Uncensored CMO

Jon [00:00:06]:
Welcome back, everybody, to the uncensored CMO. Now, one of the most downloaded episodes of all time was Les Binet and Sarah Carter. How not to plan. So I thought, wouldn't it be great to get them back on the show to talk about the highs and the lows of 2023, who did the best work, and what can we learn? As always, Sarah and Les are brilliant. Value. There is so much in this episode. You're gonna love it. Here it is.

Jon [00:00:32]:
Les doesn't do podcasts, but if you did a podcast, it'd be the uncensored CMO. And if you did a second podcast, it would also be the uncensored CMO. Les and Sarah, welcome to the uncensored CMO. Good to see you both.

Sarah [00:00:43]:
You got it right this time, because last time you signed off by thanking Leslie.

Jon [00:00:50]:
Do you know, you know, when you're thinking, I mustn't say, peter and Les, I mustn't say, and then you say, I'm sorry. Well, on a happier note, I thought I'd find out what, you know, what's caught your eye or maybe what's made you cry. I don't know. I mean, Les, maybe start with you. What's made you cry this Christmas?

Les [00:01:09]:
I do blub quite easily at sort of, you know, emotional advertising, Hollywood films, that kind of thing. I'm a bit of a soft touch. So when we were sort of preparing for this, I was looking at some ads, and the thing that got me more than anything else was the Cadbury's corner shop one. That one just had me in bits. But also, I was talking to my wife about the Amazon sledge ad, and she'd not seen it. So I explained it to her and I got all choked up just trying to tell her the story.

Jon [00:01:45]:
It's funny. Is it a dad factor? Because Ritson was on here taxing. Also the cabriad. And I choked up at the bit.

Sarah [00:01:52]:
Where dads and daughters. It's not usually dads and sons, it's always the ads. Does it get it?

Les [00:01:59]:
So another. Another thing that hit me, actually, the other night was we made an ad for Saville's estate agents, which I hadn't seen until Monday night. So we were out for dinner with journalists from campaign, and they showed some ads, and that one came on. I don't know if you've seen the ad, but it's like, got the. The family with the little kids, and then as they grow up, they're measuring the height on the wall and all the marks on the wall.

Jon [00:02:30]:
Now you say it's a daughter.

Les [00:02:31]:
It's a daughter one. Again, there's a sulky teenage daughter. She's a sulky teenager by the end. And then at the end of it, be quite careful at this point, because I might blub, but they're moving out of the house and then the new couple moves in and they paint over that bit of the wall. So literally, as I'm saying that, I'm getting goose pimples going up and down my legs. And my daughter's 16, you know, it won't be long till she. Till she leaves the house and everything just. It was a.

Les [00:02:59]:
Yeah, that's so true.

Jon [00:03:00]:
But you mentioned campaign magazine. But they made the Amazon ad turkey of the week.

Les [00:03:04]:
Yes.

Jon [00:03:05]:
Why? I mean, maybe there's a good question for Sarah, because one of my favorite Sarah quotes of all time is you are not the customer. Why do we as an industry sometimes sort of like to poke at things that are obviously very popular?

Sarah [00:03:16]:
Well, I don't think we always poke at popular things. And we say there is an overlap between things that the public like and things that the industry likes. So we'll probably come on, talk about McDonald's eyebrows. I think everybody loves that, don't they? Morrison's, everybody loves that. Marmite. Everybody loves that. So I think there is an overlap, but I think you're right. Things can pull in slightly different directions, and I think there are a number of reasons for that.

Sarah [00:03:40]:
One might be slightly distorting. Effective creative awards, which have been well documented, have tended to lean towards awarding certain sorts of work. But then I think, oh, we talked about this the other day, didn't we, that work that Tenzer and Murray did, looking at the values of the industry. Well, people in the industry and the values of the great british public, and they are quite different. The public like conformity and tradition and community and security, and yet people who work in the industry, brains are wired quite differently, and we tend to like individuality, risk taking, change. So, you know, there is a pulling in different directions of that. So I think there's a bit of that going on. But if you can pull those things together and celebrate continuity, I'm talking Marmite here, cracking campaign, been going on for 20 years or whatever, but you do that in fresh, interesting, fun, provocative ways, then I think those things can come together.

Jon [00:04:38]:
So, Les, I think you've burst your hard man of data reputation by revealing your blubbing.

Les [00:04:43]:
I don't think I have one, exactly.

Jon [00:04:46]:
But, Sarah, maybe ask you what struck you this Christmas? What made you smile about the ads this year?

Sarah [00:04:52]:
Well, yeah, I mean, one of my kind of missions, I think, is to try and get more kind of joy and silliness and fun and humor back into the industry. I think one of the side effects of the great work that you and Peter, I'm going to mention his name, did on the power of emotion, is people, I think, got slightly the wrong end of that and thought that meant sort of emotion with a capital e, and everything had to be kind of meaningful and deep and emotional and I sad, but I don't think that's true at all. I think a lot of the time, a lot of what we're seeing this Christmas is that I think people are slightly fed up with brands and comms turning up playing violins, and I think people want brands to turn up playing the banjo a bit more. So I like banjo ads. So I think be more banjo is not a bad motto for the year for all of us. I love the Morrisons oven gloves. I love McDonald's eyebrows. I mean, one of my favorite Christmas ads of all time, if you even remember from some time ago, was that Muppets giant crumpet ad.

Sarah [00:05:49]:
Remember that? Absolutely love that.

Les [00:05:51]:
Yeah.

Sarah [00:05:52]:
Pure silliness. Knock about putting on a show, but banjo to the. To the core. And that's the sort of stuff I'm loving.

Jon [00:06:00]:
You've also got exceptional judgment because that was a 5.9. It's one of the first.

Sarah [00:06:04]:
Was it one of the first scoring.

Jon [00:06:06]:
Ads on our database, as is Morrison's?

Sarah [00:06:09]:
That is so interesting.

Jon [00:06:10]:
Well, actually, the Muppets one is big budget blockbuster, but the Morrisons, they achieved the similar result on a fairly modest budget, which shows that if, you know, you don't have to spend big to get there, and then McDonald's is great as well. And what I loved about McDonald's is they carried a campaign idea from outside of Christmas into Christmas, because they tend to sort of go, we'll do one thing all year and then Christmas will suddenly change it all, you know? But I thought there's something about continuity that helps.

Sarah [00:06:36]:
Yeah, you're right, you're right. I mean, it's so clever, those gloves, because as we were talking earlier, it's just such a clever way of showcasing food in a sort of seamless, intuitive way. But I think often the best creativity makes familiar things feel unfamiliar. And I think that does that brilliantly, doesn't it? I mean, we've all got a pair of oven gloves, but we never really think about them, and yet suddenly they're the sort of hero, that amazing kind of feel good film. So really clever stuff, I think. I love that.

Jon [00:07:02]:
Well, I thought I'd reveal based on the system one data, of course, which is the audience response, how the audience feel about what they're watching. These are the top three ads. We've already talked about one of them, actually. So Amazon comes in at number three, despite its campaign. Turkey number two is interesting. So Coca Cola holidays are coming. Have literally put the same hat on for 25 years. That sort of defies convention, doesn't it? Like sticking's the same thing for that long.

Les [00:07:30]:
Yeah, I mean, we wrote about this in the book, I think.

Sarah [00:07:34]:
Yeah, we did.

Les [00:07:34]:
We did. The ads mostly don't wear out. If they do wear out, it takes them a lot longer to wear out. Them anyone gives them a chance to do. And that the ads that do wear out, there are a few ads that wear out, but they tend to be ads that have kind of got a natural shelf life. Like there's a message, like, you know, new product, you know, clearly that's, you know, only has a limited shelf life because the product's only new for a while or, you know, sale this weekend or, you know, temporary price offer all those sorts of things. But good brand ads don't really wear out very, very much at all.

Jon [00:08:14]:
That's true. I think you were way ahead of the game on this one, by the way, because this year we did a study on a major brand, I won't say who it is, major brands might advertise at Christmas anyway, but we looked at 50 of their ads. We retested them this year, compared them to the last five years, and we cut the data all sorts of ways. So we cut the data by how long did it run for, how much money got spent? How recent was it since the retest? We could not find anywhere out except for, I think, two or three. And they were time specific, they were event related, so Olympics or something like that.

Les [00:08:51]:
Right.

Jon [00:08:52]:
But the interesting thing is, in all the others, the score went up, not down, actually. So since first air, because we test on the first air date. So actually, as people start to see it in the campaign bills, actually the.

Sarah [00:09:04]:
Score goes, which makes total sense, doesn't it? I mean, we talk about popularity a lot, and I think what people often get the wrong way around is that consistency leads to popularity, not necessarily the other way around. And you see that in, you know, sitcoms or tv programs, often the most popular ones actually weren't that popular when you start. But it's the repetition that builds that. So. And most of the time, we don't get a chance to research this sort of stuff because it's not on the number. It doesn't last. I mean, the book, we talk about this funny little soup campaign, which I think when I first started in advertising, that was the first thing I worked on. So it was.

Sarah [00:09:37]:
Nor stock cubes in Scotland, because they make a load of soup in Scotland from scratch. So there's a very specific role for north stock cubes up there to use instead of real stock cubes. But because it was such a small area, they didn't have enough money to make new ads. So they literally ran the same ad. And I think we worked out the average. And I say housewife. I use that word advisedly, because it was housewives who make soup had seen that 80 times, 90 times, something like that, and they still loved it. And it wasn't just that they still loved it attitudinally in research, it still worked in terms of sales modeling as well, which quite often wear outs measured sort of attitudinally, isn't it? And not actually on.

