Tune in to Time for A Reset
Paul – 00:00:03: Welcome to the Time for a Reset podcast, the podcast where I, Paul Frampton, interview senior marketers on the big issues of the day and the thing that they want to see reset with an ever-changing landscape. Welcome back to another episode of Time for a Reset. This morning, I’m delighted to be joined by Nic Travis, who’s head of digital marketing at Lloyds Bank. Nick has 20 years experience of running e-commerce and online teams and a proven track record of delivering change and revenue and high-performance teams. He’s also held senior roles across many very performance-driven organizations like Phones4U, Shop Direct, and Claire’s Accessories. And he’s prolific on LinkedIn. I suggest all of you check out some of his posts on LinkedIn because he has some very provocative views on the way marketing is going. So I’m really looking forward to this one, Nic.
Nic – 00:00:57: Excellent. Thank you for having me, Paul. I’m also looking forward to it.
Paul – 00:01:01: Marvelous. So you know where we start. If you had a big red button in front of you that you could smash reset on in the marketing industry, what would you change?
Nic – 00:01:11: I don’t think it’s come as any surprise to you, Paul. Measurement is my bug bug. A combination between measurement and creative, certainly in the digital space, I think creative needs to reset. Although there’s progress been made over the last few years on that front, but measurement is an inflexion point in my mind in that we’ve come from the cookie-based solutions. And I’ve been in this game long enough to remember when they worked. You only had Google Ads and some affiliates so it was surprisingly accurate and everyone was accessing it from a desktop but as we’ve entered into a multi-device world and a privacy centric and apps and web and all manner of other devices, the truth is that there are more holes in people’s measurement than most people choose to recognize or have been advised. And I think that’s a big problem.
Paul – 00:02:05: Absolutely agree. I mean, I love that you bring this up as a reset. It always puzzles me that when you look at industry conferences or what’s written about in Press, that the effectiveness and the quality of measurement and attribution doesn’t get more questioning, doesn’t take up more time. And I noticed in one of your posts on LinkedIn today, you talked about the fact that attribution, the wrong data got accepted almost like as a convenient truth, I think it is what you said, which I thought was a really concise way of describing what’s happened. I know many CMOs that have gone into a job and almost been told in a D2C E-commerce or econ business, your job is to deploy an attribution tool and then prove to us that this works, which seems like a rather flawed way of approaching it. So why do you think the industry doesn’t put more attention to this?
Nic – 00:02:59: Two explanations to this, Paul. One being the old adage that turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. If you’ve got a measurement dashboard in that you’ve spent years or some of your predecessors spent years convincing finance was the source of the truth, it’s a brave man that steps in and says, oh, it’s nonsense. And the number may be much lower than what’s being counted in here. And then I think the other bit is it’s hard. Hard. There isn’t. And despite what many people have spent lots of time over the last few years, there’s all these magic bullet solutions out there that are going to solve it. I was saying beware of the man trying to sell you magic beans when it comes to measurement. And I don’t think there is one tool that can do everything for every business. You will have different requirements depending on the type of product you’re selling, the marketing mix that you have, the distribution that you’ve got, whether you’re physical, web, app. Whether you’re selling physical product, digital products, all of these things mix together. Obviously, the other ones around scale and investment. All of those bits predicate slightly different measurement approaches. So what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for the other. I could tell you in detail what we do at Lloyd’s. In truth, I could probably tell you how to do it for a large financial services company. It may not work for many other advertisers in the industry or would be totally over-engineered for some people.
Paul – 00:04:36: Absolutely. And I mean, as you say, working in financial services, Lloyd’s,, you sell some products that have very, very long consideration time and some that maybe like a savings account that gets opened far quicker. So you can’t apply the same methodology for both mortgages and savings, can you?
