Google Adweek 2010 - Adobe 21st century creative

MALE SPEAKER: --to Matt Scheckner and the whole team at Advertising Week for all their help. And they just do a phenomenal job putting the whole event on year in, year out. So we're just really thrilled to be here. As most people probably already know, the creative community and the advertising industry in particular has been a real important area of focus for Adobe, really since our inception. But just as the agency community is evolving, and today dealing with how to build brands in a much more complex, multi-screen environment, Adobe's also evolving. So moving from just content creation solutions to content delivery and optimization solutions. And so our take is that working with our agency partners, the opportunity for creativity and profit is greater today than it ever has been in the advertising world. And so we can dig into those topics a little bit here with the panel. And so with that, I just want to introduce our moderator for today. It's Jason Witt, Senior Vice President and General Manager from MySpace Studio. JASON WITT: Thank you. Could we turn up the lights in the back? I'm just kidding. I'm going to get a migraine. So thank you guys for coming out here. I was actually nervous about two minutes ago. It looked like there were going to be 10 people, and I thought we could just go get drinks. But no. We probably can't. And since I'm going to forget, there's a really cool Panasonic 3D thing happening after the show. I'll never remember. We think it's all going to be really cool. The other thing is in preparing for this panel, the guys onstage said that they had so much information that they didn't even want to introduce themselves. So I'm going to try to do that. I gave them a two-sentence opportunity to describe themselves. In a couple cases, their PR people did it. So let me start from my right. Steve Nesle from Deutsch. Steve Nesle, pronounced nes-lee, is the Executive Vice President, Executive Creative Director at Deutsch New York where he is charged with developing the agency's digital practice as well as integrating digital thinking into all of Deutsch's accounts from PNC Bank to Microsoft. Steve's a veteran Digital Creative and he's held Executive Creator positions at Tribal, Modem, McCann, and Digitas. Uh-oh. I have Michael Lebowitz, who founded and is the CEO of Big Spaceship. He's asked me to cut this short, but he did get a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. To my left-- MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: It was Creative Arts, not Primetime. JASON WITT: To my left, Dave Schiff from Crispin Porter. Dave started his advertising career eight years ago as a copywriter. Crispin Porter in 2003 was promoted to Creative Director on Coca-Cola Zero, where he helped engineer the Coca-Cola Company's most successful product launch in more than 20 years. Dave had a Detroit to DC journey on an electric motorcycle. And that was the subject of a highly successful, Shocking Barack viral campaign for the Oregon-based EB manufacturer Brammo. DAVE SCHIFF: I've also been to five different county jails in three different states, including Queens Central Booking here in Kew Gardens. [APPLAUSE] I don't know why the PR people didn't-- TOM O'KEEFE: That's not on the paper. That has to be said. You don't put that on the paper. JASON WITT: Dave made me feel a lot better about what I'm wearing. So Philippe Meunier-- PHILIPPE MEUNIER: Good. You're good. JASON WITT: --OK. Chief Creative Officer and Founder at SID LEE. Philip, actually, right? PHILIPPE MEUNIER: Yeah. JASON WITT: So he and a high school buddy founded SID LEE 18 years ago, built in part on a multi-platform approach defined as commercial creativity. You now have offices in Paris, Amsterdam, and Toronto. And as the senior partner and Creative Chief, Philippe oversees all creative-- Chef? It is Chef. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: It is Chef. JASON WITT: Master Chef. Phi-leep-- Philippe-- oversees all creative output for all major international clients including Red Bull, Cirque du Soleil, and Adidas. Anything to add? PHILIPPE MEUNIER: Nope. JASON WITT: That's beautiful. And last but not least, Tom-- look at this, it still took a long time-- Tom O'Keefe from Draftfcb. Tom's boss Jonathan Harris once described him as a malcontent. And while he's still not sure if he meant it as a good or a bad thing, Tom does everything he can to live up to that every day. That's very nice. As Draftfcb's Executive Creative Director for North America, Tom is committed to raising Draftfcb's profile within the agency's 6.5 Seconds That Matter operating system. And perhaps you'll have 6.5 seconds to describe it. Done. So-- TOM O'KEEFE: How long do I have? JASON WITT: You're over. So I wanted to start this off-- it's funny. I could tell the kind of panel I was on. I sent out a bunch of questions. And the initial response was it's too structure. And then I sent out a revised set of questions. And I heard today it really wasn't structured enough. So we know we're in the right room. So I'm going to start with, I think, a broad-based question. But there was a lot of discussion about sub-bullets. And hopefully folks will talk. At the end of the day, my piece is done now with the next 50 minutes. And you're probably really here to hear what these folks are saying, what their opinions are, and really hear them react to each other. And I'm going to try to facilitate that as much as possible. So really the starting question, and this is for Steve, is the name of the panel is 21st Century Creatives and we had a debate as to what a creative was. And so I'm going to start with Steve on that one. It's 2010. What does a creative do or look like? STEVE NESLE: That's a really dumb question. [LAUGHTER] Creatives look like us. No. First of all, I feel like I'm in a Pottery Barn window. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: Is there any way to turn the lights down? It's like we're being interrogated. If we have ways of making people talk. STEVE NESLE: So the question was-- can you all hear me-- what does a creative do? I think a creative does in the 21st century what they've always done. And that is to solve business problems. That's the boring answer. But I think that because we're all here and we have a sort of digital slant to us, I think the key thing to think about is that what a creative does is less about solving business problems with advertising but solving business problems using an unimaginable amount of tools, be it media, be it software, be it promotions and events. So it's less about OK, give the advertising brief to the advertising creative. It's more about give them the business problem and see what they can [? put out. ?] What do you think, do you agree? DAVE SCHIFF: I think it's a dumb question too. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: I'm next, man. Come on. No, go ahead. DAVE SCHIFF: I think it's a dumb question because I don't think there is a creative that's capable of doing what we all have to do. I think you have to have a department that has digital infrastructure and has people that are great at coming up with big ideas. And if you can find a whole bunch of people that can do both, awesome. But really you need both. And so I think if you can have a confluence of those two things, that's what a creative department looks like. I don't believe that there's just a singular creative that you can get a group of and make great stuff. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: I'll go you one further. I don't think that anybody should have creative in their title at all. And I think it's a pox on this industry that people are referred to as the creatives, as though everybody else is absolved of the responsibility of creativity. It also creates that horrible stereotype of the creative director, the Don Draper, I am the fount from which all creativity spills. It's ludicrous. We don't have anybody in Big Spaceship with creative in their title, and we never will. Well, never say never. We cannot foresee having it. Because creativity is cost of entry. I think what's really interesting is surrounding problems with lots of perspectives. When things operated a little bit more linearly, you could have departments. But having departments now slows you down. And we're in, at best, a low latency world and more realistically a realtime world. And there's no time for departments. And so a creative department is a negative in my book. It means you can't solve the problems without hurling things over a fence to the next people in line. TOM O'KEEFE: I would say, though, somebody has to pull together. And I think in every agency, of course, everybody should be creative. We've heard that. But I think what creatives do is bring it together and realize it. And what their job is is what it's always been which is to turn it into something that's inspiring, that makes people go I didn't see that coming, and what is commerce becomes more than that. Yeah, everybody has the ability to come up with an idea. But I still think that creatives are the ones-- somebody's got to own getting that to become a product. And creative is both what we refer to the work, as well as what we refer to the people who are ultimately responsible for creating that. I think it's important to have that signal that this is about the work. This is about the stuff at the end. And this is what we do. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: So then aren't the production companies the creatives by that definition? Because they're the ones that actually bring it into the world. TOM O'KEEFE: Yeah, when they do their part of it, absolutely, when they realize it. And I always think of production companies as being part of the creative. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: I think we're asking ourself the question for a creative person. On my side, I believe that in the future, there's not only one creative person. It's a creative attitude of the company. And for me, being creative in the future is being creative driven as a company. It makes a big difference at the end. And Michael, you're right. When you say there's no creative at Big Spaceship because you're creative driven. And that's the attitude of the company. That makes a big difference at the end of the day. So if you're starting working in an agency, whatever you do. If you have the attitude of being creative, that makes a difference. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: That's great. We say if you're not creative, you can't work here. And we really put our money where our mouth is. And I completely agree with you. It's about culture. Everybody talks about digital as though it's a practice or a channel. And what it is is a cultural shift. It's a cultural shift that goes from predictable, linear, static platform to unpredictable, hurtling forward at massive velocity and wildly fragmented. And the whole idea of one group being able to solve every problem, or especially one department being able to solve problems. Or even just bring solutions together by themselves to me seems like it may work for a little while longer but probably not very long. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: And just to add to that, it's all about confluence is what I'm hearing. And you guys are more digitally steep but adding traditional capability. And I think we come from the other side where we started off traditional, and we're adding more digital. And just as you've tried to remove, or have said, no one's going to be called a creative, we stopped saying, well, this is a digital copywriter, or this is a digital art director. And it's the same thing. And it all comes down to a group of people that are all capable of doing several things. And we just have always said the best idea is boss. So if somebody has an idea and they happen to be this person or that person, it doesn't matter. The ORG chart is adjusted per idea if you have a big idea that could be driven through strategy and advance the cause of the brand. JASON WITT: So there are a lot of different definitions, then, or non-definitions, of what a creative is. But let me go back then a step, which is you're only creative to the extent, or delivering service to the extent that clients have asked you to do so. And so the definition of what it should look