Leadership is a choice
The early days of amazon.com and advice I’d like to give my twenty-something self
A couple years before the turn of the last century (wow that sounds like a long time ago), I moved to San Francisco. Good timing, it was the dawn of the first dot com boom.
Bought a house. Had my first child. Started a new job– mostly working on a couple of Levi’s brands and AT&T Wireless. Early into my first year, a small “dot.com” project fell into my lap (well, my partner’s and my laps).
It was an online bookstore called “amazon.com”. If I remember correctly, we got the assignment because the team working on it didn’t want to work on it anymore. In fact, no one wanted to work on it. After all it was a dinky little “dot.com” account with limited budget.
The previous team created, what I thought, was a pretty funny radio campaign and some small-space print ads to go with it. The idea was that amazon was searching high and low for a physical location big enough to house all of their books. But the joke, of course, is that only the “World Wide Web” could hold them all. There was no place in the real world big enough!!!
We carried on with this “Earth’s biggest bookstore” campaign. We wrote more radio spots and created some new print ads. Eventually, after about a year or two of trying (and flying to Seattle every couple of weeks or so), we convinced their marketing team to do some tv commercials as well.
(These were, I believe, the first TV ads made for amazon. They were not the best, by any measure. Another team created some holiday ads later that year that were legendary).
At that time, the amazon.com marketing team was made up of three people. One of them was Jeff Bezos. He was in every meeting. He was as you’d expect, incredibly smart. He was also incredibly nice and thoughtful (example: one time we were in a meeting room and a group of engineers came in. Jeff said “do you have this room? So sorry, we’ll leave.” Then we moved rooms.) One thing for certain, he was very skeptical of marketing and branding. Particularly when spending any significant money on it.
Amazon expands beyond books
A year or so before we filmed those TV spots, Amazon let us know something big was coming. They were going to sell more than just books.
First they were going to sell music. Which at this time meant they were selling CDs online. Their biggest competitor? CD Now. Who they would gobble up four years later.
For this launch, it wasn’t just my partner and I working on ideas. As Amazon grew, interest in working on it grew.
We were one of a few teams who were pitching ideas.
At the time, however, we were still the senior team (just by virtue of being the only ones up to that point who worked on it).
Life in a big agency creative department
Let me step back for a second to give some context, which will help when I eventually get to the point of this story.
When you’re part of a creative team working for a very large multi-national agency, your goal is to sell work. Of course the goal is always to do great work. However, great work that you don’t sell provides you a pat on the back and some nice words. Words like “that really helped round out the meeting.” And then two weeks later everyone would forget that great work that you did.
If you were ambitious, great work only mattered if you convinced a client to actually make it. If your work didn’t get made, your upward mobility was very limited. In fact, your job security was very limited.
So the goal was to sell your work.
Back to amazon.com music. I believe 3–4 ideas were chosen to present. My partner and I created one of them.
It was just me, the account planner and the account lead who flew up to present the campaigns.
Remember, my goal going in was to sell our idea. As I was flying up there, however, I got to thinking. I was going to be the de facto Creative Director in that meeting.
I wasn’t a Creative Director at this time (I think my title was Associate Creative Director. I’m still not sure what that means.)
But here I was presenting everyone’s work. And it was very clear which idea, of the ones I was about to present, was the best. That idea wasn’t ours.
I still remember it. The tagline of the best idea was “If it’s on your mind, it’s on amazon.com.” The concept was basically this- you know how you get a song in your head? Like when you’re in a specific mood, or recall a memory and your brain gets triggered somehow to play a song in your head? Well, now whatever song or album you are thinking about, you could actually buy it instantly on amazon.com. (If you were in front of a computer that is, smartphones didn’t exist then).
This campaign was a simple and genius idea. Transit posters placed strategically so that it looked as if thought bubbles were coming out of people’s heads. In the thought bubble was an image of the song or album, with the line “if it’s on your mind, it’s on amazon.com”.
I think I’ve seen this idea executed since, but I am fairly certain that at that time it was an original.
My partner and I had a campaign that was nowhere near as good.
There may have been other ideas in the bag, but I don’t remember them. (Yes, they were literally in a bag, mounted on foamcore or illustration board…we didn’t present on screens yet.)
So there I was, thrust into the Creative Director role.
My active survival mechanism told me to sell our campaign. My ego told me to sell it too.
My brain and my heart (and my conscience) fought me.
My ego won. And they went forward with our idea.
You learn as much, or more, from your mistakes. This was a mistake. Given that I’m writing this, I’ve clearly never forgotten this one.
The right thing to do would’ve been to do everything in my power to convince them of the brilliance of the “if it’s on your mind” campaign. It didn’t matter who authored it. It was simple. Memorable. By nature, experiential. And perhaps more effective for both awareness of the product and as a building block for the brand.
In the big picture, that day didn’t really matter much. Clearly Amazon has turned out ok. The person who came up with idea, who is amazingly talented and ridiculously nice, is much more successful than I. And probably hasn’t thought twice about this since.
Can Creative Directors Create and Judge at the same time?
There has always been debate in advertising about this — can someone who does the work judge the work? Can one person evaluate a group of ideas objectively if one of the ideas is theirs?
Impossible for me to say for sure. There really should be some sort of independent, double-blind, third-party study to determine that.
But on the day I presented a group of ideas for amazon.com music, I knew which was the best idea. It wasn’t mine.
If I’d done the right thing that day, would I have really lost my job eventually because I didn’t sell our idea? Or would I have earned a new level of respect from the people with me that day? And the people whose idea I was representing?
Doing the the right thing that day would’ve been making the choice to be a leader. I didn’t make that choice.
The mistake I made, made before and no doubt made since, was believing that success came only from doing whatever it took to get my work made.
The advice I’d give my twenty-something self
If I could go back and give advice to my twenty-something self, it would be this: Success is the byproduct of doing all the little things right.
It’s a small shift that means everything. Focus not on success itself. Focus on doing all the little things right to achieve success.
John Wooden, the legendary UCLA college basketball coach, would initiate every new recruit by sitting them down and teaching them how to put on their shoes and socks. This (as he told Bill Walton) would teach them “everything you would need to know for the rest of your life.”
It’s also about changing your mindset. From a selfish mindset to a benevolent mindset. From greed (I want my idea to win!) to service (I want the best idea to win!).
It’s about shifting the focus from ambition and success for yourself to championing the best solution and success to others. It’s lifting people up and doing what you can to make other people better. It’s simply putting the work first and your ego second.
If I could go back and tell my twenty-something self this, there is no doubt that it would’ve impacted my career in a hugely positive way.
If I could go back, I would also tell my twenty-something self to buy a shitload of amazon.com stock.
About me: I’m a Partner/Creative Director at Teak in San Francisco. I’m from Colorado, moved to Chicago for 8 years then settled down in San Anselmo, California (the birthplace of mountain biking) with my wife to raise two amazing kids. I’m a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs, Denver Broncos and Peet’s Coffee.
