Huel & RedBull’s PR expert talks marketing hacks to go viral - Emily Austen

0:00Emily Austin has been the architect behind some of the most significant brand moments of the past decade. I did five years with Huel from when they launched. Yes, you're very well priced. You're sustainable. No one really cares about sustainability. Like, f***ing Leonardo DiCaprio is talking about the ocean and people still don't recycle. So we ain't gonna win banging that drum. Julian was very concerned with food waste. But it's like, food waste isn't sexy. People can't see it so they don't give a s*** about it. So you go through and you work out strategically what do we think is gonna be a little bit more ownable as a topic.

0:29Today, we're going to deconstruct some of the most successful PR campaigns of recent years. and understand how modern brands really capture attention in an increasingly noisy world. Their big win was convenience. And actually, interestingly, their original customer base was out-of-town office workers who didn't have a prep to go for lunch. And they just wanted to make something easy for lunch and they couldn't be bothered to make a f***ing spag bol. It was people who drove for a living. Truckers, taxi drivers, school mums. You know, people who needed something in the car and didn't want a Ginster's pie.

1:03Is that a thing? You know, Julian wanted to take on the sandwich, so a big win was being in the meal deal. While others were still sending press releases and floating things down the Thames, she was pioneering new ways for brands to create cultural conversations. I f***ing hate stunts. Do we have to talk about stunts? Yes. Okay, thank you. Stunts are essentially attention-grabbing, like, 24-hour news cycle moments. The lowest common denominator for stunts is, like, there's a Chanel fashion show and then Aldi do a runway show in, like, aisle two. That's quite funny. Also like floating stuff down the Thames, that's bad.

1:37For me, Brewdog has a very good relationship with their customer. I would slightly roll my eyes at their stunts. My car got burnt out and she opens the door and the Stanley Cup is still in the cup holder. It doesn't feel like you're being advertised to. It feels like a normal person has had this thing happen, which, you know, your car exploding, we've got a Tesla, so you're probably slug. what actually makes pr versus just marketing or stunts great question i fucking hate stunts do we have to talk about stunts yes okay thank you yeah like what are stunts to you then stunts are essentially attention grabbing like 24 hour news cycle moments and they are often linked to something culturally so people will like you see the lowest common denominator for stunts is like there's a chanel fashion show and then aldi do a runway show and like aisle two and it just becomes that's quite funny it just yeah but it's like it's been done so many times yeah you're you're the customer you're the problem yeah let's go yeah you shop in aldi yeah exactly makes me want to shop in aldi not chanel yeah exactly so i think that also like floating stuff down the thames that's bad that's like what are they floating down the terms oh like there's a thing in pr where every brand's just like we'll float something down the terms because it's like attention grabbing and so you always see these pop-ups and increasingly they're now ai because you know no one's got any money and everyone's trying to be progressive so they do it with ai but i think there's also stunts around like lookalikes or um it's basically a moment in time that's designed very specifically for a kind of 24-hour news cycle.

3:19PR tends to be more of like a megaphone, I would say, if you were thinking about differentiation. So it's about kind of blowing it out creatively. And from a visibility perspective, basically PR is measured in eyeballs, which is the least helpful measurement of all time. But it's about taking a concept that perhaps is advertising or marketing and actually putting it into the hands of people rather than a kind of top level strategy. What would you say is the anatomy of a good PR campaign then? I think a good PR campaign has to be collaborative with the other parts of the marketing ecosystem. It is usually very specifically about timing.

4:06It's about the right storytelling. It's about making sure that it's not abstract. so like if there was a massive tick in the center of trafalgar square everyone would understand what that brand was a lot you know if it was a random brand you've never heard of it's too abstract so there has to be an understanding from the business of what their customers know about the brand in order for it to land um i think also kind of cross-channel so being relevant in the ways that your consumer downloads media whether that is podcasting whether that's traditional publications online digital competitions etc anything can be amplified by a celebrity or influencers it's just additional reach i think also something that's shareable in whatsapp groups on memes something that creates a bit more of a cultural moment where PR can be sold back into the system um it essentially gives longevity and I think it has to make people feel something even if that thing is that it's funny or that they want to show their mate or they just go fuck that's really clever am I allowed to swear yeah yeah fuck that's really clever or um yeah both fucks trifactor um we got the fuck hat trick quite early on today it's called a fuck trick yeah thank you so yeah so i think it has to make people feel something and that's why you know people can feel negatively as much as they feel positively about campaigns and why people become outraged and stuff because it does have the power to have to sort of stimulate a reaction but you don't like stunts and you just talked about the anatomy of a campaign but one of our former guests recently you know james watt brew dog like they're incredible at how would you assess their kind of stunt yeah they love the sort of like 24 hour in your face so i guess the question is what do you think about a well executed stunt for me brew dog has a very good relationship with their customer i would slightly roll my eyes at their stunts because i'm not the customer i don't respond to that um i think there's the possibility of fatigue from too many and I think it's also important to think about where stuff lives like is it an echo chamber on LinkedIn or is it actually living you know in the homes of people Brewdog very early on set their stall out as a disruptive brand and James is a disruptive voice he has opinions that political he wants to stimulate dialogue and debate so there's a red thread throughout that whole brand from beginning to end that really works for that customer base i don't i mean whether or not it makes people go into a brew dog space or actually buy the product anymore i don't know but they've certainly created a very specific brand narrative i've worked with a lot of brands before where they say we want to be like brew dog we want to be like oatly we want to be disruptive but then they're not able they don't have the team or the ideas or the bravery to actually execute that and i think where there's often discord is where a brand doesn't have that and then they try and do something stunty for the sake of kind of garnering public opinion or they see brew dog do something and they sort of think we can do that um without any of the foundational stuff that james and yeah the team set up i think it also matters about your category so like i've always wanted to be like that for heights for example but in health care the risk reward ratio is way off and in alcohol it's not like at the end of the day you might as well in alcohol because it's not like you just come across as an idiot if you did it because not because it's you but because the sector where he is selling beer so he can be a bit of a pratt it's so it's so risky it's just it's just a company ending to get it wrong in health well also i don't need my health brand to be disruptive yeah totally like i don't need that from you i need you to like make my brain better or my skin better or my gut better and so i'm not like seeing I'm not seeing value as a customer in those stunts.

8:12So that's why it doesn't translate. Whereas as you say with Brewdog, they're like, you know, disrupt a British brand. They're gonna, you know, like take a shit outside the houses of parliament and we're gonna - Did they do that? Maybe, I don't know. I am a beer drinker and I had never once seen a Brewdog stunt. Really? Had you heard about them though? Before we were like getting, you know, talking about getting them on the show, I genuinely didn't have that much idea other than the fact that he'd had like a negative experience with his staff which was all over linkedin i'd never seen the stunts really i could only only tell you about the being on a horse yeah or no wasn't that putin yeah that was his mocking of putin right beer at the bottom of the water he told us about that yeah but i'd never seen them and also like when i think about like if beer companies did that would that make me want to drink the beer more no like, I'd be like, that's weird.

