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.
Our shows, AdTalk with Paul Bainsfair, The Effectiveness Files with Laurence Green, Making Sense, New Business Diaries, and IPA On... Talent Matters break down the big issues facing the advertising and communications business.
IPA Podcast
The IPA Making Sense Podcast: Rik Moore
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Rik Moore, Managing Partner, Strategy at The Kite Factory, joins the IPA Making Sense Podcast to talk through how his comedy career influenced his career in advertising, how leaders can balance brand and performance and much more.
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, media, and marketing today, and hopefully just making them a little bit more fun. I'm your host, Simon Frazier.
SPEAKER_03And I'm Molly Bruce, and today we're delighted to be joined by Rick Moore, the managing partner of strategy at the Kite Factory.
Simon FrazierNow, before joining the Kite Factory, Rick held senior strategy roles at Havas Media, WCRS, Engine, and also Zenith, giving him a really unique perspective on the state of play today across strategy, brand, and leadership. Rick has worked with businesses grappling with the same challenge many marketers face today: short-term pressure, endless tools and channels, and the difficulty of making smart long-term decisions stick.
SPEAKER_03We'll be talking about clarity in marketing, why great research is so important, how leaders can balance brand and performance, and what marketers may need to rethink to stay effective over the next few years. Rick, it's great to have you with us on the IPA Making Sense podcast.
Simon FrazierLovely to be here. Thanks for having me. So, Rick, you've had a really impressive career so far. I mean, I've known you for a number of years following some amazing work that you did at Havas, and obviously your managing partner at the Kite Factory, but you've also dabbled in stand-up comedy too, haven't you? Yes. Can you tell us a bit about that journey into comedy and how it helped you to be a better marketer?
SPEAKER_00Doing comedy and me being an advertising come from the same place. It comes from a love of creativity, really. In fact, comedy not working out is kind of what got me into this. Yeah, if that makes sense. I'm really shy. I'm very bald now. When I was a teenager, I used to have this wall of hair and I used to mumble. And I grew up in Lancashire and I just had a thick northern accent and impenetrable wall of hair, very shy. I did a play in six form. I'd always loved watching TV, watching comedy, watching things. Yeah, we did a play, and I it was a Shakespeare play, and we didn't really understand the language, so we played it very broad, very slapstick. And you get a room full of people laughing, and a room full of people laughing because something you did is such an addictive experience. I kind of got hooked on it. I uncovered this little superpower, and it made me feel a bit more confident, a little less nervous. And I went to uni and there was a drama society which was very serious, but there's a comedy review, little small sort of group, and I did five minutes of other people's jokes, and that really got people laughing. So I started writing my own, and then I got into it. I went to Uni in Birmingham and they had a venue called the Joke Joint, which was in the bottom of the students' union, but it was on with the Avalon tour. Avalon, a huge comedy management agency, they started around the time of the Mary Whiteass experience, and then they were the agency who had Newman and Badil, who in the 90s were the first comedians to play Wemvie Arena, and then that started that arena comic, and that comedy is a new rock and roll sort of era.
Simon FrazierYeah.
SPEAKER_00They're still really dominant now. I mean, they do Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It was the huge American thing. I think Taskmaster's theirs. So they're still very much a big force in comedy. But at that time, so we're talking 97-98, they used to run a comedy network of student unions, and it was a good if they've just signed a relatively new act, it would be a good way for them to fill their name. So I was doing lots of music reviews and interviews as head of Music for the Student newspapers. I was going to interview bands, but I knew there would be really good comedians who may not be household names, but I knew they've just been signed by Avalon, they must be good. I should go and interview them. And I look back now on that first season of who I got to interview, because also they're new comics. Nobody's interviewing them. So of course they're up for a chat. So you generally go turn up about seven on a Saturday when they turned up at the venue. You'd have a beer with them, you'd basically hang out backstage all night. You'd just pick their brain. So I'm interviewing them for the paper, but I'm picking the brain. But that first thing, there was the Boosh, Nofield and Julian Barrett, Peter Kay, Robin Ints, Dave Gorman, Chris Addison, and you just sit there and just sponge it all up. So it's all got this unofficial mini comedy sort of degree going on there. And then I just got better and better at my writing. So I started in 97. By 2001, I was national semi-finalist in Channel 4, BBC New Act, and the Daily Telegraph competitions. Wow. I found there was a running trend of I came second to people who came on to be very, very famous. I think Gavin from Gavin and Stacy beat me in the Daily Telegraph one up in Edinburgh. I think Shazi and Merzen might have beat me another one. Right. The best thing that era I have me being introduced on stage by Peter Kay. That's quite cool. That's good to have. That's quite nice. It's on VHS, I need to get it moved over at some point. But then I was like, I'm going to move to London. I'm going to be a music journalist. I'm going to be a stand-up comic. And that's really stupid because they're both evening things. They happen at the same time. So it's not really practical. And so I was looking for a job. And I really wanted something that was creative. And I went to see a headhunter and they were at this job spec. And in the job spec, there was a media planner. I went, oh well, fancy doing that. And they said, no, you can't go into that. It's a grad. Then I spoke to another headhunter. No, it's complete rubbish, of course you can. And I got my first job at PhD, which was great. But then they clocked that I was going out and gigging a lot in the evenings and I was turning up a little tired for work. So they suggested I might want to choose which lane I wanted. So I chose this and took a break for a couple of years. After three years moved to Deneth and Denneth went, Oh, it used to be a comic. We're going to tell everybody about it. Oh, it's going to sound like I'm lying. I'm going to put some gigs in. So I started booking gigs.
Simon FrazierYeah.
