Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Chris Beresford-Hill (LinkedIn), one of the most sought-after creative leaders in advertising. Chris has led brands with a combined market cap of over $1 trillion, and he was recently named Chief Creative Officer of the Americas at BBDO Worldwide.
Previously, Chris served as North America President and Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy and Chief Creative Officer at TBWA\Chiat\Day. His work for clients like Guinness, Mtn Dew, Dove, Workday, Adidas, FedEx, McDonalds, HBO, and Foot Locker has driven sales while putting dent after dent into pop culture.
Chris and his teams have won every award for creativity and effectiveness many times over, including five campaigns in the permanent collection at MoMA. He has been named to Adweek’s list of best creatives—Adweek’s Creative 100—Business Insider’s Most Creative People in Advertising, and the Ad Age 40 Under 40, back when he was under 40.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:
Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.
WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.
WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.
Tim Ferriss: Chris, welcome to Austin. Nice to see you, man.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Nice to see you too. Thanks for having me.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. So we are going to bob and weave, and do some improv jazz in this conversation. We’re going to wind all over the place. Let’s start with a basic, which is how did you land your first job?
Chris Beresford-Hill: My first job was at a very cool, very trendy ad agency in Boston called Modernista. And I convinced them to let me be an unpaid intern, because they were so small they didn’t know how to say no to me coming in and offering to work for free. So I just graduated college and I got really lucky, because there was kind of no high-speed internet or anything. I just found them in the phone book literally, and I walked around and it was this cool office.
By virtue of that, I found my way there, and they let me be an unpaid intern and they let me write website copy, very Web 1.0 copy for General Motors for the Hummer truck, when that was brought back with the H1 and the H2. And I decided this was my dream. Maybe write a ton of web copy, and that was making me really excited. Maybe do a print ad back when there was magazines everywhere, maybe put an idea on the back cover of a magazine and that would really be massively fulfilling. So as soon as I got that internship, I had to figure out how to get hired, but they weren’t hiring. And it was very, at the time —
Tim Ferriss: To go from unpaid to paid.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Unpaid to paid, barely paid. But at that time, and we could touch on this, it was much more competitive to get into the ad biz, because there weren’t as many creative options for a career. So we had an assignment for the Dallas Mavericks 2002 NBA program, like the magazine that people would buy when they went to Mavericks games. And at the time, Mark Cuban was this very — besides just being Mr. Shark Tank, he was this very outspoken NBA owner. He was always criticizing the league and the officials and he was always getting fined, and that was a big theme. So I wrote an ad, and it wasn’t a particularly good one, it was okay, but I wrote “Even Mark Cuban has nothing bad to say about it,” with a picture of the truck, which I thought was clever. I don’t know if it really stands the test of time, but I knew that getting a billionaire to give you the rights to their name was probably something that had to be thought through, where there’s probably some people that would weigh in on that.
And I remember this urban legend, again, very like Web 1.0, which was that Mark Cuban had an email address that if you could find it and you emailed him, he wrote everybody back. So I kind of put together a very short, concise email pleading my case. “I’m an unpaid intern; this would mean so much if you would let me put this ad into the world.” And I made a little PDF and I attached it. And like true to magic, about an hour later, he just wrote back and he just said, “Go for it. -M.” And so —
Tim Ferriss: You summoned the genie.
Chris Beresford-Hill: He was there for it. Maybe it was because it was an ad about him.
Tim Ferriss: He was waiting.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah. Maybe there was other emails he didn’t want to write back to, but maybe this worked for him. And so I remember I printed out the ad and then I printed out the email from him, and I put it underneath and I showed my boss Lance, and he laughed at that ad and then said that the requisite, “We’re never going to be able to do it, but thanks, kid.” And then he turned the page and there was the email. And I think that, more than any creative idea I’d ever shown him, and I was doing my best to show him everything, I think I showed him that I was going to solve every problem with creativity, not just the assignment. And so we ran that underwhelming ad, but that was enough for him to give me a job offer for 22 1/2 thousand dollars a year, which was the best job offer I ever got.
Tim Ferriss: So many follow-up questions. So the first is, and you may not recall, but do you have any idea what the subject line was, or the gist of the subject line?
Chris Beresford-Hill: You know what, I don’t remember the subject line, but I’ll tell you this. I think it was good and considered, because to this day, I receive a lot of email that’s not from people I’m looking to hear from, and I know the power of a subject line. So I think very hard on these things. Everything is the communication. So, for example, when I worked at TBWA\Chiat\Day, I would sometimes cold email clients, we’d have an idea for Audible or an idea for Ikea, and I would find the client and I would reach out, and I figured out the perfect email subject which was “Hi, from Apple’s ad agency,” because TBWA is Apple’s ad agency. And my response —
Tim Ferriss: That’s strong.
Chris Beresford-Hill: — rate on that was killer. So I’ve definitely learned that your first impression is kind of your only impression. So maybe I appealed to his kindness. Maybe it was desperate, desperate, unpaid intern. I don’t know what, but it was something.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe you appealed to his level of get-shit-done, and he appreciated the chutzpah, and —
Chris Beresford-Hill: I hope so.
Tim Ferriss: — it would seem to be the case if he gave you permission.
Chris Beresford-Hill: So if I ever see him, I’ll say a very big thank you.
Tim Ferriss: He may end up hearing through the podcast. So coming back to the phone book, becoming an unpaid intern, why did you choose to focus — because the phone book has a lot of entries.
Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of different types of businesses. Why did you choose to pursue this particular company? Or at least sector?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Everything’s luck. You can be prepared for it, you can have some gifts, but —
Tim Ferriss: You need some luck.
Chris Beresford-Hill: — you’re an idiot if you don’t think that chance and fate and all those things. Because there were a number of ad agencies in Boston, and I was sure I wanted to be an advertising creative person, but again, Googling wasn’t a thing to do. The computer with the internet was at the library, and I think it was like yellowpages.com. And I think Modernista was the name of the agency. So that’s kind of in the middle. That’s not the first one. I think I tried Arnold advertising in Boston, and they didn’t want to meet with me. I think I just worked my way down, and I think it was just the right place, right time, where they were like, “Yeah, we’ll take free labor.” So it was really, you couldn’t look up what the client lists were.
Tim Ferriss: Did you have a pitch, or was it “I will do anything if you let me in the door?” Or was it more specific?
Chris Beresford-Hill: It was “I will do anything,” because I had nothing to offer. And I think later, I would get my second job, and I would go to someone, and now I’m a copywriter, and I would say, “I will write on your accounts in my spare time, if you want.” You got to offer whatever you have, but I started out with nothing to offer. So I think I knew I was free labor, and I said I would get coffee, and I did, and I got a lot of coffee.
Tim Ferriss: We may come back to that. There’s a lot of power in being willing to do the small things, because a lot of folks feel like they’re too good for it or too qualified, but we may come back to that. I want to ask you for the program, and maybe you already said this and I missed it, coming up with the “Even Mark Cuban has nothing bad to say about this particular car.” Did they give that to you as an assignment or is that something you just did of your own volition?
Chris Beresford-Hill: No, I think I graduated from website copy to the smallest of creative tasks. And so I think there was, you could write the welcome signs for the GM convention and try to make that clever, and you could write — so there’s all kinds of little things that weren’t like the big-brand stuff, and they weren’t the big TV spot or any — and that’s kind of where all the focus was and you kind of had to work your way up to those things.
Tim Ferriss: Work your way up. So you said that you have to consider luck, I’m paraphrasing here, which is of course true. There’s certain things you can do to increase your surface area for luck to stick to them. Borrowing that concept from somebody else, I don’t know the attribution. And you didn’t get a yes from the first few spots or the first few companies you contacted. Did Modernista end up being a particularly good fit or particularly influential in a way you could not have predicted?
Chris Beresford-Hill: It gave me — so interestingly, when I kind of found my own, quote-unquote, “voice.” Modernista was one of these ad agencies that was very stylish, very European, everything was very cool, and they would put out work that was very avant-garde. I think I later became a little bit more mass, a little bit more comedic in the work that kind of came out of me. But what I got at Modernista is the owner was a guy named Lance Jensen, and he, for any ad nerds, you know exactly who that person is, because he had written one of the best advertising lines of all time, which is “On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted for VW.”
And so he had created that campaign while working in Boston at an agency called Arnold, and he’d done all these famous ads. I don’t know if you remember, there was an ad, I don’t know what the name was, but it’s that “Da Da Da” song, and a couple of guys just killing time driving around in their VW Golf, and I think they pick up a chair, and they drive around a little further, they realize the chair smells because they picked it up off the street and they let it back out and they drive around and the line said, “The VW Golf. Everything you need for your life, or your complete lack thereof.” Things like that.
So there’s all these amazing ads and there was years and years of them. And so he had struck out on his own and opened this ad agency, unbeknownst to me, Modernista. So when I walked in, they had accrued maybe 20, 25 people there. But I didn’t know that I was going to effectively be interning for one of the best, most poetic writers in the industry ever. So that was dumb luck. But what I got out of that is the one thing you cannot quite step back and get from the start is your taste level. At the end of the day, it is a skill, it is a muscle, it is an ability, but ultimately, you’re making choices on the ideas you’re coming up with and the ideas you’re approving and putting forward. And that’s all on taste.
And I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet that says they have bad taste. Everyone thinks they have good taste. And so I literally stumbled on the doorstep of just one of the most thoughtful emotional writers ever. So I learned my taste from him, and I learned the bar and the standard and I learned what was acceptable and making everything feel brand new and interesting. He could write a line about a car, and it would make a — we know what a car is, but he could make a car sound like this really exciting thing that you really needed to get one of. And that’s the art of it. So I learned that from him. And the best gift you can ever get is a first boss that has great taste or high standards.
Tim Ferriss: We will come back to taste, almost certainly, but I’m going to bookmark that. I’ll say a few things, and this is context that you did not have before we started recording, but as I began to explore entrepreneurship, all of the books, almost all of the books that I first read were on copywriting. So Caples and all of the classics. I also bought as many books as I could possibly find and afford on print advertising, because at the time, this is, let’s call it 2000, 2001, print was still a thing and it is still a thing to a lesser and lesser level, but I was going to be doing a lot of direct-response advertising in magazines. So I had swipe files; I had a three-ring binder where I collected various advertisements. I also bookmarked a lot of advertisements, one of which was the VW campaign that you just mentioned.
And I am endlessly fascinated by copy because it’s effectively, at its best, I think, sort of poetic mind control. The idea that I’m making these sounds that are coming out of my face that are instantaneously registering semi-instantaneously through your senses into your brain and then facilitating thought is pretty wild when you sit down and think about it. And no, I’m not on drugs, people, at the moment, just to be clear.
I suppose my next question is actually bridging the bookends of where we started, which is this cold email to Mark Cuban, and then an email that you sent to my team. The reason I think this is perhaps fun to unpack is that a friend of mine asked me earlier today, she said, “How many guests have you booked who have cold emailed you?” I thought, and I said, “I honestly can’t even think of three. But your email worked, which, one would hope, given your track record.” And I was like, “Okay, so this guy knows how to play the game, and he knows how to get my attention. He knows how to get it surfaced, at least, to my attention, and now we’re sitting here.” So when you thought about that email, how did you think about crafting that, or any email like it?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Honest answer. I think I have the muscle memory now, so I don’t think I had to really sit down. I think I made the connection. I thought, “Boy, I really want to talk about this with a broader audience, and I want to get more people thinking about advertising, and I want people to think about it as a career.” So I had that thought, and then I found my way to you via our mutual friend Zach, because that’s part of it.
The muscle memory for me is not only coming up with ideas. The other muscle memory is actioning and executing them. One thing to have all these great thoughts. I know people that are so much smarter and more interesting than me, but it’s also pairing that with this knowing how to do it. So I hope I had a good subject line, and I hope I was brief and didn’t oversell it, because no one likes that, and I think that’s probably what I would’ve stuck to. I think I was kind of doing what I do.
Tim Ferriss: I have your email in front of me, so let me share my perception of my read of the ingredients. First thing is you get to the point. It’s not six paragraphs of meandering life story. You sort of established that you know the podcast very quickly, within the first two sentences. And you mentioned, very quickly, your credibility. So 21 years chasing the dream, to much success and far more failure. Okay. What kind of failure? So you’re prompting sort of questions. Immediately, sizzle reel of some of my career highlights, short sizzle reel, which you can accomplish in different ways, by the way. It could just be a few bullets, but credibility up front, in other words. And then thanks for entertaining this. Here’s some macro topics we could talk about. So immediately getting into topics which prompt questions in my mind, including several that I would want answered, not just for my audience, but for myself.
So I would say establishing credibility, yes, you have the connection, but that actually is just table stakes. And particularly if I’m not extremely close to the person making the introduction. If it’s someone close, I know they’re putting their social capital at risk with me. So it gets, in some cases, elevated by someone on my team. But it’s very rare that something like this will convert. But I was interested in exploring, as you led to in the probably second paragraph of your email, not just the successes but also the failures. But first, we’re going to look at the nurturing and development of your ability to get things done on the execution side.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well before that, by the way, I think in that email, and maybe the big thing about it, because we also, when we pitch as an agency, we show up with 10 people and a hundred-page deck and our capabilities and the ideas we’re going to bring forward. But the thing you never can lose sight of is whomever makes their idea easier to buy, we’ll sell their idea. Whoever makes their product easier to buy. So I think anytime either I position the work or our company or myself, I try to give you a couple of reasons for a yes rather than relying on someone else to put together my Cinderella story for me.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean you had different headings too. You had macro topics, and then later on, techniques, truths, et cetera. And these were very well thought through. So in effect, you made it easy to say yes, because they’re like, “Okay, you’ve done 50 percent of my research for me,” in a sense, which makes the yes easier.
Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right. There we go.
Tim Ferriss: And by the way, folks, number one, this is not an invitation for thousands of people to cold email, because trust me, it’s not going to work. I’m giving you the exception to the rule. But what I would say, number two, is that, and then we’re going to go to father-son trips. That’s going to be next step. So I’m going to precede that by preparing this. And maybe you have discussed some of these bullets before in talks or in pieces you’ve written, but you’ve also, the work that you did, even if I had not said yes, would be useful in other places. Thinking about your career, your history, the techniques that you’ve used is not lost if the first person says no, or the second person, or the third person. So I’m just pointing out that it was well crafted, and a good investment.
All right. Father-son trip to California. I’m going to use that and let you run with it.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes, this is something, it is a formative experience that I only really put together a couple years ago on Father’s Day when I kind of felt like I wanted to tell my father how inspiring he is for me. Because your dad’s your dad, your mom’s your mom. I don’t often take a step back and let him know the things he showed me when I was young, how much I value them, and how much they helped shape me. So when I was 10 years old, we took a father-son trip to California, and it was the first time I’d ever been to the West Coast. And my father’s a teacher. It probably would’ve been a family vacation, but I think maybe it was like a “Let’s just send the two of you.” And on the docket was we were going to go to Universal Studios and then we were going to go to a waterpark and then we were going to go to the beach or what have you.
Obviously, Universal Studios was the big ticket item because those were really expensive, and that was the highlight. We go to Universal Studios and my mind was blown, because I had never — I grew up a little bit of a shy, reclusive kid. So I did kind of — if I wasn’t out playing with the other kids, I was watching TV, I was watching movies. So that world was extra important to me as a child, and I’d never been anywhere near where these actors were, where these things happened. And so we took the tram tour and I saw the actual house from Psycho, and the real Hill Valley Town Center from Back to the Future, which was my favorite movie ever. And even the empty water tank that was — I still remember this, that it was also at cross purposes a parking lot, but had a giant painting of an infinite ocean behind it, and that’s where they filmed the water scenes for Jaws and a dozen other movies and all this stuff.
