How to Get Buy-In for Creative Bravery
Transform your boss into an advocate against mediocrity
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How to Infuse Creative Bravery Into Risk-Averse Environments
I’ve been doing a lot of talks, webinars, and workshops about the ideas in Earn It, and one of the recurring questions comes from people inside organizations that are fairly traditional in their marketing. The question is either:
How do I get people in my organization to take a risk or do something differently?
How can I convince my boss/CMO/CEO that we need Creative Bravery in our content and our marketing?
These are the most effective strategies I use in my content strategy workshops to get people (often bosses) to buy into the need to stand out from the crowd.
Include Stakeholders in Creative Development
Do your best to get key decision makers to be participants in the strategy and development process for a new creative project. There are several benefits.
When the decision-makers help develop an idea, it eliminates “not invented here” arguments.
There is no misunderstanding about what success looks like or what the criteria will be for approval.
You get to hear about concerns, flags, or outright “no’s” in the room and not days or weeks later.
It’s hard to say no to something you helped to create.
The group can influence how ideas are perceived more effectively than a deck or meeting.
Most importantly… the stakeholders are going to be in the room for all the pieces below.
Use This Graph
Since we first introduced it at Pacific Content, I have started pretty much every strategy session or creative development session by putting up this graph.
Why is this graph so impactful? It explains content and marketing success in a very simple, visual way.
Creative Bravery
High Creative Bravery is essential if you want to stand out in the sea of sameness. You need to make something original, interesting, and valuable for your audience and it needs to be something that can only come from you. Creative Bravery starts slipping lower when there are ideas like “let’s have our CEO host our podcast and interview our leadership team about next quarter’s new products and services.”
A powerful way to gauge whether your content idea is filled with Creative Bravery or not is to ask the group this question:
“Would you tell other people about this video/podcast/newsletter if you didn’t work here?”
Commitment
Once you have your Creatively Brave project, you need high Commitment to tell all the right people about it. You need to effectively and consistently market your marketing.
A Creatively Brave project that you don’t market ends up with a small group of people who love it, and it’s not enough to move the needle on your marketing goals. On the flip side, if you tell a lot of people about a project, but it’s low in Creative Bravery, they will show up briefly, discover it’s mediocre or worse, and never come back.
The goal of the strategy or development work is to get ideas and plans that are in the upper right quadrant of the graph. Once this is established, I recommend deliberately leaving the graph up in a very visible place on the wall for the entire session… because it’s going to be valuable to keep coming back to it.
Set the Table Stakes High with Examples
The next step is to share some best-in-class examples of brands or teams that are doing Creatively Brave work and finding measurable success as a result. The goal of doing this is to paint a clear picture of what success looks like, to show how high the bar is to successful, and to make it harder for everyone in the room to do something average, conventional, or boring. The key is to choose the right examples and the right companies for your project and your brand.
When I was working in podcasting, I would often use Dell Technologies and the show Trailblazers as an example of Creative Bravery. Their VP of Marketing, JC Gama, is one of the bravest marketers I have ever met.
The host of Trailblazers could easily have been Michael Dell. It could have been any number of other executives at Dell Technologies. The brand team knew that the goal was to get people to listen to the show, so they went big on Creative Bravery with their host selection: Walter Isaacson, the iconic journalist and biographer of legendary disruptors like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Instantly, Trailblazers felt and sounded like a top-tier business show and not an ad for Dell Technologies.
Another key Creative Bravery decision is the artwork for the podcast. Can you see what’s missing?
That’s right. There is no Dell Technologies logo on the podcast artwork. They are very clearly and publicly the publisher - they’re not hiding that they made it. However, the absence of a logo says to potential listeners that Trailblazers is a REAL show. I would also share research and data about how popular and successful Trailblazers was as a series, and how powerful it was in impacting the brand positioning for Dell Technologies.
It’s much harder to have your CEO as a host and to slap your giant logo on podcast art after you’ve seen this example.
When it comes to best-in-class examples of Commitment, I would always use Mozilla as an example. Commitment is about using all your strengths as a brand to let all the right people know about your amazing show. Mozilla understood this and used their biggest Superpower, the Firefox browser, to let users know about their terrific podcast, IRL.
Again, sharing the giant success of the IRL podcast with people in the room makes it harder for the group to do a poor job on Commitment.
Once the table stakes have been set very high, consider one more exercise to get everyone in a creative and open mindset.
