Mark Ritson's Top Marketing Moments of 2025

24:12We need something new. And of course, market orientation tells you in the consumer world, that's not true. They're not even looking at the thing most of the time. So I think Amazon, yeah, this is a very bold move. What impressed me about it was, yeah, you're absolutely right. They're scholars of marketing effective. So they've seen all this data and gone, well, why don't we? They were in the audience at Cannes, for example. So that started them thinking. So they know the theory, right, which is good. But when you talk to them practically about what it did for them, it's really a remarkable set of advantages.

24:43They've got a surefire thing, right? You guys tested that ad two years ago. It was almost off the charts, right? It was. So we know that it's going to be off the charts again. If anything, from Coca-Cola, we know that it will get even stronger if such a thing is possible. These ads get better over time. So they've got a guaranteed hit, which is essential at Christmas. And it's getting heavy play here in the UK. Second, 25 % of that budget that would have been spent on creative has been moved right across the table to the working capital of media. That's a huge injection of share of voice. And then the third bit is internal.

25:18That team would have had to have spent months developing, devising, filming, producing a big ad. And they've got plenty of other things to do so they could focus on that. So I think it's a brilliant manoeuvre and it really speaks to the power. Now, you've tested it this year again? We have, yeah. And it scores the maximum possible score of 5.9. In fact, what's interesting actually about the Christmas rankings is the top four are all in some form of repetition. So you've got Al Z with Kevin the Carrot, who are doing another version of the same kind of series. You've got Coke Trucks with a little twist because it's AI, but it's the same thing.

25:55You've got Sledging Grannies. And then M &S, which is a new bit of creative, but it's carrying on the theme with Dawn French and the fairy. So it's like another edition of a series. Can you speak to that, John? Because I get this question all the time from clients, which is because I'm going around talking about this, right? And I say, you know, old ads, keep your cakes in. I'm quite general about it. From a system one point of view, what we're saying is either the same ad, literally, or a long-running campaign with a new piece of creative, but very much off the same block. And they're the same thing in terms of testing.

26:27Yeah, the key thing is familiarity. So what we find is familiarity breeds contentment in the survey. So basically what you find is if you do another version of a similar, Yorkshire Tea is a good example, right? The idea of doing it proper, it's Yorkshire, it's Yorkshire accents. Specsavers is my favourite. Specsavers is another perfect example, right? These are brands that the audience is so familiar with the constructs, the joke, the distinctive assets, that when they see it, it's immediately recognisable. organisable and it evokes emotion because they have already built up that kind of idea.

26:57Yeah, I get it. I get it. It's interesting to me because when I've talked to big clients about this, it's apparent that you can't create a campaign with legs deliberately. You know, that sort of spec savers, Kevin the carrot thing. You can have a go, but sometimes it doesn't translate into multi-year action. So you've kind of got to trust a little bit in fate that you build a good one and then, oh, by the way, it looks like it's got legs. You know, the famous example I use is Cadbury Gorilla. Brilliant, amazing, you know, incredibly effective ad, but then Cadbury lost themselves for a few years trying to give it legs and replicate it and it never worked.

27:33So I think there's also, you know, I think our marketers should look for a campaign that's going to stretch across the years and also look for ads they can just replay, but be conscious that sometimes you just can't squeeze it. Yeah. I mean, my default is always with kevin the carrot that has won crazy numbers of effies and what i love about it is actually if you look at the case study aldi store footprint has remained roughly the same their price advantage versus other retailers is roughly the same so if you and if you look over the course of the last 10 years something about it's around 70 percent of their increase in store traffic and uh buyers is down to the down to the campaign period so it's one of those rare moments where you can isolate advertising, you know.

28:15That's worth billions. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, you look at the numbers, it's just insane. The other thing with Aldi is because they were the low price borderline commodity player, when you add that brand meaning on top, which they've never really had until 10 years, seven years ago, what that generates is the perfect combo. Do you know what I mean? Exactly, exactly. I mean, the brief was, do it, be better than John Lewis. I mean, that was the brief way back in the day. But that brings up a good question for me, right? I love the John Lewis team, right? My favourite Christmas ad is the Elton John, John Lewis ad.

