 Good afternoon everybody, and welcome back to our Lunchtime webinar express series. We've got a great session today with Alex Murphy co-founder of leading financial services digital marketing agency Balance. If you'd like to turn on your webcam, Alex, I'll pass things over to you and the floor is yours when you're ready. Thank you very much Pippa. Today we'll be talking about brand and performance in balance. for coming today and signing up. We can see we've got a good close to 100 people on the quarter moment and growing, so that's excellent. Right, like Pepper said, it'll be about half an hour if I can stick to my timing and then we'll have a Q&A at the end, so I'll answer questions then. Okay, so the contents. Contents is a load of questions. So who's this guy speaking to you? What did he say? Why are we here? Why are we here now? Who should we listen to on this topic? What do we do next? How can I convince others of the same things I've learned today or around this topic? Where has this worked before? And what did we cover in the summary? Sorry. And then finally a little bonus reading list at the end. So who's this guy? Right, so I'm Alex Murphy. I'm co-founder of Balance, a digital marketing agency specialising in frame services. I've been around a while now doing this sort of thing. Marketing is my first love and it's all I've ever done. I've worked with a number of brands, Admiral, GoCorpair, The Royal Mint, and that's enough about me. Okay, balance is an agency. To very briefly mention, we do obviously with all the digital marketing things like SEO, PPC, content, training, digital PR, and we've worked with some obviously excellent frame services brands. Our teams worked with them all. So before we start, I think it's very important that I share that an advisory warning. There are terms in this presentation that might be distressing to marketers of a delicate disposition. So let's get on with it. I'm just going to give you a fair warning. So hold on to your seats. Colouring in department. Synergy. Depends. Sostac. Let's see I'm talking after all. The long and the short of it. And with all finance department. So my apologies in advance again. So some definitions because we talk about brand versus performance a lot. But actually, what does that mean? Because one of the issues that we often have with brand and performance is that different terms are used interchangeably. So let's talk about what they are, what they're not. Performance marketing. Yes, it usually has a short term noticeable business effect. Tens to the language around it tends to be things like CPA, robust ROI. And it's normally something normally something you can do in real time. You can change bids in real time. There's aspects of it that are biddable. So yeah, it's certainly seen as a more agile form of marketing. It does not mean digital. Yes, it is predominantly digital, but using the two interchangeably would be incorrect. It does not automatically mean that it's the most efficient or cost effective form of marketing. Maybe in the moment it seems so, but not necessarily always. And it does definitely not, as we've learned in recent years, mean the most accurately measurable. It'll give you measurable results of whether accurate or not is a hard topic. Brand marketing does usually focus on building emotional connections with the customer or prospective customer. Does tend to go for broader reach to be effective? And does usually have a longer window to impact business returns? That's how we think about brand marketing. Brand marketing does not just like with performance. It's not constrained to a channel. Brand marketing does just not mean TV or offline or expensive. It doesn't mean that there won't be short term benefits to it. It's not all a distant horizon. And of course, and there's all her whole other topics in this brand does not mean slogans or your your logo or anything like that. It's much deeper. So now we've got that clear. Let's move on. A little dot. So some of you may be familiar with this. This is the Gartner hype cycle, and it describes a lot. Any new technology or any new thing that people get excited about and the waves that it goes through. Dr Grace Kitewell mentioned a number of times in this talk, referenced the fact that this has a lot of alignment to how we've perceived online advertising of the last few years. Now this curve tends to align from the early 2000s up to today and beyond. And the little cyan dot, they blue dot is where we are today. Now this also aligns with my career. And why maybe I'm a good person to be talking about this stuff. Obviously, Royal Mint go compare our more balance in that order and how they align to different phases of the hype cycle. So let's go back early 2000s. And this is why this is a time why we're even having presentations. That's why we've got such a good sign of today. It's not my charm and wit. It's the fact that this topic is so critical these days. So we'll go back to the early 2000s. I finished university and getting marketing jobs and marketing it. Fall now to favour within businesses, at least the smaller, medium sized businesses. There are barriers to invest in things like brand. We're only perceived as TV and at the time the options were limited. So TV was what people thought of as brand. That wasn't something you could do. Marketing had been consigned and used the first one to being a colouring in the bar. It's where sales sent a presentation to be made. Occasionally they did catalogs and they did some brand marketing, but it was kind of almost an