Episode 11 Dom Hawes, Selbey Anderson: B2B Marketing is “looking in the wrong direction”

Speaker A: The Problem with B2B Marketing is a podcast for everyone working in B2B marketing and sales today. In each episode, we interview expert practitioners to explore specific problems each of them has faced, from common issues to emerging challenges. By talking to people who have been there and done it, we aim to share with you clear, pragmatic and actionable insights to inspire you to develop solutions of your own.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to another episode of the problem with B2B marketing. I'm Kevin Sutherland, strategy partner at Voluum. We're a marketing consultancy and studio working for and with business brands. And a big part of what we do is helping B2B brands solve marketing problems, whether that's navigating new opportunities or overcoming internal challenges or making better use of resources. So we talk a lot about problems and more importantly, what we can all do to address them. Hence this podcast. Today I'm joined by Dom Hawes, group Chief Executive Officer at Selby Anderson, to talk about what I think is a mega problem. Selby Anderson is a group of nine creative agencies with about 250 people supporting businesses. According to your LinkedIn profile, to drive revenues, awareness, influence, leads, demand, desire, interest, impact, curiosity, thoughts and purpose. So the whole nine yards. But maybe, Dom, you could give me a perhaps a richer picture mental Note.

Speaker C: Must update LinkedIn. Yeah, no, we've condensed that down to five agencies.

Speaker B: Right, okay.

Speaker C: Yeah, the basic ethos is the same. So, yeah, so I'm Dom Horse, as you say, CEO of, uh, the company with five agencies now. We have modernized somewhat over the last two or three years. We've moved down to more like 165 people. So we're doing the same amount of work but using a lot more technology than we used to do. We are, uh, business marketing specialists. I don't want to tease away the theme of today too much. I'm not a big fan of the B2B, you know, the handle on that. But we're business marketing specialists. We don't restrict ourselves to that. We do do other things. So for example, one of our agencies makes TV ads. Those TV ads are for financial services. And those financial services, ultimate customer is going to be a consumer. So we do do a bit of everything like that. But we were formed with the belief that specialisms are where, uh, people run to, where clients run to, they run to specialists. And to some extent that's been proved. And in other ways, maybe not. We might come on to that a little bit later. I also have a podcast or had a podcast, I should say. We're just in the process of resurrecting it, called Unicorny. So I think we did a, I think it was 112 episodes, 114 episodes. Maybe along similar lines, maybe like we started out talking, wanting to talk about the practice of marketing, and we ended up talking about the problem with marketing and then we ended up talking about how to create value. But it was a great opportunity to sit in the studio with like minds and just try and understand what's going on in the market and where are things moving and how's technology going to impact us. So that has been very formative for me too. You know, we did those 114 interviews over about 18 months. And I have to tell you, uh, I don't need to tell you actually, you'll know this, but creating a podcast, bloody hell, it's hard and it's a labor of love. So I'm quite enjoying the little break at the moment.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: And then we'll see where we go.

Speaker B: It's worth it though, I think. Worth it.

Speaker C: Well, it has been one of the most rewarding things that I've done in the last six or seven years. No doubt.

Speaker B: There used to be a sort of school of thought or belief or. I, uh, certainly people told me this, that if you want to learn about something, you should write about it. Right? And I think that that's still true. We publish, um, a monthly newsletter and in the 18 months of doing that, I know that it has expanded my sort of view and it helps me make connections in my thinking on a day to day basis that wouldn't be there without it. And I think that the act of sitting down and talking to people like this in a sort of semi structured formal way and making the time to do it, that's definitely worth it. And I hope that the people listening to this get the same sort of.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, I, uh. Look, people I know who listen to lots of podcasts do so for that reason. And I still do, by the way. But I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a little bit more judicious maybe about what I listen to now because I'm trying to learn in different directions, but I completely agree with you. And you know, a lot of the things we're going to talk about today, by the way, are my opinions. They're not in no way representative of the agencies that are in the group. In fact, in many ways they might be at odds with the leadership of those agencies. My job is to be a protagonist. I'm not a suit anymore. I Don't work in agency. I don't have to worry about client service, particularly in the way that I did when I was in agency. So I'm, you know. I see. And I think the podcast has maybe given me this. I see. Part of my role is to either ask difficult questions or make annoying statements and then see where we go with it.

Speaker B: Well, in a couple of previous episodes, we've covered what I would broadly describe as, uh, the problem of orthodoxy. Right. And I suspect we're going to be in that kind of territory here today. So I'm glad you mentioned your podcast. I think it's a really good listen. Uh, I would highly recommend it. And as you say, across 100 plus episodes, you've obviously covered a huge amount of topics. But the one. And you did mention it there as well, was. And the thread that I take from it is this idea of marketing's role as a strategic driver of value.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: So perhaps unsurprisingly, given the background that you've described, what we're going to talk about today is possibly the biggest and broadest topic that we discussed in the past year. Now, not to spoil the magic, but when we have a sort of briefing discussion prior to sitting down today, I was struck by the phrase that you used right at the start to describe this, which was that marketing is looking in the wrong direction. And immediately that sort of sparked all sorts of thoughts in my head. But perhaps, as it's your topic, maybe you could set things up in broad terms before we get into the detail around that.

