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- [00:00]
Tom Goodwin
And if you were to follow me around, you'd realize that 99.999% of the ads that I see are genuinely awful in almost every way.
- [00:12]
Host
That's Tom Goodwin. Tom is a marketing and digital transformation expert. He has been voted the number one voice in marketing on LinkedIn four times. He has over 700,000 followers, author of the book Digital Darwinism, and hosts the Edge, a Euro news show that reaches 250 million. If you haven't heard of Tom before, then, I think you're in for a bit of a treat today. This episode contains surprising revelations about where marketing is going. What Tom's simple truths about advertising are the most ridiculous thing Elon Musk has ever said. And some strong language as well. All of that is coming up do you remember when marketing was actually fun? When you had the time to get creative and genuinely connect with your customers, to make content that really resonated and to create campaigns that really performed well. Well, let me be honest. I'm not sure I ever found marketing actually fun, but I certainly enjoyed it much, much more when I wasn't bogged down in data sets in platforms and bureaucracy and red tape. And that is where HubSpot can help. You can turn one piece of content into everything you need. You can know exactly when your prospects are ready to buy and you can see all of your in one place. They take away the need for platforms, datasets, bureaucracy, and they make things easy to use. It is simple to use with the average HubSpot customer doubling their leads in just 12 months. So if you sign up to HubSpot, you'll get more leads, less hassle, and more time to actually enjoy marketing again. Get started for free@HubSpot.com Today's guest on nudge is famed for his controversial topics. He shares why no one I've met or understands marketing, the mistake made by most major banks, and why we're hooked on Marvel sequel movies. Here he is introducing himself.
- [02:08]
Tom Goodwin
I'm Tom Goodwin, the co founder of All We Have Is now and business transformation consultant.
- [02:15]
Host
Tom is considered a bit of a marketing influencer. He is widely followed and as I said, he was voted the number one voice on LinkedIn for marketing. So I asked him why he thinks he is so influential.
- [02:27]
Tom Goodwin
Two things really is one, I'm not really in the industry and the second thing is by not really being in the industry but loving the industry, I get to see things from further away. So I get to kind of join the dots in a different way. I get to kind of escape the day to day realities. And I get to ask questions that are quite often quite stupid but are accidentally quite helpful while being stupid or are just stupid. You know, like I make mistakes.
- [02:52]
Host
The question Tom asks a lot right now is why are adverts so bad?
- [02:59]
Tom Goodwin
So when I go on LinkedIn, I'm surrounded by campaigns, you know, from British Airways or from great advertising agencies, surrounded by lovely campaigns for Kellogg's. I don't ever see those adverts in real life. Like, like the, the ads that get the press, the ads that win awards are not ads that I ever see. And if you were to in the world's most boring hidden camera reality TV show, Follow Me around, you'd realize that 99.999% of the ads that I see are genuinely awful in almost every way. They're devoid of any pride. There's zero craft and part they tend to be sort of digitally placed ads that are very cheap. But part of it is I think the entire industry has absolutely and totally lost its way.
- [03:46]
Host
Now. Tom doesn't think that marketers are bad at their jobs. He doesn't think advertisers are naive. He thinks the Internet is to blame.
- [03:54]
Tom Goodwin
The first thing that the Internet did that no one seems to have really noticed is it meant that we went from having maybe like 100,000 advertisers, most of which would need to use agencies, so probably 10 or 20 million advertisers. The typical account today does not use an advertising agency. They've got lots of data, they don't really know what they're doing. They're using sort of Google pmax to automatically optimize ads. And what you see as a consumer, not as someone in it, is that the vast majority of ads have never been crafted by a human. They've never really been thought about by anyone. And there's just someone mindlessly in a dashboard toggling with filters and toggling with settings until it appears to get 4.13 rather than 4 point. The entire industry has sort of moved in favor of ads that appear to work quickly. It's got completely obsessed with attribution. It's got completely obsessed with micro targeting. It's got completely obsessed with results happening immediately.
