Dose of Reality - Mark Hadfield and James James Addlestone

The market research forces a choice between speed and depth. Qualitative research is deep but slow, bespoke, and expensive to scale, while quantitative segmentation builds simplified models that brands mistakenly treat as exact reality rather than a starting point.

Dose of Reality positions itself as the bridge: instant access and deep human context.

Brands hide behind data to survive a culture of short-termism. 

Three dynamics drive this: executives paralyzed by fear of making the wrong move under short-term KPIs; data used as a defensive shield to justify decisions rather than a window into real behavior; and agencies telling clients only what they want to hear, creating a race to the bottom that degrades creative work. 

On top of that, the ad industry romanticizes a narrow, curated version of culture.

Real strategic advantage lies in the messy, unglamorous realities of everyday life, not polished inner-city aesthetics.

Synthetic AI respondents don't generate net-new insight; they recycle unvalidated stereotypes. Trained on things like internet forum posts, they echo and reinforce existing internet stereotypes while missing the texture of real behavior.

Algorithms can't capture physical space and stakes — the nervous body language, the context of a room, why the door gets closed during a hard conversation.

The "90% accuracy" trap: AI may predict ~90% of consumer responses by mapping predictable baseline demographics, but that 90% is table stakes. All competitive advantage, whitespace, and creative inspiration lives in the surprising, illogical 10% that models can't predict.

Traditional data measures binary answers and misses emotional intensity — the "Brexit effect," where polling missed major shifts because it couldn't sense the undercurrent that deep conversations detect much earlier.

Dose of Reality is a subscription platform giving brands and agencies on-demand access to thousands of hours of real, unfiltered human video, images, interviews, and observations, replacing the old bespoke, slow, cost-prohibitive ethnography model. 

AI's proper role here is a sparring partner, not a synthetic generator: custom AI layers search, organize, and navigate massive multimodal human data to surface real truths faster, never to fabricate insights or fake humans.

Genuine research requires genuine empathy, which can't be coded. 

The ultimate synthesis: moving brands from cold, metric-obsessed transactional entities back toward "brand benevolence," genuine utility and community support, the kind of brands that actually matter to people.

https://doseofreality.fyi/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to um Inspiring Futures. My guests today, Mark Hadfield, James Adelson, co-founders of Dosa Reality, a newly minted organization. Welcome to the pod.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Thank you so much. Great, great to be here and great to chat, Ed. Mark, I would say great to chat to you, but um we we chat far too much. We chat a lot, yes.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Yeah, I'm sure. Um so do you want to each of you go through, tell us a little bit about yourselves, what dragged you to this moment in time, with you know, without going through the exhaustive detail of primary school? Yeah, sure. I mean, Mark, you go first.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Yeah. Uh so I once started my primary school, uh, which was in a small town in the northeast of England called Hartleypool. Uh, but essentially my background is advertising strategy. So I've worked in advertising strategy for 15, 20 years in London, uh, in the regions and inverted commons across the UK, and then also in Asia for five and a half years, whereas the regional head of planning for Iris across AirPac. Moved back to the UK just before COVID and had this burning desire to essentially want to get closer to real people. Throughout all of my time being an advertising strategist, lots of trendy research decks kind of hit my inbox that looked nice, were designed nice, had the cool kids in it. But actually, when I was opening my front door in London and Singapore and Bangkok and Delhi and Sydney, it didn't really portray what I was seeing. So when we moved back to the UK, I worked with a creative agency for a small amount of time, but then set up an ethnographic research consultancy, which essentially is just to try and deliver reality to clients. That's been going great for three and a half years now, continues to go great, which is brilliant. And it's a fairly traditional boutique ethnographic research consultancy where clients reach out to us. Clients can be creative agencies or media agencies or brands. They ask us to look into a particular area, we go away and we do it all around the UK, and we go back and we debrief them. And then a while back, I had an idea on a slightly different business model uh on how to deliver reality to clients in a slightly different way. Because I noticed some issues and barriers to purchase with traditional kind of ethnography, if you if you can call it that. So started chatting to James, uh, who brings a kind of yin to my yang. Uh, and yeah, I guess the rest is history. And very recently we we launched Dose of Reality, which we'd love to talk to you about. James, do you want to talk a bit about your background first?

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Yeah, I mean, my I did I did economics with behavioral economics at uni. So there's two things I was really interested in. One is how the world fundamentally works, um, which was why I enjoyed economics, and one is people and people being instrumental to how the world works. And then my career was very basically using data to understand people. And uh I think one of the things I don't want to spill speak ill of Deloitte, but one of the things that you get drilled into at Deloitte is you can answer how the world is working through data, more or less. Like if you're entering a new market, how do you understand the size of the market, help businesses make better decisions based based off data? And as I've gone through my career and spent more time with people like Mark, and most recently, especially Mark, uh, I've reached a point where I guess I've become less uh less of the belief that data uh gives you reality as as much as gut feel, um and gut feel probably being the wrong word, but as much as speaking to real people and basically getting in touch with data that you just can't access through on on mass through the likes of polling. Um so when I've worked with people like Mark, I've kind of realized that actually you need a lot more richness um than just a data professional sat behind a keyboard and too many decisions are made purely off data without really understanding the people. And um Mark and I work really nicely together because we're approaching the same question, really, which is how do we understand people better? Um I think data is one of the many lenses to get there, and that's my specialty. Mark thinks uh um spending time with real people and getting deep into their skin is one way of doing that, as well as as other ways, and and we we work together nicely, I think. I hope. Um and I now I left Saxon Sachi two months ago. I was head of data out of Saatchinsachi. Um and I left during Dose of Reality to work with Mark on something really new and exciting and a bit scary.

SPEAKER_02 4:19

Yeah. So kind of what's the what's the business idea behind Dose of Reality then in terms of how you're gonna deliver in a in a I guess it's more user-friendly way?

