Sleeping Barber · 2026-07-02 · 26 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
50 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Byron Sharp, director of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and author of How Brands Grow, challenges deeply ingrained marketing orthodoxies in this conversation recorded at Cannes Lions. Sharp distinguishes mental availability - the multi-cue ability of a brand to come to mind across category entry points - from simple brand awareness, arguing that most marketers confuse the two despite decades of evidence. He critiques the industry's overestimation of ad reach and the misconception that consumers process elaborate ad variations, instead advocating for discipline around distinctive brand assets deployed consistently across fleeting exposures. Sharp also unpacks the false binary between big ideas and mass marketing, explaining how brands scale by delivering value to millions rather than niche personalization. Throughout, he debunks Cannes-era hype around retail media networks (Marriott media, hotel room advertising) as unsustainable ventures destined to fail within three years, and reframes search advertising as purchase availability, not mental availability building. The conversation will resonate with CMOs, brand strategists, and anyone questioning whether sophisticated targeting and hyper-personalization actually drive long-term brand growth.
Mental availability is multi-cue - whether a brand comes to mind across various category entry points and situations - whereas awareness is a single metric. Most people won't think of your brand even when they see it on a shelf; mental availability is about coming to mind when people are in the right mindset and context to consider a purchase.
Search advertising is really purchase availability, not mental availability building. It catches consumers already in the category searching for solutions (like typing 'washing machine'), similar to walking into a store. It doesn't lay down memory structures for future purchases years away, so it shouldn't be judged by the same metrics as brand-building advertising.
Distinctive brand assets - colors, sounds, symbols, characters - are essential because they allow consumers to recognize and recall your brand during fleeting ad exposures. Just adding a logo isn't enough; the entire ad must feel like your brand, not your competitor's, while laying down memory structures that help people buy later.
Craft specifically for fleeting exposures, recognize that your actual ad reach is far lower than metrics suggest, and avoid assuming people give full attention. Most exposures are brief unless you've bought cinema ads; expect distraction and eyes off-screen, and design accordingly rather than creating elaborate variations expecting deep processing.
Creative success is largely unexplainable and impossible to predict in advance - it resonates with an incredible number of people in ways that can't be reverse-engineered. People often describe hits post-hoc by simply restating the work itself (e.g., 'Harry Potter succeeds because it's like Harry Potter'), revealing that predicting the next breakthrough is harder than it appears.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
There are a handful of genuinely useful reframes - mental availability as multi-cue versus single-awareness, and search as 'purchase availability' rather than brand-building - but large swaths of the 26 minutes are spent on Cannes observations, retail media tangents, and conversational pleasantries that yield nothing actionable.
Calling search, search advertising was a big disservice. I mean it was probably good marketing on behalf of Google. But it isn't, it's like, it's like in store, it's when people are in the category and they type washing machine... that is purchase availability. It's not laying down memory structures
you way overestimate the reach of your advertising, particularly the brain reach of your advertising. You way overestimate that your media metrics are all inflated
Sharp's frameworks are genuinely his own, but How Brands Grow has been out for over a decade and the core ideas (mental availability, distinctive assets, physical availability) are well-circulated in marketing circles; the search-as-purchase-availability reframe and the Frozen/Harry Potter creativity argument are the freshest moments.
mental availability is multi cue cost. You know, in this situation. Does it come in time when you're feeling this way? Does it come to mind, you know, all these category entry point cues
when people explain the success of Harry Potter, they say... Well, you know, kids love a story where the characters get away from their parents and it involves magic. And it's like you're just describing Harry Potter. You're saying the success of Harry Potter is because it's very Harry Pottery
Byron Sharp is among the most consequential marketing scientists alive - director of Ehrenberg-Bass, author of How Brands Grow - a genuine practitioner-facing researcher whose work has changed industry behaviour at scale; the score is not higher because the transcript itself fails to extract the depth his credentials promise.
