Liam Loan-Lack is Head of Marketing APAC & Canada at CMC Markets. He is also a Non-Executive Director, B2B/B2C Growth Consultant, Marketing Effectiveness Specialist and Marketing Academy Alumnus.
A lawyer by training, Liam has multidimensional experience working in agencies and as a marketer, which has given him a relatively unique perspective on the many challenges facing marketers today.
He shares his perspective on a range of marketing and business challenges, from the approach to marketing structures to what is required to achieve double-digit growth. It is a wide-ranging conversation that demonstrates the possibilities when you embrace the complexity of the situation and make decisions informed by data but based on instinct.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.
You’ve got to be careful because it’s easy to be seduced by the creativity. And I take it a step further, it’s easy to think that creativity will save you and your business problems.
Transcription:
Darren:
Let’s go. Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder, and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management consultancy. And welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
Now, in my regular industry column, Woolley Marketing, now once a month in Media Week Australia, I tackle the many false dichotomies that the marketing and advertising industry seem to fall for, be it brand versus tactics, or data versus intuition, or any number of them.
Well, my guest today is a marketer who, rather than simply falling for these fake dilemmas, appears to embrace the complexity of marketing in business, to find ways to successfully navigate the brands and organizations through this uncertainty.
Please welcome to Managing Marketing, Liam Loan Lack head of marketing, APAC and Canada at CMC Markets, a non-executive director, a B2B and B2C growth consultant, a marketing effective specialist, and a marketing academy alumnus.
Oh my God, what a list. Please welcome, Liam. Liam, how do you have time to have a life when you are so many things to so many people?
Liam:
So, thank you for having me, Darren, firstly. And second thing, I’m going to be clearly changing my LinkedIn title after you’ve read it out. And look what I would say reminds me of an anecdote or rather a post that Mark Ritson said about people who have long titles in their LinkedIn profiles. So, I’ll let everyone have a google about that.
But to answer the question directly, you make time for what’s important and in particular I’m really passionate about our industry. I always have been. And so, all those things that you’ve listed off are things that I genuinely believe I am.
But also, I’m really passionate about what we do as a marketing business. And in particular the non-executive director ship. It has been a great growth experience for me in the last 12 months. Getting to grips with what boards think about marketing and the way business and marketing intersect has been a fascinating area of late in particular.
Darren:
It’s interesting because I think that the more rounded you become in business, the better your perspective and application of marketing disciplines. Don’t you agree?
Liam:
I couldn’t agree more. And I think that the complexity point, which in your very kind introduction, I see that quite differently now. If you would have this conversation with me, when I moved from agency into client-side and had my L plates on client-side, I would’ve thought about the complexity of business quite differently and the role of marketing.
And so, in specific terms, what I mean, when I was in agency, and of course I enjoyed my current agency and believe in the value of agencies, but that aside, I saw a lot of effort, sweat, tears into building really quite complex responses to client briefs and talking about the data, the targeting and all those things that there is a role for in marketing.
However, three years later, client side, I now realize that the more senior you get and the more board exposure or just sea level exposure you get, it’s actually no, tell it be straight, tell it be simple. It doesn’t need to have a complex solution. And there’s an elegance in the simplicity of what you want to respond to.
And if I could go back to the agency, it would be to cut the deck by 70%, talk about it in 60 seconds or put it up on a whiteboard. And I think I’ve seen that happen at board-level conversations. It’s the value of the conversation, not the value of the pitch deck, which is a bigger realization than I’ve probably anticipated.
Darren:
Look, and that’s a great insight because it’s certainly something that I noticed, going from working in agencies to starting my own business, the level of complexity, all of the other things that a business is involved in other than marketing. Right?
Liam:
Yes.
Darren:
And that these are the things that day to day consume a huge amount of time. I was interested recently, there was an article that they interviewed some senior marketers about how much of their time would be taken up considering media issues.
Now we’re not talking about marketing issues, just media. And on average it was the old 10%. Now, I’m sure there was no actual calculation of that. It seemed to be one of those gut instincts, but I’d be very, very surprised if a very senior marketer would even have 10% of their time. Let’s think about that. That’s half a day a week.
Liam:
Well, if you are a very senior marketer, you should be spending your time managing your fellow executives and that should be the primary part of your time. And depending on whether you’ve got a media agency or not, or in-house, that percentage may flex rather, and we’ll talk about in housing later, I’m sure. Because there’s always a big conversation about that bit in particular, I’ve noticed in the last couple of months and years.
