Humour, purpose & beating imposter syndrome - Jo Arden, Ogilvy UK

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. In this episode, we're talking strategy with one of the smartest brains in the world of strategy, Jo Arden, who is Chief Strategy Officer at Ogilvy UK. We caught up to find out what is the role of strategy in the creative process? Do we need to put the fun back into advertising? And what does she think of purpose? And have we taken purpose too far? This is a brilliant episode. We cover a lot. I know you're going to enjoy this. This is my conversation with Jo Arden. Jo Arden, welcome, Jo. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you on here.

0:36So let's talk all things strategy. Let's do that. How does someone get into this world of strategy and advertising? How do you get into this? Well, this is quite a soapbox moment for me because I think that at the moment it's quite difficult. And I think it has been overly difficult for too long. So I'm just going to talk about my winding path into strategy in the hope that people will listen to it and go, okay, it doesn't need to be difficult. So very potted history. Did a women's studies degree. Amazing. Did a marketing master's. Worked in recruitment. Learned lots of valuable lessons from that.

1:08then worked in business development for advertising agencies, then went into Iris, which is an agency, as you know, and then made my way into a strategy role within Iris and then moved and sort of since then have followed a more traditional strategy path. But I don't think I had a strategy job title until I was in my 30s, probably. And I just think we need to be a bit more open-minded that you don't need to start when you leave uni and get into it. So quite a winding path, really. And for those people listening, what does a chief strategy officer do? What's your kind of role in the organisation?

1:44I'm going to completely whip people's assumptions away about how about some of the things that you don't do anymore. 100 % you are still writing pitch decks and working on client business and all the stuff that you do when you're a strategist. It's a broader role, right? So it's about agency leadership as much as it is about the client work. I sort of divide it up roughly into three bits. So one is about business strategy for the agency itself. One is about client strategy for the clients we work with. And then the other bit is about developing the strategic skill sets of the team that work for you.

2:17And each week can bring a different blend and intensity of any of those things. So what makes a really, really good Chief Strategy Officer? I'm going to ask you this in a second, but I think I have been thinking about it. and first off I'm just going to say that I think I'm a pretty good Chief Strategy Officer and I've got lots of peers that I think are amazing. I guess the thing that I admire in them that I think makes them good is generosity and I mean that in generosity of giving your time to things so the people piece is really important, generosity of thinking about clients problems and about how our industry evolves and also generosity of credit and the CSOs that I think maybe in this fewer of them now that I don't like are those that I think that they are the people that are doing everything making the work you know doing all the important stuff it's we are in a team sport so I would say generosity I don't know what do what do you think yeah well I've never worked in an agency but certainly from a client perspective that probably the best times I've worked with CSOs.

3:22It'd be really when I've got them involved in a really naughty business problem right early. Because it's often, from a client point of view, you often sort of do your brand planning on your own. You know, you get your budget signed off and then eventually you kind of brief the agency on a very specific, here's my communication brief. But the best times actually have been when I'm really in the shit. Like I'm really facing a proper challenge. I remember, you know, without going into the muck and bullets of it, I work on a rather well-known brand and And it was really in the shit. And I got the chief strategy officer from Gray, Lillian, who's absolutely amazing.

3:57Carolyn, who is the ECD. And Gavin, who is kind of head of my PR team. And we basically kind of said, right, every single week we're going to have this, like, we call it mission control. So I go war room. And as Gavin came up with the idea, he said, let's treat this like an election, right? This is the day in which we have to convince the public that the brand is back, right? We painted it on the wall. In fact, we did have a room which we had all the kind of post-it notes on and stuff like that. And we just met every week. And what was lovely about it is like everyone had a say. And it was we were united by the business problem, not necessarily the comms brief or the creative challenge.

