How not to plan: what matters most in 2025 - Les Binet and Sarah Carter

29:34And suddenly, oh, that feels like it's not the same. So you're absolutely right. The ability to iterate design without changing what people perceive of you is super critical. And this is an interesting thing is that you use the word interruption and disruption is another word that's been seen as the good word and consistency is the kind of battle, like who wants to be consistent? That's really boring. But actually, yeah, I was thinking of train stations, like disruption is not a good word at all. It's sort of like, why in our industry has that been seen as a good word? So we kind of need to flip the status around from rewarding those who do consistency well, I think, to those who just kind of rip stuff up.

30:11And I'm sorry, I was going to make one more point on that. I think people think consistency means a kind of passive not doing something, whereas there's a very and should be very well rewarded active skill in handling consistency. I mean, we've done a lot of work with Marmite over the years to stop that love hate thing being changed. and it takes hard work to keep people to that. We've had a famous Italian client who came along and said he can understand how English people could talk about hating a food because that's not something that happens to you. He liked the love bit, but could we not just drop the hate bit?

30:48And we have a lot of those. We do lots of workshops to try and talk about the power and to stop that being changed. And maybe we need to reward marketers for the decisions they don't make to change as much as another role, I thought, the chief continuity officer, maybe we need to just raise the status of all this. I think the word continuity rather than consistency might be more helpful. I mean, you talk about compounding as well, don't you? That's a good word too. The idea of building on what you've done before rather than throwing it out. So continuity or compounding has a sense of evolution and growth rather than just, you know, let's just stick with what works.

31:30I think there's a subtle shift. At that point, you mentioned about rebranding and stuff like that. So Peter and I looked at this in, I think, effectiveness in context. And one of the things we found was that, by and large, when campaigns are about relaunching or rebranding, that typically leads to a reduction in the effectiveness. Wow. So it follows through. I think it's one of the biggest reductions in effectiveness there is. So if you decide to go down that route of rebranding or whatever, it has to be a really big, important investment. It's not something you should do lightly. You have to understand that you're probably in the short term going to lose some money.

32:09And sometimes that may be the right thing to do. If your brand or your product or your company has got completely out of touch with, you know, where the profit is, then maybe there's a time to change. But we in our industry, I think, have a little bit of a tendency to reach for relaunching or rebranding or disruption as, oh, that would be a good thing. You know, let's kick it all in. I love the idea of pricing in the cost of a relaunch because no one ever thinks about what's the downside of doing this or can I account for that in my planning? And when Andrew wrote the compound creativity work, one of the, I think the surprise, not surprising insights actually, but the ones that got picked up a lot was the cost of changing creative agency or creative idea.

32:55And it's almost like you reset yourself every time, whereas the ones that were consistent had this compounding effect and the gap got bigger the more years you evidence the continuity. And I think that's where there's a difference, again, between packaging and advertising. I think maybe there's the example of Tropicana, isn't it, that everybody knows, oh, that was a disaster when they disrupted too much. But that doesn't seem to be the equivalent sort of examples of that in the comms world. And maybe there should be. But we're not saying nothing should ever change. But as you say, you just need to go into it with your eyes open and do it with more kind of intent and consideration, really.

33:28So, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, nuance and the fact that the marketing industry and perhaps human beings in general are just not very good at nuance. And, you know, it's there are times when you do need probably to start again. Another old example that we're familiar with is Alan Wicker versus Rowan Atkinson on BarclayCard. So when Rowan was first introduced, initially. Everything fell off a cliff. Yeah, everything fell off a cliff. Because if you've done 10 years of something and then you change your kind of lead representative of your brand, yeah, it looked terrible. But it all came back in a year.

34:08But, yeah, you needed to be prepared for that. So that idea of factoring in the price of a change and, again, thinking about that as an investment. I was actually in a meeting the other day with a client where they're talking about some issues to do with their brands and their brand architecture and should they change it. and you know yes well there's going to be a cost to that but it could be in the very long run that's the right thing to do we had the same actually on uh system one because we were called brain juicer and then five years ago we did this big yeah rebrand same thing happens like initially everyone's like who are you know and we actually had to start from scratch now yeah we've overtaken where we were and we're now clear about what we are than you know i guess we were about innovation and unique research techniques, that sort of thing.

