Mark Ritson on the best campaign of the year, Britain's favourite pint & why being different still matters

27:57So take me through one and two. So Cadbury was one. Cadbury's number one. Number two, actually, interestingly, is British Bake Off. Oh, really? Yeah, British Bake Off done the number two. Yeah, okay. Number three? Number three. It's a bit of a trick question. I'll tell you the answer. The 20-second cut-down version of that ad. Wow. Yeah. They've got one and three. They've got one and three. Impressive. And also, there's a six-second activation ad that is also in the top ten. So back to your campaign point, actually. It runs across different formats. It runs formats, time lengths. Media. Yeah, media.

28:30Countries. So we've got digital. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Well, we've got it in Australia, dubbed into Australian. Yeah? The first time I saw Garage was in Australia. it had the same emotional effect and they're dubbed into oz and the woman says oh it's a cadbury campaign i'm like hang on that gas station doesn't look like an aussie servo as we called them i'm like bay that's dubbed and you couldn't tell but at the same punch and everything impressive no no no i mean that's your point the campaign ability goes across media across countries across products across time that's when you that's when you win isn't it well it links to your wear out data so oh i've got a question for you before we jump in on this one because um i asked ollie at vccp knowing you're going to come in knowing we're talking about this to put some questions right so ollie asked this question actually so this is he said um firstly he said we love you mark so anyway you guys that's nice um and then he went on to say uh you've talked before about the importance of longevity saying that wear out is a problem for marketers how should a brand owner sell within the organisation the idea of doubling down versus changing something?

29:34Well, I mean, I think they won't because they don't want to. I don't think the enemy is the rest of the organisation. I don't buy this, right? Totally agree. You know, the CFO isn't saying, where's our new ad campaign, right? It's the marketer that's doing it. That's it. The marketer's, I mean, I get this a lot at the moment. I'm trying to tighten up everyone's positioning. And I'm saying, you know, you've got these eight slides, you should have one word or two words, whatever. and the only pushback I get, I get it a lot is, but it's very hard to sell that in to the rest of the company and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

30:07You're just finding excuses now, right? The problem with wear out and the problem with convincing a client team to not do a new campaign is they want to do a new campaign because they're a bit pathetic and what would they do otherwise? You know, well, I would suggest the other 92 % of marketing might be a start. But they want to do more ads because that's what they got in the game, right? So, yeah, I think that the challenge is convincing marketers. And the way – it's the missing piece right now. It's interesting. At Festival of Marketing, we were saying earlier, right, that the corpus of advertising effectiveness isn't just clear now.

30:43Everybody knows it. Really good, right? The missing additional piece is your new stuff, which you guys did start on where out may not be real. Yeah. At least outside of marketing departments, right? Because when you first sent me the data, I was like, yeah, I'm not convinced. You've measured this but not that. And then you measured that as well. I'm like, yeah, you know what? Then analytic partners had that data as well. Well, I mean, generally we've tried to cut it as many ways as we can. I've seen your work. You've looked for changes. We've tried to disprove it internally, actually, and go, look at ad length, look at spend, look at theme.

31:18The only examples of where we could find is, obviously, if you do like a World Cup promotion, let's say, and you know it's the world cup it's going to do slightly better than two years later when the world cup's not on so but not from what you showed me not that different even then even then right even then it's not that different but the crazy thing is if you take those out everything else actually improves familiarity breeds as we often say contentment rather than contempt no no i think it's a big addition i'll give you an example of why so i i work a little bit with tourism Australia it's a very big thing for Australia because Susan Coghill is a wonderful CMO yeah she's got a hundred million dollar budget but literally her work drives billions of dollars or not into the into the country's income it's Australia is a much smaller country than the UK and tourism is much more important right so it's a real big job and Susan got this early because Susan's a great student I always say this and I feel like I'm doing Susan a big disservice I said it yesterday i said susan's not the smartest marketer around and that sounds like i'm hinting that she's thick do you know what i mean i don't mean it that way i mean susan's the first one to go i'm not 180 iq marketer doing innovative new stuff she's a very smart woman student susan is a student of the game yeah and some some marketers are but she has learned it and is just doing it again without any flash or and it just works you know so one of the things she picked up on partly because she works with you guys, was this warehouse thing isn't happening.