indulgence perceived as rather than something critical to the business. However, then the hype cycle kicks in for digital marketing or online advertising. Notice here I'm saying digital and online, not performance. Though the two things, especially at that stage, were very, very tightly linked. So online advertising arrives and people think you can solve everything. You can see the money in and money out to measuring in real time. This wave that we see at the beginning, I rode that as hard as I could. I got an average degree and didn't fancy going to London. So if I was going to do well, I was going to have to get really good at this online advertising thing. And luckily I was, and the teams around me weren't. So I rode that wave throughout the Royal Mint and Go Compare and everyone loved it and it was great. But in that, I think we did a problem along so many other new of the first wave of digital marketers, is that we got businesses a bit hooked to it. Before we knew it, the brand budget was being handed to us. Whenever the business don't do effort, you leave performance marketing alone. But you, you, the brand guys by that TV. Do we need TV right now? Cut the TV a little bit. Didn't bother me. I wasn't a brand marketer. Never would have considered myself as such. And so it was great. I was getting money handed to me with no real issues. But of course, move on to the late 2000s. And but even before that, while I was still in Go Compare, I started noticing something, you know, the team there, the performance marketing team, there was absolutely excellent and would optimise to the instant degree. You know, they were as good as digital marketing people could get. But there was a thing that happened whenever we were maybe having a lean a month and we wanted to pull back a bit and TV was pulled back, or we'd had a period of time where, you know, you're talking budgets and tens of millions here, where we want to save a couple of miles. So TV's turned off or really seddiw it for a period of time. What I noticed was the optimisation of my performance marketing channels was hitting the ceiling. Couldn't explain it, didn't really understand why. My rather frustrated brand manager, my colleague, he at the time handed me a copy of Bound Shops, how brands grow, I think he knew what was going on. And so yeah, that's where we were. However, I moved on to Admore. And for the first time, I was responsible for all marketing. That was the marketing director then. Every single aspect of that businesses, marketing was suddenly my responsibility. Now I absolutely probably got that job on the merit of my digital experience. You know, they knew that we needed to be much better at that. I was very starting to become rapidly dominated by a price comparison acquisition. And so it wanted to look after its own digital skills and performance marketing. And when I went in, that's exactly what I thought I was going to be improving. But what I rapidly realised was that wasn't really the problem. Yes, it needed a lot of work, but it was bigger than that. So at the same time, digital was starting to fall off this height curve. You know, we noticed actually loads of display ads where we're junk load of load of bots and a very little actual value. We noticed that maybe the limitations are happening with performance marketing, where there was an absence of brand, it was much harder to do anything with it. We noticed that maybe there was a lot of scandal about attribution models being quite inaccurate. And so we were all then developing all these attribution modeling to kind of explain something that wasn't really there. So yeah, we were getting quite dejected and this was happening as as I was hitting Admiral. So I'm there going, well, hold on. Why can't I get brand budget? Why is it so hard for me to argue brand budget? Now, of course, I was part of the problem. Like for years, being shown people look, we can get customers nice and easily and cheaply and measurably. And you know where your money goes and that old adage of 50% of your marketing is wasted, it's gone. So, so you be, except of course, that wasn't really the case. I didn't understand the full picture. I was, I was too naive. And now of course, I was trying to argue against all of those years, going, oh, we need brand investment. And no, we can't measure it straight away, but look at all these things we're going to. I will help us get there. It was very tough. Now, I did get those budgets and it was a struggle. And, and that's the start of where I learned a lot of what I'll talk about today and continue to learn every single day. I had to avoid LinkedIn this morning because every single day I look at something and I learned something new and I want to change the deck. This is like version eight or something. So, so yeah, constantly learning, but we are maturing. Now digital online, people are starting to realise how powerful it is for brand building as well as performance. And people are starting to notice the balance that's required. But we're not quite there yet. You know, now I'm, I'm the old guy, you know, and, and people are talking about TikTok and every new channel comes along threads and everything. And, and I'm going, how do I apply that to the business? And so yeah, so I'm starting to know what, what the, the very time that people are heading me were feeling like all those years ago. And at some point in the future, what we hope for is that the challenge are used in balance, one of the challenge that disciplines are used in balance, not the agency, but the, the, the