Jenny and I very, you know, spent a lot of time telling people. Well, and partly our own fault for using the term brand salience, first of all, which we knew was a terrible term
The scientific laws told a story that said brands, the size of a brand is largely determined by mental availability, physical availability, two very important assets, but they're very different
The conversation is almost entirely conceptual; the closest things to evidence are an anecdote about marketers failing to identify effective ads and a passing reference to Duncan Watts's book - no named studies, no metrics, no timelines or dollar figures from actual Ehrenberg-Bass research.
Duncan Watts in his Book Everything is Obvious points out that when people explain the success of Harry Potter
you've got all these people around the world. Oh, we want to sell some of that. And so you walk along thinking Marriott hotels have got Marriott media
The hosts occasionally land a solid specific question (awareness vs. mental availability, search misclassification) but largely allow Sharp to meander through Cannes observations and extended tangents without redirecting; follow-up is rare and there is no productive pushback on any claim.
not confusing awareness for mental availability. Do you mind just taking a moment and speaking to that?
is effective, um, creative simply targeting the right category entry points with distinctive brand assets... Consistently over time
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Byron Sharp - Professor of Marketing Science, Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of Adelaide, and author of How Brands Grow - joins us at Cannes fresh off his sold-out Bassey Theatre session with Mark Ritson (a thousand people queued to get in). We dig into the five fundamentals he and Ritson agreed on and, more usefully, where the industry keeps getting them wrong. Byron explains why mental availability is not the same as brand awareness, why “search advertising” was a branding con that confuses purchase availability with memory-building, and why your media metrics are lying to you about reach. Along the way: the retail-media gold rush (sorry, Marriott Media), the AI hype bubble he expects to pop, why Elsa buried every other Disney princess, and the “non-artificial intelligence” agent Ehrenberg-Bass is building to stop corporate AI from breaking marketing’s laws of physics. A masterclass in thinking clearly about what your marketing money is actually supposed to do. Chapters: 00:00 - Welcome: Byron Sharp at Cannes, and why impact (not academic prestige) drives Ehrenberg-Bass 01:39 - The “two festivals” of Cannes: creativity awards vs.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: Welcome to the Sleeping Barber Podcast.
Speaker B: All right, welcome back to the Sleeping Barber Podcast. And we're, we're really excited to be welcoming Byron Sharp here. Thank you. Having you here in Cannes. Um, Byron Sharp is the professor of, uh, Marketing Science and director of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. Um, also authored the Red Book.
Speaker C: Yep. At the university at. Sorry, Adelaide University.
Speaker B: At Adelaide University, yes.
Speaker C: I have to get that in for my vice chancellor.
Speaker B: Absolutely. Uh, author of Red Book, How Brands Go, Part one, Part two, which there's a lot. Published a lot of papers. But I think what we appreciate the most is, like, how much you've changed the way that we operate as marketers and the way we think about a lot of these things.
Speaker C: So it's, uh, that's, so that's, that's what motivates, I think, the researchers in the Aaron V. Bass Institute. I mean, most of our people never wanted to be classic academics who just, you know, the job was to impress other academics.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: They wanted to actually have some impact on the world.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: Most of us sort of fell into academia accidentally. Uh, so, yeah, impact matters.
Speaker B: Well, it's funny because a lot of the origins. Because we've had a privilege of actually interviewing a lot of professors, uh, from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and the origin stories of a lot of them. It's like how they got into research. It's always fascinating because it's not usually, um, this is what I want to do. But they're kind of. They find something on their path that genuinely intrigues them. The curiosity. Probably some. A common trait that they all have. But we're catching you at the tail end of Cannes.
Speaker C: Right.
Speaker B: And we would love to kind of structure this conversation. We'll get into your conversation that you've had with Mark. Sold out the Bassey Theater. It was great. Um, it was great.
Speaker C: Kind of like the thousand people had to queue.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker B: It was insane. We had press passes, so we were like, okay, we were able to get in, but love to kind of get your sense a little bit around how the, um, the festival has gone for you.