- [04:51]
Host
Companies want results immediately. Marketing Week found that chief marketing officers at the top 100 US advertisers had an average tenure of just 39 months. That's the lowest it has been in more than a decade. So what should marketers do?
- [05:09]
Tom Goodwin
They need to accept that. By far the hardest question they get these days is they have been presenting to a board of people who don't really understand advertising. They're presenting to a board of people who at some point in recent history have been told we get 4.$13 for every dollar we spend back on advertising. They've been told that they can help hit quarterly sales targets with digital advertising. And basically the kind of the pool was being peed in by someone. You know, digital advertising kind of came along and it changed people's expectations where think advertising can work quickly. They now think that wastage doesn't need to happen. They now think that wastage is a bad thing. They now think that sales can be attributed really well. They now think that MMN modeling will tell you exactly how to spend their money. And to be perfectly honest, it's complete bullshit. But it takes a lot of balls and a lot of data to fight back and say, you know what? We don't know if this TV ad worked. You know, ask your nephew.
- [06:05]
Host
In three years time in the past, Tom has said that marketing works because it is wasteful. I asked him what he meant by this comment.
- [06:15]
Tom Goodwin
Elon Musk, you know, a man of many reputations who are not generally prone to disliking. He said one of the most ridiculously stupid things ever. And it showed completely how little he understands advertising, but also how little the entire world of technology, people and advertising don't get advertising. Like no one at Meta understands advertising at all. No one at LinkedIn understands advertising at all. These are people completely unaware of what they don't know. So he said, I'm going to help advertisers improve their targeting, you know, because advertising is finding someone who wants to buy your product and then getting in that journey. That's generally speaking, complete nonsense. Advertising is something that does perhaps 30 different things. Advertising makes you feel better about something you've already bought. Advertising brings in entire new consumers into a marketplace that otherwise wouldn't have considered it. Advertising helps you charge a premium. Advertising brings in other people who you know, who may ask you for recommendations. Advertising makes you feel better about the shitty customer service you just had. Advertising helps sellers get meetings with buyers. You know, one of my very first jobs was working for GlaxoSmithKline with a little Perspex binder, you know, and you'd go into Boots in Harrogate and say, you know, you need to stock Lucas Age. And they'd say, I don't think so. And he'd say, look at this TV ad that's coming out. And it was your way to say, you know what? You're going to be fine. You're not going to look like an idiot for stocking this product because people are going to see it on tv. Times have changed, but there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding, which is that advertising is a pretty. It's a pretty slow force and it's a pretty weak force, but it's unbelievably important. And wastage means that you're bringing in people who can be interested in your product later on. Wastage means that your brand has confidence. Wastage means that that brand's probably going to disappear next week. Wastage means that you can put your mortgage in your NEO bank because you somehow think it might be okay.
- [08:17]
Host
Now, I think this is an important point. Most business people are taught that waste is bad. We want larger roi, more cost efficiencies, and definitely no leftover budget. Most marketers would want to use $1,000 of ad spend to target as many people as possible rather than show the same ad to the same people five times. Now, it might be efficient to as many people as you can, but it's not necessarily effective. Research shows that even wasteful exposure can be valuable. This is because exposure can breed familiarity, and familiarity can breed preference. In a clever but probably outdated 1992 study by Moreland and Beach, the researchers asked four very similar looking female students to attend a psychology lecture a set number of times. One showed up 15 times, another showed up 10 times, another showed up five times, and one didn't attend at all. They couldn't interact with anybody in the lecture. They would just come in, sit down in the lecture hall, listen, and leave. At the end of the semester, students were shown pictures of these four women and were asked to rate their attractiveness and likeability. The results are fairly interesting. The more often the female was in the same room as the other students, the more attractive and likable they seemed. Familiarity breeds preference. Multiple exposures might seem wasteful to marketers, but it's not wasteful. In his updated book Influence, Cialdini shares a study on online advertising. Participants read an article with a banner ad for a camera displayed at the top of the article. Some saw the banner ad five times, some saw it 20 times, and some didn't see it at all. The results were pretty much the same as before. The more often the ad appeared, the more the participants liked the camera. Even Even if they weren't consciously able to remember seeing the ads, it shows that wastage can be valuable.
