Amazon’s Chief Creative Officer on the power of emotional advertising, distinctive brand assets and delivering at speed

0:28Welcome back everybody to Uncensored CMO. So I'm catching up in this episode with the Chief Creative Officer, Joe Shoesmith, who not only runs Amazon's own creative team, but also their network of agencies around the world, delivering both in-house and externally a consistent level of great creativity. I want to find out what is it like being in charge of creative at Amazon, particularly as Jeff Bezos is famous for saying that advertising is the tax you pay on an unremarkable product. So of course I had to ask her about that too. Joe is fantastic. She's got loads of experience. She's really passionate about what she does and she's got lots of good advice to give.

1:01Here it is. Jo, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Now, I suppose I've got to ask you, how does a girl from rural Australia end up at the biggest e-commerce platform in the world here in LA? That must be quite a journey to get here. How did it happen? It's a very good question. Love is probably the answer. I came with my partner many years ago and he's American. We met in Australia and we both worked at Leah Burnett and I got an opportunity to move from the Melbourne office to the mothership in Chicago. Wow, that's exciting. Yeah, 18 years ago this week, actually. Is it this week? Wow, congratulations.

1:34Very impressive. How does rural Australia compare to kind of buzzing LA? What are the differences? You know, I think people are people anywhere. I think for me, growing up in such an isolated country town makes you inevitably really curious about what else is out there. And so I was very drawn to like people, I, you know, just a bigger picture than what I'd grown up with. And I get to meet all different types of people. Yeah. That sounds a lot of fun. And you've worked a lot, obviously, in agencies, creative agencies, Leo Burnett particularly. And now you've come client side. How does it compare?

2:07Now you've sort of jumped the proverbial fence, so to speak. I actually love it. I mean, it was something I think a lot of agency creatives are really curious about doing. But finding the right role at the right time when you feel like you're ready to take on that challenge. And for me, Amazon was such an amazing opportunity to get a chance to just be inside that company and see how it works. And it's been, in a funny way, like being in an agency in that I work on so many different brands within Amazon. I mean, my job is to unify those brands, but it can be one day it's Prime, the next day it's Alexa, the next day we're working on brand reputation.

2:45So, yeah, it's a lot of different types of businesses to try and unify. And what advice would you give to agencies now that you've kind of seen it from the client side perspective? Is there any top tips you'd give to agencies listening? Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I think now it was so uncomfortable for me to be on the other side of pitch tables for the longest time. Like just to sit in that seat and hear the conversation that goes on sometimes when you're hearing from the agency. I think there were a few cringe moments for me. I remember back to times where words were put in my mouth as a creative that didn't feel comfortable.

3:17And you can kind of tell when the creatives have been scripted versus when they're just speaking from their heart. And so my advice would be let the creatives be the creatives and not try and make them drop specific business words so that they're saying the right thing in the room because you can kind of tell. And I also think don't assume in a few week pitch process that you know more about the business than the people on the other side of the table. And I think I probably did that a bit myself where I came in with a lot of assumptions about how it works. And, you know, I think one of the things we often get is people wanting to do stuff to the boxes.

3:54And there's such operational complexity to some of those things. And I know I would have come in with an idea to do something crazy to the box that would have had, would have shut down operations. So I think ask questions and don't assume too much business fluency, but be bold and come in with ideas that I think would surprise the people on the other side of the table. I love that advice about the boxes because you're so right. So much of the job as a senior marketer in a business is quite operational, isn't it? And understanding how the business makes money and how it works and operates. And the communication can often be an easy, well, not an easy thing.

4:28I know it's not an easy thing to do, but can often not, you know, address the business aspect of what you're trying to do. And that's any agency I think that's ever presented to me and really understood how the business works is suddenly like, right, this is going to work. So it's a big thing. Now, I must, of course, it'd be rude of me not to quote Jeff Bezos, of course, as we're talking about advertising. His famous quote, you must get this all the time. So I apologise. but his old quote, advertising is the tax you pay for having an unremarkable product. Has he officially kind of recanted that or changed his mind?

5:01No, I mean, I actually think he was right. You can't sell a bad product. So you do, and I think about even from my agency days, trying to make something sell that was fundamentally a flawed experience for customers is never going to work. So I think starting at the, we have to create a good product, we have to make a good experience, and being inside those rooms to have those conversations from the very beginning of something being stood up is amazing. And, yes, advertising is how you build love and affinity and memories and recognition, but I do think he's right in that if you don't start with something good.

