27 - CōLab: creativity, sideways

Speaker A: Hi, we're Nick and Toby and you're listening to Private Views, a, uh, podcast by Ask Us for Ideas. Each episode we invite the most forward thinking brand leaders and creatives to discuss business creativity and how the two can work together.

Speaker B: I think that's what really, uh, the key to a client agency relationship is, is to create a sense of partnership, psychological safety to go. I want you to be wrong every once in a while and to create that trust and transparency through honesty. What agencies have to also understand is we have to be more honest. Um, creativity is not a linear line to effectiveness or growth.

Speaker A: On this episode we chat about the evolving nature of startup creativity with someone who's witnessing it firsthand. Our guest is Brian Wakabayashi, head of brand at colab, the internal creative studio for private equity firm Westcap. He's had a relatively unconventional path into his role, starting out pushing milk carts and ordering pens as a receptionist at a small California agency before working for some of the most respected names in advertising. We're talking FCB, TBWA, McCann, and BBDO at Colab. Uh, he's part of something entirely different. A creative team that doesn't bill by the hour, doesn't compete for pictures, and has no incentive to oversell creative work. Instead, they're embedded into Wes Cap's investment strategy, meaning their success is directly tied to the business growth of the startups they support. In our conversation, Brian discusses the art of coming at problems sideways, why startups need a particular kind of creative approach if they want to succeed, and why, paradoxically, safety can lead to braver creative work.

Speaker C: Brian, I thought we could start off and you could give us a quick speed run of your career so far because you've gone from working in the creative industry and now you're working in the creative industry still, but in a slightly different way. So give us the quick backstory.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, I mean, I think I fell into the creative industry. Uh, I graduated with an English lit degree, which was sort of majoring in being unemployed. Uh, 2001. And right after 9 11, there were fewer jobs. I worked in sales briefly and I hated that. I worked in finance briefly. Uh, it was fine, but it was the most boring job I ever had. And then I, I wound up at an internship at a small agency in Southern California. At the time was known as dgwb. And then the first job I got there was a receptionist and I ordered the pens and lunch for the executives. I pushed, uh, the milk cart. Um, and I loved it. And it was like my, you know, it Was sort of like, uh, it didn't make any sense, but I was like, I'm just going to do this. Even though I made less money at that job than I did waiting tables in college. So it, um, it turned into five years. I was a junior, um, strategist when I left. And then I became, and I went to, on the FCB draft. FCB to work on Taco Bell. And then from there moved, uh, to Texas to work for tbwa, uh, group called the Energy Group. Um, and then back to, back to California to uh, to work at McCann. Um, and just you know, from there I worked at like I think six. This is my seventh agency. It's been 22 years, I think to date myself a little bit. But it's been, it's been fun. It's. I've always, I've always sort of like felt like the, the whole point of a career is to enjoy it. Uh, before I was smart enough to realize you also should care about money then, um, you have kids, then you start caring about money in there. But, um, I think it was just always like it. The job seemed more fun than other jobs. It didn't really seem like, you know what I imagined working was interesting.

Speaker C: That's massive. Massive. Highly respected names in the creative field. And I feel like you don't actually often hear of people that started on reception pushing the cart, doing those jobs and then work their way up in the way that you have. I wondered if uh, that. Do you think that's given you a different perspective on things?

Speaker B: Yeah, I absolutely do. Um, I didn't study any business or advertising. Uh, I think I did a lot of stuff without knowing I was not good at it. I think I had uh, my first job. I was there for five years. Small, um, agency. So they let me do anything I wanted because they didn't pay me anything. So they're like, well, if you're going to do it, might as well do it. So I worked in media. I uh, worked in studio. The, uh, creative studio. Uh, the. That's back when we still used to mount boards and, and build mechanicals and quark. Uh, I worked in account management. I worked in events. Um, I worked in accounting briefly. Uh, all this while sort of like just, you know, juggling, you know, uh, a second job. Well, not the whole time, but the first year I had a second job waiting tables on the weekend because I made so little money. And I think the, the thing that it teaches you is like none of this stuff is hard. It's just. It's yes, it's hard to do well, but the basics of it are relatively simple. You can say, oh yeah, I can do that. You can go home and figure it out and ask people for help and then they will teach you how to do it and you'll practice it and get it wrong a few times and then start getting it halfway right. And it just taught me not to fear things. I hate the term fake it till you make it, but there is a kernel of truth to it. Um, I think you have to figure out that the world is not as complicated as we make it seem.

