Planning for Effective Outcomes Ep#5: Andrew Tindall & James Hurman

0:00James Hurman: This special series is brought to you by the EFI's. For over 55 years, EFI has been the global authority on marketing effectiveness. They lead the way with the largest, most prestigious marketing effective awards across 130 markets worldwide. And the EFI Index ranks the most effective brands, marketers, and agencies globally. But EFI is more than awards. They're dedicated to helping all marketers understand what makes marketing effective. by equipping them with the insights, tools, and inspiration they need to succeed. Learn more at Effie.org. That's E-F-F-I-E dot org. And by Tracksuit. If you're a regular listener to our show, you already know there's a difference between having a good strategy and knowing whether it's working.

0:49James Hurman: That's exactly what Tracksuit is built for. Always-on brand tracking means you get continuous visibility on where a brand sits in the category, how awareness and consideration are shifting from month to month, and how that stacks up against the competition. It's not a snapshot from six months ago. It's current data, updated monthly, that shows whether the strategy you're executing is actually building what you think it's building. For agencies, that changes the conversation. You're not just defending your recommendations with logic. You're backing it with hard evidence. You can have your tracksuit up and running within 30 days.

1:24James Hurman: Check them out at GoTracksuit.com. That's GoTracksuit.com. Welcome to this week's episode of On Strategy Showcase. We are thrilled to have you join us. I'm Fergus O 'Carroll, and we are here live in Chicago. But we were last week here. If you're watching us on YouTube, you can see what I'm pointing to. We were live at Johannes Leonardo last week in New York City for our On the Spot episode, which is basically strategists pitching campaigns they love but never worked on. And we had a phenomenal time, a fully packed house in New York City. We had 220 strategists, and it was an absolute blast. If you missed it, I'm sorry, but we'll be back.

2:13James Hurman: but we are for our next episode, a live tour episode. We are in LA at TBWA Chiat Day. It is on Wednesday, October 28th at 530, from 530 to 730 at TBWA. And we're going to do it again. Three different strategists, three different campaigns. So three strategists present a campaign they love, but they never worked on. They have five minutes to pitch it to the audience and five minutes to make us fall in love with it as much as they love it. And then the panel peppers them with questions. The audience drops questions. And at the end of the night, the audience votes on which of the three campaigns is the winner.

2:58James Hurman: Now, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see this is the phenomenal and much coveted on-the-spot award, which is given to the strategist at each of these events. And it's been really popular. I mean, we love to do it. As you know, if you're a listener, we've been doing an episode in the studio every month on the spot. So taking it on the road and traveling with it is something that has been a total blast. So we'll be doing it in different cities throughout the live tour, and I hope that city is one of yours. In L.A., the three strategists joining us live and pitching the audience live are Tom Sussman, Chief Strategy Officer of TVWA New York.

3:41James Hurman: Yes, he's in New York traveling out to L.A. to do this with us. Lee Mechon is Chief Strategy Officer of InOcean. And I probably butchered his last name and just how I pronounced it. So forgive me for that, Lee. Chief Strategy Officer at InOcean. And Carl Mueller is Chief Strategy Officer for 72 and Sunny in Los Angeles. So very excited about that. You can get tickets on our website under the Live Tour tab at OnStrategyShowcase.com. That's OnStrategyShowcase.com. It is Wednesday, October 28th at 5.30. We will hopefully see you there. So back to today's episode. This is episode number five in our Planning for Effective Outcomes series with the Effies and the support of Tracksuit.

4:29James Hurman: We are doing this as a way to sort of build upon what already exists in the marketplace. We all have heard about the planning principles. We've all read many of the reports. We have all seen the data. And it is supported both in terms of data that has come out of the UK as well as data that has now come out of the U.S. thanks to the report with the EFIs and System 1. And that is available still, I believe, on the EFI website. We'll talk about that in the episode, too. So what are these conversations about? These are about adding the sort of human voice to this, to reflect on what many people feel is the reality of working in an agency or a client-side organization in terms of trying to implement these principles, organizing around these principles, and ensuring that they're able to be propagated around your organization.

5:19James Hurman: So what we've done in this series is we're taking people who are of the industry in the industry. And as those of you who may have heard the first four episodes, we started out with CMOs. We then went from CMOs to chief strategy officers. We then went to planners and strategists working on campaigns and comms. We also then went to creative directors. And now I want to have a conversation with two people who are deeply involved in advertising effectiveness. James Herman is an author. He's an entrepreneur in the marketing communications and the marketing field with many startups such as Tracksuit, Ideally, and others.

