Mark Ritson on why everyone is wrong about Sydney Sweeney, the 3 rules of creativity & why strategy always comes before tactics

0:07Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, this is another Ritson episode, which I know you're going to love. I'm catching up with Mark to find out what's been going on in his world, because since I last interviewed him, he has done a partnership with Brave Bison. So I'm finding out what that means for Mini-MBA. We talk about the hottest topic of the moment, Sydney Sweeney, and what that means for brands and why everyone's losing themselves over it, and everything else that's trending in marketing right now. So as usual, Mark is uncensored. He's a great guest. You know what's coming up.

0:37Here it is. Mr. Mark Ritson, welcome back, mate. How are you? I'm back for my third or fourth. Yeah, I reckon so, yeah. But we're in New York this time, just to kind of mix it up a little bit. I don't make any difference at all. But we can talk about UK versus US marketers just for fun, couldn't we? Yeah, well, it comes to mind, right? We're in a very hot August New York office. It's kind of cool, right? No, it's good, isn't it? It's good. I'm in the middle of winter in Australia, so this is great. Don't tell my wife I'm having a great time, right? Now, since we last spoke, your business has changed a little bit, hasn't it?

1:10Yeah. Both Bison have come on and acquired half of you. Yes, we were in play for God knows it felt like forever. Centaur, the company I partnered with when we started the business, wanted to sell their interest in it for reasons of nothing to do with Mini MBA. And I was like, yeah, good, I'm interested. And I got a say in who my new partner would be, which is, I think, appropriate. and we had loads of interest from loads of very big and interesting organizations which is also nice but very time consuming but we ended up with brave bison who are a tech marketing group and and we're very it's the it really is the perfect partner it sounds you know blasé but we've got a an upwardly mobile growing business that gets marketing importantly they run it like a house of brands so there's a whole bunch of good companies there each with the ceo there's good synergies in the back and a sort of shared philosophy but each is given their space you know so we see a ton of potential and um one of which weirdly was to leave marketing week so yeah i was going to ask you about that because you've been with marketing like 10 years i mean at least 10 years the association with marketing week is huge yeah and and really that's why i ended up with centaur because centaur and marketing week and i did mini mba when i was already a marketing week columnist and I loved it right I've been there 10 years more to be fair I'd done 10 years prior to that that no one remembers with marketing which was the previous magazine before it and then I'd switched and to be honest it's I still love Russell the editor and all that operation there but there was an opportunity once I left Centaur to to broaden the readership of a column you know So I'll start writing for Ad Week in the US now.

2:54I'll write for The Drum. I'll write for Horizont in Germany and Ad Format in the Netherlands and Resume in Sweden. So I'm broadening it out a bit, which I couldn't have done, obviously, if I was devoted to Marketing Week. So, yeah, it really will increase, hopefully, visibility, which is really, again, I'm top of funnel for mini-MBA, right? Yeah, yeah. What's interesting, and you'd find it interesting, is if you do an analysis of the readership of these marketing channels, they really don't cross over much at all. So we might imagine that if you read Marketing Week, you read The Drum, you read Adweek.

3:29That's not how it plays out. That is, because I think in marketing, if you're in agency land, you read campaign. If you're client-side, you read Marketing Week. The overlap between those two publications is hardly anything. That's right. I know very few people that read that. We engineered that, to be fair, right? So if you remember, when I came across the Marketing Week, It was one of the smartest things Russell and I did at the time. Haymarket that owns Campaign also had marketing that I was writing for. And I jumped across to Marketing Week. And then they shut marketing down. And I said to Russell, let's make sure we make it clear that Campaign can have all of that advertising stuff.

4:08Because it's a small part of marketing. It's not where the money is. And we say we're the client side thing. And that was very much something we put in place. and which worked, right? And it has worked very well, so. It definitely has. So the question I've got for you then is, given advances in AI, give an example, James and I were on this ride. We rode a stage of the Tour de France, right? Did you? Yeah. We did this experiment. On what, a motorbike or a real bike? Yeah, a real bike. No way. A flat one or a hilly one? An actual one. Yeah, a hilly one. I'm getting impressed. This was the most hilly stage, right?

