Can you angle your camera just down a little bit so that you're framed a bit like me? Yeah, that's about right. Voila. Excellent. Okay. All the intros and everything else around will do afterwards. So I'm just going to go straight into it. So we'll go straight into the questions and we'll just take a break. Excellent. Okay. me get those ready, that'll be good. Great. So Mark, welcome to Media Snack Meets. You don't need any introduction and we've done one of these before. I everyone who has ever watched a Media Snack has probably seen the episode that we did many years ago. Your dad was in the room and he fell asleep when we were talking about the lack of transparency in programmatic as we all have done in the intervening years. Yeah, he did fall asleep. think you were... You're on the back of a quite a good night out after your Byron shop punch up in London. It was then, yeah. It was then, Yeah. Excellent. Okay. So for those few people around the world that maybe don't know you and haven't heard your name, just tell us quickly, what is it you do and what does it take to be successful? so it's a harder question than it should be in the back end of my career. So I used to be a marketing professor. I spent 25 years teaching marketing at places like lbs and mit and melbourne and then all through that I was doing consulting work at the c-suite level on big global brands and then much to my own surprise for the last eight years i've become an entrepreneur founder I set up the mini mba marketing which basically gives marketers an online access to top level marketing training. And that's turned into a big business. I mean, not as big as IDComs, but pretty big. I what are we now? big. I always lose track of this. A $30 million business, you know, it's big. And so I find myself now in the final third of my career, I hope, being a founder, whatever that means, but generally working on marketing. And what does it mean to be successful? How do you get successful? I think you have to specialize to some degree. think you have to play the long game. I think you have to take the money for yourself is probably the bigger learning I've pulled in recent years. You wouldn't believe the difference between taking a salary versus having a slice of the pie. It's a phenomenal, mean, obviously there is risk and commitment on that side, but the rewards, it's the only way to get rich in marketing. I venture is to be. is to take some of the profit rather than a little bit of the salary. something. That's good. And that's what we do. We're pitching to winners now. So that's, that's the new community around media snacks as we like. So congratulations. So since the last time we recorded, you've had phenomenal success with the Mini-MBA. I was in, think either first or the second cohort of that. Was it second? Yeah. Tom, which is probably good because the first one was a bit wobbly. We've now done 17 more. It's very different from what it was back in the day. It's come on a lot. But yeah, we have a brand course, a marketing course, and a management course. And we will have trained by the end of this year probably, we're not quite sure, but probably around 35,000 marketers. So we're getting, we're getting big now. Our alumni group is big and we have things now where people like recruit off the basis of having done the course, which is, you know, a big multinational last week posted that it was like, you we're looking for blah, blah, blah. And if you've done the mini MBA, especially please get in touch. So we love, we love stuff like that. business clearly. Okay, good. Well, that leads us to very easily to the next question, which is what are you proudest of in your career? Because you've done quite a lot, as you say, you've worn many hats and now you're in different phases of it. What for you looking back, do you think that was the best work I've done? I mean, I think that there's two answers, right? So that probably the work I did with LVMH when we really were working on the big brands and sort of setting them up for the next decade, which seems to have stood the test of time. So brands like Dom Perignon and Sephora, you know, they stick in your mind because we did do the right thing by them. And the work turned out to be, you know, a big part of the next chapter of those brands. That's probably the flash part, like going to, you know, to France and working in Eau de Vier for Dom Perignon and with the CEO, blah, blah. Right. but the thing I'm most proud of is still Mini MBA because Mini MBA is a strategic creation. So I became a marketing professor because I loved marketing. It wasn't a choice, you know, it was gravity and the consulting thing came along with it with all the access that you got after a certain number of years. So as good as all that was, none of it was a choice. was mostly accidental. Whereas many MBA was created predominantly because I started having kids and I couldn't keep doing the life I was doing. And I really did, you know, go to a blank page and apply the strategic principles that I'd done for brands to myself to go, right. So what am I going to do now without having to be on a plane two weeks a month that will still enable me to earn truckloads of cash and do what I do. And that really was how it started. So. In that sense, I'm still proud as the mini MBA. very good. And we went the last mini, the last media snack that we do this is pre pandemic, of course. I think you joked something about like, well, I know I couldn't I couldn't ever be a virtual professor, I always need to kind of be there in some respect. But you've really have migrated now to be the virtual present professor that you dreamed of being she's amazing. So you can have the family time and you look good on the family time, I must say you look really good on no, thanks, mate. No, no, it's living in Tasmania is not, you know, it's not a lifestyle choice. It's my wife's choice, basically. So you're limited with, you know, it'll take me 24 hours to get to New York or London. So, you know, it's it's it had to be done. But yeah, I think I think if you look back on it, it's become almost completely virtual to the point where by the time I pack it in in 2030. It might even be AI virtual in the sense that I roll on without me. So not even virtual, know, absent almost that's certainly an option we're seriously, you know, we playing with at the moment. gift that would be to the world. Beautiful. I wouldn't go that far. will be a gift to my, it'll be a gift to my pension plan to sort of, you know, what's it, quiet retiring. So I'll retire. but the, you know, as you probably know, cause you were with the WFA, the WFA has a RIT bot already going around the world giving talks. And, you know, I'm