Marketing Effectiveness and the Proof Problem with Andrew Tindall

I've half written a column called organic reaches bullshit and the main reason for that is even if you're doing really well in organic and you're posting a lot of content if someone goes "Oh great, could you 10X that for me?" "You got, uh, I guess I'll post against horror like what?" "You can't reel it." Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper on the Marketing Team here at Marketing Architects and I'm joined by my co-host Rob Demars, the Chief Product Architect at Misfits and Machines. Hello hello. And we have a guest today, Andrew Tindall. Andrew is a Chief Growth Officer at System One, the creative effectiveness platform. He's spent time growing famous brands like Johnny Walker and Vicarity before moving into research. Today he leads System One's advertising business, writes a weekly column for the drum, and reaches about a million marketers a week on LinkedIn. He's also behind a lot of the research we've talked about on this show. So I'm very excited to have him. Andrew, thanks for joining us. Thanks so much. It's truly a long time listener, first time caller I do tune in. I have tune in regularly over. God, you've been doing this a while because this topic on your podcast is very me. I'm glad to see you guys are doing it. Well, we're excited to have you and before we jump into it, I need some real talk here for a second. You trained in medicine. So you can be saving lives right now, but instead you're raising whiskey ads. So on behalf of your mother, I need an explanation. How does a doctor fall into marketing? I was about to say this. I did it for my mother and then she still has not returned my calls. Yeah, it's a tough one. If you like science, and you know, you want to do something as an impact, do you enjoy understanding people and I don't know, being around people, and you're good at that stuff when you're in school, it's just like, oh, so which med school are you going to? You know, and then you start telling people you're thinking about it. Oh, it's impressive. Before you know it, you're volunteering in a in a hospice on your weekends, and then in med school in London. I eventually started working in drinks marketing on the side so I could pay my rent. I was like, God, this is far more interesting. You can clock off at five, thought you could back them, which is ironic. You can make a huge impact, and then I found out you can apply science to it as well. So in a weird way, it was all worked out in the end, but my mum eventually has forgiven me. Now I take it to very nice things. It all worked out. Well, I think it's great. Whenever someone with your level of smarts get into marketing, it's also a good thing for marketers. So we are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. I'm going to kick us off super quick as I always do with some research. And I obviously picked a piece for me. Andrew, this is something you wrote for the drum earlier this year. And in the article, you argue that marketing doesn't need perfect evidence. It just needs useful evidence. You open with, and I had to look up how to pronounce his name. Ignores, semilized. I believe is a pronunciation. A doctor who noticed that handwashing led to fewer deaths in his maternity ward. But because his data was messy and observational, the establishment rejected it and waited for perfect proof. And then thousands died before germ theory caught up. Darwin, the first smoking studies, tatonic plates, climate models, a lot of the science that reshaped the world, started as imperfect patterns that were still useful. And marketing, you argue, is no difference. So thanks again for being here. I wanted to start with the topic of marketing effectiveness in general, because it feels like effectiveness has sort of moved from this niche corner of the industry. To something that more marketers care about. And you've been a huge part of that through your work at system one. So where do you think we're at with marketing effectiveness education? Have you noticed sort of a positive shift in the last few years? What a brilliant alting, holy hell. Great question. So I think if you work in marketing, you now work in marketing effectiveness. I believe effectiveness is the understanding the researching and the practice of how marketing can essentially create behavior change in our favor, which should be the title of anyone's role who works in marketing. Otherwise, how else would you make a decision? So I think we're working up to that. Why has it got more popular? I think marketing effectiveness has got more popular because we've got better at marketing it. So before marketing effectiveness was some very dull books. It's a very dull people who now I think have been coming less dull because they've seen how it works. Whereas people like system one previously called brain-ducer who advocates for, you know, effective advertising, marketing, being emotional and entertaining and what you could call right-brained. We have made all our research and all our tools and all our marketing very that. And people have really loved it. So I think that's really helped bring marketing effectiveness up. You know, Mark Ritson, the legendary professor, turned online kind of Minion B.A. Leaver, he follows the same stuff. And then the dawn of social, especially linked in, has meant that the barrier to entry is no longer, can you publish a book? Have you got the goods to deliver my brand? Can you help me? And the worth it that's got marketing effects for education in general is previously it was reserved for these kind of very longitudinal studies. And what you could call laws that people were accepting as dogma. And like, oh no, we have to do this as we won't grow. When you look at the data and all that, never laws the case. These are just general rules that will