← Uncensored CMO
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- [00:00]
Jess Butcher
Foreign.
- [00:07]
John Evans
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored cmo. And in this episode, I have a returning guest for you, none other than Jess Butcher, who was actually guest number six on the podcast almost six years ago, if you can believe that. Now, Jess is incredible. I first met her as the co founder and CMO of Blippa, and she was a tech entrepreneur at the time. And. And now she's turned her hand to become a social entrepreneur. She's founded a organization called Scroll Aware, trying to tackle the issue of tech addiction and particularly focused on what tech is doing to kids and what it means for society. Now she's collaborating with celebrities and brands to try and bring around change in that area. So I thought it'd be time to catch up with Jess to find out what she's doing and why this matters for brands. Because at the end of the day, it's we as brand owners and advertisers who are spending the money on social platforms to fund what they're doing. And I think it's important that we take a responsible approach to that. And Jess is doing that fascinating interview. We talk a lot about her journey as an entrepreneur in tech and also what she's doing now. Here it is. Jess Butcher, welcome to the show.
- [01:11]
Jess Butcher
So fab to be back.
- [01:13]
John Evans
It was lovely because I was listening back to our episode, can you believe it's almost six years ago? Which I know makes me feel really old now. But it was lovely listening back because we met obviously when you were at Blipper, and we've kind of stayed in touch ever since. And I listened back to the episode and we talk a lot about Blipper, but right at the end, you say that you're about to do something about social media and I'm really pleased. Cause we're here today to talk about what you've gone on and done. But it was lovely just hearing the story back then and catching up. But maybe before we do, love you to introduce yourself to the audience and also maybe mention how you ended up at Blipper as well. And that part of the story.
- [01:49]
Jess Butcher
So I'm described as a tech entrepreneur, female, because you apparently need the label at the beginning of the whole time, which is slightly strange because I can't write or read a line of code. So I fell into tech because I love evangelizing new, exciting technology or initiatives or things that will make the world better, more delightful in some way, and I love innovation. So I rode the coattails of a lot of entrepreneurs during my twenties, during the whole dot com bubble. And then burst. And I always wanted to do my own thing. But I guess the fortune kind of aligned around 2010 when some ex colleagues and I came together around the technology for Blipper, which was image recognition, computer vision tech connected to augmented reality layers over the real world. And we were right time, right place. This was the first time that this technology had been seen. We had a really strong team to take it to market. We went after advertisers and brands and their agencies and media owners and sought to turn the static world interactive using the camera, the device. And it was a thrilling journey. So you know what started as a pub chat in 2010 I think within three, four years had become a business of 300, 350 people, 10 offices around the world. We raised an eye watering amount of money, over $100 million. And we were speaking on platforms all over the world, evangelizing the huge potential of this tech as an ad tech, as an educational tech, testing lots of different industries, lots of different markets to see where we could find the right traction for it. And from a personal perspective, obviously it really elevated my profile. There weren't many women in bleeding edge tech roles at that time. I didn't understand how the tech worked. But I guess what I learned I was quite good at is translating nerd and that that's my special skill set. I love working with innovators and I hear what they tell me the tech can do and I translate that into a message that makes sense for different audiences. That's where I sit is communications, ultimately business development, partnerships. So the tech can do that. How can we translate that for this particular stakeholder? Whether it's a client, whether it's the media for a PR opportunity, whether it's an investor potentially or whether it's the end consumer, they would say image recognition, computer vision technology takes this, you can play a video. And I said the Harry Potter ification of print. They're like, yeah, I guess so. I was like, right, I'm going with that. So that was my role. How can we sell this technology? How can we test it in the market? And it was amazing because it was such a tactile, tangible, visible reaction that people would have back then. I mean, the bad side was that it became a novelty tech quite quickly. There were lots of gimmicky applications. Just because you can make a dinosaur jump out of a poster doesn't necessarily mean you should because once the consumer's seen that, they've seen it. So we were constantly trying to educate and we realized that we almost Became an agency in working with partners to say you can do that, but actually we wouldn't suggest that. Use it for education, use it for dynamic content, things that can change, that can update, that can take customers on a journey, inform them in some way. And yeah, it was just such a thrilling opportunity. And that was 2011 to sort of 2016, 17 that we were riding very high and I was on airplanes, traveling the world, met Sheryl Sandberg, went to Silicon Valley on the main platform stage. Big ad tech conferences, quite overwhelming. More so because I had three children in four years then as well.
- [05:51]
John Evans
Wow. Just a small task.
- [05:54]
Jess Butcher
The other three startups.
