← Uncensored CMO
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored cmo. Now I've got returning guest on this show, Joe Shoesmith, who is the chief creative officer at Amazon. Welcome back to the show, Joe.
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B
It's lovely to be back.
- [00:15]
A
For anyone who doesn't know what you do, you've got an amazing job at Amazon. Chief Creative Officer. What does that role involve doing?
- [00:21]
B
Yeah, it's interesting because we pretty much are in every category at this point. And so I, I sit in a central function where we oversee things like everything from prime to Alexa to the retail events to new to world experiences like our health offering which has been recently stood up. And so we work really closely on that with our internal creative team. We have strategy, we have all of the things you would imagine would be inside an agency, inside of our walls in the team. And then we partner with agencies that we plug in. We have an in source model as well. So lots of different ways to make the work happen. And so there's work where I'm really close in, I'm either on a sh or very close into every step of approval. Then we kind of have concentric circles whether we other teams that may have smaller investments that we're pointing in the direction of agency relationships that have done great, that know our brand and will see the work, will see the brief. And so you just, you ultimately want it to become more light touch over time as we establish much more of a playbook for what our brand should look like and be recognized in the world.
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A
Now you came from agency side, didn't you? What was the experience like going from agency side to client side and what did you learn? Jumping over the fence, so to speak.
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B
You know, in many ways it was humbling. I think, I think you get a very different perspective of how important you are in the world when you go from your agency. Creativity is the product of the agency. When you go brand side, creativity is one of the many things you do in the brand and you get much more of a perspective of what a day looks like in the life of a client and why you're not the most important thing in the universe. And then also just what it feels like to be sold to versus really listened to. And I think that's something I learned really early on of like it's great to pitch and create drama and really be passionate about ideas. But I think when that's the humbling part of when I think about sometimes selling too hard and not really understanding the why behind why an idea's not right anymore or the why behind the brand has to pivot because the business is telling them they need to pivot. And you don't always know that on the agency side. And so I think I just have a lot more information and a lot more understanding as to why certain things get made and certain things don't.
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A
That is such a good insight. I remember once when I was in my client days, an agency said, oh, would they mind if I just sat in a pitch and to give them some feedback? And I remember we got 50 minutes through the hour of the pitch and I said, look, can I just stop you? You haven't once asked me what my objective is, what problem I'm solving, why I'm even here. And you've already tried to sell me six things without having any clue as to whether I want any of those six things. Yeah, and this is just like from a client point of view, I see this so many times.
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B
You know, our boxes are the thing that, that happens to everyone. Comes in with an idea of like revolutionizing what's on the box and we can't slow down distribution. Like there is massive complexity to the operations of delivering in 24 hours and the speed of prime. And so I used to do that when I was on brands. I'm like, you can just change the packaging, you can just change. And I massively oversimplified. And so now I really understand, okay, there's consequences and trade offs and business decisions and business implications for some of those ideas so they're not being rejected because someone's not brave enough. And I do think that's some language that needs to go away. The idea that like a client's not brave enough means you haven't really understood the why the business why behind why they're not doing something.
- [03:49]
A
You pick on a really good point there. Because an idea is worth nothing unless you can actually implement it through the system. Right. And therefore knowing how to execute it is probably 90% of the job, really. The 10% is coming up. The idea 90% is actually figuring out how would this come to life and.
- [04:04]
B
Not making a bad customer experience. Because at the end of the day, everything we do needs to be in service of the person at the end of the experience. And so if I slow down distribution, I create a bad customer experience and then I don't build brand love, which is what all the work is ultimately supposed to do.
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A
Now probably can't have a conversation about you without quoting Jeff and his famous, famous quote for advertising being the tax on a poor product. How much do you spend or how much do you does Amazon spend overall on advertising a year?
- [04:31]
B
Oh, it varies. I don't know that I can give you an actual number. I don't think I should give the actual number. But you know, it varies from year to year and we do have a really rigorous portfolio planning process where we make very intentional decisions around the where and how. And we're growing too, so there's a lot more countries and emerging locales to think about where that distribution of funds needs to go and then how do you break that up between events and brand love and you know, the constant debate of what the ratio of investment should be between the different jobs to be done.
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A
And you seem to be doing quite mass market media as well. You know, despite obviously being a digital platform yourself. You know, you see on out of home and on TV and obviously in social as well.