not done. I get complaints about what RIT bot has said. And I'm like, I don't know what he said in Bangkok, whatever. Do you know what mean? I don't necessarily even agree with it. You know what mean? It's a, it's a virtual life. Right, let's talk about the state of advertising, is a big down the pub conversation, but we're gonna do it in a couple of minutes. So what do you think at the moment is the biggest challenge in the ad industry or the media industry right now? So we're going down a bit more tactical than just broad marketing. So I wanna kind of get you down in the gutter with me. Yeah, tactics out my, you know, I tend to at this point sort of spread my love across the four piece, but if you zoom into comms, I still think it's the remarkable disparity between client perceptions of TV advertising and actually what TV advertising is still able to do. I don't think I've ever seen a bigger Delta between reality and perception in anything than how particularly younger, let's say sub 40 year olds. marketers think about TV advertising and how it still is. And I can't explain what's going on. I mean, it's not the force it was when we were young marketers, but it's still very, very potent and it still has extraordinary advantages. But if you talk to someone who's in their thirties in marketing, particularly in the U S you suggest TV advertising and you look like you've proposed something, you know, semi-illegal, you know, to their, to them and their, and their family, you know what I mean? It's, it's, It's got an incredible reputation disparity from reality. I think so. What do you think, Tom? I may have got it wrong. What do you take on it? This week I flew up to Chicago to speak at, they call it the TV Leaders Forum, and it's full of all of the executives from these kind of companies who are paralyzed with fear because they don't really quite know how to get back in love with the marketer. And yet the marketer is looking probably for what they're selling, but they're trying to compete on a ROI or attribution basis and just produce more and more reporting to show media. TV's effective. But it's, you know. here in Australia, Tom, there's a great move by Channel 9 to basically take some inventory and allow big clients to get it for free, to experiment with it, and to do econometrics to show that it still works. it's desperation, and it's a great idea. But I don't think it'll work because everyone's got an econometric study showing that X media is more powerful than Y media. It's sad, but in the case of TV, it's actually true. did it. did a big job for Australian radio here, late last year. And I said to him, look, don't do another econometric study on all the radio is better than everything, blah, blah, blah. And in the end, I got them to do a thing where I talked about how radio was the great sidekick. And if you put, I think it ended up being about 11 % of your money into radio, makes everything else work better. And I think that was a good message because it goes with the client perception. rather than, know, here's proof that we do work and you should put all your money with us. We've had that now for 20 years and I just think clients don't buy it anymore. And unfortunately in TV's case, it's true. They should have their money in TV, but they're not. I don't think it's fixable. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and there's nothing to replace TV as you know. There's nothing that's going to do what TV did for the last 50 years. We talked before, don't think you, you, you told me we disagreed on this, but you've told me that you thought the word programmatic was going to be so become so toxic that it would die away and it would be replaced by something else. And it's still alive. It's still going just about hanging on. And I think more marketers appreciate the technique of programmatic and can kind of see that actually that maybe is the technique and all the shit around it is the problem. don't think we would have. We wouldn't have predicted though that the word TV would have become as toxic as it's become because that's the one that marketers shiver about, know, that they want the impact of it, but nobody wants to use the word, do they anymore? No, and I think what's ironic is while everyone's, as you say, sort of avoiding TV, the likes of YouTube and TikTok are essentially becoming TV. So it's an incredible bait and switch that's taking place before our eyes. You know, I work a lot with the YouTube guys and I love them deeply and they'll tell you, you know, the great almost accidental beauty of their business is the migration onto the big TV screen. Just don't call it TV, call it YouTube. So we're back to that perceptual thing. You know what I mean? I mean, I'm with you on programmatic. think it's still, it's interesting for me, programmatic when we talked about it first was all about the right amount of money micro targeted, right? And if you look at again, how they're very cleverly now before our eyes are changing it, it's changing to the right amount of money aimed literally at everyone. If you look at where Facebook are going, right? The message is very clear. no, no, you don't do any, not even targeting, nevermind micro targeting. You just drop it. down a big funnel and the AI will find the right target. That's what programmatic does. So we, you know, when we were selling in programmatic, we were selling it in on the basis of fundamentally targeting. now we're selling it in order to do targeting, just give us your money and your ad and it'll do it. So, you know, it's become an even bigger, blacker box than it used to be. Right. And again, if you talk about perceptions, the data continues to show us that a lot of it is wasted. A lot of it is bullshit, you know, personalization. unless it's what I would call pseudo personalization or first party is absolutely rubbish, right? It's absolutely not doing what it's doing, but no one's listening. Nobody cares. You know what mean? It's like watching Trump get elected. Do know what I mean? All these people go, Trump said Puerto Rico is an island of garbage. Ooh, that'll be, you know, no, it won't. Nobody cares, man. It makes zero difference. Right. And so I think you could publish a study showing that a hundred percent of programmatic is a dark cabal of evil money based out of Cuba and people would still keep dumping their money into it. It's impervious. Nothing's changed. got, it's got worse before it can get better. I thought we were on an uptick, but we're not yet. Not yet. Let's keep moving on. Okay. So this is more about you. What best professional advice you've ever received or that you give to people? What's the best words of wisdom? repetition. I wrote an article about it