How Not to Plan in 2026 with Les and Sarah

30:00So even if they're marketing people, they're then selling to sort of general management or finance or whatever who clearly don't understand that stuff as well. So there's always a wider selling, isn't there? We tend to think it's just the people we deal with who have to know and understand this stuff, but then they have to sell internally too. So there's a very wide target market of people who need to understand all this stuff. Yeah, I mean, I can remember talking to people in finance and explaining some of this stuff. And it was just like, wow, what you mean, actually it's more like CapEx. They could get the idea, but nobody had ever shown them that sort of way of thinking about marketing at all.

30:42And so often in organisations, the rest of the C-suite are in the short term. If you're a supply chain director, if you're a sales director, often the final story, you're looking very much at that week, that month, that quarter. But the marketers should be, we should be the ones looking ahead over one to three years at least, I think. No, I mean, I'm not a CEO or a CFO, but I think those people do also care about the long term. But we haven't always been in the marketing world good enough at showing them the connection. There are some other things as well, like accounting rules don't allow you to, you know, treat it like an investment in quite the same way as with a factory or whatever it's just you're not allowed to do that i think marcus raised that sort of misnomer almost of your long and short of it really that it sets up this kind of almost like a false binary that the long doesn't work now but it does work later and the short does now but actually as we know the long does do a bit of short as well so there's that sort of nuance which i think is totally lost on a lot of people then and i think the thing about measurement is really important that that measurement and language actually so if you are measuring in terms of awareness or brand love or whatever and and if you're talking in term in sort of terms of yeah what we want to you know bond or or create, you know, fluffy language, then, you know, that's always going to come second to, yeah, well, we'll get, you know, X many conversions and that will generate this much cash flow.

32:24So I've tried to talk about the long-term or brand building stuff as this is about creating sustained cash flows and sustained profits and so forth. And enhanced performance from your short term as well, which is another kind of selling for short. It's not just fluffy. It's the same hard-edged business logic, but it's over different timeframes. Take a bit of the saying about just agency tenure being good, because it's sort of marketing tenure as much as, and it was interesting, our big long-term winners at the Effectiveness Awards last year were clients who had very long-term client tenures in there, didn't they?

33:07Lathwaite, McCain. That's true. So that is a factor as well. Didn't this come up in your compound creativity work with Andrew? The agency tenure was actually one of the contributing factors for compound creativity. Because often I find agencies have more institutional knowledge of a brand than the brand managers because the brand managers rotate every 18 months or so. Yeah, exactly. So it's often, yeah. Certainly, yeah, we've done that, haven't we? Do you remember a client who came in with an idea? Have we talked about this before? Where they came in with a new product launch. And I was going to go, the last time you tried to launch this.

33:45Here's why it failed last time. Oh, that's brilliant. Because I had more data than they did about the brand. But I think the marketing center of things is absolutely right. I always joke about this because this is the first time I've been in a job more than three years in my entire career. I mean, it's crazy when you think about it. It's almost a source of shame, isn't it, if you haven't moved on? Like, something must be wrong. You feel like you're not going anywhere. Yeah, exactly. Years four, five and six have been wildly successful. And I've now discovered what happens when you stick at something more than three years.

34:12It's the same with campaigns, isn't it? They kick off after three years, you get an uptick. So we should all be there for more than three years. So tenure is an important issue. But I have a little bit of a beef about people say things have got worse because tenures have got shorter. Have you ever seen any data to show that tenures have got shorter? Well, the data usually quoted is at C-suite level, so CMO tenure, which is around four years, I think. And it's slightly less than the C-suite average. But have you ever seen any data to show that it's trended over time? Well, it's got worse or better.

