POV Special Edition, 2016 for the 3% Conference

A POSSIBLE Publication

SPECIAL EDITION

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POSSIBLE is a creative agency that cares about results.

The Company I Keep

We back up every idea with real-world insights to create work that makes a difference—and makes a measurable impact. With more than 1,500 employees around the globe, POSSIBLE brings results-driven digital solutions to some of the world’s most dynamic brands, including Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Shell, and the Coca-Cola Company. POSSIBLE is as adept at design, user experience, and technology as we are at leveraging data to drive insights, inspire creativity, optimize performance, and drive ROI.

Martha Hiefield

MOBILE

We help clients create for and navigate the entire mobile ecosystem. We combine deep experience in mobile app, game, video, and content development to deliver in a user-first world.

CONTENT

We create content that makes an emotional connection.

We aim to uncover the emotion in data and the human truth in research to inspire creative development and make a meaningful impact on brands.

Three Reasons Why Today’s Teens are Radically Different from Millenials

Originally published in Advertising Age.

Meredith Chase

CULTURE

6 Making the Case for Women Creative Directors Adam Kahn Originally published in Campaign.

Originally published in Inc.

CULTURE

STRATEGY

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Long Live the Creative Gut

Value vs. Message

Amy Vaughan

Paul Soon

The Rise of Minimalism

Originally published in The Huffingrton Post.

Originally published in Campaign Asia.

Simran Gill

DATA/CREATIVE

DATA

Originally published in HOW. CREATIVE

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Blind-sided by Culture

Just Dance

Rebecca Bedrossian

Martha Hiefield

Originally published in The Guardian.

Originally published in The Huffingrton Post.

Four Reasons Why Working Globally Is Worth the Jet Lag

CULTURE

CULTURE

Shane Atchison Originally published in Inc. CULTURE

DATA

We use data to predict what will work and to measure what matters. As the volume of data continues to increase exponentially, we have found most organizations fail to connect data to their creative and activities in a meaningful way. We combine classic modeling techniques with world-class reporting to help clients achieve superior results.

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Where My Girls At

How Being Outnumbered at a Women-Founded Agency Made Me a Better Man

What is Culture

Carrie Ingoglia Originally published in Campaign.

CULTURE

Rick Albano

EXPERIENCE

We help companies improve customer experience.

More than ever, marketing is inextricably linked with the product and service. We have a long history of inventing interfaces, retail environments, and interactions that create competitive advantage for brands.

Originally published in MediaPost.

CULTURE

Originally published in Inc.

COMMERCE

We help clients sell more in the environments that matter most. The continued rise of Amazon and new commerce models can be an opportunity or a threat.

We combine deep knowledge of the commerce landscape with data-inspired creativity to help companies maximize their sales while maintaining control of their brands.

Danielle Trivisonno Hawley

CULTURE

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Think Small

Drowning in Data?

You've Got the Wrong Approach

Connecting the Dots: Culture & Profit

Justin Marshall Originally published in CMO.com.

MOBILE

Harmony Crawford

Martha Hiefield & Diane Holland

Originally published in The Guardian.

Originally published in Campaign.

DATA

FINANCE/CULTURE

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Tinder Causes Five Unplanned Pregnancies Per Day Jason Carmel

Cultural Intelligence: Put the Work First

Originally published in The Huffington Post.

Jen Anderson

DATA

CULTURE

POSSIBLE is a WPP Digital agency.

pov@possible.com possible.com

Editor-in-Chief

©2016 by POSSIBLE. All rights reserved.

Printer

Rebecca Bedrossian, POSSIBLE Portland

Design & Art Direction

Paz Ulloa, POSSIBLE Costa Rica

Bridgetown Printer bridgetown.com

& Tony Aguero, POSSIBLE Portland

The articles on the following pages represent our collective voice, reflect our thinking, our culture, and showcase how we work. We’re proud to share this publication with all of you and we hope you find inspiration in our thoughts.

These are exciting times for the ad industry, with everything moving, changing, and evolving at an incredible rate. And diversity is a timely and heated topic. In September, HP demanded that its ad agencies ramp up diversity efforts, and General Mills went as far as to specify quotas for women and people of color within their creative agencies. But it is important to point out that when agencies only address diversity from an angle of recruiting, and not from an angle of inclusion, education, cultural respect and proactivism, they fail to change the ratio.

At POSSIBLE, we value the ideas and skills every person brings to the table. You can’t have diversity of thought without diversity of people. It’s through respectful and frank communication, and a culture of openness that we will continue building an environment of learning and opportunity for everyone—which in turn leads to world-class work.

In short, we want to move from an environment of diversity initiatives to a culture of inclusivity and belonging.

POSSIBLE has sponsored The 3% Conference since 2013; therefore, we have a responsibility to work harder to

create change. In 2014, we challenged ourselves and other agencies to step up, know their number, and take one action towards change. I’m proud to say our efforts trend in the right direction. In the U.S. in 2014, 15% of our creative leaders were women and as of 2016, that number has risen to 33%. While these are encouraging stats, we clearly aren’t there yet. There’s a lot left for us to do.

Ultimately, the future is only as good as who we are. Our work together must be about improving the lives of individuals through stronger relationships with customers, brands, and with each other. Together, we can change the ratio.

Let’s work together: possible.com/careers

Martha Hiefield Global Chief Talent Officer, POSSIBLE

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Martha Hiefield Global Chief Talent Officer, POSSIBLE Seattle

It used to be that jumping around to different companies was a telltale sign of a bad candidate. Training can be expensive and employers weren’t interested in risking short-term talent. Many still don’t. But an influx of younger generations into the workforce has brought about a change of opinion. Short tenures are suddenly in vogue.

There are a lot of people who now believe that changing jobs more frequently can actually help your career.

The thinking goes: 1. Switching things up shows employers that you’re not complacent or lazy; you’re willing to take risks and learn new skills. 2. You’ll have a much better shot at a higher salary when you apply for a new job, rather than waiting on a raise.

The math behind that latter point is hard to argue against. A 2014 Forbes article reports that “staying employed at the same company for over two years on average is going to make you earn less over your lifetime by about 50% or more.” That’s an alarming stat, especially for people just beginning their careers, and one that Fast Company recently referenced again.

But do we really need to switch it up all the time to succeed? And is it really a new quandary?

To me, career advancement is about so much more than the number on your paycheck or the title on your business card. And deciding to leave or keep a job is a dilemma that’s always existed, for all generations—an age-old question—should I stay or should I go?

No two scenarios are the same, and each person must decide for themselves.

But as someone who just celebrated 17 years with the same company, I offer a counter opinion to the job-hopping frenzy.

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Here are a few things I’ve learned that have kept me happy—and growing—in one place: PUT YOURSELF OUT THERE. You are your own best advocate, so don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. Speak up about your goals and interests and defend your self-worth and interests. Even the best manager will be too busy to make it happen for you.

ALIGN YOUR GOALS WITH THE NEEDS OF THE BUSINESS. Business challenges take priority in the workplace. If you want to move ahead, you have to be able to tie your own personal strengths and passions to a business need.

Your skills and interests go nowhere if your company doesn’t have a need for them.

CHOOSE AN INDUSTRY THAT’S CHANGING AND A COMPANY THAT’S GROWING. Our business has transformed countless times since I started. Realities shift constantly, but our own size and structure has changed, too. We sold to a parent company. We merged with other agencies. We added more than 15 global offices. No two years have been alike, and new opportunities inevitably come from that.

KEEP PERSPECTIVE. I’ve always believed that life is 10% what happens and 90% how you handle it. Our careers and relationships present ongoing challenges, and this year I’m reminding myself to celebrate the moment. Daily achievements are what make up the bigger picture. Don’t underestimate them.

LOVE WHAT YOU DO. Finding joy in your job and the people you work with counts for a lot. Good leaders, advocates, and mentors do, too. Through all of the change I’ve encountered, I’ve found that my career has always been about people and building relationships, and I’ve made some of my greatest friends through my company.

REALLY, WHAT MORE COULD YOU ASK FOR?

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1. GEN Z IS THE MOST PRAGMATIC GROUP SINCE THE GI GENERATION

Solution: Serve up education along with entertainment.

Every generation is defined by those that came before, and Generation Z is no exception.

They are more realistic and cautious than Millennials, less cutthroat than Generation X, and more poly-cultural than any previous generation in American history.

They care deeply about issues of social justice and equality and have a thirst for self-improvement.

There’s a huge opportunity for brands to deliver content that promotes education and connects with the issues, obsessions, and moments Gen Z cares about most.

The agency I work for tapped into this insight last Valentine’s Day with our “Coded with Love” campaign for Google’s Made with Code initiative (a program that inspires young girls to pursue their passions through coding). Out with flowers and chocolate, in with messages of love and positivity.

