Carwow CMO Ben Carter on tackling marketing's 'confidence crisis'

0:10Ben Carter: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Week podcast. My name is Russell Parsons, Editor-in-Chief of Marketing Week, and I'm your host for this episode. Our guest today is someone with an impressive CV, yes, but most importantly, for the focus of this podcast anyway, he's a marketer on a mission. The mission to help put marketing back at the center of growth efforts. Ben Carter is currently CMO of CarWow and has earned a place on the company's executive. Prior to this he was CMO of Dunelm and Purple Bricks where he was also one of the executive team. Safe to say not only has he got lots of experience serving customer needs aka external marketing he knows how to engage internal stakeholders aka internal marketing.

1:00Ben Carter: A key challenge and opportunity for all current and aspiring marketing leaders and perhaps because of his background as a journalist he's also not short of an opinion or two. The perfect person then to unpack what the issues are holding marketers back and what needs to be done to address them. Welcome to the Marketing week podcast Ben.

1:22Russell Parsons: Hey Russell how you doing great to see you on this very sunny but hopefully not heatwave morning.

1:29Ben Carter: Well by the time that this goes out it might be rain and sub 20 degrees so we will look back on this heatwave as a halcyon time perhaps. Now let me take you back if I could to the dawn of the current millennium. You worked at New Media Age, which was once, say, sister title of Marketing Week, and moved to the long-since shuttered Haymarket title, Marketing, before moving into marketing. Why the switch from journalism to marketing? What attracted you, having reported on it, as a potential career?

2:11Russell Parsons: Yeah, it definitely wasn't the plan. When I was in my early teens, I was dead set on getting on to the national newspapers. I did a journalism degree in London. And then I ended up on New Media Age. And it was actually a fascinating time. It was the start of the dot-com boom. I'm going to say I'm really old now, Russell, but this was in 1999.

2:33Ben Carter: I remember that. I remember that.

2:35Russell Parsons: People listening and watching, some of them won't even have been around then. But it did happen. There was a real sort of boom where lots of companies were emerging off the back of the internet. And I had the pleasure of reporting on that, that crazy time. And both, first of all, at New Media Age, and then, as you said, at Marketing, where I was the news editor. And my plan and path was always to trying to get onto the Nationals. It's obviously a well-trodden path. And I came very, very close to joining The Guardian, got down to the last round of an interview process. and I was pipped to the post by an even better journalist, a guy called Owen Gibson, who is still at The Guardian and is a fantastic journalist.

3:15Russell Parsons: But yeah, he also started out in media and marketing trade. So anyway, having done that, I then sort of looked at sort of where the internet was going. I looked at sort of where I was going and I decided that a couple of things. One is, as I was interviewing a lot of people around the internet, I realised actually the more interviews I did, the more I read about it. I've always been really curious and love finding things out about different things. And I realized, actually, I knew quite a lot about the internet. And also, I also started to understand more that it was just another channel. Companies were sort of treating it as this sort of whole revolutionary new way of engaging with consumers.

3:55Russell Parsons: And to me, it just felt, yes, a very new and innovative channel, and albeit a channel that could be tracked much more than any other marketing channel, but we're still just another channel. And from a consumer perspective, this was really important. So I actually decided to set up my own digital consultancy, which I did for a couple of years. As a journalist, I had a really good black book of marketing directors and I approached a few of them and said, look, I'm thinking of doing this. And they were like, well, what's the consultants are going to do? I said, well, it's going to make sense of the internet for companies and it's going to help you build out content strategies, and it's also going to help bring brands to life on the internet.

4:34Russell Parsons: And I was very fortunate to pick up a few projects, first of all, from AOL. I don't even think AOL exists anymore, but AOL was an internet service provider. They used to carpet bomb houses with disks that enabled you to dial up to the internet. I mean, I'm literally sounding like a history book here. But I once worked with AOL, with British Gas, obviously still are here, Empower, and a few others. And it was all about basically either developing content for the internet, helping them understand how consumers were engaging with the internet, and also helping them understand sort of some of the newer parts of the internet, like blogging and the very early phases of social media.

