How creativity transformed Australia’s No.1 Telecom’s brand - Brent Smart

26:05And then from there, we've just kept embracing different ways of telling the story. So our brand ad is an animated spot about a guy going on a walk. And it's just, you know, again, there's no mobile phone in there. There's no sort of rational messaging about our network. It's all based on emotion and all based on feeling. And that's been a real hallmark of all the work we've done. Very emotionally driven, very different personality for a big corporate telco. Humor has been a big part of what we've done. And yeah, it has. It's this really changed how people feel about the brand you sort of i wouldn't go i wouldn't go so far as to say that they they they all like us yet but they they certainly find us harder not to like yeah i mean one hallmark of uh making people feel something is when they start to mimic you and i have to say i i did get this i went down a rabbit hole last night looking at tiktoks yeah of telstra walks yeah if anyone is not in australia or seen it just just explain it It's very funny and it's got very viral, hasn't it?

27:09It's incredibly so. And, you know, it's one of those things where you, I'd love to sit here and go, I'm a genius. I knew it would go viral. You know, you always get surprised by these things. And so, yeah, so we created a brand ad and in the ad we have a character who's walking through the world and he has a little bird on his shoulder and basically it's about their partnership. The spot's actually called Duet. and they're walking through the world and he's just, you know, he's optimistic, he's confident, he doesn't have a worry in the world. And as he walks, as they walk together, they're whistling islands in the stream, very famous duet, back and forth to each other.

27:50And it's really the whole thing's just a metaphor for partnership because that's what we ultimately are about as a telco. It's about how we partner with our customers. But the way the guy walks is quite distinct. And so when we were first working with Smith & Folks, a fantastic UK-based animation company, we spent a lot of time on how should this character walk? How do we really nail this optimism and confidence and sort of relaxed confidence that the guy's got? And we molded it on a young Mick Jagger. Oh, is that where it's from? Yeah. And we call him Mick, the character in our ad now, because he's based on Mick Jagger.

28:22And that sort of incredibly sort of loose limbs. It's very laid back, flowing. Yeah. Yeah, so it was based on a young Mick Jagger, and we spent a lot of time working out. Mick's like Jagger. Exactly right. And we spent a lot of time sort of working out exactly how this sort of character should walk. So we launched the spot, and it got an initial reaction, but not in a good way. So we're a huge sponsor of both the AFL and NRL, our two big footy codes in Australia. And in the NRL, the rugby league, we get a lot of spots. And on the average weekend, you'd see the spot quite a lot. and this sort of very unusual fan reaction.

29:03So because the spot is very sort of happy and positive and when fans' teams were losing and our spot would come on, they would get really annoyed. My team's losing by 20 points. I've got to watch this happy guy. And you've got this happy guy. Yeah. And they'd get this really sort of intense reaction, right? And so we got all these, a whole bunch of rugby fan videos, basically, on TikTok of them basically, fuck you, Telstra. Like, you know, my team's losing. I have to watch your ad. It was a real, like, I'm thinking, Jesus. And so the sentiment wasn't looking good. I got the call from corporate comms saying, you know, God, the sentiment's not great on social media.

29:44It's a bit negative. And we're sort of sitting there going, this makes no sense. Like, this is sort of crazy. Like we're trying to actually, in a time when the world feels anything but optimistic, we're trying to be, you know, positive optimistic. Anyway, then it suddenly turned because then people started, to your point, imitating the walk. Rugby fans started imitating the walk and doing the walk themselves. And then more people did it and more people did it. It started becoming this thing. And we saw the sentiment start really turning. And now there were hundreds of videos of people imitating.

30:15I mean, how amazing that people have taken their time out of their busy lives, young people on TikTok, to imitate the walk from a telco ad. I was like, this is incredible. And it was getting more and more traction. So then the question to any marketer is, how do we amplify this, right? And I think it's super tempting to, well, let's make our version. Let's put ads into TikTok. But we thought, no, no, this is something that the fans own. This is happening in their community. Let's just sort of, let's not mess this up by being a heavy-handed telco brand. But what we did do was we waited until the State of Origin, which is the biggest rugby game in Australia.

