#715: Chris Beresford-Hill — A Master Ad Man on Superbowl Confessions, How to Come Up with Great Ideas, Cold Emailing Mark Cuban, Doing Naughty Things, Poetic Mind Control, Creative Process and Insider Tips, How to Negotiate with Bosses and Clients, and The Power of a Stolen Snickers

24:12But I was interested in exploring, as you led to in the second paragraph of your email, not just the successes, but also the failures. 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 10 people and a 100 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.

24:47Whoever makes their product easier to buy. So I think anytime either I position the work or our 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 too. You had macro topics and then later on techniques, truths, et cetera. And these were very well thought through. So in effect, you made it easy to say yes, but they're like, okay, you've done 50 % 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 cold email because trust me, it's not going to work.

25:25I'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 precede 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.

26:04All 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 10 years old, we took a father-son trip to California, and it was the first time I'd ever been to the West Coast.

26:36My 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, Universal Studios 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 out playing with the other kids, I was watching TV, I was watching movies.

27:06So, 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, of the actual house from Psycho and the real Mill Valley Town Center from Back to the Future, which was my favorite movie ever. And even the empty water tank that was, you know, I still remember this, that was also cross-purpose 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 a dozen other movies and, you know, all this stuff.

27:37So 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 want it to be him because he was doing something. And so anyway, it just blew my mind. How old were you at the time? It's probably nine or 10. So it 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 that was that. And I appreciated it. And then the next morning, my father wakes me up, maybe at five or 6 a.m., which is really early to a nine-year-old.

28:14It'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 at the time it wasn't old school. It was just a projector because it was 1990. It's like overhead transparencies or something like that. All that stuff, like the sheets. And it was a four hour timeshare meeting for a new development in Anaheim. And they started, it 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.

28:49And then after they left the room, they would like lower the price. And I mean, it was really, I was worried my father, 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 Studios. 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 backlot tour 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.

29:29He 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 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 of 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.

30:06So we kind of would move around every couple of 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 bide my time. So I probably spent a lot of time observing people, which helped me as a creative person. But what would happen 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 nineties.

30:38I don't know if you're an old school hoops fan. Oh, I remember the Knicks. Okay. Starks, Mason, Oakley, Ewing. I mean, they were, that was an incredible team. And I'd never been to a Knicks game, but I loved 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 happened 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 had no internet.

31:11We 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 transport. Doesn't look like student transport. 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 with maybe to work on some stuff. And I don't know what possessed me, but I grabbed a ball and I started dribbling it.

31:41And I kind of figured, okay, maybe they're going to think I'm like a trainer's kid or something. And so my friend who I'm coaxing with me, cause he's my friend, Steven 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 or 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 two on two. And so we played, you know, a five minute game the day before they were playing straight out of a Disney movie, straight out of a Disney movie, the day before they were going to be facing off against Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls at Madison Square Garden.

32:19And so I go to school Monday and I'm sitting at the lunch table and 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 McFarlane 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. He had Youngbloods, but he actually famously created Deadpool. One, 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.

32:51And so I called 411 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'd 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 had to talk to him just for the contact.

33:24I just needed that. So later that year, we went to the Jacob Javits Center for the New York Comic Con, which was a very big deal. And this must've 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 him that much anymore. The voice of reason who is shackled. Stephen, God bless you. Out of control. I think we convinced, 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, we went to the service entrance of the Java Center where there was some barricades.

33:58And 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 bad boys and they'd all Exodus and it was Jim Lee and it was Todd McFarlane, it was Rob Liefeld 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?

34:30And I was like, yes. And she was the woman that had answered the phone there. With the patience of a saint. With the patience of a saint. and this is when I said I was like little she like lifted me over the barricade and they brought me in and I got to sit behind the table with those guys for the whole morning and Stan Lee came by you know and I got to visit from the godfather 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 real easy for them to say yes and write back and he became a pen pal for a couple 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 - So you're a superhero in your own way.

35:10Well, 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 at Modernista. Then you catch a 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?

35:51It 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 fun. It's a nice place to, if you're on a golf course in the morning, life's not bad. But I was taught that when you putt, 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.

36:20And 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.

36:51I 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 at Goodby 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.

37:24They came up with Got Milk, for God's sake. So, you know, it 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, 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.

37:53So could you say a bit more about what characterized 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?

38:30What 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, he was a great first boss, but someone I still talk to regularly. He had a good way of saying it. He's very self-effacing, like many really talented, but the most talented person is usually the person that's 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.

39:10They really to convince of cool, but there was 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. And so 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 ad, it just didn't fit into the kind of clients that were attracted to Modernista and that Modernista service very well.

39:56So 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'd 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 came of like, it has to feel fresh, it has to feel interesting, it has to be succinct.

40:33Those 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.

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42:00Part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation, and we were talking before we started recording, or you asked me rather, what would you be interested in or what do you think an audience would be interested in hearing? And we discussed a few past podcast guests who are very iconoclastic and have sort of painted a unique path for themselves with seemingly very few constraints, like Rick Rubin 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 than 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.

