Pat Murphy
Hi and welcome to The MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative and advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising for the future, and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Anastasia Leng, Founder and CEO of CreativeX, a technology company that powers creative decision making for some of the world’s best brands. CreativeX technology is used globally by Fortune 500 brands like Unilever, Mondelez, Heineken, Google and many more to measure creative efficiency, consistency, representation and impact across creative worldwide. Anastasia spent five plus years at Google, where she worked on nearly every ad, tech and analytics product and led entrepreneurship efforts in EMEA.

Anastasia, thank you for being here today on our podcast.

Anastasia Leng
Thank you for having me.

Pat Murphy
Now – Bahrain, Vietnam, Hungary, France, Russia, UK. You’ve lived in so many places. Were you an international fugitive? Were you running away from something?!

Anastasia Leng
I’ve always wondered that! My parents are very cagey about why people move around so much. So I was born in Moscow, in Russia and in about 1990, the USSR was coming undone and everyone was looking for a ticket out of Russia. Now my father was tremendously gifted at languages and just happened to speak Vietnamese. How or why I don’t know, but he did. And so our family got a ticket out to go to Vietnam because they were looking for journalists who could speak Vietnamese. Obviously Russia and Vietnam had a bit of a connection at the time who could speak Vietnamese and covered the aftermath of the Vietnam War in Russian. That ended up being my father’s ticket out of Russia.

Our whole family moved over to Vietnam. And I think that just started… again I was just coming along for the ride I was only six years old at the time, so I was really following my family’s ambitions and that eventually those took us to Hungary and Bahrain and eventually the United States. Now at some point my family wanted to move again, but I was in high school at the time and my mother put her iron fist down and said ‘we will not move her during high school’! We stayed in the US for quite some time after that.

Pat Murphy
So, what nationality do you regard yourself, having been living in all these different places? Are you US?

Anastasia Leng
It depends on how nationality is defined. Certainly, if you look at what my passport says, yes, the passport associates need to be a US citizen. I think that the difficulty about having that kind of upbringing, which is both a blessing and a curse is – it’s easier for me to move than to stay. When I had this itchy-feet syndrome, where after I spend more than two or three years in one place, I feel the need to get up and start it all over again, getting to know a new place, going to a situation where you don’t know anyone or anything, and making it home. I currently spend my time between New York and London, which is where the teams are at, but I find myself still wanting to move around. Obviously, as you get older and you have kids of your own, that becomes a little bit more complex! But yeah, I like to say home is usually on a plane!!

Pat Murphy
I’m exactly the same as you. I’ve travelled around the world for different roles and different businesses over my career. I’m living in Portugal now, and I love living here. This is my latest iteration of where I’m living so I get exactly where you’re coming from.

Your journey in the professional world, though, it has been quite diverse, from Google to founding CreativeX and Hash.co. Please share me a little bit about your career and how you ended up founding your own company.

Anastasia Leng
Well, diverse is probably the generous interpretation of my career. I think a combination of lucky is probably more accurate. So, long story short – I started my career in Google. How I ended up on Google is also complete luck. When I was at university. I needed to have a job all throughout university. Until at that time, the best way to make money – you could have on-campus jobs, but they paid about $7, $8 an hour. So I ended up getting a job at our college newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, where you would get commission on every piece of ad space that you sold. And long story short, after a couple of years I ended up running some departments at that place, and so when Google came to campus to recruit, they automatically asked certain people in leadership positions on campus to come and interview.

And so I went to interview for a job at Google. Of course, I knew nothing about technology, knew nothing about business. I had studied psychology, sociology and French, but somehow I ended up getting a job at Google. I think at that time they were just looking for people who were quite comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty and spent five, six years at Google – some of the most formative years of my career and I left Google to start a company called Hatch.

Now, Hatch was my first startup. It was a flaming disaster. Every mistake you could make as a founder and entrepreneur – I absolutely made it. The difficulty about that company was that no investor would give me money. I think they saw what a terrible idea it was, even as I was starting it out, and so the only people who invested in that business were some of my former managers at Google. So there I was with this flaming disaster of a company, but for whom the most revered people that I knew had invested in, and I could not let it fail! And so, as we were trying to save that e-commerce company, we ended up building some tools, some internal tools for ourselves that ended up becoming CreativeX, and it was in my attempt to save that first business that we actually stumbled upon what has become now our second business and what I’ve spent the last eight years of my life working on, which is CreativeX. So you know, ‘diverse’ again, as I said, is a kind word, but ‘lucky’ and maybe a little bit ‘stubborn’, probably more accurate.

