← Embracing Marketing Mistakes
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the show that teaches you growth through failure. I'm Chris Norn and this week I'm joined by Tom Roach, who's brand strategist at Jellyfish and one of the sharpest thinkers on brand in the business. Before Jellyfish, Tom spent years at bbh, Adam and Eve ddb, working with brands like kfc, Weetabix and John Lewis. Tom's mistake is a belter as well. He tells the story about how KFC and Weetabix both ditched their most powerful brand assets. Finger licking good. And have you had your Weetabix and what it took to dig them back out of the attic? So go grab a brew and let's get into it. Here's Tom Roach. Enjoy. Tom Roach, welcome to the show.
- [00:52]
B
Thanks for having me, Chris.
- [00:54]
A
Tom, so I'm fascinated to talk to you about distinctive assets, which is what a lot of people keep talking about. I've heard people like System 1 talking about the fact that you've got to have distinctive assets running through everything. Even better if it's an animal. Apparently the data shows that if you've got an animal or some sort of animal creature, I'm thinking meerkats for a good example. So what is in 2026? Are distinctive assets still as important as they were in the 1970s and the hamlet adverts?
- [01:30]
B
Okay, so quite a few bits in that distinctive brand assets can be a very, very wide range of things and they are essentially the recognizable pieces of branding that make your brand unmistakably, recognizably you from the get go. I know that some people call them things, I think System 1 sometimes call them fluent devices. And they as a company seem to be quite obsessed, as you say, with animals and characters and very specific character driven approaches to comms and advertising. I have a slightly broader perspective on that. I think they can be very useful, but they're not the only thing. And actually distinctive brand assets, as I've said, are a much broader suite of possibilities. I think they can be sonic things, they can be visual things, they can be ideas, they can be photographic styles, they can be a piece of music or a voice and of course, fonts and colors and logos and those kinds of things. And my perspective generally is that the richer the set of things you've got over the longer period that you've been building them, the better it is because you've got more to play with. Mark Ritson talks about codes and playing with codes, and I think that's quite a useful way of thinking about it, you can, you can kind of mix and remix and, and muck about with the things you've got in the armoury and that can keep things fresh. So not only the best thing is that you're instantly recognizable, but that also you're keeping things fresh and doing fun things with them. If you think about the way that I think McDonald's are probably the kings of this. They're amazing at mucking about with their logo and their gold notches and the colors and just doing very clever things with them. So I think that the people that kind of are most critical of this sort of approach, I think, tend to think, oh, it's formulaic, it just looks like branded wallpaper. You can get stuck in a rut and you can end up not being impactful and interesting and entertaining. And that's definitely true. It's definitely brands that kind of overdo that sort of stuff. But I think also there's plenty of opportunity to be creative with these things and have fun with them and play. I mean, I, I'm not, not a big fan of, of, I'm a big fan of consistency, but when you get a big brand with like a team who sort of are almost seen as the brand police, that can be a bit problematic because they can, they will tend to be quite conservative and stop you doing things. I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan of both consistency but also freshness and doing, doing good things. So what were the other, the last part of your question was about, is it different now if things changed? And I think the fundament, as ever, the fundamentals don't really change. And if you think about a brand, let's take Coke, that was, that was, you know, was around and pretty, probably pretty strong back in the, what was the year, you pick, 1920s or something, know that that's a brand that has been evolving very, very, very gradually over time. Have you seen that image of the Coke bottle and, and how its evolution has been, has been. It's virtually static. I mean, there are slight changes, but that's just a, a great example of a brand that has appropriately evolved and actually evolved very little in terms of the iconic bottle. I'm sure there are other things that have, have, have changed over time, but, um, but the sort of visuals haven't changed very much. I'm sure they've done all sorts of different things over time with other sorts of assets. I mean, Santa Claus, Father Christmas is something they obviously have kind of played around with a lot and I'm not even sure if it's a myth or if it's true, but didn't they change. They changed the color. Was he originally green? And they changed him to red and he became a sort of more ownable coat thing. And actually, in many ways, the kind of modern image of Santa Claus, I'm sure if you delve back into it, is probably very heavily influenced by those early Koch illustrations and, you know, the sort of medieval or later depictions of St. Nicholas, probably vastly different before. Before. Before Coke got hold of him. So where have I gone with that? I think this idea, in fact, you can see also the idea of character being there, as, you know. And again, they. They've got their, their polar bears that they use at Christmas as well. So they've got a. They've got. They've got a rich array of things that they've built and can play with and they can, you know, they could retire something for five years and then bring it back and it'll be fantastic. They've got their, Their holidays are coming trucks and music and that whole piece. Obviously, you know, there's a level of controversy last year around the AI film that they made, but to my mind, that controversy was entirely kind of blown up by the industry itself and isn't particularly something that. That regular people care about at all. And, you know, do people care that that that film was originally CGI and then now is animated in a new way? I mean, that's just such an irrelevant debate to me. So do things change? Yes, but really the fundamentals stay the same. The idea of recognizability stays fundamentally important. One brand I used to work on a bit of Adam and Eve. DDB John Lewis. We used to talk about the, the. The handwriting of the brand. So almost those great Christmas campaigns, obviously the character would change often each year or the idea would change or the scenario would change, the narrative would change. But many of the component parts would have a relationship with the previous campaign. So there'd be some music which had a sort of familiar echo from previous years. There'd be a similar kind of narrative structure. There'd be the role of. The role of the brand, the idea of thoughtful gifting. There'll be enough in there to give people a very, very well branded experience. And then of course, the very best of those campaigns would be brilliantly merchandising store. They would have a great piece of, you know, there'd be a character or a great. A toy or something that could be. Could be brought to life in store and There would actually be things that they would, you know, make and sell off the back of it. Remember, there was the, the Elton John one with the piano. And people complained because you couldn't buy pianos in John Lewis. And this was some crazy. So, you know, the interesting sort of principles and rules occur around individual brands and their campaigns that become, become assets that get used. So there's many ways to do it. It doesn't have to just be a character. The fundamentals stay the same, the executional things will change and the channels that we use change, don't they? So I do think some of those ones where it is a bit more reliance on a character are harder to activate in some of the channels we have today, if you take social or influencer or creator, harder to get some of those kind of characters going in those spaces. But it is possible. And if you look at the way Liquid Death have a character or Duolingo have a character, he's back. You know, what a brain one. I mean, crazy, crazy example. You know, it's super kind of extreme and sort of funny and a bit weird, but yeah, great, great, great example. Is it the only way? Of course not. You know, there's many ways to do this thing that we call marketing or advertising. And you know, I wouldn't ever propose there's one specific formula and I'm sure there are categories where you wouldn't pick a character because everyone's got one. I mean, you know, yeah, there's, there's many ways to do things.
