Take F*cking Risks: 3 Ways to Get Noticed

The problem: 89% of ads are immediately forgotten

Louis: Yeah, of course it is. What do you think? So why do companies struggle to get noticed in the first place? Why do you think it’s such an issue for companies to stand out in this day and age?

Paul Mellor: Because they all look the same. It’s as simple as that. Everyone, everyone, I mean, pretty much everyone in every single industry in every country across the world looks and Sounds exactly the same.

Louis: Can you give me an example of a, let’s say specific industry and maybe name some companies if you’re not afraid of doing so to, to show that it’s actually true, this statement?

Paul Mellor: Well, I mean you don’t even have to name industries. The research backs it up. So if I start with the stats, because I do like to start with real science before we talk about calling people out. So the average Londoner, and this is the same if you’re in any built up area, any city, but the research was done in London. The average Londoner sees a thousand ads a day. That’s radio, tv, print, mobile, whatever it is. All of Those thousand ads, 89% of them are forgotten immediately. That is a fucking joke. I mean that is ridiculous. And then of the remaining 11%, 4% are remembered positively and 11% remembered negatively. Can you imagine if there was an engineer where 89% of their bridges fell down? It would be a serious problem. They would be run out of town. Yet it’s okay if advertisers where 89% of them have forgotten and it seems like people just, yeah, that’s fin, whatever, they’re quite happy. Or they’ll skew the numbers to make it seem like they’re not being forgotten, but they are. It’s just wallpaper. That’s what advertising has become. It’s just wallpaper on the side of the street, on the side of a bus, on the side of a webpage. If it’s a banner, whatever it is, it’s just wallpaper.

Louis: 89% seems like actually too little. Right. So that means 11% actually remember them, whether it’s positively or negatively. And when you say remember, what’s the criteria here?

Paul Mellor: They need to be able to recall it. I think the test, I don’t know the exact numbers, but I think the test was within 24 hours. It was a recall within 24 hours.

Louis: Right.

Paul Mellor: So yeah, I mean it’s just mind blowingly, we as an industry are mind blowingly shit at our job, yet nobody’s prepared to talk about it.

Louis: You seem to be prepared to talk about it though. Like that advertisers are doing a very poor job. Yes, but it seems like, and that’s what we were talking about in the intro. It seems like the problem of being noticed and creating ads that actually stand out or creating marketing or being a marketer that stand out to me doesn’t seem like it’s a marketing strategy made issue or tactic or tactical issue or the fact that they don’t really understand marketing. Sometimes it feels like the biggest issue is the mental blocker to actually take some risk, take a stand and actually stand out with your own convictions.

Why companies struggle to stand out

Paul Mellor: Yeah. There’s two points to that. The first is there are a lot of ads out there. There are a lot of brands vying for people’s attention. So I get it. It’s difficult. I’m not saying that it’s easy, but it is possible. The point being, though, in order to stand out, there’s a corporate culture across the world where people. It’s the avoidance of risk. Companies are run by accountants and procurement people, not run by people that understand the craft of getting noticed. There’s the sort of projection of fear. Marketers are far too worried about the internal politics. There’s design by committee. There’s the tactics before creative. Marketers are far more interested in the channel. The media spend the tactics way before they’re interested in the creative. And it should be completely the other way around. The media buyer, the strategy. So not the strategy. The channel should not inform the creative. I mean, the evidence, anecdotal or not, is just think about, try and name me 10 ads that you saw in the last 24 hours that you liked, that you can remember. They don’t have to have liked them. You’re going to think that was shit, but you can’t. You just can’t recall them yet. If I. If I asked you to name, you know, 10 ads from the 80s, you probably could. You probably could reel out 10 ads from 30 years ago.

Louis: Yeah. Let me think about it. Like, let’s do the actual exercise right now. It’s incredibly difficult. I remember this ad from. I took it. I remember because I put it in my swipe file recently. This ad from, you know, the pencil, the highlighter, the yellow highlighter.

Paul Mellor: Yes. I didn’t know the name, but yeah, yeah.

Louis: And there is this connection between the highlighter, the use of it in scientific. The scientific world and the NASA and the massive things they’ve done with it. And I can’t even fucking describe it properly. And that’s just one.

Paul Mellor: And that’s you as a marketer. That’s you. Somebody that looks at marketing through the lens of a marketer. You’re not the average person on the street. The average person on the street could not give a fuck about advertising and marketing. They do not care about brands, they do not care about what you stand for. When someone goes to the shopping center, the mall on a Saturday, shopping with the family they’re interested in, is there going to Be parking. How long is this going to fucking take? How much is it going to fucking cost? They’re not interested in whether your dishwasher soap is kind of like having a conversation with millennials or not. They do not give a fuck. And yet marketers have this delusion that they’re so important in people’s lives. It’s a great line that I wish I’d written. But the fantastic ryan Wallman, he’s Dr. Draper. Twitter calls it delusions of brandea. This idea that brands think they’re so fucking important in people’s lives. They’re not. People could not give a fuck.

Louis: Yeah. So an example of this actually is in the kitchen of the CO working space I like to work from. There is this coffee box in the top of the fridge, right? And I always think about it and makes me laugh because that’s exactly the example on the side of the box, it’s written join the conversation on Facebook and then the name of the Facebook

Paul Mellor: page and fucking give me a break.

Louis: And every time it makes me laugh, like, who gives a fuck about joining a conversation with a coffee brand? Like, what conversation in the first place, do you put sugar or not in your coffee? You put milk or not? And then what?

