Lesley Bielby: [00:00:00] There were two incidences that could have been embarrassing, but we just threw our hands up and went, “whatever.” One was, when Lee split his pants just before a meeting, so whatcha gonna do, you're just gonna go with it. He ran into the toilet, stapled up his pants, came out very uncomfortable couple of hours presenting with staples, sticking into his backside.

Mark DiMassimo: We were a team right there. I mean, I was the guy with the staple. We're like, “come on, we're going in there.” And they saw teamwork. You know, they saw resilience, they saw a sense of humor, and they saw get on with it.

Chris Kocek: Welcome to any insights yet, the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. On today's episode, we talk about mental health brands and the power of resilience with Mark DiMassimo and Leslie Bielby at DiGo Brands out of New York City. DiGo Brands isn't just another ad agency.[00:01:00] 

Their focus is on creating positive behavior change. And over the past 28 years, they have been fulfilling their mission, helping brands who are trying to make a positive difference in people's lives. Brands like Weight Watchers, the Partnership to End Addiction, Crunch Fitness, HelloFresh, and Better Help among many others.

As you can imagine, working on these kinds of brands can be challenging because you have to tackle some difficult subjects with potential customers. Therapy, in particular, comes with all kinds of taboo topics or cultural associations, but Mark and Leslie are masters at deciphering people's metaphors and getting to those “Aha!” moments that can change people's minds and behaviors. 

Our conversation takes some interesting twists and turns as we explore the real meaning of embarrassment as well as the holy trinity of humility, humanity, and humor to solve complex branding problems. We also explore some fascinating findings from the world of behavioral science and how strategists are often a [00:02:00] critical bridge between the science and the art of advertising.

To get things started though, I wanted to know which projects have been most challenging for Mark and Leslie and what they did to work through them. What's one of the strangest or most challenging projects you've ever been asked to work on? 

Lesley Bielby: I've actually got a couple and they both involve below the belt, so I dunno how far into this I can go.

I worked in a brand, it was basically a procedure that you could get to help with vaginal laxity. The thing that I love most about this project, firstly, interviewing women about vaginal laxity was quite a blast, but the thing I loved the most was the researcher that ran my research department at this particular agency was a very sweet guy that had very ministerial qualities and just hearing him have to say the word vaginal every five minutes in the report, I just couldn't hold it together. So that was probably the strangest [00:03:00] one that I've ever worked on. 

Chris Kocek: That's amazing. Mark, how about you? 

Mark DiMassimo: We worked for Pfizer back in the day, and we did a wonderful, like Nike level aspirational campaign for people with urinary incontinence, and it was called the Life Beyond the Bathroom campaign.

So folks who just aspire to being able to live more than 500 feet from a restroom and feel okay about it. Very fun. 

Chris Kocek: So you both started off with a below the belt situation. 

Lesley Bielby: What does that tell you about us? 

Mark DiMassimo: You get Leslie and I together and we're very classy, but somehow, yes

Chris Kocek: So how do you get started in a research project like that when you're talking to someone? How do you ease in those topics? 

Lesley Bielby: Well, you just go straight at it. I don't think there's any kind of point in warming up the consumer when you're talking about something [00:04:00] quite so personal. I think you just gotta go straight for it, honestly, so the question you would ask would be, “what are some of the problems that you experience as a woman that has problems with vaginal laxity?” and just let them go for it.

I think that's really important in all research, actually, to start the research without, “Hey, do you have any pets?” “Tell me about your children.” But to go straight for the jugular and straight to the heart of the issue because that way the respondent or consumer will say, “okay, that's the kind of conversation that we're gonna have right now.”

So you're setting up the precedent and setting up the tone. 

Chris Kocek: Now switching gears here. You guys have done some amazing work for Better Help. Above the belt, above the shoulders. It's an online therapy website that connects people with professional licensed therapists. What's one of the insights or ”Aha!” moments that came up during your research on Better Help and how did that come about?

Mark DiMassimo: Better help, it's not the largest online therapy brand, it's the largest [00:05:00] therapy brand in North America. So 

Lesley Bielby: the world, I think in the world at this point, 

Mark DiMassimo: Yeah, it has an impact on a lot of people and there are whole communities where getting therapy or counseling is a taboo. It's just whole communities that awareness alone isn't gonna solve the problem because the Taboo is so strong. 

Lesley Bielby: So when we started working with Better Help, they were an unbelievably successful brand. Obviously. They were fulfilling a huge need, not only in American culture, but across the globe. There aren't enough therapists to go around.

There just aren't. If you wanna get into a profession today, that's the one to get into. So there was nothing wrong with their business, but what they were doing is they had a huge overdependence on social media. Social advertising, particularly Facebook. And when we talked to them about that, we said, that's gonna become a problem.

Because first of all, the stuff that they were [00:06:00] running on Facebook was getting worn out. Secondly, their cost per acquisition was going through the roof. And so that was happening because people are looking for a therapist online, they're gonna find Better Help. 'cause it's everywhere and it'll follow you, it'll retarget you and get you. But if you are on the fence and there's competition out there, we wanted to make sure that people went to Better Help first. And so we wanted them to have a sense of the brand, which at that time hadn't really been established. They've built a fantastic, brilliant business but they hadn't really built a brand.

So we said that the way that we begin to build a brand is we talked to prospects and because we had limited budgets to do research, we said, let us speak to the prospects that are the hardest people to attract to therapy. And we first of all started with a bunch of stakeholder interviews with their, some of their therapists were very generous with their time and told as well, Black men, number one, Asian men, number two, Hispanic men, number three.

