In a short stretch of time, from the mid 90s, to the early 2000s, a relatively small group of people started playing around with this thing called the World Wide Web. They had the audacity to think they just might change the world. This project introduces you to the big players from those hallowed days, and let them tell you what it was like and how you should have been there.
Episode Five, today we're gonna talk to ben jones. Creative superstar. He's a good guy. I think we're gonna have some fun today.
I think oh, you know, council living and making sure that we're still alive and well, and
yeah, I think there's a holiday coming up. Are you are you keeping your clients happy these these days before the holidays
You know, one of these where I inherited something and somebody who did it is no longer with the company. And this person is like, you got to fix it. I'm like, I don't know what to do. I didn't do like I was a little kid in the corner being yelled at by the teacher. I'm
glad you're here. A couple of things before we bring Brent Ben on. If you're if you're watching this, and you want to see previous episodes, if you want to get the audio podcast, if you like listening to us ramble while you drive, go to you should a.com The other thing about these live casts is you can leave us comments and we can see them so ritesh will pull those up. And if you say nasty things about Ben, we will share them live on the air. And then And then finally, and we need to see if if, if Ben has some some help for us here. We need 100 subscribers on YouTube. Till we can get our own URL. I think we're up to about 66. So maybe we can get someone who knows someone to YouTube to pull some strings for us. Oh,
man, come on. I mean, really, with everybody that's watching worlds agents.com Where is the love people? Yeah, we need a vanity URL. Yeah. I think that's the first thing we should start with with Ben was Hey, dude. Like, how does one get one of these? Yeah. Let's do them.
Who do you have to know?
Hey, Joe. Great. The problem with the YouTube thing is you just got to not suck. And I think that that's the challenge, especially when you have these old man hacks on who are like, new kids. Let me tell you about.
This is innovative. We are innovating content delivery, we are doing live streaming in an interactive way. I don't know if you heard about that. It's gonna be Big Ben, it's gonna be big.
And either way, you can go from different places to like your verb, right, Kyle and I am busy. We can bring people for far flung places
where it looks like an idyllic place that you're in. Is that are you in heaven?
It is, in fact, heaven.
Wow.
30 inches of powder yesterday.
Amazing.
mostly men shoveling and not skiing at this point. It's very lovely. Very.
That's great. So listen, here's what I want to do. I want to do a little, you know, there's something new for us. But I want to do a little sort of hypnotic journey. I want you to close your eyes. Oh, my gosh, I want you to I want you to imagine back in a time where we were we were young. This was like 25 years ago and close your eyes and just imagine.
Oh, no.
Got Mail. All right. I think
in the in the time when we were listening to that noise all the time. I had to start up noise on my then PC, which was the tick saying you are awesome. And then it would start up and then 45 minutes later you get on line.
Oh, good to see you brother. Good to see it. how life is doing well up in Vermont and life is good and
everyone on the folks on our team say 2020 Okay, we're doing what we're doing. 2020 Okay, all good teams. Good. You know, rise of fascism and a global pandemic and the disinformation age we've entered where I just don't understand who human beings are and are not anymore. And yet these deep, deep wells of wonderful kindness and in the middle of it also Yeah, 2020. Okay. Yeah,
I don't know. little pockets of kindness everywhere at the moment. Right.
Right. Yeah. So. So Ben, if you don't know, Ben is a creative director at Google with the the unskipable Labs part of it, I guess, part of YouTube correct. Part of YouTube? Yeah. Cool. You should check that out. But But, but before we talk about what you're doing now, I think the whole point of this thing is let's talk about what you were doing then. So So where are we like to start is in the beginning. And so so you joined agency.com fairly early. And as I recall, you joined as an intern, so tell us like, you know, what were you doing now? It wasn't an intern.
I was I was I was not an intern. I wasn't I was an old man already. By the time I got to agency Comm. I hate to tell you, yeah, um, so I had been living in in Europe and in the in the way that it was then since I was the one person who's like, tried to figure out email, I was in charge of the marketing over there. And then I came back to the US and I freelance for Chris Needham. Seth Golden's company, yoyodyne. So before he was the big, you know, marketing brain, he had a company called yoyodyne. And Chris hired me to help him place a Rolling Stone Shockwave game, so it'd be a little embed on a site ball would roll over a little bit more of the cover would be revealed each day. And if you could guess, who was on the cover of that week's Rolling Stone, you'd win a subscription distributed content? 1996 like pretty genius stuff. Yeah, my job was to send Chris 500 sites a week that were rolling stone brand appropriate and had an email address to contact so that Chris could reach out and see if they wanted this game. 500 sites a week on a 28, eight modem equal 18 hours solid every day of surfing, non stop seven days a week. And so my hypothesis is the last person who saw every single site on the internet, like that was the last
possible wash. Yeah.
Before it exploded so much that you couldn't possibly This is pre Google, right? Yahoo was pretty sure I saw like every little nook and cranny of the visible internet. And you were all
this was all just manual, you're surfing, you're just sort of clicking and saying is this appropriate? Exactly.