32:52So what she did with her budget was go, right, in year one, I'm going to go and spend money on a proper campaign. I got a nine-minute video. I got a cinema opening. I got Will Arnett. You know what I mean? I'm going to fucking spank it out there. You know what I mean? And she did that because, A, creative is important, but, B, she knows she can run that campaign for three, four, five, six years. And, of course, what it means is big, flashy creative, and then for the next four or five years, the 20 points of her budget, which would have gone to another new creative, goes on immediate. There's your 20 extra points right there, which is probably your excess share of voice that you need.

33:31Excess share of voice done. It's a huge point, right? It's a huge point. I've got all these CMOs around the world trying to bend the rules of excess share of voice. If we use attention theory and if we use codification and more, we'll beat the laws of gravity. No, you won't, right? But if you understand where out, and if you build a good campaign and you maintain it for five or six years, there's your excess share of voice right there combined with great creative. I mean, sorry for saying this, that's a very huge point that if you're in charge of your budget, you should get. But you have to have the discipline to say, all right, we don't need a new ad campaign.

34:13You're so right. Right. Susan, I mean, in fact, Susan in this building, actually, she came to me on a trip and said, I've got a real problem. I don't know how to sell this in. And she said, this is early stage testing. Right. So we test stuff right when it's a script or very early on. She goes, it's only a four star. I'm like, Susan, if you get a four star at the beginning of your process, you are cast iron, guaranteed gold. I mean, you're there. You're honestly, you're there. I mean, we can we can finesse it and get you there. But honestly, you are that. But she was using the data very scientifically.

34:43The other thing she said is, well, you know, she tested it in 15 markets and only 12 have got a five-star rating. You know what I mean? I mean, this is like luxury problems. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, no, it's important. I mean, even the statistical variation across 15 different tests would give you one or two that wouldn't be right. I mean, the problem is we focus on the Cadbury's right. So she's like, I want 5.9. Yeah, yeah, exactly. She was there. But imagine, like, getting a creative that worked across all those different cultures and different contexts and different understanding of Australia and all that kind of thing.

35:12I mean, that's really, really impressive. But you're right, but she was going by the data and making, you know. She's a great, she's a truly great marketer. It's funny, you know, I work with the company, it's a good company that has the license for John West Tuna in Australia. And I tried, and I think failed, to get the, you know, the fishermen fighting the grizzly bear. Yes, yes, yes. I'm like, make it again. Yeah. And they were like, I'm going to just use it again. You own the brand. Yeah. The ad will be available. I'll re-film the ad. Yeah. it will destroy every other most people don't know just put it back on air right it's funny it's obviously salmon it's obviously john west done like easy we're done right yeah the only thing i saw and it was briefly yesterday is viton started a campaign i think it's viton with um twiggy twiggy that made an ad for louis vuitton and it's ad i know it must be like 64 65 with a little baton bag which these very small like pochette bags you know from the 60s and she's kind of holding it and Twiggy's being beautiful and 60s and everything and they just replicated it 50 years later same bag same jewelry same post same everything I thought that's very very nice that's nice because it does speak to Vuitton's quality which is timeless and if you really own Vuitton stuff yeah it gets banged around a bit but I've bought Vuitton stuff for some of my business colleagues over the years especially I was working for Louis Vuitton and they still go on about the fact that they've had this bag off me for 15 years and it's still brand new you know i mean it is a special thing you know so there may be a little movement back towards it but i think that the end of wear out at least among the market is an interesting one my question for you john though is what's the balance between just literally running the same ad or it being a variation on a theme so in cadbury's case they have this platform right they could have just kept running yeah when we look at the data gorilla forever right yeah so So is there anything in the data that tells you what to do?

37:06We've got cases on both, right? So take Christmas, right? Christmas just gives us a good opportunity to look at this because most people change at Christmas. You've got Coke holidays are coming, which has run for 25 years, effectively the same ad, and it's gradually got better, but probably plateaued at around 5.0 star. Kevin the Carrot campaign started at a 3.6, I think, went up to 5, and it's now got to 5.9. So actually what they've done is really interestingly, and I mean, these guys are literally textbooks. So they say they have one month off a year. It's December, right? Because that's when it's made and you can't change it.

