Chris Norton: 1:04

A lot of agencies love a shiny North Star. Then reality bites. This week I'm joined by Chris Attewell, former CEO of Search Laboratory and now a board advisor at Realize Advisory to focus on what he would do differently. We revisit the history of SEO and he sets out what he would change for today's AI-shaped search. Fewer hacks, more intent, and clearer links between content, product and PR. He explains how he'd stop big ideas from stalling. One owner, simple goals, set timelines and a weekly check-in that clears blockers on the spot. I've known Christopher for over 10 years, more like 15 years, and he tells us the tips and advice that he'd used if he was to sell again. He's been through the process, but this podcast is really, really useful because we talk about the history of SEO, where it's going with AI, and we look at the future of what it will all mean for you, the marketeer. So if you're interested in what AI is doing to search and a little bit of the history of how uh SDO has changed and what you can take back to your desk from tomorrow, this podcast is going to be from you because Chris is brilliant. He knows everything there is to know about SDO, which is why I got him in the studio. So Will and I grill him. Uh hopefully you enjoy it. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy this week's pod. Thank you very much. Chris Attewell, welcome to the show.

Chris Attewell: 2:31

Thank you very much.

Chris Norton: 2:31

Now, Chris, you used to be a client of ours, so please be ble friendly. And we've um we've known each other for how long have we known each other?

Chris Attewell: 2:38

It's gotta be 10 plus, yeah.

Chris Norton: 2:40

10 years, yeah. And when I first met you, you didn't you didn't did you work in marketing or you worked in sales, right?

Chris Attewell: 2:46

So I think we so we met Communicator Cop. Yeah. So through my wife. Yeah, through Lisa. So Lisa at the time was doing our outbound marketing or our lead gen.

Chris Norton: 2:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Attewell: 2:55

And I think she put us in touch. Yeah, yeah. So it would have been more than 10 years, because I left Communicator in 2011.

Chris Norton: 3:02

Okay, so Jesus Christ, 14 years.

Chris Attewell: 3:05

There you go.

Chris Norton: 3:06

So how did you go from like a and that was you were head of sales and business development, right?

Chris Attewell: 3:11

Yeah, well, I was doing new business sales, yeah.

Chris Norton: 3:13

And you were very good at it. So how did you go from that to the CEO of an SE, one of the UK's biggest CEO agencies in the country?

Chris Attewell: 3:20

I so I worked with uh my boss at the time, a communicator for a wireless communicator, um, went to work at Search Labs. Yeah. And I followed him basically. Right. So I mean I was selling Communicator was email marketing software. Okay. So it was working with digital marketing and e-commerce people. So it wasn't a big joke, huge leap. It was moving from selling more tech and software to selling marketing services. So I was doing sales basically.

Chris Norton: 3:48

Um What are they doing now, Communicator Corp?

Chris Attewell: 3:50

So they were acquired the time just as I was leaving, they were acquired by Trinity Mirror. Oh, okay. Um and I think they've been rebranded a few times since. So still in existence, but a few different uh different places.

Chris Norton: 4:02

So obviously, so you've been in you've been in SEO for well you've been in the SEO wor sphere since 2000 since then then.

Chris Attewell: 4:10

2012, maybe, yeah.

Chris Norton: 4:11

And so how has that changed to 2025? We've literally just done an event on AEO GEO and the fact that traffic has just dropped off a cliff. I've said that I think it's the biggest thing to happen in into Google since we've known each other, and but I'd say since 19 since since Google came out, I think this is the biggest change or threat to Google. Do you think that's fair?

Chris Attewell: 4:38

They they change all the time. Like their business model, I feel like over the years has has changed all the time, and they're good at adapting, which is what what's made them successful. So I think while it's definitely a threat in the sense that there's changed, that have been working in the background on solutions, products, ways around it without us knowing about it. You know, they've launched it, they've built in um AI overviews, they've built in AI mode, which is the more recent one. So they're doing lots of stuff in the background, and it's starting to appear. But I guess it's still early days. We'll see what happens.

Chris Norton: 5:13

I just felt they were file they're caught with their pants down. Because I thought I I think they hit the Google Deep Mind, right? And they had the world's top guys working on Google Deep Mind, and away they were being Google clever, you know, philosophizing over AI, building this amazing, and then Chat GPT just went, Ah, we'll just give you it all for free. Pants came down, and then everyone started going, hang on a minute, this is pretty cool. We can do generative AI, what we know as generative AI now, and we can do searches, and they're quite good, and they've just got better and better and better. And now there's like the VHS beta max for the for the younger for the younger listener.

Chris Attewell: 5:48

I've not heard beta max film.

Chris Norton: 5:50

There's the cassette tape vinyl, you know, mini disc.

Chris Attewell: 5:55

I love the mini disc. I was trying to explain to my daughter in the car at the weekend about cassettes. Yeah. Actually, we were walking through Leeds Market and they had the record um vinyl fair on the other vinyl fair on. Love vinyl. I was trying to explain to her, you know, you'd buy a cassette and you know. It's such an impractical format, isn't it? I think they're having a resurgence though, aren't they? Cassettes.

Chris Norton: 6:13

Just like vinyl was having calling.

Chris Attewell: 6:16

Yeah, yeah. And they'd always snare up and a thing.

Will Ockenden: 6:18

Well, she was asking me as well, she was saying, like, what is is that what you used in one of those Walkman things?

Chris Attewell: 6:23

It's like, imagine that, you know, the early ones as well, before they had the shape control on where you would like you couldn't move.

Chris Norton: 6:29

Yeah, oh, that was C.

Chris Attewell: 6:31

You couldn't walk.