Sarah [00:10:17]:
On sales. So. Yeah, and that was a funny little sort of weird example of something that doesn't normally happen, but just showed how things build.

Les [00:10:25]:
In the book, I think we wrote about Alan Wicker and Rowan Atkinson on Barclaycard. And a very similar thing. There was. I think it was by accident, wasn't it, that some ads, Rowan Atkinson and ads were included in the clutter reel on other forms of testing so that the ads got tested. The same ads got tested. Was it du lux? Okay, the ads got tested a number of times over the years, and that what you actually saw there was wear in. Was it? But there is another thing, which is, I think there's wear out over time. Probably harder to test is wear out on repeated exposure.

Les [00:11:04]:
And I don't know whether you do that at all.

Jon [00:11:06]:
That's the way we approached it, was to retest the creative as a pretest, again, effectively. So if you were launching it today, how would people react? Do they recognize the brand? How do they feel? All that kind of thing?

Les [00:11:18]:
So I think, because I think if you were to test, say, we'll show people this ad this week, and then we'll get the same panel back a week later and we'll show them again and keep doing that, you might find a. You get different results, and I'm just guessing here. And in particular, I think you might get different results depending on the style of the creative. So, for example, if you imagine an ad where there's a twist at the end, a punchline or a funny little emotional reveal or whatever, I think that that would have less impact on repeated exposures. And so it's quite interesting, if you think about the coke the holidays are coming at, that's precisely the kind of creative that would. You'd expect to have the same effect on repeated exposure, because nothing much happens in the ad. There's no, you know, story and punchline and twist or message.

Sarah [00:12:18]:
And there's something particularly appropriate about Christmas, isn't it? And that because we all look out for the first signs of Christmas and at Christmas more many times, you want the same things happening every year to show you that.

Les [00:12:30]:
Yeah.

Jon [00:12:30]:
So I can help on this one because. Because we test it, we ask people the reasons for emotion as well. So it's not just does it make you happy? Why does it make you happy? And what we get in the answers, that one is, oh, coat trucks tells me it's Christmas. Yes, it is a signal. It's a cultural signal of the season. It's all the associated feeling that Christmas has.

Sarah [00:12:49]:
So you want that to be the same, don't you lose that.

Les [00:12:52]:
You changed it. You lose it. Yeah. It's literally, it's like, you know, the Christmas lights turning on in Regent street or putting the tree up or putting. Today, today's we're filming, I don't know if I should say this, on Advent. So it's the advent calendar, actually, and all that stuff. Kids particularly, they don't want each Christmas to be unique. They want it to be like the Christmases that we've always had, don't they?

Jon [00:13:17]:
Do you know what we found as well, which was really interesting, is Covid. So when Covid happened, everyone felt like they had to make a different ad or reflect the circumstances we're in. Wrong strategy. What they wanted was the familiar things back. And what we found is anyone that did the nostalgic repeating things that year, the scores went right up. Anyone that reflected in these times, the.

Sarah [00:13:41]:
Scores went down and people were watching tv shows, weren't they, that they hadn't seen for a while. There was a lot of nostalgia going on. But going back to my banjo point as well, I mean, I think to me, the only ads that stood out in that time that I remember even now as sort of KFC, which did brilliant stuff and just eat and everything else was violins, weren't they? But they rocked up playing a banjo. And I think the only things that stood out, weren't they? So we do overestimate how much we need to play those violins, I think.

Les [00:14:10]:
Yeah.

Sarah [00:14:10]:
Well, I know you like crying at them.

Les [00:14:14]:
I always like a good sob. But when Peter and I first started talking about emotions versus messages in ads, we made a concerted effort, actually, to, after a while, to move the conversation away from emotions versus messages to system one versus system two. I think we may have influenced a certain company in that respect, because when you say emotion, it has those connotations, say, playing a violin to answer for as well.

Sarah [00:14:49]:
Yeah.

Les [00:14:52]:
And the problem with that, I think, was that you then have to explain what you mean by system one and system two, because it's not even now, it's not got the currency. When I've got time in a presentation, I'll talk about emotions, feelings and associations. Because if you say feelings, that's a little bit different from emotions and associations is another level as well. And that does give you more leeway to talk about, you know, humor and fun and all that sort of stuff. And also craft, you know? Totally. I think we ignore that. Just sheer technical excellence and beauty in art.

Jon [00:15:32]:
Totally. I mean. I mean, this is one of the things that I'm very grateful for Orlando's work because he's put the spotlight, hasn't he, on very specific features.

Sarah [00:15:40]:
Yes.

Jon [00:15:41]:
Even in his latest book, he talks about the tone, the color. He saw a one star difference between a cold tone grading and a warm tone.

Les [00:15:48]:
Yeah.

Jon [00:15:48]:
If you sat in the edit suite of, you wouldn't think you could shift a star just by just getting a warm tone over.

Sarah [00:15:53]:
Yeah. People wouldn't be aware that that was influencing them in that way.

Jon [00:15:56]:
But actually, talking of Orlando, actually, one interesting thing with the wear in versus where out study, we divided it as well about, you know, he kind of categorizes things as right hemisphere characteristics versus left. And in there, we noticed that the left, which is more activation, sort of product messaging, flat abstracted. They just stayed flat.

Sarah [00:16:16]:
I.

Jon [00:16:16]:
Whereas actually, the right brain, which is more storytelling characters, it's set in a place that's familiar. Something happens, all that kind of stuff. That's where we saw the. We're in, you know, it's a bit like re watching a friend's sitcom, isn't it? Oh, yeah, it is. You know, I remember that scene.

Sarah [00:16:31]:
Or when you read stories to little children, I mean, they never say, we're getting fed up with scene. They want it again and again, don't they? I think I read some of the average Disney film is watched so 50 times or something by kids. And you think I. That few times. I mean, I sit watching them again and again, teletubbies.

Les [00:16:48]:
Again. Yes, exactly.

Sarah [00:16:51]:
I was thinking, when you're talking about different emotions, because I think I saw one of your spirally charts looking at different sorts of happiness, and I love that. Chardon Freud.

Jon [00:16:59]:
Chardonnay.

Sarah [00:17:02]:
I think I said to you, is that the same in different countries? Is there just something wonderful, it's almost a german word. Is there something really british that we like getting pleasure in things going on?

Jon [00:17:12]:
I think pride was at the bottom prize in other people's successes at the top.

Sarah [00:17:18]:
It's just such a kind of human emotion, isn't it? And humor, obviously, humor's number two.

Jon [00:17:23]:
Humour's number two. So actually, this is a thing's going.

Sarah [00:17:26]:
Wrong, but it's inherently humorous as well, isn't it? Slipping on bananas. Yes, exactly. Yes, I think it has. Meanly. Want to see people suffering. Yeah, that's interesting. I thought.

Jon [00:17:43]:
Have we rediscovered humor this year, do you think? I mean, if we take the top ten based on system one scores, about half of them have got humor, you know, how do you have a few sort of pantomime jokes in there?

Les [00:17:54]:
I've heard people saying this, but I didn't think there was that much to laugh at, really. Maybe it's a sign of the times that people are saying, oh, there's a rediscovery of humor, simply because the ads are not entirely po faced, you know, I mean, there's nothing in there that actually made me laugh out loud, you know, a wry smile. And I'm not saying that's why you.

Jon [00:18:15]:
Have to say humor, but if you.

Les [00:18:16]:
Think about, you know, the 1970s, you know, I'm old enough to remember them, you know, I think comedy, then there were ads there that would actually make you laugh out loud. And I mean, think about, like, Hamlet.

Jon [00:18:30]:
Cigar or something would be good, wouldn't it?

Les [00:18:31]:
And actually more recently. So specsavers, you know, like, one of my favorites is the sheep shearing one.

Jon [00:18:38]:
Yes.

Les [00:18:38]:
You know, and that is a laugh out loud at it. But I think I haven't seen anything for years, I don't think, that I can think of.

Jon [00:18:47]:
So maybe comedy would be a better definition. That's a comedy of the tango ad.

Les [00:18:51]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's, you know, a wry smile.

Jon [00:18:55]:
Yes.

Les [00:18:57]:
Or a likeability or a bit of warmth or whatever.

Sarah [00:19:00]:
Joy and silliness. There's definitely more of that sort of stuff, isn't there? Maybe not, as you say, laugh out loud humour, but interesting. There's the new can category for humour, which is kind of symbolic of people feeling that needs to be canned.

Jon [00:19:14]:
Laughter ladies and gentlemen.

Sarah [00:19:16]:
Yes.

Les [00:19:18]:
You see, I think advertising has got very poe faced. I mean, the whole industry has become worthy and serious and it's in line with the times, isn't it? I mean, whole areas of humor are off limits. I know personally. And everything has to be kind of scrutinized in such a way and has to be purposeful and saving the planet and everything. And so actually.

Jon [00:19:48]:
Well, let me ask you, what's the role of purpose in advertising? Is it effective? Because everyone, this debate seems to rage.

Les [00:19:56]:
There's very clear evidence, isn't it? So people have not made it explicit enough. But the evidence from the data, the IPA data bank, is that purpose driven advertising is about 30% less effective overall. So that's quite clear. And also increasingly, the stuff that was used, like, is it Stengler with his book grow, Richard Shotten.