37:43From January, they're starting on next Christmas. But they test, they immediately start with the next version of Kevin, which is new. But what they do is they bring in what kind of news stories, what cultural changes, what voiceover. And what they do is they test every little element with us, right? So they'll go, Jim Broadbent voiceover, does that work or not? Did people get the Marcus Rashford joke, you know, which scenes are working, not working? So it'd be a fresh idea. But what they've done is actually, I call it the Coke truck index, right? Coke truck is like the old McDonald's kind of burger index.

38:13All these are coming. Exactly, right? All these are coming. That's the benchmark, right? But what they've shown is actually evolving a creative idea consistently over time. They've now had two years ahead of Coke trucks. You beat the truck. They beat the trucks for last two years. Well, and it also future proofs it, right? So at some point it does get vintage and old. not if you keep adapting each year so it does mean campaign ability is the right answer yeah i mean it's a long bet right and it'll outsee us all but if cadbury are as smart as i think they are this is a 50-year campaign right i mean i use kitkat as my example at festival like i had to find an example of a brand that is properly simply positioned on one or two attributes differentiated therefore relatively but also was distinctive in its assets and codes and kitkat if you go is 50 years of it take a break for you know take a take a kitkat be refreshed that's it yeah there's nothing else right and then you got the red you got the twigs you got the snap and you're there and then you go back for the work and it's there for 50 years yeah that's a campaign ability that just keeps giving let me ask you now what why why did difference versus distinctiveness suddenly become the biggest conversation we were having i made it the biggest no no i did i did no so so there's two parts to this again i'm going to go on my erin bass train for a minute here i love erin boat bass there's always a sprinkle of extra syrup in their science, in my opinion.

39:41They go about 30 % too far. When they brought distinctiveness into the marketing mindset, it is the great discovery of modern marketing because it didn't exist before, right? It isn't like a new name for something. They properly found this out and it's the most important fucking thing, right? It's amazing, right? It's amazing. Mass marketing and getting that legit again, that was kind of a change of, that was going back to something else. Still an amazing achievement. But calling it distinctiveness, looking at distinctive assets, tying them into category entry points and bringing it to mind, the importance of set is a fucking amazing thing.

40:19But they just couldn't help themselves and they had to go too far. And their white suits have a little bit of extra sparkle there. Do you know what I mean? So they did it. If you look at the red book, they did it. Distinctiveness is the new differentiation. And again, they sort of caveat with differentiation is possible, but only in a basic way but in the book there's a table that says old past worldview yeah positioning and differentiation new worldview distinctiveness right and so marketers gradually read the book and gradually fell in love with a distinctiveness but also this stupid differentiation is not possible we've disproved it right and they all and it's not Ehrenberg Bass's fault it's the it's the sort of second tier disciplines disciples sorry who who sort of trot it all out but don't really understand it and just go all over the shop right you get there's no such thing as different we've disproved differentiation i'm like at the most face valid point of view that's clearly horseshit i always use like a dell laptop and an apple laptop do you really think do you really think that these two are perceived to be the same yeah so i was on a mission for a while and i couldn't think i couldn't work through it and in the end it comes down to one simple mistake that even Michael Porter makes.

41:33And it's that everyone tied differentiation to unique. All the way back. Go back to the Ted Bates Agency and Rosser Reeves. The USP, the U was unique. You find a unique thing. Michael Porter comes in and says, if you go down a differentiation strategy path, you find something unique which drives price premium. That's not true. It's simply not true. And yet in our lexicon, differentiation became finding something unique. The minute you take unique out and you think, well, maybe it's not unique. And I use the example of height. I'm taller than you by a foot, right? By foot, by an inch. You're not a midget, right?

42:15And I'm different from you as a result. It's not that I've invented height. It's not that you don't have height. You know, it's that I have relatively more of it than you. And the minute you get that, it changes everything. Because what it says is differentiation is not guaranteed for most brands. It may not exist for most brands. But relative differentiation is possible if you choose very carefully those points. So I've been on a mission this year to try and balance it out. But apply both-ism so that I'm not going to be this childish idiot, you know, part of the marketing basis. Differentiation means distinctiveness.

