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- [00:00]
A
So it was super exciting. I attended the 2025 UK Effie Awards October 11th in London. The gala was held inside the amazing Christchurch Spitalfields. And what a venue it was. It's this old church that is still an active church, but they rent it out for big events and you can see photographs of it if you go onto our website. But amazing location, really unique and fun. And given of course that most of us in the industry are sinners, it's good to receive absolution at least once a all while drinking good wine and eating good food. By my count, 37 Effie's were handed out on the night. And given that Effie judges are notoriously hard to please, I think that's kind of one hell of an achievement. And EFFIE is the most prestigious, internationally recognized award for marketing effectiveness. They're in 130 markets worldwide. And yes, it was a tough year for the industry in the uk, making effectiveness even more important and more difficult to achieve. So first of all, congratulations. Congratulations to all of the winners. But a special shout out to McCann London, who took home Agency of the Year, was the grand Effie winner for Nurofin and took home a total of seven Effies on the night. Now we'll hear more about McCann later in this episode. What follows here is a series of seven short interviews I did with some of the winners on the night as they came off the stage. We had just three to four minutes with each as they had to get back into the gala as categories and awards were still being handed out. So I wanted to thank Rachel Ems for hosting us, and to the wonderful John Bazell and Lana Meza for teaming up to make sure it all came together on the night. It was terrific to work with everybody and thanks again for having us. So let's dive in. Uber needed growth outside of London, prioritizing under penetrated towns and cities to unlock ambitious national sales goals. But those in northern cities and towns are very strong willed, stubbornly avoiding a ride even if it would clearly help them. The campaign features this wonderful tension between those who stubbornly deny the need for an Uber and the situation they're facing, which clearly indicates they benefit from one. It's a gold and bronze Effie winner for the year. And on the night we hear from Omar El Ghamel, head of Cultural Insight, and Lucy Allen, senior strategist, both of Mother London. So the fundamental idea is Uber is very successful and we see this in the US too. It's very successful to major markets, major cities, not so much outside of it. Because there's sort of a stubborn attitude towards taking Uber versus other sources. So you guys had to break through that, right?
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B
Yeah, we had to break through it. I think. I think one of the things that it's less about people being stubborn and I think the association is that most people assume that an Uber is something.
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A
That you take in the city and.
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B
In the big city areas. And so everything that we've been trying to do, not just in the uk, but actually in lots of markets around the world, has been. How do you get people outside, in suburbs, in smaller towns and other cities to really realize that regardless of where you are and regardless of what's going on in your life or your area, there are drivers always in your area, is kind of the line that echoes.
- [03:27]
A
I always loved when I watched those spots. I thought the genius in them was that you had sort of a protagonist and an antagonist. If there's three friends, there's one who feels guilty. And it's not because the brand is telling them to feel guilty. It's because their two friends wanted to do it and the one didn't. And you focused in on the experience that they've all had as a result of that. There's some genius in that creative execution, right?
- [03:51]
B
Yeah. I think what was really great was working with our creative teams to really explore that dynamic that you're describing, which we described as a bloody. A bloody mindedness, which was kind of the humor lies in that. That tension of knowing that an Uber is really the right thing that you should take, but actually just really wanting it to not be the right thing, kind of leaning into that. And there's kind of a vulnerability from the brand in saying, you know, yes, there could have been an alternative, but actually, we know that really deep down, that's what you wanted to. That's what you should have done.
- [04:25]
A
It would probably be more likely for the message to be rejected if the brand had said had delivered that message rather than having the friends deliver it right.
- [04:33]
B
That was a really important creative consideration for us, was landing the right tone and making sure that it could be accepted by lots of different communities up north and actually didn't. We didn't want to come across as, you know, a global brand telling people what to think. We really needed to think community first, and that was why that local insight was so relevant. See, this is sound. Can't believe these two are wanting an Uber. They've gone soft since moving down south. Next thing, they'll be wanting a coat.
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A
Don't.
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B
Maisie, your nearest Uber driver is six minutes away.
