Understanding 'Future Demand' with James Hurman

0:09Welcome to the WALK podcast. My name is David Tiltman and today we are talking about brand and performance and in particular this new book Future Demand from longtime collaborator with WALK and Lions James Hurman. Now, as you're here in the episode, the roots of this book and the concept of future demand go back five years to some work that James and I did at the back end of the pandemic. I will be asking him how that thinking has evolved over the past few years and how he is helping brand marketers understand how to make a better case to the C-suite for building brand or, as he would put it, future demand.

0:55Now, we're recording this in Cannes Lions, towards the end of Cannes Lions, so if we seem a little bit croaky, you'll understand why. But this is a video podcast, so you can see us as well as hear us, and if you would like to do that, please go to the Warp YouTube channel. We'll bring James on in a moment, but first, a word from our sponsor.

1:18marketing and advertising are changing at pace but the core principles of effectiveness are enduring and they've never been more important for marketers to understand the master of advertising effectiveness course led by effectiveness expert james herman has been updated for 2026 giving you the knowledge to thrive with fresh data points and the latest case studies, all in an eight-week online course. Become an expert today with the Master of Advertising Effectiveness. Sign up for the next cohort at lions.co forward slash learning.

1:56James, welcome back to The Walk Podcast. Bonjour, David. Bonjour. And congratulations on the publication of your new book. Hold it up for the cameras. next man here it is future demand future demand it's actually got the same title as your last book absolutely yeah i mean that's what that's what everyone does right it is yeah that is absolutely consistency i think i've got four or five more books in me also called future demand so um yeah look out for those of those both yeah watch the space but no the first book i actually wrote for startup founders and um and venture capital people yeah and i wanted to educate them on the value of brand building in early stage companies, where, of course, it's as important as it is in big companies.

2:41And so I'd written that book, and it was only meant to be a small book sort of given out to a few companies that we'd invested in and sort of people in our sphere. And it ended up taking on a bit of a life of its own, and marketers started reading it. And I was like, no, wait, you can't read that. It's not for you. It's not ready for you. That's for startup people. and so so it became clear pretty you know quite early on that it would be useful to write one for marketers because the principle is obviously you know the same in large companies so um so yeah here here it is after a couple of years of toiling away toiling away um it's it's really the market is one is really they no longer have to read a you know a book for startup folks great um we're going to get into the sort of i guess some of the theory but also the practice as well but I guess just so people, you know, who aren't as close to it as we are, understand the kind of history.

3:35This concept, Future Demand, you first coined this, I think it was 2021. We were still coming out of COVID. You and I were working on this. It was for the sort of Lions Live. It wasn't actual Lions that year. um and we were looking for an angle around brand and performance that was very relevant to um i mean at a narrow sense e-commerce but i guess it what what we what we meant more broadly was the growing range of startups that were had a direct line into the into the customer and were very data driven data oriented and were as we discovered very sort of uh often built off the back of performance advertising yeah just talk to us about how your thinking has evolved uh from that point to now because you we we had launched that initial report then you wrote the first book as you just said for startups and then you've written the version for brands and marketers has anything sort of fundamental changed in your thinking or is it sort of a nice sort of gradual evolution over that time yeah nothing fundamental i mean i think we were sort of in some ways we were using e-commerce companies as sort of a proxy for like modern digital companies, you know, and companies that I think had emerged and had really grown up in an era of performance market, in an era of sort of abundance of amazing digital ways to reach consumers.

5:06And so that was, you know, it was interesting to think about that while I was also thinking of the startup companies that we were investing in in New Zealand and watching this sort of, and this happened to e-commerce as much as sort of general startup, but this, you know, you'd start a company, it would grow quite quickly at the start, you'd see great growth and then that would plateau off. And the question was, why do we keep seeing that plateau? Yeah. Because, you know, we'd seen it. And that was important, and it was your experience as well. Yes. This wasn't just like a sort of theoretical construct.

