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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back to the Uncensored cmo. Now, I'm going to do something very consistent in this episode, which is get back two former guests of mine, Les Burnett and Sarah Carter, to talk about how not to plan in 2026. Two of the most popular guests on the show always got a great opinion on what's going on in the world of advertising and marketing and do not disappoint Sarah. So without further ado, let's get into it. Welcome back, both of you, for the fourth time. It's good to see you both.
- [00:32]
B
We crop up more regularly than Kevin the Carrot, don't we?
- [00:35]
A
You're competing with Kevin the Carrot for.
- [00:37]
C
I'd say we're competing with love, actually.
- [00:39]
A
Now, talking of consistency, it does. We have had a year of consistency, actually. I was looking at the kind of Christmas charts of advertising. It's amazing how much the familiar ones, you know, obviously Kevin the Carrot, we just talked about. You got Coke on there, M and S on there. Amazon even. I mean, Amazon was a surprise. They brought back an ad they'd made a couple of years ago. Have we discovered the power of consistency at last?
- [01:02]
B
I think we have. It seems to be in the word of the year, doesn't it? And Cannes particularly. It was one of the big themes of that, wasn't it? I mean, I do think your compound creativity, rephrasing of that has been a mark of genius, really, because as we said before, kind of staying the same. And repetition and consistency aren't terribly sort of exciting words, are they? But compound creativity, the rebrand, I think, has had a lot to do with it. But yeah, I mean, it's slightly frustrating for us, really. We've been wanging on about it for about 15 years, haven't we? Consistently ignored. But yeah, I think people have read. Yeah, have. I don't know. I don't know why it is this year that it's suddenly everybody's sort of understanding it a bit more. Well, we do know there's a bit to do with Andrew Tyndall and Mark as well, but yeah, it's good, isn't it? People don't get fed up with things as much as as we do. And good stuff works and it keeps working and we're in the business of building memories, which I think a lot of people tend to forget. We're more interested in getting into culture than staying in people's minds, really. And repetition is very good at doing that.
- [02:07]
C
I mean, it's very easy to drink our own Kool Aid. We've for years Been talking about the importance of building memories, one on the other, brick by brick, long term, consistent campaigns, not just individual ads. That ads don't wear out as quickly as people think, if at all. All these other things. But do we sense that the marketing community as a whole has bought that idea? When you talk to other guests, is this a thing that comes out?
- [02:38]
A
Yeah, I think there's some evidence of that. I mean, I mean, Christmas, as I started mentioning, is a good proof point because you've got brands either sticking with an idea or actually sticking with, literally sticking with the same ad, which is quite good. I mean, Amazon, world's biggest advertiser, took a conscious decision given that they scored so well a couple of years ago with the sledging grannies, which I absolutely loved. It was just such a great campaign, wasn't it? Yeah.
- [03:03]
B
And that had a gap and then came back again, which is. Again.
- [03:06]
C
So they're running that again this year.
- [03:07]
A
They ran again this year. Yeah. The same ad from two years ago, which is really good. And it scored exactly. I mean, back to your point about wear out, we retested it for them just to make sure, and it scored exactly the same two years later.
- [03:18]
C
That's interesting. So in a funny sort of way, that's actually quite a brave decision in, you know, at least within our little world of advertising agencies and all that sort of thing. You kind of go, well, that, you know, why would you do that? But it's enormously brave. Yeah, but actually from the data point of view, why wouldn't you do that? So when you look at what evidence we have about wear out is that ads mostly don't wear out. If they do wear out, it's very slow. They very rarely run for long enough to wear out. And the only ones that do tend to wear out are the ones that are based on new news, working in the kind of performance marketing space, you know, sale on Thursday type ads. But something like that could run, you know, you remember Ferrero Rocher, you know, they run those ads for years and years and years.
- [04:10]
B
There's something about Christmas that lends itself particularly to that as well, I think, isn't. It is a time of year where we, we love the repetition of the familiar and the, the thing that comes out every year and the baubles that come back every year just, it just feels if you're going to do it at any time of year, that's, that's a good one.
- [04:26]
C
So in the Burnett household, it's, it is love, actually. We watch it every Christmas, you know.
- [04:31]
A
And that's the thing. This is the thing. I think people don't realize it gets better the more you watch it. And this is what the data was so brilliant at sponsoring. You're putting light on, you know, we know that emotional advertising is better than rational advertising. That we know. But when you persist with the good advertising, what you see is actually over. You see this kind of gap emerge between, you know, what you're doing, what everyone else is doing, which is quite. And that's hence the compounding idea that you guys are talking about.
- [04:55]
B
And a lot of the problems, I think the sort of false negatives of bringing things back and sort of wear out were frequency issues, weren't they? That people, you know, people asking, tracking says, I'm getting fed up of seeing it. So there's actually not anything intrinsically about the ad. It's just the frequency in a particular time that they've seen it. So obviously Christmas gets over that very well as well, because it's.
- [05:15]
C
Because it's like taking the baubles out. It's like, yeah, they're the same every year, but you haven't seen them for a year.
- [05:22]
B
Old friends.
- [05:24]
C
There is this tension between repetition and freshness. To some extent, the most. The people who do it best find ways to. You can. You can, you know, have the same AB that comes back after. After a gap or at low levels of frequency. The other thing is you have what you call disguised repetition. So you talked about that can, didn't you?
- [05:47]
B
I mean, if everybody started running exactly the same ads every year at Christmas, would that have the same. Is, you know, the old sort of truism, isn't it? What's right for one brand at one time? Isn't university going to. Then it starts symbolizing other things. I think if people. When you test things, you're testing it in isolation, aren't you? When something comes back again and again, it then starts signaling that, you know, do they not have anything to say? Have they. Do they not have the confidence, Confidence to make anything new? Are they not making enough money to make, you know, they can start sort of signaling things over and above what's actually intrinsic to the ad. So I think, you know, as ever, there's no kind of one rule that. That works for everything. And if everyone starts doing something, then it's not necessarily the right thing to do. But we're. We're not at that stage yet.
- [06:29]
A
You're right about the bravery because part of the reason it stands out running the same ad again is that no One else runs the same ad.
- [06:34]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [06:35]
A
Oh, yeah, surprise. I've seen that one before.
- [06:37]
B
But if they all did, then maybe it would be something different.
- [06:41]
C
I mentioned Ferrero Rocher. I mean, was kind of a bit of an in joke, wasn't it? You know, it run for so long that it became a little national treasure almost.
