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The Marketing Architects
Marketing Effectiveness and the Proof Problem with Andrew Tindall
00:43:19
Ignaz Semmelweis proved handwashing saved lives, but doctors ignored his messy data for decades. Thousands died waiting for perfect proof. This week, Elena and Rob sit down with System1 Chief Growth Officer Andrew Tindall to talk about what makes...
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- [00:00]
Andrew Tindall
I've half written a column called Organic Reach is Bullshit. And the main reason for that is even if you're doing really well in organic and you're posting a lot of content, if someone goes, oh, great, could you 10x that for me? You go, guess I'll post again tomorrow. Like what? You can't scale it.
- [00:18]
Eleanor Jasper
Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Eleanor Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co host, Rob demars, the chief product architect at Misfits and Machines.
- [00:35]
Rob Demars
Hello.
- [00:36]
Andrew Tindall
Hello.
- [00:37]
Eleanor Jasper
And we have a guest today, Andrew Tindall. Andrew is the chief growth officer at System One, the creative effectiveness platform. He spent time growing famous brands like Johnnie Walker and Bacardi before moving into research. Today he leads System One's advertising business, writes a weekly column for the Drum and, and reaches about a million marketers a week on LinkedIn. He's also behind a lot of the research we've talked about on this show, so I'm very excited to have him. Andrew, thanks for joining us.
- [01:03]
Andrew Tindall
Thanks so much. It's truly a longtime listener, first time caller. I do tune in. I have tuned in regularly over. God, you've been doing this a while, because this topic on your podcast is very me. I'm glad to see you guys are doing it.
- [01:18]
Rob Demars
Well, we're, we're excited to have you. And before we jump into it, I just, I need some real talk here for a second. You trained in medicine, so you could be saving lives right now, but instead you're rating whiskey ads. So on behalf of your mother, I need an explanation. How does a doctor fall into marketing?
- [01:38]
Andrew Tindall
I was about to say this. I did it for my mother, and then she still has not returned my calls. Yeah, it's a tough one. If you like science and, you know, you want to do something that has an impact. You enjoy understanding people and, I don't know, being around people. And you're good at that stuff. When you're in school, it's just like, oh, so which med school are you going to? You know, and then you start telling people you're thinking about it. Oh, that's impressive. Before you know it, you're volunteering in a, in a hospice on your weekends. And then in med school in London, I eventually started working in drinks marketing along the side so I could pay my rent. I said, God, this is far more interesting. You can clock off at 5. Thought you could back then, which is ironic. You can make a huge impact. And then I found out you can apply science to it as well. So in a weird way, it was. It all worked out in the end. But my mum eventually has forgiven me. Now I take her to very nice things.
- [02:43]
Eleanor Jasper
It all worked out well. I think it's great whenever someone with your level of smarts get into marketing, that's also a good thing for marketers. So we are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. I'm going to kick us off super quick, as I always do, with some research, and I obviously picked a piece from you, Andrew. This is something you wrote for the Drum earlier this year. And in the article you argue that marketing doesn't need perfect evidence, it just needs useful evidence you open with. And I had to look up how to pronounce this name. Ignaz Semmelweis, I believe is a pronunciation. A doctor who noticed that hand washing led to fewer deaths in his maternity ward. But because his data was messy and observational, the establishment rejected it and waited for perfect proof. And then thousands died before germ theory caught up. Darwin, the first smoking studies, Teutonic plates, climate models. A lot of the science that reshaped the world started as imperfect patterns that were still useful. And marketing, you argue, is no different. So thanks again for being here. I wanted to start with the topic of marketing effectiveness in general, because it feels like effectiveness has sort of moved from this niche corner of the industry to something that more marketers care about. And you've been a huge part of that through your work at System One. So where do you think we're at with marketing effectiveness education? Have you noticed sort of a positive shift in the last few years?