9:05Yeah, but a lot of the stuff isn't necessarily about whether they can get Chris to drink BrewDog. It's to show that they're culturally relevant, that they can make noise and stand out and get listings in supermarkets because there's like people aware of the brand. Well, right. And also for a business like that, it's essentially like shelf space. So the more visible you are, the more people who are going into like Sainsbury's or whatever shop it is, then, you know, that's going to drive the volume. I think also with, like, It's interesting with James because he's obviously got a marketing brain, but he became very intertwined with that business in terms of, you know, the stunts were very closely linked to kind of his own personal feelings about stuff as well, which I think probably was part of the reason the negative experience with employees.

9:53He got such a hard time. I mean, like, obviously, if people are mistreating staff, they probably should get a hard time. I don't know the intricacies of what happened, but he did get a hard time in the press for that. And I think it was because he had put himself so front and center for that business that it was very difficult to separate that culture. And the culture was stunty, disruptive, masculine. And then, you know, you zoom out and you look at the broader context of the kind of media narrative about masculinity and when that becomes toxic. and that is a bit of a perfect storm for someone to be like absolutely mullered in the media yeah it doesn't need to be true it just needs to be close enough to what looks like the truth and it was always yeah whether it's true or not it was always going to come down on him yeah yeah what are the what are the core elements that separate like a good campaign from a great campaign like what are the what are the campaigns that will remember that were great i think that often businesses that where the campaign is unexpected do quite well I think if it's a category that maybe people like clever campaigns and the way you would identify a clever campaign is ultimately you are asking for a response from someone where they go that's really clever you know competitors kind of go yeah they've really nailed that I think it's about understanding the language in which consumers talk to each other so that tone of voice is often underestimated specifically the difference between good and great would be often brands use big campaigns to try and shift their consumer base so they say we want to appeal to a new consumer like Bud Light is a good example of that in the US but I think the best campaigns actually appeal to their base because they kind of double down on the narrative and the relationship that they have rather than using that big moment as a kind of tester you know it remains to be seen but in my experience and access to the data people don't often generate millions of new customers from those campaigns it's like you know they say 58 percent of mercedes advertising is aimed at people who have a mercedes who go yep made the right choice and it's like that doubling down on on on the base which makes sense in that you know if you're a car manufacturer like you're going to change a car every four or five years maybe yeah and so there's always a choice yeah we're literally doing it right now you know you're gonna get a jaguar yeah um i actually thought the concept ended up looking quite cool uh well we've got a bmw i'm gonna go for a whole bunch of test drives but still currently thinking of just upgrading to another bmw but i'm gonna try polestar tesla a few electric and a few hybrid and just see because I haven't you know I haven't tried yeah I'm curious and you know what because I'm a dad so there's a great example of PR um I had no idea that Volvo is basically the most expensive of all of them I didn't realize Volvo was a premium car I just thought the Volvo was like a lame brand or whatever they've just told you that they're it's so expensive they're so expensive and but because I'm a dad and it's the safety thing yeah and i'm about to have another daughter on the safety of my children genius i mean they're actually very nice looking cars now but i would never thought about that as a premium brand car all electric yeah well they're electric and they're hybrid but they're more expensive than bmw or mercedes who knew you just put it through the business can't you yeah you can do the electric car sponsored by volvo no and i haven't chosen them yet yeah and i haven't chosen them yet but i was interested to find that out you know your price elasticity i guess is a lot higher when you're thinking safety yeah really interesting well that's the that's the metric ultimately that people care about and that's a good example of pr like volvo have never ever tried to do anything other than say we're the safest cars no because they don't need to because they're like we don't need to suddenly generate a whole bunch of new customers but also you know that's that's a pretty solid like concern for anyone driving speaking of which you mentioned you mentioned jaguar so obviously the jaguar campaign the pr campaign etc was ridiculed and whatever lots of eyeballs there's lots of pros and cons but actually to this point volvo brought out an ad like a week later and that went mega viral and it was like sort of the opposite it was narrative it was story led and stuff and i did watch it and i did cry okay and i did share it with a bunch of my friends in a parents group it's basically about like uh them having like a daughter and it may be running them over but there's like a whole it's like a three four minute ad so well done it's so well done it's cinematic it was done by like the cinematographer from interstellar so it's like they run over their kid no no no but they don't run over the kid have you seen this no i didn't see it but i feel like you're like yeah i watched a snuff film hang on sorry so you you saw the jaguar stuff you then saw a video on volvo about someone running over their kid and you cried and you were like i have a kid and i reverse so that could be me and then he's cried.

14:51This is the narrative. No, no, so in the, obviously in the advert, they don't run over this kid. They stop just in front and it's like this whole amazing thing and it's very powerful and it's very moving and they're basically doing like a whole film's worth of narrative in three or four minutes. It's very massively done. Okay. I shared it with a bunch of... Does the car auto stuff or something? Yeah, basically. So it's like cinematically beautiful. No, but this is just, this is the whole thing. The whole thing is like Volvo's brand is about safety, right? I'm just saying, you know, my car, if I'm driving towards the car in front of me will stop.

15:21Tesla. Yeah. Sponsored by Tesla. It will auto-stop. Of course you've got a Tesla. Yeah, I know. You know, that hurts my soul hearing that, but... No, but you are like... What have you got? I don't want to say. Oh, no. You've got a flash car. Got to say now. I've got a Range Rover. Oh, do you? Enjoy getting that stolen. Yeah. I'd love a Range Rover. I've had two stolen. Yeah, I'd like a Range Rover. You've got another one. You've got to keep coming back for more. I'm like, oh, I made my insurance more expensive. Speaking about bad PR, you can't get a Range Rover insured in london anymore no well yeah it's like 20 grand a year how absurd is that why do you keep buying them i'm a glutton for wasting money um no i actually don't have it registered to london yeah so how nuts is that you can't buy one now like new because of how many of them get stolen yeah it's that's terrible broken into twice and it's been stolen twice yeah it's not even pr it's true but it's like that is really people know that now and anyone who has a range rover is like don't Unless that person sees it as a status that it's so desirable that they would continue to purchase it, which isn't me.

16:22Sounds like it is. You just said it was. In your words, you said it was you. Yeah, it is me. Talking of cars, did you see the Stanley brand turn that Stanley Cup in the burning car into an ad? and it got 84 million views for those that don't know what is that so stanley cup had a lot of they obviously exploded on social media in the last kind of 24 months and um they were always seen as a durable practical brand and then they like made pastel colors and the whole of gen z like shat their pants and started buying them and that was like their pivot and they got a lot of bad press about like leaking and um the you know questions about the kind of durability of the product so they wanted to create a campaign that essentially was like no it's the it's the best product there was a woman who uh her car set on fire she wasn't in the vehicle no one got hurt and the only remaining thing in the car was her stanley cup and the ice that was in the stanley cut was still frozen so that was the campaign so was it fake it has not been widely proven that it was fake I think it probably was fake there was also a lot of additional spend behind the scenes to promote that video so that it you know any virality that it might have had then got boosted which is you know fine brands do that interestingly when the wildfires happened in LA this year there was a video of someone who picked their stanley cup out of the wreckage and it made me wince a bit because the idea of a brand taking advantage of that it felt really um uncomfortable and that sort of disappeared from social media very quickly so i think you know both had the capacity to be viral moments and kind of communicate a subliminal message about the the product being durable but i think the the wildfire moment culturally really wasn't the right thing so um brands will try a lot of different things and then often the one you see as one of many that they've tried what do you think actually goes into making campaign like that go viral so let's just take our tinfoil hat skepticism energy with us and assume that it wasn't crazy yeah assume that it wasn't real and was all manufactured it probably happened and then they were like, oh, well, maybe.