4:40This is a bit stupid of us. Did you ever get off or did you actually? It was painful. We made it, like, what I didn't realise before doing it is when you do a stage of the Tour de France, there's a time cut because what they do is they close all the rows, you do it, and then the pros go behind you, and you've got to finish it before the pros catch you up. Oh, you're doing it during the Tour de France. You're doing it the morning of the pros, right? That's totally mental. This is crazy. I didn't know about this. And then James is like, you know we've got five minutes to finish, like, get to the top of this hill.

5:09So we made it with, like, three and a half minutes to go before they shut the entire place, kick us out, and then the pros come in. It was insane. But the reason this links to AI, apart from being a funny story, was so I'd got an actual cycling coach, right, who was kind of mentoring me and telling me what to eat and train, all this kind of thing. Was he Dutch or French? He was Scottish, actually. Jesus. But annoyingly, he went on holiday the two weeks before the thing. So I kept messaging him. He said, I'm just on the sun lounger in New York or whatever. Eating pies and drinking beers and stuff.

5:39You got it, right? Producer James here, for nothing, has got Clive, the AI cycling coach. right and just to give you an idea of how good this is so we're driving down he's like oh give me your data i'll just chuck your cycling data in and ask clive what you should be doing for your warm-up right anyway we're on the first like we start the thing and we're both feeling a bit like very early start right we're a bit knackered and the heart rate's really high so we're going on james gets his phone out talks to clive clive uh we're doing 160 watts heart rate is up at 140 is this time in the morning we're a little bit cold what should we do and clive's back with the you didn't sleep last night, a bit nervous about the stage, don't worry about it, settle in lads, take it calm, heart rate will calm down.

6:18So we've got like a film of an AI coach talking us through how to complete a stage of Tour de France. You know, my only parallel experience of this cycling, which is not parallel at all, is about 20 years ago, I cycled to Sweden from London, right? And I did it on the North Sea bike route, which is a phenomenal bike path, right, that goes right up from the Hook of Holland around Denmark and across to, Gothenburg and I did it and no one believes I did it because I had something like a month off at London Business School I just bought a bike in the morning at London Bridge and a pair of shorts right did zero that's gonna be painful zero training of any kind right and I remember it was when they just invented the iPod so I loaded my iPod with all my like 12 CDs which took like nine hours right and I just got the ferry to the hook of Holland and started cycling and I wasn't as fat as I am now but I wasn't particularly thin and I can remember I got and it was flat but I'd do 100k in the morning and then my boy I would have a giant carb lunch and my body would then shut down for about an hour and then I'd sort of reboot it do another 100k and then I would basically shut down in a bed somewhere and I did that for like 12 nights oh man that is and to this day most people don't believe I did it and it was just like me on my own cycling around Denmark and I had it was one of the great experiences of my life that is hardcore I have to say it was pretty amazing to do it the last climb took two and a half hours and it was raining and cold fuck that and the depressing thing like some idiots had snuck onto the course with e-bikes and like that sounds like a couple of large people I would do that and they're just literally going with no effort at all just smiling at us laughing I would do that that's that's They're not idiots.

7:59They're the smart ones. We're literally in the hurt locker at this point, cold, wet, and about to drop off the mountain. That's brilliant. Yeah, AI cycling sounds good, mate. It is. So my question then is, at what point is AI going to take over mini-MBA, right? Because presumably we could just take all your knowledge, all your case studies, all the data from history, everything you've taught, put it into AI, and I could just ask AI, I couldn't. You could, but then why would you worry about the answer? So, yeah, if you want to go like 20 % into AI, You can have an AI version of me teaching you how to do marketing, right?

8:32But my point is it's much deeper and more disruptive than that. Why do you need to learn it at all, right? And any process that currently exists is going to be shut down like an accordion, right? Law is currently being broken into a tiny blancmange of what it was, right? And we're seeing it before. Accounting is just disappearing, right? I mean, so process is a thing of the past eventually. And much of marketing is a process, right? So no, I think where it's going is more an AI-driven planning execution machine. Now, does that replace mini-NBA? Partly. I think you have to explain and train marketers in what the stuff is.

