Welcome And Guest Background

Chris Norton 0:00

Welcome back to Embrace and Marketing Mistakes, the show that teaches you growth through failure. I'm Chris Norn and this week I'm joined by Tom Roach, who's brand strategist at Jellyfish and one of the sharpest thinkers on brand in the business. Before Jellyfish, Tom spent years at BBH, Adam and Eve, DDB, working with brands like KFC, Weetabix, and John Lewis. Tom's Mistake is a belter as well. It tells the story about how KFC and Weetabix both ditched their most powerful brand assets, Finger Licking Good, and Have You Had Your Weetabix, and what it took to dig them back out of the attic. So go grab a brew and let's get into it. Here's Tom Roach. Enjoy. T om Roach, welcome to the show.

Tom Roach 0:51

Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Norton 0:53

Uh Tom, so I'm fascinated to talk to you about distinctive assets, which is what a lot of people keep talking about. I hear the I hear I've heard people like System One talking about the fact that you've got to have distinctive assets running through everything. Even better if it's an animal. Apparently, the data shows that if you've got an animal or some sort of animal creature, um, think I'm thinking mere cats for a good a good example. So what is in 2026, are distinctive assets still as important as they were in the 1970s and the Hamlet Advert?

Tom Roach 1:30

Okay.

What Counts As A Brand Asset

Tom Roach 1:31

So quite a few bits bits in that. Uh distinctive brand assets can be a very, very wide range of things, and they are essentially the recognizable um pieces of branding that make your brand unmistakably recognizably you from the get-go. Um, I know that some people call them things, I think System One sometimes call them fluent devices, and they as a company seem to be quite obsessed, as you say, with um with animals and characters and and you know, very specific character-driven approaches to to comms and advertising. I I have a slightly broader perspective on that, and you know, I think it can be they can be very, very useful, but they're not the only thing. Um, and actually, distinctly brand assets, uh, as I've said, are a much, much broader suite of possibilities. I think they can be sonic things, they can be visual things, they can be ideas, they can be um photographic styles, they can be a piece of music or a voice, um, and of course fonts and colours and and and logos and those kinds of things. And I mean my perspective generally is that the richer the set of things you've got, the over the longer period that you've been building them, um, the the the better it is because you've got more to play with. Um, Mark Ritson talks about codes and playing with codes, and I think that's quite a useful way of thinking about it. You can you can kind of mix and remix and and uh and muck about with the things that you've got in the armory, and that can keep things fresh. So not only the best thing is that you're instantly recognizable, but that also you're keeping things fresh and doing fun things with them. If you think about the way that I think McDonald's are probably the kings of this, they're amazing at uh at mucking about with their logo and their the the the gold notches and the colours um and just doing very clever things with them. So I think that the the people that um kind of are most critical of this sort of approach, I think, tend to think, oh, it's it's formulaic, it just looks like branded wallpaper, you can get stuck in a rut and you can end up not being impactful and interesting and entertaining. And that's definitely true. It's definitely brands that kind of overdo that sort of stuff. Um, but I think also um that there's plenty of opportunity to be creative with these things and have fun with them and play. I mean, I I'm not not a big fan of of um, I'm a big fan of consistency, but when you get um a big brand with like a team who sort of are almost seen as the brand police, that can be a bit problematic because they can they will tend to be quite conservative and stop you doing things. I I I'm I'm a I'm a fan of both consistency but also freshness and doing doing good things. So well, the other the last part of your question was about um is it different now if things changed? And I think the fundamental as ever, the fundamentals don't really change. And if you think about a brand, let's take Coke that was that was you know was around and pretty probably pretty strong back in the what was the year you picked, 1920s or something. Um, you know, that that's a brand that has been evolving very, very, very gradually over time. Have you seen that image of the Coke bottle and and how its evolution has been has been is virtually static. I mean, there are slight changes, but that's just a great a great example of a brand that has appropriately evolved um and actually evolved very little in terms of the iconic bottle. I'm sure there are other things that have have changed over time. Um, but the sort of visuals haven't changed very much. I'm sure they've done all sorts of different things over time with other sorts of assets. I mean, Santa Claus Father Christmas is something they obviously have kind of played around with a lot. And I'm not even sure if it's a myth or if it's true, but didn't they change? Brilliant story, isn't it? They changed the colour. Was he originally green and they changed him to red and it became a sort of more ownable coke thing? And actually, in many ways, the kind of modern image of Santa Claus, I'm sure if you delve back into it, is probably very heavily influenced by those early Coke illustrations and you know the the sort of medieval or or later depictions of St. Nicholas, probably vastly different before

