James Hurman on his Lions Master of Advertising Effectiveness program

0:00James Hurman: Welcome to On Strategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O 'Carroll in Chicago. Listen, we just launched our On The Spot episode live in front of an audience for the very first time. We recorded it at GSD &M in Austin, Texas, and it was a complete blast. Now, what happens is that, for those of you who are regular listeners, you'll be familiar with On the Spot, which is a monthly series that we do where we invite strategists to come on the show. They bring a campaign on that they love, and they pitch it to us. And then we ask questions. We have System 1 as a part of it. We have TrackSuit as a part of it. And they give us the sort of the way the ads have tested, the way the brands are tracking.

0:42James Hurman: And it's a great conversation. It's a fun thing, an informal kind of casual thing. We've decided this year to take it on the road as a live show. And so we did it last week in, uh, in Austin at GSDNM. And it was wonderful. The next stop that we're taking it on is in New York city on Wednesday, next September 23rd, Wednesday, September 23rd, which is next week. Cause this drop, this episode, I think it's dropping on a Tuesday and it is, and that's Tuesday the 15th. So it's next week, the 23rd Wednesday at Johannes Leonardo in New York City between 5 and 7 p.m. We have, and the way we talk about it is in simple terms, we talk about it as planners talking about brands they love but never worked on.

1:29James Hurman: So we get three strategists in the live version. Each of them comes on the show and they pitch the audience. Each of them, they pitch a campaign they love but they've never worked on. And it cannot be a campaign that their agency works on either. we give them five minutes on the clock to make us love it as much as they love it and then they're peppered with questions from the audience and from the roundtable which consists of the other strategists and at the end of these three pitches we then decide on a winner and as part of those pitches system one tells you how those ads actually ranked versus what we think they ranked which we kind of and we actually guess it and see if we're how far off we are and the audience gets involved in that So listen, it's sort of a fun thing for planners to do.

2:18James Hurman: It's a great way of bringing together a city's community of planners. So we would love to see you there. The three strategists that are pitching in New York City are Jonathan Daly, who's head of comm strategy for Johannes Leonardo, Ellery Luce, who is EVP strategy at Mischief, and Veronica Thu, who is head of strategy. at Mother in New York. So those are the three strategists that are pitching. You won't know until the night which campaign they each decided to pitch. But come along with us, have a drink, have some food, have some fun, and it would be brilliant to see you there. You can get tickets on our website under the Live Tour tab on our homepage at onstrategyshowcase.com.

3:08James Hurman: That's onstrategyshowcase.com. Wednesday, September 23rd between 5 and 7. I'm really excited to see everybody in New York next week. Anyway, we are excited today to bring James Herman. James Herman has been on the show a number of times. We've been fans of his course that is now embedded with the Lions Learning platform. And Lions Learning have been adding a bunch of new content on there. people like Fernando Machado, people like Marcus Collins, people like James, who have come onto that platform with new courses that you can take. Now, we're excited to have Lions Learning as a partner and a sponsor of the show.

3:51James Hurman: And Lions Learning, they are now enrolling for the next Master of Advertising Effectiveness program, which is James Herman's program. The program starts It's October 12th. And if you're not familiar with James and the program, James is a global recognized strategist and effectiveness expert. He's just written his third book. His first one was A Case for Creativity, which is brilliant. And then his second and third books carried the same title, which is, if you're watching us on YouTube, I'm holding it up, A Future Demand. This is the name of his second book and his third book, The Logic of Modern, really not too sure of even to this day.

4:30James Hurman: But this is a fabulous book that is really a new way of thinking about the sort of behavioral sciences and the effectiveness principles that we hear about every day. Future demand, current demand. It's a great contrast that I think does great things for making the case inside an organization for thinking about marketing in a new and fresh way. it's an eight week online program and you can sign up and learn more about it at learnings.lions.co that's learnings.lions.co so we're going to talk about two things in this episode we're going to talk with james herman about the about this actual course and the way he breaks it out in the various modules and and his intent behind it and then we're going to talk about the new book future demand, and he's going to share with us a little bit about that.

5:23James Hurman: I'm a big fan of James, and he does great things. And as with most of the effectiveness experts in our industry, he's actually from Australia. So it's from Auckland, New Zealand, actually, not Australia, New Zealand. So I'm excited to introduce you to this episode with James Herman. Enjoy. So we're going to come back to this at the end of this conversation because the book itself are are the theory of future demand, not a theory, it's a reality, of future demand and the story of that and the theme of it is baked into this course. So in essence, this is like two courses in one, right? Yeah, two courses in one.

