Latest / Sleeping Barber - A Marketing Podcast / SBP 238: The Barber's Brief - Playing on rented land, again.

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SBP 238: The Barber's Brief - Playing on rented land, again. · Sleeping Barber - A Marketing Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sleeping Barber Podcast.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to the Sleeping Barber Podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you're new around here, this is the Barber's Brief, where Mark and I get to break down things that caught our attention over the last couple weeks: the good, the bad, the overhyped.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: There will always be data, definitely a few opinions, and always an unnecessary reference to marketing effectiveness, because we just love it that much.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Then we'll always wrap up with that of the week, because amid all the dashboards, data, and debate, Great Creative still deserves the last word.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Mark.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: D, good morning.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Good morrow to you, sir.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Marked out.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how you respond to that.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing great.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm pretty pretty good.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Got a big event tonight.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Woo! Killer.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: How are you gonna be coming?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Are you dressing up Spiffy like?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Spiffy, I'm putting on a suit.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, not a suit, but a blazer.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's gonna I'm gonna polish my shoes.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be great.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Who are you?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: I know, right?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the sleeping barber guy in the morning, and then I'm a guy that opens the beds at night.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a superhero.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't know.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: You are a superhero.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: You are a superhero.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, on the story front, V, I'm excited to hear about your first one.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: The lack of CEO understanding harming B2B brand building push.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: This was interesting.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and especially off of the recent uh story that we had with Ian Whit, sorry, the recent interview with Ian Whitaker.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I almost feel like this ties quite well.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this is for all our B2B friends out there.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the study says, so I found this on Marketing Week.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Almost half of B2B marketers say they can't get brand budget signed off.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: The top reason they give, my CEO doesn't get it.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Comfortable story, likely the wrong villain, though.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: So here's here's the my take on this.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Marketing week state of brand in the B2B survey, nearly 45% find it difficult or very difficult to secure brand investment.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And about 39% say they would be easier if the CEO and CFO understood brand building.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Fine, I get it.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: We may we talked about that with Ian as well.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: But buried in the same survey, there's another number in there.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: 40% admit brand isn't seen as delivering ROI inside their own company.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when you read those two numbers together, we want the CEO to stop asking about return, and we've just confessed that we can't show one.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that's not an education gap.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's a proof gap.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like honestly.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: So a CFO's job is capital allocation.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, let's let's be really clear here.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Brand shows up with no baseline, no incrementality, no line to revenue, and the rationale finance leader says no.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's not ignorance, that's just simple discipline.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And understand brand building is the wrong ask, anyways.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Your CFO doesn't need to love the 60-40 rule.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: They need to they need that translated.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So pipeline that closes faster is what he's interested for, or sorry, what they're interested for, demand that shows up later because you prime today.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the finance argument.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Most brand decks never make it there.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, in conclusion, if you will, the uncomfortable truth here is that the leaders don't understand brand.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's that most marketing teams still can't prove it.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Fix the proof, and the understanding follows.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: I say I I know you were chuckling a little bit because I know this hits, but it's the truth.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think Ian had said something to a similar effect where within a business, so many people believe that brand matters.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like we have a strong brand.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like you'll hear, and it's a sense of pride for a lot of people.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: But then you go and talk about how we want to help build brand and invest in the brand, and then everyone goes, fuck you.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah, there's no way I'm giving you money for that.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-uh.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's such a like a weird thing, right?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like it on one hand, everyone thinks it's important, on the other hand, no one wants to invest in it.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think maybe because of the advertising side of it, they they can't get an immediate return from it.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's fair.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I so often come back to the Roger Martin uh B2B Institute promise to the customer thing.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like I think that is where it all connects.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's a new report too from um Mimi Turner.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: We should probably reach out to her again, um, for the from the B2B Institute in LinkedIn.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: But they're looking at um when you underinvest in the creative signals that drive campaign results.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Or when you I'm I'm butchering this, but anyway, there's a hundred and more likely Yeah.