42:51No, it doesn't. Distinctiveness means come on, right? it back to the idea the whole two two truths in one two ideas together brands can back to kitkat be positioned tightly on a couple of relative points if you want a quick break category entry point yeah you know refreshment quick break kitkat right we're going to try and own though not own but we're going to have a relative association for those things in the mind of the mind i think the point to build as well is that where marketers have gone wrong is the height difference matters in certain contexts, right? And that's where people lose it because they go, ah, we're slightly higher.

43:26But if the consumer doesn't give a shit about being slightly higher, what's the point? And, you know, we end up having these arms race, you know, trying to get to a point of difference that actually isn't relevant. No, no, and it's turned into this esoteric nonsense where brands literally have 12 slides for positioning. The words that they're putting in the positioning are ridiculous. You know, the champion of truth and families and all this rubbish. And what we have to do, And so the addendum to this whole, can you be differentiated in theory? Yes, relatively. But if you want it as a brand, and most brands are never going to get it because they're so shit at positioning, you have to completely strip back how you're doing positioning.

44:05In my opinion, to a single page, which is these are the three things we want to position at. There might be some hygiene things in there as well, but these are the three things we choose to aim to have relative advantages over the competitor brands. and then next to it here's my distinctive brand assets yeah that's how we're going to drive our distinctiveness and with this we will go to war right that as you know better than me that is so far from how big brands currently wank it all out there with 800 slides and complex words and a parallelogram and a fucking keyhole that isn't just not working it actually works against these brands getting any form of differentiation and the last point i'd make is not only do i still think distinctiveness is important i think in most cases it's probably still more important but it's interesting a lot of the data now suggests for younger newer brands or with younger newer customers it's still differentiation that drives it more and as things mature it becomes distinct that makes sense because you need to lock into the memory structures you've established already get into trial you're triggering those purchases yeah it makes loads of sense so that's the war but i'm getting loads of delightful flack at the moment because everyone's like you know oh this tiresome debate about differentiation and distinctness why are we talking about this again it's because we talked about it wrongly and i i yes i fully admit that i have singularly attempted to reignite the discussion so we could write an old wrong do you know what i mean yeah and we'll see if it works someone says i mean it'll be interesting this week they said we're the clients are ready for this yeah they've been doing it anyway but they sort of feel like well i can talk a little bit about my positioning my differentiation and i think that's true right that's good yeah really really good really good uh next question from ollie actually you sent me a few but um on cadbury we don't show the products being eaten or even unwrapped um at in order to make the story feel authentic uh is authenticity relevant to marketers uh or is authenticity overrated no no i i think i i would i would draw a slightly wider net that the than orlando's doing there i think you're right they don't show someone in that particular at eating the chocolate but what that ad is is the the purchase act the giving act the product itself is central literally in the center of the dyad of the ad right yeah i don't think you have to consume it i think it has to be woven into the narrative and then it's authentic right it doesn't need to be the consumption act it needs to be right in the middle.

46:37You know, the old bad ads where they'd be like, you know, a 30-second mystery story and right at the end, and it was Lil. And it was us. You know, I've just put on my budget. Woo-hoo, surprise. Forget about me now. So I think that's where the authenticity comes from. It's run right through, right? And if you actually, once you see Garage once, you realise literally the bar of Cadbury is there for the whole ad. Oh, it's there. Do you know what I mean? She's almost feeling the packaging at one point, isn't she? You got it, you got it. the sensory bit of it is amazing. I mean, actually, Orlando, to quote him, actually, his left and right brain features really help understand this because there's so much more power in implicit communication.

47:15You don't have to make it, I mean, he would call it like flat and abstract where you just put it right in front of your eyes kind of thing. You know, our right brains can detect things and pick things up. And I mean, the other thing, of course, is as fluent, but Specsavers being a good example, if you start owning an idea, people start to recognise the idea playing out even before you've shown the products. And my point, which Orlando's made much better than me, is when you join those dots cognitively yourself, the impact is significantly more powerful than it being presented to you later. Totally, yeah.

