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- [00:07]
John Evans
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to John sense of the CMO. Now, this is episode 200 of the podcast. I can't quite believe it. If I take myself back to five and a half years ago when we started the pod. I genuinely had no idea that I would be sat here 200 episodes later, but I'm really grateful I did. Now, one of my favorite guests and a returning guest is. Is the amazing Tom Goodwin. I'm a huge fan of Tom's because he comes with such a different perspective on our industry. He's always fresh, always relevant, and always sees the world in a slightly different way. That makes me think. So I was delighted when Tom agreed to be guest number 200. We had an amazing conversation and here it is.
- [00:46]
Tom Goodwin
This is a very good time to talk about what's going on in marketing, isn't it? Yes, there's a lot going on.
- [00:50]
John Evans
Well, let's start with advertising. How do you view the state of advertising today?
- [00:56]
Tom Goodwin
I don't want to be dramatic here, but I think everyone's completely lost, like, unbelievably lost. I think every single person in the entire industry is either lost or they kind of think they're not lost because they've got metrics or a target in mind, and they're probably wrong. We're at this really weird point in time, I think, where we probably have the best tools we could ever have in this industry. We've got the best data, we've got the best technology, we have more understanding than ever before. And then we're also at a time where brands are unbelievably important. There are popular people who go around saying otherwise. I think they're catastrophically wrong. Brands help us with abundance. They help us make decisions. They make us feel better about the decisions that we make. They're reassuring. We're in an era of absolute abundance and also completely overwhelmed. And brands are actually entering more and more facets of our life, whether it's condo buildings that are branded, whether it's dental offices, veterinary surgeries. So we're at this really amazing sort of opportunity where these things are all coming together. But actually, the kind of. The lived experience of being a consumer is bizarre these days. I mean, it's like everyone in advertising completely sort of gave up. You know, you watch TV and you see. I think they call CTV ads, you know, sort of connected TV ads, and half the inventory hasn't been sold. Many of the ads sort of presume they know a lot about you and are ultra sort of targeted, and they end up being Completely wrong. You know, I get car dealership ads in Spanish for car dealers 750 miles away selling cars that I'm not remotely interested in. I think. I think it's the only industry that's got worse over the last 20 years. And you wonder what the fuck is going on, to be perfectly honest.
- [02:41]
John Evans
And what do you think is going on? Because you said it at the top that like, we've never had more data and evidence for how marketing works. We've never had more technology at our disposal. There's plenty of great creative agencies out there, people willing to help. So what is it we're missing as an industry that stops us moving forward?
- [03:00]
Tom Goodwin
I mean, I kind of want to know as well, because we don't acknowledge quite how terrible everything that we're making is that people actually see. You will talk to a lot of CMOs and you'll talk to a lot of agency people who make beautiful ads. And it'll be the super bowl and we'll make fantastic ads and it'll be the Oscars and you'll see wonderful ads and it'll be Cannes. And we see things that are crafted. And the majority of time those are ads that I've never seen in the wild. The majority of time the ads that I actually see are in Instagram, they're on Facebook, they're scattered around the Internet, and they're absolutely dire. And I kind of think some things happen that we're not talking about enough, which is there are essentially two tribes of advertising. And I don't like these words, but there are essentially sort of brand, types of advertising and there's performance. Increasingly, the average advertiser has gone from a company like HSBC or McDonald's or Samsung or Apple to a direct to consumer brand that sells sort of llama socks or something. So the average advertisers become a lot smaller. Contemporary advertisers have become obsessed with sort of measurability and short termism. And I think the entire industry has sort of shifted, not on brand, but on performance. And the tools of performance are targeting the tools of performance attribution. The kind of hackbook to performance marketing is obsessed with short termism. Money's moving closer and closer to the point of purchase, not because it's more successful, but because it's easier to demonstrate success. And therefore, I think a lot of really good marketers are faced with this dilemma that you can do wonderful things that look great, that seduce everyone, that make you feel proud, that create a generation of people that know about your product. Or you can put money closer and closer to the point of funnel micro, target to death, retarget to death, and come up with a spreadsheet that shows a return on ad spend of 60.2. And I think a lot of CMOs are choosing that playbook because it's more defendable. So I think we're completely obsessed with measuring things which are preposterous and wrong. I think the entire industry has fallen into a trap of vast amounts of fraud, and hopefully we'll talk about that a bit more later on. But insane amounts of fraud, money wasted all over, over the place, sort of fakery all over the place and a mass loss of competence. And everyone's kind of okay with it because it looks pretty good on the spreadsheet.