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: When when it's from LinkedIn Work and Alliance Advisory, so they they show that campaigns with multiple viability signals, so things like recommendations, relationships, and relatability, you get 110% more likely to report growth with incremental revenue to the business when you have those signals in campaigns.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd have to read more about that, and maybe we'll get it on tap more about that.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: But there is you were talking about proof.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um there is proof for this, and I think in B2B, like it it should be more obvious because the funnel the sales cycle is so much longer.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a good point.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: But almost everything is really oriented towards brand building.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: I keep forgetting like you you've worked in B2B.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: I just always think like we're still working at SportCheck, we're not, but yeah, yeah.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, no, you're that's a that's a great point.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I worked in sales too, and the part I hated about sales was when you I worked at different places when I was in sales.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And when when nobody knows who you are, it's so hard to sell.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: When somebody knows anything about you, it's like, oh yeah, I've heard of you.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's such an icebreaker.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's it really is like the tale of two brands in a way.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a fair point.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm excited about this story.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Holy smokes.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: This comes up over and over and over again.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you're seeing this um on your end, but lately it's just been a slurry of of people asking me about what's happening to their website traffic.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I because it's going down.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so I take a look at it, and there's this article I found.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, several articles that went into this one, but this one in particular Google AI overviews are eating your website traffic, V, and here's how to get that traffic back.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not so sure about the traffic back part, but yeah, they're not getting that back.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: But website traffic is down from all these people that I'm talking to.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, agency folks, brand side, um, I've been running a few different forums recently um with directors and CMOs, and and all of them are seeing it.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, I wasn't quite sure why.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of suspect it has something to do with AI overviews.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I started looking for a few studies and a few articles.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but they but there's a few that that I found that were really interesting that that found that clicks go down when Google puts an AI summary on the top of the page, so it's not there all the time.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the impact um varies depending on who the study you looked at and who's counting.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: But the range is anywhere from, and this is crazy, 15 to 90 percent.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean, okay.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not zero is the point.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's either zero or a hundred, Mark.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: So um, so there's this one study that two couple of economists at the Indian School of Business uh randomly stripped AI overviews out of people's browsers, and clicks dropped by 38% when the summary was there.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, like we're 40% like brown numbers, 40% of the traffic just disappears when the AI overview shows up.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then they asked both groups how their searching went, and the answers came back the same that nobody got a better experience from it.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not really an us thing, like it's not just a you thing, like this is this is you.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think we're also not this isn't necessarily a new phenomenon for us.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you think back to early days of of social, everyone was buying Facebook followers, and then you know, the algorithm changed, and the reach that we thought we were paying to acquire, like the the audience size that we thought we were acquiring, just disappeared.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it turned out we were actually just renting that audience.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so we never owned our search rankings either.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's always been this game between Google changing the back end of this SEO and us trying to catch up, and it was just this invisible black box of you know, nobody knows how things get done, but we were always playing this game on rented land.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I think part of the solution is the same argument I used to make when I was selling TV and radio, which is make sure people look for you by name.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So when you can skip all this if you and you know, talk about investing in brand.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like if people type you in by name, direct search traffic is not gonna change.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like it could increase, but it it like that's a real legitimate thing and a real legitimate thing for driving growth.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the job really stops to about being ranked for you know, trying to game the system to get ranked higher and really building the memory so that people type you by name.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um I agree with that.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you know, and we we also talked about in the past building an email list, owning your audience.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: So does that kind of stuff work, or were you just moving to a different landlord here to be?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Landlord, I love that.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness, your funny pants on this morning.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think I think you're right here.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, like email hasn't gone away.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Email is still by far one of the highest converting tactics that anyone has.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, it's based on people that are already in your ecosystem, and that makes sense.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: You should be building your email audience or your email lists, anyways.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that gives you control of that set audience.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, of course, platforms do allow for match rates, so you can move those audiences over into the platforms and then try to target them.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's really what you should be doing, anyways, but if you feel inclined to, you could do that.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: I do think, though, at the same time, we are moving to a different landlord.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: The AI overviews is not only creating disruption in traditional reporting metrics.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, every website, any organization that has a website, you're always looking at traffic as a way to showcase intent.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you're gonna parse it out by saying how much organic traffic versus paid traffic.