Relaunch of a decade with Mark Evans

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes.

00:00 
Dominic Hawes 
It. Welcome back to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. This is the podcast for senior executives who want to find out how other businesses are building value through marketing. Last week on Unicorny, I was joined by Shane Redding and Nick Eades, and we discussed whether the chief revenue officer is threatening the role of the chief marketing officer. In our chat, Nick tracked how the CRO and CMO space is overlapping. We discussed why companies need to refocus on existing customers. We talked about volume, velocity and value, the three Visa pipeline, and we talked about price. My favorite quote from the show in.  

 
00:41 
Mark Evans 
Growth modes, companies don't die of starvation, they die of indigestion.  

 
00:46 
Dominic Hawes 
Now, we've had fabulous feedback on that show, so if you haven't listened already, you can find it right now on Marketing difference Co UK. Today we're going to talk about advertising. Not any old advertising neither. Nope. Today we are talking about hugely famous campaigns that captured attention, won awards, and most importantly, delivered huge value to the business. Today, Unicorny has captured a big fish. Cue drum roll, please. So, ladies, gentlemen, and others, I'm pleased to tell you that our guest is one of the greats, none other than Mark Evans, former Managing Director of Marketing and Digital and member of the executive committee at Direct line. The Red telephone insurance company that casted Harvey kitel to bring Pulp Fiction's Winston Wolf to our commercial breaks. Now, that ad series was a massive success and we're going to talk about it later. The most impressive thing about it is actually not the campaign itself, which is obviously awesome, but they decided to change it before it passed its sell by date.  

 
01:49 
Dominic Hawes 
Well, today Mark is an independent advisor to a number of companies. He's a fellowship alumni chair at the Marketing Academy. He's also executive coach at his very own Mark Evans Associates, a professional training and coaching business that helps senior marketers get their stuff together. He's also, by the way, a prolific podcaster. We're going to link his podcast The Places We'll Go Marketing Show on our show notes and on Marketingdifference Co UK Joining me to talk to Mark today is an exceptional co host. Ian Henderson is chief executive of AML Group. He is a sagacious and creative rainmaker. His agency is the agency behind the V for Vanguard campaign and many other hugely successful campaigns. By the way, financial Services forum Agency of the year. He's also, by the way, chief Creative Officer at Selby Anderson. So basically, Ian's one of the gang. Now, in the conversation you're about to hear, we dive deep into the background behind the iconic Winston Wolf advertising campaign that revitalized Direct line.  

 
02:42 
Dominic Hawes 
We discuss transactional trust versus relational trust. When it comes to customer acquisition, mark explains his choose your future philosophy, we talk about the joy of pitching. Mark also gives his take on why Direct line wanted to move on from the Winston Wolf campaigns while they were still popular. First, let's get to know today's co host and today's guest better and learn more about Direct Line's marketing setup. Really hope you enjoyed the show as much as I enjoyed recording it. Now, we're recording this in mid January and I haven't yet seen Ian this year, so I'm going to start by saying, Ian, Happy New Year. How are you?  

 
03:17 
Ian Henderson 
Happy New Year to you, Dom, and good to see you. And good to be here.  

 
03:21 
Dominic Hawes 
And today's guest is Mark Evans. Mark. Welcome to Unicorny.  

 
03:24 
Mark Evans 
Thank you very much. Fabulous to be here.  

 
03:25 
Dominic Hawes 
Why don't we kick off today with an update about you, Mark, because when we met you at Direct line, but it's a new year and you have many new challenges.  

 
03:32 
Mark Evans 
Yeah, I'm a couple of weeks into the third chapter of my career, in fact. Having done ten years at Mars and learning the basics of marketing and leadership, I then did 15 years in services sector, bigger exec roles, broader responsibility, and I'm now cashing that all in to Go portfolio, which seems to be quite the trend at the moment. A combination of nonexec work, coaching and consultancy and I'm looking forward to hopefully a cracking decade to come.  

 
03:56 
Dominic Hawes 
Look, as you probably know, the purpose of this podcast is to help senior executives, not just marketers, learn how they can build value in their businesses through marketing. That's, of course, exactly what you did with some amazingly creative campaigns at Direct Line. Before talking about the brand and the campaigns themselves, though, for a bit of context, it'd be really nice if you could explain about the marketing setup at Direct line under your tenure.  