- [10:22]
Tom Goodwin
It's a really uncomfortable thing to say because it Sounds quite stupid. You know, when you walk down the streets of Swindon, I imagine there's. I haven't been to Swindon for ages. I imagine there's probably, like, a really nice Wetherspoons and that Wetherspoons is probably in, like, the Wiltshire bank and co. And it's going to be this amazing building with like a marble lobby ruined by the Wetherspoons. It's gonna have massive Doric columns outside. There used to have been a sort of big iron vault inside. And that was the bank's way of saying, you know, don't worry. Like, look how big this building is. There's no possible way we're gonna have, like, an armed robbery here because no one's gonna mess around with us. You could look at that and think, well, that doesn't make any sense. Like, you know, that bank could have been on the edge of town. It had a nice parking space for, like, horse and carts. You know, it could have had a sort of really flimsy roof made out of hay. You know, could have been built in a very cheap manner because the building was just to sort of house the money and the people. But what is said when people do these things is a lot more than what is actually said. You know, there's this big difference between messaging and signaling. And a lot of advertising is really signaling. It really makes me laugh because there are so many things that we do in business that we actually don't know the ROI of. You know, what's the ROI of a nice office? What's the ROI of, like, a really beautiful website? What's the ROI of a staff training program? What's the ROI of giving people more days off. Like, you can't measure any of these things. It doesn't, you know, what's the roi? Wearing nice clothes, just because you can't possibly measure whether something's a good idea or not doesn't actually have any relationship with how good that idea is. And somehow we've been forced into sort of advertising where we're supposed to be able to measure everything from it.
- [12:08]
Host
I asked Tom why he thinks marketers have forgotten this principle. He pointed out that banks were once housed in grand, expensive stone buildings in an intentional display of wealth and permanence. Yet today, many exist entirely online with no physical presence at all. It might not be the perfect example, but it illustrates a broader trend. Marketers increasingly see wastage as a flaw rather than a strategic advantage. So why has this mindset changed?
- [12:38]
Tom Goodwin
The slightly difficult thing now is that people in marketing are very prone to envy. And there are remarkably few marketers from, you know, Debenhams or Marks and Spencer's or Sainsbury's or, you know, Ford that are on stages talking about how wonderful they are. There's lots of people from Aloe Yoga, from Gymshark, from Poppy, from Allbirds, from Sweetgreen, from Airbnb, from Uber. Those are the people on, on the sort of speaking circuit. And they're all talking about how amazing it was because they could optimize their campaigns in real time and they could push for more downloads and they could, you know, work with social shopping. And a lot of people in the more traditional space are kind of looking at them thinking, oh, you know, these sound like very modern contemporary techniques. We should totally try this. And, you know, we should be able to measure ROI immediately and we should be able to do dynamic creative optimization and we should be able to give more money. Google to place where it thinks is best. And actually, it's completely the wrong playbook for those people.
- [13:44]
Host
And yet people still click on bad ads. Despite Tom's claim that 99.9% of ads are awful, Facebook must still deliver results for some of its advertisers. They wouldn't keep paying for ads if not. So what makes people engage with ads that seem so poorly executed?
