The Ken Effect

I’m finally ready to write about The Barbie Movie, tangentially at least.

Don’t fret though, this isn’t a late to the party tribute to Mattel’s marketing juggernaut. It's an essay about what I’ve started to term the ‘Ken Effect’. If you’ve seen The Barbie Movie, you’ll know that Ken has the best outfits, an incredible dance number, and a line of dialogue all of us? in advertising can deeply relate to.

“My job… it's just beach”

Unfortunately it's not the sun, sea, and sand that strikes a chord, it’s the confusion between purpose and process - just ask anyone who’s worked in an agency if they’ve ever felt they can relate and they'll reply: ‘My job… It’s just Deck’.?

What is the Ken Effect?

Ken longs for a meaningful purpose outside his relationship to Barbie. Without a ‘why’ he can only elevate the things he does, such as ‘beach’, to be his raison d'etre. It’s this idea of giving primacy to actions or processes and losing sight of an overall goal that I’m referring to.

I’ll codify ‘The Ken Effect’ as:

When a process becomes a purpose it ceases to be a good process.

If you’re familiar with it, you’ll spot that this mirrors Goodhart’s law, albeit with a more qualitative twist. For anyone unfamiliar, the principle is ‘When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure’. It’s one of a ‘Holy Trinity’ of quantitative concepts, alongside selection bias and the ecological fallacy - data fundamentals every strategist should have deeply embedded in their brains.

Goodhart reminds us that gaming KPI’s distorts the pursuit of our goals, Ken reminds us that when processes overshadow purpose they become objectives in of themselves; inefficiently sucking up resources as they obfuscate the real objective, wasting time and squandering the productivity along the way.

Writing around this can get surprisingly thorny, so before I keep on going I want to clarify. Tools and processes deserve appreciation for their ability to improve efficiency and generate smart thinking. They’re a fantastic to help develop junior talent through exposure to a broad variety of ways of doing stuff and solving problems.

My criticism isn't regarding the fundamental worth of tools and processes, it's very specifically focused on how succumbing to the Ken effect renders them into obstacles and sources of frustration.?

In fact, the inspiration for putting pen to paper on the Ken Effect came during a conversation with Mark Pollard, Strategy Friend . Mark is animated by an admirable drive to democratize the tools of the strategy trade, producing an abundance of fantastic resources that help planners be better at planning. Inspiration struck while we were digging into a WARC stat showing that nearly half of planners think frameworks are a hindrance to strategy.

‘Frameworks are good, it's only when they are badly deployed that’s the problem’ - we agreed

‘Especially when they make you feel like Ken in The Barbie Movie’ - I added.??

If even the most ardent devotees of tools and processes agree it sucks to feel like Ken - Why does it happen? And more importantly: What can we do about it?

Familiarity Breeds Kentempt

Part of the problem might be familiarity. We’re so well furnished with tools and processes that we forget some of the less esoteric ones are tools at all.

Decks exist to communicate ideas.

Meetings exist to collaborate or to make decisions.

Frameworks exist to stimulate or organize thinking.

These things are there to help you do your job more effectively, yet when they become your job, you start to hate and be less good at said job.?

The familiarity factor explains why the Ken effect so often manifests in or around internal review meetings where people instinctively engage with the familiar at face value. People subconsciously think “I might not know everything about this project but I damn well do know what a deck is”, and dive in to critique the slides or a framework without full appreciation for its intended purpose.

This is especially true of more senior staff who tend to lack the nuanced day to day context of a project and usually suffer with a cacophonous multitude of other stuff flying around in their head at a given moment. Not to mention that the longer you’ve been in the industry the more familiar all these tools are going to be. I can say this having been on both sides of the table here.

My solution might sound a bit glib, but perhaps to combat the familiarity of our processes we need to better remind ourselves of the bigger goals they serve.

The best method I've found is placing a cover sheet slide for internal reviews at the start of the deck destined for external presentation. I call this a ‘Slide Zero’ and list in plain English what we’re trying to do and what the specific presentation intends to contribute towards that goal.

I’m aware of the irony in adding a process to solve the ubiquity of processes, but spelling out something like the following can be a gamechanger in avoiding frustrating feedback that leads to a Ken moment:?

Get everybody to agree to that at the start of an internal review and you’ve established concrete link back to the bigger purpose for which the presentation is a tool in service of. Worst case scenario people disagree, and far better to flush that out before you’ve traipsed through 55 slides of a deck that's pointed in the wrong direction.