Speaker C: Uh, yeah, I was thinking about this on the way in, so that. That meeting again, without spoiling the magic, I was on a train and I was feeling pretty punchy that day. But, um, look, marketing is definitely. This is why, actually. So the podcast unicorny is why we went on m. The transition, transitional journey that we did. So we started out, I think, wanting to talk about the practice of marketing to be helpful to people. And then we went into, oh, uh, um, my God, marketing's in crisis. What's wrong with marketing? Why is it in crisis? And then we realized that there's absolutely nothing wrong with marketing. Marketing itself is fine. Like, marketing is a discipline. It is something you can go to college and learn. It is a process. There are, uh, we stand on the shoulders of giants who've created methods. It's still happening with Ehrenberg, Bass and others. You know, that. That orthodoxy, which I think we might come back to because I think. I think there's a lazy adoption of that orthodoxy sometimes, which is the problem. But we, for some reason we are very inward looking as a, as a, as a profession and particularly in business to business which by the way doesn't exist. There's no such thing. Business to business is not a market. There is no market called business to business. And this has been one of my beefs. It's an unpopular opinion. But if you go to someone and say what do you do? No one says I'm in business to business. They say I'm in chemicals or I'm in professional services or I'm in this or I'm in that. And there's nothing in common between the job a uh, marketer has to do for a high end chemicals manufacturer than they have to do if they are a small trade supplier, for example of hardware. Other than the method they use is the same. But by the way the method they use, all the orthodoxy that they're inheriting, what they've learned is exactly the same as it is as the guys down at Unilever.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: It's called marketing. And marketing is a discipline about how to create value. It has nothing to do with communication. And I think for me one of the challenges is that over the last, and I think it's a self inflicted wound by the way. I think over the last 20 years everyone's got very excited about the shininess of digital channels and the immediacy of being able to measure it and what's happened. And I think this is a largely in house thing. The agency always reflects what goes on in house. There's been a good empire build going on. So where the people have built big internal departments to do marketing in United Commerce. But the definition of what they do has changed. And I've seen this in a couple of clients that I've been out uh, speaking to where a marketer, a real marketer, trained marketer, has come back into a role and has had to go back around the organization bringing back in the functions that would have been in marketing in the first place but which have disappeared because marketing M was so focused on creating content, for example. So I'm thinking about pricing, I'm thinking about customer relationship management and understanding customer journeys. I'm thinking about understanding what the channel to market is and how marketing can influence that. So I think that we've become obsessed with the community communications part because it's the shiny bit and the easy stuff to look at and that's led us into an even more dangerous area. Right. So you go online now and the problem with social media when it Comes to marketers because we love consuming content as well as creating it. Of course.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Is that everyone's talking about creativity as though it's the thing in its own right. It's like, ah, oh, the purpose of us is to be creative. No it's not.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: No one comes to work and thinking we must buy some more creativity today. They want outcomes, they want results. And the job of a marketer is to be commercial enough to understand how you create that result. Now it may well involve advanced levels of creativity and behavioral science and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: But those are methods and routes to a result. They're not an end in themselves. And I think we just talk ourselves in circles around this stuff. Around, uh, I know there's a big, a big push at the moment and it shouldn't have to happen. It's like those, it's like the posters that you say seeing be kind. Right. Like allegedly we're living these days. I'm ranting by the way now, so this is good. Allegedly we're living in an age where we're more in touch with society and each other and community. But we have posters telling us to be kind. Like when I was a kid, we didn't have posters telling us to be kind, we just were. And now as marketers, we're worrying about whether we should be commercial. For example, there's a big thing about being a commercial marketer, but what's the opposite of a commercial marketer? My argument is you're not a marketer at all. You're either commercial or you're not a marketer. You're not an uncommercial marketer. You're something else. And I think that we talk ourselves into these problems and while we do it, we just look foolish to the rest of the business.

Speaker B: So that sparked all sorts of thoughts and sort of follow up questions. First of all, I recognize everything that you've just described. Right. And I think most people listening to this will at least, even if they don't agree with your view, will at least recognize some of those things as being true. I've worked in environments in creative agencies where some people in the agency took enormous pride in the fact that they were producing work that wasn't hard sell. And you think, wow, you're in the wrong game. Then go and be an artist if you want and good luck with that. But the two really big things that I heard in what you're saying is there's this kind of reductive state of affairs where marketing and the Discipline of product, price, place, promotion and the sort of classic 4Ps has been condensed or reduced to a view where it's all about how you communicate and the creative. But you used to do that. Uh, so that's the one sort of dimension. And the other dimension is what you mentioned right at the start, which is about the trend that sort of ebbs and flows, which is, you know, there was clearly for a long time when the view was you needed specialist knowledge and specialist capability, for instance, and specialist technology that was, you know, it was more economically beneficial to outsource that rather than to in house. It, uh, but obviously advances in technology mean that that's obviously becoming cost effective to run in house again. So you've got those two things. There's the reductive condensing of the discipline, the practice down to comms and content and creative, and this kind of outsource, insource thing. So I said, I, uh, recognize it. I think I broadly agree with what you're saying. But in your experience and in your view, what's behind this?

Speaker C: Why is that? So I think the reductive thing, I think, um, the nature of what people understand to be marketing has changed because marketing is a verb, is largely used as communication for communication.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: I think also within organizations like, you know, learning by inculcation is a thing learning by doing. Like if your marketing department only does PowerPoint websites, all the graphic design or the graphical outputs, yeah, you're teaching people in your organization that that is what marketing is. You know, T shirts and mugs and shit like that. But it's not, of course we know it's not that. But if, if, uh, over time that's what it is and that's what you talk about as being marketing, don't be surprised if the organization thinks that's what marketing is. I think, you know, the other thing is organizations basically get the marketing departments they deserve and therefore fund, Right? So if as an organization you are only going to fund trivial things, don't be surprised if your marketing output and or department is trivial. If you look at the really smart organizations, whether they've brought stuff in house or whether they use agency, actually color doesn't matter because a big theme for me on Unicorny was you judge a success of a, uh, business's marketing by the success of the business, not by the success of the outputs. And we talked very briefly when we last spoke about the cynicism on social media, and I think we might talk about that later. But someone produces a campaign and all the armchair experts in the world who probably have achieved the square root of nothing in their lives, feel that they're entitled to make a comment without any knowledge of the brief, the background, the objectives, what the business is trying to achieve. People look at it and just comment on the creative feeling that that is important and it's not. It just doesn't matter.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So I think one of the reasons that there's been this reduction in the effect of the reduction in the importance of marketing, what marketing is seen as is no one understands what it really is because it's not the there very much anymore. If we talked about communication rather than marketing, which by the way is still as important. I'm not saying it's a lesser skill. It's absolutely the same. It's a same level of skill required. But you know, communication is a field in its own.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So I think one of the, one of the challenges therefore is that if a whole industry talks about marketing when they really mean something else, then who's, who's going to do the marketing, the actual marketing? And I think again, this is a theme that we touched on that uh, I ended up calling them Untitled Marketers, which isn't quite the same as someone basically going rogue and designing a bunch of stuff themselves. That's a completely different thing. An Untitled Marketer, for example, would be someone who doesn't have marketing in their job title, hence Untitled, but is doing marketing day in, day out, pricing or channel or all that kind of stuff. And so what you find in organizations is, or every organization does marketing. If they didn't, they wouldn't sell a product and they wouldn't make profit. The challenge is who's doing it. And you know, going back to where we started about the debate, if we create artificial constructs like a market that's called B2B marketing, for example, don't be surprised if non people who aren't in it get confused by it. And that's what's happened with marketing. People are confused as to what it is and therefore they think it has less value.