- [05:13]
B
And we do, we do that. It really does depend on the countries because some countries like Japan out of home's huge. And when you've got countries where transit is such like New York where you can do great advertising on the subway and on the train system, London's the same. But then you go to other countries where that just is in the channel. So we really like to look at what are those high visibility placements and natural media opportunities within different countries. And then vans and boxes is finding new meteor opportunities like where's there a canvas or a surface that, that we could utilize for messaging. And so we're always looking for like new placements. And you may even have seen recently on prime video streaming, when you pause that's an ad space now that's.
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A
I saw that, I literally saw that last week actually. I thought it's genius.
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B
So it's like looking at the, it's kind of looking around corners and that's how we would speak about at Amazon is thinking about every opportunity for there to be messaging and not in a way that's obnoxious to a but it's paused. So why not use that surface area to think about a message coming up.
- [06:13]
A
Now I thought it was really clever innovation, really simple as well. It's like just, you know, you pause something and you just go and do something and it's just there. Right. So it's a really good idea based on system on database. You guys have done genuinely some of the best creative work on the planet. I think I was looking, looking up on the database last five years, I think three years you've had a 5.9 star which is the maximum rating and you've come Top at Christmas, I think three out of the last five years. What is it that do that makes you so prolific when it comes to kind of creativity and connecting with your audience?
- [06:45]
B
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think finding the truth of the, you know, really understanding what the truth behind the character story is. Having we talked about this, there is some very instinctive things around storytelling that have been true before. We were measuring in the way that we measure of, like, character tension, a hero's journey. How do we get to that triumph? How do we build this story arc that keeps someone engaged at every beat of the story, Building our brand assets into the story. Our distinctive brand assets are a big part of every story that you'll see from us. So it's no surprise who the message is coming from so people know who's talking to them. And then we find these really interesting characters with tension that feel relevant to the moment in time now. So there's this cultural context that we want to find that insight around, but then also have this kind of universal, timeless truth to them as well.
- [07:37]
A
Something I love about that as well as we often think about branding is, is physically the branding. Like, I can see the logo, I can see the packaging. But in a way, part of your branding is that you've got an idea that you. That you repeat in different ways so that, you know, almost. It's a bit like with Nike, we just do. It is. You can kind of. You can sense that it's a Nike ad, can't you? And it's a bit like that with your advertising. Just the way you tell the story and. And the way you, you know, you become the solution to the problem is just. You're almost branding that, aren't you? That kind of.
- [08:03]
B
And keeping it framework, keeping it simple. I do think, I do think we. That the industry often overwrites for 30 seconds. You can't do a lot, right? And so when you think about some of the things that maybe on your experience didn't test well, it's too kitchen sink or there's too many characters and I don't know who I'm supposed to feel anything for and I don't know what. Whose journey I'm on when it's too much of a kitchen sink montage. Where is this going? And so we do. We do try and really go back to what's the simplest expression of this story and then partner with really good directors who make really good. Who tell really good stories like we do. I call myself a repeat offender when it Comes to directors. When I find people who get our brand and get our voice, we'll often use them over and over again because you have this shorthand of. You don't have to debate the wrong things like should there be a box there? You actually debate character development and making sure you've got great casting and that you are just telling a really compelling story.
- [08:58]
A
My colleague Orlando actually wrote this book, look out where he. It was based on Ian McGilchrist's brain hemisphere theory. Theory, basically the right and the left brain and what, what the parts of the brain pay attention to. And what I loved about his work is that he isolated, I think about 20 years of advertising and what features like, you know, the right or left brain pick up. And the right brain features were things like a story that unfolds, cultural references, characters with agency, humor, dialogue, music. And as I look at what you do, it's absolutely right brained. It's all the things that we love about a drama or a movie and so on. But Versus, I mean, he talks about left brain advertising as being fast cuts, thumb, you know, thumping soundtracks, lots of words on the screen, you know, multiple characters, that kind of thing. And it's. I think you're almost the perfect example of that kind of right brain kind of advertiser.
- [09:51]
B
Yeah, I like to think it's time. We are in a. The entertainment industry as well. Right. Whether it's sports streaming or movies, there is this storytelling culture that's building within the organization. And I don't think there's any difference between whether we're streaming a series or making an ad. We're telling a story. We have a much more contained space to do it in. But we still ultimately want people to fall in love with your characters, feel invested. To get someone invested in a character in 30 seconds is quite a task. And if you bombard that with too many art, too many deviations of that story, it becomes really complicated. And it's a hard thing to do. I think it's hard to get to lose those shots. You love to simplify a story down, to know what are the critical beats to bring someone along with you.
