The myths of marketing live with Tom Goodwin

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. myths in marketing that hold us back. And Tom, as always, has got a brilliant perspective on these things. And what I loved about doing a live event is just the energy that everyone brought to it. You could tell everyone really wanted to be there. And there were so many questions at the end of the session. In fact, we ran over time quite considerably. But it was a brilliant conversation we had. So I thought, you know what, this might make a great episode. So what we've done is we've taken some of the highlights from the conversation, put it together as this podcast.

0:58Tom doesn't hold back. So this is properly uncensored in parts. And I know you're going to love it. Tom doesn't ever fail to deliver. Here it is. Tell us how you ended up leaving the kind of more corporate world and ending up doing what you do now. I'm a real pain in the ass, actually. My mum and dad are both teachers. My dad was always quite sort of subversive. And I know for some reason, he sort of imbued in me the idea that questions are really important and that we all have rights for opinions and it's sort of a good thing to express those opinions. I think intentions matter by the way. If you're trying to provoke because you're trying to get people to sort of notice you, then that's a really shitty thing to do.

1:41But if you're trying to provoke because you're trying to learn and understand, then I think that's okay. So I started, I failed to get into advertising. I applied to a few graduate schemes and I failed to make any progress. I started working at Glaxo Smith Klein in what they called a marketing training program but it was actually just field sales so I had to go around trying to persuade schools to sell Ribena which I was quite good at actually I'm quite good at sort of doing slightly evil things and then I got really bored so I wrote to some of the companies that didn't give me a job and I said you know please give me a job and I interviewed with TBWA and I became an account manager and I was there for a year and I was absolutely terrible account manager.

2:24I was probably the worst account manager they'd ever had. So I decided to leave advertising. I did a job sort of freelance for Low Worldwide, where I was a sort of weird producer, where they basically gave me all the things they didn't know how to do. This was just as I'm answering this in a very long way. I'm sorry if this is boring. They gave me a job on Nokia, just as they were inventing their best phones. As you saw in that slide there, there was something called the Nokia N series, which were their advanced phones that were smartphones before we knew what a smartphone was. And they would win all of these projects to like do like a music festival or to make small movies.

3:00And they basically get the client to send them a purchase order for like a million. And then no one knew how to do it. So I would just do everything they didn't know how to do. So I was a sort of producer, then I did new business. And then I became obsessed with how technology would change the world. And then I got really frustrated because I thought everything that people said was nonsense. So then I started writing about it and then I kept on getting fired so then after a while I realized that I was getting fired because I wasn't very good at navigating the politics I wasn't getting fired because I was wrong I was getting fired because people were quite threatened by it and I think I had a sort of rambunctiousness and I think maybe I'm a little bit autistic because I think it's more important to be correct than it is to be liked and I wasn't really that happy about making the compromises to my integrity to say things for the sake of it yeah so then I basically sort of ended up um leaving um most advertising agencies actually and then like publicists gave me a really nice job they treated me very well uh so for about two years I was working at publicists basically doing this sort of stuff for a living and then I got fired in the pandemic uh for tweeting my opinions which is fine and then now I sort of do my own thing so I kind of I do a lot of keynotes normally a lot better than this actually and normally a bit more helpful and i'm also doing proper consulting now i'm working with really big companies to properly help them actually digitally transform there are entire industries that are staffed with absolutely brilliant people that have legacy processes and legacy structures and they have that for good reasons and they need people to come in and be a little bit more a little bit more delicate than i normally am but they need people to sort of help them have the conversations they need to do in order to make the changes they need to make and I absolutely love it amazing I've just realized something I think one of the reasons why I love having you on the show is you've been fired more times than I have which is a first so more times than anyone I mean sometimes they weren't really firing sometimes they were like this isn't gonna last that long you know um yeah well I have to write the guide to how not to do corporate culture So anyway, that's another episode.