- [05:57]
John Evans
The most valuable startups you'll have in your life. Yeah, you've touched on a really key role of a marketer. I think you mentioned, just because you can doesn't mean you should. And I think that so much of tech is driven by what's possible, not what's needed. And it's like sometimes we kind of try and sell what we can make rather than make what's going to sell kind of thing. I think that's a really important marketing lesson. I remember around the time, by the way, anyone listening who. I mean, obviously we've got things like Google Lens now that can kind of image recognize anything on the planet. And in fact I did a, did a LinkedIn post the other day showing me having tidied my desk. It's just a satisfying kind of, oh, look, I've sorted my desk out. And then someone said, oh, what desk do you. Do you use? And I'm like, I can't remember where I got the desk from. And anyway, I just literally uploaded the image to Google and it linked straight through to where you can buy the desk. In my post I was like, that's amazing, isn't it? But now of course, this all feels every day today, but this is almost 10 years ago and back then it was completely revolutionary. I remember I spoke at the European packaging conference in 2013 and I announced to everybody the QR code was dead, which I now feel a bit stupid. Thanks to the pandemic, the QR code made a revival. But I mean your tech at the time was genuinely mind blowing. And I remember the, I mean the reason I came across it was I just left a big corporate job. I was working at Britvic, I spent 13 years there and I found myself in a small juice startup with zero budgets and it was on those kind of private equity situations where they bought the brand, they hired me because apparently I knew drinks and I was a marketer and they're like, you know, make this thing the next household name drink brands in the uk, but we're not going to give you any money. And I was like, oh, no, how am I going to make this thing famous? And I remember the idea. I remember the moment I came up with the idea because I was with our designers, William Murray Ham. And the idea for the brand was juice. It was called Juice Burst, as in exaggerating the flavor. And we sat there and we had this idea, what if the fruit on the pack actually exploded? And then I'd read an article about your launch and about what you were doing. And I think someone, an agency I'd worked at the time, had sort of pitched this idea that if you put your phone over an advert, the advert would come to life. And I thought, what if you could put that on a label? So I remember rather than photograph fruit, we hired a Hollywood camera to film exploding fruit. And it was the funniest thing. Cause we had to explode, right? Raspberries and blueberries and apples. Now, I can't tell you it's very complicated to explode a fruit because any kind of charge, it will basically obliterate a fruit, if you think about it. Because obviously explosives are designed to blow up buildings, not blow up bits of fruit. So we had to invent the world's smallest ever electrical charge. It was 32 times smaller than a normal electrical charge, basically because otherwise it just destroy the thing. And then we had at the time the most advanced phantom Hollywood camera, so we could film it in slow motion. But what we did with you guys, which just I just thought was amazing, is we filmed this fruit exploding and then we worked with you guys to then make the pack explode in. When you put your phone in front of a bottle of juice burst, rather than seeing an apple or an orange, it just explodes in slow motion. And I think we'd also worked on, I think we're the first people ever to make it wrap around the bottle. So rather than being like an advert, it actually went dynamically around the bottle. But that at the time, I don't think anyone had done that before.
- [09:24]
Jess Butcher
Well, you were the dream client. Because the biggest challenge we had back in the day was they couldn this as its own dedicated medium. Everybody said the every brief was, can I play my TV ad on my press ad? And we're like, oh God, technically you can, but please don't do that. You know, look at this as a new interactive medium that you can play around with. And that you did, But Trying to move clients into that kind of mindset. And it wasn't necessarily their fault because they thought in media silos, whether it was buying silos or creative silos, you know, they had a team that would think about press and outdoor and, you know, and trying to sell something in that didn't fit neatly in one of those swim lanes was, was a big challenge. And what we found was it was much easier to do that with brands like Juice Burst because you were upstarts, pretenders to the thrones. You know, there was a, there was a risk appetite than the big incumbents, understandably, because there's a hunger to try something new. Maybe there's an award, you know, there's more risk ultimately within those organizations. So that was a really real thrill. But it made business development, from my perspective, very hard because it wasn't just about the feel of the brand, but it was finding brand managers that had that hunger. There was you. Another one that stands out is a girl called Kate Wallace. I think she's married now, but she's now. She was a junior person at Cadbury and she really played with the tech interactively and she's now, I think CMO at kfc. You know, her career's done that. And it was so interesting because I pegged her at that time thinking this girl's, you know, she's got something about her incredibly creative, incredibly energetic. And she made herself a hero internally by championing this technology and pushing it on our behalf internally. And we did a fantastic, I think it was during the Olympics and Olympics activation off Cadbury Boss. And it's been fabulous watching Kate's Journey ever since then. Cause I think they've done that people dipping weird advert recently and loads of headlines. Great stuff.
- [11:32]
John Evans
It's amazing actually. Cause I remember sort of trying to negotiate with you guys, obviously. Cause you worked on it pretty much for free, I think, and saying, look, I tell you what, if you apply all your tech and all your cleverness to Juice Burst, then you'll create the case study that everyone else goes, can you give me one of those?
- [11:48]
Jess Butcher
Well, we needed the examples, you know, we were two hustlers together. Right, Right. Trying to come up with something awesome.
- [11:54]
John Evans
My favorite one, the one that really surprised me actually was the business card. I had no idea. So I thought, look, I'm all in on this, right. So I thought you did the business.
- [12:03]
Jess Butcher
Card before we did. I know you asked for the interactive business card and everyone internally was like, ah, why aren't our business cards interactive?
- [12:10]
John Evans
It's probably the most effective media buy I've ever done. So I remember the. So bear in mind this is a sort of traditional juice business that we've just bought out. And I went to the company and said, right, all of you are going to be filmed and we're going to make you like Princess Leia coming out of your business card as if you were in Star wars, kind of in a fuzzy black and white kind of image. And you've got to do a one minute pitch for the band. And what blew me away, we had so much fun like just filming that and actually working the tech out. So you put your phone above the card and literally, you know, this, this black and white image appears, a little kind of music kicks off and it's wonderful. But what, what I had no idea about was how even I only had, I don't know, maybe a thousand business cards made, but we had 60,000 blips of the business card and people were then sending videos of the business card round to people. And I even remember going to, I even went to like Tesco and one stop, who are our biggest customers, had the entire meeting, didn't open my laptop once because I just had the business card. They were so transformed by this thing.
- [13:09]
Jess Butcher
Yeah, yeah.
- [13:10]
John Evans
So it's also as a retail, as a sort of a business to business media. It was just incredible as well.
