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SBP 242: The Barber's Brief - Sydney Sweeney Is Famous. Novig Isn't. · Sleeping Barber - A Marketing Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sleeping Barber Podcast.
0:03
SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to the Sleeping Barber Podcast.
0:05
SPEAKER_01: And on this episode, it is our Barber's Brief.
0:08
SPEAKER_01: Now, if you're a new listener around here, Mark and I like to use this to help discuss things that have caught our attention over the last couple weeks.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: The good, the bad, the ugly.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: We also highlight our out of the week at the end because you know, at the end of the day, great creative still deserves the last word.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: Mark, good morning.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: How you feeling, buddy?
0:26
SPEAKER_02: Good morning, V.
0:27
SPEAKER_02: I'm pretty good.
0:28
SPEAKER_02: I'm really good, actually.
0:29
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, things are things are rocking and rolling, as they say.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: I know it hasn't happened yet.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: I'm a little worried about this daylight savings time being like pitch black when we it's already dark when we start these things, but it's gonna be even darker for longer.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: But that's just around the corner, isn't it?
0:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, we're not switching this year, which is gonna be a bit of a thing.
0:48
SPEAKER_02: Exactly, right?
0:49
SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
0:50
SPEAKER_01: Anyways, into the news.
0:51
SPEAKER_01: What'd you find?
0:52
SPEAKER_02: So interesting.
0:53
SPEAKER_02: So I got an email this week that made me think about this one.
0:56
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I've and I'm part of this, so I wanted to just find out how common this is.
1:01
SPEAKER_02: But the idea that, and we've talked a little bit about AI cutting, being an impact on the size and scale of marketing teams.
1:08
SPEAKER_02: And so it's interesting because I'm using AI like you and like a lot of people all the time.
1:15
SPEAKER_02: And I'm in it all the time.
1:17
SPEAKER_02: The idea of it being a tool for efficiency is interesting because yes, it does help on the productivity side on a lot of things, but I'm not getting any less busy.
1:27
SPEAKER_02: My calendar is so full, and I'm I'm probably doing more.
1:32
SPEAKER_02: So maybe that's like maybe my productivity is going up.
1:36
SPEAKER_02: I I guess maybe that's the thing.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:39
SPEAKER_02: And so I'm actually doing a lot of this work with clients now, and even with the marketing association, I'm setting up AI tools and processes for work that they normally hire people to do.
1:48
SPEAKER_02: So I kind of want to look at the pattern and see if it's out there and you know what's happening.
1:53
SPEAKER_02: So it is happening a lot, and some of the things that were a bit surprising.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: So winter, they run some research panels, or they did a research panel with B2B marketers.
2:02
SPEAKER_02: They asked a hundred marketing leaders about this, and close to half had already shrunk their teams because of AI.
2:08
SPEAKER_02: But almost none of it was a layoff.
2:10
SPEAKER_02: So it was open roles that they just quietly never filled.
2:12
SPEAKER_02: So someone leaves and the job never comes back, the team just kind of shrinks through attrition more than anything else.
2:18
SPEAKER_02: But nobody's announcing this as a thing.
2:21
SPEAKER_02: And then there's the other half of the story, which there's this company organization called the Orb AG or Orb View, sorry, a workforce planning firm, and they surveyed a thousand senior executives.
2:31
SPEAKER_02: And of the ones who made people redundant because of AI, more than half now say that they got it wrong.
2:38
SPEAKER_02: And then there's famously the meta thing that they were rehiring and removing people back into management roles.
2:44
SPEAKER_02: The separate survey from Robert, half that I had discovered.
2:48
SPEAKER_02: There's a staff, they're a staffing firm, found about a third of the hiring managers cut a role for AI, had hired somebody back into it.
2:54
SPEAKER_02: Klarna was a big example that I found.
2:56
SPEAKER_02: And it was they cut around 700 support roles, handed the work to a chatbot, and essentially, and then the CO went on record saying that they really had gone too far.
3:06
SPEAKER_02: Their costs had driven the decision and quality suffered.
3:10
SPEAKER_02: And then they started hiring people back.
