Mistakes We Made in Advertising and Marketing and How You Can Learn From Them

Episode Transcript

Julia: In this episode, we reveal the top 10 mistakes we have made in advertising and how to prevent them from happening to you.

Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms podcast. We are two women with more than 50 years of marketing and advertising experience between us. And we want to talk about the struggles, the fails, and the wins that we experienced while building our careers, being a boss, juggling work and home life, and arguably the hardest and yet most fulfilling job, being a mom. This podcast was created for marketing and advertising professionals, especially the up-and-coming marketing stars of the future. We hope these tips, tricks and advice will help you navigate work and life and get ahead.

Today, we have an exciting episode for you. We’re going to go through our 10 mistakes that we’ve both made in our journey through marketing and advertising, working with lots of different clients and at different places. And hopefully, you can learn some of these, whether you are new to the industry, you are a mom making your entry back in or you’re just cruising along. I am so excited to hear what your top five are.

Kelly: This is a struggle; I’m going to go easy with the early mistakes and then get the more complex ones because that’s kind of how life goes. So, for me, and I’m guessing for you, and most of us, a lot of the mistakes that I made is kind of like when you first start driving, that’s when you get the most accidents, right?

Julia: And yeah, and they seem like car crashes when they happen. And when you’re older, they aren’t as big, they don’t seem as big.

Kelly: I haven’t been in an accident since I don’t know, 1990. But I did get many in my teen years. So, let’s start. My first couple of mistakes that I’m going to talk about are just basic mistakes that could have been caught. And I’ll tell you about the first one that happened that kind of woke me up. And I was actually a Traffic Manager at the time at Grey Advertising. And one of the accounts that I was managing was also an account that I worked on as an account person later, and that was Carl’s Jr. fast food. And we used to be responsible for all of the materials that went inside Carl’s Jr. fast food, all of those translites and duratrans that you see that are backlit that have the hamburger of the month and also what you would see in the drive thru. And what people don’t really know or realize is that back in the day, we used to change the hamburger of the month pretty much every month. There was a new bacon cheeseburger hamburger every month.

Julia: I’ve never had one.

Kelly: It’s not on the east coast. Well, I probably haven’t had one since because I had so many back then. But so that meant not only were we responsible for doing the photography for all the hamburgers, and picking off all of the sesame seeds on the buns and etc., but also the final production of the actual materials and getting them to the actual 650 stores. And so, as a traffic manager, one of my jobs was to make sure obviously, proofing is hugely important, right. And so, my job was to make sure that it was the right burger, it was the right promotion, and it was the right price, which is one of the most important things. And yes, these things change so much that what happens is the art director used to take the material from the previous month or the previous couple of months and then update the picture of the hamburger and then later update all the other information. And in this case, the price was not updated. So, all the materials shipped to us, the price was wrong. So instead of $1.99 it was $1.66, let’s say, and it was the wrong price. So, I get the materials and I look at them. And I realize, oh my gosh, I’ve got 650 pieces of materials that need to go get distributed to Carl’s Jr. fast foods and it’s the wrong price. And I happened to at the time have a fabulous production manager who was one of my mentors, and his name was Ben Worthing. He has since passed but he was kind of one of the early Mad Men in advertising in LA and he knew everybody and he adored me luckily. I said I made a mistake. It’s the wrong price, what can we do? And he was the master back in the day of things that we would do to fix problems. And he said, let’s just print a snipe, we’ll print a snipe. And we’ll put it on top of the translite and change the price. And it probably cost $1,500 for us to go ahead and make that change. Client never knew. And we shipped everything out to — well, they know now. But we shipped everything out to Carl’s Jr. and none were the wiser, and the promotion ran as planned.

But through that experience, I really learned a couple things. One, the importance of proofing. And the second thing that I learned is the importance of having a backup in your boss. And that if you do make a mistake, there’s always a way to rectify it in some way, shape, or form. Of course, the agency had to pay for the $1,500 snipe that went on there, but it saved from reproducing everything. So, again, proofing extremely important and also making sure you don’t go too fast.

And I might just slide right into my second one, if you don’t mind, because it’s very, very similar. And then we’ll switch. So, this one was a much bigger deal than the snipe. This one was when I was in my 20s, my mid 20s. I managed all national advertising for the Fairmont Hotels. And at the time, Fairmont Hotels had seven locations around the country like Boston Copley Plaza, New York, New Orleans, etc.

Julia: DC.

