The Marketoonist on why humour is good for business - Tom Fishburne

26:48So I mean, how crazy was that? So for 40 minutes, I was a world expert on internet things, having known nothing, you know. I probably still made more sense than the rest of them combined, actually. I like your approach, I have to say. All right. So where do we go from here? What was your... Take us to your next most famous cartoon. So this one is more of a marketing sort of joke. I have somebody, you know, two people in a supermarket and there's one of those classic signs that say, you are here, but on the sign is a customer funnel, which goes from awareness to trial, to repeat, to loyalty. You are here to a sign and a store manager pointing at it that the customer is here and the customer is saying, actually, I'm just looking for the bathroom.

27:29That's brilliant. And I like having, I think Huber could hold at the mirror, which I think we need, but particularly in marketing to get out of the ivory tower, to think about how like the actual people buying our products don't think about it as nearly as much as we think that they do. And I feel like we often think ourselves, I mean, a marketing funnel can be really helpful, but we can get funnel vision where we think about as if our consumers are these shoppers on a transactional path to purchase rather than complex people. And so I think it's an evergreen thing for us to remember because it's very easy to use the frameworks and tools and things that we have to think about our shoppers a certain linear way.

28:07And we miss the big picture. Can you imagine going up to someone and saying, are you in the consideration stage or the purchase intent stage? Are you a loyal customer returning? for a second time. I think technology makes this worse, doesn't it? Because with technology, we think we know and we can identify exactly where people are in the process and supposedly nudge them along. I love Tom Roach. I should be quiet after Tom Roach here because he sort of did a bit of reinvention of the funnel and it was a very basic framework. But what he said is that most people are not in the market, the kind of 9 to 5 rule, right?

28:35Most people are not about to decide to buy your thing at this moment. So actually your job is, he calls it building, which is establishing memories and associations with your brand so that at some point in the future and you don't know when that is and this is what drives me crazy is it might be a day it might be a year it might be 10 years you don't know and then he calls it kind of nudging the next bit in the funnel which is the five percent so you know when when you're close to purchase then you need to be trying to sort of nudge people over the line and then the third bit is kind of connecting and making it easy to buy so don't take away any barriers to purchase and kind of make it easy.

29:07I much prefer that because like that's sort of how normal people do things, isn't it? You know, when you're thinking of buying a new car, suddenly the features and benefits of that car become awfully important. The color, the metallic and the air conditioning, you know, all those things make me different. The rest of the time, don't care, you know, it's more about, you know, how do I feel about the brands and do I spot other ones on the road and do I think I'd look cool in it? You know, it's that kind of thing. But anyway, so the funnel is a brilliant one and it doesn't go away that debate, does it?

29:34No, it doesn't. It's funny. It's amazing for us in marketing. We're all also consumers. We experienced the other side of this. I remember when it was General Mills, the CMO I was speaking about earlier, Mark Attucks, he was a brilliant mentor and often would encourage us to try to break out of that ivory tower. And he used to say, whenever you shift to a new brand assignment, which at the junior end at General Mills, it was every year, he said, take out an empty notebook, fill it full of everything you think you know about the category then before you're corrupted by all the great industry knowledge we're going to give you, shopper decision trees and category management decks.

30:06And here are the rules of the category. Here's how people shop the category. He said, do that. And then when you're on the brand, periodically, make sure you're walking in a store and just sit there and watch how people actually shop your category. Have you look at it? Well, I'm glad you said that because my one contribution to marketing science is I invented something called the marketing bottom. So it's basically a massive U shape. And if you imagine that on the Y axis is amount you understand about the customer length of time you've been in marketing right so as a complete novice right you're actually really good because you react you know of course everyone goes you know no one watches the ads or whatever you know i mean you know your granny could tell you like you know yes what why she decides on what she kind of buys or whatever and you're like that and you go of course you'll be this but then exactly then you absorb all the nonsense you know all the kind of funnels and you know kind of weird you know kind of performance marketing terms all that kind of thing.

30:57And then you get corrupted until you reach the bottom. And then you sort of start learning how it should be. And you eventually escape and you kind of end up where you start. Oh, I'm thinking like a consumer again. Or I'm spending time with actual people that might actually buy my products. Absolutely. They don't act like I thought they did. I found when I started at General Mills, we used to have Nielsen practically surgically attached to our faces, which are Nielsen share at any moment. And the way they looked at Nielsen share for Cheerios, the brand I was on, was in a category called RTE cereal.