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A
Now we've just did a stage presentation at Advertising Week and you said something incredibly radical, which is when you're looking for a new campaign, you're looking for something to run for three to five years. Now it seems like today we're on this kind of drug of change, particularly with AI accelerating the ability to make things even quicker. We keep changing things and actually all the research would suggest that the more people get familiar with something, actually the more they like them. And we did some research this year with Effie's, looking at our database and Effie's database and what we found is there were three ingredients, right? Is it emotional, is it recognizable from the brand? But the third ingredient, which was maybe surprising is is it consistent over time? And the consistency was the biggest differentiator in terms of how it scored over time. Literally second, third, fourth year, the gap between those campaigns, everyone else just, just grew bigger. So I love that you said that. And that's quite radical really because like we seem to be on this kind of, you know, production cycle of every year. New ad, new campaign, off we go again.
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B
I think some of it is a little bit born out of the, the circle of people moving in and out of companies which I mentioned. I think this idea of like new people coming in charge, if you've got a two year tenure, you've got to make something new. And I think that, and I, and I empathize with it because when you come into a company, you want to revolutionize, you want to be, want to put your mark on it. And that does feel like that's a little bit of a, that's causing a little bit of that need to like reinvent everything. But yeah, we do need to be more patient. I mean, think about. But it also puts pressure on the story has to be good enough that I want to watch it again. It's like we go back to movies. I mean, every time I fly to Australia, there are certain movies that I watch on the plane, right? And so long distance. And I know everyone does that. They have their list of movies that if it comes on, I'm going to sit down and watch it. And I feel like ads, if you take a little bit of a note out of that book, firstly it creates a very high bar for what the story is. I need to feel invested in. I need to develop something that's going to feel like it's very watchable over and over again. But it's rarely, yeah, it rarely wears out. I feel like we rarely wear wear spots out. And then they can go into hiatus. If they're well made, they can be off air for a couple years and come back.
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A
I found this out in Covid, actually. So after Covid happened, lots of people contacted us at System One to say, can they still add the same ad? Because of course everyone was panicking about, well, what can we say? Can we show people together? You know, do we have to be more sensitive? Do we have to be very somber, you know, all those kind of questions. And a very large international drink brand, you know, with lots of famous advertising, basically say, could we retest 50 of their campaigns from before COVID after Covid? And what they're looking for is like, you know, different brands in the portfolio, how long they've been running, how much spend was against them to find out which of them wore out. Right. So the brief was, can you tell us which ones have worn out? The shock was out of the 50, 48 had worn in. So when we retested them, the only two that wore out were sponsorship of the Russian Winter Olympics from before COVID Now this is when the Ukraine war was about to. Was just happening, right. And you go, well, that's a bit insensitive. So we, we literally went back with this kind of rather surprising finding going. We have not found any wear outs. And it didn't matter whether it's amount of spend or which country or which brand, we can't find wear outs.
- [13:55]
B
Well, I think what's interesting in you say with wearing is the other side of the coin is if something doesn't work in its first flight, doesn't mean it's not going to work. Right. And especially with a new platform, like the patience to allow, like we judge everything in quarters. Did it win this quarter? Right. But actually these stories grow resonance over time. And so having the patience to stick with a new platform or a new construct and know that it has wear in is just as important conversation as wear out.
- [14:24]
A
It really, really is. Now talking of that, I think you're re airing this Christmas or holiday season, my very favorite of one of your ads, the, the grannies. And you, you won the ultimate accolade actually, which is you got a turkey campaign of the week.
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B
Yeah. I may not or may be able to confirm whether we're running that.
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A
Oh, sorry. This is great. We've just broken some news.
- [14:43]
B
Okay. I'm not. But yeah, we're still. We, we definitely that's a consideration. But it did, it did. It was interesting to watch that it received a turkey in our industry press. And I think that was a little bit telling to like what kind of stories we're looking for. Like have we lost touch with our customers? Are we making. And look, I'm the first to say, I think often we make ads for ourselves. Right. How often do you see an ad where I'm like, who's the customer? Where's the, where's the customer in this story? Because it feels a little bit like as an industry we can celebrate and applaud things that. Does your mum like it if she's the audience for this? And so I do think that's a really important thing to think about is like, who is the customer for this? And, and how are we making sure that we're writing stories that are going to resonate at the right endpoint. Yeah.
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A
Now for anyone who hasn't seen it, just in case, anyone listening that hasn't seen. Just describe it because it's a beautiful construct you came up with. Yeah.
