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Episode 176
Marketing Effectiveness and the Proof Problem with Andrew Tindall
Ignaz Semmelweis proved handwashing saved lives, but doctors ignored his messy data for decades. Thousands died waiting for perfect proof.
This week, Elena and Rob sit down with System1 Chief Growth Officer Andrew Tindall to talk about what makes marketing research worth trusting. Andrew breaks down why distinctiveness alone won't grow your brand, and why emotion is the real profit driver. The conversation also covers his research on creators, consistency, and why audio remains one of the most underrated channels in the industry. It's a must-listen for any marketer trying to separate real evidence from marketing hype.
Topics Covered
• [03:00] What "useful evidence" means for marketers
• [10:00] Andrew's favorite research-backed finding on emotion
• [13:00] Surprising results from the Creator Effectiveness Playbook
• [17:00] Why distinctive and emotional ads drive more profit
• [20:00] The case for "compound creativity" and consistency
• [25:00] Why audio and radio remain overlooked and undervalued
• [32:00] Andrew's most contrarian marketing opinion
Resources:
2026 The Drum Article
Andrew Tindall's LinkedIn
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
Chief Marketing Officer
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Andrew Tindall
Chief Growth Officer at System1
Transcript
Elena: I'm Elena Jasper. I'm on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host, Rob DeMars, the chief product architect at Misfits & Machines.
Rob: Hello, hello!
Elena: And we have a guest today, Andrew Tindall. Andrew is a chief growth officer at System1, the creative effectiveness platform. He's spent time growing famous brands like Johnnie Walker and Bacardi before moving into research. Today, he leads System1's advertising business, writes a weekly column for The Drum, and reaches about a million marketers a week on LinkedIn. He's also behind a lot of the research we've talked about on this show, so I'm very excited to have him. Andrew, thanks for joining us.
Andrew: Thanks so much. It's truly a long time listener, first time caller. I have tuned in regularly over... God, you've been doing this a while, 'cause —
Elena: Yeah.
Andrew: this topic on your podcast is very me. I'm glad to see you guys are doing it.
Rob: Well, we're excited to have you.
And before we jump into it, I just need some real talk here for a second. You trained in medicine, so you could be saving lives right now, but instead you're rating whiskey ads. So on behalf of your mother, I need an explanation. How does a doctor fall into marketing?
Andrew: I was about to say this. I did it for my mother, and then she still has not returned my calls. Um, had to... Yeah, it's a tough one. If you like science and, you know, you want to do something that has an impact, and you enjoy understanding people, and, I don't know, being around people, and you're good at that stuff when you're in school, it's just like, "Oh, so which med school are you going to?" You know, and then you start telling people, or you're thinking about it. "Oh, that's impressive." Before you know it, you're volunteering in a hospice on your weekends, and then in med school in London. I eventually started working in drinks marketing along the side so I could pay my rent.
I was like, "God, this is far more interesting." You can clock off at 5:00. I thought you could, back then, which, yeah, which is ironic. And you can make a huge impact. And then I found out you can apply science to it as well. So in a weird way, it all worked out in the end. But my mum eventually has forgiven me. Now I take her to very nice things.
Elena: Nice. It all worked out. Well, I think it's great whenever someone with your level of smarts gets into marketing — it's also a good thing for marketers.
So, we are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. I'm gonna kick us off super quick, as I always do, with some research, and I obviously picked a piece from you, Andrew. This is something you wrote for The Drum earlier this year, and in the article, you argue that marketing doesn't need perfect evidence, it just needs useful evidence. You open with Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor who noticed that handwashing led to fewer deaths in his maternity ward, but because his data was messy and observational, the establishment rejected it and waited for perfect proof, and then thousands died before germ theory caught up. Darwin, the first smoking studies, tectonic plates, climate models — a lot of the science that reshaped the world started as imperfect patterns that were still useful, and marketing, you argue, is no different. So thanks again for being here. I wanted to start with the topic of marketing effectiveness in general, because it feels like effectiveness has sort of moved from this niche corner of the industry to something that more marketers care about, and you've been a huge part of that through your work at System1. So where do you think we're at with marketing effectiveness education? Have you noticed sort of a positive shift in the last few years?
Andrew: What a brilliant opening. Holy hell. Um, great question. So, I think if you work in marketing, you now work in marketing effectiveness. I believe effectiveness is the understanding, the researching, and the practice of how marketing can essentially create behavior change in our favor, which should be the title of anyone's role who works in marketing.
Otherwise, how else would you make any decision? So I think we're waking up to that. Why has it got more popular? I think marketing effectiveness has got more popular because we've got better at marketing it. So before, marketing effectiveness was some very dull books and some very dull people who now, I think, are becoming less dull because they've seen how it works.
Whereas people like System1, previously called BrainJuicer, who advocate for effective advertising — marketing being emotional and entertaining and what you could call right-brained. We have made all our research and all our tools and all our marketing very that, and people have really loved it.
So I think that's really helped bring marketing effectiveness up. You know, and Mark Ritson, the legendary professor turned online kind of mini-MBA leader, he follows the same stuff. And then the dawn of social, especially LinkedIn, has meant that the barrier to entry is no longer, can you publish a book? It's, have you got the goods to deliver my brand? Can you help me? And then where I think that's got marketing effectiveness education in general is — previously it was reserved for these kind of very longitudinal studies and what you could call laws that people were accepting as dogma, and like, "Oh no, we have to do this, otherwise we won't grow."
But when you look at the data and all that, it never was the case. These are just general rules that will increase the chance that you'll win. Now people are really thirsty for how do you actually achieve that? How do you actually achieve growth of brands of different sizes in my category, with my media spend, where it's scattered across 20 different platforms? Like the actual practice, which I think is the most exciting part of marketing effectiveness. With everything we know about growth and marketing effectiveness — what does it mean for me? How can I measure it? Will it work for me? And how do I actually achieve it? And then opening up to experimentation and stuff like this.
So that's where I think marketing effectiveness education is.
Elena: Yeah, I agree. It's one thing to understand the principles and then another thing to apply it in an imperfect world and at brands with different rules and customs.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the science itself, because you're right, there's more marketing research than ever being shared right now, which is great. I think it's become more approachable than ever, thanks to people like yourself and Margarethe. And I know I felt very intimidated at first starting to learn this stuff, and people who can make it fun and more understandable — I think that's a good thing. But there's also a lot of pushback that only certain kinds of research are valuable, and there's a lot of skepticism around vendor-funded research especially. And you've talked about this before. I'm curious, what makes marketing research worthwhile in your opinion, and where do you draw a line on when we need to treat it like a hard science and when we don't?
Andrew: First of all, oh God, I think calling any market research — marketing research — hard science is questionable in the first place, for many reasons. As I said in that column you just shared, no research is perfect. For example, my friend, who I used to work with at Diageo, once put me onto a load of IWSR data, which is basically like, how are brands actually performing in the market. And it was like, look, there's clearly — if you grow loyalty, they're the brands that have grown over the past five years. What's this about? Well, it turns out if you actually measure loyalty over 12 months, which some businesses do or not, versus three weeks, actually loyalty is really correlated with growth, actually more so than getting new customers.
You have to really understand the methods — a basic understanding of the maths behind it, and stuff like this. So I don't believe any research should ever be framed as a hard science. This is just often an experiment on the available data, trying to answer a certain amount of questions.
So I think it's within the industry's priority to always make an effort to understand the datasets and the methods applied. I think it's on the vendors who often release this research — like myself at System1, we're a vendor that is essentially wanting you to research with us. That's why we do our research, which you could just call product marketing.
We pour all our marketing investment into buying, acquiring data, running surveys, etc. It's within us, to be honest — like in the recent playbook I just released with TikTok and WPP, there's a whole page at the end which is basically like, at the end of an academic paper, here are the caveats. Don't get too ahead of yourself. I like the fact that we've been challenged more and been asked to put stuff like that in it. And you'll actually see when — I think System1's quite good at putting citations under charts — give the nerds the actual proper detail underneath the chart so that they can really understand it.