Chris Norton: 6:32

Well, I I remember, I mean, this is how old I am. I remember having a tape deck with um like the the the Walkman when it first came out. That's because I'm older than you, and I remember The Walkman, which was like Sony Walkman came out. Anyway, how did we get onto that? But it's that that's literally what is happening right now. There's like five different providers of search, the providers of AI. Yeah, you're right, Google's launched AI overview, but that they did that because oh shit, hang on, everyone's going to ChatGPT is the fastest growing search engine. Uh well, it's sorry, it's the fastest growing app, and they they've always been the number one search engine. But I just find it I find it fascinating that this whole you're right, Google has has evolved and changed and moved on, but I just felt like it's got caught a little bit with its pants down and still they're they're battling it out. The Betamax, VHS, because it's them two, right? There's perplexity on the edge of things, which is another search engine that people are using and anthropic and stuff like that. But I just think it's fascinating to see what is going to happen because Google's just been they've they have dominated everything, haven't they?

Chris Attewell: 7:36

Yeah, totally. I I I feel like a lot of this is linked. It's more the past three years or so since Chat GPT and Gen AI, and there's been so many developments and so many new companies launching and new tools. At some point there's going to be consolidation. Because there's just so many different pots of investment being chucked in anything which is AI, and not all of them are going to succeed, and it's going to consolidate. And I I guess my if I had to bet on it, I would say that once that consolidation happens, Google's still going to be there as a key player because they've got the legacy, they've got the budget, they've got the tech, they've got the data, they've got the data, they've got the clients, they've got the relationships, the partnerships. Like it's going to be very difficult to topple Google. What they come out of this situation as and how they evolve, that'll be interesting to see. But like I can't really see a world where they're going to be gone.

Chris Norton: 8:32

No, no, no, Google's not going to be gone. I just think it's it's just a fascinating. It's it's the biggest thing in digital marketing for 25 years, I think. I've ever because it is an actual threat, isn't it? And the the reason why I think it's a threat, and we'll get onto your history in a minute, because we started on your history, but um, is the the the ChatGPT is using using, and I know this from the other day when I was looking at the sources, Bing results. Obviously, Microsoft, big investor in chat, chat GPT, and it's using Bing to get its a lot of its search signals. And I'm like, nobody uses Bing. It's like it was five percent of search traffic. You as running an SEO agency, you'll know that. Like Microsoft want you to use Bing. Well, ChatGPT uses Bing. So that that all of a sudden that's another threat from another angle. I just think it's yeah, it's fascinating.

Chris Attewell: 9:20

So um how effective are SEO agencies at kind of adapting to this new world order then? I mean, obviously you're slightly out, slightly removed from that now, aren't you? You're no longer a CEO of a search agency, so maybe you can give us kind of an objective overview.

Chris Norton: 9:34

It is available for hire though, if anybody's out there.

Chris Attewell: 9:37

Um I think it's not the first time it's evolved. Um and I think uh the best example that I've got was if you go back early 2010s when Google started dishing out penalties, so link penalties, I'm sure you'd have time, penguin, panda, all these penalties were people doing spammy lower quality SEO. Link farms. And it was such a huge thing in the industry at the time. You had the majority of agencies, I'd say, were doing dodgy, spammy link building because it was really easy to make money doing it. You know, you you could take a budget from a client um and then you maybe buy some links with 10% of the budget, then you pocket the 90% of the budget. So some of the agencies that were acquired around that time, when you looked at the kind of profit they were making, it was just like ridiculous. Our SEO team at the time, around that time, had had noticed. So I guess just to backtrack a little bit, Search Labs, Search Laboratory was set up as a PPC agency.

Chris Norton: 10:46

Oh really?

Chris Attewell: 10:46

Yeah, originally.

Chris Norton: 10:47

I did not know that. Oh no, no, I kind of do remember that because I remember you saying it was full. I remember when you were telling me all about it when we first met about it, that there were a lot of the people that worked there were mathematicians. Yeah, yeah. Which amazing.

Chris Attewell: 11:00

Hence the laboratory bit. So this was so it's coming up to 20 years now. In fact, it's 20 years this year. So Ian, uh Ian Harris, who founded the business, previously worked in I guess, data in tech and um and stats, and he's very much a like a data and numbers guy. So he he saw that at the time, like PPC was new 20 years ago, and a lot of the budgets were being managed by media agencies, um, which wasn't very transparent and wasn't very mathematical. And I think they were using this new tool in the same way that they buy media, which is a little bit, you know, make 20%. Yeah, make a margin on it, and also not necessarily be very mathematical in the way they were managing it. Got yeah. So Ian saw that and thought, hold on, we can do better here if we apply some kind of mathematical rigour to it and we're transparent with clients, we can carve a bit of a niche in the market, and that's where the company first got traction. But that then set the foundation for when we first started doing SEO. Right. Because for a while, SEO was seen as this black box dark art thing, and because we had a load of mathematicians and data people, they just looked at it and thought, I'm not getting involved in that. That's that's like magic, that's like dodgy black magic stuff. So when we first decided to do it, this was even before I joined Search Labs, but the guys at the time decided to do it. They thought we'll apply that mathematical, logical, and and above all transparent approach to SEO. So we never got involved in the the really dodgy stuff. There were things that we were doing that I guess if you look back now, you just probably wouldn't do, but we never did the full-on dodgy stuff. The blackout stuff. Yeah, the really, really dodgy stuff. So I suppose the money you can make through doing that, it must have been so tempting as a you know it's but it's it was short term though.

Chris Norton: 13:27

Yeah, like you could see, you could see it was short term, couldn't you, Chris?