The campaign highlighted groups and individuals using code to make a difference, such as an app that helps teens find local volunteer opportunities and WiFi enabled teddy bears that allow person-to-person hugs.

Another component used creative social content to prompt girls to code and share animated hearts, leading to a high volume of coding project engagements on madewithcode.com.

And what they really want from brands.

Meredith Chase VP of Client Strategy, Swift (a POSSIBLE agency) Portland

Generation Z is the most digitally savvy, socially immersed, and culturally aware segment of our population. So it’s a little weird they are so hard to reach.

Gen-Zers first appeared online when their parents uploaded in-utero sonograms to Facebook and have been surrounded by social media ever since. They sift through media on multiple channels (5 to 10 is normal) with the efficiency of a search engine.

Confronted with nonstop content, this generation— whose oldest wave just graduated from high school— has developed a sort of brand blindness, scrolling past anything that feels like marketing.

3. FOBO IS REPLACING FOMO

Solution: Enhance the experience.

Forget Millennials’ anxiety about missing out on fun stuff their friends are doing. Generation Z is fearful of being offline, period.

But they aren’t in it for the technology and they’re not hung up on being digital natives. (That’s just what older people call them.)

Kids spend tons of time on social platforms to connect with friends, influencers, news, and yes, brands.

Marketers who want to form long-lasting relationships with teens need to understand the nuances of each channel and deliver the emotional payoff Gen Z craves.

This is where one-to-one messaging apps like Snapchat kill it. Gen Z regards Snapchat as the “realest” social channe—a place to be casual (not as curated as Instagram), creative (so many hacks), and direct (personalized messaging).

And because it’s ephemeral, it carries a sense of urgency and feels closest to a real-life conversation.

Brands can win by creating geofilters and lenses tied to cultural moments, enabling users to build clever Snapchat stories that also happen to get a brand’s name out there.

2. CREDIBILITY COMES FROM NEUTRAL SOURCES

Solution: Get to know the constellation around the supernova.

North American high school campuses and allowed users to apply a subtly branded overlay to images.

Gen Z doesn’t want to be told what’s cool, they want to discover what’s cool.

It worked because the audience was already in the habit of sharing photos that evoke a chill TGIF mood: now they could put a fresh twist on it.

One way they do this is by following the stylists, trainers, writers, and producers who are close to celebs for a more intimate look behind the scenes.

Sure, they want to know what Kylie Jenner and Bruno Mars are up to, but they’re equally interested in the supporting cast. There is greater cachet in knowing who they are specifically because they’re not in the limelight.

Brands that form alliances with these almost-famous players boost credibility with Gen Z.

Consider it a call to brands and agencies to get sharper on strategy, content, and audience.

We recently conducted research with teens in New York and L.A. and learned that brands earn au-

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They are “real people,” not professional models, which sets an expectation of accessibility and makes the content feel more believable.

Hollister, another clothing label catering to teens, keyed into prevailing attitudes last fall with a “Friday Vibes” Snapchat filter. The lens targeted nearly 20,000

So, the death knell of advertising?

A few rules of engagement

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The strategy resonated with a generation that sees Valentine’s Day as an occasion to express love on a broader spectrum than romance.

They pointed to teen fashion juggernaut Brandy Melville (3.7 million followers on Instagram), which regularly tags models in posts.

thenticity points when they identify people shown in photos.

The brand struck a chord by giving followers something useful without dictating how it should be used, a smart approach for a (surprisingly!) sensible generation.

KEEP THESE STRATEGIES IN MIND WHEN CRAFTING YOUR MESSAGE. AND REMEMBER TO TREAT GEN Z LIKE PEOPLE, NOT THE NEXT GREAT UNKNOWN.

Making the Case for Women Creative Directors Adam Kahn Executive Creative Director, POSSIBLE Cincinnati

I wish I didn’t have to write this. Creative is creative, talent is talent—I believe that to my core and have built my life’s work around it.

BUT SOMETHING NEEDS TO CHANGE. I want to show the women on my creative team that they can reach the highest echelons of our industry.

I want to prove that my agency supports diversity, in thought and idea and action.

I want to make sure that my two daughters have a role model—both in their mom and in me—by ensuring that the working world they will enter into 20 years from now is one grounded in true equality.

All of which is why I would love to hire more women for open creative director roles to help us lead digital creative for one of the largest CPG companies in the U.S. My “why” is driven first by a business need: women make 70-80% of all household purchasing decisions (including—yep—CPG). Yet only 11.5% of creative directors in the U.S. are women. And so I would love to sift through a digital pile of 50/50 male and female portfolios to make a blind, “work-first” choice.

Know that I’m not in this search alone—I have the best recruiting talent in the business looking for skilled creative leaders to join our ranks. But time and time again, I am told, “Not many female candidates apply.”

Of course, relocation is an easy challenge factor, as we cast a wide, national net for this search (though, as a recent New York transplant, I can tell you that moving away is not as bad as you’ve been told it is). Flexible schedules, benefits, salary, brands—they all factor in to accepting a new job. But if those factors were the only ones holding us back from an equally-gendered candidate pool, there would be a national decline in talent. And there’s only a national decline in one gender of that talent. And nope, guys, it’s not ours.

As it has so truthfully been said, “You cannot be what you cannot see.” Right now in our industry, women rarely see other women succeeding in leadership positions.

Women often have to choose between work and home, and many leave the industry at the ACD level, not progressing further due to lack of support at their agencies and from the industry as a whole. This leaves the advertising world, specifically the creators of ads, bereft of the very gender that buys (most) everything we sell.

Recently, I’m proud to say, our POSSIBLE Cincinnati office promoted three exceptional women and one man to creative director roles, proving our commitment to diversity at the highest levels. But this move forward is really just the beginning of an old and very big problem. So, here is my very public letter of intent:

I AM LOOKING FOR MORE CREATIVE DIRECTORS. AND, FOR A BETTER FUTURE FOR US ALL, I’M URGING WOMEN CANDIDATES TO APPLY.

At my agency, we have a new Women + Leadership initative, sparked by our ongoing sponsorship of The 3% Conference. Women + Leadership intends to inspire a dialogue amongst our employees and foster an open forum where they can continue the conversation to create change. I’m confident that this initiative will lead to progress and increased diversity—both gender and overall—across our agency.

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Amy Vaughan Creative Director, POSSIBLE Cincinnati

Look at any industry publication and you’ll find an abundance of articles touting ad tech, automation, and programmatic. And then there are the start-ups and software experiments using AI to generate content, creative, and even taglines. It’s enough to make most creatives swoon. Add to this our growing capacity for data mining, and advertising has gone from a seemingly creative exercise to an almost scientific one.

There are times when it might feel as though the era of the creative gut is gone—but fear not, dear creative.

We human beings have some things that automation, data, and all of the strategy in the world can’t ever replace: intuition and a knack for human connection. Data and strategy can get us far, but to make brilliant creative,

we need each other and we need to take heart.

COME TOGETHER

There’s no algorithm for a gut feeling. You can’t solve

ALL THE FEELS Our creative gut is more than intuition; it’s a collection

for it. It’s something to which only the human mind and heart can guide you.

of current and past experiences, and these are a valuable resource. Where strategy is based on past data, our experience is based on emotion, memory, and influence.

What’s even more stunning about intuition is how accurate it is at helping us do the right thing. It’s a lot more scientific and less hippy-dippy than you might think. Psycholog y Today provides three studies as examples, which show us that our intuition is capable of recognizing patterns before our rational brains, and that, in turn, it can help us predict outcomes and keep us safe from harm.

These kudos for intuition are unlikely to surprise creatives like myself. When it comes to making great work, trusting your instinct is a powerful tool. Be it a hunch for design, or a powerful feeling about an amazing tagline, your gut can get you there. Of course, every campaign is different. In many ways, data has enabled us to act on our intuition with greater confidence. Data often sets up the strategy before the project has even begun. For others, creative intuition sets the tone and pulls the trigger. Together data and intuition are powerful and impactful.

Believe it or not, data can solve for basic human emotions. But it can’t recognize, replicate, or understand the power of true human connection.

As humans, we are hardwired for connection; therefore, the most effective work requires a creative mind to connect in a way that breaks through all of the noise. Tools are great for making our ideas and visions more concrete from an emotional standpoint, but how

they come to life still requires a creative mind.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY With AI, VR, and every algorithm imaginable working hard to replace what we humans have always done, it’s no wonder people feel threatened. And it’s true that jobs are being replaced by computers in increasing numbers. But that’s what makes the life of an agency creative so exciting. We bring something raw and real to the work because we are human. Our unique experiences and insights bring subtle beauty and truth to the work. (Yet another reason for getting diverse perspectives.)

You can sleep better tonight knowing that computers—or even strategists—won’t replace creatives.