So I was so excited, and I just never — in many ways, I’ve been kind of chasing that rush to production into sets and to where it’s happening ever since. But I mean, the guy walking past the tram with the paint bucket, I wanted to be him, because he was doing something. So anyway, it just blew my mind.
Tim Ferriss: How old were you at the time?
Chris Beresford-Hill: I was probably nine or 10. So it blew my mind. So we go home, we go to the hotel and call my mom and report on the day and I said, “Look, I know we can’t go back, but I would give anything to go back.” And that was that, and I appreciated it. And then the next morning, my father wakes me up maybe at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., which is really early to a nine-year-old.
Tim Ferriss: It’s pretty early for a lot of people.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Pretty early for a lot of people. And we get in the rental car, and I don’t really know where we’re going, and we drive 20, 30 minutes, and we wind up in some kind of a strip mall, and we go into a storefront, and I remember this, and there’s a row of chairs and an old-school projector, I guess at the time it wasn’t old school, it was just a projector. It was 1990.
Tim Ferriss: Like overhead transparencies or something like that.
Chris Beresford-Hill: All that stuff, like the sheets and — and it was a four-hour timeshare meeting for a new development in Anaheim. It was a hard sell. They were coming in, they were talking about these are going to go fast, and people would raise their hand and get up and buy into it. And then after they left the room, they would lower the price. I was worried. I didn’t know what was going on. I was worried my father was going to buy one of these things. And so after this whole four hours is over, we kind of go to the front to sign out, and we were rewarded with two super crisp day passes to Universal Studios. So my father figured out that that was another way to get access.
And so we burned rubber, got to the park, and we rode the back lot tour until they literally kicked us out of Universal Studios. And I think that was what we’re getting at with this story was this is — my father kind of taught me the definition of creativity, which is really just looking at any situation, finding another way, because he didn’t overextend himself and buy tickets he couldn’t afford. He didn’t get mad or upset that he couldn’t get them. He bypassed all of that and he was just always going to figure out another way, and that’s who he is and that’s how he lives his life. And my father is a guy who has never let his situation ever determine where he was going to go. And it rubbed off on me, and in a number of other ways, it kind of made me a little audacious or precocious.
And so I was this very shy kid. I was very little and we moved around a lot. So I was kind of, every couple of years I was the new kid.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you move around a lot?
Chris Beresford-Hill: My father is a very ambitious teacher and he became a headmaster and became a professor and he pursued a doctorate. So we kind of would move around every couple of years to wherever fit. I think I wasn’t a great athlete, I wasn’t a great student, I was small. So I felt like, “Okay, I’m not going to kill it in seventh grade, so I’m going to bide my time.” So I probably spent a lot of time observing people, which helped me as a creative person. But what would happen is I lived this double life where at school I was this quiet, nice, invisible kid, and then I would chase my passions and take these moonshots in my personal life.
So I loved the New York Knicks. They were great in the ’90s. I don’t know if you’re an old-school hoops fan.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I remember this.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay. Starks, Mason, Oakley, Ewing. That was an incredible team, and I’d never been to a Knicks game, but I loved them and I never missed watching one. So as I watched it, I absorbed everything. So when Marv Albert would reference that the Knicks had a big day of practice at SUNY Purchase before the game, I banked that, and I happened to have a friend that I would go see, and I noticed that the SUNY Purchase was on the way to his house, so I convinced him to hitchhike there. And then we’d — no internet. We walked around the campus until we found a giant beige building with eight Mercedes in front. So we’re like, “I think this is where the Knicks are.”
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t look like student transport.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Doesn’t look like student transport. Giant Mercedes. And we staked it out, and when people started walking out like trainers, they had those “Exit only” gymnasium doors. I grabbed my friend and we ran for it and we slipped in, and practice was just ending. And you could see people were filtering everywhere, and a few Knicks were staying maybe to work on some stuff. And I don’t know what possessed me, but I grabbed a ball and I started dribbling it, and I kind of figured, “Okay, maybe they’re going to think I’m like a trainer’s kid or ” And so my friend, who I’m coaxing with me, because my friend Steven did not want to do this. So we start shooting, and then I swear on my life, Tim, maybe it wasn’t as pronounced or as dramatic as this, but in my memory, I heard a ball slap, and I turn around and it’s Anthony Mason and John Starks, who were the heart and soul of this Knicks team at center court.
They go, “Two on two.” And so we played a five-minute game the day before they were playing at the —
Tim Ferriss: Straight out of a Disney movie.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Straight out of a Disney movie. The day before they were going to be facing off against Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls, at Madison Square Garden. And so I go to school Monday, and I’m sitting at the lunch table and everyone’s talking about that game, and I can’t even tell them, because they wouldn’t even believe me that I played basketball with them the day before. So that was the — but my parents supported that. They thought it was great. I know you’ve had Todd McFarlane on before.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I’m a huge Image Comics fan. I grew up loving him. And my favorite was Rob Liefeld, who I don’t know if you know of.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Chris Beresford-Hill: He had Youngblood, but he actually famously created Deadpool among many great characters. I would come home from school every day and I found out that the Image office, I will remember this, was in Venice, California. And so I called 411 and I got the number, and I came home from school every single day, and I called the number, and a woman would pick up and say Image Comics. And I said, “Hi, my name is Chris. I’d like to speak to Rob Liefeld.” And she said, “Okay, Chris, let me take your number and I’ll give him the message.”
And so I did that, and then the phone would ring and it’d be my mom’s friend. It was never him. But I did it every day, because I just wanted the off chance. Maybe that receptionist was going to be sick one day. Maybe she’d have some mercy. Maybe he’d pick up the phone himself. But I had to talk to him just, for the contact. “Hi.” I just needed that. So, later that year, we went to the Jacob Javits Center for the New York Comic Con, which was a very big deal, and this must’ve been like 1990 or 1991. And instead of just going in with our tickets, I had to enhance my surface area for something magical to happen. So, again, my poor friend Steven — I don’t talk to him that much anymore, but —
Tim Ferriss: The voice of reason who was shackled to this —
Chris Beresford-Hill: Steven, God bless you.
Tim Ferriss: — out of control.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I think we convinced, I think it was my parents at the time, to drive us in early. And we, with a few, maybe 10 or 20 people, we went to the service entrance of the Javits Center where there was some barricades. And at this time comics were big, but the limousines were showing up, and these guys were getting out with their teams. And so I was here for it. I wanted that chance to see them. Lo and behold, the Image crew roll up, and at this time they were really the — Marvel was the old school, and Image were these bad boys, and they’d all — exodus and it was Jim Lee and it was Todd McFarlane, it was Rob Liefeld or whatever. So they all walk out, and so I start yelling to get attention just like everyone else. And I swear to God, Tim, this woman walks up to me, because I’m yelling. And she goes, “Are you Chris?” And I was like, “Yes.” And she was the woman that had answered the phone there.
Tim Ferriss: With the patience of a saint.
Chris Beresford-Hill: With the patience of a saint. And this is — when I said I was little, she lifted me over the barricade, and they brought me in and I got to sit behind the table with those guys for the whole morning. And Stan Lee came by and I got to shake hands with him.
Tim Ferriss: Visit from the Godfather.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. So all that stuff. I found out where the Dave Matthews Band recorded their albums and I would send a letter and a self-addressed envelope to make it real easy for them to say yes and write back. And he became a pen pal for a couple years. But then I would go to school, and I’d have my too-big backpack and be a mediocre student. But I kind of was living this world where —
Tim Ferriss: So you’re your own superhero in your own way?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, yeah. It just felt like I was able to create the life of my dreams, even if the day-to-day reality didn’t totally match it. And that was fine by me.
Tim Ferriss: So then we flash forward, you’re getting coffee for people at Modernista, then you catch a break —
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: — with this amazing email that you get back from Mark Cuban. What is the next quantum leap moment, which might’ve been at the time, seemingly small? But some moment, some experience, some small or big win where you’re like, “Okay, here we go. I think I can be really good at this,” or something that’s sort of marked as a milestone after that? Does anything come to mind? It doesn’t need to be sequentially immediately after that, but something that ended up being an inflection point, whether you recognized it as such at the time or not?
Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s a good question. I play golf with my father-in-law, I just learned it so I’m terrible at it. I don’t know if you play?
Tim Ferriss: Terribly.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, but it’s fun. If you’re on a golf course in the morning, life’s not bad. But I was taught that when you putt, if the hole is 20 feet away, what you do is you measure 10 inches in front of the ball on the path to the hole. So you don’t aim for the hole, you aim for that spot 10 inches in front. And I think that advice landed well with me because I think I kind of had a sense of my dreams, but I was only really looking at the incremental of, “Okay, I made a Mark Cuban Dallas Mavericks ad, now what I really want is to write something that’s going to be on the back cover of GQ.” And that was everything.
Tim Ferriss: So you had a clear idea though?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, and it was incremental. I knew that I was not going to —
Tim Ferriss: That was the hole?
Chris Beresford-Hill: — do the Super Bowl in my first year, I accepted that. But every time it was, “Okay, now I’m regularly writing print ads and print headlines. Now, I really want to do a TV production. I really want to go learn that and do that.” And that’s bigger and that gave you more weight. And as I did that, I slowly accrued a body of work. And that’s the beauty of this industry is you can have a resume and you can say whatever you want about yourself, but you actually have a basket of your ideas and you can be appraised on those.
So I built up just enough to get a job in San Francisco at Goodby, Silverstein, which I think that was my big break because I was learning my craft in Boston, but I didn’t realize that when I went to Goodby, that was then and now is still one of the greatest creative ad agencies in the world that came up with “Got Milk?” for God’s sake. So it doesn’t get that much better than that. But when I got there, what I realized is I had learned how to write in the Modernista style, and that taught me a great lesson, which is that it’s not totally about you. As an advertising writer, you’ve got to be a chameleon, you’ve got to understand not everything can be your voice, it has to be the correct voice.
Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to San Francisco, so bookmark for a second. But I’ve made a promise earlier that I’ve not forgotten, which is coming back to taste. And I think this may tie into the Modernista style. So could you say a bit more about what characterized the Modernista style, and just a little bit more about being introduced to good taste? Because there seems to be, this is an overstatement, but a religious divide among creatives where on one side you have people who think that taste can be taught or cultivated, and on the other side it’s like that is nature and not nurture, and you either have good taste or you do not. Now, that might be two people with different definitions of God debating the existence of God, which is going to go nowhere because they’re talking about different things. So could you tell us a little bit more about Modernista style? What is that? And then good taste.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, the first thing I’ll say about it too is I don’t know the nature/nurture answer, but I have personal thoughts. But I think Lance, who’s still in my life now, by the way, he was a great first boss, but someone I still talk to regularly, he had a good way of saying it. He’s very self-effacing, like many really talented — the most talented person is usually the person that’s least boastful and least sure of anything. I’ve definitely learned that over time, and also radically open-minded versus fixed.
And Lance would say that the Modernista style was kind of you put an idea out there and the vibe of it is like, “That’s cool.” They really did know how to do one of the hardest things, which is cool is or isn’t, and it’s hard to convince of cool. But there was just a way of writing, there’s an ad for the big H2 Hummer truck at a three-quarter angle that made it look almost like a piece of jewelry. And then the line on it said, “Perfect for rugby moms.” But it was smart, but it was just kind of bad-ass, kind of sexy, kind of those things. And so that —
Tim Ferriss: It was succinct also, very, very succinct.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It was very hard to copy. It was very tight writing and it was beautiful art direction, and that was the hallmark and that was the box there. And if you came with something that was too wacky or too dry or too intellectual, too much maybe like Modernista or too much like a big broad Super Bowl ad, it just didn’t fit into the kind of clients that were attracted to Modernista and that Modernista sort of serves very well. So I really learned how to find that voice and write in it.
And then when I went to Goodby, the four ends of the box just fell down and I realized, okay, you could go to Jeff with something that makes someone laugh out loud or you could go to him with something profound and the color palette there because of who Jeff and Rich are because of the scale and size of the agency and the amount of talent they’d had through the halls over the years, the aperture was just wide. But at that point, I think some level of taste, some level of maybe standards came of it has to feel fresh, it has to feel interesting, it has to be succinct. Those kind of lessons were learned and then you could apply them to goofy things and profound things. But I think it’s the taste and the skills kind of were merged.
Tim Ferriss: So part of the reason that I wanted to have this conversation, and we were talking before we started recording or you asked me rather, “What would you be interested in or what do you think an audience be interested in hearing?” And we discussed a few past podcast guests who are very iconoclastic and have sort of painted a unique path for themselves with seemingly very few constraints, like Rick Rubin would come to mind, one of a kind. And part of my answer was creativity within constraints. Because the reality for most people, and the reality for me more than a lot of people would assume, is that I’m operating with a team or with contractors or with deadlines, I have constraints. I think a lot of good creativity flourishes with constraints. But when you have a team, when you have a boss, when you have clients, you have to navigate a whole host of different hurdles and challenges than if you’re a solo operator trying to be a creator on say, Instagram or TikTok, which has its own challenges, but they’re very different. And I thought that would be fun to explore.
So one of my questions, as someone who doesn’t know the business at all really or very, very little, as you’re building the portfolio, you could have a portfolio that doesn’t pull its weight after a few years, right? There’s the possibility you assemble a portfolio that doesn’t get you to the back cover of GQ, that doesn’t get you to the Super Bowl ads. How did you think about, and I’m not sure how much agency you have with this, I guess pun intended, building a portfolio that would get you closer to the hole? It’s like, okay, you can measure 20 inches out for that putt or whatever it might be, how did you think about portfolio construction and making progress towards bigger and more interesting things?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, I mean, I suppose it’s what you’re attracted to and what you love. And I’m not here to say that all of advertising, when you drive past a billboard or flick on Instagram or turn on a TV, it’s mostly not good. And in fact, most of it is not even ideas, I think oftentimes it’s just information. So there’s a lot of it.
And I think for whatever reason my interest in the industry latched on to somewhere in the top 20 percent of the — because I don’t think I wanted a job in advertising, I think I wanted to express myself in an interesting way and I wanted to put provocative or interesting ideas into the world. So I think I was obsessed with the best of the best. And so I would, in my early years, spend time with award show annuals and look at what the industry said were the best. And I’d form my own opinions and I would say, “Okay, I think that’s okay, but I love that.” So I started to shape where I wanted to go with it. And then of course you figure out, “Okay, well what are the places or who are the people that are doing that, and how the hell do I get near them?” And that became —
Tim Ferriss: And are those people who are on the creative side? Are those clients? Are those both? How much control do you have over what you do next, right? One thing you said that surprised me was you came up with an idea for a client and then sort of pitched it to a client who is not already signed with the agency. So I was like, “Oh, okay, that’s interesting,” because I would assume in a big agency it’s like, “We have these clients, and here’s your assignment.” So I don’t know how much control you have in sort of forging your own destiny with new clients, being around new people.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, like anything, I think it’s like if you are being challenged and if you have all the opportunities under the sun on your current roster or whatever your workload is, then you give your all to that. But if you’re feeling like maybe there’s a lower ceiling on some of the things in front of you, then naturally I think you’ve just got to get proactive. Because, again, at the end of the day when the clock runs out or when the year is over, whatever you made is what you have to show for it. So if things start to go south, I mean, sometimes there’ll be maybe a host of great clients, but maybe the CEO has very questionable taste, doesn’t like ideas that are too big or bold or creative. And you’ve got to account for that and you’ve got to kind of hedge on that, you’ve got to have a lot of irons in the fire. And when you’re feeling like things are stagnating or going south, you’ve got to almost invent your own opportunities. So it’s a mix.
