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Insights, Marketing & Data: Secrets of Success from Industry Leaders
Insights, Marketing & Data: Secrets of Success from Industry Leaders
DELINEATE - James Turner, CEO & Founder. Is conventional brand tracking broken? Harnessing machine-driven insights for real-time understanding; evaluating true campaign levers not vanity metrics; lessons from founding Delineate and what comes next.
Is brand tracking totally broken? Or just boring? Well, maybe it’s neither. I’m delighted to chat to James Turner (JT) who is the founder and CEO of Delineate, the pioneering firm challenging the status quo in a critical sector. Drawing on experience and learnings from Circana, BT, Black Swan and Edelman, JT is great company and offers a unique perspective. Among other areas, we discuss:
- Learning to handle ‘big data’ in the early days
- Why consumer insight businesses often don’t have their data houses in order
- Learning from the world of PR
- Moving from brand tracking to campaign tracking….and back again
- Lessons for founders
- What’s next for Delineate
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And to this day there are many media agencies and others within the ecosystem that take an enormous amount of time to mark their own homework and provide back a report that will always in some way say the campaign did what it said it was supposed to do. And so that was the frustration getting real outcomes, getting it quick so that you could improve next time. And I think also the clients were more interested in continuous improvement than, frankly, a butt-covering exercise of my campaign has got a higher score than the norm for the industry.
Speaker 1:Welcome to FutureView Now. Brand tracking is a staple of many industries, helping to measure how consumers perceive your company or product and how that stacks up within the marketplace. Undoubtedly, that's very important In competitive environments. Brand perceptions are often a really important distinguishing factor around consumer choice. That said, I have heard a lot of grumbling over the years around brand tracking in particular that it's too slow or too expensive, or doesn't seem particularly sensitive to local promotions, or that it doesn't help you understand why perceptions are changing. Frankly, the list could go on, and that's part of the reason why I've wanted to talk to James Turner, or JT as he's more commonly known, who's the CEO and founder of Delineate, a company that's really shaking up this space. Jt has a wealth of knowledge, incorporating stints of the likes of BT, black Swan, a social media specialist, and Edelman, a very well-known PR firm. There's lots in here of relevance to anyone who's starting up a business, scaling it or who's involved in managing consumer perceptions and interactions on any level. We'll get onto that in more detail in a moment, but I'd also like to give a very quick plug to MX8 Labs. It's also a great platform for anyone looking to gather insights on their consumers in a really cost effective and a fast manner, then with inbuilt analytical tools. More on that at the end.
Speaker 1:Now on to the interview. So, james, pleasure to have you on the podcast. Welcome back to the UK Now. Lots to talk about, but first of all I want to start with the traditional icebreaker. I'm sure you don't have all sorts of dark secrets, but could you delve around into your past and maybe share something that most people wouldn't know about you, that isn't easily available? All sorts of dark secrets, but could you delve around into your past and maybe share something that most people wouldn't know about you, that isn't easily available, findable on LinkedIn or the internet or anything like that.
Speaker 2:Well, I had a passion for geology when I was at school and I ended up taking that to university and I ended up in a mining degree which involved some time in South Africa in the gold mines back in the 90s. So I guess my dirty little secret is gold mining to data mining.
Speaker 1:Ah, good pun, I like it. Well, that is certainly a deep secret, dark secret, if we're going to keep on going on the tunneling puns Indeed indeed. Okay, so I'll jump on to your career. You have what our American friends might describe as a storied career and probably too many highlights to run through them all. But could you run through just a little bit of background of some of the business lessons you've learned along the way? You know there are some big names in there, so BT, Black Swan, Edelman, those types of companies.
