Uncensored CMO

Latest Episodes:

How Yorkshire Tea became Britain’s No.1 Tea - Dom Dwight Dec 01, 2021

Show notes

Dom Dwight former editor & journalist who, just over a decade ago, discovered a passion for doing marketing properly, most notably through Yorkshire Tea but with a growing focus on coffee for Taylors of Harrogate. He's on a mission to prove that brands can connect with consumers in a way that benefits business, people, and (if it's not too ridiculous) the world.

What we covered in this episode:

What a Proper Yorkshire Tea business card would look like
From journalist to CMO of the UK’s best loved Tea brand
Starting out on Twitter in 2008 to connect with ex pats who love tea
Going from No.3 Tea brand to No.1 in just a couple of years
Transforming market share from 13% to 33%
Yorkshire Tea for Yorkshire people using Yorkshire water
Why communication was the strategy to unlock growth
How social media informed Yorkshire Tea’s tone of voice
The serious case for more humour
Discovering the ‘where everything’s done proper’ idea with Lucky Generals
Why targeting new users was critical for brand growth
How well known Yorkshire celebrities helped the brand reach new users
Getting Sean Bean to run the company induction
Using the Brownlee Brothers for deliveries
Asking Michael Parkinson to do your interviews
Hiring Kaiser Chiefs to produce the hold music
Focussing on quality over quantity for Ad production
Turning the Advertising engines off during covid but gaining some useful tailwinds
Jon tests Dom on his ability to predict which Ad perform best on System1
The power of movement to capture our attention
The importance of creative instincts when making a great ad
Why trust is so important when delegating to your team
How Yorkshire Tea discovered a sense of humour
In house social on a budget vs agency high production
The power of low ego at Lucky Generals
Inventing the social distancing teapot during lockdown
Quietly going carbon neutral and painting the story on pack
The importance of culture to the performance of the brand
Time invested in genuinely asking ‘how people are; that supports during challenges
The Importance of a stable management team over the long term
Turning loyal brand drinks into advocates to recruit new ones
Customer complaints about not screening the full version of the Sean Bean TV ad
Debating which Christmas ads work and which don’t
Praising the power of M&S ‘this is no ordinary’ Advertising
Yorkshire Tea’s ambition take on the World

Punks, Purpose & Profit - the biggest marketing stories of 2021 - Russell Parsons, Marketing Week Nov 24, 2021

Show notes

In this episode I talk with editor-in-chief of Marketing Week, Russell Parsons. We talk about our favourite news stories of the year, the Mark Ritson effect and if we should still be putting "digital" in job titles.

Russell's Bio:
Russell is the award-winning editor of the UK’s most prominent marketing title. He is responsible for leading Marketing Week’s content strategy across several platforms. Russell is also a trusted authority on marketing issues, delivering keynote speeches and hosting and appearing on panels at industry events. He first joined Marketing Week as a reporter in 2009.

What we covered in this episode:

• How Russell became editor-in-chief of Marketing Week
• Making decisions based on effectiveness rather than efficiency
• Discovering purpose back in 2011
• The Mark Ritson effect on Marketing Week
• Why every marketer should claim to be digital first in a job interview
• How Unilever put digital transformation in the CMO remit
• The importance of putting strategy ahead of digital tactics
• Is B2B really that different to B2C
• The one question Mark Ritson always gets asked
• Why we are all B2B marketers but just don’t realise it
• What Peter Field really said about Purpose
• The importance of demonstrating business impact
• How Direct Line have focussed on their real purpose
• The biggest bit of good news for every Marketer
• Putting performance into brand and brand into performance
• Building the world a better funnel with Tom Roach
• Russell’s mission to make Marketing Week as nerdy as possible
• If its fundamental and flawed it gets read
• Why all models are wrong but some are useful
• Fake gold BrewDog cans, ASA bans and employee letters
• Why negative BrewDog stories might create a recruitment problem
• Russell’s favourite Christmas ad of 2021
• The case for Aldi being the quintessential Christmas ad
• Predictions for what we will be talking about in 2022