- [05:29]
John Evans
The quote that springs to mind is, I can't remember who said this originally, but not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything you can measure matters. And I think that's part of the problem, isn't it? Because certainly in my career we've become more and more and more short term and we want more and more data. Now, wanting data is not a bad thing intrinsically. But if you're looking at the wrong data and everyone becomes obsessed about what did I sell today, not thinking about what can I sell tomorrow. And I know I probably parrot this on the podcast too much, but the old Barrett Ehrenberg Bass 955 rule, which is most people are not thinking about buying you. We're putting so much money into converting the demand that exists today. No one's focusing on the future. And I think the brands that are going to win are the ones that are going to play the long game. And so I suppose the opportunity out there for brands to think differently when everyone's racing to the performance, bottom of the bar is those that build brands and, you know, do that kind of brand building going to win big time.
- [06:25]
Tom Goodwin
I think this has happened because there's been a huge sort of swing in the pendulum towards technology people. You know, digital advertising is basically now advertising, and digital advertising is run by tech companies. And tech companies are people like Elon Musk who don't understand how weird people are. I mean, he of all people should. They don't understand how sort of magical but also how kind of weak advertising is. Like advertising isn't logical. We don't really know sort of why brands work. We don't really know how advertising works. And for a long time we were quite comfortable with that ambiguity. And now we're kind of expected to sort of know Things and measure things, improve things. It just doesn't really work like that. And a lot of the logic that people are following is wrong. I saw Elon Musk the other day talk about the sort of role of advertising is to find people who want your product and to sort of reach them. That's not true at all. The role of a BMW advert is not to find me when I want a BMW and claim credit. The role is for me to wake up as a 7 year old one day and stick a picture of a BMW on the wall. We have expressions like, half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I know which half. Now I think that 95% of our money on advertising is wasted and people don't want to know about it because it seems to work in the spreadsheet. I think we've fallen in love with everything we can measure and at the same time, everything that we can't measure we presume is entirely irrelevant. And that's really weird because again, if, you know, if you're launching a sort of shampoo subscription service and I'm open to sponsorship, you kind of want to track everything and you've got no money. You need to spend your money incredibly efficiently. Most clients that we work with are McDonald's, it's Burger King, it's Apple, it's Samsung, it's a car. You know, I've been doing a lot of work recently with Stellantis. They track everything that people do online and they obsess with how long you spend on the website where you click did you phone Closing the loop. And they forget that actually sort of 99.999% of the marketing that goes on with a car is something that you'll never be able to know. It's all of the actions that happen that you don't have a data trail for. And it's one thing to only focus on what you can, but. But it's unbelievably fucking stupid to just completely discount the stuff that isn't immediate and isn't with the sort of data trail. And what's tending to happen is we're getting so obsessed with taking credit for stuff that we're actually completely forgetting that our job is to create the success even if we don't know how.
- [08:57]
John Evans
Yeah. And particularly over the measurement window as well, because I saw, I mean, Lesbinette did this study even with Meta. Right. Which must be the most performance channel that exists. Even in the research he did with them, 60% of the benefit of a campaign happened outside of the window, people were measuring it. So even in the most performance circumstance, you're still missing most of the benefit just because you're not measuring the right kind of window or not.
- [09:22]
Tom Goodwin
I mean, the most wonderful thing about advertising and marketing, and there are many, is that we're all people and therefore we all instinctively understand it. And there are two things that I'd love people to do, you know, one is, you know, you probably are already blocking ads. Just, just don't block them. You know, just, just have a day of looking at ads and have a day where you pay a bit more attention to what you're watching on TV and actually have a think. You know, are these, are these products that look like someone cared? Like, is this ad that's been served to me? Like, what's going on there? Why am I getting ads in Cantonese for fire extinguishers? You know, why am I getting ads for, you know, bras for sort of oversized women served to me? I mean, maybe I'm waking up in the middle of the night and doing strange things, I don't know. But the whole industry is entirely wrong. It is spectacularly wrong in everything is doing. And then the other thing I want people to do is look around their house or look at their sort of receipts online or look at their phone and have a bit of a think. You know, why have you got an HSBC bank account? You know, why is it that you're flying with, with Virgin Atlantic? You know, look in your grocery cupboards, you know, why have you got pedigree charm? Why have you got Heinz beans? And have a think about all of those things and why you bought that stuff and you will realize that the, the stuff that could have happened through digital media could have been amazing. You know, we have unbelievable data, unbelievable powers to persuade. We can tell these miraculous sort of wonderful, seductive crafted stories. And now we've got AI, like everyone can kind of do this. And instead, you know, I can't think of a single brand that's been built in the last 10 years. Big brands are losing market share in many categories because they don't know how to advertise. In the current era, I'd love every CMO to take a bit of a step back and to have the confidence to accept that our playbook at the moment is wrong. A lot of what worked in the 1950s, 60s and 70s still works. The amount of change that there is in what we should do is remarkably small. It's very important, but it's remarkably small. We do need to make the Logo bigger. We do need taglines, we do need jingles. We need to stop fucking changing the logo every time we get bored of seeing it in the canteen. We kind of know what we're doing and everyone's completely lost their minds and they're sort of chasing the Metaverse ads and they're chasing the press release with AI and they're doing something with the new DMP that no one even understands, but it seems to set money on fire. Let's go back to the basics and let's be really confident in our conviction and our instinct.
- [11:55]
John Evans
Yeah. I mean, picking up on a point you said about being the customer, like, I think we should just, like, ask ourselves a question. What would a normal person do? Yeah. Because we go into marketing, we forget how, like most people, what they think of advertising and what they think about your products. You know, it's like, it's amazing. I remember once I had customer service reporting into me. I think every flipping marketing marketer should have customer service reporting into you. Because when you're on the phone with an upset customer that can't work your thing, or the cap doesn't go on the bottle properly or it explodes it in the fridge.
- [12:28]
Tom Goodwin
Yeah.
- [12:28]
John Evans
Boy, do you pay attention to it and, you know, realize how people.
- [12:31]
Tom Goodwin
Actually, we talk a lot about customer centricity and how businesses need to be customer centric or they need to have conversations with customers. Marketing is the only function in a company that faces the customer. And therefore it's pretty much, you know, you can go all cottager on this. It's pretty much the only role in a company that really matters. I think marketers should be taken a lot more seriously. I think they need to do a better job. I think they need to be a bit more informed, a bit more serious and proper, but they should be pretty much the most important person any company. They should be on char in charge of the product roadmap. You know, they should be making air fryers. You know, the second that Rory Sutherland starts talking about them, they should be listening to all of their customers. We should start seeing customer service as being a part of the marketing function and an investment rather than the cost center. I don't know, I'm sort of talking quite passionately today because I think we've got amazing jobs and I think we have amazing tools, and I think we're really good at what we do naturally, but somehow we just need to figure it out and do things better and make better ads and do customer service in a better way. It's never been Cheaper. It's never been easier, it's never been more accessible. So what's stopping us?
- [13:39]
John Evans
Yeah, I was doing a, doing a talk in Germany yesterday, in fact, and one of the points I was making to them is I think I was borrowing a Ritzen quote, which is your number one job is to represent the customer where decisions get made.
- [13:51]
Tom Goodwin
Yes.
- [13:51]
John Evans
I love that quote because it's like. And also how empowering is it? A, like you might know the answer, but B, who can tell you you're wrong? If you go into a board meeting and go, this is what our customer is telling us, it gives you enormous kind of credibility, doesn't it? Rather than just going, oh, I made this up five minutes ago.
