Creating the Metaverse, lessons from Google Glass and the Whitehouse - Dave Kaufman, Meta

25:52Let me show you augmented reality. Now, in terms of timing, of course, I didn't expect a pandemic to happen. And suddenly, like, everyone goes, oh, yeah, QR codes, I get it, you know, sort of thing. Has anyone ever called you out on that? Or have you been able to? No, no. Well, the thing is, 10 years is a long time, right? I was going to say, that's the best thing about going to a conference and predicting the future. You're never wrong. And I don't remember in 10 years anyway. So the only person seems to remember is me. And I'm quite happy to talk about it. So, you know, but anyway, I think I'm going to put the pandemic as my kind of excuse box of well we wouldn't be doing qr codes without it but it's definitely a with these things it often takes longer doesn't it for the technology or for the use case to catch up the technology whichever around it is so what's your prediction on metaverse when it when is it going to get to a point where we're all comfortable with it we're all engaging and using it yeah i think that as you said it's not an overnight thing and we're probably at the dial-up internet phase of the metaverse today.

26:45So when you look at the devices and the types of interactions you can have, you'll probably look back on today and go, oh my God, the same way if you look at a picture of someone using the cell phone in the briefcase, it feels like it was 100 years ago. What we've seen a lot of traction with already just in the few years since we've branded the company is both the ways that people are already interacting with the internet, especially when you talk about younger cohorts of users. So you talk about the growth of products like Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft. These are all non-meta products, but I would consider really part of the metaverse, really deep, immersive, social, interactive products that are already wildly successful.

27:24Coming back to my world with meta, when we look at the technologies that underpin the metaverse, so MetaQuest, our line of VR and mixed reality headsets, Ray-Ban Meta, which we just talked about, the growth of AI, Horizon Worlds, which is a social platform we've built for metaverse communication and metaverse social experience as well. All these things are building a lot of traction. We've seen a lot of early success with. So I don't want to get on the stage and say, oh, well, in four years, you will definitely see this, this, and this. But all of the underlying pieces to be able to get there are moving in the right direction and being pushed not just by meta as well, which is really the most encouraging thing for us, that the metaverse is something that will be created by lots of companies, developers, creators, everyday people.

28:08This is not just a meta bet or a meta endeavor. We just think that with the focus on social and presence and communication, that we have a big role in play in helping to shape that. I think part of the problem is when you announce it, suddenly everyone's going, I'm going to be the first advertiser in the metaverse, or I'm going to buy a town square, and you get this sort of massive hype where everyone's kind of spending money on it, and then it disappears because it's ahead of itself. But actually, I mean, you very kindly allowed me to try it on before. The thing that struck me just from the demo we got to do was the entertainment value, like just from the interactive gaming, which I just thought, you're right, you say it's a bit like Fortnite.

28:47But also that as a training tool, because I could really imagine kind of learning things, whether it's learning a language or playing a piano or if I'm in, not that I would ever, but if I was a surgeon learning how to do a bit of surgery or learning how to fly a plane, you can imagine how you could recreate that experience and train people through it. Yeah, I mean, when you talk about no longer being limited by space or time or physics, I know that sounds quite hand wavy, but it's really, when you talk about the demo we did earlier with Quest 3, our new mixed reality headset, it really removes a lot of those constraints.

29:19And these are the types of experiences we're seeing people have. So you might want to be entertained and watch a movie on a gigantic screen, but you don't have a movie theater in your studio apartment. Now you can do that with mixed reality and virtual reality. You might want to hang out with someone, as I alluded to, who's 3 ,000 miles away. That's something you can do. You might not have the money to pay for. You might just not want to have a personal trainer in your flat or in your home. You can put on a headset and now be trained by a personal trainer who's not actually there. You can be working out on the side of Machu Picchu without getting on an airplane.

29:53So we're starting to see a lot of traction around a lot of different experiences. But my hypothesis is the way when you think about the personal computer, it was really work experiences that were where you started. and then those built into the personal experiences that people brought home and why people started buying computers for their home. Today, where we are gaming and social use cases, I really think are where VR and mixed reality and the whole metaverse concept is getting started. You'll start to see a lot more expansion technologies, you said education, training, productivity, so on and so on.

