Why the Best Agencies Won't Be Replaced by AI...They'll Be Rebuilt Around It with Simon Billington, Part 2

Speaker A: Welcome back to Part two with Simon Billington. On this episode, we're going to talk about growth, advisors, EQ and IQ in an agency, and also the future shape of agencies. So without further ado, over to Simon. My name's Mike Lander and you're listening to Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast where we bring you actionable insights about sales, RFPs, negotiations and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders, brand leaders and procurement leaders. Please subscribe to get updates when new episodes are released. So, for the audience, basically, who are you? What do you do?

Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. My name is Simon Billington. I'm the executive Creative director, uh, here at Team Lewis. I've been a creative for 25, 30 years. Started out in print and now find myself working heavily with AI and the AI program for Team Lewis.

Speaker A: When I was at kpmg, which was a brilliant organization to learn from, what I observed was partners were partners for a particular reason. There weren't many of them. They were very good at engaging in very broad conversations with a client and they knew exactly when to bring in a particular expert around a topic. For example, niche tax expertise in, I, uh, don't know, the Bahamas, we'd have someone, but they knew they were generalists. They, they could talk to a CEO and any C suite member about a broad range of topics that were relevant. Do you believe that's what clients are looking for now? Broader advisory providers?

Speaker B: Uh, yes, but broader than that.

Speaker A: Broad. Right.

Speaker B: Okay, so I think the game's changed. The future is going to be not those who have broad iq, it's those that have broad eq, eq.

Speaker A: We're come back to that. We're going to come back to that for sure.

Speaker B: Okay, cool.

Speaker A: We're going to hold that one. Yeah, we are going to come back to that.

Speaker B: No, I think, you know, I don't want to say it's like a counsellor, but, but it kind of feels like what businesses are looking for are counsellors. They're looking for people that can help interpret and understand what their monologue is and what their internal dialogue and what their hopes are and what they want the strategy to be for the business and be able to have a look across and say, well, okay, here, there's some gaps over here that have an opportunity.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: You can delineate you're a competitor. You can push yourself into a space where you can have a different conversation. I think you absolutely have to have a partner like that. I think in a lot of instances, what some organizations have done and for good Reasons have gone, I want three or four niche experts. That's all very well and good, but then that leaves the responsibility for the look across inside of the echo chamber. That's your business. That's the risk part. Because whilst it's great because you're defining who you are and you're growing that and developing it, it doesn't have the awareness of the broader industry and it doesn't have the awareness of the interconnectivity.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: And the fabric of how all the different parts of marketing are separated, it's blurring like crazy now. And, you know, you're seeing a fluid relationship, an interoperable relationship between earned coverage, geo, uh, website content. You know, again, that's why Sidekick was built on that predicated principle, which is, I know the lines aren't going to be fixed.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: They're going to blur, like mental. And we want to take advantage of that. So, yes, I think to your point is you do need to engage with a consultancy or at least a company that is able to advise you on the broader piece. And then we can come onto the EQ bit in a bit.

Speaker A: Perfect.

Speaker B: And everybody will probably switch off, apart

Speaker A: from me and you, of course. Yeah. Let's step back a minute. Quite a long way back. So, uh, historically, agencies existed, I think, because clients had constraints that they couldn't easily solve themselves. So, for example. Yeah, I have got notes. So I'm gonna refer to my notes. Yeah, of course, scarce expertise. Clients engaged agencies because of scarce expertise in either a, uh, particular discipline or in how you activate on a platform. Or it could be the constraint is capacity. We want to activate a thousand campaigns in the next six months. We need people to do that. Because historically it was people driven and also coordinate across messy systems. You said yourself, systems evolved, they were messy. You had to get your hands dirty. People had to do that. That's why agencies were created. If you look now, has AI changed the reasons that agencies exist at all? Have the constraints shifted? Small question for a Thursday morning.

Speaker B: Yeah, I wish I hadn't gone to the pub last night. Um, yeah. Has, uh, it changed? You know, it has.

Speaker A: Will it move the constraints?

