Rory Sutherland and Tom Goodwin Fix Marketing (Part 1)

Summary

---

Uncensored CMO with Jon Evans

Rory Sutherland and Tom Goodwin Fix Marketing (Part 1)

Date: May 20, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this special episode, Jon Evans brings together two of the most influential and outspoken thinkers in marketing—Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy Vice Chairman, behavioral economics champion) and Tom Goodwin (author, commentator, and digital provocateur). The conversation is a freewheeling, insightful, and often satirical exploration of what’s broken (and what still works) in marketing today, from the paralysis of choice and the dilution of creativity to the struggles of agencies, brands, and clients. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Overload of Consumer Choice and Brand Value

• Tom Goodwin opens by pointing out how "to be alive today is to be overwhelmed" by abundance and choice, declaring, "More choice is not a good thing" (01:51).
  • He describes a move away from the likes of Amazon toward shopping environments with constrained choice, such as Costco, where, “you just want one [bread] that’s good enough.”
• Rory Sutherland links this to decision science, noting how platforms like Amazon and eBay actually practice quiet choice reduction, making it “quite hard to find page two of the search results,” because past a certain point, consumer confidence collapses with too many options (02:28).
• Rory: “If you are overexposed to options, your confidence that you’ve made a decision you won’t regret diminishes with the profusion of choice.”
• Both highlight that effective branding and advertising act as a coping mechanism for consumer decision fatigue.

The Role of Simplicity & Product “Easter Eggs”

• Tom proposes that advertising should focus more on reassurance and simple architectures—names and labels that make decision-making easy, such as “good, better, best” (03:57).
• Rory shares stories of product “Easter eggs”—personal touches or surprising details that delight customers, like a toaster with a “just a little bit more” button (04:54).
• Tom adds stories about his Mercedes’ “inflating seat,” a delight never advertised.
• Both agree these small features have outsized impact, yet go unnoticed or unmarketed.

The Unique Selling Proposition (USP) Revisited

• Rory defends the old-school USP approach, arguing that it not only draws attention to a unique benefit but plays on loss aversion: “it makes a very big deal of the one thing you won’t get if you buy the product from someone else” (06:33).
• Jon shares his idea for a Domino’s “panic button”—a way to eliminate overwhelming dinner choice by enabling quick, pre-selected orders (07:08).
• All reference examples of “choice architecture” like Amazon Dash buttons, push-for-champagne in hotels, and loyalty programs as means of simply managing decisions.

Advertising’s Role Beyond Ads (& The Problem with Over-Complexity)

• Both Rory and Tom bemoan the tendency of brands—especially engineering-led or over-matrixed companies—to make product lines unreadably complicated, using Dyson’s bewildering lineup as an example (11:54).
• They stress the need for advertising thinkers to represent “the normal person,” translating complexity into things real people understand, and favoring simplicity and intuition over internal logic.

The “Paradox of Choice” and Design

• Rory delves into the misunderstood “paradox of choice,” arguing it depends heavily on context (“World of Jam” vs. supermarket), and bemoans how creativity is rarely channeled into things like menu design or screen interfaces which are crucial to customer experience (14:58).
• He calls for new client roles like “Director of Choice Architecture” or even “Director of Trivia,” who'd fix everyday irritations that slip through the cracks.

The Shift to Performance Metrics and Short-termism

• Tom gives a potted history: pre-2005 wisdom—clarity, ease, memorability, broad brand-building—remains relevant (24:15). The internet added powerful short-term targeting for some (e.g. Uber, Shopify), but the error was making “performance marketing” the default playbook for all, even legacy brands.
• “Almost everything for a big company today when it comes to advertising, almost everything that worked in 1970 would still work a lot better than anything the [new companies] are doing,” says Tom (26:50).
• Rory laments the rise of the media agency and the quantification craze, noting even Google admits “breakthrough creative” is what moves the needle (26:59).
  • “10% of what you do in creative advertising delivers about 95% of the value… Large part of your job is to look for those amazing outlier effects.” (28:17)
• Performance marketers win internal arguments with concrete projections on ROI, out-gunning creative proposals (“we should do sponsorship… we kind of know it works”) despite creativity’s proven long-tail impact (29:49).

The Myth of Marketing Predictability and the Role of Serendipity

• Rory and Tom stress that marketing is “fat tailed”—meaning breakthroughs and value are unpredictable and sporadic, not evenly distributed.
• The Dulux dog anecdote (31:12): a billion-dollar brand property created by accident when a dog wandered into a photoshoot.
• Tom notes that attempts to codify these successes retroactively (e.g., always put a dog in the ad) miss the messy reality of what works.

The Neglect of Taglines, Emotion, and Equity

• All bemoan the demise of memorable taglines, jingles, and long-term brand assets—referencing “Avis: We try harder,” “The world’s favourite airline” (British Airways), “Should’ve gone to Specsavers” (32:20).
• They acknowledge Orlando Wood’s work (“Look out”) proving the superior mnemonic and emotional value of such devices.

Why Creativity Struggles in Agencies

• Financial short-sightedness and arm’s-length relationships erode the value of strategic or creative thinking. Agencies capture little upside for breakthrough ideas (e.g. “Share a Coke”—Ogilvy Australia got AU$350,000 for a billion-dollar idea) (33:12).
• The industry is “extractive”—layers of admin and process extract value from those actually creating breakthrough work (62:37).
• The perverse impact of billing by the hour and the separation of media/creative (“turned a full-service solution into a Mongolian buffet”) (59:00–59:40).

The Power of Founder or Family-Owned Companies

• Both highlight that founder-led or family-owned businesses excel at long-term brand-building because they can operate over many time frames and remain closer to their customers. Most 2024 IPA Gold winners were such companies (41:00–41:48).
• Tom recites the characteristics: frontline focus, bias for action, owner’s mentality (44:01).
• Rory: “What are PLCs actually doing for us as consumers? I'm fucked if I know.” (43:58)

Creativity and Surprise – the Often-Missing Secret

• The panel explores the role of surprise in advertising, arguing it amplifies emotional impact by up to four times (50:08).
• They recount stories of positive surprise—including hotels.com support agents and businesses calling back missed calls (51:38).
• Tom proposes maybe great ads are actually simple: “Explain the product nicely, have a tagline, use memorable music, add a bit of surprise” (52:29). The challenge is agencies overcomplicating and over-processing out anything genuinely interesting or human.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Choice

  • Tom: “To be alive today is to be overwhelmed. We live in the age of abundance where more choice is not a good thing.” (01:51)
  • Rory: “If you are overexposed to options, your confidence that you’ve made a decision you’re not going to regret diminishes with the profusion of choice.” (02:44)

• On Branding Simplicity

  • Tom: “Just have a simple choice architecture: good, better, best. To have something with a name that makes sense for people to not actually know that much about it, but know it’s good enough…” (04:33)

• On the Value of USP

  • Rory: “USP also works through loss aversion… It was probably cleverer than we realized at the time.” (06:33)

• On Agency Insularity

  • Tom: “The beautiful thing about working in advertising is it’s your job to represent a normal person looking at everyday things.” (11:55)

• On “Fat Tail” Logic

  • Rory: “10% of what you do in creative advertising delivers about 95% of the value… job is to look for those amazing outlier effects…” (28:17)

• On Agency Value Distribution

  • Rory: “As a marketer you are held responsible for every penny of cost, but when you hit those extraordinary breakthroughs, you don’t get to claim much of the upside.” (33:12)

• On The Paradox of Short-Term Thinking

  • Jon: “The short pays off today, the long pays off after I’ve been fired.” (37:19)

• On the Power of Family Businesses

  • Rory: “Family-owned businesses can operate over multiple time frames simultaneously. PLCs are not capable either of meaningful innovation or of brand building.” (41:48)

• On Surprise

  • Jon: “Surprise accentuates emotion by up to four times.” (50:08)
  • Rory: “It’s difficult to be rationally surprising. What you’ve got to do is you’ve got to be arbitrary and subjective.” (53:23)
  • Tom: “Maybe it’s not that difficult. Maybe if you’re making ads… you explain it in a nice way, have a tagline, music, a call to action and a big surprise.” (52:29)

