the structure of the book the narrative it is not a long book something like 170 pages and if you want to see why John McFee is as famous as he is for being a master of nonfiction you know staff writer for the New Yorker for a thousand years this is an amazing way to get a taste test
it is so so good you mentioned before we started recording that you had an answer for the under a hundred dollars kind of best investment best investment is one way to put it but device gadget service anything that you've spent kind of less than a hundred dollars on that has had a material
impact on you what is your answer for that my first townhouse class 34 dollars there was the one that was the 34 dollar purchase to change everything is there anything else that comes to mind maybe it's a second place but just best investment that could be investment of time investment of
energy that's the money well I think sometimes you ask about what something you bought for under a hundred dollars that had a big return and you know how work is you get caught up in things and you have your plan for the week but then you wind up responding to real time and conditions and
you just never know where it's going to go but I go to Balthazar restaurant in Manhattan on spring street yeah and I take one of my mentees I go with one of my mentors I go with a peer who I get a lot of energy from or an old friend that I haven't caught up with the bill of no matter
how you do it is always under a hundred bucks with tip and it's always the best hundred dollars I spend every week it's the best thing and I'll never change it and I'll even if I'm down to my last hundred dollars I will go have breakfast with someone it's a great location I haven't been in
a million years but that is the okay so the reason I went by the way too was like like everyone the pandemic really was challenging and I used to like Balthazar but I didn't love Balthazar and when New York reopened a lot of restaurants kind of popped out there Alfresco their outdoor cafes and
things like that and I would always walk by Balthazar and it was boarded up boarded up boarded up and the owner Keith waited until you could do full occupancy in door before opening it and when he opened it he did a post and I didn't realize how much I missed it but his post said Balthazar is open
and it will never close again and I just you know like coming out of that pandemic when everyone's like everything's going to be different it'll never just that statement talk about communication that kind of a subject line on an email I'm like I will go there every week then as long as you're
open I'll go this is gonna sound like such a newbie question but I'm curious do you in any way keep track of the ads or the messaging or the copy that snag you right because that's a hell of a line yeah it's a good line yeah right it worked it absolutely works do you have any these could be
ideas you come up to do you have any way of capturing ideas whether they're yours or things you come across in the wild we're like oh wow that's good no I'm an idiot and I forget no and I probably 10 times a week I see things from like that's good and then I remember one of them and if I was
a smart man I would have a notebook with me at all times or I would put it in my stickies and after this conversation I'm gonna collect them because now I'm conscious because I see things all the time and I'm like and that you know they come up at random times but I can't call on them
so I would like to collect better what I used to do because I supposed to invoke Gling Erie Glen Rossi you must get them to sign on the line that has dotted you can ask people if they're gonna buy something but people are nice a lot of the time too nice and they will tell you
what they think you want to hear getting someone to actually buy something is a different level of commitment right it's a different type of signal so when I would find myself compelled to buy something especially when I didn't have very much money that was just getting started cutting my
teeth trying to build this direct response business and source nutrition if I bought something or if I got close to buying it I would save the ad I may take a video of the information or the commercial or I would take notes on what what it was that I thought got me to buy
what closed you right like was it really like but wait there's more there's an installment was it some was it the timing right like what do I think it was yeah just pure fatigue on my part where my defenses were low at 3 a.m. because I've been watching Animal Planet and God knows some
Genshinife thing came up and I would try to figure out although this was a secondary thing what had moved me to buy especially someone who is not stingy but had a really tight budget for most things I no longer do that but what do you learn I learned a lot about copy at the time I was
reading a lot of magazines and also newsletters and mostly text because text was easier to freeze and study just like for yourself journaling his thoughts trapped on paper if you're trying to figure something out by sitting there and staring off in the space and thinking sometimes it works
often it doesn't because it's too ephemeral right these bits and pieces the floats some jets on it's just like being thrown out of the boat in the grand can and and getting kind of tossed like you don't really it's hard to orient to up when you're in that type of chaotic mental state with
even if it's just too much going on right if you high energy state so but for me journaling for introspection but for external studying it's not that text was the best medium it was just the easiest for me to study as like a fly locked in the amber so what I learned was what kind of headlines
got me to look at anything yeah right so if I'm reading a magazine and especially I would read magazines I wasn't even interested in just to see what got my attention not to like really beat the drum on Glenn Garglin Ross was actually a very depressing movie on a lot of levels when you get to the bottom of it but you know attention do I have your attention yeah interested are you interested the a IDA the first thing is attention so I would pick up say a fashion magazine I'm like all right
this is going to be half at and I would just riff through and I would see what would get me to stop and I'd be like okay why don't I just stop and I would tear it out of the magazine might even be at like a dentist's office or something if I downtime I would just try to see what would grab my
attention and that was step one so you learn a lot of things I mean this is I don't want to go into a full monologue here but I actually haven't talked about this public it I don't think first thing you realize is how important art direction is composition right do you have a dominant element
or is everything the same if everything's the same your eyes aren't going to necessarily be drawn to any one component and you're going to skip over it generally there are some weird exceptions where like the jumble is the branding for instance I have used uncented baby soap from Dr.