Speaker C: Brian, you've kind of recounted the foundation of your career so far. Obviously now you're at Colab, that's the internal creative team for Westcap. And I think it'd be great for our listeners to learn a bit more about exactly how Colab works within Westcap, how it works with the portfolio companies, how integrated it is, how separate. Lay it out for us, tell us how it works.

Speaker B: Yeah, and this is going to sound very clear and sort of very designed, but I think it's a lot messier than that. But so, uh, I'll preface it by saying I think we're still figuring out we're a work in progress five years in. But at the same time it's like. I think the fundamental difference with Colab and other agencies is that we are creative studio reimagined for startups. We were born inside of a private equity firm and the notion was our, our general partner, our founder Lawrence, uh, Tosi, goes by lt. Um, imagine the world he came out of, uh, Airbnb, uh, he was CFO there, exited and decided to start his own firm. And he, and, and the notion there was he would take the best things that drove growth out of all the companies he's worked with and for and sort of combine them into a, a machine that helps drive startup growth for growth stage startups. And one of those is brand, uh, growth product. Um, these are the sort of things that sort of like get encapsulated in Colab. So we like to talk about ourselves as brand product and marketing and the disciplines within that are essentially chosen for relevance to growth stage startups. My title was Head of Brand because it was originally brand strategy. But I learned really quickly like startups don't really care about strategy. Or at least they, they profess not to care about strategy. They do care about strategy, I don't think. I mean if you talk to most, uh, startups, they just, they're like, let's get to the Point. Let's, let's like actually execute and do something to change the business right away. So telling them you're going to spend four to six weeks on strategy sounds crazy to them. They're like, why are you spending so much time in strategy? Why don't we just do things and see if it sticks? Because if you think about tech startups, it's more of a model of like, it's an iterative model. It's like, oh, let's just put it up and see if it works and if it doesn't, let's kill it. The problem with that is what it does is it starts to funnel everything towards a short term impact tactic. So if you only just try things for a few weeks, take it down. If it didn't drive results right away, there's not enough time to really figure out like did it actually drive another result you weren't measuring? Or did it drive something long term but not something short term? So you have to sort of train them into strategy. Now they do understand brand. So when we changed our practice name it was to move away from just being seen as sort of this like extra luxury that large companies have to be. Brand is brand is strategy. Brand is also uh, creative. And so a lot of times we define brand as not just strategy but just it's a strategy but it's also copy, uh, it's also messaging. It's also um, the way you go to market in sales. It's the, the first four slides of a sales deck or whatever those things are.

Speaker C: You said there's something interesting. You were talking about how startups would probably balk at this idea of, you know, four to six weeks of strategy. And I'm um, now that you're kind of working so much in this startup world, I'm interested if you think in general they need a different kind of creativity or a different approach to creativity or a different sort of agency partnership.

Speaker B: Well, it's, what's interesting is we still, we still actually sell the 46 weeks of strategy to them. But I have to explain it like why we need, we need this time. And I tell them, I'm like, listen, I can give you a strategy tomorrow, but what? Anyone? What I'll uh, but to be really blunt, what I'm going to be doing is guessing without any real rigor behind those guesses. I think in that, in that um, that start stage, it's, that's the most interesting stage because it's a transition. You know, you really can't do too much strategy for A seed stage startup that is going to last very long because they have to be able to pivot. They might have position, you might position them entirely around value. And then they decide, you know, it's all going to be about, you know, we're changing our business model entirely. We're going to a freemium model or we're, we're going to sell something else, or we're moving into a different category. Our audience is going to shift. That happens all the time. I don't think strategy breaks at any level for startups. I think it has to be nimble and you have to be able to do it in different ways. I, uh, think I was talking to somebody and it's like you could sort of see it as if you were, um, uh, sort of a professional sort of sports league coach, NBA coach, an NFL coach or you know, premier league coach or manager. Uh, you would, you would start to go like, there are high level concepts that you deploy. And then suddenly on the weekend, maybe you're coaching your, your kids teams now, you're not gonna sit, you're not gonna do the same things, but the principles can sort of be applied differently, I think. But a lot of times you're like, okay, before we start talking about, you know, semiotics analysis or anything, we're going to start with the rule basics, like, is your message clear and consistent and concise across all your touch points? And you start to, you know, teach someone how to dribble before you teach them a triangle offense. And I think that's sort of what you're doing, um, with, with, you know, like some of those higher concepts in mind. You, you, but you, you really don't want to walk into a founder's office and be like, let's talk about, you know, uh, your brand archetype before you've even figured out the proposition for the product. Which is something. And this is the thing I think, I think agency strategists that come from big shops, they tend to skip over things. They tend to just sort of accept that like the product's been figured out or that the target's been defined, because it usually has. You know, when we're selling, um, you know, I worked on tacos and cars and ETFs, and every time you walk in, they, they've already figured out who buys the product, why they buy it. You can put some nuance to that and you can definitely put some insight into that and maybe you can even shift it every once in a while. But generally speaking, there's sort of an immature business there. And with startups a lot of times you're selling something to someone and it's a new transaction or a new journey and you really have to start there before you get to the brand. You have to sort of go like, well let's, let's talk about what this product is, um, uh, really what job it's solving or uh, what job it's doing, what problem it's solving.