Planet saving Aston Martin’s and Transport for Humans - Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy Nov 17, 2021

Show notes

Rory's Bio

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, an attractively vague job title which has allowed him to co-found a behavioral science practice within the agency. Before founding Ogilvy Change, Rory was a copywriter and creative director at Ogilvy for over 20 years, having joined as a graduate trainee in 1988. He has variously been President of the IPA, Chair of the Judges for the Direct Jury at Cannes, and has spoken at TED Global. He writes regular columns for the Spectator, Market Leader and Impact, and also occasional pieces for Wired. He is the author of two books: The Wiki Man, available on Amazon at prices between £1.96 and £2,345.54, depending on whether the algorithm is having a bad day, and Alchemy, The surprising Power of Ideas which don't make Sense, to be published in the UK and US in March 2019.

Buy the book, Transport for Humans.

What we covered in this episode:

What Rory thinks of Orlando’s new book
The danger of big data, economic theory and the assumption of ergodicity
The strangeness of focus groups
Why we’re all trying to project the ‘right answer’ in public forums
Why reading novels makes you more attractive to the opposite sex
The appeal of true live crime to women
Why we should switch mile per hour to minutes per hour
Are we nearly there yet? The behavioural science of transport
What trains should always leave 2mins late
Why we all need a season ticket from the Isle of White to go anywhere in first class
Why going first class should be based on length of service rather than status
How Brexit is good for employee benefits
How the invention of the tube transformed working class access to jobs
How the breakthrough happens when you’re doing what everyone else isn’t doing
Lucozade Energy and how the perception of change is worse than the actual change
The real WHY and the hidden WHO
Better for the reputation to fail conventionally than succeeds unconventionally
The safe course of action in corporate life is always to be boringly conventional
Quality of reasoning isn’t quality of outcome
What every second hand car salesman knows
The case for making decisions when drunk
How behaviourial science can save the planet
Never solve a problem based on the average
Why we should be able to choose our own contribution to the climate crisis
The climate case for a vintage Aston Martin - known as the Kazzoom-brooks postulate
The case for choosing premium brands over cheap ones
What you can learn from the 4th man in Wales to own a dishwasher
Why you shouldn’t post a picture of your car in social media
Changing the currency of status signalling to solve climate crisis
Rory’s favourite ad campaign of the past 10 years
The case for Germany as a tourist destination
Why VW should have put cup holders in their cars in the US
What we can learn from the German approach to the environment
Why we shouldn’t politicise the environment otherwise it creates reputational loss
Why winning an argument and holding attention are not the same thing

How I got fired twice in one year, the Uncensored CMO story - Jon Evans Nov 09, 2021

Show notes

In this special episode of Uncensored CMO, Jon finds himself on the other side of the mic being interviewed by producer James McKinven, who grills him on some unusual career moves. After a promising start in the City Jon makes a large u-turn and decides to become a marketer instead where he goes on to learn his early craft at Britvic. His next big break came at drinks business First Drinks where he notoriously closed down the London underground after causing a terror threat. After recovering from that he returned to Britvic to launch brands in International markets and from there set up a new team of challenger brands. With the entrepreneurs bug he poured his life savings into a management buy in which didn’t end well. From there he went ‘major league’ as Marketing Director of LRS before being fired. Then landing his dream job Brewdog he only managed 3 months before being fired again. But the story ends well as you find Jon as host of Uncensored CMO and CMO for System1 talking about what makes advertising work. In this episode he shares everything he has learnt in his career and why being fired twice in one year wasn’t the setback you might imagine.