6:05Well, it's been to two parts. So the first part is really the fundamentals of effectiveness, the principles that we've uncovered as a marketing science and effectiveness community over the past kind of two, two and a bit decades. and uh and that's really you know it's it's really important stuff for everyone to know right you need to know what excess share of voices and how to apply that principle you need to know why emotion is important why creativity is important you need to know about you know distinctive assets and distinctiveness and why that's important um and so all of those sort of base principles are in the first half of the program.

6:46We really kind of ground you in the history of this discipline or disciplines we call marketing science and effectiveness research, and really make sure that you understand those kind of ground truth principles. And then the second part of the program is framed through the lens of future demand. So, okay, how do we pull those principles together in a way that really connects with how markets work and how humans make decisions and put the principles together in a way that's kind of applicable to any brand. And we can prove with the data is likely to drive much better outcomes for that brand than not applying the principles in that way.

7:29James Hurman: So it's all evidence-based in terms of this course, right? I mean, it's information that comes from different organizations, different individuals, different experts who people may be familiar with, whether it's Ehrenberg-Bass, whether it's the Net and Field, etc. But you're bringing it together as an evidence-based program. This is not a, I mean, it's not a theory, meaning it's not a new concept. It is grounded in empirical evidence. that's right it was really important to me that you know i don't i don't want to teach you what i think right what what i believe what i what my opinion is on how advertising works i don't want to teach you sort of based on you know i've had a lot of experience in advertising but my experience compared with the entire experience of everyone in marketing is very slim right so i'd be working from a very small base of kind of understanding if i based it on my experience and what i've observed and what I think.

8:33I think it's much more important that people learn through genuinely evidenced work. And what I mean by that is not just principles that have been discovered through the analysis of big marketing data sets. That's one important half of it, right, that we build up from genuine kind of empirical research. The other side of it is I'm teaching things which have been shown to be true over and over again, right? So they're not things that have just come out of one particular study, one researcher over here looking at this one data set and seeing this interesting pattern. That's interesting, but it's not robust, right?

9:15We don't know that principles are actually robust until they're generalizable. And so we can see them happening again and again and again in different data sets and different geographies and different time periods by different people using different methodologies, right? When we see the same pattern happening over and over again, that's what tells us this is a robust principle this is a proper if this then that right if we if we input this we're likely to get out this and and so it's those kind of robust evidence-based principles that i'm teaching so you know everything you learn on the program is backed up with sort of you know depth of uh of data science effectiveness research marketing science those sorts of things

9:56James Hurman: So is that one of the advantages of you connecting up with Lions and that organization? Because Lions in the last couple of years has become wark, contagious, effy. It's canned Lions themselves. It's a huge body of not only of sort of a focus in different strategic areas, but a whole body of evidence. Is that incorporated into what you're doing here? yeah very much so i mean that you know the the the great thing about lions is the you know the connection to people and campaigns that demonstrate these principles so you've of course got on on one side of the lions world there's walk in the effies and the sort of the the observations that have been derived from those big data sets and i've done lots of work with walks database and you know pulling things out like um the principle of creative commitment for example so so yes there's a lot that we can learn from those big data sets of effectiveness case studies uh and then on the creative side there's just lots and lots of great work which um which really exemplifies those principles so we can see how a brand has taken one or many of those principles applied it and we can see the results and we can tell that they're actually quite predictable results given what we know about you know the the um the the principles themselves and so yeah it's kind of i sit in this lovely world full of kind of effectiveness information and full of, you know, great work that really lives that.

11:23James Hurman: And the criticism in the past has been, or the observation or the comment in the past has been that that body of evidence did not reflect enough of a U.S. sample. That's been solved for, even within the last 12 months, where huge analysis of FE data and FE winners has now been incorporated into that sort of enterprise-wide thinking. Yeah, that's so true. I mean, there's just an increasing amount of very US-based or focused research in this area. So whether that's the work that analytic partners do, for example, really great work contributing to the canon and in fact lining up with everything else that we know.

12:05There was a great study that I read. It's actually from late last year, but it's from Boston Consulting Group. who are, if you don't know, are from Boston in America. And they did an amazing thing.