- [13:15]
Jess Butcher
I mean, embarrassing that you came up with a business card idea before Blipper did as a company. And you know, there was a lot of novelty around. That's why the business card did so well. Right. You know, and we struggled as an organization to ever move ourselves outside of the innovation box tick. And that was the challenge. We didn't get people to look at the tech in the long term, in the round, to embed it throughout. And there were weaknesses anyway. I mean, there was a lot of entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, business building, mistakes made and lessons learned. But I think in many ways the tech itself was almost too clever because it wasn't intuitive enough. We called ourselves the QR Code killers. And with hindsight I'm like, the QR Code is brilliant because it's ugly as sin. But it's so obvious what it is. And it's a free tech. Anybody can use it, anyone can figure it, you can put it anywhere, you can put it on your T shirt, whatever you want. And that's clever, you know, that's human behavior to want something that's that obvious. Whereas Blipper in many ways was almost too clever and ahead of its time in terms of people using their phone. And I guess the conflict that I felt after a while because I was also on this parenting journey at the same time is this growing gnawing sense that I didn't want to be responsible for putting the phone between us and, and our real world experiences. I'm a firm believer that tech is supposed to enable our real lives. And lots of what Blipper was doing was we hoped would do that. You know, the unlocking of the right information, the right content at the right time. But it's not. I didn't want it to just be a distraction and something that's. That put barriers up between ourselves and the real world. And I guess that revelation at that time was, you know, obviously something that I've then honed in on professionally and you know, and moved into a whole new field of work and exploration around.
- [15:20]
John Evans
Yeah, I wonder if it's a little bit the old Meier principle of most advanced yet acceptable. I mean again, I got very excited by Blippa, but then it's that adoption, isn't it? Whereas actually probably today. Well, I mean Google have integrated it into Lens, I suppose, but. But it might be a timing thing. You guys were just so ahead, weren't you?
- [15:37]
Jess Butcher
Yeah, yeah. And what we are proud of, and I think anyone involved in that journey, spoiler alert. We combusted in orbit, is incredibly proud of, I guess what we gave to the industry as far as good practice, bad practice, obviously hard technology that you know, is now in Google. Lens was used in Snap, you know, is part of a lot of what's in filters and translation text. There's a lot of engineering tech that uses computer vision technology. And obviously as a team there was so much talent there, so many entrepreneurs that have gone on to build incredible businesses, cut their teeth within that roller coaster, massive rocket ship trajectory that we had. But I think it was a bit too soon.
- [16:24]
John Evans
I remember actually having a meeting with you guys probably about the time I think I left Juice first. It might have been 2015 and you were presenting your early concepts for visual search, which was just mind blowing. Literally. It was, it was, you know, pick a pair of boots, put your phone over there, it'll tell you where the boots are from, where you can buy it, information about it, the history through to the Wikipedia site, through the website. It was amazing. And it's incredible to think that's 2015, that's 10 years ago and that effectively is what Google are doing today.
- [16:55]
Jess Butcher
Yeah. But only now, probably years has it been nailed because it was never just about the image Recognition, mission, computer, vision, tech. It was all about how you connect it to the world of information that lives online in the right way. And obviously there's a lot of AI in that. And I think we just are reaching sophistication now.
- [17:15]
John Evans
And it's back to your point about behavioral science, isn't it? With Google we're used to Googling things. So to then just make one change, which is upload the picture and then it sends you the links. It's a small behavior step, isn't it, compared to download the app, put your phone up there. This is a different ecosystem to what I'm used to. All those kind of things make it a bit challenging. You talked about combusting. So if I can ask you kind of what went wrong and what were the biggest lessons do you think you took away from that period of your career?
- [17:46]
Jess Butcher
Oh, there were. I mean, the actual logistics of what went wrong were incredibly complicated. I mean, ultimately it boiled down to Runway running out and a lot of logistics on funding rounds not closing at the right time. I mean, there were a lot of personal lessons in that. I actually wasn't still in the front seat of the business at that time. I was in a more advisory ambassadorial role for personal reasons, obviously family and three children under four. But equally this sort of reprioritization that I had at that stage and a recognition that I had been the right generalist to kickstart that. But there were better people than me. Ultimately it was a hard realization, she says with some humility, that, you know, there was, I was a good startup to scale up cmo, there were better people than me to actually run a scaled up team. And that compounded with my lack of inclination to sit on planes to New York and the west coast all the time, was a natural decision for me to become more of an ambassador at that stage. But you know, it was a painful process to have that conversation with yourself and you know that if you take yourself out the front seat, you never get back in it. And there were a lot of pressure on me from people who wanted more women at the top of technology, more role models, you know, to stay there and to be that role model for other people within other women, particularly within the sector. But ultimately I had to make the right decision for me personally, learning that I'm an incredibly heart on sleeve person and that doesn't make for the best people manager. That was another lesson that I had. I'm great at business development and being out there and you kind of think, well, I want to run this huge team. But I wasn't very good at delegating. I wanted to be in control. I remember during one mat leave, in fact, I was in the hospital intervening on an email thread about the way something was happening and being, you know, bollocked by my co fantasy. You, you weren't in the previous meeting. Can you not, you know, we don't want to hear from you for six weeks. Enjoy your baby. And by the time I did start to reintegrate, it was a short American style Matt leave. I think it was the first or second. Can't remember. Decisions had been made that I wouldn't have taken and they were better if I was honest with myself than the decisions that I would have taken. And so there was a real growth jump for me because I realized that I needed to empower in order to scale my area of the business because I had become the break, because I wanted to be involved in everything. And yet empowering actually enables a better team. And I think I learned that lesson a little late and stalled the development in my side of the business. So, so many lessons. I mean, those are just a couple of personal lessons. I learned a lot about cap tables and, you know, how to hire and when to hire and fundraising and things like that, which, you know, I continue to support other entrepreneurs on those questions in their journey, but it was definitely the most intense learning process period of my life.