increase the chance that you'll end. Now people are really thirsty for how do you actually achieve that? How do you actually achieve growth for brands of different size in my category? With my media spend, well, it's scattered across 20 different platforms. Like the actual practice, which I think is the most exciting part of marketing effectiveness with everything we know about growth and marketing effectiveness. What does it mean for me? How can I measure it? Will it work for me? And how do I actually achieve it? And then opening up to experimentation and stuff like this? That's where I think marketing effectiveness education is. Yeah, I agree. It's one thing to understand the principles. And then another thing to apply it in like imperfect world and at brands with different rules and customs. I wanted to talk a little bit about the science itself because you're right. There's more marketing research than ever being shared right now, which is great. I think it's become more approachable than ever. Thanks to people like yourself and markets. And I know that I felt very intimidated at first starting to learn this stuff and people who can make it fun and more understandable. I think that's a good thing. But there's also a lot of pushback that only certain kinds of research is valuable. And there's a lot of skepticism around vendor-funded research especially. And you've talked about this before. I'm curious what makes marketing research worthwhile in your opinion. And where do you draw a line on when we need to treat it like a hard science and when we don't? First of all, oh god, I think calling any market research. Marketing research had science is questionable in the first place. For many reasons, as I said in that column you just kind of shared. No research is perfect. For example, my friend who I used to work in at the ad show with once put me on to a load of IWSR data which is basically like how of brands actually performing in market and it was like look and there's clearly if you grow loyalty they're the brands that have grown over the past five years. What's this about? Which turns out if you actually measure loyalty over 12 months which some businesses do or not versus three weeks actually loyalty is really correlated with growth actually more so than getting new customers. You have to really understand the methods, basically understanding of the mass behind it and stuff like this. I don't believe any research should ever be framed as a hard science. This is just often an experiment on the available data trying to answer a certain amount of questions. So I think it's within the industry's priority to always make an effort to understand the data sets and the method applied. I think it's within the vendors who often releases research like myself at system one where a vendor that is essentially wanting you to research with us. That's why we do our research which you could just call you know product marketing. We pour all our marketing investment into buying acquiring data running surveys at ETC. It's within us to be honest like in the recent playbook I just released with TikTok and WPP there's a whole page at the end which is basically like at the end of an academic paper it's here with the caveats don't get too ahead of yourself. I like the fact that we've been challenged more I mean as to put stuff like that in it and you actually see when I think this is the ones quite good at putting like citations and the charts. Give the nerds the actual proper detail underneath the charts so that they can really understand it. But then marketing research at its best is about bringing the customer into your decision process and you must start with a question or a problem and try to get to as high up that getting too nerdy. This thing called like the hierarchy of evidence pyramid that I'm surprised not people that talk about but I was taught it in med school which is basically a bottle you've got a consultants opinion and at the top you've got like a randomized control trial which is ironically an A/B test which people think is very basic and marketing these days, don't they? You know, can I get further up to that to try and answer those questions? Just being aware that these things that have been positioned as laws, you know, positioning something as a law is positioning. There's no gravity in marketing pretending the raises that will lead us down the run path. Well, you've done like you said a lot of research at system one, do you have a finding then that you believe is true and useful for marketers even if there's not perfect proof or if you don't have the top hierarchy of evidence for it, is there still a favorite finding that you believe in? It obvious, I'd say this, but emotion is a key to how brands grow and advertising effectiveness and why it's super damn hard to prove despite me releasing like at this point ten kind of different datasets and evidence and research and papers and around is that emotion and how brands grow essentially building memories is something that compounds over time into behavior change. So one, you need to be building the right kind of memories, you know, you can be as emotional as you want but if you're growing the idea and a memory that my beans cause you to fart, I don't think it's going to move change behavior too much and two, what's the outcome that you should check that against? So often people are like, oh worse, campaign was really emotional. It might not line up with ROI, which is often like sales revenue within six weeks, but brands effectiveness and emotion helps build these memory structures that ladder on compound over years. So it's really damn hard to prove that proper scientifically hard signs. That is what's going to change things. This is a great paper about does ad liking matter and it comes to the conclusion that it does, but then when you