Finding the Balance Between Data and Creativity in Advertising

Written by Glenda Wynyard

In the fast-paced world that is the advertising industry, striking the right balance between data and creativity is crucial. In our game, the most brilliant creative ideas are usually based on an equally brilliant insight that resonates with and engages audiences. How does one get such an insight? Data, observation, and sometimes, a little bit of intuition.

When the balance between data driven insight and intuition-led ideation is managed correctly, campaigns can yield exceptional results.

But what do we need to know about this “sweet spot” between data and creativity?

Fact #1: Better Creative Fuels Long-Term Value

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's priorities for long term effective advertising emphasize the importance of creativity. Distinctiveness, engagement, emotion, and longevity are key elements of effective creative campaigns.

Naturally, with budgets constantly under the microscope, marketers are always trying to prove the value of their campaigns internally and as a part of this, immediate ROAS becomes a sign of a job well done. Focusing too heavily on the lower funnel, sales messaging reduces investment in creative brand building which we know is a must have for increasing memorability, salience, and future earning potential for clients.

Fact #2: Creative Measurement Tools Are Here To Be Utilised

Some measurement is marvellous! Creative measurement platforms are continually evolving to enhance and inform the relationship between media and creative (in both traditional and digital environments). However, due to campaign budget and timeline restraints, these tools are often overlooked.

Tools like JC Decaux's "Optix" for example, allow us to measure creative effectiveness on OOH by producing heatmaps that identify the most eye-catching elements. Measurement tools like these should be utilised more frequently - they can facilitate refinement until success.

Fact #3: Integration Can Be An Efficiency Superpower In the quest for success, many businesses and organisations seek an integrated approach that combines the power of data and creativity. Why? Because this holistic approach offers numerous benefits, allowing for collaboration between the two realms.

This integrated approach allows for a seamless flow of ideas, with data informing creative decisions and creative thinking unlocking new possibilities for data exploration. It promotes cross-functional and cross-department collaboration and fosters a culture of shared knowledge and expertise. By breaking down these traditional silos and encouraging collaboration between data analysts and creatives, it enhances the collective intelligence and boosts comprehensive and effective solutions.

Finding this balance between data and creative doesn’t just mean idea versus evidence. It means supporting and interrogating the idea with collective brainpower.

Fact #4: Data Alone Can't Tell the Whole Story

William Bernbach once suggested that campaigns based solely on numbers often fail to stand out. He noted, "One of the disadvantages of doing everything mathematically, by research, is that after a while, everybody does it the same way." As data capabilities, AI, and tools like ChatGPT begin to impact creative processes, we run the risk of losing originality. We must ensure that data and creativity work hand in hand to spark innovation and captivate audiences.

If AI could emulate human emotion, ChatGPT would be doing our jobs by now. The good news is, it can’t (yet), so we’re safe (for now).

We must remember that we work in the business of communicating with human beings. The nuance of our experiences, feelings, and thoughts can't be distilled into numbers on a chart.

Fact #5: Sometimes It Pays To Trust Your Gut

Sometimes trusting your gut is necessary. When we measure everything within an inch of its life, we can sacrifice intrinsic human connection, resulting in overly stat-driven, dry, and almost robotic campaigns. Sometimes, there is such a thing as too much data.

Some of the most successful creative campaigns have had their fair share of complaints and mountains of bad press, but the results have proven that the risk was worth it for their target audience. If these same campaigns were focus-grouped into oblivion, it is unlikely that they would've seen the light of day.

So, when it comes to utilising data and creativity in campaigns, let’s keep our humanity at the forefront while embracing the opportunities that data-driven insights provide. Creative isn’t the be-all and end-all, but it’s certainly the Yin to data's Yang.

This article is part of a series following the topics covered on our podcast, Pending Approval.

Glenda Wynyard is the Managing Director of The Media Precinct and host of the Pending Approval podcast. She draws on her wealth of experience in advertising to bring you key ideas from the topics covered in the show.

Get these tips and all the podcast news, straight to your inbox.

Tags: GWsFastFive

Transcript - Pending Approval Ep 27: Bibliosexual with Dave McCaughan Pt 1

Glenda [00:00:00] Before we get started, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we produce this podcast, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay our respects to their elders, past, present and emerging.

Speaker 2 [00:00:13] May I have your attention, please? This is Pending Approval, advertising from the inside out.

Glenda [00:00:23] Hello and welcome to the Pending approval podcast, advertising from the inside out. I'm your host, Glenda Wynyard. For those that don't know, my whole career has been in media and advertising, and this podcast is all about the industry, from AI to media performance, sharing my own insights as well as my fellow host Jack Geraghty and our guests.

Jack [00:00:46] This is true.

Glenda [00:00:47] This is true, Jack, we've got 4 minutes to get our listeners to want to keep listening, apparently that's the biggest drop off right in a podcast. What have you got to say that's interesting?

Jack [00:00:57] The pressure is on, yes, it's a big question made me kind of realise that maybe my life isn't that interesting at all but what's happening in my world?

Glenda [00:01:04] That's a great start for everyone, isn't it?

Jack [00:01:07] Please listen ahead, well, then, you know, it's been a bit happening in my world. We've had the mighty Maroons win last night, which was great. If I can just sneak that one in there, what else has been happening? I've been planning a trip to New York, which I'm looking forward to at the end of the year. But other than that, just been living the dream. What's been happening in your world?

Glenda [00:01:28] Work, work and more work, now, Jack, I used to work in the same agency group as our next guest.

Jack [00:01:35] Today, we've got a super talented strategic planner with whom, as you said, you shed some time at McCann. Do you want to introduce him, Glenda?

Glenda [00:01:42] Well, we do indeed. He's got over three decades of experience in strategic planning account management. I think he is absolutely brilliant with his insights and his research programmes as well. He's worked all across the industry, Asia Pacific, the States everywhere. Joining us from Bangkok, it's none other than the fabulous Mr. Dave McCogan. How are you?

Dave [00:02:04] I'm good.

Glenda [00:02:05] Dave, you and I have obviously had a bit of a shared history at McCann, where you did some amazing work with Pulse, and we'll talk about that later. But I always love to start the Pending Approval podcast by asking guests to provide our listeners with a little bit of a background on your career and how you've become an expert in your field. So what's your story?

Dave [00:02:28] Well, my story is I am a Parramatta boy who left school, got a job at the local public library in Parramatta and stayed for ten years and at night went off and got a couple of degrees, including one in librarianship. So that's what I am professionally, I guess, after about 10 years, I, like most Australians, took my long service leave and spent eight months backpacking around the world where I, including nine months working as a butler for a very reclusive, strange duke, who lived in the centre of Rome, and went back to Australia, went back to public libraries out of Blacktown, but after about six months, realised I was getting close to 30, broke and being a children's storyteller in public libraries didn't pay very much. So I applied for and accidentally got a job at McCann in Sydney to be sort of the in-house librarian cum researcher and that then led to me getting trying to be a planner. I was very lucky that McCann had sent me to London and New York to get training to be a planner, which was really new back in those days the concept of strategic planning and stayed with McCann in Sydney for nine years. It was towards the end of that time was when I sort of met Glenda and then I over time had been developing some different research programs, which I guess we're going to talk about some more. But that then ended up me being asked to spend more and more time in Asia helping the McCann Asian offices rethink about things like strategic planning, market research, etc. and eventually the company decided that it would be better if I was just based somewhere in Asia. So I moved to Bangkok, stayed there for five years, then to Hong Kong, then to Tokyo for 10 years, then back to Hong Kong. So I ended up with McCann for 27 years in total across all these places. And I ran the offices in Hong Kong and Bangkok. I was the general manager at Tokyo, which was a 900-people agency that filled around three quarters of a billion dollars. So you can imagine that sort of made all Sydney agencies look a bit small by comparison. And I was most of that time I was the head of strategic planning for Asia Pacific and got to do a lot of interesting things; a lot of interesting clients around the region because of that and that's sort of the potted history. 2015, I finally left McCann and decided to live in Asia and freelance as a consultant, which is what I do now. So I basically now help companies on their brand story in one way or another across mostly Asian companies these days, mostly Asian companies that are trying to expand across borders and figure out how their story will work in other places. Is that enough?