- [06:51]
B
You know, I think that's why I like that disguised repetition phrase, because I think, you know, I was just talking about can. Our human brains love repetition. I mean, anyone who's got kids knows, you know, they'll watch the same Disney film again and again and again, they'd love it. But we only really like repetition up to a point when it starts to feel very repetitive and, and that's where brilliant creativity comes in, because it, it helps disguise that repetition. But repetition is really important for building memory and branding. So. And I think what I was trying to say at can is, you know, you could be forgiven for thinking consistency isn't a very creative thing if you look at the stuff that's awarded at Cannes versus the stuff that's awarded in effectiveness awards, where campaigns tend to sort of dominate. But that, to me is actually, I wanted us to think differently about creatively and I think it's actually one of the highest orders of creativity to be able to effectively disguise repetition. Like, you know, for example, Marmite has done for 30 years. We were joking with Andrew Tin for longer than he's been alive. The Marmite campaign has been love, hate and, you know, far from creators not wanting to go anywhere near that, you know, they're killed to work on that. It, we do brilliant work on it, it wins creative awards and that's the role of creativity, I think, and will become even more important, which maybe we'll come on to. In this world of lots and lots more content, how are we going to join all this stuff up? So it all feels the same because, far from, you know, Mark Ritson's, we're all taking the cakes out of the oven too soon. We're in danger of chucking the cakes in the bin and creating a kind of picky bit sort of buffet of all kind of little things that have nothing to do with each other. And that's a huge challenge, really.
- [08:34]
A
I think you'd be surprised by the amount of times I go and see one of our customers at System One and they're going, right, we're really not sure where we go next in terms of campaign idea. And I've got an idea for you. What if you ran the previous ad and you can see them sort of like looking at me going, he said what? You could even re edit it. You could do a different version of it. You've got all the assets, you can tell the story in a different way. And we sometimes forget that the best ideas sometimes exist already in front of us.
- [08:59]
B
I think we talked in the book about when I used to work on Nor Stock Cubes who did this little soup making campaign up in Scotland. And because Scotland was so small they couldn't afford to make new ads every year. And we worked out, we'd showed this same chicken stock cube ad. I think the average person up in there had seen it 120 times or something and they still loved it and they could quote it all. So it's just a sort of weird sort of media quirk that set up this experiment. And yeah, it was one of the best loved ads in Scotland. Only works if you do love the ad and it's a good ad. Obviously you don't want to be doing that if not.
- [09:33]
A
Yeah, terms and conditions apply.
- [09:34]
B
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [09:35]
C
And that was late 80s, wasn't it? Yeah. And my wife, who's Scottish still now says peonham from a chicken.
- [09:44]
A
I love your disguised repetition, by the way, because, I mean, one of my favorite campaigns this year. It's 10 years since Kevin the Carrot was born. He got married already, actually. It's grown up quickly. The blessing, you know, he's not messing around. But that's a great example, I think of where they've kept the thread brilliantly throughout and even with the voiceover Jim Broadbent and the music and the characters. Introducing new characters with Collie Dog. Do you see Collie Dog this year's new cat? Absolutely cute. In fact, I convinced them to give me one as well. I took Collie Dog home and my daughters were absolutely in bits about this cute little dog. But that's a really good example. I think what you're talking about isn't it is keeping it fresh. Every year we anticipate something new, but the moment we see it, yes, we know exactly what it is.
- [10:30]
B
And there is a sort of gift giving timing. I think there is a generosity about giving people new work and not just running the same thing again. So I think, I think they do that. They do that really well. Yeah. And I like that kind of disguise repetition. Some people talk about imaginative repetition, but disguise I think is sort of is cleverer really. And I think the best creative does that because you don't realize you're watching the same thing. It does feel Kind of fresh each time.
- [10:54]
C
So something like Specsavers at their best have done that thing where, you know, at first you don't quite realize where it's going, but it's working towards the same punchline. So. So it's both consistent and fresh. And I think that's, that's a big part of making a campaign as opposed to making a series of ads. I think it's quite telling that younger people in the business, to me, they talk about campaigns as a word for an ad. You know, it's like, oh, the new campaign, it's, it's 30 seconds long. You know, it's kind of like, you know, a campaign is a complete sort of working system that, that stretches over ideally over years and builds up. Everything adds up to something else.
- [11:39]
A
That's so interesting because I've noticed it was Marcel Marcondes at AB InBev. When I was interviewing him, he was starting to talk about platforms. And I think platform is just a new word for what we used to call a campaign. But because campaign isn' now the ad, he's come up with this term platform ideas. But actually platforms are campaigns.
- [11:59]
C
Right.
- [11:59]
A
I just realized this, this is what we used to say. Campaign, long running idea that turns up all over the place.
- [12:04]
C
I think I rolled so hard there, you could probably hear it on the podcast.
- [12:09]
A
Exactly.
- [12:10]
C
We need a new word for it.
- [12:12]
A
But that's what we're talking about, isn't it? Those long running ideas that, because I.
- [12:15]
C
Hear youngsters, they say, well, the new campaign breaks on Thursday and it will run for the next week or something. And then there's another campaign that's not a campaign that's, you know. Exactly.
- [12:28]
A
Now talking of obviously focusing on the creativity here, but there's another bit to the mix which I know is, is equally important, if not more important, which is how much you spend.
- [12:36]
C
Yes.
- [12:36]
A
And Les, no one could have got through last year without noticing that you were going big or going home as well.
- [12:43]
C
Well, I hope so. So when we went to Cannes in the summer, it's the first time we, we've spoken at Cannes together, isn't it?
- [12:52]
A
Is it really?
- [12:52]
B
Yeah.
- [12:53]
C
In fact, it's your. Was it your first ever visit to Kent?
- [12:55]
B
It was me. It was my first speaking time at Kenya. Breaking news, ladies and gentlemen.
- [12:59]
A
It was.
- [12:59]
B
Yes. And living with Mr. Tindall and Mr. Burnett for a week as well, which was a bit of an education. It was like, it was like Mum and Dad with the sun in Cannes for the week.
- [13:11]
C
Two of us sharing a flat with Andrew Tindall and it was like, what.
- [13:14]
A
Could possibly go wrong?