Empathy Mode: Think Like the Audience
If you ask people to share their own experiences, it puts them in the mindset of a potential audience member. I like to ask people to think about their own attention filters. How do they choose what to ignore and what to give their attention to? You can even write up criteria on the wall about the criteria that lead us to ignore thing and the criteria that lead us to give something a try.
We’re all getting pickier and pickier, so it’s not hard to build a general consensus in the room that we all ignore the vast majority of the attempts to get our attention unless they seem really interesting or valuable. So if you’re going to make something, you need to be awesome enough to be worthy of attention.
I recently started using this slide to hammer home the point:
Heat-mapping and Ranking Ideas
Finally, when we’re at the stage of the strategy process where we’re generating ideas, there are two ways to make it hard for one risk-averse person to undermine the best ideas.
Put all the ideas up on a whiteboard and give everyone three red dot stickers or a red marker. Everyone goes up to the whiteboard at the same time and puts a red dot on their top three ideas. Instantly, the group will identify a select group of ideas, while others will clearly fall by the wayside.
Once you have a small group-approved set of ideas, we go back to the graph on the wall. Ask the group to rank each idea on the Creative Bravery scale. Again, the power of the group will identify when some ideas are sub-par or when concepts are “about” your company instead of “from” your company.
Caveat: Creative Bravery is Relative
Creative Bravery is different in every organization, and that’s because every organization has a different purpose, different values, a different voice, and a unique set of customers. Your goal shouldn’t be to become as “unhinged” as Duolingo or as playful as Poo Pourri. It should be to create something truly worthy of the attention of the people you are seeking to reach, and something that can only, authentically come from you.
When you get the right people in the room, you build the right mindset and expectations of success, and you use the power of a group to identify the best ideas, there is a much higher likelihood of landing on a Creatively Brave solution.
If your organization could benefit from a content strategy workshop or a talk about how to thrive in the Attention Economy, just reply back to this email, or reach out at steve.pratt@creativity-business.com.
What’s Earned My Attention Recently
It will not be a surprise that this Scott Galloway quote also strikes a strong chord with me:
We're in an attention-based economy, full stop. If you can command attention, you can get revenue.
Another lovely quote about attention from Shane Parrish at Farnham Street:
Attention isn't free. It's the most valuable thing you spend.
I share the writing of Rishad Tobaccowala often here. This quote made me think about marketing, advertising, and challenging the status quo:
“Adapt or die” is a good adage for an age of rapidly advancing technology.
I write a lot about doing the hard work instead of taking shortcuts, favouring patience over urgency, so this quote from Derek Sivers really resonated with me (bonus points for using “earn it” 😜):
Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.
Finally, this quote from James Clear quite tidily sums up the philosophy of Earn It:
Focus on what provides value to others, not what impresses others…
The things we do to impress others rarely impress them for longer than five minutes. But the things we do to provide value for others can last a lifetime. In the long run, one of the most impressive things you can do is provide exceptional value.Earn It Updates
Audible is offering Earn It FREE with a membership right now. I’m heavily biased, but this is a really different audiobook and this is a great deal.
Big thanks to Indigo for bringing fresh stock of Earn It to a lot of locations. If you want to buy a copy IRL, check out the store finder option here.
You know when you meet another person and just instantly love the way they see the world? That’s how I felt chatting with Brittany Hodak on her Creating Super Fans podcast. She’s not only a generous community builder and customer experience expert, but she does the hard work of making content worth your time and promoting it really well. Her book, Creating Super Fans, is also terrific!
Thanks to the Booklife team at Publisher’s Weekly for choosing Earn It as an Editor’s Pick and for the very nice review!
Sevaun Palvetzian is the President & CEO of UNICEF Canada - she is one of my favourite people and an amazing leader. It was a treat chatting with her in Toronto at the UNICEF all staff meeting!
Thanks to everyone in the Design Trust UK community for joining the webinar this past week and to so many of you for signing up for this newsletter!
Shreya Sharma is one of my favourite writers in the podcasting industry, so it was a real treat to talk about the discomfort of marketing yourself for the Marketing Magic newsletter. Thanks, Shreya!
Thank you to Jay Baer for recommending Earn It to your readers–it means a lot coming from a legend in word-of-mouth marketing!
As always, thank you for your time and attention, and I hope this edition helps you get buy-in for more Creative Bravery!
Unconventionally yours,
Steve