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B
No, it was really born out of this idea of traditions and what the holidays represent. And we're seeing that increasingly even in some of our studies. Looking at this year is in turbulent times, in uncertainty, we retreat and we actually really crave traditions. And some of those traditions can be awful. It can be the dry turkey that your aunt makes every year, but it's the tradition. Or it can be sleeping on the fold out couch in the basement, but it's the tradition and the comfort of that. And so this idea of this friendship that has persisted for so many years and so many. And what that represents, whether you're at that point or whether you are hoping or whether you hope your mom's at that point, but this friendship that has longevity and the tradition of them sledding, it really struck a nerve with people. It struck a nerve because it was that representation of I either want that to be me right now, I want that to be my mom right now. I want me and my girlfriends to be doing that when we're that age and that we can hold onto these things that give us this sense of comfort and control in a world that increasingly does not feel that way.
- [16:40]
A
Now one of the insights I think you nailed in that spot, which links to a report we just launched about seeing Gen Z is the intergenerational nature. So you've got obviously the grands, but they're going back to when they were kids and it's beautiful. And I think something we don't often recognize enough is actually intergenerational stories are things we can all connect. They're kind of universal truths. And for anyone listening, we've just released a new study actually looking at Gen Z. Now I have to say I resisted this for a very long time because I'm like, the world does not need another Gen Z report. Right. So when I went to the team, I'm like, we have to find something interesting to say that no one else has heard before. But anyway, I'll just read through the stats for Anyone listening, watching? So this is US data. We did this in the UK and the us, right. But this was wild because we found we did do a thousand ads from last three years. 93% of ads have Gen Z in them and 48% have them as the lead character. Now, given that gen Z are 25% of population, 17% of spend, that's a massive over. We are, we are obsessed with youth, aren't we, as an industry? Why are we so obsessed with youth, do you think? Yeah, do we want to be young? Is that what it is? Or.
- [17:48]
B
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me because, like, look at, like, Jane Fonda in billboards all over America at her age and Kris Kardashian becoming the face of Max just recently. And so you've got. There's two. I think maybe we're starting to realize that we shouldn't be so obsessed with youth and that. And that you could make a spot with, or make a piece of advertising with an older customer and it's still going to resonate with the younger customers.
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A
That's what you proved, haven't you? You've just proved that.
- [18:13]
B
We've proved that with that spot. We've proved that with a ton of work. And then, and then to your point on we, when we do talk to Gen Z, we play a lot to the stereotypes of what we think, think they want to see. And, and I think, I think hopefully we're getting smarter about like dimensionalizing them as human beings and giving them a little bit more characters and layers than we've maybe done historically.
- [18:35]
A
Well, this is so what we, what we found. So with the feeling scene work that we did a few years ago, we came with this insight, which is when people see themselves in advertising, they feel more, they feel more right, they feel happier and they feel happiness more strongly. And we called it the diversity dividends. Right? You represent minority groups, they feel better and it's good for everyone, right? This didn't play out with Gen Z. So what we found with Gen Z is when they see themselves in advertising, the score went down, which is really wild. And in fact, for women, it went down a little bit. So on a star rating, 1 to 5 on average went down 0.6. For men, it went down 1.5. I mean, it went from like, good to bad. I mean, it's quite, quite a big difference. So young men in particular are not connecting with the way we currently portray them, which, back to your stereotype point, I think is so key. I mean, the four Because I went back to the team and said, look, tell us what's surprising in this report because, you know, we've got enough Gen Z reports out there. So what's surprising, the four things I thought were interesting is like we tend to always show them on tech devices. Right. But actually the spots that didn't have technology, that were real life did much better. So again, assumptions there. Second one I thought was interesting. Men are often shown in sporty, competitive situations, but actually the ones where they're successful in their careers or they're showing kindness and friendship with, you know, with, with others did well. The third one was we often like to show, you know, not handling real life and being awkward, but actually they thrive in cross generational situations, family friendships and this is exactly what, you know, you're doing with the grannies.
- [20:09]
B
Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting. We had a spot last year with two for the NWSL in the US for Prime, where we had two sisters that are football players and they competing with each other. And it was a very successful spot for us. And we showed them in a light where they were being really competitive, really like somewhat aggressive with each other in the way that like one wanted to up the ante on the other. And it played really well for that reason because it just showed a, just a really positive different perspective of like, you know, not made up, messy hair, feeling very imperfect. And yeah, it was a very successful spot for us. So it is, it is about time we started all shifting to that mentality of that there is more layers to the onion of Gen Z. And I think we've kind of really just focused on the outer layer and there's a lot more to dig around it totally.
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A
And I must remember your ad from Japan as well, which is beautiful and quite maybe 10 years old now as well, isn't it? And what I loved about that is it's casting a young guy in a really positive light as well and showing kindness to his gran. Yeah, just describe that one because I wasn't as familiar with that one actually as I am with the rest of your work.