9:19So we can, I'm working on it now. we have a planning tool that's in development for building marketing plans and it explains what all the decisions are so you have to kind of understand what excess share of voice is and what distinctive brand assets are so you can understand the decisions that were made so there's kind of a role for a professor what's interesting is at the moment in our early beta test it's the professor in the box so what happens is you get given your target your segmentation and your targets and the the right positioning and the right pricing and then the right mix of channels and all of that and you can click on a trunk which contains me or an avatar of me and i can get out and explain these things if they need me to but it's kind of the reverse of i'm going to train you then you're going to do it well now it's already been done do you need the professor to explain it i've seen some research actually recently suggesting that people using ai to replace tasks they were doing are thinking like 40 or 50 % less than they were.

10:20So the danger is actually AI makes you lazy and it doesn't, sometimes it's the doing the work that makes you do the thinking that gets you to the arts or something. I think that's right. In marketing, it's not applicable because we're not, I mean, I use the example all the time of the radiographer doing breast cancer, right? They've been essentially proven now that AI can look at an X-ray of human breasts and identify breast cancer much more accurately and quickly than a trained radiographer. In the analogy, the marketing director is looking at the X-ray and can't even identify what's abreast.

10:55Do you know what I mean? They're just not doing the work. Correct. How many great marketing plans are there? Exactly. You know what I mean? So the question isn't, can AI produce a better marketing plan than a marketer? They're going to produce plans, often for the first time, that are executable. You know, if you look at Evidenza's business, Evidenza has very deliberately put synthetic research into the B2B world because there isn't that much research available. They're not competing. They're bringing it to the market for the first time. So, yeah, no, I think marketers are going to remain, but the job they haven't been done doing will be replaced.

11:37Will be replaced, exactly that. Well, this brings me to my favourite bit of research recently from our friends at Ehrenberg, Bass, about distinctive assets where they tested, this is so funny, but they tested what marketers think of their distinctive assets in terms of fame and uniqueness and what the consumer thinks. Yes. And they were wildly out. Yes. I think it was on fame, 40%. Out of 100%, they were on average 40 % out. They weren't even close. And I think the data was only a third of marketers were within 20 % of guessing the level of fame. They overstated the fame of their assets. They overstated how famous they thought they were.

12:13So the interesting thing, which I wasn't expecting, which hopefully you can explain, but they understated uniqueness, which I assumed it would be both overstated. But interestingly, they understated... I saw that too. I don't know. I don't know the explanation. I mean, the most likely thing to say is that most of them weren't unique anyway, right? So they're in the lower quadrant. But I don't know. I don't know. I mean, the point that the paper makes, which went a very long way around to make it, is market orientation, right? You know, marketers don't know anything. You know, just because you're in charge of pricing or distinctive assets or advertising doesn't mean you can look at it without data from the customer to make the decision, right?

12:54Exactly. We're meant to know that. Most marketers don't know that. We're back to Sidney Sweeney, right? Well, I think Sidney Sweeney proves this point brilliantly because we actually put Sidney Sweeney advert through the system. I didn't see this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, actually, tell you what, you guess. So five-star scale, 1.0, 5.9. That's a very good question. I was in an interesting position with Sidney Sreeni. So to speak. So to speak. I really found the criticisms on both sides, left and right, are bothers. Hilarious. Yeah. I mean, it's not the end of woke advertising, nor is it eugenics, you know.

13:29Yeah. But I wasn't that big a fan of the campaign either. And so what's interesting is you're not allowed any of that nuance on LinkedIn. You're not allowed to go, you know, it's not the end of, you know, genetics and stuff. It's all calmed down. But also, it's not a particularly great ad either, right? So my guess would be, my guess would be, well, it's very poorly branded. So I would say it will, so that will hurt it on your short scale, won't it? So I would say it wouldn't be particularly strong on the short term. And on the long, she's there. I would say it's probably average. It's sitting in the big fat three in the middle.