But then marketing research at its best is about bringing the customer into your decision process. And you must start with a question or a problem and try to get to as high up — without getting too nerdy — there's this thing called the hierarchy of evidence pyramid that I'm surprised more people don't talk about, but I was taught it in med school, which is basically: at the bottom you've got a consultant's opinion, and at the top you've got a randomized control trial, which is, ironically, an A/B test — which people think is very basic in marketing these days, don't they? Can I get further up that, to try and answer those questions? And just being aware that these things that have been positioned as laws — positioning something as a law is positioning. There's no gravity in marketing. Pretending there is will lead us down the wrong path.
Elena: Well, speaking of research, and things that maybe don't have the perfect evidence behind them yet 'cause it's a newer category, I wanted to talk about creators, because you put forward new research, the Creator Effectiveness Playbook, which I think is wonderful in a category of marketing that's still something newer. What were your most surprising or significant findings from that research?
Andrew: Surprising findings that I've been shouting about — how effective creators are — over the past year or so, from various datasets again. So, when I did that research with Effie and System1 that Mark Ritson shared last year, "The Creative Dividend," we looked at creators as a touch point in campaigns, and we showed that on average, they lead to more brand effects when they're included.
Then when you look at some IPA and WPP media research, when you treat creators as a media channel and then go into all the econometrics, you actually see that creators have the highest long-term ROI multiplier, and everyone's going, "Holy, holy hell, like God, creators are incredible." And I'd expected them just to win across the board.
But then what was special about that "Creative Effectiveness Playbook" that we released this year at Cannes is that we actually got all the brand lift studies for a lot of creator campaigns — you can say what you want about brand lift studies, but I think they're a really good way of actually measuring memory change. Experts, non-experts — really, people try to dismiss them, but we talked about that hierarchy of evidence pyramid — they're right at the top. It's a controlled randomized trial. So you actually look at those individually for creator campaigns, and we've found that it's these top 10% of creators that are doing massive, amazing stuff that's really swinging those averages of those two previous pieces of research that I just talked about right up to the top.
The top 10% are creating four times the average — what I call brand memory lift — of the average of the bottom 90%. And you're like, "Holy, holy hell." One, that's fantastic, 'cause no one knows what they're doing with creators. It's quite random, so we need some help here. And two, then the research became very easy. What are these top-performing creators doing? And building a playbook around it. And then, kind of, my favorite insight from that part of the research is: it's not about creator fame and recognition. It's about whether there's an authentic fit between the creator and your brand, and whether the creator can create distinctive, emotional, entertaining advertising. That shifts our brains from thinking about creators as a media channel — and, wow, I need their audience and their reach — to a creative partner that you need to pay to scale their reach, which I think is the biggest shift in that report.
Rob: I continue to hear this theme between distinctive and emotional, and that also showed up in your creative dividend work that you did with Effie and Mark Ritson, and how it showed that ads that are both emotional and distinctive are more profitable at the end of the day, and that's why we do marketing. So can you walk us through what you've seen in the research about the importance of emotion and distinctive ads? I mean, you've already been talking about it at a high level, but what are some of those details?
Andrew: Of course, yeah. In the Creative Dividend, we spent a few years analyzing a load of the campaign case studies submitted to the Effie Awards. And it took so long — we needed to move the initiative forward. A lot of this kind of research had been done by the IPA in the past, which is UK-centric stuff, and quite TV-centric stuff, and quite large-brand-centric stuff.
So we actually paid Effie a chunk to get as much data as possible, of American, US, UK, European, and Irish advertising campaigns, from challenger brands to large brands, from winners of Effie Awards to people that submitted and didn't even get past the first stage. We really looked into what principles held true on that kind of really large, global dataset.
And I think the most interesting thing about effectiveness, from an emotional and distinctive point of view, is: distinctiveness has to be there. Distinctiveness — brand recognition, your brand being part of your activity — is a must, otherwise it's not an ad, obviously. But being distinctive doesn't compound into behavior change. You can't beat someone over the head with a logo until they are more predisposed to buy your brand. But you have to be distinctive for it to work. So we found that without being distinctive, as you scale media budgets, it doesn't reliably turn into revenue in market. Whereas if you're distinctive and emotional, then it reliably scales into profit in market.
It's a key finding — a key finding, because we can't keep chasing revenue. The world's on fire, guys. We can't keep doing that. Anyone can spend a million on advertising and get a million in revenue. I've done it on brands. It's easy, and it's boring. Or the best way to get revenue is doing a price discount. Anyone can sell something for 50% off. You'll go bankrupt. What we must focus on is profit, and profit is harder to achieve. Profit means you're gonna be more likely to choose my brand more often, and more likely to pay for it. How do you do that? You predispose towards your brand, and to do that, you need to create an emotional appeal in your advertising, 'cause that means more memories — more useful memories that tap into the heuristics that matter, that lead into that reduction in price sensitivity and building all those brand effects that compound over time.
So I think there's a key distinction: you must be distinctive, but if you want to profitably grow, you have to be emotional.
Rob: And that's no easy task, right? I mean, creating work that is truly emotive and truly distinctive is obviously the goal at the end of the day, and that's why you guys exist — to help marketers be able to do that.
But it sounds like the second hardest thing — if that's the first hardest thing, and let's say you discover it — the second hardest thing is actually sticking with it, right? And actually believing in it and continuing to invest in that great work. And you've done a lot of work in the longevity of creative. What has the research shown you guys in terms of making sure that you give that great work enough time to be impactful?
Andrew: I'll give a more detailed answer than I've ever given on stage anywhere, or on any podcast, because this is serious.
I've researched this stuff called compound creativity for years now with IPA data and Effie data, and it's basically looking at... Well, why did I do it in the first place? Marketers were really waking up to the idea of using their ads for longer, because it allows them to wear in and achieve the strategy that they want, and, actually, people don't really notice your advertising, so you need to build the right kind of reach and frequency, and that allows you to run your ads for longer.
Some in the industry have advocated for distinctive brand assets and using them consistently so they become more famous and unique. But that's very blunt, almost useless advice. Like, "Okay, well, I need to do a new campaign 'cause I don't sell that toothpaste anymore," or, "I'm being sued, I must change that color," or, "We're on radio, we can't use any other distinctive brand assets," blah, blah, blah.
So what I wanted to do is build a more holistic view on consistency, which we've called compound creativity, which looks at the idea of a brand keeping to its foundations over time — what you could call brand cohesion — sticking to the same positioning and creative ideas, sticking with the same teams. The second pillar is a culture of consistency, which is stretching your brand and idea across time and space. So, using your campaigns for longer, but also stretching them across more media channels — putting your idea and brand to work harder, increasing its surface area. And the third idea is a boring one — execution — using the same brand look and feel.
In any dataset I have bothered to measure a brand's compound creativity score, its consistency score, and it's a pain in the ass, because you have to get all their advertising for the past five years, look at all their channels and their website, to come up with a percentage against the framework we've developed.
It means good stuff. More consistent brands in the Effie database are four times more efficient from an ROI point of view. They report large business effects twice as often — what you could call effectiveness. They're three times more likely to report large incremental profit gain.
And the same thing with the IPA data — almost exactly the same thing. But I lead with the Effie data now 'cause it's at a global level. But going back to our original question, this is not hard science. It's hard to prove this. Those campaigns and brands that have been going longer are probably going longer because they're more successful, and you're getting this kind of correlation-and-causation effect.
So they have to really try to prove that consistency and longevity cause this stuff. And there's one little dataset in the research that shows — where, if you actually look at... when you look at a five-year period for brands that are consistent, you actually see year on year their advertising gets more emotional and more distinct. So it's actually becoming more emotional and more distinct by them being consistent. That can't be explained away by this reverse causality. So consistency is doing something. It's hammering your brand look and feel and allowing you to become more distinctive. It's playing into the familiarity heuristic, where actually familiarity breeds contentment, not contempt.