Consistency Without Becoming Wallpaper

Tom Roach 5:51

before Coke got hold of him. Um so where have I gone with that? I I think it it the the this idea, in fact, you can see also the idea of character being there as you know, and again they they've got their their um polar bears that they use at Christmas as well. So they've got a they've got they've got a rich array of things that they've built and can play with, and they can, you know, they could retire something for five years and then bring it back, and it'll be fantastic. They've got their um their holidays are coming, trucks and music, and that whole piece. Obviously, um uh you know, there's a level of controversy last year around the AI um film that they made, but to my mind that controversy was entirely kind of blown up by the industry itself and isn't particularly something that that that regular people care about at all. Uh, and you know, do people care that that that film was originally CGI and then now is animated in a new way? I mean, that's just such an irrelevant debate to me. So um, do things change? Yes, but really the fundamentals stay the same. The idea of recognizability stays fundamentally important. Um, one brand I used to work on uh a bit at Adam and Eve DDB, John Lewis, we used to talk about the the the uh the handwriting of the brand. So almost those great Christmas campaigns, obviously the character would change often each year, or the the idea would change, or the scenario would change, the narrative would change. But many of the component parts would have a relationship with the previous campaign. So there'd be some music which had a sort of familiar echo from previous years, there'd be um a similar kind of narrative structure, there'd be you know the role of the role of the brand, the idea of thoughtful gifting. There would be enough in there to give people a very, very well-branded experience. And then, of course, uh the very best of those campaigns would be brilliantly merchandised in store. They would have um a great piece of, you know, there'd be a character or a great a toy or something that could be could be brought to life in store and there would actually be things that they would, you know, make and sell off the back of it. Um, I remember there was the the Elton John one with the piano, and people complained because you couldn't buy pianos in John Lewis, and this was seemed crazy. So, you know, the interesting sort of principles and rules occur around individual brands and their campaigns that become uh become assets that that get used. So um there's many ways to do it. It doesn't have to just be a character. The fundamentals stay the same, the executional things will change, and the channels that we use change, don't they? So um I do think some of those ones where it is a bit more reliant on our character are harder to activate in some of the channels we have today. If you take social or influence or creator, harder to get some of those kind of characters going in those spaces, but it is possible. And if you look at the way Liquid Death have a character or Duolingo have a character, Barry Scott. He's back, you know. What a brilliant one. I mean, crazy, crazy example, you know, it's super kind of extreme and and and sort of funny and a bit weird. Um yeah, great, great, great example. Um, is it the only way? Of course not. You know, there's many, many ways to do this thing that we call marketing or advertising. And yeah, you know, I wouldn't ever propose that there's one specific formula . Uh, and I'm sure there are categories where you wouldn't pick a character because everyone's got one. I mean, you know, uh yeah, there's that there's there's many ways to do things.

How Random Names Become Meaningful

Chris Norton 9:33

I mean, my my when I talked about character, one of my favorite brands, which I've talked about quite a bit on the pod, is um Octopus Octopus Energy, which it is a genius logo, a distinct, very distinctive pink, bright pink, like a luminous pink, um, like the highlighter pink if you haven't seen it. Octopus Energy, love the brand, it's all about sustainable electric um and doing good, and and and but it's the way that they communicate with their customer, they're really good at like telling you the cheapest rate, communicating with you, and um but the and the octopus is just genius, but the whole fact that they do you know how do you know why they came up with the octopus distinctive asset? Because the person the the comp the building that they were in, I think it was either the the company that owned the building that they were in was octopus finance. Um, and they just thought, oh well we'll if they're octopus finance, we'll be octopus energy.

Tom Roach 10:26

Well, you know, these things can come almost from nowhere. I mean, it's a crazy story. Like so the company I work for, Jellyfish, which is brand tech crew, similar similar kind of creature to an octopus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, the guys that um that named that, they were just looking for some simple things. They wanted it to be memorable, they wanted a name that was basically going to be global and could could could wouldn't need to be translated, but could be used anywhere. Um, and they wanted to be really kind of recognizable and memorable. And and they were literally flicking through the dictionary picking out words, and they they landed on jellyfish. Now, I mean, and it's funny from a branding perspective, we we often have debates about should we should we bring the jellyfish to life, should we use it more as a character? Um, I mean, from a sort of pure branding perspective, I often argue that we should. And then there's well right, and then and but then there's equally strong subjective opinions internally that we shouldn't, you know, it's not we're not an animal, we're another thing. So you you can have these subjective debates about these things, and often the the asset itself can be can have been entirely random. Um, and that uh and it sort of is an unsatisfying thing intellectually, I think, when it's a bit random like that. Um, and you know, naming can often be a little bit random or abstract. But ultimately what we're doing is we're sort of creating empty vessels that you then imbue meaning into through our communication and through the way we show up and through our tone of voice. Um, and so, in some ways, it sort of doesn't matter what you pick, so long as it has a has a potential for uh distinctiveness and recognizability, and which is why Byron Sharp has talked about meaningless distinction as opposed to meaningful differentiation. And there's this kind of slightly esoteric debate, I think, that you see Kantar get into versus Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. And Kantar believe in meaning and they believe in differentiation and salience. And um Aaron Bobas and Byron Sharp are less interested in differentiation. I don't think they deny it exists and can be powerful, but they believe it's harder to hold on to over time because differentiation can sort of slip through your fingers as product categories evolve and and and your your product is no longer as different as it was and unique as it was when it first was born. And so they're much more interested in distinction and distinctiveness. And so you do get into these slightly like esoteric intellectual academic debates about the the two things. And of course, it's actually you know, differentiation and distinctiveness. Um, you often get asked what what's the difference really? And I and and and frankly, the differences are less important than the similarities to me. But ultimately, being recognizably you is really, really important. And if you can be different, that's good, but it's hard to hold on to.

Chris Norton 13:19

I mean, we have we've had quite a few behavioural scientists, scientists, and neuroscientists on it. And I uh but I actually think it's not that complicated. I think that like you're jellyfish, great, um uh octopus, great. Um, I've written down here uh Sir John Hegarty when he whenever he does his um videos on LinkedIn. I am gonna get John on the show, Sir John. At some point, I definitely want his go. But every time he does them, he's got flat Eric sat next to him, which is genius.