5:58James Hurman: He has written three books. If you haven't read them, I deeply encourage you to do that. And he is also launching the program, the Master of Advertising Effectiveness Program with Lions Learning that you'll hear about. So James is involved in an awful lot of these, the dimensions of this, and is and has been himself a strategist, a chief strategy officer within our industry. Andrew Tindall is the chief growth officer for System One out of London. Andrew is involved on a lot of stages around the world talking about advertising effectiveness, marketing effectiveness, and I'm glad to have Andrew back on the show again.

6:38James Hurman: These two guys have never been on a show together. They're very prolific. They've been on shows separately, but they've never been on a stage together, never been on a show together. So I was thrilled to get them together to have this conversation about where we stand today in marketing and where we stand today in marketing effectiveness. And we go for a sort of a broad reach show here in terms of the topic. And I think some really important things come out of this and I hope that you will enjoy it. You can, you can, if you're listening to the show on the podcast platforms, you can actually watch it on our YouTube channel, or you can watch it on our website at on strategy showcase.com.

7:21James Hurman: So it's my pleasure to have these guys back on, and it's wonderful to have them on together, that this is episode number five of our FE Planning for Effective Outcomes series. Enjoy. Where do you think we stand today in terms of two things, I suppose, marketing and marketing effectiveness?

7:42Andrew Tindall: Yeah, I think we're at both like an amazing point and a really challenging point. So the amazing point, I think, relating it back to marketing effectiveness, we've had this incredible two decades of really kind of going from actually knowing, like thinking a bit about how advertising and marketing works to actually knowing with quite a good degree of fidelity how these things actually work now. So that's amazing. And every marketer and every agency person should be across this stuff. I think where it's challenging is like marketing's never had to do more with less, you know, and that's really, really tough for marketers.

8:22Andrew Tindall: And I think you're kind of constantly encouraged as a marketer to be as efficient as possible, to drive the biggest possible outcomes with the smallest possible budgets. and everything seems to be getting both more and more kind of diffuse in terms of the amount of media opportunities you've got and more and more compressed in terms of what you've got to go after all those opportunities. So I think it's really tough for marketers. And I know, Andrew, you'll agree with this. It's like, how do we get back into a posture of growth rather than of efficiency and trying to do more with less? How do we get back into a posture of saying, there's big opportunities out there and we now know how this stuff works as an investment vehicle, not as kind of a cost center.

9:11Andrew Tindall: And therefore, how do we kind of start to see that as the investment opportunity it is and go hard after it using marketing? That's where I think the industry is at. We now know, we can see it as an investment opportunity. We know how that investment vehicle works and we should just go full steam ahead at it. I come out from a slightly different angle. So obviously, System 1 is an effectiveness platform and part of our strategy is to fan the flames of effectiveness because in markets where effectiveness has caught on become our biggest markets, like the UK, weirdly Australia and stuff like this.

9:51Andrew Tindall: And we're starting to see inroads with more and more people caring about creative effectiveness in the US because it's finally catching on some parts. So we actually pay for data to actually look at this. So the awareness of effectiveness businesses has never been higher. They're growing and growing. You see, but then there's this tension where we commissioned a study with Effie, actually, for the creative dividend, where about half of marketers still would have confidence in proving effectiveness, creative impact. and effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. So people are becoming super aware of it, yet people are still struggling, I think, to practice it.

10:38Andrew Tindall: Probably pointing to what James just raised there, how the marketing job has got so complicated. Like, I've only been doing this 10, 11 years now. It was, you know, to similarize my job 11 years ago when I worked at Diageo or whatever, it was tv plus a couple assets now i have to have a reddit strategy understand what ai is what that's not not not why most of us got into this game and i actually think the alarm bells are ringing if you look at fmcg categories large fmcg brands in the u.s have shrunk own brand have grown challenging brand have grown so i think the type of common effectiveness knowledge that large brands have subscribed to i don't actually think is serving all brands um equally well and if you look in the fe global case library as well the number of large brand effects reported by those campaigns has been slowly decreasing in the past 10 years so i think marketing's becoming more complicated we're having to get into marketing effectiveness more and the data proves that but there's no proof saying that we're in a golden age of effectiveness.

11:52Andrew Tindall: Yes, there's some incredible campaigns, marketers, and brands out there. But generally, I think there's some red flags in a lot of the data I look at. Why do you think that is, Andrew? Why do you think the number of larger fixes going down? Do you have a hypothesis for that? Yeah, true. You pointed to the most obvious one about people wanting to look into capture efficiencies, pressures are going up and people chasing hard business metrics. I think there's an issue with if we can't measure it this week, we're not going to do it. So there's going to be a big blow up. And I know there's some research in the books.