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you always want to find that equilibrium between both.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because search always accounted for, if not one of the largest volumes, channel, pre-channel volumes, this is 100% disrupting that flow completely.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think the interesting thing is getting on uh getting a stronger understanding of what your subset of keywords are triggering AI overviews.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And if that's if it's like this uh article suggests, what 32% I think you had.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So if it's roughly 32%, you have to then look at those keywords and say, how do you continue to build authority in that topic around that?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because the AI overview could be recommending you, could not be recommending you.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: So at the very least, you want to be able to start seeing the increase in direct traffic because they've already sourced the information through AI overviews.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not really losing it.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're losing it if you're not discussing the AI overviews.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're not even in the conversation, the AI overview, that's your bigger problem.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I do say that.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know that there's a way around getting out of playing that game with AI overviews.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're right.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it is a different landlord, but it it's really important to think about it as rented space rather than something you own.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: All it takes is an algorithmic change there that will force us down another path.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And like Google's notorious for doing this.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Every few years, we're always chasing our tails again.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:55
  unknown: Yeah.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a tricky one.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Tricky shit.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Either way, traffic is down, no doubt.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Most people have confirmed that.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: That I whether it's 15 or 89% is independent.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it is definitely changing.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is an interesting one, V, we've got coming up.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Here you go.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you're still putting QR codes in your ads, sorry, you're a moron.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: So this is from our beloved Andrew Tyndall.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: So Andrew Tyndall's verdict on marketing, uh, sorry, marketers still putting QR codes in their ads.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he says, like, you're being very moronic in doing so.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's a friend of the show, and this time I'm not going to be pushing back.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: He's right.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to name that disease that we're all seeing.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the well, if you want the take of this.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: His evidence is is quite, I don't know how to put this, quite pointed.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, connected TV scan rates fell 60% in a year to 0.004%.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: One scan per 25,000 impressions.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And when people were asked why they didn't scan, 70% said that they were just not interested.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: His real target is our obsession with shoppable media.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he grounds it in this, I guess you can kind of personify it as a canon.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: On average, 84% of purchases go to brands people already favored before they even started looking.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: So advertising job to build memory for that 95% that we keep talking about, who will buy later and not chase that 5% that are looking to buy today, which is all correct.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: But the QR code isn't the disease, it's simply the symptom.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody adds one because they think it works.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows it doesn't.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: They add it because it produces a number, a small, clean, immediate figure for a deck when brand building only offers that big, delayed, probable uh probabilistic bet instead.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's a measurement theater, he calls it.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I actually I love that phrase.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the real rot is our fear of the unmeasured.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we're just keeping you remember that periodic table from the can you say that Swedish uh marketing?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Sverge Anassur, but they're now a much simpler uh name company.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I can't remember.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's the brand marketing, Sweden.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: So that's another one.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's way easier to say now.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's brand marketing, Sweden.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Anna.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Anna.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, like the because of that, because it's something we can measure, people want to make sure that they're adding it uh to the decks.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the same story as B2B brand budget fight that we were having.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: We can't prove ROI.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you bolt on a response mechanism onto a memory medium and generate 0.004% scan rate.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's not approved.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's a note to your CFO says, hey, I I panicked.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: I hit the panic button there.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: So QR code isn't a media choice, it's a confession.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: It says you don't trust the ad to do its real job, fix that, and then you'll stop worrying about that dreaded square that you're placing on your ads.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: I I understand, but I don't agree.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in my my opinion.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just my opinion.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you know, whatever that's worth, two cents.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: But like I so much of what we're trying to prove it is uh we're trying to justify it.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think especially for non-me non-measurable mediums, traditionally non-measurable mediums.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: If you believe in TV or connected TV, um, and you can't get something more than just a number of GRPs or impressions, and you can get it from digital channels that are puking data by the second that are filling up spreadsheets full of stuff.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't mean it's a signal, it just means it's data.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's it could be just all noise.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's fair.