Tom Roach 13:45

It is genius, and he's when he talks about that, it's fascinating because he talks about the story of how he sold it to the client. And the I think the client required several meetings and a lot of persuasion from John. And of course, you have to be somebody as charismatic and brilliant and famous and sort of with a track record like like Hegerty had back then and still does, to be trusted by a client to do that. And I think eventually the client kind of you can sort of imagine, you know, John turns up with his pictures of uh his drawings, the scamps of Flat Eric once again. Yeah. And and and just to get rid of him, the client goes, okay, you know, he's kind of relents and says, Well, we'll okay, we'll do this. I can see it working, maybe more positive than that. Um, and of course, it did work. Um, and that that little that creature, of course, is you know, entertaining, different, very different. And that, of course, that brand BBH um is obsessed, always was obsessed with what they used to call difference. Um, I suspect a lot of the time it was also about distinctiveness and recognizability. And um it itself, of course, that agency where I've worked there for seven years, um, their logo is a black sheep, and that black sheep was kind of bespoted upon them by like Levi's gave it to them, they said, You look, you're the black sheep agency, and everybody at BBH is now called black sheep, and they used the black sheep as a logo, and it came from one of the very first ads they did for Levi's for black Levi's, and it was a a flock of white sheep with uh black sheep um traveling in the opposite direction to the flock of white sheep and the line when the world zigs zag Levi's. So, and that ad in itself was a demonstration of that. It was a demonstration of not just putting black genes on models and saying, look at our genes, aren't they cool, back in whatever it was, '83,' where that would have been the normal way to do things. They didn't show the product, they showed an attitude and a philosophy of life, which is when the world zigzag, which subsequently became that agency's philosophy of how to do great advertising. And it's rooted in a really brilliant um neuroscience principle uh called the von Restorff effect, which is essentially um if you give people a bunch of similar objects or things, if you list out a number of things, if you put one of those things in the middle of that list that is very different and it isn't an animal, for example, if you have a list of animals and one isn't an animal, you put socks in the middle of a list of animals, people will remember socks. And that is um a sort of basic, really important principle of just doing something that is not samey, that fights against the sea of sameness, that that brings some just essentially attention to your to your brand or product to your message, gets you remembered and gets you to stand out in the in this world of clutter um that we're all trying to deal with, you know.

Making B2B Brands Less Samey

Chris Norton 16:45

I tell you where it is difficult for because a lot of people that listen to the show are B2B marketers. So the B2B, the B2C stuff you've got, you've got the octopuses, you've got the Levi's, you've got your Kit Kat, you've got all your memorable spectavers. But B2B brands that are distinctive, I mean, if there's people out there listening to that, how do they make their brand more distinctive in 2021? What could what should so if I if you if you're the uh if you were the senior marketer at you like you know B2B brand, I can't think of one off the top of my head. Um would you go out all out with completely distinct assets and to stand out totally different? Because it we we talked, we joked about this, Will and I, on the show before. If you're a B2B brand, it's blue. You know, you've got blue brand. It's like everybody's this, it's like a especially in tech, you're all copying each other.

Tom Roach 17:40

Totally. Well, um it's a mystery to me why B2B um they always think think they're they're different from B2C, and and that somehow buying, they'll say, Oh, it's far more complicated in B in B2B, it's much less emotional, much more rational. You have committees of people deciding, they're rational human beings who are who are making sure the products you know compare to each other and uh you know they're getting the best deal and the best value for money, and it takes months. So the emotional has to take a much you know a much back seat to the to the rational. And it just means that everything in B2B is really samey and pretty boring um because they seem to to to um to follow some rules about being samey and sameness being more important than than distinctiveness, which is crazy to me. That the I mean the the kind of um probably the most famous B2B case study of this kind of thing, I think at the moment, is probably Salesforce with their characters, and they they've clearly very heavily borrowed from the world of B2C, and particularly the world that we've we've kind of touched on at the beginning of this conversation with character and uh and um and those uh those those those um Salesforce characters. What are they called? Uh I'm gonna forget what they're called now. The Megans. No, Salesforce. They're like a they have these little. But I can very, very well imagine the first meeting where that work is presented, or that the idea of creating a kind of set of of almost like cartoon characters, and either there was either it sailed through because that was what the clients absolutely knew they wanted from the start, or there would have been a bit of fight on their hands from the agency's perspective, going, no, you really need something that's gonna be as fun and emotional and take this this slightly boring category of whatever Salesforce's category would call itself. I'm not even sure what they would call it. Uh CRM CRM work workflows, software systems, whatever. Um, so they they do something very different from their category, very unexpected, and they borrow from the world of consumer marketing. And I think they do it really successfully. Um, and they they add a bit of of well, they add a total load of difference and distinctiveness to that category, which you know, even if I mean there are problems clearly with with Salesforce's marketing, not least of which nobody can ever, even people at Salesforce are never quite sure what they do. Um, and so maybe there's a little bit more of that sort of message that needs to come through, which is a the harder thing to do as well. Um, but yeah, that's that's an example, I think, and a lot of us can learn from that. I'm struggling to think of other B2B examples that I think are because nobody does it. Nobody does it. No, always, you know, it always seems to me that there's always, you know, within any given B2B type category, there might be one brand that decides to do something different. I I used to work with um the very early days of of um uh an econometric agency called which ended up being called Magic Numbers. Um, if you know Grace Kite, um uh we used to talk a lot about about her brand. And um the that brand was was intentionally designed to not be the blue and green and sciencey data and evaluation and measurement company that all of the other um brands in that category or companies in that category presented themselves as like really heavy science-y companies. And we talked about it being the more fun, emotional, passionate one, the much more human one. Um, and that's where the name Magic Numbers came from. It was an intention or decision to to create a brand and a brand name and an expectation that that business was going to be different from the others in that category. And I think, you know, to be able to do that is really just uh zigging when the world zags. Just pick the thing that is really different from from the category and do that. Um, without um going against what you need, the hygiene factors in the category. You know, they couldn't they had to still say we're data experts, they couldn't say we're rubbish at data or imply that they were. They had to present themselves as really good at numbers, hence the the part part of that name number, the numbers bit, um, and the expertise bit was really important. Um, so yeah, it's it it's it's not as you say, it's not rocket science. You know, you you can you can look at it and it's it's a really easy trick you can do. You just Take all the comms or websites or ads or whatever you want from a category and you stick them on one slide, and it becomes very clear what the CF sameness is in that in that category, and you kind of do the opposite. And it was, you know, we used to dress that dress that up in lots of fancy words at BBH, and we used to talk about ZAGs in finding finding a company ZAG. But really, it's about just you know find identifying what everyone else does and doing the opposite.