5:15Russell Parsons: I'm not sure if you remember MySpace and how everyone had a Tom on their MySpace. So yes, I did that for a few years. And then one of my clients actually offered me, Satanta Sports, offered me to come in and be head of online marketing with the opportunity to really help them grow a business. They just won the Premier League rights in the early 2000s, 2003, I think it was. And they wanted to do all of the sort of the market, all the subscription and ultimately own the customer journey online. And it was my job to build out a e-commerce flow and ultimately then to start building the brand online alongside a very big above the line campaign and that was when I realized actually marketing is where I want to be the dynamism of it the opportunity to innovate every day but also the opportunity to come up with an idea in the morning and then see the results that evening or the next day was just fascinating it is a bit of

6:10Ben Carter: a potted history you've just given us there of the early years of the 2000s. Some brands, as you rightly pointed out, that feel like almost, well, as part of history, as they no longer exist, MySpace. I'm the same as you. I'm sure in some capacity AOL still exists, but obviously not the behemoth that it was. and people forget how big of a deal AOL was.

6:42Russell Parsons: These were the open AI anthropics of their time, right? That's the thing, I mean. Yeah, indeed, indeed. And perhaps that's a cautionary tale for some of those other organizations,

6:53Ben Carter: but we're not going to stray too far there. But something that strikes me that we will return to is when you were cutting your teeth in marketing, it was during, as you rightly say, or just before the dot-com boom and bust of the early 2000s. But it was the explosion in digital marketing, in data, which came in its wake, which obviously provided and presented marketers with huge opportunities. But perhaps also, as we'll go on to discuss, has presented lots of challenges and left a legacy perhaps that isn't positive in marketing. But as I say, let me just pause on that for a moment. I alluded to various different things in my introduction in terms of what you're passionate about, many things I'm sure, but definitely about the status and stature of marketing in organizations.

7:57Ben Carter: Now you've talked about marketing being one of the best jobs that anybody could have. And I know you're very passionate about the possibilities that marketers have. Now, Mark Given, who's the CMO of Sainsbury's, as many people will know, but recently he was speaking in his capacity as president of ISBAR. And he talked of, well, he agreed with you that it was a great time to be in marketing and those that hark back to a supposed halcyon past are overlooking what the opportunities are. However, you did also talk about a crisis of confidence in marketing amongst marketers. Is that something that you agree with?

8:42Russell Parsons: You hear this a lot. Marketeers are not very good at marketing their profession. And that's really, that's quite ironic. But I think at a time when most companies want to deliver balanced growth, but sustainable profit, No longer can companies just keep printing growth but not have a route of actually generating profit. Marketeers have to get so much more on the journey of how they are not a cost center but they're a growth engine. And not just that but they can prove that by talking in a financial language and ultimately map their performance back to the P &L. Marketeers at the moment, the crisis of confidence, I do recognize because we're in a world now where, as I said, 20 odd years ago, the attraction of digital was that you could start to really track things.

9:34Russell Parsons: We're now in a world where literally everything can be tracked. So obviously, if you're thinking of online marketing, it's all tracked. It's all underpinned by attribution, measurement programs and initiatives and schemes. But also, if you're looking at above the line, you're now doing addressable above the line, programmatic above the line. And I think some marketeers are actually quite scared of that because they're very comfortable. There's always been this sort of distinction, if you like, between performance and brand marketeers. And I've always struggled with it because actually I straddled both.

10:07Russell Parsons: And the reason I straddled both is as a former journalist, I love telling stories and building narrative around brands. And that's brand marketing. Brand marketing is around telling a story and engaging with an audience at the right time to make them consider your brand, fire and shark, mental availability, etc. But the performance piece, the rational bit of it is fascinating as well, because actually you can see what happens when you get people into your consideration set and you convert them. Long and short theory, etc. Activation. That's really, really, really exciting. and so I don't recognize this distinction in in marketing today between brand and performance I think it's it's been self-created by the industry but there are there are marketeers out there who just see them as brand marketeers and and I worry for them and I don't worry for them because we're in an age of performance but I worry for them because in an age of AI where brand is such an important signal you've still got to understand what that signal actually means and what it's doing.

