A (3:29)

I don't think many people realize it. Cause I was a bit shocked to discover that a lot of the most successful Cannes line winners, they do have dedicated teams doing the research, doing the pitches, you know, basically managing the whole process, making sure that they're on time. Like you do have a job to do at the same time, right? I mean, you are running a billion dollar working cmo. I actually do real work.

B (3:49)

I do real work.

A (3:50)

As this is not a normal experience for you. What's the actual pitch like? I mean, who's in the jury? But by the way, can you go and sit in as a member of the public and listen to this?

B (4:00)

Actually, I also learned that along the process. So the first thing is understanding the constraint of time, right? This is the most important thing. So they give you 22 minutes on the clock. And it's very prescriptive and it's very rigorous. There is no veering off schedule.

A (4:17)

The.

B (4:18)

The first two minutes is your case video. All of us have produced a two minute video which goes in as part of your submission. And I think that's really just to jog the juror's mind because they've seen so many submissions. You're now down to the short list. In the case of titanium, that's 17 new case files that you have to review. So the Two minute video basically jogs your memory. I think Glass is more like 25 or 26 shortlisted. So that's your first two minutes. The next 10 minutes is your live presentation and they will cut you off. And they cut us off both times, so that's why I know that. And then you have 10 minutes. Q and A. So for Glass and Titanium, two completely different rooms. Spirits, energies, jurors. So you do know who the jurors are and they do allow it to be open to the public. So people, as long as there's capacity in the room, people can come in and watch. So you're not only in front of the, the front row of drawers, you're also in front of an audience. So our first at bat was 9:15am on Tuesday morning. We come in bright eyed, bushy tailed. We've obviously rehearsed the night before. We've got our whole spiel down to 10 minutes and it took us a while to get there and we asked if we needed to introduce ourselves. Cause that takes time. And they said, no, somebody's gonna introduce you. Don't worry about that, you don't need it. Okay, great. So we're standing on the side of the room waiting to be introduced. And this particular room for glass was like a classroom. So you've got a big projector and screen at the front of the room. And then classroom style. So we're standing on the side of the room and they call us up and the woman announcing goes, so I'd like to welcome Gabrielle to the stage.

A (6:00)

Oh, no.

B (6:01)

And I'm like, so now I just.

A (6:02)

You're in the wrong room.

B (6:04)

Exactly. I literally blacked out. I completely blacked out. I'm like, who's Gabrielle? Am I in the wrong room? Is this the wrong time? Literally blacked out. And I'm like completely disoriented. And I know that I have to be very rigorous and disciplined and I'm in a state of disorientation. So now I'm like, do we go up? Do we not go up? Who the hell is Gabrielle? Is Gabrielle coming? Is Gabrielle going to introduce me? I don't know what's happening. So now I realize, like the clock's ticking and I'm not even at the front of the room yet. So me and Lisa, who's at our Oberlin Agency, we get up to the front of the room. Now we have to introduce ourselves and we didn't get any time back. So that whole disoriented moment, then coming up there, introducing ourselves, playing the video now I'm short at least two minutes. So we did our presentation. Obviously we lost time, so they cut us off, and we lost about two minutes on the tail end, and then we went straight into Q and A. And I do have to really appreciate one of the judges who asked. It was probably the third question in the Q and A who said, corey, I'd love to pose a question to you. Was there anything that you didn't present in that deck that we should know about?

A (7:16)

That's good.

B (7:16)

And I really appreciated that because it told me that they saw what happened, and while they couldn't give us time back, they were going to use this time to give us the opportunity to say anything we may have missed that we thought was critical to the file.

A (7:31)

Maybe a random thought. Have you heard of the pratfall effect?

B (7:34)

No, what is that?

A (7:35)

So there's a psychological study that basically, if something goes wrong or you make an error at the beginning of a presentation, the audience love you more than if you don't. There's something about vulnerability and a mistake, and this has been proven through, you know, through research, that actually warms the audience to you. But as a presenter, you feel terrible, and it takes, you know, all the energy goes. You start panicking, you're flustered, you know, I mean, it's really hard to deal with, isn't it? I mean, it's something that, you know, I have to sort of train myself, you know, to cope with sort of thing. But yeah, apparently the pratfall effect. So oddly, I. I occasionally plan a little accident on purpose, you know, just because, you know, or. Or. Or you. You put a little error in something, you know, just to kind of catch people's attention.

