How to overcome beige: braver, bolder marketing in the age of AI slop

Hello, people. It's so lovely to have you here today. Thank you all so much for taking the time. I appreciate you lots and lots. I hope today has brought you, nothing but good things. And hello to the absolute legends in the chat. We've got Simon, Ian, Isla, Sarah, Simon again, Phoebe, Ellie Mae, Venetia, Kate, Sarah, Elle, Elizabeth, Faye, Chris, and so many more popping in the chat where you're watching from. Thank you all so much for taking the time. Appreciate you lots and lots with saying hello. Not that. Please do pop in the chat where you are watching from if you haven't already. Let's get going introducing today's session. So today we have the final session in one of four with a collaboration with a very fantastic organisation known as WACL. WACL stands for Women in Advertising and Communications Leadership. It's a network of over three fifty senior women in advertising, marketing, tech and communications, with a mission to accelerate gender equality for the benefit of all, with the ambition to achieve fifty percent female CEOs in the industry. And a big, big thank you, to Jo Royce, who's hidden in the bottom right corner there, for bringing with us all together. We love you, Jo, and thank you so much for this collaboration over the past few four weeks. Jo has put together so much work to bring all this to happen, so it's really appreciated. Today, our guest is Hattie Matthews. Now, Hattie is, just incredible. She is the CEO and co founder at Uncharted, which is a creative agency built for a changing world. But honestly, like, when you go through and try and write a bio for Hattie, then you kind of just end up with a series of incredibly impressive things. Hattie helped grow Kama Rama from fifteen to three hundred people, leading to its acquisition by Accenture in twenty sixteen. Hathi is particularly interested in tech for good and loving loves bringing the marketing industry expertise to start ups, scale ups in social enterprises and more. She's found on stages like South by South West, The Marketing Society and Adweek. She's a member of Wackle. Like brilliantly before all of this, Hattie was an artist liaison at Glastonbury and co ran venues at the festival for several years. So he definitely knows a fair bit about chaos, which I think we spend quite a lot of time in marketing these days. So today we're going to be speaking, just to go back one second, about taking braver, bolder bets at work and overcoming beige, but sort of getting the confidence and being able to portray these things to whoever needs to get sign off for these things. I'll let Hattie speak way more on this because I don't want to steal her thunder. But it's going to be a fascinating thing, know this is a topic that the community really struggle with and getting like work which feels meaningful across the line. Before we get started, I want to say a big thank you to our sponsors. This week's featured sponsor is a company called Frontify. Now Frontify are where your guidelines, assets and brand knowledge all come together in a single space. Now this feels particularly interesting and pertinent right now because so many of us are contending with the likes of AI, etc, to try and bring everything together so we've got one source of truth. Frontify has been doing this for years and years and years. And so as a brand offer, something compelling to this moment in time, then Frontify are definitely it. Also, big thank you to Canva, Wistia, Cambridge Marketing College, Prismic and Planable. You're all wonderful organisations who without whom we will be able to make this happen. As I've been speaking, there's been a bunch of lovely people saying hello in the chat. So I just want to say hi to Tracy, to Montserrat, to Zara, to Nicole and so many more of you. Appreciate you lots and lots for being here. Please do keep that chat feature going throughout because it's the type of thing which makes this session so special. So with all that said, Hattie, thank you so much for being here, and it's it's over to you. Thank you so much, and hello, positively lovely people. Amazing to see so many of you, and I'm loving the chat as well. There's a lot of chat. It's great. Let me get going then. I'm gonna attempt to share my screen. We've we've tested this, so it should work. Let's have a go. Hopefully, we're in. Thank you so much for the very kind intro. I mean, it's always embarrassing to hear yourself spoken about like that. But, yeah, very proud to be here today. And, yeah, brilliant to be on my first marketing meetup. Let's get into it. So, how are we gonna, you know, overcome that confidence gap to create brave work and avoid beige? So, problem today, we're in an era of beige. They've got increasingly tight budget, short term pressures, complex stakeholder dynamics. There is a lot of chat about as an industry, we're starting to default to the safe functional messaging and unfortunately, the answer that is can lead to quite forgettable work, the beige. And this sort of confidence gap might be one of the biggest hidden barriers in modern marketing. And it's getting worse. Disgusting soup. But the sloppening, you've probably heard this expression before, but in the next few years, I think the volume of new digital content is forecast to grow by 10x, with apparently eighty or ninety percent of that's going to be generated entirely by AI. So it's going to be a lot more base slop out there. It's already a lot of poor quality content out there and we're starting to see sort of a sea of sameness, I suppose. When I look within the advertising industry, there was a really interesting study done called Extraordinary Cost of Dull, which found that fifty seven percent of UK ads make people feel nothing at all, which is quite depressing. And I love this. This is from the Extraordinary Cost of Dull report by System One. But, yeah, fifty percent of ads are less engaging than cows in a in a field. This this report is worth a read. If you're ever grappling with this, it's free to download report. So take a look at that. It's really, really interesting. For most brands explaining to the board or stakeholders that a kind of recommended creative route is based on the instinct and intuition of you or your agency is not really an option, know. Eighty percent of clients will be very nervous about relying solely on an agency's instinct and intuition. And there was a really interesting study done last year with fifty marketers by Up To The Light. They looked at the top challenges that these marketers are facing. This is in the UK and you can see uncertainty and caution being like, you know, two of the biggest themes. I heard at CanLyonsStat, in fact, that twenty nine percent of marketers say that their organisations are highly risk averse, which is quite staggering. That's not just a bit risk averse, that's highly risk averse. And so I suppose why is that and what can we do about it? In an uncertain world, it's a good tip to why, it is often the truth that we resort to safety bias. So safety bias, you know, is our preference to stick to what's been tried and tested before in our comfort zone rather than try something new. And that's because, you know, we protect against loss more than we seek out gains. Our brains see change as potentially risky and dangerous. And