Strategic Minds: Anita Schillhorn van Veen (Frame Strategy) — The Power of Storytelling and Staying Connected to Consumers
The responsibility of advertising, working in the nonprofit sector, and the changing perception of digital marketing.
Anita Schillhorn van Veen, Founder and Strategic Lead at Frame
Anita Schillhorn van Veen is the Founder and Strategic Lead of creative strategy consultancy Frame Strategy. With a background in film and communications, she worked in the nonprofit sector before starting a career in digital marketing and working at places like Digitas, Havas, Grey and TBWA\Chiat\Day.
She is quite active in building community among female marketers and strategists and is occasionally hosting meetups in LA (when there’s no pandemic, obviously). She’s speaking and teaching online at several events in May — find out more here.
As part of the interview series Strategic Minds, we talked about the responsibility of advertising, working in the nonprofit sector and the changing perception of digital marketing.
Please note that this interview is an edited transcript of a conversation Anita and I had via video. Please excuse any grammatical irregularities.
You wrote an article about how the power of storytelling could be used within the advertising industry to give more powerful voices and exposure to women. How are you hoping to shape the industry in this way?
Yes, that’s incredibly important to me. In the last decade, as the film and television industries have become more inclusive, the stories we’re seeing have changed. As more women and people of color like Issa Rae, Ava Duvernay and Lulu Wang get to tell their stories, we get to see ourselves in stories that reflect our experience. That’s incredibly important in the advertising industry as well.
Pulling together diverse teams and giving them voices in the context of creating work is key. Often, people are not out to offend. It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone else, especially someone that you haven’t been asked to think about in your life. Maybe you never thought “okay, this is a stereotype” or “this is something offensive” because it’s something that you’ve seen in culture your whole life. That’s why it’s so important to empower these other voices to come up and say, “hey, that’s not something I believe” or “I want to put a different story out into the world”. The more everyone is exposed to those stories, the more we can empathize and the more we can understand other people’s experiences. And we bring that into our daily lives.
So, for example, I love the work Ariel did in India around the balance of household chores between men and women. That came out years ago, and they’re continuing to tell that story. That’s shifting societal expectations.
Is there anything else about the industry that you think would need to change, or where the industry could take a leading role in changing something?
We should help our brands be truly accountable. For example, we will get briefs on things like “I want to do a campaign for Pride Day” or “I want to do a campaign for Women’s History Month”. And it’s up to us as brand stewards to ask our clients, “Okay, you want to do this for this one day, how are you doing this the rest of the year?” It’s important for us to tell them if they’re putting this out but their policies are doing the opposite.
Every brand wants to jump onto the bandwagon. We saw it this past year with Pride when a lot of companies were doing big Pride campaigns. And the LGBTQ community said, “Well, where were you when it was really hard? Were you fighting five years ago? What are your policies today? Are you just plastering a rainbow flag on your brand because it’s cool?” We need to help companies understand you can’t go out and support something on the day it’s popular if your policies and actions have not been supportive for the rest of the year.
You’ve taken an interesting journey into strategy. How did you end up as a strategist?
I took a circuitous route into strategy, as I think many strategists did. Strategy is an amazing discipline because you pull in so much knowledge from other parts of your life. Everybody brings a little piece of themselves into their strategic thinking. The best strategists that I’ve met often come from journalism or filmmaking, or have a very eclectic background.
Personally, I started my career in documentary film. It came out of a passion for telling the stories of people and finding those little nuggets that make a story sing. For every documentary, you spend a lot of time sifting through hundreds of hours of footage to identify the 30 minutes, the hour, the two hours that exemplify the life of a person or the core of an issue. The strategic practice within advertising is a lot like that. You’re sifting through so much information, trying to find that one nugget that is going to unlock everything.
From documentary, I got into nonprofit work. It was a shift in the practice although the intent is the same. How do you find the right bit of the issue that you’re dealing with, that is going to get people on board, whether it be your donors or the constituents, the people that you’re working for? To find the right way of articulating the issue that unlocks it for other people.
I was doing this in the beginning, when Facebook and Twitter were still free platforms for marketing. For nonprofits, all of a sudden, you had these tools to reach a lot of people without having to spend money. In nonprofit, because you are working with very little money, you can experiment a lot.
From there, I wanted to work with more resources. I got hired at Digitas, initially as a project manager, and recognized the part I love is the early stage where you’re figuring out what the problem is, and how to solve it. So I moved into strategy and learned quickly how my prior experiences in filmmaking, nonprofit and the early stages of social media could help shape strategic thinking for brands.
So my beginning in the strategic world was hybrid, pulling in lateral thinking and learning from one category, applying it to another. The intersections of cultures and the intersections of story, data and the actual need out in the market, that’s where you can find the nuggets that build strategic momentum.
What are the biggest differences between the nonprofit world and advertising, besides the obvious one— budget?
