A couple of weeks ago I got coffee with an old friend, Bob Coon.
Bob and I go way back to my Georgia-Pacific days, when he was at Amazon helping build out new advertising capabilities and I was one of the brand people eager to test them all out.
I have such fond memories of working with that Amazon team. Some of the best relationships I’ve made in this industry came from that era of my career, Bob is certainly one of them.
These days Bob is at Epsilon (part of Publicis) and I’m at Omnicom. Which makes us about as close to archrivals as you can get in advertising. Red Sox/Yankees, Messi/Ronaldo, Montagues/Capulets, etc. But if you’ve ever met Bob, you’ll understand why I’d make an exception. Besides, it was just two friends catching up over coffee.
At some point we started talking about how we lead teams and the little ideas we have and use to try and get teams to think differently.
I was telling him about Feldman Friday Musings and how I would pick something specific that happened during the week and try to turn that moment into meaning. (My fancy way of saying I reflect on something and figure out what I learned.)
Bob told me he has a scene from a movie that he comes back to all the time.
Have you seen Big?
Of course I’ve seen Big, Bob. Tom Hanks is the best!
Then he reminded me of the boardroom scene.
The skyscraper that turns into a robot
If you haven’t seen Big, you’ve had 38 years to check it out. But just in case, spoiler alert ahead.
Tom Hanks plays a kid living as his adult self who is working at a toy company. In the boardroom scene, the other actual adults are pitching a new toy. It’s a skyscraper that transforms into a robot.
They’ve done the research. They know the category trends. They’ve analyzed the market opportunity and can tell you exactly why this toy is going to be a hit. They would win the pitch.
And then Tom Hanks, who is actually thinking like the kid and playing with it, interrupts.
I don’t get it.
They explain some more. He still doesn’t get it.
What’s fun about playing with a building?
Then he starts talking about a robot that turns into a bug. Suddenly everyone in the room is excited about that idea instead.
I love that scene. I also love the giant piano scene at FAO Schwarz. There are a few other scenes we probably don’t need to analyze 38 years later, but those have fewer marketing implications. Anyway, go check out Big.
Bob and I spent a lot of time talking about the importance of being the Tom Hanks in that room. The person willing to say, I don’t get it, even when everyone else seems convinced.
But the more I reflected on it, the more I realized how often I’ve been on the other side of that conference table.
I can absolutely tell you why the skyscraper is a brilliant idea. I could probably enlist a few friends to build a pretty convincing pitch deck about it too.
When the explanation becomes the product
Our industry has an absurd amount of complexity. Platforms, data, identity, clean rooms, analytics, AI. Every day there’s something changing or something new to learn.
As a specialist, I love that stuff. Getting under the hood is a hobby for me. But I’ve also noticed something interesting over the years.
When we’re reviewing a pitch deck, I’ll watch most every other section get significantly more feedback. Even in my early days as part of an integrated agency, digital media rarely got any feedback but everyone always had an opinion about the creative.
I’d love to tell you that’s because my slides are always incredible (they’re not, I once had a leader correctly identify which slides in a deck were mine because of how obviously not incredible they were). But my working theory is that I’m often one of the few people in the room who is really deep in that particular specialty. Without the same frame of reference, it’s hard for everyone else to challenge the thinking the same way.
That’s also a dangerous kind of confidence.
We all like to feel like what we’re doing is special. We romanticize the technology, we idealize our process, highlight every differentiator and the seventeen steps nobody can do quite like us.
Meanwhile, the person across the table had one question.
What does any of that do for me?
Our internal complexity is not anybody else’s problem.
I know this because I spent years trying to sell my own version of the skyscraper.
I spent a long time pushing a boulder uphill
If you’ve worked in commerce or retail media for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard that in-store is going to be the next wave of retail media growth. I get why.
You can influence decisions right in the aisle. Consumers can discover your product a few feet from where they can grab it. Retailers have enormous foot traffic and rich purchase data. The potential to connect media exposure to sales is pretty incredible.
I could go on. And I did, in many meetings.
I spent years telling people why in-store retail media was going to be a massive opportunity. I thought it could fundamentally change how we approached digital out-of-home advertising. But it felt like every meeting ended with another reason not to move forward.
What about attentive reach? Great question. Here are the numbers.
What about measurement? Let me walk you through the different approaches.
What about creative flexibility? I’ll go find out!
Then, I started calling in favors, meeting with product teams across the RMNs, getting into the details of what was possible and coming back with more answers. I once sent a text message from a Target asking what the creative rotation was for the digital screens over the price scanning machines.
It didn’t matter how deep I went or how many questions I answered. It always ended the same way.
I realized I was getting better and better at answering objections, but I wasn’t getting any closer to selling the thing. Every objection became another problem to solve.
At some point I had to consider a possibility I really didn’t like. Maybe they understood me just fine.
They just didn’t want what I was selling. At least not in the current environment, and not in the form I was selling it.
That’s a different problem than needing a better pitch deck.
LinkedIn real vs. put-it-in-market real
Here’s my favorite part of the story. After spending years trying to convince people that in-store retail media was the next big thing, I eventually decided to take my defeat to LinkedIn.
I posted this exact phrase as my opening line:
I gotta be honest. I’m not sold that in-store is going to be the next great thing in retail media.
It became one of my first posts to break out. The comments section in particular.
People came out of the woodwork to tell me how wrong I was. Industry experts started getting tagged. Some of them jumped in, and I ended up actually meeting a few of them through that debate.
They were making excellent arguments about the opportunity, the data, the potential and the future of the channel. Basically, all the same arguments I’d spent years making myself. I had no defense. Those were my arguments!
I had plenty of people willing to defend the opportunity. What I didn’t have was the same amount of people and same amount of conviction to actually buy it.
There’s LinkedIn real, and then there’s sell-the-thing real.
An idea can make for an incredible debate. It can dominate conferences, show up in every industry prediction and inspire some really smart people to spend a lot of time talking about it.
But none of that automatically means somebody is willing to allocate a budget, change how they work or actually buy the thing.
For what it’s worth, I’m still excited about the potential of in-store retail media. I think the product is getting better, and there are some compelling use cases.
But regardless of the fate of in-store retail media, my takeaway is that I need to spend less time explaining why buyers should want something and more time understanding what would actually make them move.
All this for what?
There’s a question that comes up on our Omnicom team when we’re reviewing presentations.
All this for what?
I love that question. Mainly because it forces me out of my Commerce brain for a second and back across the table to the person I’m trying to help.
What problem are we actually solving? What changes for the person buying this? Is it worth their time, their money or the effort required to do something differently?
Sometimes the explanation needs to be adjusted. Sometimes the product is the problem. And sometimes what we’re selling just isn’t important enough to the person we’re trying to sell it to.
Those are very different problems.
Which brings me back to Bob and the skyscraper.
The adults at that table understood the toy business. They had all the research explaining why a skyscraper that turned into a robot should work. The kid had a much simpler question.
What’s fun about playing with a skyscraper?
I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
If I have to keep explaining why someone should want the skyscraper, maybe it’s time to stop pitching the skyscraper and ask what they’d actually want to play with.