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- [00:01]
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, 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 systemonegroup.com and find out more. Okay, without further ado, let's go on with the show. So what's going to make the advertising agency of the future?
- [01:02]
B
One of the things which is a prediction of mine is that the whole thing works backwards, which is that you have production companies that are very, very good at high speed AI production, who then hire creative people from agencies. This is absolutely the innovator's dilemma, right? Which is your suppliers become your competition because they're actually learning from what you do and they don't have any particular vested interest to defend. And so a production company could hire two or three very brilliant creative people. And instead of saying, we're going to get clients, it would just say, we're going to produce brilliant ads and we're going to sell them. So in other words, Faberge, that model is someone comes in and requests an egg. That's the advertising agency model. Okay? And gold was really expensive. Eggs were really time. Eggs were really time consuming to produce. It made sense to do it that way around Wedgwood and Chippendale. Okay. When Wedgwood could produce pottery in huge quantities using clay, that wasn't very expensive. They made the plates and they went out and sold them. So one of the things which is going to happen whether we like it or not, is that companies that are very good at effectively generating at least working prototypes could actually spontane. Now we go, that's really weird, right? Okay. How could it possibly work that way, that people have an idea first and then sell it somewhere? No one went to the Beatles and said, we want to commission a song about a submarine, did they? Okay, now I'm, you know, The Beatles wrote a song about a submarine and they sold the song.
- [02:36]
A
Yeah.
- [02:36]
B
Okay. It isn't totally ridiculous that you could. Cadbury's gorilla basically happened like that. That the ad that ran on TV was basically the ad they made for the pitch.
- [02:45]
C
Yeah. Well, art, Art works that way.
- [02:48]
B
I mean, you. Okay, you've got people with. You had patrons in the old days of art. You had someone who said, you know, Gainsborough or someone, Mr. And Mrs. Andrews standing by a tree.
- [02:57]
C
That.
- [02:57]
B
Right. But most of the time artists went and made the stuff and then sold it.
- [03:02]
C
Yeah.
- [03:03]
B
And in that model, can would no longer be a retrospective awards fest. It would be a trade fair, which is exactly what it is for tv. If you go to MIP TV in Cannes, it's not. Here's an award for a great program that somebody made two years ago. Okay. It's. We've got this TV format and if you want to use it, it's 3 million quid.
- [03:24]
A
Yeah.
- [03:24]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, what. What does seem not that weird to me is that a large portion of what happens Now, I'm talking about ads here, but it also applies to behavioral ideas to, you know, to brand partnerships, to anything else. Why don't you have people spontaneously generating ideas and then selling them? Now, an ad agency is never going to do that because it's too much of a threat to its pre existing relational business model. But other companies can. And you only need five people in a. You know, and some tokens.
- [03:55]
C
Yeah.
- [03:56]
A
This is what. I think you've often said this, but I think the creative industries should reposition themselves across the whole of business, the whole mix.
- [04:03]
B
Right. Thank you. Yeah.
- [04:04]
A
Really should. Right. Because I mean, I remember someone asked me what percentage of my time as a CMI I spent on advertising. I actually went through my 10. It was 5%.
- [04:13]
B
5%, yeah.
- [04:13]
A
Now Ritson reckons it's 8. When he's done equivalent across his. Across his students. Right.
- [04:17]
B
And he's right. But he goes, look, creativity. We're in the Cannes Festival of creativity. He did that famous thing. Well, I learned attending Cannes.
- [04:25]
A
Oh, yeah. Blank page.
- [04:27]
B
And he says creativity is only about 3% of what a CMO does. You know, if you look at the whole gamut of things and therefore claiming this is simple. However, creativity as broadly applied. Oh, completely pricing. Yeah. And that was. That's slightly my frustration with the way ad agencies have kind of painted marketing because they're two, four. Okay. Marketing actually means two things. It means a business function and it's a business philosophy. Yeah. And the reason I got famous totally accidentally. It wasn't intended or planned, was. I stopped talking about what, what we did and started talking about how we think. Yeah, yeah, okay. Fundamentally, this is actually a philosophical approach to business which sees value creation as something that happens in the mind, not in the factory end of, you know, and anything you do that effectively interfaces with the customer. By the way, an awful lot of marketing, I mean, the most important marketing isn't the work of marketers or a marketing department. Okay? So there's marketing as a zoo, which is a lot of animals in a totally artificial setting, and there's marketing as an ecosystem. Now, one of the biggest marketing ideas was joke about, okay? Now I don't think a marketer came up with it. Some random cafe came up with it and people copied it. Bottomless brunch, right? Yeah, because what is it? It's breakfast for alcoholics. Right. Do you fancy getting really pissed before 11 o' clock in the morning? Now, if you called it that, no one would go, but you call it bottomless brunch and it's completely legitimate, healthy way to spend a Saturday. Okay? So, you know, you know, if you look at what things are called, you know, lang, I mean, you know, accidental things in language like, for example, you know, whether it's tax relief or, you know, the language we choose to use in Day to Day is effectively a marketing force. The fact that it wasn't actually commissioned or didn't. I mean, the London overground I always described as an ingenious marketing idea where marketers had nothing to do with it. You take a railway line and pretend it's a tube line and everybody suddenly uses it.
- [06:29]
C
Yeah, I've got a couple of things to say on this because I think, you know, it's not the job of the advertising industry to employ people and we may have to understand that the industry is probably bigger than it should be. You know, that sounds quite outrageous, but every single year I worked in advertising, I would see how many people were employed and how many people were in meetings and it always seemed like there were too many people. And we have this weird sort of extreme situation now where we've got some people saying that AI is just going to make all the ads. And I think it's absolute nonsense because I think craft is very important. I think to celebrate amazing production values and great ideas is important, and that's way too important. Media is far too expensive to save half a million quids on production and then spend 10 million more on media because it's not a very good Ad, but at the same time, you'll go to a shoot for advertising, or you go to a movie shoot and you see catering departments and you see personal assistants and assistants to the assistants and feng shui consultants, and you see 200 people on a movie shoot, and you think, it's not going to be like this for a long time. So I think there's this sort of delicious point halfway between the two where we need to recognize this. It's too important for AI but it's not as important as we think. But I think all the growth has to come by essentially what you're saying, which is advertising type of thinking to a broader world. Yeah, and my problem is basically that if you were to get every single person that works for a big company and you try and figure out where their focal point was, their focal point would be in the past and it would be within the company. Because almost every single job is either about what's happened before or it's about what's just happened. Very, very, very few jobs in companies are about the future, let alone the far future. And every single company, every single department other than marketing is obsessed with itself and how it buys things and what it buys. And therefore, I think our job is to represent a slight point in the future and to represent people. And when you do that, you realize that actually our job is to come up with ideas or products or services or customer service or different ways of doing things that can create growth in consumers. And when you do that, you realize the products of could do could be much better. Maybe it's different recipes, maybe it's better customer service, maybe it's different go to market propositions. Maybe it's a different type of business
- [08:47]
B
strategy, different pricing model.
