Jon Evans Uncensored; what makes a great CMO and other lessons from 150 episodes with guest host Antonia Wade

0:06Well, hello and welcome to Uncensored CMO. Now, don't switch channels. It's not that John has suddenly got a woman's voice. My name's Antonia Wade. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of PwC. And over a drinking can, John and I agreed that it would be a great idea to do a reverse interview. So this week, my guest is John Evans. Welcome to the show. Well, it's great to be here. I'm usually here, though, to be fair, but it's nice to be on the other side for a change. It did sound like a good idea over a few glasses of wine, didn't it? It did. And it is a good idea because I have come up with some very, very challenging questions for you and nice to have you on the other side.

0:43And, you know, first of all, I have to say congratulations on the show. It's phenomenal. And it was quite interesting as I was doing my prep and going back, you know, you've interviewed some incredible people. We'll come back to that and some of the lessons you've learned and perhaps some of the questions that I asked you in Cannes that got us here. But why don't we start off just with a little bit about you? Not many people start in tax and end up in a company like System One with an incredible podcast. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about you know the career but perhaps focus on the best thing that you've done and maybe one big thing that you might have done differently oh narrowing it down the one big thing to do differently will be a challenge um well you're quite right i did start out in tax and my first actual paid job was at cooperson ibrand which then became pwc well there's a lovely full circle moment going on and it was also working there that i decided that i was going to go into marketing and um i was i spent i think about nine months working in tax it was it was one of those sandwich courses i was doing my degree was economics and finance so i was i always loved maths and i loved economics i know it'd be hard to imagine now but um i absolutely loved it and um when i was um when i was doing people's tax returns i just met this guy and i was interviewing him and telling you know basically telling him how he could save money on his on his annual tax and as he talked about his job i thought that sounds really interesting and i just thought i just had this little slightly arrogant epiphany which is like i want to be on the other side of the table where someone's doing my tax for me.

2:05I'm still waiting, by the way, but I want someone else to do my tax and I want to do what your job is. I just said to him, what's your job? And he said, oh, I'm the marketing director of Dun & Bradstreet, which is like this big data company. And it just sounded lots of fun. So I had this weird pivot where I had to go from tax and finance into marketing, which is a bit of a challenge because like not many people are hiring kind of ex-finance people into marketing. But I managed it eventually. I had to do it in a few steps because having left university, I also worked in a merchant bank called Climont Benson.

2:36I was on the trading floor, so I got trading floor experience. I got tax. I did a summer in audit as well. So I had the full set on finance. But I went and I pitched for a job at Britvix Soft Drinks rather randomly, but they were looking for a market analyst. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I could apply my skills in the context of FMCG and got the job, which is great. And then I sort of slowly convinced them to sort of give me a little break in marketing. But it's quite hard, actually. It took me, I'd say, three or four years to edge into the more creative part because I interviewed for a few jobs, actually, like on brand manager jobs and got turned down.

3:15And they kept on saying, John, you're too analytical. You're not creative enough, which I find quite ironic now because I tend to be the most creative person in the room now. But back then, of course, my experience didn't match where I wanted to go. Well, and I guess we'll come on to this, but one of the things that comes up quite often in your podcast is what makes a good CMO and this idea of really understanding the balance sheet, financial prowess. And so kind of curious to know how that's helped you perhaps more later in your career than it did earlier in your career. Massively, massively.

3:41It's one of probably the top things I'd recommend is real financial literacy and understanding how businesses operate, understanding financial measures, understanding what shareholders are looking for. Because if you can present marketing in the context of business change, you're so much more likely to get what you're doing approved. And there's nothing more embarrassing than kind of going into the boardroom going, oh yeah, look at my TikTok account and how many people like my last post kind of thing. And eye rolls everywhere. But what I found is that my kind of financial literacy actually put me in really good stead when it comes to doing business cases, selling into a board, justifying why marketing will transform business in the long run, value to shareholders what kind of thing and it's sort of like basic sales skills really because if you can position what you're doing in in the needs of the people you're trying to sell to and in most cases that's kind of financial performance so it's not escaped my notice that you've evaded the question about what you do differently come on let's have it i haven't even done the things about what i did all right do start with what you did well start with what you did well now you did give me a bit of a warning for this i i i picked out i picked out three things in my career actually so the the first one was um so i spent about 12 or 13 years at britwick uh doing a number of jobs category management trade marketing that kind of thing and then then i worked in the international team which i have to say was on the happiest kind of few years of my life because i got this brief which is basically take robinson's fruit which had been a massive success in the uk and go and launch it internationally and it's just like literally like a kid with a train set kind of thing go all right i researched all the markets we could launch in i kind of work with distributors i did the launch campaigns that you know the whole thing and it was brilliant that's probably the time in my career where i first got to manage the whole mix yeah and and and a relatively early stage in my career as well and got the autonomy to actually be responsible for the whole pnl you know the impact the advertising makes the impact the distribution makes so exciting it's great and so and i had a really good boss as well and i think working for someone who really believes in you gives you the support when you fail picks you up backs you to make the right decision that kind of thing was amazing so i think the first that's when i that's when i learned marketing fully i think and and was accountable for its success in terms of you know getting a business case signed off to launch a new market you know being set targets and having to meet them that kind of thing so that was really good and then um interesting thing when i was there i i really had a passion for innovation and uh i was at a management uh kind of away day and uh we were talking about kind of like i i got to a point where i was almost ready to leave actually i was a bit dissatisfied because i'd kind of done everything i wanted to do at britbic i couldn't really see the next move and um we're i think it's ashridge business school i think anyway we're we're doing this kind of management development program and they basically got us to do something really simple but i think it's really helpful in my career it's like write a venn diagram of everything the business needs and everything you are passionate about and find the little overlap what's the thing the business needs that you're really good at sort of thing and i basically went do you know what brit used to be great innovation and it started to get too complex its portfolio's growing too big so i thought i love innovation so i'm going to create this what i called the seed brand team which is take all the innovation that pepsi have got globally go around the world find like the next big thing bring it to the uk and launch it but launch it like in its own separate teams the company and it was so cool and i i went from i think it's on the friday i came up the idea on the monday i was pitching it to two of the board members and within four months i got something like six million pounds signed off i had a team of direct team of 12 an indirect team of 40 and we took we had some brands existed like that you know those brands in every portfolio that everyone loves but they're forgotten about yeah you know we had like this little brand called purdy's which is like this natural energy drink way ahead of its time.

