Emily Heath  0:00  
You have to listen to the consumer, but you've got to understand their lives and what they're doing and how their day play plays out, and find those moments that really matter, where your brand can have a very relevant moment you

Ben Walker  0:20  
Hi.

Welcome to a new season of the CIM Marketing podcast. In the new series, we're moving away from algorithms and AI to explore one of the most sought after yet misunderstood attributes in business creativity. There's a massive intersection where marketing AI and creativity overlap, and we're not going to ignore the elephant in the room. Instead, we want to focus on one of the innately human characteristics that can't be replicated by gpts. Creativity is the soul of our profession. It provides the crucial counterbalance to the more data heavy and analytical aspects of the job. It is the art, not the science. Thankfully, it is also what seems to attract rebels and Rule Breakers into the profession, those individuals who can't stand to do things in the way they've always been done, those who live and breathe innovation. We know it's a struggle for marketers to find the time and space to be creative. It's a discipline that requires practice, yet all too often, businesses treat it like a commodity, something that can be turned off and on at will. But as we'll see over the course of the season, the reality is far more nuanced. Over the next six episodes, we'll tackle the tension at the heart of our industry. We'll explore what creativity looks like in the context of modern business, examine why it's often one of the first things to be squeezed out, and ask why it's now more vital than ever before. With expert insights from the minds behind world class campaigns to advice from some of the biggest and best marketers around, we'll provide you with the tools you need to take a step back, carve out space for creativity and get inspired for the year ahead. If you're ready to reclaim your competitive advantage, then stay tuned. This is the season of the original thinker. Hello everybody, and welcome to the first CIM vodcast of the year. Today. We're Emily Heath and Paul Greenwood. Emily, can you give that introduction to yourself? Yep, so I'm Emily, or as most people call me, I'm global brand director on Rexona, which is best known as short in the UK. My role is in charge of what does the brand stand for, show up as how it's positioned, what's its strategy, as well as looking after all our sports partnerships, media, PR, social media, and then also our community impact programmes. And I'm Paul Greenwood, I head up the research and insights team at we are social and we have three functions. One is proving the value of our work through data and effectiveness. Social intelligence, understanding what's happening on social media, what makes people tick, and cultural insights, and understanding the cultural spaces that a brand can show up in. Well, you know, last season, during the autumn, we spent a lot of time talking about computers, AI, technology, things are going to change our world, the machines that are going to change the way we live and work and act. As marketers. This winter, we're going to flip that round. We're going to be talking about human beings, human creativity.

Is it getting lost? Is everything become? Is everything becoming homogenised by the march of machines? I think we're about to find out. Paul, you've got a few insights. You've produced a report which looks into some of this stuff.

Paul Greenwood  3:33  
Yeah, we did. So it's called the global digital report, and it was launched in October trade. It looks a huge amount of data across the world, two different, 200 different markets, and it's looking at everything in terms of social, mobile, e commerce, and just how people use the internet and an interesting way, I guess there were like three big stats that really stood out for us. The first was, there's now five and a half billion people on social media, and there's over 6 billion profiles, so that's like 75% of the world's population, and now on social media. What's interesting about that is that actually the time spent on social though, is plateauing. So it's hovering around the 2025, two hours, 25 Mark per day, but we're seeing that it's slowly reducing over time. It's reducing. Yeah, it is. And I think the FT put something out recently that said the same thing. And it's not, it's not a bad thing. I guess it's just people have now probably reached the peak that they had when they were using the internet, when they were using social during covid. And obviously people are going back to the real world, the real lives, and so that is slowly declining, but the number of platforms that people are on stays consistently the same, just under seven. So what we're seeing is that while the number of people using social is going up, time's going down, and I guess they're still spending the same amount of time across different platforms, so it's getting harder for brands to reach them and to communicate with them. We've reached peak social then have we? We've reached, yeah, potentially.

Peak is peak social time spent on social? Yes, there's things like Tiktok that continues to grow, and the time spent on Tiktok is wild. I think on average, the average person around the world spends two working weeks per month on Tiktok. So yeah, so that continues to, like, really dominate that. But we're also seeing different platforms come up. So the things like, I guess, like discord or sub stacks, while not technically social media platforms, there's, there's still spaces where people spend a lot of time, and maybe that's where we're seeing people move to beyond the typical large social media platforms like meta and Tiktok and YouTube. You know, I like a surprise, and you've immediately surprised me with that statistic that socials plateaued and is actually coming down a bit. I can think of lots of parents who would welcome that with open arms. It's maybe not quite as good for marketers. Emily has it surprised you as well. Well, I actually was trying to work out in my head how many social media platforms I'm on. When you said it was seven, was the average. I think I might be at that, if not over. It doesn't surprise me, to be honest, because I think it's actually quite hard for marketers when it comes to all the channels that are available to us this day to to activate through. It can sometimes be so vast and so wide that you don't actually know where to start and stop, and it's really hard to therefore really impact on any one channel, because you're trying to spread yourself quite thin over multiple so actually, the idea that there could be a sense of slowing down or plateauing is probably an advantage for brands, because it means that you can therefore invest in the ones that are going to be the most successful, or invest in the ones where more audiences are spending more of their time. Well, it sounds like that's tick tock from porters, yeah, and we spend a huge amount of money on tick tock, and we're really beginning to grow our brand presence on tick tock. I'm not going to lie, I find tick tock quite overwhelming as a user, like I open it and I always feel like I'm overwhelmed by like, a flood of content, versus more your metas, which feels a little bit more controllable, but that's where the younger generations are going. That's where they're finding their entertainment. And so therefore, it's so important that we react to that. And there are going to, even though things are going to plateau, I think there will still be new channels popping up to really just see the appetite of the users and where they're going to go. So I welcome it, because I think it will allow us to really focus in a bit more I don't think it means that the opportunity of social goes I just think it means that you can be more focused in

Ben Walker  7:34  
interesting findings. There's a shift there in the fact that social overall is coming down a bit in usage, that that actually tick tock is so popular people spend two weeks,

Paul Greenwood  7:44  
two working weeks. So it's about, yeah, two working weeks per calendar month, yes, about four hours. Yes, yes.

