Chris Norton: 0:52

Welcome to Engaging Marketing Mistakes, the podcast that enables you to hit record revenue and double your marketing ROI by learning from the glorious mistakes of the world's top marketers. My name is Chris Norton and my mission is to help you, the senior marketer, grow your brand and hit record revenue so you can have a thriving brand. Today, we're thrilled to welcome Anil Manji, a communications consultant with huge experience in the public, private and charity sectors. Anil was recently listed in PR Week's 30 Under 30 and he's featured at its annual press conference, pr360 in Brighton. He has got some fascinating stories from working on the COVID-19 pandemic in Westminster and working on COP26. And he also brings a really great, interesting mistake that you're going to learn a lot from, and he's going to tell you a lot about what to do with your hair. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's hear how you can measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, no matter what sector you're in.

Sinead Morrissey : 1:48

Welcome, everybody.

Chris Norton: 1:51

Welcome back to Embracing Marketing Mistakes. This week. We're joined by Anil Manji, who is a communications consultant, and I'm also joined by my glamorous co-host, sinead Morrissey. Welcome back to the pod, sinead.

Sinead Morrissey : 2:04

Thank you Glad to be here

Chris Norton: 2:06

and welcome to the show, Anil. How are you doing?

Anil Manji: 2:08

Thanks for having me

Sinead Morrissey : 2:09

.

Anil Manji: 2:09

Yeah, very well thank you.

Chris Norton: 2:11

So you last year were listed in PR Week's 30 Under 30, is that correct?

Anil Manji: 2:18

That's right. Yeah, it's a bit of a double-edged sword. I like the experience, but I think everyone looks at that and thinks this guy knows nothing. He hasn't been around for long enough.

Chris Norton: 2:27

Yeah, well, I had a look through your work history and is it fair to say that you didn't really start out in comms? Is that right?

Anil Manji: 2:37

Yeah, so I started in advertising. So I was an intern at Grey London I can't remember what my first client was and then was in the private sector in agency land for about three years, then moved to government, then moved to charity and now charity and now I'm freelance. So yeah, I like to think I've seen it all so you did okay.

Chris Norton: 2:56

So you started out in an agency called grey. They're in london, right? Yeah, that's right and so what's that big? What sort of stuff were you working on?

Anil Manji: 3:04

so I started off on pan 10 and herbal essences, part of the png uh hair care portfolio, hence the flowing locks that your listeners won't be able to see. But yeah, and then I moved on to M&S, so managed to get myself into the flagship campaign, which was the Christmas food campaign.

Chris Norton: 3:22

So I literally saw how the sausage got made Nice, amazing. And so you worked there for three years working yourself up to that, and then you left to go to the department for business and trade in whitehall, right yeah, exactly, it had a different name.

Anil Manji: 3:38

Now who knows, it might have a different name in a week's time with this new government, but yeah, it was dit international trade back then. So that was about the uh, the great campaign, which is essentially the uk's biggest international marketing campaign, driving investment, trade and even trying to bring tourists and students in. So I spent a little bit of time there. And then, of course, covid struck. So I got seconded into the Cabinet Office working on COVID, crisis comms, so all those lovely familiar campaigns that we know hands-based space, rule of six, etc. But I was very much focusing on strat comms, looking at hard to reach audiences, um. And then worked in the climate world. So worked on cop 26 again still in the cabinet office, but cop 26 which is amazing, by the way.

Chris Norton: 4:22

What an amazing campaign to work on it was spectacular.

Anil Manji: 4:26

I think I had the most fun anyone's ever had with the with the public pair, so I've got to work with wimbledon. Put a formula recall to downing street. That was cool I remember that premier league match. Fantastic, well, that was me, yeah. Um, I actually work with blue peter. I've got a blue peter badge. That's probably one of their oldest recipients of a blue peter badge nice.

Chris Norton: 4:46

I always wanted one of those because they were like exclusive when I was young um, isn't there different? Types of Blue Peter badge. You can get as well Gold. Yeah, which one?

Anil Manji: 4:55

did you get? Yeah, they've got a green one. Now I got the standard blue one because I was a judge on the competition that we created together. I did cheekily have to ask and they were like yeah, sure, if you're a judge, why not?

Chris Norton: 5:07

Quite the accolade. Oh, so you got there and you actually demanded a Blue Peter match for being a judge.

Anil Manji: 5:11

I like that I asked very nicely. I said you know, I know I'm not on the show, but technically I am on the show as a judge. In a tiny screen on their Zoom call that appears for half a second. So you know, I like to think it still counts.

Chris Norton: 5:27

The bit that was really interesting to me there. Obviously, you've got several bits that we need to break into on you, on what you've done. But covid, like april 2020, peak, covid and you're you were working for the the other department, as you say and you were seconded. So what happened there then? Did you actually have to go into whitehall or did you because we weren't allowed so? And I remember the pictures. If you imagine, back to that era, there was foxes and deer in the middle of London. Trafalgar Square was empty. It was. It was a ghost town London. So were you? One of the people was actually there yeah, it was really, really bizarre.