- [21:23]
B
The idea revolves around a young boy visiting his grandmother. Probably asked by his mother to visit his grandmother was sort of the backstory that we wrote. Like, make sure you visit your grandmother. So he's visiting his grandmother whose husband has just passed. And so a little bit of that was born out of this insight of we were actually seeing a pretty big loneliness and isolation epidemic going on with older people in Japan. And so there was this kind of crisis going on. So we wrote this story about a young boy going to spend time with his grandmother. And you see the shrine to the grandfather. You see a photo of them of grandma and grandpa on a motorcycle. He goes into the grand garage and sees that there's an old dusty motorcycle under the. Under a piece of a cloth, and then decides to buy her a helmet. And then the ad culminates in the two of them joyously kind of riding through this field, which was a very symbolic yellow field of flowers for Japan at the time. And this moment of joy where he's really been really thoughtful and generous and taken a moment to bring his grandmother some joy and relive her youth, which ironically, as you think about the sledding grannies, there's some similarities there because she's reliving a moment of her youth as well as well. And yeah, played really well because it showed the complexity of the character of the young boy. And I think it could have been easy in that story to focus on the journey of the grandmother and I. And honestly, I think the original script started that way. It was much more about her journey. There's a beautiful shot in it with a single teacup, which to me is the one that makes me cry because it's just this idea of getting to a moment in her life where she's by herself. Editorially, we could have swayed it much more to her, but I think the story that's the surfaced, which is what happens in production sometimes, was this was the young boy story. This was the story of the. Of his intuition and emotional intelligence to know what his grandmother was going through.
- [23:09]
A
Oh, I love that. That's really beautiful. The one it reminds. The one it reminds me that I did. So I think I was mentioning this. Well, I've won. I've won one Cannes line in my career. Only entered once. Exactly. So I'm like. I'm like, I'm. I'm calling time on any can line entries. But it was when I was working on Lucozade and we were sponsoring Anti Joshua, who at that point was going for the world heavyweight boxing title. And he was a little less known at that point. I mean, he became very famous or he was on his rise up at that point. It's one of the biggest moments. And he was playing in. He was sorry. Fighting in Wembley against Klitschko. And it's one of the. It was the biggest sporting event that year. And Domino pitched it to me and he said, john, what I want to do, I want to tell his story, like how he got to Here, because his story is fascinating. And I want to take the entire ad break before he walks out to the ring, and I want to show him from being born to literally putting on the kind of boxing overalls. And the next thing you see is the audience will be him then going out and actually doing the fight. Right, but back to your point about discovering the story and what the real story is, I had to send my team out to Dubai because AJ was in. They call it lockdown. Boxers go into lockdown for eight, 10 weeks before, before a fight where they just don't do any media. They're totally focused in on the fight. And AJ had said to us, right, the only way we do this is if you come to my kind of, you know, Dubai water camp, one with the. With the family, and I'll. And I'll tell you everything that you can then use for the. Use for the film. And I remember the team coming back really excitedly saying to me, john, it's the mum. I'm like, what do you mean, it's the mum? What we discovered was that actually the story wasn't aj, it was the relationship with his mum, because he. He grew up a, you know, single mom, council estate, and she had been the person there through thick and thin, through the difficult times. And, you know, he had been. He'd gone to jail, he'd got into trouble, he'd worked on a building site. That's where he's got the skills to learn to box, you know, to kind of keep him off the streets, the whole thing. And so we redid the. We redid the story where it opens with him kind of being born. And we have this scene where, like, he takes his very first step and the mum's, like, holding his. Kind of holding his arms up as he takes his first step. And then at the end of the film, you have little moments where, you know, she's getting him out of jail, all that kind of stuff. But at the end of it, where he lifts his hands up to get the heavyweight boxing championship of the world, you cut back to that first moment where he's. She's holding his hands up as a little toddler for the first time and just bring the story full loop. And literally when we went into the, like, production studio, see that final, but. But this is what we won. The line for was we just got the perfect soundtrack and the edit was just beautiful. I tell you, the entire team were in tears. I mean, literally, like, there was not a dry. A dry eye in the house. It's just Beautifully told. But the. But the thing that reminded me when you said that is the story was the mum. And we only discovered that through kind of meeting the family, asking them about, you know, their life and stuff, and then you suddenly uncover the real stories.
