Gareth Turner: 0:48

Oh my god, what have I done? What have I done? You seem to be hesitating to even say it right Sticking there.

Chris Norton: 0:53

I can't bring myself to say it. This is why everyone's listening. They want to hear this.

Gareth Turner: 0:57

We created a coat made out of human hair, made out of the sort of sweepings off a barbershop floor.

William Ockenden: 1:05

The thing with creativity is there's a million good ideas, isn't there, and some of them just never land.

Gareth Turner: 1:17

So how much of it is is kind of chance, the fact that it kind of resonated with people.

Chris Norton: 1:19

How much of it is creative genius. It's all creative genius.

William Ockenden: 1:20

Of course I was going to say you've just led him down. Is it fair to say if we don't have campaigns failing, we're not trying hard enough? I think I think so. Um elaborate on that. What do you know?

Chris Norton: 1:31

in this week's episode will and I are joined by the brilliant Gareth Turner, who is the founder at the Big Black Door, an agency that brings CMO-level big brand thinking to its clients, helping brands to grow without making rookie mistakes. Anything sound familiar there. Gareth's experience is widely in FMCG and food and drink, but he also has helped publishers, charities and marketing agencies, which he does touch on. Gareth has previously been head of brand at Arla Foods, but more recently head of brand at Weetabix and, yes, he was in charge of the brand when they did the award-winning collaboration with Heinz Baked Beans. In his words, it almost broke the internet. I know you're going to love this episode because Gareth shares some fascinating fails. He's got two big ones in here One about a chocolate hair flavoured coat, which I'll let him talk about, and another which was quite interesting too. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's hear how you can improve your brand marketing without having to spend the hours and hours learning from your own mistakes. Enjoy, Gareth. Welcome to the show.

Gareth Turner: 2:38

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Chris Norton: 2:46

Yeah, so you've got a very fascinating history. I've been going through your LinkedIn profile and the various bits and pieces you've said, and the proposed title for today's show was they're called marketing fundamentals for a reason. So why don't you tell me what you mean by that marketing fundamentals? Let's start with that.

Gareth Turner: 2:59

Well, I guess my theory here is that there are certain fundamentals, there are certain core principles in marketing that are the same whether you're talking FMCG, b2b, b2c, other things I can't think of right now but they're called fundamentals for a reason. A couple of times recently I've had somebody say okay, thanks for the proposal, gareth, but you're going to work with someone else because you haven't got B2B experience. Okay, I think the fundamentals are still pretty much the same. What I do have is 25 years of some of the best training in the world in marketing, from heineken, from all of foods, from wheat picks, I think. I think a good marketeer with the fundamentals behind them should be able to turn their hands to to anything. So, yeah, it's uh.

Gareth Turner: 3:50

I find it frustrating where people prioritise tactics, prioritise. You need to be on TikTok. Okay, that's great. Why do I need to be on TikTok? Because it could well be that I need to be on TikTok, but what are the fundamentals that I mean? Perhaps we'll touch on these in a bit, but what are some of the fundamentals that I need to appreciate and understand to decide whether TikTok is the right thing for me?

Chris Norton: 4:12

yeah, absolutely, you've breached the converter people saying they want to be on a channel when they haven't really thought through, just because everybody else is on it yeah, so come on, break down some of those fundamentals for us then I think there's.

Gareth Turner: 4:25

For me, it all starts with a deep understanding of the target audience, and that so that, whether your target audience is, you know, for we to fix it's, it was 99 of the population, people who have cereal for breakfast, so people are buying into your category. Or whether it's for b2b, it might be, um, I don't know, uh uh, building merchant materials, merchant or something I don't know. But the fundamental is that you understand your target audience. You understand what their motivations are, you understand what their barriers are to purchase. Why aren't these, uh, 100% of the population buying weetabix? Well, you know. Again, perhaps one pick some of these.

Gareth Turner: 5:06

But once you understand that, you can decide well, what things do we need to say to them that might make them um by our products? What uh messages do we say? What media are we going to choose? What's the right moment to intervene? So, once you understand all these things and they're all attitudinal understanding, that's not millennial, that's a, that's a absolutely pointless, that's not an understanding of the audience that's such so broad, so many different attitudes and beliefs that sit within, within that demographic. But once you understand the attitudes, the barriers, the motivations, you can then uh, think about how you grow your brand with those people so, taking weetabix as an example, by the way you were.

William Ockenden: 5:48

You actually worked at weetabix for a few years, didn't you? What was your role there?

Gareth Turner: 5:52

Head of marketing for three years at Weetabix Right.

Chris Norton: 5:56

And one of the reasons you're on the show obviously is you were there during the Weetabix and Baked Beans gate right, oh, I was.

William Ockenden: 6:04

Do we call it gate? I don't know if it is gate, is it a breaking of the internet? I think it's an accepted To give it its full term, the award-winning. Multi-award winning. Did you write the award? No, Marketing.

Gareth Turner: 6:13

Week campaign of the year. It was 2021. That's cool. Yeah, I was there, I guess.

William Ockenden: 6:22

So for anyone that isn't familiar with it, explain the campaign, and then what I'd like to do is dig into the insight and the customer understanding that led you to that campaign.

Gareth Turner: 6:29

It's quite controversial. I don't think it was a campaign. I that led you to that campaign. It's like controversy. I don't think it was a campaign, I think it's an execution. So for Marketing Week to call it a campaign of the year, I actually think it's slightly strange. It was an execution in a broader campaign, right? So, the broader campaign Weetabix had I think they still do, but they had two strands of activity. One was generally speaking around just brand equity, equity-driving ads in the classic long and the short of it, right? So, um, you'd see things like the submarine ad that we made, or the there's one, a riff on the uh, um, uh, little red riding hood, um, uh, sorry, it was the the three little pigs, sorry, three little pigs and the wolf, um, riff on that. They were equity building campaigns.

