The advertising industry is like a brand trying to remain relevant by chasing new fads.
FCB Chicago Head of Planning John Kenny speaks about the need to be bold and to always over-deliver.
PERHAPS IT IS HIS ACADEMIC BACKGROUND, PERHAPS IT IS JUST A PERSONAL TRAIT, BUT JOHN KENNY IS REFRESHINGLY CANDID. Which must lead to some interesting client conversation, but in his role as the Head of Planning at FCB Chicago, that is perhaps to be expected.
We sat down with John to get his views on how to prosper in the creative industry.
“I quickly realized their approach to solving business problems was different than mine.”
John Kenny
Q: How did you get started in advertising and specifically strategy?
John Kenny: Relatively late, I had just finished a PhD in the social sciences and was frustrated with the increasing insularity of academic life and was looking for a place that was asking big questions to big audiences.
I ended up working at a small research consultancy in Chicago (C&R Research) that defined itself as “Speaking Truth to Power”, which I absolutely loved.
My start in planning happened three years later when I was hired by Guinness to figure out what was happening to the pub in Ireland. After two years of that (probably the most fun gig in the world), I joined what is now FCB Chicago.
That’s when I first started working directly with creative teams and while I quickly realized their approach to solving business problems was different than mine (I’m still a recovering academic), but the collaboration was fantastic and I quickly realized the power of creativity in changing behavior.
Q: How has the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Professor Sharp, influenced your thinking and doing, in recent years ?
John Kenny: Hugely. It has really helped me tie the knot on the impact behavioral economics can have on the advertising industry.
Folks like Kahneman, Thaler and Iyengar have given us the tools for understanding why creativity and storytelling are so important for behavior change messaging.
What Sharp in particular has done is tease out the implications for marketing strategy, demolishing the old wives tales, that the more rational approach to marketing was based on.
“How Brands Grow” is really a manifesto for the necessity of marketing to continue to invest in big creative ideas that don’t just differentiate a brand from its competitors but make it distinctive within culture.
But its also important to realize that all this writing is less about changing what the advertising industry does and more about explaining why what we do is of value to the business world.
Q: What are some of the risks and opportunities facing the creative industry?
John Kenny: Frankly the biggest risk is the lack of confidence.
The advertising industry is like a brand that is trying to remain relevant by chasing every new fad.
If the advertising industry was a client you’d sit them down and say “you’re forgetting what makes you unique, go ahead and use these new tools, but use them to deliver what the advertising industry is uniquely capable of delivering; simple, beautiful stories that change behavior”.
In terms of opportunities, this is the best time to be in a creative industry.
Digital content was supposed to deliver millions and millions of small niche content ideas, but there is now so much content to choose from, people are overwhelmed and engaging in the content that is most sharable.
The social media age has become the age of social proof. As a consequence, big blockbuster ideas are grabbing a bigger share of people’s attention.
In music, film and media, it’s become a winner take all economy, so the rewards of coming up with a big idea that can be shared in culture have never been bigger and the thresholds to entry never lower.
Q: New technology has amplified old and created new forms of behavior. How do you decide what to invest time and money in to build skill-sets around?
John Kenny: Planning has definitely become a more multi-skilled discipline. Twenty years ago our focus was culture, now planning increasingly occurs at the intersection of culture, technology and psychology, so broadly speaking, that’s where we’ve been placing our big bets.
But Nicholas Negroponte from MIT Media Lab put it best when he said that seeing the future requires using your peripheral vision, so I spend 20% of my time reading broadly, looking for new and emerging ideas, folks like Tavi Gevinson, Nathan Myhrvold and Junot Diaz.
The great thing about advertising is you don’t need to be always right, but you do have to always be interesting.
Q: What qualities do you look for in a successful Strategist?
John Kenny: I’m less interested in what they think than how they think:
- How eclectic are their sources;
- How many different routes do they explore to solve the problem;
- Are they comfortable making just-so guesses;
- How do they collaborate?
Brevity helps too. Leave space for others to talk.
Q: If you are to test a candidate’s skills with a small brief, what would you ask them to do ?
John Kenny: Something I care about, make myself the client and see how empathetic they are in getting to a solution.
Right now I’m driving to work because of a recent knee injury, whereas normally I cycle.
Commuting by car is driving me crazy! It is a slow, frustrating and stupid way to commute, I don’t understand why anyone would choose to do it.
How can we get more people to cycle to work?
Q: What should students and graduates, looking to up their chances of breaking into the industry, focus on, in terms of skills and knowledge topics?
John Kenny: Ultimately we’re a content industry, so the candidates I find myself most impressed with are the ones who, regardless of their skill-set, are producing content regularly and with a fresh perspective, regardless of the topic.
I’m also always struck by folks who’ve lived abroad, learned a foreign language; people who embrace diversity or bring it.
Finally, the obvious one, but folks who live digitally and are comfortable using all the real time massive data sets that are being thrown up, to figure out where culture is going.
Q: In his essay on how to build brands in the digital age, Martin Weigel writes: “There is as much to unlearn as there is to relearn”. What are you unlearning and relearning? Why?
“Unlearing:
Ease vs motivating people
Going for big cultural ideas vs targeting category segments”
Shipping vs pre-testing
Relearning:
We are in the business of solving business problems through creativity”
John Kenny
John Kenny: I like Martin’s writings a lot and that’s a great one. Personally, the three things I find myself wanting to unlearn in the digital age, are some of marketing’s default settings.
- Our impulse to make a brand more motivating to use, when digital can frequently make it simply easier to use.
- Our impulse to take big challenges and make them small problems (“we just need to focus on these consumers/occasions”), that just end up delivering small ideas. Digital has given us so much content to choose from that if your content is not a big deal, it will never break through.
- Finally, digital is collapsing production costs, so now it is frequently faster and cheaper to put content out there, then to figure out if it will be successful through pre-testing.
What am I relearning? Our agency is Chicago’s oldest, founded in 1881 and its interesting to look back at our founders, folks who were working over a 100 years ago.
Guys like Albert Lasker, who, when asked to boost America’s consumption of oranges, came up with the idea of popularizing orange juice, transforming the entire industry.
Ultimately we have to keep reminding ourselves that we’re business partners to our clients and our job is to use creativity to solve business problems and help them innovate.
Q: With the way that tech, design, comms and product development are merging, what would you advise your 20 year old self, if he asked you where to work?
John Kenny: I’ve never been one for career planning and my own entry to the industry was so random, so it is hardly a good model to follow!
Work in places with really smart, eclectic, collaborative people that are trying something new and moving fast.
When you get there, try to over-deliver. If you do that, I have no idea where you’ll end up next, but your choices should be good ones.
Thank you Mr Kenny
“Where the puck is going” is an interview series by GapJumpers. We ask people we like and find interesting to share their thoughts. Whenever we find someone willing to answer our questions, we’ll feature them. If you’d like to stay updated on more stories, please follow the collection.