Glenda [00:05:24] That's enough, I mean that sets the credentials, doesn't it? It sets everything. And look, I love the way that you can actually come up with a name. And I love the name bibliosexual. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later. We'll get to that because, Dave, I think you've been quite pioneering in the way you approach advertising and particularly understanding people and how they can be connected with advertising. And I'd love to talk to you a little bit about Pulse because you developed that, it's your baby. Could you give us an overview of Pulse, the four main constituencies, these identity builders, career builders, family builders, new life builders, and then that fifth audience, the observers of change and talk us through the work that went into this program, how you developed it, because it's fascinating.

Dave [00:06:18] Well, I'm glad you remembered it.

Glenda [00:06:21] I still use some of the names.

Dave [00:06:24] Yes, no, that's good.

Glenda [00:06:25] I do, I refer to it all the time, Pulse.

Dave [00:06:28] Yes, well, it actually started when I was still working at McCann in Australia in the early '90s. And the precursor to Pulse was a program we had in Australia called Throb, and we used to say it was Throb and the dual meanings were perfectly meaning were on purpose because Throb was a program where we developed, which was try to understand young Australia at the time and we were trying to understand what was really making their heart throb, but also what was sexy to them. And so that involved just literally sitting in a teenager's bedrooms talking to them. So rather than doing focus groups in a traditional sense, we started a program which was pretty innovative at the time, which was, well, what we do is we would say to, you know, okay, Geoff, you're a 16-year-old living in Blacktown. Can you get to your mates at your place at 4:00 in the afternoon and I'll come and sit in your bedroom and we'll talk about music and bands and T-shirts and stuff like that? We never talked about brands, we never talked about ad campaigns, we just talked about what they were interested and that sort of got a good following amongst clients. You know, it became sort of interesting. You've got to remember back then nobody had ever done this at ad agencies and especially particularly we were doing this in the suburbs. We weren't doing this in the part of town where most of the people at the ad agencies lived. It would be in Sydney terms. We were going out literally to Blacktown, Penrith, Liverpool, places like that. Well, after a while this is why one of the reasons why I kept on getting asked them to go up to different McCann offices in the rest of Asia and start similar programs. And after a couple of years of this happening, I got asked to move to Bangkok in a regional role, but basically set up something similar across Asia. And we were working with a guy named Don Norris, who was a Canadian guy who moved to Bangkok at the same time as I did.

Glenda [00:08:28] Loved Don.

Dave [00:08:30] We put together this program that we called Pulse and then became the Cam Pulse, you know, to brand it better. The idea was twofold, one was to not do the normal sort of survey research, but do more qualitative research to try to figure out what was really going on in people's lives that mattered. And the premise was always that marketing and advertising should be based on what matters to people, not what matters to me as the brand or maybe the ad agency guy, but what matters to them. And so we started doing a program that involved every week doing a focus group, and in the end it was across 20 different cities across Asia Pacific. Every week, a focus group and the focus group was very open, so there were very few questions. Now, instead of a moderator's guide is a lot of you and your audience will be used and you go to a focus group and you've got a moderator's guide got three pages of questions. This would literally be like this week; you've got to ask two questions. And then just see where the conversation goes. And the two questions might be as stupid as who's the hottest singer in the world or, you know, the question might be, what's the best new thing you ate in the last six months and let's see where and when. Very quickly what we started off doing that and mostly with again with teenagers, young adults, because I was working a lot on the Coca-Cola brand, and that's what they wanted to know. But we very quickly decided no, that we shouldn't take that to cover all the different life stages. So this is about or just before we heard about this thing called Generation X, okay, so before that, what we laid light into was that life stage is the most important thing. And we identified four key life stages that people generally go through. Well, so one was identity builders, and that was built around the premise that in your very late teens, early 20s, you're really trying to figure out who you are and you're going through all the things that which is my band, which is my music, which is my outfits, you know, who do I hang out with, all that sort of stuff. Now, you're also probably leaving school, leaving uni or going to uni and figuring out like, what do I want to do with my life right now. All of that packaged up was identity builders but then we identify what we call career builders, and that would be people that would be in the first ten years of their working life. So 20s, early 30s and the principle there was that a career builder is somebody who's in theory focused on their career, but is also going through a lot of other things. So, you know, that's quite often the time when you sort of get seriously into dating for example, maybe get your first really serious boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, your living relationship situation changes, your relationships change. Some people get very serious about life. Some people basically just go wherever the flow goes so that exploring that. And then you have the next stage, which is people generally remember this is the '90s by that stage in Australia or in most developed countries or the semi developed countries in Asia, at 30 you were really thinking about having a family. And so we were thinking about people in their 30s, in their early 40s, who are thinking about getting into a permanent relationship, having kids, mortgages, all that crappy part of life in some way, but also a sort of fulfilling part of life and so tracking down what people really thought in that stage. And then the fourth stage was what we call new life builders and that was through some work I previously done, which was started to identify something that now in 2023 we see in so many countries, everybody sort of gets, which is that from the ages, more and more people were going to be living into their 70s, 80s, 90s. And more and more people at 55, mid-50s, through to 75 were not old or were not going to be old that in the past if you said somebody was 70, oh, that's a poor old bugger, you know, that sort of stuff. Whereas as we've turned out in 2023, I always use the thing now, when Glenda was young and she had an uncle that died and he died at 65, you'd have gone, lived a good life. Now, if you know anybody that dies at 65, you go, oh, geez, he died young. We've seen this massive shift and the new life builders was this recognition that we had a really different generation developing that hadn't existed before mankind. It wasn't people that were old. It was people who were probably their kids that moved out at home or they weren't dependent anymore. The mortgage was coming to an end. In Australia, for example, they were maybe financially starting to explore what else to do. They maybe had still had five, 10, 15 years of work to go, but they would start to think about what they were going to do when they stopped working or gradually stopped working. So we use those full life stages and what would happen is we'd rotate every week. So every week it'll be every across all these cities, we want you to do a focus group this. Now, the other element of doing that was we really encouraged countries in their offices not to have the jacks of the world. They are the guys who are planners or whatever do the interviews. We encourage them to have everybody take turns. So in Bangkok, for example, one time, we got the cleanup to actually run the focus group and that way, what happened was the magic of that was getting people who didn't normally do this to actually talk to normal people because one of the things because I was a westie, grew up in Parramatta. When I first started at McCann in Sydney, there were about 125 staff. I was the only person who lived west of Glebe. So I was and I actually got I would overhear these things, why that guy talks weird that's because I talk with a Westie accent. And so part of doing all this programming I found when I moved to Asia, it was even worse that people that worked in ad agencies have been people that went to very specific universities from very specific tiers of society, and they'd often never talk to a farmer. They'd never talk to a factory worker. They never talked to their own cleaners, their own maids. So this was to get our people aware of what real people were talking about.

Glenda [00:15:19] Brilliant, brilliant study I've never ever forgotten was McCann's 100th birthday. And we identified a topic in every country that Pulse was in, and we were able to use those insights to give a project or campaign back to that country. And I think that was just it must have been one of your proudest moments. I know that we were very proud. I was in New Zealand at the time. We gave an award winning campaign back to the Human Rights Commission over there with one of the insights that we had identified. And I would have thought you would have sat there going, oh my God, this is brilliant.