Keep trusting your gut and pushing your ideas to not only be the biggest ideas, but the right ideas to get the job done. Substantiate your creative gut with strategy and data, but ultimately know that you’re the one with the sixth sense. Acknowledge there is subjectivity and accept that it’s not about being right—it’s making sure that the work is right.

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Value VS. Message Paul Soon CEO, Asia Pacific, POSSIBLE Singapore

Did you know that you can only make a limited number of good decisions in a day? After too many, something psychologists call “decision fatigue” sets in and you start making mistakes. That’s a big reason successful people like Mark Zuckerberg and Albert Einstein (yes, him) wear or wore the same outfit every day. No closet decisions, no energy wasted.

Decision fatigue is a paradox for companies today. They are creating more and more products, and those products create choices. Meanwhile, marketers and others are providing more and more information that consumers have to sift through. The unintended result is that we’re not only giving them too many decisions to make, it’s stressing people out.

Part of the problem is that we’re often missing the point of the data we have. Instead of targeting consumers with ever more precise messages, we should be using it to generate real-time value. To understand how this can work, let’s imagine you’re a man in your 40s who wants to eat healthier. You research the possibilities and learn there are dozens of suggested programmes, each with its own competing and mutually incompatible suggestions. How can you narrow your choices and come to a decision?

At that point you get a message from your healthcare provider. It tells you that, given your age, family history, and the medications you’re taking, you should eat more of some things, less of others, and less overall. This advice is not for everyone. It’s just for you, at this moment in your life. It gives you something you value very much: peace of mind that you’re making the right choices.

Believe it or not, this isn’t pure fantasy. Where I live in Singapore, the Ministry of Health has envisioned just such a system. It’s not online yet, but when it comes, it should use its wealth of data to anticipate our needs and deliver real value to us. In a world where choices are increasing, brands will need to provide value like this if they want to stay top of mind for consumers. To do that, however, we’ll need to keep a few things in mind.

OUR CURRENT DATA-DRIVEN EFFORTS WORK BACKWARDS. Right now, we are all trying to harness the immense amount of data we have. But we’re using it largely to target consumers more precisely with more effective messages. This programmatic advertising is not necessarily providing value; it’s much more like a jazzed up version of a general food recommendation. It’s creating as many problems as it solves for consumers.

VALUE COMES FROM THE INDIVIDUAL OUT. The Singapore healthcare system will work in the other direction. It will look at our genetics and condition, and offer trusted recommendations for us. That will make life—and our decisions—easier. Of course, it won’t make eating healthy as tasty as the alternative, but at least we’ll understand our choices.

REAL TIME MEANS ANTICIPATING NEEDS. Real time does not necessarily require you to be nimble and respond in the moment. It can simply mean getting on your customer’s timeline. Rather than a campaign schedule, the messages from the Singapore healthcare system will come based on age and condition. They will be real time and data driven, too.

VALUE TRANSCENDS MESSAGES. Of course we need to have the right messages, but value often comes in a more tangible form. Under Armour apps, for example, look at your recent performance and sleep patterns to make suggestions so that you can work out more effectively. That’s something you can use, not merely read.

You might think, “This all sounds great, but only a small number of brands can generate value in real time.”

However, many more have the opportunity to do so than currently are. For example, it’s easy to imagine a financial institution providing more personalised and timely recommendations—or for transportation and airline apps to support us in a more individualized way. And the Internet of Things should soon provide a massive opportunity for brands of many different kinds to deliver value in real time.

THE KEY IS TO MAKE USE OF THE DATA WE HAVE TO NOT MERELY DELIVER MESSAGES TO MORE PRECISE TARGETS, BUT TO GENERATE VALUE IN THE MOMENT. THIS WILL REQUIRE CREATIVE THINKING AROUND DATA FOR MOST BRANDS, BUT LAST TIME I CHECKED, WE ARE A CREATIVE INDUSTRY. 8

The Rise of Minimalism

Simran Gill Strategist, POSSIBLE Los Angeles

Now that the Internet has provided everyone with easy access to product information and online stores, you’d expect that we would all be making more frequent and informed purchases. Of course, most of us are. That said, we are also seeing a growing number of people doing the opposite. They are proponents of minimalism:

THE ANTIDOTE TO FAST FASHION AND OVERCONSUMPTION. Minimalism is often confused with the frugal living movement, where people get off the grid in tiny houses and never buy anything. While that’s a legitimate pursuit, it’s not necessarily the point here. It’s about lifestyle, not consumption.

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Last year, for example, Matilda Kahl, an art director in New York City, wrote that she wore the same outfit to work every day. The chief benefit was not the reduced cost (the cost was roughly the same), but that she didn’t like to have to choose what to wear every morning. She found that when she had to make clothing decisions, they stressed her out, and she often arrived at work late, frazzled, and dissatisfied. Her work uniform made all that go away.

She has science on her side with this. Psychologists have long called the link between decisions and stress “decision fatigue” . The idea is that making choices takes a toll on us, and the fewer times we have to do so, the more relaxed we are. Kahl wrote that many women feel the pressure to have a flawless appearance in the mornings, and thus have to make dozens of choices about hair, makeup, and everything else every day. That’s a recipe for feeling tired and demoralized. On the other hand, if you limit your choices, you go a long way to making your life more zen.

In other words, minimalism is not about having as few things as possible;

IT’S ABOUT KEEPING ONLY THE THINGS THAT TRULY MATTER TO YOU AND ADD VALUE TO YOUR LIFE. Some brands have begun to recognize this as well. Glossier produces multi-functioning products with a fourstep “not-so-basic skincare basics” routine that takes mere minutes every morning. Restaurants have started to simplify their menus to provide only a few options. This eliminates customer decisions and allows chefs to focus on producing better meals in a more efficient way. The whole gourmet food truck movement, in a way, takes this even one step further. We can see this in media as well. People are overwhelmingly bombarded by advertising on television and radio. In order to watch a 22-minute episode, they were (and perhaps still are) expected to sit through ads begging them to buy a product every few minutes. Every time we ignore the pitch, we are making a choice, and that can add stress. That’s one reason companies such as Hulu, Netflix, and Spotify have successfully provided an offering that allows consumers to pay a regular fee to watch unencumbered.

Others have cut back on social media, whose barrage of cheery life updates and oft-unwanted thoughts on politics have negatively affected them. In fact, we’re even seeing a trend of people going through a social media purge, ridding their feeds of sources of irritation, stress, and negativity.

We also see this movement in the rise of the capsule wardrobe. For years, we’ve all been under the influence of fast fashion: a flood of cheap clothes from sweatshops overseas. It’s been estimated that the average American buys 64 pieces of clothing a year, which has led to closets that are often the size of bedrooms.

The capsule wardrobe consists of several versatile pieces that you absolutely love to wear. Caroline Rector, a pioneer in this movement, says that this approach gives her more time and energy for her to focus on things that truly matter, not having a huge amount of choices that might potentially lead to anxiety and stress.

This same practice of minimalism has even been applied to relationships. As people are busier and more timestrapped, they have begun to re-evaluate the relationships they want to invest in and those that they wish to do away with. It doesn’t have to involve animosity (though it can), it simply means decluttering your life.

Of course, minimalism has a different meaning for different people. While one person may decide that any more than two pairs of shoes would be too much, another person may have the capacity to have 15 different pairs and value each of them equally highly. (Some of us really like our shoes.)

The takeaway here is that minimalists want to find meaning throughout their lives, day after day. They want to make choices that are an extension of themselves, but also alleviate the stress, while defining who they are. There was once constant talk about possessions giving people joy, but minimalism preaches focusing on the relationships you have with the item you purchase.

It may seem ironic that in this highly digitized age a movement based on emotions and relationships is blossoming. But in many ways, perhaps this is exactly why it has taken such a hold.

WE MAY BE A DIGITIZED AND TECH-SAVVY GENERATION, BUT WE ARE ULTIMATELY STILL HUMAN. RELATIONSHIPS STILL MATTER. 10

A recent Harvard Business Review piece—“The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies” by Sarah Green Carmichael—used Moby Dick as a metaphor for overwork. While it brought up memories of my college Hawthorne and Melville class, it also had me thinking of why I uprooted my family and moved them 600 miles.

Before joining POSSIBLE, I worked independently in the San Francisco Bay Area—where I was born, raised, and had deep family and community ties. A home office allowed me flexibility to be present in my daughters’ activities, from school to Girl Scouts and soccer.

Professionally, serving on the board of AIGA San Francisco, writing for industry publications, working with creatives across the country fed my soul. In a nutshell, it was fulfilling.

AGAINST THE FLOW When I began talks with what I thought was a prospective client, I had no intention of moving or working full-time for just one client. I follow the news. More and more women are choosing to work independently in order to do work they love and be in control of both their time and careers. Not a day went by where I didn’t see articles touting productivity tips for freelancers, and reporting on the continued growth of the freelance economy.