---

Segment Timestamps

• Choice Overload & Brands as Filters (01:48–04:00)
• Product “Easter Eggs” & Delight (04:54–06:33)
• USP, Loss Aversion, and Choice Architecture (06:33–09:00)
• Advertising, Simplicity, and Complexity (10:00–14:00)
• The Paradox of Choice & Digital vs. In-Person (14:58–18:00)
• Shift to Performance Marketing and its Limits (24:15–29:00)
• Creativity, Fat Tails, and Luck in Breakthroughs (28:17–32:00)
• Taglines, Mnemonics & Orlando Wood (32:20–33:30)
• Agency/Client Value Distribution & Equity (33:12–37:00)
• Short-termism and Career Incentives (37:19–41:00)
• Founder-led vs. PLC Brand Building (41:00–44:00)
• Frontline, Bias for Action, Owner’s Mentality (44:01–46:00)
• Surprise, Experience & Expectation Setting (46:00–52:00)
• Creativity vs. Overcomplication (52:29–57:20)
• Extractive Industry, Bureaucracy, and Agency Pains (59:00–61:00)
• State of Creative Industry & Solutions (62:06–62:58)

---

Takeaways

• Choice paralysis is real and brands must help consumers by simplifying decisions—not amplifying options.
• Simplicity—of choices, product features, and messaging— is more valuable than ever. Delight can come from small touches (“Easter eggs”) that reinforce distinctive brand memory.
• Founder-led and family businesses consistently nurture real brand equity; they invest for the long term because it’s their own capital and legacy at stake.
• Advertising’s classical wisdom (taglines, mnemonics, fame, surprise) still works—in fact, it’s underused amidst today’s obsession with real-time data and ROI precision.
• Agency economics and corporate structures undermine creativity, starving the system of upside while loading it with admin and process.
• Long-term brand equity is always harder to attribute than short-term wins. The best marketing makes life easier for the next person in the role and invests in brand “luck.”
• Surprise and delight are exponential in emotional effect and can be engineered cheaply and at all levels of the organization.
• Ultimately, marketing remains a blend of art and probabilistic luck—and the industry’s greatest risk is overestimating its own ability to engineer outcomes.

---

End of Part 1. Part 2 to follow in the next episode.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, everyone. Just before we get into the show, I just wanted to give a really big shout out to my founding sponsor, System One. As many of you know, I worked at System One, and before that I was actually a client of theirs. Now, the thing I love about System One is when I need to make a big decision, they have been there to help me. Because what System One does is use the power of emotion to help predict the likely impact of my innovation or advertising. So when I've been stuck in the boardroom needing to justify why we're going to pick one creative route over another or launch this innovation over that one, it has been indispensable. It's also really simple to use. Very actionable and incredibly good value, too. So if you want to find out more about System One's Test yout Add or Test yout Innovation, simply go over to systemone group.com and find out more. Okay, without further ado, let's go on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Unsensed the cmo. Now, what would happen if we took two of the most popular guests of all time on the podcast, put them together in the same room and let them talk for as long as they wanted about the biggest questions in marketing? That's exactly what I did with my next two guests, Rory Sutherland and Tom Goodwin, and the result was amazing. Now, we do talk for quite a while. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to split this episode into two. This is the first part, and then tune in again next week and you'll get the second part. It's absolute gold. You don't want to miss this. So, Tom, you often talk about digital overload, don't you, and the amount that's going on at the moment? And I know, Rory, you're very good at kind of mental shortcuts and how people make decisions. And something I've noticed is, like, the amount of choice customers have to make now is just insane, right? We're just making more than we ever have done.

[B]

But there's definitely something here. I mean, I think to be alive today is to be overwhelmed. And I think we live in the age of abundance where we haven't realized that more choice is not a good thing. I think the first thing people use is a brand to make sure they're not making a bad decision. And the second thing is, personally, I now shop in places where they have less selection. I'm not a big fan of Amazon because you're surrounded by millions of identical products. I really like Shopping in the real world now, because inventory is limited by what they can put on shelf. Therefore, if you go to somewhere like Costco, it's amazing because you don't actually need a million different types of bread to buy. You just want one that's good enough. And that's my way of dealing with it.

[C]

Although it's interesting that I suppose both Amazon and ebay and the other retailers, in a sense, practice choice reduction, in that generally they make it quite hard to find page two of the search results. And I've always wondered that if you're buying a toaster, okay, choosing between maybe 18, 24 toasters, that's a tolerable mental effort. You can pick it on a few variables like color and so on. Once you get down to page two or page three and you've now got. You've now looked at 75, you've reached a level of paralysis where, I mean, there are various ways in which you explain it, one of which is that people like making a decision where they minimize the risk of regret. Yes, I wish I hadn't done that. And the same probably applies to things like Tinder. You see, if you are overexposed to options, effectively your confidence that you've made a decision that you're not going to subsequently regret diminishes with profusion of choice. But it is kind of fascinating. I mean, you could argue that that was partly how the USP worked. We focus on the one thing that our product has that nobody else's product has. We amplify that thing to. To an extent where it suddenly obtains a very large importance in your mind, because if you're paying attention to it, it becomes important. And therefore, effectively what you've done is, you said, this is what makes this unique. Which is therefore effectively translates into you can now feel comfortable buying it.

[B]

Which I think is weird because I actually think there's a whole school of advertising which could help people in this regard. Because we've always thought advertising is about saying everything about a product, which makes it really exciting. Actually, I think there's a level of advertising thought that could go into the art of making people feel better about decisions they're about to make, even down to things like the name of something. Like, if anyone ever shops for a printer, yes, it's incredibly boring. It's full of numbers that don't really mean anything to you, and then you end up confused. If there was just a printer called, like the best fucking printer for your

[C]

house, it can be a shit printer if it doesn't drop off the WI fi. That's the best printer as far as I'm concerned.

[B]

Just have a simple choice architecture of good. Better, best.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

To just have something with a name that makes sense for people to not actually know that much about it, but know it's good enough. I think these are all things for advertising types of people to think about.

[C]

They're also, I think, I think there's something there that can inform new product development.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

In the sense that adding what you might call Easter eggs to a product. So I'm eternally grateful. The wonderful art when I. When I sort of help. Help the people launch flat white or fuck off. I. The wonderful people at Sage gave me a dual boiler coffee machine. They really didn't have need to. Okay. So I. Obviously my reciprocation bias kicked in and when I needed to replace our toaster, I looked at Sage toasters. One of them has a button entitled Just a little bit more. Yeah. So your toast pops up. It actually serves two functions, which is this crumpet isn't quite brown enough. But I don't want to toast it twice. It'll come out looking like it's been cremated. Or else. The other problem is, you see, you put the toaster on, you wander off, you get distracted, you come back, the toast is cold. So you can just put the little bit more button on your Sage toaster and then effectively it revives what would otherwise be a rather sad piece of toast.

[B]

This Easter egg thinking should be everywhere.

[C]

Easter egg thinking is, I used to have a Mercedes.

[B]

It was quite an old one, but it was a really fancy one one. And when you went around a corner, half of the seat interior on the seat would inflate and as a result you felt like you were on a mission to Mars or something every time you drove anywhere.

[C]

So the squab of the seat would basically inflate.

[B]

It had sort of airbags that came in and one side would inflate massively when you went around the corner one way. And it just made it incredibly thrilling to drive without being any faster. And as a result, I would always choose to drive this car every single time. And. And it's again, it's a sort of example of a little thing that made a big difference that no advertising campaign ever talked about to my knowledge.

[C]

I mean, in the good old days they would have done, you know, because, you know, they go and find a USP and basically bang a drum about it. But. And actually I've always been intrigued the other way that the USP Works in a way is through loss aversion, which is it makes a very big deal of the one thing you won't get if you buy the product from somebody else. So it's very clever in terms of exploiting, I think, loss as well. So I'm coming back. It was very fashionable to disparage the usp, but my knowledge of behavioral science actually teaches me that it was probably cleverer than we realized at the time.

[A]

I love that the USP is coming back. I once pitched an idea to the Domino's marketing director in a Lyft because I thought they should invent a panic button, which is when you get to your fridge and you open it and you just cannot decide what to do. There's one flashing button that is preloaded with your favorite Domino's order.