Speaker 2:I'm lucky enough to start my career at IRI back in the 90s, now known as Sakana an awesome business, lots of great people there and the unique thing about IRI and, I guess, to an extent, nielsen and GFK back in the 90s, they were handling enormous amounts of data the first big data, if you'd like, epos data and so I was really lucky to be trained and work with some amazing people. But also more modern data tools data warehouses as we called them then, I guess data lakes now, and data science applications, as we call them now. Right back in the 90s I actually thought that was pretty standard until I left IRI and realised that most agencies weren't working with data in that way. So incredible lessons from IRI in how to handle enormous amounts of data, more data than you can see in a spreadsheet. I guess that's the way that I would describe it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's interesting, JT, so I'm jumping ahead and I will. We might go off schedule, but then when you got involved in inverted commas, more traditional research agencies it sounds like you found that was almost like a blind spot, a slightly surprising blind spot in some ways, in terms of creating data lakes and leveraging bigger data on top of traditional survey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:So I left IRI, actually as that business evolved into a software and data business, and took the opportunity to broaden my experiences and ended up at BT, and BT's need at the time was to inject technology I guess we call it kind of business transformation today into quite a traditional set of relationships, with all the large research groups at the time all now change their names in some way or other and so, yeah, I was able to.
Speaker 2:I was quite surprised at how little technology was being used to deliver data and therefore information and insights to the businesses, and actually it's a theme throughout my career that the use of technology often modest uses of technology, incrementing value onto traditional business problems has fared me pretty well. The problems we're solving even today are the same problems as the 90s and the 70s when it comes to marketing, and technology has just given us more and more edge, as have different types of data and signal that we can use, but ultimately it's finding that incremental value through technology. That's been a lesson from IRI into BT and even into Edelman, black Swan and to where I am today.
Speaker 1:And so we've both been kicking around this insight sector for probably far too long and I agree it's a common trend where you've got some very prestigious, well-established research agencies either the really big ones or some sector specialists and most of their data is just sitting there on a bunch of flat data files on SharePoint or something, and quite often there isn't even actually any consistent meta-tagging on top of them in order to be able to analyze the data as a whole. I mean, why do you think that is Slightly unfair question, because I'm asking you to analyze the industry as a whole, but it's a little odd.
Speaker 2:Well, I think there's a couple of things at play. One is product and IP, one is mergers and acquisitions and one is keeping businesses profitable. So, on the on the first one, a product and IP, and many of the well-loved and well-used products out there, whether it's pre-testing of product innovations or or creative copy tests, or brand tracking or media measurement, they all have a foot in the past, a foot in the present and I'm not quite sure which one of their limbs is in the future. A toe.
Speaker 2:So with product there's a consistency and I would say moderate change and evolution. I would say moderate change and evolution and when these products have been built, sometimes they originally were face-to-face products interviewing in the 70s and 80s and they become sometimes by telephone, but mostly the biggest changes were to online. So many of the pre-testing solutions available today in marketplaces and direct from agency brands are very old products. They haven't changed too much in many years and that not changing too much also businesses and by clients. Obviously consistency, but also in the way those businesses are valued by their owners and by potential owners as well. So that product and IP aspect to the larger research groups, the older research groups and groups that have been acquired over time, I think has a it ain't broke, don't try and fix it sort of air about it, and so they have tended to be left alone.
Speaker 2:Building around legacy processes, building around legacy technology. So you'll find some of these tools are highly automated now, but they're highly automated around old legacy processes. Now some agencies have invested in refactoring I think they call it refactoring or migrating those products to newer or more integrated platforms. But that product and IP piece is really a barrier for some research groups to get the data into more useful spaces. So legacy data, as you mentioned, flat files, legacy data formats, spss and CSV files and various legacy formats, often still being in the mix, where other parts of the marketing ecosystem have moved on significantly, I think also the M&A aspect. I think when the larger groups buy specialist groups or new technologies there's I mean, I'm sure we've all in our past seen failed integrations where either people or process or product don't integrate properly and so the cost-benefit analysis of that integration starts to fall away in year one, two, three as the business comes in and that can really just leave things as they were kind of leaving things a bit, perhaps more, in the past. And then I think there's also some businesses larger businesses particularly are always looking for growth, looking for top-line growth, looking for stable delivery of profit.
