Failure is an option

Various themes emerged throughout the 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Ignoring the trends along the beach, the 3000-strong crowd shifting from the infamous Gutter Bar to the supposedly more refined Carlton Terrace, and the frightening reduction in numbers of delegates in creative roles while the festival becomes inundated with non-creative MDs, CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, COOs and CMOs, let me focus on common threads of the inspirational seminars. After all, that’s what the CWOs (Chief Whatever Officers) are there for. Surely it's not the rosé.

Several seminars exposed the tension between the vocal proponents of big-data and those of big-ideas. It would seem those in favour of the industry saying less about big data and getting back to the business of ideas gained most favourable applause. From Hegarty deriding “I don’t care if you call it data, big data, white data or whatever the fuck you like” to Chuck Porter, co-founder of rockstar agency CP+B, warning us against believing big data and analytics are a substitute for creativity. Even renowned WPP business tycoon and data-watcher, Sir Martin Sorrell said “It’s still about big ideas, whether it’s driven by data or not.”

Others contributed to the industry conversation of technology being used as a crutch in lieu of an idea, just two weeks after Australia’s Cummins & Partners produced the spoof video ‘The World's First Crowd Sourced 3D Printed QR Code, Live Streamed Via Go Pro To A Smart Phone Or Tablet Device, Drone Delivery Ticket System Project’ – look it up on YouTube. In the festival’s Debussy Theatre, Contagious’ Nick Parish and Will Sansom told us that technology should serve creativity not creativity serve technology, while Chuck Porter claimed “Every new technology is just another way to do brilliant work” and advised us to let the ideas come first.

However, across many seminars on several stages, speakers seemed intent on building an industry-wide culture in which failure is good. Perhaps because failure is one of the few things we all have in common.

Those in favour of failure included celebrity speakers from astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson to the more-wieldy titled actor/musician/director/producer/businessman/artist Jared Leto. The latter telling us “You achieve more from failure than you do from success”, while the famous Pluto-killing scientist said “If you stop making mistakes, you are no longer on the frontier. Because the mistakes you would make are mistakes no one would have ever made before.”

Does DeGrasse Tyson think his demotion of Pluto counts as a mistake from which he has learned? Well, he hasn’t declassified any other orbital bodies since. Hmmm.

At a festival so imbued with success, failure seems an illogical topic. All along the Croisette, delegates ask each other how many campaigns they have listed and how many converted. Chief Creative Officers (the most appropriate CWOs to attend the festival) make trophy tallies as a kind of Lion leaderboard. And the festival itself centres around the world’s largest advertising award show in which the best of the best, the cream of the crop, the top of the pops, are given metal lions. The winning work is scrutinized and shared by thousands around the world, to glean insights, be inspired, and hopefully beat next year.

Seemingly surrounded by so much success, it seems odd that so many are talking about learning from failure rather than triumph.

Of the 37,427 entries into Cannes Lions 2014, just 3.05% converted to a bit of shiny metal, which leaves a whole lot of lessons to be learned by everyone else – 36,285 to be precise.

But not winning a trophy doesn’t necessarily count as a true failure because so many of the unsuccessful entries were incredibly creative and effective pieces of work. As Dave Droga put it: “If it doesn’t win, it doesn’t mean it’s not great.” It just didn’t win. And sometimes that comes down to just one of 25 jury members (or 1 of 40 jurors for the Media Lions). The margins could be as little as 0.001 of a point in the scoring.

While all those unsuccessful entrants will certainly walk away with a few valuable lessons on what it takes to do better next year – perhaps summed up with another Jared Leto quote: “the bridge between a dream and reality… is work” – the real lessons are happening on the job with campaigns that flopped, fell, and failed.

Within our industry, failure is more commonplace than we let on. We only share the successes, produce case study videos of our hottest work, and fill our agency websites and personal portfolios with our best ideas.

But we’ve all had a big flop or two. Anyone who says they haven’t is probably hiding a doozy.

On the main stage in the Palais this year, a collective of highly awarded creatives from South America provided a breath of fresh air and a healthy reality check by introducing themselves as failures and showcasing their worst campaigns ever.

Presided by Sergio Alcocer, CCO of Latinworks, the seminar included Guga Ketzer, CCO of Loducca, the most awarded Ibero-American agency in the world for two years in a row; Felix del Valle, Creative General Manager of Contrapunto, the most awarded agency at the 2012 AMPE and El Sol Festival; and Nicolás Pimental, Innovation Director at +Castro Buenos Aires, one of Advertising Age’s “Creatives You Should Know” in 2012 – so clearly three men who know a thing or two about winning.