5:09You've spent a lot of time thinking about technology, looking at how it's transformed or not transformed our lives. What do you think, as you look at it, what do you think are the things we should be thinking about? I mean, you've talked a lot about things that actually not really have changed. Do you have a hunch of the things that will change? With regard for technology or generally? Yeah, what do you think in 10 years' time will we look back and go, that did actually change how we live? A bit like the 1930s. Bloody hell, that's a good question. More than anything else, I'm quite worried about how divisive technology is.

5:42I think the modern media landscape kind of terrifies me because I really do think that we have a lot of we either miss out on or we are desensitized to a lot of things that are really important. I spend most of my life in America and therefore a lot of the things I care about are things in America. like wealth inequality is a ridiculous problem that's only getting worse and that's exacerbated by the media environment. Deaths of despair because of opioid abuse are an unbelievably big thing that everyone in most of America thinks about all the time but is never mentioned in the media at all. So I'm quite worried about some of the undercurrents of society.

6:24I despise the way that we've been brought up to distrust each other, to dislike each other, to be more politically polarized. I hate the fact that if you act in a reasonable way where you try to listen to the other side, you're caused like a sympathizer or something. So the media environment is what terrifies me the most. I think generally speaking, technology combines to form a sort of, like a canvas of opportunity. And I generally think that that will solve most of the problems as long as we sort of change some of the engineering to society. Like if you actually think about it, the Internet's nuts.

7:06You know, like if you have a tablet that could be ten dollars and you have free Wi-Fi, you can learn anything that's ever been discussed. You know, you can take part in any conversation. You know, people can self-teach themselves. ourselves you know i'm not a huge talker about ai but ai allows most people on the planet to start building some pretty good code like i feel like we have all of the tools and i feel really frustrated all of the time which is why i quite often seem miserable because we could be having amazing conversations we could be learning so much we could be talking to fascinating people we could spend our lives just stimulated and like learning from everything and everywhere and so insightful We could be so empathetic and thoughtful and somehow we're sort of using it all wrong.

7:49So I probably think that the most transformative technology out there, one, if someone can do something about voting and politics, like if someone can actually get the people who really should be voting to vote by making it easier. If someone can develop systems to actually listen to what people are thinking more honestly. if we can start emailing companies and getting good customer service i think those are some of the sort of places where life starts to change quite a lot but i think most of the things that we talk about most of the time are a bit of a distraction be like having an app that's like what real people actually think because it's like because social media divides doesn't it is driven by the extremes and we seem to fill our lives listening to the the 0.5 percent on either end of a spectrum and actually most people yeah in the middle i think when i say things like this I think if I was listening to me, I'd really dislike that guy on the stage right now because it sounds so sort of smug and condescending.

8:44We've sort of lost a love for our consumers. Like I think most people in marketing generally are quite dismissive and extremely patronizing to their consumers. You know, they think their consumers are stupid. They think their consumers are kind of voting for really horrible people. They think their consumers are a little bit evil or just ignorant or something. People are amazing. Like I'm quite shy. I don't like talking that much, which is very weird. And I love talking to Uber drivers. My favorite thing in the world is to sort of be in a long Uber drive in a part of the world that I don't normally go to and just sort of listen to them about their lives.

9:19During the sort of first half of the pandemic, I lived in rural Georgia, the American one. And I'd go to sort of bars and I just overhear what people were talking about. And I'd go to sort of local country fairs. And again, I'm not saying this in a sort of I'm smug, I'm better than people or nicer than people way. but I think everyone's really interesting if you let them be. Everyone teaches you quite a lot. And I think generally speaking as an industry, we keep on looking towards Silicon Valley or Tel Aviv. We keep on looking towards young people who are trendy. We keep on going to Williamsburg or Shoreditch and we're like, oh, wow, this is the future.

