OK, so there's never been anybody that's been mentioned
more on the Bottleneck podcast than Ellie Norman.
You're basically, as Rory describes, his client spirit
animal. That's right, yes.
So basically now we have both the client side and we've got
the agency side and we've got myself.
We're going to be speaking a lot about marketing, about
creativity, about brand build, all of that.
But we we love to give our guests the opportunity to own
their own intro. So we're going to give you the
floor to tell of our guests like who you are, what you do, and
then we can dive into some of the bottlenecks that you've been
solving along your career, which is phenomenal, by the way.
So we'll go with the the straight bit first of all.
So Ellie Norman, Chief Marketing Officer at Formula EI.
Think what sits underneath that from a very, very young age is
just being in environments or in jobs and opportunities where I
can challenge the status quo, think about another way to do
something and achieve kind of the outcomes.
And that is just what really energises me is always thinking
about how else can you do something or how else can you
solve a problem. So Formula E, Manchester United,
Formula One, Virgin Media, Honda Motors that C VS Impressive.
It is, and I just think I'm incredibly lucky.
They're lucky. Yeah.
So, so, so, so let's bring, yeah.
I wouldn't say that either. I'm a very, very big believer in
luck, but yeah. I see a lot of consistency
there. Is there.
Is there a reason why you picked those brands?
Are there something that you saw in those brands that binds them
all together? It is the challenger mindset and
the opportunity when there's constraint and that's typically
like budget team resources, that opportunity with constraint.
Do you really say how do you take creativity to the next
level? Or actually how do you really
step out of the comfort zone to feeling actually quite
uncomfortable? What that big bet swing I
really, really sort of thrive on within the sort of safe
parameters of working inside an organization.
And I think if I take some time and I sort of reflect and think
back 100% that was everything that Honda was about,
particularly in, you know, I worked at Honda from 2005 until
2012. And that was much more of a
traditional sort of television advertising time.
But it was a challenger brand within the automotive sort of
industry against sort of VW seen as very much that sort of
quality sort of premium. So you were there for Cog.
Were you? And so I was agency side at COG
and then after COG was in Honduras client.
Of course. Got it.
Yeah. But all of all of that again
came from constraint because of the media budgets.
The overall budgets were much, much smaller.
I know. Yeah.
And again, just working with amazing agencies and creatives
just to kind of reframe and to think about things in a
different way. So that was with widening
Kennedy and about just coming up to the highest human truths
where all car advertising was talking about features and
specs. There was nothing emotional
there. So that was.
I love that. You had that one advantage,
which is car advertising had become very samey, hadn't it?
Extraordinarily samey. Front three quarter, yeah,
that's it. Same colour everything, yeah.
And again, that opportunity to do something different to really
reframe how does the category come to life.
And the same was true at sort of Virgin Media because the
incumbents for Sky and BT. So that opportunity to be sort
of quite disruptive, have an entrepreneurial spirit as to how
are you going to sort of go up against Goliath and.
We always talk about the fact that at Butterfly Effect people
always ask us what is your niche?
Who do you work with? And we always respond that it's
a mindset. We want to work with leaders
that have a growth mindset and are willing to have a go, right,
But that be something big or something small.
And we've just talked about some pretty massive brands there and
to able to go into an organization in industries that
yes, they're massive and people from the outside may think that
they're sexy, but it's really difficult to actually get a lot
of things done, especially if it's not conventional.
How are you able to do that? Like it, It seems that in all
the brands that you've been at, you've left your footprint,
you've seen a visible impact from what you've done and that
doesn't happen a lot. Having brilliant allies and and
sort of mentors. So I think the certainly the old
drive gotten it is just about who you working with and who you
working for and spending that time to really sort of align in
terms of do we all want the same thing?
Are we do we see risk in the same way?
And are you going to be backed and have the support?
Like really, really important. And then I also think just be a
good human being. So I walk in every day and I'm
like walking stupid every day because you don't have the
answer to everything. And it's as much about how are
you listening? What questions are you asking?
How curious are you to genuinely sort of learn from others?
And I think that really does help to build trust.
And as soon as you've got a relationship that's built into
the trust and genuinely understanding for the other
person, what does good look like or how can I help that other
person? You're you're sort of
willingness to then maybe try extra things because you're
coming from a foundation of genuine respect and trust.
And I think that's just so vital in absolutely sort of
everything. You know, they always talk about
the fact that if you want your customers to be excited by the
brand, you first have to get your team excited by it.
And we've obviously worked for for some time together.
And I always describe a meeting, a conversation with you as one
where I leave wanting to run through a brick wall, right?
I'm I'm doing it for Ellie. I'm excited about what she's
building. I believe in the vision.
And you can see that with the team that you have around you
that they believe in that too. And and it's Michael, my Co
found always talks about the fact that how you do one thing
is how you do everything. And it seems that before you can
get the consumer to believe that, you first have to get the
team to be bought in and believe it.
Is that something that you do intentionally or has that just
been happening? By the way, can we repeat that
again? How you do one thing is how you
do everything is actually really, really interesting in
terms of behaviour and culture. And actually it's quite
interesting, which is sometimes that's why small things become
hugely important because they're emblematic of a wider mindset.
I knew someone who actually had to do the cultural work on Air
Force One, and I think they started with the menu design.
And it seems like, you know, it's a really great aircraft
with, you know, God knows what in terms of, you know, weird
technology on board. Much of it's secret, but you
start with something small and emblematic and then rinse and
repeat. I think that's really, really
interesting. Yeah, I was listening to a
podcast with Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz, and they
basically said that culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set
of behaviors and actions. Yeah.
And instead of them coming up with these philosophical terms,
they basically say, here are the actions that we have.
If you're late by a minute, you have to pay $10.10 dollars for
every minute you don't believe that you're more than the brands
we're working with. These are all things that
instill a set of actions of this is the way that we do things
here. Do you?
Do you agree with that?
Have you, have you guys had to set some beliefs, some actions
in place to ensure that everybody's on the same page?
I do. I really believe in that
because, but I think it's, it's as much about building your
tribe and 100% you want different lived experiences, but
to have a, a consistency in what do people value and how do you
kind of show up and, and sort of behave.
And I think I'm actually a really disciplined person.
Oh yeah, you message me at 5:00 AM and you've gone to a Barry's
class and trust me. Oh yeah.
Or it's only because after that
I like to sit down and just. OK, fair enough.
I was going to say yeah, yeah, yeah.
Already at 5:00 AM. You've been to, you're going to
get credit in the bank for the rest of the.
Day. Where are they open at that
time? Is there 24 hours I.
Leave home at that time. So I'm going to get into into
London, do that and then eat it is that sort of consistency of
like knowing when you're going to be at your best.
And my, my job is as much to inspire, to have a real sort of
positive energy inside of the sort of organization and to be
that sort of person who is imagining the what if and being
quite clear. And that's why I love marketing
so much because it is, it's about people, it's about
behavioural change, but it's, it's the future.
And so many other roles and disciplines in the business will
be from the past. It's a rear view mirror.
Yeah, yeah. And.
Actually it's a bit worrying because I suppose marketing and
R&D are probably the only parts of a business that are naturally
future focused, aren't there in many ways, Totally, if you look
at finance, if you look at all this business about everything
needs to be evidence based and based on data.
The problem, as Roger Martin always says, is, well, all big
data comes from the past and what you're doing, you know, and
also so much of business is now effectively financial reporting
of some kind or another that and again, it's it all the data is
effectively past focus, not future look.
At the venture firms, there's a lot of really talented,
ambitious, successful ones. But everything is based on data
in the past or instant, of course, but it's still the past,
right? And if you think about, I'm a
very simple brain and I like to break things down into two
things. And I say that there's only
really two sides of the business, the logic side and the
love side, right? The logic side is the
information that we all have. And it's all about legacy.
It's all about facts and figures.
It's the IQ. And then you've got the love
side, which is EQ, right? But I like to give CF OS a more
technical term, which is brand defensibility, right?
Because whenever you're investing in a business and you
look at the past, you think that the past will determine the
future. But what happens is if you know
a brand's defensibility score, which is advocacy, how many
people that are not part of the brand that are talking about the
brand positively without being asked, there is loyalty.
People that keep coming back because they either love the
product, they love the service, they love what they represent.
And I think that there's one that if you look at people like
Elon Haven and Donald Trump share, which is forgiveness,
right? Benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We never, of course, we'd never
value that because we tend to look at the positive side of
marketing, not the absence of negatives.
Yeah. And you know, one of the things
I've always argued about is you don't want a marketer on the
board because it'll be better. You need a marketer on a board
because if you don't have someone on a board with a
marketing mindset, you can make really dumb decisions.