Dave [00:16:03] Yes, no, this was great. I mean, I was very lucky that when we first started the program, fortunately, about a year after we started it, there was a major, well there were big agency global conferences held in the States, and they asked me to speak to the collected heads of McCann from around the world about what we're doing and on the spot, the then chairman of the company said, now we're going to make this a global program. So that was great and as you say, there were certain points in the career of this Pulse program where like the 100 year anniversary, whereas it was really good. Now, I have to say the Pulse program continues in a slightly different way they now call them the McCann Truth. And I'm no longer associated with McCann, but McCann still does it literally, I think it's yesterday at Cairns at the festival in Cairns, they were actually holding up a McCann Truth seminar on the main stage in Cairns. So, you know, the company has it's sort of evolved in some slightly different ways, but it's still there. And the point is that I think when we started doing it, within a couple of years, other agencies started doing not the same thing but programs which were maybe we should just try to understand what's going on with people's lives, which, you know, and I guess, Jack, you know, obviously, you've come into the business, you know, years later, but maybe in your training you would think, oh, well, that's normal but believe me that was not normal in the '90s.

Jack [00:17:31] That's what I was going to say and I think, as Glenda said, it sounds like, you know, the word pioneering is incredibly accurate in terms of your approach to not only research but the industry as a whole. And I think we're definitely guilty still as an industry of kind of operating in bubbles. And it's sort of funny the way you spoke about, you know, being from Parramatta and then versus the kind of attitude and the sentiment of a lot of people in the agency being from different parts of Sydney and I'm actually from Brisbane originally and there's, you know, I think it has evolved a lot. But you still have those kind of ideas of, you know, as an industry that often tries to predicate itself on being unbiased and, you know, getting to the truth of human connection, we still sometimes have that, you know, oh, this is a survey of one or are we, you know, thinking about this in a Surry Hills bubble here or in in Brisbane, you might say, oh you know is this are we thinking about this from a tender brief and you said kind of little bubble that we're living in so it's really interesting.

Dave [00:18:26] You're right, Jack, I mean, one of the biggest traps in the first couple of years that after I literally accidentally joined an ad agency, when I first got day one, I had no idea what an ad agency did, literally no idea. And one of the traps that I felt that people fell into were simple things like not really understanding that normal people like we take it for granted. Now, you know, when you say things like, well, normal people don't actually think about ads. Well, no, they don't, but they do. So the fact is that, you know, I would hear this and think about, yes, research says people don't really like ads. And I go, well, research says that because you've asked people, do you really like ads and they say, no. But have you ever sat at the Panthers Club on a Friday night when everybody's into their fourth round and guess what, quite often an ad will pop up in conversation. Now, it might be, did you see that sock of an ad for X-Y-Z? But it comes up and what you should be doing is listening to those conversations. What are normal people thinking? What are they doing? And it also pays off, especially, I think now in the last 10 years or so, the social media world, as you know, understanding that if you're going to do stuff through social media, if you're going to podcast in the last ten years as they develop, you can get around subjects that people care about that thing you said about the first 4 minute, you've got to grab their attention. Of course, of course you do, I mean, think about it. Watching a movie online, if it's no good after four minutes, yesterday, last night, sitting here on the couch with my wife, three movies got rejected within the first 5 minutes. What are you doing? Well, I don't like it. How do you know? You only watched 5 minutes? Well, I can tell. So we can all do that now. But we need to understand that sort of thinking in the way people react to stuff.

Glenda [00:20:26] No, that's very, very true. And even in advertising now, within social like you say, it's a one second rule. I always say it's you know, if you don't catch them in the first, second or first three seconds, you're gone.

Dave [00:20:39] Of course.

Glenda [00:20:39] Dave, just back on to Pulse, what are some of the most memorable client campaigns that you worked on that you feel that Pulse really helped to shape? You know what I mean because there were fantastic insights and campaigns that came out of it.

Dave [00:20:55] Well, I think one of the things that really continue is MasterCard's prices campaign. So it didn't directly come from a Pulse finding but what happened was there were a few of us that were involved in the development of that idea of that campaign, the winning of the pitch and then it was like, it's going to go global. And the struggle was if you think about and go back to the first few years of that campaign, you know, it was really about taking little slices of real people's lives about some moment that was more special than the price you paid for, because that's literally the line, right? So the struggle for people all over the world, the people in the agency, all over the world, was what are these moments? What is it? You could take the original, the very first MasterCard ad that ran in the US was Dad takes his eight-year-old son to his first ever baseball game. And you know the popcorn costs this, the tickets cost this but spending time with your son is priceless. Now, literally, that ad got copied and remade all over the world. And instead of baseball, we go to your first rugby league game or your first Aussie Rules game or your first soccer match or whatever the sport was but once we got past that, it was like and what Pulse do was find moments that were the really significant things. And I'll never forget in India, one of the first ads made was four guys who were white collar the classic what we call career builders, so five years into their white collar jobs, but there were four guys who had gone to the same college and had shared a room together at college. And it was the reunion and it was that moment of going back. And here you are, you know, you're in your suits, you're all posh, you got careers now. But as soon as you got back together with these four guys you went to uni with, it was like, we're still 18. And it's the same moment and any of us that saw that ad, you know, that was true because, you know, that was that moment. So MasterCard helped bring a lot of the moments that we were discovering through Pulse programs all over the world. Another one that was really good for me was we got given a project by Coca-Cola to develop the first ever Ramadan commercial for Coca-Cola. And of course, Coke is associated with Christmas for 100 years now. And we all know the story that the way we think of Santa Claus was actually a design adopted by Coca-Cola back in the 1920s and all this sort of stuff. And basically the brief was, let's do that for Ramadan. So how does Coke but do it in a non-offensive way? Remember that, you know, it's Ramadan, it's Muslims. It's how do you do this for a big Western brand and do it. And we ended up making a campaign that ran in, I think, '20, '21, '22 Muslim countries around the world. It was all voluntary. It was made and then every country had to decide, you want to use or not? Yes, it looks great. It looks great. And again, it was based around the discovery through Pulse of the moment that meant the most inside the whole Ramadan month and the moment when the family came together and how Coke represented a little treat at the end of the day. So without getting into details of the way it works, that's what it was. And we just managed to do that through listening to what people really do. We are asking the question, you know, hey, what's special about Ramadan? And then you'd hear this thing and you'd be able to go with that. By the way, we ended up being able to do this exact same thing with Chinese New Year in China and made the first ever Chinese New Year TV commercial based again around a Pulse insight that helped us pull together the ad.

Jack [00:24:51] I think it's super cool. I think it's really interesting, I think how pioneering this approach to insights through different life stages. And it seems like, you know, you've really developed a strong grasp on how people's attitudes tend to fluctuate and change throughout different points of their lives, which I think is something that's, you know, always really interesting in the research sort of aspect of what we do. We actually recently interviewed the head of Roy Morgan Research, Michele Levine, and one of the questions we asked her that we wanted to put to you as well, and that was are our behaviours as consumers intrinsically attached to our personalities? I mean how dramatically does this fluctuate in the face of something like a pandemic or recession or even, you know, how dramatically does this fluctuate throughout the course of our lives?

Dave [00:25:33] I think there are a lot of evidence that what happens is that you do behave in the same way that what happens is if there are huge panic moments, there are also the life stage moments. So we know that, you know, you had those whether it's five or six crisis points in life, you know, like graduating school or getting married or having a kid, all those sorts of things. Do they really, really change people that much? They changed some of the other needs, but did they change the inner perspectives that take with it? No, not necessarily, I think one of the other things, too, is that we've got to realise that a lot of these when we talk about change, the change is forced upon us by technological changes more than anything else so and then we get carried away. And so, you know, the classic example is, I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was the hot new thing. This just changed life forever. And then I read a book called The Victorian Internet, which I think still is the best book I've ever written about media. And the book is actually about the introduction of the telegraph back in the 1860s. And what the guy that wrote that did was he went up to the New York Public Library and found a whole bunch of newspapers from the 1860s and clipped the headlines. And then he compared them to the headlines that were happening at the beginning of this century in major newspapers in America. And literally word for word, they were the same headlines, right, about the Internet and about the telegraph, because we sometimes get carried away that, oh, now we can do Zoom-based podcasts. All the world is changed. And you go yes, but there was stuff before that. It's not a revolution. It is classically, it's these things, all revolutions and the whole thing about chatGPT now and about all it's changing so dramatically. Well, yes, but you know what, I'll guarantee you the headlines, the one about chatGPT; we're exactly the same headlines with people who were talking about the introduction of state power in the 1760s.