- [03:58]
Andrew Tindall
What a brilliant opening. Holy hell. Great question. So I think if you work in marketing, you now work in marketing effectiveness. I believe effectiveness is the understanding, the researching and the practice of how marketing can essentially create behavior change in our favor, which should be the title of anyone's role who works in marketing. Otherwise, how else would you make any decision? So I think we're waking up to that. Why has it got more popular? I think marketing practices has got more popular because we've got better at marketing it. So before marketing effectiveness was some very dull books and some very dull people who now, I think, are becoming less dull because they've seen how it works. Whereas people like System One, previously called Brain Juicer, who advocates for, you know, effective advertising, marketing being emotional and entertaining and what you could call right, brained we have made all our research and all our tools and all our marketing very that and people have really loved it. So I think that's really helped bring market infectious up, you know. And Mark Ritson, the legendary professor turned online kind of mini MBA leader, he follows the same stuff. And then the dawn of social, especially LinkedIn has meant that the barrier to entry is no longer can you publish a book? Have you got the goods to deliver my brand? Can you help me? And then where I think that's got marketing effects of education in general is previously it was reserved for these kind of very longitudinal studies and what you could call laws that people were accepting as dogma and like, oh no, we have to do this, otherwise we won't grow. When you look at the data and all that never was the case. These are just general rules that will increase the chance that you'll win. Now people are really thirsty for how do you actually achieve that? How would you actually achieve growth of brands of different size in my category with my media spend scattered across 20 different platforms like the actual practice, which I think is the most exciting part of marketing effectiveness, with everything we know about growth and marketing effectiveness, what does it mean for me? How can I measure it? Will it work for me? And how do I actually achieve it? And then opening up to experimentation and stuff like this. So that's where I think marketing effective education is.
- [06:41]
Eleanor Jasper
Yeah, I agree. It's one thing to understand the principles and then another thing to apply it in like an imperfect way world and at brands with different rules and customs. I wanted to talk a little bit about the science itself because you're right, there's more marketing research than ever being shared right now, which is great. I think it's become more approachable than ever thanks to people like yourself and Margarets. And I know that I felt very intimidated at first starting to learn this stuff and people who can kind of make it fun and more understandable. I think that's a good thing. But there's also a lot of pushback that only certain kinds of research is valuable and there's a lot of skepticism around vendor funded research especially. And you've, you've talked about this before. I'm curious what makes marketing research worthwhile in your opinion? And where do you draw a line on when we need to treat it like a hard science and when we don't?
- [07:29]
Andrew Tindall
First of all, oh God. I think calling any market research marketing research hard science is questionable in the first place for many reasons. As I said in that column, you, you just Kind of shared, no research is perfect. For example, my friend who I used to work in at the Agile with once put me onto a load of IWSR data which is basically like how are brands actually performing in market? And he was like look and there's clearly if you grow loyalty, they're the brands that have grown over the past five years. What's this about? But it turns out if you actually measure loyalty over 12 months, which some businesses do or not, versus three weeks actually loyalty is really correlated with growth actually more so than getting new customers. You have to really understand the methods, basic understanding of the maths behind it and stuff like this. I don't believe any research should ever be framed as a hard science. This is just often an experiment on the available data trying to answer a certain amount of questions. So I think it's, it's within the industry's priority to always make an effort to understand the data sets and the method applied. I think it's within the vendors who often release this research like myself at System one, where a vendor that is essentially wanting you to research with us. That's why we do our research, which you could just call, you know, product marketing. We pour all our marketing investment into buying, acquiring data, running surveys, etc. It's within us to be honest. Like in the recent playbook I just released with TikTok and WPP, there's a whole page at the end which is basically like at the end of an academic paper. It's here are the caveats. Don't get too ahead of yourself. I like the fact that we've been challenged more. I've been asked to put stuff like that in it and you actually see when I think System One's quite good at putting like citations into charts, give the nerds the actual proper detail underneath the chart so that they can really understand it. But then marketing research at its best is about bringing the customer into your decision process and you must start with a question or a problem and try to get to as high up without getting too nerdy. There's this thing called like the hierarchy of evidence pyramid that I'm surprised not people don't talk about but I was taught in med school which is basically at the bottom you've got a consultant's opinion and at the top you've got like a randomized control trial which is ironically an a B test which people think is very basic in marketing these days, don't they? You know, can I get further up that trying to answer those questions, just being aware that these things that have been positioned as laws. You know, positioning something as a law is positioning. There's no gravity in marketing pretending the raises will lead us down the wrong path.
- [10:31]
Eleanor Jasper
Well, you've done, like you said, a lot of research@system1. Do you have a finding then that you believe is true and useful for marketers even if there's not perfect proof or if you don't have the top hierarchy of evidence for it, Is there still a favorite finding that you believe in?