Seated in the bustling epicenter of Silicon Valley, with professional opportunity all around me, the thought of moving back in-house never entered my mind.

I suppose, at this point, it’s more than fair to ask, what happened?

TO MOVE OR NOT TO MOVE? To be frank, my path to Portland, Oregon, was not direct and I found it littered with emotion.

Not looking for change, I was blindsided by the opportunity. I thought long and hard, and then some more, about what this would mean for my daughters, ages 10 and 8, my husband’s career, and my own—not to mention leaving my tight-knit family.

While the decision to move was one of the hardest I’ve ever made, according to a recent study by Research Now for Mayflower, I am not alone. The survey found the majority of women were willing to relocate their families for their job.

Spending more than 15 years in editorial speaks volumes about what floats my boat. I find working with writers, developing stories, keeping up with an ever-evolving creative landscape meaningful. This position, global content director, tempted me— professionally.

But could my professional world coexist with my life outside of work?

Rebecca Bedrossian Global Content Director, POSSIBLE Portland

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Last May, I saw that it could.

EYES WIDE OPEN Having covered agency news and advertising work for years (I was previously managing editor at Communication Arts), I knew about the long hours, the job-hopping, the burnout. No thanks.

At this point in my life and my girls’ lives, I can honestly say there are more important things for me to do than live and breathe work.

I spent two days at POSSIBLE, interviewing the people I might work with. My last meeting with the global CEO essentially sealed the deal. And by deal, I’m not talking salary or benefits.

Rather, I saw that this organization valued company culture from the top-down. It became clear that I could fulfill my professional needs and be present with family—while working for an agency that sees culture as a key to its success.

Going in-house does not have to mean giving up control. Not when leadership values culture, focuses on results, and allows employees to control their workdays. It’s win-win for everyone—companies, clients, families. I’ve discovered flexibility, new challenges, doing meaningful work are the reasons women choose to quit an in-house job—and to enter one.

THE KEY IS TO FIND THE RIGHT FIT, which brings me back to culture. I couldn’t agree more with Lucy Jameson, CEO of Grey London, who says culture is the biggest advantage in business today. “Why? Because it is the hardest thing to replicate. Competitors can imitate product and match price overnight, but culture takes energy, commitment, and years to build.”

I’m happy to report, my inclinations about POSSIBLE were correct. Culture is paramount to producing great work. Tuning out on weekends makes for better workdays. Acknowledging that we all have lives outside of the agency does more for workplace culture than a Ping-Pong table and free lunch.

And so here I am in the Pacific Northwest working for an agency. This weekend there are soccer games to watch and hikes to take. Monday, I’m all in.

Martha Hiefield Global Chief Talent Officer, POSSIBLE Seattle

Adaptation. Fluidity. Diversity.

These are recurrent themes in business, particularly digital-centric businesses that are constantly in flux.

Hotels are losing relevance now that millennialfavorite Airbnb is around, taxi businesses are suffering under the rise of Uber and Lyft, and even non-digital brands like ChapStick are being trumped by pop-culture superstar EOS. The takeaway: companies need to be on their toes more than ever. Innovation can’t simply be talked about anymore—it must be enacted.

The solution for this?

DIVERSITY.

More specifically,

femininity.

Panning out, the majority of girls are socialized from a young age to be, above all else, likeable and nice, accommodating and polite. Yet when these traits are applied in a conference room when girls have grown into professional women, they are often described as lacking leadership qualities.

That being said, this old and tired view of femininity and leadership is changing, not coincidentally alongside the pressing need for businesses to innovate. As explored in John Gerzema’s The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future, typically feminine traits—vulnerability, patience, empathy, and candor—are already being viewed as more critical aspects of our most capable and innovative leaders (male or female!) in the business world.

From the moment we become self-aware, women are hyper conscious of the change in our physical bodies.

We’re literally built to adapt, accommodate, and plan for the long term, whether we ultimately decide to become mothers or not. Women live their lives knowing that they can’t afford to live like there’s no tomorrow (or, like there’s only tomorrow). We’re always thinking about ten years from now—this kind of forward-thinking is exactly what translates into innovation in the workplace.

Women have masculine traits, men have feminine traits—and the two can work together in harmony to provide balance in leadership roles.

Yet the number of women in leadership roles is not looking great, meaning so much of this potential is not being leveraged. According to Sheryl Sandberg’s Adweek article about marketing to women, women make up a dismal 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 3% of creative directors, and 18.5% percent of congress.

Easier said than done, as Jamie Holmes of New America states in “The Benefits of Getting Comfortable with Uncertainty”. “We have this natural distaste for things that are unfamiliar to us, things that are ambiguous.

It goes up from situational stressors, on an individual level and a group level.”

In a world that is becoming increasingly transparent, a traditional framework of powerful and assertive leadership is being trumped by a more communicative and collaborative system that brings more brains to innovate together, also encouraging people to live their best lives in and out of work. This change in ideology is already being evidenced in the office space such as collaborative open floor plans, allowance to work from home, mentorships, fair maternal and paternal leave policies, emphasis on company culture, and more.

These features come from a place of increased empathy, intuition, and understanding, which—you guessed it—are inherently feminine traits. Companies that have these office features are some of the most innovative and highest earning companies in the game, showing that this kind of diversity gives companies a competitive edge.

Think “like hires like.” So, as managers, we must make it a priority to foster a culture where speaking up is safe, and get comfortable with diversity of thought.

After all, diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance.

This is not meant to say that feminine traits are better than male traits, and it’s not commenting on what men and women should or shouldn’t be consciously doing to get ahead. It’s simply a sound case for diversity.

And this means the business case for diverse teams grows stronger everyday. According to Dr. Kathleen Wong(lau), professor at The University of Oklahoma, women think peripherally, whereas men think in a more linear manner. Mixed gender teams foster creative conflict—and this leads to innovation.

WOMEN SHOULD NO LONGER FEEL THE NEED TO “TOUGHEN UP” TO BE LEADERS. LET’S EMBRACE OUR EMPATHY, OUR INTUITION, AND OUR ABILITY TO INSPIRE THOSE AROUND US TO INNOVATE IN A TURBULENT BUSINESS LANDSCAPE AND, TO PUT SIMPLY, GET SHIT DONE.

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Shane Atchison Global CEO, POSSIBLE Seattle

Typically businesses expand overseas for reasons that have nothing to do with diversity. They do it for lower costs, access to new markets, and (I sometimes suspect) to give their executives a reason to travel to cool places.

Even so, many who go overseas find it a difficult process.

Cultural misunderstandings and lack of coordination often drive down productivity and depress morale. In fact, there are companies that exist solely to help manage international offices.

I happen to work in an organization that is almost comically global. While my company is on the larger end, that wasn’t always the case. We now have people in a dozen countries ranging from Brazil and Costa Rica to Hungary and Singapore.

I won’t lie, it’s not all puppies and rainbows. Getting out of bed in the middle of the night to take a call is a common occurrence—and exactly as miserable as it sounds.

And if you haven’t tried to wrap your head around global daylight savings time, don’t bother. Your head will thank you.That said, most of us are familiar with the advantages of diverse teams. Studies have repeatedly shown that teams with people from different backgrounds and with gender diversity perform better than homogenous ones.

But does the advantage of team diversity trump the logistical and cultural problems that come with working globally?

To understand the answer to this question, we can’t merely look at productivity. I’d be lying if I said that that has never impacted by time zones. It has.

But, you also have to look at the total value of global diversity. There we see that while some activities may suffer from jet lag, a geographically dispersed team is overall a huge plus.

As your company grows, here are the four biggest reasons to think beyond borders: `

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GEOGRAPHICALLY-DISPERSED TEAMS ARE MORE EFFECTIVE THAN ADVERTISED. In a recent study, researchers looked at the quality of academic papers produced by authors who were not living in the same city. It found that on average they received more citations (which is how you measure effectiveness in the Ivory Tower) than those from teams in the same place.

Anecdotally, I’ve also found this to be the case. If we have our Costa Rica office working with our New York one, we tend to sleep easier about it.

GEOGRAPHY ENRICHES CULTURE. A lot of companies today have tried to build diverse work forces. But you can double down on diversity by adding countries into the mix. It makes for good conversation and sharpens peoples’ minds for complex problem solving.

IT PROVIDES PERSPECTIVE. We tend to think of the Western world as technologically advanced, with all others trailing. But in reality, different geographies and cultures have all found their way through the modern world, often devising their own innovations along the way.

Our company benefits a lot from exposure to different ideas and ways of working. In particular, our offices in China and Singapore, where digital technology is, in many ways, far ahead of the West, have really opened our eyes to what the future might look like.

