What the marketing industry is truly terrified of - Tom Goodwin

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. episode a little bit more relaxed than normal but a good one all the same hope you enjoy so tom good to see you again very nice to be back in fact it's almost deja vu isn't it like almost the same place it's it's remarkably similar it's quite a nice way to make comparisons i guess between times before so what's happened the last year then uh for me or in the world well maybe both start with you um with i've been launching my consultancy uh so i'm now getting stuck into what we have is now which I think broadly best explained to this audience would be how do you take advertising thinking and apply it to really meaty business problems you know if you're a pharmaceutical company how do you move from the business of making and selling pharmaceutical medication into sort of digital products and experiences that allow you to make money on a reoccurring basis if you're a department store you know what on earth do you do if you're a car company and you have to sell through car dealerships how do you manage that you know what do you do about up and Chinese makers how will EV propulsion change the industry so it's kind of taking an advertising approach to the kind of situations that management consultants only a small handful of small problems and not not you're not gonna talk anything big it's um it's amazing how big the problems are and I'm lucky because people come to me because they like my altitude of thinking and the degree to which I can be quite provocative and as part of that there's a lot of honesty required and when When you do speak to people who are remarkably senior, it's extraordinary how directionless some of these companies are.

2:03And in a way, I think that's a big theme to the world right now. So to sort of move on to the sort of broader part of your question, I think in the last year, people have been quite lost. I think there's near endless talk about the next big thing and how everything's different and how the pace of change is faster. And I think in some industries, that's very much the case. but in others the kind of principles and the foundations of what we do have not really changed that much but people don't realize that and people are getting whipped up into a frenzy well this is a good question because um just to drop this into conversation but we're talking to smart and sorry yesterday we did a live thing at can i said to him what's the one bit of advice you'd give your younger self your younger self and he said he he's he said he's underestimated the significance of the change that's about to happen i mean he was talking about the invention of the internet you know 30 years ago and he was saying like with ai he said he he thinks despite the hype we're underestimating its significance i mean you are much more likely to be commercially successful if you put out messages that say everything you know is no longer relevant this thing is coming and it's extraordinary and by the way i have the solution ready to go as it happens i've got this amazing 12 sort of slide PDF that's going to give you all the answers.

3:24So I think, especially from a position of threat, like a lot of what I see these days, it's not people saying we have this extraordinary tapestry of brilliant devices and amazing data and brilliant people. And we can now do all of these wonderful new things. Let me help you create these new things. It actually tends to be very fear based where people are saying unless you have a blockchain strategy you're screwed and i think what we've seen in the last sort of three years are a whole series of chapters of fear that ended up changing nothing you know last year when we discussed can we were talking about how silly nfts were how stupid web 3 was um how naive a lot of the cryptocurrency provocations were and i kind of knew at the time it was all silly but people took it to heart and people spent a lot of money on these things.

4:14And it turned out that was kind of a waste of time. AI is not going to be like that. You know, let's be clear. But I still think the nature of the conversation should be much more about positive things that we can do to be positioned better, new possibilities that technology opens up. And it should be sort of focused much more on consumers and what's important to them. And we probably talked about this last year, but something that's notably lacking in every single discussion that you see at Cannes is any sort of focus on normal people and the environment in which they're doing their best to live, the huge fears they have about the amount of time that their families are spending on devices, like a really strong sense of concern about their everyday economics.

4:56You know, everything from sort of political polarization to wealth and income inequality to, you know, rising interest rates to the cost of food. I don't think anyone on any stage has even sort of thought about that. If you've got a spare£10 ,000, you can get a ticket to your palate, right? I can do my bit to help inflation. And I don't sort of say that in a preachy way. I just think, you know, the role of a marketer is incredible. And ultimately, it's the only role in most organizations which represents the consumer. Ultimately, I can't remember which management consultant I'm quoting, but ultimately the role of any business is to create a customer.

5:38And I just think it's a little bit strange that we lose sight of that and we tend to get obsessed with technologies. I mean, our job should be first and foremost to understand the customer, understand what it is they need and provide a solution to that need. I mean, in its most basic sense, that's what marketing is. And I do worry that, you know, you go around the festival and you just see incredible demonstration of creativity. But it's incredibly expensive and highly produced and involves the most talented people on the planet sort of thing, which most marketers and most people don't have access to.