But on the 10% point and paid media in particular, I do think that many clients don’t have a good understanding of media. I would say that I think clients tend to gravitate more to creative.
And then you also have to think everyone has an opinion on marketing. It’s a very strange discipline. It’s like the analogy I use, everyone will have an opinion on an IT system. Very few people will then go, “Oh, I can do that better. I can go and implement that better.”
Darren:
You’re talking to an ex-copywriter. I mean, everyone can write.
Liam:
Yeah, everyone, can write that. That doesn’t mean I can charge you a thousand dollars in that article. And so, I think that’s a very unique thing that senior marketers have to sometimes get over. And even very big businesses. And the exposure I’ve had in the last couple of years after leaving the agency the, everyone has very strong opinions and very strongly held on marketing.
But I see the beauty and the opportunity in that, because marketing is the one thing in a business is the sexy showbiz part of the business. And people understand inherently the value of it, and therefore, I see it as great.
They see the importance and they want an opinion because they see the value if we get it right. So, I choose to see the good in that and the opportunity, not the, everyone’s got an opinion. It’s so hard. I see the opportunity in it.
Darren:
Yeah. Look, I’m really excited about what you said about marketers are inclined to be attracted to the creative. It explains one of the behaviors that we’ve noticed with pitching, in that marketers are very keen to go to a creative pitch, but they’re not as keen to go to a media pitch.
And I’ve always thought it’s because the creative pitch is show and tell, and there’s some glamor and some visual stimulation.
Whereas media pitching will often require you to become a deeper expert, perhaps beyond your comfort level to be able to separate media agencies offerings from each other. And I say that because I’ve always said media’s like the ancient game of GO, the rules are very simple, but it can take a lifetime to actually master it.
Liam:
Yes. And I think this is really interesting. The trend that I think is getting more executives and more business leaders tuned into the value of media though, is the rise of retail media and owned media.
So, everyone that’s well documented, the explosion of interest there. And so, I think many businesses now going, “Oh, is there an opportunity for us to do something like this and leverage our existing assets?” CommBank doing that. And that’s been documented in Trade Press very recently, for example.
Darren:
And ANZ. That group Sonder that have gone into ANZ and found 600 million impression points existing within the ANZ infrastructure—everything from emails to branches to ATM checks.
Liam:
Not bad. Six mil times, $20 CPM, you can work out the maths on that. And so, I think I may provoke more conversations about media versus creative, but I do tend to agree the creative is the easy lever to pitch and pull. Media is less understood.
But in my business and the business I work in at CMC we are ultimately a financial services business. And we understand the value of pricing and an instrument. And the stock market is inherently an intangible asset. Just like media, you’re renting a space at the end of the day.
And so, the pricing of that and the value we can get from that, it’s an easy conversation internally when you are in a business like a stock working business or a leveraged trading business like mine, because it’s a very similar economic model in terms of demand, supply market speculation, all the other things.
So, there is heightened awareness at CMC. And of course, given my media background, I definitely have gotten more involved than I probably should, but that’s because I care. It’s a big part of our investment, and we’re setting up the foundations for our future success.
Darren:
There is a big difference, though, between the stock market and media in that while the stock market, you’ll see results, you can actually track the trends, your media investment may not necessarily be readily apparent as to the true value of that.
Liam:
Information asymmetries because it’s very hard to understand how much advertisers are spending.
Darren:
But then you do get the inclined behavior of then going and trying to get down to the last click attribution, trying to find cause and effect, which then sees too many marketers putting all their money at the bottom of the “funnel.” Because somehow that makes them feel more certain in a world that is uncertain.
Liam:
Agree. And on that point in particular, so I think coming back to your introduction, the thing that I’ve observed is in agency, I speak all the time about brand versus activation and those splits. At the end of the day, every business has a 12-month reporting cycle. We’ve got to accept the fact that marketing has to deliver, broadly speaking, in that 12 months.
How you cut up that cake is up to marketing, but the business wants this delivery, this number, this target, whatever, the mix, they don’t care. And that’s cool, but, so as a marketeer, you should go, great, I just need to invest to get this outcome, the split I need to decide.
And a few people have talked about this, there is a lot of science behind it, but also at the end of the day, it’s what do you think’s right. What do your creative support, and you’ve just got to go sometimes with a gut feel.