Kelly: Yes, and we did a cross promotion with Hilton Hotels. And what it was going to be is that every week, we would do an ad where Hilton Hotels would have their rates of their seven different hotels at their seven different locations that were the same as Fairmont Hotel locations. And so, at the top of the ad, a full-page ad in San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, the top of the ad would have the Hilton rates in those seven locations. And the bottom would have Fairmont Hotel rates in those locations. The next week, it would swap to Fairmont Hotel being on the top and Hilton being on the bottom. And you can guess what happened.

So, when we actually finished the project, I was an account executive. And usually in the agency, the buck stops with the account executive. It’s an account executive’s job to make sure that everyone signed everything and that everything’s approved. And so, I get a call on a Sunday morning early from the head of our agency, and he said, have you looked at the San Francisco Chronicle? And I said, No. He said the Fairmont Hotels has the Hilton rates and vice versa. Go find out what happened. So, I go to the office thinking there’s no way I signed this, that can’t be proved somewhere that says that I signed this, I never would have made such a mistake. And I get there and I go back and look through the traffic files and of course, my signature’s on it along with the art director, the copywriter, and everyone else on the team. Oh no. It was a situation where we were pushing through so many ads. And that’s when you make mistakes, because your eyes blur. You don’t see things because you’re so close to it. And we should have not done everything for a six-week period in one day. We should have done one week, one next day, for example, or had someone else look at it.

Julia: Someone that wasn’t a part of the team. Everyone on the team assumed when you’re doing that volume, they assumed that the other person would have caught it too.

Kelly: So, lesson learned on both these things — slow down. Don’t rush, even though you might be in a rush, figure out a way to be able to take a step back and proof things and have someone review things that are not close to the project. Because these typos and these mistakes can really cost these companies revenue and money. And it also demonstrates the importance of the traffic department to be a backup. A lot of companies don’t even have traffic anymore, to make sure that everyone signs everything and looks at it as a stopgap. So those are my two early career typo mistakes and I want you to get yours.

Julia: Well, my first one was a typo mistake too. But I think — and I won’t tell the story because it’s just silly. It was just a typo in a report. And luckily we were just — it was with a client meeting. But I had a tendency at the time because I was so young, any mistake or anything that someone pointed out as a mistake, I would take so personally. And I’d feel like a failure. I had turned out this like 50-page report, which was so awesome. And there was one little teeny tiny typo in it. And that kind of made me learn that you have to just apologize and move on and go try to find a way to fix it. And not to dwell on it. And that there’s almost always a solution for everything, especially in our industry, like you just said, like creating the snipe — you just find a solution. So that was my number one.

Okay, so my number two is a good one. Because this one especially will speak to people that are kind of starting off their careers, or they have a team of people that they work with, and if they go to meetings or if they’re working on a project, they’re not necessarily the lead. So, they’re not necessarily in the hot seat, right? So, I went to this meeting with my boss, and there was maybe 35-40 people in the room, including the CEO of our client, all the major VPs, there were some other outside partners. And at the time, I just kind of saw my role as supporting — I’m going to be there to take notes, blah, blah, blah. And we were talking about a concept. And I wasn’t at the table, I was kind of seated around the room. So again, I did not feel like I had an important role in this meeting. So, I’m kind of like, not really paying attention. And then someone goes, Julia, what do you think? And I was like, oh, fill in the blank in my head. Like, I had not formed an opinion. Because I assumed that my opinion did not count because I wasn’t the lead on the account. I was the support person. And of course, I kind of recovered. It was kind of lame. The opinion I gave, it wasn’t truly how I felt. I actually thought the concept was terrible.

Kelly: But you can never say that.

Julia: I know. But imagine if I had said that. Yeah, it would have actually saved us like two months of work, and going back and forth. The conclusion was that the concept was terrible, after two months, but no one wanted to say it. I think the lesson I learned was that if I wanted to grow in my position, I had to pretend like I was the lead. And if I was in the back of the room, I needed to have an opinion. And be able to interject at any point in a conversation. And especially from the client perspective, they’re paying for everyone from the agency in the room, not just the lead. And so therefore, everyone should have an opinion. Maybe he thought that what I had said truly was my opinion. I felt totally caught off guard. But I think it’s important advice for anyone, no matter your age, right? Because not everyone’s the lead on a project all the time. So that was one that still haunts me to this day. Okay. How about your third mistake.

