Samsung CMO on Tech Innovation, Flying Ostriches & Doing More with Less - Benjamin Braun

32:38Are they? That's so cool. And so as you can see, they are the Metropolitan Police crown. Yeah. So I've kept the buttons. The uniform is hung up for the time being as I no longer have time. And if you've got a good eye for what crime might be about to happen or, you know, you could judge a character like that. So you must have a sort of a radar for what people are up to. I think I can detect it. I think my wife would argue that wherever I am, there's always an issue. I'm not sure that's true, but I probably spot the issue. You spot it before anyone else. On my first ever, I got the job at Samsung.

33:17Within a week, they flew me to Korea to meet with the global CFO and some of the other leaders of the company. and on the plane it's a 14 and a half hour journey to korea on the plane there was a medical emergency and they asked for if there was any medical personnel didn't say anything i assume there's a doctor a nurse paramedic or something and then they asked again because there wasn't anyone on board and so i said well i have advanced life support training as part of being a police officer i showed them my police badge my warrant card and i could help a person who had a medical emergency on the plane, which was great.

33:56That person was in a pretty dire shape and I couldn't help. That's well credit to you. And maybe more people should do that. So what can you learn is your question. As I mentioned, there are never enough police officers on a shift. And so you have to be really smart with how you use your resources. And this is true for business as well. There's never enough budget and never enough people or time to do what you're meant to do. in the workplace. So we very often in the police use something called minimax, the minimum amount of input to drive the maximum output. I'm not talking about being lazy here.

34:36I'm talking about being reflective of the situation you're in. You need to police the entire area from the river Thames through Leicester Square and Soho and Oxford Circus and Oxford Street all the way up to St. John's Wood. It's a massive area. And you would rock up for your parading, which is what the briefing is called. And you would realize that you were only six officers. Wow, that's a big area for six, isn't it? Yeah. And there are other units operating, but for your response team, there are only six officers. And if you're double crewed, so two officers in one car, you have three cars to respond to all 999 calls.

35:17It's impossible. So what we did using the Minimax approach is we looked at intelligence. Where is the highest propensity for crime in our area? Based on intelligence and activities that we knew that were going to take place. And then we took police vehicles and we placed those at these potential hotspots. Because what we know is as soon as someone sees a police vehicle, people assume that there's police nearby and people alter their behavior, which is really interesting. Think about it when you're driving on when you're driving and suddenly there's a police car behind you. Even if you're keeping your speed limit, you still decrease your speed.

36:00And so when people see a police car, people assume there's police nearby and people alter, hopefully for the better, their behavior. So we started very often our shifts by placing police cars, police vans in potential hotspots areas. And that drove crime down. Wow. That's one minimax of doing it. If you extrapolate that and you look at what we need to do at work, very often I feel like we as marketeers or we as business leaders try to do all of these big, gorgeous projects. But sometimes we have to stop and reflect going, if I don't have enough time, if I don't have enough budget, and if I don't have enough people to do this, what should I do instead?

36:43What is the minimax in business to solve whatever you want to solve? So I can give you a couple of examples. My best ever marketing campaign to date was something I did when I worked at Audi. And I did it on LinkedIn. It was a conversation I had with Joshua Graf at LinkedIn.

37:12and by taking data that LinkedIn have and data that we had at Audi and mashing it together, we got a really interesting, a rich picture of people who are more likely to convert to Audi. We knew from data, historical data, that when you get promoted, one of the first things you do is to update your LinkedIn profile with your new title, right? Again, that's part of the ego, I think. Yeah, totally. We also know that certain titles are more likely to drive an Audi. We also know that getting a promotion means that you probably reward yourself with something. We also could, from the data, understand where people live and their proximity to an Audi dealership.

