Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Max Osborne on marketing's next wave

Should I do?

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The pod is called Bottleneck. And we'll let Max introduce himself and his story, etc., etc. But before we start, I'm going to pass it over to Rory to give us uh the lowdown or the summary of why we call this bottleneck and uh why we're all here.

Very simply, I think the concept of a bottleneck is really important. If you want to go really nerdy about it, there's Eli Goldrat's book, uh, The Goal, which is what happens when a physicist looks at business and they realize that business is, to use a sort of fancy and overused term, a highly complex and recursive system in which very small changes can have very large effects. And I think if we're not careful, we're getting into this weird uh habit in marketing where predictability is more important than outcome. And the point about looking for bottlenecks is that sometimes you fail, but when you succeed, the payoff is massive and disproportionate. Okay? And I think there's this I think there are two parts of marketing. I think there's what you might call mining the seam, which is you found gold and you look to maximize the efficiency with which you recover and refine it. But there's also finding the gold in the first place or looking for the mother lode. And I think a large part of marketing actually works because it's failure, failure, failure, outstanding success.

Okay? And we don't understand the maths of that kind of world which is probabilistic nearly as well as we understand the deterministic maths of efficient refining.

And I think as a consequence we're missing out on half the value of marketing which is bluntly put staying alive long enough to get really lucky. Now, I think if you know about bottlenecks and you acknowledge their existence, you'll spend more time looking for them and you'll get a bit better at finding them.

Yeah.

You'll improve your odds. But it's never going to be a perfect process. I think that's probably fair.

I love the theme of bottlenecks. It's great. There's a lot of bottlenecks that we can talk about.

Well, you're a physicist yourself, aren't you, by background if I'm right?

Close. Data scientist.

Data scientist. Okay.

Yeah. But the same theme as what you said of looking at a business from more of like an engineering lens and thinking about that. That's definitely that rings true to how I see things.

And it was very interesting because Eli Golrat starts off with the premise that this is a a topic for discussion in manufacturing. In other words, in any system, there is one part of the system which is acting as a constraint on the efficient flow of the rest of the system. Okay? It may by the way the location of that may change from time to time by the way but that if you intervene in the system it will be vastly more efficacious than intervening somewhere else. Okay. And then the concept was kind of taken not just to downstream production but up upstream demand creation the demand chain rather than just the supply chain. And they realized that the same thing applies. And I often ask people, someone asked me today, what do we do to increase footfall to a restaurant? Do we do offers? Do we do this? And I said, first of all, look at the negative, which is what's stopping people coming in.

Don't look for how we can make more people come in. Do that eventually, but the first place to look is are we missing something which is causing a load of people to walk past our location without wandering in because they're confused. They don't understand what we offer. They've got a they're laboring under a misapprehension or a misunderstanding. They don't trust us. They don't like us. What what's what's the negative you can remove before you start adding positives?

You know, I think this is going to be one of my favorite conversations, right? Because me and Max always geek out about this because we just believe that so many brands are scared to step into the gray. So for for a very long time, we're very comfortable with the idea in investing in television, in billboard marketing, etc., etc. Obviously, there is the theory that although there's a billboard doesn't mean that everybody's paying attention. Although there's a television uh like ad that's happening doesn't mean that people are actually like not hopping on their phone, right? There's all that conversation of course, but we're well and truly more comfortable with the idea of risk and not being obsessed with predictability, but it seems that ever since like performance/ like data came into the marketing mix, a lot of people almost like are using it as a permission to not take any risk at all. Right? It's almost like if 1 plus 1 doesn't equal two, then I will never do it at all. Right? And it's almost like stifling creativity and impact that's happening. Especially when you think about the fact that marketing is all about connecting with humans, right?

And it and from what I've learned about humans is they're not predictable.

The the very a lot of the times like purchasing decisions is actually not rational.

And it's you can never really quantify that or it seems in in the in an easy uh equation if you will. But

Max, I know that you're in this space. So without further ado, I'll let you tell your story and what's your bottleneck?

Oh man, I'm so pumped for this. Um, there's going to be so many bottlenecks that we can unpack and explore. And the reason why I'm really excited about this is to jam uh I mean Elf and I have jammed on this so many times. The art and science of creativity, of marketing, of measurement, of certainty, of the abundance of things that you have to find balance and synergies with. Um, but like this element of certainty that is something that our company this that provide and that has we've provided certainty on a topic uh that hasn't had much certainty before that people had a feeling of and there was energy around thinking this is going to be successful and this is worthwhile investing into and we gave them the tools to make that case um and having given them just being in the right place at the right time with that solution our company has skyrocketed uh and it's because we've helped other people skyrocket um I'll give more context to how that is and what timing that is, but there's definitely value to it and it's finding the way cuz I feel so aligned with the the thinking that you have. Um, so I'm Max uh founder of a company called this that we're the brand lift authority in the influence marketing space and we partner with the best agencies and uh influence marketing teams at brands to be able to grow brands. And it's actually a very timely moment uh to be having this conversation because I just read on my phone before I came in that for the first moment ever uh user generated content is receiving more ad revenue than professional media.

So there's actually I mean obviously influencer marketing is only part of that but it's a fairly large and significant part of it.

Yeah.

Um, and there's an element by the way to influencer marketing. I was at the A-Win conference a few weeks ago.

Yeah.

And what I suddenly realized which had never occurred to me before and it was a bit dumb of me is that digital marketing lost something which conventional advertising had.

Which was context. Okay, you appeared in a newspaper and your message was in some way subliminally linked to where it appeared.

And then digital advertising effectively just you know uh was contextfree communication which was just there randomly served with no contextual relevance.

Irony to that though cuz you you'd think with the digital space you can have a specific creative targeting a specific.

Person that's what I assume but it never happened.

Interesting, interesting. Why not? That's not quite true. It happens but people are more interested in being efficient than being effective.

And they're more interested in targeting random eyeballs than they are. And what's quite interesting is it always occurred to me that influencer marketing returns context. Okay, because the message is delivered by a person.

Yeah.

In other words, it's not just out there in the ether as a bit of inverted commas content. It actually is a content with a messenger.

Once again, which I think is important. And also going back and and Max 100% let you like land the intro, but I think like I said this is an exciting conversation because I I always like to use the analogy that the the the problem that current measurability has done has got everybody almost like pinning different forms or platforms or or or recipes of marketing against each other under one uh metric which is uh rorowass or or sales, right? It's kind of like having a band, right? And and what what I like to say is like when you have a band, you have different people playing different instruments, but they're all contributing to a great song, right? But what current performance marketing has got us doing is having like loads of lead singers yelling on top of each other to see who's the loudest, right? And because the louder you yell, the more money gets pumped into that channel, it almost like assumes that everything else doesn't work, right? But really how they work together is the the perfect symphony that you need to be able to grow a brand, right? And everything plays a key role towards growth. And uh I I'll there are multiple sides to all of this as well is like um you only have so much brain space to be able to take on information. And um whilst you want to have there are multiple people playing together, so that band thing 100% agree. Um, but there's a reason why people get behind uh like impressions as a metric or uh rorowaz as a metric is because it's it's something that now everyone understands. So no matter what team you're in, people get it. They see the value of it and so you can get a whole team running towards one direction. So having a north star I think is really really important.

But something that uh rorowaz has failed us with is it just feels so shortterm. Um I was um watching a panel not long ago where you had a CEO of an agency uh say that if you speak to the CMO of a brand more than once a quarter, you're doing a bad job. And the audience were thinking like what why why is that? Um and he then said um the CMO is looking to build the brand and they have hired you to deliver on performance and if you deliver the performance they then get the budgets to keep investing into brand and it's just this notion of brand building is this long-term thing that has no impact now and that performance marketing is this short-term thing that delivers results now which is just utter.

So you're using it to justify your existence in a way. I mean, it's just it's not working in harmony together whatsoever. We've um we've built technology and and tools that allow our clients to use brand measurement to optimize performance marketing. That's just like just debunks that concept completely.

Like trying to understand live like day by day which creatives are relevant to people, what things are pulling them in market, what's making them consider and doubling down on those things then to drive performance results. The fact that people can use brand measurement or what is considered brand measurement to optimize performance, I think it's just proven that this brand building is not a long-term thing that is actually very much live and needs to be working with performance at all times.

So tell me how your approach to data analysis and measurement differs then from.

That because in a sense there's also a problem with something like okay the problem is is that we need to impose the same criteria on everything in order to obtain comparison.

Yeah.

Okay.

With the net result that everything you do becomes more and more alike.

Yes.

Okay. So there are.

Benchmarks. I want to talk about that with you at some point.

There's a great paper by Roger L. Martin called benchmarking is for losers.

Yeah.

And you know if you okay a good analogy is our education system where in order to be fair you have to get everybody to take the same exams.

And then you justify who goes to university A and who goes to university B on the basis of the same criteria applied to everybody.

Yeah.

But a really successful society isn't about equality of opportunity. It's plurality of opportunity.

You want lots of ways. Now, we sort of acknowledge this, okay, in in schools with two subjects, sport and art, okay? Music would be a third. Sorry. It's accepted that you can be really really good at one of those three things. Okay? And different rules now apply to you. Okay? You may go to a different place to study. You may focus on a different thing. But when you think about it, I mean, there are lots and lots of complimentary and diverse talents people have. And the need to make the thing appear objective requires us to apply the same criteria to everything we do, which then fundamentally limits the plurality of what we do.

100%. I think it's huge unlock that I've had. I've moved a lot growing up, went to seven different countries, seven different school systems across Europe. Um I studied mathematics went down the data science route probably because math was the only language that didn't change.

Of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Um I mean I went to music school towards the last few years of my high school education and was close to doing art. So very much felt like a creative person.

