IPA Podcast
The IPA is the professional body for advertising, media and marketing communications agencies in the UK. We represent over 300 agencies, which are responsible for 85% of UK advertising and communication spend.
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IPA Podcast
The IPA Making Sense Podcast: Rich Kirk
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Rich Kirk, Chief Strategy Officer at EssenceMediacom, joins the IPA Making Sense Podcast to explore how to think about the physics of formats, what signal strength means for modern media planning, and how AI is revolutionising the search landscape.
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the IPA Making Sense podcast, where we'll be making sense of the complicated things in advertising and media today, hopefully also just making them a little bit more fun. I'm your host, Simon Frazier.
SPEAKER_00And I'm Molly Bruce, your co-host.
SPEAKER_03And today we have an outstanding guest joining us, Rich Kirk. Hi everyone Hello. So Rich is currently Chief Strategy Officer at Essence Mediacom and has really built an impressive career in media strategy. In fact, when Campaign named him their top 10 media planner of 2025, they described him as a strategist who talks sense in a sea of noise. So that's a that's a big accolade there, Rich. Not sure where they're getting that from. Back in 2022, he also won Campaign Media's Planner of the Year. So massive congratulations for that, Rich. I know you're not somebody who likes to be congratulated on the either subtly or lavishly, but you know, well, we this this stuff this stuff speaks for itself.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna say that if that's just for anybody who I haven't already told that I got that in 2022. There's not many people left.
SPEAKER_03Fair enough. So over the past year, Rich has been in very high demand. He's been speaking at events like the IPA's own effectiveness conference, Thinkbox Trends in TV, and also MediaCat Live. He's played a key role in some truly standout work, including the fantastic Tesco 2025 sponsorship of Britain's Got Talent, where for the first time viewers were actually rewarded for voting thanks to a tie-up between ITVX and Club Card. So more broadly, Essence MediaCom's long-term partnership with Tesco has been recognised with Advertiser of the Year and a Grand Prix for innovative use of news brands. And the network also was named Global Agency Network of the Year at the 2024 MM Global Awards. Alongside this, Rich has, of course, played a leading role in major effectiveness research, including the multi-award-winning profitability to and signalling success to, which were produced with the team at everyday people. So in this episode, we are going to be exploring why some brands may be overvaluing some channels and underinvesting in others. How to think differently about reach, engagement, and effectiveness in a fragmented media landscape, and what signal strength really means for modern media planning. So, Rich, welcome to the Making Sense podcast. Thank you for having me on. Real privilege to be here. Cheers. Fantastic. So I'm going to uh start off with a quick question is obviously you're CSO at Essence MediaCom, and I know you've had a fantastic journey. Uh, you know, I've been following your career for a number of years across the work you did at Zenith and now at Essence MediaCon. Can you tell us a bit about the journey, you know, how you got started in the industry and and where it's taken you so far?
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, sure. Um so uh I I think for a media agency um uh sort of senior planner, I I've got quite an unusual background. So my background is um SEO and search. Yeah. That's where I started out um around about sort of the end of the mid to the late noughties. Um and I was just in the right place at the right time, really. Um nothing nothing cleverer to it than that. Um SEO, I think, was well, it kind of the the the place we are in at the moment with AI search reminds me a lot of where SEO was at the end of the noughties, in that big multinational corporations were starting to take real notice of what it could do for their business. Um and I just happened to be at Zenith in Publicist at the time in London, and there was very few people in the office who actually knew what SEO was, and I'd done it previously for some small businesses. So I started off in very, very small businesses. Um and um and I was uh and and with a really, really strong tailwind, we were lucky enough to to do a lot of SEO work with some very big companies like um Recit was a key client at the time, built out a big global um uh deal with them, working with uh colleagues from uh Chicago and uh and and and it just yes, all of a sudden it was quite a big uh it was making quite a lot of revenue for the agency and it was and um and then I sort of decided that I'd always been interested in just the sort of um you know, like the kind of Jedi mind tricks of of making people want to buy stuff without actually sort of actively standing in front of them and pitching it to them. Um and so I took a a a move into planning at at that point and um and then yeah, from there on I've just been sort of beavering away trying to do cross-channel planning for as many clients as possible and and and effectiveness of always been sort of quite a mathsy person, so the study of effectiveness has always been really appealing to me. So I've done quite a lot of that and um yeah, that's and sort of just moved around as a result of that. Uh been mostly uh uh at Publicist and joined WPP uh three years ago. Um and uh uh there was a stint at Amazon advertising in the middle of all that.
SPEAKER_03Oh of course, yeah. And and in interestingly, I mean uh th what you were just saying that like now is a time where, as you said, you know, back in back when you first sort of starting out, SEO was kind of little known about in fairly niche areas. And then now we're in this new world of you know brands optimizing for AI or new working in new AI um environments whereby you know we're seeing web traffic really, really drop down through the which would have traditionally have come through through organic search. So I mean we'll get into a little bit of that later on, but it's uh yeah, really fascinating stuff.
SPEAKER_01It's a really interesting time. It does feel like um a kind of that feels you know, in our industry we're so prone to talking about everything as being a huge thing. Um still trying to do NFT-based media ideas. Uh yeah. Uh and um uh but yeah, it does feel like that shift away from kind of the the kind of foundational model of search basically, which is list of results, click, that feels like a huge, huge shift with massive implications. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00I was wondering if I could ask a bit more about your time at Amazon. Yes, I read, I think it was in a me in your MediaCat article, um, you were talking about the sort of unusual but effective culture at Amazon. I think specifically about reading a Word document in silence for 30 minutes at the beginning of a meeting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um Amazon has an incredible kind of getting stuff done. I don't know if culture's well, I suppose it is culture, yeah. But um a lot of times culture is a very soft word, right, um uh uh in organizations. But as at Amazon it it's in they sort of train you and they push you towards a lot of kind of very tangible meeting and and and and conversational techniques and practices that may really do make it a very different place to work. And they're a fantastically organized organizer in terms of like knowing what they know. They they they make they they don't learn lessons twice. Like every if the lesson is learn, everyone they make sure that everyone has access to that as quickly as possible. Um and yeah, uh the meeting culture, so if it it you know I think this is fairly well well known about, but y if you are having a QBR or or any sort of a major meeting about a project, you'll be expected as the meeting uh owner to produce a uh a fairly dense document with line numbers written in a very um a very um a very specific Amazon style which you're trained to write in. Um and uh and the first third of the meeting, depending on how long the document is, depends how long the meeting is. The first third of the meeting is always just in total silence. Well, everyone reads the document because the presumption is that people don't do pre-reads, which I think, based on the rest of my career, is a fairly reasonable. Um and then you have an informed discussion about the document. And the other thing as well that Amazon uh I think uh a really great observation that they've made is that it's very, very difficult to lie in Microsoft Word because uh you know writing something down in a long-form Word document is very, very mentally it's just it's harder to commit to a bending of the truth or or a slight spin on something and you because there's a much greater chance that you'll be called out on it, whereas you know you can hide behind a full-bleed image on PowerPoint and a pithy sentence, kind of. And so yeah, I think that's it it it made for like a really you know, uh people are incredibly well informed about everything that's going on in the business that might affect them. And there's um it's because all these documents exist and you can go back and read ones from previous meetings and stuff like that, it means that that kind of you know, that tribal knowledge that sometimes goes from an organization when people move on, um, it's much they they've basically mitigated against that, which I found really interesting.
SPEAKER_03And I like that the um We we've been talking to a number of like different guests that we had on the podcast so far, just about that, you know, kind of transparent way of interacting of companies interacting with the with with their employees in a way where there are universal truths that are actually just understood. So rather than you know, rather than being like, oh everybody's got the pre-reading, so therefore everybody must have read the pre-reading, that having that culture where you're saying, look, we know nobody's gonna read it, so we're gonna give you half an hour now. I think it just it leans into a much better approach, like because it it it it makes, I guess, people feel seen and understood that you know they've got busy stuff outside of their life, and while, you know, to a company, the most important thing is the company, actually to people who are working, when they've got kids, they've got families and they've got things like that going on, you know, in in their personal time. You know, that I think that's a really good approach for for a company to take.
SPEAKER_01I tried to uh when I went back to Zenith I've promised and I try I tried to do a few meetings like that. Um just pretty well, I'm sure the people involved will uh remember those meetings and how awkward they felt in them. Um But I I thought a few people sort of said, I definitely feel more informed about that topic now because I've and you know you can't if you're all sat around him at a table reading in silence, no one's getting their phone out to check what's going on on the news or on social, right? Because the the sort of behavioural sort of pressure is the same. It forces everybody to engage with the material. And um uh whilst it doesn't happen in meetings that I'm in now and and uh and uh and at the agencies that I've been with before and since Amazon, it hasn't been something that's that's cottoned on at those agencies, I've still not changed my opinion that it's a fantastic way of doing meetings. Oh, I think so. Um and and I think other organizations would be the better for considering it or giving it a try. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_03That's one thing that kind of efficiencies would say, actually, you know, this is 30 minutes of wasted time, you add up everybody's you know, hourly rate, and then they would see that as a cost. Actually, in terms of the the out or or the benefit or the and the f the kind of the increase in if effectiveness within that meeting, like it could be exponential. You as a result of that, taking that time to do that, you make it may make a decision that makes the company ten million pounds. But you know, oftentimes, and we were talking with Rory about this recently, oftentimes it's for that focus on the well, short term. Oh, hang on a minute, from an FD perspective, this has cost us, you know, two thousand pounds to have people sitting for half an hour. But the but the upside positive of that is it can be really really substantial.
SPEAKER_01100%. My my experience as well with it was that the discussion incredibly quickly got round to the very crux of the matter. Yeah. Which I I um I'm sure all of your listeners will be able to relate to the idea that sometimes meetings wander around a little bit before you get to the the real meeting, uh the real meat of the issue. Um but that was not the case. And and because everyone had such detailed information in front of them, the questions that were getting asked were very, very specific and and and um and led to better decision making, basically. So yeah, it's uh it's one for companies of any size or or scale, I think, should should take a look at Amazon media culture. It's it's uh it's like a fascinating case study on how to do something completely differently.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's that is really fascinating. Um we're gonna talk a little bit now, uh, because I know it's something that you've talked a lot about, of course, in the work you've done in profitability too and signalling success to. And and also, you know, in discussions we've had about the making, you know, the IPA's Making Sense Commercial Media Landscape report. Because I I remember off in the back of discussions um I had with Sarah Gale, we we uh uh now talk in terms of how a fra in a fragmented landscape, actually diverse media plans and you know, taking an approach where not you're not over invested in one specific channel and you know working out how all of the different channels can work together and you know, uh ultimately possibly minimising the the total risk of the campaign, you know, and and and and increasing the possibilities. No, from you know, from an audience point of view, it's it's it's uh it seems to be more aligned with how people actually engage with media because nobody is just like, oh, I'm only a TV viewer, I'm only a press reader, or whatever it might be. You know. What um you know, what does what what do you think you know that kind of approach of of you of using diverse media plans? How do you think we can, you know, bet get people on board with that approach and what do you think works out out of that, you know, rather than thinking, well, it's all about just building reach or building you know frequency or whatever it might be?
SPEAKER_01Oh well it's um so I caveat all of this with like one of the things that I love most about what we do is um is how complex it is. Um and um you know, I I I I work with lots of fantastic econometricians, but I think even an econometrician will will will speak to you about how complex um the relationship is between all of the stuff that we see and all of the interactions that we have and all of the ways in which we think and experience brands and then that moment of purchase decision. And and all of that complexity, I think um I think one of the most worrying, not worrying, but like one of the interesting things I observe in our industry at the moment is that we're very much in the grip of this um this conviction that we can model and compute our way to understanding everything. Um I think like it's culturally coming out the back of COVID. I think people were so in all industries, people were so trained on the idea that modelling was the answer to everything. Um and I think actually the spread of COVID is probably an easier thing to model than how 20 years of communications influences people's buying habits. Um and I and so this th there's this sort of um this compulsion or com conviction that everything can be modelled and we can build we don't there's no nuance to anything. And I think the interesting thing about diverse media plans is that some of the effects of a dime verse media plan are are perhaps some of the effects that are most hidden from those kind of models and most difficult to tease out. Right. Um so for instance, like the synergy effects of having lots of different of having the same campaign in lots of different media, you they can be drawn out to an extent through mathematical modelling, but I think even the sort of most ardent fan of econometric on econometrics would say maybe that there's you know not entirely documented. I mean the fact that you know if you give six econometricians the same campaign data and tell them to go and work in separate rooms, you'll have six entirely different models when they come back. You know, that in it alone sort of proves the point. Another thing that I'm really interested in in the moment is um this concept of marginal ROI on channels. Okay. Um and I think a lot of us spend time uh on a day-to-day basis or a week-to-week basis looking at performance marketing uh results. Um and we all know that when you map advertising spend against results, you'll get a diminishing returns curve. And we obviously invest in those campaigns to the point a lot of a lot of people I work with will invest in those campaigns to the point where they feel like the ROI can't be better, the average ROI of the whole campaign can't be better. But what um, and we sort of wrote about this in our predictions at the start of this year, was marginal ROI is saying, well, what's the ROI on the next £100 leadpoint, not the next thousand pounds leadpoint? And that accelerates much, much uh that sort of reaches a peak much quicker and becomes inefficient much quicker. Um but it's not reported, it's not a commonly reported metric. You what you usually look at is the ROI of the entire spend. Right. So if you go from 100 to 120, you'll look at the ROI of the 120, not the 20 at the top. And when you do that, all of a sudden you see that you know your cost per acquisition or whatever goes, you know, goes high very, very fast. And you s and that encourages you to spread into much more diverse media and have a smaller investment in more places faster. But it's not a sort of commonly thought about metric, I don't think. And that's um I think that's another sort of thing that's not been teased out enough or looked at enough and and discouraging this idea of um and then you know uh I've spoken a lot about quality-adjusted reach as well. So you can optimise to reach and frequency. Um WPP's research with um Philippe Tomas in uh recent years, uh, the paper that we released last year, How Humans Decide, uh all centered on this idea that like reach across channels is non-fungible, and like a point of reach in one channel is very different from a point of reach in another channel. And um you know that's another thing that's difficult to fully kind of compute and take into account in a model and and needs to be sort of treated with and nuanced.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I remember uh like a few years back there was um you know quite a lot of discussions relating to you know this is going back quite a long, long time now, but but but kind of the the dawn of like internet video and the perception was you know you just stick your TV ad on you know the early YouTube and it will perform well and then you go, actually the performance is really poor on it because people you know people watch it in different ways and they're not you know and actually if you're optimizing for say video on a smaller screen, then you know certain brand signals need to be more prominent. If you know you're optimizing towards actually being skipped and majority of the ad not actually being seen, then you need to really get that message across early on. And I think you know one of the challenges has always been you know uh the sometimes I think thinking moves much faster than the industry actually can move. Oh definitely, yeah. And uh how how do you just uh leading on from what you what you're talking about there about that, you know, that diverse investment, obviously it c you know, at a fundamental level it makes sense because you're over you know, as it's like spread betting or you know, the approach of you know putting if you put all of your eggs in one basket or if you put all of your eggs in separate baskets, the chance of the failure of the basket is much lower if you put them in separate baskets. You know, how how do you get clients on board with investing or or if they are say a client that works and they go, right, well, we've always invested heavily in ex media, we you know, we want to invest in that, how do you get them to change that mindset where you say, Well, you know, we've got lots of research which is saying that it's better for us to invest in this new media that you've not tried before. You know, how do you approach things like that?
SPEAKER_01Well, one of the things I've always found is that is generally speaking, if an advertiser's been advertising for a very long time and they've got a strong brand, more often than not, when you look at all the evidence that's available to you about the brand, generally speaking, they've they've tend to have got a real to a a pretty good answer, right? Like this is uh and and there's not you know, then I know that people criticize, well, it's the same plan as last year, and we want um but you know a lot of the time, like through kind of a long period of people um demanding accountability from the spend, the spend has got to a pretty good place. So um asking clients to look at something completely new is always um it has to be done in the con in with the caveat of like this isn't we're not pros in radical change because radical change involves a significant amount of risk, and we're you know that's not uh that's not something that we would ever advocate people take lots and lots and lots of risk on. Um so we tend to look at as much as we can, well, is this a place that consumers are spending a significant amount of time? Making sense is is a is a great source of information on that question. I think the next thing that we look at is the physics of the formats that are available to us. This is something that I'm like absolutely fascinated with because I don't think as media's fragmented, there's more places to put your campaign, and ideally you're looking to build a consistent campaign across lots of different touch points to get those synergistic effects. Um but I don't think mainly because there's just often not time or production budget, that each asset is is always brilliantly tailored to to the format it goes in, and formats are lumped together and say, well, this cut works for those formats, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do given all the pragmatic constraints we work under. But this thing of like understanding the physics of a format and then and starting from that as the as the kicking off point for for building a specific piece of creative, I think, is is really important. I think it'll be a big trend this year. I think you'll see, you know, I I've I've recently done some work with Karen Nelson Field that Amplified. Um and and she has um has uh has been building tools and technology that really are are sort of the start from this insight that she's spoken about a lot in the industry, which is that the physics of the ad format kind of dictate the corridor of effectiveness that you're gonna land in. Like the bounds of effectiveness are dictated by the media choice, not the creative its itself, although obviously having an amazing story to tell is a is a multiplier. And um yeah, I I think that you'll see the best brands will start to merge this understanding of the physics of ad formats with their specific campaign and creative to try and make sure that as much of the attention that they're buying in each buy really does deliver on brand and and and and creates brand recall. And that's kind of how I think we can sell in new formats is by saying, well, this is how the format works, this is what we think the physics of the format are. We know that there's people in this space, and it's worth going into if you can do this, this, and this with the campaign. If if you don't think the campaign flexes like that, then this co this channel probably isn't right. Um and and you know, and then it's about testing and trying to find the steep bit of that diminishing returns curve in the channel and then working from there basically.
SPEAKER_03That brings me back to um something that uh Laura McGuran from uh Essence Mediacom and Tom Marden from Tesco were talking about. They did a At the at the Pl Media Planning and Strategy Summit, I can't remember if it was 22 or 2023. But you know, about that vital role of the client and agency relationship. And actually that's so you know that's so important, I guess, in in building the environments where the client is going to trust you to do test and learn stuff that is, you know, taking to some extent every media buy involves a certain degree of risk of not necessarily uh paying back on on the investment. But you know, taking calculated risks that are really uh based on good quality research. And I think in the AI, you know, increasingly and as we're finding ourselves more within the AI world, the most vital things that you know, from a number of guests that we've been talking to, the most vital ingredients I think in the modern media or to for agents in the modern media landscape is really, really good quality data underpinning, you know, what underpinning that media interaction and also great people to really uh to really interpret that data and to and to put it into practice in the best way, and who are building those strong relationships and trusting relationships with the clients where you know new approaches can be seen as you know something that that that can that can go ahead rather than something that's immediately like, well, we don't have enough. You know, I think it's getting that balance between the amount of the the the volume of data and also the right the right people there to to to take new approaches.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus 100% like but at the end of the day, people by people, right? And that's that's uh that that has never been more more true. Um it's just that now in in organizations, some of the people beavering away in the background might not be flesh and blood. They might be you know they might be uh uh they might be agents um uh who are sort of uh shortcutting some of the uh some of the long kind of uh all the alleys that all the alleys that you have to run down to get to something interesting to put in front of a client like Tom at Tesco. Um hopefully running down those alleys and and finding that maybe it was a dead end will be a bit quicker so that we can then get to a recommendation, um uh a lot uh an effective recommendation a lot faster.
SPEAKER_00You've made a s a strong case in uh some things that you've written that brands may be overspending in one area rather than let's say like spreading your eggs across the different baskets. But just sort of playing devil's advocate. Are there any times that you think use one specific media would deserve like a leading role in in the campaign? And when when do you do you have any examples of when one specific media has worked well to sort of carry the campaign?
SPEAKER_01Well, uh so that's so those that so you I think you're referencing uh some of the work that we did off the back of Profitability 2, um, where we sort of looked at uh so for everyone who's who's not seen this, uh Profitability 2 covers you know billions of pounds of spend in the UK um in in recent years, post-pandemic years. And um we took um it it's built out of a kind of of an amalgamation of lots and lots and lots of brands, MMM. So it's econometric modeled uh spend across channels. Um and what we did was we looked at um for each category, I think there was like eight categories that were able to look at categories of advertisers, we looked at what the amalgamated MMM said the optimal spend would be by category. And then we looked at the actual spend of all the brands in the category by channel, and what we found was that the optimal spend from these brands' own MMMs, so this is remember, this is work that these brands have commissioned to tell them where they should be spending versus what they are actually spending, they were they were overinvested to a uh a very large degree in in social advertising and they were uh and also online display uh and underinvested in uh I guess tele in its broadest sense of the term, and then um also underinvested uh to a degree in search as well, generic search. Um, so they're not exploring the upper limits of the generic search curve. Um and the the the overspend in in social was 3x. So profitability too is basically saying you could take 67% out of your of your social spend and and and you would have a more optimal mix if it was reinvested elsewhere, which caused a bit of a stir, um, but it's you know that's just what prof the what the data is saying, it's not personal opinion. Um those channels uh you know so the I I think like what it'll probably end up on my, you know, like when people if it they know anything at all about um things that I've put in the press, they'll say, Oh, he he really hates people investing in social media advertising. That's I don't think that's actually true. I think um one of the areas of media that I'm like most excited about is what I call plural media, um, which is those media spaces that are creator-led. Um I actually think the term social is going the same way as the term digital in terms of like it can mean everything and nothing. And those channels, plural media channels and plural media campaigns, absolutely can lead a campaign and and drive great return, particularly for I think for challenger brands who have online response mechanisms and who need to feel popular or of the zeitgeist or you know, like in some way that they're what's trending right now. Um and you can see that, you know, that I think that there's um amazing uh campaigns centered on um podcasting, video podcasting, influencer marketing, um uh user-generated content and live events or live streaming. Um like that's the kind of media mix that I think these campaigns uh would lead with. So they're not traditionally like TV or radio or out-of-home-led campaigns. Um and it and it's worked brilliantly. I mean, you you can look at um uh something like uh Locked In by Foot Asylum. It's become a sort of thing in its own right, cultural movement in its own right. You can look at um uh you know, the dish for Waitros is a phenomenally successful asset for them uh that delivers I mean we I've I've I've done auditing work of uh of of of all of these channels for um supermarket brands, and I can I can tell you that in terms of like amongst people who listen to a lot of podcasts, Waitros branded recall is significantly higher than it than it would be given their you would expect it to be given their share of market and and that when you look at other channels, the recall, people who spend a lot of time on other channels that recall is not quite so high, it's more in in line with their share of market. So that definitely is strong asset for them. Um and also, you know, the other thing is is is going if you stretch the definition of social um to sort of its uh logical input, you I uh one of the best books I've read in the last few years was um Steve Harrison's book about Howard Luke Gossage, um his his sort of run-through that he did with Dave Dye of all Howard Luke Gossage's campaigns. And and he was building phenomenally successful campaigns for brands that are rooted in what you would struggle to to describe as anything other than kind of social uh methodologies and stuff years and years ago. So yeah, uh it's absolutely true that you can you can definitely build successful campaigns in these in these channels. What I would say though is that um as highlighted by the IPA influencer work that was released at Effectiveness Week last uh autumn, the variance in terms of payback on these campaigns is really, really high. So they the it's a it's a very it's undeniable people spend time in these channels. It's undeniable um that um there's like a cachet of being editorially integrated into all of this creator-led media. And there's definitely a synergy effect from being across lots of different formats of the same creator-led media, so video podcasting, podcasting, influencer posts on social, etc. That that all works. But but as um Dom Charles from WPP has sort of talked about, um uh it's really difficult to isolate the factors that make those campaigns fly from die, basically. And and and and so marketers need to go into those campaigns with their eyes open about all of the positive reasons for them, but also the idea that there's a very, very, very big width on the confidence bounds for ROI on those campaigns. And currently there's not a huge amount of documented evidence that says the drivers of the success are X, Y, and Z, so that you can just optimise it and know that you're not gonna make the mistakes of others. So yeah, it's uh that's my sort of very long take on people who are overestim of overinvesting in social, basically. I I I don't I yeah, it's not that I really, really don't like social advertising. I just it comes back to the physics of the formats. If you've got a TV ad or an out-of-home ad and you're just gonna cut it down and chuck it in static formats in a feed or vertical video that people are scrolling through, the physics of the format don't really they just you know it's just undeniable that people are trained to scroll past that stuff. And and uh and so the great thing about kind of plural media is that you're using creators who've hacked that to get more attention for your campaign, which is why I think it works.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Did you find in um profitability too that audiovisual needed to have more investment then? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I mean it there's uh it's definitely you know and and and and again what I would stress about that analysis is that it's these the brands that uh MMM was in, uh it was in the database, those brands own econometrics that they're they're spending big sums of money on analysts to produce, those own models are saying you should invest more in audiovisual and the spend is not there. Um so it's not it's not like I just want to stress it again, it's it's the it's the it's the it's the database and the and the and and the modelling that that shows this, not it's not like a personal opinion. I think Braun should spend lots more on Telly.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell How do you think that you can sort of better com you could better communicate like AV's effectiveness sort of internally to try and persuade people that there is it is being underutilized?
SPEAKER_01Well I think it's uh I think we're seeing some positive uh signs. I I uh you know you I think you have to do a great shout out to the um particularly the the people at ITV at the moment. I'm I I'm very UK focused, so if you're listening to this and you're not in the UK and that uh this might not be so interesting. But uh I think uh what ITV are doing that's brilliant at the moment is they've got um Samir and his team focused on Lansen because they know that they need to be able to compete in terms of short-term attribution for for business effects. And that's a really exciting project which um you know we're we're really excited to be um to see the results of so that we can we can have a bit more equivalence in terms of short-term attribution of sales between some of the digital channels and then and then TV. At the same time, the broadcasters in general have come together to um to make it easier to buy television for brands of all sizes, which I think is is fantastic, um, and a and a um uh a much needed thing, right? Because I one of the great things about um social and search, and one of the things that's made them so popular is is just how simple it is to to buy. And if you're a small to medium-sized business that doesn't maybe have loads of marketing expertise in the in the firm, then it's it's amazing that um they've made it s the barriers to entry for advertising so low. It's it's a good uh good thing for our for our industry that everyone can get involved. Um and and it's great that TV are trying to try and replicate that. So I think those are really fundamental things. I you know, also um uh the team ITV, I think you know, they they continue to come out with really sort of big insights that um that sort of stop you in your track. Thinking about the the yellow chart from Palooza last year. I think that's a fantastic example of like how you can stop um a lot of people um from following one narrative and immediately make them think actually maybe the narrative I'm following is not quite as um not quite what I thought it was. And I think that and I think that has had an influence. And and you can kind of well maybe see it coming through. So the the McKinsey report that came out last year where brand building brand strength is a is a really important um priority for marketers, now the number one priority for marketers. Um and one of the sort of channels that on the back of that report where they were looking to invest most was addressable forms of of television. Um and that was sort of one of the areas that people most strongly uh believe that they were going to invest in more in the coming year. Uh so I it's I think it is happening. I think um we are seeing a bit of a a re-evaluation of the value of um uh the valuation of of audiovisual ed media. Um and that's yeah, it's down to all the broadcasters um working effectively together in this in the UK to try and to try and change the narrative. And um and hopefully we'll see that that uh that trend continue. I think the years of people simply looking at the CPM and saying, well, what's the CPM and how can I get the cheapest point of reach available? And I'm hoping that particularly for the more sophisticated, larger brands out there, those that sort of thinking is is being consigned to the past.
SPEAKER_03I know I know from when we we uh talked before for the making latent making sense report, I mentioned about Bertha, the uh the magical machine where you put you know, if you put good ingredients in, you have the best people, then you get a quality output, but rubbish in equals rubbish out. And I think it it kind of chimes, kind of reminds me of that kind of uh that kind of approach there. Another uh I mean it's it's quite an interesting one, I think. I always found if you if if you go to if you go to the US, hyper-local TV or address or kind of far more locally addressable TV, and quite interestingly, very low quality but very entertaining adverts that you see on US TV, like for a mattress showroom at the and and then you're you know, if you hear a mattress showroom on TV in England, you know it's gonna be dreams or it's gonna be a big showroom. Like in the US, it can be like a tiny little thing in a little strip mall, and they've got a TV ad with the owner who thinks you know he's the art director, he's the creative director of it. You know, I kind of but I like that addressability because that personality is what as we were saying earlier, you know, personality is what I don't buy a mattress, you know. We we bought a sofa from DFS. I didn't buy it from DFS, I bought it from the guy Paul because he put because he did the demonstration when we were talking about old about Scotch guard and he poured wine on the thing and we watched it run. That's what I bought into because he it was the uh enthusiasm of that delivery. Um so yeah, it's an interesting the that that in you know we're seeing increased addressability in TV, um in TV formats. And you know, that that I think that that opens up huge amounts of of opportunity for for those smaller brands. That's that's really fascinating.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I mean it would be fantastic to see more advertising than that. I guess that you can see as a consumer when you watch um addressable television, you can you can see now that there's more localized advertising in it. Um the interesting thing will be it's kind of like what Rory Salom is saying on your podcast. Brands and organisations who are seeking to build brands that go into that space will face a choice of like, well, do we treat this in a very rational way and sort of talk about all the rational USPs for why you would pick us, or do we do something a bit uh a bit different? Um and that will come down to that, but to what Rory was talking about in your podcast the other week, which is just like the ability of people to sort of say, maybe we don't maybe think the non-rational answer here will result in the better outcome. And but that and and you know, he was making a great point about how in with the in the IPA effectiveness awards there's this trend, or there was a trend in the last um set of uh uh awards given out towards founder led or smaller family-owned businesses. Um and you would have well, maybe you know if you follow his thinking, as more of these local, smaller organizations in the UK get access to audiovisual media, there's a greater chance that we'll see more stuff like that um because they're not huge corporates with with lots and lots of rational change of decision making.
SPEAKER_03And funnily enough, off the back of the um discussion we had with Rory about family-owned businesses and that kind of uh ability to be more explorative in approaches and not necessarily thinking in terms of just financial quarters. Um we've been uh we've been in in discussions with Pneumatic, the maker of the Henry Vacuum Cleaner, which is a family-owned business. And the fact it's interesting, a family-owned business that has never advertised on a big scale and they don't retain a PR company. So there's some really interesting stuff. We're gonna be asking them lots of questions about, you know, those family-owned approaches and how they how they kind of shape the way that they work. And of course it's it's such a like I've we talked about on the on with Caroline Manning recently, but it's just a product that, you know, it's a it's a mascot and a product at the same time. You know, it's it's like, you know, com but I think things like you know, if we if we think of thinking of campaigns that really that you really remember, it's you know, go compare uh, you know, the opera singer guy, it's things like the mere cats, it's uh um the um what's the one with the octo uh octopus energy? Campaign you're reading. I couldn't remember the name of it. I was I was just gonna say, what's the campaign with the octopus? Yeah, but those sorts of things where they have those brand mascots or those kind of distinctive brand assets that really kind of stand out and and and maybe defy conventional wisdom or logic on you know how on on the way in which you change people's minds. I mean, think the most the most pertinent one I think of course is it goes back to the the dairy milk ad, you know, the the gorilla playing the drums, purple background, you know, Phil Collins on there. You know, every time I hear Phil Collins now, I want a dairy milk, and it's it's that you know, every time I think of that ad, you know, and it just the beat the build-up. It's just the uh yeah, it's it's it stuff that doesn't make sense but actually has you know extraordinarily large uh impact. So um on on the back of this stuff we were talking about uh we were talking about just then um about TV, I know I know you worked on a framework for Sky's Mary and George, which uh of course contains the fantastic Julianne Moore uh in say, definitely worth a watch. And that prioritised engagement metrics over raw impressions. So what I wanted to ask is how should entertainment brands really rethink the approach, uh rethink that approach in a world where kind of reaching engaged niches can actually be seen more as more important than just getting mass reach. And I think you've touched on some of it already, but you know what?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was a uh that was really interesting campaign to work on. So um obviously if you've got like a new show coming out all the time, uh you're gonna spend one of the it's undeniable that um sort of uh these short form digital channels are uh places where we can where we can um intrigue consumers. Um and we knew um that one of the most reliable leading indicators of a successful show launch for a for a show that had no previous series, so a completely new piece of intellectual property in the in the market. One of the most reliable indicators of success was um uh whether people it had a you know like a talkability or a buzz metric, but that was a kind of really strong leading indicator. And so we saw, well, in the real world, obviously, talkability is you'd say in the pub, like have you seen that new thing coming out? Or you'd say, you know, to a friend when you sat on a bus or a train or in a car or whatever, have you seen that thing? Um but what we were looking at when we were putting all these assets into digital channels was just how many impressions are we uh, you know, how many impressions are we getting, what's the cost per impression? And so and we had lots and lots of different versions. So the other thing that was taking up a lot of time was that because you've got so much content to cut up and turn into these little trails, invariably there's loads and loads and loads of them. And you want to know what which are your biggest winners quickly. So we changed the framework to be about, well, um what's the uh length of each asset? This was all video, by the way, so it's no static formats here, it was all just video-based formats. What's the length of the asset? And then um what is it, what's the view-through rate on it? So how much of that asset is getting watched, and then obviously we can work out a cost per watched second. Right. Um and then we looked at what was the cost per watch second for the whole of the campaign, like everything, um, and then obviously each individual creative and format was a row, and we could index them all against that average. Um, and then we were able to sort of line up the relative cost per watch second for every row in the table versus the amount we spent on it, or the amount that the um the amount that the uh ad delivery engines were assigning to each ad. And we were able to sort of plot that in real time and then very quickly start making pushing more and more of the money towards the the formats that are generating the longest watch time. And the reason that we were doing that was because we felt like for a brand new show that's not had any previous series, if you don't spend a decent amount of time with it, what are you gonna say when you sat in the pub or you sat on a bus or you sat in a car with someone? You can't just say, Have you seen that new thing? I I I only saw it for half a second on the screen, so I can't even tell you the name of it. You need to have um particularly something that's like a bit salacious and a bit sort of it's got a bit of intrigue and a bit of drama to it. Um and uh so we we deployed that and what we found was that um we found that some formats that we're buying into, no matter what creative we're putting in, We were just overpaying for the amount of time we were getting with the user. Um so uh I won't talk about which media owners and which formats, but um in a particular environment you could pay a significant premium to have the very first impact when the user started browsing the session, versus you could just have more standard inventory that came up in there in the course of their browsing session. And we found that the premium was the premium was significantly too much for how much extra performance it was delivering us, so we were able to immediately back out of that and make a significant saving there for the amount of time. Um uh in other other formats that we thought, you know, they traded very cheap, just buying them, the CPM cost them was very cheap. We found that just the physics of the format didn't give us enough time with the user, and so backed out of that because we felt like the amount of time each each impact was getting us on on what we were trying to communicate was so low, it was like, well, they can't possibly be you know, that's not going to inspire that kind of talkability. Uh anyway, the uh the proof in the pudding was that well, it's it's obviously it's very difficult with entertainment because some a huge amount of the effectiveness just comes down to like how good the show is, right? Yeah. But um what we found was that was certainly in terms of the amount of time that we could deliver um before the first transmission date, so the amount of time that we could deliver per pound spent was significantly better using that optimization methodology. Um, and then it helped that that show went on to have a significantly better launch period than some other shows that had been released previously but that were benchmarking against. But I'm not uh I'm not going to claim that that isn't entirely. I'm not I'm not I'm not uh yeah, I'm not gonna back myself that hard.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well it's a hugely innovative approach and and certainly certainly one that that's uh that delivered great results.
SPEAKER_01I find that yeah, entertainment's fascinating because it is one of those ones where it's ri I mean if we knew exactly what drove amazing box office or viewership, everyone would be doing it, right? And it it is it's uh what is it um uh uh fat tail, isn't it? Yeah. So it's um anything that we can do. Large volume of the results come from a from a small quantity at the tail end of and and I think in that in that sector, one of the sort of tropes is that people just try to do new stuff to get as much attention as possible, which has got a lot, there's a lot of rational thinking behind that. If we do new things that haven't been done before, big you know, that's gonna get outsized attention, which is you know, I think that's uh great thinking. That's a perfectly rational way to think about it. But also that like on the sort of more day-to-day stuff that you know you're gonna have to do, there are all these sort of approaches that are out there to innovate around. Um yeah, it's uh it's an interesting category to work in.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I think as as the as the media landscapes uh become more fragmented, it's more it's more and it's more the more media there are, the more fragmented the landscape becomes. I think the more vital the role of great planners and strategists and great research is. Oh, I certainly hope so. But also it gives you it gives you more to play with, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's definitely true that like um there's more and more and more levers out there for media planners to pull on. Uh and there's more and more things to explore that may be having a significant effect on the campaign that previously were not available to explore or were not under your control. Um obviously the interesting thing now is that some of those levers are being taken back and put behind a buying algorithm, AI, and that's interesting because then it becomes about well, how can we unpack what's in that black box for our clients faster than anyone else can so that we can and you know that's where having such massive buying scale comes into comes hand becomes a useful thing because you can you can try and decode what's going on in these in these black boxes faster and and then you can start to put some constraints around those levers and give a client a competitive advantage again.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. Now, another thing you talk uh we've talked quite a bit um already so far, but just about about metrics, which obviously do play a huge uh role in in modern planning, but how do you kind of make space I guess for creative effectiveness, especially when the most powerful creative ideas don't always show up neatly? You know, and as as for example the ones that we were talking about a little bit earlier, that those powerful creative ideas don't always show up very neatly in metrics. You know, in in the short in short-term metrics sometimes. You know, how do you get that creative effectiveness flowing?
SPEAKER_01Well Oh I don't I don't know. I don't I feel like I don't really qualify to give answers about creative because I don't work in that side of our industry. Uh I um w one thing that I will say is I think it's really important that in the and I kind of said this a little earlier as well, but in this fragmented media economy it's if you work in a creative I I I try to try to empathise with my uh colleagues that are working on the creative side. It must be impossible. I mean it's hard for me to keep up with all of the different potential places that we could put an ad. So I'm guessing if your focus is on constantly focusing on building the actual story itself and making sure it's true to the brand and making sure it's in line with the brand strategy and everything, you you haven't got time to be to be exploring this uh these all these formats in the way that that I do. And um and I think as I said earlier, what that can often result in is is a campaign vision that is thought through for some of the channels where reasonably you you imagine most of the money is gonna get spent, so you you're bigger media and the campaign works brilliantly in those places. What I think um there often isn't the time or resource to do is to think about how can this campaign idea work brilliantly in all of the other subsidiary formats that we're gonna work in. And if you think about marginal ROI, which I was talking about earlier, that encourages you to invest in a lot more places and a lot more formats to get the most efficient campaign possible, um, which compounds the issue. And I think a big thing, uh something that I'm sort of really focused on, I know other people in the industry focus on at the moment, is how can we use um uh all of the advancements in AI to enable us to look at how across lots and lots and lots of formats the ad is likely to deliver on branded recall. So are we planning to make a massive buy with channel X where um the format and the way that the creative's been sort of cut for channel X means that we might be buying a significant number of seconds where there's just not going to be any branded recall because the brand isn't in the ad at that point or whatever. Um that's the most simple way to to sort of think about um how we could help with creative effectiveness as media practitioners is just to make sure that we're not leaving a ton of paid-for attention out there that's not delivering for the for the for the advertiser because we just haven't had the resource or the time to make sure every single piece of creative fits every single box it's gonna go in. And I think AI and uh and some of the automation that's uh sweeping through the industry at the moment will hopefully make it easier for us to do that. Um but um it would certainly be a very compelling story, right, for a brand because you'd be able to go back to that brand and say that last year we think in this channel you bought so much of the UK's attention, but X percent of it went basically, I suppose, like unmonetized for you as a brand because people didn't know who it was that was putting something in front of them at that point, and only after a certain point did you start to see and and we can optimise that for you. And I think that's uh so yeah, that's sort of how I'm thinking about how I might be able to contribute a bit more to creative effectiveness, but I wouldn't sort of dream just not saying why you need to put a pot penguin in it or it wouldn't be creative if there was an exact answer. Yeah, you need some more talking dog in that one, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um talking about AI, which obviously touching on then, um you mentioned earlier about how online search is just going through like a fundamental shift. Um in sort of how people are discovering information differently, be that through AI search engines or even just that AI overview when you um when you search for something. But what do you think that means for brands and how could strategists start preparing for that shift?
SPEAKER_01Well, I just and that's any question that that's got about AI, I always caveat it by saying I've not got a clue. And I think anybody who says they do have a clue is lying. Uh I think we're all still sort of um we're all the speed of development and and how quickly things are changing as a result of and and you know the way it upturns all of your previously sort of even the sort of uh way you think about how stuff gets done and you didn't even realise that you were thinking about it that way, when you start AI sort of making you question everything, even the things that you didn't realise you actually held as beliefs, you suddenly, oh yeah, that's that is something that I need. Um so with all that in mind, uh my my theory, and it is just a theory, and I'm probably completely wrong. Um I often I often am, um is that and it's based on my the all this is based on my experience working in SEO. So in SEO you had Google that would come along and would look to use um scraping to try and understand as much as it could about your organization from structured data that was on the internet. Um and there's been a period since probably the early part of this century where the the way Google and other search engines pass process and then interpret that structured data has become more and more and more sophisticated. So back when I was doing SEO, you could trick Google essentially by stuffing title tags full of keywords. You could um you could write loads and loads of pages of copy and then hide it on the website so that Google could see it, but none of your customers could because it was unreadable copy that just had keywords in every single sentence and all this sort of stuff. Um and uh very quickly Google improved its algorithm and and absolutely clobbered sites that were doing that. And um and then things became more sophisticated. So then it became about um well, how many backlinks can we get for the for the website? Because if the website is widely referenced, then we'll um uh then we'll be we'll be we'll be more visible in in search results. And and then there was a thriving economy around buying links for a long period of time. Um and then that got absolutely clobbered. Um and over time, what you've seen now is that if you look at SEO today, um it's having to compete, you know, as an SEO, you're having to try and improve your visibility by working with an algorithm that's extremely sophisticated. Um, and so SEO has almost morphed into kind of digital brand building. Now, my working theory is that AI-led search will do the same thing, but it'll happen in ten times faster. It'll be it'll happen ten times faster. So, right now, going on Reddit and writing as much amazing testimonials, and isn't this brand great, and this brand does this and this brand does this, and writing and stuffing Reddit with as much stuff as you possibly can appears to be a good way of getting these models to put you at the at the start of their results. I can guarantee you, like I mean I've already heard from people in our organization who focus on this stuff, that that is not working in the way it was six months ago. Um and so uh I think that's all a very long way for me to get to my answer, which is that the answer if you want to be a very visible organization in search snippets, AI-led snippets, and and AI-led search, build your brand. Like that's what it will come back to, is it will be because all of these engines kind of rely on confirmation bias to an extent. Like they don't want to show you a set of results for best car that you are like, well, I've never heard of any of these. Like I don't I don't I don't want to buy any of these cars because I've never heard of any of them. So and Google if Google does that, it's like, oh well, people aren't gonna click the links and we're not gonna make any money. So what they want, you know, and I think I don't know if I'm sure that if you got uh someone who works on the organic search algorithm at Google, they probably wouldn't say this. But I I bet one of their goals is to try and make their search algorithm reflective of brand size in a way, because then more people will feel comfortable with the results they get. So like if you say, like, what's the best current account, and you get a series of banks that you've actually heard of, then you're much more likely to go, oh well, I will go with that one then because it's top of the rather than if it's like a load of banks that you've just yeah, you're not going you're just never gonna click on those results, are you? Because um people as we've as some as the industry talks about all the time, people don't just do the most rational thing, they're not completely rational actors. Um and so yeah, I think building your brand is the ultimate sustainable long-term way to cope with this change in search. Um that's not to say that there won't be some incredible hacks over the next two to three years for rapidly gaming the system. Although I would say is the again, the lesson from SEO is you engage in those hacks with the knowledge and with your eyes wide open about the fact that you're you're very very well maybe clobbered into oblivion at some point in the future by an algorithm update. Um and those algorithm updates will probably be coming round much faster than they were ten years ago as Google developed its search algorithm just because that's the world we're living now. It's f everything's faster.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. Um one of the other things that I know you've been talking about recently is around kind of the costly signalling uh approaches and things like that. Rory talks about you know the male peacock or how if you're in London, you know, it's costly signalling to drive a Ferrari, not because it's the most expensive car, because he he's he's he says along the lines of it, you know, if it was about having the most expensive car that made you the most you know attractive or whatever it might be, then you'd own like a motor coach or something. Like you wouldn't uh a Ferrari you buy it because it's so uh you know, it's so inefficient, it's so uncomfortable. And it's those sorts of uh those sorts of approaches that's really interesting. And one of the ones that I think in a media space really really kind of resonates with me increasingly as we're seeing you know less investment, certainly now than we were ten years ago in it, is direct mail. Like because direct mail is a really good example of a brand doing a costly signalling of actually physically sending you something, and it's you know, whether it's like Roy talks about having you know good quality paper or some sort of novelty in the way that it's presented to you in some sort in in in the addressability. Um one of the things that you talk about is is signal strength. Can you explain like a little bit more about signal strength and how you measure and and understand that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so um uh caveat at the start of this answer is if you if you want to know more about signal strength, then the people who uh are sort of the absolute godfathers of this part of our industry are um Ian Murray and Andrew Tenzer. Oh, yeah, yeah. Um a couple of years ago, we commissioned uh Ian and Andrew to work with us at uh at Essence Mediacom to redo their signalling success uh study that they did for Thinkbox during lockdown, because there was some sort of voices during lockdown that said because it was done in lockdown, the results would be a bit weird because it was a very strange time, obviously. So but what we did was we repeated the study and we basically found that there was no change with it. Um You s you speak to people about um if a brand appears in this media channel, are you more likely to think that it's a company with a lot of money in the bank? Are you more likely to think that it's a company that's got a lot of self-belief in its product, a lot of confidence in its products? Are you more likely to think that this is a brand people speak to you down the pub? Are you more likely to think that um this is a business you could this is a brand that you could mention and other people would know what you were talking about? Um and then you you ask people those sorts of questions based on the idea that the brand has advertised in just channel X, Y, or Z, and you get wildly different results. Um what we were able to show was that um different channels have a different profile in terms of the signals that they give out. So for instance, like social um was really, really uh relevant relatively strong at this idea that a product's popular right now, that it's kind of what's is trending right now is is kind of a zeitgeisty thing. Social was kind of like a hype man for your product. But what it wasn't was like which is which was we found really interesting was um because we separated out social from kind of influencer marketing, content creators online we called it. And um what was really interesting was those yeah, those those channels really over-indexed for for that sense of it's cool right now and people will know what I'm talking about. But is it a trustworthy product? It was like the lowest, which is really interesting because the rationale that I constantly hear for influencer marketing is everybody trusts influencers. So if if an influencer says that this is a great product, people will trust that. Yeah. But what we saw, and that and and that effect was most prevalent with 16 to 24s, so the youngest people, they were the most likely to say, well, it's cool products, and other people will know if I mention it, other people will know what I'm talking about, but they were the least likely to say it'd be a trustworthy brand, which I thought was fascinating. Um and and we there was all sorts of other insights that came out of that study. But another thing that really came down what that we sort of learnt from it was um the perceived cost of the advertising is um is a really strong indicator of how likely it is to be able to build those strong brand perceptions around your brand. So it's signalling strength. If you if you want to try and if you want to try and think, well, what's a leading indicator of of of this signalling strength? We found that people's perception of how much the advertising cost was going to be the thing to look at. And so then we did some follow-up studies as as as Essence MediaCon where we looked at, you know, uh across a suite of assets in the same channel, what did people think they cost? So like what did people think a half page add-on at the front of a newspaper cost versus the homepage takeover on the newspaper's website and stuff like that? So that you and then obviously you can plot this perceived cost versus the actual cost to get an understanding of if there's undervalued and overvalued media in a in an individual channel like f at a format level, which is which is quite interesting. That's useful for making the case. We found that data in places like Out of Home and and Press useful for making the case for clients to kind of really sort of push the the sort of boundaries of what they're doing and and going for those sort of bigger, more fame generating sites. It's been a useful data set to say, yeah, there's some there it's not just a sort of hunch that you should do this, it's there's some data behind it. So yeah, so that's kind of how we've used signalling strength. I think it's a really interesting area that I think um you know it's uh it's another thing that absolutely I don't think is getting picked up in in these kind of reason short to mid-term models that we build. I I don't think that that kind of effect is getting and and it's uh Ian could talk about this a lot more than than uh and Andrew could talk about this a lot better than I can, but the this idea that it doesn't change, like it's because your understanding of media is informed by every single media interaction you've ever had over the course of your entire life, your relative perception of media doesn't change it's a very evolutionary thing that changes very, very slowly over the course of your life. Um and and so uh uh appearing in a particular media, even if that media isn't necessarily so for instance, like press, right? You could say that like less people read a newspaper now than they used to. But if you see someone reading a paper and that you and then in at some point in the future you see brands appearing in print, the fact that that person was like sat on a train wearing a suit reading a paper, that kind of makes you think something about and and how do you and and and we could observe that we were able to observe those effects in the data, but it's um it's you know building that into your understanding of how media works is it's like that nuance that perhaps doesn't get picked up in a sort of simple model.
SPEAKER_00Uh one of my favourite of uh Essence MediaCom's 2026 predictions, the prediction was that most big streaming shows will move back to sort of more like weekly releases. Yeah. And I was wondering why you think that going back to that rather than doing it all at once would be would be a good move, and what does it change for advertisers?
SPEAKER_01So um uh this is the all the work of my amazing colleague uh Andrew Monks, uh, who is one of our uh implementational planners in in in AV. And he comes up with the we do these predictions every year, and he always comes up with a really interesting uh AV prediction. Last year his prediction was people would spend more time looking at menu screens than watching any individual channel. Um data to prove that out. Um so that yeah. So there's there's a couple of reasons for this. Um the main reason why we think that weekly drops are going to come back is um because particularly around drama series, uh drama is where that's like the sort of thing that keeps these platforms uh going and it it encourages this leapfrogging behavior where people move around between platforms to get the latest dramas and then um but if you release all of your drama in a in a single drop, what people are finding is that this the switching audience comes in, binges, leaves, yeah, and you don't make any revenue out of them. Whereas with Big series, if you drop them weekly and people get into the series, then a six-week series that takes you beyond the 30-day window for your free trial, right? And then you end up paying. So um it's and obviously you can see from the data in like Ofcom Media Nations and other uh and other sources that the kind of explosive growth of these streaming platforms has plateaued out a little bit, and we're now in a game where people are fighting over customers in a bit more of a zero-sum way. And so um keeping people in beyond that 30-day trial and stopping this leapfrogging and trying to eke out those switches, um, appointment to view weekly drops works really well for that. Um and it also uh, you know, and and and the so the impact for advertisers is I think one of the big things that we've predicted in that prediction is you're gonna see a lot more opportunity around individual show sponsorship. For a while, show sponsorship in streaming has been a tricky proposition because it's like, well, someone's gonna watch all of this in two days, so we're just gonna what we're gonna do is deliver 24 idents to them. Yeah, really we're gonna deliver 24 idents to them in the space of two days, and then you know the show will burn very, very bright and very, very quick and be gone. Whereas now, I think what you'll see now with with more weekly release uh schedules from and you know I was I was in them well I was I probably shouldn't well I was in a streaming platform last night and I noticed on the home screen that almost every major title at the top in the carousel at the top had drops Wednesday or new episode each week, and I was like this really is like you can see it. I kind of think Monksy's not looked far enough and he's kind of said something that's happening now and said don't be a big trend for this year. He's like sandbagged it a little bit. Um but uh it's yeah, it's happening, like you can see it, you can see it happening. Um and it will uh whether users will find this annoying after being used to the idea of I can have everything I want when I want it straight away, or whether we'll see this kind of two-tier behaviour where you know if something's really great, you'll be able to judge how really, really, really good it is by viewing each week versus people who are willing to wait until the end of the series and watch it all at once. That ratio I think will be quite an interesting metric for some of the broadcasters. But yeah, I would expect to see more sponsorship, sh individual show sponsorship getting sold. And it was a huge feature of Amazon's uh upfront in the sum in the autumn. They talked a lot about individual show sponsorship, it's a new route to market with them that they were they were going to be pushing hard this year.