30:50It was a State of Origin decider, game three. It was a big deal. And we have the first spot when the first try scored. It's the best spot you can buy on Australian television. And instead of running our usual animated, beautifully crafted brand ad, we decided let's run a version of all the fans on TikTok doing the walk. And we'll edit it together in a way where it looks like one continuous walk. and we'll just celebrate the fans and the way they're playing with our brand. And we won't PR it. We won't make a big deal. We'll just drop it. We'll just run it. And when we did that, then it really took off.

31:24And we saw it became a celebration. So in a rugby league game, a player did a try. He did the walk. Jack Ginevan, a very famous AFL player, he did the celebration after he scored a goal. A girl did the Telstra walk on the North Korean border. What? North Korean border? On the North Korean board, she filmed herself doing the Telstra walk. Wow. So now we're up to 30 million views on TikTok, something like 5 ,000 different videos of people doing the walk. It's become this huge cultural thing. I mean, 30 million views on TikTok for a telco is – we're not a Kardashian, right? We're a telco. It's pretty crazy.

32:02And it just had this incredible organic cultural kind of impact. And the biggest brand. Well, all the ones I saw just said hashtag Telstra walk as well. Yeah. So that's the common reference for that walk. Absolutely. And at one stage, when it was at its absolute peak on TikTok, we had 90 % of all searches for telco on the TikTok platform with Telstra, which is like, wow, unreal. Right. So, yeah. So it's had an incredible, incredible impact. And that is relevant, actually, because TikTok, it might be the second or third most used platform for search. Absolutely. That's how young kids search. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

32:37Exactly. My daughters will search for things on TikTok. It's become their search engine. Yeah, that's right. And like any big incumbent market leading telco, our market share is much stronger with, and also with the most expensive telco in the market. So our market share is much stronger with mums and dads than it is with younger customers. So to see this sort of traction with young kids on, and my favorite moment was I was watching my son play soccer under 12s and his mate scored a goal and did the Telstra Walk celebration. I was like, oh, wow, this is, I've made it, I've made it. Were you looking around to see everyone like, make sure everyone's clocked it?

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34:26Yeah, absolutely. And the donkey ad, so yeah, I mean, silly idea, a donkey eats a mobile phone. There's a famous Christmas song playing when he eats it. And so therefore, every time that donkey opens his mouth, he's singing the famous Christmas song, becomes the famous singing donkey. It's kind of a ridiculous idea. But what's interesting is that one, Aleffi, which is one of my favorite ambitions. So Aleffi is the same piece of work that wins a lion and an effie, which is really, really hard to do. Small over there, actually. Very small and hard to do. So, yeah, that one, it picked up a line at Cannes last year, but also picked up at RFIs.

34:58So, because that's, you know, Christmas, that's the pressure moment for any telco marketer because we're a retail category really, right? And obviously, you know, gifting, people buy a lot of phones at Christmas time. So that Black Friday through to Christmas period, we just, you just have to win. Like, it's so important. And again, we took a bit of a different tack because most telcos are very aggressive with their sort of offers and, you know, promos and things around Christmas. We decide, no, no, we're going to do the John Lewis style, big emotional Christmas ad and really sort of try and win that mental availability game.

35:32And, you know, it's totally worked really well for us. We've had a huge standout in the category. It's driven fantastic commercial results. But here's the fact I like the most. So we've got a pretty sophisticated market mix model that we built to really sort of prove effectiveness. What I love is I had a look at our results from Christmas just gone. and what we're seeing is at a time when it's the most intense time for like here's a retail offer, here's a call to action. You've got most people in market. We saw that half of our sales came from our retail and performance activity. The other half came from brand work that we'd run four plus months earlier.