34:51Yeah. I think it's got, it's similar, but I think the main reference is the fact that it's slightly less than other C-suite roles. Yeah. You see, that's the main, it's shorter than that. Oh, you know, the thing is, you know, tenure is short and therefore it must have been long in the past and therefore think that's why things have got worse. I have never seen any data to support that. And I have seen some data that supports the opposite, that actually tenures have got longer over time. I've seen articles where they say new data shows low levels of brand loyalty. Brand loyalty has collapsed. No, it was always low.

35:29So I don't buy this idea that shortening tenure is one of the reasons that there's been more short-termism. I think that's nonsense. I think it might be, Mark, that makes this point, that there's also a dynamic where more CMOs are getting promoted. Could we make the assumption they're getting fired, right? But actually some of them are getting promoted. There's a bigger mix getting promoted than getting fired. I mean, the thing that scares me slightly is the, if I get this right, the mean versus the median or something like that. What you've got is you've got a few CMOs that have been around 20 years and you've got a ton that have been around two years.

36:05Four might be the average, but there's a bunch of them. There's another thing. I have seen some data showing up to a certain point relentless increase in the tenure of CMOs, but I think that that's because the title CMO is new. And so, you know, there were none and they'd only been in the job for a year and they've got gradually, yeah. So anyway, the whole thing is kind of, it's one of those arguments by hand-waving thing. You go, oh, there's a lot of CMO churn and therefore it's… Well, I think it's true, actually, if you go down the organisation. I mean, certainly at brand manager level, being in a role two years is a long time, a long, long time actually, because you're at a point in your career where you're trying to get as much experience as possible.

36:49You want to work on this brand and then that brand and this category, that category, you know, work on innovation. You know, see, at that level, the churn is pretty high, I'd say. I don't know, I'm down the data to a hand, but I think it'd be pretty high. One of my hunches is that that is over-emphasized as a thing that's made marketing worse over time. But that actually, the way we measure things is much, much more important that all the big expansion in metrics is in short-term metrics. have we finally seen the end of the purpose era do you think i mean i know that we've something we've talked about almost every year yeah i hope so do you think do you think we're okay a good reference point for me i had the unilever cmo amazing conversation with her absolutely incredible and didn't mention the word once didn't mention it once and despite dove which i think is one of the most brilliant brilliant brilliant examples of purpose advertising and done well yeah but she talks about creating desire at scale like wanting people to want your products kind of thing and that very much is getting back to a superior product and marketing what is intrinsically great about it yeah uh just interested in your view as to whether you think you've seen a shift back to product it's one of the issues with purpose it wasn't creating desire at the scale wasn't it and so i think that's exactly right that um that she'd be talking about uh dove but not using the purpose word apart from that but no i mean i think one of the other big trends of the year for me is the kind of renaissance of product really at the heart of brilliant comms and we've seen that well she was talking about Vaseline verified wasn't she is a great example of that but also Heinz are doing brilliant work McDonald's with fan trees are doing brilliant work and sort of feels like with a great purpose awakening we've kind of climbed back down that benefit ladder haven't we and we're now rather nicely at the bottom again celebrating products and why people love them and how they use them in all sorts of brilliant ways and you know the big challenge for us as planners and the massive frustration and the difficulty of purpose was we were operating at these two vastly different ends of this ladder you and you you can't link we work on pot noodle as one of our which has done brilliant campaign with slurp I think you've tested it haven't you but you tried talking about the what people love about pot noodle which is that wonderful slurpy tasty satisfyingness at the same time as talking about gen z mental health which you know we kind of laugh but that that was the challenge at one stage well it's funny that we're laughing now though aren't we but this is what everyone was trying to do at one stage but so you just can't do it it doesn't work so we've we're now liberated from that we can now go right back to the bottom and we're doing fantastic stuff on that and the brand's performing brilliantly because of it so yeah and i think that is one of the reasons we're seeing the renaissance of the product and this this brilliant well i love the fan truth work that mcdonald's have been doing that wonderful gherkin transfer ad is one of my favorites from last year and uh yeah vastly verified brilliant stuff as well so um hallelujah i think we say don't we it's great one of the things i've found uh you know when i bang on about you know brand versus activation is that um many clients think that i'm saying brand versus product advertising they go oh yeah we understand you know that you need your brand up here and then you have your product advertising you go whoa whoa whoa no no no that's not a distinction you can have great brand advertising which is focused on the product and in my view a lot of the best well i think the best best brand advertising is in some way firmly linked to product but we got into this idea that somehow yeah activation okay that's product features product benefits rational blah blah blah blah blah and then okay we need to do emotional brand advertising so that needs to be about higher order values it's about you know like you know purpose it's about the way you live your life or even john lewis to be fair i mean probably one of the one of the triggers for that was that whether you know you're not going to show any product at all you're not showing the shops you're not showing any well there might be a sort of small present but that's not what it's about but it's just all about the emotion and uh but you see the thing is i think what people misunderstood there is that actually it's about a purchase occasion yes it's about it's about a gift yes um so in a sense there it is firmly rooted in in a an category entry yeah it's category entry point as byron and co would say it's not just about you know hey john lewis uh it's about mental health although they seem to have gone in that direction don't they um uh it it was rooted in something quite concrete giving someone a penguin giving someone a telescope or whatever it's not an ad for a telescope but it's about something quite concrete but the worst kind of airy fairy brand advertising is where you float off into a world of abstract values and then you become it could be an ad for any brand in any category and the worst purpose advertising was like that wasn't it was kind of you know it's all people in hard hats next to you know wind turbines on you know and mums in pushing push chairs and kind of you know for for a better tomorrow and all that sort of thing you know well you know what i think has made it possible and and led to a lot of this brilliant stuff as well it's just social media and social listening that um you know not even when i was a baby planners spending 200 hours a year sitting on sofas talking to people, you know, which gave you a brilliant kind of worm's eye view of people's life.