- [13:15]
C
Young Andrew and his aging parents. But so Andrew was presenting the stuff, the System One research on compound creativity, which I think really useful empirical contribution to this debate about long term effectiveness. And Sarah was talking about consistency as a kind of. It can be an unlock for creativity as well as a constraint on creativity. And I was just trying to remind people that it also requires what Peter Field and James Herman called creative commitment. So they identified in their research in, I think it was 2020, a different piece of analysis showing that long term effectiveness is driven by long term consistency. So that fits with what System 1 and Tindall and so on have been saying, but also number of media, the more media use the better. So it's. And so that sort of again fits with Andrew stuff about consistency not, not just over time, but over media. And then the third thing is simply how much you spend. And this is the thing that everyone I think forgets. We did two pieces of research. We did a survey amongst CMOs on what they think drives effectiveness and then I did an analysis of the IPA data bank, say what actually drives effectiveness. And broadly speaking, CMOs think that effectiveness is 2/3 creative efficiency or creative and media efficiency and one third spend. And the IPA data basically says it's about 90, 90% spend and 10% efficiency. In other words, the biggest single marketing decision, the most important marketing decision you make is not about creative, not about media, it's actually how much you spend and everything else. All those other things are important. But the really, really big decision is about budget and that's the one that people are not paying attention to, so occupies relatively little of CMOs time and effort and research. And it's done at a fairly superficial level and that's enormously important.
- [15:27]
A
Now, of course, you know you are the godfather of esov.
- [15:31]
C
No, I'm not. Really?
- [15:32]
A
Are you not?
- [15:32]
C
Oh, I mean. Well, I mean, shared voice theory goes back long before, you know, when I was a child. It goes back to unilever in the 1960s. So yeah, we helped pop.
- [15:45]
A
You made it popular. Yeah. I wonder if it was relative spend or with this absolute spend when you look at the database or are they kind of linked?
- [15:52]
C
A bit of both at one level. First, the absolute amount of spend affects how much money you make and how much you grow and so on. But then also how much other people spend. The more other people spend, the more.
- [16:03]
A
You have to spend because there are some, there are some categories where it's like an arms race, isn't There, I mean, like food delivery.
- [16:09]
C
I would say that's true in every single category. I mean, that is a good way of thinking about. It is advertising is an arms race. It is partly about how many nukes you've got, you know, and also it's about the sophistication of the delivery lab mechanism. But at the end of the day, having more tanks and more missiles and more guns and bullets than everyone else does have an effect. We'll see how it plays out.
- [16:32]
B
Do you think there's a sort of inconvenient truth that people just don't want to. They don't want acknowledge because. Because we talked about this sort of in the great kind of zombie consensus on purpose. There was a sort of purpose envy going on of sort of. Everybody wanted to be Tony's chocolone or Patagonian. We're talking. It seems like there's a sort of small brand envy now that everybody wants to be kind of, you know, ever full, glossy, I mean, brilliant brands and run by brilliant people. But. And then people look at their budgets and think, well, if they can do that on that. But relative to their share, they're still spending more than their share. But the big brands are kind of looking at that and thinking, well, well, we can do that as well. And my best. The best thing I've read this year is James Herman's paper on, you know, if you market like a small brand, you become a small brand. That.
- [17:17]
C
Oh, did he write.
- [17:18]
B
Yeah, I said that as well. Yeah. It's really. It's a brilliant paper.
- [17:21]
C
But there's not like him to steal my eyes.
- [17:23]
B
The tactics that get to that get you off the ground and lift off are not the right tactics for a. For helping you keep it altitude. But just many of the big brands just feel like, you know, I don't know, they're not confident enough to have their own playbook, but they're trying to adopt the kind of. It's a bit like I'll sort of I'll have what she's having kind of marketing. They're looking at the smaller brands and thinking, you know, that's what we need to do.
- [17:45]
A
It's funny you say because I literally used to do the. I used to give the opposite advice when I was in a small brand, which is don't just be a small version of the big brands because that was the opposite. You get the opposite trap, don't you?
- [17:56]
B
Exactly, yeah.
- [17:56]
A
You need to play ros of your.
- [17:58]
B
Size, sort of looking over your shoulder marketing.
- [18:00]
A
You can't outspend a big brand unless you're very lucky and you've got a benevolent investor or something. So you have to, you have to go for something that's going to cut through.
- [18:07]
C
Yeah.
- [18:07]
A
And hence why we all follow brands like Elf and Liquid Death and so.
- [18:10]
B
On because they do that brilliant at doing what they do brilliantly. But big brands can do things brilliantly in different ways and I think there's.
- [18:18]
C
A couple of things going on. Something that's just kind of been around forever is marketers will always latch on to something that offers the opportunity to not spend a lot of money. So you know, ever since I've been in the business, people have sort of picked up on things and gone at last. Finally we can cut all the budgets and do this really cheaply, you know. Yeah, organics. I mean we were talking in the car about 1995 when Heinz suddenly said, oh yeah, we can, we don't have to advertise anymore, just do direct mail, slash all the budgets, do a bit of direct mail and Bob's your uncle. And of course that didn't work. And you know, and people go, oh yeah, no, we just need a little bit of a few banner ads. You know, actually that doesn't work. You know, we just need, you know, organic, social, we just need influencers, etc. They're constantly looking, looking for their sort of, you know, it's the fool's gold that attracts them again and again and again. But I think what is new is what you are all relatively new is this envy of small brands. I think when we were, when we were young, when you and I were young, lass, we everyone envied big brands, you know, big and successful and profit and we want to be big brands. But since the age of startups and agility and dot coms and blah, blah, you know, all the sexy stuff has been in small, agile, fast growing digital things. And so all the people who worked at work at, you know, like say, you know, if you're selling toilet roll these days, you really want to pretend you're a tech startup, you know, because that's the sexy thing to do. So there is this thing that many of the sexy small brands are, you know, they're starting from a low base. The primary problem is to get distribution and conversion. Anything you do will build a brand. They're high interest categories with very young users in a selling direct to the consumer. In other words, they're totally atypical in every way. And then all the big companies, what's.
- [20:31]
B
Right for a small beauty brand isn't necessarily right for a 100-year-old toilet cleaner. But everything is a different.
- [20:37]
C
Everyone wants to be glossier.
- [20:39]
A
And we probably only hear about those success stories as well. So they, you know, they're very well talked about. So we think that's what every brand beneath them. There are a thousand other beautiful salience on LinkedIn.
- [20:51]
B
But also, you know, your podcast, you know, great to talk to people like Heinz who are doing brilliant stuff and, well, McDonald's, you've had them. But great as a corrective to talk about the playbooks of the big brands that are doing brilliant stuff as well, not just the small ones.
- [21:05]
C
Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point. Of course, most startups in every. Most new brand launches, new flavor launches, new company, most fail. But the few success stories are really interesting. And then you've got these other big stage companies who've got a basically thriving business going. Yeah, let's be like what, you know, 80% of the failures.