Click, click another click another you get into like bike messenger sites. You get into clothing sites, you get into obscure record labels you get into like, academic institutions, but they seem like maybe rollingstone would be okay. It was just a dreary existence. But you learn a ton about copywriting navigation site experience, you know, user expectations because 28 a modem you click the wrong link, you're like,
Yeah,
exactly. I came down to New York, and I was working at scholastic and the book clubs, which you guys all remember from elementary school, you get the Live Wire, plastic book clubs, and Chris was at agency then just up the street, and scholastic, wonderful people miserable job experience. And so Chris was like, it's Friday afternoon, we have beers. And I was like you what he said, we have beers in the office, there was a beer cart that goes around when it come up and have a beer. I mean, I just the idea of a professional experience that was pleasant like that. I just couldn't couldn't see it. So I came up and and had a beer and met some folks. And he was like, yeah, you should apply. And I was like, Oh, God, please. Let me apply. And I came in for an interview, the more so at the time, my then wife was pregnant. And we she had, you know, the Braxton Hicks contractions, we were at the emergency room until 3am. And then I showed up at 9am for my interview with Aaron Sugarman. And I was like, bleary eyed and, you know, panics, adrenaline sunk, but I didn't hear anything. I was like, Okay, well, whatever. It didn't go didn't go well. Um, and then, as we came back from the hospital from the birth of my first daughter, Olivia, there was a phone call, like, hey, we'd like to offer you a job. And I was like, Can I start today's today? Okay. Okay. So I started in New York when it was just New York, and I was right around 100. Employee 100 at that point,
was that at 665? Broadway
665. Yeah. Yeah, and I remember the thing that I remember from from interviewing and from coming in, was, I mean, the company was two years initial then was like, how much lore there already was when I started, like the room area network, and The child labor pit and like the stories of being in the basement this time life building. I felt like I joined. You know, at this moment when all this history had already happened. I felt like I had arrived late. And you were way late to the game and Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah.
That's crazy. That's
to step back a little bit. So you knew Chris before he joined the agency Columbo was it was that doing it while he was an agency?
Yeah, no, Chris, Chris and I went to college together. So I knew. And then he was at yoyodyne. And I freelance for him. And then he came to agency and was like, hey, come have a beer. And I was like, rescue me.
Where were you? Were you up in Massachusetts? So were you down in New York at the time?
When I came back and was freelancing, I was in Boston, came into New York and was working for scholastic and book clubs.
Was that the Scholastic building downtown? Like, you know, Fourth Street Fifth Street? Yes. Yes. So that was actually pretty near the offices of agency. calm. Right, right.
Exactly. Right.
Yeah. Just Just a little economic reality for you kids out there. Working at scholastic expecting a child making $32,000 a year in New York City,
and living in New York,
and living in New York and living in New York at level one, that's level one panic, I'll go into all the others. Just think about that for a moment.
So by the time you joined agency calm I mean, the web was decently a thing, right? And and were you were you doing internet stuff while you were at school, scholastic,
I was not doing internet stuff there. I had been doing it. I was in Paris before that. And so I was like the one who responded to email because I was the only one who knew what email was. And I had poked my nose into the, to the website because I was working in the admissions office, but I wasn't doing digital marketing stuff until the yoyodyne work for Chris got it.
And then when you joined agency.com, do you remember, you know, what was that transition? Like? What were those? The you know, those early weeks or months, like? Well, the
early weeks, I came in, and the place was growing so fast. I was put in a cube and nobody had any like I would, I mean, everyone was rushing by I was a site editor and I can't remember Aaron maybe was just like, find some cool stuff. See what's cool on the internet what's happening and I was so I was just surfing around looking for cool, like super hot and like these cool site experiences and, and so on. And I think it it started to pick up when I got on pitches. So I remember the first big pitch I did was Doritos, which we worked on with with red sky Ray and and then I don't think that you guys trust me to work on actual client work. So I tended to be like the pitch pony. I mean, I wrote I read some banners and stuff and some some site copy but but Doritos was the first big one Kmart, the first e commerce I was I did Texaco and the Texaco intranet. I did that whole thing. And
you ended up working on that.
White Plains. Yeah, you did. Because I remember going up to to to White Plains with you once we went up to see the client and we're walking in the hallway. And it was amazing to me because it was my my early weeks early times as well. And you'd walk in and everyone Oh, ben jones is here. Open Josie. Talk to ben jones. ben jones. ben jones. He's the guy who's doing our website. Oh, is that ben jones? I'm like, this is great.
Yeah. here's here's what I here's what I remember about presenting Texaco, so Texaco, we were gonna present to the CEO of Texaco, huge deal, huge deal. And so somebody, Kyle, well, it'll be really cool will present on a Sony via which was, you know, like a little bigger than a modern cell phone. And the CMO, the CEO up there at that time, he did not read his own email, his email was printed out handed to him, he would mark it up his assistant would. So we get in there. And this is not in any regular conference room. This isn't the CEO special conference room, like special furniture and all the things and he comes in, and I put this little tiny thing down on this, like James Bond villain table. And I was like, here's the site, and I opened it up, and he can't see it. And he's too obviously too vain to put his glasses on. And he I think he thought that like machine was the site. I think he thought like the Sony Biopic, that's what he had bought is one of those. He did not understand any of it.
Wow. That's the thing I remember most about Texaco was you know, I proudly declared I was a fan of NASCAR and I knew they sponsored Kenny Irwin with NASCAR and they actually said you want to go to a race and they they flew me down to Atlanta and helicoptered me from the airport to to the infield of a NASCAR race. Wow.
