The flamingo effect: how Very made their retail brand sparkle - Jessica Myers Very CMO

0:27Welcome back everybody, it's the Uncensored CMO. bit more about the campaign, her background in financial services, and how she made the big jump from there to the competitive world of retail. There is so much in this. You're going to love it. Here it is. Welcome to the show, Jess. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here. It's great to have you. And it was great because we met, didn't we, last summer at Madfest? We did. And we did the panel about retail and how tough it is, but also how exciting it is to work in. We're going to talk about Vary, of course, and your new campaign and what you're doing and the results you've had.

0:56and can't wait to get into that. But take us back to the beginning and your career. And how did you get here, say? Because you've had a journey through banking, particularly, having you finance through challenger brands and now retail. But yeah, give us a sense of your journey you've been on. So really early on, I always knew I wanted to get into marketing. I think someone had said to me, oh, you're an extrovert and bubbly. You'll be great in marketing. What a silly comment to make. But it set me down on a path of kind of going down to marketing. I did a degree in business and marketing management.

1:25It's one of those degrees where you do two years at university, then you go out and work in industry for a year and you come back for your final year. And when I selected my internship, I was like, oh, it needs to pay well and be in London and be a brand that I recognised. I spent a year at American Express, which was absolutely fantastic. I finished my degree at university and then turned down my graduate programme at American Express, much to my parents' absolute horror because I decided to move to Australia. So I flew over to Sydney and got a job working for a large retail bank over in Sydney called the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

2:01And my three-month contract there turned into nine extraordinary years. I sort of recreated the graduate program, did a variety of roles, but I landed in brand my final five years, which is where I guess the technical practitioner experience of understanding brand, but brand being every single customer touch point of your business and then working in corporate strategy was a really key moment. I then came back to the UK because I'd had my first child and I wanted to be closer to my family and started working for the NatWest group. We were the RBS group back then. I was head of brand. So I looked after a portfolio of about 10 to 12 different brands across strategy, identity, all of the campaign planning.

2:43And I'd been about five years there and you start to get to that moment thinking, I'm not sure what my next role is. I'm really enjoying it but I think I need to move on. I'm a real believer of throwing things out to the universe. So I did that and suddenly I get a call from Metro Bank. Wow. And is this where Metro Bank had just launched? Because Metro Bank's fairly new in the UK, isn't it? They are. So at the time they're about 10 years old and they gave me a call and said, look, we are 10 years young. We don't have a marketing team. The brand has been through a bit of a turbulent time and we're looking for somebody to join as our first ever brand and marketing director to set up our first marketing team and to be a brand expert and help us to navigate some of the reputational turbulence and I thought oh that's a bit of brave decision isn't it leading leaving from a big organization about 90 ,000 people and joining one of 4 ,000 people but felt like the right thing to do you know gut instinct is quite a pull so I took the jump and move to Metro.

3:41And that was amazing. I spent three years at Metro Bank. But after four months of being there, you know, I joined in November 2019. So four months later, we tick into the COVID time. The guy who had hired me had moved on. I get a call from the CEO. I thought, oh my goodness, I'm literally about to lose my job. We're heading into this pandemic. What's the uncertainty? And he said, no, actually, your boss has just left. I'm promoting you to the executive committee you're now going to report into me the board have just signed it off you've got any questions and I thought well loads but it's probably not time the right time to ask them so my time there was absolutely incredible I think the most important thing I learned was rather than being a kind of a cog in a wheel of a machine of a really large organization I got to work on the executive committee steering a brand and a bank and you know a community of colleagues through the pandemic and I got to understand exactly how a bank operates and exactly how a bank makes money and the skills I learned there thinking about operating an enterprise the commercial rigor was extraordinary having spent about three years at Metro I was um put on the succession plan for the CEO so in time yeah so Jess would like to get you ready for this in time we'd like you to step out of your job and maybe run the branch network or take a more of a commercial role and I thought that's the most flattering thing.

5:05I can't believe anyone would think I'd be ready for that. And then I had a moment thinking, I don't think I want to be the CEO of a bank. But the other serendipitous moment was that I was on the Marketing Academy Fellowship Program. And at that point, you write something called a stand where you look back and say, I'm so proud of myself over the last five years because I have done this. And I wrote out exactly what it is I was looking for in my next career move. And within a couple of weeks, I had a call from Headhunter to say, Jess, have you heard of Very? That's amazing. They'd like to have a conversation with you.

