← Uncensored CMO
Uncensored CMO
How Amazon built distinctive assets, compound creativity and a winning culture - Ed Smith
00:51:21
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back to the uncensored cmo. Now, we're going really big in this episode, talking to the biggest retailer on the planet and the biggest advertiser, Amazon. I'm joined by Ed Smith, who's the wonderful CMO for Europe responsible for so much of what they do in marketing. And they really, really do know what they're doing. They're one of the highest scoring advertisers on the System1 database. They're also very, very good at delivery operations and measurements. Want to find out from Ed how they approach marketing, why they're so successful and what's changing and what are they innovating with in the world of marketing. It's a great episode. I know you'll love it and a great way to start the year. Here it is. Welcome to the show, Ed.
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B
Thank you very much.
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A
It's good to have you. It's good to have you. Now, one thing that everyone, I'm sure asks you all the time is like, what sold at Christmas, because you have the literally the data on all the popular toys.
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B
You want to know.
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A
I'm dying to find out what was most popular.
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B
I can open that up and have a little, a little live look at the deck.
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A
There we go.
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B
Ooh. Crocs and Jocks.
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A
Crocs and Jocks.
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B
Bestsellers in fashion, which is kind of interesting. Home and kitchen. You know those little plasticky clip things you stick, like you can hang lights and things like that. That was pretty good in books. Guinness book of records 2025, I thought.
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A
You see, I remember that as a kid, right? I grew up and every Christmas, Guinness Book of Records, I'd be given one every year. And random fact, my grandpa was actually in the 1982 in his best records heirloom. Now, like literally, it's just the best thing ever. So I was very proud as a kid. But yeah, I'm surprised that still going.
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B
The 1% club by BBC Studios. Now, this is interesting and I'm a user of these, but health and personal care. The number one bestseller is the TP Inter Dental Brush. Oh, Oral B Pro 3. Relegated to number two. There, there. But we sell a lot of Oral B toothbrushes. They're a great partner. And health and beauty. Maybelline New York Sensational. Sky High Mascara.
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A
Sky High Mascara.
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B
The number one in health and beauty. And then I find some of the other lists kind of interesting, like what are people wishing for? Or Most sold or movers and shakers, because that's kind of where you de average the data and you Kind of see some of the things that are happening. So there's a Logitech mouse that's a new model that's doing well. More Crocs. Aha. Under most wished for in grocery. Kraken Black spiced rum.
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A
Wow. Number one, crack and black.
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B
Most wished for in home and gun Ninja Dual Zone air fryer. Oh, yeah. I knew the air fryer would be somewhere.
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A
So, returning from last week, people still want them.
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B
So that's good to see.
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A
That's not slowing down.
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B
Yeah, that's a quick round. There you go.
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A
There you go. So everyone listening can know what trended at Christmas.
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B
Well, before.
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A
Before we get into Amazon, love to find out more about it. How did you get here? So you in fact, actually similar to a guest I had earlier in the show, Joe Shoesmith, actually was on uncensored early in the year. She, like you, is from Australia and found herself.
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B
I think we've got quite a adventurous gene pool in Australia because if you think how we started as a country, we were all the convict, and if we weren't the convicts, we were the people that thought, oh, what the hell, I'll jump on a boat and go to the other end of the world and start a new life. And then after each war or trouble spot, all of the immigrants to Australia are the people from Greece or Italy after the Second World War and Vietnam, Afghanistan. They're the people who just had an adventurous spirit and thought, I'll go and start again. And so as a gene pool, we love to travel. We pop up everywhere because you've kind of got this natural selection of people that take more risk.
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A
Perhaps explains why for a relatively small country, population wise, obviously Landmass wise is different. But you meet Australians everywhere.
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B
Yeah, we bet above our weight in risk taking, maybe.
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A
Is that what it is? So just what was your pre Amazon career like? What are the highlights on your journey here?
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B
So I grew up on a. On a farm, a big sheep property. And I was an irrigation contractor when I first started out. And then I worked in the ski industry in Austria and Australia. And that was where I discovered marketing. I discovered that through sponsorship. I worked in the race department. We needed more equipment and we became the Lavazza race department with a $90,000 sponsorship. And that led on to sort of marketing. I ended up becoming the marketing director of the biggest ski resort in Australia. And then from there, our ad agency, Chris Clark of Pure Creative, he was a shareholder of DMB in Beijing and Shanghai. And so I went to China for a couple of years and ran that agency did a startup with Chris, Virtual Communities, then retail banking with St. George Bank News Corporation in their digital businesses, and then group Marketing director. And then sky in Australia was Foxtel. And then my husband's dad sold his business and built a big boat and said, I'm moving to Europe. And we said, we're coming to Europe. Did you really? Yeah. So then we literally were sitting with friends saying, where are we going to live? And they said, oh, it's a shame you don't have a UK grandparent. You can get an ancestry visa. I'm like, I never knew my grandfather, he died before I was born. But I'm pretty sure he was British anyway. He was. So we ended up here on ancestry visas. Yeah. So it was really that random.
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A
And did you. Do you come to the country first and get the job second or did you identify the job and come with the job?
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B
No. So I took a year off. We came here, I met about 55 headhunters and I got some feedback in one of those interviews that my CV looked a bit Crocodile Dundee and couldn't I dial up my UK experience. So, short of fraud, I thought, well, I've got a year off, I'll go to 100 UK towns and cities and I'll interview five people in each place and I'll come back and know more about the UK consumer than anyone who spent their whole career in London. And then someone I was telling that to, they said, oh, that's amazing, you should blog it. Then my mum read the first post and said, it's great, but you need an editor because you can't spell. So I got an editor. Someone else said, you should film it. So I got a film crew and I filmed a few of those and I got a cover story on Marketing Week and spoke at a couple of marketing conferences. And then, yeah, I found my way to Amazon, but I needed to commute to Luxembourg, to our head office for the first two years. And since then I've been in the uk.