- [26:13]
B
My favorite thing about production is, and I think that's where we need to. You put the piece, you put the thing on paper and you have this is the story. And then when you cast it and you start putting all these pieces together. We had a similar story. And a few years ago, we did a spot in India which was about our all female fulfillment centers. So we've built run the delivery drivers, the fulfillment center, the factories, all run, run by women, because it was not safe to have women working in fulfillment centers with men because there was a lot of incidents at the time. So we were going to do this story of these powerful delivery women who are, you know, stared at. They. They're going in on that. They're on vans with their saris and their Amazon vests and these scooters driving around Mumbai. And they're amazing women. But when we did all the pre interviews with them, every single one of them was doing it for their daughter, son, or their child. And so you realize this was the story of mums as well. This wasn't the story of feminists of like, go getter, like badass women on motorcycles. This was actually the story of the why they were doing it because it enabled financial independence. We had ways of paying. They got paid directly so they could control. For women who were single moms, they could control their life a little bit more. And so we actually skewed the story to start with a mother kissing her daughter goodbye, which was never in the original vision of it. It always started with, like, hooning around town and being this, this beautiful woman on a sari. And then we ran it for Mother's Day because it became this story that was a really powerful reminder of the things that mothers do for their children and the lengths that they went to and the why not just the what. And so, yeah, same thing. Covering stories in production is amazing. And being open to it is really important. It's as well.
- [27:56]
A
It is, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Being open that the story will emerge as you go through the process. And so you don't. You don't judge it too soon. You have to kind of let it.
- [28:04]
B
That's the journey for a lot of young creatives, I think, is they often go, this is it. And they get rigid about it. And like, this is how we Imagined it. And I think you learn over time that, that everyone who touches a piece of work that contributes to making that piece of work is going to come in to that with different experiences and different perspectives and build on it. And not always right, but like being open to the idea of a story unfolding through that process is thrilling.
- [28:29]
A
I mean, come back to the client age relationship. The irony was, I think it's the only time I've ever said when it, when they pitch the idea, I don't want to be involved again. I said, look, this is such a good idea. And I'm literally tingling down back of my spine already just listening to you. I said, I don't ruin it for you. And I even said I don't want any branding. I mean literally, I just want it to play out and you can just have. The other thing I remember saying is just leave the end sequence for two or three more in the end frame. Two or three more seconds normally would. Because I feel so emotional just about the script. Like when people actually see this, I don't want it to cut straight to the noise of the arena. I want it to hold, I want it to hang there and then you go in sort of thing so you feel it. And that's the final moment we came up the line. I think nobody ever moved forward by standing still and then just cuts the logo. That was it. And what was amazing about that example was I think my cost per view was like 0.0001% because everyone, everyone went wild on Twitter and we had Lennox Lewis tweet. We had loads these kind of like famous boxers tweeting it, kind of sharing it. So just, yeah, just gather like.
- [29:32]
B
And that's a really human, amazing insight to go just let someone live in that moment. And we don't get that luxury as much in advertising as film. Where you can sit and live in a moment, but where you can find those beats where you let someone feel all the feelings you've built towards is really powerful.
- [29:50]
A
It's so powerful. I mean, talking about all my emotion, humanity and find the human stories, I must ask you about AI because it just, it feels like, you know, we're racing to this kind of AI future. How is AI shaping what you do and where do you think it's kind of helping and where maybe is the human intervention still required?
- [30:11]
B
It's a really exciting tool that we can use in lots of different ways. And the way we think about it is we don't have to think about it just as execution. And I think There's a lot of conversations around scale, volume, efficiency. You know, we recently, we did last Christmas, actually, we did the atom driver review work. And the way we used AI in that campaign was, as you can imagine, we have gazillions of gazillions of reviews and not all that great. Some of them are quite functional and direct, but some of them, in fact, Ryan Reynolds ghost writes reviews. He wouldn't tell us who it's for, but he ghostwrites Amazon reviews and just dumps them on Amazon. So there's people that write very poetic reviews, but they're often hard to find because there's so many. So we used AI. We built a beta of an AI tool with a criteria to curate what we considered were the ingredients of an ideal review. Saved us weeks and weeks and weeks of time and searching and kind of got it down to a much smaller pool. That's a smart application of AI I consider. And so we're working on things like copies, tools that can help us write at speed for the things that need to be volumes and need to be optimized, like digital display, but that understands our voice and our humor and our charm, and it still needs human curation. I think there's just not. There's not one rule to rule them all. We have to think about what problems we're solving first and foremost. Like that. Don't start with the technology. Start with the problem and then decide whether the technology is appropriate for that problem.
- [31:37]
A
I'm sure I saw a quote somewhere that said, AI will give you the answer. It will never give you the question.
- [31:42]
B
That's right.