so therefore we kind of quite often can prioritise risk avoidance and loss prevention over something that which could give us huge potential gains. It's all rooted in evolution and evolutionary survival, but it can often lead to a slight favoring the status quo and not being open to experiment. I worked on IBM many, many years ago. But there's a really famous saying you might have heard, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. And it's really sort of playing into that safety bias thought. But the problem with sticking to the safe is it's not going to drive the growth your brands need to deliver transformational results in the future. So some of the articles on the right are probably more accurate, which is nobody gets fired for buying IBM but maybe they should or you know, maybe they're not going to get promoted. It's not going to lead to that transformational change that we all need and growth that we need. So what do we do about it? I've just put together today, I like a five. I like a three or a five. So I've put together five easy ways to achieve braver, better work. How can we de risk the brave and make better bets? So, hopefully it's a bit of a framework that you might be able to use in the future to help you move forward more confidently to better work. The first thing, and this won't be news to you, but human beings do not fall in love with logic. They respond to feeling and emotion. So for me, moving away from beige means having the courage to create work that's distinctly human and deeply emotional and brave. Why? And it's not just because that's fun to do, it's because it actually works. So campaign effectiveness, IPA databank, there's thousands of case studies of campaigns that have been successful in here, those that have outperformed the market. And it says that purely emotional campaigns perform twice as well as those using rational content alone. So let's say it's a rational product feature, campaign or ad, you're only getting a fifteen percent uplift from that. But with an emotional campaign where you're tapping into the feeling somebody might be experiencing or giving people a feeling, they're seeing a thirty one percent uplift in profitability, which is quite staggering. The thing I find surprising is that campaigns that try and do both sort of fall in the middle. But yeah, it's quite interesting to look at. But this is really evidence based stats. This is kind of like why you should do more emotional work. And then how I suppose. For me, it starts with like genuine customer insight and I work with a lot of clients that are quite data heavy and we'll do things like social listening and more. So, we look at all the new techniques but we always try and pair that with a bit of ethnography or in old fashioned terms chatting to people. I love speaking to customers, you know, you talk about walking the floor in the store. You often speak to brands and I say like, when was the last time you actually spoke to a customer? And sometimes it's just really not the case. I actually had a slightly tense conversation with a client. I'd asked to be set up with some interviews with the customers and I was told that that was a little bit old fashioned. But for me, that is often the unlock for really good creative work because you get that human insight. What are the drivers and needs? Why are people doing things, not just what they're doing them? So for me, it's like thinking about your creative brief, moving from what do you want them to know, what do you want the audience to know, to what do you want them to feel. I've got a little example here that's recent. So I've been working with Top Cashback for about a year now and previously, historically, they'd focused quite a lot on functional, rational benefits and claims like how much how how TopCash how Cashback works or how much money you might get back in cashback, so three hundred pounds. And actually, what we did was through that understanding of the audience and really getting some insights into how the cashback made them feel. So if it was like a double hit hit of dopamine, they bought the thing and then they got the cashback. We kind of built the whole campaign around the sort of double hit of joy that people were getting. So it's quite a big shift. I've got a little video there. Quite a big shift for the brand moving forward. I might just try and play the ad on the next page. But we lent into sort of feeling sensory ASMR, making people feel emotion, making people feel joy, how do we actually kind of bring joy? I'm gonna play this ad here, which we launched back in February. Summon the power of joy joy. The joy of spending with the joy of cashback. Together, they are spending power. Top cashback. Next level spending powers. So taking them from a very rational place to a very emotional place, it's quite a big shift. I guess the question was, did it work? So what we actually did with this campaign was test it. We've tested it in a region, tested it in Manchester and the northwest. It's been brilliant. So now it's rolling out in further regions. But yeah, we saw a forty one percent increase in brand awareness and an actual hard business growth as a result of that as well. So we could see it directly correlating into some business success. So, emotion's been great there. Good example of, you know, moving from the rational to the emotional. Second point in my five points is really avoiding algorithmic bias. So, we're all working with AI and tech throughout our businesses now. But I guess the risk of algorithms alone is it can actually lead to safe choices, which look backwards because the algorithms are based on historical behaviour. So, to bypass the bias, I think it's really important to think intentionally about increasing diverse talent and varied perspectives into the creative process. You know, isn't like a box to tick. For me, I consider diverse creatives to be like a primary weapon against predictable work. And actually, if you look at all of the McKinsey and other diversity stats around the world, the highest performing team, the best performing work is usually from diverse teams. I love this quote by Cathy O'Neil who wrote this book Weapons of Math Destruction. She said, Big data only codifies the past. They don't invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination and something only us humans can do. Which is really, really interesting way of looking at AI and what we can bring versus the AI. There's also quite a lot of research onto the diverse teams and how you can protect your organisation against the risk of bias. I mean, some of the stats about the lack of diversity in the big tech teams have been well publicized. You know, only twenty two percent of AI professionals globally are female. Only twenty five percent of leadership roles in tech are held by women. So, you know, who's building the systems and what data the systems are using and therefore why might the systems be biased and how can you avoid that in the work you're doing? Something that I've done recently is we, Unchartered, were very proudly one of the first ten agencies to sign the campaign inclusion charter. This is created by the Diversity Standards Collective, who are brilliant organization, by the way. They are working to make sure we think about inclusion throughout campaign life cycle, making it part of