Speaker B: So here's a, here's a provocative question for you. Right. And I'm studiously avoiding using the phrase B2B now because I understand your position.

Speaker C: I like business marketing, which is fine. Yes, yes.

Speaker B: Yeah. And we trip over all sorts of things, business brands and uh, business, you know, et cetera. But you know, it's in the title of this pod, so I can't, can't avoid it entirely. But similarly. Right. So I'm going to put a point to you and it's linked to your point about untitled marketers or what have you. And your starting point is marketing as a practice discipline or what have you. I wonder, is marketing even a thing anymore? Should we be actually dismantling that as a concept and talking about something different? I'll give you a very recent analogy. I've got a very good, very old. One of my best friends is now a banking, finance, and now insurance rock star. He is the CTO for one of the biggest insurance companies in the US And I met up with him a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about our various. What we're up to and what have you. Despite the fact that we're in different worlds, we can still overlap often around and increase increasingly learned technology, even though our careers started in very different places. And he was describing what they're doing at the moment. Right. Which is algorithmically, in real time in the customer journey, offering hundreds, if not thousands of different variants of COVID And what he was describing, I was thinking, I mean, that's kind of, to an extent, historically, the role of marketing.

Speaker C: Product marketing.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's product marketing. And yet he's driving that. Yeah. So analogy for context. But, you know, should we be dismantling the concept of marketing?

Speaker C: I think you're right. And I know people. I know people have. We had guests who have. They've deliberately taken marketing out of. Out of the language in their organizations because it's been devalued to the degree that someone at board said, why is marketing coming to a board meeting?

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker C: So I think you're right. Fun enough. Speaking about insurance, I was at a, Like a professional forum, um, where there were 20, I think, 25 CEOs around the table talking about their world and their lives. And one of them happened to be, you know, one of the big insurance platforms. Cars, home, all that kind of stuff. And being a marketer, what we used to call a marketer, old school, interested in, you know, the P's, 4, 6, 7, 9, however many years.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: I'm most interested in price.

Speaker B: Uh-huh.

Speaker C: Generally because it's the most effective lever that you can use to support and. Or drive positioning, but also profit. And so I. You, uh, know. And what I was really interested with this guy is he has a pricing department, and there are 26 people just doing pricing.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so I asked a question, like, do you have a chief marketing officer? And he said, yeah. And I said, does your chief marketing officer have anything to say about price? Not involved in the conversation whatsoever. So I then said to the table, look, I'm really sorry. I know we're here for a different purpose, but I've got 25 CEOs. I want to do a quick straw poll. If you involve your chief marketing officer or your senior marketer in your pricing decisions, would you please put your hand up? And out of the roughly 20. I can't remember the exact number. Out of the roughly 25, about four people put their hands up.

Speaker B: Wow. Okay.

Speaker C: Which tells you what's happened to what used to be that discipline. So I think I agree with you. And by the way, I don't think it matters as long as these things are being done and done well. I think the reason that. And, uh, maybe the world is too complicated these days. You talk about, you know, algorithmic models being created almost on the fly. You know, maybe the world's too complicated to have all of these things under one roof these days. But. But I think they all do work together. And as long as an organization works out how they can work together, that I think that probably works. But if I've, uh, got more of a beef, I mean, so my, my point of view isn't anti agency and, or anti in house or anti discipline, actually. It's just that I think we're focusing on the wrong things. Like, we should be focusing on those metrics that matter, like profit, actually, because our model, our world is changing so quickly anyway, particularly with AI. Now, I stood on stage with my own company two years ago and talked about three big influences that I think we need as an agency group to think about. AI in housing and offshoring. Those are the three big things. Now, all of those things have come to pass to some extent. The interesting thing is that the job is still the same with all of those other influences. The core job is still the same, is identifying how you create a product, how you take it to market, how you price it, how you make profit about it, and then how you build trust or influence to get people to buy it in the first place. That's. That's kind of what we all do. Whether that's done in house or an agency doesn't matter. Whether it's done onshore or offshore doesn't matter. Whether you're using AI to support it or not doesn't matter. The core job is the same. So when you think about moving the practice forwards, and this maybe we'll speak about later, when you think about things like the 955 rule or asset allocation and things like that, these are marginal improvements. There is no radical Rewriting. A couple of the professors have tried to do that, but it's not that difficult to shoot the work down in flames in the real world. This isn't a discipline. What I'm saying is this isn't a discipline that's moving on enormously because the fundamentals of what we do are pretty straightforward.

Speaker B: Well, let's move to that point then. We often talk about the difference between optimization and transformation, and I think that's your marginal kind of improvement. And you've touched on technology as well. AI in particular. I think we're at the point at the moment where it's being applied in a, uh, at best in a way that's about optimizing the way that things currently work. Maybe in your personal view or in your view as group chief exec on that transformational piece. Yeah. As opposed to the optimization piece. I'm not seeing much evidence of that happening out there, and that may be because it's happening in stealth. But what's your view on how we kind of unlock that, whether that's as agency advisors to clients or whether that's in developing propositions within our agencies to then take to market? What's your view on how we get from optimization to transformation?