5:40Not at all. You were seeing it. Yeah, we were seeing it in the startups. Our venture capital partners were seeing it in their startups. Venture capital firms around the world were seeing it. Um, people that we were talking to at Facebook were seeing in their own data on their platforms. Everyone was going, why is this happening? Right. And, and, and so the thinking was really, it was really based around that, you know, what, what happens? Why is it that, you know, we grow to a certain point and the idea that, well, there's actually only a certain amount of people in the market at any given point in time.

6:09And if you sort of exhaust those, then what happens next? And, and what's not that the thinking's changed, but it's been really interesting. If you look at the data from the end of last year, 75 % of US marketers are experiencing diminishing returns on their performance marketing. So they're seeing a very similar pattern where they've actually had really good performance for many years and then that's plateauing out. Right. So they're seeing on a much bigger scale, kind of the same thing we saw on a smaller scale with the startups and the e-commerce firms and those sorts of companies. So I think it's quite timely, not that I sort of planned for that, but that we're seeing that same curve on a larger scale.

6:47to kind of bring it back to this very basic concept that there are some people in the market at any particular given point in time, your current demand, a bunch more who are going to come into the category later, your future demand. And the more we nurture that future demand, the more we're able to convert those folks when they come into market and keep growing in a sustainable way. and what came out relatively soon after that original paper uh was completely independently was um uh linkedin and the erinberg bass institute brought out the idea of the 95-5 rule um which sort of came at came at it from a different angle i'm not to be to be specific but was telling a similar story very much so and and i think those these sort of ideas sort of coalesced and i know uh you know we in in our own multiplier effect paper talk about two jobs they're being you know you know these people are in market and out of market and we've got two different jobs it's very much the sort of language you use in the book as well um there's actually some new data in in there isn't there that you've got around how this idea of in market and out of market whether it's 95.5 or whatever plays out in other categories yeah you just want to tell you Yeah, it's really interesting.

8:03I mean, ideas are kind of, you know, often in the air, right? And we sort of end up grasping at them at the same time. I remember writing a piece for a magazine back home years and years ago about, it was called Casualties of Coincidence. And it was about how often we see different creative teams have the same creative idea. And then there's the big fuss over who copied, who stole them, who and all that kind of stuff. And often there is this kind of like, there's something about the times that makes many of us sort of realize the similar sort of thing at the same time. I think that's really helpful, right?

8:32Really useful. And yes, Ehrenberg Bass were looking at it from quite a theoretical B2B context. It was a bit of a thought experiment. And so for, you know, in the very LinkedIn B2B institution point of view, right, that B2B and B2C are actually really quite similar. was thinking, right, how do we go and quantify this a little bit more? Let's do a robust survey of a net rep sample. I chose America to do that in because we're all trying to get more American data. And just ask across a range of categories. And I started with mobile phones and then went on to international air travel and new cars and beer and recreational cannabis and all sorts.