look at it, it's just like as usual of all these academic papers, it's like a collection of like at scales and claimed stuff in surveys and stuff like this, which is useless. Every time I plug emotional data into a data set, whether that's a client, MMM, the FE Awards Data Bank, the IPA Awards Data Bank, TikTok brand list studies, brand trackers and stuff like this, it heavily correlates with the outcomes that the marketer cares about. And then if you take it back to the proper theory, it's like being more, you know, in a heightened emotional state, you build more memories in emotional arousal, and then you got those heuristics, like the affect heuristic. Something feels good, IE, you've seen some positive emotion around it. You choose it without really realizing it. So you could explain it and there's a correlation, but then it's really hard to prove that causation. But you know, people have looked at penetration and market share growth and seen a correlation and called that a law. So why is there a different standard for that? Yeah, that's a good question. We'll speak, you know, of research and things that maybe don't have the perfect evidence behind it yet, because it's a newer category. I wanted to talk about craters, because you put forward new research, the crater effectiveness playbook, which I think is wonderful in a category of marketing, that's still something newer. What were your most sort of surprising or significant findings from that research? Surprising findings, I've been shouting about how effective craters are of the past year or so from various data sets again. So like, when we did that research with FUN sister one that markets the share last year, the creative dividend, we looked at craters as a touch point in campaigns and we showed that on average, they lead to more brand effects when they're included. Then when you look at some IPA and WPP media research, when you treat craters as a media channel and then go into all the economic tricks, you actually see that. Craters have the highest long term ROI multiplier, and everyone's gone, holy hell, like God, craters are incredible. I expected them just to win across the board, but they're more special about that creative effectiveness playbook that we released this year in CAM, is that we actually got all the brand lift studies for a load of crater campaigns. You can see what you want about brand lift studies, but I think they're a really good way at actually measuring memory change, experts, non-experts, really, I mean, people try and share on them, but we talked about that high-racking evidence pyramid. They're right at the top, it's a controlled randomized trial. So you actually look at those individually for crater campaigns and we've found that it sees top 10% of craters that are doing like a massive, amazing stuff. That's really swinging those averages of those two previous pieces of research I just talked about right up to the top. The top 10% are creating four times the average what I call brand memory lift, then the average of the bottom 90%, and you're like, holy hell, one that's fantastic, because no one knows what they're doing with craters. It's quite random, so we need some help here. And two, then the research became very easy. What are these top performing craters doing and building a playbook around it? And then kind of my favourite insight from that part of the research is it's not about creative fame and recognition. It's about whether there's an authentic fit between the crater and your brand and whether the crater can create distinctive, emotional, entertaining, advertising. That shifts our brains from thinking about craters as a media channel and wow, I need their audience and their reach to a creative partner that you need to pay to scale their reach, which I think is a bigger shift in that report. Continuing to hear this theme between distinctive and emotional and that also showed up in your creative dividend work that you did with FE and Mark Wilson and how it showed that ads are both emotional and distinctive are more profitable at the end of the day. And that's why we do marketing. So can you walk us through what you've seen in the research about the importance of emotion and distinctive ads? You've already been talking about it at a high level, but what are some of those details? Of course, Jan, in the creative dividend we spent a few years analysing a load of the campaign case studies submitted to the FE Awards and it took so long. We needed to move in mission forward. A lot of this kind of research had been done by the IPA in the past, which is UK centric stuff and quite TV centric stuff and quite large brand centric stuff. So we actually really paid FE a chunk to get as much data as possible of American, US, UK, European and Irish advertising campaigns from challenger to large brands, from winners of FE Awards to people that submitted and didn't even get past the first stage. We really looked into what principles that held true on that kind of really large global beta set. And I think what the most interesting thing about effectiveness from an emotional and distinctive point of view is that distinctiveness has to be there. Distinctiveness, brand recognition, your brand being part of your activity is a must, otherwise it's not an ad. Obviously, but being distinctive doesn't compound into behaviour change. You can't beat someone over their head with a logo until they are more predisposed to buy your brand. But you have to be distinctive for it to work. So we found that without being distinctive, as you scale media breaches, it doesn't reliably turn into revenue in market. Whereas if you're distinctive and emotional, then it reliably scaled into profit in market. So keep finding it because we can't keep chasing revenue, the world's on fire guys. We can't keep doing that. Anyone can spend a