Ellie Norman with Rory Sutherland and Elfried Samba on finding fans and making them stay

10:04Elfried Samba:It's only because after that, I like to sit down and just eat. Okay, fair enough.

10:07Rory Sutherland:I was going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Already at 5am you've been to...

10:12Elfried Samba:You've got to get credit in the bank for the rest of the day. Okay.

10:15Rory Sutherland:Where are they open at that time? Is there 24 hours?

10:19Elfried Samba:I leave home at that time so I can get into London, do that, and then eat. But it is that sort of consistency of knowing when are you going to be at your best. And my job is as much to inspire, to have a real sort of positive energy inside of the sort of organization, and to be that sort of person who is imagining the what if. And being quite clear. And that's why I love marketing so much, because it's about people, it's about behavioral change. But it's the future. And so many other roles and disciplines in the business will be from the past.

11:02Rory Sutherland:It's a rear view mirror, yeah. Yeah. And... Actually, it's a bit worrying, because I suppose marketing and R &D are probably the only parts of a business that are naturally future-focused, aren't they, in many ways?

11:17Elfried Samba:Totally.

11:17Rory Sutherland:If you look at finance, if you look at all this business about everything needs to be evidence-based and based on data, the problem, as Roger Martin always says, is, well, all big data comes from the past. And what you're doing, you know, and also so much of business is now effectively financial reporting of some kind or another. And again, all the data is effectively past focused, not future focused.

11:43Ellie Norman:Look at the venture firms. There's a lot of really talented, ambitious, successful ones. But everything is based on data in the past or instant, of course, but it's still the past, right? And if you think about, I'm a very simple brain, and I like to break things down into two things. And I say that there's only really two sides of the business, the logic side and the love side, right? Yep. The logic side is the information that we all have, and it's all about legacy. It's all about facts and figures. It's the IQ. And then you've got the love side, which is EQ, right? But I like to give CFOs a more technical term, which is brand defensibility, right?

12:20Ellie Norman:Because whenever you're investing in a business and you look at the past, you think that the past will determine the future. But what happens is, if you know a brand's defensibility score, which is advocacy, how many people that are not part of the brand that are talking about the brand positively, without being asked. There is loyalty, people that keep coming back because they either love the product, they love the service, they love what they represent. And I think that there's one that, if you look at people like Elon and even Donald Trump share, which is forgiveness, right?

12:49Rory Sutherland:Benefits of the doubt. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We never, of course, we never value that because we tend to look at the positive side of marketing, not the absence of negatives. Yeah. And one of the things I've always argued about is you don't want a marketer on the board because it'll be better. You need a marketer on a board because if you don't have someone on a board with a marketing mindset, you can make really dumb decisions.

13:14Ellie Norman:Yeah.

13:14Rory Sutherland:You know, you can cut the price of something, you know, and literally sell less. Yeah. I mean, if you don't have that mindset on the board. And so I always think that the problem with marketing, and I criticize agencies for this all the time, we always go in on this premise that if you do this thing, nice things will happen. And of course, that's not how you sell. If you don't do this, you will have a problem. You know, if you don't, and your point about brand defensibility is brilliant. It's kind of like the extent to which a consumer will allow you to cock up at least once.

13:46Ellie Norman:To some degree, it's your insurance or your pension, right? Yeah. And it compounds over time. That's how you last for 100 years. There's this whole... Sometimes I'm big on the camp of move fast and break things. But I think that as well as being very urgent and in high pace on the logic side, you also have to make sure that you have your brand defensibility there to ensure that this keeps compounding, right? Because at the end of the day, something's only a risk if no one's gonna advocate for it. And a lot of brands don't think about that. Now, I think this comes with a lot of CMOs right now, not being able to get a fair seat at the table and people actually valuing their opinion and their perspective.

14:24Ellie Norman:But Ellie, it seems like you've always been able to, from my perspective anyway, get people on board to understand the importance of what it is that we do. How do you go about doing that? Because I do know that it's an exercise of making sure that people actually understand the benefits of what's happening from the marketing team. When you want your spring break to feel like... And your kid's pool day to feel like.

14:50Elfried Samba:And your hotel bed to feel like.

14:55Rory Sutherland:Ooh, and room service to feel like. Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like.

15:01Ellie Norman:Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels?

15:03Rory Sutherland:It matters where you stay.

15:07Elfried Samba:Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton, for this day. I honestly think it is taking people on a journey. I think the worst thing you can do is just keep everything super, super tight and then be like, please, may we have this level of investment and it's going to do this. Whereas if you've taken that sort of time to go through the entire journey, really be very clear, this is a problem or here's our burning platform, from case studies, real-life case studies, this is kind of what's happening. Be super, super clear as well on where are the trends, where is the market going? And it's as much around not doing anything doesn't mean you stand still, we're going to be going backwards.

15:55Yeah.

15:55Elfried Samba:And it's, I think it's really sort of setting that out with a view to having a very compelling sort of picture of the future. And your CFO needs to be your partner in crime. And I think, you know, at Formula E, we've got a new CFO, Max, but he's so growth-orientated, it's absolutely brilliant that he's not an accountant in that regard.

16:24Rory Sutherland:So you've got someone with the right risk-reward calibration. Totally.

16:28Elfried Samba:And sometimes it's hard for people inside the organization, because at one point it would be, how can we save cost here? And then everything's like, we're cost cutting. And it's like, no, no, no. It's where can we be more efficient in order to invest? And actually where we're going to invest and where we're placing our bet is here. And having someone like that in the business is so powerful because we can be the yin and the yang together. Because I don't have a financial background.

16:59Rory Sutherland:No.

16:59Elfried Samba:And so having Max to really go through, okay, this is how we're gonna achieve it.

17:06Rory Sutherland:He understands opportunity costs as well as just costs. Totally.

17:10Elfried Samba:Whereas I'm like, here's where the growth is gonna come from. There's enough things pointing in the right direction that would indicate we need to be moving here. And this is the bet that we should be taking. And I think a great example most recently has been sort of Evo sessions. And for many people, it's incredibly exciting. Cannot believe we've done it. And for some people, it's I can't believe you've done that. And does it compromise X, Y, and Z?

17:43Rory Sutherland:What's the negative? What's the fear of that?

17:45Elfried Samba:So there was fear or there has been sort of criticism around putting creators into a championship car and allowing them that experience to drive it. I mean, they have some training beforehand.

17:59Rory Sutherland:I was going to say, yeah. Right.

18:01Elfried Samba:But again, it's really thinking about how do we co-create with creators? and the creators aren't there to promote the sport, but the sport is there to allow creators to create and to essentially be sort of an ecosystem around it. And what working in that space certainly does is it allows us to not buy reach, but actually to gain trust and allowing those creators an experience that isn't afforded to everyone and allowing them that flexibility and that freedom to then talk to their trusted sort of communities. It's just so, so powerful. And so, yes, of course, it always comes to those risks, but actually just seeing how quickly the landscape has moved into the role of creator economy, that sort of first mover advantage and doing something that isn't being done elsewhere just allows us to have much more agility being 12 years old.

19:16Elfried Samba:So we're not caught up in a lot of legacy and tradition. But really also then to be in a space where by working with creators, we're really able to build a community, so kind of two-way versus broadcast, but genuinely bring to life, what should the future of motorsport be? Because in a sense, with Formula One itself, the great success was creating a hinterland,

19:46Rory Sutherland:wasn't it? Because you always have, there's always a danger with a sport that you effectively become binary. There are people who are really into it, and there are people who aren't even adjacent. And so that kind of creator hinterland provides an on-ramp to people, I think. So maybe it is increasing reach as well as just trust.

20:06Elfried Samba:Yeah, so the reach is super important.

20:09Rory Sutherland:Yeah. And we obviously need to continue to do that.

20:14Elfried Samba:But it's doing that in a way which is less traditional to how it would have been achieved in the past. So certainly in Honda or Virgin Media, that reach was predominantly achieved through television advertising and paid media. The reach here is about where are we creating those opportunities to essentially generate earned media and to work with these creators. But it's much, much deeper than that because it's where is the affinity between those creators and Formula E? Who is their sort of audience? how do we sort of become part of their entertainment sort of diet and the sort of mix? Because the entertainment bit is so important for discovery, but the sport is where the sort of trust and the loyalty will come from.

21:04Ellie Norman:And what you've seen is that the fastest growing sports as of late, if you look at the UFC, they really dove into YouTube and storytelling all from the start. Yeah. So much so that there was a point when it became even more popular than boxing, right? But boxing actually didn't want to embrace it. It was only when the YouTubers came in. And to the point where Netflix's biggest pay-per-view is still Logan Paul versus... It's crazy how the creator market has influenced traditional sports. And it seems that from a Formula E standpoint, the team have welcomed it. They've understood it. This is the world that we're going into.