recently. I, one of my favorite bosses is a guy called John Andre Ruggio who ran Sephora and benefit in the States. And when I first met John Andre, he is very impressive French American business guy. His only weakness in my opinion was every time he gave a speech, it was the same speech. And I was like, it's a bit disappointing because he's so good, you know, at everything else, but he's speaking. keep seeing him to give the same speech. And then I read a Harvard article that basically said that the essence of leadership is repetition. And I sent it to him and I said, I think, I think you know about this. And he went, yep, that's exactly it. And he could have given a thousand different speeches, but it wasn't about, you know, let's impress the troops. was, need to know this, this, and this. And next year it's this, this, and this again. So I think repetition and realizing what you say is not what they hear is probably the, you know, on so many different levels. You when I was a young guy, used to do every single client, I would literally do a completely new talk. And I nearly had a stroke doing it and they weren't necessarily very good talks. Now I don't do the exact same talk, but I remember that most of them have never seen me talk before or certainly remember any of it. And so I'm much more comfortable starting from a core base, not because it's lazy, but because repetition is often important. like all good marketing. so, outside of marketing, what's a great passion. when, when you're, when you're not working, where would we find you relaxing? Well, as the parent of several small children, sex with my wife is right up there on the top of my list, right? And I want to make, you know, the addendum with my wife is important here, I feel. Yeah, I certainly would prefer to answer the question, I'm always having sex with my wife, which I'm very much not, because there are various child children's limbs everywhere in our bed and someone is ill or snoring or puking or, you know, having a nightmare. So that's where I'd like to be. That's not where I am. I found myself pulled back to my working class roots as I get older, which is fascinating. So we're building one of these natural swimming pools in my back garden at the moment. We're in the middle of nowhere. So this sounds very extravagant, but it's not. So we've dug a big hole and we're sort of me and my, my, my, my mate Brody, I sort of building this natural swimming pool without any expertise. So we just look at big holes and get diggers and dig things. That's where I'm probably spending too much of my time at the moment. is looking at holes and pipes and that kind of stuff, which I've suddenly got very much into digging a hole is particularly with a digger is a fantastic antidote to the marketing life, right? Because Brody goes, well, we'll need a big sinkhole over there. go, okay, I'll just get the digger. And we dig a big hole. And it's like, yeah, there's my hole. It's done. Do you know what I mean? And there ain't a discussion by like experts about, that the right hole or should it have been this kind of hole or is the hole big enough? It's kind of Brody goes, yeah, that looks all right. And we move on. And I think that simplicity is something we've never had in marketing, right? If the minute you finished digging, if it was marketing, we'd finished digging the hole and someone would be like, you don't want a hole, you want a mountain, that's what you want. Holes are dead, mountains are in, you know? That's the way it goes. So the simplicity of hole digging, definitely top of my list at the moment. So it should be sex with my wife, but it's looking at holes with Brody. Very good. I can tell you that's the first time that's come up in any of these interviews. think that's a definitely unique answer. There's a few of those. There's a few of those. Excellent. Okay, so let's wrap this up. We like to end on a nice positive note, but you're always a great optimist, Mark. So I always appreciate that. Again, we're down in the kind of gutter of media and advertising and tactics here. keep pulling me back here, Tom. You keep pulling me back into the dirt. Go on, carry on. The tactical grime. Well, I will say yet again, because I've said this to many people, I've said it on Media Snack, is that anyone who works in media really wants to put their knowledge and their expertise and their career in context. that is, zoom right out so you realize how small and insignificant it is, is take Mark's mini MBA in marketing because as I said before, you put media kind of in its place, which is the right thing. So there's a lot going on in marketing and it's then there's from the strategy, there's a tactic for the strategy. eventually you get to the, I you call it the tip of the spear and that's media. there's 10 modules, right? And each module is about 90 minutes long. And media comes in very briefly about an hour into module 10. But as it should be, mean, it plays a role. I'd give it score of about 2 % in the whole thing. And it's an important 2%, but it's only 2%. And I think that's, you can either take comfort in that or you can take umbrage in it, but it doesn't stop it from unfortunately being true. we need we need more people to take some comfort in that and just maybe, you know, appreciate what it is that we're actually trying to do in this industry. So, okay, we're down in the gutter. Look ahead, there's lots of lots of things that are maybe noise to a lot of CMOs and marketers. Where should we be aiming a year from now? What can we look back and think actually, we did something that's quite good. look, the quickest wins, I think, in media at the moment are, I think, realizing econometrics is not the perfect answer. So I think taking econometrics with a pinch of salt, but still taking it is important. There's too much over-talking of that. I think that the codification of media so that it is imbued with distinctive brand assets is probably still the easiest and most missed win for media people is, you know, if you're not codifying it almost from the outset, you're missing too many opportunities. And the last big one, which I really want to highlight, and it's sort of broader for the whole comms thing, there's too much change. America, it's coming out of America. Whenever I get a question from an American, very good American market, it's like, given the, you know, change in the market and the change in technology, do the principles of this. It's the wrong question, right? It's just the wrong question. It ain't changing as much as everybody thinks. And if you look at Andrew Tindal's work on consistency, it is absolutely crystal clear that the one thing a successful brand should do is do pretty much the