"You Always Have Information Anxiety — I Feel Like I Live in Fear Every Day" | Creatives Speak

These past three years have probably brought the biggest change in consumer behavior in the advertising industry's 100-year history.

"Only the imaginative, the original, the fresh will make you interesting." Bill Bernbach, called a giant of advertising history, created no shortage of classics — among them "A Diamond Is Forever." He believed that a creative idea that fails to communicate is no different from having no idea at all.

QDaily's "Agency Daily" column will run a series of interviews with advertising creatives, to see how they understand the industry, people, and the world. Recommendations and self-nominations are welcome.

Chen Minyuan has more than 24 years in advertising, 16 of them in digital marketing. Before he joined the ad industry he played in a band called Why Not with a few friends in Taiwan; one of its members was Guanyou, the drummer of Mayday, a name very familiar to us today.

In 1999, Chen Minyuan founded TRIO (Yiling Digital Technology) in Taipei, and moved to Shanghai in 2002. Today TRIO is part of Isobar China Group, under Dentsu Aegis Network.

Q: Who have you seen lately that you envy?

Chen Minyuan: I quite envy John Lasseter (chief creative officer of Disney Animation Studios). He's the same age as me, and his passion still feels full. I envy people who can tell stories, and he really knows how to tell one. I also like Philippe Starck (the well-known French designer) a lot — I envy that he can design across so many fields and do all of them well. The one I truly worship is Yohji Yamamoto; I love his personality and much of what he does.

Q: What's the most recent thing that made you afraid?

Chen Minyuan: Honestly, I'm a very optimistic person — if you're not optimistic in this line of work, it's hard to last this long. But when it comes to the industry, I'm afraid every day, because these past three years have probably brought the biggest change in consumer behavior in the advertising industry's 100-year history. You always have information anxiety, especially if you do creative work, so I feel like I live in a state of fear every day.

Q: What do people most commonly get wrong about the advertising industry?

Chen Minyuan: Advertising today is not what it was. In the past, people who ran on feeling really were better suited to the ad world. But I think advertising now needs more and more rational thinking — you have to understand technology and data. More and more, it's about putting technology and feeling together.

Q: When you say "the past," roughly what period do you mean?

Chen Minyuan: About seven or eight years ago — not that long, really. The ad world changes so fast now that after a single year I wouldn't dare claim I know what the trends are, because the trends change every year. So at most five years ago. The change in the last two years has been too big.

There are now plenty of creative directors who came out of technology, not necessarily out of creative work — not necessarily up through art or copywriting. That could hardly have happened before; how could a creative director have had a technical background back then? Now you find that in recent years many of the works winning international awards were made by art directors with technical backgrounds. That's a huge difference.

Q: If you had to give yourself a slogan, what would it be?

Chen Minyuan: Everyone says the phrase I say most is "What's next." I'm always thinking about what will happen next, because in today's advertising world you always have to ask yourself that. Trends, behavior, possible creative approaches to media — what's next? Everyone is anxious about this right now, and every time I talk with my team it's the same thing: what's next. So if I had to pick one line, that would be my slogan.

Q: Have you ever made work you thought was great at the time and now find embarrassing?

Chen Minyuan: Anyone in advertising who looks back a few years later finds the old work embarrassing. But if you're asking whether I think any of it was badly done, I don't. The most embarrassing time was when the model didn't show up and I stood in myself. A long time ago in Taiwan, for a real estate client, I think — a full-page newspaper ad with just my face on it and a slogan, and I was shirtless. My body was in good shape back then, so it was actually pretty funny.

Otherwise I think it's fine, because when you look at each stage, every stage has its own version of you. I don't find it that embarrassing.

Q: How do you imagine your consumers?

Chen Minyuan: Consumers in this day and age can't be imagined — you need data to verify them, especially in China, because I think there's always been a problem here: a lot of people carry biases.

The Chinese market is enormous. Consumers in tier-one cities and consumers in tier-six cities behave nothing alike. Even people of the same age, the same blood type, the same zodiac sign behave in completely different ways. It's very hard to rely on imagination, so I spend a lot of time studying these people and getting into their circles. I went and registered on Bilibili, for instance, and answered all 50 questions on their user-registration quiz. You have to really enter that world; you can't guess what those people are like. You have to drop your biases and look at a lot of things.

