The Sydney Sweeney ‘Genes’ Ad & More Explained by a CMO

24:35and they won a million extra customers during that campaign. It was the best period of trading they've ever had. I mean, it's phenomenally successful. What was interesting about Zeitgeist is I think maybe a year or two ago, the brand would have apologized. It would have probably been encouraged to apologize for any offense caused preemptively almost to kind of say, you know, if anyone's taking offense, we apologize, we'll retract the campaign. But actually they did the opposite. They didn't double down, but they committed to what they'd started. And in fact, Sydney, Sweden is going to be coming back out with another campaign for them as well, coming soon.

25:12So I thought that was interesting because I'm pretty sure most marketers would have apologised and changed course, but actually it was interesting that they decided to keep going. Because Trump waded in on it as well, right? Which I think is when it sort of first came to my kind of like attention in my political timeline as well. And that's just interesting as well, right? Like him sort of wading into something like that. And you get all sorts of weird conspiracy theories about were they donors to the Republican Party and did they have links to Ku Klux Klan? I mean, this is this, I suppose, is the negative of social media is that, you know, conspiracy theories abound and then they become the story and so on.

25:47So, again, I think it interestingly, actually, the reaction of the CMO, Craig, he turned off social media and didn't pay any attention to it. And instead, he went back to the research, went back to the plan and said, what do we intend to say? Are we doing the right thing? and then he commits the business to stick the course, which I think is good because these things blow over pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting on that. There's definitely been some times in the last few years in politics where I've benefited from deleting social media. Because it just ends up everyone with an opinion and a different angle on everything.

26:23It just becomes completely exhausting. But it has led to sales increasing, right? Because that was one of my sort of big questions. Yeah, they did incredibly well. And I think the headlines are a million extra customers won in the few weeks after the share price went up. I don't have the stats quite to hand, but I think 20, 25%. And it's a brand that had been on a slow decline. If you look at the share price for the last kind of two or three years, it's been in gradual decline. So in a highly competitive market, they're obviously up against Gap, they're up against Levi's. And they've all got big celebrities as well on their campaign.

26:57So, I mean, he talks about it as the great jeans war of 2025. You know, you've got Beyonce on Levi's. And I think there was the pop group that Gap had come out with just afterwards as well. So it became a very cultural conversation, like, you know, jeans and celebrities and who's going to win this. And where do you think the future of that kind of lies in terms of like very hard to plan virality like that, right? Like, you can't sort of do it. But what does the future sort of look like? Do you think we're going to see brands leaning into it kind of being edgier? Because like you say, there's been quite a sort of move in the last perhaps decade or so where it's been the adverts at Cannes and so on have been very kind of like much more kind of purpose-led, less of the sort of risque sort of shock side of things.

27:52I think there's two things probably going to happen at the same time. I mean, there's been a number of very public kind of backlashes. I mean, Bud Light with Dylan Malvaney was another one that about 18 months ago. Cracker Barrel as well. That's a very American brand. But they rebranded and got, I think, Trump weighed in on that one as well. That got negative backlash. So I think there's two things going to happen. I think one thing that's going to happen. What happened with those ones? Well, with, I mean, Bud Light was astonishing, really. I mean, they had partnered with Dylan Malvaney, so a trans influencer.

28:23she had posted some content and that had been picked up by some of the right wing media in the US. And there'd been this kind of protest against Bud Light and everyone was kind of protesting and stopping buying it. Now, this was unusual because normally when that happens, nothing actually happens in the real world. It's just a storm on social media. This was unusual because it actually did filter into the brand sales. And it's interesting in terms of why it wasn't necessarily that people stopped drinking Bud Light, but the distributors, the people that stocked it started to switch out to other brands and the retailers put less space to bud light compared to other brands so it was quite interesting that it was more the business to business the supply chain that made the decision and therefore that's what cost them the uh you know cost them sales rather than necessarily you know customer demand why do you think they made that sort of decision with that then well i think they they probably brought into the hype that oh suddenly no one's going to drink the beer anymore and therefore it's not in demand so we won't stock it as much we'll switch it out for michelob ultra which by the way is from made by the same company so quite so the the brand that benefited was also from the same company so it helps to have two horses in a race um and the cracker barrel one what was that cracker barrel one was interesting so that you know this is where now this is quite a funny one because something that gets every marketer every marketer likes to a rebrand because if you start out i mean marketing jobs are short live right so you think in the window i've got on this brand i'm going to have to do a rebrand because i need to leave my leave my mark on it so marketers love doing this right um but consumers like familiarity they like things to say the same and so most rebrands don't work and what happened is that this rebrand had been planned and uh it was actually i met the team that did it and they did a really good job on it but unfortunately a few people picked it up and they couldn't believe that the um that there was an iconic guy in the logo they'd taken him off and there's this big sort of emotional response to you're messing with something that we love yeah you don't really understand us and so on so there were loads of there was a big protest about bringing back the old logo so halfway through this big rebrand and by the way this isn't just a logo this is merchandise this is actual stores and outlets and uniforms and staff you know staff training and so on this is a huge huge big operation to make this rebrand and it got reversed so they had to kind of undo it all but it's one of those things where if you look objectively at what they were trying to do in terms of rebrand it was what every brand does regularly but they happen to be the one that got caught up in the pr it got caught up in the social storm and therefore they had to react to it and i think what might happen is i think brands are starting to realize that you don't manage your brand by social media you need to manage your brand by the actual customers that that pay to to come in your stores or buy your products.