same as it's done ever before. And I mean the same ads and I mean the same placement and I mean the same budgets and I mean the same team and the same agency and the same strategy. There's too much change and it's at the detriment of success. So I think if there's one area I would, I would impel your listeners to focus on, have a look at Tindall's work done with system one and the IPA. He makes a very persuasive point. If you've got a good ad from 2015. It will be just as good in 2025. If you've got good media placement going on and you've got the right budget and the right with the right media partners, you don't have to change it. The consumer isn't even yet on top of it. Right. And I'll give you my favorite example, which came out the system on data. Everybody lost their shit when Beyonce did the Levi's ad, you know, it's cool. You know, wow. The old ad from exactly 40 years earlier with Nick came in that you'll remember, right? We were young men back there with. hurt bottoms back then, Tom, that young ad with, with Nick Kamen, that was a BBH ad, they tested it on a 2024 audience. It beat the shit out of Beyonce's ad. Old ads are not necessarily bad ads. They're four times out of five, they're better than the new ad. So don't change. the same challenge yourself to do the same thing. It's too much. There's too much change in this industry at the detriment of growth. Definitely agree. I like that. really like that. That's and again, it's quite a novel way of looking at the industry, it? Why is the CMO not, why are they so nervous that they have to constantly come up with something new to justify? I think by the way, the partial answer to your question is because there's no money in saying, do the same thing. There's no money for agencies to go do to use our existing ads. You know what mean? For media agencies and just basically turn the wheel. It's a great plan. Keep going. Right. The money is in change. And that's why unfortunately most marketers are impelled to do different stuff. Because, know, if I, I always joke about writing a marketing book that says next year, pretty much we will like last year. No one's going to buy that book, right? I've got to write about like that Martin Lindstrom guy that writes about, know, the whole world will change next year because of coronavirus. Read about it in my book, you know, coronavirus consumption. You know, you can get enough morons at an airport to buy that. There's some money in change. There's no money in the truth, which is not going to change that much. Very good. We will pick up another time on the, I think you call it the brown line of truth, the of the reset as well. But for now, we're going. one more though on that Tom. The brown line of truth is the reason Nike got in so much shit. Did you pick that one up? He joined the CEO, the CEO joined. They follow, he came in, anyway, that's a different story for a different podcast. Professor Mark Ritzen, thank you very much for joining us on Media Snaps Meets. My pleasure. Good. Jasmine, okay. That's good. There's loads of stuff from there, Jasmine, that we'll put into the longer form because we meandered out the hell out of the... Make sure you get the bit about other people having sex with my wife in there. That's the best bit, right? Put that bit in. That's the leader. Chop that down. Get it across every platform tomorrow. Well that was a good setup, so that was a good setup. Anyway, we hear that a lot. What sex with my wife? What? Yeah, okay. So this bit is a longer form that we'll put out probably pre-Christmas as we do a kind of review of the year. And so there'll be bits of this that we'll probably use. What I thought would be great is this is less structured. can just follow the path. I'm gonna keep bringing... I thought that was brilliant. That was clearly signposted by me. We're gonna play kind of pretty down the gutter. mean... I'm thinking that we just call this like the state of media, but we might actually just call it like the poor state of media. I love the idea of what works is obviously most important and people's addiction to trying to change everything. So we should repeat ourselves a bit as well here, I guess. bit of, yeah, we, yeah, yeah. Same thing. These are really good. for, for us, our business, by the way, is just quite different maybe from what went, when we, when we last spoke, because it's now 60 more percent is just auditing. So all of this fucking nonsense we were talking about years ago of like, you know, nobody trusts anybody. I suppose it's been quite good for business in that sense, because we're, we're the objective third party and we're hired by big brands now to go in and. look under the hood and check what agencies are buying and tell the brand that actually 20% wasted, but we're going to put it back into stuff that works. So we're following the Pritchard kind of principles. So most of our work is around that. I've got to know System One quite recently. I spent some time with Orlando and What do you think? What do you think? I had dinner with him in Belgium and we kind of hang out for couple days. was like, it's fucking genius. when I was like, how do you do this stuff? And he goes, we don't even have a panel. We rent the panel. It's 150 people and we show them the ad. then based on these, they've got this very simple methodology, but it doesn't really tell you about effectiveness particularly, but it's good enough to convince a marketer that actually they should just pay bit more attention to this stuff. And I think that's great. The simplicity, if you compare it to Cantor, someone is mind boggling, right? But the interesting thing is I still had that little worry about them, even though I liked the guys very much. So I did that thing with Sky where I went into Sky and said, all right. So I asked them, who's the client that's sniffed around your stuff the most? And they said, Sky, definitely. So Sky did the test where they went, right, we've got the last four years of ads, 40 ads. We know what it did for brand with our econometrics, what it did for sales with short term subscriptions. You've got 40 of these ads in your database. You tell us rank them from one to 40 and they were spot on 100 correct and the sky guys went from being this is bullshit to Yeah, we're gonna use you from now on so that was the bit that I was like, right i'm not gonna be reticent anymore. They they really are They're amazing. Like I mean, then you know, there's not a number you can put on it, but it's 90 95 accurate And it costs 10 grand for fuck's sake. Do you know what mean? Like it's changed When we were young guys, pre-testing was kind of like this debate. I always say now it's not a debate. If you're any kind of size