12:38Andrew Tindall: I'm not going to spoil for some other agencies around intermediary effects of like, you know, Fergus, I was listening to your last two or three episodes from the series, which are absolutely incredible. And I was listening to these amazing strategists about, you know, putting together actual mechanics that will grow brands. But I bet none of those marketers that didn't go implement those campaigns are tracking what they would expect the intermediary effects of those ideas and strategies are. they're just looking at probably same week sales and stuff like this what do we mean by intermediary effects just so everybody's clear i'll give you one example um on the last episode you had someone on from adam and eve who was talking about the strategy of marmite they basically worked out that their job is to get um uh adults that have kids to consume marmite on toast because then the frequency is super high basically if you if you get into that habit you eat more Marmite than me that occasionally has it when my dad comes around.

13:42Andrew Tindall: That is a strategy. So how are they really measuring that? I hope they've got brand tracking put in place for that demographic, tracking that kind of behavior. And I hope they understand what associations that will track onto that behavior change. So if they turn on a campaign, I'd want to be looking at instead of going, have we sold more Marmite this month? Have the associations and behaviors that we know will lead to the outcome of this strategy? Are we seeing that in the metrics? And that's just one example. Every brand needs to understand how their strategy works. Like I was just saying, I track the popularity of effectiveness because when that goes up, we sell more ad testing for system one.

14:23Andrew Tindall: That is part of our strategy. So I think we need to get better measuring that. I think largely the atomization of media is more of a distraction than anything, right? It's a time suck. How do I think about all of these different potential channels in my head all at the same time and measure them all and try to prove out their effectiveness and all that kind of stuff? And I think this is one thing that marketing has always been really affected by is the shiny things and the new things and the new things we've got to think about, new things we've got to do, and how that takes us away from all the things that don't change.

15:04Andrew Tindall: all of the unshiny things, all of the fundamentals that just don't change. And so I think that's part of it, the sort of distractingness of everything around us. The other part of it, I think, and it's the big mission I'm on, is I think there are a lot of marketers who have absorbed the advertising effectiveness principles. They sort of understand it. But getting their non-marketing stakeholders to let them do what they know they ought to do is really difficult. So we've got kind of one group of people and marketers who are learning this stuff and really soaking it up. And I know tons that are really across all of it.

15:42Andrew Tindall: But still the conversation, translating that to the rest of the business in a way that they understand it and get it is really hard. And so I think that's kind of on us as an effectiveness community to be better communicators of the marketing science and the effectiveness research and put it into principles and language that are easy to pass on. and not just easy to understand, but easy to pass on. And so I think that's something we've got to do. I think the next leaps forward in effectiveness, I don't think will be from discovering more about how these things work. I think we know so much about it now.

16:19Andrew Tindall: I think it's going to be convincing non-marketing stakeholders, educating that audience, the C-suite and the boards and all the people that sit around the marketers so that they understand and they champion their marketers doing you know following these principles i'd slightly question one idea there jens around i i agree about the kind of it's the reason i'm very glad i no longer work on fmcg brand side because i don't spend 85 of my day convincing other people how advertising works like that's that's very annoying well um and i agree it's a job to be done but i think the industry gets a bit too focused on simplification and black and white you know differentiation doesn't matter we just have to grow a penitentiary and stuff like this i think it at points i think we risk as an industry doing things down a little bit uh and it becoming not useful anymore um which is why i think you know listen to this series and having like a proper nuanced chat about how strategy works you know i think everyone should be listening to this kind of this this kind of information there's an art to science communication right so i think my um you know my wife's a scientist and and i've learned a bit about science communication through her so you've got like science the scientists in the labs then you've got science communicators who are really good at taking that stuff and without dumbing it down to the point that it you know becomes useless communicating in a way normal people can understand.

17:54Andrew Tindall: So someone like Brian Cox in the physics space is very, very good at sort of taking hugely complex concepts and talking about them in a way that is engaging to and comprehensible to laymen like me. And so I think that there's a real value in that science communication. But Andrew, I think you're right in that you can simplify things to a certain point where they still remain useful. And you can simplify them further to a place where they, you know, they lose their usefulness. So I think we've got to manage that balance. But we've got to find that, you know, that balance has been probably too much toward the academic and the scientific and not enough toward, you know, making those concepts easily digestible and easily metabolizable by the rest of the industry.