Speaker C: Brian, I think it'd be interesting to know. Tell me about what a sort of typical engagement for Colab looks like and some of the things that you're doing in your job and how you're working with some of these early stage businesses. Uh, I'd love to know sort of some of the challenges that they're facing and how Colab is really well placed to solve them or how it's helping people kind of find the way through those difficult problems.

Speaker B: I should, I should start with saying that like we are not a typical agency in that we do not work on billable hours or fee. So most of our clients are portfolio companies of Westcap, our parent company and for, and we are part of the investment. So if Westcap invests in company A, they will sort of say we are going to invest capital but we're also going to invest creativity or talent support or you know, engineering support. Colab is part of that investment. So we will come in and since we don't charge, we don't have this sort of inherent need to like take on assignments that we don't think are right. So we'll have a conversation and we always have start with an intake and we'll sort of ask the questions like what problems are you trying to solve? And like typically most clients will come to you with like uh, oh, we want to name this product or we want to a new brand design or we want uh, our product needs to be refreshed uh, by product. Usually it's digital products, so screens, mobile apps, et cetera. Uh, and sometimes we'll just sort of figure that out and go like, you know, I'm not sure this is what you need and, and give them a different path. Um, so we usually always start with an intake to understand like one. Is it something that they really need? Is it critical to their founder and CEO? Is it something that we think are actually going to drive their business? You know we'll also be transparent about budgets because even though we don't charge fee, there are production budgets for deliverables. So if they' to shoot a TV spot for Instance you have to go to outside production company. All those things have to be sort of discussed and I'll sort of be like hey, like this is sort of where the break point is on quality. If you go below this, you'll start to get something that feels like it's below that level or you know, and you'll start to like be able to have honest conversations. And you know, I've worked on stuff um, as costly as 2point something million and I've worked on stuff that costs less than $20,000 to shoot. And yeah, you can still have an idea, it could still be great. But there is signaling effect in production value. So I'll say listen, if you, if you are positioning yourself as premium, maybe like move into a different medium until you can afford a premium deliverable in this execution. Otherwise you're signaling that you're not what you say you are. So we'll have those conversations in very honest terms. And it doesn't really, to me it doesn't, it doesn't change our financial outlook at all. Whether someone spends zero money or lots of money, it's really about what is that impact. Um, because essentially our compensation is tied to their valuations and that, what that really means is as they grow their company is worth more and ultimately the West Cap benefits and collab benefits. So we don't necessarily want to do work just to do more work. We're trying to do work that makes a difference, uh, that actually drive sales, that actually drives long term value. Um, and that doesn't always mean short term sales. It could mean just um, and you know, prestige in the category or what have you. I think it's, it's uh, it's changed, it changes what you sell and how you sell it. It's definitely about like being more consultative and, and just sort of figuring out what their business is before we go in with a, ah, with a creative solve.

Speaker C: So Brian, it's a very different situation to when you were working at agencies where obviously I'm sure companies are very aware how much are we billing, what clients are we winning? Now you're in this much kind of freer situation almost where you can be really radically honest about what needs to be done and what's going to make a difference without having to worry about that. And uh, do you think that that has changed how you think about creative work or how you approach creative work? Is your relationship slightly different as a result?

