Pull Up a Chair: A Conversation with Corey Mitchell

Speaker A: Analytics Friend, a podcast.

Speaker B: Today's episode is sponsored by Idera Talk to your marketing data for instant insights at Idera Chat.

Speaker A: So welcome all to our next episode, our episode that you are recording now. Uh, welcome all to Podcast Analytics Friday. Today we have, uh, another awesome guest from the States, from the world. His name is Corey Corney. Thanks for you to accept my invitation. It's a pleasure to me to have you here. You're uh, a senior, uh, in marketing and in tech and in creativity and doing all these relations between tech and creativity and brands will be, will be an awesome show today. So, so take all the minutes here in our episodes to listen to Corey. Corey, thank you so much. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Speaker C: George, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Um, I am, um, I, uh, maybe 30 years in advertising and marketing and I started in Australia and, and I was spending five, six years in retail and brand, uh, moved into Asia, worked through integrated marketing and moved across to the US and worked into local and global, um, brand management and advertising from Chiat Day and tbwa. I um, worked through most of the holding companies and ended uh, up running agencies in New York. Um, I ran Shite Day New York, I ran MRM New York, I ran Arnold New York. Um, and then I moved into consulting and helped large advertisers like uh, J and J and um, Charles Schwab manage their agency portfolios. You know, 20, 30, 40 agencies. Um, and then I moved into marketing and I've done some work with MIT in marketing. Um, and I've had an idea that I wanted to get off the ground, which is what we're going to talk about today, which is very much close to my heart. Ah, that is uh, about tying, I um, guess, uh, creativity, brand creativity, which is different to creative or copy. So brand creativity, um, to financial outcomes and economic results.

Speaker A: That is awesome. So, um, uh, Corey, thank you very much again. And um, the question that I have to you what you are, um, today you post a uh, thing about can and about um, creativity, brand creativity. And we are moving all in this uh, sand for how much years. Please tell us about to our audience what you mean by that and um, what's your opinion on that as well?

Speaker C: Okay, well, I think it's interesting. Kahn finished last week and uh, 20, 30 years ago. Um, and from the inception comes always about branded creativity and a celebration of the world's best creativity in advertising. And now it's evolved tremendously, as it should and it's likely to do so like the industry to very much an ad tech and a Martech conference. Um, and I guess what I was observing coming out of the back of the festival was the fact that brand creativity is incapable of maintaining its dominance or its relevance, uh, on a, on a, on a business value stage. Um, the way that Kahn's had to evolve too, um, without having metrics that, that are more solid or more granite like, or more, um, uh, I guess firm to build upon. I think it's an interesting observation that the uh, technology industry, through advertising and marketing that's been built in the last 15 years, 15, um, 20 years has been built on very solid metrics. Um, and while those metrics have got critiques and I think issues with them and they're not necessarily as, by, as unbiased as they could be, um, they're very handy and very relevant for defending budgets and investments and you can do very strong ROI modeling. Brand creativity has not had metrics of that nature.

Speaker A: Okay, so if you are a brand, a uh, big brand, what, what's uh, your take, uh, on that? Uh, because uh, you are touching the point that there's a lot of performance agencies out there, um, provoking with uh, roas, with ROI and so on performance metrics. But what I noticed, I'm not so senior as you. Uh, I think what I see is that uh, you can have a lot of things that you can measure, but there are things that, that are unmeasured. So what's your take about the, this part of, the unmeasurable part of marketing and brands and so on?