- [21:05]
John Evans
I gotta say, that self awareness and that honesty and humility is quite rare. I don't hear that very often.
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Jess Butcher
I'm told I'm an oversharer.
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John Evans
This is great. I think a lot of people resonate with that actually, because you're articulating the questions that a lot of people have in their minds and the doubts that a lot of people have. And that's really impressive to understand where your skill set is, but also without downplaying what you're amazing at as well, recognizing what your superpowers are, which are. Many talk about being a woman in tech at the time, and I know that was very. That is and still is quite unusual. But also female founders and entrepreneurs getting funding is something that's kind of well documented. What advice? What are your observations on where we are with our ability to fund female founders and any advice to female founders?
- [21:51]
Jess Butcher
It's a really complicated conversation and I tend to take a more nuanced view of it than a lot of the sort of binary headlines that you see underrepresentation in any field for women. There's an assumption now within the narratives that that's down to discrimination. Now discrimination does exist. Absolutely. And I've never denied that. But I do think that we're not always asking the right questions around why there might be underrepresentation in anything, whether that's women in technology, female entrepreneurs, funding for female entrepreneurs, women in different sectors in politics, whatever it may be. Because I think in order to solve these questions, and that's always been my interest, getting more women into the field so that I'm passionate about that, I think we need that sort of diversity of outlook and thought and skill set. We need to understand that there are bell curve differences between men and women. People don't understand bell curves. It's utterly fascinating to me because of course the majority of us overlap on everything. So yes, of course every individual woman can do anything that every individual man can potentially do. But bell curves are so important because they play out in the statistics, particularly in the extreme statistics, which of course are Nobel prize winners at one end of the spectrum or unicorn businesses. This is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of businesses that achieve that. In a lot of the conversations that I'm having with women in technology or female entrepreneurs, I'm fascinated by the choices that women on average make more frequently than the choices men do. And this question of more VC for women. Obviously I want more successful female founders. But what has struck me from being around the female entrepreneurship community for the last 10, 15 years and judging all these competitions, meeting all these incredible entrepreneurs is women tend to build slightly different businesses. They build businesses out of problems that they've identified. Passion sectors like fashion or beauty or food that you know, that they love. You know, a lot of women when they start families, build parenting businesses and toy manufacturing businesses because they're passionate about that particular area. And those businesses aren't typically VC businesses. You know, they don't need super deep pockets and the businesses that come out survive, or a higher percentage of them survive because they use debt, they bootstrap, they grow within their cash flows. Women, let's be honest, more sensible on average on bell curve, they build carefully. The bell curve of risk aversion is the critical one when it comes to business building. And personally I think that's a good thing because more of those businesses survive, right? Women aren't as masochistic as men on average. So we don't take these huge risks. If you look at VC backed businesses, what, 5, 10% that survive, so there'd be a huge number of female sacrificial lambs to that statistic that will lose. Whereas I would prefer there to be 50% success rate from the businesses that women choose to create. So all these things can be true at once. We do want more women funded, but equally, let's have the more nuanced conversation about what the businesses are that women typically build and how we support those. And there's some fantastic initiatives like by Women Built that I think Sahar Hashemi pulled together, forgive me if I've got her name wrong, that are really shining the light on female entrepreneurship of all types. So it's not just about VC tech businesses that like Blipper, may well explode in orbit.
- [25:52]
John Evans
Yeah, good comparison. Actually, to your very point, you talked about some of the kind of female characteristics that help manage risk and that sort of thing, which you spend a lot of time with lots of founders. What other characteristics of successful founders do you observe in the kind of businesses you work with?
- [26:08]
Jess Butcher
I mean, to the things that I realized I wasn't very good at delegation. The best skill is to find people that are better than you. The best entrepreneurs are really, really good people, recruiters. They find people that are better than them and have the humility to understand that and pull the right teams together. No business succeeds without the right teams. So an appreciation of what you need and how you can offset your own weaknesses is the most important. And then you've got ruthless prioritization, obviously, and move fast, break things better sooner than perfect. There's a reason why you keep hearing these mantras time and time again. Because the successful entrepreneurs move quickly and take risks, take every opportunity that presents themselves and don't need to get everything perfect. Because if there's a mistake, there's a mistake. You learn from it. You know, fail, fail fast. I sound like a walking book of cliches, but there's a reason why those are the cliches, because those are the differentiators.
