Transcription
[Music] Hello and welcome back to the Performance Marketing Unlocked podcast. I'm your host, Joseph Arthur, PMW's multimedia editor. We've got a very exciting and special edition of the show for you today. This one was recorded on the ground at Retail Media Summit UK 2025 and I was fortunate enough to be joined by a true titan of the industry, one of Britain's most famous admen. Uh, and that was renowned behavioral scientist and behavioral economics expert Rory Sutherland, also known for his work as an ad executive at Ogilvy and his new Mad Masters program. Rory and I sat down and spoke about a lot of things, but it was primarily centered around why he doesn't love performance marketing as much as perhaps a lot of you listeners will. and and we dug into exactly why and and where the merit in the practice might sit and where perhaps some marketers and organizations are going wrong. So with all that said, time to sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of the Performance Marketing Unlocked podcast.
Rory Sutherland, hello and welcome to the Performance Marketing Unlocked podcast. Uh, we're recording here from on the ground at Retail Media Summit UK 2025. Your first time speaking here. uh, what brings you here today?
Um, uh, partly my connection uh with uh the summit uh through MadFest and the Mad Masters program. Uh, that was the initial introduction and partly just my enthusiasm for any effectively media innovation of any shape and kind because I think media, the whole digital media world is in danger of painting itself into a corner by all pursuing very, very narrow metrics which are, by the way, the same as everybody else is. And I think this is very, very nice if you're potentially uh, you know, Meta or Alphabet and it's probably not bad if you're Amazon either, whether it's in the interests of wider businesses to have so much of the value captured by the intermediary.
Now, you were on stage then for pretty much the last 90 minutes and we've just pulled you straight off and and sat you down with a microphone. I'm a little bit phased, but no, we appreciate it nonetheless. But one of the things that stood out to you in your discussions on stage was, >> me as a journalist primarily covering performance marketing. You sort of said that the lower funnel is not something to disregard. In fact, it's where you should begin.
So I have two contradictory, well, seemingly contradictory but actually consistent opinions uh, which is that the lower funnel is the place where you should focus first. Technically, I would say if I'm being very precise, repeat purchase is the thing to pursue first because if everybody buying your product doesn't buy it again, obviously there are things like pensions where this may not apply, but if people buying your product don't go back and buy it again, okay, then you've got a problem. The second place to focus after repeat purchase is the bottom of the funnel. Because if the bottom of your funnel is working suboptimally, everything you do further up is likewise made less effective because effectively all you're doing is is trying to push water towards a bottleneck. And so starting from the bottom of the funnel in your optimization activities and working upwards, it's the right place to go. You can also learn a lot in the bottom of the funnel because it's a fast feedback space. So you can learn things which have a bearing on uh, what you communicate higher up by experimenting creatively, although most people don't experiment really, really creatively at that moment close to the transaction. However, where I see a problem is people become so addicted to the metrical self-justification you find at the bottom of the funnel. They no longer have the appetite or the permission to move further up where obviously the metrics change and the proof becomes a bit more difficult.
Now, I was saying there because the the bottom of the funnel, it's fascinating because one, it was something where, you know, first time I've heard you talk about a performance marketing orientated behavior without sort of coming after it. I mean, I I wanted to quickly >> the first place to look is if you're doing something fundamentally wrong or you're missing something at that point.
