The new rules of brand building, with Wieden+Kennedy CEO

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f71a5d11032e1a05

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People will challenge companies.
to understand what they believe on topics that they never would have before. Right? All of a sudden in your feed.
On whatever platform that you're using.
A brand showing up right behind your best friend, right behind your spouse, and you expect the same things from each of those parties.
You expect them to have a sense of humanity and awareness of what's going on in the world. Companies didn't sign up for it. It happened without them knowing.
That's Neil Arthur, CEO of Ad Agency Widening Kennedy, most known for its breakthrough work with Nike.
I wanted to talk to Neil now, not only because of Nike's much discussed activation around the World Cup, but because businesses everywhere are struggling with how to show up in a world of unprecedented volatility, and no firm has had a better grasp of consumer sentiment than Wiedman Kennedy.
Neil also has a direct pipeline to CEOs across industries, and he shares how strategy and creativity have to reinforce each other right now in ways they never have before.
He also talks about why branding has become a CEO's job, not just a CMO's, how to think about the brand of AI, plus we go behind the scenes on Nike's New York Knicks ad, as well as its World Cup throwdown with Adidas. So to borrow a phrase,
Let's just do it.
I'm Bob Safian.
And this
is rapid response.
I'm Bob Safian. I'm joined by Neil Arthur, CEO of Widen and Kennedy. Neil, uh, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Bob. Great to be here.
So Wyden Kennedy is known for for a lot of things. Among them you're sort of
deft pulse on consumers. And that's that's where I'd like to start. Today's
business environment. It's so tricky. Like stock prices are up.
But so are oil prices. AI is disrupting and exciting people. Geopolitical issues are
Arguably an afflection point.
Contentious.
Trends.
And at the same time
Marketing messages are tending toward
The playful.
The practical, sometimes dare I say the superficial. And I'm just curious, like w what your sense is about why that is, how much of that is about where the consumer emotionally is right now versus where where brands are.
I don't think there's um a bunch of conversations in a boardroom that are like it's serious out there. So let's make some jokes. Um so so just to clarify that that's not what's going on. I I if I had to guess, I think you saw it in the pandemic.
What was happening in the world was dire.
And then marketers showed up and it quickly became what was the the the meme, right? Of like piano music ads.
And I think
People would probably prefer escape.
More than they want to be reminded.
From
Brand X.
That
times our our interest state. Let's say that.
And so when you're in there talking with CEOs and leadership teams across all industries,'cause you you guys do work for a broad range, like what what kind of conversations
Are they having
Is the is the mood in there like fear and wait and see or optimism and go for it? What what are you feeling?
I don't really think there's like
Time for fear. Like you know, fear and stress probably just lend themselves to paralysis.
And it's and certainly not time for that. We're in in a
Right now. And a point of
Of high prices generally in consumer goods.
a a lot of clients are trying to figure out how to show up in a way that feels value forward and that that feels like we're aware of the situation that the consumer's in. And so you're dealing with those things rather than talking about

Issues and topic. I think there's a a prevailing sense of pragmatism.
Where people are just trying to figure out
What's the problem we're trying to solve and how do we solve it as quickly as possible?
With all the changes going on, you need to take risks.
But at the same time, it's kind of a tough moment to take risks. And so
You know
Like like people talk about polarization, you know, like can brands appeal to everyone? Is it better to pick a lane? It's like it almost feels like no matter where you go,
you're worried you're gonna run into something
I feel like the conversations now are less about
Brand ideology.
You know, what are the politics of of brands and businesses. And it's more about
The practical nature of them.
There's been a lot of lessons learned.
About
standing for
certain value sets and principles.
And there's a lot of fear and anxiety around that because of the missteps that are kind of been have been well publicized. By no means am I saying that brands shouldn't stand for something. It's actually just about
what's the problem that we're dealing with and how do we solve it. It's less about
creative risk and some of those things. I feel like those are for um
Maybe higher pollutant times. You know what I mean? I I I think right now it's a tooth fight. And and everybody's just trying to figure out.
how to deal with the with the obstacles that are directly in front of them.
To me part of what
Has always made Widening Kennedy
distinctive part of it is your your ability to tap people's emotions. As you're talking about the environment right now, it sounds like
Utility in some ways is sort of the the primary thing that that businesses and brands are trying to get across. Does that
Change the way you
Approach.
You know, campaigns and and what you're trying to do with folks or
Or
Is it just mean like getting to that emotion, you you do it in a different way.
Yeah, it's it's the latter. It's an important distinction. I I wouldn't say that we are in a time of utility in terms of messaging and output. The way that you do that can be really emotional.
Right.