Sarah [00:20:23]:
Yeah.

Jon [00:20:23]:
Yes.

Les [00:20:24]:
Did a fantastic takedown of that stuff in his book and basically just showed that the research was bogus. So, you know, there is no real evidence that purpose driven organizations are more profitable. That doesn't mean that, you know, you shouldn't do purpose driven stuff. But there's no, it's not, it's not a business strategy that has anything very.

Jon [00:20:50]:
It's probably the classic, isn't it, that every company asks the questions, you know, would you feel better about our products if you knew that it saved the planet?

Sarah [00:20:57]:
Well, of course you would.

Jon [00:20:58]:
Who are the 10% that say no more the story rather than 90% that say no?

Les [00:21:03]:
Similarly, you know, purpose driven marketing on average is less effective than ordinary marketing. And that's, if you look at Peter Field's analysis of that, you see why that is, that you can do good purpose driven advertising, but in order to do it, you've got to do all of the things that make marketing effective. Normally, you've got to have great creative work. It's got to reach the right people, it's got to have scale, reach, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you've got to have a purpose in the ad that is closely linked and relevant to the category and the brand, and it's got to be totally plausible and you've got to kind of. It's got to be in the grain of the company.

Sarah [00:21:49]:
And so all that means that's incredibly difficult, having tried it really hard to line all that stuff up. So it's really hard to do well. It's really easy to do badly. And I think that's what, so what.

Les [00:22:02]:
You end up, you end up adding two more hoops to jump through. So the first hoop is you've got to find a purpose that is a genuine one. And with a lot of purpose driven marketing, what you end up with is you end up with brands who bolt a purpose on and it has nothing to do with the category, nothing to do with the company. And then you've got to do that in a way that sort of, it's got to be true and then it's got to be in some way relevant to the consumer decision. And you know, God help you to get through those two additional hoops.

Sarah [00:22:38]:
I've seen data I'm sure you have as well, as you say, is based on flawed research. A lot of times if you ask people how important is it going to influence your purchasing? And that's the stuff that people tend to quote, you get really high numbers and why wouldn't you? But the correct thing to ask is ask a number of other questions as well about price, product availability, flavor. And then you see it goes right down to about number ten or eleven is not actually anywhere near.

Les [00:23:03]:
People don't know why they buy things. They don't have any real insight into their own motives and decisions. And they're not emotional. Exactly.

Sarah [00:23:14]:
I think you'll see a lot, I mean, it's happening already, isn't it? A great purpose correction? I think you'll see that word used a lot less.

Jon [00:23:20]:
The great purpose correction.

Sarah [00:23:22]:
There's the headline, peak purpose used a lot less, used much more specifically. I think. I think businesses will still do good at the business level, but I think brands will kind of free themselves up from those shackles a lot more. And it will become a strategy rather than the strategy. I mean, what it always should have been, actually.

Les [00:23:40]:
I mean, I'd even slightly contradict you there, which is that what we're seeing is that businesses are downgrading it themselves. So there was quite a nice little article in the Economist recently where they'd done textural analysis of earnings calls for companies. So what they've done was they got recordings of the earnings calls and all those conversations that they have with investors and they looked at the incidents of words like purpose, ESG, sustainability, et cetera, et cetera, versus things like profit or shareholder value. Purpose down, profit up. Theres a very obvious reason for that. Its interest rates purpose is easy to justify. In a world where interest rates are zero and moneys free. In a world where interest rates are now back up to more like historic levels, youre playing with other peoples money and youre paying a price for it and your shareholders demand profits and they want them now all that stuff goes to the bottom.

Les [00:24:47]:
And at the same time, ordinary people who might have gone, oh, we can afford to spend five p more and buy a worthy brand are going, yeah, no, I just want the cheap stuff.

Jon [00:24:58]:
Totally interesting nuance in the data, actually. So when Peter shared the data, we did a bit of research as well. System 1.2 about how purpose impacts on emotional response. The interesting difference was it worked much more in b two B, so. And it also made employees feel good. Well, that's about their company. There is a caveat, I think, which is in it, if you're a b two B business or you're trying to build employer brand, it is quite a potent.

Sarah [00:25:30]:
And for other stakeholders, I think Peter showed that that was, that was a very clear purpose benefit. It's a bit different when you get.

Les [00:25:37]:
To the mental, and I'm not saying companies should note, you know, pursue other goals than shareholder value. Personally, I would prefer to work for an organization that had a purpose that was higher than making money. I kind of feel we do a great agency like ours at its best, cares most about making great ads and then money comes off the back of that. And that's the purpose. Purpose doesn't have to be saving the planet.

Jon [00:26:07]:
Well, that is a good point, isn't it? Yeah, purpose doesn't exactly, yes.

Les [00:26:10]:
If you're working for an ice cream company, I'd want to work for the company that said, we're going to make the best ice cream in the world, even if it means that we don't make as much money. It most, has most traction internally. You want your job to have meaning, people want meaning, but that doesn't mean you have to put it in your ads. So I think I'm right in saying this may no longer be true, but I think it certainly used to be true that Kellogg's, I think it's Kellogg's or one of the other big american companies, which is quite paternalistic and does work in the community and good works. I think they had a kind of rule that you're not allowed to talk about it. Oh, right. And if you think about it, that's more in line with the kind of 19th century, you know, Christian. Yeah, exactly.

Les [00:27:00]:
Yeah, you do good works, but you don't boast about giving to charity. And the modern, you know, purpose driven marketing approach says, okay, right, well, we need something to talk about in the ads, but, you know, just, we don't have to actually do this stuff, we just have to put it in the ad. It's quite right.

Jon [00:27:19]:
It's the other way. I want to be seen as virtual.

Les [00:27:23]:
So as Peter pointed out in his research, you know, you have to walk the walk before you can even think about talking the talk. And, and talking the talk is not necessarily a thing you have to do. So another example of that is, I mean, John Lewis is a purpose driven organization in the sense that it's a profit sharing, you know, mutually owned company. It's effectively, you can think of it as being effectively a communist organization with a charter that goes back to the twenties about all their sort of social goals. And they've hardly ever talked about it.

Sarah [00:27:54]:
But what I thought you were going to say is one of the things that hasn't been talked about in all the talk about the John Lewis Christmas ad, which is the shift in strategy from their social children in Care initiative being front and center of the ads last Christmas to now we're back to character led storytelling and selling plush toys in the shops again. They're still doing the social care home Children in Care initiative, I noticed. They'll talk about it in Waitrose or whatever, but it's not front and center of the ads.

Les [00:28:24]:
You don't have to put it in your ads.

Sarah [00:28:25]:
That's the kind of purpose correction, I think, which is happening.

Les [00:28:31]:
I could talk about this for quite a long time, really, because I get quite a engage, actually, if you take morality and politics and ethics seriously, and I prefer to use terms like that than purpose, you know, then doing those things, doing good because you think you'll make more money is inherently contradictory. You know, you just go, oh, yeah, oh, I think I'm going to be a good person because I'll be richer that way. You know, it's, if you really are a purpose driven organization, you will do it in spite of the fact that it will lose you and it costs.

Jon [00:29:08]:
Exactly. And it costs you.

Les [00:29:09]:
As Bernbach said, a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money. Anyway, I get quite engaged talking about.

Jon [00:29:18]:
Doing the right thing as well. What was lovely, one of the lovely things about Amazon ad this year was representation of older people in that. Yes, I love that.

Les [00:29:26]:
That might be why we quite like it. It was cross generation going back to Sarah's, you know, you are not the target audience, I think. And it's interesting, I wonder whether some people who were sniffy about it were sniffy about it because, you know, they want to work in an industry that's young and young, whereas ordinary people are quite capable of seeing someone who's not like themselves, older, younger, whatever, and still.

Jon [00:29:57]:
It brilliantly did. It did. One of the things we learned in our feeling seen report looking at diversity and representation advertising, which is better to tell one person's story really well than to try and represent a group.

Sarah [00:30:08]:
You have to have specificity to tell a story. You can't tell a story with multiple things. So I think what people get muddled up is sort of reflecting and connecting, isn't it? You have to reflect very specifically. And ideally, I think we'd say, with people who are not usually represented in ads, that's great. But then you can and must connect emotionally widely from that. And that's what that does brilliantly, doesn't it? We show elderly women, women of a certain age, which is a very specific kind of reflection, but we can all connect emotionally with the idea. Lifelong friendship, especially amongst women. You don't often see stories of women friendship, which are incredibly strong, emotional, and then that lovely twist of the kind of reminiscing of what you did, witness all these women going on reunion weekends and thinking, we love that.

Sarah [00:31:00]:
So incredibly widely connecting. But you reflect very specifically, and people get those muddled up, I think. Yeah. So, yes, really good lesson on that.

Les [00:31:09]:
And we may have talked about this last time, vignette ads. Yes. So there's advertisers who want to represent, to reach out to a wide audience, often feel that they need to show all the different kinds of audience in the ad. So where you end up with that is sort of vignettes of, you know, black, white, young, old men, women, gay, straight, you know, rich, poor, etcetera, etcetera. We're all as a nation together, you know? And all those ads all look the fucking same, don't they?

Sarah [00:31:48]:
That's where that kind of reflecting and connecting model works really well, doesn't it? Because you can reflect a widely, as you say in a vignette, something for everyone, but actually you don't connect with anyone at all because you can't tell a story. But equally, you can connect very widely with everyone. Witness an oven glove without actually reflecting anyone or a meerkat or whatever. We forget that in our kind of.