Um, but math just came so easy. I was like that's that consistent thing. But I would unlock just bring back to that context you said there benchmarks were very different. Like I went to a grammar school in Bavaria which is like the most old-fashioned with the stand up and sing your teacher's name before a class would start and I went to um uh a school in in Scotland where you had complete freedom to do whatever you wanted like it was just completely different these different school systems. Uh also went to an international school in Amsterdam at one point. So like all different kinds of approaches of thinking. Um benchmarks something I want to touch on actually you asked how um how do we do that? So we brand lift and that's something I want to talk about as well is changing behaviors as like a bottleneck that is a real bottleneck to change behaviors. Um, and so the way in which we offer values by not necessarily changing behaviors we have come into something that already exists.

Uh, brand lift is a way to measure the effectiveness of marketing has been done for decades. Um, for those that in the audience that don't know brand lift, it's a survey based methodology. You survey two groups of people, one that have seen the campaign, one that have not seen the campaign. Um, and you very much hope that those that have seen the campaign are more aware, more like to feel something, more likely to consider buying, or like to recommend whatever the KPI is of that campaign.

And that measure translates into performance, does it?

Yes. Yes. Important.

Um, but they use the word effectiveness.

Which is a much better word by the way. Yeah.

Um, but then you have three different benchmarks when you do that at scale from that. So the first benchmark is the test versus the control.

Yes.

Those that haven't seen it that I'd say actually works very well because you're looking at you want to have apples to apples audiences and the only difference being that exposure.

Got it.

Um, another benchmark that you have is you could actually compare different points of exposure. So you could have now someone's seen this asset, someone seen this asset or someone has seen this asset on Tik Tok versus this person has seen it on YouTube and you can compare different.

Do you still see by the way the multi the cross media effects? Are they still because I know that was something earlier on which is if you have seen the same thing in three different contexts. It's disproportionately more potent in its effects than if you've seen it three times only in one place.

That uh is something that we try and tackle but it's we don't do it perfectly admittedly.

Got it.

Um, we can verify exposure of one point of exposure and then we can add on claimed exposure to other elements.

Of course. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah.

Um, and.

Because you only have hard data on the one thing they've seen or haven't seen. But then.

But this is powerful as actually testing out because there's this there was a big case when influencer marketing was growing. Uh, people wanted to say influence marketing is the most effective channel.

Um, but now we're seeing influence marketing actually a more of an approach, not a channel being used on billboards, on TV, on um, social, everywhere.

Got it.

Um, so then being able to show actually when do they work in unison quite well is something we've been able to tackle with that. And just to add to that, so when I was growing up uh and I studied maths, uh my my teacher uh used to tell me that it's almost like an ideology that mathematicians are lazy. They find the simplest way to a solution, right? And uh and then Gary Vee almost like coined that marketeers everything, right? Cuz once we know that something works, we're exhausted to hell, right? Until people just get bombarded with it, right? And that's effectively this whole thing about certainty is people wait for somebody to do something new which they debunk initially when somebody figures it out. Everybody does it but not following the steps. They just try to cut to the end by just like either overpaying for influencers and then it like blows up in this case.

Often they don't know what to copy.

Yeah. They don't know what to copy. They just see what's on surface level and they try to almost like copy the output. Right. And they don't understand the input or the reasoning why we even got here in the first place, right? But then really what you what you'll realize is that.

Going back to the whole thing about compliment and how these things all work together is that you almost need to create this flywheel right of things that are all interconnected that almost like drive almost like the same message but based on I always talk about the fact that there was a Dolly Parton meme right that she posted out. She said this is me on Tinder, this is me on Twitter, this is me on LinkedIn. And I was like, well, if one person is like four different people on different platforms, you can't have a one-sizefits-all approach, right? So, going back to the whole thing about the asset, how it where it hits you, when it hits you, the tone it hits you with, all of those contexts matter, right? So, it's almost like because we're so I like to call it the the modern drug in the marketing world is like I need to be able to impress my superiors that I've been able to put one pound in and get 10 pounds out. Everyone's even failing to iterate and experiment.

I don't, by the way, I don't mind those figures. What what's so depressing is that I put one pound in and got 127 out.

Uh, which is fine by the way. We should continue to do that. It's perfectly worthwhile.

But it's only, you know, the real value of marketing actually is a process of discovery.

Yeah.

And the process of there's part of marketing which is more akin to pharmaceutical research or Hollywood.

Yeah.

Or you need venture capital. Than it is to that simple business of grinding out you know incremental efficiency improvements and actually if we forget to invest in increasing our chances of getting lucky by things that might fail. Okay.

Generally those things by the way have manageable downside risk. It's not as if you know if you try a small scale advertisement and it doesn't work it's not as if you bet the farm on the thing in many cases you know the experimentation in marketing is relatively uncostly which is why amusingly okay uh advertisers advertising agencies were doing AB randomized control trials okay uh 70 years before they appeared in medicine.

And of course that's partly obviously because advertising people are cleverer than doctors but the other reason is the consequences are less severe of getting it wrong. Okay, it's very interesting that I mean literally in the Edwwardian era and before they were doing split run ads in newspapers with different copy market measuring the coupons, the coupon codes that came back. Okay. And it only really became established in Medson in the 1940s that there were earlier cases with of course the British sailors and the scurvy. That was a very very early uh randomized control trial they did, but weirdly it dropped out of use partly because in medicine it's maybe people thought it was unethical but the consequences were worse. Many cases in marketing you simply find out yes there's a cost to experimentation as opposed to replicating known success but the upside is often disproportionately high.

It's an interesting uh place to be in is like um a lot of the time I see our value in actually proving the brilliance of great marketers um giving them the tools to be able to get the budget to be able to execute on the work that they want to do um if anything the kind of work that we do is to really understand their strategy, their hypothesis, and to be able to find a way to design a study to prove out what they've done. And often these experiments flop massively. And when they do, you want to understand why. And the deeper you can go into the why of was it the creative, was it the targeting, was it the distribution, what element of that was, um, they can give them the tools to then go back out and take those learnings to constantly be improving. And he said it's like this constant evolution of discovery. Um, I mean this that bottleneck is a big theme is a constant evolution of discovery like we oh man there's there's so many other things I want to go into that.

Should I go into a bit of a story of.

Yeah, how it all started is always a great story. Yeah. Something I think you'll find quite funny and you tapped on the sort of science element is that um so at university I was known as the guy that can build websites and apps and um I I built a couple of those but there was one that I was working on for about 3 years. I was really harnessing on this so much. I um I built this food app that allowed you to uh automate your food shopping for you.

So in other words, you said this is what you I've got in the fridge. This is what you need. Because it saved a lot of money if I'm right if I remember rightly.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, tell me tell the full story. I'm intrigued.

Yeah.

So, um I was a competitive snowboarder. Uh I lived in the Alps 11 to 15 and I would go snowing every single day from November till April. By the time I was 15, I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland. And my first competition, I managed a podium as a 15-year-old kid. And I was a very nerdy kid and it was I got attention for the first time and felt very cool. So, I went all in on snowboarding. Um, by the time I was 19, I was competing internationally and um, as part of that, I was really taking training seriously. So, I was eating about three and a half thousand calories a day and working out every single day. But I was a student, didn't have any money.

Um, so my budget was about 3040 a week for food, but I found it impossible to spend less than £50 and sometimes we'd be spending £80 in food. And then um I came across this algorithm called the simplex method which made me fall in love with mathematics. Up until that point I chosen mathematics because it was the easiest thing for me to understand but now I actually fell in love with it. The simplex method is an algorithm that allows you to optimize or minimize or maximize an objective given constraints. And so the minimizing objective was to minimize cost.

Is it optimal or is it merely is it heristic? How does it.

It is optimal. It finds like uh it that has issues with it which I'll come to. So the simplex method has the assumption that numbers are real. So they're like you I'll get to that one one sec.

Um, so the it was the objective was to minimize cost. So uh try and spend less than £40 a week.

Got it.

I inputed my favorite meals. So it knew that was the data it was playing with and it knew the cost of all the ingredients. And I also said, I want to have at least this amount of calories, at least this amount of protein, all the different vitamins I wanted.

And it helped me find a way to have my favorite meals, meet my nutritional requirements, and only spend £13.57.

A week?

A week? Yes.

Bloody hell.

Yes. It was It was so cool. Except it had some flaws. It would say, "Buy 3.7 bananas."

Ah, got it.

Yeah. And so that was the first flaw of the simplex method is that you have to work with what are known as real numbers which means you got like infinite amount of decimals whereas I want to buy in integers which are like numbers of one two or three three bananas or four bananas. But the problem is when you round up or down it actually doesn't become optimal.

Of course.

Cuz if you've got something that has high uh values of salt or uh if you round up it's very expensive. It just messes up the whole plan. And so I became obsessed with finding a heristic way to optimize this in a way that actually makes sense for our life.

And I want it to work with different flavors, uh, different preferences, different life.

How do you how do you program for say variety? Because obviously there's always that famous one, isn't there? I think, which is if you want to maximize calorific intake for minimal cost, you basically just buy lard or something. So obviously obviously you have to have variety, complimentarity, etc. But you'd set all those parameters. Did it? Cuz the the danger would be it it just finds one optimal meal that you like and suggests you eat it all the time or something.

That's exactly what it did. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't optimize uh variety. That actually didn't come up. But you the way in which you do that is you just uh input that as uh a penalty inside the algorithm and so it penalize the outcome if you didn't offer variety. Then make sure you had variety.

Um, but what I had done I built this I mean uh this is going up. Yeah, the the other issue would be I'm I'm just being a real world pain in the ass here, but it would never suggest you bought say herbs or spices cuz they have minimal calorfific value, but they have a cost.

If that was required as part of a meal.

It would include that. Okay, fair enough.

And that's why it would actually that's why I optimized not for a meal basis, but for your weekly shopping so that it could then account for that.

Yeah.

Um.

Otherwise, yes. Really bland courageous. Yeah.

You can imagine just now how complex it becomes. Like when you take into account shelf life, when you take into account um time spent cooking, when you take into account elements.