Glenda [00:27:41] I read a very interesting article about the rate of app development. So they say that there have always been great apps, to your point, it's just the rate of them has accelerated. So I think we just have to, you know, put things into perspective. You're quite right, we would in the previous podcast, they were laughing at me because I was talking about my first agency and how we were thinking about whether or not we upgraded the telex machine or we bought one of these new fax machines.

Dave [00:28:15] I remember that debate.

Glenda [00:28:17] Exactly and those sorts of things happened and life changed because you had a fax machine and you didn't have a telex, you know, that was a huge change.

Jack [00:28:27] It's interesting and kind of reassuring retrospectively. You kind of realise that, you are now, it is kind of doing old things in new ways. So I think you kind of seek solace in that, looking back. But I think when something is as new and kind of daunting on face value as something like, you know, the Apple Vision Pro, it does kind of induce that panic and that sort of, oh, okay, this too new, this is too scary. But I mean, in a lot of ways it's allowing us to do stuff we've always been doing. But in a, you know, kind of new enhanced way, which is, as you said, the same thing with the telegram and the telegraph, you know, all that sort of thing but that's an interesting insight, as you said Dave that the headlines kind of are always the same sentiment. It's, you know, shock, horror, the world's going to end.

Glenda [00:29:10] And I find also if people aren't used to using certain technologies like there's a lot of discussion around chatGPT and how it's affecting creative, it's not so much about media, which is my bag, it's because we use technology constantly. We're working with data, we're working with AI, do you know what I mean? Like it's actually really quite evolved for us and I think that's an interesting, it's how familiar you are with the different types of technology as to whether or not you're nervous about it.

Jack [00:29:42] Yes, exactly, I guess it's sort of about getting ahead of it too, and finding ways to make it work for you before it takes your job.

Dave [00:29:50] The reality is that people are always a little bit afraid of the new and very few people just totally embrace the new. And so if you go back again, you know, think about when Adobe was introduced and all those tools that we now take for granted and said, you know, my son is a designer, you know, you can't, you go into any design agency, ad agency, everybody, you know, how could you survive without Adobe. But I remember when that was introduced that was the same reaction with chatGPT it was like, well, only cheats would use this because, you know, if you're really good, you'll be sitting there over desk with a pen and then you'll be scanning the things. We react to things with a little bit of fear. We react to change with fear and we see that's why politicians always play up the good old days. I mean, the shortcut for any politician is to go, well, let's go back to the way it was. Let's get back to the good old days, you know, I'm going to bring you back when America is great again. All Trump does is just, you know, it's about trying to get people to overcome their fear of the future by saying, I'll take you back to when it was right. Well, he can't be, nobody can't, you can't go backwards, so you've just got to slowly adapt to go forward.

Glenda [00:31:13] I agree with you but just on that topic, because you think about consumers and their behaviours and how we do evolve all the time, and particularly in the face of adversity, I always find it's really interesting to track how people evolve, as they grow older. And we touched on new life builders earlier, and you've also previously suggested that it's no longer retirement, that we should be calling it retryment and could you elaborate on this, like, I just feel like it's a very interesting topic around this ageing sector.

Dave [00:31:51] Again that goes back to the realisation a couple of decades ago that when you're talking about people in their late 50s through the early mid-70s, most people that reach that age group in Australia, for example, if you reach your 60s, statistically you're going to live to be close to 90, at least.

Glenda [00:32:12] I've told my kids 95 and I'm not wearing nappies either Dave.

Dave [00:32:17] Well good luck to your kids, Glenda because you'll be probably around about 50 years time, you know but that's the reality. So then what happens is and this is why, you know, with all the government, you know, concerns about how they're going to pay pensions and all the rest of it. But the other side of that is if you hit 55 today or your late 50s or early 60s, most people are smart enough to know that the whole concept of, well, 65 compulsory retirement, then they go on to pension just doesn't work. Now, in some cases, because the pension is not going to be enough, there are concerns whether the pension will be able to keep up with cost of living and all that sort of stuff. Most people in theory, they had their superannuation in Australia stacked away, but we all know that a lot of people don't have enough money in their superannuation to take care of things. So there are the concerns of what am I going to do? There's also the other side, though, which is the concern of, you know, you hit your early mid-60s and you start thinking about, should I retire? Will the company make me retire? What will I do to fill in time and all this sort of stuff? And the reality of it is I have a friend of mine who retired a few years ago and he was a mad keen golfer his whole life. And so retirement was great, I got to play golf, but after three months he decided he was only going to play golf on Wednesday and Saturday because in the first few months he was playing golf four or five times a week. And he said, you know what, I'm going hate it if I play every day, I've got to keep it special. So I'll make it twice a week and then it's special. But then the problem is, what am I going to do for the other five days of the week? And so for a lot of reasons, this whole idea of retirement comes into play. Now, it could be retry in terms of finding a different type of job because for different reasons, you can't do the job you used do or you don't want to do the job you used to do, or you can afford to try a different type of job. And it might be a totally different change of career or a totally different type of work that you want to do. It could be retrying in terms of retryment, in terms of education. So we've seen all around the world, you know, that universities, colleges, you know, doing courses for people in their 50s and 60s and 70s is becoming more and more normal. You know, I always want to go back and do a course in this. I always wanted to study that for different reasons. And so I'm going to go back and do it, sometimes tied to money and career and opportunities, sometimes just because I want to do it. It could be for example, I hadn't played tennis for about 30 years. Until the last few years when I've been spending more and more time with my son and daughter, both work and live in Sydney. So I've been spending more time down there and there's a tennis court in the Glebe at the back of the apartment block where my daughter lives. So when I'm down there, I started playing tennis again. Now, it happened by accident, but I look forward to it now. Tennis is now part of my life again. It hadn't been for 30 years. So this retryment can be all sorts of things. But the bigger thing is the realisation for companies and brands to realise that people in their 50s, 60s, 70s are not dying. They're actually trying new ways to live. They're retrying the way they live and so what companies and this is where I still think so many companies make the mistake of we've got to get young people for the future. Now, you know, I'm sure Jack has seen more research than he'll need to see show that that's just BS. People don't do that. What you need to do is to focus where the money is and where people want to do things and explore things and by the way, in Australia, that should be people in the 50s, 60s and 70s. As I keep on saying, if you're a smart marketer and you've got any common sense that's where all your money should be being thrown at because that's the future.

Glenda [00:36:20] Well, this is future Glenda speaking here, or GW, as everyone else likes to call me. What I just want to say is that Dave MCcogan has been such a fascinating guest that we've decided to split this podcast into two different parts. So we'll see you for part two.

Jack [00:36:38] See you then.

Glenda [00:36:38] Bye.

[00:36:39] May I have your attention, please? This is Pending Approval, advertising from the inside out.

Transcript - Pending Approval Ep 28 Bibliosexual with Dave McCaughan Pt 2

Glenda [00:00:00] Before we get started, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we produce this podcast, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and pay our respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. Picking up from last week's episode, we're now bringing back Dave MCcogan for part two.

Jack [00:00:18] Let's do it.

[00:00:19] May I have your attention, please? This is Pending Approval, advertising from the inside out.