- [14:04]
Tom Goodwin
The reality is that we're at a moment now and Mr. Trump has really not helped. Where the media environment is a complete chaotic swirl. We must understand that our brain chemistry is massively biohacked into being kind of like monkeys that is just clicking at anything that triggers sort of fear, outrage, you know, division, sort of titillation, scandal, even curiosity, you know. But before I came on this podcast and I was there, you know, trying to look at the questions to make sure, I'm trying to prepare, you know, for some reason, I'm watching like a video of, like, people having a fight in a pub car park. Wasn't even a great fight. And I'm there thinking, why am I, why am I watching this? Like, I'm not remotely interested in this. Like, I don't have some sort of deep rooted desire to watch fights ever. But, like, somehow it's there sort of taking up my attention. If I actually think about how I'm spending my time. I'm not sort of listening to Mozart. I'm not watching, like, the best films ever made. I'm spending a lot of time watching what used to be good documentaries on YouTube, which are now crap. I'm now consuming media stories which are written about changes in policy, which are never going to happen. So it's a complete waste of my time. I'm watching fights in pub car parks on Twitter because it got put in front of me. We're in this very, very weird media environment where we're being kind of bombarded with email that are written by AI. We're bombarded in our social feeds with posts that genuinely not remotely interesting. We're bombarded by content on YouTube which is somewhat made with AI, and we've got extremely sort of derivative TV shows all over Netflix, just crap everywhere that's sort of fighting for our attention. The tacit relationship with media was always, you know, you take care of me and I'll take care of you. You know, you pay £1 for your copy of the Times and I'll give you good stories that have been curated and have been well written and are about things that you should care about. And I think that fundamental contract of media has now changed where it's all about, you know, click the bell to subscribe and you'll never guess what happened next. You know, click next to see the next image. And we're all being sort of taken advantage of really.
- [16:23]
Host
Now this all sounds fairly bleak, but do not lose all hope after the break. Tom shares how businesses can improve their ads without breaking the bank. The podcast I'd like to recommend today is Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings, and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. I love this podcast. I had a real great time chatting with Sarah at Inbound 2024 and learning about her wonderful podcast. If you listen, you'll hear Sarah ask the hard questions to business leaders. All of this will help you make your own billion dollar moves in venture, business and life. Listen to Billion Dollar moves wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. So far, Tom has shared a fairly drab picture of the state of marketing, but he also has some solutions. First up, he recommends learning the difference between messaging and signaling.
- [17:24]
Tom Goodwin
I mean, for me, messaging is the things that you're trying to overtly say. So messaging is the kind of words. Messaging is the bullet points that show product specs. Signaling is almost everything that's unsaid but implied through the totality of the advert. You know, if you buy like a Super bowl ad that tells the world that your, you know, milk has more almonds in it than anyone else's almonds. The the messaging is we've got lots of almonds. The signaling is we're a very big player that's going to dominate the shelves in your local Walgreens. And therefore you should stalk us, and Therefore people on TV should talk about how funny our ad was, etc. Etc.
- [18:07]
Host
Tom's convinced that aesthetics alone can work as a signal.
- [18:12]
Tom Goodwin
I don't like saying this because it makes me seem extremely superficial, but I have realized that aesthetics play a much greater role in life than we realize. And when I look at all these ads and I'm quite dismayed by how kind of crap they are, what I actually quite often mean is they're really ugly. You know, the average ad that's on Timu Fatimu is incredibly offensive to the eyes. Almost. The average, you know, banner ad that you get served has very poor sort of production values. And I actually think there's a real role in advertising now for just things that are beautiful. You know, like if you're making a really nice looking car, take like an unbelievably beautiful picture of it and say something really compelling using strategic thinking and you're sort of 99% there.
- [18:56]
Host
There's an interesting 12 part 2022 study which found how slow motion made an advert more effective. The researchers found that when an ad was shown in slow motion, people would pay 11.4% more for the wine that was being advertised. When slowed down, a Facebook ad for artisanal chocolate had 17.7% more clicks. I think this links to Tom's point on aesthetics. A better looking ad can signal higher quality. But Tom quickly pointed out that the solution isn't just expensive production and slow mo, simple, cheaper things can work just as well. Things like jingles, you know, even things like jingles.