Tim Ferriss: How did you get your first Super Bowl ad? How did that happen?
Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s a little bit of — it may be a nature/nurture thing as well. The nurture is my dad who kind of figured out how to remove obstacles to where he was going. To get a Super Bowl brief is and was a very big deal, but I think maybe 10, 15 years ago things were much more hierarchical. I think today it’s not uncommon to give big opportunities to all levels of creative people or any strategist or account people, anyone in the agency. But back then it was very hierarchical. And again, this is the most 1A thing, but I went and I asked for the assignment and I had a friend —
Tim Ferriss: Can you place us in time? Where are you?
Chris Beresford-Hill: So this would be 2005 in San Francisco at Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners. And the previous two years they’d done a Super Bowl ad for Emerald Nuts. And so I went to the creative director of it and I said, “I very much love this campaign. It’s one of the reasons why I was so excited to be here. If you would have me, it doesn’t even have to be formally assigned. I would just give anything to work on it.” And that was it.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a smart way to word it.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Make it an easy yes. If you make yourself.
Tim Ferriss: Doesn’t have to be formally assigned. I mean, that probably simplifies the political/approvals dynamic.
Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right. And it gives that creative lead. I was scoped for two teams, I just found a third writer. So I did that and I was fortunate, it was a guy named Steve Simpson who worked there, it was him and Jeff Goodby together. And we got the brief, and the brief was, “Win the Super Bowl ad meter,” and that means win the popularity contest. So peanuts are parody, so just do our peanut ad and make it amazing. And I remember we were sitting in a conference room on the sixth floor and everyone kind of funneled out and I felt like I was so close to this chance to do a Super Bowl ad that I needed it, I had to give myself the best shot to win. So the strategist was one of the last people to leave the room. And the strategists are the ones that work with the client and they align on what needs to be communicated, what are the core elements and what do we know about our audience and that kind of stuff.
Tim Ferriss: So this is not to diminish the role, but it’s kind of like an account manager, they work with that specific client to translate their needs and preferences and so on to the in-house creative folks?
Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right. To kind of translate the ask from the client into something that might be inspiring in a brief that would get the creatives thinking. And it was a guy named Matt Herman, and I remember I kind of grabbed him and he was a nice guy and I knew him socially. And I just said, “Hey, just tell me, is there anything that I could put in this that would make the client like it even more?” And he had said, “Well, we’re having these conversations about maybe thinking about peanuts as a source of energy, not just like a snack, but something that can give you a pick me up.”
And so I took that and then I ran and I wrote 20 scripts, but every single one of them had the peanuts as this source of energy that gave you something, that got you out of something, that protected you from something, made them feel like more of a utility. And as a result, I kind of gamed the system. And then all the ads I wrote were the ones that went forward because they did more. And table stakes are table stakes, in anything, in creativity or whatever your job is, if you can figure out one more thing that what you’re being asked to do could do and you cover everything and that, you’re more attractive, you’re more appealing always.
Tim Ferriss: And I want to highlight also that first you have to have the chops, you have to have the ability, the skillset to execute. But so much is left on the table by not asking targeted questions, right? You asked the question, which was the spell that provided you with the information you needed to use the hook that the client would respond to. All right, so then what happens? What does the approval process or production process and brief look like? All right, so you send off these 20 different scripts for, what is it, I don’t know how long the spot is?
Chris Beresford-Hill: 30 seconds.
Tim Ferriss: 30 seconds?
Chris Beresford-Hill: So it fits in a page. The average 30-second spot is like three-quarters of a page in a script.
Tim Ferriss: How much does a Super Bowl ad cost these days?
Chris Beresford-Hill: These days? Oh, boy, oh, boy. I want to say a 30 is like six or seven million.
Tim Ferriss: Six or seven million?
Chris Beresford-Hill: I think a 60 is somewhere in the 10 to 12. At this point, I think Super Bowl was the Super Bowl, but I think it was like $1 million in 2005, 2006.
Tim Ferriss: Non-trivial though. I mean, this is a big bet.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It was a big bet.
Tim Ferriss: Also reputationally a big deal for people within the client company. All right, so 30-second spot, obviously a huge investment for the company, if not in capital, certainly in reputation.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: What happens?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, so I wrote a lot of them, and we can chat a little bit later about the techniques, but I spilled my brains and I wrote — the trick when you’re coming up with creative ideas, I think everyone has slightly different techniques, but I think the one consistent thing is you have to cajole yourself to release every possible thought you can and get it all out of your head. And then when you think you’re empty, you have to trick yourself into coming up with more ideas. You’ve got to mine yourself. You’ve got to say, “What is the ad I think we should make? What is the absolute wrong ad to make? What is the worst ad to make? What is the ad my hero David Fincher would make? What is the ad Peter and Bobby Farrelly would make?” My friend Jason has one where he says, “What would I do if the laws of gravity and physics were not in place?” You have to fuck with yourself. And it’s almost like trying to make yourself vomit basically. I’ve never said it that way before, but you got to get it all out.
And then essentially when you’re a babe, when you’re young, you bring all that raw material and a creative director tells you what’s good, That’s how you learn some tastes. A good creative director says, “These three are the interesting ones.” As you get better, you start to be able to sift your own material, but you’ve got to get all the material out. Now, 20-plus years in, I think I can vomit in my head and extract the bits, but I think that’s the journey is get everything inside of you out and then in the beginning someone tells you what it is. In the middle, you get it out and then you work through it yourself. And then in the end you can have your private vomits.
But anyway, so I wrote all kinds of them, and the one that went through, I used it, I trapped myself to write it. And a few years ago I was reading something or I saw an interview with the artist Kaws, K-A-W-S, I’m sure you have seen his stuff. He does those big kind of vinyl Disney-looking characters with the Xs for eyes.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’d have to check it out. Yeah, all right, got it.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s really good pop art and he sometimes uses these crazy color combinations. And someone asked him how he put together such crazy combinations of colors. And what he would say is he kind of reverse-painted himself into a corner. He would start in a corner with a bunch of colors that didn’t make sense, and then he used the rest of the canvas to make sense of it. So he forced himself to make sense out of what he did here all the way here. And that I learned later but that was just something I would do to myself. So I started writing a sentence and I didn’t know what the end of the sentence would be. And I would do that to myself a lot just to force myself. I would start an answer without knowing what the answer was, and then I would —
Tim Ferriss: How would you pick the beginning?
Chris Beresford-Hill: I would start logically. So I thought about that, the brief I got to with my friend Matt was an afternoon energy slump and peanuts are a good pick me up. So I wrote around 3:00 p.m. when your blood sugar and energy are low, and then I sat there and then I wrote “Robert Goulet appears and messes with your things,” but I didn’t have that idea, I just started a sentence and I said, “Finish it, fucker.” And so that was, again, one of a bunch of ideas. But that was the idea was basically to turn Robert Goulet, the now passed, but the iconic crooner and singer of “The Impossible Dream,” to turn him into an afternoon poltergeist. And so basically, I think I had also seen that incredible Fatboy Slim Spike Jonze video with Chris Walken. I think many of us saw that and went, “Oh, my God, I want something like that.”So I had the sentence I wrote, and then I thought, “Let’s make this a weird kind of dance around an office where everyone’s asleep and Robert Goulet is pouring coffee on keyboards and taping people to chairs and just doing whatever.”
So anyway, so it’s written, and I think another thing obviously is I show my bosses, and it’s Steve and it’s Jeff Goodby, and Jeff Goodby is in the advertising world, one of the Mount Rushmore kind of figures. So I also learned if he’s 10 times better than me, don’t try to sell him on anything he knows. So that’s how I read it.
Tim Ferriss: Meaning let him judge for himself.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, okay, “This one’s crazy. Oh, you’re going to love this.” No, I just said, “Okay, here it is.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, pro tip, don’t ever say that to —
Chris Beresford-Hill: No, it’s true.
Tim Ferriss: “You’re going to love this.”
Chris Beresford-Hill: No, don’t do that.
Tim Ferriss: Don’t laugh too hard at your own jokes at the time either.
Chris Beresford-Hill: So they liked it. I think they liked it and they’re like, “Okay, that’s cool.” And then what ended up happening again is the craziest ad ideas are really highly, highly rational strategies brought to life in highly, highly surprising, memorable ways. Because when we went to the client with it, and it was a guy named Andrew Burke, who was the CMO of Emerald Nuts at the time, we had a very literal idea. We had an idea about a little Mick from Rocky kind of coach that would keep you awake in the afternoon and tell you to eat. We had stuff that was a little bit on the nose. But to his credit, he didn’t see this weird poltergeist thing. He’s like, “Oh, I get it. We’re going to show people that there’s actual danger in being sluggish in the afternoon and we’re going to make up what that is and we’ll position ourselves.” So he immediately saw past the kind of insanity of the execution to the strategy. And ultimately a great client does that and great work does that.
And I was talking to my friends Eric and Craig, who did the Old Spice, “The man your man could smell like,” and that is also a completely batshit idea. But the strategy was, “We make body wash for guys, but their lady friends buy it for them.” And they said, “Great, we’re just going to have a hot guy talk to ladies about it.” And again, and then they made it entertaining but it’s almost like —
Tim Ferriss: There’s a rationale behind it?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, and it’s simple and it’s bone simple. And then the creativity and the surprising connections you make and the surprising things you write, that’s the magic. But it’s always magic on top of something very simple and easy to understand, it has to be. So to go back to this, so we go through it. So this idea is sold, and I will say, to this client’s credit, it was not over-researched or heavily researched. So what they did is they put it into some quantitative research to show the storyboards. We made some storyboards and a moderator shared it with a panel of people, and it was not —
Tim Ferriss: Panel meaning almost like a focus group?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, they were like people roughly in the demographic. And they were kind of read the script. It wasn’t performed, it was read by a third party. And instead of saying the dreaded, “Do you like it?” Which is how many a great idea gets unraveled, they just said, “Okay, so what did you see? What do you understand from it? What did it make you understand about peanuts? And what do you think of Emerald Nuts now?” Again, it was asking customers the right questions. I think sometimes the Henry Ford, “Ask people what they want and they’ll say ‘A faster horse,’” I think sometimes when you ask your audience to tell you what it should be, you get a lot of mirroring. But when you make the conversation about what are you getting from it, then you can give them something unexpected and you can push yourself. So we did that kind of research, thank God.
Tim Ferriss: Those are good questions. It makes me think of something that is maybe only tangentially related, but something Kevin Kelly, who’s a friend of mine who’s been on the podcast who’s very wise in a lot of ways, and he has a book of advice, short, pithy lines that started as a list of lessons learned on his, I believe, 68th birthday to give to his kids.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Cool.
Tim Ferriss: And one of them was, “If people tell you something is wrong, they’re almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.” But people have a gut sense, so these questions pair well with that insight, I think. Okay, so those questions are asked?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Those questions are asked, and it passes. People say what we wanted them to say. And of course, again, maybe the reason why this one sailed through it, I have many a horror story was, again, because they got a natural energy message when they had convinced their board they were just going to entertain. So it was already in the bonus round, so it was favored. And that gives you that lift so you can move through. So then we hired a director. It was a duo called The Perlorian Brothers out of Toronto, Canada.
Tim Ferriss: That’s an amazing name.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I don’t know where, Ian and Michael —
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like an acrobatic act from Cirque du Soleil.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, I know, I know. And they’re these two former ad creatives that became directors and they got into it and we did a call with Robert and his wife Vera. And I thought we can talk a little bit about celebrity advertising because this was my greatest experience because normally celebrities are very specific on what they will or won’t do, and there’s always some pushes from their team. But Robert just wanted to know if he could choose his own wardrobe. And we said, “Absolutely, sounds good.” So we filmed it in Toronto over two days, and it was very fun.
Again, and this is probably maybe inside baseball and the industry, but I think sometimes clients become so creative that they mirror the job, but sometimes the best clients are let the creatives be creative and you’re there to say, “I think this is okay,” “I’m not comfortable with this,” “Here’s a note on why making this change would actually be more effective, not less.” But our client, Andrew, was just there to supervise and make sure that we were getting the right stuff in the can, protecting his investment, but giving us liberal room to play. So it was a magical shoot, it was right before Christmas.
And then you hire an editor separately. And so there’s an editor named Ian McKenzie, who’s cut a ton of Super Bowl ads and he’s very good at it. And early January we go into his suite in the Flatiron in New York City, and I’m super excited, and he plays it and I’m super disappointed because it didn’t live up to all my dreams. I don’t know, it feels flat. Is it funny? I could see nothing but the problems with it. And what you end up doing with the editors, I think back in the day when you had to cut film with a razor blade and use tape, you would debate and edit. But because you’re doing things at the time final cut, you can try anything.
Tim Ferriss: You can ready, fire, aim.
Chris Beresford-Hill: You can make it backwards. In some ways, it allows you to explore anything, but maybe in other ways it takes some of the thinking out of it, which could be a shame. But anyway, we go through a couple of days where we try a whole bunch of different things, we try some different music, we change the order of this little afternoon maraud, we experiment. And then what I’ve learned with Ian, because I’ve now been working with him for 15 years, ultimately we start to feel really good about it, me and the art director I was working with.
Tim Ferriss: How much of that was the product changing versus your psychology adapting to the fact that perhaps nothing could live up to the swirling dream of perfection in your mind?
Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s the latter, it’s the latter. Yeah, you’re exactly right. And what I’ve learned with Ian, and I just, for a Super Bowl ad we made this year, I brought a young team for the first time to work with him, so I have fun, I’m seeing them get to do what I did 15 years ago. And the advice I gave them is I said, “Just know whatever Ian shows you first is going to be closest to where you end,” because that’s what I know about him. So we kind of walked around the moon with him, and of course it was like maybe some music tweaks, maybe a little bit of tightening up a few moments here, but ultimately he had it. But we had to get our brains to catch up with reality. And of course, at the end of the day when someone has never seen it, they’re going to kind of see the best version of it. But you torture it.
Tim Ferriss: Editors are magicians. I mean, the good editors in any medium are so important, yet so frequently semi-invisible, right? And I think I am getting this roughly right enough, but I believe if you look at Steven Spielberg’s films and his greatest hits, the greatest constant, I believe, is his film editor, yet how many people could name his name? I wish I could name his name. I’ve read the story, I’ve researched this guy, and he is one of the masters at work again and again.
Chris Beresford-Hill: More happens in the edit than people think because it’s not lining it up in order, it’s speeding up shots, it’s arts and crafts, it’s punching in. The amount of raw stuff we do in the edit where we’ll split the screen, take this, take from that, and the amount of experimentation that happens there. And that’s really, in many ways, that’s the most important moment.
And so we walked with this edit and I showed it to Jeff Goodby and Steve Simpson, and they liked it and it was good. And then a very interesting thing happened, I had the QuickTime on my computer and I showed a couple people in the office and I played it — why would I say their name? But I played it for a couple people and they went, “Huh.” And I distinctly remember this. I showed two or three people and everyone — and by the way, I think some people respond as professionals. They immediately think what they would’ve done with the opportunity maybe or I don’t know what. But for some reason, and I don’t know why, it didn’t bother me at all, and in many ways I started getting a little excited by the fact that people didn’t get it.