Jon [00:32:09]:
Diversity, characters and animation allow you to.

Sarah [00:32:12]:
I mean, those meerkats talk to everyone. Showing anyone in there. That benefits of character ads, I suppose, that you kind of bypass all that stuff.

Les [00:32:21]:
Yeah. So you can do that with characters, but also if you have some kind of universality of a story or an emotion or a feeling or whatever, you know. So I think there's a quote in the book, was it you that said you were quoting, you know, you don't have to be black to appreciate Shakespeare's Othello. You just have to understand jealousy. And, you know, you don't have to be old to appreciate the Amazon ad. You simply have to have, you know, have, understand friendship and you know about longstanding friendships.

Jon [00:32:51]:
And there was one really interesting insight, because we've been working on this feeling seen kind of series of studies for three years now, actually looking at how different people feel representing ads. And there's a lovely summary from it, which is when you see yourself in advertising, you feel more happiness, you feel stronger emotion, you're more likely to engage with the brand.

Sarah [00:33:13]:
Right?

Jon [00:33:13]:
So there's a lovely headline story. We called it how diverse advertising unites a nation as well, and how actually everyone else also feels good seeing other people represented. So lovely story. Great. One group of people for whom that's not true. Older people. So we suddenly did the study on older people going, oh, let's just, let's see this happen again. And then I got this funny call from the team going, John, we've got a problem.

Jon [00:33:35]:
I'm like, what do you mean? It disproves your law of feelings.

Les [00:33:38]:
And I think that's how you represent older people, isn't it?

Jon [00:33:41]:
You've got it.

Sarah [00:33:41]:
Let's get the emotions right.

Jon [00:33:43]:
We had to call it wise up, which is actually the way to make older people feel good about themselves in advertising, is give them a lead role, make sure it's funny. Show them as being smarter. Tap into the years of cultural references they've got. Make them useful to society. It's not like, oh, we see them sailing into the sunset. That's not it. They don't want that. So it's very interesting nuances, but this is where Amazon got it right because they were leading.

Jon [00:34:11]:
They were funny. It was a twist. They had connection between them. Them. All those things.

Sarah [00:34:16]:
Yeah, emotional connection. We talked, didn't we? Went about that. One of my other favorite ads, that southern comfort ad, live comfortably. I mean, not a classic representation of who you would want your drinker, probably to be, someone with a pretty big beer gut kind of swaggering up a beach. But, you know, we all identify with that feeling of being totally happy in your own skin and a brilliant example of casting. And it's just all about interesting casting, really, isn't it? This isn't tick box stuff, but just characters that leap out at you and you want to be with and you can identify with and tell stories brilliantly. That's what it's all about.

Jon [00:34:55]:
You mentioned characters a little bit earlier, didn't you? And it actually brings us to our number one campaign nicely, which is Audi's Kevin the carrot.

Sarah [00:35:04]:
Yes.

Jon [00:35:04]:
So, on top of the poll, again, the only advertiser, apart from coke. Cause they've been going 25 years, the only advertiser to get five years, five star in a row, and continually get better and better each year, which is spectacular. But in a way, they've deployed that character fluent device, as Orlando tends to call it, doesn't it? Which has universal appeal. Again, it's a lovely example of that.

Sarah [00:35:25]:
Yep. And he tells emotional stories. We're not all carrots, but we can identify with that. And interesting, as you say, it started off as a three. Three score, three class.

Les [00:35:36]:
That was going to be my question.

Jon [00:35:38]:
Yeah.

Les [00:35:39]:
So has it sort of worn in over time?

Jon [00:35:43]:
Two things have happened, so there's definitely. We're in. Also, what they've done is they've kept the campaign eye, they've kept the construct the same.

Sarah [00:35:50]:
Yeah.

Jon [00:35:51]:
But what they do brilliantly every single year is they play to sort of, you know, a slightly different story in Willy Wonka this year. You know, last year it was Christmas cow and so on. And then they also tell relevant jokes. So, you know, there's a few kind of, you know, quite kind of this year's joke here. But what they do, actually, every one of those jokes is tested. Right? To make sure that it lands, it.

Les [00:36:15]:
Gets the right response.

Jon [00:36:16]:
It gets, you know, with you. Yeah. Yeah. So every second.

Sarah [00:36:20]:
So how do you. How do you test?

Jon [00:36:22]:
So we start quite early in the year, actually, with a. With a long animatic. So it might be usually about four minutes. So imagine the story, black and white. Animatic, really stretched out. So voiceover, the jokes that, you know, kind of all done in animatic style. And then what we work out is we see, does happiness and surprise change when that scene happens or the joke lands or the voiceovers? And literally we do that and we edit down to 60 to 90 based on the longer version.

Sarah [00:36:51]:
It's very frenzy.

Les [00:36:53]:
That's interesting, because I know I've heard people say in the past that humor is one of the things that's hardest to test with animatics. But I think when you're dealing with an ad which is effectively cartoon style, you're closer to the finished film. It would be much harder to test, say, Rowan Atkinson.

Jon [00:37:15]:
Comic timing, like delivery.

Les [00:37:17]:
And all that, very hard.

Jon [00:37:18]:
But because it's animatic, it's a, you know, it's almost like a cartoon, isn't it? So, and it's much easier.

Sarah [00:37:23]:
Voiceover heavy as well, isn't it? It's not like you're relying on a lot of expressions and kind of expression humor. There is this physical kind of knock.

Jon [00:37:32]:
About humor and the Jim broadband voiceovers become a fluent kind of, you know.

Sarah [00:37:36]:
Voiceover thing as well as one of those things that you don't really, I think it's probably an ad that it's very easy to overlook how they make it look very easy, don't they? But there's a huge amount of thinking that goes massive and very layered, as you say, like a great panto where the adults laugh at some stuff and the kids don't really get it or whatever.

Jon [00:37:53]:
You can watch it two or three times and get little different. It's one of those ones that you do discover, oh, I didn't spot that joke about Willy Conker and all that.

Les [00:38:00]:
Yeah. So I, this is probably a terrible thing to admit. I don't see many ads because I.

Jon [00:38:07]:
Breaking news, ladies and gentlemen.

Les [00:38:11]:
I don't really watch television. Double breaking news.

Jon [00:38:16]:
He recommends television.

Les [00:38:18]:
Yeah. So I'm quite insulated from a lot of actual ads unless I see them during the working day. I haven't, I think this is the first time I've seen a care of in the carrot ad.

Jon [00:38:31]:
Is it?

Les [00:38:32]:
I think, wow. And so I think it had less effect on me. I thought it was nice. I thought it was charming, et cetera. Yeah. I think I'm at the three star level, so I've seen it once and that's, that's the first time I've seen any of the campaign. So I think I'm at the three star level. And, you know, you talk about jokes and I was thinking, are there any jokes in there? And I think, oh, then there's a, there's a, there's a couple of things.

Jon [00:38:54]:
You didn't get the big willy joke. You didn't smell that one?

Les [00:38:57]:
No.

Jon [00:38:57]:
Well, they go, you have to watch it again.

Les [00:38:58]:
Yeah.

Jon [00:38:59]:
Look out for the big willy joke.

Les [00:39:00]:
There's a bit about, I could see his bum or some bum crack or something like with the plum or plumb crack. Okay. Yeah. So I think that's an example of how we're in works. You begin to know and like the character and you're expecting certain things and you see repeated exposure. You get the jokes, but I'm not at that level yet.

Jon [00:39:17]:
Well, let's bring excel in, or the IPA, IPA effectiveness gold was last year. The Kevin campaign. And what's lovely about Aldi is that they called it in the case study, discounting the other variables. So it's a wonderful example where they've been able to isolate the impact of advertising, because we're all trying to do that. But there's so much else going on at the same time. But over the period in question, Audi weren't opening stores. Their discounting policy was the same. So they were able to go, well, actually, all the other variables are roughly the same.

Jon [00:39:51]:
And they could look at the market share gains of Audi each Christmas and you'll know this, but Christmas is the one time where people are most open to changing the store they visit. And usually Audi loses share Christmas because.

Les [00:40:02]:
They want to go up, they want.

Jon [00:40:03]:
To go to M and s right shorthand. And that trade down has got smaller and smaller and smaller every year. And then the trade into in new year, where you go, I've got a tightened belt has gone up and up and up. So it's just a wonderful. I think it's the best case study I've ever seen of advertising's effect on business results. I'll be misquoting them, but it's like a very big percentage of the number of people that visit Audi stores. Most of it happens in the twelve weeks after Christmas they can attribute back to the campaign, which is amazing. I mean, it is wonderful to see.

Jon [00:40:37]:
The Rois and stuff are just fantastic on it.

Les [00:40:40]:
Yeah. And I can see how it works. I mean, you look at that ad, and I've seen one ad in the whole campaign ever. And immediately it makes Aldi feel Christmassy, which it wouldn't naturally do.

Jon [00:40:55]:
Well, actually, you guys are to blame, actually. I don't know. I don't know if you know this, but the original brief was beat John Lewis because the whole idea around Audi, everyone knows it's cheap.

Les [00:41:07]:
We know that, right? Yeah.

Jon [00:41:08]:
What we have to do is become John Lewis at Christmas for people. And that was. See, in a way, you can take some credit for it.

Sarah [00:41:14]:
And they were one of the first campaigns, I think, weren't they, at Christmas where they. I remember the first year that Kevin came back, it was like, ooh, you know, Kevin's back again. That's a bit of a surprise. You don't normally see. See that. So they were. They were kind of doing the consistency and campaign before other people have started.