37:52And based on that data, we could orchestrate a data-driven campaign that said, congratulations, John, on your promotion. And here at Audi, we'd like to give you a test drive for a whole week of this new car and we'll deliver it to your drive and you can have it for a week and we'll pick it up. And if you want to keep it, keep it. If not, no questions asked, just congratulations on your promotion. That converted more people to become Audi drivers than any other campaign that I did when I was there, including the ones that I won gold lines for in Cannes. They were big, spectacular, expensive productions, but this LinkedIn data mashup was the mini max of it.

38:36I love it, yeah. Yeah. And what I love about that is most people don't have big, above the line budgets every single day to spend. We hardly ever have. Exactly. Very few. I mean, you're in a rare position of someone who might occasionally be able to do something on that scale. And there are so many times where I think we are rushed to come up with something big and visually exciting and expensive produced and time consuming and complex. when the mini max is a small change. I worked at American Express and one of my jobs was to drive people to paperless statementing. And it's really hard to get someone to give up their paper statements.

39:16And so I found that we send out our American Express cards with a sticker on that says phone this number to activate your card. And then we try to upsell, cross you, cross sell you travel insurance, etc. and I found that the person who printed these little stickers that go onto the card is this guy in Brighton. And I went to see him and I said, can I make a change to this sticker? I thought this is going to be very complicated. Turns out it was just printed from a standalone laptop to a thermal printer just there. Just that. Very easy to change. So I changed it to activate your card, go to americanexpress.com slash activate.

39:55And I built this journey online where you activated your card And I defaulted people to paperless statementing, explaining to them, you will have a library online for tax purposes, etc., with everything you need, accessible all the time. For privacy, you won't lose any of these things. Loads of really good reasons to have paperless statementing. And that little change on that sticker drove the majority of people then to opt for paperless statement because people could still opt out for papers. That's brilliant, isn't it? Minimax. And sometimes it's like looking at what exists in your supply chain that you're not using.

40:34I was working on quite a small drinks brand called Firefly. It was like a kind of posh fruit drink. and the design had these black and white photos on and it kind of showed people kind of having fun, jumping into the sea or celebrating a climb to the top of the mountain. We just had this promotion where people would just send us their photo, upload their photos to websites. And because we'd invested in kind of digital printing on the production line, we could print people's personal photos onto the bottle as it went down the production line. It was amazing. And we just thought about how do we, because we had almost no marketing budgets.

41:10So our marketing budget was basically allowing people to print their own labels, personalised. Of course, people did it for weddings and birthdays and celebrations. And of course, the next thing they do, they share it online, don't they? They then post their photos online and that became our marketing. There's a good experiment that we should all try for 2025 is we sit down with our teams, we look at what the business challenges are that we need to solve with the help of marketing. and we tell everyone there is no budget constraints. We just need to solve this, throw everything at it, the entire kitchen sink if you want.

41:44And people come up with these amazing things. And once you've found the idea that you think is really compelling, you say that's a brilliant idea. Now we're going to have to do that with zero budget. And sometimes there is a way of doing it or at least a low budget. Yeah, yeah. And often I think sometimes a solution for that I found in my career is partnering with other people. So you may not have the media, but what if you partner with someone who does have that? I mean, at Samsung, you would be partnering with EE or Vodafone or Sky, for example. So it's often partnering as a way to do that. Let's pivot from Mini Maxi to Maxi Maxi, because probably the biggest thing you could do on a brand would be, say, sponsoring the Olympics, wouldn't it?

42:24You know, that'd be something really big. I don't know you've been a sponsor. How long have you been a sponsor of the Olympics for? Almost 40 years. Now, that's a lot of money. I presume you can't say how much money gets spent on it, But how would you value something like the Olympics, which is the greatest stage on earth you could pick to be on? I think we have to go back to why we did it. So on one of my initial trips to Korea, as I was trying to understand Samsung, I asked why are we sponsors of the Olympics? I probably asked when I saw the number. Why are we doing this? We can do a lot of other things with this money.