Yes, it become was a it was an NP hard problem which is basically impossible to solve.

Um, and so that I then decided to do my post. I'd heard the same thing that if you go into a large Tesco or even actually a small Tesco.

And the answer is you want to optimize your utility given a set budget.

In terms of what combination you buy of the 30,000 SKUs in the store that someone told me I I think this is right that effectively it would require sort of the the world's largest supercomput from now until the end of the universe to actually optimize it because there was now some mathematician will now no doubt put in the comments that I'm talking complete bollocks. But I but the actual question of what you buy in a supermarket without using some sort of huristics, it's a little like the thing that technically there are 80,000 drinks you can have at Starbucks.

But probably 75,000 of them have never been ordered by anybody.

Tesco is actually uh a really good store to I use Tesco for this app.

Because they had a a public API you could pull into and pull from. A.

So I was able to get the data on the on all their um offerings, all their different products they were selling. Um, the price of those they had limited nutrition um information as well on side that. So some had to get manly and plug in. Something I tried to push with them at one of the preferences that people asked me for was the environmental impact. That became its whole thing for about a month of trying to build this thing.

Because just trying to track the environmental impact of different uh produce is just impossible.

Um, but anyhow to the story of bottleneck is I eventually launched this app in 2017 after building it for about three years and I put my life into this and I've been using it myself and like and I did a whole postgrad to understand the the best way to run an algorithm to do this the best way and no one used it.

There was just no pickup of it. No.

It was it's like it's such a behavior change to be able to use an app like this to be able to change the way you do your shopping.

Um.

There's an interesting problem there, by the way, which is that I'd always assumed naively that the bigger the idea, the less marketing it required.

And then I suddenly realized if you've got a really big idea, it requires a lot of behavioral change.

And if you've got a lot of behavioral change, it requires a lot of marketing.

Exactly. This is why I thought you'd find this interesting. Um.

It's a brilliant idea, by the I mean, logically, who wouldn't use something that basically saves you an appreciable amount of money a week while giving you a perfect diet?

The only audience that it would have potentially worked for that, you know, now that I've gone for it more, athletes.

Exactly.

Um.

Not the really rich ones, I guess, cuz Yeah. But but you could optimize for all kinds of things.

Um, cuz I was selling it to students and they were just like, "Well, we have a weekly shop that we do together." I was like, "Oh, I've not really thought about how we optimize that." When you've got different people, that becomes, "Oh, it's even more complex."

So, so my brother um obviously he was the first uh in our family to go away for for university. I stayed at home.

Yeah.

And one time I went to go visit him at that dorm and him and his um housemates will almost like go shopping in packs.

They'll all say, "Okay, we've got £15 each. Let's pick out some stuff that's going to like be for the household." And every time they took something, they'll reduce it from the calculator that they had. Right.

And the advantage of doing that, of course, is you can buy something like a bottle of vodka between four fits within your budget. A bottle of vodka yourself doesn't.

Exactly. So, so they were able to all like have the countdown and then check in and see, okay, so where are we at? How much have we got?

And they'll like collectively shop that way. So, it's almost like.

There's a use case in that where that could have been useful.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, it's almost like humans.

That would have solved your banana problem. You just have to have the same, you know, because 3/4 of a banana that's actually.

Quite hard to order 3.6 bananas from Tesco, though.

It is.

So, how do you go from that to like this that?

Yes. Okay. So, building something like this, I built up a bit of a name on around the university by those that were more entrepreneurial as someone that could build apps.

Um.

I thought you were going to say like banana boy.

Not quite. By the way, do you think it could succeed now? Was it just ahead of its time?

Um.

I mean, when there's a cost of living crisis, okay, the government could actually issue.

I would love if anyone out there wants to build this, I'm going to champion you all the way and give you all the tools that I built to try and amplify that cuz I think yeah, it'd be super valuable.

Good work. Well.

Because I mean what you know one of you know one perfectly good role of government which not even libertarians can object to you know is just providing people with better information.

Do do you know where the simplex method gets used and there's this kind of thinking it's it gets used in pet food.

How can we have uh all the nutrition that pets need.

Got it.

In the cheapest way possible at scale and they just get all the ingredients. Is those algorithms get used in this.

Actually I suspect it works better for dogs than for cats cuz cats are much more finicky about what they dog dogs will basically eat anything.

Um.

They would use the same kind of techniques they would have used them at war as well. How can we make sure that our our resources.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean if if you're looking at from that scale like the government should be able to think about these kinds of things but then that might go against other initiatives but how this landed to this then uh and the irony uh of all of this was Then um my co-founder who then approached me with this idea of this that so I didn't actually have the idea of of this that. He said I'd love to have an app like a Tinder swiping environment where you swipe left for this and you swipe right for that. Um, something where you could ask questions to the public and they can help you choose which shoes to buy u which uh boxing team's going to win a boxing event, which pub we should go to with our friends this evening. And I was like.

So it started as a B TOC idea with an interface basically.

Yes.

Interesting.

And it really like I didn't necessarily take it all that seriously at that time either. I I was still thinking about this uh food app.

Um, but.

It's actually not a bad actually in fairness to the guy, it's not a bad idea because you have those coordination problems. Now, you might argue it doesn't sufficiently capture the extremity of preference cuz it's only basically it it was measuring acceptable not acceptable was it.

Or two comparisons.

Or got it. Got it. Okay.

Well, there's a lot of really fun stuff you can do with uh with that. But the the story here is that.

With me. They say exact same story as that.

Um.

We got hundreds of users within the first few days and in the first few months thousands of users and within the first few years we had hundreds of thousands of people using it every single day.

The interesting thing about that though is it seems like when you give people a lot of information to ultimately control their life, they don't want to use it. But when you restrict them to this or that.

Yeah.

One or the other, they find it a lot more easier to actually like adopt.

It was just a bit of fun really. It was like a little gimmicky thing and then just went viral.

It's a very interesting question, isn't it? Which is how many alternatives you offer, which is one of the things I I someone was talking about AI and they suggested that the role of AI was to say effectively, I need a toaster. This is the toaster you want.

And my hunch was and I said this, I don't think that'll work. I think you need to present them with two, three or four, maybe five toasters and say these are the relative merits of each. Now make a decision cuz I don't think we find it easy to.

Series of binary comparisons there is where it's super helpful.

Interesting. That's really interesting. Yeah.

So like the same way like you rank chess players.

There's always one against another. Um, there's this uh approach to measuring that called eer rating but ultimately you can have like A versus B, B versus C, D versus E.

Got it.

Um, and they they.

I would assume transitive preferences, wouldn't it? I think we Yeah.

In market research they would call this conjoint analysis.

Um, and and they use that to understand actually what drives preference. Is it the price? Is it the color? Is it what is that that component?

Um, you probably come across a really interesting company in Ireland. Epic Conjoint, have you come across those guys?

No. No. No. They do it at speed, which is really, really interesting because the problem it always had was that it was unbelievably tediously slow.

And fortunately, you can now use it at, you know, they've somehow accelerated process.

I'll give you a funny story as to um a use case of conjoint that we've that we first started with. Um, but the the story of this that actually was a very much a series of discoveries, a series of bottlenecks. So we started off as this social media platform. Um, and it it because it picked up so quick, we thought we were going to be the next big social media platform. We thought we're going to be the next big Instagram or whatever it might be. Um, but Instagram actually launched Instagram polls in 2017 and that really popularized around 2019. So whilst we had picked up this user base, we came to realize quite quickly that we were just a feature and that that wasn't really a sustainable revenue or sustainable future for our company.

Do you know what this reminds me of? So so sorry to to to butt in.

Go for it.

But it I remember the early days of like crypto, right, and blockchain, right? And how.

We had a crypto period as well at one point.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I think we all had a period. Remember we're going to look back in history and realize that people were spending hundreds of grand on like ape photos. Fascinating learning crypto. Let's bring it back to that. Like it sounds crazy saying that out loud, but people were literally wearing it as a badge of honor, right? That they spent a 100,000 and they even changed that profile picture to almost like uh it's like a trophy, right? It went into this crazy time. But I go back to the point that what happened with blockchain is that the people that uh were the early adopters were so convinced that people will love it because it gave people choice and control. But really going back to the point that people don't actually want full control. They want some form of like I get to pick from a limited amount from a curated amount of options, right? And then when you go back to the whole idea of um.

Uh, what do they call it.

Uh, Instagram launching polls, it's kind of like what's happening right now with AI and every time somebody sets up a business that is AIdriven, Chat GPT evolves and kind of like dwarfs those businesses. And that's going to continue to happen, right? They're just going to see what what businesses are getting funded with AI and just going to evolve that machine to be able to like swallow that hole, right? So, I think Sam Alman says something that a lot of people are making bets or building businesses based on their understanding of AI today.

Right. Yes.

Not what it's going to be, right? Which is why as you're almost like saying that story.

Um, uh, uh, you can almost see the eventuality of what's currently happening right now, right? It's just a different thing with a different beast that's almost got just like swallowing all these companies home. Right. But back to your point.

That thing that Johnny Ives developing which you wear around your neck interests me because it's basically an interface bet. In other words, and by the way, I think it's a plausible one. In other words, you know, will.

They'll just be talking with it.

So the idea is you wear it around your neck. It uses the processing power of your phone. So it enables it to be very small. One thing that I think needs to terrify every existing business is that they're never conscious of the extent to which their success is dependent on habituation of the consumer to their interface. Okay? Right?

And you know Amazon for example, okay, I think they developed Alexa as a kind of defensive moat in case voice became the mode of shopping. Okay. Uh, they may may have just done it too early that actually what I I suspect what will happen is the combination will be a mixture of an AI voiced driven thing that we mutter to these things uh, you know, can you bring up my rail ticket please and then it appears on your phone but that when you change the interface you change the context and when you change the context you change the behavior.

And when you change the interface for everybody everybody's behavior changes.