7:27So I just, I moved that into my portfolio to give me a bit of revenue. And then I launched Mountain Dew, Liptonized Tea, Gatorade, VWater. I had all these brands from America, I thought pretty cool. And then in three years went from 7 million to 50 million, which is amazing. Yeah, incredible. But then it leads me to my third thing, because at the, I remember sat in a meeting three years later and someone saying to me, yeah, it's only 50 million, John, that's like 2 % of the company. And I sat there and went, yeah, do you know what? In my world, that is outrageously successful. And I feel so proud.

7:59But because I was part of the broader company incentive scheme and the broader company had not done that well, I didn't see any of those rewards. And I was like, yeah, that's, you know, 50 million if it's my own business, I'll be like dining out and, you know, I'll be retiring. Right. But 50 million in a 1 billion or 1.5 billion company doesn't feel so amazing. so um i decided to well actually what i actually decided to do is try and buy some of those brands off britwick and unfortunately why not do you know what it's one of those one of those you know you asked me about like lessons and stuff sometimes i think you should just take a punt on things don't i know and um i actually went to private equity company and said will you give me some money to buy these three brands in the british portfolio that basically been forgotten about but i reckon they're high margin they've got a love great rate of sale they've got a legacy or the whole thing right and i reckon a bit of focus would be great and unfortunately timing didn't suit me because um i'd got the deal pre-approved and i went to the boardroom and in that particular board meeting there was a big crisis on fruit shoot actually where there was there was a cap problem and some kid had almost choked on a cap and it's a big product recall wiped 30 off the company valuation so the feedback was there's no way we're going to do your two and a half million pound deal john because we got much bigger things to worry about so that deal went but i'd already got quite far down the road with the private equity company and and i pretty much left in my head right and then at the same time they'd they'd also bought a small soft drink company in the midlands called purity and the idea was i was going to buy these brands and then we were going to manufacture them in this new business this this company they had bought and i was going to basically be the owner of the brands and then i was going to use the manufacturing they had acquired so i had the manufacturing but i didn't have the brands so in the end what happened is i left anyway and then became kind of marketing director this little juice company in the midlands that no one ever heard of but anyway the reason i'm really proud that's my third kind of proud thing is um that was my first time i suppose being an entrepreneur because i had a small ownership in the company i had almost no budget whatsoever and i was in the factory day in day out so i was dealing with kind of trade disputes or you know salary changes or the factory breaking down or customer supply but you know all that sort of thing and it was actually the first time where I was like actually running a business from the bottom to the top you know nuts and bolts everything sort of thing and that was that was pretty cool and quite interesting to go from such a big company to something so small and that's something that I get asked quite a lot actually by people about you know should you start big should you go small how do you make those decisions maybe just give us a bit of a view for your listeners about you know how do you think about the environment that you're going to flourish in the most and how should you kind of figure out whether you are best suited to something more corporate and structured or something kind of more nimble and small yeah i i think probably answer question is to what extent do you like the autonomy versus the matrix i think is probably the dynamic so i mean to dramatize it on my first day at purity uh as i always did at britwick i'd write down my to-do list at the beginning of the day seven in the morning or whatever and try and work through it during the day when i arrived at purity my first day i'd done everything by 9 30 and i had no meetings in the diary i had one meeting a week right and then suddenly it's like oh this business won't move forward unless i decide what needs to be done and make it happen sort of thing so uh suddenly you're hands on so i i was the twitter handle i designed the company uniforms i set the websites up i designed the labels i we had something like 14 different flavors of juice i sat in a lab with our lab technicians approving every single one of them sort of thing so if you like the sort of hands-on actual responsibility it doesn't happen unless you do it kind of autonomy feeling it is great if you like the kind of kudos of big organization and like being part of a broad team and managing the kind of matrix organization and all that comes to that they're very different yeah and i don't i don't imagine that many people kind of thrive in both i think that's right i mean i think that if you enjoy the complexities of something big you know matrixed then part of your energy and drive and satisfaction from the job comes from being in that environment so i do think it's quite important in your setting out in your career to figure that out and i've spent time in government big companies small companies and you sort of do find the environment that fits you best but yeah no it's kind of interesting to get your perspective on it just before we finish off on you one of the things i enjoyed um a conversation that you had with scott morrison where you talked about lucas aid and how you kind of went back to the original recipe as you were trying to kind of refresh that brand And you've also talked a few times about the fact that you've been fired from a number of jobs.