We'll find, okay, you you can have a fantastic car brand, but if the dealers are [ __ ] right or there aren't any, okay, you got a problem. I mean, emphatically, that is a very, very good place to start and it's a very good place to learn because the feedback you get is faster, but equally, it shouldn't effectively end up with you being painted into a performance 's corner by the need for justification and of course, with the growing power of finance who basically have been taught, I think, by uh, you know, by Meta and by management consulting firms that effectively the value of advertising is principally what it obtains in terms of an incremental sale in a short time horizon and finance people are very comfortable with that because they have very short time horizons because they're basically panicking about the next quarter, right? Given the power now that finance now wield over marketing, what has happened is that we've either lost the argument or failed to make it. That a lot of valuable things are still valuable even though it's hard to quantify the precise value. Now, you know, sponsorship will be an obvious obvious example of that. Um, branded merch, you know, what's the ROI on an AO cuddly bear? And I've talked to John Roberts. He's the UK's largest buyer of branded bears. He freely admits that you can't put ROI on that, but he makes a judicious, subjective, and intuitive judgment that they're worth more than they cost. And I'm sorry, in a business which deals with human psychology, we have to be allowed to make those intuitive judgments. If you demand perfect proof for everything we do, we'll end up either doing too little, we'll only do the things we can prove, or we will only measure the things that are easy to measure and consequently grossly underestimate the value of something like fame, for instance.
But one of the big problems I think of the modern marketer that I've summarized as someone who came into the space going looking from performance marketing outwards is, I call it almost like marketers are caught being the public sector employee within a business or like the the middle management where >> well, it's seen as a cost.
Yes. There's also an idea >> cost to be minimized and it's therefore an efficiency to be optimized and it's turned into a distribution company. You know, it's viewed a bit like UPS. You know, we need to distribute a certain amount of messages. We need to grudgingly to acknowledge we need to do this. How can we actually do this, you know, as efficiently as possible or as cheaply as possible?
And there, well, the other thing is they're caught in this, there's an aversion to risk as well. And I think that's why creative orientated branding is maybe losing out to performance in the sense that >> people know that a very good creative idea could deliver really, really well, but it's inherently risky because it might cause a degree of uncertainty which might discombobulate your short-term finances.
To the CFO and the budget.
This is why my argument is marketing and R&D are exactly the same thing, or rather they're two sides of the same coin. Okay. There are two ways you can create value. You can either find out what you can, what find out what people want and work out a clever way to make it, or you can work out what you can make and find a clever way to make people want it. Okay? And the money you make is indistinguishable regardless of the direction of travel. And the Austrian school of economics understood this fundamentally. Business would be in a much healthier state if we'd been more Hayek and less Friedman, if you want me to get really nerdy about this. And so fundamentally, marketing and innovation involve a degree of uncertainty, but it is necessary. It's it, it's it's not an optional extra if you want your business to be capable of growth and adaptation. It's necessary that you embrace a degree of uncertainty for the simple reason there's no data about the future. Right? All big data comes from the same place, the past. The guy you need to read uh on this uh is uh Roger L. Martin, Canadian business writer who I think understands this absolutely completely and has been very successful working with Ford and P&G and lots of other people in a consulting capacity. But it's not widely understood by people who have a mechanistic efficiency model of a business, not an opportunity discovery model of a business.
I I think a marketer would agree with you, but they've got to then sell that idea of it's worthy of investing in marketing to the people that are setting the budget because I think one of the reasons this short-termism has come through is because people can feel relatively safe putting their budget to Meta, Alphabet, knowing it is going to perform to a degree that will get them from quarter to quarter, keeping the CFO off their back.
Jeff Bezos made a very useful distinction between one-way doors and two-way doors. There are a lot of things you can test and roll back very quickly if they don't work.
Okay. And yet we tend to demand the same level of rigor over a decision to test something the as we do now. If Amazon is building a 7 million square foot distribution warehouse in Nashville, right? That's a difficult decision to reverse. You need to do a hell of a lot of groundwork and you demand pretty high standards of proof. If they're trying out Amazon Prime for the first time, i.e. free delivery in exchange for an annual fee. Well, if they don't like what they see, they can just reverse it. And yet, we're applying the same standards of rigor and demands for perfect certainty to the one kind of decision that we do to the other, despite the fact they're completely different decisions.
