Chris Norton: 0:04

Hi everyone, welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the podcast that helps senior marketers avoid costly pitfalls and achieve record-breaking revenue by learning from the world's top marketing minds. I'm your host, chris Norton, and today's episode features a recent conversation Will and I had with futurist and digital transformation expert, tom Goodwin. For those of you who don't know, tom is a renowned thought leader and the author of a book called Digital Darwinism, which has a reputation for challenging the status quo in business and marketing. Tom spent years helping companies navigate technological disruption while maintaining a human-centered approach. In our conversation, tom shared his unique perspective on how businesses can adapt to change without losing sight of what really matters creativity, simplicity and understanding your customer. We discussed why the pace of technological change might not be as fast as it seems and why focusing on nowism, in other words, making things better right now, can often be the key to staying agile in an evolving digital landscape.

Chris Norton: 1:05

Tom also opened up on some of his own marketing missteps, sharing valuable lessons learned from past campaigns, which was worth a listen, I can tell you. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's dive into this insightful chat with Tom Goodwin on how embracing mistakes can actually lead to smarter marketing strategies. Enjoy. So, tom Goodwin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. So, tom, we do webinars and stuff. We've been doing them for years, well before COVID, and digital Darwinism is a phrase that Will has used several times in our I'm a big fan of that phrase, that's true, and I must confess I always attributed it to Brian Solis.

Tom Goodwin: 1:53

I think you might be right to be honest. I think he might have got there first.

Will Ockenden: 1:58

Oh, okay, but he's not written a book on it though, has he?

Tom Goodwin: 2:01

I'm not sure. So my publishers sort of came to me and they suggested that there was the title and I didn't love it. But I said, um, you know, let me come up with a better one. And then I never did. But I think you know the, the spirit of improvement, the spirit of evolution, uh, the spirit of better, you know that's. That's everything that I'm about so what do you um?

Will Ockenden: 2:20

what do you for our listeners? Why don't you define um what, what digital Darwinism is and what that means for companies? As a bit of a starting point, I mean more broadly.

Tom Goodwin: 2:30

People always ask me what I do, and that's always quite a difficult question to ask to answer.

Tom Goodwin: 2:37

We're at a moment in time where technology is having profound effects on many of the fundamental dynamics of business.

Tom Goodwin: 2:46

It doesn't mean that every company is screwed, it doesn't mean that every single thing is different, but it does mean that the parameters of possibility are quite different and companies can either get excited by that, and they can invest in their future and they can understand what that change means invest in their future and they can understand what that change means or they can be in denial of it.

Tom Goodwin: 3:08

So my sort of broad, you know, role in life is to go around companies and make them feel reassured about the fact that not everything is changing and that perhaps even the pace of change is not as fast as people think, that many of the attributes that made them succeed will, will carry on making them succeed, um, but there are a spattering of things that they can do, um, which will have a profound impact on their bottom line, um, and more often than not that means, you know, relaxing a little bit and doing the things that matter really, really well, um, and that sort of ties quite nicely into the sort of theme of of darwinism. You know, this idea that improvements matter, this idea of experimentation, this idea of you know, to some extent, errors you know being key for the notion of progress.

Will Ockenden: 3:55

That's quite interesting what you said there, that the pace of change is not necessarily as fast as people think. So I feel like the last few years, you know, you read the marketing media, you read the business pages and it feels like technology is galloping away and none of us can keep up. Are you suggesting, yes, that's happening to a degree, but you know actually, maybe not as much as people think.

Tom Goodwin: 4:18

The way that you expressed it there is perfect. You know, people quite often think I'm sort of contrarian or they think I'm an idiot. You know, because I'm going around saying it's not changing faster than ever. I'm just saying, you know, we live through extraordinary moments. I mean, the 1870s were absolutely crazy. The 1930s were completely bananas. You know, if you actually look at a lot of the things that have happened since about 2010,. You know, until about two years ago actually, remarkably few things happened in that 10 year period.