21:44Ellie Norman:There's no point trying to stick to the past. We may as well build for the future.

21:49Elfried Samba:100%. And I think there is room for all sports. And it's not an all, it's an and. But actually the way that we're going to achieve fame, the way that we're going to be sort of easy to find, the way we'll be easy to buy and hard to leave, is through how do we genuinely embrace a creator economy and go sort of all in with that sort of co-creation and having and providing the flexibility because again, we don't have all the answers. So we can come with a lot of knowledge about racing, sporting integrity, but they are coming with so much in terms of storytelling, storytelling, narrative, how we're building communities.

22:42Elfried Samba:And for me, it's where do those things come together? And as a result of that, what can we create together that neither of us could create by ourselves?

22:51Ellie Norman:And the funny thing is, so I'm gonna bring us back to what you said, something that made me change the whole way I see marketing, right? And you said it in a very blase way, but you basically simplified something that people overcomplicate, which is building fame, being easy to find and buy and being hard to leave. Yeah. That's effectively what a business has to do to be very great at marketing, right? It's like you want to build fame amongst the right audience so you know who you want to be with. You want to make sure that they can find you because that's where the reach comes into play. But then once you have them, you make sure you don't have a leaky bucket.

23:25Ellie Norman:Yeah. And you work hard as hell to keep them. Why don't people do that?

23:31Elfried Samba:I love simplicity. Yeah. I also love how you talk about fame and actually just expanding the surface area.

23:39Rory Sutherland:Yeah, it is. And also, it's... It actually... The other thing is, part of fame, you can actually plan for. Part of the value of fame is that it will bring in opportunities that you yourself would never have envisaged. So we had this very funny thing happen with... Just to plug this, this isn't my business, but I was very happy to take the idea. This is flat white or fuck off. Yeah. Which is the idea of a coffee shop which only serves one coffee. And the original idea, as I explained it, I wasn't trying to compete head on with Starbucks or Costa or anything self-aggrandizing about that. I just said at railway stations and at airports, where time is at a premium, you don't want to be behind someone in the queue who wants some customized ice-based drink.

24:23Rory Sutherland:And actually, two benefits here. Tap and pay, okay, means that if you don't have to actually ask people what they want. They can simply tap with their credit card, pick up a coffee, walk off. You can make the coffees at McDonald's, basically, for coffee, okay, or the early Ray Kroc McDonald's. And the other advantage in those places is that real estate is expensive, and of course, it takes up much less space. Because if you're only making one type of coffee, you can do it in half the space, and therefore, all your profits aren't going to network rail, hopefully. And so that was the whole idea.

24:56Rory Sutherland:And then when When we launched, when they launched and I came along, I don't want to take any credit. But when the launch happened, we turned up. Suddenly we got about four calls from people who said, no, no, no, no, no. This is what I need for conferences and exhibitions. And I don't think we could have sat there planning for ages, you see. It wouldn't have occurred to us. But they said, no, everybody comes out of the plenary session. Now, if you have a brand that says in advance it manages expectation, don't come here and ask for a skinny latte with oat milk. Actually, you can have oat milk.

25:32Rory Sutherland:That's the one variant. You can have oat milk. So we are vegan friendly. So that's the only variant. They just have two patches. This is the oat milk. This is the regular milk. That's it. Tap your card. Same price. Walk off. Yeah. And the conference and exhibition organizers said, no, no, this is the perfect thing to have as a pop-up, because we can now get 50 people, 100 people, all served with a coffee in about five minutes, rather than having a grumpy queue of 70 people who've come out of the plenary session, and there's some guy at the front who's half regular, half decaf or whatever, you know.

26:09Rory Sutherland:No decaf. As I said, flat white or fuck off. Can I have a cappuccino? No. The answer's in the name. Yeah. But what was so fascinating about that is that you will never have a monopoly on good ideas for where your business might be useful or where it might be popular. And so simply being famous turns the business in. It basically turns your potential customers into a kind of creative function for you.

26:35Ellie Norman:But then going back to the point, you started with the fame and then you started to understand where to be easier to find by the people that needed that specific thing, right? And then, now once you've got them, it's like, how do you make sure that they keep coming back and back and back? And I think that so many people overcomplicate things. I think there's an over-index or over-exaggeration on just reach numbers, impression numbers. I think that those are really important. But the quality of the engagement, the quality of the relationship...

27:07Elfried Samba:And it's context. Everything is always kind of context.

27:09Ellie Norman:It's all context.

27:10Elfried Samba:Yeah. And it's like not forgetting that. And that's where it's amazing to have so much data. Yeah. But actually the human context, common sense, which isn't common enough.

27:24Rory Sutherland:No. Somebody said brilliantly yesterday when I was visiting AO, I think it was, yes, you can't get a degree in common sense. No.

27:31Elfried Samba:That's why I did the University of Life. Yeah, absolutely right.

27:35Rory Sutherland:Yeah. No, no, no.

27:36Elfried Samba:But it is about always having that sort of context. And back to your point, it's like, well, you could buy X amount of impressions, but actually would you not rather have maybe less, but the context is so bang on that actually you're going to capture the sort of attention. And it's these sort of subtle nuances about, no, what are we really here to do? And it's so hard to get attention. Yeah. And so it's thinking about, well, how do you get attention to build that sort of fame to cut through?

28:07Rory Sutherland:Interesting. Interesting. Because one interesting thing about context, which was always lovely, I worked with a company called Herdify a little bit. And Tom Ridges said this fantastic thing, he said, which is absolutely obvious, but only when you've thought of it. He said, if I was selling solar panels, I'd rather sell five solar panels to people who all lived in the same street than 20 solar panels to people who lived 20 miles apart. And so, understanding those kind of network effects. Totally. And it's where, actually, it's where marketing in a bad customer environment, a bad company environment, sorry, has a really tough time.

28:46Rory Sutherland:Because we're dealing with complexity and, generally, the value of what we do compounds over time. So, the real payoff often happens three financial years after you've spent the money.

28:59Elfried Samba:And it's that tipping point of where do you get to that tipping point where everyone in my street's got a solar panel. Why am I doing this? I'm not part of the tribe. And, you know, at the human core, it's belonging. Everyone wants to belong. And it is finding how do you achieve that tipping point in the quickest way possible. Got it. And, you know, electric cars, 2014, when Formula E launched, I think 300 ,000 were sold. And now we're coming up to sort of 20 million, I think, sort of end of this year is forecast. And so that tipping point...

29:36Rory Sutherland:By the way, I mean, I don't know whether this is just Daily Mail journalism or whether there are malign forces at work. But you keep getting these weird press stories that electric car sales have fallen off a cliff. Basically, they're not true. No. This is the extraordinary thing. It's true, isn't it?

29:54Elfried Samba:For the first time in Europe, there were more electric cars sold than there were cars with a combustion engine.

30:02Ellie Norman:Whoa.

30:04Elfried Samba:But, you know, Reuters were reporting on that.

30:07Rory Sutherland:Yeah. In China, everything is electric. Yeah. Norway is freakish, isn't it? Norway has always been a complete outlier where I can't remember what it is. By the way, do you know the story? of this, which is, I think it's the band Aha. Is that right? Hey, we'll go with that. Okay. They are Norwegian. Can someone just check? They are. Thank you. Okay.

30:29Ellie Norman:Our Scandinavian correspondent is just as you.

30:31Rory Sutherland:Ah, perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay. So, apparently what happened... You're not Norwegian, though, are you? You're Swedish. You obviously hate them deeply. This is a really interesting thing, by the way. But be really careful about this. All Scandinavians are massively rude about each other. But if you're not Scandinavian and you're rude about one Scandinavian country to another, they will leap to their defense. Sounds like a family. It's like a family. It's exactly that. It's exactly that. Yeah, yeah. So in amongst themselves, there's deep rivalry. I knew that. I thought they were united.

31:06Rory Sutherland:Eurovision, they're all voting for each other. But anyway, Aha, who are Norwegian, bought some electric. This is how, you know, network effects happen. bought some obscure electric car while they were on tour in Switzerland, and they took it back to Norway. And there was a massive debate about what motorway toll should be paid, because the system didn't allow for electric cars. And eventually, the bander Ha somehow campaigned so that electric cars would be exempt from some sort of road tax or toll on all the Norwegian roads. And so that gave Norway something like a five-year head start in electric car adoption over anywhere else.

31:46Rory Sutherland:And it's now, I can't, it's something crazy. It's like 90 % or something of new cars bought in Norway are electric.

31:52Ellie Norman:And you always talk about the fact that, you know that the development makes sense. Because if we had electric cars first, and then somebody suggested that we do it the old way...