30:25And we're already seeing a lot of nuggets of that being adopted today. So So take productivity, for example. I'm traveling here from San Francisco. I obviously, in a carry-on bag, did not bring a computer monitor with me. But I was sitting in my hotel room earlier, and with Quest 3, I can hook it up to my computer and have three giant screens in front of me without needing to pack a gigantic piece of luggage with me. And that's quite a simple experience, but it's quite a breakthrough one. and those are the kind of things that as we start to see it take traction become a lot more exciting of how are people going to use these devices and this technology in a way i think about to our earlier conversation aren't we about familiar and new because you know suddenly as soon as you frame it is gaming i'm like oh yeah of course yeah you put a headset on to play a game and you can imagine it so if you go from gaming to now it's work productivity but in a gaming style it suddenly feels a bit you know much more approachable than oh i'm gonna use a headset for work which it feels like a massive leap to take, doesn't it?

31:22Yeah. I mean, the fact that if you're able to bring even slightly more fun experiences to something like work, that's probably a good thing. So having a meeting might never be as fun as playing a video game, but there's really nothing more painful. And we all have experience in it than sitting in a one hour meeting with someone on a video call and it's dropping and the presentation feature doesn't work and you can't really get the flow of your presentation going. The idea that you could put on a headset or one day a pair of glasses and simply see things, digital objects rendered in front of you.

31:57So let's say we're sneaker designers and we're trying to evaluate a design. It's probably more fun for us to actually touch and play with a digital sneaker than it is to just see it present on a slide. It's probably also more fun to see you in person or as a hologram versus as a digital rectangle. So bringing fun into a lot more aspects of our life is also something that gets me excited about the product and something that I think we'll see a lot more of as we go. Yeah. And back to the system, one thing as well, like, you know, entertain for commercial gain. We're always trying to encourage people to, you know, advertising should be entertaining.

32:25If you make people smile, you know, make people feel good, they're more likely to buy more. Let's jump to advertising because one of the things you notice about the technology industry as a whole is a bit of an aversion to advertising, right? Because you've got, obviously, our friend Elon at Tesla, who famously doesn't advertise. which always sounds a bit bizarre because like the guy's like a one man advertising machine isn't he? I would say they do plenty of advertising whether it has paid media behind it or not there we go that's probably the distinction but definitely advertising they've got a lot of very plush looking stores I think they call them you know showing off the cars but anyway they don't advertise Jeff

33:08I checked Amazon were not only doing very good advertising I think they spend a dollar or two on it as well I think they were the biggest spender in the, if they're not the biggest spender, they're the biggest increase in spending in the US and in the UK. So they're spending a lot of money doing the thing they said they wouldn't do, which is interesting. And back to our chat earlier as well. The other, I was re-watching the old Steve Vollmer Microsoft speech, which just makes me laugh, you know, where he's getting a sweat on going. On stage sweating. Exactly. Like he's going, developing developers or something.

33:38And it's like, well, where is the consumer in a way? You know, where is the person that you want to go and buy? You've kind of forgotten that. But anyway, does tech have advertising problems? Is it so led by product that it sometimes fails to forget that you've got to consume your needs to talk to and explain your product to? A lot of the time, yes. We hit on this a little bit earlier, but there are still big parts of the tech industry, whether it's big tech companies or startups, that solely believe build it, people buy it, show that it's a better mousetrap, people buy it, and show off the speeds and feeds.

34:11So it's faster, it's thinner, it's better than last year's and people buy it. And that obviously, as you know better than anyone on the system, one side of your role is not what motivates people to be excited about a brand or to make a purchase decision. So I would actually say that the tech industry probably more than most over-index on that style of advertising. I actually don't know how different it is from, say, toothpaste advertisers, who I think also lean into 32 % more of this new whatever that helps you whiten your teeth versus like actually telling an emotional brand story. So I do think that's a big thing that weighs down the tech industry.