14:12I was quite surprised by this. 1.3. Wow. Yeah, really low. And lower than the average for fashion ads as well. And in fact, the number one emotion was neutrality. So it didn't, because I thought you got a very, very well-known celebrity, attractive looking, you know, advert for jeans, fairly popular category. So the category itself is kind of ubiquitous. I think it was very poorly branded, right? I mean, that was the first thing. So I think that contributed to it. And without, again, jumping into what we think of the ad, it was very redolent of the male gaze. So if you look at her positioning and so forth, it wasn't necessarily an aspirational look for women.

14:52it was kind of like if you were a 30-year-old man, it was kind of like an appealing image, which isn't necessarily on brand. So the data suggests what? They'll get a little bump, but not much. Hardly anything, yeah. In fact, were it not for the controversy, which was largely manufactured, it wouldn't have been noticed at all. It would just be a normal... In fact, it's quite generic of the category. It's fairly dull and ubiquitous. Well, and you might argue that all of that discussion really was taking place on LinkedIn, not the home of gene buying anyway, right? So for your average teenage jean buyer, she's like, you know, pass them by.

15:26The Beyonce Levi's ad did better. I think that was 2.8. Better ad, but not a great ad. Yeah. That was the pastiche of the Levi's original one, wasn't it, with the boxer shorts and stuff. Which would have been five stars. I think that was five stars. It would have tested off the charts, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's funny, right? We get ourselves into a froth about these things. Yeah. And the lesson of the Sidney Sweeney campaign isn't, you know, I mean, it's not going to destroy their business. It's not going to make them a billion dollars either. You know what I mean? It's just an ad. It's not that important, first of all.

15:56But the big list is market orientation. You can bang on about all day long about how this is proof of eugenics and the white attempt to blah, blah, blah. But that's just what you see. And you don't matter in all of this. None of us matter, you know. So it's a great result in a weird way that it was kind of just blah, you know. Exactly. now talking creative uh let's move on to bears and beers right because um you did your uh well well in collaboration with us actually didn't you creative dividend presentation it was your day there it was half your day there exactly which which i thought i i mean credit to andrew on this for driving this but like really cool to crash the effie database and system on database because like brilliant and have two such big databases looking at um how creative actually works but But tying it to business results and brand results using the FE data, I just thought was amazing.

16:48Because, you know, make it because obviously what we do at System One is predict the outcomes. Yeah. And what's great with this is we're adding it to the actual outcomes. Of what happened. Exactly what happened, which I thought was really cool. Well, and the angle that's also interesting is the point I made in the talk at Cannes was, we know that creative is important and it has this, you know, famous 12 times multiple that if you have great creative, you'll make 12 times as much profit than if you had shit creative. but there's not any real clear diagnosis on so what what what do we do to get the 12 and not get the one you know so that's why i love the work so when andrew gave me the i mean it's a giant data set right i was like that's kind of what i want to get i want to zoom in and get that and i think we we got it you know i mean it that it passed the test for me in the sense that it changed the way i thought about mini mbas advertising after we'd done the work and i thought well that's interesting.

17:41The work that I've read and I've talked about is now changing how I'm doing stuff. There's got to be a good sign. That's really cool. And, you know, and look, the summary is really simple, right? When you look at all the data, what we find in a nutshell is three things, right? That if you want your advertising to be a 12 rather than a one, you first of all want to encourage and utilize emotion. Second, you want to codify it with distinctive assets throughout. And finally, you want to run that campaign for at least two years, ideally longer, right? Yeah. And those three data points are pretty much inarguable.

18:19It's not like, you know, but there's also this alternative approach. They're inarguable points, right? Maybe the only little clarification is, again, when we say emotion, we've got a lot of emotion to utilize. I mean, I went out of my way to use the Twix Bears because that's an ad that has horror and shock and then humor. and those are emotional responses we don't always see. So, yeah, so for me those three things are the core to it. And maybe we go back to why not one more time, Sydney Sweeney. None of those three apply if you think about it, right? That was a curiously impassioned ad that we saw.