Anil Manji: 6:04

I um, I was living with um some of my friends at the time and they were furloughed. They were at home watching the Office and I was getting onto my bike, going through empty streets and getting into the office every day. It was bizarre. It was so, so strange. But I think the strangest thing was that we all had this sense of normality. You know, we were working in an office, we were practicing social distancing, but at the end of the day you're still there in meetings, on calls. Strange, but but equally career-wise. So fascinating, so important. Of course, the pressure as well. Before we had the vaccine, it was all about what we called non-pharmaceutical interventions. You need policy, you need to drive and ensure that people are actually staying indoors, washing their hands, all those kinds of things. And if you don't manage to communicate that message, then of course the virus spreads. So we could actually track the progress of and the success of our comms against infection rates in different areas wow, I mean that is amazing.

Chris Norton: 7:02

Did you have an inside track on what boris and the others were going to say in the conference ever? Because, if we remember back then, it was daily conferences with the press and the media every single day, wasn't it? So were you privy to? That before it went out. Did you help write that or not?

Anil Manji: 7:17

If we remember back then, it was daily conferences with the press and the media every single day, wasn't it? So were you privy to that before it went out? Did you help write that or not? I didn't. No, I mean it was. It's a bit of a difficult one. The policy was changing all the time, so we might get told OK, this is what we're going to announce. We need to prepare the communications, because you're not just putting out things on your socials and tv ads. You're working with local councils, you're working with the police department, you're working with every man has dog across the country on this. So you inevitably make some plans and then something happens like there's a new outbreak in southeast london and therefore that's affected the local policy. That affects the national policy and, before you know it, whatever boris was going to say completely changes than now, before and before you know it whatever.

Chris Norton: 7:53

Boris was going to say completely changes than now before. Crazy, crazy, like fascinating. And so how many of you were in the office at this period?

Anil Manji: 8:00

I think in the main crisis hub it was probably between 50 to 100 people.

Chris Norton: 8:06

That must have been weird, because nobody else anywhere had anybody anywhere really other than you know the hospitals and things.

Anil Manji: 8:14

Yeah, it was. It was really really strange. I think if you're in a non-clinical setting, you're suddenly there and you're, you know, you're still. You're in the cabinet office, you've got number 10 next to you, you're still in your suit and tie and you think to yourself, gosh, who is this for? We're not meeting anyone, we're not, you know, bumping into people. Um, it was, it was a really strange situation and obviously, you know, looking back, they were, you know, with part again, all of that. It made everyone's work. Just, it was really really frustrating because for us, we were working our guts out, yeah, and obviously next door there was the obvious scandals, but for the most part, everyone was just working their guts out and just doing the best they could yeah, and they did do a good.

Chris Norton: 8:54

A lot of it was the work that was done during that period was great, because I saw marcus baird speak at pr week uh, pr 360 a couple of years ago and he was head of misinformation. He's actually going to come on the podcast during that that era the same misinformation during the covid. So they were they. They were identifying things that were being said incorrectly, like such as. One of the things was if you've got COVID and I think this was like May 2020, if you've got COVID, if you drink boiling hot water, it kills the virus. And they said oh my God, that's really dangerous. We're going to have to intervene here, because people see this on the internet and think, oh yeah, I'll drink boiling hot water. I mean, you just didn't think anybody would do that would you.

Sinead Morrissey : 9:37

Oh no, there was a lot of misinformation sorry, what did you say now?

Anil Manji: 9:42

we also had donald trump talking about uh having a sip of bleach as well to cleanse the system yeah, I forgot about that, there was tons though, wasn't it?

Chris Norton: 9:49

mar Marcus said there was probably 50, 60 different. Incorrect. You know just misinformation that people were saying about COVID in the vacuum of people sat at home making things up in that environment every single day.

Sinead Morrissey : 10:09

Like how did you cope with that? Because it must have been so intense and just kind of not knowing what was going to hit every day and how. You'd have to change from sort of like panic mode on a number of different crises. Like how did you actually cope with that?

Anil Manji: 10:25

I think the beginning was weirdly normal, because you're actually continuing your routine, you're going into the office and then you begin to realize, okay, actually we have to really put our heads down. We were in a in a group of, we're in a massive team, people coming from all kinds of departments just being seconded in and you kind of focus on the hyper important stuff. You're not thinking about objectives, appraisals, six-month plans. You're not thinking about grades. If things have to happen, you have to do them. I mean, at one moment my director was meant to be briefing, or in a presentation with the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, jenny Harries, she couldn't do it, couldn't find anyone else saw me said that okay, well, you know this work, you know this particular project, so you just have to brief them. So you find yourself in this bizarre situation. I mean, it's fantastic for resilience, it's obviously amazing preparation for any future crises, but yeah, you don't really know what's happened until you leave the office. You're like gosh, reflecting on all the things that happened, totally mad.

Chris Norton: 11:33

No, I don't think there's any crisis that I can ever think about that is as profound as that, like an economic, financial health. Every single facet of a crisis was involved and it was a national like national crisis, wasn't it? It was what a strange thing to be involved in, but actually really rewarding, I would imagine. I imagine you learned a lot in that period a huge amount, a huge, huge amount.

