How Chili’s used creativity, culture and customer experience to create one of the greatest turnaround success stories - George Felix

Everyone just before we get into the show, I just wanted to give a really big shout out to my founding sponsor system one. As many of you know, I worked at system one and before that, I was actually a client there. Now the thing I love about system one is when I'm need to make a big decision, they have been there to help me because what system one does is use the power of emotion to help predict the likely impact of my innovation or advertising. So I want to be stuck in the boardroom leading to justify why we're going to pick one creative route over another or launch this innovation over that one. It has been indispensable. It's also really simple to use, very actionable and incredibly good value too. So if you want to find out more about system ones, test your ad or test your innovation, simply go over to system1group.com and find out more. Okay, without further ado, let's go on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to young sensor CMO. Now my next brand is one that half the audience will know all about and the other half the audience are probably wondering who on earth are they. Chilles have just undergone one of corporate America's most incredible brand turnarounds and I'm joining this episode by their CMO George Felix to find out exactly how they achieved it and why customer experience is the most important ingredient when it comes to turning your brand around. It's an amazing episode and I have to say it's also the first one I've had a margarita on as well and the chips. Let's just say our pretty impressive two. This is one of the reasons why they're being so successful. Enjoy. George Felix, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Janet. Awesome. Thank you for coming to Chilles. Mate, it's my pleasure. Now what I should do, I think half the audience is going to go, oh my words, you can talk about chilles. This is like the best thing ever. Half-born is going to be going to Chilles. What are they? I thought we should start by talking about what chilles is and no better way than we've got some chips. I say chips. This is the exception. This is the British guy calling the chips. Well, I mean, we're at a tradition. I know we got a lot of people outside of the US that they're watching show and I'm a big fan of myself and so we're sitting at a tile table top. So these tile tables are something that, you know, if you could, Chilles is a 51-year-old brand. They used to be in our restaurants. We're actually about to bring them back in. So this is kind of nostalgia here, but you can't start a Chilles experience without chips and salsa. So these are our signature chips and salsa. Now a pro move that I'm going to introduce you to is that we've also got Chilles signature ranch here. So the chips and salsa are amazing. What is also a nice move is to dip the chips in the ranch. So okay, this has to happen. You should probably get into it. Let's get into it. I'm going to start with the way I did it right here. You know, you get a little bit on there and here we go. Okay. Let's bring this in. Here we go. There it is. Everyone listening and watching has now got massive envy. That's right. That's right. And then you've been, let me know what you think about the chip and ranch too. It's quite light, isn't it? Right. Then chips. Really crispy. So also, also, just hit just hit the spot. Great way to start with me now. Now my my youngest daughter in particular is a massive fan of ranch whenever we order anything it has to have branch with it. So yeah, she is all over this. Well, let's give her a round. You'll have to tell her what you think of the Chilles ranch. Uh-huh. What do you think? That is very, very tasty. Okay. Now there's one thing, one other thing that you have to have at a Chilles meal to wash all this delicious stuff down is a margarita. Chilles sells more margarias than anyone in the United States. Uh-uh. We sold over 25 million last margaritas last year. So our signature margarita is the president day. So we've got some president. President say, here we go. Yes. Yes, man. Thank you, Andrea. That's it. That's magic. That's amazing. So they all come in this signature blue shaker right to the table. And uh, you know, you're going to get to keep filling this up. So we are going to, here you go. We're going to shake this guy. Okay. So, so you can see the president day logo here. We're going to, you're going to want to shake this guy. Yep. Right. There you go. Make sure it's good, good and shake. And then you go, you just take that top off. Okay. And then you can just pour it right in. Beautiful. And then if you want, you know, the rims already salted, which is, which is important. Got a lime here. So I'd recommend squeezing the lime in. Give this a go. Okay. And oh, okay. Okay. Plenty of lime and cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Oh, yeah. All right. Welcome to Dallas. Good to be here, mate. Good to be here. Oh, yeah. This is officially the first unsensitivity mo podcast that has started with the margarita. Or any margarita. Well, I hope it's not the last. I hope this is the new tradition. Yeah. Yeah. So the margarita status wild. So how many margaritas do you make it a year? We've sold almost 30 million last year. So we are the number one seller of margaritas and tequila. And it's something we want to be known for. Margaritas are, you know, the number one cocktail in the United States. And tequila is one of the fastest growing spirits. And so if you go back to when chili started, you know, the menu is quite small. In fact, there's a picture one on the wall behind you there. That little yellow piece of paper over there was the, you know, it was about this big. And so, you know, the the guys that started Chili's, they just wanted to have a place that served great food, cold drinks, cold beer, cold margaritas. And so, you know, over the years, the president, obviously, has been our flagship margarita for a very long time. But we've since expanded now. So every day of the year, at Chili's, we have what you call margarita of the month. And it, you know, rotates every single month. It's a fun new flavor, but it's a $6 margarita. So every day of the year, you can come get a $6 margarita at Chili's, which is great. So helps you, you know, nudge, nudge if you weren't sure if you were going to get that mark. But we also have great premium margaritas. We have Petron frozen margaritas, we have Casamigas margaritas, Don Julio. So you can get kind of whatever you want at Chili's. And we really think it's important that we, you know, of course, you can get other drinks at Chili's. But we want to be known as a margarita bar. And so it just fits in with the vibe of the brand and really, you know, the DNA of our brand. I love the fact you zeroed it on making one thing a signature as well. Because I think lots, lots of restaurant trains try and do a lot of things, don't they? You've kind of made that the famous thing that you do. Yeah, it's, it's a great point, right? Like, you know, of course, we're going to have something on our menu for everyone. And that's important. But I think we also, like when we came in, you know, four years ago, it was about getting to some focus and identifying and defining what Chili's is and what Chili's is all about. And so at the time, we defined what we called our core four. It was, we wanted to be known for burgers, crispers, which are chicken tenders, fajitas, which we kind of introduced America to and margaritas. That was the four things. It's like, of course, you're going to be able to get other things on a Chili's menu. Those are the four things that we really want to be known for. And that's where we started this journey. And I think, like you said, a lot of times brands get stuck trying to be everything to everybody. And for us, creating that focus really, you know, now you see it. If you come in and look at a Chili's menu, you can tell those are the things we, you know, we're really proud of. And that's the stuff we want to be known for. And now we're expanding beyond those. But, but I agree, that focus is, is, is pretty important. Now, I want to give, listen, a bit of context as well, here. So you joined, was it four or five years ago? I think I'm right. It's about four years ago. Yeah. And just for context, I mean, if you look at the data, this is one of the biggest turnarounds in corporate American history. So 19 consecutive quarters of store and store growth, last year, quarter four sales up 23.7%. I think that's store for store as well, isn't it? Yeah. Comparison. Turnover from 2022 to 2025, 3.8 billion to 5.0, almost 5.4 billion. Margin's up from 11.9 to 17.6. And this will delight the marketing audience here. Marketing investment went up almost four times. That's right. 