 
04:19 
Mark Evans 
Yeah, there's two parts to that answer. The first is pre and post agile. We did an agile transformation in 2019. Prior to that, it was a very typical broad marketing church. Reporting into me was a digital services function, insight, CRM the regulatory aspects as well as brand and comms all the things you'd imagine and data. We go through an agile transformation and pretty much everything changes in that. We organize into chapters and tribes. I sometimes start to question, what the h*** am I doing? Am I actually leading anything? Because all of the emphasis is upon federation into cross functional teams and the role necessarily becomes much more of a coach and a figurehead. It was a very broad church of a marketing function, which meant that I did look after customer experience and did look after ecom. That role grew over a period of years into a big CMO.  

 
05:09 
Dominic Hawes 
Job and I think we got to get stuck straight into some work, haven't we?  

 
05:11 
Ian Henderson 
Yeah, I think we have. I mean, I've been running agencies for about 15 years. My previous chapter to that was as Copywriter and Creative Director in various agencies. One of the big fascinations for everybody is the transition from Wolf the Fixer to Transformers. That must have taken quite a bit of sleepless nights, didn't it?  

 
05:31 
Mark Evans 
Yes and no. The Winston Wolf campaign had been described by some as the relaunch of the decade for the 20s. Not by me, but, I'll take it, of the decade, I believe relaunch of the decade, apparently, and it's been tremendously successful. This was a brand in terminal decline in 20, 12, 13 by 2015, back into electric growth, 85% growth over a three year period. It really hit on the target insight of insurances there to fix things. That purpose of the sector had been lost for eons. It was quite a big thing to think about contemplate changing it. What's really interesting is there was no change in strategy, there was no change in agency, there was no change on the client side, which would normally precipitate a tumultuous change from a successful campaign. Indeed, the campaign was still working by any KPIs you could choose to measure.  

 
06:19 
Mark Evans 
Things can't last forever and we've been running for six or seven years and I suppose it started with a conversation, is there something better available to us? Picking up one specific weakness in the campaign, which was it was very self congratulatory, as in, we're brilliant. It would just be Harvey kitel as Winston Wolf, telling that in a creative way, we've got all these amazing propositions, we're the best, but best without a comparator. It was somewhat hollow in that we could say that we're best, but where's our points of comparison? It's just our greatness as opposed to visa vis something else. Went in search of better with the agency, we could have continued with Winston Wolf, but maybe there was something even better. We found this brilliant idea which was, we're so good, we're the best and we're better than fictional superheroes. Obviously we didn't mind borrowing on hyperbole because we had a gangster as a metaphor for a fixer in a low trust sector.  

 
07:09 
Mark Evans 
This elevated the campaign in a really meaningful way in terms of better than something mythical, but still better than something. It just gave it another dimension and led to great script writing. The thing that really surprised us, and really surprised me personally, was that every single execution we've made of the Transformers has been better than every execution of the Winston Wolf campaign by all the metrics that we use to evaluate advertising pre and post. Yet this is a campaign that essentially had won three IPA goals or two goals in a new learning award. And here we are. Yeah, we've struck Jackpot again. Just thank goodness it happened, because the side story is we launched two weeks before COVID a month later, maybe this never would have seen the light of day, who knows? Throughout both campaigns, there's been a lot of what if this had happened?  

 
07:54 
Mark Evans 
Moments. In the end, it's a simple story. We were curious about, is there something better? And boy, we found it.  

 
07:59 
Dominic Hawes 
You did.  

 
07:59 
Ian Henderson 
I know you're a big fan of sticky brand assets, as indeed am I young? You've got a bit of previous with One Eight as well, haven't you? I know Mark Ritson is a big fan of both and he talks about the power of recall as being paramount and that's what's behind Transformers and indeed One Eight. Maybe that's why it's better than Wolf.  

 
08:19 
Mark Evans 
Yeah, I think that's probably right. I did economics as a degree back in the day and probably was destined for finance, and then I was made redundant before I even started a graduate job. I very much crash landed into marketing. Little did I know, bit by bit over time, that I've learned it's a lot about neuroscience. The thread of my whole career has been character led advertising, and I really reflected on this at this transition point to the Transformers at Mars. I worked with the Eminem's characters and Pedigree, where it was breeder dogs and Caesar small dogs. I worked at 118118 with the runners and got your number, and that became a category meme, and then more recently with Churchill the Dog and Direct line, the Telephone, or The Fixer or the Transformers. It seems to me painfully obvious that the stronger the cultural or character or celebrity reference that you pull from, the deeper the memory structures that are created, the greater the recall, the broader the top of the funnel.  

