I used to dread long drives on summer weekends, but now I just see them as opportunities to catch up on podcasts. So last night while driving home I caught up on Business Week’s Eureka, We Failed, which really got me thinking about how fear of failure is really plaguing the communications industry.

In Canada, we love to delude ourselves, that our clients are the decision-makers, but truthfully many marketing clients in Canada act like branch plants (or even just distribution arms) for their American/Global counterparts. Product development, communication strategies, web content, 30-second spots, and you-name-it are often rammed down our throat unless we can manufacture a focus group or white paper proving that “it won’t work here”. Now sometimes “Canadianizing” American content makes good efficient sense and sometimes it doesn’t, so I am not railing against the practice in general. What does irk me is how this practice compounds the Canadian risk-averse nature (note that I didn’t use the term conservative). Sometimes, we just act like chickens.

I firmly believe that communications operates like an evolutionary system, meaning the messages/memes/ideas that get noticed are the ones are best suited to their audience. This suitability is extremely difficult to predict. So trial and error in messaging and delivery is the very lifeblood of successful communications. This doesn’t mean randomly replacing word’s or images and seeing if it works (as evolutionary mutation does with genes), it is more like how domestic animals have been artificially selected for desirable traits and selectively bred (i.e. cows with big milk udders or dogs for every function/appearance imaginable).

So let’s create a culture where it is okay to experiment and fail, as long as you are smart about it. The Business Week podcast, mentioned the notion of a writing a “failure resumé” where various personal and professional failures are detailed and lessons learned from them are discussed. This seems like a great idea to me for communications professionals, which is supposed to be a creative industry. At the very least, I am going to start asking some leading questions to prospective employees about past failures in my next interviews.
Create. Fail. Adapt. Succeed.

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Posted in Advertising Canada Issues Podcast by dwalker No Comments Yet