That is awesome. That is not what I remember from text, go to tech school stories. One, I'm going to meet a bunch of my college friends. I'm on the subway headed up the east side. And I was working on the RFP for their safety, health and environment site. And I'm like, that's it. I'm the devil. I am business merchants of death. Here. I am figuring out how to cover up their Environmental record. As I need my college friends who are of course, you know, doing all kinds of interesting and world saving things. And I was like, Yeah, no, like, I'm in an evil phase, but I think I'll turn good again.
Yeah,
that was one and the other one. I remember we were we were pitching for the intranet. Texaco intranet environment with you. Yes.
We were as we were trying to figure out what we were going to do. We put a spider on it to see how big it was. And it choked out at 17 million pages. Yeah. Wow. And then when we won the business, and I remember first meeting with the client, he said, I don't really even know why we hired you. I don't think it's possible. Like, I don't believe you can be successful in this project. And I was like, Yeah, why don't? What do you think we're gonna do here? Yeah.
That was that was one of the things that we were always willing to do back then is if it's impossible, sure, we can do it right. We figure it out. I remember you remember. We invented the concept of something we called client weapons with Texaco? Yeah. Which was Do you remember that? Yeah, we were. We were kind of behind schedule. And whoever our client was, she kept saying my peers don't understand what we're doing. And they keep asking what's going on. And we made her this beautiful, it was basically just a project plan. Like here's what we've done. Here's what we're gonna do. But we did it in this beautiful sort of door poster thing designed for her to hang on her door, so that if anyone asked her about the project, she could point to it and go That's it. And I remember her calling us back and going. Everyone loves the project now because they walk in and they're like, ooh, I want one of those.
Genius. The genius of Martin bunny right there he designed the little flash they started out with all in the whole thing unfurled, and all three years where it is a made a big wall poster for her that was beautiful. I would have hung out in my in my house. I mean, it was gorgeous. Amazing.
Very quickly, let's say say quick. Hello, Matthew horns on Trojan room coffee pot cam. I don't know what that means. But he's saying coffee pot can. David Blackburn's on accusing us all of having COVID here or maybe just Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Hello, yours is looking pretty good. Ben, I don't know what's up.
It's called hat head. And then Walker is my is my cousin. He runs a digital agency or consulting company down in down in Lancaster pa
grew up in New York, Pennsylvania. Hey, john.
Kyle, so you were talking about reminiscing of Texas?
Yeah, client weapons. I mean, so. So, you know, you talk about, you know, what, what was the work like back then? I mean, the Texaco thing was a pretty specific thing. I mean, what do you what do you remember most about I don't know, the teams, the working environment, all that sort of stuff.
The thing that I remember the most is that is the churn, right? We were growing. I mean, we went from 100 people when I started to a little over 1600 when I left, and the employee turnover was around 50%. So just an unbelievable waves of people coming in and waves of people coming out and some incredible people. I mean, I think, yeah, no disrespect to any other capabilities. But the creative directors@agency.com were an extraordinary people who are still among my best friends doing amazing work like incredible, incredible people and technologists, and filmmakers, and architects and like just such an interesting, interesting set of people. So the churn of people was incredible and exhausting. And then this churn of new business where each RFP we got was twice the size or three times the size of the last one. You know, we had just been like, I don't have any idea how we'll ever do this one, and let's just talk some shit. Five times the size of that, and we're like, there's nobody to work on. We can't hire fast enough. And yet this is
I remember that that did not dampen our ambition for other work. Like, I remember doing a massive pitch for Barnes noble and we thought through all this stuff about books and blah, blah, blah, and we didn't write for ridiculous reasons. And the next day you called Amazon and you were like, Hey, we did all this thinking on on bookselling. You know, you guys want to talk to us. We'll just share with you for free. You flew out there and their whole lobby I remember was all people interviewing like they couldn't even get people into conference rooms. They were hiring so fast and yeah, One business for them. Right? We were the first outside agency that we worked with on the strength of that stuff. Yeah.
Yeah. No, I know sorts of ideas about how to organize Amazon. And they're like, yeah, that's cute. You can do this other work.
Like you might you write some banners.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
I mean, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Ben. Were you there? When we did the Kyle came up with the maniacal, high 30 people in 30 days craziness.
No. I mean, I don't, he did not jump out at me as any less than I have. Any other time. Yeah.
I don't know. There was. It was just basically like, hold on for dear life for five years.
Yeah, no,
I think the thing I mean, the thing that I loved about it, and there are some pieces of the work that I'm doing now that I like, in a similar sort of way, but there was a there was no body of knowledge that you needed deep expertise in over years of time, in order to come to an answer, like everyone could see the things that everyone could see. And the ability to be successful is to take that and digest it and re conceive it or reconfigure it in a way that needed work. And so it just meant like, How fast can you learn? And how inventive or creative? Can you be about this information that everyone can see? Like there's nothing hidden from from any of us? We all know what browsers can do. We all know what you know, clicks can do people are doing and so it's like, how can you organize information? And what experiences can you make out of and I thought that was amazing. Super fun.