Anil Manji: 12:00

You know, thinking about work with local government, that was really fascinating. You learn a lot about how policies are made the, the tensions between mayors and councillors and national government as well. It's obviously super relevant now that we're talking about a new government, potentially looking at more devolution. But yeah, it's really quite scary looking back, but for my career it's been fantastic. I've learned so much. I'm obviously working with the NHS now, so I've got a better understanding of behaviour change when it comes to health, the messages you need to put, how you change those messages, translate those messages when it comes to hard to reach audience.

Chris Norton: 12:40

Fascinating work so you use something called the oasis framework, don't you in what you do? So yeah, so government do you want to explain a bit something about how, what that is and how it works.

Anil Manji: 13:01

Yeah, absolutely so. So the GCS, the Government Communication Service, came up with the OASIS plan, oasis framework years ago. So the GCS use it in absolutely everything but it's applicable in all comms. So I've used it in the charity world, I use it now in the nhs um with people I manage, I taught them how to use it and basically, if you can't put your campaign ideas and plans into an oasis structure, then there's probably something fundamentally wrong with it. So it's quite simple as a framework. It's it's five letters, so objective audience um, implementation and scoring, and it enables you to go back and forth and say, ok, how did these things line up? You start writing out your strategy and then you realize actually that won't deliver on my objectives. There's an amazing template that you can download from the government UK sites as well, but that will be used in absolutely every single government comms plan, whether it's a single day influencer campaign or whether it's a 10 year plan talking about tackling climate change or, you know, stopping smoking, whatever it might be.

Chris Norton: 14:03

So it measures impact and the effect. The scoring element, I would imagine, is about the impact. Is that right?

Anil Manji: 14:08

impact. Is that right? Exactly so. Even within the evaluator, even within the Oasis framework, you have an evaluation framework, so it's not just looking at what you put into it, it's looking at the outputs, the outtakes and the outcomes.

Sinead Morrissey : 14:23

Yeah, and the amazing thing about government.

Anil Manji: 14:25

Yeah, exactly Exactly. So you've got to be really disciplined and you've got to make sure that actually you are achieving those things, because if you don't, then typically in government it's a waste of taxpayer money. I think a lot of people get confused between strategy and implementation, or tactics, and the best analogy that I heard recently was about the Trojan horse. So you can actually build out the whole Trojan horse metaphor into an oasis plan. Your objective is to sack rome uh, sorry, to sack troy and to get through the impenetrable wall, um, so to do that, you need to get the gates open.

Anil Manji: 14:59

Your audience is obviously the trojans, who are, um, who are arrogant and foolish and, you know, believe in the gods and very, very particular about that kind of thing. And then your, your strategy is deception. So what, how are you going to, um, deceive the trojans and get through their wall? And then, of course, your implementation is the finer detail. It's build a massive horse, get people in there, um, fool the trojans and then bring the horse into the gates. And that is essentially, uh, the difference between tactics and um strategy, because the outcomes is a lot of dead trojans and, uh, the end of the war do we think anybody ever really let the trojan horse in through the wall?

Chris Norton: 15:43

did they go? Oh, look at this massive wooden wooden thing. This looks good, let's roll it in. This looks totally when we're fighting some people about two or three hours ago.

Sinead Morrissey : 15:52

Where have they all gone, let's just roll this.

Chris Norton: 15:55

It does seem it does seem like a very convenient story, the Trojan horse, but it's a great one that everybody remembers, isn't it? It is a great story.

Anil Manji: 16:03

Yeah, you just think as well. You can definitely hear the people breathing and coughing inside. You know People aren't exactly healthy. They're tired from war. They're probably bleeding through the horse.

Chris Norton: 16:13

Yeah, but we'll go with it I like it.

Anil Manji: 16:16

I like the analogy.

Chris Norton: 16:18

Brilliant. So COP26, then I mean, first of all, I can see why you got in 30 under 30s. You've been involved in the COVID campaign and then you end up in COP26.

Sinead Morrissey : 16:28

Very impressive.

Chris Norton: 16:30

Is that the one in Glasgow that we got that everybody was arguing that the Prime Minister was attending and also Elon Musk was attending. And the big argument, the argument in the media was who's in control here? Who's more powerful, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom or Elon Musk?

Anil Manji: 16:49

And the answer is yeah, the answer is Elon Musk, so that was actually not COP26. I think that might have been the AI conference with Rishi. Sunak.

Chris Norton: 17:00

But that was in Glasgow too, wasn't it that one?

Anil Manji: 17:03

I think that was in Glasgow. I can't remember now I didn't work on that one, but that was. I mean I think the AI conference will go down as one of the greatest legacies of Rishi Sunak's tenure. I mean, it was such a brilliant conference. But anyway, sorry that's not the one we're talking about.

Anil Manji: 17:20

Yeah, so COP26. Cop26 was the one where everyone had huge hopes and then the final deal could have been a lot better is the reality of it. But it was also the first big conference coming out of covid as well, and I think the best thing about working climate is everyone wants to get involved. So you, I mean I work with a huge number of sports organizations, I work with the scouts, um, with the bbc. Everyone wants to get. It is just a unifying subject matter and you can have great fun when you're working on climate.