47:46And so it's a risky game, but if you can have that synapse that you have to close, you know what I mean? He's got a beautiful quote about this, which I can't remember, but it's something about leaving a bit of work for the audience actually enables it to be remembered. That's right, and the memorability and the power of it suddenly goes through the roof. I think that's the whole point about playing with codes, which for me is a super important part of distinctive assets. When you play with them and people have to join the nuts and go, hang on, the Carlsberg is red, right? It makes it more green in your mind.

48:15Totally. You know what I mean? 100%, totally. We've covered actually one of his questions, but the final question he asked is, you've kindly pointed out the Capri turnaround was inspired by going back to the brand's astonishing history to find answers to the future. Do marketers use a brand's history enough? And if they don't, how might we change it? That's a real great question. So I was trained by Americans, right? So I was in America for brand management, not at its genesis, because that goes back to P &G, but the David Archer, Kevin Keller era, when I grew up, lay 80s, early 90s, was absolutely empirical, right?

48:52You do research on the brand in order to understand the brand, right, from its consumers. and then in the second phase of my career i go off to lvmh in paris and i get a complete french beating right the french aren't even that empirical when it comes to brands right they go straight to history they go back to the literally the origins of the brand the founder when i did all the work on don perignon we stood at his grave we stayed in any air we started there right and those two i call them eyes right the french eye and the american eye If you put them together, and when I train, when I do the mini MBA brand management, when we do the modules on brand research, it's half about the heritage of the brand.

49:33And it's half about then a decent bit of qual and quant research on the current brand, a little bit of loyalty research, and you put it all together. So Orlando's right. You can't manage a brand if you don't know where it's come from. And that sounds like a bunch of French wank. but in history you will get so many, I mean there's a belief in marketing that whoever was managing the brand 100 years ago was somehow like an idiot, right? They were just as smart as us and they probably came up with equally if not better ideas. Why wouldn't you look into the archive a little bit? When I worked on Hennessy, it's a great story, when I worked on Hennessy, the CEO, Bernard Payon, his brilliant CEO, we had this strategy for a little while.

50:17So Hennessy lost the patent on XO about, I think it was about 200 years ago, right? Some idiot in the 19th century forgot to renew the fact, we created XO, right? Wow. I should explain to everyone. So Hennessy is the cognac. It's made from a blend of different wine. And extra old XO was a very special sub-brand of Hennessy. Someone forgot to renew the patent. And now we have what we have today, which is every cognac has an extra old one. Tequilas have extra old ones. Chinese restaurants have extra old ones. and Hennessy created it. So my idea to Mr. Payon at one point was, because Hennessy's a very, comes from a family of assassins, it's tough and all that.

50:59I said, let's go and sue every company that's used XO. And he's like, but we can't win the case. I'm like, I know. But if we can get on the front page of the Wall Street Journal with the court case, everyone will learn the story that they've forgotten that we invented XO. And he said, he's like, go to the archive then and see if we've got a strong enough case just to prove that we did, right? So Hennessy has a library, has an archive. And so we go and we dig through it all, right? And I have to find the manifests showing that there was, before a certain point, it was like 1800, that we had an XO.

51:37So we went to the ship manifesto there. It was actually to London from Cognac. And there it is, big line saying eight barrels of Hennessy XO to be shipped to such and such on the Strand. And then in this incredibly electric moment, underneath it, there's a second line that says, also 12 crates of Hennessy XXO. XO wasn't the first invention. There's a sub-brand that we forgot about. An XXO. Wow. So I took that and he was a Hennessy man for all these years. And he's like, hmm. And about two years later, there's a gap in the portfolio in travel retail between Paradis and XO. XXO is the one. And Mr.

52:21Payne sent me a bottle with a lovely note. That's worth a few quid. And, you know, it's got nothing to do with me, really. Yeah, yeah. But I have a letter from the CEO of Hennessy saying, well, that's that. I love it. And it's lovely because history sometimes teaches us things. I don't kind of similar stories, actually. So I was working on LucasAid when the sugar tax came into the UK and we were forced to reformulate because of the government regulations to bring down the amount of sugar use. And we were thinking, how do we tackle this and so on? And we actually went back to the history archives in the factory and looked at the original recipe for Lucas A.

