Share your work freely; anything kept under wraps inevitably stagnates.
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
— Charles Darwin65
How many times have you walked by a co-worker’s desk and seen him quickly minimize his window? He’s working on something and it’s not ready to be shown yet. He doesn’t want you to see it until it’s perfect, complete, and — let’s face it — too late to make any major changes.
As creators and innovators, we pride ourselves on our own IP. We want to keep our techniques and ideas close and safe, because at the end of the day, they’re what set us apart from the pack. We often fear that someone will steal our ideas, or worse yet, judge us on them before they are finished. But often, the closer we hold our ideas to our chests, the less opportunity we have to get the input that leads to great innovation. Being overly protective of our ideas creates a Proximity Paradox that actually undermines our ability to bring great work to life.
At my first agency job, I was put on an account for a local soup kitchen/low-cost grocery store. It was an amazing organization that focused on empowering its patrons. It believed that while a customer may not be able to pay for his breakfast today, tomorrow he may be able to pay $0.25 for it. And when you’re a paying customer, you deserve to have your breakfast cooked the way you like.
If the $0.25 breakfast customer asked for his eggs over-medium and they came out over-hard, he could send them back and have them cooked again. Being empowered to choose powerfully influences a person’s mindset, and this organization believed it was the first step to helping people get back on their feet. Sounds like a pretty amazing client to serve, eh?
Obviously, I wanted to do a good job and come up with some amazing advertising for the soup kitchen/low-cost grocery store. My designer teammate and I came up with an idea to solicit potential donors’ empathy by showing them what it feels like to walk into a grocery store when you have limited income.
We had originally wanted to find a grocery store in the community that would let us come in and multiply all the prices on their food items by ten. But an experiential campaign was a real stretch for a client with limited resources, employees, and time. So we attempted to make this same idea work in a print ad instead. The designer went on iStock and found some produce photography to use in our proof of concept, and then she Photoshopped new price stickers onto all the fruit and veggie baskets. I worked on making the body copy tell the perfect story to get an empathetic response from readers.
My teammate and I worried about getting the buy-in of our associate creative director (ACD) and creative director (CD). Their standards were high, and they had no problem sending work back to our desks if they felt it needed more time. To make the stakes even higher, both the CD and ACD had worked on the soup kitchen/low-cost grocery store account previously, and they were equally invested in the organization’s success.
We were worried that our proof of concept wouldn’t meet the ACD and CD’s expectations, so we kept our heads down and powered on to make the print ad as beautiful as possible.
Friday rolled around — the day the ad was due. (I don’t know why account people like to set due dates on Friday, but for whatever reason, they do.) We printed out our proof of concept and brought it into the creative director’s office. He immediately saw the glaring errors that we missed due to our close proximity to our own work.
The ad didn’t convey the organization’s differentiator — the empowerment angle. In fact, our ad did the opposite: it made even regular people feel powerless against the rising cost of food. If you saw our ad in a newspaper alongside the weekly specials at your neighborhood grocery store, you’d be wildly confused.
I was hugely embarrassed, completely discouraged, and totally panicked, because I didn’t know how we would be able to pull together another ad in a few hours. Needless to say, we missed our deadline. We also had to sit down with the account representative and creative leadership team, go through the ad again, explain how we couldn’t salvage it, and ask for more time to come up with another idea.
There was a lot of kind yet firm lecturing about the importance of checking in early and often, of not being precious with the work, and of developing multiple ad concepts. I’d heard these principles many times before, but being a young copywriter with a hunger to prove myself, I held my idea close to my chest. I was convinced it was a good idea, I was afraid it would get shot down, and I believed I could show people the concept’s merit if I spent enough time finessing it.
I was too close to my idea, and I couldn’t see its flaws. I was also looking really, really hard for only its best features. If I had followed the check-in-early-and-check-in-often rule, I could have saved myself a lot of tears and embarrassment.
The stakes were high in my mind, but in the grand scheme of things, this was a relatively low-impact project. I’m glad I learned that lesson then and not down the line when I was working on larger campaigns.
