Bronwen Foster-Butler (00:00):

We talk a lot about telling stories that stir the human spirit. And so Tom always has a test, Tom, our founder, of like, is it going to raise the hairs on his arm? And if it doesn't, it's like it's not us. We really want to be meaningful in the content we produce. We feel lucky every single time we show up in front of a customer or potential customer, and so we don't want to be wasting their time. A rule coined by Byron Sharp, he talks about the double jeopardy rule, which is that smaller brands have to work twice as hard to be half as successful, but we aren't in that position. And so we have to have stories that have twice as much impact as the next brand. Coming along

Cole Heilborn (00:42):

On this podcast, we go behind the scenes with industry experts as they break down what it takes to produce creative work that works. This show is produced by Portside, a creative studio that helps outdoor brands produce strategic and emotional video content. Welcome to the Backcountry Marketing podcast. Today I'm talking with Bronwen Foster-Butler, the CMO at Finisterre. Bronwen, welcome to the show.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (01:05):

Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

Cole Heilborn (01:07):

It's good to see you. Where are you calling in from?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (01:11):

I am calling in from a tiny little village in Devon, England, which is sort of in the lower part, the Southwest.

Cole Heilborn (01:21):

Right on. It sounds like a beautiful place to be this time of year, and I hear the surfing is pretty good.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (01:27):

Yes. Well, the surf has been phenomenal. The last week it's been a bit smaller, but everybody, we've had a really nice winter, a really great winter actually, so everybody's got that slightly exhausted look on their face, but we're pumped.

Cole Heilborn (01:40):

So some icicles sprung up in their hair and their beards.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (01:44):

Yeah, well this week there was a lot of the first boot list and hoodless surf severe, so everyone was pretty excited about that. I am just a baby novice. No beginner. I'm not even a novice, but I was in with a hand plane earlier this week and it was still pretty cold, but lots of fun.

Cole Heilborn (02:04):

Well, I'm excited to bring you on the show and talk. Today we're going to be talking all about Finisterreand your guys' migration to North America. We're going to be talking about meta and advertising and the role of creative in it all. I guess first question to kick us off and then we'll kind of dive into what Ness Air is, who you guys are. So this concept of Zig, when there's zag, it's a really common thing. There's books about it, but when you think about that from a content and a creative perspective, I just want to get your initial thoughts like flash in the pan. How do you zig when others zag when it comes to content?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (02:42):

I think the big test I always ask myself and challenge the team is if we removed our logo, would anyone know who'd produced this film or this piece of content? And I think in most instances from content I see there's very few brands for whom they've been able to build such a strong visual language or content, language or code that that test is successful. And even with us, I'd say 50% of the time we're not nailing it, but every time we, and something you've spoken about recently that I thought was so true, this idea of failure versus success, and it's like, well actually, what about iterating and learning and trying? And so we put content out there and sometimes we nail it and sometimes it's okay, but every time the important thing is that we're learning from it and then we're bringing those learnings to the next time.

Cole Heilborn (03:40):

Oh man, this is going to be good. We got a lot to chat about. Well kind of back up and give us a little context to your role and Finisterre.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (03:49):

Absolutely. So I am the chief marketing officer. I joined two and a half years ago, and so in finished air terms, I'm a baby because we have a lot of people who have been in the brand for a really long time, which we're really grateful for. I oversee, we've got a creative team, so it's sort of an in-house creative agency. And then we have a brand and product marketing team that does more of the strategy, the customer obsession, the insight. And then we have the marketing arm, which includes paid digital CRM and community as well as organic social. And so I think we're about 19 people now, so we're still, we run pretty lean, but it's really fun.

Cole Heilborn (04:29):

And not to make a pun, but it sounds like you're making waves

Bronwen Foster-Butler (04:32):

Anyway. Yeah, I think so. I mean, you tell me if your listeners have heard of us then hopefully, but we are 22 years old but have always been a predominantly UK business and in the last few years have started entering North America with a focus on the US in particular, the Pacific Northwest and then the Northeast, and we're getting good feedback. It's really lovely. I think the community team at Finn Air in particular have done a brilliant job over the years of just building meaningful relationships with people and investing in them, going to conferences and different places and hanging out and remembering people's names. And you sometimes forget in the world of marketing where everything's all about meta and ROAS and attribution models, that actually just being nice and being friendly and not being a dickhead is actually one of the most powerful ways you can market yourself.

Cole Heilborn (05:26):

What a concept. Yeah. Well, tell me more about the company. So there's not a lot of cold weather surf companies out there. Most people tend to imagine sandy beaches and sunny days when they think of surf, but you guys are the opposite. Well, I guess sandy beaches maybe, but not sunny days necessarily.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (05:45):

Well, yeah, the freezing cold. Yeah, so we were born back in 2003, our founder Tom K, he's still in the business. He was a chartered surveyor that had moved his family down to beautiful Cornwall, which is in the bottom part of the United Kingdom and it's wild and rugged and has the Cornish would say that they're their own autonomous nation, a bit like Ireland and Wales and Scotland. It has a hugely rich heritage and was predominantly focused around mining and fishing and the mining is all but gone. If anyone on your podcast has watched Pull Dark, which is a good British exported BBC program that was all filmed in Cornwall. If you haven't watched it, I highly recommend it, but that was, Cornwall isn't where you would naturally think a surf brand coming from, but Tom wanted to, he'd been living in London, was tired of that rat race, and so wanted to focus on creating a life for him and his family and was surfing and was bobbing out at sea and it was freezing cold in January and he was waiting for the swell to come in and he just realized that the surf industry as it was, wasn't speaking to him at all.

