To get meta, a newsletter talking about failure has failed to send for the past three weeks due to a combination of things. But that’s a minor failure. Let’s talk about the majors…
Onwards.
The great marketing failure
Failure is a strange concept in workplaces. Some of the more toxic environments I’ve come across seem to spend more time working out how not to be blamed for when things go wrong than they do at solving the problems in the first place.
They’re also usually places where the absence of any concrete understanding of targets leads failure being subjective, and then everyone gets in trouble and eventually somebody gets sacked (see also: governments)
Failure is also a very, very difficult subject for agencies to broach. They’re paid to get results and nobody wants to be the person who puts their hand up and says “hey, boss, I’ve just stuffed up this million dollar account.”
Conversely, when the client has either knowingly or unwittingly set the agency up for failure, how does your client service person say, “hey, that giant campaign that just bombed? You didn’t listen when we told you the brief was a mess, the budget was insufficient and there were at least five key messages assigned to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.”
It’s stressful. It’s unpleasant. And it’s not good for anyone involved. Which is a shame. Because failure is Interesting. A well analysed failure can help. Very few workplaces or organisations do well analysed failure though. Mostly it just sits in who to blame and how do I keep my job.
Failure doesn’t mean people are bad at their jobs though. Mark Evans - former Marketing Director at Direct Line Group and one of the best marketers I’ve ever worked with - recounted a story about a big failure at Mars, which is a good example of how to fail well.
Evans was tasked with growing Whiskas cat food pouches. The insight that many owners have multiple cats led to a larger pouch that could feed the whole cat household. There was one unconsidered problem. Different cats have different tastes. The larger pouch was a disaster.
The response from his boss? “That’s great, we learned.”
A short story about failure
I’ve probably learnt more from failures than successes, even if I didn’t know it at the time. The successes, relative as they are, have probably been built on the back of learnings from failures.
Some years ago I worked on an FMCG brief. The core tactical execution had been locked in before I joined and there was a lot that seemed logical.
The diagnosis done by the client was largely good. This brand was positioned at the premium end of the market, but had eroded its market share through years of heavy discounting. Previously heavy buyers were trading down to less premium and cheaper brands, which was having an effect on the bottom line.
The core audience was also spot on. The market sizing was there and the personas read like real people. It was easy to visualise who these people were - everybody knew somebody who matched this persona.
In a parallel world the brand would have regained its place, as the building blocks were there. But strategically, this is where the brief - and it was a well written brief - went astray. Perhaps these are the most dangerous types of brief. Agencies are so used to dealing with bad briefs, that the well written but incorrect ones don’t get pulled apart quite as well.
In hindsight the brief should have been to reach light buyers and build fame, while the client weaned itself off discounting. It was a media brief first and foremost, or at least should have been.
Instead the brief focused on loyalty. It was targeting the heavy buyers to buy more. It was content and CRM focused, with a proposed solution that would build loyalty through content and signing people up to the database.
At this stage, I had no formal marketing training. My career until that stage had been built through social and content. It was a brief and solution that made sense when seen through a content marketer’s eyes.
The content we produced was good. We very quickly found and ignited the brand loyalists on social, who were only too happy to respond. The initial launch looked good, numbers moved quickly, and everybody seemed happy.
But the numbers stubbornly refused to move. Very few people signed up to the database. Social progress became limited and there was a bit of consternation as to why we couldn’t move the owned channel numbers in any significant way.
The media agency got it. Their proposal was to reach as many people in category through the social advertising budget and drive sign ups this way.
But we’d got into a bit of a rabbit hole. We’d made the dual mistake of falling in love with our own content while simultaneously realising that paid media budget was the best way of boosting our numbers. After all, once people saw the content, they’d fall in love with it, surely? And so it was small spend on individual items of content.
By this stage, there was chaos elsewhere. The brand lead had changed multiple times and supply chain issues meant they had a lot bigger issues to contend with beyond a loyalty-content tactic that wasn't their own. The media agency got the boot - awkwardly finding out just before a scheduled presentation.
Meanwhile, a few of us had grasped that perhaps our loyalty solution wasn't really the solution after all and that, yes, we needed to speak to a wider audience, but a few good fame-building ideas were batted back while the brand tackled the supply chain problem.
This wasn't a crash and burn failure. In my experience, very few are. Failure tends to start slowly. I wouldn't even say this particular failure hit the point of no return. It just fizzled out, another online content brand play that nobody noticed arrive or shut down.
Enough money was spent for it to be a bit embarrassing but not so much that somebody would lose their job over it. And, frustratingly, there were a lot of good elements from the initial diagnosis to an execution that was done well but doomed to failure as the strategic direction that informed the brief was wrong.
Incidentally, I walked past the brand in the supermarket not long ago. They were still discounting heavily.
