SPEAKER_01 1:04

This show is all about um mistakes. And you've put a mistake up in in your questionnaire when we asked you about what's your what's one of your biggest mistakes that you've made in marketing. And I've got here that it was it was to do with Craigslist. Do you want to walk us through that, Peter?

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Yeah, I feel a failure for not having a more dramatic or spectacular mistake. But uh yeah, I worked for Craigslist, the online classified site, uh, for 11 years as a as a contractor in the US and the UK. And Craigslist, you probably know, is a much bigger name, a bigger brand in the US than it is in the UK. But we were doing stuff for them in both countries. And at the time of this idea, um it seemed to me anyway that uh premiership and the top football clubs were doing more and more corporate sponsorship on the players' shirts and in the stadia and everywhere. It was kind of more prominent and ubiquitous and in your

Setting Up The Mistake

SPEAKER_00 2:08

face. And so that seemed to be a kind of trend in the zeitgeist at the time. So what we did was we found a women's football team in Battersea Park in London. Uh I think they were called something like Battersea women's football team, and we sponsored them as their shirt sponsors. But instead of

The Craigslist Backstory

SPEAKER_00 2:29

sponsoring that just their shirts, we got them to play their matches wearing advertising sandwich boards, um which um those kind of A boards you sometimes see people wearing on the street, even now, advertising grass. They were heavy and ridiculously ridiculously impractical, and they were very photogenic. We did a short video and we took photographs, and uh so the intention was to satirize this growing trend for more and more blatant and in-your-face and ubiquitous commercial sponsorship. Um and I thought it was very funny and it produced great pictures, but it got a

The Sponsorship Stunt

SPEAKER_00 3:18

disappointing amount of coverage. It didn't get as much coverage as we hoped. It didn't matter totally because the CEO of Craigslist thought it was hilarious and brilliant, and he really enjoyed it. But I realized afterwards that one of the reasons it had failed was that it was too wacky and too out there and too ridiculous. I I got an email from uh one journalist saying, Oh, this is one of the most peculiar ideas I've ever seen, which I took as a compliment, which I'm not I'm not sure I like that. I'm not sure he meant it as a compliment. No, I know what he meant.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

We know how jaded and cynical journalists are, don't we? I know you were a journalist, Peter, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

I know. I I suffer from high self-esteem, too much self-esteem, so I took it as a compliment. But I realized one of the reasons it had failed was it was too wacky and out there. And I remember reading later that they somebody had done

Media Reaction And Missed Coverage

SPEAKER_00 4:14

a study of applications for scientific research projects, and they found the most successful applications were the ones that that were moderately innovative, that they were the right combination of being new and innovative and familiar. And then I also read uh an excellent book called The Creative Curve. And a big theme of that was that our human psychology is that we simultaneously crave things that are novel and things that are familiar, and the secret of a really good idea is to find the sweet spot um between being new and familiar, where it's both simultaneously new and familiar, both to exactly the right degree and the and the right extent. And this idea, sandwich boards for Craig's list,

Why The Idea Failed

SPEAKER_00 5:14

was just too novel and not familiar enough. It was too outlandish. And so uh yeah, and so I think that's one of the reasons uh it failed. Yeah, so the the I think the secret for creativity, Jonah Berger also talks about this in his book Contagious, about viral ideas. The secret of successful ideas are ideas that are simultaneously similar but different, and both things at the same time. And this was too different and not similar enough. So I think I learned a valuable lesson from it. Um