- [08:49]
C
Different pricing model. A very, very boring example. But it's amazing to me how many unbelievably wealthy people there are in America. And it's amazing to me how many categories there are where you can't spend that much money. Like, it's very, very hard to spend a fortune on a tv. It's very, very hard to spend a fortune on luggage. Depends on what you go by a lot. But there's a massive sort of underserved customer, which is people that want to show off, for example, you know, a very expensive iPad case. So I find it fascinating because I think we have the people to do this and we have the process to do this, but the one thing that's laying us down is we're obsessed with the word creativity. And I think nothing has done advertising more of a disservice than the word creativity because I think it means that we lose space with people. People in real business don't want a creative solution. And, uh, they want a better solution. And the, the types of clients that I work for and the types of programs and consulting that I, I do, it's never about creativity. You know, it's a big car company saying buying a car with us is shitty. How can it be better?
- [09:51]
B
It's ironic.
- [09:52]
C
I don't need to give them a creative solution. I need to give them competence. I need to give them common sense. I need to give them empathy. I need to give them imagination. But for me, we're in the business of esthetics and imagination and problem solving and not creativity. Because people don't really want a creative ad and they want. They don't want creative customer service.
- [10:13]
B
I mean, there's certain problematic words. Yeah, Weirdly, brand is problematic because as soon as you utter it, anybody who isn't in the market will go, it's not my problem. That's marketing's problem.
- [10:23]
C
Yeah.
- [10:24]
B
Okay. So brand automatically is a phrase that points you into the Marcom paints you into the Marcom corner. Creativity, I think, might be John Hegarty who's wary about it. There's certain people who have. David Ogley didn't like the word. Yeah, yeah. For example. And funnily enough, there is a kind of mathematical explanation for what it is, which is. It's the kind of thinking that's necessary to get you out of a local maximum. Yes.
- [10:48]
C
Yeah.
- [10:48]
B
So effectively it is that lateral thing where everybody has currently defined the problem in this way. And now we're trapped at a local maximum. In complexity theory, what creativity will do is effectively get you out, get you under the hump to a higher sunlit upland that lies beyond. So it is actually a necessary thing in.
- [11:05]
C
But I think it's the process result.
- [11:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. And also, I mean, it's very interesting what you're saying. I mean, I think there's an anthropologist who weirdly, was friendly with my great aunt who was also an anthropologist. The anthropologist was called Beatrice Powder maker, weird name. Okay. And I got a vague idea she spent a lot of time late in her career studying Madison Avenue and said, this is a completely uninteresting business in most respects, except the culture that it manifests and the thinking that it. And the people. And I think if we'd spent time selling how we. My argument is when I said, you know, don't make the Eurostar faster, put WI fi on the fucking trains. That's just marketing thinking 101. And much to my amazement, because I'd grown up in an ad agency where that kind of thinking isn't that weird. People seem to view me as some sort of fucking druid. Okay? And, you know, it seemed pretty obvious to me. But I think there is this way of approaching problems that sits within advertising agencies, sometimes in the creative department, sometimes in the planning part. Somewhere, somewhere else. Yeah. Which culturally and temperamentally, is surprisingly rare and valuable.
- [12:12]
C
Yes.
- [12:13]
B
And this was exactly her view was the business itself was of no interest whatsoever but the culture of the people within it. She thought.
- [12:21]
C
So there are amazing questions that we could work on. Like, imagine going to a bank and saying, let's come up with a way to get people to pay more for their bank account. Imagine going to a hotel chain and going, how can we get people to spend more nights a year in a hotel?
- [12:34]
B
I'll give you one, by the way.
- [12:34]
C
I had to go to Miami and saying, how can we make money? Miami, a better city. You know, these are the kind of questions that advertising people.
- [12:41]
B
We're like, so the ad agency is like the panda. You know that. You know that this is going to totally confuse the American audience. I apologize for that. But Alan Partridge, which is, well, if it's just the potato that's affected, you're going to pay the price for being a fussy eater. You remember that. Okay? Advertising people be like, they only eat Marcom's budgets. They've never gone after anybody else's budget at all. They're terrified of talking to anybody who is either senior to or adjacent to the marketing director because it might put their relationship into jeopardy because they're seen to have gone behind someone's back. Account people are the worst at this. Their relationship, paranoid. Yeah, they're like an abused spouse, really. The relationship a senior ad ad person with their client, you know, it's. It's like an abusive relationship. But they're. They exist in a state of total terror, you see, because their whole career is dependent on this one relationship. And so they're not going to take any risks, but taking how we think. And I made this discovery that when I started talking about behavioral science and behavioral change, I got, you know, I didn't get invited to marketing conferences. I got invited to 10 Downing Street. Yeah, okay. I suddenly went, hold on. There's a whole market for this that we do that we've never even explored. I totally agree with you there. You know, in. In the. You know, I'll give an Example, I mean, you know, the electric car thing. All I said very simply was, there's range anxiety. You can either increase range and you can reduce anxiety. It's probably a lot cheaper. Second than it is to do the first, what was the weirdest thing about all of this? And I thought you get what's fantastic about just doing okay, is that when you do bad things happen that you never expected, but good things happen that you never would have planned for. Yeah. And one of the weirdest things that happened, which I never anticipated, was that the book acquired a kind of fandom in the engineering community, because the thing in engineering called human factors, basically. And then a lot of engineers probably go, well, I'm always trying to show off to my engineer friends by solving this problem with code. Maybe I don't need to solve the problem with code. I can just solve the problem with psychology. Which is actually a brilliant example of this. An insurance company which was about to spend an absolute fortune speeding up their payment of claims because everybody complained about it. And somebody said, how long does it take you to pick pay a claim? On average, it's about two weeks. They said, okay, I'll solve the problem for you now just write to them and say, expect your claims check within four weeks. And the check got sent out within two weeks. All the calls to the call center stopped to be replaced with a small trickle of phone calls from people saying, thank you for sending it so quickly.
- [15:20]
A
Exactly how simple.
- [15:21]
B
So the problem was an uncertainty problem. It wasn't a speed problem. You see. And so often, I think we waste tons and tons of resources effectively trying to move the wrong metrics. You know, moving the psychological metric. That's what, that's what Uber did. It just made waiting for a cab not very uncertain anymore because you could see it on the map.
- [15:41]
A
You could see where it was. That's brilliant.
- [15:42]
B
And actually, if we just brought that thinking into general life, and by the way, also into government policy. I mean, government shit at this government doesn't have a marketing function. It spends 45% of GDP, doesn't have a creative function, doesn't have a marketing function. As a consequence, all it has is a press relations function, really. Now, if you think about that, your main means of reaching the public, who are your customers, that is your constituents or your voters, is through the medium of journalists who are trying to catch you out. Right. That's like saying, what we're going to do is we're going to advertise this new Ford Mustang, but we're going to have to Use Greta Thunberg as our spokesperson. So government goes, let's talk to journalists because it's the cheap way of reaching the public. But all journalists want to be is to be Woodward and Bernstein. They don't want you to look good, they want you to make look like a tragic crook, right? So it's like saying, right, Greta, this Mustang, right, V8, it's not going to work. Now if government learned to talk to people directly as people, there are loads of things you can do. One of them very simple thing, okay? People don't like having shit imposed on them. If on the other hand you impose something on people and say, but in return we're going to give you something else, yeah, that's now framed as an exchange, not as an imposition, and we, we react to it. So the classic example is I don't oppose, even though I'm a bit of a petrol head and I'm, you know, I've got six penalty points. I don't actually oppose the 20 mile an hour speed limit in London. Okay. You know, I, I don't want children to get killed. I'm not a, you know, I like driving it around. But I'm, you know, I'm not totally right. If you just said, okay, it's 20 miles an hour now in the London side streets, but we're going to get rid of speed bumps. Most people go, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, okay, yeah, fair enough. Okay, yeah, I'll take that deal. I can drive around at 20, but I don't have to trash my suspension. Okay, or you, you know, even if they just said, by the way, if you go 25, it's only one penalty point or two penalty points or it's a 50 pound fine, not 100 pound fine. But government doesn't have any, you know, it's almost like something, it's on the spectrum in terms of its dealing with people it doesn't understand. Emotional.