B (8:19)

I did not know that. And I do have to say that moment of disoriented that people need to learn how to handle. And throughout my career, one of the things that I've found is the more I can just be calm and steady. Right? You have to train that muscle. Train the muscle of diffusing. When you see a situation, get very emotional. How do you diffuse it? Sometimes that's through humor, being grounded, level setting. All of those tools are absolutely necessary because you are gonna get thrown in these situations where it's never a perfect condition. How many rooms do we walk into? We're like, you said there was going to be a speaker confidence monitor. There's no speaker confidence monitor. You said I was going to be able to have notes. I can't have notes. Right. Things never work out the way we planned. And this was a really important lesson for me, because who the hell is Gabrielle? What am I supposed to do with that? You know? So I needed that minute of just regrounding myself to be able to say, okay, just dust it off, pick it up, and just get up there and go. Now, I contrast that to Titanium, which was completely different. And I think the interesting thing for me is environment does really matter. So when we walked into the Titanium Room, it was a legit theater. Like, you felt like you were in on stage at a Broadway show. You had red plush seats, theatrical environment. The lighting was pitch dark except for the spotlight on the stage. And it was a real stage, so you were lifted above the the audience. So your mind almost goes to show mode because you're like, oh, well, I'm in a show environment, so I'm going to go in show mode. And one of the things I learned in the glassroom and these were back to back.

A (9:59)

So you.

B (10:00)

You know, you have that moment of pause and reflect was laughter takes time. If. If somebody's clapping because they appreciate a moment or they're laughing because you made a joke, that actually takes time. So I wasn't gonna make that mistake twice, because usually you pause for effect. I don't got time for that. I only got 10 minutes on the clock.

A (10:20)

That's true.

B (10:21)

If they're gonna start laughing or clapping, I have to talk over it. I have to keep going. So I learned that in the glass section. Nobody teaches you these things, Right? So now we get up on Titanium. The room was electric. The judges were laughing and hooting and hollering and yelling and laughing in all the right places. And then that lit up the room, and it was literally like we were performing in a Broadway show, and it was absolutely exceptional. So when that ended, you just felt so good. And the judges used words like, that was gorgeous. That was sensational. That I was not expecting that at all, especially with how serious this case was. But I think what they understood was we were winning and making change by using humor. And humor was the best way to diffuse a very serious subject.

A (11:16)

Such good advice. It reminds me, I think it's something I constantly have to remind myself to ask the question, how do you want the audience to feel? Not what you want to tell them.

B (11:26)

Yeah.

A (11:27)

And it's a massive difference, and it changes completely how you do it, because the default position is, I have to tell them everything. I have to get my points across. If you reframe that as, how do I want to leave the room? And leave them feeling. Sometimes I've taken Lots of content out or left big gaps, you know. In fact, I won a. I won a silver and a bronze line for a campaign I did a few years ago called no one Ever Move Forward. Standing still with the big international heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua. And I told his life story from when he was born to when he went and did his biggest ever victory. And I remember, well, one lesson was I had nothing to do with the success, right? So I gave complete autonomy to the creative agency and let them kind of, you know, run wild with this idea. It was so good. It was, in fact, when, when they pitched it, I had chills going down my spine. I said, I don't want to ruin this as a client. You don't have to put the logo and you don't have to put the pack in. And I said, I'm only going to make one request of you. When you get to the peak end, which is just spine tinglingly good, I want you to hold that frame for at least three seconds because I don't want the next advert to ruin the feeling that people have when they get to the end. So in a way I was kind of like, I want to take stuff out so that I leave you with that emotion. It just reminded me of that. Because the way you described that is beautiful. But how people feel at the end of something predicts exactly what they'll then go on to think about it. Yeah, it's a reframing, isn't it?

B (12:57)

One of the ways that I think about that, and I actually learned this from one of the TED coaches at a great experience at a summit where they brought in a TED coach for cmos and she boiled it down to abc. And I have never forgotten that. I've used it. I've taught it to everybody on my team. ABC is audience before content. Do not produce a single piece of content until you understand who is your audience. What do they need to see from you? And it makes you reorient exactly what you were saying. Reorient everything into the shoes of the person that you're gonna be speaking to. And I really take that to heart. And I always ask that question of anybody who asks me to do a keynote or a speaking engagement or whatever it is. Who am I speaking to? What matters to them? And especially if you're going to a big summit, for example, where There may be 80 other speakers they're gonna see or insert number here, I wanna know what is also on the docket so I could bring them something different. I don't need to come here and say the same thing everybody else said. And I really wish other people would think like that because I think very oftentimes, even when I go to these summits, all the topics are the same. Like, how many people are going to talk to me about AI? Like how many people are going to talk to me about performance marketing? How many people are going to talk to me about insert boring freaking thing here that I already heard 3,000 goddamn times. And please do not read me something from your goddamn earnings report, because I can do that without you. So what is the value that you're gonna bring to the audience comes actually from the empathy of putting yourself in the shoes of the person who's gonna be listening to you. So I really love that you learned that lesson as well.

A (14:41)

Well, as we're talking about so many dicks and how good it is and I'm still here waiting to find out if you've actually won. But anyway, which is great news. No news is as the buzzer gone.