SPEAKER_00And then they went phenomenally well. And so I properly stopped gigging about 2010. But in that period of time, 97 to 2010, I would added about a thousand gigs. Wow. So it was good. And the one I always point to, I did the Channel 4 Media Week Planning Awards, which was at the Marquee Club in Leicester Square. This would have been 2006. Alan Carcom Plairin, 20 minutes of John Bishop opening, 20 minutes of me in the middle, 20 minutes of Michael McIntyre at the end. And that is wow. I have the photo of that night, and we'll go, oh, he's not lying when he said he used to go. But yeah. But it was that was sort of my way in. So it's there was a huge period of my career. Well, I was doing like four gigs a week, and currently we're doing my day job. And it got exhausting. I think that was ultimately why I stopped. But it was, yeah, the really interesting worlds to sort of collide with each other. So I enjoyed that.
Simon FrazierI mean, this is a serious career that you had.
SPEAKER_00It was, yeah, it was going really well. I think there were some options. Could have slightly gone bigger. There was one thing that didn't come off. Me and my comedy partner should chat him out, is a wonderful guy called Jonathan Fraser, who's CSO of Troublemaker. We used to have this thing called 80s movie flashback, and there was a point in time when Fosters were going to bring back mid-morning matters. We were going to be like the trailer, like the undercard for Alan Partridge coming back, was going to be us with 80 movies flashback. And it fell through. But the flip side is like the thing with gigging that much, I had no sort of social life. It was just like I'm either at work, I'm off to a gig. And it got really wearing. And the bit on stage is amazing. The bit beforehand, when you just stood around, can sometimes be a bit soul destroying and boring. And I think I'd really struggle now as a parent, being away from my kids. I like the way things are shaken out that I now I got to have a social life, and then I met my wife, and then we have our kids, and I've got that. You can hear me talk about it. I get excited. There's still part of my brain like doing that. I like the performance aspect. The thing I didn't expect is I said I was really, really shy. It almost became like an autopilot. It's like I didn't notice I was making the switch. The standard persona was a lot ruder, a lot brasher version of me, but there were certain things I could take in the confidence and how I carry myself and how I interact with people. Those are transferable skills into what I do now. Yeah. You know, the ability to think on my feet, you know. See, you're doing a new business pitch, you get to the QA at the end. I am so strong for the for having the conversation, being able to riff and talk about those things. It gives me confidence to talk. It helped me early in my career that people could recognise I had no problem standing up. And it's amazing the higher you climb, the more senior people you meet who hate, even people you think would be perfectly at ease, hate talking in front of large crowds. If they find somebody, oh, this person's fine. I'll go, you you go on then. You go on. When you're a stand-up, you're reframing things, you're taking an observation, you're taking something in in the world, and you're you're you're twisting it and warping it and show taking the audience on a new journey. There is a parallel to what we do in terms of you take an insight and you take something maybe people have seen a hundred times before, and it's the reframing of it, the repackaging of it, and putting that out in the world is very similar to what happens in advertising, both from an account planner point of view, from a media planner point of view, or creative, it's taking that new spin and that new journey. And I think that's a really unexpected transferable skill that came into it. So yeah, I'm I dumb luck that those two things happened. But yes, no, it's nice. But like you say, when people go, Oh yeah, do stand-up sounds like a couple of gigs. No, it was a it was a fully flexed.
Simon FrazierIncredibly impressive thing for a period of time. As you mentioned, when you that crossover into kind of your ability to be a great kind of planner and strategist is the line to going and visiting lots of places, you understand lots of different perspectives in terms of rather than just getting in that London bubble or whatever it might be.
SPEAKER_00And think about what the motivations might be. Because it is, I think breaking the London bubble in your head was always a challenge for planners. How much it is in the narrative of the industry comes in and out. I think we're seeing another version of it now with AI. I'm in the school of thought of well, AI's here. If we use it right, it can be of a great assistance. The the analogy I use is AI is like a springboard that can help you jump further. But if you're gonna make the most of it, you still have to make the jump, and you yourself still have to land the jump. So AI can get you so far. How do you, as a human with your creativity, push beyond this? Where can I take this? How can I add my impression? I've been employed to come up with a solution for this. Yeah. How can I make this that nobody else can replicate this? How do I make this my there's a parallel to comedy there, which is how is this? Dave Gorman used to talk about how do I make material that is unnickable? How is oh how do I make material that is only for me? So early on, we were studying for degree in maths at Manchester. So he would do incredibly complex mathematical gags, knowing nobody could rip them off. Because it's a bit of a thing about it, it it's it's the worst crime, you nicking somebody else's joke. Oh, yeah. That was you know, that's you can't, so you have to come up with your own stuff. That's got such parallels where we are with AI now about copywriting and protective stuff. I mean, I was on an APG call, it just was like a wide consultant dial in people talking about the uses of AI, and there's a freelancer, I just remember a saying they have to sign waivers to reassure the employees they will not use AI in the creation of the work or be very clear about how it's been employed. We've just in publishing, there's been a book signed, big publisher, and then they worked out it had all been generated by AI, and they had to pull the book last minute, and that creates this whole debate about okay, that's one side of it, which is AI, and can you put text through AI checkers to see how much it's AI? Adam Kaye, this is gonna hurt, and just got the title wrong, but it's and then there's the children's books he writes as well, which my son loves. He talks about the fact he put his text in and it came out, oh, this is 87% AI, and it's like, well, I wrote it 10 years ago, so it cannot be AI. Fundamentally, the timelines, it cannot be AI. But because big texts like that have been machined learnt off. Right. So I think we're going back to the point about the London bubble and get out of the London bubble, it's very easy to go, oh, I can have synthetic data or synthetic audiences. And it is attractive and it is useful, and there is a place for it. But it's if you take that, if we you lose sight of it and take it as fact, you almost you follow a thread and you let go of that thread and you're just off in this morass of stuff. It's how do you validate it in data you can credibly believe in? How do you take this back? So I always say to people, check, check. You can peer review, you can use your own common sense, you can search on it, but it might be interesting, but don't just go, oh, that's the prettiest thing. No, is this right? Is this correct? And then how do you push beyond it? So it helped me then, back then with getting out of the London bubble and having that geography and thinking about the country as a whole. Also helps when I was born in Lancashire, I went to uni and Birmingham living in London, which is why my accent is a mismash of everything. So I live in South End now, and my next door neighbour, so I spell Rick R. I K. My neighbour struggles with R I K as a concept, so he's just gone with Ricky, which I love that I've moved to Essex and I've got this Essex pseudonym of Ricky. Ricky. You can tap into I I think The Guardian used to do a great series about going up and looking at the politics of different regions and just going and understanding what was going on. And what's, you know, this is the most leave voting borough. This is the most remained borough. Well, you know, what are people's worries? What are people talking about?