Speaker 2:At some point. You know, your transformation projects, your cost production projects may not deliver on time and they will stop. So a number of businesses. Over the years they've always got some transformation program going on around consolidating data, standardizing questionnaires or metadata, finding ways to reduce the number of interviews and use synthetic data or ways to replace people or processes.
Speaker 2:I won't name names today, but many teams I've spoken to are simply stuck with a technology plus people solution and they can't go any faster. It's all in series and they can't go faster. So there's, you know, I think there's a innovation, and transformation in some businesses is really quite a challenge, particularly if revenue is also problematic, and that's why some of the smaller, newer businesses that have taken a blank sheet of paper and learned the lessons and rebuilt things from scratch, I think, are really succeeding with clients because they can deliver faster at the same quality or better and often cheaper. A lot of fat in some of the larger businesses that have got many teams all working with each other, interfacing, lots of costs for project management and people, and so when you look at a kind of cost per data point or cost per insight, if you want to put some unusual business metrics on these things, the larger agencies can be very, very costly compared to some of the newer agencies out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very much agreed. I mean, it's also interesting going back to the IRA, ira, npd, slash Sakana example, because your background, I guess, is out of a measurement business. Your background, I guess, is out of a measurement business whereby what you're paid for fundamentally is speed, accuracy, ability to tie that measurement data in with other client data sets. So it is much more of a technology play, whereas I think a lot of insight businesses have tried to position themselves around providing advice and that's how they want to be valued. There's another question as to whether they're paid enough for that advice, because they have legacy business models based on charges of cost per interview or focus group, whatever it might be, rather than the value of advice that they're providing. But sometimes it strikes me that the industry's caught a little bit betwixt and between. Would you agree with that? Is that a reasonable type of analysis?
Speaker 2:I do agree. I think that some of the larger research groups are too big and try to be all things to all people and it's hard for a client to work out how to engage that business. There are consulting teams, analytics teams, operations teams, panel teams and then there are insight teams as well and you'll see teams have some level of infighting as to who owns the client and where revenue goes. And my experience of larger businesses where revenue recognition is a challenge is that's not good for the client or for the business, and so I see that in some of the relationships that my clients have with other agencies that there's often a conflict there.
Speaker 2:I think you're right on the value. I think there are two models at play within the industry the cost per data point we deliver, and you're right to say that's per interview or per focus group or whatever the nuts and bolts of delivery, and then there's a struggle to separate out the value add. So think the the value of the answer is relation related to the hierarchy of the person that's asking the question, right? So if it's a ceo asking a consulting firm, then add a digit or two to the answer, when often the reality underneath it all is you've got relatively green consultants who've got a great university and no doubt a snazzy outfit, are using self-serve research tools to deliver I would say, average at best surveys to answer questions. And then you've got very expensive market research businesses designing fantastic bespoke research solutions that can't get a look in and the client may be getting great quality data.
Speaker 2:What they're often getting from those higher, higher paid consulting firms is brand equity, confidence that the smart people that are delivering the answer to you and some safety nets from the partners and smart folk that are in those businesses, but ultimately a clear story, a clear set of steps, definitely heavy on frameworks and PowerPoints. I think we've all seen a consulting firm's slides at some point in their life very clear, with established case studies and outcomes. So the power of those brands is what's at play, and the research industry, to your point, has really struggled to consistently play alongside those consulting firms. So I'm not sure whether the future is less bright for research, that we really become a first-party data collection industry that serves a new, bigger, perhaps more varied consulting industry, or whether we will continue to play a slightly different role.
Speaker 1:So I should drag us back onto. Sorry, I've gone down a channel of just picking your brain and speculating and letting industry trends percolate. But I also wanted to find out about Delineate, and I think you've alluded to some of this JT. But what does Delineate do? Why did you found the business? Where was the market need, jt, so Delineate?
