RULESLESS. Feat Jess Wheeler

Jess Wheeler is a long time friend and linkedin hellraiser, and there was probably no-one better to kick off a a long-form interview with, as we discuss the blurred line of *where the rules are*
FFO: Building products in-house, creative agencies agency, Knocked Loose, and probably Carlton Football Club (if you want to hang out with us and hear our weekly whinge)

The general thought behind it was I led the first post with a quote, (I think it's often attributed to Banksy) that said:

It’s like a backhanded compliment because it's also acknowledging that there's all these incredibly talented, creative people in this business and often we're making things that people skip and block and try to avoid.

And I think it's okay to acknowledge that. I think as a business we try to pretend that isn’t the truth, but it is the truth.

And I think it's a humbling place to start from, that we don't have people's attention. We have to earn it.

We need to create things that are worth people's time and attention. So it's about creating a place where people in commercial creativity can just talk about that openly and how can we make the work better?

How can we leverage all this immense talent and resources that we have to make things and put them into the world?

That was the genesis of Death to Shit Ads, and it's just kind of rolled on from there.

Gaz

And when you were running AWARD School (an internationally recognised program for anyone with a passion for creativity and ideas to establish their careers), wasn't it the first slide presented to the cohort: ‘Congrats on selling out?’

Jess

Yeah, yeah, and then I had the image of 50 Cent when he wrote broke on the floor in money, as sort of the support to that.

Because it's sort of funny, you know; creative departments are really interesting places. It's where all these sort of creative misfits end up that couldn't fit in anywhere else. But we're actually really good at a new craft, you know.

So, yeah, I like to start with that because at AWARD School, you get people from all different walks of life. You get musicians and filmmakers and writers and artists and all these people who are creative in some sense, but they realise it's very hard in this capitalist system we work in to make money being creative.

And advertising is one of the best ways to earn some.

Gaz

I probably observe, based on the conversation that you're mentioning, that aspect of brand versus performance always rears its head, mainly from you engaging in the LinkedIn discussions about it. It’ll be presented to me on my feed.

Do you feel the conversation around it has gotten… is more sophisticated even right? Has it advanced or is it still sort of stuck in this stagnant contest between one side and the other?

Jess

It's kind of never ending and it's not even a new kind of discussion. It just sort of changes shape.

Before it was brand versus performance. Prior it was probably brand versus direct, and then it was brand versus retail, you know, prior to the digital era.

It's definitely gotten more concentrated, I suppose, the digital and performance marketing era. And I think it's kind of a useless time-wasting conversation because it's never really about brand versus performance, because you need both.

If you look at all the best and most enduring brands in the world, they only are that because they invested in building a really strong, consistent, distinctive brand.

Now, that doesn't mean that they don't do retail or performance marketing. In the same sense, right? It's not one versus the other.

It's how the two work together. So there's decades of research showing that, brand amplifies your retail activity, right?

Because brand work is what makes people feel comfortable with your brand and recognize it and be more open to receiving messages from them.

And then, calling it performance, it's sort of the thing that closes the deal. It's the sale of, and that nudges people over the line or catches them at the moment when they're actually thinking about making that purchase.

So if you only do brands, then yes, you might build a recognisable brand that people think is cool, but you may not actually nudge them over the line.

But if you're only doing performance, then all you're doing is bombarding people with hard sales messages when they're not actually really familiar or connected with your brand.

And then you're just kind of annoying and pissing them off. So you've got to do both, which is why framing it as brand versus performance is incredibly frustrating because it's never been one versus the other.

It's how the two work together. And I think that's the conversation we need to be having. I wrote a piece on it in Death to Shit Ads last year.

I was at a conference a while back, and there was a big panel and they asked that question. And I think it's kind of frustrating when you're in an environment like that and you've got some of the best people in the industry, you've got a room full of hundreds of people.

And you've still got people saying, ‘is it brand versus performance?’