the creative process from the beginning. I'm going to just show the next slide, which is a quote from one of their collective members. So they've got a whole collective of people. They will work with you if you've got an idea or a campaign you think you might be a bit fearful of putting out because maybe it seems quite progressive or out there something, they can check your work and concepts or they can work with their collective to make sure the creative work you're developing is going to be like really on the money, really relevant and avoiding any bias. And that will help you have more confidence in those big bold moves and derisk some of the moves as well. They're absolutely amazing organization, so I recommend checking them out. So that's the second point. Humans are good. Diverse humans are great. Third point, rapid prototyping, which sounds quite techy, doesn't it? But, know, really, is the power of fast tracking unusual ideas or weird ideas, being able to, like, try something and see if it might work. You know, when I started my career, this was quite hard to do. It's quite expensive to do. It's quite slow to do. But nowadays, if you've got an idea for something, you can kind of like try and give it a go, try and build it or try and scamp it up or try and mock it up. And there's so many great tools out there to help you do that. So one we use a lot is something called Lima. It's a brilliant AI platform that allows us to generate, iterate, and to test some initial ideas. Just means we're going we've got an initial idea. We can kind of sense check it and see if it might work before we propose it. So, it's really, really good. This is a paid platform. There are a lot of really good free platforms out there as well. I'm gonna do a shout out to one of my WACL co members, Nishma. Nishma Robb was a senior marketing leader at Google for many years. She's recently launched her new venture, which is called the Glittersphere. It's fantastic. It's an events led community for women closing the AI skills gap. Lots of suggestions on her website for what tools you can use for what and helping us all be really confident with the new technologies that are coming out. So these are some of the things she's recommend on on her site that allow you to prototype an idea, mock it up, sense check it, take something to your boss that you've got had an idea for and see what they think. So those tools are brilliant. Have a look at GlittersFit. Here's an example of how I've used those platforms recently. So, I've been working with a cash management platform called Insignis. They're fintech in the UK. Are for businesses or businesses that have got a lot cash sat in their current account. It might be like they've just received investment, for example, and that money sat there not earning interest. If it sat in your current account, it's usually not earning interest. And this is on the left is what they were doing before. It was kind of a very rational claim and it wasn't really cutting through with impact. So we had this idea, it came from a bit of insight, which was after we were chatting to the audience. They knew they needed to put their cash somewhere safe, but they were kind of apathetic and had left it sitting in the current account earning no interest. So we prototyped and mocked up this idea of the most dangerous thing you can actually sit on being your money, not doing anything with this line, don't sit on it, insignis it, get up off your asset and take control of your cash. And we had this idea of the most dangerous chair in the world being made from your money. So it was quite a departure for them to take them on the journey. We did mock ups in an AI and CG, and then we were able to, using this, go to the CEO, go to everybody in the organization, and get their buy in before we sort of, like, committed to media and committed to the committed to the production. So and it was really, really successful for them. So you saw a huge increase in new customers versus the previous work and it really, really outperformed. Of course, they're putting a bit of emotional insight, but it was the prototyping that helped us get that idea over the line. Another thing I love to do is to, like, pretest and de risk things. So I had a nervous comment from somebody yesterday. They said, oh, you can never tell if creative's gonna work, can you? But today, I think, you know, braver emotional work can be quantified to a certain degree. So you can have confidence that it's gonna work before you actually spend anything on media. We use quite a few pretesting platforms, which means we can measure human responses and attention before we spend any media money. Two of my favorites, are David or DAIVID. They're fantastic. They used to be unruly. There there are others. There are system ones and people like that. I like David. They are really good with, like, moving image content. It could be social content, TV ads, whatever. But what they do is it's an AI platform. You put your creative through their system and it tells you where the emotional spikes might be. It measures brand potential brand impact, likely next actions and more. And we use it in our development process rather than at the end to sort of see how we could refine and make the work even bolder, knowing it's going to work. How could we make the emotional impact even greater? What's great about it being an AI platform is the results are immediate. I get them straight away and I can make tweaks and, you know, keep iterating kind of at pace. Another one we work with quite a lot that's human people, real people around the world that I can look for any particular audience and ask them questions is a platform called Loops. You've got to pay for it. It's a pay per respondent sort of platform, but there's quite a few of these kind of things out there. I love it because it gets us to, you know, give a quick sense check to any idea, concept, manifesto, change of direction before we're kind of pitching it back to brands. But we get it's really speedy. It's global. You get a sort of qualitative picture at scale. It's really, really good for getting creative impact feedback so we can develop the work in the right kind of way. Obviously, those two first things I've shared cost money. There are other ways of doing it. So you can always you've got an idea for something, a b test it if you're running something already. You could be just putting a poll on your social channels and asking the customers and the audiences you've got at the moment what they think for input and get some quick feedback that way. Or I like a good old cup of tea and a chat to the audience. I think, you know, if you've got an idea, you want to run past people and see if it's going to fly. There's nothing wrong with going old school. You don't have to use technology for that. You could literally have groups of people that you speak to. I used to work with a brand called Glossier, a beauty brand, and they had an amazing active community. And what they did was then use that community to ask a lot of questions about new product development, marketing, etcetera. And the community loved being asked because they felt really special and part of something. So that's another way you can do it. What I love about pretesting and de risking is, you know, it shifts the conversation then from gut feel, like, I