Snoop, Solo Stove and why creativity is under attack

I was lucky enough to grow up in marketing working in a company that was brand-centric and believed in creativity. I remember looking up at the senior leaders at Unilever and thinking, “I hope one day I can do work that is remotely as good as some of the things these folks are doing today.” I firmly believe when you are surrounded by people who are ambitious when it comes to creativity, you end up becoming more creative. For me, there was never an alternate path. Even when my creative criteria were not so good, even when I didn’t know how to brief, even when most of my basic marketing skills were not as sharp (I graduated in mechanical engineering, not marketing!), the ambition to do creative things was already there. Creativity was the way. And many times the only way. As I grew older, it became clear to me that making great creative work was not easy. The main barrier usually had nothing to do with getting to a great idea. Instead, it was convincing the organization to take the leap of faith and bet on something that was different—because great creative is usually different. Even in an environment like the one at Unilever, which was really fertile for creative, we still had to invest a ton of time to bring everyone along on the journey. Things that are new or different lead to uncertainty, and uncertainty leads to fear. Super Bowl commercials Tracking the latest brand and agency plans Enter here In a 2015 speech to the Advertising Club of New York, Colleen DeCourcy, then global executive creative director at Wieden+Kennedy, said: “We are often left wondering what if, in this business, creators and companies behind the things we all know and love, things that redefine marketing, that changed business and whole industries, things that were considered brave ... what if they hadn’t had the nerve to act on their unusual, unprovable, seemingly irrational idea? What if they’d just done what most smart, experienced, logical, safe people would have done in this situation?” That’s the thing. I wish I could predict absolutely everything. I wish I could measure absolutely everything. I dream of a world with perfect attribution. (I am joking, I dream of other things.) Anyway, the best creative I’ve seen, the creative that has driven the best brand and business results, would not go hand on hand with what “most smart, experienced, logical, safe people would have done.” And that’s not easy to accept or to believe in. Related: The 40 best ads of 2023 I am not saying all crazy, different, wild creative is good. There is some weird stuff out there, too. But when the positioning of the brand is clear, when the brief is clear (including the target audience), when the objective you are trying to accomplish is clear (and sometimes the objective is not short-term sales), and when the creative connects properly with all of the above, the results tend to be superior. It is a hard pill to swallow to accept that one cannot predict everything. Maybe that’s why creativity is always under attack. Most of the time when I see a great campaign somewhere, it always comes with a long list of comments from people asking about attribution or business results or questioning absolutely everything. And the questions are usually loaded with skepticism and a strong sense of entitlement. (People demanding business results on LinkedIn as if you owed them something is a classic example.) Ad Age Creativity Bookmark our section covering the best in brand creativity every day Read more here Funny enough, I don’t see these same people asking these questions about the thousands of really bad ads that surround us every day in every single touch point. Funny enough, usually the people who ask these questions haven’t done anything truly remarkable when it comes to creative. So maybe criticism is also a defense mechanism. I don’t know. Yes, I wish I could measure everything and have a model that predicts it all. Life would be easier, and I would probably get home earlier. But the thing with models is that they are normally built on past data. And the best creative tends to unlock new, uncharted territories. So models tend to not work every time. I wish they did. Early dinner at home would be nice. I keep hearing things like, “We need every dollar to work harder,” which basically means, “I just care about short-term sales.” As if CMOs were there just doing self-indulgent work or work to win awards. I don’t know any CMO who gets a bonus if revenue and profit are not there. But most CMOs also know they need to nurture the brand. And that sometimes goes beyond short-term sales or short-term profit. I keep reading that companies are eliminating CMO roles. According to Fortune, only about 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have marketing experience (while over 70% of Fortune 100 CEOs have operations or finance backgrounds). I mean, if the top doesn’t always get it, what would you expect? To be honest, none of these things I hear or read surprise me. A classic example of the lack of appreciation or understanding around creativity—and marketing—happened with Solo Stove’s Snoop Dogg stunt just now. The CEO got fired because a top-of-the-funnel campaign didn’t lead to strong sales in the space of 40 days. Yes, you read that right. The campaign broke between Nov. 16-20, 2023. The company released a new guidance in terms of net sales and adjusted EBITDA for 2023 last week and fired the CEO, saying this campaign—which ran for 40-ish days during Q4 of 2023—didn’t deliver the sales lift required during that quarter. It would be funny if it were not tragic. I don’t know about you, but I had never heard about Solo Stove before. Never, ever. I had no idea what Solo Brands Inc. was. Have you ever heard of Oru Kayak? What about ISLE paddle boards? And Chubbies? I never heard of any of those. But they are all brands from Solo Brands Inc. When it comes to Solo Brands Inc., the only brand I know is Solo Stove. And that is thanks to Snoop. Yes, the top-of-the-funnel activity indeed drove awareness. Will it convert? Maybe. Depends on the target audience it reached, the price, the product, the placement, etc. And sometimes it does require a bit of time. I wish it didn’t. But it does. And yet there was an avalanche of “experts” criticizing Solo Brands Inc., jumping to conclusions based on headline analysis (which is not really an analysis) and proclaiming that a stunt like this never works. Have they ever done anything remarkable creatively? Probably not. But they are experts. And they demand to know the business results. And the attribution. Oh, the entitlement. Creativity will always be under attack. But managing to pull it off can be a competitive advantage for your company, your brand and yourself. If it were easy, everyone would do it. And if everyone were doing it, it wouldn’t be a factor of differentiation. So, God bless the skeptics!

Snoop, Solo Stove and why creativity is under attack

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