Idea protectionism is the concept of shielding our work from the input of other people. We see this happen a lot in the marketing and advertising space, and we find creative people are often trying to accomplish one of the following three goals:
1. Keep your spot on the creative pedestal
When a good writer shares her first draft with you, it’s a ruse. She’s actually sharing her third or fourth draft. Most first drafts are so horrid, the writer shreds them so peers will never stumble across them. Writers fear that you will think less of them if you realize that their creative process is as messy as anyone else’s.
Even though most brilliant ideas are born from the muck of hundreds of bad ones, creative people try to hide the fact that they must first fill the swamp. It’s because we want to be judged by our good ideas — not our boring, clichéd, platitudinous, stupid, confusing, or demented ones. We maintain our position on the creative pedestal by keeping up the ruse that the majority of our ideas are good, not garbage.
2. Command top dollar
Over time, a creative person’s process for filling the swamp and conceiving good ideas gets faster and faster. You develop your own mental tricks, hacks, and processes to speed up the process. And that’s important because the time required to come up with ideas is inversely proportional to compensation — the less time you need, the more salary you can command. That’s why a top designer charges thousands of dollars for a logo and completes it in two days, while a junior designer charges hundreds of dollars and takes four weeks.
Your process for producing great ideas quickly gives you a competitive advantage over other creatives. By letting others see your process, there’s a risk they’ll copy it, rise to your level of ability, and then compete with you for compensation.
3. Avoid the stress of accountability
When we tell others that we’re working on a new idea, a few days later, something terrible happens: They ask us how it’s going. We want to slap them, because it’s probably not going well.
The scariest part about telling someone you’re going to do something is actually doing it.
If we never share our ideas with others, and we fail to produce something good, we never have to admit that failure to anyone but ourselves.
The paradox of the three goals of idea protectionism is that in trying to protect your position, compensation, and reputation, you build a fence that locks you in as much as it keeps others out.
Idea protectionism can limit your ability to innovate and come up with new ideas. That’s because it prevents others from providing feedback that could steer you down a new path to better ideas. It keeps you rooted in your current way of doing things so you never grow. It lets you stay in your comfort zone and avoid being held accountable to achieving your full potential.
Have you ever worked with someone who keeps all his ideas to himself? How do you feel? You probably assume that person is too snobby to tell you about his project, or that he thinks you are stupid and won’t have anything to offer. Even worse is when this person finally does reveal the finished product, and you can see it’s terrible, but you’re either too kind or too shy to tell him so.
In an advertising agency or marketing department, there are two groups of bystanders to idea protectionism. The first group is your fellow creatives — the ones who won’t get a chance to collaborate and grow, and who will have idea protectionism modeled as an acceptable way to work.
The second group is made up of clients or other departments in your organization. What they want is a bunch of good ideas from which to choose, and they’re OK with a rough package at the early stage. What idea protectionists sometimes deliver is one bad idea in a beautiful package and no additional choices. The client might end up being the one who has to break the news that your idea sucks, and that negatively affects your relationship and the reputation of your agency or department.
In some industries, it can take decades of work and billions of dollars to bring a new product to market. It’s getting more and more costly to develop IP, so it’s no wonder companies want to protect it so closely.
We’ve worked with a lot of organizations in the agriculture industry, and that has to be one of the most costly and competitive spaces for innovation. In the last decade, the cost to discover, develop, and implement a new plant biotechnology trait was US$136 million. The time from initiating the development project to launching the plant trait was 13.1 years on average.66 To put that into perspective, complex apps cost about $1 million to develop.67 App developers can typically get version 1.0 built in six months.68
Agriculture organizations and others that operate in expensive, competitive spaces have operationalized the protection of ideas. The innovation teams work in a separate facility with an address that is kept under wraps. Employees cannot use any external memory devices on their machines, such as USB drives, to add or remove files. Every employee and partner signs a mile-long non-disclosure agreement. The legal department is consulted on every communications piece, no matter how small.
All of these protocols keep the company’s valuable IP out of the hands of competitors or malicious people who would seek to damage the company. But the harsh truth is that NDAs and patents are hindering our ability to create something our customers really love. The firewalling directs our focus to protecting what we’ve got, rather than looking ahead and asking, “What’s next?” Or, “How can I now make this product irrelevant?” It cultivates an intense proximity that undermines innovation.