- [10:45]
Andrew Tindall
It obvious I'd say this, but emotion is the key to how brands grow and advertising effectiveness and why it's super damn hard to prove. Despite me releasing like at this point, 10 kind of different data sets and evidence and research and papers around it is that emotion and how brands grow, essentially building memories is something that compounds over time into behavior change. So one, you need to be building the right kind of memories. You know, you can be as emotional as you want, but if you're, if you're growing the idea and a memory that my beans cause you to fart, I don't think it's going to move change behavior too much. And two, what's the outcome that you should check that against? So often people are like, oh well this campaign was really emotional and it might not line up with roi, which is often like sales revenue within six weeks, but brands effectiveness and emotion helps build these memory structures that ladder and compound over years. So it's really damn hard to prove that proper, scientifically hard science that is what's going to change things. There's a great paper about does ad liking matter? And it comes to the conclusion it does. But then when you look at it, it's just like as usual with all these academic papers, it's like a collection of like at scales and claimed stuff in surveys and stuff like this, which is just useless. Every time I plug emotional data into a data set, whether that's a client, mmm. The FE Awards Data bank, the IPA Awards data Bank, TikTok brand list studies, brand trackers and stuff like this, it heavily correlates with the outcomes that the marketer cares about. And then if you take it back to the proper theory, it's like being more, you know, in a heightened emotional state. You build more memories in emotional arousal. And then you got those heuristics, like the affect heuristic, where something feels good, I. E. You've seen some positive emotion around it, you choose it without really realizing it. So you can explain it and there's a correlation. But then it's really hard to prove that Causation. But you know, people have looked at penetration and market share growth and seen a correlation and called that a law. So why is there a different standard for that?
- [13:12]
Eleanor Jasper
Yeah, it's a good question. Well, speaking of, speaking of, of research and things that maybe don't have the perfect evidence behind it yet, because it's a newer category, I wanted to talk about craters because you put forward new research, the Creator effectiveness playbook, which I think is wonderful in a category of marketing that's still something newer. What were your most sort of surprising or significant findings from that research?
- [13:37]
Andrew Tindall
Surprising finding is that I've been shouting about how effective creators are over the past year or so from various data sets Again. So like when we did that research with Fe and Sister 1 that Mark Whitson shared last year, the Creative Dividend, we looked at creators as a touch point in campaigns and we showed that on average they lead to more brand effects when they're included. Then when you look at some IPA and WPP media research, when you treat creators as a media channel and then go into all the econometrics, you actually see that creators have the highest long term ROI multiplier and everyone's gone holy, holy hell, like God. Creators are incredible and I was expecting them just to win across the board. But then what was special about that creator effectiveness playbook that we released this year in Cannes is that we actually got all the brand list studies for a load of creator campaigns. You can say what you want about brand list studies, but I think they're a really good way of actually measuring memory change. Exposed. Non exposed. Really. I mean people try and shit on them, but we talked about that hierarchy of evidence pyramid. They're right at the top. It's a controlled randomized trial. So you actually look at those individually for credit campaigns. And we found that it's these top 10% of creators that are doing like a massive amazing stuff that's really swinging those averages. Of those two previous pieces of research I just talked about right up to the top. The top 10% are creating four times the average, what I call brand memory lift than the average of the bottom 90%. And you're like, holy hell. One, that's fantastic because no one knows what they're doing with creators. It's quite random. So we need some help here. And two, then the research became very easy. What are these top performing creators doing? And building a playbook around it. And then kind of my favorite insight from that part of the research is it's not about creative fame and recognition it's about whether there's an authentic fit between the creator and your brand and whether the creator can create distinctive, emotional, entertaining advertising that shifts our brains from thinking about creators as a media channel and wow, I need their audience and their reach to a creative partner that you need to pay to scale their reach. Which I think is the biggest shift in that report.
- [16:06]
Rob Demars
Continuing to hear this theme between distinctive and emotional. And that also showed up in your Creative Dividend work that you did with FE and Mark Ritson and how it showed that ads that are both emotional and distinctive are more profitable at the end of the day. And that's, that's why we do marketing. So can you walk us through what you've seen in the research about the importance of emotion and distinctive ads? I mean, you've already been talking about it at a high level, but what are some of those details?