Bronner's forever because it's just like the least offensive to my system and it's I really like it they're branding if you look at the bottle it's like size two font with like a million words covering the lake and I know that was very super old time is that the it's not there maybe some
old timey aspect but it's very small fun it's kind of like unibom or ransom lettery stuff like if you actually dig into it it's not very easy to follow all of it but it's full of text but it's kind of like a horseshoe where it's or the horseshoe is not the best way to explain it but it's like you
get to such a point of clutter that it becomes a clear signal again almost as like a Gestalt form of branding so there are some exceptions to that but you realize like okay if you look at the Volkswagen ads if you look at some of the old classics very reductive reductive yeah okay and
now I'm not going to get the ratio totally right but it's like all right the top two thirds or three quarters of this ad is a bold visual often black and white there's one tagline that's like three to seven words and then you've got some copy at the bottom and like a clip out coupon or
something for a lot of these direct response ads so I studied the visual element because I was actually buying and in fact at the time I was designing a lot of my own print ads so I was going into Photoshop and Illustrator and doing a lot of the art I was doing everything myself I couldn't
afford a hiring advertising creative before I was I learned a lot about clarity and also converting speeds and feeds into benefits but you said the two things that I mean these are the power of our direction right to pull you into a world to show you something that's interesting or attractive
is incredible and it still feels like art people you know great art directors do not do it scientifically they have principles but they're expressing and exploring and then the other thing is also the magical set of words that can tell you someone I used to work with one of my mentors
Rob Schwartz used to be the chief creative officer at tvwa in Los Angeles back in the day he has a saying that I repeat to everyone which is clients by words you know we can come to clients and assure them that we can deliver across every social channel and every asset and do all the strategy
research but ultimately we're going to give them a set of words that tells them who they are who they can be and who they are to their consumer and those magical words are kind of everything and no matter what changes in the industry clients by words and consumers like me by words too
totally and I feel like even if you aren't planning on playing offense in the sense that you're not a writer you're not crafting ads I feel like everyone certainly everyone is listening to this should make a deliberate study of words for defensive purposes because if you're on social media
or in any media and of course you are exposed to advertising all the time you're exposed to communications all the time you can be manipulated very easily if you're not aware of how your mind is being controlled or it is being controlled informed right if I say and this is cliched like
don't think of a pink elephant pink elephant pink elephant right it's yeah your mind is very reactive in a lot of respects so I feel like the study of words is the study of yeah thoughts and the malleability of thoughts which then leads to the malleability of behavior I mean if you
really want to see how crazy that can get you can watch these Netflix specials like the push from this illusionist is also an amazing graphic artist or should say visual artist painter Darren Brown and these are long features that are mostly about social engineering but just what
you can get someone to do if you profile them properly have a delay higher confederates and in this particular case the push is can you get someone off the street and get them to the point where they push someone off a building they commit murder just by scripting everything out from
start to finish it is horrifying I have very mixed feelings about it from an ethical perspective nobody gets hurt he has many more miracle I think is another one which is is very well done the point of all this is part of my fascination with the withle book part of my fascination with
ads is for playing offense building a business and so on a lot of it is just wanting to understand how humans work and the practitioners are always going to be ahead of the scientist and the theoreticians right that's true in exercise it's like the coaches they're going to get a lot wrong
we they're going to get a lot right and they're going to be able to see the state of the art before the academics ever get their hands on it so if you want to understand how humans work one approach and these are not mutually exclusive one approach is to study psychology and so on
another is to just look how people are affected and persuaded so there are many books that I've read like I'm blanking on his first name but lunch is the last name words that work who is a I believe a republican political strategist and if I'm not mistaken I read this a long time it goes
recommend to be by a very famous entrepreneur neither of us would say we have much in common politically with this guy at all yeah but he came up with as one example the death tax instead of inheritance tax right the death tax and just these a handful of rebrands that became almost
impossible to sort of overturn in the zeitgeist you just study that there's a gold mine there if you stay that kind of thing so you asked what I'd learn I mean I continue to learn I continue to study these things yeah and maybe I'm aware though but I just it's so fundamental to the existence the day
to day week to week month to month of existence of anyone listening to this yeah and by the way you're gonna have to get a lot better at defense because everything's gonna get everything sharper about to get so much more overwhelming so much more personalized the number of pitches that I get
the number of pitches my friends get now just in the last few months where intro paragraphs are clearly crafted using AI where it's it's gonna take away my email writing gift I think it'll take a while it'll take a while because I can see you can still pretty easily discern but you're gonna
