16709: Heat Shields Delivered Daily.

 

Adweek reported—or published performative PR—on DEIBA+ stunts at Ogilvy and Fitzco.

 

According to Adweek, “two agencies are doubling down on their DEI efforts, and making a business case for them.” Okay, but “doubling down” on historically minimal efforts does not exactly equal full commitment, responsibility, and accountability; that is, 2 x 0 = 0.

 

The Ogilvy heat shield—dubbed the Modern Exchange program—connects staffers from across the global network, allowing them to figuratively join hands and symbolically sing kumbaya in DEIBA+ unity.

 

The Fitzco heat shield involves a Creative Inclusion Panel (CIP), whereby diverse staffers can evaluate client work in early stages, allegedly assessing stuff via an inclusivity standard. Sounds like a not-too-clever twist on asking the resident mailroom attendant and/or custodian of color to evaluate work.

 

Always amazing how an industry boasting breakthrough creativity consistently delivers contrived, clichéd, and crappy concepts to address systemic racism. 

 

Ogilvy and Fitzco Are Connecting People and Driving Business Through DEI Efforts

 

The programs enhance communication within the agencies as well as inform the work

 

By Kyle O’Brien

 

There is an unfortunate backward slide on DEI efforts happening in marketing, after a surge following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Consumer backlash has curtailed many programs at companies ranging from Bud Light to Target and most recently Tractor Supply, while agencies and businesses alike have scaled back their internal DEI agendas.

 

However, two agencies are doubling down on their DEI efforts, and making a business case for them. Ogilvy is helping its employees and clients connect through a program that reaches across offices and countries to ensure that everyone gets to know each other through their differences and similarities. Fitzco has created a diverse panel to review its work before it goes out to the public to make sure it supports inclusivity.

 

These aren’t the only agencies making a business case for diversity and inclusion, but programs like theirs highlight the need for the marketing world to stay the course.

 

A modern exchange of ideas

 

Ogilvy promotes a concept called “borderless creativity,” part of which is manifested in the Modern Exchange program. The idea came from Barbara Polanco, art director at Ogilvy’s Los Angeles office. She initially asked Tope Ajala, the agency’s global head of DEI, to connect her with other senior colleagues within Ogilvy, as well as clients, to spark conversations that would help inform her work.

 

That served as a challenge to the executive team to better connect their people globally.

 

“Six months after, [Polanco] came back with a big proposal: ‘I think the best way we can do this is to have something called the Modern Exchange,’” Ajala told ADWEEK.

 

That proposal led to the team gathering junior and senior level talent across the business and connecting them in a series of video conversations with candid dialogue.

 

An employee originally from the Dominican Republic talked with someone in the U.K. and found similarities through food, while Ogilvy’s CCO in Germany had a two-hour dialogue with a junior creative, and they’ve become partners and sponsors.

 

Having people and ideas come together helps the agency celebrate diversity, but also uncovers connections that might lead to better work and more progressive business practices. Ogilvy leaned into its commitment to DEI, utilizing a minority-owned company to do the production on the Modern Exchange video project.

 

“One of the key commitments we have is a 10% partnership with diverse suppliers globally. That is the ambition for us as an organization and as a business,” said Ajala, adding that organizations that lean into their employees and cultural nuances are the ones succeeding.

 

Ajala said this is one way employees can feel like the agency is invested in them and cares about them. In addition, Ogilvy wants to expand the program and invite clients to the Modern Exchange to talk about their commitments to DEI efforts, and encourage people to double down on employees and diverse suppliers.

 

Ogilvy is also making Modern Exchange public through its social channels and platforms, and possibly on YouTube as well.

 

“I want to emphasize the importance of connecting as humans and learning about each other, regardless of your title. When that is fostered—when the environment is rooted in respect for humanity—the work is better,” Polanco told ADWEEK.

 

A double check on inclusion

 

Having a campaign falter because it’s tone deaf on inclusion and diversity efforts can make for brand embarrassment and a loss of dollars. Atlanta-based agency Fitzco is making sure its creative doesn’t go out into the world unless it’s dialed in on DEI.

 

Over the past year, Fitzco created a Creative Inclusion Panel (CIP), which allows anyone in the company to form a team to evaluate Fitzco’s client work before it gets released to hold it to an inclusivity standard.