34:46One of the things I've really tried to focus on in my role as the marketing director globally for the product is leaning into real people, real use cases, and telling stories about how people are using this product. So take Quest 3, for example. We could go out and say it's 40 % thinner than last year, and is this much more RAM and this Snapdragon processor? And I already see your eyes glazing over as we're sitting here in person. It's not a particularly compelling story. The way that we've approached the launch of this product is really showing all the ways, which have been inspired by real people who have gotten to show the product and see how they use it and showing how it's bringing value to their life every day.

35:23So again, I don't think that sounds extremely novel or extremely breakthrough, but for a tech product, taking something like this, I'm very self-aware that putting a Quest 3 on your face and wearing it and interacting with digital objects that aren't actually there is quite new and at times can be quite strange. So grounding it in the familiar and grounding it in real human storytelling as much as I think that human can become a buzzword has really been successful for us. So currently have a big global campaign running across the US and UK and Germany and Japan that shows stories from someone learning to play the piano with mixed reality to be able to play along with their grandma to people just having fun in the little downtime moments and playing video games on their coffee table that aren't actually there, but now can come to life on top of a tabletop.

36:12So it's quite exciting to see the reception to it so far. That's definitely the way to go. For anyone listening who hasn't seen someone wearing a headset, it's quite fun to watch them pointing in the air like this. I was watching you earlier swipe, and it's a bit like that bit in the, what is it, in the Matrix? Not the Matrix. Minority Report. Minority Report, yeah, where Tom Cruise is flicking through the slides like that. My favorite Super Bowl ad of all time, actually, is, I don't know if you saw it, the Microsoft one from about four or five years ago with the game controller. oh my that that gets me every time i don't know if anyone hasn't checked out look at look it up it's a beautiful piece of work absolutely so emotional but the disabled kids and you've got the parents talking and the dad just chokes up and says you know he's not disabled when he's playing and this game controller allows him to interact with kids in a way he never did before and suddenly go wow you know i i mean you know as a dad myself i just get absolute chills when i see him crack up I mean, he's quite a tough guy as well, isn't he?

37:10You can see him choking up when he realizes his son can play games the first time. It's just amazing. Yeah, it's a beautiful piece of work. And it's something about the technology, so mixed reality and virtual reality, that is one of the most exciting or one of the most meaningful parts of my job with Quest 3. I keep coming back to this idea of what if space-time limitations didn't exist. So imagine a eighth grader or year eight, trying to be culturally relevant since I'm in the UK, who is in the middle of, let's say, Kansas in the United States. They probably don't have access to the same museums and trainings and all the things that a student in New York City might have.

37:50but being able to put on a headset and have full access to not just the world's information but to museums and art and to see the let's say the ice age come to life these are the kind of things that i think we'll see more and more adoption with outside of just gaming and social is really this democratization of access and that's something that i'd say today we're really in the early days and we've cracked this much of it but when you think about where it could be 5 10 50 years from now becomes quite an exciting proposition. Yeah. And that becomes so exciting. I mean, imagine what you can do that.

38:23And one of the questions I wanted to ask you, so you've worked at Google while the founders are still there. Am I right in saying that? And of course you're now at Meta and, you know, Mark's running a company. What's it like working for founders? And, you know, you've worked for some of the, I guess, the world's most famous founders and most prolific founders. What's that environment like? I think there are three things to me that stand out about founder-led companies. The first is a sense of really mission and purpose and building for the long term. So when you work for a founder-led company, you're generally working for someone who believes they're doing their life's work.

38:58They're not a hired gun. They're not looking to add an accolade to their resume for their next thing. They are in it because they believe it, and they believe it enough to start that company. And at a company like that, the culture starts at the top. And you feel that really throughout everyone and everything that you do. So take Meta, for example, there are tens of thousands of employees across nearly every country on the globe. Obviously, it's a very diverse population of different types of employees. But the one thing that everyone probably has in common is that they deeply believe in and deeply care about building tools that make it easier for people to feel connected either with others or with their community.

