Employing Resilience #2: Losing faith

As an example which I think was probably one of the most difficult moments of my career which was we pitched for Yeo Valley the yoghurt and the the client was the owner of Yeo Valley and he came in to BBH and said i’m a large yogurt brand we’ve believed in organic farming my mother

in fact set it up so we’ve been a champion want organic food to be populist we don’t want it just to be a niche middle class thing we’re fed up with seeing fake farms from other brands we are a real farm we want people to see that we’re a real farm and we really would love people to pronounce our name correctly it’s yo and we showed a number of ideas but in that instant it was they want to be big and populist

let’s do a rap band and it’s a bit of a corny idea I suppose but it felt like it ticked all the boxes

and we won the pitch and at that moment Nick Gill who I love dearly came to me and said we can’t do

this is going to be the naffest ad on the whole planet a bunch of rapping farmers are you sure?

Maybe we should try and sell them something else and I was like we’ve won the business on this idea and my heart was sinking and also the idea that you’re going to do the naffest ad and it’s going to be deeply uncool is frightening it is really frightening

and I remember the kind of the mood of the agency shifted against this campaign and the account woman Mel Exon and I hunkered down and together went what do we do oh my god what do we do and we went well we think it’s right we thought it was right we presented it because we thought it’s right so we’re just going to soldier on and do this and we did it and it was a huge success for the business they had a quizillion views I my heart was sinking because you don’t want the the laughter of your peers you want to do something good but you just have to go why did we present this in the first place it absolutely ticked the boxes that we thought needed ticking and yeah it was it was a tough few months doing that I have to tell you