Mark Ritson on why everyone is wrong about Sydney Sweeney, the 3 rules of creativity & why strategy always comes before tactics

Summary

Uncensored CMO – Mark Ritson on Why Everyone is Wrong About Sydney Sweeney, the 3 Rules of Creativity & Why Strategy Always Comes Before Tactics

Podcast: Uncensored CMO
Host: Jon Evans
Guest: Mark Ritson
Date: September 10, 2025

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Overview

In this wide-ranging and lively episode, Jon Evans returns with marketing firebrand Mark Ritson. The discussion covers Ritson's new business partnership, the hot-button Sydney Sweeney ad controversy, the enduring keys to effective creativity, the biggest marketer mistakes, and why strategy still trumps tactics. Ritson's signature uncensored style produces candid insights, spicy quotes, and hard-won lessons relevant for marketers at every level.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Mark Ritson's Business Updates & Media Partnerships

• Partnership with Brave Bison: Ritson’s Mini MBA business has joined Brave Bison, a tech-oriented marketing group. The partnership operates like a 'house of brands', allowing each entity autonomy but sharing a marketing philosophy.
  • "[Brave Bison is] really the perfect partner... growing business that gets marketing." – Ritson [01:19]
• Leaving Marketing Week: Ritson has broadened his writing to publications across the US and Europe (e.g., Ad Week, The Drum, Horizont, Ad Formati, Resume) after parting with Centaur and Marketing Week.
  • "[Now] I'm broadening it out a bit, which I couldn't have done, obviously, if I was devoted to Marketing Week." – Ritson [02:55]

The Siloed Nature of Marketing Publications

• Marketers rarely read across the main trade magazines: agency folks read Campaign, client-side read Marketing Week – "The overlap between those two publications is hardly anything." – Evans [03:38]
• This divide was intentionally engineered to focus publications on distinct market segments. [03:43]

The Role and Limits of AI in Marketing

• AI’s Disruptive Potential: Ritson foresees AI eventually automating much of marketing’s process work (akin to law and accounting), possibly obviating some training formats:
  • "Any process that currently exists is going to be shut down like an accordion." – Ritson [08:44]
• Mini MBA & AI: Plans for an AI-driven planning tool, combining 'professor in a box'-style explanations with automated plan generation.
• Cognitive Risks: Evans points out a key risk—AI might reduce marketers’ critical thinking by automating too much of the work.
  • "AI makes you lazy. Sometimes it's the doing the work that makes you do the thinking that gets you to the answer." – Evans [10:11]
• AI vs. Human Marketer: Ritson suggests the real challenge is that most marketers don’t produce plans at all; AI may help produce plans where none existed.
  • "They're going to produce plans often for the first time that are executable." – Ritson [11:10]

The Ehrenberg-Bass Distinctive Brand Assets Study

• Marketers Overrate Fame, Underestimate Uniqueness: Recent Ehrenberg-Bass research shows marketers are poor judges of their own brands' distinctive assets.
  • "Marketers don't know anything... you don't matter in all of this. None of us matter." – Ritson [15:45]
• Real consumer data is indispensable; market orientation is key.

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The Sydney Sweeney Advertising Controversy

What Happened?

• The much-discussed ad campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney yielded minimal impact:

  • "1.3... really low and lower than the average for fashion ads... number one emotion was neutrality" – Evans [14:16]

• Criticism on both sides was extreme but misplaced.

  • "It's not the end of woke advertising, nor is it eugenics...it's just an ad. It's not that important." – Ritson [15:45]

• Ritson highlights a lack of emotional resonance, poor branding, and fleeting campaign lifespan as the main weaknesses.

  • "She looks kind of blank... it's a new campaign that I suspect will be gone within a couple of months." [19:10]

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The Three Rules of Highly Profitable Creativity

Based on recent meta-analysis of creative ad effectiveness:

1. Utilize Emotion: Campaigns that evoke emotion are far more effective.
   • "When you look at all the data... you want to encourage and utilize emotion." – Ritson [17:52]
2. Codify with Distinctive Brand Assets: The more repeated, recognizable brand cues (sounds, mascots, colors), the better. Seven touchpoints was the 'magic number' discovered.
   • "Having a palette of distinctive brand assets—it's not about slapping logos everywhere." – Evans [20:00]
3. Long Duration: Let the campaign run at least two years for compounding effect.
   • "On average, [campaigns] are pulled after two months, but to get the full benefit, you need at least two years." – Ritson [22:59]

• Memorable moment: Ritson’s “not baking our cakes long enough” analogy struck a chord.
  • "The market is putting their cakes in and not baking them long enough." [22:59]

Examples:

• KitKat: 40+ years with same agency, yielding compounding returns. [25:32]
• Yorkshire Tea: Consistency grows brand share over decades. [24:50]
• Cadbury, Aldi's Kevin the Carrot: Same agency, repeated characters, consistent format. [26:40]

• "It takes real skill not to change stuff... to stop people meddling." – Ritson [27:20]
• Ritson and Evans agree there should be an award for 'not changing’. [27:37]

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Pricing: The Underused Profit Lever

• Marketers' Lack of Pricing Influence: Few own the full marketing mix, especially pricing and distribution—most influence limited to communications.
  • "It's sub 10%. In advertising terms, that's what they all control. But for the other 3Ps, it's 10–20%." – Ritson [27:58]
• Why Marketers Need a Seat at the Table:
  • "Pricing is the biggest driver of corporate profitability... and is essentially a marketing endeavor." – Ritson [31:44]
• The Dangers of Over-Promotion: Repeated discounting leads to margin erosion, commoditization, and undermined differentiation.
  • "If you screw up price, everything goes wrong." – Ritson [32:11]
• Golden Rule: "Never discount... do your research, peg your price, communicate and defend it. And lose a few sales to defend that price point." – Ritson [35:05]

Notable anecdote: Ritson’s fiery reaction to early bird discounts on Mini MBA: - "Don’t ever fucking do that again...because it embarrasses me...The worst thing you'll ever see is a brand that launches with a half-price, bog-off, early bird special. You're slapping the baby when it's born." – Ritson [35:05]

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The Primacy of Strategy Over Tactics

• Most Marketers Get This Wrong: Too many jump into tactics without clear strategic direction.
  • "The main one remains the absence of strategy... None of it is driven from a central repository of clear strategy." – Ritson [38:34]
• Strategy Defined:
  • "Be clear on target, clear on position, clear on objectives. With those three things decided, all the answers... become apparent." – Ritson [39:03]
• Classic Origin Story:
  • "Strategy comes from the Greek strategos, tactics from tactikos... You essentially make your strategy and then arrange your troops." [39:17]
• Learning Culture: The best marketers review lessons learned and plan from there.
  • "The best 10% of marketers start with 'What did we learn last year? What will we do differently?'" – Ritson [41:51]

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AI's Shaky Marketing, and Its Future

• Tech Bros "Selling AI Badly": Ritson is unimpressed with current AI providers’ marketing and brand structure.
  • "The process by which they're being branded and sold is pretty shit." – Ritson [44:24]
• The Missing Apple Moment: Suggests space is open for a new player to bring clarity and simplicity to AI, just as Apple did with smartphones. [45:04]
• Skepticism of Self-Proclaimed AI Experts:
  • "The first question you have with any AI expert is: what were you doing three years ago?" [46:20]

Where AI Is Going

• True AI impact on marketing is a 2030s phenomenon, with current agent-based approaches not ready for prime time.
• AI as a planning and segmentation tool offers enormous promise, especially "synthetic research" for complex B2B or hard-to-reach audiences.

