Epic Fails, and why they slap

Recently the tiny world of Malaysian advertising was agog with the fact that a billboard had used a visual created with generative AI, that depicted 3 Petronas Towers in a sunlit haze from a drone’s eye view perspective.

Malaysia’s largest companies still operate from the Twin Towers and not triplet towers, so this was, in a sense, an epic fail, as today’s youth would call it. It started making news headlines.

Many pundits, professionals and patterers rose with glee to this bait, happy to pontificate on LinkedIn.

Their general gist was clear and peppered with outrage.

“See see see! AI doesn’t work! It’s rubbish!”

“AI will destroy the world!”

“Aiyoh la AI! Why like this lor. Better to have human lah!”

Seeing this social cacophony, I reached out to Wow Media, the company that had executed this unfortunate faux pas, and they graciously admitted it was human error. They humbly and promptly admitted their error and apologised on social media.

Cut to one week later.

Lo and behold, no surprise at all, when I checked with Mary, their Executive Director, she said it seemed to have blown over. I told her I admired their response and urged her to keep working with AI. Because she had had the courage to use it in the first place.

And, as the dust settles, and the LinkedIn gurus seek new matters, AI quietly goes on transforming our world.

I just wanted to use this storm in a teacup to highlight the fact that it’s the humans who will fail AI, not the technology itself. And it is the other humans who want to deny progress who will castigate, criticise and heap calumny on AI and its users.

Yet fails like this must not deter us, they must instead spur us on to explore, try and try again, because the rewards we can reap far outweigh the risks.

Another current example comes to mind. I was attending a PR event where Syed Saddiq was speaking, and he was sharing various social media campaigns he had tried, and how much money they had raised. Once one memorable occasion he offered to shave his head bald when a certain milestone was reached.

It was reached, and his pate was bared. But more importantly he spoke about trying and failing and trying again. These were some of the successful campaigns, but there were many failures too along the way. Every good performance marketer or digital optimizer would agree with him.

It would be great if more agencies and clients signed on for a culture of experimentation, trial and error, continuous learning and treated every campaign as a stepping stone, and not a make or break.

Finally, let’s not be shy to talk about our own not quite so epic fail. In 2023, when we entered the APPIES, we treated it as a training ground for our junior staff.

We threw them into the deep end of the competition, with very little notice. They fared bravely, hearts in mouth in front of a tough jury of CMOs, but our return haul of metals, while decent,was relatively sparse.

For me, it was a “failure”. Perhaps I had underestimated the competition. But we took this “failure” in our stride and took those feelings of loss to heart, with the aim of avoiding feeling like that again.

This year we entered again, and while we had lots of young staff involved, working passionately to win, we ensured we peppered in some seniors too. And we started prepping earlier, and working on our cases.

It’s not an accident that we won big, winning far more medals than any other agency, whether they be creative or media agency. We won a grand total of 11, from the total of 27 given out that night.

The lesson for me was that failures are required to succeed, or to slap, as Gen Z says.

Failures are required to give us extra motivation.

Failures make us try harder and motivate ourselves.

And failures are probably 90% of the iceberg we don’t see below the water.

And yet without failures success has less meaning and doesn’t taste as sweet.

Here’s wishing you a great Epic Fail so that you succeed.

Sandeep Joseph is the CEO and co-founder of Ampersand Advisory, Campaign Global Media Independent Agency of the Year and FT Statista 500 High Growth Companies Asia Pacific 2023, 2024. He can be reached at [email protected]