Call To Action

In July 2022, I joined Giles Edwards on the Call To Action podcast.

Whilst our conversation covered many topics, my article The Errors of Efficiency formed the backbone of our conversation. From the episodes description:

Alex talks to us on tonnes of topics, including making the jump from graphic design to strategy, efficiency vs effectiveness, why an ad being expensive and ignored is a good thing, what the Superbowl and a peacock’s plumage have in common, Darwin, Derren Brown, the pitfalls of purpose, Eastern European dystopian fiction, and a whole lot more.

You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whoever you listen to podcasts.

Thanks to Giles for having me. I hope you all enjoy the show!

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Call To Action, the go-to podcast for anyone trying to make sense of the world of marketing, advertising and beyond. In an industry that is a minefield of utter bollocks, we aim to capture our heroes and allies from the front line to have a chinwag with. It's like Pokémon Go, with the single but vital exception that it's not a short-term bandwagon of shite.

It's brought to you by Gasp, and I'm Giles Edwards. Today, I've caught Alex Murrell, a Bristol-based buff with a passion for books, beers and buildings. Alex is currently Strategy Director at Brand Agency Epoch.

Supplying strategic simplicity to the world's biggest FMCG brands, he is hell-bent on making the complex clear and understanding the role of advertising and marketing in his clients' growth, culture and society at large. Alex says, Let's stop criticizing broadcast advertising for being inefficient. Let's stop worrying about it being wasteful. Over a century of research suggests the exact opposite. The very things that make mass media less efficient are also the very things that make them more effective. Welcome to the show, Alex.

Hi Giles, nice to talk to you.

Right, seven quickfire questions, Alex. So, Mac or PC? Mac.

Beers or books? Books.

Another beer one now, an IPA or the IPA? IPA.

Madrid or Copenhagen? Oh, I've been to both this year. I loved Copenhagen. I'm going to go Copenhagen.

Copenhagen, nice.

Content or context? Context.

Right, tricky one, I think. Tim Ambler or Professor Karen Nelson Field? Oh, that is a tricky one. I'll go, I'll go Tim Ambler. And maybe I'll come onto, onto Karen Nelson Field a bit later.

Okay, good stuff. Right, last one, we're going back to Bristol now. Ronnie Size or Massive Attack? I'll go Massive Attack. I used to go to their club in Bristol, so yeah, some fond memories for them.

Ah, good man. Well, Alex, thank you for joining us.

No, thank you for having me. I was just saying before we started recording that we've been speaking online for probably two or three years, but I've never actually, been in a conversation with you, so it's, it's an honour and a pleasure.

Ha ha ha, you say that now.

Ha ha ha.

So to start the show, Alex, we always like to celebrate weird and wonderful ways that our guests find themselves where they do in their career. So I saw you studied graphic design at university. I actually left UWE the year you joined, so make of that what you will. And you're now Strategy Director at Epoch. So to kick things off, what was your first ever job and then what was your first proper job?

Yeah, I think I was somewhat fortunate, in that from a relatively young age I had a degree of focus on what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. I studied graphic design, as you said, studied that at GCSE level, so from the age of about 14. I did that through A level and then at HND and then eventually a bachelor's at UWE.

I graduated in 2008, which was not a good year to graduate. That was the year of the Great Recession and for about six months or so, maybe a year, I really struggled to get a foot into the industry. If I'm honest, I struggled to kind of get a response at that time, let alone an interview or even a role.

And eventually I was taken on by a small agency in North Bristol called Design Simple for an extended internship. The founder there, Luke Bezio, took me under his wing a little bit and taught me a huge amount. It's kind of 15 years or so ago, but I still feel quite indebted to Luke.

He taught me about design, but also about the commercials of agency life and the practicalities of cost estimates and how to politely chase late payments and presenting work and how to write your payment terms and all things like that. And so I worked there for a little bit and eventually that came to an end. Then DesignSimple continued to send work my way after that internship came to an end.

And anything that came to them that maybe wasn't a good fit for them, they ushered my way. So I fell into freelancing for a bit where DesignSimple were giving me some work. I started to form some relationships with some other agencies where I was supporting them.

I started to build a small client base of my own working directly with clients. And then maybe a couple of years later, I came to the realization that I really wanted to work in a much bigger team that I felt that maybe wasn't progressing too much working on my own. And wanted to be amongst people that were kind of much, much better than me and much, much more experienced than me and to benefit from their wisdom and their experience.

So I drew up a short list of agencies in the South West that I'd be interested in working for. And Epoch's name had come up a few times when I'd been freelancing at other agencies. And they're quite a secretive bunch at Epoch. And I didn't really know much about them at the time. Their website was just their logo and a phone number. But I eventually managed to get in touch and took on a role initially as an Artworker.