You know, you can cut the price of something, you know, and and
literally sell less. I mean, if you don't have that
mindset on the board. And so I always think that the
problem with marketing, and I criticize agencies for this all
the time. We always go in on this premise
that if you do this thing, nice things will happen.
And of course, that's not how you sell.
If you don't do this. If you don't do this, you will
have a problem, you know, if you don't.
And your point about brand defensibility is brilliant.
It's kind of like the extent to it which a consumer will allow
you to cock up at least once. To some degree, insurance or
your pension, right? Yeah.
And it compounds over time. That's how you last for 100
years. There's this sometimes I'm, I'm
a big, I'm big on the camp of move fast and break things.
But I think that as well as being very urgent and in high
pace on the on the logic side, you also have to make sure that
you have your brand defensibility there to ensure
that this keeps compounding, right?
Because at the end of the day, something's only a risk if no
one's going to to advocate for it.
And a lot of brands don't think about that.
Now, I think this comes with a lot of CMOS right now not being
able to get a fair seat at the table and people actually
valuing their opinion and their perspective.
But Ellie, it seems like you've always been able to, from my
perspective anyway, get people on board to understand the
importance of what it is that we do.
How do you go about doing that? Because I do know that it's an
exercise of making sure that people actually understand that
the benefits of what's happening from our from the marketing
team. And honestly think it is taking
people on a journey. I think the worst thing you can
do is just keep everything super, super tight and then be
like, please, may we have this level of investment and it's
going to do this. Whereas if you've taken that
sort of time to go through the entire journey, really be very
clear this is a problem. Or here's our burning platform,
case studies, real life case studies.
This is kind of what's happening.
Be super, super clear as well on where are the trends, where is
the market going? And it's as much around not
doing anything doesn't mean you stand still.
We're going to be going backwards.
Yeah. And it's, I think it's really
sort of setting that out with a view to having a very compelling
sort of picture of the future. And your CFO needs to be your
partner in crime. And I think, you know, Formula
E, we've got a new CFO, Max, but he's so growth orientated.
It's absolutely brilliant that he's not an accountant in that
regard. So.
You've got someone with the right risk reward total.
Calibration and and sometimes it's hard for people inside the
organization because at one point it'd be how can we save
cost here? And then everything's like we're
cost cutting and it's like, no, no, no, it's where can we be
more efficient in order to invest and actually where we're
going to invest and where we're placing our bet is here.
And having someone like that in the business is so powerful
because we can be the Ying and the Yang together because I
don't have a financial background.
And so having Max to really go through, OK, this is this is how
we're going to achieve it. He understands opportunity costs
as well as just costs. Whereas I'm like, here's where
the great is going to come from. There's enough things pointing
in the right direction that would indicate we need to be
moving here and this is the bet that we should be taking.
And I think a great example most recently has been sort of EVO
sessions. And for many people it's
incredibly exciting. Cannot believe we've done it.
And for some people it's I can't believe you've done that.
And does it compromise XY and Z? What?
What's the negative? What?
What's the fear on that? So there is there was fear or
there has been sort of criticism around putting creators into a
championship car and allowing them that experience to drive
it. I mean, they have some training
beforehand. I was going to.
Say yeah, right. But again, it's really thinking
about how do we Co create with creators and the creators aren't
there to promote the sport, but the sport is there to allow
creators to create and to essentially be sort of an
ecosystem around it. And what what working in that
space certainly does is it allows us to not by reach, but
actually to gain trust and allowing those creators and
experience that isn't afforded to everyone and allowing them
that flexibility and that freedom to then talk to their
trusted sort of communities is just so, so powerful.
And so yes, of course, it always comes to those risks, but
actually just seeing how quickly the landscape has moved into the
role of creator economy, that sort of first mover advantage in
doing something that isn't being done elsewhere just allows us to
to have much more agility being 12 years old.
So we're not caught up in a lot of legacy and tradition, but
really also then to be to be in a space where by working with
creators, we're really able to build a community.
So kind of two way versus broadcast, but genuinely bring
to life. What should the future of
motorsport be? Because in a sense, with Formula
One itself, you the great success was creating a
hinterland, wasn't it? Because you always have.
There's always a danger with a sport that you effectively
become binary. They're people who are really
into it and they're people who aren't even adjacent.
And so that kind of create a hinterland provides an on ramp
to people, I think. So maybe it is increasing reach
as well as just trust. Yeah.
So the ultimate the. Reach is super important, yeah,
and we obviously need to continue to do that, but it's
doing that in a way which is less traditional to how it would
have been achieved in the past. So certainly in Hondra or Virgin
Media, that reach was predominantly achieved through
television advertising and paid media.
The reach here is about where are we creating those
opportunities to essentially generate earned media and to
work with these creators. But it's much, much deeper than
that because it's where is the affinity between those creators
and Formula E, Who is their sort of audience?
How do we sort of become part of their entertainment sort of diet
and the sort of mix because the entertainment bit is so
important for discovery, but the sport is where the sort of trust
and the loyalty will come from. And what you've seen is that the
fastest growing sports as of late, if if you look at the UFC,
they really like dove into YouTube and storytelling all
from the start. So much so that there was a
point when it became even more popular than boxing, right?
But boxing actually didn't want to embrace it.
It was only when the Youtubers came in and to the point where
Netflix's biggest pay-per-view is still Logan Paul versus It's
crazy how the creator market has.
Influenced traditional sports and it seems that from a Formula
E standpoint, the team have welcomed it, they've understood
it. This is the world that we're
going into. There's no point trying to stick
to the past. We may as well build for the
future. A. 100% and I think there is
room for all sports and it's not a it's not an all, it's an and
but actually the way that we're going to achieve fame, the way
that we're going to be sort of easy to find, the way we'll be
easy to buy and how to leave is through.
How do we genuinely embrace a creator or economy and go sort
of all in with that sort of Co creation and having and
providing the flexibility because again, we don't have all
the answers. So we can come with a lot of
knowledge about racing, sporting integrity, but they are coming
with so much in terms of storytelling, narrative, how
we're building communities. And for me, it's where do those
things come together? And as a result of that, what
can we create together that neither of us could create by
ourselves? And.
The funny thing is, so I'm going to bring us back to what you
said, something that made me change the whole where I see
marketing, right? And you said it in a very blase
way, but you basically simplify something that people
overcomplicate, which is building fame, being easy to
find and buy and being hard to leave.
That's effectively what a business has to do to be very
great at marketing, right? It's like you want to build fame
amongst the right audience so you know who you want to be
with. You want to make sure that they
can find you because that's that's where the reach comes
into play. But then once you have them, you
make sure you don't have a leaky bucket and you work hard as hell
to keep them. Can people do that?
I love simplicity. I also love how you talk about
fame and actually just expanding the surface area.
Yeah, it is. And also it's, it actually, the
other thing is part of fame. You can actually plan for part
of it. The value of fame is that it
will bring in opportunities that you yourself would never have
envisaged. So we had this very funny thing
happened with just just to plug this, this isn't my business,
but but I was very happy for them to take the idea this is
flat white or fuck off, which is the idea, which is the idea of a
coffee shop which only serves one coffee.
And the original idea as I explained it, I wasn't trying to
compete head on with Starbucks or cost.
So anything self aggrandizing about that I just said at
railway stations and at airports where time is at a premium, you
don't want to be behind someone in the queue who wants some
customized ice based drink. And actually 22 benefits here,
tap and pay OK means that if you don't have to actually ask
people what they want, they can simply tap with their credit
card, pick up a coffee, walk off.
You can make the coffees at McDonald's basically for coffee,
OK, or the early Ray Kroc McDonald's.
And the other advantage in those places is that real estate is
expensive. And of course it takes up much
less space because if you're only making one type of coffee,
you can do it in half the space. And therefore not all your
profits aren't going to Network Rail hopefully.
And so that was the whole idea. And then when we launched, when
we, when they launched and I came along, I, I don't want to
take any credit, but when the launch happened, we turned up
suddenly, we got about four calls from people who said no,
no, no, no, no. This is what I need for
conferences and exhibitions. I don't think we, you know, we
could have sat there planning for ages.
You see, it wouldn't have occurred to us.
But they said, no, everybody comes out of the plenary
session. Now, if you have a brand that
says in advance it manages expectations, don't come here
and ask for a skinny latte with oat milk.
Actually, you can have oat milk. That's the one variant.
You'd have oat milk. So we are vegan friendly.
So that's the only variant. They just have two patches.
This is the oat milk. This is the regular milk.
