In July 2021, I joined Juan Mendoza on the Making Sense of Martech podcast to discuss my recent article Adland is an Island.
Together we unpack the vast difference between the demographics, attitudes and interests of those who work in advertising and marketing and those of the general population.
You can listen the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Thanks to Juan for having me, and for featuring my piece in issue 30 of his newsletter The Martech Weekly.
Transcript
Welcome to making sense of MarTech, irregular conversations with some of the most interesting people in marketing, tech and advertising. I'm Juan Mendoza. I write the MarTech Weekly newsletter, a weekly email that covers the most important shifts in marketing technology.
People who read it work in the world's largest media, tech and advertising companies. You can rate, listen, and sign up at themartechweekly.com. Today, I'm joined by Alex Murrell. He's the strategy director at Epoch in the UK. Epoch is a brand agency. He's worked with seven of the world's 10 largest FMCG companies.
He has a unique voice when it comes to understanding the role that advertising and marketing agencies play in their clients’ growth, culture and society at large. Alex recently published a paper that was featured in TMW number 30, entitled ‘Adland Is An Island’. In it, he unpacks some of the research into the dissonance between the demographics, culture and interests of the people who do the work for brands and the general population who actually receive that work.
We unpack demographics, the nature of agency work and the lives of people who actually do it. And so now I give you Alex Murrell.
Hi Juan. Thank you for having me. I should say that this is my first ever podcast, so I apologise to your editing team if I make it difficult for them to make me sound vaguely coherent over the next hour or so.
Thanks for joining me and great to have you Alexander. I was enthralled by your research. It is quite broad, but it's also very detailed and, and unpacking some of those differences between the general consumer, the customer, the person in society, and then also the life and the interests of agency people. So I'm very interested in this conversation and I'm looking forward to where it goes.
Now. I'd like for you to give me a brief introduction to yourself and the work you do with Epoch, particularly in strategy and how you went about doing your research and what was that linchpin moment where you decided to go and chase down this work.
Sure. So as you said, I'm Strategy Director at Epoch. We're a brand agency based in Bristol. Which is a few hours west of London in the UK. We work primarily on three pillars: brand strategy, brand identity, and brand communications.
And we do that for the world's biggest FMCG brands. At the heart of the agency is a core belief that most people ignore brands because most brands ignore people. And there's a lot of research to back that up.
Most people ignore brands. There was a study a few years back from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute that found that only 40% of all brand communications were remembered. And of the 40% that were remembered only 40% of those were correctly attributed. So people remembered them, but didn't remember what brand it was.
And if you, if you combine those two findings, you come to the realisation that only 16% of all brand communications are both remembered and correctly attribute. And at Epoch, we think the way to overcome that, the way to be part of the 16% and not the 84%, is to really put the consumer first. To put them at the heart of everything. To really go out of your way to understand them, their motivations, their needstates, their triggers, their barriers, their attitudes, their interests, and to really build creative work on the back of those findings.
And I think that's that has really informed my writing and this paper in particular.
One of the first articles I wrote was called The Millennial Myth, which was really trying to unpack the assumption that demographic cohort profiles like boomers or millennials or gen Z are representative of the people who fall within those age brackets. And long story short, they don't.
That led to an article that was called Big Questions for Big Data, which made the case that data can take you so far. But qualitative research is required to get an even deeper understanding.
And then most recently Adland Is An Island posits that's those who work in our industry and advertising and marketing and PR and design are nothing like the consumers that they serve. They're nothing like the audiences that they are trying to reach or sway. So that hopefully gives you some idea of my background and my work and how it's resulted in this this piece of research.
Yeah, it's an interesting way to approach your research. Because as you've mentioned Epoch, the agency they work for, you've been working with them for about 10 years now. Working on strategy is really trying to put that consumer first and in the centre of the work that you're doing and meeting those consumer needs.
And I work in an agency myself. I say that all the time as well, but what does that actually mean? It is a bit of a catch all to say we're data driven. We want to understand our consumers and meet their needs. But what I found quite interesting in your research is a quote from your article that says “The closer we get to our brands, the further we get away from our consumers. They do not pour over our positioning. They do not dwell on the details of our designs. They do not ponder our products, our prices or promotions. In fact, they do exactly the opposite”.
I love this notion and this is something that I've carried into my career. And I remember a moment where it became real for me when I was working and heading up marketing and advertising for a small technology startup. And I was actually a customer of that startup. And then I worked in my first marketing role. And I remember this quote which said “As soon as you work for a brand, you unlearn everything”. And I actually experienced that first hand. And I think this notion that you led with in the research really speaks to this existential problem that agencies and clients have.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? When do you think these dynamics emerge agency side? Particularly when you're approaching strategy, how does this actually play out in agency life?