 

The open forum invites the most junior to the most senior talent to participate in the creative process for both existing and new prospects. It’s a feedback-driven initiative designed to ensure that Fitzco is supporting inclusivity from end to end, whether that’s challenging audiences defined by demographics, making media investments that support a more balanced approach, or ensuring creative work is inclusive.

 

“It’s not about approving or disapproving work, it’s not about thumbs up or thumbs down. It’s really about challenging the work and making sure that from the eyes of our agency, the work is being as representative as it possibly can be,” Evan Levy, CEO of Fitzco, told ADWEEK.

 

The panel has worked well so far. Levy said the agency has won pitches that have been influenced by the Creative Inclusion Panel, and most of the work that Fitzco has put out into the world has gone through the CIP before it’s reached clients or the production process, including recent work for Welch’s Sparkling.

 

“It’s been really informative. It’s been educational. The agency has been proud of it, our clients have been appreciative of it. And it’s been a no-brainer addition to how we think and work,” said Levy.

 

Levy said the CIP is still a work in progress, and the earlier the panel sees the work, the better, but it can come in at any point during the campaign process.

 

“The panel can be initiated by anyone, so it could be prompted by an account lead, by a producer, by a creative director. There’s not a lot of formality in terms of who can ask or recommend that the panel come together. It’s very democratic, in that sense,” said Levy, adding that it demonstrates to clients that there’s a rigor that goes into the creative process.

 

Both Ogilvy and Fitzco have had inclusion programs for years and have no plans to scale them back. Fitzco was a founding member of Advertising for Change Atlanta, a coalition of agencies committed to developing and mentoring young, diverse talent.

 

“Atlanta agencies can come together to help work on, solve, challenge each other, share best practices around [DEI]… and that’s good for all of us,” said Levy.

16684: Detecting BS—And Deflecting Accountability—At Publicis Groupe.

 

As part of its coverage for Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Campaign published perspectives from holding company CEOs on making the business case for creativity investment in the wondrous age of AI.

 

The series reads like essays drafted by the holding companies’ respective PR departments—although it would have been more appropriate to generate the corporate content via AI.

 

Regardless, Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun leveraged the opportunity to create shameless self-promotion for his White holding company, unveiling a “BS detector bot”—while opening and closing by declaring, “Imagine what we could achieve if we all took the BS out of AI.”

 

For starters, if the BS detector bot were to directly engage with Publicis Groupe, it would explode from being overloaded by the endless bullshit that the White holding company excretes.

 

To make a sloppy segue, Sadoun’s declaration—Imagine what we could achieve if we all took the BS out of AI—must be explored through the lens of AI standing for Artificial Inclusivity.

 

Imagine if Adland—or even just Publicis Groupe—took the BS out of DEIBA+ commitments. Envision the elimination of performative PR, heat shields, Human Heat Shields, underfunded diversity budgets, crumbs, delegating diversity, diversity committees, embryo recruitment, ERGs, broken promises, faux dedication, outright lies, and more.

 

Indeed, it’s impossible to consider such a scenario, as the foundation of AI is BS.

 

Hell, Publicis Groupe absolutely prioritizes Artificial Intelligence well ahead of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, allyship, justice, etc. Technology trumps responsibility, accountability, and respect.

 

Systemic racism is the ultimate achievement.

 

Imagine what we could achieve if we took the BS out of AI

 

By Arthur Sadoun

 

“In reality, it is not creativity that evolves: it stays the same. It is everything else that grows around it.”

 

Those words are as true today as they were in 1958 when Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, the founder of Publicis, first said them.

 

Creativity, its power and its importance at our group has never changed. And neither has the case we make for investing in it: creativity is the added value that we bring, which has the ability to transform the future of our clients’ businesses.

 

It is how a small hotshop, created in Montmartre almost 100 years ago, became the market leader on every front today.

 

What does change, as our founder said, is how we anticipate and adapt to everything “that evolves around” creativity. It won’t come as a surprise when I say that, right now, this means artificial intelligence.

 

It’s everywhere in our industry. We’re all caught up in announcing the same “exclusive” partnerships, everyone is obsessed by generative AI content, and each prediction and promise around AI seems more overblown than the last.