43:05And I thought that would be fun to explore. So one of my questions as someone who doesn't know the business at all, really, or 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. That 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 hole? It's like, okay, you can measure 20 inches out for that putt or whatever it might be.

43:39How 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 the 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%. 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.

44:15So 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 were the best. And I'd form my own opinions and I would say, okay, I think that's okay, but I love that. So I started to shape 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, are those clients, are those both? How much control do you have over what you do next? One thing you said that surprised to 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.

44:52So 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 in 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 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.

45:23Because 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 or 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?

45:54How did that happen? It's a little bit of the, it may be a nature nurture thing as well. If 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. I think today it's not uncommon to give big opportunities to all levels of creative people or any strategists or account people, anyone in the agency. But back then it was very hierarchical. And I went and again, this is like the most 1A thing, but I went and I asked for the assignment. Can you place us in time?

46:30Like, where are you? So this would be 2005 in San Francisco at Goodby Silverstein and Partners. And the previous two years, they'd done a Super Bowl ad for Emerald Nuts. and so I went to the creative director 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, I will, 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 yourself a book. It doesn't have to be formally assigned. I mean, that probably simplifies the political slash approvals dynamic.

47:05That's right. And it gives that creative lead. 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 Goodby together. And we got the brief and the brief was win the Superbowl ad meter. And that means, you know, to win the popularity contest. So we, peanuts are parody. 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, I needed it.

47:44I had to give myself the best shot to win. So the strategist was one of the last people to leave the room and the strategists 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. Yes. To translate their needs and preferences and so on to the in-house creative. 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 creative's thinking.

48:15And 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 just 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.

48:55And then all the ads I wrote were the ones that went forward because they just, they did more. And if table stakes are 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. You have to have the ability, the skill 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.

49:38All 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 it? 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 second spot is like three quarters of a page in a script. How much does a Super Bowl ad 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 a million dollars in 2005, 2006.

50:15Non-trivial though. I mean, this is a big bet. It was a big bet. Also reputationally a big deal for people within the client company. All right. Yes. So 30 second spot, obviously a huge investment for the company, if not in capital, certainly in reputation. Sure. 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 slightly 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.

50:54And 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 Farrelly 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 mean, I've never said it that way before, but you got to get it all out.

51:32And then essentially, you know, 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. A 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.

51:59And then in the end, you can have your private vomits. 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 I interviewed the artist 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. Oh, I'd have to check it out. Yeah. All right. Got it. It's really good pop art. And he sometimes uses these crazy color combinations. And I think someone, it must have been a written question. Someone asked, how do you make sense of these colors?

52:32he 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 an answer without knowing what the answer was and then i would so how would you pick the beginning I would start with logically.

53:03So 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 Jonze video with Chris Walken.

53:47Yeah. 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 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 it's Jeff Goodby. And Jeff Goodby is 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.

54:19He knows. So I, you know, so I read it. I didn't, I didn't say - Meaning let him judge for himself. Yeah. Okay. This one's crazy. Oh, you're going to love this. No, I just, I just, I just said, okay, here it is. Yeah. Yeah. Pro tip. Don't ever say that. No, it's, it's true. It's - You're going to love this. No, don't do that. Don't laugh too hard at your own jokes ahead of time either. So they liked it. I don't think they, you know, I mean, I think they liked it and they're like, okay, that's 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.

54:53Because when we went to the client with it, and it was a guy named Andrew Burke, who was the CMO of Emerald Nuts 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 tell you to eat. We had stuff 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.

55:27And that, ultimately, a great client does that, and great work does that. And I was talking to my friends, 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 their 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 bone simple. And then the creativity and the surprising connections you make and the surprising things you write, that's the magic.

56:05but 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 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, okay, people roughly in the demographic and they were kind of read the script. It wasn't performed, it was read by a third party.

56:38And instead of saying the dreaded, do you like it, which is how many a great idea gets unraveled, they just said, okay, so what did you see? What did you understand from it? What did it make you understand about peanuts? And what do you think of Emerald Nuts now? It was very, again, it was asking customers the right questions. I think sometimes when you, you know, the Henry Ford asked people what they want and they'll say a faster horse. I think sometimes when you ask your audience 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.

57:14So we did that kind of research. Thank God. Those are good questions. It makes me think of something that is maybe only tangentially related, but something Kevin Kelly, who's a friend of mine, who's been on the podcast, who's very wise in a lot of ways. And he has a book of advice, short, pithy lines that started as a list 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 I mean, these questions pair well with that insight, I think.

57:50Okay. So those questions are asked. Those questions are asked and it passes. People say what we wanted them to say. And I think of course, again, maybe the reason why this one sailed through it, I have many a horror story 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 Perlorian brothers out of Toronto, Canada. Amazing name. I don't know where it, Ian and Michael.

58:20Sounds like an acrobatic act from Cirque du Soleil. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. And they're these two, you know, former ad creatives that became directors and they 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 celebrities are very, they're very specific on what they will or won't do. 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, absolutely sounds good. So we filmed it in Toronto over two days and it was very fun.

