The Worst Ad Confession

Chris Norton 0:00

Six weeks, that's how long it took for one advert to wipe a product completely off the shelves. Supermarkets pulled it, the campaign collapsed, and the strategist behind it, well he saw it coming. Today we speak to Kevin Chesters, former Chief Strategy Officer at Ogilvy, co-author of The Creative Nudge, and the man who called it Turkey of the Week before it even aired.

Kevin Chesters 0:23

I think it might have been the worst ad ever made in British history. Okay?

Chris Norton 0:28

It's got my fingerprints all over it. If you've ever watched a bold idea get watered down or felt a pitch slipping through your fingers, this episode might just save your next campaign. Because protecting great work isn't just about creativity, it's about timing, influence, and knowing when to say no.

Show Mission And Stakes

Kevin Chesters 0:47

How to create time in a world that's speeding up. Everyone thinks the world's getting quicker. It isn't, by the way. I checked it on your behalf. Last week was exactly seven days long. Every day was exactly 24 hours long, right? Hasn't sped up. I've checked it. No need to thank me.

Chris Norton 1:02

I'm Chris Norton, and this is Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the show where senior marketers unpack the moment that nearly broke their careers and reveal how those failures became their sharpest tools.

Kevin Chesters 1:14

The word creativity or creative in a dictionary means new, different, innovative. Would you ever stand in front of your board, your company, your shareholders? Would you ever stand in front and say, well, I'm not very innovative, I don't think very differently, I don't think we should be different or distinct or intuitive. No, no, not me. That's what they do.

Career Lessons And Mentors

Chris Norton 1:35

Hey? You'll learn how to recognize when an idea is quietly heading for disaster, how to challenge clients without burning those all-important bridges, and how the right kind of failure can sharpen your instincts and actually elevate you to your best work. So let's get into it. Enjoy Kevin Chester's welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. So, Kevin, I mean, so excited to get into this uh chat with you because uh first of all, your briefing was like I you said you've just asked me just before we started recording, have I got any notes? But I have got too many notes. Um most people struggle to think of an idea of something that where they've gone wrong. But before we get into your career and your mistakes, because there's some crackers in there, um, you've had some fascinating experience. Like you've worked at Ogilvy, um, Dentsu. What where have you where would you say you've learnt the the most? And and who's like been the most influential person in your career in marketing, would you say?

Confidence Versus Arrogance

Kevin Chesters 2:42

Um I think I always learnt the most at places um where it was harder to do good. So the way I would explain that is, you know, that I probably learnt the most in my career working at small places or places that didn't have a reputation, because in that sense, you've got to work a lot harder. You know, you're not I I think as I said, when I when I went see McGarry Bowen with Paul Jordan and Angus McCadam, you know, I what I wanted to do there was create a reputation, not leverage one. And the previous two agencies I'd worked at were Saatchi and Saatchi and Wieden and Kennedy. And they already had reputations when I went there. They were already famous, they were already award-winning, they already had a philosophy, you know, they had a real reputation, they had all these things, right? Brilliant people. Um and I think I learned so much sort of growing McGarry Bowen and that, those sort of three years I was there, because you know, I you know, I I won awards at Wieden when I worked on Honda. And I won awards when I was at McGarry Bowen working on Honda. Winning awards at McGarry Bowen was like going out on centre court at Wimbledon and winning holding the frying pan. Whereas going out and winning awards with Wieden, you know, you were an awards agency with an awards reputation that had loads of awards that won loads of awards. So it's not that difficult to win awards. It's much harder to win awards, you know. So I would say I learned so much when I was at McGarry Bowen about myself, about what makes for a successful agency. And then um I met Mick, you know, who was my co-author on the book, who was my collaborator when I was there. I was CSO, he was CCO. We then set up an agency together. So we were partners, and then since then, he's gone off and done his thing, I've gone off and done my thing, but we worked together loads on projects. So I would have said, you know, the person I learned the most from in my career is probably working with Mick because we're such different people and have such different skills. You know, the early part of my career, of course, it's so influential when you're a junior, which is why I think it's so important for all senior people in the industry to give their time for free for mentoring and all of that stuff. So in the early part of my career, what did I learn and who did I learn from? You know, I was lucky enough to have an amazing boss, a lady called Louise Powell, who sadly died a couple of years ago, but was empowering and taught me all, you know, uh how I was doing things wrong and how to do them right, you know. And at the time I thought she was some sage yoda and she was 30 years old, you know. But to me as a 22-year-old, I thought that was ancient. And then I was really lucky in the early part of my career, you know, really early on when I was 22 years old, I'm 52 now, you know, to work with people like Rory Sutherland, you know, who I've been, I'm you know, delighted and you know, humbled to be able to say, you know, is a mate and has been for 30 years. You imagine how much I learnt off him, you know, when I was 22. But, you know, he was in his early 30s at the time, you know, and Mike Dodds, another one who we sadly lost last year, you know, another brilliant mentor and a lot of good work that's being done at the moment by uh Martin Trouton on the Dodds Foundation, you know, to do a next generation in his name to teach people. So much, Chris. You know, I was so lucky to have worked at great places with great people. And don't get me wrong, you know, when I worked at Sarge's, I worked with astonishingly talented people like Rich Denny, Dave Henderson. When I was at Wieden, you know, I learned from brilliant people like Paul Coleman, um, Havan Andrews, Sam Heath, Chris Groom, these brilliant people, you know, who were I think that the thing they all had in common, and thinking about a theme like mistakes is they all had a humility. You know, Mick was the same, Rich Denny was the same, Mike Dodge was the same, Rory was the same. Have the humility of knowing what you don't know, of enjoying operating in the unknown, of having the sort of honesty to go, yeah, fuck that up. Yeah won't fuck it up next time because of what I learned from fucking it up this time. You know, I think that's the thing for me. I've been so fortunate to work with brilliant people, and I've also been fortunate to work with shit people, because they teach you how not to do it. Yeah, and I've been fortunate enough to work with arrogant people, and you know, I would name any of them, but you know, I I think one of the best learnings I had as a junior was some exposure to some absolute right bell ends. And you know, and it was fantastic. And there it was, it was fantastic to go, right? He's a bell end. Yeah. Um let me just understand all that bellendery and make sure that when I'm senior enough to be in that person's position, I don't act the twat to people whose lives I will be really affecting.