 
09:10 
Mark Evans 
Dot, dot with one slight twist, which is there was a moment where were particularly paul Getty's, CEO at the time, was very nervous about going with Winston Wolf and took a bit of reassurance. There's an interesting story about that. On specifically, he said, and he's a celebrity, and we've had problems with celebrities in the past, and I had to agree because we'd had Melanie Sykes when she kicked her head in of a husband or boyfriend. We'd had Vic Reeves when he did some things he shouldn't have been doing when he was advocating church insurance. We had Rolf Harris, I have to say that quietly. We had Martin Clooneys, who lost his license whilst he was so he was right. Celebrity endorsement does have its pitfalls, but in the case of Winston Wolf, he was a very clean living, very healthy Hollywood star.  

 
09:53 
Ian Henderson 
No reputational risk is huge when you're looking at that kind of campaign. I know. Just it's interesting to know your point about reassurance. I'm sure a lot of people will want to know how much you rely on testing, if at all, in order to give your CEO reassurance that switching to Transformers is going to produce, I think, 20% uplift in sales.  

 
10:13 
Mark Evans 
Yeah, I mean, I think it's the classic left brain, right brain. Test what you can test to death to create trust and latitude to make those instinctive decisions at a macro level, not just at a campaign level. I was really proud of the marketing effectiveness team under Anne Constantine and Carl Bran, which meant that were plausible as commercial marketers and had credibility and capability that led to trust. In the case of both Winston Wolf and the Transformers, at the outset, it is an instinctive decision, and in both cases, the hair on the back of your neck when you've got some gold in your hands, and then it's the battle to do whatever it takes to get sign off internally, which is sometimes data led, but not always. Sometimes it is reassurance of your character, your relationship, your previous conversations, other situations you've been in where people will trust your judgment.  

 
10:58 
Mark Evans 
Paul, I think, had a real challenge and question about whether we should go ahead with that Winston Wolf campaign. In the end I didn't ask him to trust me because that's always a bad idea directly, but I think in the end he did and he subsequently said it was one of the best decisions he made to do so. Similarly, in the case of the Transformers, it's an instinctive thing and then you have to do the backfill. Very interesting though, I'd only ever worked for marketing CEOs until four years ago when Penny James came in, who was more of a finance and risk background. It is actually quite a different context to sell in big creative campaigns to marketers than to non marketers. In the case of Paul, he knew the eight KPIs that mattered. Actually there probably was a bit more of a data pool that we had to do, not retrospectively, but just in advance of the buildup.  

 
11:38 
Mark Evans 
With Penny, I suppose she didn't really know how to interrogate or internalize a campaign less experience and therefore it was more qualitative. So it's all contextual. The whole everyone will know that stakeholder management is highly contextual. It's been in the case of both of those campaigns.  

 
11:52 
Ian Henderson 
You mentioned trust there and trust in financial services intangible products. There's often a lot of bumps in the road between the consumer and the brand. I just wanted to ask you really to draw out the difference between transactional trust and relational trust, because with the kind of characters that you've got right wolf, Transformers, One Eight, it's all about relational. It's all about how I feel about those brands, the sticky brand assets, my kind of empathy, if you like, with those characters. Whereas a lot of brands go for the transactional trust us because we're 10% cheaper. That kind of much more functional relationship. It's clear from what you're describing that relational trust outperforms the functional, wouldn't you say?  

 
12:39 
Mark Evans 
Yeah, there's a few aspects to that question. One is there's, as in any market, a lot of segmentation insurance and for some price is everything. I mean, is it the only thing? And therefore brand is almost irrelevant. They will literally not care what they've bought, not know what they bought, be disappointed, pointed when it lets them down at the point of need, but it's the cheapest one on the price comparison website. For many people they do value insurance and get it. That's an important thing to say that I think you're right. In general, relational trust is much stronger. The way I look at this, the role of trust insurance and you're absolutely right, it's critical because it's a win lose. If I pay out for your claim, you've benefited, I've lost. If I don't pay out, I've benefited you, and so on. So there is a healthy mistrust.  