- [14:08]
Tom Goodwin
The entire company is there because of the customer. You know, like you could go sort of Amazon and say that there should be a seat at the table that's empty to represent a customer. You know, I'd love there to be customers in can, I'd love there to be customers in ad tech events. And just to ask them, you know, is this true? How do you feel about it? I mean, do you think I'm sort of wrong with much of what I'm saying? Like my understanding of where we are? Would you agree with that?
- [14:32]
John Evans
I think we're spot on. I think we've sucked up too much the performance drug, which is dangerous because what happens is the more we focus on performance, the more we focus on short term, we don't get the long term gains. And what happens then is budget gets cut because you're not growing. And if you're not growing, then you're in a kind of a shrinking budget line, which isn't helpful. And as marketers, the thing that I think marketing is both a leadership function and a service function. But we treat it as a service function. We should be treating it as a leadership function, which is, what does my consumer think? Where do I want to take them? What are the strategies that are going to get me there? What do I have to do? How do I bring the business on the journey with me? And the thing with the CMO role is pretty much the only forward looking role. I mean, some companies have a cso, right? So you might have a strategy person, which is nice. But most companies, it's the only one that's looking more than how's this quarter looking? How's this week looking? How's today looking? Right. And your job is to look ahead, look at the horizon. What are the big consumer trends, what's happening on innovation, how's my Brand equity, how are we going to grow and beat our targets in five years or 10 years, not just in the next five days. That, I think, is what marketers don't lean into enough. And I think if they can lean into that, rather than optimizing bottom of funnel, which you don't get thanked for that because at the end of the day, that's yesterday's results and you'll be up against that tomorrow.
- [15:56]
Tom Goodwin
You know, I feel like they've got stuck in the weeds as part of this as well. You know, again, working for a car company was quite interesting because I would quite often say to people in the room, you know, have you tried to.
- [16:07]
John Evans
Buy one of our cars recently?
- [16:10]
Tom Goodwin
Because everything about the process is awful. You know, 79% of people shop for cars based on a monthly payment and yet you can almost never see the monthly payment. You know, every dealer website will have a chatbot, despite the fact that the chatbot will annoy each and every single one of you. So by putting on our human being head and taking a step back, you can kind of see everything really clearly and you can see the stuff that's really important and you can see what matters for the future. And I would sort of present these findings to people and I could tell they found them really enlightening, but also their head was sort of full of the urgent priorities. And the urgent priorities would be, you know, to do with a day data list that they needed to cleanse or their urgent priorities would be down to an A B test to test the Pantone reference on the website. And, you know, the reason why I can be quite lucid and clear and if it doesn't sound too arrogant quite often entirely right about the future is just because I can take a bit of a step back about it and I, I can sort of focus on the things that are important. And I don't understand why marketers are not able or they don't free, they don't feel free to do that.
- [17:25]
John Evans
I think I discovered one of the reasons why. So years and years ago, I came up with this idea. I was working at Britvic Soft Drinks and my idea was basically to create a business unit dedicated to innovation. Because what we were doing with innovation is we would launch it alongside the core range and we'd give it about three weeks of attention. So for three weeks, this new innovation, one example which I really love was we launched a natural cola called Pepsi Raw, made from natural sugarcane. It tasted amazing, it looked really cool, the advertising is brilliant.
- [17:54]
Tom Goodwin
Do you remember?
- [17:54]
John Evans
Yeah, it was One of those things that you really should have worked and actually didn't. I won't go into the reason why it didn't work, but anyway. But it got about five minutes of fame and that was it. And then the business rolled on to the next month's priority and so on. Anyway, so my idea, going back to the kind of long and the short of it, was to say, what if we took innovation outside the organization, created a team? My insight was this, right? There were seven different departments involved, from creating the idea to putting it on shelf. And so my idea was to take those seven departments and smash them into one, right? So you had one team, had accountability for both, all the way from the idea like the design and the look and the feel and the formulation and how it got made through to what it looked on the shelf with all the point of sale that went with it, right. And therefore I could decide where do I put my resource? Is everyone talking to each other. And it was like a, you know, horizontal alignment rather than versus alignment. And it worked, it worked really well. And but what was interesting is I then got asked by people, this is amazing, how have you created all this change in the organization? Right. So a couple of people said, oh, could I mentor them and help them through it? Right. And what it was really interesting what happened because when I tried to mentor other people with their ideas, they'd always go, but John, I'm too busy, I've got these short term KPIs, I've got to hit this. I haven't got time to like do the business case, go and do the research. And so basically what the advice I gave them is you have to make a short term sacrifice to create a long term gain. And unfortunately I remember this weird moment where I actually had to go and apologize to a whole set of senior stakeholders and go, I'm going to let you down in the next three months. You will thank me later. Now I got told afterwards I almost got fired for doing that. But I think the thing in most corporate cultures is you have to create the vision for what needs to happen, bring the evidence, but you need to then get senior stakeholders involved so that you almost get permission not to do the short term, you know, short term job to win your freedoms, do the long term thing. But that's hard, right, because you've got to put, you know, put your reputation on the line. You've got to get everyone, everyone aligned to it. But I think most marketers like don't invest enough in that internal kind of engagement because You've got to win the internal argument before you can win the external ones. I think.