Will Ockenden 8:36

Yeah. No arrogance. And you do come across a bit of that in the ad industry, don't you?

Everyone Is Creative

Time Pressure Destroys Ideas

Kevin Chesters 8:42

I I think you do. I I I think you do, but I think it's really important to separate arrogance from confidence. Yeah. And I think that there's only one word that separates them, and the word is validation. So confidence is validated, arrogance is assumption. So if you're very good at what you do, and frankly, I'm good at what I do. I'm not the best planner I've ever met, but I'm pretty good at it. And I have a wealth of evidence to prove that, from clients who'll tell you that, from projects I've worked on, from colleagues, from 30 years of a career, you know, from things I've got I can point to, and you go, right, well, that's all validation that in court could prove that I'm good. So when I say I'm good, that's confidence. Arrogance is the opposite. Arrogance is just going, I'm the best, I'm great, I drive the fastest cars and get the best girls, I'm great. You don't, mate, do you? You just that's all assumption. You can't prove any of that. And I think that's the difference. Confidence is useful. Where it gets misdiagnosed is people who aren't that good or aren't that confident mislabel confidence. They go, oh, he's quite arrogant. You go, no, no, no, he's confident, and he has every right, she has every right to be confident because of what they've done. Now, what often happens is people who are a bit shit or a bit underconfident or a bit arrogant themselves don't really understand confidence. But yeah, I where I would agree, Will, is yes, I have met a lot of arrogant people in my career, and both here in other countries, both when I was agency and when I was client side. And um, yeah, probably best avoided. And one of the great things about working for yourself is that now, thankfully, I get to choose exactly who I work with, exactly when I work with them, and exactly how I work with them. And the great thing about, and obviously that's 30 years of being able to do that, that permission. But the good thing about that is, yeah, you can sort of most agencies say they have a no bell ends policy, but they don't really, because they have to work with whoever's making them money, or whoever the network tells them to work with, or whoever New York or whatever tells them. Whereas when you work on your own or for yourself, you just get Yes, exactly. You never work on your own. Although I have to work with that Bellend over there. Well, as I've often said only 13 people ever stood on the moon, right? But 40,000 people work for the Apollo program. So no one works on their own. The myth of the Superman or the solopreneur is mostly put around by people, you know, who have I was trying to remember his name. Steve Bartlett. Put around by people like that because they make money out of perpetuating the myth. But no, no one succeeds alone. You know, even Evan MacArthur, when she sailed around the world solo, had over 20 full-time employees available 24-7 on the end of the phone. You know, she was the one in the boat, but she wasn't doing it on her own.

Will Ockenden 12:07

So um you you mentioned the book briefly, and I think this is going to interest.

Kevin Chesters 12:12

Did I? Did I? That would never happen.

Chris Norton 12:14

We're not here to sell books, well. Flash up the book on the video, flash up the book. We're on YouTube here as well.

Kevin Chesters 12:21

It's available available from all good book stores and Jeff Bezos.

Will Ockenden 12:25

Excellent. So does it does every um senior ad exec have a book in them? Um what kind of led you to think I need to get some of my ideas down on paper?

Kevin Chesters 12:35

Well, they haven't all got a good book in them, probably. But um the um well and also the thing is as well, yeah, I mean, uh what you have to ask yourself if you want to write a book, I think, is see if a publisher wants to pay you. That tells you if you've got something people will pay money for. There's nothing wrong with self-publishing, but that's fine. I mean, I could book Wembley Stadium today, put on a gig and tell everyone I was Taylor Swift. But, you know, it but it's not necessarily something people are worth it's worth paying for. Um where it came from, and very honestly, the idea didn't come from me, it came from Mick, was um Mick had often been asked about, you know, were there any rules to creativity? And very distinctly the difference between creativity and creative. Everybody's creative, not everybody is a creative, okay? Um, but creative isn't a job title or a department, creative is a way of thinking. Um if you look in the dictionary, the word means new and different, whatever. So Mick was always very clear on his philosophy that if you are a creative person, if you are a creative and a multi-award-winning creative, I mean Mick has more lions than longleat. Seriously, I mean he's been doing you know the amount of this for a long, long time. He is very validated in what he does. His confidence is very, very validated and completely justified, which is why he's so humble and you know decent with his time and his behaviour, because he has that confidence. But he was he said it all came very naturally to him. But but people asked him what were the rules. So he sort of he and I had a chat about it. He did a talk on it. Um, I went off, like often happens in our relationship, and did all the thinky think science-y sort of bits behind it all. And then we sat down and we went, and funny enough, it wasn't us who said there's a book in this. Mick was chatting to someone who was on the board of a publisher about what he'd been up to that week. Um, a very nice lady called Tanya Livesy, who a lot of people listening will know. And uh she said, Mick, I think there's a book in this. And so he put a deck together. We had one meeting, he had it, with the publisher, who went, Yep, there's a book in that. So people sometimes ask, how was it difficult to get a book deal? Uh no, it was absolutely embarrassingly easy because somebody came to us and said, Can you write this book? Um, we're writing uh another book which comes out in the autumn. Um actually it may be. Um there is um it's coming out in the autumn, different publisher, but again, um I think if you've got something to say and you think there's something interesting, you should go and validate it by pitching it to a publisher. And if the publisher tells you that there's something in it and pays you to write it, then yes, you absolutely should get those thoughts down. Um it won't be easy. I mean, I'll tell you, I mean, the stats I heard blew my mind, which were only three percent of books that get started get finished. And only two percent of books that get finished get published. Wow. So there is a kind of Darwinian thing of look, just go into your local Starbucks. Everyone's writing something. The question is whether anyone's willing to pay for it.