Speaker C: Well, it's interesting. I mean, I think a subject that a few people have been talking about for a couple of years is how does, how does the emergence of smart LLMs impact a discipline that we've all made good money out of over the years? Content marketing.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: So if you don't need to pull someone to your website anymore, or you can't because by the way, Google isn't transferring, uh, they're answering on page or they're referring, or they're recommending on page as chatgpt or Perplexity or any of these will do. It fundamentally changes quite a lot of our activity. It puts more power, by the way, in the hands of fewer companies, which I don't think is a good thing. But. But if you think about why or uh, what the purpose of transformation is like, why would we want to transform? It's either got to be about effectiveness or efficiency really. We either want to do better things or be able to predict more. I guess let's call it that. Rather than being better because the nature of our work is unpredictable, because there's logical stuff and there's a lot of fuzzy stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Or we want to do what we're already doing but for less, which is the efficiency thing. And I think a lot of people are using platforms already for that. In their daily work, I think. So we've been talking about that a lot internally and on an arbitrary scale of naught to 100 where 100 is perfect, in the words of Azeem Azhar, uh, getting to 70 is trivial. Right. And you know there's a Pareto principle thing here.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So doing the, the first part of whatever it is is trivial and machines are really good at that. So we see nought to 70 as machine LED, curated by humans. 70% and above is human led, supported by machine. So that's kind of the framework we're thinking about at the moment when it comes to this stuff. Now the job of us, if I can put it in those sort of arbitrary terms with revolution or rather than evolution, is to say that line is no longer 70%, that line is 90%. How do we get from 0 to 90 using mainly machines? So internally I think the revolution piece for us is uh, if you like, as opposed to evolution. Evolution for me might be how we get from 70 to 75. Revolution is how we get from 70 to 90. Like whatever happens, machines are now part of our workflow. But how do we get from 0 to 90 using mainly machine? And it's going to change the size of our, it's going to change our organizations. That's why it's going to be disruptive. It means that an agency, rather than being 30 people might be 10 or 8 or 5. So I was really interested to look at a list of companies not in the marketing sector particularly uh, in fact not marketing sector at all but a list of companies who are on the way to unicorn status but have fewer than 20 people working in them. And uh, there are a few where they've properly embraced all of the technology that's out there in an appropriate way for where it is right now. And I could see that being the way that we go right. In agency. I think what's really interesting if I can take a quick pop at the in house teams, is that people look at the marketing sector at the M moment, look at agencies, think oh, they're fat, they're bloated, their margins are too big, they're this, they're that, they are uh, not using AI, you know well enough. They're doing, there's all this criticism levels of agency that they don't apply to the in house teams that they built. So they're building a facsimile of an agency in house and there are even agencies that do that of course. And then they're not applying the same thoughts, standards, everything Else to their in house agency as there are to a real agency. I saw a post on LinkedIn last night where it was a US CMO was saying I've built myself a lean marketing team of 23 people. Uh, what's lean about that?

Speaker B: That's luxury.

Speaker C: Like an in house marketing team of 23. Do the maths. Right, yeah. You by the time you've employed them, given the computers and a desk and holiday and sickness and training and pensions and all of that stuff, your budget is through the roof. So you know, anyway, the point being that it's not just agency that's going to have to be, is going to have to change and the same things will apply to. So I think revolution is in my world. But I'm a nerd, right? I'm a proper nerd about this stuff. The revolution in our world will be led by technology and the innovators that I've seen and um, with the tools and the products that I'm personally building at the moment is in the area of coding. So one of the reasons I got back into this business in the first place was I saw a big similarity in the culture, the mindset and the skill set of marketing people and coders. And if you look at the whole DevOps revolution that happened in the kind of early noughties and beyond, I thought well this is going to happen in marketing.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: There's going to be some kind of. We're going to end up having to not be siloed. We're going to have to work together in the same way that you know, the DevOps world did. And I thought that's what Rev Ops would become. Didn't become. But. But if you look at how people are building technology products now using agentic platforms with natural language prompts, it's not a big leap to think that that's how marketing campaigns will be built. The question then is, and the question that people, I think me and you should be asking is what special knowledge do you need to build into that system in order to be able to have a natural language prompt that gives you something that is faster, cheaper, better, et cetera, when you can do that.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: That's the revolution. I think it's called, I think that Y Combinator, call it Full Stack AI model. So rather than building an AI model and then selling it to a client, we build an AI model and run a whole agency on it.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating, isn't it?

Speaker C: It really is. I've gone a bit off piece with It. But this is what I mean about us having the debates that uh, don't matter. Like we can talk as much as we like on LinkedIn at the moment about creativity or commerciality or you know, should we be running above the line advertising campaigns for B2B and trust and all that kind of stuff, but the huge mammoth in the room is that technology is here that is going to do 90% of what we currently do. So that's the debate that matters.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And, and um. And instead I think, and certainly from what I see there's a slightly different debate that's happening now. You know, and given that we're talking about machines and LLMs and AI and uh, tech stacks and what have you, the counterpoint to that, that has a very, very loud voice, whether that's in LinkedIn or within an office or an organization environment, is clinging to the idea that it's still about humans at the end of the day.

Speaker C: Right. I hope you're going to get here.

Speaker B: And you know there is a. If you don't like B2B then I'm imagining that you really don't like the idea of. So often that's applied again to comms and creativity and content. But I think there are more than one kind of canut ish type person who's sort of, you know, railing against the tide and saying, you know, at the end of the day it still needs human. So look, with that broad kind of setup, talk to me about that.

Speaker C: I love it. Thank you for that. Yeah, it makes me feel physically ill when I hear that human m to human thing. Look, I think again, because it's lazy shorthand. It is really lazy shorthand. What they, I think what people mean when they say that is the way we communicate has to be relatable and you have to give, you have to have purpose in, in. Yeah, sorry. You have to be purposeful in making sure that what you do is understandable. Can uh, get through, you know, the old NLP neuro linguistic programming that you could. You understand the way people assimilate information and you and your, and you're behaving in that way. What people use it to do is to say that you can't use features in your marketing communication anymore, which is bullshit. Like actually sometimes features are really important and sometimes they're not. The other thing that really gets my goat if we're going to rant about it when you talk about that human to human is when people use a phrase like, well, it's important to use emotion in advertising is It, Why, why is it important to use. When you say to use emotion, what do you mean? Like, if you mean it's important to evoke an emotion in the person that you, you're communicating with, that I understand it, but people shorthand that to we must use emotion in advertising. So the problem with all of these shorthands is that the world hears what we're talking about and again thinks we're trivial people. So it's important that we understand at the moment when we communicate, uh, uh, our companies, our products, our uh, value propositions, that people must be able to understand it, they must feel some affinity with it, certainly if it's in our target market. And ideally we want them to feel some kind of ownership of what they've discovered about us. That stuff's important.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: If we do that, we know that we're more m effective in what we do.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: I say for the moment because this is typical of the arrogance of marketers, particularly marketers communicating on LinkedIn. So we're busy working out how we can use AI to multiply the amount of, we put in people's feeds. Right.

