Brand marketing: How to build & measure its true impact | John James | Coffee Breaks

Foreign hello and welcome back to Recast Marketing Measurement Coffee Breaks where we dive deep into complex marketing and measurement topics with industry experts. This week we're talking brand marketing with John James Hammond, a sales and marketing Advisor to leading D2C and B2B brands. John has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things marketing and we had a fascinating conversation about the history of brand campaigns, how to think about measuring them, the concept of delayed release effects and more. If you're interested in the history of marketing, you'll definitely want to hear John's breakdowns of early brand campaigns at Apple and Nike and many of his hot takes on the right and wrong ways to build a brand. John, good morning. Thanks for joining us. It's great to have you. Really excited to have you on the marketing Measurement Coffee break to get started. I would love to to for you to introduce yourself, tell us a bit about your background in marketing, what you do, what you're passionate about.

Sure. So my career started formally trained university market which I know is extremely rare these days. I specialized in strategic marketing or the strategy side of things. A couple first jobs were at large global advertising agencies based in Australia, so Sydney and Brisbane. And then I sort of went client side back and forth again digital agencies. Lived in a couple of countries around the world working there as well. I've had lots of different jobs and then I started working digital agencies back in the sort of 20, I would say 15, 14 sort of boom times of digital marketing in Melbourne. Then started my own agency with a business partner, ran that for a couple of years almost sort of like wound that down. Worked as a growth manager in Silicon Valley in San Francisco was funded by 8 BC. So Joe Lonsdale's group returned back home and I've been doing consulting, advisory and a couple other things in between, some client work as well. So right now you could call me like more of a consultant and advisor than anything else. And yeah, I work with private equity companies and privately owned businesses generally in that sort of 5 to 50 mil ARR sort of space. So more of that medium level business in the States would be you know, maybe 10 times that as an equivalent. And yeah, I just find those very exciting because a lot of it's around bottom line growth rather than the politics and status and the optics of the marketing side of the profession of which there is a lot which I'm sure we'll talk about. So my specialty is more about like if we spend money on marketing, what do we get back and how does it affect revenue, profit and those kind of things.

I love it. Very well. Rounded background and a fellow traveler philosophically. So, you know, I really wanted to have this conversation because, I mean, I'm a big fan of yours and a lot of the work that you do, you do a lot of depending on how you frame it, like speaking truth to power or trolling. I think different people have different words for it.

That's a fine line.

You've written a bunch about a topic that I know a lot of our audience is very interested in, which is brand. And people always ask me about brand campaigns. And I guess maybe first of all, I often don't really know what they mean by that. I would love to hear from you. You know, when people are talking about brand, brand campaigns, what does that mean or what could it mean? And then maybe let's start sort of definitions first before we jump into talking about what may be good or bad about these different approaches to marketing.

Okay, do we have time to maybe go through a quick history lesson? Because I think this puts all into context and I can answer at the end.

I would love the history lesson.