term balance in terms of the performance marketing work together. Yes, it's going to be predominantly online, but not just online. And for the good of the business. So yeah, that's the hard cycle and me. So why is, so that's why we're talking about this now, but why is it so top, why is it important in this particular situation? And you may have noticed the economy is a bit messed up at the moment, and it's not doing too well. Now maybe the recession didn't happen, or maybe it's not as bad as people thought, but regardless, it's tight times. A lot of businesses are really struggling. And when you're under the cosh, you're going to grab for the short term wins. You're going to want to go, well, look, I know if my money to spend today will give me money tomorrow, that's more important. And you know what it often is, but the businesses that they can see beyond the next three months, six months a year, time and time again have been proven to succeed. There's loads of what I couldn't go into today about how you spend through a recession and marketers who spend on advertising through a recession win. And there is things to be confident about. You know, this is a good time, because actually to the right, to the left, you've seen economic situation at the moment. So, you know, about 2022, it's diabolical, and then, you know, it's a little bit the yellow box of forecasters should have a key. The yellow box of forecast, it's not great, but it's getting better and consumer confidence is improving, regarding a prime day happening today. And I wonder how much money is going to be spent on that. You know, it's not like no one, people are buying things. Right, so we know that's a good time. We know that things have evolved. We know that we need to put these things in balance potentially, but we don't really know why. Why are they in balance? What speaking, what thoughts are out there? And we also need to understand this so we can convince others. So, who are leading thought, who are thought leaders on this topic, sitting on me, I'm just good at reading other people's stuff. OK, so I've talked about four people here today. There's millions of others we could talk about, but these are four quite key people. Professor Byron Sharp, Les Benet and Peter Field, Dr Grace Keighton, Professor Mark Ritsen. So let's start with Byron Sharp. This is the book I was given by my frustrated brand manager a number of years ago, which is how brands grow on Byron Sharp on the Aranburg Basin Institute, tend to talk about a certain thing called, they talk about mental availability and physical availability. Now, on the right here, you have a little diagram done by a brilliant illustrator and marketing thought leader called Dan White. And Dan tends to illustrate concepts exceptionally well. But what Byron Sharp talked about was that 95% of your market at any point are not in market. Now, they're not ready to buy anything from toilet paper to fast cars to car insurance. You know, they're not ready to buy at that point most of the time. 95% number really is just a nominal number for saying most of the time. Now, don't get too stuck on that. But it makes sense, right? That the course people aren't right now and most people aren't right now ready to buy that thing. So if you're only hitting them with activation, if you're only using performance marketing to reach them, you're really only trying to do is really hit them on that 5%, which is a much, much harder job. You know, that was one of the strengths of digital marketing and performance marketing, but it's very, very hard to do. So all of our skill came from that. Meanwhile, the smarter brands are going, well, you know what, I'm going to continue to speak to my customers all the 95% of the time. Now, we used to talk this quite a family like, well, we'll send newsletters to customers throughout the year to keep them engaged so that when they do ready to buy, and that's all great, and that's all engagement. But real brand marketing is about building that relationship so that when they do hit what's termed a category entry point, maybe if it's champagne, it's a birthday or a wedding or something like that, maybe whatever it might be, that fast car you finally want to buy. Fast car or something like that. But regardless, you don't start then, you start when the 95% and what Dan points out is that they're almost in this pool at the top here, waiting. And that's when you apply the brand marketing to them and that's why it doesn't make sense to hit them with sales messages. And then when you get to that point that category entry point, that's when being excellent at optimisation, that's when being really excellent at performance marketing comes in. If you didn't have that, they'd just stay on the top of the or someone else would benefit from it. So that's how brands grow, according to my own chart. Long and short of it, I debated about putting this in, not because it isn't a fantastic piece of work, but because it's almost so ubiquitous now that it's almost starting to lose meaning, the word strategy loses meaning. And but it is really, really important, not so much for the metrics involved, but because it's a it's a way of showing, demonstrating to people how using data from a number of sources in the IP effectiveness studies and reward winners, they went, this is what we observed. That when people spent this much budget, 60% of the budget, and I'll get to that number in a minute, 60% of that budget on brand building and 40% on performance acquisition, the overtime benefited. The yellow