Speaker B: It will change everything eventually. And really and truly it should have changed things a lot more than it probably has so far. I think, you know, there's a trepidation when it comes to chasing the AI bubble, if you want to call it that. And I want to caveat everything I've said. You know, at the end of the day, I look at it and go, this is not expecting a singular outcome. You can't determine what is exactly going to happen. It's preparing for the possibility that any outcome might be the outcome. And for me that's just the job of an agency, and I think it's the job of a consultancy, is to start to look at the material factors of what goes into everything and say, well, this is a potential outcome. Legislation could come in and change the whole conversation like that. Absolutely.

Speaker A: I mean the EU legislation is now live, it's real. And in regulated industries that has significant implications.

Speaker B: Massive, massive.

Speaker A: And um, big fines, like huge fines.

Speaker B: And you know, that's where from a global perspective, you know, we work with a lot of global brands. We are a global brand ourself. And the legislation, the directives, the progressiveness, totally different in every single market. You know, some are embracing change far faster, some are uh, literally going, I want to replace everything and I'm going to do it now and I want to work it out later. And so that as the consultancy piece you were talking about, the visibility on how those things are performing and how, where the merits are in that change. And that's what you get an agency for, that's what you get a consultancy for. Because there's also something really comforting in being able to walk into a room, um, have a hypothesis as a client and sit there and go, like, I think we should do this. What do you think? And the consultant goes like, yes, because I've seen this here, here, here and here and here. And that's when you start to go, okay, it all makes sense. You need somebody that's gonna be accountable for supporting you in whatever decision you wanna do as a business, but also be able to be pragmatic and grown up enough to say no. One answer is the only answer. I don't know all, you know, I mean, I'm sitting here and I'm saying things and I'm going like, is, ah, that true? I can only tell you what my experience is telling me.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: And you know, and that's a perspective.

Speaker A: And you know, so we're intermingling two things, by the way, I think. Yeah, so again, it's a theory, but I think it comes from my personal bias, which is I have a consultancy background.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So when I look at the industry and the way the constraints are shifting, the lines between consultancy and marketing agency are starting to blur.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Do you think that's true?

Speaker B: Yeah, I do. You know, because what's interesting actually is, uh, and this is a generalist, you know. Cause I'm Sure. There's somebody out there that's gonna sit and go, well, that's not true, but

Speaker A: that's part of the point of the show, to be honest.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And I like that.

Speaker A: Some debate.

Speaker B: I like that. I think the marketing part of the industry has a new job to do.

Speaker A: You have to go on the shop floor and sit with the person making something and make it with them.

Speaker B: Exactly. The experience. Knowing what it feels like to have calluses on your hands because you've made a table means that you can talk to a company about how they should sell the tables that they're making. And agencies are filled with practical human beings. They've had hands on, they have been in the trenches, they've done the work. And when you're going through a period where things are being observed, is this consumable, is this replaceable by. We call it AI, But I suppose it's the accelerated implementation of technology. There has to be a consideration for what it feels to pick up a print brochure. This is where it comes back to the print part. It was always very, very early on. I went through multiple changes with the print industry. There was things like when digitisation of print came in, that's variable data printing, where you didn't actually have to. One brochure in one thing, you can have it wherever you like. And then the next thing you know is you're losing all the things like gold foiling or emboss or, you know, that kind of wonderful, beautiful stuff. And the brochures didn't feel the same. And the next thing, the brochure wasn't there and it's on a tablet and you're looking at going like, well, I believed it was never gonna feel like it did before. I was wrong. Because what happened then is when I moved the tablet, we were building, um, applications that responded to my movement and it gave a slightly different sensory m. And so you sat there and go, oh, well, the digital realm can provide me with a different sensory experience. It's not the same, but I understand what the value was in that and I'm transferring it to that in a slightly different way, move that forward to where we are now. If I want to speak to somebody that I know is going to understand the impact AI can have and whether it's good or not, whether it should be employed or not, I want somebody who's got calluses on their hands. That's why I think agencies are in the ascendancy rather than there be a situation where they're. I just don't think they've worked out how good they are in this conversation yet. And I think that's something that a lot of agencies are going to start

