The new rules of brand building

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

NEIL ARTHUR: People will challenge companies to understand what they believe on topics that they never would have before, right? All of a sudden, in your feed on whatever platform you’re using, a brand is showing up right behind your best friend, right behind your spouse, and you expect the same things from each of those parties. You expect them to have a sense of humanity and awareness of what’s going on in the world. Companies didn’t sign up for it. It happened without them even knowing.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Neal Arthur, CEO of ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, best known for its breakthrough work with Nike. I wanted to talk to Neal now not only because of Nike’s much-discussed activation around the World Cup, but because businesses everywhere are struggling with how to show up in a world of unprecedented volatility, and no firm has had a better grasp of consumer sentiment than Wieden+Kennedy.

Neal also has a direct pipeline to CEOs across industries, and he shares how strategy and creativity have to reinforce each other right now in ways they never have before. He also talks about why branding has become a CEO’s job, not just a CMO’s, and how to think about the brand of AI. Plus, we go behind the scenes on Nike’s New York Knicks ad, as well as its World Cup throwdown with Adidas.

So, to borrow a phrase, “Let’s just do it.” I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m joined by Neal Arthur, CEO of Wieden+Kennedy. Neal, welcome to the show.

ARTHUR: Thanks, Bob. It’s great to be here.

Copy LinkWhat consumers want from brands

SAFIAN: Wieden+Kennedy is known for a lot of things. Among them, your deep pulse on consumers, and that’s where I’d like to start. Today’s business environment is so tricky: stock prices are up, but so are oil prices. AI is disrupting and exciting people. Geopolitical issues are arguably at an inflection point. There are a lot of serious, contentious trends. And at the same time, marketing messages are tending toward the playful, the practical, and sometimes, dare I say, the superficial. I’m curious what your sense is about why that is, and how much of that is about where the consumer is emotionally right now versus where brands are.

ARTHUR: I don’t think there are a bunch of conversations in a boardroom that are like, “It’s serious out there, so let’s make some jokes.” Just to clarify, that’s not what’s going on. If I had to guess, I think you saw in the pandemic that what was happening in the world was dire. Then marketers showed up, and it quickly became that meme of sad piano music ads. I think people would probably prefer escape more than they want to be reminded by Brand X that times are interesting.

SAFIAN: When you’re in there talking with CEOs and leadership teams across industries, because you guys do work for a broad range of clients, what kind of conversations are they having? Is the mood fear and wait-and-see, or optimism and go for it? What are you feeling?

ARTHUR: I don’t really think there’s time for fear. Fear and stress probably just lend themselves to paralysis, and it’s certainly not time for that. Right now, we’re at a point of high prices generally in consumer goods. A lot of clients are trying to figure out how to show up in a way that feels value-forward and that makes clear we’re aware of the situation the consumer is in.

You’re dealing with those things rather than talking about existential issues and topics. I think there’s a prevailing sense of pragmatism, where people are just trying to figure out what problem we’re trying to solve and how we solve it as quickly as possible.

SAFIAN: And with all the changes going on, you need to take risks, but at the same time, it’s kind of a tough moment to take risks. People talk about polarization, like, “Can brands appeal to everyone? Is it better to pick a lane?” It almost feels like no matter where you go, you’re worried you’re going to run into something.

ARTHUR: I feel like the conversations now are less about brand ideology — what are the politics of brands and businesses? — and more about their practical nature. I think there have been a lot of lessons learned about standing for certain value sets and principles, and there’s a lot of fear and anxiety around that because of the missteps that have been well publicized. By no means am I saying that brands shouldn’t stand for something. It’s really about what problem we’re dealing with and how we solve it.

It’s less about creative risk and some of those things. I feel like those are for maybe higherfalutin times. Right now, it’s a street fight, and everybody is just trying to figure out how to deal with the obstacles directly in front of them.

Copy LinkHow Wieden+Kennedy taps into people’s emotions

SAFIAN: To me, part of what has always made Wieden+Kennedy distinctive is your ability to tap people’s emotions. As you’re talking about the environment right now, it sounds like utility, in some ways, is the primary thing that businesses and brands are trying to get across. Does that change the way you approach campaigns and what you’re trying to do with folks? Or does it just mean that to get to that emotion, you do it in a different way?