Pat Murphy
CreativeX has been helping brands optimize creative content. What does that actually mean exactly, and is this just for digital or all kinds of assets?

Anastasia Leng
Yes –  you know I’m a bit of a word pendant, which is one of the many annoying things about me. And I will say I really don’t like the word ‘optimize’. So, I think that at the heart of it, what CreativeX really tries to do is it tries to bring a layer of measurability behind the magic that is creative. What we recognize is that, because of all the advancements of technology, you can now actually extract a lot of information from every image and video piece of content that you make. Now, how you cluster and use that information to lead to insights is something that we have been working on. But the idea is how do we take that data that is inside every image and video that a consumer sees, map that data to the way people are actually responding to various different stimuli and give them back to the marketing, the advertising, the creative community, not to necessarily optimize their ads, but first of all to help them measure and understand what is going on.

That measurement tends to be measurement of two different varieties. The first measurement is around ‘are you seeing what you think you’re seeing’? If you think about a brand identity, a couple of years ago we made 100 ads a year, maybe 1,000. Now we make about a million. If you think that’s bad, wait until Gen AI comes into full force. So all of a sudden our ability to measure these things with the human eye and our existing tools… when we want to know ‘hey, I’m a company that cares a lot about diversity. Am I actually casting people of different backgrounds in my ads’? You cannot answer those questions! The first one is am I actually saying what I think I’m saying across all of the content I’m putting out there that represent my brand and my identity?

The second bit of that is ‘well, what is the impact of these creative decisions as I vary up how I communicate and what I communicate in the way I visually and creatively show up in front of my consumers? What happens to our brand perception? What happens to some of our digital performance measures? What happens to sales’? These are the questions we’re really interested in answering. We’re interested in answering them from a data point of view, but ultimately, our job is to give the data back to the creative community and let them put it on steroids and do what they do best. We very explicitly do not make content, edit content, etc. We are a data provider that tries to give data back to the creative community.

Pat Murphy
And most of what you provide is this post-production or pre-production.

Anastasia Leng
It’s both, and I don’t think you can do one without the other.

The reason for that is… the typical path of a customer is they’ll come on board and they’ll first look at their post-production data, because that is the best reflection of ‘what am I actually putting out in the market’, right, and ‘what is the impact of some of these things on marketing performance’?

Typically, what people find when they first look at all their content production in this very data-driven way is there are some basics and fundamentals that are slipping through the cracks, and then what ends up happening is they start using some of our tools to say, ‘hey, we want to set some standards around different things that are important to our brand but that we know are our corollatory or causal of better performance, and we want to make sure that we hit those things pre-production every time’, in which case you start to look at your content before it actually goes live.

But in my view, you cannot have one without the other. You really need both, because the post-production gives you the actual performance data, right, it shows you what is actually happening in market with your consumers. The pre-production is a system to make sure that all of your creative partners, all of your markets. All of your marketers are marching to the beat of the same drum and actually leveraging each other’s knowledge as they’re making content decisions.

Pat Murphy
So how does the tech actually work?

Anastasia Leng
Okay, so the easiest way I think about explaining how the tech works is – think about this as a sort of a conveyor belt and images and videos come down the conveyor belt and the first thing we do is we tag those images and videos for lots of what we think of as ‘micro data’. Right, this tends to be recognizing different objects, colours, text, things like that in the image. So we sort of layer as much of that micro creative data, onto an image.

Then the next thing we do is we start to cluster and bundle that creative data into macro themes or concepts that we understand. So, for example, one could be ‘hey, is this ad progressive? Is this ad digitally suitable? i.e. is it in line with some of the best practices for a place like YouTube or a place like TikTok? How consistent is this ad with your brand identity? Is this ad accessible?’