18:46James Hurman: So one thing I wanted to point out, I don't know if you guys saw this article this morning in the drum Ritson wrote it. I wanted to quote you a couple of things. He was talking about the demise or the redefinition of the CMO role. And a couple of data points he pointed out, I'll read a few here. Only 69 % of the S &P 500 companies now have an enterprise-level marketing chief. 69%. Forrester's analysis of the Fortune 500 found just 36 % now use the CMO title, down from 55 % just two years ago. and it's it's the idea now we're seeing it a lot it's i've i've seen it also is that the chief marketing officer title is being expanded to be and reshaped to including terms like growth and chief commercial officer and chief customer officer it's the idea that that that the the role is expanding but the advertising role of it is being questioned or is not expanding at all um i mean that's that's not a signal that we've been successful in propagating the effectiveness

19:57Andrew Tindall: principles and proving them out no i agree um so so i i've got a chief growth officer um title yeah yeah right yeah yeah and so i'm i guess an example of this but you were never a cmo originally so yours is yeah my take is um i i think the um cmo role has uh been solid and i think most um i need to be careful here maybe um i think most uh some cmos have become ribbon cutters who talk about things from a PR script and don't get involved in the job anymore. I've got one data point from my research that shows this. In compound creativity, the consistency research I've done with the IPA and FE over the past few years, we looked at the tenure of an agency relationship with the brand and how that impacted brand and business effects the longer an agency the more random effects the longer a cmos at a brand the less brand and business effects reported in the ipa um the data bank yes it's literally a mirror mirror opposite i remember talking to patricia corsi when she went in to kimberly clark and she chose to be called chief growth officer not chief marketing officer and i think you know for her it was she you know probably much the same for you andrew she wanted to you know symbolize the fact that she was there to drive the growth of the brands and uh and and of course marketing was a tool that she was going to use to do that um and i think it's always funny like you kind of you know marketing got got whittled down from four p's to one over the years and uh and and now if you look at a chief customer officer or chief growth officer that does actually give them a slightly bigger remit than just the promotion.

21:54Andrew Tindall: This is going to be my next point. I specifically spend most of my time on products and proposition these days. Whereas I think the CG or title kind of gives you that realm remit. The investors know I'm here to deliver growth. The object is very clear. I'm going to do that via, you know, marketing. Don't tell them, but like it's a full four P's in the strategy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's probably a good thing, Fergus. I think what Mark's sort of talking about, and I haven't read the article, so I don't know if he's sort of lamenting the fact that there are fewer CMOs, but if there are people who are actually focused on growth, actually focused on how to use marketing to achieve growth, then that can only be a good thing.

22:36James Hurman: We'll be right back. We are brought to you by Lions Learning, home of the Effies. Can Lions work and contagious. Lions Learning is now enrolling for its next Master of Advertising Effectiveness program starting on October 12th, 2026. Led by James Herman, this eight-week program gives marketing and advertising professionals a practical understanding of the proven principles behind advertising effectiveness and how to apply them to create work that drives stronger commercial results. James is a globally recognized strategist and advertising effectiveness expert who just published his third book, Future Demand.

23:20James Hurman: He has won more than 50 Advertising Effectiveness Awards and has spent over 20 years researching, publishing, practicing, and teaching advertising effectiveness. You can learn more about his course and register at learning.lions.co. That's learning.lions.co. Now back to the show. One of the other things I wanted to talk to you guys about, since you guys are deep in the effectiveness area, I'm just curious, when you step back and you look at all that is happening in the ecosystem of marketing, what's next in terms of what we need to or can measure or should measure better? I know things are emerging such as the brilliant work of Karen Nelson Field what are you guys seeing?

24:14James Hurman: I mean James, you do a lot of analysis also are there things that you're kind of going okay I'm going to start looking at that next?

24:22Andrew Tindall: I think there is still some like unanswered questions so there's been lots of cross-sectional analysis which basically tells you what correlates with what but there hasn't been as much longitudinal research that tells you what causes what. And so I think one of the things that's going around at the moment, and Andrew, I'd be really keen for your kind of thoughts on this, like the effect of emotional connection. So if you go by the behavioral science, there's a thing called the affect heuristic, which basically means that the more we like things, the more we're likely to place value in those things and see them as less risky and choose them and all the rest of it.

25:05Andrew Tindall: If you take the Ehrenberg-Bassian point of view, they would say that emotional affect comes after actually choosing the product and using the product and then you kind of develop an emotional connection to it. The alternative view is, no, you can create positive emotional affects using advertising and that leads people to feel better and then be more likely to choose that brand. And so I think we've got sort of like sprinklings of evidence about which direction it runs in, or maybe it's both directions, but which direction emotional affect runs in. But we don't have anything like super conclusive just yet.

