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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone. Now, if you want to know the secret to more impactful creator ads, then this is good news. Stop obsessing over engagement rates and start pulling the three levers that really make a difference to your brand. Now, what are they? They are creative quality, creator fame, and brand fit. And they're revealed in a brand new report from WPP Media, System One and TikTok called the Creator Effectiveness Playbook. This is your guide to making fantastic creator advertising that works for your brand. Now, to get a hold of it, all you have to do is go over to systemone group.com and download the report today. All right, without further ado, let's go on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored cmo. Now, two years ago, Adam Morgan and myself were on stage at the Cannes Lion Festival talking about the extraordinary cost of being dull. Little did we know that we hit a nerve in the industry by illustrating how much money people waste day every, every single year making advertise that people basically ignore. Now, since then, we think about what is the answer to all this, and we've come up with an idea. Surprise. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about the startling power of surprise, why it matters, and how to do it. So here we go. Hassan, welcome back to OnSensor CMO.
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B
Thank you very much indeed.
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A
A returning guest, of course.
- [01:23]
B
I know, I know. I think it's my third time.
- [01:25]
A
Indeed. Yes, I should do a hall of fame, I think, for the returning guest. But look, we're on stage. Weren't we in Cannes two years ago, presenting the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dahl, which, as we know, is inspired by some work you and Peter did, putting a monetary value on Dahl. And it seemed to go down all right, certainly based on the number of presentations you and I have done in the two years since. I never thought in my career that I'd be going around the world telling people how dull they are and then
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B
paying you to do it?
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A
Yes, I know. It's just extraordinary.
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B
It's a great model.
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A
I think it's a great model. But as you reflect back on that talk two years ago, what were the kind of surprising outcomes?
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B
Well, I think one of the things I've been really gratified about is the deep level of interest in it. So, for instance, I'm meeting up with somebody on Thursday who's been replicating this in Canada and exploring kind of the data in Canada. We've got a lot of interest in replicating it across Asia with a couple of partners, I think Australia have been doing some work on it, as well as some interest in France. So there's a real interest in the substance, which I think is great. But one of the other things I think has been surprising is it's quite hard to tell, isn't it? When you put something out like this in the world, it's quite hard to know what your audience is making of it. And you and I went to speak to a very nice group of people in a pharmaceutical company in the States last year, and we gave our presentation with passion and energy, as we always do, to this audience who appeared entirely impassive at the end of it. Didn't laugh at any of our jokes and it was quite funny, I thought. I thought they're funny jokes. Didn't laugh at any of it, didn't appear to have any kind of reaction, didn't really follow up in any kind of way. Thought that this hadn't landed in the right way at all. And then find out a few months ago that made a huge impression and encouraged them to produce a new, startling, surprising super bowl ad that had landed really well. So it's quite hard to tell exactly what ripple effects you're having, isn't it? Yeah.
- [03:10]
A
And it was a surprising super bowl ad, particularly given how conservative the pharmaceutical industry are as well. That was very surprising. A similar experience, actually, because we also went to a major global restaurant chain down in LA and had a great time there and got a message from one of their. This is a kind of global meeting of their CMOs. And one of them messaged me a few weeks later to say, oh, by the way, I'm setting up my own agency and my mission is to defeat Dahl, inspired by a presentation. Fantastic. So even birth creative agencies on a mission to take the insight and run with it, which is great.
- [03:48]
B
Well, and I know you're a big fan of the COWS statistic that we came up with, and I always love the fact there's an Australian marketer who's picked up that notion that a film of cows for chewing grass, for whatever it was, 20 seconds, beat 50% of the system one ads that they tested. She now has this expression, beat the cow, something she briefs her agencies with, which sounds a bit weird when you talk about it, but I like that idea of Beat the cow is the bar that you're trying to kind of overcome. Well, that was a good.
- [04:17]
A
I mean, it's your idea, by the way, and thank you for that idea, because I think it was absolutely genius. And it became the image, I think, of the Talk, didn't it? The picture of cows. And then what was surprising, surprising was quite how many ads it beat. So the system one we test pretty much most TV ads that air in the UK and the US and we put that 22nd film into test and it beat 50% of professionally made high media spend global brand advertising. And that was a shock to people, wasn't it?
- [04:47]
B
Yes, it was. It was. The other surprising thing actually, the work that Karen Nelson Field has done as part of our collaboration, because it is a collaboration, you, me, Karen, Peter and obviously starting to involve other kind of conversations as well with people like Orlando and Rory is the work that she did on the cost of dull media really startled me because I never imagined that media could be dull. And it was her who opened my eyes to that. And the sheer waste from the apparently responsible investment in cheap reach turning out because it's so dull to have no impact whatsoever. That's the bit I find most shocking actually in all of it. So it's been a really surprising and shocking journey for me as I've gone on.
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A
I love Karen's work so much because. Because as soon as you see it from an attention perspective, it changes everything in terms of how you approach media and then you combine both insights together. The compounding effect of dull media with dull creative is just like, well, the compounding effect negatively, but the compounding effect positively. If you can address high attention media with high attention creative, you get this incredible multiplier effect as well, which I mean, who can afford not to entertain their audience on the right kind of, right kind of platforms.