 
13:20 
Mark Evans 
The way that I choose to think about trust is Rachel Botsman's definition, who's a global trust guru who I've had the privilege to interview. She says that trust is a comfortable relationship with the unknown. It actually says that transparency is the enemy. If you need transparency, it's because you don't trust. The way I decode that is trust is about what people think about you when you're not in the room or when they can't see what you're doing. That helps me to think about there's advertising, which, as you say, is transactional, which gives me no knowledge of that brand's intent or capability, just says they're cheap. Now, consciously and maybe even subconsciously that can be powerful. In the case of direct line, when I see their intent to fix things, both in the TV campaign but also in many other ways that we brought that to life, or in the case of Churchill, I can see that you're really on my side, you can help me chill because care about me.  

 
14:10 
Mark Evans 
You're getting, I think, to something deeper, relational as you describe it, which means I can trust these people. Not that I'll pay a massive premium, but there's something really interesting in the sector which is that relational trust leads to attract a customer. That's a better risk. There's some economics which come in that direct line is surprisingly cheap for the customers it attracts because it attracts good customers who are reasonably conscientious, look after their car, maintain their homes. I think the point goes even deeper. It can actually affect the economics of your business model.  

 
14:40 
Dominic Hawes 
Was that an unintended consequence or was that planned? You have an economics background. When you started looking at the campaign and how you were going to segment and pitch, were you after a better class of customer, a more prudent customer?  

 
14:53 
Mark Evans 
The jackpot is that a customer that gets insurance happens to be more prudent. Yes, it's always been for customer who thinks a bit more. It created the direct market back in the day, it was for a customer who wanted to take a bit more control and understand a bit better and not be fobbed off, cut out the middleman. So, yeah, there's definitely something in that thought. It means, of course, that as a direct brand, and now the last standing direct brand, that brand has very advantageous economics in that it can pay the same cost to acquire a customer as it would on a price comparison website. But there's something much deeper and enduring. Longevity, retention, cross sell upsell, et cetera. There is a high road, but as I said, that's not for everybody, but there's still enough people who get insurance. In a very simple nutshell, there's those brands and people who only focus on the point of purchase.  

 
15:37 
Mark Evans 
There's those brands and customers who care beyond that and care about the point of need. There's something migratory around this, in that as people go through life and get older, they've got more to lose. They've also had bad insurance experiences, which tells them, if I make a bad decision, it's going to make my life worse when I really need it.  

 
15:53 
Dominic Hawes 
Part of the expectation of that actually is a slightly higher price point. You expect to pay more because you expect to get more when it goes wrong, right? If your point of transaction effectively is at need, not purchase, certainly I think the expectation should be that a higher price would support that positioning.  

 
16:07 
Mark Evans 
Yes, but you may not need to because you're a good risk.  

 
16:10 
Ian Henderson 
Underlying it. That the idea of restitution, right, making things right, fixing things, mr. Wolf fixes things, the Transformers and so on. There's quite a history, isn't there, in Direct line of being associated with solving problems? Because you've had things like the direct fixing small things that annoy you PR campaign, right? You had the fleet lights, drones. I mean, those are really interesting things in themselves. And they're not advertising, clearly, they're acts. I just wanted to get your view on whether that's shifting ads, V acts. Is the balance changing? Could you get away with just doing interesting and cool things? Or do you still need big scale TV?  

 
16:50 
Mark Evans 
It's a good question, because the media landscape is changing. Jarrett line benefited from having the budgets to be able to have integrated campaigns. Did both the heavy TV as well as the paid search, which is tremendously important, insurance, and also these demonstrable acts of fixing. It's interesting, though, just to rewind one moment, famous for fixing. I mean, literally nobody had talked about what actually happens at the point of need for 20 years, it had just been about price and discount and maybe some product features, but ultimately no brand had stood for fixing. Yet it is the category insight, the unmet need in the market. These amplifying events we thought were really important because it was obliquely reinforcing our fixing credentials. If Directline can fix this, then surely they can fix that. I guess again, a lot of this operates at a subconscious level. One of my favorites was a lovely two minute video which had great view through rates of Stuart Pierce, psycho England footballer, very famous character, fixing.  

 
17:44 
Mark Evans 
I forget the name of the football team, but it was the worst football team in the UK that was averaging a goal difference of -19 and hadn't won a game in years and it was set to amazing classical music. It's beautifully shot. In the end they did lose the match one nil that he came in as caretaker, manager and player for I think that they were disallowed a very obvious goal, but it was a beautiful demonstration of low. If we can fix or at least partly the worst football team in the UK, then what can't we do? It's kind of hyperbole and metaphor, but it's again reinforcing that notion that.  