S humanity and emotion.
And the problems that our clients are dealing with on a day to day bu basis and how to connect with consumers in a human way. But the problem tends to be
more straightforward or or um more functional than it is.
Um a lofty ideal.
I guess is what I would say in this moment in time.
Wagner is e you guys are known for the sort of ultimate go for campaign. Nike's just do it. As a longtime New York Knicks fan, I have to bring up the amazing post finals Nike campaign, courtesy of director Josh Safety, a fan.
Running through the streets as Billy Joel's New York State of Mind place. Is that the kind of thing that you like?
You're planning ahead of time? You know, do you have like options for whichever team wins, or is it more sort of
Instinctive, reactive
Uh great great question. I you know, Nike being in the business of of sport.
We're always thinking about who's gonna win, who's gonna be in that in those moments. And the goal is to
Show up for them.
In a meaningful way. When you have a moment like that where the Knicks are making a legendary run and I live in New York City and and I I'm a season ticket holder and and boy, was that electric. You kinda get to these moments where you go, Oh, this is gonna be a thing.
You know, it's one of those which is what we love about sports. Not just a moment in sport, it's a moment that's transcendent. And you kinda go, Okay.
If there's a way to have an a meaningful
contribution to this conversation about this legendary city and long beaten up team.
You know, r rising to the heights that they did. You gotta take that shot.
And I I think one of the keys for Nike always is authenticity. So you get a guy like Safety, you know, who's a long lifetime fan, and you get to see the perspective of the team or the athlete through the lens of somebody who really knows.
sport. So you get to a moment like that, and obviously that makes us uh collectively why not gonna be a Nike
Incredibly proud to be able to have that moment. And it's the moment that we're responding to. It's not just the creative output. Yeah.
When I went back to to re watch it in in preparation for chatting with you, I I it made me think like, you know, if the Knicks had lost
Like you could have done an emotional ad of a different sort, although with similar kind of feel, you know? We go through all those scenarios. Because that's the beauty of having sport as the the foundation for everything we do is
Part of the themes are lost. You know, th that's the the best part about sport is it it's life writ large.
I so I have to I have to ask you about uh Nike's World Cup Rip the Script ad. I've had other guests on the show
Bring it up.
Compare it to Adidas's own sort of cinematic effort. Both brands had a slew of soccer stars.
You know that Adidas is gonna try to
do their own thing during this when you're preparing. So h how do you think about that? Like what's gonna be different about your goal with Nike versus Adidas's goal?
And maybe this is uh
you know, unique to to Nike's culture. But Nike is never really focusing on
what's gonna happen competitively from another brand.
The questions are always just what's
The
Best manifestation.
For Nike, you can get sidetracked by trying to figure out what others are gonna do and all those things that can complicate things unnecessarily. And so you you kind of start there by like what's the truest thing that we can say right now? This world cup, we look at how do we engage all of the different communities within sport.
Right. Holland has like an incredible fan base, you know. So you there's like a whole facetedness that's around him and Bappe, et cetera, et cetera. The different kind of cultures within sport showing up as a a noted soccer mom, you know, like and and so
For us, it's like how do you kind of feed and foster
Those communities.
I think in the past you would have made one thing.
Put it out there and hope that that as much of the world is washed as possible. But now we feel like to start these little fires in a bunch of different places and then feed them continually throughout the events.
When you're you're talking about not
Focusing on the
competitor, not focusing on the data. That's a conversation that you might have with with other brands also.
Don't worry so much about the competition.
You know, identify who you are, what's
