Latest / The Crowded Market / Creating Marketing That Actually Connects: Ross Plummer

Transcript

Creating Marketing That Actually Connects: Ross Plummer · The Crowded Market

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: For all you B2B marketers who get pressured on generating leads, today I've got a guest who's going to tell you why that might not always have to be the case.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Today I sit down with Ross Plummer who has run the marketing for Nike and Heineken.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the bravery from marketing has disappeared, largely because we've become so fixated with data.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: How can we demonstrate that this is working?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to get into anything until you know I I want to be able to test something straight away.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: If a KPI, a key performance indicator is a million people need to have seen this film in the first 48 hours, well you just buy enough media, just throw enough media dollars at it, and you'll get one million impressions.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then the media will come for it, there we're hit with one.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Bro.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Today we're throwing vanity metrics out the window and talking about why the best decision you might need to make is to do nothing at all.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the most successful marketing out there has succeeded because people shared it, because it made them feel something, not because people paid dollars for it to turn up on their feed.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: You can watch this episode on YouTube and listen on all major podcast platforms.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get into the show.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Ross, how are you?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks very much for coming in.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Luke, thanks for having me.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Pleasure to be here.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Come from Oxford today, not too far.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Easy.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Easy.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Nice ride in.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Straight down the infrared.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful countryside.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's nice to float in instead of being behind the laptop for a couple of hours.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Great to be here.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of those beautiful situations where I've sent somebody a message on LinkedIn and they've replied.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Not straight away.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I apologize for that.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Not at all.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: You're a businessman.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's one of those things where I'm very grateful for platforms like LinkedIn and social and all that stuff.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's just um yeah, to like to instigate that you know relationship and then have a chat, have a couple of calls, see if we're up for it, and then making some magic together and sharing some content and creating a bit of thought-driven stuff is just it's nice.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it it it it re-instigates my energy for the platform, you know, and the internet in general.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was really glad you reached out, and actually it was, you know, the the ensuing phone call we had was was really interesting.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm happy to be here.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So great.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're happy to have you, mate.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, listen, we've spoken a lot about kind of your career and where you've navigated through.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think the main highlight to me uh mostly as well is your work with huge B2C brands and then into where you are now, which is very blockchain.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: What I want to know about is firstly the sim the differences between both of these, but also the similarities.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's a very blurred vision between B2B and B2C at the moment, isn't it?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: What have you found?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Is that the main let's start with the differences?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, so I suppose there's a immediate there's a few points to clarify there.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: So with with when we say B2B to B2C to B2B, in my example, we're talking about traditional marketing moving into web 3 marketing, and web 3 marketing tends to be mostly B2B.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um what are the similarities and differences?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Traditional marketing, B2C marketing is great at emotional storytelling.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Web3 B2B tends to be, web 3 specifically, tends to be much better at community building.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um something that traditional marketing have been trying to get better at over the years.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: They can't come close to how well Web3 does it.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Crypto blockchain is is incredibly community driven.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: So let's go to the emotional storytelling.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Traditional marketing deals in emotional storytellings to drive brand affinity, to speak to the different emotions inside of us, tell stories in archetypes, the hero's journey, probably being our favorite, certainly in terms of sports marketing, which is closest to my heart.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's tied to purpose.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like what is the company's purpose?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, how can we tell an emotional story about well, why we're here, um, and and um capture as wider audience as possible with that.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's very effective, it has its failings, and I'll I'll come back to those.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that to do this, you have to discover purpose.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Purpose in brands advertising has been around since probably the end of World War II.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've been doing it for decades.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Trying to sell a lifestyle, effectively.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um and um but finding your purpose isn't always easy and it's quite inelegant.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes if you can't, then it's easy, it's sometimes better just to not try.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, don't try to solve something that's inauthentic.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, authenticity is key for any brand.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: So especially during lockdown, this accelerated.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: All the ad agencies were telling all of their clients, oh, you've got to find your purpose, you've got to find your your, you know, what are you doing in this situation to help?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I don't know about you, I've I got all kinds of emails from companies that I bought something off seven years ago saying we're thinking about you at this difficult time.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's like lockdown is probably not a creative marketing opportunity.