And I think at CMC, our recent example, we do a lot of what I would call brand activation campaigns. It’s like a messy mélange of the both. And that’s fine because in certain, some of our markets, we don’t have the luxury of big budgets to carve out that. And that’s totally fine.
I think we sometimes get paralyzed with there isn’t any rules. Then we get some research which shows these are all the rules, so we’ve got to follow them. And then we all get secretly a bit upset and a bit wounded because we realize that we’re not close to those best practice and those rules.
And so, it can be a bit disempowering, but the reality is that just acknowledge the best practice and take the bits which work for you, and you just need to deliver in that 12 month timeframe is the cold reality of it.
Yes, there’s a broader conversation to have about the impact in multiple years. The ongoing brand value. Yes, that’s all really good conversations to have. But the whole bottom of the funnel, top of the funnel, mid funnel argument, I think I’ve learned it only goes so far.
And certainly, at the senior level, beyond demand planning in performance channels, which is valid, everything else, no one really has the appetite to have. That’s just a marketing sort of out, is the-
Darren:
Yeah. That’s another level of complexity that’s yeah, I’m really interested in the result, not how you get there. It’s a bit like I say to people, you don’t go to a restaurant and have a meal and then ask, how did you put it together?
Liam:
Well, yes.
Darren:
You want the meal; I want the outcome.
Liam:
You may want a sizzle, it depends on what restaurant, maybe we go to a different restaurant. The main meal come over and go, oh, this is how we prepared it and all the rest of it. But after a while you’re like, I’m really hungry. Could you — the food out.
Darren:
I’m not going to do it myself. So, you don’t have to train me on how to do it.
Liam:
Correct, exactly.
Darren:
What you were talking about there is very similar to all of the theories around complexity theory. Which is that a complex ecosystem, a complex operating market and markets, anything with human beings is complex.
Liam:
Unfortunately.
Darren:
But what they say is that there is no way of knowing best practice because whatever you do, there’ll be either no response, a negative response, or a positive response. And they say in complexity theory, just keep testing into market. And if you get something that gives you the positive response you want, do more of it until it stops working.
And I think it’s a really interesting because we get a lot in marketing about people talking about test and learn, but it becomes really hard as a marketer to put aside a budget to actually test and learn, doesn’t it?
Liam:
Oh, yes. And I wish people could see my face. You’ve triggered me a little on test and learn because I think many marketers use that phrase a lot, perhaps excessively would be my humble opinion. But we rarely construct tests which are ever not even close to scientific. And so, the-
Darren:
Or experimental.
Liam:
Yes.
Darren:
A true experiment.
Liam:
I have conversations still, “Oh, we’re going to A, B test this.” I’m like, “Why?”
Darren:
What are we testing and why?
Liam:
Yeah. But also, the cost benefit of, okay, so we’ve got to create another creative asset. Okay, cool. So, we do that. Oh, good. So, do we really think the cost and effort involved in creating another asset is even going to be even proportionately worth that in terms of the uplift? Probably not. And are we running it for longer? Is it going to be a sufficient sample? Is it repeatable and replicable?
And so, I think, it is also because marketing at the macro level, why are we seeing these behaviors? So, we’re seeing these behaviors because marketing has a bit of an anxiety or I would suppose a complex I would call it, around its value and seat at the table. And we want to inject scientific laws into what we do.
And there’s been some really interesting commentary by well, lots of commentary in Trade Press, all the great work that the Annenberg Bass Institute do. And it’s amazing work.
But then lots of other people go, look, not everything is scientific, it’s still messy. But I think the knee jerk reaction is test and learn everything. Everything’s data led, everything’s experiment.
But we all know how ludicrous that sounds because you need to have a control group, and you need to have the majority of your investment in what you know works now, to your point, like keep getting a positive result, until you don’t.
Darren:
It’s where you get that 70/20/10 or-
Liam:
The Coke model in particular.
Darren:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The different versions of it where 70% goes into what you know. But then you need to have the 10% of trying things that you would not necessarily consider.
Liam:
So, that’s interesting because for some executives, only 70% in what you know, is too low as well. I’ve experienced essentially, we’re saying 30%, were unsure whether there’s going to be a return. That’s really what you’re saying.
And so, you definitely have to have an experimentation layer in your plans. My practical advice is rather than thinking about the whole budget in 70/20/10, pick a channel and pick tactics within channels that are potentially very different to how you would normally act and approach it that way.
