Reloaded: How to be a successful challenger - Adam Morgan (2020)

24:30And so the founder, Mark Antony, wanted to get a meeting with a high-powered lawyer in New York who would defend the case and got a meeting surprisingly easily and quickly. And it turned out that the lawyer took the meeting because he thought he was Mark Antony the singer. Oh, really? He'd just made a mistake. So I think that was genuine luck, actually, at that point. But by and large, I love those stories. So I'd like to move on, if I can, to what I consider actually to be your best book, which I know is also the one that maybe hasn't sold as well. Let's get to this. I was working at BritVic, obviously, a relatively large organisation connected to PepsiCo.

25:10And I wanted to bring some of the Eat Big Fish ethos to it. I was creating a new team called Sea Brands that basically kind of took the challenger brands in the portfolio and managed them slightly separately. And I discovered your book. I think you'd recently written it called The Pirate Inside. And it was fascinating because for many people, and maybe many people listening to this, they're working in big organizations. They want to be an innovator or an entrepreneur, and they buy into the challenger brand approach. But they just don't know how to do it in the context of big organization. And I found your book very, very useful, particularly at that point in my career.

25:47So tell me about how you ended up writing that book and how that's worked. Well, so that was the difficult second album, really. So I'd had this big success with the first book and translated into eight languages and that kind of stuff. And so I wanted to write a second book because the question I got asked most often about challenges was, look, I understand how it works if you are the owner driver of your own company, if you are the founder of Innocent or the founder of Method, all that kind of stuff. But how does it work if, you know, like I'm in your situation, I'm a middle level, senior level manager in a matrix driven organization.

26:20I don't own it yet. How do I make stuff happen here without getting fired? And so my original title for the book actually was How to Be a Pirate in the Navy Without Getting Hanged. And the publisher, which I still think is a better title, but the publisher persuaded me to change it to a smaller one. And I thought it was going to be a really big and valuable book because I had a lot of – it was very personal. You know, it's a lot of very personal stories, so it's quite uncensored. I tried to get people to talk about what it was like, about the bleak moments, you know, particularly in that difficult first year when you've put a challenger stake in the ground.

26:53Everybody is standing around you with crossed arms looking to see whether it's going to work. You're aware there's a lot of back chat going on in corridors. You're not hearing about that. and it's quite a lonely place to stand as you'll know you know um and i wanted to capture a lot of that and i'd also um one of the questions i i had been asked about the first book was give us an examples of of learning from failure and i hadn't really learned enough from i hadn't looked and studied failure enough in challenges so i deliberately looked at a number of brands that have failed to be successfully or people teams that be pirates inside but nevertheless i thought it was interesting i mean there are some flaws in the book there are way too many analogies for instance uh for one book to withstand um but um i think it it does there it's interesting i do get people like yourself sometimes to say that is that is the favorite book because it spoke to them in some kind of way they identify that's exactly what my experience was because i i genuinely for the first time in my career felt quite lonely because i'd gone to the um i'd gone to the board of britwick and said i've got this great idea you know we'll create a separate business unit.

27:56We'll put together the brands that we want to challenge in the marketplace. So we run our own kind of separate sales and marketing and merchandising unit. And I suddenly realized that there was no one who could give me advice in the organization. There's no one that had done this before. And I was kind of middle management level. And so I didn't have a peer group. So I was kind of running a bit on my own. I mean, I was kind of attached to marketing, I guess, in my peer group. But they were doing some very different things you know big advertising campaigns and big bits of mpd and that sort of thing and i um there were loads of things i mean i represented maybe three percent of the portfolio so you know loads of people would say yeah you know this is just a fad it won't last and you're only three percent you know you see you don't really matter to our kind of future success um and you got lucky i mean that was something that i got told yeah you're just lucky you know just you happen to hit on a an idea at the right kind of moment in time and generally i felt i did feel quite lonely um I'm a little bit scared because I'd kind of promised to break even in the first year.