 

The AI revolution has created some hype, a bit of fear, and – excuse my French – a lot of BS. And you don’t just have to take my word for it, you can click here to see what I mean.

 

On one side you have the Sam Altmans of the world, who are prophesying that AI will kill off our entire industry. That’s BS.

 

Anyone who thinks AI will take our jobs or replace human creativity is lacking in imagination, foresight or both.

 

At Publicis, we have been putting AI at the heart of our operations and into the hands of our people since 2017.

 

In that time, we’ve gone from a 70,000-strong organisation to 100,000, with several thousand more people set to join us this year.

 

Then you have those in our industry who position AI as the great saviour of all their business challenges and organisational woes.

 

Let’s be honest, AI is not the solution to siloed legacy structures and a lack of capabilities. So that’s BS, too.

 

The truth is AI can only be fully leveraged if you have unique proprietary data, a single infrastructure and tech innovation expertise.

 

At Publicis, when others were buying back shares, we were buying technology and data, investing more than €9bn in the acquisitions of Sapient and Epsilon.

 

We also did the hard work of simplifying our organization, putting into place the Power of One.

 

And we can’t forget how we radically changed our culture, implementing AI for all of our people with our Marcel platform, long before AI was de rigeur.

 

Today, seven years after we launched Marcel in Cannes, we’re back on the Croisette to take the BS out of AI.

 

To hold ourselves accountable, we have created a BS detector bot that will translate the AI hype and jargon clients encounter into straight-up refreshing talk, while also prompting critical questions to ask themselves and their partners – starting with us.

 

We are also holding 30 closed-door sessions for clients to share real AI apps, customised to their specific industries, driving to real business outcomes, not cute gen AI output.

 

Everyone talks about investing in creativity. In Cannes, we all dedicate a lot of time, money, and carbon emissions to celebrate it. But, so far, we haven’t been having the right conversations about what it takes to get the best out of AI for creativity that drives business.

 

So let’s check ourselves, get off the AI hype loop and imagine what we could achieve if we all took the BS out of AI.

 

Arthur Sadoun is the chairman and chief executive of Publicis Groupe

 

16597: GSD&M DEIBA+ PR & BS.

 

Advertising Age reported GSD&M launched its latest heat shield: a DE&I advisory committee to support diverse-owned vendors.

 

David Ogilvy was wont to saying, “Search the parks in all your cities, you’ll find no statues of committees.”

 

Yet Adland is wont to creating committees to address DEIBA+ initiatives, delegating responsibility to others versus taking direct accountability, responsibility, and action.

 

So, the GSD&M stunt feels like performative PR for a heat shield delegating diversity to Human Heat Shields and ERGs. Quite a maneuver from those wonderful folks who brought you Annie the Chicken Queen.

 

GSD&M launches DE&I advisory committee to help diverse-owned vendors

 

Business owners, leaders and supplier diversity advocates will be at the helm of the committee

 

By Arvelisse Bonilla Ramos

 

Omnicom Group’s GSD&M is launching an advisory committee to help drive change for diverse-owned vendors who say they continue to face little progress within the ad industry.

 

The Vendor Advisory Committee will consist of six members, including diverse business owners, leaders from various production areas and regions and advocates for supplier diversity within the industry.

 

The founding members include Qadree “Q” Holmes, founder and executive producer of Quriosity Productions; Yvette Cobarrubias, co-founder and managing partner of video editing company Cosmo Street; Pamala Buzick Kim, founder and executive director of Free The Work; Max Rutherford, VP of vendor partner diversity at GSD&M; and Keisha Townsend-Taitt, chief inclusion officer at the agency.

 

“Committees like this matter. I have found that many of the diversity, equity, and inclusion champions find themselves talking in a room full of people that look like themselves,” Holmes said in a statement. “If we aren’t speaking to leadership, then these efforts become ineffective. Leadership commitments make these committees very real.” 

 

Holmes hopes the committee will help address the “broken promises” faced by diverse directors, editors and crews.

 

“We are hoping that people take notice and realize the impact they can actually have,” said Holmes. “We will always stand out as the first group that actually implemented a real program where the checks are being cut to change the systematic issues that exist in all sectors of business.”

 

The committee’s main responsibilities include consulting and collaborating with the GSD&M leadership team and providing guidance on supplier diversity issues, organizational matters, as well as strategies for sustainable development and growth of small and diverse businesses. It will also serve as a sounding board on supplier diversity matters.