19:03But what goes into that? There's lots of stuff around like ownership of the video. So what a brand will probably just buy that content pretty early on so that they have full ownership of it. They will promote it through an initial account, but potentially incentivize people to share it. That campaign lived very much in the early stages on social media and it was TikTok. so they will also they will probably proactively send it to a lot of people as well a lot of their influencers a lot of people in their community that can repost it to make it seem organically like it's gaining traction it's pretty low left for an influencer to just like you know repost something and they're just posting the story as opposed to necessarily the ad the original video is a woman being like my car got you know burnt out and she opens the door and the stanley cup is still in the cup holder and then she's like basically narrating to her followers like oh look i've and here it is type thing so it doesn't feel like you're being advertised to yeah it feels like a normal person has had this thing happen which you know your car exploding we've got a tesla so you're probably used to that but the the car exploding isn't necessarily a common thing but it's not like so wild like people have it's happened to people so the setting itself isn't like too hard for people to imagine plus you've got this product that people you know that has has carried a lot of favor with people that they that's instantly recognizable so it's essentially a piece of viral content that they're pushing but they're they're then retroactively applying a lot of the marketing architecture to to make it kind of live outside of just that moment they'll also be doing a lot of sampling they'll be looking on pinterest and other platforms about i think the color of it was it might have got damaged in the fire but i think the color was like a kind of brown bronzy color so then they will start labeling certain images pushing spend behind product images so people kind of start seeing it more and then they sell it back into the system so then it's like daily mail online this viral video shows how amazing stanley cups are you know so then it kind of goes back into the fun and then you get another time then you get your commentators on it so people on tiktok being like have you guys seen this video with the green screen it's gone you know it's had 10 million 20 100 million views um what do you think and then it becomes a debate and then it's so it's like you're just really getting a lot of juice for the squeeze And so in that example, as a professional, so you think that thing happened and they were like, and they weren't involved in creating it.

21:51So that event took place and they were like, okay, this is really special. And we're going to put this big plan together of all that stuff you've just said, which I mean, I worked at marketing for a long time and I hadn't actually thought about some of that. Yeah, as to like how you make the long tail of it keep bumbling along. So that was an organic event that happened. They then bought it and then they ran with it. I think probably it happened and then they took it quickly. But I think there are examples where those things are manufactured. So if that is how to make the best of a moment that happens.

22:26Yeah. And as a brand, you can sort of pick up this piece of luck, essentially, and turn it into an opportunity. Then what about when you are planning the whole thing in advance? So a really good example, this enormous marketing engine, but Barbie, right? That film went massively global, endless PR moments, all of it planned, obviously. So take us through that lens, like really structurally creating a PR giant. There's just something to caveat early on is it's a lot of this stuff depends on the size of the brand already. so like I said earlier with the Nike tick or whatever it's like everyone has heard of Barbie everyone knows what it is so you're not really having to do any education so it is literally all amplification and that makes it a lot easier whereas if you're a small brand I think this is a mistake a lot of which maybe we can talk about separately but a mistake a lot of brands make is that they they take lessons from big brands without really considering well yeah but they already have a million people on this mailing list or you know like presence in stores or you know a founder that's really famous and has a million followers or whatever so I think with Barbie there was already an established understanding the the second thing is it is a it is a topical divisive topic it's about the way women look it's about you know there was a lot of stuff in there that was like about feminism and friendship and you know there was a lot of criticism about you have margot robbie who's like whinging about not being perfect or pretty enough and she's like the most attractive person on the planet and so it stimulates conversation that is cultural social political etc so you've already got some pretty solid bedrock there in terms of the actual campaign i think most often with this with those types of campaigns where they see success is that they're very capable of working out what they want the end result to look like so for them it's like we want to make a billion dollars in the box office and so ultimately like we are then just working back from that the sequencing is really important when are we doing things so there's obviously a promotional schedule with the film which is um I mean they must have started like eight months before it came out I think where they actually have whether it's film um like Venice or whatever like actual kind of film film industry events but also um seeing a lot of the cast together that's kind of what Wicked did with Cynthia Eriva and Ariana Grande like they were at the Olympics together they're at the French Open they're like communicating to people very clearly that they are sort of part of this package the access to the talent was a big thing for Barbie so Margot Robbie et al did loads and loads and loads of interviews her wardrobe was amazing she was sort of dressed in clothing that was inspired by the looks in Barbie you then load in like Dua Lipa doing a hit song and something's like the Christmas ad thing like you know get someone famous who's gonna have a number one that then creates a whole thing over here so now you're not just in film world you're in music and you're in fashion and you're here and you're here then I mean I think probably the biggest thing that they did was the franchising was the licensing deals where they had Airbnb creating Barbie's dream house and you could go and stay or they had fashion brands creating a capsule collection or they had like I mean I think Stanley Cup did Wicked not Barbie but you know you could buy a fucking green Stanley Cup and it's like people want merch people want to buy into it people want to be part of this movement and if you're overlaying on top of that this idea that it's about this difficulty that everyone faces of navigating womanhood in the 21st century people want to be part of that topic so I think it was seamlessly executed I think the sequencing was perfect they had a massive lead into it and they were really good at storytelling you know they had a the woman who created barbie was in the film briefly and then kind of talking about it i mean it's like the cynic in me is like that was just a massive advert for bar like mattel like does anyone think that that wasn't just barbie being like shit we're not as relevant we did like a barbie in a wheelchair didn't really work we've done like we tried to diversify barbie but ultimately it's like a very specific body type with proportions that may be like on as relevant now in the kind of woke 21st century so we need to do a repositioning that demonstrates that we really understand the evolution of like of how women are perceived and how they look and how they feel about themselves so to me it was just like one massive advert but people really connected with it what about the Barbie Oppenheimer thing.

27:34The Barbenheimer? Barbenheimer. Because I don't think I saw, again, like maybe I'm just living under a rock. I don't think I saw that much about Barbie other than its crossover with Oppenheimer. But did you see, like, did you see the products and did you see Margot Robbie? Saw Margot Robbie, yeah. Yeah. And when you saw her, did you think of Barbie? Or were you just like, she's fit? No, I think, I mean, definitely thought she was fit. Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, she is fit. like it's kind of a statement but did I know it was Barbie yes because she was distinctly dressed in a very like almost toy like way which is obviously what they were doing so yeah I did but then but then the crossover of the film's doing so incredibly well like that couldn't have been planned oh it would definitely be planned really that's like me at Barbie ringing my mate Oppenheim and being like should we should we get the tale of this film and create apparently that stuff is quite planned because this is similar well that's fucking genius Yeah, it's a similar kind of thing to, it's that effect.