ARTHUR: Yeah, it’s the latter, and that’s an important distinction. I wouldn’t say that we’re in a time of utility in terms of messaging and output. The way that you do that can still be really emotional. As Wieden+Kennedy, we still find tons of humanity and emotion in the problems that our clients are dealing with on a day-to-day basis and in how to connect with consumers in a human way. But the problem tends to be more straightforward or more functional than a lofty ideal, I guess is what I would say in this moment.

SAFIAN: You guys are known for the ultimate go-for-it campaign: Nike’s “Just Do It.” As a longtime New York Knicks fan, I have to bring up the amazing post-finals Nike campaign, courtesy of director Josh Safdie: a fan running through the streets as Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” plays. Is that the kind of thing you’re planning ahead of time? Do you have options for whichever team wins? Or is it more instinctive and reactive?

ARTHUR: Great question. Nike, being in the business of sport, is always thinking about who’s going to win and who’s going to be in those moments. The goal is to show up for them in a meaningful way. When you have a moment like that, where the Knicks are making a legendary run — and I live in New York City and I’m a season-ticket holder, and boy, was that electric — you get to these moments where you go, “This is going to be a thing.” It’s one of those moments that captures what we love about sports. It’s not just a moment in sport, it’s a moment that’s transcendent. And you go, “OK, if there’s a way to make a meaningful contribution to this conversation about this legendary city and long-beaten-up team rising to the heights that they did, you’ve got to take that shot.” I think one of the keys for Nike, always, is authenticity.

So you get a guy like Safdie, who’s a lifelong fan, and you get to see the perspective of the team or the athlete through the lens of somebody who really knows sport. You get to a moment like that, and obviously that makes us collectively — Wieden+Kennedy and Nike — incredibly proud to be able to have that moment. And it’s the moment that we’re responding to, not just the creative output.

SAFIAN: When I went back to rewatch it in preparation for chatting with you, it made me think that if the Knicks had lost, you could have done an emotional ad of a different sort, although with a similar kind of feel.

ARTHUR: We go through all those scenarios because that’s the beauty of having sport as the foundation for everything we do. Part of the themes are loss. That’s the best part about sport: it’s life writ large.

Copy LinkInside Nike’s World Cup “Run the Script” ad

SAFIAN: I have to ask you about Nike’s World Cup “Rip the Script” ad. I’ve had other guests on the show bring it up and compare it to Adidas’ own cinematic effort. Both brands had a slew of soccer stars. You know Adidas is going to try to do its own thing during this when you’re preparing. So how do you think about that? What’s going to be different about your goal with Nike versus Adidas’ goal?

ARTHUR: Maybe this is unique to Nike’s culture, but Nike’s never really focused on what’s going to happen competitively from another brand. The questions are always just, “What’s the best manifestation of Nike?” You can get sidetracked by trying to figure out what others are going to do, and all those things can complicate matters unnecessarily.

So you start there: What’s the truest thing that we can say right now? This World Cup, we look at how we engage all the different communities within sport. Holland has an incredible fan base, so there’s a whole facet of this that’s around him and BAPE, et cetera. The different cultures within sport, Kim showing up as a noted soccer mom.

For us, it’s: How do you feed and foster those communities? I think in the past, you would have made one thing, put it out there, and hoped that as much of the world as possible saw it. But now, we feel like you have to start these little fires in a bunch of different places and then feed them continually throughout the events.

SAFIAN: When you’re talking about not focusing on the competitor, not focusing on Adidas, that’s a conversation that you might have with other brands also: Don’t worry so much about the competition. Identify who you are. What’s the right message for you?

ARTHUR: Yeah, that’s probably the biggest way that our business has changed. Fifteen to 20 years ago, you focused on advertising as brand. So you’d look at ads from another brand or another company and go, “OK, this is their positioning. What are we going to do?” And to your point, I’d strongly advise against getting too involved in what’s going on competitively, because basically you’re just allowing other people to position you.

I think the greatest gift or opportunity that we have as a company is the ability to have conviction and focus on what you want to stand for. If you can do that and be super clear, and then execute it better than other people, then you’re winning. No question. What has happened in the modern world of marketing is that advertising is now just a small portion of how your brand manifests itself — with digital media, with influencers, with social media, et cetera. The brand experience you have as a company has exploded.