Now, there's a great guy I knew who used to work for a performance marketing testing AB testing organization who found something very interesting. The more things people tested, the more variables people tested, uh, the more successful they were. Well, that's not surprising. Okay. But what did surprise him is it was actually a disproportionate effect. So people who are testing 10 variables were more than proportionately successful than the people who are testing four. And his theory was, which I think is probably true, but at least it at least it's partially true, is that the people who are testing loads and loads of things also tested things that were quite silly. Sometimes the very silly things work disproportionately well. And so if you only test things within that realm of expected outcome, you're not testing the really wacko things that are what actually delivers a breakthrough. And the thing I've noticed time and time again within large organizations, people threaten to resign as directors of Amazon if Jeff was to introduce Amazon Prime. One of the biggest ideas in retail in a hundred years and it was met with total hostility. Fortunately, Jeff ran the company and he overruled them. Maybe they did resign. They probably didn't. They never do. It's a [ __ ] hollow threat for the most part. Um, when Dyson made the vacuum cleaners transparent, everybody thought he was stupid. Nespresso only survived as a business within Nestle because they lied about their financial results for two years. Really big ideas require a lot of behavioral change in the consumer. Behavioral change is slow. Therefore, if you only measure the short-term payback of something, you will reject a lot of ideas for slow takeup. But the slow takeup of the idea may be evidence of its long-term significance because it's pretty okay.
I I I took this example with road building. Okay, if you build a fast road alongside an existing slow road, everybody moves from the slow road to the fast road because it's obvious they were going to Abingdon anyway. They'll take the dual carriageway rather than the the old A40, right?
It looks like you've done a brilliant thing, but what you haven't done is generate that many incremental journeys. In other words, people are just going where they would have gone anyway, but they're getting there a bit faster.
They're getting there a bit quicker.
If you built a road between um, what what would be a weird example, like I don't know, a direct road from Newport to Abingdon, okay? Or between two places which were previously really badly connected, initially because not that many people were making that journey to begin with, you get low takeup and then as happened with High Speed 1, I don't know if you're familiar, that the high-speed train in Kent, it was a total disaster for the first few years, the trains ran mostly empty and then bit by bit people who live worked in London moved to Faversham and people who lived in uh, Folkestone discovered they could go shopping for the day in London, it didn't take them that long and it was really convenient and now I on High Speed 1 this morning. It's [ __ ] rammed, right? But it takes more time. So the bigger the idea, the longer it takes to get the behavioral change necessary to adopt the idea. So I I would argue that Google Glass had a very, very good idea and they gave up on it too soon.
Too soon. Okay. But one of the problems with those ideas is that your Kent example perhaps all the people that worked on that initial launch uh were then fired because it was seen as a failure. The market is being market is being rewarded.
Look at the air fryer. An air fryer.
Yes. Yeah. I don't swear by the >> air fryer. Yeah. Exactly. Now the interesting thing about the air fryer is literally the adoption was a sigmoid curve. I mean, that's not a huge element of behavioral change, but it requires people to find space in their kitchens and get their head around the idea and so on. Initially, it was initially there were a group of us. I was, we were literally 1% of the population who these sort of, it was like the early Christian church, right? We were air fryer evangelists going door to door preaching the gospel of the air fryer. And then bit by bit by bit, you see this tipping point where suddenly it becomes less weird. More people know someone who has one. More of those conversations take place and then, you know, I I we will eventually then hit a sort of maximum penetration point because there are air fryer heretics and air fryer rejectors who just don't want an air fryer. Okay, but the point is that the adoption path is, it's called the Bass diffusion curve. It's not linear. And yet we've got a load of finance people who are thinking that what happens in year 1 is a is a linear predictor of what's going to happen in year two. And innovation and marketing, you know, the first Dove ad wasn't that successful. The first Heineken ad wasn't that successful.
So what can be done then to help these marketers? If you're sitting there out of ideas, how you've got to make that case and that argument, get a load of good examples to become fundamentally less aspurgic in the way the way it approaches and we also need a much more discussion about risk and uncertainty.
Well, and this is why the appeal of the family-run businesses in your presentation stood out.