Nic – 00:04:53: Absolutely not. And I think part of the issue you’ve had in digital is this everything’s set around performance or conversion marketing, whatever you want to call it. We don’t put enough weight behind trying to figure out which channels, which formats drive both short and long-term effects. And the long-term effect, if it’s hard to calculate the short-term, calculating the long-term is much, much harder. But that’s where the real value is. If you can start to get at that and figure out ‘how do I drive performance today’, but also drive a halo effect that builds a lasting impression on the target audience.
Paul – 00:05:32: Agree and funnily enough in our podcast Lars Silberbauer from HMD Nokia was talking about performance and brand is just two sides of the same coin you just need different types of metrics to measure to your point the long and short of it I guess is as Les Burnett would call it ‘how do you think about the longer term type of measurement’. You talked in your post earlier about medium mix modelling. And then we’ve had, MTA, which seems pretty flawed these days when you consider what’s happening with cookies, and then you’ve got just running various different experiments. Like, if you’re thinking about measurement that can work for the long and the short term, is there a perfect way of mixing those things together? Or is it just about experimenting and trying to get closer to the truth?
Nic – 00:06:18: My view on this is that you have to have a robust measurement framework. So that is not one tool, not one solution. I think those days are long gone. And hopefully, lots are advertised that marketers are starting to come around to that way of thinking. Got this view that you should be doing, have a tiered approach in your framework. Looking at business goals. So sales, conversion, revenues, whatever you want to do. The hard metrics that drive your business. You’ve got to look at an econometrics model. I still think there’s a role for attribution because econometrics tell you the long-term effects. And they bring in your competitor activity and seasonality and brand. They will inherently attribute a bunch of your sales to stuff that was not channels today. So I still think you need an attributing tool. But then what you need is a way to validate those models. Both your… Your econometrics models and your attribution tools. And for me, that is testing controls. Wherever you can, you should be running testing controls because testing controls provide certainty. That they can tell you what their short-term effect is. You can set up holdouts to try and understand what the long-term effect is. And the more channels, the more campaigns, the more activity that you’re able to have that certainty on, then you can start to plug that certainty into your models. Good luck. We’ll see you later. In reality, all econometrics models are best guesses. They’re full of inherent biases or guesswork. So the more of these test variables you can bring in, the more certainty you bring to the model. And even if you can only test a third of your activity, a third of your channels, right, the accuracy of the two-thirds you haven’t tracked goes up. It has to as you start to bring certainty to the other third that you can track. So the more testing that you can do, the more accuracy and confidence you can have in those models, and the more you’ll be able to sell them into your business stakeholders as truth. Because that’s fair. And I also still think there’s a role for… Surveys and brand associations, awareness, accomplished stuff. I think that has a role. And that somewhere in that framework of stuff, if you can pull it together and create dashboards, that’s where the real power lies. You should be able to get confidence in what you’re doing and be able to bring your stakeholders with you and also make sure that you don’t lean in too much into performance and forget brand. Because if you just build an attribution model, you will over lean into performance at the expense of building long-term value.
Paul – 00:09:05: Articulated that beautifully Nic and I’m not going to disagree with the control testing for a person that runs a consultancy called ‘Control versus Exposed’ for sure I like what you said because what I think I heard you say is like you need to use all different measurement techniques and blend them together and as you say econometrics or medium-length modeling can only be run so regularly but you can enhance it by running experiments getting certainty and plugging that back into the model and I think that is what the most sophisticated marketers are trying to do but to your point earlier it’s hard and it requires translators I’ve always thought that part of the problem is that you’ve got certain people in marketing departments or agencies that have affinity to brand and consideration those metrics and others that have affinity to conversion and cack and often those two worlds don’t work. It’s like, well, this is how you should measure or this is how you should measure. And it’s like, well, how about there’s a mixed measurement model, to your point, a measurement framework that connects different ways? Because I think sometimes organizations almost believe that they can measure everything in marketing, but we’re dealing with people. The weather forecasters rarely get the forecast right, and they’re dealing with data on the forecast. So why do we think we can predict human behavior to 99% accuracy? We can’t, but equally accepting that there are mainly flaws, biases, data inaccuracies within the measurement model seems the other extreme. So. Talk a little bit about how you overcome some of the issues with not having the right data or having blind spots, I think, as you often call it.