12:36What would you go back and tell yourself maybe in those moments before you got fired or in those moments where you were gearing up to being fired? You know, if you could go back in time, what would you tell yourself? That's a really good question. And the LucasAid thing is pretty unique. So the context for it, for anyone who's not heard me talk about it, sorry if you have already. But the UK government's introducing a sugar tax. LucasAbe was one of the highest sugar drinks in the category. And the impact of sugar tax was worth more than the annual profits of the company. So it was a case of not changing was not an option.

13:12So we went all in and reformulated everything. And we discontinued the original recipe, which was 85 years old. And I discovered after the event that diabetics depend on exactly the amount that's in there. there's a world of pain that basically just like kind of happened as a result of reformulation i was giving a sense of how bad it was um we lost about 20 of our total company well brand turnover this and this brand was about 60 of the total value we lost 20 in 12 weeks and i think we lost about 15 million pounds of profit so we missed all our targets it was serious enough that it was given as a reason on the tokyo stock exchange for the parent company suntori it was that material that had to be kind of announced on there.

13:58And yours truly was the poster boy. So although it was one of those classic things of success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. So, you know, although we all held hands and jumped and said, yes, we're going to go into this new world of low sugar reformulation. All the fingers pointed to you. Yeah. And I, you know, I think I've mentioned this before, but the moment I knew I was going to get fired eventually was when we had this sort of town hall meeting and the CEO said, we have a marketing problem. Now, I know what he meant, actually, because as a marketer, I knew as a marketer, you do own the full mix and it's up to me to figure out the solution.

14:35But he was telling the company that the marketing team of which I was the chief was the reason for the failure. That's what people heard, right? Even though he probably meant that it's a marketing thing for us to figure out, it didn't come across like that. And, you know, politically, I knew, you know, He had been in the business a long time. He was very well-respected, so he was looking for an area to blame. Even though when you break it down, there were many reasons for why it didn't work in terms of the formulation that we signed off. It wasn't the formulation that actually went down the line.

15:07The quality control on the line wasn't what it should be, et cetera, et cetera. One of the big lessons for me, actually, is when something goes wrong, don't jump to conclusions. because what you think is the reason, and everyone gravitates to a quick excuse. They want to know, like, within a week or so, okay, can we explain what went wrong? It took me about six months, actually, of proper research, proper investigation to actually work out what was wrong about the formulation and why it wasn't kind of working in the way that we thought it was going to be. And the answers at the end of six months are very different to what we probably assumed at the beginning.

15:41And again, I had the same thing at Purity, actually, with a similar quality control issue. Same learning is that you have to do your due diligence and work through the issue and actually come out the other side um so in terms of what i would have done differently i think it's a really hard one actually my failure was in navigating the politics of that situation because i found myself in a position where if it was successful i probably would have been promoted in fact i was being talked of as a successor to to my boss which was lovely but i should have realized that if it went wrong and it was a very good chance of going wrong because of course I'd read the case study on Coke.

16:15You know, when Coke relaunched to new Coke back in the, I think it was the late 80s. That was a massive disaster and they had to recall it and basically relaunch it as a classic Coke, right? So I knew that the risks were very, very high and I probably didn't think through the contingency of what happens if it goes wrong. And so by the time it did go wrong, my card was already marked and I was basically doing a very slow walk to the exit. Although what they chose to do is set me a lot of new kpis to recover the brand relaunch you know very very quickly lots of in-store activity lots of sampling you know lots of advertising and by the time i left actually the brand had recovered and was actually back into growth at eight percent but that was too late because it's kind of it's kind of an interesting point and i know that you talked to mark ritson in one of your podcasts about confidence needed as a cmo because actually if you're always thinking about the plan b and what could happen if something goes wrong it's actually then quite hard to be confident and to focus everyone towards what you believe is the right outcome i mean in all the conversations that you've had with all of the cmos you've had on the podcast you know is there are there any traits of a confident cmo that you've been able to pick up on the most yeah the most confident cmos and there's no shortcut to this have got tenure and and they they've established reputation within their business so uh like meg farron for example at kfc is a great example she's been in the right i think seven eight years or something like that she's now the gm of of the uk and you build that reputation within a business so that people trust you so there's a lovely example where you remember the the chicken supply issue oh yeah where they did the ad say fck yeah kind of thing and she was able to do that without permission from the headquarters in america but she was able to do that because she built this internal reputation of you know having good judgment built good culture made good decisions so i think there's definitely a longevity point that you get that.