Businesses are effectively optimized around humans. They're not optimized around spreadsheets. And I keep noticing this that everywhere you go, you know, I went I went into Fortnum's the other day. It's owned actually by the Canadian Western family um who also own Loblaws in Canada. It's family-owned. And I was like going, this is kind of weird because sometimes, you know, I don't something feels just a bit nicer. So, for example, some of the things in Fortnum's are less expensive than they could be. You know, you occasionally, you know, there's some things which are crazy expensive because it's Fortnum's, but not everything is. You you get the feeling that this is actually an exchange of value rather than an attempt to fleece me. And there's a lovely story about the economist John Kay who writes in the FT, professor at the London Business School. He went out to dinner with a friend at what had been their favorite restaurant for many years and he said, "There's something different." He said, "I'm getting I'm kind of getting the impression this place has been bought by private equity." And he bought, he actually got his phone out and they Googled it and sure enough, like four months earlier, it had been bought by and the portions were just a bit less generous and the service was just a bit more grudging and everything was just optimized not around the creation of emotional value in the human brain. It was optimized around the creation of theoretical value in the mind of some 27-year-old stock analyst at JP Morgan who's probably a [ __ ].
And I imagine his relationship with that restaurant then changed.
It's never quite the same.
Yeah. Yeah.
And you go around Texas, H-E-B, fantastic retailer, um, B&Q, um, but if you make a list of family businesses, you actually include, by the way, Ford in that almost because the Ford family retains some controlling stake. Uh, certainly true of Walmart's family business in the US. The German, the whole German middle is basically family-owned businesses. I think Aldi was p was family-owned. Um, I'm not sure that BMW isn't either. Okay. And you suddenly realize, hold on a second, these family-owned businesses, Tonk's Teacakes. Okay. Something about brands produced by family-owned businesses is just warmer and more resonant because it's less transactional and it's more relational. It's less short-term, it's more long-term.
Well, and they're willing, like you said, with Fortnum's to at times make concessions in what how much something might cost for the good of looking out.
Look, we made a reasonable profit on this. We're not, you know, we're now there are exceptions. So Costco would be an example of what is a publicly owned company which manages to resist the pressure to, for example, pay their staff less or to be shittier to their staff or to make more margin on goods. Costco drives some of its stockholders crazy because they refuse on many products there is zero margin. They get all the money from the membership fees and on any product they sell there is a maximum margin they're allowed to take. And this drives people insane because obviously, you know, I don't know if you're selling toner cartridges or whatever, you can, you know, you should notionally be really milking that. And they just argue that's not what makes us Costco. What makes us Costco is what makes us money. And they will also say we've got a winning formula here. Look at our results over the long term. Don't [ __ ] with it.
They've got a hyper awareness of why their brand is successful. Enterprise Rent-A-Car is, I think, which is family-owned, is the largest hirer of graduate employees in the United States, and they pay the people who manage the outlets incredibly well. And they, you know, and those companies can market and build relationships in a way that effectively the modern corporation effectively is amnesiac.
You're only as good as your last quarter. You know, everybody's only as important as what contribution they made in the immediate short term. And consequently, you then lose the appetite. Risk-takers or people who are actually entrepreneurial or opportunistic find the culture intolerable.
Yes. Well, this this is the point. That's why many of the modern marketers, they're sort of the middle management or the public sector employee within a business because they become inherently public. Public sector employee, of course, has one characteristic which is they're downside paranoid but upside uninterested because they can't, they could have the most brilliant idea in the world and all they'll get is a pat on the back.
But if they [ __ ] up in the tiniest little detail, it's, oh, I've lost my pension, right? And that is the worst possible calibration of risk and reward. But I would say my own employer is much better actually. You know, if you do something amazing, they grudgingly give you something. You know, if you [ __ ] up once, you know, it's curtains.
Well, this was >> that's not that's not Now, entrepreneurs do not have that risk-reward calibration. They they basically go, I think there's a 5% chance of success here, but if it does come off, I'll make a million quid. I'm perfectly content with the idea of failing.