Nic – 00:10:39: Yeah, it starts with the not-so-glamorous task of Auditing. Marketers and Auditing don’t necessarily always go together. But the only way to understand how your media works and where those blind spots are is to go through each channel and ask yourself, where does my measurement start and stop here. And I don’t think enough advertisers do that and spend enough time that the amount of people I speak to in the industry that assume all that double-click tracking is correct. You’re asking them, well, how much is your investments going into Safari and what you’re doing about your mobile app conversions. And do you really understand what it can and can’t do? And you have to do that. You have to do it down each of your walled gardens. What’s it allowing me to do? What’s it not? How is it over inflating it? How do I offset that? You’ve got to just get into the details. Of In truth. People have looked for convenient options. They’ve looked for off-the-shelf products. And while some of those will work for some marketers in certain circumstances, I think as your business scales and grows in complexity… That will mean that you’re going to add more channels in and adding more channels in adds to this complexity. You’re going to have to go through and try and understand. As you’re tracking start and stop because often it stops places that people don’t fully understand so Auditing for that answer to that.
Paul – 00:12:12: You’re right. Auditing is not necessarily something that a lot of marketers love. And it strikes me that part of the reason why you’re able to point some of these challenges, because you’ve gone very deep into it to understand all of these areas, whether it’s how data is collected or third party cookies and how they work on different platforms, iOS versus Safari. You’ve made it your business to go and dig deep into it. Now, not all marketers are as technical maybe as they need to be. Maybe we’ll talk about that a little bit later. Slightly off-piste, but a question around how do you communicate these things internally, I guess, upwards to get other senior marketers to understand the importance of getting these things. It’s your job, but at the same time, unless others understand the importance of it, maybe they’ll go, well, why are you spending so much time on Auditing the data sources when we’ve got a tool that can just plug in? To your point about convenience and simplicity, I mean, someone like Google made it so simple with Google Analytics that everyone just jumped in and went, right, brilliant, this solves everything. And it tends to be the people who question those things that build smarter models in the long term. So I think you know what I’m getting at. But I’m just interested in your view on that.
Nic – 00:13:27: Yeah. So, it was a relatively easy sales pitch in our organization, in all honesty, because we use a double hop domain. So we’ve got the Lloyd’s domain when you come onto the website and then when you go and apply for any products, you go to a completely separate domain. So back in 2017, when Apple first rolled out the ITP stuff in Safari, we lost all our measurement. So we quickly saw that Google started optimizing and just skewing all of our campaign delivery and budget to Android devices. But we know, financial services organization, that there’s a valuable customer segment in iOS that you can’t just ignore because your measurements are no longer picking it up. So I didn’t really have to go and do the sales pitch. I may inherit the department whose sales were plummeting and people thought we were, but it wasn’t that we’d become less effective. It’s just that our measurement, we had the blind spots and they weren’t being masked. They were laid out better so that set us on a footing really, if I’m honest, to probably get ahead of where a lot of advertisers are out of necessity, to be totally frank. We had to go and solve those problems and we had to try and figure out how to do cookie-less measurement and move stuff server side. To collect consents to use third-party data right so that was an absolute pain when I first joined but it’s been a blessing in disguise really in that it’s give us a really solid foundation where we have the rough consent cookie policies wording all the stuff that you need to go and be able to build the integrations and tech so, and that and the fact that… I’m really a technical marketer as well, Paul. I make no bones about that. I think more people need to be into the details. And I say that having been in this industry for years and certainly for probably the third decade I was in the industry, I was aware that pretty much everything I did depended on cookies. But if you’d have asked me what it was and how it worked, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. It was just , I don’t know, unicorn farts and magic or whatever. But there became an inflexion point where I was like, I have to go and figure out how all this stuff works. As I started getting more complexity and more channels and devices and stuff, you’ve got to try and figure out how are all these platforms, when somebody tells me that they’re doing all this stuff, what are they doing? How does it work? When will it stop working? I love to just go and explore and ask questions and dig into things.
