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Coke, Colbert, Clinton - Authenticity Means Owning Your Failures

Oct 30, 2015 Coca Cola

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Originally Posted on LinkedIn by Kelly Leonard
Oct 30, 2015

I recently gave a talk to 75 CMO's at an event that Coca Cola put together in San Diego. Here is what I spoke about with regard to Authenticity.

 

I want to talk just a little bit about authenticity.

 

We all say we want it; it's essential to marketing our brands; and we recognize that it is the common trait that separates the winners from the also-ran's.

And yet, we put up roadblock after roadblock to achieving anything close to authenticity.

Authenticity means owning your mistakes; Authenticity means allowing yourself to look foolish; Authenticity requires that you incorporate your failures into your narrative.

It’s been my experience over three decades of working with companies big and small, both huge consumer brands and niche brands - that most businesses have created or seek to create systems and programs that eliminate any possibility for any of those things to actually happen.

And I get it - Volkswagen, Enron, New Coke, Pete Carroll in the Super Bowl - No one wants anything to do with any of that.

However, the examples of recovering from one’s failures to drive even more success is all around us - whether it’s Netflix, Domino's, or Bill Clinton. Conversely - by the way - this is one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest issues - she doesn’t read authentic or empathetic in the way that her husband always has.

To take that line of thinking a bit further, I’m sure many of you saw Joe Biden on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. One of the major reasons that interview had so much resonance was how absolutely honest and authentic Biden was in that moment - and Colbert had something to do with that.

I’m so lucky to have witnessed the evolution of Stephen Colbert. Stephen was my wife’s roommate in college and we worked together on The Second City night staff before I became a producer and I cast Stephen in my very first production as producer of The Second City.

Stephen Colbert was the consummate ensemble member. He valued everyone’s ideas - no matter how seemingly stupid or unfunny; he was part of some of the greatest Second City scenes in our theatre’s history and he took part in some of our most epic failures.

Stephen was the one who suggested in the early 90’s that we try to use the Internet to get suggestions for an improvisational set. So we rolled the one computer that we had in the building on a cart onto the stage - with like three extension cords keeping it powered on. We did our AOL dial up and it took the cast 15 minutes to find some kid from Indiana in a chat room to type back an obscene suggestion that the cast then had to improvise on. It totally bombed.

But I would suggest that Stephen Colbert would have never been able to create the comic masterpieces in media manipulation that he performed on the Colbert Report without the many failures that came before. Failures that he happily recounts when talking about his creative process.

Colbert is also a great example that satire and civility are not mutually exclusive properties. His interview with Donald Trump is the greatest example of this. When Stephen apologized to Trump for saying impolite things about him in the past. That was entirely civil. However, it was with full satiric knowledge that Colbert asked Trump if he wanted to apologize for anything - knowing Trump would say no. Which he did.

This is an interesting aspect about our work at Second City. We have a process and environment that is positive, supportive, friendly and empathetic - it’s a process that gets us to a product that is edgy, confrontational, not politically correct and - often - borderline offensive.

We have a process and environment that values the ensemble above all else - however, we’re known as a star factory.

I guess that makes sense for a company who took their name from an insult from a snobby writer in The New Yorker.

Okay - I’ll leave you with five last thoughts around Authenticity and The Second City:

Make mistakes work for you.

The one certainty is failure - so fail fast, fail together and fail with purpose.

Fall into the crack in the game - meaning, seize the unexpected as an opportunity.

Respect, but never Revere.

And I’ll close with a quote from the late, great Harold Ramis - when asked what his key to success was, Harold shot back “Find the smartest person in the room and go stand next to them.”

 

 

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