42:58And someone explained to me that the Samsung chairman, a family member, had attended the Olympics when it was in Seoul, Korea. And he had observed that how young people from across nations, nations that necessarily don't appreciate each other very much, still get together and compete and friendships are born. And he believed that's a beautiful thing. And he said that a company of our size and the wealth that I have as a person should be put to societal good. And from there, we evolved our relationship from just being a local sponsor to being a global partner to help the Olympic Committee with a lot of, I mean, a lot of this is run on voluntary basis and there's a lot of help needed.

43:50And so Samsung can provide a lot of that help. We also want to help the athletes. And so for the Paris Olympics, we gave 17 ,000 of the Paralympians and the Olympians this foldable device. It was the first kind of device with AI built into it, which allowed people to navigate Paris and speak and understand French with their device. Oh, that's helpful. Which is really helpful. we preloaded it with money so people could just tap the the parisian metro to travel if people wanted a drink you know you you your legacy is in the drink industry you just tap a vending machine and you could get your your cold drink out on a very hot parisian day i also like that you can just put it up like this and it's kind of a built-in tripod and the athletes can film themselves and then watch back in ultra slow motion and understand how they can improve whatever technique they need improving.

44:52And for anyone listening as well who can't see this, it's also a thing of beauty, isn't it? It's gold appropriately. I mean, as a father of three kids, I wish everyone could be a winner. At home, everyone's a winner. But when it comes to the Olympics, it can only be one winner. But everyone who got one of these 17 ,000 limited edition phones, it's a golden phone. So the minimax here is interesting because the cost of traveling on the metro or buying wine during the Olympic period went up a lot, right? Hotel rooms became ludicrously expensive. So does media during the Olympic period. So what could we do without spending a lot of media money still get great coverage?

45:37And so by gifting these 17 ,000 devices to athletes and asking them to unbox them in their social media channels, that gave us access to communities that we would otherwise never be in. disregard the money, we would simply not be in all of these athletes' Instas and TikToks, etc. And we did one more thing. When people stood on the podiums, normally those victory photos are almost like corporate photos. People stood there. They're very serious. Very serious. And so we created something called the Samsung Victory Selfie. So people handed the phone out as the athletes were on the podium. and we asked them to take a victory selfie.

46:26I think maybe you and I can take a victory selfie. Oh, yeah, let's do a victory selfie. Here's a victory selfie. We do. And we just have to warn the people in the background. Here we go. George and team, you're on our victory selfie. You're in the selfie now. And that shot, that shot there, was on the front page of so many newspapers and in digital and everywhere, plus those victory selfies that were published. So it was a really nice mini-max. the way we hacked the Olympic marketing by giving our products, asking athletes to unbox them and then creating the Samsung victory selfie that got us coverage that we would not be able to buy.

47:07Yeah, I love that. And also we tend to assume that Olympic athletes are these big celebrities with lots of wealth, but actually unless you're, I don't know, Usain Bolt or Simone Biles, most athletes are kind of coming from lots of small countries where they're not particularly well known and uh you know they're not necessarily that wealthy are they so to provide something of value like you say to buy a drink and get around and navigate a foreign country with the language barriers that's something incredibly useful i saw i saw so many beautiful unboxing videos where as you said people from nations that don't have a lot of disposable income i think athletes are probably some of the last celebrities that are grateful.

47:48Yeah. Because most of them don't have sponsorship deals. And they've poured their entire life into becoming the best at whatever sports they've chosen. And I love these. I mean, they're so emotional, the videos, when they got the box and they look into, they're filming saying, I hope it's a mobile phone. And they would have competed four years ago and they got a phone that they're filming on right now. and then suddenly they unbox and it's a new AI foldable device in gold. And they're like, so happy. That was a magical moment. If you're then the CFO or you're the CEO of the company and you go, right, 17 ,000 phones given away, okay, at cost for us, was it worth it?

48:38Because what we could see was we saw in some of our countries a 23 % increase in mobile phone sales during that Olympic period? So the answer is yes, there is a way to drive positive incremental revenue out of these very expensive sports sponsorships. But you have to find a differentiated approach, otherwise it doesn't work. That's good. It's a bit like we have this debate every year when Super Bowl happens in America. It's like, you know, seven million pounds for a 30 seconds, a million dollars rather, for a 30 seconds lot. Is it worth it? And the answer is it's worth it if you activate it in the right way.