And you think, ‘the fact that we're still having that conversation at that kind of scale is pretty frustrating’ I think.

Gaz

My observation, obviously through knowing you, but then also just seeing, I guess, a bit of your imprint on SICKDOGWOLFMAN (Independent Creative Agency) as you've joined a while back, is a bit of a spirit of the rules that are meant to be broken, and then how you apply that in practice.

If you reflect on running the publication and advocating for a way of creating and operating, in terms of what you believe in. How does that influence yours and your teams work with SICKDOGWOLFMAN? And how does that influence client-side, when they’re entering into a relationship with yourselves?

Jess

You know, we're all absolutely taking a risk, for example. Every client and every brief and every situation is different. I think in terms of the way that I see things, in the way that James (Orr) and Jarrick (Lay) ( (founding creative director and design director at SICKDOG): we see things pretty similarly, which is why we ended up kind of teaming up.

If you look at even the agency's work before I joined, they generally had a tendency to try and jar against the category, and look for the opposing space around what everyone else is doing in a certain category, and bring a different look and feel to things.

And that's how I've always seen things as well. So it probably more just amplified how we all put less on the page, make things simple and clean, and really cut through.

I think we've sort of picked up momentum over the last couple of years, just because we all do share that, and we've built a stronger and stronger body of work over the last couple of years, that we’ve probably grown more confident in, because we've proven that it works.

And we do follow through, and I think that's the other interesting thing when we talk about people in marketing, advertising, LinkedIn.

There's a lot of opinions flying around and there's a lot of people saying you have to do things this way and that way, but a lot of them don't actually do the work.

They kind of give advice on things that they don't have the capacity or the ability or the authority to follow through on.

I think you need to be careful taking advice from someone who can throw out an opinion and then go, ‘yeah, but I don't actually have to follow up on it.’

Whereas, you know, we... We have strong opinions on things based on years of experience and results, and then we go out and we practice it.

We've got a pretty strong client portfolio now, and they're doing really well. And the last couple of years have been pretty hard in our industry, but we've been lucky enough to have record growth in that period, even in this environment.

So we've gotten more confident in the way that we go about things because we have a lot more proof behind us now. And then that attracts similar-minded clients.

We don't have a BDM or anyone out there, rattling the tin. It's all organic growth and we get people reaching out to us, asking to work with us, and that’s pretty lucky.

Gaz

You just scan the Australian-based Knocked Loose fan club on Facebook or whatever and find the perfect audience to rattle up business from, bring them in for the pitch?

Jess

(Laughs) Yeah, it was funny, actually, James and I got on a call the other day with someone, and I had a Knocked Loose shirt on, and the potential client said ‘Oh, sick, I love Knocked Loose’ and then James said ‘Well this is pretty embarrassing, I didn't plan this’ and moved his camera down, and he had a different Knocked Loose shirt on.

Like, that's a pretty rare coming together there.

Gaz

So, you're attracting some pretty like-minded people. In terms of seeing the growth in the business, I’ll ask one specific question: What kind of business do you have starting a sunscreen product in-house?

Jess

Oh, look,, it's a whole lot of naivety, which is sometimes, you know, a good thing, I think, to not think that you know everything… And I guess naive enough to go out and do something like that. I guess, the abridged version of where SLATHER SPF emanated from, was a number of things all coming together at once.

It's one thing, that everyone who works in any form of commercial creativity will tell you, is that we all sort of have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder because we're always coming up with all these ideas and working long hours and doing far more work than we're being paid for on paper.

Because we just, you know, we really want to create great work and we present ideas to people all the time that knock them back for various reasons.

And sometimes they might be completely right to knock them back. But there's also plenty of examples where you are just presenting a really great idea to someone without the ambition to follow through on it.

So we all have bottom drawers full of, these million dollar ideas that no one, sort of has the gumption to buy.

So there is that part of you that thinks, ‘maybe we should just do it ourselves?’ That was combined with the fact we'd also let a client go, which is very rare in our business, just because of how volatile it is.