We like the familiar as human beings. So you can start to see some things that point to consistency causing this growth. I could talk about consistency all year, all day long, and I've been talking about it for like four years now. So I'll stop there. But I think consistency is the modern effectiveness hack for marketers.
And when you look at other effectiveness hacks that we thought were hacks, you can probably explain it by consistency. Why don't celebrities work? They're not used consistently. Why do brand characters work? It forces you to be consistent. Why does a long-running campaign work? It forces you to stick with it and iterate within it, and it forces you to get more entertaining each time — like, should have gone to Specsavers.
So yeah. I could probably make a career out of just going around helping people become more consistent, 'cause good things happen when consistency happens.
Rob: It's such a great topic — one where people will nod and go, "Totally, that makes sense." But then, when the rubber hits the road and they have to spend the money to be consistent, they start to get gun-shy. So gosh, it's such a good topic — and what a great topic, just regarding the importance of emotion and distinctiveness.
So let's talk about a topic nobody talks about, and that is audio. Everybody sort of writes it off, right? And you've done research with the Radio Center and "The Effie Show." It's just showing how powerful it is. Ironically, at Marketing Architects, the TV agency, actually started in radio. We were one of the largest radio agencies in the US, so we do love audio in a way that's probably not healthy. Can you talk to us a little bit more about why you think it's so overlooked?
Andrew: Well, it's great that you guys like audio and radio, 'cause whenever you meet someone that likes radio, you always have a very nice time. Nice, smart people like radio. I love doing radio work because everyone's just lovely. So yeah, I mean, why is it overlooked? Well, you can't take a screenshot of your radio ad and submit it to Cannes. And marketing has really leant into and used marketers' egos to try to motivate us, which is fine.
I submit my work to the Effies 'cause hell, I'll get paid more if, as a marketer, I've won an Effie. So it's not a bad thing. But we have leant too far into what's popular versus what's effective, because all the evidence shows that audio and radio is effective.
But, focusing on radio specifically, it's got very similar reach, often, to TV, depending on what market you're in. It's often like six times cheaper, and your competitors are probably not there, so you've probably got category exclusions. And you can get really creative for cheap, 'cause you don't have to hire a helicopter. You can just play the helicopter sound. And there's something quite special about audio, where I've not fully looked into it, but people claim that audio is processed at a different part of the brain, which is closer to memory formation. And I've actually seen that on the practical side when I've worked with ITV, where they released some research which showed that people can recall audio features of an ad 20% more than the visual features of a TV ad.
And talking about vendor-funded research — why would a TV company, ITV, release such a killer headline about how powerful audio is for TV? So you've gotta really believe it then. And then all my research — on TikTok, or at a campaign level with Effie and stuff — looking at the use of the types of distinctive brand assets: Whenever you use jingles and sonic assets, or — recently, my creator effectiveness playbook research — a creator speaking the brand name is way more powerful than any other visual stuff, because you can close your eyes, but you can't close your ears. Killer insight.
I actually don't think I care about convincing people about audio anymore. Despite — I did some research with Bakrits and, in Cannes this year, with the CRA, the RAB in the US, and Radio Center again — looking at doing a cut of all the campaigns in the Effie case library which had audio in them, so either podcasting or radio. And we saw that any campaign that used our stuff reported more good things in every sense, and it only got better if they had a bigger scale and media put behind them, because one of the powers of radio is how broad its reach is and how public- and trust-building it is. But I'm not only gonna convince people, 'cause if I eventually get bored of this whole marketing effectiveness stuff — and I think it's starting to happen — I'm just gonna go start an FMCG challenger brand, and I'm exclusively gonna use radio to grow it, and then I'm gonna come back to this industry five years later and tell you, "I fucking told you so."
Elena: Nice. Secret weapon.
Rob: When I started my career, someone described radio as the ugly sister, and I'm like, "Well, that's not nice." Gosh, I had actually shut my microphone off for a second 'cause I was taking notes on some of those statistics you were throwing out. We love audio. The 20% one I hadn't heard before, so I need to remember that. That's a great one. And, like I said, we started out in radio.
We did pivot to a TV agency, so let's talk about TV, and it's a little self-serving 'cause we are a TV agency. But what has your research shown about the power of TV and the importance of that in your mix?
Andrew: Yeah, God, I mean, look — the most obvious one, and most recent one that I actually researched in the data, was, again, with that huge Effie dataset. We looked at the kind of touch points used in a campaign, and TV clearly fell out as a super touch point, which means that it was the second biggest driver of brand effects on average in all these campaigns.
And it could also create short-term effects disproportionately well for how well it could create those long-term effects. So it's kind of a both-ism engine. It does the long and the short. But that research hides the key principles of media. So I think if anyone's really interested in media and TV, I'd go look at some research called Profitability 2.0, which is from EssenceMediacom and Thinkbox. I have a tattered copy of it printed off under my pillow, because I think that is the world's best marketing research I've ever seen. And they have a principle in that called SET, where, if you're thinking about a media channel, you need to think about its scale, its efficiency, and the timeframe it will pay back in.
Not this binary of long and short, or performance and brand — but those things. And then TV just comes out on top on those things. So, scale. What my research just talked about with Effie hid the fact — despite it being a massive second-biggest brand builder — that creators are actually the first biggest brand builder. Creators only create 5% of all profit from advertising in the UK, whereas TV creates 53% of all profit from advertising in the UK. When you look at econometric datasets over two years, TV has scaled like you'd never believe. It's why I think organic content... And I'm unusually busy right now, so I haven't done a column in a few weeks.
I've half-written a column called Organic Reach Is Bullshit, and the main reason for that is: even if you're doing really well in organic, and you're posting a lot of content, if someone goes, "Oh, great, could you 10x that for me?" you go, "Uh, guess I'll post again tomorrow." Like, what? You can't scale it.
TV, I can scale, and the efficiency doesn't fall off. So SET: scale, efficiency, how do you turn that spend into profit — TV's got a really good, efficient driver of turning spend into profit. And then, time. People think that TV is a long-of-it channel. It's not. It's a now-and-forever channel. It creates cash now, and it'll create cash forever.
I work with this challenger-brand CMO — I try my best to advise them; I'm trying not to give away their gender, so it becomes harder to guess here. So they did a TV campaign a few years ago, and they were like, "Yeah, but it didn't really pay back, did it? Where's the cash?" So now he's got... damn it, now they've gone back to Zuck Bucks, he calls it, where he'll put a pound into Meta and get more than a pound back. He calls them Zuck Bucks, Zucker Bucks. I'm like, "Mate, you probably get more than a pound back because you did a TV ad six months ago, and that's made your digital work harder." People have got this so wrong, it's worrying.
Rob: Andrew, you strike me as someone who doesn't have a lot of strong opinions, or very contrarian ones, so you might have to take a minute on this one. But what would you say is your most contrarian marketing opinion? What's the one that gets you in the most trouble?
Andrew: My most contrarian marketing opinion is: distinctiveness is not how brands grow. So a lot of the research — specifically Ehrenberg-Bass — really talks about how we need to be distinctive to grow our brands, and differentiation is kind of useless, 'cause differentiation doesn't exist.
And it really speaks to what I was talking about earlier, around — you need to go and understand, look at the research below these claims, and understand it. For example, the claim that differentiation doesn't exist comes from academic research where they've explicitly asked people if they believe this brand is different — where, that's not what differentiation is.
Relative differentiation is: your brand has a collection of largely subconscious memories that makes your brand different from this brand — i.e., you're slightly more safe, and you believe this is slightly more hydrating than this brand. Even if I quizzed you on it, you'd never be able to explain that to me.
