Hat Marketing seine Effektivität verloren?

[Musik] Hat Marketing seine Effektivität verloren? Mit dieser Frage starten wir in die neue Staffel von "Agency Life Deutschland" bei Teamleader. Nur heute werden nicht wir beginnen, sondern Robin und Luis. Ihr kennt die beiden bereits aus der Folge mit Michael Farmer und auch heute wartet ein Special auf euch. Die beiden haben sich mit dem Marketing-Pionier Steve Harrison unterhalten, und mit ihm über seine Ansichten zur Szene und den aktuellen Status Quo gesprochen. Und in diesem Sinne geben wir auch ab an Robin und Luis. Viel Spaß beim Reinhören. [Musik] Bevor wir mit der heutigen Folge starten, möchten wir euch zunächst erklären, worum es uns und unserem Partner Teamleader in diesem Podcast überhaupt geht. Wir laden in jeder Folge spannende Persönlichkeiten aus der deutschen Agenturszene ein, die mit ihren Erfahrungen und ihrem Wissen andere Agenturen inspirieren und motivieren möchten. Genau dort setzt Teamleader mit seiner leistungsstarken Agentursoftware an. Diese hilft bereits über 4000 Agenturen dabei, Terminfristen einzuhalten, Budgets zu kontrollieren, Gewinnmargen zu steigern, Kapazitäten zu planen und vieles mehr. Damit ihr euch voll und ganz auf eure Kreativität konzentrieren könnt. Von Agenturen für Agenturen. Und los geht's mit unserer heutigen Folge. [Musik] Heute wählen wir den Gehirn eines legendären Briten, der in der Zeit den Gehirn eines anderen Advertising-Legends in seinem neuesten Buch "The Howard Gossage Show" gewählt hat. Für diejenigen, die in der Karte in den letzten Monaten leben, spreche ich natürlich von Steve Harrison. Er ist alles über unseren LinkedIn-Kanal gelesen, zumindest bei mir. Und er hat uns heute auf dem Podcast herzlich begleitet. Sehr herzlich willkommen, Steve. Danke. Vielen Dank, dass du da bist. Ich kann nur sagen, dass der einzige Grund, warum man einen "Legend" nennt, ist, weil die Leute nicht erinnern können, wofür du in dem ersten Platz bekannt warst. Danke für diese Erklärung, Steve. Übrigens. Es war, wie wir gesagt haben, unser Freund Geert, der uns an dich angetan hat. Und wie Luisa gesagt hat, sahen wir viele Leute, die über dein Buch posten, besonders auf LinkedIn. Do you feel the same? Is it resonating with people? Very much so. Dave Dye and I launched the book at the beginning of April and we scheduled other things in for our lives from about mid-May onwards, early May onwards. We thought it would take about four weeks for the wave to break and then normal life could be resumed, but that hasn't been the case. Very pleasantly surprised by the way it's been received, but also I think when we were writing this book, I said to Dave last June, I said, "Dave, you know something, ma'am, we've got the gestalt by the bollocks here." This is a very timely book. I think the industry is, there will be a very appreciative audience for the book and that is how it's turned out, thankfully. Yeah, I think it will be good to get into the book in a minute because indeed we're very curious not only on the life of Howard Gossage, which you talk about, but also how it resonates with today's ad industry and what advertising agencies can learn from Howard's work and from his view on things. So let's get into that in a minute, but maybe first, Steve, I think your name will ring a bell to most of our listeners, but maybe some people don't know you, so I'd like to give you the opportunity to introduce yourself. Oh my God, OK. My name is Steve Harrison. I am a copywriter. I was the European Creative Director at Oval V1 and the Global Creative Director at Wunderman, either side of starting my own agency, HTW, and under my leadership, we won more Cannes Lions in ad discipline than any other agency in the world. Upon being made Global Creative Director, I realized it was an impossible job. I'd also sold my agency and become unmanageable and I left Agency Life and wrote and I've written books as a result and been a commentator on the industry. I've also tried to help businesses with their marketing and their copywriting, so I've enjoyed doing that. It continues to be an interesting, I don't know whether it's a career, I'm not quite sure whether I've had a career, but an interesting pastime. So let's talk about that new book, shall we? The Howard Gosset Show and what it can teach you about advertising, fun, fame, and manipulating the media. That subtitle is important here because we'll dive into each one of those keywords and how they fit into Howard's story and into his work. But to give our listeners the full context, can you summarize what the book is about and especially why you felt it was important to write it right now? Okie dokie, it is about, Howard Gosset Show is an unknown quantity, I think, in the history of advertising. Rory Sutherland, with whom you may be familiar, he's the Vice Chair or Chairman of Ogilvy and a big Gosset Show fan, famously said that Howard Gosset Show is the velvet underground to David Ogilvy's Beatles and Bill Birnbach's Rolling Stones. Never a household name, but to the cognoscenti, a lot more inspirational and influential. So why is he important? And I would say that, as I said, I think that in writing the book we had the stout by the bollocks because I think the creative industries over the past 10 years, 10-12 years, seem to have lost their way, lost direction and unfortunately, in so doing, lost much of their audience. There was a very sobering assessment of Agency Life which went