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Stand-Out Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Marketers don't know anything... market orientation. You don't matter in all of this. None of us matter." – Ritson [15:45]
• "It takes real skill not to change stuff." – Ritson [27:20]
• "The main one remains the absence of strategy... They’re going into things with a tactical, fire-fighting mindset." – Ritson [38:34]
• "Never discount... Do your research, peg your price, communicate and defend it." – Ritson [35:05]

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Important Timestamps

• 01:10 — Ritson discusses Brave Bison partnership
• 02:13 — Leaving Marketing Week and broadening his column
• 08:07 — Will AI replace the Mini MBA?
• 10:11 — AI as a thinking substitute & potential downside
• 12:09 — Ehrenberg-Bass insights: Marketers out of touch with asset distinctiveness
• 14:12 — Sydney Sweeney ad effectiveness revealed (1.3/5 stars)
• 17:48 — The three rules of truly creative, effective ads
• 22:59 — The 'cake isn't baked’ analogy: campaigns pulled too soon
• 27:58 — Who owns the four Ps in practice?
• 31:44 — Pricing: the overlooked profit lever
• 35:05 — On never discounting & scathing brand launch anecdote
• 38:34 — Why most marketers lack strategy
• 44:24 — Ritson skewers AI branding and commercialization
• 50:30 — AI vs human data: who’s right?
• 53:32 — AI's power in complex B2B sectors

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Final Thoughts

Evans and Ritson end on a note of anticipation—for future AI breakthroughs and their annual year-in-review. Ritson's repeated themes: prioritize strategy, champion creative and brand consistency, price proudly, and never assume marketers know their own assets. If there was one thread throughout, it’s that evidence and orientation beat assumptions and fads—whether in AI, campaign creativity, or the Sydney Sweeney saga.

Transcript

[A]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the uncensored cmo. Now, this is another Ritzen episode, which I know you're going to love. I'm catching up with Mark to find out what's been going on in his world, because since I last interviewed him, he has done a partnership with Brave Bison. So I'm finding out what that means for him in the NBA. We talk about the hottest topic of the moment, Sydney Sweeney and what that means for brands and why everyone's losing their selves over it and everything else that's trending in marketing right now. So, as usual, Mark is uncensored. He's a great guest. You know what's coming up. Here it is. Mr. Mark Ritson.

[B]

John, welcome back. How are you? How are you, sir? I'm back for my third or fourth.

[A]

Yeah, I think. I reckon so. Yeah. But we're in New York this time. Just to kind of mix it up a little bit.

[B]

I don't make any difference at all. But you're right, we are.

[A]

But we can talk about UK versus US marketers just for fun. Can we?

[B]

Yeah, well, it comes to mind, right, we're in a very hot August New York office. It's kind of cool, right? That is good. I'm in the middle of winter in Australia, so this is.

[A]

Is. This is nice.

[B]

This is great. Don't tell my wife. I'm having a great time right now.

[A]

Since we last spoke, your business has changed a little bit, hasn't it?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Dave Bison have come on and yes, we tried.

[B]

Half of you, we were in play for God knows, it felt like forever. Centaur, the company I partnered with when we started the business, wanted to sell their interest in it for reasons of nothing to do with mini mba. And I was like, yeah, good, we know. I'm interested. I got a say in who my new partner would be, which is, I think, appropriate. And we had loads of interest from loads of very big and interesting organizations, which is also nice but very time consuming. But we ended up with Brave Bison, who are a tech marketing group and we're very. It really is the perfect partner. It sounds, you know, blase, but we've got an upwardly mobile, growing business that gets marketing. Importantly, they run it like a house of brands. So there's a whole bunch of good companies. There's each with the CEO, there's good synergies in the back and a sort of shared philosophy, but each is given their space, you know, so we see a ton of potential. And one of which, weirdly, was to leave Marketing Week. So, yeah, I was going to ask.

[A]

You about it because you've been with marketing, like 10 years.

[B]

I mean, at least 10 years.

[A]

The association with Marketing Week is huge.

[B]

Yeah. And really that's why I ended up with Centaur, because Centaur and Marketing Week. I did Mini MBA when I was already a Marketing Week columnist and I loved it. I've been there 10 years more, to be fair, I'd done 10 years prior to that that no one remembers with Marketing, which was the previous magazine before it, and then I'd switched. And to be honest, I still love Russell, the editor and all that operation there. But there was an opportunity once I left Centaur, to broaden the readership of a column. So I'll start writing for Ad Week in the US now. I'll write for the Drum, I'll write for Horizont in Germany and Ad Formati in the Netherlands and Resume in Sweden. So I'm broadening it out a bit, which I couldn't have done, obviously, if I was devoted to Marketing Week. So, yeah, it really will increase, hopefully, visibility, which is really, again, I mean, I'm top of funnel for Mini mba, right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

What's interesting, and you'd find it interesting, is if you do an analysis of the readership of these marketing channels, they really don't cross over much at all. So we might imagine that if you read Marketing Week, you read the Drum, you read Ad Week. That's not how it plays out.

[A]

That is it? Because I think, like in Marketing, if you're in agency land, you read Campaign. If you're client side, you read Marketing Week.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

The overlap between those two publications is hardly anything.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

I just. I know very few people that we.

[B]

Engineered that to be fair. Right. So if you remember, when I came across the Marketing, it was one of the smartest things Russell and I did at the time. Haymarket, that owns Campaign, also had marketing that I was writing for, and I jumped across to Marketing Week and then they shut Marketing down and I said to Russell, let's make sure we make it clear that Campaign can have all of that advertising stuff because it's a small part of marketing. It's not where the money is. And we say we're the client side thing. And that was very much something we put in place and. Which worked. Right. And has worked very well.

[A]

So it definitely has. So question. I got a few then is given, like, advances in AI. Give an example. Producer James and I were on this ride. We rode a stage of the Tour de France, right? Yeah. We did this experiment on what, a.

[B]

Motorbike or a real bike?

[A]

Yeah, real bike. I know.

[B]

A flat one or a hilly one?

[A]

Actual one, yeah.

[B]

This is quite impressed.

[A]

This is the most hilly stage. Right. This is a bit stupid of us.

[B]

And did you ever get off or did you actually.

[A]

It was painful. We made it. Like, what I didn't realise before doing it is when you do a stage of the Tour de France, there's a time cut because what they do is they close all the roads. You do it and then the pros go behind you and you've got to finish it before the pros catch you up.

[B]

Oh, you're doing it during the pros.

[A]

You're doing it the morning of the pros.