11:10Russell Parsons: And so if you take CarWow, we have the best visibility in AI in the auto industry. That's because we've invested very, very heavily in content over the last 14 years. We've obviously got a massive YouTube channel, but we've also got an army of journalists who are pumping out content every day of the week. And we have a huge amount of proprietary data, whether that's car pricing data, whether it's valuation data, we valued over three and a half million cars on the platform last year. These are all nuggets of data that the LLMs and Google's AIOs are hoovering up. And the interesting thing for me is that's great showing up in AI, but what does it mean from a brand intent perspective?

11:53Russell Parsons: And so I think the crisis of confidence comes back to marketeers not being able to tell the right story of what they're actually doing, and ultimately mapping it back to the performance impact it's having. Thank you for that. It's quite a lot to unpack there because I'm in violent agreement with you.

12:14Ben Carter: And I think most marketers would be that it's not performance or brand. It's both. It's a false opposition. It's never a versus. I always roll my eyes when I see people talking about one versus the other. But we've got lots of data that demonstrates that people perhaps are over-indexing on performance. And my take, plus other people that I speak to, is, well, I think it's twofold. A, that there's a comfort and a precision to performance that enables marketers to demonstrate quick wins to their CEO, CFO, that are being demanded, but particularly in challenged and challenging economic environment and times, and perhaps maybe moving away from brand because it's just a harder sell.

13:10Ben Carter: Now, if I understand you correctly, you know, both A, should be applied, but you should be confident in telling stories, particularly around brand, which perhaps isn't quite as attributable. And so you've got to take your CFO CEO on a journey. So how have you learned to do that?

13:31Russell Parsons: Yeah, exactly. And I think if you look at the most successful businesses in the world, at some point or another, they have invested in building their brand, right? There's been so much written about the likes of Airbnb who have flip flop between going all in on performance to brand to back again. But ultimately, at some point in time, you've got to keep topping up the funnel, You've got to keep acquiring customers. You've got to keep telling that brand story. And I totally, totally agree with you. The balance is wrong at the moment, that marketeers have been forced to go down a performance avenue too much.

14:06Russell Parsons: And it's hard. It's really, really hard to take your CFO, your CEO on that journey. The way that I have always tried to do it is by trying to identify proof points that it is having an impact. We talk a lot as marketeers around doing regional tests, so doing uplift tests where you invest in brand in one region, you don't invest in brand in another region. We also obviously will look at sort of the classic brand tracker metrics, so awareness, consideration, brand affinity, but also look at things like running surveys. We run surveys on our site. How did you hear about us? So where did you come across CarWow?

14:49Russell Parsons: CarWire is actually really unusual because you and I have talked about this before, but we don't invest in brand at scale. But the reason we don't do that is because we have a very big content armory and the content platforms we have are our brand platforms. So we have 11 million subscribers on YouTube. We generated 2.1 billion views across YouTube and social of our video content last year. And those platforms are so important in telling the story of what CarWow is and ultimately making sure that when people are in their sort of car changing window, they're thinking about us. But without those content platforms, we would have to invest in brand at some point.

15:30Russell Parsons: All businesses reach a phase of performance exhaustion. And this is why I go back to this false argument between brand and performance. You're absolutely right. Like brand should be an accelerator of performance. There's absolutely a question of at what point in a company's life cycle do you apply brand? Absolutely. But for me, it's a critical part of the marketing mix. I think what's fascinating at the moment is how brand is showing up in terms of all the different opportunities you have. So if you look at creator is a classic example, right? Huge amount of conversation in Cam this year and the creator economy.

16:05Russell Parsons: I think I read a report it's now worth over a trillion dollars globally. But ultimately, it's a way of telling a brand story. I think the way to build confidence is pick those, understand them and pick those proof points. Don't just pick the data that says the right story. Be really open and really transparent about it. I vividly remember when I was at Just Eat and I joined Just Eat and the CEO at the time turned around to me and said, when I joined, he said, one of your key challenges is your team feel like they've won the lottery because they just spend marketing money without really understanding the impact of it.