Speaker A: working out and they have to evolve.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Massively to lean into those skills. Yeah. So again, another thing that I was thinking about was around if AI can basically, and I'll be. Psychologists wouldn't agree with me, I'm sure. If they can automate intelligence. Yes. Then the role of being a really deep expert in a particular area. Like me, for example, I happen to be an ex procurement director. Uh, I do a lot of work with clients on how to win RFPs. A lot of my knowledge, my tacit knowledge of the triangle. Two thirds you'd get now from a model, it might not be quite right, but broadly, directionally, it's probably broadly correct. So if that's the case for me, it must be the case for other people in the agency world. Mhm. That, that expertise, that intelligence is being eroded because machines will be able to do that eventually. And then the second thing is, well, it's also very good at doing things really quickly in a repeatable way. Mhm. So the capacity problem starts to get addressed in the production area. So what does that leave agencies to do? What is their role in the future system?

Speaker B: Simon, I'm sort of trying to dance around the EQ thing because I know we're going to talk about it later, but, um, what does it leave? Right. Two sides to it. Number one is the incumbency on learning something deeply to a high IQ level is not necessary anymore.

Speaker A: Just say that again. So basically, just so um, I'm clear,

Speaker B: education system, um, says to us, here's a subject. How deeply can you go into that subject? How far through it can you go? How much can you learn about it? How can your IQ be brought up in that particular subject area?

Speaker A: This is drilling deep.

Speaker B: This is going to the bottom of the oil well. And in a generalist term, that is no longer as necessary as it would have been. Two years ago, the CEO of Nvidia was being asked, who do you think the smartest person is that you know? And the response, I think was just, it just summed up, to be honest, everything that I sort of thinking, which is, if you'd asked me five years ago, I'd have said somebody who had deep, deep, deep, deep, deep domain knowledge in one particular subject. Somebody that knew something at a level that nobody else did.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: He said, but what I'd say to you today is that there's actually somebody that understands how things are connected and how they impact people and how those things are going to evolve. And that, to me, the crucial part of all of this is how we take that on board and how we move that forward.

Speaker A: Let's jump into the EQ thing because I've got some questions. But, you know, as always, we'll move around. It's Jan. It's Jan. It's jazz. Oh, it's a Miles Davis set.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: With my favourite artist playing.

Speaker B: I was listening. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: You were listening. You were definitely listening. So talk about the EQ bit, because it's natural to talk about it now, is that that's part of the equation, as is coordination and orchestration. Then, um, the two being slightly different.

Speaker B: Coordination, orchestration, EQ iq. Okay, where do we set this up? There's a chapter. Sir Ken Robinson. Do you know Sir Ken Robinson? He is.

Speaker A: He died suddenly, didn't he? He was amazing. He. Honestly, his TED talks, if anyone's listening, hasn't seen them on YouTube, go and watch the TED talks from sir Ken Robinson. Unbelievable.

Speaker B: Just honestly, there are a few things that you see in your career or in your life of reading that have a massive impact. Huge, actually. It turns out he wrote a foreword for one of our CEOs books.

Speaker A: Really?

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: Good grief.

Speaker B: Yeah. Too fast to think. Um.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Written by Chris Lewis. And anyway, the tension.

Speaker A: All about education.

Speaker B: All about education.

Speaker A: He tells a story, the child with the picture of God.

Speaker B: That's the one, right. So you've got two. You've got the God one. Right. So basically, you better explain what it

Speaker A: is going on Earth are they ripping about?

Speaker B: Yeah, if you're still there. This is good.

Speaker A: Exactly. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker B: Listening, listening. So basically, there's a little girl in a classroom, and they've been set an exercise, which is to draw something. Draw anything that they want. And the teacher's wandering around and comes to this little girl, and she's got a hand wrapped around the thing and she's got a tongue hanging, uh, doing a good drawing. And the teacher said to him, what are you drawing there? It's a picture of God. And she's like, well, that's impossible. Nobody knows what God knows. And she turns around and says, give me a minute, you'll find out. And that kind of beautiful imagination. Right, exactly. Uh, walk out that door and there's 50, 60 people sat on that floor that have that kind of imagination. Naively brilliant. And then there's another story that he tells, which is about a girl in a waiting room, and she'd been Incredibly disruptive in her classes. And her parents are called to see the headteacher. The head teacher says, look, we understand whatever the girl's name was is having some challenges, but we think we found what the problem is and switches on a speaker that's inside the waiting room with a little glass window. They can observe the girl. She gets up and starts dancing. She's moving around like crazy. There is actually nothing wrong with your daughter. She's a dancer.