So yeah, you know, I kind of feel like, ordered the one of the challenges these days is because you can get a degree in, you know, UX and site building and things like that. And because there's all these precedents, you can look at everything. Oh, that's the way it's done. I think that spirit of well, what if you did it this other way? Like I, I kind of feel like, if you had a superpower, it was your ability to sort of live in that world of what if, right? And and and that was how we want a lot of that work? Well, what if we did it a completely different way? And that is, I think, a bit lost? So are you finding that in your current work? Do you get to do that again? Yeah, so
the stuff that I'm doing now is about is about creative effectiveness in the in the video world? And so how do you tell stories and so on? And, and we've never been able to look at how stories work in this way before, right? Before it was like, Oh, we have insights from these research things. And then it's going to get digested into a creative director, who hopefully has some experience and gut feeling and so on. But like a lot of it was was that was, was voodoo magic gut feel, I think something like this, maybe maybe not. And now, you know, to look at a billion and a half hours a day of view time and exactly what ads did what with whom, in what way and, you know, you look at 1000 ads in a row that are good and 1000 ads in a row that are bad, and you're like, Oh, my God, don't do this, definitely do that. And so I feel like we're in this time now accelerated by machine learning and stuff, where we're learning every six months, what I learned in the first 15 years of my career, about creative about how creative functions and so on. So it feels the same in a bunch of ways. Right, right.
So talk about
a takeaway from that. Sorry, I'll just ask Ben, does it take away from creativity, because you were talking about, you know, we have an I totally agree with you, the creative directors at agency calm with geniuses, I mean, they came up with stuff, and thought of things in ways that we would never have imagined. Do you think some of that has gone away now with these machines? Because I, sometimes I feel like we do too much on the brief and the, the way it's gonna work? And you know, how's it gonna get put over here? And over there? And what's the format and less about the actual overall? Well, what are we trying to do? And that's what we used to do is what are we trying to do here? We manage to change of behavior or something like that?
Yeah, I don't think I don't think that we saw one, I don't think we've re digested our ability to use these tools, the data that we have to figure out how to tell better stories. And so what we're doing is defaulting to things that data does, well, we haven't made them, we haven't made them creative. Again, I think that's what my team's job isn't fun part of my job is. And then the other thing is, I think that the that the creatives have not sort of leaned into the power that they have, right, they're trying to preserve the freedom to tell stories in a certain sort of way. And they haven't recognized that. I mean, our I believe pretty firmly creatives, the last unfair advantage in the business as, as all the machines, you know, over media, all the media planning. But the more that stuff becomes automated, the more it's a playing field, and there's no advantage left to you. If everyone has access to the same set of tools, they're the only thing you can change is the creative input. And I think we'll see in the next, you know, 18 months, that's going to become more and more and more. The other thing it does in terms of creativity, and I think this is how we position our work is I'm not trying to tell you how to store tell a story. I'm just trying to help you avoid risks, right? Now, you want to start your ad with this beautiful long, slow tracking shot of Pacific Coast Highway, like, please feel free, I can see that your audience disappears. 99 times out of 100 accordingly, even sees that it's a car ad, let alone your car. And if you want to just understand that you're taking it and then and then pitch your story. And most people are like, Oh, yeah, maybe, you know, maybe I don't want to do that. I'm not saying what this what your first shot should be. I'm just saying like, don't do this dumb thing that we know doesn't work.
Well call us to say, figure out what sucks and don't do it.
Right, right. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna hop to Matthews comment about the coffee pot for a sec. I work on Dunkin Donuts, that hill holiday Dunkin believes that the coffee needs to be made every 18 minutes. So if it's older, 80 minutes gets thrown out because it gets gunky. And so we did a thing for our office which of course all the coffee was Dunkin at our office to see if the pots which were in the middle of the middle of the office, whether the coffee was fresh or not. And how where it was in the 18 minute cycle and how and how and how full the coffee pot was. So you could figure out like, Is it worth it to get up from my desk to walk all the way over there? Because there's like, a pot of stankey coffee or start over so it's good stuff.
Wow, that's fantastic.
What so you put them at the people?
So we put a we would No no, I think that's what Matthew was talking about. We didn't put a camera in over it. We put a sensor that detected the weight and like it when it refill. I think it was a little donkey donkey smiley face timer. That's awesome.
That is amazing. Joel was given us a memory. Kyle, hang on. Just john. Ben's cousin has given a good memory to the search engine names. I'd forgotten about that. Yeah. Hello, do you remember? Do you remember that?
I remember all that. I remember all. I mean, the pre Google time, like everyone was like, my search engine is better than the other search engine. I remember when Google came out. I was like, What a dumb name. That's like I was gonna use that.
Yeah, well, yeah. Cuz Alta Vista was like King of the Hill like it. And then it's like, yeah, Alta Vista is gonna be the one that wins. And then yeah, Google just sort of snuck up and everything else down the toilet. What was is there a project? sort of in the innovation space? Is there a project that you did at agency, either that you did or that someone else did? Is there a project that you did that you really felt like, that's changing the game? Like we're doing something here that's different? Or is it you know, what, what do you remember from back then that you felt was innovative, or we're doing something really interesting at the time?
I mean, I remember being so in the lore category. And when you guys had done the loosened site before I got there, yeah, the roll over on the loosen site, where the car business was a business card interface, business card flipped over. And it had, I can't remember a patent or an innovation or like the sketch of an idea. And and just the idea that there would be that a lightness in a website was totally new, and that there would be the freshness and so on. I remember being very struck by that. I mean, being super struck, and I did not work on this. I think it was I think it was PJ's genius, but john Mann, the first you know, non text interface. I mean, it was so beautiful. And it made it feel like the web could be immersive in a way that no one had at that point done. And, and you know, just so so visually beautiful in that intersection of visual beauty and interactivity. And it just felt like a thing that that was new or might be new.