34:55And now we're more clearly a testing platform for creative ideas and innovation. But we've had to, that shift has been painful. There has been a definite short-term cost. Fortunately, it's all come good in the end and we've made it, but it wasn't without its bumps. And interestingly, when, I hadn't really thought about this, but when campaigns change, it is usually when the agency changes as well, isn't it? And also when the marketing, so everything changes at once and maybe you argue you'd be better to just change one of those and keep two others the same or whatever. Obvious historical point, but the reason we obsess with innovation and disruption is because of tech envy, because it's, you know, looking at, is Clay Shirky the innovator's dilemma?

35:39Clayton Christensen, innovator's dilemma. Sorry. Sound like a mash-up of Fergal Sharky and Clayton Christensen. I know it's Christmas. But the point is, you know, So this theory that, you know, disruption is, you know, an incredibly powerful force in technological innovation and entering new markets. We have this, we've had, you know, what is like 25 something years of, longer than that, of tech envy. Yeah. Well, you're right. But even in that book, actually, because he talks about incremental innovation versus disruptive innovation and how incremental innovation short term is by far the best way of creating success.

36:18Disruptive technology takes a long time to actually see through and you need a lot of patience. You need to, you know, separate out your expertise in the organization, learn new things. It's quite hard to do. And very few companies get it right. We sort of half learned that. Yeah. It's all about innovation and disruption. Constant revolution. The one that strikes out for me in my career was I remember I started as a marketing director at LucasAid Ribena Suntory. And I remember the CEO telling me, don't mess with the Ribena berries. And I was like, really? I mean, they've been around for ages. You know, what's so special about the Ribena berries kind of thing?

36:53And I went through a learning curve and then we ended up re-airing or slightly improved version of a previous campaign. And it actually smashed it on the System 1 score. And what I got from the debrief, which was very interesting, is that the Ribena berry was the fifth most recognizable distinctive assets that the team had ever tested. When in terms of people's associations as British, you know, tasty, natural, all those farming, you know, all those things came out. And the berry itself and Ribena were two intrinsically linked assets, basically. And it was a real lesson to me, actually, is that, you know, as a marketer, you think, how are we going to get a younger consumer in?

37:31How are we going to treat all the things? And what I realised is actually the thing was not to mess with the one thing that everyone associated with them. You said something there about you did a slightly improved version of the berries. So I was working on Ribena and the creative idea that I inherited was you can't get more Ribena-y. And it was basically a dramatic kind of, it was almost a magical fairy tale land of big Ribena berries having fun, sunshines, rainbows. who's, you know, back to our Disney point, actually felt like if Disney did British farming fruit and Ribena, this is kind of what you'd end up with sort of thing.

38:08And it had a very, you know, fun, Zooby-Doo Zooby-Dar was the soundtrack. So it was kind of very memorable and fun and engaging sort of thing. And I think the team maybe had run it for three or four years. So there was that kind of internal creative fatigue where it's like we need to go for a fresh direction and we'd spent months looking at different routes. And I remember saying to the team, can we just check that the route we're going down is better than the route we've come from and like i don't mind signing off the new route but can you just go and chuck it in system one and just just do the due diligence on it sort of thing and then i got this message going oh good news bad news good news is um it's the highest highest testing soft drink ad ever in the system one database i'm like what's the bad news and it was like oh we don't get to make the new ad And so what we did is we just like evolved the creative.

38:59And I mean, we didn't make that many changes, but the year we did. Oh, I see. Sorry, you were saying that the previous ad was the highest. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was doing what a lot of new marketing directors do, which is make the assumption that change was required to achieve growth. Actually, the opposite was true, is that consistency and continuity was actually my friend. So rather than spend all the money and effort on doing something new, we kind of evolved incrementally back to what Clayton Christensen is incrementally improved. And what was the evolution? Oh, very small. No, it was mostly in editing and things like that.

39:31So it was, I mean, we simplified it. So what, in fact, our learning was quite interesting. So it was a bit sort of noisy and a lot going on. And actually what we did, we just simplified it a bit so people got it more quickly. The outdoor, particularly on the out of home, which was sort of, you imagine like a you know sunshine rainbow you know exaggerated berries right bottle of ribena in grass that sort of thing so it beautifully encapsulated you know kind of what ribena is but the interesting thing from a you know if you were the you know me and the you know the kind of brand team we thought that was a bit basic we were like you know this is a bit you know childish it's a bit basic you know we're not going to win any awards doing this yeah but actually the going back to your consumer is you know the most important thing everyone loved it just reminded Well, Ehrenberg, Bass-wise, it just refreshed their memories about what they love about it.