52:56So, I mean, I'll do the round numbers, but let's say there were 40 grams of glucose and we're having to go down to 20, right? That's rough numbers, something like that. And one of the team came back really, really excited and said, I've just been through the archives. And Lucas A was invented because what was happening, this is back in the 20s, a surgeon was worried because kids were dying not in operations but they didn't recover from the operation so they'll be having an operation and then in the in the sensitive time afterwards where you're trying to get you back they literally weren't surviving that bit not they forget the operation and he invented this kind of mix of glucose as a way of kind of getting energy back into the body to help recovery so it's incredibly powerful um thing but we actually found the original recipe before it became a commercial drink the actual recipe and it was 20 grams of glucose was was he had all his experiments that's the amount that was enough to get the body going without overloading it with sugar and all this sort of thing so weirdly although we never intended to get back to where you started we were actually back to where we started with this original story about the optimum amount of glucose to help you recover you know from it's magic because you do have that Indiana Jones feeling for a few seconds where you know we found um uh the founder of Krug Mr.

54:09Krug I forget his name maybe Thomas don't quote me Mr. Krug's original diary which he left to his son about how to run the winery at the vineyard sorry I got me Australian out and because it was a it was a German originally a German family was much more clear and laid out and didactic and it was kind of a manual and the best bit about it was we were struggling with the with what should be the you know every luxury brand is gold if they don't know their history you know and it was this beautiful dark cherry uh handbook and at one point he refers to it as his favorite column and there we go there you are and so you have this lovely electric moment don't you where you're like and i've had it with live founders i had it with donna karen donna karen by the time i worked with her would have been 60 yeah and she would have founded that house in her late 20s and so we were going through some of the archive photographs and she got quite upset because she was remembering things that she she's a billionaire now right but when she set it up she had no money she was so why did you do this don't know oh i don't know that's why because of steven you know husband at the time and so even living founders forget this stuff yeah so i think in in the history particularly in the first few i always say when we do a diagnosis the first five to ten years of a brand's life are often these electric sparks and it's i tell you what it is john and don't get me started this i'll talk all day it's constraints and accidents become the strategy like in sephora's case you know sephora when it was acquired by lvmh all the other beauty brands the big ones didn't want to supply them anymore because they're like one was you know chanel's not going to supply lvmh you know i mean and suddenly they had empty shelves right and so sephora had to go out and find all these hot cool independent brands to fill the shelves it became one of Sephora's questions.

55:55Whenever you read the stories about how the brands became, it so often is a constraint, isn't it? Or an issue or an accident or a fix that drives the innovation that turns out to be. No, no, it's true. Madame Clico went to Russia in order to find a market that when everything was depressed, you know, Dom Perignon invented champagne because the Pinot and the Chardy on their own weren't good. In those, I mean, it's a very American thing. In the toughest moment you find yourself, but often also a path to glory. Totally. And I think you almost want to engineer that. But it's the first five years of a brand's history, maybe 10, where those sparky moments happen.

56:27And you can lose that, can't you, if it becomes too corporate and you lose that. Yeah, definitely. When you start strategizing too early, people say to me, we founded a brand. Do we do brand strategy from the start? I'm like, no, let it percolate. It's like having a kid, right? For the first four or five years, they're basically just, you know, things in the world. it's only around six or seven you can see this thing has been formed now you get to know what it properly is you know but that historical research to Orlando's point of the French eye combined with the American eye because the other thing is if you get too much of that French stuff it turns into hoo-ha you know I mean I've worked with French French branding experts right it's a long fucking afternoon you know I mean they're full of shit right but I've also worked with very rational American market researchers and they don't fucking get it, right?

57:16If I can have some French magic driven by the history and I can have some American rational good old fashioned quant data, boom, we're going to be all right. You know what I mean? And I think that's a great, one of my lessons, it's a great lesson for how to do diagnosis. And you can see on my mini MBA brand management, it's basically, let's talk about history because you find the codes as well. You do, yeah, yeah, yeah. The great ads of the past, you know? All there. But let's also build a questionnaire. Love it. So big thank you to Ollie from VCCP. Yeah, good questions, Ollie. Set me up there.