28:55And I got there with about a week to go and about£50 ,000 to spare. But it was the hardest ever work to my life kind of thing. And then I read your book. And your book was like great comfort to know that actually lots of other people have faced that. But I learned through their experience in a really powerful way. So it kind of, I guess, intellectually, Big Fish was more powerful. But emotionally, I'd say Pirate Inside just hit at the right. So it might have been circumstance timing. I don't know. But so I'd love you to relaunch it at some point. I think there's a lot of mileage in there. So it's a tremendous.

29:28Well, we should maybe at the end of the podcast talk briefly about our Challenge 30 idea as a kind of, you know, bridge to overcome that. Because it still persists and there's no reason why people should feel as isolated as they do with that situation. But the thing is, in big companies, the incentive is for everyone to act in a certain way and to believe the same things and to work in the same process. And most big organizations are quite political. So there is a kind of unsaid pressure to go in a certain direction. And as soon as you break out of that, it's very scary. So some people – I mean, I remember, for example, I advertised in BritVic for people to come and join me.

30:09and I got loads of people phone me up and they said the same thing we'd like to come and work for you john but not yet career career limiting i know i know because because the you know the back chat was hospital pass you know you'll be out of a job in six months it was seen as a risk and most people are actually if you scratch on the surface they're risk averse and i'm the opposite of that i mean i i you know i'd far rather die trying than never try sort of thing and that's what i found was so interesting about the the culture of britwick is the amount of people that were kind of quietly saying they supported me but publicly wouldn't you know until after the first year you know we we delivered our target we were still there you know we'd grown the brands by 30 you know turnover by 30 after the first year and then and then everyone wanted to join you know sort of thing but yeah but one of the reasons it is tiring doing what you did is because the level of internal marketing you need again is 20 30 40 more than you think it's going to need to be So you're doing this external stuff where you're going even further and then constantly internally managing the message and communication.

31:14Huge, huge. I mean, in the Britvik example, I had probably three different very senior stakeholders. I had obviously the Britvik side, I had the PepsiCo side, but I also had because I was managing Lipton, which was a joint venture between Unilever and PepsiCo, another kind of senior stakeholder there. So I kind of described it to my team as air cover, right? So my job was to buy them the freedom to be able to do what they needed to do. And some of them were quite shocked at the lengths I had to go to, to keep everybody supportive and justify that, you know, because I think the perception was, because they saw, I think, you know, I had maybe about 40 people in total, if you include the people on the ground going into shops and kind of selling at ground level.

31:55And people go, that's a ridiculous amount of overhead. and so i had to go and do the sums to say as a percentage if you take our total overhead as a percentage my overhead was exactly the same as a percentage of total company but because it was housed together it was quite visible you know so you know i had to do all this kind of justification and so on so what i found tough was managing all of that while then allowing the team to go and do the great work and make it happen so i you know learned a huge amount so definitely that'd be great i think the um the challenge of 30 idea is is brilliant all right well let's come back to Let's do that.

32:28We'll do that. Okay, so that was Pyro Insight. And then let's bring us up to your most recent book, A Beautiful Constraint. So tell me, what was the inspiration for this book? Well, so I'd always wanted to do kind of three different books about challenges, I suppose. And the idea would be that the first one was about strategy. So sort of loosely kind of, you know, the first book looked at kind of what's the strategic operating system. And of course, the first book touches on culture as well as strategy, but primarily is about strategy. The second book was about culture. So the third one was, I thought, going to be about innovation.

33:03And I was due to write it in 2008. And just before I sat, I kind of set aside the time to write it and started writing it. And in fact, it was called something different. that point. It was called Stubborn Magic. I was just interested in, because your point about kind of tenacity and resilience, I suppose, in making new things happen in organizations was something I wanted to kind of celebrate and talk more about. And then as I was about to sit down and write it, my editor rang up and said, look, you know, Eating the Big Fish is now 10 years old. One or two things have happened in the marketing world you might have noticed since then.