And I’ve not really unpacked this, I’m talking about this kind of long-form for the first time in a long time but I kind of felt like there was something more special happening if it wasn’t an easy get for people. And I started to think that it might be more original. And I think that was the case and I kind of learned a great lesson there, which is once you take feedback and definitely share your ideas, but once you’ve locked in and you’re sure you’re good with it, you really don’t have to look back. It didn’t rattle me, and I’m glad it didn’t. And I think to this day, if there’s something that I believe in, if I get lukewarm results, it just does not phase me at all. And usually you’ll find your audience, people will like it, people will respond differently than your inner circles.
Tim Ferriss: What happened when the ad came out?
Chris Beresford-Hill: It did well, it did really well. The Ad Age the next morning ranked it number one, they had an ad critiquer named Bob Garfield who —
Tim Ferriss: He was like the Siskel and Ebert of ads?
Chris Beresford-Hill: He was, and I feel like Jeff Goodby him had went head-to-head a few times. And Jeff wasn’t a big fan, but he liked it. And I think it was kind of early days of YouTube, and I think it was for a day or two, it was the number one comedy video on YouTube or something crazy like that. So it worked and the sales went up.
Tim Ferriss: I saw it back then, I remember seeing it. It was weird because it got sent to me and it was on YouTube, I recall this very specifically. So I want to unpack a couple of concepts/lessons from a few different people and I want you to explain them. And then we’re going to go to lying to the CMO of Adidas, if that’s the right way to put it. That’s what we call a cliffhanger. After this commercial break. No commercial break. But the first is from David Lubars, if I’m getting that right. And I’d love for you to share what advice or lessons you took from him. Now one that I have in front of me, which could be a starting point or maybe is the point, make as many decisions as possible. I’m not clear on what this means, but it does pique my curiosity. So who is David, and what does this mean, and any other lessons learned or principles?
Chris Beresford-Hill: David is the worldwide chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO. I worked for him for eight years, and I’m not shy of saying he was the best boss I ever had. He was the best boss I ever had because he was very clear, and he was very consistent, and that’s what you need in leadership. So you could show him a bunch of work, and he would tell you what he liked and what he chose right away, and that was that. He didn’t need to split hairs. He would come give you his response, and he knew that he would make a bigger impact in this giant company by going around and saying, “I think this is the most right thing, the most creative thing, the most interesting thing,” and just go and do that, and not be afraid to make decisions, create progress. By the way, if he picked something that was wrong, well whoop-de-do, we’d have to go back and do it again. Or maybe we had one that wasn’t as good as it could have been, but he never inhibited progress. He always facilitated progress by doing that.
Tim Ferriss: Meaning catalyzing some type of forward motion.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Exactly. He never would say, “Let me take this back, let me think about it, or let’s pull more people into it.” He would just give you these gut reads, and it always gave you permission to go forward, and it really taught that someone who’s really pushing everyone and keeping everyone in motion just happens to always be at the center of so much. That’s why for that eight years, I mean, the agency was one of the most awarded in the world. There was my little corner of the universe, but there was all these other corners, and he just amplified himself by empowering his people and saying a lot of yes, sometimes a no, but he was always game to move forward.
Tim Ferriss: Were you able to emulate that at the time in some small way or is that something that you were only able to implement later as you had more and more direct reports or bigger team?
Chris Beresford-Hill: I used it. I used it then because — well, because BBO at that time was David’s place, so David said to do it. David said, “Let’s go,” and whether or not — I don’t think we ever got a look at an org chart or reporting structure. I don’t think we ever knew that that carried muster, but a lot of us loved the decisions he was making, and so enough of us would constantly say, “That’s what David wants.” So whether or not that was be all, end all, it became be all, end all. So we were all emboldened to make moves, but I myself couldn’t. There wasn’t much I could do in terms of —
Tim Ferriss: In terms of making your own decisions?
Chris Beresford-Hill: No.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Chris Beresford-Hill: No. I was probably working through my own process, but it was invaluable later because you do see people that in a high creative role, you’ve really got to make things happen, and you will see some people in very senior roles that really gild the lily and that really obsess over —
Tim Ferriss: It’s such a great expression.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It is.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Chris Beresford-Hill: By the way, the gilding the lily of someone who’s looking at a two-minute case study for an award show, and changing the mix on the music eight times, and you’re like, “Listen, it doesn’t really matter.” There’s times to craft the hell out of it, but there’s also this step back. I think in our industry and in creativity, fast decisions are really stepping back as opposed to getting in the weeds.
Tim Ferriss: Can you say more about that? What I’d like to hear you riff on a little bit is how you think about fast decisions. This is a source of constant fascination for me. It’s something I revisit a lot. To what extent do I prioritize speed and just catalyzing things happening versus honing, minimizing mistakes? I think that’s what it comes down to for a lot of people. It’s what error rate are you willing to accept? Is it 10 percent? I know it’s hard to track these things, but is it, you’re willing to accept a breakage of making the wrong call 10 percent of the time because the speed net over time is just a huge competitive advantage and good for what you’re doing? That’s a long question, but with a fair amount of lead up. How do you think about that?
Chris Beresford-Hill: I remember that at the end of the day, it’s subjective, that there is not —
Tim Ferriss: It’s not mathematics.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s not mathematical. So I’ve learned to trust myself, and I’ve learned that if you A/B something too long, you’re lost. So I think the more I get stuck in something, the more I realize I need to make a fast decision because I don’t think obsession when you’re really deciding go, no go, good idea, bad idea, excited about this, not excited about this, I don’t think time is your friend. I think time pulls everything. It slows everything down. It takes the energy out of it. So I think sometimes you’ve just got to let it fly, and then by the way, you can correct, and you can change as you go. I mean, I’ve approved ads that wound up being completely different ads that we’re really proud of. So that’s the other thing, is that nothing is totally fixed.
Tim Ferriss: It also strikes me that there are so many things, just pulling from my own experience, that get worse with time and more deliberation like deals and just deal structures, negotiating. Often in my experience, it’s the longer it takes, the more that is a harbinger of pain to come or just a bad wasteful outcome that ends up stalling out. There’s so many things like that where it’s like, okay, if there’s isn’t some speed to this, likely the outcome is going to be worse.
Chris Beresford-Hill: For sure. Time kills all deals for sure, and it kills momentum, and it kills energy, and it takes people. So if you’ve got people going, if you need to take something offline for yourself, just know that their muscles are going to cool. They’re going to take a break, and they’re going to restart. Many times, the wrong decision can become the right decision.
If it’s actually an okay time, I’d love to tell you a little bit about a Mountain Dew Super Bowl —
Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it.
Chris Beresford-Hill: — ad we did because it started out as one thing and it became something totally different, and there’s a beauty in that sometimes the non-linear way, it really works. So this would be, I want to say it’s 2018. We are Mountain Dew’s agency of record. I’m working at TBWA\Chiat\Day at the time. I’m the chief creative officer, and I have these incredible executive creative directors named Amy and Julia that run the Mountain Dew business. We got the Super Bowl brief, and the idea we landed was something about how it was for Mountain Dew Zero Sugar, and this is the zero that they really got right. This one tastes so close to the original that we needed to do something that was going to cause a real reappraisal.
Before we started talking, I was like, “That’s right” because I couldn’t remember what it was. So our original idea was, it’s impossible taste. So that was the core thought we were executing against. Amy and Julia had this really gutsy idea, and the idea, and I’m caveating here, this idea never happened, was never purchased by PepsiCo. So this is behind the scenes in our house at the agency. We had the idea that for this impossible drink, we were going to do the impossible Super Bowl ad. So what we were going to do is we were going to announce mega press release billboards, front page of Variety that Daniel Day-Lewis had agreed to star in Mountain Dew Zero Sugar’s Super Bowl ad, and we were going to do it without telling him.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, continue. Yeah.
Chris Beresford-Hill: For sure, he would say “Go away” if he acknowledged it, and for sure he would probably cease and desist, if not sue. Our whole idea was going to be we were going to let this play, but we were going to say because this Mountain Dew Zero Sugar was so impossibly good, you deserve an impossibly hard-to-make Super Bowl ad, so we’re going to do it. We were going to even have a live cam of a limousine parked in front of his last known address on the day of the Super Bowl, and we were going to have the set ready, and we were going to basically film and live stream, is he going to come do it?
So as I’m working with Amy and Julia on this, we’re loving it. We’re having fun, and this is when — the best ideas are when you’re like, “We can never do this. We’re going to get in big trouble. This is so wrong.” When you feel that, you’ve got to stay there. You absolutely have to. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens. So then we started saying, “Okay, so what happens when he doesn’t show?” So we’re talking. We’re like, “Okay.”
So we made this up. The whole pre-campaign, all the buzz, Daniel Day-Lewis sues Mountain Dew because he doesn’t want to be part of this. He’s not going to participate, but we still had the TV ad. So a camera winds through a set from There Will Be Blood, and finds its way into this chapel, and finds the back of this cloaked character, and it’s Daniel Day-Lewis’ character. Turns around, and it’s Will Ferrell in a mustache and a hat, and he does the monologue, or the beautiful performance piece of, “I take my straw and I drink your milkshake,” and he does. He just goes nuts yelling about how “I take my straw, and I drink your Mountain Dew Zero Sugar, and I drink it up.” So then the rug pull becomes insane. So he’s not going to do it, and then Will Ferrell does an insane Daniel Day-Lewis screaming about Mountain Dew Zero Sugar.
So we know it’s probably a long shot, but we go to Pepsi. We go with a bunch of ideas, and we go — the client was a woman named Nicole, and there’s the CMO Pepsi guy named Greg Lyons, who’s been there a long time, and he’s great. He knows creative. Again, when you talk about the kind of clients you can work with that understand creative people but also understand their own business and can bridge that, that’s why Pepsi marketing has consistently been so strong. So we show Greg and Greg’s like, “I love it. I love it. There’s no way we can do this.” But he said, “But you know what? I’ll bring it to our legal because look, I love it. I just know we can’t do it. I love it.” Sure enough, and I won’t even get into the myriad of reasons, but basically there was a potential legal precedent that would’ve altered Pepsi stock’s price forever if we pissed off Daniel Day-Lewis or whatever.
Tim Ferriss: Hold on. That’s too tantalizing, if you can’t get into it, but just a little bit.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I’ll give it. Look, because nothing happened, nothing happened. So I think there was a case that perhaps if this went wrong, he may be entitled to a royalty on every Pepsi product sold forever.
Tim Ferriss: I can see why legal would push back.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I’m talking about a bag of Frito Lays in Bangkok is still Daniel Day-Lewis gets money. It would have been the best thing that ever happened to him, but anyway.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like that guy who had a phone thrown at him by Russell Crowe.
Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Man won the lottery, Powerball.
Chris Beresford-Hill: And if he put that money into Apple stock, now how good is he doing?
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Chris Beresford-Hill: But [inaudible 01:21:53].
Tim Ferriss: So legal’s like, “I love it, we think not.”
Chris Beresford-Hill: So we think not, but this is how it really happens. So we go back to the office and we’re — there’s new ideas and stuff, and we’re sitting, the three of — Amy and Julia are great. They’re working with their teams, and then we would get together for an hour or two, and we’re saying, “You know what?” There’s just something about that weird ass scene with the wrong actor just screaming about Mountain Dew that we just loved. We just loved it. So then you just go, “Okay, I don’t know how you’d ever get to that without the Daniel Day-Lewis thing, but let’s cut off the Daniel Day-Lewis thing and make sense of this.”
So then we said, “Okay, well what if it’s about Mountain Dew Zero Sugar is almost as good as the original, or what if it’s as good as the original, if not better and then we — that’s our idea, and we put the wrong person in an iconic scene, and have them go nuts,” and make it just — because we knew that — when we saw the Will Ferrell idea, we were like, “I just want to see that.” So then we knew, okay, if you have something people want to see, don’t leave it. So then we said, “Okay, maybe it’s Cast Away. Maybe it’s There Will Be Blood. Maybe it’s The Shining,” and that’s how we landed The Shining where we recast with Bryan Cranston and Tracee Ellis Ross remaking The Shining. But again, he’s ranting and looning about Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. So that’s how we got to that. But we would’ve never got to that if we didn’t just go on a weird journey and stay creative the whole way.
Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to something you said in passing that I’d love to hear more about, and maybe you have another example, and this ties into Jeff Goodby. Make sure you always feel like you’re doing something vaguely naughty. So that feeling of like, oh, we’re never going to get away with this, or ah, use slightly different wording. But could you tie these things together because that type of indicator, I want to understand what that feeling is, and how you actually use it. Because, for instance, this is not a hundred percent, but for me there is a certain physiological quickening that I experience, have experienced before almost all of my best investments. There’s an obvious signal that I’ve learned to tune into. It’s not right a hundred percent of the time, but the hit rate is very high. So what is this? Or how do you use it? Any way you want to tackle it.
Chris Beresford-Hill: The thing I love by the way about asking people advice is they give you advice, but people tell you who they are when they give you advice too, and that’s Jeff. Jeff is a super smart guy who went to Harvard and wrote for The Harvard Lampoon. He happened into advertising, but he’s just a vibey, really smart guy, and I think he behaves like he wants to fuck around, and he’s a serious businessman, and he can talk to the CMO and CEO of any brand he works with and totally explain why he’s doing what he’s doing. But he has this way about him where it’s going to be fun.
Some days you go to work, and your deadlines are tough, and the client pressure is tough, but he just always behaved like it was fun, like he was having fun whether he was or wasn’t, and that kind of vibe is great. That does embolden you to say, “Okay, we should be thinking about this as a form of play.” In the day-to-day, you don’t. It’s about engineering, and it’s about we have to get this just right, and we have to hit this timeline, and we have to make everything neat and tidy. But it’s really our responsibility to make it closer to art because that’s what people respond to. People don’t respond to tons of rational drivers. People don’t respond to things that have been focused group to death. It’s our job to find the line and find the edge, and stay there. That kind of attitude gives you that permission that if you’re feeling like this could be wrong, you’re probably onto something and if it feels dead right, you’re probably dead in the water.
Tim Ferriss: Are there indicators for that? So for instance, I’m making this up. But you’re going blue sky, you’re coming up with a lot of bad ideas, getting things out of your head, so you can hopefully sift the —
Chris Beresford-Hill: Sift the vomit.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sift the vomit. Exactly. It’s a good commercial visual for you, somebody vomiting into their own gold pan over a river. In any case, in terms of doing something wrong or that type of characteristic, it’s a scent trail for something promising, what are some indicators? Is it that people around you are like, “Oh, God,” or they break out laughing, or somebody above you is like, “Oh, I love it, but I don’t really want to say I love it.” I don’t know how to really express what I’m trying to ask, but I think you get what I’m grasping for.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, and there’s different feelings. I was a very good kid, but sometimes when you’re presenting an idea, and you think you might get it through, if you feel like maybe what you think you’d feel like if you were shoplifting a Snickers bar, that’s one tell is when you’re like, “Oh, boy, if I get out of this meeting…” So if you know you’re getting away with something, and if you feel that in your bones, that’s something. If people are nervous, and they start to scenario — “We all love the idea, but…” they scenario plan. The other is if you just can’t get it out of your head, if you become a dog with a bone, and us creatives, we are dying to get our best ideas into the world. We become insufferable when we attach to one, and that actually is a pretty good segue to the Adidas story if you want because that’s one where we got away with one.