something like this, where once the public rather liked advertising and we liked working in the business, our consuming public now do pretty much anything to avoid it and sadly a lot of us are looking for ways to leave. And that gloomy prognosis came from none other than the chairman of the DNAD, the custodians of advertising creativity. I would ascribe the problem to, and I think you want to talk about hyper-targeting later, but I would ascribe the problem to a couple of things that have driven advertising over the past 10-15 years, that's hyper-targeting and hyper-seriousness. By hyper-seriousness, I would lay that at the door of the near obsession with social purpose and I think that there's a dawning realisation amongst people in the industry that actually that fun and light-heartedness need to be reintroduced back into the industry. I'm sure you're familiar with Dave Trott. How about Sir John Hagerty? Sir John Hagerty explained that the best business advice he's ever had came from a greengrocer who said, "When they're not smiling, they're not buying." John then concluded, "I think he's right. We should never overlook the power of humour, especially its potential to connect." I went to see Sir John at the Caples Awards about six weeks ago and he was interviewed there as the guest speaker and he was asked, "How would you define the work that you admire the most and the work that you feel has been of your own work that has been most successful?" And he said, "Irreverence. Irreverence. It's work that is irreverent. That is the work that I admire most and that is the work which in my portfolio has been most successful and the work of which I'm proudest." And there is a sense that we need to get back to what Howard Gossage taught us and that is that we are in show business. It is our job to entertain and advertising works best when it is entertaining and fun. And so that, I think, is one of the key reasons why this book is pertinent to today's advertising malaise. How it can address advertising's current malaise. Maybe a quick side question on the humour. How do you feel in that perspective about humour categories being introduced at award shows? Is it a good way to get humour and get fun back into the industry? No, I think the award shows our institutions will hang on as long as they can to social purpose as the driving force behind the industry. And I think what it is doing, it is ring-fencing humour. Ring-fencing humour so that purpose can retain its hold upon the new definition of creative excellence. Over the past 10, 12 years there has been a new definition of creative excellence and it is one that has got to have positive outcomes for all. It isn't enough for the outcomes to be specific to the product, service or brand that is being sold and the customer who is buying that product, service. It has got to have general positive outcomes for all, which means it has got to be about sustainability. It has got to tick lots of progressive boxes. But that is the new definition of creative excellence and it is one that has been foisted upon us and one which you break ranks at that at your peril if you are in the jury room. So ring-fencing humour allows humour to be, yes we find that is important, it is very patronising, condescending attitude really, but okay let's push that over there and let's get on with the serious business of depressing the shit out of everybody. We had a previous guest in a previous episode, a Dutchman who said, well he quipped, outside of greater Amsterdam nobody owns an aesthetic e-bike. Is there a sort of disconnect between the people making ads and the people consuming ads nowadays? We know the stats, don't we? I mean in the UK, and I imagine that they are somewhat mirrored in Belgium and in Netherlands, but in the UK the latest stats we have are 84% of the agency workforces aged 18 to 40. 70% grew up in a household where the chief income earner was social group grade AB, which is the highest, most affluent social grade, whereas it is 29% in the modern mainstream. 63% had parents with a professional background. 88% have got a degree or an MA. And of our Black, Asian and mixed ethnicity cohort, 69% were privately educated, so we have, regardless of the ethnicity, it is the same bunch of posh people with the same bunch of progressive values. And so yes, I do think that we are somewhat cut off. We are not in tune with the people outside of the e-bike riding fraternity in Amsterdam. All right. So in a nutshell, one of the criticisms that you post up are that one, advertising has lost its effectiveness because it kind of refuses to really sell effectively. Two, that it's kind of lost its humor. As you describe with one of your favorite adjectives, advertising has gotten po-faced. And thirdly, that perhaps there's a disconnect between advertising makers and advertising consumers. With that set aside, let's dive into the books that Howard got to show and find what we can learn from the man himself to perhaps counter some of these trends. Yes, Steve, one of Howard's most famous lines is people read what interests them. And sometimes it's an ad. Can you explain what he meant exactly by that? Of course. Yeah, it is his most famous line, but I don't think people have quite grasped its full meaning. And it is this, that it isn't enough to do advertising that is more interesting than other ads, either your competitors or ads for the categories. That's easy because as Howard knew