Okay, so this is really fascinating, right, because I had to research this as part of these articles that were quite popular because myself I kind of didn't know what it was. But this all started when I did this tweet. It was a bit inflammatory on purpose, which said, you know, brand campaigns are a scam. I've got the evidence, convince me otherwise. Obviously a lot of the people in the advertising industry didn't really like that and were quite furious in the comments. And then more surprisingly, I had equal number of non advertising industry people kind of agree with me. So there was like this battle in the comments and it kind of went viral. But out of that came some very interesting things. One of them was that the people who use the term don't know what it means. So I had to actually research this and look it up. Because when I was writing a response, like an article, because the tweet sort of like said, hey, there's something here that we need to discuss and get to the bottom of. So I'm like, okay, I'll do some research and write an article on it. And that became like five pieces, like five very long articles. But anyway, this all started from my own research, finding out what it is, because I thought I knew what it is, but I didn't. What how this started actually was, I would say probably 1956. There was a company called Procter and Gamble P and g in the U.S. yes. Okay, quite Big still to this day they were one of the biggest advertising accounts. So CPG or FMCG we call it in places was, you know, and still is some of advertising agency's biggest clients now. Why? Because it's a very competitive industry and you need to spend a lot of your marketing budget on advertising just to get that sort of incremental zero point something percent growth every year. Right. So you need to advertise in CPG and they are the biggest advertisers often. Now what was happening in 1956 is that due to the way P and G did their accounting, you had marketers who were splitting on their accounts what we call ATL or above the line and below the line. And what that means is that there were certain mediums which didn't in which incurred commissions and were larger line items in the expenses of marketing departments. And they went above this line and below the line was all the other activities like signage, you know, point of sale, any direct response, direct mail, things that you were doing. So there was this split that started to happen inside PNG's marketing department. Now prior to this, and I know this sounds a bit weird because it's kind of what growth is now. But there was what we call four Ps marketers who the marketing department and the heads of marketing were a controlling product, they're controlling pricing, distribution as well as promotions. Now one part of promotions is advertising. We'll come back to that in a second. But you had a very round, rounded sort of like skill set here because all those components have to work together when you send it to market for the best growth opportunities. And this may ring some bells. Now if someone's working in SaaS and you work in a growth department, how cross functional it tends to be for the best results. So this was occurring many years ago. But what happened with this ATL BTL split was that advertising agencies were very cool. Broadcast advertising. So TV is pretty new, it's getting heaps of money and so was radio. And it was very sort of sexy or very high status to hang out with these kind of people who were like film directors on the side filming these short films, basically actors. There's a lot of money flying there. Yeah, it's great, right? Why wouldn't you want to hang out there? So what happened is that there started to be the split between the marketing department of the people doing these glamorous advertising campaigns and everybody else doing all the other very essential stuff that wasn't as glamorous. Now fast forward a couple of years Broadcast is getting bigger, huge money advertising agencies, like the Mad Men era is like in its full swing, right? So you had that sort of social cachet going on. And I know people working in Mad Men era were like, that were like where you got the most money, management consulting or finance today. That was the madman era. Like the highest paid people worked in advertising. Not the case anymore. But anyway, fast forward a couple of decades, right? Brand campaigns actually started in 1976. You could argue with a company called Nike in Seattle and. Hang on, I'll just get the story.

Here for those, for those.