58:54Again, the client was, and this is probably maybe inside baseball in the industry, but I think sometimes clients become so creative that they mirror the job. But sometimes the best clients are, let the creatives be creative. And you're there to say, 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, not less. But our client, Andrew, was just there to supervise and make sure that we were getting the right stuff in the can, protecting his investment, but giving us liberal room to play. So it was a magical shoot. It was right before Christmas, and then you hire an editor separately.

59:28And so there's an editor named Ian McKenzie who cuts a ton of Super Bowl ads, and he's very good at it. Early January, we go into his suite in the Flatiron in New York City, and I'm super excited. And he plays it, and I'm super disappointed because it's not, it didn't live up to all my dreams. I don't know, it feels flat. Is it funny? You know, I see nothing but the problems with it. And what you end up doing, you know, with the editor's thing, I think back in the day when you had to cut film with a razor blade and use tape, you would debate an edit. But because you're doing things and, you know, at the time, final cut, you know, you can try anything.

1:00:02You can make it. You can ready fire and. 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 maraud. We experiment. And then what 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 and our producer. 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?

1:00:40It'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 how fun. I'm seeing them get to do what I did, you know, 15 years ago. And the advice I gave them is 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. 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 ultimately he had it, but we had to get our brains to catch up with reality.

1:01:16And 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, but you torture it. Editors are magicians. 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 Steven 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.

1:01:57More happens in the edit than people think because it's not lining it up in order. 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 of people in the office and I played it for a couple people.

1:02:30And they went, huh. And I distinctly remember this. I showed two or three people. And by the way, 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.

1:03:07And 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 and I'm glad it didn't. And I think to this day, if there's something that I believe in, if I get Luke results, it just does not phase me at all. And usually you'll find your audience. People will like it. People respond differently than your inner circles. What happened when the ad came out?

1:03:37It did well. It did really well. It was the ad age the next morning ranked at number one. They had an ad critiquer named Bob Garfield. He's like the Siskel and Ebert of ads. And I feel like Jeff Goodby and 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 kind of early days of YouTube and I think it was like for a day or two it was like the number one comedy video on YouTube or something crazy like that. So it worked and the sales went up. I saw it back then. I remember seeing it. It was weird. Because it got sent to me and it was on YouTube. I recall this.

1:04:10Oh nice. 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, if 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 Don't worry we're satisfied. which could be a starting point, or maybe it's the point. Make as many decisions as possible.

1:04:50I'm not clear on what this means, but it does pique my curiosity. So who is David and what does this mean? And 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'm kind of not shy of saying he was the best boss I ever had. He was the best boss I ever had because 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.

1:05:27He 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, whoop-dee-doo, 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.

1:05:59Exactly. 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 a no.

1:06:29But 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? I used it. I used it then because BBO at that time was David's place. So David said to do it. David said, let's go. I don't think we ever got a look at an org chart or reporting structure. I don't think we ever knew that that carried muster. 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.

1:07:08And so we were all emboldened to make moves. I myself couldn't, there wasn't much I could do with it at the time. In terms 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 gild the lily and that really obsess over. Such a great expression. It is. And by the way, the gilding 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.

1:07:46And 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, 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 revisit a lot. To what extent do I prioritize 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?

1:08:24Is 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 over time is just a huge competitive advantage and good for what you're doing? That's a long question, but with a 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.

1:09:12I 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, negotiating often in my experience.

1:09:48It'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 isn't some speed to this, likely the outcome's gonna 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 gonna cool. They're gonna take a break and they're gonna restart. art. And many times, you know, the wrong decision can become the right decision.

1:10:22You know, if it's actually an okay time, I'd love to tell you a little bit about a Mountain Dew Super Bowl ad 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 nonlinear 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 Shiat 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.

1:11:00And 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 caveating here, this idea never happened, was never purchased by PepsiCo. So I'm thinking this behind the scenes in our house at the agency.

1:11:33We 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, front page of Variety that Daniel Day-Lewis had agreed to star in Mountain Dew Zero Sugars Super Bowl ad. And we were going to do it without telling him. I have so many quotes. Okay, continue. And 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 say, because this Mountain Dew Zero Sugar was so impossibly good, you deserve an impossibly hard to make Super Bowl ad.

1:12:14So 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 it. 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.

1:12:42So 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, Daniel Day-Lewis Suze Mountain Dew, because he's, he doesn't want to be part of this. He's not going to participate, but we still had the 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 it's daniel day lewis's character turns around and it's will ferrell in a mustache and a hat and he does the the beautiful performance piece of like i take my straw and i drink your milkshake 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.

1:13:30So then the rug pull becomes insane. So he's not going to do it. And then Will Ferrell does an insane Daniel Day-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.

1:14:02And 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 said, but you know what, I'll bring it to our legal because look, I love it. I just know we can't do it. 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 Day-Lewis or whatever. So it was a - Hold on. That's too tantalizing. If you can't get into it, just a little bit. Let me, I'll give it. Look, because nothing happened.