Paul – 00:16:06: That’s a great cry for all marketers, I think, Nic, to be honest, because whilst different levels of marketers don’t need to go right down to the depth of it, I think all marketers need to understand how the differences between how different browsers collect data and how different platforms are providing the data into their Power BI. Otherwise, to your point, if you just blindly believe and don’t ask questions, then you don’t know how to question your agency or the vendors that you’re working with. So I fully support that. I mean, I came from the traditional world, got into digital early and almost saw my role and for most of my career being the translation between the old and the new world. And people go, well, you’re a digital expert. It’s like, no, it’s just technology is changing everything. So how would you not add value if you didn’t understand the technology? It doesn’t feel like a completely alien concept. But for a lot of people, I think technology is frightening. So let’s go back to, you touched on third-party cookie depreciation and the fact that obviously once Apple changed things a few years back, we’ve already gone partway down that journey. But it does seem that that’s new news to quite a lot of advertisers and marketers in the industry still today, which I find quite frightening. So how do you think about how the industry needs to evolve with what Google will inevitably at some point do? They’ll keep delaying it and delaying it, but at some point, Google will go but we’ve obviously already got quite a lot of browsers that don’t allow it anyway’. So why has the industry been so slow to prepare for cookie duplication, Nic?
Nic – 00:17:43: I think it’s trying to come to a consensus as to what replaces it is the honest answer to that. I mean, Google, credit to them, have tried to build the sandbox as an industry-led initiative and try to get input from everybody. They tried to get the W3C to lead on it initially. I think the truth is that there’s too many self-interests involved in all of it. And nobody wants to play particularly nicely. So there’s been a struggle to come to a consensus. And I think we find ourselves at a point whereby there still isn’t a consensus. We’ve got sandbox, you’ve got all buffins and all gardens. You’ve got various ID solutions. You’ve got a bunch of stuff, but it’s all disparate and people still center around the cookie because it’s still universally worked in the environments and the browsers where it works. Even with the limitations of the cookie as it stands now, it’s still providing a better option for lots of advertisers than the proposals there that we moved to. I think in truth, though, people need to have a good stare at what they’re doing, what they’re trying to achieve. Do they understand what their cookie deprecation to this point has done? I think it’s most unhelpful to talk about cookie deprecation being Google are going to kill it off. I mean, it’s already gone for 50%, 60% of the traffic. So the question I like to ask advertisers is, what’s happened since you’ve lost that 50% or 60%? How well do you understand what the algorithm’s doing? They’ve been great at building models, behavior. As an advertiser, do you know how many of the conversions that are being reported in your system? How many of those are modeled? How many of them are real? Do you understand the impact that has been as we’ve moved to so much automation in the buying approach? Do you understand what, if all your signal is coming from one device type or one browser type, what is that doing to your optimizations? Who are you ignoring through that automation? So the answers aren’t clear. And I’m not going to sit here and tell you exactly what we did just because it won’t work for a bunch of other people. Where I say: You’ve got to get technical because the solutions in many are varied and they will depend on your individual circumstances within your organization. So you’ll need to know what you’re trying to do, which channels you’re trying to do it in, who you’re trying to reach, where you’re trying to reach them. But the bit for me is you’re going to need more first-party data. You’re going to need robust consents. For us, it’s all about transparency. Our customers trust us and we don’t want to misplace that trust. So we believe that we should be asking you and being very specific about what we’re going to do with your data and give you the options to opt out of that at any point in time. And that once you’ve got the first-party data, you can build some measurement solutions on some platforms. You can start to build out testing controls more easily. So there’s a real vary to that one, Paul, as to what exactly you need to do is going to be very specific to your business, your organization. Yeah. I heard that they go out and find good business partners and technology vendors to work with. I’d also argue that there are technology vendors as far as possible to be as agnostic as possible to avoid the magic bean scenario that I discussed earlier.