3:11
SPEAKER_02: It's in customer service, not marketing, but the idea is still the same.
3:15
SPEAKER_02: So first, figure out what the people were actually doing second, and then rehire them back after it's not working, is kind of the pattern.
3:23
SPEAKER_02: So, V, question for you.
3:25
SPEAKER_02: If cuts are invisible and reversals are quiet, how would any of us know whether this is actually working?
3:31
SPEAKER_02: Just a light softball question for you.
3:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for two things in the morning.
3:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: Man, you're so first of all, I've seen similar stories come up where there's a lot of organizations now that are hey, oops, I think we we've gone a little too far on this.
3:45
SPEAKER_01: It reminds you a little bit of like the performance marketing case studies that started coming out, I don't know, shortly after 2018, 2019, where you had people saying, hey, we we need to start reinvesting in brands.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: So I think the same thing.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: I here's the other side of this, though, and this is just my opinion.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: I'm not surprised, but at the same time, I'm also not worried because at the end of the day, what ends up happening is businesses are gonna do what they need to do and try to push the limits of what either the art of the possible is or trying to find that efficiency.
4:16
SPEAKER_01: At some point, these systems just simply break because they just can't keep up with the demand on their own without having some sort of supervision.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you know, it's too bad that people were let go and now they're being rehired.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: I think it's just part of the process of us adopting and understanding a new technology.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: So we can be very it's very easy for us to sit on the other side and say, Oh, we told you so, like it's not gonna replace replace jobs.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: That's like maybe they wouldn't have known if they hadn't done that.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: So now they know exactly what they need.
4:46
SPEAKER_01: So maybe this actually helps accelerate some of these organizations further because they know what the limitations of the technology actually is, because they tested it, and maybe they rehired for a different role now instead.
4:57
SPEAKER_01: So I don't I don't know.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: I think it's just part of the process.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:02
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
5:03
SPEAKER_02: Fair enough.
5:03
SPEAKER_02: I don't know that anybody knows that so well.
5:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's true.
5:07
SPEAKER_02: It's it's a tough one.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: It's it is a really tough one.
5:10
SPEAKER_02: I think the one thing that is fair to say is that and not just in marketing, like my wife's an accountant, and she's like there's a whole bunch of people that are looking at a AI and you know, how are we gonna use cloud for what we're doing?
5:22
SPEAKER_02: And in a lot of ways, I think even in other business functions like accounting, where there's more rules, it's actually easier.
5:30
SPEAKER_01: It might be easier, yeah.
5:30
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
5:31
SPEAKER_02: Things like the AA tools.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
5:33
SPEAKER_02: Where there's a gap.
5:35
SPEAKER_02: You can follow all the rules.
5:36
SPEAKER_01: Maybe there's a less chance of hallucination in those worlds too, right?
5:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: Because they're really strict in the guardrails and the guidelines.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
5:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
5:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
5:44
SPEAKER_01: Anyways, interesting.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: Fascinating.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: So, V, what do you got?
5:47
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
5:47
SPEAKER_01: Well, funny that our stories, I think, match a little bit.
5:51
SPEAKER_01: So the title of this next one that caught my attention was some companies are using ads to influence AI agents.
5:56
SPEAKER_01: And here's a sentence I didn't expect to say in 2026.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: Brands are now buying ads aimed at robots, not people, the software that shops for people.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:08
SPEAKER_01: This is crazy.
6:08
SPEAKER_01: So I found this in uh marketing brew.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: Time magazine is serving agent ads, rerouting AI crawlers to a page of brand verified facts, so the model banks them in its knowledge layer.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: The pitch around this is some days bots out will outnumber humans, and AI referred buyers convert higher and arrive further down the funnel.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: So two things that are being smudged together in my pre in my opinion.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: First of all, making sure that the model has your facts straight, so it doesn't invent your own founding date.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: Cheap, sensible, do it Monday.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: And then of course, there's this big hype, right?
6:46
SPEAKER_01: A whole new ad machine for a channel that companies themselves call nascent.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: But that killer stat, higher conversion further down the funnel, we've heard that song before, haven't we?