- [17:55]
C
It's a question for you because of all the people in the world that would ever be invited into these meetings, you're probably number one on that list. Like, do you ever get invited into these meetings? If you do get invited into the meetings, do they listen to you and take you seriously like the poster child for advertising thinking? Not in advertising.
- [18:13]
B
I get invited to meetings with Reform all the time and my wife won't let me go. But funnily enough, outlier political parties are really interested in this stuff in a way. There's a party called grud, which is a Welsh Libertarian Party. So basically they want, they Want all
- [18:32]
A
three of us can get.
- [18:34]
B
They want Wales to become independent and then turn into Singapore, basically. Sounds quite a good idea, but. But no, no, I mean, you people acknowledge it and they're interested, but I think we fetishized. Where I sympathetic with the word creative, although I define it slightly differently, and I'm defined in mathematical terms, is we fetishize process over outcome.
- [18:57]
C
Yeah.
- [18:58]
B
So we go, unless there's a totally rigorous process, we can't have a good outcome. That's not true of penicillin, it's not true of Viagra, it's not true of Darwin going around the world. You know, none of the really important discoveries happen forwards. They happen backwards.
- [19:11]
C
Yeah.
- [19:11]
B
And yet we're absolutely obsessed with how. How you get there, not where you get to.
- [19:16]
C
Yeah.
- [19:17]
B
And my argument is. So I was talking to an AI guru in Miami three days ago and he was quite taken with this sentence. The requirement that everything you do makes sense in advance fundamentally limits the size of the solution space. So by demanding that you proceed through sequential logic, you can only explore about 15 to 20% of the available solution space. Moreover, it's probably the part that everybody else knows about already, your competitors know about, because they've got there using the same logic as you.
- [19:46]
A
Yeah, well, someone was arguing that about creating. The reason creativity is not dead is AI is only ever is based on what. What's been said in the past.
- [19:54]
B
You can. I think you can. There's a novel, there's a detective book out of them called the Blink of an Eye by quite a good detective writer, which is about a detective trying to solve a case where there's a human detective and an AI detective. And it's actually quite interesting, I mean, as an intellectual exploration, because you can see that in detective work, which is what we do, fundamentally what we're doing is trying to find something out that people won't tell us. And we're trying to discover something that, you know, either people don't know or unwilling to tell us about. You know, that's what we're looking for. And I can see that in detective work, an AI plus a human, each of them will have specific strengths. I mean, the ability. Would AI have caught Harold Shipman early? You know that those are the kind of weird questions, you know, wouldn't AI, you know, wouldn't AI have convicted Lucy Letby? Kind of depends which question you ask.
- [20:47]
C
I suppose it all depends on how you create, how you define creativity as well, because the ability of AI to basically try an unparalleled number of Combinations in a logical way and to dismiss assumptions about what the answer should look like. That's not a creative process, but it can get to creative outcomes.
- [21:05]
A
Yeah.
- [21:06]
C
So if you ask an AI to design a Formula one car chassis, it'll be a very organic structure that no human would ever be able to comprehend. Or if you ask it to design, like, the perfect aerial, it'll be a very different.
- [21:17]
B
Have you seen that aerial?
- [21:18]
C
Yeah, it's amazing.
- [21:19]
B
So they produced it using sort of
- [21:20]
C
evolutionary model kind of thing.
- [21:23]
B
The perfect aerial, which you would think would have to be symmetrical.
- [21:26]
C
Yeah.
- [21:26]
B
And actually it was nothing of the kind.
- [21:28]
C
And this was done like 10 years ago or something. So it's kind of weird because I think everyone likes to think they're creative, and everyone likes to think the kids in particular are creative. But if you ask a kid in any country on the planet to draw a house, they draw the sort of archetypal house with the kind of four windows and the triangle roof and the. And the sort of the. The. The pavement going up to it. Because Even by age 8, a kid knows what a house is supposed to look like. So you do enter these sort of.
- [21:54]
B
I want Waymo to make houses where they just drive around. You just live in a Waymo, you know, commute in, you know, having a while, you ride.
- [22:03]
C
And almost everything that comes about AI ends up in this place where every conversation which is this is dead, or we don't need that anymore, or is it better or is it worse? We're already sort of changing the parameters to assume is either it or us. And actually the answer to almost everything is it's where you use it and where you don't and how you use it and where in the process it is. And if we fixate on doing things in a better way rather than a cheap way or a faster way, then we're all going to get to.
- [22:33]
B
There is, I think, something which needs to change before marketing marketers in general. And I'd include innovation and marketing as basically the same thing before they can actually achieve the influence they deserve. And the framing is, basically goes back to effectively a sort of forking of economic thought going back to about 1950, which is, if you ask a conventional economist, and this is the kind of economics which is taught in all business schools every, everywhere. Okay, what is the purpose of a business? Right. The standard economic answer is that consumers already know exactly what they want. So the only purpose of a business is to provide them with that thing at as low a price as possible, as efficiently as possible. Making as much profit. The Austrian school, which is much, much more alert to both complexity and psychology, would argue completely the opposite. Almost. They'd say the purpose of a business is. It's a discovery mechanism. Businesses exist for the purpose of exploring adjacent, you know, available adjacencies where new forms of value can be endlessly created. And the Austrian. What's strange is the Austrian model of a business is actually much more optimistic and exciting than the Chicago School one. But for whatever reason, this kind of fundamentally, this idea of, you know, competition being there to drive down prices, rather than competition being there to. To encourage diversity, you. You made exactly that point when you said there are whole areas which are not being explored, partly because there's no evidence.
- [24:09]
C
Yeah, I think there's this fascinating divide in advertising now, and there's almost two completely different industries that think they're the same industry. And I think half of that world of advertising is a kind of older world like ours, where, if we're honest, I would go so far as to say we don't really know how advertising works. Like, we have sort of broad ideas, we have broad theories, we can kind of explain some of it, but at the end of the day, I can't explain why I own the pair of shoes that I do, and therefore, I think it's going to be quite hard for someone else to explain why I own the pair of shoes I do. And then there's this other part of advertising which is much more contemporary and sort of growing, which is based on this understanding that advertising is about something else entirely different. And they think they know why people buy, and they think that people buy rationally better products. And I think the job of advertising is to find people that want that thing and get in the way. And I've heard Elon Musk talk about this, and I've heard Zuckerberg talk about it, and it seems to fundamentally either not understand advertising or talk about a different form of advertising. And their form of advertising is we have so much data and we've got so much compute, and we've got so much of an ability to see patterns in data that we can find people that are really likely to buy your thing and we can get a bit of your message in that journey, and then people are going to buy your stuff. And I think that is such an engineering way to see the world. I think it's a great way to get a media roi. It's a great way to be able to sort of create a data trail and attribution that shows your ads are working. But that's just not how advertising works. It doesn't build a sense of awareness to a broader group of people. It doesn't create a sense of wonder that means I'm going to pay more for something. Something. It's the engineering of a moment in time that's perfectly designed to allow the technology company to take credit for something that may have already happened.