- [21:30]
A
Well, it's a bit like organic social. Gary Vee on the show the other day and of course he's going, you know, and he's not, you know, but he talks about, you know, organic social being like the most powerful platform. It is if you can have a huge viral success repeatedly over time and build a following. Most people can't do that. Right. So, you know, you take, you go into the casino and you know, you're basically placing a bet on 32 red pretty much.
- [21:56]
B
Well, actually again and again as well. You might do it once, but you've got to keep doing that.
- [22:01]
C
So to go back to the go big or go home stuff, what comes out in the analysis is that variations in the budget have, are bigger than variations in roi. So, you know, if you, you can dial the budget up or down by a factor of 10, variations in ROI overall for a campaign don't tend to be that big. I mean, they can go very big, but they mostly don't. And you see this, you know, when you're tracking ROI for a brand over time, you kind of go, it goes up and down a bit, but it doesn't, it's not. You don't tend to get tenfold. And then the other thing is that you can control the budget up or down reliably. That is a lever you control. But you can't just get magic, the ROI up or down, that's much more of a gamble. I mean, like you say with social, it can, you know, viral successes can be amazing, but they're really rare.
- [22:59]
A
I mean, the Bit I really agree with Gary on is what he was saying is experiment a lot, figure out what works and then put your pay behind it. Which does make a ton of sense because then it's quite empirical, isn't it? You're working out which, what's the 1 in 100, and then you're doubling down on that.
- [23:14]
C
That's. That's. That. That is smart, which makes a lot of sense.
- [23:17]
A
So the challenge is like, you know, I talked to a lot of marketers on the show. I'd say most people in the situation at the moment where they're being asked to grow their brand with less budget.
- [23:25]
C
Yeah.
- [23:26]
A
So what. How can we help persuade businesses to put investment back into marketing rather than take. Take cost out, which seems to be where most businesses are at.
- [23:35]
C
So that thing, you know, do more with less. And the answer is that mostly never happens. So, you know, actually if you. It's usually doing less with less. And that's kind of. They need to have some realism there. It's like you. It's like the law of gravity. You know, if you cut the budget, then you, you know, chances are you will make less money as a result. So how do you persuade people to spend more on it? And it's actually. There's no single answer to that. But I think part of it has to do with the way budgets decisions are made. I think a lot of marketing departments are basically taking a budget that's been given to them, so it's been decided by finance or if they are trying to influence it, they don't have the kind of empirical tools or the modeling tools or whatever to determine how much to spend and to do it in a way that's persuasive. So I would like to see a situation where in an ideal company, finance, marketing and sales sit together with a proper financial model that's informed by what we know about how marketing and media works and they sit and do it as a financial planning decision together. And I think a lot of the tools are often in place for that. In a company, they may have an econometric model, but it's way down in the food chain. I think it's very telling that they talk about the market mix models. Mmm. Which built into that name is the idea that you're taking the budget and allocating it. You're. You're changing the mix. Whereas in fact, the really important decision is the size of the pot, not how it's allocated. So I'd want to see one of the things I'd want to see is to see that modeling process being done at a much higher level with finance. And I think that also then means you gotta, you probably gotta take it away from agencies. You need, it needs to be kind of agencies marking their own homework.
- [25:40]
B
You'd probably say more testing as well, wouldn't you? Like the sort of Lathwaites type experimentation which doesn't happen very much and it's really powerful if you can show it happens in one area or one market in the world or whatever. But I don't know why it doesn't happen. Seems to happen more in the past. But best way of giving yourself some evidence to persuade people, Certainly I think.
- [25:59]
C
There'S a. I mean, do you sense this, that people are talking about experiments a bit more? I hear it, but I think, I.
- [26:07]
A
Think people are more tuned in to the evidence and to testing and you know, we've got, we've got more data than we ever have and more opportunities to try things out. So generally I think that's probably true. Yeah.
- [26:17]
C
There's an initiative going on at the moment. So the B2B Institute at LinkedIn are working with the IPA, writing stuff about experimentation and trying to push the idea of experimentation, I think within the world of B2B. LinkedIn do quite a lot of experiments. I think the various platforms probably all do. Maybe not publishing enough stuff.
- [26:40]
A
Actually it make a lot of sense. I was just thinking about the point you made earlier. Now I think it's this time last year when you're on, before you drop the Carl Mellor quote of if brands are built in years, why they measured in quarters. Right. So I think one of the things I'd attempt to do in this situation is reframe the window in which we measure results. Right. So if you can suddenly. Because also shareholders are interested in long term gains, not interested in that quarter. So again, if you set measures over three years, for example, that could change it. The second thing I think is what you've just said. Experimentation is you try at a low level, back to Gary Vee's point, actually, you prove it on a small scale and then you combine that with a long term goal and the two things give a bit of evidence, you go in the right direction and then you, you measure it over a longer period of time.
- [27:22]
C
Yeah, I, I'm not the only person who said this, but I've talked about triangulation, we talked about in the lathewaites IPA paper, the idea that you have econometrics experiments and attribution type measures and that they all you, you bring them all together because they each can inform the other. Doing experiments with attribution data teaches you things. Putting experiments into econometrics teaches you things and so on. And in particular, running that stuff over, as you say, over longer time frames teaches you interesting things. The best econometric models are ones that have got multiple, you know, quite long runs of data because you can only measure long run effects if you've got long run data. And actually long run experiments, they can have worked. We know of one in particular. Don't you remember the Optrex experiment where they went dark in the Southwest for 10 years? And this is a long time ago. The client said, it's fantastic. The brand is practically dead now. Dark. No, well.
- [28:37]
A
And they killed the brand.
- [28:37]
C
Killed the brand in the Southwest.
- [28:39]
A
What an expensive experiment.
- [28:41]
C
They were really pleased. They were pleased the experiment worked.
- [28:46]
B
Finally we realized, sounds like a witch trial.
- [28:48]
A
We burnt the witch and she didn't survive. Oh, she wasn't a witch.
- [28:50]
C
The operation was successful, but unfortunately the patient died.
- [28:53]
A
Oh, that's the funniest thing I want to get back to maybe why we're not doing the right thing. I wonder why with all the evidence, and thanks to you guys as well, like all the evidence we have for why marketing works in the long term. Why are we not doing it? You know, what is going wrong?
- [29:08]
C
First of all, say there's an assumption in the question that everyone knows what they should be doing. And I don't think that's true. We, and I mean the three of us live in our little bubble where we talk to other people like us, who, you know, have all read similar books. But I think if you go to other countries, I think people in the States have quite a different view of what works and what doesn't. They don't read all the same books. And again, if you look at people in, there's a bin there about silos, you know, people who work in a performance marketing world or some of the digital specialisms. I still encounter people who clearly have no idea of any long term effects or the importance of long term effects. So that's the first thing I say.