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A
That's incredible. I mean, what a thing to do. I mean, you must understand the, you know, vagaries of British life probably better than any.
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B
Well, it was. Anyway, it was Brexit, pre Brexit. And so what I noticed is, in the south, everybody wanted out of the EU because they thought it would stem immigration. In the Midlands, everyone wanted out largely because they thought there'd be more support to the NHS in the North. They just wanted to give the Government a kick in the pants. But I'd come back to London and say, wow, it looks like this Brexit thing's going to happen. Everyone's like, no, no.
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A
I knew that was so true.
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B
And I thought, oh, well, I must wrong, what do I know? I'm just beginning of this process. But I was in Cannes the morning I woke up and I'm like, wow, that's exactly what they all told me. Like London was really the only place that wanted in. Like, London isn't really a British city, London's a European city that happens to be in the middle of England. In some ways, I was shocked, but not surprised because it's what I'd been hearing for weeks while I'd been out on the road. And it kind of surprised me. If I was out doing that, none of the politicians were. And if you think about your job as a politician to represent your community, I mean, I was randomly walking up to people and just saying, hey, I'm from Australia, can I talk to you? What's on your mind? What do you think about Brexit? Also asking about brands they love and hate and why. But people were very keen to talk and I was thinking, wow, they really missed a trick not talking to their constituents because it was pretty loud and clear outside London, what was going to happen?
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A
Yeah, well, the importance of listening to your customer, right.
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B
That humbled me, to be honest. I remember one place, I was up near Cardiff and this guy stumbled out of a pub. I could hardly understand a word he said, which was embarrassing because I had to keep asking him again and again, but basically his narrative was, the Germans are taking the piss. The single currency advantages them more, while some of the poorer nations, like Greece, are disadvantaged because they, they can't lower their currencies when economic conditions are poor. So it's great for Germany, they can sell more dishwashers and more cars. And then we, the other EU members, have to prop up all these poorer countries. Now, he wasn't that eloquent and it was really hard to get the narrative, but he was a carpenter rolling out of a pub half drunk. He really knew what was going on and why he wasn't happy with the eu and it humbled me. I thought I wouldn't, I wouldn't have expected him to be informed and to have such a valid opinion. And it reminded me not to be arrogant and sitting in our glass towers reading research reports, thinking we know better because our customers are people like us and they have their own feelings and perceptions informed by their lived experience. And so that was a real wake up moment to me about keeping connected with Customers.
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A
Well, talking about. I mean, we met just over a year ago actually in response to your last year's Christmas campaign actually, wasn't it? Which is the incredible sledging grannies. If anyone watching, listening, remembers it. It's just magical. It's one of the most magical kind of Christmas ads.
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B
Very special.
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A
It's very special. And it's like, it's so relatable. Everyone can relate to the kind of grannies living their youth again and sledging down the hill. It was brilliant. And in fact it topped the System 1 poll, which is brilliant. But it got the accolade, shall we say, of a campaign turkey of the week, which is when you kind of picked up the phone to us to go, can I have a look at your. And you know. Cause I don't think it's as bad as that's.
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B
No one wants their ad to be called out as a turkey in the industry press. We knew it was a good ad when we made it. And the thing that we also really liked about it is a lot of older people are typecast, sort of sitting in a chair, knitting or being the lovable granny. And actually a lot of older people live adventurous, wonderful, interesting lives, but that's not really exposed through popular culture and advertising. And so they were delighted, the people who acted in that, to do something fun and a little dangerous. They sledded down a glacier in Mammoth in California. We had ropes on the sleds, but like that was the real deal. And they had a ball. They really loved it.
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A
It looks that way as well. You can kind of tell that that's fun. In fact, we did a report, actually System One, called Wise Up. It's quite interesting because we've been doing lots of work on diversity, looking at how different groups feel when they see themselves in advertising. The good news is that if you represent someone in advertising, they feel happier, they feel more strongly, they're more likely to remember what they're seeing, which is great, you know. So we kind of called that how, you know, diverse advertising unites a nation was. Was the theme of this Feeling Scene series.
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B
But when you go too far, it feels so wrong.
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A
Totally. Yeah, exactly.
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B
So as a gay man, when I see gay couples and it's over pushed and it's just so cringe you.
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A
Absolutely right. In fact, we had a few examples where it's done badly, where it's almost like a parody or a joke. It's almost kind of carry on campers type sort of thing. The other thing we found, actually back to the sort of when it doesn't work is when you try and represent everybody. You see those kind of box ticking, right?
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B
No, that's when it's cringe as well.
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A
Yeah, exactly, because you kind of know what's going on. So one of the lessons actually we found is it's better to tell one person's story authentically than try and represent a whole group badly. And that's one of the lessons we found. But the point I was gonna say back to what you did absolutely brilliantly is we had this feeling seen series and every time we, you know, feeling seen, whether it was, you know, race or sexuality, and it kind of all prove the same point, then we got to old people and we expect it to be the same. And what we found is it was scoring lower and basically old people. Older. I say older people because when you realize it's over 55, I'm like, I'm nearly there.
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B
When I now see a brief and it's like 18 to 55 and I'm like, what? So I'm not going to be in it anymore. And they're like, oh, we always get a lot of people because they older people, they watch more television.