Prepare to fail and other cliches
A lot of the failures I've been involved in are relatively similar. They're not Kendall Jenner Pepsi levels of getting it wrong. They're often mistakes that stem from a bad decision somewhere in the strategy phase. If this goes awry, then there's often very little that can be done.
A few more vague examples (to spare those involved, largely me):
A project that ended up in some form of development hell and (I'm assuming - I'd moved to another role long before this one saw light of day) achieved very little because the client chose to ignore every single customer interview and focus group that had underpinned the strategy, and pushed for a creative concept that they liked but was absolutely what every piece of research from multiple teams said absolutely was not the right road to follow.
A strategic recommendation that never went anywhere in a very large client due to internal infighting and death by committee.
An influencer campaign that was very entertaining but delivered very little as we (or rather me; mea culpa) had got so carried away by the idea that we didn't set any measures of success. Everybody liked it, nobody knew why we were doing it.
A campaign that was born from somebody deciding "we need something more social" that led to appointing an agency who weren't really the right fit but had an idea they couldn't really execute. The account was eventually passed to an agency who got it and had an unglamorous but exceptionally efficient, focused piece of work that I can still see influences some of the output today.
Conversely, one other project that could have been a failure was rescued due to a very clear strategy. The agency involved produced some launch videos that were quite different from what was originally presented and missed the brief by quite a way.
This was a rare occasion where my colleagues and I dug in our heels as we strongly believed this was the wrong direction. One of us (not me) took another look at the brief and sat down with the small internal creative team and gave them very clear direction.
The end result saw the launch campaign paused because there was a genuine fear that we wouldn't be able to fulfil demand if we continued on the initial trajectory.
Don’t blame the agency
This may seem quite down on agencies. It's not. I've worked with some superb agencies who've delivered in spades and been involved in some agency work I'm genuinely proud of.
Saatchi & Saatchi's work for Direct Line breathed new life into the brand with a bold creative that could have easily failed in lesser hands. My colleagues at Ruder Finn helped get a Meningitis B jab onto the National Immunisation Schedule. Frank PR got roadside assistance brand Green Flag continually punching above its weight with some often hilarious, attention grabbing stunts.
But these campaigns all stemmed from incredibly clear strategic objectives. The best agencies will struggle when the client and the brief is wrong. Sometimes getting it wrong has been necessary to getting it right, either by not repeating mistakes or by having enough trust between internal teams and external agencies to dispassionately review work without descending into a blame game.
At the end of every year, my team and I at Direct Line Group would look at all the work across all the assorted work we’d produced and ranked them Great, Good, or Meh. We then asked what could we learn from the Great work that could elevate more of the Good to Great, and what could we do in the future to creative less Meh.
It was constructive, entertaining, and allowed us to look back at work outside of the heat of the moment. More importantly, it allowed us to discuss failure openly without fear. Then we’d head to the pub and come up with a plan to change the world. Because, well, what better way to counteract failure?
Dispash dispatches
Partisans and filter bubbles
A recent study studied how people reacted when shown choices of partisan or dubious source news. Tl;dr: they went for the more dubious sources. Social media amplifies this problem, but the problem is still more human than machine. LINK.
How credible are #Fitspiration accounts?
Fascinating academic study into fitness influencers. Two thirds of the “top” fitness influencers weren’t viewed as being credible or posted content that could be described as problematic. The researchers also developed a tool to audit accounts for usefulness, which is an interesting thought, but relies a lot on the user to proactively question what they’re seeing. And as the story above suggests, this relies on the user wanting to question what they see. But then if platforms use this tool to filter bad content on behalf of the user, what should be the criteria? LINK.
Advertising and the inflation effect
Global advertising network Dentsu’s Global Ad Spend Forecast shows that ad spending is expected to grow in the second half of 2023. But increase is mostly driven by inflation. That’s an issue - neatly explained by Tim Burrowes - as revenue from advertising isn’t keeping pace with the cost of running a media company (production, wages, rights). Something, somewhere will have to give. LINK.
AI and loneliness
Scott Galloway makes a pertinent point about lonliness and tech such as AI. The premise behind the movie Her is already here. But is that a good thing? It may make some people feel marginally less lonely, but at the expense of what? Plenty of people will make lots of money over this. LINK.
Trends have lost all meaning
Excellent piece from Reddit’s Matt Klein, on why what are now called trends are closer to ephemeral fads and why that’s a problem for brands. Good advertising tends to capture something of the zeitgeist, although that also comes from being in touch with your audience. And plenty of brands have failed due to conflating long term and short term trends, especially during the pandemic. The consequence of trend chasing is that brands end up coming across like James Murphy’s narrator in LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge. LINK.
Playing us out this week: Sparks - The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte. I love how latter day Sparks still sound has unusual and as futuristic as 70s Sparks. If you’ve not watched Edgar Wright’s documentary on Netflix, do it. And then delve into their back catalogue.