19:00She looks kind of blank, yeah, very sort of devoid of emotion. it's not codified at all very hard to ice it's genes but whose genes is very hard to isolate as well and it's a new campaign that i suspect will be gone within a couple of months yeah so on all three fronts no it's good in it because it does simplify how you look at a campaign and break it down i mean emotion we've known for a long time obviously going back to creativity yeah you know long and short all that kind of thing yeah um and obviously system one data we've been there for years talking about it i thought the interesting thing was uh were two interesting things one on the fluency point the number of distinctive assets that was a new thing that was a new thing i hadn't seen that before because i i would have probably guessed oh yeah as long as you got two or three you're probably fine make sure they're prominent what was the magic number again i've forgotten seven yeah well it was seven times so you could repeat the same one yeah repeating the same one or having different i mean this is where we get into i think i mean orlando i love how orlando i mean i know he talks about affluent devices rather than distinctive assets but it could be like a sound it could be a repeating scene it could be a character and the other thing i thought was great is and this is what i really try and drill into people it's not about putting your logo everywhere right and i think that's what people default to is like logo in the corner logo at the front but actually it's finding something that people associate so like the meerkats or something or you know well tourism australia actually that's a good example like with the with the kangaroo right yeah and the characters in there but find a character that associates with with your brand look the day i mean it's interesting we've been working one of the things that our new ai tool is doing and we're just calling it the tool at the moment but it identifies the palette of distinctive brand assets that you're utilizing it tells you if they're good enough and if they're if it's not it uses all the distinctive brand asset data and an analysis of the market to say what you should have is a color and a mascot and furthermore based on the brand positioning, the colour should be this, and here's some pantons, and then here's the mascot, and we've drafted out the mascot.

21:01Here's the first three examples. So it's getting to that point where, yeah, you need them and then you need to use them. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, back to the first point about Ehrenberg Bass data, marketers are very blind to this stuff. So having something that's going to actually give them real consumer data and tell you this is what your audience are going to recognise, it's going to be huge. Yeah, I mean, and even not even, again, what I smell in the 30s, and it won't happen in the next couple of years with the AI driven marketing systems is, we won't have to convince anyone anymore.

21:34We'll just give them the distinctive brand assets, and that'll be it, you know. So, no, I think it holds up all the existing work we've learned about. Probably the long-term thing is the most surprising of the three in the sense that it's only been a year or two that we've all been banging on about it. I mean, it's interesting. I came up with this line on stage about, you know, we're not baking our cakes long enough. And that was the one ad-libbed thing in the whole talk. I pulled that out of my ass, and that's the one that got quoted the most. that marketers are putting their cakes in and not baking them long enough.

22:09You know, we pull these campaigns out on average after two months. You know what I mean? So I think that's the one that we've, all of us have been chiming on about, right? That we need to keep the same campaigns out there. It's interesting. I did some discussions with Tourism Australia. I know Susan pretty well, the CMO. And when she sent me the new campaign that they're about to drop, I said, the interesting question, Susan, is why do you need a new campaign? it's only three years since you launched the last one right and and she said yeah and it's testing better every year as predicted right it gets stronger and stronger but she made a couple of nice points that they've learned stuff that they want to put into place they need that injection of industry affiliation and even the prime minister involved when you launch a new ad campaign and some of the products they wanted to feature it changed so she made a nice case for it But I thought that was great.

23:02We're now at a place where with really well-run brands, that is a very well-run brand, the question isn't, oh, you've got a new nice ad campaign. You've been running it for three years. Why not run it for six? And I think that's a great place for us to be now. I love it. I love it. It also rings true because you said that in Cannes, which is a celebration of the new and the novel, right? Well, yeah, the whole nature of the Cannes. The whole point of that is let's talk about change, whereas actually you're going, okay, let's talk about not changing. I mean, you have to submit fresh work, right?

23:30That's the point. There's less than 12 months. There's no can for the, we put the same ad on for another year. No, no. Which there should be. And that, by definition, everything submitted at can is not ready yet to be reviewed. Yeah. It's a mind boggling thought. It is insane, isn't it? The thing, I mean, going back to, I mean, it came through in that work and compound creativity we launched last year as well. What I love about it is the fact that it compounds. So not only is it better, it gets better on better. And the gap between being consistent and changing every year just gets wider and wider.