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A
I'm like, can you imagine like 55 versus 95? That is like, you know, that's like being in the war versus being in the 70s. You know, it's like a huge difference anyway. But what we found is actually we found the scores went down. But here's the thing, this is why I call it Wise up is actually for older people, what they didn't like was how they represented advertising.
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B
But you see this in retirement planning ads and things. So the brief probably says show 50 to 60 year old people. And then you see like these late 70s couple walking on a, on a, on a beach or something. And you're like, wow, some someone in their 20s has got that brief and wildly missed who those people kind of feel they are. And then when you look at like pop stars and actors who are in that age group, it's wildly different than how that age group's represented in advertising.
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A
Yeah. And I think even within the age group, I think there's some meme, isn't there, where Ozzy Osbourne and Prince Charles, King Charles were born on the same day, I think. And they both own castles, they're both kind of male or whatever. And then you look at how different they are as well.
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B
Well, you also would look at that age demographic represented in advertising and you, and you would have a very, very different kind of that walking on the Beach.
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A
Well, exactly. They would be retired, silver gray sunset sort of thing. And this is what the report got to actually reason we called it Wise up is actually what we learned is they want to be portrayed in advertising as, you know, the one that's funny, the one that's successful, the one that's contributing society, the one that's not retired yet.
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B
You know, I mean I was, I was thinking the way people position cars and we got a new car for my mum when she was 85, looking at sort of a Golf and different things. Anyway, she went for a Polo gti, like we're talking start. I'm like, you sure, mom? And she's like, yeah, like I want, I'm like a young at heart and it's really fun with like red on the stitching and everything like that. And I thought that car would be targeted a young male, European audience. And here you have an 85 year old woman in Australia who wants to feel young and she's drawn to that and again, humbled as a marketer. Just remember that it's not just who you design it for, it's how your customers want to feel. I want to feel a bit dangerous, I want to feel a bit young.
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A
Well, it's interesting actually because we've been talking about Jaguar, obviously for the last few weeks. You know, everyone's a bit bored of it. I remember going to a Jaguar, a design conference 30 years ago, a long time ago, right at the beginning of my career and I had the chief designer at Jaguar and he was saying, I think the average age is like 65 for the first time. Buyer of a Jag.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And he said the way to understand them is to look at what they were doing when they were 25. So they were looking at like Meccano and the kind of like the kind of leather that was around at the time, you know, the treatment of the seats and stuff. So they designed the car not for the 65 year old, for the 25 year old that they remember and wanted to be. And I thought that's quite interesting insight.
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B
I like that.
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A
I think that's quite cool rock and roll, isn't it? But you've got a real history of some great emotive advertising, which might seem surprising given that you're kind of a, I guess a logistics business, service in retail. Is that a conscious thing about Amazon advertising to kind of really tap into kind of emotion?
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B
Well, I mean, I mean at our heart we're a customer centric business. So I guess Amazon does well because we care deeply about what our customers want. If you think about brands that do well, the first thing is you have to be salient. You have to have mental availability. So advertising plays a big role in that. But then the most important thing is once you're in the consideration set, you need to be a brand for someone like me. If you're just a dry logistics company, I don't know that you'd be necessarily that well chosen by a lot of your customers. So helping our customers find what they need, helping us to stay salient, so when that need arises, we're relevant. But then being a brand for people like them, that requires a lot of customer understanding and we've got to really watch how customers preference change over time. What role does selection, price, speed, packaging, environmental impact, recycling, waste energy, like customers have a lot of inputs into thinking about whether that's a brand for someone like them.
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A
You seem to manage the emotional impact. I mean, some of the, like priests and imam spot, you did the grannies, I mean last year with Midnight Opus. I mean, it's so emotional watching it, isn't it? So you have that emotional pill and then you're very effective with your kind of messaging with the smiling parcels and the boxes because you're always very well branded. You know you're looking at an Amazon ad as well, don't you? It's very effective as well as being so.
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B
So. So it's no accident. My team and I are fans of Byron Sharpe's work. I think any marketer that doesn't know what their distinctive brand assets are should do a quick bit of research and clock that. And if they don't have any or they're weak, then think about what they want them to be and then be ruthless in your implementation of that over everything forever. And that will eventually build up. I think Dove had the glass and a half and let it go for a bit and Cadbury took it. Oh, really? I didn't know that.
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A
That's interesting.
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B
I might have made that up, but I'm pretty sure that's. That's true.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So you have to. And wasn't the British flag a kind of a ba thing on the tail and then Virgin took it? Or it could be. There's a lot of things that brands have used and then a new creative director or a new CMO comes in and they muck with those things. But your distinctive brand assets are probably the most important thing in marketing communications and you want to be very deliberate about that and very consistent. And I don't think that's something you might add to it, but you don't ever really want to just change them out on a whim because you would be horrified how much advertising is misattributed. So I think a typical ad campaign might have like 60% brand recognition. That means 40% of tens of millions of pounds of media budget for those brands is being wasted because no one knows who's advertising. It's kind of the table stakes that people can work out who the brand is. And the logo at the end won't cut it.
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A
Totally.
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B
Right.
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A
I mean, it's amazing the amount of times that I talk to customers from a system one perspective and it's like they've got a beautiful story to tell, but exactly as you say, you might get 50 or 60% recognition at the end. That's after seeing it. Yeah, but imagine like, you know, but.