I'll try and unpack the quote that you've pulled out. We spend you know, 7, 8, 9, 10 hours a day thinking about the brands that we build. Many of us will be more than that. We spend every day thinking about the positioning, the personality. We read their brand books, we review the campaigns. We think about pricing and so on and so forth. We spend all day pouring over the details of the brands that we build. And yet, this is completely opposite to how most consumers think and act. There's a piece of Nielsen research where they found the average shopper spends 15 seconds per category in a supermarket and they notice less than 40% of products. They compare prices between just two. They give attention to point of sale materials for only 1.6 seconds.
And I use a bit of a rule of thumb, which is that each week people spend about 30 minutes choosing 30 products from a selection of 30,000. So there's this huge disparity between the people within our industry and the people who aren't. We spend all day week in, week out, month in, month out thinking about those brands. And this led me to writing this article was the realization that the delta between those two mindsets expands over time. The longer you spend on a brand, the more previous communications you watch, the more you think about it, that delta is just expanding and you're becoming less and less like your audience over time.
You cover eight different aspects in which agency folk are quite different to the consumers that receive their messages. But I want to talk about the idea that we tend to think of themselves as freethinkers, and mavericks, but when you actually look at the research we're actually more insular as an industry and a profession than farming, and we have more of a need for conformity than the military. Why is this a problem? Why do we think we're these creative people, when we’re actually quite insular?
Yeah, I think there's two things at play here. The first is that we are not representative of our audiences. And I try to break that down across eight or so different aspects, demographics, media use attitudes, personality, etc.
But then there's a second thing that play, which is that whilst we are not like our audiences, we are also really similar to each other. Those within our industry are, are all very homogenous. Harry Guild, a strategist at BBH, used 419 lifestyle statements from the research platform TGI to create what he called a group cohesion score, which is a single score that you can give to an audience that will tell you how homogenous or like-minded that group is. Now when he applied it to those that worked in advertising and marketing, the score came to 5.8. And I should say that the higher the number, the more homogenous the group. When you look at those who work in law, that score was 4.0. For those who work in IT, that score is 3.2. In human resources it's 1.6. In sales it's 1.2. And of all of the different professions he looked at, including farming and the military, it was actually marketing and advertising that was the most, homogenous.
Now what that indicates to me is that we are largely a monoculture. We hold very similar attitudes and opinions and have very similar lifestyles and that there is very little variety in who we are, how we think and how we behave. Now why is this a problem? Well a monoculture is the absolute antithesis of a creative culture. Creativity is about variety. It's about originality. It's about uniqueness, distinctiveness, surprise, unexpectedness. And I think a way to get to that is through the combination of different perspectives, of different ideas, and of different experiences. And when there's different backgrounds and perspectives ideas come and clash and maybe even form conflicts between each other. That's when you get breakthroughs, that's when you get creative ideas that come out of nowhere.
The idea that our industry is a monoculture is at odds with the product that we promote, which is our creativity.
And what's so real about that is when you look at the demographics of the people who make up agency workforces and how they compare to the total population. We have younger people, we’re more privately educated, and we tend to come from wealthier backgrounds.
So advertising promotes and attracts young talent because they have the bold, big ideas, but. But I wanted to get your view on this because, is there a factor of ageism happening in agencies? Is that really the right word to use? What are these forces that are driving this bottom heavy agency culture and a lack of age diversity.
Yeah. In this section of the article I pulled on research from a report which was produced by the advertising diversity task force which was the largest ever censuses of media and advertising employees. I think it drew on over two and a half thousand respondents from across 15 different agencies. And in terms of age specifically, they found that only 2% of respondents were over 55. Only 2%. In the UK as a whole the portion of the total workforce which is over 50 is 29%.
So we are 15 times lower than the total workforce. And when I look at other industries, around 22% are over 50 in finance, around 28% are over 50 in medicine around 30% are over 50 in science and around 35% are over 50 in law. And I think, I think there's two issues I'd like to draw on here.
The first is that in all of those fields experience is seen as a prerequisite for expertise. The older you are the more experienced you are and the more expert you are, and you can see that in law and in science and in medicine. Age comes with trust and reliability.
And I think the opposite is true in adland. I think we are obsessed with youth. And, as you mentioned, I think we, we conflate youth with creativity and with, with free thinking and with an ability to break the rules somewhat. I personally don't think these two should be in conflict with each other.
I think that you can have young, junior colleagues who are unencumbered, but you can also have older colleagues who have the benefit of experience and expertise. And those two things should work in harmony, just like they do in most other professions.