Jon [00:41:32]:
The other thing I love about it, from Marcus's point of view as well, is how it works everywhere. You know, you can buy the toy in store. Kevin pops up and has conversations on social media. It's on the side of the bus. Not the bus, the truck, when it delivers the store, they've really integrated it and very cleverly throughout, which is brilliant. So doing the long and the short, it's kind of working in both senses.

Les [00:41:53]:
Yeah.

Sarah [00:41:54]:
Good for them.

Jon [00:41:55]:
The other thing, looking through the year, actually. So looking at non Christmas ads as well for a moment, maybe we'll see. Having a bit of a Christmas theme. There's also some consistency in fluent devices. So a little tip to my former employer, actually. So one of the top scoring ads this year was Ribena. Now, I've got a bit of inside intel on this because having worked there, but the Ribena brought back the Ribena berries. And I don't know if you've seen those, but system one, we tested it.

Jon [00:42:22]:
The Ribena berries are one of the most recognizable kind of distinctive assets out there. And they got a 5.6 star. And again, it shows what another top tip, I think, for advertisers is to look back at what your brand owns as distinctive assets. I think we're too quick, aren't we, to sort of come up with something new and we don't use something new?

Les [00:42:44]:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Sarah [00:42:45]:
How long was it since they'd used them?

Jon [00:42:47]:
Well, I.

Sarah [00:42:49]:
Did you work on that?

Jon [00:42:51]:
Well, I was there from 2016 to 2018. I remember this funny situation where we were making a new ad and then I asked this casual question to the team. I mean, I got in so much trouble for this. And I'm sure they're listening and we'll go, John. But I said, yeah, yeah, no, let's do this new idea. As long as it beats last year. So while you test the new idea, do you mind just testing what happened last year? I got this funny text message going, oh, good news, bad news. Good news.

Jon [00:43:16]:
Last year was a 5.6 star, the best ad that's ever been running soft drinks in the history of ever sort of thing. Bad news is it's going to be kind of hard to justify making a new one this year, that kind of thing. But it was a lesson for me, actually, because I didn't know, even though I was the marketing director, I didn't realize how good that asset was for the brand. I just didn't have the history and understanding and so many marketing directors come and go.

Sarah [00:43:42]:
It's one of the great. The new John Lewis positioning, I guess, has got this tension inherent in it, hasn't it, about letting your traditions grow. I mean, that is what you have to do. As a manager of brand comms, isn't it? You have to decide what to keep, what you move on subtly, and what gives howls of protest if you chuck it away. Really? So it's about managing that, isn't it? Not chucking out your blackcurrants because that's your strongest asset, but keeping it fresh every year. So I think everyone's getting better at that now, I think, aren't they? Rather than just defaulting to rip it up?

Jon [00:44:15]:
And let's see what our friend Ritson did say to me the other day. He was saying, is this the year we finally understood consistency?

Sarah [00:44:22]:
Yeah.

Jon [00:44:23]:
Yeah, it does feel like that, doesn't it? The penny has dropped.

Les [00:44:26]:
I mean, we wrote about that.

Jon [00:44:28]:
Were you aware?

Sarah [00:44:29]:
We were really struggling to think of any campaigns, weren't we? We had. Gary Lineker was still going for walkers at the time. We had Felix cat food, which is our little cartoon black and white cat, which we worked on as an agent for 2022 years. We were really scrabbling around trying to find anything else. There wasn't anything.

Jon [00:44:47]:
Okay, so talking about consistency, you've got a good Felix IPA case study on the matter, haven't you?

Les [00:44:52]:
Yeah. Well, so we wrote this one in about 2002 or something like that. Consistency killed the cat. No, it wasn't that. But anyway, continuity.

Sarah [00:45:03]:
Continuity saved the sake.

Les [00:45:06]:
I can't remember something like that. Yeah, but. And it shows the kind of the. The long roots of the problem. I think the business in general, and then the marketing community and the advertising community off the back of that, became obsessed with innovation and disruption. It's all part of that mantra that comes out of Silicon Valley and all that sort of thing.

Jon [00:45:35]:
Innovate or die.

Les [00:45:36]:
Yeah, exactly. And innovation is important, particularly when it comes to product and so forth. But we bought that so much that we forgot about the other side. Consistency and continuity. And great campaigns are about continuity and freshness. Actually, Kevin, the carrot is quite a good example of that, in that you've got continuity, but you've got something new each year, I gather. And in that Felix case study, we contrasted what Felix was doing, which was running a consistent campaign for 22 years, the same little black and white cat, and often running the same ads. The very first one is the piano player one.

Les [00:46:28]:
I think they dug that out year after year, bring it out every so often versus whiskers, which was at that point, TBWA, I think. And they totally bought the mantra of disruption and they were doing something new every time. And what we saw was that they were outspending us four to one. And we were beating them. We went over that period from being the fifth or 6th biggest brand to beating them to become the number one brand on a quarter of their spend just with a little black and white cat frisking about to music.

Sarah [00:47:09]:
And that was a great example of that. Consistency breeds popularity rather than the other way around, because people got more and more familiar with it, loved it more and more. We started doing tea towels, didn't we? And all the rest of it.

Les [00:47:23]:
I found myself the other day talking to a bunch of marketers somewhere abroad, and I won't tell you what category, but as I was talking to them, it became really apparent that they totally bought into the idea that marketing was about innovation and purpose. You can imagine how I reacted to that. And I said, actually, clever marketing is when, if you're a really clever marketing marketer, you can sell the same old stuff with no innovation whatsoever. The real challenge of marketing is to sell more stuff when you've got nothing to say, when you've got no new product, when there's no killer fact in the ad, but just to do the same thing really well. And we talk about Marmite in the book, where Marmite was a brand that had a no significant innovation for about 100 years, you know, until Marmite squeezy, that was the one significant and still grew.

Jon [00:48:31]:
Yeah. Another good example of that is Guinness. So I don't know if, you know, this year Guinness became Britain's favorite pint. Again, one product, one product, one idea consistently executed. Distinctive assets.

Sarah [00:48:44]:
Banging soundtracks.

Jon [00:48:45]:
Soundtracks.

Sarah [00:48:46]:
Bit of animated stuff going on. And I suppose banjo, beer advertising.

Jon [00:48:51]:
Banjo makes you feel good.

Les [00:48:54]:
I mean, there are other ways of doing things. And actually, I suppose we provided a big counter example with John Lewis in that on the surface it appears that we have, because people have asked me over the years, why don't you run the same John Lewis ad each Christmas? EDGAR back. But I think what we did there was. There was a consistent strategy, you know, the thoughtful gifting strategy, the idea that you're telling a story about an example of finding the perfect gift for someone you really care about. So that's, you know, the idea underpinning was the same and the whole load of consistent stylistic things, musically, you know, the palette of how the ads look and so on. But the other thing is that what we did was, was to create, if you like, a yde a ritual, you know, and again, a bit like the, you know, the holidays are coming that, you know, this thing of. There would be a big reveal, the big ad that would make everyone cry. And so there was a kind of continuity and consistency in that, even though superficially, there wasn't quite a hard one to do, because to make it work, you've got to come up with an absolute banger every year.

Jon [00:50:11]:
Yes, exactly. That's the pressure. Well, I'm related to the ads, but the thing that used to make me laugh about the John Lewis was the guy that had the John Lewis Twitter handle.

Les [00:50:21]:
Yes. Well, american.

Jon [00:50:24]:
Yeah.

Les [00:50:28]:
Wasn't he an american politician or something?

Jon [00:50:29]:
But doesn't he.

Les [00:50:30]:
Maybe canadian?

Jon [00:50:31]:
He used to get all the. He used to get flooded with people talking about, you know, talking about him for like a week. When the ads came out, you know.

Les [00:50:39]:
Suddenly it became famous. He won't have that problem anymore, will he.

Jon [00:50:44]:
Now? Actually, just before we get on to the next topic, two interesting stats for you. We tested the very first tv ad ever to air on tv, back in the early 1950s, I think.

Les [00:50:58]:
1965, Gibbs.

Jon [00:51:01]:
It was toothpaste. Yeah, yeah, you got it.

Les [00:51:04]:
It has to be 65 because that's when commercial. Oh, no, hang. Was that. I've got that wrong, haven't I? 65 commercial tv.

Jon [00:51:11]:
Yeah, it was fifties or sixties. I can't quite. Yeah, I can't remember the day, but it was for a toothpaste. Plummy British, a proper BBC news kind of accent. Scored over three star. Isn't that amazing? Now, I know there's probably nostalgia and it just, you know, there'll be a little bit of intrigue here, but just goes to show, that would put it in the top 15% on day space.

Sarah [00:51:30]:
There's a lot. How much. What percentage of your database would be in the around at that time?

Jon [00:51:35]:
Not many, exactly. Black and white.

Sarah [00:51:38]:
I know you tested some of John Webster's ads, didn't you, that the Martians were up there pretty well up the top, weren't they?

Jon [00:51:44]:
Probably the best example. Hovis, boy on a bike, 46 year. Well, we tested it three years ago, so it's now 50 years old that ads, but was five star.