6:09Yeah. I mean, I do think one of the interesting things about AI is it actually allows amazing creativity to be embraced by much smaller companies. You know, the wonderful thing about social media is it democratized access to proper advertising platforms and proper data, you know, for a small kebab shop or for a hotel with three outlets to a tiny sort of car repair company. And I think the way that social media democratized access to advertising will see some elements of AI help democratize access to really good quality advertising. And interestingly, I actually think that means that for most of the people in Cannes, that actually won't make any difference to their job whatsoever.

6:50Like if you're making ads for Nike, like AI is not going to change that much. If you're working on the P &G account or Unilever or doing the ads for Amazon, like it's a nice little thing, but it's probably not that significant. And one thing I want to make clear is, you know, so Martin is interesting to talk about how much change there has been. And that in some ways is true. But we never focus on all the things that remain the same. You know, I'd love to know your perspective on the amount of change that we've seen in the industry and what we're getting right and what we're getting wrong and how can makes you feel in that regard.

7:24Well, it's funny, actually. I mean, if I just put a day job system one hat on, some of the most successful campaigns that we find haven't changed at all. In fact, I mean, we have this kind of phrase, familiarity breeds contentment. And actually doing the same things that work again and again is competitive advantage, which sounds like the most insane thing ever. I wrote this column the other day for Marketing Week about an experience when I was on Ribena. And it was a classic scenario, right? So, you know, we're there. Well, actually, the context is quite important because we're about to we had to reformulate the brand because the government was juicing a sugar tax.

8:03And we were over the amount of sugar. You're allowed to surprise. Yeah, exactly. Two or three times. You know, it's quite significant. And so we thought, well, we better come on the new campaign. We distract people, you know, we'll come up with a new campaign and all this sort of thing. Well, we then slip the formulation into the marketplace. and um it was on those classic examples where we'd you know we spent months on the campaign i mean months and months you know evolving the creative creative idea you know putting its focus groups i just you just had a feeling it it was okay but it wasn't going to be absolutely spectacular and where this debate you know me and the brand team and they're like look we've got my decision because we're running out of time now you know there's a date when the formulation is going to change and i thought geez how do we get through this and i just said a simple thing i said tell you what let's use the system one test right that's what it's there for right let's just see what our audience think and they're the only people that matter you know exactly and the simple benchmark was why don't we test it versus last year's campaign now i didn't do the previous year's campaign i joined in in between last year and this year so i'd know i i literally had no allegiance to either one either one route and so i said well put put the last year campaign and let's just see and the funniest conversation i have with the team is the results came back and they said oh good news bad news i'm like okay well give me good news it's the highest scoring campaign ever on the system one database the one that had run last year it was like five and a half stars or whatever i'm like this is amazing so what's the bad news well we want to make a new ad and and we've told everyone we're making a new ad i'm like okay we'll tell them that the old one is the best one ever and we'll do that again.

9:41Oh, no, no, no, it doesn't work like that because everyone's expecting a new campaign. You know, all our retailers expect a new campaign. You can't go to retailers and go, oh, we're going to do the old one again. I said, yeah, you can. Go and tell them that not only are you got your campaign, it's proven to work and you might want to give a bit more space on your shelf because do you know what? It might just sell more, you know. I think you're getting, with knowledge, you're getting to the heart of a hypothesis I have, which is that we're kind of terrified that people will think that we're not busy and that we're not getting it.

10:13You know, like it takes a lot of balls to say, do you know what? We're going to do a TV campaign. We're going to have an amazing jingle. We're going to do a long rabbit in there. We're going to do sort of long copy outdoor. We're going to have quite a simple media plan. You know, we might use social media and not have a sort of competition metric. We might just have really beautiful images that sort of work well. I think people are terrified within the industry. It'll look like they're not working hard enough. It'll look like they're not reading the press enough. It'll look like they haven't learned enough.

10:46It'll look like they don't get it. And I think almost everything I see these days in advertising is people within the industry looking at each other. And going back to what Sir Martin Sorrell said, the internet did kind of take us by surprise. And it's taken a remarkably long time for us to really digest what that means. We still haven't got there, by the way. But I think there is a reaction to every new technology now, which is because we were too slow to the internet, we're going to make sure that never happens again. And we're going to make sure that we're there talking about, you know, stochastic programming.