49:16You know, so you can buy your way into the platform, but it's what you do with it that matters the most. I thought I'd move on to your advertising if I can. And I went into System 1 database and we've got 563 Samsung ads. So in the spirit of putting you on the spot, I thought I'd get you to guess. Can you guess what any of the top three campaigns that you've done might be? I would hope that one of the top three is the ostrich campaign, which literally was an ostrich running. Is it up there? Describe that, because this is genuinely one of my all-time favourite ads. It's just genius. But describe it for anyone who might not have come across it.

49:56So, as you know, ostriches can't fly. So we're following this ostrich running as fast as it can down an open safari. and suddenly you realize it's wearing Samsung goggles. And inside the goggles, it can see clouds and sky as if it was flying. And we've opened up a new world for this ostrich. It's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. And that's number two, actually. So well done. Almost got it. So that's the second highest scoring. And in fact, it was the best scoring mobile technology ad on the database. uh we've been we've been testing for six seven years now this year it was overtaken by the galaxy z flip 4 launch with the cats and dogs in which again going back to well going back to using uh using animals but um uh which has got an almost maximum 5.8 star 1.77 on spike and 95 fluency so um yeah bring us back so when we so when we say never work with animals or kids it's quite the opposite yeah so one of my that's great to hear one of my favorite audi ads we made was having kids in the back of the car but no parents up front and a hidden camera with um with a voice saying if you think about the car of the future what do you think it looks like and the kids just explaining it and they will talk about driverless cars etc it's very very cute i think the flip and the fold are very interesting products.

51:30I especially like that it's a perfect handbag size or pocket size phones. You and I and everyone who are listening to this, over the last 10 years, 20 years, our entire personal life and our entire professional life is now done through a mobile phone. And if we ask, as we do in Samsung all the time, what do you want? People keep on saying bigger screens because you need to do more and more on the phones. But our pockets, my jeans pocket hasn't become any bigger. My waistline hasn't expanded over the last 10 years. My pockets haven't and so we found a way to fold glass and so it's a very small form when it's folded and slightly bigger than a normal phone when you open it up in my other pocket is my other samsung phone and when you open this one up so it's a it's a it's a normal phone when i have it like this But when you open it up, it's kind of tablet size here.

52:41That's very impressive. And you can do everything here. You can split the screen. You can do two things at the same time. If you want to watch this on YouTube or on TikTok, it looks amazing because it's big screen, big size here. And it becomes a far more usable tool than when the screen restricts you and what you need to do. Well, you'd be pleased to know that number three on our database was the Galaxy Z Fold 4 launch with Leonardo da Vinci in, because you were demonstrating in quite a clever way using someone kind of well-known and that sort of thing and to show them how to use a product. So by looking at the data points that you have in your system, it would be really interesting to design what the next 2025 Samsung campaign should look like.

53:29It would. It would. well based based on this it would be so what's interesting about the leonardo da vinci one is you've set it in the past so you've got a surprising but relatable kind of story going on you've got some humor uh you've got some really good acting and then with the other two you well again it's it's humor and entertainment isn't it so the ostrich by the way everyone should go and google that because it's very very clever because you've got very you know the ostrich perspective in there but again it's surprising isn't it so you don't realize it's the ostrich until i think When you run it through your system, I like the graph.

