The Startling Power of Surprise with Adam Morgan

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0:38All right, without further ado, let's go on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now, two years ago, Adam Morgan and myself were on stage at the Cannes Lion Festival talking about the extraordinary cost of being dull. Well, little did we know that we hit a nerve in the industry by illustrating how much money people waste every single year making advertise that people basically ignore. Now, since then, we're going to think about what is the answer to all this? And we've come up with an idea, surprise. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about the startling power of surprise, why it matters and how to do it.

1:11So here we go.

1:18adam welcome back to uncensored cmo thank you very much indeed a returning guest of course i know i know i think it's my third time indeed yes i should do a hall of fame i think for the fantastic returning guests but um look uh we're on stage weren't we in can two years ago presenting the extraordinary cost of being dull which as we know is inspired by some work you and peter did putting a monetary value on dull. And it seemed to go down all right, certainly based on the number of presentations you and I have done in the two years since. I never thought in my career that I'd be going around the world telling people how dull they are.

1:53And then paying you to do it. Yes, I know. It's just like an extraordinary outcome. It's a great model, I think. It's a great model. But as you reflect back on that talk two years ago, what were the kind of surprising outcomes? Well, I think one of the things I've been really gratified about is the deep level of interest in it. So for instance, I'm meeting up with somebody on Thursday who's been replicating this in Canada and exploring kind of the data in Canada. We've got a lot of interest in replicating it across Asia with a couple of partners. I think Australia have been doing some work on it as well as some interest in France.

2:20So there's a real interest in the substance, which I think is great. But one of the other things I think that has been surprising is it's quite hard to tell, isn't it? When you put something out like this in the world, it's quite hard to know what your audience is making of it. And you and I went to speak to a very nice group of people in a pharmaceutical company in the States last year. And we gave our presentation with passion and energy, as we always do, to this audience who appeared entirely impassive at the end of it. Didn't laugh at any of our jokes. And it was quite funny, I thought. I thought they were funny jokes.

2:50Didn't laugh at any of it. Didn't appear to have any kind of reaction. Didn't really follow up in any kind of way. Thought that this hadn't landed in the right way at all. and then find out a few months ago that made a huge impression and encouraged them to produce a new, startling, surprising Super Bowl ad that had landed really well. So it's quite hard to tell exactly what ripple effects you're having, isn't it? Yeah. And it was a surprising Super Bowl ad, particularly given how conservative the pharmaceutical industry are as well. That was very surprising. A similar experience, actually, because we also went to a major global restaurant chain down in L.A.

3:24and had a great time there and got a message from one of their, this was a kind of global meeting of their CMOs. And one of them messaged me a few weeks later to say, oh, by the way, I'm setting up my own agency and my mission is to defeat Dull, inspired by a presentation. Fantastic. So even birth creative agencies on a mission to take the insight and run with it, which is great. Well, and I know you're a big fan of the cows statistic that we came up with. And I always love the fact there's an Australian marketer who's picked up that notion that, you know, a film of cows for chewing grass for whatever it was, 20 seconds, beat 50 % of the system one ads that they tested.

4:05She now has this expression, beat the cow. Suddenly she briefs her agencies with, which sounds a bit weird when you talk about it. But I like that idea of beat the cow as the bar that you're trying to kind of, you know, overcome. Well, that was a good, I mean, it's your idea, by the way, and thank you for that idea, because I think it was the absolute genius. And it became the image, I think, of the talk, didn't it? Yeah. The picture of cows. And then what was surprising was quite how many ads it beat. So the system when we test pretty much most TV ads that air in the UK and the US, and we put that 20-second film into test, and it beat 50 % of professionally made, high media spend, global brand advertising.

4:44And that was a shock to people, wasn't it? Yes, it was. It was. The other surprising thing, actually, the work that Karen Nelson Field has done as part of our collaboration, because there's a collaboration, you, me, Karen, Peter, and obviously starting to involve other kind of conversations as well with people like Orlando and Rory, is the work that she did on the cost of dull media really startled me because I never imagined that media could be dull. and it was her who opened my eyes to that. And the sheer waste from the apparently responsible investment in cheap reach turning out because it's so dull to have no impact whatsoever.

