April 3, 2024 • 47 mins
Matt MacDonell, the Executive Vice President of Strategy and Communications at Leo Burnett, sits down with Ryan to walk through his career and his approach to hiring and being hired.
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattmacdonell/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Good Fit Careers podcast, where we explore perspectives on work that fits.
(00:08):
I'm Ryan Dickerson, your host.
Today's guest is Matt MacDonnell.
Matt is an executive vice president of strategy and communications with Leo Burnett.
Leo Burnett is a full-service advertising agency that employs roughly 8,000 people.
Matt, thank you for being here.
Good to be here, Ryan.
Thanks.
Glad to have you on.
So let's get started here.
I'd love to learn a little bit about your background.
(00:30):
I brought you on the show here because I find your work fascinating.
You've done everything from Super Bowl ads through transforming how Minute Maid is advertised.
Could you start us off by telling us a little bit about what you were like as a kid and
maybe what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Yeah.
I mean, it wasn't a thing, as you and I have talked about in the past, that I plan to get
into advertising from the get-go.
(00:52):
I think I gradually worked my way into a field that was based on things that were subjective
and things that were creative.
I think the other big thing for me was a real interest in how people other than myself thought
or lived.
You talk about early life.
I went to a high school.
(01:12):
I grew up in Detroit, in the suburbs of Detroit.
I went to a high school called UD High, which was in the city.
I lived in a pretty far suburb called Northville.
Nobody from Northville went to UD.
But I went down there and visited it.
For an all-boys Catholic school, I know that doesn't immediately ring diversity, it was
(01:34):
a really diverse place.
Kids from all over the city went there, race, religion even for a Catholic school.
I just fell in love with it when I visited it, that there were so many people that were
different than me.
I came from a place.
It was a beautiful, lovely place to grow up, but a very singular kind of suburb.
(01:55):
That drew me to the place.
The second thing that drew me to the place was it's a Jesuit institution.
For those who don't understand the Jesuit faction of Catholicism, they're the educators,
they're the individual thinkers.
They really pushed us all to think differently and think for ourselves, way more so than
(02:15):
I would have thought from a Catholic school.
I remember my first day, I walked into theology class thinking, "My God, this is going to
be the worst class of the whole day."
I had a guy probably a few years from retirement, Father Follin.
The first thing he tells us is, and this is a tenet of Christianity, "The Spirit has no
(02:36):
parts.
There is no Trinity.
There's no parts.
There is no hell.
There is no devil chasing you around with pinchers, squeezing your balls."
This is the first 45 minutes of theology, and I thought, "I'm going to like this class."
A big thing for me was anybody who showed me a different side of life and encouraged
(02:57):
us to think for ourselves always hit the button for me.
[0]
Early life in Detroit, you were talking through your early education here.
What happened next?
I think the next stage is – the other thing that happened there, going to school in the
city as a suburban kid.
I fell in love with music like a lot of kids do, and I started going to shows.
(03:17):
My era was – I was in high school, 84 to 88.
Post-punk music, again, the major theme, think for yourself, do your own thing, make your
own rules, and that became another big influence for me.
The music thing stuck with me, and I ended up going to school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
at a place called Marquette University.
(03:39):
I followed the music path.
They had a really good concert program there that had been established for several years
and was bringing in great bands well before I got there.
I ended up running the thing.
Again, there, what started to build towards what I do now was kind of a creative, subjective
thing.
I ran this program.
(03:59):
Obviously, I didn't make the music, but I picked the bands.
I curated.
Everything we brought in had a lot of creative freedom and loved that job.
I was brought the first hip-hop band to Milwaukee, which was – or to Marquette, anyway, which
was a big deal at the time.
The ever-dangerous De La Soul, if you've ever heard of them, pretty easygoing band,
(04:21):
but it was a big deal at the time.
That was just another one of those experiences of something creative and individually empowering.
This started to form what I wanted to do and what got me excited.
The music component of your life was both in your education and then also that first
job that you had out of school.
Is that right?
Yeah.
(04:42):
Then when I got out of school, I moved to Chicago.
I was looking to stay in concert promotion.
As a dumb kid, I thought that was going to be really easy.
I wrote a letter to every club in Chicago thinking I'd land an easy job and, of course,
didn't land anything.
I ended up at a place called the Vic Theater, which is about a 1,500-seat theater in the
(05:02):
city, not promoting shows, but they had this thing that they would do on off nights, which
was called Brew and View.
These guys may have actually been the very first people to combine movies and an open
bar.
Nice.
I remember when I interviewed for it, I showed up that day thinking, "So you weren't going
to let me promote shows, but they'd let me get in the door doing that."
(05:24):
I think that's a classic old lesson.
If you can't get what you want, get close to it.
I went there and I remember when I walked up there to interview for the job, I looked
at the marquee.
On the marquee, the movie they were running at the time was Schindler's List.
I thought immediately, "I think I can help you.
This is not the movie to drink to."
(05:46):
I got in there and got quickly partnered with the guy who was actually the projectionist.
We built this operation and we did the obvious things.
We ran Animal House.
We ran comedies and action stuff, and most of it was pretty stupid.
The place blew up.
We were putting a thousand people in a movie every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night.
(06:07):
We were written up all over the country.
The idea took off.
Now you can find these places in any town, but at the time, it was the first one.
Again, it was that opportunity to use your imagination.
In that case, and I think maybe in many cases, you find that the things that work, there's
sometimes right in front of you.
(06:27):
That was just a matter of combining drinking with something a lot more fun.
They weren't always showing Schindler's List, but they would just show whatever was popular.
That wasn't the way to go.
We showed all these cult films.
It was a blast.
Nice.
It was fun to work at a place where people came every day to have a good time.
Right on.
Which I think, again, is a bit of a segue into what I do in advertising.
(06:50):
It's a tough business, but we have a lot more fun, I think, than most people do on the average
day.
Sure.
I believe it.
Was there an inflection point when you knew that advertising was going to be it for you?
It gradually grew.
The thing, and you and I talked about this in the past, it took me a long time.
If I think back now, I did this exercise talking to you.
(07:14):
It took me a good 10 years before I really believe I was good at this.
I don't know if that's always true, but I think it's more true than people think.
There was an old quote I read recently that said, "People overestimate what they can do
in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10."
That was the experience for me.
(07:34):
Gradually, the confidence, the nuance of the business, it took a while to establish.
I would say if there was an inflection point, it's when I was working at an agency called
Donor in the Detroit area, which is the most resilient advertising agency in the history
of the planet.
No matter what happens, Donor always survives.
(07:57):
It was also a real hardworking, I used to call it the sweatshop.
It was trial by fire, but I learned it.
I worked on the Shell business, Shell Motor Oil.
I had a good relationship with the clients.
It had been going pretty well.
The guy who ran the business passed away, unfortunately.
I ended up stepping up and running the business, which is something I had never done.
(08:21):
It was a real confidence boost.
I think the thing there, though, really, which is always true in my business, really, really
great clients.
That always makes a difference.
The people you're working for on the other side are the ones who really determine how
good the work is.
There's another old saying in our business that the clients get exactly the work they
(08:43):
deserve.
I think that's a cliche.
It's actually true.
I had these great clients who were really supportive, really helpful.
The best client in my business is someone who realizes the job isn't to point out everything
that's wrong, which is a really easy thing to do.
I show you an ad and you go, "I don't like this and I don't like that."
(09:06):
The trick on their side is to find the things that they like and encourage it, amplify it.
I think too many times clients get caught up thinking their job is to critique negatively
when really it's about finding the good in all of this and making more of it.
These people were like that.
(09:26):
We just had people I still talk to and reach out to this day.
Interesting.
So picking up on that thread of this works for us, this is what we want, as opposed to
seeing the blemishes or any of the flaws and helping you pull the thread and cultivate
whatever that essence is, that seems to be what you're looking for in a good client?
Yes.
It's a good thing and it's true of what I do specifically in advertising, which I guess
(09:49):
we haven't discussed as I'm a strategist.
In short, what I do is I isolate who is the exact target, what do they think now, what
do we want to get them to think and what's the way to get them there.
I think that's the layman's way of describing what I do.
But to what we were just talking about, at the heart of that is you learn all these things.
You spend all this time researching a target consumer.
(10:11):
You learn a ton of stuff.
You learn 20 cool things about them.
And the job really is to find the one or two that you're going to focus on.
So most of it's about quickly discarding what doesn't work and then drilling in on what
does.
That's what a good client does.
We'll present them 10 ads.
The job is only to pick the one and then tune in on why that's great.
(10:33):
And the other nine, let's not talk about them.
Get rid of them and move towards what works.
Interesting.
Can you teach me a little bit about how you started to be able to, I don't know, think
about the customer, identify those 20 or so things or really narrow down on what they're
actually going to care about?
I mean, a lot of it is learning to be a good listener.
(10:53):
There's hearing what you hear and being drawn to what you like.
I think most of the game gets played after that in trying to sell something.
And I think one of the things, and this is one of the things I think took me a few years
to really get good at.
And it was the thing I realized before I could live it.
