 All right, and you are all very welcome today. Thank you so much for joining us for this 42 courses, subscription only event where we are so delighted today to be joined by Tom Rothenberg. Tom is the Global President of Rufus, IPD Specialized Marketing Agency Group dedicated to the world's number one brand, Amazon, who we are of course all extremely familiar with. He's based in the LA, in LA. He oversees a 30 country team of over 1,000 staff working in over 25 different individual agencies and covers media, creative, sponsorship, data partnerships, working with a huge number, 30 more different Amazon lines of business. But let's allow Tom to tell you a little bit more about himself rather than me talking about him to tell us a bit more about what he does in his job with Amazon and of course, how you got there Tom because you're extremely experienced in many other areas, agency side. So Tom, you're very welcome. Oof, extremely experienced, makes me sound old. Yeah, it's true though. So thanks so much, Louise and Irene and Heitel, the 42 courses community. Been a supporter of 42 courses since the beginning. I know the founders and worked with them in various capacities over the years. So very happy to give you a little window of time into my life and hopefully provide some value and give you some interesting stories and points of view as you guys go through your learning journeys around marketing and creativity. So, yeah, as Louise mentioned, done a few things around this kind of world myself. Started out as I think, you know, lots of us did as a thrusting young person in a crazy advertising agency. I was a big believer that the agency environment was about the best place you could go to get your hands across different kinds of businesses and business problems and challenges and learn about how, you know, this nebulous, nascent thing called creativity we're gonna talk about a lot today, how it really worked because you kind of as a kind of receiver as someone growing up, you learn a sense of what's like interesting business, interesting brands, interesting work and other stuff isn't like, how does that work? So I started in Grace of Agencies in a couple of the WPP shops as a baby, Ogilvy and at Gray. And then kind of, I guess, made my, whatever name I have in this industry at McCann in the late, whatever that decade is called between 2000 and 2010, a while ago. I joined McCann to do a couple of things, one of which was run the Xbox Advertising and Microsoft Game Studios creative accounts for Europe and Middle East and Africa. And it was a really interesting time in gaming. Those of you who spent any time with that category will remember some of the kind of seismic shifts that came as the tech evolved to the Xbox 360 PS3 generation, but also like marketing for video games went from like Carter trailer, put some sound on it, released it to gamers and off we go to suddenly this YouTube powered world of like hang on a sec, we could tell much richer, bigger stories. And there are probably no more interesting developed nuance, huge massive entertainment properties than video games, people spend 20,000 hours in these worlds. So how can we tell those stories to people in a way that's new, exciting and challenging? And I did some of my best work in my career in that era for games like Halo 3. Anyone who's a game ball recognized the Master Chief helmet back up here from our campaign in 2008, we got the Grand Prix at Cannes, Grand Prix the APG strategy awards, Grand Prix at the FEs. Still, I think the only campaign ever to get a Grand Prix at a major strategy, creative and effectiveness award, we can talk about that a bit later on today. But I love working on Xbox, love working in the video game category and allowed me to kind of, you know, move from being a one country TV, you're not TV, one country advertising guy to a kind of multi-country, multi-discipline guy because we let an integrated team working around events and experiential and all sorts of other stuff. So that's something down a path that with a small detour to be the Chief Growth Officer of McCann in London, looking after kind of growth and new business for the agency, I left the advertising agency, the World's 2013 after a few years to do something generally different and keep on that mission. Join a friend, we had a mobile tech startup, so out of the world of content, out of the world of, I guess, you know, advertising and into running a business. I will not bore you with the full intricacies of everything we did, but it started as a Java-based platform that allowed us to write code across different mobile operating systems for people who wanted to get into the app economy that's kind of booming around 2013, but you still have this strange world of, not just Apple with iOS and Android, but Samsung had their own operating system back then, Blackberry was still a player, Windows Mobile was still a player. It all seems like a very long time ago. And people had this challenge of going, I want to get into apps. There's this new forum for how we connect to customers and how we can build parts of our brand and our service and our business, but the industry was so immature and nascent that everyone was using literally different languages to write code or to write apps in. So it was incredibly expensive. You have to write six bits of software. And we said, hey, write it once. We'll charge you three times as much as one app that you can deploy across all six. Good business until all the other operating systems fell away. We pivoted to be an iOS and Android specialized developer. Worked with all kinds of interesting companies. I built the app for FIFA for the World Cup in Brazil in 2014. Loaded apps for financial companies both in customer finance, but also like payment solutions. We worked with Visa and MasterCard. We took stakes in a company that then acquired us. Sort of a great journey, like bringing the things I'd learned as a kind of like old school creative person working in ad agency out to deal with like, how do you create a business? How do you build a proposition for a company? How do you then keep that proposition alive through an acquisition? Because we got acquired. And then again, a double acquisition because the guys who acquired us got acquired because technology is fun like that. So got a really good sense of like, how you hang on to the things that made our business difference and we were creative at heart even in that technology world, differentials of design that we could talk about again, some of that today. Following the second acquisition, I then had a couple of years of doing some consultancy work, helped a few agencies that my friends had get bought because I was a guy who had done a company sale, which is a great journey, not a great journey but a legal and financial one. I did interesting projects with interesting brands or businesses that were looking for some sense of kind of innovation or change or new thinking from the outside. And businesses love to bring in people who are familiar enough with the