28:46I still think they should be challenged to not only produce a wonderful Christmas ad every year, but also bring out their library of other ads from the past because we know, thanks to Amazon and the data, many of those older ads would perform better than their current one. So why not play them? You are spot on, by the way. I mean, literally, we've got 15 years of system one data on this and it is hit, miss, hit, miss, hit, miss. It literally varies every year. They also stopped doing something that works incredibly well, which is kind of creating the toy for Christmas. You know, they had Excitable Edgar the Dragon that became a merchandising success.

29:19And that's what Aussie have learned from. So they've got Kevin the Carrot. They've got new characters coming out. So they're also making money from their advertising as well in terms of in-store merchandise. So it's just that joining up kind of like the idea above the line with in-store experience. Well, it makes you realize again why Amazon was so smart, right? They're not going to have a miss. They're going to have a hit. And we should mention Orlando's point, which is still the best point, which I'm absolutely stealing for the new year for a column, which is every brand should do this all the time.

29:45You know, not just for Christmas. Let's use emotion. Let's use long form video. Let's be distinctive. Let's create an emotional response, but not just for the four weeks and then run up to Christmas. Oh, mate, you're spot on. If you look at the data, by far the best work happens at Christmas and it's by far the shortest duration of campaigns. Tragic. So, yeah, it's mad. So if there's one thing to do next year, work out what works and keep playing it. Christmas every day. Exactly, exactly. Right, one fun thing every year, you always call out the bullshit in marketing, right? So I thought I would just look up, I think, some of the big buzzwords from this year and get you to react to it.

30:22So the first, now we're not going to talk about AI, by the way, because that comes to the first. It's obviously number one. That's so obvious, so we're going to ignore that one. But hyper-personalization. Personalization was already bad enough, right? There's a couple of problems with personalization. personalization one it's usually not possible without first party data and two it's not necessary it doesn't work that much better right apart from that it's great right you can't do it and there's no point but then someone doubled down and said you know not just personalization but hyper personalization really a mega mega hyper hyper personalization all right here's another popular one um omni-channel marketing yeah that's love a bit of omni-channel don't you so it's so i tell What's interesting about this one is no one knows what the fuck they're talking about there, right?

31:06So Omnichannel's been around for 20-odd years since that BCG guy invented it. And it actually is a very cool concept. It relates to the ability of online firms to go offline and offline firms to develop their online presence. And there's a really nice BCG-based, Bain-based bit of insight into it. A lot of people who have heard the word without ever understanding what it means are now applying it to communications, thinking the channels in question are, you know, Facebook and Instagram. And it's sort of embarrassing because people go, yeah, I love Omnichannel. Look at, you know, I love Facebook and I love using, you know, LinkedIn.

31:42And it's like, no, no, that's not what it, it's literally not what it means. I love that. That's brilliant. All right, one more to round us off then. This is another popular phrase, growth hacking. Yeah, man, that one doesn't help me at all. Yeah, so growth hacking and the whole, just the whole concept of growth, it's part so what happened is quite sad really there's a whole industry now and a whole cohort of i would call them marketers they call themselves product marketers or product managers who've never read any marketing invented their own kind of weird childish theory of stuff which centers around growth hacking and have built this sort of small pathetic parallel universe where they're doing marketing badly with little understanding but they're building their own world And anyone who presents growth hacking anywhere in their material, you're like, oh, please come over here and have a look at the proper stuff and we'll help you.

32:37This is all very pathetic. Totally. All right, let's get back to the top 10. And we're back to the US and we're back in crisis mode now. Now, not everyone outside the US, they may not know this brand, but Cracker Barrel, I didn't know this brand. And I travel in the US a lot, right? Not in the right places, John. But I now, yeah, maybe that's what it is. You need to be on a freeway in Missouri to really get the full. So what happened to Cracker Barrel? So Cracker Barrel is a bizarre brand. I've eaten pancakes in Cracker Barrel, and you never forget the experience. So it was invented, I want to say, 30, 40 years ago, but as a kind of retro heritage brand, as a throwback to the better days, right?