9:15and just was able to show by asking people, when do you expect a next purchase from this category? Is it today? Is it this week? Is it this month? Is it in three months, six months? On and on. I could show the shape of any market, any category, and how much of that was current demand and how much of that was future demand. So it was good to be able to kind of just show that. And the final thing is, I mean, it's not always 95.5, but it's always it is pretty much standard that there are more people out of the market than in the market at any given time it's one of those funny things it actually can always be 95.5 depending on where you put the time scale right yeah but generally without getting nerdy about that generally the principle is you know if you're going to run some advertising and say you're going to run it for a month um and you know nowadays you know we used to make campaigns that lasted for six months or a year now the average facebook campaign lasts for about six days right but but let's say we're going to be in market with a campaign for a month we can only expect the number of sales back from the amount of people that are in that category that month and so that's the real kind of that that's that's the point you know yes we've got a job to do with those folks but we run out of them pretty quickly unless we've done this job of warming up a whole lot of future people who as they come into market are going to sort of gravitate towards us and we're going to get a much greater share of that current demand that those people that are in market at this point in time yeah and that's the fundamental theory of future demand and current yeah it really is and and i kind of like i say something quite provocative in the book which is that advertising actually doesn't cause sales and that you know people pause on that for a minute and get a bit frightened about that statement advertising doesn't line with what byron sharp would say though yeah advertising doesn't cause sales but it does make sure brands win a greater share of them yeah right and that's the really important thing to consider most purchasing happens quite naturally and organically people come into a category they buy a thing from that category they leave that category and spend a bunch of time out of it and uh and not really thinking about it that much in the nothing that much at all it's all it's usually all pretty subconscious right um and so they uh so so as people come into a category and this is the um another great bit of research which i've included in the book from saeed business school and wpp last year and they looked at uh the consumer purchase journeys of 1.2 million purchase journeys so people being out of market coming into market buying something from that category then leaving the market again and what they could see is 84 percent of the purchases um went to brands that the the person making the purchase had in their consideration set before they entered the market yeah right so the purchasing wasn't driven by the performance marketing that was put in front of them it was actually driven by the the way the brand had built you know before a relationship before them came into market right do you know what's funny that that um piece of research was debuted here in can last year and um that wasn't the main focus of the presentation it was almost like oh by the way we found this that that's the most that's the most interesting it's i mean what was great about it was that it it put in you know it used a really big data set to prove something that i think we've all kind of or those of us who have been you know following the effectiveness research have have really thought was true right but it really categorically proved that with a lot of data and across a lot of different categories it was it was huge it was really large scale yeah it couldn't be accused of you know being some uk case totally yeah very large scale so that was great so that just sort of shows us how humans make decisions and i like i've come to the belief that marketing is fundamentally about how markets work and how humans make decisions if we understand those two things the rest of marketing makes sense and so how markets work all markets are made up of a small group of people in them and a large group of people out of them the way humans make decisions relative to those markets as they come in and they tend to buy things most of the time yeah from a group of brands that they were already familiar with before they came into market and this is really important when it comes to feeding these ideas outside of the marketing department yeah because i think in his session this week ritson said that the the in his experience and we we've seen this too the something like the 95.5 rule or the idea that most people are not currently shopping is instinctively understandable to cfi ceo anybody you're talking to in a way that talking about brand and and using more marketing kind of jargon maybe is not uh is that your experience yeah that's right yeah absolutely i think um i think the question that i get a lot is you know we've had how brands grow in the long and short of it for like 16 years and whatever now like why have we why are we still doing the wrong things yeah right um and i think um that we are that's only partially true i think lots of companies have have actually you know ingested that and uh and we can see that come through in the effectiveness papers um but still a large majority haven't really and i think a part a part of that is is not so much the market is not knowing it.

14:31It's the non-marketing stakeholders around them still operating under an invalid mental model of how advertising works. And part of it is that, you know, I was with, I got to meet Brian Cox, the physicist this week. Only in can. Only in can. But what a thrill because Brian Cox is one of the world's greatest science communicators. So what that means is he is able to take very, very complicated science concepts and communicate them in a way that everyday people like you and me understand them and can wrap their heads around them. And I was excited to meet him because I sort of consider myself a marketing science communicator, right?

15:08A bit more than a marketing scientist. I do lots of my own research, but actually my passion is how do we take this stuff, this excellent work that others have done, and just wrap it up in language and mental models and frameworks that allow people who are completely not in the marketing world to go, oh yeah that makes sense i get that now and so that's become a real passion and when i talk to engineers or finance folk or ops folk or you know anyone else who's outside of marketing and present the future demand kind of framework you know so often i've had people come up to me and say wow i kind of understand marketing how it works for the first time it was all a bit mysterious and confusing to me yeah but now i kind of really get i really get it and so i think there's that that's really the the job i'm trying to do is how do we put this into language that marketers can easily on share to their non-marketing stakeholders um and and also kind of you know collect up playbooks of folks who have gone on that journey educated their organization and gotten you know earned the right earned permission yeah to do marketing in the right way and build brands in the right way and yeah and so that's that's that i think will be a big part of what i you know try to do over the next few years.