Chris Norton: 18:33

So how did you get involved in that? How did it come about? Did you just apply for the job?

Anil Manji: 18:39

Yeah, basically I was still in the COVID hub. Things have calmed down a little bit and there were two major campaigns that were going on at the time. You could either work in climate or you could work on Brexit transition, which was not as exciting Brexit transition.

Chris Norton: 18:58

I can see where you shied away from that.

Anil Manji: 19:01

Exactly.

Chris Norton: 19:03

So the stunts that you did for COP26, what sort of stuff did you do? So you mentioned a Formula E car outside number 10.

Anil Manji: 19:11

Yeah. So that was part of a wider campaign that I built which was around essentially the summer of sport, or green summer of sport. How do we try and infiltrate, from a comps perspective, all of these incredible sporting moments and try to get people talking about the green angle? Yeah to it as well. So we had sky as a, as a partner, um, and we worked really closely with them to say, okay, well, you know, the premier league's going on. There are some amazing teams that are really committed from a climate side. What can we do? So we built out the first ever, uh, net zero premier league match.

Anil Manji: 19:46

So everything from the lighting to the cuts that we used, everything went through that process of okay, how do we make it more sustainable? We had the first ever Wimbledon Environment Day, which I think might still be going on. I have to check that. But again, that was brilliant. We had a royal box that was packed with all of these amazing green heroes. So, again, just trying to use these moments and you've got a million people watching Wimbledon If you, for five minutes, start talking about the environment, that's a fantastic way to get people's attention, to grow awareness of the conference and what the UK is trying to achieve there.

Chris Norton: 20:27

And what was your objective for the campaign? What were you ultimately trying to do? Just get people to think about sustainability and the environment a bit more, or just to raise awareness of COP26? Yeah, I wish it was that easy.

Anil Manji: 20:39

Yeah. So the one part of it is raise awareness of COP26. The other part, the policy objective, is massive. It is get the public on board with helping achieve net zero by 2050.

Anil Manji: 20:50

The reality is we can't really measure that in a 12-month campaign. What we can do is think about what is the driver. We look at the theory of change for what it takes for someone to not care about the environment at all to actually be a full green warrior whatever you want to call it, you know. The reality is we're all going to have to buy electric vehicles and heat efficient, care about the environment at all to actually be a full green warrior, whatever you want to call it. Now, the reality is we're all going to have to buy electric vehicles and heat efficient boilers. That can cost, you know, 15 grand. How do we get people on that journey?

Anil Manji: 21:16

So you start with small green steps. So we launched a campaign called one step greener, which is showing people the small green steps that you can take that eventually build up to something really impactful. The real, the key thing there was um, we took a social norming approach so effectively. If people around me are being green, what can I do to emulate that? So our key metric, we were measuring people's perception of people like me taking green actions and measuring that over a 12-month period. And you know, nationally we did shift the dial by about five percent, which is it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're thinking about a multi-year, multi-decade plan, it shows that this kind of campaign can work um and hopefully, you know, government will continue doing that over the next 20 years or so yeah, great.

Chris Norton: 22:03

I mean, it's properly rewarding something like that. Like everybody's got to be worried about the environment. What's the next one going to be? What's the next COP then that's going to be happening. Do you go to them all?

Anil Manji: 22:15

So, no, no, I'm done. Now I'm a freelance comms consultant, working on the NHS for the moment and then actually moving to South Africa in a month's time to try something new wow, about six months.

Chris Norton: 22:31

Which bit of south africa you're going to I'm going to cape town nice yeah, it's lovely.

Anil Manji: 22:39

Yeah, I mean I'd be. Um, it's easy to go knowing that we haven't actually had a summer yet here in london, so I'm looking forward to that. But no, I definitely want to get back into climate. I mean, I think that it's only going to get more interesting. My dream job is WWF. They're doing amazing work from not just comms perspective, but actually lobbying government and changing policy as well. It's, yeah, hugely rewarding.

Chris Norton: 23:04

Yeah, great. In the notes you sent us something you talked about at pr360 which I thought is quite interesting is you talked about the use of um agencies. Seem to be coming up with a theme of joe wick, so you want to expand on that somehow yeah.

Anil Manji: 23:23

So this was born out of a question at PR360 where they said if you could put anything into PR Room 101, what would you put in there? And I said Joe Wicks. And then very quickly had to say you know not the actual person he's. I'm sure he's very nice, he's done lots of good for lots of people, but I think he represents a real laziness in the comm sector. I have had so many agencies in fact.

Anil Manji: 23:47

Fact, the last three campaigns I've worked on, each of those agencies pitched me an idea with Joe Wicks, and I think it's done for two different reasons Either because, understandably, you want to show the idea as good as it possibly can be and so you use someone like Joe Wicks to illustrate yeah, this is what it could be like. This happened when I was at a charity called London Sports and we were talking about ways that we could get people active in London, and so they use this idea of a flash mob but make a flash run and get Joe Ricks down. It's like, okay, great, in principle, brilliant idea, but we can't afford him. So you haven't looked at our budget and even if you wanted to make that idea work, it's not an idea that you can make work with a B or C list celeb. I'm not going to follow the runner up to the Apprentice last year. That's not going to work.