and we all know that 90 percent of all advertising is pretty ineffective anyway. Howard's point was that you should try and do advertising that is as interesting or maybe even more interesting than the material that surrounds it. So in his day, it was he would try and do an advertisement that was more interesting than the features or the editorial or the sports reporting or the weather forecast or whatever. The stuff that people actually bought the newspaper or magazine for. And in our day, it would be trying to do things that are as interesting as out of home on television. And specifically do things that are as interesting or more interesting than the stuff that people log on to the Internet for. And that was that was the point. The other thing that he set out to do, I think, and that was another thing that Howard hit upon long before anyone else. And that the advertising was only the first stage in a marketing media plan that would engage and use all of the unpaid media to amplify that message. So Howard's aim was to get the newspapers and the radio talking about the ads that he. Yeah, yeah, I thought I thought it was very interesting to see in the book how how Howard did so many things for the first time. He was the first to understand that, yeah, bad press is also is also press. For example, perhaps the most controversial ad in the entire book is the one for the beer brand that casually in long copy asks its audience. Do you think we should take away women's rights to vote? And I read it and I thought, oh, that wouldn't fly in this day. But also in that day, it didn't fly. And that was the the effect he went for. Yes, it was for Rainier Ale. Now, Rainier Ale was a very strong beer and they couldn't advertise Rainier beer for its strength. There were, you know, kind of restrictions on that. So Howard and his team did. They said that this is a man's beer. You know, it's a beer for men. And then they took it to the nth degree, as Howard always does. It's not for women. They don't like it. It's too strong for women. Women have got more refined and demure tastes than that. And then Howard then took it to the nth degree. Women have got refined and demure tastes to the extent that we shouldn't bother them with serious subjects like voting. And I think we should the argument for repealing the 19th Amendment. And of course, he got demonstrations by the League of Female Voters. And they came and demonstrated outside the Rainier beer factory and as usual, lots of column inches. Now, back in the day, I think most people realized that it was it was done provocatively, but with a tongue in cheek. But to this day now, whenever I show that advertising, you will see a hush falls over the whole of the audience. And suddenly people are recalibrating their view from one minute thinking, Howard Gossage, what a guy, really great guy. I think we should cancel this. So do you feel being provocative is the way to to use the media to its full potential and to enhance your ad or other other ways to to make use of the strength of media? I don't think provocative in a way of shocking people's moral sensibilities. I don't think that's a very good idea at all. And I don't think advertising, I don't think advertising's role is to make people feel uncomfortable or to irritate them. I really don't. What Gossage did do was that he said things that were unusual and outrageous and fun. And, you know, what the hell does he mean by this? Like the Qantas ad when he was asked to to promote Qantas's new transcontinental airliner and to come up with a name for it. His idea was to use advertising to ask people to name the app, to name the sorry, name the jet plane. TWA had called it the what did they call it? Super Constellation, I think it was a lovely name, fabulous name. And it spent a million and a half dollars promoting it. And Qantas had no money at all. And they just ran a few trade ads, trade press ads. And Gossage said, what should we call it? And he enticed people to get involved by saying, be the first on your block to win a kangaroo. Now, it may seem off the wall and maybe possibly a little silly. But as Gossage said, what he wanted to do was to come up with a tone of voice, a manner of speaking, which communicated the informality and the approachableness and the friendliness of an Australian brand. But he was talking about tone of voice years before anybody talked about tone of voice. And when he was describing that campaign for Qantas, he was talking about positioning, positioning Qantas, as opposed to TWA, for example, you know, or Pan Am or any of the big chest beating big airlines. He was positioning Qantas in a way that was uniquely Australian, long before Jack Reese and Trout, Reese and Trout came up with the term positioning. So there was always a commercial, certainly a hard commercial business intent behind what appeared to be wild and wacky and bizarre, iconoclastic, irreverent campaigns. Yeah, I think what's also really interesting about the example is how Howard almost, avant la lettre, uses interactive advertising when asking people, what should we name this aircraft? Absolutely, it's a way to interact with the audience in a time long before we can do it as we do today in social media, etc. Well, he wasn't the first person to use coupons, of course. Coupon advertising was used by mail order people and direct response people, but always to generate a lead or generate a sale. And what Howard did is he used