5:37Yeah, no, he's absolutely right. And, of course, Scott Galloway recently as well said the CMO will be dead if you've not understood how innovation works, understood, you know, know what what what drives business and and all that kind of thing as well so that's another good another good point um so talk to me about um your role within amazon as chief creative officer it sounds really exciting but describe it for me and how it works it is i mean it's a very we're a very collaborative team so we sit there's a lot of high judgment and leaders that kind of work together and and creativity doesn't just live in the creative department i think i and much like i liked working like that when I was agency side is we have really smart strategy leads we have really smart CMO and we're we kind of make collective decisions together um I think as I said any day can be different there's so many different things we're always building something new and we're always I think one of the things that's really amazing is how quickly we can pivot and I think that was that it was one of the things that I think people say that about the agency model is it's been hard at times to like change the model i think we are able to make a decision and move on it really fast um because of the you think about how operational how we operationalize things we can operationalize change really quickly so to sit in those seats and see us looking to customers and looking to what's going on in the world and being able to change direction to do the right thing for the business is pretty exciting yeah because actually you're right because amazon is a huge operation and yet famous for delivering something to your door in hours if you want it.

7:08So I suppose you've been able to crack scale and agility at the same time. And does that play out when you're talking about creative as well? Yeah. Have you got the ability to move fast? Absolutely. And I think a lot of the creatives I've brought in house are the creatives who are really good at thinking on their feet and are really comfortable with pivots and are okay with the idea of this is not the last good idea I'm going to have, like know that they can start again, which is a big, I think that's always the big challenge with creativity is being able to move on sometimes from your idea, knowing that we're all headed in a different direction and we all need to go there for all the right smart reasons.

7:41Now, one thing that strikes me looking at the data on your performance using the system OneData is you've done incredibly successful, particularly emotional advertising. And I suppose, you know, anyone looking at the business would assume that you're very rational and data led and, you know, platform business. Why is it that the business has become particularly kind of engaged in kind of emotional brand building advertising? I think it definitely has been a shift over the last few years. I literally joined as the world shut down with COVID, through COVID. And so our story started to change as the world was changing.

8:17And I think about the first big emotional story we told was the show must go on, the ballerina holiday spot, which really touched on how people were feeling and what was going on in the world. And when you think of us being a customer-centric company, we're telling the stories of the people that buy our products. And so it just kind of makes sense. And I think it's part of our journey. When you think about how old we are as a brand, we're not a Coca-Cola. We're like, we're young. We're an infant when you think about it that way. And so the inevitable stage we're at is where, you know, people want to hear our story and they want to know what we believe and who we are and they want to see their stories reflected back at them.

8:56Yeah, no, the story is incredible. And as I said, looking at system one data, you often scored at the very, very top of our five star system. And in fact, I think you've won two Christmases in a row, if I remember rightly, both in the US and the UK, which is incredible. One of the ones I know stuck in my mind a lot, actually, was the one from a couple of years ago, Smiling Parcels, where you had that beautiful story of the delivery driver getting all the parcels in time just before holiday, you know, the holiday break. And actually, there's something quite powerful as well about the Smiling Parcel device as well.

9:27That was quite, you know, because it made it instantly recognizable. So how are the distinctive assets? What's the role that they play in the creative as well? We're really thoughtful about it. It's very intentional. or we have guidelines around like making sure that we show that part of the experience. It's, I mean, we have this box that's so universally recognized and has a smile on it. I mean, who wouldn't want to play with that, right? We're a brand that's logo is a smile. And to have that box and to have that equity and with all the studies that were done, it's off the charts, the recognition for that.

9:59And I think it's even, we talk about what you can own as a brand and color is actually really hard to own. There are very few brands that own a color, but to have such a specific, such an iconic item that's connected to our brand that we can weave into storytelling and gives us that immediate brand attribution is a huge asset. Yeah. And it runs across products as well, doesn't it? Because every time you see that Amazon Prime or on Alexa or, you know, on the boxes, it's everywhere, isn't it? It just gets that instant brand recognition. I always think a cardboard is one of our colors. Yeah. In a way.

10:29People recognize us for cardboard. The app is cardboard as well. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. Another thing that struck me as well about your advertising is how inclusive it is as well. I mean, one of my personal favorites is the priest and imam work that you did, which is incredible. It's all about storytelling, but also very rich in diversity, in telling very different people's stories, but bringing them together. I thought that was an astonishing bit of work. Yeah, and it's finding the right story. It's not about, I think, not about being provocative for provocative's sake and not just jumping in on every conversation, making sure there are certain conversations that we have permission.

