How to really understand your audience - Yusuf Chuku, NBCUniversal

0:28Welcome back everybody to the Uncensored CMO. what we can understand about audiences, and in particular, representation and why that matters, and also the importance of empathy. So without further ado, let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Yusuf. Let's start at the beginning, right? How did you get into strategy and how did you end up where you are today? I always feel bad talking about it, not because it's a bad story, but just because I'm always conscious that it's so much harder to find work for young people today. I'm sounding like my granddad. But like, I grew up at a time when you could kind of fall into advertising.

1:00I was raised the son of Nigerian immigrants in the UK. For Nigerian kids in London, there were only about four occupations, doctor, engineer, I think accountant, or you could stay in academia and just collect like master's degrees. So I decided that like finance, which was close to accountancy, might be a legitimate career for a young Nigerian boy growing up in London. So and my parents thoroughly approved. and it helped that I subsequently married a doctor, so I'd managed to tick that bit off as well. And so, yeah, I went off to university, studied economics and was headed to the world of finance.

1:36That's amazing. I think we did the same. I did economics for finance and did an internship at an investment bank. And I think you did as well, didn't you? Yep. So we both found ourselves in the kind of creative industry somehow. Yes. Yeah. And no disrespect. And some of my best friends are bankers. I like the caveat. Yeah, exactly. But like it was not, I was not built for that world. I often like tell, so I was in an interview and they literally were asking me what motivated me. And I gave like a really, really long answer about learning new things and all this sort of stuff. And I remember like, they're all sat in front of me and they're looking at me like I'm crazy.

2:17And then one of them's like, what about money? And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Money, yeah. I like that. He goes, no, no. Do you love money? And that was like, you know, he probably was a dick. But actually, that was like, that really helped me kind of because I was like, I thought about it in the room. And I was like, no, I don't love it. I mean, I want it. And I can buy some cool stuff. But yeah, I don't love it. And he was like, well, if you don't love money, then you can't work here. Like, it's the love of money that drives us to do what is necessary to make money. And if you don't love it, you won't do what's necessary.

2:55And I'm like, yeah, you're probably right. It's funny. I had almost the same experience as you did. I looked around me. I was working at a big merchant bank in the city and doing the same thing every day. And there was no sense of team or, like, being part of something. Everyone was just, you know, managing their own positions and maximizing the profit for that month. And it felt very soulless, didn't it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Awful. And so, I mean, I guess, like you, I had a career crisis at a very young age because, like, that was what I was going to do. I knew I was going to work in finance. And so, in fact, I knew I was going to be a trader at age, like, 13, 14.

3:28So, like, everything up until that point, I was reading the FT at 16. I was like, I was so ready for this. So, like, when you realize that, like, all your plans are, like, not going to work out and you're 21, it's a little bit disconcerting. So, how do you go from there, then? You set yourself up, you know, you spent all that time reading the FT, getting ready for this finance, you know, finance career in investment banking. How do you make the jump from there, then, to creative? So I had an amazing summer, like hanging out. And then slowly people started getting on with their lives. People went off, started postgraduate degrees.

3:59Other people started their graduate jobs. At that point, I was like, oh, I kind of maybe need to find a job. And so I actually, funnily enough, took a job selling media space at The Independent, which I did for a few months. I was very bad at it. But interestingly, during that period, I saw a job advertised for a TV buyer. I had no idea what TV buying was. I had a friend who was a fashion buyer, and he was traveling the world buying sneakers, or trainers for the London listeners. So I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I watch a lot of TV. And so I thought it was like to go buy TV shows for networks and stuff.

4:37So I was like, how hard could it be? So I turned up at this interview at Zenith. obviously became very apparent. I had no idea what I was talking about because I'm talking about buying shows. And they were like, oh, you probably won't be very good at this. But have you thought about planning? And I was like, town planning? No, no, like planning, strategy. I'd never heard of it. I looked into it. It felt like I was right sized for it. There was an element of it that required like sort of quant skills, which like I had through my degree in economics. I was like, okay, that bit I could do. but it also it meant working with creative people and those were my best friends in like outside my friends were photographers designers and so i'm like oh i could do that and to top it all off i got to wear trainers sneakers to work i'm like what's not to love literally i think i work in advertising and that was that so talk me through your first few years and what kind of What campaigns did you work on?

