Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Max Osborne on marketing's next wave

25:11And I want it to work with different flavors, different preferences, different... How do you program for, say, variety? Because obviously, there's always that famous one, isn't there, I think, which is if you want to maximize calorific intake for minimal cost, you basically just buy lard or something. So obviously, you have to have variety, complementarity etc but you'd set all those parameters did it because the danger would be it just finds one optimal meal that you like and suggests you eat it all the time that's exactly what it did yeah yeah i didn't optimize for uh variety that actually didn't come up but you the way in which you do that is you just uh input that as uh a penalty inside the algorithm and so it penalized the outcome if you didn't offer variety then make sure you had variety um but what i had I don't know.

25:58I built this. I mean, this is going off. Of course, the other issue would be, I'm just being a real world pain in the ass here, but it would never suggest you bought, say, herbs or spices because they have minimal calorific value, but they have a cost. If that was required as part of a meal, it would include that. It would include that. Okay, fair enough. And that's why it would actually, that's why it optimizes not for a meal basis, but for your weekly shopping, so that it could then account for that. Got it, got it. Yeah. Otherwise, yes. really bland curries. You can imagine just now how complex it becomes.

26:32Like when you take into account shelf life, when you take into account time spent cooking, when you take into account... Human elements. Yes. It was an NP-hard problem, which is basically impossible to solve. And so that, I then decided to do my Postgres. I'd heard the same thing, that if you go into a large Tesco, or even actually a small Tesco, and the answer is you want to optimize your utility given a set budget in terms of what combination you buy of the 30 ,000 SKUs in the store, that someone told me, I think this is right, that effectively it would require sort of the world's largest supercomputer from now until the end of the universe to actually optimize it.

27:13Because there was so... Some mathematician will now, no doubt, put in the comments that I'm talking complete bollocks. But the actual question of what you buy in a supermarket without using some sort of heuristics, It's a little like the thing that technically there are 80 ,000 drinks you can have at Starbucks, but probably 75 ,000 of them have never been ordered by anybody. Tesco is actually a really good store. I use Tesco for this app because they had a public API that you could pull into and pull from. So I was able to get the data on all their offerings, all their different products they were selling, the price of those.

27:51And they had limited nutrition information as well on side that. So some had to get money and plug in. Something I tried to push with them at one of the preferences that people asked me for was the environmental impact. Got it. That became its whole thing for about a month of trying to build this thing because just trying to track the environmental impact of different produce is just impossible. But anyhow, to the story of bottleneck is I eventually launched this app in 2017 after of building it for about three years. And I put my life into this. And I'd been using it myself. And I did a whole post-grad to understand the best way to run an algorithm to do this the best way.

28:34And no one used it. There was just no pickup of it. It's such a behavior change to be able to use an app like this, to be able to change the way you do your shopping. There's an interesting problem there, by the way, which is that I'd always assumed naively that the bigger the idea, the less marketing it required. And then I suddenly realized if you've got a really big idea, it requires a lot of behavioral change. And if you've got a lot of behavioral change, it requires a lot of marketing. Exactly. This is why I thought you'd find this interesting. It's a brilliant idea, by the way. I mean, logically, who wouldn't use something that basically saves you an appreciable amount of money a week while giving you a perfect diet?

29:16The only audience that it would have potentially worked for that, now that I've gone for it more, athletes, exactly. Not the really rich ones, I guess, because yeah, but you could optimize for all kinds of things. They would like this kind of thing. Yeah. Because I was selling it to students and they were just like, well, we have a weekly shop that we do together. I was like, oh, I've not really thought about how we optimize that when you've got different people that becomes, oh, it's even more complex. So my brother, obviously, he was the first in our family to go away for university. I stayed home.

29:50And one time I went to go visit him at the dorm, and him and his housemates were almost like go shopping in packs. They'll all say, okay, we've got 15 pounds each. Let's pick up some stuff that's going to be for the household. And every time they took something, they'll reduce it from the calculator that they had. And the advantage of doing that, of course, is you can buy something like a bottle of vodka between four fits within your budget. A bottle of vodka yourself doesn't. Exactly. So they were able to all have the countdown and then check in and see, okay, so where are we at? How much have we got?

30:21And they'll collectively shop that way. So it's almost like... There's a use case in that where that could have been useful. Yeah. Yeah. So it's almost like humans... That would have solved your banana problem. You just have to have the same, you know, because three quarters of a banana, that's actually... It's quite hard to order 3.6 bananas from Tesco though. It is. So how do you go from that to like this step? Yes. Okay. So building something like this, I built up a bit of a name around the university by those that were more entrepreneurial as someone that could build apps. I thought you were going to say like banana boys.

31:00Not quite. By the way, do you think it could succeed now? Was it just ahead of its time? I mean, when there's a cost of living crisis, okay, the government could actually issue... I would love if anyone out there wants to build this, I'm going to champion you all the way and give you all the tools that I built to try and amplify that because I think, yeah, it would be super valuable. It could work now. Because, I mean, one perfectly good role of government, which not even libertarians can object to, you know, is just providing people with better information. Do you know where the simplex method gets used?

31:34It's this kind of thinking. It gets used in pet food. How can we have all the nutrition that pets need in the cheapest way possible at scale? And they just get all the ingredients. Those algorithms get used in this kind of way. Actually, I suspect it works better for dogs than for cats because cats are much more finickety about what they eat. Dogs will basically eat anything. They would use the same kind of techniques. They would have used them at war as well. How can we make sure that our troops have - Resources, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, if you're looking at it from that scale, the government should be able to think about these kinds of things, but then that might go against other initiatives.

32:11But how this landed to this then, and the irony of all of this was then my co-founder, who then approached me with this idea of this, that, so I didn't actually have the idea of this, that. He said, I'd love to have an app, like a Tinder swiping environment, where you swipe left for this and you swipe right for that. Something where you could ask questions to the public and they can help you choose which shoes to buy, which boxing team's going to win a boxing event, which pub we should go to with our friends this evening. And I was like... So it started as a B2C idea with an interface, basically.

32:46Interesting. And it really, like, I didn't necessarily take it all that seriously at that time either. I was still thinking about this food app. It's actually not a bad... Actually, in fairness to the guy, it's not a bad idea because you have those coordination problems. Now, you might argue it doesn't sufficiently capture the extremity of preference. Because it's only basically, it was measuring acceptable, not acceptable, was it? Or two comparisons. Got it. Got it. Okay. Well, there's a lot of really fun stuff you can do with that. But the story here is that... Yeah, yeah, yeah. They say the exact same story as that.

33:25we got hundreds of users within the first few days and in the first few months thousands of users and within the first few years we had hundreds of thousands of people using it every single day the interesting thing about that though is it seems like when you give people a lot of information to ultimately control their life they don't want to use it but when you restrict them to this or that one or the other they find it a lot more easier to actually like adopt it was just a bit of fun really it was like a little gimmicky thing and then went viral It's a very interesting question, isn't it? Which is how many alternatives you offer, which is one of the things I...

33:58Someone was talking about AI, and they suggested that the role of AI was to say, effectively, I need a toaster. This is the toaster you want. And my hunch was, and I said this, I don't think that'll work. I think you need to present them with two, three, or four, maybe five toasters and say, these are the relative merits of each. Now make a decision. because I don't think we find it easy to... A series of binary comparisons there is super helpful. Interesting. That's really interesting, yeah. So, like, the same way you rank chess players, there's always one against another. There's this approach to measuring that called ELO rating, but ultimately you can have, like, A versus B, B versus C, D versus E.