- [20:09]
Tom Goodwin
I think all of this explains very well the context in which what's happening is happening, where people are happy to spend a ton of money on fraudulent activity as long as it looks good in a spreadsheet and they're happy to be sort of busy all day. And this is not said with judgment, it's said with empathy, because you need to understand why things are the way they are. But everyone's sort of busy doing the things which are essentially sort of distractions. So just because the reputational risk from saying no, or I'm going to do something else instead, or actually it doesn't matter, it's too great. But I do sort of wonder, you know, how can we create a culture where it's not seen to be risky to stand up for decisions that you believe to be true? Because I would hope that we're in our jobs because we're really good at what we do and we got them and we got promoted because people trusted us. So at some point, I would hope that people are given the freedom to just say, this is a good idea. Trust the decisions that I'm making here.
- [21:04]
John Evans
Well, also, the old definition of madness, isn't it, if you keep on doing the same things, expect a different result. And actually the risky thing is not to do what we're talking about. Actually, the safer thing is to do what we're talking about and accept the known risks of doing that rather than continue repeating the same pattern. You mentioned fraud there. And without getting all Bob Hoffman, which is always the case.
- [21:24]
Tom Goodwin
I'm happy to get Bob Hoffman.
- [21:26]
John Evans
How Bob Hoffman do you want to be? But this is something that we have talked about for quite a long time. A lot of people have tried turning off, you know, search and all those different things and, you know, not seen any difference. Why are we not talking about this kind of stuff? It feels significant. We're spending a lot of money and we're not really digging into whether that money is being well used.
- [21:48]
Tom Goodwin
I mean, again, I kind of want to get your opinion on this as well. My sense is that it's kind of fine for everyone. I mean, you know, we are in a culture which I call the kind of arithmetocracy where work is measured on a spreadsheet. And as long as the numbers seem okay, people don't really want to know. To some extent, it's not really anyone's problem that money is wasted. Like power comes from having a budget. You Know, I think fraud is a sort of bucket that includes everything on a spectrum. You know, there's everything from just not really doing your job that well and kind of, you know, spending a little bit too much money on search terms which are pretty ineffective. You know, like buying your own name, for example. You know, if you look at roi, buying your own name on Google seems to be the best advertising you could ever do. So they sort of like, you know, poorly done jobs. And then in the sort of middle, you've got kind of working with tech vendors that are kind of, you know, helping you learn how to play golf or, you know, giving money to the sort of car dealer's nephew to the social media. And then sort of over here we've got sort of, you know, funding terrorism and, you know, child pornography or something, probably, or, you know, the Illuminati. And I think most of it sort of towards the middle, most of it is sort of benign and competence, most of it is laziness. Most of it is people being sold on stuff by people with data. I'll work with clients and there'll be a lot of data that shows that chatbots are a good idea because the companies that make the chatbots can conduct surveys that show they're a good idea. And you can show that to any human on the planet and say, in this particular instance, this is not helpful. So I think it covers a sort of whole range and I'm staggered that it's not something that's focused on more. I actually think the amount of money that's wasted in digital advertising would be closer to 75 or 80%. And nobody seems to care. I mean, Google PMAX, I don't know if I'm allowed to be sort of specific on this, but everything within Google PMAX is essentially saying, upload all these assets, put these sort of criteria into a black box and just trust us. We're going to take money from your account and we're going to optimize everything against these metrics. And all that's happening is the technology is doing an amazing job of finding complete suckers who click on every ad which may end up being a robot or they're just extremely bored people with big thumbs and that you'll smash the clickability metrics or it'll do an amazing job of finding its way into purchases that were already going to happen. It's incredibly sort of sneaky and sinister technology. But again, no one seems to sort of really care about this stuff at all. It's seen as being a sort of minor incorrect convenience. And I can't