32 million to 137 million. Resulting in you being the number two casual dining restaurant chain in the US. That is quite a result. Yeah. What was the context? Prior to you joining. Yeah. So, you know, when, when I, when I came in four years ago, our CEO, Kevin Harkman had come in just, you know, a couple months prior to me joining. And it was, it was clear. It was, you know, we were stepping into a turnaround. And so, Kevin and I worked together on several brands in our past. We worked together back at PNG on Old Spice and then at Young Brands on, on several brands there. And so, we weren't new to turnarounds, but I think in, you know, each one's a little bit different. And so, in this case, really understanding, we're in a new segment casual dining, really trying to understand that. And so, when we came in from just, I'll focus on the marketing side. Chili's hadn't been marketing nationally for several years, like three or four years prior to me getting here. And some of that was obviously driven by COVID. You know, a lot of people, you know, a lot of brands pulled back at that time. And some of it was just strategic. The brand at that time was, was focused on maybe some other areas, you know, other ways to promote using, you know, discounting or talking to our database of, you know, my Chili's Rewards members versus kind of a national advertising presence. So, really coming in, it was, you know, wow, we need to, like, really redefine what marketing at Chili's means, right? And that's across the board. So, that's the team. Do we have the skill set? If we want to go become a national advertiser again, do we have the skill set? go do that, do we have the agency partners that can help us do that, and then obviously do we have the budget? How are we going to re-diver, you know, divert funds from other places strategically that we've been focused as a brand to now putting that into advertising? So it's interesting, obviously when you talk about the increase in advertising spend, I think when you're not really a national advertiser and you have ambitions to become one, that's where you get those big jumps, but it didn't all happen at once, right? We kind of stair-stepped it and we really had to prove it out because that's a big decision and it's a big investment. It really is. So that's kind of what I stepped into four years ago and it takes time, you're not going to do it overnight, but now looking back at it, I think we now have what I would call a world class marketing team here and that's world class partners as well from an agency perspective and it's been a fun ride. It's interesting that Kevin brought you in and you worked together before. How important is it to bring in people that you know can do the job? I think it's critically important. Obviously, I've followed Kevin to several stops and I think there's a reason for that. One, he's just a phenomenal leader and a mentor to me and somebody that I trust and so that's hugely important to me. But also understanding their philosophy on how they want to build a brand or build a business. And so I think that's super important and so for me, I think it's important as well and it's a big part of how I built my team and so there are three key people that I knew when I looked at the team and said, hey, there are skill sets, you know, we don't have right now because Chili's hadn't been innovating from a food and beverage standpoint. We hadn't been advertising. There are a lot of things that just we weren't doing and so I brought three people from my past, Jesse Johnson, who I knew from the agency side. He worked at widening Kennedy, Steve Kelly and Mary Ellen Scott. I worked with at Yum and each of them brought a skill set that I knew we didn't know. We didn't have that we needed and then from there we were blessed to have a great team that was already here and there were people that were willing to like they bought into what we were trying to do and then we brought in some new people since then and so it's a great mix. I think in any of the stops I've been, I think having that history, you know, there's a shorthand there, you know, when you've worked with someone and you've been in the trenches with them that I really appreciate and but also blending, you know, the people I've worked with with new talent that I'm just getting to know has been a real recipe for our success. Now, a little sidebar because you kind of mentioned it earlier. You do the turnaround on old spice. Didn't you back in your career? Yes. Now, I think everyone listening, all know, it's incredibly well known campaign, the man you wish your man's felt like, which was ushered. Just quickly explained the insight behind that and how that performed. It was unbelievable. So I was an assistant brain manager, so I'd just come out of business school. I'd interned on old spice the previous summer, so coming in and I was the ABM working on Body Wash, which was not doing well. And so huge competitive launch coming in from Unilever. It was Dove for Men, so this massively successful women's brand was going to be launching a men's brand. And so we were basically trying to come up with a campaign, PNG calls it ProFence, a proactive defense. A campaign to counteract this competitive launch. And so the insight, we thought, this is where having great agency partners is important. The brand guys thought, we know it. If you have to say it's for men, it's not for men. That's got to be the ankle, right? We're going to deposition this women's brand coming into the men's category. Our agency, much smarter than us, they looked at the brief and they latched onto one stat that could have been a throw away on the brief. But it was that 60% of men's body wash is purchased by a woman. That could be a mom, a wife, a girlfriend. And so their insight was, okay, if this is your enemy, this is who you're going against, that's already a lot of those 60% that you have, a lot of those women are probably already buying Dove for themselves. They're going to make it very easy for them to buy Dove for their guys. We, for the first time as old spice, need to talk to both men and women. And that unlocked an entirely different direction for that particular commercial. And so if you recall in that commercial, the first line that he says is, "Hello, ladies," which is completely different. Old spice and never talked to women before. And so the man, your man, could smell like. So it was intentionally talking to women, but also he was a guy that guys thought was cool. And so it- Call of things was very good. Yeah. And yeah, Isaiah Mustafa was incredible. He's had an amazing career since then, but threading that needle of both a guy that women would love and a guy that guys also loved the humor and all that stuff, it was just incredible work from Wyden and Kennedy and it was just fun to be a part of. There's a great example of the element of surprise. It was totally unexpected. Yeah. The old spice to do that. Yeah. Very, very funny. And it landed the point brilliantly for both audiences in a very clever way. You didn't have to choose between the audience. You meant love it. Women loved it. And it's funny, hindsight's always 2020. So if you show that ad to people now, they're like, oh my gosh, you must have known right aware that thing was going to be amazing. Quite the opposite. We got the rough cut and it was like crickets in the room. Oh, we'll see. Yeah, like our agency, they were in Portland and we were in Cincinnati and they had to come back on the phone and be like, hey, is everything okay? We're like, oh, hang on, hang on. We're on the phone. And we didn't know. He was talking really fast and there's all this stuff going on and we were like, I don't know. I'm like, can we slow it down? Can we do all these other things? And we actually went, my brand manager is a guy named James Morehead. He took me and the other ABMs out to a bar that night and we split into two of us went to one corner, two of us went to the other and we just bought people drinks. And one group was men, one group was women and we said we were from a market research firm and