IT DRIVES INNOVATION. Many times innovation happens simply because you bring a new perspective to an old problem. When one office gets in a rut, our colleagues in another often have a ready way to push their thinking forward.

Obviously, no one relishes 3 a.m. calls—especially when you wake up at 2 a.m. because you forgot which part of Australia does daylight saving time (the South, incidentally).

But if you look at the overall advantages, working globally is a big plus. And, yes, I do like going to cool places too.

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Carrie Ingoglia Creative Director, POSSIBLE New York

Cindy Gallop wasn’t the only one who noticed the garish male dominance of the Publicis Groupe restructure. I’m sure the brilliant and powerful women at those agencies also winced at the glaring absence of themselves, or any of their female peers. And while blatant, this is just one of the latest examples of culture-blindness that leads to a disproportionate representation of male leadership in the ad industry.

In 2015, Gallop laid to bare the dangers of unconscious bias in her closing keynote at The 3% Conference, which took place over two days in New York City, and included CMOs, thought leaders, and everyday revolutionary men and women who believe that the industry is improved by women leadership.

It was my second year attending the conference, and my second as a Speed Mentor—an hour-long whirlwind of organized networking where mentors and mentees meet for six minutes at a time. Often students come with portfolios in hand, and questions about getting hired at an agency. This time I noticed something different.

We often talk about the 3% problem not being one of recruitment, but one of retention; women leave the workplace. They leave because of unconscious bias, undertones (and overtones) of male dominance, because they lack opportunity, mentors, or drive, or they simply choose something else. And while it’s true that this leaves a lack of female role models for the next generation—it also leaves a lack of compatriots for this one.

Over the years since we all entered the workforce, my female friends have slowly removed themselves from the corporate world. They’ve chosen to mother, to find schedules that work for their families. They do amazing things to make the world work for them—and staying at a corporate day job often isn’t one of them. Choosing to fight a corporate structure, whose success depends on an outmoded Leave-It-to-Beaver family dynamic, doesn’t make sense for a lot of women. They opt out of navigating the corporate politics that comes with a

desire for achievement and, instead, choose to pioneer a new model of success.

These are women I look up to, who inspire me every day. We talk about tireless effort and the definitions of happiness. We love and support one another in the different kinds of choices we make. We know what it means to be women in this world, and empathize implicitly.

So why is it, then, that when I talk about achievement and ambition, I talk most often to my male peers? If I want to talk about making waves, fucking shit up, getting my due and changing the game, almost every person I turn to is male. To be sure, this is, at least in part, due to my own unconscious bias. Myself, buying in to the old standards that women are inherently softer, more community oriented, less prone to bouts of ambition and self-promotion. When I’m inspired to take over the world, I assume that the notion is something a man is way more familiar with. But it’s more than bias—

it’s opportunity.

Which is why I’m no longer looking for female role models.

But there’s something inherently distancing in the power differential. Role models and mentors are, by the nature of the relationship, a step removed—arms distance away. I want someone in the day-to-day with me. I need women who will take a meeting or a power lunch and live life in the corporate trenches with me.

WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR NOW ARE FEMALE PEERS.

I experienced the uncommon gift of female leadership early in my career. And now that I’m a creative director, I am sure to make myself visible to as many young people as I can—visiting ad school classes, attending portfolio reviews, and taking part in Speed Mentoring at the 3% Conference.

I am encouraged by the bravado and self-confidence I see in the younger generation. They will surely be faced with challenges, but theirs will be different than mine.

The conversation about inclusion is getting broader; it’s not just about women and men. It’s about gender, racial, and experiential diversity. And I’m looking forward to seeing the ideas that come out of a more inclusive generation that expects nothing less than everything.

Last year, several women creative directors came and sat down at my table during the Speed Mentoring program. It was gratifying to see women in my peer group reaching out. Like me, they have questions. Like me, they are in it every single day. They see what’s out there, and at the same time, are working on something much closer to home. How do I take control in this situation? How can I balance my compassion with my penchant for perfection? How do I set this industry on fire? Like me, they are working to be good role models, bosses, and leaders.

When it comes to the women’s leadership movement, we talk about women taking a seat at the table. As I sat at table No.5 in the Speed Mentoring room, with a stack of business cards in front of me, I was glad to see so many peers take a seat across from me, face to face, one on one, woman to woman. These are my people, and

I WANT MORE.

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Danielle Trivisonno Hawley Chief Creative Officer, Americas, POSSIBLE Seattle

WHAT IS CULTURE? Culture doesn’t mean you don’t work weekends—as work-life balance insinuates—it means that when you unplug, you really do it and your team expects you to. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the homeroom dad, but it does mean when it’s your turn to take the troop to the Brownie Camp, your team doesn’t resent you for it and, in fact, they cover for you. Hell, they even like your s’mores pics on Instagram.

Quick. Define culture.

It’s hard, I know. It’s kind of like describing love. There are no perfect words to express completely how we feel about our kids or significant other. But, we know love when we feel it. And this seems to be the case with “culture” when describing the indescribable about agency life.

All too often, we resort to the term “work-life balance” as the support point for a good culture, and this has never felt right to me. To me, balance is 50/50, an equal distribution of weight. And to be frank, the distribution between my work life and my home life is sometimes 90/10 or 10/90. With a demanding travel schedule and two children under the age of five, my life looks a lot more like controlled chaos than balance.

Don’t misunderstand—I don’t see exhaustion as a trophy. But nevertheless, I go hard. And not just at work.

I try to be as generous as I can with my heart, even when my time for any one of those things is limited. I credit this ability, in part, to working at an agency with amazing “culture.”

The reality is advertising is deadline-based. Ideas aren’t made on an assembly line or ushered through a process that guarantees brilliance every time. You can’t pencil in “award-winning concepting session” on the calendar. Creative ideas need to incubate. Sometimes that means pitch stories get put together in the final 72 hours and critical production days turn into nights to ensure the shot list is captured. It’s what you signed up for. And life does get out of balance. You sometimes make sacrifices in the name of good work.

This is why I’m not buying into work-life balance. This is why when a prospective employee mentions they’re looking for it—I run away. And why when an agency culture claims it, they risk pigeonholing themselves into the “lifestyle” agency zone, aka, the resignation to do mediocre work.

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Culture is present when the CEO walks through the halls at night and encounters people who are busting ass and says “thank you” sincerely. Because there’s an understanding that we’re in this together.

Happy people make better work. We all say it—but few of us create a culture where it’s possible.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE DOESN’T REALLY EXIST IN ADVERTISING. What exists is a place where the culture is so good it makes the work good. Where the culture doesn’t just allow you to be a better creative—it allows you to be a better person. I know this to be true, because I live it everyday.

Here, we often call it our special sauce. It’s a differentiator. It’s a weapon with clients—we know if we can just get them in the building, they’ll feel it. In “The Way You Think about Business Needs a Revolution,” Josh Allan Dykstra wrote, “A company’s culture is actually made of

a huge melting pot of mostly invisible things — things like shared values, accepted practices, and common language.”

Invisible often means mystery. But I’ve found it’s not really a mystery at all.

I work at a place that doesn’t just welcome back parents fresh off maternity leave with a card, we institute a “come-back program” that makes it clear – bringing a new human into this world is a far greater miracle than any ad ever made. It’s a place that offers counseling to local nonprofit organizations that suffer from a dearth of digital prowess. It’s a place that values diversity and purchases an all-agency pass to Cindy Gallop’s 4A’s webinar. It’s a place where I actually enjoy the people I work with.

My friend and colleague Brandon Geary likes to say, “Most agencies run on fear or greed. This place runs on love.” The dogs wandering around the office even feel it.

But most importantly, the work feels it.

THAT’S CULTURE. Call it “the right fit” or “work-life blur” or “work-life effectiveness”. Whatever you call it, it’s not balance.

It’s not 50/50. It never will be. But it doesn’t mean it can’t be absolutely awesome.

Justin Marshall

VP, Emerging Partnerships, POSSIBLE Seattle

In September of 2014, Apple Pay launched as a “revolutionary” way to pay for purchases. It carried the promise of allowing us to ditch those pesky wallets cramping our skinny jeans, and, well, make it easier for us to buy more skinny jeans.

With almost two years in the books and one billion iPhones sold, only 20% of iPhone 6 users have used Apple Pay once.

WHY ISN’T Apple Pay CATCHING ON? To answer this question, let’s look at one company that is killing it in the mobile wallet space: Starbucks. Today, Starbucks manages 15 million monthly active users who use the app at a furious rate. How furious? To the tune of $1.2 billion in money loaded in Q1 alone. That’s more than most banks.

When people simply want a damn good cup of coffee, Starbucks delivers, removing obstacles to streamline the experience. This is why Starbucks is succeeding where Apple—one of the most valuable companies in the world—is failing.