But here’s the other thing. Most businesses want double-digit growth. They do. And whether they get that or not is neither here nor there. But if you want double-digit growth, you have to take a risk.
And so, sometimes you go, actually, this year, this quarter, we are changing big, big change of creative, big change of distribution, big change of pricing. And if you really want those step change growth percentages, those double-digit growth percentages, that’s not experimentation. That’s just taking a calculated business risk.
And many marketers, I don’t think take those risks enough because of various reasons. And the way it practically manifests, I would think most often is in the change of creative approach, change of brand campaign, change of everything that’s normally the most risky thing a marketer does. But then that has a whole heap of issues around time to payback and all the other well-documented.
Darren:
Well, because there’s very few advertising agencies or advertising people would say, you’re going to get a return on investment within that 12-month period that you’re talking about. There’s annual reporting, quarterly reporting.
Liam:
It’s the nature of it.
Darren:
Yeah. It makes it very difficult. Just on that point, one of my favorite things was I was talking to a CFO about why won’t they allow lifetime value of customer as a reporting thing? And he said, “You’ve got to understand, Darren, on the last day of the financial year, all of our customers die effectively from the financial point of view. They just die. And then the next day they’re resurrected, and we start again.” And I went, “That is such a macabre view of literally millions of people. But okay, I understand.”
Liam:
Well, yeah. What a fascinating conversation.
Darren:
Was, it was amazing.
Liam:
The grim reaper of CFOs.
Darren:
When he draws that line in the calendar, and from that point, everything that happened before, all those people are gone.
Liam:
Dead, dead.
Darren:
Dead to me.
Liam:
Yeah. Absolutely. And look, I think on that point, what I’ve noticed is the rise of conversations around product-led growth have been really interesting in the last year and a half, certainly, and normally relevant to the SaaS B2B model, where businesses are going, well, look, marketing and sales are important levers. They’re damn expensive levers, but guess what? Growth is expensive. So, there’s no growth hack out of that. It’s expensive. But product-led growth where-
Darren:
And particularly at scale.
Liam:
Correct, right.
Darren:
It’s easy to do a growth hack on a very small part of the market. And then when you try and scale it, it’s nowhere near the results that you got. And that’s a sampling problem.
Liam:
Absolutely. And it’s like a small base and big percentages, like, oh, 500% growth. On what base? It’s a similar kind of narrative.
But product-led growth for me and that CFO comment is interesting because I think what I’m observing now is more people going, actually, how is our product itself generating incrementality and also harder to do, but new customers? So, what does that look like?
And I think marketers are increasingly going and getting competency and remit, which is good in things like pricing and distribution, because that is the way to kill some of that narrative around 12-month cycle. Everyone die and is resurrected again, because that’s not the consumer experience of the product.
And so, I think there’s some good movement in that area. And I think B2C has some interesting lessons from B2B SaaS in that regard too.
Darren:
Look, it’s interesting because that’s another area, we’re seeing the CMO role or the marketing leader role get turned into things like chief customer officer, chief growth officer.
Liam:
I often say, you can call me Shrek if you’d like.
Darren:
Well, I say to people, they go, “Why do you think that’s being driven?” I said, I think, you could say it’s as simple as the old four Ps or seven Ps. That often a CMOs role in a lot of organizations was literally defined by promotions, the one P.
Liam:
One P marketers.
Darren:
And that there is a realization increasingly in a lot of organizations that it has to be a broader remit than just having the lever of how much media and promotion we do to drive growth. So, pricing and product, new product development and the placement even in a digital world, the placement of that increasingly has to be coordinated.
Now, if you used to call the person that just did your promotions, the CMO, you have to come up with a name for someone that you’re giving more remit to, don’t you?
Liam:
Yes, indeed. But while I agree with the narrative, and I think the notion of a one P marketeer is getting more readily exposed now when MarTech is becoming such a big part of what CMOs do, and obviously the Pfizer model penetration over the last 10 years. So, it’s a good thing.
But we have a bit of an issue around the way we grow up in our industry, because I still believe in coming from a legal background where it’s an older profession and there’s a much more well warm path to maturity in the legal profession. There are gates and key signals of competencies as you go through that.
If you look at marketing, it’s still a bit of a wild west in terms of the way you can navigate from role to role and the experiences that you get. And people will cobble together. And that isn’t a slight, this is one of the beautiful things about our industry too. You can cobble together an à la carte career in terms of things that you’ve done.