B (14:52)

Yet at this point.

A (14:54)

So last year at Cannes, I did a talk with a guy called Morgan called the Extraordinary Cost of being Dull. So we actually managed to put a price on like you're saying about. It's always the same topics live in the same way, in the same style, right? That's actually costing you money. So we worked out the amount of advertising in the world that delivers zero emotion. Turns out about 54% of, you know, all ads deliver absolutely nothing. Now there's a little one of the bits in it, it looks quite boring, but one of the bits in it was a 1972 research paper from a guy called Murray S. Davis. And it's called that's Interesting. And in it he said he worked out what was the source of making one production interesting and one production boring. He was talking papers and dramas, that kind of thing. And he said, the art of interesting is you deny a key assumption of your audience.

B (15:46)

Okay?

A (15:46)

In effect, you surprise them. So you take on what they think they think and you invert it. So for example, one of the examples we use as an amazing so Orange, which is a mobile phone network in France, they were sponsoring the Women's World cup and they had this incredible 90 minute video and the, sorry, 90 second video. And in the first half you think you're watching the men's French team, they're all dressed up in blue, they're scoring these amazing goals. The skills are next level that, you know, commentators are going completely wild, the crowd are going crazy and it gets the halfway point and they suddenly Reveal that you've been looking at the women's team, but they had CGI'd the men's heads.

B (16:29)

That's right. I remember this campaign.

A (16:32)

And because at System One, we measure the emotional response to advertising, we were able to do this trace that. Basically, you have all this happiness in the first half, and then it's completely taken over by surprise. And I've never seen an audience react with so much surprise because it denied an assumption. Their assumption is women's football is not as entertaining as men's football. Right. But they absolutely turned it on its head. And I just think that's another great lesson in anything like this is how can you surprise your audience by kind of taking what they think they know, which you've done brilliantly, and then turn it into something surprising.

B (17:05)

Absolutely. And if you look at any metric, all of them that show you humor, Humor makes an ad more memorable. It makes your brand more likable. And those scores are always above 70%, if not closer to 90. So I think people are afraid to use humor. They usually take the safe road. And there's a lot of crap work in market because it's just too safe. And to your point, it doesn't make me feel anything. I want to feel something when I look at the work that you've done. Otherwise, it's just. I'm just going to pass it by and never think about it and worse, never talk to anybody else about it. And when you walk the work in Cannes, I don't know if you had a chance to walk the work yet. It's my favorite thing to do. It's truly extraordinary when you stop and look at all of the exceptional work that's been put to market and why it's exceptional. And walking it with other people is more important than walking it by yourself. Because when you can talk to somebody about what does it mean to you? What did it make you feel? Why did it stop you in your tracks? You actually start to really understand more about the human condition than you thought you knew. And on your point about flipping the script, we do that at ELF all the time. And we had this project called Project Pony. And Project Pony was really built around the idea of most beauty commercials look exactly the same. Insert beautiful woman walking through a field with grass and puppies, and the sun is shining in her face, and it's just the same thing every time. So we actually started the commercial like that, and it's this absolutely stunning woman walking through this beautiful field on a perfect day, and the sky is blue. And the sun is shining in her face and she's saying a couple of things about our product that sound exactly like the features and benefits you've heard a thousand times before. And then all of a sudden, there's a pony that stops her. And it's really a flip of the switch on woke culture because this pony is very woke. And the pony's like, you can't say that. And she's like, I'm sorry, what? And then all of a sudden there's this pony talking to her, doing card tricks and doing all this crazy stuff. And it was crazy because everybody who watched it, which was the intention, in the first 10 seconds, they're like, oh, my God, Elf has gone traditional. They've gone into this safe space of the commercial. And then all of a sudden they're like, there's the elf wit and the wink. There it is. Flipped it right back.

A (19:34)

It's a pretty sad surprise. You denied a key assumption that they thought you were doing something normal.

B (19:38)

Exactly. And then you twisted it.

A (19:39)

I mean, it's interesting, actually. One of the hacks is with our system one data. Animals create loads of emotion, actually. So it's what, humor and animals and then surprise. So I think you've kind of ticked a lot of boxes. Babies or no babies too. In fact, the winning super bowl from, I think it was three years ago. I don't even remember this was Huggies. And they did. I don't know how they did this, right? They, they, they did a film of babies actually born on super bowl morning.

B (20:08)

Get out of here. I don't think I ever saw.

A (20:11)

I might need to fact check myself on this, but I think from couples that conceived on game nighters, there was something like that as well. There was this wild backstory to what they managed to produce. It was very funny. It had babies, it was very funny. And it won Super Bowl. I think it was two or three years ago.

B (20:26)

Yeah.

A (20:26)

So just goes to show, humor, be funny people. I think that's a good place to end, isn't it?

B (20:31)

I think it is.