11:03to step into. And I think it's not, it's how that, that was a human story, such a lovely human story. And there was a role for, we had a role in it, but we weren't taking too much credit for it. So being very thoughtful about what our role within the stories is how we're an enabler of those relationships and of those wins for customers. Yeah. And of course, can't forget the grandmas at Christmas as well in your UK spot was amazing. I mean, I think that one, the system one charts as well. Yeah. My mum loved it. It was one of my tests. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would win the mum test, wouldn't it? I mean, who can't imagine their grands sledging down a hill?

11:39Interesting one, the generational test. I think it's interesting, the debates around. We don't see a lot of women of that age acting recklessly, which is exactly the kind of woman I want to grow up to be, which is very spirited. But what we saw in the comments was young women sending notes to their girlfriend saying, I want that to be me. And then a slightly the older women saying, oh, I hope my mum, I want to do that with my mum. And then older women saying, I want to do that with my girlfriend. So it really struck a chord of women depicted in a way that we're probably more used to seeing men being reckless when it comes to storytelling.

12:13Women who felt real, they didn't feel like they were perfect and Botoxed within and into their life. So their faces were real, there was texture to them. And it did, it spoke on so many levels. It was a real universal human truth, wasn't it? And I think I immediately saw my gran there, or people I know. That's right. Men saw a lot in it as well. They were like, that's my mum. It just gave you hope that there is chapter and just reminded you of the people that are important and those long relationships. The moment that gets me off a clemped is when the flashback happens and you're in that moment of them when they were young and this sense of a shared experience that can last for that long is lovely.

12:51And a Beatles track, no less. Yes, I know. Music was brilliant. I mean, well, that's what I think your work does so well is it just lands all the things that makes advertising emotive, makes it effective in terms of music and story and characters. All those things have beautifully done. But let's go back to the brief then. So you must get a lot of briefs passing through your desk. So what's your advice on how to write a really good brief that's going to get you to some of the work that we've been talking about? I have really good strategists, really smart people writing strategy. We had a much smaller team.

13:21We've been building a really good bench in-house of great strategic thinkers that can rethink the briefing formats and also comms planning so that we know what every piece is supposed to do because I think that can be a bit of a mistake where we try and burden. The TV spot has to do everything. And we're very clear now about a full channel strategy and making sure that we're telling the right stories in the right places. And those have been tools that we've built over the last few years that have been really helpful. And how do you, when it comes to judging the work as well, because you must have to make a lot of decisions on what gets made.

13:55How do you approach that? We use a lot of tenants. As you know, that's a bit of an Amazon thing. And so when I joined, and being from agency side, I participated in like the Mullen Lowe Creative Council and the Leo Burnett GPC, and I wanted to create something like that internally. So we have something called the BAR, which is an acronym, of course, for the brief, the action, and the result. And we bring people from the globe together. and in those sessions we have written and then crafted and tweaked a set of tenants that really help inform creative decision making so that so that it can scale because a lot of people that are making creative decisions aren't creatives as well as you can imagine in some of our emerging locales they might have a smaller team and how do we all get on the same page about what good is and how to pick the idea and so that's been a really good scaling tool for like creative judgment and just to unify our point of view yeah and can you break that down a little bit more in terms of some of the things that form that yeah i mean i think i've used one in i mean customer customers first i keep it true which is interesting because originally that tenant was keep it real and everyone started thinking all of the it affected how they crafted the footage because everything was starting to look raw and real and underproduced but actually it was about find a truth keep the idea true don't make something up um join the conversation when you have something to say right don't just jump into a topic just because it's trending then And for us, it's especially important to make sure that we're really thinking about what conversations make sense for us to join.

15:22Craft is king. And we share these with our agencies too because I think it's really important for the agency to see we've all internally agreed this is what good looks like for us. And when you're thinking about the idea, think about does it pass the sniff test of some of these. And some of them relate to the brief. Some of them relate to the craft of the work. They have bigger impact on different parts of the process. Now, one of the advantages you've got as Amazon is you've got a very talented in-house created team and you work with a lot of the world's best agency partners. What are the benefits of having your own created team in-house?