- [05:22]
A
Thank you both so much. Congratulations. Smarty grew fast as the cheapest SIM card only brand but had to offer more. When rivals launched to their own budget options. They looked beyond their customers relationship with and found an audience fueled by frustration at the world. They leveraged this mindset to connect with customers emotionally through a shared frustration with unnecessary complexity and the love of simplicity. A bronze FE winner on the night we hear from Kit Allen, Chief Strategy Officer at the Gate London and Syed Haja Maddine, Head of Brand and Marketing at at Smarty Mobile uk. Congratulations. Great to see you again Kit. Wonderful to see you here at the show. So let's talk about this case briefly. A couple of key questions. What was it about the case that you think made it so effective and award winning?
- [06:18]
B
Can I say two things? Yes. I think one is the insight at the heart of it, which is how do you take a value brand and put it through a different lens to make it really rich and really interesting? So, so rather than just see our customers through the lens of value, we saw them through their attitudes. And so that made us pick the strategy to make Smartie a challenger. Taking on over complication in a world that's become completely insane and reaching and connecting with our customers through that shared attitude, not just through how much money they have in their pocket. And then what we did was take that through that idea. Less malarkey, more smarty. Right through the whole customer journey. Like every single touch point is working super, super hard. For me it stresses the point around being single minded across your communications, be clear with one message and actually take that through all of your channels, that whole integrated piece. So make sure that your journey matches the promise that you make in your TV ad, etc. So it just, I know it sounds really basic, but we can make it complex.
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A
Yeah, you're right.
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B
Actually the job to be done is keep that narrative, keep that simplicity and make everyone in the company, in your organization believe that it's a moment. It's not just a campaign. A lot of people put a lot of hard work and creative time and thinking to change human behavior. That's what we should be celebrating. And coming to an award ceremony like this really celebrates the fact that that creativity that's been there since the dawn of time actually drives results and impact and engages people. So it's lovely to be so.
- [07:54]
A
Any lessons for other strategists?
- [07:55]
B
Kit, don't be hidebound by the traditional way of seeing your audience. So it's very easy when you're talking to a Quote unquote budget focused audience to only see them through one lens. And what we did was look much broader than that and find a way to connect with them in a much more kind of emotional platform. Like we discovered that they were real contrarians who kind of define themselves a little bit more by the negative than the positive. And so we were able to take what is often a very functional category and a budget, you know, value brand in a functional category and turn it into something super emotional. And I think there's some real power in that. Do you have white paint? Something with heart or something a little more cynical? Just white, if that's okay. We've got anemic moon. We've got scrubbed cauliflower. No, I've just white paint, poached smoke, snowman's bone.
- [08:54]
A
What a load of malarkey. We keep things simple. Less malarkey, more smarty. Search smarty mobile. Great stuff. Thank you both. Go on back and enjoy the rest of the evening. Walker's is Britain's favorite crisp or as we call them here in the US chips. They were losing share of the key lunchtime occasion. The fact is 88% of Brits believe crisps improve sandwiches, but nobody can agree on where they go. This long term campaign was built around stirring up a national debate. Are you a crisps inside your sandwich type of person or alongside your sandwich? In other words, are you a crisp in or a crisp out? In simple terms, the this is about successfully owning a category behavior for your brand. It's a silver FE winner for sustained success. On the night we talk with VCCP's senior planner Percy Fagent. Tell me what's at the heart of Crispin and crisp Out. It's a cool. Would you consider that the platform or creative platform?
- [10:00]
B
Yeah, I think that's the platform that we've been investing in for the last five years. I think at the core of it was almost putting it back to the people and finding the core ways that people were interacting with our product and building it from that. So it felt like a truly human insight built from ways that people really interact with our product. And yeah, I think that was kind of at the core of what we achieved with this.
- [10:22]
A
And so I understand that the business challenge was how you actually could retain certain use occasions. And so you came up with this idea of sort of creating this debate. Tell us about what crisp in and crisp out is and what's at the heart of that.