31:10And I think marketers are starting to learn a lesson now because I think we got very carefully PR trained to be very sensitive to what people say about our brand online. But online isn't the real world. And you need to differentiate between when it's genuine feedback that you should listen to and when it's just, particularly with algorithmic fields where actually rage is rewarded, isn't it, with engagement. So you become overexposed to negative sentiment and controversy. it doesn't reflect how people actually feel. Yeah, but if it's 1 % of the population and none of them are customers, then, you know...

31:45Exactly. And the chances are the people are complaining and not people that buy products anyway. Yeah. So... Yeah, yeah, exactly. Who's a kind of, like, rising star in the kind of, like, marketing world? Who are doing a kind of, like, pass the mic sort of session? Well, someone I think is doing an incredible job is... Have you come across Duolingo? uh, you follow what they're doing. So Duolingo is, is basically a, an app where you can learn a language. Um, and they, they, they've created this character called Duo, this kind of green owl and their head of social media, Zaria Parvez, who's been on the podcast, um, straight out of college, got a job as, as basically in their social team.

32:28And she's created tens of millions of followers for the brand through her social media and through Duo. But what she's done incredibly well is everyone says, oh, how do you make this go viral? Every marketer wants a viral hit. But actually what she did, I think, was really smart. So she created a character that enabled the brand to have a personality, to turn up at film premieres or to turn up in your feed or to kind of make a joke out of a current event. So firstly, she created a character. Secondly, she realized that it's about entertainment, right? The problem with advertising is most advertising is dull, but she actually made it really entertaining.

33:09And then what she did is she built a story over a long period of time. So one funny example is Duo the owl was trying to court Dua Lipa, right? So they basically trolled Dua Lipa, you know, trying to get her attention. And they failed to do so, right? Until this year, they came up with the idea of let's kill Duo. This was during the Super Bowl, right? During the Super Bowl, they killed off Duo as a big stunt, right? And because they'd built up such a fan base, the world went mad going, what's happened to Duo? Is Duo dead? What's gone on? Anyway, Duo's ashes turned up at Dua Lipa's house. She was at pains to tell me, by the way.

33:48It was matcha, by the way. So it wasn't, you know, real ashes. If anyone out there worried about that, she killed this house. Exactly. We're on the phone. It was matcha powerless. Anyway, we're reassured by that. That's the first time they got her attention. So Julie betweeted her response to it after receiving that. So that's a small example. But what she achieved in terms of creating a brand over a number of years by using the power of social media, creating a character, thinking about the story that the brand's going to have, thinking about the personality and tone of voice. And she had an excuse to inject their brand into culture during the Super Bowl or Christmas or, you know, opening of a big new store, you know, or a big event, a big concert, the owl would turn up and everyone would be photographing Duo the owl.

34:37So I think what she's done is phenomenal. And she's now gone on to, she's now head of social at DoorDash, which is a huge, huge, huge delivery company. Yeah, delivery base of America. um how much of stuff like that is pre-planned in terms of like so one of my favorite examples of this was greg's launching the vegan sausage roll and piers morgan just sort of kicking off and so on and i just thought like you know it's kind of like a match made in heaven they both sort of benefit from it like how often is that sort of done um i think a lot more than you think a lot more do you think that no one ever says it's pre-planned right because it kind of takes the mystique away so it's always told as this kind of lucky accident that happened to keep the kind of mystery alive um but most most uh you know most viral successes that i've come across and teams that i've worked with and i've interviewed that they what you do is you plan for different outcomes right so um you know if this happens in the super bowl we're going to do this if that happens we're going to do that so a lot of work a lot of planning usually goes into the viral success the other thing i'd say as well is that you need to like if you take duolingo as a good example right the fact that goes viral is not because one day they woke up and had this crazy idea and it went viral they've put years yeah and a lot of time a lot of money into basically creating the circumstances that might then potentially go viral so i think it's not just did the moment itself you was that plan but it's also the work that goes before that you put yourself in a position where you might just go viral um so i've got sort of two kind of like stories on this from jimmy's jobs perspective which i just think you might find funny and amusing uh on the branding bit and the artwork like we have not changed it since we launched five years ago part of it is like it feels very sort of special to me in terms of like that was like the first bit where it all really began to feel real and i remember commissioning someone to do it for like 150 quid uh and so on part of it is like i'm just like there's just another thing to do and i don't think it really kind of makes any impact but like we're still keeping it the the same and the other is like we were thinking about whether there's a character that could ever be used for jimmy's job something for the backdrop or something like that i was talking to elf samba about it and um we were sort of just joshing along with the idea of keeping the sort of jay in it and so on and we came up with jimmy the jellyfish but like perhaps that wouldn't quite work what do you think what should we do do you know what it doesn't uh doesn't matter what you do as long as it's distinctive and associated with you so if you take octopus energy right octopus energy have got a bright pink octopus right a quick thanks to octopus energy for supporting this episode now a lot of people know about octopus for their home energy products i have recommended people switch them for years but what you might not know is that they are now rolling out more products across home and businesses from solar panels, EV chargers, heat pumps.