5:36It's funny how these things happen. I hear so many stories like that. And I had a similar thing. I worked at Britwick for 12 or 13 years, and we had a residential away three or four days. And it's funny how little things stick in your mind. I remember for me, they said, what are you absolutely passionate about? What do you bring? And then what does the company need? So I think you had to do this kind of overlap of what's the overlap between you as a person, what you're passionate about, what you bring and what the company's trying to do. And sometimes those little moments of reflection that you have when you take time out can be so powerful, can't it, as you look back and see those decision points in your career?

6:11Well, anyone who's gone through the Marketing Academy scholarship or fellowship, it's the most extraordinary privilege. How did you get into it, by the way? Because I'm aware of it. Is it something you can apply for? Do you get nominated? You have to apply for it. And it's an incredibly vigorous process. I mean, Sherilyn has set up the most extraordinary programme for both the scholars and the fellows and so you apply for the fellowship you know you need to go through an application process you get vetted and then you go through an interview process and if you're one of the select I think 20 or so who get onto it you have a life-changing experience you know and the cohort that you become you're part of become a very close-knit community of yours so it was one of the most extraordinary experiences and I guarantee you I wouldn't be in my role now had I not gone through that fellowship program, because not only did it help me think about what it was I really wanted to do, the training you get from McKinsey and the faculty at the fellowship sets you up for success.

7:05It's all about going from CMO to CEO and making sure you have the right qualities in place. So yeah, yeah, incredible. That sounds incredible. The other thing that resonated about what you said as well was going from a big organization to, I guess, a challenger brand and the learning you get in a much smaller, well, relatively smaller, I suppose, you know, Metro is still big. And again, I remember the similar thing going from a big kind of drinks business to not a startup, but a smaller scale up. And the experience you get so quickly when you get involved in everything, don't you? It's not just like my small bit of the marketing world.

7:37You get involved in the whole running of the business. And so I think often marketers are chasing the logo, the size of budget, the size of team, when actually sometimes it's better to chase the experience and what you're going to get and what you're going to learn. And I found you learn much quicker, much more in sometimes smaller organisations than you do in big ones. But somehow it feels like you can feel like you're sort of trading down sometimes, doesn't it? If you're just thinking about the size of business and how big your budget is. Well, I think that if you're thinking that it's a bit of a narrow minded thought, you know, because actually what we should be thinking about is how do I get the skills and experience I need to really deepen my expertise to help me move on and to feel fulfilled and moving forward.

8:17and moving from a large organization to a small one is a brilliant way of doing that because as you said you get your hands across everything that you do because a small organization really locks together you learn things that you would not have learned in a larger organization like an entrepreneurial mindset a growth mindset a beautiful constraint when you don't have much how to hustle your way how to fly under the radar how to nudge things forward i remember starting my first week i said right i've been trained to be a brand practitioner in a large organisation, I have my template and I know what I'm doing.

8:48Right. Can you direct me towards the customer insight team? They're like, it's you. We don't have one. I was like, cool. So how am I going to get some insight? Well, I'm going to go and speak to the branch managers and tell me about your customer. I'm going to go to the call centre. I'm going to listen to the customer. So you find entrepreneurial ways to get really close to what you need. You know, you use your experience, you ask around, you build amazing networks and gut feel will get you a really long way. There's a really good aspect, actually, in smaller businesses. You're almost, by definition, closer to your customer because you haven't got those layers of departments in the way.

9:22And you have to be close to your customer because you don't have big research budgets or big insight teams, do you? And it means you know, right? Because you just know because you're day-to-day much closer to the action. And it also means that you're much better at completely understanding the whole organisation and how that operates as well. So it's that enterprise mindset. I don't think about marketing. I think about moving the business forward. and if I wrote a question about the commercials or the operations I could get up from my desk walk across the floor go and find the person speak to them and go show me how that works and for me personally that's how I learn I don't want to read it I want you to show me and once you've shown me I'll learn um so yeah working at Metro Bank was an amazing place to learn and grow so yeah I remember my first jump when I went um sort of big big big organization you know well funded etc to to a small private equity backed little drinks company and again I was the marketing director, quote unquote.