32:05Rory Sutherland:Oh, yeah.

32:05Elfried Samba:You wouldn't do it.

32:06Rory Sutherland:No, no. I mean, that went really viral when I said that. It struck me as a fairly obvious reframing, which is if all cars were electric and someone invented the internal combustion engine. This is nuts. You're putting this inflammable liquid in a tank in the back of the vehicle, and then you're basically blowing things up. And you say, well, can you refuel at home? That'd be ridiculous. You can't have a 500-gallon tank full of gasoline under a house. That'd be insane. No, no. You'll need these special places that sell Ginsters and M &S Simply Food, and you'll go to one and you'll refuel there.

32:41Rory Sutherland:And everybody would go, no, sorry mate, you're nuts. Yeah.

32:44Elfried Samba:Yeah, 100%. It's amazing the efficiency coming from an electric power train is what, 97%. And you know, because... And that's why there's no sound. Or the sound is so quiet because of the efficiency. So actually the sound comes from inefficiency.

33:03Ellie Norman:Oh.

33:04Elfried Samba:So when you look at a combustion engine, the most efficient combustion engines will most It's probably be about 57%, 60 % efficient now.

33:13Rory Sutherland:Is it as good as that? I'm not even sure.

33:16Elfried Samba:It depends. In a race, a combustion sort of top, top, top Formula One. Road combustion engines, you're motoring in your sort of 36%, 40%.

33:25Rory Sutherland:And you've got no regen, by the way, have you? Yeah.

33:28Elfried Samba:And that is why sound is produced, because it's inefficiency.

33:32Rory Sutherland:So I was talking on this podcast called Cleaning Up, and I said... I was explaining what marketers do, and I said, you can cite efficiency figures, which are very appealing to 10 % of the population. But I said, what you need is, for the other 90%, is a story or an observable concrete thing. And I said, I discovered that by accident, which is, if you go to a station car park after it snowed, all the gasoline cars, the snow has melted off the bonnet, you know, even if they've only driven from three miles away. all the electric cars still have snow on the bonnet, even if they've driven from 15 miles away.

34:10Rory Sutherland:So in other words, you know, the waste heat is so negligible in an electric car, you know, there is a bit of waste heat in friction. But I mean, there's this beautiful thing, you can just look at a row of cars in the snow, and all the petrol cars have no snow on the bonnet, and all the electric cars still do.

34:26Elfried Samba:It's fascinating, it's that shift in terms of, in some respects, everything had been centered around speed. Yeah. And speed and noise were hand in hand. And actually, it's now the future's very much around software strategy and intelligence. And that's where the progress is coming from. And again, it's that sort of reframing in terms of, well, what does the future look like? And it's trying to do that in a way that is compelling. it's going to capture attention be discovered and quite frankly it has to be entertaining because there's been a sense of compromise for far too long and there is no compromise it's it's where the performance is but that is quite a shift i think for people we all have that

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35:49Rory Sutherland:Go to your happy price. Priceline. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. I never thought of that, that the absence of noise is evidence of efficiency.

36:25Ellie Norman:So basically when car junkies are like, ooh, that sounds great, they're basically saying, ooh, inefficiency. But it still sounds great.

36:35Elfried Samba:And there is that sort of visceral kind of connection. And it's that noise, speed, danger. And that's what really kind of moves people.

36:47Ellie Norman:Oh, okay.

36:48Elfried Samba:So certainly as a marketer, I'm always thinking, well, what is that visceral connection when you're in the future? And actually it is around strategy, intelligence and kind of software. So how do you put the grit and the emotion into that?

37:03Ellie Norman:Yeah, I was gonna say, now, because obviously, you can see that cars are getting more efficient. And if we know that people loathe and have nostalgia over the sound, surely you can use the technology to recreate that sound and that emotion.

37:18Elfried Samba:Yeah.

37:18Ellie Norman:Right?

37:19Elfried Samba:And it's, I mean, even when you were chatting, um, Jaguar.

37:24Rory Sutherland:Yeah.

37:25Elfried Samba:There are so many of those automotive manufacturers that are really now thinking about the sound profile of the cars. Where does the...

37:36Rory Sutherland:The I-Pace had a... They went and didn't they? And they created kind of skeuomorphic sounds. And it's not... I don't think it's philosophically appropriate to have something that completely mimics a petrol car, because I think that's sort of dishonest.

37:50Elfried Samba:Yeah, but you want that futuristic profiling.

37:53Rory Sutherland:And also there's a sort of pedestrian safety question to it as well. But I mean, there is feedback. I mean, that is something that you might argue is, you know, that auditory feedback we got from driving a car is something you can recreate. But eventually it'll probably disappear. It's an interesting question. But it's rather like that old thing in design where you have to, you build in familiar elements from the old thing to effectively get people into the new thing. I mean, it is interesting, isn't it, that I'm sympathetic. I mean, I have various friends. I mean, Stephen Bailey, the designer.

38:33Rory Sutherland:There are certain people who effectively have so much love for the gasoline engine. And in a sense, for a golden age of car making as well. I think Clarkson's comment was, you know, he wasn't really interested in cars anymore because they'd become a bit like domestic appliances, like washing machines. I mean, the other way of looking at it is that, in all truth, the gasoline engine, except at the very high end, had run out of road. It was, you know... Now, what we're seeing here is...

39:10Elfried Samba:100 years old.

39:11Rory Sutherland:Yeah. And actually, okay, there were still fabulous cars being produced in terms of, you know, prestige cars. But the basic family car kind of hit a wall. Now, what you see with electric cars, because you can miniaturize electric motors much better than you can petrol engines, is a whole explosion in different types of mobility. So we need to include scooters in this. We need to include cargo bikes. You know, we need to include Waymo, driverless vehicles, all of which are really only made possible by electrification. So you might say that, Yeah, I have a sort of... I mean, just as... Okay, you'd be kind of soulless if you didn't have an affection for steam trains.

39:51Elfried Samba:Yeah.

39:51Rory Sutherland:Okay, you know. I get it. I don't want to go to work on a steam train every day, but you would be kind of soulless if you didn't recognize there was something glorious there.

40:01Elfried Samba:You can still appreciate it, can't you?

40:01Rory Sutherland:Yeah, you can still appreciate it, I agree. But at the same time, you say, well, cars are becoming like domestic appliances. Well, no one's suggesting that you have a petrol-powered Dishwasher, okay. I mean, there is a reason why we electrify things, and it is, to some extent, inevitable.

40:18Elfried Samba:You can always have more than one vehicle.

40:21Rory Sutherland:Well, this is the other interesting thing, which is...

40:23Elfried Samba:What are you doing on that day? Where are you going? What's going to best serve you?

40:27Rory Sutherland:Well, do you know what I actually want to have? Unfortunately, my wife's the obstacle to this at the moment. I literally want to have two cars, which is the Lotus Electra, which I've got, and a Microlino. Okay. So the Microlino is basically a replica of the Swiss bubble cuts. It's Swiss made. I think it's Swiss made, isn't it? The tiny little thing. And my argument is, you know, there are journeys where I go 25 miles. I want a great motorway car. And then there are journeys where I go to the station. Why would I not just go in a little Microlino at 40 miles an hour and plug it into the mains? And that would be...

41:01Rory Sutherland:So, I mean, interestingly, of course, three-year-old electric cars in a year's time are going to... Literally, ordinary people on median income can have something which was a supercar in the petrol age in another two or three years. Once the very best of today's electric cars filter into the second-hand market, you know, and actually a lot of... By the way, a lot of the negatives like battery degradation. It's all gone. It's basically bullshit. It's all gone. It doesn't happen. It's irrelevant. And anyway, you know, I mean, you know, in some ways, you know, you can intelligently say, well, you know, that's not actually a terrible sacrifice.

41:45Rory Sutherland:I've got a three-year-old fantastic car and the range is seven miles less than it was when it was new. You know, it's not, you know, I bought it for, you know, a third of the as-new price. And so there's something really interesting, I think. You know, I think there's something really interesting happening. But also, we haven't even begun to see the kind of inventiveness that might happen around particularly micro-mobility, I think. That's really interesting. I've got to ask, what do you drive, actually?

42:10Elfried Samba:Wow. Where do you want to start, Rory?

42:13Rory Sutherland:Go on. No, please. I need to know. We need to know the stable. The Ellie Norman stable.

42:18Elfried Samba:So, I am a very... I love cars.

42:22Rory Sutherland:Yeah.

42:24Elfried Samba:So I've got a 2011 Porsche 997 GT3 RS, which is wonderfully antisocial and fast. A little station run around car.

42:40Rory Sutherland:Yeah, interesting.