37:44So if you're thinking of upgrading your home or business and you are a Jimmy's Jobs listener, you can ping Jimmy at octopus.energy and get the very latest deals and insights. And if you're already on the journey with Octopus, leave us a comment or a message. I'd love to hear how it's going with their wider products. All right, back to the episode. That's a bit crazy, right? Octopuses aren't pink. right but um but but they stand out and i mean pink's a lovely color you know but it's different and in in marketing science that the most important thing is to be distinctive because being distinctive is so we in marketing we have this big argument right and it's basically is it better to be distinctive or different and the answer is it's better to be distinctive but everyone focuses on being different but your goal is to be remembered so in one sense it doesn't matter what the mascot is what really matters is that people remember it yeah and that they associate it with you so what you want to do is you want to make people feel good when they see it you and you want to make sure they remember and associate it with jimmy's jobs of future that's the task so jellyfish would work obviously the j come up with a come up with a an unusual color for a jellyfish that people are not expecting and then just make sure it kind of like associates itself with you um and what do you um i mean is it like it is amazing like my kids see like the van and so on and get like super excited about it and like it's i i was a bit shocked by i met greg the other day actually we were doing uh we're doing a an advert together actually for the marketing society and we were both both being interviewed seven or eight of us being interviewed as this kind of mash-up video that that they were producing and in my head i assumed that the toy octopus was this incredible success that because it you know it's like i mean you know this when you've got kids right and any kind of soft cuddly toy is an instant hit yeah and the way to get to your heart is through your kids right so if your energy provider gives away cuddly octopuses i mean that that for me seems like marketing nirvana yeah um but apparently he said he just had a hunch on it and he bought a couple of thousand and then he i was expecting the story to be and we sold out in 30 minutes and then he said oh no I was left with like 1 ,980 I'm like wow I think it does end well he didn't then tell the rest of the story but obviously the fact they've carried on with it I assume it did become a hit but it's like um it's like most successful things that they take a lot longer than you think they're going to do yeah and um often say to people it takes on average about seven years to have an overnight success yeah and any entrepreneur like Greg will tell you the amount of hard work that went in before the thing that we all associate with them has happened.

40:25They also do solar panels and electric vehicles, which you can find out more by checking out the show notes. Very good. I'm going to throw it. You're a pro. I can't imagine doing that five years ago. I told you, like, talk about skills. That's wild, isn't it? Is the podcast, like, how do you imagine it when you started and how is it today? Yeah, well, let's get into it. Let's just chat about the jobs of podcasting and so on. Because there's definitely like a element of, you know, classic, another white middle-class male going through an identity crisis. Of course, it's got a podcast and so on.

40:57But I think one of the things that did make a difference when I started it, it was the only thing that I was doing really. Like it was a lockdown thing and so on. And I guess I thought, I never thought it would kind of like blow up to where it has. But I also thought there was definitely an element. um i knew i was on to something and i knew the sort of wider thing about entrepreneurs creating jobs ticked lots of boxes for me lots of passions and so on and it does feel a bit like that steve jobs commencement speech where i sort of tied a lot of things that i'd kind of been picking up along the way to sort of do um but yeah it's kind of like i've spent a lot of my time because one of the things is the amount of time you spend on distribution right like and i you know i thought initially like naive enough to be like well you know just have a good podcast with good people on that will be enough like it turns out it's not um and you have to you know think about market and distribution right and and that is partly that's changed a lot in five years as well like linkedin now is much more of a kind of platform for it and as a jobs for the future podcast it's like really fertile kind of like ground for us and like now i don't think you know when i started five years ago i don't think you could even upload video on there and so on so um yeah these things these things change how how do you think it's because you started even even earlier than me in that sense you're a couple years ahead of that like pre-pandemic right because that was yeah it was just it was just before the pandemic and one of the decisions was do we continue in the pandemic and in fact actually what i you know like anybody else i think i was missing talking to people and that you know that kind of connection and so oddly i continued it during the pandemic more for myself i think just to kind of talk to people and compare experience and so on like that but um but but you're right i mean it feels weird looking back to that time actually and uh compared to now and as you say you kind of you start out and you go oh 100 people listen to this and then like and you set a bar and go oh wouldn't it be amazing if a thousand people listen then you get to a thousand people and then get to 10 000 then it's like hundreds of thousands wow yeah like this seems unreal because you know you're putting the same love and care and effort into each kind of episode but the numbers of people on the other side listening and it's a weird thing i find as well because you don't necessarily get feedback immediately it's not like on social media you've got so many metrics instantly your disposal you know views and click through and who you know what demographic a person you know watched it or listened to but podcasting's the technology is a bit antiquated so you don't get that much feedback do you no data analytics around podcasts they're terrible it's really embarrassing actually there's no like search function there's no way of promoting your podcast over someone else's which in a way is it's kind of nice in one sense because it's the most it's the only organic media in the world right yeah it's the only one where you've got zero barrier to entry everyone's on a level playing field and you know the the best ones will rise to the top so which is kind of nice but the downside is got none of the tools that you have on other platforms to kind of boost yourself or promote your way and but do you think all that's changing what you just said there because i agree with you it was part of the appeal part of the reason i started it was that it was like you know well 50 quid on amazon mic and hiring an editor to like get going well let's just sort of like prototype and see and i think that's one of the things we um chatted about in on your podcast is like just prototyping and like trying other careers if you can and so on is like really important and yeah after eight episodes i loved it and was getting good feedback from it i also think there's an interesting point about like the stuff that we do which is like quite businessy just doesn't provoke quite as much opinion.

