Run with Foxes: Make Better Marketing Decisions

By Paul Dervan

Paul Dervan has spent 20 years in marketing, working for high-profile brands, creating new ones and helping to rescue those that have got in trouble. He was also given the unique opportunity to build a marketing lab where he undertook hundreds of experiments to see what really worked – and what didn't.

He’s been up close with some of the world’s finest marketers, and seen both successes and failures – sometimes on a colossal scale.

Run With Foxes is a blistering, must-read collection of real-life stories from this fascinating world, revealing the messy reality of decision-making in marketing and the secrets of making better decisions.

The fact is, most marketing lessons that get shared come from successful campaigns; marketers are too afraid to be honest about mistakes. But everyone makes mistakes in marketing: and there are hugely valuable and unique lessons to be learned from taking a closer look at failures big and small.

Breaking open marketing triumphs and disasters with brutal honesty, as well as sharing exclusive first-hand interviews with some of the world’s most respected marketers, this is the ultimate insider’s guide to being a better marketer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harriman House
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780857197733

Paul Dervan

Paul Dervan currently consults with marketing teams on their decision-making. Previously he was the Global Brand Director at Indeed, the world’s largest and fastest growing job site, with over 200 million visitors every month. There, he was tasked with growing the brand in multiple markets, managing a global team of 80 people, and was responsible for investment of hundreds of millions of advertising dollars. He also started a Marketing Campaign Lab, where he created and tested hundreds of marketing experiments in America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Before that, Paul was with PokerStars, the world’s largest online poker brand, as Creative Director for their Full Tilt brand. He was responsible for repositioning and relaunching the brand as part of their brand portfolio, targeting new mobile audiences. Prior to this Paul worked for Telefonica, in various roles. He was Brand Director in their Digital Unit in London, focusing on launching youth brands in Ireland and Latin America. He was Head of Brand for O2 in Ireland during the brand’s most successful period, becoming market leader of postpaid segments, with 35% market share.

Book preview

Run With Foxes

Make better marketing decisions

Paul Dervan

Thank you to my beautiful and wonderfully patient wife Marta. And also to my mum for putting up with talk of foxes and hedgehogs for the past year. To my brilliant twin boys, Alex and Max – my genuine hope is that you grow up to be foxes, like your grandad.

Contents

Contents

About the Author

Preface

1

I didn’t wear a seat belt

2

We are hedgehogs

3

A hedgehog that believes in being a fox

4

The first thing I’d do

5

Differentiate, or die trying

6

Serial killer

7

Only a desperate, insecure idiot would buy a Vespa these days. (I own two)

8

I’m breaking up with Tesco

9

Loyal. Just not faithful

10

I’m just not going to buy six large coffees a day

11

Good enough

12

Firstly, Paul, that’s not even legal

13

When we needed less efficiency

14

Thieves

15

The surest way to lose your budget

16

Brand marketers have a brand problem

17

So brand campaigns sell. Who knew, eh?

18

We need to eat today

19

A rather unfortunate truth

20

What we carry in our heads

21

What is brand salience, anyway?

22

Not just the pipes

23

My narrative fallacy

24

Perhaps we do buy from clowns

25

Spectacularly untargeted

26

I wish my son had cancer

27

Swing for the fences occasionally

28

There was fear in the room

29

So we made a TV ad in Japanese, for Ireland

30

We need to talk about monkeys

31

Paul, you know that’s not a test, right?

32

Must we grab their attention?

33

Sciency marketing

34

Teenagers don’t talk on the phone. They text. Right?

35

My hunch was wrong. Damn

36

No wins this quarter. Again

37

Bake failure into the process

38

All generalisations are false. Including this one

39

The first draft of anything is shit

40

Seek out people who don’t like your work

41

They are not rules

42

The memory-making business

43

I’ve killed a hell of a lot of people to get to this point

Publishing details

About the Author

Paul Dervan currently consults with marketing teams on their decision-making. Previously he was the Global Brand Director at Indeed, the world’s largest and fastest growing job site, with over 250 million visitors every month. There, he was tasked with growing the brand in multiple markets, managing a global team of 80 people, and was responsible for investment of hundreds of millions of advertising dollars. He also started a Marketing Campaign Lab, where he created and tested hundreds of marketing experiments in America, Europe, Australia and Asia.

Before that, Paul was with PokerStars, the world’s largest online poker brand, as Creative Director for their Full Tilt brand. He was responsible for repositioning and relaunching the brand as part of their brand portfolio, targeting new mobile audiences.

Prior to this Paul worked for Telefonica, in various roles. He was Brand Director in their Digital Unit in London, focusing on launching youth brands in Ireland and Latin America. He was Head of Brand for O2 in Ireland during the brand’s most successful period, becoming market leader of postpaid segments, with 35% market share.

Preface

I was in a client-agency meeting several months ago where I was referred to as the ‘numbers guy’. While somewhat amusing, it was a little worrying. I’m not the numbers guy. I was the only marketer in my MBA class, where colleagues called me the ‘colouring-in guy’.

As long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with how brands and marketing communications work. Measurement is not really what excites me. Doing better work excites me. And if I really wanted to get better at this marketing gig, I needed to understand this effectiveness stuff. As it turns out, the numbers are the easy bit. Persuading people to believe them is far harder.

