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Episode 115

Marketing Effectiveness on a Budget

Research shows brands that over-invest in short-term performance marketing alone can cut their ROI by 20-50%. But when they shift to a balanced strategy with 40-60% brand building, ROI jumps by an average of 90%.

In this episode, Elena, Angela, and Rob tackle how marketers can implement effectiveness principles without massive budgets. They explore how Dollar Shave Club drove 12,000 subscriptions with a $4,500 video, discuss the ideal channel mix for limited funds, and share practical tools making creativity more accessible than ever. Plus, discover which marketing tactics to protect when budgets get tight.

Topics Covered

• [01:00] Brand and performance balance research

• [02:30] Dollar Shave Club's $4,500 success

• [05:20] Optimizing a $1 million media budget

• [09:00] AI tools for creative production

• [15:45] Convincing CFOs to invest in brand

• [29:00] Marketing budget showdown game

Resources:

2025 The Australian Article

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Transcript

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects. And Rob DeMar is the Chief Product Architect of Misfits Ed Machines.

Rob: Hello.

Elena: We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. Today we're actually answering a listener question that has come up a few times, and it was recently re-asked in our YouTube comments, so we thought, hey, let's dedicate an episode to it. And that question is, how can I implement marketing effectiveness principles when I don't have a huge budget? So even if you are flush with advertising cash, this episode still might give you some ideas for your marketing strategy this year. I'll kick us off as I always do with some research, and I think I found a good article to sort of ground us before we jump into the discussion.

It's from Daniel Long for the Australian, and it's titled Brand and Performance Ads Create Multiplier Effect for Business Growth. Marketers might assume that a small budget limits your ability to grow, but that's not necessarily true. How you spend may matter more than how much. This article talks about the recent work report, the Multiplier Effect, which makes a case that businesses that silo brand and performance marketing or lean too heavily into performance are leaving growth on the table.

So the data shows that when brands over invest in short-term performance marketing alone, they can cut their ROI by 20 to 50%. But when they shift to a balanced strategy, investing 40 to 60% of their budget into brand while maintaining their performance efforts, ROI jumps by an average of 90%, and in some cases, doubles.

And you don't need a massive budget to achieve this effect. What you do need is a discipline to split your spend wisely, even if it's small, and you should integrate brand building into your plan. It's tempting to go all in on performance when budgets are tight, but the research suggests that even with limited funds, neglecting brand is a costly mistake.

Alright, so I said earlier that how you spend your marketing dollars often matters more than how much you spend. And that's how we often see brands with massive budgets, underperform and small budget brands make big waves. So let's start here. I'm sure we've all seen brands grow effectively on limited budgets. So what's your favorite example and kind of what stood out about their approach?

I'll go first. Ready? You guys gotta guess who it is.

Rob: All right. Do it.

Angela: Our blades are effing great. It's Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave.

Rob: Club.

Angela: Yeah. Michael Dubin. Walking past forklifts, employees in bear suits.

Rob: Grandpa had polio or something. Yeah.

Angela: Had one blade in polio. Yeah, apparently that one day shoot cost about $4,500, which is less than some brands spend on craft services at a TV shoot, at a spot shoot. So they dropped this video on YouTube and received 12,000 razor subscriptions in the first 48 hours.

And I think the spot had a really clear value prop, and it did three things at once, helped build their instant mental availability, earned them a mountain of free press and created a repeatable asset. People still quote that line, you guys know it so many years later. And five years later, Unilever buys the company for a billion in cash.

So with a budget smaller than most brands' coffee fund, maybe they proved Byron Sharp's point. That distinctiveness plus broad reach, even reach that's earned can bend the growth curve dramatically.

Rob: God, they are. That's such a great story. There's so many good stories out there, like Liquid Death. They've obviously done a ton of great work. Another one that comes to mind is Cards Against Humanity. We're not a huge games family, but the card, have you guys played Cards Against Humanity? It's been passed around our house quite a bit, and they literally sold bull crap. I can, can I say that on podcast? I don't know what that was. So,

Elena: Sure. So,

Rob: Bullshit.

Elena: Oh,

Rob: They literally sold that on Black Friday. They earned a ton of viral attention. They've just really leaned against what everyone else has done in their category for very little money. In fact, they were actually crowdfunded, but they used all that to their advantage and are highly memorable as a result.