(07:05):

It was all about board shorts and bikinis and boobs and it wasn't, and it was about Sydney and California and Hawaii and there wasn't anyone talking to this cold water surf community. And so this idea of doing business in a better way and demonstrating that combined with this niche of cold water surf was where Finisterrecame from.

Cole Heilborn (07:32):

Let's talk about meta and advertising. And I'm curious, so maybe outside of current events, how is the company, do you guys, you use meta, what role does meta play in your marketing and distributing your content? How do you use it? Because some people avoid it entirely, some people boycott it, some people use it. What's your experience been with it?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (08:00):

I wish we were in a position, well, maybe do I wish we were in a position to boycott meta? That's probably a bit of a strong statement. I wish we were in a position where we weren't so reliant on it, but we're a small brand and we don't have the power of the brand awareness and just the scale that some of the brands that have been more vocal against it and Google, we don't have that luxury. That said, we're really passionate about building relationship first. And so the first investment in North America was a community team and it was the relationships that we've built over the years. It was Tom, our founder, going around and he went and met all of our first wholesale, or at least I think our first five wholesale doors. He went and was hanging out at all these stores. And it's surprising how far that can carry you actually is just showing caring, building relationships, chatting to people and letting people then go and advocate for you.

(09:02):

That said, we do use Meta and Google and they're really great tools to, especially for new market entry, you can go in and you can test and you can scale really quickly. You can pull back really quickly. It's not like I grew up in the, I don't want to age myself, but I was print advertising and TV and radio and out of home, and that was your marketing mix and maybe some celebrity dressing, but that was before Instagram. You would hope that it would get on page three of the newspaper. So those barriers to new market expansion were really big because that media was incredibly expensive but also had huge production value that had to go into it really long lead times, very little flexibility. You'd be negotiating with a magazine and it would all be based on, well, the number of insertions you were going to do across a 12 or 24 month contract and you couldn't get out of them if suddenly that market wasn't working for you.

(10:01):

Equally, we can go in and we can test messaging. We can run ab tests really quickly of like, well, hang on, does the B Corp logo matter? Yes or no? Does being Cornish or being global, what's more effective? So it's an incredibly powerful tool in that way, but it's also a very addictive drug and I've seen a lot of brands just and marketers, it's so tempting to just be able to have an answer for everything and to be able to almost absolve yourself of the burden of making a decision by going, well, the data told me, and I think I get it. It's so nice to be able to say, I'm not actually going to have to make a scary decision here because I'm just going to be led by the numbers. And data needs to be a metric, it needs to be an input, it needs to be consulted, but it can't be the thing that makes the decision. You have to balance that with intuition and experience and what you're seeing in the market and knowledge from other sources as well. Certainly not just what the platform's telling you. The platform is going to tell you a very specific thing. Yeah,

Cole Heilborn (11:16):

And so you were saying, and I was reading up on this, so it sounds like for a few years now interest-based targeting on meta has been changing and actually maybe it's even gone now or it's severely limited to compared to what it used to be. It looks like it's different in different countries. Tell me more about the role of creative now in your meta advertising and the creative that you're producing. What was required of it and what is now required of it?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (11:44):

Yeah, I mean, I remember setting up my very first Facebook campaigns back in, I think the first one I built was in 2013 or 2014 meta. It was just Facebook. In fact, I was at Burberry when Burberry was the very first brand allowed to advertise on Instagram. And I remember that was such a big deal, and I think Kevin himself approved the ad together with Christopher Bailey, our creative director at the time, and it was this beautiful image. And anyway, so I didn't actually have to build that campaign, but I remember witnessing it, which was cool. And then I joined Lululemon and I was the first person in Europe and helping build the campaigns over there and over here. And I got to go in and be like, well, what do we think our target customer wants? They're probably into sushi. They probably also like these brands, they're definitely into yoga. So let's click all these boxes and it would fun. And then it would just constantly, you'd get this little rolling number of the number of people that you could target, and then you'd upload your creative and you'd put in a little caption and off you'd go. And for a long time, that was really effective. And then we also had incredibly rich data before the iOS changes and before cookies got more complex and so you could feed your customer data into the machine and it was cheap and it was easy, and now that's gone.

(13:06):

The ability to share data with meta and Google is completely different to what it used to be. And equally, the machines are smarter than us. And so through Meta with A SC and Google with P Max, there's very little targeting. You can give it. There is some, but if anything, you're better off letting the machine figure it out and then iterate and improve. And so that means that you're only targeting is your creative the way you show up the message you're saying that will inevitably reach the people for whom it resonates. But if you try to force that messaging on someone based on this quite static idea of who your customer is and what they might be into, that first of all isn't effective anymore because of all of the change in data. But it's also this idea that customers aren't actually very loyal. They buy from a lot of different brands, and your growth is going to come from having a lot of light users. You're never going to get a ton of heavy users. And I think a lot of brands spend a lot of time focusing on heavy users only and then just talking to themselves over and over and over again and then wondering why they're not growing.

