Giving us a 5 star review is the equivalent of swiping right on the son of a pitch podcast on Tinder. So if you like the sexy, dulcet tones of max and vents in your earholes, you know what to do. Give us a 5 star review and a little sexy comment. Cheers! You are listening to another episode of the son of a pitch podcast and on this episode we went to the back blocks of Erskineville to sit down at a little cafe and talk with two of Australia's most well-respected creatives. And that is Dan Gregory of the Groan Transfer that you might know and Kieran Flanagan. Now Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan have had a great career together. They started in ad school, worked their way through VCD, which is another Australian legendary agency that doesn't exist anymore but was absolutely amazing. And now running a bit of a consultancy called the Impossible Institute. So what's that about? From what I've copied and pasted from their website, the Impossible Institute is a strategic think tank of sorts that helps leaders, teams and organisations be people smart and make change positive. But what's even more interesting than where they work is their pitch response and their pitch response was to revive Mr. Whippy. Australia's beloved ice cream delivery truck, a business that went under recently but has come back and Dan and Kieran helped us relaunch Mr. Whippy into the hearts and minds of the Australian public. Dan and Kieran also have a book coming up. Here's our promotion to our three listeners of the son of a pitch podcast. They have a book called Forever Skills where you can help remain relevant in the workforce and future proof yourself in the future. But to hear more about the way that Dan and Kieran think, let's just jump straight into the pod. We are talking today to some of the Titans of the Australian advertising industry. I would say Titans, yes, they look very surprised. We haven't done that yet. But we are here with Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory of the Impossible Institute. Hello. Nice to meet you. Hello. Thank you for having us. I guess the reason why we've got you here today is to kind of get a grip on where some of the stalwarts of the industry got their start and their history. Just so that people can kind of understand what might be in store for them if they choose a career in advertising. Probably starting with you, Kieran, can you give us a bit of a background on where you started, how you got into the industry and what drew you into this amazing thing? Yeah, they're very interesting industry. Do you know what? I guess you could say stumbled into advertising. As I think a lot of people do. I was studying a design degree at university. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. And we had to do a team project. And one of the girls in the team was extremely passionate about going to interview Simon Reynolds at the time. Simon Reynolds. Simon Reynolds. Simon will be devastated. Simon will be devastated that you don't know Simon. He was at one of the youngest creative directors at the time. He did the Grim Reaper campaign that AIDS campaign. He's very young. He put a double eye in his name that made him notoriously well known. So infamous. The Grim Reaper AIDS campaign, made it impossible for a 16 year old boy to get laid. I could see that that would scare the. Which is a conversation I have had with Simon. Probably didn't do too much for bowling in Australia. Maybe. Yeah, but they probably could because you know, virtual bowling, knocking down demons would combine game of games with bowling. It could actually be really good. So I just went along to interview Simon with the group and my group suddenly decided they were all terrified and I ended up doing all the speaking to him. And literally in that conversation I had with him. I went, oh my gosh, I want to do this career. It sounds joyful. It sounds easy. Not in the sense of not hard work, but it sounded like all my skills. Because I was like, I really enjoy the design part, but I like to think and I like to problem solve. But no one ever said, oh, there's a job where you can problem solve essentially for it. And it's funny. It's where design is kind of moved to now. Yeah. Design thinking is very much moved to that space. But at the time it kind of wasn't. So it was more of a visual. He said, do a board school. And so my last year of university I did. And I literally got a job pretty much straight out of, I didn't ever have a job interview really. It was, you know, I did really well at it. I day one loved it. This is my thing. Yeah. So it was sort of random, but I had an instant knowing that it combined my, I think what I loved spending my time and energy doing. So were you, were you heavily an art director at the start of your career or did you lean in into that aspect? Well, I had a design degree. So technically, although most people tend to think I'm a writer. Got it. So I wonder, I think they're quite, I personally think they're quite blended disciplines and and the division can sometimes I think be slightly annoying. Yeah. For me, they come together, you're telling a story, you're creating a communication that moves an opinion and for me, they work together. So I'm and I guess having the technical skill to do the design part helps as well. But I, you know, I used to worry when we were hiring teams, we worried less about the division and more about their ability to think. Because sometimes you go, we could just get, we can, you know, outsource the final design or the, you know, the artwork in the studio and things anyway. So I think it's that, that thinking ability that distinguishes really great advertising people. And Dan, how did you get into the industry? In a similar way, actually, I'm my degree, I did a communications degree and the base of that was psychology, sociology and philosophy. And at the time, I wanted to be an editorial cartoonist. So that was kind of what I thought I'd do. And then, and like Karen, I'd sort of seen, so I was, you know, finishing high school when the AIDS Grimm Reaper campaign came out. So I had a great network if I wanted to have a cast on or if I wanted to become a tow truck driver, but not really. You know, one in advertising. You know, that was, that was a very eastern suburbs lower north shore world. And, you know, still is a little bit way. So one of the things I did, so I started calling Simon Reynolds every day for six months, just to have a chat about how to, you know, how this industry worked. And I was just curious. And, and so yeah, likewise, I connected with Simon initially. That's funny, both of his Simon. But I think that's true of a lot of people of that of that time is he was kind of the person who had the highest profile in advertising at the time. He was kind of the John Singleton of that generation, you know, whereas, you know, previously John had kind of been the, you know, the public face of advertising. And, yeah, I had a really great chat to him and, you know, he recommended two books, doors in the eastern suburbs that I'd never heard of to go and buy annuals from and to see what great work was. He said, look, at the moment, your, your, your head is filled with advertising reference, but it's all shit. Fill up with some good stuff and then, and he recommended award school. Again, another thing I'd never heard of. And so that kind of, they kind of started it. Then, then I did award school back in the back in the 19 early 1990s and graduated in the top 10. And then George Bettsis, who sort of became curing my first business partner, was running a award school masterclass for, you know, the top 10 students out of awards school got to do that. Wow. And how did Stan up comedy come into the picture? You get into that. And advertising was like, have you always been a bit of a clown? No, no, this is mean. It was his mean co-workers who told him he was, he was a shit presenter and he needed to fix that. We had a culture of front-stabbing. So there was no way to hide. We call it front-stabbing. You come at someone with a knife and you let them know what they need to work on. Yeah, and it kind of happened mid-career. So I'd kind of, I've been working with, with Karen and George for, you know, the first decade, my 20s really. And then, and I'd never had a holiday. So I'd never had a holiday in my adult life. And I was, I was a terrible presenter. And I was, I was a bit burned out. And George and Karen bought me around the world air ticket and basically said, go off and understand a comment. We were going to get rid of the image. For a little while. You'll never come back. And so I spent, I spent three years traveling around the US and the UK and European comedy circuits. And, and I'd come back and, and work with George and Karen for a month or two in between. because the visa thing is interesting because you sort of get three
month performance phases and then you have to leave the country. So it gave me a reason to come back as well. And you know, Karen isn't overexaggerating when I was probably one of the worst presenters. It was more than a weakness. It was a disability. I don't think we actually said that to you, but no. No, no, no, no, no, but I don't mean disability as in a mental impairment, but I mean a disability in that it absolutely impaired a critical function in my career and didn't allow me to function in the way I should have. And for me, sound up comedy was like training at altitude. You know, once you've done three years where you're in front of multiple audiences a week and they're far harsher than any corporate boardroom's going to be, you end up bulletproof and you also learn how to move with the room and understand it. And because my feeling is what defines a culture is what makes a slob and what makes this angry. And sometimes those things flip going from one town to another or one part of a city to another. And so being able to read the room and learn how to communicate persuasively and effectively is really useful. And I think stand up is a great tool of insight. You know, it's kind of, if you watch great comedians, the ones who do the best are the ones who I think are the most insightful and they can look at a social phenomena and comment on a way where everyone goes, oh my god, that's so true, but we've never seen it before. That makes total sense. And I've actually seen quite a lot of strategy people, creative, start to learn comedy since. I think it's actually, yeah, I see all the time people doing comedy classes these days to be able to get that exact skill, which is to be able to find those insights that are quite funny and quite unique and quite novel about the world. I also think it's about understanding the skills. I mean, I cannot over emphasize how bad I was as a presenter. I feel like I'm not really emphasizing how a trotious I was. It's really, really bad. And what I realized was, you know, 20% of our work is developing strategies and creative and communications. But 80% of our work is selling that to clients and selling it through clients and creating engagement internally before it ever goes out and becomes external communications. So I think that was, yeah. And I think a lot of people in this business don't fundamentally understand their job, if that makes sense. So a massive part of your job is to get your client promoted and famous. So we did well as a small agency with very large clients because we early on understood that a big chunk of our role was making their job really easy and making them look good. So we go, we'll do that document for you. We'll write the strategy. Would you like, would it be helpful if we did that? And what it meant was those people became globally promoted and our ability to hold big clients group, which is unusual in a small agency. But again, it's a strategy piece. It's actually understanding the function you have and selling is so important not just to the end consumer, but to the team and the people you work in. So this can change in different agencies, right? Some agencies have account managers who are just incredible people who sell like crazy. They just know how to sell that work and get that creative work over the line. And sometimes that can be a massive determinant as to whether or not an agency is successful because a lot of the ideas get killed before they even reach the client because people are too afraid to pitch them in. Where did you guys link up at the start and was that a kind of factor of that agency at the time? So we linked up in master class, which where the George Bettsas took the best students out of award school over a couple of different years. So he then hired, he basically it was early survivor. Every week he'd vote people off the class. Hard school, hard court. Okay, we need to talk about this. So it was old school. This is cutthroat. This sounds like a 4-A-T-B show happens. No, he just at the end of the class, three people out. He'd go, you know what, the people not coming back next week are. And he would slowly eliminate. I didn't say it for free. They weren't paying. Sure. So you had a bit of fun with it. Well, he was recruiting. Right, right, right. Well, he really cared about young talent, but B, he knew he wanted to open an agency and he went, I don't want to spend a lot of money on people. Therefore, I'm going to torture test to find the people that will survive. So I at the time was running my parents had a news agency. I was finishing uni. I was running their business because they were overseas traveling. So I was, you know, whatever. So it's 21 running running a business, finishing uni and doing advertising school. And my grandfather was really sick in hospital. And my two sisters and I was sharing responsibility to go and see him. Anyway, he passed away, which is very sad, on one of the mornings that I had to go and present. And George, if you didn't show up, you were automatically out. So I didn't have his number. So I went literally, and I was late. And if you were late, you were thrown