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're not helping the situation, you should probably keep your mouth shut.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um but as an example of as an example of big brands that do this well.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you like the way this podcast looks, then we can do this for you.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: LRB are a B2B podcast production agency that drive leads and sales for your business using the podcasting strategy.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Link in the description.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nike believes there's an athlete inside all of us.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not specifically, it's not explicitly written down in any marketing, but just do it as a command to the athlete inside all of us.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's why they get out of bed in the morning.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's sorry, that's why Nike get out of bed in the morning, that's why they go and do what they do.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's their belief system.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Apple believes there's a creative entrepreneur inside all of us.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you buy that beautiful looking device, you are buying into this idea that you are different.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: That was their first thing, wasn't it?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: That was their first thing.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um exactly that.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'm picking on the ones that have done this successfully, there's many that haven't.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but let's let's let's let's also pick on the tech one.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: So Coinbase believes that everybody should have the opportunity to exit the system.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you we've all seen the UK campaigns around that.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Claude from Anthropic, tech should be in the service of the human experience and not the other way around.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these are all brand belief systems, all marketing ladders back to it, and we the customer buy into it.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it has its failings.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um sneakers made in a sweatshop in Southeast Asia don't necessarily believe that there's an athlete inside all of us, nor that, nor can they deliver on that promise.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, nor can um and even to the untrained eye, objectively, if you look at people around you, clearly some of us are not born athletes, and clearly some of us are objectively bad at athletics.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's you know, it's it it has its it has its limits.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And because when your sneakers run out or your product runs out, the brand will double down on the message and you'll go back and get more, but you're never quite achieving it, you're never quite living there.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: It probably compounds a mental health pandemic that we're living through, particularly as we're surrounded by the messaging the whole time, etc.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: etc.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um Web3, on the other hand, is really bad at emotional storytelling.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's probably a few reasons for it, um, and I'll unpack those shortly.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: What they're brilliant at is community, community building.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if you can donate some computation power, you open a node, um, uh volunteer to spend some time on Discord or Telegram, then you are part of the community.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: You are helping driving it forward.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: You will be rewarded with tokens before they achieve any kind of value.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: You may potentially get quite rich out of that.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you have agency over the community.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Trying to affect a web, uh, a traditional marketing community or traditional community, that's a that's a suggestion box at best.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Web3 is a ballot box.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you vote on your decentralized on your DAO, a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you are driving it forward, you have agency over it.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And this is very successful.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: It drives tribalism, drives fierce loyalty until things don't go well for the project.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: When the tokens you've been given start to lose value, people unload very quickly.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you realize that this loyalty is actually tribalism, perhaps based on a financial instrument rather than any kind of loyalty to a brand.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um slightly less tangible in that sense.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I think they're envious of each other, they're both one's bad and one's good at at each, and and and and and they they have the downside as well.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you what what are all the kind of the brands that you've really worked for so that people have a little bit of context before, let's say, in the BTFC sphere?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I was at um Widen and Kennedy for going on 12 years.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up running global football for Nike out of Portland, Oregon, um, and probably oversaw uh uh two World Cups and three Olympics games for very variously for Heineken, Nike.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of sports marketing in there, FMCG, um, that sort of thing.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: How did you how have you got here?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: How's that like where did you kind of pull the plug on that then in terms of on the you know what is objectively or subjectively you know, exciting sports marketing?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I'm not saying that block it's a completely different kettle of fish, that's all it is.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's how have you got to that?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well the industry was changing.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the the the big budgets were coming away, digital was coming in.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but also before Web3 came along, entertainment came up.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Entertainment marketing um was something that um was becoming very attractive in the space.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I was head of production at RGA in London, the digital agency where I first got into sort of full stack development in the service of um marketing objectives.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: And um I um set up the Ridley Scott Um Um creative group in Amsterdam, the European operations, with an interest of bringing brands closer to entertainment.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um this was when Netflix Apple was about to launch in competition with Netflix, so was Prime, so was you know, more and more streaming sites coming online.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that brands like Nike, I spent time with through Widen at the uh Olympics or World Cups or whatever, they'll spend millions on media that will run out in six weeks.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, they'll run their 60-second ad, then their 30, then their 15 as it gets more and more expensive, and it's it's up in a puff of smoke.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the logic goes if you could spend a fraction of that on production and have an authentic reason to turn up in that entertainment space, then you've got free global media for as long as Netflix run the asset.