Yeah, sorry, Nike. Okay. So this started with a company and someone called John Brown, who just died four months ago, actually, and he founded this little Seattle ad agency called John Brown and partners. And in 1976, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, saw this ad campaign of a local bank in Portland and he asked around and found out who created the ad. And it was this agency in Seattle called John Brown and Partners. And Phil, Phil Knight ended up hiring them to represent Nike based on a recommendation from another company called the Seattle supersonics. And I'm paraphrasing here by this historian, Scott R. I don't know his last time, but he's a retired Nike historian. I didn't even know that was a role. But John said that in the beginning, we wrote one new ad each month focusing on the introduction of a new shoe model and placed an ad in Runner's World magazine. And these ads were very tech heavy, like sort of very product feature based, right, about the benefits of the shoe. But in one month in 1977, they didn't have a new product model that was ready for release. So the ad manager at Nike, Patsy, told this ad agency guy, Mr. Brown, to write an ad that makes runners feel good about themselves, Right. Because there's no product to feature. So he wrote this headline, we run a million miles a day. And featured a runner pacing down a country road. And they got this creative director called Denny Strickland to take a romantic shot of a runner who was not in the center of the shot, but sort of part of a larger picture. So a very sort of far away shot, right? And I'll send you this ad because it's very iconic. And then they got the photograph to find someone who was running on this road in Washington, right? And he got someone who was running to work. And then in the photograph, they didn't even feature the Nike swoosh or logo or anything because the run is so far away you can barely see them. Right. So the Focus is more about the environment of running and not the runner or the shoe itself. And when Patsy, the ad manager at Nike, saw it, she hated it. Right. So the ad execs modify the original ad and use the same image but added a tagline. There is no finish line. And then, you know, Patsy was kind of a bit better with it, but she said, look, next month we've go back to those sort of product featured ads. But then when the ad released, runners started sending letters to Nike thanking them and for supporting them. And the ad was so popular, Nike ended up making like poster sized versions of it and learned that the retailers were actually selling these posters to customers. So they're supposed to be, you know, a point of sale poster for the retailers and they're actually selling them because there's so much demand. And then they end up creating a poster line out of this. Which of course, if you've seen 80s or 90s films like Stranger Things or whatever, you'll see, you know, the kid's bedroom with posters on of whatever. Like this is what actually used to happen. And these posters are very expensive. I liken it to kind of, you know, Fortnite skins or like if you're buying drip or you know, really nice clothing. It was a bit of a status thing to have a really cool poster on your wall as you're growing up. And anyway, so this started to happen and many people still consider like this tagline, there is no finish line to be closer to the core of what Nike's about than the just do it tagline. So you could argue that 1977 or 6 was the year that brand advertising campaigns started, right? Now the thing that I wrote about and I didn't know about this when I was writing articles, but then let's just fast forward two decades. 1997 is the think different campaign by Google, right? And again, the similarities between these two things are really important, which is a key point that I'm sure you're going to ask me Next. But in 1997, Steve Jobs comes in after being fired. He's under a lot of pressure to turn the company around. And what he does is the previous media agency had booked two spots in the super bowl, very expensive, and they tried to sell them because Steve, you know, didn't want to use them, but they couldn't. So they were left with two spots or one, I think, at the super bowl. And they didn't have any products to advertise again because Steve was cutting the existing product line. Like 90% of products were going and he was working on new ones which wouldn't be ready for the next 12 months to two years. So they had nothing to advertise in terms of products. So what do they do? He gets his old agency back, chiet day and they create this now famous Think different campaign that again, doesn't talk about the product and talks more about the ethos of, you know, Apple and where they want to go. Because this is an ad that Steve really needed to galvanize the internal culture. And it was more about communicating internally what Apple was going to do in the future as much as it was about communicating to customers. So then this ad becomes quite iconic and wins lots of awards. And then that sort of has filtered through the ad agency lexicon and that of marketers creating this sort of split between a brand advertising campaign and more of a product orientated campaign. And that's the long history behind brand campaigns where we find ourselves today. But when, to answer your question, a very long answer, brand campaigns, most people think are brand advertising campaigns, and I think there's a lot of confusion between those two terms. But when people say brand campaigns, generally they mean some kind of organizational advertising campaign that hits a broad audience for purposes that aren't primarily to sell product and shouldn't be measured as such. But there's a lot of nuance to that answer.

Amazing history. This is all very fascinating. Sometimes I feel like people say that they want to run a brand campaign and really what they mean by that is they just want to run tv. Is that like a common misconception or like where does that come from? Like what is the difference between TV advertising and brand advertising? I mean it sounds like it's basically just like do you feature the product or not? But maybe you could talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah, so again, sort of TV advertising has that status. TV is where advertising agencies traditionally made their most money or margins. To create a TV ad, you have to create a film, basically a short film that's very expensive to do and not anymore, but it used to be. So we're talking like six figures or more. And that was a really good premise to get clients to spend more. The more they spend, the more percentage the agency makes. So it's in the interest to create, create these films. Now why they would create a brand campaign over something product based is more around status again and awards. So if they can create an ad that doesn't talk about the product, they're less creatively constrained so they can do things and be a bit more whimsical. About it and then submit it for industry awards and win awards. So it's more about the creatives doing the work in the agencies than it is about the effectiveness of the ad itself for the client brand.

So, so that's definitely the skeptical view, which I'm probably aligned with. But let's imagine like what's the bull case, right? What's the steel man case for doing a brand campaign? Does it ever work? Like I've heard of Apple, I've heard of Nike, those maybe worked like is, are there times when people should be doing brand campaigns? What sort of brands? Like when is the right time for this? Or what is the case where this might actually do the job that, that people would want it to do?