18:04I mean, Dom Dwight at Yorkshire T would be another good example of that credibility. But troublesome if CMO tenure is producing. I know, this is it. This is it. So I think in the shorter circumstance, I think the keys would be database as well, come with the evidence. And I think one of the reasons why I do the podcast is there's so much good evidence for marketing its impacts and how to make decisions and long and short, all those sorts of things. But I don't see marketers using data enough. They tend to sort of go, you know, trust me, I know what I'm doing or go on instincts. And actually you need the evidence of your decision so i think go with the data is really important all right so we've heard about how you got from tax to soft drinks but how do you get from soft drinks to one of the leading research companies i know i asked myself the question um and you know i genuinely love it and it was i say i i've well my well-worn getting fired twice in a year story but i i got fired from lrs and then i got went to brew dog which was my dream job and got fired in like about 12 weeks so i was unemployed and the market wasn't particularly buoyant for cmos at the time and what i reached out to some of my agency friends and contacts and said how can i help and i was working for four or five different agencies that design agency ad agency pr agency and system one and i absolutely love uh system one's founder john kieran who's just the the nicest most creative like entrepreneurial guy you'd ever meet the importance of having a great boss yes yes and he is absolutely he's the most also the most generous friendly person you could ever want to meet as well and like in life and soul the party and i can't i cannot thank him enough as well so in a period of my life where i was in quite a distressful situation where i didn't didn't have a job and that sort of thing he basically called me up and he said it's quite a quite funny brief actually just said could you work for me half day a week and in my in the half day a week he just said there were two jobs he gave me first job was uh i used to be a customer system but sorry i used be a customer of system ones and he said you know you seem to have adopted system one and taken it to heart could you write a presentation that would have convinced you that we can then send to other cmos sort of thing so he printed out like all the various bits of sales material that ever come up with and he put it all over the floor and he just said to me right pick out what's good what's bad and help me get it down to 10 kind of killer you know things that we could send to cmos so that's my first that's my first job the second job as well was um the system one at that point to just come up with the idea of testing everything in the markets which is really bold idea right it's a lovely rather than just who pays you to do it exactly and it's like a bit like ac nielsen kind of might measure your market share you know in the kind of drinks market as i would have been they weren't basically thought that we could you know we could basically provide a total view of creativity not just for you but all your competitors and then you can benchmark how you are versus your competitors because the science suggests that your ability to outperform your your category creatively it's a bit like outspending them is that at being more creative is as important as spending more than them and the two things are about equally important but we could provide the intel on kind of the market and i just thought it was a genius idea but the time uh we had no customers and we just created the capability of doing it so my job was to then package it merchandise it sell it and create a way of selling it sort of thing so um i was kind of working for the business part-time you know half day day a week sort of thing and as part of that john invited me to can and he said come and talk on a panel and uh while i was on the just after the panel i got interviewed by cnbc and uh they asked my feedback on on lines and i said you won't be surprised to hear this but i said look the one person not in can is the customer and i waxed on about you know I think we should involve the customer a bit more in Cannes and celebrating creativity.

21:43And he looked around the camera at the end and he said, you're the first uncensored CMO I've met all week. Love it. And I thought, there's an idea. Because at the time, so unlike, you know, the corporate roles I'd had before where I'd be trained on PR and I mean, I did media training quite a few times. I love media training. I found it a really good kind of like sparring exercise. It's a good confidence builder, yeah. It's great, isn't it? You learn a hell of a lot. But what I found is in my role at System One, I'm much more free to have a point of view on marketing more generally. So I'm not unlikely to say anything that's going to upset my bosses or shareholders.

22:18So that freedom, I thought, was quite useful. And then the other thing is I wanted a reason to meet CMOs and I wanted a reason to kind of get System One talked about. And so that's where the podcast idea came from. So the two things married together absolutely beautifully. And I've got to say, I've loved System 1 so much because I've really learned to craft and I've learned how to use the data. I've learned kind of the theories of advertising and marketing and branding and innovation in a way that I never knew before. I mean, I might have known it instinctively, but I really, really know it in some depth, which has been brilliant.

22:50And I've also got a breadth because we work with so many customers globally. I get to talk to like from a CMO, sorry, from an unsense CMO point of view and from a chief customer officer assistant one point of view, I get to talk about business problems with CMOs all over the world and help them solve them. And I love it. And it's been really good. And so, I mean, I'm massively grateful. I never thought I'd end up working for a research company. It wasn't on my bingo cards. But having done it, I absolutely love it. And I've been given the freedom and I've also been able to make a big, big difference to the company in a way that maybe in a bigger organization, I might have been more limited.

