Private Equity and B2B Marketing: Unlocking the Power of Brand

Speaker A: Welcome to B2B needs Don Draper, brought to you by TRU. For too long, B2B has lacked creativity and inspiration, leading to alarming declines in effectiveness and marketing departments being slowly devalued more and more within their organizations. We're here to change that by getting under the skin of what it really means to be a highly effective B2B marketer. We'll be speaking to some of the brightest minds in the industry to discuss, discuss what they're doing to be a bit more, well, Don Draper. Now to our host, Nathan Anibaba.

Speaker B: Welcome back to B2B needs, Don Draper, the show that puts the martini back in the marketing. I'm, um, your host, Nathan Anibaba, and today is a special double feature episode. First up, we're thrilled to have David Turner, a man who knows how to solve problems, build teams and create brands in the B2B tech sector. Former CMO of Iris Group, he's held senior positions at NetSuite, Oracle and Unit4. So whether you're a SaaS startup or a private equity giant, David has the wealth of experience and foundational skills to help you achieve your growth goals. Joining David is Richard Parsons, our very own co founder of Tru, leading creative B2B media agency with clients from startups to blue chip giants like Adobe, Cisco, Oracle, et cetera. Richard's experience spans over 30 years, uh, in B2B marketing, which is a nice way of saying that he's really old. So, David and Richard, welcome to the show.

Speaker C: Hi, Nathan.

Speaker D: Thanks, Nathan.

Speaker B: Um, first question to you, David. What does being a bit more Don Draper mean to you?

Speaker C: Well, apart from, you know, I would love to have been sitting here in a kind of a trilby and smoking a cigarette and looking incredibly cool. Um, I think what we're talking about is a bit more focus on brand building and creative brand building in the B2B market, which I think, uh, is increasingly missing. Actually. I think the focus we see in a lot of B2B today, particularly driven by private equity and the sort of real, uh, emphasis on demand gen or growth marketing. Uh, it's all on the sharp end of lead generation. And there's nowhere near as much thought about the, um, foundational kind of activities of brand building and particularly using creativity, which I know Richard is passionate about.

Speaker B: We're going to come to the conversation about the influence of private equity in B2B because I think they have had a hand in changing the direction of a lot of B2B marketers and just B2B marketing strategy in general, because of their goals and ambitions. But before we do, it feels as though there's been a generational shift in B2B marketing. It feels as though, um, 30 years ago when Richard was younger and had a little bit more hair, we had a broader canvas with which to play, we were more creative, we focused on brand building activity, uh, significantly more. And I think our companies benefited as a result of that. You know there are great examples that I'm sure you can share as well David, about sort of how those brand campaigns have delivered tremendous impact. Talk about the generational shift in B2B marketing. It feels as though we've shifted in the other direction due to marketing automation, the importance of data coming into marketing and our ability to sort of measure everything to the nth degree. Talk about the generational shift that has happened in B2B marketing to make Richard feel a little bit more comfortable with his age.

Speaker C: Yeah, look, I also started out a little bit over 30 years ago and um, I think um, even then proper brand building, creative brand building, big campaigns, big creative ideas in B2B, certainly in the sort of SMB area of B2B, um, was not that common either. Um, but um, you saw it in the very big brands, um, but not in the sort of mid market SMB space. Uh, but I do think people were open to it and certainly in my first company when I was at Coda, um, we persuaded the board to back exactly that. A big creative, you know, um, sort of mould breaking campaign that was much more B2C in style than B2B. Um, and yeah, we ran, I might talk about it later, but yeah we ran it and then we measured it in a very traditional style which was, you know, we measured the impact on brand recall amongst our target audience using, you know, doing market research. I think part of the generational shift has been uh, has been the introduction of technology and digital marketing and this belief that everything can now be measured and almost instantly measured. There was the old adage, wasn't there, which you still hear and I forget, uh, I think it was a famous publisher or businessman who said, I know that 50% of my marketing spend is wasted, I just don't know which half. And then when we got to this point where suddenly we could measure every kind of uh, web click and every lead and every activity, um, in using digital marketing. People thought this is fantastic. I could. Now I know exactly when I spend a pound, I know exactly where that pound is going to go and what it's going to give me. Uh, and I don't have to waste that 50% that notionally people believe they were wasting. Um, and I think there's some, there's some truth in that. Absolutely. You can measure that but, but it tends to push you towards the sort of focus on the bottom end of the market, uh, of the funnel. Um, because that's where you really can measure impact and results. Um, and less thinking about the top of the funnel or even sort of before the top of the funnel where you, you're trying to just educate the market on your, and build your brand way before people are anywhere near, you know, being in market for your product. Um, and I think, uh, I think that's people now when you propose doing creative brand building type campaigns, um, they're um, kind of a bit thrown by a bit. Um, you know, they don't, because they don't understand really how you're going to measure that in that same way. And how are you going to guarantee success? I literally got asked that, you know, not that long ago when I did this, just a year or two ago, um, exactly that. And it was kind of well, how can you guarantee that it's going to work? And what are the measures? And now there are measures you can use using some of those digital techniques. But it's different to, you know, I put ten pounds into my PPC account and I can see exactly what that gives me.