[B]

It's totally mental.

[A]

This is crazy. I didn't know about this. And then James is like, you know, we've got five minutes to finish, like, get to the top of this hill. So we made it with like three, three and a half minutes to go before they shut the entire place, kick us out. And then the pros come in. It's insane. But what's going. Reason. Reason this links to AI, apart from being a funny story, was so I'd got a actual cycling coach, right, who was kind of mentoring me and telling me what to eat and train, all this kind of thing, and. But he went on.

[B]

Was he Dutch or French?

[A]

He was Scottish, actually.

[B]

Jesus.

[A]

But annoyingly, he went on holiday the two weeks before the thing. So I kept messaging him. He said, I'm just on the. On the sun lounger in milk or.

[B]

Whatever, eating pies and drinking beers. You got it right.

[A]

Producer James, here for nothing, has got Clive, the AI cycling coach, right? And just to give you an idea of how good this is, so we're driving down, he's like, I'll give me your data. I'll just chuck your cycling data in and ask Clive what you should be doing for your warmup. Right? Anyway, we're on the first. Like, we start the thing and we're both feeling a bit like we're very early start, right? We're a bit knackered and the heart rate's really high, so we're going along. James gets his phone out, talks to Clive. Clive, we're doing 160 watts. Heart rate is up at 140. It's this time in the morning. We're a little bit cold. What should we do? And Clive's back with the. You didn't sleep last night. Bit nervous about the stage. Don't worry. About it settling. Settle in, lads. Take it calm. Heart rate will calm down. So we've got like a coach talking us better how to complete a stage of Tour de France.

[B]

You know, my only parallel experience of the cycling, which is not parallel at all, is about 20 years ago I cycled to Sweden from London, right? And I did it on the North Sea bike route, which is a phenomenal bike path, right, that goes right up from the hook of Holland, around Denmark and across to Gothenburg. And I did it. And no one believes I did it because I had something like a month off at London Business School. I just bought a bike in the morning at London Bridge and a pair of shorts, right?

[A]

Did zero. That's going to be painful.

[B]

Zero training of any kind, right? And I remember it was when they just invented the ipod. So I loaded my ipod with all my, like, 12 CDs, which took like nine hours, right? And I just got the ferry to the hook of Holland and started cycling. And I wasn't as fat as I am now, but I wasn't particularly thin. And I can remember I got. And it was flat, but I'd do 100k in the morning and then my BO. I would have a giant carb lunch and my body would then shut down for about an hour and then I sort of reboot it, do another 100k, and then I would basically shut down in a bed somewhere. And I did that for like 12 nights.

[A]

Oh, man, that is.

[B]

And to this day, most people don't believe I did it. And it was just like me on my own cycling around Denmark. And I had. It was one of the great experiences of my life.

[A]

That is hardcore. I have to say. It was pretty amazing to do it. The last climb took two and a half hours and it was raining and cold. That and the depressing thing, like some idiots had snuck onto the course with E bikes and like, like, yeah, that.

[B]

Sounds like a couple of large people. I would do that and they're just.

[A]

Literally going, with no effort at all, just smiling at us, laughing.

[B]

I would do like.

[A]

Literally in the hurt Locker at this point, cold, wet and about to drop off the mountain.

[B]

Brilliant. Yeah. AI cycling sounds good, mate.

[A]

It is. So my question then is, at what point is AI going to take over Mini mba, right? Because presumably we could just take all your knowledge, all your case studies, all the data from history, everything you've taught, put it into AI and I could just ask. AI couldn't you?

[B]

Could, but then why would you worry about the answer? So, yeah, if you want to go like 20% into AI. You can have an AI version of me teaching you how to do marketing. Right. But my point is it's much deeper and more disruptive than that. Why do you need to learn it at all? Right. And any process that currently exists is going to be shut down like an accordion. Right. Law is currently being broken into a tiny blanche of what it was. Right. We're seeing it before eyes. Accounting is just disappearing. Right. I mean, so process is, is a thing of the past eventually. And much of marketing is a process. Right. So no, I think where it's going is more an AI driven planning execution machine.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Now does that replace mini NBA? Partly. I think you have to explain and train marketers in what the stuff is, you know, so we can, you know, I'm working on it now. We have a planning tool that's in development for building marketing plans and it explains what all the decisions are. So you have to kind of understand what excess share of voice is and what distinctive brand assets are so you can understand the decisions that were made. So there's kind of a role for a professor. What's interesting is at the moment, in our early beta test, it's the professor in the box. So what happens is you get given your target, your segmentation and your targets and the right positioning and the right pricing and then the right mix of channels and all of that. And you can click on a trunk which contains me or an avatar of me and I can get out and explain these things if they need me to. But it's kind of the reverse of I'm going to train you, then you're going to do it. Well now it's already been done. Do you need the professor to explain it?

[A]

I've seen some research actually recently suggesting that people using AI to replace tasks they were doing are thinking like 40 or 50% less than they were. So the danger is actually AI makes you lazy. And it doesn't. Sometimes it's the doing the work that makes you do the thinking that gets you to the answer.

[B]

I think that's right. In marketing, it's not, it's not applicable because we're not, I mean, we use, I use example all the time of the, of the radiographer doing breast cancer. Right. They've been essentially proven now that I can look at an X ray of human breasts and identify breast cancer much more accurately and quickly than a trained radiographer. In the analogy, the marketing director is looking at the X ray and can't even identify what's abreast. Do you Know what I mean? They're just not doing the work.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

How many great marketing plans are there exactly? You know, I mean, so the question isn't can, can AI produce a better marketing plan than a marketer? They're going to produce plans often for the first time that are, that are executable.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, if you look at EV Denzer's business evidence has very deliberately put synthetic research into the B2B world because there isn't that much research available. They're not competing, they're bringing it to.

[A]

The market for the first.

[B]

So yeah, no, I think marketers are going to remain, but they, the job they haven't been done doing will be replaced.

[A]

Will be replaced. Exactly that. Well, this brings me to my favorite bit of research recently from our friends Ehrenberg Bass about distinctive assets where they tested. Yes, this is so funny. But they tested what marketers think of their distinctive assets in terms of fame and uniqueness and what the consumer thinks. And they will wildly out. I think it was on fame, 40% out of 100%. They were on average 40% out. So they weren't even close. And I think the data was only a third of marketers were within 20% of guessing.

[B]

They overstated the famous.

[A]

Overstated how famous they thought they were. The interesting thing, which I wasn't expecting, which hopefully you can explain, but they understated uniqueness, which I assumed it would be both overstated. But interestingly I saw that too.

[B]

I don't know. I don't know the explanation. I mean the most likely thing to say is that most of them weren't unique anyway. Right. So they're in the lower quadrant. But I don't know. I don't know. I mean the point that the paper makes, which you know went a very long way around to make it is market orientation. Right. Yes. You know, marketers don't know anything.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, just because you're in charge of pricing or distinctive assets or advertising doesn't mean you can look at it without data from the customer to make. To make the decision. Right.

[A]

We exactly.

[B]

We're meant to know that most marketers don't know that we're back to Sydney Sweeney. Right.