Speaker A: She's a dancer.

Speaker B: And when it comes to the types of intelligence that we have talked about in the past, we always focus very heavily on the academic. We always think of that logic based iq. There is intelligence types that have a much bigger spectrum, whether it is dancing, whether it's music, whether it's even just speaking, acting, all these different things that people do or have the capacity to do to learn and finesse, and those are the things that are dancing on the edges of eq. You don't really get scored in the education system for things that aren't IQ based. If it's not measurable specifically, then it's not measurable. So we don't exactly can't measure it,

Speaker A: we can't value it.

Speaker B: Right. I don't believe in that. And you know, the ability to sit in a room and feel the energy to look at who's in the room, what they're wearing, how they're behaving, are they looking down, are they twitching, are they biting their nails? And all these imperceptible things that you do as a human, these are the things that are, uh, the poetry of the future. They're the things that are going to allow us to become more connected with other people. Because that is gonna be the greatest currency. You know, I talked about data being currency. That's historical, that's what's happened.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: When you're talking about something that's going to happen, it's about emotional awareness of how culture works, how people work, how they respond to things, what things mean to one group of people versus another group of people. And if you think about AI as a generative form, when it's being asked questions, it knows what it knows and it doesn't know what it doesn't know. And sentientality is something that we've been talked about and how could AI be sentient and this, that kind of the other.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: It's got a bloody long way to go, isn't it? How's it gonna know that? When I walk into a room and I can feel there's a breeze and there's a smell and there's, you know. And I go like, I know who sat in that corner?

Speaker A: Yeah, you.

Speaker B: It's those kind of things. And the value content of the future is the ones that blow that right up. So I think you're going to see a wave of two things, calluses as we talked about. But I also think you're going to see the rise of the EQ warrior and those people who are emotionally driven. It's going to be a real big change for everybody because boardrooms aren't necessarily filled with EQ people, they're not filled

Speaker A: with EQ people on the whole.

Speaker B: So I think that's going to be the huge thing. And again, agencies are filled with those kind of people.

Speaker A: Interesting. So just kind of like just following that kind of thread through for a little bit. So what do agencies potentially look like? Are we going to have, as we do today, UK, only 24 and a half thousand agencies, roughly from two person agencies right up to the big indies like yourselves at the smaller end. They'll specialise in. There might be a performance agency specializing in paid media, or they might be an SEO agency or they might be a GEO agency. They've got people in IT that are activating things on platforms and are uh, doing analytics around content and building new content campaigns. Will that exist but we'll just have people that are slightly more emotionally aware or will actually the role start to change? Are we going to unbundle, um, the work? Because AI in my view and ah, many people's views unbundles work. It's not that you'll lose your job, it's the tasks that get bundled together into a role will be unbundled in an AI world and then reassembled. Some of it will be done by AI agentic AI, some of it will be done by humans. But that means the shape of an agency will change by its nature. The roles will change, therefore the shape of the agency will change and the need that it fulfills will change on that path of eq, et cetera. What do you think? What kinds of agencies might we start seeing? This is real blue sky sheep.

Speaker B: It's like we should really have.

Speaker A: Where's the alcohol? There's no gin, there's no wine.

Speaker B: I think I know where that is. I left it in the pub last night.

Speaker A: It's um. Too early.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. No, I think looking into my crystal ball.

Speaker A: Exactly correct. Yes.

Speaker B: I would say this is gonna sound strange. At the moment we define people by their output. Right? So, uh, job title Tends to lean towards. You're responsible for making this.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And you go through.

Speaker A: And tomorrow. Make that again, make it again, make

Speaker B: it better, make it again, make it again. And. Cause that. It works on the principle of, I know what it is you make for me. Now, the really interesting thing is we've talked, you know, we've seen in the industry, people talk about Simon Sinek. He talks about the why. Exactly. And all that stuff. You know, that beautiful things.