million on advertising, get a million revenue. Have done it on brands. It's easy and it's boring. All the best way to get revenue, doing a price discount. Anyone can sell something 50% off. You'll go bankrupt, but we must focus on this profit. Profit is harder to achieve. Profit means you're going to be more likely to choose my brand, more often and more likely to pay for it. How do you do that? You predispose people towards your brand. And to do that, you need to create an emotional appeal in your advertising, because that means more memories, more useful memories, that tapping to the heuristic set matter, that leading to that reduction in price sensitiveness, and building others up brand effects. That compound of a time. So I think there's a key distinction between you must be distinctive, but if you want to profitably grow, you have to be emotional. And that's no easy task, right? I mean, creating work that is truly emotive and truly distinctive is obviously the goal at the end of the day. And that's why you guys exist to help marketers be able to do that. But it sounds like the second hardest thing. That's the first hardest thing. And let's say you discover it, the second hardest thing is actually sticking with it, right? And actually believing in it and continuing to invest in that great work. And you've done a lot of work in longevity of creative. What has the research shown you guys in terms of making sure that you give that great work enough time to be impactful? I'll give a more detailed answer than I've ever given on stage anywhere on a podcast because this is serious. Give us the gold. I've researched this stuff called compound creativity for like years now with IPA data and FD data and it's basically like looking at well why did I do it in the first place? Markets were really waking up to the idea of using their ads for longer because it allows them to wear rain and achieve the strategy that they want and actually people don't really know how to do it so you need to build the right kind of region frequency and that allows you to win your ads for longer. So in the industry I have advocated for distinctive brand assets and using them consistently so they become more famous and unique but that's very blunt, almost useless advice like okay well I need to do a new campaign because I don't sell that toothpaste anymore or I'm being sued I must change that color or one radio we can't use any other things to find it so blah blah blah. So what I want to do is build a more holistic view on consistency which we call compound creativity which looks at the idea of a brand keeping to its foundations over time what you could call like brand cohesion seeking to the same positioning and creative idea stick with the same teams the second pillar is a culture of consistency which is stretching your brand and idea across time and space so like using your campaigns for longer but also stretching them across more media channels putting your idea and brand to work hard or increasing its surface area and the third idea is the boring one you know execution you know using the same brand up and feel. In any data set I have bothered to measure brands compound creativity. Score is consistency score and it's a pain in the ass because you have to get all the advertising for the past five years look at all their channels on the website so it kind of come up with a percentage against the framework we developed it means good stuff like more consistent brands in the FA database four times more efficient from an hour i point of view the report twice as more large business effect that you could call effective nurse the three times more likely to report large incremental profit gain and the same thing with the IPA data almost exactly the same thing but I lead with the FIDATI mark is at a global level but going back to average your question this is not hard science it's hard to prove this those campaigns and brands that have been going longer probably going longer because they're more successful and you get in this kind of correlation and causation effect so they have to really try to prove that consistency and longevity causes this stuff and there's one little data set in the research it shows out where if you actually look at when you look at a five year period for brands that are consistent you actually see year on year now advertising gets more emotional and more distinct so it's actually becoming more emotional more distinct by them being consistent that can't be explained away by this reverse causality so consistency is doing something it's hammering your brand looking feel and allowing you to become more distinctive it's playing into the familiarity heuristic we're actually familiarity breeds contentment not content we like the familiar as human beings so you can start to see some things at point to consistency causing this growth I could talk about consistency all year all day long and I've been talking about it for like four years now so I'll stop there but I think consistency is the modern effectiveness hack for marketers and when you look at other effectiveness hacks that was thought were hacks you can probably explain it by consistency why don't celebrities work they're not used consistently why do brand characters work it forces you to be consistent why does a long running campaign work it forces you to stick with it and iterate within it and it forces you to get more entertaining each time like should of consuspect say this so yeah I could probably make a career but I just going around making helping people become more consistent because good things happen when consistency happens yeah it's such a great topic it's one where people will nod and go totally that makes sense but then when the rubber hits the road and they have to spend the money to be consistent they start to get gunshot so gosh it's