28:34I can't remember what it's called, but yeah, basically you're launching two blockbusters at the same time, drives more people in general to both than just launching one at one time. So the studios try to do this, try to make them different, try to make them massive and try to do it at the same time. Also, what was really clever about that was that, you know, in my opinion, with absolutely no data or statistics to back it up, Barbie was like, I'm going to make my boyfriend come to this film. and Oppenheimer was like, I'm going to make my girlfriend come to this. So people went to see both because it was like, you know, Oppenheimer was, you know.

29:08Serious. Serious and technical and about science. And like, oh my God, girls, how would they ever fucking get into that? And Barbie was like fashion and whatever, and Dua Lipa. But it was, it was like this train of, that was slightly different audiences that were connected. So people went to see both. And I think that it was, yeah, it was, it would have been planned. But it's the same. It's like when, you know, when fucking McDonald's hack Burger King's Twitter it's like if you think that's not planned you're deluded I'm trying to think how many of these things exist in the world I think you'd be surprised it's kind of like when um I remember really early in my career watching David Beckham on Graham Norton huge Saturday night for me I remember talking to a friend who is a publicist and I was like god he just like he's so effortless and he's so and she was like he has a stylist he has a vocal coach he has a media trainer he's seen the questions and gone through them he like it's so engineered and part of the skill of that is that you don't really realize it's happening but it's not just like wow this charismatic guy the first moment in my life I ever learned this was if you do a TED talk you have to basically learn your whole script and you get coaching for it and stuff and they're all trained the coaches are trained on how to do this for TED right and the process is you learn every single word of your script so meticulously that you are then a robot by the time you're actually delivering it there is no emotion or anything because you really know the thing like inside out you've done it a hundred two hundred times yeah so then the final stage of it is doing it all again but acting the fumbling the mumbling the mistakes the things everything is manufactured be human and so you're even acting to be human but like you could do that same TED talk identically five or six different times in a row and it would come out exactly the saying there's no real fumbling or mumbling in any of it that's also the kind of skill of media training that's where if there's an individual who's the face of a brand yeah um it's it is very specifically engineered so the thing about i hosted sahil at this event last night to promote his book live and we had obviously done a podcast with him and he is absolutely brilliant at delivering word for word the exact same thing perfect yeah it's like rinse and repeat honestly and so during So during the live event.

31:19And not a single word more. Yeah. And then, yeah, just exactly like clip end. And so I knew when the clip end was coming because I'd interviewed him before. And so I was like, I've got like five minutes to chill in my own head. And I was like, now I need to refocus because he's about to end. But how does that make you feel? Do you feel like he's less authentic because it's a marketing thing? Or do you feel like it's, oh, he's just really well practiced and he's rolling it out and it's clever? Well, I think, I mean, we interview a lot of authors. and so they're all the same. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you are definitely coming across as more authentic than ordinary because...

31:55Yeah, but we're not asking questions about her book. So here's the thing. Yeah, wait till I switch into that. Yeah, if we ask you loads of questions about Somati, you would do the same thing that everyone else does. You would because you already know from feedback, from your coaching, from being on other podcasts, from all of the things, you know the stories and sentences that land best to sell the books and people all do the same thing. I probably wouldn't, yes. although I'm definitely not like it's probably not as like polished and specific yeah as an author but also I think you know I interact with like we work together and I have normal conversations with intelligent interesting people who are trying to figure out what to do and I never feel like it's us and them you know and I say that to my team all the time it's like it is collaborative and And I think people want to be spoken to like a normal person and have a normal interaction.

32:48I do agree that at an event where people have paid a lot of money to hear you say very inspirational things, even if it's the exact same words in the book, you kind of still expect it and want it. Yeah, and it's the best delivery of that idea. Correct. Often, you know, like if he had tried to riff it and not follow what was in the book, it wouldn't have been as powerful for everyone in there. It just so happens that I know him really well, speaks to him all the time, have interviewed him twice recently and so for me it's boring well he's number two on the times new york times bestseller list correct as of a week ago yeah yes that's about two days ago that is seriously impressive i mean he his media tour has been absolutely insane yeah it was three months straight who did that is that a publisher or does he have his own no he was with uh HarperCollins HarperCollins and they've just gone we're going to go balls to the walls well it was a big book deal and so they I think at the very beginning they were all aligned on this is going to be like huge and he himself has a huge audience yeah and he has a massive newsletter he's got nearly a million yeah Instagram yeah Twitter but he's got nearly he's got nearly a million newsletter subscribers that's loads which is crazy yeah yeah and he's like really is the only person I know that has done that and built that quite organically.

34:09But presumably, and we're talking about campaigns, presumably all of the campaigns, everyone is trying to do that. Everyone is trying to make these crazy, successful films and brands and all the rest of it. So why does something do so well? Like what's the secret sauce that Barbie had or the other brands that you know that we would have heard of? How do they cut through when others just completely fail? The failures we've seen more recently have been campaigns that have been quite heavily marred with drama that's not relevant for the film so the blake lively stuff is probably the most contemporary example with her film it's wild yeah what is that i mean yeah yeah okay what's your take on it so okay well just to just what was just quickly to go back to that i think with barbie it's a beloved brand if you if you didn't own one your sibling or your friend or whatever owned one so there's already an emotional connection to that it's amplified by the fact that you've got these mega superstars with a huge reach everyone wants to feature them they're doing really elevated press you know you're not trying to pitch margot robbie for the cover of vogue in 10 different territories you're just figuring out what it's a very different type of publicity to being like i've got this up and comer can you feature them to being like when do you want to shoot margot robbie for this so there's the star power thing is important you've then got these you know viral songs really relevant musicians at the time the movement for ken was also i think quite interesting i think that probably was something that happened more organically that they then jumped on um and then he's like performing the song and a music set so they're crossing over into other territories ultimately people go to the cinema because they want to be transported they want to you know possibly learn stuff like with oppenheimer or whatever but they're going i don't fucking know um and they're um but they want to relax and it's potentially a night out with a friend or a date or whatever so it's kind of it's evoking a very specific feeling and people don't like the drama attached to it because it's sort of it it changes your perception of the enjoyment of that moment and it is like you're suspending a fourth wall into being like I know this isn't real but I kind of I'm up for being transported into it so I think the reason most these big campaigns do well I mean the thing we haven't mentioned is like they got a fuck ton of cash and that is an important point is they are spending a lot of money on this globally to make it live and breathe there are like tens of millions in spend to try and hit a billion plus in box office yeah all these deals with you know if you look at airbnb and you go well if we create the dream barbie houses and we let people stay there you know they've then got a mailing list and a this and a that and so you're tapping into these other resources and you are migrating it from being an experience in a cinema to a cultural moment people I think that one of the big things was um America Ferrara's speech about women are expected to be x y and z and that really resonated with people and it became you know she then kind of had a a moment to break out she was very likable she played ugly Betty there was this like people have sort of watched her on her career succeed and be an advocate for women and you know margot robbie's like the ultimate girl next door my ultimate fit girl next door but she's also really successful she's got her own production company her husband was involved in the movie there's just a lot of like feel good storytelling around that and you'll notice she announced a pregnancy shortly after the film came out because she was probably like i'll take a year out and go and do that um but there was no distraction there was no drama there was nothing she wasn't she promote anything other than that film there was very specific purity of message for the whole of that time the difference with the blake lively saga i mean do you want to talk about that if we're talking about from like a pr concert i'm fascinated like that is everywhere on social media feels like a cultural moment but one that i don't care about feels like an amber heard johnny debt yeah it's like a huge war going on and people like what are these people like behind closed doors there's all the pr interaction and presumably people are so interested because also not just because Blake Lively's interesting, but because Ryan Reynolds is so broadly loved that what does that mean about him?

