could you talk to categories setting expectations for price promotion? So it rung true to me, this concept that airline seats or candy bars might be more, not only better candidates for these types of, price promotions that drive incremental profit but then also certain categories may have more expectation for it or is what's your reaction to

that well um yeah so there'll be some categories where it was better than others um so for instance if you've got a category uh where there's a lot of um scope for increasing the size of the category where demand is not fixed.

That's one thing that will help me.

ice cream or chocolate.

Demand is not fixed.

You can get people to eat more ice cream or eat more chocolate, whereas toilet paper or...

I always come back to toilet paper because it's pretty much fixed.

Is that just a spin on on this a different flavor of this or is there something materially different there?

The paper, the gold-winning paper that includes a brand valuation is for Specsavers, which essentially is putting, you know, is it a net present value? Yeah.

Yeah.

So Specsavers did not rely on that brand value calculation.

They did the kind of more conventional profit ROI first, and then they looked at it another way by saying, okay, what's the value of the brand? I...

I can't actually remember whether they really show the contribution of advertising to the value of the brand, which is a little...

If they didn't do that, that kind of...

That's an extra step that one would need to do.

I have

So what's getting in the way of effective advertising, and why don't marketers seem to be getting the go big or go home message? Here's Les Binet.

The fundamental problem is that the primary driver of effectiveness is budget and scale, and particularly budget, and marketers don't have enough control over that.

So very often they're being given a budget.

They take a budget.

They're being given money by the C-suite, and they don't have enough influence over that decision.

So as I said, the most important marketing decision of all is how much to spend, and that's largely not being taken by marketing people.

Um, and that... partly that's to do with organizational structure, but it's also to do with training.

Mm-hmm.

Yes,

exactly.

We had a legendary training system.

BMP, at its heyday, was like... an amazing place, not just strategically, but creatively and in terms of effectiveness.

There was a year when 2% of all UK graduates applied to go to BMP.

You know, 2%, that's as big as agriculture.

And we picked the creme de la creme.

No, no,

Yeah.

So I used ...

Yeah, I used the example of Coca-Cola.

So Coca-Cola do the big Christmas ads and, and all those other things, and they've done all of that stuff for, you know, not just decades, but generations now.

Um, because of that, um, every time you see a little Coca-Cola logo, um, you know, even a small reminder will, will reignite all those existing brand memories.

So, um, didn't McDonald's do, uh, some stuff with the golden arches?

Yes.

Um, so yeah.

Two

of us sharing a flat with Andrew Tindall.

What could possibly go wrong? Young Andrew and his ageing parents.

But so Andrew was presenting the stuff, the system one research on compound creativity, which I think really useful empirical contribution to this debate about long term effectiveness.

And Sarah was talking about consistency as a kind of it can be an unlock for creativity as well as a constraint on creativity.

And I was just trying to remind people that it also requires what Peter Field and James Herman called creative commitment.

So they identified in their research in, I think it was 2020, a different piece of analysis showing that long-term effectiveness is driven by long-term consistency.

I think...

But anyway, I think how we reach people is as important as what we reach them with, isn't

it? I have...

So many things to say about that.

So I don't want to run.

I mean, the first thing is I. I slightly disagree with your emphasis there because you're going down the route of efficiency and the efficiency of different channels in terms of cost of attention, whatever.

If you like, the effectiveness of a campaign is the amount of exposure times the efficiency of that exposure.

And efficiency can vary by a factor of 10 or 20, you know, choice of media, choice of creative.

A lot of it