we just watched them. We bought them a beer if they'd watched the commercial and we were watching them watch the commercial. Love that. What brilliant things is it. And we reconvened at the end of the night and we were like, guys, I loved it. They were laughing at this part. They loved this line. The women loved him. They couldn't stop talking about, you know, and so then it gave us the confidence to say, okay, we weren't crazy. Like, you know, let's not overthink this. We got something here and go. I think the moment I thought, wow, that has gotten to the kind of whole of fame. Was it if you remember the tie-dad on the Super Bowl a few years ago? Yeah. Where they ripped you off, didn't they? They sure did. That's another PNG brand, so they had the advantage, I'm sure, of like, collaborating with Old Spice on that. But yeah, I mean, that was, and that was in the early days, I mean, this really dates me, but we had just launched our Facebook page, like the Old Spice Facebook page, like months before that. I think we launched the YouTube channel with that ad. So like, it was at a time when like, virality was very different than what we know it to be now. It was one of the first, I think, ads that truly did go viral in the social media age and that pass around, because even to this day, I think people, it gets covered in advertising publications as one of the best Super Bowl ads. It actually never ran on the Super Bowl, because we didn't, we really couldn't afford it. You know, Old Spice pretty small brand. But it got passed around so much that weekend on Facebook and other platforms that by Monday morning, people, when they were talking about what ads they loved, it just kind of seeped into. That's genius. You won the Super Bowl without even being on the Super Bowl. Yeah, that's right. That's very easy. I love the fact you went down the pub and got people to kind of rate it. I think that's a really good example of the importance of being close to customers. I think so. Like, you know, I think sometimes we, as marketers, like you forget, you forget that essentially what we're trying to do. We're trying to evoke a response and emotion and there's going to be all these ways to measure things and test things and say, should I show the product for this many seconds here or when should I put it in? But the end of the day, you need people to actually stop and take notice of it. And so that's kind of the right way to like measure that. Now, I heard you say a phrase of the day which I really like, which was sales overnight, brand over time. And you talked about how you kind of raised the investment for Chitties. How do you sell that into the organisation? How do you get the organisation on this side? So I think one thing that almost everyone listening to this will know to be true is that every year marketers are having to cut the budgets back. They're going to do more with less. You know, people look on with envy at what you've managed to achieve here. What's the secret to building a good case for brand investment? Well, I think starting that framework and it's something I learned in my previous, previously when I was working at Yum, our CEO, Greg Creed, talked about that all the time. That's a marketer's job and you have to be doing both, right? I think that's the, that's the trick, right? You can't really say, you know, don't worry, the sales are going to come in a couple of years, right? Like that's not going to work. But you also can't be so short-minded or so focused on short-term sales that you jeopardize the brand in the long term. So I think using that as a starting point was helpful for the organisation to know that we are going to be doing a mix of things and some of these things absolutely have to be driving short sales overnight. And in our business, that is foot traffic into our restaurants and that is top line sales, right? And we control the menu merchandising too. So it's like once we get them in the restaurant, how do we show them all the stuff we're most proud of and the stuff that, you know, we know they're going to have a great experience on. So that is like full stop. That is our job, right? And I think sometimes marketers complicate or muddy the conversation by not starting there, right? If you start with some of the other, you know, other softer marketing metrics or things like that, the conversation tends to go sideways. And so I think just being very clear and owning, that is our job at the end of the day. Like we are responsible for that. Really inspires accountability and confidence with my cross-munctions, whether it's my CFO, my CEO. you know, COO whoever it is. But I think also then explaining like, "Hey, we are also gonna be investing in things because if we can build this brand and we can change the way people feel about Chili's, in the long term, that is going to be a multiplier effect on top of that." And thankfully, I have a leadership team that I sit on that is very supportive of that. And a lot of them have long histories at Chili's. And so they remember what when Chili's was that brand, right? They remember the heyday of this brand. And so, you know, they know the power. When we are a brand that's in the cultural zeitgeist and we are a brand that is beloved like that, they know what happens. And so, like, we're not gonna get back to that by just talking about a 1099 price point all the time. We're gonna have to do things that might not show you a sales return tomorrow, but it changes the way people think about our brand. And so, that was really the starting point of it. And both our leadership team and our board were very supportive. Now, again, like I said, we had to take one, you know, we didn't go from 30 million to 100 million overnight. You know, we did one campaign to show, can we drive people into our restaurants? Can we drive the sales lifts? And as we saw that, then we got the confidence to say, "Okay, let's continue this investment." - You just touched on something that I think most marketers forget, which is the power of not necessarily nostalgia, but using what the brand was in the past to help shape what it will be in the future. - Yeah. - 'Cause so many, so many brand managers wanna change everything, right? - For sure. - Yeah. - But actually, I quite respect how you're using the things that you're famous for in the past. - Yeah, and honestly, it's somewhat a function of my career path. I didn't like intend it to be this way, but I've worked on a bunch of heritage brands, right? Oldspies, KFC, Pizza Hut, Chilles. And so I think now having done this several times, like this idea of reviving legacy brands is really fascinating to me. I think it's really interesting. And as a marketer, when you think about what brands mean to people, I think legacy brands are a really fun challenge because that's the whole thing, right? Like the whole idea of a brand is like something that gives you irrational loyalty to it or love for something, right? I used to, I remember, I mentioned it before, Greg Creed, our CEO, Yammy, he was like, what are brands important? He's like, who has a watch in the room and everyone raised their hand? And he's like, well, why do you have the watch you have? Because you can get a watch that tells the time for 10 bucks, right? But why did you pay $100 for yours or $200 for yours or whatever? It's because of a brand, right? Like the function of that thing is telling time, but the brand aspect of it and the feeling you have when you wear it or the look or whatever it is makes you feel differently. And so I think, we call, I call this exercise, digging through the attic. That first part, when you get on a brand like this and digging through the attic to find, like what was the, what are all those things that are absolutely core to this brand that when it was at its best made it special, made it unique and finding those things and like my attic at home, there are things in there that I would like never want to part ways with and there are other things I'm like, oh my gosh, why did I hang onto this, right? And we can leave those behind. But I'm kind of old school in the sense of PNG trained that you have to start with your brand on a page and you have to define that. And I think finding those things that made the brand special in the past are part of the distinct developments that you want to bring forward. Now, the trick is how do you bring them forward in a way that isn't just looking backwards, but it's relevant today. I totally agree. I