Speaker A: Um, the why, the what and the how.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And the weird thing is, the companies that do really, really well have a clearly defined why. They have an emotional reason for existence. And to correlate that with an output feels wrong. It feels like you make that one thing. It's binary. This is fanciful, this is emotional. This is, you know, progressive. Wouldn't it be amazing if the world of the agency landscape shifted and said, you are not defined by what you make. You are defined by the process you go through to make it? Uh, and I think that is true of creativity.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So when I picked up the little bits of AI crumbles or crumbs or whatever, and they started putting it together, people looking across and going, like, but you're an ecd. What are you doing? Get away from AI. Move away. It's just another material for me to run the process for.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: Or the creative process through. And I think that, you know, a bit like, you know, you actually had a piece of Forbes, didn't you? You had the piece which was talking about different types of ways people engender themselves from a sales perspective.

Speaker A: It was a negotiation piece.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And then the archetypes of negotiation, Right.

Speaker B: Some people are authoritative and some trust.

Speaker A: You get commanders, you get trusters.

Speaker B: Awesome. The interesting thing I read.

Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. You did some of my research.

Speaker B: I know there's somebody probably in the back of this room going, I didn't think he was going to do that.

Speaker A: Um, but thank you, Francesca.

Speaker B: It struck me, actually, it's, um. It struck me as a lovely thing because it was sort of talking more holistically about how people approach something. It didn't say, well, that's the output they're gonna get. It's the way they're gonna do it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I think we're gonna have an industry that has lots of individuals that have different ways of doing things. And some people are gonna be those authoritative types that understand how to tell authoritative stories to people that need to be having an authoritative response.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But it's not gonna be defined by the output. It's gonna be defined by the way that it's approached and how they get to it. And I heard the other day and uh, it was sort of, you want to turn around and say, bullshit, that's not gonna happen. You know, it's like, wow, this is pretty much the end of the entry level positions and why would you train somebody from the beginning? And it's like, you're still not getting it right. This isn't the old education system anymore. This is the new education system, the one that you don't put a priority on iq, you put a priority on eq. What does it mean to a person? How do they feel about that? Because a business that acquires an agency has one massive problem. And I still, in uh, some inst. Not all instances, don't understand the value of an emotional relationship with the audience that they're trying to sell a product to or they're already selling a product to. And I think that the importance of that is going to become more important. Because if I'm going to sit in a world where there's a bloody robot that's cleaning my house, there's a robot that fixes my car, there's a generative thing that's telling me basically what to do with my finances and I'm not even convinced it knows what it's talking about. I'm going to want to have a feeling and fabric of something that is going to be far more fundamentally human.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: So whilst technology is going to come in and it's going to have the perception of, ha. Ah, marketing department, delete. I can now replace you. Bollocks. It's not going to be like that. Those people will be set free. They'll be allowed to express themselves and take on the challenge, which is how do I create better human connection? How do I really resonate? How do I do that thing that AI just cannot bloody do? And if you look at what from a GEO point of view AI is looking at, it's using a combination of things. When you get a result served back to you, normally there's a few things at play. Number one is did the person say that about themselves and did anybody corroborate that fact? And the corroborator can be earned coverage. But that's a human, that's an editor. There's a throat to choke there. So AI goes, I trust that because it's human paradox. Um, and then the next thing you do is the other piece that really resonates is big content, really diverse and different, that goes lots of places, but has A human relevancy to it. When you start talking about the impact that something had on someone, on a culture, on a community, this, that and the other, AI is like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Okay, really like that kind of stuff. That's right. Where are you going to get those stories from? Where are you going to get that understanding from, that empathy? You're going to get it from the empathy engine. It's the marketing department, it's the agencies. That's what you're going to get it from. And so that differentiation and it sort of feels a little bit like, you know, AI was set out as a task to try and consume creative folk. I have a funny feeling, just like always, you know, you get to the other end of it and it's actually like bollocks. It's actually done more damage to the people that built it than it did for the people that it was targeting.

Speaker A: You just made me think about going back to the 1950s, obviously, when. Not the heyday of marketing, but when it became popularized, I guess, in many ways. So you think of Mad Men as a TV series, for example, but those people had a connection with their audiences. They knew what would resonate, they knew what campaigns would work, what imagery would work, what words would work. It feels like we're kind of coming full circle. We're going to go back to. Humans aren't there to do the production because that can be done in a much more efficient way, in a more standardized way. But what can't be done certainly yet, and for the foreseeable future, is the craft. A friend of mine, Anant Sharma, who runs Matter of Form, a brand consultancy, creative agency, he talks about the craft a lot. And the craft's important. The human craft, tastes, it's everything. We're heading back towards that, you know, it's everything.