34:40Got it. That would assume transitive preferences, wouldn't it, I think? But anyway, we'll... In market research, they would call this conjoint analysis. and they use that to understand actually what drives preference. Is it the price? Is it the color? Is it what is that component? You've probably come across a really interesting company in Ireland. Epic Conjoint, have you come across those guys? No, I haven't. They do it at speed, which is really, really interesting because the problem it always had was that it was unbelievably tediously slow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And fortunately, you can now use it.

35:16They've somehow accelerated the process. I'll give you a funny story as to a use case of Conjoint that we first started with. But the story of this actually was very much a series of discoveries, a series of bottlenecks. So we started off as a social media platform. Because it picked up so quick, we thought we were going to be the next big social media platform. We thought we were going to be the next big Instagram or whatever it might be. But Instagram actually launched Instagram polls in 2017, and that really popularized around 2019. So whilst we had picked up this user base, we came to realize quite quickly that we were just a feature and that that wasn't really a sustainable revenue or a sustainable future for our company.

35:58Do you know what this reminds me of? So sorry to butt in. Go for it. But I remember the early days of like crypto, right? And blockchain, right? We had a crypto period as well at one point. Yeah, yeah. I think we all had a period. Remember, we're going to look back in history and realize that people were spending hundreds of grand on like eight photos. Actually, I've got a fascinating learning on crypto. Let's bring it back to that. Yeah. Now, like, it sounds crazy, I saying that out loud, but people were literally wearing it as a badge of honor, right? Yeah. And they spent a hundred thousand and they even changed that profile picture to almost like, it's like a trophy, right?

36:34It went into this crazy time, but I go back to the point that what happened with blockchain is that the people that were the early adopters were so convinced that people will love it because it gave people choice and control. But really going back to the point that people don't actually want full control. They want some form of like, I get to pick from a limited amount, from a curated amount of options, right? And then when you go back to the whole idea of what they call it, Instagram launching polls, it's kind of like what's happening right now with AI. And every time somebody sets up a business that is AI driven, and chat GPT evolves and kind of like dwarfs those businesses.

37:15And that's gonna continue to happen, right? This is gonna see what businesses are getting funded with AI and it's gonna evolve that machine to be able to like swallow that whole, right? So I think Sam Altman said something that a lot of people are making bets or building businesses based on their understanding of AI today, right? Yes. Not what it's going to be, right? Which is why as you're almost like saying that story, you can almost see the eventuality of what's currently happening right now, right? It's just a different thing with a different beast that's almost got us like swallowing all these companies home, right?

37:50But back to your point. That thing that Johnny Ives developing, which you wear around your neck, interests me because it's basically an interface bed. In other words, and by the way, I think it's a plausible one. In other words, you know, will... They will just be talking with it. So the idea is you wear it around your neck. It uses the processing power of your phone. So it enables it to be very small. One thing that I think needs to terrify every existing business is that they're never conscious of the extent to which their success is dependent on habituation of the consumer to their interface.

38:26Yeah. Okay. Right. Amazon, for example. Okay. Now, I think they developed Alexa as a kind of defensive moat in case voice became the mode of shopping. Okay. They may have just done it too early that actually, I suspect what will happen is the combination will be a mixture of an AI voice-driven thing that we mutter to these things. You know, can you bring up my rail ticket, please? And then it appears on your phone. but that when you change the interface, you change the context, and when you change the context, you change the behavior. And when you change the interface for everybody, everybody's behavior changes.

39:03It's not like normal behavioral change. It's a bit like the Argos catalog, okay, which is that the Argos catalog succeeded because you could actually decide what toaster to buy before you got to a shop, okay? It changed the place and frame within which you chose, okay? EasyJet did the same. You didn't go to a travel agent anymore. You phoned up. But in the early days, EasyJet planes had the number 0800, whatever it was, down the side. Because although they started, I think, in the early 90s, there wasn't a web for the first few years of EasyJet's existence. But what was weird about it was you phoned the airline.

39:40You didn't go into a travel agent. Yeah. And that's kind of interesting because where you, you know, if you're Google, you have to, or something's in Amazon, you have to be genuinely terrified. in the sense that what happens if the behavior that's been the, you know, the default norm for ages, you know, suddenly basically shifts. That in other words, people are making the choice in a different setting. Augmented reality, virtual reality, that little necklace piece. Hey, but they're also talking about, I saw, obviously, Apple just made the announcement with the like liquid screen and all that conversation, right?

40:17And then somebody made an interesting argument, right? Because a lot of people were talking about the fact that it was lackluster, like what is it happening? But the point that they were raising was it's almost like they're priming people for the technology to come, right? That actually the view emulates what the, almost like the glasses of experience is going to be like. So once you get used to seeing like things off a flat screen to almost like seeing it in a more dynamic way, it actually primes you to be ready to actually see that. Change of behavior. It's a change of behavior. It's like a Trojan horse getting us used to that.

40:52So going back to Rory's question about whether it was too early, maybe they've identified that we've launched our product. People are not ready for it because they're just not used to the screen experience. Let's just give them the screen experience on the platform that they understand and they know. And then it's easier to make that next step, which is super intelligent. I wonder if you, I wonder if blockchain and Bitcoin would have been more successful if they developed what I call a skeuomorphic interface, where it just looks like a banking app. Okay. Well, it should have been. Coinbase kind of did that, right?

41:27Yeah. I guess you're right. That's why a lot of people adopted it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I love the idea of skeuomorphism, which is the idea. It's the reason a digital camera had to click, because if you press, there's no reason it had to make a click. But if you press the button and nothing happened, people were weirded out. And it goes back to Greek temple design, where a lot of the carving of the stone was designed to look like the wood from which temples were originally made. Okay? And so, classic examples of skeuomorphism would be dials on digital radios, for example.

42:01Is it not like why toothpaste or stuff tastes how they do? No, it's the idea that you build in a kind of element from the previous technology into the new technology to make it seem more familiar, effectively. I mean, this is ties when I bring to bottleneck. I want to give you this context to what brought this that here, because I think they're really interesting bottleneck that'll be interesting for us unpack is, how do we get this on science to work better together when it comes to measuring brand, investing into brand, giving people the tools to expand stories of great brands? Because you almost you don't want to change the way in which people do things all too much.

42:47Like, change in behavior is so difficult, but you also do because they need to catch up and evolve to new times. So what is that journey and getting them through that? Of course, by the way, there's an inherent problem, which is if we're exposed to ads, not the ads that are actually effective, but ads that are accountable and attributable, okay, it will create a gross distortion in the digital advertising marketplace. because there's some things we buy on impulse, okay? And those are obviously very highly attributable. I see an ad for something, you know, a hat on ASOS. I buy the hat on impulse.

43:25It gets delivered. Wonderful. They can now make the case for advertising that hat a hell of a lot more. But if it's an ad for, let's say, a new dishwasher detergent, okay? Now, okay, theoretically, I suppose you could add to my Ocado basket. It would be a theoretical way. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at that ad, remember it when I next get to the supermarket and buy it. And one of my problems is that I never see any Unilever or P &G ads online. Okay? Now, they are the world's largest advertisers, and I spend quite a lot of money on those products that they make. But the reason I never see them advertised online is not because the advertising wouldn't be valuable or effective.