39:35And I think that's quite unique. So that's the first thing I would say is about a founder-led company. The second, you had a recent guest, Nancy King from Airbnb, who I don't know personally, but I thought she spoke beautifully about working for a founder-led company. She said this as well, is the amount of time that's spent on product and customer. And that might sound like table stakes. And you and I had a conversation about this earlier. How many meetings have you sat in your career where you get to the end of it and you say, not once did we mention the thing we're building. Is it the right thing to build?

40:06Do we have the right target on it? We're just making forward progress to make forward progress. And again, when I think at a place like Meta and think about Mark Zuckerberg's involvement in the company, most conversations revolve around the products we're building and making sure that they're exceptional and building great social value and that we're serving customers, billions of users across the globe. I think that's very different from a CEO or any executive whose main focus is, how do I pick a new cardboard distributor for our packaging to get one cent off the margin so that next month's earning call is a little bit better.

40:37So again, it comes back to that long-term focus. And lastly, and this is something you and I spoke about as well over lunch, was there's just a sense of speed and urgency that comes with a founder-led company. So whether you are a small business around the corner, let's say selling sneakers, or you are Meta, which is one of the biggest companies in the world, has tens of thousands of employees, I think there's always a feeling that tomorrow isn't guaranteed. I mean, that's especially true in Silicon Valley. So if you think of some of the most influential tech companies from 20 years ago, how many of them exist today, let alone are still influential?

41:09Maybe one, two, three. So that sense of tomorrow's not guaranteed and we need to be the fastest and the first and build with a sense of urgency really permeates everything in a founder-led company is definitely something I feel at Meta and in everything that we do. That's so true. I've done both in my career. And at its most extreme, exactly what you say. In a corporate company, you might have entire days in kind of committee meetings with lots of people just aligning. I mean, that's a favourite phrase, isn't it? Everyone has to align and agree what the plan is. And then you sit there scratching your head going, no one has actually said, is what we're doing any good or not?

41:45And yet in a founder-led company, the idea will be created in five minutes and it will be expected to be delivered the next day. And it's just how quickly. And it's building towards a 5, 10, 100-year vision. But it still feels like, hey, we need to get this down tomorrow. And you're right about the customer as well. Because again, in founder companies, you're obsessed with the customer. And you spend time with the customer as well. So even the CEO will be out meeting customers, feeding back to the product development teams what can be better. And just that customer obsession is really tangible.

42:14It's something I give a lot of feedback to my team on. So I think that there is a misconception that whether it's the founder, the CMO, or whoever the biggest executive is in the room, that when they get into the details, they're micromanaging or doing something wrong. And everyone who works in marketing at some point has presented to the CEO, the CFO, the founder, and someone has an opinion on copy or the spot. Of course, it can be frustrating when you're finishing a spot and someone says, hey, in post, can you change it from a tiger to a lion? And you go, no, that's not how advertising works.

42:47but when the founder or whoever it is in the room cares enough to question the copy and they're doing it through the lens of will our customer care about this wait i think this is actually confusing and there's too much jargon that's not micromanagement that's thinking about your product and your customer first and though it can be frustrating in the moment i tell people and i give myself the same advice as well because i'm guilty of being frustrated by it that's a sign that something's working as a company that you're still caring about the little details because you're thinking about your customer and your essentially the resonance of what you're shipping first and that's a really important part of what we do i'm a funny example you know the augmented reality soft drink that i worked on you know um with the qr code is dead uh happy days but um after after that i spent about three or four years there and then i went to a much bigger corporate company so i went from kind of you know being part of a tiny team in a factory you know no budget to running a team of i think 55 60 marketers and i remember um almost within the first couple weeks of starting with this big project big new product launch going through and um well the assistant brand manager came up to me and uh wanted some advice because there was one out of the target customers they're going for there's one big uk british customer that they hadn't quite got signed up but that customer was so big to the project that if they didn't get them signed up, they were going to miss all their targets, right?