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: That that's enormous uh value for money.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we did that for a while.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: But more and more our clients were tech companies.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um eventually, um, as we say, I got red-pilled in into uh to Web3.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, saw what was um, I don't think the term surveillance capitalism is too strong a term for what had been happening over the last 20 years, saw Web3 as the pushback against it and moved into it.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thought they could do better at telling their story.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: How's it going?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's going quite well.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: We're in a bear market at the moment, which slows everything down but also drives out all the bad actors.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think Web3, if they can achieve mass adoption, we have a genuine shot at pushing back on some of the worst excesses of centralized data and centralized banking.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sales cycles are very different between these two as well.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: In in terms of B2C, you you can see the tangibility of what you're doing to a degree.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people clicking and buying and all doing something.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, not all, you know, there's that's the difference between direct marketing, right?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then brand campaigns.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, brand is to just raise that awareness, right?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: You there's isn't necessarily tangibility.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: But with B2B, it's a little bit of a different ball game, isn't it?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's people take longer to buy, there's not that click and buy mentality with B2B.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, has that been a difficult adaptation as a marketer or not?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Would you say?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, yes and no.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think when you move into Web 3, you I mean you're still talking about human emotions.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you're talking about B2B or B2C, I know that Cisco is the first name in security, yeah.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: In in cybersecurity, because of the amount of times I've walked through Terminal 5 at Heathrow.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really know how Cisco works.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact that I know that and I work in tech and I, you know that they have done a good job in their brand narrative that I if I have to start going looking for something like this, it's probably the first thing I'm gonna search for.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um and there's other examples like it.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Recently, this is just the other day, this is just at the weekend.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: I forget his name, which is terrible, but um the first sub two-hour marathon in competition was cracked, was uh was broken.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that was when I say in competition, it had been done before by Eliot Kipchogi in Vienna in 2019, but that was control conditions.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is the this is the record set.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he did it in a pair of Adidas, yeah.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone's been saying, Oh, Adidas have stolen it from Nike because Nike spent years breaking to Elliot trying to capture this sub two-hour marathon thing, and everyone's like, Oh, Adidas have stolen the show.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think you'll find within a year people will still see Nike as synonymous with sub two because of the amount of time they've spent on the narrative.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's true.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: They've invested so much time on the narrative that I you know it's and it's the same in B2C if you can sustain that brand narrative, steal the category or own the category, or better still take your product out of the category and place it into popular imagination.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Then what was the other runner wearing?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because it broke, it was broken twice, right?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's up to hours, it's first and second place.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, and this will become common now.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: This will be what happens every single time.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um who was what what were they wearing on the other the other person?
• 14:32
  unknown: I don't know.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm interested.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: No one knows.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know, Tom?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: What's it?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: Same stage.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, very I mean, so so yeah, go on.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: No, I want to talk a little bit about um the not specifically marketing efforts that you've done as well, but also team size.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Your adjustment through moving into a huge agency or direct for client, right, as marketing and having disposal of a lot of people, right?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And a big team with you, and you're all there with the same mission driving that to into this, which is typically the same in B2B unless you're part of corporations who are kind of you know 15,000 employees.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: You don't get that size of team in B2B, do you?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: You kind of it's a much more hands-on approach to the marketing.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: You probably do in B2B.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: In web in Web3, no.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: You you don't have so it's true that I've been in some very I've worked in some very luxurious organizations.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: When I say luxurious, I mean large teams, huge budgets, lots of people, lots of support.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um ensuring that processes ran like Swiss watches so that we could afford to be creatively chaotic to steal a widenism.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's true there's less of that around.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that there's less money in Web3 necessarily, it's just that there is.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think probably because of the need to factor in this community that you've built, yeah, who are very fast to call bullshit on anything you do.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you have to maintain that community.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think there is a tendency that if we don't have something useful to say, it's better to not say it because we don't want to put anything out there that we can't deliver on.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think in traditional marketing, there's more of a fear of what happens if we don't put something out.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: We'd better say something this quarter.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: We've got to put something's better than nothing.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Something's better than nothing.