 
18:14 
Dominic Hawes 
We are the ultimate fixers in film and television. They say if you can't explain your script in one line, it doesn't work. When I hear Mark explain the concept behind the longford AFC campaign, where they brought in England legend Stuart Pearce as head coach, it comes back to the importance of simplicity in storytelling. Good versus evil star cross lovers, or in this case, the underdog story return again and again in media because of how quickly audiences can identify and relate to them. As Mark states, if Direct line can help fix the worst football team in the UK, they can fix whatever insurance problem you might have, capturing audiences imagination, spreading the brand message in a clear and creative way. That's what great advertising is all about. You're listening to Unicorny with Dom Horse, powered by Selby Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future.  

 
19:07 
Dominic Hawes 
Coming up on today's show, Mark goes into detail about how the Winston Wolf campaign was conceived. We also discuss the joy of pitching and why a closer collaboration between shortlisted agencies and the client team when coming up with campaigns can help you take creative risks. First, let's hear Mark explain his choose your Future philosophy. Listen to this. I think post COVID we all hoped were going to return to a more normal, slightly predictable planable environment. We don't have that. We've got complete unknown. When we started talking about this podcast, we said, like, what do you think about the future? You came up with a premise of choose your future. Do you still think that's relevant in 2023? Like if you were going to give advice to people listening to this podcast marketers, specifically about how to deal with the next twelve to 18 months, are there specific tips or pointers you could give people?  

 
19:54 
Mark Evans 
I think it's still definitely relevant if we start with 80% of CEOs say they don't trust their CMOS and only 10% of CEOs say they don't trust their CFOs, number one. Number two, I think 26% of CMOS say that they're regularly in the boardroom, and the average tenure of CMOS, it ranges between two and three years, but the lowest of the C suite. I think marketing in totality is not in a great place. Just as a pause for that, as I look into 2023, I see people coming back with fire in their belly in 2023 after a couple of really painful years. Yes, of course, economic uncertainty, but people ready to push on and push through. Marketing itself, I don't think is in a great place. It comes back to that point around trust again. I say choose your future, I see a virtuous and a vicious circle.  

 
20:40 
Mark Evans 
The vicious circle is that CMO who maybe never makes it through the survival first twelve months, but they're not in the boardroom, they don't have the ear of the CFO, they're not crafting the strategy with the CSO. They're quite marginalized. They're sort of boxed into performance. Marketing budgets are vulnerable, less attractive in terms of talent development, not really at the strategic table, and that's a pretty bleak place, but sadly, that is a place that many CMOS occupy. I was very fortunate to have ten years tenure at Direct Line, so I got through that survivalism period. If I'd not done, maybe the Winston Wolf thing wouldn't have happened. Direct Line might be a very different company now, but I did, thankfully. As I go forward and coach, I think I can help CMOS kick the a** out of their first year in a new CMO role when it's really tough.  

 
21:23 
Mark Evans 
The virtuous circle is a place of wonder, and I migrated over time steadily, but surely to be on the full exec and in the boardroom, where you do have a seat at the table, you are valued and trusted. You're able to do the nuts and bolts of Marketing 101, which includes developing the brand. You probably can control the Insight or have ownership of the Insight function. You're best mates with the CSO from a point of view of board strategy days and the strategic development of the company. You're in the room regularly with good content in the board meetings. Very crucially, your CFO says, marketing is the last thing I'll cut. I get it. It's an investment, not a cost. That's a crucial one, because if you're at the front of the cuts queue, you're just forever vulnerable. Getting CFOs to understand brand building is the Holy Grail from that vantage point.  

 
22:06 
Mark Evans 
It all just gets better because let's just say a climate conversation comes around, you're the person that comes into the room saying, well, this is the customer reality. In the case of insurance, they're way behind. They don't associate climate with insurance. So, okay, so how do we pick our way through that if you talk about diversity, again, you're at the table influencing the conversation through an outside in lens. You're kind of nowhere, or you are that person that is hopefully confidently leading the business through these choppy waters, bringing the future forward in the outside in and their worlds apart. As I said, I've traversed across bit by bit. So it's not necessarily a binary thing. For those that can work themselves into that virtuous, it's the best job in the world.  

 
22:44 
Dominic Hawes 
Do you think there's a role to play with CEOs and CFOs as well in that it can't all be marketing's fault? There must be some responsibility taken by other functions around the board table because marketing is so fundamental to the long term health of a business.  