Chris Norton 22:29

Love that. I don't know if I yeah, put all the logos and all the styles on one page, look at them and go, right, where's the where's the what what AI would call a gap analysis?

Tom Roach 22:40

Right. And you can, yeah, the I'm sure there's fancy terms, and you can do things like create a kind of generic video or TV commercial where you you splice together the the obvious bits from whether it's the car commercials or or holiday company commercials. And you can see it in every category. As soon as you're aware of the codes of a category, spotting the thing that you can do different. Now, of course, it really is important that you show up and are as recognizably as part of a category. If you're new, you know, you're new to a category and you're a late entrant. Um, better that you uh kind of define define the codes of a category, I suppose. But that's why you do also need to find ways of breaking out of it and showing that you're different from it.

Staying Coherent Across Platforms

Chris Norton 23:21

Um it's would you say consistency is actually harder than it was 10 years ago now with with the way everything's going with technology? Because you I know you're the brands, you're a you do brand strategy at jellyfish, don't you? Yeah. Um do you think consistency is harder now than it was?

Tom Roach 23:36

Um, I don't know if it's harder because I think I think brands always seem to struggle, whatever the exact uh ever the environment. And there are some reasons for that which we can come on to. But I think the it the the the media landscape that we have does make it hard. So um if you think about the proliferation of platforms we now have to use, the fact that each of those platforms, particularly the social platforms, has a demand for huge amounts of content. Like they're always saying we need more assets, we need more assets. And so that creates um a kind of a temptation to create more and more stuff that is different uh and isn't connected to the last piece. And so you can struggle to with fragmentation. So I think there is a problem with brands becoming incredibly fragmented across all of the assets they need to create, and that requires um some smart thinking about what you're gonna keep that's consistent. So, what's gonna be consistent um over time and what's gonna create coherence through different platforms? Um, and that has some conflict with the need to be uh like native. So if you're thinking about making a TikTok or TikTok campaign, it's got to abide by some of the rules or lots of the rules of that platform, which are slightly different to the rules of other platforms. So there's some tension there about how you create a TikTok campaign that's gonna work really, really, really well on TikTok, is gonna feel like um you know the sort of thing people expect to see there, but equally is connected through some level of connective tissue or or distinctive brand assets to the other stuff you do. And you know, that's why maybe characters uh can be helpful in that instance. Although, you know, do people always want to see ad characters in in TikTok? They they may not do, you know, they may that you know they may be happy to see your you know if you're Durilingal or Liquid Death, but if you're not doing it quite so well as them, are they gonna want to see your your ad character popping up? You know, debatable.

Chris Norton 27:11

Yeah, although I do think it's quite funny if you have like a character completely out of context doing something else on a TikTok, it's quite fun. It makes it entertaining. It's like if you look at the the way that Ryanair, so yeah, obviously Ryanair, and um whether you love them or loathe them, you know, you know um what the CEO's view on the world is. And it just amazed me like we've got brands like Ryanair, M&S who use TikTok as a completely different channel. So anything I you know, M&S, uh good with food, premium. You go on TikTok and there's there's caterpillars wrestling and stuff you know on the M&S channel, so it's very, very different. And and and uh my point about Ryanair is the planes are literally taking the piss out of people and doing really weird things, it's very, very different to any other channel.

Tom Roach 28:00

Yeah, and I guess you know there's probably temptations to do to do either, and it's can be a bit of a personal choice. There's probably you know multiple ways of doing these things. It obviously got Ryanair a level of fame in in their socials, and and they became quite sort of known and famous with that sort of audience. They've obviously got probably a different audience to M&S's, um, and you know, they were using it differently. And so I I don't I think it comes back to this thing if there aren't any absolute formulas that you have to abide by. Um you know, there there's just the need to get attention, to be, to be distinctive, to say something of relevance and to be memorable. And and you know, I obviously I'm not privy to the effectiveness of those those two specific examples, but um, that's the thing that ultimately has to be the decision maker. Do you carry on or not? Do you try something different?

