Lightly edited for readability. Speaker 1: So I'm absolutely delighted to welcome to this episode of Business Marketing, recorded live here at Cannes Lions, Mr. Mark Ritson.
Speaker 2: Hello, hello.
Speaker 1: Um, what should I call you, Prime Minister? Mr. Prime Minister.
Speaker 2: Please, please. I'm in a lovely position where I am not only a bit of a dead ringer for our new upcoming prime minister, but I'm significantly older than this one, too. So it really is the end. Like, what, what's the worst thing in middle age? It's probably looking like the Prime Minister and being older than him. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Um, I'm so happy to have you on because, you know, you are a rare voice in marketing. You... You're, you're academic, you're operator, you're critic, you're crossing, you know, academia and consulting. And of course, you know, who hasn't kind of heard about the MiniMBA. You've spent years arguing, um, that sort of, you know, too much marketing talk drifts away from the work of building brands, and here we are talking. So-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... here, here.
Speaker 2: Something to be said for that.
Speaker 1: Um, but I think really kind of what I really wanna do is kind of zero in a little bit about sort of what the industry's getting wrong. You know, what strong marketers are still doing well, what people running teams and budgets can take back, you know-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... into the business from here. So let, let's sort of start with the basics.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Um, why do they still need defending?
Speaker 2: Uh, because they're still the basics, right? Um, we've got this terrible movement in marketing where you'll get usually an untrained marketer who's very cognizant of, "I don't have any formal training in this." And what they do is they sort of future forward the discipline and go, "Everything's changed in marketing in the last three minutes." And what they're really subtly doing, other than really destabilizing our discipline a lot, is basically saying, "I don't need to justify not being trained in marketing because it's all completely different than it was when that training was created." Yeah? Now, obviously, marketing is evolving. It's always been evolving. It isn't evolving any faster than it has always been evolving very fast. But it makes no- patently, it makes no sense to ignore the 100-year history of marketing and just focus on the last three weeks, which is what we often do. So yeah, the basics are our foundation. They're mostly still applicable in their modern sense. Not all of them are, but most of them are. And I think, you know, to give you a very simplistic example, before you critique, I don't know, the four Ps, you have to know what they are. And according to the data I've got with Ipsos, about 60% of British marketers don't know what the four Ps are, or what distinctive brand assets are, or what positioning is, or what a quantitative research method is. So yeah, I mean, when we say basics, we mean very basic basics, and everybody should know them.
Speaker 1: So, um, what sort of... I suppose unpacking that a bit more, what, what- when you strip away all the kind of the noise of Cannes and so forth, what are, you know, beyond the Ps, you know, what are the kind of the-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... the things that kind of good marketers still need to kind of have in place to kind of get right?
Speaker 2: Yeah. I, I think there's two or three things you would really highlight. Uh, a- a- and the first one is the most basic and probably the most important, which is market orientation. So market orientation is, is a sort of 40-year-old concept. A- and in a nutshell, what it means is we, as marketers, more than any other group, should see things from the point of view of the consumer. Not what we th- you know, kind of bullshit think they think, but actually do that 180 and see it from a consumer point of view. And the reason that is so important is because i- if you understand the ramifications of not looking at it from an employee marketer perspective but from the actual consumer, everything changes. Yeah? Your brand is super unimportant. You work on it eight hours a day, five days a week, and you completely forget that the consumer out there has around 1,000 brands going around in her mind at any one time, none of which she's particularly bothered about. So that contradiction between you being, you know, maniacally focused on your brand and your target, having only fleeting knowledge of it, opens up this Pandora's box of stuff we're meant to do. You know, you don't understand salience if you're not market oriented. Uh, you don't understand that essentially brand purpose usually makes no sense 'cause no one cares about the purpose of toothpaste. Yeah? They've got much more important things to worry about, stuff like that. So I- on the top of my list would be market orientation. Next to it, I'd put the real importance of strategy before tactics. Most marketers jump straight into a tactical question, and hey, presto, we haven't actually answered the marketing strategy questions, which aren't that complex. They're not easy, but really, we're talking targeting, position, and objectives. Have them worked out, and you're in a good place to get into tactics. And probably the third big one is when we've got an untrained marketer, they overstate the importance of communications and advertising, which has a really important role to play within marketing. By my estimation, it sits about 8 to 10% of the total marketing bundle. Yet, when you listen to people who don't really understand marketing, it's the only thing they speak about. It's definitely the least important of all the Ps, for example, right? Product's the most important P. Price is the most valuable. Place and distribution are super important. It's not that promotion and comms isn't important, but it's certainly not the main one that you would, you would, you would focus on if you had to focus. So they're three of the great sins that we'd wanna fix, you know.