16:19Next few years. Now, it's really important. I've just looked up the stat that came to mind when you were talking there. We did a bit of work with the ANA recently, surveyed U.S. marketers in connection with the sort of multiplier playbook we brought out of the back of the multiplier effect report. And this sort of tension between marketing and the rest of the organization, I mean, we know it's a consistent theme. But the point you made there about not being a misunderstanding or a misalignment about the actual role of advertising seems to be a crucial one. Yeah. So the finding we got in our data was that 60 % of CMOs are in the States.

17:11And this is the ANA. So these are pretty senior CMOs. The good ones. Yeah, they're good ones. They felt that the C-suite does not fully understand the role of advertising. So there's a majority of marketers do not think that the rest of the organization actually has that sort of valid view of what their biggest investment is there to deliver. Which seems bonkers. Yeah, it is now. I mean, I remember Dara Treseda when she was CMO of Peloton, she's now at Autodesk, but she said to me, you know, James, marketing has not done a very good job of marketing marketing. No. And I think that's a wonderful turn of phrase, but it's very true and it remains true.

17:54And she, you know, we've done a great job of marketing the products and brands in our care, absolutely. We haven't done as good a job of marketing, how marketing really works in a way that others sort of understand it. um and i think you know usually the mental model that you find inside non-marketing people's heads and also by the way some marketing people yeah is that is the old thing that advertising works by causing sales right you see an ad you go and buy some totally and that is i don't want to sort of generalize too much although i am going to do that now um but that is i think that's very ingrained in u.s uh marketing culture that there is still that and a lot of the way media has sold itself has been around that even before the sort of you know rebranding of performance advertising but that yeah and there's the whole um for me one of the most destructive uh phrases in advertising is right person right time right place yeah because it it makes the assumption that the best time to reach somebody is just the moment they're uh about to get to a shelf or something yes totally yeah yeah i think it's it's interesting let's let's do a couple of thought experiments so first one um uh the conversion rates of advertising are normally around one percent sometimes up to five percent and never over 15 percent now we um those numbers they haven't changed in 100 years right so again they haven't changed in 100 years so although we've introduced all this creativity all of this new media thinking and available availability target and reach people we invented the strategic planning discipline we invented you know the um the creative pre-testing um world um all of these things those numbers haven't changed right so either we're incompetent as an industry woefully incompetent or the way that we're looking at it isn't right right the mental model is not yeah not a correct one the mental model has largely been ada right so a good ad uh generates awareness interest desire and then action and if it does those four things it results in a sale um and aid has been the predominant mental model that advertising works by persuading people to buy things for 125 years.

20:20Ada was created in 1902 by a man called Frank Duke Smith. Frank Duke Smith was an American salesperson. He was describing sales. He never intended on describing advertising. He described how sales works. And sales is not advertising. Advertising is not sales done over medium. And so we've been under this misconception for all this time that advertising works in a certain way without even knowing that that was never, that wasn't a marketer or an advertising person who had studied advertising and worked out that it did that. It was a sales guy talking about sales. Now, if we go back to the 1%, 5%, 15 % conversion rate, if advertising worked by persuading people to buy things, we would see at least some examples of universally persuasive advertising, right?

21:08Someone at some point would have done an ad that got like 90 % of the people who saw it to buy the product yeah there are no examples of universally persuasive advertising why right because it doesn't work in that way right it doesn't work in that way we're looking through the wrong mental model and when um when what's his name said i know that half of my advertising spend is wasted i just don't know which half that was that was a great illustration of the problem that we've had for so many years we look at advertising's outcomes and we can only sort of make sense of them half of the time yeah right whereas and if you look at it like advertising persuades people to buy things you're like hang on why does this seem to work here and it doesn't work at all here like this is so confusing and when you kind of let her out and you go well no actually it works in two different ways in a two-step process it biases people who aren't in the market yet towards us and then it captures those people and converts them when they come into the market and when you look at it through that and then you can look at the performance marketing does that capturing and converting things so well the brand marketing does that building and biasing things so well neither of them does the other thing but then you'll be well at all right and so we need to sort of bifurcate this the two jobs that advertising are doing and understand it through that dual lens and once we do that actually all the outcomes we see from advertising make absolute sense

22:38This October, Walk is heading to Denver to host the Science and Magic Summit, exploring the shifts to reshaping marketing and how leading brands are turning creative insights into business impact. The summit is part of a three-day experience that brings together Lions, Content Marketing World and TMRE, the market research event, to help close the gaps between insights, strategy, content and creativity. Join us in Denver. Learn more at cmi.media forward slash walk. Save$450 on an all access pass with code Lions450.

