Ad Age is marking Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, our guest editor Soyoung Kang, CMO of skincare brand eos, writes about thinking behind the award-winning “Bless your f#@%ing cooch” campaign.
Early in my marketing career, I was told that I wasn’t the “creative one,” I was the “analytical one.”
Was it true? Maybe. After a decade in management consulting, I had finally made the leap into my first brand role and was just learning the fundamentals.
But oh, did that comment burn. I bristled, feeling boxed in. That familiar strain of enduring others’ expectations of an Asian kid. You have to be practical. You should be a doctor. You must be good at math.
Perhaps I had approached my new job like I approached everything: observe, assess, decode and then, finally, reconstruct. I suppose that’s “analytical.” It’s what I’ve done my whole life. Watch and learn, find the patterns, replicate.