Transcription
I don't think attention spans are actually dwindling. I think they're polarizing.
The most valuable role of marketing is not actually discovering the things that consumers say they want. The really invaluable role of [music] marketing is discovering those things which consumers really, really want, but don't know how to ask for.
I think [music] it's time we occasionally have the right to say, I think science is a bit [ __ ]. I'm going to start off with a with a big question. So, as attention spans are dwindling and brands are trying to gain attention, what tools have they got that are actually working?
I don't think attention spans are actually dwindling. I think they're polarizing. So, one of the best bits of advice I ever had from a futurologist, and there isn't much cuz futurologists do talk a lot of nonsense sometimes, but one fantastic bit of advice is there aren't trends, there are vectors. In other words, there's always a countertrend. And if you look at, for example, I mean, one of the weirdest things about television was that all programs were roughly the same length. Okay? If you If you like, what was it? What's anomalous is not what's happening now in terms of our attention, but the slightly weird artificial form of attention we had, you know, perhaps between, you know, 1955 and and, you know, 2005. You know, in the in the scheme of things, that might seem to be more of an anomaly than what we're seeing now.
And what we see is we see YouTube shorts and we see TikTok and info snacking. Um that's [clears throat] always existed in a form. And we also see actually people paying extraordinary attention for quite a long time to subjects that really interest them. And so, it's a little bit like, I suppose, collective ADHD in that ADHD is often misunderstood in that people with ADHD tend to also have extraordinary powers of concentration for very long periods of time if they can actually immerse themselves in something. So, you know, quite often these things are misunderstood.
However, in terms of creating content, and I'm a very, very big fan of influencer marketing of of of YouTube in general, by the way. I think I I think of all the things that that the tech world has given us that's an unalloyed good, YouTube is not far off. Uh you know, the thing for which, by the way, YouTube Premium is even better. Mhm. But of all the things you can be really grateful for without having to worry too much about the possible downsides, I found YouTube YouTube Premium utterly astounding.
>> He tells There's a wonderful episode which is called Why I Don't Own a Ferrari by Jay Leno. He says his whole collection contains no Ferraris, I think. And he won't buy them cuz he says, "I won't put up with all the [ __ ] you have to go through to buy one." Which is, kind of, they'll only send sell you one of the rarer ones if you've already bought sort of six run-of-the-mill for I don't know if there is a run-of-the-mill Ferrari, but you get what I mean. You know, in other words, it's a bit like those very high-end French handbags where you have to go in and splurge a load of money on random non-resellable stuff before they're prepared to actually let you into the inner sanctum where you can buy the crocodile Kelly bag which, theoretically, you can resell on eBay for whatever it is. And he says, "I don't want to play those games. You know, I just don't like it. I can't I don't I don't know what those I don't want to play those games."
And he contrasts this with his experience of buying I think it was the McLaren F1, but I might have got this wrong. It might have been another McLaren. And his experience was that he contacts McLaren and he says, "I'm thinking of buying this thing." That's fine. They're obviously very helpful. And you would kind of expect that. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, well, right. Yeah, yeah. Um and uh he says, "I was thinking, by the way, of getting the ceramic disc brakes." I think I've got this right. Brake discs, sorry. I I was thinking of getting the the the ceramic uh brake discs. And they said the guy said to him, um he thinks it's Mr. Leno, "Are you planning to track race this car to track this car or are you mostly going to be driving it on the road?" And he said, "Look, to be honest, I'll probably take it out on the track once, but most of the time I'll be driving around Los Angeles stuck in traffic." And the guy then he said, "Well, Mr. Leno, let me save you $25,000 straight off straight off the bat. Don't get the ceramic things because, actually, they take ages to warm up. They're actually a bit of a nightmare in everyday traffic. You know, you'll end up bumping into the car in front cuz they haven't warmed up adequately. Just go with the standard brakes."