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it always I'm showing my age here, but I don't if you remember the TV show Lost, yeah, and there's the guy in there that has to press the button every 24 hours and doesn't know what happens if he doesn't, but he keeps pressing it, and yeah, it sometimes feels like that's what traditional advertising is.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: What happens if we don't advertise?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um how have you adapted to not having those kind of people around you then?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um by definitely staying in touch with friends, yeah.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: To balance ideas around.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think trusting your instincts a little bit more, but you know, there's no you can always scale up as and when you need people.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think trusting your instincts, any good marketer can function in big or small environments as long as um you understand the product and you understand what the product is trying to do.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't understand the product, then then you've got a problem.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that took you a long time to understand the product or not?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Are you in an office environment?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: We're completely remote.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Most web three companies are.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: Would you say that that meant it was it took a longer time for you to be in you know ingrained into this new world?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think having to be across eight platforms before the first hour of the day is out takes some adjustment.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this isn't even a web three, web two traditional marketing conversation anymore.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think anybody adjusting to remote working experiences the same thing.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And there is an aspect of this where if you're just pulling levers and pushing buttons on eight platforms all day long, there's something akin to a telephone exchange operator in the 30s, you know, where you're just plugging different things and hitting prompts and hitting buttons, and it's easy to lose sight of what it is you're actually trying to achieve in those situations.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: But we're getting off the point.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, not at all.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting because marketing teams, I mean, this this is a podcast, you know, for marketers, yeah, by marketers, and there's a lot of different facets to the role, and including working environment is super important.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, yeah, I know a lot of people who are basically being integrated into new roles, and it's taking a lot longer for them to kind of get a grasp on it, yeah, yeah.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and understand uh exactly why you know what the product is or what the service is, you know, they're coming from something completely different, especially in B2B, which is the likeness, is it that B2B is kind of it's a little bit more swept into one category as opposed to B2C, where it's like sports marketing, food and beverage, things like that.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: For B2B, it's like ah, you know, you work for a technology company, you'll be fine in legal marketing as well.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know what I mean?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: No, I do.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think whilst the training in one will stand you in good stead for the other, in good stead for the other, um understanding the mission is the first step of any marketeer.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's particularly hard in web 3 if you're not a web 3 initiate, um, especially as a lot of people outside of web 3 don't understand web 3's purpose.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: What is it doing here?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: What does it do?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that should be it's going back to Web3's marketing failings or where it can't drop sounds, it doesn't tell that emotional story.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, Web3's purpose is probably one of the best brand stories you'll ever hear.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um so Web3 is Web3 is to centralized computing and centralized banking.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's the pushback.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: And go back to 2002.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's a dot-com crash.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is the story that Web3 doesn't tell yet.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a dot-com crash.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh Sequoia's putting pressure on Google to find a way to make itself profitable, for example.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: And um Google says, well, there's this thing called um behavioral metadata, but it's a bit unethical.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: We should, you know, you know, Bing don't do it, MSN don't do it, we're not gonna do it.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, but they're they're coming under pressure to, you know, you better pop the lid off this behavioral metadata because you know, otherwise we we're all exposed.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so they do, they quietly remove the strap line, do no evil.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Washington is ramping up its war on terror, they take a lot of interest in a tech company that can track everybody online, jurisprudence is swept aside, and off we go.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And no one really hears about this until Edward Snowden drops a pen drive off to some journalists on his way to self-exile in Moscow.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: 2008, Lehman Brothers crashes, the the financial system fails, ordinary people, money is printed to bail out the workers and to bail out the banks.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Since the dot-com crash, there's these people we called them crypto anarchists, that said, well, we don't want all our information going through these big companies, we're gonna build our own systems.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: 2008, crypto anarchists, the the the culture has been referred to as cyberpunk.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: They Satoshi publishes his first white paper, and on the Genesis block he lists the Times of London's headline, which is governments bail out banks.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Crypto anarchist becomes cyberpunk, becomes web three.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: This was the pushback against centralized data storage, centralized computing, and centralized banking.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's a hell of a heritage.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's a hell of a purpose.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, massive.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's an amazing story.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why doesn't anyone outside of Web3 know that?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why doesn't anyone I'm not saying you should tell that whole thing in a six-minute commercial.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just saying there's any one thing you can pick on there.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great buy-in.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great thing to pick up.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Massively.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't we don't we don't tell that story.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's history.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's history that people know.