zigzagging line essentially is your sales performance, right? So what's in your sales are happening again and again and again and they're driving business. But whenever you turn off the promo or the top IPC or whatever you're going for, sales just drops through the floor again. You know, and but with brand building, yes, initially when you spend the same amount of money on brand as you do on activation, you're not going to get the results that you want. You are going to get results you want. You're not going to get results that are comparable. People are going to go, what did all that money go? You know, why didn't we just spend on doing a discount or spend on more price comparison or affiliates or whatever? And and so you've got to manage the expectation of that as, yes, initially that will be the case. What you're doing is building a stronger baseline. So I love this chart because it's sort of a lot of people say, well, yeah, long and short, it's great. It came out 2015 when brands grows 2010. That was 2013 to 2015, the Binayon field stuff. But it's very hard to apply to real business, you know, I was doing it at the time and he's like, well, it's not quite that, it's not quite this. And it almost it talked about synergy. Here you go, there's the word again. But it talked about synergy, but actually it was almost people think, oh, maybe I should be spending my money on brand and modern performance. What am I doing? This chart from Dr Grace Kite and the Magic Members Group, they sounds like a band. They talk about the performance plateau. And the performance plateau really means that actually, if you look across time here, at the beginning of a business, it actually makes quite a lot of sense to, to be using performance marketing. You get a lot of growth straight away startups, fintechs, startups and new businesses and exciting new products and all those things. Performance marketing can work exceptionally well for you. But what happens is you do eventually hit a plateau and that plateau can continue until you've got something else helping it. Or in fact, you can get diminishing returns. You already get diminishing returns or regressive returns because, because you are competitive might well be doing this stuff, which is in the yellow box here, which is yellow, yellow peaks here, which is this is brand building. This is when you combine the two things together, brand and performance. There is this synergy, which means that you are uplifting those channels. Now, I could talk about it a bit more later, but think about what that really is. That's when you turn on brand advertising. People have seen a brand that and they have a stronger relationship to that brand or it's momentally available when they see them in front of them in Preston Barrison or on Google or on Amazon or whatever. They have a preference. You know, it's the one that they maybe think of searching for at that point because they're the top of mind. So what this shows is actually you need both. And there's a quite a lot of data around how the two of them are together. So this one isn't really a model. This is just a method. And I feel like it was maybe taken to make a little bit when he came up with it. But there is a lot of stuff out there about how to approach this. There's, you know, there's all valuable things. There's econometrics and MMM, the mediums modelling. There's lots of ways you can go about this. You can get very complex and very detailed and also be very, very expensive to do all this data analysis. But what Ritsyn said is well, look, if you just want to just get a blank sheet paper and have a start with this, take 10% of your turnover. So a step one of the triple cook chips method, as you called it, takes 10% of your turnover. This is based on something else, a lot of research. But again, Dr. Grace Kye, I'm being a complete fanboy today. Again, Dr. Grace Kye talks about there's a chart out there which has just had enough time to go through, which says between 15%, roughly about 10% of your turnover when spent on marketing enhances growth. And the new your business, the more it should be and so on. That's on marketing, not on brand. It's just marketing's whole. Then apply the long and the short of it. So you've got that money, say it's 100,000, 60,000, 40,000. Then you start to activate it and you measure the both the short and MROIs and also the long term benefits. Now, short and MROIs, you might be putting that money in there and you've got your leaving money in the table. So of course you're going to spend more on your performance marketing, but hopefully the profits from that you can do to spend more on your brand marketing. But what Grace Kye says is and what I'll go into in a minute is about, well, that's all wonderful, but it's a model. OK, it's, it's, it's not meant to be perfect. That's just your starting point. So have a fourth chip and adapt to your circumstances. So why do we adapt to our circumstances? Well, because even in the original Bennett and Fieldwork and since then they've shown that there's a number of things that affect the mix. For example, your industry in financial services, the baseline isn't even 60 40 or as the original data was actually 62 38. It's actually closer to 80 20 brand, which sounds weird, right? Because a lot of financial products are thought of as commoditised, but that's why brand is so important. Because if the only thing is separating you from your competitors isn't is a point on the APR or three quid on your car insurance or whatever from those services and it's particularly