So we [00:07:00] did focus groups, online, focus groups, 'cause this was during COVID, with different ethnic groups. And we started them the way that I mentioned before with “what is so hard about being a man in America today,” rather than any warmup. We went straight for the jugular and they started talking. It was a lot of trepidation in particular with the, the kind of the Black male group, and people were really uncomfortable talking about some of the issues pertaining to them and very uncomfortable talking about, “you ever consider therapy for something like that?” “I would never go to a therapist. My parents would say, why don't you just go talk to the pastor? Or my girlfriend would think that I was less of a man, or people would think there was something wrong with me.”

And then something really interesting happened, the alpha male in the group, which was a big footballer said “you guys, I'm surprised at this conversation. I've been in therapy for two years and it's changed my life and it's made me a better man, a better partner, a better [00:08:00] son, a better father, and I would highly recommend it.”

And because he opened his mouth and said that the conversation completely changed at that point. People wanted to know why did you go, how did you get your therapist? How did it change your life? Give us more detail. I really just became a witness to this thing that was unfolding in front of me and the other planner that was working with, and so the insight from that really turned into one of the most successful ads that we put in the table. We created a series of ads. Some of them are funny, some of them are really serious, but there was one that we created where we had a black guy in a gym helping a Hispanic guy trying to lift a weight who did not want his help.

He says, “I'll be all right, just leave me alone. I'm okay.” “That looks heavy. You need help.” 

Mark DiMassimo: While he is being slowly crushed by the barbell, he's like, “I don't need help.”

Lesley Bielby: The whole line is sometimes you just need a little help. Overselling Better Help to that group in particular, [00:09:00] would've been a mistake, but just letting it unfold and letting that metaphor become what it was meant to become, was successful for them and for us.

Chris Kocek: Mark, was there anything you wanted to add to that in terms of the somersault from the strategic idea to the creative? Any other creative executions that you thought really brought this metaphor home? 

Mark DiMassimo: The story spot that Leslie just talked about, there was a certain amount of humor and seeing just the absurdity of somebody not accepting a help in a situation where not accepting help, probably gonna be fatal, that was human, relatable, present, almost real, but had this humorous, absurd aspect.

We also tried to go after American archetypes of independence. We had a cowboy, severely injured, physically injured. Cowboy refused to take any help, and it was absolutely absurd and we got great reactions in both cases. But [00:10:00] what we heard, played back, was the more personal, that Gym Spot Leslie talked about. I would say five times out of six people would tell me they saw that and it meant something to them.

Chris Kocek: Leslie, were there any other data points or was there any other findings that left a lasting impression on you about the mental health category? 

Lesley Bielby: Yeah. First of all, mental health is a crisis and we were doing this work during COVID. It was not lost in any of us that this is an epidemic that our country is facing with mental health and people aren't getting the resources that they need and so it made no sense to us that they weren't taking advantage of this research that is more affordable, more flexible, more available. And by the way, really importantly, where there were diverse therapists, so you could pick someone that looked like you, that sounded like you, that spoke your language, or not, the choice is entirely up to you.

The lack of diversity within the, the therapy community was extremely [00:11:00] visible and Better Help resolves that because it attracts people from all different, kind of, ethnicities and backgrounds. The other thing is that the devastating effect that somebody who is in need of therapy, the effects it can have on the whole family, when this person is in a bad place, it affects your marriage.

It affects your children, it affects all the relationships, the relationships that you have with people that are close to you. It doesn't just affect one individual. It can infect an entire network of individuals. So it's, it's an epidemic and it's in particular an epidemic with young people. 

Mark DiMassimo: Chris, I had mental health issues in my early twenties.

I had terrible generalized anxiety, panic attack disorder, and that kind of started me off on a journey that included a 17 years of therapy. It really put me on this road to what we call positive behavior change. To wanting to work on things that help people, that leave people better, [00:12:00] that help people change their lives for the better.

Chris Kocek: Yeah. You probably know this, at Gallant we have this unofficial tagline, building brands for a Better World, that is our razon detra, right? And I think when I found you guys, I was like, “oh my gosh,” there's a kinship here. We share the same goal and I have found that putting out that beacon to the world, “this is what we do, this is who we are for, this is how we help those kinds of brands.” It attracts those kinds of brands, right? They find you because you're sending that signal out into the world. So I love all the work that you guys have done, and we are gonna be talking about some of the other brands. Before we get to that though, we've talked a lot about the idea of embarrassment, right? And so the question I have for you, and there's no right answer, I just wanna hear what you guys think. What do you think embarrassment is? In one or two sentences, how would you define what embarrassment is? 

Lesley Bielby: I think embarrassment is shame. The [00:13:00] shame of being weak. There's such a lot of shame associated with going to therapy over here that it is just not talked about. It is incredible. After all these years, there's still a stigma attached to it. I think it's to do with the way that we're raised. If we're raised not to be confident in who we are and having high self-esteem, at the end of the day it's all about self-esteem. Then we don't have the confidence to stand up and say, you know what, sometimes people need help, and I'm one of those people right now that would be high self-esteem.

It's the shame of showing weakness. 

Chris Kocek: Mark your experience or your take on that? 

Mark DiMassimo: Embarrassment is vulnerability. It's unplanned emotional, ego vulnerability. 

Lesley Bielby: Can I jump in with another one? There there's another type of embarrassment, which is less to do with shame and more to do with the flushing of the face when people show kindness.

So be, it's almost like being coy. “I'm embarrassed because people are saying nice things about me.” That's a [00:14:00] different kind of embarrassment. 

Mark DiMassimo: If you don't feel worthy of attention or positive attention, and people call attention to you, they put you on the spot, and again, you're vulnerable. You're like, “oh, now my ego is on display and I'm not confident that my ego is supportable.”