SPEAKER_03You mentioned that you were really shy when you're younger. Did you find that you've s had like a very much separate persona on stage to offstage? And has that have you found that your onstage persona has kind of now like converged with and now it's harder to differentiate?
SPEAKER_00100% converged, but also evolved and changed. My 15th birthday is quite key, so that would have been 1994. It was an interesting day, 9th of April, 1994, because we'd know the internet, so news is a bit slow. And French Page News on the day of my 15th birthday was that Kirk Cobain had killed himself.
Simon FrazierYeah, I was gonna say.
SPEAKER_00And I was a massive Nirvana fan, so that was quite bad news to start your birthday off with. And I had loads of friends coming over. It was the first time I'd had sort of sleepover birthday, but I had loads of mates coming over. And I was just really I remember being sat, I remember being impressed and shouting at somebody, laughing at me, looking upset in a nirvana t-shirt. But that night when everybody was staying around, we're sort of, you know, just about to go to bed, and we just I think we'd we watched a film or something on on tell. And I put on this thing I'd taped, which was I'd seen it on channel four, and it was Lee Evans' first hour of comedy. Lee Evans, I know he's retired now, but he was. He I was another person I saw. I remember falling out of my chair in the theatre and laughing. So he was just incredible. And it's our first hour, and there was the social currency that I'd found this hilarious thing that nobody else had heard of. And that was one of the things that attracted me because there's almost a social currency in comedy, you know. I like the fact that I'd wrong footed people who thought I was shy. There was this other side that came out. I mean, it was empowering, it was really good, and it was such a good feeling. And I used to visualize it like a light switch in my head. I was gonna hit that light switch, and that light switch turned me into the comedy version of me. So I used to think of the light switch, which are the two characters, normal me, and then this enhanced version of me. As I've got older, those two have got closer. I think as I've got older, I'm very thankful I've got comfier in who I am on my own skin and the sort of place in the world I occupy. So I don't need the comedy persona to be who I am. There's an interesting thing, when I stopped in 2010, I used it to define who I was a lot. And it's oh, I do stand up, oh you're a standing is a big thing in life, it's quite a lot away. It defined me. So for the year or two after it stopped, that was a real struggle because the thing that defined you has gone away. If you have to ever stop doing what is seen as a dream, it's tricky. I think I found my creative outlet a lot through work, which is really good. There are still some things I play around with, like I've rewritten to your point, but you do increase public speaking, I've rewritten training for our work. There's the principles of what it takes to stand up, and there's a lot of the unsaid things you do when you stand up telling jokes that inform how you present and how you talk in public. So I trained some of that, and I do that for our agency, I do that for clients. That's a nice way for me to do it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Um, Rory Sutherland, you're you're a fan of his analogy of smashing two things together.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's such a good way to think about the world. Yeah. And it worked. The more you think about it, yeah, of course, that absolutely worked.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Rory is somebody you I look at and go, that's a career you want. To maintain the level of relevance, to have that respect. But he's done it all within the vein of a strategist. I mean, yes, he's done other parts, you know, he's been president of the IPAs and he's done amazing jobs at Settle Departments. But to go as far as he's gone within the career line of a strategist, that's very inspiring.
SPEAKER_03We've had him on the podcast here, but we've also had other guests like Mike Follett and Sam Knowles, who also studied well, they all studied classics, but you studied medieval and modern history, am I?
SPEAKER_00Medieval and modern history, yeah, that's right. I was Birmingham 97 to 2000. Yeah. Medieval and modern, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And do you think that there's a thread between studying things like classics or history that would make you a better marketer?
SPEAKER_00Shout out to me alpha. She's called Lydia Martin. She's great, she was a strategist in my team for four years.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, she did a Gen Alpha.
SPEAKER_00She was amazing at the Gen Alpha thing. She's over in Dublin now. She's at World Panel now over in Dublin and moving to research. Fantastic. So she had a degree in classics, and her writing style was amazing, and then she got that great present. Jen Alpha, her present presentation style was fantastic. She was great, and it made me realize she's got a classics degree. And classics and history have that thing where you have to assimilate lots of information and pull it and get lots of different sources and pull it in to write an essay of different perspectives. And also, particularly in history, they teach you to okay, what is the recognized wisdom? The one I always go to is AJP Taylor wrote the definitive biography of Otto von Bismarck. But you've got to go in a lot of the essays, they say, Right, go on, you've got to go and challenge that. Form your own opinion. It's a subject where you've got to form your own discipline. And a lot of it in Unis is encouraged to right, knock this down, knock this over, challenge this, have a look at it. So I think that assimilation of information and framing it into a coherent argument, considering different sources, considering different framings, and then also challenging, you know, what's the perceived wisdom? You know, is there a fresh perspective on this? Is there a stone unturned? That, which definitely is there in history and it is there in the classics as well, brings it together. But the great thing is, whilst that's helpful, one of the things I love about advertising, I say everybody, is it's such a democratized industry. Because no matter what educational background you come from, you bring with you perspectives that other people don't have. Probably you also bring your own personal fandoms and things you're interested in and use of media. So say I've been going 25 years, so what I bring to the table is experience, and there's a good chance I've been there before, and then again, those reps we talked about, that comfort in what you're doing, that's there. But if you're new to the business, yes, you knew you've got all that to learn, but you probably use a platform way more than I do and can have an innate understanding of that way more than I do. And I think as an industry, it's always good to remember to be respectful of that and understand that and use that to your benefit because you can elevate people, you can make people feel good about their contribution from a very quick start. Likewise, you can tap into these rich reservoirs of information. I mean, it's again like as people get older in the industry, they don't get less valuable. Their perspectives are still, it's about how we smash those things together. Yeah, that's when the real agencies, and that's where you have to break down the bubbles, and that's where you have to step away from yeah, it's a London bubble, or it's a 20-something bubble, or it's a centre-left leaning bubble, or it's a you know, it's it's unpleasant. It's un sometimes it's awkward. A political one, for example, is awkward to challenge yourself, but if the prevailing winds of the country, you've got to understand how people are feeling to understand what's going on and how you fit in and what you're doing fits in and how the message you're trying to communicate fits in with what where people's heads are at.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
Simon FrazierAnd and in going along lines, along the kind of lines of talking about breaking down those stereotypes or breaking down those kind of barriers that exist. One of the things that kind of has always struck me about the kite factory, particularly from back in the days when the Mike Colling era as well, and the foundation of Jick Mail, at a time when actually increasingly, you know, it's more the what the industry was very focused on digital measurement. But I, you know, and this is something we talked about with Rory, I think mail is incredibly undervalued across the industry. But I know you guys have done some amazing work. How do you you know what what's your opinion on where where the industry is with mail?
SPEAKER_00I think it's an interesting crossroads where there's lots of opportunity in mail. I mean, so to explain, so my collin company started in 2001. I joined January 2019, about the time they were going through a rebrand, they went to grow a strategy department. And 2019 we became the guy factories. We've been them for seven years now. Mike had built up this tremendous reputation in performance marketing, and it's still it's the sort of chassis of where we are as an agency. We've built lots on and around it and can do lots of different stuff, but there's always those fundamentals there, and with that, it attracted a lot of charities. So it today, Guy Factories 50% charities, 50% of clients in the commercial sector, which is a really interesting. I'd never really experienced charity before working there. I've been there seven years. There are rules of charity, very specific rules of charity. There's some fascinating things about charity that can be very, very different. Charity is an industry where mail has remained and still remains really important. I think the opportunity is there for commercial to do more. So if we use our making sense and go back there. Thank you very much. Yeah. Well, you see mail on the if you break out the case of media and go into the other part of the pie chart, which is the media that kind of happens to you, where out of home is a big driver. Yeah. They on the right and say mail's sort of halved in recent years. But it still offers something fascinating. And I think the fact that there might be less people using it means there's bigger opportunities for those who are using it. Still, it's a thriving industry. I think there are some barriers that newer to mail have to overcome. I mean, there's the simple hard factor print deadlines, which you don't get with digital. You know, the paper stock has to be ordered, it has to be printed up, there's a lead time there, which is unavoidable. There's also that cost, that cost of production. What I am interested to see is all the talk about AI. So I've just a couple of weeks ago I was on the outdoor media awards, I was judging. Oh, yeah. And I had two wildly different categories to judge on. So we had best new approach to out of home and best use of programmatic out of home. And they were wildly different in that the best new approach they There were just a plethora of stories. There was one paper from a company who had used one poster on one bus site for an event and used it to give amazing uptake. And at the other end, there were huge household name brands, mega sort of super blockbuster out of home, but doing it at the most blockbuster end level. So how do you compare? You know, it was really a lot of the judging room is how do you compare the two? The programmatic one was really interesting because there was almost like a table stakes similarity between every single paper, which is this is the data we can now ingest through large language models and pull into particularly the out-of-home industry, it means that it's not just buying media, it's media as a system. You can learn, you can bring these fantastic data sets. It was actually the papers that really stood out were you were then taking that extra leap. And then what was that allowing you to do? What could you do creatively? What were the extra unusual data sets you brought in and did that? So we're all getting re-trained about how geo is fantastic. You see, everybody talk about geographic comments. Well, if we understand geo so well, that surely has to benefit the print medium. There's something fantastically rational and curatable about print medium, and as we get less mail, it becomes more standout as it comes through the door. If you spend the times, it doesn't just become easily dismissable flim that's just littering your doorstep. It wasn't something interesting. And they've curated it and they've thought about the package and they've sent it to the audience. Well, that can be such an interesting media moment. And also that wonderful thing, that media multiplier effect of how different channels play off each other. We talked about in COVID, could you use TV ads to make people care and pull their heartstrings? But then could you use mail to deliver the rational, the follow-up, the justification of what you made them feel? That hasn't gone away. I know we're out of the house at home more than we were back then, but you can still use mail in a really interesting way. And as we get smarter and re-educated as an industry about the power of geographic areas, it just feels I think mail is heading for another resurgent. Creative use of mail to be standout. And again, when people's attention is elsewhere, brands to come in and use that to really do something special. That becomes really exciting.
SPEAKER_03You can sort of just picture how effective like a piece of mail was that actually just looked starkly different from like the other things that come through your mailbox. So you can see that if you were really creative about what you were sending out, that it could be really effective.