- [25:58]
B
I mean, it's quite weird for somebody who spends $100 million on their wedding to lecture the rest of us on how we make purchase decisions.
- [26:04]
C
I think it's sort of disgusting because it shows a complete inability to understand what advertising is about. And apart from the house, there's some really weird maths out there that shows if you use advertising to get people to double the number of people to buy your product, you probably make less money more than if you persuade the same number of people to buy your product but pay 30 extra because the margins in most product categories are so small that by charging extra, the real multiplier. And again, yeah, we have this really weird thing where I feel like someone in advertising is my job to generally create a situation where more people are aware of it, more people admire it, more people are seduced by it, more people are excited by it. And then some of those people are going to buy in years time. Some of those people are going to buy quite soon, some of those people are going to buy immediately and they're all going to buy a thing, perhaps pay a bit more for it, perhaps feel a bit better about it. Perhaps the people in the company that work there are going to feel better every time they go into the office that day. That's what advertising is about. And these people seem to think that their job is to know that I've just been to a Jeep dealership and if they can just put like 49 pixels of image in that corner, they can justifiably go into Stellantis head office on Monday and go, bang, we sold a car for you. And it's absolute nonsense.
- [27:19]
B
It doesn't explain why you went into the Jeep dealership in the first place.
- [27:21]
C
It doesn't. So for me, the whole performance advertising business has become the sort of art of being able to take credit for something regardless of whether or not you made it happen or not. I came across this.
- [27:31]
A
You guys probably know this one already. I didn't know that GM and Toyota had done this joint venture in the US and they built the very same car on the very same production line. Identical specs, one was badged to Toyota, one was badged, I think it was a Chevrolet in the end. And what was interesting about it is the Toyota had much higher secondhand residual values and much lower customer complaints the same car because it was basically down to the perception of the brand. So people had this halo perception of Tota, of being very reliable and therefore their expectations of it were it didn't break down. So when the customer surveys came around, they were delighted with it. But technically the same number of faults happened as the GM one. But because the GM had a, you know, different brand on it and then reserved, everyone wanted to buy the Toyota, not the gm, the very same car.
- [28:21]
B
It's very rare. It's very rare. You get that a B comparison.
- [28:25]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [28:26]
B
Brand value is very, very easy to discount because I think Ford had a similar case where there was a Ford and a Volkswagen effectively identical cars badged differently. So that it does. It has happened a few times, but it, I mean it did. I mean, intriguingly, you know, if you want to get into real extremes of that, the Swiss watch industry, you know, the luxury watch industry is completely whack, you know, so for example, probably be really careful here. You know, actually the finest watch is made of probably Japanese actually. Okay. And then you get the absurdity of course that the more expensive the watch you buy, the less accurately it keeps time.
- [29:05]
C
Yes, that's true.
- [29:06]
B
So you know, you know, a really cheap Casio, that casio was it FW90F91W or whatever it is, is basically a 10 pound one.
- [29:14]
A
It's the most accurate watch you'll ever buy.
- [29:16]
B
Okay. Now you know, obviously it varies depending on. But what's fascinating about that is it's not only that people prefer the badge value of a Toyota, they act, their whole perception of the experience is totally colored.
- [29:30]
A
Exactly. Sticking on the car theme, I was interested, I was looking up Tesla performance this quarter. So Q1, they increased market share year on year from 46% to 56%.
- [29:42]
B
That's in the electric car. In the electric car in the us.
- [29:44]
A
In the US and they've now retaken number one spot globally from byd. And everyone was trashing Elon a year or two ago, dropping prices, no advertising in brands. I just wonder whether Tesla's confounding marketing
- [30:00]
C
thinking at the moment, I think, I mean the weird thing about Tesla is you can make the bull case or the bear case, I guess. So if you, if you assume it's a car company and you know that its market share of cars is about 1.5 to like 1.9%. It's absolutely ludicrous that it's worth more than every single other car company in the world put together like that. That doesn't make any sense. And you can kind of say, well, they're going to sell full size self driving card software and that's going to be like 99 margin. But it still doesn't make any sense. So if you talk about it as
- [30:33]
B
a car company, you're right, actually, if you own the platform for all cars,
- [30:37]
C
yes, obviously, then the math start to work. So. So the only operator, the way that you make sense of the Tesla share price is to assume it's not a car company that sells EVs, it's to start moving upwards to bigger categories. So maybe it's a software company that sells mobility through cars, then it's bigger, maybe it takes over all cars in the world, so it's just a mobility company, that's nothing to do with ownership. Or you can start to make arguments that because of, you know, optimus and robots in people's houses, then it becomes a much bigger company. So basically your ability to think it's an insane valuation depends on. On how high altitude you're prepared to look at it from. And these days it's basically impossible actually to value any contemporary company because it's actually very hard to know what category any company is in. Because the weird thing about software is it means that effectively every company isn't really a vertical thing that owns a category, it's a horizontal thing. And then it's just a question of like, well, how far does the regulatory body let that company expand into other areas? Because actually, Google could be the world's largest travel company if it was allowed to use it software like it bought it for. Google could be the world's largest health care company if it was allowed to go into health. But effectively, it's almost impossible to really value any company because when you can move horizontally, you can kind of be anything.
- [32:01]
A
Well, sticking with your famous quote, right, Uber, the world's largest taxi company owns no vehicles.
- [32:06]
B
Yeah.
- [32:06]
A
Is the world's largest taxi company now going to have no drivers based on the launch of the. I want to know.
- [32:13]
C
Rory, thanks.
- [32:15]
B
No, it. This is quite amusing because I'm an absolute. Being here in Miami, I'm an absolute way more obsessive.
- [32:23]
A
Yeah.
- [32:24]
B
My wife doesn't like it, not because of the technology or because she feels unsafe, but she prefers talking to drivers.
- [32:30]
C
Yeah.
- [32:32]
B
Now, obviously there's an economic cost to talking to the driver. We're very similar in shopping I mean, you know, she likes, goes up to the bloody checkout like it's 1972 and I'm there with my mobile phone scanning stuff. It's a very, very interesting question this, which is what happens because one of the great things I was told by a futurologist is that there are no trends, there are vectors and there's always a counter trend. And what you see is that as retail became more and more kind of efficient and automated and impersonal, there was a trend towards people going to farmers markets, which are the absolute opposite. It, you know, I always joke about this with airports, which is as every airport became like Schiphol or Changi, people go, have you been to London City airports? Brilliant. There are hardly any shops. Okay. And that it goes back to your idea of surprise.
- [33:20]
C
Yeah, I am.
- [33:20]
B
That we always disproportionately notice the thing that we weren't expecting. Yeah. And it's all, it's all, you know, it goes back to all that stuff, sort of. JONI Mitchell, Omics. You know, you don't know what you've got.
- [33:30]
C
Craft beer is quite a good example of this. A lot of craft beer tastes like absolute piss, but because it's got a story, it feels better.
- [33:37]
B
And, and, and it's surprising. Yeah.
- [33:39]
C
Craft beer is basically being made by people. Not good enough to make it at
- [33:42]
B
scale, you know, incredibly unfair, actually.