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B
No, I agree and I think Peter and Karen are doing some work on that at the moment, aren't they? On that multiplier? Which would be fascinating.
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A
That would be fascinating. Now one thing I got slightly hooked on, and I know we've talked about this a lot in our presentation was a 1972 paper which I know this is like just before I was born. So like having to go back just before I was born, a guy called Murray S. Davis. And it was fascinating, wasn't it? It was called that's interesting. And he looked at what makes something interesting. What was the finding in that? Because that's almost the genesis of the idea that we took on, isn't it?
- [06:31]
B
It was. So Marios Davis was a sociologist professor, I think at Northwestern in the States. And he looked at what he called the key social theories of the last hundred years in 1971, ranging from sort of Marx and Freud all the way through to Marshall McLuhan Rd Lang and looked at what made them still current and talked about and kind of vibrant in culture. And his conclusion was it wasn't just because they were TR not, it was because they were interesting. And what made them interesting was that they denied key assumptions that we held about the world. So, you know, disgust is repressed. Desire is not what we thought about the relationship with disgust and desire, for instance. And all the way through, you can see it in the more modern, as it were, marketing theories. You look at Peter and Liz's work about. Actually, we kind of thought it was all about successful communication, was all about getting the message right. It's actually about emotion. Right. Well, okay. Wow. That challenges my assumptions, how brands grow, you know, if you want loyalty by a dog, you know, that challenged our assumptions about it. So you can see that even flowing through now. And so that notion that actually surprise isn't just about a narrative twist, it's about challenging assumptions in a more fundamental way, I think was the birth, in many ways, for this project that you and I have been doing on Surprise
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A
and I did love. We used it an example, didn't we? The orange ad from the women's Euros
- [07:49]
B
a couple of years ago.
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A
Such a clever example. It's one of the most surprising ads on the system on database because what they did is they created this incredible film. I think it's about two minutes long. And you think you're watching the French men's team score the most incredible goals. The crowd are going wild. The commentators are falling over themselves. It's just spectacular goal after spectacular goal. And then halfway through, they do this kind of rewind effect. And what they show you with CGI is that you had been watching the women's team. They just superimpose the men's faces onto the women or the men's heads on the women. And then suddenly that's the rug pull. And you see it in the graph on the System 1 chart. Suddenly you get this happiness, everyone celebrating the goals. And it's replaced with this incredible level of surprise as people realize that actually the assumption you're denying is women's football is not as good as men's. Yes, that's not true. They proved in the most dramatic fashion on the most, you know, on the biggest stage possible.
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B
And there was a strategic problem that was addressing, which was French media channels weren't showing enough women's football because people didn't respect it in the same kind of way.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
So surprise as a strategic solution to a problem is such a fundamental idea for us.
- [09:02]
A
I Think it is. So this brings us nicely onto Cannes this year, and this episode's going out just after we do our talk. So good timing. Why are we on stage talking about surprise?
- [09:12]
B
We're on stage talking about surprise in part because it's a continuation of this particular project. And by the way, you know, we should possibly also talk about your confessions of dull bit as part of this at some point, because I think that sense about why are people, in spite of all their good intentions, allowing themselves to be dull? I think it's in part because they've not entirely understood some of the key levers at their disposal to stop themselves being dull. And I think our view is, isn't it, from all the research we've done, is that marketers are getting surprised all wrong. They're thinking of surprise as an entertaining narrative twist, often in a commercial of some kind, or as some sort of something inexperienced about a little thing. Surprise and delight, a little free packet of biscuits, something you're going to get. But essentially it's something you leave to the experience creator or the creative director. They're not thinking of it as a key strategic tool in their armory to fundamentally change the way that we think about their brand or their category. And that's, I think, what we're trying to put right.
- [10:09]
A
Yeah. Now, what I love about the way you come at these questions is you don't just think like a marketer, do you? You're thinking about how other people in other categories, you know, far away from advertising, where are some of the source of inspiration that you've got on the question? Surprise.
- [10:25]
B
Yeah. Well, so, I mean, as you know, as part of my podcast, let's make this more interesting, I've been looking at people, as you say, outside marketing. And so, for instance, if you talk to Simon Peacock, who's the director of Assassin's Creed and a kind of professional improviser, he says, as a performer, you recognize that all audiences, whether they understand it consciously or not, they crave surprise. Interesting word, crave surprise. Mads Farrelly, who I know you met in Australia when you were there recently, fantastic reality TV show producer, you know, with 30 plus years experience, she says, I condense all that experience about what makes fantastic content down to three things. It's make me laugh, make me cry, surprise me. So these are experts in engaging audiences with high commercial outcomes to that engagement or not engagement, who understand that surprise is absolutely critical. And if you look at other things, like magic. Right. Surprisingly critical. So there's lots of things around us as human beings we understand the importance of surprise on. And yet somehow, somehow we're not making that connection into this. It's a very interesting thing. I don't know if you saw that thing by Mr. Beast, who is the YouTuber par excellence, talking about what he does and why he does it. And he made a very interesting comment the other day about, you know, he said he saw this TED talk about, you know, purple cows and how, you know, if you're going along and going through a field, you don't notice any kind of normal cows. You see a purple cow, you remember it. And he said, that's how I think about things. I'm always trying to produce the unexpected in my shows. And purple cow, of course, is a Seth Godin concept, you know. So the ultimate entertainer on YouTube has borrowed a concept from marketing about surprise, making himself absolutely massive. And his show is absolutely massive. And yet marketing is not learning sufficiently from that. I know, it's really intriguing, I think.