Jack [00:00:29] I think it's a big mindset shift that I think a lot of people in our industry don't really make frequently enough. And, you know, I think we're kind of trapped in that focus on the young for the future kind of mantra in a lot of what we do from either a global or an Australian perspective. Is there anything that springs to mind that you think marketers and advertisers could be doing better to connect with those older generations more to grow those market segments more?

Dave [00:00:55] Well, simple things, I think it was think a bell a couple of years ago, made a bit of news because they hired an intern. They were going to hire an intern that was over 50, so I've been sort of saying this for a long time. If you're working, whether you're on the client side or the agency side, internships for people over 50, it seems to me like something you should be doing even if it's just a three-month or two-month internship to bring in people that are in their 60s and 70s to just sit inside the company and do grunt work but talk to people. But the other thing, of course, is hiring and retraining people in those age groups. There's not enough. We sometimes think when we talk about, you know, especially in the agency world, we think about what you're really talking about, Dave, is like the older guys and the senior managers, like Glenda's age group, you know, will keep them around for another ten years. No, I'm talking about account management people at the junior level. Are you hiring people? And I don't know if you ever saw that Robert De Niro movie, The Apprentice that's exactly what companies should be doing, is going out and finding people who want to do something new. And it could be short-term jobs, part-time gigs, whatever, but getting them in to work beside everybody else. And to understand that now you can, you can go and do all the research and by the way, you should still be doing research with people of all age groups and all that sort of stuff. But actually the thing of sitting with people day-to-day who and the other thing is and what I do talk at conferences about ageing populations, one of the things I usually start off with is get the audience to close your eyes and think about somebody in their 70s and nearly everybody pictures their own grandparents from years ago. And you've got to then say open your eyes and then start flicking through photos of 70-year-old people today. And you've got to realise that they're not the same. Being 70 today is getting started; it's not the end. It's not your grandmother in the kitchen making your pancakes as a treat to a kid. It's learning to be a DJ and I always use because I spent so many years in Japan, there are some great examples. You know, one of the most popular DJs, who recently because she's coming up to 90, has decided to retire. But for the last ten years one of most popular DJs, she was this woman who didn't take up DJing until she was in the late 70s. There's another woman in Japan who's very famous who about 20 years ago got bored with, decided that she liked playing computer games and mobile games, but didn't think anything were made for people with her age group. So she got bored, she went off and in her 70s learned to program so that she could then write her own games. And one of those games became the number, I think was the number two top selling game on Apple in Japan at one stage. And she now in her 90s was asked by the Japanese government to set up programming schools for seniors all across Japan. So these are examples of, you know, those are exceptional go-getters, but this is the sort of thing that companies should be embracing. You know, like, where am I going to find somebody who is 70, go out and recruit people to come and change things? One of the things, Jack, that you have to remember is the perception, the wide held perception, that people over 50 don't learn things or don't want to learn new things or can't learn new things. And again, there is no actual evidence for that, that's a social perception. But actually the only thing you have to do is you have to remember, if you've been taught to learn things in a certain way, you have to then teach people things that way, if that makes sense. So I always use the example, if you went back 20 years ago, if you brought any piece of technology inside the box, what was beside the piece of technology.

Jack [00:05:10] Instruction manual?

Dave [00:05:11] An instruction manual, now, at some point, about close to 20 years ago, Apple as a company, decided to not include the instruction manual. Now they'll tell you it's because you don't need it, because the products are intuitive. I argue no, it's because they realised they could save a lot of money from not having to print the manuals. But the reality is, if you want to deal with older people, you've just got to teach them the technology in the way they understand it. But that's the same for people who are teaching people anything anywhere in the world. I don't know, do you guys have rice cookers at home?

Glenda [00:05:47] Yes.

Jack [00:05:48] I don't but I want one.

Dave [00:05:50] You don't but you want one but think about it, rice cookers in Australia are a relatively new thing in the last ten, 15 years, where every house has to have that the rice cooker. But we all managed to cook rice before we had rice cookers. They are a convenience and maybe you like the way it does it but we managed it before. But if I go back 20 years ago and I said to Glenda, you know, you need a rice cooker, you probably would have gone A, what is it and B, what's the benefit? I don't actually understand it and it's just another bit of mucking around.

Glenda [00:06:20] So my husband won't use it. I don't cook, but he does. And so he doesn't use it. It sits in the cupboard.

Dave [00:06:30] Yes, it's just different things. We have to take on board that now because of the work I do working mostly across Asia, you actually have to understand its cultural, its age cultures, its all sorts of cultural differences and you have to adapt that people will take things on board based on their cultural backgrounds and the historic backgrounds and their own personal backgrounds. And you can't necessarily say, well, just because the Japanese do this, this is something you should do. You need to figure out a way to explain it and make it popular.

Glenda [00:07:05] And I'm in my 50s and about to cross over into the 60s so I hope Jack doesn't think that I've stopped learning.

Jack [00:07:13] No, well, see, you're learning new things every day.

Glenda [00:07:16] I do. I just don't feel like I'm old.

Jack [00:07:20] No, yes, fair enough, well, it's all-relative.

Glenda [00:07:24] Can we raise this to, like, 70+? Thanks, Dave, not 50+, like, I'm sitting here going, oh, my God.

Dave [00:07:31] But here's the thing, this is why I often talk until about the fact that this is like the most dramatic change in literally millennia for mankind because if you think about it, even when I was a kid in the '70s, the thought that everybody in Australia would be thinking about living to be 90 was like, yes, yes, right, you know that a pipe dream right now. Let's face it, everybody, you know, unless they're chronically ill right now, will be thinking in the back of their heads, they're probably going, the reality is they're probably going to be living in today, well into their 80s and 90s, if you're a woman, certainly into your 90s, you know, so that's just life and we just got to get our heads around it.

Glenda [00:08:18] Look, I totally agree, you know, it leads me into this building of, you know, around the topic of audiences and understanding, you know, sort of what's going on and the importance of the role in actually telling the story. You even coined the term bibliosexual. Could you tell us a bit more about how you, I love it, I think it's great but how did you discover that term and what does it mean to you?

Dave [00:08:46] Okay, I told you I used to be a children's librarian and the thing about sitting in Parramatta, the branch libraries of Parramatta. So for a two-year period in my very early 20s, I was working at the Ermington Branch Library at Parramatta Library Service. Now that basically meant that I sat there all day and did nothing. We didn't get a lot of people coming to the little local library, [00:09:15]still [0.0s] kids after school, but during the day I had hours to kill and the lady I work with who was older than my mother, the very first week she said to me, have you ever read Zane Grey? Who's Zane Grey and Zane Grey, you know, I know Jack's looking at me like, who's Zane Grey?

Jack [00:09:34] I haven't heard of him.

Dave [00:09:37] Read Western novels in the 1920s and 1930s.

Jack [00:09:38] Yes, right.

Glenda [00:09:39] And was a huge fisherman.

Dave [00:09:42] And anyway, so she forced me to read some Grendel and she forced me to read all sorts of novels and then all sorts of books to kill time. But she said, look, people are going to come in and ask for your opinion on what should they read, you need to read. So she forced me to read all sorts of books I'd never read. One day I was reading a novel and there was a character in it who was described as a bibliosexual. And he was a deviant, now, of course, I then looked it up and discovered this was a real thing and a bibliosexual in a technical terms, a bibliosexual is somebody who is sexually stimulated by the smell and touch of books. So imagine somebody who walks into a library, drops his pants, gets a hard on and ejaculates just by smelling the atmosphere.

Glenda [00:10:29] Oh, my God, I love that.

Dave [00:10:31] Okay.

Jack [00:10:32] It's a lot.

Glenda [00:10:32] I can relate to this because I love novels and I know I've got this whole process. I won't let people crack a spine on a book before I do.

Jack [00:10:44] I get that.