important, but it applies for all industries. So you've got to adapt. Also you've got to adapt what's happening. We talked about the recession. This is dated from walk. It said right now if you want an item but its price is going up, what would you do? Well, in groceries, people are going to shop around but ultimately they're going to buy anyway. Necessities like household, you know, they might actually defer buying it. They're going to shop around but they're going to buy anyway a little bit less. But when you in things like expensive treats like electronics like maybe what prime day a lot of it is about people are going to be going and you know what I don't need this right now. You know, I might not need it for another year. Now there's an argument that you still spend a market at the time but you make your returns are going to be a little while further away. So adapt to your circumstances. Be aware of the picture around you. This isn't perfect vacuum. Equally through the age of your business it affects your mix. So from the IPA data bank 98 to 2018 it showed that actually in the first year the white in that table is performance in the first year. It's probably makes a lot of sense to get that engine revenue through a lot of performance marketing. You know, a new product new launches get a performance marketing thing happening. It's it's fine. You know, but over time early growth excludes the first year but maybe the first few years that should shape up. And as you become a leader brand use that use that brand equity that you've got use that in your spend reinforce that and you know, put aside forces and build barriers to entry because to someone to even catch up with you they cannot spend a fortune on their own brand to build the same level of equity. OK. And then how? So there's a lot to consider because all of those things is plus 3% here plus 2% there minus 4% there. There's a maximum work by chemical tracksuit and they built a calculator to try and take in some of this. I built my own version using AI which is a whole of the topic but I'm rubbish at code. So using AI but I built my own one based on all the research that's done and that adapts it based on whether you're innovating or whatever the link is there you'll see in the PDF but it's on theboundsagency.com and it's a calculator. So if you're funding services you can use that. If you're not funding services go to tracksuit with the original creators of this whole thing and they'll cover more sectors like FMCG and so on. Some considerations with the user models. These studies were done by marketers or at least what people would perceive as marketers. Bear that in mind when you're having conversations with the non marketers. You know, telling finance that a marketer came up with a brilliant study of why we should be spending more on brand is a bit like trying to convince a steak eater to switch vegan based on the opinion of another vegan. You know, it's not enough on its own. The studies are biased towards brand because brand was the thing that was not getting enough investment mostly at the time but the lessons are applicable for both. There's no one-size-fits-all. As I said, you need to adapt things. Don't be dogmatic. You know, the leaders in our industry argue with each other about what's right and what's wrong. You know, just take some good theories, your hypothesis and test from there. You know, don't argue about that until you've got quite a lot of years under your belt about experience of seeing one method or the other. Of course, mixing your budget is only part of advertising. If you're horrific creative, it doesn't matter how much you spend on brand, it's not going to work unless it stands out for being terrible. You know, it's a lot more to it equally if you spend a ton of money on performance marketing but you're horrifically unoptimised, then that's not going to work either. But just because you have a great plan and this is the next section, don't expect a blank check. So beware of hyperbolic discounting. And this scenario here is exactly what I've been through a number of times. I've created the perfect plan and based on red book after book, cover to cover, all the new analysis, put it into a beautiful deck and still, even how the CFO sit ups and they go, you know what? I totally understand what you're saying. I need to temp some budget cuts if that's all right. So it's not enough on its own. I didn't give the temp some cut but I would ask for it. Because you've got to do more. Because money doesn't come from the penny, it just comes in there just because you made a good argument for it. It's either got to be increased from the profits, essentially. You've got to find it. So your rationale was we're committed to you guys, we need to do this stuff, isn't actually probably that hard, all right? It's convincing. I'm just giving you tools to convince others and as well as yourselves. So you need to give it to the CFO, the CEO. So you need to tie into the right language there. But often the budget is being diverted from somewhere else. Now, within marketing, you might be diverting budget from performance towards brand or from brand activity towards performance, which I had to go through my early career, you know? You might have to convince sales that maybe they're going to see a dip if you're moving more towards demand generation than performance. And you can't have a budget for both that they're going to see a dip in the next maybe few months. That's a big fight, you know? But there's lots of evidence out there and B2B, for