- [09:33]
A
I mean, my, my. When I talked about character, one of my favorite brands, which I've talked about quite a bit on the part, is Octopus Energy, which it is a genius logo. A distinct, very distinctive pink, bright pink, like a luminous pink, like the highlighter pink. If you haven't seen it. Octopus Energy. Love the brand. It's all about sustainable, electric and doing good and, and, and. But it's the way that they communicate with their customer. They're really good at, like, telling you the cheapest rate, communicating with you. And then for the. And the Octopus is just genius. But the whole fact that they do not. Do you know why they came up with the Octopus distinctive asset? Because the person, the, the comp. The building that they were in, I think it was either the, the company that owned the building that they were in was Octopus Finance. And they just thought, oh, well, if they're Octopus Finance will be Octopus Energy.
- [10:27]
B
Well, you know, these things can come almost from nowhere. I mean, it's a crazy story. Like, so the company I work for jellyfish, which is.
- [10:34]
A
Oh, there you go.
- [10:35]
B
Similar, similar kind of creature to an octopus.
- [10:37]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [10:39]
B
The guys that, that named that, they were just looking for some simple things. They wanted it to be memorable. They wanted a name that was basically going to be global and could, could, could, wouldn't need to be translated, but could be used anywhere. And they wanted to be really kind of recognizable and memorable. And, and they were literally flicking through the dictionary picking out words and they, they landed on jellyfish. Now, I mean, and it's funny, from a branding perspective, we, we often have debates about should we, should we bring the J to life, should we use it more as a character? I mean, from a sort of pure branding perspective, I often argue that we should, but then there's equally strong subjective opinions internally that we shouldn't. You know, it's not, we're not an animal, we're another thing. So you, you can have these subjective debates about these things and often the, the asset itself can be, can have been entirely random and that, and it sort of is an unsatisfying thing intellectually, I think when it's a bit random like that. And, you know, naming can often be a little bit random or abstract, but ultimately what we're doing is we're sort of creating empty vessels that you then imbue meaning into through our communication and through the way we show up and through our tone of voice. And so in some ways it sort of doesn't matter what you pick, so long as it has a, has a potential for distinctiveness and recognizability, which is why Byron Sharp has talked about meaningless distinction as opposed to meaningful differentiation. And there's this kind of slightly esoteric debate, I think, that you see Kantar get into versus Ehrenberg. Bass Institute and Kantar believe in meaning and they believe in differentiation. And Salience and Erin Bob Bass and Byron Sharp are less interested in differentiation. I don't think they deny it exists and can be powerful, but they believe it's harder to hold on to over time because differentiation can sort of slip through your fingers as product categories evolve. And, and, and your, your, your product is no longer as different as it was and unique as it was when it first was born. And so they're much more interested in distinction and distinctiveness. And so you do get into these slightly like, esoteric, intellectual, academic debates about the two things. Of course, it's actually differentiation and distinctiveness. You often get asked, what's the difference? Really? And frankly, the differences are less important than the similarities to me. But Ultimately, being recognizably you is really, really important. And if you can be different, that's good. But it's hard to hold on to.
- [13:19]
A
I mean, we have, we've had quite a few behavioral science scientists and neuroscientists on here, and I. But I actually think it's not that complicated. I think that, like your jellyfish. Great. Octopus. Great. And I've written down here Sir John Hegarty when he, whenever he does his videos on LinkedIn, I am going to get John on the shows. So John, at some point I definitely wanted to go. But every time he does them, he's got flat Eric sat next to him, which is genius.
- [13:46]
B
It is genius. And he, when he talks about that, it's fascinating because he talks about the story of how he sold it to the client. And I think the client required several meetings and a lot of persuasion from John. And of course, you have to be somebody as charismatic and brilliant and famous and sort of with a track record like, like Hegarty had back then and still does to, To. To be trusted by a client to, to do that. And I think eventually the client kind of, you can sort of imagine, you know, John turns up with his pictures of his drawings, scamps of flat Eric once again.
- [14:18]
A
Yeah.
- [14:19]
B
And. And just to get rid of him, the client goes, okay, you know, kind of relents and said, well, okay, we'll do this. I can see it working, maybe more positive than that. And of course it did work. And that, that little, that creature, of course, is, you know, entertaining, very different. And that, of course that brand, BBH is obsessed, always was obsessed with what they used to call difference. I suspect a lot of the time it was also about distinctiveness and recognizability and itself, of course, that agency where I worked there for seven years, their logo is a black sheep. And that black sheep was kind of bespoke upon them by, like, Levi's gave it to them, said, you look, you're the Black Sheep agency. And everybody at BBH is now called Black Sheep. And they used the black sheep as a logo. And it came from one of the very first ads they did for Levi's, for black Levi's. And it was a. A flock of white sheep with black sheep traveling in the opposite direction to the flock of white sheep. And the line, when the world zigs zag Levi's. So and that ad in itself was a demonstration of that. It was a demonstration of not just putting black jeans on models and saying, look at our jeans. Aren't they cool back in whatever it was. 83. But that would have been the normal way to do things. They didn't show the product, they showed an attitude and a philosophy of life, which is when the world zigzag, which subsequently became that agency's philosophy of how to do great advertising. And it's rooted in a really brilliant neuroscience principle called the von Restorff effect, which is essentially, if you give people a bunch of similar objects or things, if you list out a number of things, if you put one of those things in the middle of that list that is very different and isn't an animal. For example, if you have a list of animals and one isn't an animal, you put socks in the middle of a list of animals. People will remember socks. And that is a sort of basic, really important principle of just doing something that is not samey, that fights against the sea of sameness that brings some. So just essentially attention to your, to your brand or product, to your message gets you remembered and gets you to stand out in the. In this world of clutter that we're all trying to deal with.
- [16:45]
A
You know, I'll tell you where it is difficult for. Because a lot of people that listen to this show are B2B marketers. The B2, the B2C stuff, you've got. You've got the octopuses, you've got the Levi's, you've got your Kit Kats, you've got all your memorable spec savers. But B2B brands that are distinctive, I mean, if there's people out there listening to that, how do they make their brand more distinctive in 2026? What, what should. So if, if you, if you, the. If you were the senior marketer you like, you know, B2B brand, I can't think of one off the top of my head. Would you go out all out with completely distinct assets and to stand out totally different because we talked, we joked about this, Will and I on the show before. If you're a B2B brand, it's blue, you know, you've got blue Brat. It's like everybody's this. It's like a. Especially in tech, you'll copy each other totally well.
- [17:42]
B
It's a mystery to me why B2B. They always think they're. They're different from B2C and that somehow buying, they'll say, oh, it's far more complicated in B2B. It's much less emotional, much more rational. You have committees of people deciding they're rational human beings who are making sure the products compare to each other and they're getting the best deal and the best value for money. And it takes months. So the emotional has to take a back seat to the rational. And it just means that everything in B2B is really samey and pretty boring because they seem to follow some rules about being samey and sameness being more important than distinctiveness. Which is crazy to me that the. I mean, the, the kind of. Probably the most famous B2B case study of this kind of thing, I think at the moment is probably Salesforce with their characters. And they. They've clearly very heavily borrowed from the world of B2C and particularly the world that we've. We've kind of touched on at the beginning of this conversation with character and, and, and those, those, those. Those Salesforce characters. What are they called? The. I'm going to forget what they're called now. Americans. No, Salesforce. They're like. They had these. But I can very, very well imagine the first meeting where that work is presented or that the idea of creating a kind of set of almost like cartoon characters and either there was. Either it sailed through because that was what the clients absolutely knew they wanted from the start, or there would have been a bit of fight on their hands from the agency's perspective going, no, you really need something that's going to be as fun and emotional and take this, this slightly boring category of whatever Salesforce's category would call itself. I'm not even sure what they would call it. CRM work, workflows, software systems, whatever. So they do something very different from their category, very unexpected, and they borrow from the world of consumer marketing. And I think they do it really successfully and they add a bit of. Well, they add a total of difference and distinctiveness to that category, which, you know, even if. I mean, there are problems clearly with. With Salesforce's marketing, not least, which nobody can ever. Even people at Salesforce are never quite sure what they do. And so maybe there's a little bit more of that sort of message that needs to come through, which is the harder thing to do as well. But, yeah, that's. That's an example, I think, and a lot of us can learn from that. I'm struggling to think of other B2B examples that I think are. It doesn't always. You know, it always seems to me that there's always. Within any given B2B type category, there might be one brand that decides to do something different. I used to work with very early days of. Of an econometric Agency called, which ended up being called Magic Numbers. If you know Grace Kite, we used to talk a lot about, about her brand. And that brand was, was, was intentionally designed to not be the blue and green and sciency data and evaluation and measurement company that all of the other brands in that category or companies in that category presented themselves as like really heavy, sciencey companies. And we talked about it being the more fun, emotional, passionate one, the much more human one. And that's where the name Magic Numbers came from. It was an intention or decision to create a brand and a brand name and an expectation that that business was going to be different from the others in that category. And I think, you know, to be able to do that is really just zigging. When the world zags, just pick the thing that is really different from the category and do that without going against what you need, the hygiene factors in the category. You know, they couldn't, they had to still say we're data experts. They couldn't say we're rubbish at data or imply that they were. They had to present themselves as really good at numbers. Hence the part of that name the numbers bit and the expertise bit was really important. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's not, as you say, it's not rocket science. You know, you can, you can look at. It's a really easy trick you can do. You just take all the comms or websites or ads or whatever you want from a category and you stick them on one slide and it becomes very clear what the sea of sameness is in that. In that category. And you kind of do the opposite. And it was, you know, we used to dress that, dress that up in lots of fancy words at bbh and we used to talk about zags in finding, finding a company zag, but really it's about just, you know, identifying what everyone else does and doing the opposite.
- [22:29]
A
Love that. I don't know if I, yeah, put all the logos and all the styles on one page, look at them and go, right, what AI would call a gap analysis.
- [22:40]
B
Right. And you can, yeah, I'm sure there's fancy terms and you can do things like create a kind of generic video or TV commercial where you, you splice together the, the obvious bits from whether it's the car commercials or, or holiday company commercials. And you can see it in every category as soon as you're aware of the codes of a category, spotting the thing that you can do different. Now, of course, it really is important that you show up and as recognizably as part of a category. If you're new, you know, you're new to a category and you're a late entrant, better that you kind of define. Define the codes of a category, I suppose. But that's why you do also need to find ways of breaking out of it and showing that you're different from it.
- [23:21]
A
And would you say consistency is actually harder than it was 10 years ago now with, with the way everything's going with technology? Because I know you, the brand.
- [23:31]
C
You do brand strategy at Jellyfish, don't you?
- [23:33]
B
Yeah.
- [23:34]
A
Do you think consistency is harder now than it was?
- [23:38]
B
I don't know if it's harder because I think brands always seem to struggle whatever the environment, and there are some reasons for that which we can come on to, but I think the media landscape that we have does make it hard. So if you think about the proliferation of platforms we now have to use, the fact that each of those platforms, particularly the social platforms, has a demand for huge amounts of content. Like, they're always saying, we need more assets, we need more assets. And so that creates a kind of a temptation to create more and more stuff that is different and isn't connected to the last piece. And so you can struggle with fragmentation. So I think there is a problem with brands becoming incredibly fragmented across all of the assets they need to create. And that requires some smart thinking about what you're going to keep that's consistent. So what's going to be consistent over time and what's going to create coherence through different platforms. And that has some conflict with the needs to be like, native. So if you're thinking about making a TikTok or TikTok campaign, it's got to abide by some of the rules or lots of the rules of that platform, which is slightly different to the rules of other platforms. So there's some tension there about how you create a, a TikTok campaign that's going to work really, really, really well on TikTok is going to feel like, you know, the sort of thing people expect to see there, but equally is connected through some level of connective tissue or distinctive brand assets to the other stuff you do. And, you know, that's why maybe characters can be helpful in that instance. Although, you know, do people always want to see ad characters in, in TikTok? They, they may not do, you know, they may, you know, they may be happy to see your, you know, if you're duolingo or liquid death, but if you're not doing it quite so well, as them, are they going to want to see your ad character popping up? You know, debatable.
- [25:41]
C
This is a message from the show's sponsors. Prohibition pr. We're Yorkshire's biggest PR agency and we specialize in delivering amazing video content and podcasting content. And we guarantee we can get your podcast, whether new or created by us, or if you've already got one, into a top 20 category in any country. Just drop me a line if you're interested in that. But meanwhile, we've got loads and loads of free stuff. We've got an entire events catalog packed for you with more than 15 webinars available free and on demand. Whenever you want to watch them or listen to them, it's me and the lovely Will talking through all sorts of topics from social media, public relations, content marketing, video execution, you name it, we talk about it. And we've also got two live events coming up, both in June, July. So the June and July ones is from creators to closers, it's all about influencer marketing and influencer ambassadorship and all that. We've got another event in September and October called how to Create Scroll Stopping Content that converts. Bit of a mouthful but amazing. All completely free. So if you want to come along to our events for free, this is your bag. You enjoy the show. First of all, give us a Like and subscribe. And please, please give us a review because we've got about 20 and we've got like 365,000 downloads, so it'd be nice to hear from you. I'll give you a shout out, but if you want to listen, if you want to register for the events, you can go to prohibitionpr.co.uk and click on upcoming Events. Really easy to do. Register. And yeah, Will and I will see you there and we'll have a chat with you. So thanks for listening, we really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoy the show.
- [27:20]
A
Yeah. Although I do think it's quite funny if you have like a character completely out of context doing something else on a TikTok, it's quite fun. It makes it entertaining. Yeah, it's like if you look at the. The way that Ryanair. So, yeah, obviously Ryanair, whether you love them or loathe them, you know, you know what the CEO's view on the world is. And it just amazed me, like, we've got brands like Ryanair, M and S who use Tick Tock as a completely different channel to anything, you know, M s good with Food Premium, you go on Tick Tock and there's Caterpillars wrestling and so, you know, on the M S channel. So it's very, very different. And, and my point about Ryanair is the planes are literally taking the piss out of people and doing really weird things. It's very, very different to any other channel.
- [28:08]
B
Yeah. And I guess, you know, there's probably temptations to do, to do either and it's can be a bit of a personal choice. There's probably, you know, multiple ways of doing these things. It obviously got Ryanair a level of fame in, in, in, in, in their socials and, and they became quite sort of known and famous with that sort of audience. They've obviously got probably a different audience to MS's and you know, they were using it differently. And so I, I don't, I think it comes back to. The thing is there aren't any absolute formulas that you have to abide by. You know, there, there's just the need to, to get attention, to be, to be distinctive, to say something of relevance and to be memorable and, and you know, obviously I'm not privy to the effectiveness of those, those two specific examples, but that's the thing that ultimately has to be the decision maker. Do you carry on or not? Do you try something different?
- [29:00]
A
You've said before, I believe you've said before that the sales fun, the sales funnel is 100 years old and wrong.
- [29:06]
C
Is that right?
- [29:06]
A
Is that what you said?
- [29:10]
B
I have said something similar, yeah. I mean I wrote a thing called. I think the headline on the Marketing Week version was something like the sales funnel is the cockroach of marketing concepts by which any punches there were you? Well, yeah, I mean the editor gets to choose the headlines, but the concept there is. This is a thing that is ubiquitous. It's become absolutely part of the marketing furniture. And by the sales funnel I mean the really standard one which is like awareness, consideration, conversion. That was first kind of sort of invented as a build on the Aido ADA model. Awareness, interest, desire, action. I think in 1924 or something. And it was a guy who wrote a book on bond sales, as in kind of investments. And I think he was, he was talking about how you do those things over the telephone, how you phone like cold calling people and how you convincing them to buy something. And the, the Aida model was invented as a, as a, as a, as a sales method for door to door salespeople. So these things are really sales aids. They're ways of helping salespeople structure a conversation, structure their communication. So they take people from grabbing their attention, retaining a bit more interest then persuading them and then sealing the deal. And this, this structure, this format of, of how you do sales is sort of there at a low level for, for sort of 80 or so years and then basically gets really popular again with the advent of the digital platforms. So when Google and Metron, people start selling ads and start needing, they've got an increasingly kind of complex array of ad inventory to sell to their clients, their media agencies. And so they kind of reinvent it or reuse it, repurpose it and they just use it as a way to simplify a really complex array of ad inventory. And so that becomes the standard way that media agencies and agencies generally structure, the kind of way they lay out their advertising formats or their ad ideas on PowerPoint slides to sell to their clients. So it's really a kind of sales tool. A very long winded answer.
- [31:43]
A
Sorry, I like it. No, I like it, it's good.
- [31:46]
B
And what I did in that article, and you can see it on Marketing Week or my blog, which is TheTomroach.com was to go, this thing is useful, it's here, it's ubiquitous. But it actually doesn't quite conform to some of this, the marketing science we now have that talks about how you build brands, what's necessary in the mind for people to have when you're kind of building a network of associations and memories. It doesn't quite conform to the fact that in most categories people aren't really being very considered with their purchases. There's not lots of consideration going on. And then the bottom of the funnel is conversion moment I felt was, was a bit like that. It seemed to borrow much more from the strong force of advertising, not the weak force of advertising theory, which is that somehow we can force people to buy stuff. And overall this notion that you can force people through a funnel is fanciful. People are either out of the market and broadly either sort of unaware or aware or familiar with your brand. And you can create sort of brand memories over time in a sort of soft way before they're in the market, so that when they fall into the market you're in their minds ready to come up to the top of the list of their choices. So there's stuff from the sort of world of academia that we could apply and I re kind of reconfigured, modified the funnel a bit. But even then I don't really believe in the funnel, even though I fixed it a little bit. And actually people like Mark Ritson will say you shouldn't really just use an off the peg thing like that. You should think much more carefully about your own customer journeys, your own customers where they are, and think about things in a more tailored way. Which I think we have to, we all have to agree with ultimately, but sometimes we do need to simplify things.
- [33:50]
A
Well, there's other things you've written as well. You've also wrote the creatives are coming. So the AI puts production into the hands of ideas people. Now, I've seen loads on this. Like I was at the Calling with. I just, just talking about our fair, weren't we? I was at the Calling on Monday and yeah, AI is the subject that everybody's discussing. Some people are positive. Nils Leonard talked about and I'll use his exact, an exact quote. Just fucking get out there and make is what he said in his. In his unique style. Just get out there and make something interesting.
- [34:31]
B
Was he suggesting he's a very inspirational character? Was he suggesting people should make stuff using AI or not?
- [34:39]
A
He was meaning that we should be creative and keep going and not just like, oh, the end of the world's coming, you know, and like, oh, that's it, give up. It's like, no, get out there and make. But then similarly, Rob Mayhew, who was doing his comedy bit, he did a little bit on AI, But I saw it yesterday, there was a post yesterday that he said he'd nailed AI, where he said, oh, AI is going to really help our industry. And he did this big comedy thing about, about that. And then he went, but also we're all. So, yeah, he goes, that's basically the argument in AI, isn't it? It's really great. And then it's not great at all. So. But you've said that the. Yeah, the creatives are coming. What do you think? What's your opinion?