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B
Remember that seeing it experience, assuming it's av, may well involve a loo break, making a cup of tea, certainly playing with your phone at the same time, you're not sitting there focused on it like we are as the marketers. So you've got a. Most of our advertising is consumed in a low focus, ambient way. So it's got to look and feel like it comes from your brand and you have to earn that over time through your consistency.
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A
You're so right. So if that's forced exposure, where you've got people concentrating to try and spot you exactly in the environment they're in. Most amazing bit of thinkbox research I came across which just blew my mind, is they, you know, you know Gogglebox, where they film people watching, you know, goggle. Right.
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B
I love Gogglebox.
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A
For anyone who's like, you know, not in the uk, doesn't understand this. Basically what happens is people are being filmed watching TV and talking about programs. Right. So it's. It sounds dull, but it's actually really amazing.
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B
We did it in Australia as well.
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A
When I was a little. Yeah, yeah. It's just a brilliant concept. And what thinkbox. I think it's thinkboxn. ITV collaborated on doing that during the ad break to see what happens in the ad break and it was fascinating to see what people were doing. So firstly, people claim not to watch the ads. People love ads. They do.
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B
Especially good ones.
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A
There were these kind of couples going, oh, no one watches the ads anymore. And then a just eat ad would come on and then the Turner go, does somebody say justy? And they literally contradict, you know, in Australia.
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B
In Australia, did somebody say menu log? Oh, no.
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A
I love the Global versus local debate. They must have had there to say, you know, you must take it. Why? Doesn't work. But the other bit of insight was in the typical ad break, only 30% of people are watching the ads, but 70% can hear the ads. So suddenly you go, wow. I mean, like having a jingle or a voiceover or a, you know, a soundtrack that's connected to you is so.
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B
Important because McDonald's has got to be the high bar for that. I mean, their consistency and their mnemonic, I really envy that. They're very good at that. You know, we've had several cracks at it. We've tried using a few different things. We're not consistently using a mnemonic. And I'm jealous of brands that have cracked that and do it well and consistently. Lots of brands have a thing but no one recognizes it or knows what they are. And then there's a few like McDonald's that have just made. Yeah, you say that's Rick from Adam and Eve. He whistled that. That's actually his whistle.
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A
Is it really?
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B
Yeah, originally.
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A
Can you imagine being like, that's me.
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B
Literally when we were talking to them, when we took them on, that they were taking through some of their work and. Oh, and I'm actually the. The whistle of the McDonald's. Wow. I'm like, no, shut up. I was really impressed.
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A
It was like on. Didn't even watch Strictly Come Dancing last year, but they had the go compare opera singer on Strictly. I'm like, no way. You know, and be famous for doing that.
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B
It's the consistent brands that are really, really good at that stuff.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's one thing I get.
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B
I wonder about a lot. And after the granny's ad, we debated quite a lot. We thought that ad did really well. Why wouldn't we just use that every year? It's like, oh. But our customers, particularly in the uk, look forward to what your new story is for the year. And the other side of the debate, really, do they. Do they really care? Like, look at the Coca Cola Christmas truck. And then another part. Well, that was great because we showed older people in a different light, but there's a lot of other facets of diversity that then we wouldn't ignore to a good point. Luckily, the team did a great job and knocked out another cracker ad this year. But I do look at those ads that are consistently reused with a lot of interest and some envy that they are really getting bang for Buck and Frugal in terms of not spending a lot more Money on production every year. I think that's a really interesting debate for marketers is when should you aim to land on one you can kind of use forever? And if you're used to making new work, how does that transition ever happen?
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A
Well, we've got the data on this. I can actually help you this.
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B
So I've seen some of your data. The top right quadrant is all the ads that are used. It is.
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A
I know. So we looked at both fluency, so branding and short term spike as well. Not so not just star rating. And seven of the top 10 are consistent. Either they're the same ad or they're an evolution of the. They're different execution of the same idea. But to give you the data, for example, Coke holidays are coming. Started as a high three star, ends up as a high five star. Same ad over a long period of time. Audi Kevin the Carrots probably the best case study because that was a mid three star. Now it's high five star consistently and they have improved it every year. Every year the execution gets a bit better.
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B
They've done a very good job with that.
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A
Insanely good job.
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B
And one of the things we've worked on a couple of times and I have craved from time to time is what would the creative framework be where every one of Amazon's ads would be a chapter in a book. That is the Amazon story. Now I hadn't actually referenced Audi Kevin the Carrot, but that's a good example where every year they're telling another chapter in that story, which I admire. I think they've done a really good job.
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A
I think again based on the data and my experience working with most of these, I mean we work with about half the top 20 advertisers in the country. And I'd say that's probably the perfect strategy because it feels fresh every year, but you've got that familiarity exactly as you described it.
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B
Our strategy would come from a slightly different angle. So we don't have a character, but we have a story construct which we call Triumph of the Everyday Hero. And Amazon is an enabler brand. So it's a little a brand. We're not like we're Amazon, aren't we amazing? We're like, wow, you're doing something amazing. Can we help? That's kind of the Amazon brand. And the Triumph of the Everyday Hero has a customer noticing something, thinking of an idea, ordering a simple product, it gets delivered the next day or same day and then something wonderful happens. And so whether or not it's the dinner suit jacket for the colleagues who want their colleague to perform, or the cushions for the grannies to ski down the slope, or the torch, which is the floodlight for the ballerina, or the paper shredder to make the snow globe. It's always just a little thing that somebody has this great idea. And so that's our kind of repeatable construct as opposed to repeatable characters.