[C]

I think it was done in the uae. I think somebody did it. I don't know if it was Domino's, but somebody did it in the uae, which was effectively one push. Yeah, Amazon did experiment with Amazon one push, which little.

[B]

They had the Amazon Dash buttons.

[C]

Yeah. And effectively, you know, when you ran out of bog paper or whatever it might be, you could just push the button.

[B]

You could have lots of these, like red wine, beer, cleaning products.

[C]

Push for champagne at Bob. Bob Ricard. SoHo, of course, is an example of that. I mean, there are some cases where unwittingly someone has just destroyed the choice architecture. Yeah. Hotels that. That's common. Yeah, absolutely.

[B]

27 different brands, none of which you understand anything about.

[C]

And so actually I was joking about that saying partly I use the Marriott Bonvoy loyalty program just to reduce the.

[B]

But even then they have so many different brands within them. You're there thinking, is this a Spring Hill Suites or is this.

[A]

I discovered yesterday morning, I'm part of Marit Bonvoy. I didn't even know because I went to SIS&M, which to me is my favorite place to stay.

[C]

It's only very recently become part of the.

[A]

Oh, is that why

[C]

Moxie is Marriott's very own Citizen M? Effectively. And when I. When I praised the Moxie, lots of angry Dutch people started attacking me, saying that the idea was started by Citizen M and that Marriott copied it. But I'm a very big fan of both. And actually it's suddenly that's an interesting case because you go, okay, okay. There's no laundry, there's no room service, but there is really good coffee and available 24 hours a day on the ground floor. That'll do it for me. You know, it makes things Very easy in many cases.

[A]

I think a bit of Will Gadara thinking in this because when I checked into mine yesterday, they, they asked me if I'd wanted to use the rooftop pool and I didn't realize it had a rooftop pool. So they've obviously saved money every. On, you know, 12 floors. They've saved money by creating the smallest

[C]

room possible to sleep in, which are very nice. Which are very, they're well thought out,

[A]

the minimum amount that you need. But you've got a rooftop pool to use whenever you like.

[C]

Unusually, although they're Dutch, they do actually have curtains and blinds. The Netherlands, they don't have curtains at all in the, in the downstairs windows of houses. And they regard you as being basically secretive enough to know. Good. So if you, if you take an after dark train journey in the Netherlands, it's like a moving version of Hitchcock's Rear Window. It's completely bizarre. That's amazing. Yeah, but, but no, I mean actually, I mean that's possibly an example where sometimes, quite often I, I, every year in Cannes I stay in the Moxie in Up of the Hills because everything else, but everything else is a total scam. And actually, But I always find the moxie, I kind of, I can't make up my mind. It's always great. It's, you know, it's always pretty good. Yeah.

[A]

You know, this is Scott Galloway. 7 out of 10 sort of theory, isn't it?

[C]

Yeah. You know, he stays that absurd place.

[A]

Yeah, he does.

[C]

And he burbles on about how attractive the people are. And I say, look, Scott, people at the Moxie are pretty attractive. They don't, they're not Russian and they don't charge by the hour. Anyway, sorry, a top tip for Cannes, save money. And also it's above, it's in the hills above Cannes. And after about six hours in Cannes, you just want to get, you just

[A]

want to be out of there and

[C]

convert to Buddhism and go and find an ashram somewhere. Frankly, I mean, it is, you know, I mean, I'm a right wing, shallow materialistic bastard, but I find can practically unendurable. To be absolutely honest.

[B]

It's also shockingly boring. I mean, you get so many interesting people and then give them an expense account and then somehow everything that people says is boring.

[C]

It's boring.

[B]

I don't know how you do that.

[C]

No, it's an amazing achievement, but who knows? It's really interesting. I mean the choice reduction question is fascinating because if, if you have a choice of which the consumer can make no sense now Nespresso made this mistake briefly when they launched the Vertuo machine, because they had two machines, the Vertuo, which you opened manually, and the Vertuo plus, which opened automatically, and then they priced them at the same price. That's the kind of thing which you can destroy enormous amounts of value if, let's say you have two products in your range but you don't explain what you get with the more expensive one, or you have one product that seems to offer more but is the same price. Once people can't basically effectively construct a kind of mental matrix of what's going on, what actually happens, you don't sell anything at all because then they're no longer confident enough in making any kind of decision.

[B]

I think Dyson have done this recently.

[C]

I worry about that.

[B]

If you ever go on the Dyson website, it's all sorts of vacuum cleaners with names and numbers that make 09. Like, they could have like the weird submarine version, which apparently just means it can like suck up water or something. But there's absolutely no ability for anyone remotely normal to understand anything that's going on. And again, I think this is where I think about sort of advertising thinking being like, these things may not be the domain of advertising people, but the beautiful thing about working in advertising is it's your job to represent a normal person looking at everyday things. And if you work for Dyson, and particularly if you're an engineering led company, of course you're obsessed with the submarine feature and you're obsessed with the fluffy code.

[C]

You also, you also have a numbering system which you yourself understand because it

[B]

was based on the model last year that got discontinued.

[C]

And the motor power, the third three digits reflect the horsepower.

[B]

All companies just need to employ a couple of people to just say, that makes no sense to a normal person.

[C]

I've always had the theory, just make

[B]

it a bit more expensive because then we'll feel a little bit wanky when we buy it.

[C]

Do you remember that? You remember Saab? If you contrast that with BMW, there used to be a car brand called Saab and there was a Saab901 and there was a Saab95. Was that.

[A]

Yeah, 9.5.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I asked someone who, who was a Saab driver, what's the difference between the 901 and the 95? They didn't know. You know, it wasn't as if they had that large a range, but it was not clear, you know what, Whereas BMW would have been the opposite, where it was absolutely blindingly Obvious to people who had only the most passing knowledge of BMW. You know, engine size, range, perfectly clear. Beth Barry, brilliant planner at Ogilvy, always said that one of the other things we do is we tend to over complicate. We love those sort of two or three dimensional matrices where you put lots of brands in different places. I always remember Beth Barry saying, to be honest, a lot of the time the consumer logic is you get what you pay for. Yeah, they, there's more expensive and better and there's cheaper and maybe a bit crap and you want to find your space. Now it's not only a matter of how rich you are, although that's obviously a factor, it's also how much this category means to you and how significant it is. And you want to be in the right place in that line. And actually this is my great defense of the moxie that I wouldn't stay there for seven days. But if you're staying anywhere for one, two or three days and you know, want to be absolutely sure it's pretty good, it basically hits the sweet spot. You know, your honeymoon you wouldn't spend at Citizen M probably, you know, unless you're, you know, quite, unless you're staff and met there. Yes, no, but, but nonetheless, I mean, I think, you know, I always remember Beth saying we're always looking for these incredibly complicated nuances in terms of people's decision making patterns and quite often it's. Is it worth another 17 quid for that? By the way, there's one little detail. Are we recording now? Yeah, there's one little useful detail which is that quite a lot of people used to say, oh, the paradox of choice. Experiments don't replicate.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And I said, well you wouldn't expect them to. It can't. The, the whole initial experiment was that more people bought jam if they could choose from seven jams from than versus 27. And it was in a kind of supermarket environment where you were kind of mugged by a jam salesman. You weren't even intending to buy jam in the first place. And then people did the experiment differently and said, well, it doesn't replicate. I said, well obviously it doesn't replicate because if you've driven 15 miles to visit a shop called World of Jam, right, you're not going to walk into the door and go, oh God, I can't cope with this. There's just too much choice. Right. If you go to Ikea, you've probably mentally prepared yourself for that kind of choice. But I think the digital environment, I mean one thing that Seems to me you were saying absolutely perfectly that the thing that really annoys me about advertising agencies is that they, they confine their creativity to such a narrow range of activities. Now you could probably make a fortune, you could make an absolute fortune for, for example, McDonald's or KFC. Continually experimenting with the design of the on the screen terminals. Okay. Yeah. One of my complaints is I want to be able to order the food by degree of spicy. I go to KFC because I consider McDonald's a bit bland. Right. So, you know, if I'm going to go to kfc, I want something pretty hardcore and so I want to be able to rank it by degree of spicy, you know, Scoville levels of extreme spiciness. Now I, I'm absolutely convinced that, you know, experiments with effectively presenting menus differently, designing choices differently. And I don't just mean the number of choices you have, but how they're actually highlighted and how they're ordered can deliver enormous amounts of value. And yet ad agencies don't really the problem. Actually I'd slightly blame clients in this because clients don't really do anything if there isn't a job title attached to it, do they? And because you don't have a director of choice architecture. I've always said clients should have a director of trivia, you know, who sorts out all the little pissy things that are really sodding annoying but that fall between too many stools when it comes to actually fixing them.