Which is just like zeroing in on that one thing, of all the things that you have that
(11:18):
you're trying to sell, know the one or two that really matters and hold those tightly
and kind of use the other things as trading cards.
It's important to know exactly what matters and what's the one thing that you really want
to fight for.
I work in a subjective business, so I can come to you with an idea, Ryan, and you can
(11:39):
just say, "Eh, I don't like it."
There's an increasing amount of math and data and it's making all of us better.
But at the core, at the very end, I'm selling you something that's a persuasive concept
that has a strong degree of creativity to it.
And you might like it, you might not.
And so it's important to cling to exactly what really matters to you and be able to
(12:03):
negotiate the rest.
Sure.
So let's say that we've got our list of, I don't know, 20 things that we think that this
customer cares about.
How do you pick the one and two versus the three, four, and five that don't quite make
that priority list?
For a good advertising strategy, the most important thing isn't the idea.
The most important thing is identifying the problem you're trying to solve.
(12:26):
And I think that leads you to the insight or the idea that best fits.
So a lot of times, the client will come to you maybe and say, "We want to raise awareness
of our product."
Or, "Of course, otherwise we wouldn't be here."
What's getting in the way of that?
Where do you live in your industry specifically?
(12:48):
What is it you want people to believe in what's getting in the way of that?
And then as specifically as possible, trying to define, "Here's the problem we're trying
to solve."
The better you define that upfront, the better you know who your real target is, the better
you know of the five insightful things we learned about, "Here's the one that actually
addresses that issue," and the better the idea that comes out the other end of it is.
(13:13):
Would you tell us the Minute Maid story?
I feel like that's one of those where you really hit the nail on the head.
That was a fun one.
It was a rare year where they didn't have a product launch.
It's usually what would drive what we would talk about, a brand new lemonade or a brand
new orange juice or whatever the case.
They didn't have anything.
So they really wanted to go back and figure out a campaign for that year that would help
(13:35):
the brand.
So they did a big piece of research and determined their big problem was they were losing power
with families.
For years and years, decades, orange juice was a given at the American breakfast table.
It was falling off and it was falling off because there were so many other beverage
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options.
Orange juice, which was once seen as the epitome of starting the day healthy, the sugar component
was becoming an issue.
And so there were a number of things that were making it not the given that there was
before.
And so they did this deep research into the modern family and found that parents and children
(14:17):
weren't connecting quite as well as they could.
And the modern parent was under attack for not spending enough time with their kid or
too focused on job or whatever.
So they kind of left that at our doorstep and said, "Let's see what we can make of this."
And so what we did is we spent, I think it was two straight weeks.
In this case, a lot of the research we did was on social media.
(14:39):
And we were looking at these stories where one of the big themes at the time, and it
was on Facebook, I think, back then, was people attacking parents.
The kids are being ignored while the parent looks at the phone.
And you'd read all these comments sectioned, everyone would be piling on because you'd
have some video of some guy looking at his phone while his toddler wandered out the street
or something.
(15:00):
And everyone's piling on.
At the very end of one of these things was this woman, and it stuck with me because it
was the polar opposite of what everybody else was saying.
And she said, "Give me a break.
I spent 23 hours and 55 minutes focused on this kid.
And I take one minute to look at a text from my friend, and everybody jumps on me.
(15:22):
Who's going to get my back?"
And then she said something just like at the end of it, I thought, "Maybe there's something
there."
And we began to put together this point of view that parents don't get the credit they
deserve.
And that was like a tension point in the modern parent that we could address.
And so we started talking to people about that just in the office.
(15:42):
It's funny, an eight-year-old never comes up and says, "Hey, old man, just wanted to
say good job parenting today.
I really appreciate it.
Good night."
- Wouldn't that be nice?
- It just doesn't happen.
It's not that they don't love you.
It's not that they're not grateful.
But that moment just never occurs.
And so we tested this idea by doing some research ourselves, and we got parents to come in.
(16:04):
But we secretly, through an aunt or whatever, got the kids to write them a letter assessing
their performance.
And we didn't tell them about this.
So we get into these focus groups and we start talking like, "How is it to be a parent?
How do you think you're doing?"
They all said part of this was because they don't get the feedback.
I do my best.
I think I'm doing all right, but I always doubt myself.
(16:26):
Am I too hard on them?
Am I too easy on them?
All that kind of thing.
And so we let them talk about it for a minute, and then we gave them these letters that the
kids had written.
And there was one that gave mom a B-minus, which was a little tough.
But most of them, they were really complimented.
It was everything that the kid never said.
And every single person in the room cried.
(16:47):
We were like, "Man, we got something here."
And so we did this social media campaign where we really just replicated that research, where
we brought real people in.
We had their kids write them a letter, and they read these letters on camera and talked
about it.
And again, all of them cry.
You can't watch this video without crying.
I think I told you that we would play this at the beginning of new business pitches,
(17:09):
and it almost felt like a dirty trick because you've had these strangers come in.
First meeting, "What's some of your good work?"
And we'd show this thing and everybody would cry.
And the thing that was really great about it though, because sometimes you come up with
these really good creative ideas, and they don't have anything to do with, because you
can say, "What does it have to do with orange juice?"
(17:29):
The tie back was that Minute Maid's tagline was "Put good in, get good out."
It had always been a product-based idea about the quality of the oranges or whatever the
fruit was.
But this way, we were able to mention that idea, the parents putting good in, getting
good out, and getting this feedback.
It's not often, and it's another one, I credit the clients.
(17:52):
It's not often that they're willing to do something like that.
There are a million points between coming up with an idea like that and getting it out
posted in social media where the client can say, "You know what?
This isn't about vitamin C, and it's not about sugar content."
They can talk themselves out of it a million different ways.
(18:12):
These guys stuck with it.
Biggest social media presence and bombshell they'd had ever before.
Worked itself all the way up to the top of the Coca-Cola Company, talked about it, but
can't at the Brant City Yearly Convention.
A lot of fun, really successful, and did, in fact, fit really well with the brand.
(18:33):
Okay.
One of the things that I'm so curious about is that this is such a subjective and squishy
topic.
The idea could have been left in the conference room and could have been negotiated their
way out of.
How do you end up actually measuring the success of a campaign like this or any sort of promotion
that you're doing these days when it's so subjective?
In the end, measuring, especially in the digital area, has become not perfect, but a lot better.
(19:00):
That was a social media campaign, and you have all sorts of metrics.
The number of people that viewed it, the number of people who commented, engaged with it,
the number of people who shared, et cetera.
Measuring the success of that wasn't that difficult.
It's harder, I think, on the selling end sometimes to prove that this is the right idea.
We test ideas.
People do what we call an animatic of any kind of video content, that's animated version
(19:25):
of the thing that you do quickly and cheaply.
They're imperfect, but you can get some kind of read.
On the back end, in the digital era, it's getting a lot easier to know when you won
and when you didn't.
Yeah.
Interesting.
We'll get back to the conversation shortly, but I wanted to tell you about how I can help
(19:45):
you find your fit.
I offer one-on-one career coaching services for experienced professionals who are preparing
to find and land their next role.
If you're a director, vice president, or a C-suite executive, and you're ready to explore
new opportunities, please go to goodfitcareers.com to apply for a free consultation.
I also occasionally send a newsletter, which includes stories from professionals who have
(20:08):
found their fit, strategies and insights that might be helpful in your job search, and content
that I found particularly useful or interesting.
If you'd like to learn more, check out goodfitcareers.com and follow me on LinkedIn.
Now back to the conversation.
One of my favorite stories of yours is thinking about Super Bowl ads.
(20:30):
I feel like there's so few people out there who have the chance to put something out there
on such a huge stage.
You launched the Hummer EV.
I would love to get a sense of what it was actually like to put together a Super Bowl
advertisement.
I've had the good fortune of getting to do that twice with General Motors, once with
Chevy and then four years ago, almost in a month now, with Hummer EV.
(20:54):
That was a fun one in general because the Hummer kind of came out of nowhere.
At Leo Burnett right now, I work on two brands, GMC and Buick, somewhere around Thanksgiving
of 2019.
We first found out that they were bringing the Hummer back and it was one of those things
where you get a call, my main client said, "Hey, can you come over to my office at three
(21:16):
o'clock?"
Mysterious, it doesn't tell you what's going on.
My business, that's not a good thing.
So it was like, "What's this about?"
He's like, "We're bringing back the Hummer and it's going to be electric."
Whoa.
We need an ad in four weeks or something like that.
There's no possible way.
Four weeks?
(21:37):
They were going to try and release it before the end of the year.
We ended up talking them into doing the Super Bowl instead, which was still a breakneck
pattern.
So we did research, developed ads, pitched them in an incredibly small amount of time.
The other trick about that one, we ended up doing a bunch of stuff with Hummer, which
(21:58):
was all great, a pleasure to work on.
That first Super Bowl ad, it was so early that we couldn't show the car, couldn't show
the vehicle.
So all we had was a CGI of the headline.
So we had to come up with a Super Bowl ad for a truck that didn't show the truck.
But look, the stage of that is fun.
(22:21):
The budget of that is fun.
We had LeBron James.
