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Episode 122

The Dangers of "Wrong-Termism" with Liam Moroney

Most B2B marketers in tech are marketers in name only. They're really just tool operators. That's according to Liam Moroney, founder of Storybook Marketing, who believes the industry has lost sight of fundamental marketing principles.

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob are joined by Liam to discuss the false dichotomies plaguing marketing effectiveness. From brand versus performance to long-term versus short-term thinking, these binaries are actively harming growth. Liam shares his journey from demand gen tool operator to brand advocate and how to make brand measurement more tangible for skeptical executives.

Topics Covered

• [04:00] Crisis of confidence in the demand gen mindset

• [11:00] How the B2B tech industry avoids the word "brand" entirely

• [15:00] The problem with demand generation as a concept

• [19:00] Making brand marketing tangible through operational metrics

• [23:00] Share of search as an accessible brand measurement tool

• [29:00] Why B2B advertising looks so generic and how it's changing

Resources:

2020 Tom Roach Article

Liam Moroney’s LinkedIn

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Liam Moroney

Owner of Storybook Marketing

Transcript

Liam: I think that a significant amount of people who are in marketing are in no way trained to be a marketer. They're a marketer in name only, and what they really are is a tool operator.

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects of Research First podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-hosts Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product architect of Misfits and Machines, and we're joined by a special guest, Liam Moroney.

Liam is the founder of Storybook Marketing, where he helps companies make brand strategy tangible and measurable. After starting an ad tech in MarTech, he had what he calls a crisis of confidence. The performance playbook wasn't working and the usual question, how do we prove it's working, started to feel like the wrong one. Now he's building tools from share of search to brand tracking to help B2B marketers operationalize brand and build long-term growth. Liam, welcome to the show.

Liam: Thank you so much for having me. I am such a religious listener to the podcast that the irony is, this is probably gonna be the first episode I will never hear because I just wanna hear the...

Angela: It is hard to listen back. I love crisis of confidence. That's such a great, I like that. Now, Liam, I read somewhere that you hand knit beanies. Now, is this true?

Liam: Okay. That is actually true.

Rob: Yeah, all right. Now this is true. And how in the world did you get into that? And as a bald man, can I buy one on Etsy? Are they...

Liam: So firstly, I'm astonished you know that, and I'm now really curious about how you found that was some solid research I do. So when I was about seven or eight years old, I had a teacher in school who insisted she was a staunch feminist and she was gonna make sure that all the boys learned how to knit and sew and that all the girls were gonna sort of learn how to repair cars and all that sort of stuff. So that was a big thing growing up in the schoolyard in Ireland.

So I came home and I was showing my mother and all the boys knitted for two years. I had her my mother happens to be a big knitter as well, so she was delighted. This was a great thing and I got quite good at it and I really enjoyed it and I never stopped doing it. So I kind of whenever winter comes around, I tend to go through my scarf and beanie phase, but for a long time when I was traveling a lot for work pre-COVID, it was my airplane activity, which gets you no end of looks from all of the staff on the plane. But yeah, I have been knitting since I was, I guess about eight years old.

Rob: I love that.

Elena: Wow. Well, Rob, thanks for that intro question. It's really hard for me to transition from that into the interview. I was like trying to, like, how could I make the connection? I'm not even gonna try to make the connection, but Liam, we're excited that you're here and we're gonna talk about some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. And I'll kick us off, as I always do with some research. I chose a marketing effectiveness classic.

This is by Tom Roach, and it's called The Wrong and the Short of It. It was published in 2020, and it's a critique of the marketing industry's favorite pastime, false dichotomies. This would be things like brand versus performance, emotion versus logic, and long term versus short term. Roach argues that these binaries are not just oversimplified, they're actively harming effectiveness. Short-termism gets a lot of deserved criticism, but Roach points out that long-termism can be equally damaging if it turns into magical thinking.

Just doing something big or expensive and hoping future sales will appear doesn't cut it. He introduces this idea of wrong-termism, which is marketers on either end of the spectrum, who miss the point that real growth comes from campaigns that drive both the short and the long. So in his words, long-term growth always has its roots in the short term. The two are connected. If you get them working in harmony, you'll achieve the strongest, most sustainable growth possible.

It's a powerful framework and it raises this question if this thinking is so clearly right, why is it still so rarely practiced? Which brings us to Liam. So thanks again for joining us. Tom Roach, he coins wrong-termism, which I think is fun. It's this false choice between this long-term thinking and the short-term thinking. And you've said you had this crisis of confidence in the demand gen short-term mindset. Could you tell us a little more about what changed for you?