And the other thing is that whilst only 2% of our industry is over 50, the over fifties makeup around half of all value sales. In many categories, they make up around 60% of value sells in new car sales, they make up around 58% of spending in travel and tourism, 58% in hospitality and leisure, exactly half of all health and beauty sales, 49% of FMCG sales. And, to take this a step further, campaign magazine did an audit of advertising and found that only 5% of ads were targeted at people over 35 years. So, again, you've got this huge disparity where the spending is huge for people that are over 50 yet they are massively under-represented within our agencies and massively represented within our advertising.
And I think that feels like a massive missed opportunity. I think across countries, across brands, across agencies, we're leaving a huge amount of money on the table because of that. So there's a moral argument. But there's also a commercial argument to be made.
The share of wallet for people over 50 is actually quite massive, but then you don't see many agencies going around advertising that their workforce is disproportionately more than 45 years old. That would be very novel and, and maybe way for agencies to differentiate themselves. To say that we actually have is a broad spectrum of viewpoints up and down the demographics but also across genders as well. Which I find really pointed.
And I think that a lot of that what's causing that bottom heavy focus on youth might be due to the result of how most agencies have a pretty big drinking culture. So let's move on to attitudes.
This is another sector in your research and you talk about there's the really strong liberal leaning in agencies. 92% of people who work in agencies voted to remain in the 2016 UK referee referendum. So that's the Brexit vote. And about two times the mainstream population identify as left wing, and more than double believe that having a high status job and earning lots of money is really important to them. And so there is this cultural bias.
Where you have people who have a really high value placed on having high status and earning and creating a lot of wealth, but then a very liberal left leaning view, which skews towards a more social attitude.
And so, so what do you think are some of the causes of the ideological misalignment with mainstream culture and where does that come from and what impact does it have an agency work?
A big part of the research in this chapter comes from three reports that were published by Reach Solutions and Andrew Tenzer and his team.
Across those three reports, they surveyed seven and a half thousand British consumers. And then compared those results to 700 industry professionals. And there's a huge amount of really interesting findings around moral foundations, political leaning, what we aspire to and the differences between the industry and the broader population. There's two things that really leaped out to me. One is this desire for financial success and the other is for status and fame. I think these two things are at least somewhat predictable.
Ultimately our job is to help our clients be commercially successful, to grow. It's a competitive environment where we're growing at the expense of others by stealing share. And so the desire to be financially successful makes some sense to me is as this is ultimately our goal for our clients. So it rings true that that would bleed in and become a goal for ourselves.
The second piece, which is the desire to have high status and fame, I think rings true in advertising as well, because a big part of what we're trying to do with brands is to raise their profile, to make them somewhat famous, to make people aware of them, to get attention, to get spoken about. And so again, I think what we're trying to achieve for our brands, to a certain extent, rubs off onto ourselves. Just as we want to make our brands famous. We also want to become famous ourselves.
I think a big problem with this is that when we look at the general public they have far less desire in both of these areas. A few aim for financial success. Far fewer aim for fame and notoriety. And so again, we come back to this idea that there's just a gulf between the industry and the audience.
And I close part of the article by saying, how can we connect with consumers when we have so little in common? How can we change their behaviour when we don't understand it in the first place? You can start to build the story that whether it's the attitudes, whether it's the demographics, whether it's the amount of time we spend thinking about brands that we are just two different species. We exist on an island completely divorced from the mainstream.
There's this vicious loop that I've been thinking about, that a lot of agency and marketing culture is quite homogenous. And the reason for that is because it's self reinforcing. Agencies have a certain culture. They uphold those people who participate in the culture and that informs their own worldview and their outlook on life. So that self-reinforcing aspect also creates a magnifying effect because it's actually really hard to connect with a plumber that lives down the road, or have a friend who's an electrician or somebody who works in law because it's actually a very, very different culture and set of interests.
I concur. I think that the idea of the self-reinforcing loop or the viscious cycle or a downward spiral plays to this idea of the gulf between our audience and us and being an expanding gap.
It's not just that we are different or separate from the mainstream, as it is that overtime those two worlds diverge from each other.
And, and I think when we dig into research that looks at our media consumption, this becomes even more significant.
92% of agency people use YouTube. 90% use Facebook and 90% of those people use Facebook in the last three months compared to the industry population, which sits about 60%. And also adding to that, industry professionals are 96% more likely to use Snapchat in the last seven days and 40% more likely to use Instagram.
Now, when it comes to things like channel selection and media strategy this what the research tells us is that people who work at agencies consume media far more, and are on social media networks, far more than the average consumer.