- [16:35]
Andrew Tindall
Of course, yeah. In the Creative Dividend, we spent a few years analyzing a load of the campaign case studies submitted to the FE Awards and it took so long we needed to move the issue forward. A lot of this kind of research had been done by the IPA in the past, which is UK centric stuff and quite TV centric stuff and quite large brand centric stuff. So we actually really paid Effie a chunk to get as much data as possible of American, us, uk, European and Irish advertising campaigns, from challenger to large brands, from winners of FE Awards to people that submitted and didn't even get past the first stage. We really looked into what principles that held true on that kind of more really large global data set. And I think the most interesting thing about effectiveness from an emotional and distinctive point of view is that distinctiveness has to be there. Distinctiveness, brand recognition, your brand being part of your activity is a must, otherwise it's not an ad. Obviously. But being distinctive doesn't compound into behavior change. You can't beat someone over the head with a logo until they are more predisposed to buy your brand. But you have to be distinctive for it to work. So we found that without being distinctive as you scale media brooches, it doesn't reliably turn into revenue in market. Whereas if you're distinctive and emotional, then it reliably scales into profit in market. So keep finding. I keep finding because we can't keep chasing revenue. The world's on fire, guys. We can't keep doing that. Anyone can spend a million on advertising and get a million revenue. I've done it on brands. It's easy and it's boring. Or the best way to get revenue is doing a price discount. Anyone can sell something 50% off, you'll go bankrupt. What we must focus on is profit, and profit is harder to achieve. Profit means you're going to be more likely to choose my brand more often and more likely to pay for it. How do you do that? You predispose people towards your brand. And to do that, you need to create an emotional appeal in your advertising, because that means more memories, more useful memories that tap into the heuristics that matter, that lead into that reduction in price sensitivity and building all those brand effects that compound over time. So I think there's a key distinction between you must be distinctive, but if you want to profitably grow, you have to be emotional.
- [19:30]
Rob Demars
And that's no easy task, right? I mean, creating work that is truly emotive and truly distinctive is obviously the goal at the end of the day. And that's why you guys exist, to help marketers be able to do that. But it sounds like the second hardest thing. That's the first hardest thing. And let's say you discover it. The second hardest thing is actually sticking with it, right? And actually believing in it and continuing to invest in, in that great work. And you've done a lot of work in longevity of creative. What, what has the research shown you guys in terms of making sure that you give that great work enough time to be impactful?
- [20:12]
Andrew Tindall
I'll give a more detailed answer than I've ever given on stage, anywhere or any podcast, because this is, this is a serious, very serious. Give us the gold. I've researched this stuff called compound creativity for like, years now with IPA data and FE data, and it's basically like looking at, well, why did I do it in the first place? Marketers were really waking up to the idea of using their ads for longer because it allows them to wear in and achieve the strategy that they want. And actually, people don't really notice your advertising, so you need to build the right kind of reach and frequency and that allows you to run your ads for longer. Some in the industry have advocated for to brand assets and using them consistently so they become more famous and unique. But that's very blunt, almost useless advice like, okay, well, I need to do a new campaign because I don't sell that toothpaste anymore or I'm being sued. I must change that color or one radio. We can't use any other things, blah, blah, blah. So what I want to do is build a more holistic view on consistency, which we've called compound creativity, which looks at the idea of a brand keeping to its foundations over time. What you could call like brand cohesion, sticking to the same positioning and creative idea, stick with the same teams. The second pillar is a culture of consistency, which is stretching your brand and idea across time and space. So like using new campaigns for longer, but also stretching them across more media channels, putting your idea and brand to work harder, increasing its surface area. And the third idea is a boring one. You know, execution, you know, using the same brand look and feel. In any data set I have bothered to measure a brand's compound creativity score, its consistency score, and it's a pain in the ass because you have to get all their advertising for the past five years, look at all their channels and their websites to kind of come up with a percentage against the framework we've developed. It means good stuff. Like more consistent brands in the FE database, four times more efficient from an RI point of view. They report twice as more large business effects that you could call effectiveness. The three times more likely to report large incremental profit gain. And the same thing with the IPA data, almost exactly the same thing. But I lead with the fidata markets at a global level. But going back to our original question, this is not hard science. It's hard to prove this. Those campaigns and brands that have been going longer, probably going longer because they're more successful and you're getting this kind of correlation and causation effect. So they have to really try to prove that consistency and longevity causes this stuff. There's one little data set in the research that shows that where if you actually look at, when you look at a five year period for brands that are consistent, you actually see year on year, the advertising gets more emotional and more distinct. So it's actually becoming more emotional, more distinct by them being consistent. That can't be explained away by this reverse causality. So consistency is doing something. It's hammering your brand look and feel and allowing you to become more distinctive. It's playing into the familiarity heuristic, where actually familiarity breeds contentment, not contempt. We like the familiar as human beings. So you can start to see some things that point to consistency causing this growth. I could talk about consistency all year, all day long. And I've been talking about it for like four years now, so I'll stop there. But I think consistency is the modern effectiveness hack for marketers. And when you look at other effectiveness hacks that we thought were hacks, you can probably explain it by consistency. Why don't celebrities work? They're not used Consistently. Why do brand characters work? Why you do it forces you to be consistent. Why does a long running campaign work? It forces you to stick with it and iterate within it and it forces you to get more entertaining each time. Like should have gone to spec savers. So yeah, I could probably make a career about just going around making helping people become more consistent because good things happen when consistency happens.