Chris Norton: 24:38

I wouldn't even know it is.

Anil Manji: 24:40

Yeah, well, exactly, exactly. I don't even watch it, but it's things like that where you think, gosh, you're really ruining this relationship with your client. So I think you've got to be a lot more savvy about the ideas you present and don't use ideas that you've only presented to make other ideas look better. Have a bit more faith in your work, do you think? Do you think they're trying to make?

Chris Norton: 25:01

them look better because obviously joe wicks. So, in the defense of all the agencies, we haven't pitched a joe wicks idea, by the way. In all, in the defense of all the agencies, we haven't pitched a Joe Wicks idea, by the way, in the defense of all the agencies that have come up with Joe Wicks. You just said your brief was about getting people to be more active, and the one person you think about for all ages is and you being from the era of COVID-19, is Joe Wicks' face doing the exercises. So maybe that is. Would I say that these ideas came from 21, 22 and a little bit of 23?.

Sinead Morrissey : 25:33

Yeah, yeah, exactly yeah, in terms of like putting that into perspective when I think about campaigns that we work on. And is that because agencies don't believe in the actual idea that they're putting forward isn't strong enough on its own, so they're bringing someone like Joe Wicks in to try and overcompensate and think are they just trying to give the agency, give the client, what they think they want to hear?

Chris Norton: 25:56

So we can't afford Joe Wicks. What we're going to do is get a hundred foot blow up version of Joe Wicks and float him down the Thames. There you go. There's your idea. That's that sort of thing, isn't it, pr 101.

Sinead Morrissey : 26:13

Yeah but you've hit the nail on the head there.

Anil Manji: 26:14

If you can't get Joe Wicks and you can't get another celeb, what creative solution can you come up with that still makes a flash mob work? I don't think it's up to the client to say, oh okay, great, who else could be used? Or how could that mechanism still work if you can't get jwix and the flash mob idea doesn't work? Right? Um, and you're right, I think. A lot of times you do see, no one wants to present just one or two ideas. Ideally you will have four or five that the client can look at and really review. But you also do have to be realistic and if you've got a really good relationship with your client, you can have that conversation, say yeah, we thought about this, but actually we don't think it's strong. Our recommendation is these two particular ideas. Relationship with your client. You can have that conversation, say yeah, we thought about this, but actually we don't think it's strong. Our recommendation is these two particular ideas.

Chris Norton: 26:52

Let's focus on those also right if it's the obvious idea. Floating down the tens or celebrity you can think of, isn't the better idea, actually something that like the funny alternative to that. So someone who's quite well known, who'd never be doing any exercise, and you've got them out doing some exercise in like a spoof video which is and it's hilarious because they can't do it, but they're trying to do it and that's the whole point. If he can do it, or he or she can do it, you can do it. Do you know what I mean?

Sinead Morrissey : 27:18

It's like the surgeon lookalike campaigns that everyone's doing at the moment, like the Kate Moss and was it Aldi campaign where she was just swatted with like an Aldi bag or something in Manchester, and I think we've pitched a flat that to clients before where if we know budget is an issue, then we can't get the Joe Wicks. So what's the closest thing? It's a lookalike and actually Sometimes they do work really well.

Chris Norton: 27:44

Yeah, for a picture movie.

Sinead Morrissey : 27:45

Yeah, and I think it comes back to that thing of like presenting three to four ideas, like as agencies. Sometimes I think we're so insistent that we need to come up with multiple different ideas that maybe we are just shoehorning in one that's got someone big like Joe Wicks, but actually we don't really believe in the idea. And are we not better off presenting two really strong campaigns and kind of sacking off the one that we think is just when we're encouraged to think big?

Chris Norton: 28:14

I guess clients, I'm guessing see right through that and find it quite frustrating if you're getting pitched by three agencies and they've all got Joe Wicks. That must be like that was. I can imagine your face as they're sat there going. So I've got a really big idea here. Picture this, Joe Wicks, and you're going. Oh God.

Sinead Morrissey : 28:33

For the third time today.

Anil Manji: 28:36

Yeah, I definitely have Joe Wicks fatigue, but you know, I think you touched on a really good point where it's really obvious that sometimes you don't need to have the classic sports person. So, yeah, when I worked on M&S, it was very much about democratizing the brand. Don't have someone fancy like Olivia Colman being the voice of your campaign. So when they relaunch, this isn't just. They instead got someone with a bit more of a regional accent, someone who's a bit more casual and it's only doesn't sound like the Queen. With sports, it's the exact same thing. I, if I want to, um, if I'm watching a campaign or watching an advert and it's about getting me active, I don't want to see mo fat, right, I don't want to see joe wiggs. I'm more likely to get involved if I see someone like ainsley harriet who's not someone I think of, as you know running down the aisle and actually saying, yeah, okay, well, if, well, if someone like him can do it, if he's not that fit and he can go on a 5K, then brilliant, I could do that too.