44:09It's because it's not directly attributable because it's something I buy indirectly at a retailer at some distance and remove from seeing the stimulus, okay? Yeah. And consequently, we'll end up with a weird problem where a hat on ASOS will always outbid Unilever for advertising, not because the advertisement is inherently more valuable, but simply because it's easier to prove its efficaciousness. Yeah. Okay. Now, so let's take a really high margin product, which could be a high lifetime value product, like subscribing to something, or just a high margin product. I gave the example, I think, on the last podcast of high-end women's hosiery, okay?

44:53You know, where the margins are probably 95%, okay? They can justify basically bidding a very, very large amount for my eyeballs. I'm assuming I buy high-end women's hosiery because the money they make from an incremental sale is enormous and they can entirely prove that the ad led to the sale. Okay. So in a really efficient advertising ecosystem, as I said, I'm always going to see more luxury goods advertising, more advertising for high-end products because, you know, there's more margin in them. Okay. And that's true in the real world of advertising. You know, there's a disproportionately high amount of advertising for jewelry or luxury holidays.

45:34But I do also see ads for washing powder, all right? Which is good because in a perfect advertising environment, I'd see advertising roughly in proportion to where the contents of my wallet go. But in the digital environment, if it's about attribution rather than about ultimate effectiveness, okay, I'm going to actually be – And I think that's exactly what we see in digital advertising. We see a very weird subset of the whole economy very heavily advertised. And another subset of the economy massively under-advertised. I mean, I don't see... I actually love cars, okay? But I hardly ever see any...

46:16And, you know, they're a reasonably high margin purchase. But I virtually never see any car advertising online. And so I don't... It's a different play. each business model will have a different approach. Like what you have with Gymshark, that they fundamentally had a different business model. They really leaned into the community and built flywheels off the back of that. But you could argue maybe there's a high margin within their products. They could have gone down a similar play, but they didn't. And that flywheel, I can come onto it in a moment. But I don't think that this... I think a lot of people in marketing think that we live in this personalization era where you have to have effective ads reaching specific people at the right time.

46:58I think that is done. I think we have moved into a community era and the quicker people move into that, understand that and work with that, the more they'll succeed. And that's something that you had done within that example, actually, really well. Yeah, yeah. I always talk about the fact that, and I think we talked about it in the last part, that in a world when IQ becomes democratized and everybody has access to the same tools, product quality. UGC, for instance. Yeah, yeah. That is just like an extension of influence marketing at scale. It's the community speaking and championing a product.

47:32And that is really, really important. And then brand can pick up on that. Yeah, I mean, actually, you know, social influence in that way has always been a perfectly reasonable heuristic, okay? Not just some... I mean, you could argue, okay, what is reliable information as distinct from information? And it's someone with reputational skin in the game recommends something. So if you're, you know, what's his name? James Hoffman and coffee. Okay. You cannot afford to. You could recommend something that was a nine rather than a 10 because you were paid to do so. But under no circumstances can you afford to recommend something that's a six.

48:12Okay. Then there's also, you know, the perfectly reasonable inference. a lot of people who are pretty similar to me have arrived at this subjective consensus around something. Well, it's not perfect information. By the way, sometimes I think you can get weird runaway effects where things just become fashionable because they're fashionable. You know, that's undoubtedly true in fashion, unsurprisingly. You know, things just arbitrarily become cool suddenly. But again, it's not a totally unreliable heuristic, you know, for making a purchase decision when there's imperfect information. It's particularly potent, of course, when a large part of the value of the product is its display value to other people.

48:52I might continue on the story of how this, that came about. Oh, please, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. So we had the social media platform. It grew to a place. We then saw that influence, sorry, Instagram, launched Instagram polls. Whereas we were just a feature. Thought, okay, what can we do with this? At that same time, this is now 2019, In 2019, SAP had just acquired Qualtrics for over a billion. And we had picked up investors on this journey. And so they were telling us to look at this. We of course had built up this whole infrastructure around collecting survey data. So is there something we could do with this?

49:25Could we become this gamified Qualtrics? And so we ran a couple of tests just to see whether that's worthwhile. So we had this bottleneck. We were like, okay, how can we discover what's the next thing? We ran ads from Instagram that went to this, that surveys, type from surveys and survey SurveyMonkey surveys, and we were able to collect 20 times more data than them. This was never planned to be this collect survey data at scale. It was an unconventional journey that led to this 10x of magnitude better ways of collecting data. Interesting. The obsession over gamifying the survey experience over two, three years, had led to us building an environment where people actually enjoyed answering the survey questions.

50:03It was apples to apples questions compared to those. So, okay, there's something here. What can we do with this? And we used that narrative to say to our investors, there's an opportunity here, could we get some more money? We'll build out a SaaS infrastructure, try and compete with the likes of Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, we'll see what we can do. Spent a year building this infrastructure and then again tried to start selling something, but now there was no one to buy it. There was no clear use case. Our value prop was you can get 10 times more data with us than you can with anyone else. Oh, but we like SurveyMonkey or we like Qualtrics.

50:35And so, we then sold to events companies, marketing companies, consultancy firms, you name it. One of our first examples was actually using this conduit analysis approach with a chicken wing festival. And the theme was swiping your favorite chick to help them rank their best chicken wings, which the owner of that chicken wing festival actually became one of our investors, which he loved. And there's a hilarious story in that in itself. So, in a sense, what you'd done is you'd amplified the survey in the sense that everybody else was focused on the results, but not on the user experience. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

51:09And actually, funnily enough, in that journey, we also had another learning. This was through a failure, but the failure had a great learning. We integrated with a cryptocurrency because we thought that would be a play. We were like, we gamified the survey experience. We've got this whole community that love answering questions. Let's integrate crypto in some way. And so the crypto was then used to reward people that answered questions, that asked questions, and that took care of the community, so would report things if they were misbehaving and so forth. The usage spiked for about a week and it dropped massively.

51:44Like the whole, it just died. And the more we looked into that, we realized that people before were just intrinsically taking part in surveys, asking questions, having a good time. And now they're doing it extrinsically for the sake of getting money. So it's become work. What had been a hobby then became... I mean, I think there are a few behavioral science experiments in that, which is that tasks for which you are paid become less enjoyable by being paid to do it. And when we started entering into the market research world, that was something that we had as a real confidence boost behind us, which was the whole market research world is based off of this panel industry where you pay people to take part in surveys, which now we do as well.

52:31So I can't shit on that all too much. Excuse me. But we've kept the gamified survey experience. And there are other things that you can do around that to ultimately reduce voter fatigue. So when they go through that, they're having a good time, which shows up in the data that they're less biased, they're more likely to be truthful when they're answering surveys in that style. So we then went through a year of trying to figure out who can we sell this to, who can we add value to? And this is when we came into the influencer marketing space. Got it. So it was winter 2021, 2022, an influence marketing agency asked us if we could do brand lift for them.

53:08I said, sure. What is brand lift? And like the irony of now I'm seen as like a global leader when it comes to brand lift that I didn't even know what it was four years ago. Not even four, like three years ago. And they explained the methodology, exposed group, unexposed group. You hope those have seen the content more favorable. They knew that we were collecting data by sending ads on social. So I asked them, could you send us those audiences that have been exposed to the content out there? And we ran a brand study for them. What's the time delay between exposure and... And unexposed. So how long do you leave it before you actually do the...