Speaker B: Richard, have B2B marketers just forgotten how to do B2B marketing properly?

Speaker D: I think it's um, I think it's probably unkind. I don't know that it's about forgetting but I think that there is a generation of B2B marketer that has never been involved in brand building. You know, they will in large organizations. You often get siloed, uh, and there is an emphasis on performance marketing. So there are more people in digital or performance marketing, performance marketing who are working in SEO or working on those um, kind of last click campaigns. Uh, there's that private equity influence or the street that's driving that quarterly reporting. It means that there's a lot of short termism. I think to David's point, there's that short termism that's occurring in the market and that means that there's been loads and loads of pressure on short term and performance marketing. That does mean that in the last 20 years when we lost, I've said this before on this podcast, but we lost our big canvas in B2B which was the double page spread, uh, in trade magazines. And as that all shifted to the Internet in the early Days of the Internet we had these little static ad units that were as big as a stamp and no way of creating a brand story within that. Um, and therefore it became a volume play rather than a quality play uh, because you couldn't really do much creatively within that space. Now it's a completely different world. I think that the Internet, we actually are more likely to be in a golden age now. The Internet has completely opened up. There's a plethora of choices. But I do think that there is a generational issue in that. In the last 20 years we've had a whole bunch of marketers. If you think about it, people who started 20 years ago are now in CMO roles. Um, even in that senior role may never have uh, built um, a brand, uh, really only being responsible for lead generation and trawling the market for people with an immediate need. Um, yeah. So I think that there is um, a educational requirement for people to kind of get up to speed with what good looks like. But I don't blame them. I think it is. There's uh, a lot of pressure. One of the big pressures came from the tech companies themselves. The marketing automation platforms with their deep pockets. They all said, let's all m emphasize inbound marketing advertising is dead. You know, things like that were said in the.

Speaker B: It's HubSpot's fault.

Speaker D: Well it's HubSpot, it's marketo, it's eloqua, um, it's all of those um, actual I think uh, David, in our pre interview you mentioned you're a physicist. I'm an electronics engineer by background and I specialize in systems engineering. I can see systems engineering thinking throughout marketing. Um, but the one thing that system engineers are terrible at is understanding human beings. That's not their forte. Um, um, and so once you bring the human into these very m. Methodical uh, systems of nurturing someone of an inch of their life, it sort of assumes that the funnel, the linear funnel, is a perfect model. It actually um, is not true at all. A human being can be in two places on that funnel at the same time, which is crazy. Uh, it uh, blows uh, the whole thing out of the water. Or you might be at the top of the funnel at 9 o' clock in the morning and you might be at the bottom of the funnel by 11 o'. Clock. Nobody's marketing automation platforms are working uh, to such stupid speed. So it's crazy. And um, by the way, by 12 o' clock you'll be back at the beginning again.