But we resigned the client, just because they kind of were a bit toxic on the agency. So that sort of lit a fire under us as well, to probably to do something that we believe in.

Then the other layer was, we had a client who was in skincare, so we had done some work in the category. We were looking at the SPF category just because we were doing some work in it. And we just thought ‘geez, it all looks the same.’

I's all very clinical. It's all very feminine. It's all mums and families. And it's also very sun loving.

It's just all these people on the beach. ‘How good's the beach?’ ‘The sun's so great!’

But the statistics, the figures, is Australia is Number One in the world for skin cancer, and that’s pretty astounding.

Number 1 in the world. And we're a pretty developed, well-off, wealthy nation. We shouldn't really be number one in the world of skin cancer.

And it's mostly men. So it's guys like you and I, who are apathetic and terrible at putting on sunscreen.

I mean, look at me. I last five minutes outside. So we sort of said to ourselves: there's this friction point here of: you've got this whole category and this whole massive industry marketing that the sun's great and the sun's good for you and mostly talking to women and they're being really clinical about it.

But it's men who are not using sunscreen and who are getting skin cancer. And it's not because they're not using it at the beach.

They're getting it working in the garden. They're getting it playing cricket. They're getting it going to music festivals. But no one is talking to this problem. Absolutely nobody is talking to this issue. So all those things kind of combine together to go: well, is there some space?

To create an SPF brand that builds this sort of void. And so then, a bit of a steamroller from there, we started building the idea of this brand, SLATHER SPF.

And then we talked to this client and ran it by them, and they thought it was a pretty good thought.

So they also came on as a partner. And that was important because we didn't know how to make a sunscreen.

We know how to make a brand. We don't know how to make a sunscreen. Put it in a tube, in a factory, ship, deal with the TGA etc.

There's like, a million things that we suddenly were thinking: ‘ we don't know how to do any of this stuff.’

And it's all been DIY. We've had to figure out a hell of a lot of stuff along the way, as well as running a creative agency.

So it was a hectic, busy, probably 18 months of developing, leading to launch.

Gaz

But then, you did lean into what you did know. So: going out with the campaign, working with the Aunty Donna production crew (Haven’t You Done Well Productions), collaborating on a particularly unhinged ad featuring one ‘Gary’. What was the process of going through that one to sort of put that out there? Because in that sort of video visual form, there's one thing to sort of position a sunscreen brand aesthetically on the shelf different to all others. And then there's something like this ad, which is just full ‘knock your socks off.’

Jess

So, I mean, yeah, for anyone who hasn't seen it, the positioning we ran with was ‘The Sun Is Not Your Friend’ which, again, was our way of jarring completely against the category, because every sunscreen is sort of really pro-sun and sun-positive.

And, that's fine. We all love the sun. We're Australian. I love the sun. And the sun is what gives us life.

Yes. But it's also what gives us cancer. So, no, we sort of went: ‘no one's actually saying… No one's saying this blindingly obvious point that we need to actually be a little bit more cautious in how we deal with living on a giant desert island.’

So we ran with this positioning of ‘The Sun Is Not Your Friend’ and we turned the sun into a bit of a comical villain because the sun, as every other sunscreen brand does, positions it the complete opposite.

And then, we wrote this ridiculous script and we were doing some work with Haven't You Done Well, who are the commercial arm of Aunty Donna's production company.

We were doing some other work with them at the time and we said, ‘Hey, we've got this script. It's a bit crazy…’

We showed it to them and immediately they were just ‘we're in.’

Like, what!? And because we bootstrapped this all ourselves, we didn't have any money either because we spent all our money making the sunscreen.

But, everyone loved the script so much. That we were able to pull together, you know, a motley crew of people that just wanted to work on this ridiculous script. And then we went out and made it.

So Will and Sej, to give them a shout out, the young director team… Will is also in the ad, the guy in the ad with the shaved eyebrows, he’s one of the directors.