6:57
SPEAKER_01: The agent isn't creating demand, it's harvesting demand.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: The agent isn't the new so it's almost feels like that agent's now becoming that new last click model that we've all been trying to move away from.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: Ask the model to buy me something good or the best one or whatever the case may be.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: And it reaches for the brand that it already knows.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: Some same as the human.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: So brand building matters more here, not even less.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: So when we come down to like what do we need to be thinking about, or you know, kind of like my take on all of this is feed the machine the clean stats, but the agent picks the brand that it already knows.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: Famous, distinctive, correctly remembered.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: That's still the whole the whole game here at play.
7:39
SPEAKER_01: And we've just added now a second brain to be remembered by, which is I don't know, man.
7:45
SPEAKER_01: We've I don't know.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: We've seen this, we've seen this song before.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: But um the question from from from me to you on this is like is advert is advertising to agents the real a real new channel, or are we just literally evolving what last click looks like and we're building it for robots?
8:02
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a good question.
8:04
SPEAKER_02: I like this is the two audience problem that I first we heard about in Cannes when we were listening to David Tiltman talk.
8:12
SPEAKER_02: They've done some research on this, and so you've got two different audiences with two different, like a human audience and a robot audience.
8:19
SPEAKER_02: And it used to be that bots were bad.
8:22
SPEAKER_02: And so bots now aren't necessarily bad, they can be good also.
8:26
SPEAKER_02: And so the kinds of content and the kinds of material that a bot wants to see, and that a bot will like a an agent will will find and remember is different from the information that a human is gonna need.
8:41
SPEAKER_02: So there's almost in every single campaign now, in addition to all the channels, there actually is two distinct audiences.
8:47
SPEAKER_02: There's the the agent bot and then there's the human.
8:51
SPEAKER_01: Totally.
8:51
SPEAKER_02: So it's interesting because I think in a lot of ways, this is just to answer your question specifically.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: I think this is a lot about Elastic Ruild.
9:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
9:01
SPEAKER_02: The age from what we know so far, and this is gonna evolve.
9:04
SPEAKER_02: I by the way, have you done any advertising on like Chat GPT yet or any of that kind of stuff?
9:10
SPEAKER_01: Pilot coming soon.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: Yes, almost there.
9:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
9:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm curious about that.
9:14
SPEAKER_02: Like I'm looking into this for a couple clients and who want to try it out.
9:18
SPEAKER_02: But so it'll be interesting to see what those models look like.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: But I I suspect this is gonna look a lot like regular ads that just gets served up initially at least, served up initially in that.
9:30
SPEAKER_02: And because I don't know that we're really at a tipping point where agents are the dominant no, we're not there yet.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: Purchaser.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: No, that's fair.
9:39
SPEAKER_02: So I think it will start really slowly and then build, but I think ultimately it gets built from a last click attribution model, probably.
9:46
SPEAKER_02: Hopefully, it gets a bit smarter.
9:48
SPEAKER_02: But it's at the start, I don't know how else maybe the surprise it'll be really surprising and how it it gets done, but it I feel like that's the path to least resistance that probably most people have some understanding of.
9:59
SPEAKER_02: So they can't build something that's so foreign that people won't get it.
10:03
unknown: Yeah.
10:04
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I think that's my take on this.
10:06
SPEAKER_02: The the what we also know about bots is that it's gonna pull towards the middle, the mean, the mode.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: The move.
10:13
SPEAKER_02: And so brand big brands are gonna win there for sure because they've got a bigger footprint and they've got more uh digital breadcrumbs leading back to them, and the brand strength is higher.
10:23
SPEAKER_02: So, like, yeah, double jeopardy law of growth here we go again.
10:27
SPEAKER_02: We'll yeah, we'll just keep playing out over and over again.
10:30
SPEAKER_02: Totally.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: All right, what'd you find next?
10:32
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so this one tariffs are squeezing margins.
10:36
SPEAKER_02: So this there's a whole bunch of this is not just one news story, but I think it this is also not a political conversation.
10:43
SPEAKER_02: So, right or wrong, I actually don't care, to be honest.