I was hired by a guy called Simon Ward, who's the head of artwork, and introduced me to agency life. And then after a few years, I then felt like I wanted to make a bit of a move and started to make some noises about moving into the Creative team. And our then creative director, who was a brilliant guy called Kelly Thinnigan, he said, have you ever thought about being a Planner?

Now we weren't an ad agency and hadn't really been exposed to the world of planning or strategy. So I spent a few weeks, maybe a month just diving into it, I got into Mark Pollard's community and started to read some of Julian Cole's very early decks when he was out in New York. And eventually came to this conclusion that maybe this was my home after doing a bit of client services and a bit of creative and a bit of artwork.

And I actually felt that I'd found a place for myself when I came across strategy. And I had a conversation with Aunt Lucas, who's one of the two founders at Epoch, and said this is maybe what I wanted to do. And they were good enough to support me, and they said, let's give it a go for a year and see what comes of it.

And the team has grown by a person a year ever since, and that's maybe eight years ago now.

So, sorry to cut you off, I was just going to ask, was that planning role, was that effectively new to the agency then?

Yeah, at the time, I mean, in hindsight, strategic work was being done, but it was being done partly by the creative team and partly by client services team. So there was comms plans and touchpoint plans and things like that. But as a dedicated department, it didn't exist at the time.

And as I said, I'm fortunate enough that the agency kind of took a bit of a gamble to make that a thing, because otherwise, I suppose I could have gone elsewhere.

That's really interesting, though. And actually, you mentioned prior to creating that short list of agencies that you could see yourself working with, you felt working on your own wasn't the right pace of development. And yet I imagine you were still on your own in a way, albeit with that agency support to carve out this dedicated department. That must have been quite exciting.

Yeah, it was definitely exciting. I've got a bit of a theory that the really good people in our industry, whatever department they work in, tend to be pretty good at most of the department skills. So a really great creative can spot a great strategy. A good strategist can build a great client relationships and things like that. And whilst I was siloed for that year or so whilst we fired up the strategy department, I picked out the people around the agency who had a good strategic brain on them, even if they were in creative or client services or whatever it may be. So I found allies around the business that would see the value in strategy, even though it was just me on my own again.

Yeah, that's nice. And so you said right at the beginning, going to study graphic design sounds like that was a very conscious decision often, as I'm sure you know as well, you probably had peers in the same position, you often get an amount of people at any university course who were there without necessarily planning it or having the life experience to even know if it's the right decision, which I think is fair. How did you find that change from graphic design to planning?

So you're still very much thinking creatively, but you're not necessarily producing aesthetic design.

Well, I always enjoyed the creative or concepting end of design, the thinking end of design. And if I'm really honest, I probably wasn't the best at the executing end of it. So in the brief spell that I was part of the creative department, I was much more at the early stages of creative, of getting to an idea, a design idea, rather than the crafting end of it.

Well, whilst the journey seems kind of like I'm pinballing around different roles, and I was to a certain extent, but the transition from creative to strategy felt quite natural.

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, for me personally, I don't think you're pinballing at all. But I say that as someone who's gone through that exact same journey, I mean, literally in terms of doing graphic design at UWE, but also from starting off studio side and doing some creative art working when I started and then becoming an art director. And it was only after spending probably at least five or six years in an agency when I realized actually I wanted to be the guy in the room where the briefing was happening to understand any creative opportunities that might have been missed prior to a brief being written. So to me, it seems very natural. But then I know, as I'm sure you do too, that actually it does seem quite alien to people who find themselves in one position and they develop it within that department as they go. And there's no right or wrong.

But I do find myself inclined to agree with your point that the best people that you work with tend to be good at other parts or they have at least experience in different departments because you've got that empathy that is so critical to marketing.

Yeah, I see the kind of the experience or exposure to lots of the different departments in the early years of my career as  being a real benefit. I think strategists tends to work at the centre of lots of different departments. You know, you're supporting client services in building the relationship with clients. You're working directly with clients to clarify their briefs. You're briefing in a creative team and following a creative project through. You're working within your strategic team. So I think that strategists act as a pivot point in the middle of lots of different departments. And I see it as a benefit to have experienced some of those different departments so that I can empathize with them and the challenges that they are faced with.

And where was it on this this journey then? Where was it where you started noticing, I suppose, errors in both efficiencies and effectiveness? Because I know that's something I want to come on to, we're going to do as deep a dive as we can in the time allowed. But was that even in your role when you were more studio based? Could you see that there were decisions being made that needed to be questioned? Was that something that kind of crept in the more immersed in strategy that you got?

I think it was probably always there. You know, graduating when I did, and having worked in the industry for around 13, 14, 15 years now, it perfectly tracks the period where the huge growth of the internet and digital marketing and performance marketing. And so I saw this shift happening, maybe away from traditional advertising towards performance marketing and at the same time, I saw a shift towards efficiency within the industry more broadly.