like this idea, to something with more certainty and objectivity behind it. So, you know, we know this is gonna connect with our audience. We've seen that seventy seventy eight percent of people that we put it in front of understood or were more likely to purchase our brand as a result and then you've got more confident position going into something braver. And my fifth tip is, you know, navigating the boardroom or navigating, you know, stakeholders. Stakeholder nevuseness is real, you know, was on that word cloud I showed earlier, top challenges, but it can be managed. And, you know, if you're armed with a diverse input and you've got a prototype and you've got some data backing up your case, can build a really strong business case for some bold creativity or a different move or for experimenting with something. I think it's important to bring them along the journey as you're not then asking them to take a blind leap of faith you're giving them more of a confidence engine that will make brave work actually the safest bet in the room. This same study I looked at earlier also said that fifty two percent of clients listed convincing internal stakeholders and bringing them with you as a serious challenge. So we can play a big part in helping make that a bit easier. I don't want you to teach you to suck eggs. You probably know this, but how you can move the conversation and talk the language of the stakeholders is something that's worth thinking about. So it's quite often talking about creative craft or something I like or look at this great idea, being able to shift into a more commercial conversation if it's with your CEO or CFO, but talking about how it solves the business challenges and how it's laddering up to their needs and their stakeholder needs. So it's quite a good idea if you don't do this already in mapping your stakeholders, mapping their goals and KPIs. Are you manmarking them so you know what they're looking for and the right language to use with them? And then I'd also say, take them on a journey. No one really likes a ta da moment. You know, dropping a finished concept on a nervous stakeholder insisting on final sign off can be instilled in with fear or can and it can actually lead to a no. So bringing people along the journey, establishing the guardrails. So it's quite a good idea to say, you know, we're we're gonna be sharing this today. We're judging whether it solves the business problem, not like personal taste of whether you like it or not. Separating the strategy and what it's trying to achieve from the aesthetic or the execution. So, you know, getting people to avoid saying things like why they personally don't like a color or I had it, you know, I don't like snakes. So I don't want snakes in the thing when actually that was one of the highest performing craters we'd had. It's interesting. So you're trying to, like, separate the objective facts, I suppose, from the feeling. Another thing a CMO said to me recently actually, it was passed on to me as a tip, was quite often he said stakeholders might choose the beige because they think it's protecting their budget and they think it's the safe option. But actually, if you think about it, if sixty percent of your media budget might be wasted because the work fails to trigger an emotional response, actually, you could reframe it as you've got more to lose by not shifting things up and more to lose by taking the safe bet than you have by taking what might feel a bit uncomfortable or new. So if you can kind of think about that psychology and framing things as more to lose, if that is the case, then it can help enormously with those big bets and just like how you're projecting those ideas. As backed up by this fab quote from John Hegarty, who I'm a big fan of, who said the first lesson of branding, memorability. It's very difficult buying something you can't remember. The real financial risk is being entirely forgotten. That is definitely going to be the worst choice financially is that nobody remembers seeing your brand and and you basically essentially wasted the media budget. I've got one more piece of work that I think is pretty brave to share. This is for an Eastern brand called Erelo and it was very different to their previous work. We wanted to create something that was quite memorable with real cut through and humor. It is a bit offbeat as well. I'll play it to you shortly. But our client really brilliantly navigated their own stakeholders, which included the founder, the board, private equity owners. Actually, used David, the platform I shared earlier, to kind of, again, build the confidence and help us refine the creative. We also ran this in test regions to start building confidence before it was rolled out more widely. So let me show you this. Hopefully, it makes you laugh. There's an old Spanish proverb, Viaja con Internet, which mostly means one who takes the Internet on vacation can arrange alternative accommodation. There's a small man in our bed. Hello. Back the Internet So little bit offbeat, very different to a functional messaging explaining what an eSIM is and how it works and why you should buy one. But I think that really kind of like bold way of doing it through humour and quite a memorable different sort of expression is something that our clients are very brave to go with, we had the backing of the research, we'd had the stakeholder management on the way through and we had kind of like real confidence that this was going to work before it rolled out. I'm very pleased to say that that creative helped the brand achieve. It was eighty percent growth in the test regions we ran it in, which is USA first actually, then it rolled out. It was so successful, it rolled out to multiple markets. It ended up getting dubbed in Japan, I think, but it delivered really exceptional ROI for them, ran online all over the place, and was shortlisted for campaigns global film of the year at the end of last year. So we were very proud that it achieved some creative accolades as well. So that's kind of my five points. I just want to leave you with a very short summary. Five ways to avoid beige. Yeah. Seek out human emotion. Avoid algorithmic bias. Try some prototyping. Test some things. Pretest and derisk where possible, and that doesn't have to cost the earth. And navigate the boardroom and manage your stakeholders. And, hopefully, through that, you can move away from sort of cold, sterile, any kind of samey, sea of sameness work, and and strip away some of the fear of trying something unexpected or a bit different. I always think about, like, trying to use technology as a bit of our shield to protect brave work. I think a lot of people consider technology is gonna make everything a bit the same, but for us, I tried to use it as a confidence engine so that we can do more emotion, tell more human storytelling, and and move the commercial needle needle with some some braver work. So I've got one more slide, and that's just us. So I'm from Uncharted. Our motto is set out without fear, and that is about in a period of big change. We wanna allow our clients to set out confidently into the future, giving confidence that our work's gonna perform. And we use all these techniques in development of our work so that we can drive effective outcomes for the brands we work with. Yeah. So I'm sure that your work