Speaker 2:works with brands in the media, brand and comms space, and our unique positioning really is our ability to work in real time, helping them make decisions. So we created the business because I'd come from, most recently, a PR and comms background at Edelman where we'd been building research products that dealt with real-time so crisis, communications crisis and brand and corporate reputation and had great success there. And delineate really was born out of the idea that the slower moving marketing communications channels like tv, and and and all the traditional media, as well as some of the slow to move digital, weren't really being served that well by the legacy research agencies. And we heard brands say why does it take six weeks, 10 weeks or more to get a campaign review? Or why can't I see things faster? And there was this paradox, really, that brands were being forced to reduce the budgets on primary research, often to pay for other digital tools, and they were reducing their ability to craft large enough samples and get the amount of data they needed to understand their campaigns and how their brand is performing in market.
Speaker 2:So we responded to those client concerns and evolved our thinking to cover things like campaign tracking, brand equity tracking and product consumption, and ultimately, what we do today is we do always-on consumer interviews that feed brand tracking, campaign evaluation and product innovation all around the world, and we're lucky enough to have Coca-Cola as one of our largest clients, who talk quite openly about the work we do for them all around the world, delivering daily data. So our use of technology, a bit like I talked about earlier, we have had the opportunity to rebuild and redesign a process and our technology allows our clients to look at their most recent performance in all of their touchpoints, across all of their brands and competitors, all within their tool of choice, which often will be a BI tool rather than a market research tool, and puts the data into their infrastructure in their data science environment so they can start to build decision science applications and other business value from the data, not just PowerPoint reports 12 weeks after the campaign finishes. So very proud of the work we've done to date.
Speaker 1:Got it. And so, going back a little bit, just so I'm clear, so when you were at Edelman and you were more in the PR world, you saw the speed that was necessary there, because I imagine you've got a brand, there's a crisis, something's happened, you need to get some consumer feedback, and so was that really a question of building out very fast agile tools, spot survey type things. And then when you started Delineate youate, you were saying, actually we could use some of that thinking but apply the traditional rigor of you know the good market research methodologies that are used to sort of put the two together. Is that how it came about?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, even even in the, in the, in the pr world, which I guess is notorious for, quote, quick and dirty surveys, end quote edelman. I was part of the team that that continued on the good work they were doing in research. So there are good researchers inside pr agencies. I'd like to make that point, but I agree I agree.
Speaker 1:Yes, I didn't. Didn't mean to be slagging off all the pr agents.
Speaker 2:Well, you see plenty of stories of of, uh, terrible, terrible polls or they're, you know, asking five people in the office and get a headline. But there was a very interesting shift at Edelman with the creation of Edelman Burland. So Mike Burland joined the business and that was a pivotal shift in using insights to drive campaign ideation, campaign measurement, thought leadership, research as well. So, yeah, the edelman was well known for its trust barometer and other pieces of ip, and the challenge set to the research team was to create products that worked at the pace of of pr. So, yeah, we built products there. So there was crisis products and message testing products and others as well. So, with that understanding, it was a pretty easy leap to as I left Edelman and gone to Black Swan in between and then thinking about, with that experience as well, how could I take my new set of knowledge building research products for, for the, for the pace of the modern world, experiencing using analytics and and building real products using proper software engineers rather than rocket researchers. What could we do? So those two inputs really led to the conclusion that, yes, pr was great, but actually the value, the spend and the risks that brands have are also in their paid campaigns, in their traditional TV advertising, their digital campaigns, and what we saw was enormous investment in research in those areas, but it just wasn't available at the right times. So pre-testing had made some some inroads to being more of a fast turnaround research product, although I still hear today that the claims of some of those products are not for every circumstance. So you'll see, you'll see. You'll see products claim that it's in hours. You'll get hundreds of interviews and be available to you. I think the reality for many of the brands we work with is that that's just not customized enough, not suitable for their needs, and so you're then still looking at custom, custom work and taking many days to get answers. So that that speed, that speed really was the, the client demand we were responding to, and tracking is enormously powerful.