Yeah, that was the the the Jordan site that was we pitched Nike. I don't know what it was maybe 98. But I remember Nike put out a, you know, an a&r request, right. So there were seven or eight agencies that were pitching for Nike arr. And we actually Actually, this I still have this is the Nike pitch that backer put together is like the basketball skin. And you know, we had a CD ROM in there and yeah, right. And, and I remember, we were so proud of this pitch, we pulled everyone off everything we put all this effort in, we rented a billboard that drove around the Nike campus, right? We went out there. We pitched all these ideas. We knew we were gonna make this business, right. And every single idea we pay Nike. revenue, some technical issues. Can you hear me? Yeah. All right. It's losing it here. But every single idea we pitched Nike was like, Oh, yeah, we did that two years ago. It didn't work. Like there was not a single thing we pitched and they ended up not hiring any single agency to be there a lot because they realized they were way smarter than than anyone else. But they gave some selective work and that the first Michael Jordan site they gave to us and that was the thing that you're talking about that PJ worked on. That was amazing,
amazing, really beautiful.
Do you remember, you know, I think you may have just arrived when flash was just starting out and we were experimenting different departments. I think Jason and folkert became like the flash kings.
Right, right, john. Now before we get that, there was a whole there was a whole sphere of genius, which is represented in my mind by Tim carrier. And he taught a class in Banner optimization kids back in the day. And he would do the the single frames of a banner and strip out the colors of the in between frames. So you could get a more robust banner animation by I remember sitting in the class. And I was like, I you Your brain is amazing, because he could do these things. And he gave me the banners do things that no one else could do. And those are incredible. Yeah, Flash, it was great if woker is genius, whatever. 10 carriers real genius. Also, the only guy that I knew who would go to a client meeting and get a glass of milk, which is fantastic.
I don't remember the glass of milk, though. But yeah, look, it's Sirius Satellite Radio. I remember the meet Chris Stetson. And Chris's, like, you want to do what I said they want to play radio over the web instead on on a browser? Like, yeah. What are you talking about? What did you say? We can't play radio to play? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, no, those those innovations you're talking about ban are the ones because tools didn't exist, because computers are slow and dial up was slow. And everything was being invented, like a lot of the innovations were, how do we sort of engineer our way through these dramatic limitations to do something interesting? Yeah,
I feel like a lot of the stuff that was most interesting to me in those days, I was not as I mean, probably because I was not as good at the tech. But I was not as in love with a thing that was purely technical. I was in love with that, like, what's a real world thing that you can use the web to get into? That would be genius. I remember we were working on a, we were working on an HP business, it was b2b, some super complex, and there was this, you know, mad scientist in Australia. And we pitched them on the idea that if you had a customer log in, you could go into a live cam in their lab and ask them questions for the biggest innovation and so simple, right, so sad. But yeah, the customers who are spending 510 $15 million, the ability to have that access felt incredible. And my favorite of those ideas, which did not get sold, and I have pitched again and again, the entire rest of my career was we went to Lucent and we were working on their job site. And we suggested that somewhere in the massive loosen campus down in the basement, they should set up a high powered KVM laser in a room full of things that would blow up if they were and let people come in over on a browser control the laser and shoot. Every single college student will want to work at lucid like all you need to do is that nothing no patents. No. Scientist like Elisa pull stuff up.
Yeah, no, they should totally do that. We have Chris, Chris hope are hot
credits out. Yeah, he's the he's the Chief Innovation Officer for happiness. FCB.
Now he's
in memory, which is good. Yeah.
Great. response. You know, he said, Matthews comments quite good. Put that up the basic comment about data being the rearview mirror, rearview mirror. Right.
That's good, great fuel for creativity.
Did you know I didn't realize Matthew on was this one.
play smart. If he if he is married to moniker and they're happy, he has got to be ridiculously smart. Here's the baseline. I mean, smart in his own right. But that piece is like yeah, I'm pretty sure he's a
few. Do you remember the state we did for Allied signal? Was it allied signal? The ones that made sparkplugs.
I remember that.
It was I just remembered that it was must I don't think it was allied signal. Now it was it was the one who makes spark plugs champion spark plugs are those but she Dan Drager did one of those things where it was sort of like an Auto Parts Catalog and she made it. They sponsored a lot of drag racing. And so she made the whole site about drag racing. Like if you're into drag racing, come here, and then you could buy all the sites. And so yeah, that kind of creative stuff.
I remember in the lizards and other lore, so I have I did bust out my age. Very nice, enormous, enormous fan of the logo. And I remember that you guys had sort of just gotten it done as I came in. I was in your office Kyle, and you showed me I came around Did it pentagram or somebody, the book of logo designs that you had rejected? And one of them ameritrade had like exactly the same it was the a with a like sunrays, and it was like the same Pantone colors, the same font, nothing had changed. And I was like pentagram, thank you guys are full shadow just copied and pasted that over and changed. It was exactly the same.
For me, the law I heard was somebody in creative came out with a logo. Was it that the rumor and legend or no, not really? Okay,
yeah, no. Yeah, it was something creative. It was I forget the name of the guy that did it. But it was, yeah, it was someone and it was incorporating, you know, HTML brackets, a compass. It was simple shapes, triangle, circle and square. There were all sorts of things that were in that logo. So yeah, that was a that was a good one. Well, so talk about those were these remarkable times, he went from, you know, small to too big. And then you're like, I'm out of here. You know, what have you carried forward? And it you know, feels like you've remained in a relatively creative role for your career. You're certainly in one now. Like, you know, what? carried forward, like, what do you remember from those days? And what's what's still the same? What do you what do you carry forward from that?