out as well. So he looked at me and was like, you're late, ready to throw me out. And I did cry. I must say I did use his, I didn't intentionally use tears. And I said, all my grandfather died today. And he went, oh, okay, we'll just sit down. But he later, he said, in that moment, I knew you were hardcore. I knew if you showed up when your grandfather died, that you were a keeper. I think I maybe suggested getting rid of you anyway. Oh, Dan was already working with him. So it just became, you know, when it was something you love, I just went, I'll just go in and present. And then I can go back home. So for him, it was again, really smart thinking was, how do I, how do I test these people out? So that's essential. Not just for talent, but for passion as well. And I think that was, that was what it was really about is, is it's really hard, you know, when you're hiring people, you, someone comes in with a portfolio or a resume and a history of work. And it's really hard to test their character and seeing how they perform under under duress. And I think that's what made, you know, masterclass really good was it is you got a sense of what people's character was, who you could rely on, what, you know, how people reacted under pressure. I think that was really useful. I'd done masterclass the year before. So I was working with George at the time and that Kieran did masterclass. And then Kieran and Eric were sort of hired as the next two employees of VCD, the agency at the time. So, so that's kind of how we met. And then I think it was, um, I think it was about, there were a lot of loose partnerships in those days working, working with different people. There wasn't, it wasn't like fixed teams. And I think what Kieran and I discovered early on is we, we think almost in an entirely opposite way, however we move at the same pace. And that was I think what Kieran and I skip across the surface of ideas very, very quickly. And a lot of people were more, they'd go from one idea and then drill deep, go to another idea drill deep. And we, and Kieran and I found that really frustrating in the same way they found us, you know, skipping across ideas really quickly, frustrating. And I think it was just a matter of going, well, okay, we're really different which is useful. However, we can move at the same pace, which means that the, the professional relationship worked. You would dig a hundred shallow, yeah. All holes. Exactly. How about this? How about this? I was thinking this, I was thinking this. We'd hold a vast array, you know, heads at a time. How did you know when you would tap into something really special? I look, it's always that question, right? It's intuition. It's, it's a combination of intuition, logic and letting it sit overnight, which, you know, with deadlines the way they are in the businesses is sadly somewhat lost sometimes I think. It's just, it's almost, you know, it's almost if you had a Venn diagram, something happens when you get that magic meeting of, you know, is it, is it interesting and insightful yeah? Is it, does it make people feel something and does it feel right and does it feel right for that brand? Yeah. Because again, that's it. You can have a great idea that's just not right for a brand. Mm-hmm. And you just go, it's great, but it doesn't fit and it doesn't fit with the company and the culture. So you're sort of turning, we belong to something called Thought Leaders Business School. We talk about twisting knobs on a safe to get them into place. And I think advertising is like that too. You sort of turning dials and you're going, oh, it's too funny or it's not funny and for it's, you know, you're turning all these dials that you have at your disposal and when they click, you go, yeah, that's, that's going to work. And now it's time for a break. Are you a creative soul who feels crushed by the irrepressible reality of hilarious delusion you live in every day of your life? Perhaps you know more about Excel formatting than you significant others private parts resulting in a deep and throbbing pain emanating from your heart as you constantly ponder you sick, fancy grise at the top of your organizational food chain. You may have even found yourself tapping your foot nonstop in the doctor's office as the pulsating flow of blood from your head convinces you that the work related stress disease you read about National Geographic One Time is about to make your eyes pop from your skull at top of guys or of hot steam. Well, have I got a deal for you? My amy ad school are offering a strategic planning boot.
that is almost sure to guarantee you a life filled with ever-changing mind-bending creative challenges that help you make an actual difference within the world. Not only does it put you in touch with some of the world's best strategic minds, like the ones on this podcast, but you'll be investing in a chance to start your life in you. And the best thing? Given you're a loyal listener to the son of a pitch podcast, we'll wave your application fee so there's absolutely no risk to you whatsoever. To email us at
[email protected] if you're interested. That's
[email protected]. Now let's get back to the good stuff. So I think that speed of communication does make it difficult now to. I was watching an interview the other day with a British stand-up comedian. And he was saying it's really hard to do comedy about controversial subjects now. Like let's say you want to talk about something like race relations or immigration or anything that sort of polarises people. Now he said you used to be able to go on stage and test it from one audience to another, but now people film you with their phones. And an incomplete joke is broadcast in its first iteration and it may not be. Tweety down across the universe as your racists. Exactly and that may not be the intent. The intent may be to counter a racist point of view by demonstrating what racism looks like. But of course if it's done without context and it's broadcast in a cut down version, you don't get the full breadth of communication. I think it's one of the risks that the marketing industry faces in its communication strategy simply because there is this pressure to respond very quickly and respond in the moment and engage in conversations. And it doesn't allow for a lot of over-nighting of thinking and nuance in language, which can actually be really important. And you just got to watch the number of people who tweet something in an emotional state and then pay a price for that. And I think that that's. I know. I think Twitter should be linked to a blood pressure app. And he goes, "We've noticed that your heart rate is raised. Are you sure you want to tweet this?" No one would have a tweet. It's the most angry social platform. I mean, it's funny. I use it professionally but I've seriously thought about, "No, I'm just going to shut down all social media. It's just not worth it." Other than commercial. Right. Right. Like it's interesting. Damn, I do enjoy it. I do enjoy it. I do enjoy it. I like my arguing as my favourite thing in the world. And sometimes Kirin describes my humour as bait and weight. And Kirin will say something for lock it in and wait for someone to respond just like I'm weighed in. And he physically throws stuff because we do a lot of. Spend a lot of time on stage with corporate speaking. Sure. So we do a lot of conferences and things. And he throws things into the audience. He physically moves forward and leans into the audience and then he leans back smugly and waits to see how long it takes for them to get it. Smugly is a bit judgmental. Smugly. Because a lot of comedians do a different approach to it. Like Jerry Seinfeld was notorious, like very nice to heckle his. How do people respond when you just sort of bait them and then you wait? Well, in a corporate audience, no one's. Very few people are going to heckle. A lot of heckle. And certainly not going to heckle either way. A comedian. But it's interesting. A lot of. I worked with this brilliant Glazedweejan comedian in. I was in Newcastle in England doing a gig. And this guy is Stu Hu, who was this. He has to be a comedian. His parents did it. But he was. No, no. He was maybe 50 at the time. Like he'd been doing set up comedy for a long time and I was maybe 30 at the time. And he said, "You've got a really interesting style." He said, "Most comedians get up and go to the audience and try and engrossing it out themselves with the audience." He said, "You stand back and sort of say, 'Fuck you come to me.' And it was. I'd never really seen it before, but when I sat back and thought about it, it was. It was a really good observation. And I think it's relevant for how you present. Having an understanding of how you're perceived by people is actually quite rare. I was doing an interview on Sunrise, with Jane Caro. And Jane and I are. And Jane, we've been friends for a long time and we get along really well and we actually really like and respect each other. And anyone. I'm doing this interview on Sunrise. My sister called me up later and said, "Oh, so you really hate that Jane Caro, don't you?" I'm like, "What?" No, Jane and I are really good friends. And she said, "Well, dude, you've got resting bitch face because go and watch the interview." And what I realised was when I'm listening intently to someone, I look furious. Like I'm really. Like I've got. I do have that resting bitch face. And what it taught me was when I'm on screen and I'm listening to someone, I have to prompt myself to smile while I'm listening because otherwise I look like I hate the person. So on panels and stuff all the time you have to as well because people take photos. But again, you don't realise how. Always how you perceived and a lot. There's a lot of non-verbals in communication that you're not really conscious of. 90% or something has been being non-verbal. And I'm not sure advertising people on the whole potentially do enough self awareness work sometimes. Like you know, having worked with a lot of juniors and things over the years, giving them that understanding of how do you take responsibility for communication on your side of the fence, not the clients in idiot. You go, "Well, how do you have enough self awareness to go, well, actually you didn't sell it. It's not their job to buy it. It's your job to present it in a way that has value to them." And I think it's a big learning for all of us. It takes time. But I think there's always work to do on self awareness to go, "Your potential to receive this way. Your potentially coming across like this." And it comes from making mistakes. And you don't need to change yourself and be fake about it, but you do need to be conscious of it. Yeah. And as I said, Kiran, I had very different thinking styles, but we've also got very different personality times and. One of us is likable. One of it, yeah. Kiran is Paul McCartney, I'm John Lennon. One is likable and cute and the other one is a genius. And then C. Ringo. And dead. And got shot. But no, but I think having an awareness of that is really important. And so even when I'm speaking to an audience, even before a set of word, a word, people look at me and think, "Well, he looks really judgmental." So quite often I'll walk on stage and say, "I'll go." "You so do when we're talking about that." "I was judgmental." "I was judgmental." "No, but it's not unconscious, right? You can't control it. But I'm big and tall and I, you know, the. "The way I speak and my facial expressions can note that even if I'm not. And even when I'm arguing with people, I'm always wanting them to argue back harder." And people go, "Oh, you're really confronting." And I go, "Well, no, I'm actually expecting you to do better than you currently do it." Because I think you're capable of. So it's actually the opposite of judgment, but it comes across as judgment. So I think. So even the word, that was judgment, by the way. Just so you know, I think you're better and capable of more. No, I think they're capable of. Actually, they're capable of delivering more than what they are. So you go, "It's judgment to your improvement." No, that's good judgment. Judgment isn't a problem. Being prejudging is a problem. But I think having that level of self-awareness and even understanding. And I think we're really quite judgmental of our customers and our teams, too. You know, I've had clients say to me, "Anagain that Eastern Subway is low and not sure thing." I've had clients say to me, "Oh, Dan, you're from the West. What are your people thinking about this?" All right. And I think. You're people. Jesus Christ, buy a train ticket. Go to Paramount. Go to Penroth. And listen. Yeah. I find that the whole. And again, that's a very Sydney-centric thing to say. But I think it's universal of our experiences. People that work in our industry are quite in a city, in their outlook. And that's not necessarily where everyone is. I mean, I think that sort of heals Paramount. A cabramata strip is kind of where the greatest population growth is in Sydney. And I'm sure that will be mirrored in Brisbane and Melbourne and other cities around the country. But I think that the. A willingness to sort of. To study people and be genuinely interested in what drives them is actually key to this. And not to filter every brief through your point of view. Were you always interested in that in the way that people were? Yeah. And how they were. I think it was always. Probably potentially, a lot of the connective thread of us is both of us obsessed with human beings. Like, I go to the movies and watch the audience. You know, I'm eternally interested in, you know, beyond the craft, why. Why some stuff is so universal? You know, why does an audience react to that story, that emotion, that moment, a funnest fascinating? And I think you're the same. And so much of our work and time is spent in that space is, how do we hack you in nature? How do we understand people? Because really, you know, advertising is one big giant behavioural chain.