- [19:38]
Tom Goodwin
We've fallen out of love with a lot of things that actually we used to do all the time. We used to have taglines. You know, remarkably few brands have taglines these days. Taglines were amazing because it just sort of held a tiny bit of space in our brains, you know, like people always think that advertising is really important and that people care. It's really important, but it's really important to have a tiny, tiny, tiny. I mean, I don't know anything about brain chemistry, but like some, you know, there just needs to be some vessel or some sort of synapse in our brain that as we decide, you know, to fly on Delta, we think, I don't, that's not a dumb idea, is it? Like, if I die, am I going to feel stupid for flying with Delta? You know, when we're looking for a suitcase in TK Maxx and We suddenly see one that kind of actually looks quite nice and then we think, oh, Perry Ellis. I don't know anything about Perry Ellis, but I've heard of them. It can't be that bad. You know, when you're deciding what sort of soup to buy, when you're in sort of Romania for the weekend and you see Campbells and you're like, yeah, that's not going to be too crap. We don't need to know much. We just need to know a tiny bit to make sure that we're not making a stupid decision. And taglines do it, jingles do it, Beautiful shots do it. Slow motion does it, you know, showing that the Mars bar looks really nice. Probably still works. Like having a picture of like a burger where the lettuce looks sort of crisp rather than floppy. That probably still works. You know, the Internet hasn't changed this stuff.
- [20:59]
Host
Tom has written about three simple truths of advertising. Three simple ideas that every marketer should know. I asked if he could share them on Nudge.
- [21:09]
Tom Goodwin
For some reason, brands have got completely fixated on the fact that if their marketing teams have got a bit bored by their logo or they've got a bit bored by their ad campaign that they need to do a new. It's really horrible as a consumer, but actually repeating a message time and time again really, really works. If you want to make changes, great, make changes. But do so within a framework that people understand. Two like, you know, as part of that repetition, like, you know, repeat the same thing in different places. You know, I don't know why we don't see TV ads sort of turned into images on the Internet. I don't know why people treat the Internet like a completely different thing. I don't know why PR is working to, like a different campaign strategy to radio ads. So, you know, just have a degree of repetition, try and say something compelling. You know, you see all sorts of like, really wonderful feeling ads and you realize they're not actually saying anything remarkably interesting. You know, make sure the ads look beautiful, make sure the ads work together. You know, if you get served like an ad to find out more about the Hyundai Sonata, then maybe when you click on it, it should probably take you to like a page about the Hyundai son, you know, rather than to a page like showing like the wonderful Maker movement that Hyundai supported. You know, just, just make it easy for people to buy stuff, you know.
- [22:32]
Host
Don'T get in the way, be consistent, repeat the message and say something compelling. This links back to the mere exposure point we made earlier. The More people see an ad, the more they will like it. So don't be afraid to show your advert multiple times. And remember, not every ad needs to be hyp targeted to be effective.
- [22:54]
Tom Goodwin
We love this idea that we can target people really accurately. It's really, really not true. My browser has about a 52% chance of knowing what gender I am successfully. If you were to spend the next three minutes looking at every single ad that you get served, and I would like people to do this, this is your homework. Almost all of them will presume that they knew more about you than they do. It will be, you know, come and learn Spanish, you know, in our clinic in Rotherham. And you think, wait a minute, I live in Cornwall. It'll be someone speaking Spanish trying to get you to come to a car dealership that's across the state. It'll be someone sort of selling you on, you know, a toilet seat. You know, because you bought one last week. It thinks you've become a sort of fanatic collector of toilet seats. We keep on thinking we know so much about people and generally speaking, we know nothing.
- [23:46]
Host
Rather than fixating on how to target someone effectively, we should spend more time working on what our message is, how we can share it repeatedly and what the brand looks like. Repetition and recognition matter more than pinpoint accuracy.