33:33And the world generally since then, you need to write it again or rewrite it. Otherwise, we're going to discontinue it. So I thought, okay, no, this is really important for my business. So I chose that time to rewrite it. So by the time I got to writing A Beautiful Constraint, which was six years later, the world was full of innovation books. And I suddenly thought, I don't want to just write another innovation book. What's the thing about challenges in innovation? And of course, the striking thing about challenges in innovation is they don't really have an innovation department. They don't have an R &D department.

33:59Very often, in fact, they're having to be highly innovative in everything that they do in spite of constraints. And so I was struck by this. And then I kind of came across two or three things in culture, including I went to see Tom Ford speak and got a chance to talk to him about how he did catwalk shows. And he said this incredible thing. I asked him, I said that I'd heard that he described his catwalk shows as filmic and what did he learn from the world of fashion that he applied to business and what he learned from business that he applied to fashion. and he said you know what you have to understand he said is that a catwalk show is 13 minutes long and he repeated it 13 minutes he didn't say roughly quarter of an hour or you know not a lot of times 13 minutes and he said so in that time you've got to convince this very cynical audience that yours is the most exciting fashion vision that they've seen in Milan or New York or Beijing or Rotterdam or wherever you happen to be and then he talked about what he did But he said, he made this really interesting thing.

35:02He said, so what I try to do in that 13 minutes is I try to get all the audience breathing in and out at the same time. He said, my ambition by the time the last model leaves the stage is to make the entire audience exhale as one. And so I was struck by this because clearly he had this ferocious constraint of seen it all audience, 13 minutes. and the natural temptation in that is to kind of reduce the level of ambition. How much can you really do, frankly? And he doesn't. He does the opposite. He raises the ambition to this almost ludicrous extent and that's what gives him the fireworks and the theatre of what he does.

35:39And then I became interested in, this is really what challengers are doing, isn't it? They're not being victims to a constraint. Instead, it's the level of ambition they are attaching to what they want to do, juxtaposed, interjoined with that constraint that actually makes it that powerful stimulus to an entirely fresh way of seeing the world. And surely this is something that is important for challenges, but actually important for us as human beings more generally. So I've got twin boys, they're 24, and they're going out in the world, which has a whole level of constraint on it now that I didn't have when I started out.

36:12And how they, at some level, in business, in personal lives, as global citizens of a planet in environmental crisis, How they learn how to live with constraints, make constraints, stimulus for better is going to define their health and happiness in all those three arenas. So it felt like to me and my co-author, Mark, a genuinely important subject to tackle. Not that they are not all important, but genuinely important subject to tackle. And so there was a new level of kind of personal impetus around it for me. I think that's amazing. I've noticed actually in my career the amount of times people have come to me when I've had teams working for me and they've said, oh if only we had 10 million pounds and and you know sometimes they've been managers of multi million pounds you know campaign budgets and i've just said you've got way more resources than you than you actually need and actually if i look back at my own experience the the the you know the the work that i'm most proud of has always been the things that i've done without any money you know with the i mean on juice burst when i was doing uh when i was doing that came up with the the world's first augmented reality soft drink brand sort of thing.

37:20And that was driven out of constraint because I had no marketing budget. And I thought, well, I'm going to have to break a record. You know, I'm going to have to do something newsworthy to get there. So I partnered with Blippa, that was a startup at the time, and worked together to create an augmented reality soft drink, which, you know, the world had never seen before sort of thing. That was great because, and that gave me an edge when I went to customers and said, well, I'm going to bring you a world first. And that opened doors that, you know, hadn't been open to me before and so on. And I think I got something like 300 ,000 different people interacting with the brand a year in compared to when we started.