4:32It was the business problem. And Lillian, who was smartest cookie I've ever met. I mean, she's just razor sharp. She brought so much clarity to because I guess for her, she was outside the company, had the perspective of the whole industry and what's going on. And I was obviously up to my, you know, up to my eyeballs in the internal issues and just brought beautiful clarity to it and go really precision about what are we trying to do? What's the problem? How could we solve it? You know, and helping us to think through. And that that clarity really made a difference. And Carolyn, you know, then came up with the idea.

5:06And the idea was really a positioning for the entire brand that the entire company then got behind and really created a whole movement, really, that was so much bigger than if we'd waited until like we just go, okay, we want to make an ad. Yeah, do something with it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I think my top advice to any clients listening is bring your strategy team from your agency into the tough conversations, even with the board, you know, the really knotty briefs for the business and involve them in that stage. I think that's amazing to hear that. And I hope that clients can find the time to be able to do that because, you know, it's obviously the best way.

5:44And I think it sounds like you've got loads of value out of that. And I know for sure that the strategists will have got loads of value out of it because they want to expand what they think about and to be embedded in the business challenge. I worry that clients are stretched so far. And we'll talk a bit in a second about how strategists are stretched. But making that time to do that, I think is probably really valuable. Some of the projects that I've been on that I've loved most are when we've had a similar thing. You know, lots of the government work I've done has been cross agency teams. And the strategists have all got together in a room.

6:13You know, not really thinking about the challenge that is immediately at hand, but just the broader challenge, you know, the societal thing that we're trying to shift. And I just think loads of value happens in the margins of those conversations, doesn't it? It's much more exciting. I mean, one tip I often give people in business development, actually, and it sounds stupidly simple, but few people do this, is go to your customer and just ask them, what's the biggest single business problem you have today? And the reason I say that is if you can help answer the thing that's keeping them awake at night, they're going to love you forever.

6:43I mean, but agencies often, I think, stay in their lane and they're sort of thinking, well, we're here for comms or we're here for PR or we're here for activation. And just asking some of the basic business questions means that suddenly the answer you come up with and present is going to be way more relevant if you've been involved in the difficult problem. 100 % and if you do that and the client says actually I'd rather you stay in your lane yeah and you can get back in it and that's fine so what I thought would be fun actually is given that you work for Ogilvy I was amusing myself the other day on some famous David Ogilvy quotes so I thought I'd use this as a rough you know kind of guide for our conversation the first thought I'd put to you was I love this quote make your thinking as funny as possible now my colleague Orlando has got this chart, almost like the death of humour in advertising, you know, the last 15 years.

7:35I'm very familiar with that chart, yes. It must have appeared in a presentation or two. And it reminded me of some fun we had last year on the System 1 database, where I was looking at different categories. And these are all kind of grown-up serious categories, like, you know, mobile phones and technology. And I noticed something really funny, that actually, in all the categories, the winning ad often was quite non-serious, right? So, I mean, I think the best phone ad had a dancing pony in it. The best kind of technical ad had a, I think it was a flying ostrich and, you know, the best insurance ad has got a talking dog, you know, and the best car ad, in fact, had a cake in it.

8:07You know, is there something we're missing, do you think, about the role of fun, entertainment, humour? And maybe we need to take ourselves a bit less seriously. I mean, it's so strange, isn't it? Given that if you think about the world of dating, the thing that people most want from a prospective partner is good sense of humour. and then in advertising or communications we kind of forget about that and start you know either being overly informative or just taking ourselves very sincerely there's a research agency one of your competitors uh called the nursery who did a brilliant thing you'll probably be familiar with this i know orlando is uh which was looking at um the sense of humor across the uk and they did this great thing where they came into agencies and you all did a test and they determined which sense of humor you had and the point of it was to tell us that actually the UK is united by our love of very juvenile slapstick humor and we find it funny it's like you know if you think about all the classic TV comedies like Only Fools and Horses and the bar scene and the chandelier and all of that stuff we find things funny and I think it's one of the great things about about the UK that we are united by by a sense of levity so yeah I think we do take ourselves too seriously and and what I love about the examples that you've given is that they immediately make you smile and I know what brand you're talking about so back to the business case if we're here to try and build salience and make people remember the brands that we're advertising humor is a really great way to do that that's so true if I said to you name me a mobile phone that has 16 megapixel camera you'll be like well all of them you know name me a phone with a dancing pony you know I know which one it Exactly, yeah.