Gareth Turner: 7:10

Then we had a strand of work which was sort of inspiration, just trying to get the product out of people's cupboards into their bowls and hopefully down their necks. So you, the tv advertising, for that was, we called it any which way a bit. So we'd have, um, we'd speak with hot milk, which is with cold milk, which is with this fruit, which is with that fruit, which is the yogurt, which. Always different things, just showing people different ways of of eating the product, and then you can take it to an extreme. Then, and um, frank, the uh the agency who worked on that with us. So what about we do some sort of slightly weird partnerships? What about, if we do, we speaks, and heinz beans and we had uh, we took and Marmite, we had Weetabix with Innocent Smoothies, with Cathedral City's Cheddar I think there may have been one other that sounds quite nice.

Gareth Turner: 7:57

That one, no, it doesn't absolutely the Marmite one was on the Monday and I thought that was that was the one that was a slam dunk love it or hate it. Yeah, got a bit of interest, but nothing much. And then Tuesday was the beans one and it went absolute gangbusters. They got 1.3 billion impressions.

Chris Norton: 8:20

And most of them.

William Ockenden: 8:20

I'd imagine so. Did it start? Only 1.2 with me, sorry. Did it start as an organic concern then and then the media picked up on it? Or was it a joined-up approach where the concept was pitched, then the media picked up on it? Or did the kind of? Was it a joined up approach where the concept was pitched to the media because it just seemed so organic?

Gareth Turner: 8:37

the way, it was totally organic. There's no paid on it at all. Really, wow, 1.3 billion organic reach, or impressions, I should say. And yeah, it was picked up by news outlets all over the place. It was on Good Morning Britain with Piers Malkin. Remember him, was he furious?

William Ockenden: 8:56

about it. He was.

Chris Norton: 8:58

He was probably interviewing people about how they can't like date beans.

Gareth Turner: 9:02

Well, he tried it. He tried it and he did try it live on. I've got the clip. But the reason that I have the clip is that on it he says I know who did this. It was Frank PR. Whatever you're paying them, Weetabix, double it. And so, funnily enough, Frank made sure that I got to see that in that clip it was discussed in the House of Commons. Jacob Rees-Mogg said as my nanny once said Weetabix are unbeatabix the most Jacob Rees comment possible.

William Ockenden: 9:38

A campaign like that it's well executed. It's a good idea.

Chris Norton: 9:43

It's a great idea it's a great piece of content.

William Ockenden: 9:46

But you know, the thing with creativity is there's a million good ideas isn't there and some of them just never land. So how much of it is kind of chance the fact that it kind of resonated with people, how much of it is creative genius, it's all creative genius.

Chris Norton: 10:01

Of course it is. I was going to say you've just led him down that.

Gareth Turner: 10:04

Well, to be fair, it wasn't my creative genius, so I didn't really see much of it until it had gone live, right. They didn't really see much of it until it had gone live, right. So I mean, it's all luck One creates the right environment for these things. Like I said, the ones I thought were the doozies, they weren't the ones that went gangbusters, so I believe you'll have to ask my team, but I believe that we created the right environment for that sort of stuff to happen. So we gave the team, uh, empowerment to create these things.

Gareth Turner: 10:35

We, um, we had, we were trying to get bolder marketing at in weetabix at the time, and so we had a couple of little sort of phrases that we, we kept coming back to. So things like um, we would say yes if rather than no because so. So in that example I'm simplifying here to make the point. But when Elaine, the assistant brand manager, if she had come to me with this thing, it would have been easy to go. Well, I'm not sure we do that because it's, I'm not sure it looks tasty or something. But what you can say is well, yes, we could do that if you can just convince me that it's tasty. It's the same conversation, but in a much more empowering, engaged way.

William Ockenden: 11:17

So that's a cultural thing that you impose or not impose you encourage within your team. So you might have nine, ten activations, none of which fly, but the fact that you've got this culture.

Chris Norton: 11:30

But that's what you said, wasn't it that you had like you had?

Gareth Turner: 11:33

there's five that week.

Chris Norton: 11:34

Five a week.

Gareth Turner: 11:34

There's five. Well, it's only one week of it. There's five that week. And then it was day two, day two, so we just brought all the other ones in that day, so we had everyone everyone was piling in Like spec sa yeah, there was, I mean, there was, I mean every brand manager there'll be social media managers listening to this going.

Chris Norton: 11:55

Oh yeah, I jumped on that. Baked beans on my. It was just basically chucked baked beans on every product, wasn't it?

Gareth Turner: 12:00

Yeah, and then so, yeah, I mean to be fair, we had it wasn't. There was a degree of planning in it, so we had spoken to each of those brands. We had spoken to each of those brands. We'd spoken to Heinz, right, and said on Tuesday, are you okay if we do this? They said, yes, we are okay. On Tuesday, we're going to say this be great if you replied. And they go okay, well, what are you going to say? And, uh, they told us what they're going to say. Okay, so we'll be ready with that one as well, right, so there's a bit of planning and we had a bank of, as it started to get some traction, we had the bank of different responses and so we played them out and then we really got going. We just prioritised the ones where there was the biggest traction, where people had the biggest followings and the biggest reach, and that accelerated it. The US Embassy in London.

William Ockenden: 12:46

I mean, that's truly, truly viral, isn't it?

Chris Norton: 12:50

I feel like we should have jumped on it for Prohibition, Will I?

William Ockenden: 12:52

know, we've missed a trick there, haven't we the podcast?