42:25But you wouldn't have got Vaseline verified from that. But social media now, you've just got this amazing ability to, you know, pick up the weird obsessives about gherkins. And, you know, that just the anthropology in me loves this sort of worm's eye view of people and products and how they use them and what they love about them. And I think that, you know, the brilliant Heinz work and Vaseline and McDonald's are using this as a brilliant new source of kind of understanding. And that's great from our point of view to feed that into comms. And I think what's great about that is a lot of it is about how people feel about the products, isn't it?

43:01And also, you know, like things like them using it in quirky ways that were not intended and stuff like that. But the danger is if people go get the idea that, oh, yeah, we need to have the product in the ad and then you get back into some sort of just rational demonstration of functional benefits. Cutaways to product demos. Yeah, exactly. And that's again, one can use product in a kind of more emotive way or you can use product in a very rational way where you're demonstrating the functional benefits and price and features and stuff like that. Products can be at the brand or the activation level.

43:41It can be emotional or rational. I really like that distinction. I think it's quite powerful. I mean, maybe my favourite Christmas ad this year, he says this year, it's going out next year. so it's now last year, is Waitrose, actually. But partly because I love the way they've created like a series or it's a bit like kind of tuning into the latest episode of I'm a Celebrity or something. It's like what drama is unfolding in this edition? But also in some of their activation, to go back to your point, on TikTok, it's very product-centred. However, it's funny. It's part of the drama that's unfolded everywhere else in the campaign.

44:14So they've managed to do that, you know, emotion, even when discussing the product as well, which I think is quite clever. Yeah, it's got the product in it and it's there as a character almost in an emotional drama. And of course, food is quite emotive anyway, isn't it? Very emotive. Yeah. No, it's a brilliant campaign. I love the ambition of it and the sort of different shape of the media as well. And it's a nice counter to the fact that, you know, people only watch five seconds or 15 seconds. They won't if it's really good. They will watch longer. And I think, yeah, I think they've done a brilliant job.