Chris Norton: 29:31

Yeah. So Danny Dyer doing the football what's the charity football game he was playing the other week and he was tear-assing around the pitch diving into tackles and fair play to him because I was thinking Danny Dyer's going to get sent off. That was brilliant. I mean yeah. So yeah, it doesn't have to be the obvious celebrity, it can be somebody a bit curveball and if it's humorous, the reason why I was thinking about humour. One of the greatest marketing campaigns I can think of it's not government related, but it is charity related is the Vinnie Jones Staying Alive.

Chris Norton: 30:04

British Heart Foundation because it was hard. Man in a video with a serious message, doing something that you wouldn't normally expect to do, and you just remember it. Do you know what I mean? Brilliant.

Anil Manji: 30:15

I love that campaign, absolutely love that campaign. It really stays with everyone. Yeah, you see it quite a lot where you have an idea of who might be in this and you completely turn it on its head. So it was Captain Birdseye. A few years ago they had the rugged old sailor and they completely changed it and it's now. I can't remember the actor's name, but it was this very cool sexy model instead and he was the new captain of the ship and it just works. It really resonates.

Chris Norton: 30:44

The theme of the show is um embracing marketing mistakes. So we we are what we often ask ask our guests um what mistakes have they made during their career and what they learned from with you having such a um, a big career already and you're just 30, I'm imagining at the moment. Is that right? You're 30, yeah what, what's? The you've put down a mistake here about a tv ad which has made us laugh a little bit. So do you want to walk us through what happened in your cgi tv campaign?

Sinead Morrissey : 31:11

I'm very interested in this.

Anil Manji: 31:12

Yeah, this one's a little bit gross, so apologies but um, yeah, this was when I first started out my career. I was working in the world of hair care, um, and we were launching a new conditioner campaign. Often what happens this is one of the fantastic things about working in advertising you learn all the random trade secrets. You'll often take a shot from another TV ad or an older TV ad, so you don't need to reshoot everything. So if I've got a new advert with a brunette, I might talk to my American team and say, okay, do you guys have anything that we could use? And you would just chuck it in. We did this with a new conditioner campaign. We had a model with blonde hair and so we took an old advert, a shampoo advert, with a model with uh, with blonde hair same brand.

Chris Norton: 31:56

It was actually an ellie. Was it same brand? Same brand, right?

Anil Manji: 31:59

same brand. Yeah, it happens all the time, all the time, um, and you wouldn't notice because you know sometimes the shot's like three seconds. So we used an older advert that featured Eddie Goulding. It was a close-up of her hair. You couldn't see her face at all. It might not have even been her and in that particular shot, but you never know. We took that particular shot and we needed to turn it into conditioner. So we spent a huge amount of money on CGIgi. Uh, looking at the application of the conditioner in the hair, thinking about the color, the texture, the way it squirts out of the bottle, put onto the palm, and we saw that iterative process. So you know, every few hours we'd see it in cgi and then a few days later we have the final product so how long did it take to do that, that process?

Chris Norton: 32:45

I think maybe just under a week.

Anil Manji: 32:48

It's a. It's really, it's a long time, really long time. Yeah, um, and finally patched up, put it into the main tv ad and sent it off to the client for their review. We had nothing back, chased a few times and then a few days later I get a call and I was quite junior at the time, so it's unusual for for me to get called about these things but it becomes very obvious why. A bit later, um, the client said I hate it, I'm not putting this on tv. You need to, you need to redo the cgi. I can't, we can't just do that. It costs thousands. You know what? What's the feedback? We'll try fix it. And he just wouldn't tell me for a while. I finally got out of him and he says it looks like cum. And I was like what? Sorry, it looks like cum it looks like semen.

Anil Manji: 33:46

Uh, I can kind of see how I mean I want to see the video now yeah, it was such an awful moment and this particular client was male and all of my managers were women and I just don't think he really wanted to have that conversation with anyone else.

Chris Norton: 34:07

So you had to.

Anil Manji: 34:09

Yeah. So then I had to go into a room with all these senior people, the producers, you know the agency that was doing the CGI and deliver this feedback. And the worst thing is you look at it and when someone says that it clicks, and you look at it and you think he's completely right. He's completely right and it looks awful, and you could just tell you know there's such a worry there, when you're like, oh gosh, if this goes out on tv with the right editing, it could become a terrible but hilarious meme.

Chris Norton: 34:41

Um, yeah, it was a horrible, horrible week I mean when, when a client says I don't want to do the cam, you've, you've spent a week doing the editing and then the client pulls the whole thing. That is horror time, I can feel. I bet that was so stressful it was.