Chris Attewell: 13:31

Well, I think that's our SEO guys could see it was short term. So this was I think this might have been when we first started to properly talk about working together. So our SEO guys at the time they thought, well, hold on, if you can't buy links or even pay for links, so this was at the time when we were working with a lot of bloggers, and when it was bloggers before influencers and social media people, so like we would work with a lot of bloggers, and what we would do is we'd say, We'll write you a bit of content for your blog, and if you post it on your blog with a link back, then you get a bit of content from us and we get the link, and that was a fair trade. Yeah, but then all the bloggers started saying, Well, actually, no, I want a fee, I want a fee, I want some money. Now, technically that's not paying for a link because you could say, Okay, I'll give you this fee for your time for posting it for me, but I'm not paying for a link, but you were paying for a link. Ooh, dubious, you were paying for a link. Yeah, yeah. So because they were then asking for more and more money, our SEO guys thought there's got to be a better way to do this. So we accidentally started doing PR. We accidentally started doing digital PR because we thought if we put some really, really good content on the client's website that's of interest to lots of other different sites, publications, blogs, and then we just tell them about it, it's in their interest to link to it. Which is kind of like a digital PR approach. Yeah. So we started doing that before Penguin and Panda, but it we were very, very early adopters in doing it.

Chris Norton: 15:03

Yeah, because I remember it.

Chris Attewell: 15:04

Yeah, and it was hard, yeah.

Chris Norton: 15:05

I remember working together, and you were like, Don't worry, we don't do PR. And then we got about 18, we got about 18 months into it, and you were like, actually, I think we do sort of do PR.

Chris Attewell: 15:15

It was that realization we didn't know we were doing PR. We had no idea. Yeah, it was only when we started going to try to sell it to clients, yeah, or but pitch these campaigns to clients, and the clients would say, Well, a few things would happen, but quite common was they'd look at it and think, I've got a PR agency doing that. You guys can't do that. Or the digital team would bring us on, yeah, and then we'd start to try to run these campaigns, but then either the PR team or the PR agency working for the client or the comms team would look at our campaign or look at our list of journalists or look at our list of blogs and say, You can't speak to them, you can't speak to them, you can't speak to them. So we just couldn't deliver the campaigns. So it was that it's a similar kind of time now, I think. That was a really big change in that part of SEO.

Chris Norton: 16:02

Yeah.

Chris Attewell: 16:02

And it's a similar kind of thing in the moment, which is interesting.

Chris Norton: 16:06

And this is sort of leading us to what we were going to talk about, which is the North Star trap, which is kind of what you're talking about here, is the siloed the side people that are working at brands now. So our most of our listeners are are people that work in marketing at a brand somewhere. And there's the we we've been talking in what we do, which is like traditional PR and integrated PR. So we've never said we do digital PR. Yeah, we do. We do. We do it's the same as everything. Everything is now digital. I said the other day, is is digital PR even a fucking thing anymore? Like, are they they're like it's like data-driven marketing? Is it yeah? Is anything not data-driven? Um and people so we used to always say don't work in silos, but your your whole theme today is like the North Star trap. So do you want to explain what that is and how people can be trapped?

Chris Attewell: 16:53

So I think it it follows on from what I was just saying about the SEO becoming or SEO link building becoming digital PR. Like as an agency, we saw this thing and we thought we've solved it, we've cracked it. This is what clients need to do. You can't do this old stuff anymore. You need to be doing this thing, it's the future. And it absolutely was what clients needed. But trying to go in, you can go in.

Chris Norton: 17:17

What was it? Sorry. Was that the link building or was that the Google Dem?

Chris Attewell: 17:20

PR approach. Oh, okay. So this digital PR, or PR approach, if you like, yeah. Earning links rather than having to potentially pay for them. But and it was very easy to go into think of a client, a bigger client, where they've got a they've got a digital team or a digital and an e-commerce team, and then they've got a comms team or a brand team, or we would go into typically the digital team or the e-commerce team, and we'd have it was really easy to get people excited about these PR campaigns. If you imagine back in the day when you you sell in link building campaigns, it's like, you know, we'll do this bit of content for this blogger and they'll give us some links. When you go in and you you move into your world of creative campaign ideas and you know how many publications are gonna pick it up, and we've got this thing over here which is gonna be cool. It was really, really exciting to sell. So you get people engaged on client side in, say, the digital team, but we just didn't even figure at the time that there's gonna be a PR agency maybe working with the brand team, or there's gonna be a comms team internally. So we'd go in and we'd sell this North Star exciting campaign idea, and we just couldn't deliver it. So that's that's the first example. But then you you see it again. I think if you jump to today in this integrated approach with SEO in particular, like SEO has changed, as you've said, it's changed massively. Um people aren't just searching on Google, they're searching on social platforms, they go into Reddit, they go into YouTube, they go into Chat GPT. So there's lots of different platforms that people are visiting to get information, might be searching for products, might be doing research. It's not just go to a search engine, search. So the landscape has completely changed. Also, Google's changed. So even if they do go to that search engine, there's now AI overview, there's AI mode, which is the most recent one. So Google itself has changed and it's it's pulling in signals from different areas, from different platforms, it's pulling in signals from those different platforms that we talked about, you know, that like social platforms or content platforms. So the whole landscape has completely changed and it's continuing to change. Um, brand is becoming more important because Google values increasingly is going to value people that have built actual brand authority. So if you imagine all of those different things that we've talked about, I've talked about content, I've talked about social platforms, I've talked about video, I've talked about search, I've talked about brand. You might look at a client if you think, where do all of those five things sit within a large client? Could be four or five, could be one team, could be five teams. So if the approach now needs to be integrated across all of those different areas, if, for example, we need to think, let's not think channels, let's not think platforms, let's think audience or customer first, let's think about who that person is that we want to engage with. Let's think about how we need to engage with them, let's think about where they are online, what they're searching for, what they're searching for and where they are online at the top of the funnel versus mid-funnel versus lower funnel. Like they're going all over the place, but it remains one person. So if we flip it all around and say, what's our strategy to engage with this one person throughout the whole funnel, wherever they are online, we need an integrated strategy and it needs to include content, PR, search, social. So that's that's the difficulty at the moment. And that's only going to work if a client's business is set up in the right way. So how should a client set their set their marketing teams up then to respond to this kind of new order? I think there there'll be evolution. I think things will will naturally become more integrated over time. But we're we're ahead of the curve here, or the market's ahead of the curve, similar to back 10-15 years ago when we started doing digital PR. Like now digital PR is just part of SEO. You work with a client and you do SEO, they know you're gonna be doing digital PR. So they're set up in such a way about whereby it's kind of just part of the the structure. Um but it took a while to get there. So I think the things that the things that we found work really well I guess this is well for the client side marketers listening, you've got to approach it from the top down. So there has to be consensus at the top, whether that's at CMO level because all of the channels report to CMO, or maybe in smaller businesses at owner or CEO level because maybe there's different channels report to that person. It has to be a top-down approach really to make it work where the mandate is we all need to work together to achieve this thing and we need to find a way. If you've got, for example, uh if you've got a head of digital or uh e-commerce director who engages with a search agency in isolation in a silo, and then that search agency says, okay, well, we also need to be doing PR and we need to be doing social and we need to be doing all these different things, it's stuck in that silo. It's very, very difficult to move over and say, Well, okay, we need to now get I'm bought in, I want to work with you. I need to now get my colleague who runs brands or my colleague who runs comms, and then you've got to, as a team, try to convince those people, and that's hard work to do. So if everybody's involved from the beginning, if everybody's involved from day one, and ideally if it's mandated from the top down, it's a team effort to make it happen. And that's the key learning I think that we've had over the years.