42:41Elfried Samba:Which again is the RS is in storage, locked away, comes out when the weather's lovely, European road trips, so definitely not now. Too many potholes, I mean, just... Yeah, yeah. No. And the same, a newer 911 Targa GTS. Wow.

43:02Rory Sutherland:So you hadn't got electric? No.

43:05Elfried Samba:Not at home.

43:06Rory Sutherland:Not at home?

43:07Elfried Samba:No. So drive, will drive sort of electric cars, but because my love is with the sort of older sort of cars...

43:15Rory Sutherland:Yeah, got to know, fair enough, yeah.

43:16Elfried Samba:It's just having that super quick station car, which is 20-minute drive to the train station, lock up, easy easing, and then nice cars for track days, European road trips.

43:32Rory Sutherland:It's fantastic.

43:34Elfried Samba:That, for me, is perfect.

43:37Rory Sutherland:It is interesting, that question, by the way.

43:39Elfried Samba:Go-kart, motocross bikes.

43:41Rory Sutherland:You've got that as well. Oh, yeah. That's fantastic.

43:44Elfried Samba:We are a family of...

43:45Ellie Norman:She goes to Barry's at 5 a.m. in the morning. She's basically Lara Croft, right?

43:49Rory Sutherland:Yeah, I was gonna say.

43:52Elfried Samba:Definitely not.

43:53Rory Sutherland:My father remembers there was a Pembrokeshire farmer in the 1950s, who I think I've got this right, had a Citroen DS, I think it was a Jag, I'm just gonna... If I've got this... No, hold on. Citroen DS, Land Rover Defender, a Mini Cooper, and it might have been a Bentley. Something like this. Okay. My father, my father saying, okay, you can't actually, he and his brother were just looking at this lineup and going, you can't really improve on that. There's a car for absolutely everything there. Absolutely everything.

44:26Elfried Samba:And the car that I do really enjoy, actually I went out in the safety car. And that's the electric Porsche Taycan, and that was absurdly fast.

44:44Rory Sutherland:Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.

44:45Elfried Samba:I mean, the acceleration is like violent, actually.

44:49Rory Sutherland:No, no, no. I deliberately didn't get the 900 horsepower Lotus Electra, because I thought it was... I've got enough self-awareness to know I'm not a good enough driver. I might see on a little launch on it. No, no, no. I basically said, look, I'll either lose my license or I'll wrap it around a tree. The great thing about being 60 is you do have awareness of your own limitations. You gradually acquire that. And I go, look, I'm just not that good a driver. I wouldn't know what to do. But I'm utterly ecstatic with that car.

45:25Elfried Samba:It's just astounding good. They're so, so good. And actually just a choice now. Yeah. Again, in all range of spectrum.

45:34Rory Sutherland:Yeah. No, no. And actually the extent to which the other thing I think we'll see is that because it's It's largely software, and the smaller manufacturers will buy this off the shelf and then tweak it. I think for brands like Alfa Romeo, niche brands, I mean, if I were a billionaire, I'd go and buy up old car brands like Gordon Keeble. Somebody owns that, presumably. But I'd buy up some of those kind of really interesting heritage brands like Jensen or Gordon Keeble. And then there's a fantastic... Have you seen the Longbow? Yes. This new British thing. So I'm going down to see them in a few weeks' time.

46:14Rory Sutherland:Anyway, we can put a picture up on the screen. But this is an absolutely classic two-seater British roadster, which is absolutely gorgeous.

46:23Elfried Samba:I mean, MGE is a great example, actually, of that as a brand being bought.

46:27Rory Sutherland:Being bought, yeah.

46:28Elfried Samba:All electrification. I mean, it's just... And that's the interesting bit, isn't it? When you have the heritage and the nostalgia within a brand. but how do you take that into the future?

46:41Rory Sutherland:Well, interestingly, Ferrari's now done that, haven't they? Which I thought they'd be the last... I thought they were the last brand that could... So, I mean, I think Aston Martin split... They created Lagonda as an electric brand, and then Aston Martin... I've got a vague idea they've done that. But, I mean, I always thought Ferrari would be the last to effectively buckle.

46:59Elfried Samba:I think it would be fascinating to see who buys that. And I remember when I was in Formula One, I think Ferrari changed their CEO. And there was so much conversation in the paddock about the CEO's background. And his background had come from essentially sensors and kind of data chips and much more kind of software orientated. And so it's super interesting to now see this kind of electric Ferrari, obviously with the Johnny Ives design in it as well. So I cannot wait to see who orders that. And is it...

47:36Rory Sutherland:What an interface, by the way. I know. Is it an entirely different audience? Is it a, I've got this car and I want this one as well?

47:46Elfried Samba:So I cannot wait to see that. And I'm really interested as well with when the Jaguar goes on sale. Yeah, me too. Who's buying that?

47:54Rory Sutherland:Yeah, the pink one, I've got my name on it. That's kind of, you know, the great thing about being Welsh is we don't really have any shame. But, I mean, I think they've done something very shrewd there, which is... And obviously, it's a bit like Dylan going electric. You annoy the purists. And sometimes it's necessary to annoy the purists, because the danger with purists, they are in love with your past. And every now and then, as musical acts, have to do the same thing. You know, you effectively have to say, you know, sometimes you're accused of selling out. Sometimes you're accused of losing your way.

48:33Rory Sutherland:People shout Judas at you. But you can't be 100 % customer focused. Or at least you've got to be focused on the future customer, not just the past one. And my issue was always, look, it didn't make sense for Jaguar at its scale to compete head-to-head with BMW, Audi, and Mercedes, who are, you know, volume makers, because anybody who's prepared to buy a Jaguar, a BMW, an Audi, or a Mercedes, will end up buying an Audi, a Mercedes, or a BMW.

49:02Elfried Samba:Yeah.

49:03Rory Sutherland:Just, you know, just by the law of Byron Sharp, you know, the scale is its own, you know, is its own force. So, it's the old recent route positioning the battle for your mind. If you can't be at the top of a ladder, you've got to build your own ladder. Exactly. You know, and so what Jaguar's doing is saying, so the idea of recent route, you know, Fantastic book, by the way. I think the best book. Positioning the battle for your mind. And the whole idea is that basically there are mental rungs. The consumer has a ladder, and if you can be on the top rung or the second rung, you're okay. But if you're on the fourth rung...

49:45Rory Sutherland:Where it's like the functional... Fundamentally, that's not a place to be. So the only thing you've got to do is build your own ladder. And my argument is, look, Jaguar isn't going to be a volume car maker. We would love Jaguars to be made in the UK still. And therefore, you can't really compete on price anymore. So what you have to do is find your own niche, which I think they did rather well. I mean, you know, I mean, the question really, I mean, you know, the question I'd ask is, you know, will Rick Rubin buy one? That's basically it, isn't it? Okay. Because, you know, if you sell one to Rick Rubin, you kind of solve the problem.

50:22Elfried Samba:And it will be fascinating because I think that's going to come. Everything we're talking about there is mindset. So that sort of traditional purist is mostly like, that is the only way. Whereas actually, is it much more about the mindset of people, irrespective of demographic, in terms of who just doesn't want to settle? Who's curious to kind of move forward, to experiment to try new things and that sort of open-mindedness and i think from again a marketing point of view everyone will talk about segmentation but rethinking it through that sort of attitude and behavior it just changes the dynamics of what realistically who is your audience where is the aspirational audience and then where does that actually kind of uh flow through into it is certainly the way that we're starting to think and to look at things.

51:17Rory Sutherland:And actually, engineers, as opposed to trad car lovers, nobody, any good engineer, effectively just acknowledges physics, which is that the electric motor is a glorious, simple, magically efficient thing. And, you know, that this is inevitable. You know, we've electrified everything else apart from perhaps lawn mowers and domestic heating. I mean, and it's, and I suppose, I mean, it is terrifying for the European car industry, which always had engine manufacturing as its defensive moat, didn't it? Yeah. It was simply too difficult to copy. And now you've created something which is actually pretty easy to copy.

52:05Rory Sutherland:I mean, the, I think the upside in terms of just a sort of Cambrian explosion in kind of evolutionary experimentation. I mean, I'd love to see a world where, you know, most people owned a cargo bike. Yeah.

52:18Ellie Norman:So to your point, though, about things being easy to copy, that's probably why these legacy brands that probably people fell out of love with are coming back, because when you have a lot of new players in the game, it becomes very difficult to make a choice and a decision. So once you have new people coming in, and you're seeing this with OpenAI and Google, right? And they came in and had all these other players, and then Google just said, you know, we're the brand here, we already have the users, we're just gonna fast forward our development, and everyone's just gonna come back to us, right? And what you're seeing now is, whenever you have a lot of new characters, someone's gonna abuse trust, and then people are gonna look for an anchor, and usually it's history, who's been around here forever?