10:12But then I realised actually, I turned up and I wrote a big long list of things I was going to do. And by 10 o 'clock I'd done it. And I realised I didn't have meetings. And I said, oh, what's the marketing budget? And I'm like, there isn't one. I'm like, oh, this is interesting. And then like you say, the topics in the board meeting we'd talk about would be how we're going to sell the business when we come to sell it, how we're going to raise money to what the pay rise will be next year, how we're going to deal with an industrial dispute. And I suddenly went, okay, so I'm now running a business now.

10:41The marketing bit is almost the 10 % that I do on the side, but actually it's about running the business. I think that's a really important point here around what are the qualities of modern day marketer, because it's not about comms. The modern day marketer deeply understands commercials, customers, thinks about the enterprise and understands how you marry those two things together to accelerate progress. and if you don't understand how the business operates and makes money and you don't understand your customer what you really are doing is the coloring in bit that's so true i remember it was the company school purity when i was there um any any product innovation any campaign you know however small everything had to link to something else either had to make the margin bet it had to open up a new channel it had to convince a customer to stop the standard range everything had to be leverageable for other purposes or it had to kind of keep the factory open for longer so we could become more efficient.

11:38You know, you suddenly think in a way holistically about a business rather than, oh, this is my budget. I've just got to, you know, address this bit of the mix. So it just makes you so rounded, doesn't it? That's amazing. Now, how did you go? So you talked about the serendipitous moment from the academy, getting the idea and then the call to vary. How did that move compare then? So you've got all your career in finance and presumably, well-funded businesses. Retail's brutal from what I see, what you read about. How does it compare? Retail's amazing. And I think you're a retailer or you're not a retailer.

12:12You've got to love it. You've especially got to love the 12 weeks leading into Christmas that we call the golden quarter. So I, although I have to say, I deeply underestimated the size of the shift from going from banking into retail. I was like, I'm a marketer. I don't understand how to do marketing it's great I'm just gonna move into retail and you know of course gonna learn different products and then off I go I was wrong because I joined a new company with a new culture in a new much bigger job in a completely new industry and I joined on the first day of the golden quarter where the business is electric and I walked in and I was like what are you all doing this is really busy what's happening now i i know it now you know we are so very is a retailer yes but we are a pure play digital retailer we are an online department store so we offer a number of categories so fashion electricals home toys gifts beauty we offer over 2 000 brands plus our own brand we have our own brand range and as well as offering all of that to our four and a half million customers we also have integrated ways to pay so yes very wanted my financial services background they wanted my brand experience and my team leadership experience and I was after to retail so in banking you know of course I've known it for my entire career but it's generally fairly consistent unless you've got a few spikes throughout the season and a good old banking crisis obviously kind of gets you a bit hot under the collar but retail especially during the key trading periods you're chasing a number every single day so the pace of change and the sheer volume of customers going through is something i hadn't experienced before and being a digital retailer you know marketing is our shop front now we don't have a store so actually the marketing team are not about they're all about driving customer volume customer growth profitable customer growth repeat customer business so i was suddenly sat in this big commercial engine and learning a phenomenal amount.

14:13So it definitely felt like I was kicked into the deep end, but I learned so much. And in the busiest period of the year. Very busy period. And actually, I left out there that three weeks before I joined, a new CEO had joined the business. So he came in and quite quickly set about on a really big growth plan for the organization, pulled together a strategic task force, which, as you would expect, is the CMO I was on. and I remember about four to five weeks into the new job, McKinsey had come in, we were writing these growth plans. I remember sitting at my computer thinking, I don't know, I don't know what to do.

14:52I feel completely out of my depth. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to manage this and of course I had a word with myself and got on with it, pitched for budget, wrote the plan and that's the start of that business plan and the avenues for growth is what set us on this amazing journey need to get the brand strategy work in place for the work we've just launched which I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute. That's a really interesting insight I mean you touched on like where do I start that that is a feeling you get isn't it when you change a sector or go from a big to a small company where suddenly you're not as familiar with how things get done or what's assumed and everyone else seems to be working in a way they're all very familiar with and it's new to you.