subject but have a different perspective. And whether it's an agency or a private individual for my consultancy in this case, I did that for a couple of years, it was great fun. I met my wife, got married, she's from South Africa, I don't know, many of the folks here have got some base camp out there, we lived in Cape Town for a while. So, life was great. And then out of the blue, slightly I got a call from some of my old colleagues for into public group, because McCann is the main creative network for IPG to come and help out on a rebooting and reshaping one of their, I guess, historically great agency brands. It was a little unvarnished, should we say. And so in 2017, I began working with initiative media. I still remember my first call from the CEO who'd just taken over. I was like, I'm a media agency, like all the things I've done, crazy agencies, worked in tech. I can't even spell media, I mean, I can, but basically I can't spell media. Are you sure you want me to help? And he said, no, I've got lots of people in this company who know media, but not that many people who know how to re-engineer businesses and do the kind of turnaround and work with clients that we have. So, and in checks and creativity, again, to use that word. So I moved to New York in 2017 and started working with initiative as the chief client officer. That brought me into the world of Amazon, which I then moved out to Los Angeles and ran full time, not just for initiative, but across the IPG group as Louise set up. So that is, I think the stats are probably out of date, but the bio I wrote from last week is probably about right. We have a whole ton of agencies working on Amazon. We have a big chunk of media business, which is how do we find people who care about all the various Amazon products and services and persuade them, but I'm doing creative. I'm running events, both in the B2B and B2C space. We're working on partnerships and sponsorships for things that we can talk about and things I can't talk about yet for the future. Really consulting them on how they spend, what is, I should be careful with Amazon, I'm not allowed to say much. There was a report that they were the world's largest advertiser and that report is factually very close to the reality. Whether other people spend more or not, no comment, but you can read their annual reports and they spend over $19 billion a year on promotion and marketing. So it's a big company and they do some amazing things. We help them in pretty much every aspect of that. And a thread that aligns it, I guess there are two threads that align it, right? With Amazon, they are a relentlessly ambitious company and so they have very high standards, famously so you can read their tenets, we can also talk about that. But there is an expectation of not good but great across all touch points that feed the customer experience. And that means that we are relentlessly being challenged on the right level of creativity and push harder and go again. There's a real tension between get it done and get it done excellently, which exists in all tech companies, exists in all business, but tech really are the kind of the flag bearers for that. And the second side for Amazon is a relentless focus on measurement and optimization because they as a business are, they believe that things get bigger, they get more efficient. It's kind of what sits at the heart of the flywheel. Excuse me, I've got some roadworks going on outside. It sits at the heart of the flywheel, which is their secret source of their business. As the thing gets bigger and more people come in, you get more choice and costs go down and customers do better and on you go. And they've really challenged us as an agency team to go, how can you, while not like having your own flywheel that works the same way, follow those principles, track, measure, analyze and optimize so that over time we can do not just better but also build more efficient teams and structures and processes. And that's the heart of the challenge for us these days on Amazon. It's like right creativity and actually measure it so that once you measure it, you can manage it. And I think the really interesting discussions that are coming for that big C word creativity and industry are all about that. This year at Cannes, Mark Pritchard, who has the, I guess the semi-artificial job of being the kind of voice of marketing as the CMO of Procter & Gamble used to be the world's biggest advertiser. Not so much anymore. He was really banging the drum for that at Cannes this year about like, what is the business case for creativity and like going, everyone involved, be you client, be you agency, be you an art director or a business director in any of our partners. It's like, it's not okay. It's not enough just to say, we think it works and we've got a suspicion it works and we can look at awards and feel good it works. It's like, we're all gonna get challenged as the world hits a, we're not allowed to use what recession are, even if you have two quarters of negative growth, which used to be the simplest definition as the world reshapes itself in a kind of post COVID easing, post quantitative monetary policy way and like people scrutinize things which is really happening across the board right now. It's easy to get nervous and easy to go, ah, let's just do something simpler. Let's be risk averse right now. Risk is scary for all businesses and of course creativity thrives in risk, be deciding new businesses or thinking about new ways to talk to your customers about whatever it is you do. We're all gonna need to have a sense to the business case for creativity and I think the protecting the spark, capturing the lightning in the bottle is gonna be the macro thing that aligns all of us whether we be client, agency, partner, supplier, you name it, to keep doing the magical stuff that we do that we know works and prove it works. So there's a long rambling intro and we started with creativity, but this is how it is. Let me go and go where we are. Such a rich background and the name dropping of brands that as you say, maybe even 10, 15 years ago wouldn't have been part of the picture and yet now I just, it's our everyday taking it for granted and the consistent word as you're telling your story is creativity. Creativity is such an important, it's easy to come out with these statements, the power of creativity and business and being so important, but what do you think is sort of the essence of creativity and how's it gonna change in the future? So I think what I'm most excited about in our industry right now is that if I compare to the late 90s when I started out it with creativity was much more bounded. So our world was simpler, fewer things to do. You had businesses, you had people who were buying from the whatever shape it was and the number of touch points and channels between was fairly fine night. There were only 70 things you could do and we jammed all the money down all of those and everybody did well out of it and you had these little moments of like discussions around logo