client, you're going to do this, Yeah. And with honestly, we're trying to do the same kind of thing in media. At some point, you know, maybe I'd get a little of your view on what that might mean to actually, we can explore a bit of that in here. Like what, what might effectiveness in media be? Maybe, maybe we'll just let me, let me kind of set that up and let's just start off there. Okay. Yep. OK. I'm going to do another welcome Mark, just so you know, I'm going to step into this. As if we've just reconnected. Hello Mark, good morning. Morning, Tom. How are we? well, very well. It's very late here in New York and very early there in Tasmania. Yes, greetings from tomorrow. I always like to tell my American based friends that the world is still here. We're in Thursday and you're in Wednesday. Don't worry. Everything's fine in Tomorrowland. Everything's good. good. Okay. So we're doing a bit of a kind of state of media and I appreciate your leaning into this because I you love being down in the gutter with me talking about the methods in media and advertising. Dirty stuff. So let's start with a big one, which is, have we been, since you and I last probably last talked on Media Snack, have we become too obsessed with cost and efficiency in media? And how do we get back to think talking about effectiveness in media? that's a good one. yeah, I think we're still as obsessed as we ever were with efficiency. I think we can thank our tech friends and the general climate of, you know, procurement, et cetera, for the emphasis on doing things at the lowest possible cost. And of course our old friend ROI, who tends to point ironically most brands in the direction of making less money as well is another factor here. So yeah, no, think we not that much has changed. I do sense a little bit of a sort of gleaming hope coming through. think how the brands, since we last spoke, handled the recession. I think for the first time in marketing history, I think brands got the memo that you don't pull back on major investment for the most part. You try and maintain it and you actually get a boost from that. I think that message got through. similar to the message on pricing. think brands did manage to work out how to put up prices in inflation. So I think what's happened with the decline of business schools everywhere in America, their influence and the rise of, for want of a better word, the LinkedIn school of thinking in marketing actually has been a very positive force. think marketers, that knowledge is far more democratized than it was during our last great recession. And I think what we saw there was a focus more on effectiveness than efficiency. which gives me some hope that things will continue to get a bit better and we will be smarter in the future. Okay, we've wrapped up this episode very quickly then we've done it. We sound very positive. Come on, we got we got to get a bit a bit bit doom and gloom first. What is effectiveness in media? What does that really mean? We you and I've been talking about, you know, our friends at system one and some of the some of great work they've done, they've been starting to build a really good correlation between creativity and effectiveness and outcome. Look, it's a couple of, there's a couple of things there. Right. So first of all, you've got to set a lot of people are conflating marketing effectiveness and communications effectiveness and major effect. It's all the same thing. It's definitely not right. We've got to put media and comms in its place. It's less than 10 % of the overall marketing game. Now doesn't mean it's not important, but marketing effectiveness, effectiveness in general has a whole host of other shit to do with strategy and pricing and product. If we purely look at ad effectiveness, I think we live in a pretty good era of knowledge on this, right? I think we've learned quite a lot in the last 10 years. We go back 15 years since how brands grow and long and short that I think has really changed how we think about effectiveness. would add things like realizing wear out is not an issue. The 60 40 reticence about going straight for ROI, the idea that mass marketing isn't a bad thing, the presence of distinctive brand assets, the role of excess share of voice. I think there's a literature now which is richer and more practical than we've ever had. But I have to point out to you, given your New York residence, that for the first time also in media history, the Americans are well behind the pace on it and are not as advanced as... as certainly Oz and Europe. And that's not because I don't think Americans are smart. I think they invented marketing and they're historically the best marketers on the planet. They just haven't stayed up to date. And I went to the a couple of conferences in the States over the summer and fall to talk about this with data showing using Effy submissions that American advertising and media is behind the count. And of course, what happened was, they didn't really appreciate it. But B, no one had a clue what the fuck I was talking about. I'm like, you know, I showed how most American FV submissions never mentioned excess share of voice and far more UK submissions do. But the American audience were like, what's excess share of voice? And when is Christie Turlington going to come out and talk to me about personal branding? Do you know what I mean? It was, it was pretty sad. dear. Okay. Let's cast our minds back. last Media Snack that we did was we made a lot of reference to some great speeches that Mark Pritchard, the P &G, was doing around media. He really kind of rolled his sleeves up and he decided he was going to tackle the media transparency issue. At the time, I think we were maybe being quite hopeful. We were probably bit hung over maybe as well that day. but we were being quite positive, like quite, positive and optimistic that maybe, media had kind of reached its lowest point and it was in the only way was up. things seem to have got a little bit more complicated since then. And some of the things that you talked about was that. Yeah. The mistrust of agencies is a smell. It's just going to hang around for a long, long time and it's going to take them an age to kind of rebuild that back. I think you told me that programmatic was toxic and that was kind of disappear. what's been your observation? Cause that's going back a few years. It doesn't seem like we've really made a lot of progress and these are, these feel like quite contemporary things. Are you still talking about these things? I think you'll find the use, I think you're right, programmatic is, you you can't live without it. Let's be honest, right? I mean, there isn't a way of doing media in the 21st century without a programmatic