We had an old Led Zeppelin song called The Immigrant Song that had been redone by Karen
O and Nine Inch Nails.
You get to do things you don't normally get to do.
And see the metrics.
I mean, you watch how that blows up on social media.
You see your ad trending number two, three, whatever in the United States for a given
(22:46):
period of time at the moment.
It's a blast.
And you're right.
I mean, it is one of those things in clients like General Motors offer you that blessing
that you get to work on some things and do some things that even within our business,
not everybody gets to do.
So very grateful for that.
One of the things that I love about that story is thinking about the perception of the Hummer
(23:09):
being the gas guzzler.
It's got its own specific connotation to it.
How did that change when it moved from a gas guzzler to an electric vehicle?
Yeah, that was the other fun part of it that came.
So that Super Bowl ad was obviously really a tease.
And then when we got into it the next year, the pandemic hits in March as we're working
on the true launch of this vehicle and all these things that some of them were going
(23:32):
to do in big places with big crowds and stuff like that.
All that gets killed.
And all the weirdness that ensues at the beginning of the pandemic.
And we're sorting through it simultaneously what to do with this vehicle because to what
you said, the old Hummer had a connotation with a lot of people that wasn't entirely
great.
It was tied to the war.
(23:53):
It was tied to a kind of masculinity that had gone out of style, put nicely.
You would look it up and like the classic picture you'd see if you googled it was like
somebody's yellow old Hummer double parked in handicapped spaces and stuff like that.
So there was a lot to fight through and how can we bring this thing to market in a way
(24:15):
that was true to it because the new one is awesome and super powerful and share some
of what was great about the old one.
It's a beast and it's killer.
The technology is amazing, but it's big in every definition of the term.
So how do you do something with that?
What we found through a stroke of luck is the pandemic was actually our friend in this
(24:36):
context because we had found this way to talk about one of the things you're trying to figure
out is what do we even call this thing?
And so we had this term we came up with, the super truck, and we started playing with superhero
motifs and we found as we tested these ideas out before we put them out in the world, that
in the context against the backdrop of the pandemic, people felt so disempowered, obviously.
(24:59):
Everyone felt locked up and contained.
And so this story, especially visually told, we used all these kind of superheroic cues
without becoming cheesy about it.
In the reveal film, it descends from the heavens in like a fireball and lands in the desert
and takes off.
So subtle cues to superhero kind of motifs.
(25:23):
And it really fired people.
It was exactly what people needed at the time was something to feel powerful about.
And so between that and the electric thing really remarkably calmed people down on the
gas customers.
I mean, it was a game changer that way.
And it quieted that aspect of it.
(25:45):
And just the potency of it at this time when everybody felt so impotent, made it really
powerful and fun and just like it was a feel good at the time.
And most viewed automotive launch ever.
Record GM stock price, three days of web traffic records, just an enormous success and just
(26:06):
a ton of fun to work on.
That's awesome.
What an amazing experience.
To zoom out a little bit and talk about what your job is actually like today.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you do as an executive vice president of strategy
and a little bit about where you fit within the organization?
Yeah.
So I'm in charge of the entire strategy team, which falls into the brand planners who focus
(26:32):
on developing the brands.
And in our case, which I'm most the vehicles and their persona and everything they represent
and who we target, et cetera.
The social strategy team, which is a team that focus specifically on the culture of social
media, the analytics of social media, all the nitty gritty that's different about that
(26:53):
space.
Community managers who are the people that interact online with customers and potential
customers on often a one to one basis.
And then the broader analytics team that is looking at everything we're doing, analyzing
it in damn near real time and adjusting on the fly.
(27:15):
So it's all things strategy.
If I simplify a creative agency, the media is often in our case, the media is separate.
You kind of break us into three parts.
There's strategy, creative and account.
Account is responsible for the relationship and making the trains run.
Creative are the guys and girls who are writing the ads and putting the content together.
(27:36):
And the strategy group as I've described are the ones guiding it in the right direction.
And so we're one leg of that kind of three legged creative agency stool.
Yeah.
Interesting.
And I'm assuming that you are involved in hiring for your team and in a range of other
aspects of the business.
How do you think about hiring?
What do you look for for your team or anybody that you're going to be hiring within the
(28:00):
broader organization?
I think the old advice is always the good advice.
I'm not going to tell you anything nobody's ever said before, but for me, passion, curiosity,
and I think if there's one that's a little less, I'd like a little uncertainty in people.
Obviously, I'm looking for people with confidence, but I prefer somebody who wonders a lot about
(28:24):
things rather than spending the first five minutes telling you that they're the best
thing that ever happened to you.
And sometimes confidence quickly turns into overconfidence.
I like someone who's got some curiosity, uncertainty, because it usually indicates someone who's
both eager and a good listener.
And then in my business, because it is subjective and a lot of times your job isn't go over
(28:49):
there and do this thing for the next four hours.
We got to figure out a way to pull this thing off.
I look for that passion.
I look for that eagerness.
I look for somebody who isn't going to be waiting to be told what to do.
These things are particular to my business, but I think they probably expand to others.
(29:10):
I need someone who's not going to wait, who's going to jump on things.
And to go back to the curiosity and uncertainty is not afraid to be wrong because we're wrong
all the time.
We spend half our day in a good way, fighting with each other over ideas.
I like that half of it, but the first half is stupid.
What if we did this?
Oh, I like that, but now that's dumb.
(29:32):
Let's see if we can...
And so you have to be in our business.
You have to be willing to jump into an argument and not get hurt and keep going and be able
to let go of your own ideas when a better one arises.
Fascinating.
And to think about how you have been hired, you've moved around to a couple of the bigger
firms.
(29:53):
What was your interview process like in your last couple of jobs?
What was your experience like when you were being hired?
I've had the good fortune, to be honest, Ryan, of having a good network.
I have a weird kind of that.
I've been at four agencies and each of them twice.
Two full round trips.
Yeah.
So I think for me, a lot of it, quite honestly, is probably leaving the place in a good way
(30:18):
and being welcomed back and establishing those relationships and remembering what a small
world it turns out to be.
You're going to see everybody again and it's a good thing to remember.
Yeah.
So thinking about advertising more broadly, I feel like some people don't necessarily
love being advertised to.
(30:38):
Some people feel like, "Oh, I've never been influenced by an ad before."
What's your perspective on how the world sees advertising?
I mean, you're not wrong.
It sees it from both sides.
A lot of institutions over the last couple of decades have gone out of favor.
(30:58):
Politics, medical institutions, and advertising hasn't gotten more popular.
But what people do love is good creativity and they don't hate ads when they're great.
And so that's what we're shooting for.
We're always shooting to try and do something that people can relate to and that in some
way, shape, or form, depending on the particular brand, can enjoy.
(31:23):
And so I think when we do our jobs, people don't hate us.
But some of that kind of comes with the territory.
If you see an ad seven times during a football game, we typically hear about it.
But that's just part of the deal.
But I think, like I said, I think when we do our job well, I think people do enjoy it.
And then I think whether it's things like we talked about with this Minute Maid piece,
(31:46):
we did a thing with Buick a couple of years ago, a campaign called See Her Greatness,
which was about elevating women's presence in athletics, particularly during March Madness,
which has always been a big Buick platform.
And the premise of See Her Greatness was women account for 40% of athletes, but only get
4% of the promotion.
(32:08):
And the trick there then was to make people figure out they're obviously not watching
it, maybe they don't care and how do you make sure they do care?
And the way we framed it was, if you're a sports fan, and you're missing that many great
moments, then that can't be tolerated.
And so we made this content largely social, a little bit of television, where we played
(32:33):
back the audio from big historic women's sporting events from various sports, but we kept the
screen black.
And I can't remember the exact copy, but essentially it said on January 4, 2016, this happened,
but you didn't see it.
Blah, blah, blah, See Her Greatness.
(32:53):
So you do stuff like that.
And then what I get is a guy I haven't talked to in 20 years says, "My daughter saw your
ad."
You're still working on a few, right?
Like, "My daughter saw your ad last week, and she was in tears."
And when we do stuff like that, then we're not such bad guys.
Totally.
One of the things that I find so interesting these days is that it seems like folks who
(33:16):
are in younger generations are excited about the concept of being an influencer.
But it sounds a little bit to me like being an influencer is kind of like being an advertiser.
Do you see a difference there?
How do you see that?
Yeah, really, it's all part of it now.
And we use influencers quite a bit.
And it's been, over the last several years, an interesting thing to bring into the fold
(33:40):
of what we do.
Because usually, if you're using an influencer correctly, you're letting them do their thing.
But you got to find a way to make it feel on brand.
It's been interesting for the likes of us to exceed some of the creative authority in
doing that.
And the art and science of it now has been about finding the right kind of influencers
(34:01):
who can do their own thing, but still feel right for your brand.
There's no question that influencers are advertisers.
And the squishiness, the fluidity of what brand content is and who creates it has been
an interesting dynamic that we've been playing with for the last decade.
It's become a predominant.
(34:21):
I don't want to say new because it's been around for a while.
But over the long haul, it's been a new dynamic that's been fun to play with.