- [12:08]
A
Yeah. And going back to data for a minute as well. So I spent seven years in total at System one and almost exclusively talking about the power of making people happy. Because the general idea, the more you feel, the more you buy and the correlation between happiness and long term brand effects is very strong. But if I'm honest, I look at the model, surprise is a key contributor to the star rating and the spike rating that System one would do. I mean, we used it in our talk for extraordinary Costa Dao and I realized we'd hardly ever looked at the role that surprise has in creating emotion, creating attention, creating memories. And it's such a. We talked about it's such a powerful device, but we haven't really quantified it before.
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B
And why is that, do you think?
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A
I. It's probably the. I think going back to your Les and Peter point landing in motion as the way people make decisions rather than rational thought is a big insight that's denying a key assumption. And System one was, even the name was built on using System one over System two, which is the Daniel Kahneman idea. Isn't it all about how emotion drives behavior? And the biggest single emotion that delivers that was happiness. How you feel at the end of an experience, you feel happiness. And so we got fixated, rightly so I think at the time on that bit of the equation. But all along, surprise accounts for around 11% of all emotions captured over, you know, hundreds of thousands of tests. So it has a really big role to play and a positive role to play as well in both short and long term effects. So I Think that's why I was so keen to do this. And let me just throw a couple of extra data points in as well, because Orlando provided some data that he had done with YouTube using Lumen. So they were looking at the ability for different features in advertising to capture your attention, create emotion. The device that caught attention the most, as he described it, was something out of the ordinary. Yeah, that's surprise. That's a type of surprise, isn't it?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Now, if you go from TV, this is YouTube. Go from YouTube to TikTok as well. There's a new bit of research coming out around can as well. The Creative Effectiveness playbook. That's with WPP, TikTok and System One. Brand new bit of research that also has something out of the ordinary. What it found is not only did it hold attention and emotion, but had by far the biggest impact on recall and memory after exposure.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So it seems to be from different data points. We're getting the power to capture attention and create emotion, but also to be remembered, which kind of figures. Right. We remember the things that we felt something in response to. So some good data there.
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B
Yeah.
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A
In support.
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B
Well, and I think one of the things I like about that is it kind of fits. You know, on the one hand, you've got the kind of. The neuroscience, and now we're fitting the marketing science to it. So, you know, you and I have both spoken to Rory about this, where he makes the point that our brains are prediction engines, effectively, and that we are, you know, constantly trying to have a predictive model of the world. And so when something unpredicted happens, we remember, A, it focuses our attention, B, we remember it more because that's how we kind of survive. And there's lots of science around that. You know, the fact that surprise has the ability to be a motto, have a multiplier effect on emotion by up to 400%. The fact that when an unpredicted event happens, we get this. It's a chemical called noradrenaline that spikes in our brain, that imprints on our memory. And what I love about it is then we can now sort of marry that neuroscience to the work that's coming out with your System one stuff and say, actually it's not like something strange is happening or so something exciting is happening out there, but it's not replicated in the marketing science. These two things fit really closely together. We can't ignore this anymore.
- [15:42]
A
There's a fascinating insight, though, isn't there, when you say, I mean, Rory is on the Money with this in terms of our brains, our prediction engines, that has such big consequences. And I know one of the things that when you present, when you showed me this research, it really grabbed my attention was Rolf from Schultz, I think about 2016, produced a study and it talked about something called reward prediction error, that actually our dopamine hits are as a result of our expectations of an experience rather than experience itself. Now, the example he gives it was an experiment done with monkeys, and these monkeys were being fed some juice, and when they first got the juice, they saw this dopamine hit. So the monkey drinks the juice, feels the dopamine hit, and they measure that reaction in the brain. And then they noticed something happen, that the dopamine started when the light went on and anticipated the experience of the juice. And then they then went on to experiment with just turning the light on and not delivering the juice. And then they saw a negative dopamine hit, it went the other way. So what they discovered from that actually is our experience, or the dopamine experience is a result of the variance, the prediction of the event itself, which I think is fascinating because you think about the role of advertising, the role of advertising is to set up the prediction, and the role of the brand experience, obviously, is to deliver that. So we're in the business of creating expectations of an experience and then how that's delivered, the variance between those two things is where the dopamine hit happens. So surprise can go both ways.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
In terms of being positive and negative.
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B
Absolutely can. When you've got an interesting example from Ryanair around that, haven't you? This is.