9:43Yeah, it makes sense. And it's really important. And I just think there is, why would you not want to entertain at the same time? And I know that it's not relevant for all topics and some of them you do need to, and I've done quite a bit of charity stuff over the years, and you need to allow yourself room to be serious. Not all the time, actually, with charity, but I just think the vast majority of the time, why would you not think about something which is fun? Working in an agency, you can tell when there's a script on the table, in a creative review, and you know somebody reads it one of the creatives reads it and it's got that real glint in the eye that immediately people are much more excited about it i think there's another along the lines of if we're not having fun we're not making great work which i thought i want to go and work for that guy that sounds like good somebody internally emailed me that literally two days ago and i think it is a good reminder that uh we're in such a privileged position Our industry is fun.

10:37It delivers business value. We work largely with nice people. Like, you know, I can count on one hand the people that I've met who aren't in our industry. And the sort of alchemy of that all coming together is why we have got, you know, why we deliver what we do. To your vice chairman, will I get alchemy? Yes, exactly. You're welcome, Rory. That's exactly. Checks in the post. Well, talking of the graph. OK, so the graph has got humour going down and purpose going up. It's almost like, you know, literally crossing over. What's your point of view on purpose in advertising? Yeah, it's a tricky one.

11:10I mean, first of all, the word just means nothing now. And I think that we need to tackle that because people just throw around the word purpose with absolutely no shared understanding of what that means. And if one of the jobs of a strategist is to bring clarity, I feel like my gift to the world might be to get rid of that word and to replace it with something else. Now, I think the way in which we're probably talking about it here is pro-social purpose. So something which brings an added benefit to society or has a point of view on the world or maybe has a bit of an activist agenda. And I think that there are some examples and some campaigns and some brands where that is super relevant and they do a brilliant job of maybe changing people's hearts and minds.

11:55At Ogilvy, we've got a very long running relationship with Dove, as everybody knows. And I think the work they do on purpose is incredible. And I thought that before I joined. I'm not involved with it, but I think it is incredible. That said, I think there's lots of other brands who take sort of short term points of view, jump on a bandwagon, do things which are very surface level, don't have any integrity. The purpose isn't hardwired into their core business practice. And I think some of those campaigns are some of the worst work I've ever seen. And it actively makes me furious when they get awarded, because I just think if they have no integrity, why are we applauding them?

12:36I also don't think that purpose and humour need to be mutually exclusive. And I love to see work which brings those two things together. And I actually think there's a bit of a gap there. You know, if you think about the conversations we have, the difficult one on one conversations we have throughout life, they're often made better by a bit of levity and a bit of humour. So why would we not translate that into... As Yolanda's got a phrase, I think he's quoting somebody else that says, what's too serious to be said can be sung. And that's quite clever, actually, because in a way it'd be a bit like we're humour, isn't it?

13:10What's too difficult to be said can be joked. It feels a bit awkward, doesn't it? But actually, I think there's some truth in it. You can tackle some pretty chunky things. You can, and if it's done with respect and it's not making light of very serious things, but treating it with lightness. Those are two quite different things, I think. Now you mentioned awards. Another David O 'Grewe quote, probably my favourite, which, you know, given being a former CMO here, if it doesn't sell, it wasn't creative. The longer version of that was when I write an ad, I don't want you to tell me if you find it creative.