help but take a step back and think none of this needs to be that difficult. I mean, if you are in the business of selling a beautiful Samsung tv, you know, how much, how much data do you really need? You know, to what extent you need to upload a customer data list and do a lookalike audience sort of search, to what extent do you need to sort of track where people are going? You know, if you're trying to sell like golf equipment? I don't maybe put an ad on a site which is about golf courses. You know, like I'm completely nuts obviously to think it's that simple. You know, maybe, maybe everyone needs to know about everyone. Miami needs to know about the new route opening up from Miami to Rome. You know, maybe, maybe, maybe we're adding this complexity because no one's had the confidence to call out quite how inefficient and unnecessary it is. There's promises everywhere. You know, the promise of personalized advertising. I was very keen on personalized advertising ten years ago ago. I did a lot of work on it. It turned out that you could spend about 10% more on media, you could spend about 10% more on technology, and the results you get would be about 5% better. And you can go around talking about the 5% uplift, or you could acknowledge the fact that you've spent 20% extra money to get 5% uplift. We've also ignored things like click through rates. I mean, actually there's not a single study that's ever been done that shows that for most brands and most campaigns, click through rates correlate with, with any meaningful outcome. No human being in their right mind is going to click on most forms of advertising. And yet the entire industrial complex of advertising is maniacally obsessed on click through rates. And again, no one cares about that disconnect. Again, it's very different if you're doing direct to consumer. It's very different if you're selling game downloads. But 99% of the money that we spend is actually laundry detergents and fabric softeners and airlines and bank accounts and things like that.
- [26:24]
John Evans
It's true, if you think about the role of advertising is to change people's perception of you and their awareness of you. Yes, the click through rate in that sense doesn't matter unless they're in market to buy and they actually want to order the car and, you know, add a sunroof. I think the. By the way, I agree with you. I think part of the Problem here is we're not measured. We haven't got the right data, the right way to measure this, which is a problem. The closest I've seen, which I'm quite excited by, is Karen Nelson, Field Amplified, is doing some. She came up with this concept of. Of served versus seen, which is really good. So she's tracking how many people have actually seen your ads, how long they actually spend. And she's got some amazing technology that does this. And she can therefore show you, based on all the different channels you're advertising on, what the difference is between what was served to the customer, potential consumer, and how many actually saw. And in fact, we're integrating her technology and ours at System One to look at what role does the creative play? Is it emotional? Does it increase the chance of being seen, not just served? It's really exciting stuff.
- [27:26]
Tom Goodwin
I think there's something interesting almost in a kind of scorched earth approach here. And it's something I tried to do with my clients where I say, if we had no idea what advertising was supposed to be, and if we had no idea what a DMP and an SSP is, what would we do? And I think the first thing we do, let's say we're advertising a car. We'd make sure that the car looks really nice. We'd make sure we photograph in a really beautiful way. And then we'd figure out what about that car is quite compelling. And then we'd sort of figure out, what else do people need to know? And then we'd turn that into a beautiful thing. Maybe it's a video, maybe it's a skyscraper ad, but it'd be really, really nice. And then we'd think, where does this need to go? And then we'd be like, well, kind of everywhere. And then we do that and we wouldn't kind of worry, well, someone didn't really see the ad. We'd be like, well, that's advertising. Like, sometimes you don't see it. Sometimes people see it, but they don't realize they've seen it. Sometimes the wrong people see it, but it means a lot because when your husband's interested in that car, you go, yeah, good one. Good one, Mike. You know, I like that one too. Like. Like advertising is such a weird and sort of mysterious and slow and weak and magical thing. And maybe this goes slightly contrary to sort of System One in some ways. But I think we need to sort of recognize that there's a lot of stuff that we won't know. But that doesn't mean Things that we know are a good idea are not a good idea. And I don't know how we can just sort of reset.