Speaker C: So. Festival? Well, um, there's sort of two festivals here.
Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
Speaker C: Isn't there? Yeah, absolutely. There's the actual festival, which is about hopefully, you know, celebrating creativity and awarding awards to creativity.
Speaker B: Mhm.
Speaker C: Although there's been a lot of question about bias in that, you know, over the years, I think Rory Sutton, something like, you know, when we see the National Rifle association win an award, we will know that objectivity is a return and it's not about how you're saving the world. It's more about is it really creative? And so that is like, um, Hawk Couture or one of those, um, supercar conferences where General Motors will show you this car that is just. It's not in production. It may never go into production for reason.
Speaker A: Yes.
Speaker C: But, uh, but, but, but, but it's aspirational. Like, what could that be? And, and, and so we're not celebrating. It's never been about celebrating the best advertising campaigns. It's about celebrating amazing creativity in advertising campaigns. Or hopefully we're gonna get back to that. And then, and, and so that's not really classic Eberg bas. I mean, hardly anyone makes presentations here about evidence and, and about how marketing works. Really, that's not. Which is why we haven't really been a big feature. Um, but then we realize there's this other fringe festival outside which is just as big. And, um, a lot of serious people come to calm because. Not for the creativity festival necessarily, but because of what it does. The gravity that pulls in people from all around the world. And it's like you having. How many podcasts have you made this week? A lot. And that will cry a lot. Lot of setting up and difficulty. But now you go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And a lot of CMOs do this. I had 20 meetings with partners and colleagues from around the world that would have just, even just organizing time alone would have taken incredible amount of time.
Speaker A: Yeah. For an event like this. And I mean maybe just in general, like, uh, being the festival of creativity, what kinds of things inspire you or have you been inspired by. Throughout the.
Speaker C: The festival comes to mind more is like you walk along the. Was it cross hit and uh, some of the things that are being sold to marketers. I'm amazed. I mean, do they really think marketers are that gullible or they're just giving it a go? Uh, ever since Amazon released how much money it makes out of retail media, which is quite understandable. Right, Because Amazon sells search words within Amazon and display things. So you know, you're selling, I don't know, vacuum cleaners. You know, you want to be on that first page and you can pay quite a lot of money and you want to.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: But when Amazon mounts that, suddenly you've got all these people around the world. Oh, we want to sell some of that. And so you walk along thinking Marriott hotels have got Marriott media.
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C: Uh, yeah. So they go, well, you know, our guests come into the hotel and they pass by the lobby and things. So we could put a TV set in there, I guess, and selling. Oh, the, the TV sets already in people's rooms. So when they turn on the tv it could be in a. This is getting pretty desperate. Uh, but they're hopeful, right? They're hopeful that someone will fall for that. Okay, sorry, Marriott.
Speaker B: But no, no, you know what, because we were having this conversation ourselves yesterday and I'm, um, I'm just going to ask the question, so to speak, but I feel like there's a lot of this fragmentation that's happening right now, thinking that because there's a lot of conversation around retail media networks that everyone has to find a way to monetize their stores, their inventory.
Speaker C: But I can see the appeal, right? So you're Marriott and you go, I've got TV sets in the rooms already.
Speaker A: Wow.
Speaker C: And I can just charge for that. The costs are. Well, I suppose they have the costs of putting on their thing, but they have actually got a hotel there.
Speaker A: Right.
Speaker C: You know, so the costs are very low and the margins could be huge. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, but probably though in 3 years time you won't, it'll be gone. Which is a lot of Khan. You know, there's the big established players, the big media houses, the uh, established podcasts that you expect to see. True, yeah. And then you see all these other companies that you. I have no idea what they do. And this year, of course it's AI, you know, so AI this, AI. And in two, one near time probably, you know, 80% of those will be gone, failed or, you know, just not there. And um, so they're all striving to have. The sun might make it, you know. Ah, someone's going to be the next Google. Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker A: Wanted to go jump into the.