12:22James Hurman: More commonly known as BCG right now, right? BCG, yeah, BCG Boston. And they looked at one of the most common things which has been studied over the last 20 years, which is this kind of interaction between brand and performance. and if we lean more into brand or we lean more into performance, what are the outcomes? And they've got yet another piece of work which shows that the companies that invest more in brands see a better overall return on investment from doing that. And so every time we look at U.S. data and we say, do these principles hold in the U.S.? Every time the answer is yes. And that is because, Fergus, these principles are really fundamental.

13:09right they're not we're not talking about the tactics and the execution we're talking about fundamentally how do marketing and advertising work and fundamentally marketing and advertising are about two things one how markets work and secondly how people make decisions in relation to those markets and those fundamentals how markets work how humans make decisions they do not change when you take a flight over to the uk or down to brazil or to here in new zealand those things don't change they're not geographically based right and uh and and those things also won't change in our lifetimes markets are not going to the way markets work is not going to change between now and when we pass on and nor is the way that humans make decisions so these things are very robust they're very stable kind of across markets so it's no wonder that what we find in the us lines up perfectly with what we find in in every other market now in any market i'll just caveat is by saying in any market of course you have a different media landscape you've got different culture you've got different you know different stuff which means that as advertisers and marketers we need to be sensitive to those things and be putting out creative work that kind of like aligns with the culture you know what what joke is funny in america is sometimes different to what joke is funny in romania and so you know all of those sorts of things we need to as marketers be sensitive to but the fundamentals underneath the very fundamentals of how the stuff works does not change from market to market.

14:35And so it's great to be experiencing a kind of surge of US data and research, which is, you know, confirming that.

14:43James Hurman: So what would you describe as sort of the industry challenge or the business challenge that this course is designed to help with? I think there's a couple. and one is really ensuring that marketers and anyone else, agency folk, anyone who's involved in the planning and the creation of advertising understands how it works, right? And we're still in the early days of this, right? When I started, when you and I started in our careers, we did not have this wealth of knowledge, right? And we were flying, not exactly blind, but very intuitively, right? There weren't these kind of rocks, so there wasn't this bedrock of kind of understanding about how this stuff worked.

15:31And we did a pretty good job, I reckon, of flying intuitively. But boy, is it nice now to have, you know, to actually understand how this stuff works and be able to, you know, really learn from that and apply it. So I think firstly, teaching the principles and teaching them in a way that's really applicable as opposed to very academic, you know and very theory based what i try to do you know i'm a kind of like bias to action sort of a person and so what i want when i learn and what i want people who learn from me to get is is okay this is what it is and this is how this is what it means and this is how i apply it here's a principle here's how another brand's applied it here's how you should think about applying it go and apply it tomorrow right so that's that's a really important thing getting out of the theory into the application and then um and then the other thing is uh communicating onto non-marketing stakeholders i think you know one of the biggest issues that we've got in marketing is non-marketing stakeholders because they are often the ones that really influence what we're kind of allowed to do and where we're allowed to spend money and the sorts of strategies that we're allowed to change and um and and they're not an issue because they're in any way deficient, it's just that they don't know a lot about marketing.

16:50And so they fill in the blanks of what they don't know with stuff that they've heard or stuff that they've read or stuff that, you know, has gone wrong in the past or whatever it might be. We've got a duty as marketers to better educate our non-marketing stakeholders. Now we can only do that if we're really clear on the principles ourselves. And so that's the other thing that I'm trying to, or the way that I'm trying to teach is very much, how do I give you these principles and how do I make them so simple that it's easy for you to explain them to the people around you? Because once you can get those folks on board, you're away, right?

17:24And until you can do that, it's sometimes very, you know, it's very difficult. You're kind of traipsing through treacle trying to get your kind of thinking through the organization. So, yeah, I think it's important to understand the principles, understand how to apply them and understand how to communicate them outwards.

17:40James Hurman: So when we talk about marketing, we use marketing and advertising interchangeably, but they're different things, right? So this is a course about advertising, but it is one part of marketing. How does the course influence the broader marketing dimensions outside of advertising? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's sort of the classical view and very much the Ritzonian view of advertising and marketing is that marketing is about the four Ps. marketing is about diagnosis and strategy well before you get to the executional stuff of like planning the advertising campaign and going out and executing it and look i think um in principle absolutely right that's absolutely right you know marketing should be about the four p's it should be about diagnosis and strategy before we get into execution i absolutely agree with that the reality though, Fergus, what is the number one biggest line item on most company P &Ls?