I speak in one of the articles I've written about how you see things like adoption of agile processes and lean workflows and lean startups and things like that. So you started to see this, I call it the era of efficiency, starting to take over where perhaps the desire to minimize waste through… whether it's targeted advertising or through the processes with which work is created, that desire to minimize waste became more important to the industry than maximizing the impact of the work. And I don't think I ever had a moment of realization, but it was just kind of growing feeling that that's the way things were going, a trend that was recognized.

Again, I mentioned before we started recording, I just had a conversation with Rich Kirk from Zenith and we were talking about the same thing and I have a feeling that give or take a few years, he and I knew a similar age because we spoke about that, how the emergence of new media and lots of different digital channels, we kind of lived through that and we saw it firsthand. And I recall actually working at an agency at the time who made quite a binary call very early on that we weren't even going to be allowed to use Facebook within the office premises, let alone explore it and see if it was a, you know, represented a tool of any worth. And then it almost went completely full circle where the answer was social media. It was bizarre. It was quite interesting to live through. But you can't live through that type of experience without being naturally inquisitive. And I suppose I'm slightly cynical when it comes to new forms of media, just because I feel like you need to be in order to interrogate and justify what you're being told.

On the topic of efficiency versus effectiveness, I gradually started to see people ask the question of what is the difference? And they, you know, they genuinely didn't know. And I don't say that in a patronising way or a derogatory way. They were asking the question with an open mind and curiosity. And I always felt like I had an answer, but that it was blurry and vague. And I never thought I could give an answer very concisely. So I never really engaged in that question. And after kind of playing on my mind for a little bit, I really thought I should try and formalise some response to that and clarify it.

Cool, can you clarify it now for our listeners?

I can do my best, I suppose. To kick off with, there's always been, to some degree, the idea that mass broadcast advertising is wasteful. It's almost a cliché to reference it, but there's the John Wannamaker quote that “half the money I spend in advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half”. And that variously gets attributed to different people. So there's always been some sense that advertising, especially mass reach or traditional advertising, is in some way inefficient, that there is a degree of waste within it. And I came across a piece of research by Epiquity, who are the media investment analysts. And they had done some research and found that this drive towards the more efficient medias, which tends to be the more digital media, was driven by three things, and those three things were the perception that paid digital, particularly social media and online video, was driven by the idea that it was cheaper, that it was targeted, and that it provided a measurable response, that there was some degree of engagement that could be measured. And when I read this piece of research, those three things really started to provide the kind of structure for this article, so that this starting point is that if efficient media is cheap, targeted and communicates to a highly engaged audience, and the inverse is the critique that traditional media is expensive, it's untargeted and it's often ignored, maybe there's a point of pushback here that those three things are not so much critiques or weaknesses, but are actually points of strength. And the article's structured around this idea that being expensive, being mass and being ignored might actually be a good thing.

Yeah, no, I totally agree. It's funny, actually, that John Wannamaker quote, I must have seen it attributed to at least half a dozen people. That idea of waste and I say this as someone who, as an agency, we've always been really interested in behavioural science and we've been going to Rory's brilliant Nudge Stocks ever since it started because we were just so fascinated at it. The reason I'm talking about Rory's because we've always loved signalling and the power of signalling. And in fact, we talked about it with the background story of your surname, which I'm hoping we can revisit at some point in the recording. But that idea of the waste has to mean something bad, like waste has to be seen as a negative thing rather than something that's the abundance of something that has a beneficial effect. And I think there's tie ins there with signalling.

Every year when the Super Bowl happens, which I think is in February time, there's always a slew of articles around how much a 30 second spot at the Super Bowl costs and what you could get for that money in other media channels. Digiday published an article that said for the cost of a 30 second spot, you could buy 2.5 billion Snapchat impressions, 1.7 billion impressions on Instagram or Facebook, 600 million impressions on LinkedIn. I think that misses a crucial point.

Darwin had his theory of evolution. Small mutations in an animal, if they were beneficial, would make that animal more likely to survive and over time species would gradually converge on an optimal set of traits. But Darwin was baffled by a set of animals that had attributes that seemed to hinder their survival rather than help it. So a peacock's ornate plumage would make it very difficult for a peacock to get away from a predator. Or a stag with ginormous horns or antlers or a bird that spends hours making a ornate nest.

Darwin actually said that the sight of a peacock's tail feather made him physically sick. This is how much it annoyed him. And he came to a bit of a breakthrough, which is that evolution relies not just on a species' ability to survive, but on its ability to procreate.