36:12So all the brand work that we're doing, not only is it working throughout the whole year, it's actually working the most intense retail period as well and drive about half of our sales during that sort of period. So, you know, I come back to 60-40, the power of brand, like it really does build that future demand. And then when people are in market, you're able to convert it. I think people forget that even in a short space of a number of weeks, creativity compounds even in the short term. I mean, whenever we used to, I mean, System 1 would always pre-test things, right? We're testing how people react before they've seen it.

36:46Very occasionally, we would do another pre-test a few weeks in or a few months later when the campaign's been out of market. The scores would always have gone up. And we used to say familiarity breeds contentment, not contempt, right? Because actually people do like things as long as they're good. If they're bad, obviously there's no help for you. But good creative wears in, doesn't wear out. Absolutely. 100%. I tell you, the reason I brought this up is quite funny. I'm doing some work with Adam Morgan on the element of surprise, basically. And it's a forgotten thing, actually, because, again, we all know about making people feel happy or maybe it's John Lewis, make them feel sad as well, you know, to get emotion.

37:21But actually, surprise is so potent. And that ad is one of the most surprising on the System 1 database. So 40 % of people pick surprise as the primary emotion when the donkey swallows the phone. They weren't expecting it, you know what I mean? So that's why it captured everyone's attention. So it's a really good way of passing through. And coming back to, because reappraisal is such a big part of our strategy to get non-customers to reappraise, re-engage, think about the rent differently. Surprise is a common element through all that work. And I think where it gets interesting, I think, for any marketer is if you're trying to drive reappraisal and surprise, how do you get that sort of tension between surprise and consistency right?

37:58So, and our approach has been, we think we've got a very consistent voice. there's also a level of craft that's very consistent on our work but but the executions are quite varied like before i was talking about an animated guy walking i was talking about stop motion puppets you're talking about a a live action ad where donkey swallows i find like there's quite a lot of variation in our in our executions at telstra but we think the voice is very consistent and we think that the the level of craft is very consistent i think it's a more maybe sophisticated way to think about consistency versus sort of slavish consistency where it's all all the same all the time, which works for some brands.

38:36But I think if you're a brand that's trying to drive some of that reappraisal, I think you just can't be too consistent because people will tune out right away. You've got to get them to just spend a little bit more time with the work and get under their skin a little bit so that they'll think differently. I mean, all the best campaigns I see, the consistency is in the idea. Yeah. Or the tone of voice or the treatment, all those things. And the more familiar you get, the more permission you have to vary. That's true too. True. That's absolutely true. Yeah. Over time, as people are sort of - Because they're familiar with it.

39:06So they've got mental shortcuts, haven't they, already there? They go, oh yeah, that must be the next Telstra out, of course, because it's the iteration of the idea or the journey. Makes sense. I want to talk about how you made the work as well, because you had an interesting setup from an agency point, if you didn't, in your plus six one kind of concept. Just explain that concept and how that contributed to the work that then happened? Yeah. So when I joined Telstra, I obviously had the chance to think about what is the right agency model for a big telco brand like this. And we're very big by Australian standards.

39:41We're probably not that big by UK or American standards, but we do about 600 briefs a year. So it is quite a lot of work. And as I said, there's a retail nature to telco. I think the thing I didn't want to do was make the trade-off between creativity and scale. So I think it's tempting when you're a big client and a busy client, when you've got a lot of volume and you've got a lot of velocity, because we had both, then I need an agency with the resources that can handle this. And often you trade off creativity for that. And I did not want to do that. I really wanted an independent creative agency that couldn't normally manage a bit of business this big.

40:18I didn't want them just on the edges, on a small brief. I wanted them at the heart of the model, leading the brand creatively and importantly, establishing a standard across all the work. So we have an agency called Bear Meets Eagle on Fire, who I think are the most creative agency down here in Australia. And Micah Walker, their founder, is our chief creative officer on Telstra. So they are our lead creative agency. And then what we did was we built scaffolding around them to make sure that with capabilities they needed around strategy, around delivery, that we could get that from a network agency.