53:51It's a good question because that does have an impact as well. We, without necessarily having a process at that time, just did it within about three days off of exposure, which actually strikes quite well. You don't really want to leave it much longer than a couple of weeks because now they've been exposed to other ads and that might influence their opinion. But you also don't want to do it necessarily right afterwards either because that has other things to take into account. We've got three different ways in which we collect data and some of them actually do do it instantly afterwards. some of them have a delay.

54:21There's pros and cons to all styles. But at this point, we were able to deliver brand lift in a way where it was the verified audience. So for the very first time, they could actually prove the impact of influencer marketing. Because up until then, when they were doing brand lift, they were going to a legacy research firm that would be forcing exposure. They would get someone to watch the ad and then take part in the survey. Yeah, right. Yeah. Because that's so realistic. And that would be the panelists that's paid to do it. It wouldn't be the community that actually had an affinity towards that creator.

54:52Or you'd go to the platform and do on-platform brand lift, which was the actual audience, but it'd be amplified through paid. It wasn't necessarily the organic audience. And then each platform has their own methodology, which has different biases. And so we were able to provide an apples-to-apples approach across all platforms. The likes of Meta, which is actually how Elf and I know each other, as Bianca from Meta introduced us. They were using us from fairly early on already to prove the effectiveness of their influencer activity. Because they... By the way, which is so insane that the platform that's kind of like not just birthed, but scaled this industry still needed to work with another company to be able to determine the true value of it.

55:39It seems like influencer marketing there was still in the gray, right? I think this is where it comes quite nicely to one of our values at this that is to co-create. And the way I see that is one plus one equals three. So I've studied mathematics, but I still believe one plus one equals three is the right way of looking at things. And what I mean by that is when you bring different schools of thought together, you can expand the opportunities and do much better work. with the likes of Meta, I suppose they were looking to have like a third party do the measurement for them because marking their own homework doesn't necessarily work.

56:19But beyond that, we were able to provide an apples to apples approach that worked across their activity when they were promoting their MetaQuest headsets on TikTok, on YouTube, and on Meta. And the value that we were able to offer to the likes of them is actually we were able to get insights that could bring their creative teams together with their talent selection teams together with their media strategy teams together with their data science teams and help them speak the same language so actually also closing the loop which is always bothered me which is that i don't think that many digital advertisers adequately feed back to the creative teams and and just to talk about we're just talking about like um the gem shark thing and a lot of the times people think that the reason why the brand did very well is because we did influencer marketing or social noise because those things all complemented each other and spoke to each other.

57:10It's almost like you knew the insights that you were getting from the influencer end and how that informed what you did on the social end, which informed what you did on the paid end. So actually how they all interconnect and work closely together is actually the secret sauce. I actually want to touch on that is like the essence of what made influencer marketing successful is its ability to influence. And that I believe is the currency of the marketing world now. I think we, in the mass media era of 1920s to 1990s, all about reach. Think of like a speaker phone, reaching as many people as you can.

57:44Internet comes out, you move into the digital space. It's now this personalization era, specific creative to specific audience is all about effectiveness. Effective ads no longer cut it. You can have the most meaningfully different type of creative type of brand, but everyone's so good at that now. People are going to be apathetic towards that. It's not going to resonate necessarily. It's not going to get them to want to talk about it, want to champion it. You need to be able to spark a ripple effect. And that really is the essence of influence. And I guess this discovery actually gives us a bit of an unfair advantage into how we did this.

58:22Because when we came into Brand Lift, it was very accidental. Like we just so happened to have built the technology that allowed us to be able to give them the insight that they wanted. But the naivety that myself and my team had when coming to this, we ultimately just wanted to help businesses grow. And so we weren't thinking, let's just prove the brand lift. We were thinking, what insights could we give you to help you grow your brand? We're now at a point where we've, when I said brand lift authority earlier, is like, that's what we do is we've got the largest data set when it comes to brand lift, which allows to give benchmarks.

58:53So before I spoke with benchmarks of test versus control or versus assets, but we also just have a lot of data which could allow us to say this is the average awareness lift that you should expect in this category and so on and so forth. But within that data - How does that vary between categories? Oh, massively. Massively, yeah. Massively, which does actually have flaws in that. That's not necessarily the benchmark you should be looking at. You should be looking at how you perform now versus how you perform last month, for instance, like how are those things changing? That's really a better benchmark to be looking at.

59:23Are you growing? Are you learning? Are you improving? But with that scale of data, we're able to do some interesting stuff and look at, okay, what actually makes someone aware? What actually moves someone from being aware to considering? What actually moves someone from considering to taking action? What actually moves someone from taking action to advocating? And the way in which influencers do this, I think is fascinating. And I think there's something you can really learn from this that should speak to all of marketing. About awareness, it's actually fairly straightforward. The industry has been speaking about a lot.

59:58It's attention. Can you capture their attention? But when it comes to moving from awareness to considering, that's where actually the way in which influencers do this well, it speaks to the community is that they actually move them from aware to wanting to advocate straight away within one sweep. And it is ultimately from awareness to consideration, it's about relevance. But what is relevance? And I think that's something that needs to be very clearly defined. The way in which we look at relevance is we would ask the brand, what are your core associations? Like what's your key brand identifiers?

1:00:34And it's really important that brands understand this, especially if you've got a flywheel, you need to have some kind of red thread that's your backbone. So we understand their core associations. We would then in the survey ask people what they associate most with this brand. And separate to that, we would also ask them what do you care about most? And the alignment of their priorities and the values of the brand, that is relevance. And that has high predictive value in terms of - Consideration. Consideration. Massively. It's the outlier predictor by far if you're able to make something relevant.

1:01:06And relevance is different for different communities. And there's this talk track within influence marketing of don't tell the influencer what to say to their audience. They should know what to say. And the unlock of being able to say, okay, these are our associations. You understand what messaging will be most persuasive with your audience. You choose what to do with this, but these are the associations that we have. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? or a sweet vanilla, smooth caramel maybe, or white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits.

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1:02:08So basically, all these brands that are sending scripts to influencers and telling them, talk about the brand this way, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. There's something within that though of the thing that moves them from considering to taking action is looking at persuasion. And the messaging is important there. But you want to also distinct the difference between messaging and a script. So when you're looking at messaging, you might be looking at a few key words within a sentence, let's say, like a brand statement, which I'm sure both of you could speak to actually more than myself even. But when we look at persuasion, which is now getting from considering to taking action, we're trying to understand what messages do they agree with?

1:02:55What messages do they believe in? What messages build affinity, build brand love? And which of those anchor those core associations of relevance as well? And if you hit all those tones, this is relevant to me. I agree with this statement. I believe in this brand and this makes me love this brand. That's going to make them take action. And if you make them take action through that journey, they're not just going to be buying your product today. They're going to be buying your product tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and they'll tell everyone else about it. And that's that flywheel. And that's something that we're now trying to grapple with.

1:03:30Okay, we do brand lift. We can do it in a unique way that helps prove the effectiveness of influence marketing. But actually we're trying to now reestablish how we should be looking at brand and how to measure brand in a more appropriate way that speaks to the community, that speaks to flywheel. And it's challenging that. You have to go through more like a Trojan horse approach because you don't want to have a new metric. So it's like, how can we do this in a way that does brand lift, does brand health, does brand value, does creative effectiveness, how can we do it in a way that they actually already understand and make that easy to bring in and easy to scale?