experiment. How do we get people to buy stuff? When we think advertising is such a narrow little term bucket, you go, "Oh, we're making ads." It's a small part of marketing too. It's quite, in some ways that's part of its history is it's quite narrow. I think you're right, Kay, that there is a narrowness of focus. It's about me talking to you, as opposed to, "No, it's about me understanding you and me understanding what motivates you and what your price sensitivity might be, what the product offering might be." It's a marketing is a bigger conversation than just advertising. We had because the agency that we started in worked outside at the time Media Commission used to be a thing agencies used to get paid. This is VCD? Yeah, so when we work in VCD, we started in agency that worked outside the system. So we were given the opportunity even when we started to develop new products and we were working on some TV shows or naming stuff. So we never had, advertising talks a lot, we're in the ideas business. But that wasn't true in the early 1990s. They're in the TV commercial business. That's how they made money. They sold TV space. So I think for us that really being brought up in a business that saw itself as problem solvers and I guess human behaviorists, how do we understand human beings and match them? That's been incredibly useful for us and joyful. I love doing it every day. I also think getting back to one of your earlier observations around a lot of agencies have account service people that are really good salespeople and is we never had that kind of siloed mentality. One of the greatest opportunities about starting in a small agency is that you get a greater breadth of experience in a short period of time because you do everything. You meet with the client, you develop the strategy, you direct the creative response, you go in, you sell that creative response, you liais with the media team and you just get such a, I remember having a conversation with someone who's got a very successful agency now. I mean, I won't mention names, Scott from the monkeys. Scott, we know that one. Do we know that one? Scott Knight, Scott Knight was speaking at something recent, oh not recently, he was ages ago, one of them I was talking about was probably five years ago now. But I was having a chat with Scott about, and he was, because he'd come from Sarchis, which was a quite rarefied environment and he was sharing how challenging it was to go from someone who's been surrounded by people who supported you in your singular function, to having to wear lots of different hats and being a business person, not just a creative director. My observation was coming from a small agency background is, you transitioned to business owner a lot more easily because you've kind of been exposed to a lot of that before, you've seen the PNL, you know how to read that. And I think that that was, and again, I mean Scott's a great example that you can do that from whatever road you're starting, and those guys have been incredibly successful in what they've done and have a lot of admiration from my point of view. But I think one of the advantages of the way that Karen and I came up was very much business focused. And I think that that's sometimes missing from a lot of people in the industry who are all about, you know as Karen mentioned earlier, that we do tend to be a little bit too focused on craft and don't have quite enough understanding that actually we're a small function within a greater business context. Yeah, look at having, I used to run a board for a while and having spoken to a lot of people coming in. And you know this sort of deluded notion of being an artist or being there because you in love with the craft and you want to make beautiful things and you want to move people and be cool. And actually, no, no, your job is to make mass communication that's hugely popular. You know a bit, we're a bit in the reality TV business in a weird way. You know what I mean? Like how do you, it's not all reality TV, but you can judge it and go oh, we're so above that because if, if mass people are watching it, why? You know, it always goes if it's popular, what's the, what's the reason behind it and how do we tap into it? So if you want to be an artist and you want to write briefs for yourself, then go be an artist. Your job is actually the business of selling, the business of persuasion, the business of moving behavior and you need to love those things. And I think sometimes we get the wrong people in who want it to be something it's not. Even though we need to work with those people and we need them in our industry as well because you know when you get something right and it's got all, it's got craft and thinking, it's magic because equally without the craft, it's pedestrian. How do you, how do you stumble upon whether or not people are going to like the thing that you think they're going to like? So how do you come to that realization? When, when we're talking about fame and we're talking about doing something interesting, I mean, and you're talking about looking at people in the cinema, for instance, and seeing their reaction, how do you craft that kind of empathy within yourself to be able to know that this thing is going to be famous? So this thing is going to be interesting. I don't think you ever know for sure. First start. I don't, you know, we're not in the business of certainty. We're in the business of your own judgment and instinct. So I don't think you ever know. It's not that linear. But I do think what you need to be great at is when you deeply understand human motivation, you know, and you go, oh, I know what loss of vision is. So, you know, we're, we're twice as afraid of what we might lose, then we are excited by what we might gain. So when you deeply understand human behaviour, you should study it and you should understand what psychologically goes on for people, then you start to get better at making a guess. So the academics get you half of the way in the rest is you just, just your own experience and being really interesting. You know, a good friend of ours is a woman named Marion Farley and she's an executive producer and she's made, like, she did Big Brother in the UK and Big Brother here and she's worked on X Factor and QA, Q&A, like a million shows and she's a genius. But she, what I would say about her still to this day is she's obsessed with human beings. She makes, the fact she makes some of the most more shows on the planet is no accident because she has a deep love no matter where you go with her. She's asking people about their lives and without judgment. Oh, that's really interesting. What do you do? Why do you do that? And I think great advertising people, either through observation or interaction, get really good at it. Be interested in people and sometimes we can be too elitist and knock ourselves up, which is what Stan's saying. And you go, no, no, it's opposite is true. You have to be deeply into them and deeply interested by their behaviour because the more you know, then you get a pretty good instinct. You know, I know what's going to make a mum feel this way. I don't have to be a mum to know. But I've hung out with enough that I know. And you know, it's why when ads get criticized, it's a miss. You know, they get slandered now by social media because someone's missed, they go, that's just not true. And people get upset because they go, you know, they're like empathy. But I think you know, the key is to be in front of people. I think one of the great mistakes advertising agencies make as a helicopter flies overhead. I think one of the great mistakes that advertising agencies make is they keep creative people at a research groups. And they, you know, say you have someone will go to a research group and then it goes through a series of whispers and the the meaning may be there, but you don't actually get to hear the real people say what they're saying. And again, research groups are flawed methodology for a whole bunch of reasons. However, being able to hear people say stuff and hear what's sitting behind that emotional response, what's driving that. I think that's really important. And I think a lot of us in who've come through the advertising industry, been too disconnected from, you know, the end consumer and don't actually really connect with them. And I think that's what gives empathy is actually the, you know, the diversity of your experience, sitting with people who you might disagree with, but for long enough to hear why they believe what they believe. Because no, very few people are actively looking to be consciously evil. All consciously irrational. So we're working, I was working with, well, doing a speaking tour with a professor of safety, workplace safety, professor Sydney Decay, he's a very clever, and he was talking about incidents in the workplace. And it's weird, the same, he eternally fascinated. The same thinking applies. He said people never set out. The problem is, because you know, when people have an accident at work, people go and investigate and then they go, well, what went wrong? But what he found was that human beings really behave in a way they expect to have a negative outcome. And there was a rational reason for them to behave in that way in the first place. He said, so they want to climb up a shelf, which in retrospect seems stupid, because this shelf may not be attached to the wall and it falls on them. But at the time, it seemed the highly logical behavior to have. But we don't think of human beings that way. And so it funny how much synergy, so he's all the same is how do we understand human beings the way they are? And then how do we design our workplace as accordingly? That's funny when you see the reds, you go actually, it's very applicable in who knew workplace safety, what we've spent our careers spending time doing. I think empathy is ultimately