37:59And, you know, that would have been impossible if I put that, you know, well, I didn't have much money. But, you know, if I tried a Facebook campaign, I would have gotten nowhere. But I had to genuinely do something that hadn't been done before. and but i would never have thought of that if i because if i'd had a if i'd let's say i had a 10 million pound budget i'd have sat there as most people do and go well what did i do last year what am i going to do this year let's do something similar so we'd divide it up and that goes above the line that goes below the line and and so on and you get lazy and you tend to do the same thing you've always done whereas i think what introduce a constraint and suddenly you have to change your thinking and it propels you doesn't it it just propels you in a direction that you haven't gone him before.

38:37Well, I agree. And there's an interesting tension here, isn't there? Because on the one hand, you know, what we know from Ehrenberg Bass is there's a certain kind of power of scale and you need a certain level of resource to buy a certain level of share and all that. On the other hand, you and I would both say resource can be a curse because it limits that. And I'm very fond of that concept in economics of the resource curse that, you know, what theoretically should be an advantage, being rich in a certain area of natural resource, actually is a disadvantage. And other economies that aren't rich in those resources tend to do better than, with the exception of Norway, tend to do better than you.

39:11And I wonder, I kind of, I'm working on this thing a little bit about, so what are the great kind of curses of the modern marketing world? You know, so one might be resource, one might be efficiency. You know, because we can buy it cheaper and more efficiently, we do. That's not the same as effectiveness, kind of famously. So it'd be interesting to kind of identify and codify what those are and the biases that they create that are actually unhelpful. weirdly i think data is actually a curse so i was at can this year and um i sat in a a whole afternoon of talks aimed at cmos and um every single one was was about data and ai and and one lady gave this example of a cmo that got fired because she didn't have the data from the day before now if ever there was a role on a board right where you're supposed to be looking at the long term and how your brand's doing it's got to be the cmo and if the cmo is going to get fired because they hadn't got yesterday's data i'm sure there's more to it than that but it just was symbolic of how we've become so you know enslaved to the data and what's happening today in short term that we're missing the whole big picture and we're just not connecting the dots or doing the right thing for long term so that as a topic i think would be a great one to come back to well and interestingly so so i i'm doing this kind of project at the moment on uh reviewing 20 years of challenger brands it's been 20 years since the book came out and i'm interviewing various people about kind of what's changed and one of the things that has changed if you talk to people so i went off to interview vanilla jackson at hall and partners and they are a big kind of insight uh driven kind of um data and planning company but they have got data on 400 brands in 40 different countries, effectively, 400 clients in 40 different countries.

40:56So, I imagine, I don't know, we've got 400 ,000 bits of data points on that. And she says one of the things she noticed has changed is that the focus on data has led to a decline in creativity, which is exactly your point, really. So, there's a kind of macro picture that confirms your theory. Yeah. And we've become very, I mean, as the book describes it, very kind of left-brained and analytical and rational and we've lost actually what what drives our behavior is emotions how we feel about brands and i think that's what challenger brands do very well is they create feeling about because they they ask you to join the movement you know they create movements there that they're trying to change you know something wrong in the world and make it right again like the tony's example and that creates an emotional connection people people want then to engage with the brand in a way that if you're just given kind of 15 rational messages about why this shampoo works better is far less effective.

41:50So I think there's a general trend in marketing. I think we've got to address the efficiency over effectiveness debate that's been happening. So that's definitely one for another podcast. I think we'll come back to that one. Okay. I hope you're enjoying this episode Reloaded with Adam Morgan. Just quickly to tell you about the next episode that's coming next week with Les Burnett and Sarah Carter, two of the most popular guests I've ever had on the show. We caught up very recently to discuss all the big trends in 2023 and what's going to be happening in 2024 so to get you inspired to get you motivated about this year please do check back in next wednesday 6 a.m where this episode will go live now back to the conversation so listen i've got a little challenge for you so um imagine you are launching a new podcast let's pick an example right it's for a friend this is for a friend for a friend right so yeah i have a friend and he's launching a podcast and he's an ambitious chap and he wants to make his podcast the number one i don't know whether okay maybe the number one business podcast right so let's let's not go too wild i'm not taking on joe rogan here but let's say i want to create the world's number one business podcast right i have no budget whatsoever.