Chris Kocek: I just love this process in terms of building this definition, building this idea in real time. So Mark, you said it's vulnerability and then you started adding some adjectives behind it to say, it’s unplanned emotional ego, vulnerability. And Leslie, picking up on what you're saying, there's a component, it seems with embarrassment, there have to be others around. People don't get embarrassed with themselves, by themselves. There's always another component, right? Doing this in front of others, what others might think. So now here's the second question around embarrassment. What do you think [00:15:00] is the key to unlocking or releasing embarrassment? We're going deep. 

Lesley Bielby: We are going deep. My goodness. This is like therapy. The key to unlocking it is just letting people feel comfortable enough to be their true selves. 

Chris Kocek: Mark, have you ever found a way, if in a moment of embarrassment, how do you release yourself from that moment of embarrassment? How do you allow yourself to stop being embarrassed?

Mark DiMassimo: Humor definitely works for me, but I learned part of what I think opened the door to positive behavior change for me. Is I learned the power of humility, how it opens the door to change. If you can't take yourself lightly, then it's very hard to accept the truth. I have to restart several times every day where I just have to say, “oh shit, I got that wrong.”

Lesley Bielby: So can I mention a couple and Mark, you tell me if you're okay with me saying this. 

Mark DiMassimo: No, embarrass me. 

Lesley Bielby: So the middle time I worked for DiGo, we were doing so many pitches, so many new [00:16:00] business meetings, I swear we were doing quite often three a day in New York that me, Mark, and Lee and, and sometimes others, sometimes just the three of us would trudge from place to place to place.

And there were two incidences that could have been embarrassing, but we just threw our hands up and went “whatever.” One was when Lee split his pants just before a meeting.

Mark DiMassimo: He had gotten this new suit, and I suppose, in retrospect, it might have been just one size too tight, but he looked fantastic. But we had a stack of boards and it was a bank, by the way, so everybody's dressed to the nines and formal. And he just leans down to pick up the boards and you, everyone can hear it, 

Lesley Bielby: So whatcha gonna do, you're just gonna go with it. He ran into the toilet, stapled up his pants, came out very uncomfortable, couple of hours presenting with staples, sticking into his backside. [00:17:00] 

Mark DiMassimo: Yes. 

Lesley Bielby: And so that, that these things make for great stories. The other one was more, 

Mark DiMassimo: Wait, I have to tell the end of the story. He won. He won the account. 

Chris Kocek: Oh, amazing.

Mark DiMassimo: Yeah, we won the account. That was the final and we won that pitch.

Lesley Bielby: because they said “the one with the guy who split his pants,” they knew exactly who we were. 

Chris Kocek: That and because I think you guys show that under pressure, you solve problems, you don't panic. You just get the job done and that's a very innovative way of doing it. Staple your pants together. 

Mark DiMassimo: We were a team right there. I was the guy with the staple. We were like, “come on, we're going in there.” and they saw teamwork, they saw resilience, they saw a sense of humor, they saw “get on with it.” 

Lesley Bielby: Yeah. And then the other one was when we went to one investment firm, sold our creds, and then went to the next one and Mark kept calling the next one by the first one's name. 

Mark DiMassimo: Yeah. 

Lesley Bielby: And Lee and I looked at each other, so what are we gonna do? We just sat there and just, we just live [00:18:00] with it for the next hour. 

Mark DiMassimo: I don't think we won that one

Lesley Bielby: We didn't win that one.

Chris Kocek: But it sounds like there's a Texas two step perhaps between humor and humility. Those two things are a really powerful combination in business, in advertising work, and in everything. Is that fair to say? 

Lesley Bielby: I think, it makes work more fun. And secondly, you know, it's humility and humanity. I really do think that's what makes you win as well. I think you, you said it earlier, Chris, clients that sense that this is a team that really like each other, that have fun together, they wanna be part of that. There's an assumption that if you get on so well with each other, that you're gonna be really good at digging out insights from consumers and getting the best creative out of the creatives and everybody else in the team and getting the best work out of clients also.

Chris Kocek: You've won a bunch of awards for your work. You've won Effies, and a lot of your work is rooted in the latest research [00:19:00] around behavioral science. For our listeners who may not be familiar with behavioral science, would you mind just sharing in a nutshell what behavioral science is or what it's all about?

Mark DiMassimo: It's all the collection of sciences that try to understand why people do what they do. They wanna understand behavior, what predicts it and all of that. Why do we need behavioral science? Why can't we just say what we mean and mean what we say? Why doesn't just pure unstrategic authenticity work?

Because people are predictably irrational and therefore there's both science and art to helping people get what they're looking for and what you're looking for from communication, design, et cetera. So behavioral scientists today include behavioral economists who focus their behavioral science and economic behavior. Why do people choose what they choose, pay what they pay, buy what they buy. And from the economic lens, social psychologists, [00:20:00] why do people behave the way they do in groups? Why do they think what they think about groups? Why do they feel what they feel about other people when they're social? And we could go on and on.

But what I have found in spending a lot of time with them is that the very things that make a great behavioral scientist make a terrible strategist. So our job is to learn from them, but we don't put a behavioral scientist in the center of developing the strategy. But they can bring scientifically tested principles. Like for example, see, here's a simple one. If you wanna emphasize that a price is lower, put that price physically further away from the old price in the layout that people predictably conflate distance with difference. It's a little [00:21:00] thing, but have lots of little learnings about perceptual glitches that we have.