Dave [00:10:46] For those who can't see them at this moment, Jack is wofting a book

Jack [00:10:53] This is a family friendly podcast, people, come on.

Glenda [00:10:56] Nothing family friendly.

Dave [00:10:57] So long story short, it turns out that this is actually true, that actually the glue in books, there's a particular chemical in the glue books, which does everybody's brain reacts to it, it causes a pleasure stimulation in your brain but one in a billion people that go overload that stuck with me for years. And years later, when I was working in ad agencies, I did actually come across one literally in the back the back shelves of Parramatta Library.

Glenda [00:11:36] Oh, I love that, I do think that's brilliant.

Dave [00:11:39] No, but years later, working at ad agencies and you know, we were talking a lot about the way in which people are, let's face it, as a media planner, Glenda, you would have been involved in trying to figure out which mediums are actually turning people on the most. So if you want your ad to ABC client, you want to make sure it's in a program that people are really stimulated by or people are really relaxed by, etc., etc. but we also did things like if you think about and I always use the example, let's say I wrote an article about X now I put that article in the Sydney Telegraph, but the article was also published in The Economist. A lot of people, if they read it in the Telegraph, would go, this guy's full of bull, it's a lot of BS. If they read it in The Economist, they would go, oh, that's a fantastic article because of the medium that it's placed in and so what I sort of thought about over time was people are stimulated by particular mediums. And in some ways, it sort of just doesn't make sense, to us, it's like, why do some people really get off on The Economist and others don't? Why do some people really get off on watching State of Origin last night and others couldn't care less? So that evolved into this theory of bibliosexuality, which is basically that everybody on the planet is stimulated to an irrational level by particular mediums. And one of the things that I believe that my job is to help clients understand their target market and what is stimulating them. Now, it could be in a pure sense of a medium. It could be in the sense of a medium of like a colour or a smell or a flavour or things like that. Why is it that people get so worked up about one thing but not another? And, you know, like the State of Origin is a good example. So, you know, State of Origin, Sydney and Brisbane, Queensland and New South Wales are in an uproar. But you know, in most of the rest of Australia what was on last night? Who cares? So that's what it's about that is a funny term and the reason I use it, Glenda, is because when I started my own consultancy, my wife actually said to me, what are you going to put on your business card? And I said, well, you know, living in Asia, business cards are still important, and you've got to make an impact with the business card. Perfect, so my business card just has that one word on it and people automatically go, what the hell does this mean and that gives me an excuse to talk to them.

Jack [00:14:35] I think it's great and I think it's, you know, it's funny, it's catchy, it's intriguing. And I think, yes, exactly, all the things you just said, I think in a lot of ways it really perfectly encapsulates, at least from a media perspective, something we should be thinking about a lot more, is that relationship between sort of content in the format it's consumed on it and looking, framing it in that way, I think is, it's just such an interesting approach. I think this, you know, kind of cross section between form and function here is really interesting. Are there any brands or agencies or even, you know, formats that spring to mind that you think do this better than others from your experience?

Dave [00:15:11] Well, I think actually what used to happen was with broadcast television, when we only had three channels and you didn't have a choice that used to do it more than we used to think about. You know, I can remember back in those days you'd have the discussion about a particular like Number 96 for anybody that remembers that show.

Glenda [00:15:30] I do.

Dave [00:15:30] When that first came out, soap opera nighttime, Channel ten, the most outrageous program on Australian television. Totally divisive, you either loved it or you were disgusted by it, even though you probably watched it anyway but that was a really telling thing. And some brands would not advertise in it because it was publicly considered disgusting and others went. I got to be there because people are lusting over this. So that was a good example of a particular program when you only had limited formats to go for. I think actually your comment about the 4 minutes to get I think is a perfect example of this. So in our professional world we're faced with and you probably get notifications of five, ten, 20, 25, 50 podcasts a week that maybe you've watched or listen to one or you know somebody and somehow it's got on your Facebook, your LinkedIn feed and all this sort of stuff. And how many of them have you literally dropped out of after the first couple of minutes, or how many of them have you dropped, you said, no, I'm not that interested because it's got a weird title or you think it's going to be boring for etc., etc., now that's all based on perception. It's all usually based on perception. So, you know, there are a couple of podcasts, I listen to it because I know the guy who's doing it and I sort of feel a loyalty to it, even though one in particular, I listen to it and I know the audience is dwindling and dwindling because he's actually pretty boring. But I listen to him because I count him as a mate. When you guys got in touch, a couple of months ago, I'd never heard of your podcast. Thanks for getting in touch. Thanks for inviting me. But I've now listened to a few I find it interesting and so you know what, I'm a fan for now, and that's great. Just keep up the good work and keep on inviting me back and then I'll keep on listening.

Glenda [00:17:26] Exactly that's the theory.

Dave [00:17:29] But you do that, I think if you think about brands, Jack, to your point, think about what Coca-Cola has been trying to do in the last two years with this magic campaign. So whether you specifically like what they're doing or not, there's been a huge shift in Coca-Cola in terms of we've got to get really on board with, I guess, the newest forms of technology. We've got to get really on board with the metaverse. So one of the first brands we can all say what's the metaverse because that was last year's news. But they jumped into it; they're jumping straight into AI and doing stuff on there with that. Now, that's part of a strategy that is, as an outsider, I look at go, is it the Coke advertising I grew up with? And by the way, I still drink at least one Coke every single day. And I've been doing that for over 50 years and it won't put me off drinking it. It doesn't necessarily appeal to me, but I get why they're doing it, because they want to be associated with things that are magical. They want it to be a magical experience, which has always been at the essence of the brand anyway. So now that involves what we're going to be at the edge of all these new technologies and how the communication for experiences and all those sorts of things. Let's see, maybe in five years time, we look back and go, well that sucked, you know but at the moment it seems to be doing a good job of keeping them in people's faces, keeping the right audience they want to be in the face of.

Jack [00:19:02] Well, it's interesting seeing how brands are sort of trying to catch up to the technology almost with some of these platforms and mediums where we're consuming on now, the kind of brands are sort of dragging behind, and then it's a few years before they figure out how to advertise effectively on that platform, and then the next thing kind of springs up. But I just wanted to loop back for a second to on bibliosexuality and where you actually discovered that term. Obviously, that was in the library, as you said in a book and you know, we've moved across so many different mediums as both advertisers and audiences over time. Do you think the mediums that we now have in place of things like print have the same effect, I just want to sort of get your perspective on, you know, the evolution of mediums and the way with which we're communicating as advertisers, but also consuming advertising. Do you think what we have today is as effective as it used to be in, you know, in the days of the humble magazine or newspaper?

Dave [00:20:00] I don't think, seriously I don't think it's a case of being more or less effective. You know, it's the way we used in the old days, we used magazines, we used newspapers, we used television because they were there. When television was brand new in the '50s, in different parts of the world, people had to get used to how to doing it. And so we laugh now, if you really go back and go to 1948 and look at the ads that were on television in America in 1948. Of course, you're laughing because what they literally were radio ads with pictures. But it takes a while, as new mediums are developed to figure out what to do. I mean, think about, you know, what we were doing with the opening days of social media, with the Internet, etc.. We were taking TV commercials and trying to place the different formats because that's what we knew. Now we've sort of evolved. I think the biggest thing now is the realisation about mobile gaming. So I don't know the exact figure off the top of my head for Australia, but I know for example, across Southeast Asia, if you're between 15 and 35, you spend an average of 4 hours and 10 minutes a day on your mobile phone gaming. So it's by far the biggest medium in the world but it very rarely appears on media plans.