16:41Russell Parsons: and crucially, basically the value of that money. And Just Eat obviously is a massive brand advertiser. And so one of the things I set out straight away is to make sure that we had the right econometrics models, the right attribution models in place, the right media mix models in place. We did regional tests to start to prove back to the CEO and the exec that actually the brand investment Just Eat was making was actually working.

17:08Ben Carter: There is, and as you've pointed out, so many more ways to measure what it is that you do. You can over measure and then lose sight of what your objective was in the first place, of course. But that doesn't mean that you are driving blind in this day and age. and just some of the things you were saying there just they led me to think oh well you know it's it there's there's different ways to invest in brand whether as creators or youtube channels but it's all about building mental ability particularly in your case where people are not making a purchase that often you've got to be front of mind and there are so many more ways you can stay front of mind doesn't have to be uh no uh no shade on tv or cinema but it doesn't have to be those things in terms of advertising and building brands through advertising at least anyway now i mentioned a moment ago when we were talking reminiscing even about the explosion of the internet or the the dawn of the internet age and and everything that came in its wake that many have said that that in itself caused marketers challenges or marketers have perhaps creating challenges for themselves as a result of some of the advances that the explosion in digital data have caused.

18:34Ben Carter: Some say that it's made people more tactical and more specialist. Now, I know we've spoken before about your belief that the art of marketing is being lost. Now, I appreciate, I'm not trying to put words in your mind, but conflating the two, data digital and the art of marketing. But what sits behind your assertion that the art of marketing is being lost is he anything to do with any of the things that i mentioned there

19:00Russell Parsons: obviously i i wasn't i wasn't a marketeer when the internet didn't exist so i but one of the things that really frustrates me about marketing organizations um is the siloed nature of them the consumer does not see a brand as an email or a paid search ad or a tv ad or or a creator film on YouTube, the consumer sees the brand experience they have. And ultimately, they just expect the brand to show up in the same way, regardless of what channel they are engaging with that brand in. So I just don't understand why we silo teams. And it really doesn't help us again, in terms of marketing our profession, because what happens, what tends to happen is you get two types of marketeer, I found you have a, what I call a one dimensional marketeer who is very focused on their channel, their channel only.

19:53Russell Parsons: They'll put a campaign live or they'll optimize a campaign or they'll do whatever they've got to do in the time that they're meant to have done it. And then they'll walk away from it and walk onto the next task. Whereas a three-dimensional marketeer is much more curious and will think about, okay, if I create this campaign, what's the knock-on impact or crucially the amplification opportunity through another channel? What's going on in the world that means that I can make this channel grow arms and legs and make it more culturally relevant? And ultimately, how do I then tell that story that this campaign is working and therefore, earn the right to go even further with it and to invest more into it.

20:36Russell Parsons: And that goes back to my comment around what why I believe marketing is the best job in the world because the opportunity is boundless it's not about budgets it's not about having massive budgets it's about having curiosity and creativity and leveraging ultimately what's going on in the world with the message or the campaign you're trying to run and I think the danger is is that we've become very siloed and very specialist and specialists are great in one way because they master the art of a channel but they're also um they're worse the sort of the worst nightmare for a cmo or a marketing director because they think in such a siloed way um and it just does not it ultimately doesn't build a great um organizational culture but also it doesn't help in terms of that broader consumer engagement that we're looking to achieve I think digital has accelerated that because clearly you have real specialists around paid search, around social, around CRM.

21:40Russell Parsons: But I'm sure this probably still existed 40 years ago in different disciplines of print, of TV, of radio. I just don't understand it. It really, really frustrates me because we've all got a common goal, which is to try and drive growth. And so I think specialism, yeah, is a real problem for the industry.

