It's our annual tradition to bring Sarah Carter and Les Binet, authors of How Not To Plan, onto the podcast to discuss the hot topics of the year and what marketers need to know in 2025. We've broken this episode into 8 key discussion points, including why consistent advertising is so effective, why the era of purpose is over and another year of the advertising industry needing to remember they are not the customer.

00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:55 - Reflecting on the agency’s year
00:05:25 - Point 1: You are not the customer
00:19:51 - Point 2: Ignore Price at your peril
00:26:13 - Point 3: Consistency but not a lack of creativity
00:42:08 - Point 4: Never forget the eyeballs
00:50:48 - Point 5: Emotions aren’t just about making people cry
00:55:08 - Point 6: Is the era of purpose over?
01:00:38 - Point 7: Don’t just be in culture, stay in culture
01:03:48 - Point 8: Don’t forget the power of Out of Home

Ed Smith leads the Amazon mass marketing team in Europe. In this episode we talk about how Amazon create such emotional advertising, how they make such huge decisions in their marketing and what Ed thinks about consistency within the Amazon brand.

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro
00:48 - The top selling Amazon products at Christmas
02:53 - Ed’s career journey to Amazon
09:08 - Amazon’s sledging grannies campaign (age representation)
14:49 - Why is Amazon’s advertising emotional
21:10 - Being consistent with your brand
24:39 - How Amazon make big decisions
28:27 - Managing the demand side of Amazon
29:30 - Amazon’s sustainability pledge
35:12 - The role of influencers at Amazon
38:56 - Culture at Amazon
46:42 - Ed’s marketing predictions for 2025

Uncensored CMO Reloaded. This episode was first published in May 2021.

Rupert Howell is one of the founders of the iconic advertising agency HHCL & Partners. This is a bumper 2 hour episode, but I promise you it's worth it. We spend a lot of time actually talking about new business and the importance of winning pitches and growing customers. We also look at the campaigns that the HHCL created, where the ideas came from that inspired such iconic and effective work. And I think you'll find that quite revealing also how relationships are basically underpinned all of Rupert's success. Enjoy.

We covered so much ground in this bumper 2 hour episode, so here's the list of what we touched upon:

• How Rupert made HHCL the best agency of the 90’s
• Ruperts New Business Mantra – Honesty. Respect. Trust.
• Why saying ‘I don’t know’ and ‘we got it wrong’ is so important
• How the agency’s sole focus is Advertising but the Clients sole focus is the business
• Why new business should always be separate to the day to day account management
• How Rupert became ‘the finest new business director of all time’
• How to win a pitch even after you have lost it
• Why the pitch process begins with the phone call and only ends when its announced in Campaign
• The sole purpose of the pitch is to win and not to solve the clients business problem
• Why HHCL had a strike rate of 65% for new business
• What the company annual report can tell you for the pitch process
• Why you should try and get your customer promoted
• How Carling Black Label inspired the most successful Tango Advertising of all time
• How Tango destroyed Fanta and forced Coke to withdraw it from the market
• How a call from a Surgeon led to the Tango Slap commercial being withdraw from market
• Why the ‘4th Emergency Service’ transformed The AA and how the bold idea was sold in
• How spending time with an AA team out on a call led to the idea
• The importance of winning your internal teams and why they matter as much as your customers
• Interrogating the product until ‘it confesses its strength’
• Why the harder you practice the luckier you get is just as true for an agency
• The real hard yards of the start-up phase that meant not taking a day off in 3 years
• How tabloids create controversy and how to respond to it
• Why relationships are the secret to really succeeding in business
• Turning down offers to sell the agency including a £1million bribe
• Why HHCL accepted an offer from Chime with the support from Sir Martin Sorrell
• Why so few agencies ever succeed after being acquired by a network
• Why HHCL was never the same after Rupert left and why he would never go back
• The importance of timing for Founders handing over to the next generation
• Dealing with bullies, bribary and negotiating an exit from McCann with a boat & DB9 as consolation
• Which celebrities are still speaking to Rupert after he left ITV
• Why social media is driven by click bait and negative headlines
• Why you should give up the news, except perhaps local news
• The Pros and Cons of a British free press
• How to get a non-exec role