Xtreme Marketing — are you really failing hard enough?
“If you think you’ve got nothing else to learn you can leave.” — Shaun White
I’m not sure exactly what sparked it, maybe a FaceZucker quote “move fast and break things” or the explosion in startups but it felt like every agency/advertiser/marketer/brand suddenly started to not just embrace failure but bang on about how we need to fail and learn, harder and faster. It was now OK to fail and make mistakes, we didn’t have to do things perfectly first time.
I can’t say if anyone is actually living by the words, embracing failure and trying harder or if actually being allowed to fail in some circumstances is making excuses for lack of hard work or executing the wrong ideas.
The other night whilst watching the Xgames Movie on Netflix the whole fail and learn thing started to make a lot more sense andfeel like less of an intelligent excuse or commercial proposition.
Skating, Moto X, Rallying, BMX, Roller Blading all showcase the genuine efforts where hours of failing leads to mere seconds of success. Their resulting perfection and talent is genuinely distilled from failure. To be successful, like winning a gold medal in the Xgames you have to keep progressing and innovating year on year and doing this is the only way you’ll be rewarded.
By putting your body on the line, crashing, breaking equipment or bones you have instant feedback knowing you’ve failed. If you know what you did wrong you can try again, and again, and again until you get it right or fail so hard your forced to stop.
Large brands/Marketers/Ad agencies aren’t really putting all that much on the line — time, budgets or reputations? It’s not quite the same. What does failure look like? not meeting your campaign KPIs and taking the learnings forward next time, isn’t really driving the same innovation you have or need when your career, body and livelihood depends on it.
Watch this, and keep watching (or the short version). Then next time you’re looking at you’re failures you can think, did I really try and give it 100%.