Glenda [00:21:23] Well, we just had a discussion or we just finished a podcast with the guys from Livewire, and we were just talking about how the volume of gamers and the misconception around gaming and we work with a client that's in ageing healthcare category, and we were explaining how the success that we've actually had with that client in gaming. And you know, this atypical gamer, people think that, you know, they're basically playing Call of Duty or something like that and killing people. They're not actually thinking about the Match 3D or whatever Sudoku or whatever else, Chess.

Dave [00:22:08] Exactly right and so it's sort of interesting to me in the last couple of years watching how first of all, watching people that work for the gaming not that the game developers, but the people that work for the gaming companies that are selling the services that are managing gamers, professional gamers that are professional gaming service companies, that are managing the influencers that work just within the gaming world and the struggle they have of getting on the media plan for agencies and their clients. And yet the numbers stack up but it's sort of like, the other problem is it's like, well, we can't run the same stuff we're running on other medium inside the game because people will just say that that sucks, we don't want to see that. So we're learning, we're now in that stage of learning to adapt to what you do inside the game or inside the game. What do you do inside Discord, for example and how do you make use of Discord? But remember, discord is a social medium, but it isn't like Facebook. It's not like Twitter. It works differently. So the content is going to be different.

Jack [00:23:16] That's it, what you said about television in the early days, so interesting. And I think it sort of harks back to that point of doing old things in new ways. You're right; they really were just radio ads with some visuals. But we say the same thing about gaming to our clients. Now, you can't just run a 15-second YouTube pre-roll in a game environment. It needs to be bespoke for the gaming audience and it needs to operate within that context, which yes, it's funny how, you know, you think we're trying to catch up, but really we always have been.

Glenda [00:23:44] It's always been the same. Look, when I was at McCann, we did a campaign for Powerade, it was a strategy where we had used transit media the creatives came up with a tagline that said, Stop the bus, I want to run, I'm going to get off and run from here. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, we can't run this on the back of a bus. It's actually got to be on the side of the street or where the bus pulls up at the bus stop. They get to see that they're going to jump off because it's talking to the commuter on the bus. It's not talking and it's no different that strategy or those tactics are no different from what they should be employed, if it's in a game or if it's on Facebook or TikTok or YouTube or on a billboard, you know what I mean?

Dave [00:24:33] But, Glenda, you know, the interesting thing for that is that the biggest single barrier to making any of this happen is the same old barrier, which is I can remember when I first moved to Japan, one of the most senior Japanese planners in the island is a big agency. One of my senior Japanese planners, and I was talking to them after I've been there about a month and I was talking about a very popular TV show in Japan at the time, and he said, well, I've never seen it. Now then it turned out that the guy didn't own a television set. This is nearly 2004 so at that time, TV was still a big deal. And it's shocked the heck out of me that this guy, how could you possibly be a planner in an agency and you didn't watch television that would be like saying, you know, well, I'm a proofreader, but I can't read. It's ridiculous. And in the same way, one of the things that I'm finding really interesting now is talking to clients about the mobile gaming thing. And until you say, well, you can include things like Tetris and stuff like that, oh, okay, well, I do a bit of that. But how would we message you through Tetris? And they say, well, what do you mean? So because we've got to get used to the medium that people are enjoying and how do we affect people through that medium that they are enjoying or they have to participate even, they have to use. And the mediums change but that principle is the same. The problem is there are too many people, both in the agencies and the client side. I'm not, I'm not seeing that oh it's just the way we use that medium and we've got to adapt to it. And you're perfectly right, Jack, you can't drop a Youtube 15-second thing into Discord and think that everybody's going to go, this is fantastic because the Discord discussion is talking about why are people wearing round lenses on their glasses now and then you're going to drop in the thing that's totally irrelevant to what they're talking about.

Glenda [00:26:48] Exactly, look, we also talk a lot about attention and I think this really, you know, really lends itself to that as well, because the qualitative value of an impression now, I think can be somewhat overlooked at times. I'd love to hear your perspective on how a static ad is received or and processed by an audience on a billboard versus a phone screen. And is one more valuable than the other? And if it is, why?

Dave [00:27:19] Well, I think first of all, I think we can see and, you know, again, I don't know the exact Australian numbers, but globally, of course, billboards being one of the big boom mediums of the last ten years and why is that? Well, partly it's because of the technology that's evolved and evolving. You know, I was in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago for a few days, and the day I wasn't doing anything, I went off with my wife and she was up there visiting friends. But she grabbed me, we literally travelled the equivalent of, say, going from the city centre out to Burwood just so that we could see a particular outdoor ad that she'd seen online, which was a 3D outdoor ad. Right and it was a great experience. I mean, it was just literally there must have been 500 people there sitting on the footpath waiting for it to stop because it rewinds every 15 minutes. And literally people, there is a crowd that forms every 15 minutes to watch this thing, so part of it is technology. Part of why I think the reason why Apple boomed again was simply because of reaction to the fact that we spent so much time on screens, on small screens and people want to get out. Now, we often hear this thing about, you know, parents will complain about my kids never go out and play anymore. They just do this and they just sit on the screen all day. But the truth is that people do want to get out. They do want to experience things. The thing that retailers are going through, so we've known for ten years now that shopping malls and department stores are on a slow decline in terms of the amount of people actually purchasing them. But people still go to those places and then they purchase on their phone. So that's what the real essence of when we throw the term omni channel around that's what it really means. People will go and walk around a mall and see stuff and then go and order on their phone while they're standing in front of it in the mall. Those experiences are three dimensional, touchy, feely experiences still matter people. Some people will just see it in their bedroom forever but that's always been the case, no matter what the medium.

Glenda [00:29:31] I talk about scratch markets and how you get a market like Tokyo, or you get a market like New York and London, and they are markets where there are a lot bigger budgets. There are a lot bigger populations. You're able to do way more in those markets than what you can do in a market like Sydney, for instance. It's a much smaller market. You have much smaller marketing budgets to deal with and so you can't actually get the scale to get some of these huge projects off the ground, like a massive 3D billboard that's, you know, like people of 500 people that look like there wouldn't be 500 people in the street on some of these streets, you know, and we just don't have the sites here.

Dave [00:30:19] No, but it's a cultural thing too. Would people in Melbourne actually make the effort to travel for, you know, half an hour to go and look at a billboard. Probably not because it's culturally just, in Japan, it's a cool thing in, you know, in Australia, maybe not such a cool thing to do that. Yes, they might comment on it. Yes, they might like it, but they're not going to do that. So you've just got to build on what is culturally right. Understand the local cultural factors, those sorts of things.

Glenda [00:30:50] And also what I just want to add to that Melbourne person, they would probably travel to Japan and then travel the extra half an hour to go and see the sights because it's in Japan. Do you know what I mean, like that's actually the other aspect of it as well.

Dave [00:31:06] Well that gets into another area that I've been spending a lot of time on, which is called country branding. And the way if you think it comes from Japan, it's X, if you think it comes from Adelaide it's Y. And the place of origin and whether you're travelling to that place or it's coming to you and the experience it gives you, or the perceived experience it gives you can make a huge difference in the way in which people react to stuff.

Jack [00:31:36] I think, you know, the different mediums that we have access to and I think 3D out of homes is incredibly interesting. You know, I'm probably one of those people that would travel out to see that one in Japan. And I think it's interesting too, I think the legality of it in Australia I think makes it a little bit more difficult for us to get those off the ground. I think there's a lot more sort of restriction in place with what we can achieve. Well, I wanted to ask you another question, Dave, I read somewhere that you previously mentioned a slightly different media format, but still interesting nonetheless. You describe the role of bathrooms as socially defining media. I just wanted to hear your perspective on that and where that came from. We have actually had a bit of experience in my time buying, you know, bathroom placements, which are incredibly effective. So I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

Dave [00:32:24] Not bathrooms, toilets.

Jack [00:32:26] Well, toilets specifically, yes, well, that's right.