Gareth Turner: 12:53

should have jumped all over it the truth is, I think many brand managers did miss the boat. Right? I talked about this yes if approach, but the other thing we had was an approach of what's the worst that could happen, and the reality is in something like that. The worst that could happen is someone just keeps scrolling. If it was, if it was, and the reality is in something like that the worst that could happen is someone just keeps scrolling.

Chris Norton: 13:12

Yeah.

Gareth Turner: 13:16

If it was and I said that we were chatting earlier on no one's going out. Very few people are going into work saying I'm really going to fuck this up, I'm going to do my best to do the worst work I possibly can do. No one does that. So if you take that positive intent and say, okay, well, what's the worst that can happen? Well, someone's going to scroll past it. I don't think anyone's at that point was going to go. Do you know what? And now they put beans on wheat bakes. I'm no longer going to buy it. Of course they're not right. So the worst that can happen is not very much so it's worth a punt.

William Ockenden: 13:47

We've not yet politicized baked beans in this country, haven't we? But but watch this space.

Chris Norton: 13:51

So the campaign was brilliant, so you won. Did you say marketing?

Gareth Turner: 13:55

week Marketing week campaign of the year. So who presented?

Chris Norton: 13:57

you with a trophy? I don't think we got one.

William Ockenden: 13:59

It was in lockdown. Oh no, Did you get a mail order?

Gareth Turner: 14:01

I don't think we got that, did you put baked beans on the actual award. We should have done.

William Ockenden: 14:07

We should Got lockdown awards. I don't miss those, do you?

Gareth Turner: 14:09

Normally.

William Ockenden: 14:10

Dial in on a really slow Twitter connection Everyone's getting pissed at home. So this idea, you know, is it fair to say if we don't have campaigns failing, we're not trying hard enough? I think so. So elaborate on that. What do you? You know, what do you If there's?

Gareth Turner: 14:27

I think one has to If you want to drive your brand awareness. You come back to the marketing fundamentals. The marketing fundamentals here are for a brand like Weetabix make your brand easy to think of, easy to find, easy to buy, easy to use, easy to eat, right. So that strand of recipe inspiration is the easy to eat part, but the rest of it is keeping yourself front of mind. So Weetabix has what 98% prompted awareness and 2% of the population, I think, are lying. Everyone's heard of Weetabix, so awareness isn't the problem.

Gareth Turner: 15:00

But you can keep it relevant. You can keep it in the conversation. That's what that did. It helped keep it relevant. And you keep a brand relevant by being interesting and having a point of view and having a helpful point of view as a point of view that somebody can easily take an opposite but equally valid point of view to so point of view. To say you know, world peace would be great, yeah, really. No one can disagree with that right. But to say we think you should put beans on a Weetabix well, that's just because I think that and you might think the other, doesn't make us bad people, just makes us having a different opinion.

Chris Norton: 15:38

I think what worked with those controversial sort of partnerships is that people like to have an opinion on something, so a cracking thing that I was. Years ago when we were social media managers for other consumer clients, I was talking to the head of social Asda is a kind of social media friend of mine and he said that they publish content every day, regular, every day tons of content, and the biggest post that they did was cheese plus toast.

Chris Norton: 16:07

How do you do yours kind of thing? And it was like different orders of cheese and toast. So is it white bread? With what sort of cheese and toast so is it? Is it white bread? With what sort of cheese? Is it beans? It's a weeabix, uh, is it? You know? Is it? Uh, brown sauce, red sauce and all the different combinations, and it just every, every time they did cheese on toast yeah, it just went.

William Ockenden: 16:26

It went. It says conversation topics that happen in the office or in the pub, isn't it that I mean? But circling back to kind of audience understanding then, so, practically speaking, brand like Weetabix, what does that look like? How do you mine that kind of insight to come up with those great campaigns and those great ideas?

Gareth Turner: 16:43

Well, Weetabix is almost a bad example because it's so ubiquitous that it's in God knows how many cupboards are up and down. I suspect a lot of us in this room have got Weetabix in the cupboard.

Chris Norton: 16:53

I didn't have any last night, actually I needed some. Well, there you go.

Gareth Turner: 16:56

But it'd be in most of our repertoires. Yeah, if you're buying cereal, it's in most of your repertoires. So your target audience so back to fundamentals. If you believe Ehrenberg, bass, byron Sharp, those guys it's um, it's people who are buying into your category. Your category buyers are your target audience. For weetabix, that's 98 of the population, whatever. Whatever it is for other people, it'd be a lot, a lot less than that. So the insight for weetabix actually is a very broad. That's why it's a mainstream brand. You never see anything too controversial from from weetabix. But a brand like paddy power or someone like that can be much spikier because their target audience is a very different target audience. So they can be controversial, provocative, because that will resonate with their target audience more Plain and full. Yes, and something that you or I may find offensive their target audience may not.

William Ockenden: 17:49

This segment of the show is about marketing fuck-ups and chatting to you. Pre-show, you've told us some absolutely horrific sounding campaigns.

Chris Norton: 17:57

Fucking hell. That's a bit harsh. Absolutely horrific. I didn't think it was that bad.

William Ockenden: 18:03

I must admit the one. I'm not going to say what it is. There's one leaping out at you. Yeah, when we mentioned it in the office, people were going what?

Gareth Turner: 18:10

Yeah, we mentioned it in the office. People were going what, yeah, how did that work?

William Ockenden: 18:12

that's disgusting. So, yeah, well, that's great. So do you want to tell us about some of the campaigns that haven't perhaps worked as well?

Gareth Turner: 18:17

you want to go there, do you? We do? We do um straight in there. So, uh, so I left heineken and I joined. I joined ala uh and I wanted to make a name for myself. So I was tasked with launching this chocolate milkshake drink and I launched this chocolate milkshake drink. We had a campaign shot, we had outdoor and I need the PR campaign here and it sticks in my throat. You can see me hesitating to even say it.

