By Gustavo Lauria, Co-Founder and CCO At We Believers
25 years in advertising hasn’t been enough time for me to understand one of the biggest mysteries in our industry: Why do many companies spend millions on media, fees, salaries, research, or productions, just to be quickly forgotten?
Think about how few Super Bowl spots you remember a week after the game, and how few of those you can connect with the brand or a clear point of view. The investment in lackluster work doesn’t make sense.
But that mediocrity is coming to an end. We are working through one of the best eras in advertising history, and it all comes down to one simple thing: People hate advertising, and that challenges us to be more creative than ever. People want to see what your brand is doing for them, what you stand for–or at least, how you can entertain them while you offer a product or try to generate brand awareness.
As a result, our industry is quickly evolving in the right direction, and as it does, a new kind of marketer is emerging. These leaders are smart enough to understand that there’s nothing safer than taking bold risks–and nothing more dangerous than blending in.
We all know the huge names like McMahon, Pritchard, and Machado, but there are way more CMOs and VPs of Marketing out there who want to follow their path. You may not know them yet, but they have their dresses and shirts dry-cleaned and ready to be on the Debussy stage.
During the last year or so, more and more top companies’ executives contacted us at We Believers with the same goal in mind. All of them want to generate conversations, garner millions, or even billions of impressions, bring tangible results in sales and brand recognition–all with the help of creativity.
From the first call, you can tell how fearless and confident they are. For example, they would never ask for the process our agency follows to come up with a big idea for Burger King. They understand that if you design a replicable process to create a fresh and unpredictable idea, that idea probably won’t be fresh and unpredictable at all.
As soon as you start working with them, they show their hunger for big thinking, thinking that is sometimes much bigger than their media buy. That’s why they’re open to flipping media to be at the service of creativity. Big ideas that make people talk and share don’t usually feel like advertising; they’re media agnostic. If they’re big enough, you can adapt them to different channels to amplify even more.
These CMO’s see data as a way to inspire and inform, but they trust their common sense and criteria way more. As a result, they agree that if the message is not simple and believable enough to be explained in one line, it probably won’t work in real life.
They dare to challenge their legal departments, and they embrace failure. They know that when you’re able to make your brand stand for something meaningful, not everyone will agree, but that’s okay as long as you’ve earned the support of the people you’re trying to reach.
And because they truly believe in the transformational power of creativity, they seek out the best creatives and work and work hand in hand with them, without hierarchies and unnecessary presentations that slow down the process. They make decisions quickly in order to unleash creativity and integrate their brands into pop culture by reacting to what’s happening out there.
So God–and Dan Wieden–bless the active people on social media, challenging us and giving birth to this new kind of Chief Marketing Rockstar. They’re finally allowing creatives to think even bigger than the most iconic Guinness spots, letting us create and innovate using their budgets and our ideas to be more ambitious than ever and potentially improve people’s lives, while we build amazing brands every day.
The only thing we need is a good idea.
Hispanic Star is honored to partner with Advertising Week to feature Hispanic voices during Hispanic Heritage Month and beyond.