13:40I want you to find it so interesting you go out and buy the product. Do you think in our, you know, focus on purpose, have we lost the sale? So I think probably the obsession with purpose is over inflated because it makes a nice headline. You know, people in our industry absolutely love a crisis narrative, which I find quite funny about us. You know, we're so dramatic about everything. So I think there is less purpose work. If you brought together all the communications that were put out into the world by all of the people we represent, the brands we represent. I think purpose makes up a way smaller percentage than people believe it does.

14:20The counterpoint to that is that, no, I don't think we've lost the sell because we are, without question, selling lots of stuff. And, you know, that may be a problem in some ways. But most of the work that we do is designed to move products off shelf, to get people to click buy, to get people to do things and take action. And I believe that it does do that. It shows up less often in the creative awards and it shows up less often, I guess, in the headlines because it's just they're doing the hard working job of bringing commercial value. So I don't think purpose has got in the way of the sell. I can understand why people get their knickers in a twist about it and that's a very valid point of view.

14:59And I think it's quite healthy for them to bring that debate to the table. But I think it's somewhat of an inflated crisis. Well, let's try and see if we can get through the weeds on this one because obviously, you know, I think you talk about crisis. yeah peterfield's famous crisis in creativity i know system one we've been testing can line winners for 10 years and in fact last year they actually got to a score that was no better than the average on our database orlando's showing we're becoming more left brains more sort of activation we're doing less of the brand building work it doesn't look good does it when you look at the data in that way well i think i think the data is part of the problem so you've mentioned two things there which are actually different and we don't treat them as such and in fact the whole conversation about the crisis in creative effectiveness tends to conflate a few different things.

15:48The first thing you mentioned was CAN-LION being measured in the in the database and doing no better than work that hasn't been creatively awarded at CAN. Lots of work that's awarded at CAN is there for I would argue a different reason and it's to show the boundaries and the experimentation and the strength of our creative muscle within agencies and brands around the world. It is a really good place to showcase the sort of extent of human imagination. And I think it does a really great job of that. So, yes, lots of things are really tactical. And I know that every year everybody gets really worked up about, well, that didn't really run or it only had one media placement or it's cam spam.

16:30And, you know, I can understand that. And as a strategist, I definitely have been on that side of the fence about certain entries. But I think we would be denying ourselves part of the magic of our industry if we said that there's no room for creative exploration. And I think Can does that really well. The other part of the equation is that we are unquestionably using more short term tactics. So driving sales, using media and therefore the creative content that goes in that media, which is designed to have an immediate response. and that has a very worrying trend when it comes to being measured against long-term effectiveness.

17:09But they're two different things. You're absolutely right. In fact, you're spot on. The data exactly says that. So we've been measuring star, which is the long-term brand with potential, that's been going down. Spike last year was at highest ever, which is our short-term activation. What was really interesting is what we noticed is that the intensity of emotion created by advertising at Cannes is very, very high. But what's typical is it's using negative emotions to make points. So a lot of it's quite activist. It's quite challenging. A lot of charity ads, a lot of purpose driven ads. And what they're doing is they're designed to be noticed and designed to be acted on in the short term.

17:41And in that sense, they're doing very well. So I think what it is, I mean, to try and sort of solve it, maybe if there was a solve, was maybe it's a crisis in creatively awarded campaigns in terms of long term brand building. But what's happened is the voting agenda or the judging agenda has changed and it's more looking at impact on society. It's looking at, you know, kind of short term activation, isn't it? Rather than what might traditionally have been the brand building kind of campaigns. Yeah, it's looking at both those things. It's looking at impact on society and it's also looking at short term spike.

18:12And I don't, I kind of, I mean, I don't think it's a crisis. I think it's a trend. A trend, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one half of the chart, isn't it? The other half of the chart is doing that. It is, yeah. And I think that there is a, there's a particular trend and goodness knows how long it'll go on for. Maybe it'd be another 10 years or so. About the type of work that gets creatively awarded. I think it's really great that Canna are also now doing a creative effectiveness and a creative strategy category. And I think being able to look at stuff that's been awarded in a creative line space and see whether you can also make a case for its effectiveness is going to be quite an interesting test.