SPEAKER_00 4:30

The insight. Yeah, I mean in in a nutshell, um Dose I'm I'm happy to get I've been I've been saying the same line for the last four days, so um I've been at a few events. So um in a nutshell, Dose of Reality um is a subscription platform um that gives agencies or or or marketers um access to the hundreds to be thousands of hours of of real people's lives on on tap. So uh all the stuff that Mark does amazingly well, um going into people's homes, really understanding, getting under their skin, we're proactively collating that content um and then giving agencies and brands subscription access to access that instantly on tap. Um we've got an amazing developer working with us um who's already developed an MVP um using AI, you've got to say using AI these days, but genuinely using AI and using it in a really clever way, not to make anything up, not to be synthetic, but to just help you access the multimodal data, the the videos and images. Um so you can go in and ask ask the deep questions that Mark tries to answer every day. Um, why is it that people show me pictures of people's cupboards and fridges and explain to me why people have both Liddl and Waitros on different shelves in the fridge? What do people really think of Andy Burnham? That's maybe a more of a UK question. Um, although I hear Donald Trump's taking a recent interest in the guy from a small town in the northwest.

SPEAKER_02 5:48

Um yeah, it's actually it's it's actually pretty interesting. I mean, obviously we've got our New York mayor, we've all got we've got our own move, our own radical moves to the left. And it's it's beyond well beyond New York now.

SPEAKER_03 6:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Um I guess Trump's thinking, oh god, I hope that the same thing isn't gonna happen in in the US that it's happened in the UK. Mayor uh gets bigger boots.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Yeah, well, he's definitely on track because he's one of the most charismatic uh individuals on the left. So uh it's interesting because um it's quite kind of timely. I was watching a video made by two journalists at The Guardian um who went up to Macerfield, and I thought it was one of the best pieces of journalism I've seen for a long, long time. Um they actually sort of embedded themselves in the community, got invited to parties, um and just really, you know, instead of just sort of being that um aloof you know person who was trying to learn things on a superficial level, they sort of actually made connections, and it was through those connections that you started to understand. And I thought, and I other thought the other thing I thought was really brilliant about it was that um they showed the kind of yin and yang. I think like I think one of the things that's so uh it's such an issue for clients, I think we've got this problem with clients, and it's probably like a universal Western problem with clients, which is they're living the bad news and they only want good news, they can't deal with the bad news, even if it is reality. Yeah, and so without any optimism or shine a bright light, you know, they feel somewhat like what are we supposed to do with this?

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Yeah, sorry, James, I was just gonna say, I mean, on that thing about The Guardian, I I I know the piece you're talking about, it's brilliant. And and for me, the best research is part journalistic, part research, part ethnographic, part documentary. Because you you're getting close and deep with a range of people, and and and you know, you've got to look at kind of bias and you've got to look at editing, and all editing is bias and all and all the rest of it. But one of the things I really love about what we do is we spend depth time with real people to try and understand their views, behaviors, attitudes, and that unearths real humanity. And and we talk James and I talk about this a lot. It's like real human beings are complicated, they're contradictory, they're messy, they say something and do something different. To your point, Ed, clients kind of don't like that, right? And and some agencies don't want to deliver that. Agencies that I find some of the less strong agencies, the client pleasers, want to give a client what a client wants to hear, right? Keep everything nice and smooth. Clients want to hear things are getting better, and people are being more optimistic, and you've got your seven clear segments, and they'll never overlap, and segment A will always act like segment A, and segment C will always act like segment. That's not how human beings operate. And actually, what we find, what James and I find is the best clients are the either the people in the agencies or the people in in brands who are willing to call bullshit on things that they're willing to actually say this isn't real life, you know, real life is a bit more like this. Now it might be difficult for us to deal with that, it might be a bit more complicated for us to extract a simple strategy from that, but that is reality, and that's where we need to start because otherwise it's basically just the emperor's new clause. Everyone's just fooling each other, and nobody's willing to kind of speak up and speak the truth.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

Yeah, and I think it's interesting. I think there's a lot of like thinking around the sort of uh aspirational gap. Like, so you're you're portraying kind of a world that is actually unattainable, and the more you do that, the it erodes trust to totally. Yeah, eventually this thing kind of collapses to the point where it's like brands become interchangeable and no one trusts them.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