Speaker B: I mean, I know this is predominantly about AI, but it is about how that exists within side of the world and how it evolves the agency landscape. And from a procurement perspective, what you need to be looking for when you go in and engage in an agency. And you need to really be seeing people that are progressive from a technology point of view, but also understand that eq, that emotional quotient, that part of the chemistry of humanity that can be visible and tapped into. And that doesn't mean just what happens in the room when you're pitching. The importance of believing the story of the person that's in the room, that is employing your services, is as important as it is to understand the audience upon which their Product serves or their service serves and being able to be that open and emotionally aware agency landscape. Pretty, pretty challenging place to be. Right. So it's basically like, right, you've got to be one of the most emotional human beings on the planet. You've got to really connect with people, resonate with them. You'll be super professional. Absolutely, you know, Right. And you got to do your timesheets, you know, AI timesheets, first thing in you go, let's have it, you know, And I think that that chemistry is only going to rise and it's going to rise.

Speaker A: The future of the agency world. People aren't recruiting junior talent. I think the numbers are down 20 odd percent of junior talent coming into agencies, which is tragic, which is horrific. I started life as an apprentice in the engineering sector. We need apprentices. We need to get young people into industries that have a passion for it. What I'm thinking now is, and I wasn't thinking before I came in the room was, well, actually, surely we have apprentice roles, junior roles for creatives, people that have that creative strand, that DNA. Well, agencies will surely recruit those people, surely, because they're the ones that have the taste and connection with their generation. Is the agency world doing that, I wonder? I don't know.

Speaker B: You'd have to ask finance.

Speaker A: I'm not about Team Lewis, just in general.

Speaker B: No, no, I don't know if they're going to. I'm not talking about. I love my cfo. He's the best CFO in the world. Uh, yeah, he's good guy. Exactly. Uh, no, I think there is a future role and see, it's sort of pissing me off.

Speaker A: It's not about your CV and the number of GCSEs you got and the grade you got. I personally, I could care less about that. If our son's listening. That doesn't mean you can forget your homework. Yeah, do your homework. It's do your homework, but it's more about, uh, our son happens to be. It loves drama.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And by other people's account is very good and has a presence. Yeah, well, you should lean into that.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: Because that's not something you can get taught through books in a classroom. You lean into that. If you're a creative person, you should lean into the creative bit and hopefully an agency will pick up and go, you're the future of creativity.

Speaker B: I think that if you've got a philosophy whereby you're going to reduce the number of graduate intakes or non graduate intakes into an organization, do you Have a philosophy where people are no longer going to be those ages and those have those same experiences and have those kind of exposures in their life. What a load of rubbish.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: You know, you can't leave this to a certain set of individuals that have specific roles, and that's a bit more progressed, so can't really get rid of that one. You know, it's about continuing to evolve, involve the organizations in a way that's representative. Those people who are going to be experiencing all of the impact of all of this far more than those people who are already setting their ways as professional. So if you're not thinking about it from that perspective, uh, what are you doing? And if you want differentiation? Well, the last time I checked is that AI is looking at all the jobs that have already existed, and he's looking at those individuals and saying, how much of that can I do? Well, they don't know what the new service, that new lot are going to do.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So it can't possibly be already on the path to creating that. So they're going to redefine, reinvent, and they're going to find different ways of standing out. And that's brilliant. That's what people do. And that is actually probably coming onto the more important part, the balance between making yourself look a credible business to a point where it feels almost like it's a suit, and going the other way, which is to say you're going to go into an environment where anything is possible. That balance is gonna be really interesting to see how that plays out.

Speaker A: It is. Because at the extremes, neither's good.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But getting the balance right in the middle takes skill.