[A]

Well. Well, I think Sydney Sweeney proves this point brilliantly because we actually put Sydney Sweeney advert through the system.

[B]

I didn't see this.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well actually tell what you guess so 5 star scale, 1.0, 5.9.

[B]

That's a very good question. I was so I was in an interesting positioning with Sydney Sweeney.

[A]

So to speak.

[B]

So to speak. I really found the criticisms on both sides, left and right, are both hilarious. Yeah. I mean, it's not the end of woke advertising, nor is it eugenics, you know, but I wasn't that big a fan of the campaign, Eva. And so what's interesting is you're not allowed any of that nuance on LinkedIn. You're not allowed to go, you know, it's not the end of, you know, genetics and stuff. It's so calm down. But also it's not a particularly great ad either. Right. So my guess would be. My guess would be, well, it's very poorly branded. So I would say it will. So that will hurt it on your short scale, won't it? So I would say it wouldn't be particularly strong on the short term and on the long. She's there. I would say it's probably average. It's sitting in the big fat three in the middle.

[A]

I was quite surprised by this 1.3.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Yeah, really low and lower than the average for fashion ads as well. And in fact the number one emotion was neutrality. So it didn't. Because I thought you got a very, very well known celebrity, attractive looking, you know, advert for jeans, fairly popular categories. The category itself is kind of ubiquitous.

[B]

I think it was very poorly branded. Right. I mean, that was the first thing. So I think that contributes to it. And without again jumping into what we think of the ad, it was very redolent of the male gaze. So if you look at her positioning and so forth, it wasn't necessarily an aspirational look for women. It was kind of like if you were a 30 year old man, it was kind of like an appealing image which isn't necessarily on brand but the date. So the data suggests what they'll get a little bump, but not much, hardly anything.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, in fact, were it not for the controversy, which was largely manufactured, it wouldn't have been noticed at all. It would just be a normal. In fact, it's quite generic of a category. It's fairly dull and ubiquitous in terms of.

[B]

Well, and you might argue that all of that discussion really was taking place on LinkedIn. Not the home of gene buying anyway.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So for your average teenage gene buyer, she's like, you know, pass them by.

[A]

The Beyonce Levi's ad did better. I think that was 2.8 better AD.

[B]

But not a great ad.

[A]

Yeah. And that was the pastiche of the Levi's original one, wasn't it? With the boxer shorts and stuff where.

[B]

Which would have been which would have been five.

[A]

I think I was.

[B]

Five stars tested off the charts. Exactly. Yeah. It's funny, right? We get ourselves into a froth about these things.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the lesson of the Sydney Sweeney campaign isn't, you know, I mean, it's not going to destroy their business. It's not going to make them a billion dollars either. You know what I mean? It's just an ad. It's not that important, first of all. But the big lesson is market orientation. You can bang on about all day long about how this is proof of eugenics and the white attempt to blah, blah, blah, but that's just what you see. And you don't matter in all of this. None of, none of us matter, you know, so it's a great result in a weird way that it was kind of just blah, you know?

[A]

Exactly. Now, talking of creative, let's move on to bears and beers, right? Because you did your well, well, in collaboration with us, actually. Didn't you create a dividend presentation?

[B]

It was your day there. It was half your data.

[A]

Exactly. Which, which I, I mean, credit to Andrew on this for driving this. But like, really cool to crash the FE database and System one database.

[B]

Brilliant.

[A]

Because like brilliant. And have two such big databases looking at how creative actually works. But tying it to business results and brand results using the FE data I just thought was amazing because, you know, make. Because obviously what we do at systemware is predict the outcomes.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And what's great with this is we're adding it to the actual outcomes of what happened. Exactly what happened. Which I thought was really cool.

[B]

Well, and the angle that's also interesting is the point I made in at Cannes was we know that creative is important and it has this, you know, famous 12 times multiple that if you have great creative, you'll make 12 times as much profit than if you had creative. But there's not any real clear diagnosis on, so what, what, what do we do to get the 12 and not get the one, you know, so that's why I love the work. So when Andrew gave me the, I mean, it's a giant data set, right. I was like, that's kind of what I want to get. I want to zoom in and get that. And I think we, we got it. You know, I mean, it, it passed the test for me in the sense that it changed the way I thought about mini MBAs advertising after we'd done the work. And I thought, well, that's interesting. The work that, that I've read and I've talked about is now Changing how I'm doing stuff. That's got to be a good sign.

[A]

That's really cool.

[B]

And, you know, and look, the summary is really simple. Right. When you look at all the data, what we find in a nutshell is three things that if you want your advertising to be a 12 rather than a 1, you, first of all want to encourage and utilize emotion. Second, you want to codify it with distinctive assets throughout. And finally, you want to run that campaign for at least two years, ideally longer. Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And those three data points are pretty much inarguable. It's not like, oh, but there's also this alternative approach. They're inarguable points. Right. Maybe the only little clarification is, again, when we say emotion, we've got a lot of emotion to utilize. I mean, I went out of my way to use it in the Twigs Bears, because that's an ad that has horror.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And shock. And then humor. And those are. Those are, you know, emotional responses we don't always see. So. Yeah, so. So for me, that those three things are the core to it. And maybe we go back to why not one more time? Sydney Sweeney. None of those three apply, if you think about it. Right. That was a curiously impassioned ad that we saw. She looks kind of blank. Yeah. Very sort of devoid of emotion. It's not codified at all. Very hard to ice it's genes, but whose genes is very hard to isolate as well. And it's a new campaign that I suspect will be gone within a couple of months. So on all three fronts.

[A]

No, it's good, isn't it? Because it does simplify how you look at a campaign and break it down. Emotion, we've known for a long time, obviously going back to creativity, long and short, all that kind of thing. And obviously System one data. We've been there for years talking about it. I thought the interesting thing was two interesting things. One, on the fluency point, the number of distinctive assets.

[B]

That was a new thing.

[A]

That was a new thing. I hadn't seen that before because I would have probably guessed. Oh, yeah. As long as you got two or three, you're probably fine. Make sure they're prominent.

[B]

What was the magic number again? I forgot.

[A]

Seven. Yeah, well, it was seven times.

[B]

So you could repeat the same one.

[A]

Yeah. Repeating the same one or having different. I mean, this is where we get into, I think. I mean, Orlando. I love how Orlando. I mean, he. I know he talks about fluent devices rather than distinct facets, but it could be like a sound. It could be a repeating scene, it could be a character. And the other thing that I thought was great is, and this is what I really try and drill into people. It's not about putting your logo everywhere. And I think that's what people default to, is that logo in the corner, logo at the front. But, but actually it's finding something that people associate. So like the meerkats or something or you know, well, tourism Australia, actually, that's a good example. Like with the, with the kangaroo, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the characters in there. But find a character that associates with your brand.