25:43Andrew Tindall: And similarly, you know, the evidence is just as weak for mental availability and category entry points. I mean, they're very widely enjoyed concepts by the marketing community, but they actually sit on very, very, very thin research in terms of establishing causation between mental availability and sales. And so I think there's some things which we've got to dig deeper on and do more experimentation to figure out exactly what's what. um so i i think that and i think the other main the other big theme is moving from you know what drives growth to what drives profitable growth and just kind of looking more and more at kind of what actually causes margin um and and what marketing can do to improve margin and getting better at sort of you know studying that stuff and and i was just doing we've got an ifi uh our FE program we created a database next to not unlike the IPA databank so everyone sort of fills in a questionnaire that goes alongside their FE entry and we can analyze that and find really interesting things like the number one predictor in our database of profit is being funny it's humor it's just like that's the number one predictor out of all of the different variables we track the number one predictor whether something's going to drive profitable growth increases in profit is whether or not it's funny and i love that james you've stolen my line and perhaps the next piece of research i'll be looking to release but um i think the next leap is uh we have to understand yeah what what what creates profitable profitable growth um i was gonna say profitable growth and not just chasing revenue market share when you look at the uh the isms in marketing a lot of them are based on market share and revenue when actually if you look at the state of the world and our economies is i actually want to make profit not just uh do more for more um and then i i think there's going to be a rebalancing of i think a great i hope a great resurgence of robert heath's research and robert heath um you know about 10 years ago he did a load of brilliant research looking into low attention processing, essentially.

28:05Andrew Tindall: Everything that we've kind of, we learned and moved on from and we've forgotten and we've kind of overcorrected for it a little bit, I think. So, Robert Heath, low attention processing, you don't have to be thinking about advertising for it to work. You don't have to be looking at it to work or even necessarily focusing on it for it to work. That consumers learn via various engagement pathways, including how something feels and that can actually become effective advertising and i think that we will see a um as our media channels shift i think a correction and a re-establishment of that way of thinking um i mean some great example of that is everyone thinks multi-screening has killed tv advertising it's not the case having a laptop when you're watching a tv ad doubles the chance you're or respond to it and it keeps you in the room and keeps you listening to the tv ad so like just a good example that ads doesn't really work as in look at screen think about thing it's not really the case so i think we'll get a correction back to that and um yeah this this you know we know not all impressions are equal but not all seconds of attention are equal that as we move move i mean sadly you know i i love everything we're talking about but what's going to happen is media is going to move to programmatic buying through dsps algorithms are going to choose where our campaigns go if those algorithms can work out what is going to create long so future demand i'll use that term because james is here future demand lasting impacts and it can inform how a media buy works within that i think that's how like the future effectiveness is really going to come in the chaos of his media, being able to go back to some first principles.

29:56Andrew Tindall: And I love Robert. He's fantastic. I love his work. And one of the things that he learned is that particularly when advertising is emotional and storytelling-based, you don't need to pay as much attention as if it were just rational and fact-based. And it sort of goes in in a way that rational appeals don't. And I remember when the night that I met my wife, we were in a bar drinking wine. And so I worked in advertising. She's a scientist, a serious person. And she says, well, I don't watch advertising and advertising has no effect on me. And I said, okay, are you sure? Yes, I'm absolutely sure.

30:39Andrew Tindall: Okay. I'm going to tell you three big bank brands in New Zealand, uh bnz the national bank asb tell me what those if those brands walked into a room and were a person what would they be like and she described like the bank that was the old old man with gray hair and the bank that was the sort of younger more sprightly person and you know and and i said to that's advertising right the only reason these are three identical companies that sell the identical same products in the identical same way the only reason that you differentiate them in your head in the way that you just did is because you've been influenced over a long time by advertising that's communicated the personality of those brands to you and so i think that again is something which is which is a very sort of subconscious thing it's not like she sat down and watched a ton of bank ads and thought about how those bank ads you know made her feel about the personality the brands.

31:34Andrew Tindall: And so if we go back to, I think, you know, what you talk a lot about, Andrew, which is consistency and the compounding effects of consistency and just being out there with something which has an emotional appeal consistently over time and, you know, and not worrying so much about exactly where it shows up media wise, just making sure that it does really consistently is kind of an easier job than trying to tweak the dials on all the possible media opportunities to optimize them all in some way and never quite getting to anything which makes a lasting difference.