- [27:20]
John Evans
Yeah, you're so, so right. And my career has been mostly apart from creating this podcast, actually, which is more so. But most of my career has been spent in large organizations trying to be the entrepreneur inside the organization. There's an amazing book, actually I should give a little plug to Adam Morgan because the book he's famous for is Eat Big Fish, which is all about how Challenger brands create, you know, create new categories and become successful. He did this follow up book that hardly anyone's read that I think is amazing called the Pirate Inside. Because what he realized is he was, he was studying all these startups and then he set up a consultancy called Eat Big Fish which advises businesses on how to be challengers. None of the startups were hiring him because they couldn't afford it. They're too busy doing right. But big companies got this fear of how do we act like the small guys that are basically eating our lunch. And his. He wrote this brilliant book called the Pirate Inside. But all the lessons that I took from that because I created a business within, within Britvic many years ago, I called seed brands. But it's exactly. The things you talk about is you need to act like an owner. So you need to, like, act as if you own it sort of thing. You need to work out how to do something 10 times quicker than the competition. You need to obsess about execution as well. Really, really obsessed. I remember, like, seeing radical growth in some of the brands I was managing just because I realized that the store and how you execute in the store was everything. So how much space you have, are you in the right position? Have you got the right flavors? You know, no one was focusing on this, but by focusing on that became really, you know, really exceptional and making choices as well. Because in big companies with big budgets, we want to do everything. We're going to do the tv, we're going to do outdoor, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. Whereas actually, what you have to do when you've got no money, a bit like you and I working in Blippa, right, is you have to double down on the thing that, you know is going to make a difference and almost win a part of the market. You know, prove the concept, then. Then go for the funding. Whereas in big companies, the funding comes first. In a small business, you have to earn the right to fund and that process. And then the other. The other point, which I think you started on, which I just could not agree more, is you got to hire the right people. And I remember I had a team, I think 40 by the end, in Britvic. And the difference, the delta between the best and the worst was like 20 times. I mean, it was incredible. And I, if I had my time again, I'd obsess, obsess about the characteristics of the person I'm hiring. You need that entrepreneurialism. They don't need to be asked twice. They can come up with the right answer on their own. They're not waiting for permission. They're not sat in the committee, you know, seeking approval. They're just going. They're asking for forgiveness afterwards and all.
- [29:51]
Jess Butcher
That kind of thing.
- [29:52]
John Evans
And I think the people thing might even be the number one learning for me actually is to get the Scale is you're gonna have to hire, like you said, people better than you that can take decisions for you, that can act in the best interest of the business from day one, you know.
- [30:05]
Jess Butcher
Yeah. I mean, the challenge with that is, you know, I think we've got a society. I mean, with AI, right, it's gonna take the jobs. I'm sure you've had this discussion many, many times. So these skills, the ability to be a self starter, to self educate, to hustle, that's the word, right? The overused word. The ability to hustle and make opportunities for yourself and pivot and that sort of resilience to fast change is the most important skill now that's going to be needed in the new world of work. And yet it's precisely what we're taking away from children in terms of how society is moving on. We have the least resilient young people that we've ever had in the history of humanity. The ability to pivot, think on their feet, be creative, be imaginative, take risks. We're just degrading throughout society at the same time as saying that those are the attributes that are going to be required in this world of rapid AI driven change. And the jobs will look entirely different within 10, 15 years. Let's wrestle that, shall we?
- [31:17]
John Evans
I was going to say that feels like an entire episode that, doesn't it? It's a good point though, isn't it? Because the more we build tools to do the doing, the danger is we end up with people that don't do the thinking. You kind of outsource the thinking, but actually the thinking should, in theory, the tools should give more time to the thinking. But I think there's some research is now that showing the greater the adoption of AI, the less people are thinking.
- [31:41]
Jess Butcher
I think, oh, there's a different research paper every single week that's showing how AI is fundamentally remapping how our brains work. It's terrifying. Actually. There was a, there's an MIT study that came out last week that showed that when they looked at people that did the work using AI, Google and books and their own brains, the difference in how they interpreted and recollected the work they did in books versus AI was so dramatic that they had to release it before it's been peer reviewed. Honestly, there's so much research on this because young people's brains now are starting to buffer because they're not used to having to think on their feet, you know, because they're so. They know what their answer is, but they'll put it into ChatGPT and then it will churn out a sort of nice narrative around their answer as opposed to them being able to think on their feet and use. It's a muscle, right. And if it's not stretched handwriting does that better than typing, you know, reading does that better than, you know, reading distilled information. It's kind of common sense. But there is a huge amount of data and evidence to back this up as well.
- [32:52]
John Evans
I so believe this because I've been thinking, should I, should I get AI to my LinkedIn post? Should I get AI to write me a Marketing Week article? Should I get AI to, you know, the research on the podcast? Right. But what I find is the learning is in the research, right? The learning is in actually doing it, writing it, trying it. Right. And I've never been satisfied with the AI outcome for any of those tasks that actually, although it may be 10 times longer for me to physically do it, I personally learn a lot more and the outcome is better. It hasn't fully replaced it yet, always.
- [33:25]
Jess Butcher
I think we all know this intuitively, individually, as adults that have gone through a process of having to learn in that way we understand how to use it for the shortcuts that help our lives. I think the big question mark now for society is when you embrace these tools earlier as your brain is developing, what are we doing to the neurons and the pathways and the muscle as it matures that's going to be able to prevent those sorts of skills and how it's going forward, we just don't know. But there's an increasing amount of evidence that points to a lot of alarm and a lot of caution and more work required to really, to really understand this.
- [34:08]
John Evans
We're talking about the impact of tech. We ended our last conversation in episode six, almost six years ago. You were saying you increasingly worried about the impact of kind of social media on kids. I mean obviously, you know, with young kids yourself at the time. So that's six years ago. Where are we today and what is the research telling us about. About this?