[B]

Look, the day. I mean, it's interesting. We've been working. One of the things that our new AI tool is doing and we're just calling it the tool at the moment, but it identifies the palette of distinctive brand assets that you're utilizing. It tells you if they're good enough and if it's not, it uses all the distinctive brand asset data and an analysis of the market to say what you should have is a collar and a mascot. And furthermore, based on the brand positioning, the color should be this. And here's some pantons. And then here's the mascot. And we've drafted out the mascot. Here's the first three examples. So it's getting to that point where, yeah, you need them and then you need to use them.

[A]

Do you know what I mean?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Well, back to the first point about Ehrenberg Bas Data marketers are very blind to this stuff. So having something that's going to, you know, actually give them real consumer data and tell you this is what your audience are going to recognize, it's going to be huge.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, and even. Not even again, what I smell in the 30s and it won't happen in the next couple of years with the AI driven marketing systems is we won't have to convince anyone anymore. We'll just give them the distinctive brand assets and that will be it, you know, so. No, I think, I mean, it holds up what, you know, it holds up all the existing work we've learned about. Probably the long term thing is the most surprising of the three in the sense that it's only been a year or two that we've all been banging on about it, right? That we're not. I mean, it's interesting. I came up with this line on stage about, you know, not, we're not baking our cakes long enough. And that was the one ad lib thing in the whole talk was it just. I pulled that out of my ass. And that's the One that got quoted the most. The market is putting their cakes in and not baking them long enough. You know, we pull these campaigns out on average after two months, you know what I mean? So I think that's the one that we've, all of us have been chiming on about. Right. That we need to keep the same campaigns out there. It's interesting. I did some discussions with Tourism Australia. I know Susan pretty well, the cmo, and when she sent me the new campaign that they're about to drop, I said, the interesting question, Susan, is why do you need a new campaign? It's only three years since you launched the last one, right? And she said, yeah, and it's testing better every year as predicted. Right. It gets stronger and stronger. But she made a couple of nice points like they've learned stuff that they want to put into place. They need that injection of industry affiliation and even got the Prime Minister involved when you launch a new ad campaign and some of the products they wanted to feature had changed. So she made a nice case for it. But I thought that was great. We're now at a place where with really well run brands. That is a very well run brand. The question isn't, oh, you've got a new nice ad campaign, it's you've been running it for three years, why not run it for six? Yeah. And I think that's a great place for us to be now.

[A]

I love it. I love it. Oh, it also rings true because you said that in Cannes, which is a celebration of the new and the novel. Right.

[B]

Well, the whole nature of the can.

[A]

The whole point of that is let's talk about change. Whereas actually you're going, okay, let's talk about not changing.

[B]

I mean, you have to submit fresh work. Right? That's the point. There's less than 12 months old.

[A]

There's no can for the. We put the same ad on for another year.

[B]

No.

[A]

And should be.

[B]

And that by definition, everything submitted at can is not ready yet to be reviewed.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's a mind boggling thought.

[A]

It is insane, isn't it? The thing, I mean, going back to, I mean it came through in that work and compound creativity. We launched last year as well. What I love about it is the fact that it compounds and not only is it better, it gets better on better. And the gap between being consistent and changing every year just gets wider and wider. So I think, if I quote this correctly, I think it was like a four times multiple, wasn't it Became a seven and a half times multiple when you Looked over three years. So, you know, as a CMO or senior marketer, you're just getting more and more return the longer you stick at it, which I think is.

[B]

And then take out all those production costs, right.

[A]

Take out all the time, put that into media.

[B]

And that's not even factored into that. Right. So what we're saying is you'd be, you'd, not only would you get a significantly greater multiple of impact, you'd be getting it for a lot less investment.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, so no, I think it's very important work and I think what it means for marketers is they have to go into that campaign mindset not with a six month mindset, but with a let's create a banger that will last for five years. Or let's be spec savers, you know what I mean?

[A]

Totally, totally. Yeah. The brands, I pre quote them too much, but I love Yorkshire Tea as a great example, you know, so they, they only make a new ad every, I think to maybe three years.

[B]

But straight off the same production line, exactly the same.

[A]

It's like a Yorkshire celebrity. It's in the factory accents, are there cups of tea, are there, the reds there, logos there, the jokes are there. You know what I mean? It's just like all there, it's just fresh and they, they've grown. I think I'm quoting Don correctly, but I think from about 13% up to about 40%. And in the tea category and the other nice thing about that is nothing else changed. It's like a category with three brands. It's been flat or slightly declining forever. Price has been the same.

[B]

Well, it's funny I'm smiling because during the talking can, because when you're on these stages, it's giant black space with like 800 people there. And again, I'd have thought halfway through it, which is we talked about KitKat and I knew KitKat was one of my examples cause I'm a huge fan of it, right. And I know the campaign has been running for 40 odd years, right. But what I suddenly thought, I bet you they've had the same agency. And I said, is YL here? Who's the global marketing director? I said, Yl, are you here? And it's just like this black void. And he went, love you, Mark, from the distance. And I said, how long have you worked with this agency? And he said, from the start. How long is that? He's like 47 years. So it's that idea of everything stays consistent back to, you know, that compound creativity point it runs against everything that we're doing at the moment. Let's bring in new agencies, let's have lots of different talent, let's do something quickly for two days. And then, you know, it's not the way to do it. You know, whether you like it.

[A]

You're right. Yorkshire tea. Lucky generals. 10 years. Over 10 years. Another brilliant example is Audi with Kevin the carrot. I mean, that's McCann.

[B]

Who's that? That's McCann.

[A]

That's McCann. McCann, Manchester. That's, I think, close to 10 years.

[B]

VCCP and Cadbury. And Cadbury have been knocking on for a long time and it just.

[A]

Every single year, it just. I mean, because we test Aussie's work every single year and it's amazing because they get like a flipping 5.9 at Christmas and every single year they phone us up and go, how the hell do we beat this? I mean, we're like, well, we've got to invent a new scale. You don't. Right. But how do you stay at the top? And they are so. So they understand how it works so well now that every joke, every bit of branding, every way of telling the story, they've done it so scientifically now that they literally can predict it from January through December. They know. They know they're going to get a five point.

[B]

It's amazing. I mean, why else point at KitKat is it takes real skill not to change stuff. Yeah, yeah. It really does take an enormous effort to stop people meddling with it. You know, I mean, and his predecessors have all been doing that for decades and I think that's the. That's the philosophy 100.

[A]

And look, we should. There isn't an awards for not changing, but I think there should be.

[B]

There should be. It's one of the most important factors.

[A]

Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, we've been talking a lot about creative, but we shouldn't forget to talk about everything else in the mix. I was going to ask you, do you. What's the split of marketers that own. Actually own the whole 4Ps?