31:28RTE stands for ready to eat cereal, which when it was created was different than oatmeal, which wasn't ready to eat. But no one, no consumer ever thinks about it that way. And they're not even thinking about you within that category at all. They're thinking like, am I going to go to Starbucks or am I going to get a bowl of cereal? But when you're looking at, you know, your slight share changes with what you think your competition is in RTE cereal, you miss everything. It's funny how we name things actually i remember um one of my friends uh had worked in margarine and they they call the category yellow fat and so she was actually the head of yellow fat i was just like that is bonkers and i also and i had another story that a kit kat they have a two-fingered brand manager and a four-fingered oh god that is wonderful i love that so much we assign these random terms industry terms about how it's produced or something.

32:19He wouldn't say, I work for the plastic bottle company with brown fizzy liquid inside. Yes. And that's where humor can help to point out these things. I remember when I worked in the ice cream business and one of our suppliers, the name of the company was Mr. Cookie Face and was quite a hard negotiator. And we had a very serious meeting. We were talking about our negotiating terms with Mr. Cookie Face. And I couldn't believe that nobody in the room was laughing about it. That's brilliant. I love that. I think maybe when when you arrive at a meeting, right, you should have this amazing kind of hold, you know, amazing music in the elevator as you come up.

32:51You should be welcomed with like, kind of like drums and cymbals or something, is it? Because, you know, how you feel, humor makes you, you know, humor and music, it makes you feel great, doesn't it? Yes. You know, imagine how good every meeting would be if you started it with a joke of the day. 100%. You know, it'd lift everything. It's the best thing a leader can do. Yeah, totally. So the next, what I want to move on to is shiny new things as well, which is another one that sort of tickled me a bit. Yeah, this is one I actually have. I have a few of my cartoons framed to my own wall, but this one I...

33:16Oh, it made the wall then. It made the cut. So it has a bunch of dogs around a table and one is saying, we need to stay focused on our marketing priorities and not get distracted by every shiny new, look, squirrel! There's a squirrel outside of the window and all the dogs are looking at the squirrel. And that's an evergreen thing. The squirrel may change, but the squirrel is always there, particularly in marketing. I think you'd update this one annually, couldn't you? You probably just need to repeat this one every single year and it will still be true by the time you retire, won't it? It's all the hardest thing in marketing to know what, But when something pops up and everybody's talking about it, is this something I should pay attention to?

33:47Is this something that's going to, a year from now, people are going to be saying, why do we waste so much time on that? And marketing is really at that point where this comes up a lot. And there's a lot of groupthink around it. And I think another example where I think we need Hubert to poke it, fun it, where it could be a bit absurd. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, groupthink's absolutely right, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, how do you tell whether something is kind of like, you know, going to go away tomorrow night sort of thing, or whether it's going to fundamentally change everything? or even it's going to change everything for a short period of time and then not like covid for example that's exactly right yes yeah so i do yeah i do i did a cartoon at the start of covid this one was another sea change moment because it was in that period of time that you talked about where everything was dour and serious and i would hear things like better too serious than sorry and yet i felt like i was hearing from people please don't stop drawing these cartoons or just hearing from people when i would send out a cartoon thanks for a little moment of levity and so i drew a cartoon with a bunch of executives around the table saying digital transformation is years away.

34:42I don't see our company having to change anytime soon. And then there's this wrecking ball outside the window with the words COVID-19 on the side of it. And I feel like it hit like a thunder blast, like in terms of where I saw my cartoon popping up. I think partly because everybody had to do things so quickly. I get to take things that were going to be take years and suddenly it was months or weeks, like it was a moment. But I also think there was something about feeling like discombobulated. This huge wrecking ball is coming toward the window. And you have no choice but to figure out how to adapt to it.

35:14And it was a real moment. There's this, Scott Brinker in the US has this lovely quote that technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically. And I feel like there's this friction between those two things that is ongoing. It's not just a moment like COVID. It's, you know, ChatGPT is the most recent wrecking ball. And how do you adapt to that? Organizations are logarithmic changers. So how do you deal with that? And so I feel like those moments of change are particular times where a leader needs to have a great culture in place so that teams can talk about the challenges because there's no roadmap in those moments.

35:50And so you need to be open and have everything on the table and talk about what's keeping in the way and holding you back. Yeah, that's really good advice. As soon as I met the chief brand officer at Gymshark, which is one of the UK's most successful kind of startups, now a unicorn. And he was saying your personal growth needs to be ahead of the growth trajectory of your company. you know it's like it's inverting that insight really which is you need to be because he was just explaining that you know there are some people in the company that have been there eight ten years with the same job title yes and basically when they sell we want to you know want to raise or whatever said no your role has grown you know has grown as fast as you have kind of thing because like you know the business is in a completely different scale but it's a good challenge isn't it thinking growing ahead of the curve yes personally you know you know as it were um we should of course talk about in terms of wrecking ball ai shouldn't we and and i know particularly i love this probably what probably i probably my favorite cartoon of yours it does make me smile but yeah explain the ai cartoon yeah so this is a two-panel cartoon and i drew this right after chat tpt sort of uh was suddenly you know became the fastest selling consumer product of ever all time but two panels on the left hand side somebody is showing a colleague his computer monitor saying, AI turns this single bullet point into a long email I can pretend I wrote.

37:09And in the other panel, it's an inverse flip side of different people, but looking at it, AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read. That's brilliant. And it's the two sides of AI written, AI read. And I think one of the conundrums we have with this incredibly powerful new technology, like what is the real root of what you're trying to do? And are you creating something that's really meaningful or are you creating, you know, infinite words that nobody wants? Totally. I think this is the problem we've got, right? Because, I mean, we're at Cannes. We've been talking about AI and creativity and we talk about productivity and the amount we can create at scale.

37:46We can create faster. We can create more. We can create more personalized. We can do so much more. There's still the same number of people out there. People are already overexposed to advertising messages. People are already bored by what we're currently saying and ignoring us, right? People are paying to not see your ads, and we're now going to times it by 100. It's insane. And the other thing, of course, we know from the presentation Adam Morgan and I were giving on the extraordinary cost of dial is AI is accelerating the homogenization, the averaging of everything as well. So you can now do boring advertising at scale.

38:20At scale. So back to your ad ignored here. Your ad ignored everywhere. Yes. Repeatedly. Yes. To everyone. It's the great samining. It's this whole averaging out over time. So I just, I can't help thinking that actually right now we need more humanity, more humor. And I think that's going to make you even more distinctive. Actually, interesting aside, it's a slight tangent here, but I was at the LinkedIn CMO panel on Tuesday, just hosting a discussion. Just before I was talking, their chief economist was using all their data they collect globally, talking about trends in terms of hiring trends, skills changes, that kind of thing.

39:00And she made a really interesting observation, which was like, obviously, use of generative AI is going up in terms of skills being looked for by employers. There were five other skills that are increasing at the same rate as generative AI. They're all people skills. leadership problem solving creativity communication yes um it's literally as fast as we can automate yes the opposite is happening at the same time which is we need people that can lead people bring humanity and all that kind of thing i just thought that gives me a little bit of hope actually is that the role will be for the the kind of creative types the people in people that can lead people um you know and not just the people that can code because effectively coding is dead now, isn't it?

39:43Right. Cause AI will take care of the productivity for you. A hundred percent. So, uh, we are in Cannes, right? And, uh, you very kindly agree, didn't you to come out all the way over here, spend a week with us here in, in our, in our amazing villa here. Um, anyone watching can kind of see it behind you. Can't see it behind me. Uh, there was a beautiful view out here, by the way, for anyone, for anyone wondering, there's a, yeah, you can't see it on camera, but there is an amazing vista of the, uh, you know, the Mediterranean and there's lots of, you know, swanky yachts going, but a few helicopters.

40:11I'm surprised. I do too. I can't at least four today. I know the amount of helicopters buzzing in anyway, but one day, Rodney, we'll get to do that. But yeah, tell us about your experience at Cannes. How's it been? Oh, fantastic. It was amazing. It had been on my bucket list forever, obviously, just as I knew of this nexus of interesting people and creative, et cetera. But I always imagined that most of the activity happened sort of inside the center, the official speeches. And what the biggest surprise for me, particularly just walking around the peripheral, the most interesting things are the conversations on the outside.

40:46In many cases, the opportunity to meet people who I've perhaps had some exchanges with in the past, at least I knew their work, and suddenly having the opportunity to have direct one-on-one conversations with them or small group conversations. Those have been really interesting. And I've really appreciated that opportunity. It's been very cool. I heard this, I can't remember who said the phrase, but they're absolutely spot on that can is a B2B trade show. And it makes a lot of sense. Originally, people came for the awards. And then media companies came to try and win some media off the advertisers who are here collecting the awards.

41:22And then ad tech decided, well, if media is going to be here, we're going to come and sell ad tech to the media suppliers sort of thing. And then even now we've got like creators coming that say, we want to try and convince the media companies and the advertisers to kind of put us on, you know, kind of things. And then you've got celebrity talent coming, well, going to get paid a lot of money to kind of party on Spotify Beach. So it's kind of grown and grown and grown. But effectively, it's a trade show that just happens to have a few awards in the basement, you know, kind of of the Palais. But you went into the Palais and actually looked at the work, didn't you?

41:52I did. Which, by the way, congratulations on that. You're probably one in, the 1 % that actually did that. There weren't as many people there as I thought, actually. Yeah, I was a little surprised by that. I thought that the work would be front and center at it. But I saw some great examples of campaigns and work. And that was really fun. They did offer tours there. So I overheard a few of the tours. Yes, yes. So they walked through a few of the categories. But I was amazed. I mean, there's so much creativity put into it. There's so many different categories. And it can be challenging. It can be overwhelming because there's the sheer number of submissions.

42:23and they're in, there's sometimes the actual tiny poster of the work. You really have to get up to it to see actually the big idea that's behind it. But it was great to see. You do. And you made a cartoon out of that, of course. I did, I did. Yes. Talk us through your days. Day one cartoon. Where did you start? So I did scribbles the whole week. And that true, ladies and gentlemen, I can confirm that he was busy with the sketchbook. I have, I usually, the way I work are stacks of index cards and I usually just capture observations. Some of these may still turn into cartoons at some point, but I get myself the challenge.

42:53lines i gave myself the challenge of having one finished cartoon for every day things i sort of observed so i'll give sort of day one i had to do something related to the yachts here because it is kind of it would be rude not to so i have a few people standing in front of a yacht and somebody saying hopefully someone will show up to our five course breakfast yacht panel on marketing effectiveness and it's this big empty yacht with two sort of director's chairs for the speakers Well, do you know, this is can panic. Honestly, I can tell you this because having hosted lots of events here, having done a few talks here and a few panels, you get that horrific feeling of like, I've put all this work in four months.

43:33I mean, Orlando and I were speaking on the forum stage about the extraordinary cost of being dull. and I can tell I mean you know we're both grown men we've both got experience you know we both know what we're good at but we were literally kind of like little school boys in the backstage kind of like poking between the curtain looking is anyone going to come to our tour? I can't believe that but by the way for anyone listening and watching it was sold out in fact not just sold out in fact they were turning people away so that was lovely actually so I was very pleased so fortunately I didn't fall foul of the superyacht but I know I do know actually talking to a lot of people that that is a common experience.

44:08Yes. Because what happens is people just sign up to everything because there's often no limits. So people have like 15 wristbands from different beach passes or whatever, and they just sort of, you know, go wherever they feel like going at the time. So yeah, you have to overbook the events and then hope the right number turn up. Totally. And I thought too, the theme of marketing effectiveness, I have seen pop up here. You know, it is, you know, it's a reminder, you know, we're all working with limited resources and budgets and everything like that. Well, good for you to say that, actually. I must pay special credit to the Can Lions team because they committed to marketing effectiveness three or four years ago as a separate track.

44:43They call them tracks in terms of thematic events they put on. This year is the biggest marketing effectiveness track, and they've promoted things like the talk I did, Orlando talks with Sajon Hegarty. He's on an even bigger stage on Friday. Mark Ritson was on a huge stage at the Rotunda. so you know we would have been on the kind of periphery in the small dark kind of like underground cages of kind of you know of rooms before but actually they are promoting and what's lovely is and i mean you know i'm i'm all about effectiveness as you know what is great is they're the ones apparently those those events that effectiveness track are the most oversubscribed and most attended oh fantastic it's lovely isn't it because like my criticism of can has always been We're celebrating the work, but we're not recognizing the one person not here is the customer.

45:30That's right. The people for whom the work is made. And unless they're going to buy the work, you know, unless they're going to buy the thing we're selling, there's no point. That's exactly right. So I'm encouraged by that. So long may that continue. Fantastic. We'll see what happens next year. So day two, where did you go day two? Day two. Well, day two, I was struck by the fact that for the first time, humor is being talked about in a really big way at Cannes. And particularly coming after some of what we were describing, the COVID years, how humor was sort of downplayed or this year it was really talked about.