Elena: Yeah, they're a great example. I was thinking about this and one of my favorites is GoPro. They do a lot of user generated content. You can see them, they partner with snowboarders. You see these gorgeous shots and you can always kind of tell when it's a GoPro camera. And Red Bull does something similar. They partner with triathletes and endurance athletes. And you'll see like in triathlon, sometimes pros will have their helmet just looks like a Red Bull can, not the shape of a can, but it's so branded out and you just think about that, seeing that all the time.

So I think those brands do a good job of really connecting with people that would already be using their products and then just monetizing that. But let's talk about tactics. I wanted to discuss kind of what does a balanced, effective plan actually look like for someone who has that limited spend? So Ange, say a CMO comes to you and they've got a million dollars in an annual media budget. How would you start to think about that mix of brand versus performance?

Angela: Yeah, I always go back to the research. So if we think about marketing effectiveness, empirical data shows us one big principle. Growth comes from adding new buyers, and you add new buyers by making the brand easy to notice and easy to buy right from day one. And I think this is a big debate as people go like, well this is, you know, marketing effectiveness principles are for bigger brands. They're for massive brands. A lot of the research has been done with larger brands. That doesn't necessarily mean that the principles and the effectiveness research doesn't hold true.

So if we had a million dollars, how do we build mental availability and harvest demand without starving either side? I would break the budget into three buckets, just to keep it simple, that brand building reach maybe 55 to 60% of that budget. Putting the brand in front of as many category buyers as we can. Perhaps using broad channels. You could look at a remnants strategy or not, but I think efficiency is important. CTV, national streaming audio, network radio, linear TV. I would really hone in on a distinctive asset with all of those impressions that can target these category buyers. Second would be that performance, kind of activation budget would be like 30 to 35%.

So capturing demand. The brand work stirs up, and the ideal there is that we're mopping up easy wins. So paid search, we all know what the performance side of the world looks like. I don't think you need to go into that. And then are you reserving some dollars for measurement and learning?

So proving payback fast and turn and tune the split each quarter, so to speak. So share of search tracking, you could look at YouTube, Meta brand lift studies. There's open source MMM models. So there are some that won't cost you any, but just making sure that if we're gonna put dollars out there, we need a way to measure it. So let's reserve a little to ensure we can do that.

Elena: So Angie, you mentioned a couple channels there. Are there any specific channels that you think are maybe more forgiving or go further or the opposite, they're more punishing when you have a limited marketing budget?

Angela: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, pick channels where each extra dollar buys incremental reach over kind of fancier targeting methods. Streaming audio, host read podcasts, linear TV, FAST TV, AVOD, CTV apps, broad YouTube pre-roll, even classic out of home. They really let you blanket a wide swath of category buyers for single digit to maybe low teen CPMs, depending on the channel that you're looking with.

Hopefully if we're doing it smart, kind of minimal creative overhead. So I think there's, I think the money pits are in the precision tools, hyper-targeted programmatic display or CTV, areas like A-list influencers, maybe splashy event sponsorships, prime only network TV, all these carry really high entry fees and deliver far less reach for each dollar. So those would be the areas to look out for.

Elena: Yeah, that's a good point. And some channels too have more of an impact on others, so that seems like that's a good way to get your bang for your buck. Like TV kind of rises all boats, so to speak. Well, Angie, you mentioned creative and that can get really expensive for certain channels. Which makes me think about like tools and technology that can help us do things like creative more efficiently. So Rob wanted to start with you. What are some kind of tools or tech that you like right now that maybe marketers could use to get more out of their marketing investments?

Rob: This is the greatest time in history for marketers and not have money. Just full stop. When you think about all of the tools that just get, I mean, it is just the headlines. It's over and over. Everything from your VO to Runway to ElevenLabs to ChatGPT. Just introducing new models that continue to write even better.

It's like the cost is going to zero when it comes to producing amazing assets, and so marketers should really be, this is preaching to the choir I know, but marketers should be leaning in as fast and as hard as they can on all of this, and that's not just for the generative tools as it relates to creative, it's also relates to strategy.

It relates to deep research, synthetic audiences in terms of pretesting. All of these costs are going away, quite honestly. And so again, there's never been a better time for marketers to have small budgets.

Elena: Ange, what do you think? Any tech you're particularly excited about?