1:14:33Yeah. 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 product sold forever. I can see why legal would push back. I'm talking about like a bag of Frito-Lays in Bangkok is like still, Daniel Day-Lewis gets money. Would have been the best thing that ever happened to him. But anyway. It's like that guy who had a phone thrown at him by Russell Crowe. That's right. Man, won the lottery. Powerball. And if he put that money into Apple stock, now how good is he doing? Okay. But anyway. Got it. So legal's like, I love it. We think not.

1:15:06So we think not. So this is how it really happens. So we go back to the office and we're, okay, there's new ideas and stuff. And we're sitting, 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.

1:15:37And so then we said, okay, well, what if it's about Mountain Dew Zero 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 people want to see, don't leave it. So then we said, okay, maybe it's cast away. Maybe it's, there will be blood. Maybe it's The Shining. That's how we landed The Shining, where we recast with Bryan Cranston and Tracy Ellis Ross remaking The Shining.

1:16:14But again, he's just, he's ranting and looning about Mountain Dew Zero 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. are like, ah, you use slightly different wording, but could you tie these things together?

1:16:50Because that type of indicator, I want to understand what that feeling is and how you actually use it. Because for instance, this is not a hundred percent, 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 a hundred percent 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 people tell you who they are when they give you advice too.

1:17:27And that's Jeff. You know, Jeff is a super smart guy who went to Harvard and wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. And he happened into advertising, but he is just a vibey, 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's always behaved like it was fun, like he was having fun, whether he was or wasn't.

1:18:02And that kind of vibe is great. And that does embolden 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 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 focus grouped to death. It's our job to sort of find the line and find 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.

1:18:44Are there indicators for that? 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. Sift the vomit. Yeah, sift the vomit, exactly. That's a good commercial visual for you. somebody 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 scent trail 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.

1:19:26I 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.

1:19:54And the other is 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 Myron. Yes. Getting it? Yep. All right. And executive at Apple, Apple CMO specifically, specifically has said what a world-class agency partner does is quote unquote reduce things.

1:20:34Yes. 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, I'd say, well, our soap's 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 Pollyanna version of it. And I think an agency partner. I thought you said polyamorous version of it for a second. Yes, polyamorous version of it. No comment on polyamorous. That's a whole other topic. We are in Austin. We're in the land of plenty. Anyway, continue. But I think what an agency does is the clients come and say, we want to say this and this and this.

1:21:15And 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 you, 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.

1:21:47So it really is the art of editing and just down, down, down, down, down. any examples that come to mind i mean this is not exactly a statement but 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 yeah anything good i mean anything good i think a 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 feeds it's about show me what about this is magical. It's about finding the one magical bit.

1:22:22I 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, that's the difference between the good ones and the bad ones. 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 one. 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.

1:22:53We 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 U S 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 us.

1:23:23Capital T, capital C. Yes. The client. 18 point, and a good client. We had the client in, and we brought our strategist. We brought a strategist from another region that had 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 creative team. But we did. we kind of full court press. We went for the full court 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 and split off.

1:24:00So our intention was like, let's land a brief together. When you say land a brief, you're basically getting the gig. Yeah. Getting the gig and, 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 you know we're talking a lot about how and this by the way is i think the statistic is still valid but like something like 80 percent 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 bias is 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.

1:24:45So 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, and 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. We're like, well, okay, for the US Open, we got to take her blue suede shoes. We got to bring them back. We got to bring them back and sell them. So obvious, done. And then as it turns out, it's a little more complicated than that.

1:25:14They'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, his name is Ricardo Franco. He says, why don't we just change people's shoes into Billie Jean King 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 affix them.

1:25:47And we kept talking. I said, what about spray paint? What if we get like shoe artists? There are these people like the shoe surgeon and all these people. 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, oh God, imagine if someone comes in like a pair of Nikes and everyone was rubbing their hands together. This was great. So a great lesson is when you get what 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 oversell it.

1:26:12I've learned this lesson, as many of us have, and seen it in practice. So leaving the room, normally we'd say, okay, we'll come back in two weeks and 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 of New York, loved the idea. So we said, can 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.

1:26:42That's an important point. Let's get a little internal money just to start it. So jump the gun. Yeah. Let's make progress because we saw green light. This is not the kind of idea that gets greenlit. I had a stolen Snickers in my pocket and I wanted out of that store. And so we, we start R &Ding it and 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 Jordans. And we're doing them around the agency. They look awesome. I mean, anyone who sees them goes, holy shit, what is that?

1:27:11I 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 Adidas shoes, that we can spray any Adidas shoe you want, but we can only have people spray Adidas 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, she's got a week and a half to lock us out of everything.

1:27:47And 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 can be very bad for my network's relationship with that giant company. To say the least. 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.

1:28:42I 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 stack the line with a pair of Converse All-Stars and Air Force Ones and Sauconies. And with the first five are the things. And they took pictures of them and they sent them to add age and to hype beast and to sneaker freaker to everywhere.