So asking people if they think brands are different is silly. Yet when we talk about distinctiveness in that kind of research from Ehrenberg-Bass, all these better tools come out, like measuring fame and uniqueness. But we've never asked anyone if we think that brands are distinctive, 'cause that would be stupid, wouldn't it?
Yet we've fallen into this kind of "distinctiveness is how brands grow." But, as I talked about earlier, distinctiveness is needed. Our brands need to be recognized so that they can be chosen, and that advertising and activity works, of course, and isn't mistaken for other brands. But how do we grow? We must predispose people to our brands.
And how do we do that? Through creativity, emotion, being entertaining, putting on a show, creating fame, tapping into culture, innovation that solves consumer needs. That's how brands grow. None of that will work unless you're distinctive. I agree, for sure. But without that, you're not gonna grow.
So you need both, and I think this is what a lot of people are waking up to now. We work with big FMCG clients. They're very proud of their distinctive brand asset grid, but their ads are shit. So, of course, you're not gonna grow. So I think I'm gladly, loudly gonna be professionally annoying for the rest of my career and fight the other side of the coin.
Elena: Yeah, it sounds like distinctiveness is a must-have, but it's not the end.
Andrew: Was that contrarian enough for you?
Rob: It absolutely was. And we've spent a lot of time on that topic on this podcast, so —
Andrew: I bet. God, your listeners must be so bored of it now. I'm so sorry for people listening.
Rob: No, no — I mean, we've actually talked a lot, I think, about the other side of that coin,
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.
Rob: that was really —
Andrew: if another person ruins a good Guinness for me in a pub by coming up to me and going, "Hi, Andrew, what do you think about distinctiveness versus differentiation?" I'll scream. So we should all just move on.
Elena: Well, Andrew, System1 — at least when I first came across them — I remember them the most for your TV commercial pre-testing. I love when you do the pre-testing of Super Bowl ads, and you've tested thousands of campaigns. I'm curious, what's the most surprising — it could be funny or shocking — finding you've had from pre-testing all these TV commercials? Is there anything people maybe wouldn't necessarily think would be important, or would work?
Andrew: I'd be remiss not to do a smidge of salesmanship at this point. So we test every UK and US TV ad — like, long-form asset — the day it's aired on TV, with millions of people. We've been doing that for about 10 years. That allows me to do the kind of research that I do, but it also allows our customers to truly understand their category and their competitors.
And over the past few years, we've done really good work moving into testing our products in radio and audio and social, skippable digital ads, and out-of-home. Very lucky with that. What's my biggest finding across all that? The most surprising finding is: I am the advertising oracle.
I spend all day in this data, looking at thousands of ads, watching thousands of ads. I watch too many ads. Can you imagine what your brain does, subconsciously absorbing all that? Like, at some point you'd think that it would just become good enough to show me, then I'll go, "Oh, 4.4." I can't. I can't. I am not the consumer.
I am so bad at picking ads that I think consumers will recognize the brand and think are emotional, and understanding why — do they recognize that character? Did they enjoy that? Do those associations come through? I'm very good once I get a 30-second glimpse at one of our reports, and then I pretend it was all my idea anyway. You'd think that I'd eventually become the advertising oracle, but I haven't. And it just speaks to how useful market orientation and market research really is.
Elena: Yeah, if that's not a case for pre-testing, I don't know what is. 'Cause, yeah, you're right — that's something like marketers — we just assume we know best with our brands, but we definitely do not always.
Well, I wanna wrap this up with something fun, still kinda on theme with the episode. What's a decision in your life that you made on pure gut — you didn't have a lot of data, but it turned out to be exactly right?
Andrew: Yeah, very good question. I quit med school — that takes like 10 years. Everything was saying no. I remember my professor at the time was like... I was actually gonna go work at Diageo at the time, and he was like, "What, a beer company? You realize you're two years away from being a surgeon now, right?" Yeah, yeah. And then I got into Diageo, and then — off pure gut — I thought that looks bloody amazing, and I reckon I'd be great at it. Then I went to Diageo, and then worked at Bacardi for a few years, and then went back to Diageo, and I was on this accelerated scheme where — All your career is really well laid out in front of you, and you've got all your training and your funding, and you're gonna be a global CMO someday. Then I quit that as well, and came and worked at System1 based on my gut, and everyone was like, "What the hell are you doing?" I'm very lucky it paid off.
Rob: Wow, that's a good one. That's really good.
Elena: Did you have something, Rob, that you thought of?
Rob: Not as good as that. I mean, I —
Andrew: I need to go emotional then, Rob.
Rob: I know. I'm like, I don't even know if I wanna go — I mean, it might be kinda dumb, actually. I was thinking about this question — my wife and I are empty nesters, and we were always against — we don't want a van. And for some reason we just impulsively decided that we are gonna buy an electric VW van. It was completely on this weird whim. We thought, "Oh, we're gonna drive around the country in it or whatever." And it's brought us so much joy. It's like so much fun driving this thing.
I don't know how it is overseas, but in America there's not a lot of them. So people smile and they're like, "Whoa, this is so funny. It reminds me of the..." Well, it's like driving around a cartoon car. And it's just brought — it's been a lot of fun, and it makes no sense on paper, 'cause we have kids, but they're all out of the house. So yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, strange that when you rely on your gut and emotion, good things happen? Weird. Very weird.
Elena: I don't know. I had trouble thinking about this one, a little bit, 'cause there's a lot to pick from. But I decided to get into triathlon kind of on a whim, and if you think about the actual data, you're just pounding your body. It's not the best thing for you, actually, when you look at it, but it's just been so enjoyable, and I've just loved it, and it's become like a passion outside of work. And I don't really know why I chose to do that. I just kind of wanted to, and just do something hard, and —
Andrew: Agreed. I'm the same with running. If I don't run, I'm a very grumpy asshole. But — everything aches now, but I'm like, if I can't run, then what's the point, guys? Come on.
Elena: No, my left knee is killing me right now. It's like, you know, you don't have to do this. Like, I could do Pilates, but that's just not fun. I just need to destroy my body every day. Well, Andrew, this has been amazing. I'm so excited. I've been trying to get you on the podcast for a while, so I'm so excited to —
Andrew: I'm sorry I'm so bad on email. I apologize.
Elena: No, you're just busy. I understand. It was worth it. Let's give you an opportunity to plug anything. Everyone should follow you on LinkedIn if they haven't. What else do you wanna plug before you sign off?
Andrew: I just went through my OND — my October, November, December — which is Cannes, where we released a lot of research, and I'm just figuring out now who we're working with to do what next. So I've actually got nothing hard to plug. Apart — oh, apart from — so I'm now kind of chief growth officer at System1. I don't just do our partnerships and research, I also help with all our product. And in a few weeks you're gonna see System1 launch an AI model which we've trained on over 18 million human emotional responses, which isn't just some janky black box plugged into an LLM. It's actually based on all the advertising we've been testing.
And what's amazing about it is: because what we've been testing it with is our data — 'cause we test every ad — we can build a proper model on it. Whereas these competitors that have launched these tools, which I still can't work out how or why they've done it, I don't think legally they could have done that. So I'm very excited to put a new tool out there which helps people make more decisions on those assets that aren't gonna get a million in media spend behind them, but will give them some amazing System1 emotional data to steer them in the right direction. So follow me on LinkedIn, and you'll be the first to be able to use that.
Rob: Sounds exciting. Can you reveal the name yet, or is that still under wraps?
Andrew: I haven't read the legal email on this yet, so —
Rob: Then don't.
Elena: We don't wanna get you in trouble.
Andrew: No, no, no.
Rob: We'll call it — we'll call it the Tindall —
Andrew: No, no, no, it's not. It's — it's Test Your Ad something.
Elena: Okay.
Rob: All right, sounds great.
Elena: Amazing. Excited to see that. All right, thanks so much for joining us, Andrew. That was fun.
Andrew: Rising to it.
Rob: Thank you, Andrew.
