So how's it going for Tesla?

Yeah.

It's interesting when you do these look backs, you typically want to look forward so that you can ignore if any of your predictions were completely wrong.

So here's the moment of truth with Tesla.

I mean, Tesla's such a fascinating one to look back on this year because you can, I mean, from a brand health perspective, which we'll dive into is still leading the innovation race and how they're perceived to be so innovative.

Yeah.

But as I think you'd expect over the course of the year and this big question of how do you divorce founder brand impact versus company brand? How does that drive brand fundamentals? I've seen a lot of movement there in a negative light.

So, you know, how have things gone for Deliveroo since DoorDash acquired them? It's interesting,

So what can the legacy bank take from these challengers without losing all that brilliant equity that they have? It's a real challenge, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's one of those categories that couldn't be more competitive, couldn't be larger.

So deeply embedded with how they bank and no one's in any urgent rush to switch.

It's like you're pretty much defining moments in your life, whether that is.

Parents setting you up with a bank account as you're a kid.

Do you just carry that forward? When do you start saving, getting a mortgage, whatever it might be.

Whereas in that age group, when you, and you touched on it there, when with banking, when you get somebody in early, that's why they do so many college promotions and always have, they tend not to move because it's such a hassle.

Anyway, what's your take? I was going to say,

it's interesting on that because it feels like with, The AI competitors, for a software product, they're almost not competing for product experience at the moment.

It's still unlike most software tools where it is product.

Whereas this feels like they are, they now need to differentiate from an experience point of view and how do they build emotional connection as opposed to people will just jump into their default open AI or Claude.

I'm not sure how many people are going between the two to see which one am I getting better.

a better product experience from.

I probably too early in the journey before all this right at the early stage of the journey where you have to be like a mega tech adopter to be really testing the different models to see which one do I get a better output for.

Oh my gosh, I'm sure they didn't see this one coming, but obviously Tylenol got dragged into this storm.

Slightly different, but kind of in the same territory.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, completely.

It does feel like one of those very familiar stories that We always revisit whether it's a change in leadership or it's economic challenges.

How do we go back to protecting the bottom line, driving efficiency? Brand gets thrown around as a bit of a nice to have in whatever format.

How do we start going back to high ROI channels? I think that they're both really interesting examples because the Diageo one makes a really conscious effort to call out how are we going to hold on and protect brand.

And we know that there will be a point to which we need to balance our how we drive efficiency so that we don't go too far and lose that long-term brand building.

So tell me a bit about Taylor Swift's brand health metrics.

It is...

actually really feeding off the content revolution they've done through Drive to Survive.

And this focus on social is coming from 18 to 34 year olds.

And that uplift is just a remarkable eight points, which is roughly a million people within that age demographic that are now preferring the British Grand Prix, which as we always harp on within tracksuit, it's always a top of funnel game until you get to a certain point where it's, how do we improve and strengthen our bottom of funnel, which is such a difficult metric.

There's a weird like difference to American Eagle here in the sense, like when we look at core and non-core audiences, we are starting to find this like demographic gap starting to emerge within F1.

And so when we think about a core audience and who they really speak to, it is male skewed.

There seems to be a female preference gap emerging where it's only 9% of preferences is driven by women.

That's really interesting to see actually where there's better divides amongst the audience.

Well, listen, one of the other winners at Cam was Uber Eats.

Yeah, completely.

I feel like there's a few common themes that we cover.

It's acquisitions and then line three seems to always...

First, we covered Deliveroo's acquisition from DoorDash in the UK and now looking over at the US and what's happening in that market.

I mean, I'm sure there's no surprise that online food delivery as a category just continues to grow.

It's now sitting at a 60% category penetration, which is up 7% over the last 12.

issue i guess in a way so how do they kind of address that because the wonderful marketing communications that we see like super well ads and all that kind of stuff can't fix that issue no but how do you you know it's it yeah it's a full company piece that has to be fixed it's like that promise to the customer

but you guys have seen some interesting growth in in i guess the category but also the road brand as well

yeah completely i mean to your point the growth of road over the last three years has just been absolutely incredible from a commercial point of view they've grown to i think it's 212 million in net revenue which is incredible, obviously having, you know, that celebrity backing and we're seeing a lot of celebrities enter and build brands in beauty.

But I think road has been the fastest growing to a billion dollar exit that there has been, at least in recent times.

And we're seeing, I mean, from like a tale of the tape around metrics from a commercial standpoint, but then also from a brand health perspective, it's incredible.

They're predominantly d2c led without pushing into retail and they've just announced a sephora expansion at the end of the year they've doubled their customer base their last 12 months was hitting 212 million rev but then from a brand health perspective it's just been a wild journey as well so in the last 12 months we've been tracking them within premium beauty in the us and their ability to outpace the category which is a highly competitive category at the top of funnel from an awareness and consideration perspective has been phenomenal so they've grown six percent awareness within their core demographic of 25 to 34 year olds so we could refer to that as the younger demographic because we know that the older demographics 35 they've in in the last six months they've built you know had an extra 10 million people from an awareness perspective so they've grown 10 in that core demographic and comparing that to the category average of five percent it's just a leap leap years ahead and then added a four percent a consideration growth and i think you know one thing that we've talked about a lot is how brand health has driven commercial outcomes and how every second episode we're covering a new acquisition it is really stemming from you know how are these brands within largely commoditized categories building such strong brand health and showing such exceptional growth in early years, how that's delivering this buy strategy from these larger incumbents as opposed to trying to compete.

