290 - The Role of AI in Marketing: Challenges and Opportunities for Authentic Brand Building with Magic Camp's Holly Willis

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Hey, Holly Willis, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of a relatively new company based in the Chicago area called Magic camp.co. As I understand it, you have a really interesting and unique approach to doing marketing agency branding and stuff like that. So tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Hi, well, thank you for having me. It's lovely to, to talk with you today. I have an unusual way into marketing and advertising. I think I, I set off originally wanting to either become an opera singer or go into foreign policy.

So, wow, that's pretty divergent.

Couldn't be more different, which is what I went to school for. I was an opera major. I double majored in opera and political science, and I graduated from college in the heart of the recession. And really, that was the main reason I didn't end up going to law school, was because I figured that if I wanted to go to law school, I had to really not just love law, but also wanna be a lawyer. And I had a couple internships in college, it for a PR and communications company because one of my best friends worked there that I really loved. And so decided that I didn't— law school wasn't gonna be the route for me. And I had the privilege of working in LA of starting off in the entertainment business. So I worked for 20th Century Fox and then the network. Helping to launch TV shows. And it was at the very beginning of social media and branding and marketing. And entertainment was really one of the first industries that had dipped their toe into what did social media mean for a brand perspective. And for me, it was really exciting because it felt just really fun. I was in my early 20s and I got to watch TV shows for a living and research what were people's perspectives on character development and storylines. And then we also got to work with brands for product placements. And then eventually I went into the internal advertising team where we got to do the promotional materials, the billboards, the parties, the events, and create holistic experiences around stories and around TV shows. And at the time, brands weren't really thinking holistically like that when it came to marketing and advertising. They were thinking much more directly, more traditionally, creating a TV spot, a radio spot, print out of home, maybe some events here and there. But social and digital was super new. And so I had to, I planned to stay in entertainment, came back to Chicago for some family reasons, and the, there was no entertainment opportunities in Chicago at that time. And the next closest thing was advertising. And I, Very luckily got a job at the, my dream agency at the time was called 360i. It's now part of Dentsu Creative, which is a large holding company. And the reason they were my dream agency at the time is they were the leaders in social and digital media and advertising and one of the first agencies that was really specializing in pairing creative ideation and brand with social media. And we also did a lot of the early brand influencer programs. Which if you think about in 2011, 2012, no one was really thinking about influencers. It was all mom blogs and pinned recipes on Pinterest, maybe some fashion styling. But what was really exciting about that was we got to be very innovative and try a lot of new things that were at the time considered very rogue and very different. I remember having some of the very early conversations around what pro— programmatic media is, which is pretty standard. And if anyone here who isn't in brand or marketing, programmatic media is basically just using data and digital tools to target your audiences with specific advertising. But that was really new back then. I had a great experience there. I was also exposed to not just advertising and marketing, but also how to operationally run a team. I had a really unique job there because I was also supporting the head of the Chicago office, which had been opened for, to support a specific new business client. So part of my role was also to help with office infrastructure management. So that was everything from ordering food and snacks for the office to helping with all the new hire paperwork and managing finances and looking into insurance programs. And when we did renovations around the office space, helping to coordinate with the designers on getting everything laid out and making sure that we stayed to budget. And so I was, I had the privilege of really getting early on exposure to what it means to run a business, not just what it meant to build a brand. And then also while I was there, that company was it was started as an independent agency and was purchased by a holding company. And because I was the most junior person supporting the office, anytime the senior executive leadership team came in and needed to have meetings, I was the person that was responsible for putting the slides together and making sure that the meeting notes were taken appropriately and next steps were handled. And so I got really early on exposure to the business of advertising, which I have come to realize later on in my career is actually quite rare that most people know how to handle the expertise of advertising and brand, but don't understand how our industry makes money or how the most executive levels of financials are handled. Now, I was not managing anything at that time to that level, but I had exposure to it and I tended to be someone who was really curious and asked a lot of questions. And so throughout my career, I was given a lot of incredible opportunities by mentors and managers. I got to sit client side a couple times, which was the best opportunity I could have had because it allowed me to see the pressures, the bureaucracies, and the infrastructure on my client's end. So it changed my perspective in, in terms of how I work with them. Quite significantly because what seemed to be a simple question or request on the agency side could actually have a very loaded answer on the client side. And so learning to really understand why questions were being asked or the context for which requests were being made has been a really tremendous opportunity for myself to better understand the perspectives of my clients and their businesses, but also in how we reshaped and retooled how our agency is structured. So I spent the next decade working at a lot of really big global clients and accounts and launching, um, products, and then went to an independent agency in Chicago, helping to turn it to a profitable business and expanding a production company before I was, had an opportunity to go out on my own and launch the venture we're talking about, which is our agency Magic Camp.