38:44And he hasn't really got that involved in it that I can see, but I don't know. I think he's involved now. I don't know. So yeah, the argument has swung so heavily both ways as well. Like when it first came out, everyone was like, Justin's awful. And then now like he's published his stuff and it's like, no, Blake's awful. And so that can't be found. Who's awful, Emily? Which one of them? So I think that all fucking awful. Right. Is the sort of professional. I know more about this because I know the publicists on both sides so I will just say that the general consensus at a zoomed out level is there are truths in both of what they're saying and this should never have been played out on a public stage so it's like it has now everyone's lost control of it and it's kind of disappeared into something that's now very very hard and it's basically just negatively impacted both of them and the film or was it done well for the film I mean the film I think did reasonably well but I think that it will have marred for everyone and like legal fees and issues and dramas it's absolutely not what you want that the reason so just to go back I think when Blake Lively first came out with the initial information which was I am suing this guy who was a director and a co-star for I mean broadly sexual harassment but there were lots of things in there that were you know about her weight and about all these other topics which are quite difficult they're quite flammable they're quite difficult to talk about as you say the general consensus was like fuck him how dare he and I think then what people did was go hang on we've actually blindly followed her and maybe this is part of this conversation in the US about like what's woke and how we take stuff at face value so you've got these like hot button topics but I mean you know without like talking about US politics part of the reason Trump is president is because Americans are sick of woke America that's what they're saying and so these conversations around gender and um you know the assumption of like that someone's guilty are make people feel really uncomfortable and i think a lot of people piled in and were like well obviously blake's correct and then obviously when justin started to talk about you know some evidence or his side of it people are like oh shit maybe i reacted too soon and then they have projected that onto blake lively as like how dare you mislead us so then she sort of lost that popular vote it she's also best friends with taylor swift and people have very strong feelings about taylor swift you know both that she's successful and also people kind of don't think she's a representative of the sisterhood you know she's a cultural phenomenon so she's divisive i think people feel like they were misled and they rushed in too soon so now they're kind of backtracking he is has a much smaller platform than her, a lot less powerful friends, et cetera.

41:53So he is trying to communicate in the way that he knows how, which is setting up a website and kind of, and then I think he's currying favor because people are like, well, good for you for taking her on. I think it's just like no one wins in these situations. And we're all getting as the public very specifically curated parts of the information. But it's a bit like the Johnny Depp Amber Heard case. It's like, it's a perfect storm of like chaos and accusations and like gender stuff, or in their case, like sex and drugs. And then you've got the fact that the Blake Lydwee film is all about, you know, a topic that makes this whole thing feel a little bit dirtier.

42:33And that doesn't sit well with people. And he's obviously now countersued them for$400 million. and I personally think the media narrative is skewing heavily in his favour. Really? Definitely, yeah. It's very much like Ryan Reynolds is a tyrant. Everything you need to be true is not true. Ryan Reynolds is now being, you know, almost coming front and centre as like the architect behind all of it and, you know, whatever. And he had, I would say before this, he had one of the best personal brands. Yes. Reputations there was. Probably the best personal brand in the world, maybe. Yeah, and his show about Wrexham, and he made very clever investments, been really successful.

43:15Deadpool killed it. Yeah, he was like the guy's guy, girl's fancy. I mean, perfect. I've been seeing that Reynolds has obviously done lots of ads with companies, and normally the comments are so positive about him, and for the first time ever, the ads are like, fuck him, fuck him. Really? To the point where advertisers are turning off the comment sections, because it's gone so negative. And it's like your poisonous wife, and like you guys are the masterminds. I think there's also just, it's very precarious, the kind of Hollywood thing, because we've been shown tangibly time and time again that people that, I mean, I don't think anyone thought like Weinstein was a great bloke, but there are lots of examples where people thought people were different and then it's come out that there's like something abhorrent.

43:58And so I think people are quite ready to be like, oh, maybe this is bullshit. And you know, it's impossible to like know the facts without being kind of in the room. But I think they have, they're not in touch with reality. And so I think this is really, really bad for them. I don't think she will recover anytime soon. So now she has a lot of haters, does she? I think there's a lot of haters. I think there's also all the follow, you know, all the press are looking for follow-up stories. So it's like every year Blake Lively's been in Taylor Swift's box at the NFL. She wasn't there this year, which is the advice I would have given her if I were her publicist.

44:43It's like, don't go. Don't go. Like lay low. Don't get, you know, no more pictures of you. Like just don't give them anything. But it's a story. She wasn't there. Is Taylor Swift distancing herself? Is, you know, and then you're like, well, at what point if you get the Swifties turning on you? I mean, that's problematic. Thank you for that. That is like another good example of like PR getting out of your control. and maybe like you said being manufactured and maybe not and then it just completely blowing out of proportion and you lose the thread of it and everyone's a loser. What about PR that is like deliberately trying to understand the difference between brand building and awareness versus making sales?

45:20For example like how did Addison Lee just beat Uber with a tweet? I would preface this with like everyone hates Uber. Everyone secretly hates Uber but they don't really have another good option. so we're using it because we care more about convenience than we do about like our own you know like political stance there's a lot of love particularly in London for black cabbies and the nostalgia of that and Addison Lee decided at the point at which Uber allegedly lost their well they did lose their license but it was like you've lost your license but we'll extend the time in which we take it away for nine months within which time you can just like appoint some more government people on your board and pay us pay tfl and like you'll probably be fine so um addison lee tweeted minutes after the announcement was made at uber you okay hun and it went viral and it obviously made a lot of people smile or laugh but it was also quite unexpected from a business like that there was a perception that it was much more corporate there wasn't like a person or or a dialogue i think that they they definitely have leaned into the safety piece addison lee has done a lot more around safety and you're you've got kids kid another one on the way do you say you've got children if you've got one coming that's a good question no i mean currently i say i have a daughter fine okay so as a dad of daughters you you want your children to be safe if they were to get in a minicab or a black cab or anything ideally a volvo ideally a volvo uber is um what we're all hoping for for you but the the safety piece is paramount and that's where uber's lost a lot because you see these stories of these like stories of people doing things that are awful and so addison women in general right are like properly on this like properly like this wouldn't take a risk it's interesting though because if you got into an illegal minicab back in the day that feels really risky but you don't apply the same risk to uber because in your head you're like it's on a phone it's tracked i can see the number plate you could share your journey with someone so the the the um structure around it feels safer so i think then when it's not safe people feel almost like more offended by it or more aggrieved by it or shocked by it because they thought those provisions were in place.