Speaker B: At lower cost.

Speaker C: Yeah, at lower cost, all that kind of stuff on the assumption that no one in procurement is working on AI. Like the, the horrible reality is in 10 years time our jobs might just be algorithmic. We might just be teaching our machines to talk to their machines.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Now ultimately, of course, a human will probably make a decision and we will want to influence that human. But to assume that it's, you know, it's human to human, therefore we must ignore everything else is just arrogant.

Speaker B: Yeah. A former colleague of mine is at ey, a guy called David Williams and he's doing a lot of research and exploration in this space. And you know, he's a big brain and this is a reductive kind of summary of it, but he was talking about or you know, imagining a future where you literally have agents talking to agents. Right. And the question is, have you, you know, is your content optimized for what that agent is going to be looking for?

Speaker C: And we're already there. We talked about it very briefly earlier with perplexity in chatgpt. M like, I don't even use Google anymore and I know loads of people don't use Google anymore. I, you know, I, I will use two or three LLMs because I might put the same question into the three.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Or I might put the answer from one into another to get some validation.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Ah, you know, but if I'm looking for product recommendations that's where I go. And like we don't yet know how those algorithms work, where they get their data from. We don't know how reliable they are. But it's a good start.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And that's just the beginning.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So as you say, if it's agent to agent, then how, how do we influence that relationship? Yeah, we don't know that stuff yet.

Speaker B: And related point, there is a subset of human to human which is the, the, the, the view that at the end of the day, you know, people are still people, whether they're, you know, a consumer or in a consumer mindset or they're at work. Now I firmly believe that's not just believe. I mean the, the evidence is that that's wrong. You know, you don't have buying committees or you know, in a consumer sense typically. And they are much less emotional decisions. You know, to your earlier point about emotion in advertising and by the way on that point. Right. As soon as you said it, it made me think a bit. There's a, there's a glut of kind of confirmation bias that is, that is caused by I think research that's been done to prove one point or another.

Speaker C: Well, and this is the thing though, isn't it? Because the people who shout the loudest are often doing so for self serving purposes.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah. And that's the challenge.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: But you know, of course people are human beings that. Well, most people are human beings. There are, there are certain people who turn up to work and have a different Persona. I've met a few. So it's like, hey, you were really nice before you came to work. Why are you such a twat now? But, so there are people who do that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And most, but most people are, you know, again, we have to have a phrase for these. We have to call it bringing your authentic self to work. Like so most, lots, most people I think are themselves at work. They don't put on a Persona. But that doesn't mean that they make decisions in the same way for the company as they do for themselves. And I think that's. So saying they're human and emotion still matters is again, it's kind of lazy shorthand. What we ought to understand if we're going to get into the sophistication of it is why do people behave the way they buy or behave the way they behave. So when they're buying for business.

Speaker A: Huh.

Speaker C: That they don't do for themselves, like. So the business, for example, the business itself doesn't care whether it drives A BMW or an Audi. The individual does.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So there's a bunch of self validation stuff that you care about when you're buying for yourself that you don't care about when you're buying for the business, but you do. Like there's, you know the old phrase of you never get fired for buying IBM. Right. All that kind of thought. There is a security in buying well known brands, which is a really good argument for B2B branding. Oh, I used the phrase that, you know, there is an argument for all of that stuff. But I just think again, my, my rant and my beef is about, is about when we shorthand it, we, we do ourselves a disfavor because other people see the shorthand and think it's just marketing people going off on one again.

Speaker B: Okay, I want to move the conversation on. Sorry.

Speaker C: No, no, no, this is great.

Speaker B: I mean we've covered a lot of the ground that, that I wanted to. And you've gone into some depth about the sort of the relationship between agency and their client organizations, et cetera. I want to focus in on the, whether it's in house or the client organization just for a minute and particularly I want to uh, examine the relationship between the business at large and what marketing is expected to deliver and by extension of that, possibly their agencies. And the reason I say that is we work with, you know, to your earlier point, you know, we work in B2B but we work with law firms, professional services businesses, fintechs, etc. They tend to be kind of knowledge based businesses rather than say chemical or manufacturing or what have you. But there's some technology in there as well. So you know, it is, it's diverse and broad. But there is a common issue that we, that we see and that is clients talking to us with some frustration about um, their boards or their senior management expecting them just to do more.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: You know, and, and believing or perceiving that the, the solution to the problem of lower sales levels or extend, you know, slower sales velocity or a reduction in leads is that we just need to be doing more. Right. Why aren't we doing that event? Why aren't we doing that? You know that report we used to do, etc, etc.

Speaker C: Just to shout louder.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Or talk more. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Whereas actually to your earlier point, if you start with what is it we need to achieve? Uh, and work back from that. Okay, what do we need? Which levers do we need to pull in which order? And not just in a comms or a content sense. So talk to me about that.