worked on a brand called Lucas Aiden UK which is the equivalent of Gatorade. So imagine Gatorade would be the equivalent. And we had this big brand relaunch to go through because of sugar tax. And we went back in the archives at 80 years and we discovered that the reason the brand existed was that doctors were noticing that kids were dying in surgery and they didn't have enough energy to recover. And they invented this glucose mix to give to the kids, to basically get the body to kind of recover more quickly and they saw this massive increase in kids surviving surgery. I mean, I was like, what a story is that? I did not think you were gone there. No, I know exactly. We just went to the archives and we ended up this positioning energy beats everything in the actually energy as a source of what you overcome any challenge in your life. And it was just like, wow, we've just uncovered this amazing insight, but it required us going through the archives and the factory in a dusty room that everyone had forgotten about sort of things. Totally. So I'm with you on this. I think because of the turnover of marketers and we just lose that legacy, don't we? Yeah. That brands have. I also think we run into the trap of like, well, if we're trying to appeal to a younger audience, then we can't go back to the past. It has to be new or we have to chase a new trend. And I think there's-- like with brands that have histories like that, there's always something that is timeless. I just believe that. Otherwise, the brands wouldn't be what they were. And that to me is the fun part of how do you find that thing and then spin it and reposition it so that in 2026, it's just as true as it was in the '90s. And also, you tap into some latent awareness of the brand, latent in motion. That's for sure. So what are you there? You're just uncovering it as well. Right. Yeah, walking away from that. Were you exactly-- Now you got to build everything from scratch, or you can actually tap into it totally. One of my colleagues, actually, Orlando, who wrote a book on advertising and how it works, actually nostalgia and tapping into things from the past are one of the most emotive. He would call them right-brained features that you can possibly use as a brand. So you're crazy not to use them if you got them. Totally agree. Now, talking about advertising, I need to check something with you because I think I heard this, right? That you managed to pitch an idea to mischief your creative agency, and they bought it. Which I just thought was amazing. Is this true? Did you pitch an idea to mischief, and they made the ad for you? OK, this is true. I just want to also be clear, that's the only time this has ever happened. So I don't want anyone to get any misconceptions that I'm like a big idea guy or creative. So this was really early when I started here. It was in that process of how are we going to get back on to be an advertiser, how are we going to go talk about this brand? And we have this thing called the Three For Me. You basically get a bottomless drink, our bottomless chips and salsa, a nearly half pound burger, and fries for $10.99. But there's other options. You can kind of pick. You can get different starters. You can get different entries. And so part of it, we were going to go on with very kind of traditional food focus advertising that kind of explains what the offer is and all of that. But we also, in the sense, wanted to do a bit more brand building and start coming back with a brand voice that we thought had been missing from Chili's. And so at Chili's, we take our food very seriously. We don't take ourselves very seriously. So it was like, how do we start to bring some of that sense of humor and voice back to the brand? And so I was talking to my team. And I'm a kid that I love 90s music. It's something that a lot of nostalgia for me. And I was trying to figure out how do we explain this meal? Because it's a little complex. You've got to make some choices and all that. One night, I woke up. And for some reason, thought of the old Brian McNight song. And he counts. He counts like one, two, three. He goes all the way to five. But I was thinking, wow, we need to figure out something like that, where we need to tell people there's steps to this thing. You've got to pick your drink. You've got to pick your appetizer. You've got to pick your entree and all of these things. And so I just kind of-- I was using it with my team as like, hey, this might not be the right idea. But it's like, hey, what if we had Brian McNight come back and sing his song, but we changed the word. So he was explaining how to order a three for me. And I just kind of kept using that as like, we need to find that idea. And then I called up Miss Jeff, who I'd worked with at Tinder when I was the CMO at Tinder prior. So I knew Greg and Carrie and the whole team there. And I was like, hey, I think we're ready to actually start doing something again if you guys are game to jump in with us on this. And I gave him this idea. Not saying this was the idea, but just like this is kind of like-- want something like that. And God, they were like, you know what? I think that's just the idea. I think we just try and do that. And so it's like the one time of my career. But I can claim that. I can claim that. And those guys are so good. Graveli, they took a very shallow idea, and they made it so fun. And it was a great first step for us in this journey to get Chili's back into the advertising game. Well, I dug out the scores in this one, actually, on the system on beta bass as well, which you'll be very, very, very pleased to hear. So Star Rating Out of Five, 4.8. So very, very emotional at Chris. A lot of happiness, a lot of surprise as well, which I expect. What I think is textbook as well was that within the first two seconds, 80% of the audience knew exactly who they were watching. They knew it was a Chili's advert as well. And that's very hard to do. So the fact that you opened in the restaurant as well was brilliant. And I dug into the qualitative feedback as well. And this, I thought, was really helpful, given what you said. The number one reason that people gave for the emotion they felt was the three for 10. And I was thinking, we tend to think of prices, a rational thing. But actually, what you made the deal and emotional thing, that's why they responded. I can't believe it's C-0310. 10-9 is not an issue. And then it does a lot of things that I think we often forget. So it's the humours there, the music's there, the celebrities there, all those things, brilliant ways of kind of creating a motion. Yeah, I love the note on the 3 for 1099 being driving the emotional connection. I think that's what we've tried to do is take things that are very functional and also find the insight that helps drive more of an emotional connection. So very fun, but the mischief team. Well, huge credits of mischief, not banning the idea on first pitch. They are great. Jeff, the Stradge, Jeff Macquarie is like the best on the Stradge side. So I'll take the one, but they've got so many more. So many more. Well, Sticky was mischief. I didn't know Greg on Monday and he just made a little comment. He said, "I wish every client was like George." Okay. Which I thought was lovely. You obviously have a great connection. You worked together at Tinder, I think, didn't you, as well. We did. Yeah. I worked with mischief. I brought them on at Tinder and then they also do work for us here. Yeah. So what's been the secret to establishing such a good working relationship? I'll say, like, I've been very fortunate. If you go all the way back to when I was an intern at Old Spice or an ABM there, I worked with. I got to work with widening Kennedy in Portland and I was kind of spoiled, to be honest with you. For that to be your first exposure to an ad agency, I realized now at the time I didn't know any different, but I realized now was pretty rare. I credit a lot of it to the people I worked with there that taught widened work with Old Spice very differently than the other creative agencies at Prokering Gamble worked with their brands. What I appreciated about it is that when you work with a great creative agency, they should have a very strong opinion on things and they wanted to understand our business at a deeper level. What it taught me was that when you're working with agencies like that, you have to let them do their thing. You're the expert at certain things and you're bringing them on because you want