Speaker C: I think probably people who, you know, were here when the first year someone like Google came and went, oh, that's really weird. A search engine thingy being here.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: What a weird, funny name.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: Yes.
Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, I wanted to jump in like from that point into some of the conversation you had with Mark, around the five things you agreed to, which was really, really interesting. It was funny because I remember there's a couple of points really like just the tension around, like the way you understand things in the common language Mart around things that we take for granted sometimes. And so in can especially the Big Idea is such an important part. Um, you know, the Big Idea, the, the insight, the human truth, you hear that a lot from on the creative side, but then on the other side, can you actually like thinking about Google and the, the, the retail media. Can you actually have a big idea in execution without something like sophisticated mass marketing? Like is it, are they at opposing
Speaker C: ideas or are they related? I don't think, I don't think there's necessarily, I don't see anything necessarily opposing. Yeah, but uh, I think you, are you asking like, so you, you've, you've thought of something that would, could be new and good for the world. Right. Or that it's meeting some need that something doesn't. Well, sure, but you still have to do marketing.
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C: So it's, I guess, yeah.
Speaker A: Ah, but it's more just about the idea that like with a lot of specific very niche targeting, you can go one to one and hyper personalize and all those kinds of things.
Speaker C: But the big idea, supposedly that's being sold, that's being sold to marketers then
Speaker A: you, and so then you create all kinds of variations and like hundreds ah, of permutations.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker A: But then there's this big idea and there's also mass marketing. And so you kind of, I think, I was wondering if you thought this or what you think about it. The big idea, to execute it properly, you need mass media. You go the opposite way from the sophisticated or the super niche mass personalization. Yeah.
Speaker C: We are uh, fortunate to live in a market based economy where people get rewarded for doing good things for other people and they get very rewarded if they do things for billions of people. And so yes, there's a huge incentive to scale, which is how it should be. Right. Someone's saying, so we always celebrate, I don't know, this doctor who did this surgery on this child and saved a life. That's wonderful. And we tend to forget the unsung heroes of the person who invented um, barriers on highways so that the cars didn't cross over and things. How many lives did that person save? Staggering amount. Uh, no kidding. So economy, the profit, motivation and things rewards people who don't just do something good but can do it for thousands or millions of people. And it may only be something little. It might be something like the invention of chewing gum and the marketing and building of those brands of chewing gum. But that adds a little bit of joy to billions of people's lives. And uh, so I get, you know, the Wrigley family, I guess, you know, they became really happy. They became very, you know, because they did something for lots of people. The same way that people say, you know, why is that sports star, you know, earning so much money? It's because lots of people watch Them.
Speaker B: It's very simple.
Speaker C: Yeah. And we all have a limited life and they've decided that that is a little bit of their life is worth doing. They love that game. That's fantastic. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker B: Um, wanted to get into some of the five things and the first one that was presented was mental availability. And you and Mark both agreed? Yes, it's absolutely important. But I thought what was really interesting is that you took it one step further, not confusing awareness for mental availability. Do you mind just taking a moment and speaking to that?
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: Jenny and I very, you know, spent a lot of time telling people. Well, and partly our own fault for using the term brand salience, first of all, which we knew was a terrible term, but we couldn't think of anything else. So this is the creativity that we could not think of a better term. Um, and, and so people immediately confuse that with like, you know, a single cue. You know, do you, you know, washing machines? Which one's the first one comes to mind or. Yeah. And so mental availability is multi cue cost. You know, in this situation. Does it come in time when you're feeling this way? Does it come to mind, you know, all these category entry point cues that, um, make a mental availability. And so, yeah, that was one of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute's very fundamental contributions or shifts because people had been. And there still will be people here, right. Obsessing about when people think of my brand or when they see us on shelf, what do they think of?
Speaker A: Right.