1:04:00But the funny thing is about that, because I remember when I was speaking to Max about a year ago or so now, and he was telling me what they're working on. And I was like, you know, Max, we all know what the end goal is. We all know the intricate detail. But at the end of the day, for us to be able to change how people value a brand and shifting away from just like the gamification of like revenue patterns, right? Because we know now that if a brand wants to build to attract investors and exit or IPO, et cetera, et cetera, there's a method to how you build your business. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right thing for the long term, but it's the right story to tell to people that you want to sell your business to.

1:04:37But effectively, there's a way that you build the brand for 100 years. Yeah. And a lot of the value there is intangible. And we know that it's important to create that ecosystem that creates those modes of intangibility that allows a brand to feel different than anybody else. But the problem with that is unless there's like a score or a metric or anything like that, people can never really adopt it. Because going back to your point about maths being a language, a lot of people just can't understand it. So by solving this very difficult problem, that can have a major impact on what people prioritize when it comes to growing their brands going forward.

1:05:13100%. I mean, Elf and I had a panel just last week, we were talking about measuring brand-like performance. And I've noticed just within that, there are slight tweaks that we've done. When you've got brand lift metrics, you're looking at a delta of the impact of someone seeing something, what does that do? So let's say it lifts awareness by 20%. Yes. If you've got the reach metrics, you can multiply that and now say, so if you reach a million people and awareness lifted by 20%, you could argue we've net new made 200 ,000 people aware. Yes. That's something that someone in finance might actually understand.

1:05:47And when you look at the CPM metrics of the cost to reach 1 ,000 people, and you take that into account, you can actually also say, this is how much it costs to make 1 ,000 people aware. So now you can actually use performance language with brand metrics. It costs this amount to make 1 ,000 people shift perceptions. It costs this amount to get people to advocate for your brand. And that's like just been quite unlocked for people. But also you can attach a value. Yes, that's the thing. Because one of the problems which is that advertising people look leapt on this fantasy of perfect accountability.

1:06:19Yeah. Not realizing that the price, the hidden price you might pay is that everybody is vastly underestimating the value of advertising. Yes. Because they're only measuring 20 % of what it does. Which is the easy 20%. Yeah. And the other 80 % is being valued at zero. Yeah. Which is, you know, if you think about it, I mean, you know, a large number of organizations are almost certainly, just as I always argue that all businesses underspend on customer experience and overspend on acquisition. Simply because the former is harder to quantify and prove the value of your activity, or slower, actually, than the former is.

1:07:01So there's fast feedback activities and there are slow feedback activities and the fast feedback activities always get too much investment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, consequently, what you're actually doing is the risk. In other words, you're comparing something with something else. But the hidden price you're paying is you're undervaluing everything you do simply in order to attain that kind of numerical comparison. And what you're doing is you're capturing not just the immediate value of something, but the deferred value and indeed the... Well, I would argue that actually investment in fame and awareness is probably a compounding asset.

1:07:42It absolutely is. Because the more people who are aware of something, the more it enters the conversation. And so fundamentally, it's much closer to a pension in terms of an investment than it is a bet on a horse. Yes. Yeah, we always talk about the fact that an investment in brand is an investment in your pension. And the more you cut corners, the shorter your life insurance is going to be, right? So actually, it's not necessarily a question about how do you drive business, how long you stay in business, right? And going back to your point about prioritizing attribution, a simple way to almost like an analogy to that is like when you it's almost like attributing the fact that or giving the credit of who shops at a store to the checkout.

1:08:30Because at the end of the day, that's where people go. And you can. But then how they came about. You're not even looking at what the source was. Yeah. Effectively. The same way in which when we're looking at, I mentioned how we do lift and how we understand what moves people through that. We describe that as drivers. And that way you can start attributing what's the value of relevance. What's the value of this. But even then, even though that's helpful, it's still, you need to make it just so darn easy for someone finance to understand. If you can start building out benchmarks of this is how much it usually.

1:09:02They allow finance to be making these calls, actually, in the sense that they have a model of the world in finance, which is, in a sense, too reductionist to be appropriate to large forms of corporate expenditure. Unfortunately, they run the business. They do. Not quite true in, say, family-owned businesses or privately-owned businesses. You have a reasonable counterbalance there. So probably that's why they're the ones that usually see the biggest benefit of doing this, right? It's because let's say, for example, with the Gymshark, you got a Ben Francis that will say, I know that this works. I'll put aside a budget to make this happen because I believe in this.

1:09:40Whereas a lot of brands with a lot more money, a lot more infrastructure, a lot smarter, quote unquote, people, I can't do this because they can't get the Excel spreadsheet to say exactly what it is that you - I mean, it's a really important role within a company finance. They are there to protect the company. They're ultimately responsible for the decisions that they make. They need to make sure that that company is still going to be around next year, that they can still pay the salaries of their employees and all of that. But I guess if you tell them, what good is the life if you don't invest in your pension?

1:10:12And that's a way to get them to understand the value of it. Yeah. And I guess context is also within that as well of like, if you're speaking to a company that's VC backed and looking just to grow aggressively, and they've got all these crazy targets to Forex year in year. It's a different world if you're speaking to a large corporate that is very happy with 10, 20 % year in year growth. Very, very different story. But this attributing a numeric value to brand is really the challenge that we're trying to tackle. And when I spoke of that example earlier of someone saying, if a CMO is talking to you more than once a quarter doing a bad job because they want to build brand and they ask you to build and drive performance.

1:10:56When you're doing ROAS, you are looking at results now and you're not attributing value to the results in the future, right? Something that we're trying to make possible, and maybe I shouldn't be saying this in advance, but actually we're discovering and everything's moving so fast, I think it's worthwhile sharing all of this.

1:11:19The way in which we look at brand, we see brand and community as interchangeable, as the exact same thing. And when we're looking to measure brand or when we're looking to measure community, we're trying to distill it down to three things. And we're trying to make sure that we can give you a numeric value of your brand. The population, how many people are aware of your brand, the intent, the likelihood that they'll take action. Now, those two things just tell you the number of actions that are going to happen. Based on the value of that action, it could be usage of an app, it could be purchase of a product, you will know what that value is.

1:11:58But now you need to have something that tells you how often these actions happen. So what's that next thing? Is it just today? Is it the ROAS today? Is it next week? Is it the next year? Is it the next hundred years? And so that's the more complicated part, And we call that strength. And we're trying to understand the strength of a brand. And within this era of community, the way in which we look at that is, you might be familiar with Kantar, they've got this meaningfully different salient approach where you look at something that's meaningful and different. And if it's both meaningful different, you can have a pricing premium and that determines the value of a brand.

1:12:28Well saying earlier with a personalization era, that framework works very well. But in a community era, that framework no longer works. They actually, in fact, every year they announce the top 100 brands. And for the last 20 odd years, it's been almost perfectly in line with the S &P 500 movements. But since 2022, which is when influencer marketing went mainstream, it wasn't. Influencer marketing went up, sorry, S &P 500 went up 25%, 25%. The top 100 brands growth went down 20 % and up 20%. And that difference now is a 60 % difference, which when you're looking at these big brands, is a swing in the multiple trillions.

1:13:09The world's only worth 110 trillion right now. So that swing is a huge, huge mistake. And so that screams the fact that the way in which we're measuring brand no longer works. And we need to evolve to the new context, the new market, UGC, creators, like community. So if you're trying to distill it to like a quadrant, because people like quadrants, It's more complicated than this, but trying to keep it simple for people. The way in which we look at it is on one axis, we'd have the level of advocacy. How likely are someone to recommend your brand? And then the other one is how aligned are they? And that alignment is that relevance piece I was speaking about.