The Big Cheese Dipper Setup

Will Ockenden 16:07

That's right. So some of the it'd be really great to dive into some because I I love the idea of kind of breaking down creativity as as a process and and and challenging that misconception that you know, a lot of people I'm not creative, I can't come up with creative thoughts, but actually everybody has the potential to be creative, don't they? So one of the themes you talk about is this idea of um time scarcity killing creative. Do you want to kind of elaborate a bit on that? Because I think a lot of the time we think I haven't got a headspace, I haven't got the time to come up with a creative idea or a creative thought. Is that a good excuse saying I haven't got the time, or can we get around that?

How A 60 Became A Broken 20

Kevin Chesters 16:46

You can definitely get around it. Um, I mean, in the first instance, I find it astonishing when I hear anyone say I'm not creative. No, I find it particularly astonishing when I hear chief executives or founders or MDs say it publicly. The word creativity or creative in a dictionary means new, different, innovative. Would you ever stand in front of your board, your company, your shareholders, um, journalists, the city, investors? Would you ever stand in front of them and say, Well, I'm not very innovative, I don't think very differently, I don't think we should be different or distinct or intuitive. No, no, not me. That's what they do. Hey? What? And you want me to invest money in this? Yeah, no, everyone's creative, right? Not everyone's a creative, everyone is creative because all humans are born with the ability to think their way around problems, right? World Economic Forum identified creativity as the number one skill that businesses need to succeed. UNICEF identified it as one of the top five skills that all children will need in the future. If you can get those two people to agree on something, then I'm going to suggest it's probably true. So absolutely, right? Everyone's creative. By the way, there's only one job where you can't tell people you're creative, and that's accountancy, because to be a creative accountant means you're a criminal. But you can be like an innovative accountant or think differently. Just don't tell anyone you're a creative accountant, they'll put you in prison. Um, but the um the thing about time, it's not me who worked this out, right? People much cleverer than me. It was Harvard. Scientists worked out that your ability to think creatively is reduced by 45% on too tight a deadline. So what what too tight deadlines do is paralyze creativity, they don't liberate it. So the thing with that is this is why you should never try and create anything in a workshop. The only people who should spend time in workshops are woodwork teachers, okay? Basically, if you try and create something in a workshop, you've got a finite amount of time, and you go, come on, people, come up with something new and different. What will happen to the human brain under those circumstances is that it will panic. It will panic that you won't be able to come up with something. So the first faintly plausible thing you hear, you will all gravitate towards, and then you will convince yourself with confirmation bias that it is genius. Okay. That's why you shouldn't do it. You should bring things to a workshop to augment and improve. But people fall in love with it because they hear the word workshop or my other least favourite word, sprint, which just means doing things with no rigour quickly. Um what happens is people just fall in love because they think it's cheap. And they like cheap. Because again, people say things like, we have a start-up mentality here, which for some reason appears to have come to mean chaotic, shambolic, cheap and quick. That's not a start-up mentality. I understand why you do sprints if you're trying to um come up with prototyping and various things. They work brilliantly in coding. Coding, yeah, that's where it came from. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, right? But if you're trying to come up with something, particularly, let's say you're a client who's trying to come up with a brand platform that you want to inform every single thing your company does for the next five years. My strong suggestion is you don't rush to come up with that in a couple of weeks just because it'll be cheap. Because if it's got to inform everything you're going to do, then I'd take a little bit of time over it. Particularly if you're one of the big global companies that spends $100, $200 million a year on marketing. Perhaps not try and come up with the thing that's going to inform all your marketing for a couple of grand in a workshop over the course of a couple of hours. You know, if you're designing a rocket to get to the moon, you probably wouldn't do it in Starbucks in an hour and a half.

Will Ockenden 20:51

So, okay, time scarcity, we need to reframe and re-educate those um those stakeholders.

Kevin Chesters 20:58

Yeah, unsurprisingly, I run a module on that. How to create time in a world that's speeding up. Everyone thinks the world's getting quicker. It isn't, by the way. I checked it on your behalf. Last week was exactly seven days long. Every day was exactly 24 hours long, right? Hasn't sped up. I've checked it. No need to thank me. Um you're not running out of time. In the first instance, people aren't very good at prioritizing what they do. Prioritize what's important. If you work for a company, look at how your company makes money and look at what makes your boss happy and prioritize your to-do list against that because it'll affect your rent and mortgage. Um, but honestly, just people aren't very good at prioritizing. Right? Look at what your success criteria is as a company, look at what your publicly stated objectives are, and prioritize your diary and your to do list against that. But the other thing is, people have a weird relationship with time. They think time is finite, they think Time is logical. They think time is sort of cyclical and works in a certain way. It doesn't. So basically, you have to change your relationship with time, change your attitude to time, change your attitude to prioritising your own time. And if you do that, in most cases, you'll never run out of time. So on my session, I promise people two things. At the end of it, you'll never run out of time ever again. And you'll never stress about it for the rest of your life.