So now, if I have a bad experience in-store, that’s out there. If I have a call with customer service that I didn’t enjoy, that’s out there. What we now have to do more than ever is sit with our clients and go, “OK, what is this brand about in its entirety, across every point of the company’s engagement with people?” We always joke that you have to do everything down to the hold music, because they’re going to call company headquarters sometimes and they’re going to get hold music. Then you’re going to have to go, “Well, what’s that hold music say about us as a company? How do we make sure that the brand shows up in a consistent way across every touchpoint?”

That’s working a lot more with CEOs than we would have in the past, because I think the days of saying that the CMO is responsible for advertising, and therefore brand, are done. I think a CEO today is actually responsible for the brand because they’re in charge of the vast majority of consumer touchpoints.

Copy LinkWhy brand stewardship has become a CEO responsibility

SAFIAN: I feel like sometimes CEOs don’t really get creativity. They say they want it. I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about traditionally viewed noncreative industries. They say they want creativity, but they don’t really understand it. Do you find that when you’re talking to leaders?

ARTHUR: This may be a little heretical to say, but I think talking about creativity in a broad sense is problematic because it makes the conversation almost exclusive. It becomes, “Well, this is for a group of people who have cool T-shirts and interesting handbags.” I think the conversation has to be much more about what, as a brand, do you want to stand for? And when you do that, a CEO can engage.

We have clients who feel like the CEO shouldn’t be involved because this is a creative conversation. No way. We’re talking about what a company should stand for at its best. A CEO should feel very comfortable in that conversation. We’re not going to, in most cases, talk to a CEO about the music in the spot. We’re talking to CEOs about what they believe, what they want to be, and what they want to project to the world. Talking about what we do as a purely creative endeavor is problematic, and I think it excludes people who we really need in these conversations.

SAFIAN: And so, when you get to the point where, “OK, this is what the brand is, and how do we emotionally connect with the consumer?” maybe the CEO doesn’t need to be in the room for that. Is that more about the music track or whatever?

ARTHUR: Yeah. If I was talking to a CEO who is marketing-averse, I’d say: Don’t feel like you need to know who the voice-over should be. Don’t feel like you need to know what happens in production. I don’t go on production myself. But you have tons to give in a conversation about the brand.

SAFIAN: For a business like yours that built a reputation on creative execution, obviously, you want to instill and continue that. But if I’m hearing you right, it’s the strategic relationship with the leadership, which you may always have had, but may not have been as obvious. You’re rebranding yourselves as something different than what people think of as an ad agency.

ARTHUR: I think what Wieden+Kennedy has always done at its best is help companies understand, and have confidence in, who they are and how that shows up in the world. We’ve sat down with the leadership of a company and asked, “Who are you really?” And oftentimes, it’s very different from who you’d want to be. Usually, what happens for us is we start the conversation and our client says, “Well, this is who we’d like to be.” And we go, “Well, that’s not who you are, though. What if we focus on who you are, and what if we got more comfortable with that?”

A lot of times, what happens is that we get companies at a point in time where they feel like there’s something happening competitively, or something else going on, that makes them question who they are at their core. And we go, “Oh, no, we think that thing is awesome.” We’ve become more of a creative and strategic partner across the business rather than just, “Hey, go make me a 30-second ad.”

Advertising agencies can get confused by thinking that the goal is just to get attention. Attention without connection to what the company and brand stand for, and what makes it distinctive, means nothing. For us, we’re very adamant about making sure everything has intention, and that intention is aligned to the company. I don’t think that’s necessarily always the goal for marketing and advertising.

SAFIAN: For a leader whose stress is not focusing on the competition, Neal certainly has a clear idea about what makes his business different from others. So how do business leaders operate in a world where a brand campaign can go from launch to backlash overnight? And what does he think about the brand of AI right now? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Wieden+Kennedy’s Neal Arthur talked about working for Nike and the connection between creativity and strategy. Now he talks about the brand of AI, what Gen Z is teaching us about the future, and why companies need to keep pace with a culture that’s moving faster than ever. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkUsing AI to expand creativity without replacing human ideas

I find myself thinking about the conversations people have about AI right now. I know you’ve said you don’t really worry about AI taking over from humans. Are there things you’re seeing on the ground at Wieden+Kennedy that give you that confidence? Because there are plenty of creatives who seem anxious about how AI is unfolding.