Look at Kickstarter. Entrepreneurs lay bare their ideas for others to see. Yes, there’s a risk that someone will swoop in and steal a great idea (and they do), but there’s an even greater opportunity for the entrepreneur to collect valuable input, build momentum toward launch, and create a community of loyal customers and advocates.
Pebble was a smartwatch company that enjoyed spectacular success in developing and financing its product idea via the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform.
Let’s look at how it all unfolded.
Smartwatches are a relatively recent product innovation. When Pebble was looking to enter this new market, so, too, were many competitors like Fitbit, Under Armour, Garmin, Apple, and Jawbone. The temptation for Pebble to keep its ideas very close to its chest was high, as it is with any groundbreaking product innovations.
The initial development of successful technology products is notoriously expensive, with much trial and error along the way. And there’s certainly no guarantee that technology product ideas will ever even be launched, let alone be commercially successful. This can make potential investors very wary of committing their funds. It’s high risk, with the possibility that investors will either lose all their money or only receive a minimal return. And for every technology investment success story, there are plenty of failures.
Pebble initially tried to attract funding via the traditional means of raising venture capital — from wealthy investors, financial institutions, and other potentially interested firms. But it failed to attract the level of funding it needed.69 Without the necessary funding, Pebble could not emerge from the starting gates.
Like smartwatches, the concept of crowdfunding is a relatively recent phenomenon. Instead of attracting large investments from just a few investors (like the venture capital approach), it seeks to raise small amounts of money from a lot of investors, using the power and reach of the internet.
The potential downside of using a crowdfunding approach is that your idea is very publicly exposed. There is the risk that it can be stolen, adapted, or exploited first by others. But there are also potential upsides — it can help you to obtain the funding you wouldn’t otherwise be able to generate, and it can establish a community of people who are interested in your idea.
We now know that a Kickstarter community can do a lot more than financially support your idea — it can also offer feedback to help you develop your idea further. The community members can also become your first buyers and promoters when your product idea is launched. You can secure long-term customer support and loyalty by listening to your community’s feedback and acting on it.
We now know this about Kickstarter communities because Pebble proved it.
Whether it was by chance or necessity, Pebble provides a perfect example of making an innovative idea very public via the crowdfunding approach. And it’s certainly arguable that publicly revealing its idea well before its smartwatch models were produced and launched was the major reason why the fledgling company shone so brightly in the early years of the wearable technology market.
Pebble decided to use Kickstarter as its crowdfunding platform in April 2012. Its initial goal was to raise US$100,000 within thirty-seven days. To entice investors, they were promised a discounted Pebble smartwatch as soon as the product could be developed. The more that investors donated, the greater the discount they would receive on different models in the planned Pebble smartwatch range.
Proposed features of the Pebble watch models included the ability to download apps and to link the watch to iPhone and Android smartphones via Bluetooth. The watch would then silently vibrate when the wearer received voicemail, text, email, or social media messages. Other proposed functionality on more premium models included the ability to track fitness data like the speed and distance traveled when exercising.
It’s important to gain early momentum in a crowdfunding campaign, but the initial results for Pebble were staggering. Within two hours, it had reached its fundraising target of $100,000. Within twelve hours, it had raised $500,000.
Kickstarter had been operating since 2009. Before Pebble, the fundraising record for an individual campaign was $3 million in sixty days by a video game producer.70 Pebble broke this record in just six days, and by the time its campaign had finished, it had attracted 68,929 backers pledging more than $10 million!71
The success of the Kickstarter crowdfunding approach put Pebble’s smartwatch firmly in the public domain. It allowed the fledgling start-up to gather ideas and build momentum with an online community. And that community was prepared to offer feedback and support its smartwatch ideas.
The Kickstarter campaign also delivered another somewhat unexpected but important additional benefit. Within days of the launch of the Kickstarter campaign, company founder Eric Migicovsky revealed that he was being deluged with hundreds of emails:
People want to know every detail about the watch and figure out what sort of apps they can make for that. It is really causing people to stop and think, ‘What would be a cool thing, what would be a useful thing to run on my watch?’72
The campaign was therefore encouraging developers to create apps for Pebble’s smartwatches to enhance their functionality. It spurred the company to think creatively about potential use scenarios and to develop associated apps. These apps subsequently became an important, ongoing feature of Pebble’s smartphone models. The company fully embraced the notion that being open about ideas leads to enhanced product development.