40:18And so that was a lesson for me, actually, in terms of consistency. And the other thing from Specsaver, I don't keep talking about Specsaver, I do think we can learn an awful lot from that. But when you've kept consistent to something like should have gone to Specsaver, creatively, the great bonus then is you can break that and mess with it and do stuff like the home visits. Like, I didn't go to Specsaver. You can do, so it is actually quite creatively liberating because the more powerful you've got these things embedded, you can mess around yeah so that's continuity rather than simple consistency yes you've got a thing and you've used a jumping off point for something else yeah yeah consistent but fresh um uh i'm thinking about schmackos so um we did a an ipa paper a couple of years ago on australian pet food brand schmackos and that was an example of i think it was animated ads that had run for a long time and they were well loved but the campaign was getting tired and i think they had run the same executions for a long time and then they had a period off air and everything kind of went south and then they took the decision they wanted to go back on air but rather than starting completely from from scratch they started with a new version of the old campaign but it used um cgi animation rather than the old which i think was kind of like flat traditional animation.

41:40So it was continuity, but fresh. And it worked really well. Great example, Face 20. And with the great, so dogs go wacko for smackos. There's nothing like a bit of alliteration or a rhyme or a jingle. I have to say, there's a whole different podcast that is. It's a campaign to get the jingle back. You know, jingle bells back. Number four, never forget. Are we only on number four? I know we're on number four. I think we've We covered about 20 different subjects in one there. There you go. But it's all good. The fourth one I wrote down was never forget the eyeballs. And this is one where I think nuance can be lost, right?

42:19You know, there's every headline about TV is dead. Everyone's, you know, Gen Z are only online and this kind of thing. Peter actually was presenting at the Thinkbox conference, really interesting bit of data. He attention-weighted media consumption. So he just adjusted it for the amount of minutes of actual attention achieved. Now, we can have a debate about impressions, how much attention do you actually need to get an impression, all that kind of stuff. What's fascinating is he had this incredible chart that TV remains number one in terms of share of attention, even in the under 35s. What he also found is that actually TV was the second cheapest media on a cost per million once adjusted for attention, which I thought was very interesting.

42:59The cheapest media was podcast, by the way. Just a freebie for anyone out there that's thinking about sponsoring a podcast. But that's fascinating, wasn't it? Now, again, you've got to balance that with things like YouTube where, you know, this blew my mind because I had Sophie Neary on the podcast recently and almost 50 % of YouTube is watched on TV. So, again, going back to this nuance of the debate, we've got this idea that TV is dead, but just how we can see TV might have changed. But anyway, but I think how we reach people is as important as what we reach them with, isn't it? Yeah, I have so many things to say about that.

43:32So I don't want to rant. I mean, the first thing is I slightly disagree with your emphasis there because you're going down the route of efficiency and the efficiency of different channels in terms of cost of attention or whatever. If you like, the effectiveness of a campaign is the amount of exposure times the efficiency of that exposure. and efficiency can vary by a factor of 10 or 20, you know, choice of media, choice of creative. The amount of exposure can vary by a factor of a million and we forget that probably the single biggest factor that determines whether or not campaigns succeed or not is sheer bulk, sheer weight of exposure, sheer numbers of people seeing the ads.

44:29It's not actually media choice or creative execution. It's how much you spend and how many people you reach. And I think we've got ourselves into a state where we've almost felt that spending money to reach a lot of people is cheating, you know, and that it's somehow not the right thing to do, that we should be focusing on efficiency, not effectiveness. this wasn't this that when we wrote our ad map myth buster column wasn't the very first one we wrote about waste is good yeah about the fact that waste is what makes advertising work i mean we don't even like to call it advertising anymore we talk about creating content and you know so when i say that eyeballs are important i mean literally the number of people you reach and the scale of reach.