sizes and exact moments of copy on body copy and print ads because it really made a difference, right? It was those fine margins around things that everyone was doing that were the difference between the beer brand that everyone cared about and the beer brand that wasn't top of mind when people walking up to a bar in a pub. I learned to load in that game. I learned to load playing that game. It's just not the discussion right now. Now like the number of things you can do and should do are so much wider. Just within the narrow P promotion of marketing, never mind product in place. Still the same number of companies. In fact, more companies because it's easier than ever to start up a brand or a business and we as a culture appreciate newness more than we did when I started. Established brands are cool but what's cooler than a brand to start up and as you say Louise, if you look at any of the kind of brand power rankings done by brands E or future brand through some smarts of Wolf Orleans, shuffle the order. But number one, two, three, four and five is basically Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. There might be one of the old legacy brands sneaking up there or Coke or McDonald's or someone but it's basically tech companies because the measure of the value of a brand is can I launch a new business and who's been most successful at launching new businesses under umbrella brands? Well, guess what? It's tech companies to do that. So we've proven that we can create real business value of tech brands. Obviously trade with the thought but yeah, I was saying like, you know, the amount of things you can do now and the amount of competition coming in means that we just don't have the, it's not smart business to obsess about the same micro details in the same way. So the best creative people are getting pulled naturally, beautifully and I've always wanted to do this away from copywriting purely. Still a craft, still very important but it's up to business design. And I think for me, the pivot moment the kind of little aha moment I saw in my career on this was, there was a kind of year and I can't even remember when it was. I remember the discussion, the sentiment more than the time but students of advertising as I'm sure some of you will know when this was. There was a wave when we as an industry moved from celebrating neat executional creativity out to what I call like program creativity and the one that absolutely nailed it for me was the piece of work celebrated by Crispin Porter when they were the hottest agency in the world very much shared with a client of my group American Express around small business Saturday. And instead of people, instead of the industry going, ah, that's so clever that you put I'm gonna get up and make some stuff up to avoid embarrassing you. And it's so clever that you put a raccoon playing the tambourine on for this ad. It was like, oh, wow. The problem is that American Express charges three and a half percent as an acquisition fee that we want to get into fintech. American Express is really expensive for the shops. So they bring you great people because Amix customers, Amix card holders are rich and spend money. So as a small store, I'm like, yeah, I want to take Amix but Amix really charged for the pleasure of that compared to nevermind Visa Mastercard but like Square and all the merchant payments processes. So you've got Amix, they're going, we've got what all shops want, rich shoppers but we're having this difficulty in embedding Amix acceptance into stores because people are going, I want it but you want three and a half percent of the money which is crazy for doing none of the work. And they solve that challenge by bringing creative people in from Crispin Porter and I've no shame in picking up other agencies for doing great work. And then instead of applying their creativity to go is there an advertising solution? They created this, the words change but generally programmatic not in terms of programmatic advertising but a program solution of like we have to embrace small businesses as a group of customers and understand in the culture how we as Amix can support them to make up the fact which charging three and a half percent and certainly become small business Saturday and then watching the case study about rep around the industry was maybe I'm slow and everyone was there a year before me but I was like, oh, there it is. Creativity has changed, it's moved from being executional into being business design and programmatic and that was probably the moment that started my journey out from being in an ad agency because I was looking to places where I could go and like use creativity, not as a creative so it's never an art director, it's never a copywriter but understand, I'll answer your question directly about what creativity is as part of this understand how I can bring that way of thinking to bear to do business design and then in honesty, if you go back to 2013 the easiest place to do that was mobile because none of us knew what we were doing everything was new so there weren't big established companies even the big like web software houses that were living in a desktop world we weren't really set up to be brilliant mobile so a bunch of crazy kids like us could go in and end up building the world's most used sports app for FIFA or build banking apps the World Bank of Scotland or Santander in Spain and build payment systems for Visa when we had no real authority or right to do that but hey, we've been doing mobile as long as anyone else so why not? And I think, you know, there's a ton of great it's a good Google question, what is creativity? So in advance of this, I did a bit of it and I kind of made some notes and then tried to put my own spin on it I think it's attributed to Einstein which probably means he definitely didn't say it but the quote about intelligence having fun is a good start because it isn't just smart thinking that which is, you know, they're good ideas that aren't creative I think we can all intrinsically feel that but the second part of like the emotional response is captured by just the part of like having fun because it isn't having fun or funny there's an intelligence and an emotional response if you get sort of scientific about it but I think defines creativity it's really hard because I don't think there's anything more slippery in the world than emotional response you know when you get it in your personal lives and your professional lives but the conditions by which you get it change from moment to moment from person to person to place to place time to time that truth is what sits at the kind of like you'll never be able to control or tame or productize creativity sure, I agree actually about that second part again, we'll pick up on that today but there is something about the diagonal thinking inherent in moving from here to here not in a straight line but not just being random that creates something new that adds an emotional response I think defines creativity and you can feel it when you've done it you know