March 03, 2025

624: Chris Beresford-Hill - Writing Excellent Cold-Emails, Taking Responsibility of Your Career, Pushing Your Edges, Becoming Dave Matthews' Pen Pal, Building Culture, & Leading a Creative Agency

1 hour 4 minutes

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes

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Chris Beresford-Hill is the Worldwide Chief Creative Officer at BBDO. Previously he spent 2 years as North America President and CCO of Ogilvy, where he helped bring the agency and its clients a new level of relevance. He brought Workday to the Super Bowl, led the team that brought in the Verizon account, and one of the biggest Super Bowl campaigns ever, "Can't B Broken," featuring Beyonce, and created the most celebrated Super Bowl campaign of 2024, the social & influencer lead "Michael CeraVe," for CeraVe. Chris and his teams have won every award for creativity and effectiveness many times over. He has been included in ADWEEK Best Creatives, the ADWEEK 100, and Business Insider's Most Creative People in Advertising.

Notes:

Cold Emails: Be specific in your praise and specific in your ask. The lame "Can I pick your brain" type emails get deleted and ignored because they aren't specific.
You never need permission to take responsibility. Chris learned this from Ed Catmull's book Creativity Inc.… And he's embodied this his entire career. The people who build huge careers take ownership of their own and regularly solve problems and improve their clients' and colleagues' lives. Chris has done this since his early days as an intern.
- At any level taking on responsibility yourself, unasked, makes you stand out.
Competence combined with insane follow-through. For some clients, it takes 50 ideas to get to the one that will work. Creating a culture where the team can share all of their bad ideas safely to get to the one great one.
The creative process:
- Brain dump everything. Purge your brain of everything it has.
- When you think you're done, you're not. There's more. You have to get it all out.
"A lot of creative people aren't fully aware of the process or the structure, they just feel it (Rick Rubin).
"When you can see it lift off the page, you feel a sense of mastery over it."
Chris's first Super Bowl commercial -- Emerald Nuts. He won it because he was both funny and added the fact that the product provided energy. Most people only covered one part, Chris did both.
Push your edges - Chris is like Lionel Messi. He's always walking around in the office, asking questions, looking for ideas, being curious. Then he sees an opportunity and goes for it 100%.
Chris has a standing reservation every week at the same restaurant where he meets with a mentor, mentee, or peer to deepen the important relationships in his life. That would be a good idea for us all to do.
Chris was pen-pals with Dave Matthews for 8 years.
- Chris saw that they recorded at Bearsville studios and wrote a letter to Dave there. He also said, "Show up with gifts." He gave Dave a Beatles Bootlegged album.
A leader takes what comes and then turns it into an opportunity.
The formula is Competence + Insane Follow-Through.
How to build relationships: Meet with people in person. Get drunk with them. Do hard work with them. Go through something bad with them. Laugh with them.
I got hired from my internship by cold calling Mark Cuban to get him to approve of using his name in an ad.
The best ideas are often bad in their first moments, or massively wrong, and then someone flips it or unlocks it. You have to stay on things and play around.
I made my first ad by going through a garbage can to learn how to write a script and sending a bunch of Budweiser scripts to my boss.
The art of finding an idea on the edge of possible, and the value of going over your skis when on the cusp of greatness - having a stomach for it. I've told a lie to keep things moving on every great campaign I was part of.
I learned the best lesson in leadership when we lost our biggest account (Accenture). I put Danny Meyer's mentality into practice, and we took that moment to put the business and clients second and play for each other. Culture carried us.
Culture is built by the stories we tell and the behaviors we highlight.

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By Ryan Hawk

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