22:00Ben Carter: So I don't want to play the blame here, but marketers do when they're talking to me, or many marketers anyway, kind of bemoan their lot. They tell me that the CEO doesn't understand marketing and doesn't appreciate it and thinks often that they can do the job better. I mean, is this a failing of CEOs to not kind of really lean in and understand marketing? Or is it something more fundamental that maybe CMOs are not asserting their abilities and their unique capability to play a huge part in a company's growth?

22:41Russell Parsons: yeah i go back to what i said at the start russell about this whole idea of a cost center versus a growth center right so there's when a business needs to cut costs the first question that always comes in my 20 odd years of working in this industry is what variable budget have you got left and what and what's locked in and obviously the variable budget then tends to get trimmed now Now, that's not because CEOs, CFOs don't understand marketing. That's because ultimately the business needs to cut costs. There's normally three massive buckets of cost in an organization, the marketing budget, the headcount budget, and the technology budget.

23:19Russell Parsons: If you start killing your technology budget, then in theory, particularly if you're a digital business, that's probably not a great place to be. So actually, it's no surprise that the marketing budget is the first place to go to in that scenario. But I think the way that we actually solve that is, to your point, don't bemoan that, be pragmatic about it. And actually, I always have in my head, this is what we're spending, this is what it's delivering. But ultimately, if someone comes and says to me, I need to make some changes, what do those changes mean? So I'm always scenario planning. I think one of the things I've found since being on execs now for the last, God knows, about seven, eight years is you're continually scenario planning and not just on costs, but on the direction of the business, on macro impacts.

24:10Russell Parsons: And so you just got to be really pragmatic. I do find it. I find it quite amusing when marketers go, oh, my God, I'm just being asked to deliver quick wins. Well, yeah, because you're spending money and ultimately the investment needs to pay back. Now, of course, there is the long and the short of it. And we have talked about the fact that some companies are too focused on the short term. But ultimately, if you're going to spend the money, you've got to deliver a payback. So the best way of delivering a payback is to get some quick wins into your back pocket and to be able to then start to build that credibility with a CEO and a CFO.

24:45Russell Parsons: I'm very lucky. My CEO is an ex-CMO. He was the CMO of Farfetch. and I thought long and hard when he offered me the job about did I want to work for a former marketeer but actually he's not a frustrated marketeer he's now a CEO and he doesn't want to be a CMO but the good thing is he understands what being a CMO is about and he understands some of the thinking that we have to do and the noise around being a CMO. When he makes a decision he makes a decision as a CEO yes he's pragmatic and sympathetic to marketing but I don't buy this I've got to deliver quick wins like of course you've got to deliver quick wins well it's both

25:23Ben Carter: isn't it you know you invest for in the short term to deliver in the short term but also invest in the long term to deliver sustainably and profitably over time I can imagine having a former CMO or CEO is is a blessing and a curse in many ways they obviously know how uh how the job plays out and what part of their uh and the component parts of the job and I'd imagine in many ways and I'm sure you've worked for plenty that it's maybe better, it's a greater test and challenge for you leading marketing to have a CEO that has had no history in marketing because then you have to talk about what you do in terms of profitability, in terms of business outcomes or try that bit harder to frame everything in that way.

26:13Ben Carter: Is that your previous experience?

26:15Russell Parsons: Yeah, definitely. I've had different bosses, different CEOs who have different levels of understanding of marketing and actually different CFO attitudes as well. We always talk as marketers, don't we, about the key relationship for marketers to build is with the CFO and 100 % agree with that. But I also go back to it's about building that credibility and being able to tell that story underpin with data, but also tell it in a way that actually speaks to the P &L as opposed to speaks to a bunch of marketing metrics that we have made up to sort of suit our agenda. Ultimately, having a CEO who understands marketing and understands the levers we're trying to pull, but also understands the tensions that we have to operate in as well is a really good thing.

26:55Russell Parsons: And we have some really good intellectual debates around marketing and sort of the direction of travel for us as a business from a marketing perspective. But I'd be very fortunate to work in marketplace businesses where you have two big sort of key areas of focus. One is obviously driving demand, therefore marketing, consumer marketing. And one is driving supply, therefore, in CarWall's case, working with car dealers, car manufacturers. And therefore, there's a big B2B marketing element to it as well.