- [34:29]
Jess Butcher
Yeah. So I'm on a new journey and it has been almost six years in the evolution and it's all I guess been centered around this grow concern and alarm I've had around cultural, rapid cultural change over the last 10 years. So I started by tuning into issues of polarization. We talked about women in technology and I tend to take a more nuanced approach on some of that. And I noticed how many of the narratives have become very binary, very simplistic, very short form and meant that we were potentially solving for the wrong problems if we didn't deeply understand what was going on. And I thought, well, why are we so polarized? And I thought, well, inevitably we're consuming content in a doom economy where only short form binary ideas cut through. There's this sense that we live in a world between good people and bad people, whereas of course that line runs through each and every one of us. It is not binary in any way. I got into a lot of trouble when some of my comments were taken out of context and used as click bait. I think I managed to get MeToo trending again when I was appointed to the Equalities Commission for Wrong Think. Whereas had you listened to the full TEDx of what I'd done, you would have realized I was advocating for women. But I wanted us to have this conversation in the round and recognize the opportunities and the positives as well as the negatives. So it was personal experience that led me to think about what was driving all of this. And from polarization and radicalization I then tuned into obviously addiction and the way in which the social media and attention economy business models are designed and the behaviors that they're driving. And from that, obviously as a parent of three young children, I started looking into what it was doing to children and to anxiety rates and all the change that we're seeing in terms of childhood. And I guess for three, four years now, I've been going deep in the research of what is happening. And to my mind, I mean, there's so many obviously complicated socio political trends that are happening, but the attention economy is the accelerant that's pouring fuel on so many of these negative trends that we're seeing in society and professionally now. That's my mission. You know, it's something that I've been worrying about as I was at the end of our last podcast six years ago. I guess I haven't quite known what my role is in tackling this problem. I spent four fascinating years on the board of the government's Equality and Human Rights Commission looking at the ramifications of what these polarized narratives do to the equalities debate and looking at how social campaigns can be successful. So we've got. If you look at the most compelling things that have changed behaviors and perceptions in the last 50 years, you're looking at things like pride, the climate, activism, Black Lives Matter. Me too. What they have done so well responding to the new content ecosystem is they've turned themselves into identities, which is incredibly powerful way of shifting hearts and Minds. And I thought, well, how can we increase awareness of the pernicious impact of an attention economy on our time and on our focus? By turning intentionality into an identity. And that's the challenge that I'm working on now, because the data speaks for itself. We've got four to five hours a day on average now being spent in infinite scroll. This is even before you look at the nature of the content that's being consumed and whether that's radicalizing you, teasing at your insecurities, or is just plain wrong and mis and disinformation. The time opportunity cost alone is terrifying. That's billions of cumulative years of humanity being taken out of society on an annual basis. The statistics say the average 18 year old is on course to spend 25 years of their life on their phones. You know, and you look at it in the world around you, everybody sees it. Phones down, unengaged, in a distraction, patting pockets. We all feel it as individuals and it's deeply worrying. It is not an attention economy, it is an addiction economy. And it is designed to be so. And it's a business model. They've mined now across the numbers of users. So the only growth metric now is depth, which is more time. And that's a problem because to get more time you need to sate natural human instincts and the worst aspects of humanity often, which are our insecurities, our outrage, our tribalism. We're human and these are all triggers that you can push. Humor's a good one as well, of course. But we push the attention economy has to push at our worst human instincts in order to minus for that time. And this is obviously a conversation that's coming up time and time again. And I guess where I've been working for the last two, three years is what are the solutions to this? And the, there's a plethora, of course.
- [40:12]
John Evans
I think the thing I want to ask about is the cognitive dissonance of most people probably listening to this, because if I, if I take Scott Galloway, for example. Scott Galloway is very passionate about young boys and men, for example. He's very passionate about society and things like that. He's very vehemently anti matter as an example, and he'll be viscerally critical of them. You speak to him and say, Scott, you know, how do I, if I'm launching a new business, what should I do? Get on Meta. So there's, you know, and it'll say in one clip, you know, we found something better than sex. It's called rage, right? So he recognizes that we've got this machine of rage, bait and everything else that, you know, driving the attention and all the negative consequences you talk about. At the same time, he puts his business hat on and he's saying, you should invest in meta, you should, you know that that's where the future is going to be. They can make adverts, they can sell your brand, they can optimize with an inch of inch of your life and you'll be, if you're not on there, you're going to be a failure. Right? And that I think, and again, if I think about it from people listening to this, I mean, I have the privilege of meeting the world's biggest advertisers that spend trillions on advertising. And what's interesting about them is I reckon probably most of my parents, most of them, most of them feel like you. You said earlier, everybody knows, right, you know that they're struggling with their kids and what their kids are doing. But you put a professional hat on, they are signing massive checks to advertise on these platforms. So where is it going wrong? Why are we knowing about something on the one hand and continue to spend on the other?