46:00I've heard it variously described that humor is a whole separate category at Kahn. I've heard it described as 13 separate subcategories. And I've heard it described as a new criteria for evaluating the work. I haven't gotten a straight answer to that yet. I don't know either. But in any case, it's talked about a lot. So I wanted to do something on humor and the fact that people are talking about incorporating it more. But it can be a challenge figuring the right way to do that. So I had a cartoon of people at a dinner and somebody sitting down with an agency saying, apparently humor is making a comeback in advertising.

46:31As our agency, can you do something funny? And unbeknownst to the speaker, somebody from the agency is sliding a whoopee cushion under the chair. And so that was just a... It's performative, isn't it? I mean, like you're saying earlier, some people have flown in comedians, haven't they? Just to talk about humor. But Actually, one of the things I love about what you do is the everyday humor and actually just the observational humor. It can be quite small things that we're very familiar with. You don't have to make a world-class joke. Humor can be very small and observational, can't it? It really can.

47:04We don't have to be stand-up comedians. It's something that we all do with our friends. We just sometimes hold that back. In fact, I had the chance to be a cartoonist in residence at Stanford's Graduate School of Business' first ever course on the power of humor in business. and the two professors have been sort of pioneering this course. And they had this research that had this enormous global panel that measures the number of times an average person laughs over the course of their day. And then they track that over their life. And they found that it kind of keeps ramping up until university.

47:35And right after university and our first job, it drops off a cliff. And they call it the humor cliff. Drops off a cliff and then it starts to creep up a few years after retirement. And their big message is, don't fall off the humor cliff. That's interesting. And I feel like if we can bring that more into our life and our work, it makes us more effective at our jobs. And, you know, ultimately, it's something for everyone. We need to tap into it more because it has a great advantage. You've just given me an idea, actually. So, a system one, we do, because for our customers, we do a thing called the face trace, which is asking consumers, what emotion are you feeling as you watch the ads?

48:09Now, what we're trying to do is encourage more positive emotion like happiness and surprise. and the correlation between those emotions and success in market is really well documented and very powerful now just to just so everyone knows we apply that to ourselves internally in system one right so we do this thing called the satisfaction which is we ask the same questions how do you feel about your work how strongly do you feel and why do you feel it sort of thing and what's lovely is over the last kind of five or six quarters our happiness score has consistently gone up every single quarter and our performance exactly matches it oh fantastic it's really the correlation is you know now i think it's cause and effect yes because i think successful teams feel happier if you're getting a bonus you feel happy if you're hiring extra staff you feel happy right so i think it's both cause and effect but also happy teams are more likely to be successful teams but going back to my previous point if humor is the second most effective and chardon freud probably is a kind of humor isn't it so we'll bundle those together but let's say human most effective form of happiness, I should actually be tracking humor, shouldn't I?

49:10I should be actually tracking how many times have you laughed today as the determinant of a happy team, a successful team. It's a great barometer. Have you ever come across an actual company where they track humor in any kind of way? I haven't. I haven't. Any sort of quantitative way, I haven't. I've seen it at an individual executive level as a personal challenge, but nothing beyond that. I think it's a great idea. It'd be interesting, wouldn't it? It would be. It would be. That'd be kind of fun. Yes. So take us to day three. What happened on day three for you? Okay. So day three related a little bit to what we were talking about, going to see the work and how surprised I was that I required going to a basement inside the main conference center, which again, had a lot of great things, but it was quite a giant room and a little bit difficult to navigate.

49:53And so I have wall after wall after wall after wall of the gallery of the work, much of which are on these tiny little posters. And so I have a few people there, marketers looking for their own work and somebody saying, there's our campaign. See, I told you it was a big idea, pointing at this tiny little postage stamp. Brilliant. That's very good. Very, very good. And it's very true, by the way, to anyone who is going to come to Cannes that, yeah, you're literally in the basement, so you're in the very bottom of the Palais. Lighting's quite low and all that sort of thing. So yeah, that's very, very true.