buying model. I think the term has been neatly kind of moved into the shadows. Do you know what I mean? Like if you look at how it's spread out now, just don't mention it and call it something else has changed. I think also what we should add to our relatively miserable prognosis back then. is the classic full service agency is now also in something of a existential crisis as well, right? And are sort of worried about their place in the future, rightfully so. So no, I don't think things have got any better. I think what we're seeing is I think Prichard quite correctly went out and sorted it for P&G. I think they've had a phenomenal seven or eight years. You know, we talked a minute ago about American market as being behind with the exception of certain brands, for example, P and G who got straight into how brands grow 10 years ago, got straight in the long and short of it. did a thing for P and G's European team a month ago and you know, they've been all over this for a long time. So yeah, I think what Prichard was doing, which we kind of got excited about was not fixing the discipline for the discipline. He was fixing the P and G approach. for a competitive advantage, which is exactly what he should have done. And the interesting thing is he's still there. If you'd have told me back then, was seven, eight years ago we were talking, that Pritchard would still be chief brand officer of P &G. He's the long, long tenure now, Tom. And it's no bad thing either, given he's probably one of the more influential and smarter members of the marketing cognoscente. and still doing it. was at conferences this year. He was at the ANA Masters, the ANA Media this year. Same message. I mean, he came out with a great headline this year, which was that media puts the market in marketing, which was his kind of like, which is quite nice. Right up your media guys would like that right? I would say the consumer does that but there you go the he was very good. I like him very much on mass marketing. So One of the great unspoken challenges of marketing at the moment is okay. We get sophisticated mass marketing You've got to put numbers on it and an actual definition on it and most marketers struggle with that because it's quite imprecise and he was very good on both tide and I think it was pampers where we talked about how defining the total market, which in the case of Tide was everyone, but in the case of Pampers wasn't, was a very difficult first step. And then you can start to think about segments and activation. He's the only guy that really addressed that point. And I thought I used that quite a lot with a lot of different companies since. mean, apart from PGA, because it's very easy to come back, isn't it? Come back to them all the time as kind of, you know, setting standards and being almost like the default of great marketing, solid marketing principles. Who else out there? Let's maybe not do, we will keep bowing down to Mark. Who else out there do you think is not distracted by all the noise, is not chasing the shiny things, is really focusing on a good marketing principle? But secondly, like in media as well, I mean, have you got any observation about who Yeah, I think McDonald's globally have McDonald's have been ahead of the curve for many, many years. I think they're one of the few brands that gets, do a lot of work with YouTube and if you look at how McDonald's uses YouTube, get the challenge with YouTube for me is it's long and it's short, but you can't get it from the same execution. So you can use YouTube as a sort of TV sidekick and you can also use it as performance video and it works beautifully for both within the same campaign. If you look at how McDonald's have grasped that, it works beautifully, right? They get that. So I think McDonald's are ahead with media. In the UK, I'm very taken with both Tesco and Marks and Spencer, who &S is back after all these years, run by a very smart CMO. They've got back to, you know, they're almost to their old media approach, right? It doesn't look a lot different from 10, 12 years ago. And my point would be, That's great. We should see more of that. They went back this year to remember the food pornography stuff of kind of 15 years ago for non-British listeners. There's this &S is all about with slightly better quality, with good value, but we're just, know, and this, great strap was always it's an &S, this isn't Christmas food, it's&S Christmas food. And meanwhile, there'd be a, you know, a Christmas pudding getting covered in loads of sexy custard, you know? And they've just gone back having, you know, someone Classically, know, seven, eight years ago killed the campaign because it was stupid. Got a CMO knows what she's doing was coming gone. Just put it back. And this is a key message. Right. We talked about this the last couple of months over and over again, using old ads, using existing media strategy and not not needing to feel like what are we going to do different next year? The smart marketers go nothing, nothing. We'll just run the whole thing again. Because the consumer, not us, isn't bored with any of this yet. And it hasn't fully played out yet. for me, think &S and Tesco, look at Tesco's outdoor strategy. It's just beautiful, beautifully done. BBH doing creative, PhD doing the media, and just beautifully done. Yeah. So in some of the stuff that we've been talking about, sounds like back to basics on creative that works. Don't throw out shit that they're trying to reinvent. You know, if you've got stuff that works. And then from a media perspective, there isn't, there's an allergy. It's going in. a media perspective, it's like this allergy against using the word television or radio or outdoor, you know. It's just not talked about. They're dirty words in media, which is kind of daft, really, because we've become so obsessed with a new thing. is there, I'm always hopeful that there's, you know, there's a still an embers burning there where I'm hopeful that marketers are going to come back to media that's effective. Is that swinging back? Tom. mean, no, no, no. TV is the most spectacular disparity between perception and reality I've ever seen in my career. So, okay, TV is not what it was at the turn of the century, particularly with respect to reach and therefore also with respect to value. But with that aside, the way that it's now perceived by sub 40 year old marketers versus its actual potency contribution. If you look at any independent research, not from the TV people, but anyone else, it's the great integrator of all the other tools. It's the great emotional brand builder. And yet you talk to a 35 year old Chicago based marketer and suggest TV advertising and they look at you like you've