1:13:46How aligned are their priorities with your values? For the right people to recommend your brand. Exactly. Because if they're recommending your brand, but they're not aligned, that's the worst thing. You don't want people... They're misfits. They will be pushing people away. You want people that advocate for you, that are aligned. And that to us is the strongest signal of repeat purchase and advocacy. That's like they're going to come back, they're going to be loyal consumers to your brand. And so if you've got those three things in a good place, a good understanding of the population, a good understanding of how likely they are to take action, and a good understanding of their strength, you now actually have a way to measure how many actions will happen today, tomorrow, next week, the whole future.

1:14:29So you have a lifetime value. Yeah. Boom. And that lifetime value is basically telling the valuation of your company. Yeah. And that's the North Star metric of every company. Which has been neglected. Yeah. Ridiculous. I mean, obviously, people who understood it were, for example, credit card companies. Yeah. Because they would be utterly foolish to look at the cost of acquisition versus the cost of, say, first year expenditure. Yeah. It's entirely down to a prediction in terms of lifetime value. And what you're judging, therefore, is the quality of a customer, not just the quantity. Yes. So you have now, you're close to something where what you're measuring is actually a reasonable assessment of what's valuable.

1:15:14Yeah. And this won't be, you know, there's... So you have a prediction of both longevity and frequency of purchase. The strength is the indicator. It's like a time decay almost. And so you can start looking at things, whatever time horizon you want to be looking at things, all from that lens of the brand value. So what's the brand value for an infinite amount of time? That's the valuation of the brand. How do you get this in financial reports? That's the ultimate goal here, which is that financial reporting around customer value rather than operational efficiency bollocks or whatever tends to dominate at the moment.

1:15:50Because if you look at the way in which companies justify their value to their own investors. Yeah. It's become, to a large part, a kind of exercise in saying, we'll basically have the same revenue coming in, and we can do it cheaper. Which is not really... They are different reports. So, like, when you're speaking to investors, or when you're speaking to a market, and you're looking at stock price, people are trying to understand the value of that company. And so, this brand value would be looking, actually, at that same metric, that's a metric to be comparing it to. Whereas when you're looking at a P &L, this wouldn't be the place for that because the P &L would be looking at your revenue over this quarter or the last few quarters.

1:16:34But it seems highly, I mean, as a form of company valuation, likely future revenue from existing customers and likely rate of growth. There will be a flywheel effect of cool things you can do with this. And you know what's going to happen is you will knock on the door of the people that kind of like hold the influence, right? Like you say, the financial spreadsheet, et cetera, et cetera. But what you're going to get, or the people that are really going to get people to take this on will be this podcast and also the Fabrizio Romano of the marketing industry, which is who are the people that actually say that, no, this needs to change.

1:17:15We need to almost like disrupt this industry because most people will actually love it to stay the same, right? But what you're going to get is you're going to get, especially in this B2B influencer world on LinkedIn, people are just going to say, well, have you noticed that the top brands that are on growth also have the direct correlation with their brand value? And everyone's going to say, holy shit, right? This is actually happening and no one's even talking about it. And actually, I think that where people are going to go to is change what the traditional newspaper was. And they're going to go to these people that are going to be broadcasting this because this is actually true.

1:17:52And I love both of your thoughts on this. But I just went to market tomorrow and said, we've got this new way of measuring brand. I don't think anyone will take it. Whereas what we're actually doing is... You need a dramatic demonstration. I'll tell you what I think is a way and I want to hear like a 10x improvement of it. I'm very much in this, by the way, with the art and science, when we speak about that, I'm the science guy trying to empower the artists to do better work. I love art and I have an appreciation for art, but I want to empower marketers to do marketing to their full potential.

1:18:36So I've already seen this experience of just brand lift has already existed. So we've come into supporting the brand lift world by just doing it better. We've got better data, better insights. We've got data that they actually can measure and trust. We've got insight that tells them what drives the success and then how to do it better. And feeds back to the creative. Yes. Most important of all. Feeds to the creative, to the strategy, to the talent, to every team. Because my problem with nearly all online advertising, there are exceptions. About once every three weeks, you see an online ad where you go, someone's actually put some love into this.

1:19:14The rest of it is mostly transactional. Yes. It's entirely transactional. Yeah. And it's not really like a business. It's not like a pub. It's like a souk. You know, it's effectively 30 % off. What I like about what you just said there is that the brand measurement world is quite complex, right? And so you've got at the asset level, creative effectiveness solutions. At the campaign level, brand lift solutions. At the regional level, when you're trying to understand brand within a market, you've got brand health solutions. And then when you get to a company level, you've got brand value solutions.

1:19:51And each of those have five different ways of doing it. And before you know it, someone trying to measure brand is just giving up because it's way too complicated. And so what we have done by just the advantage of naively rewriting the infrastructure from scratch, which, whilst we are known as a brand lift provider, we've been able to design it in a way that you can actually use it as a creative effectiveness tool as well. So we've got clients using it to understand which assets are most effective, which assets evoke certain emotions, or what makes people more favorable, why they like certain assets over others.

1:20:25That's the big creative piece, right? But something else that we have done is we've made this so accessible and easy to use and it more cost effective in this approach as well, that you can do it multiple times a month over multiple months, which gives you a time series, which allows you to start doing brand health. And so by just doing brand lift better, it spills over into now being one solution that does brand lift, creative effectiveness and brand health. And that's really kind of the approach that I think makes sense for us is to keep being this brand lift solution, but within that start inviting people that like creative effectiveness and brand health tools to start using our tools to be able to do the same thing.

1:21:03And then that same kind of mechanism, find a way to navigate to those that want to do brand value. But I'm also open to some crazy big marketing stunts if you guys think that's the approach. Hey, you know what I feel about this. I think we've been speaking about this for quite some time. The fact that it all needs to change and evolve because at the end of the day, one of the questions that I hate the most is what is the ROI? It's almost like a way to reduce - One of those called Robbie. Return on brand investment. Exactly. And that's the counter. I always, I have a very simple brain. I like to summarize things in ways that I can understand.

1:21:47If I can understand, then anybody can understand it. And there's always like this two sides to a business. It's how you make money and the perception associated with the way that you make money. right? And how you make money allows you to keep making money today. And the perception associated with the way you make money allows you to keep making money forever and tomorrow, right? And a lot of people forget that, right? They feel like, oh, as long as I'm making money, then that's great. I mean, there are other aspects to it, for example, which is it will also affect when some fuck up happens. It will massively affect the extent to which people give you the benefit of the doubt.

1:22:20100%. 100%. I remember when - So there's a kind of potential, you know, downside amelioration there, which is, again, not factored. I mean, actually, ROI is not... ROI is emphatically not the right measure at all. Unless you're very, very sophisticated in the way you ultimately measure return. But there are lots of areas of company expenditure which aren't measured that way. As someone pointed out, you know, you don't ask for the ROI for putting a roof on a factory, okay? You simply go that if we don't have a roof on this factory, it doesn't work.

1:22:58And it's become, and I think what happened is that marketers were so desperate to justify their own existence when things became effectively more and more financialized that they leapt on the first metric that they thought was comprehensible and easy to measure. And it's not remotely appropriate in this case. especially now they're in a community flywheel and it's certainly also not appropriate in a probabilistic world it's not appropriate under what you might call multiplicative growth is it? because a lot of this stuff is compounding and it's a bit of a tragedy because I think what happened is marketers thought oh if only we can be perfectly accountable that means that we can effectively say that every single penny we spend delivers X point, whatever it is, okay, in terms of value.

1:23:56And in the sort of gathering rush to do that, they forgot the fact that if you only measure what's directly and immediately measurable, you undervalue yourself criminally. Okay. You know, it's, it is really, you know, it's a bit like, you know, you can't judge, you can just about judge a striker on their goal scoring record, okay? Just about. Although even then, actually, it's not perfect, because it depends on the rest of the team. But there is a kind of shots at goal thing, which might be... Now there's XG. Once you get further away from the goal, okay, the extent to it, you have to effectively have some other measure of how good someone is.

1:24:36It even comes back to the band piece of you might have a different role within that. Maybe you're the person that tees other people up for success. Got it exactly. Do you know, funny enough, in the music world, I think, who was the chap in the Rolling Stones who died in the swimming pool? What's his name? He was always driven absolutely insane because he always believed that bands should have a band leader, like the 1920s. So there was a role band leader which was independent of any of the other performers. One of my favourite stories when you explain brands is like, are we just all shouting the same thing?

1:25:08Yeah, and the thing is, going back to the football analogy, if you think about attributing to the success of a team, obviously, and Messi and Ronaldo obviously exhausted the whole goals and assist tally, because people are trying to figure out who's better between the two, right? And that became an obsession. It's again going back to that obsession with certainty. And then now what purists say is that, but I do the eye test, actually watch the game, and I can see the quality of a player, which is why Rodri won the latest Ballon d 'Or the other year, even though he was a central midfielder. But if you think about who has been the most successful coaches in football, they've been people playing that position.

1:25:49So Pep Guardiola in the midfield. Xavi Alonso in the midfield. Luis Enrique in the midfield. Because they're not the person that's rewarded for the output, the goal, the striker being the checkout. They're the guys that actually start the play and they control momentum. Also, they probably have a better overall view of what's going on. At the front behind them and at the front of them. They're kind of like the quarterback, right? It's almost like, why is the quarterback the most, almost like a rewarded, funded position? It's because they conduct the orchestra, right? And that's the thing that we're thinking about here from a brand perspective is you're not going to get the goal.

1:26:29You're not going to get the assist, but you're the one that controls tempo. It's actually so funny. When we had the panel last week with Chris, he was giving an example of 95 % of your market are in market. And that 5 % that are, are. And it's the brand that sort of moves that 95 % into that 5 % bucket. Or is remembered when the 95 % move in. Yes. And then it's the performance thing that gets the reward at the end of that 5%. But that would make the story of actually brands building up that 5 % bucket, making that bigger. But brand also plays the role of, like you just said, remembering them, keeping it salient as they're going throughout their days, or making it relevant, or persuading them, all those different elements.

1:27:15But you also need performance. There's a big role in performance as well. You can't just not have that. There's a role to all of these. Hey, so, and I know we can talk about this forever, but then I think there's one thing that you said, Rory, that's really, really important is that it's also not only is it your pension, it's also your insurance, right? Because I remember hearing a story, I don't quite know all the detail, about Warren Buffett and there was something that happened when investors in Wall Street were just going crazy and doing like illegal stuff. And basically he got put in front of like a panel and they basically said that because of his reputation, right, they're going to give them like a pass.

1:27:56I think he has a famous quote that says, I'll forgive you for a mistake, but if you lose one sort of reputation for our organization, that's almost like unforgivable. Because he has been known as somebody that's by the book, that he has a reputation to uphold. He has values that he delivers. And therefore, when it's time when your integrity, your values are questioned, people will look at your track record. So if reputation is a non-negotiable, it's like having a roof over your building. It's like getting the ROI for that roof, getting the ROI for your reputation. It's kind of ridiculous. Yeah.

1:28:29Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah. And also, you'll never have the perfect counterfactual either, will you? Yeah. You know. And the other interesting thing, of course, about fame is that there's a very big difference between having to find your customers and being famous enough so that your customers find you. Very obvious distinction. But there's also an element to opportunity with it, which is that if you are not famous, you have to find all your opportunities yourself. Whereas if you are famous, people will bring you opportunities which you never even envisaged. Let's take a brand partnership. So, for example, no one would ever attribute the value of a brand partnership to brand investment.

1:29:14It would be looked at as a standalone thing. But the chances are it only happened because someone approached you with the idea. I mean, that gets into real weird probabilistic stuff. But, I mean, the fact that there is almost certainly a payoff to fame, reputation, and what you call brand strength, okay, which goes far beyond the things we're currently measuring. As you said, there's an insurance component and an opportunity component. You don't just live every day to win. You must first survive. And actually, if you think about it, of course, the Ford Motor Company does not possess, or at least if it does, it's in a museum.

1:29:57It has no value. Any of the machinery they owned 30 years ago, okay? Not many of the employees they had. Not much of the knowledge they had, okay? The continuity is entirely, you know, exists in consumers' minds. And then, of course, the great thing is, weirdly, it then allows you to innovate more and to pivot more and to reinvent yourself more because you are carrying the customer base with you. I'm curious as to your perspective on earned media value, because that touches these topics and some of the topics that we've spoken about before. It went massively viral within the influencer marketing space.

1:30:36It's what helped people invest further into influencer marketing. It was a dollar metric that finance saw, and because of that, they were happy to invest into it more. It was a metric that actually a lot of startups would use to fundraise and put a value on their company as well. It is a measure you could indicate of fame, but it also has a lot of cons to it as well. So, just throwing that out there, what do you guys think of? I mean, PR historically used to justify its existence on column inches as if that attention had been bought. And, you know, it's not totally irrelevant because obviously it captures the value of where you appeared, not just what is said.

1:31:25But of course, it's by no means an absolutely perfect measure. Yeah. I mean... There's value to that, like being able to have an apples to apples value of media. That's something that people don't understand. It makes it easy to invest into. Yeah, I mean, the idea that you maybe value a company on it strikes me as a bit alarming. I mean, this is the thing which is, of course, ultimately, there's no data about the future. Okay, that's where, you know, fundamentally, we've got to be ever cautious about optimizing on what happened in the past. Because, you know, obviously it slightly depends on the category, but things fairly dramatically change.

1:32:03Okay, and you can, you could have a very confident predictor of, for example, future customer value, which is completely thrown into chaos because some innovation or indeed legislation or whatever it may be, something happens which just changes everything simultaneously.

1:32:23But, I mean, this is the problem which I think is that it's the old joke which is always attributed to David Ogilvie, but it isn't, which is people use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamppost for support rather than illumination. Okay. And the... Or it's like, cover your ass and show them. No, no, no, no. No, and effectively data gathered and presented, and in some cases gamed and misrepresented for the purposes of self-justification or whatever, justifying your own existence, your own employment, your own salary. There's an awful lot of wasted effort there when that same data could be used to inspire and inform what you do going forward.

1:33:07100%. It's being used effectively to justify the power. It's being used to justify the previous financial year rather than to enrich the subsequent one. Even crazier, it's almost like the metric has been used to aid understanding, but not understanding of how the world works and how people are influenced and why they make certain decisions, more so understanding of what you do, what value you add. It was actually more to help the corporate department as opposed to necessarily understand how the world actually is. It's basically trying to generate understanding by understanding of the wrong thing.