10:47
SPEAKER_02: It's just the situation that businesses are in on both sides of the borders.
10:50
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, just for people who aren't familiar with what's going on.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: So the US had tariffs on a range of Canadian goods in August, then Canada retaliated, well, even going before that, and it just keeps ramping up.
11:04
SPEAKER_02: And so, and earlier this week, then the US put a ban on some Canadian goods, and then there's even higher tariffs on some other products.
11:11
SPEAKER_02: So it's just an interesting conversation and an interesting like exp thing uh for us to marketers to think about.
11:18
SPEAKER_02: Because if your products are on that ban list, you just lost an entire market overnight.
11:22
SPEAKER_02: And so that's when we talk about mental and physical availability, that's an incredible example of physical availability and the importance of it.
11:31
SPEAKER_02: And so how easy you are to find and buy, it just disappears in one go.
11:35
SPEAKER_02: And so there's no real amount of advertising that can fix that.
11:39
SPEAKER_02: So, really, the job there is is more about finding new places to sell.
11:44
SPEAKER_02: But for those businesses that are still have goods moving across the border and still are able to do trade, this doesn't show up as cust to customers as their products are disappearing, it shows up as margin pressure.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: And so there's lots of conversation about that.
11:58
SPEAKER_02: So the costs go up because of these tariffs on both sides, uh, and then you have to decide how much to swallow and how much to pass on.
12:05
SPEAKER_02: And so, from a marketing point of view, I think this is an interesting conversation because there's a lot of good evidence that brand strength decides how much you can pass on.
12:14
SPEAKER_02: So Bennett and Field um, you know, found that brands that invest in brand building uh have customers who are much less sensitive to price.
12:24
SPEAKER_02: Um, there's a great case.
12:26
SPEAKER_02: So that was you know, some of the work that they had done with um short and long of it, but there's a great case study from uh that Bennett had actually done with McCain's on the when the chips are down, looking at price sensitivity over nine years for a brand that they worked on.
12:41
SPEAKER_02: Some really great stuff there.
12:43
SPEAKER_02: But there's another bit of research as well that I think is interesting and like around how you communicate this to customers.
12:49
SPEAKER_02: So research on price fairness shows that people judge the reason behind an increase more than the size of the increase.
12:57
SPEAKER_02: So if you name the actual cause plainly and it reads as a fairer statement, then it could be an advantage.
13:04
SPEAKER_02: So the when margins get squeezed, and marketing is usually the first budget to cut, we've talked about that a lot.
13:10
SPEAKER_02: But if your brand is what lets you hold your price, is cutting your marketing the most expensive decision you can make.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: Well, I I if I think about if you're putting this question around the the tariffs and and things like that, yeah, absolutely.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: And and maybe this could live outside of that.
13:26
SPEAKER_01: Because when you're losing, like I think your example is is is perfect where you know overnight you can literally lose a large part of your your consumer base, a physical availability that was there and wasn't there.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: All of a sudden now what happens is like sho you need to create a new communication engine that's focused on the region you can speak to, whether that being you're in a US-based company now you lost Canadians or Canadian-based company now losing Americans.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: You have to refocus that.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: So if there's one thing that we know is making sure you become top of mind, is making sure you're still generating the awareness that's needed.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: So you're right.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: Usually when margins get squeezed, marketing reduces its its spend.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: But this is where you have to fight tooth and nail in making sure that you're having those conversations at the table to ensure that you can still make sure you can get that message out there.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, absolutely.
14:16
SPEAKER_01: It would absolutely be the most expensive mistake you can make.
14:20
SPEAKER_01: Because let's not forget, there's also a lot more pride associated to this today.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: You see, like there's consumers here, and we I as a we're both Canadian, and I think we can speak about it from the Canadian lens, is the prioritization of a lot of Canadian-based companies.
14:34
SPEAKER_01: It has become a thing.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of websites, there's a lot of news uh news stories that get populated around this.
14:42
SPEAKER_01: So there's an opportunity there, but if you're not being present when the consumer is looking for you or looking for services like yours, I think that's where you could fall.