44:09And she was going, John, what should we do? And I called the customer and spoke directly to the customer and said, what is it going to take for us to do this deal? And he said, oh, thank you. Anyway, we did the deal. And she looked at me literally gobsmacked going, you know the customer? I said, yeah, yeah. And I spent the last few years dealing with this, I won't say who it is and the person, but I said, yeah, I've been dealing with him for the last few years. And it's just the idea that somebody who was running the department was on personal terms with a buyer at a supermarket and was able to get something done.

44:40But that's what, you know, family companies, you know, you do have those direct relationships, aren't you? You're much more hands-on, as you say. So I see this even in my role, when you talk about founder-led agencies, creative agencies versus agencies that are far removed from being founder-led. So anytime I've run a pitch process in my career, kind of coming back to what I was saying about hiring, that there are certain things that I just have a good sense that when someone says it or does it, they're going to be successful in the role. When we've had a pitch process and agency goes away and doesn't talk to us for weeks and goes into their hole and then comes back with a hundred slide deck, I generally get the sense they're probably not going to be the right agency.

45:16It's the agencies who ask lots of questions, who apologize for asking too many questions, who try and understand, who don't just take a 60-minute meeting and speak for 55 minutes of it, but really want to understand me or my business or my team's business as the customer, same thing goes a long way. And I see that repeatedly in my own role. Yeah, that's true. It actually reminded me of a pitch I was running on BrewDog. I was at BrewDog for about three months before getting fired. But in that time, managed to do quite a lot, but in that time, Uncommon were pitching. This was just after they'd pretty much launched as an agency.

45:50And so I had the three founders in. And I remember as I was talking, Natalie was asking loads of questions and and nils was just there with this massive pad of paper like you know with these kind of felt-tip pens and he was just drawing stuff up he was just listening and drawing listening and drawing and it was almost like a kind of creative session live and going oh i'm you know from what you said you could do this you could do that it's brilliant but but you kind of a the founders are there b they're asking all those questions c they weren't waiting three weeks to kind of go in here's the answer they were live doing it like well would this is this what you're talking about is that what you're talking about what if we did this can you imagine you know It's just amazing.

46:26Yeah, I always say the same thing, that I love the show Mad Men, but I'm not looking for a Mad Men-style presentation where you go away and then pull the cover off of the big presentation and say, it's done. Communicate, be a part of it. Same thing for a founder-led business, same thing for working with an agency or as a marketing client as well. Now, I must ask you, because you've obviously been working for big tech companies, you've been working for founders, you've been working on the future technology in really, really exciting capacities, but you did take a little bit of time out in between those two kind of big roles, didn't you?

46:56To do something really quite unusual. So tell us about the, well, how would you describe the, not career breaks, it's not like you weren't working, but - Definitely wasn't a break. It wasn't a break, but yeah, tell me what you did in between Google and Meta. Yeah, it's a very common career path going from Google to President Obama's White House to Meta. So I spent a year working in President Obama's White House in 2016, the last year of his presidency, on a team called the U.S. Digital Service, which is actually a team that was designed after a British government office called Government Digital Services.

47:31So the very quick version is, you might have heard, America, we have terrible healthcare. And when President Obama was rolling out the Affordable Care Act, now known as Obamacare, it's really the first piece of legislation in history that was on the brink of failure because the technology behind it was failing. The website, the backend, all the technology that was supporting people being able to sign up for healthcare didn't work. And it jeopardized this extremely important legislative and presidential policy. So what the president did at the time was recruit a number of technologists from big tech companies, including Google, to come in, really serve as a SWAT team to rebuild all of the technology behind the Affordable Care Act and make sure that Americans could sign up for healthcare.

48:14And then the president, who's quite persuasive, pulled a little little bit of a bait and switch and said to these five or six technologists, what if you stick around the government, you'll be a part of the executive office of the president, and we're going to build a startup within the White House. I, President Obama, will be the founder of it. And we're going to go around and fix other digital services throughout the government. So we would talk about things like when you go on Amazon, you can buy a book or anything else with one click. Why does a veteran who served in wars, who's owed their health care from the American government, they used to this is a real number they used to have 900 phone numbers and something like 600 websites to be able to get the health care that's promised to them for their service so the digital service would go in and essentially rebuild these infrastructures and these tools alongside the civil servants already serving government to build government products that worked as seamlessly as buying a book with one click on the internet so i came in in 2016 it was the last year of the presidency i got the i think the best pitch i'll ever get from a recruiter which was, would you like?