It's not like normal behavioral change you know, it's a bit like the Argos catalog. Okay. Which is the AR Argos catalog succeeded because you could actually decide what toaster to buy before you got to a shop.

Yeah.

Okay. It changed the place and and frame within which you chose. Okay. EasyJet did the same. You didn't go to a travel agent anymore. You phoned up. But in the early days, EasyJet planes had the number 0800 whatever it was down the side because there although they started I think in the early 90s there wasn't a web for the first few years of EasyJet's existence. But what was weird about it was you phone the airline you didn't go into a travel agent.

Yeah.

And that's kind of interesting because where you get you know if you're Google you have or some extent Amazon you have to be genuinely terrified in the sense that what happens if the behavior that's been the you know the default norm for ages you know suddenly basically shifts that in other words people are making the choice in a different setting.

With augmented reality virtual reality that little necklace piece. Hey, but they're also talking about I saw obviously um Apple just made the announcement with the like liquid screen and all that conversation, right? And then somebody made an interesting um argument, right? Because a lot of people were talking about the fact that it was like lackluster like what is it happening? But the point that they were raising was it's almost like they're priming people for this analogy to come, right? That actually the view emulates what the the almost like the uh the the glasses like experience is going to be like. So once you get used to seeing like things off a flat screen to almost like seeing it in a more dynamic way, it actually primes you to be ready to actually see that through change behavior. Bring a change of behavior like a Trojan horse getting us used to that.

So So going back to Rory's question about whether it was too early, maybe they've identified that we've launched like our product, people are not ready for it because they're just not used to the screen experience. Let's just give them the exper the the the the screen experience on the platform that they understand and they know and then it's easier to make that next step which is super.

I wonder if you I wonder if blockchain and Bitcoin would have been more successful if they developed a what I call.

A skewomorphic interface? Where it just looks like a banking app.

Okay. Coinbase kind of did that, right? That's why people adopted it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I love the idea of skeworphism, which is the idea. It's the reason a digital camera had to click because if you press there's no reason it had to make a click, but if you press the button and nothing happened, people were weirded out. And it goes back, I mean, it goes back to uh Greek temple design where a lot of the carving of the stone was designed to look like the wood from which temples were originally made. Okay? And so classic examples of skuomorphism would be dials on digital radios for example.

Like why toothpaste or stuff taste how they do.

No, it's it's the idea that you build in a kind of element from the previous technology.

Uh so the classic you know uh into the new technology to make it seem more familiar.

Yeah. Effectively. I mean this is ties when it bring to bottleneck. Um I want to give you this context to what brought this that here because I think the really interesting bottleneck that'll be interesting for us to unpack is how do we get this art and science to work better together when it comes to measuring brand investing into brand giving people the tools to expand stories of great brands. Um cuz you almost you don't want to change the way in which people do things all too much. like changing behavior is so difficult, but you also do because they need to catch up and evolve to new times.

So what is that journey and getting them through that?

Um cuz there's by the way there's an inherent problem which is if if we're exposed to ads, not the ads that are actually effective but ads that are accountable and attributable. Okay, it will create a gross distortion in the digital advertising marketplace cuz there's some things we buy on impulse. Okay, and those are obviously very highly attributable. I see an ad for something, you know, a hat on ASOS. I buy the hat on impulse, it gets delivered, wonderful. They can now make the case for advertising that hat a hell of a lot more.

Yeah.

But if it's an ad for um let's say a new dishwasher detergent. Okay. Now, okay. Theoretically, I suppose you could add to my aardo basket would be a theoretical way. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at that ad, remember it when I next get to the supermarket and buy it. If and one of my problems is that I never see any unilver or PNG ads online.

Okay. Now, they are the world's largest advertisers and I spend quite a lot of money on those products that they make. But the reason I never see them advertised online is not because the advertising wouldn't be valuable or effective. It's because it's not directly attributable because it's something I buy indirectly at a retailer at some distance and remove from seeing the stimulus.

Okay.

Yeah.

And consequently, we'll end up with a weird problem where a hat on ASOS will always outbid unilver for advertising. Not because the advertisement is inherently more valuable, but simply because it's easier to prove its efficaciousness.

Yeah.

Okay. Now,

So let's let's take a really high margin product, which could be a high lifetime value product like subscribing to something or just a high margin product. I gave the example, I think, on the last podcast of high-end women's hosery. Okay. You know, where the margins are probably 95%.

Okay.

Mhm. They can justify basically bidding a very very large amount for my eyeballs assuming I buy high-end women's hosery because the money they make from an incremental sale is enormous and they can entirely prove that the ad led to the sale. Okay. So, in a really efficient advertising ecosystem, the a now I'm, as I said, I'm always going to see more luxury goods advertising, more advertising for high-end products because, you know, there's more margin in them. Okay? And that's true in the real world of advertising. You know, there's a disproportionately high amount of advertising for jewelry or luxury holidays. But I do also see ads for washing powder.

All right? Which is good because in a perfect advertising environment, I'd see advertising roughly in proportion to where the contents of my wallet go.

But in the digital environment, if it's about attribution rather than about ultimate effectiveness, okay,

I'm going to actually be and I think that's exactly what we see in digital advertising. We see a very weird subset of the whole economy very heavily advertised.

Yeah. And another subset of the economy massively under advertised. I mean, I don't see I I actually love cars, okay?

But I hardly ever see any and you know, they're a reasonably high margin purchase, but I virtually never see any car advertising online. M

And so I don't have

A different play each each business model will have a different approach like what you had with Gym Shark that they fundamentally had a different business model.

That they really leaned into the community and built flywheels off the back of that but you could argue

Maybe there's a high margin within their products they could have gone down a similar play but they didn't.

And that flywheel is I mean

I can come on to it in a moment but um

Like I I don't think that this I think a lot of People in marketing think that we live in this personalization era where you have to have effective ads reaching specific people at the right time. I think that is done. I think we have moved into a community era and the quicker people move into that, understand that and work with that, the more they'll succeed and that's something that you had done within that example actually really well.

Yeah. Yeah. I always talk about the fact that and I think we talked about it in the last part that in a world when IQ becomes democratized and everybody has access to the same tools product quality for instance.

Like that is just like an extension of influence marketing at scale is the community speaking and championing a product.

And that is really really important and then brand can pick up on that. Yeah, I mean actually you know social influence in that way has always been a perfectly reasonable heruristic okay not just some I mean you could argue okay what is reliable information as distinct from information and it's someone with reputational skin in the game recommends something okay so if you're you know what's his name James Hoffman and coffee okay you cannot afford to write you could recommend something that was a nine rather than a 10 because you were paid to do so But under no circumstances can you afford to recommend something that's a six.

Okay. Then there's also, you know, the perfectly reasonable inference. A lot of people who are pretty similar to me.

Yeah.

Have arrived at this subjective consensus around something. Well, it's not perfect information. And by the way, sometimes I think you can get weird runaway effects where things just become fashionable because they're fashionable.

Yeah. You know, that's undoubtedly true in fashion, unsurprisingly. you know, things just arbitrarily become cool suddenly. But again, it's not a totally unreliable heristic, you know, for for making a purchase decision when there's imperfect information. It's particularly potent, of course, when a large part of the value of the product is its display value to other people.

I might continue on the story of how this that came about context and we so we we had the social media platform. it grew to a place. We then saw that influence uh sorry Instagram launch Instagram polls as we were just a feature thought okay what can we do with this at that same time so now 2019 um SAP had just acquired Qualrix for over a billion >> and we had picked up investors on this journey and so they were telling us to look at this we of course had built up this whole infrastructure around collecting survey data say oh is there something we could do with this could we become this gamified qualrix Um, and so we ran a couple of tests just to see whether that's worthwhile. So we had this bottleneck. We were like, "Okay, how can we discover what's the next thing?" We ran ads from Instagram that went to this that surveys, type from surveys, and survey monkey surveys. And we were able to collect 20 times more data than them. And this was never planned to be this like collect survey data at scale. It was an unconventional journey that led to this 10x like of magnitude better ways of collecting data.

Interesting. The obsession over gamifying the survey experience over 2 three years had led to us building an environment where people actually enjoyed answering the survey questions. It was apples to apples questions compared to those. So, okay, there's something here. What can we do with this? Um, and we used that narrative to say to our investors, there's an opportunity here. Could we get some more money? We'll build out a SAS infrastructure, try and compete with the likes of Qualric, Sermon Monkey. We'll see what we can do. Spent a year building this infrastructure. um and then again tried to start selling something but now there was no one to buy it. There was no clear use case. Our value prop was you can get 10 times more data with us than you can with anyone else. Oh but we like Survey Monkey or we like Qualrix. And so we then sold to events companies, marketing companies, um consultancy firms, you name it. One of our first examples was actually using this uh conduit analysis approach with uh a chicken wing festival and the theme was swiping your favorite chick to help them rank their best chicken wings which the owner of that chicken wing festival actually became one of our investors.

Which he loved and that's a hilarious uh story in that in itself. So in a sense what you'd done is you'd amplified the survey in the sense that everybody else was focused on the results but not on the user experience.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And actually funny enough in that journey we also had another learning. This was through a failure but the failure had a great learning.

Uh we we integrated with a cryptocurrency.

Cuz we thought that would be a play. Uh we were like we gamified the survey experience. We've got this whole community that love answering questions. Let's integrate current uh crypto in some way. And so the crypto was then used to reward people that answered questions that asked questions and that uh took care of the community. would report things if they were misbehaving and so forth. The usage spiked for about a week and then it dropped massively. Like the whole just it just died.

Um and the more we looked into that, we realized that people before were just intrinsically taking part in surveys, asking questions, having a good time.

Um and now they're doing it extrinsically for the sake of getting money.

That's so it become work. what had been a hobby became I mean I think there are a few behavioral science experiments in that which is that tasks for which you are paid become less enjoyable by dent of being paid to do it.