- [24:22]
Rob Demars
Yeah, it's such a great topic. It's one where people will nod and go totally, that makes sense. But then when the rubber hits the road and they have to spend the money to be consistent, they start to get gun shy. So gosh it, it's such a good topic and what a great topic. Just regarding the importance of emotion and distinctiveness. So let's talk about a topic nobody talks about and that is audio. Everybody sort of writes it off.
- [24:46]
Andrew Tindall
Right.
- [24:47]
Rob Demars
And you've done research with the radio center and the Effy shows just showing how powerful it is. Ironically, Marketing Architects, the TV agency actually started in radio. We were one of the largest radio agencies in the U.S. so we do love audio in a way that's probably not healthy. Can you talk to us a little bit more about why you think it's so overlooked?
- [25:09]
Andrew Tindall
Well, it's great that you guys like audio and radio because whenever you meet someone that likes radio, you always have a very nice time. Nice, smart people like radio. I love doing radio work because everyone's just lovely. Yeah, I mean, why is it overlooked? Well, you can't take a screenshot of your radio ad and submit it to Katie. And marketing has really lent into and used marketers egos to try and motivate us, which is fine. I submit my work to the Effies because hell, I'll get paid more as a marketer that's won an effie. So it's not a bad thing. But we have lent too far into what's popular versus what's effective because all the evidence shows that audio and radio is affected. But like focusing on radio specifically, it's got very similar reach often to tv. Depending on what market you're in, it's often like six times cheaper and your competitors probably not there. So you probably got like category exclusions. And you can get really creative for cheap because you don't have to hire a helicopter, you can just play the helicopter sound. And there's something quite special about audio where I'm not fully looked into it, but people claim that audio is processed at a different part of the brain which is like closer to memory formation. And I've actually seen that on the practical side when I've worked with ITV where they released some research which showed that people can recall audio features of an ad 20% more than the visual features of a TV ad. And talking about vendor funded research. Why would TV company ITV release such a killer headline about how powerful audio is on tv? So you've got to really believe it then and then you know all my research on TikTok or at a campaign level with Effie and stuff looking at the use of the types of distinctive brand asset whenever you use jingles and sonic assets or recently my creator effectiveness playbook research a creator speaking the brand name is way more powerful than any of the visual stuff because you can close your eyes but you can't close your ears. Like killer insight. I actually don't think I care about convincing people about audio anymore despite I did some research with Vacrits and in Cannes this year with the cra the RAB in the US and Radio center again looking at doing a cut of all the campaigns in the FE case library which had audio in them. So if you're podcasting or radio and we saw like any campaign that use those stuff reported more good things in any sense and it only got better if they had a bigger scale and media and put behind them. Because one of the power of radio is how broad reach and how public and trust building it is. But I'm no longer going to convince people because if I eventually get bored of this whole marketing effectiveness stuff and I think it's starting to happen, I'm just going to go start an FMCG Challenger brand and I'm exclusively going to use radio to grow it and then I'm going to come back to this industry five years later and told you. I fucking told you so.
- [28:22]
Eleanor Jasper
Nice secret weapon.
- [28:23]
Rob Demars
When I started my career they someone described radio as the ugly sister and I'm like that's, that's not nice. Gosh. I had actually shut my microphone off for a second because I was taking notes on some of those statistics you were throwing out. We love audio. The 20% one I hadn't heard before. So I need to remember that that's a great one. And like I said we started out in radio, we did pivot to a TV agency. So let's talk about TV and it's a little self serving because we are a TV agency. But what is your research shown about the power of TV and the importance of that in your mix?