47:52Addison Lee is a very different proposition to Uber. There's, I think it's Rory Sutherland talks about this with Uber. It's really interesting because they can't reduce the time you have to wait for an Uber. Their entire campaign is about the visibility. Psychologically, if I can see the car's nine minutes away, it doesn't matter if it's two or nine or 18. It's the knowledge that I can plan those minutes that makes the experience better it's not that i need a taxi within two minutes so it's a very clever understanding of what the problem that you're trying to solve for customers is addisonly is slightly more expensive the booking platform's different but but they have doubled down on that trust piece like you said with volvo and safety it's like that is the message and i think because their personal narrative with uber is unexpected it lands more compellingly yeah unexpected versus exactly as you expect yeah exactly and i think also they are they are speaking like for the people that's what people think is and and it's almost like laughable they're kind of trivializing something that a lot of people think and so they've been really clever in positioning themselves um against uber i would also say that uber has done zero brand building like just functional I have never seen anything other than crisis comes from them.

49:13I have never seen conversations from interesting people in the cars. I've never seen any sort of International Women's Day, female drivers, safety. Like, I think it's really interesting to think about, could you pick a female driver if you wanted one? I mean, it's not to say that, like, female drivers will never assault you, but, like, some people feel more comfortable in that environment. they've never done anything that even begins to address the accusations or allegations or real situations around some of this stuff so it is all like firefighting with them so they the brand building is it's a functional brand where you get an uber because you can't get anything else and so you know they haven't really created a sense deeper than that i don't think would the competitive brands be elevating the negative about uber it has been known to be part of a strategy to find stories of people that have tried to be silenced or drivers that have been arrested or whatever or had their licenses revoked or you know variations on that and placed those stories yeah you mentioned trump earlier and i think the thing he was very very good at was finding the negative that was funny about a competitor and just bringing it to the forefront in a really simple, simple message.

50:38And so Uber being unsafe just permeates now. Yeah. And so they must be elevating that somehow. Psychologically, it's a volume thing. If you see the same story enough times and if it becomes kind of colloquialized in the language that we use when we talk to each other, you see it really positively. Like brands will refer to like Hoover or Sellotape or they'll mention brand names to kind of relate to a category as a whole, or I'll get a Dyson or, you know, they sort of take the brand name. But that relationship with the word can also exist the other way. And I do think that, I personally think that if there was a better alternative to Uber, many people would switch.

51:20It's just that they have, you know, in our hierarchy or our prioritization, we would happily forego those other things for the sake of convenience and that's good press bad press but there's just also the easiest product yeah simplicity wins so i suppose advice to founders to you know we are a business show at the end of the day oh sorry yeah when we think about startups doing pr when we think about like how do you make you know non-noteworthy products PR-able. So we're now talking about your products.

51:58Sorry, that was so mean. Keep that in. We were non-noteworthy for years and then we started working with Emerge. Your product cured my psoriasis. Really? I could be a medical case study. Good recovery. But your product is... It gave us a compliment in a space that we don't promote. No, like skin, gut. It's PR-able. you know like i think the timing you had your brand prable the product itself prable the way you've put it together so i'm kind of not talking about a heights type brand because i think heights is kind of brilliant but like how do you bring pr to normal brands can i also just say one other thing about dan is you are one of this is one of the dan is one of the only people i have what color volvo would you get i think like silver or black okay okay so classic yeah dan is one of the only founders i've met in 15 years who will only do press about himself if it directly elevates the brand and i think that does lead me into a point about you know to like stumble towards answering your question understanding what's at your disposal as a business and being able to separate yourself as the founder or your ego because I do see a lot of founders who double down on like particularly if their brands are struggling the first thing they do is say we need it we need a piece with me in the ft or in you know they and I always think is that actually helping or is it like I will feel better about my own position in this business if I can put that on LinkedIn and people will tell me that it's good and I talk about it in my book that we often particularly digitally reward perceived success in the same way we reward actual success so if someone's in the FT like who the fuck knows whether they're making any money or their brand's going well or if it's a last-ditch attempt like I worked with a brand that raised 50 million quid and we did a cover of the ft and they went bust two weeks later so it's like it's you know it it's very much like perception in terms of making ordinary products extraordinary i think that a lot of brands collaborate too quickly so i think i see brands like a deodorant brand being like oh we're going to do an april fools with a cheese brand or we're going to do this or and it's like it's very confusing for a customer if one of if the biggest thing you ever do is not your core product it's like what are you actually communicating and I think that repetition is important it's much more impactful to see the same product 200 times than see 200 different products once and I think people get bored and they get impacted by seeing James what a brew dog do something spicy on his on his LinkedIn or you know a stunt that's well executed I think it's also about um thinking about PR within a broader marketing funnel so for me the easiest way to think about it is PR is the megaphone but it's like what what are you saying like what are you amplifying and who are you talking to and where are you talking and for how long and in what forum and I think this I see it all the time with um startups particularly particularly is that and I wonder if it's like confidence in the product or lack of confidence in the product where it's like we want to collaborate with this other brand or we want to do something funny or an April Fool's or a um or a stunt or a moment in time and you know it maybe it doesn't cost loads of money but it's quite time it it's you know it takes up a lot of time and it's like what are we really doing this for and often we get brands that make these stunts in a vacuum and then come to us and we're like it's not press worthy I mean maybe it's a social moment but it's quite unusual for something to just like happen and go viral and it's quite unusual I think people end up then just pulling on really basic levers like my worst thing ever other than floating down the terms is like the lookalike which I've done and I'm embarrassed but um can you tell us what the lookalike is basically where brands get someone who looks like a famous person there's like this and Ed Sheeran is a good example yeah or like um I actually think Surreal did it did it quite cleverly where they hired people who had like Dwayne who were called Dwayne Johnson or whatever to be in their campaign that was well done it was well done but it's like it lived on social like no the Telegraph's not writing about it I mean people reading the Telegraph probably aren't buying cereal they're probably on social media so maybe that kind of works we did it with um Grind Coffee um we were we when I say I'm embarrassed by it I mean sorry David I'm embarrassed by it in the sense that I think it's it's not necessarily like the hardest my brain has ever worked to come up with a PR idea but we took over um Grind took the old Nespresso store in King's Cross and we wanted to do something to talk about the fact that Nespresso had moved out Grind had moved in and so we hired a George Clooney we the original idea was that's quite funny the original idea was we were going to do a George Clooney look-alike competition so we were going to have a line of George Clooney's you know some like were a bit spurious some really good with their CV's and they were applying to be the new face of this brand store it's quite good I think that's excellent but then what happens is budgets get cut and there's like budget for one George Clooney so then you're like yeah it doesn't it doesn't work in the same way but sure and then it ended up being a kind of lookalike and the store is very it's in a very useful place in the station so people come down the escalator and look to the left and there's someone who looks like George Clooney he did I'll show you a picture after this he does look like George Clooney but it was can we get that on the screen it was yeah I'll get it for you it was tonally it was quite clever because it was like grind is the you know in the David Goliath kind of thing with Nespresso they have the capacity to be a bit more tongue-in-cheek George Clooney is a kind of very well-known so it kind of works but it's like it's not necessarily like winning a PR award but it's an easy way of like creating a little bit of noise and fun i think you're being harsh on yourself i think that's quite funny and quite tasteful excellent maybe i'm just if i were to see that i'd be like yeah but you know are people buying more coffee because of it yeah i think that's the thing and actually well i mean i think it's just like what the i love that i'm promoting your idea and you're arguing yeah i'm like no this is genius for me yeah but i think that's i think that's a really important question because okay on a practical level we work together you do the PR at heights yeah and I'm quite involved in it yeah and we talk quite a lot about stuff and I imagine I'm one of the more challenging people that you work with because I say that often to a lot of your ideas which is like yeah but it's a great idea and it's creative and it's fun but like what's it really gonna do and that is a really hard thing to work out with PR a lot of the time and so actually a lot of the time the stuff that really works back to your previous point is repeating the same message over and over again having tried pr for the best part of a decade and finding it incredibly frustrating and not liking it when i started working with emerge in a two-way relationship that worked well i came to you guys with a very specific and simple brief that i said don't do anything other than this one thing and you guys were like that's actually really helpful because you're not saying make us famous about everything yeah we just launched our probiotic we had all the science studies to prove that it was better than all the other ones and i I was like, but it's hard work getting people to believe that.