5:20That's the bit I find most shocking actually in all of it. So it's been a really surprising and shocking journey for me as I've gone on. I love Karen's work so much because as soon as you see it from an attention perspective, it changes everything in terms of how you approach media. And then you combine both insights together you know the compounding effect of dull media with dull creative is just like well the compounding effect negatively but the compounding effect positively yes if you can address high attention media with high attention creative you get this incredible multiplier effect as well which i mean you know who can afford not to yeah entertain their audience on the right kind of right kind of platforms no i agree and i think peter and karen are doing some work on that at the moment aren't they on that multiplier which would be fascinating that would be fascinating Right.

6:05Now, one thing I got slightly hooked on, and I know we've talked about this a lot in our presentation, was a 1972 paper, which this is like just before I was born. So I'm having to go back just before I was born. A guy called Murray S. Davis. And it was fascinating, wasn't it? It was called That's Interesting. And he looked at what makes something interesting. What was the finding in that? Because that's almost the genesis of the idea that we took on, isn't it? It was. So, Marius Davis was a sociologist professor, I think, at Northwestern in the States. And he looked at what he called the key social theories of the last hundred years in 1971, ranging from Marx and Freud all the way through to Marshall McLuhan and R.D.

6:46Lange, and looked at what made them still current and talked about and kind of vibrant in culture. And his conclusion was it wasn't just because they were true or not. it was because they were interesting and what made them interesting was that they denied key assumptions that we held about the world so you know disgust is repressed desire is not what we thought about the relationship with disgust and desire uh for instance and and and all the way through you can see it in a in the more modern as it were marketing theories you look at you know peter and les's work about actually we kind of thought it was all about successful communication was all about getting the message right it's actually about emotion right well okay wow that challenges my assumptions um how brands grow you know if you want loyalty by a dog you know that challenged our assumptions about it so you can see that even flowing through now and so that notion that actually surprise isn't just about a narrative twist it's about challenging assumptions in a more fundamental way i think was the birth in many ways for this project that you and i have been doing on surprise and i i did love we used it an example didn't we the orange ad from the women's euros a couple of years ago such a clever example it's one of the most surprising ads on the System on Database because what they did is they created this incredible film.

7:57I think it was about two minutes long. And you think you're watching the French men's team score the most incredible goals. The crowd are going wild. The commentators are falling over themselves. You know, it's just spectacular goal after spectacular goal. And then halfway through, they do this kind of rewind effect. And what they show you with CGI is that you had been watching the women's team. They just superimpose the men's faces onto the women or the men's head onto the women and then suddenly that's the rug pull and you see it in the graph on the system one chart suddenly you get this happiness everyone's celebrating the goals and it's replaced with this incredible level of surprise as people realize that actually the assumption you're denying is women's football is not as good as men's yes that's not true they they proved in the most dramatic fashion on the most you know uh on the biggest stage possible and there was a strategic problem that was addressing which was french media channels weren't showing enough women's football because people didn't respect it in the same kind of way.

8:55Absolutely. So surprise as a strategic solution to a problem is such a fundamental idea for us I think. It is. So this brings us nicely onto Cannes this year and this episode is going out just after we do our talk so good timing. Why are we on stage talking about surprise? We're on stage talking about surprise in part because it's a continuation of this particular project. And by the way, we should possibly also talk about your confessions of dull bit as part of this at some point, because I think that sense about why are people, in spite of all their good intentions, allowing themselves to be dull, I think it's in part because they've not entirely understood some of the key levers at their disposal to stop themselves being dull.