What's the right for you? That's probably the biggest way that our business has changed, right? Let's say 15 to 20 years ago. You focused on advertising as brand. So you'd look at ads from another brand of another company and go, okay, this is their positioning.
Are we gonna do and
To your point, I guess first of all, I strongly advise against
Getting too involved in what's going on competitively because it's basically you're just allowing your other people to position you.
And I think the greatest
gift or opportunity that we have as a company is the ability to kind of have conviction and focus on what you want to stand for.
And if you can do that and be super clear and and then execute that better than other people, then you're winning.
No question.
And then then I think about what's happened in a in a modern sort of you know the modern world of marketing.
Is that
Advertising now is just a small portion of of how your brand manifests itself with digital media, with influencers, with social media, et cetera.
The brand experience that you have as a company has exploded. So now if I have a bad experience in store, that's out there. If I have a a a call with customer service that I didn't enjoy, that's out there.
What we now have to do more than ever is to kind of sit with our clients and go, okay, what is this brand about in its entirety across every point.
Of the the company's sort of engagement with people. We always joke you kinda have to do everything down to the whole music because they're gonna call company headquarters sometimes. And they're gonna get old music. And then you're gonna have to go, Well, what's that whole music say about us as a company?
How do we make sure that that brand shows up in a consistent way across every step point working a lot more with CEOs and then than we would have in the past, because I think the days of
Of kind of saying that the CMO is responsible for advertising and therefore brand.
Are done.
I think a CEO today.
is actually responsible for the brand because they're in charge of the vast majority of consumer touch points.
I feel like sometimes CEOs don't really get creativity. Like they say they want it.
I I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about in in tr in traditionally viewed as non creative industries. Like they say they want creativity, but they don't really
understand it. Do you do you find that when you're when you're talking to leaders?
I actually and this is maybe a little heretical to say, but like
I think talking about creativity.
In a broad sense, it's problematic.
Because it it makes the conversation almost exclusive. I think
The conversation has to be much more to do with what
as a brand do you want to stand for? And when you do that, a CEO can engage.
We have clients that feel like
The CEO shouldn't be involved because this is a creative.
Conversation.
No way. We're talking about what a company should stand for at its best. A CEO should feel very comfortable.
In that conversation.
We're not gonna in most cases talk to a CEO about the music on a spot.
We're talking to CEOs about what they believe and what and what what they want to be and what they want to project to the world. Talking about what we do as
A purely creative endeavor.
I think it's problematic and I think it excludes people who we direly need in these conversations.
And and so when you get to the point where, okay, this is what the brand is, and how do we
emotionally c connect.
with the consumer. Maybe the CEO doesn't
need to be in the room for that is that more about the music track or whatever? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you know does the CEO need to this is one of the things I've always
Talking to a C from a marketing advertising. Don't feel like you need to know who the voiceover should be. Don't feel like you need to know what happens on production. I don't go on production myself, but you have tons to give.
in a conversation about the brand.
For a business like yours that
Built a reputation on sort of creative execution. I mean, obviously you w you want to
Instill and continue that, but if I'm hearing you right, it's the strategic relationship with the leadership, which you may always have had, but may not have been as uh as obvious.
Right? You're rebranding yourselves as something different than what people think of as a quote ad agency.
I think what Wyden Kennedy has been has always done at its best.
It help companies
Understand.
And have confidence in
Who they are.
And how that shows up in the world.