Liam: So I think one thing that's probably worth putting into context. So all of my career was in the tech startup space. I was at everything from 10 person companies to seven 800 person companies and went through rounds of funding and acquisitions and all the volatility that comes with it. And what I'd realized was that even though I went to school for college, like after college for marketing, that was what I wanted to do. It's what I wanted to be Once I got into the tech industry, it was essentially a leave that theory at the door. It doesn't apply here situation. And I didn't know enough at the time 'cause I was relatively young when I broke into the tech industry. So I just went with and went, you must know something that I don't.

And it took me a very long time to realize maybe nobody actually knows what they're talking about. And I think I'm a big fan of the tech industry. I really do like it. I've enjoyed my career in it. But I think there's a lot of very unnatural things happen in the tech industry that a lot of people are probably not that aware of or certainly lose perspective of one of the factors that long-termism is not a thing or wasn't a thing for a very long time, for a lot of tech companies, especially when there was VC funding. In fact, I joined companies where I was explicitly told the plan was to exit the company and sell it to somebody else in the next three to five years.

Profit was not a consideration. That was somebody else's problem. So there was a whole bunch of these founders who were getting tons and tons of capital to go build a business that was wildly unprofitable, was often a solution that had yet to find a problem. And they were gonna sell it to some big tech company in a few years time, make a bunch of money, and we would all talk about what a wild success they were. Great entrepreneurs who unsuccessfully ran a business for a decade and then handed it off to Adobe for a bunch of money. And I think things like that were very normal for a very long time, so you end up doing these really weird, unnatural things in marketing because you're just racing towards an exit.

So a lot of it, I just started to feel that this didn't resemble anything that A, I had learned in college or B, would apply to how I buy anything in the real world. It started to feel like this kind of an artificial bubble where it was VCs gambling, it was startups being shipped and handed over to other people before they'd ever even realized whether they solved a real working problem. And then all of the stuff that came along with it was this technology that was proving how this was working and attribution that was showing how effectively we were creating all of this money out of nowhere. And at a certain point it was hard to it was hard to reconcile what I was preaching at a boardroom level with what I was feeling. It just didn't, I felt like I felt like vaporware and I felt like a snake oil salesman a lot of the time.

Elena: It sounds like based on that experience, you decided to start your own thing, so you just removed yourself from it sort of entirely. Or I guess now you're actually probably dealing with more of it 'cause you're helping a lot of different companies. But so what led you to start storybook marketing and what's the gap that you're trying to fill in the B2B world?

Liam: The funny thing is the original gap that I was trying to fill was actually I not fully committing to what I realized I was actually trying to do. So I, because the tech industry is volatile, I ended up having lots and lots of jobs. I mean, I was a recruiter's nightmare. My resume was just these 10 month, 12 month stints because a company would get acquired and we'd move on and it was all very short term. So eventually I just had this kind of lucky accident where I was at a lot of different organizations.

And I was seeing the very same patterns over and over again, and I was spending a lot of my time on foundational stuff. I would come in, my job would be to use the tech industry language to rebuild the demand gen engine, and that was what I was brought in to do. And then I would get it into a nice working order. There'd be a bunch of leads flowing in, and then I would move on. And I started to just realize that I was developing this skillset of, I was building foundations at companies, and I was moving on to the next one and the next one, and realizing that I had developed this perspective that I didn't really realize I had. And so I realized that a lot of my value and a lot of what my interest was was on that foundational stuff.

I really liked it. It was really fun to come in and construct everything and build strategy, and I didn't realize it, but I was slowly becoming a consultant, but I think I was still trying to do it through the lens of demand gen. I think what I was trying to do initially when I started the company was I wanted to build a consultancy that was doing a better, more fundamentals honest form of demand gen, but eventually I kind of realized that the two just didn't match you.

You couldn't fix it from the inside. So I realized what I was really preaching was brand marketing long and the short of it, like all of the stuff that had just never been found in the theory, most people in tech have never read or heard of the long and the short of it. It's just completely unknown. Despite being more than a decade old. How brands grow is slowly starting to get known, but still very generally, Ehrenberg, generally, Ehrenberg Institute, broadly unknown in the tech industry.

Just not even names that are familiar, let alone read. And so I shifted towards saying my role is I want to try and take all of this stuff that I'm reading outside of the tech industry and translate it and get it applied within the B2B tech industry. That was really what I thought I had the ability and the opportunity to do.

Elena: Yeah, that's a big, scary mission. Um, when we talk about the demand gen mindset, there's a question that probably comes up a lot, which is, how do we prove it's working? And when we talked, you said you really think that's not the right question. Why do you think that question can lead us in the wrong direction?