being forgiving for human nature. I'm Kiran and I read a book ages ago called Selfish Scared and Stupid, which sounds really judgmental, particularly when I say it. But in fact, it's about realizing that all human beings, all of us are driven by self-interest and need to mitigate risk and with a bias towards ease and simplicity. And that's part of the reason we've been successful as a species, but it's easy to judge those characteristics and say, well, you should be more selfless. And there's a reason we talk about selfless people as being heroes because it's very unusual. They're the same with risk taking, the same with people who do very complicated things. They're actually outside human nature. They're anomalies more than people being selfish, scared and stupid. And being more accepting of that and going, actually, no, it's human nature to want to be playing in some of those spaces, even though it's not something we necessarily brag about. I think it's about being accepting human beings for who they are and trying to work with who they are as opposed to shifting them to be who we like them to be. That's very interesting. That's incredibly interesting. So curiosity seems to be more of a human trait than a trait of advertising professionals or anyone who's kind of industry, right? Are there people that are more curious than others about these types of things and they're the types of people that make good advertising professionals and think about these problems? Or do you think everyone has the opportunity and the ability to be able to do that? It's just some might lean into that a little bit harder than others. Nature or nurture, right? I would say anyone could learn it and you probably have people who are more predisposed. But again, you don't, and we don't want all the same kind of people. We had this writer who worked for us who was extraordinarily talented because he was driven by the need to be different and new, but he was strategically hopeless and he was equally passionate whether he was right or not. He was equally enthused. It was the best idea you'd ever seen regardless of how badly correct it is and strategically correct it was or not. But he was really useful to having the agency because he would come up with extraordinary thinking, but you just needed someone to wrangle his strategy because he couldn't tell. So I would hate to shut people out in a way, but I do think you can learn it, but I think some people are naturally more curious about this. People are actually quite terrified of people who are different. Again, it's a survival thing. We're wired to look for similarity. Studies have shown people rescue people most like them in terms of an emergency situation. They unconsciously go to rescue the person most like them. That's what we do. Survival. And we rescue children. There's a lot of biology in this. We rescue children rather than adults, even though children have not proved their worth and adults may have. And I'm likely to die faster. Yeah, because I'm a kid's very high in fat, so hugely flammable. But I also flake. But I think that that's. I think that is quite biological. However, I think adding to what Kieran said is I think Kieran and I tend to believe more in interest than talent. In other words, you might have a natural inclination to be interested in something, but the talent can be developed. One of the things that Kieran in particular talks about is the fact that creativity is a skill and a discipline, not a talent. But we tend to filter it that way. Oh, you're good at playing the piano. I'm like, "Well, yeah, because I've been doing piano lessons since I was five." Or, "Oh, you're a really good drawer. Well, that's because my father encouraged me to do all of drawing a day since I was a kid." We tend not to see the development of that. If you have a look at any three-year-old's drawing, they're all shit. Only a parent would love them. But again, some kids have an inclination or an interest in a particular area. When you focus on that, you get better at it. Then you get encouraged. People go, "Oh, my God, you're really good." When you get encouraged, you spend even more time doing it. You end up in these virtuous circles of skill increasing. Coming back to the conversation we had before we started recording, about this idea that we tend to silo people's talents a little bit too early in my opinion. We don't give people a capacity to explore multiple areas. We go, "Oh, you're good at drawing. Therefore, that's your thing." We decide at age seven, you're done. You're not director because you're good at drawing. Well, actually, maybe you're really good at thinking. Maybe you should be a planner. I don't know. We silo and we choose really early. I spend a lot of my time teaching non-creative types, people in corporate who we ask the rooms all the time, "Put your hand up, people can think they're creative." You're lucky to get three. You might have 500 people in the room. You might get 10. Two or the three have got the hands half up. They're half a non-committer. Please don't give me a test on this. I think compared to the other people in this room, I'm more creative. It's huge problematic for going into a world where ARA is going to do anything replicable. If you can replicate it, we'll automate it. That's what's going to happen. A lot of our time and energy has been helping non-creative people understand that they are creative and to see creativity as problem solving, not artistry, drawing art directors, too much colour, disdainful of mainstream thinking. That's the stereotype. I think creative people have done themselves a disservice in the industry. A lot of them have handed over business management skills to other people and they've found themselves disempowered. They've marginalized their ability by saying we're a rarefied environment of unique people. I think that's actually been problematic. So many amazingly clever people, but so much to offer. In some ways, narrowing down their possibility because I can't be bothered learning about that because it's not my identity. I wanted to be the fringe dwelling creative person. You only have to go back to the Renaissance days and look at Michael Angelou, Leonardo da Vinci, these guys who are incredible artists, they're incredible mathematicians, which is polymaths. If you are a person that wants to be an advertising today and wants to go into an agency, are you looking for agencies that allow you to have that broad exploration of the different avenues and let you off the leash a little bit in there, or are you looking really to drill down into one skill at start and then broaden throughout your career as you jump down? Well, what's advertising going to be? Yes, the big question. I think you have to play a question called what's advertising going to look like? So if you're going into advertising right now, and look, the fundamental skill, so if you drill it right down, of being able to create communication that changes a behaviour, right? You know, actually, we want to advertise a product or get you to slip-sop, slap or stop you speeding or stop you smoking or get you to take this diet, whatever it is, we're ultimately trying to create a piece of communication that moves people's behaviour. So we're from too. That is eternally needed. It won't go away, but will the TV format, the advertising format, will we, you know, download people, start straight into people's heads, chips, don't know? I think look, I think you want to encourage people to read outside their interests and to study outside what's immediately compelling for them. And the reason you want to do that is, I think to be a really good advertising professional, you should be a world champion, an interviewer will pursue. You should know a lot about a lot of subjects. I think that's actually really useful. And what we find is, if you have a look at innovation, most innovations come from people outside that industry sector. In other words, you know, and Kirin does a lot of work with businesses in their innovation. And one of the problems is, people know so much about the way things have worked or how they should work, that they can't obviously how they might work. And so knowing too much can actually get in the way of innovation. It does most, most innovation happens from an alternate company that you don't, they don't see coming. So, you know, most corporations, iterate, they don't innovate. And it's actually usually someone outside that innovates. So again, it's how do you, how do you give yourself enough input that you cannot get stuck in the way things are? And I think advertising as an industry itself needs to go, well, what are we beyond what we currently offer? And it's incredibly hard because the massive agencies with massive overheads and massive bills that love the theory of changing the structure. But again, they're stuck in the way things are fundamentally done right now because how do they make money out of a new structure? How do they organise it? Which is exactly what big corporate space? And I think you've got to be open to that. I mean, I had this conversation with a friend of mine who's a strategist in London and she and I were having a chat. I was talking about what media she consumes. And because, like, if you have a look at my social feed, it's incredibly schizophrenic. There's radical right, radical left, radical atheist, radical religious, but I mean, it's nuts. But I want to know what the crazy is thinking. You meant the feed, what you were sharing. No, no, no. What I'm reading, what I'm following. And I think that, and she was saying, I only read really liberal media. I don't want to know what the hard right are saying. And I'm like, yeah, but you've got to assume that that's a good proportion of the population that you're trying to engage with. And unless you know the thought process that they're going through to reach that conclusion,
then it's going to be difficult to engage with them. And so I think the more you're able to broaden your interests, and certainly over the past 30 odd years, I don't think there's an industry sector we haven't worked with that we haven't got some kind of inside information on. And that's hugely valuable, I think, because again, if you look at things like, you know, Tonstein Pillows putting used by dates on their pillows, which I voted for in an advertising effectiveness award ages ago. I was on a judging panel, and there was a huge debate, is that an advertising solution? And they said, "Because it's not an ad." But it's, no, well, for me it did. But again, they were very, you know, there were a lot of people from a very traditional model, "Well, it's not a poster, it's not a TV ad, it's not a social thing, it's not a, and I said, "Number, it's a commercial solution to a problem that existed, that actually, that changed people's perceptions and drove sales." And so for me, I think the willingness to be outside your sector, and again, no one in the pillow world was looking at the FMCG world and saying, "Well, that's who we can learn from." Just to listen, this was the campaign where they put expiry dates on their pillows. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, and I think that that's the opportunity, and you only get there by being broadly interested and spending, and it's, I think that's one of the reasons I like arguing, is, and I like arguing with people who really don't agree with me, because they challenge your thinking. And that's what I'm, I like being surrounded by really, really smart people, a lot of whom don't agree with me, because it challenges my thinking. Did you just look at me? I'm happy that you called me really smart. Well, even I remember having a, I was doing, again, I was doing Sunrise Monday, I had a really interesting conversation with Mark Leifam, who is not someone I particularly agree with on lots of things. And, but again, he was, he's smart enough to have a really challenging conversation with. And so that was kind of, I think you do need to spend time with people other than Urielk. Yes. And again, I don't just mean in terms of spend time with different genders, different ethnicities. I think it's also about having, people who have different cognitive filters. No, but I think, but I think, I mean, like, drum one, the election. So you can either, oh, you can either, yeah. But I think that's one of the reasons. Yeah. And what's going on in the cycle? But I think you have, you look at, but I think it's a perfect example. You look at the Democrats. The Democrats are a left-wing party, and they talked about working class people as being deplorables. Yes. You cannot be the left and call working class people deplorables. They're the only people, rich people aren't going to vote for you. You've got to win over the working class. And I think that's what the Trump campaign did really well. Is it spoken away? Well, working class people went, oh, that billionaire is just like us. No, they don't. I mean, that was a good sell, but again, We need to go taps, but it's just like us. I'm not sure he won. I think the Democrats lost. Yeah, I think it's totally worse possible candidate to go up against Trump. She was the personification of the system. Well, to be honest, I