Yeah, look, I see this quite a bit. When people talk about, oh, we should entertain this notion of brand campaigns, it generally comes from a team that is quite constrained by their current culture and the channels that they're using, the way they're marketing. So they'll tend to be very direct response orientated. So I do advertising, I want to see an instant return on that and they'll measure it in a very short sort of space of time. And if that didn't work, then the advertising hasn't worked. Right. So it tends to be very sort of product focus, feature, benefit messaging focused. And it's about, you know, I call it gumball machine marketing, advertise, feature the product if it sells, you know, I get a gumball out of the machine, let's do it again or not. And that can work very, very well. And you can grow your brand like that through sales. In fact, the best way to grow brands is through sales and getting more customers relative to your competitors. And I think this is what gets missed in this discussion is that there are other ways to grow your brand apart from brand advertising. But I think when people entertain this notion of brand campaigns and advertising, there is a realization within the organization that we might want to take a bit of a long term view and measure advertising effects over its full effect range as opposed to a very short window of time. And then we might want to broaden our channels outside of a very narrow channel focus to something that's a bit what we call broader reaching. And you might want to also target people who are not in market ready to buy, but who will buy later. And there's a lot of science behind that because 99 to 95% of your market is not in market at any one point in time. So therefore it does, it is beneficial to market to People who won't buy, which sounds weird, but those people will remember you, hopefully depending on your ad. Lots of caveats there. So then when it's time to purchase, they will know who you are and be more likely to purchase you over someone else. So that's the kind of short answer to that.

I think that makes sense. I mean, have you ever recommended doing a brand campaign or like, are there examples of like, this is the sort of company where, like, this really makes a lot of sense to pursue this strategy.

Yeah. So generally, if there's a political environment here. So rebrands are a good one. M&A environment. So if someone acquires, someone else needs to rebrand. Like there is like, you know, Twitter went from Twitter to X. There is really important situations where I think that pure brand campaign is really important. Again with Steve Jobs, just another example of like shoring up executive support through a new way that the company wants to. A new direction that they want to go in. I think there's a lot of impetus behind that. Again, when you're doing brand campaigns, you're thinking somewhat beyond your initial customers and thinking about the other stakeholders or markets that are very important for you to affect. So investor market, you know, your board, internal employees, just being a couple of those groups, potential partners or other companies who. Or retailers or distributors who might want to stock you. So I think that's really important. And when we're talking about brand campaigns, it's a. It's a bigger view of all the wheels that are in motion to, you know, lift the company forward.

Makes a lot of sense. Really interesting sort of different way to think about those campaigns. You hit on this sort of very briefly, but I really want to dig into it. What's the difference between running brand campaigns and building a brand? And to what extent are they overlapping or totally distinct ideas? And how should marketers be thinking about how to build a brand?

Yeah, look, I think the best marketers, just off the bat, do not think in campaigns. Campaigns are an agency construct. So they created like a political campaign. This harks back to like Roman era Caesar. You know, you'd go on these war campaigns and come back to the adulation of the masses of people through a. What was it called, a tribute or they'd have this sort of festival. When the person returns, it's like, hey, you know, Caesar's awesome. So, yeah, real marketers don't really think in campaigns. They think like long term and just always advertising on and off, testing different things. And I think it's a better way to think about it. So that's why when anyone uses the word campaign, it's always pretty political and run by an agency. But I think the difference between brand campaigns and just building brand is that brand is basically in its essence memory, real estate. So I know who you are and the product category or what you do in my mind. And that memory will fade over time. If you have really good creative, maybe it will stay a bit longer. But basically it's a battle for share of mind in the market. Right? That's important because like I said before, most people are not in market and they will come in market to buy at a later stage. So by having larger share of mind in the market, you're going to get future sales more so than you will just get initial sales. Now I think what gets lost in this argument is this sort of brand campaign equals a brand advertising campaign assumption. And that is not true. You can build brand through making distributed deals. You can build brand by creating point of sale. You could do it via direct mail, for example. I could send a million pamphlets to every household in an area. They'll get an impression. I could get a direct response or a sale or I don't know, whatever. Some kind of response from the ad. And the people that don't respond will still kind of remember, oh yeah, that company that does whatever. Cool. So it doesn't have to be a TV ad or a very broad reaching broadcast media buy to, to build brand. And I think the most effective way that we build brand is really through market share, relative market share. There's a lot of science around that in terms of. If you look at the Ehrenberg Bass Institute's work around how brands get bigger, it's mostly through what we call market penetration. And that is let you have more customers relative to all your other customers and share of wallet at the same time. And I think there's, there's kind of two ways to do it. But I think the better way to do it is through sales as opposed to share of mind. But they kind of work together really well. So that's the kind of way I would think about it. And I think using this term brand campaign is so amorphous that a lot of people misinterpreted exactly what they mean. And I think it's important to be very clear about what goal you want to achieve here. Sometimes it can be just, you know, status and appeasing investors or internal stuff. Sure, that's, that's a valid way to do it. But be very specific about what the goal is at the beginning and understand what a brand is and how they work before you go and invest all that money.

I love it. I think that makes a lot of sense. I don't remember who said it, but it's always resonated with me that someone said the best ways to build a brand is to have a really good product and then to get it in as many hands as possible. Yes. Like those are the two things. All of the other stuff can maybe help, but if you really, if you don't have those two, it's impossible to build a brand. And those are the two things to really focus on. And that's really resonated with me.

Yeah, and here's a good example of that. Like the PLG motion or like, you know, the SaaS sort of era of 2015 to 2023, I would call it SaaS 1.0. Really big way of growing was to give away your product for free and get users to use it. Like that is essentially a sale. Right. You are growing brand when you do that because everybody knows who you and what your tool does. Like Canva for example. Right. They built brand huge amounts through that now, which they're sort of monetizing more and more as the price increases and like, you know, restrict the, the features of their product. But like product sampling is a really good way of growing your brand. And that's what SaaS has been doing very effectively for a long period of time.

I think that's a great highlight. Canva, obviously from Australia, amazing brand, amazing company. Let's talk. So brand stuff that all makes sense, I think interlocked with this and you touched on it a little bit is like this idea of long term effects of marketing. And sometimes I talk to marketers and they're like, we're going to run this brand campaign, you know, and we don't expect to see any sales lift, but we expect that we're going to see it in the long term. How like, does that resonate with you?

Yeah.

Is that a thing that happens? How do you. How like, how should marketers think about measuring that?

Okay, so the excuse for an advertising campaign that's very expensive, generally brand campaign that doesn't result in sales as expected is always this excuse. Long term effects. Right. But when you ask any marketer, okay, how long is long term? They can never answer you. Right. And I was curious about this. So I recently posted on my newsletter a piece around how long does advertising last? And I went through, I think four different studies which have been replicated multiple Times around. Okay, well if I do this big advertising effort and then I stop it, how much sales do I get, you know, in a short term, how much do I get in a long term? And I don't want to bore you with all the details, you can read the piece if you want, but basically there's about a half life of the advertising campaign in terms of its return on sales in about a sort of four to six week period. So big effort, you wait, stop it. You'll do four to six weeks. That will be whatever sales you get in that period is about. You can expect 50% to come in that period and then the other half to come in a very long tail trailing effect. And I say that because the long tail can be up to 52 weeks, maybe two years. Yeah. Which is why it's really important to not do campaign based advertising. You should be advertising all the time to reach as many people as you can all the time. Because of that in market, out of market effects. Right. And that's why it's. It. There is a bit of truth when people say target broader because with that wastage you will get people who will come back in market later that you wouldn't have otherwise been targeting. But yeah, like 50% of four to six weeks, 50% thereafter is the sort of the general curve. And the curve sort of goes up like this and then has a sort of a long trail that's quite predictable. It's how our memories work. That's what it's based on.

So practically. Right. Does that mean that marketers just use a multiplier and be like, let's measure the lift over the first four to six weeks and then multiply that by two and use that to make decisions. Or practically, how do people work this into their operational budgeting?

Well, this is where it's really good to have some kind of model hint, hint, like an mmm to model this on. But yeah, I think as a rough rule of bar to call out someone's bluff about, oh no, we'll get more sales in the future. Like, no, you won't. You'll get about 50% of what you got in the first four to six weeks. It's quite predictable. Of course, this is an average. Yeah. There will be ones that sort of skew one way or the other. But I think it's a really good sort of basic barometer. I would be recommending, if you're spending lots on advertising, to have some sort of model around this. I would be testing, you know, incremental uplifts in that sort of first four to six week period after the bulk of the campaign has run and do a crude calculation on that, that of course adjusted for seasonality and things like that or any other sort of competitive pressures. So you want some sort of like pretty good baseline already to do that incrementality test. But then I think, you know, it's a really good way of having discussion with the CFO, hey, I project this next 50% of X amount of revenue to come through and if we continue this, this investment, you know, we can see X and it doesn't have to be perfect. But like, that is a better answer than oh, it will come in some time, which is what a lot of marketers will answer with. Or, you know, just, just trust us. And the agency providers are going to obviously, you know, use that to kind of gaslight you. So you have to be really careful.

I think that makes a lot of sense. It's great tactical advice. Now, sort of calling back to the first conversation. Is it the case or do you have any evidence for this that you know, quote unquote, brand campaigns have longer effects than more doctor campaigns?

So this is where I think a lot of people kind of get this wrong. All advertising works in the same way. In fact, again, if I was quoting this institute actually based in Australia, weirdly enough, Arab Bass, again, who writes about using empirical evidence around how does advertising work? It all works in the same way. Yeah. So it doesn't matter whether you call it a brand campaign or a direct response campaign or whatever. Direct response builds brand through sales effects and through that impression on, on the memory. Right. Like I mentioned before, they'll remember who you are if they don't respond. So like all advertising works in this way. Now I would have to say with that said, there are some channels that the medium itself has some sort of like halo effect. So it may actually imprint memories a bit better than others. We call this ad stock. It's not a well researched thing that a lot of people don't believe in. But my point is sometimes you hear this quip, the medium is the message. And that is like the fact that maybe if I'm sitting inside a cinema listening and watching this like rich 30 second video with great sound and I'm in a really good moment or whatever, it's going to imprint on my brain and sear into that memory again, memory, real estate, and stay there longer than just flicking down a Facebook feed and seeing an ad for like three seconds, like a static image or whatever. Right? There is truth to that people have tested this. So I think that has to be taken into account and that's why I think to come back to the brand campaign people as well, that there is some truth in going to these other channels that are maybe richer, more expensive, more exclusive, but you just have to be more careful not to be taken for a ride. And that's kind of why I wrote these articles, to give those decision makers a bit better heads up. So for example, you know, putting a billboard in the middle of the downtown area, you know what's the ROI on that? It's a very high, much harder thing to measure but it can be quite significant. So especially if you're on the side of a 101 in a traffic jam, for example, there's been some really good examples of that working very well.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and I'll just sort of restate some of that in my own words. Like it's obvious that you know, you're in the movie theater, you see the really well produced ad that's going to stick in your, in your mind longer than like the Instagram ad that you flick past. But the cost per impression is going to be very, very different between those two. And if the Instagram ads are driving more sales and that's getting your product into more hands, as we talked about earlier, there's a lot of reasons to believe that the actual long term impact of the Instagram ad once you take into account conversion rate and actual sales happening ends up being longer than the ad that sticks in people's mind but doesn't drive the sale and therefore doesn't drive the even longer term memory of the product that comes with, with actual use consumption. Is that like a, is that right?