Liam: So I, I guess it's not necessarily that the question is wrong. It's what what kind of proof we would be satisfied is where it comes wrong. Like what we decide proof looks like is, we're going to measure long-term or brand marketing through the lens of performance marketing. We're gonna use the same instrumentation, the same timelines, the same metric expectations. And so the proof that you're looking for is proof that it just can't possibly deliver. So I think a lot of the time we end up forcing this failure out of things that are good fundamental marketing because they don't meet a completely unrelated type of marketing's measurement.

Like I often equate it to, I use the analogy of like health and fitness, if you were deciding I wanted to lose weight. And I said my goal is I'm gonna try and eat better, and I'm gonna try and be a fitter person, et cetera, and go for runs. And if on the end of the first day you said, well prove it is working, you couldn't possibly, 'cause this is not how it works. Like I haven't lost weight that day.

What I can show you is other things that I know the evidence would suggest lead to that outcome. I have balanced my calories, my intake is less than my expenditure. All of those things. But at the end of the day, the kind of proof and the way we expect the proof to be shown is where we often go wrong. And we so the experiment is set up to fail before you even start.

Elena: 'Cause people aren't aligned on what should something like the long term or brand even deliver. You mentioned B2B and tech and how these concepts can be like more unknown there than even D2C, especially, I mean, in the United States. I think it can be especially tough in the tech industry, but within that industry, within B2B, why do you think that brand in particular has become such a fuzzy, or even at times just completely avoided concept?

Liam: It is definitely avoided and I've sadly talked to a number of CMOs who say they don't even use the word brand when they're reporting on an executive level, like they're actively avoiding it because it just gets these eye rolls from a lot of people. I will say that is changing. There's definitely a moment right now where brand is having a bit of a hot topic kind of a moment, even with VCs and boards, and I think the reason it didn't up until now was a few reasons.

I think first like we were talking about like it's been short term in nature as an industry where it's always raced to the finish as quickly as you can. But I think the other side of it was that there was a bit of a love obsession with the product more than the customer. The product in tech has often been the very center of everything, and so there's this belief, or certainly was a founder belief, where the product is the brand.

You don't need a brand separate to that, the product is the reason this thing is great, it's self-evident. There's a lot of theories and language and practice out there about the product is gonna grow itself. It's just, if it's good enough, it will find its audience and product-led growth comes off the back of that. So I think a lot of it was that there was much more of a belief that the product was the center, and a lot of the way you see the structures of the executive function in tech are different. Where the chief product officer, the chief technology officer, are often far more senior than the chief marketing officer, so product comes first.

Marketing has almost no role in product whatsoever. And then they're sort of handed the product in its complete form and then they're told, go promote it. So I think a lot of it is just that there's been a one P motion in tech and not a four P one. And so a lot of it comes that way. Now, what has changed is that all of the explosion in AI has started to leave a lot of VCs and boards and founders realizing that the product is not a moat anymore. You cannot keep a product very differentiated.

It's very easy to copy, or at least there's a perception that it's very easy to copy and your competitors can build more quickly now than they ever could. So I think product differentiation, and I know there's the whole differentiation and distinctiveness argument, but in tech certainly it's all about differentiation, and now there's a growing acceptance that brand is the differentiation that's left.

Angela: Liam, something you said earlier piqued my interest. If we think about how we've all gotten to be where we are, whether that's through spending multiple years at a single company on the tech side in the agency world, on the brand side, we develop these deep seated belief systems.

You had mentioned even earlier in your career, you weren't even really believing it was sort of imposter syndrome, right? In terms of what you were dealing, but you went through a journey of lots of jobs and I would presume learning a lot along that way, and so you come to this point where you challenge the idea that brand drives demand. Do you think it's the wrong way to think about the brand's role?

Liam: So, I will fully admit I am a very pedantic marketer. Like I am really very particular when it comes to language and I will make the argument I think we all should be, in general, like marketers will be the first to say that the copy we put on the website matters a great deal and the right wording can change everything. Why would it not be true about the language that we use for the way we actually do marketing? And I think a lot of the language, especially when it starts to become widespread and commonly used, it starts to get misused if it's not really specifically created and brand drives demand is one of those phrases that like objectively is probably very harmless.

It's not totally incorrect, but it can lead you to the same problem that gave me a lot of the crisis of confidence in tech, which is that we think about marketing in an extremely linear and sequential order. I'm gonna do brand and then I'm gonna drive demand. And you see a lot of the language so there's other versions of that same language you hear in tech. Because brand wasn't a word that got used for a long time. There was demand creation and then demand capture. And that's the other version of it where it's very much, I'm gonna do one thing and then I'm gonna do the other thing right after that thing.