54:00Yeah. And the red bit on top is very scary because people are disliking it. Exactly that, yeah. But then you get the positive surprise element that usually kicks in towards the end when there's a bit of a reveal or something. That's it, yeah. I'm also interested in the way we construct ads in the future, if it's going to change. Almost like this podcast, there's going to be a short edit that pulls out the highlights. Let's hope there are some highlights. I'll pull out the highlights before the actual podcast, almost like a mini trailer for the podcast itself. And I've seen elements of marketing campaigns where rather than doing the reveal in the end that we have been taught to do for many, many years, because of people's attention span and people will swipe you through before you even get to that reveal moment, you actually have to lead with the reveal and then build up towards it in the following seconds i actually did this on a brand of work at luke said uh we had this campaign it was it was called the prequel which is basically started with what happened at the end so we had david and goliath it started with the fight and then it revealed then went on to reveal how he got in the fight in the first place and what went behind the scenes kind of thing very same thing you start with the drama get people in and then you kind of tell the story which is a different way of constructing the discourse of an ad so maybe we need to reverse it yeah well and to be fair you're right actually because we look you were talking about the face we call it the face trace which is people's emotional response as they're watching there's a traditional face trace that starts low builds up and ends on a peak if you can start with a peak and then get them back to that peak at the end it's that that would uh yeah that would have very well maybe we could work on that in 2025 there we go we'll try and create some dramas out of the phones to uh to test that theory i wanted to ask you about being a CMO because you know you run a European team you've got so many categories you operate in you know washing machines vacuums through to phones and TVs and so on and you're also working the concept of a big global company what's the secret to being effective in a large organization like that as a CMO?

56:05There are 44 countries in Europe we speak 24 official languages you need to recognize that there are big cultural differences between countries. Having one approach won't work, but you still need to create a theme that can be localized. But when I'm critical about being a CMO and our profession, I very often land on the point that it's time for us to mature as CMOs. If you consider yourself being a part of the boardroom, and you are because you have that C in your title, you need to be as scientific, as numerical as the accountants around the table in order for you to gain respect in the boardroom.

57:00At the end of the day, it's your responsibility to create success with what you've got. And that success in the boardroom is very often down to two KPIs, incremental revenue and profitability. That you've won a can-line or you got two percentage points higher awareness and two percentage points more consideration, etc. The people in the boardroom will think that's your problem. What we want to see you do is bring incremental sales revenue and improved profitability. Your job as a CMO is to create a positive point of differentiation between your brand and your products versus the competitors. So when it comes to a choice, people choose you.

57:58and they shouldn't choose your brand or your products because of a cheaper price because then you're going down a slippery slope of eroding profit margins. It needs to be something else. It needs to be the value of the brand, the purpose of the brand, what we stand for, the way we communicate, the way we make you feel, the proposition of the products, the technical solutions, whatever it is that you can create into a message and communicate with consumers in channels that are appropriate at times that are appropriate. But that's your job. When you get into the boardroom, they want to know, John, for the million bucks we gave you, how many incremental microphones did you sell?

58:45Yeah. And at what profit? Yeah. I think people don't realize quite how hard the CMO's role is in that situation. I did a bit of research last year looking at what skills are required on a board. Number one was financial acumen. The last was marketing experience. And I think what we need to realize as marketers is that to have credibility in the boardroom, we have to talk the language of the boardroom and measure what matters to them and show the value that we're bringing. And the way you measure it and the way you express it needs to be done in a financial way. If you don't use econometrics, I urge you now to get going on econometrics because you need to be able to have these scientific data-based conversation with the CFO and the CEO.

59:30Because if you're having conversations based on what you feel and what they feel, they will start meddling in your affairs and it won't be helpful. You won't be able to articulate that if you put in another half a million into the marketing mix, it will drive X sales. But using econometrics will allow you to have those data conversations. and that's why it's so important that we as marketeers mature yeah it is a fantastic job but sometimes we're not particularly well educated when it comes to expressing what we can bring to the table we do it but we're not very good at bringing the proof points in in a way that people appreciate it and believe it and that's ironic because we're very good at understanding the customer uh you know our end customer and marketing to them we're not as good at marketing ourselves in terms of probably the one question that i think i get asked more than any other question by cmos or people that are you know in that kind of role is how do you make the case for building a brand in the long term because everyone i think what i've noticed in the last few years is that we're getting more and more short term and it's more and more product orientated got to shift this number of boxes how do you go about balancing that sort of long-term ambition to build the Samsung brand versus the immediate need to shift more flip phones this quarter?