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: But having something that allows you to go, there was some kind of response that we can measure aside from just an impression that seems almost like nobody cares about.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I think there's a whole thing around, yes, there's the right thing to do, and then there's the game you have to play to get people to believe um in the in the or see the value in the investment.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm I'm I get it, but I also am like, well, if you have to, then you have to.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it's like, does it hurt?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like, does it really hurt?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, especially because you you know this as well, but you think about a lot of these big uh uh CTV platforms or LV platforms, they have what they call pause ads.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when you pause something and then the QR code pops up, that may not be a terrible thing.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I I do see uh Andrew's point in terms of like, hey, just create better creative and people will remember you.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: I get that.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think absolutely we should be pushing for that.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: But is it really hurting the ad?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the the question.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, if I can get even that 0.004% scan rate, like it it's not a bad thing.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, but you you can't use it as like a litmus test of the creative works because people scanned.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's where it becomes that's where it becomes dangerous.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same thing that I think you see also when you have people talk about like let's say you run a reach campaign on pick whatever channel, YouTube, Facebook, it doesn't matter.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then your objective is for reach, which is the same as like TV essentially.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but then it still gives you all this other data, yeah, like a click-through rate, a CTR, and all that kind of stuff.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Even though you may not be optimizing for that, it still gives it to you.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think the the problem is that because you're you've optimized for one thing, but you get all the data for this, all these other things that are happening, it conflates the interpretation of what success looks like.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: And you could start optimizing for a click-through rate when you never intended it to have a click-through rate.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's like this is the one of the challenges I think that we have.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's almost too much information in a lot of ways.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think um a lot of it isn't valuable.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't know.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much on even like there's this, I think I sent you this link that I found from a study sponsored by measured and then Meta, and how they're doing incrementality analysis.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And like essentially last click attribution they're saying is basically dumb.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And don't do and so then you have to think about what incrementality is and then how to measure that if you want to measure the like test and control markets, like you have to do that to and that's a new thing for them to say this meta specifically, because everything they said before was all about you know the things they can measure.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: What does a platform say?
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, you know, you know where I struggle a little bit with that, and I'm not I don't disagree, right?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Last click is terrible, we shouldn't do it, absolutely not.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: But where sometimes the trap exists is when you need to report on something in the moment.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: And unless you have multi-touch attribution set up where you can confidently, you know, use that, a lot of orgs simply go up into their Adobe dashboards, not the platform dashboards, Adobe dashboards, and they're literally pulling numbers from there, which is all last click.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I I don't disagree.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you can circumvent how do you report in real time through a different lens.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if it is MTA, you know, good on you, keep going.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: But people will always default to that.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And most organizations still only have last click set up in those dashboards, which by the way, has especially these larger enterprise companies, they still have all their other data there.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: So it's still the source of truth for the company, and then they're simply just pulling a report on paid, paid's contribution, what channel showed up, and it's always going to be search.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where you know we're we're kind of caught in the middle here, uh, because there isn't that discipline on getting out of it.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's still a reality.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: All right, final story.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: My story.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody in your company owns demand, V.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what really interesting post from Matt Georgson this week on LinkedIn.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Smart guy.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Smart guy.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, really thoughtful.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he says, nobody in your company owns demand.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought this was really interesting.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: If he positioned it this way, where if you ask who decides which customers you compete for, what you offer them, and at what price, and then where they can buy it.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: In most companies, that's four distinct different people.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And marketing's rarely one of them.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: Marketing gets actually uh most cases isn't involved in any of those decisions, it's involved in a fifth decision, which is communication.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's a reference to a study here uh from two Dutch marketing professors that that asked 213 executives to split 100 points across departments for every decision.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: And marketing got 69 points out of 100 on advertising, but only got 20 on pricing and 18 on distribution.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: So if you line that up with what actually moves sales, um they there's another study where they tracked um 70 packaged good brands in France between 1999 and 2004.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: 1% increase in distribution moves sales roughly six times more over the following year than a 1% increase in advertising.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the levers that were that we have to pull is as a remit that says you're running ads is less, has less strength or less power than some of these other distribution channels.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: So um everybody's kind of doing it's almost like if you think about a renovation project, there's all these people that are working together when it's working really well and when there's a general contractor that's overseeing it.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: But if everybody is just individual contractors, and we talked about You know, part of the reason behind the sleeping barber idea is like connecting the the or making connections between silos.