- [33:45]
C
In America. In America.
- [33:47]
B
But it's, it's, it's extremely difficult. I mean, complicated. Even more complicatedly. One of the strange findings is people, if you measure happiness at a kind of real time level, people are actually really, really happy while they're driving because it's a flow state. So one of the things that was misunderstood there was that, okay, who developed this idea, got excited about people in Silicon Valley, which has the world's worst traffic, and probably, let's be absolutely honest, a bunch of nerds who aren't actually that good at driving and don't enjoy it very much. Okay, so it's not. All I'm saying is I do worry to the extent to which a very small number of extremely non neurotypical people in a small part of California are allowed to define what the future is like for the rest of humanity to a point where we end up as analog creatures being forced to exist in a digitized world. Now, no one would deny, least of all me, that some of those achievements have been miraculous. You know, both of us, I think, agree that YouTube Premium is one of the greatest things ever, you know, in the last thousand years.
- [34:54]
C
Yeah.
- [34:55]
B
Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I'll say that on an emotional level, not just because I enjoy watching documentaries about steam trains. My father died a couple of years ago at the age of 93. YouTube contributed a significant amount to his happiness. Yeah. You know, in the last few years of his life, bit of it was nostalgia, a bit of it was, you know, utility, bit of it was, you know, documentary footage, etc. So, you know, I'm the last person to say that this stuff hasn't been worthwhile or important, but the extent to which it becomes ideological disturbs me a bit. The efficiency as an ideology generally, you know, my thing, the dormant fallacy, what happens is a load of other things that we valued that nobody could quantify end up getting trampled. Now I'll give you a perfect example of that. One of the things that worries me about technology is in some cases, in some cases it just attracts a lot of hostility to begin with, with because we're worried about it or whatever. In other cases, it's a little bit of a shape shifter because it arrives as an option and then ends up as an obligation. Parking apps. Okay. You know, there was a nice period where if you wanted to pay with coins, you could pay with coins. If you wanted to pay with a smartphone, you could do that. Then the people noticed that paying with a smartphone is cheaper. You don't have to empty the coin machines. Suddenly what used to be an option is now an imposition. And the extent to which I think that will that, you know, that's one reason to be a bit of a Luddite. It's not that the thing is actually undesirable in and of itself. It's what it ends up killing. Now, classic example, which also isn't understood. Most people in urban areas do lead their lives almost to optimize time efficiency. So the classic example of that is what I call the railway station ticket machine. Brilliant option as a queue at the ticket barrier. I know exactly what ticket I want because it's the one I book every single day. I'll go to the machine and pay with my contactless credit card. And that's all great. And then the finance nerds come in and they get rid of the person at the ticket barrier. Now this is actually quite an important point. Marketers know that the more ways you sell, the more you sell, right? More channels through which you sell. Finance people want to drive everybody to buy through the lowest cost channel, so they get rid of the personal ticket counter. Now in London, where everybody's an unfriendly bastard. The person behind the ticket counter wasn't probably that valuable. If you go to East Kent, I won't name the station because I don't want to get into trouble. Okay, you go along and you say, actually I'd like a, you know, day return to London, please. And they go, well actually this train is actually a peak train at the moment, but by the time it gets to Dover it's an off peak train. So I'll get you a return to a peak return to Dover, an off peak day return from Dover to St. Pancras, which you can't get from the machine because you can only buy a ticket from where you started. Now those little exchanges build trust, you know, they build affection, they build relationships. All kinds of things can be achieved, human to human, which don't really yet happen. Machine to human, human. I think some of them can be recreated by machines, but not by the people who we've currently put in charge of designing the machines. Whoever wrote the sentence unidentified object in the bagging area probably wasn't possessed of immense levels of kind of.
- [38:17]
A
It's crazy though, isn't it?
- [38:19]
B
Yeah, but, but you know, somebody wrote that sentence unidentified object of the banging error, from which I think we can confidently deduce that, you know, they weren't getting many of the world's. I don't think that was Dave Trott, was it? You know, I don't think it was David Abbott who wrote that. Love that, you know, and so we, we are actually right to be concerned. And don't get me wrong, I mean, I think, I think Waymo. I'm quite excited about it as an, as an addition to my travel repertoire. Yeah, but what, what, what does it kill?
- [38:50]
A
And I think I, I see where your wife's coming from on Uber. Actually, when I got picked up from the airport yesterday, first thing, first thing he said, he said, bro, the accent man. And then he said to me, literally, legitimately, he just said, you should have a podcast. I'd listen to you all day.
- [39:10]
C
Again, this is the optionality though, where it's a bit like a hotel when you go to a hotel where you're forced to check in yourself quite often. I absolutely hate that because you kind of want to have like a recognition that you've arrived somewhere, but sometimes you don't want that at all. But the important thing is that you have the ability to have both.
- [39:26]
B
So, okay, apparently McDonald's in the UK is opening branches of McDonald's where that you can't order from a human. You have to go to a screen. Now, my wife and I are polar opposites here in that, you know, I go, brilliant. An opportunity to avoid human interaction. My wife will get immediately get into some chat about the, you know, with the person behind the till and you know, I mean, we're blokes anyway, we never find out anything. You spend like two hours talking to someone at a party. My wife will know their entire backstory. They go, have they got any children? Don't know. What's their name? Don't know. Where do they live? Don't know. He's got a Tesla Model S. Okay, that's literally the shallow level at which men interact with strangers. You know, it's kind of tragic.
- [40:06]
C
I think there's something really interesting about both EVs and self driving cars because in a way they're two separate technologies, but actually for many reasons they're kind of together and they both have the same ability to kind of be a model for how change works. In that if 5% of cars on the road EVs then actually not that much changes. It's the same with self driving cars. If they're 5% of the vehicles on the road are self driving cars, then you still need parking structures, you still need traffic police, you still need signs, you need all the infrastructure there to allow both forms of a vehicle to exist. So there's a really fascinating kind of future scenario where I guess there's probably a tipping point point where if a certain percent of cars are EVs, then actually charging infrastructure is everywhere. And actually all of the conditions for the road are kind of based around evs. And the similar things happens with self driving cars where if you imagine a future state where most cars are self
- [41:05]
B
driving cars, it would be impossible to drive yourself.
- [41:07]
C
It'd be very difficult to drive yourself, although there will always be that choice.
- [41:09]
B
There's a theory that at junctions you wouldn't need traffic lights because the cars would just pass at 70 miles an hour, 2ft apart.