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: I mean um, first the, the first thing that you notice really quickly is the client relationship is different. Um, I think that when you first meet them, you meet them as part of the team that invested in their business. So there is a deeper sense of partnership versus okay, you know, there's a power relationship, agency client relationships that's very much like it's one way with, with us. It's like, oh, well, we can help you, but we have no real bias towards ourselves. Like, there's no, like we are the best solution for everything. We've said no to a lot of things. We said no to things that we're not good at. We've said no to things that we just don't think will work. You know, we're like, this is not the right time to be doing X, Y and Z. So I, we don't think we'll support it. Um, and, and it's not to be. And we're definitely not, you know, aloof or arrogant around it. We'll, we'll be honest, you know, and transparent. We'll be like, I'm not sure this is the, the right time to invest in this or this feels like it might be, you know, premature. Uh, half of our jobs is to, is to move towards solving the client's problems internally. Because startups at the growth stage, they have a board, they have investors, they have people they have to report to and those people are going to determine whether they're funded next year, next quarter or whenever the next raise is. And if you can't sell in the value of creativity at that level, so not even to the CEO, but beyond, you're essentially setting yourself up to fail. You sort of start to think like uh, less like a marketer and more like a, just like an overall business owner or investor inside of, inside of creativity. So you go, what is the role creativity plays in driving the business forward? You value it, but you sort of think about it in different ways. Let's say it's a lever for things. It's not just, it's a means to an end. And so you start to see the whole picture. You start to see that like, you know, you could have a great campaign and the business can flail the next quarter. So how do you do so in a way that you could have a great campaign and, or a great redesign or a great product redesign or product launch and make sure that it's connected or tied into the outcomes of the business for long term growth.

Speaker C: You're describing that Colab works in this very embedded way. You're kind of independent, but you're embedded, which is a lovely place to be in. I Think what we've seen ask us for ideas is a lot of agencies really want to be in a way more embedded with their clients. They don't just want to be there working on a nice campaign at the end of things. They want to really get into the data and understand what, why are sales dropping, what's going on in the business that uh, are causing these challenges? Can we look at your product? Can we tweak things about the product? Can we change things about the hands on experience? Do you think the businesses are more open to that now or is that still a big challenge for them to invite in an external agency and say yes, come and have a look at things and you know, go beyond the original brief and go beyond the creative stuff that we might originally consider you for?

Speaker B: Um, this answer might sort of seem, uh, not controversial, but it's going to seem a little. So I'm an agency person, like I've loved it never I, you know, flirted with going clients that a few times and each time I was what I discovered there I didn't want. And so I love being on the agency side and I love it because it changes and you get to be very deep but very broad in the sense that like I had a very uh, or you have a specialized job, you're a creative or a strategist. You know, you're not like a broad, you know, you're not like a generalist. You have you know, production or account management. There's some thing you can get to become like really great at, but you're also doing it for you know, over time, dozens or hundreds of clients. The problem with that is that you don't develop certain instincts uh, that, that clients need to really trust you to bring you into their business in that way. And I think that the best um, analogies I'll give you is like they're happy to let, you know, consultants into their business deeply. They're happy to give over all the data to Bain, McKinsey, et cetera. And it's because they don't approach from the lens of one deliverable or one solution. They don't have an inherent bias towards anything. They're just. And now you could argue about the effectiveness of Bain or McKinsey. Um, but putting all that aside, it's like they're there, there's an inherent credibility gap, uh, if you're an ad agency because what you make is ads. So your answer is usually ads. So I think you have to start from a different place. So for agencies looking to change how they, how they, uh, their relationship with clients. I think one, you have to sort of have a different mix of people. So Collab again has half, half. Half of half of the collaborators. People look like me in that they've spent most of their career at agencies. But the other half are people who have never worked in agencies and don't really consider Colab an agency. I think we do because, like, we're in that world. But really they think about Colab as a consultancy or a marketing department or, you know, uh, we're, we're sort of an extension of Westcap. And it ranges from our team because there are people, again, who have worked for, you know, Google, Airbnb, um, Square, uh, and they will come here and we'll sort of go, we are sort of like tech startup marketing experts or design experts or product experts. Not, you know, and they don't have an agency mindset. They're literally doing the jobs that our clients are doing now or used to do the jobs that our clients are doing now. And so there's a little bit more like, oh, let me show you these frameworks. Let me show you how I did it here. And that trust is built really quickly and that credibility, uh, arrives really quickly. And I think that's how you have to sort of think about, um, is difficult, frankly. Like, I call myself a strategist, but until this job, and I've been here about four years now, I think I was really, you know, I was, I was a very specialized kind of strategist. So for 20 years I tried to become great at building strategy that led to creative work. But that's not the only sort of flavor of strategy that a business needs. And now it wasn't necessarily great at like, overall marketing or business strategy because I wasn't choosing media, um, I wasn't planning investments, I wasn't thinking about metrics as deeply. Um, I am now. But it's, um. So in many ways it's like when you work for startups, um, I always joke that, like, everyone gets flattened into marketers.