14:52
SPEAKER_02: I think it's fair too to say that there's probably equal amount of nationalistic patriotism, that kind of approach on the buy USA side too.
15:01
SPEAKER_02: Like I totally get that.
15:03
SPEAKER_02: Like on either end, I think if it's interesting, yeah, like we've we've created this global system of trade that kind of was was making things really cheap.
15:13
SPEAKER_02: And it and we're now changing that global system so the marketing communication can help support like the re the rationale and the reasons why things are changing.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, totally.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: Couldn't agree more.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: All right, my final story how advertisers are adjusting to meta's ad creative diversification best practices.
15:33
SPEAKER_01: Back on the marketing brew here for this one.
15:35
SPEAKER_01: But Meta's now grading your ads on whether they look different enough from each other.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: Same hook, same look, and the algorithm calls it one ad and buries it.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: So per marketing brew here, Meta's latest best practices tell advertisers to diversify creative to rank fresh hooks, mix video and static, vary the tone.
15:57
SPEAKER_01: Reuse an opening or look, and the engine will simply treat it as the same creative, which is not something that you know we would expect.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: Meta frames it as an outcome-based diversified test and let the system optimize.
16:10
SPEAKER_01: So let the algos do their thing for you.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: And says recent model changes lifted ad clicks by 8.3%.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: And we all know how much we love ad clicks on this podcast.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: Problem is that the that's the opposite of how brands get built.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: Distinctiveness runs on consistency, the same colors, characters, and codes repeated until the human knows you in half a second.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: So marketers get bored with their own assets long before the consumers do.
16:35
SPEAKER_01: And now we have Meta is basically telling us like, get bored faster.
16:40
SPEAKER_01: This like, why are you still running this?
16:42
SPEAKER_01: You should be changing every week.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: Uh diversify, or as they put it, diversify, we won't rank you.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: So it rewards novelty and punishes the exact repetition that builds memory.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: Like more clicks is a meta win metric, right?
16:59
SPEAKER_01: Not proof that your brand actually grew.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: Now, to be fair, there's a sane version.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: Vary the execution, keep the assets, test a hundred hooks, but make sure your logo's there, your colors and characters are stayed locked.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: Variety in delivery, I think there is some there's something to that, but consistency in what makes you you is probably the most important thing.
17:21
SPEAKER_01: And I think the biggest mistake a lot of advertisers can take at this is like mixing up the look and feel of your brand into ditch that look people remember.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: We don't want Tropicana here being re happening all over again, even though it's a little different.
17:35
SPEAKER_01: But everyone gets it here.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: So, Mark, for you, where's the line between healthy creative testing and then letting the algorithms quietly erode your distinctive assets?
17:46
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
17:47
SPEAKER_02: I I think this is the line.
17:48
SPEAKER_02: This is it's here.
17:51
SPEAKER_02: This is the line.
17:52
SPEAKER_02: I I I really like we've talked about this thing a little bit with Andromeda and and like metasome recommendations are so interesting.
18:00
SPEAKER_02: No, because to win, they're now suggesting open up your targeting wide.
18:04
SPEAKER_02: Just give us all the creative, all the multiple iterations of creative, and we'll we'll let you special sauce do your the work.
18:11
SPEAKER_02: And we'll yeah, we got you.
18:13
SPEAKER_02: So and and we talked about this even in the last thing where we who killed the click.
18:17
SPEAKER_02: A click used to mean something specific, and it's taken on all kinds of meaning.
18:22
SPEAKER_02: So when we're talking about increasing a click rate of 8.3%, 8.3% more clicks is yeah, your point was awesome.
18:30
SPEAKER_02: Is that is that your win or is it Meta's win?
18:33
SPEAKER_02: The one thing that Meta has never really done, or Google has never really done, is build like a really great incrementality test.
18:42
SPEAKER_02: I know.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
18:43
SPEAKER_02: They could do that or build in media mixed modeling for the for clients at at a really reasonable rate, but they're building stuff that it there's there's like more data that shows up all the time.
18:55
SPEAKER_02: And so they're leaning into that need for us to have data, but the data isn't actually the answer.