That's it. Tap your card, same price, walk
off. And the conference and
exhibition organizers said, no, no, this is the perfect thing to
have as a pop up because we can now get 50 people, 100 people,
all served with a coffee in about 5 minutes, rather than
having a grumpy cue of 70 people who've come out of the plenary
session. And there's some guy at the
front who's half regular, half decaf or whatever, you know, no
decaf. And as I said, flat white or
fuck off. Can I have a cappuccino?
The answers in the name. Yeah.
But But what was so fascinating about that is that is that you
will never have a monopoly on good ideas for where your
business might be useful or where it might be popular.
And so simply being famous turns the turns the business in.
It basically turns your potential customers into a kind
of creative function for you. But then going back to the point
you started with the fame and then you started to understand
where to be easier to find by the people that needed that
specific thing, right. And then now once you've got
them, it's like, how do you make sure that they keep coming back
and back and back? And I think that so many people
over complicate things. I think I, I, I, there's a,
there's an over index or over exaggeration on just reach
numbers, impression numbers. I think that those are really
important, but the quality of the engagement, the quality of
the. Relationship and it's context.
Everything is always kind of context.
It's all context. And, and it's like not
forgetting that. And that's where it's amazing to
have so much data, but actually the human context, common sense,
which isn't common enough. Somebody said brilliantly
yesterday when I was visiting AOI think it was yes, you, you
can't get a degree in common sense that's.
Why I did the University of Life?
Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah.
No, no, no. But it is about always having
that sort of the context. And back to your point, it's
like where you could buy X amount of impressions, but
actually, would you not rather have maybe less?
But the context is so bang on that actually you're going to
capture the sort of attention. And, and it's these sort of
subtle nuances about, no, what are we really here to do?
And it's so hard to get attention.
And so it's thinking about, well, how do you get attention
to build that sort of fame to cut through?
Interesting, Interesting because one interesting thing about
context, which was always lovely.
I worked with a company called Herdify a little bit and Tom
Ridges said this fantastic thing.
He said which which sound it is absolutely obvious, but only
when you've thought of it. He said, if I was selling solar
panels, I'd rather sell 5 solar panels to people who all lived
in the same St. than 20 solar panels to people who live 20
miles apart. And so understanding those kind
of network effects and it's, it's where actually it's where
marketing in a bad customer environment, a bad company
environment, sorry, has a really tough time because we're dealing
with complexity and generally the value of what we do
compounds over time. So the real pay off often
happens three financial years after you've spent the money.
And it's that tipping point of where do you get to that tipping
point where everyone in my streets got a solar panel?
Why am I doing this? I'm not part of the tribe.
It's and you know, at the human core, it's belonging.
Everyone wants to belong. And it is finding how do you
achieve that tipping point in the quickest way possible?
And you know electric cars 2014 when Formula E launched, I think
300,000 was sold, yeah. And now we're coming up to sort
of 20 million I think sort of end of this year is forecast and
so that. By by the way, I mean, I don't
know whether this is just Daily Mail journalism or whether there
are malign forces at work, but you keep getting these weird
press stories that electric car sales have fallen off a Cliff.
Basically. They're not true, No.
This is the extraordinary thing. Isn't it for the first time in
Europe, there were more electric cars sold than there were cars
with a combustion engine? Well, but, and you know, Reuters
were reporting on that. Yeah, in China everything is
electric. Yeah, yeah, Norway is freakish,
isn't it? Norway's always been a complete
outlier where I can't remember what it is.
By the way, there is a do you know the story for this, which
is I think it's the band. Aha, is that right?
Hey, we'll go with that. OK, well, they are Norwegian.
Can someone just check that they are?
Thank you. OK.
Our our Scandinavian correspondent is just.
Perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, OK, So apparently what happened?
You're not Norwegian though, are you?
You're Swedish so you obviously hate them deeply.
Unless this is a really interesting thing by the way,
but be really careful about this.
All Scandinavians are massively rude about each other, but if
you're not Scandinavian and you're rude about 1 Scandinavian
country to another, they will leap to their defence.
Sounds like a family. It's like a family.
It's exactly that. It's exactly that.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, So in in amongst themselves, there's deep rivalry and even
hatred. United you're a vision.
They're all voting for each other.
But anyway, aha. Who are not Norwegian.
Bought some electric. This is how you know network
effects happen. Bought some obscure electric car
while they were on tour in Switzerland and they took it
back to Norway and there was a massive debate about what
motorway toll should be paid because the system didn't allow
for electric cars. And eventually the Ban Dahar
somehow campaigned so that electric cars would be exempt
from some sort of Rd. tax or toll on all the Norwegian roads.
And so that gave Norway something like a five year head
start in electric car adoption over anywhere else.
And it's now I can't. It's something crazy.
It's like 90% or something of new cars bought in Norway are
electric. And you always talk about the
fact that you know that the development makes sense because
if we had electric cars 1st and then somebody suggested that we
do it the old way. Oh yeah.
You wouldn't do it. Yeah, no, I mean that that went
really viral when I said that, that it struck me as a fairly
obvious reframing, which is if all cars were electric and
someone invented the internal combustion engine, this is.
Nuts. Yeah, yeah.
You're putting this in flammable liquid, you know, in the, you
know, in a tank in the back of the vehicle.
And then you're basically blowing things up.
And you'd say, well, can you refuel at home?
That is ridiculous. You can't have a, you can't have
a 500 gallon tank full of gasoline under a house sort of
be insane. No, no, you'll need these
special places that sell Ginsters and M&S simply food.
And you'll go to 1 and you'll refuel there.
Everybody go. Sorry, mate, you're nuts.
Yeah. Yeah, 100%.
It's, it's amazing. The efficiency coming from an
electric power train is what, 97% And you know, because, and
that's where there's no sound or the sound is so quiet because of
the efficiency. So actually the sound comes from
inefficiency. Oh, so when you look at a
combustion engine, the most efficient combustion engines
will most probably be about 5760% efficient.
Now is. It as good as that?
I'm not even sure. It's in like a it.
Depends. Oh.
Yeah, in a race, a combustion sort of top, top top Formula One
road combustion engines your motoring in your sort of 36. 40
and you've got no regen by the way, have you yeah sorry we're.
Getting and that and that is why sound is produced, because it's
it's inefficiency. So I was talking on this podcast
called Cleaning Out, and I said this, I, I was explaining what
marketers do and I said, you can cite efficiency figures, which
are very appealing to 10% of the population.
But I said what you need is for the other 90% is a story or an
observable concrete thing. And I said, I discovered that by
accident, which is if you go to a station car park after it
snowed, all the gasoline cars, the snow has melted off the
bonnet, you know, even if they've only driven from three
miles away, all the electric cars still have snow on the
bonnet even if they've driven from 15 miles away.
So in other words, you know, the waste heat is so negligible in
an electric car and you know, and there is a bit of waste heat
in friction. But I mean there's this
beautiful thing. You can just look at a row of
cars in the snow and all the petrol cars have no snow on the
bonnet and all the electric cars still do.
It's fascinating. It's that shift in terms of in
some respects everything had been centred around speed and
speed and noise were hand in hand.
And actually it's now the features very much around
software strategy and intelligence and that's where
the progress is coming from. And it again, it's that sort of
reframing in terms of what does the future look like?
And it's trying to do that in a way that is compelling.
It's going to capture attention, be discovered.
And, and quite frankly, it has to be entertaining because
there's been a sense of compromise for for far too long.
And there is no compromise. It's, it's where the performance
is. But that is quite a shift, I
think, for people. I never thought of that.
Yeah. That the absence of noise is
evidence of efficiency. So basically when people Carjan
keys are like, oh, that sounds great.
They're basically saying, oh, inefficiency.
They're basically. Yeah.
But it's still, yeah, it still sounds great.
And there is that sort of visceral kind of connection and
it's that noise, speed, danger. And that's what really kind of
moves people. Oh, OK.
So certainly as a as a marketer, I'm always thinking, what is
that visceral connection when you're in the future?
And actually it is around strategy, intelligence and kind
of software. So how would you put the the
grit and the emotion into that? Yeah, I was going to say now,
because obviously you can see that cars are getting more
efficient. And if we know that people
loathe and have nostalgia over the sound, surely you can use
the technology to recreate that sound and that emotion, yeah?
Right. And it's, I mean, even when you
were chatting Jaguar, yeah, there are so many of those
automotive manufacturers that are really now thinking about
the sound profile of the cars. Where does the the?
The I pace had a they, they went and didn't they?
And they created kind of skewer morphic sounds.
And it's, you know, you, it's not.
I don't think it's philosophically appropriate to
have something that completely mimics a petrol car, because I
think that's sort of dishonest, yeah.
But you want that futuristic profiling.