11:15We're going to make sure that we're on stages talking about, you know, real-time bypass in microchips that allows AI. We're going to make sure that we sort of really arm ourselves with the weapons in the words that we use to make sure that no one can accuse us of being too slow. And I actually think that's creating a massive disconnect between the advertising that will work, the advertising that people understand and the stuff that we spend all of our time doing so i wonder if it's as simple as the annual planning cycle i mean it's a really odd thing this but like in marketing you know you come up with annual plan and every year you feel obliged to change what you're doing it's just a bizarre thing so you've got the agency going oh what's our brief for this year and sometimes the brief this year should be what we did last year just a bit better or a bit more or and also what it's what you do with the time that that would liberate so if you know what works spend your time on the stuff that doesn't work or do you think marketers get i mean do they get bored or are they just worried okay yeah yeah 100 okay well another quote system one again another bit of research is last year actually we we partnered with a very very big global brand and we looked at five years of their campaigns um we happened to have five we had i think over 100 of their campaigns on the database going back over five years and we decided to retest all of them and what we were looking for is you know as you do you know just as experiment but we want to i mean everyone should be doing this surely yeah but what we want to know is does the creative impact wear out over time does it wear out based on how much spend there was does it wear out because it's a different time of year you know we just wanted to change the variables and have a look and see what it did it was shocking results because in every single case it's a born in people liked it better it's quite awkward isn't it i know it's just like imagine making a car and then sort of figuring out that the sort of uh you know the ford capri was a better car yeah than the latest ford mustang we'll freeze it there right that's gonna be the car forever wait a minute people used to be better at their jobs and there was only one exception and the only exception which again won't surprise you was um in this particular category case they sponsor sporting events right so when they when their commercial was linked to that sporting occasion right so the russia the russian winter olympics i think was one of them or something unsurprisingly the score went down because it wasn't relevant anymore but all the non time specific bits of creative the scores had all gone up i think it's incredible i mean there's there's a big thing there i'm always amazed by how often companies rebrand um and often in quite subtle ways and you do tend to think you know what like brands are so important and they're very weird because people really don't care but they kind of also care enormously and there's a very weird sort of paradox there but i think if if the goal of a marketer is to get like a couple of sort of you know brain synapses aligned in a certain way and no more than that you know they just need to know that the tires that are made by you know continental are not crap they don't need to know like the brand story and the provenance of the rubber and you know how the design came about they just need to know they're not crap tires and if they you know if their if their son or daughter has a car accident that's going to be something that wasn't part of it and that means that the the notion that these things need to be consistent and stable and confident and broad and sort of heavy and and simple those things feel like very logical things to me but the entire industry seems to be going the other way you know continental now would probably try to have like one-to-one conversations with brands and have like a have a sort of fifth generation tire compound which is 10 better in the wet corners 15 quickly there's so much sort of desire to to make everything complicated i'm but i think that this is the going back to disconnect between the consumer and us is is that we are so close to our products and we we think our amazing features and benefits need to be understood by everybody as you say whereas most people want an easy life they want simple i think easy is probably the biggest competitive advantage out there that no one seems to grasp.

15:14And easy in everything. You know, product ranges, I think, should be quite simple. I think sort of price points should be quite simple. I think the idea of sort of good, better, best is one of the most underused elements of marketing. I think customer service could be incredible. Like I look at something like AI, and I think actually this is a remarkable mechanism by which you may one day, you know, perhaps in 2072, you'll be able to email British Airways, and they might be able to reply to that you know maybe within 24 hours or something i mean maybe maybe if if sort of uh you know quantum technology gets to that level like they'll be able to reply i'd quite like them to connect my loyalty card number to the flight i actually took oh that's on the roadmap for 2090 so i mean but the the weird thing about these things uh and i'm sure rory sutherland talked about this this stuff really matters and i'm sure within the corridors of of their offices they kind of know it kind of matters but they kind of can't really put any um sort of cost benefit analysis to it like they sort of assume that a tv campaign with this weighting will get this sort of uplift but you could never really figure out what happens when you just stop miserable people like me complaining about british airways on twitter always all my best-performing tweets are me saying i can't believe how bad the british airways website is and there's there's no way to obviously i'm not important enough to to be um you know detracting from the brand but it is one of those things that actually impacts the way that people choose their flight and it's it's unbelievably interesting to me how essential customer service is and how no company on the planet almost without a single exception ever thinks of it as something worth investing in it's always a cost well i was on the other day with um ironically the owner of the local restaurant in the village i live in a lovely lovely guy and and he's he he travels travels that must have amazing life actually he's got hundreds of thousands of air miles and um he just said i cannot possibly there are no qualifying flights anywhere i want to go at the time i want to go where i can redeem any of this he said if anyone wants to buy them off me i'll be quite happy but it's like not only does the app not work you know it doesn't even get the the points right and then when he's got a load of points you can't even spend them yeah these things are very they are one things yeah and uh you know i think i might have said this last year actually but i wish there was a sort of can award for the best sort of e commerce experience which allowed you to send back a parcel and sort of track it like i'd love there to be a sort of beautiful packaging slip i'd love there to be um a reward for the hotel that lets you sort of pick the room on the corner um even by paying sort of a little bit this is a good conversation because we're here at the festival of creativity yeah the world's most you know celebrated yes what are the what are the categories that are not captured at can that should be captured um i mean customer service is the big one i've had these discussions over a number of years and every time it means that I'm less likely to speak in the main stage of campus because they really do hate me now.

