Welcome, welcome welcome to the 30th edition of our Sporadic Brand Ramblings blog. This month we’re chatting to Tom Ollerton, the founder of Automated Creative about what established and scaling brands can learn from each other. I had the pleasure of joining Tom on his brilliant Shiny New Object podcast back in November 2021. He’s not only a brilliant podcast host, but a fantastic ally to brands looking to optimise their online advertising.

Gareth: Hi Tom, so this is about big brands and small brands and what the two can learn from each other. Before we get going, give us a couple of lines on who you are and where you're from.

Tom: Hi, Gareth, thank you so much for including me. I’m Tom Ollerton, founder of Automated Creative and our mission is to rid the world of the millions of media dollars being spent on ineffective ads. So what we do is make and optimise ad creative using live data and insights. Recently, we analysed 6 billion impressions that we've optimised for some of the biggest brands in the world. And proved that live optimisation, extends the media budget on average by 17%. So, if you follow our process, it gets you an extra 17% media value. And we do that for the likes of P&G, Mars, Reckitt, Diageo, Brown Forman, McDonald's, Cisco, etc. The goal is creating a new way of doing ads with automation, to eradicate ineffective ads.

Gareth: Well, if the premise of this interview is what can big brands learn from small brands and vice versa, I'm going to suggest that any brand Big or small, will be excited about the idea of increasing their media budget by 17%. I guess for a small brand that 17% is possibly worth more than for a big brand.

Tom: I think that's fair, let’s say that in order for a small brand or new brand to be an effective challenger brand they have to overspend by around 20%. So actually, this is a cheat for small brands to take this approach and use data driven marketing to steal a march on bigger competitors.

Gareth: That's Excess Share of Voice, isn't it? A brand needs to overspend versus its share of market. So, if you can find 17% more, that makes it significantly easier!

So, it's even more effective at the bottom of the funnel. If you're a small food scale up, then there's going to be a strong D2C component to that. This approach to live optimisation delivers an extra 50% of media budget. So any business of any size should take advantage of this.

Gareth : What other things in your experience have you seen big brands doing that smaller brands could benefit from?

Tom: Having a session on target audience. Just saying things like “put the customer at the centre of your marketing” is lazy, because everyone does or should do that. The big brands that we work with use our technology to get data on actions as opposed to claimed behavior.

That's a huge difference between us and a research business who has a panel for example of 20 dads in North of England talking about Weetabix or it's a digital panel where you're asking consumers what they think what they're likely to do (purchase intent) which, if you haven't got another option, makes sense.

But what we're doing is running lots of variants of ads to different audiences on different platforms. And our data is based on actual action, as opposed to claimed. Big brands are employing us to give them data on what people actually do, as opposed to what they claim.

So if it's about what a small brand can learn from a big one, I say, don't pay an expensive panel to get 20 people to agree with your hypothesis, use live optimisation to test a broad range of messaging and visual hypotheses to work out what drives sales.

Gareth: As it’s working in a live environment, even if it's not the most optimised, you're still getting some benefit.

Tom: Yeah, this is live media, right. We're not a research business. But the optimisation of ads gives us research data to repeat that process. For example, Reckitt spoke at MADfest a little while back and talked about the ads that they use to target mums for infant formula. The insight we delivered for them is that the best performing visual is dads. The reason why small brands should be thinking about is that there's this horrible thing in the industry called best practice, which in my school was called copying. So if all Infant formula brands are following best practice, aka copying what everyone else is doing, it would be to have a mother and a baby right? So if that’s in every ad and everyone's following best practice, and you've got a brand who then has a dad and a baby, well then there is cut through for that ad. What a small brand should be doing, is using their paid media budget to give them insights about what people really respond to, as opposed to what they say they're going to respond to.

We have a product and a service but there are free versions or manual ways you could do this. So a smaller brand that maybe doesn't have the budget to afford what we do, they take some of the practices and theory. Recently, we ran a webinar called “An introduction to live optimisation.” (see below).

Gareth: Perfect. I like that idea of taking principles that the big brands are using and as a small, scaling business you can use that thinking, those principles combined with your knowledge, intellect and gut feel about your business because nobody will know your business better than you to make some educated guesses. It'd be even better if it's then backed up with data but it enables a small business to have an alternative perspective rather than just following the herd.

Tom: Yeah, so what we're not here to do is to tell brands their campaign platform’s wrong or their packaging is not right or anything about their pricing. But what we can do is help brands small and large, to test scientifically the different visual and written psychological triggers that drive the outcomes they want. The simplest version you could do is an A and B test; is it this line or this line? This is the very least you should be doing but the data you get back from that can be a bit misleading. For example, if you run a black ad and a blue ad and the black ad won, all you would know is the black ad won and not why. It could have been that red might have done better. If I was working with a small brand, I'd be making sure that every single impression was giving intelligence back and that's what more brands can learn from.