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to deny it.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And most people will work more than an eight-hour day to fight back against that kind of stuff.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: In our um in our call before this, we had a little bit more of a deep dive into um marketing and you know, your opinion that it doesn't always work.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm all I'm I'm really kind of interested to hear more about it because the reality is in B2B a lot of efforts are wasted as well.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: And in B2B across all of it.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Don't always get it, right?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, marketing is one of those beautiful professions where it's throwing spaghetti at the wall.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um figuring out what the health sticks.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's just good to have a couple more new eyeballs on you in B2B, right?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: In B2B, it's a much more refined audience.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: You're not, you're not, you're not marketing to the masses like you are with the Nike campaign, right?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Where it's to hundreds, millions of people, it's to you know, those 5,000 people that are doing the role that could buy your services as a business sometimes, isn't it?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um what so when you went into that, you you told me about how marketing it doesn't work.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and its effectiveness is actually very, very hard to prove.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: What what do you mean?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so a lot of the bravery from marketing has disappeared largely because we've become so fixated with data.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: How can we demonstrate that this is working?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't want to get into anything until uh, you know, I I want to be able to test something straight away.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if a KPI, a key performance indicator is a million people need to have seen this film in the first 48 hours, well, you just buy enough media, throw enough media dollars at it, and you'll get one million impressions.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, then the media will come from and say, There, we hit we've won.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're scrolling, you see this stuff.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you don't get you don't care.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: You go past it, and I'm the same.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't so what makes consumers different?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're not different.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I scroll past it, it's counted as an impression.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: The the the the brand pays for it, it makes it back to them, and everyone's like, hooray, we did it.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, maybe you didn't.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's a bit like newspapers used to claim, oh, do an advert with us because we've got a circulation of a hundred thousand people.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, a hundred thousand as well.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: What?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, what about the people that share the paper?
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: 100,000, did they did they make it to the advertising thing?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that Facebook or Meta can be valued as much as it is and everyone spends that money on it.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: You need it, but you need more than that.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a there's this, and I can't remember the quote.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: I can't sorry, I can remember the quote, I can't remember who said it.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: I know 50% of my marketing is working, I just don't know which 50%.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you can quantify the digital, you can't quantify the emotional.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: But the emotion people are getting rid of the emotional because you can't quantify it, because there's no data against it.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's quite possible that the most important part of marketing is the bit that can't be measured and is the bit that's being binned.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about a click journey.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: When did the person first click on the ad?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: What was the bounce rate?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: When did they return back to the website?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: How much time elapsed before they returned?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: When did they start to consider the product?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: What about the emotional journey before they even got to click?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, why?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can't quantify, and it's it's part of the reason.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: So Web3 and traditional marketing are as guilty on it.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but um and it's hard to convince people to do it because you'll hear a marketer say all day long, you need marketing, you need emotional storytelling, and they're like, Okay, why?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: What's my ROI?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: What's my return on investment?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, Well, that's hard to prove, and they're like, Well, get out of here then if you can't prove it, but yeah, you know, so I it doesn't if you've got a million people seeing something, like I said, we you know, we build a lot of podcast series for people, and a lot of the marketers are leveled up on impressions and how many people see it, yeah.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they're kind of like, What should we use as a benchmark?
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it doesn't matter if it's four if it's 40 of the right people listening to that episode, yeah.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter because your your audiences are so much smaller in this field of work, right?
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and like I said, we're not marketing to the masses, and that they people were thinking like, oh, we need to be the next Dio CEO, and we need you know, we need our series to be performing in the top one in the in the world.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like you need to understand the purpose of this is to is to have it viewed by the right 50 people, not the wrong hundred thousand people.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Quality leads um and it's vanity metrics, isn't it?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we spoke about.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I think vanity metrics, quite quite often, people are under a lot of pressure to demonstrate that something is working, and if they can spend enough money to hit those KPIs and demonstrate it, then it's working out there.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: But if some of the most successful marketing out there has succeeded because people shared it because it made them feel something, not because people paid dollars for it to turn up in their feed.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And one shouldn't preclude the other, you need both, but it shouldn't be at the expense of the other.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Ross, it's been an absolute pleasure to sit down with you today.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks very much.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for getting.