Episode 176
Marketing Effectiveness and the Proof Problem with Andrew Tindall
Ignaz Semmelweis proved handwashing saved lives, but doctors ignored his messy data for decades. Thousands died waiting for perfect proof.
This week, Elena and Rob sit down with System1 Chief Growth Officer Andrew Tindall to talk about what makes marketing research worth trusting. Andrew breaks down why distinctiveness alone won't grow your brand, and why emotion is the real profit driver. The conversation also covers his research on creators, consistency, and why audio remains one of the most underrated channels in the industry. It's a must-listen for any marketer trying to separate real evidence from marketing hype.
Topics Covered
• [03:00] What "useful evidence" means for marketers
• [10:00] Andrew's favorite research-backed finding on emotion
• [13:00] Surprising results from the Creator Effectiveness Playbook
• [17:00] Why distinctive and emotional ads drive more profit
• [20:00] The case for "compound creativity" and consistency
• [25:00] Why audio and radio remain overlooked and undervalued
• [32:00] Andrew's most contrarian marketing opinion
Resources:
2026 The Drum Article
Andrew Tindall's LinkedIn
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
Chief Marketing Officer
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Andrew Tindall
Chief Growth Officer at System1
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Transcript
Elena: I'm Elena Jasper. I'm on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host, Rob DeMars, the chief product architect at Misfits & Machines.
Rob: Hello, hello!
Elena: And we have a guest today, Andrew Tindall. Andrew is a chief growth officer at System1, the creative effectiveness platform. He's spent time growing famous brands like Johnnie Walker and Bacardi before moving into research. Today, he leads System1's advertising business, writes a weekly column for The Drum, and reaches about a million marketers a week on LinkedIn. He's also behind a lot of the research we've talked about on this show, so I'm very excited to have him. Andrew, thanks for joining us.
Andrew: Thanks so much. It's truly a long time listener, first time caller. I have tuned in regularly over... God, you've been doing this a while, 'cause —
Elena: Yeah.
Andrew: this topic on your podcast is very me. I'm glad to see you guys are doing it.
Rob: Well, we're excited to have you.
And before we jump into it, I just need some real talk here for a second. You trained in medicine, so you could be saving lives right now, but instead you're rating whiskey ads. So on behalf of your mother, I need an explanation. How does a doctor fall into marketing?
Andrew: I was about to say this. I did it for my mother, and then she still has not returned my calls. Um, had to... Yeah, it's a tough one. If you like science and, you know, you want to do something that has an impact, and you enjoy understanding people, and, I don't know, being around people, and you're good at that stuff when you're in school, it's just like, "Oh, so which med school are you going to?" You know, and then you start telling people, or you're thinking about it. "Oh, that's impressive." Before you know it, you're volunteering in a hospice on your weekends, and then in med school in London. I eventually started working in drinks marketing along the side so I could pay my rent.
I was like, "God, this is far more interesting." You can clock off at 5:00. I thought you could, back then, which, yeah, which is ironic. And you can make a huge impact. And then I found out you can apply science to it as well. So in a weird way, it all worked out in the end. But my mum eventually has forgiven me. Now I take her to very nice things.
Elena: Nice. It all worked out. Well, I think it's great whenever someone with your level of smarts gets into marketing — it's also a good thing for marketers.
So, we are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. I'm gonna kick us off super quick, as I always do, with some research, and I obviously picked a piece from you, Andrew. This is something you wrote for The Drum earlier this year, and in the article, you argue that marketing doesn't need perfect evidence, it just needs useful evidence. You open with Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor who noticed that handwashing led to fewer deaths in his maternity ward, but because his data was messy and observational, the establishment rejected it and waited for perfect proof, and then thousands died before germ theory caught up. Darwin, the first smoking studies, tectonic plates, climate models — a lot of the science that reshaped the world started as imperfect patterns that were still useful, and marketing, you argue, is no different. So thanks again for being here. I wanted to start with the topic of marketing effectiveness in general, because it feels like effectiveness has sort of moved from this niche corner of the industry to something that more marketers care about, and you've been a huge part of that through your work at System1. So where do you think we're at with marketing effectiveness education? Have you noticed sort of a positive shift in the last few years?
Andrew: What a brilliant opening. Holy hell. Um, great question. So, I think if you work in marketing, you now work in marketing effectiveness. I believe effectiveness is the understanding, the researching, and the practice of how marketing can essentially create behavior change in our favor, which should be the title of anyone's role who works in marketing.
Otherwise, how else would you make any decision? So I think we're waking up to that. Why has it got more popular? I think marketing effectiveness has got more popular because we've got better at marketing it. So before, marketing effectiveness was some very dull books and some very dull people who now, I think, are becoming less dull because they've seen how it works.
Whereas people like System1, previously called BrainJuicer, who advocate for effective advertising — marketing being emotional and entertaining and what you could call right-brained. We have made all our research and all our tools and all our marketing very that, and people have really loved it.
So I think that's really helped bring marketing effectiveness up. You know, and Mark Ritson, the legendary professor turned online kind of mini-MBA leader, he follows the same stuff. And then the dawn of social, especially LinkedIn, has meant that the barrier to entry is no longer, can you publish a book? It's, have you got the goods to deliver my brand? Can you help me? And then where I think that's got marketing effectiveness education in general is — previously it was reserved for these kind of very longitudinal studies and what you could call laws that people were accepting as dogma, and like, "Oh no, we have to do this, otherwise we won't grow."
But when you look at the data and all that, it never was the case. These are just general rules that will increase the chance that you'll win. Now people are really thirsty for how do you actually achieve that? How do you actually achieve growth of brands of different sizes in my category, with my media spend, where it's scattered across 20 different platforms? Like the actual practice, which I think is the most exciting part of marketing effectiveness. With everything we know about growth and marketing effectiveness — what does it mean for me? How can I measure it? Will it work for me? And how do I actually achieve it? And then opening up to experimentation and stuff like this.
So that's where I think marketing effectiveness education is.
Elena: Yeah, I agree. It's one thing to understand the principles and then another thing to apply it in an imperfect world and at brands with different rules and customs.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the science itself, because you're right, there's more marketing research than ever being shared right now, which is great. I think it's become more approachable than ever, thanks to people like yourself and Margarethe. And I know I felt very intimidated at first starting to learn this stuff, and people who can make it fun and more understandable — I think that's a good thing. But there's also a lot of pushback that only certain kinds of research are valuable, and there's a lot of skepticism around vendor-funded research especially. And you've talked about this before. I'm curious, what makes marketing research worthwhile in your opinion, and where do you draw a line on when we need to treat it like a hard science and when we don't?
Andrew: First of all, oh God, I think calling any market research — marketing research — hard science is questionable in the first place, for many reasons. As I said in that column you just shared, no research is perfect. For example, my friend, who I used to work with at Diageo, once put me onto a load of IWSR data, which is basically like, how are brands actually performing in the market. And it was like, look, there's clearly — if you grow loyalty, they're the brands that have grown over the past five years. What's this about? Well, it turns out if you actually measure loyalty over 12 months, which some businesses do or not, versus three weeks, actually loyalty is really correlated with growth, actually more so than getting new customers.
You have to really understand the methods — a basic understanding of the maths behind it, and stuff like this. So I don't believe any research should ever be framed as a hard science. This is just often an experiment on the available data, trying to answer a certain amount of questions.
So I think it's within the industry's priority to always make an effort to understand the datasets and the methods applied. I think it's on the vendors who often release this research — like myself at System1, we're a vendor that is essentially wanting you to research with us. That's why we do our research, which you could just call product marketing.
We pour all our marketing investment into buying, acquiring data, running surveys, etc. It's within us, to be honest — like in the recent playbook I just released with TikTok and WPP, there's a whole page at the end which is basically like, at the end of an academic paper, here are the caveats. Don't get too ahead of yourself. I like the fact that we've been challenged more and been asked to put stuff like that in it. And you'll actually see when — I think System1's quite good at putting citations under charts — give the nerds the actual proper detail underneath the chart so that they can really understand it.
But then marketing research at its best is about bringing the customer into your decision process. And you must start with a question or a problem and try to get to as high up — without getting too nerdy — there's this thing called the hierarchy of evidence pyramid that I'm surprised more people don't talk about, but I was taught it in med school, which is basically: at the bottom you've got a consultant's opinion, and at the top you've got a randomized control trial, which is, ironically, an A/B test — which people think is very basic in marketing these days, don't they? Can I get further up that, to try and answer those questions? And just being aware that these things that have been positioned as laws — positioning something as a law is positioning. There's no gravity in marketing. Pretending there is will lead us down the wrong path.
Elena: Well, speaking of research, and things that maybe don't have the perfect evidence behind them yet 'cause it's a newer category, I wanted to talk about creators, because you put forward new research, the Creator Effectiveness Playbook, which I think is wonderful in a category of marketing that's still something newer. What were your most surprising or significant findings from that research?
Andrew: Surprising findings that I've been shouting about — how effective creators are — over the past year or so, from various datasets again. So, when I did that research with Effie and System1 that Mark Ritson shared last year, "The Creative Dividend," we looked at creators as a touch point in campaigns, and we showed that on average, they lead to more brand effects when they're included.
Then when you look at some IPA and WPP media research, when you treat creators as a media channel and then go into all the econometrics, you actually see that creators have the highest long-term ROI multiplier, and everyone's going, "Holy, holy hell, like God, creators are incredible." And I'd expected them just to win across the board.
But then what was special about that "Creative Effectiveness Playbook" that we released this year at Cannes is that we actually got all the brand lift studies for a lot of creator campaigns — you can say what you want about brand lift studies, but I think they're a really good way of actually measuring memory change. Experts, non-experts — really, people try to dismiss them, but we talked about that hierarchy of evidence pyramid — they're right at the top. It's a controlled randomized trial. So you actually look at those individually for creator campaigns, and we've found that it's these top 10% of creators that are doing massive, amazing stuff that's really swinging those averages of those two previous pieces of research that I just talked about right up to the top.
The top 10% are creating four times the average — what I call brand memory lift — of the average of the bottom 90%. And you're like, "Holy, holy hell." One, that's fantastic, 'cause no one knows what they're doing with creators. It's quite random, so we need some help here. And two, then the research became very easy. What are these top-performing creators doing? And building a playbook around it. And then, kind of, my favorite insight from that part of the research is: it's not about creator fame and recognition. It's about whether there's an authentic fit between the creator and your brand, and whether the creator can create distinctive, emotional, entertaining advertising. That shifts our brains from thinking about creators as a media channel — and, wow, I need their audience and their reach — to a creative partner that you need to pay to scale their reach, which I think is the biggest shift in that report.
Rob: I continue to hear this theme between distinctive and emotional, and that also showed up in your creative dividend work that you did with Effie and Mark Ritson, and how it showed that ads that are both emotional and distinctive are more profitable at the end of the day, and that's why we do marketing. So can you walk us through what you've seen in the research about the importance of emotion and distinctive ads? I mean, you've already been talking about it at a high level, but what are some of those details?
Andrew: Of course, yeah. In the Creative Dividend, we spent a few years analyzing a load of the campaign case studies submitted to the Effie Awards. And it took so long — we needed to move the initiative forward. A lot of this kind of research had been done by the IPA in the past, which is UK-centric stuff, and quite TV-centric stuff, and quite large-brand-centric stuff.
So we actually paid Effie a chunk to get as much data as possible, of American, US, UK, European, and Irish advertising campaigns, from challenger brands to large brands, from winners of Effie Awards to people that submitted and didn't even get past the first stage. We really looked into what principles held true on that kind of really large, global dataset.
And I think the most interesting thing about effectiveness, from an emotional and distinctive point of view, is: distinctiveness has to be there. Distinctiveness — brand recognition, your brand being part of your activity — is a must, otherwise it's not an ad, obviously. But being distinctive doesn't compound into behavior change. You can't beat someone over the head with a logo until they are more predisposed to buy your brand. But you have to be distinctive for it to work. So we found that without being distinctive, as you scale media budgets, it doesn't reliably turn into revenue in market. Whereas if you're distinctive and emotional, then it reliably scales into profit in market.
It's a key finding — a key finding, because we can't keep chasing revenue. The world's on fire, guys. We can't keep doing that. Anyone can spend a million on advertising and get a million in revenue. I've done it on brands. It's easy, and it's boring. Or the best way to get revenue is doing a price discount. Anyone can sell something for 50% off. You'll go bankrupt. What we must focus on is profit, and profit is harder to achieve. Profit means you're gonna be more likely to choose my brand more often, and more likely to pay for it. How do you do that? You predispose towards your brand, and to do that, you need to create an emotional appeal in your advertising, 'cause that means more memories — more useful memories that tap into the heuristics that matter, that lead into that reduction in price sensitivity and building all those brand effects that compound over time.
So I think there's a key distinction: you must be distinctive, but if you want to profitably grow, you have to be emotional.
Rob: And that's no easy task, right? I mean, creating work that is truly emotive and truly distinctive is obviously the goal at the end of the day, and that's why you guys exist — to help marketers be able to do that.
But it sounds like the second hardest thing — if that's the first hardest thing, and let's say you discover it — the second hardest thing is actually sticking with it, right? And actually believing in it and continuing to invest in that great work. And you've done a lot of work in the longevity of creative. What has the research shown you guys in terms of making sure that you give that great work enough time to be impactful?
Andrew: I'll give a more detailed answer than I've ever given on stage anywhere, or on any podcast, because this is serious.
I've researched this stuff called compound creativity for years now with IPA data and Effie data, and it's basically looking at... Well, why did I do it in the first place? Marketers were really waking up to the idea of using their ads for longer, because it allows them to wear in and achieve the strategy that they want, and, actually, people don't really notice your advertising, so you need to build the right kind of reach and frequency, and that allows you to run your ads for longer.
Some in the industry have advocated for distinctive brand assets and using them consistently so they become more famous and unique. But that's very blunt, almost useless advice. Like, "Okay, well, I need to do a new campaign 'cause I don't sell that toothpaste anymore," or, "I'm being sued, I must change that color," or, "We're on radio, we can't use any other distinctive brand assets," blah, blah, blah.
So what I wanted to do is build a more holistic view on consistency, which we've called compound creativity, which looks at the idea of a brand keeping to its foundations over time — what you could call brand cohesion — sticking to the same positioning and creative ideas, sticking with the same teams. The second pillar is a culture of consistency, which is stretching your brand and idea across time and space. So, using your campaigns for longer, but also stretching them across more media channels — putting your idea and brand to work harder, increasing its surface area. And the third idea is a boring one — execution — using the same brand look and feel.
In any dataset I have bothered to measure a brand's compound creativity score, its consistency score, and it's a pain in the ass, because you have to get all their advertising for the past five years, look at all their channels and their website, to come up with a percentage against the framework we've developed.
It means good stuff. More consistent brands in the Effie database are four times more efficient from an ROI point of view. They report large business effects twice as often — what you could call effectiveness. They're three times more likely to report large incremental profit gain.
And the same thing with the IPA data — almost exactly the same thing. But I lead with the Effie data now 'cause it's at a global level. But going back to our original question, this is not hard science. It's hard to prove this. Those campaigns and brands that have been going longer are probably going longer because they're more successful, and you're getting this kind of correlation-and-causation effect.
So they have to really try to prove that consistency and longevity cause this stuff. And there's one little dataset in the research that shows — where, if you actually look at... when you look at a five-year period for brands that are consistent, you actually see year on year their advertising gets more emotional and more distinct. So it's actually becoming more emotional and more distinct by them being consistent. That can't be explained away by this reverse causality. So consistency is doing something. It's hammering your brand look and feel and allowing you to become more distinctive. It's playing into the familiarity heuristic, where actually familiarity breeds contentment, not contempt.
We like the familiar as human beings. So you can start to see some things that point to consistency causing this growth. I could talk about consistency all year, all day long, and I've been talking about it for like four years now. So I'll stop there. But I think consistency is the modern effectiveness hack for marketers.
And when you look at other effectiveness hacks that we thought were hacks, you can probably explain it by consistency. Why don't celebrities work? They're not used consistently. Why do brand characters work? It forces you to be consistent. Why does a long-running campaign work? It forces you to stick with it and iterate within it, and it forces you to get more entertaining each time — like, should have gone to Specsavers.
So yeah. I could probably make a career out of just going around helping people become more consistent, 'cause good things happen when consistency happens.
Rob: It's such a great topic — one where people will nod and go, "Totally, that makes sense." But then, when the rubber hits the road and they have to spend the money to be consistent, they start to get gun-shy. So gosh, it's such a good topic — and what a great topic, just regarding the importance of emotion and distinctiveness.
So let's talk about a topic nobody talks about, and that is audio. Everybody sort of writes it off, right? And you've done research with the Radio Center and "The Effie Show." It's just showing how powerful it is. Ironically, at Marketing Architects, the TV agency, actually started in radio. We were one of the largest radio agencies in the US, so we do love audio in a way that's probably not healthy. Can you talk to us a little bit more about why you think it's so overlooked?
Andrew: Well, it's great that you guys like audio and radio, 'cause whenever you meet someone that likes radio, you always have a very nice time. Nice, smart people like radio. I love doing radio work because everyone's just lovely. So yeah, I mean, why is it overlooked? Well, you can't take a screenshot of your radio ad and submit it to Cannes. And marketing has really leant into and used marketers' egos to try to motivate us, which is fine.
I submit my work to the Effies 'cause hell, I'll get paid more if, as a marketer, I've won an Effie. So it's not a bad thing. But we have leant too far into what's popular versus what's effective, because all the evidence shows that audio and radio is effective.
But, focusing on radio specifically, it's got very similar reach, often, to TV, depending on what market you're in. It's often like six times cheaper, and your competitors are probably not there, so you've probably got category exclusions. And you can get really creative for cheap, 'cause you don't have to hire a helicopter. You can just play the helicopter sound. And there's something quite special about audio, where I've not fully looked into it, but people claim that audio is processed at a different part of the brain, which is closer to memory formation. And I've actually seen that on the practical side when I've worked with ITV, where they released some research which showed that people can recall audio features of an ad 20% more than the visual features of a TV ad.
And talking about vendor-funded research — why would a TV company, ITV, release such a killer headline about how powerful audio is for TV? So you've gotta really believe it then. And then all my research — on TikTok, or at a campaign level with Effie and stuff — looking at the use of the types of distinctive brand assets: Whenever you use jingles and sonic assets, or — recently, my creator effectiveness playbook research — a creator speaking the brand name is way more powerful than any other visual stuff, because you can close your eyes, but you can't close your ears. Killer insight.
I actually don't think I care about convincing people about audio anymore. Despite — I did some research with Bakrits and, in Cannes this year, with the CRA, the RAB in the US, and Radio Center again — looking at doing a cut of all the campaigns in the Effie case library which had audio in them, so either podcasting or radio. And we saw that any campaign that used our stuff reported more good things in every sense, and it only got better if they had a bigger scale and media put behind them, because one of the powers of radio is how broad its reach is and how public- and trust-building it is. But I'm not only gonna convince people, 'cause if I eventually get bored of this whole marketing effectiveness stuff — and I think it's starting to happen — I'm just gonna go start an FMCG challenger brand, and I'm exclusively gonna use radio to grow it, and then I'm gonna come back to this industry five years later and tell you, "I fucking told you so."
Elena: Nice. Secret weapon.
Rob: When I started my career, someone described radio as the ugly sister, and I'm like, "Well, that's not nice." Gosh, I had actually shut my microphone off for a second 'cause I was taking notes on some of those statistics you were throwing out. We love audio. The 20% one I hadn't heard before, so I need to remember that. That's a great one. And, like I said, we started out in radio.
We did pivot to a TV agency, so let's talk about TV, and it's a little self-serving 'cause we are a TV agency. But what has your research shown about the power of TV and the importance of that in your mix?
Andrew: Yeah, God, I mean, look — the most obvious one, and most recent one that I actually researched in the data, was, again, with that huge Effie dataset. We looked at the kind of touch points used in a campaign, and TV clearly fell out as a super touch point, which means that it was the second biggest driver of brand effects on average in all these campaigns.
And it could also create short-term effects disproportionately well for how well it could create those long-term effects. So it's kind of a both-ism engine. It does the long and the short. But that research hides the key principles of media. So I think if anyone's really interested in media and TV, I'd go look at some research called Profitability 2.0, which is from EssenceMediacom and Thinkbox. I have a tattered copy of it printed off under my pillow, because I think that is the world's best marketing research I've ever seen. And they have a principle in that called SET, where, if you're thinking about a media channel, you need to think about its scale, its efficiency, and the timeframe it will pay back in.
Not this binary of long and short, or performance and brand — but those things. And then TV just comes out on top on those things. So, scale. What my research just talked about with Effie hid the fact — despite it being a massive second-biggest brand builder — that creators are actually the first biggest brand builder. Creators only create 5% of all profit from advertising in the UK, whereas TV creates 53% of all profit from advertising in the UK. When you look at econometric datasets over two years, TV has scaled like you'd never believe. It's why I think organic content... And I'm unusually busy right now, so I haven't done a column in a few weeks.
I've half-written a column called Organic Reach Is Bullshit, and the main reason for that is: even if you're doing really well in organic, and you're posting a lot of content, if someone goes, "Oh, great, could you 10x that for me?" you go, "Uh, guess I'll post again tomorrow." Like, what? You can't scale it.
TV, I can scale, and the efficiency doesn't fall off. So SET: scale, efficiency, how do you turn that spend into profit — TV's got a really good, efficient driver of turning spend into profit. And then, time. People think that TV is a long-of-it channel. It's not. It's a now-and-forever channel. It creates cash now, and it'll create cash forever.
I work with this challenger-brand CMO — I try my best to advise them; I'm trying not to give away their gender, so it becomes harder to guess here. So they did a TV campaign a few years ago, and they were like, "Yeah, but it didn't really pay back, did it? Where's the cash?" So now he's got... damn it, now they've gone back to Zuck Bucks, he calls it, where he'll put a pound into Meta and get more than a pound back. He calls them Zuck Bucks, Zucker Bucks. I'm like, "Mate, you probably get more than a pound back because you did a TV ad six months ago, and that's made your digital work harder." People have got this so wrong, it's worrying.
Rob: Andrew, you strike me as someone who doesn't have a lot of strong opinions, or very contrarian ones, so you might have to take a minute on this one. But what would you say is your most contrarian marketing opinion? What's the one that gets you in the most trouble?
Andrew: My most contrarian marketing opinion is: distinctiveness is not how brands grow. So a lot of the research — specifically Ehrenberg-Bass — really talks about how we need to be distinctive to grow our brands, and differentiation is kind of useless, 'cause differentiation doesn't exist.
And it really speaks to what I was talking about earlier, around — you need to go and understand, look at the research below these claims, and understand it. For example, the claim that differentiation doesn't exist comes from academic research where they've explicitly asked people if they believe this brand is different — where, that's not what differentiation is.
Relative differentiation is: your brand has a collection of largely subconscious memories that makes your brand different from this brand — i.e., you're slightly more safe, and you believe this is slightly more hydrating than this brand. Even if I quizzed you on it, you'd never be able to explain that to me.