will be bolder, braver and more commercially impactful. I would love to take any questions. We are here for them. I know there's been a lot of chat in the chat. So, I'm going to come back in the room and stop sharing. Thank you so much, Hattie. That was fabulous. And there's so much, like, depth of knowledge there as well. Like, you know, like, sometimes you get a sense when you're watching someone, you're like, that sentence is probably about eighteen months of work, you know, and I just felt that from you. Thank you so much for sharing. Pleasure. Really lovely. And as you rightly say, there's there's been a bunch of fantastic chat from the community. So thank you all so much for your lovely comments too. And, you know, there's a fabulous one here from Ian. I think mirroring everything you said. You said if you aren't remembered, aren't chosen. If you aren't chosen, you aren't bought. Simple as that. It's not to say the best that wins. It's the ones that are easiest to choose. I think there's been a whole lot of chatter in the past week with Sharpe and Ritz and sort of speaking about mental availability as well last week in Canada and all that sort of stuff. They were. Yes. A whole bunch. But hey, let's get into the questions because like, as you rightly say, they're the most important things to do. So think throughout the duration of your presentation, Hattie, you spoke so eloquently and wonderfully around the use of tech. This question came in from Zara about halfway through the presentation. So like, you know, I think you've spoken a fair bit to it throughout the duration, but it's lovely to ask it in another set of words. So Zara's asked, we've been leaning more on AI to keep up with the increasing demands on the marketing teams. How do you balance that pressure with avoiding beige? And I guess it's that sort of sense of like, if someone's just doing more, more, more, more, more, Yeah. Mean, it's really we're living in a period of stress, right, and anxiety. And, yeah, more no one's saying do the same before, but same volume of output as before, but with these tools to help you. You know, we just, if anything, at risk of probably going too fast sometimes, I think. I wonder, you know, I wonder what people are experiencing because your just workload keeps going up. And we used to I feel like the old days. I mean, not been around that long, but there used to be a bit of an annual rhythm to things where you'd get a bit of thinking time and then a bit of intense time, and you'd probably do different sorts of thinking in those times. And it's always on and go right now for everybody, you know, at all levels. So I guess, you know, there's probably a bit of boundaries and carving out time to be strategic and think ahead. We don't wanna just be reactive all the time because that's not us at our best as an industry. But, yeah, it can be really hard as, you know, there's demands, there's pressures, but, like, taking for me, I find what works for me is, like, carving out a day with my team or two hours, whatever it is, that's not just on firefighting and reactive work, but thinking forward and like where could we make something better or how could we push it further. I think you can plan that in to a degree, but I hear you want the pressures. It's been experiencing that. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. You you you're so right. It's it's funny. So behind this setup over here, I've got a poster with a quote from Jeremy Conaway who says, get out there and stare at the clouds. And then specifically in reference to creativity, like, and I'll acknowledge the nuance that you just said in your answer, which is like it's blooming hard. Like, I can prophesize and sort of agree with you and sort of say like, go on, you know, do some things out in the clouds. And then, like, a slack arrives, and then I've got another half an hour at work. But, like, you're so right because that's the only way these things happen. We used to do a thing. I just remembered it, comma, but we used to, like, try and was it every month on a Friday afternoon or something? We'd say, like, we're booking tickets to go to an exhibition or I don't know what it really was. Do something a bit away from the desk for a bit. Because your best ideas don't come from looking at the same social media stuff everyone else is looking at. If we've all got the same references, we're gonna come up with same ideas. And so it's like travel, isn't it? You know, the freedom to travel and think, look at the sky. Quite often, your best ideas are informed by those experiences. It's the importance of diverse teams as well. If we've all had the same lived experiences, we're gonna have the same ideas. And so that is important to sort of build that into your process if you can. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, Sarah, I'd I'd be interested if you wanna come back in the chat and sort of give us any more context on, like, whether that feels feasible and, like, if there's any nuance in there, like, we'd love to help if we could. So, like, you know, feel free to do that. Because, like, I think it's something that people really, really feel, but they're like, actually, the doing is is quite tricky, isn't But in the meantime, I'll come on to the next question just because we're about to release our state of marketers report next Tuesday. And so we we surveyed thirteen hundred members of the Marketing Meetup community, not that marketing, but the human beings in it. And, your fifth point was about stakeholder management, which I loved by the way, and taking them on the journey in Advice UK was fabulous. But one of the things that we found in the survey is that specifically juniors told us the thing they struggle with most is sign offs taking forever and then not being invited to the table in the first place. So I guess a challenge for you if you were sort of sat in that sort of junior space or earlier on in your career and you had the advice to sort of bring people in early, but you didn't feel like you were being invited in. How would you start to navigate that sort of stakeholder management sort of thing? That's interesting. That's interesting. I'm just trying to visualize what that would feel like. And in when I was a junior also, yeah, you kind of quite often do some work that goes into some kind of going up through different levels of you know, to somebody that you don't maybe even work with. It's seeing that and then making a decision on it. So how do you build a relationship with those people who get visibility? And I guess it's sort of the same principle. Just like how do you get visibility in your organization for something and not just leaving it to when you need a decision on something. It's said than done when we're all time stretched but there are those things which will raise your profile. You know putting your hand up to lead something or be on something. Never harms, right, when it comes to then when you need it to work the other way around, which is people to listen to you or to know who you are or to value your opinion on something. So I suppose it's the same principle, which is like get to know the stakeholders or raise your profile, do the legwork, I suppose, before you need to just go, here's my thing when you sign it off. But I suppose, yeah, understanding the needs and motivations