Emily Heath  7:50  
It's crazy. Does he like have enough hours in the day to be able to do that? Yeah?

Ben Walker  7:54  
Then across my wide web, do people find this time? But anyway, we'll move on. Have you noticed any shift in this context of how consumers are engaging with brands through their obsessive views of Tiktok or something else.

Emily Heath  8:06  
Yeah, definitely. I think brands need to be discovered more. You know, marketing and advertising of yesterye was very much brand out. You know, you're very able to sort of push out your brand story onto the consumer. They received it through kind of big broadcast scale channels, and they kind of just accepted it and bought into it. Now, it's really about showing up in their world, and their world, to be honest, is social media. So therefore you have to be discovered as part of that world and almost represent the world that they want to be associated with, or that they believe they aspire to or they are. So it's it's really important, and it's actually really hard, because you have to act a little bit chameleon as a brand, because you're trying to be who you are as a brand, but you're also trying to connect and relate with so many different communities and cultures around the world that it actually is, it can be quite hard. It's very tricky.

Ben Walker  8:57  
What do you need to do those with both of you, really but what do you need to do then to make sure you get that cut through given the changes, and you know, what do you need to do in terms of your campaigns to make sure that they're not just showing they're actually bringing in revenue for your company?

Emily Heath  9:11  
You've got to listen a lot more than you ever have before to say it was so brand out that it was almost you didn't really care what the consumer or shopper was saying. You just had your own vision as a brand, and you're pushing it out there. But now you've got to go you've got to go very deep into communities and small communities, not just like massive communities, and understand what motivates them, what triggers them, what makes you stand out to them, and then you kind of take that and build it upwards, and kind of, you know, sort of use that to amplify something, but you've really got to start listening, like we always say, as kind of consumer good brands that were consumer centric, no, it's never been more important that the consumer is literally epicentre of everything you do. So like, you know, used to have that nice little triangle, which was like, employee, employer, customer, and they were meant to. All be equal. I actually think now it's not equal that that customer, consumer part is so fundamentally key. It has to be at the heart of everything you're

Ben Walker  10:09  
doing personally about how have you changed your approach? And you're aware of the content shift, you're aware of the changes in consumer behaviour. But when you actually get in on a Monday morning and look what you're doing that week, what has changed in the way you approach and your team approaches activity.

Emily Heath  10:25  
It's just a lot. I don't want to say it's harder, but it's a lot more meticulous, and you've got to be very much in the detail. When we used to create campaigns in the past, you would have your TV you might have a radio ad, you'd have a single page print, a double page print, maybe a banner, just put on social, on like digital now it never starts and ends like, you know, a project campaign, you feel like it never finishes, because there's just so many channels or opportunities you have to meet. Therefore your your creative, your craft, has to be so much more detailed and finessed and thought through and to be able to continue to engage with people constantly. You know, it's a 24/7 world when it comes to advertising, people are getting new advertising messages every second, and within that second they're probably getting hundreds. So it's it's so it's really hard. That doesn't mean it's something that means that it's impossible, and you should shy away from it. It's just hard. You've got to embrace it. You've got to be very hands on. You've got to really learn and understand how your brand can show up in this new world. The brand I work on, Rexona, which is called sure in the UK, it's a legacy brand. It's, it's about 120 years old, is it really? Yeah, 1902 it was first created and bought by Unilever. 1908 so it's a really old, and it's been able to stand the test of time. But that actually is quite hard. Like brands that are those legacy brands, are trying to show up in a very new world than they were created in. And whereas these new brands that are popping up like every day, they're created in today's world, with today's consumers in mind, with social media in mind, almost created on social media, and you still got to compete with that, and it's actually really hard. You know, big companies like Unilever, you don't know what's going to happen with them in the future, because, to be honest, these new brands show up in someone's garage. Yeah, and with sort of real, an individual person in mind when they're creating that product versus mass

Ben Walker  12:31  
it's a great example. I think people love this is a really good example, because, yeah, people start up in the garage. They they're born into the new context. You know? They know that they're born into world where social media and high internet activity and smartphones exist, sure wasn't. It was born when most people didn't even have a car, exactly, you know, 100 odd years ago. And yet you've got to push that creativity and innovation to keep it relevant and fresh.