And it completely misses the point that these two things happen alongside each other and they compliment and they amplify and they maximize each other. But it's not this then that because it just, it creates a situation where that's exactly what you do. You go run a bunch of ads. And then you wait a few weeks and you see who has seen the ads, and then you go and you try and send about a bunch of outbound messages from salespeople saying, Hey, did you see our ads?

And that becomes a lot of how people think brand drives demand. I saw a post this morning that said exactly that more impressions means more intent. And once someone hits a certain amount of ad impressions, that means they're ready to buy. And now we stick the sales team on them. And I think that comes out of phrases like brand drives demand.

Elena: I have to say what's funny is their idea of like demand creation being just another word, like a rebranding of brand. I had a LinkedIn post about that one time and I really liked it. It was one of my first posts. I'm like, are we just like B2B marketers? We just can't say brand, so we just have to make up demand creation. And like nobody liked it. I don't think they appreciated that point of view. But I was thinking the same thing, like, oh, we're just rebranding it 'cause we don't wanna say what it actually is.

Liam: And I think it's worse than that because I think it's one thing to say there's a word that's not common to use. Let's use another word. But if the word is slightly and meaningfully different, it changes everything. Demand generation is one of those. Now, I will say this as someone who had a demand generation title in my career for many years, and I was a demand gen guy. That's who I was to the market. And the problem with those terms, demand creation, demand generation, is there's two problems. One demand is not something that we have an influence over as marketers. Demand is what the market has or it does not have. There is no amount of work that any of us can do to get people buying fax machines again. The demand is just not there.

It is moved on. So I think firstly, we talk about demand in the wrong way. It's economically incorrect. And then worse than that, we think that we are generating it or creating it, and we're using these verbs that imply there's a bunch of passive people out there who are sitting around doing nothing with no plans to buy. And then I threw a bunch of ads and messages their way, and all of a sudden they decided, yep, you know what? I'm gonna come in market to buy. There's just no evidence that any of that is possible, and yet that's genuinely how a lot of the tech industry thinks. We use terms like pipeline generation, but you hear things like pipeline's getting harder and harder to find these days. It's like, we're not digging for oil.

This is not fracking. Like you don't just stumble upon pipeline. So I think a lot of the language that we've used, and the reason that it becomes so pedantic about it is because it drives the wrong kind of thinking, and if that starts to fall down and one person trains a younger person who then goes on to train another person, eventually it becomes so diluted that we do genuinely believe that we are going out there convincing people to come in market who had no intention of doing so.

Angela: It's hard 'cause like as a TV agency, I could even say this podcast, we had intention of being a thought leader in the marketing effectiveness space. Something that we stumbled upon many years ago at this point. And through our own experimentation, working with clients or seeing major impacts in terms of ability to grow them, but also many folks don't recognize that TV can be such a major mover. They're caught in this digital world and you're trying to expose them through thought leadership to a new way of potentially growing your business. So you can see how there's a struggle depending upon the space that you play. You've talked about operational way of doing brand. How do you think about making brand more tangible for the marketers that you work with?

Liam: I think this is the thing that I've definitely recently gotten very passionate about. Where I think firstly, I think the reason that a lot of performance marketing has become so alluring to so many people is because it feels so tangible. The dashboards can move and you can pivot them. And I did a thing and a thing happened and it's just so dopamine filled and it satisfies all of those dashboard needs that everything moves and changes. And I think brand what happens, certainly in tech that I've experienced a lot of is that it tends to not fit into that mold.

So it gets put into just this kind of ethereal place. Brand can't be measured, so we're just gonna do it, but it will work and it has this very field of dreams sort of feeling about it, which is just not good. Like it's not lasting when you ask your leadership to have a leap of faith that it will work. Trust me, someday we'll see it, but not today. That's just not gonna work, not in the industry that we're in. And I've always said the dashboards are more political than they are strategic. What leads on a dashboard is what people will look at and report on. And the thing is, there are tangible metrics for brand.

It requires contextualizing them and putting them into the right framing. But we think brand is long term, which it is, obviously it does work, but it works for the long term. It doesn't take the long term for it to do anything. And I think this idea that like I ran a big TV campaign and nothing happened, or a very small amount of things happened, where some amount of people came in market, like in reality, like all the people who saw it were affected in some way.