or coffee for people. People like to be asked for help. Again, a CMO told me this recently. He said there's a psychology study where if you you ask someone for a favor, you might think, god. Well, then they feel like I owe them a favor. But weirdly, it works the other way around. Ask somebody, see senior, for a favor, and they help you it's gotta be genuine. Right? They then feel more in more likely to help you in the future. And so when you think about internal organizational psychology, let's say you it's difficult. You don't really have a very good relationship with your finance director or something. To be able to go to them and say, I'm doing my annual planning or I'm working you know, I'd love to get a coffee. Pick your brains on what, you know, you think we need as business, la la la. And you ask the help on something. Then when it comes to you needing the budget, they're more likely to help you. It's really interesting. It's sort of a reverse psychology. There's a theory of it. I'm not a psychologist. You you might have heard this one before, John. Have you heard this one before? I haven't, but it's golden. Just just the general not even the specific theory, but, you know, asking for help. Like, I think a lot of us will quite often sort of carol away from that feeling, right, because it feels quite exposing, I think, you know, to sort of say, what's your opinion on this? Or I'm working on this. What do you think? And it probably relates a little bit to your noted ah moments. But rather than trying to get, like, thirty minutes in someone's calendar, like bumping into them in the corridor and just sort of saying, had a thought. Can I get your help? Or whatever. And they're like, who are you? And then you can actually have the conversation or whatever it is. Like, that feels like a really productive method, you know, just to get that feeling. Google what it's called. It's called, it's a psychology, more likely to like you. It's called the famous psychologist that came up with it. The Ben Franklin effect. Sorry. I tell a tell a lie. Other person's brain resolves cognitive dissonance by concluding they must like you because they just did something nice for you. It's interesting. Yeah. Anyway you can Google it. The Ben Franklin effect. And so this marketer that I was chatting to said that they used it in their business to get stakeholders on board. Interesting. That's fascinating. I love that. That's golden. I love that, Hattie. Thank you so much for speaking to that. That's really appreciated. Right. This is the type of thing you would never get in a presentation. But, you know, so I really appreciate you speaking through that. Let's take another question from the community because I can see that there's eleven open questions right now. There's already more than we'll be able to get through in fabulous way. So we've got a question here from Helen, which is less about strategy and more about channels and specific tactics and channels. We'd love to put your marketing hat on this. So as brands try to leave beige behind, which emerging channels do you believe will genuinely shift growth over the next twelve to eighteen months, and how should marketing leaders, prioritize them? And I guess the answer is always it depends. Who's the audience? What's the market? You know, it always starts with who's the audience and also who's the future audience for growth? Often I meet brands and they're like, oh, our audience is x. I'm like, yeah, that's been fine for the last ten years. But where's the growth of the next ten years coming from? And is it younger, older, whatever, different market, different audience, doing a bit of analysis, research data. It's amazing the amount of people that don't necessarily or they have data on their current customers, but they don't have data on what's beyond. And then, you know, who are those people? What are their needs, desires? Where are they? Then, you know, that leads you into your channel strategy. How are they using those channels? What are the roles for those channels? I mean, I'm not a channel planner. But a scan last week, and there was a lot of media brands and a lot of you know, all the social channels are there touting their wares and what's gonna be big and new things they're doing. Lots of creators there. A lot of creators there last week as well, which is really interesting as well. Lots of brands having meetings with creators and influencers and platforms for managing those more budget going into creator than some of the traditional media. It depend it it does depend, obviously. Then, you know, brands that are trying to build reach and trust and trying to grow into mainstream brands and TV's the right thing for them to get the reach. They've maxed out the performance of channels. They're seeing a they sort of hit a plateau quite often seeing that quite a lot and, a good old fashioned three sixty campaign, buying posters and working really effectively for building a brand and taking it to the next level. So yeah, it does depend. Sorry cop out. No. But, you know, whether I feel like you should hopefully know that, like, it's not a cop out answer because you literally gave us the best checklist. You know, it was really tell you what was interesting. There was a really good Pinterest just pull out a channel. Really good Pinterest experience. But, you know, interesting that's not on one of the list of banned social media channels for the in the sixteens next year. Whatever. It'd be interesting to see what happens to their business. But they talked a lot about putting down our phones and getting out into real life, which I thought was kind of interesting for a social platform. But, you know, it's it's booming. Reddit were there, that's booming. Snapchat were there, launching glasses, but also talking about less social media, more kind of genuine interaction and messaging and fun messaging, a bit more raw and polished kind of fun between mates. And then brands getting into things like WhatsApp as well was also really interesting to see how brands are starting to use things channels like WhatsApp. Yeah. It was really interesting yesterday on WhatsApp. We'll we'll move to a a a different question after this one, but yesterday, saw that WhatsApp released usernames rather than this Yeah. So you can knock people number out. Is that right? That's it. And so for, you know, for me, when I was looking at that from a brand perspective, I I all of a sudden, my, the folks who sit within my brand and my community don't have to identify themselves by phone number, which changes the dynamic quite significantly. Yeah. That interaction. So it was really interesting. Let's take another one from Chantel though because Chantel's amazing and and asked like a sort of semi philosophical but like really interesting question, which is do you ever find the best ideas die from too much input testing? Die through too much input from testing, or do you find that the creative is always improved by it? Not a dumb question. Not a dumb question at all. I have to I've actually changed my view on this and can you know, probably will be an evolving point of view on it. When I started my career, like, in some more traditional agency networks who kind of did things like the big way, and there would be a lot of, like if you're making a telly ad, it would go through it