about their successes only serve to feed their own sense of failure.
In Belgium, CBC Bank discovered that people looking to buy
a new house want to know everything about their future home
and also all about the new environment in which they are going
to live. For 82 percent of them, the neighborhood is as important
as the house itself. This led CBC Bank to create the “Sleep on
it” platform, where future buyers can learn more about their
future neighborhoods before buying their home. They can get
information about schools, shops, public transportation, and the
average age and demographic profile of their future neighbors.
They can also test the neighborhood by choosing to stay in a
local Airbnb rental property, with one free night offered by CBC
Bank.
Another example of insightful data use comes from Nike.
The brand has commissioned a survey12 that reveals that, in the
United States, today’s youth are the first ever generation that,
due to their unhealthy lifestyle, are expected to die five years
younger than their parents. This is the disruptive data that
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inspired the “Designed to Move”13 campaign. The commercial
features 20 children who describe what they would do if they had
five extra years to live. The answers ranged from funny to pro-
found. They would build a time machine, make medicine for the
sick, go to the moon, get more hamsters, try to win five sports
championships, go looking for aliens, fix the bad things they had
done, and sing in front of a million people. “Designed to Move”
is much more than just a campaign; it has actually generated a
movement. As long as we do our part to stay in good health, we
can put life expectancy back on the increase.
This notion of “disruptive data” echoes what Jedidiah Yueh
calls the “magic metric” in his book Disrupt or Die. He explains
how Facebook, in spite of gathering billions of elements of data,
had become “data-rich and insight-poor.”14 This changed from
the moment the social network distilled all the data down to a sin-
gle actionable metric: seven friends in 10 days. A Facebook user
who is joined by seven friends in 10 days is shown almost always
to become a user for life. Since Facebook discovered this data,
everything it does focuses on helping users reach that milestone.
Facebook identified its disruptive data point when it only had
40 million users, a number dwarfed by MySpace’s 115 million.
Discovering the “seven friends in 10 days” number was, accord-
ing to Yueh, a key accelerator in the social network’s success.
He informs us that others have also found their magic metric.
Twitter, for instance, wants users to follow 30 people. Zynga
implements a “day one” retention policy to ensure users come
back the day after signing up. Slack found out that if a team sends
2,000 messages, it is likely going to become a long-term user, a
threshold that has been reached by 93 percent of Slack’s custom-
ers. Companies that have identified their own metric can then
work on ways to achieve their particular thresholds. “Divining a
Magic Metric can enable terrifying growth,”15 concludes Yueh.
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In Silicon Valley we have seen that companies like Google
and Netflix are committed to building strong corporate cultures,
unlike many other organizations there that remain skeptical of
promoting culture internally and externally. Similarly, by build-
ing a strong iconic brand, Airbnb is showing the way to non-
believers of the new economy.
Among companies of the digital era, Airbnb is a pioneer in
brand building. It can also serve as an example for companies
in any other sector. Few brands master their own storytelling
as well as Airbnb, and that is undoubtedly one of the reasons
for its incredible performance. According to Kantar, since 2014,
Airbnb has multiplied the value of its brand equity by 2.7 times.16
Chapter 15
Lee CLow
ON THE POWER OF GREAT ADVERTISING
decades he has been the creative head of the leading agency
in California. And he has been at the origin point of a great
many iconic campaigns for brands such as Pedigree, Adidas,
Nissan, Visa, and Apple. The spot used for the 1984 launch of
the Macintosh has been celebrated by the advertising industry
as the most admired commercial of the last century. And the
series of 66 “Mac versus PC” commercials was named as the best
campaign of the first decade of this century.1
It was Clow who also conceived the famous film signed “Think
Different,” which was dedicated to the “crazy ones who are crazy
enough to think they can change the world.”2 The film is full of
trailblazers including Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Martin Luther
King Jr., and others. As Steve Jobs explained on his return to the
company, this commercial made it clear to investors, observers,
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and employees that there was absolutely no way his company was
going out of business.
Lee Clow was Steve Jobs’s advertising partner since the very
first days of Apple. In referring to him, Jobs once said, “He’s the
best guy in advertising.”3 For most people in our industry, Lee is
a living legend and a guiding force.
Clow loves ideas in all shapes and forms, ideas that change the
way advertising works, ideas that redefine creativity. He believes
ideas accelerate change; they rule the world.
