Customerland

Revitalizing Ad Creativity Through AI and Empathy

• Ian Baer • Season 2 • Episode 27

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Ready to explore the evolution of advertising creativity? In this episode, we sit down with Ian Baer, a seasoned ad agency executive with over 35 years of experience. Ian shares his perspectives on the transformation of the advertising industry, from its golden days to the current focus on statistical analysis and measurable performance.

We discuss the impact of procurement and cost-saving demands on brand marketing, drawing interesting parallels with the world of baseball. Ian's personal anecdotes shed light on these changes, offering valuable insights into the industry's shifts.

Additionally, we examine the evolution of direct marketing and the role of technology in personalizing consumer experiences. Ian discusses advancements in AI that reduce market failures and highlights a client interaction that underscores the importance of empathy and emotional intelligence in building customer loyalty.

Mike Giambattista:

This is great fun. I love the fact that you and I see the world largely through the same kinds of engagement lenses.

Ian Baer:

Same here. You said that your white hair is atop your head and mine is beneath Right.

Mike Giambattista:

For the moment, but it's going fast. I'm here with Ian Baer, who's I'm going to read this out of your bio here, because it's just oh man, no, no, you got to allow me to do this. All right, thank you. Ian Baer is an ad agency executive with over 35 years experience leading some of the largest ad agencies in the world, including I'm listing them off Publicis and TVWA. In addition to being president of Rapp Collins Omnicom, chief strategy officer of Roxa, president of social agency Big Fuel, an EVP for Deutsch and a founder of Soothe Home, has some incredible insights to bring to the table and I'm really glad we're finally connecting. Ian, thanks for doing this Me too, mike.

Ian Baer:

We got off to a great start in the conversation before you hit record, so I can't even imagine where we're going now.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, right, and you know what I was going to say. We have to keep it PG, but we don't, we don't.

Ian Baer:

Oh, thank you. Sometimes I do get that warning at the beginning and I have to be careful not to let my Brooklyn roots show.

Mike Giambattista:

Right, we can be potty mouth here, it's okay. All right, we're all sort of grownups.

Ian Baer:

Well, I'll try to keep it a little bit clean, or my wife will be all right.

Mike Giambattista:

Right. Well, let's go back five minutes into the conversation and Ian and I were talking about some of our shared history of not only the fact that you know, when you've been in marketing this long, in and out of various circles, you bump into the same people, or you bump into lots of people who know the same people, and it turns out it actually is a fairly small industry once you've been in it this long.

Ian Baer:

And a game of Survivor.

Mike Giambattista:

Right, we're still here. So it's like that circle gets smaller the longer you stay in the game.

Ian Baer:

Right, we're still here. So it's like that circle gets smaller the longer you stay in the game.

Mike Giambattista:

Right and you don't. I guess basically kind of self-kick themselves off the island in this case. Yeah, that's right. But Ian was just making a really interesting point that I completely agree with that. When he and I both got into this business there was some sort of indescribable magic and fire to it that I think still exists in some corners. But you can look around the agency world right now and you just don't get a sense of that. You just really don't. I mean, there's a lot of look, the work has been commoditized because it kind of needed to be on some level. But the idea that creativity could reign supreme, could really change perceptions, could change brands, you just don't find it anymore. I don't think. And I look for it and I appreciate it, I'm inspired by it. I don't know. What do you think?

Ian Baer:

Well, what I?

Mike Giambattista:

think is it's tricky as hell.

Ian Baer:

What do you think? Well, what I think is, it's tricky as heck. I'll run some parallels, because as passionate as I am about marketing, I might be even more passionate about baseball. I am one of the nerdiest baseball fans on the planet. I have been since I was a kid. I have been since I was a kid. Probably one of the reasons I'm so driven by the quantified side of marketing, statistical analysis and being able to use that in really interesting ways which, frankly, that's what Soop is all about. It all comes out of my obsession with statistics as a baseball fan.

Ian Baer:

Well, let's look at what's happened to baseball over the last few decades. Analytics really took over. People became so obsessed with performance as measured statistically that I think a lot of baseball fans feel some of the beauty of the game, some of the nuance of the game, some of the more strategic sides of baseball have been lost in the process. Things like the stolen base was largely analyzed out of baseball for many years, one of the most exciting plays in the game. Right, okay, let's talk about advertising. I started in an industry I started. My first agency was a direct marketing agency and really one of the best, most pioneering direct marketing agencies. A shop that was called Cobbs and Brady eventually became Draft and then faded into the world of what is now FCB.