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't have that, then every contractor is just working on their own thing and they show up whenever they want and they do whatever they want without any kind of coordination, which leads to less impact.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the next time you see someone asks um someone ask marketing for more leads, um, ask who signed off on what you sell, who you sell it to, and what you can charge.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: And if it ends up being that there's all these different people involved, then and really it's like the leads were probably not the major problem.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: It may not be the only thing you need to resolve.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you think, V?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, does the CMO have to be invested in making those four decisions?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Or um or what's the role of marketing, or what should the role of marketing be?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it comes back to, and I know you and I are both big believers in in the four Ps, right?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we believe marketing should be close to all of them.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: I know that the discipline marketing has moved away from a lot of those more, you know, owning the four P's.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think we need to own the four P's.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: We just need to be close to them.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is another one of those examples where it should be a byproduct of strategic conversations that you're having across those four areas.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: And now, hey, market, here's where we need you to step in, right?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: What this sounds like is a complete disconnect where we're saying that demand, sure, we don't actually, you know, the the whole idea of marketing doesn't generate demand, that's on you either, right?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh who was it?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Was it um James Herman?
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: I know he he spoke about that.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think even earlier we've had other people that speak to that idea that, hey, marketing's not there to, you know, generate demand.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: What it's there is to capture existing demand and make your own product or service top of mind for a specific category entry point.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: So this example here, I just feel it it's again a little bit on us making sure that we're close enough to the rest of the organization to help stitch that together without being, you know, uh owning it.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I I I don't want to oversimplify here, but you don't have to own these elements.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to be close enough to ensure help identify the role.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I think yeah, and uh to build on what you're saying too, like I we've we've I think all of us have lived this experience where everybody's got an opinion on marketing and how it works.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: We need to have an opinion on price product place.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like we just have to, because those things all affect everyone's asking us for what's the return and what we're doing, but it's so dependent on all these other things that we can't not have an opinion on these other things because there's like it they're codependent, they're not independent variables that you just you know, you give marketing money to advertise, and everything is just gonna drive sales.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's so many other factors involved.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I think that's it's on us to it's great for us to build more conversations around the other elements.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: I agree with that.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: So now V.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Did you get a chance to see it?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because I've yeah.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: A little bit.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't I haven't seen the whole thing.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna watch it real quick right now.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna I'm gonna kick off as you watch it, you're probably gonna like bust a gut, and it's it's and it's okay.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I found uh this one, it's called Tubin.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's from Tubi, it's called Faking It.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a 30-second spot, and it's essentially part of a one in nine films as a part of their first real global campaign that's they've dubbed Find Any Feeling for Free.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the agency behind this is mischief, and the whole idea is the ridiculous lengths people go to feel something when Tubi will give you all the same feeling for free in fake in it.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, this specific ad that I chose, the feeling of being adored and a woman staging her own funeral to get it.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's very dark, it's very funny, and completely on strategy.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, why I chose this one?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it sells the feeling, not the features, not the title dumps, or not not the thousands of movies, uh, the no price or just raw emotion delivered through craft and a genuinely uncomfortable laugh.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't know, as you're watching it, I remember when I watched it, I didn't know how to react originally.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Then I watched it again, then it was just like, okay, this is this is pretty funny.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: So it's emotional, it's attention earning.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, Benefield and Orlando Wood keep telling us it's what actually compounds.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the premise is even smarter than it looks.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Those feelings are essentially category entry points.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: What do I feel tonight is the real trigger that sends someone to watch something.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Tubi is planting its flag into that idea of feeling, not their catalog.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the way you can pressure test this is it's a classic risk with a spot that is good with the the gag outrunning the brand.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: So if people retell the funeral bit at a dinner party, but they can't name who created it, the memory doesn't, you know, is essentially didn't deposit into the bank.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: So watch the branding discipline.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Does Tubi show up early enough and often enough with distinctive assets that the laughs attaches it to them, which I don't think they do uh a great job of really tying it to themselves on faking it alone?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's the one thing I'd probably want to see land a little bit better.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: But and that's your out of the week.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's it's good, it's funny.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: It like I'm with you.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like the part that I I missed because I was I had watched it a few times um with sound off, weirdly.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's remember uh what's that guy's name that we met from Nuremberg Bass Institute?