And also there's a sort of pedestrian safety question to it
as well. But I mean, and there is
feedback, I mean, that that was, that is something that you might
argue is, you know, that auditory feedback we got from
driving the car is something you can recreate, but it, it
eventually it'll probably disappear.
It's an interesting question, but it's, it's, it's rather like
that old thing when in design where you have to you build in
familiar elements from the old thing to effectively get people
into the new thing. I mean, it is interesting, isn't
it, that I'm, I'm sympathetic. I mean, I have various friends.
I mean, Stephen Bailey, the designer there.
There's certain people who effectively have so much love
for the gasoline engine and, and in a sense for a good, we know a
golden age of, of car making as well.
I think Clarkson's comment was, you know, he wasn't really
interested in cars anymore because they'd become a bit like
domestic appliances, like washing machines.
I mean, the other way of looking at it is that in all truth, the
gasoline engine, except at the very high end had run out of Rd.
It was, you know, now what we're seeing here is you.
Years old, yeah. And actually, OK, there were
still fabulous cars being produced in terms of, you know,
prestige cars, but the basic family car kind of hit a wall.
Now what? What do you see with electric
cars? Because you can miniaturize
electric motors much better than you can petrol engines is a
whole explosion in different types of mobility.
So we need to include scooters in this.
We need to include cargo bikes. You know, we need to include
Waymo driverless vehicles, all of which are really only made
possible by electrification. So you might say that.
Yeah. I, I I have a sort of, I mean,
just as. OK.
You'd be kind of soulless if you didn't have an affection for
steam trains. Yeah.
OK. You know, you know, I get it.
I don't want to go to work on a steam train every day.
But you would be kind of soulless if you didn't recognize
there was something glorious. Appreciate it.
Can't you? Yeah, you can still appreciate
it, I agree. But at the same time you say,
well cars are becoming like domestic appliances, well, no
one's suggesting that you have a petrol powered dishwasher, OK.
I mean, there is a reason why we electrify things and it is to
some extent inevitable. And you can always have more
than one vehicle. Well, this is the other
interesting thing, which is they.
What are you doing on that day? Where are you going?
What's going to best serve you? Well, do you?
Know, do you know what I actually want to have?
Unfortunately my my wife's the the obstacle to this at the
moment. I literally want to have two
cars which is the Lotus Electra which I've got and a Microlino.
OK. And just so the Microlino is
basically a replica of the Swiss bubble cuts.
It's Swiss made. I think it's Swiss made, isn't
it? The tiny little thing?
Yeah. And my argument is, you know,
their journeys where I go 25 miles, I want a great motorway
car. And then there are journeys
where I go to the station. Why?
Why would I not just go in a little Microlino at 40 miles an
hour, plug it into the mains? And that would be so that I
mean, interestingly, of course, 3 year old electric cars in a
year's time are going to literally the, you know,
ordinary people on median income can have something which was a
super car in the petrol age in another two or three years.
Once the the very best of today's electric cars filter
into the second hand market, you know, then, and actually a lot,
a lot of by the way, a lot of the negatives like battery
degradation bullshit, it's all gone, doesn't happen.
It's irrelevant. And anyway, you know, I mean,
you know, in some ways, you know, you can intelligently say,
well, you know, that that's not actually a terrible sacrifice.
I've got a three-year old fantastic car and the range is 7
miles less than it was when it was new.
You know, it's not, you know, I bought it for, you know, a third
of the as new price. And so there's something really
interesting. I think, you know, I think
there's something really interesting happening, But also
we haven't even begun to see the kind of inventiveness that might
happen around particularly micro mobility, I think.
That's really interesting. I've.
Got to ask, what do you drive? Actually, wow, where do you want
to start roaring? Yeah.
Go on. No, please.
I I need to know. We need to know the the stable.
Yeah, the Ellie Norman stable. I.
Am a very I love cars. Yeah.
So I've got a 2011. Porsche 997GT3 Rs which is
wonderfully antisocial and a fast little station run around
car. Yeah, interesting.
Which again is the Rs is in storage, locked away, comes out
when the weather's lovely European Rd. trips, so
definitely not now. Too many potholes.
I mean just no and the same a newer 9/11 Targa GTGTS so.
You haven't got electric. No, not at home.
Not at. Home no so drive will drive sort
of electric cars, but because my because my love is with the sort
of older. Yeah, got to know.
Fair enough. Yeah.
It's just having that super quick station car which is 20
minute drive to the train station lock up.
Easy, easy and then nice cars for track days, European Rd.
trips. It's fantastic, brilliant.
That for me is perfect. It is interesting that question
by the way, my. Go Kart, make it across bikes
you've. Got that as well.
Have you? Yeah.
Oh, fantastic. Yeah.
She. Goes to Barry's at 5:00 AM in
the morning. She's basically Laura Croft.
Yeah, I I was going to say. Definitely not.
My father remembers there was a Pembrokeshire farmer in the
1950s. I think I've got this right.
Had a Citroen DSI think it was a a Jag.
I'm currently if I've got this no hold on.
Citroen, DS, Land Rover Defender, a Mini Cooper.
It might have been a Bentley, something like this.
OK, My father, I remember my father saying, OK, you can't
actually. He and his brother were just
looking at this line up and going.
You can't really improve on that.
There's a car for absolutely everything there.
Absolutely everything. And the, the car that I do
really enjoy, actually, I went out in the safety car and that's
that's the electric Porsche Tycoon.
And that was absurdly fast. Yeah.
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, the acceleration is like
violent actually. No, no, no, I didn't get the I
deliberately didn't get the 900 horsepower Lotus electric
because I thought it was, you know, I'm, I've got enough
self-awareness to know I'm not a good enough driver in that, you
know, a. Little launch on no.
No, no, I, I don't know. I basically said, look, I'll,
you know, I'll either lose my licence or I'll wrap it round a
tree. I'm, you know, I've got a, the
great thing about being 60 is you do have awareness of your
own limitations. You gradually acquire that and I
go, look, I'm just not that good a driver.
I, I wouldn't know what to do. And but I'm, I'm utterly
ecstatic with that car. And it's just they are, yeah.
They're so, so good and actually just a choice now.
Yeah. Again in all range of spectrum.
Yeah, I don't know. And actually the extent to which
the other thing I think we'll see is that because it's largely
software and the smaller manufacturers will buy this off
the shelf and then tweak it. I think for brands like AR,
niche brands, I mean if I, if I were a billionaire, I'd go and
buy up old car brands like Gordon Keeble.
But somebody owns that presumably I don't, but I buy up
some of those kind of really interesting heritage brands like
Jensen or Gordon Keeble. And then there's a fantastic
Brit. Have you seen the Longbow, this
new British thing? So I'm going down to see them in
a few, yeah, in a few weeks time.
That's this anyway we can put a picture up on the screen.
But this is the idea of absolutely classic 2 seater
British roadster which is absolutely gorgeous.
I mean MG is a great example actually of course of that being
as a brand being bought. Being bought all.
Electrification. I mean, it's just that.
And that's the interesting bit, isn't it?
When you have the heritage and the nostalgia within a brand.
But how do you take that into the into the future?
Well, interestingly, Ferraris now, don't they?
Which I thought they'd be the last.
I thought they were the last brand that could.
So I mean, I think that's Martian split.
They created Lagonda is an electric brand.
And then Aston Martin, I've got a vague idea they've they've
done that. But I mean, I always thought
Ferrari would be the last to effectively.
I think it'll be fascinating to see who buys that.
And I remember when I was in Formula One, I think Ferrari
changed their CEO and there was so much conversation in the
paddock about the CE OS background.
And his background had come from essentially sensors and kind of
data chips and much more kind of software orientated.
And so it's it's super interesting to now see this kind
of electric Ferrari, obviously with the Johnny Ives.
Johnny Ives. Thing in it as well, so I cannot
wait to see who orders that. What an.
Interface by the way, I know. It's an entirely different
audience. Is it a I've got this car and I
want this one as well. So I cannot wait to see that.
And I'm really interested as well with when the Jaguar goes
on. Oh yes, me.
Too. Yeah, the pink one, I've got my
name on it because that's kind of, you know, great thing about
being Welsh is we don't really have any shame.
But. But I mean, I think they've done
something very shrewd there, which is, and, and obviously
it's a bit like Dylan going electric.
You annoy the purists and sometimes it's necessary to
annoy the purists because the danger with purists that they
are in love with your past. And every now and then, you
know, as musical acts have to do the same thing.
You effectively have to say, you know, sometimes you're accused
of selling out. Sometimes you're accused of
losing your way. People shout Judas at you, but
you can't be 100% customer focused, or at least you've got
to be focused on the future customer, not just the past.