18:38James Hurman: I'm going to say it's media spend. That's right. It's media spend, right? It's usually the biggest single item on a company's P &L, right? So although advertising might be 8 % of marketing or whatever the figure is that people have worked out, it's certainly not 8 % of the money that marketing spends. So my view is that, yes, this is a course that's unashamedly about advertising. Once you understand things like future demand, those do have very real applications across the other four Ps and help you be a much better diagnoser and much better strategy planner. But the program is unashamedly about advertising and it is unashamed because if that's the biggest single amount of money we spend as a company in a year, we better be good at getting a return from that investment, right?

19:31That's really, really important that we're really, really good at that. Or we're tipping so much as a percentage of our company's budget down the toilet because we're not getting it right. So I think that's my sort of argument for leaning into the advertising bit. Yes, it's only one bit of marketing, but boy, it's the bit that we spend the most money on and need the best return from.

19:52James Hurman: So let's talk about who should be signing up for this. So you've got both a B2C and a B2B orientation within this. It's relevant for both, right? When I built the program about probably five years ago now, when I originally built it, my definition was for anyone who's involved in sort of the commissioning or the creation or the signing off of advertising. right anyone who's uh who has an influence on that big part of the budget that's being spent on advertising media um and so i i think that still holds so certainly agency folk and we've had obviously lots of agency strategy planners come through uh we've had also lots of account people um and lots of creative people come through the program uh and then on the marketing side Like, again, if you're a kind of a marketer that's involved, you know, you've got the agency relationship, you're signing off the work, you're kind of, you know, allocating budgets, all that sort of thing.

20:56I mean, you have to understand these principles to be able to do that competently.

20:59James Hurman: I think it's important for people to know that you came up as a strategist. You were a chief strategy officer within agencies. That's right. Your first book was The Case for Creativity, which is an excellent book that should be read by everybody. Thank you. And you're coming at it through the lens of somebody who has lived it. It's not an academic exercise for you, right? Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, again, that's, you know, it gives me a sense of, you know, real empathy with the people that I'm teaching. Right. Right. And sometimes, you know, it is, you know, we kind of the, you know, the professors and the academics and the consultants of the world, you know, bless them because they've done amazing things in this particular area, which is really cool.

21:47But yeah, sometimes having not been kind of in it and really understanding, you know, what it looks like at 1130 on a Thursday night before the pitch and, you know, the realities of what you're going to choose to present and the forces that are on you, you know, sometimes, sometimes you don't have that same sense of what it's really like in the trenches. So, so yeah, it's, it's something which is, you know, a little bit informed, or my style of teaching is probably informed by growing up in the industry. Whereas again, I'd say the body of content is less about what I learned in my career and more about what do we truly know as an effectiveness and marketing science community.

22:30James Hurman: So let's talk through some of the modules. We don't need to go through every one of them. As we said earlier, it's broken up into two parts. Talk us through that first part and what's the experience like as a participant in the course what what am i doing where am i doing it and what's been done at each stage yeah great so when we start we start with a live call so you uh you jump online and and have a live call with me and i kind of talk you through with the group or just one-on-one yeah with the group yeah um and uh and and so it sort of starts with a live call and a welcome and then each week there are two modules that week and the modules consist of a video that's normally about half an hour and that's me talking you through you know lovely lovely beautifully produced videos of me talking you through a particular principle and and and then some supplementary material a kind of cheat sheet which goes back over the key points of that module and usually a podcast with somebody who is behind the work that we have used as a case example in that particular module.

23:43And so each week you will watch a couple of videos, do some light reading, and perhaps listen to a couple of podcasts from the people behind the work. And then that just basically repeats for eight weeks and we do two modules a week. And along the way, every couple of weeks, there's a live Q &A. And so that's me answering questions from the group who might want me to go into something a little bit more detailed or explain how to apply a particular thing or whatever it might be. And those are really great because, you know, you kind of like other people ask questions that are actually the answers are really useful to you, right?

24:24And vice versa. And so it's really interesting to listen into those conversations. And then at the end, there's an exam. So in week nine, you set an exam and if you pass, then you become accredited, a Master of Advertising Effectiveness.