57:46Well worked. I thought I'd end with 10 really quick, quick-fire questions for you. Just to get... As if you weren't on your toes anyway. I thought that's not what I was talking about. Go on. All right. How tricky was the Bud Light article to write? I only wrote it because so many people said they were waiting for me to write it. Yeah. And normally you get a bit of that, and that's a signal not to write it, because you're like, if they expect me to do it, I'm not going to do it. But there were so many people, I'm like, you know what? I'm actually going to have to write this, right? So then it was easy to write.

58:13What to say? And it links to that point that America, the main conclusion for me is Bud is trying to do mass marketing and you can't do mass marketing in America because the society is broken down the middle. Yeah, very good. Was the Twitter rebrand to X the biggest mistake of this year? Yeah. Which market has suffered most in this 2023, do you think? UK. I mean, you've got to pause on that one, right? Yeah. Last October, I mean, I'm British. I carry a British passport. I happen to live in Australia, but I'm very proudly British. It was very hard for me to come back here. Liz Truss had done, I'm not political, but Liz Truss was clearly a moron.

58:50The Queen had died. I'm not a royalist, but that was, you know, sad. It was a passing. The economy was down. Covid was still fucking things up. There was a massive recession. The pound was all over the place. Heathrow was run by fucking idiots. Every time I went through Heathrow, it was like, who is, you know. Where's your baggage? What is this? You know what I mean? What is this line? How can you show our country like this? and two people were staffing it with mobile phones. They were both like 12. You know what I mean? So it was really hard to come back and see all that. And I think all that's happened this year is the rest of the world has caught up with how shit it all is.

59:22Do you know what I mean? And I definitely don't bet against Britain, but we need a bounce. We need something, right? We really need something. And I'm looking for what – it will come. It might come from a World Cup, but not cricket. nobody really fucking cares um we need something we need something we do we do um what's the biggest skill that marketers don't have managing up and across we talked about this um we're doing this mini mba management quick plug and so we have 10 professors the the 10 courses you do on an mba apart from marketing um one of the interesting ones yale who teaches sort of you know managing organizations the thing that and i'm doing it as a student but the thing that i can see market as most loving in the course from all the things we've got i roger mind does strategy and accounting and finance is how she captures managing your boss and managing those across from you that aren't your your your reports i just don't think we have any clue about that it doesn't matter how good your plan is if you can't get it and the key point is you can be fully trained in this yeah like accounting right that's what i realized a few years ago when i was with brit the catch is that you can you should have a plan of like who's going to decide what influence they have what position are they for or against this thing what am i going to do how am i going to address their concerns you know it can be a lot more logical than uh it's one of the mind-boggling things about i mean it shouldn't be mind-boggling you sit in these we have each class is about two hours and they are the best professors in the topics right the professor that does barry does negotiations in two hours it changes everything forever you just go to your point there's a way of doing this oh fuck yeah you know i mean and i think that's that's astonishing but managing up and across is the one that i think definitely big big skill um does having a mini mba reduce your chance of getting fired i don't know um it definitely increases your chances of being hired okay and we definitely don't talk about it because about half of our candidates are sponsored by their companies so we don't talk about it in the brochure for obvious reasons yeah i can tell you though and again i don't know this is good or bad literally i was talking to a guy about it last night he'd just been for so we did an event last night for for the marketing academy charity and we gave away a place on the mini nba for the best question of the night and the one of the guys said i was i've just been fired today what do i do blah blah blah and i said look mate whatever the fucking question is you're gonna win you know and then i talked to him afterwards over a beer and i said to him do the brand management course because there are hundreds of management jobs and the minute you do the mini nbm brand management everyone that's ever done the course gets every job they ever apply for because you're like yeah there's 10 candidates i'm trained i know what i'm talking about yeah it's like shooting fish in a barrel exactly whether they get yeah whether they i don't know i cannot i've no i've no data on that the reverse probably is true but we'll just go probably probably the odds are with you um what new marketing bs is going to be added to your list but come the end of this year?