Emily Heath  12:56  
And you know, sometimes people think we're not relevant. Sometimes they're like, No, you are part of the 20th century. Are you really in the 21st and you don't want to reinvent yourself so much that you no longer are who you started out as, but you've got to be able to evolve with the consumer, with the channels, with the times, and create that nice balance of you still rooted in your history and where you started from and what you essentially intended from the beginning, but in a way that means something to people today. And that's it's hard,

Paul Greenwood  13:27  
it is. And when you talk about craft, and even though your craft has to be like spot on, when it comes to something like Tiktok, your craft could be quite Lo Fi, but just what we what we talk about, when we think about brands in particular, and we look at their cultural relevance, and we know that if content can be culturally relevant, culturally relevant, it's six times more effective at building brand. And when I when a new brand comes to us, we look at it in terms of whether it's high cultural relevance or low and it's customer journey. Is it short or long? And like something like a Ferrari like is highly culturally relevant? Is it automotive long purchase cycle. So when you're thinking about how you can be culturally relevant for them, it's like, how do you push into the emergent spaces in automotive and how can you find the new thing that will hook that community or that fandom onto where someone like Rex owner, which might be short purchase cycle, maybe not that culturally relevant? I don't, don't need to be rude. So like, but then it's like, so it's then, how do you borrow that cultural relevance from somewhere else? Somewhere else? How do you, how do you create meaning like you were saying? So how do you, maybe tackle taboos in the category? How do you, how do you create something that's interesting for you? And I think brands like yours are really interesting places to to work in and work with, because it's finding something new and exciting and trying to tap into adjacent cultures or adjacent fandoms that you can then push your message

Ben Walker  14:44  
to it is deodorant. I mean, you know, it's probably really, not really changed that much in 100 years. I mean, they probably, I'm sure the chemical, it works a lot better than the ingredients in it may have changed, but the concept is, but. Basically the same the product is basically trying to do the same job, and yet you have to find some sort of cultural insight along the way in order to hook a campaign too. I mean, how do you do it? How do you give us an example of how you've done that?

Emily Heath  15:12  
Well, firstly, I would love to almost be a Ferrari and be a brand that is culture. I think every brand aspires to that. But yes, we have to be tapping into cultural relevance and using culture that converts Do you know what you just they don't want to go back to that idea of you have to listen to the consumer, but you've got to understand their lives and what they're doing and how their day plays out, and find those moments that really matter, where your brand can have a very relevant moment. Sometimes that is very much in how the product is functioning. So it might be very sweat odour led ability to enter into a conversation. Or a brand like ours has been using a strap line for about 70 years, which is, it won't let you down, so just do it, or I'm loving it, and we have the ability to inject ourselves into conversations with that line. And some countries in the world where we're very, you know, our penetration is huge, like Argentina, Brazil, the line, it won't let you down, is actually part of cultural vernacular, because it's, we're such an established brand there. So actually it allows us to play really nicely into just daily lingo, like, oh, I need to Google it. You know, in the UK, we are a very big brand. We've been around for like, 8090, years. But, you know, it's not as ingrained into the daily language as it is say there, but it is very much about trying to understand how you can naturally just inject yourself into their day. And when you've got the likes of Tiktok exploding and trends popping up, left, right and centre. Some are macro, some are micro. It is you have to be very restrained to not go after every single one of those trends that are popping up and thinking, Oh, how could I do my version of this, to inject myself into this moment by the time the moment by the time you've injected yourself there, the moments passed, no one really cares. And honestly, it was about a piece, about a piece, a piece of bad content. So therefore you've got to be very focused in on what you stand for, how you can genuinely act like come into people's world in a way that is both relevant to your product but also relevant to what you

Ben Walker  17:16  
stand for. There's a danger that you try to jump on every passing bandwagon,

Paul Greenwood  17:20  
yeah, and that is true, and that's one of the hardest things to you. Were talking about, the guardrails that you need to have around your brand, of what can you react to? But more importantly, what can you what shouldn't you react to, and why? And that's some that's a lot of work that we do up front in terms of the strategy and going, this is what we stand for on social This is how we want to show up, but this is what is not for us. And a lot of that is done with smart thinking up front when you start working with a brand, but then it is in it, then it has to be kind of followed through on the day to day when you're creating that content, and when you're listening into those conversations, when you're carrying out cultural trackers to understand where you want to show up. The do's and don'ts are really important. Like shows are really like, when, when I talk about cultural relevance, it's like you already start talking about sports, which is highly culturally relevant. Culturally relevant, like, it's a daily ritual. You will put deodorant on a presumably every morning, I hope when you're going to go out to like a bar or a club when you're young. So there's, there's lots of really interesting spaces where Shaw can definitely show up. And it's just like, when do I show up in those moments and why? But sometimes it's harder when you're more we work with a music brand, and they're very culturally relevant, because everyone listens to music, but it's like, there's so many opportunities that they could be jumping on. It's like, holding them back is the hardest thing to do. It's like, it's not talking about that, it's talking about this, and how we try and get around that is, if we're talking about music, and Taylor Swift has just launched a new album, everyone knows that there's no point in us having a point of view on that, but Taylor Swift's childhood sweetheart talking about how he's she's the one that he lost when she released the album. That's that's the kind of story we might want to talk about. So it's, how do we go three levels deep when it comes to cultural interesting spaces and conversations that happening online in

Ben Walker  18:58  
the brand agency world? Do you think this sort of collaborative creative process is common, or do you think there's still too much of the bandwagon junk? Or do you think there's still too much of the bandwagon jumping?