So they're a crazy duo. They did an amazing job. It was a lot of fun. And it was also a funny moment where you get to realise, ‘we’re the client now!’

But, even though this ad was so extreme already, there were moments on set where I was sitting there going ‘My god, like, can we even do this?’

Gaz

No doubt though, this process that has driven you crazy for many, many years, in terms of countless revisions, and... and crunching to meet the needs of other clients. You must have felt a huge relief amongst the team to just basically be a lot freer, albeit like a totally different world of work.’

Jess

Yeah, it is liberating in that sense. Nothing is ever perfect. And there's always an opposing force to whatever you do.

The scary part of that is that you have no guardrails, know what I mean? You have no one to tell you that you should or you shouldn't be doing a particular thing, you know?

So, yes, it was really fun and liberating to just do whatever you want. And we really did do everything.

So we made a whole bunch of animations as well, which we did in-house. I voiced them all. James taught himself to animate. Nick, our producer, is in the sun suit in the ad. He's got the creepy light suit and the head on. So we did everything ourselves.

So all of that was super fun. It was a lot to take on, but was creatively liberating.

But then at the same time, having sort of no guardrails and nothing around you, it's kind of scary in a whole other way. You don't know what box you're meant to be operating in. So it’s kind of got pros and cons.

Gaz

Screaming into the void, so to speak. But also, I think, your perspective from so many young people through AWARD School as part of that process would have been guiding, helping you proceed acknowledging what you advocated for int the past.

Maybe we'll talk about, moving on from SLATHER SPF, but on the same tangent, in terms of developing products in-house, whether they be for direct-to-consumer, or whether it ends up being a sort of technology product.

Do you see that sort of as the... a natural trend that a lot of agencies will follow moving forward into the future?

Jess

I think it's a really interesting topic and our business is going through like seismic shifts at the moment and it's only the beginning.

I mean, the industry's been under pressure and been shrinking really for some time now, with budgets shrinking, clients in-housing, that sort of thing.

So creative agencies and production companies have been feeling the pinch for a while now. And then with AI coming in, that's just going to continue and it's going to escalate.

No one really knows exactly where it's all going to go. But the one thing that I think still remains true, is that no one is better at building brands than agency people.

You know, you can call me biased, but that's really where all the best talent is, and the best track records of building brands.

And for a long time, we've been building multi-million dollar and multi-billion dollar brands for other people.

And I think we're at this interesting point now where our industry is being pushed and crunched and constrained and people are getting squeezed out.

But they're incredibly talented people who are really good at building strong brands. And if there's nowhere for them to go as a day job in the past, then you go, ‘okay, where do you funnel that talent?’

So I think you'll see more people starting their own creative businesses or starting their own brands and sort of taking all that skill and that talent and making something for themselves.

And that might be a positive offshoot of where everything's going. And then equally to your point, I think, I wrote a post about it where I said that the future of creative agencies might be about them having more creative agency, in that maybe we need to be more proactive instead of sitting around and waiting for briefs and waiting for problems to solve from existing clients.

That we see problems in the world and we put our own skin in the game and create a brand or a product that's ours and we can control our own destiny in that regard.

So I think you will see more of it. It is a big undertaking because… the last 12 months definitely drained the life out of us.

It's sort of running two things at once. But I think you will see more of it because it's that compounding thing we were talking about.

There's all this energy and talent and ability in creative agencies and it doesn't have anywhere to go because the work has been getting more and more conservative.

The budgets are getting smaller and smaller, and there's less outlet for all of that creative energy. So maybe it'll start being channeled into agencies controlling their own destiny a little bit more, and that could be cool.

Gaz

Yeah, I mean, I'm interested to see it. Even going back to Linktree being born from a music-focused agency (Bolster) and developing a digital product in the house that just happened to do the thing. It's just interesting to linger on that topic.

I was sort of underwhelmed from attending a couple of talks a little while ago, at SXSW Sydney. I thought the discussion might be about developing products in-house basically.