But, and my, my issue is always look, it didn't make sense for
Jaguar at its scale to compete head to head with BMW audio
Mercedes, who are, you know, volume makers.
Because anybody who's prepared to buy a Jaguar or BMW and audio
or Mercedes will end up buying an audio Mercedes or a BMW.
Just, you know, just by the law of Byron Sharp, you know, you
know the, the, the scale is its own.
You know, you know, it is its own force.
So it's the old recent trout positioning, the battle for your
mind. If you can't be at the top of a
ladder, you've got to build your own ladder.
Exactly. You know, and So what Jaguar is
doing is saying so the idea of of recent trout, you know,
fantastic book by the way. I mean the, I think the best
book positioning the battle for your mind and the whole idea is
that basically there are mental rungs.
You know the consumer has a ladder, and if you can be on the
top rung or the second rung, you're OK.
But if you're on the 4th rung. Where it's like the functional.
It it fundamentally that's not a place to be.
So the only thing you've got to do is build your own ladder.
And my argument is, look, Jaguar isn't going to be a volume car
maker. We would love Jaguars to be made
in the UK still. And therefore you can't really
compete on price anymore. So what you have to do is find
your own niche, which I think they did rather well.
I mean, you know it. I mean the question really, I
mean, you know, the question I'd ask is, you know, will Rick
Rubin buy one basically, isn't it OK?
Because you know, if you know, if you sell one to Rick Rubin,
you kind of solve the problem at that point and.
It will be fascinating because I think that's going to come.
Everything you're we're talking about there is mindset.
So that sort of traditional purist is most like that is the
only way. Whereas actually is it much more
about the mindset of people irrespective of demographic in
terms of who just doesn't want to settle, who's curious to kind
of move forward, to experiment, to try new things and that sort
of open mindedness. And I think from again, a
marketing point of view, everyone will talk about
segmentation, but rethinking it through that sort of attitude
and behaviour, it just changes the dynamics of what
realistically, who is your audience, where is the
aspirational audience? And then where does that
actually kind of flow through into it is certainly the way
that we're starting to to think and to look at things.
Actually, engineers, as opposed to Tran car lovers, nobody, any
good engineer effectively just acknowledges physics, which is
that the electric motor is a glorious, simple, magically
efficient thing. And you know that that this is
inevitable. You know, we've electrified
everything else apart from perhaps lawn mowers and domestic
heating. I mean, and it's, and I suppose,
I mean, it is terrifying for the European car industry, which
always had engine manufacturing as its defensive Moat, didn't
it? You know, it was simply too
difficult to copy. And now you've created something
which is actually pretty easy to copy.
I mean, the, I think the upside in terms of just a sort of
Cambrian explosion in kind of evolutionary experimentation.
I mean, I, I'd love to, I'd love to see a world where, you know,
most people owned a cargo bike. Yeah.
So to your point though about things being easy to copy,
that's probably why these legacy brands that probably people fell
out of love with are coming back.
Because when you have a lot of new players in the game, it
becomes very difficult to make a choice and a decision.
So once you have new people coming in and you're seeing this
with open AI and Google, right? And they came in and they had
all these other players. And then Google just said, you
know, we're the leg, we're the, we're the, the brand here.
We already have the users. We're just going to Fast forward
our, our, our development and everyone just going to come back
to us, right? And what you're seeing now is
whenever you have a lot of new characters, someone's going to
abuse trust. And then people are going to
look for an anchor. And usually it's history who's
been around here forever. I can trust that.
And then if they fuse the technology and you become the
choice, the the the the the choice, it makes it easier to to
buy. Right.
I think that sometimes having too many options and if
everybody's, I always say that when technology or IQ is
democratized to the point where the difference between a product
is few and far between, the only thing you have is EQ.
What's the emotions, right? How does it tell a story about
me? Can I understand it?
Can I resonate with it? That's when that comes to play.
And I think that if you can collaborate and focus on brands
that are in that space and you can fuse them with the IQ,
that's when you see some really exciting stuff.
I had a lovely experience and last night I said, you know, you
know, I'm a huge fan of the Moxie hotel chain because I
think it's, you know, it's kind of, it's the wonderful reverse
benchmarking. In other words, do really well
what most hotels don't do well. Everything else is done well,
but in a minimalist way. And actually I was a citizen M
last night. I, I just come back from both
fairly late and I thought, OK, I'll, I'll just stay my wife's
away. I'll go and stay overnight.
And it's extraordinary because what you do is you do this is
the reverse benchmarking thing. You do really, really well what
most people don't do very well at all, which is the cold
commonal area thing. And actually, you know, after
you've checked out and this isn't them or a moxie, you feel
you can hang around downstairs all day.
Whereas at much more expensive hotels, you're kind of rendered
homeless out as soon as 11:00. Check out.
What are you doing here? You know, you know, and and then
what you do, what marketing does.
This is the whole USB thing. You focus attention on the area
where you're different, and then the area where you're different
becomes comparatively much more important to the consumer's mind
and consequently so in other words, it's it's, it's that
Citizen Kane thing, isn't it? If you make the headline big
enough, I'll make the story big enough.
And if you simplify the message, it makes it easier to make.
And it makes it easier for you to choose.
And my my funnily enough my choice there is very simple.
Even if it was someone elses money and I had a budget of
£1000, well maybe not 1000 lbs a night, I think I'd go large
then. But even if it was someone else,
if it was someone elses money and I had a budget of 450 a
night, if it's one night or two I'd rather stay at a Moxie or a
Citizen M or maybe the Hoxton. OK.
I'd rather stay there than stays, you know, somewhere
conventional that's £400 a night.
Something that's very interesting about that.
And, and you talked about the the construct and their design.
There was this trend going out on TikTok and Instagram saying
that millennials have no taste because whenever you see a lot
of the things that they're designing, it's very monochrome,
very structured. There was a comparison between
people in the 90s, like artists and celebrities, and there was
color everywhere. There was style, there was
individualism. Now it seems like everybody is
more clones of each. Other.
Right. But it seems like when you have
a a hotel like democracy that actually embraces individuality,
design something a little bit different, the purple color
effect comes into play. Yeah.
Which is really interesting. And Ellie, you talked about the.
Design is incredibly in in those places.
Design is incredibly articulate because it kind of says this
time it's different. And so it it's exactly like flat
white or fuck off. The whole point of that
ridiculous idea is that you do not turn up with an unrealistic
expectation. Yeah, OK.
It does exactly what it says on the tin.
It's just by the way, it's so funny because when that ad for
people who don't realize that that all comes from an
advertisement that Howell Henry did for Ron Seal, quick drying
wood stain. And the night the ad was going
out, Steve Henry told me this. They were sitting their head in
their hands going, we're just going to be ridiculed by the
whole of London ad land. You know, we've just done this
ad where a man goes, it's Ron Seal.
It's a wood stain that's quick drying.
It does exactly what it says on the tin.
It partly was done by the necessity of a client who hated
spending any money on anything which didn't any time that
didn't feature the product. So it was.
And what's so funny is that they thought they'd be absolutely,
you know, it was a career ending ad and it introduced a phrase
into the English language. And here we are.
What? And but that whole question of
you, I mean, I was, I was at AO yesterday and they said they
know how bad customer service is in Britain.
They said, because all we do is we tell people what we're going
to do and then we do it. And they've got nearly 1,000,000
reviews on Trustpilot and they're at 4.9 out of five.
Now that is actually, when you think about that's astounding.
And they said what's amazing are they do give you a bear
sometimes, OK, which is cute. But what's amazing about that,
as they said, it's not like we, you know, it's not like we turn
up with flowers or we, you know, but we tell people what we're
going to do. We're clear about what we're
going to do. Then we do, we turn up on time
and we do it, and then we go away and everybody's ecstatic.
Happy with? It OK and so I think there's
that wonderful thing that design can do which is effectively
unconsciously just frames your expectations.
You know, as soon as you walk into one of those hotels, you
get OK, I'm not going to ask for my laundry to be done.
I'm not going to expect room service.
You know, if I asked for a cup of tea, it's not going to come
in, you know, in a pot on a silver tray.
I get it right. OK, you you've now framed my
expectations and how you deliver and the wonderful you know, when
design thinking, you know, it's an affordance, I guess, isn't
it? It's that wonderful idea of Rob
Norman's You ever read that? The design of everyday things.
I haven't. It's your, your namesake, of
course. So Rob Norman wrote this book
called The Design of Everyday Things.
And it's it's it's wonderful this idea that the best design
effectively makes it almost cognitively impossible for you
to use the device in the wrong way.
So he talks about a teapot and how you pour it versus those
funny coffee pots where the handles on the outside where you
pour it by twisting it and the design of the handle without you
even knowing it tells you what to do.