And his theory evolved to include this idea that the ornate tail feathers of the peacock or the large antlers of a stag were signs of fitness, that these animals were so strong that they could afford to waste resources, that they could survive despite their physical encumbrances, and that would make them a more attractive mate because they were signals of their strength and prowess. And I suppose a brand’s high spend perform a similar role. The huge cost of the Super Bowl ad, 30 seconds, is a signal to an audience that that brand is strong and financially stable and is confident and is likely to go on being strong and stable and confident for a long time to come.

Yeah, I suppose lots of businesses need to stop thinking so much like early Darwin thought in that regard. I've heard Rory share a story a few times about how the waggle dance that honeybees do baffled scientists for years as well because they expected this kind of efficiency amongst bees that they'd be so compliant, they would all follow the same piece of communication. It's actually the opposite is true because if they all followed the waggle dance, they'd all become overly reliant on a single source of food and ultimately perish.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I love Rory's book Alchemy. In that he pushes this argument to its extreme. He talks about how the potency or meaningfulness of a piece of communication is in direct proportion to its costliness. So the more money that it costs to produce and to place an ad in media, the more potent and meaningful it will be, which is this argument but pushed to an extreme.

I'm going to go through your three errors, if I may, if you can just give me a bit of detail about each one. So error number one that you've written is mass media is wasteful because it is untargeted.

So the Wannamaker quote that 50% of advertising is wasted, in the digital age, has been pushed to an extreme. Chris Anderson, who was editor at Wired magazine, probably most famous for his book, The Long Tail, he wrote a book called Free and he claimed that 90% of broadcast media reached an audience that was completely uninterested in it. And to some degree, that makes some sense.

If you are advertising a luxury car, Mercedes for example, then there's a huge portion of that audience who will not be able to purchase that brand or that car. They may be too young, they may be too old, they may not have a driving licence, they may have been banned from driving, you know, whatever it may be, they may use public transport. And so you could see all of that, all of those impressions as inefficiency or waste. Waste to be eradicated.

But that ignores what I believe is one of the most powerful roles that a brand plays, which is the role of signalling something about one's identity. We talk about functional and emotional benefits of brands, but I think there's also self-expressive ones. To use the car example, if you're seeing or driving a Mercedes, then that communicates certain things about you. It communicates your financial status, or your sense of style, or some sensibilities that you have. And if you buy into that idea, the idea of self-expressive benefits, then you have to buy into the idea that you need everybody to know what that brand stands for. It's not enough just for the target audience to understand it, but everybody else needs to understand it as well.

I know you're a massive Jeremy Bullmore fan. He wrote that if a luxury car only ever advertised to people who are in the market for a luxury car, nobody would be in the market for that car. That's because people mainly buy one to be the envy of the people who can't afford it.

Exactly that. Yeah, no, I think Jeremy Ballmore, one of the greatest thinkers that we have ever had in this in this game, absolutely brilliant point, but there goes that point about shared meaning and shared knowledge that you have about a brand that you get via mass that you would never get in, say, one to one piece of targeted advertising.

There's a great article, I can't remember the name of it, by Kevin Simler. And he goes a extra step further. He talks about how it's almost not enough for an ad to reach a large audience, but it has to reach a large audience publicly.

Everybody needs to know that everybody else knows what a brand stands for. If I see a Mercedes advertised on TV or cinema, press or out of home, I have a pretty high confidence that most people will have some degree of knowledge about that brand. But if I see it on a highly targeted media, then that confidence disappears.

I don't know whether only I've seen that or if I'm in a very small group that have been targeted by the advert. So a mass audience needs to see an advert for it to take on these self-expressive benefits, or cultural imprinting as Kevin Simler calls it. A mass of people have to see it, but also they have to know that a massive audience has seen it.

Yes. Exactly that. Okay. How about error two then? Mass media is wasteful because it is ignored.

Well, this is probably the most controversial of the three, I think. And this is where Karen Nelson Field comes in. Karen works at Amplified Intelligence. She's the founder of Amplified Intelligence. She used to work at the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. She does lots of research around attention and the different levels of active attention that different media receive. I saw her give a talk a few years back. It was called Not All Reach Is Equal. She shared data that for Instagram video ads, about 89% of their duration receives active attention. And as you move across different digital media, that starts to reduce a bit and eventually gets to TV. From memory, I think TV was about 35%. So 35% of the duration of a TV ad doesn't receive active, eyes-on attention.

Again, you could argue that that means two thirds of the spend is wasted. Because of a 30 second spot, 20 seconds didn't receive active attention. But again, I think this misses the mark slightly.

Way back at the very early 1900s, there was an advertiser called Walter D. Scott, who wrote a book called The Psychology of Advertising. He tells a story about a lady who would commute to and from work every day on the streetcars, the trams. And in all of the trams, there was advertising. And she claimed that she didn't read any of the ads. But when Scott inquired a bit further, he found that she knew most of the ads by heart, and that her perception of each of the brands was held them in a higher esteem than you would expect from an average consumer. So this indicates that maybe fully active eyes on attention isn't required. Now, admittedly, Walter D. Scott's anecdote wasn't highly scientific.