the coupons to to involve his audience. This whole thing was he needed to involve, he says involving the audience gives the campaign an energy of its own and an emotional bond would develop. You know, he ran an ad for the whiskey distillers of Ireland, you know, kind of, and it just said, should we advertise in summer? There is probably still is a kind of golden rule amongst media buyers that advertising in summer is probably not very effective. And Howard had been told this, but never one to take conventional wisdom. He just ran an ad, should we be advertising in summer? And he got 2000 responses, you know, kind of 2000 people clipped the coupon in the New Yorker and gave him their opinion. You know, there's nothing to gain. There was no, you know, kind of no sale involved in any of this. But it was part of that community that he built. In a way, it shows a lot of respect for the audience. Oh, completely. I mean, as he said, I mean, you know, in this racket, you know, you're pitching for a piece of business and you'll go. Here's the launch ad. Here's the follow up ad. Here's the ad we do on Valentine's Day. Here's the Christmas ad. Here's the dealer ad. Here's the, you know, and Howard didn't do that. He said we do one ad at a time. We do one ad and then we see what the response was and then we do the follow up ad. He said, sometimes we get ahead of ourselves and we do three ads. But he said, usually by the time the third ad comes around, it's no longer appropriate because the audience has moved us in another direction. And he had a term for this, as Gerry Mander, his partner, said, Howard called it interactive. He actually called it interactive. God bless him. In 1964, 1965. Why is it that today with the opportunities that we have to go into interaction with our audience and ask them what they think of us and what they want, that we kind of stopped doing that now that it's all the more easy to do that? I think it's because we want to talk to them about subjects that we want to talk about. We think that because we have got direct access to them, we can get our message to them and that makes it important to them. And we've convinced ourselves over the past 20 years that people are interested in what we say, automatically interested. Whereas what Howard did was he said something interesting. And then he, if there was a sales message, it was almost like exit via the gift shop, as far as Howard was concerned. If you understand that term, he'd get you in to show you something interesting and then exit by the gift shop as you were leaving. And if you fancy buying something, then please buy something. So as I say, I don't think we have the confidence or actually the intention of saying something interesting to people other than buy this now, especially on the Internet. Basically, Howard perfected the art of selling by not selling. He was master of the soft sell, yes. Perhaps let's move this conversation along, Louise, unless you have another thing to ask. So basically what Howard did was he emphasized fame, that brands should be well known not only by their buyer's audience, but just by the general public. And he claims that advertising's role is to make brands famous. This is kind of like contradictory to the current way where ads are approaching their consumers, which is hyper targeted digital ads. What's your opinion on that situation? Have we gone too far with targeting? First off, I think just to clarify the whole thing about fame and it was Jeremy, Jeremy Bulmore, who was a contemporary of Howard's. He said just about the only thing that successful brands have in common is a certain kind of fame. For most human beings, fame not only holds a powerful fascination, but bestows an incalculable value on anything that enjoys it. OK, and Jeremy's point was that your advertising, everybody wants their advertising to be seen by their target audience. But the trick is to have your advertising talked about by people who will never buy your product or service, will never be interested in your product or service. That is true fame. When the general public are talking about your advertising, then that means that your brand has become famous. OK, and Howard definitely did this. If you go through his the ads in the book, you'll see that he made Qantas Airlines famous to people who would never fly in their lives. He made Rainier Ale, as we talked about with the Votes for Women campaign and the Irish whiskey distillers. He made them famous to people who are T Total, you know. He made Rover Cars and Fina Petrol famous to people who never drove a car. And that, I think, is that is the essence of fame and successful advertising. Now, I said at the start of this talk that the industry has been driven by two forces in the past 10, 15 years. The one is hyper seriousness and I talk about social purpose in that way, but hyper targeting. And the idea that you that big data can direct an ad at me. I'm sitting on the can, right on the toilet, and you can send a message to me just as I'm reaching for the Andrex toilet tissue and tell me that I should be buying who gives a crap toilet paper. This is the delivering the message at the moment when the target audiences is most susceptible to your message. OK, now I think that the proof of that is that I think that is wrong on two counts. The first is that we've abandoned idea and creativity and it's been trumped by timing and offer, you know, kind of the hyper targeting that