- [41:16]
C
So when most cars are self driving, you're actually in a situation where all cars can talk to each other so there's no crashes because they can all effectively navigate around each other. Cars effectively become a swarm where they're dynamically routed to ensure that all roads have the optimum level of vehicles. You don't need traffic lights anymore, you have slipstreaming. Cars can go much faster and effectively on freeways or motorways. They become traffic trains that have like a automatic distance. You then think, you know what, like you can now choose to live Anywhere in a city, because where your school is, if you're pretentious and you want to send your kids to a fancy school because these cars are everywhere and they're kind of perfect, then you can put your 7 year old kid in a car. And actually there's probably never been a safer environment to be in than a kind of locked metal box as you go through the roads. And that means that the real estate market changes, and that means that the insurance market changes. That means that as you look around every single street in Miami today or London next week, you start to envisage a situation where effectively you can get in any vehicle at any time and go anywhere. And then you realize, well, actually if everyone's doing this, then you could have special vehicles that take you to, you know, on camping weekends and you can have special vehicles you can get into when you're trying to impress a girl. And it actually becomes this really exciting state. And I think this is how a lot of technology is where if you take it and you sort of figure out how to apply it to what we have now, it's pretty good and it's quite exciting and there's a bit of friction. But if you let yourself sort of imagine a world where everything, especially the physical world, the moment that the physical world changes around a technology and the moment that sort of cultural culture changes and cultural norms change, then you enter this amazing paradigm where everything's different. And the big question, I guess about
- [42:59]
B
this, what have you lost at this point? Because should you optimize for optionality or optimize for optimality? And as your point is very good, which is once a certain number of the cars on now, by the way, this has happened before. The reason we have tarmac roads now, I don't cycle at all and I'm an avid motorist, okay. And so my natural inclination is to love motorists and hate cyclists. However, there's another way of looking at this, which is that the whole reason we have tarmac roads in the UK was campaigning from cyclists, because there were bicycles long before there were cars house. And people said the Rover safety bike, which was this extraordinary, amazing leap in technological achievement. Effectively we want smoother roads so we can all cycle around, you see. And so to something that cyclists gave us a wonderful road network and then these bloody cars came along, of which I have to admit, you know, I'm an enthusiastic adoptee, okay? But we sort of shattered up for the cyclists at some level if looked at through that lens. And the self driving cars, if they start Actually impeding your ability. So I'll give you one area where I'm a massive luddite. Okay. When I get home, I don't like having the mobile phone in the same room as me. Yeah. Okay. I just don't want it.
- [44:12]
A
Yeah.
- [44:13]
B
It is a bloody attention seeking, bloody parasite. Okay. So I put it in the kitchen, I plug it in, then I go and do some work on a computer. And every time I want to do anything, I have to go back to my mobile phone to authorize the thing.
- [44:25]
A
Now that 30 second window, you've got run to the.
- [44:30]
B
Now that, that imposition that you cannot function without a mobile phone on your person is deeply unattractive.
- [44:37]
A
Yeah.
- [44:37]
B
Okay. And this is my point about. Everything starts as an option and we welcome it. And then suddenly it's an imposition and it's it, you know, but, you know, I mean, just to be clear, you know, my dad didn't want a smartphone. He was 90 years old. I don't entirely blame him. Okay. You know, you don't really need a smartphone if you just go to Ms. In Monmouth once every week. Okay. And, you know, it was getting to the point where he couldn't park anywhere. Yeah, yeah. Now this is not, this is not reasonable, but there's a marketing point here which, in fairness, this is something marketers are right about. What is it? Basically, buying situations, you know, very Byron Sharp. One of the things markets are trying to do is basically maximize possible buying situations. And that means you go for variety. You know, there are times I go into McDonald's and I don't want to choose from a screen because I want to go to a person and go, what have you got that you've got right now? Okay, I've got to catch a train. What's ready right now? I don't care what it is, just give me some right now. You know, and the. And. And instead we have this choice architecture imposed on us, which is, no, no, no, you have to go to the screen and choose. And nowhere does the screen say, ready right now. And so at some level, as I said, we're analog beings forced to live in this digital world. And the way in which we're forced to choose and process information is becoming increasingly kind of bifurcated and binary to a point which isn't really. I mean, a very interesting question would be a lot of these things are both good and bad. So one of the things we tend to treat technologies like football teams, which is you love them or you hate them. The great advice from an AI Expert. The Commonwealth AI expert is don't treat AI like a football team. You've got to be fundamentally ready to be, if you like, a bit ambiguous, you know, about it. The classic example of that would be something a technology I'm totally ambiguous about is Airbnb, which is if there's a Welsh farm and they can turn their stables into a holiday let and make a few extra hundred quid and people get to stay in the countryside, I can't really see the downside there. It seems entirely positive. I get to live in places where I wouldn't otherwise be able to feel that I was kind of like a local. On the other hand, you go to Barcelona and if you basically are Catalan, you cannot live in Barcelona anymore, because it's more profitable to let out an apartment for 16 weekends of the year to Airbnb than it is to have a Catalan live there. Which also means that if you do go and rent1 those bnbs for the Airbnbs for the weekend, you don't get to experience Barcelona at all. You sit outside a cafe with 27 tourists watching people wheel luggage across. You had that experience. All people doing is wheeling luggage across cobbles. You just sit there, you're having a nice coffee. You know, probably the person running the cafe is still local, but they've been shipped in from outside, and you just watch people wheeling luggage across the cobbles and it's kind of shit, you know. And so this is the other thing, you know, we've just. We've just got to accept the fact that a lot of these things at the, you know, marginally, they might be attractive. At the extremes, they're actually slightly poisonous.
- [47:46]
A
Well, maybe to round off, why don't we think about. If you were a CMO of a brand today, given everything we've talked about, what would be the one bit of advice you'd offer?
- [48:00]
C
I think just trusting your instincts. I mean, again, I sound a bit like some sort of hippie that talks about, you know, the power of belief or something. But I think at the end of the day, if you're a cmo, you're probably really good at your job and you've probably been really good for a long time, and you probably started your career in an age where you made decisions based on feelings and common sense. And it's just a don't doubt that that feeling. That doesn't mean that nothing's changed, but it still means that your starting point should probably be the 2005 marketing playbook. And then you would. You should seek to kind of augment that with the new, rather than this idea that somehow you should throw everything away and start afresh. Because Google, pmax, by the way, you
- [48:40]
B
could, you can reinvent old stuff. If you think about that McDonald's idea of the celebrities. McDonald's, yeah. Every Los Angeles pizza restaurant have been doing that for 30 years, right? The Larry David. There's a whole episode of Curb youb Enthusiasm with the Larry David pizza, which is a pizza he doesn't like very much. So it really pisses him off. So, you know, there is stuff we can take. I mean, I would say take from that Purcell Box Top promotion for the railways and reinvent it for 20. You know, we've got more tools, it's cheaper to do, it's easier to do. Reinvent that stuff. It worked. 50 years ago. I was a 10 year old kid forced to go on a bloody train trip. You know, it worked in 1975, it'll work again. I totally agree with you.
- [49:21]
C
I guess what I'm saying is that the principles and the mechanics of the past are still as valid as ever. It's just the tools we have and the context that we have is slightly different. And that means you don't have to choose between them. You get to do both.