19:01
SPEAKER_02: The data's dumb.
19:03
SPEAKER_02: Like data doesn't give you an answer, it just gives you more data.
19:07
SPEAKER_02: Like, and then you know, we've had this conversation a bunch where you're showing up with the executive team and they're like, Yeah, so did it work?
19:13
SPEAKER_02: And we're like, actually, good question.
19:15
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
19:16
SPEAKER_02: I just got more clicks.
19:17
SPEAKER_02: What are you asking me for?
19:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, just talking about the click through rates.
19:21
SPEAKER_02: What are you talking about?
19:22
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: No, it's it's spot on.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: Again, I think we we just as marketers, there's a lot of research behind, and there's probably gonna become more.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: We just gotta stay close to this and understand what's the real job that needs to be done here, and don't measure your output simply by what the platform is telling you that it generated more clicks.
19:38
SPEAKER_02: It's like Yeah.
19:40
SPEAKER_02: I'm really fixated in this idea of doing no harm.
19:43
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like at the Hippocratic O thing.
19:45
SPEAKER_02: And it it it to me, your question around is it eroding your distinctive assets?
19:50
SPEAKER_02: I really worry about what we're doing.
19:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, me too.
19:53
SPEAKER_02: I think if we're just following the algorithms and we're building all kinds of different versions of creative and none of it looks the same, and you're penalized because none of it looks the same.
20:03
SPEAKER_02: Or you're penalized when it does look the same.
20:05
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, I'm just concerned that we're doing a lot of harm.
20:08
SPEAKER_02: And we won't know for five years, ten years until Meta tells us, whoops, sorry, that didn't work.
20:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no case.
20:12
SPEAKER_01: That was true.
20:13
SPEAKER_01: Then it's gonna make us all look dumb.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, here we'll be here for it.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: All right, it's time for let's go.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: I know you've probably seen the headline on this one, but have you ever heard of Novig?
20:24
SPEAKER_02: Well, I have now, hadn't before.
20:28
SPEAKER_02: So I bring that up, and maybe for you listener, I I can I the name's not that familiar to me.
20:34
SPEAKER_02: Sydney Sweeney, though, is very famous, but Novig is not, I would say.
20:39
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
20:39
SPEAKER_02: And so there's this new Sydney Sweeney campaign that came out.
20:43
SPEAKER_02: It it's a couple weeks old.
20:44
SPEAKER_02: But Sydney Sweeney had had done a thing with Novig, and it's a sports betting app, and you've probably seen it or seen some of the press around it.
20:52
SPEAKER_02: You've also probably seen the commentary and arguments around it.
20:56
SPEAKER_02: So I'm gonna leave the comments around whether it's sexist or not sexist and all that kind of stuff aside.
21:01
SPEAKER_02: Like that and all valid points.
21:03
SPEAKER_02: That's that's not the thing I really want to focus on, though.
21:06
SPEAKER_02: Novig's CEO said the goal of this was to force the company into a national conversation, and so they got that.
21:11
SPEAKER_02: And my question is really about whether the brand actually they got a brand out of it or not.
21:16
SPEAKER_02: So I wanted to start with creative.
21:18
SPEAKER_02: So using the crafts test that we had talked to rethink about in their model, crafts.
21:23
SPEAKER_02: So I just want to walk through this.
21:24
SPEAKER_02: So crafts is clear, relevant, achievable, fresh, and true, and shareable.
21:29
SPEAKER_02: So clear.
21:30
SPEAKER_02: So the message Novig is just sports, no betting on wars of politics.
21:35
SPEAKER_02: So we'll come back to that in a minute.
21:37
SPEAKER_02: Relevant.
21:38
SPEAKER_02: So to their buyers, yes, I would say sports generally is is sports betting specifically, heavily skews mail.
21:46
SPEAKER_02: And system one found that men loved it.
21:50
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, that check mark there.
21:52
SPEAKER_02: Achievable, so check mark on that one as well.
21:56
SPEAKER_02: So they it clearly got made and it ran everywhere.
21:59
SPEAKER_02: Uh they got a lot of.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Pickup for it fresh?