49:16Your country needs you. Essentially, it was, have you ever thought about using your skills as a marketer to serve your country? Wow. Which is a pretty good pitch. And obviously it was something quite meaningful when you talk about long-term vision and purpose. So I joined in the last year and my first day, I learned that using the word marketing within a government office or in the office of the president, it's not allowed. It has something to do with the propaganda act from back in the day. So technically worked in public engagement and communications, but worked on really three distinct things.

49:46One was doing external communications about the president's agenda. So really solidifying the idea that President Obama was the first tech forward president and was really the founder of the US Digital Service, what we call the Peace Corps for nerds. So that was one aspect of the job. The second aspect was using marketing skills to make sure that the people who need to be served by the tools that we were building could access them. So I moved from marketing smart glasses and hardware technology in Silicon Valley to making sure immigrants and refugees and veterans and small businesses had access to and knew how to access the tools that we were building for them.

50:24So marketing in a very different way. And then lastly, we were doing, I guess what you call recruitment marketing or employer branding was what we called it trying to build a tradition of public service within the tech industry. So how, like myself, do you convince technologists who are making good money working in Silicon Valley on big, hard, meaty problems to take six months, one year, two years, we call them tours of service with the US Digital Service to put their skills, whether a designer, a marketer, an engineer, to help build the government services for the citizens that need them most.

50:57That's a pretty big challenge, right? Because presumably you're on a career trajectory. I'm guessing you'd be pretty well paid if you're in Silicon Valley. and you're going to take a year out to do something with the government, you know, not where you tend to build your career. How do you convince people to do that? It comes back to what we're talking about around founder-led companies, which is a sense of purpose and a sense of mission and a sense of care. So it is one of the things I take the most pride in about the digital service today is it's founded under President Obama, survived and grew under President Trump, and it grew further under President Biden.

51:34When you think about the last however many years, the last eight, 12 years in American politics, there is nothing that both sides of the aisle agree on. So the fact that the digital service has not only survived but thrived comes back to the heart of your question is it's doing something good and it's doing something that serves all Americans. So of course, it is not the easiest pitch if you're an engineer with a huge stock option package to say, give that up, move to Washington, D.C., wear a tie, live in the D.C. August swamp heat. But the right people, and really it's a self-selecting group who say, I can put my skills towards a purpose that's going to serve hundreds of millions of people and people in matter 5, 10, 50 years from now is a pretty compelling pitch.

52:21And how was your experience viewed at Meta when you joined Meta? How did they look at it? well overall i mean one of the things we we look for and i want to be careful because i'm saying i really value marketing education i really value people who have read how brands grow and the like diversity of experience is quite important so i was lucky when i joined the company i actually worked for a brilliant technologist named regina dugan uh who worked at darpa which is part of the department of defense she also had a government background so it's actually quite well received that I knew how to think like her and how to interact with a government official.

52:57But the idea that I could think about problems a different way and knew how to tackle problems in a scrappy way, I had no marketing research budget working for the White House. I remember walking around the National Mall in Washington, D.C. with a notebook, trying to do my own marketing research for free by asking people. And Washington, D.C., great place to do that. You have tourists from all over the world, so you get a nice cross-section. So all of the work that I did was not a full tangent or just fully unrelated. It really helped change how I think in a meaningful way. So definitely something I'm glad that I did.

53:29I appreciate the speed at which the tech industry moves, which the government definitely does not. But it was an incredible experience and it's definitely something I encourage people to consider. I do love the little insight you had in there, which is about when you have no resources. Because I remember when I was in the big corporate world, they often would say, imagine you had no money. what would you do you know what i mean and and of course when you're in those brainstorms you're thinking well i have money right so i do know what i'm going to do but actually when again going back to my juice burst augmented reality i actually had no money and when you actually have no money you've got to be incredibly entrepreneurial you have to go and do your own research and meet your customers you have to think about you know something extraordinary that's going to make people change their minds and and get you in front of the right people it does really you know in one sense.