40:56So TWA provides that and they bring fantastic strategy, they bring fantastic delivery, they bring an account team who are super professional and great at what they do. And then also importantly, our media agency OMD then plugs in as the third partner of Plastic Suns, Plastic Suns, and they work in an incredibly integrated way with the creative agency and connections planning becomes a way we integrate. So the really important thing about Plastics One is it's not a standalone Telstra agency. I don't think you get the best talent on your business by doing that. It's three agencies coming together in a unique partnership and a unique way of working to deliver integrated work for Telstra.

41:33And so far, it's worked really, really well. In terms of the making piece, at the core of the way we think about work, and it's one of our brand personality traits, is we say we want to be always crafted with the human hand. So craft, we think, is not just a sort of afterthought when we're making ads. We think craft is actually really core to our brand for a couple of reasons. One, we're premium. We're the most expensive telco in the land. So we've spent billions of dollars on our mobile network. And therefore, I think our work should also feel a bit special and a bit elevated and kind of worthy of our network.

42:13and so we spend a lot of time making sure that the craft really signals this is special, this is better, this is premium. So that's one reason and I think the second reason is in a world of too much content, a lot of it being created by AI, I think stuff that's been crafted beautifully, it just feels warm and human and like it makes you feel something, which I'm all about clearly based on this conversation but also it just stands out. It stands out and is elevated versus all that other content there. So for us, craft is really at the core of what we do. And when we're working on projects, we really are thinking about, you know, we almost think, what's the hard way to make this?

43:00Let's do it that way. So all our out of home, for instance, we use paper craft where we actually, none of it is done digitally. It's all handcrafted out of paper. but then it's photographed, then it's turned into outdoor sites. And again, why bother? I think that makes out of home feel different and feel special. And it's funny, we got a verbatim on it. You know, those classic NPS surveys tell us about your experience with Telstra. We got one back and they didn't tell us about their experience with Telstra. They told us about out of home. And it basically said, I love your posters. They all feel so handcrafted and special.

43:36And it makes me think that your service must be pretty good. in various sort of customer terms. So customers do feel it. They just feel special and it feels like it's been cared for and therefore the brand feels like it's going to care for me a bit more. I think it's super important. I love that. There's a Scott Galloway quote I like where he says, strategy is finding the hardest possible thing to do. Yeah, right. And because the hardest possible thing to do is the thing you can't be copied at. That's right. Usually. I agree. And you can build a moat around it, right? I do the easy thing, which is let's get AI to make this ad for me.

44:08I love that. Who else can do that? I love that. And I also think big brands should do things that only big brands can do. Totally. You know? So, yeah, I really agree with that. I think it's important. Yeah. In terms of culture, you also said you're hard on the work, not hard on the people. Yeah. How does that manifest itself in terms of – because you're working with your internal team. You've got three agencies. Yeah. All working together to deliver against the goal. Yeah. So how do you kind of raise the creative bar but also protect people's egos? Because there's a fair few egos involved in that process, right?

44:38Including mine. Yes, exactly. Yeah, no, look, it's, so yeah, I think with building a creative culture, you need equal parts, psychological safety, and a lot's been written on that, right? And, you know, Silicon Valley, tech, you know, it's all about psychological safety, and you need that for innovation, and you need that so people feel they can bring any idea into a room. But then, what if that idea is not any good, right? you also have to have intellectual honesty to be able to actually talk honestly and openly and have some really robust debate about is this work any good and so and that's what kind that's what hard on the work kind of the people was about hard on the work is about having that intellectual honesty and really being prepared to call out work that isn't at the stand it needs to be at and then kinds of people is doing a way where people feel supported and trusted and and confident to be able to do good work.