Chris Norton: 18:51

It's sticking there. I can't bring myself to it. This is why everyone's listening.

Gareth Turner: 18:54

They want to hear this, so it was. The stunt was that we created a coat made out of human hair, made out of the sort of sweepings off a barbershop floor, and we got some London fashion students to make this thing and we PR'd that, I repeat, to support the launch of a chocolate milkshake.

Chris Norton: 19:19

So okay, okay, let's just go back. We'll just wind back to the strategy.

William Ockenden: 19:23

Well, yeah, there you go. It's all based on insight.

Chris Norton: 19:25

So the insight of having human hair onto a coat. Let's just go through the insight.

Gareth Turner: 19:31

And there you go. There's the challenge, right. So the brand was it was a high protein chocolate milk stream with added protein, 25 grams of protein. It was an amazing product and we were the sort of campaign idea. We were sort of riffing on these ideas of overblown masculinity. So on my Facebook feed today the shoot was 11 years ago today and there's a picture of me. I can say I've never looked cooler than the moment of me in this coat and sort of big, long fur coat.

Chris Norton: 20:04

Can we get that picture.

Gareth Turner: 20:06

It wasn't in that coat. Good Lord, Is that picture?

Chris Norton: 20:08

on the internet. It's not the hair coat. We're going to get that in the video. Oh the hair coat.

Gareth Turner: 20:11

I've given you a link to the hair coat.

Chris Norton: 20:12

Oh, let's take a look at that, yeah, but it's overblown.

Gareth Turner: 20:15

Masculinity was the idea, and we had a guy holding a lion looking strong, like this sort of perfume ads and sort of. There's a riff on those sort of things, right, and it's like things like, yeah, we thought that was funny and so we just took it to the next level. So what could be more manly than a coat made of man hair? And so that was the thought progression. But I come back to your point there was no insight there. So why did that not work? Well, I think a number of different reasons. I think it was overly complicated.

Gareth Turner: 20:50

It was so many layers to that onion that you had to unpick to understand why we'd done that thing, it wasn't executing an idea, it was a thing that we thought was funny and I've since learned that's not probably good enough to put out in the real world. And finally, a fundamental of marketing is if you're talking about a food, it needs to be talking about taste, or at least not going against taste. It's not undermining taste credentials. So you put all those things together I I didn't adhere to the fundamentals of marketing and that's why that thing hence the name of the show that you've given us.

William Ockenden: 21:31

Yeah yeah, so, yeah that. So how has it met? So you know you, you used this as a as a PR hook, did you so what? Was it met with indifference or confusion, or no, no, it was.

Chris Norton: 21:41

What was the title? That was my question. Similar to what? We were saying what was the title of the release?

Gareth Turner: 21:46

I can't remember.

Chris Norton: 21:47

I'm trying to connect the two dots, like human hair becomes chocolate.

Gareth Turner: 21:50

I'm just looking here. The news article from 2013 was Manly Milk Company creates human hair fur coat.

William Ockenden: 22:00

That's a very functional headline, isn't it?

Gareth Turner: 22:01

There's a sort of guy in this hair coat, but it got some traction, so it worked then. Well not it wasn't good traction the link. It was discussed.

William Ockenden: 22:50

The moment you've got to explain an idea. It's too complicated.

Gareth Turner: 22:54

I'm there the first, however many months six, seven months into my job at Arla, and I get a call from the global head of PR. I've got CNN from Japan on the line. Oh my God, what have I done? What have I done? I'm just trying to do good stuff here. He goes yeah, yeah, don't worry, mate, I'll sort this out. They want an interview, cnn want an interview with you. Okay, I can't, I can't do this, but yeah.

Gareth Turner: 23:21

So despite that, I did, alright, did you go on it no, no, no, oh okay, no, no, that was I wasn't, I wasn't experienced enough to do that live okay, it do that live. Okay, yeah, it was. Thank God Piers Morgan didn't get hold of that one. That would have been.

William Ockenden: 23:35

Yeah, he wouldn't have liked it.

Chris Norton: 23:36

The weird thing about this is you're saying that it did get some traction despite the headline being quite functional. But actually, in the modern era of social media and TikTok, if you did a TikTok video about the campaign creating a jacket out of human hair although I have to admit, it does sound revolting, doesn't?

Gareth Turner: 23:53

it, it sounds itchy it doesn't sound like something I want to wear. It was awful, but it doesn't link to the product. It doesn't link to the logic flow from your product and your product benefit of it's got high protein.

Chris Norton: 24:11

I mean, that's quite a leap there.

Gareth Turner: 24:12

I mean, that's why that didn't work.

Chris Norton: 24:14

We've had fuck-up number one, which was the human hair jacket, and then we've got fuck-up number two here, which is interesting mainly because my kids are massively into darts. Now at home They've already put nearly a hole in my £5,000 flat-screen TV just slightly because they're into darts. So why don't you tell us about your insight and your campaign around darts, because they'll be interested so this is, this is an executional thing.

Gareth Turner: 24:39

So John Smith's back in the day I mean this would be is this Peter Kay John Smith's ads thank you for mentioning that I did. I did do the last three Peter Kay ads for John Smith's. That was my. That was my first ever TV advertising.

Chris Norton: 24:51

Before we go any further with you, you fuck up. Then, peter Kay thing, what was the brief? Or did you just let him do whatever he wanted and put John Smith's on it?

Gareth Turner: 25:00

Okay, maybe if I was dialing into this I would just down there in my home desk I've got a pile of probably 150 scripts that were written for those three ads. We chose three out of those Unbelievable Comedy gold Unbroad. For those three ads we distilled. We chose three out of those unbelievable comedy gold unbroadcastable comedy gold in there.

Chris Norton: 25:18

Who wrote them, peter? No, no, no, no, no, you did.