- [28:59]
Andrew Tindall
Yeah, God. I mean look, I mean the most obvious one and most recent One that I actually research in data was again with that huge FE data set, we looked at the kind of touch points used in a campaign and TV clearly fell out as a super touch point. Which means that it was like the second biggest driver of brand effects on average in all these campaigns. And it could also create short term effects disproportionately well for how well it could create those long term effects. So it's kind of a birthism engine. It does the long and the short. But that research hides the key principles of media. So I think if anyone's really interested in media and TV, I'd go look at some research called Profitability 2.0, which is from Essence, MediaCom and Thinkbox. I have a tattered copy of it printed off under my pillow because I think that is the world's best marketing research I've ever seen. And they have a principle in that called set, where if you're thinking about a Mebi channel, you need to think about its scale, its efficiency and the time frame it will pay back in. Not this binary of long and short performance and brand, but those things. And then TV just comes out on trumps in those things. So scale. What my researchers just talked about then with FE hid the fact, despite it being a massive second biggest brand builder, whereas creators are actually the first biggest brand builder. Creators only create 5% of all profit from advertising in the UK, whereas TV creates 53% of all profit in advertising in the UK. When you look over econometric data sets over two years, TV has scale like you'd never believe. It's why I think organic content. And I'm unusually busy right now, so I haven't done a column in a few weeks. I've half written a column called Organic Reach is Bullshit. And the main reason for that is even if you're doing really well in organic and you're posting a lot of content, if someone goes, oh great, could you 10x that for me? You go, guess I'll post again tomorrow. Like, what? You can't scale it. TV I can scale. And like the efficiency doesn't fall off. So set scale E efficiency. How do you turn that spend into profit? TV's got a really good efficient driver of turning spend into profit and then time. People think that TV is a long of it channel. It's not. It's a now and forever channel. It creates cash now and it will create cash forever. I work with this Challenger brand, cmo, try my best to advise them. So they did a TV campaign a few years ago and they were like, yeah, but it didn't really pay back, did it? Where's the cash? So now he's got. Damn it. Now they've gone back to Zuck Books, he calls it, where he'll put a pound into Meta and get more than a pound back. He calls them Zucker Books. Zucker Books. And I'm like, mate, you probably get more than a pound back because you did a TV ad six months ago and that's made your digital work harder. Like, people have got this so damn wrong. It's worrying.
- [32:08]
Rob Demars
Andrew, you strike me as someone who doesn't have a lot of strong opinions or very, very, very contrarian. So you might have to take a minute on this one. But what would you say is your most contrarian marketing opinion opinion? It's the one that gets you in the most trouble.
- [32:31]
Andrew Tindall
My most contrarian marketing opinion is distinctiveness is not how brands grow. So a lot of the research from, you know, specifically Aaron Berg Bass really talks about how we need to be distinctive to grow our brands. And differentiation is kind of useless because differentiation doesn't exist. And it really speaks to what I was talking about earlier around. You need to go and understand. Look at the research below these claims and understand it. For example, the claim differentiation doesn't exist in academic research where they've explicitly asked people if they believe this brand is different. But it's like, that's not what differentiation is. Relative differentiation is your brand has a collection of largely subconscious memories that makes your brand different to this brand. That is, you're slightly more safe and you believe this is slightly more hydrating than this brand. Even if I quizzed you on it, you'd never be able to explain that to me. So asking people if you think brands are different is silly. Yet when we talk about distinctiveness in that kind of research from the Ambro Bass, all these better tools come out, like measuring fame and uniqueness. But we've never asked anyone if we think that brands are distinctive, because that would be stupid, wouldn't it? Yet we've fallen into this kind of distinctiveness is how brands grow. But as I talked about earlier, distinctiveness is needed. Our brands need to be recognized so that they can be chosen. And that advertising activity works, of course, and not mistaken from other brands. But how do we grow? We must predispose people to our brands. And how do we do that? Through creativity, emotion, being entertaining, putting on a show, creating fame, tapping into culture, innovation that solves consumer needs. That's how brands grow. None of that will work unless you're distinctive, I agree for sure. But without that you're not going to grow. So you need both. I think this is what a lot of people are waking up to now. We work with big ether and CG clients. They're very proud of their distinctive brand as sacred. But their adverts, their ads are shit. So of course you're not going to grow. So I think I'm gladly, loudly going to be professionally annoying for the rest of my career and fight the other side of the coin.