Kelly: This one’s a little bit more complex. And there’s a definitive message for this particular one. Years ago, I was at another agency, and I was working on a pitch for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, MTA, and they’re the ones that run the New York City subway system, the trains, the buses, etc. And we were at orals. And as part of the oral presentation, they gave us a list of five questions that we had to answer and we were co-presenting with another agency. And I thought a great way for us to answer the questions would be for us to do a whiteboard animation. And it would not just answer the questions in a PowerPoint, it would be entertaining. We record it with a voice, and we have wonderful animation that would explain how we recommend the future of marketing and advertising for the MTA. So, we were really excited, we came up with a really great concept. And again, this is not new creative. It’s just answering questions, just another way of answering a question in a creative way in a pitch situation. And so, we were ready to farm it out. And one of our internal staffers, creative people, said he knows how to do this. And he would do it. So, we said, great.

Julia: Like happens with pitches.

Kelly: So, he basically had maybe 48 hours to finish this thing. And it went so close to the wire that he actually didn’t finish it until we actually got into the room of the presentation. And I had seen bits of it, so I knew it was good. But we knew right as we were about to walk in there, that obviously this was a danger. And so, the VP, and I’ll never forget this, and I will always learn from it, said okay, and he was very calm. He said, we got to have a plan B. And we had the VO recorded. But we also had screen grabs of what each of the animations were going to look like. And so, we just quickly put together a PowerPoint of what each of the animations were going to look like, with the VO behind it. And so, my job and our plan was very quickly, very last minute — if the video doesn’t happen, he will play the video and I will play each of the slides as they go because I knew what slides to push when. So, we get in the room. It’s our time to present. The client said “we’ve been having problems with internet.” And so we — let me just — we’re going to try to access this video that we developed through the internet. So, I go in to get the video. And it’s on YouTube, and it’s marked private, so I can’t access it. So however, the client had just said the internet, something was wrong with the internet. So instead, I said, “Well, gosh, we worked so hard on this video, and we’re really excited to share it with you. But it seems like the internet’s not working for us. So, we’re going to have to email it to you later.” And instead, made a joke of it and said, “We’ve got some screen grabs and the audio so we’ll play it that way. But we’re really hoping you listen to this later.” And so, we did it. And we got through it. Obviously it wasn’t as dynamic as the actual video, but all the women in the room just went, “OHHH NOOO.” And they felt so bad for me that I didn’t have the video. But we won the business.

Julia: Oh, wow.

Kelly: And I don’t know if it had anything to do with the fact that the video didn’t play and they felt bad for us. I’m quite sure it didn’t. But it was one of those scenarios where you have to have a plan B. You cannot rely on technology. There’s so many different instances where internet goes out, something happens, audio goes out, you name it. And I never go into a presentation without a hard copy. People think I’m crazy. But there’s a very real specific reason because I can name five to eight different times where it hasn’t worked. And this is one instance where it was really important. And it didn’t work. And thank God for the VP ahead of me who had the idea to jerry-rig it and it worked. And we did it. But a very big learning that you must have a plan B and not count on technology to work.

Julia: Oh, that’s a good one. I can’t even believe I didn’t have one of those because I’ve had so many tech issues that I’ve had to deal with. And I agree. Recently actually on a Zoom, I was giving a presentation and my internet just turned off. So, I was kicked out of the meeting and I got onto the Zoom on my cell phone using cellular data, but it meant that I didn’t have any of my slides and I actually hadn’t printed them out. And so, I was going from memory and oh man, that was a struggle. Yeah, so plan B, 100%.

That’s great. Okay, another one of mine, kind of following up on always having an opinion, is also about taking notes. So, I had a client once, she was just this really different person, like she was just kind of like a boho chic kind of girl, very laid back. And I never once in the years that I worked with her, never once saw a pen in her hand. She never had a piece of paper on her desk either. And so, over time, we realized every time we would go into a meeting with her, that if we didn’t take notes for her and send her a follow up, she was just basically never going to do anything, because she did not take notes. And why her boss never mentioned this to her, especially after a year or two — it became an inside joke, how she just got away with floating around the office from meeting to meeting holding absolutely nothing. So, the learning lesson there is, especially when you’re young and you’re new to a team, you can be an asset by taking really awesome notes. It’s turning a person who documents and is available to fill in the little details for people that might have been leading a meeting or answering the tough questions and didn’t get to write down these things or remember them. So, you can be an asset in that way.