Tom Goodwin: 4:48

I think generative AI is one of those things that actually has come along. And you know, it makes me feel a bit embarrassed having said some of these things before on a stage, but I think we should be. You know, for me, I'm much less about kind of indefatigable, arrogant opinions and I'm much more about suggesting that we have conversations to learn from these things and actually having people who really understand technology saying here are some of the precise things that are changing at a faster pace and then having historians saying you know what we've kind of. You know, we've had these conversations before in the first industrial revolution. We kind of had these conversations in the 1960s.

Tom Goodwin: 5:27

Some elements of life are actually changing more slowly. When we talk about complexity and fragmentation, actually many parts of marketing have become more simple. I would like us to just be a bit more sophisticated and sort of proactive and calm about the way that we go through a process of change and it's not to jump on 3D printing and drones and the metaverse and Web3 and blockchain and to, you know, think that computers are going to kill us and, you know, maybe take our jobs first. You know, it might be that jingles work really well in advertising. Still, it might be that brands are an incredibly important way that we navigate abundance. It might be that simple messages told well still work. I think we need to go through a period of where we have sort of confidence because we're having more nuanced conversations.

Chris Norton: 6:23

Do you think we're getting less creative and relying on technology? Because I remember you mentioned a while back that you felt technology shaped us. I heard you saying something about you felt that technology shaped us. I just wondered if you thought that humans are just going to get more lazy and less creative.

Tom Goodwin: 6:41

It's quite hard to know, actually, when generative AI, which is quite a good example of this, when that first came along, I sort of presumed that it would make us less creative because it was kind of based on, you know, repurposing what had happened before. And then, sort of slowly, it dawned on me that because AI doesn't really care and it doesn't feel vulnerable and it doesn't feel stupid, because it can try trillions of combinations, like, in some ways, ai can actually be quite creative. Um, I do think quite often technology has not been the lever we would presume, um, that has allowed us to do better work. Um, and I think quite often people rely on the technology in place of the idea. You know, it reminds me a bit of sort of celebrities and advertising, I think. Sometimes, you know, people think that if they do something clever with technology in an advert, then that's enough, rather than thinking actually, this is a mechanism by which we can do even more things.

Tom Goodwin: 7:38

A particular passion of mine and I actually think I'm probably one of the only people in the world that gets excited by this I think we should be making amazing digital ads, you know.

Tom Goodwin: 7:47

I think the internet should be full of these, really seductive and premium and beautiful and sort of compelling things, and these things might look a bit like print ads that are beautiful and they move and they shimmer, and these things may sort of offer us information and these things may sort of you know, tell us a little bit of a story that kind of builds over time.

Tom Goodwin: 8:12

You know, I think there's this enormous sort of potential to make something like digital advertising really compelling and instead it's just become a festering pile of absolute crap and harassment. And, you know, ads that can't even be bothered to have an image attached to them, and ads that presume that the moment that you've bought one air fryer, you know you've become an air fryer connoisseur and you should be chased around the internet with ever more expensive air fryers. You know I get very angry about how badly we're using all this stuff. You know people think I'm sort of curmudgeonly. I'm not. I'm really like I love technology and I love people and I love advertising and I love marketing and I love business and I just think we're not doing things as well as we could do.

Chris Norton: 8:58

Yeah, because I thought when they were talking about the cookie gate and ending like privacy measure, you know, monitoring where you were going and, like you say, I used to get followed around by ads for radiators, my wife radiators on my laptop yeah, I had radiator ads everywhere I went um and I thought that actually cookies. When they were talking about getting rid of the google cookies, I was thinking is that going to make ads even shitter because they won't be personalized anymore?