50:23And it's a bit of a shame, isn't it? I mean, I suppose the good thing is the work does get um shared on the lion's website and that kind of thing so you can you can go and look at it after but yeah it feels like it should get a little bit more of a hero status shouldn't it a bit more of a light shine on it i think so because a few of the examples i saw again were brilliant you know i saw some great examples that i would have loved to have seen in a bigger in a bigger way the category that's there's one category that disappointed me this year i have to confess which is um i i'm a big fan of b2b marketing i wasn't always actually i spent my career in b2c But once I've got into B2B, I've discovered that actually B2B works a lot like B2C.

50:59People buy things on emotion, relationships, you know, how they heard of you. All the things that we know work for kind of consumer brands. Funnily enough, also work in B2B. But actually, the understanding of how marketing works in B2B seems to be much less. And less money is spent and, you know, less time invested and all that kind of thing. And the role of the CMO seems to be sort of more of a support act in B2B, whereas a CMO in a B2C company is kind of like the rock star that's setting the strategy. and doing all the stuff everyone else sees, right? B2B is more like, you know, can you do a trade stand and, you know, print out a few flyers?

51:32Sorry, B2B. I get a flood of B2B CMOs that go, our job is not that. Anyway, so apologies for the influx of mail on that one. Anyway, so CanLions, I think last year or the year before, introduced a new B2B line. Now, another question for you. Can you guess which brand won the B2B line this year? Because it was a bit of a surprise. that's difficult i might pick something like salesforce or something i'm not sure well i would have thought that right so so when someone said to me last night oh who do you think is one and i was going through my head going yeah who are the really big kind of like sap or salesforce hp you know the big tech businesses that do all the kind of big deals kind of business business heineken i'm like what's beer doing in b2b now i mean apparently the idea was something along the lines of kind of like they wanted to kind of restore these pubs that have kind of close down they're going to turn them into museums lovely great you know it's a contribution to you know contributions to the economy and history are fantastic but that's not b2b i mean in which person's definition is that b2b it's not a company that relies on transactional relationships between businesses right for their success i mean okay the supply chain of getting the beer to the consumer involves doing a transaction with a pub but that's the same for every i mean b2c brands all go through distribution networks, right?

52:48Yes. Sounds totally insane. So I thought for next year, we should basically create a new agency called the B2B Markets. It would come up with a fancy name, but what we should do is basically go to that museum, go to the museum, get Heineken on draft installed in there. And basically, we should just do this film of coming up with a new B2B idea. Thousands of people were disappointed by Lions nominating Heineken for this B2B award. We thought this was unacceptable. So we're going to go, we're going to take over the very place, you know, the museum, and we're going to come up with a new idea. And then millions of people saw it.

53:24I thought what we could do, actually, because we need a bit of purpose, okay, because you have to have purpose. So what we could do is enlist one of the world's most successful B2B brands and say, we're going to have a night in a museum. And you've got the night to come up with something that will change the world forever and bring all your developers. We'll try and solve humanity overnight and do something real that serves B2B businesses everywhere or something. Anyway, that's my plan for next year. I'll turn it into a case study. Day four, where'd you go next? Yeah, so day four, I spent a lot of time walking around with my sketchbooks and note cards, just listening to conversations.

53:59And there's something kind of surreal walking around Khan and it's this beautiful town with these cobblestone streets and you hear people talking about customer obsession and marketing terms. So I have two people in the conversation and one is saying, and then the brand promise ladders up to higher order benefits of world togetherness. And the other person is saying, what brand? And he says, my personal brand. I love that. That's absolutely brilliant. That's brilliant. So what next? Yeah. So day five, this is the return, the leaving. We're building up here to a peak end. It's such a lovely place here.

54:39It's hard to imagine the world outside in some ways, but I have somebody walking down the big steps, you know, at the, at the Palais, the big center and saying, I am so inspired to unleash my creativity back at work. And then the next panel is in a dreary conference room and all presenting work and everybody's saying, seems risky. It's too different and make the logo bigger. Oh, that's brilliant. That is so true. That is so true. I remember actually, I, um, I did a week away on a kind of management development course and, um, I was so inspired that we had to write a personal statement by the Friday and a vision.

55:14And we had to look at what our skills were, what the company need was and where the overlap and write a kind of plan or something. I remember I did it all on the, on the kind of post-it notes and a flip chart. I said, I remember phoning the sales and marketing directors at the company I worked for. I was quite a junior at this point. So these were kind of like the God level people in the organization. I'm so inspired by the idea. Can I buy you breakfast on the Monday morning? And I remember it was like, literally we're on the industrial state. It's pouring with rain, like the heating wasn't on.