43:06Tell me how I go about doing that. So, all right, well, let's take, there's a section of a beautiful constraint that looks at how ambitious marketers without a significant marketing budget can break through, John. Very good. I knew I came to the right place. So it's called the Fertile Zero. So I'm really interested in how zero can be fertile, how a lack of, to pick up on our previous conversation, a lack of resource can be fertile for us. and so there are kind of I think four or five things to think about and I haven't played them out for you but let's have a look at them so one of them is if you don't have a lot of money you've got to be dramatic you've got to be dramatic so drama is kind of one of the great unsung currencies of our times it's not simply that we sit and watch drama in the evening but we it's kind of it's the in a world of continuous partial attention where we're constantly half looking at other stuff if you do something dramatic it commands my attention it creates an emotional reaction to your point it creates a memory it's more like i'm more likely to mention it to somebody else so you know let's take your your previous experience you're very good at setting world records so maybe there's some dramatic way your podcast is set a kind of world record um so something like that um secondly i think you know um and it's closely related to drama it's not exactly the same i think surprise i think being surprising if each podcast had a surprise of some kind a surprise perhaps about the person you're interviewing or a surprise about yourself oh you give me an idea or a series of surprises yeah okay about yourself the more podcasts you listen to about john the further you get into the yeah yeah what you never knew when he was 19 and you know disappeared for three months here's what happened yeah i don't know um third of course collaborate so collaboration so so collaboration is a big thing in fashion and music and youtubing but not so much in conventional marketing mysteriously uh and yet if you talk to an A &R director in the music world.

44:59They say, you can't break an artist without collaboration. So if you regard yourself as, I'm breaking a podcast, you would collaborate. You would get on other people's podcasts. You'd do joint podcasts with them. You'd invite them to come and do just a guest piece for you in the equivalent. Rappers have guest verses that they do for other people. So you do a lot of that stuff because you'd be trying to get to each other's audience bases and fan bases. And those might not be predictable ones. They might not be marketers. You might be deliberately trying to get to a different, you know, you do one with an innovation, with an innovation podcast or a cultural podcast or something like that, you know, do that kind of thing.

45:31So use other people's resources, adjacent abundance. I suppose the fourth, and I don't know how this would work for you, but the idea of making your secondary medium your primary medium. So what are the assets that you have, the little things that are kind of just good practice in a podcast, you know, maybe you're opening a piece of music, you know, other things that you do, your intro, your outro, how do you make them your primary medium, effectively, the thing that people pop for. The podcast is kind of interesting, but I just love the way. Well, so crudely, I came late to Game of Thrones. My wife said she would never watch anything with dragons in it.

46:12Did it have dragons in it? And I had to confess it did have dragons in it. And that was a restriction to us watching. But anyway, finally, this year, she said, okay, let's go for it. Clearly, we've got to watch it. So we watched it under the kind of tuition of one of my boys, a 25-year-old. And one of the things he pointed out was, as you probably know, is obviously the opening credits change every time. So it's a really interesting example of something that's just dull and repetitive in every other thing. That's true. It becomes a really interesting part of the narrative, actually. And you don't fast forward through them.

46:40You sit and look at them, and they become part of the richness and the detailing of the entire thing. So anyway, so make your secondary assets your primary assets. And the fifth, I think, obviously, is being interesting on the inside. So there is so much that is talked about in the world of marketing. Your whole notion, as I understand it, in terms of being uncensored, is kind of getting to the heart of it, stuff that isn't talked about. That should inherently be the most interesting topic in the world, isn't it? So making sure you prod and poke at your interviewees and indeed yourself to get to those naked revelations, I thought would be okay.