5:38What did you get to do as a strategist? So it's funny because I ended up joining BNP DDB. I really wanted to be both a creative planner and a media planner. And that was not allowed at the time. Like you had to pick a lane. And so I picked media because it felt like it was an interesting space. It was like early days of the internet. I remember showing a TV by the internet. this is when was it 90 95 90 yeah maybe late 95 so he's at my he's at my desk and we're typing in HTTP backslash and then the dial up kicks in so then we're waiting and I'm like oh America's come online so it's going to take a bit of time and so we're sat there I remember that exactly we're sat there and nothing happened he was like yeah it will never work and then he walked away dismissed the internet just like that but like it felt like an exciting place to be and it kind of was I was working on like Budweiser campaign at the time.

6:35I did some stuff on HMV, worked a lot on like PlayStation and Nintendo. So just like working on really cool brands, launching stuff. And I just really enjoyed thinking about the context in which advertising lived. And so like media planning itself was all about like choosing kind of what kind of media channels to use and sort of some of the rotational planning that went alongside that. But like the bit that fascinated me was this idea that advertising didn't live in a vacuum. And I remember my sort of creative planning partners, like in their world, there was like the brand and then there was a consumer.

7:14And the messaging traveled through this void into a consumer's head. And I was always like, but no, they're like, there's other stuff in the world. Like there's all this noise and they care about other stuff. And so for our advertising to land, we can't just pretend that that stuff, that noise or culture, as we call it now, doesn't exist. We kind of have to like harness it and understand it and like chart a course and how do you kind of use it to amplify what you're trying to do. And so I just became obsessed about kind of understanding culture and brands' place in culture. And it's quite unusual to do a strategy role in media and in creative as well, isn't it?

7:51Yeah, yeah. They do feel like two tribes that don't talk to each other. They always were. And it wasn't until I got to Naked that, like, we had permission to just, like, do both. And so for me, it was just, like, finally I'd found a place where I could talk to both things. Because in my day, I do so many – I have so many relationships with media companies, and they don't talk about the role of the creative. And it astonishes me. And I'm, like, going, hello, everybody. You know, what you air is as important as how much you air it, right? You know, it's almost, are they really? I'm like, yeah. Yeah, it amazes me.

8:27But yeah, no, you're absolutely right. In economics, there's a principle of ceteris paribus. Everything remains equal. And it's weird. Well done, by the way. Congratulations. The only thing, three years at Manchester, the only thing I remember. The only thing I remember was the capital asset pricing model. What use is that, anyway? But it's funny because in advertising, I was thinking we have that same sort of thing where depending on the discipline that people occupy, They just assume that everything else remains equal. And so we kind of go, messaging, whatever. Like, this is like how we need to think about like impressions and how many times we need to hit.

9:02I'm like, yeah, but what you're saying, really important. But at the same time, there'll be people who just only care about the messaging and the creative. And I'm like, no, no, context fucking matters. It does, it doesn't it. And the thing I never understood is, because my career is all client-sized, I've never worked in a media agency or a creative agency. But when you do your media buying, it's like going to be 85 % of the nation you're going to see it 25 times. And you leave thinking, really, this is amazing, right? Everyone's going to be talking about my campaign. They're going to see it 25 times.

9:30And then no one mentions it. And you're like, what's happened? Yeah, no, I got me. The only thing I used to get the most joy from was hearing people talking about things I'd worked on because that was proof that you'd impacted culture. That for me was like, yeah. The culture is so important, isn't it? Let's come back. I want to come back to that in a minute, actually, and how you understand audiences and what brands can learn from audiences. But complete the story for me. Like two Englishmen sat here in NBC here. It was quite entertaining. But why are there so many English people in planning in the States?