Ian Baer:

I took a lot of pride statistical nerd that I was that we could actually measure the performance of everything we did, and I thought that was amazing.

Mike Giambattista:

Which back in the day was also really unique. You know, not everybody could do that.

Ian Baer:

That's right, and advertising had such a reputation for being pomp and circumstance. And dog and pony and you know, but I don't really know what you sold at the end of the day. Pony and you know, but I don't really know what you sold at the end of the day. And then here I was, working with people and working under mentors who showed me no, actually we can prove out the business benefit of what we do, and I thought that was amazing when married to creativity and the same way, people fell in love with statistics in baseball and probably overanalyzed the game, and now we're seeing it start to roll back a little bit. People really became obsessed with measurable performance and accountability.

Ian Baer:

So it's not a great mystery when we look at how we got here to understand that, by and large, people were saying well, I'm going to choose between the thing that makes me feel good about my brand and the spreadsheet I can show my boss that might lead to my promotion or bonus or job retention. It's understandable why they chose the spreadsheet. Enter the era of procurement. And now you have these analytics, crossed with a bunch of people whose job it is to deliver cost savings to large, often publicly traded entities that demand the same. So more and more you have brand marketing organizations demanding higher performance, more results and willing to pay less for it every year.

Ian Baer:

And the unfortunate reality of where way too much of the business has ended up is in this morass that I refer to as advertising by the pound, that I refer to as advertising by the pound, where it's more. How many ad units am I going to get? How many TV spots, how many bodies for the dollar, with an expectation of relatively low, commoditized performance, whether the work is brilliant or not? And, as a result, the industry's lost passion, the industry's lost artistry. It's also lost a lot of talent.

Ian Baer:

You have a lot of people saying you know what there's?

Ian Baer:

other stuff I can do that might feed my soul more. I do think to your point. The fires still burn at a number of shops, especially a number of independent shops, at a number of shops, especially a number of independent shops. But it's certainly not the kind of star system it was when I entered the business where it was like gosh, maybe one day I'll work for Lee Clow or maybe someday I'll get to work with Richard Kirshenbaum. Now in the business people don't really have that same understanding. It's just a different time.

Mike Giambattista:

But don't you think that the pendulum having swung this far into commoditization kind of creates an opportunity on the other side of that big circle for real creativity, for people to start thinking out of the box? Because at this point it's almost a necessity, because if you said, you know you're, you're looking at, uh, diminishing returns and results, you're looking at, you know, uh, you know a commoditized process, you know a commoditized process, and and it just seems to me that if you, that if you really look hard, you could find people who are still trying to think of solutions that don't look like everybody else's For sure.

Ian Baer:

I do think the pendulum is going to swing back and I think a couple of things will drive that. One, ironically, is artificial intelligence, because as much as people are in a panic, seemingly, over creative jobs going away as a result of AI taking over a bunch of copywriting responsibilities or you know copywriting responsibilities, or you know virgining out the same banner ad for 300 different websites, and yes, it will take that mechanical side, but it's actually going to take a lot of the process management, a lot of what has fallen. You know, functions like traffic that are sort of becoming a thing of the past already thanks to software, and the less clients are paying for that, the more there's going to be an opportunity for differentiated talent to step up and say no, actually we're not going to get paid to do the same thing a machine can do, or or you know, for an hour of somebody's talent to do the same thing a thousand other similarly qualified individuals could do, but we're actually going to be able to receive value for a differentiated offering, for a higher level of creativity. I think the people who will survive this wave of technology upheaval will be the most talented people with the most to say. And what that converges with is a change in consumerism, because, you know, when I was growing up, advertising was a necessary evil of life.

Ian Baer:

I want to watch this TV show, I'm going to watch the commercials. I want to read this magazine, I'm going to see a bunch of ads. That's not the world we live in anymore. People get to be very selective. People get to pay extra to not see advertising at all. So for advertising to be relevant, it has to break through and it has to act in ways that advertising hasn't always acted. It actually has to help people. Or it has to entertain them, or it has to touch them on some emotional level, or it's the tree that fell in the forest with nobody to hear Picture your organization as a solitary island amidst a vast churning sea of opportunities.