But everyone just ended up talking about how technology helps them service clients better. That was sort of really underwhelming for me, because I thought ‘shouldn't we be talking about diversifying revenue and growth, not retention, here? This is crazy!’

Jess

Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting because the playing field and barriers to entry are about to be knocked over and totally leveled.And that goes for technology and platforms as well. Pretty soon, everyone's going to have access to all the same .

And look, there'll be people out there going, ‘oh, we're going to make our proprietary version or whatever.’ But that's not really new.

People have been skinning spreadsheets for a long time. I think it's interesting, and maybe this is me being optimistic, but I think as we all reach more of a technological parity, when we all have access to the same tools and the same AI platforms or wherever it all goes, the human element is still going to be this sort of differing factor.

The people that you've got there driving the technology, that's still the thing that is the differentiator because we're all going to have the same tools.

We're all going to have access to the same stuff. And now even brands that have smaller budgets are possibly going to be able to create things that are closer to brands with much bigger budgets.

But you've still got to have people and ideas to create the point of difference. So that's just going to be the interesting thing to observe.

Everyone's saying that it's going to wipe all these people out, and it probably will to some degree. But when everyone suddenly is on the exact same even keel, what then becomes the point of difference for your company or your brand?

Probably people.

Gaz

And maybe to round out that arc, just talking to the playing field being leveled as the access to technology becomes more accessible, more democratized or whatever:

You've been mucking around in this space for a very long time, you know, experimenting with AI tooling, albeit in the unique way that you've done it.

It's sort of not something new to you from, you know, doing the Michael Bay project to, you know, various other things, like the headlines in the Herald Sun AI project etc.

What's your crystal-ball gazing thing at the moment expectation on, what you'll sort of utilise or deploy within SICKDOG, whether from an operational sense or whether from an experimental creative sense?

Jess

I think you can only see so far into the future. Like, there's a lot of people out there making all these outrageous claims and predictions, but no one knows where any of this is really going to go, and it's moving at such a pace that I think you're being disingenuous to make, you know, absolute claims.

But, we use AI every day to some degree and have been for some time, but it's more to kind of enhance what we do as humans and creatives, really.

I use it to do tons of grunt work and the stuff that normally takes longer, like earlier in the process when I'm sort of working through insights and strategy, because it's kind of an aggregator.

Because normally in the past, if you got a brief or, I don't know, you're working with an insurance company or something… you go and do some research and now, you can just quickly get insights and ways in, and I was very good at all that grind sort of grunt work, and then I take that out.

Now we can write and think and sort of play with it.  I mean, visually, it's really great for reference or mood boards or really early, you know, concept reference imagery.

In terms of the actual output, we have a certain standard and a certain level of craft, so we don't use it to output anything at the moment, because it just looks like, really, off if we're all honest, compared to the quality of work and the standard that we have.

So we don't use it to make the final output of video or a piece of content or a still or anything, but we use it in our workflow to help us get to ideas quicker and to help us execute on things quicker.

And we're always playing and experimenting with it. And as it gets better and better and better, then it probably will start bleeding into the executional aspect of it, but it has to reach a point where it's of a certain quality. I think we still need to call a spade a spade.

There's a lot of people going, ‘oh, this is amazing’, you know, a high-res film quality. No, it's not. It is amazing what it can do. It's amazing that it can do it and what it can do so quickly.

But it's still a really warped, uncanny valley, six-fingered, overly lit, strange nightmare fuel. So I try to be pragmatic about it.

I'm not anti-AI, but I am willing to just call it out for what it is. And you can tell when something's written in AI that it just reads horribly and people switch off from it.

And so I think you can't just copy and paste things from AI. I think you've got to use it to help enhance what a talented group of people can do.

And it's... a really good tool in that regard, and that's the immediate future of it, that's how we'll use it right now, but that will possibly change over time as it gets better, but I think you've just got to play what's directly in front of you.