The global coffee company is relentless at uncovering the simple solve for micro-friction points in a customer experience, and building features that fix the annoying: Hate waiting in line for your triple-grande-soyextra-foam latte? Order ahead through the app.

Forget your Starbucks Gold Card? Open the app and pay.

Don’t want to load your card or even open the app?

THEY MAKE THAT HAPPEN AS WELL.

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Starbucks is winning in the mobile wallet space because they focused on winning at the point of purchase (a small, but mighty moment)—not over-engineering a tech solution in search of a problem—and delivering big benefits to those who use it.

Does this mean that every brand should emulate Starbucks and not Apple? For brands looking to use technology to improve their customer experience, yes.

In the new mobile universe, it’s important to not think big. Instead, think of the small, functional ways you can enter peoples’ lives and deliver big benefit.

Uncovering the simple solve to big consumer obstacles is what will keep your customers happy—and coming back.

Brands must keep the following top of mind as they embark on the mobile commerce journey:

USE TASK-BASED DESIGN. Task-driven behavior is highly emotional. Look for the emotional spikes in your customers’ daily tasks that involve your product, and then build on those moments where delight shines.

Make sure the design supports your customers as they research, purchase, and use your products. It’s a good idea to set out functional scenarios for each key touchpoint, and then create solutions for them.

ENABLE SEAMLESS COMMERCE. If they want to buy, enable a purchase in the moment. A client recently saw an 80% bounce rate in those interested in purchasing their product through a Facebook ad. Why? Because it took an average of six seconds for the site to load in the app. I repeat, six seconds! Take heed: if you’re looking to capitalize on mobile payment, focus on creating native experiences in the apps they’re already in, using lead-gen features in Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest to reduce friction in a simple purchase path.

LOOK TO CHAT. This has become especially relevant with the arrival of messaging platforms. With Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp gaining scale in the US and UK, everyone is racing to create one-to-one engagement. As chatbots enable brands to build experiences that meet simple tasks, messaging apps will force a shift in mindset toward helping your customers get shit done in a quick, low-bandwidth way. Embrace the unique, little scenarios in which customers will seek out or welcome convenience, and build a chat experience around that.

Successfully reducing friction through mobile requires both insight and empathy: 73% of consumers prefer to do business with brands that use personal data to make their shopping experience more relevant.

As technology moves forward, personalization will become more automated.

Until then, brands need to think small, cultivate an insatiable curiosity for what their customers need day-in and day-out, and create experiences using new technology to deliver them. Customer Service 101—for brands.

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Martha Hiefield

Diane Holland

Global Chief Talent Officer, POSSIBLE Seattle

Global Chief Financial Officer, POSSIBLE Los Angeles

With competition for talent at an all-time high, office life is not what it used to be. Employees now choose from a multitude of perks; everything from ping pong tables and posh workout facilities, to catered lunches, wine on tap, and parades of dogs.

The bill for these perks can add up for an agency, and at the end of the day, is there any real correlation between

1. HIRE AND LIVE BY YOUR VALUES. Skills and experience are undeniably important, but attitude counts for as much. We hire candidates who are already living and working by our agency’s values.

Knowing and promoting our values goes a long way in finding people who fit our culture, and that goes a long way in minimizing turnover.

what’s on tap and your quarterly earnings?

In an era where “CULTURE” is much discussed and loosely defined, agency leaders are wise to question what serves their bottom line versus what serves as a distraction.

We’ve found putting culture first does make us more profitable.

HERE ARE SIX THINGS THAT ARE KEY TO MAKING SURE THAT CONNECTION HAPPENS

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2. INVEST IN PEOPLE. Culture is much more than a series of Instagrammable perks, and investing in people means more than what’s stocked in your kitchen. As of late, it even means more than just what you’re paying. Flexibility, work-life harmony, training, and mentorship—these are hugely important in building a people-first culture.

And they’re becoming more and more standard as younger staff enter the workforce.

3. SHOW YOUR APPRECIATION. An often-overlooked part of a healthy culture is employee recognition. Studies show that one of the most common reasons Americans leave their jobs is that they don’t feel appreciated.

It doesn’t cost a lot to engage with people and show your gratitude, so it’s amazing how few companies take the time to do so. Especially considering that organizations with mature recognition approaches are 12 times more likely to have strong business results.

Your employees work hard on your behalf. Take time to recognize and thank them.

4. BE TRANSPARENT. It’s no secret that management plays a huge role in shaping and maintaining culture. A fascinating 2013 study by MIT, “The Value of Corporate Culture,” found a strong correlation between management’s perceived integrity and “good outcomes” for a business. In short, the more integrity employees felt management had, the more profitable and productive the business often was.

We work to be transparent with our employees about our numbers, the state of our business, and what the leadership team is working on. Everyone has a stake in what’s happening. In a big, global agency, open communication is one way we build trust and accountability.

5. BUILD KPIS (and conversations) around more than just numbers.

It’s hard, especially in a publicly-traded company, to get away from numbers. Agencies are often measured largely by their returns for shareholders. But working in a place that’s driven by profit alone doesn’t inspire people. And there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that it’s not good for your bottom line, either.

Your entire leadership team—including the CFO—is responsible for making quality of work and innovation an integral measure of success.

6. MEASURE AND COLLABORATE. The CFO used to be a more segregated role, more concerned with compliance and numbers than the overall strategy. That’s changed a lot, and for good reason. Collaboration with other business leaders is necessary for a CFO to make decisions based on more than dollars and cents.

LOOKING AT FINANCIALS IS ONE MAJOR SUCCESS METRIC, BUT IT’S NOT THE ONLY ONE. Nor are the numbers always indicative of the long-term health of an organization. That’s why we work together to look at other measurements: employee satisfaction and exit surveys, retention, referrals, productivity, and customer relationships. All of these are important indicators of how we’re doing. Tracking these helps us make choices about how to invest in our people for the long haul, while still delivering on our short-term KPIs. CULTURE doesn’t have to be a nebulous or mystical part of your company. Nor is it a box that you check off through a series of perks. It’s much bigger and more important.

Think of it this way: If talent is your agency’s potential, then culture is what sets your talent up to reach that potential. It’s a direct link to sustainable growth and profitability.

THE WAY WE SEE IT, THAT’S ABSOLUTELY WORTH INVESTING IN. 17

Throw a life-ring to a marketer drowning in data these days, and it’s likely she won’t even notice it. While many companies have amassed huge troves of data and automated dashboards, they are sometimes blind to the true path to actionable information.

Part of the problem is that data companies have long made a sharp distinction between data and insight—and continually promise to deliver the latter rather than the former. That has given marketers the impression that insight is something that should drop out of the sky and show up in neat, multicolored rows. The tools they buy, they think, should make it easy.

Unfortunately, THIS ISN’T TRUE. A good data solution does have the potential to deliver insights faster and easier than ever. But no matter how much data you have, or how beautifully arranged your dashboards are, you won’t get meaningful insight from them alone. That requires something else: the active use of a human brain. To see why, we have to acknowledge some key truths about the relationship between data and actionable information.

ROI comes from people, not tools. I’m not beating up dashboards in general. They’re an essential tool that can provide a unified view of your business. They track progress and help you understand what’s working well or not. But they are also only the beginning of insight. They’re merely the place where the real work begins.

It also comes from discovery and iteration. Insight leads to insight. Once you start asking questions of data, the answers will suggest further questions. You may run a test to determine if something works, and then run follow-ups to deepen your knowledge. Eventually, you’ll iterate to a true understanding of your business and your customers.

You’re probably underutilizing your analysts.

Analysts in the marketing industry typically spend the bulk of their time aggregating data sets and creating spreadsheets and dashboards for executives. That’s important work, and yes, it requires sharp minds and good instincts. To merge disparate data sets, you must know how to balance their importance and create processes that are repeatable for future analysis. But again, the end result is the beginning of insight, not insight itself.

Compound data is gold. Of course, the best questions involve not just a single KPI, but multiple data sources.

For a simple example, it’s a common practice in marketing to use data to target segments. To do this, we survey customers up front to determine what we think works. But oddly enough, we never go back and compare those initial predictions to data about what people said they did. The survey data, in other words, is just the start. The behavioral data shows the real results. When you compare one to the other, you get real insight into why people are acting as they are.

Insight comes from asking questions. When a good analyst looks a KPI, it isn’t merely a piece of information. Rather, it prompts her to ask a question: Why? Why did something happen? What produced this result? Then, she dives into the data, pivots the numbers, and researches other correlations to find out the answer. That kind of analysis, not passive data consumption, is what delivers true insight.

Granularity is the goal. Insight also increases the more specific you get with data. You can learn a little about your customers from a generic data set. But you learn more if you focus sharply on a specific platform, like mobile, or look at usage in the evening versus the morning. By digging into this level of data, you learn what people want and when.