their outside perspective on how to solve your business problems. And I think what I've seen too often happen is that you kind of suffocate the creativity with an agency. You put on too many mandatories or you tweak an idea to death that started off great, but you kind of water it down. I think with, I just learned, and it wasn't me, I was an assistant brain manager, but just watching the way that my brain manager worked with them or even at that point Kevin was our marketing director. You could see there's a certain point where you pull back. There are certain things you have to push for, but you also need to pull back me willing to give and take some chances with them to get to bigger ideas. That experience kind of gave me belief that creativity could solve business problems. If you work with the right people and you work with great creative agencies and you let them do their thing, more often than not, you're going to get better output. I've tried to carry that through my career and it's no different now. If we work with another group called it's advertising time and I think we have an inherent trust of, here's what we need to accomplish here, the mandatories that we're going to hold very dear to us, but we're going to leave you enough room to have that creative freedom to do what we think is breakthrough work. I think sometimes I've seen it a lot. I think sometimes clients can't help themselves but kind of get in the way. Totally great. The trust point is so spot on and you sometimes need to know when to get yourself out of the way. You know, and just give them the freedom. I think the best work I've ever been involved in has had the least input from me and the work where I've been intimately involved because it's politically sensitive or there's a lot of writing on it and then you end up being safe. The other interesting thing actually is that you're at the tenure of your relationship as well. I've worked at the system one called the compound creativity and it was all about how creativity compounds over time, so difference between campaigns that run a long time versus a short time. The difference gets bigger, but there was an insight in there as well which was that those that change your agency regularly effectively reset the creative and those that had a consistent relationship with their agency over time saw this big gap emerge between them and everyone else. The thing about the compounding effects of relationships that you have with people as well as the work. Yeah, and I would agree with that from my personal experience without having the data, but you know, widening Kennedy I think still works on old spice, but I mean that when you looked at whether I was there or any of my other brands, I think that there's a lot that you build up. One is just knowledge of the people, right? You build a trust amongst the people and certainly people, you know, kind of inner, there's some people that come in and out, but when the core players are together for a longer period of time, you build some trust there. I think the understanding of the business is very important and the best agencies that I've worked with are very curious. They want to, they want to know the sales numbers. They want to go spend time in a restaurant or talk to a franchisee or whatever it is, right? So I think anytime, you know, if you change, then you're resetting all that and you're starting from zero again, you got to relearn. So I think a lot of that makes sense, but and then I think the biggest thing I think is when you get into a groove with an agency or agencies that really understands the voice, the tone and creative, like, man, that is, like, you save so much time and you start to get the conversations you have are very different. It's less about, you know, like, you're not debating the same things that you are in those newer relationships. You're more just like building on each other and figuring out how do we make this thing bigger. And I feel like we're really fortunate with, you know, those two groups. It's advertising time. I miss Jeff. I've been on Chili's basically the entire time I've been here and the shorthand we have now is really good and I think, you know, the work, you know, the work shows and the work. I love that. And almost when you're in that situation, you don't, the idea has just come, you know, exactly. You don't have to wait for a brief. It's exactly right. You've got an idea. It's exactly right. It's just no. Yeah, it's like they know. They're like, you know, I mean, they come, you know, one of the things I love is all of our agency partners come every year. We do a general manager's conference. So every restaurant has a general manager that runs that restaurant. So we have over 1,100 restaurants in the United States. And so once a year, we get all 1,100 of them together in for a week and we come together and it's a huge celebration, big culture driver. We celebrate the work they're doing, all of those things. And we bring our agencies to that because we want them to feel one. We want them to feel they are part of our team, but two, we want them to feel the culture. We want them to hear and interact with our general managers and, you know, coming out of that. Now our agencies are getting involved in actually putting that conference on. They're like, we have creative ideas for that. Oh really? Like, they're not even as cool. No, no, no, and consumers that we're going to see it. But they're like, if that gets our general managers fired up, let's go do it, right? And so like, we're, you know, and there have been ideas that come from that of like, okay, now we understand this better. You know, and now we design all of our team member uniforms and all of those, like the t-shirts and all that stuff. And so, like the definition of marketing, I think, is expanded here a bit more than, you know, where I've been in the past. And I think it's because the people that are working on it, whether it's my team internally or our agencies are completely bought in. Or like the idea of applying the same creative craft during turn audience, as you do the external audience, because imagine if you fire up the internal audience, exactly the same extent, right? That's going to pay back many times. Well, and it's something I've learned in this role is, you know, we talk, you know, and I've heard you talk to many CMOs about, you know, effectiveness and what are the things we can do to drive better effectiveness. And I think there's all these things we can do, right? The marketing sciences, I'm a big fan of that and I try to apply that. But honestly, the thing that's driven the best marketing ROI I've ever seen is a great experience, right, in our restaurants. There's nothing like they can have a bigger impact on that. Oh, that you touched on something. So, I'm just doing some new research for Cannes this year, which is all about the startling power of surprise. Okay. So, we did Adam Morgan and I did the extraordinary cost of start a couple years ago and we're coming back with the answer now. So, you know, if the problem is advertising is too dull, what's the answer? And we've really locked in on the power of surprise. Okay. But what's really interesting about it is that surprise is based on your, it's called this reward prediction error. Okay. But basically, our brains are prediction machines. We anticipate an experience. Yep. And surprise is the variance to what anticipated your experience is. So, you're at 100%. Okay. So, you're advertising bills and expectation of an experience. The difference to the expectation and the inoutlook experience is where the surprise comes. And going back to system 1 database, we looked at every reason on the database that any consumer's given for being surprised. And the outliers by far are the experience of the brand compared to the promise, both negative and positive. So, if you have a really high expectation of a brand, the underlivers, you get this extremely negative surprise and the reverse happens. So, you just think time together consumer experience, customer experience rather, with the brand promise is where the biggest surprise can happen. I love that. And I think it's been really the secret sauce of this whole turnaround is I think some people Thank you. It's been marketing lead and I think marketing's been a big part of it. But honestly, I would say it's really been operations lead and it starts with our CEO and our COO and all of us on a leadership team where we get into