Dave [00:32:29] Okay, so I have a speech that I do at conferences and stuff. It's called my mum's throne room, and it's about partly about the history of toilets, but I use it to explain social media and the way social media really works because if you think about it, in the history of mankind, toilets have been the dominant social media for all of recorded history. One of the examples is if you go if you travel around Europe and you go to Roman cities, so cities that were built by the Romans or the ruins of Roman cities you're going to find at the centre of the city was the public toilet, not the public baths, separate issue, but the public toilets. And the public toilets are built as a giant U-shaped bench with 20 or so seats on them. And you would sit there and you were encouraged to sit there and gossip. You sit on the toilet and talk to people and swap stories. And it's full of graffiti and it's all the normal graffiti expecting toilets plus a whole bunch of advertising stuff. And they were literally the social medium of the day. So my argument when I use this is what we think of social media, we think of stuff since you've probably never heard of this guy, there's an Aussie guy that lives in England. Darrell was the guy that invented the term social media in 1992. Okay, so full credit to an Aussie for inventing the term as we use it. But he was referring to social media in the sense we now think of it as Internet-based interchange and free access of information between people and swapping stuff. But actually, social media has been around forever, the cave paintings in the south of France, north of Spain were social media. They just were more successful than Facebook because they last there were active social media for something like 5,000 years being added to all the time. But toilets are social media because what happens is we've historically always used toilets as a place to drop the gossip. To put that, you know, you want a good time call Glenda at this number, that sort of stuff, this has always been what social media was about, and that's all, it is what Facebook is about. It's also the place the toilet was, the place you write Trump sucks or, you know, Trump is our greatest hero that was the walls. And if this were in the 1960s, that's what you would be reading on the walls of toilets so understanding that and understanding that. The other thing is that if you ever use toilets as a medium specifically for ads and I've been involved with some campaigns that have done that right, the great thing about toilets is that it is a concentrated moment. It's a moment where the rest of the world, like I can see Glenda laughing at this but it is true.

Jack [00:35:26] It's a captive audience.

Glenda [00:35:28] I call it dwell time.

Jack [00:35:32] Not only is it a captive audience, but think about it and, you know, we're getting crude. If you think about it, you're sitting on the toilet and there's that moment where you are a little bit strained and staring straight in front of you. Now, that seems to me like the perfect opportunity to place a message.

Glenda [00:35:50] Absolutely.

Dave [00:35:51] Obviously, well, absolutely and I'm always amazed, I have seen and I've participated in some very successful campaigns using toilet doors, toilet seats as mediums. Most brands won't touch it because they think our toilets are disgusting. Now, I always use that statistic, tons and tons and tons of research shows that if I entered your homes today and did a search for bacteria, the toilet is the cleanest room in the house. The toilet is the least germed room in the house; the dirtiest room in the house is always the kitchen that's always the filthiest, that's the one is disgusting with bacteria. The cleanest is nearly always the toilet, why because we actually put more effort and if you think about disinfectant, more disinfectant is used in the toilet than the rest of the house put together by a magnitude of ten. So toilets are actually really clean environments. We should be using them more often.

Jack [00:36:53] Yes, well, I mean, it doesn't have to be glamorous to be effective, does it? And I think you're right, it's a captive audience.

Glenda [00:36:57] I'm about to do a presentation tomorrow that includes toilets, so I'm actually going to use a couple of these lines for tomorrow because I know the client's going to push back. I know they're going to get really upset with me. And it's aged care again, it's aged care, so I actually think that, you know, but I've done one based on the number of times someone slightly older has to go to the bathroom particularly in high dwell times, repetition.

Dave [00:37:32] Repetition, you know, drive the message and that sort of stuff.

Glenda [00:37:35] Absolutely, look, Dave, you have been absolutely generous with your time and, and your knowledge and sharing it with. I really do believe listeners are going to get a lot out of it. But I just want to ask one more question, and it's the most important question of the day. I always find I think it's fascinating what people come back to me with. But in your view, with all of the people that you've spoken to all around the world through Pulse and everything else that you've done, what is the most useless invention of all time?

Dave [00:38:09] Oh, wow, the most useless invention. I don't know if it's an invention. I'm anti-DIY. I think DIY is just a con job.

Jack [00:38:29] Do you mean, are we talking like IKEA flatpack or what level of DIY?

Dave [00:38:34] Bunnings is the greatest rip-off retail in the world. It sucks people in to do a lot of stuff badly. And I get into this, my wife is a great DIY fan and I hate the time and effort that she puts into DIY because it just sucks. It's most of the time, it's socially would be better for society if you just hired somebody to do it. It just doesn't get done properly most of the time and more importantly, people are encouraged to do DIY and stuff they don't need to do. And I mean, that's why and so that would be my most useless thing.

Glenda [00:39:15] What about you, Jack?

Jack [00:39:16] Well, I came across on the other day, which I thought was appropriate for this chat. We just had a little bit outdated now, but a DVD rewinder. So it was a separate piece of hardware from your DVD machine, which has a rewind button on it. Oh, wait, hold on or is that no DVDs, maybe it was a video, but it was a videocassette rewinder.

Glenda [00:39:42] You could rewind it in the video.

Jack [00:39:44] I think that's what it was. It was either it must have been video, but it's not separate to your actual video player, which has inbuilt into it a rewind function anyway. So it's just a completely reductive thing. I guess maybe you'd use it in the video store that'd be the only place it would be appropriate, right?

Glenda [00:40:04] I don't know.

Dave [00:40:09] You know what, you're probably right, if you went to a Blockbuster 20 years ago because everybody used to return that video when it was on a tape and would turn those tapes at the end of the movie and so somebody in the back room had to rewind.

Jack [00:40:26] Of course, yes, I think then maybe it must have been a DVD rewinder or the point of it was that maybe it was old, maybe it was just a complete joke, maybe it wasn't a real product because you can't, we don't need to rewind DVDs. But yes, video rewind would have existed in Blockbuster for sure, because there's was that whole thing they say, be kind, rewind. You want to pay it forward to the next person loaning the video so they don't have to rewind it.

Glenda [00:40:48] I'm amazed you still remember that.

Jack [00:40:50] I think I'm older than you think, Glenda.

Glenda [00:40:52] I think you're older than me sometimes. Mine was the plastic corset. I was thinking about this, Dave, because you are up in Asia all the time and you'll appreciate this. The plastic corset to lose weight. You used to put it on and you'd like sweat it out. You were meant to sweat out basically all the fat. It didn't work.

Jack [00:41:13] As in like, would you wear it yet under your clothes throughout the course of the day?

Glenda [00:41:17] Throughout the course of the day or for a few hours.

Jack [00:41:21] I do remember those that was ridiculous.

Glenda [00:41:24] Totally ridiculous, hey, but, Dave, before we go, are you a Parramatta Eels man?

Jack [00:41:32] Yes, used to play in the old Cumberland Oval. My brother and I used to climb under the fence together, watching the break all the time.

Glenda [00:41:39] They are going to make a comeback. I've decided. It's got one of my most favourite players is playing for them at the moment. I call them Freddie Mercury and when I was up at the Rugby League World Cup, I got to talk to him and I was telling him what I call him and he just laughed. He couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe I said that mad old woman. I think he thought.

Dave [00:42:04] Yes, go Eels

Dave [00:42:06] We'll wrap it up, thank you so much again, Dave. It's been an incredibly interesting chat. If you want to find any of Dave's details, please have a look in the link in our bio, we'll pop all your details in there and then the same for me and GW as always.

Glenda [00:42:21] Yes and of course we'd love to have you join the Pending Approval community. You can sign up to our mailing list and join in on the conversation at mediaprecinct.com.au/pendingapproval. Okay, Jack and Dave that's a wrap. Hoodaroo everybody, big healthy and happy till next time.

Jack [00:42:40] Hoodaroo

Dave [00:42:41] Thanks a lot guys, thanks a lot.