IT’S TIME WE STOPPED USING DROWNING METAPHORS FOR WHAT DATA IS DOING FOR US—AND NOT. Insight is available for those who are

Harmony Crawford

Group Director, Marketing Sciences, POSSIBLE Seattle

willing to go out and get it. It’s not available if you expect it to magically appear in a spreadsheet. Only if we invest in the analysis we need, will we get the true picture of our customers that everyone so desires.

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FIVE

Jason Carmel Global Chief Data Officer, POSSIBLE Seattle

Digital is just the best when it comes to data collection, isn’t it? Given the right tools and a reasonably comfy chair, a good analyst can tell you anything a consumer does in a given channel. Websites are easiest—analytics can tell you when someone arrives, from where, what they do, what they liked, what they didn’t, when and where they left, and how much they spent before they did. And that’s just the out-of-the-box stuff. Media, mobile apps, and even social are catching up as well. While it can be gnarly to staple all of those things together to get the true omnichannel view that we’ve all heard so much about, if there’s any shortage in what we know about someone online, it’s not the data’s fault.

However, all of that awareness evaporates when we switch offline. And, despite what digital trending indicates, the overwhelming majority of buying still happens offline. Most companies have absolutely no idea whether their digital campaign drives someone to purchase or engage offline and, if so, how much it can claim to have motivated that sale. After being exposed to digital advertising, there are a series of often competing paths that the consumer could take to either finalize a purchase, or not. All of this happens far away from their screens, and there’s rarely an automated, fool-proof way to quantify the end state, let alone the individual path that led to it. Offline, we are dealing with Schroedinger’s customer.

So marketers have three choices. The first and easiest choice (and likely the most common) is to not attribute any digital influence to offline purchases. This feels

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neater because it doesn’t contaminate any of the firm digital data we’ve grown so fond of with “intentions” or “likelihoods” to buy. It’s also dangerously misguided.

A 2015 study indicates that $0.64 of every consumer dollar spent offline was influenced by one or more interactions online. Not paying attention to how our digital efforts influence offline activity is a recipe for a laughably inaccurate marketing plan.

The best choice is to build a system that requires authentication and passes unique, everlasting tracking parameters seamlessly across every channel throughout the entire process. I love this choice, but it’s a myth.

No one does this. Not seamlessly, at least. You will never know exactly what a customer does offline or why they do it. Pure data feedback into offline motivations is the tooth fairy of analytics. The best you can do is get close.

Which leads to a third way. Don’t stop trying to know the impact of digital to offline. Do stop trying to be exact. There is a world of utility in understanding a directional range of impact, well short of “knowing for sure.” I’m a big proponent of it, but it involves a word that is much (and, I would argue, unfairly) maligned in the analytics world: educated guessing.

GUESSING IS OK.

Nobel physicist and all-around architect of the nuclear age Enrico Fermi guessed a lot while he was working on the atom bomb. He had to. There was no convenient mechanism to replicate a nuclear blast in a lab (obviously), and computer hardware wasn’t advanced enough in the 1940s to build a model to do it for him.

So, while personally witnessing the nuclear explosion [author’s note: not recommended ] at the Trinity test in 1945, Fermi dropped scraps of paper when the bomb detonated, and watched how far the paper traveled as a result of the blast repercussions. Based on calculations from that simple test, he estimated the strength of the explosion with remarkable accuracy. He wasn’t right (he guessed 10 KT; the actual blast was 18.6 KT), but he was well within an order of magnitude, while other scientific peers didn’t even come close. People, if Fermi could use educated guessing to predict the impact of atomic weapons, then you are pretty much cleared to use it to understand digital advertising’s impact on offline actions. On behalf of Enrico Fermi, I give you permission.

Fermi was a huge proponent of educated guessing to predict outcomes. At his physics lectures, he would give his students what came to be known as “Fermi Problems”—hypothetical questions that were next to impossible to validate down to the integer, but could be estimated to a reasonable point of utility without a ton of data or prior knowledge. Fermi’s most famous problem was to estimate the number of piano tuners in Chicago. But we’re all about digital, right? So let’s update the fact pattern.

HOW MANY UNPLANNED PREGNANCIES DOES TINDER CAUSE PER DAY? Perhaps unsurprisingly, a simple web search doesn’t return any hard data on this. Perhaps even less surprisingly, Tinder doesn’t offer a point of view here either.

So where do we start?

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I like population as the first variable. It sets a good top bracket (it is unlikely that there are more pregnancies from Tinder per day than people who match on Tinder per day), and is typically a fairly easy figure to drum up. Tinder itself tells us that it has 26 million matches per day.

Of those people matched, the vast majority are 44 and under, which we will deem capable of conceiving a child. But let’s knock off 5% conservatively to account for those unable to have kids, and those (uh-oh) who are already pregnant, leaving 24.7 million relevant matches capable of producing a child.

Not everybody who matches on Tinder ever meets in person. In fact from asking the people I know who use Tinder, I understand it’s a rarity, and it varies greatly depending on whether you are a man or woman. A very crude user research exercise I held over a lunch one day put the match-to-meet ratio for men at 15-20% and the match-to-meet ratio for women between .25%-1%.

A simple average would put the universal match-to-meet ratio at 7.6%. So we are down to 1,877,200 people who actually meet in person via Tinder, every day.

Of those people who meet in person through Tinder, let’s continue with an assumption that 1% end up having sex—the kind that could produce a child (please don’t make me be more specific here). This is, of course, debatable.

But I am sure that 100% of in-person Tinder meetings don’t result in sex. And I’d be surprised if it were 0%. So I picked 1% to be extremely conservative. And again, because the math is easy. That’s 18,772 uglies bumped per day.

Also, Tinder has an option for same-sex meet ups, which should be excluded when we’re talking about pregnancies. For the purposes of addressing the issue, let’s assume that the Tinder demographic maps to the US population of gay, lesbian and bisexual people at 3.5%. So we’re down to 18,115 heterosexual hook-ups.

Now we have to pause for a moment to deal with a bit of an attribution issue.

Of these 18K+ sexual encounters, we need to recognize that some of them would have happened anyway, even if Tinder had never existed. There is definitely no found data on this, but I like to think that any app with a $5B valuation

would be relatively successful at promoting casual sex if it put its mind to it. So let’s say that 50% of the hookups would have happened anyway, and 50% can be directly attributed to Tinder. That is 9,057 boom-booms courtesy of the app itself.

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Side note: I know that an in-person meet-up that leads to intercourse may lead to multiple instances of intercourse, and that would definitely impact pregnancy risk. That being said, the idea of building a histogram to understand the number of boinks per Tinder match seems like overkill for the purpose of this illustration. Assuming one boink per meet-up is conservative and easy, and you know by now how much I dig that.

Of those sexual encounters, I assumed that 1% would be unprotected, because people can be stupid. (Note: A casual search for research on unprotected sex rates indicates that 1% is grossly under-reporting. I’ve seen data for the US that put the number at 8%. But I’m still going to use 1% because—all together now—I want to be conservative and the math is easier.) This means that there are 91 unprotected liaisons, and 8,966 liaisons that use some sort of birth control.

Of the 8,966 hook-ups where protection is used, we will consider a failure rate of 1% —this assumes (blah, blah, blah, conservative. Blah, blah, blah, math.) that most popular male (condom) AND female (pill) contraceptives are used simultaneously, with a typical failure rate of 18% and 9% respectively. That means of the hooks-ups that are theoretically playing it safe, there are still 89 daily cases when the proverbial dam breaks during intercourse.

Add those poor slobs to the 91 couples who just couldn’t be bothered, and you have a daily grand total of 180 couples at risk of inadvertently procreating.

Now we need to know how many of those sessions resulted in actual conception. To understand this, I had to Google way more about fertility and cycles than I really wanted to, so I beg you to spare me having to explain the math, and simply trust that I’ve come up with a weighted average for a likelihood to conceive on any given day of the month. That daily risk of pregnancy, averaged out over the entire month, is 3%. So of the 180 Tinder matches where conception is possible, 5 will result in an unplanned pregnancy. Per day.

NOW right off the bat, I will tell you that the actual number of unplanned pregnancies from Tinder in real life is not five per day. Our assumptions are flagrantly scribbled on the back of this pixelated napkin, and that will immediately make a lot of people nervous. But remember, we are being super conservative in our assumptions and are only looking for an order of magnitude answer, rather than an absolute specific answer. This gives us a lot of freedom to be loose. We have mapped out that set of assumptions in a way that suggests that the number of pregnancies is greater than zero. We also can feel pretty confident saying that the number is far more likely to be 5 pregnancies per day than 5,000, or even 500. It gives us a generalized, but still useful, understanding of the relative risk (erm, opportunity?), and that’s infinitely more useful than assuming it is unknowable or (even worse) that it doesn’t happen.