Mike Giambattista:

On the horizon lie other islands, relationships waiting to be built, partnerships waiting to be formed. But between your island and those distant shores stretches a turbulent expanse filled with uncertainty and risk, expanse filled with uncertainty and risk. You're going to need a bridge, or bridges plural to span this divide connecting you to new horizons. Those bridges are strategic partnerships.

Mike Giambattista:

Yet building bridges and partnerships is no simple task. They both require careful planning, precise engineering and a deep understanding of the terrain. Missteps can lead to collapse, leaving your business stranded on its island. Tectonic builds strategic partnerships, helping organizations navigate the treacherous waters, ensuring that those bridges are strong and resilient and scalable. There's a reason why some of the largest, most progressive companies in the world are retooling their revenue models and investing in partnerships. Find out more at tectonicco.

Mike Giambattista:

That's T-E-C-T-O-N-I-Qco. You know you're talking about AI and everybody's dread, especially in the creative community. I actually don't see any reason for dread if you are genuinely, if you're approaching your task in a genuinely creative way. I mean for me personally, I love that. I now have the ability to churn through 35 bad ideas quickly to get to the one decent one, and I you know that was an excruciating process of hours and days and sometimes weeks to get to that, and right now I can be in a flow. I can churn through the junk which you know everybody has to churn through. You just have to. That's just part of the process.

Ian Baer:

But AI has been incredible for me just to start burning through the junk, getting to the good stuff, synthesizing the good together and coming up with a decent solution, so I'm a huge fan and in a lot of ways, that's exactly the role it plays in our business, because after years and years and years of seeing time and money spent on testing and learning and refining, or doing two years' worth of market research and dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars or, even worse, having all that research redlined at the start of the project because no one wanted to pay to understand what people would need, we'll just try a bunch of stuff and see what works. Now all of that gets crunched up by AI and when I can go to a client in a few weeks with the insights that it used to take me years of research and testing and learning to be able to prescribe what their customers want from them, ai is the hero in that story.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, it's good to be allowed to do with. It is focus on actually solving people's problems Right right, instead of selling the idea that you could get to a solution.

Ian Baer:

Yes, I've never forgotten. Early in my career I had a meeting with a client and I was so excited we had done. You know, as typical, again I started in direct marketing, so we're very big on test matrices, right? And I'm the earnest account guy who comes in and, good news, here's the latest results of our test and I show him look at how well the winning cell out of this five cell test performed. And he laughed and he said that's interesting. You see one success. I see four failures. I have to explain to my boss why we spent money on these four things that bombed. So good for you that you can say you found me a new performing control. But I have to explain why I let these four things into the market. And I have never forgotten that conversation and I really made it my mission, often my problem, to keep those failures out of the marketplace. To keep those failures out of the marketplace. So now having the ability to do that thanks to technology, just makes me feel like a much better partner.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, it's a much more efficient way to go in with a solution, yeah. Yeah, completely agree.

Ian Baer:

It's kinder to the consumers too, because who likes having a bad experience with a brand? True which feeling like a brand doesn't understand you're just trying to sell you something you don't need. That just makes people recoil and they have a lot more options than they used to when they can get to those options much faster. So you know you don't have the time you used to have as a brand to make up for a bad experience. The clock's already run out.

Mike Giambattista:

And how many conversations have you had on the client side recently or whenever you picked a time frame where the client says, yes, we need to improve our personalization efforts, and in the next breath they're talking about essentially what we were saying, just a commoditized approach to throwing expletive at the walls and hoping something sticks.

Ian Baer:

It's the innovation conundrum of our business. You know it's coming from a good place. When a client says I want you to help me do things no one's ever done before, and then when you come up with an idea, the next thing is great, show me five other clients. You've done this, for that conundrum has been there for as long as I've been in the business and you understand it because again, nobody wants to own those failures.

Ian Baer:

Because again, nobody wants to own those failures. I do think we all have an opportunity now to deliver a better, more refined, more meaningful experience to a consumer who will absolutely tune out a brand that doesn't show a level of understanding or empathy.

Mike Giambattista:

Let's talk about let's break it down this way empathy let's talk about let's break it down this way. There's personalization, which is every organization's brass ring in marketing.

Ian Baer:

Yes, and a very loaded term right, Because to some people, personalization means sticking someone's name at the beginning of an email.

Mike Giambattista:

Right.

Ian Baer:

But really you know the heart of it is personal.

Mike Giambattista:

I guess that's what I think about personalization.