Speaker C: I think the unmeasurable part needs to become measurable and it can become measurable. And I think part of the issues here that are arising over the last two or three years as there have been more analysts and more uh, written about this, is the, I guess the, the differences between measurement and analytics and brand growth and business growth. And just because you're able to measure doesn't mean you're actually measuring the most relevant metrics. And there's been enough written about that and I think enough stated about that to suggest that the lack of brand growth and statistically speaking, I noticed at least half, maybe 2/3 of the top brands in the U.S. for example, have only grown by something between 0.7% and even under GDP in the last, uh, since 2009. And I think with such statistics that are floating around and unquestioned, you've got to ask yourself whether the extraordinary investment behind media and ad tech and Martech has resulted in brand growth. And the answer seems to be A resoundingly no. Um, or not enough. Now it's interesting correlation to that is that brand creativity as a cost representation and Michael Farm has documented this very well, the price paid for it has dropped by 75% 7 5% in the same period. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that brand creativity is not valuable or not worth it. What it means to your point is it's not measured and not measured financially. And I think if you had measured or developed a method to measure it financially, I think that statistic might not be what it is. It might be very different.

Speaker A: Okay, so um, in measurable will be different. Can what kind of new metrics that or your point of view? Uh, to deal with that

Speaker C: I've had to develop something that didn't exist. And I think it's interesting. I think the reason the industry moves the way it does is it's incentivized by certain things. So holding companies are incentivized for a period of time to sell time and materials because that was the contract that was the basis. The unit of account was time and materials or labor. Um, and that made sense to manage a public company and to be able to manage quarterly requirements, um, with some consistency. Um, but it doesn't necessarily represent what's occurring in market. So those incentives get in the way of what might actually be appropriate. Um, so I think those incentives keep the market a bit restricted or a bit tied back or a bit handicapped. And I think brand creativity has not had a free market unit of account, um, since media has and media does. Media and performance marketing does have an in market performance unit of account and the prices for those outcomes are set by the market. Brand creativity has not had a metric or a methodology to do that. So I've developed a methodology to do it which is a little bit more progressive. So if you've got time and then you've got outputs and that's where the industry is currently focused, it's trying to move from time to outputs. What I'm suggesting is outcomes are uh, the place we need to be. Because what a business wants is outcomes from a financial point of view and business results. What I'm suggesting is there is a world of brand, uh, experience and communication outcomes that exists which are all based on influence, which are in paid and owned and earned media and those can be priced similarly to media. And if you do that you start to create a linkage between brand creativity and communication outcomes or business outcomes.

Speaker A: Corey, thank you for that point. Um, if someone asks like uh, okay, so uh, we have Incremental incrementality that is, uh, measuring uh, what is not. What is not, uh, kind of measured, uh, by. Without my ads, my media spans my brand creativity. So it's my brand recall that is selling with no media, with no ads, only brand recall. What are your take on these? Because, um, this focus on, on outcomes, it's difficult to measure as well because there's some uh, restriction. What, what is? Um, everything. It's, it's media recall or brand recall. If someone see a, uh, see a uh, thing about Coca Cola or something or other brands, um, they can recall. This is called co. I like it. And uh, there's no ad on that. There's only the, the, the brand that is out there selling like the others. So for brands that are already uh, well established in the markets, uh, how you can push them to, to make these outcomes, um, based creativity, brand creativity on outcomes and not to tell them. Okay. Incremental utility gives you some part of, of the equation, but it's not completely part of the equation. So I get here like three questions. Sorry for that. Correct.

Speaker C: Now I think the, what you're raising is the question around what are the right metrics to measure and how can you financialize them? Because there is a lot of proxy metrics and a lot of uh, I guess indicator metrics. Um, so if you think about what is the current bank of metrics used to measure brand creativity, you're right. There's brand tracking and brand recall and there's pretest to suggest that what the ad might perform, how it might perform in market, um, beyond that, for measuring branded creativity, there's not too much. It's usually a representation of those two. I think you've got an extraordinary bank of metrics currently in the performance marketing world. Anything from MMM to mta, uh, to incrementality, as you suggest. Um, but what we haven't done with brand creativity, especially in those areas of brand recall, is provide any sort of financialization or monetization to those metrics. So it's very difficult for a board or an exec level to be able to understand the quantification of the result. Um, and there's been a lot of research from large corporations, large studies and large, uh, renowned groups, anything from Interbrand to McKinsey, uh, et cetera, who have proven that branded creativity does result in business results. But there's still no direct linkage. So I think part of the challenge is to provide direct linkage between such metrics that exist, but also realize the other metrics that are not being measured. The ones that are sort of very relevant, but they're not being measured. The areas in the impressions and the engagements in the paid, owned and earned space. Um, these are metrics that are very important to define influence that lead to the recall and the outcomes, the business outcomes.