44:49credit to them. It's one of my favourites as well. It's very good isn't it? Now one campaign actually, this will bring us on to a different topic, that actually got banned, got pulled was the McDonald's, I don't even pick this up, in Netherlands McDonald's did an AI ad and it actually got pulled in the end because it's, I don't know about this tell me about it. Yeah so it got quite they were exaggerating what goes wrong at Christmas. Now it's interesting, a few people have tried this kind of invert Christmas and Harvey Nichols did it, you know, I would have got you something, but, you know. What was that campaign a few years ago?

45:22I spent it on myself. Sorry, I spent it on myself. I spent it on myself, that's right. So every now and then someone tries to sort of like invert, you know, invert what Christmas is all about. In this case, it's dramatising all the things that can go wrong, but they've used AI to make it just very extreme. So, you know, the Christmas lights, you know, explode and the guy ends up in the, you know, other end of the garden sort of thing. It's that kind of thing. And it got such a consumer backlash, actually, that McDonald's actually pulled it, which I thought was interesting. That's hard to do. It is, isn't it?

45:52I know. Because, you know, people mostly don't care about apps. Well, this is the interesting thing is that, you know, I wanted to get your point if you're on AI versus kind of the craft, because Christmas is a time where there's so much craft on display, isn't there? And, yeah, I've seen it in a couple of things that's given me a bit of reason to think. But is that due to the craft, though, or due to the strategy, or both? Probably both. Because, as you say, that kind of, oh, Christmas is a time of struggle, because wasn't it an M &S ad two or three years ago that called – one where those people was chucking Christmas cards into the fire and it was all about how – I think it was M &S.

46:27There was a lot of – it's really hard to pull off that. And I think with Harvey Nicks you could do it because it was an edgy sort of brand and, you know, you're not John Lewis, so you're kind of doing something different. But if you're a McDonald's or an M &S, which is kind of heartland mass market, I think there was another ad that I think that Christmas Again, that was all about how, you know, mums get put on and it's all down to them. But it's hard to play with your instincts as strategists is to do something different. I think I was telling you, I was reading about the strategists on Waitrose who was saying, you know, before they did this, it was all like, oh, we need to be more edgy this year.

47:02And that people don't want sentimental kind of schmaltzy stuff. And actually, they really quite like it. Particularly Christmas. Yes, it's quite hard to kind of nail that anti-Christmas feeling well, because people want to feel good. It's especially, it means a lot and people want it to work and to make their families happy. So that's difficult. But, you know, I mean, I haven't followed it closely. How much it's the strategy or how much it is actually that and not the AI bit of it? I don't know. Yeah, it's probably both combined. I think people are reacting to the fact that it's made by AI, but also the idea.

47:35I learned this in COVID, actually. I mean, we tested, I mean, we almost lost our entire business at System 1 because no one was testing ads, right? So we thought, what should we do? We'll test every COVID ad and just write a report on what we've learned. And I'd say apart from the first four to six weeks where it was okay to go in these hard times and reflect back, people wanted escape. We did not want reality pushed back in our face. And actually anyone that went the other way, I mean, the first Christmas, there were so many in these times. And, you know, anyone who referenced COVID saw a drop in their response.

48:10Anyone who went for escapism saw this massive boost, you know. We did not want to kind of have reality push back at us. I sort of think if you went back to the Second World War, you know, what do people remember about films and music and stuff of the 40s? It's not, they don't remember lots of stuff about, you know, the difficulty of rationing and essentially. They want, it was feel-good stuff, you know, whether it was music or movies. And these ads are all, they land in a particular way at a particular time in culture, don't they, as well? And, you know, it's pretty tough for people at the moment.

48:48Arguably, you want even more escapism and feel-good from your Christmas advertising than in years of, whenever there were years of kind of plenty when people got loads of money. You can do different things. So, yeah, I would have thought it's to do with the strategy probably more than anything. I think one of the things that you particularly have been thinking about is this craft issue and the importance of craft, all the little things in music, you know, lighting, casting, the particular way a line is delivered, the particular framing of a shot or whatever. I don't think it's inherently that AI is necessarily going to dilute all that.