45:23I mean, I had a little epiphany earlier on in last year when I was in a meeting where 35 different creative groups were presented and not one of them used paid media and not one of them would reach more than a tiny number of people. And that nobody seemed to think that was important or what mattered. John Lewis, we bang on a lot about John Lewis over the years. And I I think in the marketing community, there's almost a feeling that was a viral campaign. I've actually heard people say, well, of course, that was made predominantly sharing online. John Lewis was a massive paid media campaign. And typically in six weeks, we would reach somewhere between half a billion and a billion exposures.

46:12And you cannot get that kind of level of exposure using one medium, using unpaid media, using viral sharing or any of those things. Rant over. No, no, no. It also reminds me actually of, I think Ritson made this point when he looked at FEs, looking at what contributes most to effectiveness. The size of your brand was number one. Creativity, fortunately, was number second. So we all had a few. Can I just correct for that? Yeah, please do. I think that's the size of brand. Well, it does relate to effectiveness, but actually I think the research he's quoting is that the efficiency is driven by the size of the brand, not the effectiveness.

46:56Yeah. But that's the point that actually we forget that scale matters, doesn't it? Yeah. The numbers of people you reach. Budget. You know, your market penetration matters. You know, your mental availability matters. That's the scale matters a lot. Particularly if you've ever been a small brand, you know that's your detriment yeah i keep coming back to this budget matters yeah probably the biggest thing that determines the effectiveness of a campaign is how much you spend and therefore how many people you reach and so forth and we've kind of i mean media agencies still think about it but i think there's a big chunk of our industry that kind of has either forgotten it or doesn't really want to talk about it or kind of feels it's cheating it's that kind of wishful marketing yeah you don't just get a free lunch yeah you do more with less you know etc etc well that is a good point though because there is a lot of pressure on budgets and the data is suggesting that actually budgets last year are down to a level almost back to pandemic level so i think that's probably coming from clients that are being asked to sort of trim their budgets back and and of course you throw ai in and all that kind of thing and so that there is a there is a a lot of marketers are feeling that pressure.

48:04So it could be where that mindset is going from. But isn't measurement one of the issues that people, you can't compare kind of apples with apples with how many eyeballs different media are getting? Absolutely, that is an issue. That definitely is an issue. And some things just sound a lot in terms of YouTube views in the millions. It sounds a lot, but actually it isn't really. And it's certainly not enough. In marketing, a million is a small number. I've done some back of the envelope calculations And for a mainstream UK brand, if you're getting less than 5 million exposures for anything, anything that you do that gets less than 5 million exposures is too small to be measurable, really, in terms of its effect on sales.

48:47and yet we mess about with stuff where we go oh we got 150 000 likes or whatever or we got you know 20 000 views or we got 18 uploads or whatever you know just kind of go all of that stuff can be ignored anything gets less than about five million you should probably just not be doing that yeah yeah laws of gravity isn't it you can't you can't cheat gravity in that sense um now also you're telling me earlier weren't you about the 60 40 split and and some different data sources as well that have kind of all correlated in the same direction as well? It's a slightly different issue. But Peter and I have talked about how, again, we sort of get some stick.

49:30What we're not saying is that all budgets should be split 60-40 between brand and activation, long-term and short-term. But that on average across all categories, for any brand, in any situation, there will be an optimum split. And if you were to estimate the average optimum split across all brands and all categories, it would be around 60-40. And there's another ratio, which is that there's increasing evidence that if you look at the balance of short and long term effects across many brands and many categories, that that also is around 60-40. But all of that is kind of a different issue. Yeah, yeah.

50:08And I was just, yeah, linking to. The issue that, I mean, you can probably tell that I'm sort of angry about this, is that we have just forgotten about how big campaigns need to be to work, how much you have to spend to do that, and that you cannot do that without paid media spend. And I think to me, we've become ashamed to talk about advertising. We don't want to call ourselves advertising agencies because somehow the idea that you pay for people's attention, that just feels like old-fashioned and inefficient. Sorry, it's the only way to do it. No, definitely reality. Well, let's pivot to our number five then, which is emotion doesn't mean making Les cry.