1:29:26That's the one where I didn't have the Snickers bar. I was like, felt like I was going to vomit, but it was so good. And I knew it was not vomiting ideas. This is like, no actual vomit, like bile. It was like a bile one. So anyway, I go back and I sit down at set and I show Nancy and I'm like, look at these. And she goes, Oh, that's cool. Actually, she always says the word babe. She talks like a Hollywood proof. She goes, that's cool, babes. And I was like, thanks. and uh 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 i 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 i'm patching in our global legal and i was like okay 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.

1:30:20And 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 would 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.

1:30:48So 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 to, you're going to change lanes in between two and you got to say, I think I can do this.

1:31:41And 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 thread the needle. And that's the getting away with it. So to use 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 where you're like, okay, I'm going to make this decision.

1:32:22And you gave me a little bit where you're like, I don't think, it seems very unlikely that say Nike is going to come after a campaign that is trying to foster youth women's participation in 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, okay, worst, worst case, this is what happens, but I'm not going to get killed. Here's what I thought. The truth is, as you talk about what 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.

1:32:53And 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 swinging 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 right so what would be a for you your personal hall of fame failure list, if you had to pick out one that 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.

1:33:38Any 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 quickly. Don't dwell on them. 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 - Brings back the memories.

1:34:06Yes. 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 plugin 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 LimeWire, but Napster was the first time that suddenly, at least in the popular zeitgeist, that people can get music for free. Yes. Including new music.

1:34:41And we were, and 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 soundbite. And 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 like a way too ahead of its time streaming platform where it was, the proposition was 10 bucks a month and unlimited plays, a million songs.

1:35:21and 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 Modernista. And 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 Modernista loved it because they were kind of cool and subversive.

1:36:06So we somehow, and this is, you know, I'm talking 2002, 2003. This would have been pretty ahead of 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, that.

1:36:40So anyway, this was kind of crazy stuff. Lawyers were okay with it. I know we just said something about lawyers, but this thing was done. We had insurance. We'd 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 Burr. So young Bill Burr 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 the big sign and they're like, what the hell's going on? They get escorted out and then Bill Burr's like, what the hell's going on?

1:37:15The Napster sign? What do these guys do? It worked like a charm. So this thing was going to go. And it was like within a week of going. And 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 them 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. We're going to go to market and we have a new positioning in this and the other.

1:37:45And 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 crashter.com, walks through it. And the chairman of the board just interrupts him and says, I'm going to interrupt you before you finish, just to let you know we are not doing that. And that was it. 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 - Don't linger.

1:38:23Don'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?

1:38:57Like what if it had happened? What if someone died during it? I'm glad we didn't do it because it could have been bad. Could have been messy. Could have been very messy. What was the, just a 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 happen or maybe because he was on other boards and he didn't want to like wreck NBCs, you know, or I don't know.

1:39:26I 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? Yeah. Whatever these questions might be. I think about questions a lot, not just in podcasting, but in 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.

1:39:57Seems 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 self, you're 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.

1:40:38You know it? this is one of my books that I read. So it is the most perfect one because it's - I gotta 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 on it? 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?

1:41:16And what do 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 others. So 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. It told me what the job was and I said, that's the only job I want to do. But now I think these days people do ask to hop on and do informational interviews, but people will sometimes, even these days, ask you to describe your job to them, which I always thought was a little crazy because 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.

1:41:52But I just feel that constantly with just 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 the creative journey or 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. Looking at the pressure these guys are under to come up with and do a show. I don't know if it ages well, I think, because the humor can be... So please don't judge me if the subject matter is not PC. You can judge me. It's pretty funny. Judge Tim.

1:42:23So that one goes to Tim, because he likes that show too. 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 are so many payoffs. No, but even just the thing of like when, which one of the blonde ones, that Trey? I can't remember. He's like 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 an 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 it, but I don't want to.

1:42:58So 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 board-o-matics, like rips. That's considered a chore. That whole show is a board-o-matic 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 how challenging that can be.

1:43:34And that documents Metallica almost breaking up and working out their shit as they come up with the Black album. And it's amazing. You don't have to like Metallica to love it, to see, are you more of a Lars? Are you more of a James? Who do you side with here? 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. Ah, okay. So he made, after that really painful departure from this night 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, or 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 watched the thing and I'm like, I do not work hard enough.

1:44:32And you see the euphoria and like slap happiness around all of it when you really push yourself. 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. So those things, they inspire me so much that I've just got a bank that 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 Park doc and can you guess my favorite part? Where did I laugh hardest? Well, Tim, I don't want to be bawdy, but would it be the Apple user agreement, human centipede? It was the voiceover session that was related to that.

1:45:08Yes. Oh, there's a lot of good stuff. There's a lot of good stuff. It's crazy stuff. Wow. Hey, Whipple Squeeze this. 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 doing very expensive testing because the lead time and the turnaround time for any type of quantitative feedback on magazine ads, I mean, oh my God, how painful. 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.