Speaker C: Uh, and we're like, well, here's the news for you. Okay. Mostly they, you might. You're on shelf and they don't see you. They do not think of you. Uh, sometimes they think of you here, but they never think of you there.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: And that's what mental availability is. And so the evidence is pretty, uh, you know, stark on that. That, that is so important.
Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker C: And you know, it's beside the advertising industry, which of course is hugely about building mental availability, had lost sight of that. Um, Yeah, I love the French word for advertising. Publicity. It's like. Yeah, yeah, it is, isn't it?
Speaker A: Right, yeah.
Speaker C: Publicity. Publicity is advertising. Advertising. Publicity. Yeah, Anything. Anything then.
Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker C: I think we got very much into the American school. Advertising is like a salesperson, Right. It's to persuade. It's, uh, the awareness thing. Sure. But you know, the main thing is for brands that people are aware of and you convince them you're buying the wrong one.
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C: Let's sway. You should buy this one.
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The publicity has that nuance to it, it's, it's more subtle and probably more actually. What, advertising?
Speaker C: Yes. Really? Yeah, yeah. I like to point out to advertisers, um, two truths. One is you way overestimate the reach of your advertising, particularly the brain reach of your advertising. You way overestimate that your media metrics are all inflated. Um, and people do do stuff like take their eyes off the screen or get distracted and not give you full. And so the other thing is to expect fleeting exposures. Unless maybe you've bought a, uh, cinema ad. Okay. You've locked people in the room, it's dark. A bit like when you do your ad pre testing.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: But that is a weird, you know, the rest of the world is fleeting exposures. So craft for fleeting exposures and be realistic. Your reach is so much lower than you think.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: You know those stories that people hear that consumers are exposed to 7,000 ads every day? Yeah. So how can you remember the thousand or so ads you've been exposed to this morning? It's nice and not true at all.
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B: We're half joking. Like people handing out the. People handing out on our walk over. Yeah, handing out the.
Speaker C: Yeah, but that's unusual. That's unusual. That's because we're at an advertising that's fair.
Speaker B: Right. We don't get that anywhere else. But isn't that publicity? Isn't that like advertising? Right.
Speaker C: And it is mental availability. So I'm on a bit of a crusade to, you know, the big. The scientific laws told a story that said brands, the size of a brand is largely determined by mental availability, physical availability, two very important assets, but they're very different. So be very clear with what am I doing now? Is it for mental validity? Is it for physical availability? Calling search, search advertising was a big disservice.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: I mean it was probably good marketing on behalf of Google. Right?
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: But it isn't, it's like, it's like in store, it's when people are in the category and they type washing machine.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: Which is a bit like walking into a, uh, washing machine store. Uh, you're trying to catch them as they fall. So that is purchase availability.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: It's not laying down memory structures for uh, people that might activate in five years time. So be very careful. Clear on what, what your money, what your money is supposed to do here, what your money's supposed to do here. And use different ways to judge them.
Speaker A: Yeah. One of the other parts around the, of the five things you guys had agreed on was the distinctive brand assets and which is a core component of, of mental availability.
Speaker C: Yes. You can't, you can't build mental about a bit if people don't know who you are.
Speaker A: Right. And on the distinctive brand asset thing I marketed casually mentioned there's uh, I can't remember what study he referred to specifically, but having four distinctive assets early in an ad. But, but so often we, we go
Speaker C: okay, well yeah, he said he, someone he's done something with. Tick tock or something. I, I don't know. I don't know of this. And I, I, you'd have to ask Jimmy whether that's really correct. It sounds a little odd.
Speaker A: The question though that I would, I wanted to ask about is like we often just do a checkbox with a logo. Like we.
Speaker C: Right.
Speaker A: And then, then we're like we're done, we're good. And so there's obviously more to building mental availability than just adding a logo to everything.
Speaker C: Yes. So, uh, communication is really difficult. Um, um, you know, there'll be people listening to this podcast who miss bits and misinterpret things and.