such a good topic and what a great topic just regarding the importance of emotion and distinctiveness so let's talk about a topic nobody talks about and that is audio everybody sort of writes it off right and you've done research with the radio center and the acting shows is showing how powerful it is ironically marking architects the TV agency actually started in radio we were the largest radio agencies in the US so we do love audio in a way that's probably not healthy can you talk to us a little bit more about why you think it's so overlooked well it's great to you guys like audio and radio because whenever you meet someone like radio you always have a very nice time nice smart people I love doing radio work because everyone's just lovely so yeah I mean why is it overlooked while you can't take a screenshot of your radio ad and submit it to count and marketing has really lent into and used marketers egos to try and motivate us which is fine I submit my work to the F is Chris hell I'll get paid more if as a as a marketers one an effort so it's not it's not a bad thing but we have lent to faring to what's popular versus what's effective because all the evidence shows that audio and radio is affected but like focusing on radio specifically now it's got very similar reach often to TV depending on what market you're in it's often like six times cheaper and your competitors probably not there so you probably got like cast a career exclusions and you can get really creative for cheap because you don't have to hire a helicopter you can just pay the helicopter sound and there's something quite special about audio where I'm not fully looked into it when people claim that audio is processed at a different path to the brain which is like closer to memory formation and I'm actually seeing that on the practical side when I've worked with ITV when I release some research which showed that people can recall audio features of an ad 20% more than the visual features of a TV ad and talking about vendor funded research why would TV company ITV release such a killer headline about how powerful audio is on TV so you've got to really believe it then and then you know all my research on tiktok or at a campaign level or with everything and stuff looking at the use of types of sensitive brands are set whenever you use jingles and sonic assets or recently when I create a effectiveness playbook research I create a speaking the brand name is way more powerful than any of the visual stuff because you can close your eyes but you can't close your ears like killer insight I actually don't think I'd care about convincing people about audio anymore despite I did some research with backwards and in can this year with the CRA the RA being the US and radio center again looking at doing a cut of all the campaigns in the FD case library which had audio in them so you were podcasting the radio and we saw like any campaign that use our stuff reported more good things in any sense and it only got better if they had the biggest scale and media and put behind them because one of the power of radio is how broad reach and how public and trust building it is but I'm not going to convince people because if I eventually get bored of this whole marketing and I think it's starting to happen I'm just going to go start an FMCG challenge brand and I'm exclusively going to use radio to grow it and then I'm going to come back to this industry five years later and told you I fucking told you so when I started my career the someone described radio is the ugly sister and I'm like let's not nice gosh I had actually shut my microphone off for a second because I was taking notes on some of those statistics you were throwing out we love audio the 20% one I hadn't heard before so I need to remember that that's a great one and like I said we started out in radio we did pivot to a TV agency so let's talk about TV and it's a little self-serving because we are a TV agency but what does your research shown about the power of TV and the importance of that in your mix yeah God I mean look I mean most obvious one and most recent one that actually researching data was again with that huge effort data set we looked at the kind of twitch points used in a campaign and TV clearly fell out as a super touch point which means that it was like the second biggest driver of brand effects on average and all these campaigns and it could also create short term effects disproportionately well for how well it could create as long term effects so it's kind of a buffism engine it does the long and the short but that research hides the key principles of media so I think anyone's really interested in media and TV I've got look at some research called profitability 2.0 which is from S's melee common and think box I ever tatted copy of it printed off under my pillow because I think that is the world's best marketing research I've ever seen and they have the principle in that called set where if you're thinking about a maybe channel you need to think about its scale, its efficiency and the time frame it will pay back in. Not this binary of long and short of performance and brand, but those things. And then TV just comes down on Trump's in those things. So scale. What my research has just talked about then with Effie Hidd, the fact that despite it being a massive second biggest brand builder, whereas creators are actually the first biggest brand. Creators only create 5% of all profit for advertising in the UK, whereas TV creates 53% of all profit now advertising in the UK. When you look over at economic data sets over two years, TV has scale like you'd never believe. It's why I think organic content and I'm unusually busy right now so I haven't done a column in a few weeks. I've had for it in a column called organic reaches bullshit. And the main reason for that is even if you're