1:02:29I'm not much taken with full funnel marketing. I think it's good in principle, but it ends up being target everything all the time, which is the opposite of strategy. I think we've interpreted it badly. That's the one I worry about the most. Okay, okay. Are we already past peak AI? I saw something in New York last week that should scare the fuck out of everyone. So you can, I don't want to go into too much detail because I'm not allowed to. you can put your they put my company name into a box they gave me excess share of voice distinctive brand assets uh correct uh media mix key segments category entry points price optimization yeah in the keystroke and i sat there and i looked at some of it and i said have you got any triangulation there's a couple of there's a couple of sales guys in the room then there's a couple of smart boys further in the back that did it so i just ignored the two sales boys and i looked at the sort of spooky looking guy in the back i said have you got any triangulation data or any of this shit and he's like yeah there's a couple of points we can show you so they can show you a legitimate empirical data point versus what their program has just pulled and scraped yeah yeah 91 92 so i think media planning is a pursuit is over yeah I think econometrics as a separate entity is over, but it won't happen overnight.

1:03:57Chat GPT is like a little fucking toy in the corner. It is, isn't it? There's another deeper bunch of spooks building shit that we as yet find difficult to understand. System 1's place in this is you have a primary data set which you need to protect, which would make the AI smarter. Exactly. But as you've already worked out, John, once it starts to escape in a presentation, in a report, the pigeons are loose. It's speeding the world. Yeah, that's true. I think there's a time coming where, like, look at excess share of voice. Everybody wants it. Very few people have it. This system is already able to basically produce it in two seconds.

1:04:38And then think about this. Once you have all that panoply of data, the AI algorithm can then maximize within those things to then do your Monte Carlo analysis and spit out, these are the three things you should do. So I think whoever nails that, and it will take someone with real skill and marketing knowledge, possibly. That's the key thing, isn't it? That's the key. The good news is only the marketers can do this. There's a bunch of spooks from Bain that have a go at it, but they'll get it wrong. But I think it will change the, yeah, we're nowhere near peak. So Bill Gates is right. For the next three years, it will disappear.

1:05:14but unlike other things it will come back yeah makes sense makes it well final question then i think you've already referenced anyway but uh marketing mba has now extended what new uh courses are there that we can look forward to well thanks for that intro john i appreciate that um we've always done the mini mba marketing we've always done the mini mba and brand management and they continue to be very successful we we wanted an extra course for people who'd done those courses and the ambition was can we the point of mini mba was we took my marketing course from business school turned in a 10-week course could we go out and get the 10 best professors from the 10 best business schools to each teach a two-hour master class in each of the management subjects finance marketing negotiation strategy etc and so we hunted them down over two years incredibly long-winded contractual negotiations um then briefing and then filming and teaching them how to do it it's interesting when someone comes in from the from the business school world they teach they look at the camera as if they're talking to 100 people and you have to always say to them there's just one person there yeah think about it that way try again um and we got i think we're running it right now we're testing it with a 300 marketers i think we have something very special no one has time to spend two fucking years of business school, six hours a day in a windowless room.

1:06:35We don't, and we're old fucks, right? You look at these kids now who are 19, right? How are we going to get them into a room for four hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, five days a week? Get out of it, right? So what we're trying to do is not replace the NBA. It will die on its own merits. But to create for busy marketers, this is definitely not as good as going to happen, right? but it's 10 weeks and it's 2 hours a week long and it's good and you can learn negotiations you know what I mean so yeah I'm pretty bullish about it it's what I wanted to do I'm not really involved in it as much in the sense I'm not teaching as much I'll pick the professors so we'll see but I'm excited everyone that I talk to about it wants to do it which I always think is a good sign so I hope it's going to be we'll sell it as the second course come and do marketing and then now you understand it let's do this i think it's the it's the one and then i'm redoing the mba mini mba marketing completely because some of the things differentiation mass marketing have changed a lot and i think it's time not just to update material but to completely restructure the narrative of these sections because marketing has changed a bit right so we're on that we're on that platform too but you know we go from strength to strength we're in 40 countries it's great it's great business amazing well well done congratulations and and well done again on being the gary v of australia it's something i really take seriously yeah and it will only be complete for me when someone and i mean i'm speaking to you listener confronts gary v at one of his religious style conferences and says gary we love you you're like the mark redson of america the world will be complete full circle on that bombshell mark thank you mate thanks mate thanks for listening to uncensored cmo i hope you enjoyed that if you want to never miss an episode again please do hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and if you're watching on youtube hit the subscribe button never miss an episode again thank you for listening or watching you can follow me at twitter at uncensored cmo or over on linkedin i am under john evans see you next time