And and and everyone looks the same because everyone's saying the same, and that the kind of the codes of advertising are the same. Aspirational marketing is something that blows my mind. There are brands that you know I'm not saying every piece of communication should be a window to reality. I'm not I'm not saying that, I want to make that clear, but I think you've got to start your research there, you've got to start your thinking there and then decide creatively where do you want to go. But I think even from a research point of view, there are too many brands and too many agencies who are happy now to have a very, very curated sense of research that helps them deliver a piece of work they want to deliver. And the what one of my bugbears is the word culture. It's like agencies love the word culture. They wang on about the word culture. Now, culture to lots of agencies is the cool kids, the cool in the city kids doing cool, cool things in specific sports and specific kind of life areas. Yeah, culture is a much wider thing, right? And and culture touches single mums in Rotherham and it touches single dads in Hartlepool and it touches blended families in Portsmouth. You know, but it's very rare that brands and agencies actually want to touch that. It's not the kind of culture that they want to work on. So you end up with this really kind of culture with an asterisk, right? Yeah, yeah. But you you end up with this really curated sense of what the the culture is what they define because it makes them feel better about themselves a lot of the time.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Yeah, it's interesting. I think going back to the um to add to what Mark was saying about the challenge of simplification, and I think this is especially true from a data science perspective. Like our job is basically, oh, there are 70 million people in the UK, 350 million people in the US. How do we understand them as quickly as we possibly can? And like literally the job of segmentation is to simplify and build stereotypes of different audiences to try to people in boxes. Yeah, that that's what that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to like turn how do we turn these 70,000 data points, like arguably like millions of data points a day in theory, into boxes that somebody can understand and build a strategy around. And uh the reality is every individual is too complicated to understand. Like I don't understand I don't understand my own decision making or my my children's decision making because it's emotional ed difficult to get to the bottom of. So how can you possibly understand 70 million people simultaneously? Obviously, you need data as one of the lenses to do that because otherwise you how can you have even a starting point? But you do also really need the depth, um, because otherwise you're missing 95-99% of what makes a human a human. Um yeah, and I think I just think there's a big danger of us relying too much on building simplified models, and then there's like a there's a really good line. I'm gonna really misquote this, it's it's horrible, but it's like whenever anyone is trying to create new laws or trying to understand how the world works, the first job is to create models that build off simple assumptions in order to be able to understand how you can then apply that back into the world, whether that's genetics or whether that's physics, that's that's fundamentally what you need to do. And then you need to apply your new thinking to see if it works. The problem is what we get into a space of doing is simplifying the world, applying our thinking, but then forgetting to sense check it, and then you end up in a space where you've simplified and then built everything off the simplified model rather than remembering that the only reason you simplified was to try to understand rather than to action.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I I I was um I'm also interested in this idea that it goes back to like the trust is broken on multiple dimensions. And uh we're we're such a sort of performance-oriented business environment right now where like data is to performance, right? And uh, I mean, I had people tell me in the last few weeks that they don't want to do any blue sky research projects because they're just being measured by KPIs that are all about getting customers through the door and they don't think long term, they don't want it, they can't afford to think long term. Yeah, so that's kind of crazy. And then I've heard someone say, well, well, consumers lie to us because we get them in a room and they say one thing, and then we look at the data and it says another. And so we don't we're not gonna bother to even go talk to them, we're just gonna rely on the data.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

Yeah, I I I've got I I want to jump in here because this stuff gets away out. I mean, I've got two points making. The first one is I think there's a hell of a lot of fear in the industry at the moment, a lot of fear. The impact and disruption of AI, yeah, you know, nobody really knows what's going on with the economy, you know, quarter to quarter shifts, yeah, you know, the holding groups are are running scared, kind of frantically reorganizing. So there's a lot of fear, and and and I I I often talk to like to our clients about clients are looking for a piece of data or something that they believe is solid to make decisions based, like to make decisions based on, so that if it doesn't work, they can point at the data and say, Well, the data told me to do it. It's like nobody ever, like, nobody ever like uh kind of um bought an IBM, the I the IBM quote. Yeah, yeah. I think so there's a lot of fear. Now, again, the kind of research we offer, I believe, is self-selecting. And I would I would say this, I'm biased in this, but I think that the kind of research we offer is self-selecting to what I call the smartest clients, of course. Because the smartest clients, I think, know the data will only take them so far. It's very beneficial. AI is very beneficial, but but in an industry that is paralyzed by fear, you need to be different somehow and you need to think of something kind of real and rich. That's my first point about fit fear. Um, the the the second point is to your point, Ed, about some clients who basically want to strip humanity out of the whole process, right? So what what it's a it's a business, they're developing a new brand, a new product or service. Uh that they're paying agencies millions of dollars to come up with a new brand proposition, to come up with branding, develop the brand, all of that kind of communications. And they have the arrogance to not even ask real people questions about that opportunity, that product, brand or service. I just think it's it's arrogance on an industrial level, right? And and these same people will be sat in a room in six months' time looking at a chart saying, right, how how are we performing? And they'll have a brand love metric on screen. So they want people to love their brand in inverted comments, yet they couldn't be asked to talk about them when they were developing the brand. It boils my piss, it really does, right? Because I just think it it it it goes up to an existential level for me, right? You're sat in the US, we're starting the UK, we're two of the most divided countries on earth at the moment, pretty much 50-50 down the middle, right? And one thing that helps to kind of bridge that divide is communication, it's talking to each other, it's spending time with each other, it's not just looking at the other on social media. So I think businesses have a real role to play in speaking with people, trying to understand people, yet when it's so performance-driven, to your point, is A, I think that's a it's a red herring because businesses grew and developed, right, before AI existed. Businesses grew and developed before big big data existed. So I think it's a red herring. But the second thing is I actually think they've got an obligation to speak to real people because if big businesses don't speak to real people, how the hell are we going to heal the massive rifts that we've got in society?

SPEAKER_02 17:25

Yeah, I think that's I think it's really, really interesting. So I've got like that just leads to a bunch more questions. Um really good point you made was about self-selecting. And I know we don't want to put people in boxes, but what are your characteristics of those self-selectors, you know, that seem to uh get what you do and want they seem to be a certain breed, right? How would you how would you just describe them?

SPEAKER_01 17:56

I'm happy to go again, James, unless you would like to. Uh I I think it's the the people in meeting rooms who have the confidence to put their hand up and say, This is all great, but I think we're missing something, right? Because most agencies and most brands have have very similar data sets, right? They will buy subscriptions from the same companies, uh, they'll track the same metrics, uh, that they'll run the same focus groups, right? They've got roughly the same stuff. The kind of clients that kind of attracted to us are the ones that say, but that's only taking us so far, we need something different. And it's the kind of clients that I think have got the confidence to say, I want to blend our AI, I want to blend our big data with true humanity, with how people really, really act. Uh and and that and it's not in replacement of, you know, ethnography does not replace big data, big data does not replace ethnography, et cetera, et cetera, right? These things are they're complementary and they're kind of that the multiple they multiply each other. So for me, it's it's a client uh that has the confidence to say, this is all great, but I think we need to go deeper, and then have the confidence to say, we want an indie chat to a handful of people. They they don't need to be statistically robust, which I know James will come on to. They don't need to be statistically robust, but we need some depth that goes beyond a claimed survey or a piece of AI that is scraped Reddit, right? We need some real humanity, some real behavior, some real contradictions, some real tensions, some real feeling and emotion from real people to go along with that. And and like I said, that tends to be in agencies and in brands as well. And that they tend to be the minority clients, they tend to be more senior because maybe they've got a bit more gravitas, they've got a bit more confidence, they back themselves a little bit more. I think it's a bit more difficult for more junior people to do that, and and I kind of I empathize with that. But I think it's the clients that that recognize that the data and AI inputs they've got will only take them so far and they're missing something. And they put the hand up and they say that and they push for something. James, do you want to touch on the statistically robust things? We've had good conversations about it.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

I'd love to I thought I'd say one thing before I do, which is what is a really good point, Ed, that you made as well on short-termism. I I genuinely do think short-termism is probably potentially the single biggest root cause of issues pretty much in every domain, um, from politics to everyday life to our own health. Like, I think we're becoming increasingly focused on the short-term. And it's not like I'm a big fan of data as being a way of understanding progress. And like, we have to find a way of you know, we've got to build towards something, you've got to have a some way of measuring whether you're doing the right things or not, other than just gonna feel um, and data is important, but to your point, how do you understand what the trade-offs are between short-term metrics and potential long-term metrics? Um, how do you understand, you know, yeah, 3% of people clicked on the ad, 97% of people didn't, how has our ad affected those people? Um, how do we start to understand long-term uh dangers of discounting, for example, which is a real short-term, short-term thing. So I think I think that's I think there's a big thing around how do we get people to think more long-term. And it then to add to Mark's point, I think the kind of client in general who I think we're having really interesting conversations with are people who probably care. And I I think there's a real and I'm probably speaking slightly out of turn here, but I'm gonna say it anyway. Um, I think there's a real danger that we stop caring about how good a job we're doing, and instead we care about whether we have good relationships with clients. So, like success, uh, there's so many times that I've come out of meetings with colleagues and they said, Oh, that was a really good meeting, the client really liked what we said. And I'm kind of sat there thinking, yeah, but have we actually made a positive impact from that meeting? Have we changed their decision in a positive direction? Or is it just that we think it's a positive workshop because they really like us and they're giving us high fives and bringing out the drinks later? And and I and that's for me the difference. Did we ch did we challenge them? Yeah, did we did we? Sometimes you have to have a bad meeting.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Like sometimes you have to have a bad meeting to have a good long-term relationship because otherwise, how you yeah, like you don't make as you said, you don't make any progress if if you do that. So yeah, I think that's I think that's really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

I think it's I think it's a I think it's a race to the bottom, isn't it? I was always taught in agency world, you do what you think will help the client achieve their communications, marketing, and business objectives. And start from the top if you can. I was always taught taught that. Now, sometimes that means in the short term, you ruffle a few feathers, but as long as you're aligned with them and they buy into you that you are helping them achieve their objectives, they should go on that journey with you. There's a whole bunch of agencies that have always existed and they always will exist, which client pleases, but it's a race to the bottom, and it'll kill the industry because if all if all you're out to do is to please the client, they can they will they can get AI to you. They're interchangeable, you're interchangeable totally.

SPEAKER_02 22:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think I I and they I think the industry's finding that out right now. I mean it it's it's it's definitely it's definitely happening. Um the other thing I think for me is like I'm more I'm always been interested in sort of the archaeology of brands, like going back through history, you know, to understand where they started and why they existed. And there's always a good there's always a benevolency at the beginning of the history of a brand. And I know you know, look no further than Cadbury is the one of the best examples of people that have actually managed to tap into that and and make that contemporary. Um, but what happens is the drift, right? That's the issue. The issue is the drift, and that's where you guys become really important. And um I was just I've had been having conversations I was with a bunch of people and working on different stuff right now, and I I look I was looking at three brands, iconic American brands, 60 Minutes, Under Arma, and Xbox and each one of those brands is going through tribulations right now because they didn't understand what was happening. So the new owners of 60 Minutes didn't understand thought it was about being political when it was about truth in reporting. Sony understood that attention was changing, and that their competitor threats were free and cheap, and that means that you had to invest a lot of money into games to make people put down their phones and get on their consoles, and then Under Armour got confused in thinking that performance as it had been defined by them would return. In fact, the Athletia sports market fragmented and redefined performance in front of them and they couldn't track it. So that's what frustrates me about all the culture stuff is A, it's got no evidence, it's just someone with a tape, and B, there's no what does this mean? This is happening, so this means you should do A, B, C, and D. And so I think I think it's fascinating that the it's almost a little like kitchen nightmares, you know, the Gordon Ramsay show.

SPEAKER_03 25:43

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

It's always the same story, right? It's it's like it's an analogue for relationships, it's an analogue for the way companies treat their customers. It's like French guy moves to the north of England. He was a he was a great restauranteur in Paris. He brings a great restaurant to the north of England. But after five years, he starts buying his food and putting it in a microwave, and buys it from a wholesaler and starts microwaving it. And the passion's gone, the customers go. You know, it's always the same, right? This is the same narrative, and I think it's I think there's a parallel with like with companies as well. They get super comfortable, they get super complacent, uh, and they don't bother trying. And you know, I think I think what's really interesting in in if you I don't know if you guys have any experience here, but we have a new generation of companies that are very monopolistic uh and create a lot of dependency. I mean, in the sense of the bad utility dependency and telecom dependency, where you never love these companies, but you can't exist without them. And I think that becomes an that become becomes an abusive relationship.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think there are three there are three really interesting things that you said there is. I think I think that the the first is um the challenge of identifying new trends in general, like how do you start to understand where things are moving, um, which which I is really interesting and I'd love to talk for a second about. The the second thing that you said was really interesting is general care for customers and the point at which it becomes unprofitable to care. Um, and there's a trade-off between customer care and and financials, and how do you manage that trade-off, especially in the business world of coming up to an event, um that then things change. Um, and obviously, if you're in a business world where there's multiple events, multiple raises, and multiple seeds, then then that changed as well. And then the third thing that you said, which I think is really interesting, is um what did you just say? There was something that you just said that that I was like, that's really interesting, I want to talk about that, and I forgot what it is.

SPEAKER_01 27:53

You just said Ed, you're talking about brands that you you become it's like at the Amazon thing, which you can't natural monopolies.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

Yeah, like the day the danger of natural monopolies forming in everyday markets, which I think is natural economic stage. But that's uh that's a better way of saying what I said. Yeah, basically wasn't once you've invested so much data into a platform and natural monopoly, and that's existing I don't want to say which AI Mark uses, but he uses an AI that I think there's a better one, but he's put so much time into the AI that he uses that he that he now even you know what what is it like six months and maybe a year you've been using it for? And like it's already now too a difficult switch for you because there's everything's in it, it's logged in. There's basically a natural monopoly that's formed already that makes switching really hard in the AI space. So to come on to those, I'm I don't want to spend, I could honestly, this is really interesting, and I don't want to spend talk too long. So Mark, please everyone please interrupt me. But the the um what the the identifying first movers are really interesting things. I for my I'd say everywhere that I've worked, there's always been a product idea that someone's had, which is oh James, can you I want you to build a product or build some kind of data engine that shows me the first people who move in the market and show me how their behavior is changing so we can identify like new upcoming trends using all the data tools that we have, social listening, blah blah blah. Everyone has this idea everywhere I've worked, and it never works. And the reason why it never works is because the first movers are pretty much different for every market and every juncture.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

There isn't just everyone has this idea that there isn't a group of people who are constantly trying the same new their new new trialists.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Exactly. There's like there's there's like a question on like GDBI, which is always like, are you the first amongst your friends to try new things? Everyone's like, well, let's just look at those, let's look at them, what are they doing? It's like, well, they're not like you get different trend setters in different spaces at different times. And the the only way that you can understand the nuance is unfortunately by having conversations with people because you can then start to, for example, Mark, even in even in the few interviews that we've conducted recently, there's been an emerging theme, which is parents of children who are of social media age starting to navigate their own social media and phone usage. And like I'd say that's a dramatic change. And the everyone who literally everyone who's speaking to is basically saying we're conscious of our own mobile phone usage because we've seen our kids use it too much, therefore we're decreasing our usage and we we have become addicted, but we're trying to work out how we reframe that addiction. If I look at the numbers of people, especially all the people who are using social media, I'm not seeing in like an immediate cliff edge, but I would bet quite heavily that over the next couple of years, basically parents of kids will probably use social media a lot less. Uh I would be where I'd put my money. And and I don't I wouldn't have reached a hypothesis had we not had those conversations with people. I may be wrong, it's a hypothesis, it's not proven, but the people who are setting that trend are people in their 40s and 50s with kids, they're not 20, you know, and and and you're only identifying first moves is almost impossible from a data perspective because the average moves a lot slower than the first people. So you the long tail moves a little bit, but the average does it hardly moves at all. And so you can't really set spot a trend just by looking at averages. Um anyway, the the monopoly thing I also want to touch on because I think that's really interesting. It's like there's a big danger that we everything that we do is if we're becoming much more data heavy in what we do, then everyone who we're using data with basically has a slight natural monopoly forming. And I think it's a legislative thing, but I think we need to be a lot more honest with or clients, I think clients should be a lot more honest, and I think the government should be a bit firmer across every jurisdiction to start to say, like, how do we start to recognise where these natural monopolies are forming early and work out how we intervene, whether that's promising data sharing between businesses. And we wouldn't look I'm not the first person to have said this, and I definitely won't be the last, but it's true of basically every single piece of software that's being used, um, especially the very big tech players. And I I don't want to I've got quite strong opinions that I don't necessarily think I should voice too too loudly, but uh, but I think there's a real danger that we get into places where we just you know the the the capitalism only works if we have strong, um free open markets. It it doesn't work where natural monopolies exist. And I think that is one of the things that when people say at the end of capitalism, we're having a new capitalistic age. I think it's because pretty much every market isn't is becoming a worse market, it's becoming less competitive because of this, because data's becoming such an asset. I'll soft it now.

SPEAKER_02 32:13

No, but I I I I I kind of think that's really uh I think that's a really interesting uh well there's I mean, I don't I'm sure you guys know Corey Dotter, you know, the entitification stuff, right?

SPEAKER_03 32:24

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:25

Yeah. And um there's now uh Eric Reese who wrote the lean startup, has written incorruptible. I haven't read that, but I've read at least really interesting, like it's the sort of a lot of the themes that we're talking about that are basically companies, it's just a natural structural trajectory. They sort of get worse. You know, it's like the incentives of the struct infrastructure like push them to not being the good companies that they start off being. And it's like how funding, it's how venture funding happens, it's how private equity happens, it's how what happens to founders who have the vision and how that gets lost and diluted. Um, so yeah, so it's like this a lot of people are talking about this right, all this stuff right now, which I think is is super interesting. And then I think where the threat comes from, maybe legislation, but I think maybe AI disintermediates. If if if if if you think the monopolies are you if you think there are like monopolies, you could disintermediate them with AI. For example, if if and the brands themselves could be disintermediated by it just being a query that says I need the I need the cheapest car to be here to pick me up within 15 minutes.

unknown 33:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:43

And and and that that I mean, I don't know how far away that is, but um that's the threat that's posed to not just monopolies, but also brands.

SPEAKER_01 33:57

Can I touch on something you said a couple of minutes ago, which I thought was really interesting? Yeah, is about kind of the but the benevolence of businesses. Yeah, and you mentioned Cadbury's as an example. It's interesting because I was in Cad I was in Cadbury World a month or so ago. So I I was in the the the town of Bourneville.

SPEAKER_02 34:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

And and and it's something again that you said e even earlier when we were chatting, which is I'm paraphrasing, but kind of clients only want optimistic things, they don't want the bad news, right? And the reality is if you if you go and chat to a whole bunch of people, which is what we do, people are struggling, right? It's like inflation, cost of living, what's going on around the world, social media threats, you know, people generally are working harder and they've got less money left in their pockets. Now, I I think in the UK particularly, we're probably through the the heat the like the real stressful point of when List Truss was prime minister a few years ago. I mean, that that was hot, I mean, overnight people's lives change for the worse because of that.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

Thank the economy.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Totally. So so we're definitely seeing kind of a sense of resilience of of people uh across this country, certainly. But the benevolence thing and and the thing clients kind of want optimistic news. I I I was again, I was always taught a challenge is an opportunity. If I'm a brand and people's lives are tough, you know, and we're not talking tough like Palestinian lives or you know, lives of some people in in developing countries. Well, people's lives are hard at the moment in in the UK generally. If people's lives are hard, surely the role of a brand is to help make it better, you know. And it and again, it I I come back to kind of like the smarter clients and the the lead, the less lazy clients. If if you are if you're working for a brand and you just want good news so you can give somebody some communications with some nice product shots and good news in it, then you deserve to fail, right? Because for me, the role of brands, it it there's a huge opportunity for brands to be to your to your word, benevolent. I don't want to get it confused with purpose, which the industry is kind of this massive kind of fight about over the past few years. But there is a role for brands to make people's lives better, right? And and I'll speak from a UK perspective, and I'll speak from a perspective of being a parent in a small town in the northeast where I live. Playgrounds are falling to bits, right? There's absolutely a role for a brand there to develop the playgrounds, put a big plaque on there saying this was developed by Holiday Company. You know, come and use the playgrounds in our holiday parks, right? That's making people's lives better. It's it's it's it's product for good, it's it's advertising their their products and services.

SPEAKER_03 36:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Particularly when, you know, as a country, we've there's there's not much money to go around, right? And the things that make a difference to people's lives. And James and I were chatting to a friend about this just just this week about things that brands and political parties can do that make people's lives feel better. Right? The opportunities are there. The brand brands just need to think differently about it. Because I think gone are the days of just advertising your way to growth. You're gonna have to play a role in people's lives, but you've got to mean it. So you you you mentioned Cadbury. I actually think in the in this country in the UK, I think Tesco do a really good job on that. So Tesco, supermarket, their line is every little helps. And it's not just like their line in advertising, they've got funds the way they employ people in local areas, you know, that you they give back to local areas, every little helps. And and and that is their benevolence, that's their being, that's their kind of north star. So I I think actually brands need to be more benevolent, and and brands should spot the the opportunities of people going through tough times, and they should be there to help them.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

I I think that that guardian um piece, when you look at dissect it, um what I thought was so positive about it was the resilience that you talked about.

SPEAKER_03 37:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:48

And you know, um, the story of the pub had closed, new people had come in to open the pub, so the community rallied and painted the interior. Well, what a great opportunity for sort of like a DIY to say the paint's on us.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 38:05

Right. I mean, it's not that hard, is it?

SPEAKER_01 38:07

No, exactly. And that's why again, taking it up a level to a more existential level, that's why you've that's why you've got the rise of populism, right? Because people's lives are hard, and you've got the this people with a megaphone, so it's hard to blame blame these other people, right?

SPEAKER_02 38:21

And you've got the I think the the the biggest weasel is, and I think the thing that's ruining British politics is change is always better, yeah. Right? So that the the the idea, oh, we need a change, you know.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

Well, it comes back to James's thing about short-term versus long-term. Yeah, you know, and but politically, we're suffering from that, right? Because regardless of what what colour your mast is is painted, we're suffering from short-termism. But but what when people's lives are hard, what again, what you're seeing in the UK and what what I'm finding when I go and visit people. Yesterday I was in the northwest of the UK chatting to somebody who's a reform voter, so pretty right wing.

SPEAKER_02 38:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:57

Right. And then I meet a bunch of those people. I also meet the the other side of the spectrum, which is people who, you know, they're a lot more left-leaning. I meet a whole bunch of people in the middle don't know what to don't don't know what to do. They're just at the wit's end, really, right? But the reason I bring it up is because when you're when you're when when you've been when when when you're resilient, it's easy to take a way out to get angry and bitter and blame somebody for what's going on. Or you can try and be optimistic and you can try and fight your way into positivity, into a better world, a better life for you and your family. And kind of seeing both both strands happening. It's going to be fascinating to see what happens over the next few years politically here because it could it's fork in the road moment, I think, for the UK. And isn't that what Burns?

SPEAKER_02 39:44

Well, isn't that what um the whole Manchester thing's about so much about Andy Burn Andy Burnham?

SPEAKER_01 39:50

And that's the thing, but what but what you've got there, right, is you've got a guy who most people don't really know what he stands for. They've heard his name. He's been focused in Manchester. I've heard mixed things from people who live in Manchester, not just people on the news. Uh and again, you've got this whole argument of, well, he's coming in without a mandate. Nobody's voted for him. The press are now talking about Andy, uh, Andy, the next prime minister. Like, it's totally undemocratic. So then you go get back to this big existential thing of what's what's the role of democracy? The role of democracy is to put a tick in a box once every four or five years, right? Which is bringing it back to dose of reality. One of the things we really find when we chat to real people is they really value their voices being heard. Because for year after year after year, they don't feel anybody's listening to them. Right? They can't really say how they feel to their friends and family. They certainly can't say it on social media because it just becomes a massive slanging match. So having somebody in the room that's just there and tell me about your life, tell me about your story, tell me about why you buy that, tell me about why you do that, let me observe you doing that, or why do you do that? Nobody does it. So that they going back to this point of kind of uh people's voices being heard, that they there's a real value because people actually genuinely just want their voices heard. And and we find that actually a lot of the participants we work with they'll say, Oh, that felt a bit like therapy, or it was great, it was great to get stuff off my chest because I don't have the opportunity to do that because nobody listens to them.

SPEAKER_02 41:15

Yeah, there was a moment, there's a there was a I remember really clearly because I kept sending it around to people who didn't really understand that concept. It was a show, it was a drama that was made in the UK about Brexit, and there's a moment, there's a focus group, and the whole thing just implodes. And uh this that's when the stay the the guy who's uh you know for for staying in Europe, he's watching this focus group and he's like, We've lost. This is why we've lost. Yeah, yeah, just totally because no one listened, and and no, and and and no and now this pent-up anger because no one listened to the water.

SPEAKER_01 41:57

And and and what's and what's happening now is you get the kind of the I'm gonna put this in inverted commas, the far-right inverted commas, the far-left inverted commas, all they're doing is mudslinging at each other. They're not actually sitting down and saying, right, let's let's and they're massive description.

SPEAKER_02 42:10

Solve this problem. Let's actually they're exploiting the problem to their advantage.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

And and the language around the far left and the far right. I I've met people who are right wing and inverted commas. I've met people who like Tommy Robinson, I've met racists, I've met people who other people would call them far right. I don't think they're far right at all. I think they're just desperate for change, right? But they're all getting lumped in together over that side, and they're lumping in all of the far left over that side. So it becomes this kind of war of the other. And the social media just kind of all it does is it amplifies the other. And that's what I'm saying about. I think there's a role for businesses and brands and governments and NGOs to just listen to people, yeah, just spend the time to sit down and listen to people. And you mentioned focus groups. I mean, the focus look, no research methodology is universal and is right for every brief. Yeah, but I mean, focus groups didn't predict Brexit, surveys and polling didn't predict Brexit. Everyone thought we were gonna remain, you know. But yeah, if you went out and speak to people, you you you you could have predicted that.

SPEAKER_03 43:08

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

Uh and and and likewise now with like the upcoming general election. I mean, I I predicted six months ago, I think I think reform were gonna do really well. Slightly different now, I think. I think Andy Barnum could be a change, but but when you go out and you speak to people and you sense a feeling, that's the other thing that you can't get from data, doesn't move you, doesn't make you feel anything. No, exactly. Because by by chatting to people, you feel something, you can feel something in your bones. Yeah, that's really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

Um just very quickly. I just want to add just uh anecdotally, I think it's a very big difference between someone saying, Who are you voting? Are you gonna vote for Labour next election? So, yeah, yeah. Like a polling question. Are you gonna vote for Labour next election? Yeah, like that they're just two masses with different answers, but like and and uh you yeah, you unless you're measuring that strength of feeling, which is always impossible in a poll, yeah. And you don't really know what either means.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

So I want to get I want to.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

to uh focus the remaining time on what you guys are doing and this dose of reality and the whole idea so um what i'm what i'm guessing it is it's a subscription service that allows you to access on a regular basis um all the work you guys are doing to help understand what's going on in in the country with consumers etc etc and maybe you deal with a different topic or a different region and there's sort of like you know you know what you're getting or you you're getting into is that kind of how it works yeah so so so traditional ethnography is kind of on demand uh so a a a client would come to an ethnographic company uh research company custom and custom and stuff do a custom study yeah and and do a custom bespoke study takes a bit of time you've got to recruit people you've got to get out on the road you've got to you've got to distill it this business model has kind of flipped that way essentially we're proactively now as we speak kind of going out around the country meeting as many people as we can spending time with them filming them recording them uh observing them doing various things now what do we focus on uh we've we've got like a bespoke AI model uh which basically has three or four different inputs which is right what is the creative agencies are looking at now from a seasonal calendar point of view i.e. when do they start doing their Christmas advertising planning top button questions that are based on like seasonality count and different and different and different so what you're kind of already like predicting the need of what what exactly that and when users use the platform when they search for something we're tracking what they're searching for and whether there's a depth of so that so basically what happens then is we're going out around the country with bespoke conversation guides yeah meet meeting a whole range of different people uploading that into the platform and then a user which can be an agency planner strategist or it can be a brand marketer can go in there and they can search for things that are specific and unique to them. And then just to uh kind of uh repeat James's point the AI here does not create anything synthetic right what the it's just used for sorting and and analyzing no sort of like putting the data in a box of the it's a strategic sparring partner in a sense because because back to my old planning days I I wanted to go somewhere and say right show me what people think about this. All right now if they think that what do they think about this and is there a correlation between that and that and it's and and what will happen over time which I think is really interesting is we're going to build up such a body of content. We've already got a lot right but we're going to build such a body of content where I again as AI progresses where it can be much more sophisticated. So it becomes an AI aspiring partner for a client but then over time as we get more content and year after year after year you can then spot those trends and themes and how language changes which just my final point is when you go beyond marketing and advertising there's a social role for Dors of Reality how language is changing what was going on in people's lives at that time it becomes a living time capsule of what people's views were.

SPEAKER_02 46:53

Yeah it's amazing so what's what about the whole like argument that says the corpus of humanity is already being harvested by AI and so I can use a synthetic respondent who will tell me everything you can tell me anyway.