10:04Yeah. Like I didn't know it was a cliche until I arrived and everyone went, oh, God, another Brit planner. I was like, oh, it's a thing? And, yeah, and it's a thing for a very deliberate reason. Like planning was invented in London at two agencies simultaneously. a little bit of planning history, like Stanley Pollitt at BMP DDB had come to the conclusion that he needed to create a department that sat somewhere between creative and account management, like literally was the voice of the consumer at the table. And then Stephen King over, and not the other Stephen King, the advertising Stephen King, over at JWT pretty much had the exact same thought.

10:41His vision of it leaned a little bit more research, but like same principle. So both agencies created these planning departments, and that was kind of account planning, which is a hybrid between account management and media planning and all that sort of stuff. And so they created this role. It had a massive impact on the quality of British advertising. And then as the story goes, Jay Chayot saw this, Jay Chayot of Chayot Day, and was like, hmm, I think we need a bit of that. And so hired a British planner for Chayot Day. Chaiot Day went on to create Got Milk and all these other famous campaigns.

11:20And he put it down to strategy being the thing that made the difference. And so a whole load of agencies in the US went, hmm, we need one of those. And so they flew to London and they picked themselves up British planners. And that tradition kind of carries on to this day. And here you are, what, the biggest media organisation in the US? Yeah. Wow. What's the difference in terms of the role now, you know, being within a media organization obviously that makes a lot of the most famous programs not just in the u.s around the world you know i mean it's funny actually i was going to um ask what some of your favorite you know favorite programs are um i've got two young daughters i keep saying two young daughters and they're teenagers they'll tell me off you know daddy we're really grown up now but they're obsessed with friends you know and it's like it's really funny i mean friends aired just i think just after left university or whatever but it was a thing at the time amazing how some of these you know some of these shows that are still still going now 30 years on yeah yeah and and and we see it on on our platform peacock and actually there's a um i have a kind of a theory behind it and it's borne out by kind of like a lot of the viewing behavior but when i was growing up i was very into music right and so i ended up i say inheriting my dad's record collection basically i stole it during the divorce and the confusion but like discovered like james Brown and I was listening to a lot of hip-hop at the time so I'm like whoa whoa whoa like this this is the beat from like and and so like just just opened up this world of like jazz and funk and so I'm playing stuff to my dad going out and he's like yeah we used to listen to that back in the 60s and 70s but I'm like listening to it like it's new and that's been like youth culture has always done that they've also like found inspiration from the past and like you know taking it up as their own and I was I was obsessed by like kids dressing up like they're 90s ravers I'm like oh Oh, shit, I remember that the first time.

13:07There's tracks who's never looked good then. I certainly don't look good now. So it's happened in fashion and music. I think the advent of streaming and the ability to access back catalogue programming has also meant that you're seeing a generation of young people doing the same thing with television viewing. And so they are finding, you know, my kids are the same. They're watching The Office, but for the first time, this is not a retro thing. My daughter likes Cheers. Yeah. Who would imagine? Yeah. And so like they're able to like indulge in this stuff from the 80s and 90s, not as a kind of like, oh, I'm nostalgia.

13:44It's like, no, no, I'm discovering this for the first time and loving it because it's quality. And that streaming has enabled them to do that. There is like my one of my current favorite shows is Poker Face. Love it. And I don't know if you've seen it, but it's like the lead in it. It's on Peacock, by the way, I should say. Those who don't know where to find it. but she basically solves crimes but she's like she has this ability to see when people are lying but what's interesting is she does it this kind of like bumbling kind of like not smart but like things just stick and she bugs her and so we were watching it and my wife's like oh my goodness she's just like Columbo I'm like you're right she is and my daughter was like what's Columbo I'm like oh I'll put it on next and so we watched an episode of Columbo and you watched Columbo brilliant i thought that was just us i hadn't realized that it popped and like we could see like a whole load of people watching columbo as a result of like poker face and i was like of course because we can do that now you can find the source material for shows that you love and go back and like discover new ones and just so this this ability particularly for like gen z to like discover stuff for themselves which they couldn't do before like but yeah it makes that possible It does, doesn't it?