15:29How do you personally cope with that sort of shock of a new business new culture new circumstances is you're trying to get clarity on what to do how do you sort of cope with that one of the things i did really early on and actually i nicked this from the first 90 days book which was really helpful i got across the organization as fast as i possibly could in meeting people to give me real depth and breadth so i probably met about let's say 50 people um across internally and also kind of our key partners and i went and asked everyone the same five questions the first one which is you know what are our biggest challenges and how do we overcome them the second being our what are our greatest opportunities and how do we achieve them third question being what's precious i shouldn't break we shouldn't break fourth one being um how do our teams work together and how can we make that better and the fifth one being if you and me what would you do so very quickly i got to understand the business and crystallize that really quickly in terms of what the opportunities were i already knew roughly the things i needed to get on to and people then start talking around the business and what's important and at one point they'd say um something something the brand I'm like oh that's a good question now when you mentioned the brand can you describe for me our brands who are we and what do we stand for in which case I'd either get and this is not unique to vary I'd either get 30 seconds of silence when they go I'm not sure how to answer that question or I got a completely different answer from every single person so I was like brilliant so being really clear on the brand positioning and the role that plays in driving the business forward and connecting with our customers and our colleagues, first big challenge.

17:05Next thing they'd say is they talk about the customer. I say, oh, that's really interesting. Tell me about our customer. And they would say, well, they like retail and financial services. And it's like, anything else? Great. So we really need to deeply understand. So unearthing a few things through those five questions I found really powerful, which helped give me a bit of a test bed going into kind of this process. You've also got to sort of back yourself a bit in terms of understanding, you know, yes, I understand commerce. Yes, I understand marketing. Yes, I understand customers. So how do I start to bring some of that together?

17:37And if in doubt, just start writing something and then the rest of it will come. Very, yeah, that's good advice, isn't it? Because I don't know what you're like, but I sometimes feel I have to have all the answers. And sometimes the answers appear as you start doing and as you start going. And it kind of fills it, you know, the blanks fill themselves in. What about the positioning? Because I'm curious, as a retailer, you're like an online department store that sells so much of variety of many, many things. How do you crack the positioning job then? How do you land who you're targeting and what you're going to stand for and be all about as a retailer?

18:12First of all, really clear commercially on the business and how we are finding our avenues for growth and how we're moving forward. the other thing that the business has done incredibly well is deeply understand our customer in a way that I haven't got as close to before so we've got our value-based segmentation which means we understand who our most valuable customer comes from and where they come from and who they are and then we overlaid an attitudinal segmentation to really deeply understand our customers in hopes and fears and wants and dreams and you know we know what it what it should do so we can articulate our customer really really clearly we pull those two things together and said right well how do we ensure that we have that uniqueness of very that the way we can bring the retail and the financial services element together is one really clear message and how can we break through that sea of sameness that seems to be coming up in other retailers to really stand out from the crowd to be that challenger to really connect with our target customer so the journey we went on was articulating that in a really pithy way which is we landed on with lots of work that supports it there's good and there's very good and so that's the brand strategy which then took forward into our agency pitch process and a brief to bring the work to life but having gone through a few having the privilege to go through a few brand projects in the past one of the things i found has been most powerful is making sure you're bringing people on the journey with you so how do you have the depth and breadth of thinking how do you have somebody from yes the financial services team but the digital customer experience team someone from operations someone speaks in customer of care how do you make sure you understand the business and understand the customer and make sure you've got that you know that um inclusivity and diversity of thinking into what you're doing because if you don't have that and it's just done within the marketing team it's not going to be successful you talked originally didn't you about your by the way i love your interviewing 50 people that is so cool because you build the relationships you get a lot of intel a lot of experience from other people and it it forms a bond of trust doesn't it you know very very early on so that's that's amazing you described me how people had different views the customer different views of you know what the positioning company was having then landed on that how do you then bring all everybody with you what are the top tips in terms of getting everyone on the same page in terms of positioning well so having you know you've got you know the senior leadership team piece to go through to make sure you're kind of getting by in at the right level so doing that presenting to our executive committee and to our board making sure everyone was lined up or it was one thing but that's only part of it because we all know that brand is not a logo and it's not a tv advert and it's not a color it's quite simply everything we do um it is the way a customer feels when they land on the site they navigate to their product it's how we get that product into their hands it's how we answer the phone when they have a challenge it's how we deal with a complaint everything is an interaction with the brand and so actually every single person in the organization has a duty of care to be a custodian of that brand and make sure we're really clear on the North Star and we're all pulling together in the same way versus building different things everywhere, which is what we might do if we're not clear on who the customer is or what the brand is.