Speaker A: Okay, so you are getting there. We are getting there in the conversation. So it's interesting points. So um, what you are saying to make fit on my head, it's um, okay, we have so many metrics for typical campaigns that are uh, performance for consideration, awareness and linking to creativity, which is the better creatives that can be better uh, performing for the business outcome. I think it's more or less. Am I framing right or uh, you can have uh, some take here.

Speaker C: Well, I think it's, it's interesting. I think currently the platforms and the technology that's uh, available has suggested that conversion are the most important metrics. But if they're only converting the, I guess, customers who are already in the pipe, you're not growing anything. You're not bringing in any incremental lift in the growth overall. So I think the missing piece to what's being measured and represented to the financial or the exact level of a corporation is this other piece which is a balance. It's not trying to suggest optimization or performance at the expense of influence and brand. The two together are symbiotic and one feeds the other. And what I'm suggesting here is that the way that you can ensure branded creativity is represented with fairness without bias is by providing real financial metrics which you've got, you've got access to the right outcomes in communication outcomes whether it's brand tracking or brand recall. You just need to financialize them so they can relate to the media and the performance metrics. They need a, uh, need a language they can both speak.

Speaker A: Okay, what you can do, uh, or what the brand can do to give the first steps, uh, to start measuring, uh, to start measuring brand creativity and the, the outcomes. What are your, your take on that?

Speaker C: My m. The first steps are to audit the creativity strength, the financial creativity strength of your campaigns or your programs. And you can do that by using the data that the corporations, the brands already have. So they have a great deal of data that represents the branded creativity outcomes in the paid, owned and earned channels representing impressions and engagements. And I'm working with teams that guide that process. They make an audit. We actually run the actual methodology which converts the pricing into the, with the outcomes and provides you with a total um, incremental lift that the brand creativity represented for the cost of the program. Um, and that means that you can actually understand and identify and isolate the creative multiplier. So by using these metrics, these outcomes, you can isolate the creative multiplier against the cost of the production and the media going into the program and you will understand to what degree your actual creativity, your branded creativity lifted that investment in the media landscape.

Speaker A: Okay, uh, a question that uh, I'm sure everybody is going to do. It's what uh, what is this what, what you can do with AI for, for branding, for using brand creativity and business outcomes altogether to get better uh, better financial results. And um, what, what are your take here in the AI? So because people are talking, everything has to as a piece of AI. So um, on. This is more an accelerator, right?

Speaker C: It's an accelerator and it's got a multi pronged situation as to what is going to occur here. Because what the first situation is is it's going to more of what it's been already doing, which is increase volume at a lower cost. So you're going to have a lot more content coming to market and you're going to need to understand what's working and what's not working. What I'm talking about is a methodology that can isolate what is and what isn't working. That's one point. But I think for me as I, as I, as I keep building what I'm doing, I'm also using AI to understand the pricing structures currently being used and what are uh, fair representational pricing of the communication outcomes. So AI can help me with that as well, which it is doing.

Speaker A: Yeah. So because pricing has a lot of, in the marketing mix. Yeah. So okay, so um, uh what, um, so the brand, the brand recall, the incremental lift. Okay. So that can be for the top of funnel on consideration. Um, funnel, if there is a funnel. Because sometimes you don't have a funnel. Art complex journey away. Sometimes they know more than sometimes that the brand knows. So um, but for the brands, for the manager, uh, uh, you are giving steps for, for doing, for doing this and I think it's, I think brand creativity should have more credit. As you as you told, as you are talking and I think it's, it's correct to be not biased and be more correct because uh, creativity in the end represents, must represent something for the company value for the, for the business value.