Speaker 1: And going back to your point around the voice of the consumer-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... how, through all of this noise, do you today hear, listen to that voice?
Speaker 2: Uh, I mean, there's two stages to it. The first stage is shutting up yourself, right? Stop trying to talk to customers with your TikTok account and actually shut up and, and, and, and, and be ready to listen. You know, and that, that sounds a small thing, but it's really not, right? The second stage then is understanding the basics of market research so that, you know- Marketing begins with market orientation. You know nothing. Every time you look at your website, your product performance, your pricing, what you're thinking is wrong because you're the marketer, right? You, you, you don't know what it's like to be the consumer. You're the producer. So the first stage is learning that and the humility of that. And then the second stage is having enough basic market research knowledge to then know how to bring that voice in, whether it's qual or quant, whether it's conjoint or Van Westendorp, you know, the skills of just basic market research. And again, in the research I'm doing, more than, more than half British marketers don't know what a quantitative research method is. So they just don't have the skills to do it.
Speaker 1: And you're, you know, with your academic kind of pedigree, whatever, you know, the, uh, you know, the... And, you know, to ch- sort of challenge you somewhat about-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... sort of nothing's changing, 'cause I think, you know, you- you're quite, quite vocal about this and I think-
Speaker 2: Think things are changing
Speaker 1: ... I was gonna say. That's what I wanna really unpack a bit.
Speaker 2: They're not changing any more than they have changed.
Speaker 1: Why not? Are we-
Speaker 2: Look, we're, we're men of a certain vintage, right? And we'll remember the impact that, um... I mean, the, when the internet arrived, right? That was pretty, that was pretty seismic. I'm not saying it's more than what's happening now with AI, but it, it was an, a gigantic, humongous impact on everything, you know? So my point is, we've always been going through these paradigm shifts in marketing, and anyone that says, "Oh, marketing's changing now more than ever before," just doesn't have any memory for what has happened before.
Speaker 1: Mm.
Speaker 2: Marketing is certainly changing. Our tactics are certainly moving all the time, but they always have. And disassociating that from what's happened in the past does us a disservice, is my point.
Speaker 1: So I get that, but, you know, you've, you've been quite sort of vocal about sort of your view of, of k- of kind of the speed with which maybe the tools that we're using-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... you know, is changing perhaps what we and how we get to the same outcome.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: You know, tell me a little bit more about kind of view, your views on kind of where we're going in that regard. You know, y- synthetic research, for example, you know, really landed with me when you were talking about that.
Speaker 2: No, no, it's exciting, right? I mean, AI is, you know... I don't want to say that we aren't going through a revolution. It's another one, and it's a big one. I think our focus on AI in advertising is, is a bit of a MacGuffin.
Speaker 1: Mm.