restaurants. We are in restaurants. We do listening sessions with our team members all the time. And before we turn on advertising, we were on a mission to, you know, how do we better staff our restaurants? How do we better maintain our restaurants? How do we make it simpler, you know, a via on the menu and I want someone to deliver. We call ourselves chili heads here. If I want them to deliver chili head hospitality, right, which is like exceed your expectations when you come into a Chili's. But our menu so complex that, you know, you're worried about, you know, all these different things that you don't make all the time and I've got you doing all these processes that aren't adding value to the guests. It's not really fair for me to ask you to do that. So we've cut 25% of our menu over the last four years. We've simplified all these things in our, we call it our hardhouse, our kitchens where, you know, processes that weren't really value ads for the team member or the guest. You know, our technology works better. We've done all these things and we're staffing our restaurants more. So now, hopefully when you go to Chili's, there's someone at the door that opens the door for you and says, "Hi, welcome to Chili's." And hands you, you know, gets you to your table really fast and you know, chips hit your table fast and you got a cold margarita really soon. And all these things and now our team members can focus on taking care of the guest, which is what they show up to work, you know, wanting to do anyway. And so we've invested far more money, you know, a lot more money in that side of the world than we have in marketing and I'm completely supportive of it because, you know, as a leadership team, when we talk about where we want to invest, sure, I want to invite, increase our marketing spend year over year. But there's a certain point where I'm saying, you know, I think we're okay with this much because I'd rather put the investment in if we can get more bussers that are cleaning tables faster and we can get more people into Chili's or more bartenders so we can get more drinks out faster. So I think like this idea of, you know, really understanding the full business and the impact that the operations and the experience can have to make your marketing better is huge. We have this mantra here that marketing brings the guests in and operations brings the guests back. And like that to me, you know, is a, it shows the partnership we have of like the job we have to do. Once we get them in the door, we pass the baton to our team members and they're doing an amazing job of serving great food and it's fun atmosphere. It's lively and they have a good time and that's really, you know, because I think we've all had examples probably where we had, you know, what we thought was good marketing. You drive trial, the experience, it's that negative, it's a surprise, like you said, you're not coming back, right? It's okay. Well, I've got some good feedback for you. I've got a producer James and I were at Chili's gate by the gate D15 in Miami Airport. So we thought, you know, we're not always seeing you. We're going to test everything. And big shout out to Jesse, I'll say, I did a great job. Good job, Jesse. But what was interesting is that the menu is even tighter at the airports. It is. Now rather than that be a disappointment, what did Jesse say to us? He said, we care so much that you don't miss your plane that we want to make sure that everything is on the table in 10 minutes. That's great. So we've taken a negative, which is, oh, we can't get the gazadiers or whatever, and turned it into positive, say we only do what we can make in 10 minutes, so we don't make you late and leave you disappointed. There you go. Which is a great example. There you go. Love it. Love it. Alright, well, I hope it was a good experience and we'll have to get you to one of our nine airport locations soon, hopefully, and yeah, it's great. Well, James got me doing the TikTok craze, which is the Mozzarella Stick. Yeah. Would you call it the cheese pull? The cheese pull. I failed the cheese pull this morning, but James did a much better job with this. Okay. I think he's going to go and give you. He's bringing the evidence here. Let's see. You need to be the judge of this. Promising start. It fails about. And then, yeah, unfortunately. Not bad. I'm going to give that one like a, let's see, out of 10, a scale of 1 to 10, I'm going to give that one a six. I can't. Not bad. Not bad. I'm not going to anticipate a million views on TikTok from this, but pretty good. Have you counted? Have you counted? How many views are all? Cheese pulls. It's a metric, yeah. I don't have the current count. It's literally like hundreds of millions though. It's insane. If you had told me like four years ago that the triple-dipper or fried mozzarella was going to be a key to like, you know, this brand turnaround, I would have told you you're crazy. But I think it's another good lesson for marketers. Sometimes the thing that you're talking about and you're like, hey, I want you to go buy this. Your guests sometimes will tell you they actually love something else and they find something else really fun about your brand. And I think if you're willing to go with that and then, you know, try and figure out how you can bring that more to light, then there's a huge opportunity there. So that was something that really started organically from our, you know, our fans and now we, you know, a few years later, the triple-dipper makes up, I think, 17% of our total sales. Wow. But it's an item that's been on our menu for decades, right? None of it was new. It was just, I think, it really resonates with TikTok culture. It resonates with how younger people want to eat, with variety and dipping and just the experiential nature of that item. And it's kind of just taken on a life of its own. I wonder if there's a world record for this. We need to, you know, it's a good idea. We need to probably formalize this and determine who has the best cheese part. Yeah, you need to get evidence that how far you've pulled the cheese. That's amazing. Well, this is a really important point isn't in terms of cultural relevance. So what are the top ways a brand can, you know, create cultural relevance? I mean, I'll say just from my experience on the brands I've worked on, I think it first starts with setting the conditions and the environment on your teams that this is something you're going to do and you're going to prioritize and you're going to make important. Because what I hear from a lot of, you know, friends and colleagues in the industry or people is that, you know, it's almost a, it's too much of an uphill battle. And so when that moment comes and they want to move fast, they don't have that alignment and that agreement that this is something that's important. And so what I try to do with my team is, you know, one, just stress the importance that we, like that is a goal of ours. We want to be a brand in culture. We want to be a brand that is in the cultural zeitgeist and talked about and popping up on, you know, the SNL or late night or, you know, people saying, did you see what Chili's just did? In order to do that, you have to make it a safe place for people to take swings and do that. You have to set aside budget. You know, that's the reality of it too, right? Like, if you don't set aside any money for it, but you say I want to be a brand in culture, well, how's that going to work? So we set aside, you know, money for what we call culture pops. We don't really know what they're going to be. Some of them going into the year, we have some rough ideas, but a lot of them are kind of still to be determined. And then some of them are low spend and, you know, they're just social swings. Others might be bigger spend, we might get a celebrity or something like that. But the other thing I would say is, is you got to take a lot of swings. I think sometimes brands that try to do this and they're like, this is the one thing we're going to do this year. Well, guess what? Like, yeah, there's so much pressure on it. Like we were talking about before. Like, I'm probably going to get too involved. I'm probably going to water down the idea and, you know, we're going to kind of suffocate that one and it's not going to go. Whereas, I think if you take a ton of swings, you're going to miss a bunch, which is fine. Again, that has to be okay too, right? You have to like create that environment where if you try