So asking people if they think brands are different is silly. Yet when we talk about distinctiveness in that kind of research from Ehrenberg-Bass, all these better tools come out, like measuring fame and uniqueness. But we've never asked anyone if we think that brands are distinctive, 'cause that would be stupid, wouldn't it?
Yet we've fallen into this kind of "distinctiveness is how brands grow." But, as I talked about earlier, distinctiveness is needed. Our brands need to be recognized so that they can be chosen, and that advertising and activity works, of course, and isn't mistaken for other brands. But how do we grow? We must predispose people to our brands.
And how do we do that? Through creativity, emotion, being entertaining, putting on a show, creating fame, tapping into culture, innovation that solves consumer needs. That's how brands grow. None of that will work unless you're distinctive. I agree, for sure. But without that, you're not gonna grow.
So you need both, and I think this is what a lot of people are waking up to now. We work with big FMCG clients. They're very proud of their distinctive brand asset grid, but their ads are shit. So, of course, you're not gonna grow. So I think I'm gladly, loudly gonna be professionally annoying for the rest of my career and fight the other side of the coin.
Elena: Yeah, it sounds like distinctiveness is a must-have, but it's not the end.
Andrew: Was that contrarian enough for you?
Rob: It absolutely was. And we've spent a lot of time on that topic on this podcast, so —
Andrew: I bet. God, your listeners must be so bored of it now. I'm so sorry for people listening.
Rob: No, no — I mean, we've actually talked a lot, I think, about the other side of that coin,
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.
Rob: that was really —
Andrew: if another person ruins a good Guinness for me in a pub by coming up to me and going, "Hi, Andrew, what do you think about distinctiveness versus differentiation?" I'll scream. So we should all just move on.
Elena: Well, Andrew, System1 — at least when I first came across them — I remember them the most for your TV commercial pre-testing. I love when you do the pre-testing of Super Bowl ads, and you've tested thousands of campaigns. I'm curious, what's the most surprising — it could be funny or shocking — finding you've had from pre-testing all these TV commercials? Is there anything people maybe wouldn't necessarily think would be important, or would work?
Andrew: I'd be remiss not to do a smidge of salesmanship at this point. So we test every UK and US TV ad — like, long-form asset — the day it's aired on TV, with millions of people. We've been doing that for about 10 years. That allows me to do the kind of research that I do, but it also allows our customers to truly understand their category and their competitors.
And over the past few years, we've done really good work moving into testing our products in radio and audio and social, skippable digital ads, and out-of-home. Very lucky with that. What's my biggest finding across all that? The most surprising finding is: I am the advertising oracle.
I spend all day in this data, looking at thousands of ads, watching thousands of ads. I watch too many ads. Can you imagine what your brain does, subconsciously absorbing all that? Like, at some point you'd think that it would just become good enough to show me, then I'll go, "Oh, 4.4." I can't. I can't. I am not the consumer.
I am so bad at picking ads that I think consumers will recognize the brand and think are emotional, and understanding why — do they recognize that character? Did they enjoy that? Do those associations come through? I'm very good once I get a 30-second glimpse at one of our reports, and then I pretend it was all my idea anyway. You'd think that I'd eventually become the advertising oracle, but I haven't. And it just speaks to how useful market orientation and market research really is.
Elena: Yeah, if that's not a case for pre-testing, I don't know what is. 'Cause, yeah, you're right — that's something like marketers — we just assume we know best with our brands, but we definitely do not always.
Well, I wanna wrap this up with something fun, still kinda on theme with the episode. What's a decision in your life that you made on pure gut — you didn't have a lot of data, but it turned out to be exactly right?
Andrew: Yeah, very good question. I quit med school — that takes like 10 years. Everything was saying no. I remember my professor at the time was like... I was actually gonna go work at Diageo at the time, and he was like, "What, a beer company? You realize you're two years away from being a surgeon now, right?" Yeah, yeah. And then I got into Diageo, and then — off pure gut — I thought that looks bloody amazing, and I reckon I'd be great at it. Then I went to Diageo, and then worked at Bacardi for a few years, and then went back to Diageo, and I was on this accelerated scheme where — All your career is really well laid out in front of you, and you've got all your training and your funding, and you're gonna be a global CMO someday. Then I quit that as well, and came and worked at System1 based on my gut, and everyone was like, "What the hell are you doing?" I'm very lucky it paid off.
Rob: Wow, that's a good one. That's really good.
Elena: Did you have something, Rob, that you thought of?
Rob: Not as good as that. I mean, I —
Andrew: I need to go emotional then, Rob.
Rob: I know. I'm like, I don't even know if I wanna go — I mean, it might be kinda dumb, actually. I was thinking about this question — my wife and I are empty nesters, and we were always against — we don't want a van. And for some reason we just impulsively decided that we are gonna buy an electric VW van. It was completely on this weird whim. We thought, "Oh, we're gonna drive around the country in it or whatever." And it's brought us so much joy. It's like so much fun driving this thing.
I don't know how it is overseas, but in America there's not a lot of them. So people smile and they're like, "Whoa, this is so funny. It reminds me of the..." Well, it's like driving around a cartoon car. And it's just brought — it's been a lot of fun, and it makes no sense on paper, 'cause we have kids, but they're all out of the house. So yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, strange that when you rely on your gut and emotion, good things happen? Weird. Very weird.
Elena: I don't know. I had trouble thinking about this one, a little bit, 'cause there's a lot to pick from. But I decided to get into triathlon kind of on a whim, and if you think about the actual data, you're just pounding your body. It's not the best thing for you, actually, when you look at it, but it's just been so enjoyable, and I've just loved it, and it's become like a passion outside of work. And I don't really know why I chose to do that. I just kind of wanted to, and just do something hard, and —
Andrew: Agreed. I'm the same with running. If I don't run, I'm a very grumpy asshole. But — everything aches now, but I'm like, if I can't run, then what's the point, guys? Come on.
Elena: No, my left knee is killing me right now. It's like, you know, you don't have to do this. Like, I could do Pilates, but that's just not fun. I just need to destroy my body every day. Well, Andrew, this has been amazing. I'm so excited. I've been trying to get you on the podcast for a while, so I'm so excited to —
Andrew: I'm sorry I'm so bad on email. I apologize.
Elena: No, you're just busy. I understand. It was worth it. Let's give you an opportunity to plug anything. Everyone should follow you on LinkedIn if they haven't. What else do you wanna plug before you sign off?
Andrew: I just went through my OND — my October, November, December — which is Cannes, where we released a lot of research, and I'm just figuring out now who we're working with to do what next. So I've actually got nothing hard to plug. Apart — oh, apart from — so I'm now kind of chief growth officer at System1. I don't just do our partnerships and research, I also help with all our product. And in a few weeks you're gonna see System1 launch an AI model which we've trained on over 18 million human emotional responses, which isn't just some janky black box plugged into an LLM. It's actually based on all the advertising we've been testing.
And what's amazing about it is: because what we've been testing it with is our data — 'cause we test every ad — we can build a proper model on it. Whereas these competitors that have launched these tools, which I still can't work out how or why they've done it, I don't think legally they could have done that. So I'm very excited to put a new tool out there which helps people make more decisions on those assets that aren't gonna get a million in media spend behind them, but will give them some amazing System1 emotional data to steer them in the right direction. So follow me on LinkedIn, and you'll be the first to be able to use that.
Rob: Sounds exciting. Can you reveal the name yet, or is that still under wraps?
Andrew: I haven't read the legal email on this yet, so —
Rob: Then don't.
Elena: We don't wanna get you in trouble.
Andrew: No, no, no.
Rob: We'll call it — we'll call it the Tindall —
Andrew: No, no, no, it's not. It's — it's Test Your Ad something.
Elena: Okay.
Rob: All right, sounds great.
Elena: Amazing. Excited to see that. All right, thanks so much for joining us, Andrew. That was fun.
Andrew: Rising to it.
Rob: Thank you, Andrew.