Chris Norton 28:52

You've said before, I believe you've said before, that the sales fun the sales funnel is a hundred years old and wrong. Is that right? Is that what you said?

Tom Roach 29:00

Uh um I I have said something similar. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a thing called um I think the headline on the marketing week version was something like the uh the sales funnel is the cockroach of marketing concepts, by which which I'm gonna be punches there, will you? Well, yeah, I mean the editor I the editor gets to choose the headlines, but the the concept there is this is a thing that is ubiquitous, it's become absolutely part of the marketing furniture, and by the sales funnel I mean the really standard one, which is like awareness, um, consideration conversion. That um was first kind of um sort of invented as a as a build on the AIDA model, awareness, interest, desire, action, um, I think in 1924 or something, and it was a a guy who wrote a book on on bond sales uh as kind of um uh investments. And I think he was he was talking about how you do those things over the telephone, how you phone like coal calling people and how you're convincing them to buy something. Um, and the the AIDA model was invented as a as a as a as a sales method for door-to-door salespeople. So these things are really sales aids, they're ways of helping salespeople structure a conversation, structure their communication. So they take people from grabbing their attention, retaining a bit more interest, then persuading them, and then sealing the deal. And this this structure,

Why The Sales Funnel Misleads

Tom Roach 30:34

this format of of how you do sales, um is sort of there at a low level for sort of 80 or so years, and then basically gets really popular again with the advent of the digital platforms. So when Google and Meta people start selling ads and start needing, they they've got an increasingly um kind of complex array of ad inventory to sell to their clients, to their media agencies. Um, and so they kind of reinvent it or reuse it, repurpose it, and they just use it as a way to simplify a really complex array of ad inventory. And so that becomes the standard way that that media agencies and agencies generally structure the kind of way they they lay out their advertising formats or their ad ideas on PowerPoint slides to sell to their clients. So it's it's really a kind of sales tool. Very long-winded um answer. Sorry.

Chris Norton 31:35

I like it. No, I like it.

Tom Roach 31:36

It's good. Um but and and what I did in that article, and and you can see it on Marketing Week or my my blog, which is thetomroach.com, um, was to go, this thing is useful, it's here, it's ubiquitous, but it actually doesn't quite conform to some of this, the marketing science we now have that that that that talks about how you build brands, what's necessary in the mind for people to to to to have um when you're kind of built building a network of associations and memories, it doesn't quite conform to the fact that in most categories people aren't really being very considered with their purchases. There's not lots of consideration going on. Um, and then the bottom of the funnel, this conversion moment, I felt was a bit like that it seemed to uh borrow much more from the strong force of advertising, not the weak force of advertising theory, which is that somehow we can force people to buy stuff. And overall, this notion that you can force people through a funnel is is fanciful. People, you know, are either out of the market and broadly either sort of unaware or or aware or familiar with your brand, and you you you create you can create um sort of brand memories over time in a sort of soft way before they're in the market, so that when they fall into the market, you're you're in their minds, ready to to to to come up to the top of the list of their choices. Um so that there's there's stuff from the sort of world of academia that we could apply. And I I re-kind of reconfigured, re- you know, modified the funnel a bit. Uh, but even then, I don't really believe in the funnel, even though I fixed it a little bit. Um, and actually, people like Mark Ritson will say you should you shouldn't really just use a sort of uh uh an off-the-peg thing like that. You should think much more carefully about your own customer journeys, your own customers, where they are, um, and think about things in a more tailored way, which I think we have to we all have to agree with ultimately. Um, but sometimes we we we do need to simplify things.

Chris Norton 33:42

Well, there's other there's other things you've written as well. You've also wrote the creatives are coming. Um so um that puts a uh that AI puts production into the hands of ideas people. Now I've seen loads on this. Like I was at the calling with just we're just talking about RFA, weren't we? I was at the calling on Monday, and um yeah, uh AI is the subject that everybody's discussing. Some people are positive. Nils Leonard talked about in and I'll use his exact an exact quote just fucking get out there and make is what he said in his in his unique style. Just get out there and make something. Interesting. I thought it was really inspirational.

Tom Roach 34:23

Was he suggesting he's a very inspirational character? Was he suggesting people should um make stuff using AI or not?

Chris Norton 34:31

Uh he was meaning that we should be creative and keep going and not just like oh the at the end of the world's coming, you know, and like, oh that's it, give up. It's like, no, get out there and make. But then similarly, Rob Mayhew, who was do who was doing his comedy bit, he did a little bit on AI, but I saw it yesterday. There was a post yesterday that he said he'd nailed AI, where he said, Oh, AI is gonna really help our industry, and he did his big comedy thing about that, and then he went, but also we're all fucked. So yeah, he goes, That's basically the argument in AI, isn't it? Where it's it's really great, and then it's not great at all. So um but you've said that the yeah, the the the creatives are coming. What what do you think? What's your opinion?