And what's interesting is from that moment on, basically, the relationship was different because this person is not trying to maximize their commission in the short term, they're trying to maximize the value of the relationship over time by establishing trust. And talking to Dan Ariely, you probably know of him, the author of Predictably Irrational, very good book, behavioral economist at Duke. And he came in and, as an extraordinary thing, couple of weeks ago, he offered, effectively, to work as an intern in our behavioral science department for a week. Genuinely, probably the world's most overqualified intern. Okay? The There's a house near me in Sevenoaks where um the owner, a man called Spotswood, it was something like the third house in Britain to be wired for electricity. And he got Michael Faraday to supervise the wiring. Give us the >> [laughter] >> So, this was equivalent to that. You get the person who's practically invented everything to do with electricity and you're and he's actually supervising the wiring of the house. I was like, that's a fantastically overqualified case, you know. Chance I I would have thought that music would predominate in the car, but for a lot of For a lot of people, it does. But the the explosion of the podcast is something that genuinely surprises me. It feels like what you talked about and you talked about a trend emerging and the countertrend. The trend might be deliberate, so it might be a brand trying to start a trend to sell something, but the countertrend is the piece that's kind of unpredictable. The countertrend is the thing that often emerges more organically because it often the trend often meets a a thought-spoken need of the consumer.
I'd like lower prices and more choice. That's Tesco Extra, right? The countertrend is a farmer's market. Right Right? Now, if you think about it, no one would really describe a farmer's market as something they wanted. So, I'd like to buy direct from the manufacturer and pay higher prices. And I'd like it to be outdoors and I have to go to seven different stalls to buy what I need, paying separately every time. Okay? Right? All of that stuff in the farmer's market is, to some extent, seemingly illogical. But it seems to meet some weird unmet human need. Is it theater? Is it authenticity? Is it that, actually, we as humans enjoy personalized transactions and that, actually, the growth of Tesco Extra has left us feeling slightly bereft because, you know, we you know, we wanted that No, nobody's going to buy 100% of their calories in the farmer's market. But somehow it meets it it it occupies a market space which has been vacated by the trend. So, what tends to happen is there's a trend which is sort of logical, which would make sense in terms of consumer market research or stated preference. And the countertrend then satisfies unstated preference, as economists call it, which is the kind of preference which is generally unspoken, but is revealed through behavior. You know, you know, one of the one of the most interesting things would be to say, you know, that's what marketing is for.
Ultimately, marketing is there to The most valuable role of marketing is not actually discovering the things that consumers say they want. The really invaluable role of marketing is discovering those things which consumers really, really want, but don't know how to ask for. You know, there are literally occasions where you can tweak something to a tiny degree and just have a transformative effect in how people react to it emotionally.
Um there's a nice example which I can end on, actually. Which is someone I'm not sure whether they thought it was a good idea or whether they thought it was just marketing [ __ ] but they were at Changi Airport in Singapore. And their flight was listed it was leaving 30 minutes off to the schedule time. The flight was listed not as delayed, but as retimed. And there are two ways of looking at this, which is one a load of marketing [ __ ] you're trying to escape the blame for a delay by referring to it as retimed. Okay? What a load of crap. And that's one interpretation. But I responded with a more benign interpretation, which is, "Hold on a second." Said, "You could look at that and say it's a very generous thing to do." Let me explain. Because 20% of the people waiting for that flight, on average, are [ __ ] scared of flying. A lot of people are. Either of you? No. There's a percentage of the population who genuinely are [ __ ] scared of flying. Okay? If you put delayed, retimed looks like it's a logistical thing. It's to do with schedules, push back dates, slot runway slots, whatever. We've made a conscious decision to actually reschedule this flight. Delayed is going to make that percent of scared people think, "Oh, they probably noticed one of the ailerons is missing or that the engine's going to catch fire." And then they'll go into a fear spiral of what else does this mean?
Cuz I imagine I'm I'm not a nervous flyer. Um >> [laughter] >> Terrible admission. And I have confessed this once before. In the early days, when you could actually download Sky programs from Sky Go to your laptop, when I used to fly, I used to just take all the things I'd recorded on the sky and watch them in the air on what was something like a 15-17 in Apple MacBook at the time. I used to sit on the plane. Came with this bloody great screen. I used to watch air crash investigations. [laughter] And when I tell my I realized after I'd done this a couple of times that it was probably insensitive. When I tell my wife and children, they say, "Dad, I cannot [ __ ] >> [laughter] >> So, there are a lot of people behind you who are [ __ ] scared of flying. And they're looking over my shoulder and seeing like footage of the wreckage strewn across a Japanese mountainside or, >> [laughter] >> you know, burning debris and whatever. Or the you know, or or the basically the the recreation of a plane flying upside down because Anyway, that was my terrible confession of total crass insensitivity, for which if anybody was on one of those flights, I really apologize. And it was astoundingly insensitive of me. But if you're frightened to fly, I imagine that every time it's delayed, you go into that mindset of imagine the worst. What's the worst that can happen? And you don't go, "Oh, well, they've probably rescheduled this because of a you know, change in departure slots or whatever."