And so we study those, we learn from those, we get together with behavioral scientists and what we can learn, and we ask them to look at what we've done and give us comments about it. Have you thought about making that lower price just a little further from the previous price? People will think it's lower or act as if they think it's lower. Okay, sure. So there are a lot of learnings, but then integrating them into a strategic brain that can turn around as Leslie does so brilliantly and make it simple, scientists can't do that. They can do it for their careers and maybe for the paper that they're working on, but they can't really do it for clients.

Chris Kocek: So you guys are the conduit or the translators from the behavioral science, you're the bridge to get to something simple and elegant.

Mark DiMassimo: Between the problem and the behavioral science and between the behavioral science [00:22:00] and the solution, that's us. 

Chris Kocek: Any other really quick examples of one of your favorite things like the distance equals greater difference?

Mark DiMassimo: Can we go back to that Better Help case? So we found that there were whole markets that were underserved, and we found that taboo was the reason, but then we had to consider strategies together, and one strategy was we're gonna democratize mental health care. Another was to identify the taboo, basically, and say “we understand you have this feeling about this, but here's how you're gonna overcome it.”

What we found was that, that's why these other examples like the gym, it's obvious if you're being crushed by a barbell, that you need help. You don't feel embarrassed, right? So we went at the irrationality of it, but we lowered the stakes. Behavioral science basically says that kind of lowering of [00:23:00] stakes works and, and the advertisers often wanna raise the stakes.

You're suffering so much, you don't have to suffer, right? But the truth is, this is just a little irrationality. You'll feel so much better, get yourself the help. It worked so much better. So that was informed, but would a behavioral scientist have given us that strategy? I don't think so. I think we, I think it took Leslie and planners and strategists to give us that strategy.

Chris Kocek: That's why I'm so fascinated by comedians and what I like to call comic insights, right? So the one difference between comedians and, and what you guys do is you guys have to help solve the problem, or your brands have to help solve the problem. But what comedians are so great at is that they identify the tension or they identify the situation that is absurd where everybody would be like, “oh my gosh, that's me, I'm so ridiculous sometimes,” and then we laugh at ourselves. That's a really powerful position to be in as a comedian or as an [00:24:00] agency, to find those situations that allow people to let their guard down, laugh a little bit, and then take an action.

Mark DiMassimo: Amen. We did a great thing in, in the world of positive behavior change for Crunch Fitness back in the day, and we realized with Crunch Fitness that young professionals after work, they either went out to a nightclub or they went and sat on their couch and watched cable tv, or they went to the gym and we wanted more of those evenings. That was the whole goal. Did we do it by being sanctimonious? Did we do it by talking about the benefits of fitness and all of that? No. We did it by being more insightful and entertaining. So when we introduced kickboxing. Which was a super entertaining thing, right in the middle of the gym, we did a contest that was based on a comedian's insight, which is that people are really resentful about, it seems quaint now, millionaires. Now it would be billionaires, but back then [00:25:00] it was millionaires. We did a Who Wants to Kick a Millionaire's Ass contest and we ran Who Wants to Kick a Millionaire's Ass contest entry forms where people could win the opportunity to get into the real ring for a televised bout with a millionaire.

We did a survey of whose asses people most wanted to kick. Believe it or not, 20 years ago, Donald Trump was the top of that list, Bill Gates was number two. So this shows brand management here because I don't think Bill Gates would be as high anymore, but we'd also have insights about why they were sitting on the couch.

We had a washroom workout series with exercise diagrams of all the muscles they engaged with non toilet seat touching, deep knee bends. So they would be like, “oh, it'd be fun to go over to crunch.” And God, boy did it work. It went from a single exercise studio, it became the top fitness brand in the country before it was then [00:26:00] sold and ruined.

Chris Kocek: Well that's a story for another day. I love all these examples by the way, one of my favorite techniques for getting closer to an insight is interrogating language. And when you think about some of the brands you guys have worked on, can you remember a particular situation where you heard a word or a phrase and you just thought, what does that really mean? I want to dig into that word. Or maybe how could we flip that on its head and make it mean something else or something totally unexpected? Does anything come to mind? 

Lesley Bielby: Yeah. Maybe not a word, but a phrase. 

Chris Kocek: Sure. 

Lesley Bielby: So. One of the things that we've lost a little bit post COVID is we tend to do more online focus groups. We do more survey-based research, more social listening, that kind of stuff. That's all really important, but there's still nothing that beats sitting in somebody's living room, talking to them, or going to the store with 'em or basically spending time with 'em [00:27:00] in their own natural environment. Worked in a few luxury car brands, but this was like the ultimate luxury car brand, Dream Cars. And I interviewed a lot of millionaires or close to millionaires that were driving these hundred to two hundred thousand dollar cars, and there was one guy in particular who, Hispanic guy, second generation, who invited me into his home, beautiful home. I noticed the first thing I noticed when I drove up the driveway in my own little car, is that his luxury car was not in one of the four marriages. It was sitting right there and it had just been cleaned. So that's number one. This is really important to him. And then when I get into the house, he makes a point of taking me the long way to his living room so I can clock some of the stuff in his house.

When we get into the living room, we sit down, we start the interview, I start recording. And I said, tell me about what does success mean to you? What is it, and he said, “it's [00:28:00] not about money. It's not about money at all. The trimmings of success are not important to me. What's important to me,” and he points to pictures of his family, “is my family, and spending time with them and making sure that they're happy and educated and well.” But at the same time, it's starting to get dark. It's about six o'clock in the afternoon. And I noticed that he flipped the lights on outside and there's this enormous swimming pool. So it is almost as if the words were coming out of his mouth that why money wasn't important to him, why the trappings of wealth were not important to him, why the luxury car that he was driving was not important to him.