Organizational Kenplexity

While issues of familiarity are psychological and my proposed solution is specifically simple. The issue of complexity is systemic, and the best solution I can offer is simply avoidance.

Everyone’s overall objective in a creative agency is fundamentally the same - producing effective creative ideas - and depending on your particular department the dials get tuned up or down on each of those words differently. We strategists for example have ‘effective’ on max, ‘producing’ dialed in low, and ‘creative’ somewhere in the middle.

At the start-up stage, when an agency is still very small, the sense of a bigger common purpose feels very tangible. It’s scrappy; everybody mucking in with their sleeves rolled up and their hands dirty, what you might call ‘messy in a good way’.

Yet as agencies grow they run the risk of becoming more hierarchical. They take on more headcount, titles can become ludicrously stratified, then sub-departments start blossoming into existence. It isn’t an inevitability, but before you know it an agency can transform into a bureaucratic hairball of matrixed layers, what you might call ‘messy in a bad way’.

As the hairball grows, hiring might become a bit less selective. The Big Egos, the Blaggers and the Coasters, drawn by the irresistible pull of a knottily matrixed organization, begin slipping into the agency.? What marks this triad out is that unlike most of us who find the Ken effect intensely frustrating, in a sense they desire and propagate it.

The Big Egos themselves don’t want to be Ken, they want everyone else to be Ken. They see producing effective creative ideas as their job, regarding everyone else as Kens existing to furnish them with the things they need to do it.

For the Blaggers, the knotty hairball offers a hyper-specialized niche through which they can attain a kind of ‘most special Ken’ status. You see this a lot with every new technology - the current flavor of the month being all things AI, and with it the ‘Chief Strategic Prompt Writers’ have sprung forth from the aether.?

The Coasters, who are the most benign of these three archetypes, simply want to avoid thinking too much about the bigger objectives, do a Ken styled job and clock off.

These different groups can form a self sustaining Kendom inside an agency, something an individual can do precious little to change. As such, the best strategy is to be on the lookout for it during the interview process and act accordingly by running in the opposite direction. This door swings both ways, don't hire a Ken thinking it will make your job easier - it won't!

Mentorship or Ken… torship?

Our industry does a generally poor job of training and mentoring, but within the scope of this particular piece I’m focusing on just one specific way we suck at it. This is likely the biggest factor in why the Ken effect has grown increasingly common, and where concerted effort is most needed.

Despite doing decently well at instructing junior talent how to do things, we are awful at helping them understand why to do things, when to do things, or where the things came from to begin with.

This distinction between ‘how to do things’ vs. ‘Why and when to do things’ demarcates the transition from individual contributor to leading an account, or indeed leading a department. The cynical bit of my brain thinks there might be self preservation at play - not wanting to train your direct report into becoming your replacement - but lack of time is the more likely and less malignant culprit.

It’s simply so much quicker to explain how to perform a task, than it is to also explain a rationale for why it needs to be done or why that particular tool is best for that particular task. Without a reflexive appreciation of why we’re doing things, the Ken effect becomes an inevitability for those on the receiving end of this management style.?

There’s a compounding generational consequence of this. Knowledge gets lost when each time-squeezed cohort expediently gives just the ‘how to’ instructions to the next. Most mind-boggling of all, as talent progressively moves up each rung of the ladder they receive relatively less and less training at every stage.

To some extent as a junior your job is going to be ‘Just Deck’, or ‘Just GWI’, or ‘Just Mockup’, but a good manager will always ensure the bigger purpose is salient, making clear how the processes and tools get us there. A bad manager says “We need a Slide on Gen Z’s TikTok habits” and dooms their direct reports to perpetual Kenhood.

There’s no magic bullet that solves this one, but it’s not something we should be avoiding either; the industry needs better training for managers, more time dedicated to mentoring, less ageism so we don’t lose valuable mentors, accessible resources for juniors, and a more reflexive mindset around why we’re doing things the way we’re doing things.

That sounds like a lot of effort, but it’s worth it. I’ll come back to that conversation with Mark Pollard, whose egalitarian passion for smashing down barriers to accessing the industry is so commendable. I can’t think of a bigger barrier to attracting talent into advertising than advertising being a crap job, and that’s precisely what the Ken effect does to the industry.

That's Kenough for now

I might not have cracked it, but hopefully I've done enough to provoke some discussion. If nothing else, putting a snappy label on a problem lets you better spot it, call it out when it happens, and perhaps gives us more power to change things.?