9:34And I think our view is, isn't it, from all the research we've done, is that marketers are getting surprised or wrong. They're thinking of surprise as an entertaining narrative twist, often in a commercial of some kind or as some sort of something in experience about a little thing surprise and delight a little free packet of biscuits on that you're going to get but essentially it's something you leave to the experienced creator or the the creative director they're not thinking of it as a key strategic tool in their armory to fundamentally change the way that we think about their brand or their category and that's I think what we're trying to put right yeah now what I love about the way you come at these questions is you don't just think like a marketer do you you're thinking about how other people in other categories you know far away from advertising what where are the some of the source of inspiration that you've got on the question surprise yeah well so so i mean as you know i as part of my podcast let's make this more interesting i've been looking at people as you say outside marketing and so for instance if you talk to simon peacock who's the director of assassin's creed and a kind of professional improviser he says as a performer you recognize that all audiences whether they understand it consciously or not they they crave surprise interesting word crave surprise maz farrelly who i know you met in australia when you were there recently fantastic reality tv show producer you know with 30 plus years experience she says i condense all that experience about what makes fantastic content down to three things it's make me laugh make me cry surprise me so these are experts in engaging audiences with high commercial outcomes to that engagement or not engagement who understand that surprise is absolutely critical and if you look at other things like magic right surprisingly critical so there's lots of things around us as human beings we understand the importance of surprise on and yet somehow somehow we're not making that connection into um into this it's a very interesting thing i don't know if you um saw that thing by mr beast you know who's you know the youtuber par excellence talking about kind of what he does and why he does it and he made a very interesting comment the other day about you know he said he he saw this ted talk about um uh you know purple cows and how you know if you're going along and going through a field you don't notice any kind of normal cows you see a purple cow you remember it he said that's how i think about things i'm always trying to produce the unexpected in my shows and purple cow of course it's a seth godin concept you know so so the the ultimate entertainer on youtube has borrowed a concept from marketing about surprise making himself absolutely massive and his show is absolutely massive and yet marketing is not learning sufficiently from that i know it's really interesting i think yeah and going back to data for a minute as well um so i spent seven years in total at system one and almost exclusively talking about the power of making people happy yeah because the general idea the more you feel the more you buy and the correlation between happiness and long-term brand effects is very strong but if i'm honest if i look at the model surprise is a key contributor to the star rating and the spike rating the system one would do i mean we used it in our talk for extraordinary cost of dial and i realized we'd hardly ever looked at the role that surprise has in creating emotion creating attention creating memories and it's such a we talked about such a powerful device but we hadn't really quantified it before and why is that do you think i it's probably the i think going back to your les and peter point landing emotion as the way people make decisions rather than rational thought is a big insight.

13:02That's denying a key assumption. And System 1 was, even the name, was built on using System 1 over System 2, which is the Daniel Kahneman idea, isn't it? All about how emotion drives behavior. And the biggest single emotion that delivers that was happiness, how you feel at the end of an experience, you feel happiness and so we got fixated rightly so i think at the time on that bit of the equation and but all along surprise accounts for around 11 of all emotions captured over you know hundreds of thousands of tests so it has a really big role to play and a positive role to play as well in both short and long-term uh effects so i think that's why i was so keen to do this and um let me just throw a couple of extra data points in as well because orlando provided some data that he had done with youtube using lumen so they were looking at the ability for uh different features in advertising to capture your attention create emotion the device that caught attention the most as he described it was something out of the ordinary yeah that's surprise that's a type of surprise isn't it yep now if you go from tv oh this is youtube go from youtube to tiktok as well there's a new bit of research coming out uh around can as well the creative effectiveness playbook that's with wpp tiktok and system one brand new bit of research that also has something out of the ordinary what it found is not only did it hold attention and emotion but had by far the biggest impact on recall and memory yeah after exposure yeah so it seems to be from different data points we're getting the power to capture attention and create emotion but also to be remembered which kind of figures right we remember the things that we felt something in response to so some good data there yeah in support well and i think one of the things i like about that is it kind of fits you know on the one hand you've got the kind of the neuroscience and now we're fitting the marketing science to it so you know you and i've both spoken to rory about this where he makes the point that our brains are prediction engines effectively and that we are you know constantly trying to have a predictive model of the world.