What was important to him is that it kept his family safe. And at that point, I think I had enough because I realized this was all for show, what was coming out of his mouth was not reflecting what he was showing me with his body language and his movements and his actions. So I remember saying to him, if safety's the most important thing to you, then why don't you just drive a Volvo?

And then he said, okay, [00:29:00] you got me there. And then the whole conversation changed. So it was less a word and more a, “I've gotta challenge this. I've gotta challenge this, not in a way that's rude, but in a way that might entice a chuckle,” which it did. And then we had a real conversation like, “tell me about your past, why do you drive this gorgeous car? Why do you live in this gorgeous house? Why is the pool so important to you?” And it all came out, it was a second generation Hispanic born dirt poor. His parents came over and they didn't speak English. And the story unfolded that this was all about proving to himself and others his worth. And so I guess, I think a lot of the time, as I've said a few times in this discussion, it's just calling it like it is in a kind way. 

Chris Kocek: So you used humor to disarm a little bit.

Lesley Bielby: Yeah. Humor and a little bit of, I guess, that why don't you just drive a Volvo? He wasn't prepared for that 'cause I've been very polite to that point.

But this kind of show, it got to a point where I thought, I've gotta say something because [00:30:00] clearly he doesn't mean any of this. It was gentle humor, but it was disarming. And in that moment he decided to, to switch it to something else. He also said something really interesting, and this is one of my favorite insights of all time.

I said, at what point in wealth, what is the number where things change for you? And every single millionaire that I interviewed said the same thing, 10 million. When I said, why is it 10 million? They said, “because at 10 million you become yourself.” And I thought that was fascinating. What do you mean you become yourself?

Until 10 million you are being whatever anybody wants you to be. If you're in the corporate world, if you're an entrepreneur, you're basically grabbing and growing and sticking your elbows out and, and really pushing the success. But when you hit 10 million, you don't have anything to prove anymore. So you just become who you really are.

And I noticed that with interviewing people, luxury car owners, people that were ultra high net worth [00:31:00] individuals, that was a consistent theme with a hundred percent of them. 

Chris Kocek: You've gotta be part of the Three Comma Club.

Mark DiMassimo: So Chris, I've got three quick stories in that I'd love to give you an answer to your question there.

Three sounds like a lot but they're quick. And because your question about looking at language, I'm a writer, I'm a strategic writer thinking about words and our marketing landscape is cluttered with language that people have become nose blind to, that they don't even realize the words in their name anymore.

It ceased to be meaningful for them, and yet the whole world is seeing it. So I'll give you three examples. The first one is for 25 years I've been working with, and we are currently working with the Partnership to End Addiction. Used to be the partnership for Drug Free America. Then it was the partnership for Drug Free Kids.

Now it's the Partnership to End Addiction. I've been in the middle of all of those sort of [00:32:00] reframing and renamings as the world has changed. But at some point just looked at it and said, what does partnership mean? When it was formed, it was really a partnership between media companies and the advertising industry.

It really was a partnership, right, in order to do something about drugs when it first started. But that long since broke down, and yet partnership was still in the name. So what does it mean? We ended up working together with a whole campaign. The best way to fight addiction is connection. The answer to addiction is connection and it's family connections.

So we activated that partnership word and we activated it again at every level in the name. We are currently working with a brand called The Good Feet Store. These are systems of arch supports that change people's lives. People experiencing back pain, people experiencing hip pain, knee pain. The insight there is that the problem comes from the [00:33:00] feet.

It's the way that the feet meet the ground that is causing so much of this problem for so many people. And once you realize that, we're really making people's lives better from their feet on up. And you look back at the name, you're like, “good feet” is right in there. As your feet goes, so your life goes, so your life experience goes. So that when you have good feet, it leads to a good life. So again, those words were right there, but you wouldn't be shocked, because you do this, how little of the conversation, meaning zero in the beginning, focuses on what do we mean, our name is the thing we put out in the world, our brand, what do we mean by that and how do we activate that? 

Third is, I think, a particularly brilliant thing that Leslie led in terms of the discovery that unlocked all the value that took a distant second in this meal delivery category, [00:34:00] Hello Fresh, and turning them into a number one. And it's the hardest thing in the world.

Pepsi's been trying to chase Coke for years. How do you go from number two to number one? And so we looked at the number one Blue Apron and we said, all right, it's a new category. It's a category that sort of started from the top with sort of a prestigious, slightly gourmet, slightly more expensive product.

There's an opportunity for a Hello Fresh to become bigger and more successful by winning the whole middle of the pyramid. A little less expensive, a little more cheerful and accessible, right? There's the opportunity, but then the next step in the planning was when we looked at the competitive, the big insight was that everybody was talking about fresh.

That fresh was the entry level to the category. There was Fresh Direct and there was a Hello Fresh, and there every, Garden Fresh and all these fresh brands. Leslie came back and said, and I'll never forget it, because we made a lot of [00:35:00] money for them and for, and a little bit for us doing it. She said, “hello” is the word that makes all the difference in this brand name, and looked at the design. We redesigned it to emphasize the “hello.” We built the whole brand on “hello.” The whole brand. And that's how they got to be number one. 

Chris Kocek: Leslie, can you add to that in terms of how did that light bulb go off for you? That it's not about “fresh,” it's about, “hello?”

Lesley Bielby: The foundation that Blue Apron had set up, it was a little bit more premium, that the ingredients were more special.

It was the kind of thing that you might do on a date night with your partner, and so it was really more kind of high end, kind of restaurant quality foods, whereas Hello was about, sometimes you're just exhausted when you get in from work. You don't wanna throw a pizza in the oven. You want to actually sit down and have a proper meal with your family and maybe cook it with your family.