Paul Mellor: It’s just nonsense. Yet that would have probably been through, what, maybe a month’s worth of meetings, you know, around the benefits of or the merits of that kind of approach is bullshit. And that is why 89% is immediately forgotten, because marketers are way more interested in shit like that than they are in actually coming up with something novel. And you know, what’s really the acid test in that respect. And they get pulled out as an example all the time. But there’s a reason for it, because it’s absolutely brilliant, is innocent smoothies. They were the first guys, you know, you rewind, what, 15, 20 years ago, they were the first people to just write some nice copy on the pack and now it’s copied, you know, all over the place. But they grew a business out of doing something completely different to everybody else. Nobody else was writing kind of quippy, funny one liners on their packs. No one was doing that yet. Innocent were the first guys to do that. And I know it’s a bit of a tired, tested model to kind of pull out. Innocent smoothie is an example of someone doing it really well, but they do it fantastically and they still continue to do it today.

Louis: Yeah, I think that’s a good example. I think they have offices in Dublin and their cars are actually. They all have Fake grass on them and they run around and they’re the only one doing it as well. Now, does it make sense? Does it connect with their brand? Probably. Do I remember it? Yeah, I just fucking said it. So I guess, yeah, people remember innocent, where you don’t really remember the others. So I think you’ve, in the marketing lingo, you’ve agitated the problem quite a lot at this stage. We understand the problem, we know that it’s a problem, we know it’s a painful one. Let’s come up with a solution together, shall we?

Paul Mellor: Yes, do it.

Louis: So when you start working with a company, a client, and they are like in this position, let’s say they want to go against or they want to stand out in their categories, such as, I don’t know, they do Orangios as well. How do you go from you don’t stand out, nobody will notice you, to we are launching a campaign that we know fairly sure it’s going to be noticed or at least a bit more certain than any other stuff we’ve done. What is the first step? What do you like to do first?

Paul Mellor: I put all the other bullshit to one side and we focus 100% on ideas. Creativity. There isn’t a problem in the world that cannot be solved by creativity. It is the number one. It’s the last legal, unfair advantage that any brand has against its competition. If you’re not as a marketeer, as a brand, if you’re not putting ideas at the absolute heart of everything that you do at the start, then you’ve lost already.

Louis: Now, that sounds nice, right? But you probably need to know who the business is, who their customers are and stuff. So maybe we should start with that, because I guess even though that’s the meat of the thing is the idea and the creativity of it, you still need to understand who they are. So what type of things do you like to know about a business before you dive into the ideas?

Observing real customer behavior over demographic reports

Paul Mellor: I don’t take the word of the marketing team I go and meet. So let’s say it’s, I don’t know, a brand of orange juice. I’ll go down to the shops, I’ll go down to Tesco’s or Sainsbury’s or something, and I’ll just watch people buying that orange juice, see the kind of people that they are, see how much care and attention they take as they walk up and down the aisle before they choose that brand of Tropicana rather than, I don’t know, Tesco’s own or whatever. And I’ll see that people don’t give a fuck. They don’t walk up and down the aisle and take Spain, spend maybe 10 minutes looking at which orange juice to buy. No, they walk up to the orange juice section, they might have a look at the prices first. They might look at two. They might look at two options before they plum for one. Invariably, they will choose the one that they’ve bought before, so convenience. Or they may choose the one that’s cheaper. But they certainly don’t look at it through the eyes like the marketing team think that they do. So one of the things that we do really early on is go and observe real people buying, interacting with, depending on the brand, what we’re working for depends what they’re doing, but either buying or interacting with that brand.

Louis: Right, That’s a novel concept, isn’t it, for a marketer to actually give a shit about the people buying their product.

Paul Mellor: I know, it’s shock horror, actually go and speak to the people that buy the product. I mean, but you would be surprised at how often the marketing team go, what, like you don’t want to see my 30 slide deck on who we think our customer is? No, I have no interest, I have no interest in sitting through your 30 slide deck. I’m going to go down to Tesco’s and I’m going to watch them. I’ll learn more doing that than I will sitting through your 30 side deck. We have another tactic, another thing that we do in the studio where when I take, because I do the vast majority of the client interaction and sort of client discussions, I do, and then I’ll bring the brief back to the studio and then when we’re briefing in the team here in the studio, I’ve only got a team of 10. I mean, it’s. We’re very, very small and everyone works on every project, which is quite novel as well. So we, when I’m briefing in, before I talk to them about the brief, I’ll say, right, we’re working with, let’s continue to use the example of Tropicana, but we’re working with Tropic. I want everyone now before I brief them in, I’ll say, right, I want everyone to write down everything that they know about Tropicana now before we get into the brief, because that is the moment where the people in the studio are the most like the consumers, the closest they can be to a consumer. Because as soon as we get briefed in on. And they get briefed in on Tropicana, that’s It they’re no longer, it’s much more difficult to put their feet in the shoes of a customer walking down the aisle at Tesco’s, you know, because they can, they can read the insight documents and they can read the strategy decks and all that kind of stuff and the customer doesn’t have that. So we write down everything. And you’d be amazed at how much people don’t actually know about products. And that’s why marketers think that everyone, customers think all these different things about their brand. That’s the don’t, they don’t care.

Louis: This is why it’s incredibly difficult when you start in a company or like when you’ve been in a company for 2, 3, 5 years to take distance out of, you know, the fact that people actually don’t give a shit about 99% of the things you think they give a shit about. And as you said, when you look at them buying and all of that, you realize it. And this is also why when you start as an in house marketer or with a client, as you mentioned, it’s much better to get, just to get a lot of stuff out of your system and ideas right now because you’re not polluted by the marketing bullshit around you.