example, covers and do quite a lot of data on how demand generation works better than just demand capture. You know, you might have to convince your product teams. You have to convince sales. There's a lot to be done here. So how do we go about that? Use the right language. Brand consideration, brand equity, brand, brand, brand, it doesn't matter. Even things like ROAS and CPA to a degree are important and easier to understand, but they're still marketing terms to a lower degree. You've got to start using the language of the business. How does this business make money? You know, is it a public company? Does it have shareholders? You know, there's a lot of considerations here. The middle chart I've got here is, talks about a 4% increase in brand equity down the side. It was a study done, and it's in HV, a Harvard Business Review. And it says, okay, we did a 4% increase in brand equity. What did that actually mean to these four businesses? Our three types of businesses and the average across 4,000 brands. And they showed it. They had that brand equity score to all of these brands and then they applied it to what happened. Terms like annual revenue growth. When we did this, there was an annual revenue growth of 1% and you will shareholder value growth. It's a big one for a lot of companies. And you're often fighting against that when they want to keep their profit margins up. That they're pleasing the shareholders can be one of the curses against marketing. So you have to show how it keeps the shareholders happy. But the investment as a percentage of the business, how much more you want and you want. It's not just 3 million, it's, I need a bigger percentage of the businesses turnover but it'll net you an even bigger percentage back. Shareholder value return investment and return an investment as a whole. These old numbers you need to talk about and they will, as you see, they did vary by businesses, but these are just single examples of businesses, right, does vary. So you're doing that. Data driven should have been in my list at the top, right? But data driven decisions this easily said. Here I mean obviously using data, using performance, but all of these things are totally the just models, right? They're things that have worked for many, many, many businesses but they're a baseline for your hypothesis. You have to then use them to test. Chances of them giving you, of someone giving you a doubling your marketing budget, spend on brand of performance is very, very small, okay? But can you get 5% to test with? Can you say, well, look, I want you to shore away 10% for me but I'm going to spend 5% of the test and if that's successful, I want the other 5% this year. Something like that. You know, negotiate, give them an out if you're wrong. Give yourself an out. You know, as I said to a board in the past, I'm not in commission here, I'm not spending money for the sake of spending money. I don't get any kickback out of it. You know, spending money because I believe it's the right thing to do. So, but backup data and don't take it personally, be data-led. You know, it's not you, you don't believe in, it's the marketing, hopefully. Communication and language, I've already talked about this, but communication, think about what we talked about. Something that's going to be one of the biggest marketing jobs you're going to do, okay? Is talk about, talking about Bound Sharp at the beginning, 95% of the time, you're not in budget season, okay? So, do you just go all out at the finance department when you have to speak to them and you have to get money from them? Or do you spend the year, the other 95% of the time, building a relationship with them, showing what money does, showing what money doesn't, showing what your theories are, what they're based on, having a relationship and then explain to you how money works in this business. Keep that communication line open, have a relationship with them, you know, and don't be scared. You know, they have targets the same as you and you need to understand, equally with sales, equally with others. Show what your brand equity does for the price elasticity. That was a big one for me, price elasticity. Use lots of charts, but don't make the mistake of taking a chart into a meeting that you don't fully understand. I've done that earlier on and had someone just take it apart. I think, well, why does that happen? Or another one, and I nearly colluded it until I looked at it. It showed absolutely clearly the click-through rate improvement based on brand performance. So if you've got a high brand, you get a high click-through rate. This has been proven down again. But the chart I had showed a 0.68% click-through rate if your brand is number one, if your brand is number three and a 0.71% click-through rate if your brand is number one. Now, it's an improvement, yes, but the chart was massively stretched out. And actually a fan's person would go, well, how much is that 0.02% cost me? Just be wary of what you're going in with. Equally, when you mess up and you will, be transparent if I did. Understand what you did wrong. Don't brush under the carpet. Don't blag it. Maybe the circumstances are wrong. Maybe your creative was rubbish. Maybe you misjudged something. Be transparent because ultimately you'd dare to fight another day and be better coming up with time. So I'm going to move to two case studies in the summary. So it's a case study from the meal in a box kind of category. Gusto, many of you will have heard of, go back about 10 years or so when the whole category started, less