Also, in my 20s, I was kind of embarrassed to be writing so much down. But I’d be like, oh, that person said something so genius. And I was embarrassed to want to literally record conversations. And then I realized, no, write it down. And I have all my notebooks from all time. And I still sometimes go back and look at them, because I love a pen and paper. I’ve never really tried to make it all digital. I just want a pen and paper and I can write so fast and record things. Sometimes clients or people I’m working with say the most genius things. And I’m like, oh, I don’t want to let that go. So just not being timid in terms of recording things. I also had a co-worker who would go into meetings and had a little sign on his notebook that he was recording this meeting. So, he let everyone know in advance, I am recording this. If you were uncomfortable, you could obviously tell him not to. But he had real meeting notes, like how we record Zooms, and he could go back and listen to the conversations people had because he was a creative. So anyways, note taking. I don’t have a disaster story about it. But I feel like that could lead to people not making mistakes by doing it well.

Kelly: And if you don’t take notes, especially as a junior person, then it’s almost like you’re not listening. And I think there’s another counter to that. I’ve watched tech people take notes on their phone. And you have to be careful with that. Because that also looks like — what are they surfing?

Julia: Yeah, totally.

Kelly: You don’t really realize that they may be taking notes. So that’s something you would have to qualify if you’re using a digital device. A lot of people just pull up their laptops and start doing, and that’s also kind of…

Julia: Yes, it totally is. Because then you can get a message on Slack or your email dings and you want to go look at it, but you really need to be plugged in. Which is why I love pen and paper, even though it takes twice as long, right? Because if I do meeting notes, or if I do follow up, I actually have to transfer it.

Kelly: Well, I’m convinced, I am definitely convinced that the act of writing something down helps with memory. And you don’t get that the same way when you’re typing it on a Mac. Because especially in college, I remember I used to be able to remember my notes. Not that I have a perfect photographic memory. But I would remember exactly where I wrote down a specific piece of information and how I wrote it down. I knew where to find it. And that’s really important for memory. And I wonder how that’s going to impact, completely different subject, kids today. They might not realize that that’s a really good memory tool to be able to write things down. And because you’ve written it down, you’re going to remember it in your own handwriting.

Julia: Oh, yeah, I know. If I remember something, I’m like, ooh, it’s in that notebook two and a half years ago. I’m kind of crazy like that. Notebooks and pens are my thing. Okay, what’s your next mistake?

Kelly: This is a generic mistake. And I’m curious to see if you agree. And this is an across-the-board thing that I see in advertising at every single agency that I’ve ever worked for. And it’s a mistake I do not want to make again. And what it is, is I have never, ever won a piece of new business with unsolicited creative. It’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of money. And the only reason to do it is if it’s an existing client that you happen to know really well, and you’re trying to keep the business, you know their strategy. But going in to a new business pitch and bringing in creative just because you had this grand idea, which happens all the time, has never, ever won a piece of business that I recall ever. So, save your time, save your money, focus on the strategy, but don’t present creative. How do you feel about that?

Julia: You’re making me really jog my memory. Trying to remember where we did unsolicited. There was one pitch where we threw in concepts. And we didn’t know enough to make it a great idea. And so, it fell flat. We also didn’t know the personality of the client, what would really appeal to them. We were really taking a chance. That’s really — I feel like we have to do another episode about just new business stuff. Because there’s so many little nuanced things about new business, like do’s and don’ts. And I think that one’s a valid one. I’ll come back to you in a few episodes when I’ve really dragged my memory. Yeah, big one.

Kelly: You let me know, but I cannot recall one that I have, except in retaining business. Because I know what their strategy is.

Julia: Yeah, exactly. Well, and also, should we be doing creative for pitches? That’s also a topic for another day, right? Okay, my next mistake is also maybe a little generic too. But it’s learning when to say, I don’t know. I feel like, and this is for anyone of any age, at any point in your career, I really dislike being in meetings where someone has asked a question, and the person feels obligated to give an answer, like they know what they’re talking about, when they could have just said, I don’t know, or I don’t think so.

Kelly: Or I’ll get back to you.

Julia: Or I’ll get back to you. Oh man, it’s on my pet peeve list actually. I think it’s totally legit to not know 100%. And to be upfront and honest that you don’t know the answer. A lot of the times, sometimes people ask me questions, and the meeting is fast paced. And I’m already, my brain is in one lane, and they’re taking me to another lane, and I just can’t think of an answer. And I’ll say like, I don’t know right now, but I will definitely follow up with an email. And I always can think much clearer after the meeting is ended and come up with probably a million times better answer than I could if I just spit-balled and made it up.

Kelly: Sure.