Paul Mellor: Yes, 100%. And you’ll be amazed at how quickly the clarity of thought comes when you get rid of all of the crap and you just focus on going down to the shops and looking at someone buying your product. That you’d be amazed at how quickly you cut out all the crap and you get straight into coming up with decent ideas. And that goes on to my point, ideas have to be the absolute center.

Louis: So let’s go back to this example of like, okay, in a B2C stand in a B2C scenario, B2C context, it’s fairly easy. And even in the FMCG, like the fast moving consumer group, it’s fairly easy to see people buying your stuff. Right? You can go, as you said, to the supermarket, to Tesco and whatnot. Now what if you work in, I don’t know, a service industry or agency and it’s a bit more difficult to observe people like, have you worked with clients like this?

Paul Mellor: Yes, we work with B2B as much as we do B2C. And if I had a pound for every time a marketing director of a B2B brand said, look, that works in B2C but it doesn’t work in B2B then I’d be a far richer man because it is just another way of people adding More complication into something that doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s so fucking easy to make something complicated. And it’s much harder to make something simple. There is no difference between B2C and B2B. These are still people buying goods, services, whatever they may be. Of course, the difference is that they’re spending somebody else’s money, they’re not spending their own money. But other than that, there is no difference. And if marketers, they just fall over themselves to make it more complicated, there is no difference. We work with B2B brands. I actually think that it’s easier to get noticed in B2B world because even more brands, you know, 99.9% of brands are doing exactly the same thing as each other. And all you need to do is be 20 degrees different to stand out from the crowd. But that unfortunately takes some balls from someone. They got to have some guts to actually stand out. And this is where I go to this point. People have got these marketers, especially when you get to CMO or VP of marketing or marketing directors, brand directors, that kind of thing. And people are earning pretty good wages by this point. They probably got a mortgage, probably even a second mortgage on that second holiday home. You know, they got kids in private school. It’s a lot to lose by making, you know, a wrong step. So I understand that there’s a hesitancy to go against the grain, and it’s much easier to sit in the, you know, the crowded group where everyone’s exactly the same, or you don’t really stand out. But no one ever got sacked for not standing out.

Louis: That’s a good point. And that’s actually. Sorry to cut you, but that’s something that I haven’t really thought about before. But because you’re a good marketer and you know your stuff, you can empathize with those VP of marketing and CMOs who have two mortgages and all of that. And I understand why from their perspective, as you said, you don’t get fired if you don’t stand out, you get fired. You might fear of getting fired if you try to stand out and make a mistake. And your brand going AWOL and just getting this bad rep that you don’t want to have. Right? But to go back to. I want to go back to the B2B example again. And I know it’s the same thing, but I’m more thinking of a buying process that could take longer than just going to the shop and buying an orange juice. How do you understand the buying process? There how do you get to the core of the thing? You want to know why people buy, how they buy and all of that.

Paul Mellor: Yeah. So I try my best to be a fly on the wall in those longer processes. So if you think about a consumer side of things, rather than B2B, but a longer buying process, I don’t know, let’s say buying a house, you know, that’s quite a long process. You know, you do quite a lot of research. You know, you don’t just walk down to the shops. Some people, maybe, some people do, but most people don’t just walk down the shops and buy a house or a car, you know. You know, you’d be a fly on the wall in those kind of situations. So you’d be amazed at how many estate agents I’ve just kind of loitered around in while I listen in on people’s conversations. Or car showrooms that I’ve loitered around in, not actually buying a car, but, you know, kind of observing other people. The point being that as long as. As soon as somebody knows that I’m there to be. Let’s say we started working with a car brand, then I would. If I went to the car showroom and I said, you know, it was. It was agreed, it was a trip that was agreed from, like, head office, then I’m going to be treated differently. Whereas if I’m just kind of milling around and try to sort of blend in the background and listen, and I’m going to find out a lot more and be able to learn a lot more about the reality of situation than I would do if I’ve been on there, you know, like an organized trip. Other ones as well. Like. So we’ve worked with some retailers, you know, some really big retailers, I mean, some of the biggest in the world, and, you know, they’ve got huge stores and I just hang around in the store. I mean, it makes me look a bit weird, you know, if I’m hanging around the store for two or three hours and don’t buy anything, but then, you know, that’s. That’s kind of what. What you need to do. And I think that not enough creatives, not enough marketers are doing that, where they’re just kind of on the coal face, learning about what it is, how people buy. You know, how the hell do people walk around IKEA and buy furniture and pots, pans, glasses, whatever else they’re buying? Nobody does that. They just don’t because they think it’s beneath them. I don’t know what it is, but, you know, the amount of people are not doing that. And if they are doing it, they’re doing it on, you know, work time Monday to Friday, where it’s an organized trip, you know, for the agency to go down to the local ikea. That’s bullshit. You’re not going to get anything real like that.