44:31You probably get more of it in marketing. That's why I wanted to ask about Jaguar because whenever we talk about that, it always does well. But I think where it's sports and politics, which are two other big podcasting areas, they provoke opinion. So you get a lot more kind of feedback on it in that sense. But yeah, do you think the sort of barriers to entry have changed? I don't think they've changed much, but I think the competition is insane. Yeah. So, arrogantly or not, I think when I launched, I felt like I was offering something a bit better than what was out there. I certainly had a bit more experience than other podcasters, as in I'd done the job myself for 20 years, right?

45:12Yeah. So, I came to it knowing a bit about marketing. I had a really good network myself as well, so I could get good guests on. Yes. You know, so I was punching above my way in terms of other podcasts or punching above other podcasts way, maybe to say that. I mean, there were certainly some very good ones at the time. Now I look at it and go, holy smoke, like most other other marketing podcasts are getting similar guests to me. You know, their production quality is really good. The frequency of output is high. So certainly in the era I'm in, the bar has gone up a lot in terms of quality. The barrier to entry, I think it's the same in terms of like, as you say, 50 quid Amazon mic and off you go.

45:50Right. So anyone can start. But I think you'd find it tougher or actually it's tougher to sustain. So what I do notice is what I see in certainly in marketing or sort of marketing slash business category that I'm in, there's a lot of podcasts that come out that do well just for a short period of time and then they drop off. And then there are a few that are sustained that end up kind of remaining at the top. And I fortunately, you know, touch lots of wood, you know, unscented CMO who's kind of remained up there. But I think it's also a longevity game. It's a bit like anything. It's like a bit like fitness, isn't it?

46:24you have to put in the hours you have to be consistent you have to keep raising the bar with you know with quality you have to promote you don't know which one's going to get you know going to be a viral hit but but the more you promote the more content you create the more you start to see um you know the the good content coming out what do you think has allowed you to keep that consistency going and keep it up i think for me um i think there's a number of things actually. Firstly, the success of the podcast is tied to my day job, which is really helpful. So my sort of OG kind of backer is System 1, which is where I'm chief customer officer, right?

47:05And as part of my... Basically, I wanted to meet other marketers because I wanted to build relationships with other marketers who may, at some point in the future, then buy from System 1. Because I had a reason beyond the podcast to do it, it meant that it didn't matter how many views I got. It didn't matter that, you know, I was on the 10th or 20th or 30th episode. The point was, who was I meeting? And, you know, were they kind of good potential contacts for System 1? And then over time, what I realized is as more and more people listened, actually, people were starting to phone up System 1 because they listened to me talk about my job.

47:41So it actually created not just a network for me personally, but it also created a media vehicle to tell the story of the company I work for. So because of those two angles, it meant that I kind of had this incentive to keep it going. And then, as you said, you get this feedback loop, don't you? You get, oh, people like the show, and oh, I've risen up the charts. And then you get on that drug of like, you know, you start to see the numbers go up. And it's very satisfying. I mean, I joke actually, because I was nominated as one of the top performance marketers last year. Now, within marketing, you've got two tribes, right?

48:15You've got brand marketers and you've got performance marketers. And so I'm very much in the brand marketer camp. So to get nominated by performance marketing world was this sort of quite in joke, you know? John is always dismissing performance marketing as being a bit dirty. Bottom of the funnel, they call it, you know. It's all about conversion. Go down a status thing. Yeah, I'll completely buy it. This is exactly the status thing, right? So it's a bit of an in joke. But when it comes to podcasts, I'm probably the top performance marketer in the world because I'm obsessed with the data. I'm like, what have we learned from this?

48:44How many people have listened? How long have they listened? Are they listening again? And the data is a drug as well, isn't it? But it's a feedback loop. And I think the statistic, I'd have to fact check myself on this one, but there's a ridiculous number of podcasts that never make it past the third episode or the 10th episode or the 20th. I mean, it's staggering. I think 95 % of podcasts don't make the 20th episode or something like that. So it definitely rewards consistency and learning and improving and continually raising the bar. How has it changed the way you ask questions? That's a very good one.