50:59I remember like this time last year, I think you were a sort of half blubbering wreck with all the Christmas ads out. But this is something as well. I mean, I know this quite a lot from system one is that people kind of assume that's what you're trying to do. And actually emotions encapsulate lots of different feelings, don't they? All of which contribute. And I mean, I liked actually an episode I did with Greg Hahn where he said the biggest risk you face is to be ignored. And actually the primary job of advertising is not to be ignored. but emotion is a powerful vehicle to catch people's attention well that was probably one of the the few downsides of the john lewis advertising wasn't it that just became this thing that you have to cry to buy and everyone was trying to compete with each other to make the christmas ad that made people cry the most and i think that has gone hasn't it it feels like i think we talked about be more banjo last year didn't we but it just feels like there's a much more upbeat feel around i mean there are some that might make you cry but not that many anymore i think so that That feels like that's kind of worked its way through the system a bit.

51:59And people realise that there are different emotions that are suitable for different sorts of jobs. I mean, we'll get on to perhaps pre-testing and happiness and things later. But yeah, there are lots of different emotions, luckily, that the human being has that we can play on in our communications. I don't actually do. Lots of them. I kind of go slightly wider than that, actually. I mean, you called yourself System 1. When Peter and I first started talking about this, we went through a phase of trying to distinguish between system one and system two routes of influence. And the reason we chose that language was that system one ways of influencing people are not all about emotions.

52:43It's about emotions and feelings and associations. So emotions and feelings are slightly different things. Psychologists distinguish between those two. but also there's the associative route where you're you're you're creating a kind of pavlovian conditioning brand x is associated with y it's not communicating a message it's creating these system one links in the brain and the problem is that you know as you can tell it takes quite a while to explain that and people default to talk about emotions or they talk you know adam and eve we talk about feeling first um so there's that issue and then sarah says even if you're talking about emotions or feelings there's quite a wide palette yeah that's a really really good point so some of the criticism we sometimes get is that people think the goal is emotion yes and it's not and what we see in our testing we look at the role of emotion to help the brand be remembered so of course your first job is to remember who you are yeah you're absolutely right about the key associations so what we find is that depending on which emotion you generate will alter the association people have your brand so you know you know testing a number of campaigns for one brand and the take out associations could be completely wildly different based on which emotion you're drawing as well so that's also important so you know emotions the vehicle by which you get people to notice you remember you associate with you with different buying occasions you're trying to do several things you you you want to make sure that your brand comes to mind in relevant buying situations relevant situations so that's you know what erinbo bass would call mental availability and part of that is making sure that you've created associations between your brand and particular situations context mental states whatever the things you know that the moments where your brand would be relevant and then the other thing is to create feelings about the brand so when the brand does come to mind you feel positive about it so it's emotions feelings and associations the other thing we found as well is um in our testing that also is important is intensity of those emotions so in fact it's something that i think is probably we haven't drawn out enough at system one but we measure how strong that feeling is and there's a very very very close connection between kind of short-term effects and how strong the feeling is as well so you know because you can make people feel a little bit or you can make them feel really passionate about whatever it is as well that makes a big difference right so let's go number six controversial perhaps or perhaps not is the era of purpose over what do you think there you go he drops that one in there like a little grenade kind of talked about that a bit haven't we i mean it there is certainly a lot less talk about it now yeah i mean some companies i think everyone was banned it as a word now even so it's uh it's the words they're not speak its name so So I think we've got a better sense of proportion about it.

55:39Well, I suppose if I was giving a kind of grown-up reaction to that, I think it's gone back into the box, which it probably should have always have been in before we lost our collective marbles, that it is a strategy for certain brands, probably not many of them, but it's certainly not the strategy for all brands, which is where it was coming. So, yeah, more sense of proportion around, I think, and we've all kind of come to our senses, would be my summary of that. Yeah. I mean, again, nuance. Purpose is the thing. Purpose is dead. I don't think it's over. I think, as you say, it's one of the things that goes on.

56:15But the other thing is, I think we talked about this last year probably, but purpose is not a strategy. If it's a strategy for selling stuff, it's no longer purpose. So true purpose is actually, you know, setting a goal that is not profit. Anything else is just fake purpose. It's purpose washing. And I think where we got into a bit of a muddle was thinking that purpose and business were just naturally aligned. You know, that the way to make more money is to do social good or whatever. and that there's no conflict between those two things. And I think that was just wishful thinking. I mean, this thing is Ritson's quite, isn't it?