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A
Makes complete sense. Now, you talked about decisions about do we do the same thing again? Do we change? What kind of data do you have available to make those decisions? How do you decide on those kind of things? I guess when it comes to sort of fulfillment, you've got amazing amounts of data. It's very clear what, you know, what good and bad looks like. How would you decide on something like that?
- [24:59]
B
We look at a lot of different things. We would look at the creative strength of the work. And so we look at brand attribution, likability, message outtake, those types of standard metrics. We look at the economic impact of the campaign. So what did it drive in terms of sales and other things that we care about, signing up for prime and different things like that. We use quite a lot of judgment and making great advertising at scale like Amazon does, it's a bit like trying to make great movies or great pop music. You can learn and improve over time, but you'll have some that will work better and some that won't. So, for example, in Europe last year, we were sponsors of the UA for women's football and we really wanted to do a brand ad on that and I think we made a great ad on that. However, it didn't go so well compared to some of our other work and a lot of misattribution. But it was very well branded with all our distinctive brand assets, like lots of boxes and unboxing and user info, all the things we normally do. But customers didn't expect Amazon to be doing a sports ad. And also we wanted to portray women footballers in an authentic light. It's a pretty rough and tumble game. And so seeing women athletes banging into each other and sporting conflict, not violence, but the proper sporting conflict and showing all that, that's pretty unexpected for Amazon. So people are, huh? And so there's a bit of cognitive load, to join the dots, that that's an Amazon ad. So then, you know, there's a lot of debate then. So the data says that's not one of the best ads that we've made. But we love this sponsorship and we love this story and we're one of the biggest sporting goods Retailers there are. So what are we going to do here? We're going to double down, lean in, pull back. They're very interesting debates.
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A
They must be. Yeah. And how do you balance kind of long and short term decisions as well? Because I guess the funny thing, of course, Jeff Bezos is famous for saying advertising is a tax on a poor product.
- [27:05]
B
He's also wonderfully pulled back from that and realized that salience and mental availability and brand choice are really important. So it's an important part of our mix. It's a good question. So most of the Amazon marketing organizations originate from a concept that we would call traffic. So whether you think about free or paid search or social, where we might be doing, say asin, retargeting advertising, and most of those channels are tuned where we can invest to the last marginally efficient dollar. And so it's not like we are looking at a basket of money and thinking how much will we invest in short term or long term? Each of those channels is operating with a lot of technology and a lot of scale at its optimum. And then when we come to advertising, we think, well, what are the brands that we want to build and what are the jobs we want to do? So in my tenure at Amazon, we've spent time advertising the Climate Pledge, we've spent time advertising various other environmental and reputation initiatives. We had a spent time Echo and Alexa, the Amazon brand, the prime brand, our deal events. And so then it's a portfolio discussion of what are our priorities, what brands are we investing in, where are our deal events and how much does each of them need to be sufficient?
- [28:29]
A
I guess, yeah, you're juggling a lot as well. And you've got all the promotions like Black Friday as well and Prime Day and all that. So how does Amazon cope with managing the demand side of it, the supply side really? Because you're creating demand through what you're doing, all the things you're doing, but you've got to fulfill that as well. On the other side.
- [28:44]
B
So that's highly automated. There's a secret department, the men in black that do the forecast Christmas, but we have so many. So more than half of everything sold on Amazon comes from third party businesses. And so they're managing their own stock and we're selling for them. So that's half the work is with them. And on the Amazon retail side of the business, quite a lot of sophisticated demand forecasting, automated ordering and then a lot of old school vendor management. So vendor managers talking with their brands and looking at the promotion calendar and working on pricing and how they're going to operate at. And so there's sort of no big one top down thing. It's a, it's a lot of activity that builds up to quite an efficient enterprise.
- [29:32]
A
Well, you mentioned sustainability, didn't you? Just earlier as well. So you know, you generate a lot of packaging, cover a lot of miles, have a big, big footprint on the world. So how are you kind of addressing the challenge of sustainability and reducing your carbon footprint?
- [29:44]
B
So this has become incredibly important for our customers. And we're a big company with real logistics. Aeroplanes, trucks, vans, motorbikes, data centers and we consume a lot of energy. So we came out with the climate Pledge, which is our plan to get to carbon neutral 10 years before the Paris Climate Accord. We worked really hard to make that real and robust and scientific data led 545brands have now signed on and have partnered with us on that, which is great. We're now the largest purchaser of renewable energy globally. It's kind of exciting to be part of that. And so it's really integrated in our DNA. And then the next part of it is beyond the science, is then what customers expect. So one of our most popular ads in Germany, more popular than the beautiful storytelling we do, was a really dry technical advertisement talking about how we're reducing packaging. Nothing annoys customers more than excess packaging or excess space. Big box with a little thing in it, and in Europe in particular, use of plastic. People hate that. So we had put as part of driving down our carbon footprint, we put equipment in that instead of using big boxes, it made a flat pack bubble wrap envelope that was much smaller and much lighter. So a lot less carbon to deliver. And customers hated it because it was plastic. And so then we're like, what do we do? We don't go back to the box because that's bigger and uses more carbon that plastic customers don't want. And so then we ended up either using the original packaging that the manufacturer supplies the good in, where it's robust enough, or into cardboard envelopes, which drove a 40% reduction in packaging volume, which was really cool. But this is really in our DNA to be constantly talking to customers, listening to them and thinking how can we do better for them? Because customers are much better informed than a lot of businesses give them credit for.
- [31:50]
A
This is a real challenge. I mean, we produced a report last year at System One called Going Green and it was measuring whether people care about sustainability, how many ads have sustainability messages in them and then how to deliver the behavior change that we want to see and it's really challenging actually. And I put your ad through the system one test and the amazing thing was it got 4.4 star, 1.49 on spike and I think it was 97%. It did very well.