18:05But this festival started out being about advertising and then over time it became about creativity. But realistically, it's only about creativity as displayed by advertising agencies or maybe media agencies if they're allowed to stick their name on the submission or clients in their marketing department or ad tech companies. so there's no sort of creativity about an amazing uh i don't care rental company that's refurbished its um sort of waiting rooms like there's no can award for um the fastest checkout experience that just sort of blows your mind with how beautiful it is you know i think that creativity is everywhere like um it sounds tiny but you know like payment terminals like whenever you sort of pay with sort of apple pay you kind of get like there's the noise um which always sounds like it sort of hasn't really worked like like who's going to get the award for sort of making the sound and the payment terminal sort of go like you know to mean that you've sort of successfully paid like how can you sort of create like um like a like a banking experience which feels quite nice how can you move your flight on british airways just by sort of glancing your finger across the screen you know these things for me are actually much more important these days than advertising and they involve both engineering prowess, but also empathy and also imagination and also ambition.

19:26And I kind of look around the entire world and I think, actually, you know, why is the experience of choosing how to send a parcel abysmal? Why is the experience of trying to tell your car rental company that you might be a day late? Why is that so incredibly painful? Because actually, these things really matter. The category I'd love to create for Cannes would be the zero budget category ah that's nice yeah yeah because i you know i walk around and i i feel very envious because clearly the the people had a big big budget and the production is beautiful and it was superfluous the advertising was superfluous to the core brand idea or campaign and you know i thought they must have found a few million spare down the back of the sofa to put that that together and you know whereas actually i would love to do something with there's a startup that had no money and they came out with a really creative idea and everyone's talking about them now that would be great that's that's really inspiring yeah yeah i mean even things like sent from a blackberry that's probably one of the most like successful marketing campaigns ever and it must have cost zero i mean just someone typing out sent from a blackberry that's really nice i mean for me creativity is all about constraints actually um and if you've got a really sexy brand like your job's a lot easier you've got tons of money your job's a lot easier it's actually you know how can you work on you know switzerland's third largest adhesive brand you know how do you sort of make that quite fun like how do you sort of sell you know parity products in a way which is unexpected yeah like without much money yeah i think it'd be far more exciting you know maybe we should invent that um create that they then have to spend a ton of money on that i noticed these days the case study videos are absolutely extraordinary yeah so like it couldn't be someone with no money it would have to be someone with 25 000 but only to spend i've realized the floor in my idea actually is that People with no money haven't got money to come out to the festival and to sponsor the category that means it would be affordable enough.

21:19It should be done. Yeah, maybe they should make it free of charge then. Maybe we'll go to Margate or something. Out of season. February and Margate. There is always this funny thing about Cannes where you come to one of the most obnoxiously nice and wealthy and excessive place to talk about stuff which in theory should be about cost effectiveness and reality. And I think there's always quite a lot of tongue-in-cheek things said about how this should actually happen in Scunthorpe, and then you'd really see who wants to talk about advertising. And it's kind of weird to me that it stays in the same place.