9:59Maybe a little bit, but probably not. The real future sort of happens in a shopping mall that's about to close down in Milton Keynes. The real future happens in Poundland and Scunthorpe. The real future happens in a sort of sad Pyrenean village. And I'm not here to sort of preach, but I think it would be nice if we had a little bit more curiosity about how most people are living their lives. I like your distinction between busy and being overwhelmed, which just really struck a chord with me. Maybe I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment, I don't know. But what opportunities does that create? because it strikes me that as advertisers, brand owners, agencies, we don't really spend much time thinking how do we make the life of our audience or consumer easier, which strikes me as an obvious thing.

10:43I mean, that's it. Just make it easy. Make it easy for people to be aware of your thing, you know, by doing some sort of mass market stuff. It's obviously quite expensive. Make it easy for people to understand your thing by not changing your logo all the time, by not changing your tagline all the time. Things like jingles probably would have worked better today than they've ever worked before. you know make it easy to understand it um make it easy to choose you know like there's this obsession with with line filling that means that you know every type of sort of dog food is on like a matrix i don't know if you ever saw i think it was um someone looking at dishwasher tablets it was amazing there's like a picture it was like i'm gonna forget the name of the brand but it was like sort of let's call it wishy-washy it was like wishy-washy ultra like wishy-washy ultra premium wishy-washy platinum wishy-washy platinum with lemon like wishy-washy like 3.0 wishy-washy cyber and you were like how on earth would anyone ever like walk away feeling happy about what they just bought because they probably just sort of missed out on wishy-washy premium superb 4000 i get that with razors right you get the gillette mac 15 you know with extra gel i'm just saying so i think i think sort of good better best like you can't go that far wrong with that um and then the other thing and this is one of the things that has really really changed people can now buy from anything anywhere on the planet.

12:03So make it really, really easy to take people's money from them. Like I genuinely believe you should almost be able to buy anything from any surface on any device with about two clicks. You know, these trousers, if I like them, I should just be able to reorder them by sort of hovering my phone over a QR code in a label and they should just arrive. There's a weird thing going on where I think a not insignificant proportion of the population has more money than they know what to do with and less time. And we tend to not talk to those people that much, even though we think we are. And then there's a lot of people without that much money who are also quite overwhelmed and probably don't have that much time.

12:44But money is the biggest factor in how they behave. So just coming back to your humping and staying dry quote, you were talking there about things that don't change. You remind me, I think it's the Jeff Bezos quote, isn't it? Tell me what won't change yeah and i'll build a build a business around that what do you think's not changing that we should be looking at and building a business around so taking contrarian point everyone's rushing to do ai what's the thing that isn't changing that if you focused on could be uh an opportunity i mean the the lazy way to answer this question but it's true is almost everything is not that different at all.

13:19Like really. So I don't think there are sort of big obvious headlines to answer this one. Something may come to me later. I do think the question is what's not changing that we're not paying attention to the most. I think if we just presume that most people today are generally living lives similar to the 1960s and 70s and 80s and quite often the things that are in our heads quite a lot are not really that much in the heads of other people. Like, I'm not going to sort of start weird conversations about the sort of movements towards like transgenderism. I'm not going to start things about climate change.

13:56But you have to understand that for a lot of people, you know, they're trying to get by. Again, I'm not here to be the sort of the voice of the North or something. But I think we are quite far removed from the realities that most people have. Most people are terrified to answer the mail. You know, most people, if they see a piece of mail that has, you know, must be open now they're not going to think they've won the lottery they're going to think that they're you know that they've lost their benefits or something and i think we've become we've got really sort of removed from that well one small one that struck me was um hi at denim i don't know if you've come across what yeah amazing yeah built a business on a newsletter and you just think newsletter i mean they're out of fashion when i was starting but yeah you know people what as long as you make good content people are quite happy to read it and consume it i mean all these things are quite hard to talk about in a slightly um slightly rushed conversation because actually like the real value is in the nuance.