Speaker 2: We're... Again, we're so obsessed with advertising. We've looked at AI, and it w- it's making ads. The least interesting arena of AI is AI generating ads at Christmas and stuff. We can make ads relatively cheaply without AI. I'm sure it will happen, but it isn't the exciting bit. You know? The exciting bit is, first of all, synthetic data. We're at a place now where I think if you do it well, it's certainly cheaper, it's definitely faster, and it's probably, probably often more accurate than consumer research. And people sort of query that last one and go, "Well, how can it be more accurate than the source?" And of course, the reason is consumers are a really bad source of insight into consumers. If we move, you know, if we... And, and you've got to work in research to understand this. If you change the order of questions, if you change the way you ask the question, you can instantly move an agreement from 20 points to 80 points, right? Because consumers are not reliable witnesses of their own behavior. Once you get that, you realize synthetic is not perfect, but it actually might also be accurate as well. It, it, it will never destroy organic consumer research, but it will supplement it. And in sectors like, uh, B2B, particularly SME B2B, where they've never had any research 'cause you can't get accurate data from, you know, CFOs based in the north of England. Suddenly you can, and it's pretty good, right? So synthetic data is exciting. And then in the next five years, that base of synthetic data, which is available in real time, will feed what I think will become, I don't know what the name is yet, but w- w- basically synthetic marketing planning. Some... Even with the big companies, their marketing planning is pretty dire, right? So the ability to synthesize a, a, an artificial plan built from synthetic data, it, it won't just be faster, it will be significantly superior to what companies currently produce. And then, of course, the last bit is connecting that to tactical execution, media buying, real-time pricing, product development ideas. You've suddenly bolted on the whole process there. Now again, there'll still need to be humans involved in this. Less humans, I think, but suddenly you've got a spine of marketing, planning, and execution that feels pretty meaty. Like, you know, you've, you've got your, you've got your tool there helping you on the way, and we need it. We, we definitely need it.
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. I mean, it's funny, isn't it? Because what you're describing actually sounds tremendously exciting in terms-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... of the opportunity that we have ahead of us.
Speaker 2: Yes, it is. It's just that less people will have the opportunity because it is already starting to reduce the number of marketers we need, and that's terrifically sad, but I think unavoidable. Unavoidable. So we're gonna end up with, again, the, no one can predict this, but it certainly looks like the discipline of marketing, the headcount would halve or something, you know, eventually. Not like COVID, you know, but it's gonna winnow down. We're already seeing it in a couple of places. Less recruitment, lower salaries in most of the countries, and senior marketers not moving. Yeah, they, they're staying put where they know they're all right, because they know the risks of jumping now. And then if that doesn't work, and I've got several good friends who are in this position right now, for a senior marketer, you're in a good place if you've, if you've established yourself. Much better than a junior person, who is replaceable with AI in many cases. But if you're one of these senior marketers looking for a role now, there aren't that many roles. People aren't moving. It's, it's a very tough job market, even though the economy is okay, you know? So yeah, we are gonna go into a horrendous decade, I think, for, for the marketers themselves, even though the, the business of marketing gets more exciting.
Speaker 1: And I think that's- Potentially kind of a nice segue into kind of where marketing education comes into play, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, you, you just... You mentioned sort of earlier about the uneducated, I think you said UK marketer, but you're know, you're, you're a global-
Speaker 2: We've got data from lots of markets. They're all equ- The, the Canadians are actually the worst, it turns out, which is a big surprise. I kinda think of Canadians as better at most things, but it turns out they're really poor at marketing. And when I spoke to Canadian marketers in Toronto, they agreed with me that it was pretty shit. They're even worse than Americans, which I think was a particularly hard- I mean, I spent most of the morning when I presented the data sort of hitting them with the left and the right. The left hook was like, "You're shit at marketing," and the... But the right one that really got them was, "You're even worse than the Americans," which-
Speaker 1: Rits big hit stuff. Yeah
Speaker 2: ... blow for Canadians, right? They really weren't happy with that one. So yeah, they're all pretty... I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty poor out there, yeah.