1:00:49So there are a couple of things I think you should do with your CFOs and CEOs and other C-level members. You should do mystery shopping with them. You should physically walk into various different stores and see what happens when you're trying to buy products in your category. And then you should do the same thing sitting on your boss's phone or tablet and see how they browse the category and how they buy, etc. And then they should also observe people who are real customers doing it. This is pretty straightforward research. It's easy to do yourself. You don't have to pay a lot of money or an agency to do it.

1:01:28But it will open your eyes and open other C-level members' eyes into the value of a brand. If you stand on Oxford Street at John Lewis on the third floor and you're about to buy a TV and all the TVs look the same. They all show Disney Plus and Netflix and BBC iPlayer. They're all more or less priced the same. How do I convince you to buy the Samsung TV? How do we get people instinctively to choose Samsung ahead of one of our competitors. And we've done that for the last 18 years. I don't think I want to give away some of those secrets, but there are tricks on doing that. And it comes down to deep psychological beliefs that people have when it comes to looking at a brand and the perceived value of that brand and the promise that that brand gives you.

1:02:27It's a good trick you use there, actually, which is putting your colleagues, CFO, CEO, et cetera, et cetera, in the shoes of the customer. Because it's funny, actually, because in business, we're so focused on the business metrics that when you ask the question, why did you buy that mobile phone? Why did you buy that TV? Why did you buy that new suit? That often reveals all the kind of things that we're trying to do as marketers to influence. So when I got the job at Audi, which is a fantastic job, very excited, the first thing that i got on the first day of arriving in the office was the a key to a brand new audi q5 suv fully specced amazing super expensive looked wow glitz and that was my car from the company it actually took me longer to get my laptop tablet and phone to get a car and I had to fill out forms and requests, etc.

1:03:24It was quite cumbersome. Wow. Then it came to me ordering my next car. There was a very simplistic Excel spreadsheet where I just put down what car I wanted and they ordered it from the factory and that was my next car. In one of my very first presentations to the leadership there, I said, this stops now. Because what happens is that you do not go to a dealership where you don't go to the Audi website like real consumers do to do the research. So from now on, if you want a company car, you order it online or you go to a dealership. And that's part of your research process. Because what will happen is you will find loads of things that you think are, that's wrong.

1:04:08That's not good enough. We need to change this. A consumer shouldn't experience this. And so we drive the change that was needed. Another thing that I found when I joined Audi was that the official Audi app was blocked on our phones and asked for it to be unblocked because of security. They blocked all non-native apps, which was crazy. That meant that no one used our own app, which meant it wasn't a particularly good app because no one was really feeding back on the app. And so by enabling it and pushing it down as a default app, suddenly we got a lot of people having a lot to say about our own app that drove change, including our website, etc.

1:04:52I think something really interesting happened as COVID hit us because the marketing teams were marketeers. But suddenly during COVID, many marketing teams also owned the brand website. and overnight the brand website went from being a brand brochureware website to being the number one shopping window of the brand including samsung we had to shut all of our stores most people had shut all of their stores and the only way you could still buy a samsung product was through samsung.com and suddenly the marketing community had to grow up overnight and realize it's not just about glitzy photos and beautifully copywriting and actually needs to convert as well.

1:05:40What we do needs to convert to profitable sales or we go out of business. That's so true. Probably the number one tip in my career has always been the closer I am to the customer, the better a marketer I am. And as soon as I see that distance emerging and I start to look into the company and think about the internal processes and decision making, that's when I lose my ability to become a marketer. So any reason you can have to embed being close to your customer day to day, you know, every single day. When I worked at British Gas and I worked at Compare the Market, we did call listening. We read social media posts from consumers.