Speaker B: Coming to you David, because you spend a lot of time working in PE backed companies. Brand isn't something that PE backed companies typically talk about. They typically talk about demand, performance, bottom of the funnel results. Why don't we talk about brand as much with PE backed companies? If they understood the power of brand to be able to drive results for their, for their organizations, they probably would. Does it take a strong CMO or senior leader to educate them about the power of this stuff? Why aren't PE backed companies, which it almost feels as though they're partly responsible for this shift that we've seen in B2B marketing recently, why aren't they more bullish about brand?

Speaker C: I think um, there's a couple of things here and look, I don't think PE companies are entirely responsible. I think we've already talked about the technology aspect to it. I think PE companies operate on um, this cycle they invest and they're looking for four to five years, um, until the next turn when they're going to either invest again or they're going to sell it on. And that's not to say they're entirely short term because they're not. I've worked with PE companies who absolutely understand that they need to invest, uh, they need to invest in technology or in product or in service or sometimes in brand as well, um, in order to get the uplift they need. But that relative short termism does lead them towards thinking more about performance marketing that focus on if we invest in demand gen, if we invest in sales and we can build sales and build um, ebitda, ah, uh, within a few years then uh, we'll achieve um, the targets they want and they always have very aggressive targets. I think that there is a point about understanding the cycle of a PE company's investment. So in the early years, in the first couple of years of a cycle, that is when the PE company has just invested, that is the time when a CMO needs to be talking to the investors about uh, investing in brand because they are absolutely open to, to investment in all aspects. As I say, not, not just, not just marketing but in uh, product and everything. And you know, they will make longer term plays. But the reality is if you're at three year three or year four, they are not going to start investing, you know, hundreds of thousands in brand building because then that's not going to, or it's unlikely to impact the sales results by, you know, by the end of the fifth year or so. So I think um, it's not impossible. But those cycles do drive increasingly as you Go through the cycle a sort of more short term, um, focus, uh, and therefore, yeah, you don't see it. And then the other thing that I uh, don't see as much in B2B companies is a focus on the value of brand, literally valuing it as an asset on the balance sheet. And I know that's not a, uh, it's not something you see a lot in again, mid market B2B. Yes. You set the very big companies, of course, you know, Facebook and Google I'm sure will value their brand absolutely, uh, as a matter of course. But you don't tend to see that further down the market. And I think that's a conversation to be had between marketing and finance. Actually I did, I did open that conversation with my cfo, ah at a firm recently, uh, and um, it didn't get very far to be honest. And possibly that was because where we were in the cycle again. So it wasn't really, it would have been a big exercise to do that valuation project and then we weren't at a point where we would be able to impact the valuation of the brand within that cycle. But I don't see PE companies focusing on that so much.

Speaker B: When you talk about valuing brand, it feels as though, and Richard, you can talk to this point, it feels as though quite early on in the valuation of a company, everything else is measured, uh, uh, and appropriated. And the last thing to be, uh, valued seems to be brand. Richard, just, just talk about kind of how accountants take brand into account when they are looking to drive valuation for a company. And how much more should we be focusing on that in general when, when it comes to valuing our businesses, I