Speaker 1: So, you know, you- you've got that academic hat. You've taught at LBS, MIT, Melbourne, um, and obviously MiniMBA. So, you know, tell me a little bit about kind of, you know, I suppose really the kind of the problem that you're trying to solve there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Uh, it's very simple really. The job to be done is most marketers don't know enough about marketing, and if... But at the same time, they're not gonna trot off to a campus in France or America for two years and 150 grand to find out about it, and it's not reasonable to expect them to do that anymore. I mean, you know, the 17th century model of teaching that I was part of for 25 years is, is not gonna last us much longer. I, I... You know, I dunno about you, but sitting in a room for eight hours with 95 other people while a bloke at the front shouts at us is not the optimum model for learning, right? And then do it again the next day a- having got incredibly shit-faced that night on a, on a team dinner, right? It's, it's... You know, companies aren't letting people out anymore for that length of time. Marketers aren't sitting in a room without their device for long, you know? And we're not spending money flying people around as much as we used to. So what we've created is basically 25 years of experience teaching MBAs at the highest level, but it comes to you now, and you do it at your pace. A- and in my world, there's kind of... There's shit online training, which is, you know, a guy in an Al-Qaeda style booth, you know, t- shouting at the camera with lots of books behind him, you know, with no actual training or academic background, in a really poor q- quality way. On the other side, you've got, you know, spend four days at Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Cambridge, England, and s- you know, drop 35 grand at leafy campus and... But it's very intensive, you know? A- and often very forgettable as well. In the middle is where MiniMBA sits. I've done all of the leafy campus stuff. I've won the teaching prizes. I've got the chops. I know what you need, you know? But I wanna deliver it for a fraction of the cost in a way that's accessible for you or your company, and which is far more sticky for our people because they, they have it forever then, and they can learn from it. So that's where we sit, and it seems to... Like, it is working. We- It's working brilliantly for us and, and for the people that do the course.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, uh, maybe eating your own dog food somewhat. But-
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's what I'm all about. That's why I'm here. I've come with my bib.
Speaker 1: And from a MiniMBA perspective, like, talk me through kind of like what, what's, what's been the, the secret recipe, the Colonel-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... Colonel Sanders style kind of Ritson-
Speaker 2: The Colonel Sanders recipe. That's right. Um, I, I think it's been a couple of things. We s- There's a couple of things we knew from the start that have turned out to be true. You have to have the experience and the pedagogical know-how to do this, and I, and bringing that in definitely worked. But the thing we found along the way was convenience, right? So as we started to make things more convenient, we felt we had to make it more and more convenient. So for example, we've abolished time. There's never an out... So nothing is live, and that doesn't mean we're lazily giving you, you know, videos from 2015. It means everything's recorded at the start of the week, but you watch it when you wanna watch it. There isn't, like, a 2:00 thing where you've gotta scurry from a meeting and sit down for appointment teaching. It d- That just doesn't work anymore. But at the same time, we don't just dump it like Netflix, and you get through it. So each week there's a new module. Time doesn't exist, but in that week you have to get that module done. So there's a really nice balance there. And then the other thing with convenience is we just... It's interesting. We're gradually era- eradicating print materials. We started out with a lot of readings. We're now just down basically to the Harvard Business Review column each, article each week 'cause they won't let us, for copyright reasons, do it audio. Otherwise, that would be audio as well. Everything else now is podcast because that's how our people learn, and they all have dogs and children and washing up and commutes. You know what I mean? And suddenly rather than, you know, b- being on the fucking jogging machine with a Harvard Business Review, you've got your headphones in, and we're transforming it for them. And I tell you, the way we've done that with AI. So we have, you know, a couple of, of personas we created from our own data who are going through the course in an artificially intelligent way, talking to each other. And they're, they're not scripted by me, and they bring the thing to life. You know, they do all the readings and talk about it. We reanimate long-dead marketing experts to talk about their paper in the modern sense. And this stuff, even for me, and I've read these papers, you know, uh, literally a thousand times, but listening to these guys come back to life, like Ted Levitt. You know, "Marketing Myopia" is a very important paper, seminal paper. It's, you know, 15 pages in the Harvard Business Review from 1981. But if you, if you reanimate him and ask him to talk about how it applies today, and he turns up and he says, "You know, literally, I'm Ted Levitt. I've been dead for, you know, 30 years, but let me tell you about what I think," you know, they've brought him back to life, I- I'm spellbound by it, and I've learned more from it as well. You know? It's, it's, it... We're onto something, I think.