Entrepreneurs wants to play a game which is like real life. Where it is how you respond to chance events that determine success. They don't want to play a reductionist game like chess, where the rules are all already written and where you know effectively what you know, in other words, what's a legitimate move at the beginning of a chess game. Also with chess, Okay, there's another reason why I don't play chess in chess. What happens if you play the most brilliant chess game of your life? You get one point. >> [laughter] >> Right? Okay? You get one point for a win. Right? Okay, it's Jeff Bezos made this point. He said in baseball you can only score four. In business you can score 100, 1,000. Mhm. If you're brilliant if you're an entrepreneur, poker's interesting cuz when you play the best poker hand of your life, you get to retire, right? It's major. Right? Chess game, you get one point. >> [snorts] >> Nobody Nobody who's interested in entrepreneurism is going to play a game where is going to play a game where you get one point for being a total genius, right? Yeah. What's the point?
So, then is the That's an interesting question. Is is the universal shared factor of being an entrepreneur just that decision-making is viewed differently? Uh the thing I always notice is that um entrepreneurs are effectively interested in Actually, they're very very happy to get lucky. They don't necessarily want to be right, they're just happy to get lucky. Uh I mean, you could write a whole book on effectively the essential role that entrepreneurs play in any business ecosystem. Um because it is effectively R&D. And they're more you know, they're more interested in outcome than they are in argument. The quality of the outcome is what matters. What I always notice about them uh is that if you go to someone in a large corporation and you point out an anomaly, it annoys them or they try and ignore it. If you go to an entrepreneur and you point out an anomaly, they get excited by it because they see it as an you know, arbitrage [laughter] opportunity or in an opportunity to game the system or you know, whatever. Um probably you know, property developers like that. They're always looking at you know, what's everybody else missed? They're not interested You see, if you're in a corporate environment, you want to know what everybody else knows so that you can demonstrate your rightness. If you're an entrepreneur, you want to know what nobody else knows so you can actually outplay the [ __ ].
Mhm. When richer people are paying for a car, they're paying for status to a degree or or what I call L'Orealism, which is because I'm worth it. And I'm not all status about showing off to other people. A lot of status about showing off to yourself. Mhm. Okay? You know, there's a certain thing we do which is not really because we're showing off to other people. It's kind of reinforcement of our own identity and self-worth by spending a bit more on things even if nobody else notices, you know? You know, that's the sort of Versace underpants school of Yeah. Oh, by the way, do you want the funniest story? I absolutely love this. Talking about underpants. It kills me. Okay. Which is one of the strangest problems of the rich, okay? >> [laughter] >> It's just >> [gasps] >> Calvin Klein's daughter complained at one point about the disadvantages of being Calvin Klein's daughter with a complaint that I have to admit would never have occurred to me, which is that when you're Calvin Klein's daughter, just at a high point in the sexual excitement when you're getting romantic with a man, you're confronted with your dad's own name in >> [laughter] >> giant letters. No, the rest of us have never had to put up with that, have we? I can't get over that. I always thought that was a brilliant brilliant observation. Mark Brunson. Exactly. [laughter] No, no. Um but um But it it it it's interesting that that um >> [laughter] >> Got me there. What a weird experience that must be. Completely bizarre.
But no, I mean, the the whole thing is, you know, I mean, the whole thing about why we buy what we buy and also what prompts us to buy it. Um To be honest, I think it's always a bit messy and there are always multiple reasons going on, you know, from one consumer to another cuz people are fundamentally different. But the you know, the violation of fairness is an interesting one. One thing that really annoys me personally, and I will say this to the rail industry repeatedly, okay? If you buy an advance ticket and you miss your train, okay? They make you buy a full fare ticket. I think they should allow you to put something from the advance ticket towards the full fare ticket.