49:22I, yeah, that's a really, really good one. I think I think, I think I, what I'm trying, this is a work in progress thing for me. So I'm naturally curious and I naturally love conversations with people. I naturally love finding the story. I think what I'm thinking a bit more now is working back from the headline and the social content in a way that I didn't do before. So I think when I started, I'd probably just go, let's have a great conversation, right? Whereas now what I think about is what are the fault lines in marketing? So you mentioned Jaguar, right? Jaguar is a fault line in marketing.

49:54What I mean by that is that everyone's got an opinion and it divides even, you know, clever marketers who would normally agree their opinion. So for example, Mark Ritson and Rory Sutherland, right? I have equal massive respect for both of them, right? I'm a big fan of both of them. They have the opposite opinion on whether Jaguar did the right thing or not. So when you find a story like that, I know that is going to be good content because it divides the very best in our industry. So I think I've learned to find the fault line that is going to divide people and basically make people kind of talk about it.

50:34And then the next thing I try and do is then think about what is useful in this conversation and can it be broken down simply? So I had the Unilever CMO on my last episode. She was amazing, right? Because she could break down why something works. Here are six ways in which social media is most effective in Unilever. Here's my five-point framework for how we build brands. And being able to communicate something so useful in a clear framework that's memorable is a great way to do that. So to answer your question in terms of how I approach the interview, thinking about where's the fault line that's going to create the story, and then think about what's most useful to communicate in a simple way that can be clipped up and then distributed.

51:15Because then that creates a distribution that leads people into the podcast that hopefully then leads to a subscriber listening. Yeah, that's... Out of interest, by the way, would you agree with that? Has that been your experience as well?

51:31Not quite the same, but I think it's different. I think that is a good way of thinking about it. And I definitely do think more about like, okay, what's the social story here? Like, how are we going to frame it from the outset? And I resisted that for a long time in the way that I resisted going on TikTok with it and so on. So I was like, we're a long form, serious business podcast. But actually, after a couple of years, it was like, well, you know, we need to reach more people. Like, how are we going to do that? Well, it's kind of through socials, really, is the kind of only way of it. So I definitely think more about that and I've got more comfortable with that.

52:03just in the same way that newspaper journalists have snappy headlines, which aren't always quite sort of like entirely representative of what is written beneath and so on. So that has definitely been something that has taken a little time to get used to. I think thinking particularly when we do the big politicians, thinking of what I term the unlock question, which is how they're going to, even though they know they're doing a podcast and they know that it's not the Today programme studio, is like, how do you get them to sort of subconsciously realise that and kind of like, ah, I can ease into that sort of a bit more?

52:41It's been quite a big thing, and that's something I put a lot of time and thought into. Particularly when you're doing somebody like a Blair, who's probably like the most interviewed Briton that's ever lived, right? Like, is like, okay, how am I going to get something that's different? And it's almost like a personal kind of goal of like, not only do you want to elicit different information, but you want to ask something that they've not been asked before as well. So that's kind of like quite a sort of thing that I find. I spend a lot of time on that as well because it's easy. ChatGPT will give you every question, right?

53:12Yeah. That person's ever been asked, right? It's a real skill. Well, two things are a skill. Number one, to find the question no one's asked, but number two, to ask it in a way and make the person comfortable enough that you're going to get an answer that's unexpected as well. and one thing actually but you'll know this extremely well one thing actually um producer james and i have have kind of started doing is recording before the podcast has begun and after the podcast begun because what the people are so much more relaxed before the cameras roll right and when when cameras stop and if you can ask a question why you're still sat in this position with somebody in a slightly different way or a bit more casual their guard just drops yeah you just get something really interesting yeah that's kind of very authentic and and so on so i mean james kind of added on to an episode we did recently where the conversation that happened just after he added it at the end of the at the end of the podcast episode now i think that's something i'm going to experiment a bit more with because how do you capture people in in in the most relaxed most vulnerable most honest moment well i think i think so in politics that is termed at the margins of the meetings, which I always tell them was like an interesting thing because often you do get the most sort of out of people.

54:27Are you allowed to cover that, by the way? So if you've got something in the margins, you say? Yeah, in the margins. Out of the margins. Out of the margins. So what if you reported on something that's out of the margins? Would you get into trouble? Well, so I think that's why it's a grey area. I meant more the sort of like, you know, the meetings with diplomats or like heads of state visit and so on. like it was almost those bits that the sort of would be the most interesting I think with journalists it's different but I think this is where it's different in terms of the the rules are kind of being written a little bit in terms of because you would get like my background when starting off in politics was to basically get the mics off the politicians as soon as they finished right because you didn't want a hot mic moment and so on and yeah we had Julian Keegan on who did that famous like why does no one ever tell me i'm doing an effing good job and whatever so i think it it's hard in that sense i mean we did it on your podcast and we had like a free chat at the end of it and it's like you know i've just said well we'll watch it back and just sort of check exactly you don't have to put it exactly that's the new rules and like when we did starma they actually said to us like you know could you take this one question out and i didn't have a problem with it particularly um and that actually happens quite a lot and i think that's where they don't sort of the handlers don't realize that it's kind of changed and yes you would sort of do that but then it's also you're completely within your right to be like well no we're keeping that in as well so like it's yeah it's feeling that sort of way that trust element is difficult it's a bit like meetings as well because one thing i learned in my former career when i was kind of you know doing a proper job rather than just chatting to people like this which is great by the way was the meeting is never the meeting.