The underlying goals are usually different. Sometimes they overlap. If you’re thinking about startups or early-stage companies that want to build contact, oftentimes nonprofits map to that. Your goal is to build an audience and a community that is receptive to your message. But when you’re talking about big Fortune 500 companies that have a huge machine, a product they want to sell, that have the bigger name recognition or a built-in audience, that’s quite a different challenge.
The other thing is that most companies and brands are selling something that ideally, a consumer wants, whereas nonprofits are saying, “Hey, give me money so I can do this thing that doesn’t necessarily benefit you, the donor.” You have to compel people to be invested in altruism versus compel people to buy something.
Is there a particular strategy that works well in this nonprofit context? Do you frame it around people — doing good as something that leads to a benefit for them and how they see themselves?
One of the things that struck me at the time was a study done comparing a data story to an individual story to understand what gets people to donate. What they found was that it was an individual story. That really struck me as something that’s interesting about humanizing the issue versus the big, statistical component of it that feels more intellectually wrong. But when you get that human connection, this sense of “this could be me” or “this could be someone I care about”, that changes the game for a lot of people.
In our current situation, we’re inundated with death counts, unemployment numbers, and other overwhelming data. But if we want people to stay home, wear masks, and be responsible, they also need to hear those human stories. What’s it like to have the disease, or to be away from a family member dying from the disease? What’s it like to think someone you know might go through it?
That’s interesting. You’d think, intuitively, maybe the larger societal aspect might be more important but it seems that people indeed react more strongly to personal stories.
Yes, I think what that ties to is where it hits us in our rational-emotional line. Numbers will put you pretty quickly in a rational mindset. Even if it screams injustice, or it’s this “holy shit” moment that can trigger an emotional reaction, it is still mostly rational. But what they found is that the individual story hits you at this very different place. You put yourself into that story. That’s the power of very good storytelling. It gets you to feel like you are present in that moment and unlocks your response in a much bigger way.
Let’s talk a bit more about digital marketing. What are some of the shifts in this space that you see?
The last 10 years has, of course, been a sea of change in the way digital marketing functions. Paid media, earned social media, content — all of that has matured.
And now, we see brands trying to strike a better balance between performance and brand marketing. Adidas recently said, “we’ve over-rotated on the world of digital and performance marketing at the expense of brand-building and we’re going to shift the way we do things.” Their public announcement took many people in the marketing world by surprise because it questioned some orthodoxy of the last 5–10 years around digital and performance marketing.
There’s also been issues with metrics, like Facebook video views, or the intricacies of how YouTube counts. Marketers must be more critical. Ask more questions about, “what does this really do for me? How does this really change the bottom line for me? How does this help build my company, my brand?”
Through the lens of metrics, programmatic and complex media buys, we can lose sight of the customer. We lost sight of who we’re actually serving because they’ve become spreadsheets on spreadsheets, and we forget who we are actually trying to reach and what we’re trying to do for them.
The rise of DTC brands has pushed more established brands because DTC brands look at consumers from a product-centric, communications-centric lens. Of course, all that data is important, but they don’t lose sight of who their consumer is and how to respond to them. And they respond incredibly quickly. DTC brands put an interesting model on the table for more traditional brands and challenge them to say, “is the digital arm of my marketing really serving my consumer the way that a brand should be serving their consumer?”
How can brands stay connected to consumers?
Unfortunately, brands are less and less willing to pay for the kind of qualitative research that is going to unlock fresh insights. We can read all we want, we can pull together data points, but until we actually talk to people, we’re going to just regurgitate the same thing some other market researcher has already found.
So, I will always push brands to spend time with their customers in ways that are not typical. Many brands have their research departments that have standard methodologies, and that becomes the status quo within the company. It becomes rote, you’re asking the same questions. You’re getting the same learning. and you’re not pushing the boundaries of what you can learn. I like introducing different types of methodologies to push brands to learn differently.
How are you doing that?
There’s a lot of different ways humanize the consumer. I like to use day-in-the-life, I like to use video man on the street interviews, or ethnographies. These can be conducted remotely as well and can be super effective; sometimes people are more comfortable doing a video recording than talking to a person directly and can be more vulnerable and honest. I like to talk to people who don’t know the product or service that we’re selling. Because all of that brings to the teams and to the client a different view. It just shakes it up a little bit and says “okay, we can’t make these assumptions about this person. Because now we see a bigger picture.”
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Anita!
An interesting book Anita recently came across:
Different by Youngme Moon: “It’s about 10 years old, but what she’s written relates so well to digital marketing and performance marketing today. We look so closely at metrics and the granular parts of differentiation. What that leads to is a very similar world of brands. Her argument is that we need to look at ways to go beyond that competition. True differentiation is a much deeper process. It comes out of having a deep understanding of who you are as a brand, and then figuring out, what is that shift that is going to make people treat your brand or category quite differently?”
If you enjoyed reading this interview, keep an eye out for other interviews in the series Strategic Minds: Conversations with strategists across different disciplines exploring their view on the nuances of strategy.