don't think it was just her though. I think it was actually the infrastructure in the Democrats was communicated in the very elitist way. And the fact that working class people look at the Republicans and go, "Yeah, they can't more about regular people like us." Is clearly not true. However, that was the perception that was created. Also, the zeitgeist of fear, because there's so much change. Yeah, human beings can't things go back. I mean, make America great again. The advertising thinking is genius. Because it said, let's go back. It's like the Brexit line as well, take back control. Well, you'll know we can't go back. And it will never be what it was. And our parents can't give us the childhood they had. And I can't give Mike in the childhood I had. It was playing on that as started. Well, look, everything is. Democracy, as much as people like to say, is not a popularity contest. Is a popularity contest. And in between Los Angeles and New York, there's a lot of poor, angry white people only making 40 grand a year who think that being a white angry person should be worth 80 grand a year. And again, they're wrong. However, that doesn't mean you elections. That doesn't mean you elections. And you've got to be able to engage people who you disagree with. And I think that, again, and certainly that's as politics becomes more polarized all around the world. I think an unwillingness to engage with people where they are and actually have a reasonable conversation with people you disagree with as opposed to going to straight to #FuckYou. Yeah. I think is problematic. It's hard to win that. And again, I think, and you should be able to move your own opinion. Well, if you have any complaints with this podcast, just #FuckYou. Yeah, the #FuckYou to some of the weird podcast. We could have made a controversial. We'll be really nice. No, we actually really enjoy this. I mean, it's kind of like you don't debate to win your debate to learn, right? Or you debate for progress. And I think progress speaks perfection. And a lot of us are two, it's either all my way or not at all. And that's how the world works. Well, we are being middle ground compromise average. Yes. Yeah, the trick is how do you dance right? How do you create progress? Not just everyone's disappointed. And we've reached it. Iki, vanilla, lukewarm, teppet, teppet, such a good word, isn't it? Teppet solution. Because that's all from what we get. We get decision by committee, lukewarm, nothing, sitting on the fence stuff. Everything works to the mean. Yeah. And again, we're all caught up in our own worldview, which is a natural thing to do. And I think social media has only exacerbated that. Like I did a lot of work with White Ribbon, which is about men ending men's violence against women. And I would post about it and people would say, what about women's violence against men? And I'm like, yeah, we're not saying that's a good thing. Like, like, daffodil day isn't fucked day, beady's day. It's a day for raising awareness about cancer. So raising awareness about men's violence against women doesn't mean that women's violence against men is a good thing. It's just, no, we're focusing on a particular issue. Well, I'm statistically speaking. Statistically speaking, what's the violence the other way is? By you. What in terms of effects, certainly. But again, it's an, and, and, and propensity. But again, it's, you know, people are so reactive. Yeah, we're teaching people to be intolerant. Social media, the downside is great, but the downside is intolerance on mass. At, you know, not being very good at accepting another opinion. I mean, sometimes I really have to restrain myself. We have a friend who's, yeah, highly like we, the good little wife sort of, and as a kind of working woman who is very progressive, I have to not arc up and accept that he's very traditional. Yeah. Well, there you go. I guess. That's what you do when you plan out. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. To Segway, I think we were talking about vanilla tepid and lukewarm, which is kind of the perfect, perfect move into our next segment, The Pitch, where we have given Dan and Kirin a challenge, which is very much a behavior change challenge now. Now it's time to put your talents to the test. Now it's time to give us a scenario to, I guess. So what would be a strategy? Break it down, let's see how you do it. Problem insight, strategy and solution. There is nothing more nostalgic than the sound of green sleeves blasting through suburban streets, from the speakers of everybody's favorite ice cream merchant, Mr. Whippy. Founded in the UK in 1958 and first launched in Australia during 1962, Mr. Whippy is the epitome of Australian summer culture. However, in the year of our millennium, Mr. Whippy closed its vandores to the Australian public forever. Or did they? In 2015, the franchise food company relaunched the Mr. Whippy brand along with a fleet of 200 tricycle trucks known as Tuk Tuk's. For the poultry sum of 80 grand, you can set up your own Mr. Whippy franchise. This is a high price to pay to convince people to set up their own Mr. Whippy business. Some would consider this a terrible investment, unless there was a sudden surge in demand for Mr. Whippy ice cream. In that case, it might be a masterstroke. Our task reinvigorate the demand for Mr. Whippy ice cream in Australia by any means necessary. As always, for this segment, we've asked our guests to respond in the son of the pitch, taking the piss format, which is problem, insight, strategy, and solution. Let's see how they go. Well, we thought, you know, now that the Catholic Church is no longer a person. (Sounds of a man playing) That maybe Mr. Whippy vans could. no. Um. Don't put that in. I think in New Zealand, that's going to be the start of the podcast. I'm not really lying. Yeah. Oh, look, I think there's a couple of challenges I think that Mr. Whippy have. And the challenges that have always existed, but solutions now present themselves. One of the problems we talked about was seasonality. Was this idea of, you know, an ice cream is not. terrific in high summer, or what are we doing winter? - Kind of medium summer, 'cause it melts really quickly. - Yeah, yeah, but you feel like an ice cream. - I know. - And the other problem was, is it's very much an impulse purchase, but the impulse can't always be met. - 'Cause Mr. Whippy's a bit random. - Yeah, you don't really know anything about that. - Like you'd be sitting at home and you'd hear, (humming) and then you'd go running through the house, and then you'd go, "Shit, it's in the next street." - And I wanna have missed him and waste my coins, and I can't find, and don't run on the road kids. So Mr. Whippy's accessibility, I think, was a huge hindrance to this experiment. - The first thing we thought was, you actually needed a technological solution. So something like an Uber app, so you can track where Mr. Whippy's are driving, and also a way to. - And you can call Mr. Whale or flag them. So let's say you're having, and you could do like a pre-flag, so you could say, "Okay, we're gonna have a kid's party for lunch, "but at one o'clock, Mr. Whippy van shows up, "and, you know, does multiple sales." But also if you're, if you can see, you know, in the same way with Uber, you can see whether Uber cars nearby, if you could tag Mr. Whippy and demand drive purchase in the way that they never could before, it's a way of, of making sure that that impulse purchase isn't based on just you hearing green sleeves traveling through the road next to you. - Yeah, and then you could allow a crowdsourcing call. So, you know, you can see, "Oh, someone near me called." So if there's no one near you, you can actually call them far enough away if you get enough of a crowdsourcing like, so a crowdsourcing hail. So your, at what point is it useful to go and sell a nice cream? - Yeah. - Do I need 20? I mean, I don't know the mathematics, so. - I'm more effectively mirroring up the supply and the demand for Mr. Whippy. - Yeah, exactly. And you could be, you could be at work, right? You could be at work and it's a hot day. Who wants Mr. Whippy? There's a Mr. Whippy van five blocks away and you do a call. - Also, you could shout people. You can go basically, "I've now via app shouted "100 Mr. Whippy's to our office." - Yeah. - So how do you do, how do you increase volume of sale? And make it easy and barrier free to do that. So for us, it was as much accessibility, 'cause it's far too random. And then you can go, "Okay, what else makes it more fun?" You know, you could do a Spotify partnership or something and choose your music. - Choose the music that it shows up with. - You can make it more fun. - You can talk about that too. - Yeah, but technically, the biggest barrier is, how do you get to know where Mr. Whippy is? 'Cause otherwise you may still get in your car and have a Mac as drive through, for 50 cents. Well, I don't know how much. - It's a 50 cents. - I have no idea. - Do we, anyone know how much McDonald's cone is? - 25 cents now. - 25 cents? - Yeah. - Really? 'Cause click, you know, get out. It's race to the bottom, like, so I choose. - I'll pay five bucks for delivery. For me, not to get out of my chair. - Yeah. - Yeah. 'Cause I'm not, if I'm at work, I'm not gonna drive to McDonald's for a 30 cents. - I agree. - I was crazy. - Well, little owner, you get it. So it becomes fun and, and I would able to call them. So we thought that was the biggest solution that they could do was accessibility. That seems to be the most important. - And then in terms of seasonality, I think, you know, the capacity to deliver coffee or whipped-op chocolates, or if you can make, you know, an indulgent winter experience, you know, chilly hot chocolate or whatever, you know, - Hot chocolate with Mr. Whippy in it might be. And then how much it would cool, but it would be interesting. - No, yeah, but I think having a seasonal offering so it wasn't just associated with high summer. - Mm. - And I think the other part, you know, then the communications, does it, like, they haven't got a problem with brand awareness. People know Mr. Whippy. But haven't got a problem with desire ability. People like ice cream. I mean, like, it's kind of a no-brainer. It's like, the issue is, how do you drive volume of sales? How do you make the product offering relevant to a, you know, slightly more sophisticated consumer in 2019? And also, how do you make sure that it's not just associated with summer, but there's a reason to want to interact with the brand, you know, through different parts of the year? - Yeah, and we talked about increasing, you know, again, how do you get repeat purchase? - You go, well, I've done most of Mr. Whippy for the summer. So potentially a flavor focus. So broadening offering. So there's a reason to try something new. Then a little bit not high in innovation. Whereas, you know, messinas of the world, cow and moons are really good at, this is a flavor of the week or whatever to get people back. So how do you potentially make a flavor play? You have your standard, but what's your flavor play? Maybe your chocolates that go on top, you know, your chocolate, your toppings become quite interesting and unique. So you could make it a bit more premium if you wanted, I don't think they should go too far. - And fast food does that well, you know, that McDonald's will bring out a burger for a limited time. And what they're doing is they test marketing. But what it does is it drives interest in something that you're really familiar with. And I think that's kind of the opportunity as well. - You know, it took about unicorn, unicorn Mr. B, I don't know if you've seen Japanese rainbow ones. - Yeah, absolutely. - So you know stuff like that, that A is Instagramable visual. - Yes, I haven't seen it because you've been doing this. - So it's like a unicorn shot in your cup. (laughing) - Sounds desirable. - For the Americans listening. - What hoop. - What you would imagine a unicorn, shit would look like. - So what you imagine in your head, like rainbow coming out in a swirly pattern. - Yeah. - But they lay, you know, it layers up. So stuff like that that you suddenly go, oh, and you could make poop emojis really, couldn't you put eyes on them and stuff. But stuff that becomes very social, very Instagramable, very visual. How do you make it interesting? So if it has come to the office, that everyone's Instagramming a rainbow one, or of course you wanna keep your classics. 