Les [00:51:54]:
I think this sort of slightly leads us into a point that we were talking about before we started recording, which is to interpret results like that, you've got to put them side by side with comparables. So, for example, Hovis buying a bike. I'm sure part of the emotional response from that will be from people who remember it. There'll be a nostalgia thing and not all the people in your group will be people who remember it. And similarly, you show a white ad from the sixties, it will have an emotional impact. Simply in the same way that seeing something really old does. So in order to assess the emotional impact of ads, you've got to put them alongside things that are in some way similar. So, Hovis boy on the bike versus Cadbury's.

Les [00:52:46]:
Everyone's a fruit and nutcase, for example, like categories.

Jon [00:52:53]:
So this is a very, very good point, and I'm glad you asked it, because I wanted to ask you about this. So I've pulled off the average star rating of the categories this year and ranked them. There is a big difference, because I know we were looking at the top ads this year. Sarah, I know you and I were having a chat about this.

Sarah [00:53:09]:
There's lots of sugar in there.

Jon [00:53:11]:
Yeah, well, there is. There is. If I read out the top three in a number three, magnum, a new magnum variant. Number two, the advert for the british bake off.

Les [00:53:21]:
Yes.

Jon [00:53:22]:
Number one, Cadbury dairy milk, glass and a half.

Les [00:53:25]:
Right.

Jon [00:53:26]:
And let me tell you, the top three on average, in at number three, baking. So, boy. And, like, number two, ice cream. Number one, chocolate. So mirror the best ads. Mirror the most emotive categories.

Les [00:53:40]:
You know. You know, you see, actually, I've done a little bit of work on chocolate advertising, not for a long time, but earlier in my career. And one thing. So, econometrically, one of the things I noticed is, with chocolate, anything works. You know, it's really easy to sell chocolate.

Jon [00:53:59]:
It's very impulse, isn't it? Just have to remind you.

Sarah [00:54:02]:
It's called impulse category.

Les [00:54:03]:
Yeah. Particularly. Yeah, impulse chocolate. Because you, you know, you go into a corner shop, there are. How many variants are there to choose from? You know, a million. You know, you only have to say chocolate and people start, literally start salivating. I'm probably will myself in a second. So you could sell chocolate by just going arrow, and that's it.

Les [00:54:23]:
You just say the word arrow immediately sales go up, so it's not hard to get a response. I thought, for example, bake off. There'd be, first of all, people think like cakes, but secondly, people love great british bake off. And so, again, you could probably run.

Jon [00:54:41]:
A test of the program.

Les [00:54:43]:
Yeah. You could run a still that said, bake offs. Come bake off next week. People go, oh, I love that.

Sarah [00:54:52]:
Sort of, like, built in feeling to the category that there is.

Jon [00:54:56]:
And this is really important. We're coming, sort of. But just before we talk about why that's important, because there's a very important point that comes up all the time when I'm talking to advertisers about this. Before I do. Here's the harder question to both of you. What do you think the lowest performing category is? And I'll give you some leeway here. So any of the bottom three, what do you reckon?

Les [00:55:16]:
How about ball bearings?

Sarah [00:55:20]:
Probably not a lot of that in the date of days.

Jon [00:55:28]:
So ball bearing category would be what?

Les [00:55:30]:
So industrial products.

Jon [00:55:32]:
Industrial products.

Les [00:55:34]:
I say that simply because I've been talking to a barbarian manufacturer.

Jon [00:55:38]:
Breaking news again on this podcast. Well, it gets you some effective ball bearing advertising next year. Sarah, would you reckon bottom performing category.

Sarah [00:55:46]:
Cars.

Jon [00:55:47]:
Cars. Cars are interesting one. They're statistically exactly average. And the interesting thing with cars is all advertisers are hugging the average line. So there's like zero difference between the best and the worst. It's like the most. Stereotypically, in fact, I think cars have been using AI for ten years longer than that. Because if you use AIH for cars, you get the same thing again.

Sarah [00:56:08]:
That's kind of thing.

Les [00:56:09]:
I do think there is a problem with finance, actually. What I was thinking particularly was things like life assurance and pensions, because it's. That's close, because it's quite. Again, I've done a bit of work in that area. It's both boring and frightening, you know, thinking about, you know, whether or not you're going to starve to death in retirement. No one wants to think about, you.

Jon [00:56:33]:
Know what, it's one of the only. So one of the only awkward moments I've had doing the job I do is because usually when you measure, you test with the national population and then you test with your target audience, the score goes up.

Les [00:56:45]:
Right.

Jon [00:56:45]:
It's obvious.

Les [00:56:46]:
Right.

Jon [00:56:46]:
That's why we do targeting. Right. And I was working with a major pension provider and they got a one star. And I'm in that awkward position. I was. I'm in quite a lot of time. But don't worry, we'll test it with the customer audience. I'm sure it's going to go up.

Jon [00:57:01]:
Oh, how wrong I was. It went down.

Sarah [00:57:04]:
Yes. Because actually reminded you.

Jon [00:57:06]:
I did not want to be reminded of, of, you know.

Les [00:57:09]:
And so it's quite hard to do good work in that category. But it is possible, I mean, you know, the, for the life, you don't yet know. That was Allied Dunbar, wasn't it? Yeah, I think. And, you know, they managed to, you know, they had music, humor, Whitehouse stuff, wasn't there?

Sarah [00:57:26]:
Yeah, actually.

Les [00:57:28]:
Interesting. So humour is quite good at diffusing.

Jon [00:57:32]:
It's a serious case for humor.

Les [00:57:33]:
Yeah. I think more generally in society, one of the things that humans can do is allow you to go to touch areas that are sensitive, you know, push boundaries, say truths that you couldn't say explicitly in a po face way, and so on. I think that's quite a good example of.

Jon [00:57:54]:
It's never a truer word than spoken in jest.

Les [00:57:56]:
Yes, exactly.

Jon [00:57:58]:
You got close. You got very close.

Les [00:58:01]:
There's ball bearings, I think.

Jon [00:58:02]:
I think financial services are mid to high. One star the bottom. Well, I should go from the. So the third least popular category is gyms. The second most least popular category is slimming aids. And the least popular category is sport betting.

Les [00:58:19]:
Sports betting.

Jon [00:58:20]:
It's interesting, the juxtaposition with the eating and not staying healthy.

Sarah [00:58:25]:
It is, isn't it?

Jon [00:58:25]:
I hope the government's not listening to this, by the way, because we might end up with a.

Les [00:58:29]:
Sports betting, presumably, is that there'll be a certain amount of antipathy.

Jon [00:58:33]:
It's probably regulation, because actually, one interesting thing is we work in the US with a major manufacturer of health products, I'll say medicines. And in their category, they actually, by law, have to state the negative side effects that come with the category. Everything about sports betting and their category average is 1.2. It's the lowest on our entire database globally. Now, of course, with sport betting, you have to have all the terms and conditions and you have to have the gambler where and that sort of thing. So I'm pretty sure it'd be government regulation that's driven that down, which is a point of it. Interesting.

Les [00:59:12]:
Again, going back to finance, financial advertising is heavily regulated as well. And I remember working, again on stuff to do with life insurance and pensions. I remember that the company I was working with years ago, so they had more people in the compliance department than in the marketing department by a factor of something like four or something like that. And the ads were so heavily regulated that effectively you couldn't say anything, which was tremendous, because it meant that they ran ads with no messages in, which really worked. There was no option but to do emotional advertising. And it worked.

Jon [00:59:49]:
I love it, actually. One of my. Isn't that there was a Millwood Brown study, wasn't there, where they found the more the message, the more messages you have, the less gets remembered.

Les [00:59:57]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jon [00:59:58]:
It's like the same thing as you say, the more you get, the more.

Sarah [01:00:01]:
You crank the rational bit up, the less. The more the emotional bit goes down.

Jon [01:00:06]:
Real truth.

Les [01:00:07]:
So people often sort of say, oh, well, what's the optimum number of messages in an ad? And you go, yeah, yeah, if you want one? The answer is nil.

Jon [01:00:16]:
Exactly. Now, I'm glad we talked about this because one of the things I have to explain to people, when Orlando built the kind of system on methodology inspired very much by your approach IPA database, again, looking at, and what he did is he looked at the relationship between EsOV and market share changes in the following year, and then he worked out the emotional response and created, I think he called it the kind of creative amplifier sort of thing. But what's really interesting, and we have to explain this because obviously we do the five star system and everyone kind of celebrates because it's simple and intuitive, but actually the prediction is actually related to your performance within your category context. So what he found is that your ability to outperform your category average creative, exactly as you do with EsoV. It's like a creative weighted ESOV kind of measure. So if you're in ice cream, you better be doing five star advertising equally if you're in sport betting, slimming or gymnast a two stars. So category context is actually. So when you get into data, the contextual thing is critical.

Les [01:01:22]:
And I suppose the other thing is that in order to really outperform your category, you probably want to be doing something that's a little bit different. And that's one of the reasons why, I think, why there will never be any hard and fast rules about what is effective in creative terms. Because one of the rules is to break the rules. Yeah. So, you know, for years I've been thinking, you know, the John Lewis thing, we're not going to keep getting away with this forever because other people will copy us. And, you know, there's more and more of that kind of advertising around. Sooner or later, if a formula works, other people will copy it and then it will stop working.

Jon [01:02:11]:
Yeah, well, we're kind of seeing that at Christmas, aren't we? With the system on testing, you can see it coming.

Sarah [01:02:17]:
I was thinking that when you were talking about actually the lack of a distinctive asset per se for Gill Lewis. And when we talk about handwriting, didn't we, Antonia? And that is the stuff that's just so widely copied now, isn't it?