15:56Because it's one of those hot topics, isn't it? Everyone's got an opinion about. Should you have your own team or should you outsource? And I remember being agency side and that tension of like the in-house teams joining the. And again, it's one of those things I look back on and go, oh, my God, was I awful in that moment. But, you know, I think there's so much benefit to sitting inside the walls and being able to make creative choices based on more information, right? You're closer to the business problem and you understand it and you know who to call if you've got a question. And so being inside and I've built a team of our internal team are all people who are one liar.

16:29And so they're great high bar creatives. I'm not delineating certain work goes to agencies, certain work goes internally with a lot of work to go around. And so I have an internal team that do really high bar creative work. And then it's really important that we have agencies to give us that fresh outside perspective. And they should, they all click together. They're extensions of the same team. And the agencies that are really successful with us are the ones that are really comfortable with that kind of co-creation model. I think about when we did like the Michael B. Jordan Super Bowl ad, we worked with Lucky Generals to do the spot.

17:01And then the internal team did a whole social activation with Kevin Hart was annoyed that he hadn't been chosen as the body of Elector. Oh, fast clever. And then he's ribbing Michael B. Jordan. And so putting those two things together, and then another team at Amazon had a movie coming out with Michael B. So, so much of my job is getting everyone to figure out how to work together in the way that's really productive, which when you're in an agency, it's probably the equivalent of a global pitch where you have the agency from Italy or the agency from Australia and the multicultural agency, and you have to sit as the creative leader at the centre of that and make everyone feel heard and that they're contributing and that their point of view is really valued.

17:39Now that's quite a task, isn't it? Yeah. What's the secret to getting all... It's lots of plates. And also we're talking about, you know, people with, you know, strong opinions, you know, very motivated, may have high egos as well. How do you manage all those people to get to the right result? Yeah, I mean, I'd be lying if I said there aren't tricky moments with everyone. But I think any room full of people that come from an art and commerce perspective and trying to get, that's a big part of the job. It's kind of what I love about it too. It's like, not that it's, I'm trying to think of the right word.

18:09So much of it is just helping everyone figure out each other's super strengths and like reminding people, this is why we're here. Big picture. Like, let's just take a step up and like, let's forget, we talk a lot about it's don't write your narrative, write the narrative. And remember that it's not just about your point of view and taking a step up from that. And we have a lot of really great agency relationships where we've recently done a lot of work on Prime with Widen and Kennedy in London. And that work has been very much a co-creation model and it's been terrific. You've got an amazing roster as well.

18:41It's incredible. So you just tap into some amazing talent out there as well as obviously, you know, employing your own. And also another related question is that how do you manage the sort of global plan versus the local plan? Because there must be some, well, maybe there's not, but is there tension between what the local markets want to do and what you might decide to do globally? It's interesting. I think my background, I really benefit from having sat in Melbourne, getting the global work and being told just to run it and being the person that's going, no one's going to like that ad that doesn't talk to the Australian sense of humor or sensibility, but just being told to run it.

19:14And so I can imagine that seat, but I'm now sitting in the US so I can think about what it's like to have that perspective and how do we give, how do we think about freedom within a framework? How do we give rules, but still allow things to feel really local and I get to and having that benefit of working you know APAC and understanding India and Europe and yeah it's been it's been really helpful. Now you talked about Michael B. Jordan's spot last year I must ask you as well what's it like making a Super Bowl ad does it bring extra pressure you know or is it just? It does but I think I think with those high I mean high risk in that there are a lot of eyeballs decisions we're really good at simplifying the decision makers and it's not a hundred people in a room.

19:57I think we've gotten to a place where we make sure that there's high judgment involved in that. We're not testing it to within an inch of its life. And I think that really shows in the work, in the simplicity of the ideas, in the universal humor of it. I think that between even last year's Saving Soil where we stepped away from celebrity, we really tried to make sure that it still had a really simple human story at the heart of it and i think i think that just comes from judgment of lots of smart people in the room together it does i think you call that absolutely right actually because i mean we've been testing um every super lab for the last five years actually one of the things that uh is very true is that simple stories well told always win it's like everyone's trying to engineer so much into it you know too many cultural references celebrity after celebrity well and we paid this much for this person so they must have this much time on air and so you end up with an extra shot at the end that makes no sense like yeah yeah I agree I think but I also think that we now have made a lot of work and know the ingredients as well so like you'll see the purchase moment the box moment like there's there's patterns that appear in everything and you're right it's all centered around the product whether it's a story about Alexa losing her voice or whether it's a story about a new body of Alexa it's very you're not going to forget what the brand in is in it no So actually, we looked at the data at, well, first thing we noticed is we divided up all the Super Bowl data for the last five years into celebrity-led ideas and non-celebrity-led ideas.