24:39James Hurman: So do I have to stay on track with everybody else or can I take it in my own time? I mean, people do take it in their own time. I think it's a lot better to sort of, you know, keep up and learn what everyone else is learning. Because when we're doing those live calls, we're talking about the, you know, the most recent modules that we've been through. So it helps to kind of keep up. But, you know, we're pretty, we understand that people are not always able to do exactly that. So there's a lot of flexibility built in. So if I'm B2B in a room of B2C people, is it a different experience for me? And how do you make sure that it's relevant for my stakeholders and my audiences?

25:18Yeah, cool. So B2B and B2C, but like I was saying before for, you know, across geographies, like the fundamentals of marketing are the same for B2B and B2C. and what we've learned particularly through the great folks at the LinkedIn B2B Institute have really kind of done the work on this. All of the principles we see in B2C hold up in B2B. So there's actually a specific B2B module and so if you're a B2B marketer, you really want to do that. And throughout the program, the rest of the principles are all applicable both ways. and yes like such as advertising that there's more b2c examples than there are b2b examples on the program but you know we've had plenty of b2b marketers come through and and and find the program very useful so um so yeah the fundamentals are the same and in the q a's and you know on the we have a on the online platform there's a you know discussion board where people ask questions and i answer and so often we get into b2b discussions and how to apply these principles in B2B, but it's remarkably similar.

26:24The biggest job that B2B marketers have on their hands is that non-marketing stakeholder job because the non-marketing stakeholders in B2B organizations think that marketing B2B is completely different to marketing B2C. And there's no data that supports that whatsoever.

26:38James Hurman: Take a minute and walk us through the modules just so people get a sense of it. You don't have to go through every one of them, but just sort of give us a sense of how those weeks sort of break down and what's involved in that. Yeah, great. So where we start, the first module is a history lesson. So it's actually the history of effectiveness research and marketing science. It's really good to sort of base what we're learning in, you know, the people behind these disciplines, the work that they've done, when they've done it, and sort of understand what's happened over this last 20-year period that's been, you know, just an amazing sort of enlightenment when it comes to understanding how marketing and advertising work.

27:20Then module two is about budgeting for growth and how investment into advertising and media underpin the success of everything else. And it's such an early module because actually, you know, what we've learned is that investment is so foundational. If we don't get that right, you know, everything else kind of, it's very difficult to put all the other principles into effect if we're underinvesting and not spending enough to actually generate a return. then we move into building mental availability describing mental availability and what that is and how how advertising grows it then into the power of emotion the role of emotion and decision making and brand growth then the case for creativity so why creativity makes advertising more effective then the importance of distinctiveness about distinctive assets that make brands more recognizable and why that's important and then into creative commitment which is about how we organize media variables like the amount we spend, the time, the duration we're in market and the channels that we're spread over and how those things impact on effectiveness and set us up with effectiveness advantage.

28:31And then the last bit of part one is you do a choose-your-own-adventure where you can either choose to do the B2B module or you can choose to do a media effectiveness in the post-digital age module where we dig into the work of Grace Kite and Karen Nelson-Field, who have done a lot of epic work in the media space. And so you can do one of those modules or both of them, whatever you like. So that's part one, really about kind of those foundational principles. And then part two.

29:01James Hurman: So that's across probably four, that's about four weeks. That's four weeks. It's roughly eight modules, two a week. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's the first four weeks. And then the second part is about future demand. And we start with the wrong mental model, which is a sort of an explanation of why this way we think about how advertising works, that advertising causes sales by putting the right argument in front of the right people or the sort of framework of ADA that advertising should generate awareness and then interest and then desire and then action. I really take apart how wrong that is, where that came from, why it's wrong, the evidence that it is wrong, to really set up this new mental model around future demand.

29:51So that's where we start, sort of really dismantling something that's actually been very destructive in terms of people's… Because the assumption in ADA, as I understand it, is that you could convert somebody from the point of awareness to conversion through your advertising in real time in the moment.

30:13James Hurman: Absolutely. And your thesis is, yeah, there's always a percentage of your audience that's in market now. Yeah. But the larger opportunity is people that are dealing with the issue of creating future demand. They will be in market for you at a later date. And so the idea is you need to separate that from people that are in market and those that are out of market, but will come into the market shortly or over whatever period of time that might be. Yeah. So future demand versus current demand. Yeah, that's right. I mean, advertisers got two jobs to do. One is converting the current demand in market.