53:04Ellie Norman:I can trust that, and then if they fuse the technology, and you become the choice. It makes it easier to buy, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think that sometimes having too many options, and if everybody's... I always say that, when technology or IQ is democratized to the point where the difference between a product is few and far between, the only thing you have is EQ. What's the emotions, right? How does it tell a story about me? Can I understand it? Can I resonate with it? That's when that comes to play. And I think that if you can collaborate and focus on brands that are in that space and you confuse them with the IQ, that's when you see some really exciting stuff.

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54:09Ellie Norman:With Venmo Stash, a tag on one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back.

54:14Rory Sutherland:With Venmo Stash, get up to 5 % cash back when you pick a bundle of your favorite brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash Terms and Exclusions apply. Max$100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo.me slash Stash Terms. I had a lovely experience. Last night, you know I'm a huge fan of the Moxie Hotel chain because I think it's the wonderful reverse benchmarking. In other words, do really well what most hotels don't do well. Everything else is done well, but in a minimalist way. And actually, I was at Citizen M last night. I'd just come back from Bolton fairly late, and I thought, okay, I'll just stay.

54:51Rory Sutherland:My wife's away. I'll stay overnight. And it's extraordinary because what you do is you do... This is the reverse benchmarking thing. You do really, really well what most people don't do very well at all, which is the cold communal area thing. And actually, you know, after you've checked out at a Cisnes M or a Moxie, you feel you can hang around downstairs all day. Whereas at much more expensive hotels, you're kind of rendered homeless. As soon as 11 o 'clock checkout, what are you doing here? You know? And then what you do, what marketing does, this is the whole USP thing, you focus attention on the area where you're different.

55:35Rory Sutherland:And then the area where you're different becomes comparatively much more important in the consumer's mind. And consequently, so in other words, it's that scissors and cane thing, isn't it? If you make the headline big enough, I'll make the story big enough. And if you simplify the message, it makes it easier to make a decision. And it makes it easier for you to choose. And my, funnily enough, my choice there is very simple. Even if it was someone else's money and I had a budget of£1 ,000, well, maybe not£1 ,000 a night. I think I'd go large then. But even if it was someone else's money and I had a budget of£450 a night, if it's one night or two, I'd rather stay at a Moxie or a Citizen M or maybe the Hoxton, okay?

56:17Rory Sutherland:I'd rather stay there than stay, you know, somewhere conventional that's 400 quid a night.

56:21Ellie Norman:Something that's very interesting about that, and you talked about the construct and the design, there was this trend going out on TikTok and Instagram saying that millennials have no taste. Because whenever you see a lot of the things that they're designing, it's very monochrome, very structured. there was a comparison between people in the 90s, like artists and celebrities, and there was color everywhere, there was style, there was individualism. Now it seems like everybody is more clones of each other. Uniform. Right? But it seems like when you have a hotel like the Moxie, that actually embraces individuality, design, something a little bit different, the purple cow effect comes into play.

57:01Yeah.

57:02Ellie Norman:Which is really interesting. And Ellie, you talked about the human culture.

57:05Rory Sutherland:But design is incredibly, in those places, His design is incredibly articulate because it kind of says, this time it's different. And so it's exactly like flat white or fuck off. The whole point of that ridiculous idea is that you do not turn up with an unrealistic expectation. Yeah. Okay? It does exactly what it says on the tin. Which is, by the way, so funny because when that ad, for people who don't realize that, That all comes from an advertisement that Howell Henry did for Ron Seal quick-drying wood stain. And the night the ad was going out, Steve Henry told me this, they were sitting there, head in their hands, going, we're just going to be ridiculed by the whole of London ad land.

57:49Rory Sutherland:You know, we've just done this ad where a man goes, it's Ron Seal, it's a wood stain that's quick-drying. It does exactly what it says on the tin. It partly was done by the necessity of a client who hated spending any money on anything which didn't any time that didn't feature the product. So it was... And what's so funny is that they thought they'd be absolutely... You know, it was a career-ending ad that introduced a phrase into the English language.

58:15Elfried Samba:And here we are.

58:16Rory Sutherland:But that whole question of... I mean, I was at AO yesterday and they said, they know how bad customer service is in Britain, they said, because all we do is we tell people what we're going to do and then we do it. and they've got nearly a million reviews on Trustpilot, and they're at 4.9 out of five. Now, that is actually, when you think about it, that's astounding. And they said, what's amazing, they do give you a bear sometimes, okay, which is cute, but what's amazing about that is they said, look, it's not like we turn up with flowers, but we tell people what we're going to do, we're clear about what we're going to do, then we turn up on time and we do it, and then we go away, And everybody's ecstatic.

59:01Rory Sutherland:And so I think there's that wonderful thing that design can do, which is effectively, unconsciously just frames your expectations. As soon as you walk into one of those hotels, you get, okay, I'm not going to ask my laundry to be done. I'm not going to expect room service. If I ask for a cup of tea, it's not going to come in a pot on a silver tray. I get it, right? Okay. You've now framed my expectations and now you deliver. and the wonderful, you know, when design thinking, you know, it's an affordance, I guess, isn't it? It's that wonderful idea of Rob Norman. Have you ever read that, The Design of Everyday Things?

59:36Elfried Samba:I haven't.

59:36Rory Sutherland:It's your namesake, of course. So Rob Norman wrote this book called The Design of Everyday Things and it's wonderful, this idea that the best design effectively makes it almost cognitively impossible for you to use the device in the wrong way. So he talks about a teapot and how you pour it versus those funny coffee pots where the handle's on the outside where you pour it by twisting it. And the design of the handle, without you even knowing it, tells you what to do. And the classic case of a bad affordance is a door that you push that has a handle rather than a push plate. Because you always come and you turn up, you look like a prat.

1:00:18Rory Sutherland:And then everybody outside goes, you push! And so there's a wonderful thing which you can take that idea much, much wider. And, you know, okay, flat white or fuck off does it with words. But you can effectively communicate expectations. And then if you meet those expectations, maybe take one little cute detail and just do one extra little cute thing.

1:00:40Elfried Samba:Everybody's pretty damn happy. But it's amazing when you get something that works, how it almost then becomes even more noticeable because in amongst so much stuff, it just doesn't work effectively. So my favorite thing is, I travel a lot, obviously we've got quite a good race challenge. I was gonna say, yeah. My favorite thing is, is there a plug hole near the mirror in the hotel for drying your hair? So how many hotels will you go into?

1:01:11Ellie Norman:Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

1:01:12Elfried Samba:It's a thoughtful design as to, do you have a USB charger by the bed for your device or your phone? Is there a plug hole there?

1:01:21Rory Sutherland:Swedish guy here, my one is hook on the back of the lavatory door, which is when you go to Scandinavia where there's a real design, you know, real design focus. I always joke about this, which is that, you know, country by country, when you go and close the loo cubicle and you're wearing a jacket or you have a handbag, okay? Do I have to put it in a pool of urine? Or can I hang it? Or like a shelf. Put your bag on. In Scandinavia, it's 100%. It's unthinkable for Scandys to have a loo door without a hook on the back. One of the weirdest ones, airport lounges, because you must be a familiar airport lounge user, where they go, we'll have loads of plugs, we'll have loads of tables, but we won't put the tables anywhere near the plugs.

1:02:03Rory Sutherland:Not together. No, no, no. The plug will be over there, right? And then we'll put a table over here. Who's the pilot? What the hell's going on? And then there's also that thing which I... What the hell? Someone who does airport lounges is in the pay of the coffee table industry, aren't they? Because you want something at laptop height. Yeah. All right, they have that business area where they have desks, okay? But that's like for the saddos, isn't it?

1:02:28Elfried Samba:You don't ever sit in there.

1:02:29Rory Sutherland:You never go and sit there, because that's like... That says, I'm a corporate saddo. I've probably got a spreadsheet open. So, exactly. You want to sit at the main bit of the lounge, but you want to use a laptop. Okay. So, there's always that weird area which basically says, I'm a sado. It's like the school chess club, part of the BA lounge. Sorry, I'm really, really upsetting your chess-playing users here. But you know what I mean? Yeah. And it's so funny because these things aren't that difficult. And actually, you're absolutely right. If you're a regular user, you get, bizarrely, you get genuine delight.

1:03:07Elfried Samba:Oh, so excited.

1:03:08Rory Sutherland:The weirdest one with hotels, I'd be interested to know your one on this, which is if you use the hotel laundry, and let's say you're staying for four days, there's a high likelihood you're going to use it again. But when they bring your laundry back, they never bring a bag and a form. Yeah. And funnily enough, someone said that they do, the only two places where they've encountered this is like the Dorchester and maybe I think it's the Jumeirah Group or something like this. But it's the weirdest thing. Your laundry comes back. You'd think it's the simplest thing. Whenever you return someone's laundry, take a new bag in a new form.