- [29:56]
B
And then there was the corollary that I think the wording was something like selling internally. So even if the marketing people, they're then selling to sort of general management or finance or whatever who clearly don't understand that stuff as well. So there's always a wider selling, isn't there? We tend to think it's just the people we deal with who have to know and understand this stuff, but then they have to sell internally too. And so there's a very wide target market of people who need to understand all this stuff.
- [30:22]
C
Yeah, I mean I can remember talking to people in finance, you know, and explaining some of this stuff and then it was just like wow, you know what you mean? Actually it's more like Capex, you know, and they could get the idea, but nobody had ever shown them that sort of way of thinking about marketing at all.
- [30:43]
A
And so often in organization, the rest of the C suite are in the short term. If you're supply chain director, if you're sales director, often the finance director, you're looking very much at that week, that month, that quarter. But the marketers should be, we should be the ones looking ahead over sort of one to three years at least I think.
- [31:03]
C
I mean I'm not a CEO or a cfo, but I think those people do also care about the long term. But we haven't always been in the marketing world good enough at showing them the connection. There are some other things as well, like accounting rules don't allow you to, you know, treat it like an investment in quite the same way as with a factory or whatever. Just you're not allowed to do that.
- [31:30]
B
I think Marcus raised that sort of misnomer almost of your long and short of it really that it sets up this kind of almost like a false binary that the long doesn't work now but it does work later and the short does now. But actually as we know the long does do a bit of short as well. So there's that sort of nuance which I think is totally lost on a lot of people then.
- [31:49]
C
And I think the thing about measurement is really important that measurement and language actually. So if you are measuring in terms of awareness or brand love or whatever, and if you're talking in sort of terms of yeah, what we want to bond or create, you know, fluffy language, then that's always going to come second to yeah, well we'll get X many conversions and that will generate this much cash flow. So I've tried to talk about the long term or brand building stuff as this is about creating sustained cash flows and sustained profits and so forth and.
- [32:39]
B
Enhanced performance from your short term as well, which is another.
- [32:43]
C
It's not, it's not just fluffy, it's. It's just, it's the same hard edged business logic, but it's over different time.
- [32:52]
B
Frames take a bit the saying about just agency tenure being good because it's sort of marketing tenure as much as. And it was interesting. Our big long term winners at the effectiveness awards last year were, were clients who had very long term client tenures in there, didn't they? Lathwaite McCain.
- [33:09]
C
That's true.
- [33:10]
B
So that, that, that is a factor as well.
- [33:12]
A
Doesn't this come up in your compound creativity work with Andrew? The agency tenure was actually one of the very, one of the contributing factors.
- [33:21]
B
Yes.
- [33:21]
A
Because often I find agencies have more institutional knowledge of a brand than the brand managers because the brand managers rotate every 18 months or so.
- [33:28]
B
Yeah.
- [33:29]
A
So it's often.
- [33:30]
C
Yeah, certainly. Yeah, we've done that, haven't we? Remember a client who came in with an idea. Have we talked about this before? Where they came in with a new product launch and I was able to go the last time you tried to launch this, here's why it failed last time.
- [33:48]
A
Oh, that's brilliant.
- [33:49]
C
Because I had more data than they did about their brand.
- [33:52]
A
But I think the marketing center thing is absolutely right. I always joke about this because this is the first time I've been in a job more than three years in my entire career.
- [33:58]
B
Yes.
- [33:59]
A
You know, I mean, it's crazy when you think about it and it's almost.
- [34:02]
B
A source of shame, isn't it? If you hadn't moved on, like something.
- [34:05]
A
Must be wrong, you're not going anywhere.
- [34:06]
B
Exactly.
- [34:07]
A
Years 4, 5 and 6 have been wildly successful and I've like now discovered what happens when you stick at something.
- [34:12]
B
More than same with campaigns, isn't it? They kick off after three years, you get an uptick. So we should all be there for more than three years.
- [34:19]
C
So tenure is an important issue. But I have a little bit of a beef about. People say things have got worse because 10 years have got shorter. Have you ever seen any data to show that 10 years have got shorter?
- [34:34]
A
Well, the data usually quoted is at C suite level. So CMO tenure, which is around four years I think and it's slightly less than the C suite average now.
- [34:45]
C
But have you ever seen any data to show that it's trended over time?
- [34:50]
A
Well, it's got worse or better. Yeah, I think it's got, it's similar but I think the main reference is the fact that it's slightly less than other C suite rolls.
- [34:58]
C
Yeah, you see that's, that's the main people say. Yeah. Oh yeah. The thing is, you know, tenure is short and therefore it must have been long in the past and therefore think that's why things have got worse. I have never seen any data to support that and I have seen some data that Supports the opposite that actually 10 years have got longer over time. I've seen articles where they say ah, new data shows low levels of brand loyalty. Brand loyalty has collapsed. No, it was always low. So I don't buy this idea that shortening tenure is one of the reasons that there's been more short termism. I think that's.
- [35:40]
A
And I think it might be Mark that makes this point that there's also a dynamic where more CMOs are getting promoted. Could we make the assumption they're getting fired? Right. But actually some of them are getting promoted and there's a bigger mix game promotion than getting fired. I mean the thing that scares me slightly is the, if I get this right, the mean versus the median or something like that either. What you've got is you've got a few CMOs have been around 20 years.
- [36:02]
C
Yeah.
- [36:03]
A
And you've got a ton that have been around two years and yeah, four might be the average but there's a bunch of them.
- [36:09]
C
So I have seen some data showing up to a certain point relentless increase in the tenure of CMOs. But I think that that's because the title CMO is new and so you know, there were none and they'd only been in the job for a year and they got gradually. Yeah. So anyway the whole thing is kind of, it's one of those arguments by hand waving thing. You go, oh, there's a lot of CMO churn and therefore it's.
- [36:38]
A
Well, I think it's true actually if you go down the organization, I mean certainly at brand manager level being in a role two years is a long time. Long, long time actually because you're at a point in your career where you're trying to get as much experience as possible. You want to work on this brand and then that brand and this category that catego, you know, work on innovation, you know, see at that level the churn is pretty high I'd say. I don't know, I'm down the data to hand but I think it'd be pretty high.
- [37:01]
C
One of my hunches is that that is over emphasized as a thing that's made marketing worse over time. But that actually the way we measure things is much, much more important that we that all the big expansion in metrics is in short term metrics.
- [37:21]
A
Have we finally seen the end of the purpose era, do you think? I mean I know that we've something we've talked about almost every year.