23:27I've been able to use my kind of creativity and entrepreneurs. Found the right environment for you. It's a really wonderful story. And one of the things I really like about it, because I think we've all been in this situation, you know, you work really hard, you apply for jobs, you do your best. But very often your real break comes with somebody taking a chance on you. And it's really lovely to hear, you know, how system one took a chance on you. and you know many of us have had that in our career there's a person or there's an organization that just takes that chance and i think that that that you know really speaks to being able to see potential and create an opportunity for that person and you know actually i'm going going to talk about advice for anyone listening as well i think interviewing your potential boss is the best thing you can ever do in a process because i think your boss has a bigger job at pwc yeah here we go breaking news ladies and gentlemen back to pwc yeah that'd be full circle wouldn't it you know the tax department pwc has been taken over by this renegade podcast host what happened there that'd be quite a move um but one of the biggest lessons i've learned i used to chase the name above the door or or the challenge within the job i think if i had my time again i'll be thinking about who do i want to work for and i'd pick somebody that had my back i could really learn from and would give me the freedom and support to really jump and make some brave moves.

24:45So I think if you're sitting here applying for a new job, think about a new job, think much, much, much more about who you're going to work for than the company itself. I think that's so important. And actually just to say as well, John, amazing. My current boss, James, who took over 18 months ago as well, he was our chief operating officer before. He's been amazing as well and he's continued that level of backing for some of the ideas i've come up with the approach on the podcast the partnerships we created some of the kind of wacky ideas we've come up with marketing wise it's been great so yeah makes sense and so you've now done over 150 episodes congratulations what a phenomenal achievement your first one was with richard shotten why did you choose him um and what's directed your choices ever since then well firstly i i wanted to start with a bang so richard met a few criteria for me so firstly he's a very interesting speaker so he he's a very good communicator of kind of sim he makes ideas very simple and applicable to business i thought that's that's really good he uh had a book coming out as well and i found that actually same with you actually like authors are great because they're subject matter experts they really know what they're talking about they they can communicate very well and they they've got an incentive to be on the show because because the book kind of thing which is very good and richard also had a good social media following so in my head i was thinking how do i get reach with an interesting person with a subject that i think is going to connect with a broad audience and that was where i picked him first and it is a great episode by the way i would recommend anyone to go back and listen to it it's phenomenal thank you it's funny actually because like i i i wasn't particularly well prepped for for episode number one i'm probably a lot better now than i was then so is i find it weird listening back to me back then sort of thing but um but rich but lucky be richard was good well richard was great and exactly but that's also the thing um so one of my one of my criteria for guests is they have to be interesting and they have to be easy to talk to because it's a conversation but you know we don't want it just to be kind of a one-way question answer question answer it's lovely to have a conversation so i am looking for people that can you know communicate very fluently but the interesting thing about the podcast kind of growth versus then is when richard did his follow-up book a couple years later had him back on the podcast and within 24 hours of that episode we had downloaded more of that episode than the prior I think two or three years of that first episode so it just shows the difference between kind of episode one and I can't remember which episode he was on the second time but the podcast has grown so much that just in 24 hours we beat that episode's lifetime downloads yeah and it's interesting because I obviously went back a little bit to kind of look at you know who you've interviewed and what you've talked about and of course you started it just kind of before COVID and and it's it was a bit of a walk back in time because so many of your early podcasts were all about marketing in a crisis, you know, how do you deal with this kind of externality that you hadn't expected?

27:31And then I kind of listened to the most recent ones. I'm like, how much of what we learned during COVID actually still happens now? I mean, you must have a good sense of that. I sort of feel like it was an incubated time and it's almost like that all got put on the shelf and we've gone back to some sort of normal. But there must have been some things that were good about that period that perhaps we should have pulled forward. I don't know what your viewers on that. No, that's a great question. And it's interesting as well because I started the podcast doing like a series. And when COVID hit, a genuine question, you know, me and producer James Adormat is, do we continue with this, right?

28:02Is it relevant? I mean, should we have a podcast going? But what I found is that actually during COVID it was really interesting. People wanted to listen, wanted to connect because the thing we couldn't do during COVID was, you know, connect with people in the way that we did before. And actually, I think podcasting started to explode during that time because people were looking for ways to stay informed and connect with people and listen. And also what else were other people doing, right? Because you kind of have to dig deep for new ideas. Half hour walk a day or whatever, you know. And I also found it therapeutic.

28:30I actually got, being isolated, I actually found it very good for my mental health to be able to talk to people about what they were facing and kind of share insight and learning. So it was actually quite valuable to me, actually just irrespective for anyone listening was actually part of me kind of getting through that time really, in a way. But one of the... There was a report by Clear M &C Saatchi. It's a really good episode, actually, looking at the role of a CMO in a crisis. And it was very interesting because basically what it was saying is that when times are going well, there's not as much pressure on the CMO to lead.

29:06As soon as you're in a crisis, the CMO is expected to step up. And what they were looking at is what does the CEO think the CMO should be doing? And what does the CMO think the CMO should be doing? sort of thing but what was interesting about the about covid is suddenly the spotlight is all on the cmo like what's our long-term plans get out of this what should we be investing how should we invest in what are our strategy and tactics that kind of thing what what can we do now that we couldn't do before and vice versa and so i think um it was a wake-up call to cmos to to lean in and lead and lead the business um there's also of course um you know well-known evidence that actually investing in a crisis can give you you know excess share of voice for example and you know allow you to kind of get a once in a lifetime shift on your competitors and weirdly i think we're in a not that different period now actually where we're you know the sorry marketing spenders percentual revenue is down to almost covid levels across on average and we are operating in an era where we're asking cmos to do more with less investment it's not that dissimilar actually right to sort of covid times and i think hopefully we've learned the lesson about you know making tough decisions, leading the strategy, leading the business, you know, you know, through a crisis into the future.