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A
This is funny. I know. Well, of course I was looking. Actually, let me just explain one thing first. So I just test this out. I thought, okay, if our experience of a product in terms of how it delivers versus our expectations is where surprise comes from, I should be able to go into the System1 database and look at all the reasons for surprise and find evidence of brand experience. And I did. And it was really interesting because we looked at every reason given for surprise, categorized it and looked to whether it's positive or negative. And here's the interesting thing. So the number one most positive reason by far was the product experience exceeded my expectations. And the number one negative by far was the product experience under delivered my expectations. So as marketers, we're rubbish at managing all 4Ps we need to make sure we manage the product experience to be as good as the promotion experience and drawing those two things together. Now, that brings us to Ryanair, because having Been inspired by that. I thought, let's go and find great examples of where brands deliver amazing experiences and you can find loads of them. But Ryanair do the opposite. In Ryanair's social media and in their advertising, they intentionally tell you how bad the experience is going to be. I mean, Rory was talking about this the other day, joking about. He said, I don't fear going on a Ryanair flight. I fear the 24 hours before I go on a Ryanair flight being told my baggage is too big and having my expectations met.
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B
Managed.
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A
Yeah. And that's the thing. I mean, Ryanair, they have this kind of mean tweet approach. If anyone complains, they kind of go, what do you expect for £17.99? Or did you really want a window? You know, you buy a seat, not a window. Someone complained that they got a window seat and there's no window. They even announced they were going to charge for using the toilet.
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B
Yes.
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A
Which is crazy, isn't it? They had the, I think, I assume this was spoof, but they had standing seats where basically you stood up and just got belted in because you could fit 30% more passengers on there.
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B
And so are they engineering an above expectation experience effectively?
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A
I think so. I think they're taking their positioning of ridiculously low cost and managing your experience so low that when you get on a Ryanair flight, oh, this isn't too bad, it arrived on time, people quite friendly. I could buy a drink. The seat was plenty big enough. And I think it's just reward, prediction error. They're just managing expectations so low.
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B
Really interesting.
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A
So you actually think the real experience is not too bad.
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B
So Ryanair and RPE is a case history waiting to be written?
- [19:58]
A
I think so. I think so, yeah. Now, of course, Ryanair is the negative example of surprise, but the positive example, actually, in someone I met last year, Will Godara, in his Unreasonable Hospitality book, talks about the surprising power of giving people more than they expect. Couple of simple example. So when. So he believes that you, when you sit down for a dinner, you want to serve someone as quickly as possible with something. Because that, that, that bit where you have to wait for the menus, wait to get something is a bit awkward. So they had. The waiters and waitresses had signals. So when they took your. Basically when they took your. Which water would you like? You know, still water, sparkling tap behind their back, they'd signal to somebody else who would bring it immediately as you worked around the table. And people go, it's like magic. Like I asked for the water, and then there it is sort of thing. And then at the other end of the meal, when the check arrived, he would open a brand new bottle of cognac and say, take as long as you want and feel free to enjoy the entire bottle. Now, he says, in however many years of being a restaurateur, only two or three people ever drunk the entire bottle. But the memory it created of getting way more than you expect, because he said, look, the negative surprise of a big check at the end of a meal is not what you want to leave people with. So his thought was, how can I surprise people with generosity at the end of the meal when potentially they could leave going, oh, that was a bit expensive.
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B
Well, then there is a lot of evidence, isn't there, that what happens at the end of an experience is disproportionately important. So that kind of overwrites your other bits of the memory. So fizzling out at the end of something is not a good idea, even if you had a fantastic experience. Experience. But actually if you have a mediocre experience and then one really good thing at the end, clearly he's having great experience overall, but for the rest of us is disproportionately important. So I think that's really interesting.
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A
That makes a lot of sense. The peak end rule, I think they call it, don't they?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Let's talk about types of surprise, because I know Peter Fields has done some work on this, hasn't he? So not all surprises delivered in the same way.
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B
Yes. So Peter did some very interesting work looking at different types of surprise that showed up. So from, you know, breaking taboos, for instance, all the way through to surprising uses of media, extreme humor and that kind of stuff, I think part of our work has been said. So let's take that a stage further and think about two different kind of families of surprise, effectively, because we want to make it useful and use. Right. The whole point of the Cost of Dull is not simply to stick a sharp stick in people's ribs, but actually to say, here are some questions to ask yourselves and to make it useful. So we're looking at two different families of surprise, which we're calling the short O and the long O or the short O and the long oh, maybe I think that was your idea, wasn't it? So the short O are kind of surprises that are kind of narrative surprises or surprises in the way kind of a brand sort of shows up that don't change the way that we think about them particularly, but grab our Attention, imprint that experience on our memory. Just. Just kind of gives us a higher sort of share of mind about them. The long O is actually to do with surprises that really change our perception of the category, the brand, the possibility of the category for us. So let's just look at each of those briefly. So a couple examples of the short O. So the short O might be sort of factual. Surprise. Oh, I didn't know that. I mean, you first talked about this. So your guest on Chili's the other day, right? He talks about the fact that Chili's sells more margaritas than anybody else in the US they sold 25 million margaritas a year, you know. Oh, that's kind of interesting. I mean, it doesn't completely change my relationship with Chiles, but it's kind of a. Okay. I just think about them in a slightly different way. And journalists are really good about this as well. So if I said to you, do you regard yourself as being very wealthy, what would your answer be?
