Uncensored CMO

Edward Pilkington is the Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer at Diageo North America, managing a portfolio of the biggest brands in the world, including Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Baileys, Smirnoff and more. If theres anyone that understands how to run marketing for huge brands, it's Ed, and he certainly brings his wealth of experience to this conversation.

Nishma is responsible for leading brand and reputation marketing for Google in the UK. She has led many of Google’s acclaimed projects and campaigns including Digital Garage, This is My YouTube, the Google Executive Summit, Brandcast, ThinkwithGoogle and Be Internet Legends.

Nishma is a Board Director at the School of Marketing and is proud to be a Fellow of the Marketing Society. Her accolades include Ad Age’s Woman to Watch, Europe (2018), Campaign A List (2017, 2018 and 2019), Drum Digerati and was recognised in the Hospital Group’s h100 list as one of the most influential and innovative people in the UK’s creative industry.

When she’s not looking after her twins or at work, you’ll find her in sparkly shoes dancing in the sun or under the stars!

Talking points

00:00 Intro
00:32 The inspiration behind MadWomen
04:18 How Teletext was the Google before Google
07:54 The responsibility of managing the Google brand
12:20 How Google makes you look clever
13:30 What search reveals about humanity
16:08 "It’s Ok to Ask" campaign with Uncommon
17:59 Why Marcus Rashford helping out with the campaign
20:37 It’s not what we ask it’s what we do with the answers
20:47 The role of humanity in Google's work
24:05 Why we shouldn't just sell cheese
26:01 How the Google Pixel phone makes technology accessible to new audiences
30:17 CODA, How Google helped people understand the life of someone with two deaf parents
34:02 How diverse advertising unites the audience
36:40 Telling one person's story well
39:40 Diversity and representation in media
42:28 How technology democratises the ability for creators to get funded
46:54 Creating the worlds first augmented reality brand
48:00 Top tips for YouTube creators
50:20 How creators and collaborators can grow your brand
51:05 The role of AI to democratise tech
53:13 Advice for advertisers using YouTube
58:01 The surprising effectiveness of brand building style advertising in digital
01:00:35 Nishma’s biggest ever failure
01:02:36 Outro

Yusuf has worked across most flavors of planning and strategy making him one of the few genuine hybrid strategists. His experience spans a number of the world’s leading corporations including Microsoft, BMW, Samsung, Kimberley-Clark, Kraft and Verizon. He is currently EVP, Client Strategy at NBCUniversal. 

1. Early ambition to become a city trader
2. Falling into media planning
3. Wearing trainers to work
4. Selling the internet in 1995
5. Crossing the creative and media divide
6. Why all things are not equal
7. The birth of planning
8. Why so many Englishmen end up in New York
9. Why 90’s sitcoms are still so popular
10. The power of stories to attract a global audience
11. The special relationship between audience and programming
12. The 3 aspects of Fandom
13. 98% of commercial airtime is as engaging as the content
14. Pricing media based on emotion
15. Reflecting people identity on screen
16. Satisfying cultural curiosity
17. The representation hierarchy
18. The diversity divided when people feel seen
19. The power of empathy to connect with audiences
20. How empathy and sympathy are different things

Today I'm joined by one of the most influential and successful CMOs on the planet, Fernando Machado, of legendary Burger King fame. He went on to work at Activision and now is CMO at NotCo.

Fernando is a creative genuis, he's been awarded many, many times I've started to lose count (over 200 Cannes Lions). I wanted to catch up with Fernando and find out what makes a great creative marketer, was that "Mouldy Whopper" campaign actually worth it, and why did they sponsor a low league English football team? We also talk about what is he doing now working for a plant-based company and how AI plays a crucial role for them.

Links

• Follow Jon
• Follow Fernando
• Watch UCMO on YouTube

Topics covered:

• What makes an influential CMO
• The culture that leads to award winning work
• The importance of influencing an organisation QUOTE
• The two hidden P’s of the CMO
• The importance of a shared creative ambition
• Why shared values and purposes is so important
• What it takes to create award winning work QUOTE
• Why is takes time to build up the credibility to take risks
• Why huge failures are similar to most campaigns QUOTE
• If your creative isn’t noticed everything else is academic
• Why attracting the best creative talent means committing to bold work
• The more creative work you do the more creative you are likely to get
• When you have a smaller budget you have to get more creative
• Sharing the results for Mouldy Whopper in public to address the critics
• Where the idea for the Mouldy Whopper came from QUOTE
• What Fernando learnt at Activision Blizzard
• The power of networking in finding a perfect role
• The biggest challenge facing NotCo
• Why the best creative work gets done on small budgets
• How AI is accelerating the development of plant based products
• How AI beat the Nike design department
• How AI created the most average Pizza advert
• Why the brief matters when using AI QUOTE
• From curation to creative, why AI is a tool and not a replacement of the marketing function
• Why Notco is advertising old animals
• Think of a colour that doesn’t exist
• The one piece of advice for marketers