Well, and this was almost you're saying the problem with the agency business model in some sense is that no matter how well an idea performs, you're paid by the hour. People. All these people who run agency holding companies deserve to be strung up and shot because they have continued to pursue against all the evidence and all sense a model of remuneration which is totally unconnected with value creation. Um, I mean, it's Marxist, right? Payment by the hour derives from the labor theory of value, which is straight back to Das Kapital. No capitalist organization should charge by the hour. You should charge by the value of the outcome.
Which I mean seems obvious, but
Which seems obvious. Okay. And yet management consultancies, law firms, to satisfy the needs of procurement, right? By and large have been forced to adopt this mode of remuneration which is utter [ __ ]. It's a perverse incentive. It means we and then the finance people start to think that what makes us money is what is what where we add value and they're almost diametrically happening in different places. It's totally [ __ ] moronic. I mean, it, you know, I mean, it's like charging a [ __ ] but it's like paying an act, you know, the the value you add is own in any kind of meaningful brain work, the value you add is barely correlated or even maybe inversely correlated with the amount of time you spend. People have become very short-term in terms of the time it takes to get results now and I guess it's the product of the economy where they're just hamstrung on, we don't have the time to sit here and wait for results.
The people who founded the company who hosted this conference, okay, left Danone because they had an idea which made Danone millions and millions of pounds and they got a sort of four to five figure bonus in return.
Okay. Now this, you know, companies are basically full of [ __ ] because they are accounting for every single unit of cost while being incredibly parsimonious about the attribution of value.
Now, I'm just conscious of time here and I don't want to take up too much of yours. You've had a very busy morning. Uh, retail media, you sort of made the plea to ensure that retail media marketers and that the channel itself doesn't get painted into the corner of performance. Just talk about it branding elements.
Okay. Well, okay. In performance marketing, performance marketing is a completely um, uneven playing field where people who have high capability for attribution while selling a high margin discretionary purchase >> can justify enormous ad spend. Yeah. Whereas if you're Unilever and P&G, you have a relatively low margin product which is sold through an intermediary which isn't bought immediately on impulse and which is also um, very hard to track back a sale to an individual investment. Now, I've asked various people, do you ever see any ads for P&G or Unilever products online? Probably not. Do you? Very occasionally, if I go to the website, which is retail [ __ ] advertising, right? Now, what's happened here is that ASOS will always be able to outbid Unilever for my eyeball because they're a higher margin, direct selling, high attribution um, uh, uh, impulse purchase. And Unilever is the opposite of all those things. And consequently um, the reason I think um, retail media is so important is partly because it gives a space for advertisers who I think are being ill-served by performance, conventional performance marketing.
It breaks away from the body blue of it all that you were talking about on LinkedIn.
Bonnie Blue, which is all about the numbers. Yeah. Yeah. Never mind the quality of the relationship, just maximize the numbers. Bonnie Blue would have a fantastic career in performance marketing. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Look how efficient this is. Fantastic, isn't it? Look at you. You're just having sex once a day as part of a meaningful relationship. What a [ __ ] loser. Right. I mean,
I'll refer everyone who's unfamiliar with that to your LinkedIn post. But yes, absolutely. Absolutely right. And so I think a lot of advertisers who are, let's face it, the biggest advertisers in the world, are being fundamentally, they're ending up with the dregs of inventory because they're always being outbid for the good stuff by people who have higher levels of attribution, higher margins. So I call this the Walford paradox. Um, which is because I had my daughters went to schools which separate schools which demanded they wore black tights as part of their uniform and they kept laddering. Okay. And a friend of my wife said, "Look, actually, um, buy them really expensive tights because although they're bonkers expensive, they do actually last longer." So, I went to, I think it was the Walford website or something, and bought two pairs of black tights, which did actually last a hell of a lot longer. Partly, I think, because they took better care of them, but that's another matter. And then I noticed I didn't get advertising for anything else for about a month. Now, you think about it, the margin is probably 90%. I'm buying direct, not through a retailer, which makes me disproportionately expensive, uh, valuable. It's an impulse purchase, so it pays to advertise to me more regularly. Okay? My purchase isn't tied into any other activity like a visit to a supermarket or something of that kind. And so, it suddenly occurred to me that they could profitably spend, you know, assuming I was going to order two more pairs, like £27 on attracting my attention as an individual. And I was also an outlier. So they would concentrate their budget disproportionately on people who'd bought before in this particular channel.