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A
Medium. I'd put myself in the middle of the. There you go. There you go.
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B
But as you know, Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire. So when a journalist says to us, actually, you are. You, John, are closer to wealth, closer in wealth to Bill Gates than he is to Elon Musk, it's just a kind of surprising fact. You go, oh, okay. I don't know if I'll better or worse about how I do. I feel sorry for Bill Gates now. Poor guy, you know, he's practically broke. But that's just kind of a short O. So it just kind of wakes me up a little bit. But I mean, short O's obviously in sort of the way that advertising works, kind of narrative twists. It's interesting to see how that works with things like. So my dentist, for instance, my dentist is comedian. Who knew? My dentist says things like, you don't have to floss all your teeth, Adam, only the ones you want to keep. Okay, so that is a little narrative twist. It's a short O, you know, which is how comedy works, right? I set something up, I go the other kind of way. But you can see it in what's called chaos packaging now, which is people starting to package things in different kinds of formats. You know, you might say this is an interesting format perhaps for Jimmy sized coffee. And I wasn't expecting to see it in a tin in that kind of way. You might say the gin that is packaging itself in a, you know, in a petrol can, for instance. You know, does it really kind of make me think differently about gin? No, but it makes it stand out on the shelf in a different kind of way. So you can see lots of short O's working like that. And I suppose because I think we see, we see quite a lot of surprise from kind of challenges in. And we come on to talk about, you know, brands like Aldi for instance. But so luxury, I think is really interesting to look at challenges in. And Loewe is this Spanish luxury brand. And I saw the CMO on stage last year talking about the fact that they realized they couldn't just show up like a kind of classic French luxury brand. And of course craft is important and they pay attention to craft, but just kind of revering all the kind of traditional sombre things that French luxury brands do. So one of the things they very famously did was they chose Maggie Smith as one of their kind of brand ambassadors, which was entirely unlike the rest of that particular business. And interestingly, they chose her at the same time as a bunch of other perhaps more predictable brand ambassadors like Josh o' Connor and Greta Lee. But it was Maggie Smith that really spiked in terms of how people paid attention to that. We're doing some work with a very interesting kind of social tracking company called Wearisma that are looking at how you measure the kind of ripples and spikes from the unexpected. And that's a new kind of collaboration out there. So I think that's a very good example of the short O, the unpredictable, the surprising. Not really changing your view massively about something, but just getting your attention.
- [26:12]
A
Definitely one of my favorite examples actually from the last Super Bowl. So there's a streaming platform in the US called Tubi and they specialize in kind of more specialist kind of content. So you can in fact their positioning is all about going down rabbit holes. So pick anything you want. So whatever your particular interest is that there's 100 kind of specialist dramas or horrors or whatever that can meet your fantasy. And they were thinking, how do they use surprise to cut through on the Super Bowl? And so what they did is, you know, during each quarter you cut back and you have the commentary from the kind of commentators and then you have the ad breaks and so on. And so what they did, they collaborate. I think it was Fox who were running the, running the super bowl coverage that year. They collaborated with Fox and they created a 30 second scene of the commentators reviewing the game. But then they, then they made it as if the channel had been taken over and it had been, and it been switched over to Tubi. So what happened is, you're watching this, the commentators are chatting, and then the menu pops up, someone clicks on Tubi, it goes to a horror film, it starts playing a horror film. And what happened is, in front of, you know, 110 million people or whatever there was in the super bowl this year, everyone went into meltdown and people were picking up their remotes, trying to, like, get it back. What's happened, people. People are on, you know, on X, trying to. What's just happened? And who's taken over my channel? Who sat on the remote? It went wild. And I just thought, what a brilliant example of surprise. And also delivering your key message, which is, Tubi's got some horror films or two Bs got some entertainment, whatever. So I thought it was absolutely brilliant example of creating surprise on the biggest. And they also timed it for the final quarter when the game was very tight, very good, and everyone was on the edge of their seats trying to work out who was going to win.
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B
So very good.
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A
It was one of the favorite examples I've ever seen.
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B
Well, that's interesting, isn't it, about the location of surprises. We were talking a bit with your Will Godara thing early on about the location of surprises. Really important. Perhaps we'll come on, talk a bit about that later on. I think that's fascinating. Which is, again, it's this thing about being strategic, about not simply what the surprise is and why you're using, but where it shows up and how it changes your perception about the other things around it. I think.
- [28:22]
A
I wonder how much of how much surprise is intentional. Because if I think about Jaguar, I think the Jaguar relaunch was, I mean, well documented in terms of the reaction. Billions of views around the world, enormous engagement. And I think it denied people's assumptions of Jaguar because people had an assumption of Jaguar as being, you know, an older man's car. You know, kind of like history, heritage, certain driving experience, a certain look and feel, a certain aesthetic. And they launched something very futuristic in pastel pink in Miami. So they challenged our assumptions as to what a car launch should look. Well, what a car launch from Jaguar should look like. And that got huge attention. Yes, but both positive and negative. Probably more negative than positive, in fact. But surprise probably was the thing that got people engaged.