32:12James Hurman: So let's talk about creativity for a second. If the ecosystem is more complex than it's ever been, which is true. The assumption then is that creative needs to be versioned in 10, 100, 1000 different ways. Is that true though? Having a core creative idea or a

32:36Andrew Tindall: brand platform or a stretchy idea or something which is, you know, you can just kind of limitlessly execute in any media and it's always going to pay back to that one idea is just the massive unlock for marketers to then make everything from then on so much easier than it would otherwise have been because you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel keep thinking up new ideas and all the rest of it you've got one that can kind of go everywhere and i totally agree that is kind of that's the holy grail for marketers and it's boy it's hard to get there and not enough brands are doing it but um but we should all be championing that kind of you know get to a place with your agency or with your internal agency or whatever where you've got an idea that's not only good strategically or good from a consumer perspective but you can hand to any creative person and they go i know what to do with that um and so i think i'm a big advocate for when you're developing a brand platform don't test it on consumers test it on creatives you know can they pick it up and do something amazing with it in any channel any time of day um and uh and that's kind of sometimes a better path to go than trying to research it with consumers to figure out whether it's going to be any good in episode three with the creative directors you had on focus i loved what someone was talking about around um digging small holes on strategy you know finding a few mechanisms that will work choosing a few that are plausible and then actually before you take into the client um they'll have to come with some prototypes of create what what the execution looks like because some of them will live or die by the execution and will you know create really amazing entertaining where other you know others not won't rely on it so much so i actually do think part of the creative process has to be about taking that strategy into ideas and i do agree i like your idea on can creative stretches around but i you know everything i've done in all my research shows that largely all of that has to line up to making people feel great in your advertising and it being distinctive so i obviously i have to say you should be testing it with you You know, consumers, obviously.

34:43James Hurman: So, I mean, for me, I'm thinking, and maybe I'm naive about it, but to James's point about it's difficult and it takes time, why does it take so much time to get to something simple? It can only be an issue of either talent or politics.

35:03Andrew Tindall: No, look, Fergus, my favorite quote, which I thought was from Winston Churchill, but I'm told it's not, is, I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time. Proper thinking takes goddamn ages. I don't, you know.

35:21James Hurman: Proper thinking takes talented people time, but I think the problem is a talent, issue of talent that is either being misdirected by fear or something. Because, yeah, it takes time, but talented people can get there pretty quick. I wonder if it's an issue of talent or something else.

35:44Andrew Tindall: Okay. I think people need proper training in what we're talking about here. If you look at all the data from Better Briefs, a creative review actually is now this five go back and try again on average in creative reviews, which is too long. I think people need...

36:05James Hurman: Which is because there isn't a foundational strategy that's been bought in that leads into creative development. I mean, one should be done before the other.

36:12Andrew Tindall: Like in my time in advertising, one of the things that I observed was that when you walk into a creative review, you and your client, normally people walk in with kind of a checklist in their head of what they're looking for in the work. And usually there's many different checklists in that room. The agency's got a checklist on what do they think kind of great work looks like. and the client, maybe there's four of them, and they've all actually got kind of slightly different checklists in their head. And so when you're evaluating the work in that room, it's very, very difficult to all come to the same conclusion if you're all working from different checklists.

36:51Andrew Tindall: And so one of the things when I'm training organizations on how to improve their creative effectiveness, one of the first things that we do is sit down for a day and we look at like 10 case studies of the most creative, most effective work in the world. So did one gold lines and gold FVs, all better. And then I get the client and the agency in the room to go, at the end of the day, like, what do you see running through all of that work? What are the characteristics of great work? And they make a list, right? And they make a list. And always on that list is simple. Always on that list is a sort of a platform that can go to lots of different places.

37:35Andrew Tindall: always on that list is you know something that makes people feel emotion you know emotional or elicit some kind of emotional reaction and so they all get to this list together and then that's their list that they then take into every creative session after that right so they're all coming with the same checklist that they've agreed is the key characteristics of great work and that enables them to get there a lot faster and it's not five rounds of creative anymore right because they're working, they're briefing that checklist and they're evaluating that checklist and everyone's on the same page.

38:06Andrew Tindall: I think that it's an alignment problem, right? Fundamentally, it's an alignment problem. And when you can solve that alignment, it makes things a lot easier. And if you can solve that alignment in a pub with two people, that's awesome. But in the reality of most businesses, there's a whole lot of stakeholders that you have to align. Fergus, why do you think it's a talent problem?

38:28James Hurman: A great strategist can get, working with a strong team, can get there pretty quick. The great agencies are a match of great, talented people on the client side and on the agency side. I worry that below that, there's a lot of people who are struggling with how to get there. And it's the majority of the marketing and agency community that are struggling to get there. and they need better ways to get there. And they're floundering and therefore the ideas are not tight enough. The strategies are not tight enough because there's either resistance from the client side or the agency side or there isn't the talented creative teams or strategy teams or marketing teams that allow them to get, as James said, to get aligned.

39:15Andrew Tindall: I reckon, Andrew, do you see it? System 1, I mean, I would imagine that the clients that have used System 1 and have been successful because of it, they start walking into the agency asking for something that is going to generate a really positive emotional response as opposed to starting with a completely different type of brief and maybe the process produces something that's got a strong emotional response. I would imagine that if you can get clients walking into the agency in the first place asking for the right things, the whole process becomes a whole lot easier. And Azure, I would imagine that happens with clients that are real system one fans.