1:03:42Rory Sutherland:It's quite profitable. There is an element where hotels hate laundry because if it goes wrong, it's a living disaster because you have someone attending a meeting in their underpants or something. But if you get it right, it's actually quite lucrative. I've never understood this, which is, you know, you go three days later, you go, time to get a bit of laundry done. Which is weird, actually, because you don't really need it done, but it's the repulsion about having dirty clothes in your...

1:04:10Elfried Samba:Dirty clothes, the ability just to travel with hand luggage, never check a bag again. Of course, of course. Love that, because that saves time. But it is... You're right, it's that thoughtfulness of when your laundry comes back, There's a new bag and there's a slip. I also like someone that hides your cables. I'm not a shitter package as a guy.

1:04:27Rory Sutherland:So if you get it back and you get the shirts folded, you go, put that in there. Whereas, you know, otherwise it'll just be a total disaster. But it's just one of those weird pleasures, isn't it? It's one of those perks. And yet the bag and the form come back about one time in ten. Completely weird. Yeah.

1:04:43Ellie Norman:And Ellie, you were talking about the human context earlier. And one thing that I really want people to leave with is a better understanding of you, right? And your signature. We talked about signatures, we talked about the story about my hat, the fact I have five of the same hat, et cetera, et cetera. We're not going to go into signatures, but just to get a better understanding of who Ellie Norman is, right? So let's go right back to the start of your career. Marketing is described as one of those really difficult things that people think is easy and fun, right? So did you fall into the industry?

1:05:14Ellie Norman:Is there something about the industry that sparked your interest? Why did you decide to come into this space and...

1:05:20Rory Sutherland:By the way, maybe it is easy and fun. Yeah. I mean, Drayton Byrd always used to say, you know, this is a simple business made complicated by fools. And there's a little bit of truth to that. Yeah. It's also made complicated, I think, by the obsessive quantification culture, which is, you know, sorry, some marketers just need to get it accepted that not everything we do pays off immediately in a way that you can measure in a deterministic way. It's a probabilistic enterprise, you know. Yeah.

1:05:50Elfried Samba:And not everything that counts can be measured.

1:05:52Rory Sutherland:Do you mean that?

1:05:55Ellie Norman:So, earlier days of enrollment. Early days.

1:05:59Elfried Samba:Most probably, always a little bit of a rebel. So leaving school, I went to a brilliant grammar school. Kent's 11 plus. Where were you in Kent? Weald of Kent. Oh, you're Weald of Kent. Oh, right. Fantastic.

1:06:16Rory Sutherland:Cumbridge. Exactly, yeah. Kent Friends. Kent Massive. There we go.

1:06:19Elfried Samba:Practically neighbours, weren't we?

1:06:21Rory Sutherland:Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

1:06:22Elfried Samba:Toys Hill and where you live, very close.

1:06:25Rory Sutherland:Yeah.

1:06:26Elfried Samba:So I went to an amazing school, expectation that everyone would go to university. Yeah. And I think there's just always been this innate sense inside of me of there is always a different way to do something. Equally not having a clue what I actually wanted to do. Really disliking any form of exam taking. So, I left school. The condition was I had to go and get a job. Clearly. So, my first job was pretty much dog's body, do absolutely anything for the tiniest start-up whitening toothpaste company. But the expensive... Which one? Janina. Oh, right. So, it was like quite an expensive... Yeah, yeah.

1:07:11Elfried Samba:That was a really clever...

1:07:12Rory Sutherland:Yeah, 10 pounds of tube.

1:07:13Elfried Samba:Very different sort of tube, bottle, everything. But it was so brilliant just to start to actually observe how do things get done, again, trying to get, sort of, pick up coverage, all of those kind of moments, whether it was, I don't know, Fashion Week or this film premiere of just getting this toothpaste out to people. But I learned so much, and actually, from that, and this is, it always happens like this, I say yes more than I say no, because that's where opportunity comes from.

1:07:46Rory Sutherland:Yeah, yeah.

1:07:46Elfried Samba:So I was at a party, loved meeting, talking to people, and met a guy and he said, oh, actually, I've got a role, you should come and apply for it. So this was a design sort of agency, went and applied for the role, successful, then went into essentially my sort of five years of agency side account management. my client was Honda, which was brilliant. The day-to-day client then left, and they asked the agency whether I'd go into the con for six months. That turned into my seven years. And I think, again, any opportunity...

1:08:26Rory Sutherland:Do you know what worries me? Would HR allow all this stuff to happen?

1:08:29Elfried Samba:Right, I never would have got a job because I... No.

1:08:31Rory Sutherland:David Ogilvie said the same thing, by the way. He said, you know, I was a failed tobacco farmer, university dropout. He said, my CV when I founded Ogilvy and Mather wouldn't even get me admitted, you know.

1:08:43Elfried Samba:Like, had I genuinely applied for a job, I wouldn't have actually got through, because, you know, certainly back then, it was like specified, must have a degree, must have... Well, obviously, I didn't have any of that. So, genuinely, and that's when I say I feel I've been incredibly lucky, because I've been in the right place at the right time and said yes to these opportunities. And even when I left Honda, it was because I was fortunate enough to say, there's a job going, I think you should apply for it. So that sort of phone call has just meant that I've been in the right place at the right time.

1:09:25But I think underneath of that...

1:09:28Rory Sutherland:That's because you went to the party in the first place.

1:09:30Elfried Samba:Always say yes, because you never know what's gonna happen. You never know. No. And the same with this sort of rebel sort of nature. I mean, there's so much for me that will play it safe, but just this curiosity and this rebel nature that even if I don't know anything, I feel quite comfortable going, well, do you know what? I'll figure it out. So going for, I could have stayed in automotive forever. Yeah. I love it. I understand it. But, you know, the thought of going into media, entertainment and telco, why know nothing about that? But it's like, well, why not? What genuinely is the worst that can happen?

1:10:09Elfried Samba:And I think it's been a series of these moments...

1:10:16Rory Sutherland:Frighten yourself a little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

1:10:18Elfried Samba:Like, well, I don't know what an ARPU is, or I don't understand all these kind of funny words, but I can learn that. But what I can bring is some thinking from a different perspective, a core skill set of just how to get shit done, because a PowerPoint slide is lovely, but unless it's going to get into the real world, it means nothing. So actually that navigating relationships, how to get stuff done, take a team with you, you can take that anywhere and I can learn an acronym and I will ask questions as to how does the business work? Where does the revenue come from? Where's the growth come from?

1:10:57Elfried Samba:So going from like auto into media, telco, entertainment to again, then getting a telephone call

1:11:08Elfried Samba:from Liberty Media when they'd bought sort of Formula One to say, oh, we need someone to come and set up kind of marketing. I'd never worked in sports marketing and everyone said to me, you don't know anything about sports marketing. Well, it's not really any different. You know, marketing's marketing. But it's, well, what can we bring to make sports marketing more sophisticated? Because it's really, really hard selling cars, and it's really, really hard selling like mobile phone subscriptions. And so, of course, you adapt. You go and ask as many questions as possible and say, OK, how do we do this?

1:11:45Elfried Samba:OK, yeah, the model is entirely different. I'm not working with paid, but everything is about what are earned and are sort of owned, and there's a sprinkler of paper.

1:11:55Rory Sutherland:Of course, the fact that you know what you don't know is a weird advantage.

1:11:59Elfried Samba:100%.

1:12:00Rory Sutherland:And actually, most... I mean, this is something that terrifies me, actually, which is you look at the greatest people in advertising and half of them luck their way in. Most of of them are marketing the same. Most of them are autodidacts, in a way. And then you actually look... And I was researching this slightly nerdily for something I was writing. And you then look back at history and you realize that there's about a 50-50 split between the really brilliant people who are conventionally trained and schooled in something, and the people who are self-taught. Michael Faraday, okay, who invented the electric motor, okay?

1:12:36Rory Sutherland:I mean, he was basically just a random kid from a poor family who got a job working for Humphrey Davy or something. I think it was his book binder or something utterly crazy. And then started annotating the books he was binding. I mean, you know, all these people, it's a William Blake. You could just reel off the nose. I mean, Darwin wasn't a trained naturalist at all. Okay. And you realize that actually what we've done is that in the act of formalizing all this stuff, there's a small gain in what you might call, you make slightly fewer mistakes, but at the price of not having the breakthrough.

1:13:13Rory Sutherland:I mean, a third of the great people in advertising came from the post room or something. And the fact that we've lost that really scares me.