doing really well in organic and you're posting a lot of content, if someone goes oh great could you 10x that for me? You go, I guess I'll post again. Oh no. Like what? You can't scale it. TV I can scale. I'm like the efficiency doesn't fall off. So set scale the efficiency. How do you turn that spend into profit? TV's got a really good efficient driver of turning spend into profit. And in time people think that TV is a long of its channel. It's not. It's a now and forever channel. It creates cash now and it'll create cash forever. I work with this challenge of brand CMO. Try my best to advise them. So they did a TV campaign a few years ago and they were like yeah but I didn't really pay back. Did it? Where's the cash? So now is got down it. Now they're going back to Zook books. He calls it where he'll put a pound into meta and get more than a pound back. He calls them Zook books. Zook a books and I'm like mate you probably get more than a pound back because you do the TV yard six months ago and that's made your digital work harder. Like people have got this so damn wrong. It's worrying. Andrew you strike me as someone who doesn't have a lot of strong opinions or very very very contrarian. So you might have to take a minute on this one but what would you say is your most contrarian marketing opinion? So one that gets you in the most trouble. My most contrarian marketing opinion is distinctiveness is not how brands grow. So a lot of the research from you know specifically on both best really talks about how we need to be distinctive to grow our brands and differentiation is kind of used us because differentiation doesn't exist and it really speaks to what I was talking about earlier around. You need to go and understand look at the research below these claims and understand it. For example the claim differentiation doesn't exist in academic research where they've explicitly asked people if they believe this brand is different but it's like that's not what differentiation is. Relative differentiation is your brand has a collection of largely subconscious memories that makes your brand different to this brand. I hear you're slightly more safe and you believe this is slightly more hydrating than this brand. Even if I quiz you on it you never will to explain that to me. So asking people to think brands are different is silly. Yet when we talk about distinctiveness in that kind of research from the end of that's all these better tools come out like measuring fame and uniqueness but we've never asked anyone if we think that brands are distinctive because that would be stupid wouldn't it? Yet we're following into this kind of distinctiveness is how brands grow but as I talked about earlier distinctiveness is needed. Our brands need to be recognized so that they can be chosen and that advertising activity works of course and not mistaken from other brands but how do we grow we must predispose people to our brands and how do we do that through creativity, emotion, being entertaining, putting on a shell, creating fame, tapping into culture, innovation that solves consumer needs. That's how brands grow. Now that will work unless you're distinctive. I agree for sure but without that you're not going to grow so you need both and I think this is what a lot of people are waking up to now. We work with big F&CG clients. They're very proud of their distinctive brand new secret but their ad's a shit so of course you're not going to grow so I think I'm gladly loudly gonna be professionally annoying for the rest of my career and fight the other side of the coin. Yeah it sounds like distinctiveness is a must have but it's not the it's not the end. Was that contrary? I like it. Absolutely was yeah. Okay so a lot of time on that topic on this podcast. Thank you. God your list is must be so bold of it now. I'm so sorry for your list thing. No no I know I mean we've actually talked a lot I think about the other side of that coin so I think that was really valuable. If another person ruins a good gimmist for me and a pub by coming up to me go hi Andrew what do you think about distinctiveness versus differentiation? I'll scream so we shall know. Well Andrew system one at least when I first came across them I remember them the most for your TV commercial pre-testing I love when you do the pre-testing the Super Bowl ads and you've tested thousands of campaigns I'm curious what's the most surprising it could be funny or like shocking finding you've had from pre-testing all these TV commercials is there anything people maybe wouldn't necessarily think would be important to that work. I'd be a miss not to do a smidge of salesmanship at this point so we test every UK and US TV ad like long format set the date's aired on TV with millions of people have been doing that about 10 years that allows me to do the kind of research that I do but also allows our customers to truly understand their category and their competitors and over past few years we've done really good work moving into our products testing radio and audio and social skippable digital ads and out of home we're very lucky with that what's my biggest finding across all that most surprising founding finding is I am the advertising Oracle I spend all day in this data looking at thousands of ads watching thousands of ads I watched too many ads can you imagine what your brain does subconsciously all that like at some point you think that it would just become good enough to show me that I'll go 4.4 I can't I can't I am not the consumer I am so bad at picking ads that I think consumers will recognize the brand and think of a emotional and understanding why you know did I recognize that character I did enjoy that do those associations come through I'm very good once I get a 30-second glance at one of our parts and I pretend it was all my idea anyway you'd think