49:30It just depends how you use it. I was interested in that Aardman. Were you there? Oh, yeah, putting on a show. Yeah, you did your brilliant work with Aardman. But I didn't realise Aardman had done so many ads. I think they've done about 90 in your database, is it? Something like that. And I know they appeared in the, I think they overall in the top 1 % or whatever. So they're clearly doing something very right, aren't they? And I loved there was a talk by, were you there or not? I can't remember. No, I wasn't there on the night. But there was a talk by somebody from Aardman there. and the kind of creative side of Aardman.

50:04And they were talking about the production side of it. And there was this word they used, which I really loved. They were saying that Nick Park is obsessed with thumbiness, which is the word. And when they're creating their models, he's always saying, but is there enough thumbiness in it? And what he meant by that was the kind of literal and metaphorical thumbprints in the sort of plaster scene figures that they make. And I thought that was really interesting because, I mean, now they say it you kind of see that but I don't think you would overtly notice that but I think you sense that when when they create things there's a sort of sixth sense that we have of things that are created by humans and I think that's just a really good example of how that craft has created a kind of connection through a sort of humanity really and I think you know I think we will be craving more of that kind of humanity and I think craft will be particularly important for that I was talking to Liz earlier and we were I was just saying I was reading something recently about when photography came in in the 1800s and before that you know people had to paint portraits and landscapes but obviously photography could do reality better than paintings then and that sparked a huge new creative kind of way of thinking and paintings became all about impressions and feelings and gave birth to impressionism so I think it's quite exciting what AI will spark as a kind of creative counterforce if you like and and just what ways creativity will give us that feeling of humanity which machines might not be able to so i think all that's i've been wanging on i think all that's quite interesting really fascinating going back to ai and christmas so we tested the coke holidays are coming ad yeah the ai version compared to the previous version yeah scores exactly the same so at a headline level we're looking at it going oh no one cares that it's made with ai it's just they care about the output and then one that's something my team uh messaged me and said john you do realize we've cut this by demographic and there's a big variance what do you mean and apparently for older people the fact they use ai is like oh well done them you know that's fantastic right for younger people for gen z it actually scored pretty low okay and they're rejecting that a i think they pick it up more easily they see it yeah but there's a rejection of it and it's interesting because i know i mean even a small example but my younger daughter lydia often says to me i wish i went to school when you did daddy when they didn't have phones you know what i mean because i want to be present with my friends i don't want to be on the phone all the time sort of thing yes i do wonder whether actually at that you know that generational level there's a who've grown up with this stuff it's a bit of a desire craving for the opposite maybe older people are just well they are by definition more familiar with that ad because it's been around for 20 years or whatever so i think the way you process that ad is is a lot less they've got the mental shortcuts already It's the huge, you know, you see the trucks, there's light, you hear that music, you think, oh, it's Christmas, there's a Coke.

52:55And so I'm not sure you're going to be, yeah, so into the detail as younger people who've perhaps not seen it before. So I think almost certainly young people will have a better radar for detecting the differences because they're just exposed to it more. You know, I think the first time you see AI-generated imagery, you know, you go, wow, that's amazing. And then after a while, it becomes routine and you kind of go, now that's AI so and then also our radar for people versus animals you know we're in we're so we've evolved to identify real human beings so so there so all of that makes sense I mean in many ways that coke trucks ad is the worst ad to try and do this sort of AI analysis on I think because it's so familiar and I think for so many it's been around so long the shortcuts from it are so great that I'm not sure you can actually really use it to assess it anyway what AI is right or not but I actually think that that this craft issue is is bigger than AI you know it it's not just a AI versus you know human made thing it's this whole idea that there's there's I think we've lived through a view of creativity which is creativity equals novelty you know relentless focus on disruption and innovation and new campaigns and new ads and all that sort of thing and that whereas in fact and this takes us right back to your disguise repetition often what matters is as well as creativity as novelty there's the that thing about the common thing done uncommonly well you know that the yes yes people have done this loads of times before it's a hackneyed approach to advertising but look at all the little details look at the you know and when we were talking about the waitrose ad earlier you know like you mentioned the shot where she nudges him pira knightley nudges phil and he uh and he disappears off the pavement disappears off It's a little, it's little touches.