55:39They were in a grump. and I walked in with these kind of post-it notes and I did not feel the kind of inspiration that I had on the sunny, you know, out in the garden, the lawns of this mansion house on Friday kind of thing. And I remember this awkward kind of, well, it did make sense last week. Yes. Is it okay if I polish it up a bit and come back in a PowerPoint? My idea actually, to be fair to me, my idea did actually end up happening, which was one of the most proud things of my career because I basically wanted to create a separate innovation department or a launch department basically to manage, we call it seed brands, but manage all the innovation brands and the later, the brands that maybe, you know, died a bit and could resurrect them and something.

56:20And, but it needs to be managed sort of aside from the company. So its own sales and marketing team and distribution, that kind of thing. So that was the idea. And, but yeah, I mean, so it did eventually get a PowerPoint sign off and all the rest of it. But, but I remember that feeling and it was like, I was so fired up on Friday. We forget about that even in big ways and small ways. that is actually where creativity shows up the most is how you navigate the, the, the, the, the march for the organization with all the gatekeepers and stage gates. How do you make an idea come to life without it getting watered down so that the point that it reaches the end is sort of a pale shadow of the original idea.

56:56I did this cartoon once of Newton, uh, sitting under the apple tree rating for inspiration to fall and the apple falls. And then they're just chomps taken out of the apple over time. And then the last panel is just a can of applesauce. And I think we have to watch out for Newton's applesauce because that is that watering down effect. That is the vast majority of what happens because it's the path of least resistance. It is. And it's not survival of the fittest idea that wins. It's survival of the safest idea that usually wins. And so you have to be brave as a marketer to go through that gauntlet, to fight for your ideas, to get to a place where your idea stays remarkable in execution.

57:35And when you can find a way to do it, those are the ones that really make an impact and stand the test of time. That's very good advice. I remember having Mike Cesario, the founder of Liquid Death on the podcast, and he said it very, very well. He just said, your idea is worth zero dollars, zero dollars, right? It is all in the execution. And I think he's right, is that, you know, So an idea starts with something that's actually worth nothing until you can find a way to execute it and execute it well. Now, I was very pleased, by the way, you actually made a cartoon for me, didn't you? Just to round off one week.

58:07I did, I did. Yeah, that was very kind of you. What was in that cartoon, he says, rather nervously? People do get nervous around me sometimes when they see me scribbling away. Like, exactly, where is this going to end up? But in this case, I got your permission to do it. You did, yeah. And you have the cartoon that I'm going to get the exact lingo. Yes. But there was a conversation you had with... Actually, should I set the scene on this one? Yes, please do. The very lovely people at Boston Consulting Group and Marketing Society asked me to join their panel. And Sophie Devonshire, who's absolutely wonderful, was introducing me.

58:39And it was quite interesting how she introduced me. So it wasn't like an amazingly successful marketing career and he's broken through and done some enormous innovation or anything like that. It was, yeah, John's been fired twice and he loves to talk about it. And it's quite reassuring to know that we've got somebody in marketing that could share their failures that we could all learn from. I'm like, I'm happy to be of service, you know, but it did make me smile. And, you know, but she meant it lovingly and it was very sweet. But there's something about being refreshingly honest about some of the difficulties, you know, that I faced in my career that people actually really appreciate.

59:14They really do. It's kind of that self-deprecating humour can kind of give other people permission. So I've decided that being fired twice is a badge of honour. It is. When the mic was handed over, I said, oh, yeah, you know that phrase, those that can't teach? Those that get fired start a podcast. And I think I mentioned it to you, didn't I, on that night? You didn't forget it. It's such a good line. Yes. So, yes, this is why my cartoon has basically in a podcast studio, you saying that line. I had to capture it. Indeed. Well, thank you very much. That will make its way to LinkedIn, I'm sure, very shortly.

59:45Fantastic. So look out for it. Tom, it's been an absolute blast, mate. Thank you for coming on the show. I've loved hanging out with you this week. It's so much fun. Really good for hospitality. The whole group at System One has been lovely. It's been really great to get to know everybody. Brilliant. Well, it's been an honor. Thank you, mate. Thank you. Till next time. Awesome. Sure. 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 podcasts. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well.

1:00:11I'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. Plus, if you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on x at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn, where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.