1:33:50You touched on not looking at what next. I mentioned before one of our core values is co-create. Our second core value is do better. The do better piece is that when we create reports for clients, We don't just tell them what happened and why it happened, which are two core elements. And that gets used for all those reasons that you just mentioned. But the biggest emphasis that we have, and earlier I said, you know, brand lift authority influence marketing, but also the growth partner for the best brands and agencies in our space is because we always tell them the what next as well. Why? This is right.

1:34:25Why the next. Always. And actually, if people don't want to know, do you see what I mean? Yeah. Okay. Sometimes they don't. That's not necessarily the right partner to be working with as well. No, no, no. But actually, of course, also, if you are predicting the future on the basis of a very, very biased view of the past, that's, you know, that's catastrophic because you have fundamental misalignment there of effort, which is you're not doing what adds value, you're doing what effectively. What do you think the role of cadence of this insight plays with that, though? Because if you're doing this every day and you just help that can build an instinct as to which direction should be moving in, it's quite different to if you have one big report each year.

1:35:11I mean, theoretically, it should be ongoing and permanent because if you've got that feedback loop, I mean, if you think about it, The entire business that companies report their finances annually is totally arbitrary. Okay. Now, you have the quarterly forecast, which is Unilever and a few players have refused to engage in that game because they just argue, if you want that kind of short-term information, we don't really want you as a shareholder, is the argument. Which is, in other words, we're in this for the long game. We want shareholders that are in this for the long game, if you're one of those people who is effectively fixated.

1:35:50But at the same time, presumably the cadence of the thing will vary according to the category because there are fast feedback. Yeah. There are fast feedback businesses where you can effectively test and learn quickly. Yeah. And then there are also slow feedback businesses. I mean, I always argue, look, if you're a slow feedback business, one of the best things you can do is Nick learnings from fast feedback businesses, which I think is quite an interesting question. And fast feedback, slow feedback, something that I find fascinating as well with brand measurement in itself. People would often say this argument of we want to look at ROAS or sales because it's the fastest metric to be able to measure success on.

1:36:35But actually sales is a lagging indicator. It's a result of all the work that you've put in before. Yeah. And the way in which people have measured brand before because of it being so slow to be able to get it afterwards, they see it perhaps as more of a lagging metric. But actually, when you can measure brand in real time, you realize it's a leading indicator of future success. And the best business should be optimizing. You can carry it forward. Exactly. Yeah. It's going to be an indicator of whether you'll do sales today, tomorrow, and in the future. Do you know what? We could all talk about this for hours.

1:37:08And I actually want to talk about this for hours, so we might have to have a part two of this podcast, right? I would love that. But Max, you're a legend, right? So are you. Hey, we try, right? We have the goat over there, right? But what's so interesting is you, effectively, you had a 10x through an interface, which simply made it, and by the way, that 10x is really, really important, Because I would argue that, by the way, one of the great problems with painful feedback is that the more painful it is, the more unrepresentative the people participating are likely to be, by the way. You know, for example, you know, one example that would always strike me is that if you buy a lot of things online and you're asked 100 times a month for, you know, to give your feedback and the process is inherently painful, then eventually everybody who's not an extraordinarily infrequent, okay, purchaser or people who simply aren't fucking angry, for example, okay, will actually exit from the process.

1:38:19Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it's the first principle of data. If your data is not representative, it becomes massively untrustworthy. Yeah. And so, you know, that 10x thing, which is you're actually getting feedback from people who are, it seems to be, fairly representative of the people who are actually exposed to the adversities, rather than the cross-section of total fucking weirdos. This is the bottleneck piece as well. That was an example of one small thing to tweak, which was sort of not fine. And they were optimizing for the wrong thing, weren't they? They were optimizing for, you know, ludicrously complex, bloated surveys.

1:38:57Yeah. And now I guess another thing that's like a 10x that we're seeing is, and clients describe us as the next gen Niels, the next gen Kantar, is having built out the infrastructure from scratch, we've been able to build such efficiencies in this process, something that has historically taken months, we can do in hours. And we've been able to automate a lot of the workflows for our own team such that they can deliver and manage more than three times the amount of work than a traditional research partner might do. but that three times more actually makes it ten times easier for our clients to work with us because they don't have to speak to three different people.

1:39:33That one person can manage all of the work and build that relationship with them. So that's another 10x that's now pushing us forward as well. So the question that brand strength is, and obviously it's harder to prove with something like a bank where you tend to get very high retention anyway, but you generally find that brand strength absolutely correlates as an early predictor of both frequency of purchase, and also longevity of relationship. Is that right? In the community era, that is it, yeah. You want to have champions. Yes. And that's how we measure strength, is how strong are your champions.

1:40:09Oof.

1:40:14Does that, now, how does that vary from category to category? Because obviously there are interesting categories which are never going to have... Hemorrhoid cream, okay. Okay, just to take an extreme outlier example, you're unlikely to have people wandering into the pub and announcing that they're absolutely delighted with their hemorrhoid cream, or indeed posting interesting shots from Ibiza of them applying. And then at the other extreme, obviously, there are entities where people are natural, confident recommenders. Well, the other component is alignment. Right, like alignment of relevance.

1:40:52like does what that hemorrhoid company offers align with what they need. And that would be a strong indicator of strength as well. That was a strong indicator, got it. And just to add to that, basically, it's the whole concept of sexy brands and unsexy industries. If you look at a company like Beats by Dre's, like headphones were not sexy. They came with the headphones, they were wired, you get caught up in them and you got people to spend 250 pounds plus for them, right? But it wasn't because of the product itself, it was because of the association of how it made you feel and what it said about you, right?

1:41:27Which is why going back to this whole entire point, it's very difficult to measure. It was very difficult to measure brand until this point, because those factors didn't take into consideration. People were looking for the tangible reason as to why somebody liked something, but they forget there's always a human reason behind that. And until we understood those motivators, those drivers, it is almost like impossible for us to use the current metrics at hand, right? Do you do any post-purchase stuff, by the way, as well as post-exposure? That would be a very natural thing for us to extend into.

1:42:02We've not done that to date, but that would be - Because that's probably an even more reliable indicator, isn't it? Which is having a, what is it? They call it in Procter & Gamble, It's sort of the final moment of truth is usage. Yeah. It's a really good place to actually get insight as to what brought them there. Massively, especially if you're trying to understand the core element. If you're doing, let's say, a UGC play, and you want to be able to have just one word that they always bring back to you, you can find that by understanding, if you can do a survey at the post-purchase stage to understand why they bought it, and you can do an analysis of that, What's the one thing?

1:42:41That would be a really good place to find that, for instance. So they go hand in hand. Yes, they do. Yeah. All right. Like I said, I still have so many questions, so many things that we can talk about. But for the sake of the listeners, we're probably going to have to talk about a part two. But this is like such a great conversation. I think that we can talk about this for ages. There's so much stuff this can go into. I've got one more. So the speed at which they can respond, okay. Yes. Is there also a kind of argument in neuroscience that you're getting their instinctive reaction, which is actually given that it, you know, do you see what I mean?

1:43:22I mean, you could even measure the speed at which they answer each question, couldn't you? Which is an interesting variable. Sorry, I'm getting into nerdy stuff here. Sorry. Sorry. There's implicit association testing that takes that into account where you could ask them what you associate most with this brand, and they take one minute to answer, their associates are probably quite different if they answer that within one second. It's that. Yeah. So it definitely plays a factor. That's interesting. Yeah. Part two. Part two. Part two. The implicit association test. It's all right. Thank you very much.

1:43:58Thank you. Thank you.

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