Paul Greenwood  19:12  
So I think people are, I think brands in particular, people work with certain brands are becoming more are realising that if you just chase every trend, you're going to just, it's going to just, you know, it's the lowest common denominator, it's not going to work. So I think people are pulling back and trying to be more selective in how they jump on onto a conversation that's happening and not have any kind of meaning or point of view on that. I work on two big brands. One of them is that music brand. One of those music brand, one of the travel brand, and we, what I like working with those brands is that we were kind of empowered to like this is something that we, we know could be working for you, and we can, we can jump on that trend and talk about it. The two brands I work with are very, very data centric in terms of, they measure everything within an inch of its life. So if that works, we come back, back to it at the end of the month ago. That worked, and that helps kind of prove why we should do it. If something hasn't worked, it's not there to be used to beat us over the head. It's like, Oh, why didn't that work? Should we do that again? And sometimes it's like, no, so we stop that. Or how can we improve

Ben Walker  20:21  
at the outset, though, is there, does a lot of human instinct come into it? A lot of human instinct come you can always prove what you're going to do is going to work. Can you,

Paul Greenwood  20:30  
I think, interestingly, human instinct does come into it. But the longer you've been doing that, and longer you've been working social, the better your instinct is. So there is some kind of formula underneath it, and on the music brand I work on, there's a big there's a big photo, a big like image on the wall, which is like, this is how we create content. And there's a seven step process of it needs to contain this, this, this, this, and this. And if it has all seven of those criteria, then we're good to go. And that's a good piece of content. Now, some of that might fly, some of it might not, but the good thing is like, if it doesn't work, it's like, how do we improve it? How do we optimise it? And our clients are really good and going, if it's not worked, just stop that. And they make decisions relatively quickly, which is a nice way to work. You've got good clients. I'm lucky with my

Ben Walker  21:12  
how common law clients, in your opinion, Emily, who allow experimentation like that.

Emily Heath  21:18  
It's tricky. Everyone's got those pressures of needing to be able to prove the data, to prove the success. And, you know, I think we all want to be risk adverse and take experiments, but at the end of the day, people are very focused on need to be able to prove the numbers. I do think we need to all be better at taking those risks, to really understand where those permissions lie. And, you know, where the consumer might positively react, positive to something that may have been a mistake. You do see these scenarios where brands have really been bold and put out some quite, you know, strong, creative, and there has been quite a backlash, and then you've got to recover from that as a brand. And so there has been a bit of a hesitance. I do think we need to use our own human instinct a lot more. You know, I work on a daily commodity. It's a deodorant brand at the end of the day, and I do try and sometimes put my own view on things. Would I care about this piece of content if I didn't work on this brand? And I do think sometimes you've got to be that realistic with things, because at the end of the day, if you don't care about it, and you are working on that brand, then no one else is going to probably care about it. And it's really easy to almost get caught up in the moment spend all this time and effort and money on a piece of content that probably is going to do nothing.

Ben Walker  22:32  
It's interesting, isn't it? This idea of this, this, this sort of tension, if you like, between innovation and risk taking versus tried and tested. And you know, you went around for obvious people went on the didn't come on the shows last season. But last season, we're talking, as I said at the top of the show, about AI and how machines can help us at marketers, and how machines can help us as marketers. And there are many, many ways in which AI can help us, but one of the flaws that I think last season uncovered was that that does lead to a degree of homogenization if you rely on it too much, because what it's, what it's effectively doing is saying, this has worked in the past. Let's do this. And at some point it needs a human in the loop, doesn't it? Paul to say, Yeah, well, we've done that. We've done that to death. Yeah, we're going to try this. And you know what? I can't prove it immediately, yeah, maybe to prove it in the future, but you got to give, give it a go.

Emily Heath  23:24  
Yeah, it's like system one, system two. To be honest, you need to look at AI as the system two, and the system one is you as a human, just being able to make a better judgement with all of the information that's presented to you. And that's why I think, I mean, I wasn't part of the conversations you guys had last year on your podcast, but AI is a brilliant tool. It, you know, it's it's there to help us get to solutions, probably faster, to create more options. But at the end of the day, that when it comes to to marketing and advertising, people are making decisions based on, based off, an irrational way of thinking. So therefore you need an irrational mind to help kind of push it over the line. So I think AI is brilliant. I think AI makes us a lot better at our jobs, makes us faster at our jobs, but at the end of the day, you must have that human touch, that human magic, to make it really connect with people.

Ben Walker  24:17  
The argument is it can be too rational, and actually our irrationality is our strength.

Paul Greenwood  24:21  
So it's a spark of creativity. Is our rationality? Yeah, so like, we the travel brand I work for. They don't act as a travel brand on social they act as an entertainment brand. Social media is an entertainment space. They want to be entertaining So, and we got to that because they're an online travel agent, and you look at all the competitors, they have the same inventory, the same the same the same prices, the same destinations. There's nothing cutting them apart. And when you looked at the social content, it was all the same beautiful, wonderless kind of content. And so we just took a really kind of native, first, chronically online approach, where we do silly things and there's a payoff with the brand in the background, and there's always a push down, down the funnel to like you. You can, you can check it out here. Do this, do this. But it's worked really, really well from them, because we looked at what all their competitors were doing, like, let's just do the opposite, or do something completely different. So that you need to have a human instinct to be able to do that. That creativity, what I find interesting around creativity and AI, and it's what happened with Disney and Sora. Did you see the news late last year where Disney have given, I don't know exactly, but it feels like they've given their IP over to Sora, which is open AI's video AI generator. So all what I can imagine is all of Disney's characters are going to show up in Sora and hand over that creativity to the consumer to create their own videos. So that means that creativity is changing from being in the hands of agencies and in the hands of brands, and they're putting it into the hands of consumers much higher up, and giving them an opportunity to remix that content to create what they want and use their imaginations to create a really interesting space, I guess. And it's, it's must be quite terrifying for a brand to give up all that content. Control, and brands have done that in the past. I remember a few years ago, McDonald's allowed people to play around with its logo, which is like iconic and no one does that, but it generated a lot of conversation. So I'm really interested to see where this Disney partnership with Sora is going to go, because they've basically changed the way that creativity can happen with their IP, which I find fascinating.