33:17And so you go in there, and there's just a collection of what can only be described as American tat, like old banjos. and, you know, you can buy, you know, old shit in this sort of curiosity shop. And then they serve traditional American fare, you know, with 9 billion calories in it, you know what I mean? And it's quite, you know, it's quite a big brand. It's quite well known, particularly to the Midwest. They got a new quite progressive CEO. She became convinced it was time to, you know, modernize. So she did two things. She completely revamped the interiors. So if you look at the photos, it is a peculiar looking place.

33:56But she modernized it to make it look like, you know, a really bad Hilton, like somewhere on the M6. It looks like a really shit Hilton, right? One that hasn't been properly done, you know? So the interior has lost all flavor of anything. And then the ultimate sin, she rebranded it and certainly at least redeveloped the logo. so they have this weird logo of some old looking guy sitting next to a barrel he has a name like you know scary jim or something much beloved and very strange and she took all that out and again sort of gave it a kind of marriott style middle of the road logo it took about four seconds for first of all the founder who's about 165 he was like i don't like this this is you know burn her burn her and then you know everyone over the age of 75 who basically eats at cracker barrel I hate it, I hate it.

34:47And they were all videoing it. I hate this, you know. So it went bananas, got in the mainstream press. And then again, the American political machine kicks in. Trump does one of his best tweets of the year, which is a work of poetry, right? He basically says, look, I can't do the voice. Look, first of all, it's shit. Second of all, if you listen to customers and rebrand back, so rebrand to rebrand, you'll get a billion dollars of free publicity. And then in a brilliant twist, he says, That's what I did with America. America was like, you know, fucked. And I basically turned it into the best country in the world in one year.

35:23It's completely mad, right? So that comes out. But what makes it unique is, so that's the right. The American right is saying, we hate Cracker Barrel. A day later, the Democratic Party launches a tweet saying, oh, by the way, we also hate the new Cracker Barrel. No, no, no, no. I didn't spot that bit. It's a unification that we've never seen before. That's never happened in history. So the CEO basically goes, fuck this. Everyone's shouting at me here, right? So she gets onto CNN or somewhere and says, essentially, I hear you, America. America has spoken. We've listened. We're going to go back to the old Cracker Barrel scary stuff.

35:56We hear you. And initially, there's this kind of like, oh, that's nice. Listen to the market. Give them the customers what they want. My point is, but now they're really fucked, right? They're double fucked because Cracker Barrel was in trouble, right? Same-store sales dropping 6%, 7 % every year. share priced in the toilet she's done a really bad job of rebranding and modernizing it and now she's had to go back on that she's got no play so for me it's a pretty it's an example of what happens when you really do a bad rebrand job and in my world i always say to you know most companies 95 of the time when you're repositioning or rebranding you should be just doing revitalization Yeah.

36:41She sort of tried to do that, more gentle, but it was so poorly done, you're not going to win. So I think they're, yeah, they're deeply fucked now. There are a couple of little nuances in the story as well, which caught my attention. Because to be fair, brands do do this all the time. Yes. And don't necessarily get a tweet from Donald Trump, right? Very true. Do you happen to know what percentage of the Twitter reactions in the first 24 hours were from bot accounts out of interest? That's a very interesting question. And I think what would be the proportion? 45%. There's something weird going on here, isn't there?

37:16So who would have an agenda? Oh, the Chinese government. Within 24 hours, 45 % of the negative sentiment on Twitter was from bots. So who's got an agenda against Cracker Barrel? It's weird, isn't it? McDonald's. I know. So you just get these situations where that rebrand might have gone under the radar. You and I might be eating there and not none the wiser. But something happened in the first 24 hours. some agenda that made that blow up. And you're right, to your earlier point, it's the reaction to the reaction, right? And that's what CMO is having to deal with now. It's like they can go and do their plan, good or bad, in this case, probably bad.

37:51And then the other thing, of course, was they fired the agency, which I thought is an abdication responsibility. For sure. No, they fired the agency. I think their head of diversity also got the job. It's got nothing to do with him. No, nothing. Yeah, exactly. The poor guy is like, oh, you're fired. He's like, what? It wasn't me. I don't care, you're out, you know? So yeah, I think it's a subtle situation. The message is, yeah, go gentle with these things. And the other one, which applies, let's go back to Jaguar for a second, why not, which has nothing to say this year because it's not making any cars and it's completely lost.