54:16My most creative work ever has been when I haven't had the big resources and the money and the budgets and stuff. I 100 % agree. I say this all the time to my team. And a lot of the teams that I manage are lucky to have significant marketing budgets working, as I said, for one of the biggest companies in the world. It's a double-edged sword. Having a big marketing budget means you can buy a spot during any ad break. It means you can work with any agency. You can pursue six ideas and hope that one of them works out. It's also a huge detriment as well at times, because as you said, without constraints, you're sometimes just throwing spaghetti at a wall.

54:51And I see over and over again, the marketing leaders I work with who are most successful are the ones that whether they have zero budget or$300 million budget, still think the same way, which is, how do I work in a scrappy way? How do I work with constraints? And what's the most creative solution to this problem. Simply throwing money at a problem never ends up the right way. So, you know, nine times out of 10, I'm happy to take the budget because it makes things a little bit easier. But you have to hire people and work with people who have been challenged to work with nothing and people who have worked with big budgets and it really creates a nice intersection.

55:26Yeah. You sort of need to have this, you sort of need to act as if you have no money and then the money will work in a way, doesn't it? But if you act like you've got all the money, You're going to become lazy. You're less likely to focus on what works. You're more likely just to throw money at it. Take, for example, the brand that I think everyone talks about now too much almost. Every presentation I can, Liquid Death. They're doing some of the best advertising work and some of the best creative work, while also doing the fundamentals like having physical availability in really interesting retail, at least in the US.

56:02what they don't have i would assume is a 500 million dollar marketing budget so they've been had to be very smart about their four p's their creativity how they think about effectiveness how they think about mental and physical availability you know all of these things and those constraints have turned them into one of the most envied brands in the world i think on one of the recent episodes of your podcast you're talking about the work that mcdonald's has done recently drawing into how their ip has been used in the disney catalog throughout years they're a brand that probably has an unlimited marketing budget to some degree but seems to really think with constraints and think in really intelligent ways so on both ends of the spectrum those are the brands you have to admire and you just see continuing to do great yeah they're really good examples actually i love both those examples because you're right because what one one is kind of imposing constraints as you say and one is acting as if there are no constraints you know at the other end um so question finish up on then um so everything you know about technology, all the stuff you're working on, where would you place your bet for 2024?

56:59From a marketing point of view, what's going to be the thing? My big bet is that humor makes a return. Since the pandemic, I think the marketing industry has become so inward looking, so serious, really lacked a self of sense awareness and in place of it become extremely self-important, if I can be very blunt about it. So one of my favorite marketing books of the last, really the last decade has been Steve Harrison's Can't Sell, Won't Sell. For people who haven't read it, this hypothesis is simply that Adland is focused on saving the world and purpose and brand purpose and everything except actually selling the product you're hired to sell and building effective marketing operations.

57:42There is ample evidence, much of it from you and System 1 and looking at Lennon and look out at the publications you and Orlando would have had that shows emotional resonance with work. Humor is a great way to build emotional resonance, builds businesses. So my prediction is that we start to see a return to that and that that actually starts to feel novel again. And whether it's the Super Bowl or the holidays, when I look at the lion's share of advertising that's shipping these days, in the US and I'd say in the UK as well, I haven't seen humor be a big part of it. When I think about the best ad campaigns of all time, large percentage of them rely on humor.

58:21at least cleverness, I think we're going to start to get a bit of that back. And I think at least the brands that start to do that, we'll see effectiveness that others don't because it seems to be a unique strategy at the moment. I think it's right. And the prize is for those that do it as well, because like you said, the evidence that humor sells is very clear. So amen to that. Let's hope we'll see. Have a few more laughs in 24. I hope so. Brilliant. Dave, thank you so much. It's been great having you on. Thank you for having me. Great to be here. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO.

58:54I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on x at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn, where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.