Migicovsky articulated this philosophy in the following statement:
Our developer community set Pebble’s wearable technology ecosystem apart from the rest. No other wearable platform was more open or gave developers more freedom to create, experiment, and delight the world with beautiful watch faces, useful apps, and unique experiences. The Pebble Dev community’s mission was to Make Awesome Happen, and they accomplished that beyond our wildest dreams.73
Pebble put its IP out to the world via Kickstarter, and many people came back with additional smartwatch features that they wanted to see. The company subsequently worked hard to integrate those features into its smartwatch model development to give its backers what they wanted. Pebble wouldn’t have come up with as many enhancements if it had taken the approach of developing its smartwatch in isolation in a lab and waited to unveil it at a grand event.
Pebble brought a new dimension to crowdfunding. It’s no longer a means to fund product development; it’s also a platform to build a community of like-minded individuals and rally them around a vision for a product. The community creates leverage that the company can use for ongoing product development and support.
The initial Pebble Kickstarter campaign ended in May 2012. The company then embarked on the development and mass production of its initial range of smartwatch models. They were first available for sale in July 2013. By the end of 2014, Pebble had sold more than one million smartwatches.74
Buoyed by the success of its initial Kickstarter campaign, the company used the platform twice more to test and promote its ideas for subsequent models. These campaigns were also massively oversubscribed and broke records.75 76
Given the excitement and funding Pebble generated via the Kickstarter crowdfunding community, you might expect that the ongoing financial success of the company was guaranteed. But after two years of profitability, the company began accumulating losses. It never recovered and eventually filed for insolvency.
Despite its operational demise, its assets and many of its staff were acquired by Fitbit, one of its major competitors. Fitbit paid US$23 million for Pebble’s intellectual property.77 This included its smartwatch operating system, apps, and patents. Its ideas were its major asset, even though the company was in liquidation.
One of the major reasons cited for Pebble’s operational demise is that demand for smartwatches as a specialist product category didn’t reach a critical mass quickly enough to sustain all the market competitors that quickly emerged. That made it difficult for an organization like Pebble to sustain its commercial viability, given it focused exclusively on this category.78
Smartwatch competitors like Apple have more diversified revenue streams and are therefore less dependent on a single product category. This allows them to ride out competitive situations in the early years of crowded, less mature product categories. These markets invariably have more potential for revenue fluctuations, as Pebble discovered.
However, the key takeaway from this case is that Pebble developed extremely valuable IP, largely due to not keeping its ideas locked away during product development. Fitbit can certainly see the potential in that IP. The company has a broader range of wearable products that should be able to leverage it. Not many (if any) liquidated companies receive $23-million offers for their IP like Pebble did.
And the value of that IP was significantly enhanced by the open way that the company developed its ideas. You could argue that without that approach, Pebble would not have had any significant assets to sell when the end came.
This first step to overcoming idea protectionism on a personal level is simple but not easy. It requires convincing yourself that your creative output on any given day does not reflect the sum total of your creative abilities. Some of your ideas will suck, but that doesn’t mean you suck. Some people will crap on your work, but that doesn’t mean they think you’re crap. And if they do, they’re probably not great people themselves.
When you put your ideas out to co-workers, customers, or the world, be cool with them. Embrace the praise, criticism, and suggestions that will give your ideas life outside the confines of your mind.
When sending a video script out for feedback, I like to give it a new name, like, “The Courage Story,” rather than, “My video script for the university.” It helps me create distance in my relationship with the script so I can accept feedback objectively and let the script take on a life of its own.
It’s also important to remember that art and creativity is subjective. A friend of mine often says that if fifty percent of people who see your work don’t like it, then it wasn’t good to begin with. In marketing, we often say that when you try to please everyone, you appeal to no one. Accept the fact that your idea will have some haters, and remember that it’s no reflection on you or your talent. You’re going to go on creating long after the current project is dead and gone.
In her book Mindset, psychologist Carol Dweck compares a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe that qualities like their intelligence or talent are fixed. People with a growth mindset, on the other hand, believe that that their intelligence and talent can be continually developed and improved.79
On a personal level, choose a growth mindset. Break free from the fixed mindset that makes you feel that your intelligence and abilities are up for judgment. Reframe the way you view challenges and hardships. Instead of greeting them with dread, greet them with optimism and anticipation. Creative people grow fastest when they push themselves to the edge of their ability, fail, get up, and move forward.