And and when we started entering into this market research world that was something that we had as a real confidence boost behind us which was the whole market research world is based off of this panel industry where you pay people to take part in surveys.

Um which which now we we do as well So, I can't [ __ ] on that all too much. Excuse me. Um, but we keep we've kept the gamified survey experience and that there are other things that you can do around that to

Um ultimately I guess reduce uh voter fatigue so when they go through that having a good time which shows up in the data that they're less biased, they're more likely to be uh um truthful when they're answering surveys in that style.

Um so we then went through a year of trying to figure out who can we sell this to, who can we add value to and this is when we came into the influencer marketing space.

Got it. So it was uh winter 2021 2022 an influence marketing agency asked us if we could do brand lift for them. Um I said sure what is brand lift and like the irony of now I'm seen as like a global leader when it comes to brand lift uh that I didn't even know what it was four years ago.

Um or not even four like three years ago.

Um and uh they explain the methodology uh exposed group unexposed group. you hope those that have seen the content more favorable.

They knew that we were collecting data via sending ads out on social.

Uh so I asked them, could you send us those audiences that have been exposed to the the the content out there?

And um, we ran a brand study for them.

What's what's the time time delay between exposure and

And unexposed?

Um,

So how long do you leave it before you actually do the

It's a good question because that does have an impact as well. um we without necessarily having a process at that time just did it within about 3 days off of exposure.

Uh which actually strikes quite well. You don't really want to leave it much longer than a couple of weeks cuz now they've been exposed to other ads and that might influence.

Of course.

Uh their opinion but you also don't want to do it necessarily right afterwards either because that has other in uh other things to take into account.

Um we've got three different ways in which we collect data and some of them actually do do it instantly afterwards. Some of them have a delay. There's pros and cons to to all styles.

Um but at this point we were able to deliver brand lift in a way where it was the verified audience. So for the very first time they could actually prove the impact of influencer marketing because up until then when they were doing brand lift they were going to uh a legacy research firm that would be forcing exposure.

They would get someone to watch the ad and then take part in the survey.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because that's so realistic. I know.

And that would be the the panelist that's paid to do it. It wouldn't be the community that actually had an affinity towards that creator.

Um or you'd go to the platform and do on platform brand lift which was more uh was what the actual audience but it'd be amplified through paid. It wasn't necessarily the organic audience and then each platform has their own uh methodology which has different biases and so we were able to provide an apples to apples approach across all platforms.

Um the likes of Meta which is actually how uh Alf and I know each other as Bianca from Meta introduced us.

Um, they were using us um from fairly early on already um to prove the effectiveness of their influencer activity because.

By the way which is so insane that the platform that's kind of like not just birthed but scaled this industry still needed to work with another company to be able to determine.

That the the true value of it. It seems like influencer marketing they were still in the gray.

Right? But uh what's your.

And I think this is where it comes quite nicely to um one of our values at this that is uh to co-create uh and uh the way I see that is 1 plus 1 equals 3. So uh studied mathematics but I still believe 1 plus 1 equals 3 is the right way of looking at things. And what I mean by that is when you bring different schools of thought together, you can expand the opportunities and and do much better work.

Um with the likes of of Meta, I suppose they were looking to have like a third party uh do the measurement for them because marking their own homework doesn't necessarily work.

But beyond that, we were able to provide an apples to apples approach that worked across their activity when they were promoting their Meta Quest headsets on Tik Tok, on YouTube, and on Meta.

Um and the value that we're able to offer to the likes of them is actually we were able to get insights that could bring their creative teams together with their talent selection teams together with their media strategy teams together with their data science teams and help them speak the same language. So actually and also closing the loop which I has always bothered me which is that I don't think that many digital advertisers adequately feed back to the creative teams.

And.

And just to talk about we're just talking about like um the Gym Shark thing and a lot of the times people think that the reason why the brand did very well is because we did influencer marketing or social. No, it's because those things all complemented each other and spoke to each other.

Right? It's almost like you knew uh the insights that you were getting from the influencer end and how that informed what you did on the social end which informed what you did on the paid end. Right. So actually how they all interconnect and work closely together is actually the the.

Want to touch on that is like the the essence of what made influencer marketing successful is its ability to influence.

And that I believe is the currency of the marketing world. Now I think we in the mass media era of 1920s to 1990s all about reach. Think of like a speaker phone reaching as many people as you can.

Internet comes out, you move into the digital space. It's now this personalization era. Specific creative to specific audience. It's all about effectiveness.

Effective ads no longer cut it.

Um you can have the most meaningfully different uh type of creative or type of brand, but.

Everyone's so good at that now. People are going to be apathetic towards that. it's not going to resonate necessarily. Uh it's not going to get them to want to talk about it, want to champion it. You need to be able to spark a ripple effect. And that really is the essence of influence.

Um and I guess this discovery actually gives us a bit of an unfair advantage into how we did this. Cuz when we came into brand lift, it was very accidental. Like we just so happened to have built the technology that allowed us to be able to give them the insight that they wanted.

Um, but the naivity that myself and my team had when coming to this, we ultimately just wanted to help businesses grow. And so we weren't thinking let's just prove the brand lift. We're thinking what insights could we give you to help you grow your brand.

Um, we're now at a point where we've when I said brand lift authority earlier as like that's that's what we do is we've got the largest data set when it comes to brand lift which allows to give benchmarks. So before I spoke about benchmarks of test versus control or versus assets, but we also just have a lot of data which could allow to say this is the average awareness lift that you should expect in this category and so on and so forth.

Um, but within.

How does that vary between category just massively massively massively which.

Which does actually have flaws and like that's not necessarily the benchmark you should be looking at. No.

Right like the you should be looking at how you performed now versus how you performed last month.

Mhm. For instance, like how are those things changing? that's really a better benchmark to be looking at. Are you growing? Are you learning? Are you improving?

Um, but with that scale of data, we're able to do some interesting stuff and look at, okay, what actually makes someone aware?

Mhm. What actually moves someone from being aware to considering?

What actually moves someone from considering to taking action? What actually moves someone from taking action to advocating?

And the way in which influencers do this, I think, is fascinating. And I think there's something you can really learn from this that should speak to all of marketing.

Um about awareness, it's it's actually fairly straightforward. The industry has been speaking about a lot. It's attention. Can you capture their attention?

Um but when it comes to moving from awareness to considering that's where actually the the the way in which influencers do this well it speaks to the community is that they actually move them from aware to wanting to advocate straight away within one sweep and it is ultimately from awareness to consideration. It's about relevance but what is relevance and I think that's something that needs to be very clearly defined. The way in which we look at relevance is we would ask the brand what are your core associations like what's your key brand identifiers and it's really important that brands understand this especially if you've got a flywheel you need to have some kind of red thread that's your backbone.

So we understand their core associations we would then in the survey ask people what they associate most with this brand.

And separate to that we would also ask them what do you care about most.

And the alignment of their priorities and the values of the.

And that is relevance.

And that has high predictive value in terms of.

Consideration.

Consideration.

Massively. It is the outlier uh predictor by far. If you're able to make something relevant and relevance is different for different communities. And there's this talk track within influence marketing of don't tell the influencer what to say to their audience. They should know what to say.

And the unlock of being able to say okay these are our associations. You understand what messaging will be most persuasive with your audience. You choose what to do with this but these are the associations that we have.

So, so basically all these brands that are sending scripts to influencers and telling them talk about the brand this way, it.

Doesn't work.

Doesn't work. There there's something within that though of the thing that moves them from.

Uh considering to taking action.

Is looking at persuasion.

Um and that the messaging is important there.

Uh but you want to also distinct the difference between messaging and a script.

Yeah.

Right. All right. So, when you look at messaging, you might be looking at a few key words within like a sentence, let's say, like a brand statement.

Um, which I'm sure both of you could speak to actually more than myself even.

Um, but when we look at persuasion, which is now getting from considering to taking action, we're trying to understand what messages do they agree with.

What messages do they believe in, what messages build affinity, build brand love, and which of those anchor those core associations of relevance as well. And if you hit all those tones, this is relevant to me.

Mhm. I agree with this statement. I believe in this brand and this makes me love this brand. That's going to make them take action. And if you make them take action through that journey, they're not just going to be buying your product today. They're going to be buying your product tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and they'll tell everyone else about it. And that's that flywheel.

Yeah. And that's something that we're now trying to grapple with of we do brands of influence marketing, but actually we're trying to now reestablish how we should be looking at brand and how to measure brand in a more appropriate way that speaks to the community that speaks to flywheel.

And it's challenging that like it's like you have to go through more like a Trojan horse approach because you don't want to have a new metric.

No. So it's like how can we do this in a way that does brand lift, does brand health, does brand value, does creative effectiveness. how I can do it in a way that they actually already understand and make that easy to bring in and easy to scale.

But the funny thing is about that cuz I remember when I was speaking to to Max uh about a year ago or so now and was telling me what they're working on and I was like you know Max we all know what the end goal is. We all know the intricate detail. But at the end of the day for us to be able to change how people value a brand and shifting away from just like the gamification of like revenue patterns, right? Because we know now that if a brand wants to build to attract investors and exit or IPO, etc., etc., there's a method to how you build your business. Doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right thing for the long term, but it's the right story to tell to people that you want to sell your business to, right?

But effectively, there's a way that you build the brand for 100 years, right? And and a lot of the value there is intangible, right? And we know that it's important to uh create that ecosystem that creates those modes of intangibility that allows the brand to feel different than anybody else.

But the problem with that is unless there's like a score or a metric or anything like that, people can never really adopt it. Because going back to your point about maths being a language,

A lot of people just can't understand it.

So. By solving this very difficult problem that can have a major impact of what people prioritize when it comes to growing their brands going forward.

100%. I mean, um, Al and I had a panel, uh, just last week. We're talking about measuring brand like performance,

And I've noticed just within that there are like slight tweaks that we've done. When you've got, uh, brand lift metrics, you're looking at a delta of the impact of someone seeing something, what does that do? So, let's say it lifts awareness by 20%.