when you've just kind of iterated something iteration is important optimization is important I don't quite call it creativity because then you're in the kind of literal path and I think there's that like what about this that comes from an insight and a spark and then is put through at the moment just people but at one day there'll be machines that can do this because we're gonna copy the brain that diagonal jump that's smart smart purveyors, buyers and sellers of creativity understand that that diagonal thinking angle jump at the middle of the old Coke head of advertising used to talk about it a lot I think that's kind of the heart of what it is there's this sense of a creation of something that changes an emotional response and if you've done that then it's creative it's a difference between a tag graffiti and a nice mural it's a difference between shapes on a page and art and it's a difference between communication that is functional communication that is creative I love that when you were telling that story of creativity that we segued into the work with it with mobiles and so many people when you talk to them about creativity they're thinking along sort of the traditional lines still I do say hugely important copywriting the artistic side but of course automation has impacted incredibly and accelerated creativity and it's still creativity would you talk a little bit sort of on that how it has accelerated and brought it in a new direction this is a fun one so the doom and gloom pessimist they say a version is like oh god that's it we're gonna be replaced by AI and robots who never take a sick day and they never crash with their car on the way to work and they don't get depressed or related and do silly things they stay on task I wonder I think that while I'm much more optimistic in general I'll be working with tech companies so I know kind of where we are with some parts of AI although maybe I'll get surprised I think that there is a sci-fi terminated point where we create the AI that can recreate itself and we lose control of what we're asking it to do I don't know let's not go to the Philip K. Dick land I think the great challenge to creativity is time we all have infinite resources an infinite amount of time and money then wow we will be creative go away spend a month walking the woods drink a glass of wine do some yoga on a hill come back and bring me a thought like it's tougher to do than if you've got 15 minutes right you've got more time to iterate through stuff will automation free high value human thinking up from having to do menial stuff to give us more time to do the creative stuff absolutely I 100% believe that I see I see I'll say that we talk about data later on I think that I think that we that time is the key to it because we want to be able to like synthesize inputs and synthesize data points that give us real insight for us to be creative on top of and if you've ever spent any time sifting through data while being able to automate those tasks is a nice thing and how you kind of get signal from noise is something that a computer is better at doing than a person and you see this as we see the beginnings of the like fusion of automated processes with creativity I don't think it's a coincidence that all around the world now people are going into these interactive Van Gogh exhibitions there's another Rembrandt want to think of his world where we're trying to trade computers to recreate new works of art by going here's all the brushstrokes by a creative person extrapolate now people are pretty smart so we appreciate that for what it is no one's like oh well there's a new Rembrandt or a new Van Gogh it's like no it's something that can only be done with the power of machine learning but it needs AI people talk about trading it needs the seeds of human creativity and that's where we are right now I see lots of the kind of like let's automate previous human creativity to make interesting things we have a company in our in our family here at IPG you think if you're a can a can lines watcher you'll have heard of FCB six over the years sort of go through a bit of a rebrand and it's called performance art now which is a neat title because it's as creative as you can come in terms of the output what they do and very much an art but designed to live in a trackable measurable like proven works performance he type world and it's super interesting stuff where they they absolutely come in and go we want to automate the things that need to be done to allow us to operate at scale and allow the creativity to be applied as the right leave at the right time to create amazing and wonderful new things some of the famous stuff they did was around for a company called black and abroad in the U.S. which was leveraging the EDC you see on you know the kind of sadder parts of social media around in particular phrase go back to Africa towards African African African American African people in the U.S. to actually leverage that kind of a hate term as a way to sell holidays to Africa for people who have been who've been targeted so they kind of reclaim to go back to Africa is like hey no actually it's a great it's a great it's a great rallying cry for people to understand heritage and you sort of can't do it without a sense of the big data approach is not a case of like go on Twitter and find one person who's being a you know to be polite but being a prick and then find the people impacted by that and then use their negative you can't sort of do it individually you've got to do it at scale and they're all about scale and automated solutions where we can take a human creative intuitive idea and then make it come to life all around the world and they do very interesting stuff with companies that basically have data but have never found creative ways to use it yet and whereas that the list of companies that were formed that bucket used to be pretty small now because you know people are getting a hang of the value of like of customer data and we've got a nice window where regulators are still fairly okay for there to be a nice transaction between customers and businesses around around data you know everybody's got everybody's got more instant they have used to have us to real people what they really care about what they really do when and what an opportunity to be able to find ways to apply apply human creativity because it's still a while before the four machines could we fun pack the way that the synapse is the neurons work to be able to recreate machine that can be generally creative like human creativity to vast amounts of inputs and insights gathered by machines to build brand new things we can't do and you feel it right you feel it coming from the companies that are have the human face of technology I'll put Amazon in there because I'm biased but Airbnb are really good at this too Spotify are amazing at this you know you get tired of stuff quickly but like every year still at the end of the year when it gives you your personalised Spotify listening list of what that means but you know