Uncensored CMO

Latest Episodes:

Can marketing save the planet? - Leo Rayman, Eden Lab Sep 22, 2022

Show notes

Leo is the founder of Eden Lab, a new kind of consultancy and venture studio, they don't just advise on how to win in the Net Zero future, they build it with you. He's the former CEO and Chief Strategy Officer of ad agency Grey London, founder of Grey Consulting, speaker, writer and start-up mentor.

He believes businesses can help shape the planet for the better. To do that he says we need to invent - and reinvent - companies for a post-carbon world. He scouts, designs and assembles new business models, products and services that actively create a better future for all of us.

What we covered in this episode:

The state of the industry
Why CMO spend so little time on comms
How to ask better questions
Solving every problem with a poster
Post Covid hybrid leaving do’s
The biggest challenges the world faces
Good intentions vs real action
The one mission to end all missions
What is stopping marketers making a difference
Climate change ignorance
Not all growth is green growth
Bridging the gap between sustainability and the consumer
Why fear and ignorance is holding us back
The £12trillion cost of saving the planet
How do we create the change we need to see
Why it’s time to commercialise sustainability
Moving from shame to seduction
The gap between consumer experience and sustainability
Why Backmarket models a customer centric approach
The importance of the green business model
The tension between costs of living crisis and doing the right thing
The power of an impossible brief
Why brands will be punished in the future for lack of green credentials
The future value of your customer book
What is your clean share of market
Putting creativity into the heart of the problem
Commercialising ESG to create change
Buying trainers for life
What every brand needs to do now

How a great culture led to creativity at KFC - Meghan Farren, KFC CMO Sep 13, 2022

Show notes

Meghan Farren spent 10 years at KFC UK, spending the last 5 as CMO. What does it take to run a marketing department of one of the biggest consumer brands? What do you do when you run out of chicken as a fast food chicken joint? How do you change your strapline when it involves licking fingers during a global pandemic? And how a strong culture is pivotal for all this creativity to happen.

What we covered in this episode

Going back to KFC after a year - back to school vibe
The realness of working in a KFC restaurant
Research vs real world experience
How Meg got into marketing in the first place
From finance to marketing
How to transition industry
Experience vs action and impostor syndrome
How to nail a new job
Importance of culture
Hiring the best talent
Being close to the customer
Marketing week brand of the year
Power of consistency
The FCK campaign
How taking a big risk can pay off
How humour in a crisis can help
KFC’s many distinctive assets
How to do brand innovation well
Advice for aspiring CMOs

5 ways to make effective advertising - Jon Evans Aug 09, 2022

Show notes

Now it's the summer holidays, and that means everybody's taking a well earned break from all their hard work. And that includes the Uncensored CMO, but producer James never wants to let me off an episode, And he said, why before you go away, why don't you just do a quick episode. So, I thought, why not do a little bonus episode?

It got me thinking, what subject do I know a little bit about that might be useful to my listeners? And, this is where I have to put my System1 hat back on, because what we do better than anybody else is advise people on how to make advertising that works. We like to frame that as how to make a five star ad. So in this special edition episode, I talk about why emotion and advertising matters and how I can prove it. And some of the tips that we give all our customers on how to make advertising that actually works.

What I covered in this episode:

The crazy amount of money spent on adverts
Why 50% are still a waste of money
The data for why your creative matters
Why Creative is your most important tool
Why emotional beats rational advertising
Why System1 was created
Orlando Wood and his masterpieces
- Lemon
- Look Out
Why we make decisions
ESOV and how creativity is an amplifier
The reason to pre test your advertising
Right brain vs Left brain advertising
The decline in creative effectiveness
The importance of Fluent devices
The 5 things that make a 5 Star ad
Why you should take no notice of awards
A shameless plug for System1

How to target the invisible powerhouse (over 50s) - Jeremy Hine, MullenLowe Aug 03, 2022

Show notes

Do you think the advertising industry has a problem with age now? In my experience, the majority of marketing departments are run by people under 40. Sometimes the majority, even under 30, and that's reflected in creative agencies as well. I think that's a real problem because if you look at the statistics, people over the age of 55 represent the majority of people in the UK, they have enormous buying power, lost disposable income, and often a bit more time on their hands to spend it as well.

So it's such a shame that we as an industry are neglecting a very significant part of the population. Recently that MullenLowe have released a new report called "The Invisible Powerhouse", looking at the lives of over 50s and how we can market to them better. In this episode, I speak to MullenLowe UK CEO, Jeremy Hine, about the report and what we can do to address this problem.