Tom Goodwin: 9:26

It's. It's it's really interesting and I'm like all of these subjects, I'm definitely not the expert and I like being I've been wrong, because it means that someone will tell me and then I'll learn. Um, I think that personalized advertising is generally, um, sort of the chasing of a Holy grail that actually if we we got to, we'd realize it was a sort of old, rusty cup like. I think you know a lot of people in technology. They don't really understand how people work and actually within the media there is signaling. So to get served an ad that you know is freakishly specific actually doesn't really do that much when it comes to the creation of sort of confidence and scale, because often it's the kind of wastage and it's the kind of the broadness of the advertising that makes it compelling.

Tom Goodwin: 10:11

You know, trying to personalize ads, you know and I was looking into this in about sort of 2010,. You know we had this idea that we'd have like a Fitbit or you know an early smartwatch or something and we'd go for like a run on a treadmill and then we'd finished our run and then there'd be a sort of a message from Gatorade saying you know, congratulations, buy a Gatorade now. It's so sophisticated and it's so sort of suave. But then when you think about it it's kind of nonsense. Because you're not, you're probably in your apartment, you're probably not going to go out to the shop to buy a Gatorade. Then you know you probably would have been better off just sponsoring a Champions League football team with Gatorade instead.

Tom Goodwin: 10:54

Um, you know this idea that we can sort of guess that. You know, because someone was looking at um, you know a kind of a car last week. You know that means that they, they're absolutely in the market for a car and this particular car, you know they might have been doing research for their daughter's. You know, design project at school or something like. Like we much better off trying to avoid irrelevance than we would dialing up personalization. In my opinion this.

Will Ockenden: 11:16

I'm going to ask a question now, which might be too big a question to answer, or it might not be so we'll give it a go, we'll give it a go there's going to be a lot.

Will Ockenden: 11:28

A lot of our listeners are going to be listening to this, either thinking, look, we need to be more innovative, or we are innovative and we need to be even more innovative, or I don't even know where to start with being innovative. Um, what would you say to them and I know you've got a concept of nowism, which may or may not tie into this, which I found fascinating reading about that what do you say to? You know the average, you know I don't know five to 10 million pound turnover mid-tier company in the UK that wants to be innovative, particularly with its marketing.

Tom Goodwin: 11:58

For a very exciting question. I think I've got quite a boring answer, actually. I think we talk about creativity all the time. I don't think it's our job to be creative. We talk about innovation all the time. I don't think it's our job to be innovative. I think it's our job to do things better.

Tom Goodwin: 12:18

You know, I think it's our job to have an enormous amount of respect for our target audience, or people at large.

Tom Goodwin: 12:23

I think it's our job to be fairly obsessed with them and what it is to be a human being today.

Tom Goodwin: 12:28

What is it like to live in Slough, in a state on the edge of town, and to be worried about petrol prices and to be thinking that your kids are getting bullied at school? When we have this respect and this obsession with people, we can then go through the process of trying to be somewhat helpful, and that might mean that some of the work that we do is about helping them make decisions about what to buy. It might be that some of that work is about telling them about something in a compelling way that they might want. It might be that our work is to create better customer service, where you don't get put on hold for 45 minutes, you know, because people taking that call have more information about your inquiry and they can help you more quickly. It might be that you can email them. So I quite often think that innovation is almost the accidental byproduct of going through a process where we're making things better rather than obsessing about innovation for the sake of innovation, because what does that actually mean?

Tom Goodwin: 13:27

I mean it feels a bit like sort of going around to people saying say something funny. You know, you know, come on, chris, say something funny now. But it's not helpful, you know, going around saying be innovative. Um, you know, innovative, I think, is probably an environment where people um are fairly optimistic and they're probably fairly they feel I think there's a term psychologically safe. You know, they feel like they can do something dumb. They can be quite honest.