[B]

It's a really interesting. It's a really interesting question. Yeah. It's been done in the CMO survey in the UK and Australia. But the question is wrong. So the question asks, and forgive me if I don't get this exactly right, which of the following processes does you and your team have direct control of? And the problem I have with that question is I don't. I don't think anyone would vote for marketers should control pricing or marketers should control distribution. Or marketers should even control product development, right? My point is they should be involved in it and have a seat at that table and bring value to it. So if you go back to that question of who controls it, it's sub 10%. And then in advertising terms, of course, that's what they all control. But again, you could even argue they don't even control that because ultimately there's an agency involved and other partners. But yeah, it hovers around 20 to 10% for the other 3Ps. Now, the other complication is it's the best companies, however, that are in that 10, 20%. If you look at a P and G structure and you talk to P and G about how they do it, the brand manager role does have, again, not control, but direct input into new product development, product innovation, into the pricing process, and certainly into distribution. So, yeah, I get very tired of modern marketers who come from badly run marketing companies and who don't have any training in marketing saying it's unrealistic to say that marketers can involve themselves in price. It doesn't happen that way. And I'm like, it doesn't happen in your company because you don't work for P and G who know how to do it properly. But I do think the misnomer here is marketers should be in charge of pricing. Definitely not, right? But when we're not involved with the research and with the communications around price, it is a massive negative impact. The prices are therefore almost always going to be lower because we've set prices based on cost, we've set them based on dumb competitors, we've erred on the side of volume rather than value. And if you just had a decent bit of research from the target market, you would find a significant difference in the price you would go for. And then even worse, if you had marketers who knew pricing involved in pricing, the way we would communicate a price and frame it and anchor it and change it would allow us to again, control a much better margin. If you want to summarize all of this down, it's when I was talking with Pete Weinberg from, from Evidence yesterday about this. He thought I was full of shit for at least 10 years. Because I'd say to him, pricing is the most important thing, right? Bullshit. And now he's got his own company. He's like, oh my God, it's so important. I'm like, I told you.

[A]

And it drops the bottom line. This is the thing.

[B]

I mean, so, yeah, there's a couple. There's only three things to Remember, Right. Number one, it's all about profitability. I have no respect for anyone who makes revenue. Right. I could sell this table here for 10 bucks. Right. It costs $200. Anyone can make revenue. Right? That's, that's not impressive. Show me profit. Yeah, so one, it's about profit. Following from that point, the single biggest driver of corporate profitability is price. It's not cost, it's not sales, it's price. We've got 50 years of research on this. There's no doubt that the big lever to pull is price. Yeah. And the third and most important factor is the thing that drives price is basically marketing in brackets, relative differentiation, not distinctiveness, but perceived differentiation on the part of the brand drives the thing that drives the thing. Right. So that's why I need marketers involved in that shit.

[A]

100%. I've seen that in my career. Like it blows your mind as a marketer when you don't know that. And then you go, right, put a 5% price increase through and suddenly you're like, wow, like margin's gone up 20%, I've suddenly got more budget to spend.

[B]

We do, we do exactly the same thing when we run a simulation at the end of the mini pain brand management and one of the things they control is price. And one of the complaints you get at the end of the course is if you, if you screw up price, everything goes wrong.

[A]

Everything goes wrong.

[B]

And I'm like, yeah, I know, I know. That's your lesson from the simulation, right. It doesn't just go a little bit wrong. Yeah, you completely, you either get no sales or you make no money. 100%, you know, I mean, yeah, that's.

[A]

You need to experience, you've got to go through that. I mean I was at, I worked at Britvic 13 years and so I saw a lot of annual planning cycles and we got in this trap every single year. We got in the promotional drug, right? So we do deals with Tesco, Sainsbury's, half price for Pepsi on the gondola end. Right. Because we got addicted to the in year kind of drugs.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah. You know what I mean? And every year it was so competitive, we put a 1 or 2% price increase through. Because what happens is your biggest discretionary spend is your marketing investment. Right. So marketing I think when I started was something like nine and a half percent of revenue by the time I left four and a half, that's it in that ten year period. So we'd literally gone from probably a competitively branded, marketed brand to one that was kind of getting around sort of traded commodity territory, by the way, which.

[B]

Of course then hurts differentiation, which of course then hurts your ability to get price premium, which means you have to give more discounts to maintain distribution and on it.

[A]

Correct. And the moment I realized what we'd done was I did some research on Robinson squash up against own label and own label on product quality matched U.S. sensory performance. Because what happened is we'd had to engineer the product down to a price point to protect our margin because we'd taken, you know, you're becoming a commodity. We were trading. Exactly. And so we'd basically lost our competitive advantage over those 10 years.

[B]

And the thing that I think should guide most marketers on this is almost all of the sales boost you get from that initial promotion are just sales that you, that you're pulling forward.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

So what you're effectively doing is pulling all of your future sales forward at a much lower margin. And then of course, you've also taught yourself that the only way to get a boost in sales is through a discount. So you walk into that next quarter, there isn't any demand. So what do you do? You press the button again. And you know, it's, it's a tragedy that we don't recognize this cycle. You know what I mean? It's, there's not even a sales boost there. And the other point I always try and make with clients is you're going to piss off every single client that paid full price. And the old school literature from the 18th century is that price is a bond between two people, right. I sell it to you for this and you agree to buy it at that. But then you've gone and broken that bond and there's all that sounds very old fashioned and frilly shirt that matters. You know, when people find out, oh, someone got it for less than me. What's, you know, there's something wrong with this. What's going, you know what I mean? It is such an. I get so much shit about this. But when I do the pricing module on mini mba, it basically boils down to never discount. Now that doesn't mean charge Chanel prices. It means do your research, peg your price, communicate and defend it. And lose a few sales to defend that price point. And don't monkey with it, right? And people go, well it's, you know, they go, yeah, okay, but it's not that quite that simple. It is that simple, you know, and you've got to talk to guys that have worked for businesses like yours where they've gone down that toilet to understand why it's imperative. And then one thing I did, we launched Mini MBA very early because it was launched into a business that usually did magazine sales and conferences, right? And early bird specials, right? And they did some form of early bird special. You know, if you sign up for Mini MBA in the next two weeks, it's half price. And I, I found the person responsible for that. And I, I, I was as, as, as bad as I've ever been in a meeting, right? And I wanted the word to spread. Don't ever fucking do that again, ever, ever again. Not even like without my permission. Just don't ever do that again because I'm not an amateur. And this isn't how we do this business. Fuck all your other businesses with this shit. Carry on. Enjoy it. Right? Destroy them. Do not bring that amateur shit here because it embarrasses me. You know what I mean? Yeah, totally. And that's a horrible thing to do. But if you know what happens to a business, you know, the worst thing you'll ever see is a, is a brand that launches with a half price. Bog off. Early bird special. You're slapping the baby when it's born.

[A]

That's it. You stuck with that. And then, and then, of course, the other dynamic is your competitor feels compelled to respond. The retailers laughing, always the bank. I mean, we had this crazy situation. I think, I think it's on Pepsi where Tesco were increasing their margin on promotion. It wasn't just holding the margin, they were asking for more margin.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Like you take your gross margin with gross margin down from 30% to like 2%, you know, scratchy, right, I know. And you just work out the maths. You got to sell like 600 times. It becomes, you know, a whole truck every, like every hour in every store or something.