[B]

And this is the big problem with the go to market proposition of ad agency thinking for not advertising is that one, you need the client that has this within their remit and two, there needs to be a purchase order that gets made out for the thing that you're buying. And there's not that many procurement departments that want to make out a positive person that challenges in the meetings or the person.

[C]

It's worse now because there's not much discretionary budget kicking around because procurement of demand is that you define everything you do in any given year in advance. Yeah. For no readily apparent reason. And consequently, if someone comes to you with a really interesting idea for which you haven't budgeted, you're scraping together pennies from the back of the sofa.

[A]

Talking McDonald's actually in choice prices. One of the coolest things they did with Wyan and Kennedy a few years ago is that you see the famous orders.

[C]

Yes, genius. Absolutely brilliant, brilliant idea.

[A]

Yeah. So basically they picked a celebrity and asked them like what would their favorite order be? And just put that on the menu.

[C]

It was a British guy, I think, at Wyden, who is the planner on that, who had this fantastic brief, which is McDonald's decided he was a very good planner, but he didn't know enough about the United States. They more or less paid him to drive around.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Tas. Tas.

[A]

Yeah, he was the one I was interviewing.

[C]

Yeah, he's driving around the US Eating.

[A]

Went on a big road trip as part of the. As part of the idea.

[B]

But, I mean, everyone listened to that and they were like, this is phenomenal. What a great thing to do. That's what the job used to be.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

I mean, like, you know, back in the 2000s, if you worked in advertising, like, it was your job, you know, to go to the supplier meetings. It was your job to go to, like, the annual convention for retailers that sold your phone.

[C]

My wonderful colleague Jules Chalkley has a brilliant plea. He's the creative director at Ogilvy. He says, bring back the factory tour. Yeah, yeah. Because the factory tour delivered the kind of insights. Yeah. Most famously for Sprung book. That was a factory.

[A]

Okay, So I need to. So Justin Timberlake hasn't been involved in the campaign. Feel free to give me some royalties if you take that one up. But Stormzy was the face of the UK one. Okay. Travis Scott, that was who I was thinking of. Travis Scott was the og. Travis Scott.

[B]

It was.

[A]

Travis Scott was the og and then the following year, Mariah Carey as well.

[B]

At Christmas, they're eating many burgers, to be honest.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I can't either.

[B]

It seems more like a sweetgreen.

[A]

There you go. Famous orders, I guess.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Would have shifted a few more salads.

[B]

What I find amazing, though, is the number of times where we will talk about campaigns that we've seen. And I always wonder whether people in the real world have done that. I don't want to kind of bitch on can too much, but I feel like in every single Cannes session, there should be a normal human being. And they go, do you understand anything we talked about? Or have you ever seen any of these campaigns, like, in real life? And the answer would always be, I

[C]

used to get a bit pissy at Cannes as a copywriter because if you ever wrote an ad which required a knowledge of, like, Jane Austen opening sentences, everybody goes far red. Ridiculously intellectual. How. But the degree of visual literacy they expect in the audience. Yeah. Because I would literally occasionally wander around some of the more art directory parts of Cannes. I'm gonna fucking clue what's going on. And I pretend I understood. Marvelous. And sort of twiddle my imaginary darling moustache. But in truth, I haven't got an effing clue.

[A]

Yeah, well, tell you what, for this conversation, why don't we start with the incredible Kerry and Anna who came up this idea of the illuminari, which I just thought was inspired, which is getting together people that should be on stages and also to get together to solve complex problems by bringing together people that think differently, industry experts, that kind of thing, of which all three here are part of that. So I thought this would be quite cool conversation because we have you two together, who I love both of you because of the way you think differently to how everyone else thinks. You know, you take an opposite position to how the industry might think about something. And that's where we get kind of creativity. That's where breakthroughs happen, by the way,

[C]

I only realized very recently partly a large part of why I do think differently. And it's something I never, I never made the connection at all, which is I'm actually quite good at maths. Okay? I'm not, I'm not making this up. I did A level and S level maths. Now the problem was my brother is an astrophysicist and he was on the UK Maths Olympiad team, which is the four best mathematicians in the UK in like 1980, which is like world's greatest nerd competition, basically. And so growing up in that environment, I always just assumed I was really crap at maths. Okay. Because obviously comparison, it's a bit of an unfair comparison, right? And then I suddenly realized that actually in marketing, if you've got A level maths, you're practically sort of John von Neumann. Okay, right. And, and I actually, actually even, even I would regard the maths used by most finance people as ludicrously over simplistic. In other words, they're trying to cram the whole complexity of a business and a market into an Excel spreadsheet, which is basically ill equipped for handling the complexity of what's going on. But also, I'm going to weirdly sort of make a big Rishi Sunak plea here. I thought his, his basic proposal that people should study maths into the sixth form wasn't. I'd couple it with something like creative problem solving. But the extent to which being reasonably good at maths actually help you approach problems, because often mathematical problems very similar to creative problems, which is the trick is actually to change the question. In other words, you're presented with a question which seems insolvable, but if you sort of redefine the Parameters, it suddenly becomes obvious. And so, you know, one of the weirdest things you're not going to expect is, you know, I would like more marketers to spend a bit more time brushing up on particularly statistics.

[A]

I totally agree with you.

[C]

Probability.

[A]

My degree was in finance and economics, and it's one of the best things ever, I think. Because the other point, of course, is marketing operates in the context of business. People forget this, don't they? You're there to drive a financial outcome, and the more you understand how businesses make money, the better, Really.

[B]

I take slight issue with this sort of idea that we're people who think differently, because I don't think I think differently. I think I experience things differently.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I take times to go on a bus, I go to really shitty hotels, I listen to people in shopping centers. I'll go to Boots and Super Drug and the weird pharmacy with the strange people. Like, it's just my job in the U.S. yeah, yeah. Because I feel like it's my job to understand what it is to be a human being today. And therefore you have this corpus of experience. And then occasionally you're in a marketing meeting and you think this is like, everything that people are talking about is nonsense. And I'll just have the confidence and an English accent and a way to sort of exert myself where I'll just say something like, are we sure that's true? Or we're talking about numbers to four significant figures. Like, I know how we got them, but what do they mean? And people will think that's contrarianism, or they'll think that's thinking differently. And actually, I'm just asking questions. Yeah, I'm just. I'm just curious about stuff and I'm not afraid to ask questions, I guess.

[A]

So, on that. Then let me ask you both this question.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What are the biggest marketing myths today that you think need to be challenged?

[B]

I could talk for quite a long time about this, and I don't want to talk over Rory too much, but my basic hypothesis is almost everything that we knew about marketing in 2005 was based on about 200 years of marketing knowledge. And all of that knowledge is completely relevant today. So the benefit.

[C]

Phew. I thought you were going to say the opposite.

[B]

The benefit to consistency, the benefit to making things easy, the benefit of making things that are memorable. So taglines, jingles, wastage. Like, wastage is an amazing drug because it basically allows you to reach people who in 10 years time or after a promotion or when they get old, we'll buy your stuff. So in 2005, almost everything we knew about marketing was completely right and completely helpful. And then the Internet created all of these new tools and all of these new approaches and all of these new philosophies.

[C]

And we're still metrics.

[B]

And we're still metrics. And for a lot of companies those things were amazing. If you're a local landscape architect and you sell Kluge your hedges, your ability to go on Facebook and buy ads against people that have shown interest in privacy hedges is amazing. If you're Uber and you're trying to get downloads of your app and your ability to see how people respond to your ads is amazing. But what the problem is that we took that playbook of performance advertising that was amazing for about 20% of clients.

[C]

And then that was also new.

[B]

It was new,

[C]

you couldn't do it before new.