They either saw it or they didn't. They either consumed it or they didn't. They either remembered it or they didn't. So you can test that and you can look for things that would be good hallmarks of what comes off the back of that working. And I know you've used this before, like the George Box quote, that all models are wrong, but some are useful. And to me, what is helpful is build a model that represents how brand could show up in tangible ways. You can firstly do quantitative and qualitative stuff. You can ask people if they remember seeing the ad that's how it's always been done. I mean, that is it in a nutshell.

But then there's other things like search data that comes off the back of people actually seeing those ads. You see an increase in people taking actions, whether that's finding out who that brand was, going to that brand's website, asking questions to compare that brand to other things. And what you can start to build is an imperfect model, but a model that actually makes brand feel a little bit more tangible and more present day like, I can see where brand is today. I can put it in the context of my competitors, I can put it into the context of my market, and suddenly you can end up with what feels like a brand that people can look at and touch and pivot and look at from different directions.

And I strongly believe that makes it satisfy a lot of the reasons that performance marketing has done so well because you can be put into a reportable dashboard like a number of how many people have heard of your brand that you update every six to 12 months doesn't really scratch the leadership itch, unfortunately.

Angela: In the marketing world, it's such a measured sort of economy and even more today than it's ever been. Gone are the days mostly that we can just throw millions of dollars out there and cross our fingers that something big is going to happen. And so we're in search of these proxy metrics. We've really leaned into share of search which I think you're a big fan of as well, and in just those leading indicators of how am I moving market towards me versus to my competitors. What do you love about it and where do you think maybe some of the blind spots are?

Liam: It is probably about a year ago that I really started to pursue it. I'd been aware of it for a while. I know that Les Binet had been a big champion of it and my telescope was who they'd been a big champion of it with. So I went down this experiment of looking it up about a year ago, and I was truthfully quite skeptical.

I had the kind of feeling that this is probably a too good to be true thing, and especially with B2B, where you've got long sales cycles and indirect buying and all of those things, I figured it wouldn't work, so I decided to give it a bit of a road test and I was shocked at how well it worked. I continued to be shocked at how well it worked. It is imperfect. There's always caveats to it, like the blind spots are the ones that unfortunately are more common than not in the industries like tech, where if you have a very common use noun brand name, then you're never going to show up for all of the search and you're gonna really have to build a very different picture. Like I was working with companies who had brand names like trolley or you look at tech, they're common box notion. There's just loads of words that are the search is in the millions before that brand ever showed up. So you have to start to find more narrow versions of the search. So a lot of times that could be box software, trolley payments, notion, app, like you can narrow it down.

The caveat is that you end up with a not a full picture because you're always gonna be missing some of the search. But what you're really using it for is to build a representative picture. Can I build a view of the brand that I can at least see where it is and I can see if it is going up or down. And then is it representative enough that I can put it alongside competitors? And now I can build an actual share view that represents ideally what my category looks like. And I found from doing hundreds of these, I ended up going down the path of being so convinced by it that I approached the CEO of my telescope and I said like, I want to do more with this.

So we ended up striking up a partnership. I ended up doing training and certification in this, and then I ended up building an entire platform to put this into. But I think what I've learned is that it's not perfect. It's not the be all and end all. It's not the only metric that measures this, but you would be shocked at how detailed a picture it can paint of you and your category. And a lot of it is stuff that, in my experience, very few companies have that point of view.

Angela: Yeah, it definitely feels like one of those spaces where spending the time and or working through the right product, like you had mentioned, launching a new product to address the gap is worth the effort. It can be complex and fragmented, but definitely opens your eyes, I think, to some of those proxy metrics that ultimately get us to a place where we have a better contextual understanding of what brand is doing for our business.

Liam: I think the other thing I love about it though is that it's cheap. It is extremely accessible. It requires a little bit of thought on how you build it, but you can build it for essentially nothing if you want to. Like even tools like my telescope themselves, $20 a month. These are not something that's out of the reach of most people, and that's what makes it really interesting to me.

I think brand research studies, all those kind of things are expensive and they're slow and they're tedious and most people don't have the resources for it. And there's something very nice about this thing that's just sitting there that's cheaply and easily accessible. It's a very democratized form of brand measurement, and I like that.

Angela: Absolutely. So you've launched a new product to address this gap. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Liam: So this kind of came out of the work that I've been doing with clients over the last couple of years where my role had been very much a consultant. And where I had been working with companies was building out their measurement frameworks, building out their internal tooling systems. And once I started using my telescope, I was doing a lot of training, I was putting it into place and I keep coming back to the same realization that I think data is as good as you're able to interpret it and the story you're able to construct with it. And the My Telescope tool is fantastic.