Ben Walker  26:25  
What's the benefit for the brand of doing that?

Paul Greenwood  26:27  
Well, people would take your content anyway. People would take, I don't know, Lion King, and create their own content, create their own memes, whereas here you're basically giving some control to the brand, because I presume you'll be able to use it on the brand account, and there'll be some restrictions around what you can do with that IP, whether it's Aladdin or jasmine, or any other Disney like IP, and allow people to create short form videos with it, and which might go viral and go and fly. So you're you're basically making every single consumer, or any person who's on AI and that platform, your marketer,

Emily Heath  27:02  
it's just, it's also taking their brand to an audience in a different way. You know, it's stretching the realms of what it means to be a Disney entertainer. I think it's, it's quite genius in a way, because they're really reacting to what's happening actually out there, and as opposed to resisting it or flying out lawsuits, left, right and centre. They're like, let's be a part of this. But there's probably still an element of there being able to have some control in that. So I think it's really interesting. I would have

Ben Walker  27:32  
loved to been flying the wall in the board meeting when this was getting approved at Disney, Disney headquarters, because we talk about risk taking, we talk about innovation. I mean, it's both of those things, it probably will work, because effectively, you're getting consumers to produce free advertising.

Emily Heath  27:44  
I think Disney's always been on the front foot of trends. You know, they invested into Pixar before, sort of digital animations were becoming anything people were really even considering. I felt like they've always had that, that foresight to how they need to be at the head of the game, as opposed to trying to chase from behind. So I think it's very in keeping with who they are as a company.

Ben Walker  28:07  
It's a great example of a company striding into a new space and boldly doing so. Do you think there's any other areas where, if you're under exploited, which marketers can think, well, hang on a second, we could try this.

Paul Greenwood  28:17  
So and just a bit of a data point on AI, there's a billion, a billion users per month on AI, different AI products, which is huge when you think about it, but in terms of, maybe not as not as innovative, and as bold. But I think the one thing that I'm seeing partly as a resistance to AI is when it comes to marketing, that people are trying to signal humanness and human led stories, and they're trying to move away from Ai aesthetics, and the way, and it really easy and obvious way to do that is, and you see it all, especially with premium brands and prestige brands, is like this. They often, like, lean heavily into nature. So there's, like, lots of natural aesthetics coming out. It signals provenance and heritage and you know, and I think what we'll see as a reaction to the AI content coming out, and it's estimated that 70, I think it's 97% of content on line will be aI informed or generated in some way. This year, I think you'll see a pushback, and people want to see more human led stories, real people, deep emotion and longer form content. As a result of that, there's some really interesting not brands, but like creators, like mug of life in the UK, where people sit down have a cup of tea and they just talk about someone that they miss. You know, like someone like a nice memories. It's nostalgic. It's deeply emotional. You see it on like Subway takes in the US, or a View from the Bridge, is this like very deep human stories, and it's a and has a strong emotional pull. And I think that's where brands might start to lean into to showcase that their content is not AI generated. It's something different.

Ben Walker  30:00  
When you given that anecdote, the first word that popped into my head was human, yeah, isn't it? Is essentially, you know, human, there's something, there's not something a computer can generate, and it is very, can be very powerful for marketing.

Emily Heath  30:12  
Emily, yeah, definitely. And you can't replace real human stories with AI stories. They just don't connect as meaningfully with people. And I think, you know, aI had a bit of a bad rep last year. I think there was a lot of worries that, you know, Terminator was going to come to life. And people therefore become quite protective. They go, you know, they pull back, they feel threatened. And so they almost become more aware of who they are as an individual and their sense of humanity, and almost become protective of that. So AI is there, and it has a very clear role, but we need to allow human instincts, human stories, human needs, to really shine through. And you know, when we use AI in our communications, the final product you see on the screen is never going to be AI, but it may have helped us create initial storyboards, or it may have helped us create something that just went into testing, because it allows us to get there a lot faster. But it's not what the end product. The end product truly is human from human insights that has just had the speeded up process in the middle to just allow us to go to market so much faster. But you just it's so important as brands to reflect humanity and reflect the communities and consumers you search, and you can only do that if you are reflecting humans.

Paul Greenwood  31:29  
So I work in research, and so we were talking about cultural relevance and understanding cultural spaces and new cultural spaces. What I find, what it's really good at, is synthesising data. So I have one of the analysts or directors carry out a large piece of cultural insight work, and then we have lots of different it's a big exploratory piece of work with lots of different kind of data sets, if you can upload that into AI tools, and have like different gems that are set up to carry out certain methodologies within cultural insights. So like an RD, which is residual, dominant and emergent, a kind of analysis of, like expressions of, I don't know love or I don't know hatred, it will be able to map that out for you very, very quickly. And it's not perfect, but I had a director do one of that, do that piece of work, and I had the AI do that piece of work, and I reckon it was about 67% correct. So it helps you shortcut a lot of that deep thinking as well.