- [29:17]
B
Well, that was interesting, wasn't it? Because it wasn't resolved as surprise. It opened up a new possibility that was going to be resolved at some point in the future. Well, and recently, now you've been part of that kind of resolution and seen it and maybe that was the thing that made people uncomfortable, which was an unresolved surprise in that kind of way. But they needed to leave it open because they needed to make us open to what they could do.
- [29:40]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, so they're good examples of kind of short term O with dramatic effect.
- [29:47]
B
Yep.
- [29:48]
A
Give me an example of a long
- [29:49]
B
term O. Yeah, so I think there are two. Let's just focus on two examples of the long term O and that this really is the. Oh, you know, I kind of hadn't thought about it like that, really. So there's two. So one is, I think I hadn't expected you to do that or I hadn't expected you to do that for me or allow me to do that. So you look at, you know, what, you know, everybody. Everybody's constantly being surprised about AI. You wouldn't believe what AI allowed me to do. Right. That is. That is the long O around AI. But I think, for instance, you look at HSBC and what they did a few years ago and they did their program backing the homeless. I was talking to Becky Moffatt, who's the UK CMO, about that and saying that actually that did more to change consideration for and relationship with HSBC than a lot of the advertising that they'd been doing. Because she says there's this very sort of negative media narrative about big banks in the uk. They don't expect them to do things that are selfless. Here they are doing something that's genuinely. Why would they get any commercial thing out of that? They're just doing it as a good thing. That in itself, I think was kind of a long. Okay, fantastic. A bank does that. That's great. And then I think the other one that I really like is kind of. I hadn't thought about it like that. I think sort of the thing that Specsavers did around hearing aids in Valentine's Day, you know, which was they showed this very sort of sensual ad that was talked about, you know, a relationship aid. And you think it's going to be some kind of sex toy and it turns out to be a hearing aid. Based on a real insight that, of course, actually one of the things that goes with hearing loss is the relationship, you know, because that sort of intimacy disappears, was just a really great way to reframe a source of embarrassment, I think, in a really interesting way. And then, of course, you know, there are companies that use Surprised consistently, like Aldi and like Elf, you know, and you've done a lot of work with Corey and Elf, obviously, who do that much more systematically. And you know, perhaps we could discuss that in a minute in some kind of way. But I think that's really interesting what they're doing.
- [31:52]
A
It is Aldi have been tremendously successful, I know, particularly in the UK market by challenging our assumptions on the quality of what they sell. And I think they've been brilliant. I mean champagne is a good example, isn't it? They seem to double down on exceptionally good award winning champagne 11.99, which is probably about half the price. You'd get something anywhere else. That's a really good example of where they thought about products, haven't they and how can they deliver? How can they challenge your perception that Aldi low price means low quality? And in fact one of the as well that people assume that talking about price is not emotive. But actually the Like Brands campaign they started that with 10 years ago is five star on system one.
- [32:33]
B
Is it?
- [32:33]
A
Yeah. So they show you a premium expensive branded and then the old lady reveals it. And behind there's the Audi one, that's about a quarter of the price. I like this, but this is better. So I think. But I like this as much, but it's only 39p or whatever. And that was a five star ad. So you surprise. I wasn't expecting it to have a cheaper product behind. That's just as good.
- [32:57]
B
Well, I had a very interesting conversation with Kirsten Halley, who until recently was the CMO of Aldi, about what they did and how they approached it. And one of the things I asked her was, so, you know, so what's the secret for a marketer and using surprise. And she gave me a gratifyingly surprising answer. Because her answer to what's the most important thing how a marketer uses a surprise was rigor and discipline, which is not what you expect to hear. Right. You think it's going to be about improv, have a great creative kind of thing, all that kind of stuff. Because her point was if you are going to match Waitrose on the quality of mince pies at Christmas, which is going to be surprising for half the price if you are going to produce lobster tails for £5.99 and therefore make people think, oh, Aldi's not just for the basics, it's for the special stuff as well, these are big strategic shifts you are trying to kind of create. Even frankly, if you are going to offer scuba scooters and kayaks in your center aisle on Thursdays or Sundays, that takes a lot of rigor. And discipline. It takes the different departments working well together. You have to plan it a long time out in advance. You're going to produce a mince pie that matches Waitrose for half the price. You've got an engine, it takes you quite a long time to construct that. It's a really deliberate, long term strategic play. And she said you need to do it consistently because you can do lots of them. Some will work and some won't work and you just keep going. So it's really interesting, I think. And clearly you and I both love challenges. And I think the interesting thing for challengers and surprise is they don't have the budgets to be boring. Right. To quote one of your previous guests. So they've got to do something. They're using surprise, very systematic and baking it into what they do as a key part of their strategic intent and
- [34:29]
A
execution and going back to reward prediction error. So what that demonstrates is once you've had the surprise about what you're getting, it's now built into your expectations. And that's what the experiment showed, is that basically when you repeat the surprise, it has lower and lower effects. So from Kirsten's point of view, you need to build a system that can create more surprises that continually challenge your assumptions about, in this case, Audi and value.