- [34:56]
Eleanor Jasper
Yeah, it sounds like distinctiveness is a must have, but it's not the. It's not the end.
- [35:00]
Andrew Tindall
Was that contrarian enough for you?
- [35:02]
Eleanor Jasper
I like it.
- [35:03]
Rob Demars
It absolutely was.
- [35:04]
Eleanor Jasper
Yeah.
- [35:04]
Andrew Tindall
Okay.
- [35:04]
Rob Demars
We spent a lot of time on that topic on this podcast.
- [35:08]
Andrew Tindall
Thank you. God, your listeners must be so bored of it now. I'm so sorry for people listening.
- [35:12]
Rob Demars
No, no, I know. I mean we've actually talked a lot, I think, about the other side of that coin. So I think, yeah, yeah, that was really valuable.
- [35:19]
Andrew Tindall
If another person ruins a good Guinness for me in a pub by coming up to me going, hi Andrew, what do you think about distinctiveness versus differentiation? I'll scream. So we should all.
- [35:32]
Eleanor Jasper
Well, Andrew, System one, at least when I first came across them, I remember them the most. For your TV commercial pre testing. I love when you do the pre testing, the super bowl ads and you've tested thousands of campaigns. I'm curious what's the most surprising it could be funny or like shocking finding you've had from pretesting all these TV commercials. Is there anything people maybe wouldn't necessarily think would be important or work?
- [35:56]
Andrew Tindall
I'd be a miss not to do a smidge of salesmanship at this point. So we test every UK and US TV ad like long form asset the day it's aired on TV with millions of people. We've been doing that about 10 years. That allows me to do the kind of research that I do, but also allows our customers to truly understand their category and our competitors. And over the past few years we've done really good work moving into our products, testing radio and audio and social skippable digital ads and out of home. We're very lucky with that. What's my biggest finding across all that most surprising founding finding is I am the advertising oracle. I spend all day in this data looking at thousands of ads, watching thousands of ads. I watch too many ads. Can you imagine what your brain does subconsciously absorbing all that? Like at some point you'd think that it would just become good enough to show me. Then I'll go, oh, 4.4. I can't, I can't. I am not the consumer. I am so bad at picking ads that I think consumers will recognize the brand and think are emotional and understanding why, you know, do they recognize that character? Do they enjoy that? Do those associations come through? I'm very good. Once I get a 30 second glimpse at one of our reports and then I pretend it was all my idea anyway, you'd think that eventually I'd become the advertising oracle, but I haven't. And it just speaks to how useful market orientation and market research really is.
- [37:35]
Eleanor Jasper
Yeah, if that's not a case for pre testing, I don't know what is. Because yeah, you're right. That's something like marketers, we just assume we know best with our brands, but we definitely do not always. Well, I want to wrap us up with something fun. Still kind of on theme with the episode.
- [37:47]
Andrew Tindall
This is fun. No, Jesus, come on, we're getting more fun.
- [37:52]
Eleanor Jasper
What's a decision in your life that you made on pure gut? You didn't have a lot of data, but it turned out to be exactly right.
- [37:59]
Andrew Tindall
Very good question. I quit med school. That takes like 10 years. Everything was saying no. I remember my professor at the time was like, I was actually going to go work at Diageo at the time and he's like, what a beer company? You realize you're two years away from being like a surgeon. And then I got into Diageo and then I'll feel guts. I thought, that looks bloody amazing and I reckon I'd be great. And I went to Diageo and then worked at the Cardi for a few years and went back to Diageo and I was on this like accelerated scheme where I was all your careers really well laid out in front of you and you've got your training, your funding and you going to be a global CMO someday. Then I quit that as well and came and worked at System 1 based on my gut and everyone was like, what the hell are you doing? I'm very lucky it paid off. Wow, that's a good one.
- [38:54]
Rob Demars
That's really good.
- [38:55]
Eleanor Jasper
Did you have something, Rob, that you thought of?
- [38:56]
Rob Demars
You know, not as good as that.
- [38:59]
Andrew Tindall
I mean, I. I need to go emotional then, Rob.