 

“We reached a point where we cannot internally make any changes other than what we’ve [already] made. We need that external voice to come in and help us present the right story that will engage our agency folks, as well as our clients and the industry in general,” said GSD&M’s Rutherford. “We’re needing their expertise because they live this life. They live the life of trying to get through the gatekeepers.”

 

The committee’s launch comes two years after GSD&M conducted its first survey of diverse partners in the advertising industry. The results of the 2023 survey of 2,000 diverse-owned vendors mirrored the 2022 survey of just over 1,000 vendors.

 

In the survey conducted last November, about 79% of vendors said they received little to no feedback when not awarded a project, essentially the same amount as in 2022. About 78% of vendors said they believe agencies prefer working with established partners, overlooking new companies, also flat year over year.

 

The survey found that 48.7% of respondents think they don’t have enough connections or partnerships with agencies, which rose from 46% in 2022.

 

“Momentum overall is plateauing for DE&I, and all of that eagerness we saw in June of 2020, these commitments and these statements, have stalled,” said Townsend Taitt.

 

The slowed progress is evident in overall media spend: Investment in diverse media grew much slower in 2023 than in 2022, according to recent research from the ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing. (Some agency executives, however, believe that the slowed growth was expected given the 2022 surge.)

 

Taitt said there are “really simple things” agencies can do to improve relations with diverse vendors, such as providing feedback.

 

“That’s going to help them. Make sure the budget and the parameters of a bid are well defined before you’re making calls so that you’re not wasting people’s resources because we know that’s a heavier burden on small and minority-owned businesses,” she said.

 

Taitt noted that quick responses are crucial for minority-owned agencies. With fewer employees and resources, every response costs money because time is money for these smaller, more diverse companies.

 

The advisory committee will also be part of the agency’s annual Diverse Partner Summit. The summit, last held in December, featured in-person and virtual programming aimed at connecting diverse partners with agency decision-makers. Some 126 people attended.

 

As part of the summit, anyone in the industry can register to meet diverse vendors in pre-scheduled 15-minute virtual meetings. There were 251 virtual meeting registrations in 2023, compared to 126 for the same event in 2022. The number of meetings increased to 150, up from 75 in 2022.

16309: Are DE&I Defenders Keeping Up With The Times?

 

Is the Ad Age DEI Council a symbol of progress—or does it symbolize the progressing disinterest that the industry displays for diversity, equity, and inclusion? After all, the trade publication continues to hype the committee with banners reading: AD AGE 2022 DIVERSITY COUNCIL. Um, we’re now beyond the halfway point of 2023.

16052: The Advertising Age DEI Council Counsels On Cultural Competence…?

Advertising Age presented its DEI Council, described as follows:

 

Ad Age’s DEI Council brings together some of the most influential leaders from the marketing, agency, media and tech worlds to act in an advisory role to ensure the publication is representing the viewpoints and exploring the critical issues of people of various racial, ethnic, social and economic backgrounds. The council, launched in fall of 2020, regularly meets with the Ad Age editorial staff to take a candid look at the publication’s coverage, as well as events programming, all with the goal of advancing diversity and inclusion within the newsroom.

 

Interesting how Ad Age mirrors the industry it covers. That is, the trade publication saw fit to assemble a DEI Council in 2020. Of course they did. And it’s a safe bet that council members are offering their services pro bono—or accepting crumbs. Heaven forbid Ad Age might show a progressive bent by, say, diversifying its editorial staff.

 

(Side note: Ad Age editors ought to review what Translation CEO Steve Stoute shared on the topic during a recent interview with the publication.)

 

Finally, enough with the clichéd royalty-free stock images for minority-related content already!

15848: Verizon Network Communicates Clear Racism.

 

Advertising Age reported on the Verizon Responsible Marketing Action Plan “first-year results”—which warrant quotation marks due to the fuzziness of the figures and data.

 

Verizon hatched the DEI initiative in 2021, pledging to bring internal and external change. Read the article below for the do-gooder details.

 

Anyway, the “first-year results” appear to be fucked-up rhetoric. For starters, the reliance on percentages versus actual numbers is a common divershitty dodge.