Tom Roach 35:12

Well, I I I I'd hope I'm a bit more balanced than that. I obviously, you know, have I think we all have fears about the the jobs market and how it's gonna affect that, and particularly

AI As A Creative Revolution

Tom Roach 35:24

more junior people. Um, but I think uh on the whole, I tend to see there's a lot of snake oil in hyperbole, and of course, there's always that thing in any technology technological revolution of people, it's a famous quote, isn't it? We uh massively overestimate the effects in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. So I'm not gonna make any like major, major predictions, but I do I do um like and enjoy and embracing the fact that this does feel to be a creative revolution in the sense that previous tech revolutions in at least in marketing haven't always been creative ones. So this technology is something that creative people can really get hold of and make stuff with. Um so, yeah, get out there and make, I think, can actually be a um a rallying cry to do things with AI, not uh, not as an anti-AI statement. And um our our creative department, uh Jellyfish, our our our ECD and her people are on a weekly basis almost being being kind of asked to make stuff, make things, do things yourself in a way that previously um they would have had to wait some time or get engaged production people or or production partners to to make the things that they're conceiving of. And that's really exciting. So the the the closing the gap between execution and idea, and on the earlier than that, closing the gap between strategy and idea, um, and it's evolving people's roles. We've got creative people who were previously more in the production space or um filming things, video videographers, cinematographers who are now able to get much more involved in the ideation of things, which I think is really exciting. So it is kind of creating more hybrid roles, it's collapsing um the process. The process is is is is becoming in a way more collaborative, and individual roles within that process are collapsing. So it's changing things, but I think in a really exciting way. And yes, there is obviously lots of debates about slop and how much slop there's going to be. You know, it's hard to predict. I mean, my general perspective on that is is I think it's called Sturgeon's law: 95% of everything has always been crap. Yeah, totally. Let's try and make the five percent, and that applied pre-AI, applied pre-digital, it probably applied pre-uh camera, pre-uh photography, pre pre-paint, pre-pencil. So it's it this is this is just a technology.

Chris Norton 37:57

I use that example on TV ads because like uh interviewing so many ads, I said to you before we started, like I'm I'm obviously uh I've been in PR all my career, did a PR degree, I taught PR at university after I graduated and I've run my own agency. And um, yeah, um 95% when I'm speaking to ads people from ad land who film TV ads, Sturgeon's lot, not Nicola, but Sturgeon's lot, I like the idea of that because they all talk about the the good old heady days. I referenced Hamlet before and the brilliant days of you've talked about Levi's, Fla Eric, and we haven't even talked about the which seems to be coming back. Um uh but 95% of ads then were shit as well, weren't they?

Tom Roach 38:42

Yeah, and and uh whenever anybody sounds like they've got a kind of nostalgia a golden era in mind or they've got a nostalgia going on for some previous era, I just would caution against that because the trouble is we tend to remember the good stuff and forget the really bad stuff. Um, and most of the stuff is bad. And so um our job is to make the 5%, not the 95%, with the professionals. Um, and we should remember that. In fact, my one of my very first memories of coming into the industry was on a um, I think it was an IPA course. There was a room full of us, like junior grads in the industry, and Peter Souter, who was then um uh creative director of Abbott Mead Vickers, BBDA, where I later worked, he stood up and said his role is to make the 5% not the 95%. And that was you know 25 years ago. Um, so I think it's it's a it's a basic constant. Uh now, yes, the volume of the 5%, the volume of the 95% is going to increase, but the proportions don't change. So I think I think it's probably a constant. I would caution against nostalgia. We tend to forget the bad stuff. Um, you know, I have to say my kids, the few moments when we're sort of sat together as a family these days, watching any TV or watching something on a bigger screen could be a YouTube thing. And something that looks like a TV ad comes up on the on the TV screen. Um, invariably my kids will say, Oh, that's just awful, Dad. Did you make that? Um and uh and I'll say, No, no, I didn't. Um, and then they'll get they'll then they get me to apologize for the on the on behalf of the industry for the quality for the quality of the ads they see. Yeah. Um, but then a lot of the stuff they're seeing doesn't look and feel like a TV ad or an ad in itself. It's probably a some sort of pay partnership or some some sponsor content or a creator-led thing, and that slips by them and they accept it, you know. So I think there's there's does it does it conform to what we would say is a good ad? No, I think we just have to change our definitions of what advertising is. It's a funny word advertising because it's becoming less and less relevant to the broad collection of things that we do, I think, um in communication. So it's no longer it's no longer the single word that defines what we do. Um I don't know what the replacement for that word would be, though.

Chris Norton 41:09

Um, we will get on to your mistake in a minute, um, but I've just got I've got one thing here because I I love this. Um, being an AI geek as well, um not I'm I'm I'll tell you one thing I am sick of. Dear LinkedIn, stop sending me connection messages from AI companies. Jesus, like they've become the new recruiters, haven't they? Do you want to productize your business? Do you want to systemate everybody's got the same? Do you know sea of sameness? Then you what that's where we're at now.

Tom Roach 41:38

I've been in the last two months or month or so, I've had, I think about once a day I get from a recruiter, from a new recruiter I never heard of. There'll be a kind of AI version of my C V sort of summarized, and I'll say, We're looking for um a brand strategist who's worked at AMV, BBH, and Ibernet, and now works at Jellyfish in brand strategy, and you'd be amazing for this run. I'm like, that seems a bit too specific and a bit too, you know. And it just one even spelt that their logo had clearly been designed by um one of the models, a previous model, not one of the later ones. Um, and they'd spelt recruiter wrong. It was recruiterer. And I was like, this you can't spell your own company name wrong in your AI-generated image thing. That's just so bad. So I don't know. There is obviously all sorts of things going on. Hopefully, even those snake oil people start doing it a bit better.