Darren:
I was going to call you on calling marketing a profession, because in actual fact, it fails at the very first hurdle of profession in that there is no minimum educational requirement to be a marketer. I don’t have a marketing degree.
Liam:
Neither do I.
Darren:
But calling it a profession, but I agree that perhaps the thing that it’s not so much becoming like the legal profession where you have to have a specific degree, but there needs to be some guidance or at least some landmarks in a career path that starts to say, if you are going to have this type of title, these are the types of capabilities and skill sets that you need.
Liam:
And I would love it if there’s an industry, and for anyone who’s listening to this, I’m happy to feed my contribution to it. To come back to your point on skillset and titles. It would be wonderful if we could just standardize what the CMO Chief Customer Officer does from a competency point of view.
And what I would love to see in the future as an industry is that we have to have some level of exposure to be seen as a marketeer at that level. Because for me, if you are CMO, and really your role is about the one P of promotion, with the greatest respect, you’re not a CMO because a CMO should have very important influence and sometimes approval rights on things like pricing on the way that product is created, like NPD for example, not just P promotion.
And of course, they should also have a really important influence on things like the process, the whole entering customer journey, and how a customer interacts with you.
And so, there are many CMOs that, and this isn’t a slight to them that do one P. And so, I think that’s not correct from a title point of view.
Darren:
Well, 20 years ago they were called the promotions or promotions manager, or promotions director maybe, or advertising manager. We used to have those people in organizations.
Liam:
You make a good point. Yeah.
Darren:
That have then been upgraded to a marketing director or a chief marketing officer, when actual fact the job requirement hasn’t changed. And yet the expectation has, because anyone in business that thinks about marketing should be thinking about the more broader go-to market strategy that a CMO should be in charge of.
Look, I think that’s a great innovation and probably something that someone in Australia, the double A … the Australian Associate or the Australian Marketing Institute should be taking on. I know they’ve got a chief certified practicing marketing allocation. Perhaps that should be part of what does that indicate as potential titles?
Liam:
Totally. And the one thing I’m quite passionate about in a related vein on that point, is we as a industry, we cannot get enough. It’s like we’re addicted, or we have a fetish about it, about the strategy and talking about marketing strategy and brand versus performance and all the dichotomies, this or that.
Obviously, the ink spilled over that is well known, but we never, if I was to draw you a bar chart, it would be the biggest, biggest bar you could possibly imagine. And the tiniest sliver in the comparison of the time we spend talking about what is the optimum marketing team structure? What is our marketing operations kind of policy, what is our playbook for that?
People, we don’t talk about this. And then related, what is the right skillset? Which comes back to-
Darren:
Yeah. The capabilities.
Liam:
Because human capital is the thing, which we still are all humans trying to market to the humans, AI side, which we can touch on, of course, it’s a marketing podcast. So, I suppose we have to talk about AI.
Darren:
But to that point, one of the things that we spend a lot of time doing with our clients is this idea of strategy structure. Structure follows strategy.
Liam:
It certainly does.
Darren:
And culture eats strategy for breakfast. And once you’ve got a structure, then what are the capabilities that you need to populate that structure with? And what’s the process that actually defines how they work together?
And then how you work is a big influencer of culture. It becomes this cycle that you need to consider.
What we find is often where, in organizations where marketing structure has happened, almost either organically or as part of an overall organizational structure, usually by people that don’t actually understand what the marketing department does.
And so, that’s why I think you’ve hit on a really important area, because if you don’t get the structure right and align it to the strategic objectives of the organization, what are you doing?
Liam:
Of course. And obviously the strategy is important to be clear. Well, I think we need to debate that, but I would just love some rough proportionality in terms of going, okay, so this is the strategy.
There are various operating models in terms of team agencies, technology, and use cases for technology which are enablers of that strategy. There’s loads of interesting commentary around marketing tech and how so many use cases and so much of what clients are subscribing to isn’t used.
Why? Because they either don’t have the capacity, they don’t understand it, and/or the whole structure and process just doesn’t enable you that usage, which is business value going out the door.
Darren:
Yeah. The first 10 years though, I found going into marketing departments, they seem to have only two structures sold to them by one of the consulting firms. And that is a centralized marketing structure or a decentralized.
And then they got really creative, and they started creating hubs and spokes. So, you’d have a hub with all these spokes, which was sort of halfway between the two.
Liam:
Sounds sharp.