- [37:28]
C
Yeah, I hope so.
- [37:29]
A
Do you think we. Okay. A good reference point for me I had the Unilever. Cmo. Amazing conversation with her. Absolutely incredible.
- [37:36]
B
She didn't mention the word once.
- [37:38]
A
Didn't mention it once. And despite Dove, which I think is one of the most brilliant, brilliant, brilliant examples of purpose advertising and done well. But she talks about creating desire at scale, like wanting people to want your products kind of thing, and that very much is getting back to your superior product and marketing. What is intrinsically great about it? Yeah, just interested in your view as to whether you think you've seen a shift back to product.
- [37:59]
B
It's one of the issues with purpose. It wasn't creating desire at the scale. Wasn't it? And so I think that's exactly right, that. That she'd be talking about her Dove but not using the purpose word. Apart from that. But no, I mean, I think one of the other big trends of the year for me is the kind of renaissance of product really at the heart of brilliant comms. And we've seen that. Well, she was talking about Vaseline Verified, wasn't she? Is a great example of that. But also Heinz are doing brilliant work. McDonald's with fan trees are doing brilliant work and sort of feels like with a great purpose, awakening. We've kind of climbed back down that benefit ladder, haven't we? And we're now rather nicely at the bottom again, celebrating products and why people love them and how they use them in all sorts of brilliant ways. And, you know, the big challenge for us as planners and the massive frustration and the difficulty of purpose was we were operating at these two vastly different ends of this ladder. You and you. You can't link. We work on pot Noodle, as one of our products has done. Brilliant campaign with Slurp. I think you've tested it, haven't you? But you tried talking about the. What people love about pot noodle, which is that wonderful Slurpee tasty satisfyingness at the same time as talking about Gen Z mental health, which, you know, we kind of laugh, but that was the challenge at one stage. Well, it's funny that we're laughing now, though, aren't we? But this is what everyone was trying to do at one stage, so you just can't do it. It doesn't work. So we're now liberated from. We can now go right back to that bottom bit and we're doing fantastic stuff on that and the brand's performing brilliantly because of it. So. Yeah, and I think that is one of the reasons we're seeing the renaissance of product and this brilliant one. I love the fan truth work that McDonald's have been doing that wonderful Gherkin transfer ad is one of my favorites from last year. And yeah, fascinating, verified, brilliant stuff as well. So hallelujah. I think we say, don't we? It's great.
- [39:51]
C
One of the things I found, you know, when I bang on about, you know, brand versus activation is that many clients think that I'm saying brand versus product advertising. They go, oh yeah, we understand, you know, that you need your brand up here and then you have your product advertising. You go whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, that's not a distinction. You can have great brand advertising which is focused on the product. And in my view a lot of the best. Well, I think the best brand advertising is in some way firmly linked to product. But we got into this idea that somehow, yeah, activation, okay, that's product features, product benefits, rational, blah blah, blah, blah blah. And then, okay, we need to do emotional brand advertising. So that needs to be about higher order values. It's about, you know, you know, purpose. It's about the way you live your.
- [40:46]
B
Life or even John Lewis to be fair. I mean probably one of the, one of the triggers for that was that whether, you know, you're not going to show any product at all, you're not showing the shops, you're not showing any. Well, there might be a sort of small present, but that's not what it's about. But it's just all about the emotion and.
- [40:59]
C
But you see the thing is, I think what people misunderstood there is that actually it's about a purchase occasion.
- [41:06]
B
Yes, it's about, it's about, it's about a gift. Yes.
- [41:09]
C
So in a sense there it is firmly rooted in, in a category entry point. Category entry point. As Byron and co would say. It's not just about, you know, hey, John Lewis. It's about mental health. Although they seem to have gone in that direction, don't they? It was rooted in something quite concrete. Giving someone a penguin, giving someone a telescope or whatever. It's not an ad for a telescope but it's about something quite concrete. But the worst kind of airy fairy brand advertising is where you float off into a world of abstract values and then you become. It could be an ad for any brand in any category. And the worst purpose advertising was like that, wasn't it? It was kind of, you know, it's all people in hard hats next to, you know, wind turbines on, you know, and mums in pushing push chairs and kind of, you know, for, for a better tomorrow and all that sort of thing.
- [42:09]
B
You Know, well, you know, what I think has made it possible and led to a lot of this brilliant stuff as well is just social media and social listening that, you know, not even when I was a baby planner, spending 200 hours a year sitting on sofas talking to people, you know, which gave you a brilliant kind of worm's eye view of people's life. But you wouldn't have got Vaseline verified from that. But social media, now you've just got this amazing ability to, you know, pick up the weird obsessives about gherkins and you know, that they're just the anthropology in me loves this sort of worm's eye view of people and products and how they use them and what they love about them. And I think the, you know, the brilliant Heinz work and Vaseline and McDonald's are using this as a brilliant new source of kind of understanding. And that's great from our point of view, to feed that into comms.
- [42:55]
C
And I think what's great about that is a lot of it is about how people feel about the products, isn't it? And also, you know, like, things like them using it in quirky ways that were not intended and stuff like that. But the danger is if people go get the idea that, oh yeah, we need to have the product in the ad and then you get back into some sort of just rational demonstration of functional benefits.
- [43:22]
B
Cutaways to product demos.
- [43:23]
C
Yeah, exactly. And that's again, one can use product in. In a kind of more emotive way or you can use product in a very rational way where you're demonstrating the functional benefits and price and features and stuff like that. Products can be at the brand or the activation level. It can be emotional or rational.
- [43:43]
A
I really like that distinction. I think that's quite powerful. I mean, maybe my favorite Christmas ad this year, he says this year it'll be going out next year. So it's now last year is Waitrose actually. But partly because I love the way they've created like a series or it's a bit like kind of tuning into the latest episode of I'm a Celebrity or something. It's like what drama's unfolding in this edition, but also in some of their activation. To go back to your point on TikTok, it's very, it's very product centered. However, it's funny, it's part of the drama that's unfolded everywhere else in the campaign. So they've managed to do that, you know, that, you know, emotion even in. When discussing the product as well, which I think is quite clever.
- [44:22]
C
Yeah, it's. It's got the product in it and it's there as a character almost in an emotional drama. And of course, food is quite emotional.
- [44:31]
A
Anyways, Very emotive. Yeah.
- [44:33]
B
No, it's brilliant campaign. I love the ambition of it and the sort of different shape of the media as well. And it's a nice count of the fact that, you know, people only watch 5 seconds or 15 seconds, that they won't. If it's really good, they will watch longer. And I think. Yeah, I think they've done a brilliant job. Credit to them. It's one of my favorites as well.