1:45:48When 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. 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's block doesn't really exist. You think it's block, but clearly you can.

1:46:23It really is like a game 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 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 start writing sentences and finish them.

1:46:56But I think it's knowing yourself and knowing your interests and then using avenues. So 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 to 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 challenge is fresh, when your brain is first trying to put it together.

1:47:27And the more you get out of that moment, the more you're paid back later. What do you do when you're, say, overwhelmed or unfocused? 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 bend, something you can break. But endurance is important. The ability to not just flame out, burning the candle at both ends. Some people are superhuman and can bank all sorts of crazy work weeks and sleep four hours a night because they happen to have the right genetic profile for that. But what do you do when you're overwhelmed or unfocused?

1:48:04Interesting that you bring that up because 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 it, there's kind of two answers that are different, but I read a book. I know, you know, this book called bird by bird. So good. So an amazing book. And it's going to, 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 have had a good teacher or whatever.

1:48:38So I had to read it. What 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 panic. And he pushed it off until the last minute. Pushed it off to the last minute. He had all semester to do it, something like that. Of course, 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.

1:49:09And then good old dad comes in and goes, just take it bird by bird, but it's a bird by bird. And you're like, wow. So I like 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 Ashe 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 off the hook for anything more than that, you know?

1:49:47Yeah. 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, 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, whatever this kind of fog of anxiety that I used to live in, it just burns it off.

1:50:24And I just am so calm for the rest of the day because I've already been through something tough in the morning. What does it work out? There'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.

1:50:55and I swear in my head, I looked like Alfred Hitchcock or something. 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, bing, 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 founder is 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 Under Armour 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.

1:51:32And so the first time I did it, I stepped out of class after 10 minutes because the warmup 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 it 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?

1:52:01Well, 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 sidelined me for the better part of the last year. And I'm really excited to get back and do 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 going to go crazy.

1:52:41And 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 that 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 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 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 i'm 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 what to and they don't know how to apply those idle cycles man i remember in school for me it's like i needed to draw non-stop in grade school i got very good grades i did 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 chanced upon drawing but a lot of other kids were very smart got into all sorts of trouble got kicked out got suspended and up getting involved drugs because they didn't know how to occupy or consume those cycles, right?

1:54:08And exercise is 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 those are the things I always jot down when I hear what people gift. Two of 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 of 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 audio book.

1:54:45Somebody had recommended it 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 dispelled 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.

1:55:13And 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 of anything. 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've given 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 Coyle. You know, I know the book and I have not read it and it's been on my to read list forever.

1:55:44I 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 10 incredible high-performing cultures that are all different from like IDEO 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 get confirmation bias. You're like, I do that. That's great.

1:56:16Or you're reminded, I need to do that. Or there's things you never thought of. Now, 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? Who do you give that to? I think for leadership, for sure. So if anyone's 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. Obviously, we're all students all the time. So I think there wouldn't be any harm in imagining if you were to lead something or if you were to have total control, what kind of culture you'd want.

1:56:50But definitely if you're in leadership or you're stepping into leadership or if you're stepping into a new role, 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, that you're like, oh, that can make all the difference. And I understand having been on the receiving end of those kinds 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.

1:57:19Okay, I need to read it and I will. Side note, just because I made a mental bookmark to mention this 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 a 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.

1:57:57Trust me, folks, find it on YouTube. It is beyond hilarious. I've seen it. It's so good. It ends with him in the class. He's in the classroom, right? And he kind of - He's with the teacher. And he's, oh yeah. And he's amazing. He's - So fast. Yeah. So fast on his feet. Unbelievable. And another just quick side note, because this is what I do. Arthur Ashe, another legend, 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 McPhee, which is about one tennis match, a single tennis match involving Arthur Ashe, but it becomes this study of the macro through the micro and the structure of the book, the narrative.

1:58:40It is not a long book. It's something like 170 pages. And if you want to see why John McPhee is as famous as he is for being a master of nonfiction, a 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 $100 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$100 on that has had a material impact on you. What is your answer for that? My first Tonehouse class,$34. That was the one.

1:59:20That was the$34 purchase that changed 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, investment of 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 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.

2:00:00The bill, no matter how you do it, is always under$100 with tip. And it's always the best$100 I spend every week. It's the best thing and I'll never change it. And even if I'm down to my last$100, I will go have breakfast with someone. It's a great location. I haven't been in a million years, but that is... So the reason I went, by the way, too, was, 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 their alfresco, their outdoor cafes and things like that. And I would always walk by Balthazar and it was boarded up, boarded up, boarded up.

2:00:39And the owner, Keith, waited until you could do full occupancy indoor 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. 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 going to 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?

2:01:16Because that's a hell of a line. Yeah. It's a good line. Yeah. Right. It worked. It absolutely worked. Do you have any, and these could be ideas that you come up with too, but do you have any way of capturing ideas, whether they're yours or things you come across in the wild where you'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 where I'm 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 going to collect them because now I'm conscious because I see things all the time.