Louis: I’m glad you’re talking about all of the stuff because I don’t know if, I mean, let’s be clear, I don’t want to bash marketers that much because I am one and I know I can empathize with why they’re not necessarily doing it. I think people are getting a bit too comfortable with the digital technology we have nowadays. You know, the Google Analytics and all of those stuff where you can get stats and data from any sources you want and you feel you understand people. But unless you see someone else telling you or showing you how it’s done, and unless you take this leap of faith to actually get out of your comfort zone and do it, see how people actually behave, and then seeing how people actually behave, then you’re going to get some serious, serious clarity. Yes, I know that recently I didn’t go and sit and meet with some of the customers of our business, but I spent some 30 minutes on the phone with a few of them and oh boy, it gave me so much more clarity than I ever thought I had about why they buy, how they talk, what they care about, what they don’t care about. And it’s so much easier to do marketing once you have an actual vivid idea of who you’re talking to. You remember the person you talk to. You remember the person in the car dealership or in the shop, you can see this person. And it’s so much easier to come up with a campaign based on this person, isn’t it?

Paul Mellor: Correct. 100%. And for the record, I don’t. I’m not hating on marketers. I think this goes far deeper than just bashing marketers. There’s a massive problem with agencies where they’re just lazy. And that’s my competition. And it’s very easy for me to trash talk my competition. But, you know, this is just. It’s endemic in the industry. I think it’s endemic right to the core, you know, so awards, juries, awards that are given out for absolute shit work, work that was written to win awards as opposed to work that was written to do the job it was supposed to do. You know, the average lifespan of a CMO is 18 months. Now, you know, you’ve got bullshit like Audi put in, putting the advertising account out for review and putting BBH under under review after 30 odd years of doing some of the best work, some of the best car advertising ever in history of car advertising. It’s. It’s mad. It’s mad how fucked up the industry is and people are just following and accepting it like lemmings. And it’s not the way to do it. We need more people to more troublemakers. We need more people to challenge the status quo. We need more people to take a fucking risk. We need more people to stake their claim on an idea and fucking go for it. Nobody. I’ve not come across anybody that took a risk and then got fired for taking that risk if it didn’t pay off. The vast majority of the time it does pay off. Occasionally people take a risk and it doesn’t pay off. But they didn’t get the sack. But the fear of the fact that they might get sidelined or fired, it stops people from producing work. And that’s why 89% of it is completely forgotten.

Louis: Yeah, the pool of being in a comfortable position, this inertia that you feel as a marketer versus the push of what if we do something outstanding is just too big, isn’t it? And a small example, right? And I’m not trying to position myself as a fucking brilliant marketer who knows

Paul Mellor: how to set up. You should do, Louis. You should be positioning yourself as a brilliant marketer. Any possible opportunity, right?

Louis: As a brilliant marketer than I am. Right. I took, I took a risk to two years and a half ago with this podcast on the name. And I remember vividly the feeling I had before I pressed live and before I started to talk about it. I had butterflies in my stomach. I was nervous as fuck. I was afraid that nobody would give a shit. I was afraid people would say this is a shitty name. I was afraid people would just say I don’t agree with you and whatnot. I was afraid that the people I would ask to interview would say no. But I pushed through this fear because I really, really believe in this. Right? And I’m so fucking glad I did it because I reap the rewards of it after that. People connect with something when it’s genuine, when it’s out there, when it’s something that is just beyond the status quo and all of that. And so I know it’s a small, small case study of what you’re trying to describe and there might be some much better, wider, more grandiose type of things, but I Want to just say to you, if you’re listening to this right now, if you’re on the verge of creating something and you’re a bit afraid of it, just do it, because that’s a good sign, right? If you have those butterflies in your stomach, you need to chase this nervousness because it’s a sign that you need to do it.

Paul Mellor: Yes, 100%. 100% agree with you. That nervousness, that butterflies, is the telltale sign that you’re onto something that is different to everybody else, because you don’t get nervous when you’re putting something out there that’s the same as everybody else. That doesn’t get anything, that doesn’t get a reaction. I mean, the reason why everybody hates marketers, it’s been successful. Not the reason, but one of the reasons is because it uses language that people use down the pub. That’s real language used by real people. And that’s one of the reasons why you’ve been successful and why it stood out and why I started listening to it. So I’ve been listening to your podcast for a little while now, and I really like it. And I think, not that I want to plug. I didn’t come on here to plug my event series, but take fucking risks. The event series that I started, or I started with Cookie Taberna, who’s one of the designers here at Mellor and Smith. We started it two years ago on nothing. You know, we spent £300 on some beers, booked the upstairs room of a pub, and that’s now probably the biggest, if not one of the biggest, if not the biggest, creative event series in London. We’re getting 450 people to an event now, which is ridiculous. And it’s just a side thing. But the reason why people like it is because we use language like take fucking risks. We talk like people talk down the pub. We don’t talk in corporate jargon where you just kind of talk around problems and use really long words and obfuscate. None of that. No one talks like that down the pub. But people respond when you’re honest, and they can feel the honesty in the language.

Louis: And, you know, that’s something I haven’t really shared before, openly on the podcast, but I feel the reason why I talk simply and I interview people and they, in return, also talk simply because they know they can’t really bullshit. Much like we need to simplify things, is because English is not my first language, right? And even if I wanted to use clever words, I don’t have them. I don’t fucking know them. So I just keep it simple because that’s what I understand. It’s true. So I think that’s an advantage for me, the fact that English is not my first language. If I was educated in a private school in London, even if I wanted to be like everyone else, I probably would struggle.

The briefing process: one page, three magic questions

Paul Mellor: Yeah. So French has come to your advantage?

Louis: One of the ways. It came to my advantage multiple of the ways. But I can’t share that. It’s for another episode. So going back to the steps, going back to what we’re trying to achieve. First of all, as you said, observe people. Observe how they buy. Be a fly on the wall, don’t be afraid to get outside of a comfort zone and just observe what people do. Now, what is the next step? What do you like to do after that?