Wow. You ever run across a guy by the name of Matt Wassiloff?

I don't believe so. No.

He was the guy that invented video advertising back when modems were running at 56 baud.

Amazing. That's impressive.

I interviewed him yesterday on this show.

No way. That is so funny. That's really impressive.

It was pretty, yeah, very interesting guy. He lives back in New York. So what caused you to leave the corporate agency business to start your own firm?

I think like many industries, advertising and marketing was incredibly disrupted by COVID. It was, we were already going through a very big evolution as an industry as it was. A lot of that is economically driven. I think with new technology and infrastructures coming into play, that has impacted our industry quite a bit as well. But COVID really changed, from my perspective, the general outlook on marketing and advertising. It was an industry that felt like we had to keep going during the pandemic. It did. We didn't stop at all, but there was quite a few layoffs and furloughs, I think as many industries felt. And I don't think that from a environment, we've totally rebounded since then. It's become a much less happy place to work as an industry. I think there's almost a sense of nihilism and scarcity within our industry. I think everyone feels incredibly nervous about the potential disruption of AI and what that's gonna do to our agencies. You've started to see a lot of agencies move to lower profit margins and smaller teams and then the ones that are still have robust teams, see those folks working incredibly hard, long hours. And advertising has for many years, especially when I first got into it, was considered a really cool, sexy, exciting business to be in. And it was very adjacent to entertainment and we got to be creative for a living. So we got to work with musicians and art artists and create stories. And I really got into this business because I wanted to positively impact culture and be able to tell stories that felt like they resonated with everybody, not just myself. And I think when you see that a lot of your most successful and hardest working friends and colleagues are just really unhappy, I realized that it wasn't an environment that I wanted to continue to propel forward. And so I had a, a unique opportunity to partner with an investor to create a different agency dynamic. And the whole reason we created our agency was because we felt like there was an opportunity to create a happier, more, um, positive work environment that had healthier relationships with our clients and produced more positive work that went out into the world so that hopefully that the messages that we create are more inclusive by design, are happier by design, and contribute positively to culture, where I think some of that has fallen off a little bit in our industry.

So the company's called Magic Camp, and the website's magiccamp.co. You've been open now for 6 months?

Yes. Yes.

How's, how's it worked out so far?

It's been great. We are designed quite differently than a typical advertising agency. We actually would call ourselves more like a consulting firm in many ways. We do a lot of marketing consulting and strategy along with advertising, and we work very heavily upstream with our clients. So I've, I did about 6 months of research prior to launching the agency to really understand the operational systems that were driving a lot of this unhappy culture. And it was not just unhappy culture within the agency systems, but it was also a lot of turnover with our clients. I've, I have a few stats because I'm a big numbers gal, but advertising actually has the highest turnover of any industry outside of tourism, which is designed for turnover. And we are also seeing incredible amount of attrition between agencies and clients. I think it's about 3.2 years is the average tenure of a CMO, and the agency-client relationship is anywhere between 18 months to 3 years. When advertising the current model, which is basically the same as what it was at when it was first created, that model relied on agency-client relationships of 15+ years. So when you start to see an incredibly decreased attrition around your consumer base, any marketer will tell you that it's really expensive to acquire new customers. It's always cheaper to to keep a current customer. Those are the most valuable ones that you want to have. And so as an industry, a lot of what we would preach to our clients about your customer base and the way in which you should market and brand yourself, we weren't doing as an industry. And we, I found that a lot of the pain points that have created not only the internal friction points, but also the attrition rates with clients has to do with the lack of knowledge about the business. And most, I mentioned this earlier, but most agencies Unfortunately, because we're not trained this way, don't get a lot of exposure to the business of advertising, let alone the business of our clients. And so when we're making recommendations or strategic point of views that are meant to come from an incredibly nuanced and learned space, lack a lot of the business context, makes that a much tougher sell for our marketing partners. And so The main reason that we have moved so upstream is because we really need to understand the business context for which we're making recommendations before we can provide anything creative.