proposed some illegal sex act on the subway, right? They're like, you must be out of your mind, you know? So I think we'll never get a, we'll never get back to where TV was at the turn of the century where you could hit. 30 40 50 percent of your target demographic in a night but we also will never get back to a place where people saw tv as a Key, there is no superior media form but a key contributor to the mix I just think that it's been outflanked and of course while all this is going on and tv is a dirty word YouTube and tiktok are invading the tv. They're just not calling it tv. So it's it's completely bananas, right completely bananas It's good. the idea, the idea of these kind of, you know, immersive experiences and communications that we're talking about these iconic ads that you're saying are being tested. They work just as good as the new stuff. I like the idea of marketers maybe, and, and, and media directors getting back to some basics and having some confidence in to go back to things that, maybe work and not be trying to change everything all the time. We've, we've kind of touched on that. that's a big advantage, Tom, right? And so not only do old ads work just as well, if not better than new ads, four times out of five, the research says the old ad is probably superior. As you say, it's a lot less risky. And I'll tell you a move I saw, Tourism Australia did it down here with a CMO called Susan Coghill. She worked, she knew all of this. She knew that, Hey, you know, we don't need a new campaign every year. So what she did was took three years worth of creative money and really spent the farm on shit hot. Creative right knowing that she might run these ads for you know, five or six years so she's got much better creative and as time ticks on money that she would have had to spend on a new creative campaign is dumped back into 20 points more of media and she was absolutely explicit about it at the start and she sort of three years into it now and Sure enough. She's got award-winning work and she's not going for new awards. What she's going is now I'm just gonna run it again And again, with way more media investment than I would have had if 25, 30 % of the money was going on a new shoot with a new campaign that wasn't as good as the one I've already got in the can. I think that's a model that more marketers should look at. How does that, so that's okay. There's a bit of looking at the glorious past as well. And there was a golden age, wasn't there, of advertising and a golden age of media partnerships between brands and media platforms and great media brands as well. And that's kind of evolved forward. When we put AI on top of this now with marketers, and what are they thinking about AI? and how to implement that to improve effectiveness of their media and advertising. Is it all? Or fluff, are you actually seeing some impact? no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not fluff. And I deserve more credit on this topic than anyone else. As you well know, I have shit canned every single innovation correctly from NFTs to fucking 3D printing my whole career. I've just spent my life going, what a load of bollocks, right? A lot of bollocks openly in the press, right? Going, this is also bollocks. You'll see. But when we lost our shit about NFTs, it was just like, what are you doing? Stupid people, right? So you would expect Gary Vee to go, yeah, AI is the future, right? But if someone like someone miserable and pessimistic and cynical like me goes, no, no, no, it's the future. I think I get 20 more points for that. Right. So there's two things going on. First of all, it's AI is everyone. Every single platform has to demonstrate how they're using AI. Right. And most of it's bullshit. Right. but there's a couple of things going on. So all of this personalization. micro targeting stuff that never worked and we didn't want to do anyway is very quietly now just being swept under the carpet because what they're now saying from Facebook to LinkedIn is look, just give us your creative and give us your budget and we'll plug it into AI and it will automatically find Pachinko style, the right target for the right return. Right. I'm, skeptical because I think that's where the media will respond best. doesn't necessarily mean the strategic target, but anyway. That's where AI is playing an immediate role right now, I think, in the media business. Targeting is disappearing. And what it's saying is, just give it to me. We'll tell you where it plays best. In the longer term, and I do work with a couple of big AI firms in the state. So I'm not just sitting here talking ass, as many people are about AI. I think we do largely get removed from the equation, starting, unfortunately, with media. I just don't think it's, you know, I've got If you step back where we come from there was a traditional system, excuse me There was a traditional system where You went to a private school if you were lucky. I certainly wasn't then you went to a good university and then you got into You know a pwc or a mckinsey and you did accounting or you did that whole thing's gone, right? Law accounting Consulting in my opinion is gonna quickly now get eradicated because AI comes in and changes the whole nature of our career paths. Not for us, we're old and don't care. If you're sub 30, I don't know what you're going to do. Right. And what's interesting is first to go, I've got a mate who's an interpreter. It was a Japanese interpreter, Alex. And we had a wine tasting a couple of months ago and he came early, which is very unlike him. And he wanted to have a chat with me. And I thought, God, he's got, he's having another child or something, you know, his wife's leaving him or something. But he basically lost 70 % of his work. He works out of Australia to do Japanese translation and AI had just come in and taken all his work away. And I was kind of counseling him that it wasn't, you know, it was going to get worse, you know? And I thought if I'm sat in a kitchen table in Tasmania having an AI conversation, it's starting to happen, right? Now translators were always going to go first, right? Then accountants, right? But media is very close to the top of that. pile of things that can be automated and improved, think much lower cost. So for me, the media and particularly the performance side of it is, will start to crumble. Ironically, I don't believe AI is going to be any use at producing long form brand building ads. I mean, you can do it. Lots of brands are doing it with waggly armed people and it's coming on and that, look at my new ad. Ironically, that's the one area where I do think humans will continue. to be predominant, right? And creative genius will remain creative