was slow and expensive to make, and it'd go through, this link testing thing. It's so weird. The creators used to hate it because it was always done let at the end of the process, you know, what you're gonna do is you're gonna it's so bad it's not gonna run or it's fine or it could have been better but there's nothing you do about it. It's just like not a great not a great process. And or yes it would be like the edges would be knocked off or there'd be like amends asked for. It was like not very helpful to making the work bolder and better for sure. I definitely remember that being a thing. It was a kind of, well, I won't get fired because I've tested it. It's not disaster sort of thing. There were there were occasions where things didn't run, I'm sure. Whereas I do feel like we're in a slightly different era. For me, it's like early and often, and actually my creatives now, very different to the old fashioned creatives I used to work with, who were like, oh, I because they've worked in digital, they've kind of been around iterating. They've not like it's not like they're making something that's a finished product and then ta da. They wanna, like, know early on, well, if I do something that's even wackier, for example, people can can I is it are people gonna like that if I go, you know, even bolder? Can we get the evidence that that might work? And then they're leaning into it to see how they can kind of push things further or explore different areas. And then using that to like iterate the work through. But my yeah, my Chief Creative Officer, she says I use it to make the work bolder, to help me, to help back up my bolder decisions, for example. Not scared of it, but it's different if you leave it, you know, again, it's like if you leave something till too late in the process, there's either gonna it's either gonna be yes or no. It's sort of too late to make it a good bit of feedback potentially. So it's not a dumb question at all. There will be one one caveat I've got is that with any system, people start to game it. And so when the link testing thing was a thing, people start to get system one. A lot of brands I know use system one now. You can game it. Right? You know how it when you know how it works, let's say it's not a competition. This is not and it's kind of when you've got the research, what do do with it, right? It's how you respond to what you shouldn't use it just to make your decision for you. It's what informs you and gives you something that then you can use to make a decision. But if you're using it to make the decision, then unfortunately, people may game it to make it look like it's gonna be the right thing to do. For example, putting cats in. I've just felt thought we've got an adamant of cat in it. But, you know, there are things you can do if you're going through a system one test to make it perform well in the pretesting. That's interesting. And can can I ask a follow-up? Because I I haven't used the system. So this is like coming from a place of, like, pure curiosity than rather than, like Yeah. I think what we've spoken about a lot today is sort of like just not justifying, but sort of like giving confidence, to our decisions, backing up with data and intuition and stuff like that. But there will be moments presumably like it's the inverse of the gaming where we're like no I'm actually gonna make this call because it's I feel like it's the right thing to do rather than like the data proves it and I feel like it's not an easier, but it's like it's such a logical process to go through to say the data proves x y z and so we're gonna do x y z. Can is there any stories or any, like, calls That's a really good point because at the end of the day, it's not shouldn't be a crutch or whatever. You know, it shouldn't be the thing that's making decision for you. Absolutely. You know, you could should you could have a hypothesis you could test. You could have something you're really passionate about that you could prove out. But go, I'm just hands off. It's not my call. I'm just gonna leave it in the fate of the gods and whatever the data says. I feel like that's not that strategic to investigate that. You know, we'll always we'll usually have, like, a gut instinct and a recommendation. Yep. And then you can back that up or check it or test it or pull it apart because it might be that you're just seeing it through a cultural lens that's yours. So that's why diversity standards selective and brilliant. Like, just seeing it in a different way through fresh eyes or or doing I'd do loops test and I'll do it in, like, ten markets. And I had no idea that this thing meant something, I don't know, like in Asia, black and white means death, for example. You know, you might not quite understand the cultural nuances. So, but that's not using the data to make the decision for you. Slight different, isn't it? It is. And could I just ask what that conversation looks like for you? So, like, you walk into a boardroom and it's like, here's this creative. We test it, but the test says this, but we're gonna do the test is x, but we're gonna do y. Like, have you been through a situation like that recently where you kinda had I've never don't think I've done one. A recommendation is the thing that everyone hates. I don't think I've done that before. I do believe there might be an industry story, and it could be legend. But, you know, this Cadbury's gorilla drumming gorilla thing. I did hear that that was on the table for quite some time, and they weren't quite got it because a bit random. Right? Just nothing happens. It's just the gorilla drums end off. You know? And I heard it was knocking around for some time, but whoever came up with it, like, was really passionate about it and kept trying to sell it, which could backfire. Right? Because it just could be quite annoying. Tell me this idea again that's not got an idea in it. So I don't quite know. I don't think that that came back as something that was wonderful. There's no data to say it was great or was gonna work. It's kind of just like quite out of the box, memorable, distinctive, mad thing to do. But I have I have heard that that was against the data or against the and therefore it's and it but it is one of the most loved ads that comes up in lots of surveys. And, yeah, it's a perfect point. Thank you. Sorry. Feel like I've got a rabbit hole on that particular point, but curiosity gets better on me. Can we let's let's refocus on the great questions from the community rather than my slightly rabbit hole new one. So we had Lisa ask this during the presentation. It's an open question, but it says, can you say more about how to convince the boardroom grand fromages that, LLMs and big data can only codify, the past? And Lisa says that, she loves that quote. So, like, found it very useful. But Yeah. I mean, all it is all LLMs are are over big things of collating big data sets of historical data. Right? And I'm gonna tell you it's ten years since I did my first AI project this year. When I was at Accenture, we had, they had a proper AI lab in Dublin. It was amazing. Got to work with them. Got to build a a bot where we had to build it from scratch. There was no LLMs. We had to input the data ourselves. So we had to to create a corpus of data, they call it, a body of data, which you then input and then it trains itself on that