So we’re trying to take all those kind of micro signals and map them to some macro themes and concepts that you care about. Now, once the ad is labelled and categorised and all of that, then we also overlay performance data on top of the ad. These are all the actual signals of when this ad was exposed to people – what happened? Did they click on it? Like it, view it? You know, if we have other data like brand data or sales data, we could follow it all the way through, and even if itself becomes kind of fun, it’s an interesting data point. But we do this millions of times a day and so all of a sudden you start to get a picture of patterns forming around the relationship between the various creative decisions that brands are making and their specific performance information and how they’re showing up in the market.

Pat Murphy
So what you’re looking for is that set by you and the client, or is that very generic?

Anastasia Leng
It’s both. So when we first started the company, it was entirely client-led. i.e. a client came to us and said ‘here’s some of the things I care about’, and we would say ‘we think we can train an algorithm to detect that. Or you want to know if the ad’s funny? Sorry, even people will disagree on that. We don’t think technology can tell you that at this moment in time’. And so you know we would get lots and lots of signals.

But then what we really started to look for is what were the creative signals that, a- lot of brands are interested in but b- were leading to behaviour change at brand level. With this kind of data – there is what I think of as ‘sexy data’ and ‘unsexy data’. The sexy data is like oh, there are dogs in my ads, or there’s a lemon in there, the ad’s orange, and that’s fun, but it doesn’t tend to lead to repeatable, sustainable, statistically meaningful performance impact! In fact, right, because you can’t make every ad orange. You can’t put a dog in every ad, obviously, unless you’re a pet food company or something like that. And so this is when we started thinking about what are some of these macro themes that start to be more universal, and the first macro theme we noticed was that, as a lot of advertisers were moving their media spend from television to digital, they were recycling their content and they ended up putting a tremendous amount of content but, more importantly, media budgets on digital ads that were not set up to be successful on digital. This is a concept that our customers are calling the creative quality score, which was, ‘hey, as we are taking these great creative ideas and essentially running the last mile of the creative execution, we’re messing it up because we’re not adapting those ads to the various digital environments.’

Right, and now that is pretty much an out of the box solution where we have, over the last now eight years or so, figured out and worked with the different digital platform partners to say ‘this is basic digital suitability standards at TikTok, at YouTube, at Meta, at X, at Snapchat, et cetera’. Now once folks stabilise that, then they start to think about what are some other signals that I care about? Maybe it’s representation, maybe it’s brand consistency, maybe it’s about how often do I talk about purpose and the purpose behind my brand and what does that mean from a brand association point of view? So, to be truthful, I think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what are some of the things that creative data can do for us. So I don’t think we’ve figured out all of it, but there’s a ton of signals that can be extracted.

Pat Murphy
It’s absolutely fascinating. What you’re actually doing you should taking subjectivity away, because historically it’s always the loudest person in the room that gets their way with a lot of things, so you’re taking that away. Would that be correct?

Anastasia Leng
My personal belief is that there will always be an element of subjectivity in creativity. Great ads have an element of je ne sais quoi, an element of magic that technology will never 100% take away, at least from what I have seen to date, although there is obviously a lot of chatter about whether or not the likes of the generative AI tools will eventually replace that the whole other debate. So what we’re trying to do is bring a layer of measureability to measure the things that we can. So I think those things start with again when we think about things like creative quality, which is just a subset of creative excellence, all the things that make a piece of content great. Some of those things are just about how you execute that great idea. So it’s less about you’re right in some places, taking about subjectivity away, but really we’re trying to bring measurability where we can.

Pat Murphy
Got it.

You mentioned creative excellence. What’s your definition of creative excellence?

Anastasia Leng
Well, it’s a very difficult question. What we’ve seen when we have this conversation with our brand partners is that creative excellence means something a little bit different to everyone. There’s an element of creative excellence that is always brand specific, in that a creatively excellent ad is not only an ad that cuts through, that represents the brand accurately and authentically, but that also achieves business impact. And those are the three components. I don’t think we will ever be able to define creative excellence as a formula that is one size fits all, because some of those elements around ‘hey, does this ad represents our brand, our audience, etc’ those will always be dialled up or down based on who the brand is, who is making that piece of content. If you think about – I’m flying on Sunday and you take a brand like Virgin Airlines versus a brand like United, both airline companies, both get you from A to B. Very different brands. The way they show up in the market and the way what their ads are probably capable of accomplishing because of the brand identity are fundamentally different! They operate in different places on that spectrum. So I don’t have a universal definition for creative excellence, but I do believe creative excellence ads have a combination of representing the brand well, cutting through with consumers and ultimately achieving business impact, which is something I don’t think we talk about enough.