that I'd eventually I'd become the advertising Oracle but I haven't and it just speaks to how useful market orientation and recent market research really is yeah that's not a case for pre-testing I don't know what is because yeah you're right that's something like marketers we just assume we know best with our brands but we definitely yeah well I want to wrap up with something fun still kind of on theme with the episode this is fun now you know what's what's a what's a what's a decision in your life that you made on pure gut you know you didn't have a lot of data but it turned out to be exactly right no question I quit med school that takes like 10 years everything was saying no I remember my professor at the time I was like I was actually gonna go work at Diagio at a time and he's like well a beer company you realize you have two years away from being like a surgeon and then I got into Diagio and then I bought pure guts I thought that looks bloody amazing I reckon I'd be great and I mentioned Diagio and then what's at the coffee for a few years and went back to Diagio and I was on this like accelerated scheme was all your careers really well laid out in front of you and you've got your training your funding and you're gonna be a double-seem awesome day then I quit that as well and came up with a system warm based on my gut and everyone's like what the hell are you doing my very lucky paid off wow that's a good one that's really good did you have something Rob you thought of you know not as good as that I mean I I didn't go emotional then Rob no I'm actually I was thinking about this question my wife and I are our empty nesters and we were always against we don't want to ban and for some reason we just impulsively decided that we are gonna buy an electric VW van it was completely on this weird whim we thought oh we're gonna drive around the country in it or whatever and it's brought us so much joy it's like so much fun driving this thing I don't know how this overseas been America there's not a lot of them so people smile and they're like wow this is so funny it reminds me it's like driving around a cartoon car it's just brought it's been it's been a lot of fun and it makes no sense on paper because we have kids but they're all out of the house so yeah it's a strange that when you rely on your gut and emotion good things happen I don't know, I had troll thinking about this one a little bit because there's a lot to pick from, but I decided to get into triathlon kind of on a whim. And if you think about the actual data, you're just like pounding your body. It's not the best thing for you actually when you look at it, but it's just been so enjoyable and I've just loved it and it's become like a passion outside of work. I don't really know why I chose to do that. I just kind of wanted to and just do something hard. Right, I'm the same with running. If I don't run, I'm a very grumpy asshole, but everything aches now, but I'm like, if I can't run then what's the point guys? Right. No, my left knee is killing me right now. It's like, yeah, you don't have to do it. It's like, I could do pilates, but like, that's just not fun. I just need to destroy my body every day. Well, Andrew, this has been amazing. I was so excited. I've been trying to get on the podcast for a while. I'm so excited to have you here. I'm sorry. I'm not buttering my own. No, no, no, you're just, you're busy. I understand it. It's worth it. Let's give you an opportunity to plug anything. Everyone should follow you on LinkedIn. If they haven't, what else do you want to plug before you sign off? I just went through my OND, my October 9th of December, which is Cannes, where we released a lot of research, and I'm just figuring out now who we're working with to do what next. So I've got nothing. I've actually got nothing. Nothing had to plug. A pat, oh, a pat from, so I'm now kind of chief gravel research system. Well, I don't just do kind of our patches of research. I also have a product and in a few weeks you're going to see system one launch and AI model, which we've trained on, for the 18 million human emotional responses, which isn't just some janky black box plugged into L&M, it's actually based on all that advertising we've been testing. And what's amazing about it is because what we've been testing is our data because we test every ad so we can build a proper model on it, whereas these competitors that have launched these tools, which I still can't work out how a wide have done it, I don't think legally they could have done that. So I'm very excited to put a new tool out there, which helps people make more decisions on those assets that aren't going to get a million media spend behind them, but we'll give them some amazing system one emotional debt to see them in the right direction. So, for me, I'm going to make something you'll be the first to be able to use that. Sounds exciting. Can you reveal the name yet? Or is that still under wraps? I haven't read the legal email on this yet. We don't want to get you in trouble. No, no, no, no, call it, we'll call it the tindale. No, no, no, no, it's not, it's, it's, test your ad something. All right. Sounds great. We're excited to see that. All right. Thanks so much for joining us, Andrew. That was fun. Rising. Thank you, Andrew. That's it for this episode of The Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor DeLos Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn, and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now, go forth and build great marketing. Marketing Architects. I think it's Angelic. There we go. Well, I did this out. The magic about it. Please don't. I think it's cool you have doors on your ceiling. All right. I'm not normal. I'm just on the wall. That was a Minnesota. - We have our doors on the wall, man, on this U.S. - You Americans. (laughing)