So reflecting back, if you were to give yourself your 20-year-old self advice or perhaps someone
who's curious about the advertising world, what sort of advice would you give yourself
if you could go back in time?
(34:41):
Again, I'll say the classics just happen to be true.
I remember when I got married, and I was trying to think I was 27.
I knew everything about marriage at 28.
I'd done it for a year.
And I worked with all these old guys who would tell me about it.
And then I would watch gradually everything they said would be right.
(35:03):
Somewhere in my early 30s, I finally realized maybe these old guys know what they're talking
about.
And I think so it goes for it.
But like the classic advice, I think the big thing I would tell people is to go for it,
to not doubt themselves, to go after anything that they really think they want to do.
Because I think we're at a time where the individual has never been more empowered to
(35:27):
pull off what they can imagine doing, they can actually get away with it.
And if I look back, I don't think I've played it safe.
But I think every time I thought, "Oh, I probably could have done it."
And especially when you're young, go for it.
You'd be amazed what you can do now as an individual, as a small group that would have
been a lot harder to do 20, 30 years ago.
(35:51):
And I think that there's these interesting two dynamics.
Like I said, there's this, I believe the individual has never been more empowered.
But I think there's this cultural thing that we've never been more obsessed with approval.
Some of the dark side of social media is always like hunting.
Screw the likes, screw trying to follow what everyone's telling you to do, do your thing.
(36:14):
You never been in a better position to get away with it.
And in the old one, if you can't get exactly what you want, get close to it.
I was just told a story about a guy who wanted to get into CGI with the movies and he had
no background whatsoever.
And he took a job as a classic story.
He took a job pushing a broom in the place where they filmed all this.
(36:37):
Three years later, he's working on Harry Potter.
And this stuff does happen.
And it goes back then to that passion and that curiosity.
If you're standing around close to something that's going on and you have a good idea,
people are generally going to listen.
And I think it goes back to that same point about don't make it need to happen in a year.
(36:57):
Don't sell yourself short.
Oldest advice in the world, but it's still true.
Amen.
I agree.
What are you excited about for the future in general or within the advertising world?
Within the advertising world, I think it's funny.
It's always the same thing, but it always changes because of the components.
And for that right now for me is how does creativity merge with technology and analytics?
(37:25):
The things that are big and emerging now, AI is obviously a big one.
Machine learning is coming into its own.
So you can set the digital world up to change an ad all by itself and optimize based on
behaviors.
Very cool.
And all that stuff is amazing.
It's allowed us to get a lot more precise, a lot more efficient, a lot more successful.
(37:51):
But until neurology reaches a place that will be far past my career, until technology is
able to capitalize on that and we can really figure out what exactly about an idea works
at a mathematical level.
And I do believe that they will probably come.
We're not there yet.
And so there's still this component of within all that wonderful technology I have to do
(38:14):
my job so much better than when I started in this business.
There still needs to be a great persuasive, entertaining, engaging, relatable idea.
And how you make those things work together really keeps my business constantly fresh.
There's always a new thing.
AI is a really new concept, but it's a super powerful tool.
(38:37):
And most of us are looking at that not as a threat to our jobs, but a way to do our
jobs differently in a way we haven't been able to do before.
So is there anything that AI is being used for in your work today that really moves the
needle that's good enough now to make a difference?
Well, it's coming into its own on multiple fronts.
(38:58):
I mean, the two that come to me most instantly is on one hand, it's about doing multiple
things instantly.
So for a person like me, a strategist, it'll mean instantly compiling every piece of data
I might want to chase down on a target, for example, their behaviors, social listening,
(39:22):
demographics, whatever, and summing that up immediately, an effort that might take people,
I don't know, a week or two, and then giving that to everybody.
So that's one of the things it does is it compiles instantly, completely, and distributes
to everyone.
(39:43):
Interesting.
And if you don't mind me asking, what does that let you do if you can have that instantaneous
read on the people, the consumers that you're trying to connect with?
I mean, that part of it, there's another part of it, but that part of it is about really
speed and thoroughness and some of the analytics that it can do for you that would have just
(40:05):
taken you either time, effort, or complexity.
But the other part of it that's perhaps even more interesting is about knocking down one
more giant barrier between what we can imagine and what we can actually do.
So imagine you're like an outdoor clothing brand and you've got whatever, you've got
(40:28):
a half a day allocated for a shoot and you get as many shots of whoever in your clothing
and against whatever backdrop you hope to get.
And it's always going to be limited by time and money, et cetera, availability.
And with AI, imagine now a scenario where I can instantly create a scenario where person
(40:53):
A is skiing, swimming, running, biking.
I can create different personas.
So now it's just not one person, it's multiple people.
And imagine that in the context of, say, a celebrity talent where things are even more
limited and more expensive.
And imagine an ultimate scenario where I can just pay for that celebrity talent's likeness
(41:17):
and just create whatever scenario I want almost instantly without limitation.
And so, like I said, it removes another barrier between what a creative person can imagine
and what they can pull off.
And I think there's a lot of talk about AI obviously right now.
(41:38):
And I think there's a lot of worry, right?
Like everything I just outlined, you can imagine all the jobs that disappear as those scenarios
bring themselves to life.
But just like every other huge technological leap forward, I can also imagine a number
of jobs that create.
So I think rather than be scared of this, I think people should obviously embrace it
(42:01):
and find the new opportunities in it.
Because everything I just said, five years from now, if we play this back, it's gonna
sound silly and naive compared to what's actually happening with it.
So we don't even know exactly what it'll bring to bear.
But just like I talked about earlier when you asked about what young people could do
now, start making things, embrace this thing, and be one of the people who figures out what
(42:27):
else it can do that I'm not even imagining right now.
Yeah, how exciting.
And if you were to make just a couple of bold predictions here, I know we're not gonna be
able to predict the future.
But what do you think that 2030, six years from now timeframe might look like in advertising
and AI?
(42:47):
Clearly we're gonna be able to do things we can't do now.
And I think the biggest thing is that second one I talked about, that things that you could
go, "Man, I wish I could do that, but how would you pull that off?"
That's not even gonna be a question you ask yourself anymore.
Anything you can conceive, you'll be able to bring to life, I think.
Wow, how exciting.
(43:10):
Beyond the AI topic, is there anything that you'd like to share with folks out there who
are being disrupted by AI who are in the advertising world right now and are perhaps struggling
or unsure of what their next step might be?
No.
I think, I mean, the disruption is just beginning, first of all.
And what I'd say is, go figure it out.
(43:32):
Go figure out what it can do and figure out how you can add to it.
Because it's coming, and it's coming more quickly than most of the technologies that
have appeared during my career.
So I'd get on it right away, but I wouldn't embrace it with fear.
I'd embrace it with excitement and a sense of opportunity.
So to bring this to a close, thinking about people out there who are curious about your
(43:55):
work or your industry, they are trying to find their own way and figure out maybe what
they want to do or find their own path.
You got any closing reflections, thoughts, ideas, inspiration for the people who might
be listening?
I mean, I think the thing that you can do now, you talked about influencers, is start
doing some of this stuff yourself.
(44:16):
The ability to make social content, the ability to make any video content, sound, whatever,
it's right at your fingertip.
You don't have to wait to get a job to do my job now.
And I would start in your bedroom.
It's amazing what we see people interviewing first time for jobs, what they can already
(44:36):
do because of the editing or what they filmed or what they've written and produced all on
their own.
Start without being asked, create something yourself and start getting good at it before
you show up at our doorstep.
It's funny, over the holidays, I was reading this old book, I'll go back to music one last
(44:56):
time, a book called Our Band Could Be Your Life, written by a guy named Michael Azeroth,
I think his most famous, he wrote a definitive Kurt Cobain biography.
But Our Band Could Be Your Life was about the period leading up to Nirvana when Nirvana
broke in 1991 from the beginnings of punk in America in the late 70s, 1980s.
(45:19):
And there was about, I think, 13 or so bands who built on one another and carried throughout
this decade.
It goes back to this thing for me of like, make your own rule.
That whole kind of music was about making your own rules, not waiting for a corporation
to sign you, not waiting to play a gig at some huge place.
But this weird little infrastructure of record labels and clubs and fans and bands that started
(45:45):
that time and just did their own thing.
And it just goes back to what I was just talking about.
It just re-inspired me reading this and thinking about that, that like, you can do so much
on your own, just get after it.
Right on.
What a great way to close.
Matt, thank you so much for coming on today.
We're so grateful.
Yeah, good to be here.
Thank you, Ryan.
Always good to talk to you.
(46:06):
Our next episode is with Varun Puri, founder and CEO of Utili.
We are living in the middle of this massive AI inflection point.
We are moving to a world where AI will be at our fingertips at all times.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe for new episodes, leave a review
and tell a friend.
Good Fit Careers is hosted by me, Ryan Dickerson, and is produced and edited by Melo-Vox Productions.
(46:32):
Everything is by Storyangled and our theme music is by Surftronica with additional music
from Andrew Espronceda.
I'd like to express my gratitude to all of our guests for sharing their time, stories
and perspectives with us.
And finally, thank you to all of our listeners.