39:57James Hurman: Or it increases the odds of it happening. Let's put it that way.

40:01Andrew Tindall: Agreed. You know, you said something about like agency like living and dying by its talent. I think it's actually, so it was number two of the prep I did for this call, which no one's sticking to. What else the creative actions is doing well? We never stick to a structure. I'm just going to force it in here anyway. it's having a belief system so like adam and eve um believe that emotional work is is all that's really what they live and die by um i love mccann's um which is truth well told i think that is how all of advertising might work try find the truth tell it well i interpret that as like showmanship entertaining emotion that kind of thing get attention you know you get these like challenge urgencies now that should have like a manifesto 10 things they believe in um on their website um and i believe the ones that are doing it well are the ones that are focusing on the emotion you know i need to make people feel good and yeah i think then you get you get like clients and businesses that worship at different altars of marketing the ones that are worshiping and the ones that are more emotional and the ones that kind of work come system one or go to adam and Eve, you know, there's a reason Adam and Eve got Disney and they credit Disney.

41:18Andrew Tindall: Adam and Eve makes so emotional work, Disney gets them to make their Christmas ads. How insane is that? That's how good they are at focusing on what they're good at, making emotional work because they believe it works. Going back to the belief system thing, I think agencies, the most successful agencies aren't the ones with belief systems. They're the ones that can get all of their clients into that belief system yes so it's not a brief it's a briefing process and i think the brief's a bit of a fugazi it's about falling in love without we all are all gonna agree how advertising works aren't we and if we can get there then you'll have a 10-year client relationship like amv bbdo for for guinness for example like that's like that's a good example of that and anyone that works with mother seems to do that like i feel like mother mothers their clients into being emotional i'm convinced that's why they're called mother it's not but yes let's talk james is there anything

42:13James Hurman: um because for those listening we did originally have a discussion guide but we've kind of just spun out of control for this you guys are well for only an hour only an hour times two speed of course yes james did did you have anything in terms of what you feel creative agencies are doing really well these days well reducing head count i mean you've got to hand it to them.

42:41Andrew Tindall: Oh, that hurts. I mean, it's incredible the speed with which, I mean, it's Musk-like, isn't it? The speed with which they're reducing headcount. That is true. That's the truth. I think that's one thing that the holding companies are just phenomenal at. I think agencies have, I mean, I'm going to go back to things that don't change. You know, I think agencies, creative agencies, were always really good at coming up with big, stretchy, long ideas that are super engaging and then crafting those ideas really, really well. And I think over the years, agencies got pulled in lots of different directions that weren't that.

43:21Andrew Tindall: How do we move into what's our performance offering and what's our shop and marketing offering and what's our all of these sorts of things to service the wants of the market? I think AI is going to automate almost all of what we think of as performance marketing and almost none of what we think of as brand marketing. And the reason that I say that is on the brand marketing side, it's all about making stuff that's creative and emotional and distinctive and putting it in broadcast media in a really well-crafted way. and I think whilst AI can help with some of that process, it certainly can't do the whole thing like it can do performance marketing sort of end-to-end.

43:56Andrew Tindall: So I think we should probably embrace that and say, look, where do we focus our creative talents as an agency? Let's not focus it in the wrong place. When you're converting current demand, you actually don't need creativity. Creativity doesn't make that much of a difference and so let's not focus our creative attentions in the wrong areas. Let's kind of get back to doing the one thing that AI can't do, which is coming up with genuinely emotionally engaging ideas that can serve as platforms for brands. So I think agencies are still really good at doing that and sort of going back to doing that and figuring out the value of that and how to achieve that value and doing it, like we've been saying, with clients that buy into the same sorts of things that we do, or at least if they don't, working harder to get them on board through educating them and showing them the evidence that it's right and all that sort of stuff.

44:52James Hurman: And the one thing I'm excited about is to see that strategists are making a stronger presence on the client side. And in the CMO episode of this series, which was episode number one, I was really excited to hear how strategists with experience on the agency side are now migrating over to the client side. I think that's because did they lose their jobs?

45:12Andrew Tindall: I was listening to that. I was like, is that because they had to leave agency?

45:16James Hurman: No, no, no. These are, I don't know for everybody, but I think what it's about, it's about really talented, experienced people that are migrating over to the client side and doing a phenomenal job in making the briefs better for the agency, making the thinking around strategy more tight and more clarity around it on the client side. I love to see that happening. And I don't think that these are people who get worn out quick.