There was only one researcher, one subject. There's no quantifiable aspect to it. We have no idea how many ads she saw, what her recall levels were. We just don't know.

But then about 50 years later, in the middle of the century, Leon Festinger at Stanford conducted an experiment. Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance, which is the discomfort that one feels when you're presented with information that contradicts an existing belief that you hold.

He conducted an experiment at Stanford where he recruited members of a fraternity and he presented them with an audio argument that made the case that fraternities were morally wrong. And like all good psychology experiments, there was a slight twist, which was that there was in fact two groups and that one of the groups was simultaneously shown a completely unrelated silent film. And Festinger measured their support of fraternities before and after the experiment.

What he found was that the change in opinion or belief was greatest in the group that had been shown the silent film at the same time. And he hypothesized that the silent film acted as a distraction, which weakened the subject's cognitive defences. That the undistracted group could give their full attention to the message, the argument, and could create counter arguments and could rationally debate it and push back against it. Whereas the distracted group adopted the argument with little push back.

And Paul Feldwick, who I'm a massive fan of, in discussing this experiment, he said, ‘when we don't notice we are being influenced, we cannot argue back’. So there's this idea that perhaps an inattentive audience soaks up our distinctive brand assets and our messages and the tone of voice that we deliver a message in. And all of that gets soaked up and lodges itself in the subconscious and long-term memory without ever really kind of actively or deeply processing the message.

I love that quote from Paul Feldwick. We've had Paul Feldwick on Call To Action recently. As has Professor Karen Nelson Field. She was on a few weeks ago and she was absolutely wonderful. But I think it's such a key point that people don't necessarily consider or maybe they just don't want to believe it's true. I made a similar point recently.

I was talking about Adland's London bubble and how I think there’s a detachment from the real world. The real world is mostly outside London. That bubble's only been made worse because of the pandemic. Because a lot of people who work in Adland, 85% I believe, live in London. That opportunity to just rub shoulders with normal people on their commute to work has been removed because of lockdown. So not only are people living in the bubble of London, they also have been in a bubble within that bubble. I think that there's a passive ethnography, maybe you could call it, that's been taken away.

Yeah, for sure. I should say that in the quickfire questions, I didn't choose Karen Nelson Field, but I am a massive fan of her work. And she actually acknowledges the idea that some attention is better than no attention, and that her work finds that the higher the active attention, the greater the short-term, sales activation response. And I think her work and the work of Festinger and perhaps later Dr. Robert Heath, maybe work hand in hand. Maybe it's the inattention, or the slightly ignored work, or advertising that is more akin to brand building that just slowly kind of seeps into your subconscious. A jingle comes to mind and you instantly know the brand. Whereas the work that requires active attention is maybe more effective for the sales activation, the short-term, the calls to action, the price promotions, things like that.

Have you ever seen, I believe he's a Bristolian, he certainly lived there when I was at UWE. Have you seen Derren Brown's TV show, his stunt when he invited a couple of agencies to pitch ideas to a brief that he selected for them?

No.

It's really interesting. It's one of the very first things I believe that he did. So it's probably going back 15, 20 years maybe. I'll find a link to it. I'm sure it's on YouTube and we'll add it to this episode. But he basically made that same point about how receptive we are subconsciously. He invited, an ad agency, to come to his office to receive a brief and spend some time thinking about it and turning it around in a day. A fairly standard creative brief. But what he had done very strategically and very intelligently, in that Derren Brown way, is he had controlled the route or the journey that these people took from being picked up from their hotel or agency to the venue where they were going to receive the pitch. And he made sure they stopped at certain traffic lights where they could be exposed to certain things like characters and mascots in shop windows and all sorts of things that he basically planted to demonstrate, I suppose, slightly the point you've just been making. And he effectively predicts what the ad agency is going to come up with. And yet by exposing them repeatedly to certain physical objects and things along their journey, it kind of plants this seed in their head.

It's wonderful. I'll dig it out and share it.

Yeah, you know, the work of Daniel Kahneman and people like that who found that the amount of information that we perceive through our senses is so much greater than the amount of information that we consciously process. I think it's something like 90-10 or 95-5. So there's a huge amount of information that we're exposed to and that influences on some level that isn't necessarily conscious or that we're aware of.

I would caveat that this can be taken too far. I think Vance Packard’s idea of subliminal advertising has largely been discredited. He believed that a single frame in a film with a message on could influence you. I think that's largely been discredited. I think there has to be some perception. You have to be able to perceive it in some way.