21:16We have something at Verry called a balcony briefing, which is where we get the entire company together every couple of months in our aircraft hangar in Speak, where we do a presentation on business strategy or updates on charity partnerships. And I had the opportunity to present the brand strategy to the entire company in one go and describe to them, you know, in the right way, you know, because you're dealing with people who are working in our distribution center and those who might be working in head office. So in a way that everyone can understand and feel excited about and say, right, this is who we are.

21:48This is what we stand for. And this is what we're doing next. And the next time you hear from me, I'm going to show you some work that's going to bring that to life, which hopefully you're going to feel enormously proud of. I'm going to connect very well with our customer and it's going to drive some accelerated growth for us. So that's the first point I got to do the brand strategy and bring everyone on the journey with us. And off we went then to write a live brief and do an agency pitch. Well, I can't wait to get into that. Just before we do, because it'd be a lot of fun to talk about that.

22:17You obviously cover the breadth of the P's, you know, in terms of marketer, you know, cover a lot of things. How do you do the long and the short of it? Because, I mean, again, outside in perception on retail is it's so driven by the short term and almost daily results become everything, don't they? how do you balance where you invest money and time and so on how do you get that mix right it's a constant balance you know you it's a constant balance for all of us i wouldn't be lying if i sat here and said we have it completely nailed because everyone's wrestling every single day with wanting to manage how do you drive the sales to hit that number but also how usually you're kind of bringing in a pipeline of profitable long-term future future growth we use a number of different measures and indicators and metrics it's all around measurement really for us to be really disciplined and forensic on where we're investing our money and how we're delivering growth.

23:04We use econometric modelling, we have our brand tracking, so we use empirical data to support us, but we also have all of our own internal customer data, which shows the same picture. And through the modelling that we do internally, we're really clear on what customer value looks like, the channels the customer comes in, where they land, how they shop, how they behave, and a lot of that paints the long and the short-term picture of a customer who's in for a sale right now versus the customer who's going to be a loyal sticky customer and repeat business and we help manage the marketing mix using that data yeah so so important isn't it um so let's talk about the pitch process then this is exciting so you got to go out to pitch how did you select the agencies that were going to appear on the pitch we were really so we worked we partnered with oyster catchers who i think are absolutely fantastic um so then they really got to understand us and know who we are and what we're looking for.

23:56So we were looking for an agency who shares the same values as us. So we had a really, we would have a really cultural, you know, close relationship. Somebody who would deeply understand our customer and celebrate and value our customer. Somebody who's done some really clever things with creative and insight. Someone who understands digital. Somebody who understands a regulated environment. So we had a bit of a list of things we were going through. Went from a long list down to a short list. Had some chemistry sessions and took three agencies through to a kind of final pitch round. And all of those agencies were absolutely fantastic.

24:27Honestly, I would recommend any three of them incredibly highly. And we brought them all up to Liverpool for a day to experience, to bring our customer to life, understand our business, to open our doors, to share our data and insight, experience our culture, and we gave them all a live brief. And the live brief was, help us break through the sea of sameness, help bring our brand strategy to life, to cut through the clutter in the market, and to bring the work together for our most important quarter, the Golden Quarter, and relaunch our brand then. And as it's a life brief, the final work will be the winning work.

25:02And actually what you saw live on TV is pretty much exactly what The Gate presented to us on the final day. And what we really loved about The Gate is just how much they totally understood our customer. everything they came back to us was so grounded in data and insight they built us the more machine which is based on fame fluency and feeling the system principles we'll come back and talk about that gold star for the gate five gold stars they celebrated our customer they got the insight and the work you know one of those moments where you look at the work and go feel nervous in a great way i'm i this is it this is it that's a good feeling we've got to do it so and it was such a great when we brought the gate up to Liverpool to present to our executive committee I thought oh this is a bit of a brave one a pink flamingo at Christmas right need to make sure that everyone's on board when we come out swinging unanimous decision that absolutely the gate was the right the right agency with the right work and then one of my this will be hands down one of my favourite experiences I remember calling Jamie earlier who's the CEO of the gate and I said to Jamie look you've won, congratulations but can you keep this to yourself because I'd like to pop in tomorrow and have the ability to be able to tell your team myself.