Q: So how would you describe consumers?

Chen Minyuan: Here's an interesting point. China has changed so much in 30 years that people born in the 1970s were "fighting to grab territory"; people born in the 1980s said "my turf, my rules"; people born in the 1990s say, "this was already mine, what's there to fight over?" The generation gap in China keeps getting narrower — someone born in 1995 may already find someone born in 1990 off-putting. That's why I say imagination won't do it. You have to jump in and see what kind of people this group really is before you can understand what they're thinking.

Q: Who in this industry do you most want to become?

Chen Minyuan: Honestly, I've never thought about it, because I have my own expectations for myself. I often get to go to international advertising festivals, and Chinese work gets criticized a lot for so-called scam ads — ads made only to win awards, never meant to run — and there have been plenty of them in recent years. I think China has a lot of very good work; it just doesn't know how to package it, how to package it into something everyone can understand. That's what I really want to work on, so I've never thought about who I want to become.

Q: Where do you usually get new knowledge and new perspectives?

Chen Minyuan: There are plenty of sources. Every year I attend two or three conferences, and those are chances to see the changes happening all over the world. I think that's a great opportunity, and I enjoy getting to see all of it.

Second, most years I get to judge at an international advertising festival, like D&AD. The good thing about judging is that you see the best work in the world, whether or not it wins. I might spend several days shut away reviewing hundreds of pieces, and through those hundreds you see how different cultures are leading the way. I judge mostly in digital, so you see a huge range of possibilities — some of it really opens your head, and there's a lot of cultural innovation too.

Third, I spend a lot of my own time on all sorts of fields — I read history, I read science fiction, I read all kinds of things. It's a habit, I suppose.

Q: If you weren't in this line of work, what would you be doing?

Chen Minyuan: I'd probably still be in music. At 13 or 14 I decided it would be either music or design, because I'd loved both since I was a kid — when I was little I most wanted to be a comic artist, and later, growing up, I found design interesting. If I weren't doing advertising, I'd probably still be in the music world; a lot of my friends are still in it.

Q: Why didn't you stick with music? Doesn't the music business sound cooler?

Chen Minyuan: Actually, I did a few years of advertising first, then went into music. A few good friends and I started playing together very early, more than twenty years ago; back then we played acid jazz and R&B. Once we were in it, we found the entertainment environment at the time didn't suit musicians — if you went on a show, you had to play games. So when you were actually making music, you didn't feel happy about it. There was friction among the band members too, and eventually we broke up.

I don't think the music world is cooler, because I know that world. When I was in the band I spent a lot of time writing songs, and we were nominated for a Golden Melody Award; I also wrote songs for Eason Chan. Later I decided I shouldn't turn both of my interests into work — I should pick one. Advertising takes in an enormous range: it has to pull together imagery, animation, music, writing, and art, all at once. That's the part I really enjoy.

Q: What talent would you most like to have?

Chen Minyuan: The ability to build in three dimensions. I think my strengths are in graphics and motion, but take someone like Philippe Starck — he's an industrial designer, and his feel for space and volume... or Alexander McQueen, his feel for the structure of a garment, or Yohji Yamamoto, whom I mentioned earlier. They're all extraordinary at that. It's hard to describe the feeling; you just know in your heart that if you tried to do what they do, you'd never do it as well. That's what I envy.

Q: At 22, how did you imagine your future self?

Chen Minyuan: Honestly, I didn't think about it much back then — I was just always thinking about becoming better. I had no particular fixation on how much money I had to make or how famous I had to be. I'd count myself as the adventurous type: doing advertising and music, going to New York to study when I was almost 30, then turning down a job offer from AOL (America Online) to go back to Taiwan, and coming to the mainland after that.

I kept moving toward that kind of world, and I found it interesting. I tend to follow my own heart — I do whatever I feel like doing — so I never particularly wanted to become anyone. Take Steve Jobs. I don't think he was happy; he was so obsessive. I envy his inspiration, but I don't envy his life. I quite enjoy my own.