the timing of the message and the offer you can make trumps creativity and idea. So you're talking about an ideas free zone, essentially with most hyper targeted digital work. So it's wrong on that track, but it's particularly wrong because how can you make a brand famous to the outside world if you're targeting only your customers? But you need to be talked about by people who are not in your target audience, the man and woman in the street, you know, need to be quoting your ads, humming your ads, part of the catchphrase of their eyes, part of the warp and weft of their life, you know. And it's interesting in the UK that we don't have ads over the past 10, 15 years. We haven't got anything. I don't think that has landed in culture in the way that ads used to when I was up until the turn of the century, because I think of the emphasis on hyper targeting and on hyper seriousness. I think it's quite similar in Belgium and the Netherlands. I was wondering, though, do you feel that that targeting or hyper targeting is a completely bad thing in itself and should be should be eliminated? Or can it be useful in combination with an ad on in above the line and an out of home that does make a brand famous? You're absolutely right, Louise. Integrated advertising is still for me the answer to successful advertising. But I think that it needs to be brand driven, of course. So no, hyper targeting brilliant if you can pull that off, you know, but I think it should be part of an overarching strategy. Perhaps in defense or as devil's advocate for modern advertising, can we say that it's gotten exponentially more difficult to cut through the everyday haze of the tsunamis of communication and messages that are coming over the audience? Has it got more difficult to really catch the eye and the ear of the audience and to become famous? It shouldn't have really, should it? Because I don't know. I've got some research and it's in a different file or whatever. And there's a there's a neuroscientist who tells us that the brain, we talk about overloading the brain, you know, kind of. And eventually we just get too full of information. But in order for us to remain sane, we actually cut out. We have a very good filter for cutting out crap, you know. What we do notice is stuff that is useful to us, you know, or unusual. Another one of the things that Howard's pioneered, not just making your brand super famous, but also the cult of personality itself. Oh, completely. I mean, he did his best ads for himself. And he was he was he was a show man, you know, he was in show business with Howard, you know. And it's again, it's fascinating, you know, how he how his whole approach to everything was to entertain people. Did he he he he it drove him mad trying to achieve that. He worked so hard. He would go up up to his attic in the firehouse and spend lock himself away for days on end. And became a horrible man to work with, you know, sustained by cups of hot chocolate whiskey and Galois cigarettes and pet pills. And he was Alice Lowe said he was a horrible person to work with, you know, a really bad tempered person. You know, he took it very, very seriously, you know, although they are like many funny men. He actually took his craft extremely seriously. Steve, you've mentioned it shortly before, but I want to dig into this a little bit deeper in the first book that you wrote in 2012. Changing the world is only fit work for a grown man. You write about how Gossage reinvented advertising and then changed the world. How do you feel that that differs from the current approach to purpose in the industry? Well, quite frankly, Louise, Howard. Did great cause related work, you know, the the the work that he did, which was changing the world, was charity and cause related work. You know, the work he did for the Sierra Club, the Sierra Club was a charity and he did magnificent work there, stopping the damage, his idea with the use of coupons and creating feedback loops, stopped the damming of the Grand Canyon and the flooding of the Grand Canyon. And the ads he did subsequently, you know, protected forests, pine forests, and, you know, so. But you will not find now social purpose is the usage of commercial clients for social purposes for the social good. And Howard did not use his commercial clients for anything other than selling their cars, their petrol, their whiskey, their beer. What's your personal favorite Gossage ad, if I may ask? I think it's it's one of the early ones, and it's for new color margarine. And his brief was to simple advertising awareness, name recognition, keep the name in front of the public. And the idea was to do some radio spots in New York, you know, five five five borough area. But what he did was he actually hired a pilot to sign write new color above the skies of Manhattan on the Monday, the Tuesday, the Wednesday, the Thursday, the Friday and ran a full page ads in the New Yorker beforehand, saying that this sign writer had never done it before. He'd never actually sign write it before. He was a crop sprayer from the Midwest. But hey, oh, you know, he's going to try his best and there will be daily radio bulletins explaining his successes, you know, you know, and go with him. So this full page ad with no mention of new color, but saying that this whole gig was taking place. And of course, the the the sign writer misspelt new color on Monday and the radio, the radio spots, you know, suppose the editorial, they