Most Creative Marketers: Zoe Harris

“What percentage of advertising is truly brilliant?” Harris asks. There’s a bunch that’s functional, she explains, and then a lot that’s probably not particularly effective and not recalled. “I don't think we have enough conversations about that.” Harris believes adland can be guilty of thinking “everything’s brilliant” and not being honest enough about how good an idea actually is.

The problem, says Harris, is that the ad gets made and run – and then you see what happens. “And by the time you've done that, you're a year down the road, and you're all-in, and maybe that's why you have to say ‘oh yeah it was great’, because you've spunked 10 million quid. At that point, you're there to make it feel successful.”

That’s not to say Harris thinks marketers and agencies are covering up “crap work” but by the time a campaign gets seen, all parties have invested so much on a personal and financial level that it’s hard to admit it could have been better.

“In the briefing process we should be asking what does ‘good’ look like? What do we think ‘great’ is? And what are the example ads or strategies that we're looking to emulate here? We are looking for honesty,” Harris says.

She admires her creative hero, Quiet Storm founder Trevor Robinson OBE, because he owns this quality, along with a relentlessness that made working with him extremely productive. Harris recalls a campaign she worked on with Robinson more that a decade ago, for the launch of MTV’s Viva freeview channel. The team at Quiet Storm were, she says, “very unpressurised and happy to keep going at ideas”. Harris and the team went through a creative process that involved around 50 different ideas, she explains. “It was fast-paced. Everything was openly shared and there wasn't a load of faff agency side.”

In the end, there were two ads shot for the campaign, one was the safe version, in a manifesto-style, and the other was the “fuck-it version” says Harris: “Let’s just make it and see.” The MTV Up your Viva campaign delivered a 30% increase in viewer numbers overnight. This experience, says Harris means she is always searching for that chemistry between client and agency, where she doesn’t feel pressured to accept something that isn't quite as good as it could be.

“Better than Christmas”

Having built up a canon of experience working for media brands and owners such as MTV, The Guardian, Hearst, Reach, and ITV, Harris also flirted with agency life, at WCRS, where she held the post of strategy director, working on the Sky account.

But it was the travel industry that stole her heart, right at the beginning of her career, when she landed a job in the Airtours head office for a couple of months in the winter, after repping in the Greek Islands. She’s been keen to get back into the travel trade ever since, and leapt at the opportunity to start at online travel brand On The Beach despite the pandemic-obscured timing.

The early operational knowledge Harris gained during the late 1990s at “innovative and entrepreneurial” Airtours, where she was instrumental in introducing market-firsts such as long-haul ski package holidays to America and Canada, gave her a different viewpoint early on.

“There's a lot of talk now about purpose, and then other people say ‘that's bullshit, it's just a washing powder’. Whereas a holiday really matters to people, and for the average person it’s the best week of their year: it's better than Christmas.”

The experience, she says, taught her to always properly understand the product, and customers’ interactions with it, “in the real world”. “I see my role as to understand people and to make sure that understanding is held onto through the creative process. We have to remember why the average person may have voted for Brexit, or thinks Boris is OK. It's the bubble stuff: we have to look outside ourselves at what's happening to the customer. How do we tap into that to deliver something creatively that will resonate?” Harris asks.

Maximising a “distinctive asset”

This resonance was achieved in Harris’s previous role as chief marketing officer at GoCompare, where she enlisted Wynne Evans, the man who has played Gio Compario in the GoCompare adverts since 2009, to appear as himself, not singing, in the brand’s 2019 ads. In the work, created by Droga5 London, Evans gets behind the wheel to re-enact an accident that led to a real car-insurance claim, and appears as himself to narrate the events.

“He’s famous, but he's also quite irritating, so the debate was; do we keep him or do we lose him?” But Harris discovered a third way – she would evolve the creative so that it diversified but still delivered all the benefits of a “distinctive asset”, as described by marketing experts Byron Sharpe and Mark Ritson. “It has given them more tools in their toolset,” Harris says.

What makes a good creative marketer and a good creative agency partner, says Harris, is being “driven by the numbers”, and to think about short-term as well as long-term goals.

“The value of numbers can be forgotten in marketing. For all the talk about brand and purpose, actually we're here to sell products, and you have to hold on to that for commercial success.”