Yes. If you've got the reach metrics,

You can multiply that and now say, so if you reach a million people and awareness lifted by 20%. You could argue we've net new made 200,000 people aware.

Yes. That's something that someone in finance might actually understand.

And when you look at the CPM metrics of like the cost to reach a,000 people and you take that into account, you can actually also say this is how much it costs to make a,000 people aware. So now you can actually use performance language with brand metrics. It costs this amount to make a thousand people shift perceptions. It costs this amount to get people to advocate for your brand.

And that's like just been quite unlocked for people.

Um. But also you can attach a value.

Yes, that's the thing. Because the one of the problems which is that advertising people look leapt on this fantasy of perfect uh accountability.

Yeah. Not realizing that uh the price the hidden price you might pay is that everybody is vastly underestimating the value of advertising.

Because they're only measuring 20% of what it what it.

Yes. Does. This is the.

Which is the easy 20%.

Yeah. And the other 80% is being valued at zero. Yeah.

Which is you know if you think about it I mean you know a large number of organizations are almost certainly just as I always argue that all businesses under under spend on customer experience and overspend on acquisition simply because the former is harder to quantify and prove the value of your activity or slower actually than the former is. So there's fast feedback activities and there are slow feedback activities and the fast feedback activities always get too much yes investment but you know consequently what you're actually doing is the risk in other words you're comparing something with something else.

But the hidden price you're paying is you're undervaluing everything you do.

Simply in order to attain that kind of numerical comparison. And what you're doing is you're capturing not just the immediate value of something but the deferred value and indeed the well I would argue that actually uh investment in fame and awareness is probably a compounding asset.

It. Absolutely. Because the more people who are aware of something the more it enters the conversation that you know and so fundamentally it's much closer to a pension in terms of an investment.

Than it is a bet on a horse.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We always talk about the fact that an investment in brand is an investment in your pension.

Yeah. And the more you cut corners, the shorter your your life insurance is going to be, right? So actually it's not necessarily a question about how do you drive business, how long you stay in business.

Right? And going back to your point about prioritizing attribution, a simple way to almost like um um almost an analogy to that is like when you it's almost like um attributing the fact that or giving the um the credit of who shops at a store to the checkout.

Right? Cuz at the end of the day, that's where people go and you can but then how they came about. You're not even looking at what the source was effectively, right? the the same way in which when we're looking at I I mentioned how we do lift and how we understand what moves people through that we describe that as drivers and that way you can start attributing what's the value of relevance what's the value of this but even then even though that's helpful it's still you need to make it just so darn easy for someone in finance to understand these like this the if you can start building out benchmarks of this is how much.

Should we allow finance to be making these calls actually in the sense that they are uh they have model of the world in finance which is in a sense too reductionist.

It's to be appropriate to large forms of corporate uh expenditure.

Unfortunately, they run the business.

I think. They do. Uh not quite true in say familyowned businesses or privately owned businesses. You you you have a reasonable counterbalance there.

So probably that's why they're the ones that usually see the biggest benefit of doing this, right? It's because let's say for example with the Gym Shark, you got a Ben Francis that will say, "I know that this works. I'll put aside a budget to make this happen because I believe in this. Whereas a lot of brands with a lot more money, a lot more infrastructure, a lot smarter quote unquote people, I can't do this because they can't get the Excel spreadsheet to say exactly what it is that you.

I mean, it's it's a really important role within a company finance. Like they they are there to protect um the company like they're ultimately responsible decisions that they make. They need to make sure that company's still going to be around next year, that they can still pay the salaries of their employees and all of that.

But I guess if you tell them um what good is the life if you don't invest in your pension and that's a way to get them to understand the value of it, right?

Yeah. And I guess context is also within that as well of like if you're speaking to a company that's VC backed and looking just to grow aggressively and they they've got all these crazy targets to forex year and year. It's a different world if you're speaking to a large corporate that is very happy with 10 20% year-on-year growth.

Very very different story.

Um but this this attributing a a numeric value to brand is really the challenge that we're trying to tackle.

Um and when I spoke of that example earlier of uh someone saying if a CMO is talking to you more than once a quarter you're doing a bad job because they want to build brand and they ask you to build and drive performance. When you're doing rorowaz, you are looking at results now and you're not attributing value to the results in the future.

Right? Something that we're trying to make possible and maybe I I shouldn't be saying this in advance, but actually we're discovering and everything's moving so fast. I think it's worthwhile sharing all of this.

Um, the way in which we look at brand, we see brand and community as interchangeable, as the exact same thing. And when we're looking to measure brand or when we're looking to measure community, we're trying to distill it down to three things. And we're trying to make sure that we can give you a numeric value of your brand.

Okay?

Um the population, how many people are aware of your brand.

The intent, the likelihood that they'll take action.

Now, those two things just tell you the number of actions that are going to happen based on the value of your the the value of that action. It could be usage of an app. It could be purchase of a product. You will know what that value is.

But now you need to have something that tells you how often these actions happen.

So what's what's that next thing? Is it just today? Is it the rorowaz today? Is it next week? Is it the next years? Is it the next hundred years?

And so that's the more complicated part. And we call that strength. And we're trying to understand the strength of a brand. And within this era of community, the way in which we look at that is you might be familiar with with Canar, they've got this meaningfully different salient approach where you look at something that's meaningful and different. And if it's both meaningful different, you can have a pricing premium and that determines the value of a brand.

While saying earlier with a personalization era, that framework works very well. But in a community era, that framework no longer works.

Um, they actually in fact um every year they announce the top 100 brands.

And for the last 20 odd years, it's been almost perfectly in line with the S&P 500's movements.

But since 2022, which is when influence marketing went mainstream.

Yes. It wasn't. uh influencer marketing went up uh sorry S&P 500 went up 25% 25%. The top 100 brands growth went down 20% and up 20%. And that difference now is a 60% difference which when you're looking at these big brands is a swing in the multiple trillions.

The world's only worth 110 trillion right now.

Yeah. So that swing is a huge huge mistake. And so that screams the fact that the way in which we're measuring brand no longer works and we need to evolve to the new context, the new market. UGC creators like community.

Yeah. So if you're trying to distill it to like a quadrant because people like quadrants, it's more complicated than this, but trying to keep it simple for people.

The way in which we look at it is on one axis we'd have the level of advocacy.

How likely are someone to someone to recommend your brand? And then the other one is how aligned are they? And that alignment is that relevance piece I was speaking about. How aligned are their values with your priority or their priorities with your values? the right people to recommend your brand.

Exactly. Because if if they're recommending your brand, but they're not aligned. That's the worst thing. You don't want people they're misfits. They will be pushing people away. You want people that advocate for you that are aligned.

And that to us is the strongest signal of repeat purchase and advocacy, right? That's like they're going to come back. They're going to be loyal consumers to your brand. And so if you've got those three things in a good place, a good understanding of the population, good understanding of how likely they are to take action, and a good understanding of their strength, you now actually have a way to measure how many actions will happen today, tomorrow, next week, the whole future.

So you have a lifetime value.

Yeah. Boom. And that lifetime value is basically telling the valuation of your company. And that's an allstar metric of every company.

Which has been neglected ridiculous. I mean obviously people who understood it were for example credit card companies.

Yeah. Because they would be utterly foolish to look at the cost of acquisition versus the cost of say first year expenditure.

Yeah. It's entirely down to a prediction in terms of lifetime value. And what you're judging therefore is the quality of a customer not just the quantity.

Yes. So you have now you're close to something where uh what you're measuring is actually a reasonable assessment of what's valuable.

Yeah. And this won't be you know there's this won't. You have a prediction of both longevity and and frequency. The strength is the indicator. It's like it's like a it's like a time decay almost. And so you can start looking at things whatever time horizon you want to be looking at things all from that lens of the brand value. So what's the brand value for an infinite amount of time? That's the valuation of.

How do you get this in financial reports? That's that's the ultimate goal here which is that financial reporting around customer value rather than operational efficiency bollocks or whatever tends to dominate at the moment.

Because if you look at you know the way in which companies justify their value to their own investors.

Yeah. It's become to a large part a kind of exercise in saying we'll basically have the same revenue coming in and we can do it cheaper.

But they're not really.

They are different reports. So like um when you're speaking to investors or when you're speaking to um a market and you're looking at stock price, people are trying to understand the value of that company.

Mhm. And so this brand value be looking actually at that same metric. That's the metric to be comparing it to. Whereas when you're looking at a P&L, this wouldn't be the place for that. Uh because the P&L would be looking at your revenue over this quarter or the last few quarters.

It seems highly I mean as a form of company valuation, likely future revenue from existing customers and likely rate of growth.

There will be a flywheel effect of cool things you can do with this. And you know what's going to happen is you will knock on the door of the people that are that kind of like hold the influence right like you say the financial spreadsheet etc etc.

But what you're going to get or the people that are really going to get people to take this on will be this podcast and also um the fbriti romano of the marketing industry. Who are the people that actually say that no this needs to change we need to almost like disrupt this industry because most people will actually love it to stay the same, right? But what you're going to get is you're going to get especially in this B2B influencer world on on LinkedIn, people are just going to say, well, have you noticed that the top brands that are on growth also have the is direct correlation with their like brand value? And everyone's going to say, "Holy [ __ ] right.

This is actually happening and no one's even talking about it." And actually where people are going to go to change what the traditional newspaper was and they're going to go to these people that are going to be broadcasting this because.

And with the and I love your your both of your thoughts on this but like with the I just went to market tomorrow and said we've got this new way of measuring brand.

I don't think anyone will take take it.

Whereas what we're actually doing is.

You need a dramatic demonstration. Or that I mean I I'll tell you what I think is is a way and I I want to hear like a 10x improvement of it.