Emily Heath  32:26  
Yeah, when we're looking at research reports, you know you might be looking at multiple any one time, hundreds of slides long. It will help you almost look to them all, compare contrast, and come to some clue conclusions that you've obviously then got to put a human lens over to be like, are these conclusions really in keeping with what the bill and business challenges are, what the local context is, what who we are as a brand? But it will just help you get there so much faster.

Paul Greenwood  32:52  
And I think that's the main thing, is having an expert who actually understands what an RD looks like and like analysis looks like, to go actually, that is actually correct. So you need experts, whether it's within research or strategy or creative, who can prompt the AI to do what you want it to do, because you know what good looks like, because of experience.

Ben Walker  33:10  
It's interesting. I'm working on a piece for a professor at them, with a professor at the moment who's saying that, you know, actually this Terminator analogy, everyone that was last year's thing Terminator, that actually this stuff is going to be a tool, and it will end up being a very mundane tool, like electricity, which is very clever and almost magical, but people just expect to exist in the background, and that's what it'll end up being. It'll be the new electricity. You know, nobody really knows how electricity works, but it just happens. It's just there these lights are on, it'd be same, same sort of thing, and the human on top will be, will be still, the key player. Let's move on to marketers favourite topic, measurement. We all have a measurement, don't we? We'll start with you, Emily, when you look back at a major brand campaign where creativity has been the thought that creativity was good, the creative process was good. The campaign has landed. What are the metrics that you use to measure its success now? And how do they check? How do they differ from the metrics you would have looked at in the past?

Emily Heath  34:16  
I wouldn't actually say the metrics themselves are changing, so the main metrics we'll look at on at Unilever, you've got your hard and soft. Your hard are very much, how much we selling? What's the value? How much volume is shifting? Are we gaining? Market share? Is our margins improving? Those sorts of things. The soft is really like, where's that brand power coming from. So we look at Brand power across multiple metrics, meaningful difference and saliency, and no matter really what's happening in terms of how social media is evolving or AI is evolving as those are still pretty much the three most important metrics we look at to really. Fundamentally understand how our brand is showing up with all the other brands in the world. We've been measuring that for decades, and it is still very much at the forefront of of our mind. Now there are other metrics that go along with that, so we'll be like, Unilever has something called UBS, and it has multiple metrics like feeding into it that look at what are called the 6p so pack price, product promotion, place, I always forget one of them when you're going through more, but you've got so many data sources feeding into those different 6p that then help us really understand what are those levers we need to be pushing and pulling in any given quarter of the year to ensure that we are kind of staying ahead or reacting to local business challenges. But when it comes to those campaigns, specifically the mark, the advertising side of things, it's really is going to be that meaningful and difference in the saliency, because saliency is very much that mental and physical, like availability, like, Are people seeing us, remembering us, and we're literally in a shop that they can go and buy. When it comes to the meaningful difference, it's really like, are we giving them something that is adding value and meaning to their world, like it's a product they need? And are we different? Are we standing out from everyone else? And that can come down to, is the product itself different, or the way we are communicating and engaging with people different? So the channels might be shifting, the amount of channels might be growing. The need to constantly be pushing out content and act like entertainers, like your brand is like we very much say, act native to the channel is changing. But actually, what we're trying to achieve isn't it's very important that those metrics kind of stick throughout. What about

Ben Walker  36:47  
you, Paul, when you're in a social first of cultural, culturally driven campaign, is it reaching? Is it changes in behaviour, looking for

Paul Greenwood  36:55  
so is all of those things? So you were talking about like, short and fast metrics, or like, so short metrics are like, how we show up in social is it working? So view through Ray people, eyes on, eyes on the content. Are people engaging with it? Are people sharing with it? And then we go deeper in terms of what's the impact on brand. And so that would be brand of studies that we carry out. Are people? Are we basically control and test kind of like, are people? Is it changing any kind of aspect of what we want people to do? The other thing that we have here when it comes to like cultural relevance is we've created something called the hype score, which allows it is made up of three different metrics, similar to your salience, meaningfulness and differentiation. It's around visibility, cultural cultural salience and actually action. And we can measure and that's made up of many different metrics from social and beyond, and earned and paid an influencer. And we can kind of give ourselves a score based on ourselves, of, are we growing these things? And if not, we use it as a diagnostic metric to go, actually, we're not getting that much visibility. Why is that? And so then we can go in and go, How can we get better? But in terms of changing behaviour, I think one of the best examples, and this is probably the best example, and best proof of like the campaigns worked, is we worked with Adidas, and we did a campaign when Paul Pogba moved to Manchester United youngs ago, and we it was a transfer season, we had a bit of content with him and storms. He storms is a massive Man United fan, and he's also a massive Pogba fan, and Pogba was a fan of Stormzy, and it was just a spice up of those two dancing to one of their songs. And we, when he transferred over to Manchester United, we released it. It like blew up, and it was like, that's a really good piece of content. And then nothing happened. And obviously it happened internally. We, like, celebrated and shared results, but the next transfer season, every other Football Club tried to replicate that. And so that was when we knew that we had a really good piece of success, because we changed sporting culture, because every other football club in the UK was trying to replicate what we did. So it's a bit like flattery, but like something had shifted, and we think it was that piece of content,

Ben Walker  38:54  
imitation is still the most sincere form of flattery. Do you think there are measurements that the industry still over relies on?