'Cause that obviously is one of the big things they provide. But for repeat purchase and need to have it again, 'cause you're not gonna go, it's my Friday Mr. Whippy, I don't think you might. Some people might be really interested. - So I call you make it, right, with this unicorn stuff. - No, the unicorns, we call everybody loves unicorns. I mean, it's a bit larmory at the moment. We've moved a bit larmory, but everyone likes unicorns. - Waiting for the alpacas to tell alpacas. - Alpacas have a turn. - Yeah. - And it's gonna be dragons. - So this is really interesting, because it's kind of like Mr. Whippy, you immediately know what Mr. Whippy is. And we're talking about creating new products, and really kind of redefining the service that you get from a Mr. Whippy. Is it just through that social media and engagement type of thing that you're kind of getting across exactly what they do now, or did you think about kind of other ways that you would really imprint in people's minds what the new Mr. Whippy delivered and what it offered. And what it stood for and all of those types of things. - I look for us, again, if you think of size of business and investment, I would say the first place should be accessibility. 'Cause again, you don't want a client to overspend and invest more than they need to. Potentially they don't actually need to over-invest in other staff. And we talked about merchandise, 'cause you know, so again, how do you get people to advertise your stuff for free? - Yeah. - You know, I've been whipped merchandise. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, exactly. - Yeah, we need a single. - There's like a million whip puns that one can use that would make fun merchandise. And we talked about that party angle. So again, how do you get bulk sales? So how do we get volume sale up? 'Cause single sales is a tough way to make money. So how do we create more bulk? So officers, kids, parties, pool parties. - 'Cause there's two customers. There's the franchise purchaser that Mr. Whippy needs to engage. And then there's the consumer who buys the ice cream or hot chocolate, whatever it is that you need to engage as well. And for the franchise, franchisee, you kind of wanna see that your $80,000 investment is gonna pay back in year one, right? And you go, okay, well, how many sales do I need to make? They're gonna be doing all those kind of calculations. I think the opportunity though is to demonstrate that you can do volume of sales. So I think investing in a way to drive sales. And then they have a whole lot of problems around, well, this Mr. Whippy's been encouraging on my patch. - Yeah, yeah. - But again, that's one of the conversations you'd wanna have with a franchise. And that's any franchise, whether it be a fast food chain or a stationary chain is having those conversations about who owns what patch and how do you drive sales within that area geographically. But I think the opportunity for people to become engaged in inhaling Mr. Whippy, that's the kind of thing that's quite story worthy. And I think you wouldn't need to invest a huge amount of money. I think I'd have a PR strategy where I'd let people know that this was possible. And I think the story would start to spread. I mean, if you look at someone like Anuba, they don't spend a lot of time or money in above the line advertising, what they do is they made the functionality that works so well that people said, "Oh, you've gotta try this." - Yeah. - And I think that's part of the battle. - The kind of thing is, like if we look at Uber, right, they set up that kind of loop where the more drivers means the quicker the service and the quicker the service, the more customers means the more drivers, 'cause there's more customers and that kind of keeps going, are you living out of the same way? - Yeah, what you only do is make sure people know they can get it. People know they can get it, you know, we want stuff fast and on demand now. I mean, I was really irritated this morning 'cause my Uber was 12 minutes. I was not happy, it's normally three. I literally canceled it to try to get a fast one. I was going on with Uber, it shouldn't be 12 minutes. But once upon a time that was a very reasonable wait time. - Do you think there's room for an alliance between Uber and Mr. Webe? - We actually talked about an alliance and whether your van could drive you around as well. - I guess we'd be quite funny destination to destination. - But I think it's, you know, you look at Uber rates. I think Uber,
has recognized actually there isn't a alliance between that. And certainly if you think about when we were kids, Pete's a hut was a destination. - Yes. - Now it's there are not a big hut. - No it's compromised, it's all delivery. - No but again, it became all about convenience and delivery and I think that's kind of the understanding is that the thing that most limited Mr. Whippy was you needed to be in that particular street at that particular time. - Free enough to get out of the house. - Yeah and fast enough to get out of it. And I think that those were a whole bunch of limiting factors that a really simple app could get you around. I mean even when Kiran picks up her little girl from school, is my goddaughter, so I'm quite often with Kiran and we'll pick her up from school. Kiran will order Darcia a boost use via the app. I mean we have to walk past it to get to the car. - Yeah, I've pre-ordered it. I mean we could have just gone up and said, I'll have a blah, blah, blah juice. But she still uses the app because of the convenience. - Yeah. - Well because it takes five minutes to walk up and all the kids go after schools. That's far easier to pre-order it. So again you just go, it's a convenience mindset. - The app doesn't make the walk shorter. The app all that saves us is literally 60 seconds of lining up behind someone else while they are on their dues. - No I'm waiting. - No I know but you know in terms of- - So efficient. - So efficient is the whole time. - Everything if we per minute that money, it would be a rally value. - So Kiran doesn't drink coffee. So she's not used to waiting for beverage. - No I don't do waiting. I don't like waiting. - Well this is such a big thing. As we've gotten all of this convenience, we actually start to take time less for granted maybe with regard to these services. We actually really do value the amount of convenience that these people can create. - That's everything. - So I've got a 10 year old, she can't fathom. Stuff isn't on demand. What do you mean I can't watch the show? I know that I haven't bought the season out yet. What do you mean? She can't quite wrap her hand around waiting. So because they don't have to wait. They don't appointment view, everything's on demand. I pretty much can order anything on the internet and it comes the next day. The longest wait is the next day really. For a lot of stuff. So when stuff takes a while to come, it's quite this weird mindset. So the waiting thing for Mr. Whippy, otherwise you could make a Mr. Whippy route like bus routes and know where the Mr. Whippy goes. But I actually think that on demand response, but if the demand's quiet potentially, you would have the tracking app. But we think that's their biggest, what we'd solve first. Again, we want to make the money work really hard. They don't have a communication problem really. They have an accessibility problem. And we could too quickly go, oh yeah, you can make some funny ads. There's also whipped puns you can do. But you can do lots of funny stuff. And you can make it retro or you could make it, as I said, you could do a Spotify partnership. All this stuff that makes it fun, but fundamentally we need to solve how to, we get more people to be able to get it when they want it. And how do they not have to get off their lazy butts and stay on their side? And again, going from single sale, single sale, single sale, randomly in a street to volume sale by appointment. Or an event, I booked Mr. Whippy because-- Kids party. Or we know we're at the swimming pool. Or where do we know people gather? We're having a picnic, a family reunion. So you can appointment it. Or some of their sales go up. It's not random. Because we know when there's a Mr. Whippy at an event, the queue's really long. Right? We know that happens. So I don't think it's a desirability issue. I think that's where we'd solve it. Would you keep a lot about the brand itself? I mean, it's got that kind of very eye-deckos sort of feel about it. I remember the trucks used to be really beautiful pink and pastel greens and things. If anything, I'd make it more retro. Yeah. I think I'd want to inspire some of that nostalgia. Keiran and I actually worked on our-- Kirk's, the soft drink brand. And the strategy we used for that was about nostalgia. So in the 1970s-- so the target was baby boomers. In the 1970s, soft drink used to get delivered in a crate to people's homes. Like milk got used to get delivered by the milk. The milk companies like-- So dairy farmers that have people that worked as milk coars and they deliver-- It would be a big mix crate of flavors. Yes. I actually-- I remembered this. When I grew up in Harvey Bay, which is like in Queensland, we had exactly the same delivery. You were 20 years behind. Yeah. You would get the sugar would rise and you'd have little floaty sugar bits in there. But again, that was-- So Kirk's was the Queensland brand. But in Sydney, we had crystal and X in Melbourne yet. But there was a whole range of different brands in each state. But the thing is, people didn't remember what the brand was. They did remember the experience. So when we relaunched Kirk's, we created nostalgia. And a lot of people assumed that Kirk's was the brand they grew up with, whether it was or not. But we essentially faked it because it wasn't the brand. They grew up with for most of them. But it was deliberate because it-- But we disamplified the sense of nostalgia. And I think that that's really-- And nostalgia is a really powerful motivator. I mean, we were talking earlier about political motivation and the whole idea, oh, it was better when I was a kid. And that's a really powerful motivator for people. Now, whether it actually was better when you were a kid or not is debatable, but that doesn't mean that your emotional response is based on any rational data that you can draw on. But we do have a feeling of nostalgia if we've had a happy childhood. Yeah, I didn't know whether we should keep green sleeves or not. We could partner with Spotify. So Uber, it shows up playing your music. But we had a long-- we weren't sure about how much do you keep the