- [44:53]
A
It's very good, isn't it? Now, one campaign, actually, this will bring us on a different topic that actually got back, got banned, got pulled, was the McDonald's, as it didn't even pick this up in. In Netherlands, McDonald's did an AI ad and it actually got pulled in the end because.
- [45:09]
C
I don't know about this. Tell me about it.
- [45:10]
A
Yeah, so it got quite. They're exaggerating. What goes wrong at Christmas now. It's interesting. A few people have tried this kind of inverts Christmas. Harvey Nichols did it. You know, I would have got you something, but, you know. What was that campaign a few years ago? I spent it on my son.
- [45:25]
B
Sorry, I spent it on myself.
- [45:26]
A
I spent it on myself. That's right. So every now and then, someone tries to sort of like, invert, you know, invert what Chris is all about. In this case, it's. It's dramatizing all the things that can go wrong. But they've used AI to make it just very extreme. So, you know, the Christmas lights, you know, explode, and the guy ends up in the, you know, other end of the garden sort of thing. It's that kind of thing. And it got such a consumer backlash, actually, that McDonald's actually pulled it, which I thought was interesting.
- [45:50]
C
That's hard to do. And, you know, people don't. Mostly don't care about.
- [45:56]
A
Well, this is the interesting thing is that, you know, just I wanted to get your point of view on AI versus the kind of the craft that, you know, because Christmas is a time where there's so much craft on display, isn't there? And, yeah, I've seen it in a couple of things. That's given me a bit of reason.
- [46:09]
B
Was that due to the craft, though, or to. Due to the strategy or both? Because, as you say, that kind of, oh, Christmas is a, you know, time is right. Because it wasn't an M&S ad two or three years ago that caused the one where there's people's chucking Christmas cards into the fire. And it was all about how. I think it was M S. There was a lot of. It's really hard to pull off that. And I think with Harvey Nicks you could do it because it was an edgy sort of brand and, you know, you're not John Lewis, so you're kind of doing something different. But if you're a McDonald's or an M S, which is kind of heartland mass market. I think there was another adword that. I think the Christmas again, that was all about how, you know, mums get put on and it's all down to them, but it's hard to play with your instincts and strategies is to do something different. I think I was telling you, I was reading about the strategies on Waitrose who was saying, you know, before they this, it was all like, oh, you need to be more edgy this year. And that people don't want sentimental kind of schmaltzy stuff. And actually they really quite like it. Yes, it's quite hard to. Yeah. To kind of nail that anti Christmas feeling. Well, because people want to feel good. It's especially. It means a lot and people want it to. To work and to make their families happy. So that's difficult. But, you know, I mean, I haven't followed it closely how much it's the strategy or how much it is actually that and not the AI bit of it. I don't know.
- [47:29]
A
Yeah, it's probably both combined. I think people are reacting to the fact that it's made by AI but also the idea. I learned this in Covid, actually. I mean, we tested. I mean, we almost lost our entire business at System One because no one was testing ads.
- [47:43]
B
Right.
- [47:43]
A
So we thought, what should we do? We'll test every Covid ad and just write a report on what we've learned. And I'd say apart from the first four to six weeks where it was okay to go in these hard times and reflect back, people wanted escape. We did not want reality pushed back in our face. And actually anyone that went the other way. I remember the first Christmas, there were so many in these times. And, you know, anyone who referenced Covid saw a drop in their response. Anyone who went for escapism saw this massive boost. We did not want to kind of have reality push back at us.
- [48:19]
C
I sort of think if you went back to the Second World War, you know, what. What do people remember about films and music and stuff? Of the 40s. It's not. They don't remember lots of stuff about, you know, the difficulty of rationing and et cetera. It was feel good stuff, you know, whether it was music or movies.
- [48:40]
B
And these ads are all. They land in a particular way at a particular time in culture, don't they as well? And, you know, it's pretty tough for people at the moment. Arguably you. You want even more escapism and feel good from your Christmas advertising than in years of. Whenever there were years of kind of plenty when people got loads of money. So you can do different things. So, yeah, I would have thought it's to do with the strategy probably more than anything.
- [49:04]
C
I think one of the things that you particularly have been thinking about is this craft issue and the importance of craft. All the little things in music, you know, lighting, casting, the. The particular way a line is delivered, the way. Particular framing of a shot or whatever. I don't think it's inherently. The AI is necessarily going to dilute all that. It just depends how you use it.
- [49:33]
B
I was interested in that. Aardman, were you. Were you there?
- [49:36]
A
Oh, yeah. Putting on a show.
- [49:38]
B
Yeah. You did your brilliant work with Arnold, but it was really. I didn't realize had done so many ads. I think they've done about 90 in your database. Is it something like that? And I know they appeared in the. I think they. Overall in the top 1% or whatever. So they're clearly doing something very right, aren't they? And I loved. There was a talk by. Were you there or not? I can't remember.
- [49:58]
A
I wasn't there on the night.
- [49:59]
B
But there was a talk by somebody from Aardman there in the kind of creative side of Aardman. And they were talking about the production side of it. And there was this word they use, which I really love. They were saying that Nick park is obsessed with thumbiness, which is the word. And he's. And he's. When they're creating their models, he's always saying, but is there enough thumbiness in it? And what he meant by that was the kind of literal and metaphorical thumbprints in the sort of Plasticine figures that they make. And I thought that was really interesting because I. I mean, now they say it, you kind of see that, but I don't think you would overtly notice that. But I think you sense that when. When they create things, there's a sort of sixth sense that we have of things that are created by humans. And I think that's just a really good example of how that craft has created a kind of connection through a sort of humanity, really. And I think, you know, I think we will be craving more of that kind of humanity. And I think craft will be particularly important for that. I was talking to Les early and we were. I was just saying, I was reading something recently about when photography came in the 1800s and before that, you know, people had to paint portraits and landscapes, but obviously photography could do reality better than paintings then. And that sparked a huge new creative kind of way of thinking. And paintings became all about impressions and feelings and gave birth to impressionism. So I think it's quite exciting what AI will spark as a kind of creative counterforce, if you like, and. And just what ways creativity will give us that feeling of humanity which machines might not be able to. So I think all that's. Sorry, I've been wanging on, I think. Well, that's quite interesting.
- [51:36]
A
Really fascinating data point going back to AI and Christmas. So we tested the Coke, Holidays Are Coming ad. The AI version compared to the previous version scores exactly the same. So at a headline level, we're looking at it going, oh, no one cares that it's made with AI. It's just they care about the output. And then somebody in my team messaged me and said, johnny, do you realize we've cut this by demographic and there's a big variance. What do you mean? And apparently for older people, the fact they use AI is like, oh, well done them. You know, that's fantastic, right? For younger people, for Gen Z, it actually scored pretty low.