I mean, I think that the thing that was really fun about that group of people, you know, especially the CDs, and I think about Lauren, Paul Gali, nicklin, Deanne. Like Amazing, amazing brands. Right? It was a it was a curiosity, right, a curiosity about the potential of the kind of questions that you were asking. And so I did a lot of different things after after agency when I went to this venture capital, network mmediately. And then I was the Dean of Admissions at Bennington, and then back in digital agencies and general agencies. And I think it was just this, like, look at the same thing that everybody's looking at and figure out if there's, if there's something different, right? Is there
a new way to look at it?
Right, like, I mean, with the unskipable Labs thing, part of the when we started, so dominant part of Google's video revenue is skippable ads, right. TrueView ads, five seconds, and then you skip, and I was looking at that, and this is, you know, multibillion dollar business. And I was just sort of like, Well, why don't we have a sizzle reel about like, what good TrueView ads are. And they're just there wasn't one like no one had looked at that we hadn't thought about marketing and as a product in that way that it would be good to go to a client, press a button and see, you know, how TrueView ads worked? And what was really cool. And people like, yeah, we should do let's do one, let's do one of those. I'll do it. And we didn't want him, you know, that was whatever it was for four or five years ago. And that's still I can see because people have to permission to see it, I still see that people are using it. And for me, that's like, you know, there's so much in front of all of us, that is exactly the same. And we have the same information. And can we look with new eyes, and I think agency was a place that really trained me to be like, look at everything everyone's looking at and just do better with it, do more with a ticket, another place spring into a different kind of environment, etc.
I'll actually want to go back because it relates to john Walker's statement. JOHN says I'm still amazed that agency.com was able to pitch and win the biggest global brands, when you guys have been through you.
Mobile brands when we were two months long. part of the deal was it was so early Yeah, that you didn't have to be great. You just had to be not horrible. But but it points to I think, been one of the things you're talking about being willing to ask what seems like a stupid question. Like, why are you doing that? Or Well, what if we did it this way? What if we did it that way? I that it was often the most simple questions that led to the biggest insights for me. Mm hmm. Yeah,
I remember when when Unilever the Unilever Board of Directors came that was the time I felt about two years old. Their whole board was coming to 65 Broadway and like we had to they couldn't all come on the same flight because you know, the GDP of Unilever is the same as Belgium or something like that Christmas for you. And we had to arrange for two ambulances to be on standby while they toured our offices. And that was a moment for me where I was like, there is so much that I don't understand about the world or this world or who these people are. And they were great. I mean, they were super engaging and super curious. And I think that intersection of this, you know, totally new thing that nobody really knew he knew as much as anyone and then this massive established business was it was a very interesting point of intersection.
Yeah, we never we we Kept stumbling into sort of massive cultural problems within these big corporations, right? Where they would hire us. And they'd say, go solve this problem for our website, like, you know, we want it to work well for our customers, and then we dig in and we go, Well, if it's gonna work well for the customers, then that division needs to be able to talk to that division. Oh, they haven't done that in 30 years, that's never gonna happen. Well, like, well, then you ended up doing as much management at Site building.
If for some reason I remember I remember that as much in in the failures as not certainly in the Texaco intranet where they had 16 million, but remember, we won the global branding business for HP, like think about we had no business doing that. And one of the things, one of the things that they hired us to do was to make a sound right, and he had a sound and they wanted us to do a sound and I remember going and sitting in a room with all of the division heads the server guy, the printer guy, though, whatever. And a they hated each other. They were never going to cooperate with each other. And so we got paid to sit in the room and watch them live with each other and be like, I think we're gonna give you the money back because this is not there's no gonna work. And you could see I mean, it took you know, it took it took Meg Whitman coming in, and Carly Fiorina coming in and these waves of people crashing against the walls of the divisional strength of HP before they converted to a single brand and valued it enough to actually change what they did. We could not do it.
That. That reminds me. The last thing I think that I worked with you on was good old gs.com. And you I think you went and got that I don't remember that pitch. I don't remember pitching that. And maybe it was me you James Plath. I think class was with us on that one. And we came back he said, I think we want it I'm like, really?
That was a biggie. I remember I remember that was a biggie. I remember feeling like the biggest logistical challenge was that they were going to require drug testing and x for everyone to work on. I'm like, No one is gonna work on this, but it's okay. Because you can't hire anyone else with any talent or work on it either. So like, you're gonna have to fix this. We're not gonna get drug tested.
Yeah, yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Didn't were you telling me that was your last pitch to Goldman Sachs pitch?
That was my last Yeah, that was my that was my that was my last hurrah was like landed Goldman Sachs. Here's $10 million. I'll see you later, you guys. I was I was out. I was
a team to 10 million we I remember. Jamie coral, and I going over there and just listening to the guy who was the client, and the expectations and the integration with sapient. And Alyssa, we walked on. What?
We can do that? Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah.
You were you Were you there when we did the the Lehman Brothers work real early on at agency calm? I don't think it was it was one of those things where we built this site, and then they were gonna show it to the chairman. Right? It was one of those we're gonna show it to the chairman now moment. And they call us up. They're like, he's freaking out. He says, it looks horrible. We're like, What? What's going on? How's it look horrible? And we're like, we're scrambling literally everyone in the agency to try to figure out why does this site look like crap. And it turns out his system was was a system that could only display 16 colors. And so, to 256, we had no inkling that they would have showed this giant site on a on his computer that could only show 16 colors. And it was like
crap. We had nothing experience with Novartis. We were doing a Novartis site, and they were on Windows 97 and could not upgrade and so like they we couldn't do any remote presentations because they couldn't look at the site. And Matthew, I think says rightly it was much more social engineering hacking words and hacking people totally. It was technical technical challenges were relatively simple but like what could you sell in and get an order to do or change and do yeah, the Goldman
executives That's right. Absolutely.
Goldman was one of a wave of of intrapreneurs that was a big as I was leaving people who are starting new businesses inside existing businesses that was the second one of the first one was and also I'm sorry in advance for the PTSD was was was ft Oh, what we pitched in one the finance personal finance experience for ft and they were gonna have tools and be a bank and sell mortgages and you know, was going to be content and one stop personal finance with the expertise of the Financial Times.
Yeah, I remember talking about do you know, is there some digital equivalent of like the because they have that unique color paper for their paper. Was it was there some digital way that we could replicate that experience in some way?
I, the thing I remember about that, and I posted it in one of the links to this was was in the pitch one of the competitors, did this whole conceptual build up, it's going to be this and that, and it'll be amazing. And they'll come and they did this huge, you know, old AD AD ad agency reveal. And it'll be called Smart money.com was the name of the Wall Street Journal's personal finance site, primary competitor up already running already, like all that stuff. And I was like, you're just, you didn't even think you built up. He just built it up. They designed a logo and like all these layouts, and I was like, no, not one person, like smart money calm into browser ever to see. That was fantastic. That was it.
It was almost like maybe that was our skill was that we had just a little bit of common sense to like, anyone done that before. Oh Ben, this is a great talk, talk. Talk to us about you know, what are you? What are you up to today that you're really excited about? Is there anything that you're doing today that is that is that you're excited about? Or? You know, you feel like you're in a similar place? creatively? Yeah, I
mean, this the ability to look at storytelling, video, storytelling, ads, essentially, but also any of the video storytelling that we're doing our team's doing right now is incredibly fascinating. What an amazing seat to be in to be able to dig into the data and say, here are these patterns, if they're useful, use them. If they're not, don't, my whole team is built on experimentation. So we go to clients and say, give us your best dad, if we can do better working with your creative teams, then you learn something. And if not, then you're a genius. And there's really sort of no risk. So it's a it's a wonderful sort of position of generous innovation to say like, let us just help make you better and learn as we go. And I think that we're having great opportunities to work with sort of some of the best storytellers in the world, I mean, HBO, and the movie studios, all major global brands, you know, European cheese, and Nestle's, and so on. And you just, you can just see the world, again, changing in this endless frontier of creative effectiveness right now, I think it feels like the early web, to me feels like, Oh, my God, you can find something out today. And it'll change things tomorrow. And it's really good, and other people aren't doing it. And we have a responsibility for these tools, like, you know, machine learning, does it work? Does it not work? How does it work? What will be good or not? So
what are some of the what are some of the things that that you think are happening now that are going to be you know, how we experience things in the future? Any any specifics of storytelling? You know, how people are approaching it? You can?
Yeah, exactly.
I'll give you, I'll give you, I'll give you guys some freebies. Number one, we're understanding really amazing things about the nature of attention, and particularly attention and choice. So there were this, you know, huge narrative that like attention spans are shrinking, shrinking, shrinking are shorter than goldfish. Turns out research is flawed goldfish have long attention spans. But it turns out, as we've learned, during this time, if we're interested in something, we'll watch a lot of it right, I'll binge watch the whole Queen's gambit or the Marvel, you know, universe is 30 movies. And the last one's four hours long, we choose to watch that, right. And so this idea that our attention spans are shrinking is not right. And so that changes everything from six second ad to a two minute ad to a whatever, and you can start to see it play out in these markets, my team is about to publish some research. And so only because I know that, you know, no one but Yahoo's are watching this. One of the things they found in their research is the top performing ads in Japan are about 20 seconds long, top performing ads in India are about 44 seconds long. And you could say like, you know, culturally, India values, storytelling is longer storytelling, much richer, the Japanese more precise, it's more product focus, etc. But I think the bigger piece of it, and this is speculative now, but the bigger piece of it is Japan's a much more sophisticated media market. And so it's TV dominant, and the ads that are coming into to our ecosystem are almost all TV ads. You know, the range of ads is from 18 to 22 seconds saying the best ads are 20 seconds is no big because all the TV ads are 20 seconds right right here which isn't which is a you know, sort of wild west media market in a lot of ways. People that that that people choose to watch, guess what are twice as long and this idea that ads need to be six seconds or 15 seconds is it's just like how interesting Can you be and gravely that's a that's a fantasy. I mean, and you're you're obviously
Who the hell is your yard, by the way who's you read you read you read all
He's one he's one of those one of those creative department creative director geniuses.
Yeah, he is. Yeah.
Quick question on you. He, by the way, did you ever? I mean, I tried, I used to think I was going deaf when I used to talk to you. Because I could never hear him. He would say things.
Oh, he's very quiet, very quiet, but but he packs a big punch.
I remember the punches, not so much punching I remember.