than 10 years really, they were very much reliant on paid ads. They had very low brand awareness. And at a tipping point, I remember watching, I can't remember his phone in Tom, the CMO there. I remember seeing him in marketing week saying, you know, we were so deep into performance marketing now, we're going to move into moving into brand. And we have to spend more of our money on brand. So what did they come up with? They decided on a mix of about 60, 40. Now this actually wasn't based on whether it would involve the business field, no doubt, but it was based on their own data and their own tests. And they settled on a roughly 60, 40% split. That drove people into a demand pool, which then led to tighter acquisition. Then of course, they get a pool of customers who through word of mouth build network effects, which then comes back into awareness through word of mouth, back into demand pool, creating a machine basically using brand. It's not brand is what's driving it. So now from 2020 anyway, it's not now, but around 2020, they were 75% organic customer acquisition. You know, so that's a much healthier business, a much more sustainable business. You know, when it's up against people like Hello Fresno, that's why it's doing well. I was that one. And then my final example before moving to questions is my own experience. I started out in five years ago, gosh, I was in out in five years. I explained how I started, perhaps comparison was very dominant and we had an issue where it was very dominant. It's great, the performance of the business is doing exceptionally well and that was almost a problem. There was no burning platform. We had very weak consideration compared to our awareness, 97% awareness and quite low consideration. The impact of brand marketing was known was just something you did and performance marketing was terribly unoptimised. So I did all of this work to get increased budget on the ATL above the line. I had a big review of our creative. We changed our creative entirely. We kept a fluent device, the Lady Admiral, changed everything else, went animated to get greater emotional response. We started to measure what that did to click through rates on price comparison versus a control brand. We also looked after elephant and diamond. So they hadn't had any brand investment so they were my control test. We also moved brand and performance into one team. It's a balance, yeah? So they were all into one team with the same budget, worked out differently. And we used method more than being obsessed with the mix. It just happened to settle down a certain way. What was the outcome? Price comparison dependency sort of stabilised if not dipped. It was going 60, 65 cents, you know, it was going up, it flattened off because just direct marketing was working so much better. Our click-through rate from third position. If you think you've got a price comparison website and you have five results, it's like the second or third result. If that's a brand you know, you're more likely to click it and prove that click-through rate. It sounds very dull and very dry and it's worth millions. Our consideration became first in market. This led to the thing. It isn't a result in itself. It isn't a goal in itself. But that's what we were. First instead of fifth. And then we also had the lowest direct CPA in the market by quite a while. And I know that because there's an anonymous benchmarking thing called the benchmarkers. So and we did that with that sacrificing share. This is this model in growth. But yeah, performance impacts brand by increasing equity, increasing penetration, network effects and awareness consideration. Brand impacts performance by increasing elasticity, click-through rates, et cetera. But what you've got to work on over time and this little slant here is just like that. Just like that along the short of a chart is that it'll take time to improve that coefficient. You know that the money is energy going into a system. It's not spent and gone. And that's the big conversation you have to have. This money is being invested. Yes, we've all used the investment trick. But it's energy going into a system. And the better you get at these things, the more that energy transfers into the other type of business, performance brand and so on. So in summary, it's a critical time. Performance marketing is matured as a discipline. It's still got some way to go, but it's definitely matured a lot. We're working on conditions we're working against us. So we need to be really on this stuff for our business to survive past that and beyond. But it's a great time for marketers. We're well respected and we need to be well educated on what's available to us on that education. There's several works of critical thinking out there. There's tons of analysis now, but you've got to use it as a baseline hypothesis. You can't just rely on it because you won't get by in and you might be wrong. So just adapt and then find teamwork is critical for success. It's not brand marketers versus performance marketers. It's complete nonsense. You're a team and you really depend on each other and you can really help each other. So you work together, but also work with a broader business to get them buying and whatever you choose to do. And that's it. This is a reading list. I don't know if you want to move on to questions. Thanks, Alex. Absolutely fascinating presentation. We will head into Q&A. We've already received some great questions to get us underway. So thank you for those of you who have sent your questions in. Please do