[B]

I've worked with B2B companies where it's taken us about two weeks. We've realized that by the time you apply all the various discounts and trade discounts to blue sheet pricing and off blue sheet pricing, they're losing, you know, 20 grand for every ton of product they sell. And that realization that, like, you know, literally the more you sell of this, the more money you're gonna lose, you know, and it's like this is the mess people get into with price, you know, so, yeah, no, I think there's a huge. And I think the things marketers struggle with is they don't realize no one else knows this, right? The only people that can measure value from a consumer point of view are marketers. And if you're not doing it, the company of these very smart, apparently brilliant finance guys are gonna get it completely wrong. Because pricing is and always has been a marketing endeavor. Right?

[A]

Completely.

[B]

So, yeah. The long answer to a short question. Yeah. Most marketers are not involved in pricing and nor should they be because they have no training in pricing. Right. They're basically communications people, but they should be. And they can have an enormous difference on the company.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, this is where I think FMCG kind of leads the way because I know it does most of my career. And you'd own the strap plan, the brand plan. In the brand plan, you had to answer the question about what the price should be, competitive price, all that kind of thing.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Now, someone else might do the research, the sales team might implement it in a price change, but you own that plan.

[B]

Same with distribution. Right. Same with product. You look at the Diageo boys and girls who are among the best in the world. They're not in charge of product, but they have a massive involvement in that process. Right.

[A]

So we've done market orientation, we've solved the creative pay, we've done pricing. Right. What else are marketers not getting right, in your opinion?

[B]

Look, the main one remains the absence of strategy. Right. So they're going into things with a tactical, fire fighting mindset. You know, I'll start with comms and then I'll worry about, you know, this particular issue we're having this week. And of course, none of it is driven from a central repository of clear strategy. And strategy isn't complicated. Bain and McKinsey made it complicated so they could make money from you. But it's in marketing, it's very simple. Right. We need to be clear on target, clear on position, clear on objectives. Right. And with those three things decided, all the answers to all the questions you face for the year will almost immediately become apparent. You know what I mean?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Without them, you will make a series of decisions that are not connected together. The brand will not be clear, it will not be differentiated, it won't be as successful as it could be. And you will be busier because you don't know the answer to any of the questions. So you have to keep trying to work it out. So if there's one thing you want marketers to really grasp, it's the need to do strategy before tactics. Yeah. Because if you come back to, you know, it's a cliche, but we should mention it, strategy comes from the Greek word for General strategos. Tactics comes from the Greek word for arranging shit, which is tactikos. And the point the Greeks were making 3,000 years ago is that you essentially make your strategy and then you arrange your troops according to the strategy, right? And today what that means is you get your strategy for your brand, right? And then you arrange the pricing and product development distribution in accordance with that strategic approach. And it, you know, the number of times that's clear. I mean, I beat it into the mini MBA classes that, you know, you don't move until you have a strategy. You better off delaying these tactical choices. Doesn't take that long to get your strategic answer. And your strategic answer is never perfect. You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't know what the right answer is every time, but what I do know is you need to have that clarity to answer the tactical questions, you know, so for me, I think that's the one that. And again it is bred into the Diageo and the P and G guys at an early stage in their careers, right? In your plan you have your strategy and then it leads to this. The market is despair for. And there's more and more of them is we have these product marketers and these growth marketers and these digital marketers, they're all well meaning, very bright people, but they've invented these horseshit terms that are all wrong and the wrong way around. And as a result, I despair with this ideal customer portrait, right? The icp, right. It's a terrible thing to do because you've gone straight to this is my ideal customer without doing segmentation or targeting properly. You know what I mean?

[A]

Because everyone define their role by the tactic, don't they? Not by the strategy. And the other thing I've discovered when I've led larger teams is that so everyone owns their tactic and then every year basically want to do the same thing, add 10%. So you end up implementing exactly the same thing. The system repeats itself. No one steps back and goes, what do we need to do differently? And can we put our resources behind the thing that's going to make bigger things?

[B]

No, It's a super important point, right? If you look at the best 10% of marketers each year, they start with the question, what did we learn last year? And to your point, what will we do differently, right? But even what we will do differently comes after what have we learned, right? If you do that for 30 years as a marketer, you get pretty good, right? And we work for the CMOs that have done that. They're not smarter than anyone else, but they've learned on the game and evolved. Right. All the other marketers are like to your point. Yeah, let's do some more of this. Oh, it's a new year. Let's get going and spend more money. Right. So yeah, learning and learning from strategy, learning what did and didn't work is, is right up there, especially at the early phase in your career because it sets you on the right path, you know.

[A]

Yeah. Now we're going to get together back in December to review the year. We're in August now, which would be good. What surprised you so far this year?

[B]

What's.

[A]

What's been the. Apart from Sydney Sweeney in her jeans that wasn't expecting that.

[B]

I think it's an interesting economy in the sense that, you know, it's hard to know where we are with Trump and tariffs and everything else, but it feels relatively robust. I thought it would be more bouncy, more like last year, but it does feel like it isn't the greatest time in the economic history of the world, but it's relatively stable. I didn't expect that. I've been surprised at the degree to which the tech boys are selling AI in a really poor way. I think that's been my biggest surprise. So AI is, you know, as we go for these evolutions, becoming more and more astonishing. La la la. But the process by which they're being branded and sold is pretty shit. Right. If you step back and look at I upgraded to ChatGPT 5, you know, I don't know what I was upgrading from. I don't know which other packages I'm also currently using or meant to use. I don't know what does what. One of the reasons I use AI is to work out which one can create video. They all seem to do it and none of us. I ask AI. Right. And then when you buy the thing for, you know, $52.99 on a special deal, you get this, you know, and also buy this photography app for $12. Now it's like it's a dirty, very low end way to sell high end tech, is it not? So I'm very surprised at the moment with how shit it all is. Not the product, which is astonishing, but the way these tech bros are selling it and marketing it and their brand architecture, it's a shit show, right?

[A]

It is totally.

[B]

So I wonder if it does suggest that at some point an Apple style new, a new company, no one's going Amazon and these guys aren't going to win. It's not how this cycle works. Right. But I don't think it necessarily is chat GPT. You know what I mean? Like I wonder if there's someone or something else yet to appear that does what Apple did with with mobile handsets and goes no, no, no, no, that's not how you do it.

[A]

Yeah. This, it might, it might be Jony I've with his collaboration.

[B]

It might be. But I think those geniuses are all a busted flush in this universe. Right. We forget how old we are and how old. Much older. Jony I've is right. This is not the kingdom of old men. Do you know what I mean?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's a new. Just as when Google came in, two immigrant, you know, smarty pants PhD students changed everything and it wasn't Yahoo and it wasn't Microsoft. Right. It has to play that way again. It'll come from China.

[A]

I think you're right. It smacks of no marketer being involved in process because it's almost like those situations where you're working on a secret project in a company and you codename it something that no one understands and no one gets to hear about it. And then they just went and didn't bother doing anything and that was in there. Yeah. This confusion continues into the market. I actually launched it. I'll do it.