SPEAKER_00And anybody listening, the Royal Mail have market reach who look after the mail, and they have awards every year. That's a really good place you want some inspiration about what's interesting. I got to judge on one of theirs a couple of years ago, and it's fascinating when you get into the I'm an advertising geek. That's five that that will probably come out through a lot of what I'm saying. But just the way you people were talking about, oh yeah, we use this paper stock and we thought about this, and we thought about putting the label here, and then whatnot. The level of intricate that real male experts have about what that channel can do and how it can excite and how it can do. If you've got the right data set and you're so targeted on what you want, you can justify spending the money to make that connection in that way. Yeah, it's incredibly anything that physically gets through the door and into someone's hand, that's incredibly, incredibly powerful. As long as it's distinctive. I had an old brilliant phrase, trampled. Trampled versus untrampled trampled would be something that's been sponsored loads. So it's got lots of misattribution about who sponsors it now because it's been loads of different things. That would be a trampled property. Something that's untrampled. So I think male with this this this rich opportunity now, we've got the data, we've got hopefully unless cluttered doormat away from the way local takeaway flyers and things like that, that you could cut through and really stand out, that becomes very powerful.
SPEAKER_03The Making Sense report, that report, which also started in 2019, the same year as the Kite Factory is thinking of. But has there been any other ways that's helped you and informed your work over the years? Because I know you're a supporter.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, no. Well, my and Simon's friendship has forged very heavily over my my love of this report. I I just find it so useful. It's so I know it's generally going to come out round about September. It changes, depends on the cycle. It's roundly a September thing. Media Nations is a really interesting document for just as a sort of temperature gauge from where we are and what's going on. The one unhelpful thing about comm is they sometimes change the what they're looking at. So sometimes you would like to see how a data set continues and it maybe isn't there in the report. There's one I always go back to, which is they've got a brilliant bit of data on average TV viewing by age view split by decade, which still shows that there's 1% of the population on DVDs. But you see the dominance of live TV, it's something that was coming through in the making sense, which is the dichotomy of media, the change between the younger audiences versus older audiences in post-pandemic, older audiences really, really adopting analog channels and still digital is in there. I think the interesting about making sense, there's so many interesting things about making sense, but particularly interest is the just because the younger audiences are more digital, just because the older audiences are more analog, you can still clearly see how much more digital they're getting and how much more analog is being maintained. And the fact we've got making sense going back to that period of time. So you see it in the buildup. Yeah. And because it's built on touch points data, it's so robust as well. It's so good to take that in, you know, with clients and go, look, temperature check, this is where we are, this is what shifted. These are things that stayed the same. There's a huge part of things staying the same, but these are the bits that are moving, these are the things to look at, be wary of. So you can look at perennials and you can avoid writing off channels. You can go, actually, it's their time to shine. Their odds have gone long, but they're really interesting. We could go for them. So making sense just becomes a really good, really robust piece of information that I can put in front of clients and talk them through and talk about the implications and challenge maybe assumptions. I'm very lucky that I don't really have as many clients who talk like that.
Simon FrazierYeah.
SPEAKER_00But it's that ability to challenge, go, no, look, that shifted. That's different. We could do that there, that helps them, that works with that. I'm really, like I said before, the media multiplier affecting the interplay of things and how things work together and how channels work together. And I think taking that thinking owner and shared paid in that order is really good.
Simon FrazierI mean, when we do the Making Sense report, it's a kind of a labour of love in a way, because it's like every year it's really exciting. Because I love the touch point to have worked on it for so many years, and and sitting down and kind of putting it together, and then you kind of get the wafflings of a madman in the narrative throughout it of whatever obscure thing I might have been listening to at the time.
SPEAKER_00No, I love those culture. I mean, they're they're all but I love but also for you, that's got to be good because you know people have read it. Because if they reference back to you and go, I got this little Easter egg, I got this little joke, I love the reference you made here. It's that great because people decide to check the people who've read the rider and are following it to the detail. And you know, because if they're scrimped there, where else are they scrimped? But the you know, the people have made some reference to Melanie C, or there's something that's as unexpected has popped out of it. I love a bit of that. I also love it's one of the great things about advertising is people can turn up and be their authentic self. More and more so. But I think the good place to work fully allow you to do that. So places that allow you to indulge in an interest, indulge a passion, bring that version.
Simon FrazierI love that. One of the things that's quite interesting is that obviously marketing effectiveness often struggles against short-term pressure. Now, what have you seen at work where convincing senior stakeholders to invest in long-term brand building? Because that's that you know, that long and the short of it kind of angle. You know, what would you say is a good way of overcoming that?
SPEAKER_00There's a phrase. Cheryl Calvary, she was my bird's eye client, and she went on to be the CMO and CEO of Eve Sleep, the mattress company, who had a really I mean, she tells she's been a lot of podcast on the story. So she talks about flying, flying during in the run-up to COVID, comfy mattresses doing well. Then suddenly everybody's at home and spending more, you know, a bit more time at home. Let's invest in a nice luxury mattress. But then I think it's the war on Ukraine and gas prices and the start of what became the cost of living crisis. Suddenly, an expensive mattress is a luxury a lot of people are willing to forego. So suddenly, what was a very healthy business, the legs suddenly drop out. She's on this podcast and she's in her usual spirited way, she sort of said, I dare anybody to come and talk to me about long-term brand building when you've got to keep the lights on.
Simon FrazierYeah.
SPEAKER_00And if somebody who's in a business who's been challenging, you know, you've got to manage it and try and navigate the stormy waters. Come and tell me this through every session to Dark Times, invest in brand, which the academic resource says. So I think you've always got to start with uh you're the custodian of this budget, right? You have to help them keep the lights on, it has to deliver growth, it can't just do anything for flight or fancy. But it's grounding the long-term and brand within that lens to say actually investing can really help your business and can show, you know, make a real difference. And I think there's different sources. There's such a wealthy body of academic research, and obviously we sit here in the IPA data bank, therefore, the long and short of it and the work of Binnett and Field have done there, but also with other trade bodies. There's Peter Field and Field and Britain do work with the Advertising Council of Australia. They've got a whole series too, ESOV and Beyond, the Dex A Share of Voice and Beyond, fascinating reads as well. Wherever the data is there to talk about the power of brand and the power of brand over time. And then you layer on uh I don't know, Mark Ritson can be a polarising figure. I I've done the mini MBA and brand management. I actually really enjoyed it. I think he's been very good about talking about the nature of bothism. I think when you talk about the 6040 rule and you talk about long and short, I think the work there to say they are not inseparable. It's looking at 1500 IPA databank studies in 2013. The optimal blend is 6040 and the two work hand in hand. I think that's what we struggle as an industry to step away from. System one did a really interesting update on long and short in 2023, the 10-year anniversary, where they scored ads on how they performed for brand, how they performed for short-term response. And they looked at ads that were short-term ads, could they have a branding effect? And ads that were branding effects, did they have a short-term effect? And what they showed is short-term ads had a minimal branding effect, which they put down to we've become so good as an industry at performance marketing that they are just fully focused on being performance marketing. So why wouldn't they? But if you see, oh, there's buy one, get one free on KitKats, you still go, Oh, KitKats are a tasty chocolate bar. There's a slight brand job there. Whereas brand also does short-term, because you might see big brand ads. You go, well, I'm in the market for that. I need that now. So there will be a short-term response there. But again, that says the two don't work separately, they work together. Yeah. I see it in charity a lot. We talk about legacy. It's one of the things that blew my mind about charities when you get into them is gifts in wills is one of the biggest growth areas for charities. So that money notes bequeathed, I will either leave a percentage of my state or I will leave this amount of money in my will. And legacy marketing is a place where charities moving on as well. But as they look do ads for legacy, so it's a great one at the minute for Oxfam. I didn't do the creative and there's a team next to me work on it, but it is one of our clients, so I should declare that at the start. The creative agency did the work from it. And it's all about staying in the fight. People who would have been going on marches and protests in the 1970s might be old now, but they can still stay in the fight, they can still take actions to do it. Elvis, the creative agency, did a brilliant one for Greenpeace about I won't rest in peace. Very much speaking to the tone of a Greenpeace supporter, very alienating for people who aren't, but that they talk about that. So those sort of campaigns for legacy, because it's not something that you're gonna, oh, that's good, I'm gonna pop out and change my will now. Not gonna happen. It's gonna be a longer burn thing. So there's actually this proxy in charity between the slow burn talking about the mission of a charity that you would take to leave a gift in will with brand. There's this proxy of brand and brand building other side of it as well versus the short. It's about how they work together. So brand, the evidence is there, it can be such an enhancer, it can move things on. So when it comes to talking to clients, I think it's showing those advertisers in their category that have invested in brand, what shifts has it made. Looking at their annual reports, looking at their figures, mapping that against what spend trend figures you can get, add Intel, whatever you can look at to show. They invested here and they're starting to see the return round about here. You set your KPIs in the outset, right? This is the KPI I'm looking at. But it's also keeping an eye on what are the shoulder metrics, how was that main KPI affected, but what else shifted? Was there something unexpected? Was there something we didn't expect to see? And again, this resurgence in geographic advertising means you can do regional hothouses, you can have opportunities to spend it in a responsible way and not a huge amount of money, to prove this has legs, this could work. As long as it's replicable at scale, this could work. So you can start to educate people there. So you start through the lens of how do we keep the lights on, but then show how brand can be the enhancer and brand can build. And it's it's that classic of how do you move it from oh, it's a cost. Well, I've got to pay this much for this to it's an investment. If I invest in this now, I will get this return. That's the trickiest conversation. It's that conversation to go, what am I gonna get for it? What am I gonna get in return for it? Because it's such an intangible until you've started to test it, started to evidence it. But it's finding ways to reassure the CMO and then help them reassure the CFO and executive leadership team that this is an investment worth making, which is the big ass now because it's getting harder. In the economy we're in, we've got businesses who have to take a decision, but it's this investment over doing something else, which is equally business critical. How do you help give them the confidence in how you take and building that and retaining that confidence, particularly in a world where you can be bombarded and you've got so much noise? AI seems to weave itself into everything these days. There's a really interesting article, it was last summer, it was in the New York Times, and it was all about look, here all everybody talks about all the jobs AI is gonna take away. Nobody's really talking about the jobs it's gonna create. And this article suggested there are three buckets you're gonna get, which are trust. So that's the classic AI wrangler, which is can I trust what it's put out? You know, sense checking, just making sure this is legitimate, it's not hallucinated, it's not giving you something weird, it's not just copying something that one of your competitors have done. This is real world legitimate. So there's the whole management and almost like managing teams of agentic AIs, and you're in charge of making sure that what they're putting out is truth. It's the same as you would used to be teams of grads making sure what they've done. Then there's the integrators, the builders, who are taking what's out there and smashing them together to create new things who are very technologically minded and probably have a programming language in their heads can go and do that. The third one, the one I think resonates most as a strategist, is this notion of taste. It's a theme you're getting written about more and more. In the old thing, the strategy is what you choose not to do as important as what you choose to do. Yeah. You again, I've completely got the words wrong in there, but the sentiments, right? Yeah. AI theoretically, you could do anything. In theory, anything's possible. So therefore, how do you choose what to do and how do you choose what not to do? You have to pick a path. You test, you learn, you prove evidence, you prove it worked, and you have to be open to some course correction, but you have to have the tools and skills to find the evidence to give you that confidence, that foundation, yeah, but then the confidence to see it through. And I think protecting people and giving them resilience and giving them the confidence and giving them the social skills to then communicate with people to explain why. In the world of AI, that human plus element of it, yeah, I think that's going to become really critical.
Simon FrazierIt r reminds me of that line from the song The Gambler, where you've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them. Oh, absolutely. Know when to walk away and know when to run.
SPEAKER_00It's like we're in a making sense report right now.
SPEAKER_03It was reminding me of what Caroline Manning said earlier on the podcast, which is that young planners like what she thinks is the most important skill, is having a point of view. Otherwise, you could be just a very expensive Google Sheet, but having that point of view is what's really vital.
SPEAKER_00Huge. And it's something I think we've got to wrestle with now is there's a duty of care. I think we've got to leave the ladder down, and young people have to come in. And again, it's one of the great democratized things we shouldn't be obsessed with university degrees. I mean, relevant university, absolutely they should be valued, but again, shouldn't devalue if someone's taking a different route in the industry, what they can bring to the table. Yeah. But is AI and optimization and is it going to shut down doors? Already we're seeing you know, headlines about it shutting down doors. We have a duty of care to keep those doors open and bring people up. And yes, let's enhance them with what tools will enable us to do, able to do things faster and better. But as an industry, we've got to have the element of succession planning. We've got to have ways for the next generation of talent to come through. Because if we don't have that, we're running into a big problem. I was doing some research for a client on a category. I was looking at um independent financial advisors. And there's an industry that's got a massive problem at the minute, and that a lot of advisors are in the late 40s, 50s, 60s, because they're very good with the money, they're probably going to retire early. So there's a huge sway in that industry, quite close to retirement, yeah, with not the same numbers necessarily coming up through the well, how there's a real talent crisis starting to form in that particular industry. I could see us, if we're not careful, falling into that, which is again, it's why trade bodies like the IPA and things that can protect the wisdom. The fact, you know, you can be MIPA accredited. I mean, those things that protect those skills and can then but set them for the new world. I was talking to my team the other week. I have a PDF of the JWT planning guide, Stephen King, the March 74 one. But there are quotes out of that that are so relevant now.
Simon FrazierOh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00But it's the world around it that's changed. It's the fragmentation of media, it's the rampant change we've seen, which is why documents like Making Sense are so important because they allow you to orientate yourself through that rampant change to go, well, what has stayed the same and what is fundamentally shifting? And it's holding those two thoughts in your head and pulling together, much like you've got to hold the long and the short in your head and pull them together.
Simon FrazierWow. I mean it's an honour even to be considered in the same sentence.
SPEAKER_00Look around the industry. Who else are the guardians of wisdom at the minute in the industry that we're all benefiting and we're all sharing from? Oh, okay. There's some great new trade bodies and great stuff. But you know, you've got to count making sensors up there. Oh, thank you. Well, credit where credit's due.
SPEAKER_03Another area of interest for me at the moment, off the back of the Insight Summit, which we had in March, is stereotyping different age groups and how we need to be a lot better at understanding nuance and especially within older age groups, a very interesting panel that my colleague Sophie led, which basically broke down several myths about the over 65 age group and looked at this is where the biggest spending power is and and stuff like that. But I know that the Cliff Factory has done quite a lot of work with overcoming stereotypes with both the older audiences and then also that Gen Alpha report that we talked about earlier. Is there any advice that you think you could give to marketers about how to rethink how they approach older audiences?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, it's a great question. And it goes back to the points you're making before about how do you break out London bubble. It's part of the art of media planning is how do you step out of your own shoes and understand your audience? I mean, I know you've got a background in point of Simon here, you've got a background in social anthropology. But there's a huge parts of that, that being able to understand and observe and take on board what might be driving people. The best place to start on any brief is think about the audience. Why are they in this category? What are they hoping to get out of it? If you know the goals they're entering the category with, how can you help them achieve those goals? Because you're most likely to get behavior change. It's a big thought, and that's something that came from OK Change and that side of it, that thinking. You know, how are you going to take them to come on the journey with you? How is that going to work? So, how do you get out of your head into those audiences? And I think age is a really interesting one. So we do a lot of work with the Silver Marketing Association. I am in the Silver Marketing Association Hall of Fame. Wow. And I'm so proud about this. Except there's a thing. I'm in the Silver Marketing Association Hall of Fame for my contributions for thinking about diversity and thinking about audience. They're a really good organization for challenging how people perceive older audiences. I first got into it back when I was at Habas, I worked on New Market Holidays, though the sort of escorted coach-based sort of holidays.
Simon FrazierI've been on multiple, because they used to do mirror reader offers, New Market holidays.
SPEAKER_00One of the things when at working on them, you that thing where you get immersed in clients' business is you try and do so. They had a brilliant thing. We went down to their head office and we sat in on a sales pitch from a travel board coming in and explaining to their sales reps what a trip was like, how you might put a trip together. And it was up the west coast of Canada, British Columbia, and that. And I came out of that. I just want to go. I just want to go. That sounds amazing. That sounds so fascinating. Do you ever watch? I love that show Race Across the World. I think season three is the Canada one. There's so many different climates and types. Anyway, it was fascinating. Working on that account, there was a piece in The Economist about how older audiences hate being labelled silver or older. There's a real frustration to it. One of the things I do now, we have this planning guide we put up on the wall, which is what age were people born? What age are they now? And therefore, what was the window of time? They were 15 to 21. Because those are your formative years. Yeah. And that person kind of holds true. There's different experiences, different life things back to it, but that person kind of holds true. So what's going on? But if you do that, it's a really interesting way of reframing how you think about different audiences. I'll give you my mother-in-law is in her early 80s, but in the 60s, played bongos in a band. Brilliant. My mum and dad are in their mid-70s. My dad took my mum on a date to a jazz club to see Black Sabbath. So, you know, you could say, oh, that person's 65. And that sounds a big number, but 65 by the dates. They were watching Star Wars when it first came out. They were the original punks. It's a really interesting way of framing those audiences. And it's a big risk we do is we write things off looking for the new, looking for the next. And it's a big thing, you know, you can say, oh, it's the over 55s. That's useful in a document like Making Sense, but as you get into further targeting, you do need to understand there are several, there's a lot of baby boo. Is in there, some of the second generation. There's the upper part of Gen X now. You've got to understand, okay, what's their motivators, how they're driving it. If you can go and meet them as they see themselves, but also not oversell them and go, Yeah, it's all models and people who are clearly 20 years younger dressed up to be. No, it's not that. But also, it's not all funeral planning. Like I said, there's got to be and I think that you see brands really well. Holland and Barrett's been doing great work. People are able to reframe it and bring it in. So I think it's just that challenge back when you're thinking about how do you how do you step out and address the audience of any brief? Going back to that Stephen King planning document, every brief demands you to have innovation. I went to a great talk with, I think something that really took with me, which is the role of the strategist is to be excited about the brief.
Simon FrazierYeah.
SPEAKER_00No matter what the product, get excited. I mean, I remember a brilliant one. I had a great client at Birdseye who had a brilliant, it was called Will, and his job title was head of side of plate. What a job title. Tremendous job title, which basically meant he looked after frozen peas and anything that was in that brain. He left and he went to Gardman Birdseed. And we had a good relationship coming up on Gardman Bird. I remember everybody laughing. Oh, I've got this birdseed. What? Go on. No, no, no. You can something you lock into. There's a thing about we go into this thing about birds. Birds are in every part of life, but the amount of things into culture be it place names, street names, football club logos, it's all part of it. And if you can tap in, you get to really interesting places. And I think that's the strategy's job. How do you get excited? How do you look out for it? And one of the places that has to start is the audience. So if you can be more inclusive about your audience and think about how you bring them in, if you can use new AI and to find new tech and new ways to connect with them. But it should always be about who you're trying to connect with at the bottom. But if you can connect with them and show you that the thing you're promoting meets the need they have, that's a really interesting way we stay inclusive and bring different audiences on.
Simon FrazierFantastic. That's made me feel very much more positive about, you know, especially the world of AI and everything. And just, you know, that's I think that embodiment of what you just said there is really yeah, is really the fundamentals of white of what the industry's all about. But something that I guess we don't really know until somebody explicitly says it as well as you did this there, Rick. That's very, very kind of you assigned it. No, it really makes me feel positive. So, what's one belief or habit you think that marketers should urgently challenge to stay effective for over the next five years?
SPEAKER_00I think we need to challenge how we learn and be open to learning. And I think that's the best chance for success. And the examples I always give is Madonna and David Bowie, who are people time after time could be shape shifters, could learn and move and melt the style without losing what made them them and what made them popular, but could adapt if that's how you get longevity, that's how you get career. So I think from a staying employed point of view, that's really important. But I think as we're faced with such change and such rampant potential change, I think it's be open to learning. They're not setting a ways that you're not so immovable that you don't listen and don't pay attention on one side. Another side that you don't become so fearful of it that you fail to move forward and get caught out. Going back to that point of confidence, how can you fuel your learning that you've got confidence to navigate it and go forward? Because whilst there's new techniques, new ways of doing things, your expertise and your experience in navigating it is still relevant. I mean, I know the AI is getting more and more powerful each time, and the capabilities are truly head spinning. The reassuring thing is I was at Nudge Stock. Oh my god. But they had the head of AI for WPP, and I found it very reassuring the fact he said, look, if anybody tells you they can see more than five years in AI, they're lying because we just don't know. Yeah. But if we could, if we can stay open to ideas that we are not losing sight of the fundamentals, the strategy, tactics, the fundamentals that are in the JWP planning document, the stuff that's in Binett and Field, we don't lose sight of that. But we are open to taking on board new things, new perspectives, new ways of working that come out of it. I had a nice moment of realization that just because you haven't learned something doesn't mean you missed the window to do it. You can learn something at any time. So I had this part of your subjects at school. I chose German instead of art. And it's always been a bit of a bugbear. Should I have done art? Because I really did enjoy art. Should I do how much has German really helped me? But I've started just doing art and I find that one of the most healthiest and loveliest things. But I'm beginning to do this thing that my brain said, Oh, you can do art because you can do art GCC.
Simon FrazierYeah.
SPEAKER_00No, but I can still go and do it and enjoy the act of doing it. And I think if you've got to do you've got to stay that sponge, particularly for strategists, I think you've got to stay as sponge to because things outside of work, your passions, your hobbies, things in culture, if you can turn up for work in an authentic way and you can bring them into the work without crowbarring them in, but finding ways as they sit alongside your other stuff, whilst being open to stepping outside of your own shoes, your own bubble to bring in other people, but be alive and be aware of the learning opportunities and new things and new perspectives you can bring in. If you can be that melting pot to bring all those together, that is how we stay relevant and employable, both to our agencies but to our clients. And that's a really important thing going forward.
Simon FrazierAbsolutely. And such a positive and inspiring message there to close on. Well, Rick, it's been fantastic chatting to you today.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I've had a great time. I'm definitely gonna embrace my inner David Berry for the future. I love that.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm leaving, I'm really excited after this. This has been a great day. So I was doing this speech this morning to kick off a day we're having as an agency. So we're talking about what creativity means to me. Yeah, yeah. The energy levels were not as high as I would want. But we had a really good, it was a good session, and I think it landed well. But this afternoon, my colleague Gabby has done this improv workshop course, and she's invited one of the course trainers in to do an improv session for our people. Which I think for the first five minutes is going to be a hard sell. Yeah. Because the whole room could go, no, thank you. We're not interested doing it. But I I know in our lot, I think they'll come on the journey. I think it'll be a really it'll be a really interesting afternoon. It'll just open people's heads up. I think that's staying curious and being a sponge. I think that as a strategist, to your point, how do you navigate the next five years? Be a sponge, be curious, be interested, both for the briefs you get and for what's going on in the industry. Perfect. Well, lovely to see you, Rick.
SPEAKER_03Thank you very much. It's been brilliant.
SPEAKER_00Cheers.