you can feel it coming you feel that synthesis of like emotion of music with reality business reality of an automated platform that can recommend things to you and how that can be not just functional because it's great as a business tool to make people sign up to Spotify and keep listening to music but also how it can be creative and to go back to my phrase earlier how that days can be used to change your feeling about the emotional response of the Spotify brand for them to fight against Apple music and Amazon music and diesel River Ross is going in that space so I think I think you know as with all these things you whether you're whether you think you can or whether you think you can't you're probably right so if you think you can't survive automation then well you're probably right but if you think you can thrive in an automated world again you're probably right and I think that kind of optimistic approach to go free free people up from stuff to allow them to focus on what they want to do that's that's a good thing you know it's been the promise of Texans rebel but this is the Jetsons back in the day if I think about if I think about what we're doing inside all our agencies right now that's absolutely our task right so we're trying to create we're trying to create little box and little bits of like repeatable scalable tech that can get our junior people out for being data entry folks or you know context providers or analysts and get them up to being strategic and creative because that's where that's where people want to be that's where it will honestly to compete in the talent war that's out there these days just who is brutal you know we people want to do meaningful work and we can help more people do more meaningful work if we can automate the drudgery and get them out of just being like processing as gold and gold and people love love doing business we love them I can't get enough of them I think data is sort of the buzzword is that there's so much data out there obviously a company called company like Amazon so much data to draw on and it often seems to be an either or conversation big data does it is it or creativity on the other side and you know never the twain shall meet but you don't agree with that do you don't think it's versus I do not I do not I think that very rarely in life do we ever come across anything where it's this versus this I think if I could be slightly philosophical about it black versus white versus shades of gray the Dara symbol of the yin yang is a closer approximation it's opposing forces that work together I always think that decision-making is a balance both answers are right so what are you going to do now I think that's kind of how it is with data and creativity I can't imagine a time where you don't want someone to be thinking about what does this mean and how does it matter how can I use this opportunity or this problem or this know or whatever the thing we need to solve is to not just fix the problem but make the thing better as well and that's a creative process to me equally I think the days of like I don't want it you know it's a creativity is just mused it's uncaptionable and it's unmeasurable and it can never be replicated like sure you can try that but I don't think many people are going to fund your hobby unless you are as wildly creative as you know a sculptor or painter where you kind of get to break free from the realities of the world and you have a patron someone goes I love the crazy stuff that comes out of your brain so much that I will never be able to do it because I don't know commercial imperative just they exist for the sake of themselves lovely thank God thank God there are people in the world who are able to create art and music and sculpture and even FT's although I think that's perhaps less artistic those guys take me at all that stuff out there that people want to have for the sake of it luxury clothes and shoes and like you know most of us I do this stuff there's a reality about the funding that comes from all of this is a borrowing shareholders money and the day where the the ability to continue to get that money to fuel your creativity building things it's going to have to be backed by some sense of data I point anyone who cares about about the because again I don't want to read someone else's questions or maybe any of them one of our companies inside IPG who's one of the kind of proper genius guys in our in our industry as well CEO of huge which is a really interesting digital transformation company for one of a better word they kind of yeah work on how a business could we all point itself for a digital future around columns and platforms and everything about creative capital and that's a that's a term that we use a lot when we talk with our with our clients and we think about how you need to have creativity that makes a difference but also measure and optimize to move forwards and we think about capital and business all the time right there's human capital there's working capital there's I don't know intellectual capital they've got value on balance sheets and like if you start to think about creativity business as um as creative capital that you can have to actually make a difference and apply and not just something that kind of gets rebooted every time there's something that builds and becomes a living part of your enterprise that it completely changes the way that you approach it treat it nurture it protect it grow it develop it innovate around it and make it part of your part of your business so I'd definitely point anyone who cares about kind of rethinking what creativity is as an essential part of the business rather than something that's unmeasurable towards that for me I guess the the um the way I put it is that like I feel like a ladder and I think I might have talked about this on a podcast with with uh Jake from 42 courses one time but so I drew this on my wall years ago and I've seen a version of it flying around around the industry in the year since but the bottom of the ladder is data which I think was your original word and there's you know there's a lot of data out there data point could be seven or it could be left or it could be every day but there's stuff happening all the time I'm being measured on this being measured on this being measured on this laptop everybody's tracking everything data is fairly useless and it's purest form because actually if I if I said dump a CSV file on someone and go here you go here's all the data you can't really do anything with it there's there's the level one which makes data into information information I'd say it's a subset of data you've got all this data out there but you only really need to know a thousand of these 10 million numbers that I can give you because they're the ones that actually matter to what you're trying to do and then how do you make data into information I think the answer is context once you have context you can look at the data and understand um uh which of it is information that part but to back to our last discussion that's getting