- [52:10]
C
Okay.
- [52:11]
A
And they're rejecting that A. I think they pick it up more easily. They see it. Yeah, but there's a rejection of it. And it's interesting because I know, I mean, even a small example, but. But my younger daughter Lydia often says to me, I wish I went to school when you did, Daddy, when they didn't have phones. You know what I mean? Because I want to be present with my friends. I don't want to be on the phone all the time sort of thing. So I do wonder whether actually at that, you know, that generational level, there's a. Who've grown up with this stuff. It's a bit of a desire, craving for the opposite.
- [52:39]
B
Maybe older people are just, well, they are by definition more familiar with that ad because it's been around for 20 years or whatever. So I think the way you process that ad is a lot less. Less.
- [52:50]
A
They've got the mental shortcuts already.
- [52:52]
B
The huge, you know, you see the trucks, there's Light, you hear that music, you think, oh, it's Christmas, there's a Coke. And so I'm not sure you're going to be. Yes. So into the detail as younger people who perhaps not seen it before.
- [53:01]
C
So I think almost certainly young people will have a better radar for detecting the differences because they're just exposed to it more. You know, I think the first time you see AI generated imagery, you know, you go, wow, that's amazing. And then after a while you just, you, it becomes routine and you kind of go, no, that's AI. So. And then also our radar for people versus animals, you know, we're in. We're so we've evolved to identify real human beings. So, so that, so all of that makes sense.
- [53:37]
B
I mean, in many ways that Coke trucks ad is the worst ad to try and do this sort of AI analysis on, I think because it's so familiar and I think for so many. It's been around so long, the shortcuts from it are so great that I'm not sure you can actually really use it to assess anyway what AI is right or not.
- [53:56]
C
But I actually think that, that this craft issue is, is bigger than AI, you know, it. It's not just a AI versus, you know, human made thing. It's this, this whole idea that there's, there's. I think we've lived through a view of creativity, which is creativity equals novelty. You know, relentless focus on disruption and innovation and new campaigns and new ads and all that sort of thing. And that. Whereas in fact. And this takes us right back to your disguise, repetition. Often what matters is, as well as creativity as novelty, there's the, that thing about the common thing done uncommonly well. You know, that the. Yes, yes. People have done this loads of times before. It's a hackneyed approach to advertising. But look at all the little details. Look at the, you know, and when we were talking about the Waitrose ad earlier, you know, like you mentioned the shot where she nudges him, Keira Knightley nudges Phil and he disappears off the pavement. Disappears off the pavement. It's a little, it's little touches. Paul Feldwick's also talked about this, about that, you know, a creative idea is, is pointless until it. He said there's a thing he wrote about making pots. It's, it's about the craft of turning ideas into an actual made object. And all the little you say, the thumbiness of the made object. You could do it with AI or you could do it not with AI, but it's a view that says it's not just about getting the message across, it's not just about doing something new, it's about doing whatever you do well. So we've talked in the past about the importance of lighting and casting and music. Really, really important that all the little details in an ad matter about elevating.
- [55:57]
B
Not just executing an idea, I guess.
- [55:59]
C
And I think it also fits in with the stuff about product somehow, like so in that Waitrose ad. So I've, you know, full disclosure, I've only seen it once just before we started recording. You saw me watch it, but I can remember little details about the cheeses in the cabinet and you know, the, the pie and all that sort of thing. And it's about people don't view. Actually it's particularly true about long, long form content. People don't view the whole thing as a message. They remember, have the episodic memory, little details that they remember and sometimes those come from the product.
- [56:38]
A
Well, I can really resonate with your music point actually. We just done some work at System one looking at to what extent music and soundtrack will predict the performance. If you can't see any of the visuals, you only have the soundtrack. It's incredible. It is so close. It is almost the most predictive element that there is in terms of how you feel because of, you know, the way the music's done, the way it links to story and the whole thing.
- [57:02]
C
I think that's really important. I mean, I think it's one. It's important because it helps you to understand that advertising is mostly not, not a communications medium. It's a training mechanism for training people's associations and feelings with the brand. Because if adverts were primarily, primarily there to get a message across, it wouldn't really matter what the music track was, was it? You know, that's just garnish. But if actually So I was one of the co authors of a paper about quite a few years ago called the Power of Music and we stuff from the IPA data, for example, suggests that maybe 20 to 30% of the selling power of an ad come down to the choice of music. So put it another way, you know, about, you know, maybe 30% of the money you make, 30% of the volume you sell is down to the choice of the music track. You suddenly realize this whole idea that the advert is a, an envelope for putting a product message in, you go, that's. Yeah, that's not it at all. It's something.
- [58:11]
A
The thing about that as well is, I mean, and I'm guilty of this totally, is that when I used to make ads, the music would be the very, very last thing I'd do. And usually I burnt the budget, you know, because I got an expensive, you know, director, producer, the whole thing, right? And If I spent 5% of my budget on the music, I was being extravagant. But of course, you know, when the creative team sold it in, they probably had Justin Timberlake doing. By the end, it was kind of no studio down the road does something for free, you know, but we lose so much the magic. And I think we need to put. If we can put the value into the music and demonstrate the impact it has.
- [58:47]
C
So we might used to work with. We had a scientist in residence at Adam and Eve, didn't we? So Daniel, Dr. Daniel, he had an induction to the advertising business when he first started coming into the agency. And they spent a day talking about the whole process of making ours. And he said, literally about 4 o', clock, before they were about to knock off, and they said, and then you put a bit of music on it. You know, it was like absolutely the last thought. But the research we did suggested that it was really important. And then this year I've been working with massive music on a newspaper piece of research which they unveiled at the IPA conference in the autumn. And again, similar numbers that you can, you could boost the effectiveness and efficiency of your ad quite substantially just by getting the music right. And you could kind of look at the numbers and go, well, that means maybe you should be spending about 30% of your production budget on music rights. I'm not saying you should, but you.
- [59:49]
A
Could make at least more than the 3%. Most people probably. Well, on that bombshell, and that is a bombshell and it's a good, good insight for this year, I think, is pay more attention to music, for sure. But thank you both. It's always so much fun to have you back on the show and happy New Year.
- [60:08]
B
Happy New Year.
- [60:08]
C
Happy New Year.
- [60:09]
B
Yeah.
- [60:10]
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 podcast. If you watch 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 UncensoredCMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.