Speaker 1: I love that. That's amazing. You know, you made me think about sort of, you know, are we entering kind of, you know, a, a new kind of era whereby- We're going back almost to the days of Shakespeare, where we were orally kind of driven, right? And we've had, you know, we've had what, three, four decades of being visually led?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: But this oral point you just made there is fascinating.
Speaker 2: It, it... And, and we're being dragged there by the market.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: While it's not my vision, right? I didn't have that at the start. I was very much traditional in the sense of, "Oh, here's a short paper. Here are some of my columns." As we test and learn, what we're learning from our marketing classes is the more we give them convenient audio, the happier they are. And so yeah, I- it's something that's, you know, it's evolving out of the program, and as we build more courses, we're learning this, you know, savoir faire of, of 21st century learning is very different. And, and it's exciting. Yeah, it's exciting. It's good. And it's grown up people. They aren't kids. They don't need to be disciplined. You know, it has to be tight, you know. You can't get away with more than an hour now, which is a, it's a stretch for me, but I'm going for it. You know, our classes are an hour. Anything more than that, we are really pushing it. A- and when we talk with companies, we, you know, we're half enterprise. A lot of the companies will say when we go in there, "Oh, you can't give them an hour. It doesn't work." And I say to them, "No, no, no, your shit's useless. You can't get more than an hour. My shit's great. I can get an hour. Trust me. Look at our completion rates." So the other part to it is there's, there's a real skepticism now o- you know, one big client at the moment is like, "Oh, no. The, you know, we've tried that. You can't talk to them for more than 10 minutes." I'm like, "No, your, your stuff's shit." You know, we've got green screen and humor-
Speaker 2: ... and amazing stuff. Watch. You know, give us 10 of them. I'll watch them do an hour every week, you know? So there's that message-
Speaker 1: Right
Speaker 2: ... as well, which is it's getting shorter, but it's still possible if you engage and make it interesting to get people... You know, the, the single best comment we get, the most common comment we get at the end of the program is, "I'm really sorry it's over. What am I gonna do next week?" You know, this is, this is what we want. You know what I mean? What on earth will I do with my dog walking because I, I, I've loved this? You know what I mean? And I've come on, you know, I've learned so much. It's changed my life. I had a Romanian guy who, Brandon, was a slight lunatic this morning that was interviewing me. He's just done the course, and the first thing he said to me is, "It's changed my life." Do you know what I mean? And we get that a lot. I mean, the intimacy of that, you know, we're not... It's an interesting observation. We're, we're not in a classroom with 100 people, and when we, when I've trained other professors to help do MiniMBA classes for us, the first coaching you give them is, "No, you keep talking to the camera as if you're addressing 100 people. Don't do that. It's just you and the other person." The intimacy, even though we would train easily 7,000, 8,000 a year, but it's an intimate thing. You know, you've got your podcast, and you've got your thing. So when I meet MiniMBAers here, and I will, they come up to you like, you know-
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah
Speaker 2: ... they're really kinda, you know, "Hey," you know. The, the, you know, the Romanian basically thought I was his best mate, right? I have no idea who he is, right? But I've sat in bed with him, I've been on his commute, I've helped him with his baby in the pram-
Speaker 1: Yeah
Speaker 2: ... you know what I mean, for three months. A- and that's... it's lovely. I mean, it's, you know, he was a mad fiend for, for Baudrillard, you know, and I, I, I grew up on Baudrillard, so he's w- i- you know, we had a very intense discussion about postmodernity. But his point was, "It's not you that I know. It's the represent- digital representation of you." And I thought, "Oh, God, here we go. Romanian postmo- mo- postmodernity." I'm, you know, it's fucking, it's 10 o'clock in the morning. Jeez, you know.
Speaker 1: Day one.
Speaker 2: We're straight in day one, you know. Some Romanian nutcase talking about postmodernity. I'm, I'm there. I'm there for it, you know.