18:50Test for strategists, but also test for data. I think it's a genius move by Wark. I have to say, I credit to them because I've won two cans in my career. Ooh. But, just putting that out there, by the way, listeners. But was never invited. What? I know. It's outrageous, isn't it? How come? I know. I literally was like, why is my agency not returning my calls? And then literally about a week later, oh, John, where were you? And I'm like, I didn't get invited. I know, it's outrageous. That's terrible, unless it was us. It wasn't us, was it? No, it wasn't. It was fine, actually. And of course, you know, very unhappy with you lot.

19:24But the point was, it would be very hard for me as a client to justify a week going to kind of creative awards and, you know, a week drinking rosé on the Quasette, right? However, if you've got an effectiveness track that is sharing all the best practice and so on, well, that sounds more like an educational trip. So I think it's quite clever. I think it could help kind of bring clients along. At the end of the day, clients are paying for the work, aren't they? And they want the work to be celebrated and they want the work to work. So I think it's a neat trick. It's a neat trick. If you bring the both together and have one rub off on the other, I think that's quite cool.

19:57You think it's moved out of the travel and expenses budget pot into the training? Into the training, which is much bigger. Much, much bigger. Yes, exactly. I would love to explore that with Rob and find out. I think so. I think so. It is interesting. And it's, I mean, I just think we've got some great effectiveness awards competitions, IPA, obviously, gold standard, amazing. We've got FEs, obviously. You're a judge on that, aren't you? Yeah. So I'm convening this next year's, so it's every two years. So we'll kick that off at the end of the year at FWorks. And it's important and actually important for people to sort of prove the effectiveness of their work.

20:35Also important to build the database, because obviously lots of the stuff we're talking about is based on the IPA databank. And having that, despite all of my reservations about sometimes how that data gets manipulated, but there's no doubt that having that data is a really good thing. And what a legacy to build as well. I mean, I think that's one of the many things I love about our industry is that we're thinking about what the people who come after us will be able to draw on. and that's a really great thing to have. Now, there is one award that most people don't want to win, right? Now, I know you're a campaign columnist, aren't you?

21:06Yes. Turkey of the Week and it's coming back. What's your views on that? I'm not into it. And I think Rick Brim wrote in campaign the reasons why I'm not into it. I mean, I guess to summarise, there's so much goes into making an ad and Turkey of the Week is always pretty much ads, TV ads generally. There's so much that goes into that. so many things that can go wrong, so many missteps, but also the people at Campaign aren't, they're not reading the brief. They don't know what the intent was. They don't know what happened along the process. I think we forget sometimes that people who work in agencies work really hard, you know, I mean, within the context of being in a, you know, a job, which is nice, they work really hard, long hours, you know, way more, I think, than some people realise, blood sweat and tears it's a confidence game you know we all are all dependent on having the confidence to put an opinion across to have the imagination to put creativity down on paper and I just think it's a bit snarky I'm like oh turkey the week thanks thanks for those three weeks where I didn't go home and you know I was on a shoot where it was absolutely knackered the whole time I just don't know I just don't think we've got the right to do that I attempted to turn it into an accolade.

22:22So I got a call. I think it was Matt Bamford Bowles at the Elephant Room. I think that's where it works. Anyway, and I got this message from him and he was livid, absolutely livid. And I said, dude, what's happened? He goes, I cannot believe Aussie Kevin the Carrot has just been named Turkey of the Week. And he said, can you tell me how it scored on System 1? And this is about three or four years ago, just as they were kind of rising to prominence. And at the time it was a four star. It was in the top three or four percent on our database like pretty damn good anyway it it got him going see this big post it was like a campaign campaign to try and kind of take stop turkeys kind of thing and it got some momentum and i said matt i'll go one better you send me a list of every turkey and i will test every turkey for a year on our database right it turns out the average turkey was three stars it was better than the last 10 years of cans at long-term brand building so i wrote this article for marketing week when turkeys eat lions for breakfast kind of thing oh i read it yeah but i ironic that the one you know that the the ads that were derided actually turned out to be winners in the end so you know i so anyone out there that's won a turkey yeah maybe wasn't so bad after well done well done i mean also but it does beg the question because you're you're you're and i'm a big fan of the system on research methodology, but that's about real people, isn't it?