something and nothing happens, that's okay. You're going to learn from it and move on. But the more swings you take, the odds of hitting a big one are going to be, you know, much higher. And so I think like to me, a lot of this, at least from my seat, is creating a culture and an environment that enables the teams and agencies to actually go do that and then you leave it to the experts to go. It's such a good point that with social media, isn't it? Because like, you're really hard on an idea that's super polished. And then nothing happens. Right. And then something that you spent no time at all is very rough. Yeah. Suddenly takes off. Very unpredictable, isn't it? Totally. Like, you really, there's, I mean, I could go on and on about ideas that I thought were amazing that I was like, oh, this is going to be a big one. And then something like the cheese pole, which I would have never guessed, has now turned into this crazy thing. So I think you just got to be, you know, willing to kind of go with it and when something takes off, like how fast can you move and does your team feel empowered to go move that fast? Now, one idea I saw that I absolutely loved because it really, it involves your distinctive assets and it's a good partnership is what you did with Tacovas. Oh, yeah. And for anyone who doesn't know what they are because I don't know what they are. So we're talking cowboy boots, aren't we? Cowboy boots, yeah. That's great. Yeah. But not just any cowboy boots. I mean, they are a, like, Tacovas is just an amazing brand. They are a Western lifestyle brand. I think Western lifestyle, cowboy boots, cowboy hats, all of that culture. I mean, we live here in Dallas, so it's, we're closer to it, but it's becoming a bigger thing. I think you saw it with Beyonce and her, you know, her whole tour and all that. And so Tacovas is a, like a rocket ship brand. They are going to be just absolutely huge. And so as we, this is another idea from mischief, they brought us, and we do these big briefs. We call it branded everything briefs, where it's open, you know, just, you know, hey, celebrate things about Chili's, like no product tied to it. Just bring us a ton of ideas. And one of the ideas they brought us was called booth boots. And so Chili, part of an iconic Chili's experience is sitting in a booth. It's kind of this, like, maroonish colored, you know, kind of, you know, kind of, like, of leathery booth. And so the idea was to take the material from Achilles' booth and make amazingly great handcrafted cowboy boots. And so we reached out to Tacovas. They were, they're amazing partners, totally game. And so we took, we took some old, they took our material. They have very high standards. They're like, well, we're not going to make boots that don't meet our standards. So thankfully our booth materials are apparently very high quality. So pass the test with Tacovas. That's good. Yeah. And so, and then we used this design that we saw from an old picture of Achilles that our founder was like a kind of a chili pepper vine design that was on one of his shirts from like the archives. And they created this incredible design. So we made boots and a belt all out of the Achilles' booth material. They sold out in, I think, under two minutes. Thus and say-- It was remarkable. Can you reverse the coat up and get to Covis, to brand dual boots? That's a pretty good idea. OK, after this I'm going to call Chris to see what she says. But that would be great. It's an upcoming brand. It's premium. Yeah. Great sign name would be great. Yeah. But it was awesome. And like I said, for brand like Tacovas, I think they saw the value. We're both Texas brands. They saw the value of appealing to the Chili's audience, the same way we did with them. They were absolutely awesome. Amazing. I did a CMO survey recently, which was not surprising. But it might surprise some people. And I discovered that 91% of CMOs only control the 1P promotion. OK. And they don't even have much influence over the others. But what's interesting about your role is that you do have an influence over pricing. You do have an influence over products. How do you influence the, I guess, the products part of the mix? Yeah, it's a really fun part of my job. The structure here is that all of the culinary and beverage and drink innovation sits under marketing. And so we have a whole part of my team that is just focused on innovation, the innovation pipeline. And then we have the culinary and beverage teams. And so every week we spend time in our test kitchen, we're behind the bar. And so we're really responsible for defining what's the three-year roadmap on innovation. And so having that integrated into marketing is, I think, a huge advantage in that we really control from the very beginning of the idea all the way through the go-to-market. And that can be the promotion of it, the advertising of it, it can be the way it shows up on our menu, and our merchandising, every part of that. And so it's different parts of my team that hand it off through the process. But to me, it's been really a really powerful thing for us. And I think it's not that marketing runs that whole thing. It is a cross-functional effort. And so every step of the way, supply chain, operations, finance, IT are all brought in because we just launched a brand new chicken sandwich, the big crispy, to launch that. I mean, we've been working on that for two years. And we have six different sandwiches. But it's all the things you don't think about. How hard could it be to launch a chicken sandwich? Well, you got to think about, OK, what's the capacity in the kitchen? And the area where the friars are, if we're going to sell a ton of chicken sandwiches that we're not currently selling, operationally, how's it going to work? What's the procedure to build it? Does the tech work in the restaurant? All those things that you don't think about. And so it's a huge cross-functional effort. But the fact that marketing is really leading that through from the beginning to the end, I think gives us a pretty big advantage. I think that's huge. I mean, one bit of us, I'd give to any senior marketer, is think, act like you do own everything. Correct. Yeah. The friars marketing, we are-- we create the vision. We create the strategy. We understand the customer. We represent the customer when decisions get made. So our job is to kind of organize all the resources and help us realize the vision. And I think that's something that Marx has tend to get frustrated about. Oh, I'm just a last bit in the chain. Yeah. Think about yourself as the first bit in the chain. Absolutely. Even if that's not the remit of your role, I mean, I'd take it a step further. I'd say like some of the things I've done that have made me a better marketer here, but also given me more kind of credibility with my peers and other functions is just understanding, getting your hands dirty in the restaurant and understanding the operations more and spending time with our team members or spending time in the kitchens and all of that. And so thinking of marketing outside of what you traditionally call marketing, but really taking an interest in those other functions and understanding how marketing can play a role there and then educating them as far as what you're doing. I think we'll just build more of that trust, even if the scope isn't technically yours. And we talked about three for me, didn't we earlier? And that's kind of touched on pricing. I think I've even heard you see us as far as before, actually, about the sticker shock you get, particularly by the way, if you're British and you come to America, that sticker shock is just even bigger by the way. But it's so expensive, isn't it? Have prices gone up, or is it just perception of things being more expensive? Well, I'll tell you, a lot of what we've been talking about for the last few years has been driven by just what we've seen from people on social media. And particularly, we've gone pretty hard at fast food. And it's because we see people basically every single day in drive-thrues holding up receipts. So how did I just spend $50? Or how did I-- like, I can't believe I'm getting this bag of food and I had to pay this much money. And so I do think prices have gone up. I think there's also-- there's shrink flation as something you hear a lot about right now. And really, what we're doing is we're using fast food as a foil to talk about how great our value is. And we're really proud about the food we