23:20I want to spend the rest of the time we've got talking a bit more about the practical implications of this. So let's start with measurement because this is often the area where people struggle with this. I get that big theory, but I've got a bunch of numbers around the performance stuff and I'm really struggling to measure and understand the stuff you're talking about, that biasing over time. What's your thinking here? What's the advice in the book in terms of... Yeah, it's a really important... area and and i think let me talk about it because we're on a podcast in a slightly more simplistic way you know kind of explain the entire measurement stack but but i think if if you if we accept that there's these two jobs for advertising to do we need to metric those in two different ways so if we're trying to convert a sale from someone who's in market we should absolutely be using performance metrics absolutely they are the best way to you know figure out whether we're converting in an of an efficient way.

24:25If we're trying to bias people towards before they come into market, it's no good looking at a metric like conversion rate. They're not in the market yet. They're not going to buy any own from us, right? So we're not going for a sale immediately. So we need to be looking at really, are we building familiarity and awareness among this group? Are we making them feel emotionally positive towards us? Because we know if through our familiarity bias and our affect heuristic which means we bias towards things that we feel familiar with and the effect heuristic means that we tend to think things that we feel good about are better quality and more trustworthy and less risky and so we bias towards those things so are we growing our awareness and consideration and preference and those sorts of things can we see that people are feeling good about us yes of what we've done those are leading indicators that once they come into market they will convert at a higher rate right they'll make our performance marketing better so it's those two different ways of measuring those two different things and if we've got those things in balance then we've got our you know brand health brand tracking dashboard here and we've got our performance dashboard here then we can see as we're building here we're collecting more here you know we're planting more we're harvesting more yeah and uh and those two things are in balance so it's really simplistically it's kind of about that and then you get into you know how do we prove that through incrementality testing in our mms and all of that kind of jazz which we don't have time for today but that's basically the fundamental principle so i was in a in a sort of closed door meeting uh yesterday with a bunch of cmos and this this always comes up it doesn't matter what the topic is this always yeah it always comes back to this one way or another um and one uh cmo a very large brand i obviously can't say who it is because it was in chatham house but um said that they now have five key metrics that they report up into into uh into the cfo and they've been on a very long journey to to crack this uh two of those metrics are top line um he didn't say what they were but obviously that's to do with sort of revenue yeah value and volume two of them are bottom line so presumably things are about pricing and profit and then the other one is a brand power score he He didn't say where he got that from.

26:48But that sort of seemed like, you know, in terms of presenting to the CEO and CFO, that feels like a good sort of collection of data because it's got, well, how are we doing right now in terms of driving sales? What's our profitability against those sales? And have we got a sort of future facing? Yeah. You know, do we expect that to go up, down or sideways as we... Totally, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a really sensible stack. I think, you know, it's interesting. I was learning more about McDonald's and their marketing recently, and they measure brand love. Which is a very controversial term these days.

27:36Yes, totally. So I'm kind of, you know, the Ehrenberg Bass Institute would say that's nonsense. and I'm very much on their side that I don't think that people are in love with brands, right? I don't think there's that strong emotion. But what McDonald's measure and call brand love is really just an emotional positivity towards the brand. It's not that people are in love with the brand. It's just that, you know, do people feel a bit more positive to it or a bit less positive than they used to, right? And they have done a lot of work to prove the correlation between if our brand love goes up here, our sales our sales comps will go up three to six months later yeah and if it goes down we can expect a decline three to six months later and so they've got a way of measuring the affect heuristic measuring people's emotional kind of positivity towards their brand and using it as a leading indicator and making sure that they're continuing to keep that emotional positivity really high so i think they've got that brand power that they've got that sort of interim metric that gives them that sort of glimpse into what sales are probably going to do in the future they call it brand love other brands use a you know brand power or some kind of composite kind of thing or just use awareness or whatever it might be um i don't think it matters what you which one you use or what you call it i think it matters have you done the work where you can see this kind of lagging correlation between those two things exactly it's not like it's i'm just using a random metric it's like have we actually totally do we know through and mcdonald's did the work to really prove that it was causal and not a correlation and so that's the thing to do because once you've got that it's very easy to say to the rest of the organization look we can prove that this is important we can prove that you know it guides where we go in the future in terms of revenue and profitability and so that's why we're focused well that's why we're keeping we're trying to keep it high and that's why we do this sort of creative work and all that sort of stuff like Like anything, none of this is going to be 100 % like, you know, oh my God, we've proved it to the 10th decimal point.