Tim Ferriss: So we are going to get to the Adidas. I’m going to put one thing in between, which is — and you may have to help me with the pronunciation here. Tor Myhren.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Getting it?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yep. All right. Executive at Apple, Apple CMO specifically, has said what a world-class agency partner does is, “reduce things.”
Yes.
Tim Ferriss: What does this mean to you?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, it’s the case for creative agencies because if I’m a soap company, I could hire us, or I could just make our own ads. Well, I’d say, “Well, our soap’s the best soap, obviously, and we put love into it and our people…” you start to want to say everything, and you want to say your Pollyanna version of it, and I think an agency partner —
Tim Ferriss: I thought you said polyamorous version of it for a second.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, Pollyanna version of it. No comment on polyamour. That’s a whole other topic.
Tim Ferriss: We are in Austin, the land of plenty. Anyway, continue.
Chris Beresford-Hill: But I think what an agency does is the clients come and say, “We want to say this, and this, and this, and we say, ‘No, no one’s going to care.’” No one’s going to care that you think your soap makers are the best soap makers. No one’s going to care that you’re saying — everyone says the ingredient. Look, we show you. Everyone says ingredients. So what you get from us is your jumble of all the things you want to do, and we strip it down to the most compelling core truth about why your product, or service, or offering is compelling. Everyone adds, and really what you want from us is to subtract, and come to you with the one thing, and passionately and say, “We know, and we know communication, and this is what you have to do to make your point.” So it really is the art of editing, and just down, down, down, down.
Tim Ferriss: Any examples that come to mind? I mean, this is not exactly a statement, but “Got Milk?” is pretty good. I mean, it’s an attention-grabbing distillation for messaging purposes, but do any other examples come to mind of reducing?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, anything good. I mean, anything good?
Tim Ferriss: “A thousand songs in your pocket.”
Chris Beresford-Hill: A thousand songs. I mean, talk about a brilliant way to get at the benefit.
Tim Ferriss: Nobody gives a shit how many megabytes.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s not about speeds and feeds.
Tim Ferriss: Speeds and feeds.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s about, show me what about this is magical. It’s about finding the one magical bit. I think you can just look at any great execution or any great ad and say, “Okay, that was focused, that was reductive.” That’s the difference between the good ones and the bad ones.
Tim Ferriss: Inherently present.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: “Where’s the beef?” We could go on and on.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: “Drivers wanted,” on and on.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right, Adidas.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay. This is a good landing spot because it’s like the Mountain Dew one. It’s a bit of a tale.
Tim Ferriss: Love tales here.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay, good. I’ll say every bit of it, as much to not get in trouble, everything ended well for everybody. So start there. So we are given an Adidas assignment, not the big brand Adidas assignment. Adidas works with a number of agencies on a number of projects, but we were granted an awesome opportunity to do something for tennis for the US Open, what Adidas calls Heartbeat Sports, which is tennis, fencing, swimming. So we had this opportunity and we thought, “Okay, for our motley crew, for our squad to get to do something for a brand like Adidas, we’re going to show up at our very best.” So we invited the client, and I’ll refer to the client as the client. We invited the client to visit us.
Tim Ferriss: Capital T, capital C.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: The Client.
Chris Beresford-Hill: 18 point and a good client. We had the client in, and we brought our strategist. We brought a strategist from another region that had worked on Adidas. We brought a creative team. When a client is going to tell you about a project, you don’t normally bring the creative team. Normally, you understand the project, and decide what you want to do with it, and then bring in the creative team. But we did.
Tim Ferriss: Full-court press.
Chris Beresford-Hill: We went for the full-court press. By the way, another lesson — certainly in advertising, but anywhere — is the more ground you can cover in a room, the better because you start further ahead than if you constantly come together, and split off, and come together, and split off. So our intention was, let’s land a brief together.
Tim Ferriss: When you say land a brief, you’re basically getting the gig, right?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, getting the gig and also — and the strategy, and what we want to do, and what our objective is, and the challenge that we’re going to meet with creative ideas. So we’re having this day, and we’re talking a lot about how — I think the statistic is still valid, but something like 80 percent at the time of young girls would drop out of sports due to body confidence issues or not feeling like athletics were for them because obviously the kind of media biases towards male athletes. So an initiative not only with Adidas, but also with Nike, and all these companies, is about keeping young girls in sports because it obviously has great benefits, not only that they could go on to be professional athletes, but for confidence, and all kinds of teamwork, and all the great things that come with it.
So our client was excited about the idea of let’s do something about girls in sport. Okay, we’re talking and then our client says, “We have Billie Jean King, and she’s going to work with us.” We’re thinking, “Billie Jean King is awesome.” I mean, she’s a total rule-breaker, trailblazer. She played the battle of the sexes, so how exciting. So we had the very obvious idea, we’re like, okay, for the US Open, we’ve got to take her blue suede shoes, and we’ve got to bring them back. We’ve got to bring them back and sell them. So obvious, dumb, done. And then as it turns out, it’s a little more complicated than that. They’ve got to make that in a factory somewhere else in the world, and then ship that volume of shoes on a big slow ship, and so that wasn’t going to happen.
So one of the creators we brought into the room, his name is Ricardo Franco, he says, “Why don’t we just change people’s shoes into Billie Jean King’s shoes?” It was just that, and we went, “Okay, that sounds interesting. That sounds like something I haven’t heard before,” and we didn’t know what it meant. We said, “Okay, so would we have felt applications that we could stick on?” So if you came in wearing a pair of New Balance, you could fix them. We kept talking and said, “What about spray paint? What if we get shoe artists? There’s these people like the Shoe Surgeon and all these people. What if we got some of those people?”
And so we started saying, “Okay, maybe this is possible. We should figure this out.” And even someone in the room said, “Oh, God, imagine if someone comes in a pair of Nikes,” and everyone was rubbing their hands together. This was great. So a great lesson is when you get what you want, get out of the room. Don’t let the vibe dip, and you start thinking about all the reasons why it might not work.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, don’t oversell it.
Chris Beresford-Hill: So I’ve learned this lesson, as many of us have, and seen it in practice.
So leaving the room, normally we’d say, “Okay, we’ll come back in two weeks, and let’s put it in a deck, and let’s draw out the comp.” But in this one, we just knew that the more we sat on it, time would kill this deal. Time would give people time to think about the pros and cons. So our team was just, “Go do it. Just go. We’ve got money.” Nancy, our president in New York, loved the idea. So we said, “Can we just get 10 grand to start paying people to test? Don’t get client money, let’s just do it.” So we started setting this whole thing up and we were —
Tim Ferriss: That’s an important point.
Chris Beresford-Hill: You’ve got to have —
Tim Ferriss: Let’s get a little internal money just to —
Chris Beresford-Hill: Start it.
Tim Ferriss: Sort of jump the gun.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, let’s make progress because we saw a green light. This is not the kind of idea that gets green-lit. I had a stolen Snickers in my pocket, and I wanted out of that store. So anyway, we start R&Ding it, and we find someone that blends a cool pearl blue paint, and we make these stencils and we start doing these tests, and we have — so we’re spray painting Converse and Air Jordans, and we’re doing them around the agency. They look awesome. I mean, anyone who sees them goes, “Holy shit, what is that? I want that. I’m so into that.”
So we get maybe about a week and a half away from the US Open, and this client didn’t live in the States. It was a global client. The phone call comes, and I knew the phone call was coming. We get on the phone and the client says, “I just want you to know though, that we can only have people wearing Adidas shoes, that we can spray any Adidas shoe you want, but we can only have people spray Adidas shoes.” So at this moment, this is a moment where, no, because then it takes all the coolness out of the idea.
But if I say no now, I mean, she’s got a week and a half to lock us out of everything, and this is the client. They hold the purse strings. And they have the ultimate say. They’re the brand. So I can’t argue it because if I lose the argument, it’s over. So I lied. And so I said, “Absolutely,” and I knew what I was doing. I knew that I was straddling a third rail where if you do something like this and it doesn’t work out for you, it could be very bad for my network’s relationship with that giant company.
Tim Ferriss: To say the least.
Chris Beresford-Hill: But there comes a moment where it’s not even, is it worth it? You say, “Okay, I understand lawyers are there to avert risk.” But in my gut, I know that when someone at Nike sees a shoe of theirs defaced to look like a Billie Jean King shoe, I know as a human being that that brand will not come after Billie Jean King’s legacy or empowering young girls in sport. I just knew it. Now the lawyer would not sign it, but I knew it. So that’s the moment where you say, “Fuck it.”
So our team is still going, and our client is not at the US Open. Our client is still in Europe. So I’m in Beverly Hills at the Hilton, at the Beverly Hilton with my partner Nancy, my president, and we are filming a big campaign for Hilton. The morning of the first day of the US Open, my phone buzzes and Amy and Julia are sending me these shots of, we stacked the line with a pair of Converse All Stars, and Air Force 1s, and Sauconys, and the first five are the things… They took pictures of them, and they sent them to Ad Age, and to Hypebeast, and to Sneaker Freaker, to everywhere. That’s the one where I didn’t have the Snickers bar. I felt like I was going to vomit, but it was so good, and I knew it was so good.
Tim Ferriss: Not vomiting ideas, this is actually —
Chris Beresford-Hill: No, actual vomit, bile. It was a bile one. So anyway, I go back, and I sit. I sit down at set, and I show Nancy, and I’m like, “Look at these,” and she goes, “Oh, that’s cool.” Actually, she always says the word “Babes.” She talks like a Hollywood producer. She goes, “That’s cool, Babes.” And I was like, “Thanks,” and then my phone rings. I see the number, and I say, “I think I’m about to really get unloaded on.” And she goes, “Good luck.” She was in on it. And I was like, “Okay. Okay, I’ve got my anchor here.”
So I walked outside, called the number back, and the client said, “Please hold. I’m patching in our global legal.” And I was like, “Fuck, here we go. This is it.” I got yelled at. I got screamed at. I got, “You said that this wasn’t going to happen, and this happened. How did this happen, and who would’ve done this,” and this and that. And I said, “I told you this wasn’t going to happen. It happened, so I accept responsibility.” I did not volunteer that I had endorsed it, but I accepted the responsibility. I said, “I will have our PR…” the toothpaste is out of the tube. Once it hits the internet, it’s done.
So I said, “I will have our PR reach out to all the publications and ask them to take it down because I know a thing or two about journalists, and journalists will say, ‘No, thanks. It happened, so I’m going to cover what I want.’” But I said, “Look, we’re going to do that.” I said, “I’m very sorry, and I understand you’re very angry with me.” So it happens, and then the little Hypebeast community love it, and then it all goes away, and there was no problem.
People thought it was really cool, and they got some tip-of-the-spear cred for doing something really innovative. All the hardcore sneaker nerds loved it, and they started going for thousands of dollars on eBay, and we made a great case study out of it. That client was included in juries to evaluate the biggest brand ideas of the year for notoriety for the highly disruptive Billie Jean King, your shoes idea.
So the lesson there, or not even the lesson, but the thing about it too is when you’re in a position where you can gatekeep or put yourself out there, it’s like driving a car or something where you’re going to change lanes and in between two, and you’ve got to say, “I think I can do this.” Sometimes you’ve got to pump the brakes, and then sometimes you’ve got to gun it. But really, it’s a lonely decision. But you’ve got to make it, and you’ve got to have confidence that you’re going to thread the needle. And that’s the getting away with it.
Tim Ferriss: So to use the racing metaphor, I mean, very few race car drivers who have consistency over long periods of time are routinely reckless. They do have to make those decisions, but they’re not routinely reckless, and you don’t strike me as someone who’s routinely reckless. So what I want to ask you about this particular decision, this calculus, in your mind, if you did, how did you rehearse the worst-case scenarios where you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to make this decision.” You gave me a little bit where you were like, “I don’t think — it seems very unlikely that say Nike’s going to come after a campaign that is trying to foster youth women’s participation in sports. That’s going to be a bad look.”
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not a hundred percent.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Nope.
Tim Ferriss: But it would be a bad look. So how did you think about the calculus and just like, okay, worst, worst case, this is what happens, but I’m not going to get killed.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Here’s what I thought. The truth is, as you talk about what it feels like to get away with it, it’s like a dog with a bone. I just knew the idea was so good, and I just saw so much upside. And then the only question I asked myself was, “Could someone be hurt by this?” So could you do something that would marginalize a person or a community, or is there — and no, it would’ve been really pissing off a marketer and that, no one ever died from that. So that was that.
Tim Ferriss: So swinging big is a prerequisite for home runs, but it doesn’t always work out. Babe Ruth, a lot of home runs, a lot of strikeouts. So what would be a, for you, your personal Hall of Fame failure list, if you had to pick out one that was important in some way, whether it was just a very strong lashing that you got, that you learned from, or maybe you took something away from it, maybe it set the stage for something later. Any failures come to mind?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah, obviously way more failures than successes, but I think by the way, you just have to have a short memory. So I don’t want to think about them very much. Actually, I was thinking about when I was coming to talk to you, I was like, probably that will come up. And I had to dig around, not because I haven’t had a million of them, but because I wash them out quickly.
Tim Ferriss: Don’t dwell on them.
Chris Beresford-Hill: No, no. You learn what you can. You take that nugget. But going all the way back to that agency in Boston, Modernista, we had Napster as a client. So for —
Tim Ferriss: Brings back the memories.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. So any of your listeners that are too young for this, so probably when Tim and I were in college, maybe you were just finishing college and I was just in college.
Tim Ferriss: It was in college at some point, yeah.
Chris Beresford-Hill: And it was a file-sharing app or thing. I don’t remember how the hell we got it. I guess it was like a plugin or —
Tim Ferriss: I can’t even recall. But it was, I would say to my mind at least, there may have been some predecessors or parallel tools like LimeWire, but Napster was the first time that suddenly, at least in the popular zeitgeist, that people could get music for free.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Including new music.
Chris Beresford-Hill: And we were. And I think the statute of limitations has run out, but we were stealing. But what Shawn Fanning, the founder, said is, “No, no, no, we’re sharing.” And that was the big soundbite, and we all remember that it was, he said, sharing. And that was like, it became a bit of a joke, but that way it was synonymous with that. So Napster, turns out it maybe wasn’t sharing and it goes away, and then I think someone buys the naming rights or something and it relaunches a few years later. So it relaunches in maybe 2002 as a way too ahead of its time streaming platform where the proposition was 10 bucks a month and unlimited plays, a million songs. And it was a streaming database that you could subscribe to. Again, way ahead of its time. So we had been given the assignment to work on it at Modernista, and of course, we were a tiny agency and it was way too busy.
So I got to take a big swing. And the idea we had that I had come up with as a 21-year-old or 22-year-old was what if our campaign was, instead of buying media, we share media and what if we took a million dollars and we just put bounties and had regular people crash live broadcasts of every sort wearing Napster shirts and holding signs. So it was called Crashster.com and the bosses at Modernista loved it because they were kind of cool and subversive. So we somehow, this is, I’m talking 2002, 2003, this would’ve been pretty ahead of its time. And we built a website with this cool design, Crashter.com. We made a bounty list and it was all the way from $250 for a local radio show. If you said 1.5 million songs, unlimited downloads, napster.com all the way to, if you crashed a presidential address, you got a million dollars.