Speaker 1: But I love that. I mean, you, you're building a brand. I mean, uh, you know, I, I wanna ask the question about well, you know, what are you gonna give them when it ends?
Speaker 2: Ah. Well, we give them it all forever, first of all, right? So we, we, we... They all think it's a good deal I think, and then they find out that they get access to the material as it updates literally till they die, right? So there's that sort of thing where they're always gonna be there. I have a couple more things up my sleeve. I mean, I'm 55, 56, so I do not intend... I'm very working class. I don't intend to work... I, I really would've been done around now if it was up to me, but contractually I've gotta do a few more years. I have a couple more things up my sleeve which are pretty fucking good-
Speaker 1: Yeah
Speaker 2: ... linked to the MiniMBA. So once those are rolled out, I'm a big believer in taking your money and going away and spending it. Again, a very working-class c- it's interesting. All my lovely middle-class friends struggle with the idea of stopping-
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm
Speaker 2: ... because their job is part of their identity. But because I'm from perhaps the most working-class town in England, in West Cumbria, the idea that I'm somehow dependent on my job to define myself or my future is hilarious, you know. Both my grandfathers are coal miners, you know what I mean? Like, fuck that, you know. Give me, you know, several million pounds and watch me not have a problem with that. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Well, maybe that's what's made you you, because you have that ability to kind of cut through the, the, the bullshit, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you have in some ways, right? It's sort of, you know, like Warren Buffett was always quoted as saying that, you know, the best people you can give, you know, the, the job of CEO to is the people that don't need the money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point. Uh, now and look, I, I do like the money very much. I'm, I'm just not bothered about... I, I've-
Speaker 1: Yes
Speaker 2: ... I, I was saying to Tim, my CEO, I'm very relieved now that I've got a modicum of tiny, tiny fame. Let's, let's get it in perspective. It's marketing fame, therefore pointless. Um, I'm very relieved it hasn't, it really hasn't gone to my head. I was quite an arrogant fucker before, I hasten to add, but it hasn't made me, do you know what I mean, any worse. And I think that's a, that's a tremendous relief to me. Do you know what I mean? I'm just as annoying as I ever was, but I'm not more annoying. I'm not more, you know, I don't think more of myself because of all this hoo-ha. I think that helps as well. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: I think you're just known as being quite honest, and I, you know-
Speaker 2: Mm
Speaker 1: ... and your honest, your honest kind of, you know, um, uh, is, is part of your appeal I think in many ways. You know, you're, you know, you, you've worked with a load of brands, you know, outside of the day job, as it were. And, and I just wondered kind of where, where that kind of, you know, that, that relationship of, of, of kind of, you know, being able to k- kind of tell a CEO or a CMO straight to their face kind of-
Speaker 2: That you suck
Speaker 1: Dropping F-bombs in the-
Speaker 2: When I was younger, it did, it worked once in my favor. So I got a big gig for LVMH in Paris, right, with Mr. Arnault and the gang, and that definitely exclusively came from my absolute lack of interest in luxury branding, which they took to be exclusivity and desire. And everyone in the world of branding would've given their right nut to work for LVMH except me, to the point where I got to Gare du Nord Station, I remember thinking, "If they don't come in five minutes, I'm gonna fuck off home." I really wanna work for them. But the money was good, you know. So yeah, that sort of lack of, you know, lack of interest in shit like that made me paradoxically fantastically attractive to the French, you know. Like, you know, Gilles Hennessy and those boys, they, they, they could sense my complete, my very strong interest in, in cognac, but my absolute lack of interest in, you know, la-di-da. But later on, what happens, of course, is you get recruited according to your reputation. So the only people that hire me are the ones who want slapping around a bit anyway, who think they n- you know, they'll let me loose on their teams, 'cause they're like, "Listen, what these guys need is that thing you do," you know. So later on in your career, at this stage, it becomes self-refuting, you know what I mean? It's, uh, self, uh, proving. So yeah, look, it's good. I mean, I think you've... I was taught a long time- I did a thing with