Pat Murphy
was listening to another podcast that you di – you talked about the four things that you measure. Maybe you want to just talk a little bit more about that, because I was also wondering whether creative excellence in your mind also links back to ROI.

Anastasia Leng
Yes! It’s a lot more than four things now, I think we. You know the use case and applications behind creative data have grown unbelievably quickly. So I’m happy to talk about all the things we measure. To your broader question about creative excellence, if you do not believe that creative excellence or creative contributes to ROI, you know that is such a fundamental question and debate in our industry. The power of brand has historically been proven over and over again. The power of great creative has historically been proven over and over again. The problem is it’s been proven in micro-campaign examples that have been hard for us to extrapolate to board level or to the C-suite and make a case in financial terms they understand. But in my mind that debate’s been settled. We just haven’t been able to measureably demonstrate it over and over again in a way that the folks who hold the purse strings tend to typically understand.

Pat Murphy
I’m an audio guy, as you can tell, and it’s my belief that sound has always been underrated as a way of driving effectiveness. Is that borne out in your research?

Anastasia Leng
Absolutely! When we look at a piece of creative, we don’t only look at the visual components or the text component, we also look at the audio components of that piece of creative – the presence of music, what words are being used in the audio. For some of our customers, we’re tracking things like the presence of jingles and sonic identifiers that are being used in their content, so they can start to figure out, ‘hey, as we develop these sonic identities and invest in them, what happens to our recognition’? Right, ‘what happens to some of these branded elements that we’re trying to drive up’ – again, with the belief that if we increase our brand perception, our brand association, sales will follow.

Pat Murphy
Is it purely tech that delivers the outcomes or the outputs of what you provide, or do you still have a load of human beings running around as well?

Anastasia Leng
The company is about 100 people now, which is a combination of engineers, product people, designers, as well as our revenue organisation, who are a combination of sales folks, client success teams and other folks who contribute to all elements of the business.

If we think about that kind of conveyor belt that we have, a huge part of what we do is now in a place where it is automated. But anytime someone wants to track a new signal, the first way to build that initial training set is to have people actually go in and provide the data, build an accurate ‘petri dish’ – for lack of a better word – of labels on that ad that we can use to train our machines.

What we go through is a three-step process where every label starts out as manual, then it goes through a process where it becomes partially automated and it sits in this purgatory of sorts until it reaches a certain level of repeated accuracy and then, once it’s out of there, it gets let go into the wild and it’s fully automated. As of today, over 80% of the labels we produce are fully or partially automated, so technology is heavily involved in the creation of those assets.

Pat Murphy
So you talk about being automated. I mean, I’m guessing that AI is a really key component that you use in your technology to be able to deliver on that.

Anastasia Leng
Yeah, we use a tremendous amount of the technology that we’re using is mostly from the machine learning camp. Again, this is where my pedantry becomes a little annoying. So we train a lot of machines to recognize those things. A lot of what we’re trying to use the AI for now is – you asked the question earlier about ‘how much of the signals that we extract are derived or asked for by our customers, versus things that we tell them’, and historically it’s been customer driven right Customers saying, ‘hey, I really want to track purpose or representation’, and we go back and we figure out ‘okay, great, how can we extract that signal out of your ads’?

Now, a lot of what we’re spending our time thinking about now is ‘how do we get data signals for things you’re not asking for and give you surprised insights that you might not even be thinking about’, and this is actually a very difficult problem.

In fairness, we’ve been doing a version of this since the very beginning. The problem is you get a lot of insights that are like ‘oh, some higher performing ads are red’ and you’re like ‘cool, my brand colours are blue, so I can’t do anything wrong. I can’t do anything without information’. So what we’re trying to think about is how do we find signals that are machine led and AI generated but that still have actual meaning to the business?

One of the most recent things that we found is we noticed that – to your question about pre-production and post-production because we look at both. We’ve noticed this trend that actually a lot of the ads we were seeing in pre-production were not being launched or seen in post-production when they were live months later, and we started noticing that every organisation was effectively only using a tiny subset of the content that it paid for.