Speaker C: Uh, right, absolutely. I think one of the things that AI will make very clear is that if you continue to increase the amount of content coming to market and you can do it at a lower cost. Then what's the point of brand creativity or copy or creative now the point has to be to provide a greater return on the cost. So if the cost is represented by the media cost and the production cost to get it to market, creativity represents your ability to increase the return on that spend and you can do it via multiples. We've done cases so far where we've shown for a very good piece of creativity you can have a 3.95 return on that spend if you can isolate it. Now that's, that's the first time you've been able to isolate the creative multiplier to that extent using the communication outcomes. That's going to be tremendously important and powerful as AI continues to I guess reduce the cost of getting to market production and materials and creativity creative. But the lift, I think the, the growth. If we take the cost out, at some point we have to create the growth. And I think focusing on how to create the growth is what this method allows. You know, especially from the point of view of branded creativity as it relates to influence and then, then down the track optimization to convert that.

Speaker A: So um, what, what do you think are the next M steps that we can forward? Okay. For big brands it's. I think it's more easier. Easier on the financial aspects to put brand creativity uh, with space and need it for what the take for small brands. What small brands can. Can or small organizations because they have more flexity, flexibility, uh, access to technology as well. What they, what they can do. Please give an example. What can do like one or two steps they can start doing to give more because they have to on the world that is uh, is a massive uh in terms of brands and attention and so on. You have to be creative to get your share of attention. Right. So what's the take for, for small organizations? For small brands that are going for the first time,

Speaker C: I would suggest the takers to not necessarily accept um, the marketing programs that are being provided off the shelves of the platforms as the way to move ahead. I think they need to understand and this method can help do that. Which communication outcomes lift their business? Which ones are the most important? Which ones are the most powerful? Is it engagement? Is it engagement in a particular channel? How much are those outcomes worth? I think this method by focusing on that for your business rather than which channel can actually be used for your business, which is the easiest, most efficient and effective what lifts your business? The small brands have the flexibility to be able to do that. Uh, and Understand which communication outcomes might lift their business. And if that's the case, they can incent the agencies and the creators to focus on those outcomes. That's where the ball game changes. When you can incentivize and focus the creators and the agents that you're working with, the agencies on, um, producing the creativity that actually moves my business, those communication outcomes that moves my business. So that's the most important question to understand which communication outcomes move my business. And then how can I price those and incentivize those for the people I'm working with, the brand, teams and the agencies.

Speaker A: So Corey, let me see if it's, uh, if I'm framing all things correctly. Um, if you track, um, your creatives, um, the best, you track your creatives the best, you can narrow your outcomes. Right? It's like that.

Speaker C: Well, it is. And every brand has a different set of outcomes that they want to focus on. So they have variables in there. And you can test and learn using this method to understand which ones create the greatest lift, um, which is which one is the greatest influence. And that's what I think is critical to be able to understand that and know that especially over a longer period of time and short periods of time, each one has a different valuation. But if you're going to incentivize and organize your teams to create those outcomes, you need to be able to identify them and price them and then you can reward the team specifically or understand the value you're creating, the financial value you're creating.

Speaker A: So the creative side for each, for each experiment that you can do to test and learn. Like you are saying that to give the value to, uh, the right creative or the right team that uh, is going further on creativity, to give more attention, to give um, more brand recall, to give more sales and so on. So, um, starting. So, okay, so we have two things here that are, uh, most welcome to our audience. I think, um, for our audience, one of them is to, okay, leverage creativity in a different way to track, to track outcomes and not to track only. Okay, My drawing is better than use it. I'm more creative than you. No, take real value for your creativity to your brand to get the right outcomes, um, to get the budget from his cfo. Right?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's the thing. You're able to show a CFO the outcomes you're going to get from media plan and from a performance marketing program, but you're not able to actually show what you're going to get from branded creativity or brand creativity. This method allows you to actually quantify it so I can say that this, I need to invest in brand creativity so that I can maximize the return of my spend on performance and media. This gives you language, ah, a financial language to make that case.