- [24:01]
Tom Goodwin
Fortunately, I think these people have shut up. But there was a time for about the last four years where these sort of tech centric people were saying their brands were dead. Actually, they're saying it again now. They're saying that because we've got AI, a bot's going to decide what shoes are going to make us feel good. Good brands are everywhere. Like, it's actually remarkable. Brands are in dentistry, brands are in pharmaceutical medication. You know, we talk about Ozempic and Mounjaro. Brands are in yoga classes, brands are in hairdressing. You know, the franchise movement has never been so strong, so branding is not going anywhere.
- [24:36]
Host
Of the top 20 movies at the box office last year, 18 were sequels. Tom says this is just one example of how much brands can influence us.
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Tom Goodwin
This Rise of the sequel movie is just that. Everyone gets to about 8:30pm, they're thinking about having a glass of wine. They go on their movie streaming provider. They get lost after about 42 minutes because they realize they've watched about 39 trailers and nothing looks that good. And then they think, sod it. You know, we'll watch Bad Boys 9 or we'll watch Fast and the Furious 27, or we'll watch that sort of Superman's spin off. Spin off.
- [25:16]
Host
Sequels work because we're familiar with them. Familiarity breeds likability. It makes people more attractive and online banners more effective. As marketers, we should ignore short term digital thinking and opt for long term solid messaging. But it's hard. CMOs have shorter tenures than ever before. And Tom's summary of the state of marketing isn't very rosy.
- [25:39]
Tom Goodwin
Everyone kind of knew exactly where they were in 1960, you know, by 1970, we knew exactly where we were. We were a little bit smarter, you know, by 2000 we're like, we really, really knew what we were doing. And then the Internet came along and basically gave us quite a few interesting new tactics. It gave us quite a few interesting new possibilities. It gave us this amazing array of sort of new things. And after 25 years of it, everyone's completely blown their mind. No one has any idea what they're doing anymore. Everyone's been told that everything's changing. Everyone's been told that they're doing it wrong. Everyone's been told that they should be able to reduce all of their wastage down to zero. It's an absolute mess. There's fraud in all directions, there's massive opportunities that go untapped. And broadly speaking, what we really need to do is take a step back, chill out, realize that everything that we knew in 1995 is completely true today day. And we just need to take that wonderful playbook that made our jobs delightful to do and just sort of tweak it a little bit here and there and then with an occasional bout of this is a whole brand new thing, what can we do in addition to what we used to do that's a little bit more fun and exciting and sort of sexy, but the playbook still works.
- [26:57]
Host
Tom reminded me that great marketing isn't about chasing the latest trend. It's about consistency, repetition, wastage and at its heart, understanding human behaviour. And if you take just one thing away from this episode, it's show your ad enough times and eventually someone will start liking it. Now that is all for today, folks. I would like to say a massive thank you to Tom Goodwin for coming on the show. If you want more from Tom, be sure to follow him on LinkedIn. He is the number one voice in marketing on there, which is both impressive and a little bit humbling for me. He regularly shares brilliant insights and you'll also find him on X. He's omfgoodwin there and his book Darwinism is linked in the show notes as well. But if you're curious about Tom's take on AI, then you're in luck, because we recorded a special bonus episode where he shares his thoughts about how we should be using AI. Here's a sneak peek.
- [27:55]
Tom Goodwin
You know, I use it quite a lot. I use it as part of a kind of strategic understanding. I use it to try and inform myself, to try and challenge myself. I don't find it particularly useful yet, but it might get better. But where I would absolutely not use it is for anything that people might see.
- [28:13]
Host
To access this bonus episode, all you have to do is click the link in the show notes and enter your email address. Once you do, you'll be sent straight to the bonus episode. So if you're keen to hear more from Tom and want to hear his surprising thoughts on AI ads, you can do so by clicking the link in today's show notes and adding your email in the landing page. That is all for today, folks. Massive. Thank you again to Tom for coming on. I hope you enjoyed today's show and I will be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Cheers.