Speaker D: think to a certain extent it comes down to accounting rules. So in the, when you look at the balance sheet, uh, no one puts their brand value. No one. Even Coca Cola are very unlikely to put a, uh, I may be wrong with Coca Cola, but for most brands they don't really put a value on the brand. It's not on the balance sheet. It's not seen as an asset. The only time that it becomes uh, an asset is during the exit. So that's when you end up with these intangible assets. And a significant part of intangible assets is brand value or goodwill, it sometimes is called. So um, it's in that moment of the exit, that's when uh, there is a communication to these private equity firms to understand that at that exit point they will be negotiating. Uh, they know this very well. I mean they're experts in what in Exits and selling the businesses that they've invested in. Um, but to be fair to the private equity firms, the lion's share of what they're doing is looking at that EBITDA and a multiple. And there's two things you can do. You can get volume by bringing business, uh, A and business B and merging the two together. Uh, so this merger and acquisition piece, uh, just one plus one equals three. Uh, the bigger you are, add another 10 million to the revenue, more likely to increase the multiple. So just by being bigger, ah, and just by adding two businesses that you've acquired and bring them together means that um, you can create uh, increases in the multiple. Um, but also uh, you then obviously can end up with these massive consolidation benefits. And that means that you can increase your ebitda. Ah, so just your EBITDA can go. That's what they're focused on because that is the easiest way for them to make money. But they are in the market for this kind of three, four, maybe five year cycle. The thing I would agree with David, they should be heavily in that cycle, doesn't mean that the business needs to be a startup. But in that investment cycle they should be investing in that 3, 4, 5 year growth. Um, and that means they should be putting an emphasis on brand in the first instance. As they get closer to their exit, they probably, I would agree they probably should be divesting in the amount that they spend on brand. But any new acquirer will look in a very shallow way actually due diligence very rarely looks at the difference between brand advertising and um, performance advertising. It's just seen as advertising. What I would say is if I was a private equity firm, um, and involved in the operations of the businesses that I invest in, I would say let's put more emphasis on brand. A higher percentage, let's say 70, 75% of the budget towards brand in year one. But when I'm near my exit year four, let's say maybe I'll only spend 10% but overall my performance marketing will shoot up as I go throughout that cycle. So overall my investment looks flat. So anybody buying into this organization will say this actually is a stable business, they're investing the same amount in marketing over the long term. But actually behind the scenes you've been a bit tricky. You have actually invested, uh, for the short term, not good for employees, not good for customers, not good for the brand and the health of the business. So I'm not doing it from that point of view, purely from the point of view of the private equity firm and the investor and maximizing their return. That would be. If I was an investor in private equity, that's what I would be doing.