Chris Norton 22:29

That would be nice.

Kevin Chesters 22:30

How's that for a promise?

Chris Norton 22:32

That'd be lovely. When we spoke last time, so we spoke a few weeks ago, you told me that you were proud that you'd had five picks of the week and three turkeys of the week with your ads. Yeah. So what were the five picks and what were the three turkeys? I can't remember.

Production Missteps And Culture Clashes

Kevin Chesters 22:53

I can remember the turkeys. Okay. Ironically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny with Turkey of the Week, because everyone criticizes it. And I remember asking um, I think it was Kate McGee when she was editor of campaign. I think it was Kate. I don't think it was Maisie. I think it was Kate told me this. Was that everyone criticizes Turkey of the Week and has a pop at it, but it gets four times as much traffic on the site. Because everyone loves a bit of gossip, don't they? Everyone loves a bit of sort of, you know, hello and heat and a bit of sort of you know Love Island. Everyone likes the gossip and the chat. A friend of mine from uni set up Pop bitch, you know, the site. And um you'd imagine it wouldn't you? A graduate from Oxford University. What did she do? Set up Pot bitch. Why? Because there's a lot of money in it. Right, there's a lot of money in chat and a lot of money in all that. So yeah, sorry. This is gonna sound to anyone listening like I'm trying to put off mentioning turkeys of the week. So I mean, look, you can imagine what I got pick of the week for. I think like the times change work that Mick and I did. Uh I think we got like one for a Boots Christmas thing we did, loads of stuff for Honda over the years. Um I think I got a pick of the week for Old Lions when uh Rich Denny and and and um Dave Henderson and I did that for Carlsberg. Uh turkeys.

Will Ockenden 24:17

Um what's the criteria for a turkey, by the way, before you go into the turkeys? Is it just an advantage? My criteria or theirs. Their criteria, yeah.

Kevin Chesters 24:24

It's a random opinion of one journalist. Okay. And by the way, it might be a journalist who's never made an ad before in their entire lives. Certainly it was for the one I got for Vodafone. The first Martin Freeman ad that we did for Vodafone got given pick of the week by a journalist who I believe has never worked in an agency or a client. I don't know that for a fact, but I think it was. I seem to remember it at the time sticking in my head. But anyway, in that classic thing, I've sometimes, and I wrote this when I wrote Private View for campaign years ago. What one has to separate is the in my brain is planner and punter. The planner in my head wants to overthink things and think that people give a shit about ads and really look at them and go, oh, I wonder what the proposition was behind that. Oh, I wonder what Schopenhauer and Daniel Kahneman would have made of that, you know, fuck that, no one thinks like that. They just like stuff. You know, hence why the Meerkat has lasted nearly two decades, despite the fact that I've never found it funny. You know, but who cares what I think, right? You know, people love it. You know, it scores brilliantly. Just go and chat to Andrew or John at System One and work out what real people like, you know. So I think for Vodafone, the Martin Freeman work, you know, people loved it. It worked really well. Martin's an everyman. You know, the they told us they wanted an archetype of an everyman. We're going, okay. Well, just look at Martin Freeman's character, Tim, in the office, you know, the kind of person who's just like you. You know, anyway, so we got a Turkey a week for that, which was completely unjustified and bullshit. Um, there was one that we got was completely justified. Totally justified. In fact, when I was originally shown the script for it in the meeting 20 years ago, I wrote across the top of the script in pencil and passed it back across to the account handler. This has got Turkey of the Week written all over it. Okay. And unsurprisingly, sometimes it's shit to be right. But unsurprisingly, I think it might have been the worst ad ever made in British history. Okay? It's got my fingerprints all over it. I mean, I can't disassociate myself from it. I'm trying to think whether to mention it. You can find it on YouTube. Well, you can find the 20-second version of it on YouTube. Thankfully, no one's ever put the 60-second version of it up. But um, but yeah, that was a turkey. It was terrible. Um, for all sorts of reasons. That do you want to go into them? Absolutely, we want to go into it, yeah. Ask me anything. Look, I think one of the best things you can do from a behavioral science point of view, it's demonstrate vulnerability. But I think from a human perspective, I just think people like honest people.

Will Ockenden 27:17

Yeah. So come on, what brand was it for and what was the ad? And we'll we'll we'll we'll absolutely look it up after the show.

