The Nokia Music Misfire

SPEAKER_02 1:04

So our show is all about,

Pushback, Constraints, And Big Company Logic

SPEAKER_02 1:05

well, fuck ups and failures. Um we we basically get people to come to the right place. Well, we've had enough. Um and um people share it's this is like where you can get it off your chest of about something you've made a mistake and what you learnt from it. So do you do you have any that that you've made in my in what you do?

SPEAKER_00 1:22

I've got millions. I mean uh people worry a lot, you know. Like um I've been fired like a lot of times. Maybe four or five times. Um and it it no, normally it's nothing like as personal as people think. Um, probably one of my biggest failings. Um, I was working on a campaign for Nokia um to launch a music service. So this was probably 2007. Um, and we'd sort of procured the rights to like Kylie Minogue's new album that was going to be exclusively available. Um, and we spent probably 15 million pounds on on media and you know technology and IP. And

ROI Reality Check And Accountability

SPEAKER_00 2:05

I think 37 people um downloaded um the particular app that we were trying to push at the time. So on a sort of on a sort of uh what's it called? CPO, on a sort of cost per acquisition basis, you know, we could have sort of arranged like a private, you know, living room performance of Kylie Minogue for every single person that that wanted it. I I would say, like, I'm very I'm very happy to accept when I've been an idiot. In this particular case, I wasn't an idiot. I actually did tell the client quite a lot of times, look, you know, this isn't really how it's gonna work. Um, you know, most people who see this TV ad are not gonna be able to download this because they don't have the right type of Nokia handset. Um, but it's a good example, really, I think, of understanding quite how big companies work and how their finance works. And, you know, someone had made the business case and they couldn't, they couldn't sort of accept it wasn't gonna work. Um, but yeah, I make mistakes all the time, all the time. The most important thing is to not do the same mistake twice. Um, the most important thing is

Dot‑Com Deja Vu And Discovery

SPEAKER_00 3:05

to kind of really, you know, understand what you learn about yourself and the world every time you do it. Um, but yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm quite idiotic and I make quite a lot of mistakes.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when you had to have that um ROI discussion about uh 15 million for 37 downloads.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

You'd have been better off with bags of 10,000 pounds just giving them to people walking in the street and asking them to download the app and you'd have got a better return on that activity.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

It I mean it's completely true, and yeah, it it just goes to show um you know accountability is a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

It r it reminds me of the era when the internet first came out, like in well, not the right when it first came out, but when people started to use it and um there was the the dot-com boom and it was going into pitches, and it was right at the beginning of my career, and people were saying, So what we're gonna do is we're gonna build a website and potentially 60 billion or however many billion people can come and land on it, and I kept thinking this is all all this money is going to this, this just doesn't make any sense. Aren't they gonna have to find it first? Which sounds very similar to your app scenario.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

I think um like we we do not

Common Sense Over Complexity

SPEAKER_00 4:16

have simple jobs by by any means, but I think quite often we make them a lot more complicated than they need to be. And I think you're sort of thinking where you're saying, you know, only this many people might actually see it. So it's unrealistic to expect that. Or, you know, if you were a normal human being, how would you respond to this? I actually think taking a bit of a step back, um, you know, relaxing a little bit and and and trying to approach these things from a common sense perspective is is quite often the you know the best way to succeed. I'm doing a lot of work with a car company at the moment where they're figuring out that almost all of their search spend is going on terms that probably people would have ended up on the website without clicking. You know, so all you're doing is taking people that are already very interested and sort of taking credit for making them, you know, become interested, even though clearly clearly they already were. Uh and and often you have these cultures of specialisms um and sort of expertise and and spreadsheets, and and people can sit in meetings and talk about numbers um and ratios, and everyone has the goal of making that number as big as it can be. And I think it's really important to just take a step back, you know. Maybe uh maybe that doesn't matter. You know, maybe there's something much more fundamental that we can solve instead.