Les [01:02:28]:
Breathy singers and had it to ourselves for so long.

Sarah [01:02:32]:
Where are babies? I was just musing on your list. They must be up there fairly high.

Jon [01:02:36]:
Yeah, very, very high sugar. The couple of categories, actually, that will probably round out the top five or six. Pet care. So pets ads. We always joke about putting a dog in your ass power. Often when you're looking at you go, jeez, there's a very average dog ad in the top 20, kind of on our database. So again with that, you need to do something more interesting with the dog than just pinch of the dog. So that's one.

Jon [01:02:56]:
And babies, of course. In fact, the Super bowl winning ad, was it this year or last year, was Huggies. The only Super bowl ad a five star was. I mean, it was brilliantly funny, brilliantly cute. You know, it was very, very well done.

Sarah [01:03:09]:
The only Super bowl had to get a five star.

Jon [01:03:11]:
It's rare, actually. Yeah, yeah. Every year there's one or two. Well, here's an interesting. Here's an interesting thing. We should all celebrate, by the way, as uk advertisers, the average Super bowl ad is. And that we test about 80 and at Christmas is about 80 uk ads. If you say Christmas is our Super bowl, right, same sample size.

Jon [01:03:32]:
Average star rating is 2.7 for Super bowl. Average star rating is 4.3 for Christmas in the UK. So the standard is demonstrably different.

Les [01:03:43]:
However, to turn your own point against you, I mean, Christmas advertising, if you think of it as a category, category is going to be, you know, Christmas is an emotional time and then the products are going to be, you know, indulgent food and stuff like that.

Jon [01:03:58]:
I mean, we used to say Christmas is half a star, probably now it's a star. Roughly speaking. Yeah, very good point. The cafe contest is enormous. Now, I asked our friend ritson to pop some questions over for both of you, so we'll give these a go. He's obviously in his date. He's obviously in his Excel spreadsheet, actually, as well, because we've got some quite good, quite techie ones here. Anyway, he wrote a column recently on the power of synthetic data.

Jon [01:04:23]:
Very interesting, actually. So I don't even caught this story, but he created this perceptual map of car brands and then revealed that he'd done it on chat GPT, and then he went and tested it with a real human survey responses. And there was a 90% overlap between what the computer was able to generate scanning the Internet versus what people actually felt about these car brands. Now, 90% feels like, within the realms of statistics, statistical significance and pretty. I mean, most people would take 90%. As if I can get 9% of it right and save time and money. I will. I guess the question for you two is, like, that being the case, what else can you do with AI to get shortcuts?

Les [01:05:07]:
Lots to say about that. I mean, it was a great article. I was on holiday when it came out and I was quoting, we were waiting for a bus in Mallorca and I was quoting bits of it to my family and my wife was going, you're on holiday? Yeah.

Jon [01:05:23]:
You're on holiday. Les doesn't take holidays.

Les [01:05:26]:
And it was classic Ritzen. Why classic Ritzen? Because it was. On the one hand, there was some very powerful and interesting ideas in it, plus also the best description of programmatic advertising that I've ever read, which was describing it as a black box full of turds and spiders. It was brilliant. But, yeah, I mean, I think I've been messing around with chat GPT.

Jon [01:05:53]:
For.

Les [01:05:53]:
A while myself, and it's powerful and interesting, and I think as an industry, we probably kind of got the wrong end of the stick in that. I think the really powerful uses for it at the moment are actually in the research area rather than the creative area that's generated by AI. I think once you've seen it a couple of times, you recognize it pretty much instantly, but it's a great way of speeding up research. So I'm slightly biased because I know the people behind the synthetic data stuff. They are great guys and they are doing interesting things. But I think the other thing that you learn from messing around with AI is you have to be really cautious with it because it sometimes just completely fucks up and it will tell lies and it will make things up. I mean, somebody once said it's a bit like. It's like having a really clever intern who's completely unscrupulous, you know, who will go off, you know, just go and bring me data on that and you don't know whether they've made it up or not.

Les [01:06:59]:
So. So you do really need to double check everything but the. But the speed with which it can come up with. Yeah, stuff that, I mean, you know, quick way of testing hypotheses, putting out feelers for things.

Jon [01:07:13]:
What areas do you think it'll touch? I mean, can it help with my media mix, for example, or which, which audience I should target, those kind of questions?

Les [01:07:21]:
I don't know. I mean, I think. I think we should all be playing with it and finding out. But the point is that I don't think you can use it well unless you already know quite a lot of stuff because you don't know whether or not to trust what it's telling you.

Sarah [01:07:39]:
I think it can go badly wrong, as you say, I've had a bit of experience of it. It's already in pre testing, working with one client who use sort of AI pretest to save time and money. And yeah, you can get really bum steers from it. And one where it wasn't understood that there was a celebrity in this ad, because that couldn't be kind of detected by the methodology and completely changed the response to the whole ad. If you didn't know that that was this certain person. So proceed with care, I can give.

Jon [01:08:10]:
You the data on that. So we've been using AI to compete with ourselves. Can AI out predict the system one approach? The correlation between the system one prediction and market share change over twelve months is 0.66. That's been tested 264 times in different studies because we continually update our validations, the correlation between AI trained on our data. So this is AI with the biggest advantage you can imagine because it's using our own data. Correlate, whatever, 0.33. So it's not there yet. It's not there yet.

Jon [01:08:48]:
But interesting on the creative. Another thing, I'll chuck in as well. So we helped with a study looking at could. So we gave some art students a project with a fictitious brand to come up with some posters. And then we gave AI the same brief, almost identical. So one group, the students, got 1.9 star, the AI got 1.83. There was one cell within this experiment where we had to ban the result and they actually came out top. The reason we had to ban it was they used both.

Jon [01:09:19]:
So they tested with AI, they then use their judgment to improve it and retest it.

Les [01:09:23]:
And that is the smart way forward.

Jon [01:09:26]:
Got 2.8. So I think that was actually the story.

Les [01:09:31]:
Well, exactly, yeah. And this is exactly what I find with messing around with chat GPT is that I think if you just used it and say, well, that's the answer, you get a lot. It can do some things quite well, but you get a lot of stuff that was not right or just very bland or very generic. But if it becomes a dialogue between a smart person like myself and this tool, then you can do something a lot better. And I mean, the really clever thing about it is the speed, because that means that you can explore research avenues that you just wouldn't have the time to explore. A little example, trivial example, I'm reading trollops the way we live now at the moment. And at one point in the book, one of the characters says something which about America being bigger than Britain. And I thought, oh, okay, so at what point did the us population pass the population of the UK? Was it around about this time, 1870s? That's quite a hard thing to answer with Google.

Les [01:10:41]:
And even with Google you wouldn't bother. But I asked Chatgpt and it came up with an answer. And immediately I thought, there's something wrong about this answer. The figures didn't stack up. So had a conversation over the course of about a minute or two, and then eventually got chat GPT to admit that it made a mistake. I misspoke about, and then eventually got to an answer that was satisfactory. But all of that stuff, kind of like, I would not have bothered to do that if I didn't have a thing on my phone that allowed me to do that.

Sarah [01:11:13]:
Was that in the bus queue as well, Jackie?

Les [01:11:15]:
No, I was lying in bed reading my book. Yeah, I'm sorry. I am a nerd, aren't you? But it. But you have to watch it.

Jon [01:11:26]:
You do. I've actually done an experiment to prove this. A rather funny one. So I had this very negative review about the podcast earlier in the year, right? So this guy filmed a seven minute video doing a takedown of the episode I did with Bob Hoffman, and basically going, oh, he's not uncensored. In fact, he called me tyrannically english bullshit. Tyrannically polite english bullshit. Anyway, that was how he kind of summarised the review. And it was properly, you know, properly in a way.

Jon [01:11:58]:
It was quite funny, actually. So, you know, when you get this situation, you think, well, what do I do? Do I get offended? Do I just treat it as banter? I decided to treat it as banter and just enter into the spirit of this guy. And he'd copy me into everything. And I messaged him on Leighton said, look, with respect, there are plenty of podcasts out there to pick on. And this is the first time we'd done a review. Like, why mine? And he said, well, I asked chat GPT for the world's number one marketing podcast, and you came up, right? And I said, that's interesting, because I'm not technically the world's number one marketing podcast. But as a joke, when I launched.

Sarah [01:12:32]:
The podcast, you said it, didn't you?

Les [01:12:33]:
You said, the world's number one.

Jon [01:12:34]:
There you go.

Les [01:12:35]:
Yeah.

Jon [01:12:35]:
Yeah, you see? So, you know, chap, cheapities learning. The only problem is, when I tried to recreate the result, it obviously learned itself in the time between then and now, and I couldn't recreate the result and got a lot of other things.

Les [01:12:46]:
So I don't even know if you know this, but at DDB, we're working on an AI, a lesbot, a less bot, which is trained on all the stuff. Peter and I.

Jon [01:13:02]:
What you.

Les [01:13:05]:
Ham lots plans in there as well.

Jon [01:13:06]:
But does this mean we're going to go to conferences and Lesbot will be taking a slot?

Les [01:13:11]:
So I was messing about with it. So I said, okay, I'm just asking it some questions. One of the questions I asked was, do ads wear out? And it gave me a long considered answer about the evidence that ads wear out. They do, yeah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, didn't we write in our book how not to plan that ads don't generally wear out? And it sort of went, oh, sorry, I misspoke. Yes. Ads don't generally wear out to train your own boss.

