Continuous learning comes from a $1.4m campaign failure

Andy Morley, director of marketing APAC, Uber and Uber Eats

Failure is ultimately about celebrating learnings. If we’re really going to be world class, we have to work out where those gaps are and be able to take things up to the next level. You only get there by having a culture of vulnerability, leaning into the things that could be better and heroing those things more.

At our last all-hands meeting, instead of teams presenting and celebrating campaign launches, we focused on post-campaign reports in each market and talked about three things that went well, but also three things we could have been done better that will inform work next time. This was a way of telling people learning matters more.  

An interesting example of failure for us was in 2018. We were about 12 months into scaling up marketing for Uber Eats and wanted to take our efforts up a notch and into more non-traditional and cultural drumbeats. On the cultural calendar was Cinco de Mayo, a good opportunity to do something around Mexican food that was fun and different. The campaign was one of the first brand activations at scale on Facebook Live, which had just launched.

We put on a mariachi band and at the end of every song, the band would turn around and have either promotional codes or offers on their backs - things like 2-for-1 but also a $2 or $50 promo codes. We had a $50,000 budget for the whole program.

We had a record amount of engagement, with 85,000 people tuning in. What was different was everyone who went there stayed. That was surprising. It was only about two hours after the event that the project leader looked at the metrics on our dashboards and saw something was off. We were watching two metrics: Promo code applied, and promo code used. Promo code used was tied to our payments system so it was pretty accurate, and we’d capped promo codes at $50,000. But the numbers were showing $1.4m promo code applied and the number kept going up. It seemed the issue was with the tools, and we kept an eye on it. Half an hour later, it hit $1.6 million, with spend over $50,000 and accelerating. As it turned out, the tools weren’t broken after all.

The marketing manager had only been in marketing for six months, and it was her first big project. She’d shown great diligence in setting up the campaign, checking promo codes 101 times to ensure these capped out, and building relationships with Facebook’s product people in San Francisco. What wasn’t apparent in testing was what happens when 80,000 people try and apply the code at same time. In the end, we overspent the campaign by $1.4 million, which is obviously a pretty big number. You can imagine how the project lead felt after she’d done everything she could.

What she then did was face into the situation quickly and openly, and kick off a post-mortem report (what we do when there is an accounting issue). This had all the right inputs and collaboration, included what we learnt, what it means for the future and recommendations.

The next promotional cycle, we promoted that person. She deserved it. But it was also symbolic and demonstrate that despite doing everything she could, things are going to fail. The last thing we want to do is stop taking any risks or doing innovative things. Given how much we invest in innovation, $1.4m is a rounding error in the longer-term scheme in some ways.

I try to keep that story alive. On 5 May every year, we do a Mexican pub crawl as a team, recognising the risk-taking we do. We got our agency village together and ate Mexican food while people shared what they felt were the bravest campaigns they had seen.

Then we have more specific actions and processes in place to make sure we keep learning. For example, we now have a new rule: For all post-campaign reports, teams need to not only celebrate but also clearly identify things that could have been better and we can improve on. It’s about helping them be comfortable and taking ownership of those learnings. Sometimes it’s easy to say an agency was late in delivering this, to shift blame or put it against external context. But what we’re asking for are the learnings that would have led us to do something differently with the knowledge we have now.  

This idea of celebrating failure was here when I started at Uber, but I felt it got lost over time. It’s called ‘T3 B3’ – the top three things that happened and the bottom three.

Having a consistent approach helps, plus a lot of education. I mandated everyone needs to send learnings to everyone in the marketing team. What has since happened is teams have taken further initiative. I’m really proud of the Japanese team, who didn’t just send learnings to the marketing team, they sent them to everyone in the Japanese business. That’s a cultural 180 compared to how they normally operate. I had so much feedback from senior people in the business saying how impressed they were, and how much trust they felt that marketing was paying attention and using investment in the best possible way.

I have seen this unlock opportunity, investment as a result. Deep down, while stakeholders keep asking us for an ROI on marketing, they totally understand what comes with it. We need to find a way for business partners to carry risks with us and see it not just as marketing’s job. We’ve educated people on the challenges and caveats with an ROI lens. But more than that, they know we’re doing our best and hold ourselves to account. Then they’re willing to hold hands and take risks together.

The other thing is work gets better and better. With campaigns last year in Australia and a couple of other markets, we had good ideas, but through openness to learning, testing and optimising, we probably improved results by 30 per cent in the first six weeks of the campaign. This was by taking on this mindset, identifying signals, redoing channels and platform executions and getting it back out to market.

The easier we make it for people to do this, the more comfortable they will be. But I feel the cultural change is much more important. It’s continuing to champion this behaviour, much more than just launching a campaign and being a hero for it. We have to get the weighting right to get hungry for results.  

Good marketing that cuts through is harder than ever. We’ll only get there if we really look at how we can be better, be willing to take risks, be brave, fail and celebrate that as a positive thing. In 2024, my theme is going from being good at what we are doing, to truly being world class.