When a client comes into your agency, one of the things you're looking at is what are their business objectives and goals and how are we going to measure those? It's not just return on ad spend. It's how are we really going to measure and understand whether or not your marketing and advertising dollars are You're going to ROI.

100%. I think we find we have a conversations a lot about how we think that the, no pun intended, magic exists between the tension of business and brand. Mm-hmm. Because especially as we start to see how AI is gonna impact everything, then that's everything from manufacturing, product development, innovation, HR, operational needs. The thing that we are already seeing, all research is showing, is that yes, basic ads you can get from AI, but people inherently, and we don't know why, understand when an ad isn't totally real and there lacks that human depth and connection and, and point. And I think we also need to look at both micro and macroeconomic factors because there's a lot of inherent tension. Brand building is by nature a long-term play. And there's a lot of conversation around, are you trying to do things that perform against your business right now? Are you trying to drive towards sales? What's your CAGR? Are, are you, are you hitting all of your metrics that the board needs to see versus investing in your brand long-term? And we really believe that with AI coming in, that tension is gonna become even more critical and more crucial because you're gonna start to see the push and pull of, am I investing right now in my brand for long-term success, or am I investing in hitting immediate immediate sales goals and business goals right now.

That's a tough call.

It's a very tough call. And I think that as agencies, we have a much bigger responsibility to understand where the, those pressures come from, because that's what our senior marketers and their boards and the rest of the C-suite is balancing is how do you make decisions that keep you in business and competitive right now versus investing in things that keep you in business and competitive Maybe even 6 months from now.

Right.

And so if we don't really understand those pressures of the push and pull, how can we provide an informed recommendation or strategy, especially when it has dollars attached to it from an investment standpoint?

I totally get that. And that's a difficult problem. And it, it's complicated by the fact that in any kind of marketing or branding, there is so much noise out there. That it's really expensive to punch through the noise and get noticed.

Yes.

And how do you deal with that? That's it. And that's really, especially for a smaller company or a newer company trying to get noticed, it's tough.

It's really— I think, I do think it's very tough. I think it's tough for the, even the biggest of companies who have huge dollars, because even if you are able to break through, consumers have an incredible level of scrutiny right now.

Right.

And I think for us, we, I think the word authenticity is oftentimes overused and has lost a lot of contextual meaning. I think it still is really valid when it comes to brand building, but a lot of that comes from having a point of view.

Right.

And so if you don't inherently as a business or a brand have a point of view around what you want your impact to be in the world, not just the products you sell or the services that you deliver, but really why do you exist at your most basic, most intrinsic level, it's really hard to have a consistent point of view that you then are able to break through with. And I believe that creativity is breaking through that in the most interesting way. And so you can have really interesting creative, but if it doesn't match up with a business or a business's point of view, it's not very great brand building. And so for us, it is that balance. It's I think for a long time people talked about it as art and science, and I think that's true to some degree, but a lot of it is just making smart calls and being able to react and getting everybody who is in the decision-making space on the same page really quickly. And I think we've found that you might be using the same words, but when they lack context, those words could mean something really different from one person to another.

How do you help clients align their brand vision with who they really are? They may have, right?

Yeah.

They may have a brand vision that does not align with who they are, but they want the brand, but it, it's not supported by the values or cultures of the company.

Those are oftentimes the, the trickiest conversations to navigate, especially if you have a bold marketer who wants to make a big impact, who works at a really conservative client base, I would say number one is first of all, getting everyone on the same page. Like I mentioned, I think bold is one of my favorite words that is misunderstood when you're in a briefing because you might have one person saying bold and it could mean that they really want to be bold when it comes to culture. And that means something very different than bold within your category, which means something very different from bold compared to what your company has done before. And so we try to get rid of any jargony terms or adjectives or words that have different kinds of meanings and really look at, okay, what does that at its base level mean?

Words that are ambiguous.

Exactly.

Anything like bold is ambiguous word. It can mean many things to many people. And of course, this is where listening comes in, isn't it?

Exactly. And I think that oftentimes people mistake, the biggest communication mistake is not listening to the context around a word because it can be so ambiguous. And so for us, it's about getting all of the decision makers on the same page and getting rid of any of that ambiguity.

So I take it, and I know how I would do it, but if you're in a meeting and somebody uses the term bold or uses some other buzzword that was ambiguous, do you stop and say, wait a minute. What do you, what exactly do you mean by that? How do you measure that? What's it look like? What's it feel like? Give me some definition. Give me some specificity. It has to be your job, I would think, to stop the conversation and say, don't bullshit me.