- [34:56]
B
Yes.
- [34:57]
A
Rather than do it as a one off.
- [34:58]
B
I used to work on the jeweler Harry Winston. Right. Did you come across Harry Winston? No. Harry Winston. So big jeweler in the us. He was a very famous guy. He was name checked actually by Marilyn Monroe in the song Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend. And he's no longer with us, sadly. He loved really big diamonds and he used to carry them around in his pockets actually. Rather sorry when he sold them. And there's a great story about Harry Winston, how he's. There's a, There's a wealthy woman who's come in, Mrs. Byfield, Valla Byfield. She's married to a wealthy American hotelier and she's going to try one of his rings that he's been making for her. And she comes in and it's a square cut diamond ring. And he puts it on her finger. Harry Winston. And he sees her gasp because she's horrified at the size of it. And he's realized that she's intimidated by how big the ring is. And he says to her, I love this. He says, don't worry, Mrs. Byfield, you'll find it gets smaller the longer you wear it. And that's exactly about the degradation of reward. Right. Effectively, which is you can't just go on doing the same kind of surprise in the same kind of way. Particularly as a challenger, you've constantly got to cap it. And that goes back again to our point about a recognizing that's happening. I think one of the reasons that challengers flare very brightly for a while and then fade and die is because the initial surprise they were launched on, they fail to either repeat or cap and they try and ride that all the way to the beach and that's just not going to work. Right. You've got to keep doing it and building it in and resurprising in new and fresh ways.
- [36:26]
A
Yeah, yeah, you're right. All the best challenges, if you take Liquid Death or elf, they're constantly coming up with new, different surprising ways to deliver surprise. Or Tony's, you know, like, they talk about, you know, their impact on the supply chain in their financial report.
- [36:43]
B
Yes.
- [36:44]
A
And you go, oh, I wasn't expecting to read about slave, modern slavery in the supply chain. Yes. In the bit about margins. Yes, in the financial report.
- [36:52]
B
Exactly.
- [36:53]
A
Yeah.
- [36:53]
B
And I think there have been. There have come to be some quite cliched places to do surprises. Like collaborations have become a quite obvious way to do surprises that aren't really intrinsic to the brand. LTOs, you know, quite obvious places do surprises. But actually baking the surprise into more of the kind of fundamental elements of how the brand shows up, I think is a key part of what we're trying to talk about in Cat. Yeah.
- [37:13]
A
Talking about colabs. I don't know if you saw. Do you see the Crayola and Camelbak water bottle?
- [37:18]
B
No, I didn't.
- [37:19]
A
I mean, LinkedIn went into meltdown last week, so Camelbak launched a Crayola kind of designed water bottle. So it literally is the color design and the lid. It brilliantly replicates crayon.
- [37:32]
B
Fantastic.
- [37:33]
A
And it was great because it would have cost, you know, it would have cost not a lot better capital to design it, but basically it's leveraging. The surprise of seeing the crayon that we all grew up playing with in the context of water bottle, that. The surprise of just seeing that it did all the heavy lifting. You didn't need any copy, didn't need any promotion. Just seeing that was like, oh, I wasn't expecting that. Brilliantly done. And I just thought, what an easy way to get two brands to collaborate, to bring. Bring surprise for mutual benefit.
- [38:01]
B
And Crayola showing up in an adult environment in an adult world.
- [38:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I can imagine the amount of Kids that must go to school with, you know, with a backpack and a water bottle inside. And now they've got the Crayola one. I mean, it's going to be. Yeah, it's their brand campaign done for the next five years. Yes, very cool. That's a really good one. Now, talking about, we've talked about how, you know, surprise might degrade over time. Is there also a conversation to be had on the right balance of surprise? Because I think you can shock people on the one hand or you can pleasantly surprise people on the other. Is there kind of a perfect balance of surprise?
- [38:34]
B
Well, if you talk to experienced designers. So Heather McGill, for instance, who was the head of Spectator experience for London 2012, has also designed a kind of very successful Harry Potter kind of global experience. She's done expos. She talks about the fact that when you surprise, you've got to kind of really surprise. So she talks about this thing called the third spider drop, which is when you go into the Harry Potter Forbidden Forest, there's this kind of spider scene, there's a spider drop, A second one comes down, you go, oh, okay, right. You know, and then she said, but it's the third one. The third one comes right down to just above your head. Because we're so used to audiences expectations, as I. On the one hand, you have to have the third spider drop rather than just the second or the first one. On the other hand, she said the lulls are as important as the spider drops. You can't have a constant bunch of surprise. You've got to manage it. And actually your stuff on System one kind of reinforces that, doesn't it? Which is there's a kind of a balance to be struck here.