[B]

It was sufficient sophisticated, it was short termist, it had a rich data trail and it was sort of digital.

[C]

And you have to remember an ask cover as charter if you wanted to justify your own existence within an organization.

[B]

That entire playbook is brilliant and it's brilliant today for those companies. The big thing that's a problem to me is that every single large company now looks at the small companies. And because it was new and it appears to be sophisticated, it appears to be efficient, then we've got Coca Cola thinking, if only we could have a one on one conversation with people. We've got like Unilever thinking, oh, wouldn't it be good if we could like personalize ads? We've got P and G thinking, wouldn't it be great if we could measure click through rates in real time and then optimize things? And basically what's happened is the playbook that made people like Shopify and Spotify and Uber and Metro bank and all of these up and coming companies that had limited budgets because it made them successful, big companies are copying it. And actually it's completely wrong because almost everything for a big company today when it comes to advertising, almost everything that worked in 1970 would still work a lot better than anything that the other companies are doing.

[C]

I think that's absolutely fascinating. One thing is no advertising agency ever goes in anymore. Well, one of the effects of that by the way, is it completely distorted the relative power of media agencies versus creators. And it suddenly took the conversation into this very nerdy media arena of kind of quantification and self justification and a load of nonsense like that. And actually even Google, who benefit quite a lot from that trend, admit that occasional Breakthrough creative slogans, if you want to use a really unfashionable word, that actually really breakthrough creative is what really makes the difference. Yeah, Again, that's never changed.

[B]

Never changed. But you can't predict what's going to be breakthrough.

[C]

No, no, but that's funny enough. My other thing about what everybody's wrong about marketing's fat tailed, and everyone is trying to pretend it's thin tailed. I mean, Ritson says very well, the average is the enemy of the marketer, that when you aggregate information and you average it, you lose what's really significant and interesting in the act of averaging. But the other point is that it isn't the fact that half the money you spend on advertising is wasted, that the trouble is, I don't know which half. That's a thin tailed expression of the problem. Yeah. The real thing is 10% of what you do in creative advertising delivers about 100. Well, 95% of the value. You don't know in advance what it's going to be to some extent. And I mean, I, you know, I've got chapter and verse in that, because Nassim Taleb, who's like the world's biggest expert on fat tail distributions, we're in a restaurant in Amsterdam and we were talking about marketing. He said marketing is fat tailed. Yeah. You know, in other words, a small amount of what you do will just have extraordinary effects. And a large part of your job is to look for those amazing outlier effects. But instead, what we've got is that let's optimize at the. Optimize things at scale to make them 4% more efficient. Yeah, that's fine, by the way. It's not a total waste of your time, and it keeps the wolf from the door while you're doing it. But it's not why you do you do marketing because. Because every now and then you hit a ball out of the park. You know, you. You stumble on something which is just spectacular. And yet what we're trying to do is we're trying to turn it into a. It's fat tailed and probabilistic, and we're trying to turn it into a thin tailed, predictable, you know, almost like a sort of, you know, crappy game of, you know, effect painting my numbers, I suppose.

[B]

And if you go into a senior meeting armed with the types of words that people like Rory and I will use to describe what we know to be effective, you sound like a complete chump relative to people with the charts. So if you, the performance marketer will go in and go. For every dollar that we spend, we're going to get 7.14 back. It's going to take an average of 3.2 hours to do that. We've got this mysterious black box that optimizes the creative to ensure that we

[C]

get one point and sucks out 80% of your budget.

[B]

And then the next person is going to come in and be like, we should do sponsorship. Why? Because we know it's a good idea and we can take the clients from Verizon and we're going to get them drunk and actually like this bit of business is coming up soon and because we kind of know it works. And actually, you know, when I was little, I used to have the shirts on my wall. You sound like a complete idiot. Relative to the kind of. The pools have been peed in basically by the tech people.

[C]

One advantage of being circumstances 60s, you're less worried about looking like an idiot. And the two, the two most idiotic but true sentences you can utter if you're in an advertising agency is, we're going to make you famous because it's good to be famous and it's bad to be obscure. Yeah, that, that. The other one is wherever you can put an animal in it.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Yes, we know both those things to be empirically true.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Long observation. I'm delighted to say, by the way, that Ogilvy is bringing back legitimate. If you want to know about fat tail distributions. By the way, the Dulux dog emerged completely by accident. They were at a shoot, shooting a newly painted room in a house that they'd rented. It so happened that the owner of the house had an old English sheepdog which wandered into shot. And the photographer was astute enough to go, it looks a lot better with the dog in it. Okay. So that is literally a billion dollar brand property that basically. That's what I mean by fact tech.

[A]

I think most success is like that. It's that in retrospect we're all geniuses, aren't we?

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

We always rewrite the story.

[B]

And the problem is now that people will look at things like a dog and they'll sort of codify it. And what are the symptoms of work that is brilliant and what are the symptoms of a culture that is amazing? People think that they can play back those ingredients in a sort of causal way such that by putting a dog in every paint ad will do better, or by having a table tennis table in the office, people will like each other other more. And I think that's the weird thing about the types of conversations that we're trying to have where you have to say things like, oh, be lucky or be serendipitous or be patient or go with your feelings or trust you to make good decisions. And all of these things are antithetical to this world of, you know, big data, immediate decision making, ratifiable processes.

[A]

Well, I have to say this is why I'm such a big fan of Orlando woods and his look at book, because he actually, actually codified over like 25 years of data to make the point that animals are more likely to capture our attention, create an emotion and create a long lasting memory than anything else. Soundtracks are more likely to make us remember. You know, jingles are more like, I mean literally kind of provide.

[B]

People aren't doing that stuff, you know,

[A]

not as much they should be. I mean, they need to read his book.

[B]

I mean, can you remember any taglines for any recently introduced companies? What a new tagline or even old taglines. I mean, you know, if you had to think about like the big taglines in our heads right now, it would be people like Avis, we try harder. And it would be things like ba, the world's favorite airline and both of those things.

[A]

Yorkshire Tea is when I use quite a lot, where things are done proper. I mean it's a very British example. Yeah, but they've got an insight about Yorkshireness and properness and they, they've carried that for 10 years.

[B]

But if you imagine how many brands there may be in our life, I

[C]

mean Spec Saver's got Spec savers, that's

[A]

almost 20 years old by the way,

[C]

two family owned companies. I think you should make that point.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And then you have this question, okay, so what's the ROI on the tagline? We'll never know. We just know it's a good idea and that's how I think we should do our jobs. We're empowered to be trusted with our ability.

[C]

Actually that fat tailed what's the value of a tagline question is really fundamental because marketers are ill treated by the finance function because as a marketer you are held responsible for every penny of costs. But when you hit one of those extraordinary breakthroughs, you don't get to claim much of the upside. So Ogilvy in Australia who came up with or helped Coke come up with the share a Coke with names on the Coke can idea, they made 350,000 Australian dollars from that. Now that's not enough to buy a shit flat and a crappy part. Now my point is that's this is not a reasonable way to assess the value of any part of your business. If every now and if, when they really, really win big, you only allow them to keep 10% of the upside and then only for the next financial quarter, but you hold them responsible for every penny of cost. I mean, my question is, who's getting the credit for that idea ten years later? Sales probably is it. Or, you know, or the. Or people are writing in articles in McKinsey Quarterly saying, Owing to our successful supply chain management, we've increased our prop. It's not the marketing people who are getting the credit for that.

[A]

Well, I did this survey with TikTok of CMOs to find out what they really think about things. And one of the brilliant quotes in there, this person came back and said, the short, the short. Hang on. Sorry, I've completely forgotten the quote. He says, oh, hang on, hang on. That's really annoying.

[B]

I think this is very true. If you were to look at my behavior in a supermarket, or if you were to go around my apartment, or if you were to look at my bank statements and try and figure out, like, the brands that I now buy, the center of gravity of the ads that I will have seen will go back to media buys that were done in the 1980s and 1990s. And no, no marketer can do their job a bit like Philip Patek, where, you know, you're kind of. You're not inherited, you're not investing in your brand, you're investing in your.