(14:26):

So you've got to get in creative that inherently speaks to who you are and who you're creating for, but don't limit yourself to only targeting one singular version of a customer or a community.

Cole Heilborn (14:41):

Do you have an example of creative that you've ran and tested and been surprised by the results?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (14:50):

Yeah. Well, I think one of the biggest changes for us has been the importance of social first. So that has been a bit uncomfortable because, and I think to be honest, I can see that it's pretty uncomfortable for most of the outdoor industry because really doing it particularly, not that they're not doing it well, but I'm still seeing a lot of the outdoor brands clinging to this idea that high production value and really beautiful imagery is going to be enough, and it pains me to say it. And to be honest, the algorithm might change next week, in which case what I'm saying is completely wrong, but that just doesn't work on social like it used to. And again, you used to be able to pay for it to work, and it worked simply because the platform itself was doing a better job of finding the people more likely to be your customers and then following them across the internet.

(15:38):

But now the platforms just don't work that way anymore. And so we have gone on a big journey of self-discovery around how do we create content that's right for the channel. So what does social first look like? What does creating ads that are effectively a UGC ad or we shoot a lot on phones now, so on every campaign shoot, we have a social media creator who is there capturing everything that's going to end up on social and very little of what we capture on our proper cameras actually ends up on social. And probably 50% of it doesn't even end up in ads because we find that the social first creative is still what is most effective in the ads, and that comes with risks of following the trends. Does everyone then just kind of meet in the middle rather than playing in the edges? But we've done a lot of work around refining what makes us distinct, what are those brand codes that we must always be present, even if it's a social first ad versus a high production value ad.

(16:46):

And then also what's the rest of the customer journey? So it might be that they come through social first ad that might make most creative directors roll over just want to die so horrific and far away from why they got into beautiful outdoor advertising, advertising outdoor space. But then if they land on the webpage, that's where you can have your beautiful content and you can have an email telling really beautiful stories. And I think email is such an underappreciated channel too, of if you really invest in your newsletters and you make really high value newsletters, you can build an incredibly successful business and then you don't have to spend so much money in performance as well. So I felt like that was a very long-winded answer.

Cole Heilborn (17:31):

No. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack in there. I often wonder if what's lacking and why the high production value stuff doesn't seem to work isn't necessarily because it's high production value, but because it doesn't speak to the audience in a way that they immediately connect with or it isn't emotionally evoking or it doesn't pique their curiosity quickly. And I wonder if that's the missing piece and regardless if it's UGC footage or red footage that's the missing ingredient rather than the camera that it was shot on. I do think there's certainly maybe a resistance to that initial frame that you see when you're scrolling through Instagram and you're like, oh, is this an IMAX movie or is this just someone who just shot this on their phone? There is certainly a bias towards that initial frame, but once you get past that, I wonder if it's something deeper that folks are connecting with or seeking for. This is kind of like a theory I'm trying to explore more of.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (18:32):

Absolutely. And I think good content will always work, but it has to be really good content and it can be shot, it can be a shitty photo from your phone, or it can be a million pound production shot on the highest quality cameras. If it's really good content, it's going to work. There's a lot of really bad content out there and a lot of lazy and inward focus, not customer focus messaging that is so easy to fall into as a marketer. I also think there's a big difference between what you're advertising and then what you put on your organic channels. So your organic channels, generally speaking, are your existing audience. They've already been introduced to you, they've made the choice to follow you. You're not trying to constantly educate them about who you are. You have more space to play and more room to kind of push and experiment.

(19:21):

Where with advertising, especially if it's prospecting brand awareness, you're going after new audiences. You are fighting against what 10,000 messages that singular person is going to receive a day. So it is you are just making your life harder. If you aren't showing up in a way that's going to get their attention in that split second, and that's going to feel like they aren't being intruded upon in the channel in which they interact with you. So I love TikTok. I spend too much of my life on TikTok book talk is my, yeah, it's my downfall probably. But anyway, the second I'm scrolling and a high production ad comes into my TikTok, it is just like, because that's not what I'm here, that's not what I want. But I can absolutely watch an ad if it's filmed in the style of a TikTok because I'll just be like, oh, what's this?

(20:12):

And if it's good, and if it gets my attention the first three seconds it follows all the principles of how to succeed on TikTok, then I'll stay with it. And also it can be stills from behind the scenes of an amazing shoot Stills ironically work really well on TikTok. People think of it always as a video platform, but still photography can work well there. Show some really exciting behind the scenes of how something was made and then include a link to go to your YouTube to actually watch it in full. That's a really great way of being quite generous of getting attention in a way that feels like you care about the customer, you care about their experience. You don't want to intrude on whatever content that they're looking for at the time, but then you're also giving them something a little bit more. You're not just shouting at them. I'm a millennial and other millennials and older. We grew up in the age of just being able to shout at everybody broadcast. We're like, we're just going to shout, and whoever shouts the loudest wins. And that's how it worked for a really long time. And now you can't. It has to be a conversation and it has to be customer first, and I think it has to have a spirit of generosity around it