Les [01:13:38]:
This is an example. It is already trained on stuff we've written, but all the same, it needed to be kept on the leash, as it were.

Jon [01:13:51]:
I see.

Les [01:13:53]:
My view is that AI will help low skilled people to become much more skilled and high skilled people to become much more skilled. The people in the middle, I think, will be the ones who are in some danger.

Jon [01:14:07]:
All right, so Mister Ritson had another question for you, Les Esov. Given that some data out there is walled and it's difficult to get to, how reliable is Esov now? Or how easy is it to get to a proper esov calculation?

Les [01:14:22]:
Well, it's a valid concern, and certainly Peter and I have been expecting that share of voice would stop working. It would stop predicting market share. For years, we thought this, as the proportion of ad spend that is audited goes down, you'd think that this stuff would no longer work, but it still does work. So I'm literally, you were asking me earlier on what you're going to do after this. I've got two things to do this afternoon, and the third one is were finishing off a share of voice model and it still predicts market share right now. Why does it do that? I think the answer is two things. The cynical answer would be that some of the unaudited media that people spend a lot of money on don't have much influence on long term market share because they are short term tactical stuff. The other one is that the unaudited share of voice tends to be proportional to the audited share of voice.

Les [01:15:28]:
So you're only measuring the tip of the iceberg. But if you've got 20% of the audited ad spend, the chances are you'll probably have about 20% of the unaudited ad spend, because people have similar ratios.

Jon [01:15:44]:
Of if the ratio is the same, then it would hold, wouldn't it?

Les [01:15:46]:
Yeah. So I think somewhere between. That's a kind of like, one's an indicator of the other to the other stuff doesn't work.

Jon [01:15:56]:
Yeah, it makes sense that. Yeah. That follows his third question. Question for you was, if I ran three mmm models, would I get three different answers?

Les [01:16:05]:
That's a very interesting question. It would be an interesting experiment to do. There was a famous experiment done in the late eighties, early nineties, the ARF copy validation project. You know that one? So they did that with pretesting. So they got 23 different pretesting companies to all test the same ads to see where they. Yeah. You're getting nervous now.

Jon [01:16:31]:
Yeah, I was going to say. And the result, we didn't take part in this. They left out the correct answer.

Les [01:16:38]:
Well, it's relevant to you, because what they did was they compared. They didn't just compare whether or not they came out with different answers, but they compared the results against econometric measurements of effectiveness. And the overall conclusion was that pretesting as a whole was no better than tossing a coin at predicting effectiveness. But if you looked within that, some methodologies were better than others, and all the ones that had any predictive power were based on liking of the ads anyway, that wasn't the question. But I reckon if you've got different econometricians to all tackle the same problem, they might come up with different answers for two reasons. One is they might, might choose different data sets. You know, one econometrician might think to include rainfall in the variables you test and one might not. And the second thing is, you know, the actual methodology of how you build a model has more craft in it than one might, than a non expert might understand.

Les [01:17:50]:
One would hope to get around this. What companies should be doing a lot more of is actually forecasting and using forecasts to test models. That way, if a model is good, it should have predictive power.

Jon [01:18:10]:
Well, going back to Esov, that's actually probably the reason I joined system one is that they were able to evidence in every single case that applying a creative weight on top of ESov was more predictive in every case that we've ever looked at. So it has all the always, it tells you what you knew to begin with, that the creative matters, but still good to have the evidence. But the important thing from our point of view is that the prediction did correlate, did improve the correlation to in market performance.

Les [01:18:39]:
And the other point is, and I've made the same point myself several times, is that creative is really, really important, but also so media is really, really important. And the basically weight of spend and share of voice is really, really important. And there's no point in having a great ad that no one sees. Your quote about cathedrals building cathedrals in the desert.

Sarah [01:19:05]:
And brand size is very, very important.

Les [01:19:06]:
Brand size is very important as well. And really great advertising is popular advertising. It's ads that, most of the time, it's ads that have, you know, that people, like, makes them feel something, makes them, you know, emotions, feelings, associations, all that stuff at scale. And that's what we get wrong a lot of the times. We. We think it's all about just winning a little creative award for something that nobody sees.

Jon [01:19:37]:
Well, listen, it brings me quite nicely, actually. I wanted to round off right with the best performing admin ad on our database because it joins our conversation up in a really beautiful way. Today, as we're recording, this is the first day of cop. We talked about purpose, we talked about advertising, and the most successful Adam and Eve added this year on our database is Great Western Railways.

Les [01:20:00]:
Yay.

Jon [01:20:00]:
Which I don't know if you knew that, because it's a lovely example and an awful reason to mention it as well. We just included it in our Greenprint report, which we launched at System one, about how advertisers can help deliver sustainable messages in the right way. And what I love about this ad is brilliantly, is it's funny, it's an Enid Blyton story, famous five. You know, it does all the things that. Great advertising campaign.

Les [01:20:24]:
It's a campaign.

Jon [01:20:26]:
It's basically a fantastic ad that delivers a message about taking the train rather than taking a car. And we talked about how to do purpose. We're doing purpose with humorous and storytelling, and making a great ad is what we should be doing. Right.

Sarah [01:20:39]:
We might be seeing a lot more of getting people to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, almost, which is sort of where purpose, I think, went wrong a lot as well, sort of preaching at people. But this is a really good example of that, isn't it? It kind of slides under the door, that kind of environmental message, and people just see a lovely story and something that reminds them of their own holidays. And it's all very nostalgic, so very. I didn't know that there's no carbon.

Jon [01:21:04]:
Messaging, there's no kind of real messaging at all, apart from a big advert for, you know, and we can relate to the insight of, like, getting stuck in traffic and being late diversions, and then people on the train have a beautiful time and get there early.

Les [01:21:18]:
And to the extent that it does the sustainability carbon stuff, it doesn't do it explicitly, but there's, you know, quite a lot of clouds of choking smoke, isn't there?

Jon [01:21:28]:
It's implicit.

Les [01:21:29]:
It's implicit. Yeah. Very nicely done. Doesn't preach, as you say.

Jon [01:21:33]:
Yeah, no, so, brilliant. So it's lovely to show that we can make a difference and do some purpose in a funny way.

Les [01:21:39]:
And again, you know, it's the. The purpose is baked into the product, isn't it? You know, inherently. Yeah.

Jon [01:21:47]:
Back to your point before. Yeah. So as you look ahead to this year, because we're now in 2014, 2024, I should say 2024 as this goes.

Les [01:21:55]:
Oh, I'm still in 2014. Don't worry.

Jon [01:21:59]:
There's lots to be said for that. What do you think we're going to be talking about this time next year? There's a big case for AI. We talked about how that could change how we do research. There's a case for. Is this the year that sustainability finally, actually we do something about, I don't know, it feels like we've been talking about it for a while.

Sarah [01:22:15]:
I think that's right. And probably more focus on doing that through products, packaging, pricing, even more than promotion, which is where it's been focused, arguably too much and in the wrong way up to now. So I think a lot more marketing on those sorts of basics rather than some of the things that have been diverting people's attentions over the last year. So a lot of climbing back down the benefit ladder into products, maybe, and pricing and products and that kind of stuff.

Jon [01:22:44]:
It's a good point, because if this year or last year was the year of consistency, maybe this is the year we get the basics right, because there's been a lot of distraction in the last few years with global events. It'd be nice to think we get some, get on and deliver the return.

Sarah [01:22:57]:
From maybe the year where we don't talk about what's new. At the end of the year, it'll be much more about just getting. Getting the basics right.

Les [01:23:04]:
I don't know about what we'll be talking about, but the advertising industry, I'm sure, will be going up its own ass with about something irrelevant.

Jon [01:23:11]:
That's one.

Les [01:23:12]:
That's what they always do.

Jon [01:23:14]:
One consistent thing about the market.

Les [01:23:16]:
You know, as an industry. Industry, we love something shiny and new. I mean. I mean, we were all talking about blockchain, weren't we? NFts and NFts. How much of that is, you know, apart from, you know, actually, have you seen the McDonald's crypto bros. No. Ad it's a poster, says something like, you know, crypto bros, we're hiring because they're all going out of business or going to jail. But, yeah, I mean, we forget this, I think, is how often that as an industry, we become obsessed with things which turn out to be absolutely ephemeral.

Les [01:24:01]:
Do you remember the point back in the late nineties when we thought that Wap was going to be the big technology? It was going to change everything? Does anyone remember what Wap is anymore? It does still exist, but, well, it.

Jon [01:24:18]:
Brings, I think, full circle back to Sarah, your point at the beginning, which is you are not the customer. So if there's one thing we do this year, it's getting in touch with what our customers actually want to do rather than what we want to wang on about all year.

Sarah [01:24:29]:
Yeah, less wanging, less wanging. And with that, thank you, Lesnar, on.

Jon [01:24:35]:
That bombshell, oh, how can you say Sarah? Les, thank you very much. It's been a blast.

Les [01:24:44]:
Thank you, Orlando.

Jon [01:24:45]:
Thanks for listening and watching the uncensored CMO. Hope you love my conversation with Les Burnett and Sarah Carter. I certainly had loads of fun doing it. If you'd like to never miss episode again, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're watching this on YouTube, hit subscribe there, too. If you want to get in, contact me. I am over at X, or formerly known as Twitch Twitter at uncensored CMO, and you can find me on LinkedIn under my own name. John Evans, thanks for listening and watching.

Jon [01:25:10]:
I'll see you next time.