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B
It was kind of a beautifully simple moment of realizing that everyone naturally self identifies with either being A crisp in person or a crisp out person. And by tapping into that and engaging with it, we could continue this discussion and drive it into culture, which I think is the most powerful thing that we've done. We made it something that people wanted to discuss and, and engage in. A treacherous campaign so far has created.
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A
Real division around the country.
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B
Softness and crunch for a delicious lunch. Don't you deserve softness and crunch? Leave crisps out of sandwiches. End of story. Vocal crisp Outer Gordon Ramsay apologizes for.
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A
The scandalous leaked footage of him eating.
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B
Crisps inside his sandwich. I want to apologize to all those I've let down. Locals in the town of Sandwich are set to decide once and for all, crisp in or crisp out. Needless to say, the excitement is palpable. Not another boat.
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A
It's crunch time.
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B
The big boat is coming to the town of Sandwich. 19th of June, 2022.
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A
And it's something that it's, it's a, it's a category activity or a category behavior that you guys have owned over multiple years. So for other people who are afraid to touch those common category factors, you can own these things, right? You can take them and own them as a brand.
- [12:00]
B
Yeah, precisely. Precisely. I think that's one been part of the power of it is recognizing areas we can play in areas we can own and really doubling down on that. And Crispin Crisp out is a great example of that.
- [12:10]
A
Yeah. So other question was what lessons other planners should or could learn from this case.
- [12:18]
B
A lot of how we came to the insight was being true to ourselves and honest about how we engage with the product and how real people do and reflecting on that in society. And I think also not, not taking things too seriously and going back to the roots of what make Walkers a great brand, which is its humor and how tightly knitted it is with the public and yeah, that's of kind, kind of where.
- [12:40]
A
And you, you. And one final thought is what impressed me was this was a sort of a portfolio wide campaign. This wasn't just for one flavor. It was for all various types of crisps across the the Walker portfolio. Right. So it works at an enterprise kind of a product portfolio. High product portfolio level.
- [13:00]
B
Precisely.
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A
Congratulations. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us. Well done. The challenge for Irish tourism was to drive off peak travel outside of Ireland's major cities. Despite no iconic bucket list attractions, how could they drive traffic to the more remote areas in the off season, the places that rarely experienced high tourism traffic? It's a bronze Effie winner for Publicis London. We Hear from Publicis strategy director Adam McGlasson. I was born in Dublin, Ireland, so when I see Irish tourism, it's close to my heart. And I'm really excited about Publicism. We know Jer Rowe from Publicist Dublin. He's been on the show too. And you guys are doing great work. Tell me about this particular campaign. I did not know, even as an Irishman that Halloween apparently originated in Ireland. I didn't know that it did. It did. Tell me about this.
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B
Yeah. So what was really lying at the heart of this campaign, so with the island of Ireland, what they very much need to do as an organization is drive off peak visitation. So essentially they want to drive people in the kind of the shoulder season, so essentially not summer. And they want to drive people beyond Dublin, so beyond major cities like Dublin and Belfast. So what we were very much looking at is what is a big.
- [14:21]
A
You.
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B
Know, a big hook that can kind of drive people in the off peak and also drive them beyond just kind of major cities. So what we did is we were looking at kind of all of these motivational reasons that people would actually go somewhere when the weather isn't great and a lot of kind of big attractions are actually closed.
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A
And these are people that are. They could be Irish people, they could be people from international countries or who.
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B
Was the target in international countries. So essentially we're talking to the people from Great Britain and we're also talking about the Americans and French, German, lots of European countries, but they're kind of our four big markets is Great Britain, US, France and Germany. So we're looking at how can we actually drive them into Dublin in the off peak. The biggest thing that we found was what this audience called the enrichment explorers. What they very much wanted was enchantment. So they loved this idea with Ireland of kind of the things that felt really enchanting. And when you start to look at all these enchanting experiences of across the island, they're really incredible, but they're almost kind of road trip pit stops rather than bucket list headliners. And then we actually found that Halloween actually originated in Ireland. And it hit all the notes that.
- [15:30]
A
We needed it to.