1:06:21We read people's emails to us, et cetera, as a leadership team to understand what was going on. But I think my managing director at British Gas took it to the next level. He would sit like this in the boardroom and every time we had a meeting, he would bring two people from our contact centres in Cardiff and Leeds and sit next to him. And as all of us presented our various different ideas, he would just lean towards the real call reps and go, what do you think about that idea? And they would just go, rubbish, we'll never work in the real life. And he would just shut it down immediately. That's genius.

1:06:58I thought that was so smart. Bring the people in who are the closest to consumers to give you real feedback to your presentation. There's an argument, actually. I did have this for a time when I was at LucasAdeRibina. But there's an argument to have the customer care team report into marketing. Because actually, that is a hotline to anything that's going wrong. Advance warning if things are going wrong. A hotline into what's good or bad. And, you know, the complaint, as they say, one complaint represents 100 people on average, doesn't it? So it's a brilliant test. Yeah. I wanted to end, if I can.

1:07:28I know you've been quite open and honest and vocal about your dyslexia and you shared a lot of that online. So I think sometimes hidden, you know, disabilities, as we sort of call them, like there are more prevalent than maybe we realise. So it's nice when it's good when someone is so open about these things. What have you been able to share about your struggle with it? And what advice have you got for people that might be listening and watching that have also faced some of those challenges? So I went to school in Sweden. My dyslexia impacted my Swedish reading and writing. So I was sent off to, I'm translating directly from Swedish here, to retard Swedish.

1:08:07And just imagine as a seven, eight, nine year old kid, you're told that you have to go to retard class. That could potentially set you up for failure in life because it will knock your confidence. and the reason I decided to start talking about dyslexia was that I was speaking to a couple of people in my PR team about what my narrative should be about and I told them I have dyslexia and there was a woman in the team who said oh I've got dyslexia too I didn't know you have dyslexia you should talk about it so I thought that's interesting because a lot of people probably shy away from that conversation because it has a stigma associated with it.

1:08:55We know from a lot of research that people who have dyslexia have a different way of thinking, which is less linear, which means that we get to answers in a different way, which means that we might have more creative solutions. We find patterns and paths that are less obvious. And so I'm afraid that people, so the reason I started talking about it is I'm afraid that there are going to be kids in school who are diagnosed with dyslexia, who think that they will never, ever be able to achieve. And if I speak about it, and I'm proud about my dyslexia, I hope it gives them confidence to also achieve.

1:09:42Having dyslexia shouldn't be a hindrance. You just need to understand how to harness that power to your advantage. And I know a lot of parents who have kids who have dyslexia who've contacted me now trying to understand how that's impacted my career. And it's only impacted in a positive way because I've kind of owned it and I make it mine and I use it to my advantage. And so the reason I keep on talking about dyslexia is that I want people to know that it is not a career limiting neurodiversity. It's quite the opposite. Use it to your advantage and you will unlock things that other people will not be able to have.

1:10:28Yeah, that's a lovely way to look at it as well, isn't it? So not just how you cope with it, but how do you turn it into an advantage as well? And I don't think I know enough about ADHD or ADD. It's another neurodiverse area, a spectrum that's interesting. And I know there's a lot of people who are worried about kids having ADHD as well. But we also know that many of the leaders of businesses, many of the greatest innovators in the world have dyslexia and have ADHD. so somehow there is a magic recipe in this neurodiverse community that allow people to be different it's their personality it's their character and it their brains are wired or our brains are wired differently and so how do you harness that if you are a team leader and you have someone with newer diversity in your team how do you work with that person to maximize the value you can get out of them if you are a parent if you're a kid how do you recognize it and use it to your advantage that's a wonderful question i love that benjamin thank you for being open about that because i think i think a lot of people will value hearing you talk about it particularly how it's you know not held you back and you know made you successful thank you mate it's uh been great so i could talk for a long time with you by the way because i'm like the amount of tech that we could spend probably a whole day kind of getting into but thank you for sharing your experience and what you've done in your career and I know a lot of people are going to value it.

1:12:07It's been great to be in your studio and I look forward to speaking to you again. Yeah look forward to it thank you. 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 under my own name john evans thanks for listening and watching i'll see you next time