Cole Heilborn (21:22):

In the advertising realm. What's a piece of creative that you've ran that is just, it's done phenomenal? What's your best performing piece of creative

Bronwen Foster-Butler (21:32):

Hard? Well, it depends on how you rate performance. So if it's driving conversions versus brand awareness, I mean, we've got brand awareness running right now on Meta and on YouTube. And on YouTube we do really well with more brand level film on Meta and TikTok, it is a UGC of a content creator who, he's an outdoor guy and he's reviewing our number one product, the Storm Bird, and he's talking about why he invested in it and why it's great for his adventures, and you see him taking it on and taking it off. It was filmed on his phone on the Cornish Cliffs. It's got a SMR behind it. It's just all those things and that regularly much to the horror of the creative team, that is the piece that outperforms. But then we spend a lot of time thinking about, so then what are they going to see next?

(22:29):

Because we've got their attention and now they've watched this. They may or may not have clicked through, but then what's the next piece of content we're going to get? So if you look in our Facebook ads library, you'll see we have a really broad mix of content in there. We've got the UGC to get the people for whom UGC works. We also have high quality films. We also have still images that talk about being B Corp that talk about being from Cornwall at times we've had, if we win awards, we'll license the award and we'll put that on the product that won the award. That can be really effective. We were featured in an editorial piece in the FT all about visiting Cornwall, and it was a profile on Tom K, our founder. We turned that into an ad that worked really well. So you're going to have the old rule of thumb, and I think it probably still stands the test of time, is that it was nine interactions with a customer before they're going to come to your site or they're going to visit your store.

(23:30):

So just thinking of your advertising as a single hit is doing yourself a disservice and doing the potential customer a disservice too. It's like dating. You're not just going to say the same thing. I'm really into books over and over again. It's like, okay, but what else are you into? Well, I'm also into fly fishing. Oh, okay, now you're getting a bit more interesting. And not just fly fishing. I'm also into, I dunno, pottery. Suddenly you're like, okay, this is somebody I'm going to spend a bit more time with where just being a one trick pony is I think self-limiting.

Cole Heilborn (24:05):

Yeah. Tell me more about some of the, what you call it, the brand distincts, what makes a piece of content from Finisterre? Can you share what some of those items or trademarks are?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (24:20):

So one of the tools that has helped us define our brand codes is something we call our muse. Full disclosure, I learned about a brand muse when I was at Lululemon, and you can probably Google Lululemon Muse. It's been controversial. Everything Lululemon does is controversial. But when I joined back in 2012, what was so no, 2014, forgive me, I was one of the first people over in the European market, and Lululemon had a very decentralized model. So it was about hire great people, set 'em up to be successful and then let them go. And I think it was what contributed to Lululemon being really successful, but also being really profitable because it meant they didn't have to spend a ton of money on advertising. They had people going out and doing stuff and advocating on their behalf. And part of how the teams were always set up to be successful was introducing a brand muse and they had a male and a man and a woman.

(25:16):

And everything that we did at Lululemon was we always asked ourselves, how is this adding value to our muse's life? Or what is our muse up to right now? What are they doing now? The muse was, we were very specific about who they were. They were very different from our customer. Your customer could be, we used to always say 16 to 65, but they don't want to be spoken to like they are 16 or 65, whether they know it or not. They are inherently attracted to the energy we give out by designing for this at the time of Lululemon, this 31-year-old woman. And so it was an incredibly effective way at removing personal bias, removing like, well, I prefer this and I prefer that, which you get a lot of in every team. And it was like, well, it's not about me, it's about our muse.

(26:06):

And the Muse framework was really specific. So it was actually incredibly easy to make decisions because everybody would just have this really quick understanding of whether it was on or off brand for the muse. And so now I think Muses work really well for smaller brands and for fast growth. They can be an over strength, so to speak. So at Lululemon, a lot of why the Muses eventually were removed was that it essentially created a singular version of a white blonde woman, and that was all that Lululemon was catering to. And whether that was through neglect or lack of understanding or just not having a very diverse team at all, or maybe just being the size of the brand, it actually had to become more mature and not use the muse anymore. When I've now gone into smaller brands, I've always found having a muse, a really powerful tool because small brands have limited resources.

(27:08):

We can't go after everyone. We can't have five different campaigns speaking to all these different people and creative that looks different. And also we have to really be careful with personal bias, always influencing things. It's also a really effective tool with founder led businesses where a founder often becomes the muse by default, whether they want to or not. And so how do you separate the founder from who the brand is for? If you build it around this personality or personalities, it's a really powerful tool. And so at Finisterre, when I joined, there was a big conversation around whether or not we could grow by being a cold water surf brand. And what I felt really confident saying was absolutely because our muse, how we're going to grow is by speaking to our muse. One of the things of which they do is cold water surf, but they're really multifaceted and we're going to define all the things that they do so that we have confidence when we do speak to these activities and these spaces at the periphery, we're confident in it rather than going, oh, but hang on a second, we have to, if we're cold water surf, we're only cold water surf.