- [15:31]
B
It was enchanting. It had Instagrammable uniqueness. It was literally the birthplace of kind of this world class celebration actually originated in Ireland. So we knew that we'd kind of found gold dust when we found that because of all of these other kind of findings that we had. And it had a really incredible story because it was still very much celebrated by the local people within Ireland. So, you know, the, the thing they want is to kind of be where the locals are and kind of experience culture kind of.
- [15:59]
A
Was there, was there a specific county in Ireland or a town in Ireland where this, this, this festival was taking place?
- [16:05]
B
Yes. So you've got Derry. So there's the, the Dairy festival happens and also Puka. So kind of in two, two big counties within Ireland, but then it also happens in a lot of kind of other small, smaller counties. But a big one is the, the Derry Festival and then the Pukka festival.
- [16:21]
A
What made Halloween a better choice than a culinary festival or some other festival that, that had that sort of spirit?
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B
The biggest way for us to kind of put Ireland on the world stage was to hijack something that was already world famous.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And kind of tell people about its original Celtic roots. Thousands of years ago on the island of Ireland, as the harvest met the winter, the boundary between worlds became blurred.
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A
Spirits were said to walk the earth.
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B
And carry the living off to the other world. But one brave villager found a way to walk unafraid. And over many years a tradition was born.
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A
Visit Ireland, the home of Halloween. So thank you so much and congratulations on your award tonight.
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B
Oh, amazing.
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A
Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
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B
Cheers.
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A
COM stands for Campaign Against Living Miserably. The challenge was to encourage more life saving conversations between UK adults and children about suicide, now the leading cause of death for those under 24. This is the third phase of the COM campaign. It started with Project 84 in 2018, followed by the last photo and now missed birthdays. It's a brilliant body of work. 6,929 young lives lost to suicide in 10 years isn't just a tragedy, it's a generation of lost potential. Awarded a gold and three silver Effies on the night, as well as receiving Brand of the Year recognition, we hear from Adam and Eve, DDB's Jack Gilbert and Comms CEO Simon Gunning. Jack, tell us about this iteration of the campaign and what makes it not only special is the wrong word to use for this, but I don't know how you could describe it better, but it is a phenomenally impactful campaign. What makes it so strong and so effective?
- [18:38]
B
Yeah, a really good question, I think, to be honest. Early on we spoke to a lot of families who had lost a young person suicide. And I think what was so profound in all of the answers we got back was when you hear a mum, when you hear a father, a brother speak about the person they lost, they didn't just describe what that person was like. It's actually kind of the potential that they could have been as well. And to be honest, that that was at the backbone of this brief from the very beginning. It's revealing. How do we reveal not just a generation of young people who've taken their own life, but a generation of lost potential. And early on that was really a nugget that I think maybe the craves kind of grabbed onto. And what led to the campaign. Happy birthday, Evelyn, my beautiful girl. From the moment I first held you, my world changed forever. Happy, sad, happy, sad. You've brought sunshine into our lives. Evelyn, do you think that Santa Claus has left you some presents? Should we have a look? Yes. With your kind heart. Yeah, we're going to Disneyland. And amazing hugs. You're gonna give Jack a hug too. You make us so proud every single day. I hope you know that you brought so much joy and laughter into our lives and I feel so proud to be your mum.
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A
What we need to do when we're dealing with really, really hard subjects is.
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B
That there's the old maxim of breaking.
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A
People'S hearts and then bringing them into what we need to give them as a solution. And working Adam leave, as we have now for eight years over three major.
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B
Campaigns, so 84, the last photo and.
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A
Then miss birthdays, we've kind of gone on a journey of revealing bits of truth.
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B
And the truth that we wanted to.
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A
Reveal on this last one was a chilling and awful statistic, which is that.
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B
Where we all feel, maybe all, a.
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A
Lot of us feel we understand the.
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B
Numbers around male suicide, for example, which.
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A
Adam and Eve so brilliantly did with Project 84. The terrible thing is that young people.
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B
Are at most risk.
