Tom Goodwin | If You Dropped the Best Marketers of the 1950's Into Today's Environment, How Would They Do?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: CMO Confidential – Tom Goodwin | If You Dropped the Best Marketers of the 1950s Into Today's Environment, How Would They Do?

Host: Mike Linton
Guest: Tom Goodwin
Release Date: August 19, 2025
Podcast Network: I Hear Everything

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Episode Overview

In this enlightening episode, Mike Linton welcomes back Tom Goodwin—a leading marketing futurist, author, and agency veteran—to explore the provocative question: What if the best marketers of the 1950s were dropped into today’s hyper-complex marketing environment? Would they succeed, or be completely lost? The discussion sharply contrasts the fundamentals-driven approach of legacy marketers with the data-obsessed, tech-forward focus of today, highlighting how the marketing industry might benefit from rediscovering its roots. The conversation also ranges into topics like measurement mania, the performance-vs-brand debate, the hype around AI, and even why beauty (and packaging) still matters.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Premise: 1950s Marketers in 2025

• Main Question: If top marketers from the ’50s entered today’s landscape, could they thrive?
• Tom’s View: Modern marketers are obsessed with the "new and shiny" (tech, instant data, micro-targeting), but many have lost touch with timeless marketing fundamentals: segmentation, proposition, business strategy.
• Quote:

  “We’ve become so obsessed with everything that’s different and technologically sophisticated, a lot of people in the industry have no idea what those fundamental foundations are…” (Tom, 03:04)

• Argument: Once the ’50s CMO caught up on the tech basics, their grounding in fundamentals might actually allow them to outperform many current marketing leaders.

Then vs. Now: A Question of Altitude

• Depth vs. Breadth: Past CMOs had to think broadly about the total consumer journey, product development, culture, and brand. Today’s marketers are often forced into the weeds of tech and data minutiae.
• Mike’s Observation:

  “The expectation now is that you will understand everything—because the consumer is there. Thirty years ago, nobody cared if you understood paper stock; now, they think you have to know everything.” (Mike, 07:11)

• Tom’s Take:

  “There’s a race to be more technologically proficient… people are now getting in the weeds to the point where very few marketers feel they have the time to focus on consumers and what makes people buy.” (Tom, 05:01–07:11)

The Two-Playbook Tension: Performance vs. Brand

• Startups vs. Legacy: The marketing playbook has been heavily influenced by growth-hacker, DTC startup culture—short-term, performance-driven, hyper-measured.
• DTC Trap: Most DTC brands, Tom notes, have negligible market share and often lose money, challenging the notion that “new = better.”
• Quote:

  “It may well be that the fundamentals we’ve learned over 300 years of marketing are actually a better playbook than the tactical, channeling, micro-targeting, personalization that smaller companies use.” (Tom, 10:24)

• Mike’s Reflection:

  “Folks have lost their way and are refining the front end without paying attention to the fundamentals in the back end.” (Mike, 11:35)

[11:38] - Concrete Examples

• Tom lists brands (Casper, Ridge Wallets) as cautionary tales for growth-at-all-costs, and highlights how “wastage” and broad reach are actually strengths for bigger traditional brands.

The Tyranny of Measurement & Short-termism

• Investors and boardrooms now demand rapid, measurable results—reinforcing a focus on tactics over strategy.
• Tom’s Critique:

  “Everyone’s now moving toward short-term metrics—they want everything attributed. You can improve the metrics long enough to find another job, and then building the brand becomes someone else’s problem.” (Tom, 16:00)

• Mike’s Warning:

  “The advice in there is: know what you’re getting before you take the job. If you’re a long-term builder, you may not fit.” (Mike, 16:50)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

The Cannes Lions as Industry Metaphor ([17:26])

• Role of Cannes: Nominally about creativity, but now more a “fear of missing out” fest for tech solutions nobody really understands.
• Tom’s Shot:

  “Clients feel vulnerable if they haven’t heard of a new ad tech company with a funny name… Cannes becomes a place so people aren’t vulnerable to missing a trick.” (Tom, 20:27)

• Mike’s Sarcasm:

  “The industry is there patting itself on the back for how good it’s doing, when the boardroom doesn’t really care.” (Mike, 19:56)

The Limits of Data-Driven Marketing & “Dark Social” ([26:51])

• Concept: Most meaningful customer conversations and influences are invisible to marketers (“dark social”).
• Tom’s Explanation:

  “Probably 0.1% of conversation in the world actually happens on social media… When all we do is look at the data we have, we skew our strategies around a really small set.” (Tom, 26:51)

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Hot Topics Explored

Personalization vs. “Relevantization” ([25:26])

• Exposing the absurdity of hyper-personalization (“serve me more toilet seat ads because I just bought one”) and suggesting moderate targeting and broadly appealing creative might work better.
• Linton’s Aside:

  “Second time toilet seats have been used on CMO Confidential as an example!” (Mike, 26:31)

The Real Potential of AI and Agentic AI ([29:21])

• Tom pours cold water on the hype:
• Quote:

  “Agentic AI is being used as a magic wand… it doesn’t really work. It offers huge security risks, and no one’s really shown it working in the wild.” (Tom, 31:15)

• Mike compares the hype cycle to Web3 and the smart home, both of which under-delivered.

Realistic Industry Predictions ([32:48])

• Tom predicts that not much will change dramatically in the next 12 months, except perhaps for emerging home robotics for higher-income households, but cautions that societal divides may deepen.

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Practical Advice and Stories

On the Power of Beauty in Marketing ([37:03])

• Tom’s Resounding Point: Packaging and aesthetic beauty matter more than marketers admit.
• Quote:

  “Packaging is one of the strongest levers we have… what if brands started to think hard about how to make things beautiful?” (Tom, 37:03)

Lighthearted Moment ([38:30])

• Tom’s anecdote: Wrestling a self-driving car in San Francisco that tried to "eat" his luggage—an emblem of the oddness of technology transitions.

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Key Timestamps

• 02:05-04:39 – Why marketers have forgotten fundamentals, and the ’50s marketers’ hypothetical journey.
• 05:01-07:11 – Then vs. now: breadth of CMO jobs, tech distractions, and fundamental grounding.
• 09:38 – Summing up the evolution: modern marketers start with details, old-schoolers start with fundamentals.
• 11:38-14:36 – DTC brand performance, performance-vs-brand playbooks, clickthrough fixation.
• 17:34-20:27 – Cannes as a “FOMO” industry show, and why creativity awards may be missing the real challenge.
• 25:26 – Dangers of hyper-personalization, rise of “relevantization.”
• 26:51 – “Dark Social”: Most real influence is invisible to measurement.
• 29:21-32:23 – The reality (and limits) of agentic AI.
• 37:03 – Practical advice: The neglected power of beauty.
• 38:30 – Tom’s funny self-driving car story.

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Conclusion

This episode serves up a provocative, nuanced, and often contrarian view on the evolution of marketing, the unhealthy obsession with measurement and technology, and the enduring (and underappreciated) value of fundamentals and beauty. Marketers stuck in tactical trenches are prompted to reflect: are they missing the forest for the trees? And would their predecessors school them if given the chance? The answer isn’t simple, but the conversation is timely, thought-provoking, and—true to Tom Goodwin form—never dull.

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Transcript

[A]

The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential.

[B]

The podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the Head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton.

[A]

Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer, Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, ebay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com here today with my guest, Tom Goodwin. Today's topic if you drop the best marketers from the 1950s into today's environment, how would they do now? Tom has been studying innovation and change his whole career. He started in the agency business and held positions as the Head of Innovation at Zenith, the Head of Futures and Insights at Publicis, and the SVP of Strategy and Innovation at Havas. He's a prominent speaker, wrote a book called Digital Darwinism and publishes Nowism. We've had him on several times during our three years worth of shows and always appreciate his provocative challenges to conventional wisdom. We're going to do more of that today. Welcome back, Tom.

[B]

Thank you for having me back.

[A]

So, Tom, let's start with the thinking behind the title of the show. We Pluck somebody out of one of the great marketing companies in the, in the 50s. Tell me what you're thinking.

[B]

I mean, this sort of comes from a walk with my puppy. I was with my puppy one day and everything that was moving, the, the puppy would chase after every leaf, every squirrel. And it made me realize we're, we're. We're completely programmed instinctively to look at things that are different. And we spend our entire lives talking about everything that's different, everything that's moving, everything that's unexpected. And over a period of years, the jobs that we all do have become so obsessed with those new and shiny things that I think we've completely forgotten about all of the fundamentals on which our job is done. I'm a big fan of Mark Ridson. You know, he's a fairly good friend of mine and his course, the mini MBA has done extremely well across the world. And if you look at the Mini mba, which has performed extraordinarily well. And I don't mean this disrespectfully, but a lot of the concepts in it are sort of fairly basic stuff. You know, there's the sort of principles of marketing. You know, they're the sort of need for segmentation, there's a need for a proposition, they're the need for a kind of business strategy. You know, you look at things like retailing and how do you increase the frequency of purchase. And it sort of dawned on me that we've become so obsessed with everything that's different and everything that's shiny and everything that's technologically sophisticated. I actually think a lot of people in the industry have, have no idea what those sort of fundamental foundations and logically competent things are to do. We've become so obsessed with sort of immediate performance and hacks and a fancy kind of retargeting message that, that we've sort of forgotten those principles. So my kind of question really became a sort of theoretical exercise, which is, if you went back 1920s or 30s and you got the CMO of deers or Pear soap or Coca Cola and you put them in a meeting room today, you know, what would they think they'd be? They'd be so sort of perplexed at how immediate everything is. They'd be so sort of confused as to why we couldn't rely on our instincts to do our job. Well, it. It would just be this really extraordinary thing to. And the sort of assumption is somehow that they'd be bad. The assumption is that because they hadn't seen TikTok, you know, they wouldn't understand the cultural zeitgeist. The assumption is that because they don't know the latest technology with DMPs and DSPs and they don't know how retargeting works, that they do a bad job. And I guess my kind of contention is maybe they would do things that were really important, really well, and maybe we'd end up in a situation where we'd end up learning more from them than we expect.

[A]

And beneath that statement would be, once this CMO from whatever brand you want to pick from long ago got up to speed on technology, they would do excellent or maybe even better work than a lot of the CMOs today because they were way more grounded in the fundamentals of the marketplace. Am I getting that right?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I have this big question I always wonder, which is about the altitude at which we should do our jobs. So it's very easy to Go around on the conference circuit and people will say that the pace of changes faster than ever before. People will say our jobs are more complicated than ever before. People will say we need to know about stuff that's much more sophisticated than we used to. I don't know if that's true. I mean, be interesting to get your opinion, Mike, actually. But you know, when, when a CMO did their job in the 1990s, you know, media was fragmented because we'd all be watching different TV channels. The act of making an ad was quite complex where we'd have to use different edit suites and different editing tools. We had pal, we had ntsc, we had C Cam. If you did printing, you'd need to know about paper stock. You need to know bleed, you need to know about CMYK printing. Like it was possible in the 1990s to get involved in all those details. But you didn't because it wasn't your job. Your job was to be the cmo. It was to understand the consumer. It was to work in new product development, it was to understand the broad cultural changes in the world. It was to look at things like packaging. You know, the CMO job in the 1970s, 80s, 90s was a sort of broad job. And now there is this sort of race to be more technologically proficient to the point where people are now getting in the sort of weeds of, you know, I don't know, third party data policies or the latest update From Google with V03 and AI generation of video. People have become so obsessed with, with understanding the weeds that I actually think very, very few marketers feel like they have the time to take a step back and to focus on consumers and to focus on competitors and to focus on what it is to be alive today. And how is it that we make decisions about what to buy? How is it that, what is it that a product does that makes us feel more loyal towards it? I think the whole conversation has become transfixed by this kind of real time news landscape where people feel vulnerable unless they've used the latest version of Grok.

[A]

I'm halfway with you on this. I would say, you know, we've had a bunch of people on the show saying things like the CMO job is, is the hardest job in business. And what I will say is I do think the fundamentals are the same, but the difference from long ago and today is the consumer now has access to all that stuff into the company and the brand. And so a lot of the things you didn't have to pay attention to, like Paper stock and everything else you actually have to pay attention to because the consumer's there. And the other thing that has evolved, I think, is the expectation of you as a marketer that you will understand this because the consumers there, when, you know, 30 years ago no one really cared whether you understood paper stock and now they think you got to understand everything. And so it's interesting, halfway through it.

[B]

It'S interesting because technology has become a boardroom conversation and in the past it wasn't like that. So it would never come up in a kind of monthly board review to talk about paper stock, but people might talk about AI. I mean, to be clear, I'm not saying that the role of a marketer has not changed at all. I'm saying is it easier for a really good marketer for from the 1920s to learn what's different and to realize the new parameters around advertising on TikTok or influencer marketing or retail advertising? Is it easier for someone competent in the past to learn those new things than it is for someone who's a growth hacker and who's excellent at retargeting and can do brilliant bidder rates? For them to learn the principles of marketing to some extent, it doesn't really matter which is easier. The question is how do people spend doing that? How do people broaden out their experience to have a holistic view?

[A]

I agree with this. Let me, let me see if I'm getting this right because I will say what you just said is it depends a lot on where you start. And I think what you're saying is a lot of today's marketers start with the detail. Yes, they are putting a super fine point on the detail and they're not starting with the fundamentals of the marketplace. They work their way back sometimes to the fundamentals or sometimes they're managing the details. And you're saying if we went back in history that people would start with the fundamentals and work their way to the details. Is that a fair discussion about how things have evolved?

[B]

It's precisely like that. That was a much better job of summarizing it and structuring than I did. I mean, the other thing is, you know, we are being made to become jealous and to try and learn from a whole sector of business that has not necessarily performed that well. So if you work at Nestle, you're sort of supposed to look at an up and coming direct to consumer brand like Poppy and then sort of learn from them. If you work for sort of Marriott, you're supposed to feel envious of Airbnb, you know, the sort of, you know, I think of it as two tribes. There's effectively sort of traditional companies that have deep expertise, perhaps a lot of staff, perhaps long, long reputations have been built over a long time. And then there are these technology startups that have started in the last sort of 20 years. And every single catego is a bit of a battle between them. You know, who's going to win between Sketches and All Birds, who's going to win between Away Luggage and Samsonite, you know, who's going to win between Monzo and Chase. And the assumption has always been that these technology companies would win. And they, everything that they do is better. You know, the way they spend money on media is better. You know, Ridge Wallets is better than Louis Vuitton. And I think we might have to come to the conclusion that actually most of these companies are not doing that well. You know, your average direct to consumer brand has an absolutely minuscule market share and the average direct to consumer brand still makes a loss. It may well be that the traditional playbook as used by Heinz and as used by Nestle and Master Foods and Chase, it may well be that the fundamentals that We've learned over 300 years of marketing have actually ended up being a better playbook to start from and than the sort of tactical channeling, interest, micro targeting, personalization and so on that smaller companies have used.

[A]

And one of the things implicit in that I would say is, and correct me if I'm getting this wrong, in your mind, the speed of measurement, which, where you can measure stuff in really minutes, hours, and the demand for instant results from a lot of investors, including, you know, PE and, and other folks are also forcing marketers to do the short things and only focus on things they can measure. You know, we talked about this in previous shows, but this is kind of folks have lost their way and they're refining the front end without paying attention to the real fundamentals in the back end. Is that fair?

[B]

Yeah, almost for the same reasons. I mean, the reality is the contemporary playbook has been created by companies that didn't have that much money and needed to return capital pretty quickly and needed to show growth rates very fast, and they needed to optimize against that. And if you're, you know, a company that decides to give me a couple.

[A]

Give me a couple examples of that.

[B]

I mean, almost every direct to consumer brand would be an example. You know, sleep 8N 26, you know, ro health 1 medical, you know, Casper Mattresses, you know, Ridge Wallets. You know, Ridge Wallets is a company that spends $50 million a year on Facebook advert do an amazing job of sort of expanding from a niche out. The problem with these companies is there hasn't been that much proof that a niche direct to consumer dog food can actually ever get to the point where they're big enough to make money. It's interesting because, you know, effectively we are at this time where there are these two playbooks, there's a sort of growth marketing performance playbook and then there's the sort of traditional marketing playbook. And traditional marketing playbook will do sort of broader media. And for me it's the sort of point pointless dilemma or it's a pointless tension. The, the question is how do traditional companies who spend a ton of money learn from the performance playbook without giving up everything they stand for? You know, the reality is that wastage is a good thing. The reality is that you don't need people to click on an ad for it to be successful. The reality is that in the majority of categories click through rates actually correlate with no meaningful business outcomes. And again, it's really difficult to talk about this stuff because I'm not saying that click through rates are a waste of time and they don't matter. What I am saying is for the majority of clients that people in advertising work for, it doesn't matter. The average client that an agency will have will be a company that's spending 10 million to a billion and they will be a company that cares about their brand and they'll probably be a product or a service which is not primarily transacted online as well. And this assumption with measuring everything we can do, even though that's not how people work or how people buy, is part of the big problem here.

[A]

But you're also implicit in that is the pressure on the marketer today from everything from the media, from the board, from the investors, from their own peer group, at all the get togethers, the conventions or whatever is to conform to this versus to go back to the fundamentals. And is that right? Is this like there is no counterpoint available or what's really going on? Because you see everybody in this space.

[B]

I think we're kind of getting towards the really unfortunate realization which is the playbook for contemporary marketing has been set by technologically focused companies that have shown that you can measure things, you can optimize things, and you can get immediate results. And therefore this has become the standard to which all companies are now starting to look towards. Even though it basically pulls through demand and doesn't increase your ability to charge a premium. It doesn't increase the size of your interested audience. So essentially everyone's now moving towards these short term metrics. They're moving towards everything that can be attributed. And even if you're faced with a boardroom conversation where you have to kind of explain what you're doing, probably the average boardroom would almost rather that you pull through immediate, you pull through demand and you show optimization and you show attribution because the hope is that they can probably improve all of the metrics for long enough to find another job. And then the fact that you haven't built the brand and the fact that you haven't created a defendable position and the fact that you haven't increased the audience that might want your product becomes someone else's problem. And I'm not being sort of cynical or miserable by saying that, but these are the conversations I have yesterday that a marketer, you know, spoke to me through Twitter and they said, my CMO is, is a marketer, my CEO is a marketer and I'm a marketer. And the reality is that it's in our interest to effectively show immediate results very quickly because everything that happens over a 10 year period is completely irrelevant to us.

[A]

You know, I think the more you jam PE in there and yeah, cap in there also there, they're not in this for a ten year run.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

For a shorter run. So, so, so, so I think they. The advice in there is know what you're getting before you take the job. If you're a long term builder, I want to flip this over to can, you know, which is the giant industry fest in France where they actually are talking a lot about branding and all the tech companies are there and all these people go to Can. What is the real purpose of can and is it achieving its purpose.

[B]

There? There are two different cans. There is the, the sort of the, the history of Cannes and the providence of can, which is the, the creative awards. And then there is a recognition that when the circus comes to town, there's going to be a big audience of people that get sort of pulled around the flowers and the honey. So there is still the part of the show which is about creativity and is about great ads. And that is to me is fascinating because that is an industry. We have such fragile egos. The amazing thing about advertising is you don't really know if you're any good at it. It's a bit like other creative endeavors like fashion or architecture, where you can't really prove that you make a better building in an objective way. So the awards are there to basically celebrate each other and to sort of inspire each other. Increasingly, I think they're becoming a bit farcical. I mean, I think in the last five years, I've never seen a piece of work win anything it can, that I've actually ever seen as a normal person living a normal life. You know, it's unfair for me to think that I might see, you know, Peruvian work from McDonald's, because I don't hang around in Lima that much. But at the same time, if 5,000 pieces of work have been given awards, you know, at some point in time, the work must have been good enough for the client to spend some money on media behind them anyway. So you have the sort of creative endeavor and then because, you know, because people go there and because it's a nice time of year to drink and because, you know, Cannes, quite a charming place. You know, over time, the technology companies went there, the media companies went there, and we've got to a point in time where, you know, it's become a bit of a part of the sort of roadshow of the year where you sort of go to Vegas for CES and then you go to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, you know, and your. Your sort of travels take you to south by Southwest and then you go to Cannes. And it's sort of become this place where if you're not there, it almost starts to reflect badly on you. Because the presumption is that you're, you know, anticipatory solution to seventh party data that uses AI and quantum computing to target toddlers and before they can, you know, own a wallet. You know, the presumption is that your technology can't be good enough, otherwise you'd have a yard can.

[A]

So not to kick the can, but in your mind, this is kind of a poster child for everything we just talked about, which is the industry is there patting itself on the back for how good it's doing, while when it goes back to the boardroom, the boardroom doesn't really care how good it's doing on the stuff that's going on at Cannes. Is that fair?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I'm sounding a bit miserable here and I'm enjoying it, but you're good at that.

[A]

It's one of your best skills.

[B]

You know, the reality is that our jobs are amazing and what we do is really important. And what I think is really exciting about our jobs is that we get to work with Normal people. You know, I actually think it's our job to, to go to shopping malls in third tier cities. It's our job to overhear conversations on the bus. It's our job to try and buy our products and see what it feels like. Like, like our job is to look at consumers and look at how they behave. I think I become a little bit irritated by can because it's actually a place where people go essentially. Well, I think a lot of what, what drives people to go there is a sense of sort of fear of missing out. I think for a long time our industry was incredibly slow to embrace new technology. Our industry was incredibly ignorant to what the Internet would be. And we now have got to a place where I think clients are quite, clients feel quite vulnerable unless they're up to speed with the latest technology. And clients feel quite vulnerable if they haven't heard of a new ad tech company that's got like a funny name. You know, unless you've kind of gone to the Bogo yachts or unless you've started to spend money on yellowbird or, you know, unless you've heard about the optimization technique that's driven by, you know, Blue Monkey Squared. And I think can becomes a great place for people to go to make sure that they're not vulnerable to this idea that they might be missing a trick. And at the same time, you know, these technology companies and media companies do an amazing job of, of the lubrication of, of relationships. So you know, they have sneakily brilliant and, and charming and charismatic salespeople and I think a lot of them persuade, through sort of relationships, you know, to spend money on their technology. Because actually the process of really assessing these technology companies and figuring out what the differences really are and to try and figure out quite what you should put in your tech stack, it's so unbelievably complicated that almost no clients actually have the right level of staff to do due diligence on this technology to even figure out if it's meaningful. These companies are so good with the way that they run experiments and the way that they collect data that they can create extremely persuasive PowerPoint presentations that make you seem like a complete idiot if you don't use the latest.

[A]

And they also are feeding into what we talked about early, I think, which is you used to be able to get this data in two hours and now with our stuff you can get it in 10 minutes. And if you don't get that, you're going to be beat by all the people that are doing 10 minutes. So a lot of that, in my mind, a lot of the technology is right on that front end of faster, more precise, more specific than you ever could do before, which goes to how we kind of open the show.

[B]

Yes. I mean, something to note is that I'm saying these things because I'm interested in being corrected by people that know more. So these things are kind of hypotheses and they're there to be sort of challenged. But I do have a sneaky feeling in my heart of hearts that the. The sort of center of gravity and the most effective principle for advertising is still very much rooted in stuff that we used to do. So if you take a kind of brand that is. I know, let's pick Samsonite. You know, if you're in the business of selling luggage, you know, having data on who's bought your bags before, you know, it's fairly helpful. Having a sort of loyalty program is. Is fairly helpful, but it's not really how it works in luggage. Knowing who flies with American Airlines is fairly helpful. Like, you could use all of this really sophisticated data. You could use lookalike targeting. You could do, you know, deals with. With technology companies that monitor how people are behaving around the web. And you could build these really sort of complicated system, and you could then place, you know, 37 different versions of an ad, and you could then use AI to figure out whether people prefer the ad with the blonde hair or the. Or the no hair. You can get all of this stuff and you can refine and you can optimize and you can automate. And I do wonder, for all of that money spent on data and technology, whether you end up with something that's more meaningfully different from just buying media airports or buying media on travel sites, or buying media on relatively premium news sites. You know, what would happen if you just sponsored a travel show on tv? What would happen if you actually just did the sort of. Not. Not the traditional playbook? Because it does need to change a bit. But what if you just did fairly simple things that fairly obviously feel like quite a good idea?

[A]

Well, focus on the brand versus specific CAC today.

[B]

I mean, I'm kind of interested in calling this word which is sort of relevantization, which I don't think is sort of grammatic.

[A]

That's like 10,000 points gravel.

[B]

No, because we love this idea of personalization. We love this idea that if I've just bought like a toilet seat, that we should really serve me more ads for toilet seats because I've become A kind of connoisseur, you know, in sort of bum health, you know, may. Maybe we shouldn't be aiming to specifically talk to the precisely the right person at prec. The right time with precisely the right product. And it says, hey, Tom, you know, here is the new, you know, marble based toilet seats. Maybe we should. And rather than the opposite, rather than just sort of advertising, you know, life insurance to people that are 15, maybe we should just have a sort of vaguely, sort of a moderate degree of targeting and a moderate degree of creative that is sort of slightly specific. And then we should try a small number of different executions to see what sort of broadly works.

[A]

And I also have to say this is the second time toilet seats have been used on CMO Confidential. As an example, I want to flip over to something that you call dark social or somebody calls dark social. What does it mean and what are you implying with the concept of dark social?

[B]

So dark social is the recognition of the idea that almost all of the conversations that happen in reality don't happen on the Internet. I remember a long time ago, people were trying to sell me sort of reputation management by social listing. And the idea was that you could listen to all of the conversations on Twitter and you could figure out what people thought about your brand. And what sort of dawned on me, without being too miserable, is that Twitter is where really unusual people behave in a really unusual way. It's not reflective of reality because actually, and I'm just pulling numbers from thin air here, but probably 0.1% of conversation in the world actually happens on social media. So most of the things that people are saying are not in any way recorded. Now, the same is true for influence and the same is true for impact. So if you are a car company, you will have all of this data about where your ads are. You will have all of this data about what people think of your brand online. You'll have all of this data about who filled in a lead form. You'll have all of this data about how many times they were called. You'll have all these details about what they want. What you won't have is about 99% of stuff that actually happens, which is people that visit the dealer without ever going to the website. It's people that lie on the forms and put down a different phone number because they don't want to be harassed. So we need to sort of recognize that when all we do is we look at the stuff that we have data on, we're actually completely skewing our marketing campaigns and our communication strategies around what is a fairly unrepresentative and really small set of data. Data. And again, we go back to the sort of classic things that I talk about on the show, which is, there's not that much you can do about it. You know, when you, when you know that your data is not representative, the, the answer is not that you can find data that is more representative. It's just that you have to accept that you might not know as much as you think about and you might have to focus more on your instinctive way to do your job.

[A]

I think that's interesting. It also goes to. In every election, there's usually at least 50% or more of the population not voting. And no one is actually exploring that concept. They're really focused on the fringes of both sides. Hey, how about your thoughts on AI, particularly agentic AI. And we know it's all the rage, we know it's a super powerful tool and taking a lot of things by storm. But what are you thinking of where we are in the entire AI adoption space cycle?

[B]

This is a very big question. I mean, first of all, AI is a very broad term that means a ton of different stuff. So whenever you talk about it, you're prone to, to sort of misspeaking because someone can say, but what about robotics? Or, you know, what about expert systems? Tom, AI generally is amazing and AI will be completely transformative, and it will be transformative over a fairly long period of time. I think we're at the sort of peak of the frenzy about it. I think we're going through a fairly typical life cycle with technology, which is what we do is we apply it to the places where it's easiest to apply it to. So we figured out how to write with generative AI, so we think, right, how do we write emails for generative AI? And we figured out how to make images. So we're like, right, how can we automatically create the images for PowerPoint presentation using AI? We're now getting to the point where we realize that actually AI can't really take people's jobs because AI is doing tasks. So most people's jobs are not to log into Outlook and reply to emails all day, because when they reply to an email, they're probably going to Excel and looking up some data and then they're probably going to a PDF and like reading the third column and then they're probably going to expensive software and putting their receipts there. So the actual way that people really do their job is to span different software and to span different tasks. And agentic AI is a very loose term which is essentially saying we can now start to automate fairly complex workflows. And it's being sort of used as this sort of magic wand. So whenever anyone says anything, agentic AI is the solution. It kind of reminds me a bit of Web three, actually. For a period of time it was like, oh, you know, people aren't reading your newspaper, web3. People aren't buying your apartments, web3, your company's going.

[A]

Or the networked home. The network is going to be everything because you can control everything from your home, from your car.

[B]

Yes. So people love talking about agentic AI. The problem is it doesn't really work. I mean, the fact is that it's actually extremely complex for a number of reasons. And the fact is that it offers incredibly big security risks, it offers enormous reputational risks. And as yet, no one's really been able to show it working. You know, I've spent four years now talking about AI in business a lot. And throughout the whole time, I've done some amazing demo reels of agentic AI. And the next time you do the presentation, you go back to the website to see if they've got a new video that's a bit better. And it turns out the company's gone bankrupt. It turns out that they pivoted to a different approach. So I'm sort of slightly concerned because everyone loves talking about how different everything is. And there's assumption somehow that, that, you know, we're now going to get an agentic AI to buy all of our laundry detergent for us, and we're going to get agentic AI to book holidays for us. And agentic AI is going to be how we navigate the world. And I just don't think it's anything like as transformative in this current packaging as people think it will be.

[A]

Thank you for that. Let's go to your greater predictions. A lot of your predictions have been true, like the emergence of Netflix and other stuff. Less. Some of your predictions, not as much like, like scooters did not take over the world. Let's talk about a prediction for something that happens in the next 12 months that would surprise our listeners.

[B]

Oh, I'm gonna seem so boring. And this is almost like the opposite to prediction. But I don't think that much is going to change, actually. You know, I, I don't, I don't think. I don't think in the next 12 months we'll see as much change as we think. I think people are glossing over some of the difficulties in adopting a lot of this stuff. You know, there's talk about phones dying. I don't see AR in any kind of real, in any kind of normal shape or form taking off. So I think the 12, the next 12 months will be quite disappointing. One technology I think is worth looking out for is a sort of a home style of robots. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is going to happen fast and I'm not saying this is going to happen across all demographics, but some of the progress that I see being made in sort of humanoid like robots is extraordinary. Now, many of the things about humanoid robots are quite sort of poorly designed. You know, they kind of fall over. They're extremely expensive to make. You know, most of the time if you wanted to add a robot to a factory, you wouldn't make it look like a human. You'd make it look more like a wheelbarrow or something, right? But the beautiful thing about a humanoid robot is it gets to fit around existing systems. So if you have a kind of woodworking shop, your robot gets to go in and use the same working equipment because it's a similar sort of form to you. So I think if we combine some of the policies in politics, if we combine things like the demographic makeup of many developed countries, I think over the next five years there could be a real thing which is fairly privileged people, people having fairly regular access to something that is somewhat robotic to do many elements of your life. And I think that there'll be this sort of interesting, you know, impact really on what happens to people's time when their ironing is taken care of and when packing, the shopping is taken care of. And we'll start to see a sort of an automation and a sort of robotization of the world happen a bit more.

[A]

I'm envisioning my Roomba doing my laundry. And also, but I'm also hearing you say beneath that statement, that will increase the tech divide between the haves and have nots.

[B]

I mean, the, the, the kind of cruel thing about this is if anyone needed a robot, it wouldn't be someone, you know, with a ski lodge. You know, the people that need the robots are the people that are getting a bus to do three jobs. There are projections that show that these things could be fairly cheap. You know, they could be the same cost as a fairly simple family car. You know, if you add in sort of financing to that, you know, we could enter an environment where actually this is adopted by quite a different variety of Sort of demographics, and people kind of see it as a. As a kind of an investment, really, and how they can spend their time better. I might be completely wrong on this, this, by the way, but. But the sort of early signs are that these robots can learn very, very quickly. And their sort of dexterity and the degree to which they can handle quite fragile and complex tasks, it's quite extraordinary. And robot vacuums are quite interesting, actually, because I don't really ever remember people talking about them. You know, I don't remember seeing them on a CES Trends deck, really. But actually, the number of people that have robot vacuums is quite high. They're still quite bad at vacuuming, by the way. I mean, they're extraordinary. They've got lidar and they have AI and they can navigate your house and they can avoid furniture. But that's sort of, you know, that part of the process where they pick up the dirt. They're not that good at that part.

[A]

And also they will get stuck in the weirdest places. Which. Which brings us to our. Our. Our traditional last question. Funniest story you can tell on the air that you haven't told. Told before and. Or practical advice for our listeners we haven't discussed. You have to take one or both of those, but you must take at least one.

[B]

I think I've done funny things for a long time. Let me try and think about that while I talk. Practical advice, you asked.

[A]

Yeah, that we haven't talked about yet for all the. All the people listening on the show. You know what?

[B]

Like, we. We think of beauty as a very superficial thing. You know, if you date a partner because they're beautiful, you know, that. That sort of seems like you're not very thoughtful or intelligent. If you. If you own, you know, a piece of furniture, that's quite impractical, but it just looks amazing. You know, we think that's a bit stupid. I think we need to recognize that the beauty is an unbelievably powerful thing and it works in quite a logical way. And actually, when it comes to things like marketing, it may well be. The packaging is one of the most strong levers that we have. It may well be the very best way to sell your new, you know, sports drink is just to make it look unbelievably beautiful in packaging and then to make ads that just look unbelievably beautiful. And actually, beauty gives us a sense of sort of seduction. It gives us a sense of some premium cues, and it actually gives us a lot of trust in what's been done. So as a sort of interesting thought experiment, you know, what if brands just started to think about how to make things beautiful? What should bank lobbies look like? What should bank cards look like? What should it feel like to log into a banking website? How could that actually impart quite a lot of value? As for Funny Stories, I was in San Francisco the other day and I couldn't figure out how to get into a self driving car, you know, and I couldn't figure out how to put my luggage in. And I ended up sort of in this weird situation. I was sort of wrestling with the car to try and stop it from eating my luggage. And you know, it's a sort of better story after a few beers. But it was quite a kind of weird tension between the sort of future and the current world where I'm there sort of shouting at a car trying to get it to give me back my luggage.

[A]

All right, so I think beauty and locked out of a self driving car is a great way to end the show. Thank you Tom for joining us and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. Look for all of our shows on Spotify, Apple and YouTube which include marketing the battle between believers and non believers. Parts 1, 2 and 3. Is your next best customer an AI bot managing the gray area? The fine line between puffery and lying? Parts one and two and Tom's previous shows which include a contrarian's view of everything everywhere all at once. Hey all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential.