The Effectiveness Files: Depop

Peter Semple, CEO of Depop, joins the IPA Effectiveness Files Podcast to talk about his journey from CMO to CEO, the challenge of growing a circular fashion marketplace and their ambition to change consumption behaviour at scale.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

You're listening to The Effectiveness Files and the latest in our series of conversations with the C suite brought to you in association with our friends at Track Suit. For this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Peter Stempel, the recently appointed chief executive of the circular fashion marketplace Deepop. So I want to talk about Depop the Business, Depop the Brand, and some of your recent advertising and advertising plans. But before I do, I also want to hear from you about your ascent into a pretty rarefied club of CMOs termed CEOs. That's a recent development for you. Tell me about your your journey to chief executive because it's it's unusual and it's one that I think people in marketing would love to hear about. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

And thanks so much for having me. Yes, I've recently become officially permanent CEO. And I suppose the journey in summation is some mix of hard work and then serendipity along the way. But I began my career in agencies and was actually lucky enough to start at VCCP, which is now a very big agency. But in those days, I think I was employee 23 or something of what was then a startup entrepreneurial figuring stuff out as they went business. And I look back on that a lot as a really interesting grounding for my career rather than having started in a bigger, more established business. Was there for a few years and then uh moved to New York and worked for the agency Anomaly, which was also in a relatively, it was probably a couple of years old by that point, but still relatively early days. Um, and again, very entrepreneurial, very creative strategy driven, very conviction-led, so tons and tons of learning there. Uh, and after Anomaly, I went to Google for a long time, in New York for the first few years, and then back in the UK for the latter part of my Google career in the creative lab. And throughout all of this, I had done some mix broadly of I sort of grew up as a hybrid strategist and account person in the kind of agency structure. At the very, very beginning, I was sort of an aspiring copywriter because I liked the writing discipline, but I got to touch lots of the bits along the way and learn from lots of different shapes of leaders. At Google Creative Lab, it was a sort of wild, wild and wide remit of marketing, product development, new innovation, taking new technologies to some version of maturity. It was a sort of yeah, wide variety of things and teachings, and my first in-house role and my first technology business role. Um, and I was there for yeah, probably seven and a half years, and then I joined Depop in late 2018, early 2019. I met the CEO, uh, and Depop ended up being this really fascinating culmination of tech experience. They were looking for a CMO marketing experience. The founder had recently left the Depop business and stepped out, stepped out of operations onto being on the board, and he was always the cultural force behind what Depop wanted to be. So they were looking for a CMO who had brand and intent and purpose as part of their core skill set. Uh, and for me, lots of my professional career added up to looking reasonable for a business like Depop, but I had also spent 20 odd years online buying and selling and trading sneakers and streetwear and being part of forums at the end of the 20th century and chatrooms, all of which was sort of a precursor to what a business like Depop is. So when I met the CEO, I think she was excited that I had the professional side and actually my kind of personal obsessions aligned pretty well with a community-driven fashion business like Depop. So joined a CMO, much earlier stage of the business. Post-Series B was when I joined. We went through a Series C raise, fascinating experience for me because I'd never done the fundraising thing before. We went through COVID, which a business like ours, I would say this with a slightly heavy heart given how difficult other businesses and various folks found it, but a business like ours flourished and grew very quickly with things like lockdown dynamics. Um, so we went through this kind of rapid scale growth, and then we were acquired by Etsy in 2021. Um, and throughout all of that, I was the CMO of an ever-growing and ever-maturing business, and that was sort of my part of my remit: was how do we show up in people's lives, but also how do we build the discipline of marketing that we will need as we realise these ambitions ahead. Um, and then yeah, I've been doing the CMO thing for about six years, and our brilliant CEO, not the one who hired me, but the one who came in post-acquisition from Etsy. She has now gone back to Etsy to become the president and the growth leader there. Um, and this opportunity arose for me given my tenure in the business, my understanding of the community, my sort of obsession with what we mean to people and how we differentiate ourselves and bring more people to circular fashion. And here I am figuring out how to be a CEO, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

This um this probably betrays my prejudice rather than yours, Peter, but was there anything you had to prove either to yourself or to others as someone who'd come up through marketing, which isn't always understood fully? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Um yeah, it's been a it's been a really interesting six or seven months of this year since Kruthy, who is our outgoing CEO, now the Etsy president, um, since she sort of got the call to go back to the mothership, which happened at the end of last year, and this prospect of my potential evolution to the CEO role became a possibility. Um, and I think you know there were preconceptions around every discipline and every shape of person in the business. And within our business at least, I was a known quantity, and I have been a vocal mouthpiece internally and externally for the business since I got here. Um, but obviously the kind of connection between brand and the commercial output of the business is one that is contested, maybe overstates it, but hotly debated. And so I think this year I've really focused on, as I had a remit to do in my previous CMO role, but really focused on helping people understand that the skill set I bring and the kind of storytelling and the narrative and the intent and purpose that I want to bring for Depop in people's lives is also directly connected to the commercial growth of the business. Um I think perhaps there's also some bias of, you know, we're a technology company, the engineers are the rock stars, they're the ones capable of building it. Our product, we're a product-led business and product experience first and foremost. Um and I have worked in Google for many years, I've obviously worked here for many years, but I'm not a product and engineering leader per se. So figuring out for myself and then figuring out how to kind of articulate for the business how I bring my expertise and guiding principles and ways of working to help disciplines that are you know technological and and sort of far beyond my own.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

Deep op then. So uh I think most of our listeners will be aware of the brand. Many of them will be users. But just explain in a nutshell the the model um uh and perhaps how big the business has now grown to be.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

Yeah, for sure. So we are a circular fashion marketplace platform, it's primarily app-driven, but also available by web. It is a place where anyone with no barrier to entry can buy and sell fashion from one another. Um, and therefore it's second-hand fashion because it's mostly people selling things they have owned and buying things that other people have owned. Um, we have existed since 2011 and were actually built initially as the sort of e-commerce part of a fashion magazine in Milan. That's sort of the history of the business. And the founder Simon built a kind of e-commerce platform for the interesting people he was featuring in the magazine and the stuff they had to sell. So, really interestingly, we've been very community-driven and personality and self-expression driven from the very beginning, but we've grown into becoming this quite substantially large peer-to-peer marketplace where I think we have about 44 million registered users. Um, there's about 50 million things for sale on the marketplace. We have something like 400,000 new listings every single day. We're active in the UK and the US and Australia, uh, and the US is our biggest market, and also, of course, the biggest market with future headroom ahead of it. Um and yeah, we, you know, as I said, have been very community-driven since the beginning. It's the people, it's the personalities, it's the advocacy that the people have driven for us that have helped us grow very quickly without investing significant volumes of call it money and paid media in ways that other businesses have done to scale across the course of time. Uh, and we grew up, I suppose in the early days, and when I joined, very much focused on being a business where Gen Z, in those sort of early days of Gen Z coming online, they found identity and they found purpose. And we are we have social media aspects to us, but it's social media uh dynamics that can also help you, as I say, buy and sell and find self-expression and this economic opportunity for people who want to sell. And our groundswell of momentum came from being very tapped into and being a space that Gen Z found their own. Um, and our first years of large growth came from that cohort, and the journey we've been on over the last few years is sort of wanting to be the resale space and help change fashion consumption behaviour for that generation, but not limit ourselves to that generation. So, so yeah, it's been a wild ride, and it's uh we're big, but obviously have an enormous ambition to change consumption behaviour at scale. We'll know that we're doing what we came here to do when we are more and more, as we are already, but at a greater and greater scale, convincing people to not buy new fashion, like pulling people from traditional retail into becoming circular and into choosing resale, not just as an alternative, but actually as a primary first destination for fashion.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

Um was that Etsy's ambition, or was it was it a mix of commercial intent and scalability, but also this softer uh community craft.

SPEAKER_02 11:39

Yeah, I think that w what I've loved about this business, and I've I've had aspects in of this in other businesses that our commercial ambitions and our sort of philosophical intent overlap entirely. The bigger we are, the more money we make, the more transactions that take place on the platform, that means we're displacing more and more sort of first-party retail uh fashion choices. So in some respects, I think the mission has always been to be as big as humanly possible, really, and change fashion consumption. Um, as I say, one of the interesting shifts in strategic intent and strategic focus was I think in the years pre-Covid, it actually felt like we could be the Gen Z place and grow up with them and then bring in Gen Alpha and B youth down effectively. Um, but what was fascinating about what we saw in COVID and general consumer behavior and kind of consumer understanding, I suppose, of um environmental impact of things like fashion, is loads of people have the propensity to become circular. It's not like, hey, I'm 43, I'm never going to buy circular fashion. So what we've sort of had to do, and I guess this has been part of Etsy's thesis in buying this, and and and part of learning from Etsy, who have a very different demographic from us, is actually we shouldn't be limiting ourselves to 26 and under. We should be more and more the destination for anyone to go looking for interesting resale and finding great affordable second-hand clothing. Um, which presents, and I'm sure we'll come on to this, an interesting evolutionary challenge in terms of the brand because we were so determined and defined by that youth cohort that we need to sort of consistently perhaps reintroduce ourselves to some people who only knew of us because their kids were shopping on us, and we're now ever more a destination for them as parents.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Yeah, we'll definitely come on to that, but AI. Yes. It feels to me like the the whole industry and certainly agencies and brand owners are moving beyond the kind of initial hysteria around it and actually putting it to work. Yeah. How how is that playing out here?

SPEAKER_02 13:56

Yeah, I mean, I mean, as a as a tech business, I suppose our usage of it will have differed over the last few years from how agencies uh are adopting it and getting their head around it. And we use AI and ML in many, many ways in the improvement of the product experience, and we have you know millions and millions of users that we need to understand and learn about and recommend things to and guide on their journey. So we have a very robust and quite brilliant ML we call them machine learning scientists internally, but a very kind of strong core of how ML will improve the product experience for our users going forward. And then I think the AI thing on, you know, more broader business or commercial use cases, or certainly in the marketing creation and creativity, I think we're still all collectively relatively early in the journey of it becoming a second nature tool that we just look to multiple times a day. And that's you know, certainly many people here do that already, but there will also be some people who aren't yet that comfortable and familiar with it. And of course, there was the early fears of, you know, if I'm a copywriter, do I no longer have a job if this thing can write for me? And I think we're now usefully getting past that fear into a place where, oh, it's a tool and I can jot down some stuff, or as I do often, I ramble in some dictatorial fashion into a uh into an AI assistant, and then it organizes something, and then I have something to start with and work from. Um, so we use it in various ways, some of which are still very nascent. As I say, on the product side, they're very, very developed. I think on the creative side, there are ever more interesting examples and internal use cases of how it has been helpful and how it has helped us move faster or prototype quicker. And every one of those helps the rest of the group who aren't as further far developed with their relationship with it, feel comfortable to try further and to push further and to explore further. Um so I would, you know, we're all collectively still in the early days. I think hopefully some of the initial fear has been dispelled about is it going to debase the uh creative industry? And you know, having still being tapped into some of the stuff that's happening at Google as my alma mater or whatever, of seeing the incredible AI creation tools for video content. And I mean, there's so much that it will it is already and will continue to make possible and speed up and make more efficient in the development of kind of creative marketing. So I think as I think in lots of ways, I think sort of setting an optimistic context and then um trying to dispel myths and fears and replace them with curiosity and opportunism and go give it a shot. How might we figure it out? And if that doesn't work, how do we try something different? Um that's a version of where we're at with it internally here.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Yeah, makes perfect sense. So um home question, brand. Um you've touched on, I think you described it as some tensions within the brand, the different segments that you might approach, the evolution, which is fast, right, from 2011 and and Milan to Des Moines Boise Idaho is the uh boss used to always refer to. Yeah. 2025. Um perhaps tell us a little bit more about that, and also if you don't mind, touching on why brand matters to this business. Yeah, cosmically.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

Cosmically. Yeah, I think um, as I say, this this business was founded. Uh the the founder had a strong eye for storytelling in brand, and that's why he had a magazine that he had founded, and that this was an evolution of that. Um, and I suppose across the course of time, he had a very open mind, and Maria, the previous CEO who he brought in to partner with, they had an interesting open mind about they thought there was something interesting in this space of self-expression, and businesses like eBay had become large and and so kind of multi-category that they'd sort of didn't have any coherent centre, particularly. Um and they saw this opportunity for people to people have stuff to sell, people want to buy from other stuff, uh, from other people. Um, they saw this opportunity to build this different shape of marketplace. And you know, a number of other people had a similar idea at a similar time. There are various other businesses that look like ours. I think what Simon and Maria, the founder and the CEO, did exceptionally well as a kind of definitive kind of brand choice was really celebrate self-expression, and they did it at a time when, as I say, Gen Z were coming online and wanting to shape the world in their image. And Simon and Maria very astutely identified this very early and lent heavily into being the place for this emergent generation who were capable of changing many, many things in the world ahead of them. Um, and so I think when I landed, interestingly, we were community driven, we were youth energy driven. Funnily enough, the sort of sustainable part of it and the fact that we were displacing first-party retail wasn't really, it was sort of a byproduct of the business rather than a kind of core intent of what the brand story could be. Um, and similarly, I think the economic opportunity that comes with hey, you can people can build businesses here. Like that was still relatively nascent. It was certainly being used, but I saw my job when I came here and and when Maria hired me as pulling together the wonderful attributes of an incredibly powerful story and a business that really is well placed to be big and accessible and desirable and approachable and compelling. Um and so the first thing I did was take all these pieces, and I can't take credit for creating any of them, but take all of them and arrange them into a coherent brand story that we could then make sure that the limited money we had to put out to the world was being repetitive in a useful way and was reinforcing, was establishing and reinforcing at every limited touch point we had back then the story of who we wanted to be and what we wanted to bring to the world. And we also used that, or I used that clarity, clarification, and definition of the brand to help teams in a relatively scrappy and a relatively kind of immature business make sure they were all had the same or somewhat the same principles of how to make decisions and where to go next and how to work interfunctionally. So we've always been brand-driven, but in a somewhat organic way. I think around about 2019 we shaped it into here is the brand story, here is the purpose, here is what Depop's special version of resale could be, which has always been this intent of approachable to everyone, but also aspirational, like a retail store you're excited to step into. Um and we built some brand architecture and some brand artifacts. In fact, we published it as a zine in 2019 because that felt like an appropriate format internally to get people on the journey with saying the same things and having the same sound bites of what the brand could and should be. And it helped us focus, I think, is really the like the the long and short of it in 2019. We had taken on some money, we had, you know, people willing to invest in us, we had the opportunity to grow, and you need some direction to make sure you're growing in the right place. So, what is the thing you're actually trying to do for your users or your potential users, and how is that different from what other people may be building in your category around you? And does everyone internally understand what that is and what's Do with it. So Bram was a really, really useful storytelling, narrative, narrative, galvanizing function back then. And it helped us as we then went into this crazy period of 2020 where things just exploded for this business. And actually, we were hiring loads of people to deal with the volume. We were hiring them all remotely. What a wild time that was for us all to have lived through. But we had a strong brand even at that stage, and the people we're hiring were mostly coming here because they understood what we wanted to do in the world and they believed in that sort of brand purpose, and they were interested to get on board and see if they could contribute to it. And even though we were hiring people in various different parts of the world and different parts of the country at random hours and random times of day or night, there was enough common context to give them internally to at least give them a good shot at running forward. So brand has been very definitive, and I suppose as we've the past few years and we think about how the competitive landscape around us has developed, there are lots of other businesses that also offer resale. And I think we have carved out this very interesting space where we are the exciting one to go to. That kind of youth energy carries forward. As I say, the job is almost to make sure that that excitement doesn't make it feel exclusionary to people who don't consider themselves fashionable or overly stylish. But we have a very definitive shape in the world, and we continue to kind of um build credit into that with the activities that we do, and it helps us carve out a lane amongst a more and more um busy resale category. It also helps us um establish ourselves as, as I say, an aspirational alternative to first party retail. I think that we are an experience-driven business. The thing itself that people interact with is is, you know, they there are more impressions served, call it, by people actually using the thing than even at our growing scale of advertising. And so what has been really important for me working with the other leaders around the business is making sure that we think of brand not just as the domain of the marketing storytellers. It is the merchandise that people carry, or the tote bags is a brand thing. It's very much the customer experience, it is entirely the product thing itself. Um, and I think across the course of the kind of six or seven years I've been here, we've been better at times and less good at other times at just making sure that that all is one connected experience that you could call product or you could call brand. They're ultimately trying to do the same thing for people. Brand matters for growth businesses because, you know, especially where the world is now, you can't necessarily rely on having enough money to plaster your name out there. You need to give people something you need that is worth talking about and then provoke them to talk about you on your behalf in order to grow. Um, and so what we were very proud of when we did the I think the Series C raise, and it was definitely part of the story when we talked to Etsy, was we'd actually grown comparatively much further than our competitors had by spending and had spent a lot less on doing so, and we had done that by having a strong kind of brand store uh core and having a very good story to tell, and by activating communities to disseminate the word on our behalf effectively. And so I think the brand thing ultimately is you know, how are you understood as different, how are you memorable, and what do people say about you when you're not there to pay for them to say stuff or for them to see stuff, and that has been, I think, probably the the most incredible proof point of why brand has been so important here is we've grown organically far beyond the means of what we actually pay for. And there are other competitors in our environment who are much bigger businesses than us and do spend lots of money, and we couldn't go in an arms race of spending against them, so we have to find ways of showing up in people's lives without having to pay for it, and having a strong brand and a strong identity, and thinking about the things, the sound bites you'd like people to carry forward on your behalf has certainly been vitally part of our growth so far.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

So tell me, so you said you did a zine in 2019. Um what what other playbooks or methods kind of enforce or reinforce brand understanding in the organization? Because it's a it's a big it's a big business now.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Yeah, um I think one of the wonderful things I learned when I was at Google and and being close to product and software development was this idea of you know nothing's ever finished, it's iterative and it's testing and experimenting and it's always developing. And it when I came here, I sort of wrote this thing about we should think of this brand as truly always work in progress. And I just think that's a pretty good way to think about most things in life, including our own personal development, of course. Um but in 2019, it was a smaller team, I certainly didn't have the means of like developing a fully robust um brand book and reference set, etc. So we hacked together this zine, which included enough artifacts of common language and simple summary, a summary of who we are and what we wanted to be, and that was enough to get people galvanized at the time. I guess in 2020, late 2020, after the sort of explosive growth, and suddenly we had different demographics coming to us that we hadn't quite thought we were the business for, and we had bigger opportunity ahead of us because of our growth in the US. We then did a sort of regroup and called it, I think at the brand, I want to say we called it the brand future project or maybe the brand refresh. But it was about how do we now set the new stage and the new rules of engagement of this evolved version of what the brand is. And there's lots that we carry through, but there's lots we need to newly define because we're a bigger company and we have bigger aspirations ahead of us. And I think in our, in my sort of six and a half years, we've done three of those intent brand refresh projects. And and the kind of always work in progress theory is because you know, users' lives are always work in progress, the competitive set is always developing in our world of call it fashion and self-expression, the things that influence people change shape often daily. Um, and so we've been intentional about spending time and signaling to the rest of the business that hey, the game's changed. Now we're going to restack and re-articulate the principles that will help us take the brand we've always wanted to be forward. And let's look around the room and let's do in the internal roadshow and presentation and things and make sure that people feel and understand this latest version of what the brand is. Um, and I think we'll continue to do a version of that every 18 months or two years, depending on what the growth trajectory is, and depending on how the ambitions continue to expand. And internally, what I continually find to you know is necessary and is less easy in a world where many people come to the office, but we have a pretty significant portion of remote. Um, is you need to think about the artifacts and you need to think about the repetition of just creating even a wonderfully compelling kind of articulation of the brand. It's it's a responsibility to keep people engaged with the brand and where the brand is now and where the brand wants to go tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Yeah, but I love the reminder that it's a shortcut for decision making inside the organization, not just at a customer level, which is again what we we typically default to that understanding of brands as the the shortcut for customers, but it's equally true uh in inside an organization. Yeah. I'm gonna come back to your um cascade of your responsibilities or your concerns at the end, but um you talked about growing organically way ahead of uh what what I interpreted as kind of advertising investment or um at least cost and uh traditional resource expended. Um but you have done some advertising, yeah. So could you just paint a picture of why and when you use advertising and what success looks like? And I'm conscious that may be different across different markets or different moments of maturity, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:35

I think if I if I reflect on my own wonderful naivety when I joined this business, I think I said to the CEO at the time, I never want to make any any ads, I only want to invest in things that are activation and experience and community driven. And um, and for the most part, actually, I suppose in those first couple of years, that was largely what we did. Um but advertising in its various forms is an incredibly powerful vehicle of building brand awareness and building engagement and various things, and and obviously, I think my naivety of just wanting to do experiential stuff was also at a time where we didn't have as many direct competitors in as many different markets, and as the competitive set is advertising and is showing up in more traditional spaces and more visible spaces on a day-to-day basis, then it changes the behavior that you have to adopt to make sure you're showing up for people as well. Um, so it you know, in reality, you know, over the years, therefore, we've we've used advertising in in many ways. A lot of it has been about channels that can help us shortcut to massive new audiences or opportunities for the recalibration, the reinvention. Oh, you thought we were for young cool kids. Actually, this is resale for everyone, and it's exciting resale for everyone. Um, and we've used it probably in relatively functional means. I mean, the subject matter of our business is pretty exciting and people and fashion and self-expression. So even our functional advertising and paid social and PLA, like it's all pretty awesome stuff that people are excited to engage with. Um but yeah, I mean, in the UK where we're headquartered, but as I say, it's it's the US is by far the biggest chunk of our business. In the UK, there's a very tough competitive set, uh, and there are very big businesses that are European based that that operate here. Um, and we are currently running an interesting campaign, which is about sort of going back to the thing that has always differentiated us, which is it's exciting retail and it's exciting inventory, and it has a sort of taste profile that hasn't always been present across other large corporations and tech marketplace businesses. And so there's some stuff running, it's actually only running in in the north at the moment as a sort of geotest, etc., when you talk about effectiveness. Um, and it's very much about finding and the sort of the feeling and the emotional attachment of finding something on a second-hand marketplace, and the you know, like the joy of that, and the kind of exhilaration that comes from there's so many incredible items of fashion that exist out there, and so many ways you can uniquely serve your taste or serve your self-expression. And what we pride ourselves on is both having this cultural energy and kind of taste filter over the way our retail experience is understood, and we also have technologically an incredible discovery engine, which is obviously powered by ML stuff that we talked about earlier. So we're using advertising here to state difference from a competitive set and from larger competitors in this market. You know, in the US, um, there are bigger incumbent players than us for sure, but we're the fastest growing marketplace on the US side. And actually, the advertising there is just it's about scale. It is about getting in front of, you know, we're pretty well established in New York and Los Angeles, but there's a whole load of other people in America who could or should be participating in the circular economy. So our advertising there at the moment, and we have some um a new campaign coming with Uncommon. Actually, we've done our London or our UK work as well. We have a campaign there which is about, you know, this sort of age agnostic resale is a really fascinating, compelling way to think about fashion discovery and fashion consumption. And yeah, there's some work that is is storytelling at the largest scale, too, or the largest scale that we can afford, I suppose is the answer. Um, to get in front of millions of people and and get deep up on the radar and start the conversation with them about who we are, and then we will find lots of activation ways and social ways and influencer-led ways and community-led ways to continue that conversation. But that's sort of how we think about the advertising, there is it's it's the it opens the conversation with new people who've never heard of us or don't know that we could be for them.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

Yeah, well, we'll we'll watch with fascination because it's an interesting bit of sort of clutch control across markets, isn't it? That you your your objects your objectives are different, and therefore your idea and execution is different.

SPEAKER_02 35:19

And maybe actually one other thing, because this might be useful to people who listen is you know, as I said, we're we're presidents in the UK where we've been headquartered for 10 years, growing enormously fast in the US. Um and we're also growing enormously fast in Australia, and actually the competitive context and the consumer landscape is quite different in each of those markets.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

So we love a good geotest at the IPA, yeah. So um indulging our nerdy side for a moment, what's the what's the test? If you see what I mean. What what what what needs to happen as a consequence of that northern burst? Yeah, yeah. For it to be for it to wash its face commercially or be evidence to your to your owners, to your board that that this is worthwhile.

SPEAKER_02 36:05

So in the UK, as I say, you know, there are big competitors, there are big competitors who spend a great deal and have done over years, and as brilliant research from the IPA shows, you know, there is they have unlocked enormous compound effective scale by doing so. At the same time, we have actually had to make the somewhat difficult decision of forever scaling back our investment in this market because we're still small, we're still growing in lots of um contexts, and you know, the decision that I've had to make, and alongside the other executive members of the last few years, is every dollar counts as it should do in every business. And if I invest it here, where we're being outgunned in lots of ways, or I, you know, that same dollar is better invested in a market where we have a clear view of where the growth can come and we can see how we can kind of cut through and bring ourselves to new audiences. So our competitors here have been growing in presence continually, and they have unlocked a scale where so much of that happens for them organic now. We have actually been intentionally retreating to some degree from investing in visibility in the market. Um, and what we've done over the last couple of years is a couple of tests of trying to see how we might win back some of that share. Um, and you know, whilst also largely keeping the largest focus on the growth markets with the biggest headroom. So this this thing in that's running in the north at the moment is actually a you know, it's it's a very sharp differentiation point versus our competitive set. The thing that we hear mostly from user research is that we're just not visible in people's lives anymore. And that's that's physically true. We don't spend very much here at all. And because of that, the organic cycle that was so much part of our growth, like people aren't talking about us in a way. So this piece of work is definitively about impact and cut through and memorability for perhaps a generation who grew up in the last few years and actually weren't on us in our sort of UK heyday, or about re-establishing visibility for people who were like, oh yeah, actually I did use like Depop and I don't necessarily think of using it all the time. So very precisely, this thing is about unprompted awareness. Actually, it is about top of mindness, it's about can we with some very tactical and very sharp messaging reintroduce ourselves into the consideration set? And if we can, brilliant, we can think about how we might scale those endeavors, still within the context of the distribution of the dollars really makes a difference. And is this the strongest place we could be investing going forward? Question mark. But it's the market in which we're headquartered, it's the market in which we still have a very loyal core base. Um, and I do think we have a differentiated product here. So reminding people of that or showing up on their radar is part of hopefully bringing them to us at some point. And we'll learn lots from the work is inspiring and exciting and impactful and cut through, and it's been really interesting sort of seeing the response to it. We'll also likely leverage some of that work in our other markets because we've seen it sort of hit the ground running here. Um, so yeah, let's see whether the unprompted awareness and the consideration set things move in this geotest setup, and then we'll have some investment decisions to make.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

I I sort of want to spend the last few minutes clo closing where we started because um you've talked, for example, I suspect you're quite you've been quite close to that creative development. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 39:44

Correct me if I'm wrong. Well, I would say yes, and I mean I I think what has been really interesting about the development of this campaign, which is something I've had to get my head around both professionally and also personally, is I can't be close to the creative development anymore, and it's no longer my highest order priority. And and so I would like to think that I created the space for this, and I wanted to in you know breathe the confidence into our team to we hadn't worked with Uncomma before, we spun that up pretty quickly. We they have found brilliant ways of working, Uncommon have been a great partner. Um, and actually, I haven't been enormously close to the ideation or the execution. I think the role I've played as my CMO turn CEO is giving them license to be ballsy about here to think about the development of it and to sort of run forward. And as an interesting example, sorry as I ramble on about this point, I as we're doing this work that will go live in America in the next couple of weeks, I actually was even further removed from that process because that was all kicking off when I was fully in the a month or so into the permanent CEO seat. So again, I had a couple of initial conversations and kind of wished them my best and told them that I have faith that they'd make good decisions. Um and at one point I asked to see the first round of creative from the agency, and I definitely don't want to be a CEO, and I've met people like this along the way who feels like they need to approve the creative. That is no longer actually my job, but I'd still want to be a steer, and I have done it for many years and like to think I have some good ideas around the whole thing. So the team said for sure we'd love your input. Um, and they sent me the credit deck, and I didn't open it for eight days. By the time I finally opened it, I realised it had been eight days since I'd been sent it. And it was a really interesting, yeah, I don't know, reflection moment for me that I have great faith they're doing what I don't want to be a bottleneck. They know that they can call me, but if they don't hear from me, they should get on with it. Like that is the nature of the business. Um, but I suppose in those eight days I had just had more important things to spend my time doing, and as I say, it was a real moment for reflection for me because I loved being close to the work.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Yeah, well, I I'm just as curious at a personal level about how you let go of stuff in order to attend to the new to-do list. I mean, that's that's one example, isn't it? The eight days is one example. Are there others that spring to mind in terms of how you're consciously stepping into new deliverables for the business?

SPEAKER_02 42:16

Yeah, I think I think the things that I am working through, and again, this is a work in progress thing, and hopefully, not surprisingly, as I haven't been doing for that long in the CEO role, is I I still need to remain involved in some of those things because actually we haven't yet built the architecture that will follow me in order to continue with the role I was playing on the brand leadership side and the marketing leadership side. And we have brilliant leaders and brilliant teams here, but there's a bit of like, what is a backfill and what is the future of the organization look like thing to figure out. So more and more the the teams and the leaders in those spaces have been running with things over the last few months anyway, and working very closely with our product team to collectively build what they think the next chapter of the experience should be. Um I feel it most acutely on the kind of closeness to the creative side. I realize that you know, on marketing and marketing's kind of commercial impact as a whole. Again, I can't be as close as I was, and I can't be as responsible for measurement and insights and analysis and understanding at the kind of granular level that I would I was necessarily involved. Um and I'm, you know, part of it is thinking about what I have to give up on the marketing side, call it, and part of it is thinking about what I need to quickly learn so that I can apply the things I pride myself with being experienced at and and good at, and thinking about how those work for, you know, I now have a chief of technology who uh who reports to me, and I have worked very closely with product. I've been very lucky to work at Google and Depop in some sense of closeness with engineering, but I have never had responsibility for guiding and giving advice to the engineering leader who sits above our two hundred engineering staff. And so There's relinquishment on one side, but actually, it's sort of what are the new structures I need to build, and what are the new rules of engagement or principles or expectations I need to set out clearly about how my leadership style and how my experience can stretch and can meaningfully impact parts that I am not an expert in, and and how do I make peace with um not, you know, not being an expert. Like the job is not for me to be an expert, the job is for me to create the conditions for success for many, many people. And that was always true as I grew up in marketing, but I was still also an expert at the core skill set. Um, now as I oversee it all, my job is to make sure that people have the clearest direction, they have the clearest alignment, and at a commercial level, I have newfound commercial responsibility to our parent company and various things in a way that I didn't have direct responsibility before. And how do I take the things that I say I feel confident and good at and have been schooled on and have learned from brilliant people along the way and apply those to a much much broader set of um intentions, and you know, it's the kind of like player coach thing. I kind of still want to be a player coach, but ever more so I need to just be the coach because there isn't time for me to attempt to be the player that I have been, as it were. What a weird way of saying it.

SPEAKER_01 45:20

Um I get that. Two two final questions in the spirit of of guidance and giving advice outside your organization rather than inside the organisation. So, guidance and advice for CMOs who aspire one day to more general management and and and leadership, specifically as chief exec, I guess, or whatever the appropriate title is. Anything anything that you would say to someone in that space? Because they tip they typically do hit a ceiling, and the ceiling may even kick in before before the boardroom in some organisations. But is there anything you've learned about how CMOs can equip themselves for more general role?

SPEAKER_02 46:02

I mean, I don't know whether I'll I'll say anything that hasn't been said before here, but I you know I think the responsibility of being a marketing leader is is understanding your audience and knowing what is messaging that is going to be compelling to those audiences, and that is as true externally as it is internally. I think we have a responsibility to learn the languages of the financial leaders within an organization or the technology leaders in order to lean in to their worlds and establish credibility in their worlds more than I feel like they have a necessary responsibility to learn the language of creativity and brand building and messaging. And I'm always in learning mode, I'm always interested to understand. I have no aspirations to be an engineer, I don't think I'd be a very good engineer, but I've always taken every possible opportunity to speak to the brilliant and engineering partners that we had at Google or and understand what makes them tick. And again, maybe that's the kind of empathetic marketing person in me. Um, but by knowing what makes them tick, I can build a stronger relationship with them, I can find ways to connect our organizations, and ultimately that is a version of human-to-human credibility. So um, as I've grown up here, I've just spent time across the business, and I think probably more so than other leaders. Um and so I'm a I'm an understood quantity, and they know that I'm always in learning mode, and I'm very willing to take learning, even as now the CEO, which is obviously a strange construct, from junior engineers know stuff I don't know, or will never know unless I go and ask them. And so that that notion of learning the language and leaning in and seeing it as a core responsibility to build credibility with other other people, that is a necessity if you want to expand at some point beyond CMO remit. And I would just say be curious and understand every aspect about the business you possibly can, because one day it might all be yours to take responsibility for.

SPEAKER_01 48:04

And and finally, you you've worked with great agencies, you've worked at great agencies. Is there a single thing or a priority from either your agency partners or or more generally for the for the modern advertising agency to serve its clients well? What's what's the what's the core skill, do you think, or the core deliverable in this?

SPEAKER_02 48:27

I think we, you know, on a creative agency sense, I worked at creative agencies and then I worked at this creative lab within Google that was sort of a creative agency for Google at times and often our own incubation space for new idea development. Um, and when I came here, I was very intent on building a creative studio internally, so we didn't have to rely on agencies, and also at the time we couldn't really afford to pay agency fees. I just needed people here making the stuff. Um, and I'm a big believer that having an internal creative team is actually a pretty valuable asset for a business because in a business like this, the internal landscape changes so often. You know, it's not just what's happening with the consumers, it's also how are we doing this month and what do we need to like move very quickly on because there's a financial need to, or we have a parent company and their expectations of us, we have a very respectful parent company and they let us sort of perform independently, but there are other people within the business context who impact the things we need to make and our ability to move quickly. And I think what is difficult for agencies trying to connect with tech businesses is nothing's quite definitive, everything is changing all the time. It's very difficult for people external who aren't physically living in here to know what the hell is happening at any given moment, and therefore um at best, agencies really can become this brilliant kind of extension pack for creative thinking and creative execution and strategic thinking. Um, and they have to be very, very intertwined with businesses in a way that I don't think I felt like I needed to in my agency days. It was a sort of different world back there. So I like this idea of thinking of them as expansion packs for who we are, and in order for them to be as valuable as they can be, and I'm sure for them to find gratification in the work they do, they really need to dig into the fact that there are politics and inputs beyond what happens with the marketing client, and the more they can understand about the shifting landscape internally of the business, the better they'll be able to partner and generate ideas. And and then the other, you know, unsurprising bit is there's brilliant objectivity out there. Like I have a great creative team, I have a strong point of view on things, but I spend my life thinking about this thing, not working on other businesses of different shapes and different scales, and that bringing the outside world into, even though I obsess about trying to remain up with what's going on in the world and try and relate that to my teams. We are still somewhat insular because this is the thing I think about 23 hours a day. Um so the more embedded they can get, the better value they can add in an ever-changing landscape, and then they can bring challenging objectivity, and that's what we found with and comma. We've worked with a number of different shapes of agencies for little projects here and there across the course of time in this expansion pack theory versus our or in addition to our existing team. Um, and this latest version of it is is working pretty well, and I really want to build with any partners. I'd like to get to a point where you build long-term relationships because then you'll really understand each other across the course of time. Um, so yes, I hope that's somewhat helpful.

SPEAKER_01 51:45

It is somewhat helpful. I love I love expansion packs for who we are. So I I think that's a great note to end on, Peter. Thank you for your time today. Congratulations on your recent promotion and good luck going forward.

SPEAKER_02 51:58

Thank you so much. And I must shout out the fact that I did my you know, IPA 1 and 2 early in my career. So I'm very grateful for some of the shape that you folks have brought to my uh professional development as well. And yeah, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 52:12

Not at all. We're definitely keeping that in the edit. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Effectiveness Files.