ARTHUR: It’s one of those things, Bob. I’m sure if you play this back in five years, you’d be like, “Oh, that idiot.” But I guess my feeling on it at the moment is that we fully embrace it because what we see is more benefit than downside. The way we’re using AI, in conjunction with our clients, is to scale our creativity. More iterations than ever before, more quickly than ever before, more cheaply than ever before. That’s not at the expense of the humanity in a creative idea.

There is nothing I see at this moment that makes me worried that the creative minds within Wieden+Kennedy are at risk. AI, by nature, goes to the norm. It goes to the thing that it thinks most people, because it’s a large language model, are going to value and appreciate. Creativity, particularly creativity at Wieden+Kennedy, is always about the exceptions. It’s always about finding the thing that you wouldn’t expect, that goes against the grain. If anything, right now it’s allowing us to scale, and it’s providing us a source of inspiration for topics like what’s going on in culture and how we stay culturally attuned. The conversation around AI may be one of the biggest cultural conversations to have.

SAFIAN: There has been some backlash among consumers. I’ve been told that there are advertisers who are using AI more than they’re talking about because they’re worried about how consumers are going to respond to that. Is that true? Do you see that the public conversation about fear of AI and the business’s actual execution with AI are slightly different tracks?

ARTHUR: What we’ve seen is that using AI for the sake of using AI, very early on, seemed like a cool idea to some companies, and there’s been backlash against that. I don’t think anybody is excited to hear that company X made an all-AI ad and doesn’t want humans anywhere around it. That’s not a thing people are excited about.

So I think we’re very much now in a more nuanced conversation. Our personal view is that we never want to use it in a way that’s going to replace something that a human could do. But we are in favor of using it when it can create opportunities that we didn’t have before. And we’ve never said, and will never say, “Great news, our embrace of AI has allowed us to cut X number of jobs.”

Copy LinkWhat Gen Z demands from brands in an always-on world

SAFIAN: I asked you in the beginning about the mindset of consumers. Are brands approaching the next generation of consumers the right way? Is there a right way?

ARTHUR: We have to acknowledge that Gen Z and younger generations have more access to information than older generations had. They don’t go to the store and want to buy the hair product because they saw an ad on whatever network. They have all of these different touchpoints. What’s fundamentally changing is the idea that you can just make an ad or a back-to-school campaign and go, “Done, I did it.” I think you are in a full-on 365-day, 24/7 conversation, and you need to figure out how your brand is going to show up in all of these different environments, as opposed to thinking about them as campaigns that you launch and are done with.

And by the way, we are now fully in a world in which a marketing calendar doesn’t mean shit. You need a team of people thinking every single second of the day about what it means to be your brand and how you deliver on that premise every second of the day.

SAFIAN: Every time there’s a new technology that hits in the advertising industry, the first talk is like, “Oh, it’s going to be cheaper. You’re going to be able to reach more people in a more focused way.” And as you’re talking about, it’s like, “Nothing is easier. You’re doing more things than you ever were.” It doesn’t get more efficient. Maybe it gets more effective, or maybe it’s just because the media is so fragmented you don’t have a choice.

ARTHUR: These tools increase the volume of stuff that you can put out. They increase the frequency of things you can make. But if it’s still automated, it’s not going to work, because it’s the dynamics that are changing, not your ability to make more stuff. So the promise is always like, I can press the down-funnel button and make a bunch of assets every day. But that doesn’t have any connection to what your company and brand stand for.

You’re just making more stuff. And making more stuff in the absence of a real intention can actually make the problem worse. I’m not by any means denigrating the fact that there are new tools and ways to connect with audiences. I’m just saying that if you don’t have a clear intention and a clear sense of what your brand is, then those tools don’t have any value.

SAFIAN: I’m noticing as we talk that sometimes you use the word advertising, sometimes you use the word brand, sometimes you use the word marketing. For you, is it all one thing? Or are those things differentiated?