And you know, the classic case of a bad affordance is a door
that you push that has a handle rather than a push plate because
you always come and you turn out you look like a prat.
And then you know, everybody outside goes, you push.
OK. And so there's a wonderful thing
which you can take that idea much, much wider and you know,
OK, flat wider, fuck off does it with words.
But you can effectively communicate expectations.
And then if you meet those expectations, maybe take one
little cute detail and just do one extra little cute thing,
everybody's pretty damn happy. But it's amazing when you when
you get something that works, how it almost then becomes even
more noticeable because in amongst so much stuff, it just
doesn't work effectively. So my favorite thing is I travel
a lot. Obviously we've got quite a
good. Restaurant.
I was going to say yeah. My favorite thing is, is there a
plug hole near the mirror in the hotel for drying your hair?
So how many hotels will you go into?
Oh. No, no, no, no.
No no for design as to do you have ausb charger by the bed for
your device or your phone? Is there a plug hole?
There is. Guy here.
My one is hook on the back of the lavatory door, which is when
you go to Scandinavia where there's a real design, you know,
a real design focus. I always joke about this, which
is that, you know, country by country, when you go and close
the glue cubicle and you're wearing a jacket or you have a
handbag, OK, do I have to put it in a pool of urine or can I
hang? OK.
And in Scandinavia, it's 100%, you know, it's unthinkable for
Scandis to have a loo door without a hook on the back.
One of the weirdest ones. Airport lounges.
You, because you must be a familiar airport lounge user.
Where they go, we'll have loads of plugs and we'll have loads of
tables. But we won't put the tables
anywhere near the plugs. Not together.
No, no, no. The plug will be over there,
right? And then we'll put a table over
here. What the Hell's going on?
And then there's also that thing which I what the hell, Someone
who does airport lounges is in the pay of the coffee table
industry, aren't they? Because you want something at
laptop height. Yeah, that all right.
They have that business area where they have desks.
OK, but that's like for the saddos, isn't it?
You never go and sit there because that's like that says
I'm a corporate saddo. I've probably got a spreadsheet
open. So exactly.
You want to sit at the main bit of the lounge, but you want to
use a laptop. OK, so there was that weird
area. I'm a sado.
It's like the school chess club, part of the BA lounge.
So I'm really, really upset at your chess playing users.
Yeah, You know what I mean? Yeah.
And and it's so funny because these things aren't that
difficult. And actually, you're absolutely
right if you're a regular user. You get bizarrely, you get
genuine delight. Oh.
So exciting. The weirdest one with hotels.
I'd be interested to know your one on this, which is if you use
the hotel laundry and you don't say you're staying for four
days, there's a high likelihood you're going to use it again.
But when they bring your laundry back, they never bring a bag and
a form. And, and funnily enough, but
someone said that they do. The only two places where
they've encountered this is like the Dorchester and maybe I think
it's the Jumeirah group or something like this.
OK, but it's a weirdest thing. Your laundry comes back.
You'd think it's the simplest thing.
Whenever you return someone's laundry, take a new bag in a new
form. That's quite profitable.
There is, there is an element where hotels hate laundry
because if it goes wrong, it's a living disaster because you have
someone attending a meeting in their underpants or something.
OK. But you know, if you get it
right, it's actually quite lucrative.
And I've, I've never understood this, which is, you know, you go
three days later, you go time to get a bit of laundry done, which
is weird actually, because you don't really need it done.
But it's the repulsion about having dirty clothes in your.
Dirty clothes, the ability just to travel with hand luggage and
you never check. Of course, of course.
Love that because that saves time, but it is it you're right
it's that thoughtfulness of when your laundry comes back, there's
a new bag and there's a slip. I also.
Like I'm not. From a shit to a cable.
Guy So if you get it back and you get the shirts folded, you
get put that in there. Whereas, you know, otherwise
it'll just be a total disaster. But it's just one of those weird
pleasures, isn't it? It's one of those perks.
And. And yet the bag and the form
come back about one time in 10. Completely weird.
Yeah. Yeah, Ellie, you were talking
about the human context earlier. And one thing that I really want
people to leave with is and better understanding of you,
right? And your signature.
We talked about signatures. We talked about the story about
my hat, the fact I have 5 of the same hat, etcetera, etcetera.
We're not going to go into signatures, but just to get a
better understanding of who Ellie Norman is, right?
So let's go right back to the start of your career.
Marketing is described as one of those really difficult things
that people think is easy and fun, right?
So did you fall into the industry?
Is there something about the industry that sparked your
interest? Why did you decide to come into
the space? And.
By the way, maybe it is easy and fun.
Yeah. I mean, Drake Bird always used
to say, you know, this is a simple business made complicated
by fools. And there's a little bit of
truth to that. Yeah.
It's also made complicated, I think, by the the obsessive
quantification culture, which is you, you know, sorry.
We, some marketers just need to get it accepted that not
everything we do pays off immediately in a way that you
can measure in a a deterministic way.
It's a probabilistic enterprise, you know, And, and that's the
great. And not everything that counts
can be measured. So early days of.
Early days most probably. Always a little bit of a rebel,
so leaving school I went to a brilliant grammar school, Kent's
11 Plus. Where were you in Kent?
'S World of Kent, OH. You're wield of Kent.
Oh, right. Fantastic coverage.
Exactly. Yeah.
Same friends. Kent.
Massive. Here we go.
Yeah, there we go. Practically neighbors well.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Toys Hill and where you live? Very close.
So I went to an amazing school, expectation that everyone would
go to university and I think there's just always been this
innate sense inside of me of there is always a different way
to do something. Equally not having a clue what I
actually wanted to do, really disliking any form of exam
taking. So I left school.
The condition was you had to, I had to go and get a job,
clearly. So my first job was pretty much
dog's body. Do absolutely anything for the
tiniest startup whitening toothpaste company, but the.
Which one? Yanina.
Oh right, Sounds like quite an expensive.
Yeah, yeah, that was a really clever, Yeah, 10 lbs of tube.
Yeah. Very different sort of tube
bottle everything, but it was so brilliant just to start to
actually observe how do things get done.
Again, trying to get sort of pick up coverage, all of those
kind of moments, whether it was, I don't know, Fashion Week or
this film premiere of just getting this toothpaste out to
people. But I learnt so much and
actually from that, and this is it always happens like this.
I say yes more than I say no because it's fair opportunity.
Yeah, yeah. So I was at a party, love
meeting, talking to people and met a guy and he said, oh,
actually I've got a role, you should come and apply for it.
So this was a design sort of agency went and applied for the
role, successful, then went into essentially my sort of five
years of agency side account management.
My client was Honda, which was brilliant.
The day-to-day client then left and they asked the agency where
they're already going to 2nd for six months.
That turned into my seven years and I think again, do you?
Want worries me. Would HR allow all this stuff to
happen? Rory, I never would have got a
job because. I, David Ogilvy, said the same
thing, by the way. He said, you know, I was failed
tobacco farmer, university drop out, you know, he said.
My CV when I start, when I founded Ogilvy and Mather
wouldn't even get me admitted, you know?
Like had I genuinely applied for a job, I wouldn't have actually
got through because, you know, certainly back then it was like
specified must have a degree, must have I well see, I didn't
have any of that. So it genuinely, and that's when
I say I feel I've been incredibly lucky because I've
been in the right place at the right time and said yes to these
opportunities. And even when I left Honda, it
was because I was fortunate enough to say there's a job
going, I think you should apply for it.
So that sort of phone call has just meant that I've been in the
right place at the right time. But I think underneath of that.
That's because you went to the party in the first place.
Always say yes because you never know what's.
Going to happen. And the same with this sort of
rebel sort of nature. I mean, there's so much me that
will play it safe, but just this curiosity and this rebel nature
that even if I don't know anything, I feel quite
comfortable going well, do you know, I'll figure it out.
So going for I could have stayed an automotive forever.
I love it. I understand it, but you know,
the thought of going into media entertainment and telco, why
there not nothing about that? But it's like, well, why not?
Watch really is the worst that can happen, and I think it's
been a series of these moments. Frighten yourself a little bit,
yeah. Yeah.
Like, well, I don't know what an ARPU is or I don't understand
all these kind of funny words, but I can learn that.
But what I can bring is some thinking from a different
perspective, a core skill set of just how do you get shit done?
Because a PowerPoint slide is lovely, but unless it's going to
get into the real world, it means nothing.