SPEAKER_03And it it's funny how often when new emerging platforms come out, they say, right, we're gonna break from everything everyone's done before, we're gonna give you it all at once rather than make you wait for it. And then actually as you said, you you burn through it very, very quickly. You know, you get that series and it's done in the done in two days, and then the talkability drops off, it tails off. The thing that I really like about that weekly drop kind of approach is actually you know, when we look at within touch points at people's, you know, daily lives, the pattern of daily life doesn't really change. There's those moments of the day when you do certain things, you know, video, audio, text, and out of home-based media. The pattern hasn't changed since 2005. It's the same peaks, the same troughs, and everything. And actually, what I think is a nice thing about moving back towards that more structured form is people like structure and people like to feel actually, oh, hang on, it's Wednesday. Oh, that's good. Then I'll have something to talk to Gene at the water caller at about tomorrow because this program that I really like. So on. And it builds those moments back into life rather than it just being, oh, have you seen this series? Oh, I binge watched the whole of it, oh no, I haven't seen any of it yet. You've got it like, well, I'm out. See you, Gene. I'm back to my desk. You know, but in that sort of situation, then you're like, then you can go, oh, actually, well, I'll I'll catch up on the last couple of episodes, and then and then you can get back into that fold of you know being in with the cool kids who are all watching that series.
SPEAKER_01It's quite a nice Yeah, I it's you've never heard anybody I mean this is a massive generalisation, but I don't remember ever hearing anybody moaning about the fact that they had something to talk to their colleagues and friends about at school or at the workplace. And um, you know, you were we all the celebrity traitors before Christmas. I mean, that was genuine sort of everyone was talking about it the next day, or don't tell me because I haven't seen it yet. Like that was uh and that is that's rare nowadays, but I think um if you wanted to sort of zoom out on it, is it's because we went through this period where um the streaming services came to prominence because we had really, really low interest rates, really low inflation, that period between 08 and 22, um, and they were all looking to build out massive market share, and it was all about growth as fast as growth now, profit later, that was the model. Um, and to do that, you had to break the way that content was released, and and and you had to give everyone everything immediately to just get people into your platform because the the key metric in that era was how many users have you got on the platform, how many, what's the account? Now we're in a very different uh economic paradigm where um you know, as I said before, that that market's a bit more static now and a bit more established, and now the metric is what's your kind of monthly active users, how many people and and you know, because they're selling advertising, they need to be able to show that they've got a big repetitive audience for things like drama and reality, and so and and and so you know naturally the the schedule shift and and and if if it brings back more of those water call moments and more of that common shared culture, then I think that's you know it's the kind of thing that uh it's good for all of us, really.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, because offline you know, we were talking about kind of word of mouth and that talkability, like it's such something that I think can be really, really overlooked in you know, in campaign performance about the you know, the the power of offline influences, you know, that talkability and that generating that excitement. Because it it goes back to that kind of I remember when I was a kid, I once took an entire pack of Twix because I love Twix and I ate the entire pack. I ate like about six Twix bars. I could after that I was felt so sick of Twix that I never ate a Twix again. But actually, you know, that kind of binge approach, it's not healthy in the long term, is it? It's quite, you know, it just you just burn out burn through the content and you don't really value it. You don't have that value that you have for something that you that you're waiting for week in, week out. You like it gives that more I think it builds brand affinity more because you f you feel, oh actually, I have desire towards seeing the next episode, or I'm anxious for what's going to happen. You know, all of those emotive things don't really happen when it's like this episode's finished, three-second countdown, and you're on to the next one because you're just like at the end of it, you're like, oh, I feel like I feel like I've eaten a whole pack of Twix at the end of a series of Emily in Paris or whatever it might be, you know, if I've watched it all in one go.
SPEAKER_01Well, the way back into Twix, obviously, is to bite the end off either end and use it as a straw and coffee. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could I could eat any number of Twix that's given that. Uh much to my wife's absolute disgust. Um but yeah, um I think it's it I think one thing that having worked with a few of the uh TV companies um and sort of helped them trying to build their audiences, it that binge model wasn't it it didn't encourage longevity in the platform. People come in, binge, and then you might not see them again in the platform for a little bit of for for quite a while. And whereas um I think all uh execs who work for for the for platforms, whether they're streaming platforms or broadcasters or whatever, they would say they'd like to see people dipping in regularly once or twice a week. That's better, and then it means that their platforms likely to be more sticky in the minds of those people and more of a default option when they turn the set on. Um yeah, so I uh you know uh all the talk this year is about this change in search behaviour and how that's gonna shift the fortunes. But I d I think you know Monxies um uh raising here another really big behavioural shift that will have significant impacts for advertisers as well, particularly because we we we do know that the the sort of that environment that all of this that we're talking about takes place in, where you've got that big screen, shared viewing, sound on, non-skippable advertising experience is a really, really powerful experience. Um, you know, uh and and serves a very different purpose for kind of the 95% of non-buyers versus search, which is uh is changing, but he's much more focused on that 5% who are trying to get something done or in market. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Fantastic. So, Rich, one final question. I was going to ask you a little bit about what you think will be different in strategy in two to three years' time, but I think based on what we've kind of touched on, I'm gonna ask you a slightly different, like final question. What are you most excited about at the minute? What is the thing that is, you know, when you're coming into the office and you're working on something or whatever thing you may be, problem you may be solving, what's the thing that's really making you the most excited at the minute?
SPEAKER_01I uh always tend to get like really excited when I'm working with someone who's looking at something in a slightly different way. Or one of the most exciting uh or interesting things that anyone in the office says to me is when they say, We're doing this, but I just I feel like we've been doing it a lot and I'm not convinced it's the best thing. What could we do instead? Those questions like if you want, you know, if you want me to put down whatever I'm doing and spend three hours going through spreadsheets with you, then that is the question to ask me. Um I really enjoy and get excited about trying to investigate those those questions. Uh I'm also I think it's probably come through maybe in what we've talked about, but I'm really excited about this idea of trying to do more integrated work with creative teams where uh people like myself and and my colleagues can bring to them a better understanding of like this thing that I talk about, the physics, the physics of of ad formats, so that they can be more informed when they think about how they're going to build that story arc and how they're gonna bring the brand into that story arc so that they get in the absolute most because I think there they'll it'll be really easy for us to just very quickly be able to take to clients a numerical improvement in the utilisation of their media. Uh, and finally, the other thing that I'm really excited about at the moment is um is this plural media space. So I know that a lot of people if you've sort of read the stuff that I've written about media in the past, you would say, well, he doesn't like anything to do with social or creators, but I think this creator-led revolution we're seeing in media is really interesting. You know, there's really amazing media businesses getting built on the back of it, uh, including here in the UK, which is great for for our for our industry. And then uh um, you know, the the uh the ways in which brands will integrate into those those opportunities and they'll they'll think about the integrated nature of that plural media space. I think that's fascinating and uh potentially you know a a whole new canvas for us. Well, not it's not new anymore, is it? Like Ricky Gervais was making the XFM podcast 20 odd years ago. But you know, like the the the the mature the as that space matures and we spend more time spending in it, the the opportunity for building brands on a sort of different canvas to the ones that we've had previously is I find that endlessly fascinating as well. But I always say there's never been a better time to be a media planner, despite all of the people who say AI is gonna take our jobs away. I still believe there's never been a better time to be a media planner than than right now.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. It's it's a complex landscape, but it's it's a an extremely challenging and rewarding one at the same time, I think, as well. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming in today, Rich. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. You've got lots of exciting takeaways there and you know, new th new learnings that I'm gonna certainly go and uh dig deeper into off the back of the day. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you, thanks for having me. I say it's a real privilege to get invited on. So cheers, thank you. Thank you very much, Rich.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much, Rich.