McKinsey. This is an interesting, uh, experience. About four or five years, I was training McKinsey consultants around the world, and I did, like, the Tuesday, right? To get, like, a day and a half, I had to get them right through the marketing syllabus. It wasn't fun, but we got on there, you know. And I'd go to, uh, like Madrid, and I'd go to Miami, and we'd just have fucking 40 guys in a room. I'd just, like, spank them around and get them through marketing. The guy before me was an old retired partner from McKinsey from the US, and he did, like, client management, client leadership, and he was fucking great, you know. So I always used to get in early and watch him in action, 'cause he was silk, you know. It was, it was always different.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And his thing about client leadership, which was brilliant, was... So here's what client leadership is. You basically have to have the expertise and honesty to say to a client, "Your idea is so bad we're all gonna fucking die, and I love you so much I'm gonna tell you that. Now, if you want me to go on that hill with you and die, I'm coming, but I'm telling you in advance we're dying on the hill." Right? And his point was, at that moment, you cannot lose, 'cause either the client goes, "Your honesty is great. We won't do it, thanks," or they go, "Fuck, let's do it," and then you die, and then he goes, "What a n- what a great man you were to come with me." Or he could turn around and go, "You were totally wrong. I'm a genius." And, and, you know, so he was, he was a smart man. You know, he was one of those guys. Like, he was one of those guys. And, and that always gave me some confidence, that if you go in with a client and go, "Listen, this is completely fucking madness, but if you wanna do it, we can do it," it works. It works. It's like a magic charm. And as you'll, as you'll know, clients of a certain age and experience have only had the ass-licking school of, of service laid before them, right? So when someone does say to them, "I tell you what, that's fucking stupid, mate," you know, it, it, it hurts, but then they go... If they, if they're senior enough, they like it, you know. They really like it.
Speaker 1: Y- you, you're a big kind of advocate about sort of consistency, and I-
Speaker 2: Yeah, man
Speaker 1: ... I, I love, I love all of those kind of, those-
Speaker 2: Boring, boring consistency.
Speaker 1: Man, it's... But you know, like, there's something to be said for it, and I wanna kind of unpack it a bit, you know, and linking that to luxury, because it seems to me that sort of luxury brands, I mean, this is a huge ster- stereotypical t- you know, kind of statement, but they really have brand discipline that maybe other kind of sectors miss.
Speaker 2: Agree. Agree. It's very interesting. I'm doing this thing with Byron Sharp this afternoon, and we both sort of came up with the same concept at the same time, and he called it distinctive brand assets, and I called it brand codes. And the reason I call... And this is, you know, the, the, the handful, the palette of your logo and your four or five other distinctive identifiers, you know. And we call them brand codes 'cause I was working, and it sounds odd now, but I was working for Christian Dior in Paris, as you do, and what we learned from the fashion houses that we were bringing into the wine and spirits houses and the watch houses was that these fashion brands had had this sensitivity since the '40s and '50s, since Chanel and Dior had been doing this. And what they'd recognized was there were symbolic identifiers that, that would bring the brand to mind and that you would play with in a way that was fashionable and creative, but also branded, you know. And I learned that early from those brands, and we certainly took it into brands like Dom Perignon and Moët and Tag Heuer, and we said, "Look, the... Trust me, the fashion brands can learn a lot from how Moët Hennessy does things." But what, what the other brands can learn from fashion is, uh, have a palette, you know, of codes, and play them, play them, play them, because a- again, we come back to market orientation. Most consumers aren't paying attention to your shit. You've... The way you make an ad is diametrically opposed to how your target consumer is consuming that ad. You've spent four months literally staring at a screen, changing the pigmentation of the model, right, and altering the sofa, and it's gonna be watched by a consumer who's talking to her dog, right, slightly pissed, at nine o'clock at night. So the way you make an ad is bollocks. It, it, it, it's got to be how it's received. I mean, the stuff I'm doing for TikTok tomorrow is basically saying to them, "You need four of those codes in the first two seconds on, especially on TikTok, or it's pointless," right?