(28:18):

And it's like, well, no, but that's the spirit of who we are. That's in our DNA. That's a part of our muses life, but that isn't the only part of our muses life. And I think what we were able to rewrite a brand book and just really give the brand and everyone in it confidence that there's scope and scale within this niche that we occupy, but also it's not endlessly flexible. There are parameters that we have to stay within. And I feel like the team now we're a lot quicker in determining whether we've stretched too far because we've got this idea of our creative muse now.

Cole Heilborn (28:58):

How does that influence your emotional understanding of your audience and then allow you to produce creative that meets your audience emotionally?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (29:07):

Well, and I think this is also an important distinction is our muse isn't our audience always.

(29:14):

I think one of the things that I've certainly grappled with in my life, but I often see marketers are having a tough time right now. There's a lot changing, and especially those of us that are now in senior positions, we grew up in a very different landscape to the landscape that's now. So it's a lot of unlearning and being curious. And I think one of the things, I don't know if it's a mistake or if it's because I'm in a smaller brand, but I often see this idea of brand and marketing overlap. And they're two different functions. And our muse is our brand. They're who we create for our marketing is who we're trying to reach. And when it comes to new market entry, we also have a layered approach. The first customers we're trying to reach are going to be the closest living versions of our muse in any market. But the fact of matter is that is going to be a very, very small group of people. New market entry, we definitely are targeting like brand and marketing are pretty overlapped at the beginning. But as that market matures, they become two quite separate entities where on every creative brief we write, we go, what's the muse insight? But then we talk about who's the target audience we're trying to reach.

(30:30):

And so a great example for that is we create a lot of content around ocean activism because to your earlier point, some of our brand codes for us, we are an ocean. We are a coastal outdoor brand. We are not top of mountain, which is what a lot of other brands are. We were born from the sea, born from the coast. And so Ocean is where we focus our activism. There's a lot of other amazing causes out there, but where we're going to focus is on saving the ocean. And so when we're creating, our muse is an activist, so they're going to know, they're going to be pretty up to speed with what's happening with ocean health, with what's happening, with the issues with bottom trawling and deep sea oil exploration, et cetera. But our target customer probably isn't, but our target customer wants to give away cues that they care about the environment, they just don't have the time or don't have the energy and sometimes don't have the interest to do as much of the self-education that our muse would.

(31:33):

So when we produce content around activism, we produce it in a way where visually, where stylistically it appeals to our muse, but the messaging and what we actually do is going to be really, it could be really entry level. So it's like, okay, how do we introduce people to activism or maybe not even say activism, that word can be a barrier. How do we introduce people to understanding more about what's going on in the ocean right now? Or in the uk we have really big issues with sewage in the sea. And so how do we speak to a lot of people in a way that is going to resonate with them and not feel exclusive or not feel like there's shame attached to it because they're not in the know, and instead really invite them in and try to get them to engage with the content because we're meeting them where they're at. Does that make sense?

Cole Heilborn (32:24):

Yeah, it does. You mentioned that sometimes in your briefs you'll pull a muse Insight and incorporate that and kind of anchor your brief. Can you have an example or anything you can share?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (32:33):

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So every brief template has, what's the news insight? So we are preparing for Autumn right now, and our brand manager, she'll have spent time going, what is our muse up to? What's happening in the world? What sports are they going to be doing with Autumn? They're going to be really excited that the winter swell is on its way. The beaches are less crowded, they're going to be going back to their favorite spots because the tourists have left. They're going to be going for more solo surfs because the summer was all about community and connection and being together. Where Autumn is a bit more selfish, it's a bit more like, oh, the good waves are coming. I'm going to get out there and I'm excited. And also it's that coming into themselves. The winters getting, or the winters sort of there looming in the distance. So they're sort of becoming a bit more insular as all humans move through the seasons. And so we'll put all of that into the brief and then we put, especially in the specific channel in the paid digital team, they'll go in and go, this campaign is speaking to this target audience, and therefore the key message is this campaign is speaking to a retention audience and therefore the key message is this. And they all come from the same insight, but what the messages will actually be will slightly different.

Cole Heilborn (33:55):

That's cool. That's awesome. I wish more briefs had that level of detail in them.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (34:02):

It puts us into our consumer's shoes. It's going like, well, hang on. And also in fashion, you're working so far out. So it's what May 8th here. And we're thinking, well, what are they going to be doing in September and October? The muse is a way for people to project themselves into the future and go, hang on. What are they going to be doing and what are they going to be feeling? When you talk a lot about emotion, how can I feel that right now for the creative team in particular of how do I want them to feel? How do I think they're going to feel? What message? So is it about coziness, is it about warmth? Is it about those, the first feeling of the cold northerly wind? How do I bring all of that into the creative expression that then answers the brief? But I love what I've been hearing about what you're doing with the pivoting to the creative studio because I feel as though it really resonates with how some of the best brands in the world have been built is that deep understanding of the emotional connection they have with their customer, but also it goes beyond the surface.

(35:06):

It's not just, oh, you're making a raincoat so they don't get wet. You really want them to live a meaningful existence. And how does the content you create add to that?