Paul – 00:21:10: I think that’s a really good answer. Of course, it’s worth reflecting on that answer is pretty complex versus, oh, here’s one tool that solves it all. And unfortunately, that’s what often happens is that people want simplicity and they don’t want to have to exert too much effort to get to a truth. So they compromise the truth in order to get to something that, to use your phrase, is convenient at a point in time. Not for your business or financial services if you were looking in a crystal ball a few years out, what do you think the future of measurement looks like in a privacy-compliant world?
Nic – 00:21:46: I don’t think you need a crystal ball for some of this, Paul, if I’m honest. I think you have to just go back in time a little bit. It looks like the old world did. Kind of metrics models. And I do think that there’s some nuance in that. In that, I think the modeling capability has got a lot better. You can collect a lot more data, a lot more granularity. If you can then start to introduce variants at that level of granularity, you can get even more data points. So where econometric models were always backwards looking and they needed huge amounts of data and that couldn’t give you an answer for six months and I do think that the technology and the ability to create the huge uplifting data points and the ability to create variants within those data points allows you to train models a lot quicker. When you start to stick AI on top of that and the ability to learn from other advertisers in the whichever tech stack it’s using, I do think they become more powerful. But I don’t think it gets away from my earlier point, right, that it’s not just about having a new metrics model and having an accurate model. But you’re going to need surveys. You’re going to need test and control and all that other stuff piled on top of it.and a real laser focus on what drives your outcomes.
Paul – 00:23:05: No, good answer. So I’m going to change tact a little bit because I think we’ve done the measurement and data piece in a lot of detail there. So thank you for sharing your views. Really interesting. You’ve obviously gone into a lot of e-commerce online teams and driven a lot of change and moved on and done it again. What is it that interests you about that? And could you share some of the lessons that you’ve learned from going in and transforming those teams? I mean, measurement is a key part of that. I’m sure there are lots of other aspects to it as well.
Nic – 00:23:36: Yeah. Firstly, I have to confess to being a bit of a digital marketing, E-commerce nerd. My job is my hobby, sad as that is to say. But now I read about this stuff in my spare time. I genuinely enjoy what I do. So I think that always makes it quite easy. When you work in an industry that evolves rapidly as ours does, you have to keep learning and you have to be willing to, your ear to the ground and try and figure out what these emerging technologies mean and how they can be used. How can you test things and get started? So there’s always something new to try. And that’s the bit I always try to take into organizations with me. You want to look for bright people. You want to look for people that are willing to learn. And you want to build a culture that’s centered around learning and development so that build out that expertise. Because it’s really hard to recruit good people. So you want to get that mixture between recruiting good people and creating a learning culture so that you can say that the ships rise with the tide.
Paul – 00:24:43: Right, absolutely. And… you talk to about learning mindset there and getting the right culture. I’m imagining in some of the orgs you’ve gone into, maybe hasn’t been as much of a test-and-learn or agile enough culture of looking at data. So what have you learned over time? Obviously, you hire the A-class talent. What have you learned about how to get teams to behave differently, to focus more on what works? It strikes me that that’s been a consistent theme of your career.