- [39:03]
Rob Demars
I know, I'm like, I don't even know if I want to. It might be kind of dumb. Actually. I was thinking about this question. My wife and I are empty nesters and we were always against we don't want a van. And for Some reason, we just impulsively decided that we are going to buy an electric VW van. It was completely on this weird whim. We thought, oh, we're going to drive around the country in it or whatever. And it's brought us so much joy. It's, like, so much fun driving this thing. I don't know how it is overseas, but in America, there's not a lot of them. So people smile and they're like, wow,
- [39:41]
Andrew Tindall
this is so funny.
- [39:42]
Rob Demars
It reminds me of. It's like driving around a cartoon car, and it's just brought. It's been. It's been a lot of fun. And it makes no sense on paper because we have kids, but they're all out of the house, so.
- [39:55]
Eleanor Jasper
Yeah.
- [39:56]
Andrew Tindall
Isn't it strange that when you rely on your gut and emotion, good things happen? Yeah.
- [40:03]
Eleanor Jasper
I don't know. I had. I had trouble thinking about this one a little bit because there's a lot to pick from. But I decided to get into triathlon kind of on a whim. And if you think about the actual data, you're just, like, pounding your body. It's not the best thing for you, actually, when you look at it. But it's just been so enjoyable, and I've just loved it, and it's become, like a passion outside of work. And I don't really know why I chose to do that. I just kind of wanted to and just do something hard and right.
- [40:27]
Andrew Tindall
I'm the same with running. If I don't run, I'm a very grumpy asshole. But, like, everything aches now, but I'm like, if I can't run, then what's the point? Guys.
- [40:36]
Eleanor Jasper
No, my. My left knee is killing me right now. It's like, yo, you don't have to do. It's like, I could do Pilates, but, like, that's just not fun fun. I just need to destroy my body every day. Well, Andrew, this has been amazing. I was so excited. I've been trying to eat on the podcast for a while, so I'm so excited to have you here.
- [40:51]
Rob Demars
I'm sorry.
- [40:51]
Andrew Tindall
I'm so buttering Meryl. Apologies.
- [40:53]
Eleanor Jasper
No, no, you're just. You're busy. I understand. It was. It was worth it. Let's give you an opportunity to plug anything. Everyone should follow you on LinkedIn if they haven't. What else do you want to plug before you sign off?
- [41:02]
Andrew Tindall
I just went through my O N D. My October, November, December, which is Cannes, where we released a lot of research, and I'm just figuring out now who we're working with to do what next. So I've got not. I've actually got nothing. Nothing hard to plug. Oh. Apart from. So I'm now kind of chief graph system. I don't just do kind of. Our patches and research also help all our products. And in a few weeks, you're going to see System One launch an AI model which we've trained on over 18 million human emotional responses, which isn't just some janky black box plugged into LLM. It's actually based on all that advertising we've been testing. And what's amazing about it is because what we've been testing it is our data, because we test every ad so we can build a proper model on it. Whereas these competitors that have launched these tools, which I still can't work out how or why they've done it, I don't think legally they could have done that. So I'm very excited to put a new tool out there which helps people make more decisions on those assets that aren't going to get a million media spend behind them. But we'll give them Some Amazing System 1 and Marshall Data to steer them in the right direction. So follow me on LinkedIn and you'll be the first to be able to use.
- [42:16]
Rob Demars
That sounds exciting. Can you reveal the name yet or is that still under wraps?
- [42:21]
Andrew Tindall
I haven't read the legal email on this yet.
- [42:24]
Eleanor Jasper
We don't want to get you in trouble.
- [42:26]
Andrew Tindall
No, no, no, no.
- [42:27]
Rob Demars
Call it. We'll call it the Tindal.
- [42:29]
Andrew Tindall
No, no, no, it's not. It's. Test your ad something. All right, sounds great.
- [42:37]
Eleanor Jasper
Amazing. Excited to see that. All right, thanks so much for joining us, Andrew. That was fun.
- [42:40]
Andrew Tindall
Amazing.
- [42:41]
Rob Demars
Thank you, Andrew.
- [42:42]
Eleanor Jasper
That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor de Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing. Marketing Architects.
- [43:00]
Rob Demars
I think it's angelic.
- [43:02]
Andrew Tindall
Here we go. We'll edit this out. The magic of editing, please.
- [43:05]
Rob Demars
I just think it's cool you have doors on your ceiling.
- [43:10]
Andrew Tindall
How do you not know that? I'm just sat on the wall.
- [43:14]
Rob Demars
We have our doors on the wall,
- [43:15]
Andrew Tindall
not on the ceiling, you Americans.