If you have any recommendations on future guests, questions or comments, please send
(46:52):
us an email at hello@goodfitcareers.com.
[Music]
(dramatic music)
Welcome to the Good Fit Careers podcast, where we explore perspectives on work that fits.
(00:08):
I'm Ryan Dickerson, your host.
Today's guest is Matt MacDonnell.
Matt is an executive vice president of strategy and communications with Leo Burnett.
Leo Burnett is a full-service advertising agency that employs roughly 8,000 people.
Matt, thank you for being here.
Good to be here, Ryan.
Thanks.
Glad to have you on.
So let's get started here.
I'd love to learn a little bit about your background.
(00:30):
I brought you on the show here because I find your work fascinating.
You've done everything from Super Bowl ads through transforming how Minute Maid is advertised.
Could you start us off by telling us a little bit about what you were like as a kid and
maybe what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Yeah.
I mean, it wasn't a thing, as you and I have talked about in the past, that I plan to get
into advertising from the get-go.
(00:52):
I think I gradually worked my way into a field that was based on things that were subjective
and things that were creative.
I think the other big thing for me was a real interest in how people other than myself thought
or lived.
You talk about early life.
I went to a high school.
(01:12):
I grew up in Detroit, in the suburbs of Detroit.
I went to a high school called UD High, which was in the city.
I lived in a pretty far suburb called Northville.
Nobody from Northville went to UD.
But I went down there and visited it.
For an all-boys Catholic school, I know that doesn't immediately ring diversity, it was
(01:34):
a really diverse place.
Kids from all over the city went there, race, religion even for a Catholic school.
I just fell in love with it when I visited it, that there were so many people that were
different than me.
I came from a place.
It was a beautiful, lovely place to grow up, but a very singular kind of suburb.
(01:55):
That drew me to the place.
The second thing that drew me to the place was it's a Jesuit institution.
For those who don't understand the Jesuit faction of Catholicism, they're the educators,
they're the individual thinkers.
They really pushed us all to think differently and think for ourselves, way more so than
(02:15):
I would have thought from a Catholic school.
I remember my first day, I walked into theology class thinking, "My God, this is going to
be the worst class of the whole day."
I had a guy probably a few years from retirement, Father Follin.
The first thing he tells us is, and this is a tenet of Christianity, "The Spirit has no
(02:36):
parts.
There is no Trinity.
There's no parts.
There is no hell.
There is no devil chasing you around with pinchers, squeezing your balls."
This is the first 45 minutes of theology, and I thought, "I'm going to like this class."
A big thing for me was anybody who showed me a different side of life and encouraged
(02:57):
us to think for ourselves always hit the button for me.
[0]
Early life in Detroit, you were talking through your early education here.
What happened next?
I think the next stage is – the other thing that happened there, going to school in the
city as a suburban kid.
I fell in love with music like a lot of kids do, and I started going to shows.
(03:17):
My era was – I was in high school, 84 to 88.
Post-punk music, again, the major theme, think for yourself, do your own thing, make your
own rules, and that became another big influence for me.
The music thing stuck with me, and I ended up going to school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
at a place called Marquette University.
(03:39):
I followed the music path.
They had a really good concert program there that had been established for several years
and was bringing in great bands well before I got there.
I ended up running the thing.
Again, there, what started to build towards what I do now was kind of a creative, subjective
thing.
I ran this program.
(03:59):
Obviously, I didn't make the music, but I picked the bands.
I curated.
Everything we brought in had a lot of creative freedom and loved that job.
I was brought the first hip-hop band to Milwaukee, which was – or to Marquette, anyway, which
was a big deal at the time.
The ever-dangerous De La Soul, if you've ever heard of them, pretty easygoing band,
(04:21):
but it was a big deal at the time.
That was just another one of those experiences of something creative and individually empowering.
This started to form what I wanted to do and what got me excited.
The music component of your life was both in your education and then also that first
job that you had out of school.
Is that right?
Yeah.
(04:42):
Then when I got out of school, I moved to Chicago.
I was looking to stay in concert promotion.
As a dumb kid, I thought that was going to be really easy.
I wrote a letter to every club in Chicago thinking I'd land an easy job and, of course,
didn't land anything.
I ended up at a place called the Vic Theater, which is about a 1,500-seat theater in the
(05:02):
city, not promoting shows, but they had this thing that they would do on off nights, which
was called Brew and View.
These guys may have actually been the very first people to combine movies and an open
bar.
Nice.
I remember when I interviewed for it, I showed up that day thinking, "So you weren't going
to let me promote shows, but they'd let me get in the door doing that."
(05:24):
I think that's a classic old lesson.
If you can't get what you want, get close to it.
I went there and I remember when I walked up there to interview for the job, I looked
at the marquee.
On the marquee, the movie they were running at the time was Schindler's List.
I thought immediately, "I think I can help you.
This is not the movie to drink to."
(05:46):
I got in there and got quickly partnered with the guy who was actually the projectionist.
We built this operation and we did the obvious things.
We ran Animal House.
We ran comedies and action stuff, and most of it was pretty stupid.
The place blew up.
We were putting a thousand people in a movie every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night.
(06:07):
We were written up all over the country.
The idea took off.
Now you can find these places in any town, but at the time, it was the first one.
Again, it was that opportunity to use your imagination.
In that case, and I think maybe in many cases, you find that the things that work, there's
sometimes right in front of you.
(06:27):
That was just a matter of combining drinking with something a lot more fun.
They weren't always showing Schindler's List, but they would just show whatever was popular.
That wasn't the way to go.
We showed all these cult films.
It was a blast.
Nice.
It was fun to work at a place where people came every day to have a good time.
Right on.
Which I think, again, is a bit of a segue into what I do in advertising.
(06:50):
It's a tough business, but we have a lot more fun, I think, than most people do on the average
day.
Sure.
I believe it.
Was there an inflection point when you knew that advertising was going to be it for you?
It gradually grew.
The thing, and you and I talked about this in the past, it took me a long time.
If I think back now, I did this exercise talking to you.
(07:14):
It took me a good 10 years before I really believe I was good at this.
I don't know if that's always true, but I think it's more true than people think.
There was an old quote I read recently that said, "People overestimate what they can do
in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10."
That was the experience for me.
(07:34):
Gradually, the confidence, the nuance of the business, it took a while to establish.
I would say if there was an inflection point, it's when I was working at an agency called
Donor in the Detroit area, which is the most resilient advertising agency in the history
of the planet.
No matter what happens, Donor always survives.
(07:57):
It was also a real hardworking, I used to call it the sweatshop.
It was trial by fire, but I learned it.
I worked on the Shell business, Shell Motor Oil.
I had a good relationship with the clients.
It had been going pretty well.
The guy who ran the business passed away, unfortunately.
I ended up stepping up and running the business, which is something I had never done.
(08:21):
It was a real confidence boost.
I think the thing there, though, really, which is always true in my business, really, really
great clients.
That always makes a difference.
The people you're working for on the other side are the ones who really determine how
good the work is.
There's another old saying in our business that the clients get exactly the work they
(08:43):
deserve.
I think that's a cliche.
It's actually true.
I had these great clients who were really supportive, really helpful.
The best client in my business is someone who realizes the job isn't to point out everything
that's wrong, which is a really easy thing to do.
I show you an ad and you go, "I don't like this and I don't like that."
(09:06):
The trick on their side is to find the things that they like and encourage it, amplify it.
I think too many times clients get caught up thinking their job is to critique negatively
when really it's about finding the good in all of this and making more of it.
These people were like that.
(09:26):
We just had people I still talk to and reach out to this day.
Interesting.
So picking up on that thread of this works for us, this is what we want, as opposed to
seeing the blemishes or any of the flaws and helping you pull the thread and cultivate
whatever that essence is, that seems to be what you're looking for in a good client?
Yes.
It's a good thing and it's true of what I do specifically in advertising, which I guess
(09:49):
we haven't discussed as I'm a strategist.
In short, what I do is I isolate who is the exact target, what do they think now, what
do we want to get them to think and what's the way to get them there.
I think that's the layman's way of describing what I do.
But to what we were just talking about, at the heart of that is you learn all these things.
You spend all this time researching a target consumer.
(10:11):
You learn a ton of stuff.
You learn 20 cool things about them.
And the job really is to find the one or two that you're going to focus on.
So most of it's about quickly discarding what doesn't work and then drilling in on what
does.
That's what a good client does.
We'll present them 10 ads.
The job is only to pick the one and then tune in on why that's great.
(10:33):
And the other nine, let's not talk about them.
Get rid of them and move towards what works.
Interesting.
Can you teach me a little bit about how you started to be able to, I don't know, think
about the customer, identify those 20 or so things or really narrow down on what they're
actually going to care about?
I mean, a lot of it is learning to be a good listener.
(10:53):
There's hearing what you hear and being drawn to what you like.
I think most of the game gets played after that in trying to sell something.
And I think one of the things, and this is one of the things I think took me a few years
to really get good at.
And it was the thing I realized before I could live it.
Which is just like zeroing in on that one thing, of all the things that you have that
(11:18):
you're trying to sell, know the one or two that really matters and hold those tightly
and kind of use the other things as trading cards.