26:20So he got the entire team together. I stood up and very quickly said, congratulations and welcome to the very group. My team had bought pink flamingo balloons, pink fizz, pink cake. And it was amazing to be able to meet the people who had worked on the pitch to thank them for the work they had done and to know that we're about to go into the trenches together because I gave them four months to turn away, ran the work from pitch to launch. Do you know what? That effort will have paid off handsomely, doesn't it? And it's funny, isn't it? Because as clients, we're so used to agencies indulging us and pitching us and all putting the effort.

26:54It's lovely to put the effort back in, isn't it? Like that, because that will last a lifetime for a lot of the team, I'm sure. And for me, it was started to go on. This is who we are. This is our culture. This is the type of people that we are. And actually, we're a team. There's not agency and client. We are an extension of each other's teams and how deeply we know each other. or improve the working relationship, we'll understand each other's businesses better and we'll make extraordinary work. And that's the legacy you want to leave, isn't it? I want to do great work with great people. Now, you touched on a very important point, which is customer understanding and remembering that we are not the customer.

27:29We need to understand who the customer is. And you've reminded me of your Pink Flamingo about probably my very first ever campaign I ever worked on. So young John, like 22, I got to work on, maybe I was 25, my first brand manager job, right? I got to work on Matthias Rose. So now back then, we're talking 20-odd years ago, Matthias Rose hadn't rebranded for 50 years. So it'd been the same bottle, same packaging. And this is the first time, so this is an iconic brand, but it was very kind of, you know, grandparents drank it on holiday sort of, you know, sort of wine. But it was the very first time they were literally trying to relaunch Rose.

28:10And back then, hard to believe this, there was no rosé category. So, you know, there was Blue Nun, there was Leafra Milch, and there was Matthias as these kind of sort of slightly eccentric old kind of wine brands. But there was no rosé as a sort of a thing in the UK. So their strategy was to kind of create the rosé category. and I remember being you know you know my first meeting with the entire team from uh you know from Matt Sograp was the company that I'm at yes they flew over they flew their ad agency in and they did this massive reveal in front of me of the big new campaign now um I wish I knew now what I wish I knew then what I knew now you see because I was really nervous about how on earth do I judge this creative in front of the people that own the brand and all that sort of thing anyway the agency he did this big reveal and basically the big idea was a massive 78 72 sheet poster blue sky a bottle of rose on ice in the corner and a pink flamingo and the words drink pink i love it now 25 year old me was like you know who'd just been sheet dipped in the diageo brand building kind of manual of you know credit development with all its frameworks and sit there going this is way too basic.

29:23I mean, oh my God, this isn't sophisticated. You know, this isn't wine. This is like, you know, too cheap. It's something anyways. I was like, so I thought the idea was terrible. So I came to compromise in the meeting. It's very awkward, of course, because they were like global campaign. It's brilliant. We can't wait to see this in the UK. And then I said, I'm not sure. And so we talked about it and I said, well, would you let me research it? So I said, let me go away for a couple of weeks and just do some qual groups. And you just like, make sure that I'm right and you're wrong. I was so wrong.