45:32And so at the heart of it is a way of every quarter looking at every single output and we give it a score, which we kind of copied from ABM, but what we did copy from ABM, but you know, they've been, they've been now three times can marker of the year. So they know what they're doing. And, and so basically it's a, we created, it's called the Telstra dial. It's a one to 10 rating. And we, we, we sit down every single quarter and we mark every single piece from the biggest ad to the smallest EDM, it all gets marked. We give a score. And it does two things, which are really important. The first thing it does is it sets the standard for everyone.

46:07So everyone, there's absolute clarity from everyone of what the standard is. Because honestly, I can't stand it when people throw great around. Oh, that's a great ad. Oh, that's a great EDM. Oh, that's a great post. Like great? Great. There's one barrier reef in the world that's great. There's one wall in the world that we can see from space that's great. like great or is it just kind of good or is it just average or what so so so that the scoring gives you that sort of common language common standard everyone understands what the standard is which is critical but then the second really important piece is it gives you data so i understand by team by channel uh by products like you can start diagnosing where's the problem and then what why is it a problem and then importantly it's a coaching tool where we can go to the teams and say, well, let's have a look.

46:54Why did this work not school well? Is it the brief? Is it the execution? Is it the craft? What's gone wrong? And so it becomes this beautiful sort of system where we're being very honest about where the work's at, but we're also providing lots of support and coaching for the people doing the work so they absolutely have clarity of where they're at and clarity of how to make it better if they need to make it better. And for us, it's really helped elevate all the work. I think there are a lot of brands where you can do one or two good things and that gets celebrated and wins awards, but then there's a long tail of stuff that's not very good.

47:29And that long tail is what touches the customer day in, day out, right? And so for us, we want to try and raise the level of all of it so that the whole brand starts feeling more elevated and sort of better. That's very well said. I mean, and also some of the work that gets celebrated in Cannes doesn't even see the customer at all. Well, there's that too. but they're all seeing your kind of in-store experience and that's what builds a business day in day out and that's what makes such a difference the experience so yeah we take that really seriously and and the important thing i didn't say is to keep us honest we also get an external chief creative office to market as well so it's not just us marking our own homework we also get an external very senior creative point of view who hasn't touched the work yeah to market as well so that sort of yeah keeps us honest really love that a lot let's talk a little bit about being a CMO as well, because we did this study last year, which was a lot of fun, called Confessions of a CMO, which has given me plenty to...

48:26I think I made a confession. I was part of that. You did, didn't you? Yeah. I wasn't going to mention that because it was anonymous. But yeah, seeing as you've confessed to doing the survey... Confessed to doing the confessions. Yes, exactly. We've got one here. By the way, thanks for doing that. Pleasure. Pleasure. Loved your answers. I know when you took up your first role, you said, I'm not a corporate CMO. what is the biggest lessons or biggest lessons you've taken out of being as having come from your agency experience you've now been a cmo eight ten years now yeah what have been the biggest lessons for you about what it takes to be a great cmo oh so many so many lessons but i think i think it comes back to the thing we were saying um earlier at the start i think the most important role for a CMO, I believe, is to protect the work.

49:14And that's not just because I grew up in agencies. Like, obviously, I love the works I grew up in agencies. But I think in the end, what you put out into the world is what builds your brand. That's what touches the customer, not your amazing strategy deck or your keynote presentation you did at the conference. It's the work that you put out into the world, that's what touches customers. That's what builds brands. So I just think that your role is to make that as great as you can make it. And it seems it's a very simple way to look at the world, but I tell you what, it's given me so much purpose and so much focus.

49:52I wake up every day knowing what my role is. It's to protect that work, to make that work great, to create the conditions for creativity. Because in the end, I think creativity is the biggest competitive advantage that a brand or business can have. So that's what drives me. That's what I'm passionate about. And I think all the lessons I have are all in learning how to protect that work, get stakeholders to understand why we're doing that kind of work, and ultimately start building a movement inside the corporation where they start wanting that type of work. And you're not selling it to them anymore because they kind of want to buy it.