have to get better at defense if you want to preserve your sanity and your ability to function let me ask a question that has been sort of in the hopper for a little while it's been gestating and it comes back to blue sky thinking and creative brainstorming and then constraints right because
I'm listening to some of your stories and I'm like man it'd be great to sit down for my own business and be like you know what I want to get bill Murray doing this in an ad I want to have him in the cockpit of a space shuttle yeah I already want to watch this and then there are certain
eventually real world considerations like budget like legal and I'm wondering if there are examples of like overriding these constraints where it's worked out or at what point you kind of bring things back to earth right because if you do it too early you see my tools it exactly yeah
you know there's no hard and fast rules I think the nice thing about working at big agencies with big brands is my experience has always been if the idea is good enough there's always more money I think I can say that without getting in trouble but it's true and then I think creative people
we need the constraints to push off against to have ideas that have tension and that are going to be effective so I think we try to know as much about that going in as possible and sometimes you'll have a ten million dollar idea for a one million dollar budget and it's tragedy because it
would be amazing and they would probably get great ROI on it and it might make economic sense but sorry I'm quoting everyone in their mother but my another one of my mentors Rob Riley who's the chief creative officer of the WPP holding company always says no client ever fired you for bringing
extra ideas and so I think the great one you know some of the best things we've ever gotten away with have been a lucky strike extra or saying okay here's the thing you asked for but by the way I know this would involve getting a few celebrities or opening the conference but what about this
and I think once you've taken the defenses down by showing what's within possibility you buy yourself goodwill and permission to bring a crazy idea and you're going to be sharing that crazy idea with someone who's not nervous about what's to come they're going to enjoy it and so by and large you can get there with that but yeah I think you've got to cover your basis first or else yeah it'll be pissed at you. TBS is funniest out of the year. Yeah. Could you give us some context
on this on this prompt? This is it's like you're in my head Tim because this you've just connected it and maybe you already know where it's going but we my creative partner when I was at BBS was a guy named Dan Lucy and he and I he's my best friend and you know and for eight years I spent more time
with him than I spent with my wife sharing an office and finishing each other sentences and fighting all the time too and we had a new client and footlocker and their aspiration was to not be this kind of transactional house of brands but for holding the footlocker bag to mean something and so that
we knew there was big ambition there that we had to it wasn't just about like the shoes that were in stock it was about trying to make the brand cultural so we we worked together on footlocker for about five or six years and we created an ongoing campaign where we got celebrities and athletes
to make fun of themselves and you know kind of play it close to the bone so part of this we had a great client a guy named Jed Berger who he didn't come up from traditional marketing he'd come from Models which is an East Coast sports store I know Models you know Models we all have online
island here he also found it a basketball magazine called dime magazine he had other interests besides just marketing so he's kind of came at things from a cultural place so sometimes we would show him ideas that got to the bone of sports issues or athlete issues and he always championed it
so this was our first kind of big campaign and we overswung the fences like crazy like there was maybe you know money for a for a cameo and an ad and instead we came up with this cockamama idea that for this one week footlocker was putting out the very best shoes they were just going to
stack it one day after another and the client who called it the week of greatness and so we had written an ad that said you know basically the what's happening at footlocker it almost feels like with all these shoes coming out it feels like all is right in the world and then we leave that
scene and we go and we see a bunch of wrongs be righted and impossibilities happen and so we wrote the script and it had Mike Tyson answering the door in a van der Holyfield is there with a box and he's returns the Mike Tyson returns the piece of the ear that he bit off of and her so
ready we're showing that to the rest of the team at BBDO and they're like that's never going to happen and then we're like don't worry it keeps going uh you know Dennis Rodman this is but wait there's more 2012 kind of joke Dennis Rodman what did we all want to see he was at an airline
counter and he buys a one-way ticket to North Korea they're like that's never gonna happen and then and they're like wait there's more because Brett Farve would refuse to retire so Brett Farve is going to make a joke about retiring you know he's at a diner and he's got a piece of pie and he
hands it back to the lady half eat and says he's time to stop so one of the other ones have the you can't bring this to them because this is going to cost a bajillion dollars and never going to do it this is not they asked us for something simple and you've given something incredibly complicated
and you know this is I would say kind of halfway through my journey and you know there's probably a period usually around the halfway point where you're like maybe like a little more arrogant than you then you are later and in the beginning and so Dan I just went nah we're gonna do it and so we