- [32:18]
B
That's Chris Brown and marketing team in Europe. Well done, Chris.
- [32:23]
A
Honestly, big props to Chris because we tested. I can't remember now, the team will probably kick me. But it's 50 or 100 ads, environmental ads to get our data set and there were very, very few examples of, of emotionally engaging and well branded advertising with a sustainable message. I think the winner was, I think the Carlsberg one with the seal. I don't know if you remember that one a couple of years ago. I think that was the top one. But this would have been right up there with the best examples.
- [32:49]
B
Yeah, well, they put a lot of thought into it. Joynt does a lot of work on our reputation marketing stuff and that's usually fact led communication where there's something that we want to say about who we are or how we operate or the results or and might include a statistic around parental leave or how much we spend on training or how much we're reducing packaging. They're hard ads to make because they can be very dry and very rational.
- [33:14]
A
But very impressive because I think it was 40% less packaging I think was the kind of creative idea or the brief. But the way it's executed was absolutely magical. I learned something new about that.
- [33:22]
B
We had some debate about it just to lift the hood for a minute.
- [33:25]
A
Go on, tell us.
- [33:26]
B
Well, what's our most distinctive brand asset?
- [33:28]
A
The smile. The brown box. Yes.
- [33:31]
B
So what are they doing in this ash? We're using less boxes. Yeah. And so we're like, oh, but you'll use.
- [33:37]
A
But you're using it. Well, it's going to good cause.
- [33:39]
B
Right.
- [33:39]
A
Come on.
- [33:40]
B
But there's a lot of debate, so. And also what if you're killing the box or you're relegating the box to history and that's your distinctive brand asset and you're going to an envelope.
- [33:49]
A
It's going to a good cause. Yeah, it's going to go.
- [33:51]
B
Yeah. A fascinating, A fascinating debate. We end up in the right out outcome, I think. But it shows you some of the stuff you have to think about.
- [33:59]
A
Oh, it's true. All these debates matter. I mean back to your previous point about bar and sharp and distinctive assets and how you use them. I suppose it's like how you play with your distinctive assets because again they're still there, but you just play them in a different way.
- [34:10]
B
I was interested looking at the fluency track for the Midnight Opus Christmas ad this year. The user interface is something relatively new we decided to, to build as a distinctive brand asset. So we always use the box and the smile at the end. We often will use a van, the user interface. We started using that consistently a few years ago and it was fascinating to me to see that how effective that now is as like, oh, they're ordering something from Amazon.
- [34:40]
A
We did loads and loads of testing for LinkedIn and that was one of our biggest learnings, that you only have to only one or two seconds to do it. You just literally have someone pick up a phone and it's got, you know, you cheat it a little bit so you make it blue and below you have to simplify the interface. You don't get the detail but. But literally that thing, you'd get 50, 60% brand awareness immediately. And that's way more effective just that couple of seconds than the end frame.
- [35:05]
B
Yeah.
- [35:05]
A
So it's just dropping that in a third of the way in naturally. And as you know, naturally into the kind of story arc is perfect. So, yeah, definitely good. Bit of a hot tip, that one. Something I learned new today, actually, after we were chatting, is the role of influencers in driving sales and demand.
- [35:22]
B
I'm loving this part of my job.
- [35:23]
A
This is like, this is a new responsibility for you as well, isn't it?
- [35:26]
B
And it's very fun and exciting. So it started off as the Associates program. So comparison shops, people that are quality publishers who are writing articles about Christmas lists or comparing the best 10 headphones or something. But we're spending a lot of time now on social media with influencers. And if you think Amazon has a couple of hundred million products and how do you find the right thing for you? If you see an influencer that is somebody like you or someone who you aspire to be, the products they're using in their everyday life are probably products for people like you. And they link through to the Amazon store and we pay commission on that. And they have built some huge businesses. I met one of our influencers at a global summit that we had and she was working as a receptionist only like two years ago, and she's now earning huge money and she bought them a new house. And she told me the story with her husband, which said, I found this house, I want to buy it. And he's like, are you crazy? We can't afford that. And she goes, actually, we can. And I can pay cash for it with what I've been doing with Amazon.
- [36:34]
A
He's like, what do you mean?
- [36:36]
B
In two years she went from being a receptionist, I don't know what a receptionist gets paid in the US probably 30 grand, to having saved something like 800,000 in two years to buy a new house. And her whole thing is finding high fashion looks and then working out products from lower cost fashion brands that are on mode and on point so everyday people can create high end looks at a lower price. And she's amassed a huge following. There are others who their thing is all about house cleaning and all of the different things they use. Someone else is all about traveling. Someone else is all about house renovating. Someone else all about fitness and gym equipment. And so all of these special interest groups, they've built wonderful followings and they love what they do and we're now able to help them monetize their following. So that actually becomes their job, just not their kind of hobby or their side thing. I find it very cool.
- [37:40]
A
Isn't it fascinating? It's a whole world that I guess, you know, guys our kind of age, you know, just didn't realize existed and you discover it what.
- [37:48]
B
But I think the role they play. If you think about a generation before, if you were reading magazines, you were being introduced to new products that you might choose to buy. Now people are spending a lot of time on social media and the role they're playing is filtering all of the things that are available and then showing you the stuff that's for people like you. I think that's very cool.