Paul Mellor: We then take it into the studio. I brief in the team and we’ll work on the brief. So like I say, everyone in the studio works on every brief. And either myself or Jim, the Smith of Miller and Smith, will run the project. And at the absolute heart is ideas. So we will spend probably 50 to 60% of the time. If we were to look at the amount of time that’s used on a campaign, 50 or 60% of the time is coming up with the idea. We put the absolute emphasis on coming up with the idea. And we will come up with hundreds of ideas until we find the one. And then with skill and experience, you become better at knowing which one is the one. And then we’ll develop that, get it to a point, you know, where it’s able to be presented to the client. Will then present it, and then the client likes it, which gladly, sort of. Fortunately, a lot of the time, most of the time they do. Will then run with it and produce it, depending on whatever it is. But we don’t produce multiple ideas. We produce one idea. We have value in what we place value on what we do. So we don’t present, you know, here’s gold, silver, bronze. What quicker way could you have for devaluing what you do than saying, yeah, this one, you could buy it. But it’s like the third worst. You know, it’s not the best. You’re like, fuck. Like just language like that. You’re just like, how the hell do people think that they should be valued if you present gold, silver, bronze? Like, this is madness.

Louis: I’m laughing because I’ve sat through those meetings. I understand exactly what you’re saying.

Paul Mellor: It’s an absolute belief in our ability and our ability to come up with the right idea and therefore the right campaign for that client, for that problem. And clients, they trust that a client knows when you’re, when you don’t believe in an idea. You can tell when someone doesn’t believe in an idea and they know when you’re just, you know, kind of giving them the sales patter to kind of to buy it so you can get the invoice in and bank the check. And I just think that’s such a, that does so much damage to our industry. You gotta, you gotta really believe in what it is that you come up with. You have to, you have to have absolutely belief that you will come up with it. There hasn’t been a brief thus far that we haven’t been able to resolve. You know, maybe one day there will be. I hope not, I hope not soon. But yeah, you have to, you have to have belief in what you’re doing. And I think there’s not enough people that really, really love what they want, what they’re doing.

Louis: Right?

Paul Mellor: So there’s a lot of people that talk about passion. I’m passionate, you know, passionate about brands. You just need a fucking girlfriend if you’re talking about being passionate for brands. But yeah, you have to really want it. You have to really want it.

Louis: So now for people listening who are eager to know, how the fuck do they come up with 100 plus ideas and select one, let’s try to break down the steps even more. Now, I know that coming up with ideas is a muscle you need to flex, right?

Paul Mellor: Yes.

Louis: I know that you have plenty of experience, very much like your team does. I also know you have probably a sort of a proprietary process you’re using that you can’t necessarily talk about in detail here because we don’t have two hours or three hours left. And you don’t want your competitors to copy you necessarily. But I’m pretty sure you can distill for us a few pointers that would make people turn from, I don’t have any ideas. Where the fuck do you get ideas to? I have so many ideas, how the fuck do I pick one? So how do you come up with that many ideas?

How to generate hundreds of creative ideas

Paul Mellor: Well, the first thing to say is that we don’t have a proprietary system that we have trademarked because that is the wankiest thing that you could possibly do. And the amount of agencies that do it, and I just want to scream into a pillow. Anyway, that aside.

Louis: Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Paul Mellor: A proprietary system does not equal ideas. A proprietary system is just a way that you can add A zero onto an invoice to show that there’s some sort of process that an accountant can go, oh, well, they’ve got abc, you know, trademarks, you know, as their process. Therefore it must be correct. It’s bullshit. The best way of getting ideas, the best way to come up with ideas is to have a diverse, talented team. There is no shortcut to talent, hard work, desire. Those characteristics in people are the best characteristics. You want people that we have people in the studio that are opinionated, they’re obstinate, they’re difficult, they’re funny, they’re snarky, they’re observant. These are not words that you see on job adverts today. You know, these are not things that your average recruiter is looking for when they’re looking for creative people. And that’s exactly the type of people that are the best creatives. When you have writer’s block, I mean, if we’re going to come on to that, you know, the idea that you go, how do I go from zero to a bunch of ideas? Getting away from a computer, a computer is the fastest way to know ideas. Google is the fastest way to know ideas. You want to get outside, walk down the street, go for a walk on the seaside, go to the pub. I mean, I used to spend quite a lot of time going to the pub at midday in my misspent youth, before I decided to set up an agency. I used to get fired quite a lot from various agencies that I worked at because I was pain in the ass.

Louis: I’m not surprised.

Paul Mellor: And, yeah, I just go to the pub at midday sometimes when I was supposed to be at work, which is why I got fired. And other times after I’d been fired, I’d go to the pub. But, yeah, the people that you see at the pub at midday, they’re the people that buy orange juice. It’s not like some metropolitan liberal elite that, you know, that buys vegan sausages on a Saturday. That is not who buys your orange juice. And yeah, but if you walk into an agency or into a brand, that’s exactly who they think buys their orange juice. It’s mad.

Louis: Yeah. And I very much like what you said about the diverse team. Right. And I guess if you only hire people who have the same MBAs, who came from the same school, who are all white males in their 30s, who all were born in the same area, it’s going to be a bit more difficult for you to come up with some proper creative ideas. Right?

Paul Mellor: Yeah. You’re just talking it’s just bros talking to bros. And that’s never going to be. That’s never going to be a recipe for a good idea.