What we covered in this episode:

What inspired Jon to go into Marketing
Making the giant leap from Business Finance to Marketing
Getting a big break launching Fruit Shoot at Britvic
How small conversations can make a big difference
Why leaving Britvic was the best way to get promoted at Britvic
Learning the marketing ropes at First Drinks
Causing a terror threat in the London Underground
Appearing on Have I Got News For You
How sometimes it pays to go back
What you discover in International marketing
Creating a challenger brand from within the company
Betting his life savings on a Management Buy In
What you learn when you have nothing
Landing a grown up CMO role at Lucozade Ribena Suntory
Working with a Boxing legend Anthony Joshua
Imposter syndrome when going from nothing to £50m budgets
Managing perception vs reality in a large corporation organisation
Creating the best performing OOH ad ever
How to screw up the Lucozade reformulation
Getting fired despite delivering every single KPI
Jon’s 100 day plan to meet 100 people
Landing his dream job at BrewDog
Getting fired (again) after only 3 months
The power of being unreasonable
Was James Watt a good CEO to work for?
The unexpected source of work after being fired
How Uncensored CMO was born
The episode that made him cry
What happens next for Uncensored CMO and how he wants to help you

The power of feeling seen in advertising - Ade Rawcliffe, ITV Oct 25, 2021

Show notes

Ade joined ITV as Head of Diversity Commissioning in 2017. She was later promoted to Director of Creative Diversity, before taking on the role of Group Director of Diversity and Inclusion and joining the Management Board in 2020. She has responsibility for all diversity and inclusion related matters across the Group, including leading, developing and growing ITV’s Diversity and Inclusion strategy on and off-screen. Prior to joining ITV, Ade spent over 10 years at Channel 4, most recently as Creative Diversity Manager, where she supported and nurtured the careers of diverse creative talent and sought out and commissioned a slate of developments which encouraged diversity, risk-taking and innovation. Ade is currently a Trustee of BAFTA, Chair of BAFTA’s Learning and New Talent Committee, and a Trustee of the National Trust.

What we covered in this episode:

From making Shirley Bassey’s tea to Director of Diversity & Inclusion at ITV
The excitement of seeing a black person on screen in the 80’s
Advice for how to get into TV
Being inspired by the arrival of Channel 4
How Ade created diversity on and off screen at Channel 4
Thanks for the warm up – positioning the Paralympics in 2012
How Channel 4 led the change throughout the entire industry
How the Paralympic advertising beat the Olympics
The impact of the pandemic on Diversity & Inclusion
Talent is equally distributed so cast your net wide
Hiring the best talent vs the people we are most familiar with
You can’t be what you can’t see and the importance of role models on screen
ITV’s role is to tell a story for everyone
Telling someone’s story well rather than everyone’s story badly
How off screen diversity has been transformed
Learning about other people’s culture through drama
The opportunity for more action on social class and disability
Why we should stamp out unpaid work experience
Top advice for creative Diversity change
We are changed when we are seen as we are changed by what we see
Proving the commercial case for Diversity in the Feeling Seen report
What is good for society is also good for business
Nike Toughest Athlete and the power of seeing black pregnant women on TV
The power of the wonderful everyday inspiration from Ikea
Why it will be good when we no longer have to reference a person’s race
The importance of doing your cultural research
Telling fresh stories can be a brilliant ways to stand out
How the Boots ad makes you feel like real life holidays enjoying yourself
Advice to Advertisers to be authentically diverse

Mini Episode - 5 Reasons to "Look Out" - Orlando Wood Oct 19, 2021

Show notes

Here's my mini conversation with Orlando Wood, author of Lemon and Look Out where I ask him about 5 key insights from the new book:

why it’s rude to stare and how the fixed gaze took over art and advertising
whether you can actually build a brand online
the serious case for humour
how emotions capture our attention
the surprising power of the finer details

Listen to my longer conversation with Orlando: https://share.transistor.fm/s/9496c9dd
Buy the book: https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/look-out/

Why it’s time to Look Out - Orlando Wood Oct 12, 2021

Show notes

Orlando Wood is Chief Innovation Officer of System1 Group and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. He is also a member of the IPA’s Effectiveness Leadership Group. Author of Lemon (IPA, 2019), co-author of System1, Unlocking Profitable Growth (2017), his research on advertising effectiveness draws on psychology and a study of the creative arts.