Angela: Yeah, I mentioned one of them already, just open source marketing mix modeling I think is a good thing to consider. So Meta's Robyn, Google's got Lightweight MMM, that let any analyst with Python spin up an MMM and simulate kind of budget reallocation.

So that would be one. Another one that shocks me at times is how few folks are looking at share of search. Google Trends is free. Les Binet's work shows that a rising share of branded queries is a quick proxy for rising share of voice and eventually, hopefully market share. So all you need is to give them the tool, download that data into a spreadsheet, and get a sense of you versus your competitors, what's going on.

Elena: Yeah, those are great. Especially, yeah. The MMM share search. I think too that the like use of synthetic audiences is something that you should consider, like if you're using any traditional market research tools. I was listening to the, like John Lombardo and Peter Weinberg, they have a new podcast.

Lab Grown Marketing, I think it's called. And they were talking today about the complaints about synthetic audiences. Like, oh it can't come up with anything unique. It's like, well, they were saying the point of market research is to get the, actually the consensus. Like you wouldn't necessarily want some crazy insight to come out of market research. Like part of the point is to figure out what is the average, like what's the average customer thinking? So I thought that was a great point.

Rob: And even deeper point, which kind of blew my mind. I was talking with a friend who has a colleague at a major packaged goods company. And they're not only, they're like, well, how are you studying your audiences today? And they're like, we're actually not even studying the audiences. We're studying how AI is interacting with our product. And because they're realizing AI is gonna be determining so many of the buying decisions in the future, and they're trying to better understand how to connect their brand with the AI. It's like, geez.

Elena: That's one level

Rob: deeper into the matrix.

Elena: Yeah. When AI is making your purchase decisions for you, it's like, not how do you please the consumer, but how do you please the AI? Yeah. That's tough to think about. Cool. Well, Rob. What about like specifically creative? How should marketers think about that when their budgets are tight? Because that can become a huge expense depending on the channels you're investing in.

Rob: Yeah. You know, we've all been there and have said, gosh, you know, we just don't have the budget, right? I got this great idea. We just don't have the budget. And then do you really have the idea, I think, is you always have to ask yourself that question, even in good times, right? Like there is no correlation between cost and creativity. I think that's an invented reality.

It, but it's not reality, right? It's just that the biggest ideas can be a word on a billboard, right? Or it could be an amazingly crafted PR stunt or a brilliant TV commercial that's just brutally simple or complex, but done in a simple manner. Just production value by no means should be a restriction in times of war.

Elena: And Angie made a good point earlier too, about if you are gonna invest in creative, how do you make sure you have clear, distinctive assets so that any investment you are making, anything you're producing, it is delivering the most for your brand. And it's recognized. What do we call that, Angela? Like taking full credit of your commercials? Yeah. Or any creative that you can. Yeah,

Angela: Absolutely. When we think about spot length and things like that, like how do you get full credit if you're gonna be on air for 30 seconds, let's not wait until the last couple of seconds to be like, oh, that was for Dollar Shave Club. Right from the very beginning. You're like, we're, I mean Dollar Shave Club, razor

Rob: blades. Right. And Dollar Shave Club was shot for like $4,000, you know, so, right. And seriously, like it was crazy. And I think the flip side of it now, even with AI, is it's kind of calling out us creative folks. It's like, okay, you said you needed a dragon flying over a castle for this spot to be amazing. Okay, you've got it now. Now is it an amazing spot or not? Like. It's kind of put up or shut up when it comes to, how big is your idea really?

Elena: Yeah, and getting full credit too. I know we always talk about it in terms of TV, but it counts for anything. Like, how hard is it to recognize a brand sometimes from digital ads and, just getting full credit of anything that you do makes a lot of sense. Well, let's just be honest here. Sometimes the hardest part of investing in marketing is actually convincing internal stakeholders, convincing them that advertising is worth it when, especially when you're in these times of times when budgets are tight. So Ange, what advice do we have for when you're convincing a stakeholder, maybe like a CFO? That investing in brand is a worthy, both like short term and long term investment.

Angela: Well, I think first, are we leading with gut or is there something that we can point to in terms of effectiveness? So something like the Multiplier Effect study - brands that rebalance from performance only to an integrated mix lift overall ROI by a median of 90% while overfunding pure performance cuts returns by 20 to 50%, so our dollar works almost twice as hard when part of it builds demand before we harvest it.