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A
And so working with an agency like Adam and Eve means that we don't go at it just with very simplistic shouting about an issue. We use the most sophisticated marketing techniques. We deal, as Adam and Eve do, with emotion and we bring people in and we give them the solution straight away. You can't leave people in a point of impotent terror.
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B
I think something we were really diligent about doing this time around is as much as possible giving voice to the families and the parents who had actually experienced that loss themselves. Because I think, to be honest, it's one thing to speak about it and put it on a billboard, but it's another thing entirely to hear it from, from a mother who's lost their 14 year old daughter.
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A
But do it in a way that.
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B
Makes change because we can be more kish and we can just show pictures of Sad stuff. But to do it in a way that leads to a customer engagement and.
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A
A funnel that leads to action means that we've now had more than 250,000 users of the Care Kit, which is.
- [22:06]
B
A product that we created for parents.
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A
To look after their kids. That's a small number compared to Google. But to have 250,000 people in the.
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B
UK who are now actively engaged as.
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A
Suicide preventers for kids, that's a big deal. Thank you both so much, really. Congratulations. Phenomenal work over the years. Thank you. And we'll encourage people to go back to listen to our episode and we'll show the work on the show. My pleasure.
- [22:32]
B
Thank you so much.
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A
Thanks a lot. Next up is Xbox and the everyday tactician campaign. The challenge was to win over a new audience where previous campaigns had failed despite having nothing new to say about the product. Football manager gamers dream of recognition and respect amongst the wider footballing fandom. Xbox offered a real job at a real football club to football manager gamers who played it using Xbox's game Pass subscription. This required migrating football managers PC based players, which is a massive audience. Over to an Xbox cross platform game Pass subscription for a deeper, broader gaming experience. It's a winner of two gold and one silver Effie on the night as well as receiving brand of the year recognition. We talk with Aaron Harridge, Head of strategy at McCann London and Alex Passingham, strategy director at the McCann. So congratulations to you guys. Xbox, big winner here tonight for the Effies. It's got to feel good, right?
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B
Feels good.
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A
Love it. Tell us what's at the heart of the case you think that made it so effective?
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B
I think on this one it's really such a true insight to this particular game audience. I think everyone always generalizes about gamers as one group, but each game has such different audiences and with this game they're not just playing for fun, they're playing for real. And football manager gamers don't play for a laugh. Like when they're playing these games for hours on end, they're doing really detailed management techniques, whether that be organizing training plans, hiring their physios, organizing their reserve team. It's so much more detailed than other games and I think the thing that we learned is this game audience just wants to really do it for real, which is why they play the game in the first place. It's not really for fun, it's them actually trialing it. And everything that we saw from the audience on Reddit, social media was all of them talking amongst themselves. Could we do this for real? So we thought why not give someone a chance to do that? So I think there's just a true gamer audience inside at the heart of it, that this audience wants to do it for real. So let's give someone a shot.
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A
So at the heart of this is the fact that an everyday fan is selected by. Was this sweeps, not a sweepstakes. But how would you, how would you describe it?
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B
It's the most unconventional way into football ever, potentially. I mean it, you had to win a game or league on football manager in game and then the best player then was interviewed. So there's never really been anyone getting into football like that before. And I think one thing I would say is Xbox had no relationship with the football manager audience before this. All of them played on, on PC. So we really had a job to do in making people think of Xbox when they thought of football manager because people played it on other platforms. And I think by doing this and giving someone a shot like never before, that showed that Xbox really understood this audience more than maybe they all thought before. That's it. And you know, we were really leaning into that belief that football manager players do genuinely believe that they can do it for real and the people who are best at playing the game believe that they can do it better than the manager. The real managers themselves. That really came to the fore and how we saw, you know, the work.
- [25:48]
A
Come to life and you rolled it out not as I think of it as more, more than a campaign. It feels like it was an almost a documentary style series that rolled out over a period of time.
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B
Well, we are here at Bromley and.
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A
As I'm sure you know, they're making the news.
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B
We've taken somebody that's applied for a job application, education, but through football manager and it's very nervous to be part of this. Nathan coming into the building has risks. Part of his job is to not upset the apple car. They had to come in and earn our trust and understand how we work.