14:49Like it's easy to say that everything in the 1960s still works, but the reality is that people are not watching TV in the same way they used to. It's easy to say that if you sort of zig when others are zagging, then you do the newsletter or you do the RSS feed or you do the money off coupon or you do the jingle by being sort of counter to the trend, your win. Everything depends on the very specifics. I guess what I'm saying is we shouldn't go into these conversations with our eyes open to the idea that everything is interesting, everything is different, everything is profound. We should go into these conversations with a sort of deep breath, thinking if I was a marketing director that was 55 years old in 1970 and I looked at this problem today, if I had to give them a briefing note as like an intern to say, just so you know, three things have changed.

15:40Those three things would be surprisingly small. You know, I look at things like the Lunascape. I think it's called the Lunascape, which has got like a billion logos everywhere. And I'm like, there are a lot of marketing directors that are really worried because they think they're supposed to understand this stuff. You know, if you had a marketing director 20 years ago, you wouldn't put a chart up saying here's all the different stocks of paper you can have. Here's all the different types of printing cartridges. This is CMYK printing. This is PAL TV format, CCAM format. This is a digi beta. This is a new type of editing suite software.

16:13It's not our job to be in the weeds. And I think because everyone kind of ignored the Internet, because the entire advertising and marketing world put its head in the sand as the Internet was created. And because for about 15 years we did nothing and we were really ignorant and we were OK with being ignorant. I think ever since then, we've sort of become aware that we have to broadcast to each other in the industry that we get it. and we have to be talking about everything that's new as a way to prove to each other that we haven't fallen asleep at the wheel this time and i think that leads to really destructive conversations and if you go around saying things like things not that different people don't assume you're enlightened they assume that you're ignorant i was just thinking actually is chang what would the system one day to tell us uh has changed that shouldn't change would be probably characters and jingles you mentioned jingles actually so there's been a steady decline in use of characters but They're one of the most effective ways of, you know, making advertising work.

17:09And jingles are a brilliant way of getting people's memories, but they're a bit unfashionable. I mean, you've probably done it at System 1, but if you took some of the sort of classics from our youth and you presented them today, you know, maybe I'm wrong or maybe I'm being nostalgic. But I think the devices like the Nescafe sort of story, you know, the man who loves milk tray story, the sort of simple like tunes like I could do with a D, you know, the print adverts for cigarette brands that are obviously not allowed anymore. Maybe we remember these things because the media environment was much more simple.

17:39Maybe the media spends were higher as a percent. But I think that actually the beauty of a fairly clear message that you reinforce, which is not overly complicated, which is giving people just a couple of sort of, you know, synapses in their head. Yeah, I find it very hard to believe that that wouldn't work these days if you did it in the right way. Two minute warning audience. Think about your questions. So before we do that, just I'm interested in your Scott Galloway. He was at Cannes this year declaring again that brands are dead. Even an article I was looking at last night, he was talking about it again.

18:15Slightly different question. What's motivating Scott Galloway to say that? Because he's a smart guy, obviously professor, well known. What do you think is behind his motivation to declare that? I think people don't realise that this is a bit of a game in a way. I mean that quite nicely. But if you're in this sort of thought leader world, you get very removed from the reality of actually doing people's jobs. You know, like if you're sort of flying around on a nice plane and I'm sort of guilty about this a little bit. You know, I quite often have said things in a tweet and then it's brought up to me the next day in a meeting.

18:49And I'm like, one, sometimes I'm really wrong. Sometimes I'm being unhelpful. And sometimes I'm just being really naive. You know, I remember saying things like there's no such thing as digital. You know, no company should have a digital department. you know what is social media anyway at least you know is youtube social media you know is paypal social media and they're kind of like in the context of like a thought leader-y kind of world they kind of make sense and they're kind of fun and they start good conversations but in the context of everyday jobs you know there's no point in going to png and be like there's no such thing as digital uh because they've got like a whole fucking department called digital um and they're right to do that because that's how you bring new things in so i think these things are best understood by realizing that um he really likes sort of just fanning the flames um what he said is what he generally tends to say rooted in some sort of truth what he tends to say is obviously a simplification um i do think he is fundamentally wrong about a lot of things in advertising and that's because everyone who's not in advertising thinks they understand it you know So if you read enough S1 filings and if you understand how company accounts work and if you understand how boards work, you kind of think it can't be that hard to understanding.

20:08It's just about coloring in. It's just about picking pretty people. And I think there is a real nuance to branding and advertising, which is very illogical. The sort of stuff that Rory Sutherland talks about all the time, the concept of wastage being a good thing. So I think he's deliberately being more stupid than he is because he knows it'll be helpful for him. he's quite a funny he's quite a string amazing thank you cut that bit out but he's a bit producer james have we got a microphone that works as us to go around the audience we do amazing right so your opportunity everybody um hope you got some good questions oh there we go we've got one already this is good this is a good sign we're avoiding that pregnant pause that often happens at this moment where i get awkward do you this would be the hello you got me yeah Hi, Tom.

20:56Bob Wootten. So nice to see you again after so long. You never disappoint. Thank you for flying over. Fantastic. As general kind of useful idiot and retired nuisance of this industry, I have a hypothetical question for you. I am the CMO of a hypothetical large consumer business. How do I tell my C-suite colleagues that the online advertising emperor has no clothes?

21:24our industry has become very tribal um so i entered the world of advertising in about 2002 and we were very closed we had loads of money um we were quite um glamorous we'd have sort of long lunches um we used a lot of sort of mysterious language you know we sort of lived in the world of the myth and of the film and sort of people who are very charismatic that sold ideas and we were a little bit old-fashioned and then the sort of internet came in and they were the kind of geeks and we didn't really like them these are not my opinions but this is how I'm expressing how people felt about it and we kind of thought that they had like tiny tiny media budgets and we didn't really like them and they wore different clothes quite often we thought they were like the IT department and they sort of smelt a little bit and often we'd sort of put them on like the the ground floor.

22:16And then as time, the internet became a bigger thing. So we had more meetings with them. Maybe we moved them up to the first floor, but we were still on the ninth. And then all of a sudden, you know, we had the sort of Facebooks of the world and the Googles, and they had all of the money. And then you go to sort of Cannes in about 2007, and they started taking all the yachts, and then they'd start taking your clients out for meals, and they'd spend loads of money with them. And then they became a sort of threat. And then before you know you are they had all of the money in the world and they had all of the the the relationships and we started to think that we were stupid because we didn't understand anything they were talking about you know they were able to prove things with data they're able to use really complicated terms that we didn't really understand um and ever since then there's been this sort of two tribes and i think we've never really had the confidence to call them out on their nonsense i will publicly say this i despise every single thing about facebook i think every single thing about that company is pure evil.

23:12I think the people that work there are extremely ignorant to the evil that they cause. But they have so much money and they are always making mistakes that are to the benefit of themselves. And they have done this year upon year upon year upon year. And generally speaking, the marketing world is kind of OK with it because one, they sort of take care of us. And I'm deliberately being vague about that. But there's a lot of people who do very well in the industry out of this. Clients do very, very well from the money that exists in that world. And they are able to justify everything with very hard metrics that look good on paper.

23:46So whatever claim it is that you're trying to make, there'll be someone within these big tech companies that can provide the data to show it. And broadly speaking, people are kind of complicit in it because it's much easier to go along with it than it is to disagree with it. To sort of fight and say their numbers are nonsense, to say the last click attribution is a waste of time, to say that the amount of fraud in the industry is much greater than people say, to say that there's never been a single brand really built in a sustainable way, only using digital media. There are all these things you could say, but most people most of the time look at that and they think, you know what?