Owning Failure And Fallout

Pitch Nightmares And Improvisation

Kevin Chesters 27:24

Okay. Now look, all I can say to this, if anyone comes at me for it, okay, is I was involved in this. I'm guilty. Right? Could I have stopped it? No idea. Could I have said more? Yes, I could. Okay. It was for a product called the Big Cheese Dipper from The Laughing Cow. Okay. Okay. Now, there are moments in processes where you can make single-telling gestures that would have stopped bad things happening. Okay. And you know the old analogy of boiling a frog? Mm-hmm. Yeah? Yeah. So don't throw a frog into boiling water because it'll jump out. If you put a frog in water and boil it gently, it will, it will go, it will sit there and boil to death. So there were moments in this process where, and if you want me to over-intellectualize and overthink it, it always reminds me of that line from Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth says she is steeped so far in blood that to carry on, that to go over is, you know, you basically to carry on is less irksome than to go back. Okay? Too far in, basically. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we were given a brief for a new product called the Big Cheese Dipper with a Zed. Hey, come on, it was targeting kids. You can't blame me for that. Gen Z? And by the way, that wasn't my thing. Well, I didn't name it, okay? I'm gonna sit here basically making excuses for myself all the way through this. But we started off with me going, look, if you want to come up and from an industry perspective, give me a big giant punch in the face for being responsible for the worst ad in British history, I'm I'm culpable. Right. We got a brief, and uh it made sense as a product, and they'd got just distribution in two big supermarkets and whatever, right? Anyway, the it taught me that over the years you should just be more honest. But anyway, we'll we'll come to that. So the brief came in and they had mentioned somewhere on the brief that that we could do TV. So what did the agency see? You know that old Gary Larson cartoon of what you say to dogs and what dogs hear. So, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Rex, you know, when the you're saying to the dog, look, Rex, we've been out before, there's some foot. Well, anyway, he's just hearing his name. So all the agency saw when they saw this brief was telly. So the creative team, oh, I'm not gonna name, went off and wrote a telead. Which, of course, I mean, I'll tell you another story of this. I remember years ago, the same thing happened to me on a pitch for Ford, um, ten years before this, where the client had said, Yes, you can do TV as part of the mix, but it has to be direct response because we haven't got the money for it. When we got the first set of scripts back, um the opening line of the script was opens in a forest in Thailand. I'm like, cheap, fuck off, mate. Um, anyway, and then proceeded to be an ad where elephants did precision walking. I'm like, what anyway, so let's get back to the cheese dipper. I know I keep looking like I don't want to talk about this. The first thing we saw was a 60-second TV ad. Anyway, we had the first meeting with the client where the client said, we have booked 20-second spots. The media company gave us the media schedule. At this point, the entire idea depended upon the ad being quite long. Because remember, it's called the Big Cheese Dipper. So the creative strategic thought on it was that it's one upmanship. You think that's big, but this is big. You think that's big, but this is bigger. You think that's bigger, look at this. And then you end the argument with the big cheese dipper, which is the ultimate big cheese thing. Yeah? I didn't say it was genius, mate. I just said it worked, okay? So anyway, but it did work, right? At the time there were lots of sort of trends of kids wearing really big heels on trainers and really big jackets and the rest of it, right? I want to say back in the day, this is 2006. I'm not talking about, you know, we're not talking about Goethe, you know, or alotoshgar Toshiba. I mean, like, this is like, you know, it is the modern world. Uh 2006. Anyway, at that point the ad should have stopped. Because it only worked with this one upmanship. But basically, the creative team had Lady Macbeth did, they'd got so into the idea of doing a telead. I think it might have been their first telead. They've done loads of work since. They're a lovely couple of lads, but in this instance, it was like, yeah, okay. We should have stopped it. It didn't work as a 20. We can make it work as a 20. And then as an agency, we did something terrible. I'm going to absolve all the clients of all blame here. We basically convinced them that it could work. Because I think it was what we wanted to do. Um, and it didn't work. I mean, it was pretty poor to start with, but it was kind of like the ad was a rap battle, right? It was like, you know, people doing like sort of and now this is quite a big thing, but you know, like almost like a roast, a rap battle. Two people in a tennis, in a basketball court. So you think that's big, this is bigger, you think that's big, this is bigger, you think that's big, this is bigger. Look, I've got a big cheese dipper. Oh fuck, I've lost the argument, I look like an idiot, and then you say big cheese dipper. Do you know what I mean? Again, I'm not claiming this is, you know, Lars Van Trier. Do you know what I mean? It's like, you know, we're not in Kubrick territory, it's an advert. You have to get over yourself sometimes and realise, you know, you're in the commercial application of creativity. I mean, I've often shut down overly arrogant creators in my time by pointing out that, you know, you're not an artist, mate, you're a commercial artist. You know, if you want to be an artist, fuck off and paint and see if you can make a living out of it. You know what I mean? You probably won't be able to make a living out of it. Look, but I'm not saying the most stunningly, some of the most stunningly creatively, brilliantly creative people I've ever met in my life, like Mick, like Chris Groom, like Stu Hartness, you know, um Sam Heath, these people, right, are brilliantly, brilliantly creative, but they're smart enough to understand that what they do is the commercial application of creativity. Anyway, we're back to Cheese Dipper. We've got a script, it doesn't really work. Um, we saw the budget for production, it didn't really work either. You've got a bunch of sort of slightly older people who like are a bit middle class trying to write a rap battle. I mean, everything sort of conspired to make what I think is technically known as shit. Right? So it's awful. It really is awful. Look, if you want to go on YouTube, type in Big Cheese Dipper with a Zed rap battle, you'll see it. It doesn't really make any sense. It's a bit pony. Um, and I've done ads with ponies in, by the way, I'm sure you know for three, which were very good. But this was just pony, okay? Um, as I said to someone before, I made a fair bit of pony in my career before I was allowed to make pony. And um, and yeah, so it is the worst ad I think in British history, and for all sorts of reasons, it was a massive mistake to make it. I absolved the client from all blame who went on to have a good career. I don't think holds it against me. But if you find me dead in a ditch with a big bunch of cheese over the top of my head, um, with a diver's flipper shoved in my mouth, which will make sense if you go and watch the ad, then you'll know that the client never forgave the agent.

Speaker 1 35:27

Can you top it? Michael Scott Big Cheese Dipper Divers Flipper. Introducing the Big Cheese Dipper.

Will Ockenden 35:41

Big and Cheesy, O'Zie. What a confession. What a claim. I don't think we've ever had somebody confessing to the worst advert in the history of adverts before.

Chris Norton 35:53

And I'm absolutely fine. Because you've been through like um, I mean, when you film an ad and then you it goes it turns into a turkey, that's that's one thing. But have you uh one thing I've put out on um LinkedIn really recently is pitch nightmares. Have you got any pitch nightmare stories where you've absolutely fucked a pitch right up?

