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Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
A
Entertainment is the ultimate loyalty scheme. That's the way that I like to think about it.
- [00:05]
B
Hey everyone. Today we have Dan Selke back on the show to talk about entertainment brands and what it takes to become a entertainment powerhouse. So buckle up and let's talk branding.
- [00:19]
A
Yeah, I mean, just to I guess set the scene. We live in a world where I think the two main things that I'd like to talk about in the context of that we talk about three main points in the report. I think two are in particular important to talk about. But first of all, we live in a world where algorithms have meant that we, we have effectively fragmented the amount of channels that we reach people across. Marketers have been talking about this media fragmentation for years. It's nothing new. I think something that people talk about less as a result of media fragmentation is the fact that it changes who your competitive set is. So as, whereas before when you worked in a, as a brand, you're operating in a kind of media siloed world in which you had print, tv, billboards and maybe radio ads and you were competing against other brands in this sort of brand safe advertising Olympics, I guess you could call it, where, you know, Mars up against Mandalay, P and G up against Unilever, McDonald's up against Burger King, social media, algorithms, the Internet had totally changed that fragmenting media and meaning that you're now in this kind of royal rumble at large with the likes of MrBeast, TikTok, Netflix, you're constantly competing for people's attention up against tons of other competitors, tons of other people in the competitive set. And that's only going to be intensified by AI, which is allowing people to create more content at speed, which in some ways can be brilliant, but in other ways can be absolutely terrifying and terrible, and increases the amount of slot on the Internet, which makes it even harder to break through and reach people. So I'd say that's one thing, this sort of idea of the, the competitor set increasing. And in a world where your, you know, Your competitor is Mr. Beast or the latest A24 film, the Bar is just so much higher in terms of what is going to grab people's attention. So you need to be an entertainer. And then equally, even if you do have bottomless pits for paid media spend, the amount of reach that you can get for that money has skyrocketed effectively. Cost per acquisition has, has gone up 222% on platforms like Meta in the last decade alone. And since they've had kind of the iOS changes for Apple and It's become harder, harder and harder to target. That situation is only becoming more of an issue effectively. So we're seeing that even the brands that do have the money to spend on bottomless pits of paid media aren't actually seeing the same effectiveness from that paid media. They're not seeing basically a kind of, they're not seeing a reaction to it in the same way that they would. And you've actually seen that a lot of D2C brands that were overly reliant on that spend have started to fall by the wayside. There's this kind of graveyard of these sort of puffy, colorful millennial Gen Z brands that never went omnichannel, that are kind of, you know, laid effectively by the wayside. I think it ultimately boils down to the fact that entertainment is the ultimate loyalty scheme. That's the way that I like to think about it. If you think about the things that you pay religiously for on a month by month subscription, they're probably your bills and utilities which we don't like to spend money on and kind of we see as a necessity. But then after that it's things like Netflix, your Amazon subscription, which includes Amazon Prime, Disney. Those are the types of things that we're willing to part of our money with on a consistent basis and we feel give us entertainment value on a consistent basis. So that's the way that like kind of brands to think about entertainment value is that ultimately starts becoming this, this, this loyalty scheme for your brand that, that pays for people's attention basically.
- [03:43]
B
Yeah, I love that. I mean there's a lot to unpack there and maybe to start off like, I think it's also mentioned briefly in the paper Entertain or Die. As soon as I hear things like loyalty and entertainment on the one hand I'm excited because I believe in this world where we don't have a lot of attention, try and get it by doing something fun and light hearted so people can just see it and they can think about your brand in the right moment. On the other hand, we have seen a lot of research about the fact that brands are very small and insignificant things in the consumer's mind. How do you consolidate these two things? Just curious about that.
- [04:29]
A
Yeah, totally. I think those things go hand in hand. The very fact that you're competing against people and competing against entities, entertainers in life that hold up a lot more bandwidth for, for everyday people means that you need to fight so much harder, means that the bar is so much higher, means that you need to be entertaining and Actually, I think you can scroll down to the attributes that we ranked within our research. The page that we're looking at here is all about what actually makes a brand entertaining. So just to give a brief recap of the research itself. So we're obsessed with what makes brands entertaining and that's what we do for clients. We try to make them more entertaining. We've realized that there wasn't much research actually done into what makes a brand entertaining. And then equally if that brand entertainment factor was Genu driving ROI for a business in the form of kind of share price increase and revenue increase ultimately. So we partnered up with Tracksuit, Brilliant, affordable brand tracking partner that lots of people will be aware of doing brilliant things in the space to kind of take the fight to the likes of a Kantar and YouGov. You can go and look at them if you want to look at them. But effectively we partnered up with them to create this entertainment index, this ranking of 100 of the biggest and best brands in the world purely on entertainment value. And that was a combination of social metrics and social listening that we did, but then also combined with a robust 20,000 person deep survey where we looked at seven different attributes that made a brand entertaining. So again, for those who are just listening, I'll read off kind of the seven attributes that we ranked and looked at by surveying people on a bunch of different questions. But there was love, connection, social, humor, memory, attention and character. If you want to go into detail those, download the report and go and have a look at kind of the meaning behind all of them. But I'll kind of go through the key highlights. Basically of those seven attributes, the ones that we found drove the most entertainment value were social. So they're a brand that kind of creates the best content on social, much like their favorite content creator. Those are some of the questions we asked. Humor. They're a brand that is inherently funny. Attention, they're a brand that shocks people into attention. They're very surprising. They stop you in the scroll in the feed. And then finally, character. They're a brand that has the personality of a character that somebody would see on a TV show or a cartoon or a series. So again, they're on on a level with some of the other most entertaining entities out there in the world today. The two that we actually saw didn't really over index or didn't drive a big jump in entertainment value and weren't over indexing by the top 30 brands in our index were Love and Memory. Love is what we talked about as I know we kind of talked about sort of brand loyalty. I guess I was talking about it more in the context of getting people to keep noticing you and keep remembering you. What I wasn't talking about in the context of was, was people having love for your brand, which I think we all kind of know is sort of a fleeting concept in, in the world of branding and marketing, people have maybe max free brain cells which they think about your brand with at any one time. And there's probably a kind of constantly popping on and off. So we found, yeah, that most people wouldn't consider any of these brands to be like a brand that they love necessarily. They didn't, you know, attach the concept of love to any of these brands and particularly the ones that they found the most entertaining, that didn't really matter to them. It didn't need to be a brand they loved or had that inherent level of connection with. And then equally memory. And I don't think this is anything to say that, you know, being distinctive as a brand is a bad thing and you shouldn't strive to be distinctive. I think memory as a question. So again, the thing that we looked at here was a brand that is remembered or distinctive. The main thing that we noticed here was just that across the board, basically brands weren't really remembered all too much. And that's inherently because of the speed of the Internet and the way that things move today. When you have a big brand moment inherently, the very next day you are old news. I think a really good example of that, which we can look at, which is from one of the top brands in the index, and I love this one, is a day after the super bowl this year. So the super bowl, loads of brands spending millions and millions of pounds kind of on their adverts and on these big brand moments. A day after the super bowl happened, Duolingo stole 84% of the conversation of all of the brands who advertise in the super bowl combined simply by killing their Green Owl with a Tesla truck. So it just shows you how, you know, one tiny thing on social can suddenly become the moment and steal all of the conversation of brands that spent millions and millions of pounds generating buzz just a day before. And I think that's the main point they want to make about memory. You know, people remember. The people remember the first thing they saw, the last thing they saw, and the best thing they saw and the last thing they saw and the best thing they saw benefit from volume. So what we're seeing from a lot of these brands is that they tend to be those that experiment and do lots of little things. Grace Kite talks about that a lot, about the strategy of lots of littles and working across lots of different channels and working on an experimentation kind of lab style approach to, to creating content as opposed to the big campaign moments which invariably can have a large impact in one big spike but then are pretty much forgotten the very next day.
- [09:34]
B
Yeah, that's interesting. And I guess like that's the whole thing with like if you take this, this large traditional waterfall campaign system where you put months into something, producing it and then putting it out there and hoping it will work versus like the fact that you really don't know what the algorithm will pick up and what will work. Like it's a lot better to just put a whole lot of small stuff out there and then maybe at some point scale something like. I think Duo did that very well when they started seeing their mascot doing really well. They just like own down and double down on that. There's like a bunch of teams that are really interesting and I'd love to dive into in the paper. But maybe before we do that, like, is there something that you've seen across the board with all of these like let's say these, these entertainment brands that they all have that makes them work?
- [10:31]
A
Yeah, I mean like just, just before we dive into that, I think number one thing I'd want to say and the point of this report was that we give hard facts and evidence to marketing, marketing teams, brand brand people and marketers that allow them to go into a boardroom and say this works, this works from a fiscal point of view, this works from a financial point of view, this is generally driving ROI for businesses. So across the board, amongst the 30 brands that were the top in the index and they're considered like the gold standard, they are the most entertaining brands in the world in our mind. And there's a lot of them, ones that you would expect. TikTok, YouTube, Marvel, Disney, they are literally by definition entertainment brands. There's plenty in there that you wouldn't expect. And what I mean by that is that they come from categories that aren't inherently entertaining. So Liquid Death is can water. You know, water is traditionally one of those boring categories. That's how they've had the most impact. Duolingo is a language learning app that is not inherently entertaining. They shouldn't have a right to be an entertaining brand. Viva's Financial Services Crocs Ugly Shoes Tubi is a fifth place competitor in the space that they're in. You know, they don't really have a right to be ranked that highly vinted as a, you know, secondhand clothes store. Like there are plenty of examples in that top 30 that aren't necessarily entertainment brands, but across the board, 96 of those. There was only one. GoPro I believe had revenue growth in the last year and two thirds of those brand had double digit revenue growth. So entertainment led strategies are genuinely driving ROI for businesses and brands. And lots of these businesses and brands mention it in their shareholder letters Duolingo quite regularly, in fact every quarter. So that's the first thing I would probably say is that this is, you know, this is genuinely a strategy today for brand teams and marketing teams to drive ROI and for their business if they commit to it. I guess the next thing I'd say is, yeah, as you said, there's six themes that we look at across the board that show how these brands kind of operate and the different tactics they use. I think, and I would say this because I'm biased, but I think the most interesting thing and when you look across these brands, they all do this to varying degrees when you look under the hood is that they combine two things which in the report called in house in Hollywood, but then we also called industry unstanded talent. And basically what that means is when you look under the hood of some of these brands, so Liquid Death, Duolingo in particular, they really expertly combined the very best of brand and marketing thinking with the very best of entertainment world thinking, some of them in quite siloed ways. So Liquid Death, very well documented how they have kind of a left and right, right brained marketing team. They have tons of people who understand cost per acquisition, who understand how to drive ROI on across different channels, whether it be through retail or whether it be through paid media spend. And all of those guys are, you know, kind of MBA style marketers. And then you've got, you know, the, the right side effectively, which are the creative thinkers, the mavericks led by Andy Pearson who is, you know, VP of Creative does have a kind of agency background, a more traditional industry background. Then outside of that it's people who are kind of, you know, lead singers in punk rock bands, wrote for the Onion, were kind of animators and adults for animators for Adult Swim, the kind of cartoon, Adult Cartoon Network. Effectively they're all of these kind of different thinkers. I would say industry understanded is what we call them, but thinkers who come from totally outside of the world of marketing advertising and as a result know how to make entertaining content and know how to make things that differently than advertising and feel differently to advertising. And it really does show. That also allows them to move at speed. Duolingo is a really perfect example of that. I think all of these brands are able to move at a certain speed. That allows them to not be precious and allows them to follow that lots of little strategy that we talked about. So they're. They're brilliant at experimentation. They're brilliant at finding out what works and then scaling it, you know, liquid death. Again, a really good example of that with the way that they scaled their approach to the Super Bowl. First they did sort of stunty things that. That kind of tried to hijack the Super Bowl. They saw some success from that, and then they went into, okay, well, if we were to do a Super bowl advert, how would we approach that? And how could we scale that and how could we make that efficient for us to do? And I think that their ad was $350,000 all in riches. Again, seems like a lot of money on its own, but compared to the millions that brands are spending, it's a tiny drop in the ocean. And I think it was the fifth or the third most effective advert at the Super Bowl. So you can start to see, again. Yeah. How building this kind of unique, I'd say creative setup that can move at speed, that can come up with ideas differently, is central to a lot of the brand's successes in this top 30.
- [15:17]
B
Yeah. And it reminds me of this. I saw this. I think it was this point about, like, adolescence, the new show on Netflix that is, like, doing really well, has like 100th of the budget of, like, the. The new blockbuster that Netflix also put out and the one that one kind of tanked and Adolescents is doing, like, amazing. And I think it really goes to show the power of, you know, creativity and even working with constraints and that you can really capture an audience regardless of a budget. Of course, there's like, a baseline where you have to invest in creativity, but I think it was a really interesting example. Maybe let's just like, dive into. Straight into the first team. I don't know if we'll hit all six, but we can have a look. So brand lore, what is that about?
- [16:09]
A
Yeah, brand lore. I mean, again, you're being a fan of Entertainer by one, which is a report we did last year. You'll know that you'll see some of the similarities between some of these themes and some of the archetypes, for instance, that we talked about last time. And brand lore is definitely one of those, we talked about scriptwriter brands last year, and this idea of, like, building a brand universe, we tried to kind of flesh that out into a more theoretical concept and something that, again, if you're a brand, you can start to codify and start to use as a playbook for your own brand, rather than just kind of giving brand examples necessarily effectively. Brand law is all about how you go from a set of brand guidelines to a brand universe. The best example that I always use for this is taking Duolingo and Duo's Green Owl and then taking Tony the Tiger, the Tiger on the front of the Frosty box that everyone's kind of familiar with. They're both essentially the same thing. They're a brand mascot. And, you know, you're the master of mascot stuff, so you'll know plenty about that. They're basically a brand mascot. They're a brand asset. They sit at their purest form. They just sit on a set of brand guidelines with some rules and regulations set around how you can use them, and they're effectively a little drawing on a page. The way that Duo has kind of broken out of that box and become, to be honest, I would say, an Internet celebrity, a celebrity in his own right. He has more followers than Brie Larson, who's kind of a Hollywood celebrity, a Hollywood actress. The way that he's broken out of that is through brand law. That is the number one key to turning something that is a brand asset into something that is a brand character, basically. And, you know, Tony the Tiger is relegated to the front of the box of Frosties and has very little lore built behind that asset, and therefore doesn't feel like a character, doesn't feel like something that you relate to, doesn't feel like something that you want to interact with, basically. And so Duolingo are amazing and have done so brilliantly well over the last few years in experimenting and building the brand lore behind Duo, the Owl. And the very really interesting thing about that is that, yes, they have a brilliant team who have come up with plenty of the Law behind the Owl, but actually, the massive success of Duo, and they'll say this themselves, is from the way they've mined the comment sections of their own page to create a patchwork of what fans actually think this Owl is, what fans actually think the brand is, the storylines that fans want to see behind the Owl. And that's why it only works in this, this method of experimentation and building on the Owl, because if they just did one big campaign every year where they had, you know, Five people in a room come up with the latest storyline behind you of the owl. And it was only going to be a 30 second advert that you saw every year at the Super Bowl. It just wouldn't have the same impact. Instead, they're creating new storylines for JIO on a daily basis based on hundreds of comments of people saying things like Spanish or vanish. And that's where this whole idea that duo is this kind of like manacle and a kind of almost stalker type character who's going to kidnap you if you don't do your Spanish lessons came from or you know, someone in the comments saying, oh, Duolingo kind of sounds like Dua Lipa cool. Obviously that's where a whole romance then blossoms that puts Dua Lipa in contact with Duolingo. You know, there's tons of little stories and nuggets in the comments that then became much bigger things and scaled into full blown campaigns and became massive ideas. That is really at its core what brand law is all about. There's definitely different ways of communicating that it can be. Yes, it might be imbue your brand law into a character like Duolingo have done, but equally on the flip side, it could be that you imbue your brand law into a world. So Liquid Death and Vacation Inc. Are both good examples of that. Vacation Inc. In particular, if you look at the work those guys do, again it's that for those who are watching, there is an example in the top right corner there. The leisure awaits little, little slot there. But for those who are just listening, vacationing because a sunscreen brand that effectively embraces the world of the 80s and every. When you go onto the website, everything feels like you just stepped back in time into this nostalgia dripping world of the 1980s. The brand sounds exactly like that. It feels very unique. They draw on archival imagery and footage from that world as inspiration to bring bring this kind of whimsical sunscreen brand to life. They don't have a central character who's necessarily at the heart of their story like Duolingo, but they build on this kind of brand lore of the 80s and make people feel like they're escaping. You know, one of their lines is escape to a vacation state of mind. That's the way that they will feel. And again, it doesn't feel like a set of brand guidelines. It feels like a world that you can actually interact with, be a part of. They just start started a walking club in Miami. So harkening back to the that in the 80s where you know Run clubs weren't necessarily a large thing at the moment, but walking clubs were. And, like, walking was always seen as the sport, this weird, whimsical, 1980s style sport that was happening at the time. They really lent into that. So, again, that's a way that you can start to bring brand law to life. And I think the last example we kind of have in there is just looking at heritage brands at least. You know, how can I embrace brand law when I do have a strict, strict set of guidelines? You can go into your archive is the best tool that you have possibly to use. And McDonald's have done that brilliantly of late. They've gone back to old mascots that people have forgotten. They've brought them back to life in new and interesting ways. They brought back menu items, meal items that people had totally forgotten about. That's another way to play with brand law as well. You know, lots of these brands existingly have law. You know, Dueling and Vacation had to create that law for themselves from scratch. Actually, the power of heritage brands is that they have a lot of this already under their nose. They just need to reinvent it for a modern age.
- [21:41]
B
Yeah, it reminds me of, like, when I'm working for Alan, and we also have this really cool, cute mascot. And, like, we put out some ads where it was like, Alan and his cute little, like, fluffy baby. And there was some comments where people are like, what is this baby called? I didn't know it had a baby. And it's so interesting that people are drawn to these, like, even if it's just a very baby, basic thing. And that, like, I think as. As brand managers, we're, like, always afraid to, like, expand on these stories because, like, it doesn't feel so connected, per se, to what we're selling. But actually it's something to draw people in and to, like, show that there is a lot more to it. So I think it's really important to think about that lore and as you said, like, maybe look at some hints that you're getting from your audience. It's a great start. Or look at the heritage that's. That's amazing.
- [22:37]
A
Yeah.
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B
All right. In Housing Hollywood.
- [22:42]
A
Cool. In Housing Hollywood. I mean, I'll briefly glance over this one because I kind of talked about it largely already. But effectively, this is just about looking under the hood of a lot of the brands. Right. We want to see how. Well, how, again, this is all about giving people a more practical guide to becoming an entertainment brand and some things that they can actually take away and achieve for their brand. So we're seeing that a lot of the brands that we work with, but also some of the brands that are in this report as well, are starting to rethink how their content production works basically. And they're operating more like a content studio or they're working with partners like us who help them operate more like a content studio rather than operating like a. Yeah, marketing team who are going to create one large campaign in a year. And they're, they're sort of creating a patchwork, this sort of Ocean's Eleven style team of skill sets to make that work. So we already talked about, you know, Liquid Death, we talked about Duolingo. There's a case study from Rescue Remedy, who's a client of us as well, who will talk about in more detail on another one of the themes. But yeah, this is just really about thinking about non traditional skill sets that exist outside of the world of advertising and marketing. How you can bring those talent into your business, but then also how you can set them up for success. So how can you think about, you know, adopting a writer's room mentality that exists in Saturday Night Live or in comedy writing or in film writing? That's something that a lot of these brands do really well. How can you think about adopting production methods which are inherently lo fi and allow you to move quicker, like Jack Moose's campaign shot on iPhone, for instance. There's tons of tools out there in the world that allow you to operate faster, quicker, better from a content production perspective and those brands are embracing those techniques. So yeah, I won't talk any more about this one. Just say that.
- [24:25]
B
Yeah, I think, I think it's a really interesting point and obviously I've, I've seen a lot of it happening at brands that I work for, including Alan, where we really like go all in on the in house part. I think what's interesting is like finding a balance between what you said earlier, like that cast of creators, like hiring traditional marketers and trying to get them to be creative, like giving them tools and education and that, you know, AI is also playing a role there versus or maybe and also hiring like maybe not your typical brand managers, marketers, performance marketers, but really like creative people, stand up comedians, movie directors. And I think that second part is still something that a lot of brands like are afraid of doing because you know, the discussions about how will they perform on a daily basis and how will we manage these people. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but it's just an observation.
- [25:27]
A
Yeah, I totally agree. I think the observation that I've made as well is that, and this is why, you know, at least we had your bet that businesses like ours are going to be ever more important, is that it's. Both sides of these worlds don't really understand that the. Well, they don't understand each other for starting points. And both of these sides of the coin basically don't know that the other wants to work together with them. Right. Like brand. Brands inherently are like, oh, that, that, you know, content creator who has 300,000 followers creating really funny content online isn't going to work. Want to work in house at my brand and come up with content for my brand, because why would they're making really brilliant content on their own. And then on the flip side of things that those creators obviously are, you know, have a really brilliant reach, are necessarily bringing home tons of brand briefs or bringing home tons of cash, you know, because of the monetization of the platforms and the way that they work so inherently actually, when you reach out to these guys, they do want to work on brands for. They do want to work on briefs for brands. Like, they're very open to doing that. Of course, they want to monetize their creativity and what they do, and it's less about being an influencer for them and it's more about doing what they want to do, which is use their creative skill set. So we've worked with tons of really brilliant creators who have massive followings and we haven't used them for their massive following, we've used them for their creative skill set. And they're more than happy to do that and they want to do that. And again, going back to that sort of fragmentation of media is also caused these like blurred lines that exist between, you know, someone saying, I'm a director. Cool. That means that they can direct stuff for content, for social, for tv, for brands, for themselves. It's not a siloed anymore. And I feel like brands inherently like to think in silos because it's easy to think in silos and it's easy to think about, I've got my social media spend over here and my brand design spend over here and my this spend over there. But the world isn't that simple anymore. And the sooner that brands kind of wake up to that, there's a whole world of possibilities out there in terms of the type of talent that they can work with and wants to work with them.
- [27:27]
B
Yeah. And I think there's a lot of people listening, working on the Agency side, like what are the implications for that side of the industry? Like how do you think they should adapt to this new world where in house is becoming more and more the dominant way of working together?
- [27:45]
A
Yeah, I mean again, you know, we're, we're inherently not just a kind of in house partner. We are an external partner. When we work with brands. I don't think agency partners are ever going to go away. I think there's always going to be place specifically for the, the top 1% of brands. Top 1% of agencies who work with the top 1% of brands. Our lead investor, mother are the, the biggest and best independent creative agency in the world. That you know, they're never going to go anywhere. They're always going to have the likes of the KFCs of this world who need to work with them, the likes of the Ikeas of this world who need to work with them. But then there is, there will be this kind of like middle ground of agencies, I suppose that will start to fall away and the only way that you're going to remain is by being specialized around something. And that doesn't mean that. Sorry, specialized around something and also inherently flexible and nimble and able to work around kind of in house teams. Because again, in house teams will always still need resource, particularly when it comes to a production standpoint. I think again, if you look at those brands that I spoke about, all of them work with this kind of patchwork of creator and creative talent that make up their in house production team. And most of that talent will not usually sit in the house 100% of the time. Why would you have talent there 100% of the time? You don't necessarily use 100% of the time. You know, that's the gambit that they would make. That's the comment they would make, which is fine. But in that case they will definitely need to work with partners and they'll definitely need to be symbiotic with partners. I think the ultimate thing that you can focus on is just again not fighting against the tide. I think this is the same thing with AI in particular as well. The very best thing that a creative can do is recognize the prevailing trends that exist so in housing, AI technology, and figure out how they can be the very best partner in all of those things. For instance. So I see for instance AI and technology as the ultimate iron man suit that can be put around talent. Right. In the same way that I see the rise of in housing as a brilliant opportunity to create a company that offers in house Creative partners. The very best solution that they wouldn't usually get from a traditional agency because it doesn't fit in the same way. So I just see the opportunity in these things rather than kind of the negative in them. But yeah, to make that point clear, all of those brands who are kind of in that top 30 still work with agency partners with some variety. I think it's just the word agency feels very loaded for some reason to certain brands when it shouldn't because they're basically just partners. It's the best way of thinking about it.
- [30:15]
B
Yeah. And what I have seen is like we recently attracted some, some really good like talent that was like, you know, they can take a camera and create really cool videos in a style that they could do it for themselves as well. But like as soon as you, you have a bit of like an incubator space where they can start to create cool stuff, entertaining stuff, it also becomes a lot more attractive. Like I think we somehow still think like in house, boring agency, cool creative work. Well if as a brand you're able to create this space where people can be creative, I think it will also change the dynamic a bit of what is there. Let's, let's keep, let's keep going. In real life. That's an interesting one.
- [31:02]
A
In real life. Yeah. Again we can sort of keep on top line. It's pretty obvious hopefully from, from the, from the, from the headline there. But there's a really great stat there that talks about how this last year marketing spend expiring global exponential marketing has been grew by 10.5% which is the first year that it had that it exceeded pre pandemic spending. Sorry. So basically experiential real life activations are back on the agenda. Tons of brands are leaning into this. Tons of brands are bringing experiences to life in the real world. I mean anecdotally even small world. My own business is an example of this. We've been out to the States at different, various different events and panels and being kind of front and center and getting our faces out there as much as possible because it feels like that's the way that people want to, want to interact with you. I think even more so in a kind of AI prevalent world, being able to actually touch grass so to speak and be able to see people front and center and be tactile and touch and feel experiences is going to be ever more important. And equally in a world where anyone can snap anything that happens out in the world and it suddenly becomes news globally. Brands that can think cleverly about how they turn up in the real world and then amplify that online will actually see that experience have a tenfold impact than what it had previously. So I guess it's not something that's necessarily new. You know, experiential marketing has been around for, you know, probably a century in various different forms, but it is something that is back on the agenda. And in particular, brands are thinking about how they can build experiences that are entertaining rather than just do a job for the brand. In particular, loads of brands that have really strong IP like Netflix, who are creating, you know, the Netflix house, which is Netflix houses, which are kind of their mammal centric response to Disneyland Disney parks is really interesting to look at equally epic games and all the activations they do of Fortnite, bringing those into the real world. Hasbro taking their IP and building out experiences around like the Nerf brand for instance. Tons of tons of experience. Tons of examples of brands who are bringing their IP into experiential because they see it as the next form of growth, basically. Again, it's the Disney model that's existed for ages. Create a brilliant IP that exists in people's heads and then bring it out into the real world and package and sell that experience to them in a new format. So yeah, I expect to see this on the rise, basically.
- [33:25]
B
Yeah, I'm very bullish on this part. I think like we, we've gone too far on like making everything 100% digital and like just like we started almost avoiding touching the real world. Well actually like, and a lot of the arguments are always the same, like, yeah, this doesn't scale well. And you know how we're going to prove the ROI of this big single event thing? Well, actually what I've seen like even like again giving Alan as an example, we organized a run contest where we had like 300 people come to us and run together 20km. We had our mascot there cheering. You put a camera on that sort of thing and the content immediately is like 10 times more entertaining because it's real and it's like, it's hard to emulate that in any way or form in the digital or in a very produced environment. So I think it's like a huge opportunity to create these smaller pockets of real life experience and then as you said, scale them, broadcast them them to social media and so on. So yeah, I'm excited about this part.
- [34:29]
A
Yeah, I think counterintuitively, and this is another thing that we say, but counterintuitively, the very best ideas on social are things that don't happen on social. So Charlie XCX and her brat wall last year, for instance, or set the severance cast in a box in Grand Central Station. Like, these are the things that go bonkers online and a spread left, right, and center. And they're things that didn't start or originate online at all. So definitely where I would be focusing some of my small bets and experiments.
- [35:01]
B
Exactly. All right, let's keep going. Let me know which. We only have, like, 10 minutes, so if you have any or.
- [35:08]
A
Yeah, I mean, understand the talent we kind of covered as part of In House in Hollywood. Again, this is. This is one of the unique things about Small World. As a creative company, you know, we build and craft teams bespoke from this roster of what we call industry unstandard talent. Talent that isn't typically, you know, part of the marketing and advertising conversation. We talked about it as part of in housing Hollywood. But, you know, just to land it again, we can. We can skip over this. I mean, there's a couple good examples on that page. I think the one that I'd really kind of look. Look for people to. To read in about, because it's really interesting, is Doritos crashed the Super Bowl. So we mentioned it on the page here for those who can see. See the video. But for those who can't, Nate Norell and Dylan Bradshaw are two content creators who entered a competition to win $1 million as a cash prize and have their super bowl advert aired for Doritos. And they ended up winning the competition up against, you know, small production houses and actual, you know, directors and film companies. And it just proves that, you know, today some of the most entertaining talent doesn't necessarily work in, you know, the traditional creative services or marketing or advertising industries. And they're kind of the new creative class coming through. So it's just about embracing this type of talent in the same way that we talked about in In House in Hollywood.
- [36:21]
B
Yeah.
- [36:22]
A
And then I think if we have time for one more, I talk about media moguls. I think this might be the last one. Or maybe there's one more after. Anyway, I think it might be the last one. Now there's two more. Well, we're talking about media moguls. I think that's the one that I'd like to end on. So media moguls. This is about going from being a media buyer to a media owner. Again, we talked about this in the context of brands that have existing IP going out into other formats. So, I mean, really timely to be Honest, because we had the Minecraft movie that just came out, which again supposedly saves cinema, which I guess most cinephiles would be sort of shouting at the screen right now and smashing X and me saying. But you know, anecdotally, it kind of has, it's. It has been a bit of massive box office smash and it's showing how you can take IP from one world and translate it into another format and make it work for others. I mean, we're seeing that with hbo, you know, bringing Harry Potter to the TV screen now as well for streaming. But we're seeing tons of like consumer brands do this as well, taking, you know, brand IP and turn it into other formats, whether it be Duolingo or Liquid F, which you've already talked about, which are really well documented. But I also think some lesser known examples like Elf Beauty, for instance. So Elf Beauty have got a studio now called Elf Made. One of the amazing things that they've recently done is they've effectively created their own record label, they created their own music label because they realized that loads of female content creators on the platform didn't have the right songs that they needed for their Get Ready With Me videos. So they commissioned basically up and coming musicians to create the perfect tracks for Get Ready With Me videos and then Elf would basically license those and allow creators to use them as a music label. That's brilliant. That's amazing. That's them acting a brand, acting as a kind of media mogul, acting as a record label, which is again, something that you think is totally counterintuitive when you hear about the example, actually makes perfect sense for the audience that they're trying to reach. Equally, you've seen LVMH recently set up 22 Montaigne, which is a entertainment studio basically specifically made to take all of those amazing stories from the archive, like the Vince Lombardi Trophy, which is the trophy behind every NFL story over the years, or the 10 that signed the Treaty of Versailles, for instance, and telling the stories behind some of those iconic kind of like Tiffany moments, for instance. So, yeah, taking all of the IP that exists within LVMH and then turning those into podcast, film, tv, whatever it might be, anything that can drive kind of success. But then even, you know, if that's one end of the spectrum, tv, movies, massive productions, there's on the other end of the spectrum, brands that. And some of the brands that we work with, Rescue Remedy, that I mentioned before, there's an example of that there, that little square for those who are looking that Says hangxiety. There's tons of brands who are taking formats that we'd expect like TV or film, and translating them onto social in small bets and small experiments. Experiment ways. So like for instance, in China, 60 second soap operas are massive and TikTok first soap operas are massive. These are 60 second to 90 second formats which are quite lo fi. Inherently entertaining. Yeah. Amazing to watch. And there's brands like Rescue Remedy, who we created this concept for called Rescue Rama, who again are creating mini dramas for platforms like TikTok or platforms like YouTube that are inherently watchable. Don't cost the world to create. But take the very best from media owners like Silver Studios and Music Studios and think about, okay, well we were to translate this for social today, what would that kind of look like? And becoming media owners in their own right, just in a very different way to traditional media. So yeah, this is a really good kind of one to, to end on something that again, I think any brand could start to look at these examples on the page and put into practice tomorrow because it doesn't cost a lot to do and something that again, we've been doing for clients for the last few years. But we're really, really hedging our bets on this this year.
- [40:23]
B
Yeah, maybe just to, to wrap it up could be interesting. I think a lot of people listening are like nodding their heads at everything you're saying and the examples we're seeing. But you know, the typical thing a lot of people are at companies where marketing has to play this role of like just doing what it needs to do to work to the business and this is also part of it. But you know, they're not able to convince the key stakeholders that yes, let's do something more creative, entertaining. Maybe like you talk a little bit about the strategic part but like how do you start creating the shifts if you're inside of a company to say like, guys, come on, we need to do better than this boring, bland, generic things we're putting out there. Yeah.
- [41:14]
A
I mean, first things first, I'd download this report and send it out to everyone in the business. That is usually a good first stop, first step for most of the brands that we're speaking to. But no, then I would particularly look at the slides which communicate, you know, the financial incentive to the brands that are doing this, which hopefully gets you a meeting at the very least with, with the C suite. And then after that I would really. Well, and I'm happy to talk to anyone about this who's listening to this and is interested, but it's really about auditing your brand as it stands and looking at the kind of entertainment metrics, I guess, behind the brand. And again, if anyone wants to know what those might be, please do get in touch with me. But auditing your brand, looking at kind of the entertainment metrics that exist, the metrics that matter. Not really necessarily looking purely at reach and impressions. I think we look a lot at shares saves, the types of. Types of metrics that you can't gain effectively, the types of metrics that don't necessarily come straight through paid. I would do a bit of an audit of your brand, try and compare it to other brands that exist out there best in class, like Liquid, that Duolingo, understand what that entertainment gap is and then set out a series of experiments. So, again, Duolingo, when they first started out, TikTok was very much seen as their experimentation channel. And although it's now their main channel now and seen as a massive success, it never was that in the beginning, it was always seen as kind of a testing ground, a place to experiment, a place where nobody might look. The CFO wasn't interested in. The CEO didn't really care much about that. We can start to prove out some of this theory and put some of it into practice. Equally, I would always say experimentation, experimentation, experimentation. That's the name of the game. That's how you get these things signed off. You say, can I just take 20% of my budget, 15% of my budget, and put it into two or three experiments to show you the success of this work and always make sure that you're measuring what matters to the business in the context of entertainment. Again, I'm happy to talk about what those metrics might be. We're doing it for loads of different brands who've got in touch off the back of the back of the report. We're doing these kind of entertainment audits which look at, you know, how they rank up next to some of the brands in here, why they've got such a big gap in certain areas between some of the brands here, and then help to give them a little bit of a measurement framework for proving the success of some of the experiments they're going to be putting in place.
- [43:29]
B
Yeah, all right. Amazing. Well, then, thank you so much for trying to make our world a bit more entertaining. I think it's important that that happens and I'm looking forward to the next study next year and what you'll find.
- [43:44]
A
Yeah, Entertain or die free. It's coming.
- [43:47]
B
Thanks so much, man. Take care.