Wow. So let me let me ask another question. Because this all came about when Kyle and I were reminiscing of those days, and then we were talking about the culture, the creativity, the and it was everyone from, you know, PM, just going all the way to, you know, the managers with curiosity, go figure it out. Let's go learn. Have you seen a shift in that I see it a lot. Where even in the in the agencies that I interact with within WP, there are pockets of it, but not culturally all the way through? Is that shift happen? Do you think?
Ah, I think that changes, always pockets. Like we work with all the different agencies, whoever whoever our clients want to work with will work with. And one of the things that I have been struck by with very, very few exceptions is there are great people everywhere, great copywriters, great creatives. And part of what holds them back is the thing that they're expecting to hear, you know, their clients are expecting here because their x agency, a client is going to hear something very different from Wyden or droga than they're going to hear from other agencies, I won't name names, but that difference creates a big piece. And then the other piece is, to your point, that sort of up and down culture, like are their managers and those managers and the chief creative officer? Are they receptive and open and willing to take risks? And what are those risks look like and feel like? And so I, you know, I think the most interesting work that we see happening now, or the biggest change is, is at that sort of like a boutique, hybrid, advancing production shop. Yeah, much more creative about how things are made, and not really caring what they might be, then big agencies have incredibly talented people. But you know, the bread is buttered by being able to sell in a campaign with three ads, it's gonna be a two to $5 million, shoot and show up in Super Bowl. And so yeah, the, I mean, this is another insight that we see when you look across 1000 ads is the ad that somebody shot on their phone can be just as effective as the ad that cost $2 million to shoot. And so therefore, the brand that, you know, shoots that way, but it's interesting and compelling, and so on, has just as much access to a big audience and a compelling kind of business outcome. You know, if you're, if you're bbdo, I hate to say it, like, that's not your business, and you're not going to do it, and your boss isn't going to approve it in your clients not going to buy it from you. And so other places, I think, are making really interesting progress there faster progress, and in bigger shops.
And I think part of that is, you know, the push pull of the technology and the abilities. And, you know, there's been whole this whole thing around user generated content for a long time. But I think, you know, the machines that we use to do those things now, with the handhelds that we have, that we use other things for like it actually making a call now and again, you know, they're really powerful, and they can do a lot of the stuff that used to have to hire big production shops to do right.
I think I think it's an interesting thing. ritesh because I think that a lot of the interesting technology has actually gone out of marketing and advertising. If there is interactivity, and it's valuable, it's the business it's ecommerce, right, it's not marketing. Yeah, and I think marketing overall has become much less interactive marketing and I was like 90% video and text basic click and it's done this like massive flattening because if the interactions are important, then you want to invest in make it a part of your core business and the rise of this sort of, you know, ecommerce infrastructure CRM infrastructure, and the technology has gotten much more serious and in some ways I think it's it's left parts of marketing behind interesting
yeah, fascinating. Well, I you know, as as with all of these I feel like we could we could do another two or three hours on this because we've barely scratched the surface but
we're not doing we're not doing two more hours later, I'm just giving you crumbs. Now I was waiting for the crowd to build and we're doing the Christmas.
So yeah, that'll be next week.
Wait, we'll be calling people to say donate money to dollars to ben jones, this fund right?
Did you hear my insight about attention it should go on as long as You can be interesting. I guess what you're telling me is
there were words coming out of your mouth. Absolutely.
I was looking at the people in the live stream and it's like,
oh, okay with. This is why that's
right. The good news is we got past six seconds, the bad news.
So who have you stayed in? Who was some of the guys from those days?
I mean, as I said, a lot of that creatives. So you know, Paul Gali nicklin, has been working with me continuously for 20 years, we work on projects all the time together, I feel like the best work of my career across four or five different jobs has always been has always been with Nick. And he's the guy I call to do, whatever, whatever. So those guys certainly, and then a lot of folks in this sort of wider, you know, wider circuit, I mean, banner, I love to see his work in the studio, those guys have shot set up loron john nack, who's now at Google. I see I see. You know, we check in from time to time he's doing the cool, super cool, wonky tech stuff. And so it's always interesting to sort of call up and see what he's after augmented reality, or photo stuff or whatever. But a lot of folks, you know, I feel like a lot, Matthew, I see those guys when I'm in London, Matthew, Molly's fun to see them and see what they're doing. And I don't know a lot of people
will be more money in the name. Yeah, indeed, agency, you remember that? I think it was called
inspire you. Yeah, we turned it into the internal University. I think that was after your time, Ben. That was when we were losing people so fast. We had to find ways to keep them. And then we invented all these ways to keep them up. And then we had to lay them all off.
I went to play site went after I hired a bunch of people from from I mean, Nick and Martin and a blast Blackburn and I'm in touch with David and Megan Aton. And then I had to lay them all off. And that fucking sucks. It sucks. You ferroli see a bunch of, you know, here and there as the orbits of the digital world intersect? Yeah. That's awesome. Well, this
has been amazing. Ben, thank you so much. Take care keep keep making things. unskipable. Again,
exactly. Tell us when you do the nine second unskipable ad. That's all I know.
I'll let you know. We're trying to get all this. Pull ads out.
And a shout out to Matthew Vaughn for joining you know, giving us some good commentary and URI as well, we have to get you on here so well. No, because we won't be able to hear anything right.
We'll get a good microphone and
then you can just have him post pictures. He put pictures do a visual version for your
There you go. Perfect. Perfect. Great. Man. Enjoy them on.