56:57The purpose of purpose is purpose. Yeah, exactly. But also purpose comes at a cost and purpose should be costly. I mean, yes. And we know from Peter Fields and us that it does come at a cost because it's not an effective strategy by and large. Unless your business is in the business of purpose. If you're a Patagonia or your Tony's Jock Lonely, your business is founded on. But even that, I mean, we had Tony's on just before Christmas and they have to justify quite a significant price premium in order to pay the living wage for cocoa farmers where they source their cocoa from. So there is a big cost and, you know, therefore they make less profit or they have to charge higher prices to the consumer.

57:35And I think if we did do the purpose inquiry, like the COVID inquiry I was talking about earlier, I think, you know, a couple of other things would emerge. One is just, you know, the misleading way that dodgy research can lead you astray. We all know if you ask people, if I knew that this shampoo made a difference to girls' lives in developing countries, would you buy it more? Well, of course, you're going to say yes, but that's not the same as that's going to influence you when you're faced with 20 different shampoos at the shop shelf. But the other thing is companies sort of distorting data to show what they feel purpose does when, you know, we're using some sort of dodgy correlations that the brands that use purpose are growing more than others.

58:17When is the causation going the other way? Yeah, there's just all sorts of dodgy research. That's probably what people are reacting to, isn't it? The overreach of purpose and the dodgy claims. And confirmation bias in research. You know, just a whole other podcast on dodgy research use, I think, in this world as well. And lack of market orientation, it does come back to that, that we're wanting other people to behave in the way that we feel is important rather than looking at it from the other end of the telescope. A lot of it is kind of wishful thinking, isn't it? I mean, there's been a lot of dodgy research in that area.

58:45And it didn't matter so much in the sort of, I don't know, decade from 2008 to 2019, because interest rates were, basically money was free. So real interest rates were zero. That means money's free. That means businesses don't have to make a profit to survive. And so you can pursue other goals. And everything changed, basically, once we got past COVID and we moved back into a world where interest rates are positive again, in real terms. I mean, I think anyone who's young will not realise just how exceptional that decade of free money was. I mean, it is unprecedented in the last 200 years. And we've now moved back to normality, which means that companies do actually have to make money now.

59:38And there are some quite interesting little data points on that. So, for instance, The Economist magazine, or newspaper as they like to call themselves, have tracked the use of terms like ESG, purpose, DEI, etc., in earnings calls of CEOs talking to, you know, investors. and it's fallen off a cliff. CEOs are no longer talking about that stuff. And ESG market funds, you know, you can choose to invest in purpose-driven companies. For the first time, billions of dollars are flowing out of those funds because people are realizing they're not more profitable. Not giving the return, you know. So to me, those are the things, you know, that message will filter down from CEOs and boards down to us little, you know, hobbits at the bottom of the chain.

1:00:34In a couple of years' time, we'll begin to realise that actually nobody wants that stuff anymore. Well, maybe this links us nicely to point number seven, which is about don't just be in culture but stay in culture as a goal. Because, I mean, how many briefs you must get to, yeah, we want to be in culture, be in the conversation. yeah uh the best brands the ones that probably stay in culture yeah that i mean i i was struck by something the mccain's marketer was saying uh a month ago where he was saying he thinks actually fame is overrated because it tends to lead to what he would call fireworks sort of activity kind of brief flashes in the sky and then it kind of dies away and he said he was more interested in lighting bonfires which i thought was a rather lovely new way of looking at things really and and we talk very much we have loads of breeze about we want to get into culture and that kind of stuff but yeah we don't talk so much about staying in culture slash people's minds which is what when we were talking about earlier with brands being built for the long term and memories need to be long term and that kind of stuff so i thought that was an interesting reframing of what we should be doing and then then this is another conversation but we've talked before about slogans jingles stuff that stay in people's brains for a very long time and how that tends to have been derided as well but some of the great campaigns that are winning effectiveness awards show that that's probably a rather misguided point of view as well i mean fame is incredibly powerful i mean but but enduring fame is kind of what you want and this this is really hard i mean saying do something that's going to make you famous that's like saying have a number one hit record which is you know there's no formula for doing that and secondly what you really want is enduring fame so you know what you want is to have a number one hit record you know again and again and again which is hard but um i mean two two examples i'll keep coming back to john lewis i mean we did manage to do that for a decade didn't we it was we did the equivalent of having a the christmas number one every year for a decade but the other one is my actually so what we did there was we inserted ourself into culture and in a way that has been quite enduring in that people i bet even if we stopped talking about love hate people would still say oh i'm a bit like marmite you know yeah people either love me or hate me you know well it was one of the thing we did a bit of research when one of the conversations came up about should we change love hate and drop the hate bit and we did some research that looked at the awareness of love hate against other lines actually from other brands i won't say who they are but who spend a huge amount more money on that and it was off the scales i was you can't actually erase that from people's minds even if you want to drop this and i say you may as well push on the open door and go with it and uh and do something kind of fresh with that familiarity so yeah well you you've already referenced this one as well but my favorite in this space it should have gone spec savers but even they after how many years i think it's probably 17 18 years i mean they did consider they're changing about three or four years ago i'm like i can't believe it you know just look at how that's in the vernacular yeah and and and how this is a bit like what we're saying earlier the nothing like the freedom of a tight brief because they're so clear on on what they're about that actually that liberates you doesn't it it's creative to express it and yeah break the break the rules a little bit and go with i didn't go spec say was rather than junking the line completely still leveraging play with it but yeah exactly well it seamlessly brings me to number actually which is don't forget the power of out of home because i think my favorite out of home campaigner last year i don't know if you guys saw this was did you see in in sydney airport they did a massive spec savers ad saying welcome to melbourne yeah i'm just like yeah that's so simple yeah so simple and that like like everyone was talking about it i just thought how clever and i was at cinema in cinema the other day and they they had the ad upside down yeah you know should have gone spade because at first at first you're going what's going on here the one i like Oh, the cameraman's got it wrong.