Chris Norton: 23:06

Yeah, because I always used to like you you said like this about the siloed approach, but uh we we used to run events, we've run events for years, and and we like when we worked with Interflora several years ago, and the first thing I said to them when when we when we met them, we were doing we did a brief with them uh years ago was I need to get all your heads of all the department in one room and we need to talk about this, which is exactly what you're talking about now. And that was 10, yeah, maybe 12, 15 years ago, something like that. Um, and it's still the same. Everybody, all the heads of all the need to be on the same page and agree. The one thing that does worry me with SEO agencies doing PR or digital PR for a brand, and the and I can I know where the pushback's coming from from our side of it, will be the reputational side of it. It's like great, you you're gonna get some excellent links to I don't know, um Chris Atterwell's uh GEO report on the tractor industry. Uh you're gonna get some excellent links to that, but then John Deere Tractors will be like, what's that doing for our reputation? Why do I why am I getting coverage in media coverage in whatever the title is? Um and what does that mean for our actual reputation? We don't want to be seen there. We're a premium brand. We want to be seen in the telegraph or the times or wherever it is, and only on the business pages. And we don't want to be down in these lower tier, and I think that's where a lot of the pushback is coming because you've got you've got sort of like comms professionals that want to look at our job is to look after the brand look after the brand and its reputation, and it's reputation, it's trust, right? Is but your you guys are talking coming at it from a digital trust side. So I can see where the two worlds sort of go like that.

Chris Attewell: 24:48

I think on that, that's that's given this new world that we we're starting to live in with this more integrated approach, that's a barrier that really has to be overcome. Um, if you think back to um what we're talking about, the the the current SEO landscape of everything coming together, um that that those two things need to come together, like the the brand reputation side of PR and the SEO side of it. Like we we would be able to justify it as an SEO agency, you know, going and targeting publications and targeting what you deem as like less relevant publications from a brand point of view because there was digital and SEO value in um in getting links and coverage there. So we we kind of kept it apart. We would say, we're doing this thing over here for your search rankings, and we're gonna get coverage on these kind of sites which is gonna be beneficial that kept us apart from the pure brand campaigns if the client was running them. They did bleed over into each other, we'd target nationals, we'd we'd get high profile coverage for clients, and we'd give them a brand lift accidentally, if you like. But our brief as an agency wasn't to directly improve brand, it was to directly improve um SEO, and indirectly we might improve brand, where I guess for you guys, you'd directly focus in on brand and you'd indirectly benefit digital. Exactly that. It seems like a waste of you know, if you're getting as a as an SEO agency, you're getting national bits of media coverage. You're obviously high-fiving the team because you've got a link, not saying I'm not saying you're saying the wrong thing, but not crafting that message and thro through a reputational lens seems a waste, doesn't it? I think this is where it's gonna have to evolve because all of these channels are now coming together. Like in order to effectively do SEO, you're gonna have to factor in brand and reputation and authority that way. So it has to that barrier has to be broken down. So that as a as a client for client-side marketers, looking at this thing and thinking, how do I get the maximum impact from the PR and brand activities that I'm doing, both directly and indirectly, going both ways, if you like. So it's that I see that as still being a challenge. Because you've got a whole industry, you've got a whole PR industry. You've got a whole, you know, you've got people in-house on client side who are brand marketers that are very good at what they do, they've got lots of experience, they've got their team, they've got their budget, and likewise you've got the same on the visual side. Now, if we're saying that all of these things are converging in the market, there has to there's gonna have to be, I think, some kind of convergence in agency world and on client world.

Chris Norton: 27:41

So, like a restructure, the the the initial the actual thing that everyone's talking about, like the AI restructure where people go, hang on a minute, people aren't looking at performance just performance, and they're not just looking at brand, they're looking at it's looking at the whole the whole holistic thing.

Chris Attewell: 27:56

I think so. I think it's gonna be a it's a catalyst for another stage of evolution.

Will Ockenden: 28:00

Yeah.

Chris Attewell: 28:01

You know, just like I mean, if you go back, try to give examples, but you know, there have been other times where it's evolved. Like you you you might not have had a digital department or an e-commerce department as many years ago. You would just had a marketing team. So it's kind of all branched out, and maybe now it's gonna start to consolidate a little bit.

Chris Norton: 28:17

Well, I I'm that old that I remember when people not everybody had a website and we were doing websites for people. Oh, you couldn't. Because they didn't, it was like your brochures. I remember doing PR brochures and for conferences and things like that, and people would say, Can I can you send me a brochure? That was literally the beginning of my career, by the way.