There's always the danger that the content gets politicized. And my argument is that you only put the content up there if it is universally agreed to be true by you know, panel of experts. Fact I'll I'll I'll tell you a fact, okay? Which every This is why I always show the pace meter when I give a talk. Because my argument is once people see a pace meter, they understand speeds differently >> [clears throat] >> and therefore they're less likely to go at extreme speed. The speed awareness course, there's a story in the speed awareness course which everybody should know. As I get older, I more and more want advertising to perform a useful social function. When you're 25, it's just a fun place to work and you're happy to flog stuff. But the longer I spend in this game, the more I get interested in areas where bad decisions are made simply through lack of information. And when you're on the speed awareness course, they may have told you this story um which is that you have two cars that are parallel on a motorway. One of them's traveling at 70 mph, the other one's traveling at 100 mph. They come around a corner and simultaneously see that there's a tree right across the road. And they both brake at the same moment when they see the tree. The car that was traveling at 70 mph screeches to a halt half an inch from the tree, saving its occupant any energy. What speed is the car that was going at 100 mph doing when it hits the tree? And nearly everybody goes, "Well, it'll be 30 mph because if the other car decelerated by 70 mph No, the actual answer is 70 mph. Because don't forget your reaction time, you've covered a greater distance while you're reacting. And then braking distance is exponential. Now, when people know things like that, they tend to think of risk as being linear, okay? With speed, it's absolutely not. Now, that's not to say that speed is is the only dangerous thing. Speed isn't always dangerous, you know? Obviously, it's rapid deceleration that's dangerous. But nonetheless, I I think there are literally thousands of things which if the populace knew, and I you know, one of the things I would love is to start again a government in No, funnily enough, the very libertarian economist Deirdre McCloskey also argues that look, government must have loads and loads of data from things it buys on for example, what laptops are really reliable. You know? In other words, government procurement functions must have a load of data on you know, how to buy things. Deirdre, libertarian though she is, thinks that information should be put in the public domain because it's a useful um you know, it's a useful side effect of government. It enables informed decisions. And so, that's one of the things that interest me.
Now, one of the great things about our info diet changing is I'm not entirely sure that some of that content people wouldn't watch voluntarily. Now, trying trying to get that through IT ITV's entertainment division in 1975, you know, we want a program on this, would have been quite hard. >> [laughter] >> Um And we obviously never mention that cuz we've always got to accentuate the positive and pretend pretend the absence of negatives is not really a factor. >> [laughter] >> And so, I think a lot of the time people talk nonsense about why they do the things they do. And I think you know, as I said, McDonald's is I've often said McDonald's is the most successful restaurant in the world, not cuz it's really really good, but because it's incredibly good at not being bad.
And we had this discussion just at lunch just now, which is and I I love what I call kind of anthropological detective work, which is what explains the popularity of Nando's, you know, the extraordinary success of Nando's. And one part of it probably is if you think about it, there's not there's very little there to dislike. And if you're a party of six, basically everybody's happy, aren't they? Right? So, the spicy people can have something spicy, the bland people can have something bland. There's a fabulous practice Have you heard this practice at Nando's where people who take girls out for a date ask the person to make them a mild chicken, but to put the flag in for the super spicy chicken. >> Wow. Show they're a real man. It's really funny because Now, I may be getting this wrong. I'm not I'm the last person to put myself forward as an expert in dating psychology, but there is that very peculiar male belief that women will be really attracted to men by their ability So, that that is undoubtedly men admire other men for their ability to eat spicy food, don't they? I mean, it is, you know, but the assumption this translates to the opposite [laughter] sex, which is I didn't really like him much, but when HE ORDERED THE OH, THAT WAS IT. YOU KNOW, YOU'VE PULLED, you know. >> [laughter] >> I mean, maybe that happens. I don't know, but it seems particularly implausible, you know. I don't know. It's his ability to handle a chicken vindaloo. That's when I knew he was the one. [laughter] Oh, he's a keeper, you know. Okay. But but but I find I find this sort of psychology of let's Cuz there's always a rational explanation, which is kind of half true, but it's you know, it's good value for money, you know, people like chicken, all of which is kind of true, right? But I always think getting to the bottom of it, what's the real you know, if we could find out what that real magic formula is. And maybe part of it is that no group of people has a Nando's hater in it. Knew this. >> [laughter] >> And all I'm saying is I think everybody was so frightened of putting their neck out and going what if. But evidence-based just bollocks, right? This is Roger L. Martin, my personal guru in Svelen Galli in the business world, so don't listen to me. [ __ ] waste of time. Go and read the books written by Roger L. Martin. He was the dean of the Rotman Business School in Toronto, okay? Go and read his medium posts. He's I think the best, you know, strategy thinker. He's the heir to Peter Drucker, basically. And he says this whole evidence-based thing is a ridiculous barrier, because there's no evidence about the future. What was complicated about the bloody coronavirus was novel. It was novel, okay? It wasn't the same as other coronaviruses. Therefore, the evidence you had about past coronaviruses may or may not have had any bearing on the behavior and transmission of this one.