Holding a party for staff to farewell a failure

Olivia Dickinson, GM growth, Chobani

When it comes to broader innovation initiatives, we certainly look at how we engage the wider business. And with food innovation, we have been turning to employees to co-create. After all, they plus their families are also shoppers and consumers, not just staff. It’s a great way for us to learn and engage.

Recently, we were working on an innovation opportunity and giving all our people product to take home to their families and kitchens. We were experimenting, bringing all this feedback in. We made a call as a team and department that we weren’t going to proceed with the idea. While I wanted to move on, there was so much passion and engagement in the business, it felt really abrupt to just move on.

I was reflecting on what has been different this time, and asked why everyone was so behind this. What we found was it because we had engaged them along the way as our co-creators.

So for the first time we threw a farewell party. We did this as a business to say goodbye, celebrate it. During the session, we talked about all the learnings and gave context on why the decision was what it was. It was bittersweet in many ways – we enjoyed the product for the last time as well.

It was a really important learning for us. We talk about innovation, but it’s not all the blue-sky – half the time it is also about failing. It’s an essential part of being resilient as an organisation. One of our team values is I get knocked down but I get up again – you have to keep going. That contributes to the learning and ongoing motivation for everyone and helps develop that mindset. These reflections, learnings and failures bring us closer to the successes.

You could see from that a tangible component – in engaging everyone in that process, how much more they engaged throughout the project and if that had of come off, how much more engaged they would have been to execute on the project as well.

It also allows you to control the message. It’s so easy when something doesn’t go right or go ahead to stick your head down and not own that. We wanted to own it and share it. 

'Flearning' thanks to a new mental health platform

Lewis Pullen, Partner at The Bridge International

While consulting for The Bridge International on a new mental health platform, we tested a bespoke video conference service for mental health patients to connect with specialist help providers, using a white-label SaaS platform. This feature enabled patients to share their mental health e-learning provided by the platform on screen, while in a consultation.

The client and dev team got very excited with the demo, pilot and opportunity to provide this video capability, given the growth of telehealth during Covid-19 and consumers acceptance of VC to connect.

We pulled it due to escalating development costs and an inability to deliver a reliable seamless customer experience. We reverted to a simple messaging application – text or email – followed up by phone call from the help provider. Because we were monitoring costs and progress on development on a weekly basis, we were able to see things going pear shaped. It was very hard to pull, as we were getting so close, but there was no clear pathway to success.

This is an example of what we call “Flearn” at The Bridge. Learn. But fail fast. You want to learn but stop before you totally blow the budget and jeopardise other aspects of the project.

This experiment made us think further and deeper about this connection product and customer engagement. The basic “connect service” has now been improved as a result of this project, even though we don’t have the “shiny new thing.” The sunk investment is partly justified by improvements to the core service.

We also learnt a lot about how far you can push SaaS products. We now don’t always believe what is on the tin, especially when it comes to customisation. However, you often must experiment to see how far you can push SaaS to meet your needs. Fortunately experimenting is much lower cost today because of SaaS.

We were open with the challenges and risks on the delivering the project, so there were no nasty surprises. The key is to regularly communicate how the experiment is going to all stakeholders, have some key milestones or stage gates where you make the call to continue or stop. It’s a career limiting move to bury these things.

In today’s world, you must innovate and take risks to deliver new services and points of difference. If you don’t, your competition will. The key thing is to capture all the learnings so the investment in time and money makes you better at innovating next time. This failed experiment hasn’t dampened our desire to innovate in this health care space. Just fail a bit faster.

Finding decisive closure

Anny Havercroft, head of global business marketing, South East Asia and global marketing solutions APAC, TikTok

In the dynamic landscape of digital innovation, not every product launch emerges as the triumphant success story we envision. Earlier in my career, I was fortunate to be working on a standalone digital video proposition that was brimming with anticipation for unlocking new audiences and additional revenue streams. The business case was supported by robust audience data, market analysis and an internal capabilities audit. 

Following the pilot period, it became increasingly apparent the expected return on investment was not materialising. Despite our initial excitement and preparation across product, content, marketing and sales teams, the results simply did not align with our projections. It was a humbling realisation, but one that prompted us to take decisive action.

Gathering our wider leadership team beyond executive leadership to review the results was a pivotal moment. There was no denying the analysis in front of us. We could have swept the project under the carpet and continued business-as-usual, but with transparency and humility, we confronted the stark reality the product was not delivering the expected ROI with the broader team. This candid assessment and collective discussion allowed us to build buy-in and pivot swiftly, closing the project and redirecting our team and focus towards new opportunities.

As a dynamic digital business, the culture was built on resilience, adaptability and action, which enabled the team to acknowledge the shortcomings of the project and pivot our efforts towards initiatives that held greater potential. This included refocusing on integrating video into the core content offerings of news, sport and entertainment as well as doubling down on our capabilities in programmatic advertising. A strategic move that has subsequently paid off with sizeable revenue growth.

While the journey may not have yielded the desired outcomes, it reinforced the importance of maintaining a nimble approach in the face of challenge and openly acknowledging failures in a timely manner in order to move forward with new opportunities. I call it ‘decisive closure’.