Darren:
But to your point, none of this — it was very traditional organizational design. None of it actually was ever designed around marketing technology platforms actually changes the way people work.
Now, it’s not, I do this and then hand it off to you. It’s more following, for instance, customers through a particular customer journey or path. And yet the structure rarely is aligned to that.
Liam:
But on the marketing technology point in particular, so from my own experience where I’m at the moment, it is changing the way that marketing perceives itself and the way that at the end of the day, internally, marketing is servicing our internal stakeholders and their needs. Let’s not beat around the bush.
So, when that happens, marketing technology can bring that stakeholder to do 80% of the work for themselves. And so, it’s a great thing for marketing, because we can be what towards on the tasks which merit it, the really valuable execution of what they need, all the sense check and the QA before it’s executed, but they can do it all themselves.
So, self-service is great because marketing teams should be focusing on the high value tasks. Like, how are we going to steal share from competitors? How are we going to think about our brand value in the next two years? How are we going to encourage switching and all these really hard things to do?
Whereas I think historically, marketing was far too tactical. So, I think marketing technology can help create culture of self-service for certain tasks, which otherwise marketing would perhaps do. And it’s good because other departments and other disciplines within businesses can realize that actually when they touch the customer, they are performing a pseudo marketing role.
Even if you’re sending an operational communication or a legal communication, that’s still a touch point, that’s still technically marketing and many people in the business have buy-in and the need to sometimes even execute those comms.
So, I think, obviously it’s here to stay. It’s good for us as business. I hope it will bring us back and the industry back to helping marketers focus on the harder stuff, the real challenges of growth rather than the tactical BAU of marketing.
Darren:
And also, therefore transform the conversations that happen between marketing and the other areas of business, I’d imagine.
Liam:
Absolutely. So, we’ve got lots of marketing technology. We’re onboarding some new technology. And the conversations are changing because of that self-service mindset.
And of course, the ability to get an “real-time data” on what’s happening with the existing customers, of course, is super valuable.
Another example, our customer support team, yes, their whole notion is to service our existing clients, but also there are things we can now re-skill them on because there’s capacity. So, how can they help us with social organic management, getting them across other parts of our business too, which is great from a skillset point of view.
So, sharing that classic marketing function within the business is also another thing that’s been enabled by marketing tech.
Darren:
Yeah. It’s interesting you say that because one of the other areas that we find CMOs, if they don’t just have the one promotion lever, they might have product. Then when we get to customer experience, there’s very few marketing departments that have either the capacity or the remit to influence all of those touch points that you’re talking about.
One of the ones that cracks me up is where an organization is using an inbound or outbound call center. And it’s always way over there. And then, well, what about all your own media, particularly websites, oh, well, that’s over there in IT.
And it’s like I love what you’re talking about that the technology’s allowing marketing more opportunity to go out into the organization to actually turn it around to being a marketing focused, customer focused organization, which every CEO would probably talk about, but wouldn’t necessarily have the platform or strategy to deliver that.
Liam:
Correct. And if we come back to what are we trying to achieve as a marketing profession, I’ll use the P word again, even though there’s very healthy debate on it, we do need to be relentless and pretty annoying internally on what’s going to work for our customer.
And many businesses are guilty of developing things because the developer thinks it’s good, we’ve got research to back it up. That’s all well and good, but does the client even care? And is it competitive?
And so, you do need to be provocative on those things, and that’s where marketing comes in to play that role, which is what the CEO will talk about. But the reality of that is that creates positive tension in business, but you should be able to have positive tension and indeed conflict around these things in business.
Darren:
Well, you certainly see that in organizations where marketing is seen as a strategic leader. In that they’re very much positioned as the voice or the perspective of the customer. And so, they’re listened to and followed because of that role.
But yeah, to your point earlier, in many organizations, marketing is a service provider in the same as IT, even procurement or legal, all service providers. That operations is the biggest part.
The next step up from that is to be a strategic partner. And that becomes very wishy-washy because everyone wants to be that. But that really ultimately where marketing should be heading, is to become a strategic leader that informs the operations on what the customer is, to your point about delivering double-digit growth.
Liam:
Completely agree. And the normal strategic input I’ve seen from marketeers where they’re the one P is of course; is we’re going to do a new campaign. And we’re going to be more creative. So, creativity is a valuable and important, good.