2:01:51And I'm like, and that's, 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 suppose to invoke Glengarry Glen Ross, you must get them to sign on the line that is dotted. You can ask people if they're going to 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 and I was just getting started, cutting my teeth, trying to build this direct response business in sports nutrition, if I bought something or if I got close to buying it, I would save the ad.

2:02:36I would take a video of the infomercial 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 the like, but wait, there's more on, there's an installment. Was it some, was it the timing, right? Like what do I think it was just pure fatigue on my part where my defenses were low at 3am because I'd been watching animal planet and God knows some Ginsu knife thing came up and I would try to figure out, although this was a secondary thing, what had moved me to buy, especially as someone who is not stingy, but had a really tight budget for most things.

2:03:15I no longer do that, but... What did 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 is thoughts trapped on paper. If you're trying to figure something out by sitting there and staring off into space and thinking, sometimes it works. Often it doesn't because it's too ephemeral, right? These bits and pieces, the floats and jetsam, it's just like being thrown out of the boat in the Grand Canyon 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?

2:04:01If you have high energy states. 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 Gary, Glenn Ross, which is 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?

2:04:42Like interested? Are you interested? The AIDA, 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 did I just stop? And I would tear it out of the magazine. It might even be at like a dentist's office or something. If I had 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 publicly.

2:05:14I 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 eye isn'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 unscented 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. Their branding, if you look at the bottle, it's like size two font with like a million words covering the label.

2:05:50I think I know that was super old timey. Is that the... It's not, there may be some old timey aspect, but it's very small font. It's kind of like Unabomber, 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, oh, okay, if you look at the Volkswagen ads, if you look at some of the old classics.

2:06:25Very reductive. Reductive. You're like, okay, 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.

2:06:58I couldn't afford to hire an 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, and I mean, these are the power of art direction, To pull you into a world, to show you something that's interesting or attractive is incredible. And it still feels like art. 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 sell you. Someone I used to work with, one of my mentors, Rob Schwartz, used to be the chief creative officer at TBWA in Los Angeles back in the day.

2:07:38He has a saying that I repeat to everyone, which is clients buy 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 buy words and consumers like me buy 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 who's listening to this, should make a deliberate study of words for defensive purposes.

2:08:22Because 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'm not, if I say, and this is cliche, but like, don't think of a pink elephant, pink elephant, pink elephant, right? And it's like, your mind is very reactive in a lot of respects. So I feel like the study of words is the study of thoughts and the malleability of thoughts, which then leads to the malleability of behavior.

2:09:00I 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 i 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 hire 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.

2:09:43I have very mixed feelings about it from an ethical perspective. Nobody gets heard. He has many more. Miracle, I think, is another one which is very well done. The point of all this is part of my fascination with the Whipple 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 scientists and the theoreticians, right? That's true in exercise where it's like the coaches, they're going to get a lot wrong. 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.

2:10:25So 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, and I'm blanking on his first name, but Luntz 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 ago, it was recommended to me by a very famous entrepreneur. Neither of us would say we have much in common politically with this guy at all. But he came up with, as one example, the death tax instead of inheritance tax, the death tax.

2:11:03And just these a handful of rebrands that became almost impossible to overturn in the zeitgeist. You should study that. There's a goldmine there if you study that kind of thing. So you asked what I'd learn. I mean, I continue to learn. I continue to study these things. And maybe I'm a weirdo, 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. And by the way, you're going to have to get a lot better at defense because everything's going to get sharper. About to get so much more overwhelming, so much more personalized.

2:11:42The number of pitches that I I get the number of pitches my friends get now just in the last few months where intro paragraphs are clearly crafted using AI. It's going to take away my email writing gift. I think it'll take a while. It'll take a while because you can still pretty easily discern. But you're going to 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?

2:12:15Because 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. Yes. I already want to watch this ad. I like it. And then there are certain, eventually real world considerations like budget, like legal. And I'm wondering if there are examples of overriding these constraints where it's worked out, or at what point you kind of bring things back to earth. Because if you do it too early, it would seem like you - Stifles it. Exactly.

2:12:51You 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$10 million idea for a$1 million 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.

2:13:24But sorry, I'm quoting everyone and their mother, but 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 - It's a great line. 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 coffers, 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.

2:13:57And 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 bases first or else, yeah, they'll be pissed at you. TBS is funniest out of the year. Yep. Could you give us some context on this prompt? It's like you're in my head, Tim, because you've just connected it and maybe you already know where it's going. But my creative partner when I was at BBDO was a guy named Dan Lucy. And he and I. He's my best friend. And for eight years, I spent more time with him than I spent with my wife, sharing an office and finishing each other's sentences and fighting all the time too.

2:14:34And we had a new client in Foot Locker and their aspiration was to not be this kind of transactional house of brands, but for holding the Foot Locker 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 worked together on Foot Locker for about five or six years. And we created an ongoing campaign where we got celebrities and athletes to make fun of themselves and kind of play it close to the bone. So part of this is we had a great client, a guy named Jed Berger, who he didn't come up from traditional marketing.