55:08Paul Feldwick's also talked about this, about that, you know, a creative idea is pointless until it, there's a thing he wrote about making pots. It's about the craft of turning ideas into an actual made object and all the little, you should say, the thumbiness of the made object. you could do it with AI or you could do it not with AI but it's a view that says it's not just about getting the message across it's not just about doing something new it's about doing whatever you do well so we've talked in the past about the importance of lighting and casting and music really really important that all the little details in an ad matter about elevating not just executing an idea I guess and I think it also fits in with the stuff about product somehow So in that Waitrose ad, so, you know, full disclosure, I've only seen it once just before we started recording.

56:11You saw me watch it. But I can remember little details about the cheeses in the cabinet and, you know, the pie and all that sort of thing. And it's about people don't view, actually it's particularly true about long-form content. People don't view the whole thing as a message. they remember episodic memory little details that they remember um and sometimes those come from the product well i can really resonate with your music point actually we've just done some work at system one looking at to what extent music and soundtrack will predict the performance so if you can't see any of the visuals you only have the soundtrack it's incredible it is so close it is almost the most predictive element that there is in terms of how you feel because of you the way the music's done, the way it links the story and the whole thing.

57:01I think that's really important. I mean, I think it's important because it helps you to understand that advertising is mostly not a communications medium. It's a training mechanism for training people's associations and feelings with the brand. Because if adverts were primarily there to get a message across, it wouldn't really matter what the music track was, would it? You know, that's just garnish. But if actually, so I was one of the co-authors of a paper quite a few years ago called The Power of Music, and stuff from the IPA data, for example, suggests that maybe 20 % to 30 % of the selling power of an ad come down to the choice of music.

57:51So put it another way, you know, about maybe 30 % of the money you make, 30 % of the volume you sell is down to the choice of the music track. You suddenly realise this whole idea that the advert is an envelope for putting a product message in. You go, that's not it at all. It's something else. The thing about that as well is, and I'm guilty of this totally, is that when I used to make ads, the music would be the very, very last thing I'd do. And usually I'd burn the budget, you know, because I got an expensive director, producer and the whole thing, right? And if I spent 5 % of my budget on the music, I was being extravagant.

58:28But of course, you know, when the creative team sold it in, they probably had Justin Timberlake doing that. By the end, it was kind of, no, studio down the road does something for free. But we lose so much of the magic. And I think if we can put the value into the music and demonstrate the impact it has, we might make it better. So we used to work with, we had a scientist in residence at Adam and Eve, didn't we? Daniel. Dr. Daniel. He had an induction to the advertising business when he first started coming into the agency. And they spent a day talking about the whole process of making ads. And he said literally about four o 'clock before they were about to knock off.

59:08And they said, and then you put a bit of music on it. It was like absolutely the last thought. But the research we did suggested that it was really important. And then this year I've been working with Massive Music on a new piece of research which they unveiled at the IPA conference in the autumn. And again, similar numbers that you can boost the effectiveness and efficiency of your ad quite substantially just by getting the music right. And you could kind of look at the numbers and go, well, that means maybe you should be spending about 30 % of your production budget on music rights. I'm not saying you should, but you could make that argument.

59:50At least more than the 3 % most people probably spend. Well, on that bombshell, and that is a bombshell, and it's a good insight for this year, I think. It's paying more attention to music, for sure. But thank you both. It's always so much fun to have you back on the show. and happy new year happy new year happy new year thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO I 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.

1:00:36I'll see you next time.