Chris Attewell: 28:33

Um because it's it must have been so hard work without a website. I mean, how you know, thinking you'd actually have to go and I mean how would people ever find you? So my my first job was at a sales job. I used to sell products. I used to work for a manufacturing company at I'd sell products to like wholesalers. Um and I had the yellow pages. I'd be calling in the yellow pages. I'd had I just had all of the yellow pages on a shelf and I'd start at the beginning, I'd call and I'd try to book, I'd try to get somebody on the phone. When I got them on the phone, I'd then say, okay, I'll send you some literature.

Chris Norton: 29:06

Yeah.

Chris Attewell: 29:07

And I'd then have to go down to the post room and get all the literature out and put it in an envelope. And we had a frankin machine. Yep, I had that. Maybe we'll see it in. Maybe we'll see a return.

Chris Norton: 29:15

This is what I did from my first trip.

Chris Attewell: 29:17

And then I'd have to send all my posts out and then put a reminder in like four days later. Franking machine is great because you could run your own letters through it sometimes, couldn't you?

Chris Norton: 29:23

Because really, it's funny when you fired it from one end and it flew out the other end.

Chris Attewell: 29:27

But this was, I mean, this is 25 years ago. Like, we're not talking about a I mean, it's a huge amount of time in digital and marketing terms, but it's a very, very short amount of time. And if you imagine how marketing digital has evolved in that time and the different stages of evolution it's gone through, it uh my view is that it's just gonna have to evolve again. And and this is in order to stay relevant and successful from an agency perspective, you've always got to be thinking about what's gonna come next, where are things gonna go, and try to be ahead of the curve. Yeah. And I think it's I would say agencies now are starting to think about that more integrated approach to working with clients. How do we how do we do that? On the SEO side, you know, there's different things on paid media is a little bit different, but on that organic side, I think agencies now are thinking that's the direction that it's going to go in, and therefore if if they're sensible, they're starting to think how can we engage with clients in a meaningful way so that we can actually deliver this kind of work rather than just curious.

Chris Norton: 30:36

I saw something on Marketing Week a couple of weeks ago, and it said based back to the brand thing, that brand is the most important thing over performance marketing now. Um brand marketing is the but 50% you said 50% it was in marketing week, and I think I believe the stat was 50% of B2B businesses don't do any brand marketing. Embracing marketing mistakes is the this is B2B podcast of Prohibition PR. Yeah, so but yeah, most people don't do it because they don't believe in brand, they just do Google clicks, you know, Google PPC or whatever it is. So everybody out there, whether you're B2B or B2C, needs to need to do brand, and the agencies need to engage with people on a brand basis, don't they? That's where we're at.

Chris Attewell: 31:18

So, what should you know uh brands listening to this in, they will want to be cutting edge, they want to they don't want to be left behind. You've already talked about the need for this kind of integrated approach. What else should they do in terms of how they're set up or their way of thinking or their philosophies of marketing? So uh I I attended a really interesting session a few years ago um run by run by Google. So we were uh um like a prem premier ad partner for Google and as a result they would set up education sessions and training. It was really, really good. Um and one of the sessions was run by one of the top tier consultancies. Um they came in and were trying to explain to us as as digital agencies how to get clients to commit to spending quite a lot of money on data and digital transformation projects. Um because we were kind of clueless. We just to kind of give a bit of backdrop on this one, the um platforms like Google now and and Meta they're becoming increasingly automated. So whereas back in the day, the reason we used to hire mathematicians is because you'd go in and you calculate bids and you'd manipulate the system to be able to generate um output, that's uh more and more automated now. So it's not necessarily about logging in and who's best at pressing the buttons, it's increasingly about who can feed those systems with data, insights to allow the algorithms, the AI within the systems to be able to then work out how to make the most money. So if if if that's the way the algorithms are working, the people that are going to win are the people that can feed the best data in. Now, as digital agencies, we therefore need data and insights from clients to be able to deliver value. And we were going to clients and saying this, saying, you know, we you know it's all about um signals and data and input and automation, and therefore, if you just give us all this data, we'll do a better job. And they're turning around and saying, Well, we're not gonna give you it because the security issue. Yeah. Or we're speaking to the um the e-commerce team and they're saying, Well, it's not me, actually, it's the CIO or the CTO or the tech team that owns the data, and they're not gonna give us it. No charts. Or, you know, it's or actually, oh, that's expensive, and we're not gonna see a return on that. It's a lot of work to get the data into a place where we can do something with it, therefore, we're not gonna invest in it. So, yeah, Google spotted this and they brought in um one of the top tier consultancies who were selling you know multi-million data and digital transformation projects.

Will Ockenden: 33:55

Right.

Chris Attewell: 33:55

And they gave us a bit of a framework for how to do it, which was really useful. So the the main things they said were well, the first one that I said, which was go from the top down. So go in where the real decision is made, get everybody on board.

Chris Norton: 34:10

But who is the decision made on that that level of data?

Chris Attewell: 34:12

It depends on the business, really. But in some cases, it's gonna be the leader of the business, it's gonna be the CEO. It may be the CMO potentially, but it's from a potentially from a like a data transformation pro uh perspective. If if you're talking about marketing and and business data, it's probably gonna be the CEO because you've got a CMO and maybe a CTO who both report to the CEO and they both need to be involved. If it's you we're talking about the you know, this new integrated search, digital, social, it it could be the CMO if all of the channels report to the CMO. So it's just understanding the structure of the business and understanding who needs to be involved. So that was the first one. Make sure that you get everybody from day one around the table. Another one that was really interesting was it's it's fine to show what that North Star or that kind of end goal is, even if it's a stretch, but it has to be chunked down into stages. Right. So you your North Star bells and whistles solution might be stage five.

Chris Norton: 35:16

And what was that?