I'm great friends with the CEO, so I think like it's a tool and it is the backbone of what this platform is built on. But I realized that building the dashboard was easy. Interpreting the dashboard was hard, and then using the dashboard to actually inform your strategy was even harder again. So I started to realize there were patterns that I saw emerging. Same thing that I saw when I was bouncing from job to job, and I started to realize that there are consistent things that if I could process this and put this into a view it's the same work that I was doing myself initially.

It started with me building a tool for myself that would just help with analysis and make it quicker. And then I realized that it was visually really interesting. And so I started putting it in front of some existing clients and I said does this help? And they were like, yeah, we're gonna continue to use this. It started to find its way into their board presentations. The charts started getting more interesting, and so I ended up building out what became this kind of housing for all of this brand search data where it's all in one place. And the idea was I wanted to be able to build something that was interactive where, again, back to this whole brand being tangible, you could pivot it, you could look at it from different angles.

You could see you, you could see your competitors, and then you could put that story together in terms of what does this mean for the category? And I found that this was a bigger blind spot than I had actually anticipated. One of the big things back to this kind of crisis of confidence was in tech. I think we, and I mean me certainly, 'cause I was guilty of this, found ourselves like we take a lot more credit for growth that is the market itself than is actually our work. If you're in a really fast growing category, turns out it's slightly easier to grow than it is if you're in a non-moving category. Like you just hold your place, you grow with the category. And I think a lot of the tech industry was not aware of what the growth of their category looked like or whether it was changing.

So they were getting these targets saying, Hey, we're expecting another 20% quarter over quarter growth. And then you look at their category and you're like, yeah, but your category has been slowing down for the last two years. Where's that growth gonna come from? Because if it's not coming from new market growth, it's coming from competitor share. That's a completely different ball game. And all of this was coming through this dashboard that I was starting to realize was doing a better job than I had originally expected at putting this into a story of saying, you are going up, but you're not going up as fast as your category and your biggest competitors are outpacing you and they're taking market share. And suddenly you became a fully fledged product that I started to actually build out and put into proper production.

Rob: That's super interesting. It's really cool to see and to hear about that evolution. When you think about creativity in B2B, it tends to have a brand. And you've mentioned this in the past, that B2B advertising tends to be seen as generic. And why is that? Why does B2B have a brand issue in and of itself? And what are the great B2B campaigns doing to separate themselves?

Liam: I think the good news is it is beginning to change and ironically, it's actually changing from the top down from the bigger tech companies. That was never the case that I thought was gonna be true a few years ago. I think certainly from being in companies, in tech companies that were growing up, if you join a really young startup company, especially one that is lucky enough to get a ton of funding, which I was at, a few of them were like that. They're brand crazy. 'Cause they wanna stand out, they're loud, they're swearing in all of their campaigns.

Like it is like that really kind of in your face type stuff. And then eventually they almost all hit that inflection point where suddenly the board says, well, it's time to move up market and we need to go sell to enterprise buyers. And enterprise buyers are serious people, so we need to be a serious brand. And then they all go blue, and then they all have the same font and then they all end up looking exactly the same. And then for a long time, that was the cliche. That was true. That's why there's so many blue cloud looking tech brands out there. But then I think what's funny is that you're seeing a lot more of the distinctive brand asset theory. A lot of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute theory happening with bigger companies, Salesforce brought on the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and they ended up bringing in things like the mascots, which at the time were really controversial ideas.

I heard Colin Fleming talking about it when he brought that in, when he was the SVP of marketing there, and he said he was raked over the coals for it. They thought it was the silliest thing ever. Why was Salesforce having these cutesy, furry animals? But again, it was distinctive brand asset theory, and it worked. It separated them. I mean, arguably like they're blue and their Logo has a cloud in it. They couldn't be less distinctive if they had tried.

But now you're seeing a lot more of it happening. There's a lot more of this sort of like Sentinel One companies out there where they're doing a lot more like out of home is suddenly really sexy. TV advertising is actually happening. LinkedIn is leaning into CTV, which is helping that case in a lot of ways. So I think it's changing from the bigger companies who now have to be more distinctive, whereas once it was, the startups started very distinctive and then lost it along the way.

Rob: And you just mentioned TV and that's another area where people often dismiss B2B advertising because they feel like it can't be targeted. Why do you think that logic falls short and where do you see TV fitting in to the media mix for a B2B brand?