Chris Norton 42:34

Well, yeah, because I'm from PR then social media, and like the the original days of Twitter, I did some of the first social media campaigns in the UK. And I remember we got like a year in, and it was us doing like you couldn't find blogs on Google, it was that long ago. I did the a campaign for Sony where we outreach, it was like one of the first influencer campaigns. And then we got, I was like a year into social media, but it was called word of mouth marketing. It wasn't social media marketing yet. And then all of a sudden we we coined the phrase social media marketing, and then LinkedIn became there was engineers changing their title to social, and it's exactly like what we're seeing now, except for now you've got the access to the knowledge like instantly, and you can pretend that you're a social media, you know, you're a an AI specialist, even though you only started a month ago. So on that note, I'm an AI specialist.

Tom Roach 43:22

There are there are people that, you know, two or three years ago were crypto specialists or NFT specialists or metaverse specialists or web3 experts. And now, of course, they're AI experts. And I, you know, I guess these things move on. Are they all charlatans? No, of course they're not. They're a lot of them will be a lot of them, but they're just really into the latest stuff. Um, are they can they be experts yet? I don't think so.

Chris Norton 43:47

Yeah. Um, yeah, so before we get onto your question on because I want to keep uh I don't want to waste too much of your time, but yeah, you talked, I don't think we've touched on it. Share of model. So share because obviously we had brand brand share, we have PR share in my world. Then we had, then in the last few years of digital PR and SEO, we've had share of search. If you're in and now we've got share of model in the AEO and GEO space. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

Tom Roach 44:15

Yeah, why not? Um, so as you said, every kind of era has its share of, and um you know, share of mind, share of search, share of voice, all these share offs. Well, the the new one uh from our perspective, at least at Jellyfish and Brand Tech is Share Model, and it's not only a sort of concept and a metric, we've got a platform as well called Share Model, um, which helps you as a brand understand your your brand visibility uh within the LLM outputs. You know, how often is your brand being mentioned when your category comes up and when people are having a conversation about your category? Um, and we can look at your share of uh voice within each specific model. And we can look at your brand strengths and weaknesses against category and against your competitors. Um and it's and it gets much deeper, it gets it gets very, very deep into all the sources of influence that that are all the domains that are citing you and and and and your brand. And um it's it's a brave new world. Um, it's it has its relationship with SEO. Um I'm I'm interested in it probably more from the perspective of the overarching brand strategy side and how your brand is showing up and where it's showing up than than all the very granular detail that you can get into of precisely what kind of content you. need to create on which site and all that kind of stuff.

Share Of Model And LLM Visibility

Tom Roach 45:38

But you know, we've got we've got people who are kind of SEO experts who are who are very rapidly learning the relationship between SEO and GEO and and and this new world. So it's exciting stuff. It's early days, other platforms are available and but it's a very common request that we're getting from clients to understand this world and understand how they can better understand it and how they can understand how their brand's showing up. So it's a yeah it's it's it's it's a it's an extremely um live um interest amongst the client community.

Chris Norton 46:16

Yeah and it's exciting for the it's exciting for my sector PR because we're when you're looking at the data I've seen numerous reports. We did a we held a GEO webinar held in November because I analyzed my own data before um uh this was November last year uh and I analyzed my own analytics and and I basically analyzed it all and shared it all in a webinar and we had 600 people marketers come along and I analyzed where the traffic's gone how my inquiries had gone and I went right into to show what was happening to us and then showed the the Daily Mail and the other tiles that are losing traffic overnight. But one of the key things is sources were was um Reddit for obviously chat GPT but a lot of them are PR earned media from earned media sources none of your shitty little blogs anymore like the the SEO world it's more of the bona fide media sources and it's taking more of a a human interpretation of all of those things instead of just links. So even if you're not mentioned sometimes it's it fascinates me that so it's gonna be an interesting time for brand PR and SEO all to combine over the next but we'll see SEO usually gets all the budgets but actually yeah hopefully we get some as well. So this show's about mistakes I haven't asked you what's what's a mistake that you've made in your career then and you've learned from um oh gosh uh you you asked me this and then I failed to come up with a mis mistake that I personally made but it was a mistake that we were making as a team and as a brand with a brand uh that we that we learned from and we corrected and it was in fact there were a couple of brands that were doing a similar thing and I'll touch on both of them. So one was um it was quite a long time ago it was KFC and we had ditched um in the UK at least the kernel and finger looking good and we weren't using the right uh colour combination of colourways so we and as we learnt we we discovered that we've been making them these mistakes and it's kind of unbelievable to think that was a brand no with finger looking good is that it's probably the the most brilliant piece of slogan writing or copywriting in in ad slogans if not in history certainly I don't know the last century. And we weren't using it and it was the most memorable thing in the category um and people just love it and it's so evocative of of of what that brand's all about um the colonel had reasons to to for it for him having been dropped a bit um but nonetheless was still a powerful icon but we weren't using it and we discovered um we'd we'd got into some really bad habits with the advertising at the time there was a formula that we'd constructed which was like I can't get it wrong slightly but it was like how you construct a 30 second TB commercial