Louis: So then, so then you’re not in front of a computer. So do you get together as a team in front of a whiteboard and you start saying, okay, come up with shit. Let’s, let’s go. Let’s just write anything. Nothing is stupid, right?

Paul Mellor: Yes. Yeah, yeah. No idea. I mean, the classic no idea is a bad idea. I mean, there are obviously some bad ideas, but the safety that no one’s gonna laugh at you when you come up with a shit idea. The amount of times where an absolute perler of an idea comes out of something that was a really average idea. It happens a lot. We have a technique that we call and it’s used widely. Yes. And so whenever someone comes up with an idea, nobody says no. They say yes, and. And then they’ll develop it or they’ll come up with something else that makes people feel comfortable and talented people want to work with talented people, and so they’ll nurture other people’s ideas. People might get halfway through an idea and then they get stuck and they’ll get halfway through talking about it, and then somebody else will pick it up and go, yes, and what about this? Or yes, and what about that? And that culture that breeds ideas.

Louis: Right. So once you look at people, how they buy, you ask your team before you get the brief, before they are like polluted by, by the company you’re going to work with. You ask them about how do they feel about the brand, do they remember anything about them? Whatever, whatever. And then you just step away from your computer and you say, okay, let’s just come up with shit. Right? It’s going to be bad. Some of the stuff we’re going to say are going to be bad. But you then ask. Yes. And so you make them develop their idea. And then from my small experience, what happens is someone will say something. It could sound very bad, but then someone else will say, that sounds like, yeah, but if you do this instead, that looks like a much better idea and whatever. And you start to play off each other. Right. And this is when the magic happens.

Paul Mellor: Yes, 100%.

Louis: Okay. So you come up with stuff, you just write stuff on the whiteboard. How long does it typically take you to come up with a list where you think, okay, there’s something there in this list.

Paul Mellor: It can completely vary. Sometimes it can come up, you know, within a couple of hours. You can be bound that is it. That Is it? And then others, it might take a few weeks. And there’s, there’s no, there’s no formula other than some of these things that we’ve talked about. You know, there’s, there’s no kind of magic formula to. Which is why so many bean counters, accountants, procurement people don’t. They can’t. Because you can’t put a. They can’t put a, you know, a timeline. Well, I want ideas by X day. Yeah, and it’s the, it’s the old. It’s a very famous advertiser, David Abbott, who is fantastic. And I’m going to bastardize this quote because I can’t remember it exactly, but he said, you know, who the fuck came up with a good idea when they had a brainstorming at Tuesday at 11 o’? Clock? No ideas ever came good from having, you know, the idea being that just because the client puts, hey, we’re gonna have a brainstorming session Tuesday at 11 o’. Clock. That isn’t when the good ideas happen. You know, good ideas come from when you go out for a walk, when you’re down the pub, when you’re in the shower, when you’re having sex, whatever it is, when you’re doing things that are not in a brainstorming session.

Louis: How do you note your ideas when you’re having sex? No, don’t answer this.

Paul Mellor: I’m quite happy to tell you.

Louis: All right, go ahead. Now,

Paul Mellor: I scream at the top of my voice. Remember that?

Louis: Okay.

Paul Mellor: Once it’s done, remember it. Yeah.

Louis: So let me cut you there. I need to go back to something you said. Right. So you come up with all of those ideas, this list and whatnot, and I mean, I’m going to forget what I want you to say, so that’s beautiful. So you have a list. You don’t necessarily set up a brainstorming session for two hours and then decide at the end. This is it. Give me an example of a transition from shit, tons of ideas to a concept that you fell in love with, with the past clients. Give me a concrete example of this.

Case study: Fawlty Towers takes over the London Underground

Paul Mellor: Okay, a good example is we started working with a theatre production company that puts on immersive experiences in London. And obviously the theatre scene in London is huge. You know, was it second biggest to Broadway or whatever? And they were what, about 30 years old production? And they run these immersive experiences. It’s Fawlty Towers. So Fawlty Towers, the TV show, they have a theater immersive experience where people can interact with the characters and, you know, meet Basil and Sybil and Manuel and. Etc, etc. And we had. We were given the brief. You know, we’re 30 years old, we’ve been the top of our game for a long time, but we’ve got a new competitor that’s come into the market and they’re starting to eat, you know, nibble away our market share. And that’s a problem. I mean, that’s. That’s not a. Not. That’s not. Lots of businesses have that kind of problem. And we toyed with hundreds of ideas, all sorts of different ideas, and I knew that we hadn’t nailed it. I knew that we hadn’t hit the nail on the head and I knew that we were close, but we hadn’t hit the magic idea. And then it dawned on me. I was out for a walk. I’ve actually recently moved to France and I split my week between France and London now. And I was out for a walk in the mountains. I live in the Alps. And it just dawned on me, I thought, what are we doing? We’re forcing this far too hard. And what’s the biggest asset? And that is the interaction between the actors and the people that buy the tickets, you know, the theatre goers. Right, well, let’s put on really big immersive theatre productions, what they do, but just in unusual situations. So we took over the Tube, so we took over the Bakerloo line and we ran faulty towers. There was Basil, Sybil and Manuel causing havoc on the Bakerloo line in the middle of rush hour, all up and down, all up and down the Bakerloo. And people went mad for it. I’m sure a lot of people who are listening to this have traveled on the Bakerloo line at rush hour, sort of between five and eight in the evening. There are no happy people on that train. They’re all grumpy, you know, fuck off, don’t talk to me, don’t even look at me type people. And it was amazing, the reaction that we got. People loved it, they were interacting with it. They were acting sort of like ad libbing with the actors. Because we set up like a dining room, a Fawlty Towers hotel dining room on the Bakerloo, so people could have a drink, they could sit down to a pretend meal. The actors were serving them, people were taking videos, photos. It was amazing. The reaction was fantastic. So that’s great, from a kind of feel good factor, but they solved their problem. Ticket sales went through the roof. The goodwill that had been born out of the stunts was kind of followed through into Ticket sales and the client is really, really happy. And we’re still working with them today. But that’s a really good example of I’ve got loads of ideas but I know that we don’t have the one. And then getting away from it, you know, getting away from it and thinking about it from a different angle, not being satisfied with something that was almost good enough, which is what, you know, a lot of people would do, they go, it’s kind of, they are kind of happy with it. But I knew that it wasn’t the one. And so it’s that desire. I think that’s not just me. I mean plenty of people down the years have had that desire. But I think that’s what sets good ideas from the idea.