Q: What does the most to enrich creativity, and what does the most to kill it?

Chen Minyuan: That's hard to explain; it's a very individual thing. When it comes to enriching creativity, I don't think there's a shortcut. For me it's about seeing a lot. What most holds creativity back, I think, is bias.

Q: When do you feel you've fallen behind the times?

Chen Minyuan: I've never felt that. Inside, I feel I haven't changed since I was 25. The whole company is full of people born in the 1990s, but honestly, the one who understands pop culture best may still be me. Ask me who's in BIGBANG and I know exactly; ask about AOA, or Japanese culture, or Western style, or which designers are hot right now — I don't think anyone here understands it better than I do. I'm not joking. Everyone says I'm the most serious, the hardest-working person in the company. I'm genuinely interested; I follow the culture of every age group.

Q: What do you understand least about the advertising industry right now?

Chen Minyuan: Spending huge money on title sponsorships. Plenty of big brands aren't short of awareness in the first place — what they're short of is preference. So what's the point of spending hundreds of millions on a title sponsorship? This is something creative agencies or ad agencies should take responsibility for, though the client may go and negotiate it directly, which is often what happens now, and they want whoever is hottest. Take Jiaduobao: it has great resources and its awareness is already high enough, so does it really need to spend that much money on a title sponsorship? A rock-sugar pear drink sponsoring The Voice of China makes more sense to me, because it soothes the throat. That's the one thing I truly don't understand — spending a lot of money on IP without any effect on preference.

Q: What's the most enviable thing about this industry?

Chen Minyuan: That you get to work with so many different kinds of people, and every project is a new challenge. It isn't a routine job, and that's one reason I've kept so much passion for this industry. We've been working with DreamWorks lately, and you get to talk with the animation team about how they work; or today I might be working with Jay Chou, watching how he shoots. Working with different people brings different kinds of fun.

Then there are your clients — some sell water for one yuan, others sell cars worth millions. Each one challenges you differently. So you need to understand the so-called diaosi (a self-deprecating term for ordinary, low-status young people), the newly rich, the very rich, students, and so on. That's the part I find most interesting.

Q: You've recently handled a lot of creative advertising for KFC, much of it widely talked about, and it's very different from KFC's old marketing approach. How do you see a CMO's influence on a brand's marketing strategy?

Chen Minyuan: His name is Li Bo, KFC's vice president of marketing. I think the person who deserves the most credit for a good idea, or a good case, is really the client. Plenty of creative people at agencies can come up with very good ideas, but the one who can make it happen is usually the client.

Li Bo is a very open-minded person. He only took the job last year, and we started working together after he took over. He cares a great deal about user experience — and here user experience doesn't mean UI and UE design in general. What he means is how to create a complete dining experience, whether through the brand, through emoji, or through in-store interaction and self-service ordering, turning the whole of KFC into a fully upgraded digital dining experience.

We're very happy about that. Entertainment and technology are playing a bigger and bigger role in advertising creative. So in the end it led to a few great collaborations. Worldwide, DreamWorks partners with McDonald's; only in China does it work with KFC across the entire product line.

Q: What does it mean to you to judge awards like the New York Festivals and Spikes Asia?

Chen Minyuan: It's a very good chance for me to absorb information. And at the big international shows you meet a lot of excellent people; spending time with excellent people gives you a different angle of your own.

Q: When you judge, what are your standards for picking winning work?

Chen Minyuan: Great minds usually think alike here. First, is the idea simple enough. Second, is the idea original — does it make you go "wow." Third, is it a real case, which I think is the most basic requirement.

Q: Where do you disagree most with the other judges?

Chen Minyuan: In the final round the arguments are usually fierce. Asian cases are at a disadvantage internationally, because you don't have to explain Christmas, or the difference between Christmas and Halloween, but you may have to explain the Dragon Boat Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Ghost Festival or the Double Ninth Festival, and what these things mean to Chinese people. Japan, of course, has Obon; Thailand has Songkran. The disagreements that come up are mostly about not understanding the culture. That's the biggest source by far.