- [49:36]
B
You want a story about this? Which blew my mind. Okay. In terms of marketing, in its best. So Matthew Bolton and James Watt, they've invented a much better steam engine. Okay, first of all, nobody can work out whether they want to buy a steam engine or not because obviously, how do you compare it with horsepower? Or the Newcomen engine, which was what was used to drain mines. They did two things. They invented the horsepower as a marketing tool for basically saying if you buy a 25 horsepower steam engine, you can get rid of actually 75 horses. Because they had to work in shifts. These people could then do the maths and go, I have two of those. I didn't realize it was even cleverer than that, right? They go to a Cornish tin mine, say, and they'd say, we'll provide you with a steam engine. You just provide a building, right? Just build it, build the stuff and do the basics. Our experts will come in and provide you with a Watt steam engine. Here's what you pay us. You pay us 50% of the money you're saving on coal because this steam engine is more efficient than the newcomer engine. That's hardware as a service. That was, that was fucking 1775. Steve Harrison always says there are far too many people in marketing who aren't Remotely interested in the history, you know, delving back into Luck Gossage or Claude Hopkins or any of these people, because they were just as clever or cleverer than us, okay? Now sometimes you could see that Howard Luck Gossage would have loved the Internet, but it wasn't around in the same way that Bach would have loved a synthesizer, but it wasn't a rat. You know, sometimes you can see what they would have done if only they'd had the technology at their disposal. The other thing I do is I'd use your intuition, but I'd also marry it to complexity maths. Because my argument is that most of business is using the wrong maths. So it's using addition, subtraction, multiplication, okay? All of this stuff's linear. Now, two things I think are really important that marketers know that other people are wrong about. One of which is the more ways in which you can buy, the more people buy. So this business of hiding the phone number on your website is total idiocy, right? If someone wants to call, let them. I mean, unless you're a tiny margin product, someone wants to phone you up, let them phone you up, right? Okay. If someone wants to click on the thing to book that way, let them do that. Give them as many channels as you possibly can. Don't try and drive them down the low cost channel. For two reasons. I think it's, it's unethical and unpleasant, but also it's bad business. Very unfair to disabled people, people with other constraints. But it's also really bad business. The other thing is with complexity maths is one of the worst things that I think happens is that people don't realize that most humans are driven by habit and social copying. And therefore the adoption of new things is a sigmoid curve. And one of the things that fascinates me is how many good new products were killed too early because everybody expected them to be an overnight success. Success at Google Glass, the classic example of that. I mean, they were, they were bang on the money. What was that, 15 years ago?
- [52:39]
C
Yes.
- [52:39]
B
Yeah, okay. Now all of us had, they had, they maintained Google Glass, all of us in the intervening 15 years would have got pissed in an airport and bought the bloody things, right? They would, you know, but the point is, you know, if you ask someone to be the first person to try something that goes against two human instincts. One, I've never done it before and two, nobody else has doing. Now I work with a guy, which I think is really fascinating, a guy called Tom Ridges at Herdify, which looks at these social contagion effects in human behavior. And he came up with a brilliant phrase, which is, if I made solar panels, I'd rather sell five solar panels to five people who live in the same street than 15 solar panels to people who live 10 miles apart. And when I thought about this, you mentioned the very beginning of this podcast. You said, we don't know ourselves why we do the things we do. So expecting something else to know them. And something occurred to me which was fascinating, which was if you'd asked me, why did you buy an electric car? I would have come up with loads of plausible sounding explanations. Then something occurred to me. I never would have bought it unless my brother had bought one first.
- [53:44]
A
Totally.
- [53:45]
B
So now who was it with you? Was it somebody else? Or were you the first person, you know, to buy an electric.
- [53:50]
A
No, I think you were the.
- [53:51]
B
You, Right. Yeah.
- [53:54]
A
You were the one.
- [53:55]
B
This is the really interesting, interesting thing. Genuinely being the first person to do something is, you know.
- [54:00]
A
Yeah.
- [54:01]
B
You know, unless you're one of those people who gets into bass jumping or wingsuits. Right. I mean, there are. There is a tiny percentage of people who. Who are motivated that way, but to most people it's absolutely terrifying. And so my brother. My brother's a bloody astrophysicist, so I could ring him up and go, what's a kilowatt hour, will? You know, and how many kills? So, and he basically. He gave me heuristics like, basically, if you're charging at 50 kilowatts, that means every 20 minutes you gain 50 miles of range.
- [54:27]
A
Yeah.
- [54:27]
B
And he gave me loads of these rules, and finally I could navigate the whole thing. But it was only. It was only when I met Tom that I realized that an awful lot of what I do is totally motivated by people around me because it's a really strong. So what we're doing often as marketers is if you imagine that shot around the moon that happened, you know, just a few weeks ago, okay. If you tried to do that, but you were unaware of one or two fundamental forces like gravity or centrifugal force or whatever it may be, that would have ended up terribly. I think quite often in marketing, we obsess about five or six of the forces that are in play, and then the ones that we don't understand, we just set to zero. And I think, you know, so understanding also. The final thing about complexity maths is that brand buildings undoubtedly are compounding investments. Husband.
- [55:15]
A
Totally.
- [55:15]
B
The idea that you invest money in a brand and the returns are linear, a And yet weirdly, we're judged as if they are. And so that point your, your chap made where he said, what was it that I get the credit for the stuff, the short term stuff. I do the long term stuff pays.
- [55:31]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [55:32]
B
The guy who gets my job after I've been fired.
- [55:34]
A
Yeah, it pays off in the short term and the long term pays off after I've been fired.
- [55:37]
B
After I've been fired.
- [55:38]
A
Just on the Google Glass, actually a surround off Dave Kaufman, who's I interviewed about three years ago, he was a product manager on Google Glass. He's gone to Meta and he's the guy running Meta Ray Bans. And so I think what's happened is all the benefit of the investment in Google Glass is now being. Now being translated. I mean, he would say it's the Meier principle that they got wrong on googlass. Most advanced yet acceptable.
- [56:01]
B
Yet acceptable.
- [56:02]
A
It was most advanced, not acceptable. Googlass. And by partnering a Ray Ban, they've taken something everyone finds very acceptable and they built technology into the Ray Bans, bringing it. In fact, they've dumbed it down, actually. You know, it takes.
- [56:13]
B
There's no screen.
- [56:14]
A
It records. It records what you say. I mean, oh, it plays music through your ears here. So it's way simpler than a Google
- [56:20]
B
Glass, by the way. Really interesting tip. I'm going to write a Spectator article about this. Which is technology. One favor marketers are not very kind to the old. Okay. Because they always want their technology to be presented as if it's ideal for the young. Yeah. So there are two or three technologies which are fantastic for elderly people, but which are never promoted to elderly people.
- [56:45]
C
Watch.
- [56:46]
B
So Apple Watch be a perfect one. Second, one would be bone conducting headphones because if your hearing's a bit shit, they bypass your ears. Now, they're always marketed to joggers because the idea is you don't lose spatial awareness and run in front of a bus if you're elderly and your hearing's a bit shot. Bone conducting headphones are a total game changer. Also the Samsung Galaxy folding phone. Phone. Yeah.
- [57:07]
A
Bigger screen because.
- [57:08]
B
Because the screen's actually big enough to read on. Yeah, okay. And. And by the way. But complain to young people. You know, these things that arrive as an option and end up as an obligation. I'm gonna launch a one man campaign for bringing back soap. A bar of soap is a proper way to wash yourself. Right. This stuff where you get into a hotel shower and there's this liquid which basically goes straight down the drain. Why don't they just give you the option to give five pounds to Proctor and Gamble? Just walk out of the shower again. Okay. It's. Right. But young people, for some reason think that soaps. It's not. There's a magical property of soap that is basically totally bacteriacidal, so nothing can survive on its surface. But that's. That's another thing which is. Don't mind. I don't mind those things in the shower. Give me a bar of soap. Crying out loud.
- [57:57]
A
There we go. Well, on that bombshell.
- [57:58]
C
Yeah, bombshell.
- [58:00]
A
I think we've got. Yeah, I think we've got quite a lot there. Yeah.
- [58:03]
B
So much. Do you agree with me or do you. Are you happy with these unguents? I don't like it.
- [58:08]
C
I have real problems with soap because I feel like it dries.