genius, but that's a small place, right? The whole of the media buying is going to be taken over. And by the way, I'm in there too. I'm one step up from the coast because I'm doing strategy and stuff, but I don't see myself as any more than five to 10 years from obsolescence as well. And I'm hedging with a big AI firm and I'm training it to do my planning process using synthetic data and the results are already mind-boggling. So I give it 10 years for my role to disappear and less for media to be gazumped by the process. I don't think IDCOMS is necessarily the bad place, by the way. I think your monitoring audit role, when it's machines, probably becomes all the more important, right? So I think you're probably the last man standing. But the idea that you would, from a human point of view, have to do this, I think, is rapidly... Not yet. Let's be clear. But within the deck, within 10 years, if you're 30 now, you've really got to think about what's going to happen within the next 10 to 15 years, how it will all change. We see media. enabling the marketer to do more of that in-house, to manage more of the media themselves. So I think that's going to be one of the biggest impacts is certainly for media agencies, it's going to have a probably negative impact, not least because as we've talked about before, the underlying trust between the marketer and a media agency is not great. So are you going to buy all the AI tools from media agency? No, you probably build them yourself and run it all yourself. Creative, maybe you'll a great point there. There's a great point there, Tom. If you understand core competence, you know, which is the great Prahalad Hamil paper from HBR, summarizing it too quickly, brewing beer and running a pub aren't the same thing, right? So breweries can't run pubs. In the same way, media agencies aren't going to produce the best software for buying and planning media. is not this, you know, so they're out of that. And what's interesting is the extinction response of media and creative agencies is, what role will the agencies play here? And it's like, it's capitalism. You don't have an automatic seat at the table. No one's worried about you. No one cares. You know what mean? No one hates you, but nobody cares. You'll be taken out of the equation because nobody wants to pay for things that they don't need. there's a preciousness. It comes out in the pitching bit as well, when people say, we shouldn't have to pitch for business and all of that. I think there's a good debate about whether they should be paid to pitch. you know, all right, if you don't want to pitch, that's great, but you won't get the business. You know, it's not up to you're not in charge. It's not your it's not your game. You know, you're not you're not running anything. You're serving a much bigger master. Do you know what mean? Get you know, and I think in this case, when the master says, I don't need you anymore, I've got a dingus. I don't think anyone will care, frankly. And we're increasingly auditing those internal in-house buying operations as well. we're getting all the market, this media buying data independent of the agency and now applying AI to find patterns of opportunity so that they can improve the effectiveness of that spend. that's, a, that's, we might be some of the last people standing maybe, but we're lying wholly on the marketer side here to kind of analyze the as they implement AI through media, we'll be doing the analysis of it for them. And that's the right play, Tom. That's where you need to be, because that's where the money and all the power is. I mean, follow the money. It was interesting. You remember when Campaign Magazine and Marketing Magazine were sister brands when we were young marketers in the UK, right? And then Campaign killed Marketing Magazine. And I said to my editor at Marketing Week, let Campaign have the whole agency news world, all that, because it's tiny. There's no money there, and nobody cares. Make this the moment that Marketing Week becomes about the client. And we don't talk about advertising that much because we'll let that 10 % go to campaign and we'll have the 90 % with all the money. And that was a hugely important strategic move for marketing week. And in the same way, if you go in-house and work with the client and go upstream, there'll always be money and work there. just, I'm not confident that there will be work further downstream. and in order, I think there's always human work. Go back to my mate, the translator, Alex. There's one job left where you audit the AIs translations of Japanese businessmen. And he's going for that kind of work now as the human auditor. So yeah, I think there are new roles, less important roles still to play in our new world. But also I should point out, Tom, like you, I don't give a fuck. I'm 55. I do worry about the younger generation. I mean, I do care. I see what's going on and I feel for them. I don't want to sound callous about it. Personally, I don't care. It'll I have a tunnel which ends at 61. They're not death. hope but work and God knows what happens after that. It'll be fascinating to watch with popcorn and very large expensive glasses of French wine But I really feel for that 30 year old who was me 25 years ago who wants to work in marketing and media and is committed to it as a profession But literally now doesn't know what it looks like 15 years from from here when they actually need it to be a big paying lovely job, That's not fair on them. It's really not. They'll invent something. we, as you are, we're raising them. We've got to guide them. We've got to enable them to do something. Mark, listen, I'm going to let you go and have your, have another cup of coffee. nice to be young. Yeah, it's nice to be young, Tom, but also they can fuck off, right? I mean, we've got to put up with all the, you know, it's for once being in your 50s is that you're not 50 yet, though. You're late 40s, aren't you? late 40s, yeah. Late, late forties. It's miserable, right? It's miserable in your fifties. Take it from me. So this, if there's one advantage of being in your fifties, which is, don't have to worry about AI because by the time it gets in, you're hopefully dumb. That's a glorious thing. Right? So we get one thing versus being fit, lovely, you know, being able to bend over, not make strange noises. You know what I mean? Like this, you know, we, we deserve one upside of age, I think. So we should have that Very good. Okay, mate. Listen, lovely to see you. Thank you again for joining us. Take care. Good rest of the day. yeah, maybe your Mrs. accommodate you at some point later in the day. Be nice. Have a shave. It's not gonna happen, but yeah, yeah, great, great. running.