21:57It does. For me, a lot of creative is about experiences. I think it was probably invented here before anyone realised how big it was going to be. I mean, you wouldn't pick June, would you? Like, really hot, you know, south of France. maybe it's just maybe it's just big i live in miami this is like a cold day this is yeah exactly i've got a coat in my bag rory said actually when he came on he said he arrived four days early just to acclimatize yeah it's like altitude training cost an extra four days in the carlton i don't know if we're allowed to talk about this but you've now done a lot of podcasts what's the most fascinating revelation that you've you've had from it i mean i have to say i think what Karen, we were talking about this before actually, what Karen Nelson feels doing with attention is genuinely quite mind-blowing.

22:42So, I mean, just to give the background to what she's doing is that she's worked out that, I mean, again, the best things are the simple things, right? She's worked out that what you pay for in terms of display advertising, in terms of advertising and the reach, number of people that see it, versus the attention that's actually achieved. So, you know, some platforms are better than others but she's measured actually whether people, you know, how much of an ad people watch, and how quick the decay is. With eye tracking or something? Yeah, I think she sends kind of these devices out to different people and then measures what they actually watch.

23:15And what I find fascinating about that is there's an enormous difference depending on the platform and depending on the creative. But you get this extraordinary difference in performance. So, I mean, we did this experiment, actually, at System 1. Not with Karen, actually, with someone else that does something similar. and we look there was like a 12x difference between a i guess what you call a low attention platform and a high attention platform right but then there was another three times difference on top depending on how good the advertiser the creative itself was right now i know this is obvious right i mean you and i would intuit this wouldn't we we just kind of instinctively know but the issue is that you know uh media planning has been based on reach and frequency which makes an assumption that every opportunity to see is the same and it's vastly different and you sort of and once you get your head around that you look at it go wow actually that completely changes how you might want to buy and sell media so you really should buy media based on who's seen it not based on who could see it and the difference between those two is like dramatic so i think that's um that that i think was probably the most sort of like profound yeah something i didn't know that i sort of thought oh it's a good example of how um intuition these days has been sort of discounted somewhat where you just knowing that something is a good idea yes um after being in the industry for 20 or 30 years and being demonstrably good at your job that's discounted i invented what i think is uh my theory of the marketing bottom yeah so basically someone who doesn't work in marketing i'll describe this my mind went to a very different place okay basically what happens is and it takes about 20 years to draw this okay um so basically before you go into marketing you instinctively know yeah whether something's a good idea or not yes are you going to buy it yeah that's why you came into marketing that's right yeah but you go into marketing and you start to learn a lot of stuff that is absolutely bonkers yes and you start to make decisions that are not what you would have done had you been a normal person yes and you get this like rapid decline yes in your in your ability to make sensible decisions well of course i need a 360 integrated campaign and you know of course i need to do you know of course my brand must have a TikTok strategy.

25:21So you end up doing these really stupid things. You also get completely removed from what it's like to be a normal person. You're no longer a normal person. You're going to like Sainsbury's and looking for Ribena on the shelf and like thinking all day about, you know, the sort of brand onion for Ribena. Well, you do. That's right. And actually your thoughts on, you know, shoe polish or shampoo are actually more interesting in that situation because you can look at them like a normal shoe. Precisely. You got it, right? So basically we unlearn everything as marketers. And then our ability to make decisions is disastrous, right?

25:51And then what happens is you discover this thing called, you know, books or theory or marketing science. And then you begin to sort of piece it back together. And eventually you get back to a level of understanding at which you started, which most people take almost a career to achieve. I think the sort of paradigm of data being really cheap generally and everywhere has also done a lot to accentuate this bottom where you now almost have to use data to support any argument, regardless of how logical or illogical it is. I remember towards the time that I was sort of leaving one agency, having a client where I almost felt like I'd need to present her with data to stop her from putting her hand in a blender or something.

26:36You know, like I'd have to do a sort of focus group to decide if it was a good idea or not. And I think it's quite strange, because actually a lot of data that we have these days, I don't think is that helpful. Often it's measuring completely the wrong things. And often it's very accurate. And people love really accurate data, even if it's actually got no sort of meaning whatsoever. Like Google search results is quite a classic thing for me, actually. You'll see sort of Google trend lines to show that, you know, in the fifth round of the, you know, Democrat candidate elections, this person's skying high on Google search.

27:08And people seem to think that means they're popular. And I always think, actually, that just means they don't know anything about this person. and they decided to do a search to find out something about them. That's sort of showing a mixture of sort of curiosity divided by current interest, which is actually a sort of remarkably unhelpful parameter, but people love data like that. I remember doing a Google search, it got quite similar to that, and it showed this perfect downward trend in this particular topic. And, you know, going down to nothing, I'm like, this really proves my case. And then I looked at the y-axis and the peak was 80 people.