Julia: I know a lot of people talk about imposter syndrome. I think that my way of never really feeling like I’ve suffered from that is by being upfront that I don’t know everything. Obviously, there’s gray area, right? We all do new things, things that we may be in our comfort zone, something that’s new that we don’t have experience with. But still, you can still say, I don’t know. So, there you go. There’s my fourth mistake.

Kelly: All right. So, we’re moving on to number five. So, this last one for me is more of a difficult, challenging one. I went with the easy ones and I kind of built up to the hardest ones. And I’ve talked a little bit about this before, and it’s office politics. And it’s one of my massive pet peeves. And one of my things that as a boss, I try to minimize as much as possible. And the only way you can minimize that is by being transparent. But I think the main thing is, a huge part of it is culture. When you are a boss, or you are in a position where you’re managing people, making sure that the people around you feel confident in their jobs. You don’t want people to feel like they could lose their job tomorrow pending XYZ. And I was in a situation in a company that regularly laid off employees, at least twice a year, and in some cases four times a year, based on how income came in. And that’s just the way that particular company was run. And I was part of senior management. And so, every quarter or twice a year, I’d get called in, along with some of my peers in senior management, and we were asked, okay, who should we let go of now? Numbers are down, who’s vulnerable? Who’s not performing? Who’s not — utilization is very big — who’s not being 85% utilized? And in essence, we were asked to give up a name. And when you’re in a microcosm like that, it starts to become like high school.

Julia: I was going to say toxic.

Kelly: Well, yes, toxic, but it starts to become like every man for himself. Of course, I’m going to give you a name because I don’t want my name to come up…

Julia: Right, of course.

Kelly: And the problem with that is that eventually your name is going to come up. And you’re not going to be one of the people in the room. And I made the mistake of giving up names, because I felt like I had to. And I regretted it. And eventually, my name did come up. And I was one of the people that was let go. And out of that, I just realized that that type of environment is not an environment I ever want to work in again, or that I ever want to be responsible for. I don’t want people to feel like they’re going to be let go. I don’t want people to feel like we had a bad month that someone’s got to go. And that’s the rough part about advertising — of course, we’re dealing with income and income ebbs and flows. But to a certain extent, as a leader in a company, you need to make sure that your employees feel comfortable, feel confident, feel secure, feel stable. And yeah, even if there are issues, yes, I’m all for transparency, but you have to be able to figure out how to keep that stability in mind. And when you bring other people into play to make them responsible for picking names out of a hat, it’s not an environment where most people are going to thrive.

Julia: Yeah, and you can have all the — you can have a great culture outside of that. But that one thing will then infiltrate everything else eventually. That’s rough. Yeah, it’s hard. Our industry is definitely hard. As I grow my business, I’m very careful about that, right? Because anyone that I work with, I feel very responsible for their livelihood, their happiness. Obviously, not all of it, but that is a tricky one.

Okay, my last one kind of circles back to your first two, Kelly, actually. And it’s really about creating systems and protocols when you’re dealing with high volume of work. It can become very overwhelming when you have a team of people where maybe they’re really reviewing things, or maybe they’re not, or you’re doing things in a repetitive nature. And that opens you up to making more mistakes, just like little tiny mistakes that get through. And so, one of the things that I’ve been working on lately is setting up wikis and protocols for a lot of my work because a lot of what I do follows the same protocols, the same step by steps to get to the finished work. Obviously, every project is different. But when you set those up, you have the framework to make sure things are consistent and you don’t make mistakes.

So basically, the story is I was young and hungry and setting up this brand-new HTML email system for a client, which allowed us to do email automation before email automation was a real thing. And I was setting it all up and just got so excited. I never had anyone proof it. I never had any discussions with how things would work. I never created any flows; I was just doing it in my head. And somehow I thought this was okay. And the first email I ever sent, I ended up sending it to a group of people, half of which really should have gotten a different email. So, it wasn’t like a disaster, right? But looking back on it, I’m like, yeah, those protocols and guides and really thinking through having something on paper or digitally set up so that you have those internal checks and balances can help prevent mistakes. Always the little ones that get us. It’s true, that bite.

So, there you go. Look at us. That’s 10. Thanks, everyone. We hope that these 10 things are things that you’ve experienced, you feel some camaraderie with us. Or you’re able to think through some situations that you might be going through or might encounter in the future and…

Kelly: Learn from our mistakes.

Julia: Yes, and learn to talk about them. So, with that, we’re signing off. We’ll see you next time. Take care. Thanks for listening. Follow us on social at TwoMarketingMoms.com. Please also smash that subscribe, or leave us a review. We will talk about what you want. So please give us your feedback. Until next time.