Speaker 2:So my back back in the 90s, working with iri, that was tracking like measurement, as you say, having that data always on so you can go and query it when you have a question, rather than having to set up a project and execute it and get it back. There's always been the faster way, the more cost-effective way of getting the data you need to to build insights and make decisions. So that was, that was the genesis really of some of the early conversations with clients, and we were really lucky to be supported by clients that were frankly just so frustrated with the quality they got back after waiting so long for even monthly wave-based tracking studies to complete, and they gave me examples where their internal processes for budgeting and planning for campaigns required a go or no go. So, green, it is the same as last year. Yellow make some changes. Red don't do it again.
Speaker 2:Those decisions were being made ahead of getting the data back from the campaign.
Speaker 2:They didn't actually know truly whether it had the impact that it should have done.
Speaker 2:They weren't able to close the loop and to this day there are many media agencies and others within the ecosystem that take an enormous amount of time to mark their own homework and provide back a report that will always in some way say the campaign did what it said it was supposed to do.
Speaker 2:And so that was the frustration getting real outcomes, getting it quick so that you could improve next time. So I think also the clients were more interested in continuous improvement than, frankly, a butt covering exercise of my campaign has got a higher score than the norm for the industry. So a frustration that if they're a successful brand, paying some very smart people to build fantastic campaigns and experiences for them over many years, that they would be comparing themselves to the average of all things tested didn't make any sense really. So there was a evolution in in how measurement was perceived, a need for the speed and de-risking future work, following in the in the footsteps of of yet to be validated work, and and that's where we ended up essentially taking that fast turnaround research that took less than a day and, adding it all up, it becomes a tracker.
Speaker 1:And so would you say, your focus then is more campaign tracking as opposed to brand tracking. I mean, I know the two things are interrelated, but would you see a distinction?
Speaker 2:there. There's certainly a distinction in how brands come to know us and hopefully love us. So typically the larger clients will already have a brand tracker and some of those clients will love a methodology or IP from one of those big agencies out there and those methodologies and IPs have a place, and we could talk forever about those, but we won't. So either your business believes in that IP, has embedded that IP and therefore is fairly wedded to that IP, or you're not. So brands that talk to us tend to not want to mess with brand equity tracking. However, they do have the frustrations that it's run by global, it's really slow, it doesn't work for me in my country or my category, and all sorts of ailments that they will say it has, and possibly that's because they don't have control. But ultimately, I think there's some truth to the fact that centralized global tracking it struggles to meet everyone's needs and that's something we we work hard to to address. So when, so when, clients come to us, they are usually looking for campaign, because that's the element that's not dynamic, not agile on the global, on the global tracking, they'll have some measure of. Have you seen, read or heard a campaign about brand x in there? And that's probably about it. Maybe a global campaign will be there.
Speaker 2:So we we talk to brands about, about brand tracking and campaign tracking, but what they often see an opportunity for, particularly with our agile approach is, is campaign and the classic I guess the classic sales journey, not to just to sort of tell. Our secret sauce here is that clients will, will experience our campaign tracking and it has a a wide array of brand funnel metrics. Against those campaign tracking sections is that they'll get more responsive and analyzable brand metrics alongside campaigns. Ultimately, we're showing clients what impact has your campaign had on these brand metrics. So once they've fallen in love with campaign analytics, we then see our clients putting a business case together for brand as well. So we've had several clients end up switching out their brand tracking because they realize that you can do it differently. So it's kind of a Trojan horse in that regard.
Speaker 1:Exactly, it's just what I was thinking, jt. I'm going to oversimplify it a little bit, but surely if your brand equity is moving, something must have changed in the marketplace. And I know this is going to vary by category, but to some extent it may be fine. The market's just changed, your competitors have done something. But most of the time, surely, if it's moving, it's because you've done something, so you've done a campaign of some type? I mean, isn't that generally the case? Am I just being naive?
Speaker 2:No, I think you're right. I think the problem. So, look, brand tracking is discussed so much in the media. You've got Mark Ritson who I believe claims in his mini MBA if you're not doing brand tracking, you're not a marketer or something along those lines. Right, brands do need to track their performance, their positioning. It's really important.