27:42and if it's helpful then you can keep that i just hide the access yeah i was gonna say if no one asked then it's fine there's been a catastrophic decline in people searching for my brand it's down by like 5 000 80 people in 2003 no but like people love that stuff you know like even like time spent on a website like we don't really know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing like does that mean that they were um sort of lost does that mean that the website was slow or does that I mean, they were loving the times walking around different aisles of a website. It could be the experience was so bad, they just couldn't find what they're looking for.

28:12Yeah, it could be like a newsletter sign up. Actually having, you know, the shortest possible time website could be good if it's getting them to where they want to get to. I think so. On my book website, like I've designed it to be the fastest website you could ever buy anything from. And yeah, it's fascinating. I get loads of emails every day saying it was the simplest website ever. And that's because I don't want people to do anything other than buy my book with Apple Pay as soon as they can. The thing I hate is the gate. You know, you read something and go, there's a really fascinating study on this particular thing.

28:40You look it up and it goes, please provide 15 lines of data about you before you can download it. Well, you know you can just put anything in those. True, yeah. On almost all of them, you can sort of fill in, you know, FU or FU.com. Is there an auto generator? This is a good use for AI. Yes. AI, please. So which work that you've seen here, are you most jealous of the fact that you didn't do oh that's a good question i tell you what now i mean i knew unusually because i used to make work and don't make work so i probably look at it through a slightly different lens but um apple did uh apple was shortlisted for titanium uh now apple's unusual because i'm not a big fan of apple advertising generally because it's it's usually way over products it's usually just products over everything else it's like here's a beautiful shot of our phones, camera, close up, you know, that kind of thing.

29:29I always think sometimes if Samsung did Apple advertising, people would really pan their advertising. Yes. It's only because of Apple that they get like a free pass. No, it's true. Same with Nike as well. It's a weird, Nike and Apple, the two brands that seem to sort of disprove everything, you know, and Red Bull. Red Bulls defy everything as well. But Apple's titanium ad this year is actually very, very good. And it's because they've done something about disability. So it's got some good purpose to it. It's beautifully shot. But the reason I thought it was interesting was it just shows how much of a trend there is with the kind of thing.

30:01Because it's almost identical to a Microsoft ad from five years ago in the Super Bowl. And it's one of my favorite ads of all time. I mean, if you go to what ad would I wish I had made sort of thing. And it's probably the – there's only two ads ever that have made me well up. I won't say cry. I wasn't bawling. But maybe kind of tear to my eye kind of thing. And this was one. And it was a very simple one. You've got this dad and the son, and the son's severely disabled. And what Microsoft have done is invented a games controller that is enabling this boy to suddenly enter a world that he couldn't enter before.

30:37And the point that got me in this ad was that the dad said he's not disabled when he's playing with the Xbox controller or whatever sort of thing. And I thought, wow. Now, I know that was a big demonstration of a product's idea, but they've made it really useful and really life-changing. you know in that particular thing and i've never forgotten it you know it just stuck in my head but it reminded me because the apple one the apple ad is very good it's quite similar to that but it's but it made me realize that microsoft ad five years ago wouldn't have gotten here an award so it's interesting isn't it that you know the fashions change in terms you know i guess we're all about a lot more about purpose we're on apple's budget genuine genuine okay so another another another interesting thing here is i i the other day i wrote down the five most creative things I think I've done in my career.

31:23And none of them had a, well, the top four almost didn't have any budgets. The fifth one had a reasonable budget, but even that budget was a fraction of the total budget that I had available to me. And interestingly, even with that one, it was a shot to nothing, as in I had some money left over and I said, let's just do something and we just decided to do it. So actually I wouldn't want money. I think budget, big budget makes you lazy. it makes you I tell you what I've noticed actually because weirdly in my career I've had no budget I've had small budget and I have a big budget the interesting thing is I notice what everyone does is they spend based on their budget they don't go what are we trying to achieve what's the best way to achieve which would be obvious they go well we've got 10 million what does 10 million get well it gets us 20 weeks on TV it needs to be big you know yeah exactly which is lazy you know it's a fascinating thing to think about though isn't it like how could you change that and I guess to some extent And that's how budgeting works, where the CFO will sign off on a certain amount of money per campaign.