- [41:43]
Jess Butcher
Right now we're in a wild west, period, ultimately, where we're still trying to work out. We know there's a problem, but we're not entirely sure what the solution is and who's wearing the right roles and hats to do this. And there's a number of different solutions and conversations happening at the moment. One is a grassroots one, so you've got things like the smartphone free childhood movement. The other one is obviously regulatory. And that is, I think, really interesting because there's now a groundswell of research that's coming out. I think Professor Jonathan Haidt takes a lot of credit for being the high priest of kind of kickstarting the conversation and putting evidence out there for how addictive it is, what it's doing, especially to children's brains. And those seem to be the two responses. So we've got grassroots parenting, especially regulatory questions being asked of governments and movement starting there. You've seen bans proposed in Australia. There's lots of different markets now talking about banning social media. And you've got education and that one's probably the easiest nut to crack. And I think that's been the biggest value of a lot of what we've seen in the last year or two. The opportunity for schools to say, this does not work in the educational environment, the amount of politics that we have, the distraction that we have, we can actually Every school can freely say, right bell to bell, no phones allowed. And that is already having huge implications for improvements in concentration and educational attainment. There are solutions are happening. The one thing that isn't happening to my mind, and that's what I'm looking to target with Scrollaware, is to bring together corporations and businesses around this as a question, a collective alliance, if you will, that seeks to say, yes, we want to be involved in this conversation. We don't have all the answers yet, but we accept that we have power as brands and corporations, that we have a huge number of users, we have a huge number of staff and customers that we can talk to about this issue. And we accept that there's some corporate social responsibility question marks around this and the implications of what's happening to society. I think that's the next conversation. It's not going to be an easy conversation, but it's one that brands are starting to engage in because as you say, every brand manager and CMO feels this conflict in themselves. I feel since I've opened the door to scrollerware, I feel like a priest in a confessional. Every single time I have a meeting. The first 10, 15 minutes when they realize that I'm building something to tackle societal tech addiction, they proceed to tell me all their bad habits, their fears for their children, what they observe. And I'm like, right, so let's do something about it. And they're like, ugh, gut. But you know, and they had this professional conflict of interest. We need to put our content where the consumers are. Now, I'm not bloody idiot. I understand that. I'm a marketer. You know, I've been selling ad tech. You know, I understand that there's a reality of performance that advertisers and marketers have to work within. And I don't think anybody would be stupid enough to advocate for pulling budget from social media platforms. It just doesn't, obviously doesn't make any sense. But I think what we need to do is open the door to a conversation that says what can we as an industry with huge power and influence do to think about what a responsible approach looks like? And it'll be baby steps, right? It's the coming together to say, first of all, we care. We recognize there's a problem. We recognize as a conflict because ultimately it's our advertising money that fuels the platforms that addict people and are keeping them so polarized, distracted and anxious and away from each other. And we recognize that there are antidotes and solutions that together we can help Shift culture towards. And that ultimately is what I'm trying to build. Scrollaware is not anti tech. Absolutely not. It's not antiphones, it's not even anti scroll. It's pro human, it's pro people, it's pro intentionality and breaks and boundaries and that's all. You know, I'm a scroller. I feel truly seen by the humorous mum influences that are in my feed at the moment, particularly on back to school week. You know, it's hilarious. But then I'll get something. I think, christ, that's a bit close to the mark or, you know, that's a bit bigoted or something will come up. But I'm a 40 something woman, I know that that's fake news, you know, whatever else my kids don't, you know. But instead of saying no scroll, no phones, no tech, tech bad, you know, this is not a Luddite movement. It's saying how can we craft strategies and ideas and messages that simply encourage more mindful, intentional digital balance? And I think that's how this movement gets traction. It's not going to be about ban this, stop doing that, do that. It's about saying, let's work together. And it could be as simple as having digital balance champions internally in organizations. It could be about using end screens more mindfully taking a leaf out of the Gamble or drinkaware campaigns that simply say, right, less scroll, more soul, now is it time to get off instead of watching others do do for yourself. Particularly because there's this conflict in so many brands that they are what I call more soul. They're in the business of more soul. They're selling physical products, retail environments, hospitality venues, sporting goods, pianos, toys. You know, they're in the real world, their products are in the real world and they're losing market share to that four to five hours a day in scroll. All the time someone's in scroll. They're not running around with their football boots on or in the coffee shop or, well, they might be scrolling in the coffee shop but they're not engaging often with the brand's products. So if we can bring the ratio or rebalance this ratio from what I call scroll to soul, there's market opportunity in doing that. And let's be honest, there's market opportunity in the responsibility angle of the messaging because the zeitgeist is shifting. Everybody's worried.
- [48:33]
John Evans
That's so interesting. And whoever can tap into that is presumably going to win.
- [48:38]
Jess Butcher
Brands are starting to tap into it and it's really fascinating.
- [48:42]
John Evans
Who are you seeing Doing that well, because I think the interesting debate in this question is like, you can go down a regulation angle, can't you? Like the. The school ban. I remember I went through the sugar tax ban when straws got banned. And now fast food adverts are being banned. Right. You can go through the kind of government intervention or as you're trying to do, you can create a movement positively, use behavioral science to try and do that. So who are you seeing doing it well and what tactics they deploy?