The kind of research that we did showed us that “this makes me feel like a better parent.” That was another important insight. “Makes me feel like a better partner,” whether you're male, female, same sex, [00:36:00] different sex couples, “because I feel as if I'm actually contributing something, even though it's all been prepared for me, and all I'm doing is really tossing it into a pan and mixing it together and serving it.”

That feeling is just inherently human of preparing food for others. Food is love at the end of the day. That was at the heart of it. It is the approachable nature, the fact that it gets us back to our roots, our humanity, and pulled families together. 

Chris Kocek: That's a really interesting metaphor that you're using, right?

Because in our society we often say food is fuel, right? Grab and go. And the fuel you put in your body, you're like a sports machine. You're always on the go, but you just said food is love and that's a very different framing, right? 

Lesley Bielby: It is. I think that now, nowadays the kind of the quantifiable self, the fact that we're looking at our Fitbits and our apps, we're looking at our heart rates and analyzing the amount of calories that we're burning and the amount of calories that we need to intake to lose weight.

We've become machines and have really lost our humanity. But you only have to go to countries like [00:37:00] Italy and Spain and, and some parts of the south of France and others to know that food is still love. It's the heart and soul of everything, and not just the eating of, but the production of the development of, the nurturing of that, the love of the preparation of food is still there.

Chris Kocek: This also reminds me, I remember hearing years ago someone talking about newspapers and that newspapers became obsessed with the second half of their name “papers” and they lost sight of the fact that they're in the news business. 

Mark DiMassimo: Just building on that, we got the assignment to to save the Reader's Digest.

So it was really a full on rethinking and relaunching, and it worked. The core of it to shift from digest. Which, by the way, had been completely surpassed by the internet and Google and Apple News and all of that, right, to shift and yet still on their Cover, “Digest” was emphasized. “Readers” was [00:38:00] minimized. We shifted from “digest” to Readers and we built our whole brand for people who love to read and just don't have much time, right? On the basis of that and a few other insights, we were able to relaunch that brand successfully. 

Chris Kocek: That reminds me of Cigar Aficionado, not that I'm a subscriber, but Cigar Aficionado. When they started out, “cigar” was huge and all the emphasis was on cigars, and then over time you got to watch Cigar get smaller and smaller until it became just “aficionado.”

Mark DiMassimo: Yes, 

Chris Kocek: Right? Because that's a much bigger platform to work from because you can be an aficionado of anything. At that point, so, 

Mark DiMassimo: Absolutely. And cigars are just part of the aficionado lifestyle, right? 

Chris Kocek: Exactly. 

Mark DiMassimo: Exactly. Fine indian leather.

Chris Kocek: Yeah. Alright, so before we get to our speed round, I'd love to ask, one more question about jobs that you both have done that [00:39:00] have helped you do your current job better.

Leslie, what is a job that you've had in the past that has helped you do your work as a strategist even better?

Lesley Bielby: Yeah, so fairly early into my career, when I was about five or six years into being a planner in the uk. So a third of my career was in London, a third in Boston, a third in New York. I decided that advertising probably wasn't for me 'cause at that time, working in the London scene was brutal. It was a very hard industry to work in. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna retrain. So I started retraining over a number of years, after work every weekend, as a psychotherapist. So it took me years to train. And as part of that, one of the specializations I was most interested in was clinical hypnotherapy.

So not the kind of hypnotherapy that you see stage performers do, which is unethical and really shouldn't be allowed, but the kind of hypnotherapy where you dig into somebody's [00:40:00] subconscious and find out what really is driving their behavior 'cause behavior and belief are really intrinsically interlinked, like what I believe is gonna affect how I behave and vice versa.

And so one thing that I did practice very briefly. I didn't leave the industry until I was pregnant with my first two children. My first two children are twins. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna extend my maternity leave and actually try this. And so I set up a practice with a friend. And I hated it.

I absolutely hated it. I found it very boring. And so I had an epiphany. I realized that I could take everything that I'd learned over the last few years and I had been actively putting it into use in the industry 'cause remember, I was still working while I was learning. I thought, I'm just gonna go back into being the best planner I can be with all of this knowledge.

And it has served me ever since. I can tell you, because Mark and I were having this conversation earlier. As we move more towards being very data dependent and as we move towards [00:41:00] overtesting things to the point of where they just stop being interesting, and we start to become part of this kind of regime of CMOs in particular, having short tenure, so moving into do no harm mode.

As we all get into that, we're forgetting what our industry is all about. And at the end of the day, it's about making people feel something that when you make people feel something, regardless of what medium you're using, it's not all about television. It can be about any of the channels that are available to any of us.

You make them feel something, you've got them, and nine times out of 10, they cannot put their finger on why they feel that way, but you've triggered something subconscious in them that generally goes back to an earlier stage of their life. I continue to tap into that knowledge. It's probably the best thing I've ever done for myself. That and lasik, although still need reading glasses. 

Mark DiMassimo: For me, the foundation, I think, was sitting on the phone books with my head under [00:42:00] the old dryers in my grandparents' hair salon, where I spent a lot of time growing up and I imbibed a lot of wisdom from my grandparents about taking care of women, what they thought they wanted, what they asked for, what they really wanted, and how to deal with the difference.

I remember my grandfather, just for one example, saying “what do you do when a woman comes in and she says she wants to look like Marilyn Monroe, but this woman will never look anything like Marilyn Monroe. What do you do about that?” And I was like, “oh God. I dunno.” And I'm maybe six, okay, so this is formative.

I think this is why I spent the first half of my career mostly creating in categories targeting women, because I think I got a headstart on that stuff and only really started to figure out men as an adult. And he said, “you know what? You say [00:43:00] we are gonna make you the best you can possibly be and then you show her how.”