Richard Warren has spent his career working in and growing agencies, but most recently has worked in house at one of the UK's largest banking group, Lloyds. In 2000 Richard founded DLKW as Director of Strategy, which grew to become the the UK’s largest independent agency, before merging with Lowe in 2010. As someone who has spent time on both sides, I wanted to catch up with Richard to find out how to make the most of the agency-client relationship.

Rebecca Dibb-Simkin is the Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Octopus Energy Group. Previously at British Gas, Rebecca has helped scale Octopus into an impressive challenger brand with over 50k customers and $10b in revenue.

What we covered in this episode

• Responding to a job ad written by Rory Sutherland
• From the tax department to marketing
• Being rejected on graduate schemes
• Poetic job applications
• Marketing jargon that needs to be ditched
• Why being close to the customer matters
• The marketers role in the middle of the spiders web
• From energy industry giant to start up
• The spontaneous moment that led to Octopus energy
• Jon blags a speech on the Internet of things
• The surprisingly short distance to the edge of our atmosphere
• The cost advantage of green energy
• Which energy sources are the cleanest
• The tricky of balance of managing variable sources of energy
• Advantages of smart energy
• How octopus are helping with the cost of living crisis
• The red tape holding us back
• How to incentivise people to adopt wind power
• The 40,000 electric blankets helping people in crisis
• From 50,000 customers to 5 million
• The secret to seriously rapid growth
• The Brewdog question that drives growth
• How to handle 80k job applications
• Keeping the core management team together
• The advantages of an in house agency
• Outrageously good customer service with humans
• Now the octopus came about
• The science behind animals as mascots
• In praise of simplicity and products that work
• Running the same campaign over and over again
• The role of industry awards

Jo Arden is the Chief Strategy Officer of Ogilvy UK, and she joins me on the podcast to talk all things strategy. What's involved, why it's important and how to make a career of it. Jo's experience is vast, not landing a "strategy" role until her 30's and since has had senior roles at Publicis•Poke and MullenLowe.

Here's what we covered in our chat:

• How Jo got into strategy
• Her winding path from PR through business development and into strategy
• What does a Chief Strategy Officer do?
• The role of generosity in being a great CSO
• The business case for involving your strategy team on a core business problem
• The one question you should always ask your customer
• “Making your thinking as funny as possible”
• Why the winning ads in technology don’t take themselves seriously
• The ‘good sense of humour’ approach to planning
• “If you aren’t having fun you aren’t doing great work”
• In praise of Dove and it’s purpose in advertising
• “If it didn’t sell it wasn’t creative”
• Why the industry loves a crisis narrative
• The crisis in creativity is more of a trend than a crisis
• Cannes Lions role in creative exploration rather than effectiveness
• Jon was left out of his own Cannes Lion winning party
• The one Campaign award no-one wants to win
• Why Turkeys eat Lions for breakfast
• “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife”
• The challenge of bringing the consumer into the room
• The importance of doing normal things
• Spending the most time out of the office
• Rabbits in the office and other fun things at Ogilvy
• Generating borderless creativity
• Putting pressure on the task and not yourself
• How to create an environment for creativity to happen
• What Jo would advise her 21 year old self
• Jon share his almost unbelievable imposter syndrome story
• Using the power of your network

Chaka Sobhani is Chief Creative Officer of Leo Burnett London. With 20 years of experience as an award winning director, writer and creative director, she has worked for the biggest broadcasters, brands and agencies worldwide. She hasn’t had a conventional advertising career, having spent over 10 years as a film maker and in television. Chaka was recruited by ITV to set up and ECD their first in-house creative agency, production company and design studio. She has worked on countless brands including McDonalds, Boots, Coca Cola & more.

Watch the McDonalds ad.

Talking points:

• Celebrating Campaign Creative Leader of the Year
• Getting rejected 200 times before breaking into the industry
• Setting up ITV’s in-house creative department
• Learning production techniques at ITV
• How to make great work on a budget
• What its like being a global Executive Creative Director
• Helping others being successful
• Getting industry acclaim and audience success for McDonalds
• Where the ‘raising your arches’ idea came from
• System1 Test Your Ad scores for McDonalds Raise Your Arches
• The subtle branding for McDonalds that stood out
• The challenge of casting eye brow raising
• How Raise Your Arches became a Tik Tok sensation
• The state of diversity and inclusion in the industry
• How advertising doesn’t reflect the society we live in
• Treating diversity with the same passion as new business
• Telling one persons story well
• The diversity dividend of representative advertising

Professor Jenni Romaniuk is the International Director of the world-famous Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of Building Distinctive Brand Assets and How Brands Grow Part 2 - revised. 