Liam: It's funny, the targeting is what most people will say is the reason, and I think it's half of the truth. I think most of the truth is that the measurement is not satisfactory. I think targeting is one of the issues and that's the first thing they'll always say. Well, our buyers are very niche and they're very hard to find and you can't reach them. And I think that was a lot truer a couple of years ago than it probably is now. Out of home has done a really good job of kind of changing that narrative. 'Cause out of home is very in vogue right now,

but I think there's an obsession over targeting and everyone was advertising on LinkedIn and that was why, and hyper targeting was definitely an obsession. But I think the other part of it is that even if you knew that the right people were gonna be reached by this television campaign, even if you could guarantee that the only people who would see it are your ideal customers, there would still be a big problem with the fact that they want people to click on something and fill out a form and go to a website.

Like that immediate attribution thing is really the sticking point that I often see. I've been guilty of it, whereas like if I can't measure it, it's not worth doing. But this whole argument that every ad is a button and every button has to be clicked is very much a tech thing, like that's how a lot of the measurement has been built.

Rob: It is so true. So you have a lot of spicy takes. What is your most contrarian marketing opinion?

Liam: Oh God.

Rob: We love a good contrarian marketing opinion here, so...

Liam: All right. I will say the more direct one, I think that a significant amount of people who are in marketing are in no way trained to be a marketer. They're a marketer in name only, and what they really are is a tool operator. They're trained to use a platform, and that's what they do.

Rob: Wow.

Angela: I don't know if we're going to disagree with you on that one. We love the marketing community. It's especially in the US. It has come to be what it is in the way that it has, and to your point, lack of understanding on the long and short lack of awareness around Ehrenberg Bass. Like there's a huge opportunity. That's the mission that we're on behind this podcast and what we do with our clients. But it's an amazing growth opportunity. It's an amazing professional career opportunity. Just the enlightenment that we see happen through really digging in and understanding the empirical research that exists out there. And yes, it's not one size fits all. Yes, a lot of the research that's done has been done with massive brands, but being able to understand kind of the principles behind them and leveraging that in a way to test out theories and produce growth scenarios and growth stories for executive teams boards is really impactful. But it's an area where research has just not gotten the attention that maybe it deserves.

Liam: And I think truthfully in tech, it's even worse than that. Where if the research that's presented isn't research that came from tech companies and not only that tech companies that were the same size and industry as yours, it's not even listened to. So you present something from CPG or FMCG or anything like that, it's just like as far as they're concerned, that's apples to oranges, and that's not even worth listening to in the first place. So it ends up becoming this very isolated world where the only research you listen to is research that is exactly like you, but the problem is everyone else is in the exact same boat that you are and they all need to get out of it. So it just becomes this sort of like facsimile of bad advice.

Angela: Yeah. I think that exists even outside of tech. It's frustrating. If it doesn't perfectly fit how I define myself in the space that I exist in, I'm just gonna toss it aside, but...

Elena: We have B2B clients on television and they're just crushing it. And I think part of that reason is because they're doing something that the rest of their category isn't. 'Cause they didn't wait for that example. They decided to jump in. I'll also say, Liam, I agree with you that a lot of marketers are marketers in name only, they have the platform experience. And part of the consequence of that is I've found that everyone thinks they're a marketer. Which puts marketing at risk sometimes at companies because all of a sudden everybody feels like they can have an opinion on marketing and they know what marketing means. And also I add this, whenever I watch a lot of reality TV and I'm telling you every single time that there's someone like of a contestant that's just annoying, they're always a marketer. Like, why are you always a marketer? Like every single time it's like marketer. I'm like, no, this time don't be a marketer. But I'm sure that's just a small you know, maybe they go on reality TV 'cause they know how to market themselves. Who knows? But it seems like a pattern.

Alright, well Liam, thanks so much for joining us. This has been super fun. I wanted to wrap up with more of a personal question, which is, what is something outside of marketing that you think people are getting totally wrong? Maybe your own version of kind of wrong-termism.

Liam: I think it's somewhat related to work, but I think the whole work life balance type thing is definitely like a sticking point for me. I think it's, you know what exactly that means? Looks entirely different for every single person. They are not separate. Like I know, and I'm totally okay with the fact that if I weren't doing marketing, I would still be reading about marketing.

So like it's not a leave it at the door type thing, which is to the annoyance of my wife who has no interest in hearing about marketing whatsoever. But I think that they are not sort of one, again, it's like brand versus demand. It's the same as like work versus life. Like they can be intermingled. I watch ads for fun. I would do so even if I weren't working on it. It's who I am. It is the vocation that I chose and I'm happy with that.