Emily Heath  39:02  
Emily, yeah, I do. I think, you know, if we go back to talking about the experimental side of things, because of this, the measurements that are put on brands, local markets to perform, it means that that experimentation doesn't really happen, and it's because you're trying to prove that every piece of content is beneficial. I think when it comes to say social media specifically, we talk about engagement rates quite loosely. And actually, an engagement rate isn't necessarily a real sign of if something it might be performing well on social media, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's performing well in terms of converting people. And sometimes, when it comes to measurement, it's it's hard to connect all the dots and to really prove that this piece of content has the capability to drive someone fundamentally into a shop to buy. And when you work in a company like mine, that's fundamentally what everyone wants to understand. You know that every. Every piece of content should have the ability to sell your product. And you know it that is really hard in today's world to be able to prove that every single piece of content has that ability. So we can sometimes get ourselves lost in measurement and not really just allow ourselves to create, experiment, learn, test, and because you're so kind of constrained by all these different measures,

Ben Walker  40:23  
engagement is vanity, conversions are sanity.

Paul Greenwood  40:26  
Conversions are sanity. Yeah, engagement, I wouldn't, I would say that not every single piece of content should be able to convert. I think there's different types of content, and you take them all as an aggregate, and if you have a proper like, I try and think of it over like, we need to like we need to capture their attention somewhere. So this is how we do that. We then need to have a follow on message, and we hit them again and again, where we slowly bring them down in the funnel and go actually. Now, do you want to convert in some way? And so it is around social, working with the performance team to make sure that that journey is tight and correct. We do a lot of conversion lift studies and some of the accounts that we work with, and we can prove that we've driven incremental sales on quite large incremental sales on the content that we're putting out there as a whole for the year. We wouldn't go that one piece of content needs to do this, this and this, I

Emily Heath  41:14  
think it's because marketing or advertising, it's just not linear these days. You know, you don't have we, we kind of stop creating consumer journeys now, because at the end of the day, it's very hard to take Bob from step one to step 10. And therefore you have to have in your head that they might just see that one piece of content from you. They might not see the other 10 pieces. So if you are assuming that you've got this piece of content that has this job, and then this piece of content that does that does that job written and this one that will ultimately convert you, you might own, they may only see number one on number two and not number three. And the problem is, if they only see number one on number two, that might not mean that they go into the shop and buy you, which is why there's quite a lot of pressure that's almost that every piece of content should have the ability to drive that sale. Because, yeah, unfortunately, in today's world, when they're being bombarded with messages by the second, like they say that every consumer now should be treated like a goldfish, because they're receiving so many advertising seconds, like every eight seconds

Ben Walker  42:13  
that you've got two weeks a month on tick tock.

Emily Heath  42:16  
So therefore you have to assume that they're not going to see a b c, and so therefore A, B and C all need to have the ability to do the same thing, which is, it's hard, especially in tick tock, where people are fundamentally there to be entertained, like they're not there in a way, to be sold to. And so therefore, when you're trying to entertain them, you've got to have this balance of entertain them, oh, but buy the agent. And that's quite tricky, because that's not what they're wanting. They're wanting entertainment. Want to go down that rabbit hole that they never come back up for for two weeks of the month. So yeah, that's where measurement can sometimes get stifled creativity, because you've got to have this like, it must sell, it must sell, it must sell.

Ben Walker  42:56  
Yeah, what are the big mistakes do you think, Paul, when people are trying to get that cut through, when people are trying to get that cut through as marketers.

Paul Greenwood  43:02  
So I think the big mistakes that they might have is, I think you were talking about this earlier, where it was around trying to react to every single every single moment. I don't think you need to. You need to know who you are as a brand, what you stand for, and what's that value exchange. And be quite explicit with that value exchange when you're talking to your consumers like this is what we can do for you. And I think don't try and don't try and push that message too hard. Like, the one thing that especially on social, I'm thinking of this from a social perspective, and you've just said that in terms of people are on social primarily to be entertained, so the how the brand shows up can be quite ambient. It can be around you, not like explicitly in your face, but also make sure that it's memorable. You were talking about mental availability and just making that memory structure. I think if you can do that regularly, that works. Whereas if you think you're just going to have a one hit wonder, hit them with some content, and then suddenly they convert. It's going

Emily Heath  43:58  
to be really difficult remember being in a production bidding process, and this social director was talking to us and was saying like how she would like to bring our brand to life through social and one of the things she said that stuck with me most was brands need to stop thinking they're influencers and acting like influencers on social media. You're not an influencer. You are a brand, so stop pretending to be influencer. She's like, it's like going to a party as an 18 year old's party as a 50 year old and pretending that you're going to fit in. You don't. You've got to remember that you are coming into their world, and you need to work out how you can be relevant and engage in their world. But you are not that world, if that makes sense. So you're not the influencer.