Cole Heilborn (35:17):

Yeah. Well, I think of it like the proof is in the pudding or the rubber meets the road when it comes time to produce the content or make the brand film or you're building the website, that's when all of the issues, if you will, are exposed when you are realizing, oh, what is our brand? Who are we speaking to? Who is our audience? What is our muse? Why should anyone care? And that's what I've seen so many times is we get a brief and there's not substance, there's not differentiation. And it's been tough because as formerly as a production company, we're like, well, we can't really influence these things upstream. We're so far downstream and we kind of got to respect our place in the process. But yeah, that's the opportunity I see is I love creating feeling through content and there's a way to do that really strategically and be really smart about it.

(36:16):

But maybe I'm naive, but I just feel like that's where the future is hopefully going, is going. I think that's how brands have to show up. Not every time, not everywhere, certainly. But I love that insight about we want, our audience wants to live before they die. Oh, that's so good. That's so powerful. And it raises the hair on my arms when I think about that. But I don't think many people have that level of insight about their brand and who they are. Obviously no shade on those brands, but it's difficult to get there. I think that's what I'm trying to say.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (36:54):

Well, and we have the huge privilege of being a small brand. And so I have very strategically built my career going from bigger brand down to smaller, and now I only work on smaller. My career is sort of reverse pyramid of the biggest brands in the world down to small startups. And I've engineered that because I want to be able to work someplace where not only can I have that influence, but also we can be in this room and be in these conversations. And you don't get lost to the politics and the permission asking and writing a thousand decks and them always getting watered down and creative by committee, it's that's such a standard playbook for big brands. And again, to quote you, no shade to them because big brands are often incredibly successful by doing all of that. But as a small brand, there's a rule coined by Byron Sharp where he talks about the double jeopardy rule, which is that smaller brands have to work twice as hard to be half as successful.

(37:55):

And it's like until you're a big brand, you just don't, big brands have so much privilege and so much they're able to boycott meta. I would love to be able to boycott. I'd love to have that big budget back to go and spend and just make amazing videos and think that people will just find them organically, but we aren't in that position. And so we have to have stories that have quite as much impact as the next brand coming along. And we're mindful of that. One of the things that you talk a lot about, and we see a lot, there's been some research coming out of a brand, a company over here called System One that does a lot of advertising around effectiveness or a lot of studies around effectiveness of advertising. And one of the things they talk about is just use the same creative over and over and over again. And I think a lot of marketers and a lot of creatives, they get so bored of their own work way too quickly.

(38:47):

And it's like you can produce, I think there's also, so I think people get bored of their own work also, it can be hard to birth it, and then you get it out and you're like, I am done. Where's the next shiny thing that I can focus on? And that feels new and exciting. So there's that. But there's also, and again, I age myself back when we would buy tv, the production value that went into TV needed to be a fifth, if not less, of what the media budget was. And I think I see a lot of brands producing beautiful content and then they don't spend any money marketing it or they don't spend any time. They get it up on Instagram, they put it on YouTube, and then a month later they have something they new and it's like, well, hang on a second, that works.

(39:32):

There's a few brands that can do serialized content really well. And again, they've got the money to do it really well, but especially if you're a smaller brand, you have got to milk that thing, get it out there, spend 12 months putting it on the road, keep it. One of our most successful meta ads is three years old because it just keeps working. It's like a really cool, is our head of design. He's a really cool looking guy covered in tattoos, he's in Scotland, he's using a saw and he's sawing a log, and that sells more knitwear for us than any other new ad we could create. So we just keep it going like why not? But there's always that appetite of like, oh, but we need something new and we want to go and do this shoot and all that. And budgets are getting harder. So I would encourage brands as well, especially smaller brands where resources are constrained to just milk your assets and you are going to be so much more tired of them than your customers are. And don't underestimate the efficacy as well. People can watch it more than once and they're not going to be offended.

Cole Heilborn (40:35):

And the reality is they won't remember. They won't

Bronwen Foster-Butler (40:37):

Remember. I know. It's so sad, but true. Yeah,

Cole Heilborn (40:42):

But true. Where do you feel like the world of content and where do you feel like it's going? Where do you feel like it's headed?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (40:55):

Oh, where is I think it's headed versus where I want it to go? Two

Cole Heilborn (40:58):

Questions. No, be honest. Where do you think it's going?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (41:01):

Where, I mean, AI is here, it's not a threat looming in the distance it's here. I think what is going to be interesting in that space is how creatives use it to their, and creatives and marketers use it to their advantage versus you see it as a competition. Last week I was again at this industry event and somebody was, we heard from a futurist, no doubt what a cool job title. And one of the things she, I know I'm like, Ooh, I might add that to mine. But one of the things she was talking about is the degradation of source material. So as AI builds from AI generated material, the quality of the output will degrade. And so AI is only going to work if new creative and original thought is feeding it. And so if at any point creatives are like, or the world is like, hang on a second, we've got to back up the kill switch, is that we just stop inputting and eventually it will at least, especially in the creative world, it won't have anything new to go off of.