38:22Everyone missed that point, by the way. Oh, look, sales are down 96%. They shut the factory. But then the other point is, all those guys say, oh, it's brilliant, it's wonderful. I'm like, you realise there's going to be nothing now for two years, right? but yeah we don't be able to afford it anyway we could get on that because i think they might be changing their mind right anyway but with jaguar the point was when you do something new an electric vehicle for god's sake use your distinctive brand assets in a traditional way on top of it i learned that from my life working in fashion whenever you do something really new and different play your assets strongly just to legitimize it and that's where cracker barrel went wrong modernize the restaurants better, just keep the weird spooky logo because that probably was the thing that tipped it over.

39:09Yeah. Now, sticking on the theme of famous American brands, in at number four, Starbucks and their positioning. I have to say, and I'm going to sound like I'm getting old and soft, I think Brian Nichol is the best CEO in America. So you remember Brian Nichol? So he was the guy at Chipotle. He's based, I think, in Florida or anyway, not in where Starbucks is based in the Pacific Northwest. And he took a massive, massive salary to become CEO of Starbucks, but refused to go into their offices and was commuting from thousands of miles away. So that's how he started his tenure. Everyone gave him a whole bunch of shit, right?

39:47And I think he was asking his team to work in the office, but he was based, you know, thousands of miles away. So he started off badly, right? So you think, well, here we go, another plonker, overpaid plonker, right? No, he's awesome. He's worth every dollar of it. Already his first 100 days, right? He's got everyone in the organization behind him. He's got a back to Starbucks strategy, which is perfect. I think he's an absolute champion. The thing that I focused on in the top 10 is I've held Starbucks up as the worst example of positioning globally in the world, right? They've been smoking, metaphorically speaking, they've been smoking the positioning crack now for about 10 years.

40:28So their original brand positioning back in the day was, you know, helping every community, you know, be better in a lovely, gorgeous way. And then they made it even, you know, one cup at a time, we're changing the world. It was just utter nonsense. He's come in, done his work, realized it was all, you know, when you have a really weak, stupid positioning, it doesn't kill you straight away, but you don't have that clarity. And you can see it in Starbucks, right? They don't really know what they're selling. The products are all over the place. The service is weird. The environment's not very good.

41:02And so he's come in and he's sorted positioning out. So their new positioning is basically two things, serving the world's best coffee in a nice place where you want to be. So it's very humble. And I like it because that, for me, is relative differentiation. What is positioning? All it basically is is what are the one or two things we want to be seen to be better than anyone else at. and he's saying it's the coffee and it's going to be the space. They're the two things. So for the first time they have a realistic, correct positioning. He's got three or four brand values for the team. That makes sense.

41:36The thing that's missing, and I hate to be critical, but they haven't done their distinctive brand assets. So I like positioning on a page. I like it never to change. I like it to be humble and not full of shit. I like two things max, you know, don't have 25 things in there. and then I like to see the distinctive brand assets because we have to bow down to Professor Sharp for a second. Distinctiveness is more important than differentiation. I still think we should do relative differentiation, but what is your main job to make sure the brand is coming to mind? So put the bloody distinctive brand assets on the page.

42:11Love it. Absolutely love it. Good advice. Okay, number three, keeping the theme on CEOs, of course. New CEOs chasing growth versus gimmicks. Yeah, two big ones, right? So we've got Fernando Fernandez coming in at Unilever. It's a huge appointment. I thought he was disappointing because in his opening kind of communications, he made it all about advertising and specifically all about influencers. And again, he's right. I think we are in a new era for influencers or creators, whatever we want to call them. I think we're learning now that it is a legitimate tactic. It's a strange place for a CEO to focus at the start.

42:48Not even a CMO, right? The CEO opens, his opening gambit is we need more influencers. It's like, well, that's, I'm selling my Unilever stock. You know what I mean? And then we've got Philip Navratil turning up as the new CEO at Nestle in the exact opposite fashion. An absolute machine coming in, right? He's laid off thousands of people, which is sad, but I think necessary. He's fixing the culture. He's operationalizing the whole Nestle approach. and I suspect he's about to consolidate the Nestle brand portfolio. And if my guess is true, I think he's going to kill between 1 ,000 and 1 ,200 brands in the new year.