47:09Well, that's exactly it. I mean, certainly if I look at the podcasts that I listen to regularly, they're the ones that go behind the scenes, that kind of reveal the person behind, you know. I mean, I love Diary of the CEO, for example, with Stephen Bartlett. And what's fascinating about him, hugely successful at a young age. But when I listen to him, he's talking about his regrets. He's talking about his failures or he's talking about things he's learned. He's very humble when he talks. And I find that fascinating to kind of meet the person behind the bit. And I think that's what podcasting allows you to do.

47:40And certainly, you know, my desire in setting this up was that if all you read about a brand or a person is what is in the press, you're going to get a very airbrushed view or a very censored view of what they really think. And actually I think the value for us as marketeers is to really get insight into the person or into the subject matter. And that means asking some tough questions. May not be popular questions but they'll get to the truth. And so that's kind of the mission I'm on is to try and uncover the truth particularly with CMOs because CMOs there are very few interviews with CMOs and they don't really say very much because they're being controlled by their PR agency to make sure, well, don't mention this and don't mention that.

48:19Yeah, you can't be honest at the time, can you? You can't. And I remember, strangely, I was at Cannes this year being interviewed by CNBC about what I thought of Cannes and, you know, the pros and cons and, you know, all this sort of thing. And afterwards, the guy interviewing me said, wow, you're the first CMO I've met that's actually given an opinion. And he spent, like, literally three days trying to get a CMO to say what they really thought about, you know, Cambridge Analytica or whatever the thing was at the time, you know. and uh it was him saying that to me just got this whole idea started i thought oh that's interesting because i know i love to you know i'm probably a bit too honest on occasions but but i you know i just that's what i love i love kind of understanding people and and things and how it works and and there's so much nonsense out there that you know i'm on a mission to kind of you know destroy that and uh get to the heart of what matters so well and and there's such an appetite for it and a thirst for it in the world isn't there i mean i hope so yeah i i if i look at my own experience and I look at what I see succeeding at the moment, it is authenticity.

49:20And everything is so polished and managed and, you know, censored that I think we're in a moment in this world where we've got to have some honest conversations and not be afraid to speak our minds, you know. Not like being political, but I mean, just, you know. Well, that's true. And I think it's everywhere, isn't it? You know, one of the frustrations about watching football these days is, you know, they all come off the pitch and they interview this person who's just, you know, pushed three past the top class team. And how was it? Well, the most important thing is three points and the lads did well.

49:47Just for God's sake. You know that. You know, you must be on cloud nine. Just tell us how you're feeling. Yes, exactly. People are dying for that kind of thing. And I think that's partly why podcasting exists is because it's a vent for all that. Finally, I know what they really think. I agree. Unpolished, gnarly. Exactly. The gnarly John Evans podcast. Well, there you go. That was your alternative concept, I would imagine. Indeed. Yeah, we did play with a few, naked and uncovered and so on. Naked and gnarly would be also good. Yes, exactly. I was worried about following through on the naked one, though, in terms of level of overcommitment.

50:18Nobody will ever know. That's true, actually. Here I am, John Evans, completely naked again. There is no YouTube version, unfortunately, and there never will be. Actually, who knew? I might be sat here naked anyway. Well. There's a thought that no one wanted to have, isn't there? There you go. So anyway, we'll stick with the previous one. Listen, let's wrap it up with a – you gave me a thought, actually, as you're talking about a surprise. in terms of a question that I could ask everyone this, actually. So here it is. Tell me something or tell me a story that you've never, ever told anyone else.

50:54Yes. Okay. So this was early days. I had – it was the first year of the company. So this is 1999. It was quite a big project. It was – turned out it was a very political project, and the person who had hired us, who I had a lot of respect for, very smart person also had a kind of nemesis in the room as well and had operator them the view you know keep your enemies closer kind of thing and so they were you know the tiger was in the tent with us in the workshop and the first morning of the workshop this nemesis decided to play their cards quite early and really bounced me around as i was doing the upfront stuff and caught me out on a couple of stuff that i was trying to kind of just kind of bullshit my way through and there an awkward moment in it and and i kind of conceded that i perhaps had been bullshitting a little bit at that point i didn't know enough about that particular case as much as i i thought i did and and and the break came and i went into the into the gents and i found myself dry retching in the toilet i was i was so i just i've never happened to me before or since um and what i learned from that experience, John, was don't ever let yourself get blindsided by political situations.