Louis: And if you had to deconstruct the way you’ve selected this idea. If I remember what you said a few minutes ago, you said, we complicated this way too much and we focus back on the biggest assets. Is it something that you tend to go back to which is like, what is the main differentiator? What is the main value, the main one thing that people usually remember from this brand or this product?

Paul Mellor: Yes. So we have our briefing template. So we get sent briefs by brands all the time, which is fantastic. It’s great when people send you opportunities to work together. But the amount of briefs that come into us where they’re 7, 8, 9, 10 page Word documents, that’s what they are. And we won’t work with a client unless they’re prepared to allow us to assimilate all that information down into. And I will do that with the clients. So I don’t brief in the guys at that point I’ll assimilate that down into a one pager. So our briefs are one page and in there there’s a few questions that have to be answered and they purposely force the brand to think down into, you know, ones.

Louis: Give me a few questions that you’re asking.

Paul Mellor: What is, you know, like what is the aim? What is the number one? You have one sentence to write down. What is the aim? What is the. What is the one selling point? Yeah. And if you ask a Martin there, oh well, there’s three or four. Well, you’ve got to choose one. You have to choose one because you can’t say three or four. You can say three or four, but nobody, nobody will. It’s difficult enough to get someone to remember one thing, never mind three or four, no one will care. The best ads in the world, the ones that people remember, have one message and that’s because people don’t care. And they will only care if there’s one. You know, if there’s three, they just won’t. And we purposely. We have what we call three magic questions. And it purposely forces the client to think about their brand and what they’re trying to say and achieve. And only from that can you get good ideas. And that’s one of the. Without sounding arrogant, we sound like we’re quite difficult to work with, but we’re really not. We’re just very honest with what produces good work. So if a client isn’t prepared to do that, then we’ll say, look, we’re just not, you know, we’re not the agency for you. You know, you’re better off going, finding somebody else. And I say it in a way that I’d rather they went and did that now rather than wasting both of our time. And I think that’s a really valuable. That honesty is really. I think it’s really valuable. People value the fact that you, look, this is what we stand for. This is how we work. If you want to work with us, this is the way it needs to be. The results speak for themselves.

Louis: That’s a great lesson, I think, for consultants, freelancers, agencies who are struggling because they work with clients they don’t like on things they don’t like, with deadlines they don’t like, and they feel like shit when they go back to their partner at night, in the evening, because they don’t feel like they’re doing good work now that it takes some guts to do it. Obviously it takes some time to develop a reputation, to have people like sending you briefs all the time and being able to say no to some of them. But I guess this is what you need to do, right, if you really want to make some work you’re proud of and where you can take some fucking risk.

The agency transformation: rejecting 70% of clients

Paul Mellor: Yeah, I mean, we weren’t always like this. I mean, the agency, Mellor and Smith, is 10 years old. We were 10 years old in January a few months ago. And for the first four or five years, we were just like everybody else. We just did average work. We just. We kind of did as we were told. Everything was designed by committee. And it got to five years, and me and Jim just turned around like, this is not what we set out to do. The pressures of running a business had forced us into kind of doing work that we didn’t want to do, we weren’t proud of. And it was about that time that both of us started having kids, not together. Separately, we have our own wives, because that would be weird because we spent enough time together as it is. But we just, you know, I want to be able to. I want to be proud of the work that I. A body of work that I can show my kids. And Jim said the same. And it was at that moment we just thought, right, that’s it. We’re going to completely change. We’re going to do work and we work in this method. And it’s been really successful. I mean, it has been very successful since we made that change. We got rid of about 70% of our clients at that point. We’ve grown a pretty successful business to that point. We got rid of about 70% of our clients. We applied a series of questions, and if they didn’t, it didn’t answer. If we didn’t score them by a certain level, then we just said, look, guys, this is not for us. This is not the kind of relationship we want. I think you should go find somebody else. And we kept just 30% of the clients, but they were the ones that believed in this approach. And subsequently we’ve grown really well with those clients and more. But, yeah, it takes. You have to be honest with yourselves when you’re making those kind of decisions.

Louis: How did it feel to take this decision and go for felt?

Paul Mellor: Yeah, I mean, it’s not an easy decision. It was scary. But you talk about that butterfly feeling. Yeah, it had that. It had all of those kinds of feelings. I knew it was the right decision, but I had to take a deep breath and we went for it and it paid off.

Louis: Where was the trigger, actually? Because there’s always a trigger. I mean, you know that you watch people buy shit. So, you know, what’s the trigger? What was the trigger for you?