Gareth Turner: 25:22

No.

Chris Norton: 25:23

As in John Smith.

Gareth Turner: 25:24

So when I say I did those ads right. Well, I briefed those ads and TVWA made those ads and Peter Kay starred in them and other tidbit, k starred in them and other other tidbit. The director of those ads was a guy called Danny Kleinman who now directs the opening credits for James Bond films.

Chris Norton: 25:42

Wow, I mean because those Peter K ads are like. I've heard people talking about the fact that in you know TV campaigns now, there's hardly any humor other than spec savers yeah there's not a lot of humor and Pete, there's two lambooners here.

Gareth Turner: 25:57

So, if I'm being totally transparent, I did the last three, which were called Diner, where he's there with his wife and some friends in like a harvester. I did one called Dog Show. I did one called Antiques, a sort of riff on Antiques, sort of riff on Antiques Roadshow, whilst whilst the Dinah did win a Golden Arrow, I don't think they were the Champions League of the PEK, I think they were maybe mid-table premiership, but the big ones are Top Bombing, abbott those ones.

Chris Norton: 26:28

Top Bombing. They weren't mine, but they. You won't know what the hell we're talking about.

Gareth Turner: 26:30

No, you need to look those up. The top bombing is an avid Avid. I still say that you still hear it at the football grounds when someone hoofs the ball and a Tom and Charles avid. And that is the sign of amazing copywriting. When I'm going to say, 30 years later, maybe people are still saying that thing. That's unbelievable.

Chris Norton: 26:53

Avid and you still associate it with John Smith. That's how I remember John Smith. So that shows you amazing adverts that you connect the two. It was Peter Kay, but I always believed that Peter Kay wrote the scripts to the ads and it was his free reign. It wasn't.

Gareth Turner: 27:09

No well, peter Kay had done these. John Smith had done these. Loads of Peter Kay ads amazing, peter Kay had done these. So John Smith had done these loads of Peter Kay ads amazing Peter Kay ads they won loads of awards, right yeah?

Gareth Turner: 27:18

yeah, before my time, amazing John Smith ads. Then they moved away and they went down another avenue, did a thing called no Nonsense Landlord they do all these different things and then I came along and we said we're going to give it another go, we're going to do some more advertising and we created a script and we created the scripts that ended up being Peter Kay coming back. But Peter Kay wasn't on board when we wrote those scripts, so they were written for John Smith and a character who was going to be we call him a no-nonsense man type character, like an everyman character. And then we approached a few people pk was one of those people we approached and pk eventually said he'd do it. So they were written for john smith's character. They weren't, they weren't written specifically for pk. Having said that, when you know lucky to spend three days shooting those with peter k, just you know. You know it's like on a shoot.

Gareth Turner: 28:12

He's hanging around and he's just sitting there chatting to us, but he added another level of yeah. I would say they were like an 8 out of 10, 9 out of 10. He takes them through an 11 out of 10 with just his, his riffs. The outtakes, again unbroadcastable but hilarious. Somewhere at home I can't find it. I've got a DVD of Of the outtakes, but I'm still trying to find it, but I can't. It was brilliant.

Chris Norton: 28:34

Because that's him in his peak, I mean right on the peak of Peter Kay fame. I know he's just come back to about 18 months ago to do a world sold out tour for about seven years or something.

Gareth Turner: 28:49

That was, I think, probably about 10 years ago, perhaps maybe a bit longer, maybe 12 years ago. So he was right in his pomper at that time.

Chris Norton: 28:57

We'll move from top bombing back to.

Gareth Turner: 28:59

Quickly in darts then. So what we sponsored? I think I've got darts and something else to show the yin and the yang of that. So we sponsored the Grand National at the time and we sponsored the Lakeside World darts, like the BDO world, not the PDC one, the BDO one, the grassroots, the sort of every man darts and we wanted to bring our drinkers closer to the action of these sort of things. Right, and so eventually, with the racing, we bought a racehorse, we gave you, had a promotion where you buy a pint, you get a share. And then we brought so we brought these people, the working men's clubs drinkers, up and down the country, take them to Aintree, get them in the parade ring, get them in the winner's enclosure, all these sort of stuff like that.

Gareth Turner: 29:47

That was when it worked brilliantly. That was the insight was we know our punters love John Spears and they love racing. We do that. They also love darts and so we, when it worked well, we did a thing called the people's darts, where we got all the pub players up and down the country playing each other, tournaments, tournaments, get to the final of this and we play the final on the stage as the curtain raiser for the world darts Final Wow. So you've got the whole thing packed and these guys are throwing darts Amazing. But then we said, well, do it again. Well, it was the early days of the iPhone. We'll get you. Remember the Carling iPint, remember, oh?

Chris Norton: 30:24

wow yeah.

Gareth Turner: 30:25

Sort of look at that.

Gareth Turner: 30:26

And so in the business, we're chatting in the office and we go what's our version of that? So we want to. This is where you get the exit, the, the tactic and the execution ahead of the, the strategy. Let's do. We'll do an iphone app. Um, uh, app, what can it be? We'll do darts. And so we did this. We had this darts game on on the iphone. It was brilliant. It was the. The actual app was incredible. But this is in the very early days of the iPhone. Our drinkers are guys who are sort of late 50s into their 60s. They're not at the cutting edge, they're not early adopters of that. So Carling, yes, absolutely, that's the right people. But John Smith's was not the right thing to do for that. We got too distracted by an internal desire to do something quite interesting that was not customer-related, consumer-related, do you?

Chris Norton: 31:16

think that's the, because I'm thinking of the era of when that would be and that was. It's like now. It's like what can we do with AI? Ai, because AI is in everything. And isn't this just? Oh, the iPhone's come out we need an app. It's like when websites first came out we need a website on this, and then it was. Apps came out. We need an app. Do you think that's what it was? It's the new shiny thing in marketing.