And I feel like within consumer or any disruptive category, the question is always, why can't a Unilever do that? Why can't a Pepsi do that? But what we're seeing is we're seeing these larger brands really start to buy brand and buy capability within really important segments.

And one thing I wanted to call out was just to compare the acquisitions we've covered in the past, Pepsi acquiring Poppy, Unilever acquiring Wild.

And I just think what's important to remember here is that it's this kind of intangible brand equity that really inflates valuations beyond pure financials and commercials, as Dan mentioned.

I can get super detailed about what data, who am I going to buy for and start to follow this trend even further.

Yeah, I was just going to jump in there actually to that point because I came across a really interesting Nielsen article on how connected TV is essentially transforming advertising.

And really what it was highlighting is how connected TV, so CTV, is rapidly becoming a dominant face in the television landscape and a critical component of modern advertising strategies.

According to Nielsen's recently released ad supported gauge, 72.4% of the time US viewers spend with television is ad supported and 42.4% of that viewing time is spent on streaming.

So essentially that shift is obviously presenting a major opportunity for marketers.

And in their recent annual marketing report, they highlighted the 56% of marketers globally plan to increase their spend on OTT or CTV advertising in 25, which is up slightly from 53% last year.

And CTV is one of the few digital channels where planned spending increases year on year with the most significant growth planning coming from the Americas, which is, as Dan highlighted, is obviously the data that we're looking at.

And well, is it working?

Hugely competitive space in the UK that DoorDash have bought into and then kind of buying into or buying Deliveroo seems like a really interesting option.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it was huge news.

They've paid a 44% premium for Deliveroo based on their last trading day.

So a great result for the Deliveroo team.

But to your point, it's such a crowded market and it feels like the best place to start is Deliveroo.

is how that market is now starting to consolidate.

Yeah,

On a nickname basis with verbo.

No, it is.

I mean, it was a very funny campaign.

I mean, the Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, he responded quite well to it, actually.

He took a photo of the billboard, put it up on his Instagram story, just with a sort of a lot of Ricky Gervais laughing face.

So evidently, you know, a bit tongue in cheek, kind of leaning into it.

But it is interesting.

It's something that they seem to, regardless of whatever format they're running, it's how do we make sure that we have an expert in that space? So to your point, it's like, it is like creating almost like an SNL cast depending on what format or what activity they're going to run.

And this was following backlash against Elon Musk, and that they delivered almost 337,000 electric vehicles in the first few months of 25, which was a 13% drop from a year ago.

Incredible.

I mean, it's impossible to ignore as well in terms of just like the publicity they've had over the last 12 months.

But now starting to see how is that translating into their funnel metrics? It really does frame this question of celebrity leadership because there are so many brands that have innovative founders.

If you think of Steve Jobs, Apple, Apple.

So Richard Branson, Virgin, how does their presence impact the brand? And I mean, just looking at our data, so we're looking at 12 months running April 24 to March this year.

Tesla's awareness has grown, so 2% to 85%, which is incredibly large.

I have to take it.

LAUGHTER

But things are going well for Galaxy.

Yeah, I mean, amazing results for Galaxy at the moment.

And, I mean, chocolate's probably going to dominate the conversation for the next few weeks.

Obviously, Easter should just be a year-long conversation.

Before diving into Galaxy, I mean, my personal preference is love a Tony's chocolate only.

It's so hard to beat.

They're like, we will share with you the way that you can do this and pay people

So what have you guys seen in terms of Nike's maybe return to greatness? Yeah.

I think the first is just like the relief and the excitement of seeing that campaign where it just felt so Nike.

I think that, yeah, the SoWin campaign, Super Bowl campaign was so exceptional.

It's pretty moving to when you see an ad like that that just gets you so fired up, especially for someone who is like a very average, pathetic athlete.

Nothing more do I want to like go and shoot a hoop after seeing – caitlin or like run around a track albeit very slowly but yeah i think it was just it was epic i was watching a uh a piece from elliot hill the new ceo who was talking about like letting night get back to their roots which is like sport human performance and or like he just back to its ethos around just do it, as you were saying.

And we've already seen some changes or things starting to turn around.

It'll be a long-term fix, but we've seen a 3% jump in consideration, which 3% might not sound a lot, but that equates to roughly about 7.5 million people that are starting to drive back to Nike after what has been coined the flop era of John Donahue.

he's leadership right so you're kind of thinking that's you know it maybe it maybe it is all part of the the pepsi way we will find out we will see how this one plays out our last one today was talk of reddit and threads and they're on the up in the uk which i was honestly i was really interested in this one because reddit reddit's such a fascinating space right tell me a bit about what you guys have seen on reddit and threads uh increases