- [58:10]
B
My.
- [58:10]
A
It dries if you get.
- [58:11]
C
If you get.
- [58:12]
B
Dove doesn't. Moisturizing.
- [58:15]
A
Moisturizing soap is the other thing.
- [58:16]
C
I've been in quite a lot of hotels recently where all they've had is soap as well, and I've been quite.
- [58:20]
B
That's interesting. That's weird.
- [58:23]
C
My big thing would be I would bring back baths. It's almost impossible. I've got quite a bad back.
- [58:27]
B
And therefore Americans have never really done. They do those weird, very low baths, which is like. Like a shower thing, which could be a bath.
- [58:35]
C
They also have, like. Especially if you pay a lot for a hotel. It's like a Cadbury's flake bath as well.
- [58:39]
B
Yeah. As an option.
- [58:40]
A
Yeah.
- [58:40]
C
But I think bring back baths. I find hotels amazing because Marriott will have, like, 27 different brands, all of which are kind of identical. I'm like, why? You just have one which is like. We have bars.
- [58:50]
A
We have bars. Yeah.
- [58:51]
C
And there should be another one. Like, we give you soap.
- [58:53]
B
We give you.
- [58:53]
C
So there should be another one which is like, we've got a really nice gym. And then you could actually.
- [58:57]
B
And actually a vaping airline would do really well, wouldn't it? Sake. Why can't you fake.
- [59:01]
A
There's a dog airline, I suppose, you
- [59:02]
B
know, this is a dog, so. That's right. Is that a New York one? Is it?
- [59:07]
C
Yeah.
- [59:07]
A
I thought. I thought it was like an April Fool's joke. And then it turned out to be
- [59:10]
C
basically a private jet.
- [59:12]
B
But, like, it's New York, ironically, isn't it? It just go from New York.
- [59:16]
C
Well, they go to Miami to London and Paris, but it's basically a scheduled private jet service and it's like $10,000 a person.
- [59:24]
A
Oh. Oh, right.
- [59:25]
B
Is the dog free, then how many dogs can you take? And the dog be.
- [59:29]
C
I didn't get that far into the process. I was just like, I like the
- [59:33]
A
fact you didn't get that far. You'd start the process though.
- [59:36]
B
The bath thing's actually quite funny because one of the cleverest ideas to actually reduce water consumption in a hotel, obviously you can have no bath. There's an alternative. You make the bath so big. Unless you're planning an orgy. Okay. Because I've actually had hotel rooms where you get up in the morning, you're quite like of bath, and you look at the bath, it's like half an hour. Okay. It'll take me half an hour to fill, then the temperature will be slightly wrong. It'll take me another 15 minutes to get the temperature right. See? Oh, it. I'll have a shower. But yeah.
- [60:06]
A
I love your positioning of hotels though.
- [60:08]
C
Forget the same bath one, the gym one, the like all these like really weird contemporary ones where you can basically see the marketing meeting in the hotel room. So you're like, this is for like busy millennials. So you'll go in the lift and there'll be like millennial music and then you'll be in the room and it'll be like clear. This is designed for people that carry like five T shirts. So you have like three hangers. Like I. I've been a bit like you. You've probably been in hotels that cost like $5,000 a night.
- [60:37]
B
I've never bowed in Cannes.
- [60:40]
C
I've never been in a hotel that had enough hangers.
- [60:42]
B
No.
- [60:43]
C
Like, no. And like you can go to Ikea and buy wooden hangers. They're beautiful. And for $8 you can get 12 beautiful wooden hangers. And every time I go to a hotel, I just want to go downstairs to be like, here are your hangers. Like just.
- [60:54]
B
Actually come to think of it, another brand which is targeted at the young but is actually pretty good for the old is probably sisters name and Moxie actually, isn't it? When you think about it. What I like about that, by the way, which is a hidden benefit, which is most hotels, once you've checked out, quite often your flight doesn't leave till 8 in the evening and you check out of the room and you basically feel homeless. You've got to leave your luggage, then wander around the town like a bloody hobo.
- [61:15]
C
But like you read in Jesus too.
- [61:16]
B
I mean, yeah, where's the great thing in the Moxie or the Citizen M
- [61:19]
A
is you stay there.
- [61:20]
B
Exactly. Stay there all day.
- [61:21]
A
I do that all the time.
- [61:21]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [61:22]
A
The communal areas are beautiful, aren't they?
- [61:24]
B
Fantastic. Yeah.
- [61:25]
C
The other weird thing about hotels is they never have travel adapters or phone chargers. So again, I've been to, like, quite nice hotels and you go downstairs and you go, do you have a phone charger? And they look at you like you've just asked for like a roll. I might just go to, like Alibaba, buy like a thousand iPhones, sell a bit of margin, put an icon of your hotel on it.
- [61:45]
B
Yeah.
- [61:45]
C
And again, like the crap that you get when you walk around Cannes, you get all sorts of crap, but you never get like a USB C cable or like a phone charger.
- [61:51]
B
You get a battery but never tell. That was clever. And then.
- [61:54]
C
And I have it on the charger, like, please take this with you, please stay. And then everyone, for like $1 will spend their whole life, like, with this charger being like, oh, do you remember the Conrad Hotel in Istanbul?
- [62:06]
B
They gave me this 90, by the way. Yeah. 1996 or seven. One hotel that got that really right. Which is a brilliant case of surprise. In 97, you could totally screw your whole business trip by not taking RJ11 socket that plugged your laptop into your modem. Okay. And the W Hotel sold RJ11 cables, which I thought was. Bear in mind, this is 97. Doesn't seem like WI fi now, but that was just a piece of genius. Yeah. No hotels offer monitors in the room, which I'd pay for quite a lot. The other weird ones. Anybody else notice this? That if you have your laundry done, you're staying for five days. They never replace the bag or the bit of paper, the form. Now, obviously there are laundry people and there are non laundry people.
- [62:50]
C
You're non laundry because it's cheaper to buy the clothes.
- [62:54]
B
Yeah, no, I.
- [62:55]
A
When you live in T shirts.
- [62:56]
B
Yeah.
- [62:57]
C
I didn't travel with an Ogilvy.
- [62:59]
B
Expensive. No, no. But the really swanky thing, do you know what they do at Conde Nast? Do you ever believe this? So they. They stay at hotels and they FedEx their dirty clothing back to their laundry in New York so that it's waiting for them when they return. But no, I quite like a bit of a bit of hotel laundry, but I always find it really strange that you then have to phone down on day three and ask for a replacement. I don't know why that is on that bombshell.
- [63:23]
A
Yeah, sorry, yeah, we do need to wrap up. We've just hit time. Well, that was interesting. And no shortage of things to talk about in this episode. Thank you both. It just shows the power of having two great minds together tackling some of the big problems. And I am sure we'll do this format again.
- [63:41]
B
Absolute joy. What a pleasure back in Miami.
- [63:43]
A
I hope back in Miami.
- [63:45]
C
Annual Fixture how often do you come to London?
- [63:48]
B
Do you come back about three or
- [63:49]
C
four times a year?
- [63:49]
B
Three or four times a year? Yeah. Fantastic.
- [63:51]
C
Enough enough to do it in London, right?
- [63:53]
A
London and Miami is okay.
- [63:54]
B
Fantastic.
- [63:55]
A
Thank you both. So I hope you enjoy that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoy 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 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.