- [26:18]
A
Yet start off with, I didn't think.
- [26:19]
B
It was a gimmick. They're planning for their mortgages, they're playing.
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A
For their living and we're seeing a team that just seem to be running.
- [26:25]
B
Out of steam at the wrong time. And don't think this is for the.
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A
Cameras, by the way.
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B
I want to make that clear. Need to make sure not just for me, but for their careers, that they are giving it everything. His family should be hugely proud of the young man.
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A
He is.
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B
Pemberley, the home of football Every little kid dreams of lifting that trophy that you've been playing all season for. Even the biggest football clubs look for what they call marginal gains where they're actually at a stage where they can't get 10% better. Every year we've got Nathan to look at certain bit set pieces. What they do, it's a cumulative effect really. Those small margins, they stack up. So Nathan may have said something, analyzed something, and that's where these margins come into play and these fine, fine, fine margins. That wasn't the original intention for it. I think as the story developed and we were filming content with Nathan when he was at Bromley, we realized that to do this justice, we need to do a longer form piece. And I think that's the beauty of this kind of work is it doesn't need to be an advert, it doesn't need to be traditional advertising. This was a piece of full on entertainment, lived on TNT sports content. And I think everyone really appreciated it. Us actually letting the story breathe and telling it in the most compelling way possible.
- [27:44]
A
Yeah. And then is there a lesson you guys would say that other strategists should learn from this campaign that they can or should be considering or applying to their own work?
- [27:53]
B
I think it's genuinely, you know, when you are working in a cultural space, you should always be considerate if you are giving more than you're taking. And I think with this piece of work, we were genuinely giving something to fans of the game and fans of the wider game that they genuinely wanted to see. Yeah. And I think on that, like big shout out to the Xbox clients for trusting us on the journey. They really followed us in and trusted us and were ready to see what happens. And I think if they didn't trust that leap of faith, we wouldn't have got to such an interesting space. Yeah. To work with those clients has been a real, a real pleasure. And yeah, we, we thank them greatly for that.
- [28:40]
A
So two gold fes. Well done. Brilliant work. Thanks for a few minutes of your time.
- [28:44]
B
Thank you.
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A
Go back and have fun.
- [28:46]
B
Cheers.
- [28:46]
A
Thanks. And finally, the grand fe winner of the night was McCann's NeuroFan Pain Relief. The challenge here was to increase Neurofan's value sales to regain category leadership in a functional product led category. Where offering the fastest pain relief had become table stakes. Research discovered that women's pain was being ignored in society. Women needed someone to slow down, listen and show empathy. No more boasts of fastest pain relief. Nurafan forged a new vision of category leadership from fastest pain relief to challenging the cultural and institutional biases in responding to pain. Nurafan was the grand winner of the night. As well as receiving a gold, a silver and a bronze Effie alongside Brand of the year designation, McCann was also named Agency of the Year in addition to Neurofan and Xbox honors. It also received the Silver Fe for Dettol and McCann Central won a bronze for the electoral commission. We talk with Jos? Major strategy partner, and Mel Arrow, CEO. They're both of McCann London. Important to point out that Mel was promoted this year from Chief strategy officer of McCann to CEO. What a night it was for McCann London.