Orlando’s work has influenced thinking and practice in the research, marketing, and advertising, winning him awards from the ARF (Great Minds Distinction Award), the AMA (4 under 40), Jay Chiat (Gold Award for Research Innovation), ISBA (Ad Effectiveness Award), MRS (Best Paper and Research Effectiveness Awards) and ESOMAR (Best Methodology).

Orlando led the IPA’s Creativity and Effectiveness research for Effectiveness Week in 2018, 2019 and 2020. He has repeatedly worked with Peter Field and the IPA’s DataBank to demonstrate the long and broad effects achieved by emotional advertising, including the performance of fluent devices, a term he coined.

Orlando is a frequent conference speaker and has been published in The Journal of Advertising Research, Admap, and Market Leader.

What we covered in this episode:

Why digital disruption means we need to start ‘looking out’
His last book was a Lemon but it did rather well
How Prof Iain McGilchrist inspired Orlando
What history can tell us about what is happening today
How understanding the brain helps us capture & sustain attention
The left brain argument for right brain creativity
How our culture lost its vitality
The separation of writing a book during lockdown
Orlando reads his own introduction to the book
Its rude to stare. How the stare has been used throughout history
How advertising is starting to reflect art from periods of disruption & conflict
Fake news isn’t new. How the printing press created a publishing revolution
How the industrial revolution created a loss of community
The rapid rise of anxiety and the loss of humour
The different modes of attention and why they matter
Why we can’t see the wood for the trees
We watch what interests us and sometimes that’s advertising
How emotion orientates our attention, encodes in memory & aids decision making
The role of digital to support brand building ‘broad beam’ advertising
Why brand building becomes more important for online businesses
How emotion drives more viewing of advertising in digital environments
The trap of using digital style ‘narrow beam’ advertising on TV
What features in advertising holds attention and drives business effects
The swordfish strangler called Wilford. Why uniqueness creates believability.
Yorkshire Tea and creating connections
Poking fun at rigidity and the serious case for humour
What’s too silly to be said can be sung
How colour grading can change our mood and how effective an Ad will be
The pandemic and why we need a right-brained reaction
The story of a dog and cone and the inspiration for this book
Look Out for the book o Amazon and via the IPA’s website

When Brands Stop Advertising - Dr Nicole Hartnett, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Oct 01, 2021

Show notes

Nicole is an advertising and media researcher with a particular interest in how to design effective advertising content.

Her expertise spans advertising measurement, management and decision making, distinctive brand assets, brand performance metrics and consumer behaviour. She has published in international journals including the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and the European Journal of Marketing. Nicole also has extensive experience conducting research projects for the Institute’s sponsors across industries and markets, and regularly presents seminars and workshops on various marketing topics.

What we covered in this episode:

Why Marketers are not good judges of advertising
Marketing departments are not better than a coin toss
Intermediate campaign variables don’t often correlate to sales
Why experience doesn’t make you any better at spotting winners
The importance of distinctive assets
Why characters are a dying art form
Why we all need to be a little more Churchill
The case for not changing the creative
What happens when brands stop advertising
Alcohol, babies, pet food & Pandemics
Why scale matters when you go dark
How your trajectory determines how bad going dark will be
What to do when you manage a portfolio and have to cut spend
The long term consequence of going dark
Why you need a range of distinctive assets to aid memory
The power of blackcurrants as a Ribena distinctive asset
Why the high turnover of brand managers is bad for effectiveness
Why How Brands Grow is the one book every marketer should have
Quiet behind the scenes discipline is what matters when everything changes
The comfort of familiarity when it comes to memory
Building your business around what doesn’t change
Are you measuring what really matters
Organisations suffer from short term memory and short datasets
Learning from success and failures over a long time series
Why the insight department need to start letting go
Winning the Boardroom battle with data

The Long and the Short of It - Peter Field Sep 20, 2021

Show notes

Peter Field has spent 15 years as a strategic planner in advertising and has been a marketing consultant for the last 20 years. His pioneering work on the link between creativity and effectiveness – such as Media in Focus with Les Binet - has earned Peter a global reputation as one of the Godfathers of Effectiveness.