Speaker B: Absolutely.
Speaker C: Because that's how humans are. Yes. Uh, and when you're doing it with a fleeting exposure, it gets really quite weird. Some things work fantastic and other things don't. And you know we've done research with marketers. Can marketers pick the ad that was, you know, really effective. This is what? No, this is afterwards they can't.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: Uh, so because it's a difficult task. So that fleeting exposure has to be recognized for the brand. Mhm. And what does that requires us to research our uh, distinctive brand assets and know what they are and use them. Um, just hoping that the logo works might not be uh, the thing. I mean you might have the logo there, but people, the ad feels like your competitor and make something of your competitor. We obviously don't want that.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: And then in that fleeting exposure we want to lay down some refresh or lay down some memory structures that help people buy in whenever they do this. Which, which m. Which could be long time away. Yeah.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: And so researching what are those memory structures that I need to embed? And then working hard to embed and it's, it's, it requires quite a lot of discipline.
Speaker A: Mhm.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker A: Quickly.
Speaker B: Um, here. Just, uh, another one was just consistency. Right. And just kind of as we're thinking about consistency.
Speaker C: Yes. Mark and I agreed on consistency and I said so does everyone in the world over in the marketing world.
Speaker B: Well, exactly.
Speaker C: But it's not what they do.
Speaker B: Exactly right. So is effective, um, creative simply targeting the right category entry points with distinctive brand assets.
Speaker C: It's a.
Speaker B: Consistently over time.
Speaker C: Yeah, that's a big part of it. That should be embedded into the discipline. But that's the, that's not all. It's not, uh, uh, you know, it's a bit like, you know, just around football matches, an ad that just says Sony actually does do something. Um, but, but there's more. We can do better. We can do better than that. But, but it is, it is true that the sort of minimum floor should be something that at least looks like us. Uh, gets the brand across. Yeah, but we can do better than that.
Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, one last question for me. We had, um.
Speaker C: I'm fixated, I don't know why, about
Speaker A: this idea of a big idea, but partially because of. Of we're in Cannes and all that stuff. And is. Are category entry points the source of or can they be a source of big idea, like trying to find that common language thing?
Speaker C: I don't know. I mean this big idea thing is very, uh, very, uh, sort of post hoc. You know, afterwards people go, oh yeah, it was the big idea. Um, category entry points can certainly be a thing where you look for opportunities.
Speaker A: Mhm.
Speaker C: You know, where you, you just don't come up on that entry point. Maybe not a lot of other brands do too. And that is a super opportunity. Right. You know, that's a cool idea.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker C: Probably spun later onto it that it was a big idea or something. I don't know. Um, I think the idea of that big idea is just something of. Is creativity that resonates with an incredible amount of people. And that's very hard to. I use the example of Frozen amongst Disney's pantheon of princesses. They got a lot of princesses.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: But I bet Elsa, is it from
Speaker B: Frozen is like, wow, uh, my daughter's got it down.
Speaker C: It's interesting, isn't it? So you would have thought that those sort of more targeted, uh, princesses, you know, there's a Scottish one and there's a, uh, Chinese one. There's a Pacific Islands one. Yeah.
Speaker B: Moana, but you know them all.
Speaker C: Brilliant. Excellent.
Speaker B: Look at those DBAs working.
Speaker C: It's so cool when you say it, you know, recognize, which recognizes easier than recall. Um, but it's Elsa frozen. She is just like the other princesses are m. Mere princesses compared to her. And you look at that and go, why? That is the magic of an unexplainable thing of, I think, creativity. Um, Duncan Watts in his Book Everything is Obvious points out that when people explain the success of Harry Potter, they say, ah, ah. Well, you know, kids love a story where the characters get away from their parents and it involves magic. And it's like you're just describing Harry Potter. You're saying the success of Harry Potter is because it's very Harry Pottery. And we do the same for Frozen. Right. And that is the problem. Um, so, you know, we know it when we see it. And, uh, yeah, that is the magic of creativity. It's very. It's impossible. I don't know. It's probably all people out there saying, no, we've got some AI that will be. We'll predict the next Elsa. I think they're wrong.