want spots. They were they were dressed up to sound like news footage, you know, reported on this Tuesday gets it wrong. Wednesday gets it wrong. Thursday gets it wrong. So by Friday, the whole of Manhattan stops on midday to see whether Dudley, as he was called, would finally get it right. And you see, you know, kind of to everyone's absolute delight, he actually spelt it right. And by which time the radio stations, the newspapers are all over it, you know, to everybody's hilarity and satisfaction apart from new color, who fired him because clients being clients, I don't think he told them actually what was going to happen. And of course, clients don't like their brand name being messed around with. So I think something out of nowhere, you know, kind of that that he was an entertainer. You mentioned that the advertiser actually fired him for this work. It makes me wonder if brands today, if Howard was alive, would hire him with his controversial ideas and his different way of approaching things. Well, you know, there's a couple of ways of looking at that. Howard would only deal with the chairman or the CEO. You know, he said, I don't want to deal with people who who can say no or no. I don't want to deal with people who can't say yes, who can who can they're free to say no, but they can't say yes. OK, so he would only work with, if possible, with the president or the other owner of the brand. So he's built up great relationships with them. But the other thing is that I think that there's a certain that this is an observation about the UK, that creative directors fresh to the industry had that charisma about them whereby people would trust them. People would clients would be slightly in awe of creative directors. And I do wonder whether we're whether we're whether we've lost that cavalier creative lead like we used to have. Louise, I think Steve gave us a magnificent bridge to talk a bit about Michael Farmer, perhaps, don't you think? Because you completely agree? I completely agree. Thank you for that, Steve. Yeah. So a while ago, we had a man in our studio or remotely called Michael Farmer, an American gentleman who talked about how, quote, the agency industry is broken, unquote. After hearing you talk about the issues in the industry, I wonder, do you agree with Michael or is it not at all that bad? Look, I I know a hell of a lot about Howard Gossage, and I think I know quite a lot about the the general directions the industry has taken over the past 10, 12 years. It's hard not to be aware of that, you know. I don't work in agencies and I don't have a an informed view of whether that is the case. I think that we've lost all confidence in ourselves. And this is I'm not sure that that's because clients have lost confidence in us or clients are sensitive to our lack of confidence. But I think that one of the things that we could do to rectify this is to have an all out advertising campaign on advertising's value to clients in commercial terms. And I think this is something that we've neglected terribly over the past 10 years. And I think that the agency model is broken because clients can't see our value and we've done nothing to enlighten them. Nothing. So that I think if the agency if it's broken, it's simply broken as a business because people can't see the business purpose in it anymore. Clients can't. So they treat us badly. And they don't pay us. And you wonder and they'll probably say, why should we? And they don't give us time and they don't give us money because we haven't convinced them that it's a damn good idea to use us. Well, honestly, we've been hearing a lot of in what you just said and in the rest of the conversation, a lot of parallels with what others have said here as well. Underpaid, not given enough time, not given enough respect, can see eye to eye with the customer because the customer has somewhat lost faith in the agencies. And that's why they partially also change agencies every every three years. So, yeah, the good good news is or the positive note, it appears that if this problem is a real thing, that many top voices in the industry are feeling it. So positive change might be around the corner. Good. Well, I think so. I think with the sense that we have got to that, I think the whole idea of rekindling our interest in commercial purpose, which you do detect, you know, I do detect that pendulum swimming back to that, that understanding that things that sell things are equally as admirable as things that, you know, save the oceans. Well, whether or not the industry is broken and how we can fix it, what does seem apparent is that it's becoming hard to find people and to keep people on in agencies. They, as you said in the beginning of this podcast, we're looking to move away from the industry, we want to leave it. People are struggling with with work-life balance, et cetera. What's your opinion on this situation, on getting people to want to work in the industry again? Well, I mean, the first thing is that you start doing work that is entertaining, you know, you start doing work that people home and quote and becomes part of, you know, that you grow up with and you say, I want a bit of that, you know, kind of I want to participate in that industry. Gaming has no difficulty finding recruits, you know. The gaming industry in our country is massively booming and has no difficulty because it's part of people's lives. You know, we've got to make, so it would it would