Big Brand Ideas
When it comes to our business, Clow likes to say, “Big ideas win.
Good ads don’t.” More than being a criticism of “good ads,” his
comment should be seen as an encouragement to always associ-
ate brands with powerful ideas. This is what he calls “big brand
ideas.”
He knows better than anyone how to encapsulate in just one
or two words the essence of a brand, be it Apple, Nissan, Adidas,
or Pedigree. He was at the genesis of lots of big brand ideas,
including Apple’s “Think Different,” Nissan’s “Shift,” Adidas’s
“Impossible Is Nothing,” and Pedigree’s “Dogs Rule.” These are
ideas of a higher order, the kind that Marc Pritchard at P&G
has always looked to promote. Pritchard is a strong believer that
“big ideas are the currency of our industry. They lift the entire
brand.”4 As for me, I have always thought that such ideas estab-
lish a before and an after in a brand’s life.
Our industry is at its best when clients take ownership of the
advertising slogans we create for them. On his return to Apple,
Steve Jobs stressed the importance of “Think Different” to an
audience of retailers. Erich Stamminger of Adidas declared in
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front of a crowd of enthusiastic staff members that “Impossi-
ble Is Nothing
.” As for Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn, he mentioned
“Shift” at several automobile shows, held in cities from Tokyo to
Detroit. In referring to these ideas, business leaders use advertis-
ing words to show the world how they see their companies.
Some people think that this way of viewing our business is out
of date, that the importance given to the brand idea is a vestige left
over from the old school. The evolution of technology and data
is such that many believe that advertising will now only focus on
driving transactions and promoting sales. It’s true that automated,
digital, transaction-driven advertising will be the fastest-growing
marketing activity in the coming years. But it’s worth underlining
that the way this kind of advertising is conceived does not naturally
lead to great, overarching ideas. Its mission is rather to deliver a
multitude of specific messages to very narrow targets. Of course,
this type of advertising is indispensable but, at the same time, it
can result in fragmented brand experiences and an increasingly
diluted overall brand image. Which is why I think that, today
more than ever, expressing an overarching idea about what the
brand stands for remains a priority.
One of the brand ideas I just mentioned dates from 1998; the
others are from the middle of the 2000s. I thought at the time
that such big brand ideas would start to flourish and I was on
the lookout for them everywhere. I observed ideas from agencies
all over the world—our own and our competitors’—but ideas of
this style and magnitude rarely took hold, because most creative
people today are looking for ideas of a different nature, which
they can exploit in real time and circulate instantly on the web.
These may be really creative—“good ads,” as Clow would say—
but they nevertheless remain somewhat narrow ideas. They lack
the stature of brand ideas. The growing importance of digital has
dragged our profession in another direction.
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When I talked about the merits of brand ideas, I sensed that
creatives were skeptical. They thought I was having trouble let-
ting go of something that had worked well in the past. But then,
little by little, these brand ideas started to reappear. Among those
from Clow’s agency, I can cite Gatorade’s “Win from Within,”
Reuters’ “The Answer Company,” Accenture’s “New Applied
Now,” and Airbnb’s “Belong Anywhere.” Nike is another exam-
ple. For more than 10 years, Nike’s agency, Wieden & Kennedy,
had stopped closing its commercials with one of the most famous
brand ideas ever created: “Just Do It.” At the 2017 Cannes Lions,
I was pleasantly surprised to see that tagline reappear on Nike’s
ads. Recently, a new Nike commercial featured Colin Kaepernick,
the American football player who kneeled during the national
anthem in protest against racism. In doing so, the brand drew
strong criticism. The end of the film finishes with this voiceover,
“Don’t ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they are crazy enough.
It’s only crazy until you do it. Just do it.”5 This proves that if big
brand ideas are kept fresh, they can span generations.
A big brand idea is, at the same time, a source of inspiration,
and a filter. It gives direction to all the creative initiatives and
outputs—videos, films, events, brand content, posts and tweets,
conversations on social networks—that substantiate the idea, day
after day. A brand idea also enables you to exclude messages that
do not reflect what the brand really stands for, no matter how
creative or interesting they may be. Digital disperses messages
and attention. Brand ideas do the opposite. They provide focus.
They aggregate.
Brand ideas bring more density and substance. They give a
sharper image. They create a new moment in a brand’s history.