Speaker C: I think it's so interesting, this idea of niche or specialist versus generalist. And I feel like people flex through the creative disciplines much more than they used to. People used to maybe be a lot more, you're an ad guy and that was what you did for your life, or, I don't know, you're a brilliant, uh, design director or I feel like now everything's become a lot more permeable. Would you agree with that? Does it feel that skills are kind of bleeding into one another. And I don't know if I think that's good or bad or I don't really know which it is.

Speaker B: You know, I mean it's both. You know, there's a world in which I would have been happy to do what I was doing 10 years ago forever. You know, there's, there's ah, uh, I was definitely specialized in specifically not even brand strategy, like campaign strategy for a long time, um, coming up with a great insight, uh, a great campaign, um, brief, um, designing the briefing. So to be inspiring and interesting and engaging for creatives, selling that brief through to clients, like those are the aspects where literally you spend more time and effort doing a smaller and smaller thing so you become really good at it. However, I think the world right now, um, I saw a lot of my professional friends are from the agency world and I see that in order to be viable, uh, moving forward, you can't sort of have, it's very difficult to have one, one sort of product mindset to sort of think about the world as like, well, the answer is always a TV spot or the answer is always a website or whatever that, you know, whatever your specialization is, you really do have to figure out how to at least at some level, sort of broaden into everything. Now you don't want to sell everything. You're still going to be good at one thing or the other. But if you don't understand the rest of the world around it, you're going to be increasingly frustrated with client, um, responses to, you know, so even if you do continue to just sell websites or TV spots or performance campaigns or whatever it is, if you don't understand the rest of the media landscape, how it's shifting, how you know, the performance versus brand debate is shaping, if you don't really understand what clients are going through, um, the pressures they're under, uh, the complexity of the choices they have to make, then you're probably not going to be able to sell the one thing anymore. And so I think it's, it is more permeable. I would say it's like how do we take stuff that used to be just directed at creative briefs and turn it into other outputs? I think that is something that's really true and permeable is a good way to think about it. Like we get asked for things we've never done before all the time now.

Speaker C: But it's interesting what you're saying about how that interface between creativity in the client actually needs to be changed slightly. Maybe it's been a bit too rigid Historically. And there need to be different ways of finding out what clients really want that are a bit less directional.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And it's funny because I think there's this, uh, one of our. One of our portfolio company, um, executives told uh, this joke that like, uh, consulting is the art of asking the client for their watch and then telling them what time it is. Which is like a. It's an old joke. But I think a little too often we can default as strategists, uh, to like, you know, just asking questions and really sort of trying to understand the client through their words directly. I think it is nice when we can get outside of that and try to break them down into. Into revealing things without necessarily directly revealing them. So there's a couple things that I love. Uh, one, we do a lot of workshops now. Uh, it started in Covid, for sure, because it's like, usually you sort of get that by going out to the client, hanging out with them, having dinner, and maybe over dinner and drinks, stuff will come out and you'll be like, oh, this is what's really happening. When you're stripped of that. You have to sort of figure out a way to create that without in like an hour block of time. We've been using figjam and uh, creative exercises and, you know, all sorts of things to try to get at that without necessarily directly asking the question, hey, what do you think we should do? Because that's really not a thing you want the client to dictate. Because at the end of the day, yeah, you know, their input is key, but you also are trying to figure out their internal metaphors. They're, they're sort of like repeated. The things, the language they repeat over and over again internally, that sort of becomes a sacred cow. You, you're trying to find, uh, the language they use to describe the problem, the competition. If you don't put somebody on the spot, like if you put, you know, a client or anybody on the spot in the moment and go, hey, what do you think we should do with the business? They have an agenda. They have to protect their department budget, they have to go their pet projects, et cetera, and they're going to give you an answer that supports that. But if you ask them to go, okay, hey, we're going to have you role play as Nike, or you're going to have your role play as McDonald's, and we're going to solve the same problem through another company's lens, or we're going to ask you to choose. We're going to Write seven blocks of copy in different voices. And we're going to have you sort of interrogate those. Or, uh, we're going to have you do, you know, lateral thinking exercises where you're going to free associate different, you know, images or metaphors that apply to this. Then, you know, they can't really, you know, it's like it sort of tricks the brain into going, let's just be honest, uh, and give a response rather than going like, what response is going to help further my agenda in this moment? And if you get to that, then maybe you get to something good.