Nic – 00:25:15: At heart, a performance marketer who is slowly turning into a brand and performance marketer. So I’ve always been incredibly commercial. I started out my career at Phones4U in a Caldwell business that was just all about building propositions, designing. You know, you’d sit down on a Wednesday with the commercial team, figure out what proposition, what deal you could do and then you would build it, deploy it, test it, test and learn. The next week, you’d try and do the same thing, do better. We would methodically try and figure out how to get new handset launches to rank number one in Google. What was the play? How could we refine it over time to try and make sure that we could get there. So, yeah, just being commercially focused into the numbers to try and figure out what works. That is the culture that you have to get into. Definitely not trying to bring us back to measurement again on this one, Paul, but that is a key bit. I suppose. My learning over the last decade or so is that I probably spent the first decade in digital marketing thinking that creative was an inconvenience and that whatever I stuck in my display ads or whatever would work as long as the deal was good enough. But I came to the realization that part of that was, the deal was good enough. But also partly that the display ecosystem made marketers because so much of it was just cookie bombing. And, you could effectively run that ad with almost anything in it. And if you had a great deal, it would report as having sold stuff. So I’ve come more and more around to in recent years as the formats have changed and you start to get into the social environment and I was, I’ve started to have more and more accountability on the brand investments that we do at lights. You know creative plays such a key role right it’s easily the biggest lever in my mind I think there’s a ton of stuff you can do around placements and addressable audiences and media buying and whatnot but creative is just often overlooked by advertisers, especially digital marketers and you know a good creative that’s made for the environment, just as a transformational effect on their performance of your marketing. That makes it much easier to measure if you’ve got great creative.
Paul – 00:27:34: I agree. And it feels like we’re still at the very beginning of this emerging creative tech world. Obviously, a lot of it’s been focused on targeting and tools that automate targeting or measurement or whatever else. But to your point, and I think what I’m hearing is, as you’ve gone through your career, you’ve grown up in a very commercial orientation around, if we do these things, it drives sales and then you’ve learned to optimize that and probably that’s been the thing. But over time, you’ve developed more awareness of how all of those factors and attributes drive it. So the reason why people focus on the long term and creative is because it builds strong businesses. It’s just you need to adapt the way that you plan and measure. So I think it’s really interesting your point around by being digitally focused, you end up being very commercial. I think it’s a great opportunity for more digital marketers or people in digital. In agencies to realize that they have a lot of those commercial skills if they have a learning mindset and curiosity to apply that thinking or technology or ways of working to traditional marketing. Because, frankly, data or measurement, the same principles that you learn. I mean, everyone gets obsessed about first party data is a way to drive the bottom of the funnel. The customer data helps you plan a whole funnel. So I find it quite interesting how people, we have this siloed mentality. Well, if it’s data, it must be about performance. Well, no. If data helps you become better at doing brands, then surely data is just something there to help you be more precise and your test and learn, whether it’s about getting to place one on Google or running different experiments, all of that can still be applied to brand marketing as well.
Nic – 00:29:24: Yeah. Absolutely, 100%. I would say I’ve been on this as a marketer, definitely starting off as a performance marketer, but then realizing that brand drives performance. The stronger your brand, the stronger your performance ads. It’s not all about having a better product and a better proposition. Often, if you’ve got a much stronger brand, you’re going to have a worse product and a worse proposition, and it will pull harder. So it’s about getting, being a proper holistic marketer. It is about the proposition. It’s about the product and price and all that stuff. But it’s also about your position of it in market, the creatives that you use, where you choose to advertise, what that says about you where are your audiences? You have to become a more rounded marketer. I think that the opportunity we have is the delineation between marketing and digital marketing is most unhelpful, I think, at this point. Marketing is marketing. All channels are moving towards mediums, digital programmatic bands. You just need to get back to the basics. Putting great ads online, in great places, drives business outcomes. And the more great ads you can put in great places, the easier it’s going to be for you to measure, is my experience. You can make it complicated, but at its heart, it’s pretty simple.
Paul – 00:30:46: Well said. So that’s quite a nice segue into let’s pick the CMO. What do you think the CMO, not even the future, what’s the CMO of today for emerging for the world we’re in? I think we’ve had a conversation around having a good technical understanding, being able to understand new technology is a core part of marketing. And as you say, digital marketing isn’t a thing, it’s marketing in a digital world these days. So what do you think that the future and a person running a marketing department needs to do more of?