On an organizational level, make collecting positive and negative feedback a priority in your creative or product development process. You can have a drink and lament the bullies later. As soon as you have the concept together, share it with stakeholders. For highly specialized IP, bring together a small group of people you admire and will share honest feedback. For IP that can be appreciated by a large group of people, consider sharing it and gathering feedback through online forums, surveys, and crowdfunding platforms.
The key here is to get feedback early and often. Don’t schedule the first check-in after you’ve spent half your budget or taken the project nearly to completion. It’s hard to change or adjust the course once you’ve made the stakes impossibly high. It’s easy to accept feedback when you still have the freedom to nimbly change course.
One of the most basic things a marketing department or advertising agency can do to operationalize feedback-gathering is to put work-in-progress up on a wall. Pick a wall that’s well trafficked by staff, but not by clients.
As soon as you have the concept together for a campaign, video, landing page, customer event, or anything new, put it on the wall. Pencil sketches and snapshots of whiteboard drawings are sufficient for expressing the idea in the concept development stage. Keep sticky notes and pens near the wall and invite all staff to contribute feedback. Check the wall for feedback regularly and post new iterations of the concept as you build it out.
We’ve been fortunate to work with Balmoral Hall School, an amazing all-girls school in our hometown. One of the things that makes this school so amazing is its attitude toward failure. The faculty teach students to embrace failure, not fear it, because it’s only by pushing yourself to the edge that you learn what you’re truly capable of. When students try and fail, they’re praised for their courage and supported in taking their learnings and trying again. The students become confident women who don’t let a fear of failure stop them from pursuing their interests.
There’s a lot that marketers can learn from these students.
Pick one upcoming work project at which you would be willing to fail. A low-cost project with a longer timeline, few stakeholders, and opportunities to try a new craft, technology, rollout, or strategy makes an ideal test subject.
Then, up the ante for the project and try to push yourself to your limit. For example, can you remove features to move up the launch date? Can you add features and make your product ten times better than the competitor’s? Is there a different platform to carry your product? Explore avenues that are outside the zone of what you know you can deliver.
Next, install a fail board in your workspace. When the project goes sideways (as you expected it would), document mistakes and failures on the board. Attach a note of learnings to each one.
Invite your co-workers to participate by creating their own fail boards. Host a quarterly failure awards show, where everyone gathers together to share their failures and learnings freely. Award prizes to the setbacks that ultimately led your team to some form of success (such as developing expertise in a new area, improving a process, redefining a goal, etc.).
Most importantly, give others the chance to use your failures as a springboard for their growth and development.
Think the fail board is child’s play? Try this. Conquer idea protectionism by launching a venture that is likely to fail. Have you ever had a silly idea for a game, book, t-shirt, app, or online store? Build it! (But don’t blow your life savings on it. You’re making an investment in the process, after all, not the product.)
I once paid a designer to develop a smartphone sticker pack. I set up my company, registered it in iTunes, and challenged myself to market the idea. Then I failed. Hard.
It all started when I saw a stat that said the poop emoji was one of the most popular emojis available. So I figured, let’s give the people what they want: more poop. Enter Pooporium, the ultimate stinky sticker collection! Because if you can’t say it with poop, then you shouldn’t say it at all.
I launched an app of realistic poop stickers on iTunes. Or I tried to, anyway. The iTunes representative assigned to my account was pretty grossed out and did not accept my sticker pack, no matter how many times I tried to change her mind. Only slightly discouraged, I submitted my sticker pack to the Google Play store. They cleared it for publishing.
So far, Pooporium has not been the overnight success I hoped it would be. Instead of a million downloads, it’s had five. So why launch a potentially terrible idea? Because you bring your idea to market quickly, avoid getting hung up on the details, and learn a lot through the process.
With Pooporium, for example, I created something that five people may really like. Likely, they’re tween boys. But still, if I didn’t go through the process of setting up the Pooporium business, I may not have started my own agency, just a few months later. I saw how easy it was to get started and realized there wasn’t any magic to launching a new venture.
To launch a mini-venture, all you need to do is: