Marketing's Education Crisis: Mark Ritson on Why Most Marketers Are Getting It Wrong

Summary

Marketing Vanguard Podcast Summary: "Marketing's Education Crisis: Mark Ritson on Why Most Marketers Are Getting It Wrong"

Release Date: January 2, 2025

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Introduction

In this thought-provoking episode of Marketing Vanguard, hosted by Jenny Rooney from Adweek, the spotlight is on the pressing education crisis within the marketing industry. Renowned marketing professor and industry expert, Mark Ritson, delves deep into why most marketers are falling short and offers actionable insights to bridge the growing gap between marketing education and practice.

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Guest Introduction: Mark Ritson

Mark Ritson brings over 25 years of experience as a marketing professor and consultant. Having taught at prestigious institutions like Minnesota, MIT, London, and Australia, Ritson is a formidable voice in brand management. Approximately eight years ago, he transitioned from academia to launch his own initiative, the Mini MBA, an online platform that has trained around 35,000 marketers across 40 countries. His mission is to provide an accessible alternative to traditional MBAs, focusing solely on marketing excellence.

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Main Discussion Points

1. The Structural Crisis in Marketing Education

   Ritson passionately critiques the current state of marketing education, particularly within American business schools. He argues that unlike professions such as medicine or law, where practitioners must engage in their field alongside teaching, most marketing professors do not actively practice marketing. This disconnect leads to outdated curricula that fail to address real-world marketing challenges.

   “Most American business schools and international business schools, the professors of marketing don't do any marketing. Not good enough. Not good enough.”
   — Mark Ritson [08:19]

   Ritson emphasizes that without active practitioner involvement, marketing education remains stagnant, leaving marketers ill-equipped to handle modern industry demands.

2. Brand Salience vs. Brand Image

   A central theme of the discussion is the shift from brand image to brand salience. Ritson contends that the primary role of marketers should be to maintain a brand's salience—ensuring that the brand comes to mind in consumers' buying situations. He critiques the overemphasis on elaborate brand positioning, which often dilutes the brand's core message.

   “Most of a marketer's job when it comes to ad effectiveness is to maintain a brand's salience... Does my brand come to mind or not?”
   — Mark Ritson [01:03]

   By focusing on salience, brands can ensure they remain top-of-mind amidst a consumer base inundated with thousands of brand choices.

3. Case Study: Nike's Marketing Missteps

   Ritson uses Nike as a prime example of how basic marketing principles can be overlooked, leading to significant brand failures. He points out that Nike's overemphasis on performance marketing at the expense of long-term brand building resulted in a loss of brand salience.

   “They went far too short with their silly performance marketing look... There's an important role for performance marketing. There's just as an important role for long term brand building.”
   — Mark Ritson [14:10]

   Ritson also criticizes Nike's strategic decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting how data extrapolation without nuanced understanding can lead to flawed marketing strategies.

4. The Role of AI in Marketing Strategy

   While historically skeptical of marketing technology, Ritson acknowledges the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing. He foresees AI playing a pivotal role in synthetic data generation and brand strategy, predicting that within five years, AI-driven strategies will outperform traditional human-led approaches.

   “With synthetic data, we're looking at a new, very interesting area... AI brand strategy, which will replace the human version, which is very suboptimal.”
   — Mark Ritson [19:09]

   However, he cautions that the current application of AI in performance marketing and ad creation often misses the mark, emphasizing the need for strategic integration over mere tactical use.

5. B2B vs. B2C Marketing: Breaking Down Barriers

   Addressing the dichotomy between B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) marketing, Ritson advocates for a more unified approach. He challenges the notion of treating them as distinct categories, arguing that effective marketing principles apply universally across both domains.

   “It's all just marketing. We gotta fix marketing generally, not worry about B2B versus B2C or products versus services.”
   — Mark Ritson [22:26]

   Ritson acknowledges the increasing sophistication in B2B marketing but maintains that the core challenges and solutions remain consistent regardless of the target audience.

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Notable Quotes

• On Marketing Education:

  “There's a massive structural problem with business schools... Professors of marketing don't do any marketing. Not good enough.”
  — Mark Ritson [08:19]

• On Brand Salience:

  “Most American brands are so fixated on brand image, they've ignored the salience piece of coming to mind.”
  — Mark Ritson [16:14]

• On AI's Future:

  “I believe that is the role that AI will ultimately play. And then I think it will link to tactics, but only the short term performance tactics.”
  — Mark Ritson [19:07]

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Conclusion

Mark Ritson's insights shed light on the critical gaps in marketing education and their repercussions on the industry. By advocating for a return to foundational principles like brand salience and leveraging emerging technologies thoughtfully, Ritson provides a roadmap for marketers aiming to enhance their effectiveness in a rapidly evolving landscape. The conversation underscores the urgent need for educational institutions to align more closely with industry practices and for marketers to prioritize strategic clarity over superficial branding efforts.

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Key Takeaways:

1. Revamp Marketing Education: Integrate active marketing practice into academic roles to ensure curricula remain relevant and impactful.
2. Prioritize Brand Salience: Focus on making brands top-of-mind rather than overcomplicating brand positioning.
3. Balanced Marketing Strategies: Maintain a healthy balance between performance marketing and long-term brand building.
4. Strategic Use of AI: Embrace AI for strategic decision-making while being cautious of its current limitations in tactical applications.
5. Unified Marketing Approach: Move beyond the B2B vs. B2C dichotomy to apply universal marketing principles effectively.

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About Marketing Vanguard

Marketing Vanguard is hosted by Adweek and shines a light on the individuals leading the marketing industry forward. Through in-depth conversations, it delivers valuable insights, strategic wisdom, and growth opportunities amidst the ever-evolving marketing landscape. To stay updated, follow Adweek's podcasts and join the conversation on Twitter @DWeekPodcasts.

Transcript

[Unnamed Student]

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for Career Day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day.

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[Mark Ritson]

Most of a marketer's job when it comes to ad effectiveness is to maintain a brand's salience, which is a much more brutal and basic but harder concept. Does my brand come to mind or not? In buying situations, what the consumer thinks about it has become an over elaborate mess. So most marketers in the room here have let me take an example. Positioning have seven or eight slides or a brand book and they have brand characters and they have brand purpose and they have brand associations. It's complete nonsense. Brand positioning, when it's back to its basics of effectiveness tells us you have a couple of brain cells maybe in your consumer's head. Your main job is that your brand comes to mind and they think this and maybe this about it.

[Jenny Rooney]

Hi everyone and welcome to the Marketing Vanguard podcast. I'm Jenny Rooney with adweek and I'm here coming to you live From Brand Week 2020 Hot and sunny Phoenix, Arizona. I'm joined by Mark Ritson. Mark, it's a pleasure to have you here and by the way, have you in human form because I've sat next to you on a stage at the WFA Global Marketer Conference and you were in AI form at that time.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, they created a RIT bot which I had nothing to do with. I said delighted you're doing it, but I didn't do anything. And then afterwards I got loads of complaints about this and about that. I said look, if take it up with someone else it wasn't me.

[Jenny Rooney]

Blame that AI. But it was interesting. They leaned in. Into your. Into your Persona, if you will. And a bit of your language.

[Mark Ritson]

Very good.

[Jenny Rooney]

So, yeah, so they were on brand.

[Mark Ritson]

I'm on my best behavior because I'm in the States, so I'm very conscious of the fact that it's very different here when we're in bars in America, everyone swears beautifully, but in professional settings they don't.

[Jenny Rooney]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

Whereas everywhere else. We just do it everywhere now.

[Jenny Rooney]

Sure. Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

It's a shame because you. You definitely have the best swear words in the world. You just don't use them during work hours, which I feel is.

[Jenny Rooney]

That needs to change.

[Mark Ritson]

I won't start it here. Don't worry. But I would care.

[Jenny Rooney]

That could be something. We could get some headlines out of that. That would be fun, actually. So you never know.

[Mark Ritson]

Don't even tempt me with it yet.

[Jenny Rooney]

The week is short.

[Mark Ritson]

I'm there if you need me to be there.

[Jenny Rooney]

But, Mark, you are an marketing education legend in this industry.

[Mark Ritson]

Steady on, Jenny. Steady on.

[Jenny Rooney]

Okay. You really need no introduction, but for those who surprisingly may not know you and your body of work and where you've spent your time, would love for you to share that.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah. I was basically a marketing professor for 25 years. About half my career was in the States, teaching at Minnesota and MIT and the other bits in London and in Australia. I was a specialist in brand management. I did a lot of consulting on the side. A lot of consulting. And about eight years ago, I left academia and I set up my own brand, which is called the mini mba. And basically I took my marketing and branding courses and we created a really unique online format. And we've now trained about 35,000 marketers in about 40 countries. And we continue to grow. So what are we? We're an alternative for marketers. If you don't want to spend a hundred grand in two years and do the whole MBA thing, you can just get the marketing stuff better than anywhere else, I would argue, done online. That's what we do.

[Jenny Rooney]

And you are present for that. I mean, you're like, they are getting you.

[Mark Ritson]

It's just me. We don't do anything live because it doesn't work. But everything is created each week and then people can access it wherever they want. But it's absolutely me. Yeah. I do the Q and A's and everything. Yeah. I don't like. I never like having teaching assistants. It's. I want it to be me. So I do the whole thing and we can scale it beautifully. So.

[Jenny Rooney]

Okay, that's wonderful. So the live thing doesn't work because people can't show up. There's. It's too hard to corral people.

[Mark Ritson]

There's a couple of things, right? It's, we're in 42 countries, so every time zone, but most importantly, yeah, most of our average age is 44. We have very senior marketers who are very busy. They don't have time to tune in at 2pm for some kind of 20th century nonsense live thing. So we do everything. We drop it like Netflix on a Monday and it's there in podcast and video format and it works much better. The age of teaching people in rooms without windows is over. People of my generation put up with it. But I don't know if you've noticed, anyone younger than 40 is not going to sit in a room for three hours and watch a dude in a suit shout at them. So it's a model that will replace the traditional 17th century teaching model.

[Jenny Rooney]

So interesting. And yet we do see other executive MBA programs from Kellogg and Wharton and all the others. How do you think about how people must navigate or think about choosing what you're offering against other offerings like that?

[Mark Ritson]

Look, there's always going to be space for the top 20 business schools in the world to prosper. Everyone underneath that top 20 is going to flail and die over the next 25 years because you can't expect. I mean, I think YouTube has changed the world. If you look at a kid who's now 20, they've grown up with YouTube literally since birth and they've learned that they can go online, get mainline key information fast when they need it. They're not going to have this appetite. And executives of our generation, maybe they can. I'm very skeptical that will happen down the track. It doesn't make sense for us to be flying to places to physically sit in a room when we don't do that. We'd go to the theater, what, twice a year? It's a TV digital video world and we need to get into it.

[Jenny Rooney]

Yet you flew to Phoenix, Arizona.

[Mark Ritson]

Only for you, Jenny.

[Jenny Rooney]

Join us here at Brand Week.

[Mark Ritson]

Only for you, Ginny.

[Jenny Rooney]

Well, thank you very much. Tell me a little bit about what you're doing here. What are we going to be hearing from you?

[Mark Ritson]

So I have a long prevailing obsession and love for America. I mean, America is the home of marketing education. I was made a marketer here. I did my postdoc at Wharton and it changed my life. I mean, I came from the UK 1994 and it was just so far ahead, it was mind boggling. But since about 2010, the world of advertising effectiveness, the theories and practice have changed dramatically and the Americans have not kept up. So I believe they're, for the first time in the history of marketing, are far behind most of the other developed economies. And I think that's surprising. And my talk this afternoon is basically, what are they behind on? Here's data to show, thanks to my friends at Effie, that they are behind and here's what they should do about it.

[Jenny Rooney]

Interestingly, it feels like over the last, you know this better than anybody, but, you know, witnessing this ever widening gap between marketing education and marketing practice, it's something frankly I dove into. I did a series of events with business schools across the country bringing legendary alumni back into the classroom. Not a one or two, one off or two at a time, but critical mass of like 15. Because when you start to see the patterns of like, all these people came out of Mendoza, Notre Dame, all these folks came from Rossett, Michigan. All these folks came from Fuqua, Duke. It's interesting. And that is frankly a little community. And the schools loved it because they brought that practitioner perspective in. And the practitioners loved it because they want to give back, I think, to the classrooms. We also have other frankly rock star academics in marketing, Kevin Lane Keller at Tuck and Dave Reebstein at Wharton, both heroes of mine.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[Jenny Rooney]

So there's incredible folks who are doing a lot of things. Rob Malcolm was a former practitioner. He's been at UT Austin. Like, there's also that model where we see practitioners go back to the classroom, talk a little bit more about this because obviously this is your sweet spot. This is where you've lived. What can the academic community generally do to meet? I mean, if marketers in real time are struggling with keeping up with the change that's happening, by the way they're making the change. How can education continue to iterate?

[Mark Ritson]

So there's a massive structural problem with business schools. And about 50 years ago, the business schools of America, and therefore everyone else decided to follow the more traditional natural science model where you were a full time academic doing full time academic research. We didn't follow the law school medical school model. That in my opinion is horseshit. I worked a lot with medical companies and I would work a lot with professors of surgery, for example. So I'd be here or I'd be in New York City working with a professor of orthopedic surgery. He or she would be my Kol, my key opinion leader. And they'd be doing surgery four days a week and on their fifth day they'd do some teaching on how to do spinal surgery or whatever else. The question that they always ask me and other people have asked me outside of our industry is, so to be a professor of surgery, you gotta do surgery, which kind of seems obvious. And yet to be a professor of marketing, there's absolutely no requirement to do any marketing at all. And that's horseshit in my opinion. And the select few people you've just named, who are all heroes of mine, unusual in the sense that they spent more time doing marketing than teaching marketing. But let's be honest, in most American business schools and in most international business schools, the professors of marketing don't do any marketing. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough. It makes no sense and you'll get a lot of rational explanations for it. They hold absolutely no weight with me. I won the teaching prize at MIT six weeks after I got there. I'm a good teacher, but I'm not that good. Right. It's not good enough. We need practitioners who are also able to teach and your efforts with alums are a perfect example of that. But it's a structural problem that won't be fixed until we really revisit the whole thing. And it's a problem for me because on one side I've got Gary Vee saying you shouldn't have any training. Yeah. In marketing, I asked LinkedIn for the statistic. 26% of American marketers have a training in marketing. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough. If three quarters of our profession haven't got a training in it, no wonder the effectiveness capabilities are low. But at the same time, I have some sympathy for that 75% of ignorant American marketers. Because if you went to a traditional business school to learn traditionally taught marketing these days, I'm not sure it would make you that much better. So there's a real challenge between these two places and I'm not sure how we solve it, but it's a structural issue that has to be fixed. And I don't want to tell you it's better anywhere else. I think it's pretty much the same problem everywhere.

[Jenny Rooney]

Yeah, you know what, it's fascinating and to your point, it's multi layered. It's not going to be fixed anytime soon. And look, I mean, marketing, the joke was, at least when I was a student, folks went into marketing in the business school because they felt it was the easiest path to take.

[Mark Ritson]

Right?

[Jenny Rooney]

Because you didn't have to want to do accounting or finance. Yeah. But now here we are and it is such a data heavy, math heavy part of business.

[Mark Ritson]

It is, it is, Jen, you're right. But I think what we're also finding is the basic foundations of our discipline are not known by most of those who currently work in the discipline. I'll bet you right now if we survey that room, they couldn't name the four P's. I'll betcha the majority wouldn't know what they are.

[Jenny Rooney]

Yep.

[Mark Ritson]

And that's a problem for us because I'm not suggesting we should all do it one way or another. But there are certain foundations. You look at what just happened at Nike. I'm sorry, but that's a very basic set of mistakes that were made by people that should have known better. It's very abc. Right.

[Jenny Rooney]

So I'm glad you brought up the Nike example. Obviously that's just been something that folks have been talking about for the last few weeks and it's suddenly become a case study in overnight it's become a case study and what not to do and such a learning moment. What's Mark's take on that?

[Mark Ritson]

I think there's four basic things that were done badly there. There was a reticence to focus on the product. Having a menswear and a womenswear and a kid's wear division and walking away from specialist sporting product categories was dumb. But that's symptomatic again of most marketers. Let's again be honest about this. Most marketers aren't involved in product development anymore. In America, according to latest data, 70% have no impact on product at all. So it's expected, right, that we would screw up product? We have to be honest, most American marketers aren't marketers anymore. They're advertising people. And there ain't nothing wrong with that. But it's about 8% of our discipline. So I think Nike is entirely typical that they got product wrong.

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[Unnamed Student]

He came by my school for career day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day.

[LinkedIn Advertiser]

Not everyone gets B2B but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be. To be.

[Mark Ritson]

They went far too short with their silly performance marketing look. There's an important role for performance marketing. There's just as an important role for long term brand building. And you have to get them in the right proportions. We know what the proportions are thanks to Field and Burnett. It's just people don't know Field and Burnett's work. So there was a huge short. What happens in companies like Nike is they go super short on performance because they're in love with ROI and they've come out of tech businesses.

[Jenny Rooney]

Of all brands.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, of all brands. These guys knew how to do it right. That makes sense in a way because you can fly on the fumes of your previous brand greatness for a year or two until suddenly the performance stops working because the brand stuff stopped working. So that was definitely a failure. His main failure in my opinion, this is Donaho, the CEO is he started out his tenure in 2020, which is exactly when Covid was at its worst. And there was all these lines like if you look at the online e commerce penetration of total sales in 2020, it was going through a roof because no one was going to the shops. I think he extrapolated that line. That's why he pulled out of all of his wholesale relationships, tried to set up nike.com I think it was just a silly extrapolation of data that was always gonna come back down again. So there was a bit of that going on. And I think when you add all that up together, what you've got is it doesn't take that long to screw up even a great brand. It takes three or four years. But then it happens.

[Jenny Rooney]

Takes a long time to build a good brand and then not much time to have it.

[Mark Ritson]

It's competitive now. You give up room for your competitors. They'll take it.

[Jenny Rooney]

Sure, yeah, which definitely happened.

[Mark Ritson]

Nike will come back. But all of those things are very basic is my point. There wasn't some extraordinarily it was just basic stuff done wrong and remarkably wrong.

[Jenny Rooney]

So look, you brought up the Word effectiveness. That has been your, your mantra, your focus. It's part of who you are and your passion. Tell me a little bit about where we are right now. You've continued to talk about the concept of effectiveness which should have been just a no brainer from. Right. Where are we in that, frankly, in that journey, what are marketers getting right and wrong?

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, there's two things. So we are talking about ad effectiveness, which is 8% of the pie. We can't talk about marketing effectiveness more broadly because that would take us into things like diagnosis and segmentation and strategic stuff that's important. Not to say ad effectiveness isn't important, but that's our topic. And within ad effectiveness we've had a revolution thanks to predominantly, not only but predominantly the work of Ehrenberg Bass, the great institute and field, and Burnett, the great British academic advertising thinkers. Those two contributions have sparked a revolution in how we think about advertising effectiveness that has, as my data will show this afternoon, very little impact in the us so things like salience. So the American marketing model, which came out of the 1980s and 90s with Arker and Keller, which was brilliant now it seems puts too much emphasis on brand image rather than looking at salience. I still believe brand image has a role to play, but it's a much lesser role than we once imagined. Most of a marketer's job when it comes to ad effectiveness is to maintain a brand's salience, which is a much more brutal and basic but harder concept. Does my brand come to mind or not? In buying situations, what the consumer thinks about it has become an over elaborate message. So most marketers in the room here have. Let me take an example. Positioning have seven or eight slides or a brand book and they have brand characters and they have brand purpose and they have brand associations. It's complete nonsense. Brand positioning, when it's back to its basics of effectiveness tells us you have a couple of brain cells, maybe in your consumer's head. Your main job is that your brand comes to mind and they think this and maybe this about it. Most American brands are so fixated on brand image, they've ignored the salience piece of coming to mind. And they have so much wahl and nonsense in their positioning, none of it will break through. You have to be choiceful. This is a great lesson of effectiveness. And the other great lesson of effectiveness is that your consumers don't give a shit about your brand. And I think we've spent too long in America believing that consumers somehow have this great passion for our brands. Like we do. It's not true. We spend eight hours a day on our brand. Turn it around and look at it from the consumer point of view, the only point of view that matters. They have literally 5,000 brands to worry about and they spend three seconds on your brand. We have lost that orientation.

[Jenny Rooney]

I'm going to ask you this question because now you're here in human form, not rip bot form, artificial intelligence. I'm not even going to say AI because I think everybody's sick. Well I did, but everybody's sick of hearing that good thing, bad thing, unavoidable.

[Mark Ritson]

Thing, full of bullshit at the moment. But I think I get a little more credit than other marketing thinkers in the sense that I've always poo pooed most marketing tech as being bullshit. From VR headsets to the works.

[Jenny Rooney]

NFTs, NFTs.

[Mark Ritson]

I was always very clear that it was all horseshit. So I think the fact that I think AI will play a massive role in marketing deserves a bit more credit because I'm normally not of that neighborhood. My take on it is with synthetic data was looking at a new, very interesting area. So the idea that AI can produce incredibly accurate market research without consumers being present, particularly in B2B gives us an incredible opportunity. And in about four or five more years time and I'm involved in this work, we'll be able to use that synthetic data to properly run AI brand strategy, which will replace the human version, which is very suboptimal. And it will replace it because suddenly we can run a million scenarios using our synthetic data to come up with the optimum price point, the right targets, the right media buy, the right budgets, the right category entry points and we can build it in real time. And so I believe that is the role that AI will ultimately play. And then I think it will link to tactics, but only the short term performance tactics. Everyone right now is obsessed with AI is building ads for Toys R Us and everything else that's just pointless, right? You can use humans for that and it'll always be superior. But the short performance tactics and communication where we have to do 500 different messages a day and blah blah, AI has an amazing capability there. But for me the interest is strategy. I think we're on the verge of being able to do things with a brand using AI that will far surpass any kind of human capability.

[Jenny Rooney]

Fascinating.

[Mark Ritson]

But not yet is the key one. I mean, not in the next five years.

[Jenny Rooney]

You mentioned B2B. Ann Mercagi was at our Marketing Vanguard Summit in Chicago this past May Former CMO of Frito Lay, many different companies. Most recently the CEO of Pernell Ricardo. Obviously, she's very outspoken, and she sat on our stage and said, Listen, B2B marketing is the most sophisticated, innovative, hard, challenging part of advertising and marketing. Giving B2B marketing its due. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, I just think we are entering into a time when, you know, and frankly, we as adweek are being much more cognizant of opening up our aperture to beyond just B2C marketing. I mean, I think we all. Everybody loves consumer marketing and advertising branding. And no disrespect, because they're doing incredible things, but I think Obviously on the B2B side, there's been incredible innovation because it's a much more complex demand. So your thoughts there?

[Mark Ritson]

I mean, it's still pretty poor in the tactical area. If you look at the quality of the comms, I'm a big one for not even caring for many years. I get a lot of questions from the people I train, and they say, I'm in B2B. Will this be relevant for me? And I say, yep, I'm in services. Will this be relevant for me? I think the problem with this B2B2C thing is everyone goes, well, there's B2B and there's B2C. Yeah, but just look at B2C for a minute. Okay? We might be selling wart cream, insurance, fashion dresses, vacations. You know what I mean? It's bullshit to even create, in my opinion. These two buckets. At the end of the day, they're all different and they're all part of marketing. So I'd broaden it out and say, I do think B2B has become a lot more interesting, but I don't really think as a subcategory, you need to worry about it. I mean, would I take a B2B marketer into a B2C brand or vice versa? Absolutely.

[Jenny Rooney]

And that is happen.

[Mark Ritson]

It's happening more and more, which is good to see. More and more.

[Jenny Rooney]

It is good to see.

[Mark Ritson]

And to be honest, I think that's the key message now is it's all just marketing. We gotta fix marketing generally, not worry about B2B versus B2C or products versus services. But I do think, yeah, B2B has come on a lot, which is good to see.

[Jenny Rooney]

Yeah. Last quick question I'm gonna ask you. I do ask this in every guest on the Marketing Vanguard podcast, but who's next? Who's somebody that we should have on as an interviewee here? On the Marketing Vanguard podcast can be somebody in this business really well or somebody you've never met, but you admire from afar and you just think they're doing extraordinary things.

[Mark Ritson]

Well, I would say there's a couple of options there. I really like the guys at Evidenza that are doing all of the AI synthetic data I'd have them on. I mean the story about how it's a public story, so how they. The CMO of EY is a very impressive woman. I slightly suggested it was all bullshit, the synthetic data. And they replicated a CEO study in about seven or eight hours and sent it back to her and she was like, okay, we need you as a provider. Talk to those guys. Because I think there's so much bullshit about AI those guys are doing it and I think talking to someone that actually is working in AI and producing services in it would be a really good place to go.

[Jenny Rooney]

Great, okay, then I'll reach out.

[Mark Ritson]

I'd also try and get Tom Ford, but it might be a harder ask.

[Jenny Rooney]

That could be cool.

[Mark Ritson]

He's in semi retirement now from fashion and commercial, but he seems like he's got a bit of time on his hands and he's gonna be a film director in another year. But at the moment he's sitting out there in Palo Alto doing nothing. So I'd have a chat with Tom and Tom's great because he's retired, he's 60, he's a good looking 60. And I think he was always the smartest cat in the fashion, luxury, commercial universe. Yes, he's a designer, et cetera, et cetera. But the other half of him was just a brilliant, brilliant marketing executive. So if you could ever get an hour with Tom Ford, I just think he's solid gold.

[Jenny Rooney]

Consider it done. We're going to give that our best shot.

[Mark Ritson]

It wouldn't be an unpleasant hour either, I reckon.

[Jenny Rooney]

Okay, well, sounds good. Mark, thank you so much. This has been enlightening and as always, just a pleasure to talk with you and hear about the latest you're doing for this industry. So thank you.

[Mark Ritson]

Thank you. Bye.

[Jenny Rooney]

Thanks for being here.

[Podcast Host]

Thank you for listening to Marketing Vanguard, part of the Ad Week Podcast Network and Acast Creator Network. You can listen and subscribe to all of Adweek's podcasts by visiting adweek.com podcasts. Stay updated on all things Adweek Week Podcast Network by following us on Twitter D Week Podcasts. And if you have a question or suggestion for the show, send us an [e-mail] thanks for listening.

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