What we covered in this episode:

52 year old Jeremy introduces himself
What inspired ‘The Invisible Powerhouse’ report on age diversity
Why age represents the greatest disparity in Advertising representation
How do older people feel about the way in which they are portrayed
The business case for people ‘Feeling Seen’ in advertising
Almost half the population are over 50 and own 70% of all assets
Why not all over 50’s are the same
The age people feel rather than the age they are
What segmentation by attitude reveals
Inspiration from the gear lever design in a Jaguar
The dominance of youth in the ad industry
How to brief to ensure older representation
The importance of seeing and understanding the older generation
Why Entertainment matters to an older audience
Inspiration from the Magnum campaign featuring older people
The value of spending time with older people
What we can learn from TikTok
The stereotypes of older people in advertising
Taking inspiration from Top Gun
Why women experience an even greater invisibility in advertising
How Mullen Lowe led the Governments covid response
How a crisis super charged creative work & collaboration
Where to get more help on marketing to an older audience

How marketing can fix the global economic crisis - James Hankins and JP Castlin Jul 14, 2022

Show notes

A double header episode as I speak with JP Castlin and James Hankins on the back of their Cannes 2022 talk, in partnership with WARC, "The Gravity of e-commerce".

JP Castlin is an independent consultant who coined the term naturalized strategy-making and created the ABCDE framework. JP has been featured in Marketing Week, The Drum, WARC and more, and he also wrote "Strategy in Polemy". James Hankins is the founder of Vizer Consulting & Global VP Marketing Strategy and Planning at SAGE.

View JP & James' WARC report here.

What we covered in this episode:

How the pandemic inspired the Cannes collaboration
The one question everyone was asking at Cannes
What is driving the sudden adjustment in e-commerce valuations
Presenting straight after Gary V’s Cannes talk and our obsession with new things
The threat of Stagflation and how it will impact the economy
Returning to the 4 P’s for the solution to the problem
The gravity effect of e-commerce and the challenging cost efficiency
Defining the model as a shift from one-to-many from many-to-one
Why marketers are needed to solve this problem
The real cost of returning e-commerce products
The long and short effect of guaranteed returns
How Amazon mitigated the cost of product returns
Why marketers needs to see the whole picture to solve the puzzle
The Nike business model and how even they struggle to do e-commerce
Why growth-first companies like Uber Eats fail to make a profit
The Vegan Sausage roll principle and the challenge of second-hand car buying platforms
Why fulfilment capability is so critical for e-commerce businesses
Why Cinch are set up to beat Cazoo in the car e-commerce war
The importance of understanding your business model first
Using creativity to solve the most fundamental commercial challenges
What we can all learn from the Next annual report and their emergent strategy
The pivotal role of the CMO in a commercial crisis

From Saatchi copywriter to denim brand founder - David Hieatt, Hiut Denim Jul 05, 2022

Show notes

Today we're joined by David Hieatt, founder of Hiut Denim Co., and The Do Lectures.

What we covered in this episode:

How to pronounce Hiut and its origins
What inspired David to start a jeans company
Pitching a business aged 14
Raised by wolves at Saatchi and Saatchi
Setting up their first business Howies
Surviving without pay for 6 years
How it feels to sell your business
The impact of having a dad in the merchant navy
The importance of making people feel something
Having a purpose and bringing your values to work
How to find your purpose
Why saving Britains biggest jeans factory inspired David to create Hiut
Coping with 6 months orders in one month
Why a newsletter is your most important communiction tool
Getting geeky about newsletter stats
Trying to beat your best newsletter
Writing a book in 30mins a day
Learning from Paul Arden
The importance of choosing your boss carefully
Focussing on being the most influential 30 person jeans company
Being better today than yesterday
Saving the planet with the No Wash Club
Coping with 3 years of repairs in 3 months after offering free repairs for life
The 88 hours it takes to win business
The inspiration behind the DO lectures and the irony of 'doing one thing well'
Don't just stand there, do something. Making change happen.
Selling tickets to Do lectures out in an hour
Talks from a cowshed in west wales

Cannes Uncensored with Tom Goodwin Jun 27, 2022

Show notes

I've always had a bit of a love, hate relationship with Cannes. It's wonderful that we celebrate creativity with this event, but seeing how the festival rewards a certain type of creativity, particularly short term activation and purpose recently, I'm starting to wonder how effective Cannes Lions winners are in the real world.

So who better to talk to about this than Tom Goodwin, who isn't short of uncensored opinions, to find out what he really thinks of Cannes. Is it just a jolly for the industry? or is it something more?