And I think we had two and a half million dollars if you said that line during a live televised spacewalk. And there was everything in between of getting a sign on college game day or doing this that. So anyway, this was kind of crazy stuff. Lawyers were okay with it. I know we just said something about lawyers, but this thing was done. We had insurance, we built the site. Anyway, we even did an inaugural practice Crashster where two interns from the company crashed a morning interview in Boston and interrupted a live interview with a little-known comic named Bill Burr. So young Bill Burr was playing some crappy comedy club and was promoting it on Good Morning Boston. And these guys came up with the big sign and they’re like, “What the hell’s going on?” They get escorted out and then Bill Burr’s like, “What the hell’s going — the Napster sign? What do these guys do?”
It worked like a charm. So this thing was going to go, and it was like within a week of going, and I’m 22 years old and this thing would’ve been something real. This overshot the GQ magazine cover that I had dreamed of or whatever. So anyway, so the client has to go to the Napster board to give them a progress update. And the Napster client is under no responsibility to share launch ideas or activations. This fell under. So the client goes to the board and says, “Okay, here’s our strategy and we’re going to go to market and we have a new positioning,” and this and that and the other. And then he says, “Oh, one more thing. We’re going to do this next week.” And he brings it up, and I’m not in the room, but this is the report we got back that he shares, Crashter.com walks through it and the chairman of the board just interrupts him and just says, “I’m going to interrupt you before you finish. Just to let you know, we are not doing that.”
And that was it. And this thing could not have been more firmly dead, but that was for 21, I learned that if you get what you need, get the hell out of the room, which has served me well, has served many people well, to not get into lily gilding and see what happens when everyone starts thinking about —
Tim Ferriss: Don’t linger.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Don’t linger. But the other great thing is was the best thing for me, because this industry is full of a lot of heartbreak and rejection. You have a million ideas to sell one. And I think if that had happened for me, I would have a different — I would’ve been very successful at 21 or 22. And I liked my climb. I liked working my way up slowly and learning my craft and not doing something that might’ve made me very sought after and might’ve gotten me a bigger, better job faster. So it was a heartache, but it put me right on the path that I needed to have, which was the long path.
Tim Ferriss: So many what ifs in life, like what if it happened?
Chris Beresford-Hill: What if someone died during — I’m glad we didn’t do it because it could have been bad.
Tim Ferriss: Could have been messy, could have been very messy. Just out of curiosity, if the lawyers, if legal had given the okay, do you know what the substance of the objection was by the chairman?
Chris Beresford-Hill: It was so long ago. I don’t exactly remember, but I think he just did not want a problem. He did not want it to — he either, maybe it was because something bad could happen or maybe because he was on other boards and he didn’t want to wreck MBC’s —
Tim Ferriss: Jeopardize.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Who knows?
Chris Beresford-Hill: But someone had to kill that thing. It was too scary.
Tim Ferriss: That was out there. Question for you, coming back to process and technique. You mentioned a whole bunch of questions. What if David Fincher made this, what if, I’m making this up, but what if, what’s the commercial my mom would respond to? Or whatever these questions might be. I think about questions a lot, not just in podcasting, but in certainly writing the non-fiction books that came before the podcast, interrogating myself. When I’m journaling, I think about questions a lot, and the power of questions seems to be a fundamental piece of creating, creativity. Looking at something that a million people have looked at and seeing something different or seeing a way to position it differently. Are there any books on the ad game, on creativity that come to mind if somebody were sitting in front of you like your much younger self, you’re like, “Okay, this kid’s got some balls, gender-neutral and is willing to step out of his or her comfort zone. Okay, I want to help this kid.” What might you recommend?
Chris Beresford-Hill: I have a prescription for that.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s go.
Chris Beresford-Hill: So there’s a book called Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This, that’s authored by Luke Sullivan. You know it?
Tim Ferriss: This is one of my books that I read.
Chris Beresford-Hill: So it is the most perfect orrne because it’s —
Tim Ferriss: I’ve got to go back and reread this now.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It tells you what an ad agency does.
Tim Ferriss: Does it have a photograph of a roll of toilet paper on it?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. So Whipple was a grocer in some 1970s campaign, and I think he was selling toilet paper to customers. And so the logo is written on a double roll of paper. So I think it’s a weird title, but one you don’t forget. And Luke just lays out what an agency does, what every job is at the agency, and then specifically as a creative, what are the types of things you’re being asked to do and what do those outputs look like? It’s an amazing book. It explains to you what a headline writing assignment is and what headlines look like and why some might be better than that. So it’s really, it’s a really smart trek, micro apprenticeship. So I read it and I said, “I will be damned if I don’t do this,” because I read it and I was like, “I’m in.” That’s it.
That told me what the job was. And I said, “That’s the only job I want to do.” So anyone who — now I think these days people do ask to hop on and do informational interviews, but people will sometimes, even these days, ask you to describe your job to them, which I always thought was a little crazy because you do want people to do some level of legwork where they might know what your job is and ask you a question about it. But I just feel that constantly with just please go read this book and if you can’t live without doing what’s in this book, then we’ll get time. But that book is perfect. But then for the creative journey or even to understand what it’s like, there’s three video bits of content. We were chatting about them earlier. Number one, South Park, 6 Days to Air, looking at the pressure these guys are under to come up with and do a show. I don’t know if it ages well. I think because the humor can be — so please don’t judge me if the subject matter is not PC.
Tim Ferriss: You can judge me. It’s pretty funny.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Judge Tim. So that one goes to Tim because he likes that show too.
Tim Ferriss: I will say that it’s an amazing doc/mini-doc. There are a couple of points where it drags a little bit, but there are so many payoffs. There’s so many payoffs.
Chris Beresford-Hill: No, but even just the thing of when — which one is the blonde one? Is that Trey?
Tim Ferriss: I can’t remember.
Chris Beresford-Hill: He’s like the writer, writer out of the two of them. And once they’ve got the story down and he has to write the script, he has his assistant go get him an extra value meal from McDonald’s because it’s just so hard after all that to sit down and then hammer it out. And you know as a writer, and I know as a writer sometimes you’re like, “I know I have to do it, but I don’t want to.” So even watching him bribe himself, watching one of the most dynamic, prolific, edgy writers, he has to fool himself into it. And by the way, sometimes when we make commercials, we have to make little animatics, like little boardomatics, like rips. That’s considered a chore. That whole show is a boardomatics when you watch how they make it. So it’s so inspiring to see those two power through. And there’s just a ton of stuff that you can relate to.
The two other ones I love are, I love the Metallica doc Some Kind of Monster because it gets into doing creative within a team and chemistry and how challenging that can be. And that documents Metallica almost breaking up and working out their shit as they come up with The Black Album. And it’s amazing. And you don’t have to like Metallica to love it, to see are you more of a Lars? Are you more of a James? Who do you side with here? So that’s an amazing study on high-performing creative team dynamics. And then the last one, and the most underrated is Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Chris Beresford-Hill: So he made — after that really painful departure from The Tonight Show, he had a non-compete. So he threw a comedy tour, and so he allowed it to be documented. And you see that this guy is a creative animal that coming out of what he just came out of, where you must be so damaged and wounded, but he throws himself right into another enterprise and they’re writing bits and skits and they’re staying up late at night the night before a show to rewrite it. And just seeing the obsession in the craft of it, you’re like, I watch the thing and I’m like, “I do not work hard enough.”
And you see the euphoria, the euphoria of, and slap happiness around all of it when you really push yourself to — that man really pushes himself to his limits. And you watch that and you’re like, I just want to go and write something after I see that. Those things, any one of those things, they inspire me so much that I’ve got a bank that someone else will get something out of them.
Tim Ferriss: I can’t wait to watch Some Kind of Monster and Can’t Stop. I’ve seen the South Park doc and can you guess my favorite part? Where did I laugh hardest?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, Tim, I don’t want to be bawdy, but would it be the Apple user agreement? Human Centipede?
Tim Ferriss: It was the voiceover session that was related to that.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of good stuff.
Chris Beresford-Hill: They were in a booth.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of good stuff.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s crazy stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This. I haven’t thought about that in ages. I used to have that book when I was really cutting my teeth on copy and spending a lot of my own money doing very expensive testing because the lead time and the turnaround time for any type of quantitative feedback on magazine ads, I mean, oh, my God, how painful. I had that book deliberately cover-out on my shelf as a reminder of some of the contents. It’s been a very, very long time, but it’s wild that that has now resurfaced in my life. What fun.
When it comes to the prompts and the questions, are there any other questions that come to mind? If you’re stuck and you’re just like, man, we’ve been banging our head against the wall, we’re not there. And this is going to lead into some of the less glamorous maybe aspects of the job where it’s like, okay, you’ve got to come up with X number of ideas, this is important and you’re getting close to deadline and you don’t have it. What do you do to mix things up? And I suppose just broadly speaking, what do you do in a situation like that?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, writer’s block doesn’t really exist. You think it’s blocked, but clearly you can. It really is like a game of tricking yourself. So, say, Sally is trying to come up with ideas. “Sally, what are your five favorite movies or directors or writers? Okay, what would each one of them do?” It’s just coming up with a new challenge or a new way to approach it that fools you into coughing something up. And then again, I’ll go as far as then what’s the absolute right thing to do? What’s the absolute wrong thing to do? What would I do if I thought this whole thing was a big joke, if I wanted to make fun of it?
And again, and then even the cause technique of just start writing sentences and finish them. But it’s not even — I think it’s knowing yourself and knowing your interests and then using avenues. So what are the things you’re into? Put it through that lens. But it’s just, it’s a forcing exercise and it’s really uncomfortable. It’s really, really uncomfortable because the more you get out, you will find — one thing I have found, and I don’t think it’s just me, I’ve talked to friends about it, is that four-hour, five-hour, whatever your big dump is, later you will have new ideas and things. But the biggest treasure trove you’ll ever have is when the challenge is fresh, when your brain is first trying to put it together. And the more you get out of that moment, the more you’re paid back later.
Tim Ferriss: What do you do when you’re, say, overwhelmed or unfocused? Because this is a game of creativity and we’re all playing different games. So all of our careers on some level are games of different types of rules. Some you can bend, some you can break, but endurance is important. The ability to not just flame out burning the candle at both ends. Some people are superhuman and can bank all sorts of crazy work weeks and sleep four hours a night because they happen to have the right genetic profile for that. But what do you do when you’re overwhelmed or unfocused?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, interesting that you bring that up because I work with some of those people that are, I don’t know if they sleep and I am sensitive and I need sleep. And so I’m very aware that I’m not like a full beast. So there’s two actually, the question as you phrase it, there’s kind of two answers that are different, but I read a book, I know you know this book called Bird by Bird.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, so good. An amazing book. And some people will ignore it because it’s intended at face value for fiction writers. It does not matter. It does not matter.
Chris Beresford-Hill: So I had to read it at school, so talking about… I must’ve had a good teacher or whatever, so I had to read it.
Tim Ferriss: What a gift.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I don’t remember a single thing in the book except for the titular story. And that story was, and I think about it all the time. And so the author’s little brother had to write a report on the birds and he had books open and printed out essays everywhere. And he was in a full meltdown and panic.
Tim Ferriss: He pushed it off until the last minute.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Pushed it off until the last minute.
Tim Ferriss: He had all semester to do it, something like that.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Of course, that whole thing, everyone has a version of that and he’s there. And I think in my version of the story, he’s crying at the table with all that stuff, and then good old Dad comes in and goes, “Just take it bird by bird, bud, take it bird by bird.” And you’re like, “Wow.” So I have an imaginary father that comes in and says that to me every time because it’s permission, permission to stop thinking about the totality of it and permission to do the littlest bit. The other quotation that I love, I don’t have a ton of quotations, but the great Arthur Ashe said, “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” And that’s so fantastically empowering because it’s saying that you’re in a good enough spot and you’re off the hook for anything more than that.
But then the other part of it about being a beast and the constant pressure is I’ve figured out that I can’t meditate.
I think I’m too, it’s something I’ll get to later in life, but I think I’m too — I can’t sit still. I can’t be alone in my thoughts. And so I discovered that instead of turning the dial down to zero, I found also that hard fitness is another meditative instead of going down to zero, it just puts me at a 10. And so every morning I go do a similar workout that gives me almost like an existential crisis so that by the time I show up at work, whatever this kind of fog of anxiety that I used to live in, it just burns it off and I just am so calm for the rest of the day because I’ve already been through something tough in the morning.
Tim Ferriss: What is the workout?
Chris Beresford-Hill: And that’s helping. There’s a gym in New York City called Tone House and there’s just one of them. And I used to exercise in college and I was in pretty good shape. And then I got to doing a lot of writing and drinking beer and doing writing, and I kind of let it slip. And I think around 2015, back when people would upload Facebook albums the night after you did anything, I went to a New Year’s party and there was a picture of me on New Year’s Day and I was leaned over a table of food and I swear in my head I looked like Alfred Hitchcock or something. It was like the way my jacket lapel was open came out on this huge thing and I got so upset that I looked up “Hardest workout in New York” and then, bing, there was this one-off gym called Tone House.
And I went that day, on New Year’s Day they were open and the class is like — the founder is a guy named Alonzo Wilson, and he played D1 football and played a little pro football. And when he stopped playing, he missed the practices. So it’s a lot of — the way I describe it to friends is it’s like a one-hour Under Armour commercial that you’re in where you’re just dropping the deck and jumping over stuff and banging ropes and the heart rate stays up the whole time. And so the first time I did it, I stepped out of class after 10 minutes, because the warm warm-up is really intense cardio, and I vomited in the locker room and I stayed up at night staring at the ceiling and being like, “I can’t let this thing get me.” And so I came back the week later and the week later and it kind of pulled me in.
And now me and a fairly regular group are there five days a week, six days a week, and then we do other stuff. But that has been such a gift for me because I’m just — I used to walk around in between meetings and I’d be like, “Should I run? Am I using my time well?” I would just ruminate on all the things I could be doing, wasn’t doing. And something about really beating myself up in the morning, I don’t expend the energy worrying about all those things. I just focus on what I’m focusing on. So it’s made me normal.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Do you relate?
Tim Ferriss: You’re inspiring me to double down. I’ve recently, knock on wood, largely addressed this kind of crippling lower back issue that has sidelined me for the better part of the last year. And I’m really excited to get back into serious exercise. And this might sound strange because I’m not built like a border collie, but it’s kind of like if you can’t have a working dog and put that dog in an apartment all day long, the dog’s going to go crazy. And I remember when I was training my dog Molly and taking it super seriously, going full deep dive on dog training. And one of the lines that stuck with me is “A tired dog is a happy dog.” I think that is true, not for every person, but for people who have a certain hard wiring and sounds like you’re one of them, I’m certainly one of them. If you’re not putting that creature to work physically, all sorts of strange things are going to creep out of the cracks, mentally.
Chris Beresford-Hill: And not the best things because you want to get a lot done and you need to be tired out a little bit to be a little bit normal about it because if you’re going full energy, you’re doing what’s in front of you and you’re freaking out about all the other things you could, should, might. And when you’re just a little taken back a little bit, you’re, I’m more present. It’s great.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think a lot of kids end up getting into trouble in school because they have idle cycles. They don’t know what to, and they don’t know how to apply those idle cycles. I remember in school, for me, it’s like I needed to draw nonstop in grade school. I got very good grades, I did really well, but I would get so bored in class. I had to draw all the time, even though I was listening to exactly what the teacher was saying because I had to occupy myself. And I was fortunate that I’d somehow chanced upon drawing, but a lot of other kids who were very smart, got into all sorts of trouble, got kicked out, got suspended, ended up getting involved drugs because they didn’t know how to occupy or consume those cycles. And exercise is an amazing way to do it.