43:27And I think he's hit the ground running. I know some of the Nestle guys pretty well. I love the company and I think they've got a champion there. So two very big brands for marketing with two very big appointments. Let's see how it plays out. Be fascinating. Yeah, I love that. Right, we're getting near the top now. So in runner-up place, we need to talk about deep fake Martin Lewis, don't we, for this one? If anyone doesn't know, if you're not in the UK, Martin Lewis is the money-saving expert. The most trusted man in the UK. You don't get more trusted than Martin Lewis. He's the housewife's favourite.

44:00He's the man that helps you save money. Everyone loves and trusts Martin Lewis. So we're in this postmodern place now where Martin Lewis has to go out on Instagram and warn people not to trust Martin Lewis because he's apparently part of about 40 % of all fraudulent advertising on Instagram and Facebook. He's a deepfake version of Martin Lewis, basically telling people to invest in a new crypto, right? And, you know, working men and women, you know, quite bright, but obviously vulnerable sometimes to this, are giving away, you know, very large amounts of money and not getting it back. The reason they're doing that is because these ads are quite convincing.

44:38And Martin Lewis is very easy to deepfake because he's quite sort of a blank presence, you know. And in fact, when you look at the deepfake version and the real version, I actually think the deepfake one is slightly more convincing. But the reason it's convincing is it's on Instagram using their algo being presented as a proper ad. So people are like, well, this is a real ad, obviously. So there was an article, a really good investigative article from Reuters last month that basically got hold of a bunch of meta documents. and what it shows is essentially meta are making reuters estimated to be about 16 billion dollars a year 10 of their revenues comes from fraudulent advertising like this facebook are aware of it meta are aware of it and they've limited the amount of action to to less than one percent of their revenue activity presumably because they they want the revenues right so so reuters have examples where a company has done 500 of these fraudulent ads and is still allowed to keep doing it because it's very good money.

45:43And when Meta suspect this fraudulent advertising on the platform, most of the time they don't ban the company, they just charge them more money for the ads. So the whole thing is, and there's a great quote at the end of the Reuters article, which is basically Facebook expect fines of around a billion dollars a year. But of course, if you and I were to rob a bank, knowing that we'd be fined a billion dollars, but we get$16 billion from robbing the bank, we'd rob the bank. Unless morally, we decided robbing a bank was wrong. So it's a really horrendous situation. And, you know, I think it points to the fact there's some good men and women working at Meta, clearly.

46:19But there is a moral conundrum here that they should respond to. The government should do more. They're not going to, I don't think. But it's also an interesting one for marketers, right? We're full of our own, you know, purposeful, ethical standards, you know, and we're quick to jump on anyone for any small infraction. Here's one of the biggest marketing companies in the world making billions of dollars from taking working men and women's money fraudulently, and nobody said diddly shit. It hasn't appeared anywhere. That in a way, I think is the story that it's not a story. That's right. It's not been out there, right?

46:57When I've presented this, a couple of things now have come up. Four or five people that have been convinced by it and have lost money have reached out to me, and it's tragic. And marketers are like, I didn't even know this was happening. It's a stunner one. I think 97 % of meta revenue is advertiser funding. Literally the entire business is advertising. That's where it comes from, and about 10 % of it is coming from fraudulent ads from companies that are selling scams. So, you know, what do we say in the face of that? I don't think anything's going to happen. I just think it calls to mind, and I understand, look, marketers are partly scared of Meta, and also they realise we've had all these bans and, you know, all of these boycotts that have done precisely nothing in the past.

47:41So I guess without government intervention, I mean, Martin Lewis has sued them and successfully sued them for three million quid. Again, didn't make much headlines. So Martin Lewis is in this horror, he's a nice bloke, you know, He's in this terrible position where he's been warning British people about scams for 25 years. The biggest scam is him. So if you ever look at it online, it's the strangest stuff. I think Martin Lewis' mistake, he should have taken a leaf out of Trump and just said$10 billion instead. Well, there you go. I mean,$3 million is a very British response, isn't it? It's a great contrast, though, John, right?