-> Listen to my previous episode with Tom

Whether Web3 is the next big thing
How dis-interested we are in real people’s lives
The cost of luxury opinions
Having a seat at the Davos table
Why normal people do all the wrong things
How purpose has replaced creativity
Making good advertising that sells
How big tech stole the creative football
Comparing Cannes to previous years
How the Cannes experience can vary
The status symbol of Cannes passes
The future of travel to Cannes
Tom’s view on Gary Vee’s talk
Inventing the perfect Cannes
The case for seducing and entertaining

The triple threat to creative effectiveness - Peter Field, Orlando Wood, Karen Nelson-Field (Live from Cannes) Jun 22, 2022

Show notes

For the 50th episode of Uncensored CMO, I'm live in Cannes to talk about the triple threat to creative effectiveness. Why effectiveness has been declining over the years, how attention has impacted mental availability and what we can do about it. Fresh off the stage at Cannes Lions 2022, Peter Field, Orlando Wood and Karen Nelson-Field talk us through what they're calling Triple Jeopardy.

From Peter Field himself: "Triple Jeopardy is three things: the withdrawal of money from brand and putting it into performance marketing and the short-term on a massive scale. That has drained the mental availability fuel supply, if you like"

What we covered in this episode

Karen, Peter and Orlando's triple jeopardy Cannes panel
How effectiveness has progressively declined throughout the years
What's causing the decline? Is it a focus on short term activation vs long term brand building?
Why are you calling this triple jeopardy?
Why short term activation is damaging mental availability
Measuring inwards vs outward
Why we need to change attention metrics
Active vs passive attention
85% of ads sit below the attention memory threshold
Viewablity metrics are failing us
How the elasticity of attention varies
So how do we solve this? How do we sustain attention?
Why we need more right-brained features in advertising
What captures attention?
Are you paying attention to this very message on this podcast? (and in these show notes?)

Sex, driving and how to be a CMO - Marg Jobling, NatWest CMO Jun 07, 2022

Show notes

Margaret Jobling is the Group Chief Marketing Officer at NatWest. Margaret has spent the majority of her marketing career in FMCG, before to joining the utilities sector in 2014, as Director of Marketing at British Gas. At the beginning of 2016 she moved into a CMO role at Centrica, transforming the firm’s marketing capabilities across all regions. Then in 2020, joining NatWest as CMO.

In September 2020, Margaret was announced as one of Marketing Week’s Top 100 Most Effective Marketers for her work at Centrica.

What we covered in this episode:

How Marg went from laser chemistry to marketing
Blagging her way through her first job in marketing
Capturing an emotional response in a rational way
How to look smart giving creative feedback to an agency
The ABC of assessing a piece of creative
Why marketers face a much more complex context today
How marketing is like sex and driving
Using the language of business in the Board room
Why marketers should focus on customers and commercials first
The two hats every CMO wears
Creating a culture where people can test and learn
Inverting the pyramid and supporting the marketing team
Why the store manager is king
The power of showcasing what has gone wrong
Marg’s hidden showreel of what went wrong
Jon’s best training talking about his biggest failures
Why Marg wouldn’t go back to fast moving consumer goods
The importance of a consistent customer experience
How service sector and FMCG differ
Defining what marketing is
The inspiration behind ‘tomorrow starts today’
Why procrastination is the largest barrier to your success
What NatWest is doing to protect the climate
How banks can finance a greener economy
Which technology we should be paying attention to
Why not even the tech giants know what the future holds
If it saves time, money or effort it will work
What being in the Top 100 CMO charts does for Marg
Leaving the world in a better state than we found it

Tom Goodwin on the metaverse and other marketing nonsense May 09, 2022

Show notes

Tom Goodwin is an author of a quote you might just have heard of: "Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening."

He does other things too, like spending an immense amount of time on LinkedIn and writing some seriously impressive books - two of them in fact - Digital Darwinism 1 and 2 (out now in the UK).

What we covered in this episode:

From architecture to advertising
Coping with job rejection letters
Jon blags himself a job
The terrifying feeling of going solo
Being a Decathlete rather than sprinter
The importance of saying No
How the industry lost its way
Why customer service has been lost
The story behind THAT quote
Potential applications of the insight and its limitations
How we may be coming full circle
Why is better to leverage existing tech rather than gambling on new
The challenge of the Metaverse and how society will reject it
How technology should be making us more human not less
Technology as augmentation rather than replacement
Why nothing new has happened in the past 8 years
The power of Nowism vs Futurism
The biggest barriers to innovation inside larger corporate businesses
Where the next big innovations should be
The ‘in the office’ auto reply
Tom’s new book is out now

Links

Follow me on Twitter: @uncensoredCMO
Follow me on LI: LinkedIn
My website: www.uncensoredcmo.com
Email me: jon@uncensoredcmo.com

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