Tom Goodwin: 13:54

I think it comes from having quite different perspectives in the workplace, and by that I mean things like class, which we never, ever talk about. And I think when you have this environment of kind of fun and optimism and excitement and safety, I think in that environment you can actually come up with really good ideas and those ideas might be called sort of creative and those ideas might be called innovative, but actually they're just smart things for a company to do, and sometimes those things are less as well. Everyone always thinks that innovation is about an extra thing. How do we make an app for the apple vision pro? Like, how do we make a um an app for the smartwatch? What can we do with apple tv? You know, I think quite often, uh, just being able to buy something more quickly, um being able to, um provide a suggestion to the company, you know, through a feedback mechanism, without fitting in a form. You know, I think quite often it's about the removal of stuff more than extra.

Will Ockenden: 15:29

Who's getting it right, then you know I mean, I think it's easy to talk about massive companies that are deemed as innovative you know who's kind of caught your eye? That's maybe not an Apple or a Microsoft. That's doing it right.

Tom Goodwin: 15:41

I think quite often I mean quite often small companies do it best. Actually, you know, I think it was probably 2012 when I went to like a little hotel in Dubai and they had a sort of QR code, you know, and it said you know, if you want to get the Wi-Fi, just scan this QR code. And I was like, how does that?

Will Ockenden: 16:02

work.

Tom Goodwin: 16:03

And now I know how it works and now quite a lot of companies do it, but it was a little hotel in Dubai that did it. I was in Brazil and you know my wife was like, oh you know, have you seen this sort of what? Was it like a barbershop, you know, you can just arrange like an appointment, get your haircut with whatsapp? Um, you know, it was like 2014. I was like how is it that a barbers, you know, can use whatsapp to book an appointment but you can't, you know, ask british airlines if there's another flight that day, you know?

Tom Goodwin: 16:35

So I think I think big companies do a really good job of sort of um, innovating systems and making things at scale, but actually I think quite often it's it's sort of small, individual places that do the best job of the really raw innovation and, and quite often the challenge really with innovation is not having the idea, it's figuring out how you can make it bigger. You know, like the the medium of innovation is very hard. Like small is easy and big is easy because with with big, you have money, but but getting something that's small and making it medium size is where it gets really hard you've presented over hundreds of keynotes, right?

Chris Norton: 17:09

how many keynotes have you presented?

Tom Goodwin: 17:11

I don't know, but like it would be hundreds yeah and our audience is marketing marketers.

Chris Norton: 17:18

So what's a common theme or question that consistently comes out from your audiences?

Tom Goodwin: 17:22

you know what do you get consistently asked um, maybe this isn't that helpful, but it's the honest answer. Um, probably the question I get five times more than any other question. Um, is someone quite sheepishly coming up at the end and saying you know, tom, that was great and all that. Um, I'm really worried, you, I'm really worried about my kids. So up until about two years ago it was they were worried about how much time their kids are spending looking at their phones, and then now there's been a little bit of a pivot where people are talking about they're a bit too, you know, they're a bit afraid of what their kids' futures look like in a world where AI is doing quite a lot of the thinking for them. Um, so that you know, I'm sure you expected me to say something else, like about marketing, or yeah I thought they'd usually ask you like about an innovation.

Chris Norton: 18:11

I like to think about augmented reality, um or or qr codes. Qr codes to me were like they came out and we all, the like the cutting edge people was, used them for about six months and then nobody. They didn't catch on at all, and then it was covid that made them like commonplace, because everybody had to have menus with them.

Tom Goodwin: 18:30

Yeah, that's weird and that's why, um, you know it's not easy to predict the future, but it's not that hard in a broad way too. But the thing that's really hard and people don't talk about this enough is the timing. So I remember in 2012, I was doing all these decks about shoppable advertising and about stream TV, and in the future, all the ads will be inserted dynamically into your TV because everything's going to be delivered digitally. And I presume that because people were talking about that in 2012, because it was quite obvious that would mean sort of 2014,. You know your ITV. What's it called? Like X or whatever it's called. You know that would just be full of. You know, an ad for a local car dealership? Or you know a nice ad for, like an ice cream, because it's a sunny day, and we're still not even there yet, really. So it's actually the timing of innovation.