Chris Attewell: 35:17

That was one customer view every yeah, it could be, yeah, it could be the you know, the all singing, all dancing, data-driven, like AI-driven data insights model that was feeding the algorithms.

Will Ockenden: 35:28

Yeah.

Chris Attewell: 35:28

That might be stage five, but you've got four more four stages to get to before you can even do stage five. So it's it's both getting buy-in that stage five is the goal, like this is where we're all aiming. But actually, it's saying what's important now is stage one. We just need to do stage one in order that we can then do stage two, because we can't do stage five unless we do stage one and then stage two and then stage three. Yeah. So chunk it down that way, show the full journey. Yeah. But say, well, actually, we just need to do this thing. And that the the important thing that they said around that was it's showing value. So stage one needs to deliver value. Yeah. Everything needs to deliver value. Yeah, early. It's short-term, long-term goal, short-term value, deliver value from stage one, get all of the skeptical people bored in because you've delivered early value. You can then all move together stage two and kind of move it through that way. And you've sold them the chain, haven't you, then? You know, and you're then engaged in that business for Absolutely, yeah. From from an agency perspective, the the challenge, the challenge that you have is if you just try to sell them stage five without the other stages, it's really, really difficult to do because they just can't innovate and they get put off by the complexity. If you just sell them stage one without showing them where you're heading, you then have to re-engage to try to do stage two and then re-engage to do stage three, and that's really, really difficult as well. So it has to be that balanced approach of we're all agreed that we're heading over there, but also we're all agreed that we just need to do this thing first, and that's what we're focused on, and that's what we need to show value from.

Chris Norton: 37:01

I mean, one of the questions I've got is how far did you get down the stages? Did you actually get to stage three?

Chris Attewell: 37:07

I mean, this could be a long, long, long-term process. But yeah, that's you you do, if you do it in that way, you can move forward. If you've got everybody who's um required from the beginning involved and has a seat around the table, then you've got those barriers are removed. If you can do stage one and show some value and show some business value and some return on investment, you're more likely to get through stage two. But it's it's a it's a process. You know, any kind of change that requires multiple departments and multiple people and investment in a big business is gonna be a long, complicated, sometimes painful process. But if you don't make that change, you get left behind.

Chris Norton: 37:49

I feel like Michael Jackson music should have dropped on. I'm gonna make that change. That's another one from our young listeners, then any other problematic singers that you have to represent? Have you got a Gary Dunner cloth?

Chris Attewell: 38:04

Um George, just just to add, I guess this there's one more really interesting one on this, which I think we found the hard way. What's that? Which is sometimes clients don't need the North Star.

Chris Norton: 38:16

What do they need then?

Chris Attewell: 38:17

They just need some value now. Like you you'll have some clients where, let's say, for example, you'll have clients now who are searching for an SEO agency because they know they've got an SEO issue or a challenge or a goal or whatever, and they just want an SEO agency. Now they've got a budget there to give to an SEO agency, and they may be very siloed, they may know that it's not even worth their time trying to bring those silos together. They just need someone to come in and do some traditional SEO work. What it's easy to fall into a trap as an agency of seeing that and saying, Oh no, you don't need SEO, you need this integrated search everywhere. For brands that know they don't need that. Absolutely, yeah. They don't, or they know they may need it, but they're just not in a position. Totally. Yeah. And it's it's very easy to get excited as a forward-looking innovative agency to then turn around and say, uh, yeah, but you what you actually need is this big thing over here. So choose your battles. Pick your battles. If somebody just wants some SEO and they've got an SEO budget and you can deliver some real business value from that budget, do the SEO work. Like, don't be too proud or innovative that you're chuckling.

Chris Norton: 39:31

You sort of get that with the PR stuff. Like, even even on the when we talk about the PR brand references, like there was a I'd say five, six years ago, all PR, it was um in a lot, well, not all PR, but media relations, a lot of it was like um uh the latest top ten report to find out and it here it is a research research done by you know insert brand name, and then you'd get coverage in the express, the mail, and stuff like that. And then a client would go, Great, I've got I've got 35 pieces of national coverage, and I've got this and that. But it's just saying that we've done this research, what's that doing for our reputation? And we're like, Okay, that but that's the the hook to getting you in the media. So the the the two sides of it, it's it's the same for both for everyone, basically. You've got to try and make it work for the client as best as you can. Now, um, this show is all about mistakes, and um you've run well you you run um you you ran Search Labs for over 10 years, was it?

Chris Attewell: 40:30

Uh 10 years of search labs and three years as part of Havas, yeah.

Chris Norton: 40:34

Yeah, which is amazing. So you must have made some mistakes in your time. Is there is there a particular mistake that you've made in your career that you've can reflect on now that um you'd like to share with our listeners? I think it will help them in their job.

Chris Attewell: 40:48

The more lured the better. Do you know what? Well, this is this is the thing. I think I'm thinking more back towards that my my when I first started working doing sales and being out on the road all the time. Like I learned so much doing that. I I was I was 22, straight out of year idiot, never had a proper job before. And I would I was traveling around Europe selling stuff basically, selling products, and I I learned so much doing it. The responsibility of you know, here's a credit card, book yourself a flight, get a hire car, go and meet all these people, sell some products and come back was like it was brilliant. I messed up so many times doing it, being young and stupid. Like, you know, I I'd miss flights, I'd like not check the office address of where I was going, and I'd end up in a different town if it was like so many stupid things. I guess my best ones that I can think of. Um I remember I first got a laptop, which was fairly early on, like early 2000s. Not many people had it was massive, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But not many people had taking out not many people had laptops in like the early 2000s for work, yeah. And they were huge. And I'd argued that I needed this laptop, and then like in the end, I got this laptop. Uh first trip out, I reversed over it in my car. Like, like I was kidding. Brilliant. So I I I had my bag with my laptop in, and I had a load of samples, product samples in the boot of my car. Put my bag down, opened the samples from the boot of the car. Oh no, I put them back in, that was it, because I was driving away. Put the samples back in the car, shut the boot, walked around, reversed over laptop. So that was a good one. Crunch, gone, gone, totally gone. Did you try and hide it from months and months? These are the two grand laptops as well back in the car. They were pretty expensive. Yeah, yeah. I said, I can't remember what I said at the time. I didn't say I'd reversed over it though. I was doing integrity there for Mr.