- [31:43]
A
And I think that's what you're touching on there, isn't it? It's the actual skill is asking the right question and being refining what the question should be.
- [31:49]
B
Yeah.
- [31:50]
A
Did you just say Ryan Reynolds ghostwrites reviews on Amazon?
- [31:53]
B
He does. When we met him a few years ago, he was talking about. We just met with him and like, didn't. Did a session with him in Cannes and he said he writes. He doesn't. Wouldn't tell us what name he writes under, but he writes reviews and just dumps them in there. So who knows?
- [32:06]
A
Can you train the AI to kind of learn Ryan Reynolds?
- [32:11]
B
If I feed in a Ryan Reynolds voice, like, can I start figuring out what the ghost writing is?
- [32:16]
A
But this could be the.
- [32:17]
B
Does it. Who else do you think does it? Like, that's the thing I find interesting is like, there's. Because some of them you read and they're borderline Shakespearean. Is the word that I would use. Like, some of them are so poetic and long. And like, there's a review we have of a beach ball. Like, that's like nothing I've ever. We've got. We're two comparison reviews of a beach ball. One that just says big, which I thought was funny. Like a large beach ball big. And then you put it next to the one that is poetry about the experience created by a beach ball. So people do take a lot of time and pride and it's a bit of a creative outlet to write these amazing reviews.
- [32:50]
A
I'm wondering if there's some underground subculture we've just stumbled on there.
- [32:55]
And they all go under code names or synonyms. That's incredible. How's AI being used in the kind of. You talked about production, you talked about gathering insight, which I think is amazing. Example from your reviews. Are you using it in the creative process in terms of coming up with ideas, or is that still very much kind of human?
- [33:15]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think in different ways. It depends on the brief. Like, I think teams will 100% go to AI for that spark. Like you would go to the Internet for a spark. Like looking to feed things, looking to. And different teams have different level of fluency. So some teams will utilize it as an input. We use. I think the big. The big question for me was look at the entire workflow. So don't just. I think there's been a lot of focus on the creative and execution end of AI's applications, but I think there's a lot more opportunity when it comes to insights and workflow and trafficking and some of the other parts of the process that aren't as sexy to talk about because it's much more fun to talk about. Can I put this bear in a hammock? Right? Like, can I do this thing with. With something visual that looks like an ad? But I think a lot of companies are now coming to the realization that it's. It's somewhat more of a workflow tool. And then how does it apply? But we use AI to make sure that products aren't broken when they come off the production line. Like you can detect things on the production line with AI. We are. Our climate. Our climate pledge team are using. Partnering with a company that uses AI to decipher whether. When they're cleaning the ocean, whether it's plastic or a fish. So AI in application at different scales, when it comes to all the different jobs that we need to do goes well beyond advertising. And I find that stuff really exciting.
- [34:33]
A
That Is super cool. Difficult, isn't it? I was just thinking, because the creative process is. It is very imperfect, isn't it? Like, sometimes the idea will come straight away, sometimes it'll take months. You know, it's not like a linear thing that you can just go schedule. It's. It's context, it's circumstance, it's the right mix of people, it's the right brief. It's. There's so many things, isn't there, that come into.
- [34:53]
B
And you need to go down a lot of rabbit holes. Like, I found myself down Reddit rabbit holes. Often when I'm, like, trying to Spock something, go to a movie, like, I think, what. What is the source of inspiration? And I think actually with the speed with which we work and sometimes the static nature of, like, creatives sitting in their cubes kind of trying to come up with ideas, like, you get. You get out what you put in. And I think the best creatives are sponges of culture. And AI is one of those things, right? It's like you're a sponge of that. You're a sponge of the new, you're a sponge of the old. You're just inputting as many things that are in your toolkit that, when you are tasked with a brief, can kind of surface and make the idea great.
- [35:31]
A
You talked about speed. Now, Amazon's famous for its agility. You know, I mean, I find it amazing that you can get deliveries in the same day now. You know, it's just like, incredible. So you forget something. And I go, oh, yeah, I can order it in the morning, it's there in the afternoon. It's just wise. How does such a big company remain so agile? What is it you do to kind of create that agility?
- [35:53]
B
I just think there's a lot. I mean, it's a really smart team of leaders who are looking forward. It's not backwards. And so always looking about what, What. Not what, not what you look like now, but what you're going to look like in five years time and being ahead of that and what's coming. And so. And that's where I think failure is a big part of the culture, because that's why you can fail, because you don't look backwards, you learn from it, but you then go on to the next thing. And I think that tolerance of forward, kind of constant forward momentum and always looking to what's next and not dwelling on the thing that didn't work, but learning from it and taking it to the next pieces is what's enabled us to move fast.