Tom Goodwin: 19:29

That's really hard and, like you say, some things get really big and then they vanish. Um, some things get really big and and then they sort of become so boring that we don't think about it. You know, like, without being controversial for the sake of it, the Gartner hype cycle, I think, is a complete load of crap because actually everything that's ever been really big was never on it and everything that's on it has never been that big, unless they pull it on after it already happened. You know, like no one talks about Bluetooth, no one talks about Wi-Fi. Do you remember the first time you got Wi-Fi? It was nuts, it was like you've got the internet and you didn't plug it in. You know, no one talked to that was never in the Gartner hype cycle.

Chris Norton: 20:04

No, wi-fi wasn't it.

Will Ockenden: 20:06

Still blows my mind Wi-Fi, how all that information travels through the air. Yeah, you don't.

Chris Norton: 20:10

I trust it, you don't but that and Bluetooth. Bluetooth's a wild one. Who invented Bluetooth? There was some random. Who invented Bluetooth? I?

Tom Goodwin: 20:17

think it was like a consortium of people you know who probably should be like fantastically wealthy and smug, but I think they probably just worked for like Siemens or something in a cupboard somewhere and no one remembered.

Chris Norton: 20:29

Yeah, you're right, bluetooth was never on the Gartner Heights.

Will Ockenden: 20:33

How mad is that.

Chris Norton: 20:35

So our show is all about well, fuck-ups and failures.

Will Ockenden: 20:38

Yeah.

Chris Norton: 20:39

And we basically get people to Come to the right place. Well, we've had enough um and um people share. This is like where you can get it off your chest about something you've made a mistake and what you learned from it. So do you have any that you've made in what you do? I've got millions.

Tom Goodwin: 20:55

I mean people worry a lot. You know, like um, I've been fired like a lot of times and maybe four or five times um, and it normally is nothing like as personal as people think. Um, you know, probably one of my biggest failings, um, I was working on a campaign for nokia um to launch a music service, so this was probably 2007, um, and we'd sort of procured the rights to like Heidi Minogue's new album that was going to be exclusively available um, and we spent probably 15 million pounds on on media and you know technology and IP and I think 37 people um downloaded um the particular app that we were trying to push at the time. So, on a sort of what's it called? Cpo, on a sort of cost per acquisition basis, we could have sort of arranged like a private, you know living room performance of Kylie Minogue for every single person that wanted it.

Tom Goodwin: 21:58

I would say like I'm very happy to accept when I've been an idiot. In this particular case, I wasn been an idiot. In this particular case I wasn't an idiot. I actually did tell the client quite a lot of times. Look, you know, this isn't really how it's going to work. Um, you know, most people who see this tv ad, are not going to be able to download this because they don't have the right type of Nokia handset, um. But it's a good example, really, I think, of understanding quite how big companies work and how their finance works. And you know, someone had made the business case and they couldn't sort of accept it wasn't going to work. But, yeah, I make mistakes all the time. You know, the most important thing is to not do the same mistake twice. The most important thing is to kind of really, you know, understand what you learn about yourself and the world every time you do it.

Chris Norton: 22:43

Um, but yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm quite idiotic, um, and I made quite a lot of mistakes I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when you had to have that um roi discussion about uh 15 million for 37 downloads crikey you'd have been better.

Will Ockenden: 22:58

You'd have been better off with bags of 10 000 pounds just giving them to people walking in the street and asking them to download the app, and you'd have been better off with bags of £10,000 just giving them to people walking in the street and asking them to download the app, and you'd have got a better return on that activity.

Tom Goodwin: 23:07

I mean it's completely true and yeah, it just goes to show you know, accountability is a good thing.

Chris Norton: 23:13

It reminds me of the era when the internet first came out, like in. Well, not right when it first came out, but when people started to use it and there was the dot-com boom and it was going into pitches and it was right at the beginning of my career and people were saying so what we're going to do is we're going to build a website and potentially 60 billion or however many billion people can come and land on it and I kept thinking this is all this money is going to this. This just doesn't make any sense.

Tom Goodwin: 23:39

Aren't they going to have to find it first, which sounds very similar to your absolute scenario I think, um, like we, we do not have simple jobs by by any means, but I think quite often we make them a lot more complicated than they need to be. And I think you're sort of thinking where you're saying you know only this many people might actually see it, so it's unrealistic to expect that. Or, you know, if you were a normal human being, how would you respond to this? I actually think taking a bit of a step back, you know, relaxing a little bit and trying to approach these things from a common sense perspective, is quite often the best way to succeed.

Tom Goodwin: 24:20

I'm doing a lot of work with a car company at the moment where they're figuring out that almost all of their search spend is going on terms that probably people would have ended up on the website without clicking. So all you're doing is taking people that are already very interested and sort of taking credit for making them become interested, even though clearly they already were. And often you have these cultures of specialisms and sort of expertise and spreadsheets and people can sit in meetings and talk about numbers and ratios and everyone has the goal of making that number as big as it can be, and I think it's really important to just take a step back. Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe there's something much more fundamental that we can solve instead.

Chris Norton: 25:08

So what's your hot tip for 2025? Then, if you work in marketing like as a futurist, oh, there's a lot there.

Tom Goodwin: 25:17

I think we'll. Well, you know what. There's two very different answers to the question, like, what do I think should happen logically and what do I think will actually happen? Because, generally speaking, I think the world of marketing is quite illogical, I think we do quite lots of stupid things. So what I think should happen? I think we'll start to see far more in the way of advertising that leads to commerce very directly.

Tom Goodwin: 25:45

Okay, um, I'm always amazed, like you know. Sometimes I turn my ad blocker off just so I can kind of see what's out there. Um, you'll get sort of like an ad for, you know, a Samsung um fridge, you know, and you'll sort of look at the fridge and you'll be like, actually that's, that's interesting. Like I'd quite like a fridge right now. And rather than being sort of like, find a local stock list or come to this showroom and experience the fridge or buy the fridge, and it will say, you know, come and watch some videos of our creators and what they think about life being cool. And you think you know you're talking to me about a fridge. You know like, just tell me about the fridge, don't sort of like make more content. So I think ads that have a more helpful call to action that is often linked to commerce, will probably be quite a big thing.

Tom Goodwin: 26:40

I think and I hope this is true I think I can see a movement towards more premium web advertising. I'm really sort of excited by this. You this. I'm starting to see some websites like, you know, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, where you actually go on it, and rather than these awful sort of Google PMAX. You know, text based words for you know rivets for airplane manufacturing and you think, how on earth are they deciding to show this to me? I'm just starting to see like a really nice ad for like a beautiful hotel chain. You know, I'm seeing like a beautiful sort of image of a, a nice plane, and it's saying you know, we're investing in our, our fleet. You know, I'm seeing these sort of more sort of um, sort of gentle and premium adverts and, and I'd like to think that that might be something that's kicking off what?

Will Ockenden: 27:34

what's driving that then why, why, why do you think we're seeing a shift, or potentially a shift towards that? Because, I mean, that's the creative stream, isn't it that kind of work, as opposed to really transactional work?

Tom Goodwin: 27:45

um, I don't really know, because I'm not in these rooms very often anymore. To be honest, a lot of my sort of work is more business transformation than advertising. What I hope is happening, and I think this is a very real thing, you know, in most countries. You know, I'm not going to say that TV is dying because people have been saying that for a long time, but the reality is that if your people are a little bit like us in most countries and if you're people a little bit like you know the kids that we might have you're not actually spending that long reading magazines and you're not actually spending that long watching TV. It's not dead, but it is diminishing.