It's important to know exactly what matters and what's the one thing that you really want
to fight for.
I work in a subjective business, so I can come to you with an idea, Ryan, and you can
(11:39):
just say, "Eh, I don't like it."
There's an increasing amount of math and data and it's making all of us better.
But at the core, at the very end, I'm selling you something that's a persuasive concept
that has a strong degree of creativity to it.
And you might like it, you might not.
And so it's important to cling to exactly what really matters to you and be able to
(12:03):
negotiate the rest.
Sure.
So let's say that we've got our list of, I don't know, 20 things that we think that this
customer cares about.
How do you pick the one and two versus the three, four, and five that don't quite make
that priority list?
For a good advertising strategy, the most important thing isn't the idea.
The most important thing is identifying the problem you're trying to solve.
(12:26):
And I think that leads you to the insight or the idea that best fits.
So a lot of times, the client will come to you maybe and say, "We want to raise awareness
of our product."
Or, "Of course, otherwise we wouldn't be here."
What's getting in the way of that?
Where do you live in your industry specifically?
(12:48):
What is it you want people to believe in what's getting in the way of that?
And then as specifically as possible, trying to define, "Here's the problem we're trying
to solve."
The better you define that upfront, the better you know who your real target is, the better
you know of the five insightful things we learned about, "Here's the one that actually
addresses that issue," and the better the idea that comes out the other end of it is.
(13:13):
Would you tell us the Minute Maid story?
I feel like that's one of those where you really hit the nail on the head.
That was a fun one.
It was a rare year where they didn't have a product launch.
It's usually what would drive what we would talk about, a brand new lemonade or a brand
new orange juice or whatever the case.
They didn't have anything.
So they really wanted to go back and figure out a campaign for that year that would help
(13:35):
the brand.
So they did a big piece of research and determined their big problem was they were losing power
with families.
For years and years, decades, orange juice was a given at the American breakfast table.
It was falling off and it was falling off because there were so many other beverage
(13:57):
options.
Orange juice, which was once seen as the epitome of starting the day healthy, the sugar component
was becoming an issue.
And so there were a number of things that were making it not the given that there was
before.
And so they did this deep research into the modern family and found that parents and children
(14:17):
weren't connecting quite as well as they could.
And the modern parent was under attack for not spending enough time with their kid or
too focused on job or whatever.
So they kind of left that at our doorstep and said, "Let's see what we can make of this."
And so what we did is we spent, I think it was two straight weeks.
In this case, a lot of the research we did was on social media.
(14:39):
And we were looking at these stories where one of the big themes at the time, and it
was on Facebook, I think, back then, was people attacking parents.
The kids are being ignored while the parent looks at the phone.
And you'd read all these comments sectioned, everyone would be piling on because you'd
have some video of some guy looking at his phone while his toddler wandered out the street
or something.
(15:00):
And everyone's piling on.
At the very end of one of these things was this woman, and it stuck with me because it
was the polar opposite of what everybody else was saying.
And she said, "Give me a break.
I spent 23 hours and 55 minutes focused on this kid.
And I take one minute to look at a text from my friend, and everybody jumps on me.
(15:22):
Who's going to get my back?"
And then she said something just like at the end of it, I thought, "Maybe there's something
there."
And we began to put together this point of view that parents don't get the credit they
deserve.
And that was like a tension point in the modern parent that we could address.
And so we started talking to people about that just in the office.
(15:42):
It's funny, an eight-year-old never comes up and says, "Hey, old man, just wanted to
say good job parenting today.
I really appreciate it.
Good night."
- Wouldn't that be nice?
- It just doesn't happen.
It's not that they don't love you.
It's not that they're not grateful.
But that moment just never occurs.
And so we tested this idea by doing some research ourselves, and we got parents to come in.
(16:04):
But we secretly, through an aunt or whatever, got the kids to write them a letter assessing
their performance.
And we didn't tell them about this.
So we get into these focus groups and we start talking like, "How is it to be a parent?
How do you think you're doing?"
They all said part of this was because they don't get the feedback.
I do my best.
I think I'm doing all right, but I always doubt myself.
(16:26):
Am I too hard on them?
Am I too easy on them?
All that kind of thing.
And so we let them talk about it for a minute, and then we gave them these letters that the
kids had written.
And there was one that gave mom a B-minus, which was a little tough.
But most of them, they were really complimented.
It was everything that the kid never said.
And every single person in the room cried.
(16:47):
We were like, "Man, we got something here."
And so we did this social media campaign where we really just replicated that research, where
we brought real people in.
We had their kids write them a letter, and they read these letters on camera and talked
about it.
And again, all of them cry.
You can't watch this video without crying.
I think I told you that we would play this at the beginning of new business pitches,
(17:09):
and it almost felt like a dirty trick because you've had these strangers come in.
First meeting, "What's some of your good work?"
And we'd show this thing and everybody would cry.
And the thing that was really great about it though, because sometimes you come up with
these really good creative ideas, and they don't have anything to do with, because you
can say, "What does it have to do with orange juice?"
(17:29):
The tie back was that Minute Maid's tagline was "Put good in, get good out."
It had always been a product-based idea about the quality of the oranges or whatever the
fruit was.
But this way, we were able to mention that idea, the parents putting good in, getting
good out, and getting this feedback.
It's not often, and it's another one, I credit the clients.
(17:52):
It's not often that they're willing to do something like that.
There are a million points between coming up with an idea like that and getting it out
posted in social media where the client can say, "You know what?
This isn't about vitamin C, and it's not about sugar content."
They can talk themselves out of it a million different ways.
(18:12):
These guys stuck with it.
Biggest social media presence and bombshell they'd had ever before.
Worked itself all the way up to the top of the Coca-Cola Company, talked about it, but
can't at the Brant City Yearly Convention.
A lot of fun, really successful, and did, in fact, fit really well with the brand.
(18:33):
Okay.
One of the things that I'm so curious about is that this is such a subjective and squishy
topic.
The idea could have been left in the conference room and could have been negotiated their
way out of.
How do you end up actually measuring the success of a campaign like this or any sort of promotion
that you're doing these days when it's so subjective?
In the end, measuring, especially in the digital area, has become not perfect, but a lot better.
(19:00):
That was a social media campaign, and you have all sorts of metrics.
The number of people that viewed it, the number of people who commented, engaged with it,
the number of people who shared, et cetera.
Measuring the success of that wasn't that difficult.
It's harder, I think, on the selling end sometimes to prove that this is the right idea.
We test ideas.
People do what we call an animatic of any kind of video content, that's animated version
(19:25):
of the thing that you do quickly and cheaply.
They're imperfect, but you can get some kind of read.
On the back end, in the digital era, it's getting a lot easier to know when you won
and when you didn't.
Yeah.
Interesting.
We'll get back to the conversation shortly, but I wanted to tell you about how I can help
(19:45):
you find your fit.
I offer one-on-one career coaching services for experienced professionals who are preparing
to find and land their next role.
If you're a director, vice president, or a C-suite executive, and you're ready to explore
new opportunities, please go to goodfitcareers.com to apply for a free consultation.
I also occasionally send a newsletter, which includes stories from professionals who have
(20:08):
found their fit, strategies and insights that might be helpful in your job search, and content
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If you'd like to learn more, check out goodfitcareers.com and follow me on LinkedIn.
Now back to the conversation.
One of my favorite stories of yours is thinking about Super Bowl ads.
(20:30):
I feel like there's so few people out there who have the chance to put something out there
on such a huge stage.
You launched the Hummer EV.
I would love to get a sense of what it was actually like to put together a Super Bowl
advertisement.
I've had the good fortune of getting to do that twice with General Motors, once with
Chevy and then four years ago, almost in a month now, with Hummer EV.
(20:54):
That was a fun one in general because the Hummer kind of came out of nowhere.
At Leo Burnett right now, I work on two brands, GMC and Buick, somewhere around Thanksgiving
of 2019.
We first found out that they were bringing the Hummer back and it was one of those things
where you get a call, my main client said, "Hey, can you come over to my office at three
(21:16):
o'clock?"
Mysterious, it doesn't tell you what's going on.
My business, that's not a good thing.
So it was like, "What's this about?"
He's like, "We're bringing back the Hummer and it's going to be electric."
Whoa.
We need an ad in four weeks or something like that.
There's no possible way.
Four weeks?
(21:37):
They were going to try and release it before the end of the year.
We ended up talking them into doing the Super Bowl instead, which was still a breakneck
pattern.
So we did research, developed ads, pitched them in an incredibly small amount of time.
The other trick about that one, we ended up doing a bunch of stuff with Hummer, which
(21:58):
was all great, a pleasure to work on.
That first Super Bowl ad, it was so early that we couldn't show the car, couldn't show
the vehicle.
So all we had was a CGI of the headline.
So we had to come up with a Super Bowl ad for a truck that didn't show the truck.
But look, the stage of that is fun.
(22:21):
The budget of that is fun.
We had LeBron James.
We had an old Led Zeppelin song called The Immigrant Song that had been redone by Karen
O and Nine Inch Nails.
You get to do things you don't normally get to do.