Paul Mellor: We had a project, and I don’t want to name names because it’s not. It’s not fair. I’m quite happy to call out other stuff, but for this particular one, I don’t think it’s fair. We’re working on a particular project, and what should have been a two or three month at the most project turned into over a year. And it was killed. It was killed by indecision, design by committee, the brief changing halfway through. Just all of the things that don’t create good work. And we weren’t strong enough and we didn’t fight back, and we just kind of took it. We tried our best to kind of roll with the punches and kind of keep the project going and just got to the end and we got it out and stopped this. I’m never doing that again. I’m just never going to put my name to something like that ever again.

Louis: Right.

Paul Mellor: And yeah, that was the trigger. And yeah, a couple of months later, it was all. It was. The transition took no time at all.

Louis: Interesting. Yeah. That’s why I wanted to know. There’s always a trigger. Right.

Paul Mellor: So thanks so much for going through

Louis: those steps with me. I know it’s difficult to turn a creative process into. Into a kind of a step by step, but I hope that in these episodes, if you’re listening still right now, that you’ve taken some pointers, not necessarily in terms of what strategy should you take or tactics should you use, but what mindset should you have, what emotions should you strive to feel when you do this type of work? And also showing you that people like Paul have been able and are successful taking an approach that is not trying to fit everyone’s agenda or not trying to please everyone, but instead to try to pick a small portion of the businesses out there who are willing to take some fucking risk. Right. Who are willing to take a gamble and the world is big enough for you, even if you’re choosing, I don’t know, to work with 10% of businesses out there or 5%. Right?

Paul Mellor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the people that we work with now, they really want to work with us. That’s what. If you’re looking at, like, business case, if you’re looking at like a fucking bean counter would look at this and the sort of thing they’d say, but, like, there is a bona fide business case for the approach that we’ve taken. I mean, we didn’t do it for that reason. We did it for the level of work that we wanted to achieve. But, yeah, you don’t have to appeal to everyone.

Louis: You should not. If you do, then it just. It can’t work.

Paul Mellor: Well, you’re just nobody.

Louis: Yep. In a sentence or two, what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years? 20 years, 50 years?

Creativity before tactics before media

Paul Mellor: Creativity before tactics before media. There’s the Mark Ritson quote. People that look at media or tactics before creative. It’s like, you know, I’ve got a hammer, I’m looking for my nail. And that is madness. It’s absolute madness. The amount of people that come, you know, well, I want to do an AI campaign the fuck, or I want to do something on the blockchain. It’s fucking like, do me a favor, fuck off. You are not a marketer. If people say Shit like that. You are not a market. You know, you are not a marketer by any stretch. What you try to achieve, put some talented creatives on it to come up with the idea and the campaign that will deliver on the aim. And your job as a marketer, if your brand side is to facilitate that process and to make sure that it works internally within your brand. The mechanics of marketing, your job is not to decide what bullshit piece of technology that is sparkly and then tell people, tell your agency that’s what you’d like to do. And I’ve just. I’m in a glass room that makes me sound like. But my business partner has just walked up to the glass door and pulled down his trousers and. And flash me a Mooney, which I think is his way of saying, shut the fuck up and let’s go down the pub.

Louis: All right, before you go down the pub, let me ask you two other questions and then you’re done.

Paul Mellor: Okay, Go for it.

Louis: What are the top three resources you’d recommend listeners?

Paul Mellor: Top three resources. You cannot go wrong with Dave Trott’s massive fan of Dave Trott. So he writes a weekly column or a monthly column in campaign and then he also writes a blog on his own, on his own website, davetrop.com, or davetrop.co.uk, i think is pretty much the godfather of advertising in London. I think the Davedye davedi.com so he’s an ex or like an old advertising guy and he finds it’s called Things from the Loft and that is old ad campaigns. And he interviews old advertising and marketing people. So he interviews old ad agency owners and creative directors and then also people, brand side. So you know, people, old people from the brand side of things and finds old campaigns, dissects them, talks about them, where they went, you know, why they were right, why they were wrong. He also finds stuff that never ran, so ideas that were pitched that never ran. And it’s an absolute treasure trove of absolute gold, really, you know, because no one really approaches marketing like that. Looking at what happened, what didn’t run 40 years ago, no one ever talks about stuff like that. And then I suppose my, my last one would be Vicky Ross. Vicky Ross writes. She’s on Twitter. She’s fucking amazing. I love her. She’s a copywriter in London. She’s on Twitter. I think it’s ickyrosswrites. If you just follow her. She runs all the copy for sky at Sky TV and now TV and all that sort of stuff. And she is, if you’re walking down the street, you’re reading her copy, she’s very, very good.

Louis: Nice. Paul, once again, thanks so much for taking the time to be like you shared a lot of interesting stuff there and you put, put your heart into this interview, I can feel it. So I really appreciate that because it’s not often so where can listeners connect with you and learn more from you?

Paul Mellor: I’m on LinkedIn. Paul Mellor, shock Horror. I don’t really go into any of the other social media stuff. I’m not on Twitter or Instagram or any of that shit. You can find [email protected] or if you want to buy tickets to the events that we have, then you can go onto TFR Events events. So that’s TFR for Take Risks events.

Louis: If you haven’t listened, if you haven’t heard the take risk enough today, I think we said it 20 times so I think people got the message. One thing right, one thing to remember, take some risk. Once again, thanks so much.

Paul Mellor: Cheers man. Thank you very much.

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