Gareth: You talked about best practice being like copying. I would argue that things like really understanding your target audience and that's what you described is in fact best practice. Let’s call them best principles instead of practices that small businesses can take from larger ones.

Like you said, a brand should understand its target audience, but not everyone does.

Tom: It reminds me of this time we got a brief from a cereal brand when I was at We Are Social and they said oh, here's the information about our target audience and she's like called Sandra and she was from Birmingham or similar and they had a stock image of this lady. It really showed the brand had not thought about this at all.

Gareth: I was judging some awards a while ago and it said describe the target audience and one entry said; “We've refined our audience to both genders, between 18 and 64.” Refined!! what the hell was it before?

There was another entry where the target was people 50 plus, and the reason they had chosen outdoor media was because people over 50 have trouble using the internet. That's lazy.

So we've got something about big brand thinking and applying that to small brands. What is it that small brands do well that big brands could learn from?

Tom: The smaller brands we have worked with have been successful because of the way that they're set up. Smaller teams, for example. We worked with Pension Bee – they’ve said that using our approach to make an ad with live data and insights had reduced the cost per acquisition of new customers for a pension by 20%. But the client was the CMO and he was like, “I've signed this off and I'm gonna do this” Then we had all the assets in the right place. It was incredibly fast. No complex sign off. So how can larger brands create innovation silos to do things that quickly?

Gareth: There’s this idea of agile, project management. Agile doesn't mean lazy or cutting corners, it's a proper project management technique. I think that sounds like what you're talking about; you’ve got a squad to work on something, who are empowered to make decisions and move things forward iteratively rather than waiting for the big “tada” at the end.

Tom: The scale-ups you work with Gareth I would think they’d have media in-house. A media team sitting next to the design team, so they get data back from the platforms, take insight from that and say, Oh, this thing is working. Right? Okay, let's respond immediately.

So having a having a team that's autonomous and quick enough to react to culture and the data. That is difficult for bigger brands, but we can really look to those smaller brands that have those tight internal teams that can turn around content and ads very quickly in response to the data without a kind of slow process.

Gareth: How do the most agile big brands set themselves up for that?

Tom: One of the solutions we've come up with, that potentially removes friction, is a platform where you can combine strategy, creative copy, generative AI, media trafficking, all in one place. So the brand, creative agency, media, agency, legal and compliance all get a single view. For example if we have three pieces in each market and we've got four platforms in many different languages, all with different outcomes, we can create all those assets in one place. Then all media trafficking information goes in there and it's all signed off and all completely visible. All of those ads arrive on different ad servers and go live and start pulling in data. So our solution is to bring everything into one place. So it's not long lists of spreadsheets or Google Docs, it’s all been put into one place and automated.

Gareth: So you run podcasts and speak to marketers. What are the top tips and common themes you could give to our readers, listeners, viewers.

Tom: Yeah some really nice ones from the podcasts. So Patrick Neyret, Danone says “Our task is not to nurture enthusiasm, but to overcome indifference.”

And then Anna at L'Oreal says, “never try and use your own experience over data.” Which is a reflex that people have to get over and then Shaaf Tauqeer from EasyJet said, “Don't be afraid to test, learn and fail and then learn from that too,” which is really lovely.

Jill Cress, who's the CMO at h&r block in the US, and I love this “Your career is not about what you achieve, but it's about the relationships and the impact you have on the people around you”.

Those are my favourite tips covering a few different angles.

Gareth: A couple of those are very true to me, that data trumping opinion. That's something we can all relate to as marketers, I'm sure we've all been there. So what's next for you Tom, carrying on with world domination for Automated Creative?

Tom: Keep on with our mission to stop these billions of pounds, dollars, euros being spent on ineffective ads. In our report we found a third of marketers are not optimising at all and going back to our data that if in fact there is 17% media value being left on the table, there's 30% of the industry that aren't doing that. So there’s a clear opportunity for growth for us and our corner of the industry. But ultimately, what gets us up in the morning is helping brands understand what the visual and written elements of their ads are driving the outcomes they want and helping them make those ads. That's fundamentally good fun. It's rewarding and it works.

Gareth: Brilliant. I’ll share your LinkedIn profile so people can get in touch with you to find out more.

SBR 30: TOM OLLERTON ON HOW TO MAXIMISE YOUR MEDIA BUDGET

SBR 31: A COUPLE OF FREEBIES!

SBR 29: A MARKETER’S PERSPECTIVE ON IFE 2024