Nic – 00:31:21: The truth is CMOs now and in the future need a real broad set of skills. You need people that are commercial, people that are technical, people that are creative. It’s quite hard, but I could pinpoint the one thing that CMOs need to do is to see marketing is not just the product that you’re pushing. It is technology. Every touchpoint is how we show up for customers in our journeys, in our contact centers, in our emails, in our how you deliver the product. Marketing is every single touchpoint with a customer. Because if you can exceed and delight in all of those bits, it makes the job of converting and harvesting and growing that much easier. Subtle Delivery tricks with the products, whether it be the packaging your cards come in or the packaging the clothes arrive in. They make difference. They create wildfires. They get people to post things on social media. They create those moments of truth that build brands. And so, yeah, I think CMOs need to be really experience-led. Have the technical and creative skills to maximize those opportunities.
Paul – 00:32:39: Nice. I like that. And a lot of people listening to this podcast are probably thinking, knows so much about measurement and data and has learned a lot about traditional marketing, so he must know everything. I’m sure there are things that you’re working on because if it strikes me, you’ve got a lot of curiosity, you’ve got a learning mindset yourself. So if you were being vulnerable for a second, what would you say is the areas that you needed to develop in to be more rounded marketer?
Nic – 00:33:10: Firstly, as you can say, I don’t think your job as a marketer is ever done. The world is moving so fast. I think you have to admit that you only know what you know today. The trick is to try and figure out what’s all this other stuff. What does AI mean? I look at AI and I’m hugely curious. Lots of people look at it at their buy-in end and the report-in end and I do think it will impact some of that stuff, although a lot of it will sit within the walled gardens and in truth is already being done. I think the transformational bit for brands is more at the creative level. I genuinely think if you’re a startup now, making high-quality production ads used to be the purveyor of large brands, of course. I genuinely think there’s going to be this bit where big brands are going to have to get really good at creative again, really, really good, because little one-man bands are going to be able to set up incredibly high-production quality videos and creative and ads. The smaller advertisers get much better like the bigger advertisers are going to get even better otherwise you just narrow down that competitive advantage. I think where AI probably will have the most transformational effect on marketing over the course of the next five years, is in creative production; like how can you use it to be more personalized, be more relevant to people. If you want our ads to be less annoying, let’s use AI for targeting, but let’s also use it to make the creative less generic, make the people in the ads sound like you look, you worry about the same things you’re worrying about. I think that my learning area at the minute is to try and for some of the cliche you spend too much time on linkedin; every man is dog trying to talk to you about AI. But, I do very specifically in and I think it’s that creative that you’re working on, understanding it.
Paul – 00:34:57: Rather than I think every podcast or conference panel is like ‘how are you using generative environment’; let’s be honest the vast majority of people are really early days in these use cases so I like that honesty. You’ve taken us on a really interesting journey in this conversation, Nic. We went very deep on measurement and attribution and effectiveness just overall. And I love how you questioned and challenged how marketers look at that. And are they asking the right questions? Are they running regular enough experiments and updating their measurement frameworks? The winner also talked about preparing for the calculus world and how the mindset, the learning mindset, the performance mindset can be applied to everything. It’s not performance people are in one bucket and brand people are in another bucket. And that’s another thing I take out of our conversation is you came from more the performance area, but you’ve made it your business to understand both so that you can be a more rounded marketer. And I think that’s good for people to hear. Whether you’re brand side or agency side, you have to have that curiosity and apply yourself to learn those other parts. Otherwise, to your point, you’re too narrow in your thinking and this industry doesn’t need more people in very narrow areas. Digital did that where you take social and you’ve got 12 different streams of social expertise from influencers through to someone that does paid social. And that’s just one channel. It’s not very helpful, I don’t think. I really enjoyed the conversation, Nic. So thank you for joining us today.
Nic – 00:36:32: Pleasure, Paul. Thanks for having me.
Paul – 00:36:34: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Appreciate. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Time for a Reset. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did. We’ll be back talking to a senior marketer very soon. Make sure you don’t miss out on any new episodes by subscribing on Apple, Spotify.