But the reality if you’re fixing your product and you’re really reluctant on the customer experience, which should be marketing as the certainly the lead or a key voice in that, that’s going to be more accredit to business value than just saying, our ad is so creative and people are going to cry, be happy when seeing it.
And I think one thing I find fascinating is as an industry, we put on a pedestal creativity as a kind of a good in and of itself.
Darren:
You’ve absolutely got me on my soapbox now because-
Liam:
Oh, stand up.
Darren:
No, because I think from a from a seller’s point of view, let’s talk about agencies, creative agencies, seller service, what they’re focused on is selling creativity.
Liam:
Of course, they are.
Darren:
That’s like a chef selling his ability to whip cream. I don’t want to know about how good you are at whipping cream or frying something. I want to know the dish you’re going to serve and why it’s going to be so valuable, the experience, that this obsession with creativity don’t-
Liam:
It’s valuable.
Darren:
When you say it people go, oh, you don’t believe in creativity? No, I absolutely believe in creativity, but it’s the application of it that is much more interesting than the idea of itself. What are you going to make with this skill, not the skill in its own right. And most creative awards are just focusing on the skill in its own right.
Liam:
Indeed. And so, but that’s like architecture. There’s architectural awards, but my God, you would never live in these houses because it would be cold. It would be like living in a dungeon and where can I hang my things? It’s just impractical.
So, but it’s celebrating the profession, which is awesome, and it’s a valuable good, but I think it creates the wrong incentive sometimes. And so, personally, the only awards I really take stock of all the indicators of success are things like the IPA Awards or Effies, the work awards. They’re quite interesting in terms of the data they’re trying to bring to it.
But you’ve got to be careful because it’s easy to be seduced by the creativity. And I take it a step further, it’s easy to think that creativity will save you and save your business problems. And it’s just not true. And I worry about how many marketers are left holding the baby when that happens.
Darren:
Well, I have another conversation I had with the head of corporate affairs, corporate comms. And I said, why don’t you work closer with the CMO, because the two of you are really out there projecting the reputation of this organization.
And his response, and it was quite pompous, but he said, “Oh, Darren, you don’t understand. My job is to convince everyone that it’s business as usual and growth will continue while my colleague over in marketing is coming up with new creative ideas.” And it just reeks of risk, risk, risk.
Liam:
Well, yes. And that’s the fun tension of it, because it and we talk about this CMC, to grow, you’ve got to take risk. And so, I think it would be really healthy to have more of a risk-based conversation when we’re talking about the initiatives that we want. Because again, you want double-digit growth. Who doesn’t want double-digit growth? To do that, you got to take some risk.
Darren:
Yeah. You can’t keep doing the things you’ve always done hoping to get a better result.
Liam:
But being creative alone is not the type of risk you need to take. There’s much more to it is, I suppose, what I would take from that.
Darren:
Yeah. And the application of creativity in a whole lot of skills other than just developing comms, to your point about new product development and there’s creative elements. People would say to me, “You’ve gone from science to advertising copywriting, are you upset about giving up science?”
And I said, “Well, science is creative, advertising copywriting’s creative.” I applied many of the skills I learned in science today, which is probably why I’m here talking to you.
Liam:
Well, yeah. Look, as a bad ex-lawyer, I bow down in your better qualifications than me on science. But I think we have broad rules about what we think will work in marketing right now. But we should, what’s that expression you have strong opinions, but hold them lightly. We’ve got rules. Let’s hold them lightly and let’s be open to challenge, but let’s not experiment to death off the back of that.
Darren:
No. Now there is another area that comes off that, which is we are now seeing marketers absolutely drowning in data.
Liam:
Yes.
Darren:
Some of it-
Liam:
I’m wet sitting here now.
Darren:
And not all data is equal which is the first lesson that … it’s almost like we talk about data as if it exists as a great uniformity, but in actual fact, there’s good data, there’s bad data, and there’s questionable data.
Liam:
Yep.
Darren:
And there are also a lot of marketers that have actually perhaps chosen marketing because they wanted to get away from things like mathematics and science and things, and they actually actively reject data. Or they see that it’s potentially going to replace it. And it’s weird to see that dichotomy. What’s your relationship with data?
Liam:
Oh, look, we have an on and off relationship. It’s inescapable. I think on the data question marketing, there’s two things. We are now at a state where anyone can justify anything with the data points available.
So, any marketing strategy, any approach, you can find data point for it, and you can find a super convincing argument, that’s the truth. Like, oh, put all your money into influencers. Great, here’s all the data to support why. Put all your money into classic TV. Great, here’s all the why. Split brand activation, here’s the data why.