29:37But it's about building a model that has data behind it. You can say, okay, this gives us, in a very uncertain time, this gives us more certainty and more confidence that we're making the right investments. Yeah, yeah, that's right. so I think that's part of it but I also think almost a step before the measurement piece is making sure that people understand how fundamentally marketing works and we talked about this earlier language is a huge part of this and that's why I mean coming back to the book you called it future demand we talked about future demand because we didn't want to get stuck in some of the marketing specific terminals and make it sound more useful.

30:25It's sort of a, it's a kind of like, if you ask someone in a business, do you want brand building? You know, I'm not really sure. Do you want future demand? Well, yes, of course. Right? So it's a kind of, it's a way of just presenting it in a way that's very difficult to misunderstand and very difficult to say, no, I don't want that. Thank you. Yeah. You've been doing work with other brands uh i know both you and i have have worked with instacart who seems to be a great example of a company that uh you've obviously read the research but almost kind of stumbled on them uh on this themselves um have you learned anything from talking about law with laura instacart yeah i mean so that was so that was so great that we did that thing the three of us on stage together last year because i hadn't met laura before that and um and and so you know from from what she said on stage and and sort of from talking to her afterwards i was like wow you have done like a masterful job of leading this organization it is it is like an yeah a really impressive case yeah not just of getting the data but organizational changes yeah absolutely and the way that she when she started you know she in her words they had a clip art logo and and a bunch of search advertising you know that was basically their marketing um and and now i mean this week uh i think they they they they won lions yeah they had a lead first lines um and and the business is i mean she's just turned it into the right balance of brand and performance performance is still important um the right balance of brand and performance um she's doing great work and she's got the business to understand why she's doing that work and really buy into it yeah and she's done i've case studied her in the book um and i'm really keen to kind of platform her as much as possible because she is a truly exceptional very smart marketer um and she's done like you were alluding to before almost without having any of the data or the research you know she's done all of this stuff instinctively which shows how how you know how strong she is intuitively as a as as a thinker um and the way that she sort of you know started with her board presented the case did what she called marching up the funnel and measuring at each step and sort of making the whole organization comfortable with going further up the funnel, doing more and more brand stuff.

32:47And, um, and, and she's just the, she, she is just such a good person to follow and learn from because she has done what we're all finding it hard to do. How do we get the organization to frankly, let us do the marketing that we know we ought to be doing. Right. And so, uh, and so, yeah she's she's the first of many playbooks that i'm going to do of marketers that have managed to do this i think so so there's another another one this this week uh in camp we've we've seen i don't know if you're in the session but you should check this one out is um lucinda barlow of uber um she she's out of australia and um but she manages uber internationally and um yeah some of the stuff they've been doing is very impressive but like laura and instacart what i love about these examples is these are not classic fmcg these are these are digital native data rich uh brands with very strong powerful performance marketing functions yeah who have the data and they are working on the data it's not like they're just going on gut or going and doing a whole let's be brave kind of nonsense they're um they're they're doing it proving it out and then scaling and repeating i love that one it's very cool i mean that's frankly why i really wanted laura in the book was because she's you know she's not from a cpg firm that's kind of like sort of leans into brand already um and and you know if you can do it in silicon valley with some pretty you know hard-nosed folks who are also very smart and as you say have a lot of data if you can sort of do it there you can probably do it anywhere and the way that she's sort of corralled those folks and helped them the cfo the ceo the chief ops officer the board helped them really understand what she's doing why she's doing it and so that they buy into it and um and and now look i mean the business is like twice as big as it was and it's you know it's going pretty well so um so yeah really excellent example to follow just finally james where do you see this going over the the next few years obviously you're on a bit of a mission to to kind of educate and prove this out and we're also hearing and i hope this is true i hope this isn't just wishful thinking but we're we're hearing that there's a lot of a lot more interest in in brand like you know the whole brand is back thing um and that the way kind of the second order effects of ai are that actually brand is we're finding is becoming a much uh much more powerful playing more powerful role uh or at least a more visible role as people get all into things like geo and go oh my god this what what's this model thinking about me and it's almost it's almost like it's creating a new a new set of arguments or reinforcing the arguments we have tell me what you think was yeah i mean i really i mean you guys published some some excellent research recently that showed that i think was it 65 percent 63 yeah charlie Oscar, Charlie, that's good later.