serve, how much food you get, the price point that you get it at. And I think when you start to see this groundswell of people talking about how frustrated they are with the other options out there, and their prices have now come to a point where they're actually comparable, which we wouldn't have guessed, several years ago, that we'd be comparing price points at fast food to a full sit-down experience at Chili's. All of a sudden, that gives a very helpful frame of reference for people and for us to talk about our value. So I do think prices, in general, have risen. But also, there's a lot of pressure right now in the economy, whether it's gas prices or just all the things. People are having to make choices. And so our big thing is value-- we think fast food's broken their promise of being the best value and all that. But we believe value is more than just a price point. It's what you get for what you pay. And so for $10.99, I'd put our meal up against anybody's, because-- Very, very, very competitive. Yeah, because you're-- and it goes beyond the food. We think the food's amazing. But it's because of the Chili had hospitality, and it's the music in the restaurant, and you're in a fun place, and like you're not eating in your car, and all those things. And so for us, value goes well beyond. I think sometimes, especially in the United States, you got a lot of restaurant brands and fast food brands that are thrown out $1, $2, $3. Well, what are you getting? What are you getting for a dollar? Well, it's great that I only paid a dollar. But if it's not something I'm excited about, then that, to me, doesn't actually mean value. And I can confirm the portion sizes are very generous as well. Well, again, I'm glad. James and I are pros. But even we didn't quite finish yesterday when we had one, so glad to hear. Yeah, no one's going to go hungry. That's for sure. You got to think of Bob L. pricing, I'm new as well. Yeah. Which is quite an interesting call. I've not heard of that concept for-- Yeah. So again, I think that's part of us-- we want to be known for everyday value. Like no matter when-- we're open 363 days a year. And so any day you come into a Chili's, you don't have to have a coupon. It doesn't have to be at a certain time or day of the week. You don't have to use the app to get the offer. Just come into Chili's. And we're going to have something that, at an entry price point, if that's all the money you have to spend, you're going to get a great meal. You're going to get a great Margarita. No questions asked. Now, for those that might have more to spend and want more variety or more options, we're going to have things that are maybe at a higher price point, still an amazing value, right? Like our baby-back ribs, the full rack of ribs hangs off the plate. They're so big, right? Now, they might be at a price point that's somewhere in the $25 plus range. But for what you're getting, it's still an amazing deal. And I talked about our premium Margaritas, whether-- Adon Hulio or Casa Migos Margarita. If you go to an independent bar and get a Margarita like that, you're going to pay, I don't know, $20, $25 at Chili's. It might be $13, $14, $15, right? So we want to have something for everybody. But that barbell is we're always going to have that opening price point. If that's all you-- if that's what you can afford, you are going to have a great meal. But we always want to give a variety of options. We're going back to the element of surprise. Actually, when we were ordering our drinks, we were surprised that the quality of the chili we're being offered is like, oh, you've got those. If you've got something-- see, that exact thing playing out. So you get the surprise at the bottom end. I try to get the surprise at the top end. That's right. And even our $6 Margaritas, we use great spirits. Our Luna's Old Tequila, which is a great Tequila. But yeah, if we're going to be the number one Margarita, we've got to have a good range of tequila. So we're talking about baby back ribs as well. That was a fantastic ad as well, we're poised to them. So anyone listening, check that out. That's very, very funny. In fact, it was the highest scoring on the system on database I could find. I was a final line. That was very funny. That's one. The take out of that one was the surprise that everyone had when she just took the order. The baby back ribs and warts off and ignored them. That's right, that's right. That's one of those things we found in the attic that we definitely can act at Rideau. Everyone loves that song. So we've got some fun stuff coming up with more things with that jingle coming up here in the next few weeks, but it's just synonymous with Chili's. Well, that's another lesson that you've touched on a few times in this conversation, is doubling down on the things that work. Not being too proud to admit that that's working, it might be a cheese pull or baby-out ribs and run with it and put some money behind it. Absolutely. Maybe to round off, what would be the most important attributes of a successful CMA? Would you say? I think being curious is very important, so the way I would play that out is being curious when you're talking about your business and learning other aspects outside of marketing that we talked a little bit about, asking questions of your agency and your team to understand different perspectives, your consumer, your team members. I would also say just never settling, I guess, or always trying to push forward for what's next. I think as the CMO in an organization, you have a responsibility to push things forward and be provocative and push the organization forward, obviously in a way that feels on brand and all of that, but instigates different thinking and growth. That's something that, again, as a CMO, if you can play that role in your organization and deliver that, I think you start to gain the respect and credibility amongst the rest of the organization. I love that. I did a study last year called Confessions of a CMA where we did this bit off the record, because often the best conversations happen before the camera starts. So we found out. We ended up concluding that actually there's not much marketing that happens in the CMO role. We came up with six alternatives to the marketing, but one was mutiny, the other one was chief momentum officer. Back to your point is you have to create that tension in the organization to get it to move to the next level, but then you have to create the momentum that makes that change follow through both those things are really important. Your first point at your own curiosity is the single most cited reason from every CMO conversation I've had is the ability to always stay curious, recognize you don't know everything. Always reflect the customer insight when decisions are being made and always ask questions for other people to get everyone else thinking and remaining curious. So that plays out very well. Totally. I think that, and it's something I think I can continue to do a better job. It was that empathy for our guest or our consumer and making sure that they're represented early enough in the process is something that I think there are times I've done it and other times where I could have done a better job. All the time. Always remind myself of that. When if you do that decisions become simple, there's nothing complicated when you're in the restaurant seeing how it was. Well of course that's the else. We can't let this go on. It's really obvious. Absolutely. Amazing. George, thank you so much mate. It's been a great pleasure. This was awesome. Big VNU show. I appreciate what you do for the industry too. Thank you. I really appreciate the tequila as well. Anytime I agree to it. Anytime. It's never really for a margarita show. The first time. Hopefully won't be the last. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Thanks mate. Thank you. So I hope you enjoyed that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now by the way, I've got a new newsletter. So if you'd like to get my thoughts on the one thing that I take out from each episode every week then do subscribe to the one thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast. Just launched Uncensored. Renegades with the fabulous Corey Marchesotto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that. It's in your feed Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast. It would not happen without them. It's a big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.