I suddenly realized if the advertising ecosystem is to be regarded as macro-efficient as opposed to micro-efficient, it should be roughly speaking representative of where the contents of my wallet go.
Right. It shouldn't be disproportionately dominated by a few anomalous purchases I've made. Now, obviously, there's going to be more advertising for luxury goods and high margin products than there is for you. We we all get that, right? But nonetheless, I should see some ads for dishwasher tablets alongside the ads for tights. But I don't. And my argument is that one of the great things about retail advertising is you've actually got a space that ASOS doesn't want >> but Unilever does >> and it's got both elements in a completely relevant setting where it's actually doing double duty.
Because it's saying, "Ooh, that's nice. I forgot to buy that last time." That's the performance marketing aspect of it. But it's also, particularly if it's attractive and someone puts a bit of effort into the creative for a [ __ ] change rather than just getting it written by the guy at the media desk, seems to be what's happening at the moment.
It will start rewarding that behavior though as it goes on. The better creative will perform better in the across retail media channels. So there's at least more bandwidth for successful creativity to be commensurately rewarded.
Absolutely right. And actually the importance of looking good is probably better appreciated, to be honest. Um, uh, but also, you know, there is the opportunity by the way to produce bespoke creative for that particular channel. I didn't get into this on stage because I hadn't got time, but you know, there are partic, you know, well, I'll tell you a lovely story about retail media. Do you want to go a story?
Yeah, absolutely. You know the "Got Milk?" campaign,
The classic.
Which was a big ad campaign in the US and a few other, it was the California Milk Marketing Board, I think, which did it and a few other milk marketing boards, I don't know, the Wisconsin Cheese Head Marketing Board or whatever, decided they buy the same campaign to run in their own territories and basically it didn't work nearly as well and the reason is they'd bought the ad campaign, but they hadn't bought the point of sale. If you optimize the top of the funnel but don't actually carry through to the bottom, it's like the advertising equivalent of coitus interruptus, right? You do all the hard work up front, but you, you know, you never actually consummate any of this. Okay.
And what was interesting about that is several people told me that that they said that um, when you, it was still effective. It wasn't irrelevant, but when you didn't carry it through to the trolley messaging and the, you know, the retail, the actual, the communications happening closer to the point of purchase, the efficacy of that campaign was significantly reduced. Now, I am conscious of time or we usually conclude the podcast with the "resell me a pen" challenge where someone's given 60 seconds to resell an outdated product or service. Got it. I thought this would be better served instead of springing that on you for you to bring.
You you do know the lovely story, do you? There was a there was a copy test for John Thompson and you put two quarters on the table and you had to sell someone the one on the left. You see, yes, otherwise identical in value. And of course, the winning entry was always, you take the quarter on the left, you put it in the handbag of Marilyn Monroe, who's particularly alive at the time because otherwise it'd be a bit gruesome, and then you say, this is a genuine quarter as owned by Marilyn Monroe. And of course, it has emotional value, intangible value alongside its intrinsic value.
I knew we were going to get something good just picking this up.
Yeah, there you go. But so so with the pen, that's Jordan Belfort. >> It's it's the Jordan Belfort Wolf of Wall Street sort of exchange there. But what I was going to get into was I
That was a proper business. I would love to have worked there. I had a proper work culture, you know, compared to the modern the advertising agency. Welcome. It was lovely. I I also, I mean, working in a modern business, you mentioned that everybody in modern capitalism, I call this Soviet-style capitalism, where everybody in modern commercial business feels like they're working in the public sector.