And they had all screwed up.

From a social campaign that lasted all of 3 seconds before it literally broke the internet, to an attempt at wearable tech for marathon runners that bravely/foolishly went untested and caused mayhem when it utterly failed to accurately record run times for thousands of participants (supposedly quite an important thing at a public marathon), and lastly a personal story of a three-week relationship that ended in bitter tears every month for 12 months as the credit card bills arrived.

They imparted such wisdom as “Failure is the information that is not available to everyone. This makes it the most valuable information.” And “Experience is the best benefit of failure”

Amid obvious camaraderie between the three, plenty of laughs, and exuberant storytelling, the trio had actually produced award-entry-style case study videos for their campaigns that sucked. Each presenter detailing the valuable lesson he had learned from such a public catastrophe, lessons we could all take home: test your tech before you deploy it, double-check the capacity of your servers, and never ever buy an expensive car stereo for a woman who is way out of your league. OK, so maybe that last one is more metaphoric.

Felix said “Learn from your own failure. Nobody is going to fail for you.”

My own career has been peppered with a few failures. One was an exhaustive 12-month production of an expensive, highly-technical and complex internet-based contest that ended in only 8 days when two hackers beat us at our own game – and we still have no idea how they did it.

The lesson here was to never, ever underestimate the intelligence or resourcefulness of the consumer.

But lessons and mistakes have a way of hiding themselves sometimes, for I managed to learn the above lesson yet again, 2 years later, when a social competition for a completely different brand also finished in just 3 days after participants managed to guess the exact locations of what we thought were the most obscure and seemingly cunning images of the tiniest, most insignificant and unrecognizable details of places around London.

The lesson has subsequently been revised to never, ever underestimate the intelligence or resourcefulness of the consumer.

As Michael Caine’s Alfred Pennyworth imparted to Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne: “Why do we fall, sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up again.”

Alfred’s words could easily be the motto of Wieden+Kennedy, one of the world’s largest and most successful independent ad agencies. Since opening its doors in 1982 in Portland, Oregon, the agency has built a seemingly-healthy culture of acceptance of failure that now spreads across its network of nine offices.

On-stage, three W+K Creatives spoke lovingly of how their agency allows them to embrace failures, share the mistakes, and grow from the experiences.

Colleen Decourcy, Global ECD, fondly recalled her job interview with founder Dan Wieden when he told her “Until you’ve failed three times, you are no use to me.” The wisdom of Wieden was that we learn our most valuable lessons from failure, being able to improve ourselves and ensure we never make similar mistakes again.

While it might be hard to replicate a success, it is stupid to replicate a failure.

Mark Fitzloff, also Global ECD, recounted his early days as a junior Copywriter at W+K in 2000 when he wrote an ad for Nike that, having outraged consumers and disability-advocacy groups, AdWeek called the fifth most offensive ad of the decade.

As the story goes, Dan Wieden apologized to Nike and, rather than dismiss Mark, let him learn from this error in judgment.

Missing from this parable is any learning W+K might have had from failures in their approval procedure, because a junior writer certainly can’t send an ad live without at least 10 other, more senior and hopefully experienced, staffers being part of that ad’s development and deployment. Or several clients.

While many clearly think failure is OK, surely this is an era when failure may indeed not be OK given the explosive nature of social media, especially during times of outrage.

I doubt a junior copywriter would be afforded the same leniency and benefit of a ‘fail to succeed’ philosophy in today’s world of social amplification. When the village becomes a global crowd tweeting pitchforks and posting burning torches, it’s hard for any brand – client or agency – to turn to each other atop the ramparts and eruditely say “Now, what have we learned from this?”

Or does an amplified mistake amplify the lesson?

With the stakes so much higher, some agencies and clients are probably being a little more risk-averse, but you can never truly avoid failures. Failures are like party-crashers. They always find a way in. And you’re the one who has to work out how to remove the Escalade from the swimming pool.

But party-crashers only try to crash the parties that have a chance of going big.

If we want our campaigns to go big, we have to go big. We have to embrace the risk. We have to free ourselves from the fear of failure.

As one of Wieden+Kennedy’s cultural philosophies says: “Failure and mistakes are necessary to create groundbreaking ideas.”

So go. Fail. Repeat.