It doesn't necessarily need to be fully conscious, active perception. But in the Derren Brown example, they are seeing those things and being exposed to the various cues along that route that Derren Brown has placed them. But I'd be wary of pushing it too the point that you can subliminally influence people's behaviour.

Yeah, it's a very old school kind of thinking around advertising and the brainwashing capacity of it, isn't it? I'm mindful of time, but I was going to ask to... I was going to talk to you about the expense. So, error three is mass media is wasteful because it is expensive. I'm mindful we have touched on signalling a few times and I've already crowbarred the peacocks plumage in once. But is there much else around that that you can elaborate on?

No, I think we've largely covered it. I think the reason I chose Tim Ambler in the Quickfire questions is that he, I think, was the first person that I can find that has drawn the link between the biological side, the Darwinian side and the marketing brand building side. And I think that's such a brilliant lateral leap to make.

And whilst I love Karen Nelson Field's work and greatly admire it, that lateral jump  was glorious.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Very well said. No, we're also fans of Professor Karen Nelson Field. And to be honest, if that wasn't the case, I wouldn't have asked you to make such a binary choice between two such esteemed people. So yeah, apologies if I made that awkward. The last thing before we go to our listener questions is just in conclusion, and I know, and we've spoken about this before, your piece isn't a criticism on other forms of marketing and media choices and performance marketing, let's call it, at all, is it? It's merely just an acknowledgement of what people might perceive to be ineffective actually is effective and we shouldn't prioritise efficiency in the way that we currently can do too easily.

Yeah, some of the feedback I got from the article was from people who saw it as an argument for inefficient media over efficient media or for the effective over the efficient. That wasn't the intention at all. The intention was to defend that there is value in mass media and inefficient media and that value comes across in the cultural imprinting that I've spoken about, the seducing the subconscious that Dr. Robert Heath talks about, in the costly signalling that Rory talks about.

But all of that should be balanced with efficient media, just as you would balance brand building and sales activation, that there is a role for both and that they should complement each other. It shouldn't be, I don't think, a binary choice between one or the other. It should be. What's our problem? What's our objective? And how do we allocate our funds accordingly to best solve that?

Absolutely. Good. Well, I'm pleased you've managed to have the opportunity, at least, to set that straight. Boom! I've got a couple of listener questions for you, Alex. Here we go.

So asking the general public for their opinion, be it on Brexit or boat names, is notoriously fraught with danger. We've got two for you, starting with Jim from Lincoln. He asks I thoroughly enjoyed your article on the pitfalls of purpose. My question is, can purpose be pursued successfully by brands? Can you name any examples of brands that have found success in purpose?

Oh, good question. All of my articles try to take aim at one of the big topics or one of the big debates or one of the big questions, that exist within the industry. And I felt like I had to write something about purpose because it's such a contentious topic.

The article that Jim refers to, Pitfalls of Purpose, broadly outlines the ways that that purpose goes wrong. It makes the claim that purpose isn't wholly positive or isn't a silver bullet for success, but it isn't also wholly negative. It can't never work. It's not doomed to failure. And I think Peter Field's work that caused a bit of an uproar at the EffWeek last year found this. In summary, his work found that on average, campaigns that were built around purpose were slightly less effective than campaigns that weren't built around purpose. But within the purpose bracket, there was a group of very effective case studies and a group of very ineffective case studies. So purpose can be done well and it can be done poorly. And I list three pitfalls within it.

The first is not being credible. And there's a great cartoon by The Marketoonist where he gives a standard brand ladder of product truth, functional benefit, emotional benefit. And then it keeps going up and up and up until they fall off the top of the ladder and in the striving to go to big, worthy purpose they end up being completely detached from the credible product truth at the base of the ladder. And I think to do purpose well, it has to be highly credible.

The example I give as being a very good example here is the brand Lifeboy, which is a antibacterial soap which was developed in the UK by the Lever brothers to help fight cholera initially. It's now very popular in countries like India. And their purpose is to help children reach the age of five, to reduce child mortality.

And they do that through their antibacterial soap and healthy hand hygiene, which stops the spread of diseases. So their purpose and their product have a really strong link between them. And we can all think of purpose campaigns where that link hasn't been there and things have gone very badly and ads have been taken off air and things like that.

Very good. Well, we're going to link to that article as well in this episode, so I encourage everyone to check that out. Question two is from Zoe. You're captured by an evil wizard. They wave their magic wand and eliminate all the knowledge you've learned from every marketing book you've ever read, apart from one. Which one do you choose to remember? And you're a very well-read man, Alex, so you're going to struggle here.