Speaker 1: I'm really glad you mentioned TikTok, 'cause I was kind of nervous about asking this question. Not... You know, you can cut me down whenever you like. But what was more around just the fact that sort of you'd go, "Oh, well, that's just noise." But what's your kind of take on the kind of, the rise of the creator and its role in mark-
Speaker 2: I think it's a new medium, okay? And you and I are old enough to know how this has happened before. Everyone loses their shit, because now it's the death of everything else, and the... It's all about-
Speaker 1: Yeah
Speaker 2: ... creators, right? Unilever's took its underpants off and thrown them off the... Fine. I'll burn everything, right? We're... It's all about creators, right? Fucking advertising's dead, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We've seen this before. It's been happening since TV came in, right? Oh, fuck, radio's dead. We're all gonna fucking be watching TV. Well, here's radio still here, right? And so what, what we should have learned and we haven't learned is we always are evolving new tools. Search came along 20 years ago and changed everything. Podcasts came along and changed everything. But they don't wipe out the other... Podcasts didn't kill radio, right?
Speaker 1: Mm.
Speaker 2: Search didn't kill newspaper advertising. It did a fucking number on it, but it didn't destroy it completely, yeah? So what we learned is the, the, you know, the palette of tools, the toolkit is ever-growing. We've just gotta remember that the fundamental... Again, back to our, you know, what are the principles here, the principle rule of media is A times B is always better than two A or two B. And that stupid stuff out of Unilever, who should know better, is no, traditional TV isn't dead, for goodness sake. But if you take some of your traditional TV spend and you put it into creators, the synergy of those two things is more than doing TV or more than just doing creators, right? Why is that so hard for everyone to understand? I don't know, right? But w- that's one... The law of integrated marketing communications, Don Schultz, 30 years ago, if more people knew about it, that, that fundamentally diversity works, we'd be in a lot better place.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna finally, finally kind of end on Cannes. So here you are.
Speaker 2: Here I am-
Speaker 1: Right
Speaker 2: ... in Cannes.
Speaker 1: What is the best version of what this industry gathering can do?
Speaker 2: Oh, fuck. I don't know. I mean, look, I, I really li- I really... We make a lot of money here, I have to be frank. The reason we're here is because we do some good deals with very important people from both Europe and America. And I, you know, was famously cynical of Cannes for a very long time, partly because 95% of marketers are in Cannes and get very fucked off with some bozo on a balcony.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: "Ooh, I'm in Cannes," you know what I mean? What, what a way to piss everyone off. We had to stop our marketing director this morning from posting, like, "Mark Ritson is in Cannes." I'm like, what is the point of this other than to enrage most marketers who go, "What a knob," you know? Um, but the deals, I have to say, that are done here, usually while inebriated, are fantastic. Yeah, so we're here for that. The impact of Cannes, you know, I mean, everyone gets to hang out. I'm more skeptical of that, I fear. I don't think there's a lot of good data on... And Cannes won't be happy me saying this, but I have to say when we've looked at it, there's not a lot of correlation between getting these lions and, and making money in terms of your campaign effectiveness. The, the Effies are one thing, the lions are another, right? But, you know, whisper that quietly. You know, it's all very nice and lovely. But as... The first time I got here, it was apparent that this is the place... And I've worked in, you know, Europe and America, uh, you know, as well as Asia.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This is the place where they come, and I... The one place, and nowhere else has that, and for that reason, you got, you gotta really be here for that reason. The impact of it, I don't know. I don't know. I know there's a lot of CMOs that I've worked with and for who would give their right leg for a lion, so therefore it must be important for them or for something, right? But I'm less... If you've won an Effie, I, I have a lot of... Yeah, I go, "Hmm, look at that." If you've won a lion or two, I'm like, you know, you know, great. Sagittarius, who cares, you know?
Speaker 1: Mark, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2: My pleasure. That was fun, wasn't it?
Speaker 1: It was brilliant.