(42:09):

That said, in marketing world, I don't think I'm competing with ai. I think I'm competing with marketers that are using AI better than me. And so how are we in the team using the various tools to get rid of annoying tasks or to find information really quickly or to synthesize documents or to check legal things to create SEO copy that doesn't require craft, but means our copywriter then has a lot more time and space for the creative writing that they need to do. So AI is here. I think there will be brands that get lazy and there will unfortunately I think be big businesses as well that undervalue the role of hiring human creatives. I'd like to think that that doesn't last for a very long time before they recognize that you have to have more original source material. But I also think how we do our jobs are going to be different. You don't need to hire translation humans anymore. AI translation is really great, but you still need native speakers and you still need someone to write the prompts and you still need somebody to manage it and to understand nuance. And so it might be that your job isn't a translator anymore, but your job is a translation manager and you get to know the AI tools really well, which LLMs are better at which languages than others. And again, you as yourself, you build a distinctive career through understanding how AI can be a help versus a hindrance.

(43:45):

That's where I think it's going, but could all change tomorrow.

Cole Heilborn (43:49):

Have you been following any of Meta's black box AI announcement that came out in the last week or so? Zuckerberg did an interview on a podcast and he was talking about, have you heard about this?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (44:00):

No, tell me.

Cole Heilborn (44:01):

So Zuckerberg was talking about this, what did he call it? Infinite creative. I'm trying to look at my notes here. So I'm going to read a quote that he said, I think he summarized it better than I can. So the basic end goal here is any business can come to us, say what their objective is. We get new customers to do this thing or sell these things, tell us how much they're willing to pay to achieve those results, connect their bank account, and then we just deliver as many results as we can. In a way, it's kind of like an ultimate business results machine. I think it'd be one of those most important and valuable AI systems to get built. So what he's proposing is you feed meta your goal, and then this black box will develop creative thousands, millions iterations of creative and then take over all of the testing, all of the placements, all of the refinements that humans often do. I have a follow-up question based off of this, but I'm curious what you think about something like that.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (45:04):

I think two things, first of all is on the creative, some brands can use AI generated creative because it works for who they are. Authentically. As a brand, we would never, because part of who we are as a brand is that we are shooting real people doing real things. And no computer could do that in a way where it feels as real as what we're able to achieve. Also, because so much of what we do is the storytelling around how we achieve this amazing adventure to the outer Hebert or to, I dunno, Newfoundland or Alaska. We're telling the stories of making it and that resonates with our customers just as much as the end result. So on the creative side of the actual generation of the imagery and video for us, that wouldn't be something we needed. If we could feed it in and they could resize it, great.

(45:54):

I'm sure even our video editor would be, woo, I don't have to resize anymore. That's handy. I think the challenge is going to be that humans aren't very good at prompts, so right, yeah, maybe we're getting better, but am I able to ask this black box the right question and actually give it a tight enough and powerful enough brief to be effective? And then I think the flip side is what are the platforms doing to keep people on them? I think Facebook has devolved into a product that could quickly become obsolete. And what I don't hear enough of from the platforms is what are they doing to create a really great user experience at Instagram? People had to scream from the rooftop to just be able to go back to it, having posts and chronological order, and even still, it's still not chronological order. And that is such a basic principle of that's what people want, but the platform isn't doing it.

(47:02):

It means they can't serve as many ads perhaps even right now. I know CPMs on meta have gone down because they've dramatically increased the number of ads they're showing people. That's going to backfire pretty quickly because you see three ads in a row and you just exit the app. I mean, so in theory, that sounds great. As a marketing point of view, I can just say, this is what I want you to do. Can you go and build this? Upload the creative. But I don't feel excited about what that's going to do for the actual user journey. And we are talking a lot about what the other platforms are. We're very much on TikTok, we're really on YouTube. Pinterest is brilliant, but also we're at real life events. We are talking to people, we're expanding our retail footprint, we're expanding our wholesale footprint. There's so many different touch points in the marketing mix that you need to consider. And my concern about meta is that they're focused too much on generating ad dollars and not enough on actually just retaining users.

Cole Heilborn (48:01):

So here's my hypothetical situation. Let's say, I dunno, it doesn't matter what channel or what social feed you're browsing through, but you're scrolling through and you see a photo or a video of it's clearly been labeled AI generated, so it's pure ai. This was not shot on location, but let's say it's an identical reflection of a surf break that you've surfed before, that you've felt you've experienced, and the reflection of that real life moment that you've experienced is portrayed exactly as if it were just a real photo taken in that real location. But it's just all ai. And if you knew it was ai, would that bother you?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (48:46):

It would bother me. I think controversial opinion is, I don't think it would bother the majority of people.

(48:53):

I think we operate in the sustainable outdoor space that is a very privileged, wealthy white space where usually left-leaning, it's a pretty non-diverse group of thinkers and customers. And I had this experience at a previous brand I was at called Panaya, where their whole principle was it were material science brand, the most sustainable brand in the world, and they sold almost a hundred million dollars worth of tracksuits because Justin Bieber wore it and the Kardashians wore it. And what people weren't buying the tracksuits because they were sustainable, they were buying it because celebrity was buying. Were wearing it. And I think what was actually great is we talked a lot about we don't care at Penga, it was like, we don't care if they're not buying it for sustainability reasons, they're still buying organic and recycled cotton over a poly blend. That's better. So let's use, and I think that was actually a really refreshing thought of we're not going to change the world by preaching to the converted. And I think advertisers and the outdoor industry will be doing themselves a disservice if they think that the majority of people will care. My instinct is that a bit like sustainability, they might say they care, but when push comes to shove, if the price is right and the product is right and they like it, they'll probably buy it. It will turn some people, I wouldn't, it would annoy me, but I know I'm very much in my own echo chamber.