Speaker 2:There's a big issue in our industry about the price paid and the value received around brand tracking. I think it's having a resurgence, but not necessarily called brand tracking. But what's happened over the last 10 to 15 years is to the point we're making. At the beginning, those larger research agencies, with their IP and their need for growth and their huge cost base, have maintained a price point that's fairly high for their IP and the cost of doing fieldwork has decreased perhaps too low and that's a subject for another podcast. But the cost of doing research has never been cheaper and access to tools that keep you the right side of methodology and quality are aplenty. But those larger research agencies are keeping the prices high and you'll see they're evolving their models to serve data only and basic analysis and dashboards and all the usual stuff, but ultimately it's still fairly high, and that's the same in concept and pre-testing as well. But what's happened for the marketers is their budgets have remained static or shrunk. Their budgets have remained static or shrunk. They're being asked to increase the use of tools in digital analytics and funnels and many other areas. So where do you look for that money for those new things?
Speaker 2:Probably the largest item in your measurement budget, which is probably the brand tracker, possibly a CX tracker, but many of those are in-house now, and so when you go to those big agencies and you and you say I need to, I need to cut our spend a little bit, they won't be able to round individuals down to half a person or or not to deliver a key report, and so it becomes the sample size that decreases, and what happens then is a sort of bit of a spiral. Then let's cut the sample size. We're going to go from monthly to quarterly or quarterly to six. Monthly. The data becomes left responsive to the outside world and some agencies are running field work in the sixth month of a six month period, so only getting a dip in a moment in time, because the sample sizes are small and it'll be pretty impossible to spread it out over the six month period.
Speaker 2:So you're getting highly affected waves of data that don't tie to the activity of the brand and that's being written up and delivered into scorecards and more often than I'd like to count, we'll hear insight leaders say I can't change it, it's in the the CEO's scorecard and it's reported it's in a pretty PDF once a year for shareholders. So the cost of change is high and those brand trackers are left running, which is why it's not an easy transition for some of those businesses. Fortunately, we're very good at doing fairly sophisticated parallel runs and obviously we can't obviously duplicate the ip of another agency, but there are only so many ways you can skin the brand funnel cat.
Speaker 1:So we find exactly so, yeah, it's a.
Speaker 2:It's an. It's interesting, interesting world that there are. The businesses that we work with I think are really smart. They. They know how to do this stuff. I don't necessarily want to do the nuts and bolts of collecting data and probably they shouldn't. Their time's better served inside the business using the data to to get to gain value, but they understand how it all works and they understand how to buy things differently and perhaps how to to create their own ip, their own models of managing equity and campaign evaluation that work for their category and markets I also wanted to do a quick sanity check, in that you explained why you set up theidiate, and I think there's a very clear reason for doing so, but were you totally bonkers in terms of setting up a startup?
Speaker 1:I mean, it's a tumultuous journey in many cases, so how has that experience been for you and what lessons would you impart to other founders who are potentially early in that journey or considering doing something similar?
Speaker 2:I think I had to be a little bit bonkers. But I was also fortunate that in several businesses before setting up on my own, I had been trusted to set up teams inside an Edelman or a Black Swan or before that, icm group. So I had a confidence that I could build teams that could deliver and scale and so felt confident that I could do it on my own. One of the first lessons is I'll never underestimate again how much effort the quote back office functions of our early team members who was strong on that was fantastic. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that goes on in the background that you need to get right. That's hard to do if you've been an insights professional. And the second thing is that Delineate to this day is still not it's still self-funded. It's still self-funded. I think we were lucky. We worked hard, we delivered what we said we would for clients and we were rewarded.