And so those are some of the kinds of things that you can start to unearth when you have a very rich data set, which leads you to ask questions like ‘oh, am I paying for ads I don’t need’? Or another example here is because when we track all the creative for the brands that we work with, we tend to do it on a global basis across all their brands. You can start to see when one brand in two different markets ended up paying two different creative agencies to produce what is basically the same ad. Instead of – having one ad that you produced that you can then tweak or configure slightly to make it relevant to the other market. So those are again some interesting applications where – no- one explicitly asked for this, but we started finding these insights and bringing it back to our customers.

Pat Murphy
Fantastic.

Elon Musk said at the AI UK summit the other day ‘there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want to have a job for personal satisfaction, but the AI will always be able to do everything’.

What’s your view on that? Do you subscribe to that view?

Anastasia Leng
The real answer is I don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I have two young kids and as I think about our education system, which is always the last thing to adapt to these massive trends, I’ve been thinking about ‘what can I really teach my children to help them be successful, contributing members of society when they’re older’? And I don’t know the answer to that. And I remember a couple of years ago I heard a Thomas Friedman, who is an author, speaking on a podcast and he was asked this question. Now in fairness to him this was five, six years ago, and what he said at the time was it will be the jobs of the heart that stay. You know, the therapist, the psychologist, the coaches, all of that.

What’s fascinating is, when Chat GPT came out and everyone was playing around with it, a good friend of mine, who was also a founder and CEO, said his largest competitor had just raised an obscene amount of money and he was just playing around. He was, he wasn’t feeling very good and he went to Chat GPT and he wrote something along the lines of ‘our largest competitor just raised a huge sum of money. They’re now so much better capitalized than we are. I feel bad’. A version of that, and Chat GPT wrote back a response which was along the lines of like ‘look, competition is healthy. This is a validation of your space. This is a common. Ups and downs are common. As a founder and entrepreneur’ and he texted me, said ‘you know, I felt better. I had she felt better from talking to Chat GPT’.

So all of this is a long way of saying Pat, I don’t know! My work gives me a tremendous amount of purpose, right? As it does for a lot of people who have these jobs now. What I am trying to instil in my children is a love of learning and a love of curiosity. I try and put them in positions where they don’t know something and have to try and learn it quickly. I have been asking this question to everyone – what would you be teaching your kids now If you knew all of our predictions about AI we’re going to come true 10, 15 years from now? And I have not yet heard an answer that I was like, ‘yes, this is it’!

Pat Murphy
I mean I’m the same as you, I’ve got two young kids, right. So, I wrestle with this every single day, this conversation that we’re having, I’m thinking, you know, do I want my son to go off and be a plumber? Or you know, you’re always going to need a plumber.

Anastasia Leng
Yeah, that’s right.

Pat Murphy
But you know, the reality is that he doesn’t want to do that. He’s got a whole load of other things that he’s passionate about, and just encourage them to do that.

I could go into Chat GPT, because I’m writing a book at the moment and I could get Chat GPT to do a lot of my writing with my book. But there’s something really satisfying about struggling to write this thing. And at the end of it. You know you get to the end. You kind of go ‘You know what I feel good about, having worked hard at that’! So I don’t want, you know, AI to take the fun away. I think it’s part of the fun, right?

Anastasia Leng
That’s right I completely agree. If you look back at the industrial revolution and jobs stayed just not in the way that we imagined at the time and you needed people to wrangle the machines. One of the things I’m personally doing is that I’ve signed up to take a prompt engineering course over the winter break!

Pat Murphy
Me too. I’ve done the same right, yeah, yeah.

Anastasia Leng
Personally, I’m keen to understand and we’re so relatively early and I was reading actually – I went back and read the other day on Chat GPT. I was so curious  – what are the predictions we made about the internet when the internet started fully coming to fruition and how many of those turned out to be right or wrong? Turned out all of those predictions were categorically wrong. I mean, at that point we didn’t think the internet was a big deal. You know, there were only a few people who got that right and in some ways that gave me some confidence. You know, if you look at our track record – in fairness, I do think AI is a lot bigger than this and I do think it is a real societal and systemic change. But you know, I look at our track record as a marketing and advertising industry of some of these trends I mean two years ago everyone was about the metaverse!