56:17Decisions never get taken in meetings. Decisions happen in the corridor. They happen after work. They happen on phone calls. They happen through alliances between people in preparations to meetings, right? The alignment, as people like to call it, is all done outside the meeting. And the meeting is a performance. The meeting is to kind of performatively go through the decision-making process to agree what's been decided outside a meeting, right? And it's a bit like that with this because actually it's the conversations outside the podcast that often will be where people are not performing, where you're going to get the unvarnished truth.

56:47And so I think I want to find more creative ways of capturing. So we did a thing recently called Confessions of a CMO, where we basically anonymously interviewed CMOs, not on camera, on purpose, right, to find out what are they too scared to say. What would they say if there were no consequences to their answer? Ask those kind of questions that actually unveil the real truth. I mean, man, you must know this. with your politics career is everyone is trained within each of their life to say the right thing stick to a party line right that they are so well trained to do that but i think that's changing though as well right like with the sort of trump rogan three-hour podcasts as well i mean i remember the pm's diary bid meetings like would be held like in the thatcher study and people would bring the various requests that they'd often receive from whether it be newspaper journalists or i I would get a lot from the business community.

57:40We'll show up in this, do that, et cetera. And you would take these things to it, but it was entirely like, if you really wanted them to do something, you basically went around the room with people that were going to be there beforehand and be like, look, can you weigh in on this one, please? Completely, yeah. And so on. So yeah, it's really funny with that. I mean, I do think political communication will change quite a lot in the next few years, particularly as we seem to be entering in the UK. a multi-party system as well much more so as well it's going to be kind of like fascinating to see how that all kind of works and it will be interesting over the next few years when we know we're quite a long way from a general election i think the sort of moment that the election is called it might be interesting to see how it all sort of tightens not necessarily reverts to type but yeah i get a lot of the people asking me about predictions for podcasts and politics because that was what was the big thing at the trump election but i think by 2028 it will might have shifted quite a lot again so it's going to be yeah interesting although i think the winner will be whoever plans now for that eventuality because we're so short-termist about this and you know including kind of in podcasting but if you could build a podcast platform that basically takes the piss out of politics or something and it's something that everyone wants to tune into and build that over the next three years so that by the time the next election politicians are bidding you yeah to come on the show not the other day around right you're gonna have to do the bidding this is by the way something i found on my podcast is i started out having to you know kind of pitch myself out uh to guess now i get pitched yes in fact it's 95 turning people down rather than the other way around so the the dynamic change when you become the media the power dynamic changes yeah in that respect yeah that's definitely taken some kind of getting used to a little bit i think uh you spend so long kind of scrapping i mean you were talking about seven year thing earlier seven years yeah there is a lot of scrapping that goes into those sort of first three or four years and i think that's why a lot of people don't kind of like go through it and so on so yeah it'll be interesting well look we should definitely get you back on to talk about it i tell you what actually before we round up can we do jaguar because we didn't actually we didn't actually do that so let's do a few minutes on that um And so, Sidney Sweeney, big story.

1:00:01Other big kind of like issue in marketing, big viral moment was the Jaguar kind of rebrand. And you had the MD come on and talk about it, right? This is one of my favorite episodes I've ever done. It was a massive coup. So late last year, Jaguar announced their new concept car, right? The Type 00. Now, they did something I don't think any car company has done before, which is advertise a car when they're not selling cars. So this is part of the interesting part of the story, actually, is that Jaguar had planned to shut down production, have about an 18 month period of not selling any cars before they relaunched Jaguar as a brand with Type 00.

1:00:41So they literally are going back to the start. But the positioning was a copy of nothing, which as an old, you know, their founder basically said a Jaguar should always be a copy of nothing. And they were inspired by that to basically, you know, come up with something completely new. And they announced this. But what they did before they announced it and went on a kind of tour of, you know, fashionable places, Paris and Milan and Miami and places like this, they did a teaser video. and the teaser video it was just after this is also important with politics just after trump right it got in and it was very very kind of uh i i suppose the phrasing woke in quote unquote it's basically sort of androgynous looking people very brightly colored um it was kind of weird i mean basically i thought it was like united colors colors of benetton it looked like a fashion ad right it was kind of an upmarket fashion there was no car in the ad so elon musk even kind of They go like, which car company advertises without showing you the car?

