Failing Forward: How Missing the Mark Can Fuel Advertising Innovation

Resilience in the face of failure isn't just advantageous; it's foundational. Every agency, regardless of size or renown, experiences the highs of successful campaigns and the lows of rejected pitches. It's the nature of the business, where constant flux is the norm and adaptability is essential. For better or for worse - the advertising industry is built on this way of operating.

Released in March, the Lions' State of Creativity report claimed that 70 per cent of respondents believed that 'allowing people the freedom to fail' was highly effective in boosting creative output.

In an industry known for chasing groundbreaking ideas, embracing failure as a catalyst for growth is crucial.

Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer of Mastercard, stated, "Failure is a crucial element of success. It indicates that we’re pushing ourselves to think differently and innovate."

He reveals that he allocates a separate innovation budget to his teams to allow them to experiment and learn, without any expectation of tangible results.

"This grants my team members the freedom to explore new ideas without the fear of falling short of a traditional benchmark. Although testing and learning often lead to necessary pivots, they provide valuable insights that bring us closer to our consumers," adds Rajamannar.

Advertising agencies, by their very nature, operate in a realm where wins and losses are part of the daily grind. Each pitch, campaign, or creative project represents an opportunity to innovate but also poses a risk of falling short. Understanding and accepting this transient nature is key to fostering a culture that not only tolerates failure but encourages it as a springboard for future success.

Successful agencies embody this mindset by creating environments where experimentation is celebrated, and failure is reframed as a necessary part of the creative process. Ben Shaw, the recently appointed CSO of Mullen Lowe, underscores this approach, advocating that innovation thrives in spaces where risk-taking is encouraged and where learning from both successes and setbacks is ingrained into the organisational DNA.

Shaw highlights the importance of embracing failure as a means of gathering insights and improving outcomes, thereby fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation within agencies.

By embracing failure as a natural part of the creative process, you not only build resilience but also unlock new possibilities for innovation and growth. Mel Arrow, CSO of McCann London, emphasises the importance of acknowledging setbacks and failures as opportunities for growth and learning within the creative industry. In an industry where change is constant and creativity is king, the ability to turn setbacks into stepping stones is not just a skill—it's a mindset that propels you toward lasting success.

We ask industry experts how they approach setbacks and failures and the strategies they employ to turn them into opportunities for growth.

Jo Arden, CSO, Ogilvy

You need to be an optimist to work in our industry. We make incredible things out of imagination, perseverance and hustle. Above all else it is a confidence game. Turning setbacks into success is a core skill.

One setback we all have in common is the pitch loss. No matter how great the agency or talented the team, no-one wins the day, everyday. My advice is to get the pitching team together as soon as they’ve had a rest and run a thorough but fast wash-up. Reflecting so soon afterwards means you get the unfiltered feelings about what we’d do if we were doing it all again. Waiting for the result risks losing the motivation to unpick problem areas.

If you approach everyday believing that everyone, like you, has turned up to do their best, you won’t go far wrong. Support for each other comes from that place. It helps us remember that even when things have not gone to plan, the people at the eye of the storm were acting with good intentions.

That doesn’t mean moving immediately past the difficult conversations. When fuck ups happen, we need to know why. The ability to take responsibility is as much a leadership skill as supporting people through troubled waters.

We also can’t learn from every misstep – that’s a bit ‘everyone gets a medal’. Seeing what went wrong is not the same as being able to avoid the same mistake again. The optimism which means we often win, can also mean we lose. Accepting that is perhaps the most valuable lesson of all.

Ben Shaw, CSO, Mullen Lowe

Failure with a capital C.

Mandate failure. Every project should have failure built into it.

In creative agencies presenting the answer is seen as bold and decisive.

In startups following one route to the answer is naive, short-sighted, and risky. Startups explore multiple paths to success, knowing some routes have an increased failure rate, but they allow collating more data about what could be right.

The wrong can validate the right.

Never present one strategy, never present just one route, it implies you already know what the answer is and there is nothing to learn. Which is the exact opposite of the reality of creative development.

There isn’t a perfect answer, there isn’t a perfect process, and there isn’t one way to make things. If there were, it would already be perfectly replicable (and we’d be replaced by now!)

There is always something to learn from a 'no'.

Creativity so often isn’t A to B, it’s A to B to C, but you wouldn’t get C without the B.

Mandate failure to find out what C is.

Mel Arrow, CSO, McCann London

As an industry, we do a lot of celebrating success, but failure is pretty much ignored. Lost a pitch? Bury it, burn it, never talk about it again… When I left an agency a few years ago, in a parody of this behaviour, I decided to turn my leaving email into “a list of all my failures”. I had a tonne of replies saying how liberating it was. In short, what I’m saying is, the best thing we can do to turn setbacks into opportunities for growth, is to acknowledge those setbacks wholeheartedly. Look at them from every angle and learn from them. We rely so heavily on wins that it’s natural to find the losses too difficult to look at. But we need to break that tendency and stare into the sun.

We work in a creative industry that is changing fast. New media frontiers, new tech advancements. Every day needs to be about new ideas, and every new idea involves risk. Or at least the good ones do. This is the new norm. Settle into it.

I think it’s important to remember that as an ideas industry, there’s a real human side to things not going to plan. It’s not about a product malfunctioning, it’s inside our brains. Setbacks feel closer to home. So, an allowance for the full spectrum of human emotion, from swearing to crying, should be factored in. Add it to the timesheet. But then we need to move on, just as passionately.

Get curious. I’m convinced curiosity is the answer to everything from work stress to starting a new business to imposter syndrome. Every new pitch win, loss, risk or project development is a new thing to be curious about. It puts fear, self-blame, and other unhelpful feelings to one side and forces you to be interested and ask questions instead. Why did it happen? What does it mean? What can we do about it? I think someone in Silicon Valley would call it having a ‘growth mindset’, but it’s far less pretentious than that. It’s simple, human curiosity and we all have it in us.

Dan Hulse, CSO, St Luke's

Making the odd mistake isn’t just inevitable, it’s desirable. Neuroscientist Dr Andrew Huberman has actually put a number on it: we should aim for an ‘error rate’ of 15%. He explains that when we make a mistake, it activates neural circuits so we pay more attention and learn more effectively.

That sounds great, but how do you do it in practice? At St Luke’s, we work hard to keep ourselves in a constant state of learning. Everyone in the agency gets £200 and a day off, every year, to learn something new. We call it ‘Make yourself more interesting’, and people come back with tales of struggling to fix Land Rovers, wakeboard, blow glass or master archery. It doesn’t matter than these things are nothing to do with advertising – in fact, we insist they aren’t – because the whole point is stepping outside of your area of expertise.

We also learn from the work. Four times a year, we have a Flag Meeting where we share every single piece of work. Not just the high-profile projects, or the triumphs, but the briefs that were more of a struggle. It sends a powerful signal to everyone: every project matters, and every effort should be celebrated. As much as we enjoy seeing the brilliant best bits, we get so much more out of sharing the stories where it wasn’t all plain sailing, or where the team took a big swing that didn’t quite hit. When we have a drink afterwards, those are the projects that get people talking.