got in such a blow-up fight with our account lead that he said well you know what you're gonna tank this whole thing and I'm not gonna go to the meeting and so we went sounds good so we went down to the meeting by ourselves without our business partner who forsook us as a matter of pride
at principle and we presented it to this guy jet and he went I fucking love it let's do it so you know you've you've got to take your chances there's no shame in it and we would have had the been you know and he knew and jet knew we would have had the back we can write him a cheap ad but
we have a great one and then and so he you know he went to bat for it and he went and he negotiated that our client negotiated with all those athletes people on a little side story which for any sports nerds will be really fun as we filmed the Brett Farve segment in hadysburg Virginia so Dan
went down there with the camera crew to pick that up he gave us half an hour because he was a high school football coach in his first season retired and he famously had you know hung on to things in green bay and kind of as the story goes prevented a young Aaron Rogers from ascending
and taking the starting quarterback spot year after year and so there was tension there and that was famously or in the press a bad relationship and Dan calls me from set and he says I was just standing next to Brett Farve in between shots and I saw him open his fantasy football on his phone
and Aaron Rogers is his starting quarterback and I was like God that is such fun intel to get from the front line and I swear we were like should we call like Bleacher Report and tell them this to so people sports fans would all love to know that I really have two questions there are 50 more
I'm just going to give some teasers that we won't get to yes what's the why why that why what if that's something that someone really wants to know about and then we didn't do it then maybe we do around two okay Farrell Farrell so the time Kanye tried to get you fired yeah okay we're not
gonna do that although I really I really do at some point want to talk about that because just the limited context that I have makes it seem really hilarious pretty good okay okay actually I'll let you choose you know what this is going to be not dealer's choice this will be your choice and gamblers
choice so that gamblers choice this is one option another option is you on the cusp of taking your name off of the Guinness wheelchair basketball ad yeah and what that was all about and just how that unfolded the Kanye is easy but we'll save that for another time the wheelchair basketball one because there was a good lesson which is so Dan the partner I mentioned another guy named Tom Kramer and I pitched that ad what is the ad so in the ad a group of it's almost like you start like a Nike ad or
in a scene from movie murder ball which is a movie that features wheelchair basketball you're just in a really intense game a wheelchair basketball and you get seduced into it you follow the team down one end of the court to the other and you you think it's all about performance or drive or what
these guys are doing and as the game resolves the surprises that nine out of the 10 guys get up out of their chairs to leave the gymnasium and then one friend is still in the chair and that you understand that this group of friends all participated in a wheelchair basketball so that they could play
with their friend who's in a wheelchair the way we got to that so that the line we had was made of more for Guinness and it was it's simple it's one of those great lines where the beer itself is complicated but also it's maybe a drink maybe someone who who wants to feel like they're of more
substance or that there's something more substantial in that moment would choose so the brief we gave ourselves was what's a story you would tell that you would wish you could do that for a friend or if your friends did that for you that would mean everything so it was just kind of writing that way
so it's very simple and that was what was pitched and that's probably what anyone who saw the ad saw but what happened was our experience making it was not great we were pretty hard headed at that so it's right right around the the footlocker time where we were maybe a little more rambunctious and
a little fighting and we had a client that also was a little rambunctious and fighting and I think early on for whatever reason I think there was like a sense of distrust that wasn't solved when we were going to produce the ad and for whatever reason we didn't quell it we fought it so we brought
forward the director we wanted and the client didn't like something about the director's treatment the director will write a synopsis of how they plan to tell the story and instead of saying okay we hear you let's go back and rewrite it we tried to push back we tried to win the fight and as I think
I mentioned from my adidas experience you know you you can't really win these fights you've got to play it collaboratively and forward but we ended up basically just every single thing was a fight and ultimately we lost every fight and it got to the point where you know the director was challenged
and the casting was challenged and the wardrobe of one of the actors that wasn't even the lead actor was why would you choose green shoes and we like green shoes but it didn't matter but we lost and then they weren't green shoes and there was a red stripe in the gym and why is there a red stripe
that's Budweiser's color and we're like it doesn't matter and then instead of just saying we'll change it we'll paint it out so we fought everything we lost everything and we just felt like such losers by the time we were done the music wasn't the track we like the set of words had to be rewritten
because it wasn't right and we were so down we were so miserable and sad that when it got released the three of us said let's we're gonna take our names off it because this is it's garbage because maybe of our egos the 30 battles we lost along the way that must have meant was crap you know
and so maybe it was subconscious but we never made that phone call even though we intended to I think we got busy so we didn't ask for our names to be taken off of it but we intended to and then it aired with no fanfare on a playoff baseball game in October that I wasn't watching the ad was not
on YouTube someone videoed it on their phone maybe on their DVR uploaded it to YouTube and by the morning it had over a million views but I don't even know how anyone found it I don't even know how you could search it but it just kind of went through the roof because it touched the thing that we
wanted to touch where everyone felt God I would do that for someone right I pray I have people around me that would do that for me but we missed the whole point because we were so caught up in the 30 things we lost we missed the story was still intact and it was still good but we were obsessed
about our own personal experience on it that made us lose faith in it and so it's just that concert reminder like step back ask yourself if you're feeling a certain way does it really matter is it really changing things or are you just caught in the weeds so that was a big lesson for me to
get outside of my own attitude about stuff we're able to change your behavior in future projects because of that I think so I think it was a clear lesson that a lot of things we thought matter don't matter so maybe we need to be a little more a little more meaningful to be back and suggest you know
yeah totally but it was good there was a work lesson in a life lesson so lessons not that you have to impart a lesson but the billboard question so if you could put a message a quote an image anything on a billboard non-commercial metaphorically speaking just to get something in front of
a lot of people what would you put first thing is I would request a billboard location would be at my house because I want to see it every day whatever matters to me is probably the thing that I need to be reminded of more than I need to broadcast but I would just say in the spirit of creativity
and living an interesting life see what's possible see what's possible see what's possible what would that mean to you if you're in front of your house how would that be helpful to you it would remind me every day that I'm not living a routine but I'm here to see what I can do and what people around
me can do and how can we I don't like the word maximize because that sounds maybe a little functional but like how can you fully express in life by taking chances by believing in yourself by trying new things and it can mean anything to anyone but it's just that reminder of I'm not here
to do what the plan is today I'm here to see what's possible I love it Chris you're winding to a close is there anything else that you would like to well first of all any websites places to point people to the you'd like to mention and then is there anything you'd like to say before we
come to a close well first of all thank you the best place to find me is LinkedIn because I tend to post a lot about creativity and work and work that we're doing and work that I find inspiring so it's a good place to engage and I hope anyone out there we were talking before we started that
when I was 21 a career in advertising was one of the few options for a creative person today you can self publish you can become an influencer you can write your own movie you can publish your own novel it's not as attractive but I hope we continue to attract the best talent and I hope people
do pursue it because it's a really fun job you learn about all kinds of different businesses they tell you all their secrets about why things aren't working how good their product really is and you get to come up with ideas to solve it and if you hit it you know you get to put them out
into the world and get your ideas in front of hopefully millions of people and I think it's probably a career that doesn't seem as as illustrious as it used to be but my hope is that we continue to bring great people in because that's the only way it's going to be vibrant and exciting and by
the way otherwise you're just going to have horrible ads on TV or whatever screen we look at so it's kind of like let's get good people in this industry so that we don't have to look at horrible marketing in the future and you also get to collaborate right it's a big yes a big one I mean a
lot of people out there I think have lost sight of the possibility of collaborating these types of environments and these types of companies because the shiny object for a lot of young people is running your own ship as an influencer but there are a lot of trade-offs and one of them
that I know from having spoken to a lot of people our creators independently is you can end up being we're feeling very isolated and very lonely and one of my top priorities in fact I just finished an offsite recently for my whole team was a fast creative collaborations with world-class people
because you can do a lot as a solo operator even with the team but if you're in isolation you're not going to be broadening at least I don't think for me personally your horizons you're not going to be bending and testing your perception of the world in a way that you could in a collaborative
environment so we will link to your LinkedIn in the show notes for everyone and we will link to everything we've discussed in the show notes everybody at tim.blog slash podcast that'll be easy to find and until next time please be a little bit kinder than is necessary not just to
others but to yourself and until next time thanks for tuning in hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half
and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week it's
kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles on reading book some reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them
and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you'd like to try it out just go to tim.blog slash friday type that into your browser tim.blog slash friday drop in your
email and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought to you by element spelled LMNT what on earth is element it is a delicious sugar-free electrolyte drink mix I've stocked up on boxes and boxes this was one of the first things that I bought when I saw
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