15:05And so when something unpredicted happens, A, it focuses our attention, B, we remember it more because that's how we kind of survive. And there's lots of science around that. You know, the fact that surprise has the ability to have a multiplier effect on emotion by up to 400%. The fact that when an unpredicted event happens, we get this chemical called noradrenaline that spikes in our brain that imprints on our memory. And what I love about it is, and we can now sort of marry that neuroscience to the work that's coming out of Real System 1 stuff and say, actually, it's not like something strange is happening, something exciting is happening out there, but it's not replicated in the marketing science.

15:38These two things fit really closely together. We can't ignore this anymore. There's a fascinating insight, though, isn't there? When you say, I mean, Rory is on the money with this in terms of our brains, our prediction engines. That has such big consequences. And I know one of the things that when you presented, when you showed me this research, it really grabbed my attention was Rolf from Schultz, I think about 2016, produced a study. and it talked about something called reward prediction error yeah that actually our dopamine hits are as a result of our expectations of an experience yes rather than experience itself now the the example he gives um it was an experiment done with monkeys and uh these monkeys were being fed some juice and when they first got the juice they saw this dopamine hit so the monkey drinks the juice feels the you know feels dopamine hit and they measure that reaction in the brain and then they noticed something happen that the dopamine started when the light went on and anticipated the experience the juice and then they then went on to experiment with just turning the light on and not delivering the juice and then they saw a negative dopamine hit it went the other way so what they discovered from that actually is our experience uh or the dopamine experience is a result of the variance the prediction of the event itself which i think is fascinating because you think about the role of advertising the role of advertising is to set up the prediction yeah and the role of the brand experience obviously is to deliver that yeah so we're in the business of creating expectations and of an experience and then how that's delivered the variance between those two things is where the dopamine hit happens yeah so surprise can go both ways absolutely in terms of being positive and negative absolutely can when you've got an Interesting example from Ryanair around that, haven't you?

17:24This is funny. I know. Well, of course, I was looking at you. Actually, let me just explain one thing first. So I just test this out. I thought, OK, if our experience of a product in terms of how it delivers versus our expectations is where surprise comes from, I should be able to go into the System One database and look at all the reasons for surprise and find evidence of brand experience. And I did. And it was really interesting because we looked at every reason given for surprise, categorized it, and looked to whether it's positive or negative. And here's the interesting thing. So the number one most positive reason, by far, was the product experience exceeded my expectations.

18:06And the number one negative, by far, was the product experience under-delivered my expectations. So as marketers, we're rubbish at managing all four Ps. You know, we need to make sure we manage the product experience to be as good as the promotion experience and join those two things together. Now, that brings us to Ryanair. Because having been inspired by that, I thought, let's go and find great examples of where, you know, brands deliver amazing experiences and you can find loads of them. But Ryanair do the opposite. In Ryanair social media and in their advertising, they intentionally tell you how bad the experience is going to be.

18:41I mean, Rory was talking about this the other day, joking about, he said, I don't fear going on a Ryanair flight. I fear the 24 hours before I go on a Ryanair flight being told my baggage is too big and, you know, having my expectations managed. And that's the thing. I mean, Ryanair, they have this kind of mean tweet approach. If anyone complains, they kind of go, what do you expect for$17.99? Or did you really want a window? You know, you buy a seat, not a window. Someone complained that they got a window seat and there's no window. They even announced they were going to charge for using the toilet.

19:12Yes, I saw that. Which is crazy, isn't it? They had the, I think, I assume this was spoof, but they had standing seats. Where basically you stood up and just got belted in because you could fit 30 % more passengers on that. And so are they engineering an above expectation experience effectively? I think so. I think they're taking their positioning of ridiculously low cost. and managing your experience so low that when you get on a Ryanair flight, you go, oh, it arrived on time. People are quite friendly. I could buy a drink. You know, the seat was plenty big enough. And I think it's just, it's this reward prediction error.