So the insight there is, why does she wanna look like Marilyn Monroe? Because she needs reassurance that she can look good, that she can look great. And so that if you go right to that underlying need and you support, that's the experience that really keeps them coming back. And he had customers who moved to Canada but would fly back to get their hair cut by Marino, my grandfather and their hair washed by Nancy, his wife. So yeah. That's loyalty. So they certainly liked that experience that they were getting there. 

Chris Kocek: I love those examples. Alright, we're at our speed round, so this is where we ask fast questions. We have fast answers. Are you guys ready?

Yeah. What was your favorite subject in school Mark? 

Mark DiMassimo: It was philosophy. I'll tell you [00:44:00] why it's philosophy, because I love questions more than I love answers. 

Chris Kocek: I love it. 

Lesley Bielby: And mine was probably organic chemistry versus inorganic chemistry, which I was terrible at but I always got ease for organic chemistry 'cause I love nature and I love understanding how things work. 

Chris Kocek: So the tinkerer's mindset, understanding how it works. Excellent. What is a word you'd like to say in any language? Just because of the way it sounds or the way it feels on your tongue. Mark? 

Mark DiMassimo: Mercy. 

Chris Kocek: Okay. And Leslie? 

Lesley Bielby: I love the word beverage.

I dunno why I just love that word. Maybe it's 'cause it's got a V in the middle. I don't know. It's just a great word. 

Chris Kocek: Wonderful. Is there a recent book or TV show or movie that you've seen recently that you thought, wow, that was amazing, I want everyone to know about this?

Mark DiMassimo: Last night I [00:45:00] watched the movie Easy A, which is like a high school coming of age movie, loosely based on the Scarlet Letter.

It was one great, insightful gag after another that added up to something more, and so it was a wonderful little discovery. 

Chris Kocek: Easy A. Alright, I'm gonna add that to my list. Leslie, how about you? And it doesn't need to be profound, right? It could just be something like Mark said, I just, I love it because it was just fun.

Lesley Bielby: Yeah, there's a couple of films, actually. There's one that I saw not so long ago, which you guys might have seen called The Holdovers. Have you seen that? 

Chris Kocek: Yep, I just watched it. 

Lesley Bielby: We went to see that film with no expectations whatsoever, and I just thought it was a masterpiece. I think that Americans do that genre so well and it's been such a long time since a film that that has been developed possibly even since The Graduate.

I thought it was up there right on a par with The Graduate 'cause it was all about sacrifice and [00:46:00] love and understanding and humility. And then the other film I wanna plug, which may surprise you, is the Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which I think is a work of genius. I really do. It's nothing to do with Walter Mitty really.

It's Ben Stiller to me, it's his finest star. And it's all about the death of art and the death of photography, the death of real journalism, the death of taking time with your craft and doing it brilliantly in exchange for the snacking of media and art, which we've evolved into unfortunately. 

Chris Kocek: Isn't that the Ben Stiller movie where he's on a long board in, is it Iceland or somewhere?

Lesley Bielby: Seen that film about six times, six to eight times now, and every time I watch it, there are more subliminal messages. It's a genius piece of work. 

Chris Kocek: I love it when that happens. For me, that's Back to the Future. You could watch that, that whole trilogy. 

Okay. What's a favorite challenger brand right now that you're looking at in any category? A brand [00:47:00] who you think “keep an eye on them. They're doing some really interesting stuff.”

Mark DiMassimo: I feel like I'm gonna spout cliches, and then no one's gonna learn something new from this but Liquid Death, 

Lesley Bielby: Oh, you took mine. I can't believe you. 

Mark DiMassimo: Oh, well, they sell a healthy product, but they label it “death.” So I just, I love the joyous simplicity of their challenger marketing and advertising approach. God bless them. 

Chris Kocek: I just interviewed Andy Pearson from Liquid Death earlier this week. 

Mark DiMassimo: Wow. I'm gonna touch the little square that you're in on my screen here just to see if any of it rubs off on me. Yeah, I really admire his work and what they've done. 

Lesley Bielby: Admire the fact that he's built a $1.4 billion business in a handful of years, which is extraordinary as well.

Mark DiMassimo: Do you think he's being himself now? I think he's probably being himself. 

Lesley Bielby: I think he's being himself, one hundred percent. 

Chris Kocek: Leslie, any challenger brands that you are [00:48:00] just in awe of because of what they're doing other than liquid death? 

Lesley Bielby: Yeah. Let me think. I've gotta think of my feet now. I suppose it's a challenger brand because it challenged the industry.

If you guys have seen the advertising for Oslo, the Norwegian tourist board. I love that. I love the fact that they have challenged the convention of the category where you show all the best parts of the city, the best parts of the countryside, the best parts of the people, and then you invite visitors come in and join us and be part of this great community.

And they've done exactly the opposite. They're talking about all the residents are obviously the ones that are unfolding the story and they're just telling you all the things that are really unimpressive about Oslo that are actually really subliminally very impressive to the likes of us. So I, that's a genius piece of work. So I'm looking forward to seeing more from them. 

Chris Kocek: In both cases, they're challenging the category conventions, right? Water brands look like this, we're gonna be the exact opposite.[00:49:00] All tourism ads look like this, we're gonna do this. So it's a great technique. 

Is there a purchase either of you have made in the past six months that surprised even you, because a brand managed to get you to take an action with some irrational reasons to believe?

Lesley Bielby: Yeah. In my case, it's not a brand, but a category, I finally caved in and bought an air fryer because it seems the world and his mother has got an air fryer and we used it religiously for two weeks and it's just been sitting there in the kitchen counter ever since, and I'm mad with myself because of it.