- [39:25]
A
Yeah, it does. In both innovation and packaging, actually, as well as advertising. So in innovation, what's interesting is it ends up about 80, 20. So when we look at the innovation that landed most in market, it had about 20% surprise and about 80% happiness, if you look at the ratio of familiar to new. And I think a great example of that. And in fact, he's been on the podcast. Dave Kaufman was the kind of brand manager for Google Glass, Google Glasses, when it came out maybe five, six years ago. And it got quite a big backlash. It was too futuristic, it looked a bit awkward on people. And he framed it as the Meier principle, most advanced yet acceptable. And that most technology companies focus on most advanced. They don't focus on most acceptable. And ironically, he was then poached by Meta and he's now the guy in charge of Ray Ban metas. And Ray Ban metas have perfectly got that balance right because what they've done is 80% familiar. It's the Ray Bans I know and love. It's the Wayfarer design. It looks and feels pretty similar, but it happens to have a bit of technology in, but interestingly not too much. So it does simple things like I want to take a photo while I'm, you know, skiing down a mountain. I want to record a little bit while I'm on my bike. It can play music through the arms. So it's giving you the familiar things, but with a slight twist.
- [40:51]
B
Very nice.
- [40:52]
A
And I think that's a really good example because it's easy, isn't it, to over rely on technology and do imagine what's possible, but actually end up shocking people or surprising people too much rather than balancing it with familiarity.
- [41:04]
B
But as a side note, as we play out the Costa Del project a bit more, there's a whole thing about the, the cost of dull product and the cost of dull innovation that one could go into there, which we do today. So I think we should. Well, this is an appeal to anybody listening who's got any data around that we'd love to, love to dig into that a bit more because I think
- [41:20]
A
that could be helpful. And in fact it came through on advertising because, I mean, my first thought was, you know, dear team, send me the most surprising ads of all time in the database, expecting to see some a lot of work that is now famous. And I was surprised how I didn't like quite a lot of it because it took two surprise. It took surprise too far and didn't resolve it into happiness.
- [41:41]
B
Okay.
- [41:41]
A
So I'm like, ah, it shocked but didn't delight. Yeah, I'm like, that's interesting.
- [41:45]
B
Yeah.
- [41:46]
A
So there is. And then when we looked at the data, the correlation between kind of the campaigns that led to long term results, what we found is there was a landing zone of around 15% surprise.
- [41:56]
B
Okay.
- [41:57]
A
So if you go too far beyond that, what we saw is, you know, they were less likely to be effective of don't create enough surprise and not at all. So again, using surprise, it's not the end in itself, it's a means to create the end. And the end should be leaving everyone feeling happy about what you've just served. Mark?
- [42:15]
B
Yeah, I think, yes, it's interesting. I think there are certain situations where shock might be necessary. Bit like your Jaguar kind of story. And certainly Lucinda Barlow talks about the fact if you're trying to really change ingrained habits for Uber in New Delhi, for instance, you do have to kind of shock them out of those. But your point is you have to also resolve it a little bit. I think it's. That's an interesting question. There's going to be continuum, isn't there? From a little playful smile in the mind. I saw a pub sign the other day which I really liked, which was. It said, it's on blackboard. It said, soup of the day, the tears of our enemies. Right. So it's just a little smile. Right. It just kind of makes you. Oh, that's kind of fun. I'll tell John about that. You know, and we're kind of like all the way up to shocking people. There's clearly a continuum one can play out here that we can use as we develop strategic tools. But maybe we need to think about at what end of this scale do we need to play?
- [43:04]
A
We do. Very good. Well, when this goes out, we'll have delivered our can talk. So listeners either have been a big success or not. Who knows?
- [43:14]
B
Or a surprising failure.
- [43:15]
A
Or a surprising failure. Whether our surprises on stage worked or didn't were yet to be determined. So. So we'll have to do an update on that. But, Adam, thank you. It's been so good to do this journey with you. I have to say, I've loved it. A pleasant surprise.
- [43:31]
B
Well, it's taken us to some unexpected places. I think it has. And every good journey should do that. Right. Enjoyed it.
- [43:35]
A
It's a great topic. I've absolutely loved it. What should happen next?
- [43:40]
B
Well, clearly, as with the spirit of the cost of dull, we want to get this out there. We want to help people make interventions within their business, in their company. We want them to help themselves stop being so dull. So, I mean, we'd love to be talk to as many audiences and as big an audience as we can about it, really, I think. Don't we take it on the road?
- [43:56]
A
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, Costa DA has taken us far and wide to all sorts of places. And it's been fascinating, actually. I found the types of organizations that invited us in to talk. And it's almost as if people wanted to have a mirror put up to their industry and to be reminded of how dull they are because they understood the journey they have to go on. And actually, this was a surprising way of getting the organization to rally behind the cause of not being dull. And I hope the same thing happens with surprise.
- [44:23]
B
Yeah. And I think we are developing specific tools around that that we can share as we talk more over the next 18 months or so. So there will be more to come.
- [44:32]
A
Amazing. Adam, thank you. As always, an absolute pleasure.
- [44:35]
B
Loved it.
- [44:36]
A
Thank you. So I hope you enjoy that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter, so if you'd like to get my thoughts on the One Thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast just launched, Uncensored Renegades, with the fabulous Corey Marchisoto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that it's in your feed. Uncensored Renegades. And and finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast, it would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.