Anil Manji: 35:01

It was a really terrible moment, but you know, we did manage to salvage it. It it was. We did go back into CGR. We spent a lot more money and we fixed it, which is great. The example I always use is when a parent watched their kid grow up over the course of the year. You don't really see how much they grow, but someone who hasn't seen that kid for a year will say, oh gosh, this is a massive change. Wow. It's the exact same when it comes to creative work. You've got to keep a little bit of distance. I think if we had shown that because we were all part of that iterative process we'd seen each stage. You we couldn't see the exact resemblance at the time, but if we had shown it to anyone else who wasn't part of the team in a moment, they would have been like, oh, not sure about that, it looks a bit glistening in the wrong way, I mean yeah, interesting, I mean a great fail.

Sinead Morrissey : 35:52

I like that.

Chris Norton: 35:54

And a good learning. I bet you haven't done many more adverts for. Cgi. Since then have you.

Anil Manji: 36:00

No, thankfully, not Thankfully no more issues like that.

Chris Norton: 36:05

Another thing you put down in the form which I thought was quite interesting is you've you've done the mini mba with with mark ritson. Um and I have heard a lot about this, um, I've heard mark speak loads of times. I'm gonna get him on the pod. That's one of my objectives is to get him on the podcast at some point, because he's very, very sweary. Did you so walk me through what that experience was like?

Anil Manji: 36:29

it's so good, it's so, so good. I came in from an angle of you know, I'm not, I'm not a marketer. I have done campaigns, I've done communicate, I've done pr, I've done everything from a general commerce perspective. That particular course makes you realize, oh my gosh, I know nothing about marketing as a whole. So I think anyone that works in an ad agency particular, you'll, you'll, you'll go through this course and you think, gosh, I'm just a small cog of this whole process. He delivers it so well, it's all online, it's so clever and you learn so much about different tactics, everything from pricing strategies to distribution. I couldn't recommend it enough. It's, yeah, it's really worth it.

Chris Norton: 37:11

It's a mini MBA, so how long did, how long did you, how much do you have to watch and how long has it gone for?

Anil Manji: 37:17

So it's a 10 week online course and I think it was around. I mean, you can put into as much as you want, but around three to six hours a week and then an exam at the end. It's all online, it's done digitally. Um, yeah, and it's pre-recorded sessions as well? Um, yeah, it's.

Chris Norton: 37:36

It's quite accessible in that way interesting, but you're obviously big, big advocate and loads of people I've heard are big advocates that have done it. It's definitely it might be on my bucket list. I might do that it's.

Anil Manji: 37:48

It's really good and I think what's so clever about it and he frames it in a really clever way. But essentially it's called a mini mba because he's taken all of the marketing classes from a real mba, so you are getting taught exactly what mba students are getting taught and that's that's his, that's his career in his style as well in his style, which is, you know, you would not really believe he's a professor.

Anil Manji: 38:12

Uh, yeah, he's very affable, very. He's a bit like rory sutherland in the way he presents. Yeah, he doesn't really give a shit about what people think no, that's what makes him brilliant though he does.

Chris Norton: 38:22

He's like a bit of a maverick, isn't he?

Sinead Morrissey : 38:24

I was just kind of wondering. Obviously you've had quite a varied sort of career. How do you feel like the sort of high stakes communications roles that you have been in have prepared you for your future? Obviously, I mean, covid is probably the most high stakes communication role you'll hopefully face but what sort of like learnings have you taken from that kind of key things that you take on board when you go into a new role now?

Anil Manji: 38:54

Yeah, that's such a good question. I mean, I think leadership is a really big part of it, and teamwork so how you work with teams and the culture you build. So, having worked in lots of different sectors, even the way you ask people out to the pub is very, very different in each sector um, and the way you manage people as well. I think that's that's something that if you want to be a leader, you've got to really enjoy it. I know loads of people who have done as many years as me which admittedly, is not that many who hate being managers, and you just can't really progress your career unless you learn to love it. That's something really important. You have to love seeing people grow, seeing people progress and giving them the space and opportunity to grow.

Chris Norton: 39:36

And you're currently working as a freelance. You've got a contract as a strategic communication consultant at the NHS in central London, so what are you doing there then? You're taking all your learnings from your government work. What are you doing for them?

Anil Manji: 39:52

I'm writing lots of OASIS plans. Honestly, a little bit of everything I've been doing, a little bit of internal comms. I've been running a campaign talking about new health services for sickle cell patients. Uh, obviously we've got a new government now, so a lot of that will be around how we communicate with these new mps, how do we bring them to the fold of what we're doing. So, yeah, it's, it's slightly it's chaotic, but really fun, very varied. Have you worked with joe wicks?

Chris Norton: 40:21

yet I have not worked with joe wicks. I don't know if he's a listener of your podcast, but I'm not sure he worked with joe wicks.

Anil Manji: 40:25

I don't know if he's a listener of your podcast, but I'm not sure he would work with me anymore yeah, I don't think you're the only person with joe wicks fatigue, to be honest, after yeah, um, you've been on the show.

Chris Norton: 40:38

Um, if you were us, who's the next person you would invite on this podcast, and why?

Anil Manji: 40:46

I would have said, mark Ritson, actually that's probably a bit boring for you. I think you already have some amazing people on talking about mis and disinformation. I'm trying to think of another really fascinating topic. I mean, I think, how this new government's going to change the world of comms, so I guess anything from any policies that they might put in, but also how the people properly manage their public affairs um and their comm strategy within that. But otherwise, yeah, I know it's a bit of a boring answer, but I I think mark ritson's brilliant, so definitely bring him up.