 

For Verizon to boast awarding 65% of its video budget to diverse-owned video production enterprises and 49% of its video productions to diverse directors sounds swell—but how much of the pie went to White women versus people of color? Who enjoyed cake and who got crumbs? Surely Verizon has invoices to provide specificity and transparency.

 

Once again, the diversity budget is the least-defined financial plan of all.

 

Perhaps the most outrageous semi-revelation involves a DE&I Agency Council comprised of CEOs and creative leads from White advertising agency partners that assembles every quarter and allegedly shares their diversity numbers “in front of everybody else,” according to Verizon Chief Marketing Officer Diego Scotti. Okay, but no one is publicizing the conference reports—and it’s doubtful that any council members even recorded minutes.

 

No deep-dive research. No clear strategic goals. No sense of urgency. No measured outcomes. No professional accountability. In short, processes that would never be accepted for marketing ventures are modus operandi for DEI schemes.

 

It’s not a Responsible Marketing Action Plan—it’s Systemic Racism 101.

 

Verizon Reveals DE&I Initiative’s First-Year Results

 

Verizon spent 65% of its video budget with diverse-owned video production companies and 49% of its video productions used diverse directors

 

By Brian Bonilla

 

Verizon released the first-year results of its Responsible Marketing Action Plan, which was announced in April 2021 as part of the company's long-term commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

 

The telecommunications giant’s plan involves four areas: increasing diversity and equity across its creative supply chain; building an inclusive work environment and retaining diverse talent; fighting racism and eliminating bias in its advertising, content, and media; and instilling responsible content policies. The Verizon marketing team for 2021, inclusive of both the brand and agency partners, was approximately 3,900 people in the U.S.

 

The action plan encompasses data from Verizon’s internal marketing team and agency teams, which make up more than half of Verizon’s full marketing team, according to a statement by the company. In addition to Verizon’s own marketing organization and in-house agency, it has a roster of 12 external agency partners, according to Diego Scotti, chief marketing officer of Verizon, including McCann, Momentum, MRM, Madwell, R/GA, The Community and VM1 among others. Below is an outline of its progress so far.

 

Budgeting for diversity

 

Verizon last year set a goal to spend over 30% of its video, experiential and print production budget with diverse companies.

 

Over a year later, the company says it has spent 65% of its video budget with diverse-owned video production companies and 49% of its video productions used diverse directors. Verizon also spent 46% of its experiential budget with diverse-owned experiential production companies and 45% of its print budget with diverse-owned print production companies.

 

Verizon defines diverse-owned as a business that is at least 51% owned and operated by an individual or group that is part of a traditionally underrepresented or underserved group, according to a spokeswoman for the company. This includes Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, LGBTQ+, veterans and proprietors with disabilities.

 

Examples of diverse-owned companies Verizon has worked with include Prettybird, Epoch Films, Park Pictures, Makers Lab for production, Cosmo Street and Sarofsky for post-production and editorial, and Duggal Visual Solutions for print.

 

For 2022, Verizon is increasing its overall goals across video, experiential, and print from 30% to 40%, although Scotti said that this new benchmark could change at some point.

 

“I personally think that we have to raise the bar,” Scotti said. “We're trying to be sensitive with COVID and this being the first year...but I think we're going to raise the objective because we definitely see the opportunity and it will keep people focused.”

 

Accountability and talent

 

People of color composed 39.3% of the combined Verizon marketing and agency team, an increase from 37.1% at year-end 2020. Women made up 51.7%, which is an increase from 50.9% in 2020. (There was no specific goal established for the makeup of the team in the first year.)

 

While Verizon’s year-over-year change in diverse talent was a little more modest compared to other areas in the action plan, Scotti still sees this as a significant improvement.

 

“The reality is that when you start with a team that is composed of the people that you have you can’t just fire half of them, and then rehire,” Scotti said. “It is going to take a while. I’m super impressed with those numbers because growing from 37% to 39% on people of color is massive in the sense of when you look at the overall composition of the team now and when you look at new hires in the last year.”

 

In 2021, Black, Indigenous, and people of color talent made up 46.5% of Verizon’s new hires, and women made up 56.3%.

 

One challenge that Scotti and Verizon focused on tackling early on was making sure executives across its marketing and agency teams were held accountable.