So actually that navigating relationships, how to get stuff
done, take a team with you, you can take that anywhere and I can
learn an acronym and I will ask questions as to how does a
business work? Where's the revenue come from,
where's the growth come from? So going from like auto,
intermedia, telco, entertainment to again then getting a
telephone call from Liberty Media when they'd bought sort of
Formula One to say, oh, we need someone to come and set up kind
of marketing. I'd never worked in sports
marketing and everyone said to me, oh, you don't know anything
about sports marketing. But it's not really any
different. You know, marketing is
marketing, but it's, well, what can we bring to make sports
marketing more sophisticated? Because it's really, really hard
selling cars and it's really, really hard selling like mobile
phone subscriptions. And so of course, you, you
adapt, you go and ask as many questions as possible and say,
OK, how do we do this? OK, yeah, the model is entirely
different. I'm not working with paid, but
everything is about what are earned and are sort of owned and
there's a sprinkler paper of. Course, the fact that you know
what you don't know is a weird advantage. 100%.
And actually most, I mean, this is something that terrifies me
actually, which is you look at the greatest people in
advertising and half of them luck their way in.
Most of them are marketing the same.
Most of them are autodidacts in a way.
And then you actually look, and I was researching this slightly
nerdly for something I was writing.
And you then look back at history and you realise that
there's about a 5050 split between the really brilliant
people who are conventionally trained and schooled in
something and the people who herself taught Michael Faraday.
OK, who invented the electric motor?
OK. I mean, he was, he was basically
just a random kid from a poor family who got a job working for
Humphrey Davy or something. I think it was his book binder
or something utterly crazy. And then started annotating the
books he was binding. I mean, you know, you all these
people that are William Blake, you could just reel off that.
I'm Darwin wasn't a trained naturalist at all.
OK. And you realize that actually
what we've done is that we're in the act of formalizing all this
stuff. There's a small gain in what you
might call you make slightly fewer mistakes, but at the price
of not having the breakthrough high.
I mean, 1/3 of the great people in advertising talk came from
the post room or something, but the fact that we've lost that
really scares me. When you would walk into the
Wyden and Kennedy office in London, I love it.
But there was a mannequin and the mannequin was dressed in a
pinstripe suit, bowler hat, and he had a briefcase.
And on the side of the briefcase, it said walk in
stupid every day. And that has just stuck with me
so much back to the point of I'm really aware of what I don't
know. And I think that comes comes
from a place of I'm always wanting to learn more and more
and more, but I'm so aware of what I don't know.
And that drives my curiosity or the fact that I'll then go down
like little rabbit holes. So, you know, clearly AI is is
here and I'm like, OK, how does this work?
So I just want to play with it and start to sort of experiments
and say, well, how can we sort of introduce this?
Or actually if we did this, what would happen?
Or, you know, I'll go and think, oh, maybe I shouldn't.
Like I've learned so much over 25 years.
I'm like, OK, maybe I should test myself.
Do I know marketing or do I not? So I'll go and do Mark Ritson's
mini MBAs and I just love that. But that ability to be confident
enough say, I'd actually don't have all the answers, but.
Happy with ambiguity. I'm really comfortable with it.
I always think in in Formula E now when I'm talking to people
and we're recruiting uncertainty experts are the people I love.
Interesting. Because nothing is certain, the
best we can do is provide clarity.
But those people that are just comfortable with ambiguity
because everything is moving so, so fast, it's like, no, let's
just kind of go with the flow. Things are always changing and
they change even more so because we're 12 years old.
We're a 220 person organization. Shit happens, you just got to
deal with it. And if you take the Netflix
thing for Formula One, for example, that presumably was a
left field thing, was it? That was honestly a perfect
moment because Liberty Media had bought from the one from Bernie.
So this was at the very beginning of 2017, January 2017,
I think they completed the sort of acquisition.
The big dream was always to crack the US, wasn't it?
And Chase and Sean came in. Chase Carey and Sean Bratches 2
like incredible men to work for. I then started a little bit
behind the scenes in April 2017 with them, and a number of kind
of proposals had sort of come in.
And obviously it had always been a no previously very, very sort
of secretive in terms of no one's coming in.
And Sean was like, I think we should just do this.
To your point, North America really important.
There were proposals from Netflix and a number of other
streaming companies and we just sat at the table and it was a
case of why would we not do this?
Like Netflix 2017, arguably still the biggest and the best
storytellers. And you know, there was
conversation, our broadcast team at Formula One, absolutely
amazing at libraries broadcasting.
And they were like, do you know, we can do this?
And I said, you could do this, but that's not what you're an
expert at. And so why not work with the
experts again, allow them into the Formula One world?
Everyone was so, so nervous. But it's not in their interest
to go so far that no one's not that no one in the paddock is
going to talk to them, right? Because otherwise it's not going
to be a success. But the doing the drive to
survive and I'm the thing I'm most happy about was maintaining
the conviction that at Formula One there was sort of three or
four of us that would see the episodes before it was kind of
released. And I'm most pleased that we got
to a place where the teams could only look at the edits where
they featured. So no one ever saw the full
episode. Because I think had we made it
in terms of everyone needs to sign off on this, it would have
become vanilla and then the average would have just been so
sort of reduced. Whereas actually people by
people. And so this is all about who are
the characters, who are the heroes, the anti heroes, where
are the rivalries? Because people want to again,
feel this sense of connection and belonging and to kind of
have a side with someone. It was a double win in a sense,
wasn't it, because it broke the US and it also broke into a much
bigger, more female audience than them?
Hugely. And I think I, you know, COVID
was horrific for so many reasons, but actually the timing
was lucky for Formula One. And I think a combination of the
first drive to survive series was released in from memory,
February 2019. And so we spent 2017 filming it.
2018 first one came out and then obviously through 2019
championship they were filming and then that released in
February 2020. So then, when the world shut
down and you. Still have.
If you remember last dance, you. Had a back catalog.
And Drop survived. So then everyone discovered this
two seasons, so essentially kind of 20 episodes, plus all of the
work that Chase and us as a leadership team did to go racing
in. So it was the first global sport
to go racing again in at the beginning of July 2017.
So sorry, 2020, early, 17 races, 13 countries.
It didn't feel odd that there wasn't a crowd there because of
the engine sound. So I think Netflix drives to
survive COVID and being the first global sport back with a
really compelling competitive calendar and during the races
which were cancelled. So I was in Melbourne when we
had to cancel that first race. And then, you know, we didn't go
to Hanoi, China, didn't happen, etcetera, etcetera, but we got
all of the Formula One drivers to then actually do online
racing. So for the first time, people
that were watching Drive Survive were then actually seeing the
Formula One drivers, no helmets on chat talking, kind of taking
the piss out of each other and the thing.
That was missing, particularly I think, for a female audience,
without getting into stereotyping, was the
interrelatedness. It's a bit like computing, which
was uniquely male until you connect them together, wasn't
it? When you had stand alone in
computers, it was a total kind of, you know, male nerd fest.
And then Steve Jobs came. Along, yeah, and then and also
also they became communication devices rather than stand alone
glorified calculators I suppose. Yeah.
Again, all of this just context and the storytelling.
So for me, as I kind of reflect and look back, I think
combination of rebranding the sport which comes with its
risks, I mean, there's so much advice of like never rebrand.
Right. But actually changing what it
looked like, the logo signalled change not dissimilar to what
Jaguar are now doing. What, what drove the decision to
do that? Was that was that a Liberty
Media? I spent the first four months
and worked with an agency called Flamingo, I think, I think they
shot now actually. But we just did this incredible
ethnographic study, which was absolutely fascinating in terms
of clearly all of the symbols, the associations, and
essentially where it got to was Bernie had built such an
incredible sport and his mind at the time to generate and put
that together was phenomenal. But certainly over the last
10-15 years, it had very much become seen as boring, super
clinical, a little bit like maybe driving around the M25.
The logo was a badge. It wasn't part of how do you
think about brands and an ecosystem not friendly in terms
of kind of digital or sort of any of that and had many
perceptions that were connected to an old Formula One.
So in terms of how do we best signal changes coming when the
evolution of the car technology isn't going to happen overnight?
So, you know, the next rule changes weren't until 2021, they
got delayed with COVID. Obviously now we've got this set
of rule changes, 2026. So then it's a case of, well,
how are you signalling that this is real change?
And in Western society, so visually driven, it was a case
of we know enough that if we continue down this path, we're
not going to get to a turn around position and essentially
stop the downward trend. So yes, it's a risk.
Was there a bit of an American acronym drive as well?
You have, you know, MLSMLB, Look at the MBA sports.
Yeah. So much for how they've sort of
done things. And again, just these sort of
identities around it. So yeah, Formula One, it's not
really user friendly when you're thinking about how you showing
up and where sort of culture is now and how culture is coming
through fashion and music and kind of broader entertainment.