Speaker 2:But there were a number of near misses on the way. Not winning that first client when we won them could have meant the end for our business. Of course it was awful for many people, but our ability to be agile in our research techniques meant that our foundational clients evolved their campaign tracking into COVID tracking. What are consumers doing? How are they trying to buy products in this difficult time? What are their concerns? How is this going to affect our business? We would deliver that data in days and our competitors delivered that in six weeks. So we were we were left turned on during that time. So I think you know the lesson. For me, there is be very sure of your model and control of your business, if you're. If you're not, if you're funding it yourself. I think if I was to do it again, I think I probably would take someone else's money and a bit less stress, if I'm honest. But we are where we are and well done.
Speaker 1:I know you're doing very, very well, and so where do you want to go with the business next? Where do you want to take it?
Speaker 2:So alluded to the fact that brand tracking is in a bit of resurgence, but not necessarily just as brand tracking. So we are evolving what we do to serve different channels of customer. We will continue to serve insights and professionals and marketers interested in campaign. Real-time tracking and brand equity tracking work for sure, but there's also a type of client that wants data entirely over API. They just want signals about the world around them. So there is a type of client that wants marketing signals and consumer opinions in more real time that we will also be working with, and there's also a type of of media agency partner that values brand data more readily.
Speaker 2:So I think there's a very interesting change happening in in in the media and marketing world, where performance marketing has gone as far as it can and we're seeing we're seeing a need for brand marketers to have a currency or data that lets them have the same kind of control and ability to adjust brand campaigns in the same way that performance campaigns have had for some time in real time, understanding the impact it's having on brand metrics and, ultimately, outcomes commercial outcomes. That becomes incredibly powerful. We're seeing what I thought was dead MMM making a bit of a resurgence.
Speaker 2:We're seeing businesses build their own ecosystems of analytics to automate some of the decisions they're making around campaigns. We talked about consulting firms, but you know they're building systems, decision science applications, integrations. The big media agencies are have enormous analytics teams, data teams that are just trying to get signals into their, into their models to make better decisions every day. So there's some interesting, I think, evolutions of how, frankly, the same brand funnel metrics we've been tracking for 50 or 60 years get into into the place where decisions are made, and that could be a machine now, not necessarily a powerpoint and a. So that's where I think that's where we're headed to, where I think the industry needs to go. So maybe, as we talked about at the beginning, being great data collectors and connecting our data, isn't a bad place to be if we've got less people-based decisions happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, certainly agreed. I did an interesting interview with John Redman at Ask Bosco and he's at the performance marketing end of the equation, but he also makes the point. He's seen it in practice where clients have turned off their brand marketing or turned it down, and then you see the impact six to 12 months later. So that is from somebody who's very much with an agency that specializes at lower funnel. Now, jt, I'm conscious of time, so I might just jump on to a few quickfire questions, if that's all right. Now, aside from what we've been talking about in terms of brand tracking and campaign tracking and that type of area, is there anything that you believe that most people don't? So I mean, it may be like an industry truism, or not even necessarily an industry truism, but just something that people conventionally say at the moment but that you actually don't think is the case I struggle with this one, actually, to be honest, something I believe in that most people don't, or vice versa.
Speaker 2:I guess that I'm biased in my answer here, but sometimes you just need to ask people. So, when it comes to the analytics industry, creating incredibly sophisticated models on signals with probabilities and crazy amounts of effort sometimes just ask someone. Ask them the smart way, but just ask them, and so I strongly, if not passionately, believe in opinion-based market research, first-party data.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm with you on it, and while I believe that you can clearly implement some very important roles, all sorts of sophisticated techniques, whether you're trying to get a read on people's emotions or whether you're looking at in-market signals, if we want to understand how humans are behaving, what they're feeling, we've developed a mechanism over thousands of years as humans whereby we're very, very well-attuned to that. Quite often, by asking them questions and getting a read from them, there can be a risk. Another buzzword in marketing incrementality. If you look at incrementality, actually a lot of the new techniques are not giving you incremental benefit. They're almost just innovation for the sake of innovation. Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now. You're meant to be the one answering the questions.