- [36:27]
A
Yeah. And if you could look at all your creative output, all the what you've done for Amazon, if you could pick the one thing that's made the biggest difference, what would it be? If you had to choose one thing.
- [36:38]
B
There'S a lot of things. I think, I do think defining our brand architecture and brand expression system from a design standpoint has been enormous because the voice of the brand, the font, the look and feel, the colors, simplifying that, and that was a project we honestly started about five years ago where we started realizing we were showing up very different everywhere. And because of the way we were growing, there was just a lot of autonomy to grow. But then with that comes different brand expression systems and we also knew that AI was coming. And so having a design system that wasn't repeatable, recognizable, that didn't have like modular elements, that technology could move around, was also going to fail in the future at some point as well. So the design system, which now is in multiple languages, in multiple countries, means that you can travel the world and Amazon looks the same. And we didn't PR it like we did things like fattened up the smile in our logo, we sharpened and tweaked some of the character shapes within the Amazon logo and it wasn't something to get a headline out of. It was work that needed to be done that hadn't been done. And it's probably not the sexiest going to win all the lions work. But it's so foundational to consistency that's so important to anything else that we do. If we can start to have that layer of just, okay, I'm making it easier on the customer because they know who's talking to them.
- [37:58]
A
Yeah.
- [37:58]
B
And I just don't think we had that foundation. So that's been a huge.
- [38:01]
A
I mean back to our little formula from the Effie's work we did, emotion plus branding plus consistency was basically the formula we ended up with. Is it the other thought that occurred to me, as you said, that is. Is the freedom actually in a tight brief. I know it's a different context that phrase, but it's true, isn't it? If you're really clear about who you are, it actually get. It actually gives creativity freedom. And all the best brands, like you're not you when you're hungry or sugar and Spec Savers, they're all super, super tight on what they're about and how they look, but their creative output appears quite different because they're so tight on actually what they stand for. It liberates the kind of expressions of that, doesn't it, in the different contexts? Because you all know the joke, don't you? That they all know their position, the joke, more familiar you become with it. Then you can express it on the side of a van or in direct mail or it opens up everything. Yeah, it's actually liberating. And I think some people think it's like a constraint, but actually it's a.
- [38:53]
B
Well, a lot of that work comes from us. You know, when I came in, we had these silos of like design set over here and advertising set over here and production. And so forced collision of integrating those groups together. Started to realize what. What were we always talk about, what are the problems to solve every year. And. And that was a pretty big problem to solve that has really stepped. It's actually taken us really far forward because then when we start talking about. Then you talk about storytelling consistency. So it's not just fonts and colors and, and repeatable grids of like how the work looks like and shows up in the world. But then it also opens the door for your voice and your tone and are we a funny brand? And can we be a funny brand? And can we be a serious brand? Which I believe we can, but knowing the kind of stories that we tell. And so, so it's, it's forced. That foundational architectural conversation has forced a lot more storytelling conversations as well.
- [39:47]
A
I love that a lot. It's funny. I think if I had to, if I was to pick one thing I've learned during this podcast and at System One in the last five years, since we're doing both, the compounding effect of consistency, I think would probably be it. And it's probably something that is funny actually, because being in marketing, I've never done a job more than three years. This is the first time I've done it. Almost six years now. I've never been in a job long enough to see the compounding effect happen.
- [40:11]
B
You're living it.
- [40:12]
A
This is what happens in year four, five and six. It's worth waiting for this, you know, because literally as a marketer, I pre ham the success off the. To someone else, you know, or it gets stopped.
- [40:21]
B
I mean, that is also the short.
- [40:22]
A
To be fair, that's usually what happens.
- [40:23]
B
That's the short termism that you like. It takes at least three years to have an impact.
- [40:29]
A
Yeah.
- [40:29]
B
To see the outcome of. And then even to be able to go, well, that didn't work. We can optimize it or change it. But it does take a this is my biggest learning time.
- [40:36]
A
I know. It's been wild.
- [40:37]
B
Yeah.
- [40:38]
A
On that bombshell, I'd love to keep chatting and, and thank you so much and it's always a joy to to chat to you and congratulations on continually smashing it with the work you do.
- [40:49]
B
Thank you. And congratulations on six years on your longest tenure.
- [40:52]
A
Yeah, I know. Fantastic. Great stuff. Thank you.
- [40:56]
B
Thank you.
- [40:57]
A
Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to contact me, you can do I'm over on X at UncensoredCMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.