automated you should be able to write rules that work out enough with enough accuracy which of the data is information then it gets interesting though because once I've got the information I want to kind of take the next step up the ladder and go okay I know which numbers are important but like how do I how do I use them how do I turn that information into the knowledge which meets next run the ladder and that's analysis and that's where it's blurred I think that's people and that's machines and that's where the creative thinkers are starting to come in so if you're in data science um you can be wildly creative and some of the folks who work inside performance are inside huge inside RGA inside initiative inside our great agencies who are able to go the numbers say this but the story is this those analysts very creative people concede the future and can extrapolate from numbers and then then the real art is when you move knowledge to wisdom and you start taking things into action and that's where the creative and strategic people live so um I think that it isn't a case of like I don't want that I don't want that data don't give me those real human insights don't give me the real world sense of what's actually happening because I want to be creative not really the creativity of the future is like oh I need to know exactly what's going on in real world from real people because I only want I only want stuff that works if you go right back up to like creativity and say what is it an extrapolate amount Einstein definition I could ask three questions of what of something to be creative I could say do I care if I don't care that it's probably not creative doesn't make me think differently but it doesn't make me think differently is it creative and last one does it work and if your project or your task or your thing your stuff whatever it is makes people care makes people think makes people think differently and it works then I think that's the modern creativity and you can't do that without data because I just don't think there's much scope for for you know to get people excited and think differently if you don't know it works and if you don't know if you don't have the data you don't know it works you got to have some sense of how this thing survives contact with the real world because that's really where where businesses that will keep us all you know motivated and rich and fed and happy it's where they're around their heads so it's never it's as always it's rarely an either or it's more or like a how do I synthesize reality that comes out of data get it up the ladder and turn it into like wisdom and then use it to to create an emotional response for people. It's great to hear insights and I'm sure there's plenty of people on this call are scribbling furiously and everything that you're saying there and we've had some great questions I'd love to stay ask you so much to ask you but I do want to bring in the people who've been so kind as to join us on this call and we've had a very interesting question here from Ron Godfrey thank you so much for putting that question to us Ron and I'm going to spotlight you here and bring you into the conversation so that you can ask your question to Tom directly if you'd like to unmute yourself. Thank you Louise hi Tom thanks very interesting stuff I come from I come from a business where creativity is the last thing that we do because for many many years I've been in financial services and to do with stopping people from doing the things that they shouldn't do okay both from the firm's point of view but also from the customer point of view trying to get behaviors that are good for outcomes for people and the reason for my question just to give you the background is that every time something new comes in in financial services we always say the law of unintended consequences will apply and I've been saying that for decades latest big one of this is the chancellor in the UK got up seven years ago and said something stupid about nobody needs to buy an annuity in the future and they thought that they'd sorted out all the possible things that could go wrong from doing that but they didn't they missed huge things and people behaved completely differently and all the creativity that happened after that was people being miss sold in the biggest and widest sense things which weren't necessarily the right thing for them for the wrong reasons and people were using I've now discovered they were using lots of behavioral science techniques to do that and the reason to give you the background is to get to where my question is which is when you're being creative where have you seen things which have turned out completely counterintuitively so that you set out to do one thing and you produced something completely different if I could be a bit crude about it where did you find your Viagra moment where you went out to find out a drug and found something completely brilliant thank you Ron great question thank you Tom Tom how are you going to address that okay um oh man our first many years okay um look I mean I think it's very interesting about the Viagra thing I mean of all the of all the of all the pharmaceutical side effect stories that's the nice one because wow there's some nasty ones and if you watch tv shows about the US pharmaceutical industry in particular you'll just be very depressed in life hey regulator categories medical financial services always add a layer of complexity and I would and again it's been a few years since I did anything in UK financial services so I'll I have full sympathy I'll stray away from trying to make any recommendations it's um it's an interesting one what I said before emotional response and people in the real time really hard to very impossible to control quite hard to predict um so think about you'll think about what you're putting it out into the world and what might happen as results of it I would I would always in a regulator category where you you can't you're accountable and responsible for things you do as part of an ecosystem be careful about how your decision-making process upwards while creativity versus versus risk and governance and like we built we built mobile software for car companies and we spent I spent ages trying to get into the head units of the cars I'm like let me into the car because there's so much data in the car that I get and they were like best one in the world love you guys Alfa Romeo mobile apps fantastic if the car crashes and people die we get soon familiar this is a different world you're in in some time so um I could answer it with like ads that went wrong uh and everyone's got funny war stories about that but I don't think that'd be that interesting for you what would be the time we tried to build something and we create something different I'm not from my world but one of the guys I work with started another company they sell to Clana you know the sweet I'm sure you know them very well the well the largest private company in Europe right now there's a really good example of like a kind of