- [38:12]
A
I know it literally from my kids. Tell me what's on their Christmas list. And you go through it, go where'd you hear about that? Where'd you hear about that? And then you realize that, oh okay, TikToks. Yeah, yeah, TikTok influences. Exactly. And even producer James here that does that, does this show, there's a make of microphone he really, really hates.
- [38:28]
B
Yeah.
- [38:28]
A
And so he's done this video recommending the competitor to it and again he's got a affiliate link to Amazon for that.
- [38:34]
B
Yeah.
- [38:34]
A
Oh wonderful.
- [38:35]
B
Thank you for that. There you go.
- [38:37]
A
He'll be minted there, you see? But we'll keep mentioning it on the show.
- [38:39]
B
Well, if anybody here has a reasonably large following, just Google Amazon influencer program. And if your account's commercial, not personal, you can link your accounts and start posting links and start earning straight away. It's a no touch program that people can participate in and there's no such thing as being too small.
- [38:59]
A
I wanted to chat quickly about culture at Amazon as well, because obviously big organization, very fast paced, huge scale, all that kind of thing. So what makes Amazon so successful from a kind of cultural and how you work a work point of view?
- [39:13]
B
It's a good question. So my definition of culture that I like, that I came across at one point was the way we do things around here. And I remember when I was approached to work at Amazon, the recruiter said, here are the Amazon leadership principles. Read them. If they resonate, you might be a fit. If they don't, then best we don't pursue this. And so I read them and I thought, oh, wow, I love these ownership. It's like leaders will grab something that needs to be done, even if it's not their direct responsibility or bias to action. You just go out and start, you just get going. You don't wait. Bias to action is wonderful. If someone says, why'd you do that? You go bias to action. It's like, oh, okay. It's just most things in business and life are two way doors. And so at Amazon, if it's a two way door, we kind of go for it. Because if it's not right, we can turn around and go out. If it's a one way door or has a lot of risk attached, we're a bit more careful. But two way door things we do very quickly. So the thing that's unique then about the Amazon culture is everything's wedded in these leadership principles. So when we hire somebody, we'll check your skills and experience, but you'll be interviewed against the leadership principles. So you'll have an interview loop. You'll probably have say, five people interview you for an hour each, and each of them will probably have two of the leadership principles and they'll ask you behavioral interview questions. So if you think about ownership, a question might be, john, can you tell me about a time you took responsibility for part of something that wasn't really in your scope or direct? What was the circumstances and why did you need to do that and how did it turn out? And then the candidates will answer those questions and then we'll kind of grade on whether we think that person shows strong ownership or bias to action or whatever the principles are you testing? We take notes and we kind of make our decisions. Then we have a conference, we read all of each other's notes, and then we debate whether that person's a good fit. So we're hiring people that meet our culture.
- [41:20]
A
Yeah.
- [41:21]
B
Then your performance is managed against the against the leadership principles, the feedback we give you in our forte process against the leadership principles, our promotion process is written against the leadership principles. We coach against the leadership principles. So the leadership principles are our culture. And it's so truly embedded in our whole people operation that even though we're now of a very large scale, the culture has stayed very true.
- [41:52]
A
It kind of makes sense because you can only manage a business that big because you can't micromanage people. So you have to manage them for leadership competencies well.
- [41:59]
B
And actually I'm sure there are pockets of micromanagement. But cold culturally, Amazon is the opposite to that people. We have what we call single threaded leadership. You're very clear on what you're responsible for. Often people quite young in their careers are making huge decisions and investing a lot of money. Every decision in Amazon is usually made off the basis of a document. No more than four pages for a one hour meeting, six pages for a 90 minute meeting. You map who the stakeholders are that need to be involved in that decision and that document will be read and a decision made. Usually most of the time in one meeting, really.
- [42:36]
A
Sometimes not deferring up the chain or to anyone else, but if it needs.
- [42:40]
B
Up the chain, they'll be in the meeting.
- [42:41]
A
They'll be in the meeting.
- [42:42]
B
Yeah. And it's just bam, done. If it's a two way door, the pace is amazing. So. And our innovation process we call a prfaq, you write a press release for the product or service on the day it's launched and the business case is in infrequently asked questions. Anybody can generate that. You get the right people in the room and then it's like, yeah, go and do it. And they're like, oh, wow. And off they go. It's amazing.
- [43:07]
A
I love the idea of a press release because it forces you to do that discipline of reduce it down to what is special. What's the headline? Can you summarize it in a few sentences?
- [43:16]
B
Well, I'll go one further. In Amazon, and this is hard for someone who's disliked. I don't know how I ended up in Amazon, but the narrative culture. So everything's written down in long form narrative. There's nowhere to hide in long form narrative, in bullet points, in PowerPoints, lots of wiggling and hiding. So everything's written down. We don't use like fantastic, wonderful kind of adverbs like that. We just say this is what it was last year, this is what it is this year. And we let the reader make a decision. If that's fabulous or not good enough. So long form narrative supported by data, well constructed memos or documents. The introverts are then participating in the process as much or more than the extroverts. And then if anyone says why are we doing that? Who is in the meeting? Say well this is who is in the meeting and here's a copy of the document and the notes. And then people can inspect what's happened and understand that. And that allows the business to innovate a lot but operate at pace in a very consistent way.
- [44:16]
A
That's interesting, isn't it? Because it feels very formulaic and processy but actually that gives you the freedom then to go. We make the decision quickly.
- [44:23]
B
It's the culture, it's the way we do things around here. So if you want to invent, you do the prfaq. If you want to have a decision made, you write a document, get the right people in the room and it happens very quickly. If it's a two way door and then we have a lot of inspection mechanisms with a bit of discipline around that, whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly business reviews, who the audiences are and how we inspect things. And if you're doing that well, you can allow people to run really quite free. And then there's the adequate inspection that if something going off the rails, you can catch that and protect the business, but you're not having to micromanage that.