35:49Should we have the caveat here that all of this data is early? It's very early. It's, you know, we're still learning. Yeah, yeah. For us, that's, yeah, one of the most interesting sort of little tidbits. Totally. I mean, I agree that we're at a really nascent stage, but just to sort of see, you know, there's a few different data points that I've seen line up, you know, the Charlie Oscar point probably being the most lucid of them, but just to show that when the models are thinking about how to serve us, they're thinking about what's the decision that I'm going to make that's going to be a safe one for us right um and so it's making an evaluative decision not based on purely rational kind of what's the best product but what am i going to give to this person that's going to be the most sort of safe reliable likely to be you know a good overall choice as opposed to something that might have amazing rational credentials but not be from a company that has a particular sort of you know track record or people feel good about or feel familiar with so i think that's i i'm pretty sure well we don't know how the companies that own the foundational models might train them differently to think differently in the future because they could for what for all we know train that out of them and just make them purely rational actors so so that might or more likely you'll have to pay them to uh to uh to include it yeah and so but i think um you know my my sort of my phrase for it is i think in it going forward in this world of ai brands need to be machine readable and human lovable and that now that's great that's the really is this whole two audience the two audience only yeah i think and we need to we we of course we need to get good at sort of gel and we need to learn that as a new skill that we put into our performance stack because it's that's an important new thing to learn is it going to fundamentally change marketing or upend the way that we do business or the way that people buy things it's not right going back to what i said before marketing is about how markets work and how humans make decisions markets work the same way all over the world doesn't matter what country you're in they work the same in china as they do in america as they do in new zealand as they do here in france um and uh and for markets to work differently for markets to evolve to work differently that will take at least hundreds of years for the human mind to evolve to think and make decisions differently that will take at least a few million years so in our lifetimes this stuff's not going to change it doesn't matter how many amazing new technologies come along now what those new technologies are going to be great for is like doing better research you know is producing things more efficiently is reaching people with greater accuracy if that's possible and you know they're going to do all sorts of wonderful things that help us as both marketers and consumers live our lives and we should totally embrace that but they're not going to challenge the fundamentals of what marketing is they're a sort of tactical layer on top of those fundamentals that helps us sort of, you know, achieve what those fundamentals tell us we ought to achieve in a better, faster, kind of cooler way.

38:41So, yeah, that's sort of my take on AO. But, yeah, we do need to consider now, you know, is the brand machine readable? You know, are we putting the right things out into the world that the machine's going to be able to read and know the right things about us? But also what the machine has been trained on is a bunch of stuff that we did years ago. Yeah. And it's very hard to make up for all of that stuff if you didn't do it. And the great brands did do it. And it was called brand marketing. James, that's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much. Amazing. Thank you, David. That's all we've got time for today.

39:14Big thank you to James for coming in. And of course, the book is available online. And there is a lot more on all these topics on walk.com. If you like what you heard, please do follow us on your podcasting platform of choice. And if you really liked it, please give us a review. Until next time, thanks for listening.