Angela: I think one of the best things that we have found with our employees in the search for the right type of employees, just that curiosity, just in life, like the people that are so curious that whether it be marketing related, marketing effectiveness related, they're a fan of cooking. They wanna understand alligators on a deeper level, whatever it is, that they're just passionately driven.

Liam: My 4-year-old has gotten really into dinosaurs right now, and I've been waiting like my entire life for this. 'Cause I have never stopped loving dinosaurs. So I'm like, oh, wait till I tell you. So we brought them to the Natural History Museum in Manhattan a few weeks ago, and it was like one of those core memories. And it was just like, talk about curiosity. Like you, it was, there was something wonderful about seeing your kid, just like his life will never be the same. There was the moment before I saw what a T-Rex looks like in real life and there was the moment afterwards and they are totally different.

Angela: Oh, love that story.

Elena: Well, dinosaurs are super cool.

Angela: Oh yeah,

Rob: They are cool. I think for me, breakfast should absolutely be served 24/7. Like there is just breakfast for dinner, like restaurants need to just open up. There's very few that just open up the menu to be having breakfast, like breakfast burrito for dinner. Amazing. A bowl. I'm wearing a lucky charms shirt gonna bowl of Lucky Charms while watching reality TV at night. Absolutely. Like just, you know, breakfast transcends the morning.

Angela: Mine is also food related, so I don't know what that says about me and Rob, but it is summer in Minnesota and in Minnesota. We only have about four months of summer, which means we spend as much time outside as we possibly can. So that means barbecues and brats and hotdogs and some of y'all are really missing out on the sauerkraut. It's the version of wrong-termism.

Liam: I can't get with you on the sauerkraut. This is like, I've, it's nearly two decades of being in the US and there are things that I've never been able to get past in this country. And one of them is things that are pickled, which is, I can't understand it. The concept makes no sense to me and that's gonna be probably a hotter take than anything I would say. I think this country likes cheese far too much. Mac and cheese has too much cheese.

Angela: No, no, no. There I don't know if there is a thing is too much cheese. That's not a thing. Stick anything in sauerkraut. Lucky charms in sauerkraut.

Liam: Oh, that's being ruined immediately.

Angela: Vinegar in general is just outstanding.

Rob: It is vinegar and potato

Liam: I am with you on that. Like vinegar and fries, like chips and vinegar. A hundred percent. Totally behind that concept. I can even get behind pickled onions. But like once you shift into like pickles, like gherkin, like that territory. No, you've lost me entirely.

Rob: What about pickles? Period?

Liam: No. Truly, truly dislike them.

Rob: You don't like the dill pickle. Wow, get behind us.

Elena: More pickles for us.

Liam: Yeah, totally. You're a no pickle. Wow.

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. I'm straight. I go to McDonald's, bun off, straight off. Back on.

Elena: All right. I'm gonna try to move us away from food here. Mine was the thought that introverts don't like being around people 'cause I would consider myself an introvert. And there are actually a lot of different types of introverts. Some people are social introverts, but there's a lot of different kinds. Some people just enjoy being alone or need to recharge, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you don't like people or don't wanna be around people. So I think if you've ever heard of the book, Quiet, it's a book about introverts and it's a good read.

Liam: Oh, I mean, actually that reminds me, I'll give you a different one. There's a really good book. Have any of you read A More Beautiful Question? A fantastic book and really short, and the whole concept of the book is that stupid questions are great. They're incredibly important. And the whole thing was that when kids go to school or when they're young, kids are not afraid to ask stupid questions. 'Cause they just want to know the answer to everything. And then eventually you get conditioned to not ask what could be seen as a stupid question for fear of looking like you should know anything and.

The whole book is about like asking what could be the obvious question that no one else is willing to ask, could be the most important question. And I learned that firsthand when I was in-house in companies where there was one company where they were doing a thing the same way for years. And I was like, why are we doing it this way? And it turns out no one had asked it and no one knew the answer. 'Cause it was like an executive, three executives ago had put it into place and everyone just went with it. 'Cause that was just how it was done.

Elena: What a great question. You could ask that for almost anything actually.

Angela: Absolutely.

Elena: Well, Liam, this has been so fun. You're so smart and articulate, and I love that you have this real world experience that you could bring to this stuff too. So it's been a pleasure to have you here. Where can people follow you and learn more about what you do at Storybook Marketing?

Liam: I am chronically online on LinkedIn for sure. So I am always available there. And I'm happy to have a conversation about marketing to anyone who will listen.

Elena: Love it. Yeah. Liam's LinkedIn is amazing, so go give him a follow.

Angela: Love it. Thanks for joining us

Liam: Thank you so much for having me.