15:02It's really interesting. I mean, I know you've read Orlando's books, haven't you? One of the really simple frameworks he uses in there, he describes kind of character, incident and place as the three ingredients to a great ad. But actually it's the same with all these programmes, isn't it? You've got characters that you can relate to, you've got an incident, something happens, and then you've got a familiar place, whether it's set in a kind of New York apartment or the Cheers bar or whatever, isn't it? And it's, you know, as long as you've got good acting, good storylines, you know, it's not more than that, isn't it?

15:30in a lot of cases. Stories are stories. Like we, I was talking about, we've been telling ourselves stories since like we could stroll things on the side of caves and we'll be doing it well into the future. And a story's ability to travel is the thing that never ceases to amaze me. We did some work a year or so ago, I think it was now, where we were looking at like, essentially like what was very specific, small stories from different parts of the world, but like their ability to kind of attract to global audience. And so it's always funny, whenever we think about appealing to people and you always think about like lowest common denominator, it's like, okay, well, you can tell these things that people, everyone quite understands.

16:10But what's interesting is when you get really narrow and really specific, it's actually at those points that people really start to see themselves and understand that. So this story might be set a million miles from where I live in a situation that just does not resemble mine in any way. But people, their motivations, like all of that, I totally get. And so as a result, like, we find ourselves drawn to these stories. But that's the power of stories, I find. We'll talk in a minute about representation. But the power of stories is you can start living someone else's life, can't you? And actually it allows you to see things that you wouldn't have seen if you hadn't have done it.

16:47Talk to me a little bit about audiences. Because I know, you know, in your role, how do you understand your audiences? And, you know, you talked about fandom as well, didn't you? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. As a concept, which I quite like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when I think about kind of what we do as an organisation, NBCUniversal, we obviously create premium content, invest billions of everything in creating it. But there is this special relationship that exists between the content and audiences. And I have to confess that we probably, as an industry, haven't invested enough time and effort in understanding that.

17:21We just kind of all accept it as truth because it's true. But we haven't spent enough time really dissecting it and understanding it. We, as NBCU, have done that. Like we've invested the time and effort and money to understand the relationship between our content and audiences. So, for example, we work with a company called Coherency and everything called Love Quotient. It's based off a lot of the principles in relationship science. And so you then apply those to people's relationship with brands. and what we found with our content is this really passionate, strong relationship. The shorthand for it has really been fandom, of which there are kind of like three broad elements of fandom.

18:09Part of it is about self-care. Like when I watch stuff, I just feel better. It's cathartic. I just like, I can lose myself in it and all that sort of stuff. But there's also a piece of it that's around like identity. like I understand more about myself through it it becomes a representation of me and then the the third element is is really about how it enables me to connect with other people like there's this human connection like we are fans of the same thing so therefore we are I know yeah skateboarding being a great example yes indeed yeah and so like those three elements kind of go to creating this this this really special relationship we then have worked with another company called Mindprover who has spent a lot of time bringing kind of a psychophysiological kind of element to kind of research so essentially a fancy name for putting sensors on people's hands like measuring a galvanic skin response when they're watching advertising but at the same time asking them sort of very rational questions too so you're capturing kind of both this emotional and rational piece and so what we were trying to understand is like the level of emotional engagement in the programming and how that carries over across into the content and and and what we found one of the most surprising statistics is that 98 of kind of that that commercial airtime is as engaging as the content itself is it really exactly and who would have thought like our assumption is always that's a headline it's the ads of people suddenly and instantly like i'll go make coffee right when the ads are playing yeah really is yeah obviously system one know very well we can't turn off our emotions.