You know, something like that that is backed by data, I think is helpful for a CFO. They're smart folks, they keep us in line. So, are we able to show a payback window that the P&L can feel? So share of search moves within weeks and has been shown to predict market share about six months ahead.

Can we say well, watch this weekly if it's flat after 60 days, we reallocate. Just not going in leading that CFO to believe we have to burn a couple million before we recognize what's going on. And then I think too, quantifying the cost of inaction. IPA data on excess share of voice shows that every 10 point deficit in share of voice eventually erodes half a point of share.

So cutting brand today is like skipping plant maintenance or something, you know, you saved this quarter, but you face a much bigger bill later. In a time that you might not want it then as well.

Elena: Yeah. I saw some cool LinkedIn data the other day about cutting brand spend. And like the immediate impact it has, but also the longer you cut it, the longer it takes to build back to where you were too. It's not like you can just turn it back on and all those positive effects we were seeing come back to baseline. It's like sometimes it can take nine, 11 months, a year for you to get back to those impacts you were feeling when you were always on. And even if you cut for like a month, you're gonna have to - it's gonna take longer to build back. Which I thought was interesting. Well, speaking of proving how these things are working, you mentioned like share of search earlier, MMM. What are some other metrics that we recommend marketers track if they wanna prove the value of their spend, even at lower levels?

Angela: I knew what you were saying.

Elena: Yeah.

Angela: Yeah. Beyond some of what I've already mentioned, branded search volume and CPC - more, the more people searching your own name and lower CPCs to win them shows brand demand is making performance cheaper. Obviously we should be looking at direct to site visits.

Incremental sales lift from geo uplift studies have been interesting. Just hard currency proof, comparing units, revenue, margins in exposed versus holdout markets. There's a lot, I mean, I think. A test, attention adjusted CPM is something that we can look at, ensures you're paying for eyeballs that are actually on the screen, not just impressions. So there are a lot of ways to get access to full funnel thinking related to measurement, without having to put a lot of dollars out there.

Elena: I thought one fun question we could talk about is, is there a mistake, just one that we see marketers making again and again when it comes to trying to do more with less budget? And you're talking a lot, but we'll start with, we'll start with that. I know sorry, poor Ange.

Angela: I mean mine is the obvious one. I think you probably are gonna both be like you took mine. It's hyper targeting. To squeeze short term efficiency is what they think. When budgets tighten, marketers instinctively slice their audiences even finer, let's only hit the core, core, core, core of the core. Believing that fewer wasted impressions is a thrifting way to work. But in practice it does the opposite. Every extra filter can potentially inflate CPM depending on how you're doing it. Caps the reach to those same heavy buyers and blocks the, you know, 95% of category shoppers who will buy later, that aren't on your list today.

Rob: Yeah, I would say the idea of regressing to the least expensive channels, not the least effective channels. You know, it's an obvious temptation to be able to, you know, show that spreadsheet to the CFO and go look at the money saved. But are you doing that at the, you know, the obvious detriment of the effectiveness?

Elena: Yeah. Rob, mine is kind of connected to that. 'Cause I was thinking when marketers cut, they typically go towards performance channels. Which can make sense. However, when you're doing that, you're typically taking away channels like, you know, video, out of home. Ones where you can really display your brand, stand out. And I think when you get stuck in those bottom of the funnel channels, you can sometimes disappear into the sea of sameness. Where now you're just competing, you know, maybe in paid search, competing on Facebook, and I also think that same sea of sameness, I would say that's all the same mistake too.

Marketing teams can become risk averse and stand out less, you know, try less new ideas. We talked about the importance of your distinctive assets, especially when you have a limited budget, so you wouldn't want to kind of be forced into just doing what everybody else is doing, kind of disappearing. Alright. If we had to cut something, let's say you have to, you've got, you know, you've got a plan, it's already lean, but you wanna try to maintain effectiveness. What would we cut and then what would we protect at all costs?

Angela: Yeah, I can go first. We tend to see that brands sometimes overinvest in retargeting. A lot of the sales visits that you end up driving there would've happened anyway, so I'm just gonna call it retargeting. It doesn't mean that no retargeting is the advice, but after a couple of touches, we tend to see the return falls off a cliff. So that would probably be the one that I would cut after once or twice.

What I would keep, I don't know. I mean, I've already talked about distinctive assets. I guess another that I would keep is any internal cost or external marketing that you have focused on new buyer penetration. So whether that's in your CRM, your panel data, whatever it might be, growth lives in that first time buyer, light buyer, influencer buyer. So drop that lens. And I just get worried about optimizing to the heavy users to too great a degree.

Rob: Okay. Sorry. I am gonna go with my gut on this one. I have no data to support this, which I know is your favorite thing to hear, Elena, but I just think there's a lot of dumb money being thrown at influencer campaigns. I mean, you just hear about the ridiculous cost of, you know, a hundred thousand dollars to send an influencer to a yacht in the Mediterranean and go, geez, I can't say that one. Can I, Elena? Let me, no, you can say it.

Elena: You can take it.

Rob: It's fine. You know, and you just go like, I'm super happy for the influencer. It sounds amazing, but is that great for them? Yeah, absolutely. But is that dollars well spent? And I just, I don't think we have that kind of cushion to be able to be doing those kinds of experiments.

And, I guess, you know, in terms of, what to protect at all costs, I guess I'll just go back to the marketing budget period. I just think it's so easy to just go after marketing in times of recession and you know, as we've said earlier in the old quote of stopping your marketing budget to save money is like stopping your watches to save time. And I always like that one. And it's just, it's so easy to go after what seems like a squishy line item, but it is your lifeblood.

Elena: No, I think that's great, Rob. Yeah. And one of the thoughts I had was similar to yours, which is any marketing channel that has very high frequency because we know your first impression is gonna be your most efficient.

We had Jordan on the podcast last week to talk about this. Your second impression's gonna have to work twice as hard as the first. So if you have any channels in general that you have an extremely high frequency within, that might be something important to look at. And then I also thought, you know, paid search, things like display - hear all the time stories, oh, I cut my paid search and, my marketing results didn't change. And those could be things to at least test if you're pulling spend.

Angela: Absolutely. Those are great ones.

Elena: All right. How about this? What is our favorite cost-effective, you know, quote unquote marketing hack right now?

Angela: Okay, I'll go first. You already talked about synthetic research, so I won't talk about that one, but what we call synthetic control TV testing, and I think there's a lot of different names for this, so I'll just describe it a little bit. Similar to a classic geo lift test where you black out ads in certain markets and expose other markets.

Synthetic control CTV testing is that same mentality. So start by ingesting impression logs, sales, macro trends. Basically every signal you can grab for the entire country. A machine learning model then builds a statistical doppelganger for each of these either markets, zips, and then a weighted blend of all of the unexposed zips. That pre-campaign behaved almost identically to the outcome that you care about. So because the control is synthetic, hold on. I'm describing this wrong.

Elena: That's okay. I couldn't stop thinking about the word doppelganger after you said it. I love that word. I haven't heard that word in so long. Great. We're thinking of brand names right now. Rob. We should consider that's a brand name. That's true. It's a cool word.

Angela: Okay, so because, sorry, let me start again. Because the control is synthetic, we are, oh my God, how do I say this? I screwed up my language here. 'Cause the control is synthetic. So because the control is synthetic, we've got a situation in which we've got control groups and exposed groups that look very much like each other. And because we're not doing it on a geo basis, on a DMA basis, we can sort of hack the amount of money we can spend against those audiences.

Either zip based or whatever your statistical model is gonna kick out, but allows you to get a really tight, controlled, exposed result on a macro level across your business versus just looking at, you know, immediate visits to a site or something, app downloads, et cetera. It allows you to see, especially for top of funnel marketing, how is that marketing impacting all of your channels in those controlled spaces? So, super great way to get a sense of what marketing does in that space.

Elena: Yeah. Synthetic controls are super cool and so cool that we can use it now for something like TV. Like, who would've thought, pretty cool?

Rob: God, that was a smart answer for a marketing hack. Mine's equally as smart. It's poop.

Angela: Oh, geez.

Rob: No, it, well, I talked to you guys earlier about the use of earned media when it came to Cards Against Humanity and, you know, and the bull poop. And I immediately, when I was thinking of Marketing Hacks, I also went to the Poo-Pourri and the Girls Don't Poop Campaign. And I go, there's just something about earned media that when you think about a marketing hack is near and dear to everyone, and maybe it's near and dear to the seventh grader in me. But it is just going, how do we lean into something that can truly garner attention? You'd think we did earned media at Marketing Architects, given how much I bring it up.