like in some ways has to follow what you're being asked to deliver. And was it Tom who said 30 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, it was about filling the space. And now it's about something different. What are you being asked to do that allows you to give the varying responses. And how does that differ from being asked to fill the space, let's say, 10 years ago? TOM O'KEEFE: Well, I don't know if I said filling the space, but I'll take that. I'll say I think the difference is, at least when I started, it was about the story. Advertising and brands are about stories. But when I started, it was about telling that story. It was about a beginning and a middle and an end and an arc. And it was about the emotion of that that was the message. And I think now there is just as much if not more opportunity where the actual messenger is that story. It's how you're applying it. What makes people go holy *** is the technology sometimes or how cool it is to be able to tap into something from a different-- and so the story isn't necessarily that emotional telling a story as it is the way you go about it. And I think that's what's different. I think that's what opens it up exponentially in terms of what the possibilities are versus 20 years ago or 30 years ago when as a creative, you had an assignment, your job was to fill that space, whether it was a television commercial or an outdoor board or radio. And you told the story within that space. But now I think it really is the mediums that you choose, the technology that goes into them, the devices that become the ***-*** that you get excited about. And there's nothing wrong with that. And there are other times when they come together and it's both the story and the technique. Someone was talking about the Arcade Fire Wilderness Downtown video. The technology of that and the Google Map is amazing. But at the end of the day, it's still a story about bringing you back to your childhood and all the sentiments that come with that. And that's very powerful. STEVE NESLE: But one of the challenges we face today is that that grand story can't be told one way through one pipe through one piece of content no matter how beautifully crafted it is. You just go to Google or you go to Bing and you type in-- MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: What's Bing? [LAUGHTER] STEVE NESLE: Bing's awesome. Check it out. Go to Bing and type in Nike, and there is the story. That's the brand's story. It's a confluence of all the things that real people are talking about when it comes to the brand. Now, part of it could be the advertising. Most of it, though, is the actual product experience. So as creative people, I think we have to recognize that yeah, sure, the brand's stories are important. But we don't control them the way we did even 10 years ago. DAVE SCHIFF: Well, I think another part of that, what you're saying is that it's a conversation with pop culture. And it used to be that you tried to make that happen. Now it's going to happen no matter what. So you can put something out there, but people are going to respond. And the questions is what do you do next? And it has to be realtime, or as close to it as you can get and it has to be still through the strategy. But having that conversation is what the brand becomes. JASON WITT: But you get paid by brands to create a certain kind or facilitate a certain kind of a conversation. Isn't that true? I mean, do fans carry all the water now when it comes to defining a brand? DAVE SCHIFF: I mean, the original question sounded to me a little bit like a media question and how do you roll out a campaign, maybe, or how do you express a brand through all of these various media. And to be honest with you, I think few people up here would argue that that incredible digital tool or app or property is probably more effective than a single television commercial. But the reality is that with a lot of big brands, the client does not see the campaign until they see the television. And that's just reality. So you can make the most amazing things in the world, and you would not just stick to digital, but you need that layer of traditional over it. And that could be a great thing. And it can pour gas on the fire. But often times, it's necessary even to sell something through. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: The problem is the process. TV still lights the fuse better than anything else. It will for a while. But it's a little like trying to teach your child to speak by just having it repeat the same thing over and over. Like, here's a slogan, kid. Now learn to speak and learn to have a a conversation. You don't start with one-way communication. You start with two-way, and then you figure out how you're going to do it. And the two-way is the dynamite. And all anybody's ever done to this point is lay fuses. And they've never been held accountable to actually blow anything up. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: But we're talking a lot about mass media, and we're talking a lot about digital. For me, this is reality. We're just starting the hockey stick on this curve now. But I think the real question of the future is what's going to be next? Are we going to talk about theatre, movies, games, all of that other stuff that are really, really present around us and that we have to look for in the future. Because this is where the curve's going to happen and the big surprise is going to happen. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: I couldn't agree more with that. I think all of our role really is to understand human behavior, both emerging and existing, much more than understanding technology. We're a digital agency born and bread, and we don't ever start with technology. We always talk about who are we trying to talk to and what are we trying to say. And then the next question is what do they want and how can we get that to them, not how do we make you care about our brand, but what do you care about it, and how can our brand make that happen? TOM O'KEEFE: So that gets all the way back again to the difference between what was and what is. What was is you only have so many ways, yeah, you've got a strategy, you've got something you want to say about the brand. Now you've got all these different vehicles to say it. And I think that's the difference. It's like if you can think it, it can be. And at the end of the day, it still is about what the brand stands for and finding ways of getting that across and having consumers engage and say that's relevant, that's what I believe, that's what I'm engaged in, that's for me. DAVE SCHIFF: I don't think it's about saying things at all. I think it's about doing things and making either tools or utilities that make someone's life better through the brand or possibly that help them intersect with the brand. But people are done with being messaged to. And hey, this is what we stand for, check this out. You have to prove what you stand for by making *** that actually enables that in the real world. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: Yeah, I don't think a brand is a story anymore in any traditional sense. I think a brand is the sum of its actions and not the ones that it's chosen to articulate or chosen to take, but all of them because everything's been made transparent. And so a brand is no longer the sum of its communications activities. It's the sum of its customer service activities, probably even more than its communication activities. And all of those walls are down. And it's really about organizations having to go through a process of breaking down the infrastructure. Part of what you're talking about about needing TV is because there's 50 years of infrastructure built up around procuring TV. I've spoken to so many CMOs. They all seem to really get it. But they've got some marketing group in Kazakhstan who needs TV. DAVE SCHIFF: Or they have to walk it down to the CEO to justify their existence and it's like, where's the TV? TOM O'KEEFE: But wouldn't you agree that brand still has to stand for something, whether or not its message is what it stands for? I think that's what, at the end of the day, this is still all about. Yeah, you may not come out and say it's me pounding my chest, but I think that's some of the issues that we have to be able to still focus on. DAVE SCHIFF: I think stuff has to stand for something, but it has to do something that expresses that. Like, if Best Buy-- and I'm not trying to be self-referential with our work. But with Best Buy, you could just run a commercial that says Best Buy has awesome customer service. Or you could create something like 12 Twelpforce, where we actually made it so that a consumer can send a text to any Best Buy employee, even if they're off work, sitting at home on the couch watching TV, hey, what's the best VCR for-- oh ***, I guess it's a DVD player. I'm old. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: What's a VCR? DAVE SCHIFF: What's the best Blu-Ray player for under $400? And you're going to get these things back. And then it's cool to do a TV spot that drives to that and celebrate that. But that is a living manifestation of Best Buy has awesome customer service. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: That's a great example of what I'm talking about. But you guys did this amazing thing. It's a customer service decision. It's an operational decision. It's not a marketing group decision. I mean, obviously it has to cross all of those things. And someday we should sit down and you can explain how you actually pushed that through. Because I run up against the that doesn't fall within my budget thing all the time. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: But this is a good example where creativity goes beyond marketing. It applies to every stage of the business. And I think in the future from product design to customer service to marketing, creativity will be the major force in the future. And I think it's exciting for us. Because it's like when music changed a few years ago, now we're listening to more music than ever. And I think everything will change in the next few years. And we'll have more visual simulation from brand exercise or whatsoever around us and it will be amazing. JASON WITT: So let me ask this. If you have either a democratized brand experience or a lot of touch points that need television or some other way to bring them together, if brand is the sum of its actions but those actions are now smaller, more finite than before, who is guiding a brand? And I'm going to assume that there's probably no CMO that's going to keep his job if he says we are just the sum of what consumer is saying. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: Not say it, but embrace it. I mean, you need to embrace the fact that you don't really control your brand anymore. I mean, there was that example of Nestle on their Facebook page saying, hey, don't mess with our logo. And they just got destroyed. They got literally just eviscerated by people because you can't control it. You cannot control a group of people. And especially on Facebook. We say all the time, on your own website, you can say whatever you want, you can be whoever you want, that's where you can speak about yourself comfortably with your own tone of voice. When you go into somebody else's space, it's the equivalent, for a lot of these brands, of going into a party, changing the music, and then interrupting everyone and starting to talk about yourself. No individual would ever do that, I hope. I wouldn't. But brands do it all the time. They have no social graces whatsoever. And recognizing that if you are the sum of your actions and that people are going to point out your flaws more actively than they would with just another person, you have to embrace the fact that you can't operate from command and control anymore. All you can do is try to be true to your brand values. And I agree with you that a brand has to have a set of values. It has to stand for something. STEVE NESLE: The point there is that people can see through a tag line. So if you're saying you believe in X and you're meaningful because of Y and then you're behaving a totally different way as a brand, people see through the *** and you lose. TOM O'KEEFE: Somebody's got to manage what the thing is that makes the brand have a single voice and