And see the metrics.
I mean, you watch how that blows up on social media.
You see your ad trending number two, three, whatever in the United States for a given
(22:46):
period of time at the moment.
It's a blast.
And you're right.
I mean, it is one of those things in clients like General Motors offer you that blessing
that you get to work on some things and do some things that even within our business,
not everybody gets to do.
So very grateful for that.
One of the things that I love about that story is thinking about the perception of the Hummer
(23:09):
being the gas guzzler.
It's got its own specific connotation to it.
How did that change when it moved from a gas guzzler to an electric vehicle?
Yeah, that was the other fun part of it that came.
So that Super Bowl ad was obviously really a tease.
And then when we got into it the next year, the pandemic hits in March as we're working
on the true launch of this vehicle and all these things that some of them were going
(23:32):
to do in big places with big crowds and stuff like that.
All that gets killed.
And all the weirdness that ensues at the beginning of the pandemic.
And we're sorting through it simultaneously what to do with this vehicle because to what
you said, the old Hummer had a connotation with a lot of people that wasn't entirely
great.
It was tied to the war.
(23:53):
It was tied to a kind of masculinity that had gone out of style, put nicely.
You would look it up and like the classic picture you'd see if you googled it was like
somebody's yellow old Hummer double parked in handicapped spaces and stuff like that.
So there was a lot to fight through and how can we bring this thing to market in a way
(24:15):
that was true to it because the new one is awesome and super powerful and share some
of what was great about the old one.
It's a beast and it's killer.
The technology is amazing, but it's big in every definition of the term.
So how do you do something with that?
What we found through a stroke of luck is the pandemic was actually our friend in this
(24:36):
context because we had found this way to talk about one of the things you're trying to figure
out is what do we even call this thing?
And so we had this term we came up with, the super truck, and we started playing with superhero
motifs and we found as we tested these ideas out before we put them out in the world, that
in the context against the backdrop of the pandemic, people felt so disempowered, obviously.
(24:59):
Everyone felt locked up and contained.
And so this story, especially visually told, we used all these kind of superheroic cues
without becoming cheesy about it.
In the reveal film, it descends from the heavens in like a fireball and lands in the desert
and takes off.
So subtle cues to superhero kind of motifs.
(25:23):
And it really fired people.
It was exactly what people needed at the time was something to feel powerful about.
And so between that and the electric thing really remarkably calmed people down on the
gas customers.
I mean, it was a game changer that way.
And it quieted that aspect of it.
(25:45):
And just the potency of it at this time when everybody felt so impotent, made it really
powerful and fun and just like it was a feel good at the time.
And most viewed automotive launch ever.
Record GM stock price, three days of web traffic records, just an enormous success and just
(26:06):
a ton of fun to work on.
That's awesome.
What an amazing experience.
To zoom out a little bit and talk about what your job is actually like today.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you do as an executive vice president of strategy
and a little bit about where you fit within the organization?
Yeah.
So I'm in charge of the entire strategy team, which falls into the brand planners who focus
(26:32):
on developing the brands.
And in our case, which I'm most the vehicles and their persona and everything they represent
and who we target, et cetera.
The social strategy team, which is a team that focus specifically on the culture of social
media, the analytics of social media, all the nitty gritty that's different about that
(26:53):
space.
Community managers who are the people that interact online with customers and potential
customers on often a one to one basis.
And then the broader analytics team that is looking at everything we're doing, analyzing
it in damn near real time and adjusting on the fly.
(27:15):
So it's all things strategy.
If I simplify a creative agency, the media is often in our case, the media is separate.
You kind of break us into three parts.
There's strategy, creative and account.
Account is responsible for the relationship and making the trains run.
Creative are the guys and girls who are writing the ads and putting the content together.
(27:36):
And the strategy group as I've described are the ones guiding it in the right direction.
And so we're one leg of that kind of three legged creative agency stool.
Yeah.
Interesting.
And I'm assuming that you are involved in hiring for your team and in a range of other
aspects of the business.
How do you think about hiring?
What do you look for for your team or anybody that you're going to be hiring within the
(28:00):
broader organization?
I think the old advice is always the good advice.
I'm not going to tell you anything nobody's ever said before, but for me, passion, curiosity,
and I think if there's one that's a little less, I'd like a little uncertainty in people.
Obviously, I'm looking for people with confidence, but I prefer somebody who wonders a lot about
(28:24):
things rather than spending the first five minutes telling you that they're the best
thing that ever happened to you.
And sometimes confidence quickly turns into overconfidence.
I like someone who's got some curiosity, uncertainty, because it usually indicates someone who's
both eager and a good listener.
And then in my business, because it is subjective and a lot of times your job isn't go over
(28:49):
there and do this thing for the next four hours.
We got to figure out a way to pull this thing off.
I look for that passion.
I look for that eagerness.
I look for somebody who isn't going to be waiting to be told what to do.
These things are particular to my business, but I think they probably expand to others.
(29:10):
I need someone who's not going to wait, who's going to jump on things.
And to go back to the curiosity and uncertainty is not afraid to be wrong because we're wrong
all the time.
We spend half our day in a good way, fighting with each other over ideas.
I like that half of it, but the first half is stupid.
What if we did this?
Oh, I like that, but now that's dumb.
(29:32):
Let's see if we can...
And so you have to be in our business.
You have to be willing to jump into an argument and not get hurt and keep going and be able
to let go of your own ideas when a better one arises.
Fascinating.
And to think about how you have been hired, you've moved around to a couple of the bigger
firms.
(29:53):
What was your interview process like in your last couple of jobs?
What was your experience like when you were being hired?
I've had the good fortune, to be honest, Ryan, of having a good network.
I have a weird kind of that.
I've been at four agencies and each of them twice.
Two full round trips.
Yeah.
So I think for me, a lot of it, quite honestly, is probably leaving the place in a good way
(30:18):
and being welcomed back and establishing those relationships and remembering what a small
world it turns out to be.
You're going to see everybody again and it's a good thing to remember.
Yeah.
So thinking about advertising more broadly, I feel like some people don't necessarily
love being advertised to.
(30:38):
Some people feel like, "Oh, I've never been influenced by an ad before."
What's your perspective on how the world sees advertising?
I mean, you're not wrong.
It sees it from both sides.
A lot of institutions over the last couple of decades have gone out of favor.
(30:58):
Politics, medical institutions, and advertising hasn't gotten more popular.
But what people do love is good creativity and they don't hate ads when they're great.
And so that's what we're shooting for.
We're always shooting to try and do something that people can relate to and that in some
way, shape, or form, depending on the particular brand, can enjoy.
(31:23):
And so I think when we do our jobs, people don't hate us.
But some of that kind of comes with the territory.
If you see an ad seven times during a football game, we typically hear about it.
But that's just part of the deal.
But I think, like I said, I think when we do our job well, I think people do enjoy it.
And then I think whether it's things like we talked about with this Minute Maid piece,
(31:46):
we did a thing with Buick a couple of years ago, a campaign called See Her Greatness,
which was about elevating women's presence in athletics, particularly during March Madness,
which has always been a big Buick platform.
And the premise of See Her Greatness was women account for 40% of athletes, but only get
4% of the promotion.
(32:08):
And the trick there then was to make people figure out they're obviously not watching
it, maybe they don't care and how do you make sure they do care?
And the way we framed it was, if you're a sports fan, and you're missing that many great
moments, then that can't be tolerated.
And so we made this content largely social, a little bit of television, where we played
(32:33):
back the audio from big historic women's sporting events from various sports, but we kept the
screen black.
And I can't remember the exact copy, but essentially it said on January 4, 2016, this happened,
but you didn't see it.
Blah, blah, blah, See Her Greatness.
(32:53):
So you do stuff like that.
And then what I get is a guy I haven't talked to in 20 years says, "My daughter saw your
ad."
You're still working on a few, right?
Like, "My daughter saw your ad last week, and she was in tears."
And when we do stuff like that, then we're not such bad guys.
Totally.
One of the things that I find so interesting these days is that it seems like folks who
(33:16):
are in younger generations are excited about the concept of being an influencer.
But it sounds a little bit to me like being an influencer is kind of like being an advertiser.
Do you see a difference there?
How do you see that?
Yeah, really, it's all part of it now.
And we use influencers quite a bit.
And it's been, over the last several years, an interesting thing to bring into the fold
(33:40):
of what we do.
Because usually, if you're using an influencer correctly, you're letting them do their thing.
But you got to find a way to make it feel on brand.
It's been interesting for the likes of us to exceed some of the creative authority in
doing that.
And the art and science of it now has been about finding the right kind of influencers
(34:01):
who can do their own thing, but still feel right for your brand.
There's no question that influencers are advertisers.
And the squishiness, the fluidity of what brand content is and who creates it has been
an interesting dynamic that we've been playing with for the last decade.
It's become a predominant.
(34:21):
I don't want to say new because it's been around for a while.
But over the long haul, it's been a new dynamic that's been fun to play with.
So reflecting back, if you were to give yourself your 20-year-old self advice or perhaps someone
who's curious about the advertising world, what sort of advice would you give yourself
if you could go back in time?