Chris Kocek: It was society that kind of pushed you into the air fryer because everybody else had one or was it a particular brand message? 

Lesley Bielby: No it wasn't a particular, it wasn't a brand message. It just got into the kind of the ether of our culture that you had to get an air fryer because you can have fries that don't have any calories.

And so I just felt compelled at that point. The message had been jumped into my head so many times that I think it just hit my subconscious and found myself going on Amazon and buying one before [00:50:00] I knew it. 

Chris Kocek: Mark, has anybody gotten to you? 

Mark DiMassimo: We also got a, an air fryer and everybody insisted we absolutely needed an air fryer that a house without an air fryer was not really a home.

So we got an air fryer and we burnt out the delicate circuit in it fairly quickly with overuse. And it now it sits there like the black monolith in 2001, A Space Odyssey with no inner workings at all.

Chris Kocek: You guys both have the credibility badge on your counter that you are of the modern era, and you both have air fryers even if you don't use them. That's important. 

All right, last question. What is a piece of advice that you got early on in life or in your career that you still remember to this day or that you think of often? 

Lesley Bielby: I think it was a piece of life advice, which was just be true to yourself. I came from a very working class background.

I'm from the west of Scotland, a very working class, mill town. My parents were young when they [00:51:00] had us and didn't have very much, and when I got into advertising in London, at that time, it wasn't really cool to have a Scottish accent or a northern accent. It was expected that you'd have that Oxbridge way about you, and I didn't have that.

And you have two choices in that instance. You can either pretend to be like that or you can just be true to yourself. And I chose the latter path, and it worked out okay for me, but at the time, it wasn't really a popular choice. But yeah, be true to yourself because if you're not true to yourself, you'll never ever be happy.

Shakespeare had something going when you said to thine own self, be true. 

Chris Kocek: Whatever mask you wear is who you choose to be or who, who you'll end up being. 

Mark DiMassimo: Yeah. Be careful who you pretend to be because that's who you become. My first creative supervisor in an ad agency, BBDO, BBDO direct, was Eileen Carlson.

She was a wonderful and is a wonderful writer. I was reporting to her and I got my first assignment and [00:52:00] I wrote all this stuff real fast and I brought it into her office and she said words that have stuck with me to this day. She said, “Mark, you're a bright guy, you're quick, I'm sure a lot of things have come easy to you in your life. This will not come easy to you.”

You are going to have to work hard at this, and you're going to have to get past your initial ideas. Go back to your desk, work hard, come back tomorrow or the day after, and bring me something next level. Dig deeper. I ended up with my first two ideas that I was really proud of in my career. So it became a little addiction to do it again. 

Chris Kocek: The high,

Lesley Bielby: Can I throw in another one? Do you mind? That's more related to work, to our work. When I was a younger planner, I was working in a really hot agency in London, like the hottest agency that they named agency of the decade.

And I wrote a brief for a brand, I believe it was a bank brand [00:53:00] that was targeting 40 something men who were primary breadwinners. Seems very antiquated now, but back then, that was a typical household and the creative director at the time, who was also one of the partners and founders, threw the brief back at me and said, I don't like this guy.

And he was one of those guys. He was a 40 something white male. And he says, you have to make me like him, otherwise I can't write to this at all. And I was very offended. What is there to like about these individuals? And they're old and they don't know anything and they're not cool. But I went away and thought about it and then started digging a lot deeper and did more research.

I talked to people and so I got into that mind space and that changed everything. And so I wrote a much, much better brief and he said, okay, I think you nailed it this time, but he wrote a great campaign based on that brief. Yeah, like the individual that you are writing to and if you do it on the surface, [00:54:00] like them, find something that you like about them that you can empathize with as a fellow human being and then great work will follow. 

Mark DiMassimo: Oh, Leslie, I love that one. How you feel when you're doing the thing is how people feel when they receive it. So that, to me, that's huge and applicable to so many situations. And so sometimes it's about consciously stepping back and thinking, how do I want them to feel?

But even more than that, it's like, how am I feeling right now and how do I need to be feeling to do my best work in this situation? Because however you feel it comes across.

Chris Kocek: And what I'm hearing from both of you on this is find the human underneath all of the roles and the titles, and the responsibilities and the cliches. Find the human truth that is there and tap into it. 

Mark DiMassimo: Always, yeah. Always. Very well summarized. [00:55:00] We're humans working with humans trying to inspire humans. 

Chris Kocek: You guys have given our listeners so many things on this call during this interview, so thank you guys for sharing your time, your processes, and your insights. We really appreciate it. 

Mark DiMassimo: This was so fun, Chris. Thank you. 

Lesley Bielby: Yeah, Chris, it was great. 

I always love hanging out with Leslie and this is great.

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guests, Mark DiMassimo and Leslie Bielby from DiGo Brands in New York City. If you want to connect with Mark or Leslie, you can find them on LinkedIn and make sure you check out Leslie's book, Super Strategist, which is a wonderful resource for strategists in an increasingly complex brand planning world.

If you're looking for even more ideas and aha moments, be sure to subscribe to the Light Bulb Newsletter at chriskocek.com/newsletter. Every Thursday, I share three “Aha!” moments that are guaranteed to inspire [00:56:00] your next project creative briefing or campaign, or check out my latest book Any Insights Yet. Connect the dots, create new categories, transform your business. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us five stars on your favorite podcast platform and share it with friends, family, clients, colleagues, even your enemies. Special thanks to Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios for producing this episode.

And thank you to Megan Palmer for additional editing and production support. Until next time, keep looking for patterns, finding contradictions, and asking “What if?” more often.