Tom Roach 49:05

for KFC it was like five percent or five seconds insight five seconds

KFC And Weetabix Asset Mistakes

Tom Roach 49:12

um of family moment and then 20 20 seconds of product product uh demonstration and then some branding just horribly formulaic um and you know we got into a rut and in fact we ended up losing the business because of this rut that we got into um but we did some we did some research with company called decode um who who look at brand assets and we discovered just the sheer strength of in this in the UK marketplace of the assets that we were not using. So the the kernel and finger licking good and then a particular combination of red white and black for that brand um and um and we we basically okay we brought those things back and we um and reconstructed things and actually as it happened I don't think we ever got to do the advertising off the back of that because we'd lost the pitch and the the the winning agency got to to be the one to to to kind of reinvent those things. And a very similar thing happened um with with Weetabix we were working Weetabix we had won the business actually not me at the time won the business with with a different campaign as so often happens you know new CMO or new agency comes on board um and wants to prove itself by doing something new and fresh and different um and and we we did some things which were really good initially and then then the um the the the the the the the kind of effectiveness started to wear off and we were looking for ways to get to get some growth again and we did the same kind of research and we discovered that have you had your Weetabix which we were not using at the time and hadn't used for seven years in the UK market have you had your Weetabix remained the most um the most salient um slogan in the category and so we brought it back but it we didn't we it wasn't just as simple as oh the research says it's the most powerful thing we need to bring it back there was quite a lot of um persuasion that had to be done and I ended up as a sort of intermediary between the the the clients and the agency and the agency team were very skeptical because they felt it was backward looking to kind of go back to something um like that that it was somehow not going to show the agency in its best light because we were just reinventing something we were reusing something that another agency had invented 10, 20 30 years before um and so we we we but we did persuade the you know the the the the team internally and we got we got some some new advertising which was much better branded and performed much much better because it was more recognizably Weetabix so the going back to the beginning of this conversation um it it was still present in people's minds. So we went with that and and tried to refresh those memories rather than continuing to pursue building some new memories which weren't really working for us. So um lots of sort of forces at play and really fundamentally about bad branding in advertising or poor brand you know weak branding in advertising and and and how easy it is to fall into doing things which are weakly or poorly branded and that being a sort of fundamental issue that all brands can do better on. It's not it's not just a lesson that you can learn if you're doing it completely wrong. It's basically the the the the thing that um that that most brands just just don't do very well is to is to is to brand things. And so you you can get some quick and easy wins just by better branding. So that's that's the lesson there.

Chris Norton 52:49

I mean that is amazing because I mean there'll be people out there with with the brands and brand assets that they've not even thought about that they're in the back catalogue and because new new man new marketing manager, new marketing director or CMOs come in and just move things on and actually if they just take a step and take a look back they may well find that they don't have to spend other than just checking through to see what what the public or what your audience remember.

Tom Roach 53:16

Totally and and it's a it's a very common thing and we we um we wrote a case study which was called Rembrandt and the attic so the idea that you've got something in the attic in the locker that that you can you can bring out and read you know dust off and rediscover and use. And it it's a fairly simple way to do things. It it might be a slightly unsatisfying world if every brand just kind of brought out its old thing um and of course it doesn't apply to all brands you you can see it there'll be brands like um birdseye kind of have this continue you can see the sort of even as an outsider you can see the debate they obviously have internally about what do we do with the captain how do we bring him up to date should we use him should we not should you know those debates that all brands have um that tend to sort of zigzag and swing from one thing to the other and you can always tell when a brand comes out there with its press release saying we've just ditched this thing in favor of this thing or we brought this thing back having it not used not used them new not used it for years you you can sort of see what they're doing and you can see the debates they're having and it's always quite entertaining and invariably when somebody drops something that's really famous you go that'll be back. So there's one there's one which is um Dos Equis the the beer brand with the most interesting man in the world and it's just such a wonderful campaign if you if you don't know it have a look at it and and every so often they drop that and then bring it back and they drop that and they bring it back although the Sugar Puffs Monster became the Honeypuff Monster didn't they yeah um I worked on that brand um at one point I'm trying to think I don't think I've got anything particularly interesting to say about it. It was I think the the honey honey Monster was one of John Webster's you know so John Webster the great um DDB uh creative who who in fact he he loved character I mean he in the Cresta Bear was one of his Hofmeister Bear was one of his um loved these kind of Monster characters I mean in fact in a in a in some ways um a little bit of a I mean terrible to say a bit of a one trick pony but it worked it really really worked um back to back to the the the chat about character from up front so thanks for that we've got one final question which we ask all our guests which is you've been on the show now Tom and we've you you've got the format if you were us who's the next guest that you'd invite on this show and why um well if that john evans uncensored CMO you mentioned uh having been on the their event recently um he's he's got he'll have a he's got the great stories about mistakes he's made because he's you know he he'd been a CMO and his he's he's he's made all the mistakes I think and has learned from them and I'm gonna challenge John when he does come on the show because he said he's gonna come on the he told he keeps messaging me to come on the show.

Chris Norton 56:03

I'm gonna challenge him to come on the show and not talk about getting fired because he talks about in every episode.

Tom Roach 56:08

Sorry okay I've I've just just fallen into your trap since he'll make a new finding find a new mistake that he's that he's making oh no I know what I know a couple he's got a couple are great um tom thanks so much for your time if if people want to get hold of you how can they find you to to you know to hire you for your services um well LinkedIn is always probably the best way um and then if you want to read content that I do um the tomroach.com or Marketing Week