Ian Baer:

It's how do you make it feel like this is just for me?

Mike Giambattista:

Right, and there's a big difference between the way we approach it technologically versus the way we approach it from the other side, which is like hey, there's a person over here. You want them to feel something? Yes, because on the other side of that, feeling is probably an action, if you're smart about it.

Ian Baer:

More than anything, you want them to feel seen.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah.

Ian Baer:

I mean, that's such an easy term to throw around, but I was just interviewed on a similar topic yesterday and it was about the importance of emotional intelligence in marketing. I was asked for some of my experience and I said you know what we learned. For example, I did a lot of work with a major airline I won't name them, but I love them. They're far out west, maybe not even on this content, I'll keep it at that and what we found was you wanted to really lock in somebody's loyalty and get them to book incremental fares with you.

Ian Baer:

Throwing fare sales at them or bonus miles didn't, because everyone can do that. But hang on, we actually have a history of where this person goes. We can see patterns, that data tells stories and when we use data tied to the destinations that people visited most frequently, that made them feel seen, that showed an understanding of who they are, and suddenly you're not the same as every other airline, throwing a fair sale at them, trying to sell them the cheapest seat Heck, they might even take a connecting flight. Because you show them, you get them and you understand the motivations for their travel and the memories they're creating when they're there.

Mike Giambattista:

And you know what we?

Ian Baer:

won a bunch of netty awards doing that, so it's not just like warm and fuzzy stuff, it makes money. Emotional connection is the greatest financial leverage any marketer has right now. It's just elusive for a lot of brands that don't want to invest in figuring it out.

Mike Giambattista:

Well, you know, we keep talking about this as if it is some sort of magical inflection point. In fact, I think it is. You know, with AI to personalize let's just say, a conversation for lack of a better word with a customer, it was too expensive a proposition. You couldn't get to the level of the quantity of data, the level of insight that you need to cobble together a sensible conversation. Up until very, very recently, and now, with AI, that's actually possible, and I feel like I know this because I talked to companies all day long who were in the midst of their own kind of AI transformations like holy smokes. Look what we can do now that we couldn't do 18 months ago relative to finding the right way to engage with a customer.

Mike Giambattista:

But I'm feeling like you know. So now light bulbs are going off all over corporate America and hopefully all over the marketing world as well, like, wait a second, we have a whole new set of tools we can use. You know, in a couple of years, my hope is that weak personalization will be a thing of the past, because there's almost no excuse on the consumer side. Right now, there's still a pretty heavy lift, because you've got a lot of technology you've got to integrate and buy and figure out and and grow with. But you know, give that two or three years. I feel like if you're a consumer oriented brand in this country and you're still putting out uh hi ian.

Ian Baer:

Email copy goes here right, as I literally got recently. It was high and then it was a seven digit number.

Mike Giambattista:

Makes you feel good, doesn't it? Yeah, you know, at some point our expectations as consumers will rise to the point where weak personalization isn't acceptable anymore. I think we're not quite there yet.

Ian Baer:

Well, I think it varies by category. The more options somebody has available to them and the easier it is for them to get at their options, the higher the bar gets raised.

Ian Baer:

And look, I think something happened to everyone through the pandemic Gosh, I feel like we talked about the pandemic and its impact on marketing. You know so ad nauseum, and then it became like nobody mentioned the pandemic anymore. But the reality is we experienced an acceleration of tech adaptation that nobody could have seen coming. Through the pandemic, we merged what used to be these somewhat coexisting spheres of digital customers and traditional customers, and there are the people who only want to buy in retail and the people who only want, and all of a sudden, when everyone realized this is how life works and I have a choice to either be part of modern life or not it all merged together and there are elements of customer experience that clicked ahead three to five years in the space of about six months, fairly early in the pandemic, and it left everyone with a much higher level of expectation, because once everyone had to start using things like Amazon, things like Zoom, just to live their life, things like Uber, uber Well then they expect all of life to be that content-driven, to be that anticipatory.

Ian Baer:

But now you're either in or you're out, and if you're in, in any category, there is an expectation that everything works like Amazon, that everything works like Netflix and has this coded understanding of where I've been where I'm going. The next thing I want to see what I'm looking for. Or it's just too easy for people to choose a competitor and when they do, they never come back. This is an age-old adage. Is the vast majority of people who are dissatisfied with a brand. They leave without ever opening their mouths to complain. It's not people's nature to complain. It's people's nature to move on, and it's way too easy for an undersatisfied or dissatisfied customer to just click over to another solution and never come back.