ARTHUR: I live in a world where brand is the most important thing. I think if you’re not talking about your brand and all the things that come with that — who you are, what you’re against, who you’re striving to be, who you’re not for — then the rest doesn’t matter. Beneath that, marketing, and then advertising, which is a much smaller subset, are just ways to execute against a brand idea. If you just talk about advertising in the absence of brand, you end up creating either slop or stuff that gets attention — stunts, et cetera — that don’t connect to capital-B brand.

Copy LinkWhy brand clarity matters more than more content

SAFIAN: So much is changing in this world right now. There is a lot of volatility that you have to manage through, that you have to plan through or react to. How do you think about dealing in an environment that is this volatile?

ARTHUR: I think people often assume that if there are more events, more things, and more volatility, what’s new is the fact that you as a company are expected to have a perspective on it. And so now, in real time, you’re trying to figure out, “Where are we on this?” And if you’re not set up that way, if you don’t have that ability to be aware and respond inherent somewhere in your system, this is hard for people.

A lot of times, people feel responsible for not changing a brand and a company’s values, but we’re in a time that requires these things. I think your values should be pretty consistent. So if there’s a baseline of things, they’re foundational. But the way that you show up in the world should be pretty flexible.

SAFIAN: Yeah, unless you’re Cracker Barrel, in which case you can’t change it.

ARTHUR: Right. We won’t get too much into Cracker Barrel, Bob. But what that signaled was a change in values. And that’s where you have to ask, what’s fixed and what’s variable?

SAFIAN: Yeah. Or it was an exercise in, actually, we don’t really believe this new direction. It’s, as some people might say, just branding as opposed to actually a strategic shift, right?

ARTHUR: That’s exactly right. And if you look at the biggest mistakes that get made, they oftentimes come from a marketing notion of what a company wants to be, rather than the overall sense of what the company believes. It’s important to understand why that’s happening. Before, brand and marketing and advertising were all synonymous, and they were like a thin moat around a company. But now, in an era where there’s more transparency than ever before because of digital and social media, people will challenge companies to understand what they believe on topics that they never would have before, right?

Something happens in the world, and it starts with social media. All of a sudden, in your feed on whatever platform you’re using, a brand is showing up right behind your best friend, right behind your spouse, and it’s all the same. And you expect the same things from each of those parties. You expect them to have a sense of humanity and awareness of what’s going on in the world. That’s what happened. Companies didn’t sign up for it. It happened without them knowing.

So all of a sudden, the expectation of them is the same as it would be for a family member, rather than for this nameless, faceless organization that I didn’t really have a relationship with before.

Copy LinkStaying grounded in core values while responding to constant change

SAFIAN: The business you’re in, the industry, I mean, it’s been through so many different kinds of crises. For where you are now, what most keeps you up at night, and what most excites you?

ARTHUR: Well, let me start with what I’m excited about, because I go to bed with more excitement than anxiety. I believe in the value of creative people who think about things in a counterintuitive or subversive way. That skill set, and a collection of people who do that full time, being able to solve much bigger problems than we may have in the past, is interesting as hell.

And so I feel like, as creative people, we were typically brought in for a very specific thing. And now we’re brought in for much bigger problems, and that’s awesome. What am I scared of? If I’m being really honest, I look at the headlines I see about the diminishing value of creative perspectives. And I think if this business decides to just chase tech and media, that would be a tragedy of the greatest scale. Companies and the world need — it sounds trite, but it’s true — creative thinking and creative people now more than ever. And if we get rid of one of the really foundational places and industries where it’s been a safe space for those people, I think that would be a disaster.

SAFIAN: Well, yeah, Neal, this was great. Thanks so much for doing it.

ARTHUR: Thanks, Bob. Such a pleasure.

SAFIAN: Neal’s championing of creative safe spaces is spot on and a great argument for why ad agencies should exist. What strikes me most in Neal’s comments is how the story we tell about a brand isn’t a derivative of the business strategy. Instead, it helps define that strategy. In fact, sometimes good brand storytelling provides more clarity about where a business is going than quarterly earnings calls or investor pitches. And businesses that don’t have a clear brand story rarely have a cohesive and lasting strategic direction.

When Neal talks about intentionality and foundational values, what he’s describing is a consistent framework for addressing unexpected disruptions and questions about risks and opportunities in a way everyone in the enterprise embraces. With all apologies to Nike, the real takeaway in a world that’s constantly shifting isn’t to just do it. It’s to know why you’re doing it. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.