59:38Just do this one thing. Don't talk about the other products. You don't need to talk about the brand. You don't need to tell people about celebrity. You need to do any of those things. Just get science journalists focused on this fact for like a period of time. And that, between both of us, as in between Heights and Emerge, that was an awesome strategy. It was a bit boring. Probably not much fun for you guys, but really consistent. Don't want to speak for the team. But really consistent and clear message where I knew that we could win. Yeah. Because we had the evidence to prove that that was true and we could win that.

1:00:08So the whole game became, okay, how do we just focus on that one message? And that hasn't been the whole entire way that we've worked together over the last two years. But it was a great way to start because it was super clear what I knew, where I knew that we could beat other people. But that's also the point you were making, we were talking about earlier about like, your customer is not asking you to be... Their best friend. Well, they're not asking you to come up with like the funniest campaign they've ever had. like they just want to make you you know your gut healthier or like whatever thing we're doing you know it it's like i don't need my brand i don't need my supplement or my health brand to be doing that so it is a bit misplaced and i think it's just we it's an eternal question with pr and i don't think anyone has like a perfect answer for it because it isn't tangible numerically in the same way that other parts of the business are and that's always going to be a challenge I don't think it means that you can't create a clear idea of what value would look like I just think that we now have a more sophisticated way of understanding what value means to brands and for example being in the FT or Bloomberg or whatever publication it's investors like it and if you're trying to hire a new CFO they might see it you know that it does certain things that aren't always like tangible it depends where you're at as a brand if you're really small and you want to just get people to hit on your website i don't think pr is the first spend you should do but there are points at which you like you say you know you have a really good understanding of how pr can work well for you and how it's not worked in the past and how it's not worked and you're able to be really directive and that's that won't be the same strategy forever it will iterate and move and it may be that doing a dinner with press is important because you want to create relationships with 10 people who will always write about you or when you have a scandal or when you do something you've got some press mates but are they necessarily driving sales to the value of that eight grand dinner probably not in in that instance but i can say i've never done pr really and i'm quite quite fast because because of the way like i came up i came up running a digital marketing conversion agency so like it was an agency that did e-com and lead gen yeah and so in many ways we were pitching against the pr budget and so just never like never believed in it um and yet now and i think the uber example is such a good one had someone been more intentional with good pr about them the financial outcome of that would be huge did you have examples where you had clients who were also investing in PR where you saw definitely that work together yeah and so we were very good at being like oh you're having this big PR moment yeah let's us try and do like retargeting or try and make it take that experience from like you know online and make it part of the site and whatever and did very well with it and so did it work with PR agencies but from a personal perspective I've never done it and it's quite cool to hear because you know off show Dan's talked about how great you guys have been so many times and it's it's interesting the spend for a founder feels like a lot to spend on PR yeah and the idea of doing like a dinner and but the value is so much more than just a single click yeah totally also I think it's like Dan and I have a good relationship so he can be like the team shit can you fix this do you know it's like i'm not offended by that it's like i think sometimes prs they do like a monthly call and then the founder doesn't turn up and then the marketing person's distracted and then there's not the direction and like it's not always that the agency shit or the brand doesn't know what they're doing it's like it's a compatibility thing as much as anything else i mean are you comfortable talking about just even recently our conversation oh and i was like you know we did we were doing the strategy and i was like you know just genuinely i don't think that the strategy is good and i agreed yeah and i don't think this is good it's not good enough for us i don't think it's right I do think, no, I love the guys.

1:04:14I'm joking. But I do think you guys are brilliant. So I'm only giving you all this feedback because I know that you're much better than this. And we wouldn't do the strategy, so it's a no. But it's not like it's a no, I'm going to find another PR agency. It's a no, let's work together on making this a good strategy. It's just an honest relationship. I would say to you, do you have a different jumper for the rest of the things you're filming today so that you could... I do. That's what I thought when I came in. I'm joking, I'm joking. I do, don't worry. but I think that's my point is like I actually was gonna say you're gonna wear that for this but I also think that you know I've been I started when I was 22 which was a long time ago and I've worked with a range of really brilliant people loads of really brilliant men loads of brilliant women and I don't get offended very easily I'm not sort of personally bothered if someone gives feedback I think it's really important to be open to it and I also run my own company so I care very very much about the fact that it is your money or shareholders money or a combination that you are investing and I think maybe I have a unique understanding of that because I run my own business which I own 100 % of so I sort of I do give a shit about that so the agency business is so hard because you have to be brilliant all the time yeah you've got to show up with like the best lady you've ever had and all the time and you know if you work with brands for a long time the brand you know you can not be brilliant once and they're like oh yeah should we put it out to there is one thing there is one thing you mentioned that i do think is worth reiterating because it's important well yeah i've seen but also like i feel that horror you know remembering that yeah um one thing i think is important one thing i think is important to reiterate though to your point of, you know, I don't want to do PR if it's not about heights.

