The Work That Made Me: Elizabeth Paul

 

Music video would be Black Hole Sun, but not in a good way. The melting barbie doll on the grill gave me nightmares. (((shiver))) 

A less troubling one would be Bjork’s ‘Oh So Quiet’ video, directed by Spike Jonze. From the lilting Shhh Shhh Shhh to the big band fantastical dance scenes on the street. It made me want to dance — and scream and sing and tap and cavort. It captured and conveyed a feeling that I still remember to this day. Ah the ‘90s ☺

Volkswagen ‘Big Day’. I remember the first time I saw it — I. was. rapt. It's just incredible storytelling. The whole spot you see cuts back and forth between a guy in a tux driving furiously to try to get to a wedding interspersed with cuts of the wedding party getting ready with subtle nods to checking the time. The whole time you’re watching you think he’s the groom racing to get to the church on time. And then in the end, when he pulls his VW up to the chapel, runs up the steps and throws the door open, you realise that he’s there to stop the wedding. 

It was a whole contained story in 60 seconds. It hooked your interest, honoured your time and made you feel something. So, of course, when ‘Drivers Wanted’ comes up — it felt like an ethos of daring. I loved it so much I downloaded the song (J. Ralph’s million miles) and listened to it on repeat when I was studying. And, of course, I aspired to a Jetta upon graduation.

            

I’m a big revisiter. When my brain is fried, I like the comfort food of familiar content. So I’ve rewatched The West Wing and Fleabag more times than I care to admit. They’re so rewatchable, I can throw them on and be both entertained and unbothered. Not sure what that says about me!  

I worked in retail all through high school and college. Gap. American Eagle. Express. Banana Republic. If it involved a folding board, I was there. I learned a lot from the floor about how people engaged with products at shelf, in the fitting room, in the mall window — and how discussion / perception of the brand propelled purchases. 

In advertising, it was ESPN X-Games. We were pitching it as an agency, but it was tiny at the time and they weren’t sure how they were going to resource it among bigger, more structured pitches. I was an RFP writer at the time with no real research experience — but I’ve been surfing and snowboarding since I was 16, so very much in the demo. After work I went to this snowboarding shop I loved called Glass & Powder, and just started interviewing people about the category and their relationship with the games. I remember bringing my notes in the next day, and when I shared them with our then-CSO, he got a big smile on his face and said, “I think you might be a strategist.” 

An appliance brand did a campaign with Kelly Rippa in the early oughts that had an I Dream of Jeannie motif that ended in ‘Be even more amazing’. It was during a time in ad culture where most brands were hesitant to show the reality of motherhood. Virtually all domestic products featured moms using them, and those moms were almost always incredibly put together, rocking chinos and twin-sets. I was a new mom and struggling to keep my head above water — so watching this working woman in Jimmy Choos and a tulle skirt dancing from the laundry to the oven while she juggled cupcakes and dishes without missing a beat — felt like another planet from the world I was living in. Also, at 90 lbs with flawless skin and hair, overall it made me feel like shit. It didn’t seem like an invitation to ‘be even more amazing’ — it felt like an impossible standard on full blast.

I vowed not to make anything that would make women feel worse about themselves — and then spent the next few years proving to marketers that millennial women wanted to be represented differently.

The piece of work that still makes me jealous…

In recent years, it would be Yayoi Kusam’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton. The insight — that from space we’re all just colourful dots — resonates on the profound sense of alienation so many people feel. And the yearning for catharsis. I love that it took such a heady idea and made it beautiful and accessible. And not just a piece of art to sit on a shelf, but larger than life installations that made us rethink what retail can do. AR experiences that allowed people all over the world to play along. It was just a ‘Big Idea’ in the truest sense that was brought to life in a wonderfully cohesive way. 

Other things that will forever make me jealous… Nothing Beats a Londoner. As a strategist, the cultural exegesis and audience insights are just so powerful. I love hyper specific stories, which marketers are often afraid to tell because they want to hit the widest possible audience. But that piece showed the world what James Joyce said in the 1930s — in the specific is found the universal. 

Repositioning Walmart. It might not have seemed like the sexiest thing from the outside, but it was a career maker for sure. On a brand that big, and a challenge so daunting, a young planner got the opportunity to do all the research. They wanted to transform from a merchant-driven company to a more consumer-centric company, and I asked the day-to-day client, Tony Rogers, if he would send me on the road with an anthropologist and a documentary film crew to capture the lives of middle American moms. And miraculously he said yes. I rode in their carpools and sat in their scout meetings and ate at their dinner tables. I went back to school shopping with them and helped decorate Christmas trees — and the footage from those interviews played on a loop at Walmart headquarters for years after. The honour of bringing the voice and experience of their customer to the forefront of all they did was a big honour — and it shaped the way I thought and worked as a strategist. So definitely career defining for me.

I was the global strategy lead for a luxury hotel brand for a few years. It remains a category I really love. And we’d done some positioning work I was really proud of, rooted in the sense of care and attention to detail they paid to their visitors. The strategy was about the luxury of understanding — or rather the luxury of being known and understood, all down to the tiniest detail. It was an IAT team, and someone who hadn’t been involved in the work swooped in at the end and redefined the meaning behind that strategy to be something else entirely. A kind of shallow, performative space that resulted in creative that just wrung hollow. I fell on my sword hard, but I wasn’t able to get it back on track. The work in the end just felt like a bad PSA and was miles away from where the brand should have been. Not gonna lie, that one still stings. 

Probably Hanes! We’ve worked with that brand for the past 17 years and for most of that time the marketing briefs were driven by innovation releases. Every other year they’d launch a great product advancement (from the tagless tee to the no slip socks to the total support pouch) and we’d create work that dramatised the problem in a fun and funny way. It worked well enough. Each launch would break records for previous product launches — but the brand was being starved over time. You started to see the impact on brand health, and consideration with younger audiences and female audiences were falling off a bit of a cliff. So they gave us the AMAZING brief to reignite the brand. Hanes is an icon — and while they got credit for comfort as a functional benefit, we had an opportunity to elevate the idea of comfort to a cultural place. We did amazing research with Non-Fiction to uncover what comfort means in culture today — and discovered that for gen z, the most uncomfortable thing is editing themselves to make others comfortable. From there it feels like the work just broke open — from a reimagination of the invention of comfort in the gilded age to the iconic white tee as a canvas for hip hop culture. I just love seeing that brand move beyond the places and spaces it's traditionally gone and step into its inherent iconicity.