I’m not the same marketer I was 15, or even ten, years ago. There are things I believed then that I do not now. And things I believe now that I too quickly dismissed back then. Truth be told, I’m far less certain in my decisions, less sure about what works, and far happier to be this way.

I wrote this book for client-side marketers. Folks like me. The goal is to offer up some humble views that may help your own decision-making. The decisions we face year in, year out. I write here about brand positioning, about acquiring new customers and about keeping them. I dip into the complexity of advertising decisions. Making ads. Getting ads approved. There is arguably a very fine line between bravery and unnecessary risk. I dig into the evidence of what works, and try to answer honestly why, at times, I ignored it.

This is not a book of answers. Mostly because, more often than not, the best answer is ‘it depends’. That said, I do believe that some bets are better than others. I’ve placed my fair share of wrong bets and reflect on them here. I’ve tried to write a book that I believe would have helped me 15 years ago. I’d like to believe that I would have made fewer mistakes if I had. Who knows. While writing this, I interviewed and quizzed about 40 marketers, many of whom are global experts and authorities. These interactions forced me to go back and challenge some of the beliefs I held as gospel. It was genuinely painful at times.

The chapters are only a few pages each. Keep them short was the advice I received from the talented marketer, and my close friend, Conor Byrne. And none of your usual meandering shite he added. I do have a structure and loose narrative throughout the book, and some chapters start when the previous one finished. But you don’t need to rigidly follow this. You may not even notice it.

A final note. Many of my stories involve advertising. The simple reason for this is that much of my experience, my mistakes and learnings included advertising or communications of some sort. But marketing and advertising are not the same. I would hate for this book to add to this misunderstanding. Advertising is just one piece of this. And a far smaller piece perhaps, than I once believed. Even if advertising is not part of your marketing world, I’m hoping you see this as a specialist book that offers up nuggets of general wisdom.

1

I didn’t wear a seat belt

I spent seven months working on a new, global, multi-million-euro marketing campaign. Too long – I know. It was full on. A passionate, smart, hard-working team sweated the details to create something of which we could be proud.

Internally, there was a strong reaction to the campaign. Many loved it. Some didn’t. I’d have preferred it if everybody loved it, but could live with polarised views. Beats indifference, I told myself.

After the normal last-minute panics, edits and challenges, we launched. We saw an initial uptick in our metrics in the first week. Then a small gradual decline, after which it levelled out – back to where we had started.

And I had predicted great things. Stupid. Stupid.

So, did I fail? Yes, of course. It still pains me to say it, but it was a failure. My failure. The temptation is to skirt around failure. Call it something else. Talk about unforeseen competitor activity. Or simply move the goalposts – easy to do in marketing.

But the fact was that I had predicted we’d hit certain goals within a time frame and this hadn’t happened.

Was it a bad decision? Or just a poor outcome? I’ve subsequently learned that it is better to evaluate decisions based on the actual decision-making process you use – not the outcome. A decision to drive a car without a seat belt is a bad one. Just because you didn’t crash this time, doesn’t change this. It is possible to make a good decision and the outcome still not go your way. One way to think about this is to ask if, given the opportunity to make this decision again, would I? With this campaign, I would not. It was a bad decision.

While I am not 100% certain, I believe I made a tactical marketing error. A rookie error. But I wasn’t a rookie. Nor were the people working with me. I’ll get to this specific marketing mistake later. I’ve a full chapter on it. But the more interesting question is: how did I make it?

Professor James Reason writes about human error. He distinguishes between slips, violations and mistakes.1 Slips are execution errors. You did something by accident. Violations are when someone deliberately does the wrong thing. Such as fraud.

And then there are mistakes. Mistakes sound innocuous. But they are dangerous – because they’re difficult to spot. Mistakes are things you do on purpose but which end with unintended consequences. Your mental model of the world was wrong. The problem is, we often don’t know we’ve made them. So we don’t improve next time.

That is what happened to me: my mental model was wrong. Several years earlier, I launched a campaign that was very successful. Don’t worry, you’ll hear all about it. This success partly shaped my views about advertising. Because the results were so good, I assumed that the decisions I made were good ones. Some were. But others were not. I had missed the other possible reasons that might have contributed to this success. I was guilty of what is known as a narrative fallacy.2 This is where we use flawed stories of the past to shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future.

My success led to a later failure. I didn’t wear a seat belt all those years ago. And because I didn’t crash, I stopped wearing one.

Then I crashed.

2

W

e are hedgehogs

This is a book about decision-making. Specifically marketing decisions. I’ve spent 20 years in marketing. Every year I discover new things that make me seriously question the beliefs I’ve held and the decisions I’ve made along the way. It’s pretty humbling.

I’ve been lucky, though. I’ve been tasked to manage some truly wonderful brands. To create new ones. To take a stab at troubled ones. I was even given the opportunity to build a marketing lab – to create hundreds of experiments. To test theories. And I got up-and-close with some of the world’s finest marketers, incredible people who challenged and changed how I think.

I’ve had some successes and failures. While I’ve enjoyed the pleasure the