Yeah, exactly. And that's why I'd be using sort of multiple channels here using their like all channels like I'll admit have pros and cons. Yeah. And you need to be aware of that. And that's why I'm saying like use the balance mix and that's why with this brand campaign thing comes from a brand marketing movement now is that a lot of firms have been sort of exhausting the yields from these. I would say Google and Facebook prices are going up and a lot of teams now, especially in Tech and SaaS DTC are going okay, you know, this isn't working as well as before. It's getting more expensive and went up to crunch the numbers. You know, using attributing to revenue and new customer sales and that kind of thing. These Other mediums can sometimes be cheaper on a CPM basis too, so. Or a CPA basis. So. But the teams aren't familiar with them, so. Very funny. I was advising this DTC fashion company and you know, tens of thousands of customers, I'm like, got the addresses obviously, because they ship out the product. Have you ever done a direct mail campaign? No. Spend all their money on Facebook and Google Ads. I'm like, well, you know, you could do that, but they don't know how. So there's also a gap in terms, I think familiarity with some of these offline channels as well that is creating a bit of a, I don't know, irrational divide around decision making here. And I think markets would be really find it very interesting if you're chasing yield to maybe broaden your prospects out a bit and consider some channels that you wouldn't have considered otherwise.

I've seen this as well. I think, you know, Facebook and Google are amazing advertising platforms, like just truly incredible in terms of driving incremental sales. You know, huge businesses have been built just on top of those platforms and they're so easy to use. Like it's so easy to set up a Google campaign that works that like drives profitable business to your, to your website. Same thing on Meta and Facebook. And I think some of these other channels are more complex in terms of like what, you know, producing video creative. It's obviously more difficult than like throwing together some static creatives to pump it to the Facebook algorithm.

Yeah.

For these brands that are like, okay, maybe they're saturating Google and Facebook and they want to broaden. Like, what's your advice to them on how to get started or things to avoid or what to do? How can they go about doing that?

Well, I think coming back to sort of the measurement piece, I think that's the first thing I found when I've talked to these clients. There's a culture of, I would say like a data driven sort of measurement culture, which is very much, look at the stats we're getting from the platforms themselves, you know, Facebook Ad Manager or whatever or triple Whale, whatever they're using and then base decision making off those stats. And I think that's a very dangerous path to go down because it feels comfortable. I get it, it's. It's free. Yeah. Because the platforms are there, but there's a con. There's an inherent conflict of interest there between what they're reporting and what's actually causing incrementality in the business. And that's why I always encourage Maybe to move forward first from that measurement mindset, which is very much a digital attribution mindset, which we know is horrendously inaccurate now due to privacy and Apple clampdowns and other things, to more of a model based incrementality testing, experimenting sort of mindset. Like at least if you can't afford a proper mmm like tiptoe into a broader sort of crude model, I think is the first baby step and have that discussion with executive, with your cfo, with your CEO or key decision makers who are, who are funding these things and get buy in on that first and discuss this and hopefully some of the things that I've said previous to this will help break that ice with some robust data of these papers and research studies. So break the ice there and then. I think there is this sort of paradox in marketing where it's like the lower the barriers to entry on a channel, generally the lower the yield and the more friction there is and the higher the barrier to entry, sometimes the higher the yield, but it takes a lot more effort. So you know, like direct mail, learning a new thing like tv. If you haven't done TV before, how do you even start doing that? Or a billboard. But there, there are vendors out there, it's pretty easy to find and it's not as hard as you may think. And the CPMs actually can be quite low even if you're buying like a CPM or reach metric. I think the thing that prevents a lot of people taking that step is the uncertainty with the effect. Because if you're selling that to someone like, well I've never done that before, how do I know I'm going to get a return on that? And I think, you know, the answer to that is like find someone who's experienced and done that before and you know, maybe read between the lines. If you're getting the sell from a vendor, just hire an independent person who's done that work before and get their, their advice on do's and don'ts before you go and do that. Because I think, you know, with a five or ten minute conversation with for example, someone who's an expert in direct marketing or direct mail, you'll, you'll find out the, the five biggest pitfalls within five minutes. Right? Just don't do those things. It's going to be pretty successful.