Gareth Turner: 31:37

We need to do one. We were chatting before we recorded, but this idea of I regularly what we need, we need to be on TikTok. Okay, we might need to be on TikTok, but let me, let's have a chat about what you're trying to achieve, who your audience is, where your audience is hanging out, where they're finding the right information, and the answer might still be TikTok, but there's some fundamentals that go before that, which, in that example for the John Smith app, I don't think we did. We got distracted by the shiny new object.

Chris Norton: 32:04

Did you see what he did there? Will? He pulled it right back to the title of the show. I like it. I like that. I like that he segu the fundamentals.

William Ockenden: 32:11

It's hard to kill a good idea, though, isn't it? You know, when you've got a cracking idea that you just think is brilliant, but part of you does recognise this might not be quite right for our audience.

Chris Norton: 32:20

I actually think the idea was quite good. It sounds like you had quite a good idea.

Gareth Turner: 32:25

It was before. It's time. Everyone's got an iPhone now, or everyone's got a smartphone. Let's say so. It's just that I didn't even know I would have been like in my 30s I didn't have an iPhone. If I haven't got one, we went with the agency that developed it for us. We went and bought an iPhone so we could go see what it did. There should have been an alarm bell ringing at that point.

Chris Norton: 32:49

Yeah.

William Ockenden: 32:54

So the racehorse, that's intrigued me, me. So how did that work? Then you went out. They say never work with children and animals, don't they?

Gareth Turner: 32:58

yeah, so we bought horse Smithy the horse as a PO. I raised a PO how much was that?

Chris Norton: 33:03

then you raised a PO for a racehorse yeah, that sounds expensive.

Gareth Turner: 33:08

Yeah, item horse one. It cost us, I guess, about 50 grand that horse it was. It cost us about 50 grand now. So it was, it was a decent amount of money. It wasn't. It was um and we had because we were into horse racing I think john spitz still are, but they, we had um. A lot of people points right direction this this is. It was a horse, a young horse, hadn't raced before. The lineage of it was was strong, you know some, some sort of group one winners in the parentage and stuff. We then took the horse and we had it trained in the McCain yard. So where Red Rum was trained, we had Donald McCain Ginger McCain was still alive back then promoting it. We raced it and the idea was that we would race this horse and our drinkers could come and watch that horse and go in the parade ring and stuff. But then did it ever win?

William Ockenden: 33:57

no, um, no, I think it twice and and the punters could become a shareholder in the horse is that where a bit? Like the equity for punks.

Gareth Turner: 34:07

Yeah, yeah again before our time, weren't we? But yeah, so you buy a pint, get a chair, that was that was the thing. So got a little. It wasn't actually a share, right, but the idea was that you could then go to the races Then at Aintree for the Grand National Festival. We would then build a pub, so where we'd bring these shareholders along and we had like the dog and trumpet or whatever it was, and we had a proper pub there. So most of the hospitality there is all sort of fancy sort of silver service. This was a proper pub. We'd bring Bobby George to come and play darts against all the blokes from the Working Men's Club.

William Ockenden: 34:46

That was a great execution. That's remained a big theme, hasn't it? We do a lot of persona work now at prohibition and and constantly, the theme we see when we're doing kind of audience deep dives is that people want, um, just buying from a brand isn't enough. They want to be involved in the community. They want a community side of it they want insider information and insider and that's a really good. I mean again maybe, but ahead of its time, but that's definitely a trend now as well yeah, I think so.

Gareth Turner: 35:11

And yet one of those observation, but it perhaps wouldn't have been articulated like that back then. But the agency I should give them a shout out Space. The agency created that for us. That came from an immersion. So when we pitched that work they said, well, Gareth, can we go and can you give us a name of some working men's clubs? And they went out to this working men's club in Nottingham and got to chat with these guys and the racing was on. They got to chat about horse racing and the guys were sort of saying, well, yeah, we'd love to go horse racing, we'll take you horse racing. So they took them horse racing and just chatting to them and said, look at all them in the braid ring, it would be great to be. It would be great to be in there and you see the cogs going. Of course, we'll get you in there, of course. And John Smith can then create you're in the know, you're in a circle there.

Chris Norton: 35:59

What I like there is that the agency has pitched to you that they've held a strategic focus group. In actual fact, what they've done is gone and get pissed in a working men's club and gone to the races.

William Ockenden: 36:08

We should do that more often, yeah exactly on the company budget. Oh, my God Amazing.

Chris Norton: 36:15

And so obviously you worked at Arla Foods, you worked on Lurpak, is that right?

Gareth Turner: 36:23

Yeah, so I was the marketing director in the UK for Butter. So Lurpak, anka and Private Label what's the little guy called Douglas? See, talk about distinctive brand assets we talked about earlier on and Douglas the trombone playing butter man, that's definitely getting clipped. He hasn't been on Lurpac, I'm going to say for probably well over 20 years.

William Ockenden: 36:46

Bad strategy bring it back 25 years.

Gareth Turner: 36:49

Well, again, I think they've done all right, since Douglas was sort of Is he dead? They killed him.

Chris Norton: 36:55

I don't think he was realouglas. Uh was um sort of uh they uh, is he dead?

Gareth Turner: 36:56

they killed him. I don't think it was real. I think he was. He was made of butter morph, he's melted, he melted there's a.

Chris Norton: 37:02

There's a. There's a growing. There's a growing movement towards characters, animals and um. Characters are known to work with brands yes so a good example is the guys from ribena are now bringing back. They've brought back the, the ribena berries, yeah, and there's there's a lot of brands are getting a lot of more traction from brand work rather than just blimmin digital marketing, performance marketing it's all about the brand. It's like you said, talkability and people referring back to the brand, and I think that lerpac and p Kay for John.