1:01:42Now, it was done as a teaser video, basically to signal the change that they were going through as an organization. And everybody just lost it about this ad. You know, it's ridiculous. It was post-Trump's. It got a lot of heat in terms of the kind of representation, how it was, you know, done. And most people hated it, right? And particularly in marketing, everyone thought it was silly. And then the car came out two weeks later. and what the interesting thing about the car as well is that they they designed it in this very unusual pink shade yeah and this unusual blue shade and um i thought the car looked amazing i mean honestly i'm a bit of a car nut i mean i've been i i used to go to motor shows when i was growing up and i i nothing excited me more than going to the nec and going to the national motor show and looking at the jaguar xj220 right yeah so i love cars and so i was fascinated as a car I thought this looked like, it looked like kind of the Batmobile, but in pink.

1:02:34But again, that created this visceral reaction from people. It's like, you can't have a car that color. It just kind of offended people. So anyway, everyone thought the company had lost it. And in marketing, actually, the majority of people, including, you know, Mark Ritson, who I'm a massive, massive fan of, panned it because what they'd done is they'd kind of, A, they'd repositioned away from their target audience. They weren't targeting kind of middle-aged men like us. They were targeting young, ultra-wealthy urban people in mega cities around the world. But also, they'd given up a lot of their distinctive assets.

1:03:10So a lot of the things that you associate with Jaguar, they had left or appeared to given up in terms of the design language and that sort of thing. So basically, from a marketing point of view, you've got a patent. Interestingly, I think there were about three people in the world that thought it might be a good idea. So our good friend Rory Sutherland, his argument was when a brand is in trouble like they were, they've lost buyers for a decade, basically. And they're almost non-existent as a brand. I think they sold 7 ,000 cars in America last year, the biggest market in the world, right? So when you're in that situation, the normal rules don't apply.

1:03:49You have to roll the dice into 32 reds, right? So his argument was there are rare occasions where actually you need to do something pretty crazy to get noticed again. I think Sir John Hegarty was one. And I looked at it and just went, do you know what? What they've done very well is got us all talking about the brand. Now, what matters is does the product live up to the hype, right? If the product is as good as they suggest, then I think actually they'll have done very well because it's more important that we're talking about the brand. I mean, who would have had Jaguar on their bingo card as a brand?

1:04:22we're all talking about, right? Yeah. You know, and I think as a, in terms of the brand perception, it is seen as a dusty old man's car and not car of the future. So I thought it was pretty, I thought it was pretty good. So I was desperate to get the marketing, sorry, the managing director, Rorden Glover, right? Who overseed it. Now, to give you a sense of how serious this was, he got death threats and his team got death threats. He got so, like he got so, there's so much rage, you know, around this whole thing. and yet they've stuck to the plan. But what was interesting about talking to Rawdon is once he explained the research they did, how advanced the car is, what their ambition is in terms of the Jaguar.

1:05:02Imagine the Jaguar E-Type and how iconic that car is. That's what they're aiming for. They're not aiming to be the next BMW 3 Series. They're aiming to create a once-in-a-generation icon. And to do that, you have to be talked about. You have to see rappers driving it and wishing you could drive the same thing. And then when he broke down the economics of who they're targeting and the ultra wealthy and so on, it makes a lot of sense. Have sales increased or just? Well, this is the funny thing, right? Because they had planned to shut the factory down. Now, of course, what happened is when they announced their Jaguar sales, sales had plummeted like 90 % or 95%.

1:05:44Everyone jumped on social media and said, told you so. They do the rebrand. three months later sales that literally sales disappeared but they're not going to sell the car until next year yeah so this was always the plan but of course anybody that didn't do their research basically got fooled by the fact that you know that the sales decline was a consequence of rebrand but it wasn't at all consequence of shutting the factory so talk to me about two kind of opposing brands here right like apple and sort of vision pro and then at the other end of the branding spectrum kind of Ryanair. So you've got Apple Vision Pro, everything incredibly polished, thought about to within a millimeter.

1:06:23And then you've got Ryanair, which is just sort of, yeah, at the complete opposite end of that. Yeah. Apple Vision Pro is an interesting one. There's a principle in marketing called Maya, most advanced yet acceptable. And I think the interesting thing about Vision Pro is have they got that balance right? So, I mean, would you would you use it as an example i'm not necessarily saying you're the target audience but can you see yourself using that vision pride um i'm i'm always up for trying things but i am also skeptical of the price point of these things yeah of the first things basically so i i think the challenge apple have got is contrast that with ray-ban metas right yeah so what what meta have done is they've been through the myer cycle right so what they realized is that they had they bought oculus and they made um basically metaverse right it was a similar thing to apple pro you put on a but on a headset you get an immersive experience all very interactive but it was a jump too far in technology it just didn't feel like it is so maya stands for most advanced yet acceptable so things can be too advanced for you for you to adopt them right yeah what they got right is they then did a collaboration with meta sorry with ray-ban and what they did with ray-ban was brilliant is they designed glasses you want to wear so they took the most common and most popular Ray-Bans and built the technology into that so that you're wearing something you're used to wearing, but it's got a twist.