Gaz

To finish, whether referencing AI or other… so you've always been prone to launching out these sort of, you know, it could be a provocative project or just something just for purely the kick of it, you know… sometimes really leaning into sort of pop culture, in the current zeitgeist.

So if you had spare time of a night time, what would you be tinkering away at night time, right now? Are you mucking around with particular tools at this point in time and creating new things? Or are you sort of over that and sort of seeking some new forms of entertainment?

Jess

It's probably hard finding the time at the moment, but I... I tend to… I've always played with different forms of tech. I’ve been making AI things, I've programmed bots, I've kind of done all this stuff.

But there has to be a purpose, I can't do it aimlessly. I can't sit down and just fiddle for no reason, so I generally have to give myself an avenue to do it.

And it generally is some form of subversion, is what I find interesting, using the tech in a subvertive way or that's different to what everyone else is doing with it, because that's what I find more interesting.

So I've done a lot of playing around with, I guess, the static imagery part of AI and with language models and stuff like that.

What I haven't done tons of playing around with yet is motion, just because I haven't enjoyed it as much as a lot of other people have in terms of where it's at as a technology and the fact that everything that people are making, it's just this constant staccato, choc-choc edit, one frame after the other kind of structure that I don't really find very appealing.

But it is getting better and better, and I'm starting to see, I don't know what to call them, people would call themselves AI filmmakers, I'm not sure, but let's call them that, who are coming from more of a traditional film background.

So you start seeing some AI-generated vision where they actually have thought about the camera angle and they have thought about the lighting, and it's not just all this front-on 90-degree, it's almost like a thoughtless image where someone's pictured something and then you're just seeing a literal version of it.

But we look at great filmmaking, it's very deliberate in what's in the frame and what's out of the frame, and you're starting to see more of that come in to AI.

And I find that a little bit more interesting, so maybe soon I'll do a little bit more playing around with the video component. To get in there and see how it works, but it hasn't been at a technological level that I've necessarily enjoyed it, but it's getting there. So that might be the next thing I'd look at and come up with some silly excuse to use it.

Gaz

Anything that can simulate Carlton FC performing at a better standard to finally win a premiership? Yeah, technology can only do too much.

Jess

(laughs) I think that's too tall of an ask. Yeah, yeah.

Gaz

Last one, maybe in the spirit of this rule-breaking theme, with someone, or a brand, that have particularly impressed you, in whatever realm that sort of thing is?

Jess

There's one brand I've noticed lately that I think is kind of similar to us. I don't know the whole story behind it - I don't know if you saw the launch film for Oat Cult. It's right up your alley. Oh, you'll love it.

Probably more up your alley than my alley even. So it's very, very Dark Mofo, very HEALTH, very kind of… has a bit of a modern sort of gothic feel to it.

Anyway, so I think it's a bunch of agency people, similar to SLATHER SPF, who have started their own brand and it's cultured oats.

So it's instant oats, but it has probiotics and stuff in it. But it's like a cult. They've shot a film that is like a scene from a horror movie.

And I loved as well that they purposely put it through testing, knowing that it would test horribly and then promoted it as the worst testing, you know, oat ad ever, which I kind of love.

But, again, it's just subversion. All these sort of norms in the industry, and it went viral for that very reason because it was doing the opposite of what's expected of a brand or someone in that category.

And I think it's only been out for a few months and it's got a good amount of traction for a brand that's been started from a blank piece of paper.

So I think that's kind of cool and it ties up a lot of things we've been talking about, right?

Like it's a bunch of creatives who've gone, this, let's make our own thing. They've gone about it by looking at what everyone's doing in the category and going, okay, let's do the polar opposite.

Follow Jess on LinkedIn, if you dare: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheelerjess/
Death to Shit Ads: https://deathtoshitads.beehiiv.com/
SICKDOGWOLFMAN: https://www.sdwm.com.au/
SLATHER SPF: https://slather.com.au/