[B]

It would be an interesting bit of research. Right. To see does anyone really know what. What current AI products they're paying for.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because I'm pretty sure nobody does. Right. That it's all over the. It's just a show of stuff. And yet despite that. Yeah. I become more and more convinced of the eventual impact it will have. You know, but I think eventual is an important word too. It's a. It's a 2000-30s thing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Right. These guys with their prompts and all that. Right. And again there's an old joke about it, but it's true. The people that were, you know, there's a cartoon about expert that was selling you NFTs now becomes AI experts. Right. It's true. The first question you have with any AI expert is what were you doing three years ago? Right. Because you've become an expert awfully quickly. Yeah. And also do I need an expert given its AI? Why don't I just ask the AI? You know, so these guys that are sort of inserting themselves with their prompts and you know, it's all going to get washed away and it's going to get washed away by big system thinking. I work with Evidenza on synthetic data through AI And I get so annoyed about every week someone on LinkedIn goes, so I did a head to head between synthetic Data by asking ChatGPT a few questions, comparing it to an actual survey of humans, and it's way off, right? And you're like, it's like me saying, I took up the banjo on Monday and, and here I am on Friday telling you banjo music is. Doesn't even sound good, you know what I mean? Like, obviously the way AI is going to work is not some loser in his underpants sitting there banging stuff on his own for four hours into ChatGPT. That's not what we mean here, right? There is a new revolution where, where the. I know, I know how synthetic data is generated and it's by a team of very smart people who use multiple tools in a massive architecture, right, to get what they get, right? That's only the start of it. So I think that's, you know, that's where we get to. We're not anywhere near it yet. So again, all these buffoons talking about agentic stuff, you know, I'm here doing it at the moment. It's not possible, right? Agent stuff doesn't work, nor will it work for a long time, right? It may work to order you a pizza maybe, right? But the minute you have two or three nodes of interaction where you depend on data, driving data, a quick hallucinogenic moment and we're off ordering, you know, 40 foot pizzas, right? So the agent thing isn't ready yet. And when that comes, that's the moment that it begins, but it's not here yet. And I think about you remember this, remember the Star Trek movie where they went back to Earth? The original Shatner stuff, right? Remember they're all on a bus and stuff. And this is great scene in it where Scotty comes into a computer room and wants to control things as the chief engineer. And he says, and he looks around, he says, computer, can you put up on the screen, you know, the dimensions? And the woman engineer looks at him and says, no, no. And she shows him the mouse and he picks up the mouse and he goes, computer, and starts talking to the mouse, right? But that's a very prescient moment because it's only when you and I can say to the AI in the room, in the atmosphere, you know, order me the pizza and tell me what time we need to be at such and such, you know, and it just becomes out there, do you know what I mean? It has to be released from the text and it's getting There now, to be fair, but it's got a ways to go.

[A]

It has marketing approach needs, a proper consumer need and a solution that's simple, that's well branded, understood. I mean, talking. I get to talk to a lot of people on this and like behind the scenes, the thing everyone's, they're building the tools ahead of the data. So data quality is what everyone's worried about because it isn't good enough data to make good decisions. So the technology, the agent technology is there, but it's being trained on poor data. That's the next.

[B]

Yeah, it's partly true. It's really interesting you say that. So one of the things we've been looking at is the disparity between synthetic data and human data when it's done properly. So if you look right now at Evidenza, the correlations are at 0.8, 0.85 and people say, well, that's not 100, the value is all in the last 0.1 and all that bullshit. But there's a big problem with that. And the problem is the assumption that the human data is correct.

[A]

Where home data doesn't correlate to human data, it doesn't.

[B]

And so I'll give you a good example. Yesterday I'm looking at data from an engineer and he's showing me how where AI performs worst with synthetic data is when it's asked questions about predicting future human behavior. So we've looked at it, you know, we were constantly running tests. Where does the synthetic data fall short? The real weak point is, is when you ask questionnaire, you know, will you lose weight next year? And will, you know, will you stop drinking next year and stuff? Way off there. And I said to the engineer, it's not way off, it's probably way on. What you're seeing is notoriously human research. And we taught this 30 years ago in questionnaire design. When you ask a consumer to speculate on the future, they're always way off. What's happening is the AI data is correct and the human is now varying way off into the stratosphere. And I remember the guy from Kantar that does all the stuff on survey errors, who's a genius, saying to me the reason surveys are mostly flawed isn't because of fraud or any of that. It's because people get bored after 10 questions and just click D. And so what I'm passionate about at the moment is stopping people from going, oh, you know, it's 20% different from the human answer, so therefore it's 20% wrong. No, you've got to get onto a new footing now. An alien footing where the AI is right and the human stuff is fallible. Do you know what I mean? It's funny, programming, training the machine now to do the planning. A lot of the time we just replicate what me and you would have done 10 years ago, building brand plans. But there are lots of moments where we sit in a room and we go, we don't need to do all of that. We can just get it to do Bing Wang Wong in a very strange alien way that humans couldn't do. And we'd get a much better answer. And you tread occasionally into this new alien world of how things can be done more accurately. A good example is one of the things that comes out of the system is a really good segmentation in B2B. It produces a firm based segmentation. Then for each target segment, it gives you a very good portrait of what the firm is, but also of who makes the decision in the buying committee. Then their headshots appear. If it's the CTO and the CFO are the two decision makers, their headshots appear and then you can just talk to them about how they make the decision, what they think, what they're going to do next. They sit there blinking and you can go back to them in a month's time and ask them more questions. So you start to get into places where you're like, holy shit, this is a new thing we're doing.

[A]

It is. I mean, what I love about that as well is it's solving the harder research questions. Not the easy ones. It is actually the difficult to reach people. You know, the highly technical decision making, you know, the complex industries, the highly.

[B]

Regulated, didn't have the data, you know.

[A]

Yeah. Exactly where it would have taken you six months and a PhD to figure out that. That's the, that's the beauty of it.

[B]

Well, or even, even worse, you just meet all these B2B companies that just can't do it. Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, working with pharma, pharma executives in rare diseases. Right. Where they just couldn't have got the data for ethical or practical reasons. And you're like, how much data would you like to. There's no ethical issues, there's no market access issues. You know, you can. And It'll take exactly 20 seconds to get it. And they can't believe it. Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But the tests are great. It's accurate. So it's. That that revolution is, is fascinating. Right. And it's very deliberate. Companies like evidence have picked B2B. There's more money there. There's, as you say, there's almost. There's complexity there. I mean, I can run a focus group for two grand. Yeah, you know, okay, I can have a synthetic one, but two grand is not interesting. A pharma company will spend a million dollars on a piece of really bad, inaccurate research, you know, I mean, that's where the money is, you know, 100.

[A]

Well, mate, it's been really good to catch up. Can't wait to catch up in December.

[B]

And we'll see what happens.

[A]

Right, well, you do your every year, you do your big 10 moments.

[B]

We do the 10 big marketing moments. Obviously there's a couple already. We can mention a certain young woman in her jeans already and we try and talk about, you know, what are the lessons for us at the end of the year. And then we normally get massively drunk at a party in London, which I think is on the cut.

[A]

There we go. Look forward to it, mate. That'll be our next stop.

[B]

Sounds good, mate.

[A]

Good. See you. 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'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 Xensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next.