That's tricky. I mean, this might bleed into book recommendations question, but one that is a go-to recommendation for me is Anatomy of Humbug by Paul Feldwick. I think I find it so valuable because Feldwick doesn't attempt to give a single answer in the book. He gives a history. He covers six theories of how advertising could work. And it's an account of the last, I don't know, two centuries of advertising or brand thought. He concludes that they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. He concludes that the different theories can work together, and you can have two or three of these theories all working in your favour.

In one relatively short book, I think it exposes you to a lot of advertising thoughts. But I also love that conclusion that there’s not a single right answer to this. Brands aren't built in a single way. They each exist with their own context, and in their own categories and with their own audiences, and with their own challenges, and that different techniques can be applied to that brand in order to succeed. So I think if there was one that I had to keep with me, it would be Anatomy of Humbug.

Nice, that's a good choice. So the final part of the interview, Alex, is our four pertinent poses. Starting with number one, what advice would you give to your younger self?

A couple of things. One would be to write more and to write earlier. I only really started writing about the industry in 2018. And I've come to the realisation that writing is thinking to a certain degree. The act of writing forces you to clarify your thoughts and formalise them in a way that is very clear and very simple, but also compelling. I think I didn't do it for maybe the first decade of my career because I didn't necessarily feel that I had a fully formed argument yet. And I think what I've learnt over the last four years of doing it is that you don't need a fully formed argument to start. You need a hunch or a question or a topic. Then you will naturally look to substantiate your arguments. You'll read more, you'll expand the argument or narrow the argument over time. And the act of writing a few thousand words about a topic will result in you having a much stronger argument than you started out with. If you can write maybe two or three in depth articles a year consistently over time, then you end up with having a bank of well-formed arguments or well-formed opinions on a number of different topics.

The other thing is that when I started in strategy, I thought that I was a very slow thinker. I would often be in meetings where there was heated debate going on and lots of people speaking very passionately, and I always felt that I was a step or two behind. And then usually towards the end of a meeting, I would manage to contribute something that cut through the noise a little bit and got to the crux of a problem. And Vix Hansard, who is the creative director at Epoch, would ask me how I did it. She perceived it as a wise quality. I could say quite little but get to the crux of something. But I always perceived it myself as really taking ages to get to an opinion. I've come to realise over the course of my career that it's okay to be a bit slow or considered or reserved or maybe a bit introverted. And to really just lean into your way of doing things and what's comfortable and right to you. As long as you get to somewhere good, it's okay.

One of the mantras that I've adopted is ‘direction over speed’. The direction that you're going in is more important than the speed at which you're travelling. Anyone can run around like a headless chicken. But few people can go single-mindedly in a direction which points towards success. So yeah, that was a big anxiety for me when I was starting out. Is this kind of slowness. But I've come to think of it as part of who I am.

I love ‘direction over speed’. It's funny, isn't it, how we perceive ourselves over how we are perceived. And in fact, that taking a breath and that perception of being slow is something that I always recommend if I'm ever asked for tips on public speaking. By actually pausing and taking your time for the same reason as your creative director concluded what she did, it has exactly that effect. And writing is thinking. Write sooner. That's really smart because you're right. In your mind it's so easy to overthink and think of too many words. But actually writing things down forces you to think and forces you to be so selective with your thoughts and your points of view. Love that.

Juniors that join Epoch, I encourage them to write even if they don't publish. Even if they don't hit go on the piece. Because there's still value or benefit to the act of clarifying your thinking in words. And I think I just wish I had done that earlier.

It's a great one. It's a great one. That hasn’t come up before. Number two, if you could banish one thing from the industry, Alex, what would it be and why?

I have to admit, I struggled with this one a little bit. Not because I couldn't think of anything, but because I could think of too much. What I landed on is this obsession with the pace of change or this idea that there's this runaway train of change happening and that it's exponential and that things will never be as slow as it is today. And the reason I've chosen that is I think it has a knock-on effect and it causes lots of other issues in the industry, such as the obsession with new technology, the obsession with youth and youth audiences who have very little money to spend and potentially even the kind of under-representation of older people within our agencies.

I think it's all driven by this absolute obsession with change, and so many times we hear something's been killed. It's the end of TV. TV is dead. Or that this new thing will change everything forever, and broadly it's just not true. I did a whole bunch of research on this, and I found that the pace of change largely isn't accelerating. Technological adoption isn't really accelerating. Creative destruction, which is the rate at which new businesses are born and older businesses die, isn't really accelerating, if anything it's declining. When we look back even 50 years or so, we look back to the 25 years between 1945 and 1970, which has been christened the Golden Quarter, and there's a huge amount of change in that era. You had the development of the pill, electronics, computing, the foundations of the internet, nuclear power, mass adoption of TV, antibiotics, huge cultural moments like gradual decolonisation, the advent of pop music, mass aviation. There's just a huge amount of change happening in that 25 years. We put man on the moon, we sent a probe to Mars, we beat smallpox, the double helix structure of DNA was discovered. I think we've always thought that the pace of change is accelerating. And I don't think it's necessarily true.