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm totally drawing a blank on his name.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, he's got this uh brand or brew thing that he does on LinkedIn.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's so good.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: I actually need to do it.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's really interesting.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: I totally forget I'm drawing a blank on his name.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, um they look at commercials or look at like a sp uh like an ad, and then they try and guess, and they kind of zoom in and they then they or they watch the ad if it's a video and then they zoom out of the ad if it's static, so you can kind of see the thing come to life.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: Or if it's a video, they do watch it and then they're just guessing what the brand is.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really interesting when you're watching them because they they're watching it kind of with sound off, I think, in some cases.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we're trying to figure out what the brand is.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I I was doing that when I was watching this at first because I had no idea what the brand is, other than in the like description, yeah, it says Tubi.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: But like the video itself, I have there's no there's no brand linkage there.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm kind of like, yeah, but it's funny for sure.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's hilarious, yeah.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's really funny.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so it's a good idea, I think.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: The execution of it though, just thinking about distinctive brand assets and all that, I'm like, yeah, they think they need to they deserve the credit for what they did, and they just don't give it to themselves.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the part where I think we there's a general idea about advertising that you somehow can't link it to yourself or somebody shouldn't take credit.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what that is.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it's their first real global campaign.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if that's a pretty big miss.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's a pretty big miss.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: But it's really good.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like the the it's entertaining, it's good, it's funny, all those kinds of things.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I think it just needs to be, yeah.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: They they shouldn't miss the the brand part.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, Mark, what's coming up later this week?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: We have uh we have a murder mystery V coming up.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's the first murder mystery.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: We're getting it.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: We're getting in yeah, we're getting into the whole uh murder podcast thing.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's gonna be great.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Who killed the clique?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: Dun dun dun dun.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's really yeah, it's gonna be an emotional roller coaster.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's lots of twists and turns.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, who done it?
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: Who done on the history of a click and where how do we get to where we are today?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: Looking forward to that one.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's a few suspects, and you know, I don't want to give anything away.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: You will be the jury and you will decide who done it.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then exactly.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we also have a great interview as well.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, who killed Target?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Who killed?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: I tell you you're on fire today, man.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we've got Omar Ruby coming back to share his story and and his insights on this fascinating case study with Target Canada.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And literally a company that was too big to fail, except that they did.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: Except that they did.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a great case study.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like we were talking about the four Ps before.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like a case study in ROI, but in reverse, starting from what all the things that went wrong and how you couldn't have proven our ROI.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how you how Target messed up across all four Ps, essentially.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was such a fascinating story because you could see how much had to go wrong for it to fail and how much went wrong to fail.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was crazy.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And Omar has an interesting line of sight of this because his uh his wife, his partner, uh was actually working for Target at the time and was responsible for opening some of the stores here in Canada.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, and he's an accountant, so he's invalid, he's doing the analysis based on like an accounting lens.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh great.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's a great, great uh inside story, inside scoop on the whole Target mess.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, can't wait to get that out to everybody.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: And with that, me, that's our Barbara's brief for this week.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for keeping us in yours, everyone.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: Stay sharp, everybody.