1:13:20Elfried Samba:When you would walk into the Wyden and Kennedy office in London, I love it. But there was a mannequin. And the mannequin was dressed in a pinstripe suit, bowler hat, and he had a briefcase. And on the side of the briefcase, it said, walking stupid every day. And that has just stuck with me so much. Back to the point of, I'm really aware of what I don't know. And I think that comes from a place of, I'm always wanting to learn more and more and more, but I'm so aware of what I don't know. And that drives my curiosity or the fact that I'll then go down like little rabbit holes. So, you know, clearly AI is here and I'm like, okay, how does this work?

1:14:09Elfried Samba:So I just want to play with it and start to sort of experiment and say, well, how can we sort of introduce this, or actually if we did this, what would happen?" Or, you know, I'll go and think, oh, maybe I should... Like, I've learnt so much over 25 years, I'm like, okay, maybe I should test myself. Do I know marketing or do I not? So I'll go and do Mark Ritson's mini MBAs. And I just love that. But that ability to be confident enough, say, I actually don't have all the answers, but...

1:14:41Rory Sutherland:Happy with ambiguity.

1:14:42Elfried Samba:I'm really comfortable with it. I always think in Formula E now, when I'm talking to people and we're recruiting, uncertainty experts are the people I love.

1:14:56Rory Sutherland:Interesting. Yeah.

1:14:57Elfried Samba:Because nothing is certain. The best we can do is provide clarity. But those people that are just comfortable with ambiguity, because everything is moving so, so fast, it's like, no, let's just kind of go with the flow. Things are always changing and they change even more so because we're 12 years old, we're a 220-person organization. Shit happens. You just got to deal with it.

1:15:26Rory Sutherland:And if you take the Netflix thing for Formula One, for example, that presumably was a left field thing. Was it completely?

1:15:32Elfried Samba:That was honestly a perfect moment because Liberty Media had bought Formula One from Bernie. So this was at the very beginning of 2017, January 2017. I think they completed the sort of acquisition.

1:15:49Rory Sutherland:The big dream was always to crack the US, wasn't it?

1:15:52Elfried Samba:Yeah. And Chase and Sean came in, Chase Carey and Sean Bratches, two like incredible men to work for. I then started a little bit behind the scenes in April 2017 with them. And a number of kind of proposals had sort of come in. And obviously it had always been a no previously. Very, very sort of secretive in terms of no one's coming in. And Sean was like, I think we should just do this, to your point. North America, really important. There were proposals from Netflix and a number of other streaming companies. And we just sat at the table. And it was a case of, why would we not do this? Like, Netflix, 2017, arguably still the biggest and the best storytellers.

1:16:40Elfried Samba:And, you know, there was conversation, our broadcast team at Formula One, absolutely amazing at live race broadcasting. And they were like, do you know, we can do this. And I said, you do this, but that's not what you're an expert at. And so why not work with the experts? Again, allow them into the Formula One world. Everyone was so, so nervous, but it's not in their interest to go so far that no one's not, that no one in the paddock is going to talk to them, right? Because otherwise it's not going to be a success. But the, doing the drive to survive, And the thing I'm most happy about was maintaining the conviction that at Formula One, there was sort of three or four of us that would see the episodes before it was kind of released.

1:17:36Elfried Samba:And I'm most pleased that we got to a place where the teams could only look at the edits where they featured. So no one ever saw the full episode. Because I think, had we made it in terms of everyone needs to sign off on this, it would have become vanilla and then the average would have just been so sort of reduced. Whereas actually, people by people, and so this is all about who are the characters, who are the heroes, the anti-heroes, where are the rivalries? Because people want to, again, feel this sense of connection and belonging and to kind of have a side with someone.

1:18:13Rory Sutherland:It was a double win in a sense, wasn't it? Because it broke the US and it also broke into a much bigger, more female audience.

1:18:20Elfried Samba:Hugely. And I think, you know, Covid was horrific for so many reasons. But actually the timing was lucky for Formula One. And I think a combination of the first Drive to Survive series was released from memory February 2019. And so we spent 2017 filming it, 2018 first one came out, and then obviously through 2019 championship, they were filming, and then that released in February 2020. So then when the world shut down...

1:18:59Rory Sutherland:You still had.

1:19:00Elfried Samba:If you remember, Last Dance, you had a back catalog. Yeah, Last Dance came out. And Drive to Survive. So then everyone discovered this. Two seasons, so essentially kind of 20 episodes, plus all of the work that Chase and us as a leadership team did to go racing again. So it was the first global sport to go racing again in the beginning of July 2017. So, sorry, 2020. Yeah, that's good to say, yeah. So, so early. 17 races, 13 countries. It didn't feel odd that there wasn't a crowd there because of the engine sound. So I think Netflix strived to survive, COVID and being the first global sport back with a really compelling, competitive calendar.

1:19:47Elfried Samba:And during the races which were cancelled, so I was in Melbourne when we had to cancel that first race and then, you know, we didn't go to Hanoi, China didn't happen, et cetera, et cetera. But we got all of the Formula One drivers to then actually do online racing. So, for the first time, people that were watching Drive to Survive were then actually seeing the Formula One drivers, no helmets on, talking, kind of taking the piss out of each other.

1:20:16Rory Sutherland:And the thing that was missing, particularly, I think, for a female audience without getting into stereotyping, was the interrelatedness. It's a bit like computing, which was uniquely male until you connected them together, wasn't it? When you had standalone computers, it was a total kind of male nerd fest. And then Steve Jobs came along. Yeah. And also, they became communication devices rather than standalone glorified calculators, I suppose.

1:20:44Elfried Samba:And it's, again, all of this just context and the storytelling. So, for me, as I kind of reflect and look back, I think a combination of rebranding the sport, which comes with its risks. I mean, there's so much advice of like never rebrand. But actually changing what it looked like, the logo signaled change, not dissimilar to what Jaguar are now doing.

1:21:11Rory Sutherland:What drove the decision to do that? Was that a Liberty Media?

1:21:17Elfried Samba:I spent the first four months and worked with an agency called Flamingo. I think they shut now, actually, but we just did this incredible ethnographic study. Wow. Which was absolutely fascinating in terms of clearly all of the symbols, the associations, and essentially where it got to was, um, Bernie had built such an incredible sport and his mind at the time to generate and put that together was phenomenal. But certainly over the last 10, 15 years, it had very much become seen as boring, super clinical, a little bit like maybe driving around the M25. the logo was a badge it wasn't part of how do you think about brands and an ecosystem not friendly in terms of kind of digital or sort of any of that and had many perceptions that were connected to an old formula one so in terms of how do we best signal changes coming when the evolution of the car technology isn't going to happen overnight.

1:22:33Elfried Samba:So, you know, the next rule changes weren't until 2021. They got delayed with COVID. Obviously, now we've got this set of rule changes, 2026. So then it's a case of, well, how are you signaling that this is real change? And in Western society, so visually driven, it was a case of, we know enough that if we continue down this path, we're not going to get to a turnaround position and essentially stop the downward trend. So yes, it's a risk.

1:23:08Rory Sutherland:Was there a bit of an American acronym drive as well? You have, you know, MLS, MLB, NBA. I look at US sports so much

1:23:18Elfried Samba:for how they've sort of done things. And again, just these sort of identities around it. So yeah, Formula One, it's not really user friendly when you're thinking about how you're showing up and where sort of culture is now and how culture is coming through fashion and music and kind of broader entertainment. I wanted to get Formula One to a place where it could be genuinely part of culture versus it just looking like it was stuck on. Yeah. And so, thinking about what does it need to look like? How should it work in different environments and cultures? So actually, how do you bring movement into it?

1:23:59Elfried Samba:How do you bring texture into it? How do you reverse and correct so much of the sense that Formula One had become very engineering and very kind of clinical and just had no feeling to it? Um, tone of voice, explored sound, smell, actually everything. And that for me, having that set of principles and then really genuinely thinking, well, what could this become? Then meant that when it got into which tactics should we do? No brainer.

1:24:33Rory Sutherland:Yeah.

1:24:34Elfried Samba:Drive to survive. Fashion collaborations, music. So just taking Formula One out of its kind of echo chamber, encouraging the drivers to be who they are as people.

1:24:48Rory Sutherland:Because it was effectively an automotive, if you think about all the sponsors, all the brand connections were all essentially sort of inbred, weren't they? Yeah. In a sense.

1:25:01Elfried Samba:And at the time, Ross who, Ross Braun, who is an incredible man. I was going to say. I think he's most really won about 40 world championships, like a phenomenal person, incredible sort of leader. He came into Formula One with a view of working with the FIA to look at the, essentially the rules of Formula One. And a lot of it was, to your point, engineers have been talking to engineers. And with that comes complexity and actually a lot more money. But so many of these things were invisible to people. So actually really looking at the rules with kind of Ross and the FIA was to say, well, how can you take some of that out so that the cost for teams to actually operate the teams was reduced?