 

“One of the challenges that we saw at the beginning was accountability,” Scotti said. “Everything that we’ve done either to put in some goals where it makes sense or reporting publicly or having these meetings quarterly with the agencies where they’re not only reporting to me, they’re reporting to each other, so there is also accountability to each other. That is a critical challenge to overcome, which is how do you get people accountable? What I say to the team all the time is that if I leave this job, this should be something that should continue without me not that it’s just happening because I’m calling people every week to see how things are going. [The goal is to] make it systemic, scalable, and also to really make sure that it runs deep in the purpose of the team.”

 

As a result, Verizon set up a DE&I Agency Council, in which CEOs and creative leads of each of its agency partners meet quarterly and report their diversity numbers “in front of everybody else,” Scotti said.

 

Every meeting has two parts. The first one is reporting results and discussion about the results. “Everybody talks about what they are doing to either improve in the areas and where they need to improve. Our goal is to get as close as possible to the composition of the job market in America. The second part of the meeting is then when you look at this as a whole, as Verizon and these agencies together, what are the areas that we need to put more focus on?” said Scotti.

 

The idea for Verizon’s Adfellows program, which is a fellowship program focused on getting diverse talent into the industry, came from a council meeting, Scotti said. Currently, the AdFellows program is in its fifth year.

 

Training against bias

 

Verizon has also made sure that 100% of its advertising goes through gender and cultural bias testing.

 

To accomplish this Verizon uses a measurement tool from SeeHer, an organization comprised of marketers, agencies, and media companies dedicated to making sure women are portrayed accurately in various forms of marketing, advertising, media, and entertainment.

 

SeeHer’s Gender Equity Measure (GEM) is a research methodology that quantifies gender bias. Verizon said it received what it called an “above-average” GEM score of 99. According to the organization’s website, ads are submitted to SeeHer for testing and members receive detailed results, typically within 10-20 business days.

 

Verizon also uses its own proprietary “Diversity Inclusion & Equality Measure” to vet the representation of race, gender, ethnicity, and identity in its advertising. “We created our own version of the SeeHer GEM indicator but for diversity beyond gender,” Scotti said. “It’s an important thing because when the creatives of the agencies start seeing that you are actually measuring the creative with those lenses it creates a virtual cycle. It’s not punitive what we do, but it’s like, ‘Guys, we have to do better.’”

 

All Verizon marketers and agency partners also completed anti-racism and bias training to help identify bias throughout the creative process from research to production, according to Scotti, which will continue as required training for new hires.

 

Scotti said Verizon is also “ruthless” about where its media is placed. The company achieved a 99.4% rating (out of 100%) within the Integral Ad Science Brand Safety measure that counts the percentage of media placements that “do not violate the brand safety threshold,” according to a statement by Verizon.

 

While it is hard to exactly measure the impact of its results and how Verizon is viewed in the marketplace, Scotti says Verizon’s penetration in diverse segments such as the Hispanic community “has never been stronger.”

 

“The No. 1 thing that has made a difference for us is to almost flip the model in terms of making these groups part of our mainstream communications and advertising,” Scotti said. “In fact, we’re doing less specific advertising and more of just representing these groups in the right way by bringing them into the mainstream, which is also what these groups want. They want to see themselves represented in the whole. With older generations [for example], maybe they said, ‘No I want you to speak to me in Spanish only,’ There are new generations that are very respectful and proud of their heritage, but they also speak English.”

 

“I remember a few years ago we had spots that we did for the Oscars that were in Spanglish [a mix of English and Spanish]. The Academy wanted us to use subtitles for the commercials and we refused to do that because we said, ‘Well, that that’s not accepting how people speak and being respectful of individuality,” Scotti added.

 

Creating a blueprint

 

Verizon also provided a Responsible Marketing Action Blueprint, which is a set of free online tools that combine different learnings from Verizon’s work around DE&I that other marketers could use. The blueprint includes a template letter that marketers can use to request agency partners to report certain aspects of their DE&I-related numbers, a guide to formalizing a DE&I council, and more.

 

“I always tell people to start somewhere—instead of all the four areas at once you start in one area,” Scotti said. “Maybe look at where's the low-hanging fruit so that you can start making progress. That’s how we did it, and when you make progress, more progress comes and you create that cycle.”