Speaker B: David, it almost feels as though your career has mirrored the changes in B2B marketing over the last 20, 25 years or so. Because it feels as though you started off and uh, it feels as though you started off very much as a brand marketer. Um, you talked at the top of the show about the Coda campaign and the, the tremendous effects that it had on the business. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that campaign was and what the results were, but it feels as though since that point you've then gone on to unit four, netsuite and Oracle, uh, Iris, who have been in many ways very uh, um, bottom of the funnel, performance focused. I may be wrong in that characterization but can you see how your own career has sort of mirrored the changes in B2B marketing over the last handful of years?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's true. I think like I said my first job was a company called Coda, which was a mid market um accounting software player based in the uk. Um, very successful, um, probably had the best accounting system in the world um, in the early mid-90s. Um and it knocked the spots off Oracle Financials or any of those at the time, um, but was not particularly well known um, other than in its very kind of niche customer base really. And we um, decided, we decided that we really needed to build the brand and at the time, uh, advertising accounting software, uh, accounting software systems. Um, you would take out a page or half page in accountancy age. There will be lots of text that explained all the functionality that your product had. There would be a picture of um, lots of international coins and notes because you wanted to say it was multi currency because that was a big thing. Um, there'd be a picture of a computer because obviously it was software and you wanted people to understand it was software. And there was this kind of formula literally we looked at all competitors ads and the ads that Coda had been running, um, and they were very just trade, just uninspiring. And uh, what I then showed to the board was look the people that you're. And it goes to Richard's point about where people being in different parts of the funnel and that people are also have different roles and you know, in their personal life the CFO is. The finance directors that we were trying to sell to are reading the Sunday Times and seeing these beautiful double page spreads from British Airways and BMW and they're exposed to all this amazing advertising and suddenly you expect them, when they become in their day job, a finance director to suddenly respond to these dreadful ads with 500 words of copy and um, these dull pictures. So we took a very consumer approach. We used um, a famous fashion photographer, uh, he was doing the BA ads at the time. And um, uh, yeah, long story short, we did five ads and they were five full page pictures of indigenous people from around the world. Uh, Papua New Guinea, Mudman, an Aborigine, um, a, uh, Mohican Indian, uh, um, a Tuareg, um, and a uh, uh, there was another one which I forget. But anyway, the beautiful, beautiful, absolutely stunning images that you could frame and put on your wall and then it just had I think seven words. It just said an accounting system for the world and then had a phone number. It didn't, didn't have a web address at the time because we didn't have, it was before we had websites and you know, we showed that to the board and they were kind of apoplectic because it didn't say what the, it didn't say what your software did. Sorry. Each of these people, I should. Each of them was holding a disk, a floppy disk which tells you when it was, which just had the Coda logo on. And that was the only thing. It was very out of place of course because they were you know, in their sort of indigenous, in their kind of natural um, environment and costumes and whatever and uh, with this computer disk. Um, so it was a striking image. Um, but it didn't say anything else. Didn't tell you that was multi currency. It didn't tell you all the functionality it did or how many ledges it had or the fact that it was, you know, better than the competition. It just. But it was, yeah, obviously it was very bold, it was a real statement and we persuaded the board to go for it and then we persuaded them to also to cough up the money to run full page ads in not just things like the Accountancy Age and uh, Finance, um, Director Magazine, but actually in the FT and uh, some other publications. And um, it had a massive impact. Um, we measured the impact. So over a period of 18 months we grew brand awareness amongst finance directors of 50 million turnover companies and above from somewhere around 23% to about 77% which is pretty stunning. And uh, uh, but also they had unintended consequences like the FT would ring us up fairly regularly and say look, we've got an empty page, we've got nothing to run, can we run your ad for free? And that was like £45,000 worth of advertising for free. Just because these ads were so stunning and they just unlike anything that was being run in the FT or anywhere. Um, so yeah, it was that period there was the opportunity to do that. It's not that everyone was doing it clearly because we did kind of break the mold um, doing that. And it was the team effort. I had a CMO at the time who'd uh, come from consumer marketing who was very much driving that and a fantastic advertising agency as well by the way, uh, who really kind of grasped the, the challenge there. And uh, yeah, you know, I think that was a great example. And we did see, you know, we saw obviously that awareness did translate into more activity and more invitations to tender being sent in and more leads and more sales over the, over the years. You know, we didn't necessarily have the tools in place to measure it in, in the way we can today, I think. Yeah. Whereas if I go forward, uh, actually in the sort of mid 2000s was when I saw I was starting to work with SAS companies, I started uh, a SaaS accounting software company actually still within the Coda organization.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker C: And we worked with Salesforce and working with Salesforce was when I first saw that high volume inbound demand generation model. You went to Dublin and they had these roomfuls of kids on phones, uh, you know, just um, phoning out and then, and then there's this um, but you know, sort of very traditionally a very consumer style kind of outbound marketing. But then also this approach uh, to digital marketing which was, you know, about, about generating high volume inbound. And then later at Netsuite we built that, we built that sort of machine right as we expanded the organization right across emea. So the focus was much more on that uh, on the sharp end if you like, than it was on the brand end. And I think there's still room to do it at Netsuite, sorry, uh, at Iris, just in the last few years we did a big out of home campaign which was something they'd never done before. Uh, we included radio, um, sports advertising around matches that were on sky tv, uh, bus tube advertising, all of that. So if you've got the right opportunity and the right uh, product I think is absolutely still the chance to do it. And you can now measure certainly short term the impact that has on web visits, for example, which you could see spike literally if there was a sports match. You can actually see the visits to the website go up during that match. Um, or during that radio when the radio campaign was run during the day. You can absolutely measure today impact that it has or leading indicators at least that it's having an impact. But I think it's beholden on. We've blamed technology and we've blamed private equity. Um, it is beholden on us as marketing people to stand up and show the market, show, uh, uh, our investors and our colleagues, um, demonstrate why they should invest in brand and what impact that will have. We can't just say we want to do it because it's great and it makes us feel good and we all love doing that creative stuff. We've got to show, demonstrate and prove that it will have an impact and it will ultimately drive sales. Because you know, let's face it, at the end of the day we are there as marketing people to drive revenue and drive the success of a company. Uh, you know, we can't deny that. Uh, we just have to be able to demonstrate how investing in creative brand building is going to make uh, that job easier actually, you know, and increase the impact of your digital marketing and your PPC and your, your other activities.