- [49:08]
Jess Butcher
Some are doing it in a really sort of responsible product initiative way. Like ee, I think, is fantastic on this. They're a mobile operator, right, that you'd think there'd be a conflict of interest there, but there's not in their messaging. They're very much about tech as an enabler for your life, not as a destination where you spend your life, which is one of my mantras. And they came out last, they do a lot of education around kids and phones, but they also came out with a safer SIM product for back to school last week. Fantastic video. Another way to do it. So that's a sort of more educational way to do it. Another way to do it is have fun with it. Heineken, Absolutely brilliant. Their Be More Social, I think, campaign that came out, that used Joe Jonas and it really poked fun at influencer culture with sort of tumbleweed going down the streets and somebody going, is it cake or is it fake? And no likes, whilst everybody was in the pub just jumping up and down. That's social. The idea, what they've done is, I guess, reclaim the term social for in person community initiatives. The other one that leapt out at me recently was Polaroid. Obviously it's an analog product, but their messaging was just spot on. No one on their deathbed ever wished they spent more time on their phone or AI. Can't help you, feel the sun between your toes. There was some lovely, lovely messaging in there and I think they're all tapping into a hunger that people are feeling for almost an analog renaissance of types. Friends suddenly became hugely popular again with teenagers. And, you know, a lot of researchers looked into this and they just. Kids just loved looking at a world where people were sat in a coffee shop, chat, chat, banter, you know, there were no phones on view and there was a TikTok that massively did the rounds and got viewed by billions of kids because it was a high school in 1996, remember the year I graduated, and there's all these kids running around, like jumping on the tables, piggybacks, you know, the day they graduated and the threads underneath with just all kids saying, oh my God, I wish that was my high school. That looks nothing like school environment. And kids in particular, or Gen Z, they're the power gen in this movement because they're now voting with their feet and they're saying digital defiance is like a growing term there. And over 50% now, 53% according to a recent survey, said that they support a ban on social media for under 16 year olds because they're saying it stole our childhood. So interesting that that's the generation and these are the customers of the future. Right? They're the ones coming through. And there's this expression that they're feeling a nostalgia for a world they never knew. Isn't that interesting? You know, a world that they never knew because they see it in films, but it's not reflected in the world around them because everybody's face is down is on the phone. You know, the drama, the constant pings and messaging. So opportunity, there's so much opportunity. Brands are starting to embrace it. And I guess what I'd like to do is provide a sort of not for profit home for those conversations. So the bravest brands that are willing to say, we want to be part of this conversation, there will be no accusations of hypocrisy because there's no pull your budgets from social media overnight. It's, let's think together about how we can use responsible messaging, more authentic storytelling end slogans that can say right now, get off and do. It's small steps that I think we need to take, but it's providing, I guess, a market forum for the brands that care about this, as everybody does on an individual basis, to say, okay, we're in. And this has got huge potential to be the next, I believe, CSR initiative because it also hits a lot of the things that other CSR initiatives have been targeting. You know, diversity, equity and inclusion. You know, is, is, is, has become a bit of a minefield in recent years. And yet the, the trends that we're seeing in digital are affecting the most socioeconomically disadvantaged people the most. Where there aren't facilities within the communities that provide alternatives to smartphone use, where in a single parent environments, there isn't that support structure for kids. So chuck a phone in their hand, a device from a young age. If we can shift this conversation into antidotes, what do we give people? Instead of this investment in grassroots, in community facilities, in parks, in high streets, in places, people, and place is the antidote to tech addiction.
- [54:06]
John Evans
I love how you framed real social media, there's something in that. It's really powerful. I saw this last week. I saw this Guinness campaign because their new campaign is a lovely day for a Guinness, which is actually a very old campaign. They brought back and they had these beer mats. It just had a Guinness shaped, you know, a Guinness shaped glass cutout. And it was getting you to kind of like take a photo of your favorite outdoor place. And obviously it was framed with lovely day for a Guinness kind of thing. I thought, that is so good. Of course, it was trending on social media because everyone was kind of like putting up these, taking photos of where they wanted to be outdoors. But that was inspiring you to go, well, where do I want to be outdoors with people? And that's the ultimate social media, isn't it?
- [54:49]
Jess Butcher
Yeah.
- [54:49]
John Evans
Now, I must just ask you, you've brought what appears to be some mini sleeping bags to our conversation. I just wondered what, what are these sleeping bags all about? I have a feeling they've got a role to play.
- [55:00]
Jess Butcher
Well, they do. They kind of do. I mean, this is a, this is a behavioral change product. In actual fact, Rory Southern gave me the idea of this when we were chatting, because I know this is something that he, he feels acutely as well. It's literally a sleeping bag for a phone. It's an opportunity to very ostentatiously say, I am committed to digital balance. So to put your phone in that is to say to everyone that you're around and yourself, frankly, right, I'm offline. Now is the time for me to do my deep work. Now is the time for me to be with my girls on a night out, or more importantly for me, be with my children. Because when I put my phone in that when my children are around, they know that they have my attention and that I'm present. So it's designed as a product to demonstrate intentionality and to enforce these sort of breaks and boundaries. And I should say there's a huge growing industry around digital balance. We've got unplugged cabins cropping up all over the place. We've got offline events. We've got loads of apps now that are doing incredibly well. Opal Forest, you know, others where you are blocked out of your social media. You know, these products exist because there's a hunger and people are desperate to, to reclaim their brains and their time in some way from what are the most sophisticated addictive technologies that have ever been invented. So helping them to do that, not just with messaging, but also with products and services that give them ideas and inspiration. But so many of the solutions are free. And that's a problem because there's no incentive to market the free stuff in life. Right. It's much easier to market a mindfulness app for £100 a year than it is to tell someone to go and touch grass, go for a walk. Who's the CMO of the best things in life are free. And yet there are ways for brands to be part of that conversation. I think there was a litigation advert with the Muppets that was all about be more tea, which was just simply about getting outdoors some years ago. I think there's a zeitgeist around all of this stuff that is not just about CSR but it's about opportunity because people themselves are hungry to rewind a little bit or to embrace the analog ways that ultimately are what make for a happy life. Right. People place perspective.
- [57:34]
John Evans
Absolutely. You couldn't say better. Jess, thank you so much. It's. I wish you genuinely every, every success in this, I think. I think everyone listening is going to want you to succeed, want us to succeed in this because, you know, we're all, we're all in this together, right? You know, we've all got kids, we're all experiencing what you're talking about and there's a gap for someone to lead it, I think. And that's, that's what that's. We are stepping into. So encourage everyone listening to get in touch with you. You know, find out more how they can get involved. Get your hands. If you're watching, you can see this lovely sleeping bag here. Even available in uncensored CMO yellow, I'm very pleased to say. But yeah, do get hold on those, they're fantastic. And thank you for sharing all your insight, wisdom and lessons on the journey too.
- [58:19]
Jess Butcher
Thank you. It's been so much fun to come back.
- [58:21]
John Evans
Great to have you back. We'll make sure it's not six years since until I thank you.
- [58:25]
Jess Butcher
Thank you.
- [58:26]
John Evans
Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do I'm over on x uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.