the first step would be to make advertising that people like, you know, how to attract people to it. I. The work-life balance thing, I think, is a. I don't think that people will be attracted to an industry because it has a good work-life balance. I think they will be attracted to an industry that will make them famous and and quite wealthy. And I think that I find I thought I think the work-life balance thing is a is a bit of a problem. Generally in in my country, work is now regarded as a what would you say it's it's an intrusion and necessary evil, something that stunts your personal growth, you know, kind of limits your happiness, but it's something that impinges upon your real life. And I think that this sense of a reluctance to encourage people to throw themselves into their chosen profession results in the fact that, again, I talk to quite a few creative directors and they say or managing directors more than anything, and they say that they're that they're that they're achieving seven out of ten at best. You know, as far as the creative product, we're getting a lot of seven out of tens. But if I don't know, we're not getting any nine out of tens. And I think you get seven out of tens. And this is probably going to go down like a cup of sick. But you get a lot of seven out of tens when the creative director or executive creative director can't say this isn't good enough. Go back and do some more. And I want to see it by tomorrow lunchtime, which is, you know, it's like, oh, my God, you know, you can't say that to people. So the creative director who's got a pitch the following after the presentation the following afternoon has got to say, that's all right. It'll do because they know they don't they can't call upon their staff now to come back at lunchtime with something better, you know, because it would impinge upon their work life balance, you know, kind of. And, you know, I think that any great person I ever worked with never did 40 hours a week. You know, they're then the really good ones. Generally, their work and their life were indiscernible linked. So your work and your life, you and you derive your enjoyment, your sense of personal satisfaction from the thing that you do. During the daytime, you know, it becomes who you are and whether that is limiting to people, whether that inhibits personal growth. I don't know. I don't know. What do you think? Yes, it depends who you are. I asked Rainier Steurus, a guest in our previous season of Agency Live, something about work and work life balance. And I remember very well that he answered somewhat quizzically, like, what do you mean? I'm I'm doing work all the time. If you love what you do, then then you can't stop doing it. Right. And I guess that's the mentality that you would have to have to be successful in the long game of this Agency Life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. I just think it's very difficult to be to produce consistently. You've got to be brilliant to consistently produce very good work 40 hours a week, you know. And so to do great work quickly is something that is probably the province of hugely experienced people. But youngsters coming into the industry cannot do the great work in 40 hours a week. You understand what I mean? And in order to work these long hours and long weeks, the youngsters will have to have something to look forward to, like you say, some fame, recognition, wealth somewhere down the line. Otherwise, without the success experience on the other side of the rainbow, nobody will nobody will put in the work to become truly great. And no, it's a vicious cycle, I guess. Yes, of course. Some of the things that you mentioned, like looking at work life balance in a different way, but also what you mentioned earlier about emphasizing the value of the industry towards our clients are all ways in which the industry has to has to change and make some some bigger shifts. I was wondering, though, for our listeners, what are maybe some smaller, some easier steps they can take starting tomorrow to change things around? Well, for me, I think that this this advice actually would help recruit new people, better people would help with the work life balance. And that is that I would drastically reduce the role that HR play in an agency. I think management have rather shamefully delegated a lot of their roles to HR, you know, kind of to begin with recruitment. I think that, for example, the creative director should be the person who prospective employees come to. I think as a creative director, you should be constantly looking for people who are better in order to, you know, you should know who's out there. You know, you know, you should be visiting the schools and everything. You should be looking at who's winning awards. You know, you should be you should know who the hell is out there. And you should also be looking at prospects coming in. And I can't understand why you would allow HR to be the person who vets the new recruits to creative, to planning, to account handling. It's the manager's job to to sort out recruitment training that it is the manager's job to make sure that the people who you who work for you leave you better than they were when they came in. You know, they should leave for much better paid jobs. That's that's your role. You know, the managing director should do it. The head of account people, the creative should be training regular weekly sessions and making their people