They simplify solutions to complex problems. They often accel-
erate change, but always add value. The value of the Nike brand,
which is listed as its prime asset on its balance sheet, represented
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almost 30 percent of the company’s total market capitalization6
in December 2018. And whereas it’s not possible to measure pre-
cisely the contribution of the “Just Do It” idea, it unquestionably
counts for a lot.
Creativity, the advertiser’s Best Bet
All this being said, and irrespective of finding big ideas or not, we
are living in a media environment that is in constant upheaval.
Media and business analysts are alarmed by what they refer to as
“the progressive disappearance of audiences.” In fact, rather than
speaking of disappearance, it would be more accurate to describe
dispersion and fragmentation. Audiences have not disappeared
but, because of the vast number of content choices, they have
become scattered and difficult to reach.
To compound this, tens of billions are being invested by plat-
forms like Amazon or Netflix to produce quality programs. By
allowing their subscribers to avoid seeing advertising, they also
contribute to audience erosion. The advertising business is expe-
riencing a significant reduction in the consumption of traditional
media, and it must find new ways of reaching those referred to as
the “unreachables.”
Guillaume Pannaud, the head of our French agency, sums
up the challenge our industry is facing: “Our job consisted in
creating messages to reach an audience. Now we have to create
audiences.” To do so, marketers need to aggregate the thousands
of Internet users who are interested in the content their brands
produce and make them want to share it. But viewers will
only circulate content that they find original, new, surprising,
uplifting—in a word, creative. In this age of ad clutter, ad
blocking, and ad avoidance, there is no place for mediocre work.
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On a positive note, brands today have a great many levers
to activate new ways of interesting their audiences. Creativity
is taking on new forms. I’ve looked at the options that brands
can use. Here’s a list. Brands can exploit the compelling data
they have isolated, or build on an insight they have uncovered.
They can sink into a crowd culture where people share things
centered on common interests. They can be inspired by the
news or by conversations being conducted on social networks.
They can take advantage of an event they have created, or one
organized by someone else. They can propose brand tutorials,
or use YouTubers’ videos. They can produce online mini-
documentaries showing the initiatives they’re taking. All of these
levers are new ways for brands to reach those “unreachables”
and, in doing so, to touch the very core of their digital intimacy.
Nevertheless, an advertising message, in whatever form or
channel, has always been—and always will remain—the fruit of
the conjugati
on of two elements: an idea and the way in which
this idea is expressed. The idea must be creative and so, too, must
be the storytelling that brings it to life.
The ultimate value of an idea depends on the way in which
it is executed. Imagining messages that are fresh and original
requires a certain know-how, not to mention talent. Pritchard
often speaks of the craft of advertising. “Express the brand as
a masterpiece painted on a creative canvas,”7 he says. We are
always looking for the right phrase, for finely chiseled formulas.
Whether it is in conceiving films, creating websites, or produc-
ing short programs, we must preserve this respect of the writ-
ten word, this concern for things well done. Some would like to
make our business an industry, but it must remain a craft.
This finally leads to a topic that has been crucial for me for
decades: the relationship between creativity and effectiveness.
There is proof of the direct link between them. Solid, statistical
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evidence8 has been supplied by both the Gunn Report, a relent-
less advocate for creativity, and the British Institute of Practi-
tioners in Advertising, a well-respected organization with one of
the richest databanks on effectiveness. The findings are unequiv-
ocal: Creatively awarded campaigns provide a higher return and,
paradoxically, with less risk.
McKinsey has also devoted two studies to the subject. The
first states, “The more creative a campaign, the higher the
likelihood that the featured product will sell.”9 The second
study,10 published in 2017, led McKinsey to observe that
creativity matters for the bottom line. It would appear that the
Boston Consulting Group and Bain share the same opinion.
They agree with the McKinsey conclusion that “other things
being equal, creativity is an advertiser’s best bet.”11
I imagine the Lee Clow of the 1960s, an avid surfer and
raw creative talent. He would likely never have imagined that
McKinsey would one day make such a statement, or that the
best-established consulting companies would confirm what
he’s been trying to prove all his life: that creativity can be a real
game-changer.
Clow pays attention to every word, every pixel, every pack,
every logo, every little piece of point-of-sale material. For him
everything counts because, as he says, “Everything a brand does