I think it links back to the idea of taking a breath and slowing down a bit and thinking long term and being a bit more critical and sceptical of things. I think we would all benefit by letting go of this idea of radical exponential rate of change. 

Number three then, so apart from Anatomy of Humbug by Paul Feldwick, are there any books that you would recommend to our listeners?

I get asked this question by interns and juniors quite a lot. Anatomy of Humbug is always one of my go-to's. The other is, and this will have come up many, many times, is How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp.

I think they act as a nice pair in that, where Feldwick gives these six theories throughout history that can interact. Sharp provides a single data-driven theory of how brands grow. So the two act as quite nice counterbalances to each other.

Outside of the industry, I really enjoy dystopian fiction, particularly Eastern European dystopian fiction. So there's a book called ‘We’ by Zamyatin, who was Russian, which was written about 30 years before George Orwell wrote 1984. And it has very similar themes. All the houses are made of glass, for example, so that the authorities can see into them, that kind of thing. Franz Kafka's The Trial, he was born in Prague in the 20s as well. He writes about this overwhelming sense of bureaucracy and impenetrable red tape and things like that. A little more recently, there's a book called Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy, who's a Hungarian and wrote in the 70s, which is about a guy who jumps on a plane to travel. And he lands and it's just a completely unknown city where nobody speaks a language that he recognizes. And it's so teeming with people and he spends weeks and months just trying to = work out where he is and to escape from this dystopian city.

But I think the reason why I like this genre is because whilst they're always about a dystopian future, they usually a comment on the present. A bit like, I don't know, Black Mirror or something like that, where they usually take an observation or a cultural challenge about today and push it to an extreme and then play that story out in the future. So I think there's quite a lot you can learn.

From We you can learn about Russia. From Metropole you can learn about the challenges of Hungary's past. Yeah, I really enjoy this genre.

It's interesting actually. There's a few strategists we've had on the show who have recommended specifically sci-fi genres because they explore a ‘what if this’, and then push those limits of what would happen in this scenario. We've not had those specific books, but there's a common thread there I think. 

The ones I particularly like both in dystopian fiction and sci-fi are ones that are near future, where they're close enough to be believable but distant enough to be uncomfortable.

Nice. That's quite a nice niche description. I like it.

And then number four, Alex, is we always dedicate every episode to someone and we bestow or hospital pass that honour depending on your view to our guest who has to give their reason why. So would you kindly dedicate this episode?

This might be a little bit difficult for me, but I'm going to try and get through it. But if I start to choke up a little bit, you might have to jump in, Giles.

Not a problem.

I'd like to dedicate it to my dad who is currently, I won't go into too much detail, but he's currently in a bit of a health battle. And I think a lot of my career, a lot of my interests actually, are influenced by him. He was a programmer, but was also a very talented artist. He played guitar and taught me to play blues guitar. He was a photographer, and I studied photography at an early age. I think a lot of the reasons I ended up doing what I'm doing, particularly the early focus on graphic design, was because of him.

He used to subscribe to a magazine that was called Digital Photographer or Digital Photography or something like that. Each issue came with a CD-ROM that had a Photoshop tutorial on it. And I used to pinch them and teach myself Photoshop on the family computer in the dining room. Before he retired, he worked at Herman Miller, which is a furniture designer. They created the iconic Aeron chair. So I think a lot of my love of art and design and architecture and photography comes back from it just rubbing off on me from him.

Amazing. Well, this episode is very proudly dedicated to your dad. So we wish him all the best, Alex. Thank you.

As a final call to action, we will list everything we've discussed. We'll link to your articles, the areas of efficiency, the books you recommend. Anatomy of Humbug, How Brands Grow, and then your dystopian fiction, We and Metropole.

How else can our listeners get more? Alex Murrell.

Probably the best place to go is just my website, which is www.alexmurrell.co.uk. From there, all of my articles are on there, linked to my LinkedIn, my newsletter, so on and so forth. So yeah, just the website. If you can work out how to spell Murrell.

We'll link to it. So if you're listening to this, you can just open up your phone or however you listen and there will be a link there. Wonderful.

Well, Alex, I've really enjoyed chatting. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Me too. Thank you for having me. And it's great to finally speak to you Giles after a few years of talking on Twitter.

Yeah, exactly that. Finally, thank you to everyone listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do share and review the podcast.

Keep the questions and guest requests coming in. To get in touch, it's easy to find Gasp online. You can check out CTAPod on Instagram or just email hello at calltoaction@gasp.agency.

Notes

• A quote from this podcast featured in the article, 100 quotes from Call To Action.

• This episode made Call To Action’s top 10 most listened to episodes of 2022.