data. So I could see where the problem is. Where are you getting the training data from? Well, I'm putting it in and I'm choosing it. Problem number one. And you know, like it's old data, right? It doesn't keep pace with, and it certainly can't, it's not the future. It's the past. Literally is historical data and it's making assumptions, which is why we've got bias in it. And also, you know, all the problems of the past are in that data. You can try and prompt that out to a degree you know. Er but that I I saw the problems with it. We were trying to create something that would work live. Er or for future things but it only work based on historical facts and historical data. So I was like oh yeah that is a problem with AI isn't it? And so yeah and all the most of the big AI LLMs and people working in it are one not diverse themselves and the data sets they're working from are historical sets of data. So there there is a that is an issue. Don't know how you convince them how bad, you know, it's seven slide deck of every tech pros incorrect about ten years and and maybe that's enough to show. It's really it's really good at some you know, it's we someone said, oh, you're always trying to get AI to do the things that humans are quite good at and not the things it's actually quite good for. So but, yes, it's interesting, isn't it? I can imagine there's a quite a lot of debate going on. It's inaccurate. I asked somebody to do some research for me yesterday, and I was like, oh god. Did he use AI? Because I'm this is out of date. It's worth you know, it's such a good test there, isn't it? Like, asking AI to tell you about something you know a lot about, and then you'll see. You know where that sort of comes out. I I I'm I'm all for the tech, you know, for what it's worth. It's just, as you say, it's it's it's often not right. Yeah. And I also really big believer. What did you say? You need to be on the steering wheel of the car or this expression? Like, we need all need to be in it using it and telling him when it's wrong. My chief creative officer just made a perimenopausal horror film on an AI platform, as a bit of a test to say she's up with the skills of the tools, etcetera, but also to help prompt it and see how what what it's not good at. And it really struggled with this image generation moving image generation, really struggled getting a woman that was without making it younger and more attractive or very old and haggard, like, really struggled with and it's because the data that it's fed on is pushing people into those you know extremes. So but you have to keep prompting and you and it and it it learns. If we are not in it, if diverse people are not in the tools and not helping train them, then they're not gonna improve either. So yeah. It's both. Absolutely both. Thank you. Thank you. That's I'm glad I I can't echo the message enough, you know. So I'm I'm I'm I'm stood here agreeing and nodding, But I guess agreeing and nodding does make for great watching. Not to move on to the next question, thinking that that point doesn't matter because it really, really does. So thank you for making it. I will go into the next question just for the benefit of time and not nodding at you like a nodding dog though. So, we've got this next one from, Simon. Now Simon is incredible and, picked up on your, rapid prototyping point. I'd be interested to see how you read the question. So Simon says, if you wrap a prototype, how do you ensure you're known as a performance marketer rather than an ideas person? I think there's so much richness in this particular question because I guess as marketers, we we do have that phrase, you know, relegated to the coloring in department and and stuff like that. And and so I think we've tried to force ourselves into scientific box quite a lot as an industry, and this is now me pontificating. But, like, you know, how do you how do you maintain that sort of area of credibility and scientific sort of nature to this while sort of also bringing the ideas that are so brilliant about our industry and so brilliant about the human beings in it as well. I mean, I find the question really fascinating because it sounds like wherever Simon works, the ideas people are somehow not appreciated or worse and that a performance marketer is the goal. And you know what there's been lots of reports for years and years, the art and the science and you know how brands are built and if you want to improve your performance results then you know the long and the short of it. I'm sure you're familiar with the long and short of it. If you haven't, everyone have a look at the long and the short of it. And yet also John Hagerty speaks a lot about the biggest, one of the biggest things facing businesses right now is the lack of creativity and the lack of ideas in business. Not talking about advertising ideas, but just like creative thinking, which is out of the box, experimenting new things. I think about Octopus. They've just launched something in car like they're always trying something new. Never seem to sit still. They've got interesting. They've got ex agency people there. They're I think a couple of the founders are creative people. So they really like creative in terms of experimentation, trying new things, moving forward, innovating. Their ideas. Right? Yes. They've been probably validated, tested a lot, but they're not sitting still, and it's all in line with their vision, their overall business vision and, you know, being consumer champion, doing the right thing, etcetera. You wanna drive growth. You wanna be delivering on the business results. But I think yeah. I don't think I don't like to see the diff I don't like this whole brand performance line thing debate with sort of still having to a degree which is one is one has to it has to be a zero sum game or something like one has to lose for the other to win. It's not I don't think that's really the case. But be an ideas person, Anna. Deliver results. I remember that in itself is a fabulous way to to to to bring the session to a close, Hattie. So thank you. You know, thank you for all the work that you put together, on the presentation, but subsequently just like the interesting chat afterwards with I can't wait for your comments. There's so many comments. They're great. Honestly, the people who come to these sessions are just like, some of the greatest in the world. So, like, like, we're very, very blessed. So thank you everyone for just, like, just being incredible as ever. It's really, really appreciated. And, yeah, like, I I just love that final point, you know, creativity and and performance. It doesn't have to be separate things, you know, and I think that sort of as a semi rallying cry, feels quite nice, to finish on. So thank you, Hattie. Thank you everyone, for showing up today. Today is the last of four sessions with Whackle. So big thank you to Joe Royce, to Whackle again for being fabulous. We couldn't do this without you. So thank you so much. We'll return next Thursday, so next Thursday, not next Tuesday, with James, my co founder, and I, presenting back the State of Marketers report and some of the key findings and, implications from it. So hopefully, can make that. But in the meantime, Hattie, thank you, and, thank you, everyone in the community. Appreciate you lots and lots. Cheers, Hattie. Take care.