But I do, I do love the idea of how do you become famous without spending a dollar. And again, it forces the creatives to get in a room and go, okay, let's, you know, let's do this, but what are we gonna do that's truly gonna show results? I think that's maybe the other thing is we're a marketing effective agency.

We've always been a marketing effective agency, and earned media is akin to that, right? It is truly measured performance. Nobody goes, that was a great earned media campaign, but it earned a dollar. No one in the history of marketing would ever say that, right? So it kind of, it's another one of those put your money where your mouth is. Or no money where your mouth is, I guess. Think bold, think

Angela: fame first. I love it. Yeah.

Elena: Yeah. That's great. Sorry, there's a man underneath my window. Can you hear the buzzing?

Rob: Yeah,

Elena: Yeah. Why don't I, why don't we keep going and I can record. It's okay

Rob: that, they, that happens on podcasts now all the time. It's like, I want, I'm listening to SmartLess and they got a weed trimmer going on in the background, so,

Elena: no, it's just, we're like annoying.

Rob: Just happens.

Elena: Okay, let's give it a second. It's getting quieter now.

Rob: I'm not hearing anything now. Okay,

Elena: perfect.

Rob: We're right at the end anyway.

Elena: Yeah. Obviously synthetic audiences. I was thinking that one too, but we already mentioned it for consumer research. So one other thing I was thinking was content like a podcast. Podcasts, they do take your time, sometimes your heart and soul, but they are cost effective and could allow you to reach your audience in a different way. I know that a lot of B2B brands do podcasts, but we've also talked about brands like Away - they do travel podcasts.

Just a way to reach an audience in a new way. And now there's all these different tools for editing your podcast, for releasing. It could be a fun way to connect with your audience in a different way and reach people that maybe aren't reachable through other channels. It's a good idea. Speaking about, listen to podcast and really listen.

What? What, I like that we should, somebody had that good idea. We should start one. Okay. Alright. To wrap us up here, I have a game, it's called Would You Rather Marketing Budget Showdown Edition. So I'm gonna give you a few would you rather questions tailored to a CMO making marketing decisions with a limited budget and you can both kind of pick and defend your choice. Sound

Angela: good. Love it.

Elena: Okay, first one. Number one, would you rather run $8 million evergreen on TV all year round or spend it all for one Super Bowl airing?

Angela: Well, I got my answer.

Rob: Well, I mean, you, yes. I think you have our answer on that one, but you always go first, Ange. So I'll just say it. Okay. I'll just say we're both thinking of course, you'd rather spread our money around all year long on really awesomely cost effective media intersections. And not blow it all in the big, in the toilet bowl that is the Super Bowl.

Angela: You were really going after the Super Bowl there? Not to say it doesn't ever make sense, but if you're doing it, hey, if you're only doing, you got money to, you

Rob: got money to burn. I'm all, if money to, if we're

Elena: budget strapped. My goodness, geez, this feels like a bad move.

Rob: Absolutely.

Elena: Yeah. Yeah. That was an easy one. Okay. Number two, would you rather reach 5 million light buyers once with an average ad over four weeks? Or reach 1 million buyers five times with a great ad over four weeks?

Rob: I'm still trying to understand the math. You're still trying to follow Rob's like,

Angela: I need a piece of paper and a pencil.

Rob: I need a diagram. But I'm gonna go with A, 'cause I normally like cheat and look at the person's paper next to me. So I'm looking at Angela's and she says A and I'm going A, but I do get where she's going with that.

Angela: Yeah. Light buyers, low frequency. Absolutely. Wide and broad. Yes.

Elena: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Would you rather have perfect brand tracking but no sales data or perfect sales data and no brand tracking?

Angela: Oh my goodness. Perfect brand tracking and no sales data. Well, I'm gonna go outta business if I don't have sales, so. Right. I want sales data. Yeah.

Elena: Yeah. It's tough. It'd be tough without that to do anything. It be, in

Angela: fact, it would be, yeah.

Elena: Alright. Would you rather launch, oh, sorry. Would you rather launch a big campaign once every two years with stunning creative and broad reach or run ongoing always on creative that's consistent, but never quite remarkable?

Angela: Oh my goodness.

Elena: Say that one again. Would you rather launch a big campaign once every two years with stunning creative and broad reach or run ongoing always on creative that's consistent, but never quite remarkable?