I think there's another stat, we have something like four times more use of the video-on-demand services like Netflix. And we also tend to use different devices than the average consumer out there.
In what ways does this actually impact our strategy? When we actually provide recommendations to clients that you should use this channel or that channel, do you think there's a lot of bias there? How can we deal with some of that?
I think this question overlaps with our previous one on age and the idea that the industry is very skewed towards the young, because I think they go hand in hand. The younger the industry, the more likely they are to lean into new technologies or new media types.
And the research here is pretty robust. I think I quoted three different studies from Thinkbox, ThinkTV, and Ipsos Mori that covers the UK, Australia, and Canada. And it seems that whatever country, whatever research agency, the research always comes to the same conclusion, which is that are those who work in our industry are far more open to new technologies and new media types than broader populations.
And I think this puts a huge skew on the work. It makes our work far more biased towards those new technology platforms and towards those new media. And I think it also makes us biased against traditional media. For how many years have we been here hearing that TV is dead, for example? And it is in gradual, structural decline. But as we stand today, it is still a significant reach media channel. And so we can make the argument that it is slowly dying, but today it is not dead.
And I think our propensity to lean on the bleeding edge of technology makes us far more likely to try and activate on the new and shiny. You know the augmented reality, and Clubhouse, or blockchain or something. And this actually causes us to ignore some traditional channels, which still hold a huge amount of sway.
I think to try and summarize, we end up creating things that we're interested in rather than things that our audience are interested in. And I think that maybe the desire to create a breakthrough idea has been eclipsed by a desire to use a breakthrough technology. There’s a desire to create something which is technologically new rather than an idea which is new.
Yeah, I think you're right. There's a lot of overlap between the demographics of agencies and their technology and media consumption.
And that's something I would say to my clients. A lot of the times they would come to me and say, “Hey, we need a channel strategy for this or that”. And I would say, well what's the underlying idea? What's the core idea you're actually trying to pursue here? Because if you have a high dependency on one channel and you're building a strategy around that it's not really a strategy. It is a tactic.
One funny story actually on this is I just came off a holiday. And I, I haven't been using my phone and my laptop. It's all been packed away. So I sit on the couch and I'm bored. I have nothing to do. So I turned the TV on and the only thing available was ABC on television, just free to air TV, and I'm sitting there and I'm watching the TV show. I'm like, do people watch this stuff? I can't even remember a time when I'll actually watch regular TV. And I'm like, oh actually like millions of people watch this stuff. You know what I mean? But because I'm in an agency culture, where most of my media comes from digital channels and it’s streaming services where I get to choose what I want to watch which actually creates a lot of distance between what the majority of consumers are actually doing?
I should just say that there's nothing wrong with digital channels, or new channels. There's, there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that. I would just say. Base your channel selection on an understanding of your audience. If you're targeting a younger audience and the newer media really resonates with them, then that's fine.
But whatever your channel selection is, it should just be based on an objective understanding of the audience.
That's right, where would be the best place to reach your audience be? You know, we can box ourselves into a corner, thinking we should tick off a channel because everyone else is there. It boxes us off into a corner and then it's really hard to get out.
Let's actually start with where audiences primarily at what's the best way to reach them? This leads into our last question here. What are some of the concrete ways you think agencies can act on the recommendations your research has put forward? How can they bridge this gap? How can they reduce the void between them and their consumer?
I think there's three things that we can do. The first is that we should absolutely have a greater diversity within our agencies.
Some of the findings that we've read out are pretty damning. I think we absolutely need to do that. I think that there's a moral argument. It's the right thing to do. I think there's commercial arguments. I think McKinsey found that more diverse companies tend to grow faster than less diverse companies. And I also think there's a creative argument. I think the greater, the variety of opinions, backgrounds, and perspectives we have within our agencies the more dynamic the creative ideas are going to be that come out of them. So that's the first one.
I do, however, think that that isn't enough. I think that we can absolutely have more diverse agencies and we should do, but we still fall into the trap where everyone within our agencies is thinking about brands all day, every day, and our consumers aren't. So there will still be this gap between us and our audience.
And I think that leads on to the second point. Which is that I think we need to develop a greater capacity for empathising with the audiences that we're seeking to serve. Some of the Reach Solutions that I referenced earlier has a great section on empathy. I think the report's called the Empathy Delusion where they found those working in our industry have no greater capacity for empathy than the average person.
So we like to think of ourselves as these great empathisers, that we have this unique ability to connect with consumers and to turn that into creative ideas. The truth is that we are regular people with different job titles. And I think that that needs to change.