Any other books, favorite books that you have or put a different way, books that you have gifted or recommended a lot to other people outside of what we’ve discussed already?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes, and I love this question because I find those are the things I always jot down when I hear what people gift. Two of them. One of them is called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Allen Carr, have you heard of this?
Tim Ferriss: That’s so weird. All of these things are coming up in this conversation, I listened to a derivative of that, but it’s based on the same method, The Easy Way to Quit Caffeine. I listened to the audiobook, somebody had recommended it to me and I stopped. I went 30 or 40 days without any caffeine, which is the first time I’ve done that since I was like, God only knows, 16? So please keep going. But this is —
Chris Beresford-Hill: In my 20s, I smoked cigarettes and I was hopelessly addicted to them. And I don’t know how I found the book, but I read it and it told me bit by bit all the reasons why I thought I had to keep or why I would hang on to it. And it dispelled them one by one and it was kind of romantic. And then there’s a chapter and it says, “Go outside and have your last cigarette.” And I went outside and I did, and then I finished the book and I never smoked again. And I talk about it sparingly because the easy way is kind of usually a red flag of anything, but that’s what I love about it. If you look it up on Amazon, the reviews are in, it is like five-star for thousands, but I’ve given it to four or five friends and all four or five of them just read it and never smoked again.
Tim Ferriss: So wild.
Chris Beresford-Hill: So that book is probably a life-saving book. And then the other one that I love, and I know you know this book, but The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.
Tim Ferriss: I know the book and I have not read it and it’s been on my to-read list forever.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I think you would not only love the book, but you would love talking to Daniel about that book because I don’t like business books and especially when things become dense and theoretical, I get lost. But he went and spent time in 10 incredible high-performing cultures that are all different from IDEO to the San Antonio Spurs to the Navy SEALs, and just identified what makes people feel like they belong in those and what gives people the psychological safety to do their best, do their best in those environments. And you read it and you’ll get confirmation bias. You’ll be like, I do that. That’s great. Or you’re reminded I need to do that. Or there’s things you never thought of.
Tim Ferriss: Now, do you recommend this book to people who are individual contributors, kind of operators on the front lines, or do you give that to people who are running companies? Who do you give that to?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Good question. I mean, I think for leadership for sure. So if anyone’s stepping into management, but I also find it’s good — I would imagine I would’ve loved the book if I wasn’t a manager just to understand the kind of culture that I want to be part of. Obviously, we’re all students all the time, so I think there wouldn’t be any harm in imagining if you were to lead something or if you were to have total control, what kind of culture you’d want. But definitely if you’re in leadership or you’re stepping into leadership or if you’re stepping into a new role, there’s just the simplest things you could do to show that everyone you meet, that there’s a long-term potential future there. And that’s a thing you would forget to do.
But if you reference something in the future, some minor things like that that you’re like, “Oh, that can make all the difference.” And I understand having been on the receiving end of those kind of culture, those kind of behaviors, it’s just, it’s great stuff. But that’s one of the few things that I reread every year for the last two, three years.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. I need to read it. And I will. Side note, just because I made a mental bookmark to mention this to people listening, Conan O’Brien is so impressive to me. The more I learn about that guy, the more I see, the more impressed I am. So Conan, if you’re listening or a friend of yours is listening, would love to chat sometime publicly or privately. There’s a video that I found, actually it was sent to me because I went to Seoul for the first time recently, became deeply enamored of Korea and the Korean people, started learning Korean, studying the Korean language. And there’s a video called something like Conan O’Brien Learns Korean and Makes It Weird, which is like eight minutes long. Trust me, folks, find it on YouTube. It is beyond hilarious.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I’ve seen it.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you have?
Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s so good. It ends with him in the — he’s in classroom and he —
Tim Ferriss: He’s with the teacher.
Chris Beresford-Hill: And he’s — oh, yeah. And he’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: So fast, so fast on his feet. Unbelievable. And another just quick side note, because this is what I do. Arthur Ashe, another legend, I mean iconic figure on so many different levels. And to take that word a step further, levels. There’s a book called Levels of the Game by John McPhee, which is about one tennis match, a single tennis match involving Arthur Ashe. But it becomes this study of the macro through the micro and the structure of the book, the narrative. It is not a long book, it’s something like 170 pages. And if you want to see why John McPhee is as famous as he is for being a master of nonfiction, being a staff writer for The New Yorker for a thousand years, this is an amazing way to get a taste test. It is so, so good.
You mentioned before we started recording that you had an answer for the under a hundred dollars best investment. I mean, best investment is one way to put it, but device, gadgets, service, anything that you’ve spent kind of less than a hundred dollars on, that has had a material impact on you. What is your answer for that?
Chris Beresford-Hill: My first Tone House class, $34.
Tim Ferriss: Ah, there we go.
Chris Beresford-Hill: That was the one. That was the $34 purchase that changed everything.
Tim Ferriss: Is there anything else that comes to mind? Maybe it’s a second place, but just best investment that could be investment of time, investment of energy, investment of money.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, I think sometimes you ask about what’s something you bought for under a hundred dollars that had a big return. And you know how work is, you get caught up in things and you have your plan for the week, but then you wind up responding to real time and conditions and you just never know where it’s going to go. But I go to Balthazar restaurant in Manhattan on Spring Street, and I take one of my mentees, I go with one of my mentors, I go with a peer who I get a lot of energy from or an old friend that I haven’t caught up with. And the bill, no matter how you do it, is always under a hundred bucks with tip. And it’s always the best a hundred dollars I spend every week. It’s the best thing. And I’ll never change it. And even if I’m down to my last hundred dollars, I will go have breakfast with someone.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a great location. I haven’t been in a million years, but that is —
Chris Beresford-Hill: So the reason I went by the way too, was everyone, the pandemic really, really was challenging. And I used to like Balthazar, but I didn’t love Balthazar. And when New York reopened, a lot of restaurants popped out their al fresco, their outdoor cafes, and things like that. And I would always walk by Balthazar and it was boarded up, boarded up, boarded up, and the owner, Keith, waited until you could do full occupancy indoors before opening it. And when he opened it, he did a post. And I didn’t realize how much I missed it, but his post said, “Balthazar is open and it will never close again.” And coming out of that pandemic, when everyone’s like, “Everything’s going to be different,” it’ll never — just that statement, talk about communication, that kind of a subject line on an email. I’m like, “I will go there every week then. As long as you’re open, I’ll go.”
Tim Ferriss: This is going to sound like such a newbie question, but I’m curious, do you in any way keep track of the ads or the messaging or the copy that snag you? Right? Because that’s a hell of a line. It’s a good line. It worked.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It absolutely worked.
Tim Ferriss: Do you have any, and these could be ideas that you come up with too, but do you have any way of capturing ideas, whether they’re yours or things you come across in the wild where you’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s good.”
Chris Beresford-Hill: No, I’m an idiot. And I forget. No, and I, probably 10 times a week I see things where I’m like, “That’s good.” And then I remember one of them, and if I was a smart man, I would have a notebook with me at all times, or I would put it in my stickies and after this conversation, I’m going to collect them because now I’m conscious because I see things all the time, and then they come up at random times, but I can’t call on them. So I would like to collect better.
Tim Ferriss: What I used to do, because I suppose, to invoke Glengarry Glen Ross, “You must get them to sign on the line that is dotted.” You can ask people if they’re going to buy something, but people are nice a lot of the time, too nice. And they will tell you what they think you want to hear. Getting someone to actually buy something is a different level of commitment. It’s a different type of signal. So when I would find myself compelled to buy something, especially when I didn’t have very much money and I was just getting started, cutting my teeth, trying to build this direct response business in sports nutrition, if I bought something or if I got close to buying it, I would save the ad or I would —
Chris Beresford-Hill: Amazing.
Tim Ferriss: — I would take a video of the infomercial or the commercial or I would take notes on what it was that I thought got me to buy.
Chris Beresford-Hill: What closed you.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s really —
Tim Ferriss: Was it, “But wait, there’s more; there’s an installment?” Was it the timing, right? Do I think it was just pure fatigue on my part where my defenses were low at 3:00 a.m. because I’d been watching Animal Planet, and God knows some Ginsu knife thing came up and I would try to figure out, although this was a secondary thing, what had moved me to buy, especially as someone who is not stingy but had a really tight budget for most things. And I no longer do that, but —
Chris Beresford-Hill: What did you learn?
Tim Ferriss: I learned a lot about copy. At the time, I was reading a lot of magazines and also newsletters and mostly text, because text was easier to freeze and study. Just like for yourself, journaling is thoughts trapped on paper. If you’re trying to figure something out by sitting there and staring off into space and thinking, sometimes it works, often it doesn’t because it’s too ephemeral.
These bits and pieces, the floats and jets. It’s just like being thrown out of the boat in the Grand Canyon and getting kind of tossed. You don’t really — it’s hard to orient to up when you’re in that type of chaotic mental state, even if it’s just too much going on, if you have a high-energy state.
But for me, journaling for introspection, but for external studying, it’s not that text was the best medium; it was just the easiest for me to study as a fly locked in the amber.
So what I learned was what kind of headlines got me to look at anything, right? So if I’m reading a magazine and especially — I would read magazines I wasn’t even interested in just to see what got my attention.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Interesting.
Tim Ferriss: Not to really beat the drum on Glengarry Glen Ross, which is actually a very depressing movie on a lot of levels when you get to the bottom of it, but the “Attention, do I have your attention? Interested, are you interested?”
The AIDA: the first thing is attention. So I would pick up, say, a fashion magazine. I’m like, “All right, this is going to be half ads,” and I would just riff through. And I would see what would get me to stop and I’d be like, “Okay, why did I just stop?” And I would tear it out of the magazine. It might even be at a dentist’s office or something.
If I had downtime, I would just try to see what would grab my attention and that was step one. So you learn a lot of things. I mean, I don’t want to go into a full monologue here, but I actually haven’t talked about this publicly, I don’t think —
First thing you realize is how important art direction is: composition. Do you have a dominant element, or is everything the same? If everything’s the same, your eye isn’t going to necessarily be drawn to any one component and you’re going to skip over it, generally.
There are some weird exceptions where the jumble is the branding. For instance, I have used unscented baby soap from Dr. Bronner’s forever because it’s just the least offensive to my system and I really like it. Their branding, if you look at the bottle, it’s like size-two font with a million words covering the label.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I think I know that. Very super old-timey? Is that the —
Tim Ferriss: There may be some old-timey aspect, but it’s a very small font. It’s like Unabomber, ransom-letter-y stuff. If you actually dig into it, it’s not very easy to follow all of it, but it’s full of text.
But it’s like a horseshoe or it’s — the horseshoe is not the best way to explain it, but it’s like you get to such a point of clutter that it becomes a clear signal again, almost, as like a gestalt form of branding. So there are some exceptions to that, but you realize, “Oh, okay.” If you look at the Volkswagen ads, if you look at some of the old classics.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Very reductive.
Tim Ferriss: Reductive.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Very —
Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “Okay.” Now, I’m not going to get the ratio totally right, but it’s like, all right, the top two-thirds or three-quarters of this ad is a bold visual, often black and white. There’s one tagline that’s like three to seven words, and then you’ve got some copy at the bottom and a clip-out coupon or something for a lot of these direct-response ads.
So I studied the visual element because I was actually buying, and in fact, at the time, I was designing a lot of my own print ads. So I was going into Photoshop and Illustrator and doing a lot of the art. I was doing everything myself. I couldn’t afford to hire anybody.
Chris Beresford-Hill: You were an advertising creative before I was.
Tim Ferriss: I learned a lot about clarity and also converting speeds and features into benefits.
Chris Beresford-Hill: But you said that the two things, and I mean these are the power of art direction. To pull you into a world, to show you something that’s interesting or attractive is incredible. And it still feels like art. People, great art directors do not do it scientifically. They have principles, but they’re expressing and exploring.
And then the other thing is with also the magical set of words that can sell you. Someone I used to work with, one of my mentors, Rob Schwartz, who used to be the chief creative officer at TBWA in Los Angeles back in the day. He has a saying that I repeat to everyone, which is: “Clients buy words.”
We can come to clients and assure them that we can deliver across every social channel and every asset and do all the strategy research, but ultimately we’re going to give them a set of words that tells them who they are, who they can be, and who they are to their consumer. And those magical words are kind of everything. And no matter what changes in the industry, clients buy words and consumers like me buy words too.
Tim Ferriss: Totally. And I feel like even if you aren’t planning on playing offense in the sense that you’re not a writer, you’re not crafting ads, I feel like everyone, certainly everyone who’s listening to this should make a deliberate study of words for defensive purposes.
Because if you are on social media or in any media, and of course, you are exposed to advertising all the time, you’re exposed to communications all the time, you can be manipulated very easily if you’re not aware of how your mind is being controlled or — it is being controlled. Informed.
If I say, and this is cliche, but “Don’t think of a pink elephant, pink elephant, pink elephant.” Your mind is very reactive in a lot of respects. So I feel like the study of words is the study of thoughts and the malleability of thoughts, which then leads to the malleability of behavior.
I mean, if you really want to see how crazy that can get, you can watch these Netflix specials like The Push from this illusionist who’s also an amazing graphic artist, or I should say visual artist, painter, Derren Brown.
And these are long features that are mostly about social engineering, but just what you can get someone to do if you profile them properly, have a delay, hire confederates. And in this particular case, the push is: can you get someone off the street and get them to the point where they push someone off a building, they commit murder just by scripting everything out from start to finish? It is horrifying. I have very mixed feelings about it from an ethical perspective. Nobody gets hurt. He has many more. Miracle, I think, is another one, which is very well done.
The point of all this is part of my fascination with the Whipple book — part of my fascination with ads is for playing offense. So building a business and so on. A lot of it is just wanting to understand how humans work.
And the practitioners are always going to be ahead of the scientists and the theoreticians. That’s true in exercise where it’s like the coaches, they’re going to get a lot wrong. They’re going to get a lot right, and they’re going to be able to see the state of the art before the academics ever get their hands on it.
So if you want to understand how humans work, one approach, and these are not mutually exclusive, one approach is to study psychology and so on. Another is to just look how people are affected and persuaded.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So there are many books that I’ve read, like — and I’m blanking on his first name, but Blunt is the last name, Words That Work, who is, I believe, a Republican political strategist.
And if I’m not mistaken, I read this a long time ago. It was recommended to me by a very famous entrepreneur, and neither of us would say we have much in common politically with this guy at all. But he came up with as, one example, the death tax instead of inheritance tax, like the death tax.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Unappealing.
Tim Ferriss: And just these, a handful of rebrands that became almost impossible to sort of overturn in the zeitgeist. You should study that, right? There’s a gold mine there if you study that kind of thing.
So you asked what I’d learned. I mean, I continue to learn, I continue to study these things. And maybe I’m a weirdo, but it’s so fundamental to the existence — the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month of existence of anyone listening to this. And by the way, you’re going to have to get a lot better at defense because —
Chris Beresford-Hill: Sure, because everything’s going to get sharper.