Um um I very much in this by the way um about like uh with the art and science when we speak about that I'm the science guy trying to empower the artists to do better work.

Yes. Um I love art and I have an appreciation for art. Um but I I I want to empower marketers to do marketing uh to their their full potential.

So I've already seen this experience of just brand lift has already existed. So we've come into supporting the brand lift world by just doing it better.

Uh we've got better data, better insight. We've got data that they actually can measure and trust. We've got insight that tells them what drives a success and then how to do it better.

And feeds back to the creative. Yes. Most important of all.

Feeds to the creative, to the strategy, to the talent, to to every team. Because my problem with nearly all online advertising, and there are exceptions, about once, you know, once every three weeks, you see an online ad where you go, someone's actually put some love into this or something. Okay. The rest of it is mostly transactional.

100%. Okay. It's entirely transactional.

Yeah. And it's not really like a a business. It's not like a pub. It's like a souk. you know, it's effectively 30% off or you know.

What what I like about what you just said there is that. The brand measurement world is quite complex right and so you've got at the asset level creative effectiveness solutions at the campaign level brand lift solutions at the regional level when you're trying to understand brand within a market you've got brand health solutions.

Interesting. And then when you get to a company level you've got brand value solutions and each of those have five different ways of doing it and before you know it someone trying to measure brand is just giving up cuz it's way too complicated.

Um and so what we have done by just the advantage of naively rewriting the infrastructure from scratch whilst we are known as a brand lift provider we are able to we've been able to design in a way that you can actually use it as a creative effectiveness tool as well. So we've got clients using it to understand which assets are most effective, which assets evoke certain emotions um or what makes people more favorable, why do they like certain assets over others. That's the big creative piece, right? But something else that we have done is we have made this um so accessible and easy to use and made it more cost effective in this approach as well that you can do it multiple times a month over multiple months which gives you a time series which allows you to start doing brand health.

Cool. And so by just doing brand lift better, it spills over into now being one solution that does brand lift, create effectness and brand health.

Right? And that's really kind of the approach that I think makes sense for us is to keep being this brand lift solution, but within that start inviting people that like creative effectiveness and brand health tools to start using our tools to be able to do the same thing and then that same kind of mechanism find a way to navigate to those that want to do brand value.

Um, but I'm also open to some crazy big marketing stunts if you guys think that's the approach.

Hey, uh, like like you know what I feel about this. I think we've been speaking about this for quite some time. The fact that it all needs to change and evolve because at the end of the day, one of the questions that I hate the most is what is the ROI.

Right? It's almost like.

A way to reduce.

One of Robbie.

Yeah. Yeah. Return on brand investment.

Yeah. Exa Exactly. And and that's and that's the that's the counter, right? I always I have a I have a very simple brain. I like to summarize things in ways that I can understand. And if I can understand then anybody can understand it, right?

And there's always like there's two sides to a business is how you make money and the perception associated with the way that you make money, right? And how you make money allows you to keep making money today and the perception associated with the way you make money allows you to keep making money for tomorrow and tomorrow, right? And and a lot of people forget that, right? they feel like oh as long as I'm making money then.

I mean there are other aspects to it for example which is it will also affect when some [ __ ] happens.

It will massively affect the extent to which people give you the benefit of the doubt for.

100%. I I remember.

So there's a kind of potential you know downside amelioration there.

Um uh which is again not factored I mean actually ROI is not ROI is emphatically not the right measure at all.

Um uh un you know unless you're very very sophisticated in.

The way you you you ultimately measure return, but there are lots of areas of company expenditure which aren't measured that way. As someone pointed out, you know, you don't ask for the ROI for putting a roof on a factory, okay? You simply go, "If we don't have a roof on this factory, it doesn't work."

Um, and um, it's become, and I think what happened is that marketers were so desperate to justify their own existence when things became effectively financialized, that they leapt on the first metric that they thought was comprehensible and, uh, and easy to measure. And it's not, it's not remotely appropriate in this case, um, especially now that we're in a community flywheel. And it's certainly, it's certainly also not appropriate in a probabilistic world. It's not appropriate under, uh, what you might call multiplicative growth, is it? Okay? Because, you know, a lot of this stuff is compounding.

Mhm. Um, and um, it, it's a bit of a tragedy because I think what happened is marketers thought, "Oh, if only we can be perfectly accountable, okay, um, that means that we can effectively say that every single penny we spend delivers X, whatever it is, okay, in terms of value." And in the sort of gathering rush to do that, they forgot the fact that if you only measure what's directly and immediately measurable, you undervalue yourself criminally.

Okay? You know, it is really, you know, it's a bit like, you know, you can't judge, you can just about judge a striker on their goal-scoring record. Okay? Just about. Although even then, actually, it's not perfect because it depends on the rest of the team. But there is a kind of shots at goal thing which might be, once you get further, once you get further away from the goal. Okay? The extent to which you have to effectively have some other measure.

Yeah. Of how good someone is. Even comes back to the band piece of, you might have a different role within that. Maybe you're the person that tees other people up for success.

Got it. Exactly. Do you know, funny off in the music world, I think, um, who was the chap in the Rolling Stones who died in the swimming pool? What's his name? He was always driven absolutely insane because he always believed that bands should have a band leader like the 1920s. That there was a role, band leader, which was independent of any of the other performers.

Yeah. But, but if you think about, one of my favorite stories when you explain brand is like, "Are we just all shouting the same thing?" Or, "Yeah." And the thing is, going back to the football analogy, right? If you, if you think about, um, attributing to the success of a team, obviously, and Messi and Ronaldo obviously, um, exhausted the whole like goals and assists tally because people are trying to figure out who's better between the two, right? And that became an obsession. Is again, going back to that obsession with certainty. And then now what purists say that, but I do the eye test, actually watch the game, and I can see the quality of a player, which is why Rodri won, uh, uh, the, the latest, uh, Ballon d'Or the other year, even though he was a central midfielder. But if you think about, who has been the most successful coaches in football? They've been people playing that position. So Pep Guardiola in the midfield, in the midfield, in the midfield field, right? Because they're not the person that's rewarded for the output, the goal, the striker being the check out. They're the guys that actually start the play and they control momentum.

Also, they probably have a better overall view of what's going on.

Yeah. At the front, behind them, and at the front of them. They're kind of like the quarterback, right? It's almost like, like that. Why is the quarterback the most, uh, uh, almost like, uh, rewarded, uh, funded position? Is because they conduct the orchestra, right? And that's the thing that we're thinking about here from a brand perspective. You're not going to get the goal, you're not going to get the assist, but you're the one that controls tempo. It's actually so funny, like, it's the, uh, when we had the panel last week with Chris, he was giving the example of, um, 95% of your market aren't in market. Um, and that 5% that are, are. And it's the brand that sort of moves that 95% into that 5% bucket, or is remembered when the 95% move in.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and then it's the performance thing that gets the reward at the end of that 5%. But that would make the story of actually brand building up that 5% bucket, making that bigger. But brand also plays the role of, like you just said, remembering them, like keeping it salient as they're going throughout their their days, or making it relevant, uh, or persuading them, all those different elements. Like it is, um, and, but you also need performance, like there's a big role in performance as well. You can't just not have that. There's a role to all of these.

Hey. So, so, and, and, and I know, hey, we can talk about this for forever, but then I think there's one thing that you said, Rory, that's really, really important. Is that it's also not only is it your pension, it's also your insurance, right? Because I remember hearing a story, I don't quite know all the detail about, um, Warren Buffett. And there was something that happened when investors in Wall Street were just going crazy and doing like illegal stuff. And basically, he got put in front of, uh, of, like a panel, and they basically said that because of his reputation, right? Uh, they're going to give him like a pass. I think he has a famous quote that says, "I'll forgive you for a mistake, but if you lose one shot of reputation for our organization, that's almost like unforgivable, right?" Because he has been known as somebody that's by the book, >> that he's has a reputation to uphold, he has values that he like delivers. And therefore, when it's time when your integrity, your your values are questioned, people look at your track record, right?

So, if if reputation is a non-negotiable, it's like having a roof over your building.

M. It's like getting the ROI for that roof, getting the ROI for your reputation. It's kind of ridiculous.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely right. Yeah. And, um, also you'll never have the perfect counterfactual either, will you? You know, um, and, uh, the other interesting thing, of course, about fame is that it, there's a very big difference between having to find your customers and being famous enough so that your customers find you. Very obvious distinction. Okay. But there's also an element to opportunity with it, which is that if you are not famous, you have to find all your opportunities yourself. Whereas if you are famous, people will bring you opportunities which you never even envisaged. You, let's take a brand partnership. So, for example, no one would ever attribute the value of a brand partnership to, you know, to brand investment. It would be looked at as a standalone thing, but the chances are, it only happened because someone approached you with the idea.

Um, that, I mean, that gets into real weird probabilistic stuff, but I mean, the fact that there is almost certainly a payoff to fame, reputation, and, um, and what you call brand strength, okay, which goes far beyond the, you know, the things we're currently measuring.

There's, you said both, there's an insurance component and an opportunity component. You don't, you don't just live every day to win. You must first survive. And actually, if you think about it, of course, the Ford Motor Company does not possess any, or at least if it does, it's in a museum. It has no value any of the machinery they owned 30 years ago. Okay? Not many of the employees they had, not much of the knowledge they had. Okay? The continuity is entirely pro, you know, exists in consumers' minds. And then, of course, the great thing is it weirdly it then allows you to innovate more. Yeah. And to pivot more and to reinvent yourself more, because you are carrying the customer base with you.

I'm curious as to your perspective on, uh, earned media value, cuz that touches these topics and some of the topics that we've spoken about before. It went massively viral within the influencer marketing space. Um, it's, it's what helped people invest further into influencer marketing. It was a dollar metric that finance saw, and because of that, they were happy to invest into it more. It was a metric that actually a lot of, um, startups would use to fundraise and put a value on their company as well. It is a measure you could indicate of fame, but it also has a lot of cons to it as well. So I just, yeah, throwing that out there. What do you guys not? I mean, PR historically used to do the justified existence on column inches, as if that attention had been bought.