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B
I think from the outset of the campaign, the one thing we wanted to do was it is a category where everybody follows each other. It's a category that for decades have been focused on fast fixes. So it been a walk speed, who is the quickest in the category. And it took a lot of bravery, both from the agency side, but also from the client side to say, we want a real step change. We're going to stop focusing on fast fixes and we are going to focus on being the brand that leads in understanding and empathizing with people's pain. And it was that pivot and it was that moment to say we're going to step change what it means to be a leader in this category that set us, us on a completely different track. And through that process, we discovered that through researching what it means to really understand pain, that actually there are women across the country whose pain is being dismissed and ignored and gaslit and there is this huge systemic medical issue that nobody is confronting, no one is even aware of. And we can be the brand that genuinely changes that. And it's called this pain pain gap. And it really is. It really is a thing, isn't it? It is. It is. What it refers to is this unconscious bias that women feel and get. It's the gender pain gap report that's been launched by Neurofen. 56% of women report that their pain is dismissed. I didn't want to get up, I didn't want to eat. I didn't want to sort of. This pain was like you were being tortured over 50 years of living with pain to just put up and, you know, carry on, which at the time I couldn't. My friends sort of got on with their lives and thought, natasha will be okay. I was told it was just wear and tear. That was wear and tear. Why don't you go to bed then if you're in pain? Well, maybe it's just stress. You Start to believe when they say that there's nothing medically wrong. Yeah, nothing wrong with you. It's like this energy of dismissal. Like, I think if I'd have been told your pain's real, it'll save my mental health. I don't think for one minute if a man was sitting in my position, they would say, you're just being emotional, Mr. Smith. That was like an ongoing thing. You're the female that doesn't really know what you're talking about. Kind of no one was listening.
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A
They just looked at me and assumed.
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B
I was an overly dramatic woman.
- [32:43]
A
It's one thing to have that ambition and to have that desire to sort of pivot, but how do you make the case to a client who has had that embedded behavior of we work in 10 minutes, we work in nine minutes, we work in eight, and it's about the speed of performance of the product. How do you get them to sort of pivot to something there where the case could be, is this too much of a risk? How do you make the case to make them comfortable?
- [33:08]
B
Rigorous measurement and feedback of how it was working gave this client the confidence to continue with this strategy. So Jos and the strategy team proving the effectiveness of following emotion in this category was absolutely fundamental to them. Continuing taking the leap initially and then continuing with the strategy.
- [33:31]
A
So was was a leap, sort of a pilot. You tried different markets and then you built confidence that way. That's a pretty critical point. Right.
- [33:39]
B
So we started this as a test case. So we did a built an econometric model and said, let's test this in one region of the UK versus others. And what we found was that actually even in terms of short term sales, going after purpose and really fighting for women's pain was five times more effective in terms of driving short term sales impact than just following the category and talking about how quick things were. So it was all rooted in the data and it was rooted in genuine sales performance. And the fact that this wasn't a case of pursuing purpose for the sake of purpose, this was purpose that actually had a real business effect as well. And we knew that from the beginning because of all the research we did.
- [34:22]
A
So any lessons you both think other marketers or other strategists could learn from this case?
- [34:30]
B
The three, I think big things for me are one, immerse yourself in the audience and doing ethnographic research and really hearing the firsthand impact of, of what it is like to have your pain ignored and dismissed by doctors, by your friends, by your family. And I think that was such a rich learning experience.
- [34:49]
A
Anything you'd add to close that out, Mel?
- [34:51]
B
We talk about truth well told At McCann, which I love that term. I mean, I think it is. It cuts to the core of not just what good advertising is, but good storytelling and how you get anyone's attention in the modern world, frankly. And I think this is such a fantastic example of a truth well told, but not just any truth, a truth that hadn't actually been spoken at this scale and this loud before. So a brand with the reach of Neurofen that reaches into GP surgeries and pharmacies, to tell a truth like this as loud as it has and commit to it at every single level is so brave. So. So I think, you know, telling the truth, identifying a truth and telling it well is the fundamental principle of what makes for great advertising and great branding.
- [35:42]
A
Well, brilliant. Thank you and congratulations. What a great, huge night from McCann London. We thank you for your time.
- [35:50]
B
Thank you so much.
- [35:50]
A
All right, go back and have fun. So that is it. What a night it was. And thank you to Rachel, Ems and the entire FE team for having us along for the evening. Congratulations. Congratulations to McCann and congratulations to everybody involved. You can see all of the creative work on our website@onstrategyshowcase.com we'll have the films up there. If any of the work wasn't clear in listening to it here on the show, you can actually see it on our website. It'll be up there for you. So we will see Everybody at the US FE Awards Gala in 2026 and we'll be back again to London for the 2026 awards and we will see everyone on the next episode.