19:49They're just managing expectations so low. Really interesting. So you actually think the real experience is not too bad. So Ryanair and RPE is a case history waiting to be written. I think so. I think so. Yeah. Now, of course, Ryanair is the negative example of surprise. But the positive example, actually, is someone I met last year, Will Godara, in his Unreasonable Hospitality book, talks about the surprising power of giving people more than they expect. A couple of simple examples. So he believes that when you sit down for a dinner, you want to serve someone as quickly as possible with something.

20:23Because that bit where you have to wait for the menus and wait to get something is a bit awkward. So the waiters and waitresses had signals. so when they took your which water would you like still water sparkling tap behind their back they'd signal to somebody else who would bring it immediately as you worked around the table and people go it's like magic I asked for the water and then there it is and then at the other end of the meal when the check arrived he would open a brand new bottle of cognac and say take as long as you want and feel free to enjoy the entire bottle now he says in however many years of being a restaurateur, only two or three people ever drunk the entire bottle.

21:06But the memory it created of getting way more than you expect, because he said, look, the, you know, the negative surprise of a big check at the end of a meal is not what you want to leave people with. So his thought was, how can I surprise people with generosity at the end of the meal, when, you know, potentially they could leave going, oh, that was a bit expensive. Well, then there is a lot of evidence, isn't there, that what happens at the end of an experience is disproportionately important so that that kind of overwrites your other bits of the memory so so sort of fizzling out at the end of something is not a good idea even if you had a fantastic experience but actually if you have a sort of mediocre experience and then one really good thing at the end clearly he's having great experience overall but for the rest of us is disproportionately important so i think that's really interesting that makes a lot of sense the peak end rule i think they call it don't they yeah let's talk about types of surprise because i know peter fields has done some work on this hasn't he so not all surprises delivered in the same way yes so peter did some very interesting work um looking at um kind of different types of surprise that showed up so from you know breaking to booze for instance all the way through to surprising uses of media extreme humor and that kind of stuff i think part of what our work has been said so let's take that a stage further and think about two different kind of families of surprise effectively because we want to make it useful useful and used right we the whole point of the cost of dull is not simply to stick a sharp stick in people's ribs but actually to say here are some questions to ask yourselves and to make it useful so we're looking at two different families of surprise which we're calling the short O and the long O or the short O and the long O maybe I think it was your idea wasn't it so the short O are kind of surprises that are kind of narrative surprises or surprises in the way kind of a brand sort of shows up that don't change our the way that we think about them particularly but grab our attention imprint that expense on our memory just just kind of gives us a higher sort of share of mind about them.

22:54The long O is actually to do with surprises that really change our perception of the category, the brand, the possibility of the category for us. So let's just look at each of those briefly, right? So a couple examples of the short O. So the short O might be sort of factual surprise. Oh, I didn't know that. I mean, you first talked about this. So your guest on Chili's the other day, right? He talks about the that chilies sells more margaritas than anybody else in the uss or 25 market 25 million margaritas a year you know oh that's kind of interesting i mean it doesn't completely change my relationship with chilies but it's kind of a okay i just think about them in a you know slightly different way and journalists are really good about this as well so if i said to you you know do you regard yourself as being very wealthy what would your answer be uh medium i'll put myself in the middle of the there you go there you go but you know as you know elon musk has become the world's first trillionaire so when a journalist says to us actually you are you john are closer to wealth uh closer in wealth to bill gates than he is to elon musk it's just a kind of surprising fact you go oh okay i don't know if i felt better or worse about how i or do i feel sorry for bill gates now poor guy you know he's practically broke um but that's just kind of a short o so it just kind of wakes me up a little bit but i mean short o is obviously in um sort of the way that advertising works kind of narrative twists it's interesting to see how that works with things like um So my dentist, for instance, my dentist is a comedian.

24:19Who knew? My dentist says things like, you don't have to floss all your teeth, Adam, only the ones you want to keep. OK, so that is a little narrative twist. It's a short O, you know, which is how comedy works. Right. I set something up. I go the other kind of way. But you can see it in what's called chaos packaging now, which is people starting to package things in different kinds of formats. You know, you might say this is an interesting format, perhaps for Jimmy's Ice Coffee. I wasn't expecting to see it in a tin in that kind of way. You might say the gin that is packaging itself in a petrol can, for instance, does it really kind of make me think differently about gin?