signature tune. But if you're ordering, it doesn't matter. I know some brands are coming out now with Sonic Branding, sometimes like green sleeves, is there? That was the original Sonic Remastered. So we created-- Yeah. And they've had new brand new monies with auditory. Hotels have signature cents. And experiential tactile stuff is really important. But the name is hilarious. What means we can charge more, basically? Because it's Sonic. I heard about this-- That is sound. It's a good word, though, Sonic. I know it's a good word. I heard about this really interesting experiment that kind of leans into what you guys were talking about before. And that's implanting memories in people. So this researcher would talk about basically Disney World and you saw Goofy and all of these things. And the people who went to Disney World actually never saw Goofy, but then when they asked them to remember that experience, I would say, I'd seen Goofy. So essentially, a you building nostalgia that doesn't actually exist for these new people that are coming into the market. But they feel a connection to that? Yeah. It's like right of passage. It becomes-- you can't have summer without Mr. Whippy. It's essential. And you want parents-- paranoid parents who don't want to give their kid anything. You want them to go, well, I now have permission, because it's a right of passage for childhood. You can't let your kid go without Mr. Whippy every now and then on a hot day. Because otherwise, you don't get past that gatekeeper who's not going to give their kid anything, which is great. But you know, you have to get past that gatekeeper mind, say, with a really good justification called it's part of a happy childhood. And a lot of junk food cells in that strategy, I guess, is-- So the thing about Kyrx was baby boomers were buying it. But they weren't buying it for themselves. They were buying it for their grandkids. So the grandkids had the experience they had. Yeah. Right. So there's this whole wanting to pass on, I remember running outside for the Mr. Whippy. My kid should have that experience too now. Which is what we want to give them. We want to give them the things we loved. We want to give out-- Salted sugar, it's not good for the kids. However, the experience is what I'm looking to pass on and the joy, yeah, exactly. You know, it's why ritual and tradition and stuff become so big in family. We pass those things on. And it's very motivating. And people really want to give-- So we're working with a really big group of entrepreneurs one day. And there was a woman put her hand up, and she sold food for kids with allergies. Right? I sell gluten free or whatever, you know, low salt, depending what they're allergic to. And she was really struggling with any communication. She's like, all my newsletters are boring. Hey, he's some yummy gluten free chocolate cookies this week. And we said, well, who's your customer? Because most people actually don't know who their customer is, particularly entrepreneurs. And she was like, oh, parents. We're kids with allergies. And then a really hussie-- who buys? And she said, when she dug in, it came out that moms do the majority of the buying. And we're like, well, what's going on for their moms? What are they actually buying? Do they care about-- what are you sell most of? So again, for the volume, if you're not sure as an entrepreneur. And she said, I sell most junk food. Well, you know, less health food. Treat food. Treat food. Yeah. I sell most of that. Well, I guess that's really interesting. Why do you think that is? And once we dug in, what we realized is, again, people didn't want their child with an allergy to miss out on the childhood they had. So the biggest trigger for me was my kids are free to get the birthday party. I could say a birthday. Or they've worked really hard this week at school. And I really want them to have a cookie. Or I want them to have something nice. So they were spending money on the treat because it was as much a part of the childhood. And part of the psychological motivation for that was avoiding social isolation. You know, you don't want to be the kid at the party going, I'm gluten intolerant. You want to be the kid who has as much. fun as any other child. And actually what she was selling was a normal childhood to kids with allergies. And that's a whole lot more compelling than here's a gluten-free cookie. Do you know what I mean? And so in other words, again, there's full circle coming back to what sits behind the emotional response that people are looking to enjoy. What's actually driving that behavior is really important to understand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do we trigger in human behavior? What is it about getting an ice cream from a truck that shows up to our house? Well, in this case, it's a man in a tuk-tuk, which is quite interesting. Can you have a Mrs. Whippy? Or a Mrs. Whippy, yeah. Sorry. That was just gender bias right there straight away. I apologize to that. In the night. In the best Whippy you can be even. That's it. Be the best Whippy you can be. But did you miss Whippy's a different service? Well, that could be a man also. I reckon you could charge more. Yeah, it's only drag clean Whippy's would be awesome. Designing. Actually, yeah, the aesthetic is very similar in the pink hair. Yeah, totally. Fantastic. Because you know, you could absolutely dress up the people running the Whippy more for that experience. But you don't want to be creepy kids scary. Yeah, not years. Like creepy clowns. Not the clown, yeah. No clowns. I love clowns. No clowns are scary. We've got not a- How do you sell clowns? Let's see your next brief. That is the next brief. I think you'll take that one. Yeah, I actually like that idea. Yeah, it's our thoughts. No, clowns really aren't creepy people hiding their personalities behind makeup in big shoes. Why big shoes? People are so easy. She's looking at Dan like he knows the answer. Oh, I thought he might. He'll have some fun. Would you keep the took to cook or does it need to go back to band? Yeah, I mean, I mean, hygiene. Like, is he going to diesel in there? I just like, you know, I think they took and doesn't give you enough variety because I actually think the repeat business need and do you get enough sound quality and he's a visible enough. I don't know. I'm not sure about the took to cook because of this down. Although although it doesn't like to live in Italy and in Italy, they have the motocaro, which is the single front wheel, which is it's a took to cook but with an Italian flavor. So, I mean, you could almost do a competing offer around, it's all about the gelato, which is a slightly different style of ice cream. And, you know, you could build some nostalgia around that, which is really interesting. I mean, I found the van. The van's always a bit weird because you're driving through a street with children running out to a van with, you know, just to get, you know, hang out with some anonymous man handing out sweets. Oh, woman. And that was always a man. I know. It was usually a man. But again, they're much better. Yeah, I know. But we're talking nostalgia here. And so I always found that a little bit creepy. But Santa's creepy too. Of Santa's. Most things are deeply creepy. Let's face it, think clowns. Santa, me too. Put your, put your child on a strange man's lap. And get into whisper secrets. And whisper secret story. I know. Tell mom and dad. I know. Santa is deeply creepy. Creepy. It's all creepy, really. Yeah. No, no, but I actually think the in some ways that the the the took to opportunity does allow for for greater visual recognition and. And speed and accessibility. So we know that the ambulances were transformed by having motorbikes that could get through traffic faster. So one of the big shifts in emergency services has been in the introduction of motorbikes. And the technology that allowed them to be able to put enough technology into the motorbikes. So there's motorbikes are highly technical that allow them to get to a scene fast and be at a start treatment. Yes, they still need to ambulance to show up. But if they can get a bike through fast and they can. So it's that same thing I would say you still want to mix. Because you want the whole experience sometimes but for speed and you know be able to get down the laneway in the city or. Yeah. You probably want a bit of both. I think I don't think I'd go one single way with it. Totally. That would be me. Because I think the vans and the ability for it to show up and have scale and you know that nostalgia. I mean you could even push it to have. You know, they could put chairs and tables out like how do you you could park it there for a whole day. You could increase. It could be a pop up. And they could do that as well. We got I'm going to hire Mr. Whippy for my event. And it's a whole pop up experience. So I potentially go how do you go faster nimble and more you know detailed and more engagement. Would you go as far as opening up transit lanes for Mr. Whippy's? Oh totally. Need that exercise. Just with the smiling pile of poo emoji on the ground if nothing else. We can make them rainbow lanes. I mean you can make Mr. Whippy emoji. It would be cool. The rainbow unicorn pooping. You could call him with it. Well, the monos made emoji calls. I mean, you know, I think there's enough people in the motorcycle bus lane at the moment. So I'd like to keep people out of it. I'm not sure you want to do you want to drone in Whippy? You do know what I'd like to see. I'd like to see lanes allocated by tax bracket. You know, so if you pay more tax than anyone else, you get the lane with the least traffic in it. Yeah, I'm paying for it. Yeah, absolutely. Oh yeah, because that would that would create social. I'm okay with that. Yeah, social love. Everyone would be in favour of that. Totally. Yeah, they would be stone. Yeah, you live three minutes from the city. I live an hour away. Shut up. Who sports that? Yeah, shouldn't have bought that house out. You know where you could afford it. Free will, Dan. Free will. Well, you guys killed it. You didn't do very well. Oh, we're getting a review. And so advertising, they wanted free work, just saying. Yeah, well, the thing we are actually going to package us up into a slide deck and post it out. With your permission to miss a whippy. A slide dick. Yeah, excellent. Yeah, of course. How do you miss a whippy? Yeah. One last question, when you approached this task, how did you go about it? Did you instantly just gravitate to talk together or did you both split apart and go and start it? No, for this one, we probably more for time and efficiency. We split apart, but we both actually came. So we like to go, what's the fundamental issue that we're solving, which is why we broke it down into words. It's an accessibility seasonality issue. And I think we do enough of that. Yeah. Sometimes you jump too fast into it. Well, we could make clever whippy puns because it's funny and it's pink and we could do all these fun things with it. But when you really go, what's the business problem we're solving? And when you're not paid by, we don't need them to buy an ad. We actually go, the fundamental business problem is an accessibility problem. So then you can go, well, you can dig into that. So I think we both came to the same fundamental issue that we would want to solve. So that's the process. But I think when we work, we tend to work independently and then come together. I think we like to allow each other time to get some clear thinking before