32:26I've always had this very weird thing where half the clients I've ever worked with, if they put money behind a product or a launch and it went very well, they would then make an argument to get more money to support it. And half of my clients, if it went well, would cut the money because it was already working. And they would do the opposite, where if they started to launch a product and it wasn't working, They'd then sort of pull back the budget because they'd say it's not working. That's fascinating. But if you go on the basis and nine out of ten products don't work in the long run, if you get one that works, like, go, go, go.

32:59Yeah. This has always been odd to me. You pour as much as you possibly can behind it. Tell that to some of my old clients. Yeah. Actually, one of the best books I read, which you might have read as well, is A Great By Choice, Jim Collins' book. And the lovely idea, he calls it kind of load the cannon, but the idea that you fire bullets, because innovation is risky. I mean, there's loads that will fail. But he basically says, once you hit the target, put all your resources behind it because you've already proven it's going to work and literally fire the cannon. I think in these days, when you hit the target, people then think, oh my God, we're amazing at shooting.

33:33Let's keep shooting. We should move the cannon somewhere else. Let's buy a different cannon. Let's shoot over there. Let's go shoot over there. We're amazing at this. We can shoot anything. And what happens in that situation? But then in that situation, you get so busy that you end up, the thing that's working ends up getting drowned out. Again, I think a lot of this comes down to a bit of sort of discipline in a way, really. Like I have this sort of mental experiment in my head where I think if you got like an incredible marketing director from the 1950s and you sort of parachuted them into today, they would probably have a horrendous time.

34:04But they would probably be amazing at their jobs today. Like they'd probably be able to understand, oh, so what's this whole Internet thing? OK, so it's a bit like digital display. It's a bit like display, but people can click on it. OK, that's really nice. You know, let's let's do something a bit like this. They would be amazing at their job. My colleague Orlando is hilarious on this because he's basically used art history as a reference point for today's advertising. And he was talking in his Cannes presentation about 17th century Baroque art. And he categorised it basically into sort of display advertising all the way.

34:38And you look at it and you go, it's exactly the same. I mean, obviously, it's a different media. but the style when you've only got a limited amount of time versus when you know and the way they valued art which basically is equivalent of valuing a display ad versus tv i mean it's funny you look at them side by side and you go nothing has changed really i mean you know the technology has moved on but actually as human beings the value we place in you know say for at the top you know uh you know a romantic scene with lots of you know kind of lots going on is yeah exactly exactly it's kind of like that's amazing whereas the basic you know buy from here 15 cent or whatever is you know it's not worth much yeah that's amazing i think um i like how you talked about value there because i think somehow the industry feels quite small at the moment and it feels very fragmented and i feel like a lot of it is based on this idea that we're kind of you know targeting people it's very sort of aggressive language there's no sort of seduction There's no sort of explanation.

35:40It's always sort of getting at people. I feel like the whole industry has become very dismissive of the value of a human being's attention. I actually think the media has become way too cheap online. I've been saying that for like 15 years. And therefore, we're not really having sort of particularly sort of big conversations about it. We're not really respecting our audience. We're not really assuming that we make something that's worth their attention. We're assuming that they're not going to notice, but it doesn't matter because it's cheap. And every year the Super Bowl happens in America and everyone goes bananas about all the ads.

36:16So the ads are generally big and quite often amazing. And it's always weird for me that for the Oscars and the Super Bowl, everyone cares about advertising, makes great adverts, assumes that people likes the adverts. The ads seem to perform very well. And then like a week will roll by and we'll just be seeing the same sort of crap out there. Half price deals. We've got the data to back this up, actually. So the equivalent of Super Bowl in the UK would be Christmas. And we actually track the number of new ads that get released, the quality of the ads, and the length the campaign runs for. So no surprise this.

36:52The most amount of new ads at Christmas, the best quality of new ads at Christmas, and they're the shortest campaign duration. So it's basically saying we do our best work, We spend our biggest money and then we cut it and we stop it. You know, exactly. And the same thing as Super On The S. So it is true. We seem to do our best work and then forget about it. It's quite inspiring in a way to know that we can do this. And the weird thing is relative to the cost of media, like creative budgets are quite small. So actually, I mean, I would say this coming from a creative agency originally, you know, the cost effectiveness of spending 50 % more on an ad that is noticed, you know, three or four times more.