24:22Like, I'd rather go on a yacht I can. So I'm not saying the entire industry is a waste of time. I'm not saying the entire industry is evil, but I'm saying it's very difficult to start a conversation like that because you're basically going against lots and lots of data and lots of personalities and lots of misaligned incentives that mean it's probably not worth starting that conversation you probably need to start sort of chipping away at it but part of the reason I get very vocal about a lot of this stuff in the industry is I'm surprised at how stupid we are as a whole you can show research for an hour in a meeting to show that click-through rates mean nothing whatsoever and after that hour everyone will agree and then the next person to enter that room will show off their campaign and the click-through rates and everyone has completely forgotten the fact that for the last hour you showed that to be nonsense we are so much in love with things that are logical and easy to prove and not about persuasion but about data and that we have no way to sort of fight these battles unless we sort of succumb to that whole way of thinking so i other than hypothetically you can have it as a sort of intelligent thoughtful conversation but i think in reality it's quite hard to do that um i haven't fully answered the question but i said lots of stuff that was sort of vaguely helpful it's a really good question thanks bro next question good morning kurt edwards you've partly answered the question i'm going to ask anyway but i'm asking as a parent i've got two teenagers and i see firsthand the harm that these social media and the world that these sort kids are drawn into and i'm i see governments and i see media calling these companies out but i don't see enough brands calling them out and i think lush a couple of years ago said we're not we're going to stop social media advertising because we just don't agree with what they're trying to do why do you feel that more brands are just not willing to put their hand up and say look we just don't want to be in this space i mean you definitely are right um and we certainly do not talk about this stuff enough um i don't have kids but i have two um a niece and a nephew actually two nephews um and it's terrifying it's absolutely terrifying i i think because it's not a simple enough thing to to get behind you know if if a if there's a sort of really horrible media channel it's quite easy to rally around as brands and be part of a movement together but i think the reality is that you know social media you could argue includes youtube if you're talking about youtube then we're arguing about wonderful documentaries that people make about you know bedouin tribes um if we're saying that social media is bad we're also saying that you know people that um comment on each other's pictures on instagram to say you know i miss you babe you know you look amazing we're saying that that's bad so i think the problem is that everything in the modern age is so sort of multi-purpose and multi-faceted that it's quite hard to find a particular way to slice through it and say it's bad that's that's that's probably why brands don't want to do that because these arguments either become too simple um and then you miss the target or they become too complex and then everyone gets confused like i really can't stress enough the degree to which in the modern age everything has to be quite simple for people to understand And, you know, genuinely, if you look at a phone, you know, it is a newspaper.

27:40You know, if your kids woke up every morning and they started reading, you know, the New York Times, you wouldn't sort of freak out. The phone is a phone. Like if your kids are texting their friends, then that's a bit like having a phone call with their friends. That's nice. If your friends are playing computer games, a lot of computer games kids play as part of a community. Like it's like going around to each other's house and playing together, but they haven't left the house. but it's really hard because also the internet on a phone is you know giving them things to make them angry and misinforming them and you know making their brain chemistry go haywire like these things are just really complex and if nothing else I just wish that we could talk about these things a lot more and we could be much more open and honest about it okay thank you Oh, three questions.

28:28So should we start here, here and here? Hi, John. Hi, Tom. I had a question on, I guess, what the biggest barrier is when you go into businesses to actually deliver on their digital transformation ambitions? Or what should they agree and stick to from the off for it to be successful? there are loads of barriers um so i can almost go through them in order um the first barrier is they don't want me in there because they don't really want to fix it you know the consulting business is based on not fixing problems it's based on maintaining them for as long a period as possible um under the illusion that they're fixing it so people have hope that one day it'll be solved so one is them actually wanting to hear from someone who might sort of tell them how it is two is these things are all said without any sense of like nastiness by the way it's just how i see things um two is it requires an element of blame probably like whenever we talk about something that wasn't perfect people get very defensive so you need to create an environment where it's very um blameless where you accept the reality of your situation thirdly is it's much harder to find capex than it is to find opex like railways are a very good analogy to this You know, we've got something like the East Coast mainline and the West Coast mainline.

29:43Over about 25 years, we've spent more than three times the amount that it would have cost to build a brand new train line. But because building a brand new train line would have been capex, it's very hard to make that case. So most sort of companies really exist on maintenance. So finding the business case is very hard. It's also very hard to find a business case for something that doesn't really exist. You know, you can't really put into a spreadsheet the benefit of creating something that people don't know to exist. You know, a lot of the metrics you can't really measure. You know, if you say, you know, British Airways is a company that's universally hated, I think, in the UK these days.