Ideally, we'll, if we're walking into a room with a lot of different leaders who might have different objectives, we will have prepped for that meeting to understand individually what they want to make sure that everyone feels really set, set up for success in those conversations because Part of what I find is that a lot of times people use that word and they haven't done the internal homework to understand, and that they use those words because they've either heard them from other coworkers or colleagues. They're jargony words that they hear from the industry that feel like cues that mean success or mean that they're doing something great. And then if you put them in a context, if you put them in a situation where they feel like they have to be put on the spot and answer, have a, prepared answer, that they might feel really up against the wall. And I personally feel like shame is one of the most powerful drivers towards breaking down a relationship. Right. And so for us, we do try to have some of those deep dive conversations individually first so that we don't ever put someone in a pressure cooker situation. But if we are in a situation where there is quite a bit of, like, quite a bit of conversation or different perspectives and there is a lot of jargony terms, we like to let a lot of that conversation happen, and then we pick a, a moment where there's maybe a little bit of a lull to summarize what we're hearing. There you go. And then without using any one specific person, wrap up, okay, I love this idea of bold. What does bold mean to all of us in this room? I'm hearing it in this context. I'm hearing it in this context. I'm hearing it in this context. Let's talk about where that's gonna take you depending on which way we go. And then really aligning it on what potential success looks like and the implications to business and finding ways to make everyone have an opportunity to speak and to be heard, but to break it down for them because sometimes people don't even realize that they're using so much of that because it's become such colloquial commonplace.

That's leadership. What you're, what you just defined is what leaders are supposed to do.

Thank you.

And it's so interesting to me that sometimes it takes outside perspective to come in and guide a team through some of these very difficult decisions because they can't do it for themselves for one reason or another.

And I don't find it that surprising though, because I think you have to imagine that there's different stakes when you're having that conversation with your boss or with your boss's boss or with a peer that you're vying for the same promotion against than if an outside person comes in and is able to provide—

Clarity.

—a perspective that has— I don't have those same stakes. I'm not vying for that same promotion. I am not trying to impress my boss and make sure that they know that I'm their biggest champion. I'm here to just get to the right answer for the team. I'm not trying to get my answer to be correct.

You talked earlier about how you were thinking about going into the Foreign Service. Look at you now, Miss— Missed it on that, right? And doing a lot of conflict resolution in a really sophisticated way. So what is it that gets you up in the morning? You've been doing this now for a while. You got your business going for 6 months. You're obviously very articulate, very intelligent, and smart. What motivates you to do the work you're doing? Thank you.

That's very kind of you. I I think I have a lot of passion for this business and I have loved it at most of my career. I think at its best, advertising and marketing can be one of the best careers you can get into. You are able to learn about people. You are at the forefront of innovation and technology. You get to still work with creative people all of the time. The work is different every single day, so it's never routine and it's never boring. It's always, it can be really exciting. And I think I'm not ready to give up on advertising, and I don't think I'm gonna have all of the answers, but I think that if we can start to put a different process in place and pressure test others to really problem solve around not just the work that we produce, but the ways in which we produce it to get to happier, healthier, more positive communities and organizations, I do think that the nature of the work we produce will be healthier, more inclusive, and happier work. And I think when you look at culture right now, there's so much fragmentation and there's so much conflict around it's us versus them, you versus me, right versus wrong. And really, I would love for there to be more middle ground. I think people have more in common than they have different. But we are so trained right now to call out the differences rather than to celebrate them. And so I, and I think that advertising plays a big part of that. I think why and how we've gotten to that has largely been through our communications. And I, I think social media is a big part of that and it's a big enough machine. I'm not gonna be able to change that, but I do think in how we manage our brands and the examples that brands that have media dollars set expectations around the way in which they create attention, if that can be more positive in nature, that hopefully that can start to shift some of those conversations to be more positive in general.

Yeah, I, I agree with everything you're saying. In fact, it's so much so that I've devoted my life to teaching people how to listen each other into existence. And when we learn how to listen, And not to the words. The problem is we've been taught, ordered to listen to words. Words are meaningless in relationship. What's important in relationship are emotions. And when we learn how to listen to emotions rather than to words and validate people's emotional experiences and what they're feeling and what they're going through, they feel deeply heard and connected. It doesn't matter whether you're polarized politically with that person. Once they feel heard, you're able to have a conversation and to your exact point, find out that we have far more in common than we have in difference. And that, that to me is really important. And teaching, my goal is to teach as many people these skills as I possibly can because I've watched the transformations occur and it's mind-boggling. And you're absolutely right. And you're looking at advertising as being when properly executed, conceived and executed, can bring people together as opposed to driving people apart.