Choosing Who You Work With

Compound Creativity And Trust

Kevin Chesters 36:13

Oh mate, you could do two episodes just on the ones that I've done. Um I mean I I think I I was actually gonna write a book once called 99 Problems in the pitch ain't one. No, I've obviously I've had all sorts. I mean, I've from ones I've been I turn up, I mean, and again, these aren't necessarily pitch mistakes you've made, but pitch nightmares. So I turned up to a pitch once where all the electricity went out. So it was a digital pitch. There's no electricity, so we can't use a Mac, we can't present anything. And the client said to us at the time, this is where you turn a nightmare into an opportunity. The client said, Okay, you can come back tomorrow if you want. Or do you think you can pitch without it? I looked at the creative director, he looked at me, we went, I said to them, Have you got a flip chart? They brought a flip chart in. I drew the strategy up on a flip chart. Oh, the creative. Remember, this is a website, this is a digital pitch. Drew, drew the thing, going, This comes in here, and this wobbles here, and then two things drop down here, and then you have this. Um, and the funniest punchline here is to say we came fifth out of fifth, and we never heard from them again. But the um, but no, genuinely, we won the pitch. And they said to us, we'd had a whole day of PowerPoint. They said it was really funny to watch people who knew exactly what they were talking about, who were really passionate about the idea, and who could explain it without any crutch at all. And they went, look, and it's one of the biggest lessons I learned in pitching. And by the way, I learned this lesson again when I was a client, sat on the other side of the table, where all the pitches were identical, all the client, all the agency creds were identical, everyone was saying the same thing. We're all about the work, we're all about the work that works, we're all about the work that works in the real world. What as opposed to where? You know, we're all about culture, creating culture, influencing culture, cultural work that works in the real world for culture. Mate, I've no idea what the fuck you're talking about. And so everyone would be really similar. So I think the fact that we just turned up and talked about it, they went, it was such a breath of fresh air, you can have the business. But I mean, I've been in all sorts of pitch disasters. Ones where the account handler forgot to bring the work. We were literally waiting outside the meet the meeting room, and I was like, so uh where are we going to put the boards? Boards. Oh my god. Um I had a brilliant one, which Mick tells better than me, and the account handler ML, who is now at Leo's doing Vodafone, um tells brilliantly. Where we were we'd done a presentation about a month before where we couldn't get the work to stick on the wall properly. So we said, that's not happening in this pitch. It was really important pitch. So we we got this Velcro stuff, put it on their walls, we put the work up, it all sat around brilliantly. Nothing fell off the walls, nothing at all. And then when we pulled the wall, the work off, it pulled half the wall down. We had to spend 5,000 pounds replastering. Yeah, exactly that. Replastering the walls and having it redecorated, because essentially, you know, the joke is kind of we brought the house down, kind of thing. Do you know what I mean? But we literally pulled the client's office down. Shit. We didn't win that one either. So not only did we not win, we had to pay five grand for the you know, people say, Oh, you don't get paid for pictures. We paid them. And they got a new broadroom out of it. So, yeah, there's all that. I mean, I've had pictures. Um, I had a chemistry meeting once with a client who I'm not gonna name, who turned up to the tissue session of the pitch, not just with their own idea, they turned up with an ad, their own ad that they'd had made by an agency friend of theirs in Germany, and so they turned up into the chemistry meeting where we were sorry, tissue meeting, where we were supposed to be presenting our ideas, going, well, I've got a brief, but can I just show you like something? I'm like, yeah? Showed us the stuff. I'm like, right, so you want something a bit like that? Like, no, no, no, no, we want that. I'm like, what do you mean? Well, we want an ad that's this. I'm like okay, but you've already got an ad like that because you've just asked to make it for you. And they were like, it was very bizarre. And as it turned out, again, I'm not naming the client, turned out we were only on the pitch list because he had some kind of beef with his sister-in-law who turned out to work at our agency, and he sort of just wanted to dangle us on the end of a string.

Chris Norton 41:42

That is mental. I mean, that is that is virgin on pathetic, isn't it?