1:04:24But then you realise, of course, the joke's wrong. The one I like was there was somebody drove through the middle of a roundabout somewhere in the south of England and smashed all the flowers up and stuff like that. And within a day or so, Specsavers put a poster up on the roundabout saying he should have gone to Specsavers. Yeah. So clever. So outdoor, I was kind of going to mention this earlier on, actually. in in in today's world outdoor has now overtaken tv as the medium that has the broadest reach and the the highest number of exposures so i think everybody should be compulsory that everybody in our industry in the uk at least should scrutinize the ipa touchpoint survey when it comes out every year because what that shows very clearly is now outdoor is the only way you can reach everyone and you mentioned the attention research did they look at outdoor oh i don't think so i better better check sorry before i say but i think it's the audio visual on different platforms attention so so that'd be interesting you said yeah tv's still the medium yeah you know but um so they're missing a very big and important medium there and of course nowadays some outdoor is maybe not audio but it's visual it is yeah i often think you know they should stop calling it digital out of home or something calling you know like out of home video or something like that so i think it's kind of a forgotten medium to some extent we don't talk about it nearly enough we don't do um having said that there are some challenges about measuring the effectiveness of outdoor and you can see why for example it might not be in that retention research because it's not something you can so easily show someone on a screen screen in a controlled environment we got a partnership actually jc deco we're doing some work at the moment looking at the link between emotion well star rating effectively but emotion and success of out of home campaigns so very early days we weren't published for another couple of months but direction looking very very promising and it's creatively an interesting space as well i mean we're recording this in uncommon uh studios and shout out to them for their their monzo ads and their british airways ads and i think it's just it's a really good test of a strong idea if you can well spec savers do great posters as well if you in our world that's getting ever more complicated if you can if you've got an idea that you can do a good poster from you know you've got a good idea and so i think uh creatively it's a very interesting space as well for us to think more of all of you because you're right it just tends to get overlooked and uh it's the one medium that reaches both young and old people yeah it does it does doesn't it and probably a lot of wastage he says in quotes yes but that's where everyone sees you not just not just the target audience that you might be paying excess money for we know that that the primary driver of media effectiveness is reach and outdoor is the one with the highest reach but there there is there are challenges so for instance you talked about the fact you're going to be doing or are doing some research but that's about creative efficiency and what i'm worried about is measuring exposure getting back to counting the eyeballs and that is hard to do and and that matters because if you want to do econometric modeling market mix modeling you've got to have that data to put in and if you haven't got good exposure data then you won't get a proper measure of effectiveness of ROI, payback, whatever.

1:07:58And therefore, outdoor is always lowballed in terms of effectiveness in those sorts of quantitative studies. But listen, thank you both. As always, it's an absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. 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 podcasts. 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 podcasts if you want to contact me you can do I'm over on x at uncensoredcmo or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name John Evans thanks for listening and watching I'll see you next time