William Ockenden: 37:35

Smith's.

Chris Norton: 37:35

Yes, the point is that brand characters seem to work and they make it memorable.

William Ockenden: 37:39

So the Meerkats good example. Everybody thought they were stupid.

Chris Norton: 37:42

Next thing I know they've won all the awards and John Smith's Peter Kay Lurpac.

William Ockenden: 37:48

Douglas.

Chris Norton: 37:50

I think this I'm starting it now they should bring back Douglas.

Gareth Turner: 37:54

Well I'm sure they will welcome. You wouldn't be the first to suggest bringing back Douglas, but yeah, they've done all right without him. But yeah, so Good Food Deserves. Lurpak is their campaign that they've been running for 20 or 20-plus years and Widening Kennedy should give them a shout for that as the agency. But they were what number two or three brands in value terms in butter in the UK and the trajectory is unbelievable. They became, I think, probably before I got involved they probably just become the number one brand by value, but at a 100% price premium to its nearest competitor. So if you're double the price of your nearest competitor and growing, that's a pretty strong brand.

Chris Norton: 38:39

Yeah, I saw again during lockdown or I don't know if it was lockdown or after you'll know the one we're about to talk about, because it got loads of PR traction that it had broken through the £5 per piece of butter.

Gareth Turner: 38:51

What do you call it? A knob?

Chris Norton: 38:54

You can beat that up.

Gareth Turner: 38:55

I don't think it was. Yeah, it was block.

Chris Norton: 38:57

Block block there we go, not knob.

William Ockenden: 38:59

A knob is what you cut off, it isn't it.

Chris Norton: 39:01

I'll leave that to you.

William Ockenden: 39:02

You would do yeah.

Chris Norton: 39:02

Yeah, so the block of butter is five quid. Yeah, right.

Gareth Turner: 39:08

Butter to that. Yeah, it's expensive at the moment.

William Ockenden: 39:12

So so, outside of the clients you've worked with, then you've you've probably got a really good kind of macro view and a keen interest, I'm sure, in other brands, um, across the whole market. Who's smashing it as far as you're concerned when it comes to marketing? You know who's doing really bold work. That just really impresses you uh who's?

Gareth Turner: 39:30

uh well, spec savers are doing great work, think I think the reason I like that work so much is that it's consistent, it's brand building, it's in-house, because I think it's unusual to see work of that consistent quality being done in-house. I think.

William Ockenden: 39:52

And led by insight. You know the petrol pump activation. They knew that people often can't see the pumps refill with diesel instead of petrol. The sponsorship of the referees as well. That's what I was going to say.

Gareth Turner: 40:04

That's an amazing, creative idea which has been executed in different channels.

Chris Norton: 40:10

Based on.

Gareth Turner: 40:10

Insight Based on Insight Well, and the other. I mean, if we're really going to torture this, On. Based on insight.

Gareth Turner: 40:16

Based on insight, Well, and the other, I mean if we're really going to torture this On sight not insight, but I think the beauty of it and this will be wrong, but the creative idea is something like you make silly, funny mistakes when you can't see properly and they dramatize that in all these different ways. Now, what I like about that is that any optician could say that, that. So when people talk about I need to find this thing, that's, that's um peculiar to spec savers or vision express or what have you? Vision express could have done that, um, but they've. They've made this land grab for something and they've talked about it consistently and persistently for a long period of time, about this sort of funny, silly mistakes.

Gareth Turner: 40:56

And that's a category entry point. People will be recognizing that thing. Like you say, the petrol station, or misreading something, mishearing something. They do the same thing for their hearing aid service, so it's about mishearing something. All these things are great insights that anyone in that category could have spotted. But they've spotted it and then they bring a strategic consistency to that and an executional consistency. The narrative arc of those is broadly the same. You get this set up there's a vet doing an operation on a cat. Oh no, it's not a cat, it's a hat.

William Ockenden: 41:34

They've effectively branded any mistake anybody makes in the public eye, which is extraordinary.

Gareth Turner: 41:38

And there you go. So we talk about John Smith and Avid, then the same is for Specsavers. When someone has made a mistake about miss seeing something, then people would say it's in the vernacular. And that's the power of the great idea.

Chris Norton: 41:54

It's like when we used to work with Ronseal and people used to say it does exactly what it says on the tin. We used to do social listening for them and every month it would come out strong in the reports. We do it does.

William Ockenden: 42:04

It's the only brand I've ever seen that they strap-lined. And the other thing with Ronseal, when someone appears on TV really suntanned they've been Ronciled. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's amazing how that like you say, it moves into the common vernacular, doesn't it? I think?

Gareth Turner: 42:16

the don't scratch the surface of my knowledge on this, but I think the Specsavers case study is a great case study because they they had the should have gone to Specsavers away from that for a year or so, um a few years ago, and didn't perform well. They came back to it and suddenly they it, the brand has started performing well again. So it's a, I think, a a validation of, of a strong insight end line, everything else, but also the power of consistency over time because those ads don't feel old-fashioned and stale.

Gareth Turner: 42:53

They keep moving it on, but they're not moving off.

William Ockenden: 42:55

They're genuinely entertaining, aren't they, which you know, even if you know what's coming, but they're still entertaining.

Chris Norton: 43:01

The weird thing about ads as well is, as marketers, we always think, oh, we've got to update them, we've got to update them, but actually, like the holidays are coming every year, 25 years, every year for 25 years same advert and it gets five out of five every year in the scoring. It's insane.