24:55No, but it makes it stand out on the shelf in a different kind of way. So you can see lots of shortos working like that. And I suppose, because I think we see quite a lot of surprise from kind of challenges in, and we'll come on to talk about brands like Aldi and Elf, for instance. But so luxury, I think, is really interesting to look at challenges in. and Loewe is this Spanish luxury brand and I saw the CMO on stage last year talking about the fact that they realised they couldn't just show up like a kind of classic French luxury brand and of course craft is important and they pay attention to the craft but just kind of revering all the kind of traditional sombre things that French luxury brands do.

25:30So one of the things they very famously did was they chose Maggie Smith as one of their kind of brand ambassadors which was entirely unlike the rest of that particular business and interestingly they chose her But at the same time, as a bunch of other, perhaps more predictable brand ambassadors like Josh O 'Connor and Greta Lee, but it was Maggie Smith that really spiked in terms of how people paid attention to that. We're doing some work with a very interesting kind of social tracking company called Weirisma that are looking at how you measure the kind of ripples and spikes from the unexpected and that.

26:00So a new kind of collaboration out there. So I think that's a very good example of the short O, the unpredictable, the surprising, not really changing your view massively about something but just getting your attention definitely one of my favorite examples actually from the last super bowl so there's a streaming platform in the u.s called to be and they specialize in kind of more specialist kind of content so you can in fact their positioning is all about going down rabbit holes so pick anything you want so whatever your particular interest is that there's a hundred kind of specialist dramas or horrors or whatever that can meet your fantasy and they were thinking how do they use surprise to cut through on the Super Bowl and so what they did is you know during each quarter you cut back and you have the commentary from the kind of commentators and then you have the ad breaks and so on and so what they did they collaborate I think it was Fox who were running the running the Super Bowl coverage that year they collaborated with Fox and they created a 30-second scene of the commentators reviewing the game but then they then they made it as if the channel had been taken over and it had been and it'd been switched over to 2b all right so what happened is you're watching this the commentators are chatting and then the menu pops up someone clicks on 2b it goes to a horror film it starts playing a horror film and what happened is in front of you know 110 million people or whatever there was in the super bowl this year everyone went into meltdown and people were picking up their remotes trying to like get it back what's happened people people are on you know on x trying to go what's just happened and who's who's you know taking over my channel who sat on the remote yeah it went wild and i just thought what a brilliant example of surprise yes and also delivering your key message which is tubi's got some horror films or tubi's got some entertainment you know whatever so i thought it's absolutely brilliant example of creating surprise on the biggest and they also timed it for the final quarter when the game was very tight very good and everyone was on the edge of their seats trying to work out who was going to win so very good it was i think it's one of the favorite examples i've ever seen well that's interesting isn't it about the location of surprises we were talking a bit with your will godara thing early on about the location of surprise is really important perhaps we'll come on talk a bit about that later on i think that's fascinating which is again it's this thing about being strategic about not simply what the surprise is and why you're using but where it shows up and how it changes your perception about the other things around it I think.

28:22I wonder how much surprise is intentional because if I think about Jaguar I think the Jaguar relaunch was I mean well documented in terms of the reaction billions of views around the world enormous engagement and I think it denied people's assumptions of Jaguar because people had an assumption of Jaguar as being you know an older man's car you know kind of like history heritage a certain driving experience a certain look and feel a certain aesthetic and they launched something very futuristic in pastel pink in Miami you know so they they challenged our assumptions as to what a car launch should look well what a car launch from Jaguar should look like yeah and that got huge attention yes you know but both positive and negative probably more negative than positive in fact but surprise probably was the thing that got people engaged well that was interesting wasn't it because it wasn't resolved as a surprise.