- [28:57]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [28:57]
Tom Goodwin
You know, your average Advertiser today uses 245 different technology products as part of their tech stack. There are 15,000 technology companies out there. And you meet all these companies and they say so many things which sound sort of seduce, seductive and they sound perfect and they sound sophisticated. And I can't begin to describe to you quite how frustrated I get because there are all these promises of personalization and trackability and delivery and proof. And then the actual lived experience of everything that you're served is completely disastrous in a way that doesn't work for anyone. It doesn't work for the media owner, doesn't work for the advertiser, it doesn't work for the customer. And actually, you know, I'd love to be part of a movement towards advertising that's really helpful to people. You know, like, like people, people want to see ads, people want to make decisions that they feel more comfortable about. They want to fall in love with a car, they want to learn about a shampoo that's been designed a bit for people with blonde hair. We are, we are a helpful force for the world. We help people feel better about products that they save up to buy. We help tell people about charities to support, we help inform people. And this industry has kind of gone from being this sort of sexy, glamorous, fun and powerful sort of culture creating entity to this really sort of sneaky and dark and sinister sort of embarrassing sort of salesmanship. And I wish we could all have the confidence to walk into a meeting room on Monday and go, you know what? Like fuck this. Like let's do the really, really simple things that matter.
- [30:39]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [30:39]
Tom Goodwin
And let's do them really, really well. And let's have the confidence to go around and basically set fire to all these contracts that we've got. And I'm going to go down in flames as being the person that actually made really good ads that, you know, allowed my customers, kids to buy the product in 25 years time.
- [30:55]
John Evans
So I was chatting someone yesterday at this conference asking my advice on what they should in their B2B marketing. And I said, honestly, I brought it down to be incredibly useful and generous with what you know, or be very funny and entertaining. I said, I think they're your options.
- [31:14]
Tom Goodwin
I think if you just do one.
- [31:15]
John Evans
Of those two things, you're probably not far right.
- [31:18]
Tom Goodwin
We're terrified to accept that actually fundamentally our job is not that different. To what it used to be. And I'm sorry if I'm annoying lots of people here, but it's not, it's not that hard. I mean, like, can you imagine how hard it is to be a doctor? You know, can you imagine going to like a conference and talking about your latest research towards, you know, stem cells? Like, can you imagine the questions you'd get? Our industry is completely idiotic. Like, if we were doctors, we'd sort of go into a room and there'd just be like a really loud guy talking about phrenology or the healing power of the crystal. And then someone else would sort of come on later on and talk about, you know, belief and purpose and how, you know, as long as we believe that medicine will work, you know, it's definitely going to work. And everyone in our world would sort of be like, oh, that was great, they were really funny. Or look at the data that, you know, people are saying complete nonsense and no one's calling it out. I actually think what we need is a lot more competence. You know, we talk a lot about creativity in this industry. You know, I love creativity. I love design. I think it might be more simple than that. I think just make ads that look beautiful. If you make like a beautiful sofa, just take a picture of it where it looks beautiful and say, like, look how amazing our sofas are. You know, I don't think we need this sort of story. I don't think we need this amazing sort of narrative arc. Maybe we need a dog, always a dog. But I think we're terrified of the fact that our jobs might be quite simple. And maybe that's why we insist on coming into work and sort of obfuscating everything and believing that, you know, because there's a new iPhone out, that everything we knew about advertising before is different. We haven't talked about AI, but you know, AI will in some ways be amazing, in some ways will be somewhat threatening. But, you know, I hope that we can use it as a sort of lever to do competence at scale.