Chris Norton: 42:40

Ackhawan.

Chris Attewell: 42:41

Another, another brilliant one that I can remember from that time was um I was going in to do a pitch at a client. Okay. I used to wear suits at the time, I four seam and tie. And um I again I had some product samples with me, and I'd taken the product samples out of the boot, I put them on the floor, shut the boot, bent down and ripped the seat of my pants of my suit. But I'm not I'm not talking about just like a little rip around the seam. From the the hem from like the waistband all the way down the seam and like down the inside leg as well. Just flapping. Total flapping, yeah. And I had to walk in and do this pitch. Like martial arts pants for needs to put it. Honestly, I just stood there and thought. Did you design it? What do I do? What do I do here? What did you do? I just walked in and did the pitch. What with with your trousers flapping around in the wind?

Chris Norton: 43:32

Yeah.

Chris Attewell: 43:33

I just had to do it. I had no choice. Did you win the pitch? I sold some stuff, yeah.

Chris Norton: 43:37

Great.

Chris Attewell: 43:38

But I was like, this is It's one of those moments where you think, well, I I just don't know what I'm gonna do here.

Chris Norton: 43:43

We we've literally spoken to like four or five people recently, and it's like everyone's got pitch nightmares. Um I'm gonna do a pitch nightmare special, I think, where we ask people on LinkedIn to send us in there. Because no one wants to talk about mistakes, but everyone wants to talk about pitch fails from both sides. Yeah, yeah. Camps that like you've been in your in-house, you've been pitched to this just completely wrong. Yeah. Or or the other side, like doing some pitch nightmares where people have been hung over and they've turned up and forgotten that turned up to the wrong. We had one guy who was on the who used to work with me, and um it was for the Discovery Channel, right? And they had a pitch down in London, and uh we were up in Leeds, still up in Leeds, and um basically um we'd won this pitch to for the Discovery Channel. Great, um, spent loads of time on it, and we all got um put the work together. Now I wasn't on this pitch for some reason, can't remember what for. I wasn't on the um the pitch team at the time for some reason I was somewhere else. And um thankfully this isn't my mistake. Anyway, so they this um they booked the uh the the pitch and they all headed down there, six of them, down to this down to the Discovery Channel. Meanwhile, the client headed up to their office because they'd agreed to do it at their office. So they ended up at the Do you think they crossed somewhere something or something? Somewhere in Shropshire. I don't know. Um and yeah. This I think they think they actually won the brief, but there's yeah, I mean there's loads of them. Everyone's done the wrong wrong location and everything, haven't they?

Chris Attewell: 45:12

Starting out um a completely ripped pair of trousers though, I quite like that. Sure, I I didn't even I think thinking back, I walked into a well not sure everyone could see this room, walked into a meeting room like this with a desk. I didn't even say anything. I walked straight in facing forwards. Sat down. I sat down at the table.

Chris Norton: 45:29

Hid basically.

Chris Attewell: 45:30

Basically hid, and then got up and kind of walked out backwards saying, Thanks. See ya. Moon walked out. Yeah, but then I had a page of buttock as you left the room. I don't think they realised, did they? No, I don't think so. But then he's really weird, that Chris. He he walked backwards everywhere he goes. I then I had another meeting straight afterwards. I had another pitch like two hours later. So I was like, Well, so I had to go in straight to a supermarket, like black bear a trousers straight on and George. So I pulled it out, but Okay. I mean that was pretty embarrassing.

Chris Norton: 45:59

I mean I I I did something, we we used to have an office in Headingley, and um we I think Will might remember this. Do you remember when I walked into the meeting and it was a new business meeting and the the door handle I hadn't button on the door handle? My pocket on the door handle as I walked in and it ripped open my trouser. So I've had a similar and it was a joke, it was called it a trouser malfunction for ages because it was a reference to the Janet Jackson um, but it was a proper you know, it it made the sound a nice and I still don't as well. Yeah. We've all been there and we've all had trouser uh clothing malfunctions at some point. Do you remember that well?

Will Ockenden: 46:35

I do actually. Yeah. Didn't you do it twice?

Chris Norton: 46:38

Yeah, well I also did it I also did it at a wedding, slightly drunk, which my wife found hilarious. We were at a wedding and um I might have tried to do the splits. Brilliant. Yeah.

Chris Attewell: 46:46

Well that'll do it.

Chris Norton: 46:47

Yeah, and the trousers of over suit trousers, linen suit trousers, and I and I I did the Chris Attawell and uh moonwalk into the room and then I had because it was quite early on in the well, it wasn't that early on because we've been drinking for ages. And um I I spent like my wife kept saying to me, Why are you stood next to the wall? And I was stood right, you know, like against the wall because it was the back of the, you know, the one up there. Yeah. And I said, Can we go home now? And she just sent me home in a text and sended me and she sort of stayed out. I think we've covered quite a lot. I'm trying to think of anything else that I need to ask you.

Chris Attewell: 47:19

Um why don't you let people know where they can Yeah, what are you doing now? Yeah, what are you doing now and how we're doing now? Um I started doing consultancy and and board advisory for agencies. Um I I was so we Search Labs was acquired by Havas in 2022. So I I then spent the best part of three years working at Havas as part of the integration, and then yeah, begin of this this year decided it was time for a bit of a change. Didn't really have any plan. I just having gone through that process and which was brilliant and rewarding, but quite hard work at the same time. I thought bit of time off.

Chris Norton: 47:56

So you you got on your private yacht. Unfortunately not.