We've kind of sat down with the leadership of a company and gone.
Who are you really?
And oftentimes it's very different than who you want to be.
What you usually happens for us is we start the conversation and and our client goes, Well, this is who we'd like to be.
And we go, Well, that that's not who you are, though.
W what if we focus on who you are and what if we got more comfortable with that?
So a lot of times what happens is is that we get companies in a point in time where they feel maybe, you know, like
There's something happening competitively or something that's going on that makes them question.
who they are at their core. And we go, Oh no, no, we think that thing is is awesome.
We've become more of a um creative and strategic partner.
across the business rather than just hey, here, go make me a thirty second ad.
Advertising agencies can get confused by thinking that the goal is just to get attention.
Attention without connection to what the company and brand stands for and makes it distinctive.
Means nothing.
For us.

making sure everything has intention and that intention is aligned to the company. I don't think that's necessarily always the goal for marketing and advertising.
For a leader who stresses not focusing on the competition, Neil certainly has a clear idea about what makes his business different from others. So how do business leaders operate in a world where a brand campaign can go from launch to backlash overnight? And what does he think about the brand of AI right now?
We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.
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Before the break, Wyden Kennedy's Neil Arthur talked about working for Nike and the connection between creativity and strategy. Now he talks about the brand of AI, what Gen Z is teaching us about the future, and why companies need to keep pace with a culture that's moving faster than ever. Let's jump back in.
Okay.
I find myself thinking about uh
The conversations people have about AI right now.
I know you've said you don't really worry about
AI taking over from humans.
Are there things you're seeing on the ground that Wynn and Kennedy that that give you that confidence?'Cause they're
There are plenty of creatives who seem anxious about how AI is unfolding.
It's one of those things, Bob, I'm sure if you played it in five years, you'd be like, Cool. What what that idiot.
Um but I
I guess my my my thing on it at the moment is w we fully embrace it.
Because what we see is more benefits than not.
And and in conjunction with our clients is to scale our creativity more iterations than ever before, more quickly than ever before, more cheaply than ever before.
That's not at the expense of humanity and a creative idea.
There is nothing I see.
At this moment.
That makes me worry that the the creative minds within Wide and Kennedy are at risk.
AI by nature.
goes to the norm. It goes to the thing that it thinks that most people
Because it's a large language model.
are going to to value and appreciate.
Creativity and particularly creativity wide activity is always about the exceptions. It's always about finding the thing that you wouldn't expect that would that goes against the grain. If anything, right now it's allowing us to scale and it and it's providing us.
uh a a source of inspiration for for topics like when we look at kind of what's going on in culture.
And how do we stay culturally tuned?
The conversation around AI may be one of the biggest cultural conversations to have.
There has been some backlash among consumers. I I mean I've been told that that that there are advertisers who are sort of
Using AI more than they're talking about because they're they're worried about how
You know, consumers are gonna respond to that i is that true? Do you
Do you see that that sort of thing?
The public conversation about fear of AI and the sort of
business actual execution with AI are kind of slightly different tracks.
Yeah.
What we've seen is
That using AI for the sake of using AI and very early on seemed like a cool idea to some companies. And and there's been backlash against that. I don't think anybody's excited to hear.
That
Company X made it an all AI add and doesn't want humans anywhere around it. That's not a thing that people are excited about. Um so I I think we're very much now in a more nuanced conversation. Our personal thing is we never want to use it in a way that's going to replace something a human.
Could do.

But we are in favor of using it when it can create opportunities that we didn't have before. And we've never said and will never say that like
Great news. Our our embrace of AI has allowed us to cut
You know, X number of jobs.
I uh asked you in the in the beginning uh uh about sort of the the mindset of consumers
Are brands approaching
the next generation of consumers the right way? Is there a right way?
We have to acknowledge g Gen Z and and younger generations.
have more access to information than older generations had.

They don't go and to the store and want to buy
The hair product because they saw an ad on whatever network.
They have all of these different touch points. What's fundamentally changing is the idea that you can just make an ad or a back to school campaign and go.
Done, I did it. You know.
I think you are in a full
On
Three hundred and sixty five day.
Twenty four seven conversation.
And you need to figure out how your brand is going to show up in all of these different environments, as opposed to thinking about them as campaigns that you launch and are done with. And by the way, we are now fully.
A a a a world in which a marketing calendar doesn't mean shit.
You need a team of people thinking every single second of the day about
What it means to be your brand and how do you deliver on that premise.
Every second of the day.
Hm. I mean, every time there's a a new technology that that hits in the advertising industry, like the first talk is like, oh, it's gonna be cheaper, you know, you're gonna be able to reach more people in a more whatever focused way. And as you're talking about, it's like nothing is easier. You're doing more things than you ever were, right? Like it's

It doesn't get more efficient. Maybe it gets more effective, or maybe it's just
Because the media is so fragmented you don't have a choice?
Th these tools, they increase the the the volume of stuff that you can put out. They increase the frequency of things you can out.
But it's still automated.
It's not gonna work, you know, because it's the dynamics that are changing.
Not your ability to make more stuff. So the promise is always like I can press the down funnel button and make a bunch of assets every day.
But that doesn't have any connection to what your company and brand stand for.
You're just making more stuff.
And making more stuff in the absence of a real intention can actually make the problem worse.
I'm not by any means
Denigrating the fact that there are new tools and ways to connect with audiences.
I'm just saying that if you don't have
A clear intention and a c clear sense of what your brand is, then those tools don't have any value.
I'm I'm noticing as as we talk
That
Sometimes you use the word advertising, sometimes you use the word brand, sometimes you use the word marketing. For you, is it all one thing?
Or are those things
Differentiated.
I live in a world where brand
Is the most important thing.
Um
I think if you're not talking about your brand and and all the things that come with that, who who you are, what you're against.
who who you're striving to be, who you're not for.
Then the rest doesn't matter.
You know, then if beneath that.
Marketing and then advertising as a smaller
It's much smaller subset.
Are just
Ways to execute against
A brand idea.
If you just talk about advertising in the absence of brand, you end up
Just kind of creating either s slot.
Or stuff that gets attention.
Dance etc.
That don't connect to.
Capital B brand.
Hm.
I mean, so much is changing in this world right now. There is a lot of volatility that you have to manage through, that you have to plan through or react to. How how do you think about
Dealing in in an environment that is this volatile.

I think people think oftentimes that if there's more events and more things and more you know volatility things happening.
It's the the fact that that you as a as a company are expected to have a perspective on this. That's what's new. And and so now in in real time, you you're trying to figure out.
Wh wh where are we on this?
And if you're not set up that way, if you don't have that ability to
To be aware and respond inherent somewhere in your system. This is hard for people. A lot of times people feel responsible for not changing.
A break.
And what company's values.
But we're in a time that requires these things. You know, I think your values should be pretty consistent. So I think that there's a baseline of things that are kind of foundational.
But
Like
The way that that you show up in the world should be pretty flexible.
Yeah, un unless you're cracker barrel, in which case you you can change. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. We won't get too much into cracker barrel, Bob. But what that signaled was a change in values.
And that's where you kinda have to kinda go what's fixed and what's variable.
Yeah, or or it was a it was an exercise in like, actually we don't really believe this new direction. It's
Right. As some people might say just a branding as opposed to actually a strategic shift, right?
That's exactly right. And if you see the biggest mistakes that get made, they get made from
Oftentimes a marketing notion of what a a company wants to be rather than
The overall sense of what the company believes. It's important to underst uh to understand why that's happening. It's because
Before brand and marketing and advertising were all kind of synonymous and they were like a thin moat.
around a a company.
Right. But now in an era where there's more transparency than ever before because of digital social media.
People will challenge companies.
to understand what they believe on topics that they never would have before.
Right. Something happens in the in the world and it starts with social media, like
All of a sudden and and and your feed.
On whatever platform that you're using.
A brand showing up.
Right behind your best friend, right behind your spouse. It's all the same. And you expect the same things from each of those parties.
You expect them to have
A sense of humanity and awareness of what's going on in the world. That's what happened. Companies didn't sign up for it. It happened without them knowing. So all of a sudden they're the expectation of them is the same as it would be for
A family member.
Rather than for this nameless, faceless organization that I didn't really have a relationship to before.
The business you're in
The industry
I mean it's been through so many different kinds of crises.
For for where you are now
What most keeps you up at night?
And what most excites you?
Uh let me start with uh what I'm excited about because I go to bed more with excitement.
Then I do anxiety.
I believe in
The value of creative people who think about things in a in a a counterintuitive or subversive way. That skill set.
And a collection of people who do that.
Full time.
being able to solve much bigger problems than we may have in the past.
is interesting as hell.
And so
I I feel like as creative people we were typically
Brought in for a very specific thing. And now we're brought in for much bigger problems.
And that's awesome.
Uh what am I scared of? Uh being really honest. I look at the headlines I see.
About the diminishing value of creative perspectives. And I think if this business decides to just chase
Tech and media.
I think that that that would be a tragedy at the greatest scale.
The companies in the world need
Yeah, it sounds trite, but
It's true.
Creative thinking.
And creative people now more than ever.

And if we get rid of one of the really
foundational places in industries the where it's been a safe space for those people.
I think that'd be like a a disaster.
Mm.
Yeah.
Well, um
Yeah, Neil.
This was great. Thanks, uh thanks so much for doing it.
Thanks, Val. Such a pleasure.

Neil's championing of creative safe spaces is spot on, and a great argument for why ad agencies should exist.
What strikes me most in Neil's comments is how the story we tell about a brand isn't a derivative of the business strategy, instead it helps define that strategy.
In fact, sometimes good brand storytelling provides more clarity about where a business is going than quarterly earnings calls or investor pitches. And businesses that don't have a clear brand story, they rarely have a cohesive and lasting strategic direction.
When Neil talks about intentionality and foundational values, what he's describing is a consistent framework.
For addressing unexpected disruptions and questions about risks and opportunities in a way everyone in the enterprise embraces.
In all apologies to Nike, the real takeaway in a world that's constantly shifting isn't to just do it.
It's to know why you're doing it.
I'm Bob Safian.
Thanks.
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