Speaker C: Yeah, look, I think it's interesting, isn't it? It's hard to say this to the rest of the business, but they've been asleep at the wheel as well. It's not acceptable to be a senior in finance or operations or whatever department you're in, sitting at a board level and know nothing about marketing. It's not acceptable. Like we beat ourselves up all the time as marketers saying oh, it's unacceptable to be uncommercial or not financial. And I've, and I've said some of that today. In fact, on our podcast I got not quite hate mail, but nearly for, for criticizing marketers who didn't have that stuff and saying they didn't deserve to be a marketer. It's like, hey, we have a hard enough time. You should stand up for the brotherhood or sisterhood or whatever it is. Well, it's just like you're either a marketer or you're not. If you're commercial, you are. It's the same in other sectors. Like why is it acceptable for a CFO to be a CFO of an organization and huh, know nothing about marketing to the degree that they say we need more of it.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Without knowing what it is. And you know, the, the reality is sensible businesses, successful businesses, are very much objective oriented. They start where they want to be and they work backwards from there. To think you can do it the other way around is, well, it's a very quick way to lose your cmo.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Because no sensible CMO will stay in an organization like that. But I mean there is, I think, you know, there's a wider thing though that it's easy to, it's easier to produce content. It's very easy to produce content. Now you can self publish, you can build as many websites as you like, you can make movies, you can do all this stuff at very low cost. Of course it doesn't mean it's good or valid or worthwhile. And I think the problem, the problem with the. Sometimes the rest of businesses, they see that you can do this stuff in the belief that the more you speak, the more people will listen. And that's almost invariably the opposite.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Like the most powerful voice in the room is often the one that says the least. And which. I've just been doing that of course. But, but if you, but if you're thinking about, if you're thinking about it from a business point of view and they were thinking about trying to influence people to make decisions, particularly big decisions, like if you're Talking about, as you were saying, financial services, uh, or professional services, where the commit is pretty large and where you're probably going to have a buying team and you think about the process they're going to need to go through. Like noise is not important in that, like well targeted, well structured communication tailored to the needs of each of the individuals because you understand them is really important. But just doing more blah is not effective. Now of course that flies in the face of some of the orthodoxy you mentioned earlier that is out there. So we know that there's recency bias and mere exposure and all these other effects that can help influence people. And if you take the work of Ehrenberg Bass and market based asset theory, two big important aspects of that, there's mental availability and distribution. And if you're flogging Mars bars or Sprite or deodorant, I would agree with you that those are really important. If you are selling commercial insurance to a 15,000 strong manufacturing business. While mental availability is important, it's not everything. And so just speaking more isn't going to help. You have to be able to address the individual concerns of the buying team, which will be the FO and all the various other people in the room. So I think, and uh, this is a challenge. I mean the challenge, as you say for marketers is getting back to the original question is how do I get them to take what I do more seriously? Because they're just telling me I need to do more with less. Yeah, well, uh, they probably need to do less, I think is the answer. It's not, it's an unpopular thing to go back to the board and say instead of doing more, why don't we do less but make it more meaningful.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: With the same budget, like why don't we concentrate our assets in an area that we think is going to be more effective? And by the way, I'm the professional in this area, trust me to deliver it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: It's a hard message to deliver though.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, there are two schools of thought. One is, you know, the, the high volume, high frequency school of thought that says that if you're there and if you're ever present and if you're visible, then um, when somebody, when they're, they're in that 5%.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: In market, the work that you, you've done 95% of the time means that they at least remember you or what have you.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: The other view is, you know, to use the, the Bass vocabulary, the other, the other word or the other concept, they focus on a Lot is obviously distinctiveness.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And actually doing less. But focusing on what makes you distinctive is obviously another strategic route to achieve the same.

Speaker C: Yes. Being distinctive is. Yeah, I think. Well, and we're into the realms of brands and business brands. Yeah, I think that is really important. Let's talk 955 for a m. Moment. Mhm. Because I've got an issue with 95.

Speaker B: Another orthodoxy. Right.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: So the concept of 95.5that you know, only 5% of your market is actively in market at any one time, I properly get. But if you go and you look at the industries that were used in that research in the long and short of it and in the, in, in a lot of the Ehrenberg bas work things like banks or financial services products or whatever and then consumer goods. Fmcg.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Those particular industries have particular characteristics that are unique to them and are well known. So current account banking, for example. Bank. Bank current accounts. So I used to do a lot of work supporting management consultant that provided work to them. And then was a long time ago showing my age. But it was the mid-90s in the banking world. In consumer banking, retail banking, they had a point system, current account, one point personal loan, one point credit card, however many points. And there was a received wisdom in those banks that if you reached a certain number of points, your customer was loyal and you had them. But we knew that it was, you know, people find churning banks really hard. We know that. So I don't understand without going into all the detail why banking or retail banking is a good industry to use to try and prove a, uh, point about in market or not in market. Because virtually no one is in market for a bank account. It's a, it's a thing. It's like water. You turn a tap on, there it is. No one is in the market for a new water company right now. No one.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: You know, fmcg, I am not in the market for any impulse or distress purchase by nature. That's why they're called impulse or distress.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: But if I walk down the aisle and I see a Snickers and I think, oh, I might have one of those, I might be in market for that 5% B2B I think. Or B2B business marketing.

Speaker B: Sorry.

Speaker C: B2B is different. It is different. And what is in market and what is not in market. So if you are, if you're in, if you're in finance, in enterprise, what's the difference between m being in market for a new financial platform and not in Market for a financial platform. Like you're constantly looking and surveilling. You're looking at NetSuite, Net, SAP and you know all the big providers will be on your list and you will be monitoring them all the time, I would expect. Like uh, you know, we're in marketing services. Is there a day when we don't think about how technology is coming on or what are the new platforms? And uh, you know, I hear about Clay and Reply IO and all these, all these new products. Now am I in market for it? I don't know. And so I don't understand what the definition is or the distinction is with someone being in market or not in market. Because I'm looking at this shit all the time. It's what I do for a living.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So that's, I find, So I find 95.5 a little bit unhelpful there. And I think what it is, it's a useful tool to be able to go to a board to justify brand marketing. I, we're going to market to people without the expectation that what we do here will lead to a sale directly. Yes, that's the conversation that we're having. But by, but by again by changing the language and not saying what it is, I think we're doing ourselves a disservice.

Speaker B: I think you're right. And on that last point about using it as a crutch or a justification or what have you, I mean look, the 955 concept, even if you don't buy into the numbers, you're right. It is a justification for maintaining investment in brand alongside and in the, the right combination with more demand driving kind of activities. And I, I do to be fair to the, the exponents of those numbers and the people that use it in practice, I guess it's almost like a necessity. Right. You know, or, or something that people used to say, look, I'm not making this up. Right. You know, here's why we need to be doing it.

Speaker C: So I agree, look, and I'm not uh, it's easy for me to be dismissive about, about it uh, while we're having a conversation. You know, Pareto, the Pareto principle is exactly the same. The 80, 20 rule. It's never 80 and it's never 20.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Everyone goes, oh, it's amazing when you do this thing. It's always 1820. In my experience it virtually never is. Yeah, but, but it, but it, what the principle is that you can get. It's like my 70 thing earlier. Uh, yes, you can get most of the way. You can get to a uh, to a very high level with very little effort. And I think So, I think 95.5 is really useful for that. To say that not every or not all the money that we spend needs to be on direct response. Like to say, no Sherlock, stuff like if nobody knows who we are, we will not have any customers. Yes, you know, that's, you know, and if people, if people don't think we have a good reputation, they will not buy from us. Yeah, that's plain language I think. But so 95.5 as a rule is good I think to try and help people understand that you probably want to spend more money on building reputation, trust, awareness, all that kind of stuff than you do on trying to close um, deals at the end, particularly in high ticket sale items where you know, if you're into account based marketing and that kind of stuff, you know, you may be, you may be very focused on one to one or one to few.