Cole Heilborn (50:35):

Well, it just seems it would kind of erode the core of what the outdoors is, right? Yeah. As you said, it's real people, real places, real experiences. But I've been thinking about that hypothetical situation myself of like, oh, if I was in that, how would I respond? How will other people respond? Because that's going to happen that we will reach a time when an ad or something is displayed that meets that criteria and yeah, I wonder what will people do?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (51:09):

Well, and I think it's like what's the biggest outdoor brand in the world? I'm guessing North Face.

Cole Heilborn (51:15):

Yeah, I don't know. By revenue,

Bronwen Foster-Butler (51:19):

Let's assume it is. The vast majority of North Face customers aren't spending time in the great outdoors and probably wouldn't care if it's an AI generated image. Their athletes will care, their team will care. And I would say it would probably be a slow long death, but it wouldn't be overnight that everyone would be an uproar. But

Cole Heilborn (51:39):

It might be a similar path that many or a few outdoor brands have gone when they've lost their way, they've lost their core, they've lost their essence. It might be a similar path.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (51:50):

Yeah, definitely. I do think it would have that negative trajectory at time, but I don't think it would be, I mean, even look at Nike Times skims, like the Nike share price shot through the roof, even though I know people at Nike and they're horrified that that's what they're doing, most athletes are sort of like, hang on a second. They were all about women's empowerment and now we're working with somebody who doesn't. I mean, people might have different opinions, but isn't necessarily this a great feminist, but my God, people were hot for it. Same skims in North Face. It sold out in about two and a half minutes. So North Face have done a lot of work this year. You can see they're repositioning their brand saying with Arc TerraX saying with Solomon, I think they've all had this big GOP core and street wear surge, and it's so easy to kind of lose yourself in that for a bit. And you can see that they're all pulling back to their core. But I also don't necessarily know if pulling back to their core is commercially, if it's having a commercial impact yet. I don't know.

Cole Heilborn (53:06):

Well, as we start to wrap up, what's one of your biggest failures or lessons learned on the job that you think about that has really, I dunno, changed how you do your job, how you think all this stuff? I'm trying a new thing ending on failures. What are your thoughts?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (53:33):

I mean, it's always to do with leadership, and I think it was something I learned early on in my career, and I think I was even talking about it with someone yesterday, but allow other people to contribute to your success. It's so tempting and it's seemingly rewarding at the time to make it about you and that your ego take over even without realizing it, but not sharing, not letting other people in, not taking the time to enroll others. And anytime I've tried to do a project where I haven't taken the time to enroll people like, well, I think it's great and we need to do it, so we're going to do it. It's always been another failure. And so it's a bit like invest the time in writing a great brief, invest the time in enrolling people and bringing in diverse opinions and experiences. And the product will always be so much better than that original thought.

(54:24):

But also just as a leader and leading a team, my success is entirely based on whether or not my team are successful and happy and thriving. And so every day I come in going, how am I setting them up to be successful? What questions do I need to ask? How am I creating the conditions for them to thrive? And if I'm not, then that's my number one concern. I talk a lot about the number one growth hack is finding out if your people are happy working as a retailer. Most retailers, every Monday you have trade meetings. And so 99% of trade meetings I'm in, we never talk about internal happiness and internal engagement. And are people wearing the product? Are they liking it? Are employees showing up? Are they engaging? And the brands where I've been where that is a conversation, and we do that at Finisterre, we talk a lot about employee engagement. I see it as a direct result on sales and also just making sure everybody's having a nice time. Life is short. And yeah, it's not just about the dollar at the end of the day

Cole Heilborn (55:36):

About finding that good surf

Bronwen Foster-Butler (55:39):

Dying as though we truly lived

Cole Heilborn (55:41):

Bronwen. If you had to summarize our conversation and kind of give folks just some bullet points, food for thought, how would you wrap up this conversation?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (55:50):

What I would hope is that everyone looks around and goes, how can I make the world around me a better place? And if you make one person's life better, then you have the power to change the world. And so in the outdoor industry, we have a huge opportunity to get more people into nature and to feel the benefit of it, but also we have a huge responsibility to protect it. And so how are we doing that in small ways? There isn't a silver bullet, but we all have a responsibility to help.

Cole Heilborn (56:21):

Incredible. Well, I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate the time and the thoughts. If folks want to follow along with you or with the brands, where can people find you?

Bronwen Foster-Butler (56:32):

Finisterre on basically every social platform. So F-I-N-I-S-T-E-R-R-E. And then I am Bronwen Foster Butler on LinkedIn. And I'm Bronwen FB on Instagram, and I'm mostly just a lurker on TikTok. So yeah, unless you're on book talk, you're not going to find me.

Cole Heilborn (56:52):

Oh, alright. Bronwen. Well have a great rest of your day and thanks again.

Bronwen Foster-Butler (56:57):

Thank you, Cole.

Cole Heilborn (56:59):

Thank you for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or leaving us a review on Apple. And remember, as you're working on that next piece of creative, the difference between creative that works and doesn't work often comes down to the hard questions that you ask while you're shaping it.

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