Chris Attewell: 47:59

Unfortunately not. I got on my bike for a bit, but um You're selling the dream to me well, yeah. So yeah, a bit of time off. I thought I'll just work out what I want to do, maybe I'll get a job, maybe I'll dunno. Um but then I I I just got a bit bored and started speaking to some people I knew in the agency world and having a few conversations, and that then turned into some paid work.

Chris Norton: 48:20

So, what sort of work are you doing though?

Chris Attewell: 48:22

Yeah, a bit of a mix, really. So um kind of non-exec board advisory type work for some agencies. I've I've done some one-off projects, a bit of training, change consultancy. Um you can help get client-side businesses, marketing teams in order, can you? Or is that not not part of your room? Do you know what I think I've I've not done work directly for clients, but I think helping clients select agencies, work better with agencies, you know, engage more meaningfully with agencies, review their agencies is definitely something that I've got on my on my radar. Um keep them away from our clients. But no, it's um yeah, it's really good. I I I think having that having that time to sit and reflect on actually not like a midlife crisis moment, but what do I want to do with my life? The fact that I've gravitated back towards agencies, it's because you get the buzz out of it, though, isn't it? Yeah, you do, yeah. And I think you'd you've having done it for so long and having built a really good network and having all that experience. There's I we we went through a lot at Search Labs in terms of evolution and like we launched in the US, so I was there for a bit. We I remember that. Yeah, we you know we um evolved our proposition, we launched new services, we did like Sunday Times Top 100, we did B Corp, we did all these different, we did acquisition, we do all these different things that at the time you kind of just go through it and you think this well, this is interesting, this is interesting. But then when you take a step back and speak to other agencies, I maybe underestimated the the value in that experience. So now to be able to go and share it is is it's quite rewarding.

Chris Norton: 50:04

Yeah, because as agency, uh well, any leadership role is is quite a lonely place because you can't the you the your your your staff can't really your team can help you, but they don't understand the the responsibility, I think. And so when I felt like we've just recently joined a group called WorldCon, which is the biggest independent network of PR agencies in the UK. We're one of three, uh two in the UK, I think. Um and it we're not we're complimentary to everybody in there, but in that group. But what I found absolutely refreshing from my side of it is we've always shied away from apart from I've got a few friends who own agencies, um, but I don't we don't really deal with other because at the end of the day we're in competition or and so you just sort of get on, like you just said, you just get on and do stuff. And then so but when you actually sit down and talk to people like yourself or other agency owners, it's refreshing when you can just have a candid chat about everybody's dealing with similar situations.

Chris Attewell: 50:56

Some some of it is just sense checking that what you already know, like you're probably on the right path, but you just need a second opinion. Um a lot of it actually is when you especially when you speak to maybe smaller agencies with less experience and where there's maybe only one person, you you guys have got each other to speak to maybe a network of people, but they'll sit there and they'll stew over things and not make a decision because they're they're worried they'll make their own decision. The amount of time, like the cost lost cost opportunity of that time and the headspace and the distraction of just not making a decision. Any decision's better than indecision, isn't it? Yeah, and having been able to call somebody externally to have a chat and just say, Yeah, what do you reckon? And I chances are, you know, 13 years of doing it, I've probably bumped into most things. Not saying I've got them all right, but I at least have the experience to be able to say if I were in your position, I'd maybe think about that one or you know, question why we're thinking so. So it's good to enjoy it.

Chris Norton: 51:53

So you're good with you're good with numbers as well. So the numbers side of it is one of the interesting bits that I'll I'll definitely chat to you about because you know you can be on as on top of your numbers as you but the fact that you've been in you've been at the you've sold an agency to have been part of the selling the agency to have us group, which is one of the biggest in the world. I actually know the chairman, I need I think I mentioned his name to you, didn't I? Uh the you know he's like of the the whole the global side of it. Um and that you've you've done that and then you've also yeah, you you've then been part of a public uh owned company as well, where you've got to have your numbers completely different again, which is fascinating if you've if there's somebody out there that uh uh it needs help with how to interpret the numbers because people just are obsessed with profit or whatever the numbers are that you're looking at. I think being able to interpret the numbers and make sure that you're making the right decisions based because our leadership level that's what you're looking at, numbers.

Chris Attewell: 52:48

That that's a key thing that I learned. I think we were we were very good, I would say, at Search Labs before we sold. We had a fantastic finance team, we had a really experienced finance team, and our processes and our reports and our and management information were were were great. It was very easy as a leader to get report every month and understand what was going on and make a decision. And I just assumed that that was normal. But it's not, I don't think any business, not a lot of agencies, and I assume on client side is probably a similar kind of thing too long. But um, yeah, then going into a much larger business, like a publicly listed company where like forecasting and and reporting is like all the forecasts get pushed up to global head offers because they have to report to the market. So you've got to be on top of it. So it just I I think I had a good baseline, but then you it got ratcheted up another level. So it's that's not not understanding what's going on in the business and not I would say having a forward-looking view of what's gonna happen in your business, like a forecast-based approach, makes it really difficult to make decisions, really difficult to see where you're going and be able to course correct. And I think that that's yeah, like I say, that conversations I have with agencies will will typically start with let's just have a look at your numbers. Let's have a look at the way that you report and the information that you have to make decisions, and then putting in place some kind of foundations to um to allow them to do it better. So how can people find you then? Should they look you up on LinkedIn? Look me up on LinkedIn is the easiest one, yeah. Connect on LinkedIn. Um I'm there for the moment.

Chris Norton: 54:24

At a world with an E, not an A, right?

Chris Attewell: 54:26

A-T-T-E-W-E-L-L. Yeah. There you go.

Chris Norton: 54:32

Uh embracing a marketing mistake there.

Chris Attewell: 54:34

Well, thanks very much. That was excellent.

Chris Norton: 54:36

I know we're always really enjoyed. Yeah.