21:25Zero difference in the score. Now, so it really comes down to how you use them. Now, if you use them authentically to tell the story, then you can kind of do well. But celebrity itself, you know, given I think about 60 % of our ads have got celebrities in at the Super Bowl. So it's kind of like this, you know, that's now standard. Yeah, and it's a shame. It is, isn't it? But the other thing I think you've done really well is we call them fluent devices, system one, which is kind of familiar assets to your brand, so to speak. And that's what you do well, whether it's Alexa or the parcels. You don't have to shout very loudly that it's you and people just get it.

21:57And we found, I think, there's a whole star rating difference between those that had fluent devices like M &M's characters or the Clydesdales versus those that don't. You know, it makes a massive difference. Yeah, no, it's right. I feel really lucky that we have those assets. But then there's a lot of discipline around where they come up, how long they're up, making sure that they register for sure. Yeah. I must ask you as well, what do you think of Timu then? Because obviously a competitor of yours. Yeah, they went big in the Super Bowl this year. They went big, didn't they? Yeah. I thought I'd re-round or something.

22:28In the first ad break, I'm like, oh, there they are. Yeah. And the next, I'm like, hang on a minute. Did I jump backwards? Like how often does a new entry? Hang on a minute. Have I just hit re-wound or something? Yeah. It was incredible, wasn't it? It was. Whenever a brand shows up multiple times in the game, you're like, okay. Yeah. Now, I must ask you about innovation as well because, obviously, Amazon's famous for its kind of culture of innovation and scale. How does that come to life in the business? I mean, you're definitely surrounded by – I think someone said to me, you should take the job where you're the dumbest person in the room.

22:59I often feel like that. I often feel like that. Can I apply? Can I apply straight away? I'll be there. I think that is a big part of the decision I made to come to Amazon because I met Simon Morris and Claudine Cheever and Neil Lindsay and all these people that were really, really smart and had business fluency and creative fluency. And it's amazing to meet people who can kind of left brain, right brain that way. And creativity is kind of everywhere because to invent a new product, to build a new piece of tech, you have to be really creative. Jeff's a really creative person, right? Being an entrepreneur and having the foresight to build the business that he built.

23:33um is amazing but it also you know I think about I talked about the boxes one of the more exciting projects I've loved working on is a project we call chariot which is taking an observation we made that we have the world's largest out-of-home network driving on the streets and at your doorstep so the boxes and the vans is a canvas to do to work with and so in the last couple of years we've started bringing our personality to those surfaces and gotten really great response so being able to think about, okay, what are the opportunities? What are the canvases we can use? And not in a way that, again, doesn't slow down the operations of the business, but that's really inventive and it gives us a whole new space to work with.

24:13Yeah. And how do you take those ideas and make them happen in a business of your size? I mean, as I was talking about earlier, you've obviously perfected the art of getting lots of things to the customer very quickly, which is your kind of Jedi, you know, master skill, isn't it? But how do you then deliver new ideas within the business yourself? Yeah, it takes lots of conversations with lots of different people who have lots of different backgrounds and expertise. So you're talking to the fleet people to do something on a vehicle or on a box. So it's interesting in that I think it forces a way of talking about ideas that everyone can understand, which is a really good skill to have because I think often we can talk about ideas in a lofty way that just doesn't feel plain spoken enough.

24:52And I think if I think about what I've learned, one of the biggest things I've learned is how to talk to an idea in a way that's super relatable to anyone within the organization. And then know that it doesn't, the idea is only a tiny part of actually making it happen. There's so many amazing people that operationalize and deploy that work for it to even see the light of day. There's definitely a skill, isn't there? It's something I've tried to work on quite hard is how do you take something complex and simplify it in a way that everybody can get it and buy into it and understand it? And there's definitely an art to that, isn't there?

25:26It's maybe better at reviewing ideas because I'm always thinking about how do I simplify, simplify. And I'm doing that every day, talking to teams, going, how do I make sure that this person who's an engineer or works in the fleet understands why we're making the kind of choices that we're making? Yeah, that's true, actually, because I think sometimes as marketers, we forget that actually we've got to market within the organization as well. It's one thing marketing outside, but nothing will happen unless we can market our own, you know, our own ideas internally. Yeah, yeah. What would be your top tips for doing that?