(34:41):
Again, I'll say the classics just happen to be true.
I remember when I got married, and I was trying to think I was 27.
I knew everything about marriage at 28.
I'd done it for a year.
And I worked with all these old guys who would tell me about it.
And then I would watch gradually everything they said would be right.
(35:03):
Somewhere in my early 30s, I finally realized maybe these old guys know what they're talking
about.
And I think so it goes for it.
But like the classic advice, I think the big thing I would tell people is to go for it,
to not doubt themselves, to go after anything that they really think they want to do.
Because I think we're at a time where the individual has never been more empowered to
(35:27):
pull off what they can imagine doing, they can actually get away with it.
And if I look back, I don't think I've played it safe.
But I think every time I thought, "Oh, I probably could have done it."
And especially when you're young, go for it.
You'd be amazed what you can do now as an individual, as a small group that would have
been a lot harder to do 20, 30 years ago.
(35:51):
And I think that there's these interesting two dynamics.
Like I said, there's this, I believe the individual has never been more empowered.
But I think there's this cultural thing that we've never been more obsessed with approval.
Some of the dark side of social media is always like hunting.
Screw the likes, screw trying to follow what everyone's telling you to do, do your thing.
(36:14):
You never been in a better position to get away with it.
And in the old one, if you can't get exactly what you want, get close to it.
I was just told a story about a guy who wanted to get into CGI with the movies and he had
no background whatsoever.
And he took a job as a classic story.
He took a job pushing a broom in the place where they filmed all this.
(36:37):
Three years later, he's working on Harry Potter.
And this stuff does happen.
And it goes back then to that passion and that curiosity.
If you're standing around close to something that's going on and you have a good idea,
people are generally going to listen.
And I think it goes back to that same point about don't make it need to happen in a year.
(36:57):
Don't sell yourself short.
Oldest advice in the world, but it's still true.
Amen.
I agree.
What are you excited about for the future in general or within the advertising world?
Within the advertising world, I think it's funny.
It's always the same thing, but it always changes because of the components.
And for that right now for me is how does creativity merge with technology and analytics?
(37:25):
The things that are big and emerging now, AI is obviously a big one.
Machine learning is coming into its own.
So you can set the digital world up to change an ad all by itself and optimize based on
behaviors.
Very cool.
And all that stuff is amazing.
It's allowed us to get a lot more precise, a lot more efficient, a lot more successful.
(37:51):
But until neurology reaches a place that will be far past my career, until technology is
able to capitalize on that and we can really figure out what exactly about an idea works
at a mathematical level.
And I do believe that they will probably come.
We're not there yet.
And so there's still this component of within all that wonderful technology I have to do
(38:14):
my job so much better than when I started in this business.
There still needs to be a great persuasive, entertaining, engaging, relatable idea.
And how you make those things work together really keeps my business constantly fresh.
There's always a new thing.
AI is a really new concept, but it's a super powerful tool.
(38:37):
And most of us are looking at that not as a threat to our jobs, but a way to do our
jobs differently in a way we haven't been able to do before.
So is there anything that AI is being used for in your work today that really moves the
needle that's good enough now to make a difference?
Well, it's coming into its own on multiple fronts.
(38:58):
I mean, the two that come to me most instantly is on one hand, it's about doing multiple
things instantly.
So for a person like me, a strategist, it'll mean instantly compiling every piece of data
I might want to chase down on a target, for example, their behaviors, social listening,
(39:22):
demographics, whatever, and summing that up immediately, an effort that might take people,
I don't know, a week or two, and then giving that to everybody.
So that's one of the things it does is it compiles instantly, completely, and distributes
to everyone.
(39:43):
Interesting.
And if you don't mind me asking, what does that let you do if you can have that instantaneous
read on the people, the consumers that you're trying to connect with?
I mean, that part of it, there's another part of it, but that part of it is about really
speed and thoroughness and some of the analytics that it can do for you that would have just
(40:05):
taken you either time, effort, or complexity.
But the other part of it that's perhaps even more interesting is about knocking down one
more giant barrier between what we can imagine and what we can actually do.
So imagine you're like an outdoor clothing brand and you've got whatever, you've got
(40:28):
a half a day allocated for a shoot and you get as many shots of whoever in your clothing
and against whatever backdrop you hope to get.
And it's always going to be limited by time and money, et cetera, availability.
And with AI, imagine now a scenario where I can instantly create a scenario where person
(40:53):
A is skiing, swimming, running, biking.
I can create different personas.
So now it's just not one person, it's multiple people.
And imagine that in the context of, say, a celebrity talent where things are even more
limited and more expensive.
And imagine an ultimate scenario where I can just pay for that celebrity talent's likeness
(41:17):
and just create whatever scenario I want almost instantly without limitation.
And so, like I said, it removes another barrier between what a creative person can imagine
and what they can pull off.
And I think there's a lot of talk about AI obviously right now.
(41:38):
And I think there's a lot of worry, right?
Like everything I just outlined, you can imagine all the jobs that disappear as those scenarios
bring themselves to life.
But just like every other huge technological leap forward, I can also imagine a number
of jobs that create.
So I think rather than be scared of this, I think people should obviously embrace it
(42:01):
and find the new opportunities in it.
Because everything I just said, five years from now, if we play this back, it's gonna
sound silly and naive compared to what's actually happening with it.
So we don't even know exactly what it'll bring to bear.
But just like I talked about earlier when you asked about what young people could do
now, start making things, embrace this thing, and be one of the people who figures out what
(42:27):
else it can do that I'm not even imagining right now.
Yeah, how exciting.
And if you were to make just a couple of bold predictions here, I know we're not gonna be
able to predict the future.
But what do you think that 2030, six years from now timeframe might look like in advertising
and AI?
(42:47):
Clearly we're gonna be able to do things we can't do now.
And I think the biggest thing is that second one I talked about, that things that you could
go, "Man, I wish I could do that, but how would you pull that off?"
That's not even gonna be a question you ask yourself anymore.
Anything you can conceive, you'll be able to bring to life, I think.
Wow, how exciting.
(43:10):
Beyond the AI topic, is there anything that you'd like to share with folks out there who
are being disrupted by AI who are in the advertising world right now and are perhaps struggling
or unsure of what their next step might be?
No.
I think, I mean, the disruption is just beginning, first of all.
And what I'd say is, go figure it out.
(43:32):
Go figure out what it can do and figure out how you can add to it.
Because it's coming, and it's coming more quickly than most of the technologies that
have appeared during my career.
So I'd get on it right away, but I wouldn't embrace it with fear.
I'd embrace it with excitement and a sense of opportunity.
So to bring this to a close, thinking about people out there who are curious about your
(43:55):
work or your industry, they are trying to find their own way and figure out maybe what
they want to do or find their own path.
You got any closing reflections, thoughts, ideas, inspiration for the people who might
be listening?
I mean, I think the thing that you can do now, you talked about influencers, is start
doing some of this stuff yourself.
(44:16):
The ability to make social content, the ability to make any video content, sound, whatever,
it's right at your fingertip.
You don't have to wait to get a job to do my job now.
And I would start in your bedroom.
It's amazing what we see people interviewing first time for jobs, what they can already
(44:36):
do because of the editing or what they filmed or what they've written and produced all on
their own.
Start without being asked, create something yourself and start getting good at it before
you show up at our doorstep.
It's funny, over the holidays, I was reading this old book, I'll go back to music one last
(44:56):
time, a book called Our Band Could Be Your Life, written by a guy named Michael Azeroth,
I think his most famous, he wrote a definitive Kurt Cobain biography.
But Our Band Could Be Your Life was about the period leading up to Nirvana when Nirvana
broke in 1991 from the beginnings of punk in America in the late 70s, 1980s.
(45:19):
And there was about, I think, 13 or so bands who built on one another and carried throughout
this decade.
It goes back to this thing for me of like, make your own rule.
That whole kind of music was about making your own rules, not waiting for a corporation
to sign you, not waiting to play a gig at some huge place.
But this weird little infrastructure of record labels and clubs and fans and bands that started
(45:45):
that time and just did their own thing.
And it just goes back to what I was just talking about.
It just re-inspired me reading this and thinking about that, that like, you can do so much
on your own, just get after it.
Right on.
What a great way to close.
Matt, thank you so much for coming on today.
We're so grateful.
Yeah, good to be here.
Thank you, Ryan.
Always good to talk to you.
(46:06):
Our next episode is with Varun Puri, founder and CEO of Utili.
We are living in the middle of this massive AI inflection point.
We are moving to a world where AI will be at our fingertips at all times.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe for new episodes, leave a review
and tell a friend.
Good Fit Careers is hosted by me, Ryan Dickerson, and is produced and edited by Melo-Vox Productions.
(46:32):
Everything is by Storyangled and our theme music is by Surftronica with additional music
from Andrew Espronceda.
I'd like to express my gratitude to all of our guests for sharing their time, stories
and perspectives with us.
And finally, thank you to all of our listeners.
If you have any recommendations on future guests, questions or comments, please send
(46:52):
us an email at hello@goodfitcareers.com.
[Music]
(dramatic music)
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