Then that sort of died with the winter and we never went back and sort of acknowledged that, ‘hey, we let this hype cycle get a little, little intense’. And so I am, I am observing, but I I don’t have any answers!

Pat Murphy
No, no, I totally agree with you. That’s why I love these kind of conversations. One of my previous guests on the podcast was Rishad Tobaccowalla and he said ‘look, you have all of these companies out there pretending to be experts in AI but it’s bullshit, because we’ve already been talking about this for a year’, so no one’s gonna be able to learn this stuff and be an expert in a year, so it’s fascinating to see how this is gonna to end up.

Let’s change the subject a bit now to a very important issue for our industry its representation in advertising. I remember seeing a very strong post on your LinkedIn in the beginning of the year about women in advertising and saw that your company created a report about gender in the industry. That report on gender representation in advertising is a significant endeavour. Tell us more about the report’s findings.

Anastasia Leng
Yes, so we try to do this every year now where because we sit on a tremendous amount of data and have access to ads from all around the world, from some of the largest advertisers in the world. We’re able to look at those and understand how are people being represented in advertising. So we’ve done this the last two years running. My hope is that we’ll do it again. We typically do it in in March of every year and what we see is we typically take about a million to two million ads, over a billion dollars of advertising invested behind those ads. So pretty substantially significant pile of data.

And we look at a couple things. We look at the presence of women in ads – you can cut that by age. You can cut that by skin tone. We also look at how different people are being represented in advertising. So, for example, you can feature more women in ads and give yourself a pat on the back for this. But if 90% of the way you feature women is in domestic situations or holding a child, there’ll be a caretaker versus a leadership position. Well, that that perhaps is also a portrayal Issue that you should at least know. ‘Yes, you’re casting more women. But here’s the story you’re telling about them.

So – long story short, what the report found, which I don’t think will come a shock to anyone is that while we, while we have tended to do a little bit better on casting more women in ads, the way we portray them is still largely stereotypical. There are types of women who are largely absent from advertising. These tend to be older women. Women over 65 and up are pretty much invisible and ads. In fairness, the same is true for men as well. I think people of a certain age are just not visible in ads. Women of colour tend to be substantially absent from ads. When you do have women of colour and ads, they tend to be lighter skin instead of darker skin.

Now I am a pragmatic optimist, which is why I think data is a great place to have these conversations, because I do believe a lot of people have good intentions here, but there’s still a gap between our intent and our actions.

I think one of the things that’s happened is more people have started to make casting decisions that represent their values, you know, and cast for a broader pool of people to show. But whenever we try to ramp up one thing,  there are unintended things that ramp up with it, and what’s happened that the serve? The TLDR of the report is that as we’ve cast more diverse people in ads, we’ve done it in a way that actually increases stereotype portrayals, and that’s just the next thing we have to work on right? I actually think we are on the right track. We’re starting to solve problem one. But now we think about ‘hey, as we’re casting more different kinds of people, let’s make sure we have people in that creative breeze, people behind the camera who understands the lived experiences of different groups and can tell authentic stories about them. And that’s the next big hurdle we have to cross.

Pat Murphy
So I was reading a paper from the ANA three or four months ago about marketing or marketers having a gap between intent and real action. How do we fix that?

Anastasia Leng
Well… the selfish answer is, we haven’t been able to measure the gap. You ask any CMO: “How does the people you cast your advertising breakup by demographic” they will not be able to answer the question. We fundamentally have a giant data gap that we have not been able to answer. That’s one problem is we lack meaningful data and sometimes I actually think we’re afraid to look.

The second problem, which is a much more systemic problem, is as a society, we are not very forgiving of people’s mistakes in the space, which I think actually makes it much harder to have an open, honest conversation. One of the things we’ve seen from our brands is when they find out ‘hey, CreativeX is a product that can help us understand representation and you know how, we’re casting and how the people are be shown and advertising’. They get really excited. But then that they start navigating internally how to have those conversations.