2:15:06He'd come from Modell's, which is an East Coast sports store. I know Modell's. You know Modell's. We all know Modell's. He also founded a basketball magazine called Dime Magazine. He had other interests besides just marketing. So he 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 money for a cameo in an ad, and instead we came up with this cockamamie idea that for this one week, Foot Locker was putting out the very best shoes.

2:15:41They were just going to stack it one day after another, and the client had called it the week of greatness. And so we had written an ad that said, basically what's happening at Foot Locker 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 and Evander Holyfield is there with a box and he's returns the, Mike Tyson returns the piece of the ear that he bit off of Evander. So already we're showing that to the rest of the team at BBDO and they're like, that's never going to happen.

2:16:18And then we're like, don't worry, it keeps going. 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 going to happen. And then, and they're like, but wait, there's more because Brett Favre would refuse to retire. So Brett Favre 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-eaten and says, it's time to stop. So one out of the other, everyone said that you can't bring this to them because this is going to cost a bajillion dollars.

2:16:49They're never going to do it. They asked us for something simple, and you've given something incredibly complicated. And this is, I would say, kind of halfway through my journey. And there's probably a period, usually around the halfway point, where you're maybe a little more arrogant than you are later and in the beginning. And so Dan and I just went, nah, we're going to 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 going to tank this whole thing, and I'm not going to 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 and principle.

2:17:26And we presented it to this guy, Jed, and he went, I fucking love it, let's do it. So you've got to take your chances. There's no shame in it. And we would have had the, and he knew, and Jed knew we would have had the back. We can write him a cheap ad, but we have a great one. And so he went to bat for it and he went and he negotiated, our client negotiated with all those athletes and people on little sides. story, which for any sports nerds will be really fun, is we filmed the Brett Favre segment in Hattiesburg, 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.

2:18:00And he famously had, you know, hung on to things in Green Bay and kind of, as the story goes, prevented a young Aaron Rodgers from ascending and taking the starting quarterback spot year after year. And so 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 Favre in between shots. And I saw him open his fantasy football on his phone. And Aaron Rodgers 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 Bleacher Report and tell them this?

2:18:37People, sports fans, would 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. Why that? What if it's something that someone really wants to know about and then we didn't do it? Then maybe we do a round two. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. So the time Kanye tried to get you fired. Yeah. Okay. We're not going to do that. Although I really do at some point want to talk about that because just the limited context that I have makes it seem really hilarious. It was pretty good. Okay. Okay. Actually, I'll let you choose. You know what?

2:19:12This is going to be not dealer's choice. This will be your choice. And gambler's choice. So that's gambler's 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 in it, 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 in like a Nike ad or in a scene from the movie Murderball, which is a movie that features wheelchair basketball.

2:19:50You're just in a really intense game of wheelchair basketball and you get seduced into it. You follow the team down one end of the court to the other and you think it's all about performance or drive or what these guys are doing. and as the game resolves, the surprise is that nine out of the ten guys get up out of their chairs to leave the gymnasium and then one friend is still in the chair and you understand that this group of friends all participated in wheelchair basketball so that they could play with their friend who's in a wheelchair. The way we got to that, so the line we had was made of more for Guinness and 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 wants to feel like they're of more substance or that there's something more substantial in that moment would choose.

2:20:35So 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 was right around the Foot Locker time where we were maybe a little more rambunctious and a little fighty. And we had a client that also was a little rambunctious and fighty.

2:21:10And I think early on, for whatever reason, I think there was like a sense of distrust that wasn't solved when we were 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 can't really win these fights.

2:21:41You'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.

2:22:12So 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 liked. The set of words had to be rewritten because it wasn't right. And we were so down and we were so miserable and sad that when it got released, the three of us said, we're going to take our names off it because it's garbage. Because maybe of our egos, the 30 battles we lost along the way, that must have meant it was crap. 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.

2:22:43And 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. 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. Or I pray I have people around that would do that for me. But we missed the whole point because we were so caught up in the 30 things we lost.

2:23:12We 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 constant reminder to 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. Were you 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 mattered don't matter. So maybe we need to be a little more amenable to feedback and suggestion, you know?

2:23:50Yeah, totally. But it was good. It was a work lesson and 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 the 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.

2:24:22See what's possible. See what's possible. What would that mean to you if it were 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 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.

2:24:54I love it. Chris, we were whining to a close. Is there anything else that you would like to, well, first of all, any websites, places to point people to that 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.

2:25:27Today, 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 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 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.

2:26:09And 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. Yeah, and you also get to collaborate, right? It's a big one. I mean, a lot of people out there, I think, have lost sight of the possibility of collaborating in 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 who are creators independently is you can end up being or feeling very isolated and very lonely.

2:26:48And one of my top priorities, in fact, I just finished an offsite recently for my whole team, was 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.

2:27:27That'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 subscribe 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.

2:28:08It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that 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.com slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog.com slash Friday.

2:28:44Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application.

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