I wanted to get Formula One to a place where it could be
genuinely part of culture versus it just looking like it was
stuck on. And so thinking about what does
it need to look like? How should, how should it work
in different environments and cultures?
So actually, how do you bring movement into it?
How do you bring texture into it?
How do you reverse and correct so much of the sense that
Formula One had become very engineering and very kind of
clinical and just had no feeling to it.
Tone of voice explored sound, smell, actually everything.
And and that for me, having that set of principles and then
really genuinely thinking, well, what could this become then
meant that when it got into which tactics should we do No
brainer drive to survive, fashion, collaborations, music.
So just taking Formula One out of its kind of echo chamber,
encouraging the drivers to be who they are as people.
Because it was, it was effectively an automotive.
It is. If you think about all the
sponsors, all the all the brand connections were all essentially
sort of inbred, weren't they in a sense?
And at the time, Ross who? Ross Braun, who is an incredible
man, I was going to say I think he's mostly won about 40 World
Championships. Like a phenomenal person,
incredible sort of leader. He came into Formula One with a
view of working from the FIA to look at the essentially the
rules of Formula One. And a lot of it was, to your
point, engineers have been talking to engineers and with
that comes complexity and actually a lot more money.
But so many of these things were invisible to people.
So actually really looking at the rules with kind of Ross and
the FIA was they're saying, well, how can you take some of
that out? So that the cost for teams to
actually operate the teams was reduced.
So a cost cap was introduced and I think up and.
He's like the Jurgen Klopf, isn't he?
Of the business. He's like this.
I'm not remotely. I'm very straight back.
I'm not remotely interested in football.
But every time Jurgen appeared on the TV, I go, who is this
guy? He's just like the complete
human being, Yeah, you know, absolutely complete rounded
human being and so. And I think the the investment
for teams have been so much. There was no team that was
actually making a profit. Then the cost cap was
introduced. I think it's from memory, it
started at $140 million, then to 135, then to 130 and then now
you see that pretty much every single form on team on the grid
that enterprise values increase and they're now profitable.
I mean, the cost cap has now just gone to $215 million
because they've got new set of regulations, so 50%.
Oh, that's allowance for the. Yeah, got it.
And now they've gone 50% electric, so it's increased.
What's interesting is our cost cap is $15 million and 100%
electric. So what you see is a lot of
manufacturers again coming back to is the future of you.
Want to play at that? Point software and intelligence
and strategy they can play in our sandbox, which is
unpredictable, so brilliant for real world testing software
program that overnight and it's in your automotive fleet.
Yeah, it's so the Oh, you mean the speed of diffusion is just
Yeah. Yeah, that, that race to Rd. is
absolutely phenomenal and I love it.
You go in the garage now if you've been.
Yeah, I love it. People are on laptops.
It is software. The engineers are phenomenal.
Hey, I, I, I, I went to Miami and the team and just being
around the whole environment. When is the Miami formulae?
So we've just been 31st of January, so our next race is
Madrid, yeah, which is 21st of March.
When you're back in London, because I'll go, I'll go on
it's. August come together.
I'll come. I've been around in August. 15th
and 16th. Never leave the UK in August in.
Months perfect in the team that Formula E has the opportunity to
be Silicon Valley's favorite sport.
Yeah, software. Yeah, only do you have the
opportunity to get the credit economy involved, Not only do
you have the tech space involved, when you go and live
and read the experience, it's phenomenal.
And and I was really excited when Ellie got us on board to
understand the sport. Why do people love it?
And, and now with the Evo session, it's really started to
bring it to life, right. And going back to a thing that
we said before we wrap up, I've always learned that there's no
one more dangerous in a boardroom than an intelligent
person with a fixed mindset, right?
Because they'll use all these words or use the fact that
they're an expert or whatever to justify whatever bullshit that
they've learned. But I think that.
A lot of intelligence is actually directed towards self
justification. 100% and and every now and then you're in a
room with somebody that didn't take the conventional route, the
zig where everybody else zags. They're willing to go into the
room and say, let me listen to everybody and let's figure
things out and make things happen.
And I think you are one of those people, right, that you are
very, very intelligent by the way.
But the role there is the role is not for me to exercise my
intelligence. They learn from me.
The, the goal for me is to learn and make sure that we're making
the right decisions to move forward based on what is just
obvious, right? And so many people have got a
handbrake on because it's all about themselves, right?
And, and, and it's, and I see that with you.
I see that with your team. And, and I know that a lot of
work has gone into making sure you do that.
How, how do you make sure? And this is more like the ask to
hiring people because whenever I speak to leaders, the biggest
challenge that they have is people.
How have you found the best way to navigate that to able to make
sure that you have a world class team around you?
As an exec, we talk about you want you want people with
optimism, energy, accountability and this sense of kind of
agency. And so for us, we, you know, our
job is to make sure it's high support but high challenge.
And so when I'm looking for people, I think I'm really open
minded in terms of where they've come from.
And because I've been less linear myself, I'm fascinated by
people that have had interesting journeys all like little side
hustles. And you see that kind of like
grit and the entrepreneurial spirit.
And that's why I love people who are those uncertainty experts
because if you've been through like a very linear kind of rigid
path, as soon as something goes wrong and it goes wrong all the
time, they are like. Panic Station.
Don't know what to do. Whereas actually, if you've had
a few kind of things like thrown at you, you build up some
resilience. It's like, you know what, we'll
just go around this way or OK, that didn't work.
What am I going to take from that?
Where are we going now? And that ability to get stuff
done and out in public that might only be 70 or 80% there
because we're never ever going to achieve perfect, perfect.
I find that really hard because I have such a high expectation
for myself and I'm really self critical of.
I could have done that better, but it is that sense of the
momentum and the movement to do stuff I think is more important
and having that sort of upward spiral of momentum interesting
and getting all of these things compounding.
And you're still allowed to hire that because this is the thing
that terrifies me, that we're entering a world where HR tells
you who to hire and then finance tells you you can't hire them
anyway. And that business where I think
you, you call them uncertainty experts.
A certain amount of recruitment should be deliberately
randomized, you know, But the, the thing that worries me about
all manner of things like AI is that the act of optimization
brings with it uniformity. And there's and nobody ever
notices the cost that actually 6 optimal hires who are very
similar aren't nearly as good as, you know, a slightly, you
know, a slightly less optimal group of hires who are
complementary and different. I've, I think, I mean, you've,
you know, the team, but I think I've got a really mixed group of
like senior leaders in my sort of team.
And I love that so much. It makes it in some respects
harder because everyone's coming from a different point of view,
but that's where the real genuine kind of magic is.
And you do get the points of tension.
But I've got, you know, a relatively new brand and
creative director that I wanted to bring in house because I'm
such a believer in creativity and having that inside a formula
E. But he's come from fashion and I
love it. That's.
Brilliant because if you've come from racing, are we going to be
too much? This is how things been done in
racing and we've got brilliant people that have that race
experience. And so we can sort of understand
each other's perspectives. And it is it is about
continuously doing that. And I think to to your question,
are we able to do that? I love the fact that we're a
relatively small organization and the fact that you're so
young, it still has the entrepreneurial spirit to it
whilst starting to get a little bit of kind of processing.
That's how to AI proof yourself, by the way, is be small and
radical, not big in uniform because big in uniform is being
commoditized. You know, the gains still, you
know, the gains to sort of scale and, and, you know, are
diminishing. And I, and by the way, I mean,
it's, I think it's also interesting career advice, which
is there is a natural tendency for people and we grew up with
it, which is go and work first for a really big firm.
Well, yeah, that probably made sense in about 1993, you know,
when there was actually a path and a, you know, reliable source
of future employment and, you know, job security and people
would invest in your training. And.
And I'm not sure the opposite. I mean, kind of, you know, the
opposite is probably true now in.
Those small organizations, there'll be, there's always a
job description that you'll read, but the reality is when
you get inside, do you know what?
It's nothing like that. You are doing everything.
And I'm just as happy cleaning the coffee machine because it
needs cleaning when you're in the office with people as I am
coming and having a wonderful conversation with you guys to
being in the boardroom. It's like what you're exposed to
and your opportunity is far, far greater in that small
organization. And I think you're, you're
learning and therefore experience that you get, you can
just do so much more in short periods of time.
Yeah. You know what?
Absolutely lovely. So it's great.
I could have this conversation for hours likely.
You're incredible. Thank you so much for.
I know you have a really busy schedule.
Thank you so much for making some time for us and we'll have
you here over and over again. So thank you for.
Two of my favorite men outside of my husband.
Fantastic. There we go.
Like, yeah, fabulous. Oh, brilliant.
That was amazing.