- [33:04]
John Evans
Well, maybe to round off. Because there's one. One thing that consistently I get asked about and I consistently worry about at the same time is that we're not valuing creativity enough. If you look at any award winning case study and you see the role creativity has, if I look at the things that have worked for me personally in my career, it's been the big creative leaps that I've made and spotting opportunities and work to make them happen. And with so much technology and production capability now at our Disposal. It feels like, if anything, creativity should be at a greater premium, not less of a premium. And yet when I talk to great creative agencies, design agencies, they're not feeling particularly valued right now. They're certainly not kind of with AI, they're feeling probably more threat than they are opportunity.
- [33:52]
Tom Goodwin
I think, in short, it's a massive consequence of this massive pendulum shift towards the arithmetocracy, where you just can't value it. And like we said before, because you can't value it, somehow we've convinced ourselves it's not important. I did a LinkedIn post years ago, which I thought was brilliant, but no one else did. If you look at the numbers behind Grand Central Terminus and Penn Station in New York, they're very similar. They actually take up, like, a similar amount of area. They have a certain number of trains leaving every day. They have a similar number of platforms, they have a similar number of people using it. If you were to look at people's body language within them, and for people that haven't been to Penn Station, not the new Moynihan one, but the old one, it was one of the worst places you could ever go. You sort of somehow felt that you might just die. Not because a homeless person might stab you, although they could, but just because it was the most miserable place you could ever imagine. And then you'd see people in Grand Central, and it was as if a sort of holy experience was coming upon them. It was, if they're sort of trained to, you know, White Plains was going to take them to heaven or something. And you can look at that and you can say, there's something magical here that's not going to come out in an Excel format. And you can look at that and as a developer, decide that doesn't matter because you can't measure it, or you can be a human being and take pride in what you do and accept that there is something unbelievably powerful to. Whether you call it design or aesthetics or creativity, I don't think it matters. But it's an acceptance that there is a way of communicating beyond sort of logic, which allows people to feel something remarkable that you may not ever know about. And I think, you know, in a way, we're kind of getting to a nice ending here. What we're kind of talking about is pride. So how can we do our job in a way where we're making stuff that when we see it, we think, I don't even want to see the spreadsheet. I know I did a really Good job here. And I'd love that to be the sort of rallying cry for our industry where we can be really proud of the behavior that we kick off, but just the stuff that we introduce into the world.
- [36:08]
John Evans
Tom, I love that. And actually having spent the last five or six years doing a lot of work in New York, having never been to New York before that, I totally agree with your Grand Central Station point. It's like of all the things that I kind of was told to go and check out, that's by, by far the one that exceeded my expectation. I'm like, this is so beautiful. And it's almost like being transported back a hundred years to some golden era where everything's immaculate, everything's been thoughtful, everything's, you know, of a great scale and wonder. And it's like, wow, I feel great. And the. The bar that I had to comment with, the bar was called There's a bar downstairs. Amazing. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Yeah. And then the oyster bars and all that kind of thing. It's just like. It's like being transported onto the set of some magical film that, you know about the roaring 20s, you know, that's what we need.
- [36:54]
Tom Goodwin
Then the next banner ad to get you to download, you know, cyber security.
- [36:58]
John Evans
Software, it's going to feel like it's.
- [37:00]
Tom Goodwin
Going to be the Grand Central.
- [37:01]
John Evans
Yeah, the Grand Central of advertising. I love that. Well, it's not. Could not have ended on a nicer note. So, yeah, be more Grand Central, I think, is the way to go. Tom, been awesome, mate. Thanks for catching up. And here's the next 200 episodes.
- [37:15]
Tom Goodwin
I'll see you in two years.
- [37:17]
John Evans
Indeed. Thanks, mate. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can to. I'm over on XcensorCMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.
- [37:48]
Tom Goodwin
I think we got there.
- [37:49]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [37:50]
Tom Goodwin
Love it.
- [37:51]
John Evans
Thank you.
- [37:51]
Tom Goodwin
I hope it didn't seem. I don't think it seemed miserable, but I am not at all frustrated. Like, what the fuck is everyone doing all day? Like, seriously, I mean, it would be amazing to actually have a lot of people express their thoughts on those questions. I really do think that people are kind of lost. Like, I think people just don't know how to do their job. And I'm not being like. It's not like a personal criticism. I don't see anyone that seems to be that confident anymore.
- [38:19]
John Evans
Yeah, no, I think you're right.