24:03So I think, if I quote this correctly, I think it was like a four times multiple, wasn't it? It became a seven and a half times multiple when you looked over three years. So, you know, as a CMO or senior marketer, you're just getting more and more return the longer you stick at it. And then take out all those production costs, right? Take out all the time. Put that into media. And that's not even factored into that, right? So what we're saying is not only would you get a significantly greater multiple of impact, you'd be getting it for a lot less investment. So I think it's very important work.

24:36And I think what it means for marketers is they have to go into that campaign mindset, not with a six-month mindset, but with a let's create a banger that will last for five years or let's be spec savers. You know what I mean? Totally, totally. Yeah, the Browns, I probably quote them too much, but I love Yorkshire Tea as a great example. So they only make a new ad every, I think, two, maybe three years. But straight off the same production line. It's exactly the same. It's like a Yorkshire celebrity. It's in the factory. Accents are there. Cups of tea are there. The red's there. Logo's there. The jokes are there.

25:12You know what I mean? It's just like all there. It's just fresh. And they've grown, I think I'm quoting Don correctly, but I think from about 13 % up to about 40%. and in the tea category. And the other nice thing about that is nothing else changed. It's like a category with three brands. It's been flat or slightly declining forever. You know, price has been the same. Well, it's funny. I'm smiling because during the talking can, because when you're on these stages, it's a giant black space. You know, we've like 800 people there. And again, I had a thought halfway through it, which is we talked about KitKat, you know, and I knew KitKat would be one of my examples because I'm a huge fan of it, right?

25:47And I know the campaign has been running for 40-odd years, right? But I suddenly thought, I bet you they've had the same agency. And I said, is YL here, who's the global marketing director? I said, YL, are you here? And it's just like this black void. And he went, love you, Mark, from the distance. And I said, how long have you worked with this agency? And he said, from the start. I'm like, how long is that? It's like 47 years. So it's that idea of everything stays consistent, back to that compound creativity point. it runs against everything that we're doing at the moment. Let's bring in new agencies.

26:21Let's have lots of different talent. Let's do something quickly for two days. And then, you know, it's not the way to do it, you know? You're right. Yorkshire Tea, Lucky Generals, 10 years, over 10 years. Another brilliant example is Aldi with Kevin the Carrot. I mean, that's McCann. Who's there? That's McCann. That's McCann. McCann, Manchester, that's, I think, close to 10 years. VCCP and Cabri have been knocking on for a long time. And it just, every single year, it just, I mean, because we test Alzi's work every single year. And it's amazing because they get like a flipping 5.9 at Christmas.

26:54And every single year they phone us up and go, how the hell do we beat this? I mean, we're like, well, we're going to have to invent a new scale, guys. You don't, right? But how do you stay at the top? And they are so, so, they understand how it works so well now. But like every joke, every bit of branding, every way of telling the story, They've done it so scientifically now that they literally can predict, you know, from January through to December, they know they're going to get a five-point. It's amazing. I mean, Wael's point at KitKat is it takes real skill not to change stuff. Yeah. Yeah?

27:26It really does take an enormous effort to stop people meddling with it. You know what I mean? And his predecessors have all been doing that for decades. And I think that's the philosophy, right? Yeah, 100%. And look, there isn't an awards for not changing, but I think there should be. There should be. Given it's one of the most important factors, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, we've been talking a lot about creative, but we shouldn't forget to talk about everything else in the mix. I was going to ask you, what's the split of marketers that actually own the whole four Ps? It's a really interesting question.

27:59Yeah. It's been done in the CMO survey in the UK and Australia, but the question is wrong. So the question asks, and forgive me if I don't get this exactly right, which of the following processes does you and your team have direct control of? And the problem I have with that question is I don't think anyone would vote for marketers should control pricing or marketers should control distribution or marketers should even control product development, right? My point is they should be involved in it and have a seat at that table and bring value to it. So if you go back to that question of who controls it, it's sub 10%.