Kevin Chesters 41:51

I mean, before I if anyone listening to this is has got a Yeah, what was the line someone said that's virgin on the offensive? And he turned around and said, No, I think there's only one virgin on the offensive in this room. So I think um, I think yeah, he was he was just yeah, I mean, just look. If you work for 30 years, in that time, you're gonna come across all sorts of people, and sometimes you're going to work with poisonous twats. And I've been really lucky in my career. I genuinely think I'm so lucky in my career. I have mostly worked with really good clients, I've mostly had really lovely colleagues. You know, in my time, and by the way, there is a list, I mean I'm not claiming it's like Arya Stark, right? But I do have a list of people I would never go anywhere near. And I have a list of people who I am very often asked by agencies about my opinion of clients, and I'm very more often asked by clients my opinion of agencies. So if you're on that list. The shit list. Yeah. And there's probably only about it's not long. I'd say there's seven names on the list. But in my time, I have found wonderful partners. Really wonderful partners. Mick probably being the best. You know, but over the time I've had wonderful partners in account handling, in planning, in creative, in finance, you know, people who totally understood that the role of finance was to help create great creative happen. You know, shout out here to Bromwyn Hemming at Wieden, best finance person I ever worked with, most creative finance person I ever worked with. And I don't mean that in a criminal way, I mean it in a good way. You know, but but over my time as well, I have met not very nice people. And you will in any industry. It's not unique to advertising or marketing. And so there are people who are. Shameless frauds, hopeless liars, morality vacuums. Some people are all three. Um, you know, and I have met some people who you're probably better off avoiding. Um, and again, not naming anyone, you know, so in my time, but I think I'm incredibly fortunate. In my time, 30 years, only seven people who I would say are, you know, hopeless flaw frauds, shameless liars, you know, and just not very good people to be around. And the nice thing about working for yourself is you get to choose exactly who you work with, when you work, and how you work. True. And so nowadays, if you see from my website or you see from you know stuff I put out on LinkedIn, you know, the people I'm working with are good people with the ambition to do good things. You want to embrace creativity in all its forms, you know, and you look at those people, you know, like Sherry Crammon, MS. You look at those people and you say, right, they do good, don't they? They do good stuff. Why do they do good stuff? Because they have a commitment to do good things. And like I say, people like Mick, you know, who Mick and I argue about absolutely everything apart from what's important. You know, and the thing we have in common is we share a value system, we share a value, and we push each other to do better. And the reason we do good stick stuff together is probably because we would absolutely hate to disappoint the other one, you know, and a bit like when you go for a run with a partner, yeah, like you you go a bit further because you push each other to go a bit further, and you know, I think that's the thing. So, you know, long-winded way of saying, I think that, you know, over the course of my career, I've worked with brilliant people, you know, I I've worked with good people, but even the people I work with who were limited, if they had an ambition and they were good people and they had a good value system, you know, not everybody can be Max Verstappen, but there's a thousand people who work at Red Bull putting him in that car. You know, there were 13 people who stood on the moon, but 40,000 people as part of the Apollo program. You know, not everybody can be that one out front, but be the best you can be at what you do, and don't be a twat.

Chris Norton 46:45

Don't be a twat. Yeah.

Will Ockenden 46:49

Lots of lots of potential titles for this episode, isn't there?

When To Fire An Agency

Chris Norton 46:53

Yeah, definitely. Um if you if you were like because I I like the idea of compound creativity. What's your theory on clients firing agencies after two or three years? What do you think of that? Should like because people will be listening to this, they'll be in-house working for brands. And what's the but is it best to change your agency for a for a uh you know for for ideas? Because I hear a lot about um obviously we work we work in public relations, um often it can take a year or two to get under the skin of what a client's about, all the all the political side of it, and sometimes you don't even get six months, and it's crazy because you just you're just getting going. What do you what do you feel with that? That agents they can get most out of agencies.

Shared Risk, Shared Reward

Kevin Chesters 47:40

It depends why you're firing them. Okay. If you're firing them to cover up for your own inadequacies, because it's easy, then no. Okay, and and you see this cycle, you know, um CMO or someone comes into a client, uh, they fire the previous agency and do a pitch. Well, that's bought them six to nine months. The new agency then comes up with something new, which will always be something that was different from before. But unless you're willing to change your behavior and what you're doing as a client, changing your agency and expecting your work to get better is like a shit driver changing their car and expecting their driving to get better. It won't, will it? Right? But what happens then in that cycle is you run a pitch, you get new work, you run it for 12 months, you realize, oh my god, I've been exposed because it isn't any good really, because you just made all the same mistakes. You normally move on to a new CMO job, new CMO comes in, they get fired, right? But it does depend on why you're firing them, right? First off, look at look at all the great campaigns that anyone can name. Right? You know, John Lewis with Adam and Eve, IKEA with mother, Dove with Ogil vy. You know, you can just look at these great campaigns, right? McDonald's with Leo Burnett. I'm only talking about ad agencies here, right? But you look at it, right? What have they got in common? Right? It's a longevity of relationship. The personnel changes, right? But but the fundamentals don't. So all the best things come from relationships, right? If you're doing anything new, anything new at all, remember what the word creative means, it means new. If you do anything new at all creatively, it involves an element of risk. You will never take a risk with someone you don't like or you don't trust. Therefore, the ability to do something good takes a little bit of time. Now, if I go back to three at Wieden, so I was the CSO and the planner on the pitch. We did the pitch, we won the pitch in 2011. Pony came out, the first one of those keep on interneting ads, right? And that strategy came out in March 2013. It was 18 months of building the trust, building the relationship, doing a print campaign, doing a few posters, getting to know each other, and then it came out. Now you look at what that work was. So the strategy that was written by myself and and Sam Heath and uh sorry, not so many, sorry, uh Dan Norris, Ray Shaughnessy, Freddie Powell, um Holly uh Sayers. So you look at what happened there, right? We did that work. Now, everything that then happened, you know, sing it kitty, and then every single piece of work that was then developed subsequently, the strategy had already been written. And the relationship had already been set up. And so over time, you could do great work for a decade because of the initial thinking and the initial work that was done. So again, it depends why you're firing them. Yes, longevity in relationship is what will always lead to better work because you'll take risks together and all the rest of it. But don't just expect to get that. You know, a lot of agencies get fired because they do shit work. Well, if you give someone shit, they'll be surprised if they fire you for it. So I think it's very encouraged in modern life to think of binary answers to questions, right? Everything's all this or all that. Yeah. Should people stay with an agency forever? Should people fire the agency after one campaign? Depends on the agency, depends on the campaign. But I think you can see from the evidence, go and look at System One's brilliant work on compound creativity. Yeah. You know, you can see that the longer you stay in a relationship, mother and IKEA, Leo Bennett and McDonald's, right, you can see this, right? Over time. You get better work over time. You look at what Uncommon are doing now with BA. The work is infinitely better for having gone through a couple of rounds of working together and a couple of years of getting to know each other to take more risks. But they're not risks. Creativity is proven to be the number one driver of commercial advantage. It would be risky if you were doing really obvious, really samey work. And when I say risky, I mean suicidal. Right? It would be idiocy. So, yeah, I think and also, you know, to go back to the theme of mistakes, if you know people and you work with them, then you can be honest and hold your hands up. And I think the thing is what I always say, and I run a course on client agency relations, is shared risk, shared reward. Clients are very happy to go waltzing down La Croisette and pick up loads of gongs and all the rest of it, when it goes well. They should be equally as willing to put their hands up in their organization and say to their chief exec, no, mate, this isn't their work. It's our work. We did it together. You know, and all the best clients I've ever worked with, genuinely, you know, your Ian Armstrong's, your Ellie Norman's, you know, these people, right? You know, um, have been willing in their time, you know, the Shari Crammans, all these people who've done brilliant work, have done that brilliant work because they have shielded their agency from that blame if something goes wrong. Totally agree. It's a partnership, isn't it? I think it is a partnership, but I think as well, sometimes there's a lot of bullshit spoken. You know, at the end of the day, they are the client. And I sometimes think that the partnership you have with them is a little like the partnership you had with your mum and dad when you're trying to get some more pocket money. So, I mean, at the end of the day, they can fire you. At the end of the day, they are in charge. I've been a client, and one of the awkward conversations I had to have with my agency at the time was your ad, my ass. You know, if this all goes hideously wrong, you know, the client will be blamed for it. Yeah. The agency will go off and work on another, you know, just change the logo on the creds deck and go off and pitch your idea to a different supermarket. But but you won't. You won't. You're there, you're exposed. You're that advertising or that creativity when it's inside the client's organization, yeah, is the clients. They will get the blame for it. You won't.