[C]

Your predecessor, your douchebag son. Yeah. I mean, it. 1. One weird problem with marketing and advertising people is they're too fucking young. Yeah. And I suddenly realized that you. You were. You might not even know this.

[B]

You.

[C]

John, you probably remember the Purcell British Rail promotion of the 1970s, do you? Not quite. Not quite.

[B]

The infamous.

[C]

I've heard when I tell people that there was this extraordinary, successful way of getting people to use the trains, which is you got four. Four box tops off Purcell. Yeah. You sent off and bought a family rail card which should be newly launched.

[B]

So.

[C]

So they launched the family rail card with a brand partnership with Unilever. And as a result, I think with your four box tops, you also got like a free return trip somewhere in. In the UK with your family. And that was much more important, I think, than Jimmy Savile in actually reviving interest in train travel because it got people to adopt the behavior through a really clever brand partnership. And of course, I suddenly realized that I'm the only person in the room who has any memory of this whatsoever. And I'll also occasionally go in and say, as you will do, undoubtedly you take something from the 1970s. I had a class the other day, I said, look, don't underestimate the value of total bullshit words. Which I said, nobody knows what organic means. Right. Nobody knows what sourdough means. Find a word. Now what they would have done in the 1950s if they'd introduced a new form of cheaper packaging, they wouldn't have made it. They said cheaper packaging. They would have said, you know, it's fresh O matic. Right, okay. You know, they would have added O matic to it. Yeah, but that kind of. The fact that you bothered to come up with a term for something kind of imbued it with a kind of significance and value which is completely missing if you don't bother to do that. I love that, you know, and so. No, it is fascinating. I think your point is absolutely fair, which is that what happened was it the digital added an extra string to our bow.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And weirdly people got fascinated with the string to the point where they almost threw away the bow, I think. And the pre existing string. Yeah. Terrible analog.

[A]

Remember the quote now. All right, I finally got it. The short pays off today, the long pays off after I've been fired.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And this was the thing in the survey, right. Because all these CMOs are saying they know they need to do the right thing, but they're putting all their money in the short term because they don't believe they'll be around in the long term.

[C]

Well, interestingly that's true of all fat tail businesses. So archetypal fat tailed businesses would be. Venture capital would be, you know, in other words, 5% of your successes pay for everything else. Hollywood is massively fat tailed. The music industry is unbelievably fat tailed. Football, of course, you have that thing, don't you, where now a manager. I don't understand football. But managers get fired because they lose three games in a row, right?

[B]

It's all.

[C]

But it's all noise and no signal. But in Hollywood it happens all the time that the, this guy, the head of the studio gets fired because you have two loss making years. The other guy comes in, they make a fortune entirely off films that were greenlit by the previous guy who was fired. There's a finance fantasy that you can turn a business into something which is entirely mechanistic and Newtonian where every penny of cost is matched to a penny of incremental revenue. Okay. And it's all beautifully proportionate. I mean, the reason marketing's fat tailed is because real life is fat tailed. Nearly everything about our lives, you know. You know, there were three days in our lives where if we hadn't got out of bed in the morning, our entire lives would be totally different. Right. You know, a large part of being famous is probabilistic. It's you increase your surface area exposure to upside optionality.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Because if you're famous, people come to you with things. In other words, if you're famous, customers find you. If you're not famous, you have to find customers. It's a, it's a phase transition. It's huge.

[B]

I guess the point I always get to with this is you basically have to try and persuade our clients to do a better job by building equity in a brand that's not going to pay off on their watch by using their judgment. And that's quite patient. Well, okay, unless we all, unless we all sort of agreed to enter this sort of weird world where we're going to make life easy for the person that comes back afterwards. And that's where you get to this weird thing where I think real life is a very good analogy for this. Where in a culture where you're forced to show the ROI of every decision that you make, if you look at reality like what's the ROI of meeting a friend? Like, what's the ROI of living in a nice apartment? It's probably going on a date with the person that might become your, your wife or your husband.

[C]

I mean, another way of framing it is if you don't do any of that stuff, you'll never get lucky.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

You know, you, you might, you might have three slightly, slightly better quarters, but you're so. I mean, what's quite interesting is AI people really understand this. They talk about the explore, exploit, trade off all the time. It's not a trade off by the way. They're two complementary activities. Exploit, funds, your exploration. Exploration directs what you exploit that entirely. Yin and yang. And they're complementary and they understand that. Actually you have to do two different things. One of them is quite easy to measure, it's quite short termistic and it's an efficiency game. The other part of it is a discovery game which, where the maths is totally different. You know, I mean, literally, you know, there are areas like pharmaceutical research where most people who work in pharmaceutical research spend their entire working lives never working on a drug that makes it to the market. That's too extreme for me. Okay. But effectively what happens is that 1 in 100 of those things pays off. And those are the odds you're playing. Now, what finance people want is complete short term predictability and certainty. Consequently, I'm going to be a bit controversial here. I thought it was pretty significant and Lawrence Green wrote a fantastic article about this, that of the five IPA Gold winners in 2024 for advertising effectiveness, four were family owned companies. Yeah, McCain, Yorkshire Tea, Nath Weights and Spec Savers. And the fifth one was Guinness. Now, you know, Diageo played a lot. Diageo aren't totally idiots, right? But they don't go, we'll just launch a world famous spirits brand overnight. You know, they realize that these things really, really take time. My argument is that I'm not sure that PLCs are capable either of meaningful innovation or of, or of brand building. So the two things that Drucker said were fundamental to value creation, which is marketing and innovation, I'm not sure they have the patience or the comfort within uncertainty. Now, a family owned business can operate over multiple time frames simultaneously. They can go, this is what we're doing to make more money next week and this is what we're doing to make more money in 15 years time. If you're forced into this very narrow fitness function of basically justifying yourself through EBITDA reported every quarter, okay, bear in mind what that means is you're optimizing for only one thing now, the idea that you can handle something as. Imagine if you, okay, imagine if you did that in your own personal life. You just chose one metric and said, this is going to stand for everything in my success, you know, well, no one would claim that in real life. You can reduce success in life to a single variable over a single time frame. And yet for some weird reason business people think, you know, think that's a perfectly adequate kind of. I mean, John K. Rants about this all the time in the ft. Yeah,

[B]

I think he's nuts. I think it's nuts. But again, my question on all of this is how do we change this and how can we get people to do the right thing? Not just on the basis that it's the right thing to do. And the challenge has always been with this stuff that if we are going to measure success in a multiple of different ways, then those things are probably going to have to be things that look good on a spreadsheet and they're probably going to have to have a robust, fairly efficient way to measure them. And something like brand equity or awareness is notorious.

[C]

I mean, just customer focus will be a start. Okay. If you think about family owned businesses, they tend to see their customers as the source of their wealth. You know, they're not fixated with endlessly reporting to some Scott market analysts or whatever. Yeah. And so it is kind of worrying to me that if you look at. When you find British businesses that you really admire, one of two things basically seems to be the case. They're either family owned or they're founder led or both. So you. Okay, let's roll it out. Octopus Energy, AO2, I know very well. Dyson family owned, Jaguar Land Rover family owned, JCB family owned. Okay. You know, Ocado kind of, you know, found a lead. So you kind of go, well, what's the actual. What are PLCs actually doing for us as consumers? Because I'm fucked if I know.

[A]

Have you read the founders mentality? I'm always dropping this into conversation.

[C]

There's a brilliant podcast as well called Founders. It's not linked. No, it's not linked. Okay, got it.

[A]

These two Bain guys looked at, they split the S&P 500 into founder led companies, management led companies, and they saw this massive disparity and they basically worked down. There were three things I think they, that founded companies did frontline focus, they spent time with the customer, bias for action, they made things happen. And an owner's mentality, they, they acted like everyone in the business acts as if they owned it. I mean it goes into more detail

[C]

than that, but there's probably also some element that the person in charge has spent some time in front of the mast. You know, I think it's not irrelevant that Willie Walsh used to be a pilot.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's not irrelevant that the, the guy who runs Marks and Spencer, okay, started his working life pushing trolleys around a car park.

[A]

Well, you were talking about spec savers. So I met Mary Perkins.

[C]

Oh, wow.