Yeah, I guess I, that eloquently is putting into perspective a lot of, I guess really what is my main motivation is trying to bring more community and bringing people together through a medium that I happen to know pretty well. Right. And I think, I think when you look at social media in general, it has trained us to put our culture's currency around attention, and that could be good or bad attention. Mm-hmm. And I think I listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of books around how we make decisions at a neurological level. But if you just, a basic one, if you go to like fight or flight response, if you are in a place of fear or shame, or you feel physically on, you're tired, or you're just not at your best, we typically tend to react quickly. It's much faster to do that in a negative way, in a reactive way. It requires—

it takes much less energy metabolically.

Metabolically, it takes a lot less energy to just have a reaction. Right. And it takes a lot more energy to be patient, to be thoughtful, to listen, to absorb, and then react. And unfortunately, I think when you look at advertising or communications in general, we have trained culture that the currency is around speed. It's not around thoughtfulness. It's not necessarily around quality. And so in an environment where from a work perspective, we have to be able to react quickly. So much of what we are trying to do is how do we start upstream earlier so that a lot of the patient, thoughtful, kind responses are prepared for so that when we are put into the quote unquote fight or flight response, we don't come from the reactive, scared, emotionally drained place. We come from the more positive place. That's just not how our industry has evolved to, though. So I think, I think as much as we can try to help people spend more time in the upfront with preparation and even in terms of our work culture coming from a place of patience and kindness and thoughtfulness. The work that they create will become happier and will become more thoughtful, will become kinder, rather than just the reactionary, I need to do this because I need to get attention quickly. Right.

Yeah, I was just having this vision of these larger companies putting out stuff on social media and streaming and wherever they're doing placements of images and ideas of people connecting rather than disconnecting. And my pro— our product, our service is designed to connect community, not to draw people apart. You can do these beautiful, really poignant messaging and stories around that. How cool would that be? I hope that's where we move to.

I really hope that's collectively what everyone sees being the necessity of our future.

Exactly. I'm glad you're out there driving that change because it would be, it could have a tremendous influence. Over the next couple of decades, and we're going to need that influence if we're going to survive as a, as a species and as a country. Yeah. One last question. I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself personally, Holly, that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Normally, if I'm asked a question like this, I say that I was an opera major, but I revealed that at the very beginning of this call. Oh. I feel I'm not totally sure how to answer that now. I think probably that I tend— I'm actually a social introvert. I am a very social person by nature. I love being around people. I love going to concerts and sports games, but I think I don't get energy from those places. I— they do really drain me. I enjoy them so much and I love being around people, but I do need a lot of alone time to recharge. And that binary look of, are you introverted or extroverted? I never really totally fit in one of those boxes, and it took me a very long time to understand that I don't get recharged from a lot of people, and it really impacted how I work, how I create social spaces. When I'm tired, how do I recharge? And learning that about myself really has helped me tremendously. It's also not naturally where I gravitate towards, but Whenever I tell people that, they are very surprised. I'm not.

And I will tell you that of the almost 300 episodes of this podcast that I've done interviewing leaders, the vast majority, 99.9% of them are introverts. Hmm. I have found very few successful leaders who are not introverts. Isn't that interesting?

That is interesting. Yeah. I think it's because it can be a very lonely place. It's a very, in many ways it can be, you have to make a lot of decisions by yourself, even if you are surrounded by amazing people.

And I think that to your point, introverted people take, get their energy from the inside and extroverted people pull their energy from the outside. And I think that if you have a tendency towards introversion, you're going to tend to be more reflective and thought about what's going on as opposed to the extrovert. So that may, that might be part of the cause. I don't know. But it's just a very interesting that When I ask my guests that question and they say, I'm an introvert, the answer, it's so common. Interesting. I'm an introvert myself. And so I understand that. Anyways, this has been a really amazing conversation. I wish you the best with your venture. You obviously are a thoughtful, and as I said before, intelligent woman who is really thinking deeply about some topics that I think are really important. So thanks for doing what you're doing and thanks for being with me today.

Thank you so much. You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.