we pollute each other's ideas with something one person's come up with. So I think that's actually really useful as to have that time to work independently as well as together. Some people are different, but yeah, I think we both like to have our own processing time for thinking. So that's an out technique. At the same moment, writing books or we'll kind of take bits and work on them and swap them over. So we find that highly useful. I hate brainstorming. Kill me now. Do not brainstorm. I want to stab people. Yeah, why would you want to walk into a storm? What's really a storm? It's more like a brain light shower most of the time. Well, because what happens is you end up having the same predictable ideas come up every time. As opposed to no, no, no, no, no, what if you went away independently and actually invested some time in thinking and then brought that thinking to the table as a group to test and stretch and I prefer, you know, come prepared. No, hey, we've just got you with some pizza and sugar in the in the semi and a whiteboard with some coloured markers and we all going to pretend we're creative for a minute and then the safest idea. And then we'll in the safest. Well, and then everyone's going, oh, no, it's just I don't think it's fundamentally a good strategy. And there are better methodologies to stretch people's thinking and I think some some pre-work and giving people some an idea to play with or build on or pull apart is often better than just go, okay, standing start, go, what do you got? Yeah, it's really hard in the moment for people to solve something. And again, you know, we don't do enough deep thinking, I think, or let our people do enough deep thinking. And you look different personality types. Some people really like to hang in a group and brainstorm, I think, but I think it was a convenient way to try to be efficient. I don't know if it leads to great ideas usually. Last question, do you guys have any go-to methodologies that you actually use? I mean, you mentioned just before there are some methodologies that you can kind of go to to kick off the ideation process, whatever it may be. So American process. Yeah. Well, no, just just go for it. No, I think there are. And I think there are processes that sort of become more intuitive over time. You know, again, we're referencing Simon Reynolds. You know, Simon Reynolds taught everyone who came sort of through the creative industries of that time, the Box method, which was 20 boxes on a page and I do in every box, you don't leave the table till you filled an idea in every box. And Kiran and I will do hundreds of those, typically. But what we found over time is you kind of. of you do a lot of that internally now. And what it does is it helps you not be attached to your first or your second or your third idea, but helps you get beyond that default thing. Because one of the biggest problems we have is, you know, we, the human brain is a heuristic system. In other words, we look for shortcuts, you know, and we like shortcuts. We go, well, I've solved that kind of problem in this way before, therefore I've done it very efficiently. And the problem with those shortcuts is, it doesn't get you necessarily to anything new or anything innovative. And I think having a process that allows for a volume of ideas without judgment. So get, you know, get everything out of your head, even if it's shit. And then going back and bringing judgment to the table that'll later date when you've generated volume, I think is a useful process. We use a couple of processes one we call mind the gap, which is the behavior gap. So we're really interested in what people say they do and what they actually do and what's the gap. So how do we close it? So people say, because I've heard them in research groups that they don't eat McDonald's. We all know that's a lie. And then we get a food call, we see the longest cues McDonald's. So what's going on with that? So why McDonald's have salad on the menu because we can say we get salad from McDonald's. So plausible deniability. Do you want to make that's why it's there. No one. I have ordered one once and they went to the back. He was like, oh my god, someone's ordered the salad. It's never happened before in the history of McDonald's McDonald's made this. They may go, actually we have a high volume of salads. So we use a behavior gap methodology and it can also work with, you know, what's the current behavior and what's the desired behavior and what's the gap. So, you know, current behavior is we like Mr. Whippy, but we can't actually get it. So the desired behavior is to get it readily and fast and at volume. So what's the gap? The gap successfully. And for us, the reason we caught ourselves in impossible issues is it institutes. We've got a methodology around asking an impossible question. And it was based on high school maths, which is so up until year seven or year rate, they say you can't take the square root of a negative number. Then around year seven year rate, they say, actually we're going to let the square root of negative one equal i and a whole branch of mathematics because it was possible that was before. They probably make believe in mathematics. It was awesome, right? So we do that with a lot of the problems we're looking to solve for clients is what are you not even thinking to ask because you're so limited by what you've done in the past. And, you know, so we had, you know, we were working with one of the big banks who had a problem with they had so many people on hold, being put on hold and people don't like being put on hold, they get angry and then their staff get angry and then there's this, you know, terrible circle. And they said we want you to come in and run a performance program for our people to get them, so they get people on and off the phone more quickly and we said, well, that's probably not going to help the problem. We said, what if we change the question? What if we said what would it take for people to want to be put on hold? And what that does is it allows you to get on to the other side of something impossible just to see what's what's there. And we talked about a whole bunch of days if we gamified the process. So you're in hold for two minutes, you get a reward, you're in hold for five minutes, you get a reward. We talked about getting one of the record labels in Australia. It's not worth listening to. You know, someone, you know, they get all of their artists to record an unplugged version of their song and the only place you can hear it is in their own hold music for this, this bank. People who weren't even customers would ring up and ask to be put on hold. But you only get there by being willing to suspend the limits of what's possible long enough to explore the other side. And so having, and again, people don't naturally think that way. And particularly, you know, Karen does a lot of work with the corporate world on having corporate people solve problems in why using methodologies to solve problems in ways they haven't seen before. And if they've come from an accounting background or an engineering background or manufacturing background, they don't necessarily think that they're creative. And so oftentimes you need to give people a process that helps them unlock creativity that they've got, but they've kind of shut down or ignored. We also use, I guess, a brutal honesty process we call the selling stack. So we go and look again, this is a lot of entrepreneurs and startups don't ever do this work and they don't know what they're selling. So we say, what are you literally selling? So literally at the bottom of the stack, a lot of people absolutely don't know who their customers are and what they're selling. We were working with the events industry, actually, they were a great example. And they said, we're in entertainment. And we said, well, that's really interesting. Where do you make the money when you put on like the car show or whatever? Do you make it on ticket sales at the door? And they said, no, no, we make all the money on advertisers who show up and buy a booth. And we're like, wow, that's really interesting. You're not in entertainment. You're in media. They were so upset because they like entertainment. It's sexy. It's fun. They're like, but we're creative and we're in entertainment. So the entertainment is their product, but the customer is the advertiser. They think their customers, the person coming to the event. No, no, that's the product. They're selling those items. They're not, they don't realize they're selling eyeballs. So we use that technique. So what are you literally selling? What are you emotionally selling? Which most people can work out in some level. But then we have a let's not kid ourselves. It's being brutally honest. What are you really selling? So that can become really interesting. Do they end up changing their business model on that recommendation? Yeah. There's been some interesting conversations. But again, it can be quite challenging because and a lot of people confuse product and customer. And and we're one of the issues is we tend to be more in love with our product than we are with our customer. And that's true of any industry like I you know, you know, Kiran, I have a have a leadership and training development company and we love our IP and we invest all our time in our IP. And and if we if we spend more time loving our IP than we do loving the the clients that we work with, well, that becomes a business problem because all of a sudden we have lots of IP and not a lot of sales. And and I think that and I think that but I think that's a universal thing. People naturally fall in love with their craft or their product or their service or what what they've invested, you know, their their life's profession in and not enough time in understanding. Well, actually the person who pays for this what's going on in their world and how do I how do I link really tangibly to what to what they're after? I think we've gone full circle. I'm full. You guys want to plug plug the new book plug plug your business? Sure. Where can people find you? I know. What can they buy and what services do you? Well, you can find us at the impossible institute.com. We have a new book coming out in I want to say June is it June? June. It's June. It's June. It's called Forever Skills. Future proof yourself, your team and your kids, which is all about what are the skills that will always matter no matter what happens in terms of change and technology. Yeah, it's an anti-change alternate futurist book that gives us a different perspective, which is really fun. And we offer a lot of training programs for companies that want to help people increase their influence and increase their creativity. So how do we build that? And essentially how do we change people's thinking and change the way things are done around here? That's what we spend our time and energy. So we train, we keynote speak and we write books. So we're happy to help. Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We enjoyed every second of this conversation. I think our minds have been blown. Several times. Thanks for having us. You have been listening to a son of a pitch podcast. My name is Vince and my name is Max and we're both planners living in Sydney, Australia. A big thanks to Helga Diamond and Miami-Aid School for supporting the show. And if you want to get that $100 fee waived for my Miami-Aid School, please drop us a line at podcast
[email protected]. That's podcast
[email protected]. See you next time. Bye! [Music]
PodcastTranscript AI