Yeah.
And um, yeah, I have to confess, you know, I found myself really enjoying watching Narcos because you never get Pablo Escobar going, "Let me just clear this with HR." The HR. Never get that. And you, you kind of go, okay, I think that I've got some ethical problems with the Medellín cartel. It does look mercifully short of tedious bureaucracy, you know. Oh, um, hold on. You need to input that into Workday, Pablo. [ __ ] off. You know, right?
Um, yeah. The final thing I want to finish on was your love for the frozen paratha. This is something I've come across.
Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. Have you discovered it?
So, this is something that I was completely put on to by listening to you. I think it was Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson where you, where I was first exposed to it. It's a brilliant product and maybe explain for the listeners why it's so brilliant.
So, and we can finish on this.
It is a beautiful thing in and of itself and it's bread that's like soda bread. I What the [ __ ] is all this sourdough [ __ ] about? It's all right. Right. Sour.
Oh, I'm a sourdough lover. Sorry, it's part of my bread repertoire. Right. You know, sometimes I'm grateful that I have the option for, but every single goddamn bakery is producing nothing else. It buggers your teeth, right? It's not that flavorsome compared to a paratha. Okay.
And it's not as good as soda bread. I'm Welsh, so the the Celts still have. So you actually, it survives in Australia as well, I think. Soda bread, doesn't it?
Yes. Weirdly. Yeah. You got a large Celtic um um diaspora. We do indeed. Yeah. The fascinating thing is we were, I was having a conversation with a P&G guy about this. The crumpet is an amazing thing, but even better is the teacake, right? If you think of the teacake, you can put butter on it. You wouldn't put anything else on it. It's it's in and of itself. It's perfect. Teacake is one of the finest bloody things you can have because it's impossible to embellish it. And the paratha is a bit like that. You can put a little bit of stuff on top, but it's it's in and of itself almost perfect, like a teacake. Crumpets are a bit like that, but you can pimp a crumpet. Um, but the frozen paratha, I discovered by accident, and I can't remember how. I think it was just an accidental Ocado discovery. So, it's bread you can freeze because obviously it's frozen. You take it out of the freezer, bang it in a pan with a little bit of oil, about a minute either side, and you have a perfect goddamn paratha. And it's, keep it keeps in the freezer. And it was one of those things which was just an epiphany to me because there is no reason why anybody on the planet shouldn't have at least 10 frozen parathas if they've got a freezer because why wouldn't you? You know, it's got infinite shelf life, all the efficiencies of frozen food, low risk of food waste, and in one minute you have perfect warm fresh bread which is nicer than any other apart from soda bread, I would argue, and maybe the teacake, which is, you know, it's like the apotheosis of a perfect piece of flatbread. Uh, so you, you just can't beat it. It's absolutely fantastic.
Revolutionary products everyone needs.
What was your experience? Same thing was.
Well, I I did enjoy it. It was one that I was, I was less familiar with the paratha to begin my my first experience of it all. Uh, but it lived up to the hype because it was something that I'd otherwise seen out at restaurants as a bit more of a sort of high-end bread.
Or at least that's how I'd seen it advertised.
But the way it flakes makes it absolutely astonishing.
Well, and just the fact that it's frozen food that's not sort of rubbish once you heat it up. Actually, we need to revive frozen food because it's a bit of a brand tragedy or category tragedy because what happened in Britain is in many ways freezing food is the best way to preserve food. Okay. What happened in Britain is that Marks and Spencer tended to do fresh ready meals. And because frozen food was cheaper, frozen food because it was not not because it's worse intrinsically, but because it's less expensive to transport, there's vastly less waste. You don't have to operate a whole chilled supply chain around.