29:56I mean, I've never been so embarrassed. In fact, I had to fly to Portugal with the research agency to present the results to them. And they were sat around the table with this most enormous grin. And I told you so expression, right? Because I sat in groups, right? With our target audience going, oh my God, this is like being on holiday. They're like blue skies. Oh, the pink flamingo. That's so cool. And oh, just put the bottle of rose just reminds me of like oh yeah i don't i you know in the category i have red or white and then suddenly yeah a rose i'll do that that sounds great it just created the category created a brilliant association and it was fun and a beautiful simplicity of it it was simple and it was so impactful and literally you know outdoor posters can be really dull and this was really fun and really interesting and really unlike a wine and i tell you it's one of the most effective campaigns i've ever been responsible in my life and of course it is it's gossiping mingo in it i know i had no freaking clue so lesson number one and you're not the customer and like but but now i understand advertising much better obviously than i did then and i guess i was trying too hard to be all clever and sophisticated about it and actually you know it the beautiful simplicity of it the associations it creates the emotion it creates the association with you know with the brand there's an art and a science isn't there to deeply understanding the customer and there's a real discipline to staying true to it and not responding to the noise around you of other people's bias in there around what they believe is the right thing to do like a marketer's role is to deeply understand the customer and to make sure you're delivering something to them in a way that's going to help you know provide growth for the business i can't tell you how many times i get a message from you know a board member and say oh i haven't seen our ad out there it's like well that's good because you are not a 35 year old female with two children who earn 30 000 pounds a year and if you did see the advert i'd be wasting my media money so what a response i'll tell you when you can see it on bake off that's a brilliant answer now let's talk about the work because um you know you got pink you got pink flamingo so there we go we know we're off to off to a winner straight away but um you did the unusual but shouldn't be unusual step of actually testing the creative idea in the pitch process didn't you so tell me about that and how did it do why would you spend a lot of money on creating work if you aren't absolutely sure it's going to deliver or use of course we tested the work we tested the work a number of times during the creative process to make sure that it was really resonating with our customers i mentioned we're disciplined and clear on our target customer she's got very specific needs and attitudes we need to make sure that the work and the brand is really resonating well with with her so yes we tested the work in the process really early on during the pitch um the gate tested and then we tested again of course with system one we put our board pragmatic through um to make sure we're clear on the long term the short term and our overall um you know brand ratings are in there so it was important for us to test the work and then of course we tested again um at the end as well and we had the the live advert ready to go yes and it's a great case study actually uh in terms of how to do how to use testing because in your case you scored a three three and a half i think even 3.8 star at the animatic stage really unusual really so one of the fun jobs well not fun jobs the challenging jobs i get whenever i'm working a lot of our customers is because when you when you test early stage you get a much lower score because people don't have that you don't have the finished film it's you know people get confused oh i'm looking at a cartoon what's this about so naturally the emotions quite dampened down so to get three and a half stars i think 3.8 which is already in the top 10 or 15 percent of all ads who ever tested at that stage you are on to a winner like honestly to get that score early on is you're absolutely kind of home and dry.

33:36And then to see the difference between that, it added a star, didn't it, by the time you then got to air. But another star taking it right to the high fives amongst your target audience. So to see that difference from what was already a very good animatic stage to great finished film is exceptional. I was quietly confident very early on that we were on to a winner. You know, one, you can just feel it, but two, yes, it's pink and it's fantastic and it's sparkly. But when you put that aside, the entire campaign is completely grounded in data and insight one of the brilliant things the gate did for us is to create an effectiveness machine that we call our more machine and our machine has three engines as i mentioned it's based on fame fluency and feeling so we'd use the system one thinking in there already to ground the work we'd use really deep insight on understanding not only customer value our position in the category and how we were going to win against our competitors we tapped into cultural insights that are really unique to our customers such as hun culture and we pulled all that together in the work and that's what the work represented the strategy was sound and strong baked in insight and the work really represented it so i was quite confident when the original kind of boards went into that but again delighted to get a 3.8 star and thrilled to have got a 5.7 star for our target customer when we um with the final spot.

35:00It's worth mentioning the context here as well because one of the advantages of having a system on databases is we test everything in the UK, test everything in the US. We test a lot in other markets as well around the world. We test every different category, time of year. So we test Super Bowl. We test the biggest categories, the smallest categories, the financial services, for example, the hardest categories to do well in. Retail in the UK at Christmas is the world's toughest category to win in. I mean, the standard is insane. You know, you take Audi, Kevin the Carrot, you know, as an example of the, or John Lewis, the level of work in the UK at Christmas, it way beats Super Bowl in terms of standards, you know, which is the most, probably the most prestigious, most invested in event in the world in terms of advertising.

35:47It is, for whatever reason, UK retail at Christmas in the golden quarter is the most competitive where the best work in the world. And it felt like there were more five-star ratings or out there this year than I can remember seeing before. The standard has gone up amazingly, actually. So, I mean, one of the joys of my job is I've been doing this for five years. I've had five Christmases to see the difference. And I think my first or second Christmas, John Lewis, Excitable Edgar. And that was a high five. And that, I think, was probably the only or maybe one or two. Well, the one that always gets five star every year is holidays are coming from Coke.