Tom Goodwin: 28:27

And therefore, if you are coca-cola or personal or you know warburton's muffins or an oil lubrication business or eso and you're trying to reach quite a lot of people, um, it's not very easy to like you. You basically have to spend your money online and I think there is slowly again, I may be completely wrong um, there may be slowly a sort of recognition that if you are trying to reach people like us, then you have to spend that money online and if you're going to spend it online rather than sort of retargeting and search, it might be worth creating some form of advertising that is more akin to the sort of brand messaging in the broader reach of TV. You know, I think it's a really interesting conversation and I'd really like to know sort of what other people in the industry think. But I think it's quite hard for brands to spend that money. You know, if you're Uber and you're trying to push towards downloads of the app, then digital is quite a nice place to do it.

Tom Goodwin: 29:32

But if you're Airbnb and you're trying to reach like a few more people that might not know about it, or you're trying to just, you know, create a sense of top of mind awareness again, you probably can't do that in TV as easily anymore and you need formats online that people are going to see and that people are going to feel a sense of sort of gravitas to, and especially when it comes to quite premium places like the New York Times or Wiredcom or Voguecom or the BBC, you know, if you're looking at it outside the UK, you know there are a lot of really quite premium places and I think they've missed out on a lot of money that they should have had because they've been charging too little.

Chris Norton: 30:13

Definitely. Obviously, we've asked you about your mistake. If you were us, who is? Who would you have on this show next, and why?

Tom Goodwin: 30:21

Um, I mean, Rory Sutherland is always just the most amazing person to hear from. Um, maybe, maybe you don't need to have him on the show because he does enough stuff that people can finally hear him, so maybe he doesn't need to be here.

Chris Norton: 30:39

I think there's more than one, rory, to be honest.

Tom Goodwin: 30:41

Oh, yeah, I think it might be quite interesting to get, um, a fairly interested, a fairly normal person, just like a customer, just like, you know, just just find your mate that's got opinions on anything, um, and just be like what do you think about advertising? What do you? What do you think about? Yeah, what do you think about the media? Because you know, I know I'm sort of going on a little bit, but I think, um, when I entered the industry in 2000, it was a really it was a really warm and exciting industry and it was full of a lot of fun and a lot of um recognition that we had a really privileged job which was to do stuff that was that was sort of helpful and fun. And I think at some point in the last sort of 10 years it became quite boring and it became quite nervous and I think it became quite serious and I think we started to lose.

Tom Goodwin: 31:40

We sort of lost our focus on people. You know, we don't go around the streets asking people what their favorite ads are anymore. We don't. We don't go to Boots and have a look at how people are deciding what type of nail varnish to buy. We don't really do focus groups where we ask people how they decide what bank account to have or at least we don't as much as we used to. So I think any chance to actually listen to what it's like being a normal person, because I'm on LinkedIn quite a lot. Whenever you hear marketing people, myself included, talking about marketing, you know you realize we've got no idea what it's really like out there we live in a bubble, don't we?

Will Ockenden: 32:16

it's uh, yeah, it's um, and you need to break out of that.

Chris Norton: 32:21

I've heard you talk about that before. Yeah, you're right. You're right. You're not like the average joe blogs on the street, which is what you need to do. You need to get like a diverse range of opinions and to hear from different, different, different angles um so, tom, what's the best way for our listeners to get older? If they want to book you or whatever, want to speak to you because you've got a million different ways, including an amazing newsletter that I've subscribed to. Yeah, yeah, so what else?

Tom Goodwin: 32:47

um. So if you wanted to sort of see my daily ramblings, then you find me on LinkedIn. Normally about once a day I'll sort of do something. My newsletter I try to send out every two or three weeks, which is on Substack. I mean, if you type in Tom F for Freddie Goodwin into the internet, you'll probably well hopefully you'll find me in one of these places, and then I've got like a website as well, like tgoodwinme um but yeah like find me somewhere, and then you'll start seeing my stuff everywhere.