Everyone’s afraid of being cancelled, everyone’s afraid of saying the wrong thing, and that creates even more inaction. Because we all fear we lack the right vocabulary and, in fairness, a lot of us probably do, myself included, and so that fear actually prevents us from from doing some of those things! Again, I don’t know what the answer to it is. We’ve done our best to be very open about those things and try, in whatever capacity we have, to create spaces for those conversations to happen. But it’s broader than that. Every time someone runs an ad which is well intentioned but perhaps didn’t show someone exactly the right way, there’s a huge backlash. You know, there’s calls to cancel the company, cancel the product, etc. And that Increases the perceived risk of trying to do the right thing because if you fail, the intent and the action will be perceived as sort of one and the same, even though the intent and the result may be different.

Pat Murphy
Anastasia, you are also an aspiring writer!

Anastasia Leng
Ha, ha ha. Yes, I am.

Pat Murphy
Fiction or non-fiction?

Anastasia Leng
I would like to write fiction, but I think as I’m getting older… I once read this quote in a book. I think the book is called my Life is a Quant and the quote which I will butcher was something like this.

When I was 18, I thought I’d be the next Einstein. At 21, I’d settle for Newton by 28, I realised I’d be lucky if I got my PhD! It’s how I increasingly feel about some of my ambitions! So the real answer is I would love to write fiction. I’d started writing a couple of crimes but but never got tremendously far. Just because you know life.  I do try and keep my writing muscle engaged by writing more for work. I don’t let anyone write for me. Our marketing team hates me because I will not let anyone write anything for me ever! Everything that has my name on it has been, has been written by me. But yeah, at some point I would like to think maybe I can take a stab at writing the next great American novel. But that’s a very lofty dream!

Pat Murphy
I’m just coming to the end of writing my book, so maybe we can get together and share some war stories and on how challenging it is! I never realised how difficult it is to write a book. It’s taken me two years now, so hopefully!!

Anastasia Leng
What are you writing about?

Pat Murphy
It’s about my adventures of working in advertising and production. So let’s see how that turns out. But I don’t think anybody’s going to read it, so I’ve kind of aimed it at my kids so they kind of know what I’ve done for the last 30-odd years, you know!

Anastasia Leng
Well, I will read it, so please send it to me! The thing that I struggle with is I’m a voracious reader. I love reading. It’s one of the few things I still find time to do that is just for me, and I think a lot of readers fancy themselves writers, and I think I’m one of them, so I will definitely read your book. I may not write my own, but I will read yours!!

Pat Murphy
Fabulous. I will share with you the manuscript and you can tear it apart.

Finally, the question we have to ask all of our guests, since it’s become the highlight of our podcast – Anastasia, what’s your favourite ad of all time?

Anastasia Leng
One of the ads that made me smile recently is an ad by a ski resort in Utah known as Snowbird. Have you seen this ad?

Pat Murphy
No, I haven’t, so I’m looking forward to seeing it!

Anastasia Leng
Okay, so The Snowbird is a resort in Utah and it has some very difficult ski slopes, and I came across this ad a couple of months, if not years ago, because it sort of started making the rounds online and basically someone went to ski at this resort and gave it a terrible review.

It said the slopes are too advanced, it’s impossible. And that resort took that negative review and made it into an ad! It’s an ad that has a one-star review next to it. It has the review from this guy named Greg who talks about that it’s just impossible to ski here!

Now, what I love about this ad is, you know, taking lemons and making it into lemonade, but also a clear understanding that not everyone is your customer. In this case, where they were saying, ‘hey, the fact that Greg found it too difficult means that all the other folks who love a difficult ski resort – this is for you!’ And I love that, both for its ability to turn a negative into a positive, but also for clearly demonstrating it knew who’s audience was. I also just think those things are terribly clever and I’m a sucker for a bit of a clever ad!

Pat Murphy
Brilliant. Thank you so much. We’ll find the ad, we’ll dig the ad out and we’ll post it up on theprodcast.com.

Anastasia, it’s been amazing talking to you today. Thanks so much for joining us on The Prodcast.

Anastasia Leng
Yeah, thanks for having me, and I’m glad I got a free book out of it, so time well spent!

Pat Murphy
Today we talked to Anastasia Leng, Founder and CEO of CreativeX.

To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com, where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes.

If you’d like to feature on The Prodcast or have any comments, questions or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com. I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA – do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, which all the links and the notes for this episode will be there. We’d love to hear from you!

Thanks again to Anastasia, my team at MCA and my production team at What Goes On Media. Thanks for listening. See you next time.