I love it. I think that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned, you know, getting the, educating the executives, which is a thing that I've definitely seen as being a roadblock. It sounds like you Do a lot of this sort of work. Can you maybe talk about like, you know, you mentioned like sort of rolling out some experiments, having your rough model, but how do you get the executive team on board with moving off of a digital tracking or a touch based attribution model to be able to do some of these other things?

Sure. So I would build it in tandem. So you don't want to go from one to the other and cut across like a hard stop. You want to keep that going and do kind of like a pilot thing. So there's going to be skepticism from the executives. Right. And rightly so. They're not familiar with it. Sounds risky. Right. Why would I allocate resources to that? What's the blowback? You really have to think about the downside risk from this going really pear shaped. Yeah. So to limit that, what you do is you do a small experiment or a pilot study around this. So let's just say measurement. You got your attribution. Keep that going. Sure. And you should probably keep that going anyway, to be honest. If you're doing per channel optimization. But then start, create a crude model and then do some long tailing trailing effects. Ask them, especially a cfo, these really key questions like critique this for me, like how would this go wrong? Or what's the error in that? You see and get their feedback on it. Yeah. So you're getting buy in. But CFOs and CEOs are generally quite trained in math. Well, hopefully. And finance. Yeah. So they should be very familiar with how these models work. So number one, get them involved and get them to critique your work and do no hard cut over, do a bit of a pilot thing and do it slowly. So Robert Daniels, the ex WeWork CMO I interviewed, he said he allocates like, you know, 60% to day to day stuff that's working. Yeah. But then he's like, okay, we need to allocate 20% of our budget to like longer term stuff. Yeah. And then 10% to epic moonshots that are really going to fail. Right. And we know that, but they will if they work, they work out really well. Yeah. So it's more like risk management here and getting buy in with these different percentages. So it's a very easy sell to go to your CFO. Hey, I want 20% of my budget to go to this stuff. You know, we know long term will work, but I don't want to like hamper what's already working. You know, get by in there first and then you know, do your pilot study, create a crude model and bring them along on the journey. That's the easiest way. It's not going to be fast, but it's a really risk mitigated way that they will probably say yes to. Rather than let's dump everything and go to this brand stuff. You're just going to get an instant sort of rejection.

I've seen that fail a number of times, so I fully agree. I think that's a really good. The idea of having the CFO or the finance team like critique it is, I think a really great tactical piece of advice to get their buy in and make them feel a part of it. And instead of just like dropping them and be like we're going with this, they're going to reject that flat out. So I think that's really smart, big time.

Yeah. And like selling it like I think I interview this guy called Mike who advises CMOS executive coach. I think people underestimate how much you have to sell this. Whatever you want done internally to everybody and get buy in. Don't be afraid for that to be very arduous and long and then fight for it, you know what I mean? Like it can't be just here's the evidence, like I'm right, it's just not how it works. And I think, you know, that sort of like impetus between selling things internally has kind of been lost, but it can be, can require a lot of effort. So just be prepared to put in the hard yards.

I think it's important to go in with eyes open, but that sounds exactly right. So look, this has been an amazing conversation. I mean We've done 40 minutes. I think we have have plenty of content. So I'm happy to wrap here unless there's any last points that you want to share. Any other topics you want to make sure that we hit on today?

Not really. I mean just to sort of like plug. Because if any of this is sort of like hit a chord, you know, I have written about this quite extensively. So there's the branding mag article series which I think you're referencing before. So you go to brandingmag.com you'll see the, you know, what is a brand campaign, which is the first one that started. And then yeah, the newsletter, the one I referenced was the how long does advertising last? Just go to my LinkedIn, you can find that one. But if you know people on your show are wanting links to that, I'll send those to you. And the Nike ad as well.

What was the last one?

Oh, the Nike. The Nike ad. Sorry, the original brand campaign. Yeah. I think that story is really interesting. It's sort of like. It's actually a really good ad. I like it, but I think it's like this sort of brand campaign, sort of mantra has pointed a lot of people in the wrong direction, unfortunately, so.