27:25Ben Carter: If you were to identify, and I know it's an impossible question, but let me ask it anyway, maybe a couple of things that you found work really well in building those key relationships internally, what would you identify?

27:40Russell Parsons: I think the first thing is really important. When you say you do something, you actually do it. It sounds really simple, but a lot of people go, oh, yeah, no, no, I'll get to that or we'll do that. But actually delivering on what you commit to is really important in building credibility. And I think the second thing is not hiding bad news, being so upfront about when things are going well, but also being really upfront around when things aren't going well and crucially what you think is driving that and then what you're going to do about it as well.

28:09Ben Carter: And what do you think marketers are uniquely placed to offer? Again, on your experience in an organization and actually not just in an organization, within a C-suite, within an executive team. Again, we talk a lot about marketers learning, understanding and communicating like business people. And of course, they absolutely should be. But there's also plenty that they should feel like they are uniquely placed and feel good about that. So what would you think that those things are?

28:42Russell Parsons: I think brilliant communicators, brilliant storytellers, like I've said before. I think ultimately leveraging creativity and innovation. and that's not just creativity from a marketing point of view but creativity in terms of how are we going to grow this business being able to operate and coordinate cross-functionally really really important and then being a being a radar both external radar so scanning the horizon seeing what's coming up what are we going to do about it what's the competition up to what's the mac what's happening in the macro market what's the consumer sentiment looking like what are the icebergs ahead What's the green fields ahead?

29:22Russell Parsons: Being able to navigate that really, really important. But also being a radar internally as well. How are employees showing up as brand ambassadors? What's the culture of the company? How are we representing ourselves from an employee brand perspective? And again, this goes back to why I think marketing is such a great job, because no day is the same. Because as I said, one minute I'm developing a campaign for six months time. The next minute, I'm looking at the performance of yesterday's trade. The next minute, I'm working on a communication strategy for something that we're launching next week.

29:58Russell Parsons: It's just completely changed. And then the next minute, I'm talking to any one of the big media owners or big tech companies about what they're doing and how we can take advantage of that. And that's just fascinating. Sometimes you do get home at night and go, oh, my God, my brain. But it is fascinating.

30:15Ben Carter: I mean, it speaks to what you said earlier, doesn't it, about the need to be curious. And there are so many more ways, both to engage customers, but also so many more opportunities that should be marketing-led. And I know, at Franwa, you are exploring many of those opportunities. You can ask you to think about preparing, perhaps to take advantage of some of those opportunities. And you as a marketing leader, you talked about the importance of employees feeling good and being advocates and ambassadors for the company. But that requires an investment in them. And there are so many different ways, as I say, so many different means to engage.

31:02Ben Carter: So what are you doing in terms of investing in your team and preparing them in order to take advantage of some of these opportunities and for them to feel like they are supported so you can navigate both the headwinds and the opportunities ahead?

31:19Russell Parsons: So when I say change, I don't. AI is just written into change. It's not like, oh, AI, shiny new thing. What are we going to do? It's just it's part of change. I think that the one thing that's very, very, very prevalent in every scale up business I've ever worked in is the only constant is change. You only have to look at my CV to see the companies I've worked for and to think of the corporate change that they've all been on. And a lot of that corporate change has been when I've been there. And so actually, the first thing is just is just making sure our employees are set up to deal with change.

31:52Russell Parsons: Not everyone likes change. But when you're in a business that has to grow 20 % year-on-year growth every year, there's going to be a lot of change. That's the first thing to say. I think in terms of AI specifically, there's a few things. So we rolled out Clawed to the entire organization about six months ago. And the idea there was to democratize it and to let people start to develop workflows and actually work out their own rhythm in terms of how to work with it. And then the plan from there is to identify the power users, I guess, and enable them to be power users, but also to make sure that the people who are adopting it or slowly or are reluctant to adopt it, that they're not terrified of it as well.