1:06:11It's so important if you're a startup founder of a consumer brand, you know, the James Watt example is really good. He's so tied to that brand. It's like it's all Brewdog or James, James or Brewdog. I think really good advice for founders, especially in consumer space, is try to separate yourself out from the brand. And or if you're going to do PR, it has to elevate your brand. Like there are multiple examples over the last couple of years where you've come to us with amazing PR opportunities for me and as you said I turn them down if I'm not if I can't talk about heights yeah it's not relevant because it doesn't really benefit me that's my ego getting in the way if I was to say yes because what is the benefit to my whole team and company and that my company is who's paying you not me yeah so like it has to feel strategically aligned and the other example of that most recently is like our Sunday Times business front cover yeah you know when it was like is this going to be Joel and I on the front cover or Vogue Williams.

1:07:02And they're like, well, Vogue Williams will get more attention. It will do better. So we're like, we'll choose Vogue Williams. But that's also not a given, right? Like I've worked with a lot of people and it's ultimately about your intentions. Like you're not trying to be famous through your brand and take all the PR opportunities. You understand that you are a pawn within that. You can utilize it if it's helpful. But it's and I think a lot of young founders, maybe not young founders, like green founders are very concerned and interested in the opportunities for them as an individual. And I think that that's problematic because it's a it's a personal agenda masquerading as a kind of business goal.

1:07:49When you're thinking about 2025, what are the most important levers? is one of the most important platforms in PR for brands who are thinking about? Consumers have an expectation that brands have a point of view. I think, you know, everyone's an activist, everyone has an opinion, and it's a really difficult line to tread. But I think people want to be aligned with brands that stand for something. I mean, that's a broad brush. Obviously, if you're buying like bin bags, they're probably not like super concerned about pushing that narrative or having a founder piece. But, you know, certainly for like consumer brands, that's important i think brands are terrified about cancel culture i think there's even more fear around the founder and i think people need to understand the context of that individual as part of a marketing function as opposed to like a personal moment i think that there's a lot of confusion around which channels to be on and where to spend and no one necessarily has any more money they've just got more areas to distribute it so what what i say to clients is where are your customers or where are your desired customers you know i can't possibly advise you where to be until i know you're targeting women of this age or people doing this or whatever so i think being really connected to your own data your own information and trying to double down in the spaces that those people already are rather than trying to convince loads of people feels like an easier win i think that the influencer space is really hard i think this we're seeing a lot of spend change from face offs to just people making content so you know not even needing them to post it on their social feeds but just becoming like almost freelance content creators for brands which is changing the relationship they have with people who create those assets internally i think a lot of we'll start to see a lot more rebrands i think there's a lot of dusty brands that aren't resonating i think that's what we saw with jaguar which by the way i actually thought was i didn't hate it people really hated it people had a lot to say about it but you know they've got to do something at some point i mean i think the biggest backlash was they were like it's virtually signaling and it's like is this diversity important to the person buying this car perhaps not so that's why it didn't land um and I think we'll see much more crossover between categories that are growing but I think we'll see a lot of brands disappear which I know is not very inspiring but I think we're seeing it all the time it's a hard time to start a company to raise money to run a business good businesses probably will survive but I think there'll be a lot that that go or that it's not necessarily viable for them to continue well I saw I saw this trend recently where brands like McDonald's and Tesco were just removing their logos what's that about I think the um Heinz just did it this week where they've put it's got to be beans or it's got to be this and it's I think it's reaffirming the relationship customers have with their core products that they can almost be brandless because they're so synonymous with those moments and I would say that one of the things we've talked about but I talk about quite a lot with clients is in our desire to connect with our audience there are some very good examples of where we have seen brands totally own an emotion or a time of day so kellogg's is a good one like we only used to eat cereal in the morning then it became we'd come home from work and have a bowl of cereal or we might have it do you remember the special k diet yeah it was just like a woman in a red swimsuit and it was like you can look like me if you only eat special k for two weeks ridiculous it's very tasty it's so good but heavy crunching up um yeah i mean absolutely um so i think are you it's legit everything do you get scared on airplanes no thank you for your bravery thank you for your service no thank you that would be awful what else are you allergic to move on eggs shellfish nuts sesame seeds and honey and amoxicillin i'm so sorry yeah it's rubbish if someone is wondering like how do i make my brand famous yeah like how should they approach that the first question i would say is like why do you want to be famous because people talk about brand fame but they don't really have a definition of what that is i think that there are i think sequencing is one of the most important things in any brand's life but particularly in relation to pr you know when are we actually doing these things why etc and what our level of comfort is with the fact that they might they may or may not work I think also being really thoughtful about whether things exist in a vacuum and what helps that is having very clear definitions like to your point this is what we're trying to achieve and we can get rid of all of this stuff because this is the one thing or the two things that impact that thing we haven't talked about is like you've got to have a great product like you know you've got to have a great product it's got to be well designed people have got to like it you know i one of our clients is um mark at suri and it's like if every time we sent that for a try like a big part of their pr is people testing the product it's reviews if every time we sent the product it broke they wouldn't have good pr it's the product is amazing it is very competitively priced the colors are brilliant the way it's merchandised in store is you know it deliberately looks like a kind of Apple product you know it's sustainable and people do care about that but they also care about it working and if it broke every time we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing so the great product the great packaging and the very clear point of view and messaging I actually had it with Huel when I started with Huel I did five years with Huel from when they launched with Julian and James and at the beginning it was like yes you're very well priced you're sustainable there's health benefits there's convenience but you know these are all the things that you're doing but like no one really cares you know 10 years no one really cares about sustainability like fucking leonardo dicaprio is talking about the ocean and people still don't recycle so we ain't gonna win banging that drum julian was very concerned with food waste but it's like food waste isn't sexy people aren't writing about a food waste epidemic people can't see it so they don't give a shit about it and then you go well you know then you've got the idea of price but we don't really want to go hard on price because we don't want to be a student cheap product you know so you go through and you work out strategically what is important what do we want to be important to our customer how do we want to speak to them what do we think is going to be a little bit more ownable as a topic because if a million other people are talking about the same thing you know it's it's really hard to create cut through in these really bloated spaces i mean fuel had other challenges because it was like the first product here not that soylent was in the us and they had it there was a german brand i think called feed but they people think they were first to market because they came out the gate so hard and they were just like eat complete yeah and their big win was convenience right their big win was convenience and actually interestingly their original customer base was out of town office workers who like who didn't have a prep to go for lunch and they just wanted to make something easy for lunch and they couldn't be bothered to you know make a fucking spag bol and then it was people who drove for a living truckers taxi drivers school mums you know people who were like needed something in the car and didn't want like her ginsters yeah pie is that a thing yeah yeah perfect um and so there was this evolution and like you know julian wanted to take on the sandwich so a big win was being in the meal deal so it's like the placement followed all of it and it was so considered and then it's like airports and you know gas stations and this and so it all fit together really seamlessly but they could have talked about all these other topics and actually the challenge was not that we were like working out what to say it was like which of the things can we really own and land and create storytelling around that lives in all these other places and having the discipline to say okay well we won't do that um we like we never targeted the fitness community because we didn't want to be a protein shape you know you were challenged with the fact that no it's not a meal replace you know it's a meal alternative like all the language stuff so it that was a really interesting um learning process for me to be able to, I mean, that was like the best, some of the best work I've ever been a part of.