continue to post any questions and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next few minutes. Yes, I ran over. Yes, okay. First question. In your projects and teams, did you always get the budget that you wanted? Absolutely not. Particularly earlier on I didn't. I think I had a little bit of leeway when I first went there and they went well as a new guy. We got to give him some rope to hang himself with. So I did then, but after that, I always protected my budget. We often would ask for like a 10-15% cut and might get away with a couple of percent. I often got budget with new products based on this building consideration because newer businesses are on some ways easy to grow. So no, I didn't get it all the time, but I got better at keeping it and then sometimes increasing it as time went on. But it's not flawless. You go think of the big picture. Right, thank you. Another question that had come in was how would you advise justifying to board members that are investing in branding for a product portfolio that it's worth it in the long run, especially that it is difficult to quantify compared to other tactical marketing activities? That's kind of the last section. So for me, I noticed, and I had to rush through that a little bit because I was conscious, but what I did was a type of elasticity. So what I said was consideration over time. So where our activity should build a relationship which will grow consideration. That's meaningless to the CFO, but it's the number that we start with and we can directly improve. This consideration in many studies is correlated to improve click-through rates or improve performance. So take your performance channel and go, what's the big metric that we're targeting there? CPC, CPA, CTR, whatever. How can it tie to that? And talk about it logically. If you have to convince yourself, then you're not ready. Look out there what's happened. I've mentioned that ZAN do a really good report. I've done a really good paper on it. You've got to take your brand metrics that you can immediately influence through brand activity and then show how they tie to performance metrics and then show how those performance metrics tie to profit or elasticity or whatever it might be. You're talking in future cash flow. You're not talking in just having a luxury. Okay, great. Thank you. And talking of those metrics that you mentioned, there were a couple of questions that came in asking what metrics would you say are the core ones to analyse performance? Performance? I don't know. I'm a bit old school. For a couple of years, with a 30 million pound budget, we tend to look at two metrics above all, which were your cost per acquisition and your volume against target. Budget was not recently measured. The reason for that was because, well, we needed a certain volume, but we did not find hitting it if you're losing money on every customer. TROAS is a big one in performance marketing. These days target ROAS, sorry, and return on ad spend, sorry. It can be quite short termists and you can solve for it so it's a bit risky, but they're all useful metrics. But like I said, ROI, CPA, ultimately what can your business afford to spend on a customer and that's how you are sitting in the KPIs from that. Fantastic, thank you. I think we've probably got time for another question. This is around how smaller organisations what your experience is of those and whether or not you find that any smaller organisations that may not have as robust a marketing structure, whether they lean on performance marketing and ROI more than the longer term brand focused marketing. It's a hard one, no, because someone said to me once, it's easy to run an efficient corner shop, so you can get very good at being a very small efficient business and that's fine. If you just want to maintain the status quo, that's fine. There are other ways to build relationships with your brand that are beyond just going on TV or spending a fortune. Brand advertising and YouTube and valuable content, there's nothing to do with sales, is brand advertising, right? You're establishing authority. Definitely do that stuff, because if you don't do it, you can bet that it will be doing it. And it's, you know, it's weird. I mean, I'm a consultant aside running an agency and I go to electrical engineering firms and I say, you know, you need to be doing more than just trying to hit people when they need electrical engineers and they go, what am I going to do? Well, be on LinkedIn. Talk about what you think is important in the market because your little audience cares. You know, your niche will care about that. It's not about just speaking to them when you want money out of them. That's building brand. It doesn't have to be some fancy advert. Be more to customers than just a transaction point. That's what brand is. So, yeah, I don't think you have to rely. Performance marketing gets the wheels running and it keeps the money coming in, but you have to be doing more because one day you're going to find that it gets very, very hard and your business will not grow but your business will want to grow and you won't be able to achieve it for them. Amazing. Thank you so much, Alex. That's fantastic. And I think, unfortunately, that's all we've got time for for the webinar today. I would like to thank Alex once again and also to CIM Wales Committee for organising the webinar. So that just leaves me to say a final thank you to you for joining us today. We do hope you've enjoyed the webinar. Take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again very soon.