a personality and doesn't feel like it's by committee. And you're right, maybe it's not the tag line. Maybe it needs to be something like what's the brand's voice, or how do you articulate a certain soul of the brand so that when all these different partners are doing different things, they at least understand that there's something that pulls it all together. And I think in many cases, it's the CMO or somebody within the client who's charged with that because there are so many different partners now at the table. But the schizophrenic brand is the one that doesn't have at least somebody who's able to articulate something. Well, the brand talks like this. Oh, I get it. Whether I'm doing the digital or whether I'm working for the client, at least I understand that that's how to carry it. That's a tough thing. But the successful and the great brands are able to, I think, understand that and promote that. DAVE SCHIFF: I agree with that 100%. You've got to have a strategy. It's got to be a brilliant strategy. That has to come from the agencies and the brand itself working together. And then you've got to have a point of view. And then once you do that, of course, you're going to put that out there. And it's not announcement, I give you this. It's the beginning of that conversation. But I think that you absolutely have to have strategy and a point of view. And that's why a purely crowd sourced advertising agency model is never going to work. Because you need those things to be focused. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: And going back, when you were saying you could have the best brand manager, the best CMO on the table, but if you have to manage with 10 people, they express your brand in different ways, that's a pretty hard job. But after that, after their vision of the strategy, I think we need someone who's in charge of the brand expression. And for me, that's the creative. The creative are in charge of the brand culture and put the brand expression out there and follow the strategy. But it needs to have one guy, not 10 companies going in different directions to prove that they are the best company [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. STEVE NESLE: The danger with that is in how you define expression. And if it's a loosely defined thing, great. If it's so tightly controlled, then you run the risk of chopping off all the other partners at their knees. You've got to let them do what they do and be great at it. Because frankly, circling back around a little bit, your first question about creatives in general and having a creative culture, I think you can apply that, frankly, or you should apply that, to the culture that surrounds all the partner agencies and the client, that broader team together needs to have a creative culture and that creative drive can't just reside with one agency that has anointed themselves the brand steward. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: Right. There's too many services to be offered for anyone to be best in class at all of them. So everybody needs to learn this really new thing that hasn't been part of the industry-- it's been part of my part of the industry to some degree-- which is how to play nice in the sandbox with everybody else. Know what you do really well and do it, rather than trying to capture every single marketing dollar there is, because you'll build better relationships that way, and it'll be long term value over cash in hand. So I couldn't agree more. I think strategy is creative. I think it's one of the most creative activities there is. So I don't make the same distinction you do, but I think we're saying ultimately the same thing. We talk a lot about frameworks instead of processes. Because the world is moving so fast, a framework is elastic. A framework can be adapted. It just nudges you in the right direction. Whereas a process is extremely rigorously defined. And I don't think a process for how to execute communications against brand values is likely to stay relevant for very long. And you may not have schizophrenic communications for three months or a year, but the following year, you probably will. So thinking elasticity and how do we communicate refinements and learnings, I think a lot of it is about going from the investment in the big, blockbuster spot that is of most value the day it airs and then diminishes in value from that point forward to more of an investment model where you start putting a bunch of things out there and see what resonates and then double down on the ones that are working. DAVE SCHIFF: Well, I agree. Quickly, and I don't mean to cut you off, but I'm going to. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: I love this guy. He rides tattoos. DAVE SCHIFF: I agree with you. Again, it's not just because you're handsome and charismatic. But I think that the strategy should be something-- and we said there shouldn't be a distinction between creative and not creative. But I think if you look at what would previously be called the planner, and we call them cognitive anthropologists. We have *** up names for everybody in the company. But if you take those people and you take creatives and you put them together and you make a great strategy-- and I also agree, don't try to do everything. You can do a lot of it, and it's good to have some consolidation. But invariably with these huge brands, you're going to have a million partner agencies. If you have a simple strategy that's based off of a true insight, those partner agencies will be able to execute and do what they do and what they're good at against that. So I think that's the key. TOM O'KEEFE: And I think that's where our value is. Because the CMOs, they'll talk about I've got more data, and I've got more coming in than I know what to do with. Our job is to be able to say, well, this is what matters. That's the 6.5 Seconds That Matters, by the way. But this is really what you need to be focusing on. And somebody's got to be able to take the lead and show them the way. Like, you're getting hit. You open the door and it's a tsunami. But we're able to boil that down and tell you something strategically based on that. And that strategy should