[A]

Yeah, I think he's about 80. I hope you haven't aged her unnecessarily, but I think, I think she's that kind of age. She still takes the bus and it's legendary. So everyone talks about how she takes it, has conversations, everybody on the bus into work about, about their glasses and what they think and this kind of thing. So it's staying connected to your customer, isn't it? Despite the fact that's a multi billion.

[C]

It's a Guernsey bus. It's probably. I did amusingly about taking the bus. I was just talking to someone at the hotel in Miami who went back to LA for four days and didn't bother to hire A car. And she thought, okay, I'll go and try the bus. And she said it was absolutely lovely. And I actually, you know, reconnected with Community. She said it was wonderful until day two when somebody boarded the bus and started shouting that Elon Musk had injected something into his penis. At that point, you want to get off the bus and you want to disconnect from Community, I think, but there we go. There you are. By the way, just for the purposes of legality, I don't think Elon had injected anything. I think we ought to clarify that

[A]

just to fact check the random person on the bus.

[C]

Community note, you never know. Did not inject anything into this man's leaders. Just.

[A]

Just change it.

[C]

Pick up.

[A]

As you said earlier about prediction, actually, I was fascinated. I had this conversation near IOW recently on the podcast, talking about how our prediction of something influences how he feels. There's an experiment done with monkeys and they were serving them juice, and they looked at the dopamine that the monkey had when they actually drunk the juice. And then what they worked out is that the dopamine started kicking in when the lights turned on, because they started to associate the light turning on with being served the juice now. So what happened was the dopamine started to kick in in anticipation of a reward. Then they, then. Then they tried turning the lights on and not serving the juice. And then of course, the dopamine went the other way. They suddenly felt disappointment. And what they concluded is that basically there's this thing called a reward prediction error, which if we're expecting something to be good or expecting something to be bad and it doesn't happen, we're basically surprised. And that is what creates the kind of dopamine.

[C]

So actually the book, there's a great book on the neuroscience of this, which actually is written by a guy who's a pupil of Carl Friston, who's it's all about. There's. It's a weird theory about how the brain works and it gets into a lost energy something or other. Anyway, but it's called the Experience Machine by Andy Clark. And the idea is that most of what we perceive is actually driven by an expectation, a prediction of what's going to happen.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

And that we. What effectively constitutes. By the way, it goes back to the 19th century, this theory. It's very similar to how your TV works. So the reason JPEGs work and MPEGs work is that for every pixel there's an expectation value. And the only data you need is to what extent A pixel differs from the expectation. If you didn't have that particular architecture, your sky dish would have to be like Jodrell bank or something. Okay. You know, in other words, you know, every photo it RAW mode. If you're a digital photography person, the brain doesn't work in RAW mode because it's inefficient use of bandwidth. So what it does is it goes, you know, basically, okay, I'll ignore all of that because it's basically within expectation and that thing's really weird, so I'll pay attention to it.

[A]

But if you think what advertising is doing, advertising is creating predictions, isn't it? It's creating anticipation. So this is why I think people always complain about BA and never complain about Ryanair, because in Ryanair they've managed your expectations, expectations of experience so low that you expect it to be bad, whereas with bas, your expectations of it going to be.

[C]

So the only reason, the only reason I don't fly Ryanair is really interesting. My actual experience of flying Ryanair, unless it's a Friday afternoon flight to Prague, by the way, where you're the only sober person on the plane, I don't recommend that one. But all my other experiences of Ryanair have been excellent. The reason I don't fly Ryanair is for the 24 hours before, before I fly Ryanair, I'm terrified. I'm absolutely convinced that something will be found wrong. You know that my carry on baggage is 1 millimeter oversized and they will immediately put me in a room and pistol whip me with Serbian mercenaries or something. Right. And so I'm so frightened beforehand. That's why I don't fly Ryanair. Every time I've actually been on Ryanair, it's actually pretty good, perfectly fine.

[A]

They've managed your expectations so low, anything.

[C]

But no, you're absolutely right.

[A]

It's kind of got me thinking about the element, the role of surprise in advertising. And actually this blew me away. Actually. I got System one to analyze the reasons people are surprised, positively and negative on the database. They looked at every single reason everyone's ever given in a survey while they're surprised. And the thing that stood out beyond everything was positively. It always came down to the experience. The product relative to expectations and negatively was exactly the same.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So it wasn't like, oh, I wasn't expecting that dog in the ad. It was that the experience of the product when I had it let me down.

[B]

Compared to what I thought the perfect example of this. Have you seen the film From Dusk Till Dawn?

[C]

No, I haven't I've heard about it.

[B]

I'm not going to tell you too much about it. But there's a very surprising moment in the middle of the film and the start of the film is pretty bad and the end of the film is pretty bad. But as a piece of film it's just amazing because of the surprise.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So we need to think about this in advertising. What's the dust till from the dust till dawn of advertising?

[A]

Exactly. But surprise accentuates emotion by up to four times. It's really, really powerful. I think it's one of those undiscovered things.

[C]

Thank you for saying four times because I've always basically, you've always said that being a bit of a fraud. I've always said it multiplies it many times or order of magnitude. But no, I mean. And actually the sweet thing is you can be surprising one at quite low cost. Yeah. The other thing is the opportunity to be surprising scales all the way down an organization, doesn't it? So yeah, you can be surprising if you're on a call center person. All you got to do. I'll give you my best example of this, which hotels.com I was about. I booked some hotel somewhere in the Canary Islands, I think and then my father in law got ill and so we couldn't go and I managed to get the flights changed and I forgot to bloody well cancel a hotel and they had a 48 hour policy and so I got onto hotels.com and said, look, just cancel this anyway so they can sell the room to anybody else. And he said, well, I'll try and get you a refund if I can. It's not technically within the bounds. And he gave it a try and said, I'm terribly sorry. I got ahold of the hotel, they couldn't do it. I said, fine, you did your best. I wasn't, you know, that was brilliant. Three days later, okay, I get an email from this person. He goes, I thought you were a bit harshly treated. So I got back onto the hotel and I've got your first night refunded. And I'm like, this is astonishing. But you know the weirdest surprise? I rang a Lotus dealership in Ashford Saturday. I just had a query about connecting the app to the car. Rang up, no reply.

[A]

Yeah, okay.

[C]

Oh, well then I'm Saturday, you know, I'll try again on Monday. Ten minutes later I get a call back saying, oh, I was outside on the forecourt with a customer. I noticed that I missed your call and it occurred to me we've had calling line identity for 20 fucking years. This was only the second time in 20 years where any business had noticed a missed call from me and thought to phone back. So you have these call centers of hundreds of people, okay, which are losing calls, okay? Now you have the opportunity to absolutely amaze a customer simply by calling back someone. The only other occasion was a restaurant in Ventura, okay, Where we. My wife rang. There was no reply, and she actually rang back. The restaurant rang back and we booked the meal.

[B]

This does make me think that weird is that sort of semi leaving advertising. I did have this quite cheeky thought one day because when you're not in it and you see what people talk about, especially when you go to Cannes, you do think, like, what on earth is anyone talking about about? And it kind of dawned on me as a hypothesis one day, like, maybe it's not that difficult. Like, maybe if you're making ads, like, maybe you get the thing that you're making and you explain it in a nice way. Maybe you have a tagline. Maybe you have music that's somewhat memorable. Maybe you have a call to action where you say something quite good about the product and what people should do. Maybe you have a big surprise. It's like a new thing I've learned today. Maybe you have a surprise. Maybe you just have, like a really weird piece of music and everyone's like, that's weird. Like, maybe you could just make great ads by following, like a really basic playbook. And then maybe the media plan would.

[C]

That's what I always talk about, the double tree cookie. And what's interesting is that I think

[B]

we're just terrified that it might be quite straightforward.

[C]

Well, the thing is, it's difficult to be rationally surprising. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, yeah. What you've got to do is you've got to be arbitrary and you've got to be subjective. Let's just do the. Okay, the AO bear. Right, right. That's classic. Founder case John Roberts. Okay? We deliver our own appliances. We'll keep a box of bears in the back of the van. If there are children or a dog in the house, we'll give the recipient a bear along with their washing machine. Okay? Now, if you tried to do that within a plc, they go, okay, we need to have a framework for surprise definition. How can you prove that a bear is better than a stuffed aardvark? Okay, right. You know, we need to compare a whole potential menagerie of. To arrive at an optimal decision. But actually, if you want to Be different.