M. Okay. And, you know, yeah, it's, it's not totally irre, it's not totally irrelevant because obviously it captures the value of where you appeared, not just what is said, but of course, it's, it's by no means an absolutely perfect measure.

Yeah. I mean, there's value to that, like being able to have an apples to apples value of media. That's something that people then understand. It makes it easy to invest into. So, yeah, I mean, the idea that you'd maybe value a company on it strikes me as a bit alarming. Um, I mean, this is the, this is the thing which is, of course, ultimately, there's no data about the future.

Yeah. Okay. That's where, you know, fundamentally, we've got to be ever cautious about optimizing on, on what happened in the past, because, you know, obviously, it slightly depends on the category, but things fairly dramatically change. Okay. And you can, you could have a very confident predictor of, for example, future customer value, which is completely thrown into chaos because some innovation or wind indeed legislation or whatever it may be, something happens which just changes everything simultaneously.

Um, but, um, I mean, this is, this is the problem which I think is that it's the old joke which is always attributed to David Ogilvy, but it isn't, which is, "People use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post for support rather than illumination."

Okay. And, the cover your ass insurance. No, no, no, no. And ask, you know, effectively data gathered and presented, and in some cases gamed and misrepresented for the purposes of, um, self-justification or whatever. Uh, you know, justifying your own existence, your own employment, your own salary.

Um, there's an awful lot of wasted effort there when that same data could be used to inspire and inform what you do going forwards. It's being used effectively to justify the part. It's being used to justify the previous financial year rather than to enrich the the the the subsequent one. Even crazier, it's been, it's almost like the, the, the metric has been used to aid understanding, but not understanding of how the world works and how people are influenced and why they make certain decisions. More so understanding of what you do or what value you add, right? It's actually more to help the corporate department as opposed to necessarily understand how the world actually. It's basically trying to generate understanding, but understanding of the wrong thing.

Right. You, you touched on like not looking at what's next.

Yeah. Um, I mentioned before, one of our core values is is co-create. Our second core value is do better. Um, the do better piece is that when we do our, when we create reports for clients, we don't just tell them what happened and why it happened, which are two core elements, and that gets used for all those reasons that you just mentioned. But the biggest emphasis that we have, and, uh, earlier I said, you know, brand lift, authority, and fund smarting, but also the growth partner for the best brands and agencies in our space, is because we always tell them the what next as well.

Why next? Always. And actually, if people don't want to, No, you see what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes they don't. That's not necessarily the right partner to be working with.

Is no. But actually, of course, also if you are, um, predicting the future on the basis of a very, very biased view of the past, that's, you know, that's catastrophic because you have fundamental misalignment of effort, which is you're not doing what adds value. You're doing what effectively.

Um, what do you think the role of like cadence of this insight plays with that though? Cuz if if you're doing this every day and you just help that can build an instinct as to, okay, which direction should be moving in? It's quite different to if you have like one big report each year. That's, um, I mean, theoretically, it should be ongoing and permanent because if you've got that feedback loop.

Yeah. Um, I mean, if you think about it, the entire, the entire business that, that companies report their finances annually is totally arbitrary.

Okay. Now you have the quarterly forecast, which is Unilever and a few players have refused to engage in that game because they just argue, "If you want that kind of short-term information, we don't really want you as a shareholder." Is the argument, which is in other words, you know, we're in this for the long game. We want shareholders that are in this for the long game. If you're one of those people who is, you know, effectively fixated. But at the same time, presumably the cadence of the thing will vary according to the category. Because there are fast feedback.

Yeah. There are fast feedback businesses where you can, you know, effectively, uh, you know, test and learn quickly.

Yeah. And then there are also slow feedback businesses. I mean, I always argue, look, if you're a slow feedback business, one of the best things you can do is nick learnings from fast feedback businesses, which I think is quite, is quite an interesting question.

Fast feedback, slow feedback, something I find fascinating as well with brand measurement in itself. People would often say this argument of, "We want to look at ROI or sales because it's the fastest metric to be able to measure success on." But actually, sales is is a lagging indicator. It's a result of all the work that you've pushed in before.

Yeah. Um, and the way in which, uh, people have measured brand before, because of it being so slow to be able to get it afterwards, they see it perhaps as more of a lagging metric. But actually, when you can measure brand in real time, you realize it's a leading indicator of future success. And the best business should be optimized for indicators.

Exactly. Yeah. It's going to be an indicator whether you'll do sales today, tomorrow, and in the future.

Do you know what? We could all talk about this for hours. And I actually want to talk about this for hours. So we might have to have a part two of this podcast, right? But, uh, but Max, you're a legend, right? So are you.

Hey, we try, right? Uh, we have the goat over there. Right. So, but what's so interesting is you effectively you had a 10x through an interface.

Yeah. Which simply made it. And by the way, that 10x is really, really important because, uh, I would argue that, by the way, you know, one of the great problems with painful feedback is that the more painful it is, okay, the more unrepresentative the people participating are likely to be. Yeah. By the way, you know, for example, you know, one, one example that would always strike me is that if you buy a lot of things online and you're asked a hundred times a month for, you know, to give your feedback, and the process is inherently painful, then eventually everybody who's not an extraordinarily infrequent, okay, uh, purchaser, or people who simply aren't [ __ ] angry, for example, okay, will actually exit from the process.

Yeah. It's the first principle of data. If your data is not representative, it becomes massively untrustworthy.

Yeah. And so, you know, that 10x thing, which is you're actually getting feedback from people who are, it seems to be fairly representative of the people who are actually exposed to the total [ __ ] weirdos.

This is the bottleneck piece as well. That was an example of one small thing to tweak which was sort of, and they were optimizing for the wrong thing, weren't they? They were optimizing for, you know, you know, ludicrously complex bloated.

Yeah. Uh, surveys.

Yeah. And, and now I guess like another thing that's like a 10x that we're seeing is, and clients describe us as the the next-gen Nielsen, the next-gen Kantar, is having built out the infrastructure from scratch, we've been able to build such efficiencies in this process. Something that has historically taken months, we can do in hours. Um, and we've been able to automate a lot of the workflows for our own team such that they can deliver and manage more than three times the amount of work than a traditional research partner might do. But that three times more actually makes it 10 times easier for our clients to work with us because they don't have to speak to three different people. That one person can manage all of the the work and build that relationship with them. That's another 10x that's now pushing us forward as well. So the question that brand strength is, I mean, obviously it's harder to prove with something like a bank where you tend to get very high retention anyway, but you generally find that brand strength absolutely correlates as an early predictor of both frequency of purchase, uh, and also longevity of relationship. Is that right?

In the community era, that is that is it. Yeah. You want to have champions.

Yes. And that's how we measure strength is how strong are your champions. That's.

Does that now, how does that vary from category to category? Because obviously, obviously there are interesting categories which are never going to have brand, if hemorrhoid cream, okay? Just to take an extreme outlier example, you're unlikely to have people wandering into the pub and announcing that they're absolutely delighted with their hemorrhoid cream, or indeed posting interesting shots from of them applying. And then at the other extreme, obviously there are, you know, there are entities where people are natural, confident recommenders.

Well, well, the other component is alignment, right? Like alignment of relevance. Like, um, does what that hemorrhoid company offers align with, what they need?

Yes. And, um, the strength that would be a strong indicator of strength as well.

That would be a strong indicator. Got it. And just to add to that, basically, it's the whole concept of sexy brands and unsexy industries. If you look at a company like Beats by Dre, like headphones were not sexy. They came with the headphones, they were wired, you get caught up in them, and they got people to spend £250 plus for them, right? But it wasn't because of the product itself, it was because of the association of how it made you feel and what it said about you, right? Which is why going back to the whole, this whole entire point, it's very difficult to measure, um, uh, like it was very difficult to measure brand until this point because those factors didn't take into consideration. People were looking for the tangible reason as to why somebody liked something, but they forget there's always a human reason behind that. And until we understood those motivators, those drivers, it is almost like impossible for us to use the current metrics at hand.

Right. What do, do you do any post-purchase stuff by the way, as well as post exposure?

That would be a very natural thing for us to extend into. We've not done that to date, but that would. Because that, that's an even probably an even more reliable indicator, isn't it? Which is having a, what, what is it they, they call it in Proctor and Gamble? It's sort of the, uh, you know, the final moment of truth is usage.

Yeah. It's a, it's a really good place to actually get insight as to what brought them there.

Yeah. Massively. Especially if you're trying to understand like the core element. If you're like, if you're doing, let's say, like a, a UGC play and you want to be able to have just like one word that, um, they always bring back to you. If you can find that by understanding, if you can do like a, a survey at the, at the post-purchase stage to understand why they bought it, and you can do an analysis of that, what's the one thing that would be a really good place to find that, for instance? So they go hand in hand.

Yes, they do. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Hey, like I said, I, I, yeah, I still have so many questions, so many things that we can talk about, but for the sake of the listeners, uh, we're probably going to have to talk about a part two, but, uh, this is like such a great conversation. I think that we can talk, like we can talk about this for ages. There's so much stuff that's going on. I've got, one more. So the speed, the speed at which they can respond. Okay.

Yeah. Is there also a kind of argument in neuroscience that you're getting their instinctive reaction, which is actually given that, you know, do you see what I mean? I mean, you could even measure the speed at which they answer each question, couldn't you? Which is an interesting variable. Sorry, I'm getting into nerdy stuff here. Sorry. Sorry.

There's implicit association testing that takes that into account where, um, you could ask them, "What do you associate most with this brand?" And they take one minute to answer. Their associates are probably quite different if they answer that within one second.

It's that, yeah. So, it's definitely plays a factor.

That's interesting.

Yeah. Part two. Part two. Part two. The implicit association test. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. [Music]