32:39Russell Parsons: That's the first thing we've done. The second thing is to try and, particularly in marketing, I'm trying to get the team to think model first, not human first. And that's not, by the way, we want robots to do your jobs, but it's ultimately to try and get the most manual jobs to be done by the machine to free our teams up to be more human and human fueled, to be more human fueled curiosity. That's the second thing. we ran a workshop actually to identify to got everyone to write down all the things that really did that they had to do every day that was so manual so laborious so repetitive to work out what we can automate and we've automated a lot of that and then which has freed them up time to be as i said to think more and to be more strategic and to be more challenging as well the third thing is we're running in a we've actually got a marketing off-site uh coming up on tuesday the afternoon the whole marketing team and one part of that is we'll run a master class so we've got a specialist coming in a guy called ian croakham who will basically paint the picture of sort of where organizations are going and and and then ultimately work with the team on sort of a workshop around sort of again just trying to sort of get people to play around with it because ultimately we want people to play with it there's a number of different ways that that's all intended to ultimately unlock more productivity.

34:05Russell Parsons: We know AI sort of, I think, has three big sort of use case opportunities. One is unlock productivity, give time back. The second one is around actually efficiency. And certainly, for example, we have created now Claude Skills and projects. And when we're using Gemini, which we also use because we're on the Google Workspace, Gems to automate some of our copywriting, which is then viewed by a human and made more human. And obviously, there's nothing worse than AI slot going out. So that's not happening. And then the third use case is around value creation, i.e. how to use AI to start to create new products.

34:41Russell Parsons: And the amazing thing for us as a broader carwire business, not just within marketing, is that when you're a scale up, there's no shortage of opportunities to invest in or new initiatives to do. The constraint is always resource and money, basically. What AI enables us to do is all to start to be builders, to prototype, to start to wrap actually get some of these ideas built as tests to then understand what do we then get the engineer to then take on and actually build and fully roll out that's a philosophy we're embedding across the company culture um right from the ceo the ceo down just building off of that uh you talked about

35:20Ben Carter: the one thing or one of the things that kind of fires you up is is the pace of change and the the sheer variety of things that you have to do. I guess AI is driving some of that change, but it's not exclusively as a result of AI. So how do you make sure that your team and those that are reporting to you directly and indirectly are as excited as you in what's possible? And I guess the converse of that is there are many people that can feel overwhelmed by the number of things that are going on and the number of things that they have to deal with and the pace of change in terms of tactics at least so is it a question of hiring the right people or is it a question of making them feel part of a journey and if so

36:11Russell Parsons: how do you do that no i think it's a bit of both right i think as i said before working for a scale up and it's not just car wow it's the same at just eat it was the same at betfair um it's not for everyone right these businesses are all consuming they are full on um and i don't mean as in working 24 7 as in there are always problems and there's always opportunities and it doesn't stop and so i think you do need to be a certain type of person to want to work in that environment but also i'm fully aware as a leader my job is to recognize people's different working sort of ways of working but also to your point how that making sure that there is not information overload I'm someone as I said before that I love being out there scanning understanding what's going on and how do we react to it and then what we try and do is to then try and bring that to the teams through different forums so for example like the the workshop we're doing on at our off site next week but also bringing in some of our media partners to show and to excite and inspire the team on the creative side for example we uh itv run every year a um a competition to to win uh win airtime uh in partnership with mind around mental health and creating a a correct we we we got down to the shortlist and that was an amazing opportunity to let the team go and create a whole new campaign idea well out of what they do every day right but the reason i said to them, I want you to do this, is I want them to keep honing and developing their creative spark and enjoying it.

37:48Russell Parsons: So I'm a really big believer in giving people opportunities and making sure that whether that's opportunities within the organization, so getting them to work on cross-functional projects, or actually how do we start to work outside the organization and give people exposure to the different platforms. You're right, it's not just about AI. There's literally a new marketing channel emerges pretty much every month, right? So how do we make sure that the teams can sort of be playing around with those things? So another great example is, we've got a pretty young team. But we've had work experience people and we've had interns in who have come in and 16 year olds, 18 year olds, and they told us things about TikTok that we never knew.