Speaker B: So again, moving things on. We've spoken a lot about what's wrong. We've spoken about the factors or the reasons that have led us here. Uh, a lot of what we've focused on has been uh, broadly internally driven problems. Whether that's people level or whether that's about how roles are defined or what have you, whether that's how marketing engages with the board or the rest of the board. You uh, know the, the role of external agencies. But it's, it's largely been an internal practice, discipline led kind of view of things. I want to just briefly look externally. You know, we're the, where we're at is the product of many things.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker B: But one is obviously the, we find ourselves in right now, you know, on our um, global economic level, on a uh, domestic or international level, etc. Now I'm not asking you to tell us what's going to happen next, although you might have a view on that. But in the current market situation it's driving lots of behaviors, things are stopping, things are being postponed, there's a reduction in expenses, there's longer timelines for everything. There's rising costs. You know, it's a difficult business environment, perhaps the most difficult that I can remember. So in this situation what can marketing do or what should marketing do? And is this, do you think this is a short term issue or are we facing, as we were talking about earlier on a sort of a point of revolution?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean nice link by the way, because they're all connected these things. They are all connected yes, I'm aware that I've been ranting and um, people may be throwing stuff at their screen at this stage or sending me hate mail. My thing isn't personal with anyone. And I think marketers are often the brightest people in the room. I just don't think they often have the voice or the respect of peers who should know better. And I think a lot of the things that I've been ranting about are the result of false prophets who speak very loud. I think at its heart, the process of marketing is fairly straightforward and we are in this really weird time at the moment where it's never been more uncertain. And I think we're going to be here for three to four years to the degree that with my board, we've completely changed our strategy, we've completely changed our structure. We are looking at a new agency model. We're doing all these things because we think where we are right now, we're going to have to get used to surviving in this environment where as you say, things are delayed. And of course if you're selling a perishable asset such as time, a delay is as good as a cancellation. Yeah, uh, yeah, you can't replace that time. So we have to get used to it. So I think the best thing we can do is ignore the false profits, try not to do shorthand or shortcuts. I think we need to simplify actually and find a way of communicating with our uh, businesses, whether the business be our agency friends or whether it be our clients or if you're in house, colleagues in other departments. I think we need to find a way of simplifying what it is we do and how we're going to drive value either for ourselves, for our clients or for our businesses and seeking some consensus on what is worth backing and what is not. Because at the end of the day the job of any C suite person is, uh, you know, if you boil it down it becomes about resource allocation. How are we going to allocate, you know, here's my resource, how am I going to allocate it to drive our uh, best results for the business? And the same in marketing. But here's a bunch of money, how are we going to deploy it, what are we going to do with that money to help drive the best outcome for my business? And I think if we can simplify, and this might be an over simplistic answer while we're talking about simplifying but like there's so much shit out there, you know, online and you know, in some of the received orthodoxies that I think if we simplify and just focus on, um, what, what really matters, I think we might, I think we might find a way of surviving. And invariably that means doing less. By the way, you can't do more with less. It's not possible. We're not alchemists, so I think we need to do fewer things, make sure that they're more meaningful.

Speaker B: I'm hearing in what you're saying that it's reminding me of that phrase about never waste the opportunity presented by a good crisis.

Speaker C: Uh, well, yeah, like an AI is a really good example of that. Now it's interesting that a year ago a lot of the debate was, oh, you shouldn't use LLMs in any of your work because it hallucinates and it does all that. No one's saying that anymore. Yeah, like no one is saying that. Like, I don't know anyone who I work with that doesn't have at least one of them open all day, every day. Yeah, all day, every day. Who? You know, it's a cliche, but it's physically true. I could not do my job if I didn't have an LLM anymore. I just have too much work to get through now. I'm judicious in what I use it for, based on my 070 and 70 to 100. Yes framework, if you like. And most of the stuff I'm using it for is 0 70, but that's kind of how I think we all need to think. It's like simplified distill. Simplified distill and, and, and work out. Is it, is it sensible to have a lean department of 23 people? Not really. Like, if you can. If lovable, you know.dev if lovable. That tech platform can build a near unicorn business with 15 people. A really good question marketers could ask themselves now is, what can I achieve for my business with 3, 4, 5, 6? How would I need to restructure how we do the work that we do and what we do in order to be able to do that?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And maybe there's just a load of stuff we just don't do anymore.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Or like a good example. I'll give you a really good example. So unicorny, my podcast, our podcast used to be, although it wasn't overtly branded as an agency podcast, it was a vessel of the agency. Yeah, that went when we changed strategy. That's why it's gone on hold. It's like we're changing strategy. We're not going to go down this route Anymore. But unicorn is something of value. So my question now is, okay, how can I deliver benefit to my organization without it costing the organization anything and get it up and running without it taking all of my evenings and weekends? Well, what we're doing, as you know, because I've spoken to you about it, is we're going to try and community source it. So, like, can we make this podcast a community asset to bring other people in who have interesting things to say or who are interested in help produce it so that the thing itself lives on? And I still have a way of having a voice. Uh, now my voice might be one in five episodes, but I still have a voice, but it's not costing me a thing. So I think it may be a simple example of that, but there's so much that we can do with very little m. Maybe that's what we should be doing right now.

Speaker B: Indeed, there's a very clear theme coming through here about doing less, doing better, et cetera. And I think there's a lot of organizations that could benefit from that kind of shift. Shift in. In mindset and behavior. Having given me recognition for a really good link a few moments ago, I've just realized that there's something that we didn't talk about before.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: That I really don't want to finish without discussing, and that is, and you touched on it briefly, is the topic of metrics and measurement. And you know, one of my bugbears is the use of the freeze roi. Right. Because again, it's reductive and it ignores the complexity and the, and the, the greyness of return rather than the black and white of the. The financials. Talk to me about that, uh, in the context of the conversation.