Speaker A: Okay, so um, is there something question that I did not make that you'd like to, to take on? Because I think I'm missing some pieces of uh, uh, so please take

Speaker C: so your question again.

Speaker A: I think I'm missing some parts of the uh, of the, of your take of brand creativity or I would like you to. Is there any question that I did not question you about what is the future of what you are expecting in the near future for brand creativity?

Speaker C: I think the future for brand creativity resides in whether we can financialize it and monetize it. I think for it to survive and thrive in this world of accountability, it needs to have a financial language representing itself. A unit of account based on in market performance. Media has it, performance marketing has it, brand creativity doesn't have it. So if you can use this method to establish your, your financial meaning your financial credibility with your CFO and your exec level, then you can also have a better conversation as to how to harness your media and your product production spending. Because together they're much more powerful than they are separately and today they're too separate. And the metrics being used to judge each one of them should not be separated. They should be unified. And this provides a ah, language to unify that around a creative multiplier. Then the future of brand creativity can surge again with financial meaning. At the moment it needs financial meaning to be able to resurge, to recover.

Speaker A: Okay, Corey, thank you so much for your take and awesome episode that so far that we get. Uh, what is your um, your book recommendation that you can ask. Uh, but first I need you a question for you. There is something that people uh, should you, you get, you get the way that okay, people should do this, this and this. But um, sometimes uh, what we see in other, in other fields that. Okay, so what is the step one to start um, tomorrow with brand creativity? What is the, the first thing that a uh, brand can, can do to start on the journey to brand creativity? Correct.

Speaker C: They audit their communication outcomes and they establish benchmarks for what their current level of brand creativity financial strength is. They need to understand their financial strength whether their brand creativity currently is returning positive or negative. And most likely 3/4 of the audience, if not higher, will have a negative uh, outcome there a negative multiplier. It'll, it needs to be Positive for you to be returning anything from your spend. That's the first step. Audit and benchmark. And you can do that using the methodology I've developed. Without that, it's very difficult to know what to do.

Speaker A: Okay, so thank you very much for your time. Corey, let's have your book recommendation or movie or something else that you'd like to recommend to our audience.

Speaker C: I'll give you two. I'll give you. The book is, is called Perfume. Um, it's one of the most extraordinary tales of a serial killer. Um, wow. And I think, and I think it's an amazing story, extraordinarily told. It's very thin, it's not a very thick one, but it's a wonderful thing. It was made into a movie. Um, but the movie I'd recommend as well, which is very different to the world we've been talking about. Um, but I would recommend AMADEUS, you know, nine times out of. Out of 10, every day of the week. I like amadeus is wonderful. 10, 10 times out of 10 I would recommend it. Amadeus. Magnificent.

Speaker A: So, um, where people can find you

Speaker C: on the, on the social media, uh, creatives, creative CPM. Uh, this whole methodology is built around creative CPM. So creativecpm.com is where they can find me. And I'm on LinkedIn with articles and insights about what I'm talking about.

Speaker A: You are planning to launch, to launch a book of your methodology for sure, right?

Speaker C: Most likely. I think the most. The roads will most likely live in, you know, in that area. I think most people like to see a book come out of a methodology like this. So. Yes, I think so.

Speaker A: I think so as well. Uh, okay. So, um, Corey, thank you so much for your time and uh, to give you some, uh, different perspective on brand creativity because many, um, people are in the agency mode, performance only. And we know that conversion, it's not the only factor that people buy. They need to know the brand to have consideration, trust. And then they buy it. Without that, uh, they don't have it. But okay, so it's, it's a great take for that and thank you so much to, to be, uh, on the show. And um, we'll have a specific episode with, with where you can find Corey the, the, the website. And we are expecting a book. There's a challenge for Corning now to launch a book soon. I, uh, hope to have this, uh, awesome methodology to be more broader. Ah. Um, and out there in the market. Thank you so much.

Speaker C: Thanks, George.

Speaker B: Today's episode is sponsored by Idera. Talk to your marketing data for instant insights at idira Chat.

Speaker A: Analytics Friday podcast.