[B]

Just do it.

[C]

You just, Just do something weird. And you're right, maybe it's that.

[B]

And I actually think the entire industry,

[C]

I said, they have this huge problem because they don't. They want to do something which is very important, which, which Roger L. Martin calls commercial innovation. Now, share a Coke is commercial innovation. Amazon prime is sort of commercial what it is. It's a form of innovation where the product itself is not changed, but the way in which you sell it, present it, price it, charge for it. Okay, you could say that Klarna is a form of commercial, you know, selling something. Three payments of whatever. Another example commercial innovation might be, which I've always want, I've always told P and G and Unilever anywhere where there are lots of Airbnbs, just sell your products in tiny containers, an insanely high price. Because when you stay at an Airbnb, you go around buying the smallest thing of dishwasher tablets, the smallest shampoo. Oh, God, nine bog rolls. I'm never going to get through that. Oh, brilliant. There are four bog rolls that cost twice as much as the nine bog rolls. But at least I won't be leaving a load of bog rolls behind. Okay, anyway, but that would be commercial innovation. You know, small shampoos and airports. I mean, we did some research, research once into bottled water and discovered that the principal differentiator was whether it fit in your cup holder in your car. So everybody was agonizing about all the imagery around sort of mountain streams and things, but people go, yeah, that'll fit in the cup holder anyway, but. So they wanted to do this commercial innovation, and they said, we need to define it, we need to have a framework, and then we need to work through a whole process which decides what, what the best ones are. And I said, no, you don't do that. You just have an idea right now, the idea. And then you post rationalize it. And I suddenly realized that all these, all these organizations, they're so defensive in their decision making that instead of doing something, finding out whether it works and then effectively saying, we're glad we did this because it worked, you have to arrive at everything through this laborious process of, you know, rational selection. And nobody could get married or choose where to live. That way you couldn't do anything interesting in your life. If you needed to build a 56 page.

[B]

We have to make things complicated.

[C]

Well, Bird was always fond of the phrase that advertising is a simple business made complicated by fools. Yes, I think David Ogilvie might have said the same thing.

[B]

So My career is taking me in different directions. So at one point I was working for like a digital agency where their main job was designing websites. And again, there's this very robust process that people would write to you saying, how much is it going to cost to deliver this website? And the answer was always between 1 and 5 million. And then you figured out a way to throw enough bodies and enough of a long enough process that someone would be comfortable paying a million dollars for a website. And you'd go through, you know, Persona development, you'd go through, you know, feature prioritization, and then you'd end up with a website as a result of this million dollar process, which was really fucking obvious in the first place. And actually any ability to do anything interesting has been stripped out. So you'd end up looking at a website like Ling's Cars or something, which is completely nuts and completely loved by people and highly successful.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

And the probability that you could ever do something as good as that is removed. And it does make me think, you know, what if you could just go through life by doing simple things quite well and focusing on a little bit of surprise and a little bit of ambition, empathy and, you know, great packaging. You know, again, that's one of the elements.

[C]

Weird thing here.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Probably because they're not beset by that problem.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Actually quite a lot of government websites are actually quite good, aren't they, in the uk because they just go, what have we got to do? We'll do this as simply as possible. Yeah. The consumer goes in and goes, this is pretty clear. It remembers my login.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Whereas the people who are trying to make money by over complicated. This is the thing that happens. Okay. So you want to check into a hotel, obviously. Unless you live in hotels, it's been eight months since you last checked into a hotel. So then you try and get the loyalty program off the app, but in the interim, the app now requires an update because you know it's been updated, which then means that it's completely forgotten your password and login in the process of updating the stupid app. Okay. And you realize you, you probably made something 4% better at the level of the average while making it at the decisive moment. You've made it a royal pain in the ass.

[B]

Yeah. In a way that you remember.

[C]

Yeah. It's just, I mean, you suddenly realize that an awful lot of this stuff, I mean, to be honest, I mean, we were probably more intelligent when we were both lazier and also admitted that there were lots of things we didn't know, Yeah. I mean, I've always thought that religion was quite helpful in decision making because religion was an acknowledgment that there were a lot of things in life that were beyond your control. You could simply attribute those to in the lap of the gods, right? And there's, you know, in the Odyssey or the Iliad and probably the Iliad, okay, I think, I can't remember who it is. Like Achilles about, okay, he's about to fall over and he manages to catch his footing. But they don't say he, he lucked out there and caught his footing. They say Phoebus Apollo pushed him back to a vertical, you know, was behind him and stopped him falling over. Okay. So lots of things which were actually just luck were effect. You had this catch all thing of you just attribute it to divine intervention, but at least you weren't pretending that everything that happened was entirely within your control. Yeah. And so the admission of, first of all, the admission that there's loads of stuff we don't know and we're just going to have to accept that, you know, and that also lazy people to some extent, I mean, the worst thing that happened to marketing services was payment by the hour. Totally catastrophic. Separation of media and crazy was totally moronic, okay? Which turned what used to be a full service restaurant into a fucking Mongolian buffet, right? You know, there's Mongolian buffets where you turn up and you pick raw food and you have to cook it all yourself, right? You know, so I mean, separation of media and creative, totally moronic decision. Again, taken nothing to do with value creation, all to do with how you make money, okay, out of intangibles. And similarly, payment by the hour is a complete perverse incentive in that how you make money and how you add value, there's barely any connection between the two. Time consuming things aren't necessarily valuable. And then the people who ran agencies didn't really understand agencies, so they looked at a spreadsheet and thought, oh, where we make money, that must be the valuable bid. Yeah, okay, but in a restaurant we all know you get people in on the food and then you make money on the wine. I guess the difference, that was how it used to work. You got people in on creativity and then you made money on execution. Fine, okay, but loads of businesses work like that. It's not that unusual.

[B]

If you were going to be cynical though, you could almost look at the entire advertising complex, the advertising industrial complex, and recognize that this is almost machinery that's been designed to extract money from clients.

[C]

Because we Want to defend yourself against procurement argument?

[B]

Yeah. Okay.

[C]

I mean, it's interesting, by the way, I wouldn't, I wouldn't confine that to advertising. The whole consulting world, the whole legal world, I think, have become grotesquely distorted by the need to actually quantify costs.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I've got a friend who's a serious. I mean, we shouldn't totally single out the ad industry for this because I got a friend who was a serious partner in a major magic circle law firm who must be pulling in a million or something a year, and he actually said, if I actually had my time again, I wouldn't have gone into this job. Right. Ok. What, you're coining it, mate? And what he said was, I went into the job because I like doing law. When I became more senior because of this whole obsession with sort of procurement and cost justification and invoicing, he said, I spend three times as much time justifying why we've charged something than actually doing the work in the first place.

[A]

Totally, totally get that. Well, let's flip it to what's the solution for the creative industries? Because last year, this is UK data.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

The headcount in the UK creative industries dropped by 14.6%.

[C]

This is terrifying.

[A]

That's worse than Covid. It's worse than 2008 recession. And in fact, it's the worst year.

[C]

By the way, it's not the people in finance or hr. Is it her going? No, no. It's not the totally unbillable people who are being gotten rid of. It's the people who are only 73% billable who have to go.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

I mean, I've always thought the whole advertising industry is basically extractive in that it's a vast administrative layer, basically extracting the value created by the people who act, who do the actual work, and it supports this ludicrous kind of administrative. Administrative kind of bureaucracy on the top of what could be much simpler, to be honest.

[A]

So what's going to make the advertising agency of the future? Okay, ladies and gentlemen, that was part one of the special uncensored CMO episode with Tom Goodwin and Rory Sutherland. I hope you enjoyed it. Part two will be out next week, so check it out. Now, finally, just to say, if you'd like to catch more uncensored content and you want to find out what I think of each episode, I do sign up to my newsletter, the one thing. Also, I have a second podcast, Uncensored Renegades, with the completely awesome Corey Marchisotto. So catch that. Just search for Uncensored Renegades wherever you get your podcast. And finally, a big thank you to System One who sponsored this show and make everything happen. Really, really appreciate all their support. I will see you next.