1:07:42So it's like, oh, I can take photos. Oh, I can take a call. And actually, the technology has been dumbed down quite significantly. So, you know, rather than kind of being a 3D kind of virtual world that you're kind of wandering around in, actually, it's just integrated into your everyday life. So I think the challenge for Apple from a marketing perspective is they're asking their audience to do a lot. They're asking them to make a really big jump in technology whereas what apple's really good at is taking something that we're familiar with you know headphones or or the ipad or the phone and making it a bit more stylish making easier to use making it more beautiful so i think with with um vision pro it's just too big a technology jump i think for most people to make that's interesting and then ryanair just like just seems to be increasingly rude to everyone i know ryanair ryanair is an amazing brand i mean people would be surprised me to say this, like Ryanair, what brands, you know?

1:08:34But the thing with Ryanair that people don't understand is they are consistent with who they are. So it doesn't matter what personality you are, but make sure you stick to your personality. If your personality of your brand is basically to give people only what they need and not what they want, and you specialize in the cheapest possible flight to Girona, but basically you have to, you know, you have to slum it on the seat, you have to pay to go to the loo, you have to pay five pounds for a glass of water, right? That is actually signalling. It's negative signalling, but it's signalling, right?

1:09:05It's reinforcing the fact that you're getting a very, very, very cheap seat. So them being rude on social media is completely consistent with the idea that they don't care about what you say about them on social media, you're getting a cheap flight. And that's why it's consistent. But imagine if BA, who, you know, want to be the world's favourite airline, or that's certainly how we perceive them, if they're rude to you, everyone would have a meltdown. yeah you know but Ryanair built it in it's a bit like why Boris got away with stuff right Boris could get away with so many things a normal politician couldn't because it was part of his persona yeah part of what we expected him we expected him to kind of you know fluff his lines and and do something stupid um and therefore that you know he got he got forgiveness for priced in right yeah yeah no it's really um really interesting on the um sort of i have this concept about mentors and so on that we have mentoring wrong and too much of it we think of it as the sort of like person in the 50s mentoring someone in the 20s whereas actually you kind of need somebody that's like a couple of years ahead of you really because the world is moving faster and like context and cultural stuff is changing um what where do you as somebody who's run a podcast for seven years like and i've done it for five years like what are the metrics that you kind of now look at in terms of where would you like to be in a year's time two three years like how do you think about it how do you sort of plan for it what are the things you look for yeah i think the thing i'm at the moment what i'm thinking is where how do i expand the footprint of the podcast.

1:10:45So the audience, I'm very fortunate to have a really high value audience. So the audience are typically senior marketers, founders of creative agencies, people who work in the media, right? So it's a really high value audience that spend a lot of money on a lot of things, right? They also love to go to events and conferences. They love to get trained. They love to network and so on. So the way I'm thinking about the podcast is what are the other things that could sit around the podcast that would create value, given that I've done the media job. I've done the job of creating a vehicle to reach and talk to them regularly every single week.

1:11:21What else can I do that then is consistent with the uncensored CMO brand? So the thing I'm excited about really is what's the big annual conference that the very best, most creative people in the world will come along to? What's the networking event that means that if you want a new job, I can connect you with the best marketers on the planet in just the kind of sector that you're thinking about. So yeah, so I'm thinking more in terms of footprints than maybe what's next. Although I will continue experimenting with different formats of the show, one thing I'm looking at is the rest is model, right?

1:11:58So uncensored, if uncensored is the brand, uncensored could mean more than a CMO. It could mean a founder. It could mean different channels like media. So the brand itself, so I was quite glad actually that I came up with a brand idea that's stretchy you know so it's kind of got it's got kind of future uh you know innovation built into it i think just in terms of positioning yeah definitely that is uh that's interesting so it's thinking about the other sort of products around it and so on and i guess that that's the point is like in the marketing space everyone would have heard of you right there isn't going to be like anyone that has and if it is it's there probably their fault rather than yours Well, I would say in the UK, that is 100 % true.

1:12:41But back to your question, actually. Sorry, what I should have also said. I've been a really big pivot I made 18 months ago was 50%, at least 50 % of my content was going to be in the US. Because actually, if you look at all the big British podcasts, they've all gone to America because the market is just 10x, right? Everything is bigger. The money involved is a lot more. The influence you get is a lot greater. so and this is hard yards for me actually to be honest because it means we have to fly you know me and producer james fly we go we take the studio with us we have to go where you know go where the guest is so it has a big consequence for travel for time uh for investment but but i can see it in the numbers though so uh almost my entire growth now is coming coming from the us and the us as a percentage my listener base has doubled in the last couple of years so that's really exciting um but i have to remember the competition in the u.s is a lot a lot greater so again in terms of the podcast i've got to think how do i make it different how do i make it better um how do i expand the footprint in the u.s as well so that comes with like a ton of logistics and cost and yeah everything else in it as well john thank you very much coming on jimmy's jobs of the future right good to be here man thank you for having me

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