30:19And I think those skills are as relevant today as they probably were then. Well, it's interesting because sometimes as a CMO, your podcast makes quite uncomfortable listening, by which I mean, you know, you have people from agencies, you have people from kind of the broader industry, all of whom have very strong perspectives on what CMOs should and shouldn't be, right? And you've just talked about, you know, this future proofing, strong decision making this ability to lead you know I also picked up on people saying we wish the CMOs would be more creative we wish that CMOs would be more savvy about channel choices be more into pricing rather than the other piece would take a more kind of financial financially astute position on the board and as I listened to it as a CMO I'm like wow I mean I don't know that it's possible to be the CMO that everyone would want a CMO to be I'm just kind of interested in your thoughts about that because you've heard obviously and then you've spoken to all of these incredible cmos many of whom display many of those traits but probably be quite unusual to find somebody who's got all of those things uh just give us a bit of a sense of you know what are the commonalities that you see across the cmos you interview and if you think about what the people who work with cmos are asking for what advice would you give cmos to kind of really lean into well number one you're spot right number one there is no perfect cmo and every cmo this one of course yeah obviously It goes without saying the two of us on this conversation.

31:42But generally, there is no perfect CMO. I mean, I know Ritz and attempts to do the perfect CMO that does everything sort of thing. It's kind of this hybrid thing. And look, that doesn't exist. We're all individuals. We've all got a different experience. We all have natural traits and things that we're strong at and things that we're not at. A lovely conversation with Kofi Ami Gottfried, actually, at DoorDash. And what struck me about his journey is, even though he's in a very senior position, multi multi-billion pound organization absolutely nailing it and growing in the u.s he has this he doesn't feel he's the finished article yet he's still learning and as he talked through his career he's like i need to go from agency to client i need to go from client to sort of brand owner i need to go from brand owner to you know kind of an area where i could learn products you know and so he was really thinking through very carefully how to get the kind of complete kind of rounded cmo but he wasn't thinking of himself as finished article he had a massive appetite for learning he was conscious about the choices he made in his career to try and make himself a rounded marketer he was also challenging himself so he wasn't sitting still he was always thinking like what's the next thing i can i can go to so i think i think that appetite for learning and appetite for gaining experience and pushing yourself i think is is really important um other cmos i think have got it really right like uh cory elf was one of my favorite ever episodes and what i love about someone like her is she has a real clarity about what matters and about how to get things done in an organization and she had this brilliant phrase i absolutely loved which is the distance from the c-suite to the customer it determines your success and the distance from insight to action or the gap between insight and action determines your such a simple way of putting things but i think as a cmo your job is to provide clarity for a whole organization and give them a sense of direction where you're going and help because i mean you know this in your role but the amount of complexity that gets created across organizations and your job is to cut through it and kind of create that clarity so that's really really helpful and then whether it's mark jobling or meg farin i talked about earlier who really create the conditions for success and this is something i know that that you experience as well is that when he gets a cmo role there's this weird thing that happens where you're no longer doing and and i found it i'm not good at it right so partly reason i'm not CMO you know big CMO now is because I quite like doing and and I found that jump to overseeing I mean Lucas Auber's probably my biggest team and biggest responsibility suddenly your job is to facilitate others and to put the conditions for others to be successful and to put the guardrails up or to you know empower them or train them or create the culture yeah I liked how um Chris Burgrave describes it as you're like the atelier you've gone from being the artist to being the atelier and and I quite like that as a sort of image of like you then kind of manage a stable of artists who all need things and who will need things from you but that's not your job anymore and I think that that is a that is a really big shift because a lot of your joy as a marketer comes from the work and so suddenly to then not be in the work and there are some things where I have to say to my team I'm not going to be able to resist I will not be able to resist getting my finger just because I really love this type of work and so at least knowing and acknowledging I'm sure that doesn't really help my team.

34:54And they're like, oh, gosh, keep her out of these ones. But it is a hard shift, for sure. But you talked about creativity as well earlier. And that's another thing is that creativity, I should separate creativity from creative, right? So creativity in a CMO role is very important. It's applying your kind of creative thinking to business problems, right? That is critical. But in terms of the creative output that might be advertising, let's say, that's a very small part of the job. Right. And most people don't realize it because it's the public bits. Everyone's kind of got an opinion on your ads, right?

35:26Actually, your job is like managing people. It's creating strategy. It's finances and managing budget. It's operational, getting projects through the organization. It's aligning stakeholders. It's reporting back to a board. They're the jobs for CMO. It isn't really spending a lot of time with a creative agency, just debating the next idea. That's done by your team. And that's what I think most people don't realize is that at the level below, you can be the most senior creative, you know, personal marketer. But when you get to the CMO, you're suddenly part of a cross-functional team that's managing a whole business.