38:31Russell Parsons: So it's just it's making sure you don't you don't lose touch. And nothing worse for me, When I was at Just Eat, I used to frustrate the hell out of me that some of the marketing team operate in the M25 bubble. The majority of Just Eat's business came from outside of London. And yet we sat there with a London mentality and there is that there's nothing worse. So I want to make sure that the teams are always thinking about your consumer, but also what's going on out there in terms of opportunities to engage with the consumer and what that looks like.

39:00Ben Carter: I think a great piece of advice that definitely not my own advice, but something that I heard, I can't remember, I think it might be Mark Ritz and said a version of this, that the best thing you can do as a marketer is to realize you know nothing. and then go out there and find out and it might you know and that involves leaning into not only your customers and realize that they don't they're not like you and they're not like your friends but what their lives are and what their motivations are but also bring people in and build a diverse team of people that have various different specialist knowledge and also have an eye on the bigger, more strategic marketing picture.

39:48Ben Carter: If you didn't say any of that, Mark, I apologize, but a version of that, I'm pretty sure I can attribute to him. Yeah, indeed, indeed. Now, one final question. You've made an excellent place for the virtues of marketing and also the opportunities that are being presented right now and will be in the future and we talked about some of the ways that you can organize yourself and behave internally as well as externally to realize that opportunity if there's one piece of advice that you would offer those that are listening that's worked for you in terms of ensuring that you can take advantage of the

40:31Russell Parsons: opportunities what would you impart i'd say two two key things i would i would be be pragmatic around marketing and marketing's impact in the business and by that what i mean is don't get set in your ways and be so sort of predetermined that this is the way we do it and and and we can't we can't move on you've got to keep adapting you've got to be you've got to be a bit of a a bit of a chameleon to be honest um we've talked about the breadth as a marketeer of what you need to do in an organization so you've just got got to keep adapting you got to keep and you've got to keep building new skins as well um so that would be the the first thing so pragmatism and and and resilience i think the second thing is just don't ever stop learning the probably the best thing i've done from a work perspective in the last couple of years was going on the marketing academy or being selected on the marketing academy as a fellow two two years coming up to two years ago now the course obviously which mckinsey supports is really great um and and some of the some of the materials are fantastic but actually the network that you build not only do you make some friends for life but also you learn from them and um and you just see again what an amazing profession this is so never stop the learning i was sat in can in in the audience watching uh watching ritson's presentation around the the the his whole point around marketeers lacking qualifications.

42:01Russell Parsons: Actually, it was a funny one for me because I'm not a classically trained marketeer. I was a journalist, as we said right at the start, and I taught myself on the job. But I do stop myself every now and then and go, is there anything that I don't know or that I haven't yet achieved because I haven't got a qualification? And so actually the Marketing Academy Fellowship was a really good opportunity to just go back and learn a bit more.

42:23Ben Carter: I don't think having been his editor for 10 years, Mark's a proponent of having a qualification what he is a proponent of is having training in the yes yeah in in the um in the in the basics um i mean marketing which is coming across very clear from what you've talked about is is always different yet always the same and i guess the different element means that you keep having to top up always the same means you need to be skilled in the in the fundamentals as well and every day indeed should be a learning opportunity i really liked what you said there about leaving different skins or growing different skins you also perhaps need a

43:06Russell Parsons: thick skin on occasion you do need a thick skin very true well thank you so much uh ben for

43:15Ben Carter: offering your thoughts on what's possible and indeed how uh to realize what's possible thank you so much and I know you'll be joining us in October for the Festival of Marketing where we will talk about many of these issues as part of the Raise the Bar theme so please do everybody listening look out for what else is on the agenda and what else we've got in store for Festival on October the 14th. Ben thank you so much for joining us today.

43:50Russell Parsons: Russell thank you it's been an absolute pleasure um and yeah i look forward to seeing i'm sure i'll see you before but if not i'll

43:55Ben Carter: definitely see you on the 14th thank you so much and thank you to everybody that listened goodbye