30:51So getting the smaller group of people that's in our market right now to choose us and not another brand. and it's got a second job to do which is creating future demand which is basically like biasing future buyers towards us talking to all of those people that are going to come into the category over the next weeks and months and making sure they come into our market with a bias toward our brand i.e they feel more familiar with us and they feel kind of like they like us a bit more they feel more emotionally positive towards us yeah if we do that they're just more likely to choose us when they come into market even if there's a functionally you know superior product put in front of them from another brand so so we know those things also the that idea that you can take people through that kind of funnel of ada in an ad and out they pop at the other end buying the product um it's um it's interesting to look at the conversion rates of advertising sort of across the board They're usually around 1%.

31:49So one in every 100 person that sees an ad goes out and buys the product. Sometimes in really effective cases, maybe 5%, never, ever, ever over 15%. And those numbers haven't changed in a century. So even though we've had the creative revolution, we created the strategic planning discipline, media has got ever more powerful in its ability to target and reach people. even with the industry advancing as much as it has being unrecognizable from what it was 100 years ago the conversion rates of advertising have not moved a bit now either you take out from that as an industry we are completely incompetent or you take out from it that we've actually got the mental model of this wrong right it's not advertising's job is not to cause people to buy stuff advertising doesn't cause people to buy things but advertising does ensure that brands win a greater share of the sales that happen in their category.

32:48And so understanding that distinction liberates us to be able to organize our advertising in the right way so that it goes from being what's being called a very weak force. We talk about advertising being a weak force. And if we're thinking about advertising causing people to go out and buy things, it is indeed a very weak force. It's actually a very, very strong force if we look at its combined ability to make people feel more familiar with and positive towards a brand and create future demand and then convert that bias and that demand that we've created as people come into market. Advertising is a very, very strong force when it's doing those things.

33:29James Hurman: So, I mean, I would think that in certain cases though, would you agree that in certain cases there is the ability for advertising to create immediate demand or desire amongst people who may not even even have been considering your product be that a um a fashion item be that something that you come across online in a tiktok shop be that a a new product a new innovation so there i mean there are examples where it can create a desire that converts when you're not really consciously in market is that fair to say or no it's totally fair to say yeah absolutely i mean sometimes we're sort of triggered into the market or we're reminded of a need that we've forgotten about um or we're just kind of you know dazzled by something new and very interesting looking so yes it can have that effect it just doesn't most of the time right if advertising was capable of causing people to come buy things we would see at least some examples of universally persuasive ads, right?

34:33There are no examples of universally persuasive ads. There are no examples of ads that have conversion rates of 50, 60, 70, 80, 90%. There just aren't any, none in history, right? So we should see at least some examples of that. If it was true that advertising could cause people to go out and buy stuff, we should see some ads that really do that at scale. And there are literally none. So we've got to take something out of that, right? We've got to kind of come to our senses a bit and realize, actually, this model of how advertising works, it's wrong. It makes sense. Absolutely. It sounds logical.

35:09It sounds feasible. It's wrong.

35:12James Hurman: So the one thing that I, when I read the book, I read the first book and then I read the second book. And when I read the second book, I was struck by this framework that you offered in the second book that allowed a company or a marketer to be able to put in front of their C-suite a sort of a sense of what the current and future demand is going to be within their category. And then I saw that you in presentations do this in front of a live audience, a version of it in front of a live audience. Tell us about this idea of new phones and the example that you use. Because you give away, because I come off the first book thinking, yeah, I totally get this.

35:55James Hurman: I agree with this. I love this new mental model. But how do I predict it within my own category? The second book gives the solution to that, I think. Yeah, absolutely. So what I do when I'm speaking on stage is almost always I'll say, I want you to put your hand up. if you're currently in the market for a new mobile phone so you're about to buy a new one maybe in the next couple of weeks and um and let's say it's an audience of 100 people one or two people put their hand up and then i say okay put your hands down but i want you to put your hand up if you think you'll buy a new mobile phone smartphone hands there in the next two years and almost everyone's hand goes up and i say i do this experiment to show this very simple reality that in any market there are two types of demand.