Ben Walker  44:41  
That's an interesting example of, I mean, I don't get invited to my son's policies. He's 16. Good job, really. But that's an interesting example of an insensitive sort of local insensitivity. Local insensitivity, thinking you're something you're not as a brand. You're a global brand. What about global insensitivity? That. Is often a pitfall we hear in creative that people just get they work for the culture they're from, rather than the culture that they're going

Emily Heath  45:07  
to Yeah, and we we get that a lot. I'm the global team based in the UK, and you have to really force yourself to take yourself away from being UK and to really imagine how the brand exists, show ups and brings meaning into people's lives around the world. And surprisingly enough, geogen is very different around the world, like there are many cultures in the east where geojun isn't part of the daily habit, sweating is not an issue. They don't care. Whereas you go more West, and it's very established, like most people are using it once, twice, even three times a day in countries like Brazil. And yes, you've got it. It's very hard when you are a global marketeer to pull yourself out of your own experience, in your own existence, and also global brands as well. You know, as I've said, when there are so many new brands showing up in people's garages. They're being created in that garage, for that country, for that community, for that culture, as opposed to with that big, global mass mindset. So it is hard. You've really got to have this view of who you are, really as a global brand, and they're going to be things that are going to be consistent in every country you are. You're your logo, your name, your strap line, the types of products you're selling, but you then have to have the ability to really react and respond to how your product needs to show up for those local people. So yeah, if you were to go to different countries around the world, actually, we've got five different brand names, which is just something to juggle, but you might see a slightly different view of what Rex owner is in Brazil versus the UK versus the US, because we have to be we have to adapt to what is meaningful to those people.

Ben Walker  46:45  
There pieces of advice would you give to the audience, Paul and luckily, Emily, to make sure they create great creative marketing that's innovative, that's willing to take a bit of risk, that cuts through and doesn't fall down. Any of these pitfalls, the

Paul Greenwood  46:59  
pitfalls there. I think the quick answer to that is you should always have your common brand guidelines at a global level. This is how we behave, this is how we show up. But then you should always be creating content in the local markets to ensure that you have that local nuance, that cultural context, that you're not making insensitive comments or content. And so we're a firm believer of having cultural trackers and newsrooms in every single market to make sure that we can show up in the right way. I think for a brand to be we were talking about experimenting, and I think social is a great place to experiment. Yeah, there's a lot of eyeballs on social, but the great thing about social is, like, you can just take it down. You can't take a billboard down overnight. And I know that's a bit of a flippant thing, but like, some people get really caught up on social. But what I found really interesting when Gucci launched on Tiktok, they were really playful. They were doing some really unusual, interesting stuff, which a brand would not do. The brand would never do on like, out of home. They were they were working with Francis bourgeois, the train spotting guy, doing really strange and odd things. Same with Marc Jacobs. So I think social is a place where you can experiment. And try some stuff out. And if you're not comfortable with doing that on your own brand channels, think about what creators could do as well, and influencers and working with those types of individuals to push a different message, test something new, be bold, and if it works and it sticks, and you get the results, you can then start transforming that into your own content, and then, and then and then into other marketing spaces as well.

Emily Heath  48:25  
It's also the channel where you can post things like organically. You don't have to necessarily put paid media behind it. You can therefore see how it performs, how it reacts. Do I want to put any media behind it? Whereas other channels are more rigid, you know, you've got to invest in them up front. And if it doesn't hit stick, it doesn't sit, doing anything to our physical products. Is also a massively risky area. You know, once it's on the shelf, it's on the shelf. If you put anything on there that gets challenged, legally, you lose all that stock if you lose the challenge. So I agree, social really is a bit of a playground if you want to experiment, it's the place to be able to do it, because it has lesser risks associated it slightly on the flip coin of that, if something suddenly picks up noise negatively, also positively, it can spread like wildfire. And that can be something you've got to be able to get a control of quite fast.

Ben Walker  49:14  
But it's interesting that you your underlying sentiment is that don't fear social as this is this sort of, you know, tinderbox drive places that can catch fire, because that's a good thing about it as well as a bad thing about it. But actually accept it as a place of experimentation, and remember that it's not like you spent millions on a billboard that you can't then remove.

Emily Heath  49:34  
So I'd say, embrace it, get creative, have a bit of fun, because at the end of the day, we want to have fun in our on our jobs, and that's the place you can be having it,

Ben Walker  49:43  
creativity, innovation, risk taking is terminated, behind us now, is it 2026? The year humans are back in charge?

Emily Heath  49:51  
Yeah, I don't ever think they weren't in charge. Personally, this is my point of some people, some people did. I think there was just a. A sense of unease. It's something new. People don't like change. It's change, and it's just you've got to adapt and control that change in a way. So I don't feel like we ever lost control. I never felt in 2025 like aI was in charge of my job.

Ben Walker  50:15  
Year of the human marketer, Paul,

Paul Greenwood  50:17  
yeah, I think it's the year of the human marketer, harnessing AI and expanding on the best parts of themselves to produce better creative as well. So I think it's a the year that people stop fearing AI and go actually. We can use this to actually make some great content, some great campaigns, and really like make an impact.

Ben Walker  50:36  
Paul Greenwood, Emily Heath, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. That's all the time we have for this episode of the CIM Marketing podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and find it helpful, please consider supporting the show by leaving a rating and review. It really helps grow our reach. The CIM Marketing Podcast is hosted by me Ben Walker and produced for CIM by Brindley Walker, no relation. Thanks again for tuning in to the CIM Marketing Podcast, we'll catch you next time.

Karen Barnett  51:08  
CIM training courses cover all marketing subjects and provide you with the confidence to drive real results. Choose now from our comprehensive learning portfolio on the CIM website under learn and develop the contents and views expressed by individuals in the CIR Marketing Podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the companies they work for you.