30:19And I think most people would agree their customer service is absolutely atrocious. At the same time, EasyJet has an amazing app. Like, I absolutely love flying on EasyJet. The whole thing's beautiful. Also, our expectations are lower, which is a whole other thing. but it'd be very hard to make the business case to be a that they need to change their systems like i'm not you know you could sort of show like call center time being lower you could show that you give refunds to people for their left for their lost baggage more quickly you know you'd probably end up using like nps or something which i think is a complete waste of time so you can basically not really make very good sort of mathematical um you can't really make mathematical sort of um arguments for these things and then the other thing is it's just quite hard and it takes quite a long time and often if these things are important they're actually too important for them to go down for a while while they're doing it so you basically have to build something in parallel then move across so i'm not sort of defeatist in any way but it takes quite an unusual brave company normally someone where there's a ceo at the top who wants to make a name for themselves so it's quite an unusual combination of things and that's why if we look at all of of the big companies in the world and may actually have to figure out which have digitally transformed um i don't think you could make an argument that there's a single one that has you can show that they bought a unit you know hsbc doing first direct first direct still quite cool but generally speaking it doesn't happen thank you uh i think we had a question here didn't we i both um sarah here um i wondered what do you think would need to happen within the marketing profession to have marketers as respected as accountants or legal and should that happen um i'm gonna be a little bit mischievous here actually certainly within the advertising industry which is not being a marketer um i am massively aware of how naive and ignorant we all are but the number of times i've worked on pitches where you know people have looked at the ads you know let's say you're pitching emirates uh you'll have looked at the ads um maybe you've looked at their all chart Maybe you've gone on sort of Glassdoor and read how people work there.

32:23There won't be someone that's read the annual report. There won't be someone that realizes that their entire business is really about the cost of oil. There won't be someone that realizes that actually the really big things for an airline are about international trade agreements. They're about the five freedoms of flying. I say these things not because I'm an expert in the airline industry, but I'm aware there's loads of stuff that I don't know. And when I would sit in a meeting in an advertising agency on a pitch for Emirates, no one would have any interest in this stuff. No one would be figuring out what are interest rates going to do to the cost of buying an A380?

32:59What are the differences between a spoken hub model and a point-to-point model? Everyone will be talking about the hyperloop and people will be talking about flying cars, but no one will be talking about the real nuts and bolts of how to run a business. now marketers are far far far better at that than advertising agency people but i think there are a lot of marketers over time that have sort of moved their shift away from people and being the voice of the people and they've moved their focus away from the operations of the company and they've become obsessed with the sort of marketing chatter so they'd be pretty good on you know d2c brands They'll be pretty good at figuring out the metrics that matter.

33:43They'll be pretty good at knowing conversion rates and LTV rates. And they'll have listened to Travis at Uber. And they'll have been to TechCrunch Disrupt. And they'll know about how Airbnb moved their money to performance, to brand. But I think they've sort of lost sight of the idea that, for me, the role of the CMO is to be the future of the business, to understand the real business problems and to sort of approach business problems from the vantage point of a consumer and more general technology. And I think this is obviously all hypothetical because I don't know many marketers, so I'm not being critical, but I think the more that you can, the more you'll get invited to the board when you have something worth saying in the board.

34:28And a lot of agency people dream of the day they play golf with the CEO of their client. They would embarrass themselves on the practice range. You know, they'd be saying, you know, what do you think of the Super Bowl ads? You know, the CEO is thinking, you know, fuck, you know, the trade show next week and the, you know, the shake of Dubai. You know, they're not going to agree to the subsidy to build the power plant. That's what they're thinking about. They're not thinking about bloody ads. Just to add, I think the three things marketers don't do, they don't represent the consumer in the business well enough.