Speaker D: And there's so much, there's so much empirical evidence. I mean so when you were at Coda and you had to persuade the board or you know, your senior execs to, to uh, invest in, in those FT ads, um, it was a bit of a pun. It probably was a bit of like, you know, we've got a good feeling about this. Yeah, right. Um, but now there's so much empirical evidence and I mean what's interesting is, you know, back in the day, uh, the FT gave you some free space because they like the ads and the ads probably stood out in the FT. Um, you know, if you run something on YouTube today and it has high uh, viewability so people can, you know, to completion people are watching your ads on YouTube. Then actually YouTube give you a discount. So you're. So the amount that you pay your CPM will drop dramatically because your ads are performing and that happens over and over again. So you end up with, if your ads are good ads and performing and people like them and the relevance is there and they're clicks and all those things, then actually the platforms nearly always reward you by giving you a discount. That is free space. Um, so I think that, and those things are highly measurable. Um, I think the other thing is that this move from high attention media which we have t would have been uh, to this kind of short attention media, uh, like PPC would be the extreme version of that. But um, there's Loads of empirical evidence that says that high attention media outperforms that short term, uh, sales activated type type media. Um, and not just in the long term, but in the short term too. So there's an awful lot of evidence out there and for Some reason marketers, B2B marketers especially are ignoring a lot of um, this evidence. So um, I mean uh, just Google high attention media. There's a load of uh, a load of results coming out of uh, the equivalent of the IPA in Australia. Um, it's kind of the Advertising association of agencies down there. Um, you know, go and have a look at some of their research, go and have a look at the B2B Institute, go and have a look at the IPA in the UK. There's an awful lot of research. And walk. Of course if you have a subscription to Walk, there's an awful lot of research that says what good looks like. And for some reason B2B marketers are reluctant to kind of grab hold of some of this evidence.

Speaker B: What's a good example of high attention media in the modern age? Are we talking about tv?

Speaker D: Um, yes. I think as everything moves to being bought programmatically, uh, the most um, obvious high attention one is TV. Actually I always think that just above TV is cinema. the moment though, uh, you can't buy cinema advertising programmatically as far as I know. Um, but you can buy TV uh programmatically so you can buy that little 30 second slot that is only going to be sightseeing by the audience that you define and not by the general population or by geography as it historically was done. So Sky, Sky Adsmart in the UK is a great platform for that. Um, so TV is definitely high attention media. But even on the web, video as a format rather than a um, channel or a platform, video is high attention as well. And these are really really big canvases. Much better than the double page spread ever was that allows us to tell that story. The other thing is uh, digital out of home. So we used to buy out of home used to be the big canvas. It's the equivalent of that space used to be the preserve. Back in the day of code it would have been the preserve of only those massive brands. M and now you can buy digital out of home very very economically. You know it's uh, uh, buy those bus shelters, buy those uh, train, uh, station digital, uh, billboards, you know they're not as expensive as you think and

Speaker C: you can be incredibly targeted with them as well. So we were buying tube station ads and positions around London and Manchester, where we knew they were going to hit the audience we wanted. So around, you know, obviously sort of City of London. And key, Key kind of literally by tube station. By tube station you can, you can define where you want them to hit. I'm still trying to work out how you do Programmatic cinema advertising. That would be, that would be interesting.

Speaker D: It would be again. Yeah, it would be based on audiences and it's obviously quite broad. It's not going to be, uh, you know, it might be the last bastion or I think the last passion of Programmatic will be print. Uh, that's, uh, but, but uh, yeah, uh, you're right. It's uh, obviously very general audiences, but there's a difference between the Oppenheimer movie and Barbie and the audiences that went to see those. Therefore, that's traditional media buying. But maybe if you add the geography where the location of that screening is, you can start to add maybe data layers to some of that. I mean, I don't know, I'm kind of imagining the future. Uh, but for example, radio ads are programmatic podcasts, uh, advertising is programmatic these days. So, um, an awful lot, uh, an awful lot is programmatic. In terms of the digital, uh, out of home, one of our clients, uh, that's involved in quite big um, uh, bidding regarding, um, digital out of home, one of our clients actually, um, because you've got the hyper targeting that you talked about, we actually target around the, the head office, the headquarters of that business to support bids. So when they're. So all of those people that are coming from Bank Station to their office in, I don't know, somewhere in the city, um, we are following that commute route. Um, and in addition a lot of these organizations um, carry advertising inside their building. Uh, so we actually buy the digital inside the HQ of the organization that our client is targeting.