SPEAKER_00 47:11

Yeah I've I will I've how long I got nine minutes um I actually do a I do a talk um which is on basically the dangers of synthetic AI um there's there's quite a lot to be said but I guess the main thing that I'd say is broadly if we don't understand what the training data of NAI is that's being used then it's impossible to validate its veracity. So you end up in a space where the burden of responsibility um is on the recipient of that data. And if you're in a place where you cannot prove whether that's true or not then how useful is is that data? And most evidence there's lots of different papers that have been written out there real large but there's been no compelling paper so far that has suggested that synthetic research is able to get you to the same level of accuracy or anything like the same level of accuracy for anything that is a net new question. So the there's a paper that's always quoted which is a Colgate um example where they basically I I I'm really massively um shortcutting it because it's it's it's a really good example of how they used AI to be able to answer questions, but they claim that the synthetic data was 85 to 90% accurate. Well that was data that was trained on very specific individual questions about different toothpastes and then they gave them new toothpaste and they said okay do you think you'll like would this synthetic persona like this new product this new product this new product and it claimed to get it right 85 to 90% of the time I mean that's obviously not how most people are using synthetic research because they're not building off training data that's specific to their domain. There's a good example is if I was to write on Reddit, I think working class Scottish women tend to buy this product quite often then there's as good a chance that that's been used as part of the training data than a genuine working class Scottish woman talking about what they're like in that probably a better chance. And so you end up with this body of training data which is basically just reinforcing stereotypes that exist across the internet. And there are some businesses out there that I there's some digital so there's a company called Original Voices who who I know well and they are a good example who I think are trying to do it well and doing a good job. They're um building specific panels they've got humans in the loop they're building digital twins off the back of that. Yeah I'm not saying a company I'm not saying every player is bad and there's not a role for any synthetic data but certainly the use cases I'm seeing people use synthetic for example for validation it's so erroneous.

SPEAKER_02 49:41

And anyway I could honestly I think the other thing that's really interesting because I there's a similar company here than the original voices that I've been sort of working with looking at playing with and the interesting thing is it cannot do texture. It can't tell you the store they go to or the person they buy stuff from or the guy in the bike shop down the road or the name of the politician or you know it doesn't it doesn't it's just an average blandish blanded neutral I think and just on that as well I've got I've got two two two anecdotes.

SPEAKER_01 50:21

The first one that right is also what they don't do is pick up context. So I I I've been numerous times I've been chatting to people in the homes and and one example is chatting to parents of of adult children and talking to them about uh their investments and and their financial situation. And I asked them about their kids going to university and the dad got up and went and closed the door because his kids are upstairs. Right so that little action there he's now gonna say he's now gonna say something that is true and he doesn't want his kids to worry about it. Yeah. Right? Right so synthetic doesn't do that right which makes you know there's something important happening here. The other thing is an anecdote this is kind of this is a direct call to action for the strategists who are listening because I'm really passionate about planning account planning and strategy. I I was chatting to an old colleague of mine a a while back and I was basically saying look you you should be doing what you should be using our our services you should be looking at ethnography and and his answer is basically what James said well we're using some synthetic and it's it's 90% accurate and it's quicker and cheaper and I and I said to this old colleague I said look me in the eye and tell me you got into the industry to be 90% accurate quicker and cheaper of course you didn't you got into the industry to do fucking amazing work and amazing work needs amazing research. So again I think there's a lot of fear right and and I I'm not as hardline on synthetic as is James particularly I think there is a role I can remember being forced to go out onto Oxford Street in London and find six people to run a spontaneous focus group right that is bad research I think I think synthetic can do a better job of that definitely but I do not think it's going to replace what we're doing and in fact there's more there's more of a demand for what we're doing because more people are recognising again it will only go so far and it's missing a huge chunk of reality. Yeah I think the one thing I think it's a good I mean I think yeah it's look why not use it to get somewhere that tells you like a starting point maybe yes yes and and and and James and I use AI for starting points all the time. Yeah right but that's exactly a start starting point I think where it becomes dangerous for the industry is when that starting point becomes the end point. Because you you you're not going to get any we we we we did a study with the APG here in London the account planning group where we basically interviewed the vast majority of the award winners from the APG uh uh awards and chat to them about the research methodologies and all of them use most of them used AI all of them used published implement is that published anywhere yes yeah yeah that's published and I can share that with you after I'll share that after yeah I'd love it that'd be really awesome if you guys because you guys have mentioned so many things that you guys are up to and I I'd love to include that yeah in the when I post the pod yeah yeah let me know like remind me because I might forget about I'll I'll send it over but essentially that's look there were lots of different research inputs across those award winners but the differentiating thing was human-led research now human-led research might have been a focus group it might have been chatting to somebody in the call center it might be in ethnography for one of the purpose it wasn't what somebody was saying it was the way they said it it wasn't what somebody was saying it was the books on the shelf right this stuff was the differentiator between the standard briefs that everyone works on every day and the briefs that are are being amplified and creating better outcomes for their clients yeah so so that and that's why I think it is a minority you know I I don't think Dose of Reality will have every brand on earth signing up to it. It will have I think a minority of brands there are enough brands to go around but I think there'll be the best brands I think there'll be the brands have got the most ambition I think there'll be the the agencies that want to do the better work. So in in that regard I think it is kind of self-selective and I'm quite happy about that.

SPEAKER_02 54:00

Yeah that's great.

SPEAKER_00 54:02

James we've been cutting you off all the time no no not at all I was only the only thing I was going to say is the 10 like there's an interesting thing about being 90% accurate because not every percentage is equal right so the 10% that you're not accurate with is arguably at times the most interesting and useful percentage and that tends to be the things that synthetics bad at which is things like novelty or thing things that are basically net new that it doesn't understand. And that goes back to Mark's context point. So yeah I'm there's a pay there's a um there's a few different papers um which I think are really good. There's one in particular that's really good on the dangers of synthetic and then without being too self-promotive but I I've written a couple of substack articles on some of the dangers and um Australia.

SPEAKER_02 54:48

What should we so yeah I mean I think I think we covered a lot of crap haven't we we could have done three hours. Easy um yeah thank you thank you guys so much that was a really good conversation and I'm really excited about what you guys are up to.

SPEAKER_01 55:03

And we we need we need this here in the States badly give give us a call I mean the the the where we've set them up you need an office over here no I mean we've the with with the way that we've structured the business is UK first but the you know expansion is on our roadmap so yeah the yeah the way that we're looking at that is uh yeah we'll we'll tell you when we stop recording.

SPEAKER_00 55:24

Hey look Ed thank you so much for having us really enjoyed it brilliant to chat to you and lovely to uh to to probably meet you as well thanks so much guys thanks Ed stopped recording