23:43It is, yeah. So it's 150 people. How do you feel about this ad? And does it make you happy? So we've managed to correlate the response to that survey to basically market share gains over the following year. So it's like the, you know, if you think about, you know, your share of voice, your media spend coupled with your creative effectiveness are the two things that helped, you know, predict. And we've shown that the creative, unsurprisingly, everybody, the creative quality matters as much as the media by, you know, breaking news. Thank goodness. I know, but everyone spends all their money on the media, don't they, optimising that and clicks and reach and so on.

24:18You need to spend as much of the time making sure the creative works as well. Yeah, which I mean, hopefully we'll continue to bang that drum and land it. Because I do worry sometimes about that ratio wildly changing. But with the Turkey of the Week, I mean, I think maybe they need to just caveat it and say, in our opinion, it's Turkey of the Week. Maybe they do actually, I don't know. Maybe that is in the text. Yeah, we can subvert it and go turkeys, statistically, are more likely to go on to long-term success. Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, that's good. I like it that you're giving the agencies the ammunition to go to their clients with that.

24:49Well, it sort of brings me on to another David Ogilvy quote, which is, the consumer's not a moron, she's your wife, which I thought was brilliant. And the longer form of it, which I always get this wrong, because you have to kind of pay attention, is people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say, Which is sort of why I work at System 1, really, which is because it all boils down to do you like it or not, you know, because you sit in focus groups and they'll tell you anything you want them to say. Are we, as an industry, getting better? Okay, let me ask you the question.

25:21How do we bring the audience into the creative process and make sure that we make work that effectively does what it needs to, which is win over the customer? Yeah, and I think it's got to get back to speaking to customers, hasn't it, and understanding them. One of the things that I sort of bemoan a little bit for strategists now starting out is that they're so required to be able to assimilate such huge swathes of data. You know, you could get as much data as you want about an audience, you know, their digital signals online, their buying behavior, their footfall in various stores, where they live, their demographics, their opinions, all sorts of data.

25:58And it's a lot. It's a lot for people to be able to bring together. And I think that there is still no replacement for actually speaking to people, you know, speaking to real people, you know, being in the supermarket, going shopping, doing research. It doesn't need to be really expensive and structured. You know, I think just being part of the world and the people that you're trying to appeal to is really important. And I think because of the pressure to be able to understand big data sets and the time that requires, I worry that we limit our strategists and our creative people's ability to get out and just be a normal person, because that is the best way to find out.

26:36That's not to say that some of the bigger data sets aren't handy, but they lack the viscerality, I think, of understanding people. our job is to bring the consumer into the room and i think one of the bits uh that i like about the quote i mean i don't like the word moron i've got to be honest and also the assumption that she's she's your wife yeah but anyway of the time uh i think it is really important that you have that memory about it's somebody that i should like um and there's been various great articles over the years andy nairn did a really nice one for campaign it probably is about 15 years ago when we both worked on smoking cessation together and it was about referring to our audiences and I think it was probably C2DE hardened smokers and it's like wow what a negative way to talk about the audience that you're trying to get to behave in a certain way I mean I always think that you you do your best work when you kind of fall in love with the audience you're talking to and why not they're people you know it's it's like the general public are fascinating one of the thing we talked about this before weren't we but one of the things that I think is very useful for a strategist is to just consume like normal culture, like, you know, to read magazines, to watch maths, exactly, you know, to just like do not like normal stuff.