Mike Giambattista:

And you'll never know it. You'll never know it.

Ian Baer:

You have never known why.

Mike Giambattista:

Right.

Ian Baer:

You'll just know when they stop buying.

Mike Giambattista:

Right, so let's, let's point this forward a little bit, because this is, this is great fun. I love the fact that you and I see the world largely through the same, the same kinds of engagement lenses.

Ian Baer:

Same here, but let's let's say that your white hair is atop your head and mine is beneath.

Mike Giambattista:

Right For the moment, but it's going fast. So, because you and I have been around the block a couple of times here, we've seen trends come and go, We've seen the sine wave of, you know of, here's what's working, here's what is going to be passe in six months. Let's look ahead for the next, say six months to two years, and frame it up this way Right now we're looking, we're just now realizing what AI can do for us in terms of productivity, efficiency and personalization the right kind. What do you think that's going to look like in, say, a year or two years?

Ian Baer:

more every day is that brands can't get away with treating customers like customers. And what I mean is if a brand only knows you in the context of what you buy from them, that's not going to be enough to satisfy you as a consumer, because more and more people expect brands to fit into their lives. The notion of customer centricity remember when that was like all anyone wanted to talk about. When's?

Ian Baer:

the last time you heard somebody brag about being customer centered. It's because by the time those systems were built out, the promise itself became irrelevant to people. People want life centricity. People want you to get who they are when they're not buying from you, when they don't need your product. And AI really gives brands all of us in marketing a lens into somebody's life far beyond that moment when they need to buy something. So I think that's one of the big evolutions. That evolution of expectation is only going to increase.

Ian Baer:

Some of the conversation we had a few minutes ago about it's going to be too easy for people to find a brand that makes them feel seen and understood. So you don't want to play that game. You might want to figure out something else to do for a little bit. That's just reality. The other thing that's happening is we're seeing a crazy acceleration in the way technology and consumerism fuse together. That's only going to continue, and the interesting thing is it's being led by our youngest concerns. You know older generations like me. I got introduced to new technology when somebody that I looked up to a business mentor.

Ian Baer:

You know my dad bringing home the VCR, like that's how you learned what technology was, and somebody, usually older and more experienced than you, showed you how it worked. And that has changed dramatically. Gen Z is now teaching everyone how the world works. You know, social commerce very quickly went from something only Gen Z did because they're crazy, and now it's like the way everyone buys everything. It's the way seniors find out about new nutritional supplements. You know so. The outsized influence of Gen Z as they grow into being a dominant force in both business and consumer spending will evolve the way people expect to interact and experience brands. At the same time, everyone's expectations are already increasing, based on their own life needs. It's going to. Marketing has to become exponentially more empathetic in order to survive as a practice, and I see it happening. It's very encouraging.

Mike Giambattista:

I hope that the next conversation we have and I'm counting on more of these, but we can talk about, about some of the brands that are doing it well where you know, creating empathy, feigning empathy, is easy. Creating genuine empathy at scale is extraordinarily difficult, or has been yes.

Ian Baer:

It's a high wire act because people can see through the bullshit like never before. See it took me all this time, to use a vulgar term.

Ian Baer:

We finally got to it, though. That's the good part we finally did, but yeah, people's bullshit detectors are so much sharper they can't be snowed anymore. And again, the more much sharper they can't be snowed anymore. And again the more consumerism and just like living life merge into one thing, like you. Look at a new product like Telly, for example, and that is going to be a fascinating human experiment to see how people feel about getting a free TV and free programming in exchange for constant exposure to simultaneous ad messaging running underneath. A lot of people are betting against Tally. I think it's going to revolutionize things.

Mike Giambattista:

I mean that model's been tried before and successful for some period of time until somebody came along and had something better, so I'd buy it.

Ian Baer:

Yeah.

Mike Giambattista:

Plus, I love advertising. So there's that, ian. It is a pleasure to speak with you, and I was serious when I said I'm looking forward to the next several conversations we can have. It's not just nice to commiserate with somebody with a similar point of view, but I think that the way you articulate that point of view, which I think is important, is really solid, straightforward and worth listening to.

Ian Baer:

So thanks, that's so kind of you. Thanks, mike. I really enjoyed this. Can't wait to keep the conversation going.

Mike Giambattista:

Let's do it.

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