Chris Norton: 41:22

It's a challenge to get mark on the show, but we've just given a big plug for his um mba, so I hope he's going to give me free access. But we'll find out. There you go. Yeah, um, I thought I thought I'd read that you, you, um, you did use tiktok somewhere, or you as part of a campaign yeah, so tiktok were used in the climate campaign while in government.

Anil Manji: 41:43

So that was an amazing experience because it was the first time there'd ever been a proper government campaign on TikTok, so it was very much, you know, new waters for the cabinet office and for government. We worked with influencers to try and get people engaged in what we call the one step greener challenge. So taking on a small green action like I don't know might be using leftovers and turning into an amazing new meal and generating a little bit of a UGC campaign. So yeah, that actually did incredibly, incredibly well on TikTok. So, yeah, in terms of government using it, it's a case study that's still being spoken about now and still being talked about. So I think we'll probably see more tiktok tiktok content from government, which would be strange because it's not where you'd expect a government uh, nobody's content to be.

Chris Norton: 42:33

It's the future audience, though, isn't it?

Sinead Morrissey : 42:35

it's it depends on who they're chasing for the vote for the next election it's like the um exactly the campaign that we were talking about on monday. Um, obviously their tick tock presence was huge throughout the election campaign and it just shows how much impact that can have. I think, like the number of tick tocks that they did in comparison to the um tory party was like triple in the first.

Chris Norton: 43:00

Yeah but the labour party's been really, really active and stewart bruce is a big part he used to be a big part of the political side of the Labour Party. But actually I was reading in the Sunday Times on Sunday about Reform and Mr Farage. They see the future of their communications in TikTok not for now but for the next phase, because they saw this as the first phase of getting into government. They've got five MPs, I think haven and they see that they see it as the next step. So they're going to be apparently the amount that they used. It was even the most of the lot.

Sinead Morrissey : 43:34

Oh, really I didn't realize, so quite interesting yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

Anil Manji: 43:37

I mean, you know, reform got four million votes and they basically did that by distilling incredibly, incredibly complex policies into simple messages. So you, you know, if you can't really listen to the Prime Minister without having to hear a spiel for two minutes, you can't distill a policy within 10 seconds then you're not going to work on TikTok at all.

Chris Norton: 43:57

Yeah, it's a bit worrying though, because I mean, that is what public relations or comms always was how can you tell a really complicated message to your gran or your mum and so she'd understand? My mum still doesn't know what I actually do for a job, but that is the role and, yeah, doing that into it. So we've moved from doing that into a press release to now doing that into a 10-second TikTok. Yeah it's wild, it is a challenge, and thanks to everybody out there that's doing it and working out.

Anil Manji: 44:26

Yeah, well, I think that's why davy's gonna do so well, because he's made some fantastic content. You know, he's actually getting onto a surfboard falling into the water. I mean, those are, those are clips that you can marry up with whatever the message might be, and uh yeah, better than seeing nigel farrell's dance actually.

Chris Norton: 44:40

So yeah, I haven't seen I'll make that available in the show notes nigel farad's dance. And if people want to get hold of you, anil, how can they get hold of you? What's the best way to get hold of you?

Anil Manji: 44:53

uh, linkedin is the best for me. So, yeah, anil manji. Um yeah, on linkedin every day. I can also put my email address up. It's anil manji at gmailcom what's your twitter handle? Uh anilmanji uk.

Chris Norton: 45:07

I think well, thanks for coming on the show and I'll really appreciate your time thank you so much for having me, guys.

Anil Manji: 45:11

That was really really fun to do what?

Chris Norton: 45:13

what does anil do for fun?

Anil Manji: 45:15

oh, you'll hate this answer triathlons mostly. So just on a well, triathlon training yeah, that's been my personality of the month. So did a half ironman last weekend, um, wow. So yeah, completely shattered body right now.

Chris Norton: 45:30

I nailed the iron man. What's?

Anil Manji: 45:36

a half iron man is that one mile swim 75k bike, two kilometer swim, 90 kilometer bike and then a half marathon at the end. So it's basically double the distance of an olympic triathletes.

Chris Norton: 45:55

I've got a friend who's a. He was a royal marine, he's now he works and and he did, he did five iron mans and the first time I spoke I saw him at a wedding and I said to him his wife was stood next to him and I said, oh, have you just done an Ironman? Obviously he'd just come out of the Marines, he'd just done an Ironman. I said, how was it? And he's a big lad and a muscly lad.

Sinead Morrissey : 46:14

And he said you know it was kind of tough, but it was okay.

Chris Norton: 46:18

And his wife said shut up, you passed out in the tent at and they put the stuff on him he was that tired he collapsed. So I was like, I mean, I I just was like, if he's collapsing because he is an ex-marine who's been everywhere, and I was just they, you guys do that you've got. You've got. It's a certain type of mindset, so well done very impressive thank you.

Anil Manji: 46:38

Thank you so much.