Gareth Turner: 43:18

I think I forget who it might be. System One have been talking about ads not wearing out, but they actually need to wear in more than wear out, and that's as marketeers. We get sick of the ad More often than not. You've been working on this ad for six months. You've been pouring over every detail. You've been do you think we should make that cut 2.83 of a second earlier, whatever it is obsessing over the detail and by the time it comes out you're sick of it. All the joy has been sucked out of this thing, uh, and then it it goes off. So you're ready to move on, but the general public haven't even seen the thing yet. You think of the? You think of the um, the money you to spend to get 50 the population of the uk to to be fed up with it.

William Ockenden: 44:05

Most brands aren't spending that sort of money so there's still a place for mass market advertising. You know there's a lot of talk about there being no place for mass market advertising. There's a lot of talk about there being no place for the TVC anymore. What's your view on that Rubbish?

Gareth Turner: 44:17

Yeah, I agree, Absolute rubbish. If you can afford it, and that's the big if right, If you can afford it, TV should be your go-to first thing on your lay down, absolutely. And then you build on top of that.

Chris Norton: 44:30

Yeah, because you can target better on TV. Now you can do direct-to-consumer targeting, but I still think.

Gareth Turner: 44:34

I just think it's the cost of doing it. The entry cost is high, but the cost per thousand actually is very good for TV and it's a signal of intent to your retail buyers when you're going to Tesco. I'm going on TV the 1st of April. Up to you if you want to list it or not, mr Tesco, but you'll be on TV and I've got it listed in all the other places. So you're cool. Suddenly you're in a slightly stronger position to negotiate your listings, et cetera.

William Ockenden: 45:08

When it comes to retail buyers because I'm fascinated by this that is really important. Isn't it Showing that you've got marketing clout to put behind a piece of NPD?

Gareth Turner: 45:16

Yeah, so anything. So when you're selling in, you're talking about the category role you're going to play, how you're going to grow the category for that retailer, how you're going to perhaps premiumize. You're talking about where it's going on their shelf. Because the first question they normally ask you is so which one of your skews are you going to sacrifice? You know, it's not my skew, it's, it's the kellogg's, the kellogg's one over there we're taking. We're taking that one on what's in it for them. How are you going to bespoke it for them? Is what they want to know. And then, how are you supporting it?

Gareth Turner: 45:48

And you can't just put something on a shelf and expect the general public to go oh, it's just what I've been waiting for. It just doesn't work like that. You have to show people back to some of the fundamentals, to carry all that in. But you need to make your brand and your MPD easy to think of, easy to find, easy to buy, easy to use. So if your failure needs to think of, then no one's going to buy it. You need to have mental availability and physical availability.

Chris Norton: 46:18

So, bringing it right back from the fundamentals to today. What are you doing today, then, gareth? What are you doing at the big black door?

Gareth Turner: 46:29

So I'm helping more brands with those fundamentals right. So all that training I had over the years at Heineken et cetera all the three-day residential course on writing a brief, the three-day residential course on how to assess work I'm taking that and working with scaling brands who have just got all these opportunities coming at them and just people saying you need to be on TikTok, you need to be on this. Everyone stop. What is it we're trying to do here? What's our objective? And just getting them pointed in the right direction using my experience and my team's experience I've got 25 years plus. My team have got almost half a century between us to point them in the right direction or to work with bigger brands who just don't have the time to do everything they should be doing and they go. I just need someone who knows what they're doing here. Just go and do that thing for me and we go and do that thing for them. Come back, go. We've done that thing for you now. Thank you very much.

Gareth Turner: 47:33

And it's food and drink, is it? It's food, fmc, me is food and drink.

Chris Norton: 47:36

And if people want to get in contact with you following this they've heard this episode they think, my God, I need to talk to Mr Weterbeck. So how can they get on?

Gareth Turner: 47:43

with you. Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's a necessary evil. It's a bit icky being self-papizing on LinkedIn, but it's it's where I hang out it's fine everybody's, pretty much every guest we've had has said find me on.

William Ockenden: 47:58

LinkedIn it's hideous, it's fine. Do you want to give Big Black Door?

Chris Norton: 48:02

website address as well. What's the URL to Big Black Door? Bigblackdoorcom how did you come up with that? No, okay, good small black door was taken.

William Ockenden: 48:10

Yeah, one of the questions we ask all of our guests and I'm going to put you on the spot again here is um, who should we get on the show next? Um, so anyone you know within your network who you think would be fascinating yeah, who would make a cracking guest is what?

Chris Norton: 48:22

will's saying that? Uh, who make a cracking?

Gareth Turner: 48:25

because that's how we got you on the show lucas bergman's is uh, it's good, so we work togetherineken he, former CMO at Kazoo. What's?

Chris Norton: 48:33

he called sorry.

Gareth Turner: 48:34

Lucas Bergman's. We were at Heineken together. He was at Money Supermarket Kazoo. He's now set up on his own so he can speak freely.

William Ockenden: 48:43

Someone recommended the founder of Nando's his personal friends with the founder of Nando's. All right, wow, who he's supposed to be introducing us to?

Gareth Turner: 48:50

I'm not sure if he has yet One of my clients wouldn't be a bad shout. So Johnny and Annie are brother and sister-in-law, johnny's married to Annie's sister. They have a company called Spoon Cereals, spoon Granola. They're doing very well, lovely people, lovely to work with them. They were on Dragon's Den, got funding on Dragon's Den and they're sort of 10 years old now, 10 years into their cereal journey. Which dragon? They got two, I think it was. They got Deborah and I think Peter. They actually got mentioned last night there was a granola snack. I didn't see it last night, the granola snack. I didn't see it. Last night the granola snack was pitched and Deborah referenced the fact she invested in Spoon.

William Ockenden: 49:35

Nice. There you go. All right, good stuff.

Gareth Turner: 49:37

Thank you for that.

Chris Norton: 49:37

That was excellent, that was a great show, yeah.