Speaker B: Really clever. Richard and David, final question to both of you. I'm going to ask you to look into your crystal ball and ask, do you think that the future of B2B marketing and B2B marketers will change? Are we going to see a shift back to the emphasis on brand, or do you see this trend towards increasing performance and digitization and data in performance and marketing continuing? What do you think the future looks like for B2B marketers?

Speaker C: I think, I don't think it's an either or, but I think there will be, I think there kind of is a move back towards the uh, brand building, that creative brand activity. And I think the reason is that if you go down the Digital performance marketing route to its nth degree, which is you focus everything in on that very uh, targeted digital advertising. What you will find is a bit like Richard was mentioning earlier, there becomes a sort of law of diminishing returns where you can't get beyond the numbers you got to and you keep increasing budget on your PPC or whatever and it doesn't generate anymore. And the only way you can grow the market or actually reduce the cost per click or per lead is often is actually by investing in brand. Because if you're just focusing on that sharp end, uh, without any kind of brand awareness, and I've literally, uh, I've proved this, uh, sort of to my cost really is if you're doing the performance marketing bit without any sort of brand awareness building or brand activity, you are, it's very expensive and you end up putting more and more money into it because if nobody actually knows you, they're not searching for you, you're trying to kind of raise your flag in a sea of other competitors who all look exactly the same. And let's face it, differentiating yourself in search marketing or whatever is really difficult, um, unless somebody recognizes your brand and goes, oh yeah, okay, I know this guy. Uh, so it becomes uh, critical that you invest in brand at the same time as you invest in your performance marketing activities. I think it goes hand in hand and I think people have started to realize that in order to be more effective at the sharp end, you've got to make that investment upfront in the brand building.

Speaker B: What do you think Richard? Are we going to see a shift back towards brand? Are we already seeing that?

Speaker D: We're already seeing it. There's lots of empirical evidence, as I said, but I think it's going to get um, even the momentum is even going to kind of push even further. Uh, if you take something like, just take an activity like PPC like um, you know, Google AdWords, and you're finding those phrases and those words that people are searching on, you hit a plateau very quickly. So you get some, you get that growth but then you hit a plateau very quickly. It kind of does, it kind of just uh, you can't get any more growth out of that word. So the way that PPC gets growth is it starts to look for a long tail of search phrases. And sometimes you might be only one click on that search phrase, but you get that click because you've got your very, very long tail. AI is going to be much better at uh, looking at those patterns and creating that automatically. So we will end up hitting those plateaus very, very quickly, because AI and everyone will have access to AI, everyone will have access to the same data. Everyone will ultimately all be following the same, chasing the same audiences and hitting those plateau plateaus faster. Um, so that means that the only place left is in the ingenuity. The bit that AI is going to struggle. The bit that AI, Eventually, I'm sure it will catch up and it will get there, but hopefully, uh, not in my lifetime. I think that the bit that's left is that ingenuity bit, the storytelling bit, the pit that. The emotive bit that. That is all about humanity and not about data. Um, that will be the bit where we end up getting additional growth. Uh, those brands that don't communicate to me and feel like they're stalking me, but those brands that talk to me and make me feel like I'm a human being, uh, entertain me, reward me, make me feel something, that's where we're going to go. And that AI thing is coming really, really fast. So, uh, watch your space. I suspect, you know, within a couple of years, we'll already be there.

Speaker B: Well said. Uh, well, it just leads me to say thank you to both David and Richard for a fascinating and insightful chat. Thank you to you both.

Speaker C: You're welcome. Thanks. I enjoyed it.

Speaker D: Thanks, Nathan. Yeah, appreciate it.

Speaker B: As usual, all it leads me to say is thank you very much for listening to this episode of B2BME's Don Draper. Uh, I'm Nathan Anibarber. See you next time.

Speaker A: Find out more@TrueAgency.com podcast.