What we covered in this episode:

How he become ‘Godfather of effectiveness’
Getting fired from two agencies
The evidence based approach to marketing
Creating the IPA database
Origin of The Long and Short of It
The curse of short term thinking
Why brands take time to build
The power of emotion to create connections
The window in which you measure effectiveness is vital
Long term is broad reach emotional creative
Why the 60/40 ratio works
Why brand building matters even more for DTC
The conflation of physical and mental availability on line
The myth of digital replacing brand
Convincing the CFO of the role of brand building
Why investors really get it
Why the ESOV model matters and what it tells us
The impact of brand size on ESOV
The challenge facing new entrants and why challenger brand thinking matters
How economies of scale benefit market leaders
The amplification power of creativity
The tidal wave of disposable creativity
How award judges are celebrating short term activation
Even effectiveness awards lack long term results
The dangers of going dark in a recession
Why we should be more P&G than Coke
Why it’s time to celebrate consistency
The power of strong fluent devices
What happens when brands stop advertising
The one thing we should be talking about which we aren’t
The breakdown in the correlation between media spend and share of voice
Why we should be measuring share of attention rather than share of voice
It’s time to start paying for attention

Peter Field

The Long and the Short of It

The Case for Creativity & Cannes Lions - James Hurman Sep 07, 2021

Show notes

Here's the articles before you listen:

Part 1 – The Case for Creativity in Business

Growing up in a world that didn’t recognise the potential of creativity
How Apple ‘Crazy Ones’ Ad inspired James to pursue Advertising
James’ mission to prove the value of Creativity
Why Jon was supposed to have a career as an Actuary
What the research tells us about the role of Creativity on your success
Why we should define effectiveness in hard commercial terms
Establishing a universal definition with the Creative Effectiveness Ladder
Why understanding your commercial contribution will get you promoted
Why the CMO needs to match the certainty and measurability of their Exec colleagues
How to sell a Gorilla playing drums to your business
We overestimate what we can achieve in 1 year and underestimate what we can achieve in 10
The surprising impact on light buyers even on large brands
Very few people are buying right now so you must focus on creating future demand
The seduction of short term performance metrics
How the failure rate of start-ups warn us about the danger of rely on short term metrics only
Why it takes an average of 7 years to have an ‘over-night success’
The importance of using familiarity when launching a new innovation
Why you shouldn’t ditch the old creative if its good

Part 2 – The Controversy over Cannes

How little time CMO’s actually spend on Advertising
Jon shares the story before his Effie and Cannes Lion wins
How Jon created the name for Uncensored CMO on the beach at Cannes
System1 puts Cannes Lion winners to the test
Why James reacted so strongly to my Campaign article
The importance of recognising the power of Creativity in Advertising
How the emotion being created by Cannes winners has changed
The case for picking a side and standing up for your values
Effectiveness awards look back whilst Creative awards look forward
What the Nike winners tell us about Juries decision making
Aldi Kevin the Carrot and the power of consistency
Whether we can judge creative on a first impression only
The importance of authenticity when it comes to purpose
Wisdom of Crowds and how a Nat Rep samples can be a good guide to effectiveness
The power of Excess Creative Share of Voice in addition to standard ESOV
How the opinion of others impacts on our opinion of a brand
The history of Essity’s Bodyform campaign and how agency & client worked together
Peter Field’s Crisis in Creativity and how we have seen a significant shift to short termism
What the role of Creative Awards should be
Why we all need to work towards a longer term view and apply creativity to the health of our business

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