Speaker C: Well, it's been one of my big hobby horses as well. That ROI phrase, I think I've learned. I mean, I think I learned to live with it. This is symptomatic of something else. That part of the marketing. I was going to say industry, but that community is that we must learn to speak other people's languages in order to justify what we do. And actually, I don't believe that. I don't believe that because you can't speak like a cfo. A CFO isn't going to take you seriously because if you wanted to be a cfo, you should have become an accountant. Right? You are. Your business relies on you for other things. And not insignificant thing is the ability to create and wield influence which you can't measure. So look, it's what we know about brand and what we know about influence is that they're sales multipliers. Uh, uh, that's kind of the shorthand. What does that mean? I don't know. Maybe it's not even possible to make a sale unless you have a brand or influence. Like you might make some, you might find some desperate people. But at what price?

Speaker B: Like a commoditized price, probably.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So it's a really difficult area. Uh, you know, I'm pro measurement actually, funny enough, people think I'm anti measurement, but I'm very pro measurement. I'm just, I'm struggling to understand. There's no, sorry, there's no one size fits all. I guess like econometric modeling doesn't. It's very expensive, it's very imprecise. Does it solve a problem? No. So I think. But each business needs to understand what its own measures of success are. The best way of measuring, in my opinion, marketing effectiveness is through things like sales margin, market share, their business level metrics, not marketing level metrics. You could obsess about what marketing's contribution is to that success. You could always switch it off completely and see what happens. I suppose, yeah. And you won't notice. Like you won't notice for the first six months you think, hey, marketing doesn't matter, we switched it off and no one went away. But in two years, when you're talking to an administrator because you haven't got a business anymore, you think, oh, if only I realized that, you know, it did actually have a place. Like marketing is part of the process. It is a process of taking an innovation or an identified customer need and working all the shit out in between. Now the communication part, how do you measure the effectiveness of your communication? Is maybe slightly easier to do. Not in all cases, but maybe whether you're creating phony metrics like engagement or whatever, those are all proxies for other things. So I think each business needs to work out what's important to it. So we have one agency, for example, who finds the size of their LinkedIn community important to them. They've managed to work out a correlation between their engagement on LinkedIn.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And, ah, their financial success. It's not causation. There's no direct link. If it's a correlation good enough for me, I don't care. But if they tell me that we're trying to increase our engagement on LinkedIn and we think it's going to affect our business, that's good enough for me. And I think, uh, maybe CMOs can help themselves by how they present that kind of stuff and building. Ultimately we have to have the guts to say, look, you can't measure everything. You just can't. You can't.

Speaker B: You're right though. The real acid test is stop doing it and see what happens. The only example I think you know, and obviously you're not going to do that. Ah, at large. Now, I won't remember the source of this. I will find it and I'll put it in the show notes. But it's specifically to do with investment in kind of communities. And there I think it's a case of a technology company that had a customer community that they were funding and what have you, redline through that and the business found that their cost to service their clients increased and their customer acquisition cost increased. So you have a very kind of black and white example there. But of course it's not practically possible.

Speaker C: It's not practical. No, because yeah, I think, look, I think measurement's important in that we all need to know that we're doing a good job.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: As individuals we need validation that we are worthwhile and I think the business needs to understand that it's investing in the right areas. Not all of that needs to be measurable, I don't think. I just think. I think businesses need to get comfortable with the fact you can't measure everything. You just can't.

Speaker B: Okay, well I'm going to draw things to uh, uh, a close with. Thanks for a really wide ranging conversation. I think you've been very generous both with your opinions and your experience. Having said that, there's some potentially quite big questions to close on. Well, it's the classic, it's the sort of the two sided thing given everything that we've spoken about here. If you could get every marketer uh, to stop doing one thing that they're currently doing, what would that be?

Speaker C: LinkedIn pylons.

Speaker B: Go on.

Speaker C: So when a brand or a company comes out with a campaign or a brief or sorry, a campaign or an execution, let's call it the armchair experts, come out and do a pylon. Now in the case, if you're an invoke agency, you can create some average work and all the sycophants will come out and talk about how brilliant it is because you haven't done something or you have done something, it's like, oh, they're so brave, they're so brave. If you are out of vogue and I'm thinking about the Land Rover thing for example, ah, everyone in the world becomes an expert on it instantly. It's like really like a. No one cares. Really. No one cares. This is just that little echo chamber where we look like inward looking, obsessive intellectual midgets and we're not as a profession. We have really great brains, creative, inventive, insightful brains and I just think we're better than that.

Speaker B: Very, very insightful. I'm also laughing because when you said it, and it's maybe because on the way in I was reading about reform and their view on uh, net zero in the green economy and their policy to ban pylons. I was thinking what's a LinkedIn pylon?

Speaker C: I didn't realize that.

Speaker B: It makes a lot more sense to me. Look, and the follow up question, inevitably, and I think you've suggested many examples here, but what's the one thing that everybody needs to start doing?

Speaker C: Look, it's about AI. Ah, it really is. If it's not already your best friend, if you're not already thinking about how you can be cannibalizing your own business model, someone else is.

Speaker B: So it's the 30%, not the 70%. 70% stable state.

Speaker C: Think about the 30%.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: Like so I'm spending most of my time now when I'm not doing the things I have to do, trying to put the like work out. What are the pieces that I would need to put in place to make my whole business model redundant.

Speaker B: Great. Final thing, we always ask everyone, you know, what problem should we discuss next or find somebody to answer? Oh blimey, is it related to that 30%?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think. Well, it wasn't going to be because I thought you might ask this because obviously I listened to your previous work and I was going to talk about something slightly different but I think if you could find an expert in agentic systems.

Speaker B: Uh-huh.

Speaker C: Who knows what's being developed now? Who's got visibility of what's being developed right now. I think that would be really interesting. Not so. A lot of the systems that we're seeing at the moment are to do a thing, a gen this, that. But if you're, if you're taking the Y combinator view of uh, looking at full stack AI, that is, what is the AI company that's going to replace everything that we currently have agency in house, whatever that department is, if you've got some with a view on that, that would be really interesting.

Speaker B: Great Dom, thanks for your time, really appreciate it and I really enjoyed it.

Speaker C: So did I. It's not going to win me many friends, but we had a good time. Thanks again.