So we need to be more diverse and we also need to be able to connect with people that aren't in our industry in a much stronger way. And the third thing is that we need to strive for a slightly greater degree of objectivity. I think you need to assume ignorance about an audience when working on a project.
And, and then from that base of assuming that you don't know anything, we need to build up from there. One thing that we do at Epoch is we really try to prioritize primary research. I think there's no greater way of feeling an audience than to actually do the research yourself. To not just work with supplied research or research from third parties, but to actually do it yourself.
And we also try and build in a fairly significant amount of qualitative research. Not necessarily at the expense of quant data, but for those two things to work hand in hand it. I think that as a strategist, there's no better way to really feel an audience and to really try and understand an audience than to go out and speak with them, meet them, be in the same pubs and bars and restaurants as them, spend time with them, speaking to them or simply observing them. So that would be my three things. Build more diversity within our agencies, improve our capacity for empathy, and use less intuition and more objectivity.
And Alex, you mentioned just before we started recording that you actually did a lot of this research yourself. Tell me a bit about how you actually approached a bunch of pub owners. I think you were you in Bristol, walking through a few pubs and then you had an insight that you really couldn't get anywhere else.
Yeah, exactly. We were approached by a drinks brand to develop what they call an on-premise toolkit. So this is a campaign that will come to life in pubs, bars, hotels, restaurants and cafes. Promotional materials, essentially. And the first thing I did was spend half a day walking around the local establishments to my office in Bristol. And across that four hours, we didn't find one piece of branded point of consumption material. Not one piece. And we spoke to the bar staff, the venue owners, the bar managers, and all of them said the same thing.
And that is that they themselves have a brand. That that pub or bar is a brand, even if it's independent and not a chain. They have an environment that they have curated and continue to operate, and that they are inundated with these promotional materials from every spirits brand and every mixer brand and every soft drinks brand and every juice brand and they don’t use any of it because it dilutes their own brand.
And so our response to the client at that time was that we can do the job for you, but we honestly believe that it won’t make a difference as the work is only going to end up in storage rooms. And that our recommendation would be to start with a problem (the band is invisible on premise) and work out from there. I don't think it's a breakthrough insight into human behaviour, but it's just a truth that we uncovered.
By getting out by getting out from our desks, by speaking to people, we uncovered that the whole brief was somewhat flawed. And, you know, this wasn't expensive research. It was literally just going out and speaking to people to uncover a truth that ended up changing the whole the whole direction of the brief.
I think that's really great thing to take away. From the staff that we employ, the way we approach strategy, our channel selection, sometimes we can really over-complicate it. Sometimes it just takes one really great strategist to walk through a pub and ask some really curious questions to actually get to a really good idea.
One thing I would add. I think more companies are hiring anthropologists. So a cultural anthropologist is somebody who would study history and culture and derive insights and recommendations based on their research. So cultural anthropologists is part of the social sciences, but also, you know, people who are doing behavioural science and cognitive science as well to add that layer of rigor to research and that function of primary research that you mentioned as well.
So what are your views on that? Is that something ad agencies and creative agencies should be looking at. Or it would it actually make the work more complicated or more complex to get to those insights?
I think that for me, human understanding or audience understanding is so central to strategy within creative agencies that experience or backgrounds that can further those ends can only be a benefit in my eyes. One of the first strategists that I hired into my team at Epoch came from a background of documentary photography. In his interview he spoke about how every picture he took was trying to capture a human story. And if it didn't do that, it wasn't a successful photograph for him. And that really spoke to me because that was demonstrating empathy. The primary research that I spoke about was demonstrating getting out from the desk of doing research, and documenting it and interpreting it and trying to spin a story from that research.
His story was in photographs and ours, as an agency, is in design and communications. So whether it's anthropology or journalism or documentary photography, I think any background, any skillset, which encourages observation and interpretation of the human condition can only be a good.
Yeah, I agree with that. Well, Alex, thank you for joining me on Making Sense of MarTech. We've had a very insightful and very intriguing conversation on the state of ad land. And I think we can both agree that it is definitely an island. And there's probably a lot of parties happening on that island!
And you've really helped us unpack some of the really, really important research into the demographics and the way that agencies think. But also some really concrete ways that a lot of agencies can actually move forward as well. And I would also say that brands can take learnings from this from this research and apply it to their practice.
And so thank you for joining me now. I'd like to throw it to you, Alex. And let us know where we can find you on the internet.
Of course, well first of all, thank you for having me and thank you for making my first podcast appearance. In terms of where you can find me the best place to go is my website, which is alexmurrell.co.uk. And I'm sure a link would be in the show notes to the article itself. Everything else can all be found on the website.
Great. Well, thank you for joining me.
Thank you so much.