52:06So I'm really careful about doing due diligence and stakeholder interviews now, really flush out what the tank traps and the unpleasantness might be in advance, really know my stuff, really encourage my lot to know my stuff and have a kind of strict no bullshit policy. Because it's quite easy, you know, you're working hard, you're working at pace, just take one of those kind of searing experiences to really knock you sideways. ways and actually you know i i had a product that i was very confident in the rest of the time the rest thing went really well but if you're relatively new and starting out in my line of work or indeed in my in our company that could really could really mess you up so um that was a very formative and useful experience for me that's very very good advice and i think particularly in large organizations where you just don't know the politics and and well you know that you know there's going to be politics yeah you don't know where they are exactly so you just have to try and make sure you're not blindsided.

52:56And I think that level of preparation. I know one thing I've definitely learned through my careers is how the meeting is never actually the meeting. I mean, this is something that it took. I was way late to the party on this, actually. I have to say, I'd have been far further on in my career if I'd learned this early. But you kind of go to the meetings, yeah, we're going to have an open, honest conversation. We're going to debate this topic, and we'll come to a resolution. And then you sit there and you go, ah, okay. So we're pretending to have a conversation because the boss has decided we're going to do it in this direction.

53:24And the job for me now is basically to fall in line and say, yes, why didn't I think of that? I remember watching the first season of House of Cards a few years ago. Have you seen House of Cards? I have, yes. Brilliant. It's that great moment in the first season where Kevin Spacey is having a meeting with the then president. And he turns around and he kind of breaks the fourth wall and he turns around to Cameron and he says, this is the real meeting. Ever since then, I keep thinking, am I in the meeting? I'm reasonably sure now I'm in the meeting. I think this is the real podcast. No, no, no. I'm recording it separately down the road.

53:57But there's this phrase that used to really piss me off, which is like alignment. That what you had to do was you had to go and meet everybody who was influential in a decision, pre-align them. And then when you got to the meeting, all the positions had been played out. And basically, it was this sort of like pretend meeting, you know, where the outcome, I mean, the Japanese apparently are masters at this. So it's common in Japan to fall asleep in a meeting because they all know this. And they go, well, we recognize nothing's going on, so I'm going to have a couple of hours' kip and catch up, which I respect for being so honest.

54:29But anyway, that's certainly something I wish I'd learned much earlier in my career. I've been far, far ahead. Adam, it's been an absolute blast. Thank you for sharing those stories. And I've learned a huge amount. Just give me a quick shout out for your social media channels, your business. Where can people find you if they want to get you? Oh, fantastic. Well, so the Challenger Project is the way that we share all our information, thechallengerproject.com. If you go onto that, you can get all the latest kind of research that's going on. And there's a fabulous newsletter, which you can sign up for, that costs you nothing, but it's full of richness and nutrition.

55:07My company is called Eat Big Fish. And we're essentially based in the US and the UK. though most of our business is kind of US or continental Europe at the moment. And I'm on adam at eatbigfish.com. Brilliant. Get in touch. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Cheers. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you liked that reloaded version of Uncensored CMO, bringing back a previous episode that you may not have heard before. I would love some feedback. If you liked that, please do drop me a note and let me know. It's funny how so many people miss out on some of the early episodes and there were really good content there that's well worth bringing back to the top of the list.

55:43If you'd like that and other episodes of Uncensored CMO, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. And if you'd like to follow me, you can do. I'm John Evans on LinkedIn or over at Twitter at Uncensored CMO. Thank you for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.