Speaker C: It's funny, I was thinking as you were talking, I did a short story writing course at the beginning of the year and one of the things that was just kind of hammered into us was when you're writing a great short story doesn't just go straight to the heart of whatever it's trying to say. It comes at things slant. And I remember our tutor just kept saying, glancing blows, glancing blows come at things slant. It's the way that you don't come at things directly head on. You kind of find your way around to them, them. And it really reminds me of exactly what you're saying, which is that to get good creative work and to understand the heart of a business, you also kind of need to come at them slant and get these truths and beliefs out of clients that they maybe don't even know that they have themselves somehow. And that feels like a really lovely way to think about creative work and what you do.

Speaker B: That's a really great analogy. I love that the old stereotype is that strategists and creatives are sort of enemies, naturally, because on some level, strategists try to order a chaotic world and, you know, creatives are going to try to put some chaos into the order. But what I think is like, having worked as like a pure strategist where I just sold strategy and when I was independent, I started a small, uh, company and I was just selling strategy and I realized how boring I found it. Without Creatives. There is a certain amount of. I like having creative partners that will take a brief and then I know that the round is good in the, in the icr, in the internal creative review, when I'm like, oh, that's surprising, or I never thought of that, or I couldn't have seen that. And I know that the work needs more work when they bring back what I imagined from my brief. Um, so I think there is the glancing blows. The slant is the right sort of metaphor. I think it's sort of, you do have to like find a different way. You can't logic your way into great creative. There has to be a feeling. I think there's a little bit of that spontaneity that has to happen and it comes from a place that isn't always conscious. And that's. Yeah, I think that is the key to great work. I think um, it's, it's even in, in things that aren't considered sort of high craft work. In uh, maybe it's an investor presentation or a ah, sales deck. Uh, there are moments where you're like oh actually let's not say that, let's say this, let's not be so logical about it. You do have to have a spine of logic in a lot of things. But then inside of that you can do a lot.

Speaker C: So I think Brian, creativity is this lovely, wonderful, beautiful, effective thing. I um, think effective is the word that can make it difficult because ultimately if you're making commercial creative work it does have to do something. And in your job you know that very well because you're working very closely with these portfolio companies. So I wondered how do you quantify the success of your creative work?

Speaker B: It's interesting, I will say the answer to all questions is it depends. Um, I think it depends on the portfolio company and the problem they're trying to solve. The way I think we personally sort of try to answer uh, that question is we don't apply one single metric to everything. But we will start to think about are we solving the problem and is that problem unblocking growth? Because ultimately to, to be blunt, like Westcap invests in companies and they expect those dollars to grow uh, you know, at a percentage point so that you know, our invest, the investors in Westcap will make more than they put in. And so ultimately valuation growth is the metric. But how you calculate valuation growth because we're investors will sort of think about well what do other investors look at before they invest in a company? And so those things do tie back to growth. Now what we started to think about is on the road to that. It could be now it could be very direct. There are times where we're actually working on investor decks so presentations to talk about and share the story of a company. And that's very like the audience is other investors. Uh, there are times where we are working on marketing or consumer facing uh, uh, initiatives where the impact is going to be. You know one uh, of our projects was to redesign a landing page, basically product design project. And we, we saw you know double digit lifts in conversion. So you know, going from 5% to you know, 13 conversion is a humongous change in the business if you can get, if you can convert more with uh, the same number of uh, people visiting. So I think it really does depend but in it philosophically because we're kind of again like I said, like I've been talking a lot about the creative side in terms of the traditional creative side because that's the side of the business I live on. But we also have you know, a uh, deep discipline in like product marketing, uh, in product management and helping people think through a roadmap to think about product features and how they work. And you'll start to see different metrics entirely and you'll start to go well are we solving the problem? There was a problem with usability with this product. Did we actually get people to spend more time using the product or get more engagement on those features? And I think that's an interesting thing because we are diverse in that sense that we're solving different kinds of problems. So you'll start to see lots of different ways of defining success. And so we try to just go, okay, it's not going to be one size fits all, um, it's going to have to be defined a little bit more qualitatively and quantitatively. But the metrics will shift every time.