Tim Ferriss: Everything — about to get so much overwhelming, so much more overwhelming, so much more personalized. The number of pitches that I get and the number of pitches my friends get now just in the last few months where intro paragraphs are clearly crafted using AI, where it’s —
Chris Beresford-Hill: It’s going to take away my email writing gift. I better —
Tim Ferriss: I think it’ll take a while. It’ll take a while because you can still pretty easily discern, but you’re going to have to get better at defense if you want to preserve your sanity and your ability to function.
So let me ask a question that has been in the hopper for a little while. It’s been gestating and it comes back to blue-sky thinking and creative brainstorming and then constraints.
Because listening to some of your stories and I’m like, “Man, it’d be great to sit down for my own business and be like, ‘You know what? I want to get Bill Murray doing this in an ad. I want to have him in the cockpit of a space shuttle.’”
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. I already want to watch this ad. I like it.
Tim Ferriss: And then there are certain, eventually, real-world considerations like budget, like legal. And I’m wondering if there are examples of overriding these constraints where it’s worked out, or at what point you kind of bring things back to Earth, right? Because if you do it too early, it would seem like —
Chris Beresford-Hill: It stifles it.
Tim Ferriss: — it was it. Exactly.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah. There’s no hard and fast rules. I think there’s — the nice thing about working at big agencies with big brands is — my experience has always been: if the idea is good enough, there’s always more money. I think I can say that without getting in trouble, but it’s true.
And then I think creative people — we need the constraints to push off against — to have ideas that have tension and that are going to be effective. So I think we try to know as much about that going in as possible.
And sometimes you’ll have a $10 million idea for a $1 million budget, and it’s a tragedy because it would be amazing and they would probably get great ROI on it and it might make economic sense, but I think —
Sorry, I’m quoting everyone and their mother, but another one of my mentors, Rob Reilly, who’s the chief creative officer of the WPP Holding Company, always says, “No client ever fired you for bringing extra ideas.” And so I think —
Tim Ferriss: That’s a great line.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Some of the best things we’ve ever gotten away with have been a lucky strike extra or saying, “Okay, here’s the thing you asked for, but by the way, I know this would involve getting a few celebrities or opening the coffers, but what about this?”
And I think once you’ve taken the defenses down by showing what’s within possibility, you buy yourself good will and permission to bring a crazy idea, and you’re going to be sharing that crazy idea with someone who’s not nervous about what’s to come; they’re going to enjoy it. And so by and large, you can get there with that. But yeah, I think you’ve got to cover your bases first or else, yeah, they’ll be pissed at you.
Tim Ferriss: TBS’ Funniest Ad of the Year.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Could you give us some context on this prompt?
Chris Beresford-Hill: This is — it’s like you’re in my head, Tim, because you’ve just connected it and maybe you already know where it’s going, but my creative partner when I was at BBDO, there was a guy named Dan Lucey. And he and I, he’s my best friend. And for eight years, I spent more time with him than I spent with my wife sharing an office and finishing each other’s sentences and fighting all the time too.
And we had a new client in Foot Locker, and their aspiration was to not be this kind of a transactional house of brands, but for holding the Foot Locker bag to mean something.
And so we knew there was big ambition there that we had to — it wasn’t just about the shoes that were in stock; it was about trying to make the brand cultural. So we worked together on Foot Locker for about five or six years, and we created an ongoing campaign where we got celebrities and athletes to make fun of themselves and kind of play it close to the bone.
So part of this is we had a great client, a guy named Jed Berger, who — he didn’t come up from traditional marketing. He’d come from Modell’s, which is an East Coast sports store.
Tim Ferriss: I know Modell’s.
Chris Beresford-Hill: You know Modell’s. We all know Modell’s.
Tim Ferriss: I grew up on Long Island.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah. But he also founded a basketball magazine called Dime Magazine. And he had other interests besides just marketing. So he kind of came at things from a cultural place.
So sometimes we would show him ideas that got to the bone of sports issues or athlete issues, and he always championed it. So this was our first kind of big campaign, and we overswung the fences like crazy. There was maybe money for a cameo in an ad. And instead, we came up with this cockamamie idea that for this one week, Foot Locker was putting out the very best shoes. They were just going to stack it one day after another.
And the client had called it the Week of Greatness. And so we had written an ad that said basically what’s happening at Foot Locker, it almost feels like with all these shoes coming out, it feels like all is right in the world. And then we leave that scene and we go and we see a bunch of wrongs be righted and impossibilities happen.
And so we wrote the script and it had Mike Tyson answering the door, and Evander Holyfield is there with a box, and Mike Tyson returns the piece of the ear that he bit off Evander.
So already we’re showing that to the rest of the team at BBDO. And they’re like, “That’s never going to happen.” And then we’re like, “Don’t worry, it keeps going.” Dennis Rodman, this is —
Tim Ferriss: But wait, there’s more.
Chris Beresford-Hill: — 2012 kind of jokes. Dennis Rodman, what did we all want to see? He was at an airline counter and he buys a one-way ticket to North Korea. They’re like, “That’s never going to happen.” And they’re like, “But wait, there’s more.” Because Brett Favre would refuse to retire.
So Brett Favre is going to make a joke about retiring. He’s at a diner and he’s got a piece of pie, and he hands it back to the lady half-eaten and says, “It’s time to stop.”
So one or the other, everyone said that, “You can’t bring this to them because this is going to cost a bajillion dollars. They’re never going to do it. This is not — they asked us for something simple, and you’ve given something incredibly complicated.”
And this is, I would say, kind of halfway through my journey. And there’s probably a period usually around the halfway point where you’re maybe a little more arrogant than you are later, in the beginning. And so Dan and I just went, “Nah, we’re going to do it.”
And so we got in such a blow-up fight with our account lead that he said, “Well, you know what? You’re going to tank this whole thing and I’m not going to go to the meeting.” And so we went, “Sounds good.”
So we went down to the meeting by ourselves without our business partner who forsook us as a matter of pride and principle, and we presented it to this guy Jed, and he went, “I fucking love it. Let’s do it.”
So you’ve got to take your chances. There’s no shame in it. And we would’ve — and he knew, and Jed knew we would’ve had the back. We can write him a cheap ad, but if we have a great one…
And so he went to bat for… and he went and he negotiated, our client negotiated with all those athletes and people. And a little side story, which for any sports nerds will be really fun is we filmed the Brett Favre segment in Hattiesburg, Virginia.
And so Dan went down there with the camera crew to pick that up. He gave us half an hour because he was a high school football coach in his first season, retired. And he famously had hung on to things in Green Bay, and as the story goes, prevented a young Aaron Rodgers from ascending and taking the starting quarterback spot year after year. And so there was tension there. And that was famously, or in the press, a bad relationship.
And Dan calls me from set and he says, “I was just standing next to Brett Favre in between shots, and I saw him open his fantasy football on his phone, and Aaron Rodgers is his starting quarterback.”
And I was like, “God, that is such fun intel to get from the front line.” And I swear we were like, “Should we call Bleacher Report and tell them this because it’s so…” People, sports fans would’ve loved to know that.
Tim Ferriss: I really have two questions. There are 50 more. I’m just going to give some teasers that we won’t get to.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes. Why that? Why? What if that’s something that someone really wants to know about and then we didn’t do it?
Tim Ferriss: Well then maybe we do a round two.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay, fair enough, fair enough.
Tim Ferriss: So the time Kanye tried to get you fired.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. We’re not going to do that, although I really do at some point want to talk about that because just the limited context that I have makes it seem really hilarious.
Chris Beresford-Hill: It was pretty good. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Actually, I’ll let you choose. This is going to be not dealer’s choice. This will be your choice.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay. Gambler’s choice.
Tim Ferriss: So that’s — gambler’s choice. This is one option.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Another option is: you on the cusp of taking your name off of the Guinness wheelchair basketball ad and what that was all about and just how that unfolded.
Chris Beresford-Hill: The Kanye is easy, but we’ll save that for another time. The wheelchair basketball one, because there was a good lesson in it, which is — so Dan, the partner I mentioned, and another guy named Tom Kramer and I pitched that ad. And again —
Tim Ferriss: What is the ad?
Chris Beresford-Hill: So in the ad, a group of — it’s almost like you start in a Nike ad or in a scene from the movie MegaBall$, which is a movie that features wheelchair basketball. You’re just in a really intense game, a wheelchair basketball, and you get seduced into it. You follow the team down one end of the court to the other, and you think it’s all about performance or drive or what these guys are doing.
And as the game resolves, the surprise is that nine out of the 10 guys get up out of their chairs to leave the gymnasium, and then one friend is still in the chair. And that you understand that this group of friends all participated in wheelchair basketball so that they could play with their friend who’s in a wheelchair.
And the way we got to that — so the line we had was, “Made of More,” for Guinness. And it’s simple. It’s one of those great lines where the beer itself is complicated, but also it’s maybe a drink that maybe someone who wants to feel like they’re of more substance or that there’s something more substantial in that moment would choose.
So the brief we gave ourselves was: what’s a story you would tell that you would wish you could do that for a friend? Or if your friends did that for you, that would mean everything?
So it was just kind of writing that way. So it was very simple, and that was what was pitched. And that’s probably what anyone who saw the ad saw. But what happened was, our experience making it was not great. We were pretty hard-headed at that.
So it was right around the Foot Locker time where we were maybe a little more rambunctious and a little fighty. And we had a client that also was a little rambunctious and fighty. And I think early on, for whatever reason, I think there was a sense of distrust that wasn’t solved when we were going to produce the ad. And for whatever reason, we didn’t quell it, we fought it.
So we brought forward the director we wanted, and the client didn’t like something about the director’s treatment. The director will write a synopsis of how they planned to tell the story. And instead of saying, “Okay, we hear you, let’s go back and rewrite it,” we tried to push back. We tried to win the fight. And as I think I mentioned from my Adidas experience, you can’t really win these fights. You’ve got to play it collaboratively and forward. But we ended up —
Basically, every single thing was a fight, and ultimately we lost every fight. And it got to the point where the director was challenged and the casting was challenged. And the wardrobe of one of the actors that wasn’t even the lead actor was, “Why would you choose green shoes?” And we like green shoes, but it didn’t matter, but we lost. And then they weren’t green shoes.
And there was a red stripe in the gym and, “Why is there a red stripe? That’s Budweiser’s color.” And we’re like, “It doesn’t matter.” And then instead of just saying, “We’ll change it,” we’ll paint it out.
So we fought everything. We lost everything, and we just felt like such losers. By the time we were done, the music wasn’t the track we liked, the set of words had to be rewritten because it wasn’t right.
And we were so down and we were so miserable and sad that when it got released, we both said, or the three of us said, “Listen, we’re going to take our names off it because this stank. It’s garbage,” because maybe of our egos, the 30 battles we lost along the way, that must’ve meant it was crap.
Maybe it was subconscious, but we never made that phone call, even though we intended to. I think we got busy, so we didn’t ask for our names to be taken off of it, but we intended to. And then it aired with no fanfare on a playoff baseball game in October that I wasn’t watching.
The ad was not on YouTube. Someone videoed it on their phone, maybe on their DVR, uploaded it to YouTube, and by the morning it had over a million views. But I don’t even know how anyone found it. I don’t even know how you could search it, but it just kind of went through the roof because it touched the thing that we wanted to touch where everyone felt, “God, I would do that for someone. I pray I have people around me that would do that for me.”
But we missed the whole point because we were so caught up in the 30 things that we lost, we missed — the story was still intact and it was still good, but we were obsessed about our own personal experience on it that made us lose faith in it.
And so it’s just that constant reminder to step back, ask yourself if you’re feeling a certain way — does it really matter? Is it really changing things or are you just caught in the weeds? So that was a big lesson for me to get outside of my own attitude about stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Were you able to change your behavior in future projects because of that?
Chris Beresford-Hill: I think so.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Chris Beresford-Hill: I think so. I think it was a clear lesson that a lot of things we thought matter, don’t matter. So maybe we need to be a little more amenable to feedback and suggestion. You know?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally.
Chris Beresford-Hill: But it was good. There was a work lesson and a life lesson.
Tim Ferriss: So lessons, not that you have to impart a lesson, but the billboard question. So if you could put a message, a quote, an image, anything on a billboard, non-commercial, metaphorically speaking, just to get something in front of a lot of people, what would you put?
Chris Beresford-Hill: First thing is I would request the billboard location would be at my house because I want to see it every day because I’m — whatever matters to me is probably the thing that I need to be reminded of more than I need to broadcast. But I would just say, in the spirit of creativity and living an interesting life, “See what’s possible.”
Tim Ferriss: “See what’s possible.”
Chris Beresford-Hill: “See what’s possible.”
Tim Ferriss: What would that mean to you if it were in front of your house? How would that be helpful to you?
Chris Beresford-Hill: It would remind me every day that I’m not living a routine, but I’m here to see what I can do and what people around me can do. And how can we — I don’t like the word maximize because that sounds maybe a little functional, but how can you fully express in life by taking chances, by believing in yourself, by trying new things? And it can mean anything to anyone, but it’s just that reminder of, “I’m not here to do what the plan is today. I’m here to see what’s possible.”
Tim Ferriss: I love it. Chris —
Chris Beresford-Hill: Tim.
Tim Ferriss: — we are winding to a close. Is there anything else that you would like to — well, first of all, any websites, places to point people to that you’d like to mention? And then is there anything you’d like to say before we come to a close?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Well, first of all, thank you. The best place to find me is LinkedIn, because I tend to post a lot about creativity and work and work that we are doing and work that I find inspiring. So it’s a good place to engage.
And I hope anyone out there — we were talking before we started that when I was 21, a career in advertising was one of the few options for a creative person. Today, you can self-publish, you can become an influencer, you can write your own movie, you can publish your own novel.
It’s not as attractive, but I hope we continue to attract the best talent. And I hope people do pursue it because it’s a really fun job. You learn about all kinds of different businesses. They tell you all their secrets about why things aren’t working, how good their product really is, and you get to come up with ideas to solve it.
And if you hit it, you get to put them out into the world and get your ideas in front of, hopefully, millions of people. And I think it’s probably a career that doesn’t seem as illustrious as it used to be, but my hope is that we continue to bring great people in because that’s the only way it’s going to be vibrant and exciting.
And by the way, otherwise, you’re just going to have horrible ads on TV or whatever screen we look at. So it’s kind of like, “Let’s get good people in this industry so that we don’t have to look at horrible marketing in the future.”
Tim Ferriss: And you also get to collaborate, right?
Chris Beresford-Hill: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a big one. I mean, a lot of people out there I think have lost sight of the possibility of collaborating in these types of environments and these types of companies because the shiny object for a lot of young people is running your own ship as an influencer.
But there are a lot of trade-offs, and one of them that I know from having spoken to a lot of people who are creators independently is you can end up being or feeling very isolated and very lonely.
Chris Beresford-Hill: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: And one of my top priorities, in fact, I just finished an offsite recently for my whole team, was fast creative collaborations with world-class people. Because you can do a lot as a solo operator, even with a team, but if you’re in isolation, you’re not going to be broadening, at least I don’t think, for me personally, your horizons.
You’re not going to be bending and testing your perception of the world in a way that you could in a collaborative environment. So we will link to your LinkedIn in the show notes for everyone, and we will link to everything we’ve discussed in the show notes everybody at tim.blog/podcast. That’ll be easy to find.
And until next time, please be a little bit kinder than is necessary, not just to others, but to yourself. And until next time, thanks for tuning in.
Chris Beresford-Hill: Awesome. Thanks.
Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That's how we're gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you're rude, we'll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)