Chris Norton 54:16

Um, so you've been on the show now, you've been through the questions, you've given us your mistakes. If you were us, who's the next guest you'd have on this show and why?

Will Ockenden 54:27

I'm guessing this is going to be a long list as well.

Kevin Chesters 54:30

Oh, I've got a massive list of people you should talk to. Um, maybe get the Cheese Dipper client on. No, don't do that. We'll get the actual Laughing Cow on. If you're out there laughing cow, I don't know what your name is. There was a time when I was Mr. Cheese. I was doing Leodammer, Port Salut, Laughing Cow, Cheese Dipper. Literally, if you wanted to know about Cheese, mate, I was your man. Um, look, I mean, uh there's all sorts of people you could get on. You know, I think you should, you know, Mick would be a fantastic guest. I think you should talk to Ellie Norman about all the things she did when she was CMO at Formula One and maybe ask her, you know, how that went at Man United when Jim Ratcliffe came in. Now she's CMO of Formula E. That's how well that went. Uh maybe get her to chat about that. I don't know. Ellie's great, super smart. Um, you know, Sherry's really good, really honest. Sherry Crammon, the MS. There's all sorts of agency people you could talk to. Um Mick's a great person to talk to. He's, you know, he'll tell you very honestly about all the fuck-ups he's done over the years. He loves a bit of it. As long as you buy him a cup of Barry's tea, he'll tell you anything.

Chris Norton 55:46

I'm gonna tap up all of those people now, Kevin. I might need to have some introductions. Um, if um if people want to get older and book your services, um how can they do that?

Kevin Chesters 55:55

So I am the easiest person to find, mostly because I'm astonishingly needy on the socials. So you can you can find me very easily on LinkedIn. The other thing is, unsurprisingly, my name is Kevin Chester's, and you can find me at kevinchesters.com. That didn't need a naming workshop.

Chris Norton 56:12

We don't like workshops. The only people that need workshops are people in woodwork classes.

Future Guests And Finding Kevin

Kevin Chesters 56:19

Well, I also think as well, the funny thing is how agencies find themselves very, very different, sorry, difficult to find. And again, agencies spend their time telling, you know, um lamenting that they're not taken seriously in the boardroom. And then they say, and so which agency are you? Oh, we're Sexual Hedgehogs. Mate, no one's gonna take you seriously, you know, or you go, you know, we're the pirates. You go, Yeah, I think modeling yourself on 17th century sex criminals probably won't help your credibility in a boardroom.

Will Ockenden 56:55

That that was um that was on the short list for our name, wasn't it, Chris?

Kevin Chesters 56:59

Well, I think honestly, if ever you want to talk to someone about this, go and talk to system one, who for the first 10 years of their life were called Brain Juicer. And I used to find it really hard in a boardroom. I'd go to my CEO or the CEO of my client and go, um, I really think what we need to do is understand a little bit about the emotional drivers of this work. So I want you to talk to Brain Jucer. They go, Who? No, when I go talk to System 1, they're like, Oh, that sounds clever. That sounds very Daniel Kahneman, that sounds very lesbine. Let's have a bit of that, you know, and then somebody just changing the name.

Chris Norton 57:33

John's gonna be delighted with the amount of plug-in we've done him and Andrew, they're gonna love this. The amount of plug-in they've got on this show. I'm gonna tap up. John's coming on the show, I think. And he's literally asked me three times like the game on. He's great, isn't he?

Kevin Chesters 57:45

John doesn't need any of it. He's made all sorts of mistakes. Getting to tell you about it is. I know that's what he keeps saying.

Chris Norton 57:50

He keeps saying he's gonna come on. Um anyway, thanks for coming on the show, Kevin. He's the world's busiest man in Is he these days.

Kevin Chesters 57:56

He's like trying to get a sort of you know, he's like trying to get a quant a quantitative Sabrina Carpenter on. You know what I mean? He's probably a bit overbooked, isn't he?

Will Ockenden 58:05

He'll make time for us. Thank you so much, Kevin.