If you want to be right, try being wrong

The more fashionable parts of the advertising industry have always loved failure.

On and on about how important it is to fail. To be honest, I’m not sure what’s so great about failure.

Whereas the more intellectual people in our business love tension. They are constantly beating on them. “Where’s the tension?” they bark at you. To this day I have absolutely no idea what voltage is or how to find it. Even thinking about the tension makes me tense up.

What I really understand is wrong.

I have always believed that great work must be interesting. Interesting strategy presented with interesting execution. But now I’m of the opinion that the fastest way to be interesting is to be wrong.

Not completely, disastrously, career in the end badly. But a little wrong. Because something a little wrong in our world has always been worth mentioning.

I’m no evolutionary biologist, but I suspect that being alert to things that are wrong or not as they should be was one of the best ways for our ancestors to stay alive.

In other words, we may be pre-programmed to pay more attention to things that are wrong than to things that are right—for example, orange and black stripes in the undergrowth.

You’d think this idea might be important in marketing, where we’re locked in a perpetual battle for attention and engagement. That we might obsess over the power of a strategy, idea, or execution that is wrong.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case, quite the opposite

As strategists, agencies and marketers, our clients and organizations constantly ask us to be right. As correct as we can be. That’s why we’re so obsessed with research, not to find out interesting things we didn’t really know, but to try to prove to people that we’re right. And if not, it was the research that was wrong, not us.

Being right has cult status in marketing.

Of course, there are exceptions to the cult of entitlement—work that goes wrong, either by accident or by design. And it is often the work that proves the most in the market.

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty is deeply flawed and has been going on for twenty years. He said “correctly” that women don’t want to see normal bodies in beauty ads. ‘Wrong’ said it was nonsense and that fighting for real beauty would unblock permanent growth.

KFC work is also pretty bad. For a fast food brand to be so open about an animal being intensively raised and then slaughtered is completely and utterly wrong. And yet the fixation on chicken, whole chicken, and nothing but chicken seems to have brought home the bacon for the Colonel.

Whereas British Airways now runs ads with just three bullet points and no beautiful holiday photos. How bad?

And all the work I’m most proud of, from Winston Wolf at Direct Line to the decade of success for EE, was really bad. Show me a successful campaign and I’ll show you something bad about it.

After all, who the hell sells insurance by deliberately misbranding a family of Russian rodents?

It’s also an incredibly simple action standard that you can take to your work.

Sit down with the campaign you have today – it doesn’t matter if it’s the brief, the strategy or the work – and ask yourself what’s wrong with it? What are we doing wrong here for the brand, the category or the wider world. And if you can’t find something, maybe now is the right time to file it somewhere. Not because you like it, but because it will be much more successful if you do.

And you will know what it is because bad is not subtle.

The bad is challenged and often dismissed once you uncover it. From you, your team, your management and your client. One clue that you’re on the right kind of bad is when every stakeholder you talk to raises the same objection. At that moment you will know very clearly what is wrong and what needs to be protected.

That’s why one of the greatest qualities of a client-side marketer is the ability to take an idea that’s wrong – from Cadbury’s drumming gorilla to BA’s refusal to show us pretty pictures – across every internal stakeholder and still get the job done with all the commercial success it delivers.

Because wrong only happens when agencies and clients agree that wrong is the right thing.

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