36:46There's what I call current demand, people that are in the market ready to buy, that's the two hands that went up. And there's what I call future demand, people who aren't in the market yet but will definitely come into it at some point in the near future. And that's what I call future demand. And that audience experiment, I think, does sort of make lucid for people that this is a real thing, right? Yeah, yeah, completely. In a room and I didn't pay anyone to put their hands up or not put their hands up.

37:16James Hurman: And a similar version to that is done within the book across different categories. There's like four or five key questions you can put into your quant surveys to be able to gauge it, to get a sense of it, to make the case to your C-suite. Yeah. I mean, you can just go out and say to people, you know, when do you next expect to buy a new mobile phone? Is it today, this week, this month, in the next three months, six months? Yeah. Two years? three years, four years, you know, whatever. And you can just ask that question across a nationally representative sample of category buyers and see, you know.

37:53And now that's actually, I will say, just in case there are, you know, researchers and scientists listening, that is an imperfect exercise, getting people to actually predict when they'll take a decision or take an action, very messy. You know, people tend to over and under predict those things. And so it gives you a sense of the shape of the category without being super precise. I'm actually working on something at the moment that's a lot more precise and doesn't require people to answer a question predicting when they'll next do something. And so I'm building a tool which I hope to release at some point, which you can put your category and your country into that tool and you can find out exactly what the current and future demand is at any point in time.

38:37um and and so that's a much more sort of mathematical way of doing it rather than you know a human survey based way you know but what's interesting to me is i i think that

38:47James Hurman: in the last couple of years it's become far more evident that the that the marketers and the creative folks or those with a creative orientation are getting their hands on these principles and reframing them in ways that make them more palatable in the c-suite because future demand, current demand is in essence the case that's been made for 10 years about performance marketing versus brand marketing. That conversation has not been working enough at senior suite levels. Future demand, current demand feels like something that would be more in the language of a CEO or a CFO. I love that. Also the whole case that's been made by people like Adam Morgan about the cost of doll, the amount of waste.

39:33James Hurman: It feels like we're kind of creating a new language that's going to make this a lot more palatable and digestible by the people who are making decisions. Do you think of it that way too? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think stage one of marketing science and effectiveness research was sort of discovering the principles. Yeah. And in our sort of little circle of nerdy people, you know, understanding those principles and being able to, you know, communicate them to one another. Yeah. And then I think we're all now exploring ways to be better communicators of those principles and put them in different language, put them in different sort of mental models that click with people just intuitively.

40:27And if you say to anyone in a C-suite in business, like, do you want great brand? They will say, I don't know. Maybe. Do I? Yeah. Do I need it? If you say, do you want future demand? They'll say, well, yes, obviously. Not only do I want it, but we really need it as a company. Right? And so that's the difference, right?

40:56James Hurman: how do you ask that question in a way that's very hard to say no to yeah there are very few people who would say no i don't want more more demand in the future for the products that we sell right yeah so i think yeah it's that it's that and and it's kind of like my wife's a scientist and and i've learned she's a biologist so totally different type of science but you know i've learned about the science and the science communication and the science is the science and the science communication is like people like um brian cox who i got to meet in can this year who's like one of the world's best science communicators he can take very very difficult to understand normally physics concepts uh and communicate them to us in a way where we kind of understand it and we're also fascinated by them and um and so you know you've got these kind of people that have cracked the code on how to take the stuff out of the stodgy old papers and you know, out of the academic world and start to explain them in ways that are very accessible to anyone.

41:56And that's what we need to do as a marketing industry if we're going to get our non-marketing stakeholders more on board and allowing us to do the things that we know are the right things to do.

42:05James Hurman: So it is James Herman, author, entrepreneur, multiple serial entrepreneur, strategist, and designer of this course. It is the lion's master of advertising effectiveness course as part of the Lions learning portfolio. You can learn more at learning.lions.co. That's learning.lions.co. And it actually starts, I think it's October 12th is the next one, James. So it's a couple of weeks away. So people can sign up. And I think when you look at the book and you look at the course, the course covers much of the book. So I think if you sign up for the course, you'll get a very good sense of it. And something tells me that the book will be a great follow-up to the course.

42:54James Hurman: But you've got to get that broader dimension of the full course over the eight weeks. James Herman, great to see you again, man. Thanks for coming back on. Thank you, Fergus. And we'll see everybody on the next episode.