Speaker B: I think I'm with you on that. Okay, final question here. Recent, uh, grad of your executive how brands grow program, uh, told us it was phenomenal. Really great.
Speaker C: Yeah, it is.
Speaker B: We'd love to kind of get a sense of, like, how has the response been? How happy are you with the program, how it's continuing to evolve. How do you like to share?
Speaker C: It's a product that we developed in house for sponsors. And then we thought, well, what, what if people aren't, you know, they, they're not going to get together, you know, 50 people in house and could we do a public version? And, uh, it has to be different. So we sort of cap it at about 20 people because.
Speaker B: Oh, nice.
Speaker C: Because, um. Yeah. Which is part of the huge benefit. But, but you have to. Because when someone's in the, like, say you got large group of people and they're all work for a bank, you know, someone might go, you know, does that apply for banks? You know, and you can answer one question and you know that all the other people in the room sort of had that question. Now we've got this really diverse crowd. So. So that the question. Way more, way more questions. So, uh, yeah, it's good. It's very transformational. You know, I mean, I think anyone who's done handbrands go live, whether that's inside a company or on the public thing, it's probably the, you know, best trained marketer on the planet. But it's a small program. It's a, it's, it's not niche. It's not niche, but it's a, it's very premium. I mean, the, the demographic is. Everyone in the room is like 20 plus years. And so it was deliberately designed to compete with the London business schools. In Harvard. First one we ran in Boston, we actually had someone from Harvard. Who works in marketing at Harvard. Not a professor, but a marketing Harvard. And she came to the course, we thought, oh, wow, that's a good endorsement, isn't it? And we asked her, will you give us an endorsement? She went, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then their bosses said, no, no, no, no, no, no, not allow.
Speaker A: Um, we'll obviously put links to the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and yourself, um, into the show notes and things. But is there anything else you'd love to just share?
Speaker C: Uh, what's the few? Well, uh, some people ask me, what are we working on? Things. Well, lots of things. But, um, we provide non artificial intelligence for the world. Um, but we are building, uh, AI agents. That won't be. Ginny was saying she wants a Ginny bot. No, it won't be a Ginny bot, but it will be something that. Because all the big corporations could build, building their own AI, you know, for their competitive advantage. And so ours will just be an agent that plugs into it.
Speaker A: Ah.
Speaker C: And makes sure it doesn't hallucinate and do stupid things and make sure it is based on, you know, because we'll be plugging in new research. Yeah, yeah, just I sort of think of it as the sort of laws of physics, you know. So if Boeing were building an AI to help out their engineers design planes, well, we'd be the Newton's laws. One who comes in and goes, don't get. No, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker A: Forget gravity.
Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B: It's still there.
Speaker A: Yeah, I love that.
Speaker C: Did you know that patent offices, offices, you know, every year still get people putting in, um, patents for perpetual motion machines? You know, something where you start and it, you know, this hits that and then that and then that and then it just goes forever. And they reject them. They do actually just reject them. They go, that breaks the law of physics. Right. Uh, you know, energy cannot, it's. Sorry, you're always going to lose some energy. It's not going be perpetual. Uh, you can't pay for this.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker C: Or they could just take their money. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter.
Speaker A: Yeah. I have an idea. I got an idea. And then Claude will say, great idea. It's exactly the right way to think about it. Thanks.
Speaker C: I wonder, I wonder if the laws of. Yeah. You know, the same thing would like look at Marriott Media and go, ah, uh, well, it better be cheap cuz there's not much reach there. Yeah.
Speaker A: What?
Speaker B: I get that.
Speaker C: I'm not getting ready.
Speaker A: Well, thanks so much for joining us. It was great.
Speaker B: This was awesome. It was fantastic.
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