35:57I mean, I found this, this is where actually a small business is really useful. Because when I went to Purity, I was on the board and I found maybe only 10 % of my time was marketing. Like, I mean, it's quite funny in board meetings, like the, and finally, John would show his new label design. It was almost like everyone relaxed at that point. After we worked out the electricity bill and our factory's factory. We've just remortgaged the factory or whatever and worked through a redundancy or two. Anyway, we'd do all those serious things and then it would be, literally everyone would relax, we'd have a coffee and then it'd be like, oh John, have you got a new brand design to show us?

36:31Like on the news where they have the jolly story at the end. And of course everyone's got an opinion, right? Suddenly it went from, you know, we respected each other's kind of disciplines and then when it gets that opinion, everyone's dining in with an opinion about, yeah your pantone's not quite right or yeah the fruit doesn't look good enough on that you know well and that goes back to your point about why data is so important and research and insight and as i listen to the podcast you know you clearly have themes that come up over and over again around creativity emotion storytelling i love the episode about not being boring and the cost of that but i one of the things i was wondering about as i was listening was you know if you think about data and consumer behavior and you of course are very close to that in system one does it really support that or you and i just old and we're harking back to those 1980s nescafe gold blend series yes exactly and we all just want that but actually that's not how consumers buy today this comes up a lot actually and i think there are two things that are true at the same time so i i think yes we as older marketers need to also understand how modern digital channels work right i think that's absolutely true um how influencers influence buying patterns and decisions and those kind of things right that's absolutely true and ironically actually i found out last week that uh i've been nominated the uk's number one digital marketer there we go there we go so this is a shot to me so how i managed it i've got no idea anyway so but you know dm me for any advice in deep marketing strategy um so yeah that so that is true i mean we have to be on top of you know how people are consuming media and those kind of things on the other side is we have gone through this revolution of the last 20 years technical revolution which has changed the way advertising communication is done and not for the better because what it is reduced it down to two or three seconds it's it's flattened it it's made it very uh in Orlando Wood my colleague would talk about showmanship versus salesmanship that the old the old school I mean back in the 20s it was all salesmanship advertising which is here are my 15 features and why you should buy and then there was a creative revolution in the 60s and 70s which was showmanship which is entertain people and make them feel something.

38:36And we've kind of gone back to the 1920s style of the rational salesman advertising and we need to rediscover the showmanship. Now, the data I see at System 1 and via people like Orlando is absolutely genius and is kind of surfacing all this, is that the way we as humans make decisions is far more emotional than we like to believe. And the brands we remember, the brands that make us feel good, the ones that come to mind quickly, all those kind of heuristics that Daniel Kahneman would talk about in Thinking Fast and Slow, those things are served much better by the kind of advertising that we used to do than we do today.

39:11So there's a massive opportunity. And the opportunity is to get the balance right. I'm not saying it should be all one way or the other way, but the evidence would suggest in terms of what gets our attention, what sticks in memory, what makes us buy in the future, all those things. It is emotion. It's storytelling. It's kind of well-branded ideas that stick in the mind. It's jingles. It's characters. I mean, these things are not... Yeah, these things are not... I know, exactly. You can take a 3P carrot and make it famous. You've nailed it. But no, I think I feel confident I'm on safe ground on this one, that the data would suggest we're not done yet.

39:46Fair enough. Well, that leads me to a question around the data. So you're all over that. What's your favourite campaign that didn't do well from a data perspective, but you just kind of love it? Oh, that's a good one. probably we had this quite we had this quite we had this uh we're doing a website rebrand uh three or four years ago uh for system one and it was like each of the exec members was asked to showcase their favorite brand and so i was like i was like right tango ads are like the best ads ever i grew up with tango ads you know i worked on the brand for a short time i'm like yeah it's got to do so well so i put a load into test again and it's like oh they did all right they got like three stars i'm like damn they should be five stars and then i think i went where did i go next I can't remember the next campaign.