like repeated pivot company and I know there's some potentially some challenges coming for the the unregulated credit that sits inside their model but they didn't start as this like break into four unsecured credit type product they started thinking about ways to to change the payments industry and it accidentally built the thing that became the heart where their company is now I think you're in when you're in and fintech loves this I don't know exactly what what company you're in how they work but I'm sure you've got someone who's a kind of pure proposition led fintech person in your space who's got all these ideas about why the legacy way is wrong and the this is never regulating that and in fact it's all about a customer experience you need to have you can brace that flexibility so that you don't over design yourself into a fixed solution that can't move with some kind of change on pressure so I think what I think we don't when we were building stuff ever accidentally create something that wasn't what we set out to do but we definitely set out to build things that aren't like locked in to only be one thing for the next five years because life moves pretty quick in tech and finance and customer habits change and competition comes and goes so it's a bit of a fudgy answer but what would be the best one a lot of the stuff we did with Royal Bank of Scotland was kind of around that so I don't know if you've ever worked with RBS but you've got decades of legacy infrastructure in the way that they you know have all this stuff held together with basically the the digital equivalent of sticky tape and and gaffer tape and string but you've got customers going hey I'm being seduced by Starling and Monzo and I want a new way to look at my money and I'm not interested in I'm not interested in why you can't show me a balance that's live on purchases because you've got to run through some strange old automated tele-machine you know um cashpoint rails so you know we we tried to help those guys be flexible about going hey push here or give up a bit on this because you've got to make that balance between what's easy and comfortable to do and where customers are going and some of our like mobile amount money manager peer-to-peer payment type stuff was pretty on the on the cutting edge of that uh and I'm sure that our a good example would be we built the um the Royal Bank of Scotland and Coot's business banking app for for small businesses and that was if I think about the original feature set we went in on our discovery project to go what are the key things we need based on you know interview a lot of small businesses interview the bank try to find that middle ground of like what's beautiful and what can be done um what we ended up building 18 months later coming out of an agile process was very different to what we went in on but it wasn't a case of like oh my god we accidentally built something it was more hey don't bake yourself in to not be able to make the move if you need to based on the realities and I think the one of the very interesting things and where where it's hard for like old world creative people to appear in technology is the an understanding of time frame because uh an ad is a discrete unit that can go out can be going from con from like a brief to you know final product in three months and whatever pick a number but then continually evolving a roadmap of a technology product with creative people in in software engineering in UX and visual ID and IA and all the people who go into that you know it takes 18 months sometimes to be up and running and you're in well as if I'm your MVP which is what I don't like um I'm not what I don't like but a product that I don't like to build your MVP to your final thing could be very different I'll give you a I'll give you a little nugget coming out of amazon because this is one that's public amazon don't deal an MVP piece so if you try and build a minimum viable product inside amazon you get fairly short thrift they actually see the the kind of bar to launch as a minimum lovable product um and if you a lot of people in the fintech space have a don't remember it came up there's a little like overlapping circles model of like viability usability feasibility like is it possible does it like to make me money will people use it and can it be done with the tech you need all three to be in line but what's your what's your driving lever often the viable is like you know spend as much as you can to get something that will do the job um amazon don't do that take take that take that what you will think about how they launch and build companies and services they're like sure I can do it but if it isn't minimum lovable product will the customer get excited that's the that's the bar for entry um I like it but please more than the MVPs and then also let the feature set flex as you go because you need to have you need to have enough of a a sense of um what's right to change first is what you've got to actually keep in any any any piece of of software especially in something as complicated as fintech or medical I'm just starting to work with some of the father and medical guys inside amazon now and again it's another whole world around my head around I've never done pharmaceutical before but it's like again you the data is different the regulations different consequences for getting things wrong are different you do health not just shopping behaviors so very different emotional context around that for people that you have to design around thanks thanks so much Tom thank you Ron Ron's giving you the big uh thumbs up there yeah and um we've got another question that's come in from our members who've joined us uh Yulia um I did see Yulia up here just like pop her in the spotlight there she is hello Yulia I'll just give you the spotlight and maybe you'd like to put your rather different question to Tom about sort of the the practicalities of agency and client life yeah thank you for your time very interesting uh the speech um actually I work in the beer industry in brand management and one of the problems I face is we don't feel we can't really build long term relations with uh local agencies uh because when we teach many agencies it's easy to find one great idea but how can you really foster like better creativity in the long term relationship with the agency to make sure that you really have this breakthrough even if you don't have like plenty of agencies coming with different perspectives thank you Yulia that's a big question isn't it Tom uh his agent agency guy trying to answer a client question about how to do great work so um and I do know a bit about beer I I worked for um for Colesbro group for quite a long time uh as an agency side so so I know this is more more more current for me I would say that the there's there's two different approaches to this uh some clients go gotta keep agencies sharp and hungry and they're always pitching everything and very competitive so you basically you recreate what you said there which is you do a pitch you get everybody