45:47Andrew Tindall: I really noticed that in Cannes this year, Fergus, like just talking, you know, I went and had breakfast with Andrew McKinney, who's the chief creative officer at OpenAI. He's a New Zealander originally. And we bumped into Kirsten Rutherford, who was formerly ECD at Chi at Day. She's gone to DoorDash. And then I had lunch with Gareth Kaye, who we talked about before, and his partner is at Joe Staples, like great creative. That's right. They've gone into Coinbase. Laura Jones at Instacart's built a really great internal agency, which won their first Lions this year. I really noticed, man, there are a lot of people who are really, really, you know, top tier creative and strategy people going into client side.

46:33Andrew Tindall: and I think a few years ago it was pretty kind of poisonous to do that you know it's sort of like it was you know you got fired and you had nowhere to go but now you know talking to these guys they're like actually our creative canvas is a lot bigger we're a big ask and put into what the product looks like and you know all sorts of other areas of the business outside of just the advertising bit and they're having a ball because they've got like a broad canvas to play on and they're really really enjoying it so I think we've really seen a turn where you know a lot of great talent is going in-house and taking their skills in-house and producing amazing outcomes from doing so.

47:08Andrew Tindall: So I think that's a real change that I noticed this year. I mean, literally on that episode, Chris Macciani was mentioned from the Amazon team. He's like global head of planning. He's like an effectiveness thinker, a strategist who like works across the team and advises that way. I think that's great. I do think it's a reaction of agencies. you know if you read all the dusty old books of where advertising came from um and there's a lot of them knocking around the system one office like i think agencies were made to because because they were competent marketing functions that you you basically out saw you know they were marketing knowledge that and then that's what they did then it turned into like comms and strategy essentially then medium creative split and now i think the outcome of that is a lot of that thinking now has to sit client side like what i agree it's great that these amazing thinkers are now sitting in the brand side but isn't it a shame that's needed wouldn't don't i hire a great agency and they do that for me isn't that why we hire the agency right yeah yeah it should be i mean if you go back to like the root of the of the word agency right to you know you use an agent to give yourself a capability that you don't otherwise have some agency in the world around a certain thing and so you know back when clients really didn't know anything about media and creativity that was why they had an agency to give them agency in that space and and i think we've moved forward to a point in time where actually you can develop your own agency.

48:53Andrew Tindall: And I think a lot of people are jumping on that. I don't think that that tide's going to turn anytime soon. I do think nostalgically, Andrew, that, yeah, what a bummer that is. But I kind of also think, you know, if that's the right way, if you can both, you know, on a cost-benefit analysis show that having an internal agency is better, and you can also make that internal agency really, really effective and really creative, then why wouldn't you do that? So I think it's interesting. It really does knock against my love for the agency world and what I experienced growing up. It definitely knocks against that.

49:28Andrew Tindall: But if I'm to think super objectively, it's like maybe we don't need, companies don't need agency in this space anymore.

49:37James Hurman: All right, gentlemen, you're the best. I love you both for coming out here. And Andrew, man, you came on at 10 p.m. in London. So it's incredible that you took the time. It's an honor to have you do that. I appreciate it. Straight from the pub, mate. Straight from the pub. Anything for you guys. And it was great. Andrew Tindall is Chief Growth Officer for System One. He is based in London. He has written the Creative Dividend with System One and the Effies. I think you can get this on the Effie site at effie.org. I'm hoping it's still on that homepage. page uh it's a great read and it's a summary of of um of work from the u.s and it is talking about in essence how the part i took away from it most importantly for me was it has made the case for u.s brands that these principles are universal that they're not just things that worked in the uk or in australia they work in the u.s this was a an analysis of the fe database uh with a system one against the work of, uh, of ads tested in the system one system.

50:41James Hurman: Do get your hands on that. And for James Herman, he is the author of the great book that is, um, out and available now. It is future demand. Go for the one with the red cover because the one with the dark cover is for a different audience. He named the book twice. It's so damn good. So it's future demand. And James is also the, um, the, the new program that you have now with lions and learning James it's the Master of Effectiveness program the next session is starting October 12th I believe coming up in October was that?

51:17Andrew Tindall: yeah coming up October 12th I think is the right date yeah that's the kick off

51:21James Hurman: I've done it I've done it

51:24Andrew Tindall: yes why I know what I'm talking about I'm so I'm so flessy I take my job very seriously I do every course that's out there and yours is one of the one of the good ones, James. It is.

51:37James Hurman: You can learn more about it at learning.lions.co. It's the master of advertising effectiveness program. Thank you guys. And it's so great to have you be a part of the conversation. Thanks a lot, guys. We appreciate it. I've been a part of this FE series and we will see everyone on the next episode.