All good things. Because it was cheaper, it was therefore effectively slightly um, uh, not not demonized, that's too strong a word, but it was it, it was basically it ended up being perceived as downmarket. It was it was effectively just devalued because it's cheaper, therefore it's probably not as good. And Marks and Spencer did fresh ready meals which are expensive and those in the UK became the gold standard. And so fresh, uh, frozen food has been, uh, effectively undervalued in the UK as a form of preservation and as a perfectly sensible solution to your culinary needs. In France, there's a.
Your time poor as well.
If your time poor, it's wonderful. If you, you know, and if you don't like food waste, it's absolutely fantastic. In France, there's a thing called Picard, which you can buy on Ocado. So if you go to an Ocado and search Picard, it's like the French Marks and Spencer Simply Food and it's all frozen. So the high-end French trader chain is really a frozen food chain, like Iceland, and the French don't really have fresh ready meals to the same extent. So, so, so the kind of um, stigmatization of frozen food is tends to be a bit of a weirdly British phenomenon which is just the product of something that happened 30, 40 years ago which still has its effects kind of seen and felt today.
Well, there you go, marketers. That's that's your opportunity. That's the opportunity I think for a resurrection of our interest in high quality frozen foods. The other thing, by the way, as a bloke, okay, is frozen fruit is a lot of fruit. It's a lot cleaner to eat when frozen. Retains it. Ivy does this thing where you take a load of frozen berries, bang them on a plate, and you tip a warm white chocolate sauce over the top of the frozen berries, right?
You know, I mean, they know this occasionally. is off the menu and I actually asked for it and they and obviously they can go and make it because it's a piece of piss to make it, you know, I'm not being mean, it probably cost them £1.75, [ __ ] amazing. And actually frozen peas, I think are tastier frozen than they are when cooked. So I I think I think part of the part of the solution to the frozen food crisis might be you get into the alternative ice cream business. You see it not as a form of preservation, but you get people to enjoy eating things that are really. Oh, I see. I will. There's plenty to think about, Rory. I am going to have to stop you there. We've got miles over time, but there's so much there for our listeners to ponder. I appreciate you taking the time as well. It was.
It's always a pleasure, never a chore.
A true pleasure having you on, Rory. Thank you.
Nice to find Melbourne cuz you're like [ __ ] hen's teeth here. The half the [ __ ] population of Sydney is crawling over London. And you never meet anybody from Perth and you never meet anybody from Adelaide and you never meet anybody from goddamn Melbourne here. What's going on? Well, here you go. They they do say Melbourne is a little bit too similar to London, actually. And it's why and so what's the point? And I, as someone who went from Melbourne to London, I I couldn't disagree more. And I'm trying to people otherwise, but certainly there's a bit more of a dramatic change from a Sydney to a London. Maybe that's it.
I I think the London tourist board needs to do a Melbourne advertising campaign. Yeah.
I don't know if people want more of us hanging around, Rory. I'll be honest.
Always a pleasure. Thank you. And that concludes this episode of the Performance Marketing Unlocked podcast. A big thank you to my guest this week, Ogilvy's own Rory Sutherland, the very well-regarded behavioral scientist and behavioral economics expert. It was a pleasure to join him in conversation and well, really just sort of sit back and listen to the many metaphors and and anecdotes and interesting takes a lot of sort of different perspectives, I suppose, on performance marketing and retail media than perhaps you were used to. It was certainly very enlightening for me. So I I I hope you all learned some valuable lessons from that. And again, a big thank you to Rory, who's a very busy man, but we appreciate him committing so much time to joining me on the show. A big thank you, of course, to you, the loyal listener, for tuning in each and every week, as you do. We will be back in a week's time, of course, with another episode of the Performance Marketing Unlocked podcast. Don't forget, if you haven't already, please subscribe to the show on your podcast platform of choice and give us some love across on social media. We're over on YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, posting clips, highlights, full video episodes. You can also find many of those on the website, too. With all that said, have an amazing week, and you'll be hearing from me again very shortly. Bye for now.
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