So, first point, data will not give you the answer. Sorry, it won’t. The second point, even before the era of “big data,” where we are now, even before then and even now, the good business leaders and good marketeers understand that they will never have a perfect view of the situation.
I read a really interesting article once saying that the best business leaders realized you are only ever going to have about 30, maybe 40% maximum of the amount of data that you need to make a decision. The rest is all based off your risk appetite, number one, and then, ultimately gut instinct. Now, that is a stark reality for people, and I think people are very uncomfortable processing that.
Darren:
Yeah.
Liam:
So, they’re my two big pillar points on data. And I think the way I would link that back to marketing is going, this is the strategy. We have enough data to support this. And specific terms, I mean, we have short-term data around things like attribution. We have what I would call that intermediate data. So, like market mix modelling data, search demand data, competitive data. Then we have longer data, brand health data, consumer attitudes data, and proper customer research like ethnography.
Once you have all those data points, you’ve then got to make some choices. And there are many potential right answers, is the reality. And the difference between a strategy that succeeds and a strategy which doesn’t succeed is down to two things then.
Number one, there is some element of choosing things that will grow at a faster rate, and you ride that wave up.
But the second thing is how the market reacts to your execution. And sometimes you have to stay on that execution of that strategy and stay the course and know that alignment of your business to that strategy and those tactics is highly valuable and back the fact that the market will respond in a certain way.
But there’s no guarantee. So, it’s about having a conversation about that risk. And so, that is a broad reply. That’s my view on data and marketing.
Darren:
And look, the thing I like about it is it goes to the very heart of my introduction, that I find the most interesting and often the most successful marketers are the ones that have become comfortable with uncertainty.
That they don’t sit there going, “I have to know what to do,” because it’s not about having to know what to do. It’s about collecting the information you need to inform a decision to do something and then be willing to go in whichever direction the results take you.
Liam:
Well, I’m paid to make a decision. And someone once said to me, someone much smarter than me, one of my mentors said, “If you are an evangelist, you are salesperson.”
And so, if you have that radical belief that it’s this, and it must be, that’s great. That evangelism normally means you’re peddling something and you’re selling something, and that means your objectivity is clouded.
Nothing wrong with that because you believe in it and that’s awesome. And it may be true. But I live in the gray and my role is to inhabit that gray area.
Darren:
My father famously said to me, “Son, you’re an expert if you get it right 51% of the time.” And I said, “Well, Dad, if I get it right 51% of the time, I’ll be happy.”
Liam:
Well, yeah. But related to that on data, I think we rarely talk about — one of my old bosses he used to talk about a blameless post-mortem.
Darren:
I’ve attended a few, but anyway.
Liam:
Yeah, the blood’s dripping on the floor from how blameless it was. But it’s a bit like your CFO, at the end of this year, all customers die and resurrect like a blameless postmortem where two people die in the …
Take a hard think about this when listening to this, when do you have a real root and branch postmortem on why we think something hasn’t worked? We may do lip service to that, but we rarely diagnose it and think about it in a blameless way.
Darren:
To get the lessons to move forward. I mean, the one thing they always say in science is if you learn nothing from an experiment, negative or positive, then you’ve wasted the experiment.
Liam:
Totally. I’d rather know why I failed miserably.
Darren:
What’s his name? Edison. Remember the famous story you took 5,800 and some filaments to find the one to make the light globe. And they said, “Well, isn’t that a waste of time? And he goes, “No because every one I got closer to the right answer.”
Liam:
And in that instance, you only need one. You only need one.
Darren:
Well, but he wasn’t right 51% of the time.
Liam:
More than 51. 5,800 to — he would’ve been a non-expert, using your definition.
Darren:
Liam, unfortunately, time’s gone away. We’ve run out of time. I’ve so enjoyed this conversation.
Liam:
Thank you for having me.
Darren:
It’s refreshing and exciting to talk to someone who thinks from multiple perspectives on things rather than running at this with ‘this is the way to do it’. I think it seems to be driven by curiosity. Curiosity is at the heart of creativity but also balanced by an analytical approach. So, I really appreciate your conversation today.
Liam:
Thank you for having me, Darren, and for the great chat. I love being here.
Darren:
Just a question before you go: if you could know what the future is, what would be the one thing you’d really want to know?