22:01
SPEAKER_02: Probably not.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: Like the idea of using a nearly naked woman to sell something to men is really about as old as advertising gets.
22:08
SPEAKER_02: So that's not really that unique.
22:10
SPEAKER_02: True.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: So this is where I think it is strongest.
22:14
SPEAKER_02: So Noveg is a sports only, and Sydney Sweeney had said she was uncomfortable with platforms that let you bet on things like wars.
22:22
SPEAKER_02: So I think that's probably true.
22:24
SPEAKER_02: Shareable off the charts got lots of like pickup and all that kind of stuff.
22:29
SPEAKER_02: So passes a lot of that test.
22:31
SPEAKER_02: But the whole is really in the brand part.
22:33
SPEAKER_02: And I think when we use something like Jenny Romanick's Distinctive Assets grid, she's from the Airburg-Bass Institute.
22:39
SPEAKER_02: So you you look at this grid that they've got, and you score anything a brand uses, a logo, character, famous face on two things.
22:47
SPEAKER_02: So fame, when people see it, do they think of your brand and uniqueness?
22:51
SPEAKER_02: Do they think of anyone else's?
22:53
SPEAKER_02: So Sydney Sweeney is really famous, but not famous for Novig.
22:58
SPEAKER_02: And she's tied to a lot of other things.
23:00
SPEAKER_02: Just last year, we were talking about her because of the American Eagle ad that was controversial.
23:05
SPEAKER_02: There's a boxing movie that I can think of that shows up in her career.
23:09
SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't know all the things she's been in her career, but like I know she's a movie person, she's got something to do with genes, and like, and then there's also the sports betting app.
23:16
SPEAKER_02: So when I first saw this ad, I actually thought it was something for American Eagle.
23:19
SPEAKER_02: I thought they were doing a reboot.
23:21
SPEAKER_02: I'd never heard of Novig.
23:22
SPEAKER_02: And and then when System tested it, they found the same thing.
23:25
SPEAKER_02: People remembered her, not necessarily the company.
23:28
SPEAKER_02: And then the wider research really backs that up.
23:30
SPEAKER_02: The celebrity in the first two seconds of an ad gets attention, but most almost nothing to tell people whose ad it is.
23:38
SPEAKER_02: So for me, the other part that's frustrating is that the just sports is a real point of difference.
23:44
SPEAKER_02: That's what Novig could have built something on.
23:46
SPEAKER_02: And it got buried underneath the celebrity part in my mind.
23:50
SPEAKER_02: So if you put a celebrity in your ad and you give them something only you own to carry, you have to do that.
23:56
SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, you're building their brand and not yours.
24:00
SPEAKER_02: So V, she also took a stake in the company and they didn't say how much they she got paid for this.
24:05
SPEAKER_02: But certainly equity isn't free.
24:07
SPEAKER_02: If people remember her and not Novig, did they save money, Novig, or do they just pay with a piece of company instead?
24:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, what I what we don't know is what's coming next.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: I think they took a shortcut.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: They took a shortcut right now.
24:22
SPEAKER_01: Novig people know of Novig right now, maybe not in the buying situation.
24:27
SPEAKER_01: So if we kind of think about you're trying to make sure you increase mental availability against specific category entrepreneurial in our buying situation, they didn't do that with Sydney Sweeney.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: What they did though is take a shortcut and say, well, we're gonna latch on ourselves to Sydney.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: She's controversy, we're gonna get a lot of press around this, we're gonna get a lot of visits.
24:46
SPEAKER_01: It may not generate the outcome up front, but it's gonna create the track some level of traction.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: And what we don't know is how their communication engine is now around, say, are we seeing them live sports games?
25:00
SPEAKER_01: Are we seeing like the connection to the actual game?
25:03
SPEAKER_01: Because if they do that, then I would argue this may work in the long run because they accelerated the who they are, and now they're trying to marry with Novig being part of live games, their communication strategy is around a lot of the sports that obviously that they'll feature as a sports betting app.
25:22
SPEAKER_01: And because I've worked in this space in in the past, it's actually not.
25:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I always forget that you worked in this space.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: So I f I like I honestly found this quite fascinating.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: I think it's a great moment because other I used to work for bwin.com back in Europe, and their point of entry was always sponsorship of major clubs.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: That's was the thing, the shirt sponsor soccer jerseys and stuff.
25:42
SPEAKER_02: Soccer jerseys, football jerseys.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: They would they would sponsor like basketball leagues, they would do all this stuff.
25:47
SPEAKER_01: So they were like where the sport was happening, but they built that equity over time, over years, right?
25:52
SPEAKER_01: And I think Novik's just taking a shortcut right now.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: But again, in absence of the the evolution of their communication strategy, I would argue, yes, you're they're probably this probably won't go very far.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: But I don't wanna I don't wanna pre I don't wanna put a nail in a coffin just yet, because this could turn out to be actually quite genius if they're able to marry this buzz that's been created, whether negative or positive.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm not here to judge that either.
26:19
SPEAKER_01: But it is in the conversation, but now all of a sudden consumers get to see it in the field of play on jerseys and stuff like that, then it actually might work.
26:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
26:28
SPEAKER_02: I think that's the thing.
26:29
SPEAKER_02: Even like we this is the thing that we've when we've revisited American Eagle, it's been that conversation.
26:35
SPEAKER_02: It could work.
26:36
SPEAKER_02: It could work in the short term, it probably did work for them.
26:39
SPEAKER_02: I know there's lots of different opinions about that, but yeah, it really is about the longevity of it, like sticking to something.
26:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
26:48
SPEAKER_02: Not to Sidney Sweeney is the same thing as the Geico Gecko, but like I think there's a durability there that you need to that you need to in order to make that ownership and that link real, it's not just a one and done.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
27:03
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
27:03
SPEAKER_01: And think about the timing is perfect, right?
27:05
SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of sports are starting up now again.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
27:09
SPEAKER_01: NHL, especially back, NBA's coming in a few weeks.
27:12
SPEAKER_02: There's NFL, yeah.
27:13
SPEAKER_02: NFL MLB's in playoffs, yeah.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: Right?
27:15
SPEAKER_01: So the the the timing's perfect.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: I think it broke through the noise and just plastering your ad or sorry, some boxes in some areas and people looking at what the hell's a Novig?
27:24
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: Right?
27:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: So, anyways, I think it accelerated, I think it accelerated that uh who they are.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: Okay, we have something else coming up later this week.
27:34
SPEAKER_01: Our latest sharp cut, Mark, walk us through it.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: Brand love and love marks.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: Can you feel Barry White and love tonight?
27:45
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're in two different directions.
27:53
SPEAKER_02: I'm going Barry White, you're going you're going the Lion King.
27:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah, we're gonna dig into brand love and love marks.
28:01
SPEAKER_02: And by the way, for anybody listening, if you want to send us any thoughts about sharp cuts you want to listen you want us to dig into, let us know because we're always looking for new topics.
28:09
SPEAKER_02: We've got a whole list of things that we're thinking of, but love to get some of your input.
28:13
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
28:14
SPEAKER_02: And then next week we have another interview scheduled, which is a great interview.
28:19
SPEAKER_02: What's on the deck, V?
28:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, we have a banger coming up.
28:23
SPEAKER_01: We have a couple local legends here from Canada from Coss Ed Media, Corinne, Kutramash, and Melanie, who joined us to talk about a the the evolution of a the agency model.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: So really looking forward to getting that aired and out to everyone.
28:37
SPEAKER_01: It was a really great conversation.
28:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's so interesting just thinking about all I we talked about this before about AI changing out.
28:44
SPEAKER_02: But there's so many things in terms of business models that are changing and their their thoughts and ideas around that.
28:50
SPEAKER_02: Just it's it's really interesting hearing how they're changing and thinking about managing that that change.
28:56
SPEAKER_02: Couldn't agree more.
28:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:58
SPEAKER_01: So with that, and that's this week's Barbers Brief.
29:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
29:01
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for all you keeping us in your ears once more.
29:04
SPEAKER_01: Stay stay sharp, Harry.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course.