40:27It took me about three or four attempts to get a campaign that I like to actually get to a five-star system. So I was like, okay, all right. But, you know, to be fair to me, only less than 1 % of ads we ever measure get to five stars. So, you know, you have to... Unfortunately, I mean, modern ones I like now would be... I mean, I always give Dom Dwight a big call out on this podcast, actually. And every time I do it, he gives me a little text. Thanks, mate. So he'll be listening, I know. But I love what they do, for example. And a good example of like, you know, advertising done well kevin the carrot he talks about is is a great example of where kind of advertising makes you laugh makes you remember the brand is you know is still good isn't it well and you talk about characters and the kind of memorability of that but maybe john you just like orange with tango and carrots maybe that's it so the reason this podcast came about um was i had the pleasure of interviewing you and mark ritson um while we were at can um and the first question i asked you there was you know given that you can get so much real-time data and insights um and learn from it and use that to shape your strategy why do you need a can lion you talk a lot about lions on this podcast and i'm just curious about whether you think that their time is done oh lovely question i i think it's i think it's for us to work out what the role of can is i think that's the key question isn't it and and um so years ago i worked on a i worked on a campaign when it was a lucid actually with auntie joshua called no one ever move forward standing still and we won a couple of lions on that which is lovely but it's interesting that the lions we won i mean that was an enormously effective campaign so it was probably in that venn diagram which is quite a small venn diagram of like creatively celebrated and wildly effective right actually which i would love to do a study on find out what are those ones that the creative industry thinks is amazing and has been wildly effective in real life well you have done a bit of a study on that haven't you and you tend to find that there's not much of it no those circles aren't crossing very often so like cheetos would be a good example so cheetos is one of those brands that is creatively celebrated regularly and is and is very very effective as well and actually this this anti-joshua campaign would be a good example so um we won for film craft i think the soundtrack i think it's film craft and soundtrack which which we got so what i think can does very well is recognize and celebrate craft and the particular elements of it whether you know things like soundtracks and you know acting and uh editing and all those sorts of things so i think it gives a real showcase of that craft element i think it used to be very predictive of effectiveness and it's become less so and i think part part of that is fashion i think it's because we've become very obsessed on purpose we've looked i think the awards are more short-term activations so things that get talked about more than the things that maybe are effective day to day and there's also like it's not you know being effective can be boring right so doing kevin the carrot seven years in a row is not going to win you a can but is very very effective thing to do because also what we know at system one is that good advertising compounds over time so take kevin the carrot right that started as a 3.8 star it's now a 5.8 star now the the the creative has evolved not saying it hasn't changed it every year they adapt it but the core idea is the same um coke trucks is another one at christmas right wildly effective but isn't going to win any awards so i think that the difference is if you look over a long term what's effective over a long term is not necessarily going to be the thing that is new and novel and necessarily reflects a particular craft that might win you an award now having said that so i think that's why the the venn diagram is quite a small venn diagram of overlap what's massively reassuring and again i know the guys over at essential pretty well is they've put uh an effectiveness track on for the last three years and that has become so popular so this year adam morgan and i did the extraordinary cost of being dull as a wake up to the industry to say look you can't afford to be dull because you're wasting your money and the cost of being dull on average is 10 million pounds a campaign right so why not be more interesting and more engaging and what's lovely about that is um they tell me that the effectiveness track was the most popular one this year so what i hope is is we're going to see this kind of like slight reverse back into celebrating the craft and novelty and innovation within within creativity but remembering that the business context and the customer is king and if you find that overlap that'd be great so one of the things you just talked about was purpose and i know you do a podcast around purpose and you know how we leaned more towards purpose than we need to um and uh sorry not a question i told you i was going to ask so hopefully it's all right But when we look at the data at PwC, we do not see consumer behavior really markedly shifting into those more purposeful companies.

45:07Although all of us would wish that that would happen. And I do think that marketing and advertising plays a huge role in challenging or encouraging certain consumer sentiments. And so that kind of leaves me in a bit of a quandary around some of this purpose-based advertising. Because on one hand, you do want to shift people towards caring as much about purpose as perhaps price. But on the other hand, you know, it needs to be both genuine and real. And I don't know, I'm just kind of interested in your perspective on that. Yeah, totally. And look, and the answer is in the middle. I'm almost pretty sure about this.

45:41Because so a number of things to say. Firstly, having done a bit of research on purpose, we looked at the IPA database. and looked at awards that were purpose-based and those that are non-purpose-based. And at the top-line level, the purpose ones underperformed the non-purpose ones by about 40%. I'm making it up slightly, but it's an order of magnitude of about that. It lagged, I think it was like 1.6 business effects versus one. It was that kind of ratio, right? So at a macro level, there's an interesting observation there that ones that lent wholly into purpose were overall less effective. Now, that's the sum of everything, right?

46:18And he goes to great lengths to say within that, you've got some amazing purpose campaigns. Now, the interesting thing about the amazing purpose campaigns is they were authentic to the company's reason for being. And that, I think, is so important because if you are in business to make recyclable clothing or to take child labor out of a supply chain or, you know, et cetera, et cetera, or save CO2 when flying, right? If that's your purpose, then, of course, purpose matters, right? Like, I think if you're a brand that isn't on this earth to do something like that and you co-opt a purpose that's not your reason for being, I think that's when you get into this kind of sticky situation.

46:54So the pendulum swang so far that everyone had to have a purpose, even when it wasn't authentic. And that, I think, is where it gets kind of problematic. Yeah, but it's kind of interesting, though, because you would want consumers to take into account the purposeful nature of a company, even if it's not a purpose-based product. Because that's buying behavior shift will encourage companies to change how they think about supply chains or whatever else. So I think that there's something kind of interesting in that as well, which is, of course, marketing purpose if that is not the core of your business.

47:22However, trying to encourage consumers to take into account the impact that they're having on the planet or supply chains or whatever, as they're making decisions, particularly if they're a bit price insensitive, I think probably is quite important. Yeah, I agree. And I also think that the other kind of basic point to make is we should all do the right thing. Right. So whether it's like representation advertising or whether it's reducing carbon in your supply chain, we should all do that. Right. So that's not that shouldn't even be a debate. Right. We should as kind of employers, public citizens, we should be doing the right thing so that like I think sometimes in the purpose debate, people, if you're kind of anti-purpose or whatever, you somehow think that you should destroy the planet.