- [35:20]
B
Well, I, I'd hope I'm a bit more balanced than that. I obviously, you know, have. I think we all have fears about the jobs market and how it's going to affect that and particularly more junior people. But I think on the whole I tend to see there's a lot of snake oil and hyperbole and of course there's always that thing in any technological revolution of people. It's a famous quote, isn't it? We massively overestimate the effects in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. So I'm not going to make any like, major, major predictions, but I do like and enjoy and embracing the fact that this does feel to be a creative revolution in the Sense that previous tech revolutions in marketing haven't always been creative ones. So this technology is something that creative people can really get a hold of and make stuff with. So, yeah, get out there and make, I think can actually be a rallying cry to do things with AI. Not, not, not as an anti AI statement. And our creative department at Jellyfish, our ECD and her people are on a weekly basis almost being kind of asked to make stuff, make things, do things yourself in a way that previously they would have had to wait some time or get engaged, production people or production partners to make the things that they're conceiving of. And that's really exciting. So closing the gap between execution and idea and earlier than that, closing the gap between strategy and idea and it's evolving people's roles. We've got creative people who were previously more in the production space or filming things, videographers, cinematographers, who are now able to get much more involved in the ideation of things, which I think is really exciting. So it is kind of creating more hybrid roles. It's collapsing the process. The process is becoming, in a way more collaborative and individual roles within that process are collapsing. So it's changing things, but I think in a really exciting way. And yes, there is obviously lots of debates about slop and how much slop there's going to be. It's hard to predict. I mean, my general perspective on that is, is, I think it's called Sturgeon's Law. 95 of everything has always been crap.
- [37:48]
A
Yeah, totally.
- [37:49]
B
Let's try and make the 5%. And that applied pre AI, applied pre digital. It probably applied pre camera, pre photography, pre paint, pre pencil. So this is just technology.
- [38:05]
A
I use that example on TV ads because, like interviewing so many. As I said to you before we started, like, I'm. I'm obviously a. I've been in PR all my career. Did a PR degree. I taught PR at university after I graduated and I've run my own agency. And yeah, 95, when I'm speaking to it as people from Adland who film TV ads. Sturgeon's Law. Not Nicola, but Sturgeon's Law. I like the idea of that because they all talk about the. The good old heady days. I referenced Hamlet before and. And the brilliant days of. You've talked about Levi's flack, Eric. We hadn't even talked about the work which seems to be coming back. But 95% of ads then were shit as well, weren't they?
- [38:50]
B
Yeah. And whenever anybody sounds like they've got a Kind of nostalgia, a golden era in mind or they've got a nostalgia going on for some previous era. I just would caution against that because the trouble is we tend to remember the good stuff and forget the really bad stuff. And most of the stuff is bad. And so our job is to make the 5%, not the 95% with the professionals. And we should remember that. In fact, my, one of my very first memories of coming into the industry was on a, I think it was an IPA course. There's a room full of us like junior grads in the industry and Peter Sutter, who was then creative director of Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO where I later worked, he stood up and said his role is to make the 5%, not the 95 and that, you know, 25 years ago. So I think it's a basic constant now. Yes, the volume of the 5%, the volume of the 95% is going to increase, but the proportions don't change. So I think it's probably a constant. I would caution against nostalgia. We tend to forget the bad stuff. How to say, my kids, the few moments when we're sort of sat together as a family these days, watching any TV or watching something on a bigger screen, could be a YouTube thing and something that looks like a TV ad comes up on the, on the TV screen. Invariably my kids will say, that's just awful. Dad, did you make that? And, and I'll say, no, no I didn't. And then they'll get, then they get me to apologize for the, on the, on behalf of the industry, for the, for the quality of the ads they see. Yeah, but then a lot of the stuff they're seeing doesn't look and feel like a TV ad or an ad in itself. It's probably some sort of pay partnership or some, some sponsored content or a creator led thing and that slips by them and they accept it, you know, So I think there's, there's. Does it, does it conform to what we would say is a good ad? No, I think we just have to change our definitions of what advertising is. It's a funny word, advertising, because it's becoming less and less relevant to the broad collection of things that we do, I think in communication. So it's no longer, it's no longer the single word that defines what we do. I don't know what the replacement for that word would be though.
- [41:18]
A
We will get on to your mistake in a minute. But I've just, I've got one thing here because I, I love this, being an AI geek As well. Not. I'm tell you one thing I am sick of. Dear LinkedIn, stop sending me connection messages from AI companies. Jesus. Like, they've become the new recruiters, haven't they? Do you want to productize your business? Do you want to system? Everybody's got the same, do you know, sea of sameness. Then that's where we're at now.
- [41:46]
B
I've been in the last two months or month or so, I've had, I think about once a day I get from a recruiter, from a new recruiter I never heard of, there'll be a kind of AI version of my cv, sort of summarized. And I'll say we're looking for a brand strategist who's worked at amv, BBH and the Ebonnet and now works at Jellyfish in brand strategy. And you'd be amazing for this role. I'm like, that seems a bit too specific and a bit too, you know. And it's just one even spelled that their logo had clearly been designed by one of the models, a previous model, not one of the later ones. And they'd spelled recruiter wrong. It was recruiterer. And I was like this, you can't spell your own company name wrong in your AI generated image thing. That's just so bad. So I don't know, there is obviously all sorts of things going on. Hopefully even those, those snake oil people will start doing it a bit better.
- [42:42]
A
Well, yeah, because I'm from pr, then social media and like the original days
- [42:47]
C
of Twitter, I did some of the
- [42:48]
A
first social media campaigns in the uk and I remember we got like a year in and was us doing like, you couldn't find blogs on Google. It was that long ago. I did a campaign for Sony where we outreach. It was like one of the first influencer campaigns. And then we got. I was like a year into social media, but it was called word of mouth marketing. It wasn't social media marketing yet. And then all of a sudden we coined the phrase social media marketing. And then LinkedIn became. There was engineers changing their title to social. And it's exactly like what we're seeing now, except for now you've got the access to the knowledge, like instantly. And you can pretend that you're a social media, you know, you're an AI specialist, even though you only started a month ago. So on that note, I'm an AI specialist.
- [43:30]
B
There. There are people that, you know, two or three years ago were crypto specialists or NFT specialists or metaverse specialists, or Web3 experts and now, of course, they're AI experts and, you know, I guess these things move on. Are they all charlatans now? Of course they're not there. A lot of them will be. A lot of them just really into the latest stuff. Are they. Can they be experts yet? I don't think so.
- [43:55]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So before we get on to your question, I don't want to waste too much of your time, but yeah, you talked. I don't think we've touched on it. Share of model. So share, because obviously we had brand brand share. We have PR share in my world. Then we had. Then in the last few years of digital PR and SEO, we've had share of search, if you're in. And now we've got share of model in the AEO and GEO space. Do you want to talk a bit about that?
- [44:23]
B
Yeah, why not? So, as you said, every kind of era has its share of and, you know, share of mind, share of search, share of voice, all these share ofs. Well, the new one, from our perspective at least at Jellyfish and BrandTech, is shared model. And it's not only a, a sort of concept and a metric. We've got a platform as well called Share Model, which helps you as a brand understand your, your brand visibility within the LLM outputs. You know, how often is your brand being mentioned when your category comes up and when people are having a conversation about your category. And we can look at your share of voice within each specific model and we can look at your brand strengths and weaknesses against category, against your competitors. And it gets much deeper, it gets very, very deep into all the sources of influence that are all the domains that are citing you and your brand. And it's a brave new world. It has its relationship with SEO. I'm interested in it probably more from the perspective of the overarching brand strategy side and how your brand is showing up and where it's showing up than all the very granular detail that you can get into, precisely what kind of content you need to create on which site and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, we've got people who are kind of SEO experts who are, who are very rapidly learning the relationship between SEO and GEO and this new world. So it's exciting stuff. It's early days. Other platforms are available, but it's very common requests that we're getting from clients to understand this world and understand how they can better understand it and how they can understand how their brand's showing up. So it's a. Yeah, it's an Extremely live interest amongst the client community.
- [46:24]
A
Yeah and it's exciting for the exciting for my sector PR because when you're looking at the data I've seen numerous reports we held a geo webinar held in November because I analyzed my own data before this was November last year and I analyzed my own analytics and and I basically analyzed it all and shared it all in a webinar. We had 600 people marketers come along and I analyzed where the traffic's gone, how my inquiries had gone and I went right into to show what was happening to us and then showed that the Daily Mail and the other tiles that are losing traffic overnight. But one of the key things is sources were was Reddit for obviously chat GPT but a lot of them are PR earned media from earned media sources. None of your shitty little blogs anymore like the the SEO world. It's more of the bona fide media sources and it's taking more of a a human interpretation of all of those things instead of just links. So even if you're not mentioned sometimes it fascinates me that so it's going to be an interesting time for brand PR and SEO all to combine over the next but we'll see. SEO usually gets all the budgets, but actually yeah, hopefully we get some as well. So this show is about mistakes. I haven't asked you what what's a mistake that you've made in your career then and you've learned from.
- [47:46]
B
Oh gosh, you asked me this and I failed to come up with a mistake that I personally made. But it was a mistake that we were making as a team and as a brand with a brand that we that we learned from when we corrected and it was in fact there were a couple brands that were doing a similar thing and I'll touch on both of them. So one was it was quite a long time ago it was KFC and we had ditched in the UK at least the kernel and finger licking good and we weren't using the right color combination of colorways. So we and as we learned we, we discovered that we've been making these mistakes and it's kind of unbelievable to think that was a brand with finger looking good. Is that probably the most brilliant piece of slogan writing or copywriting in ad slogans if not in history certainly I don't know over the last century and we weren't using it and it was the most memorable thing in the category and people just love it and it's so evocative of what that brand's all about the Colonel had reasons for him having been dropped a bit but nonetheless was still a powerful icon but we weren't using it. We discovered we'd got into some really bad habits with the advertising at the time. There was a formula that we'd constructed which was like, I'm going to get it wrong slightly, but it was like how you construct a 30 second TV commercial for KFC. It was like 5% or 5 seconds insight, 5 seconds of family moment and then 20, 20 seconds of products, product demonstration and then some branding just horribly formulaic. And you know, we got into a rut and in fact we ended up losing the business because of this rut that we got into. But we did some, we did some research with company called Decode who, who look at brand assets and we discovered just the sheer strength of, in this, in the UK marketplace of the assets that we were not using. So the kernel and finger licking good and then a particular combination of red, white and black for that brand. And, and we, we basically, okay, we brought those things back and we, and reconstructed things and actually as it happened, I don't think we ever got to do the advertising off the back of that because we'd lost the pitch and the winning agency got to be the one to kind of reinvent those things. And a very similar thing happened with Weetabix. We were working on Weetabix. We had won the business. Actually not me at the time won the business with a different campaign. As so often happens, you know, new CMO or new agency comes on board and wants to prove itself by doing something new and fresh and different and, and we, we did some things which were really good initially. And then, then the, the, the, the, the, the, the kind of effectiveness started to wear off and we were looking for ways to get, to get some growth again. And we did the same kind of research and we discovered that have you had your Weetabix which we were not using at the time and hadn't used for seven years in the UK market. Have you had your Weetabix remains the most, the most salient slogan in the category. And so we brought it back, but we didn't, it wasn't just as simple as oh, the research says it's the most powerful thing, we need to bring it back. There was quite a lot of persuasion that had to be done and I ended up as a sort of intermediary between the clients and the agency and the agency team were very skeptical because they felt it was backward looking to kind of go back to Something like that, that it was somehow not going to show the agency in its best light because we were just reinventing something. We reusing something that another agency had invented 10, 20, 30 years before. And so we, we, we. But we did persuade, you know, the team internally, and we got, we got some, some new advertising which was much better branded, much better because it was more recognizably Weetabix. So going back to the beginning of this conversation, it was still present in people's minds. So we went with that and tried to refresh those memories rather than continuing to pursue building some new memories which weren't really working for us. So lots of sort of forces at play and really fundamentally about bad branding in advertising or poor weak branding in advertising. Advertising and how easy it is to fall into doing things which are weakly or poorly branded. And that being a sort of fundamental issue that all brands can do better on. It's not just a lesson that you can learn if you're doing it completely wrong. It's basically the thing that most brands just don't do very well is to brand things. And so you can get some quick and easy wins just by better branding. So that's, that's the lesson there.
- [52:57]
A
I mean, that is amazing because, I mean, there'll be people out there with the brands and brand assets that they've not even thought about. They're in the back catalog.
- [53:05]
B
Yeah.
- [53:06]
A
And new marketing manager, new marketing director or CMOs come in and just move things on. And actually if they just take a step and take a look back, they may well find that they don't have to spend, other than just checking through to see what, what the public or what your audience remember totally.
- [53:24]
B
And, and it's a, it's a very common thing. And we, we, we wrote a case study which was called Rembrandt in the Attic. So the idea that you've got something in the attic in the locker that, that you can, you can bring out and read, you know, dust off and rediscover and use and it's a fairly simple way to do things, might be in slightly unsatisfying world if every brand just kind of brought out its old thing. And of course, it doesn't apply to all brands. You, you can see it. There'll be brands like Bird's Eye kind of have this continue. You can see the sort of, even as an outsider, you can see the debate they obviously have internally about what do we do with the captain, how do we bring him up to date, should we use him, should we not should. You know, those debates that all brands have that tend to sort of zigzag and swing from one thing to the other. And you can always tell when a brand comes out there with its press release saying, we've just ditched this thing in favor of this thing, or we brought this thing back, having it, not used, not used them, not used it for years. You can sort of see what they're doing and you can see the debates they're having and it's always quite entertaining. And invariably when somebody drops something that's really famous, you go, that'll be back. So there's one, there's one which is Dos Equis, the beer brand with the most interesting man in the world. And it's just such a wonderful campaign. If you don't know it, have a look at it. And, and every so often they drop that and then bring it back. And they drop that and they bring it back.
- [54:51]
A
Although the Sugar Puff Monster became the Honey Puff Monster, didn't they?
- [54:56]
B
Yeah, I worked on that brand at one point. I'm trying to think. I don't think I've got anything particularly interesting to say about it. It was, I think the Honey Honeymonster was one of John Webster's, you know, so John Webster, the gray DDB creative who, who in fact, he, he loved character. I mean, he, in the Cresta Bear was one of his. Hofmeister Bear was one of his. Loved these kind of monster characters. I mean, in fact, you know, in, in some ways a little bit of a, I mean, terrible to say a bit of a one trick pony. But it worked. It really, really worked. Back to, back to the, the chat about character from up front.
- [55:33]
A
So thanks for that. We've got one final question which we ask all our guests, which is, you've been on the show now, Tom, and we've. You, you've got the format. If you were us, who's the next guest that you'd invite on this show and why?
- [55:47]
B
Well, John Evans, uncensored cmo, you mentioned having been on their event recently. He's, he's got, he'll have a, he's got great stories about mistakes he's made because he, you know, he, he'd been a CMO and he's, he's, he's made all the mistakes think. And his loan.
- [56:06]
A
And I'm going to challenge John when he does come on the show because he said he's going to come on the, he keeps messaging me to come on the show. I'm going to Challenge him to come on the show and not talk about getting fired because he talks about in every episode.
- [56:16]
B
Sorry. Okay. I've just, just fallen into your trap, making you find. Find a new mistake that he's, that he's made.
- [56:23]
A
Oh, no, I know what I know. A couple. He's got a couple. They're great. Tom, thanks so much for your time. If, if people want to get hold of you, how can they find you to, to, you know, to hire you for your services?
- [56:33]
B
Well, LinkedIn is always probably the best way. And then if you want to read content that I do the tomroach.com or marketing week.
- [56:52]
C
Thanks for listening to Embracing Marketing Mistakes. You've reached the end of the podcast. Hooray. What can you possibly do to help Chris and will the providers of this show? Well, what you can help us by doing is just please give us some feedback. Positive, negative, constructive. Well, hopefully not negative, but if you could give us a review somewhere, five star review, preferably wherever you get your podcast, it will really help for people to find the show because there's loads of other people out there that we'd love to hear about it. And the guests that come on here, we want to give them as much visibility as possible. So, yeah, I want to just thank you personally for listening to the show. I really appreciate it because it's a bit weird. We record it in Leeds and wherever
- [57:31]
A
you are around the world, from Peru
- [57:33]
C
to Estonia to Russia to Africa, I want to thank all of you for listening. Really appreciate it.
- [57:40]
A
So, yeah, if you, if you like
- [57:41]
C
the show, please, please give us a review because it means a lot. So thanks a lot and enjoy the rest of your week. See you next week.