19:45No, true. Like, they're just there. And so when people are emotionally engaged in the programming, when the commercial break hits, it doesn't suddenly disappear. And so they are leaned in, they are engaged, and so that carries across into the advertising, which therefore makes the advertising even more effective. And whatever score you look at, like, it's heightened by this increased emotional engagement, And that's driven by a surface off the back of kind of like this emotional engagement in the programming. Could you price media based on the emotion of the programming around it? Yes. And we really should.

20:23And I think there have been shortcuts that we have probably used like sort of media heuristics around like positioning break and all this sort of stuff that like we've kind of made assumptions, but they've not necessarily been born of like genuine sort of research and insight. On top of that, there has been this, what I described as just an awful move towards, and finally Ceteris Paribus again, but also this move towards assuming that every impact is the same. And they're just not like the context in which you see it really does matter. And so we have been doing a lot more work to really understand the importance of that context and then how brands can really take advantage of it.

21:07And so you see, like we saw on standard ads, we saw like a 16 % lift in emotional engagement. When you start to do advertising that like uses some more elements that we kind of, you know, a little bit more custom, you actually start to see that increase by 26%. So it's just, there are things that you can deliberately do as an advertiser to kind of capitalise on that emotional engagement that's set up in certain environments. And is that based on the context of the programming around and the kind of emotion that's being created? Totally. Would it vary on which emotion? So if you've got a crime drama and it ends with a gruesome death, would it be different to sort of a romantic comedy when they get married at the end?

21:47Yeah, it's one of the areas that we're looking to kind of learn a little bit more around. It gets sometimes, other than very crude categorisations, it's actually often hard to categorise an emotion. People can tell you they are feeling something. They just can't really articulate what they're feeling. It's just there. and so I think if anything what we've started to understand is just like it sort of doesn't really matter as much like the type of emotion it's the fact that I'm feeling it and and so when I'm I'm emotionally primed I just like I receive stuff differently my senses have changed I mean what we also know from some of the work we've done at system one as well is that you pay more attention as well and you remember so it has this we've done this study to see what followed up with people afterwards and the stronger the emotion the greater the attention and the memory recall is way higher which again it's funny isn't it it's one of those things that when you think it through it completely makes sense right but it would influence you know where you buy your media and what kind of you know what what kind of message about any advertising it hasn't mattered that's that's totally we sort of intuitively we've sort of known it we've just never really been able to kind of like uh like give it like a understand its full effect like actually kind of start to understand its scale it's funny actually because having been coming client side 25 years of my career and then ends up working in a research agency which is quite different you know for me but i've spent the last four years discovering the scientific evidence for what i knew before oh yeah so what i always knew was quite right but now i've got this book you know i've got this this data point you know it's quite funny that's that's that's funny i know i yeah no it's true i I mean, I sit on top of an insights and research group, and a lot of what I'm trying to do, have them do it, is understand that there are things that we sort of intuitively know, but actually the real insight comes from really understanding and categorising it and quantifying it and all that sort of stuff.

23:45Now let's talk about who's on screen as well, because who's on screen also makes a difference, doesn't it, to the emotional engagement. And I know you've done some work on audience representation as well. So talk to me about what understanding you have of representation in advertising. Yeah, so there's two bits of work that we have done amongst many that really started to build. And one of the areas that we've been looking at is like identity. And so people's identity is, it's, you know, it's not just, it's multifaceted. So it's not just one thing, you know, there are various elements that come together to make up their identity.

24:19We've also like realised that actually it's fluid and context specific. So depending on where you are, for example, I was never British until I found myself in New York. Then suddenly it became part of my identity. And so there was a context specific nature to it. But also probably one of the most important things is that we are actually curious culturally. I think we found that like something about like 93 % of people are interested in learning about cultures other than their own, which is new. So when I was growing up, my mum used to make packed lunch for me. I'd open it up in school and everyone would be like, ugh, it stinks.

24:54What is that? That's horrible. And all I wanted was to have some jam sandwiches like everyone else. Fast forward, my kid takes interesting ethnic food for school lunch. Everyone's like, oh, can I try it? Can I try it? And that's just cultural curiosity in action. And so we have this desire to learn about cultures that aren't our own, which means that we as a media owner have a big part to play in like satisfying that that curiosity but also brands i think 67 of consumers kind of go i expect brands to help me satisfy that that that curiosity and so then you kind of go okay so then what does that mean for for the advertising and this is where kind of representation becomes really important like people go i want to see myself, my community, people like me kind of on screen.

25:44We have spent a lot of time understanding what that means for advertising, but as well as programming, we came up with a thing called what we call the representation hierarchy. So it starts to look at representation, but at different levels and what that means. So it starts at the bottom. It's about presence and about like seeing people like me. It then goes up to cultural signifiers. Now I want to see things that represent my culture, these little things that, like, are very specific to my culture, the music, the situation, all that sort of stuff. Then there's empowerment. So I want to see, like, my culture, my people uplifted and see us in situations that are beyond stereotypes.

26:26You know, it's about uplifting. And then there's, like, full integration at the top. So now I want, like, fully the full kind of richness of my culture, fully interweaved into the story. And so as you go up the hierarchy, the impact kind of increases. And so there's at the base level of presence, people go, I want to see myself. For certain groups, that's more important. So we found that Asians, it's just because the lack of representation meant that actually I want to see more of it. Same with certain disabilities. But black consumers kind of actually expect a lot more. I was actually speaking to one of the writers for New Amsterdam, and she talked about putting a Trinidadian beer into a barbershop scene.

27:05And so what's fascinating is like it's a scene set in a barbershop with these black men. So you've got like presents ticked off. But like the Trinidadian beer that they were drinking and referencing, you'd only know if you lived in Trinidad. Like it's super specific. She was like, I got letters from people going, thank you for I felt seen and recognized. That's such a like. And I'm like, it didn't really matter if you got the reference or not because the scene still worked. but because she'd kind of gone beyond just presence to sort of some of these cultural signifiers, it had a greater impact.

27:38And so I'm always like, for advertisers, there are these, I don't want a better word, Easter eggs that you can put in that actually have this huge outsized impact because people feel seen. It's so funny. You give me a little weird flashback, actually. So at university, I live with a Nigerian and a Ghanaian and an Indian, right? And we actually lived over a barbershop, a British barbershop, not an Afro-Caribbean one, which is quite important. I remember saying to Kay and Dave, why are you travelling 20 minutes? We live over a barbershop. They literally fell about laughing at me. I'm like, what?

28:11But it's what you say, isn't it? Yeah. You know, it's that cultural understanding. And it's funny because actually I didn't really care about the race of my barber, but I needed to see that. You know those pictures they used to have in the barbershop? I'm like, I want to see my haircut. Yeah. If you show me like these are black models, I'm like, okay, you get it. You get it. Exactly. That's brilliant. I mean, there's some lovely echoes with the system one day, which is brilliant. So in fact, you use the word feeling seen, which is amazing. And one of the things we wanted to understand is how do other people feel when they see different cultures represented?

28:43Because, you know, I noticed some nervousness with some advertisers going, well, if I'm going to, you know, in the niche kind of Trinidadian, you know, barbershop scene, you think, well, what's everyone else going to think? You know, they feel excluded. But the amazing thing we found in our study actually is that diverse advertising unites us as long as you tell the story well. And so it's interesting. I'll just go and quote some of the stats that we found. So we tested 98 ads in the US. And we looked at how diverse advertising compares to non-diverse advertising, for want of a better word, right?

29:12And what was amazing is in the 98 ads we tested, 37 saw a statistically significant improvement of half a star, so on a five-star rating. 20 saw a drop. So it wasn't quite – it was interesting. We did it in the US and the UK. In the UK, everything went up, but from a lower base. Now, this is the interesting thing in the US is that diverse advertising all perform better versus non-diverse. So even – so one of the questions we got asked is, well, okay, we get that, John, but maybe just progressive advertisers are the better advertisers. They tend to do more of the diverse advertising, and that's why it's better.