Another utility from this type of problem solving is that it highlights (often in blinking neon) exactly what you don’t know and where your argument is the weakest. The next step then is to look at each data gap and assumption (I count at least eight whoppers), and figure out what type of research would help paint in the white space. Could we run a study to ask Tinder users what their actual match-to-meet percentage is? Could we compare hook-up behavior among Tinder users with non-Tinder users to get a better attribution rate? Could we look at specific contraceptive usage in each of the 196 countries where Tinder operates to replace our blended average assumption with real, in-market data?

With each data point we add, our assumptions look less gray and we begin to have more faith that the “educated” part of our exercise vastly outweighs the “guessing” part of it.

And we can start using these numbers in our planning.

Look, I know this example is ridiculous. No one in their right mind (or at least, no one with a basic understanding of human psychology and reproductive physiology) would “blame” Tinder for a pregnancy, any more than they would blame John Legend’s “All of Me” or a little too much champagne. But the point is that attributing pregnancies to Tinder usage is a far more difficult and “unknowable” problem than understanding whether your Pinterest page is getting people to your physical store. Or whether the nutritional information on your mobile app is persuading consumers to buy your product in the grocery aisle. You have access to more data than you do for Tinder. You have been exposed to regularly-used internal assumptions and anecdotes for your company. And (no disrespect to your mad swipe game) you are far more informed on the product/service/industry you sell than you are on Tinder usage and its consequences.

EDUCATED GUESSING IS A MENTAL EXERCISE THAT GIVES YOU A FRAMEWORK TO SOLVE A DATA PROBLEM WHERE, UNLIKE IN DIGITAL, YOU CAN’T SIMPLY JOIN ALL THE DATA SETS IN AN ELEGANT FLOW. THAT EFFORT CAN RESULT IN MUCH GREATER INSIGHTS ABOUT YOUR DIGITAL IMPACT ON HOW CONSUMERS NAVIGATE THE WORLD, ONLINE AND OFF. 20

Being Outnumbered at a Women-Founded Agency Made Me a Better Man Rick Albano Executive Creative Director, Swift (a POSSIBLE agency) Portland

The most recent Gallup report on the state of American managers found that only 20 percent of polled workers preferred girlbosses. This is for the other 80 percent who don’t know what they’re missing.

I’ve worked for and with women for most of my career.

As a painting major in college, I was surrounded by women artists. Ditto when I was a film student. I remember looking around wondering how this would change the creative landscape and what it meant for the future of art.

Before long I was part of that shifting creative workforce, writing copy at a small agency founded by two visionary women. Nine years later, I’m still here and can unequivocally say that working alongside women in an agency that is 60 percent female has made me a better creative at work. And a better man, period.

I don’t think I’m alone. Women leaders are 41 percent more likely to encourage development and provide regular feedback—in other words, they give a damn about your career ambitions and life goals.

BE IT TO SEE IT

POTENTIAL PAYS OFF

It’s crazy that only 11 percent of creative directors in advertising are women (up from the abysmal three percent), especially knowing that women consumers make 85-90 percent of all buying decisions.

When I started in advertising, the agency co-founders saw something in me that I’m not sure my male peers would have noticed and supported. I didn’t come from an agency background, and they were like, “That’s OK, you can do this.”

It’s eye-opening to work with strategists who can look at an idea and immediately say whether it resonates with the target audience—because they are the target audience.

Collaborating closely with women has also helped me think more like them. Earlier in my career I created a Tumblr blog from the point of view of a female Nike consumer. The client didn’t ask for it, but we wanted to tap into the amazing training and style culture on Tumblr and understand what inspires women athletes.

People believed Woosh Woosh was curated by a woman, which I bear as a huge point of pride.

RESPECT

Here are five other things guys can learn from women leaders: POUND YOUR CHEST LESS Working with women has saved me from gratuitous posturing.

Put a bunch of dudes in a room together and it doesn’t take long to kick into alpha-male mode. Who talks loudest? Who’s got a face-melting idea you’ve never heard before? Who’s the most connected?

This need to dominate leads to more talking, less listening, less resolution... less doing.

The women I work with are laser-focused on results.

They want to take the most effective route to a great idea and a workable plan. And get on the next thing already.

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An even gender split is like having a built-in filter to blot out inappropriate remarks, off-color jokes, and sophomoric tendencies.

I’ve personally become more attuned to individual communication styles. As an agency, we’re vigilant about creating an atmosphere free of intimidation, high on respect—without sacrificing any of the fun.

I began working as a writer and soon started doing illustrations and taking photographs. Then I was art directing shoots and pitching new business. Based on friends’ stories at other companies, if the agency was led by men, there may have been a more competitive, every-man-forhimself vibe.

I’ve seen this again and again with others. Perhaps because women tend to be evaluated more on their accomplishments than their potential, they are determined to change that double standard and believe that our best work lies ahead.

PUT FAMILY FIRST Having faced backlash for prioritizing family over work, women in leadership are filling the public policy gap (shockingly the U.S. remains the only democratic country without paid parental leave) to make life better for all working parents.

Working at a women-led agency with generous family benefits has made me a better dad and husband. I can attend my son’s baseball game and jump back on evening work later, and get great tips on anniversary gifts from the same women I’m in the trenches with (I’m terrible at picking jewelry).

Flexibility is baked in and it is understood that family emergencies—or celebrations—take precedence over everything else.

A LESS EXPECTED SIDE BENEFIT OF WORKING ALONGSIDE INSPIRING WOMEN IS THEIR PRESENCE AS ROLE MODELS FOR MY OWN DAUTGHTER. I COUNT MANY OF MY COWORKERS AS CLOSE FRIENDS SHE CAN LEARN FROM, AND EMULATE, ON HER MANY VISITS TO MY “OTHER HOME.”

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: PUT THE WORK FIRST Jen Anderson Regional VP, Marketing Sciences, POSSIBLE Seattle

I started my career in 1995 as one of the few white people at Carol H. Williams Advertising, a full-service agency dedicated to African American and multicultural branding. Being in the minority at the agency gave me the opportunity to experience the advertising business from a unique perspective. I was grateful for the opportunity to work with colleagues and clients dedicated to supporting cultural differences. At that time, the racial tension surrounding the O.J. Simpson trial and subsequent acquittal were in full force. Some days our cultural biases were squarely on the table. Other days, we worked harmoniously across all lines. Adaptability became a core skill, and respect for differences, clear communication, and cultural considerations became the foundation of my work ethic.

It was only after my tenure at CHWA that I began to understand the value of cultural intelligence (CQ). The Cultural Intelligence Center defines CQ as “your capability to relate and work effectively in culturally diverse situations.”

Mapped and tested in 98 countries, the value of CQ is undeniable—but it’s not a given. The bulk of us never leave our country or our comfort zones for work, and even when we do, it’s often fleeting. However, putting such intelligence to use within your own culture is not only valuable, it can promote multiculturalism within the work place.

Here’s what I’ve learned from growing my CQ over the years.

THERE IS NO “IN SPITE OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCES.” To not acknowledge differences is one thing, but to believe our differences are unreconcilable is where we run into a road block. To get great work done, we must see differences as opportunities for growth and learning. This ultimately means our work will be better and appeal to a wider audience. As Forbes points out, “Culturally intelligent

employees also possess the potential to drive up innovation and creativity, due to their ability to integrate diverse resources and help the business make best use of the multiple perspectives that a multicultural workforce brings to the workplace.” In other words, CQ doesn’t just help you communicate, it helps you create.

EACH OF US HAS A VOICE. FINDING IT WITHIN CULTURALLY DIVERSE SITUATIONS IS CRITICAL. Where my time at CHWA was about sharing our voices and amplifying them to create great work, my recent trip to our Singapore office was about finding my voice. Traveling to support colleagues on a large data project, the trip included sharing our US best practices on data-driven social media with the CEO of the Singaporean Health Promotion Board. While working together, I quickly discovered that it was not just about accepting and being aware of differences, but about learning a new language around technology, scope, and client perceptions.

I found myself mostly observing and defering to my Singaporean counterparts for their expertise on the client’s business which, in this case, was very specific to their nation. It took all of my experience, intuition, and dedication to our work to remind me of my purpose for travel: my perspective was greatly valued.

And so I spoke up.

I shared proof points that inspired the work. From there, we collaborated equitably on a compelling presentation that landed well and has had positive business outcomes since.

THE BOTTOMLINE. We can’t make changes if we don’t voice opinions or are silenced by differences. We may adapt quickly to trends, fads, and new technologies, but we need to change constantly to the diverse landscape we live in.

A fierce commitment to continuous learning from our intercultural experiences means we may need to adapt our perspectives to be heard clearly. But if we remain dedicated to putting the work first, and truly consider our audience, anything can happen.

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POSSIBLE is a WPP Digital agency.

pov@possible.com possible.com