Jenni is a leading expert in brand equity, mental availability, brand health metrics, advertising effectiveness, distinctive assets, word of mouth and the role of loyalty and growth. Through her work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute she has advised many of the world’s biggest brands.

Jenni is an engaging and entertaining keynote speaker that has presented her research at leading industry conferences globally. 

Her latest book Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics in a How Brands Grow World, is for anyone who wants to get better at brand measurement and improve their brand health tracking.

What we covered in this episode:

• The soft porn scam version of Jenni’s new book
• The one question Jenni hasn’t been asked
• Publicity over persuasion
• How even academics don’t always have the right beliefs
• Can you have too many distinctive assets?
• How marketers over estimate the number of assets they have
• Why Ehrenberg Bass use an owl as their distinctive asset
• How do you measure a distinctive asset
• Does the time frame of measurement make a difference
• The difference between new and super light buyers for Lucozade
• Brand tracking on a small budget
• Why differentiation is the most surprising discovery by EBI
• What inspired the book  
• Starting with the laws that shape how brands grow
• The important of asking the right questions
• Calibrating your tracker for your brand size
• Which definition of brand awareness to use
• The importance of non-buyers to your trackers
• Designing for the category not your own objectives
• Why brand awareness is a lot less stable than you think
• The probabilistic nature of memory and why recall changes
• The power of Donald Trumps hair
• Types of brand attributes and the role they play
• How many category entry points does a brand need
• Mental market share and how to measure it
• Distribution points of the mind
• The importance of share of mind
• Jenni writes a song to brand love
• How to measure your marketing  
• Some advice for Word of Mouth
• The role of physical availability on brand health
• The importance of physical availability to convert customers
• Shopping distinctive assets

A return for podcast guest number 1, Richard Shotton, following the launch of his brand new book "The Illusion of Choice: 16½ psychological biases that influence what we buy".

"Every day, people make hundreds of choices.

Many of these are commercial: What shampoo to pick? How much to spend on a bottle of wine? Whether to renew a subscription?

These choices might appear to be freely made, but psychologists have shown that subtle changes in the way products are positioned, promoted and marketed can radically alter how customers behave.

The Illusion of Choice identifies the 16½ most important psychological biases that everyone in business needs to be aware of today – and shows how any business can take advantage of these to win customers, retain customers and sell more.

Richard Shotton, author of the acclaimed The Choice Factory, draws on academic research, previous ad campaigns and his own original field studies to create a fascinating and highly practical guide that focuses on the point where marketing meets the mind of the customer.

You’ll learn to take advantage of the peak end rule, the power of precision, the wisdom of wit – and much, much more."

What we covered in this episode:

• Why the podcast 4.9 star rating is the best one
• The meanest tweet Uncensored CMO ever had
• Social proof gives you wings
• Why the new book has 16 ½ chapters
• Feel free to ignore this chapter in the book
• Why biases affect professionals as well as consumers
• The Russian tank effect and how AI can be misled
• How AI design a better pair of Nike Trainers
• Recency, primacy and the peak end rule
• How behavioural science supports the laws of marketing
• Jon ranks the biases
• The Zuckerberg t-shirt principle (red sneaker effect)
• Why breaking convention is associated with higher status
• Always use concrete phrases not fluffy marketing nonsense
• The more visual the phrase the easier to remember
• Relatable stories beat cold hard statistics
• Telling one persons story well is better than trying to represent a group
• How well can experts predict a successful Super Bowl Ad
• Experts are trained to see novelty rather than broad appeal
• We are all rewarded based on sophistication and complexity rather than simplicity
• How thicker paper led to more charity donations
• Why marketer can’t predict how well their own advertising will do
• Professional forecasters are no better at predicting than the average person
• Why freedom of choice leads to much greater perceived value
• Why we would rather suffer a loss if we now someone else has done better
• Adverts aren’t trying to be funny anymore even though the funny ones work
• Why making a joke would increase your tips
• Making it easy is the best way to make someone do something
• We radically underestimate the impact of removing friction
• Removing friction beats customer benefits every time
• How to frame your pricing so people buy your preferred product
• What colonoscopies can tell us about the peak end rule
• Why ads with a peak end perform better overall

Links

• Follow Jon
• Follow Richard
• Watch UCMO on YouTube