29:19It opened up a new possibility that was going to be resolved at some point in the future. Well, and recently now, right? You've been a part of that kind of resolution and seen it. And maybe that was the thing that made people uncomfortable, which was an unresolved surprise in that kind of way. But they needed to leave it open because they needed to make us open to what they could do. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, so they're good examples of kind of short-term hope with dramatic effects. Give me an example of a long-term O. Yeah, so I think there are two. Let's just focus on two examples of the long-term O.

29:54And this really is the O. I hadn't thought about it like that, really. So there's two. So one is, I think, I hadn't expected you to do that or I hadn't expected you to do that for me or allow me to do that. So you look at what everybody's constantly being surprised about AI. You wouldn't believe what AI allowed me to do, right? That is the long O around AI. But I think, for instance, you look at HSBC and what they did a few years ago, and they did their program Banking the Homeless. I was talking to Becky Moffitt, who's the UK CMO, about that and saying that actually that did more to change consideration for and the relationship with HSBC than a lot of the advertising that they'd been doing.

30:38because, she says, you know, there's this very sort of negative media narrative about big banks in the UK. They don't expect them to do things that are selfless. Here they are doing something that's genuinely, why would they get any commercial thing out of that? They're just doing it as a good thing. That in itself, I think, was kind of a long, okay, fantastic. A bank does that. That's great. And then I think the other one that I really like is kind of I hadn't thought about it like that. I think the thing that Specsavers did around hearing aids in Valentine's Day, which was they showed this very sensual ad that was talked about, a relationship aid, and you think it's going to be some kind of sex toy, and it turns out to be a hearing aid, based on a real insight that, of course, actually one of the things that goes with hearing loss is the relationship, because that sort of intimacy disappears.

31:28It was just a really great way to reframe a source of embarrassment, I think, in a really interesting way. and then of course you know there are companies that use surprise consistently like aldi and like elf you know and you've done a lot of work with corian elf obviously uh who do that do that much more systematically and um you know perhaps we could we'll discuss that in a minute in some kind of way but i think that's really interesting what they're doing it is aldi have been tremendously successful successful i know particularly in the uk market by challenging our assumptions on the quality of what they sell.

32:02And I think they've been brilliant. I mean, champagne is a good example, isn't it? They seem to double down on exceptionally good, award-winning champagne,$11.99, which is probably about half the price you'd get something anywhere else. So that's a really good example of where they thought about products, haven't they? And how can they deliver, how can they challenge your perception that Audi low price means low quality? And in fact, one of their, as well, that people assume that talking about price is not emotive, But actually, the Like Brands campaign they started that with 10 years ago is five-star on System 1.

32:33Is it? Yeah. So they show you a premium, expensive, branded. And then the old lady reveals it. And behind there's the Audi one that's about a quarter of the price. I like this, but this is better sort of thing. I like this as much, but it's only 39p or whatever. And that was a five-star ad. So you surprised. Oh, I wasn't expecting it to have a cheaper product behind that's just as good. Well, I had a very interesting conversation with Kirsten Halley, who until recently was the CMO of Aldi, about what they did and how they approached it. And one of the things I asked her was, so, you know, so what's the secret for a marketer and using surprise?

33:09And she gave me a gratifyingly surprising answer because her answer to what's the most important thing, how a marketer uses surprise, was rigor and discipline. Which is not what you expect to hear, right? You think it's going to be about improv or something. Have a great creative kind of thing, all that kind of stuff. Because her point was, if you are going to match Waitrose on the quality of mince pies at Christmas, which is going to be surprising for half the price, if you are going to produce lobster tails for£5.99 and therefore make people think, oh, Aldi's not just for the basics, it's for the special stuff as well.

33:39These are big, you know, strategic shifts you are trying to kind of create. Even, frankly, if you are going to offer, you know, scuba scooters and kayaks in your centre aisle on Thursdays or Sundays, that takes a lot of rigor and discipline. It takes the different departments working well together. You have to plan it a long time out in advance. You're going to produce a Mint Spy that matches Waitrose for half the price. You've got an engine. It takes you quite a long time to construct that. It's a really deliberate, long-term strategic play. And she said, you need to do it consistently because you can do lots of them.