at their best working so hard they over and above and you get tons of great ideas that there's an energy to that that you as a client feel for your agencies some clients want to keep that going forever and just basically keep everybody in like pitch mode by bringing new people in and threatening and not working with the same partners a lot I'm not going to sit here and say it didn't work for Coke in the 80s and 90s uh uh uh I know an automotive company that sort of works that way where lots of people are playing jump ball the american phrase and if you google how many different creative agencies work on amazon there are people at amazon who do that as well and you get some great workout sometimes if I was taking the other approach I think the the the biggest of the two obstacles to like a long-term agency uh not staying hungry and crazy and sparky with you one would be if they're scared of being put to pitch because fear reduces a lack of trust or fear makes people not take risks and I you know I've seen from the inside around the companies I've worked at there's these relationships that start off exciting and then both people stop like challenging each other and then it's okay and no one's getting upset and then two years later there's a review and always the client goes just lost the sense of like innovation because I don't know people like either we're scared to do it or you or you got comfortable and that the always pitch mode can fight the is the agency comfortable I prefer dialogue I think if it's a I think you build things together over time and knowledge is useful like incumbent knowledge can be very useful and I always encourage clients to think about ways that you can keep use building with an agency you have the the trust part is really important though so your agency has to feel that they are encouraged and incentivized in the right way to bring some things that maybe don't work exactly and they're not going to be held to it because if you try and take all the risks out of the client business which I can be very tempting on a run of business and hire people so I know it's nice sometimes to be able to go wow it wasn't me the agency um that environment will never get you what you need either and I think you know I'll take a counterpoint from Amazon while they have a lot of agencies working on them if I take their most high profile piece of of advertising work for the year it's the Super Bowl ads every year this you know the Super Bowl the American most watched show in the world blah blah blah blah and it's almost become the advertising Super Bowl as well where everybody analyzes and dissects what ads run in that moment there are only about two or three of the agencies at Amazon use that they would ever use to do that Super Bowl ad and those guys know that they're going to get some of that work because when it really matters and you need to do something that's of high value to your brand I would always say you want someone you know and trust who's going to do the right job for you and there's a real risk of being in that consistent pitch mode that you get shiny stuff but these might not be people you know and trust and when you really need them they haven't been able to commit to it so I would say I like relationships I think it's on it's on the agency and the client to say hey we never want this to get boring we've got to keep it so that we're both challenged to challenge each other but an environment of like an environment of trust and a bit of like it's okay it's okay to bring us stuff that we would both decide isn't right without that being a problem for you because if you get fear it's the relationship the quality of like the innovation thing can goes down and there's a reason you have an agency you don't do it yourself is you want outside perspective and you've got to have that outside perspective be someone's welcome by the business and I know that could be that could be tough because client organizations don't always align and and there's all the internal challenges of that we have we have clients where we work with in-house creative teams a lot with agency teams as well and you always find that if it's antagonistic it doesn't work it's got to be it's got to be enough understanding of commercially wise worthwhile for both parties and then and then align people around real challenges and problems and give people things to do that are real and then you've that normally tends to work even when it's kind of ah we'll execute this and you do that but we think that the other thing I'd say is pay for the right things you care about so if you care about ideas find a way to pay for ideas not just final executions because then what you do is you force people to get to bring you things that might happen to get paid um commissions in media you know things like that or heavy incentives that are based around making things that work like agencies have always been really um traditionally most of us have been bad at selling strategic and upstream thinking we get really mugged off by consultancies on that have a very good at selling mad stuff not saying we want to be consultancies but like um yeah really be thinking think about what you really want and find a fair way to pay to incentivize the agency to give you more of that good stuff because we're very simple people we respond to incentives like everybody else thanks um great question and good and good luck with it good luck with it amazing category rise of non-alcoholic destruction of the untrained environment with COVID I've full sympathy thank you Julia thank you so much and it's been amazing to hear your insights and your great responses to the questions Tom and everyone who's everyone who's joined us thank you so much for taking the time to sign in you can hear Tom uh his other insights in conversation in our 42 courses podcast if you want to have a look in that direction and there's also excerpts in amongst the creative effectiveness course but for now on behalf of 42 courses I'd like to really thank you Tom for joining us for this fantastic hour of insight into the workings of your mind and your expertise in uh so many areas and to thank everybody of course who signed in to join us and hope that you will join us again for another event thank you very good bye my pleasure good luck everybody keep learning curiosity is a powerful powerful force that is Colin Powell the recently recently deceased former US government official he wrote an amazing list of 12 rules rules for life um which is a really great way to like think about stuff you have one in there which said relentless ambition is a force multiplier I think that's a great message to leave with and like learning's part of ambition so it's good it's great what you guys are doing a lot of 42 courses I think you guys have an amazing platform to help people follow their their passion to their interests um nothing more ambitious than that so thank you so much for having me fantastic that's like a great closing message a great closing Tom thank you so much thank you bye