But I you know, I think it's time I think it's time we occasionally have the right to say I think science is a bit [ __ ] >> [laughter] >> Okay, cuz we fetishize science completely. Oh, it's scientific. Oh, it looks scientific. There are fields in which that is entirely legitimate. I'm sure in cosmology, okay, the science is pretty legit. I'm absolutely sure that in elements of engineering, okay, it's totally legitimate to be scientific. This is what Roger Martin said in his Nudge Talk talk. Aristotle specifically said you can only use the scientific method in fields where things cannot be different from the way they are. So, tomorrow gravity's going to be the same as it was yesterday, or else we've got far bigger problems to worry about right? Okay? Right? You know, there are certain aspects where the rules don't change. There are enormous parts of life, and Aristotle would say the greater part of life involves decision-making in fields where things are different. And therefore, demanding that everything you do in a fat-tailed chaotic world necessarily meets the rules you have laid down for operating in a totally deterministic and predictable world is a complete misapplication of the scientific method.
I think, okay, cops would have been done a better job of solving the COVID problem than scientists would have done. Two things about Few things about cops. One, they know that they don't have all the information they need. Secondly, they accept the fact that some of the information they get is misinformation, because people are lying to them. Some of it will be luck. Some of it will be probably, you know, psychological branding. Some of it may be unbelievably trivial, by the way. And there's a guy I recommend here called Mark McCullough, who's like a a quick service restaurant hospitality marketing guru. And one of the things he points out is that a lot of cafes and restaurants fail to do the obvious, because they know that they sell salads or they sell premium burgers. But the person walking by, unless they're an avid reader of Time Out, doesn't know that. So, we had this interesting discussion in the office. We were talking about Oaxaca, and nobody knows what's a chimichanga, what's a what's a you know, what's a burrito, what's a People get muddled. And I suddenly said, "Actually, how many random punters in a London location, particularly if they're not even uh native, okay, will know that Oaxaca's a Mexican restaurant in the first place?" And Mark McCullough told me the story of a woman who walked for 9 years every day, walked 200 yards past a branch of Chopped to buy salad for lunch. Now >> [laughter] >> Now, she just assumed she saw Chopped, she assumed chopsticks. She thought, "I don't like spicy food. I'm going to ignore that." >> [laughter] >> Right? So, literally 9 years of her life, that was like the person who worked at Ogilvy when they were at Lancaster Bridge, who asked somebody, "What's the closest tube to the office?" And they said, "Embankment." And for the first 2 years at work, she traveled down to Charing Cross. And literally, after 2 years of this, she was walking back to Embankment, and someone says, "You go and live in you know, you live in Finsbury Park or wherever it was. Why the hell you Why don't you just walk to Charing Cross?" He goes, "Well, I change at Charing Cross every morning." And she she was literally changing trains. She'd done that 400 times before she realized that effectively they're they're more or less I think, you know, it's an extra 2 yards walk to get to Charing Cross versus the other one. Quite often, it might be something it might be a bottleneck, a mental bottleneck, where loads of people are walking past and they don't know what you do.
Now, I'm talking to Mark McCullough on a on a Zoom call with the guys who run Chaiwala. And they said, "We we we realized this, and we're going to put Indian street food cafe on the outside of all the restaurants." And Mark McCullough, this is where I go, "Okay." This is one of my you I am not worthy moments, okay? Cuz I don't think I would have thought of this in 100 years, okay? Mark McCullough, just without pausing, just says, "Put Indian street food and cafe." Cuz then, people who don't like Indian street food can still use you as a cafe. Interesting. And you know, you you now are solving two jobs to be done, rather than just one. Now, sometimes I suspect major businesses fall or succeed on the basis of things they've never even noticed.