50:30They're on the journey with you. And when that happens, it's incredible. You get such momentum because they're all supporting you and they're wanting you to succeed and they're part of their creative journey with you. And I think that's the biggest thing I've learned is how to do that and the importance of doing that. Got it wrong along the way, but I think that's really the job. And I think the CMOs who do that are the ones who have outsized influence in terms of their ability to transform brands and transform businesses i think the interesting thing about that i i um i had a similar experience i used to call it air cover yeah is that when there's an amazing idea that surfaced i'd create the air cover so in rooms that people didn't even know that you know i was in defending the work creating the permission yeah you know um dealing with the objections right or if somebody made a mistake and it didn't go well i'll be defending them yeah and keeping them in a job and all this kind of thing yeah and the the challenge i found personally is that people only knew when it went wrong they didn't know all the work that went out that went well only because i stood between them and the you know the sort of great invasion of of objections from the c-suite or whatever it was and it's it's it's one of those skill sets you've described beautifully there it's an unrecognized skill set isn't it a little bit um a little bit it is because you know you sort of thing but like yeah and as you say it happens in it happens in boardrooms and closed rooms and like you know and corridor conversations and you know and early morning phone calls and but but i but i think that you have to be vigilant right like you've got you've got to really be be protecting the idea at all times because you know like i said nothing's been invented that's better at killing them than a corporation they're great at killing ideas so you just got to be ever vigilant and always sort of think about how you can help it but for me that gives me um enormous sort of motivation and satisfaction when you do get through if you pull if you pull the person out it's amazing how quickly the corporation sucks the life out of the idea or the thing or replaces it with something else yeah you know that's right you really are like the old the old dutch story of the you know you got the finger in the dike stopping the dam flooding something you know you take you out of the situation it's amazing how quickly it all collapses isn't it That's right.

52:49That's why it's so rare to see brands that are able to do it through multiple CMOs and over many years. They've institutionalized it. It's become part of the culture. Hardware DNA. That's right. That's the ultimate place to be actually. Yeah. If you can hardwire it. This is why, by the way, I responded earlier when you talked about going from a kind of brand idea to a company idea. Yeah. Can the people in the stores, you know, play back to you, your kind of corporate or your kind of marketing strategy? I mean, that's when you know you've embedded it into the culture of the business. Big time. And, you know, one of the real sort of, it's been really humbling in sort of leaving Telstra.

53:24The notes I've cherished the most are from those store managers who I've had a few of them who have sent me notes just saying how much the brand means to them and, you know, how they love the way the brands change. And like, so if you can get those guys being brand believers and protecting the brand and, you know, that's the game. The more of the company that understands why we're doing this and they become believers in the brand, then that's a really powerful place to be. One question to finish up on then, maybe a tricky one. What's the single best bit of advice you've ever been given? It was very early in my advertising career.

54:01And funnily enough, I can't actually remember who said it to me. But I just will always remember the bit of advice, which is trust your gut. It's smarter than you. It's served me so well, trusting my gut. because I do think we have a tendency to want to overthink and we get in our own heads. Whereas, I don't know, I've always sort of tried to stay true to what I feel in my gut. And again, in terms of like buying the right work and in terms of hiring the right people, choosing the right agency partners, so much of it's always been sort of gut-driven with me and I've always tried to stay true to that and hold on to that.

54:35So I'd say, yeah, trust your gut. It's smarter than you. Love that. That's really, really powerful. It's funny because our gut is often more intelligent than our brain. Anselmo Ramos is the founder of Gut Agency. That's the entire basis of their creative agency. That insight alone. It's a great name. Brent, man, it's been amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for having me on, man. It's been great. Thank you for sharing that wisdom with us all. It's hugely appreciated. And good luck for the next chapter. Thank you, John. Thanks so much. Cool. Cheers, man. So I hope you enjoyed that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it.

55:06Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter. So if you'd like to get my thoughts on the one thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast. Just launched Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Cori Marchesotto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that. It's in your feed, Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast.

55:42It would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.