Speaker B: Yeah. Creative without credibility, I think, was something somebody said recently. And I do really ascribe to that. You know, credibility comes in all sorts of forms. It comes in accountability. It comes in, uh, the sense of experience. It comes in the sense of being commercially solid. But when you look at the creativity part, you want to see differentiation, you want to see exploration. And, you know, I think that I've heard it so many times.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker B: Uh, well, you know, at the end of the day, if we can deliver this with a programmatic approach, and it's going to be numbers driven and it's KPIs driven. You're sitting there going like, this isn't Moneyball. You know, you can, to a certain extent, math what's out of this. But there comes a point when somebody needs to walk into a room, look at everything that's there and be the 10th man and go, nah. Yeah, let's fucking fuck this up. Let's just go the other direction. Let's see what that looks like. And then lo and behold, someone goes, wow. Because I think Rory Sutherland said, sometimes a really good idea is the opposite of a really good idea. It's not always a bad idea. And, you know, Christ, you know, if people stand behind a line that sits in front of an atm, you can make people do some awesome things just by thinking slightly differently.

Speaker A: I have this thing about. Again, it's not me, it's learned thinking over many, many years. I think I was taught this by McKinsey. Necessary, but not sufficient. It's necessary that you collect the data and you measure things. Absolute. It's necessary. If you're not doing that, you're not at base camp. That's not sufficient, uh, to make a successful campaign and deliver significant results and do things that stick in people's memories. Like the guerrilla ad.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: How old's that? 20, 30 years? Don't know. But it stuck in my mind. I wasn't looking at the numbers, how long the advert was, how many drumbeats. It was this thing. So you have to have both, is what I'm reading from you.

Speaker B: Actually. Our, uh, ah, EVP of Creative growth, he was involved in the production of that.

Speaker A: Oh, was.

Speaker B: I love that you picked that one up. He'll love that.

Speaker A: Brilliant. Brilliant. And apparently when it tested. When it tested again, back to the data, it tested very badly. Ah. And the creative director stuck their neck on the line and said, I'll back it if it flunks. Fire me if it doesn't. Hurrah.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, absolutely. What was the question again?

Speaker A: There wasn't one.

Speaker B: Good.

Speaker A: Moving on to the next point. I was checking on it, but not so much. Was I supposed to say something then? You have to have both. You have to have the creative chops, as one of my clients says, and you have to be able to be brilliant at data. Collecting data across multiple systems, connecting things together that wouldn't normally fit together into a coherent set is a skill. It's data. Data engineering.

Speaker B: Can I jump on something there? Because actually, in the early stages of the AI bit, one of the things that drew, I'm going to say, rage, and obviously being a creative person, slightly dramatic probably wasn't rage. It was just like dis. Annoyance. Um, when I was watching people type into AI what they wanted it to return, there were some of the best briefs I've ever seen. And I'm like, you bastard, why can't you do that for People, why can't you give that level of investment? And the reason why is because in some perverse way, they feel like they're in this personal relationship with the AI piece and that they will be credited with the response of whatever it gives back. So they're investing more upfront. I won't name any names. You know, who you were. Uh, um. And I just sat there and thought, that's mental. You know, it's just you approaching effectively the same kind of dynamic at play, but this one, you're investing more in it. And it just showed what the human nuance was. I would have said it would be the other way around if I'd guessed and it wasn't. But coming back to the point, Sidekick was built very specifically to give more visibility to the information that impacts decisions, to the ability to make you able to think about a strategy that either follows the course of recommendation or completely goes in a different direction.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And we did talk about this beforehand, but ultimately, if you can measure as much as humanly possible and we can talk about the bureaucracy that exists within organizations and poor interconnectivity of data till the cows come home, if you can get all that information together and you can see what that looks like and you can make fast decisions, you are going to move forwards much faster with better creative outcomes, better strategic outcomes, and, uh, obviously that is going to affect your bottom line in a good way.

Speaker A: Exactly, yeah. Where can people find out more about you?

Speaker B: You can go to teamlewis.com and you can go find out there, or you can hit me up on LinkedIn. Simon Billington. There's no billboard on it, actually. Maybe I'll add that.

Speaker A: Maybe there should be.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Thank you ever so much. Indeed. And that's the end of part two. Tune in in about two weeks time for the final part, Part three with Simon, where we talk about control points in the wider, uh, marketing ecosystem. And also some final warnings from Simon. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast series with your host, Mike Lander. Please subscribe so that you'll catch all the next episodes.