Speaker C: And just to finish our chat, you've got so much exceptional experience, you've worked with amazing brands drawing on all of those things. I wondered what your kind of closing piece of advice would be for brands that want to build better relationships with their agencies and make better creative work together as a result.

Speaker B: I think it's interesting because I think the biggest blocker of creativity is fear. Years ago Google did a study on high performing teams, um, and uh, they had PhDs and a team of researchers do a study of tens of thousands of people over years to see what was the marker of a high performing team. And I promise this will get back to the agency question in a second. But the highest performing teams weren't people who all looked alike or were entirely diverse or um, lived in the same area or spent more time together or socialized the most. All these theories like were, were tried and disproven. Uh, what they found in, that happened in the highest performing teams is that they had a high degree of, of, of safety on the team, psychological safety. And what safety allowed people to do was to try things fail but to know that the team had their back, that the team would not abandon them if they tried something or they were bold or they were courageous. And I think creativity is one of the most fragile things that you can try to make a job. Um, if you think about children, if they are free and they are running around in a classroom and you ask them to color, um, something they might, you know, make the giraffes red and the elephants green and they might do all sorts of things that are highly interesting and they see as creative. As soon as you tell them that they did it wrong and that they are not good at this, then suddenly, and then you tell them how to do it, their creativity dies and they start to become, you know, uh, automatons and do what you told them to do. I think that's what really the key to a client agency relationship is, is to create a sense of partnership and psychological safety to go, I want you to be wrong every once in a while and to create that trust and transparency through honesty. What agencies have to also understand is we have to be more honest. Um, creativity is not a linear line to effectiveness or growth. Uh, just like anything else, like if you think about movie studios, you know, or record labels, the, you know, you could invest in a great artist and have an album flop, or you can invest in something that shouldn't work and have it become the greatest hit of the summer. There is a certain amount of randomness, uh, probability. Ah. And uh, just, you know, you can't unpredictability about anything that relies on human beings to collectively sort of make a decision. So I think that's, it's important to go, we think this will work. We have this evidence. But it may, you know, outperform or underperform. And the important thing is that you don't put all your belief in one thing, that you continue to, uh, you know, over time, I think, continue to uh, raise the bar on yourself and the brand and to hold yourself, uh, your standards higher and higher. And people will, over time, you know, m. If you put out one idea, then it may not work. And then you go, well, creativity didn't work. And that's, that's a lot of unfortunately what happens in bad client relationships. But I think if you, if you start to build the trust to go, we've done this effectively for a lot of clients where we've been consistent over the years. And if you work with us and if we build a long term partnership, we will continue to put out song after song, movie after movie, and you will continue to build a reputation for, you know, excellence, then it does change, you know, it does change your brand in the course of the business. And now if you think about any examples of great brands, you know, there's been a lot of mistakes along the way. There are a lot of forgettable forgotten brands or uh, or campaigns from Apple, Nike, whoever you want to Coke you want to point to and go, well, that didn't work. But they never sort of lost faith in the ability for creativity move their business and that the idea that excellent work is going to bring excellent results over time, not, you know, sometimes excellent work goes out in the world and flops and sometimes mediocre work somehow becomes the most talked about campaign in the world. But if you're, you know, generally speaking over time excellence is going to work. And I always, last thing I'll say is like, you know, people talk about like, I don't know, Steph Curry or uh, is one of the greatest three point shooters of all time and he misses 60% of the shots. So you have to understand that there is a certain amount of like being confident and being able to forget that you just missed three shots in a row. And to go this next one's going in is sort of how greatness is, is going to happen. Like you're not going to turn a brand around with one campaign or one moment. Building that trust, building that faith in each other. I think building that relationship that says I believe in your abilities. Uh, I think that's the advice I would give clients. And for agencies, you know, I think I would say be more honest, try to be more vulnerable. Um, no one is going to buy you because you're slick and, and you know, shiny, uh, and telling, telling people there's certainty in a world that there is no certainty. I think you just have to be a little bit more honest and vulnerable.

Speaker A: That was Colab, um, Head of brand Brian Wakabayashi talking with Ask Us for Ideas Head of content Emma Tucker. Thanks to you for listening to James Green for editing this episode and to George Grindling for the theme music hit. Subscribe to be the first to hear new episodes. And for more about how Ask Us for Ideas helps brands find agencies, visit us, uh, @aufi.com.