1:25:53Elfried Samba:So a cost cap was introduced. And I think up until that point...

1:25:57Rory Sutherland:He's like the Jurgen Klopf, isn't he, of the business? Absolutely. I'm not remotely interested in football, but every time Jurgen appeared on the TV, I go, who is this guy? He's just like the complete human being. Yeah. You know, absolutely complete rounded human being.

1:26:13Elfried Samba:And I think the investment for teams had been so much, there was no team that was actually making a profit. Then the cost cap was introduced. I think it's from memory it started

1:26:24Ellie Norman:at$140 million, then to$135 million, then to$130 million.

1:26:32Elfried Samba:And then now you see that pretty much every single Formula One team on the grid, their enterprise values increase and they're now profitable. I mean, the cost cap has now just gone to$215 million because they've got new set of regulations, so 50 % combustion engine. Oh, that's allowance for the, yeah, got it. And now they've gone 50 % electric, so it's increased. What's interesting is our cost cap is... 15 million dollars and 100 % electric. So, what you see is a lot of manufacturers, again, coming back to... is the future of motorsport about software and intelligence and strategy. They can play in our sandbox.

1:27:19Elfried Samba:which is unpredictable, so brilliant for real-world testing. Software, program that overnight, and it's in your automotive fleet. Yeah. So, you mean the speed of diffusion is just... Oh, that race to road is absolutely phenomenal. And I love it. You go in a garage now, or if you've been...

1:27:40Rory Sutherland:Yeah, I love it.

1:27:41Elfried Samba:People on laptops. It is software. The engineers are phenomenal.

1:27:47Ellie Norman:Hey, I went to Miami, with Kelly and the team, and just being around the whole environment... When is the Miami Formula E?

1:27:56Elfried Samba:So we've just been, we were 31st of January, so our next race is Madrid, which is 21st of March.

1:28:05Rory Sutherland:And when are you back in London? Because I'll go on and say it's... Oh, August, come together. I'll come. I'll be around in August.

1:28:11Elfried Samba:15th and 16th of August.

1:28:13Rory Sutherland:Never leave the UK in August. Perfect.

1:28:15Ellie Norman:I'm telling the team that Formula E has the opportunity to be Silicon Valley's favorite sport. Yeah, software. Not only do you have the opportunity to get the creative economy involved, not only do you have the tech space involved. When you go and live and breathe the experience, it's phenomenal. And I was really excited when Eli got us on board to understand the sport. Why do people love it? And now with the Evo session, it's really started to bring it to life, right? And going back to a thing that we said before we wrap up, I've always learned that there's no one more dangerous in a boardroom than an intelligent person with a fixed mindset, right?

1:28:54Ellie Norman:Because they'll use all these words or use the fact that they're an expert or whatever to justify whatever bullshit that they've learned. But I think that...

1:29:02Rory Sutherland:Yeah, a lot of intelligence is actually directed towards self-justification.

1:29:06Ellie Norman:100%. And every now and then, you're in a room with somebody that didn't take the conventional route, they zig where everybody else zags, they're willing to go into the room and say, let me listen to everybody, and let's figure things out and make things happen. And I think you are one of those people, right? That you are very, very intelligent, by the way, but the role there is, the role is not for me to exercise my intelligence. The goal for me is to learn and make sure that we're making the right decisions to move forward based on what is just obvious, right? And so many people have got a handbrake on because it's all about themselves.

1:29:47Ellie Norman:And I see that with you. I see that with your team. And I know that a lot of work has gone into making sure you do that. How do you make sure, and this is more like an art to hiring people, because whenever I speak to leaders, the biggest challenge that they have is people. How have you found the best way to navigate that to be able to make sure that you have a world-class team around you?

1:30:07Elfried Samba:As an exec, we talk about, um, you want, you want people with, um, optimism, energy, accountability, and this sense of kind of agency. Yeah. And so for us, we, you know, our job is to make sure it's high support, but high challenge. And so when I'm looking for people, I think I'm really open-minded in terms of where they've come from. And because I've been less linear myself, I'm fascinated by people that have had interesting journeys or like little side hustles. And you see that kind of like grit and the entrepreneurial spirit. And that's why I love people who are those uncertainty experts. Because if you've been through like a very linear kind of rigid path, as soon as something

1:31:03Ellie Norman:goes wrong, and it goes wrong all the time, they are like... Panic station.

1:31:09Elfried Samba:Don't know what to do. Whereas actually, if you've had a few kind of things like thrown at you, you build up some resilience.

1:31:14Rory Sutherland:Yeah, yeah, interesting.

1:31:15Elfried Samba:It's like, you know what? We'll just go around this way. Or, okay, that didn't work. What am I going to take from that? Where are we going now? Um, and that ability to get stuff done and out in public that might only be 70 or 80 % there because we're never ever going to achieve perfect. I find that really hard because I have such a high expectation for myself and I'm really self-critical of, I could have done that better. But it is that sense of the momentum and the movement to do stuff, I think, is more important and having that sort of upward spiral of momentum.

1:32:01Rory Sutherland:Interesting.

1:32:02Elfried Samba:And getting all of these things compounding.

1:32:06Rory Sutherland:And you're still allowed to hire that, because this is the thing that terrifies me, that we're entering a world where HR tells you who to hire and then finance tells you you can't hire them anyway. And that business where I think you call them uncertainty experts, a certain amount of recruitment should be deliberately randomized. You know, the thing that worries me about all manner of things like AI is that the act of optimization brings with it uniformity. And nobody ever notices the cost that actually six optimal hires who are very similar aren't nearly as good as, you know, a slightly less optimal group of hires who are complementary and different.

1:32:52Rory Sutherland:Yeah.

1:32:53Elfried Samba:I think, I mean, you know the team, but I think I've got a really mixed group of like senior leaders in my sort of team. And I love that so much. It makes it in some respects harder because everyone's coming from a different point of view. but that's where the real genuine kind of magic is. And you do get the points of tension. But I've got, you know, a relatively new brand and creative director that I wanted to bring in-house because I'm such a believer in creativity.

1:33:29Rory Sutherland:Interesting.

1:33:29Elfried Samba:And having that inside of Formula E. But he's come from fashion. And I love it.

1:33:36Ellie Norman:That's brilliant.

1:33:37Elfried Samba:Because if you've come from racing, are we going to be too much? that this is how things have been done in racing. And we've got brilliant people that have that race experience. And so we can sort of understand each other's perspectives. Yeah. Um, and it is, it is about continuously doing that. And I think to you, to your question, are we able to do that? I love the fact that we're a relatively small organization.

1:34:04Rory Sutherland:Yeah, yeah. And the fact that you're so young,

1:34:10Elfried Samba:it still has the entrepreneurial spirit to it while starting to get a little bit of kind of processing.

1:34:18Rory Sutherland:That's how to AI-proof yourself, by the way, is be small and radical, not big and uniform. Because big and uniform is being commoditized. You know, the gains to sort of scale and, you know, are diminishing. By the way, I mean, I think it's also interesting career advice. which is there is a natural tendency for people, and we grew up with it, which is go and work first for a really big firm. Well, yeah, that probably made sense in about 1993, when there was actually a path and a reliable source of future employment and job security, and people would invest in your training, and, and. I'm not sure the opposite.

1:35:04Rory Sutherland:I mean, kind of, you know, the opposite's probably true now.

1:35:07Elfried Samba:In those smaller organizations, there's always a job description that you'll read. But the reality is when you get inside, do you know what? It's nothing like that. You are doing everything. And I'm just as happy cleaning the coffee machine because it needs cleaning when you're in the office with people as I am coming and having a wonderful conversation with you guys to being in the boardroom. It's like what you're exposed to and your opportunity is far, far greater in that small organization. And I think your learning and therefore experience that you get, you can just do so much more in a short period of time.

1:35:49Yeah.

1:35:50Ellie Norman:Do you know what?

1:35:51Rory Sutherland:Absolutely lovely.

1:35:52Ellie Norman:So it's great. I could have this conversation for hours.

1:35:55Rory Sutherland:Like much, yeah. You're incredible.

1:35:57Ellie Norman:Thank you so much for, I know you have a really busy schedule. Thank Thank you so much for making some time for us. And we'll have you here over and over again. So thank you for...

1:36:05Elfried Samba:Two of my favorite men outside of my husband. Oh, fantastic.

1:36:08Rory Sutherland:There we go. Yeah, fabulous.

1:36:10Ellie Norman:Oh, brilliant. That was amazing.

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