- [45:01]
A
And presumably back to your leadership thing. People then have permission because they've done the process correctly, they then got permission to go and execute, execute it because the right people have agreed and.
- [45:10]
B
Yeah, but I mean you asked me a question before we started about oh, who's the agency on that piece of work? And I had to text one of my people, not because I'm negligent, but because we're at quite scale and which agency we're using for that work is that person's decision. I'm not, not everything's coming up to the cmo. Like a lot of those things that you think I would be deciding, I'm not even informed. If I ask ask, they'll tell me. But the decisions. So the person who runs that portfolio, and it might be a large portfolio that a lot of investors, they can choose what agencies they want to use, they're working out how they do it and I'm looking at the work and if there's a problem or the work's not performing well, I'll deep dive and I'll get interested in it. But if they're going well, that's their call. And I should know most of the time what's happening through my general knowledge. But, but I don't know everything all the time. There's just too much happening.
- [46:05]
A
Well, there's too many things you're responsible for, aren't you?
- [46:07]
B
And I don't want to know everything all the time. I want them to own their business and to run it. And my job is to hire the best people to empower them, to develop them, to support them. And then they go off and do wonderful things and they feel ownership, they feel pride. It's kind of cool.
- [46:23]
A
That's really cool. We'll just finish up. Say, congratulations, you got the Marketing Week Top Retail Marketing Marketer of the Year award this year.
- [46:30]
B
I feel a little bit of an imposter because my great team, I know, don't do all the wonderful work. I'll take the trophy knowing that I'm there because I'm standing on the pedestal because of the wonderful people and the work they do.
- [46:43]
A
No, exactly. So massive. Congratulations on that. Any sort of predictions for as we, as we start 2025, anything that you think from a marketing point of view, what should people be thinking, caring about and fast focusing on? So, so I, Tricky question, I know.
- [46:56]
B
But I, I, I went to Cannes last year and everybody always wants to meet you in Cannes. And I was, I didn't enjoy the one I did before, so I was very disciplined this year and I thought, I won't take any meetings and I'll go and look at interesting things. And I was in one session and the, the person predicted that in five years we won't actually be creating advertising for people, we'll have to create advertising for people's agents because the agents will be deciding what content the people consume.
- [47:29]
A
And I thought, wow, that's a mind bender, isn't it?
- [47:31]
B
Total mind bender. And so if last year was the year of generative AI, I guess 2025 is going to be the year agents start to emerge. So I've seen lots of examples on YouTube and stuff where agents are going into trade travel websites, doing research, then asking the user, would you like me, I've got this this or would you like me to book that? Then they're actually doing tasks, completing bookings, things like that. So I think if we've enjoyed the ride in 24 of generative AI, 25, 26, it's going to be agent driven, I think. And as marketers, what a topic to get our head around to think what happens when we're having to get through an agent gatekeeper to get to our customers to tell our stories.
- [48:22]
A
That's a bit mind blowing.
- [48:23]
B
So I don't know that, but that was the thing that stood out to me is like I gotta give some thought.
- [48:29]
A
I think it's Tom Fishburne, the marketoonist had this cartoon where you've got, you got a split page and the guy on the left is doing a prompt, one sentence prompt. It's like write me a letter to Ed. And then it produces amazingly long letters and then Ed on the other side of the coin is going summarize this letter into a sentence. Which is brilliant.
- [48:50]
B
I love that. We've got a lot of things going on in our personal life at the moment. We're getting a lot of advice and we're paying a lot of money to people to give advice. And then I'm reading it two, three times and then getting it summarized by an AI so I can understand it. And I'm thinking, oh this is helpful but also kind of strange.
- [49:09]
A
Yeah, that's like the agent thing. We just kind of creating a whole new level of complexity. We then need to simplify down again.
- [49:15]
B
But I can totally imagine a world very soon where you say I'm thinking about going to Barcelona for the weekend. What flights are available on Friday afternoon or evening and your agent would know the class you prefer to travel, your airlines, you prefer where you've got your status. The airports you prefer would come back with three or four options. And if that's acceptable, you say oh, that one. Would you like me to book it for you? Yeah, it's book booked, put in your diary, paid for.
- [49:43]
A
And I think, oh, that's pretty damn amazing. Yeah, that is pretty amazing.
- [49:47]
B
I think that'll start and that'll start in 25, I think.
- [49:50]
A
Well, since I was chatting to Sophie Neary from Google and she was the incredible statistic that 15 of all Google searches have never been searched before in the exact search is new really. And because you'd imagine that everything's been asked by now but because we're getting more and more sophisticated and trends are changing I guess and the possibilities are emerging that still 15% of all search news. So like you say, we're able to ask things that a year ago weren't possible that AI can then hopefully solve. But it's mind bending, isn't it like that. Apparently our 15% has stayed consistent ever since the beginning.
- [50:26]
B
Every year busy at Google at the moment thinking about what's the future of search.
- [50:30]
A
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly Ed, it's been amazing mate. Thanks for sharing all your experience and chatting about Amazon and yeah look forward to hopefully this time next year I've kicked up an influencer account and I'm looking forward to I can drop some.
- [50:44]
B
Hints on I will offer you to coach you on your journey.
- [50:47]
A
Please do. Yeah amazing.
- [50:48]
B
Cheers.
- [50:49]
A
Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. 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 XenSoredCMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.