become inspiration. That inspiration is what everybody should be able to work against. And it feels effortless even though it's not. And I'm speaking from a larger agency. That's the value that we bring, I think, is the ability to do those things and to think it all has to lead to something in the end. JASON WITT: So that was awesome. One of the things that I struggle with-- so I'm trying to put this CMO hat on here and collect the aggregate of what we've been told which sounds like a brand needs a soul, it needs values, it needs a strategy, it may or may not need a story. And then it needs some way to now express that to the world, that both is led by then but embraces the audience. And it's like, holy crap. That's a whole lot of stuff. And that's where, I think, I worry that we're putting a lot on the backs of the CMO because he's not up here. And it's easy to say, well, you should do all those things. Bring those in, bring in these multiple viewpoints, understand how to express all these places. And I'm like, we all have photos that we wish weren't on the web, and we're one person. We're going to deputize employees, and then we're going to deputize in some ways consumers. And knowing that one or two bad comments has to be offset by 10,000 or whatever those stats are, is that realistic to do? MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: We talk all the time about the opportunity of negative experiences with a brand and that those are now transparent and broadcast. If you have a good relationship with a brand but you don't feel passionate about it, what's going to drive you to passion? I have a friend who works on the client side, international, digital. And for a CPG company. And he told me the story about how he's been buying the same brand of butter for 20 years. But he's never thought about it because it's butter. And then one time he got a rancid batch. And because he's in CPG, he knew where to look to give them all the information. And no Twitter or nothing fancy, he emailed them and said, hey, just thought you should know. And they wrote back this very human, oh my god, all anybody else does is tell us to *** off. And you gave us really valuable information. Thank you so much. Here's a year's supply of butter. STEVE NESLE: All at once. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: Yeah. Exactly. He's just bathing in butter. He's really greasy. But now he had a positive experience after a negative experience that he is now a die hard fan of, I don't know if it was Breakstone or whatever, because they responded in a human way to an otherwise negative situation. And so it's not don't make mistakes. That's unrealistic. Those glossy, perfect brands that have existed for so long aren't going to exist anymore because brands make mistakes more than an individual. JASON WITT: But if we increase the number of brand representatives, the mistakes start multiplying. Imagine Comcast has a guy who falls asleep on a sofa. Give every Comcast guy a Twitter handle and deputize him to speak on behalf on the brand, and what comes next? That's not rancid butter, that's not customer service per se. I'm just saying, now give consumers the deputization and don't have somebody that's driving or facilitating the message. I'm just curious, is that a realistic response? PHILIPPE MEUNIER: I think it's honest. And we have to go this way, because otherwise it's going to break. And I think the key for that is to go fast. Because consumer thinks fast a lot. And spending months and months trying to test a TV campaign and going to focus group and retest and blah-blah-blah. And then you go out there, after three, six months, it's done. It's over. It doesn't work anymore. You have to go faster. So that's why the consumer wants things fast. It wants a response. It wants to talk. They want to express themselves about the brand. So let's not be too rigid, otherwise brand will break in the future. DAVE SCHIFF: I think it's laughable that we're up here talking about transparency like it's in an option. Whatever *** is going on with your brand, it's going to get out. Transparency is a foregone conclusion with what's out there today. And the question is what do you do about it? And the example here is a great example. We worked with Domino's. We had YouTube videos of kids that worked at Domino's shooting snot into the pizza. That's not part of the new formulation that we've had success with, by the way. But what we did was we had the CEO come in, immediately respond to this thing. It was like the next day, we have a video up and running with the CEO. Also, we've recommended something like a Twitter aggregator that goes on a company dashboard or even as a consumer facing thing. And what happens is when somebody ***-talks something-- even on our website now, we have an aggregator that anything about Burger King or any other brand we work on will just come up in real time as it's happened. And some of it's like, oh, Burger King's awesome. And some of it's like, Burger King sucks. And when you hold that up to the world and you are Burger King and you're showing them, it diffuses the Burger King sucks comments so powerfully. So I think you have to embrace transparency because it's here. It's not something that you get to decide you're going to do. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: To Philippe's point, this goes back to the investment model and doing a whole lot of things really fast and not worrying about them being perfectly polished, I have this line that I say to my clients over and over and over again. It's never been cheaper or quieter to fail. So as long as you're learning from it, it's an incredibly valuable exercise. Because usually failing in the digital world just means nobody showed up. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: Well, let's try three campaigns and see what's happening in 24 hours and remove two. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: We prototype so many things and drop some off along the way and then put four or five things-- and this is what I think is a little bit of the fallacy of the big idea. I think big ideas are important in certain cases, but I think agencies have been holding onto it because it's the last vestige that they can hold on to with their fists tight. Sometimes an aggregate of a whole lot of little ideas that circle in an authentic way the values of the brand are going to be more successful. I think that's what gets to your point about letting the partners do what they do really well. Again, it's iterative and collaborative rather than command and control top down. Why does there have to be a lead agency if everybody's working towards the same goal? DAVE SCHIFF: I think that's a cool point that the big idea is maybe changed to the big point of view from which your communications come from. And another important point, just based on this whole subject is just we hear from clients all the time, all the time, we want to be real time. We want to be relevant. We want to respond to things as soon as they happen. And never ever do they have the infrastructure that allows that to happen. And they want to, and we work with them, and we try to streamline the process. But that's one of the biggest challenges, I think, facing the brand today is how can you respond when this is the way that pop culture speaks? Are you able to get your organization to a place, empower the right people, put a process in place that allows you to do that. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: There's so many Catch-22s in business process. We have a client, one of our best clients, really forward thinking, and they say, we want never before been done ideas. And we give them to them. And then they go to legal and legal says, well, we need a precedent. And it's like, well, OK. There's nothing we can do in this situation. JASON WITT: So we agree that there should be no lead created agencies going forward. Perfect. [INTERPOSING VOICES] TOM O'KEEFE: Whether it's the lead agency or it's the client, somebody's got to still be the keeper, as I will say, it still has to feel like it's coming from one voice, and the brand feels like it's a person and not like it's a committee. And who's going to own that is a good question. I think an agency, it's the responsibility of an agency to be able to articulate that, especially if the client's not able to do it themselves. And whether you're the lead agency or you're just trying to play nice in the sandbox, the brand has got to be the thing that we're all working together on. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: But see, maybe in the future the agency will be better in that point. And they're going to be good to manage their brand. And maybe advertising agency, we're the middle man right now. And maybe they're going to get stronger and take over their business and they're going to do it. TOM O'KEEFE: I just saw Barbara Lippert said something about that today, that that's a whole new industry for us to be the air traffic control and manage that. But I think that is what we've been doing. It's just a matter of does everybody understand the brand that works on it, truly understand it? What does it take to understand the brand? Some people say, well that's not what Taco Bell would do. And it's like, well, why not? If you can't articulate it, then you're just saying something for the sake of saying it. JASON WITT: So actually that's a great segue to the last question, I think. If in the future it keeps getting teed up, if you could blow it up and rebuild it right now-- it sounds like some of you are more likely to do that than others-- what would be the big thing that you would change? STEVE NESLE: I'd abolish the term lead agency. Honestly. I think our industry has always been about meritocracy, the best ideas, the best talent, the best whatever. And when you get into this complacent mindset, that there's a lead agency, then I feel like we're getting soft. I think that the agency supremacy should be constantly challenged. Because at the end of the day, you always want the absolute best, not just the guy that was deemed lead. You always want the best talent, you want the best ideas constantly in front of the CMO. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: I totally agree. I would say that the best talent only works in the best culture. You have to have a culture that actually embraces collaboration internally. We're not in the business of producing account services, so don't just put all the account services people together because that's not your product. Put everybody who surrounds the output of the agency together to really empower them and give them autonomy to solve the problems at hand. That's how we work across disciplinary teams. And a real focus on culture. The culture internally is going to be how you can adapt the culture externally. And to your point, we don't pay attention to what the big agencies are doing. We pay attention to what the real small up and comers are doing because they're the ones who are going to be closest to the culture. We have our interns have just as loud a voice as we're brainstorming and devising strategy as myself or my senior executives. We have interns who have come up with brilliant ideas because they are close to the culture. And I think meritocracy is great, but meritocracy is spoken but it's not practiced in a lot of cases in bigger companies. Because somebody's got tenure of 10 or 15 or 20 years, so they have to be heard first. And I think that's got to be blown up. Because at least for the time being, the closer you are to being completely born digital, the more native insights you're going to have into how people interact and what the behaviors are. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: The first thing I think we should blow up is the building. Because if we want to attract talent, I think it's really important to open our doors to whatever the talent is in this world. And I think when you're 26, 22 years old and you're creative, you have your laptop, your phone, and you're ready to go everywhere to enjoy and to work in great companies with great culture. And I think the fact that we're having those buildings and so many floors of different department and so many silos with different companies, I think this is where we're getting fat. And we're not fast anymore. And if we're fat and not fast, we'll all die one day. That's for sure. So I say let's blow up, and let's be small, and let's be remote and focus on the talent, on the people. DAVE SCHIFF: If we get to blow *** up, I would like to blow up more than just the ad side. I'd like to blow up some of the client side as well. Because first of all, it would just be fun. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: Let's blow up [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. DAVE SCHIFF: But honestly, I think if you could just blow *** up and start over, you can't just talk about what's happening on the agency side, because invariably, that is going to get sent over to the client side. And if there's not a process in place or a structure in place there that facilities and buys the ideas and gets them to market quickly, it's a waste of time. So what I would love to see, and this sounds like *** Willy Wonka, but I would like to see an ad agency client situation, or whatever we want to call ourselves, the creative and the brand sides, have a system that was able to work really quickly and bring these tools like we've talked about, utilities, applications, things that make people's lives more fun, more interesting, better, to market quicker. Because right now, we're not in the business of hey, we've got to get to this idea before those guys do. We're competing more against the startups. The kind of things we're making are business model changing things, and they happen really fast. And you can present an idea like Groupon. You could present that to a client and say, hey, what if you did a thing where you let consumers get on your website and get together and save money? Well, then they're going to come out with it and turn it into a billion dollar business within two years. So that's the business we're in now. And it's competitive, and it's fast, and it's scary, and it's fun, and it's cool, and that's it. [APPLAUSE] TOM O'KEEFE: So my turn to blow something up? I think I would blow up what could be a trend that there's too much piling on and everybody gets an opportunity to put their little spin on something. And that's both on the client end and that's on our end. I think, again, I'm going to get back to my belief that you've got to stand for something, you've got to have vision. And I look at brands that their founders are still there, like your Apples and your Amazons and your Zappos. Where it's like, this is what we stand for. Because I founded this company with this vision. And everybody's going to follow that. And over time, brands that don't have founders and other people interpret it different ways and they put their mark on it. And then other agencies or partners can come in and they all put their little mark on it, it starts to lose its focus. And I think that the watch out is yes, you want to bring a lot of people to the table because you can get a lot of great ideas. But the caution is that that becomes the *** thing again. And that it's very important for brands to have that clear vision. So that's what I would blow up. JASON WITT: Do we have time to do Q&A, or we've got to-- TOM O'KEEFE: Who wants to blow stuff up? JASON WITT: One, two questions and you're going to have people-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. DAVE SCHIFF: Are you drinking a Coke Zero? MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: It worked. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. JASON WITT: All right. We've got time for two questions before [INAUDIBLE] Panasonic 3D. DAVE SCHIFF: Was that a question? AUDIENCE: It wasn't a question because I'm addicted. DAVE SCHIFF: Put my kids through college. AUDIENCE: Why isn't there a woman on the panel? JASON WITT: She dropped off. Actually, there was one. She dropped off. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: She's actually doing work instead of pontificating. JASON WITT: Talking about the future. AUDIENCE: Perhaps what you ought to blow up is an attitude about women in the creative departments of the agencies. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: That's true. DAVE SCHIFF: Well, Crispin Porter has had a reputation as a fraternity for a lot of years. But now with [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and with more and more amazing talented female-- across every department, I was going to say creatives, but I know you're going to lash out at me about that. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: I'll try to restrain myself. DAVE SCHIFF: But it's increasingly important. We've been working in a preliminary capacity for Vitamin Water. And you look at their business, and it skews female. And we've got all these guys. And so they're saying look, that's great. Get a really senior talented female creative on this business right now or we're not interested. Because we what those insights. And so yes. I think it's needed and it's good and it's going to keep going. MICHAEL LEBOWITZ: Absolutely. We've gone from the early days when really it was only possible for the most part to hire geeks, or geeks were mostly male then. I'm not really sure what it was. But where we were 10% female, 15% female, we've gotten much closer to 50-50 at this point. So I see a positive trend there. I didn't invite people to this. And in fact, I was a late addition. I'm probably filling in for that female. So I don't know what to say about why the invitations went the way they did. PHILIPPE MEUNIER: But in 10 years from now, it will be more female because guys are lazy to go to school. So I'm sure it's going to change the industry. DAVE SCHIFF: But obviously this is just belaboring the obvious, there are insights that only a female can write competently about or think about or present about. And so I remember early on before Crispin had hired a lot of female creatives, we had a little piece of the Victoria's Secret business. And the kind of ideas you got from guys were just like, OK, you open on a hot chick. And it was embarrassing. So they forbid any male from working on the business because the stuff was so dumb. I'm probably not doing myself any favors here. JASON WITT: I think we're going to end on that note. [APPLAUSE]