Speaker 2:No, I think you're right. I don't think we're quite done with some of the more traditional approaches. We've talked about brand tracking extensively here. It works. It has worked for a long time. It's not the brand tracking that's broken. It's the commercial model of how brand tracking is collected, disseminated, interpreted and used by brands. That that's the problem.
Speaker 1:And something's got to change in the industry. Well, I'm glad to see that change is beginning to happen. Now I can't resist this question, having also met James. What would your partner say are your best and worst characteristics?
Speaker 2:I'll start with my worst characteristics Too many ideas, too many ideas. I think that the downside to being a problem solver who likes to tell people about the solution is that you can come up with too many ideas, too many ways to solve the problem. So that's something I have to manage as a leader, where we have to keep pointing in the same direction.
Speaker 2:And then best characteristics, I would say trying to keep things upbeat. We actually have a great word that we don't use it so much now. Working with alacrity, a think there's a. I think one of the most important things you can, you can do as a leader is to keep things as light-hearted, pleasurable, as an experience as possible, even when times are tough, when things go wrong, having that control, that calm if not, and not making light where it's not due, but just keeping things, keeping a happy team, and there's a great deal of power in humor and to to bring people together and fix things. So I'd say one of my strengths is that I enjoy what I do. I enjoy helping people, whether that's clients or the team, and yeah, I'd say I like to keep things light-hearted.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't want to keep on agreeing with you, jc. I should probably argue with you more on some of these points. But yeah, I mean, nobody ever works well in environments where they're being shouted at. And I'm not saying you can't be firm and you can't address problems if are problems but very much with you on it. Okay, so if you were to take on your mindset and your skill set and you could be the CEO of any business apart from Delineate because that one's already taken which would it be and why?
Speaker 2:I like creating new things, so I would really like to run a country pub restaurant. That's what I'd really like to do, but anyone who knows me would say you wouldn't be cooking the food, would you? And I'm probably not. I wouldn't be. I think I'd be described as front of house, but that's that gives me a great deal of pleasure to organize parties and gatherings. I run a pub quiz in a local pub and that gives me a great deal of pleasure.
Speaker 1:So CEO would probably be too strong a title here, but owner front of house would be a fair summary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that perfect moment of a of a sunday afternoon, friends and family, perfect lunch, would be every every sunday would be amazing.
Speaker 1:That sounds wonderful. Now, what's your favorite book or recent book? Doesn't have to be a book, could be a piece of media, tv series, film, anything like that well, I'm I'm quite well known home and here for not reading real books.
Speaker 2:I've started audiobooks, audio books that I probably should have read years ago, all the standard business books, so that's been great recently reading some of those books that I've never really found time for. I have a particular book that I've cited before and I read it from time to time. It's a short book in research why do buses come in threes? It's an interesting book. I often lend it to junior team members. It's mathematics in real life and why do buses come in threes? Well, it's actually bunching theory. There's all sorts of interesting ways in which the maths and statistics that we rely on in our industry manifest themselves in in real life, and it's a yeah, it's a fun little read uh, well, you know what?
Speaker 1:I may well actually pick it up. I haven't heard of it, but it sounds great and probably not too long as well, so it actually might be something I'd finish it's not quite enid blighton level, but it's pretty, it's a pretty usually I'm more enid blighted level enid blighted, enid blighton level. Jt, thanks so much. It's a pleasure, as always, talking to you, really, really insightful, and we can probably do this for hours, but unfortunately we don't have time.
Speaker 2:Thanks, very much for inviting me today.
Speaker 1:JT's great, isn't he? Super knowledgeable, pragmatic and shaking things up in a really practical, actionable way. In some ways, it seems like Delineate is just getting rid of a lot of the unnecessary complications that have bedeviled a lot of research processes, which brand tracking, or perhaps campaign tracking, as we should think of it now really has been a prime candidate. Anyway, enough of me. For the meantime, thank you to JT for the interview, mx8 Labs for their sponsorship Go on, do check them out and also to Insight Platforms for their support and, of course, to you for listening. See you next time.