48:15Trump is suing the BBC for$10 billion for one slight edit of his speech, right? The numbers, when you look at it, it's something like about 12 billion fraudulent ads a day. A day, globally, are going out over Metas platforms, and no one's doing anything about it. Blimey. Right. Anyway, maybe we should get to the number one. Yes. And you've invented a new word for the number one, haven't you? Maximiniflation. Right. Let me explain. What's that? Maximiniflation. That came from AI. There were many options, and they were all bad. So maximum inflation is what's happening in Germany, America, here in the UK.

48:54Let's do the German one. It's the best example. So Milka is a very popular chocolate brand. It's the purple Swiss one. It's actually from Mondelez. It's a very popular brand in Germany. And this year, Milka did two things at the same time. They reduced the size of their bar by 10 grams, so 100 grams down to 90 grams. and they put the price up by 50 cents. So from a Euro 49 to two euros and didn't tell anyone. And the Germans don't like that shit. I have a lot of time for Germans. And one of the things that Germans don't like is fucking around and not telling, they like it to be straight. And when it's not straight, they get unhappy.

49:33So the fact that this shrinkage had happened, and the price increase at the same time, and it hadn't been announced, they gave it all kinds of awards for lying. sales are down about 20 % in Germany because the Germans are pissed off with Milka and have banned it and are buying other chocolate bars. So it was a big story. In and of itself, why is that number one? It's happening everywhere. It's been happening in the UK with toothpaste. We've seen brands like Aquafresh have gone from 100 mil to 70 mil and almost doubled their price without saying anyone. So you've got this maxi effect on price and this mini effect on packaging.

50:15We saw it with McDonald's, with the recent new burgers getting smaller and more expensive. And so why is that so interesting? It's the response that fascinates me. We've had shrinkflation going on for the last 10 years. We've had companies very much profiteering from putting prices up surreptitiously, and they've got away with it. What we're seeing this year again and again and again is consumers are no longer accepting it. and in fact if you look at the McKinsey State of the Consumer Survey which just came out, they list everything from immigration to healthcare across all the major countries, how much are you concerned by these things there's only one major concern and that concern is price increases literally it beats everything else in every one of the 18 countries so I think consumers are suddenly conscious of the fact hang on, companies have been putting up prices and shrinking products and they're pushing back.

51:10And the American example is Dunkin' Donuts where there's a huge saga exploded about when you don't ask for ice, Dunkin' don't fill up your coffee for your iced coffee because they're trying to save money on ingredients. So it'll go more next year. You can see it playing out. I always ask my ice in a separate glass. Which is fine, but they won't top you up. Because you drink a bit and then you put the ice in. It's a good maneuver. Otherwise you lose. The more ice you get, the less coffee you get. But Dunkin' will actually still give you a two-thirds full cup. because they're not giving you any more ingredients to keep the cost down, right?

51:41So what's happening, I think, is a big moment where we know companies have to somehow either charge more or cut costs next year. Inflation is continuing. And I think that's how we've got growth over the last 10 years, right? There isn't a lot of new market. So we're getting it from clever cost cutting or clever price increases. I don't think that's going to happen next year. I think consumers are going to push back. So I think if marketing is about growth, we have a real challenge coming because I don't know where that growth is going to come from. I think consumers are against a wall now, and I think companies are going to struggle.

52:19And we'll see a lot more of this next year. It's just starting to go off. So for me, a very big story. And maxi-miniflation, the attempt to do basically shrink-flation and price increases at the same time. Mark my words, there'll be a few of these next year, and marketers will get into trouble. There you go. You heard it here first. Mate, thank you. That is a pretty amazing top 10 there. Lots of different stuff going on, right? Yeah, really varied, actually. Lots of crises, lots of pricing in there as well. So we covered some non-typical subjects as well, which is good. Love it, mate. Thank you very much.

52:50So till next time. Well, mate, it's been my pleasure. And happy Christmas, both to the listener and to you. Here's to a very pleasant 2026. Indeed. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on X at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans.

53:26Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.