better. That would, I think, make people feel so much better about working in a place that they were getting the support they were progressing. You understand, you know, we are doing the 10,000 hours for you, you know. And the other thing I think that HR have been tasked with is setting the moral and social climate for the agency and saying what the behave, setting the behavioral norms for the agency. And I think that, again, is an abdication of responsibility on the manager's part that the management should be. They should view the agency as an organic entity. And you know when it's sick, you know, you know, when your organization is sick and who is responsible for who the bully is over there, who the sexist is over there, who the racist is over there, who the homophobe is over there. You should you should know this shit, you know, kind of. And you should set the tone, you know, kind of. And you should have the ability to to understand nuance, you know, so that it doesn't become a humorless, pole faced place of work where people are afraid of misspeaking. You understand what I mean? You know, so that would be a simple thing for me. Fire HR, take HR into the room, get HR to fire itself. I'm going to make let HR fire themselves into the subtitle of this episode. I mean, clickbait works well, so that's that's a good one. And there's no point in me ever applying for a job anywhere, is there, because as soon as HR see. But it's been interesting to listen to you in this respect, Steve, because it's as you you hint at it a lot yourself. I'm sure you're aware, but some of the stuff you say, written in different words, shorter, with less of an explanation to it, it can come off as inflammatory. You see it and you mention it in some of your LinkedIn posts that you go on the territory of, for example, progressive hiring and ageism, that all of a sudden these LinkedIn likes and the smiley faces, they really drop down pretty, pretty harshly because people are they're afraid to touch this stuff, even with a nuanced conversation, which is I think it's probably a shame. Steve, I think we're nearing the end of this super interesting podcast. I do have one final question for you, though, maybe looking looking ahead a little bit into the future. How do you see the industry evolving in the next, say, 20, 20 years? Do you think Howard's ideas will make a return or will we continue to go down the path of hyper-targeting purpose, et cetera? I think unless we are again, you know, this is the other stuff I've ventured my opinion upon. I feel reasonably confident that it might be interesting or at least informed. This one, I will just venture that it can if the industry continues in thrall to the next silver bullet to come along, you know, the next the next bandwagon to roll by in the hope that they that we can convince our clients that we really do know what we're doing. Then I don't see a lot of future for us. But I think if the industry gets back to as I do think, you know, if the industry accepts that its role is to build brands and sell things and that it can add value to our clients by building brands and selling things for them, then I think from that will proceed a different outlook and more pragmatic and more businesslike and more commercially oriented outlook. And it will stop looking for native advertising, influencer advertising, AI, you know, kind of every two years something new comes up. And, you know, kind of and just close the door on the next martech salesman who comes around, you know, that's not the answer. It's a tool, but it's not the the core competence lies in understanding marketing and advertising. So, you know, for what it's worth, that's that would be my take. Positive, I think there's a positive way through this. And the first flowerings of that might be the sense that we are that commercial purpose is is is the way to go, you know. But who knows? Who knows? And I think the best way to start with putting that idea of understanding advertising, understanding marketing is perhaps reading. Thank you very much. Our readers and listeners can apply their own post-its to whatever they find most interesting. And with that, I believe we can close off for today. So, Steve, it was wild peeking into your head and in that of Howard Gossage. I assume our listeners and readers can still get a hold of that book of yours. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And I think it's on Amazon. I don't know how quickly you can get a copy in Belgium, though, unfortunately. Hopefully, Amazon have got their act together. But if people want to buy in bulk, I can have my publisher send them. Which kind of makes things quicker and I think cheaper as well gets through the EU problems. Possibly. I don't know. So if you want to buy Steve's book as a lonely reader, amazon.com.be might be the option for you. Otherwise, contact HR or no, go straight to your managing director and have them order a thousand bulk copies for everybody in the broader agency. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you very much for joining us on Agency Live, Steve. Dankeschön. Danke, Louise. Danke, Robin. Und diskutiert gerne mit und hinterlasst uns einen Kommentar im Kommentarfeld. Auch neue Gäste sind jederzeit herzlich willkommen. Auch diese könnt ihr uns im Kommentarfeld vorschlagen. Und vergesst nicht uns zu folgen und vor allem tippt auf die Glocke, um keine der neuen Folgen "Agency Life Deutschland" zu verpassen.