Angela: Is the stunning creative every two years consistent or no? Is it changing? No. They're

Rob: spending all year round or they, or it's like tent pole, like big burst and then you go quiet. It's a tent pole. Okay, well I'm going with the other one. I'm going with same with more consistent.

Angela: Yeah. Consistency is super important.

Elena: Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Would you rather be seen as boring, but trustworthy, consistent and familiar or seen as bold, exciting, but polarizing and risky?

Rob: Oh, polarizing.

Elena: Yeah, for

Rob: sure.

Angela: That's a good one. I mean, am I known? Yeah. You know, you're

Elena: familiar

Angela: with this. I'd rather

Rob: be anything but boring. Is that what Steve Jobs said? I, Steve? Well, this is sort of the, this is

Angela: sort of the debate over distinctive versus differentiated.

Rob: Hmm.

Angela: You know, do we need distinction? It can help, but more we need to be easy to remember, easy to buy.

Elena: Yeah. I think a lot of famous brands might not be considered exciting. You know, they're trustworthy, they're consistent. Yeah. Still successful.

Rob: It depends upon how big you are in the category too and how much you need to differentiate yourself.

Elena: True. Are you like a, it depends or a new - I always

Rob: like that answer.

Elena: It depends.

Rob: How's that

Elena: makes you right all the time. Yeah. It's a classic marketer's answer. Alright. Would you rather make the case for purpose marketing against Bob Hoffman? Or argue in favor of loyalty programs and retention efforts against Byron Sharp?

Angela: Oh gosh, say it again.

Elena: Would you rather make the case for purpose marketing against Bob Hoffman or argue in favor of loyalty programs and retention efforts against Byron Sharp?

Angela: I'd have to go. Which way do you like to

Elena: be yelled at? Yes, exactly.

Angela: I, yeah, I think I probably go up against Bob Hoffman.

Rob: I'd go up against Byron Sharp. Okay. And only because I, and I agree with what he's saying and it was really good for me to process his perspectives on loyalty marketing. But I do really like my Delta point card, and so I just feel like you just spoke wholehearted on that. I just feel like there's still a little something there.

Angela: I do feel like you, Rob, disproportionately love loyalty programs more than the, than the average person.

Rob: I like really good ones. You have that, and it's not even, it's not even the value they deliver. It is, it's like an emotional thing. Like, I like my Fandango too. I like my Fandango. You know? I like my Delta. You

Angela: but you exploit it more as well. Like, I don't know if you're the worst customers or the best, but like you have a Mr. Car Wash and don't you go more than 20 days a month?

Rob: I bathe myself. Oh my gosh. I get my value. I walk through it. I come in there with my towel and I say, all right, Mr. Car Wash.

Angela: So I don't know if that makes you like their best customer or their worst, because I'm sure they're losing money on you.

Elena: As a kid, did you ever like open the window in the car wash? My brother used to do that all the time. He'd like wait for the perfect memory, he would be screaming. Okay. Okay. For that one, we, another one I'd be, oh, I wanted to answer it too. I'd be terrified of both of them. Oh, I don't know. Yes. I think I'd rather argue against Bob Hoffman and Byron Sharp, to be honest.

Angela: Yeah.

Elena: This last one is a ChatGPT one that I thought was so funny that ChatGPT came up with this. Okay. Would you rather have to rewrite Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow as a children's book or attend an ayahuasca retreat with Mark Ritson and your brand team? Oh

Rob: my gosh, that's hilarious.

Elena: Isn't that crazy?

Rob: That is hilarious.

Angela: Oh man. Probably the retreat. That sounds amazing. You know, that'd be a good time. Although I think the world could use the children's version of How Brands Grow. So

Rob: yeah, I guess I would go with that one too. As long as we can make it like a popup book, you know, version. I think that'd be really fun. But barfing alongside Mark Ritson in the middle of a jungle does not sound like a good time to me.

Elena: Yeah, agreed. I think the children's book would be fun. Yeah. Isn't that funny? I'm like, man, ChatGPT, I don't know what you're thinking.

Rob: It's twisted. It's on a little ayahuasca update.

Elena: Yeah. Alright, we'll wrap it up. That's all we got. Alright, Rob, you did good job, Rob. Sounded totally normal to me, so yeah,

Angela: that's

Elena: just, just that was a compliment. Dumb as always.

Angela: Nope, that was a compliment.