 
22:58 
Mark Evans 
I think most CEOs are smart enough to know that at a very crude level, if you don't invest in your brand, you won't have a business in five years. How should I invest and how much should I invest and what's the balance of these things? This is where there is actually a ton of literature and support out there to help to educate boards and execs. Very specifically, were sponsors of Erinburg Bass and we did a teaching session with all of the exec and subsequently some of the board on the principles of mental and physical availability and what drives growth in brands. Somehow, some way, through whatever means, you got to get the CEO to get it. Otherwise you're always having the wrong conversation because you don't want to be having that conversation. You want to move on from that, but you'll kept getting dragged back into that conversation.  

 
23:43 
Mark Evans 
I mean, don't get me wrong, at some point sometimes marketing has to stump up because circumstances dictate that there's such big cuts and at that point it feels a bit less great that philosophically, it's the last thing that would be cut because it's the same difference. But nonetheless, that is important. That howsoever CEOs understand the principles of brand building. And some of the nuts and bolts.  

 
24:01 
Ian Henderson 
As well when you are coaching CMOS, I mean, is part of it kind of being better at marketing and positioning that in the terms that the rest of the C suite, the people around the board table would understand about value creation. The alignment seems to me, of the business objectives, the brand itself and the behaviors that the organization exhibits. Getting all of those in a row seems like it should be the central function of the CMO in the context of the board.  

 
24:30 
Mark Evans 
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a two by two here. On one axis is great marketers at marketing and one is great accessors at marketing brands. And if you got both it's great. I think actually the bottom right, if it were where you're great at marketing brands but you. Don't know how to marketing means you will always be constrained in what you do. Creating the latitude to get on with it is a critical thing. Again, some of these things aren't through the front door, it's through the side door or the window or the loft or the seller. Actually, the creation of a really robust marketing effectiveness suite with econometrics and a B testing and geo testing and all that stuff, was, I think, the critical building block to credibility and capability and also self confidence. If I think back to the very early days in 2014, when we just really signed the Wolf campaign with Saatchi and Saatchi, they then came back into do a presentation in front of the whole marketing team, reenacted the pitch, best pitch I've ever been in, dressed up as Winston Wolf, albeit with red bow ties.  

 
25:26 
Mark Evans 
Subsequently, Harvey kitel said, not on your life, black bow ties it is. Anyway, they came and reenacted this pitch in front of the team and it was just as brilliant second time round. I was thinking that we're going to have a deluge of questions and there was not one question. Absolute silence, tumbleweed. Embarrassing, actually. Afterwards, I spoke to a few people, were like, Why did that happen? That was a weird moment. My synthesis of it would be, well, yeah, but can we do that? Until the moment went on air and it was trending on Twitter and we started winning awards, I don't think there was the belief that were capable of the resurrection of the brand that were planning. Of course, that does come from knowing that you can prove it. That's where marketing effectiveness is super critical. Personally, I'm a fan of housing marketing effectiveness within the marketing function, keeping the independence and critical, friend and objectivity, but being involved in things.  

 
26:13 
Mark Evans 
I think that's a tricky balance because some would say cynically, you're marking your own homework, but I think, who knew? Actually, the relationship with marketing effectiveness within and around the marketing team is probably a cornerstone for any credible CMO and marketing team.  

 
26:28 
Ian Henderson 
Good to hear that Saatchis are keeping the flame of the big a** pitch alive.  

 
26:35 
Mark Evans 
Yeah, I love pitches. Some of the best days of my career have been those mega itch days. And, yes, sometimes you just know you've got gold in your hands and the hair standing up on the back of your neck. Maybe for a moment I can tell a bit of the backstory about how we got to Winston Wolf, because that's also a magical moment that's in and around the advertising process, which is that were having. A chemistry meeting with Saatchis and Richard Huntington, the senior planner, goes off on a rant about being mugged in Vietnam. And afterwards, Paul Silburn sadly passed away. Now and Richard were in a lift and Paul said, I think I know what insurance is all about. It's like being an account guy or girl in an ad agency. You've got to get s*** done. In fact, it's a bit like that Winston Wolffeller in Pulp Fiction, to which Richard said, look, come on, no, we've got to get the strategy.  

 
27:19 
Mark Evans 
Let's not get executional, let's not worry about the creative idea until much later. Lo and behold, that became the idea that was pitched. Apart from the red bow tie, nothing changed. The scripts were kind of effortless, I'm told. I mean, I'm not that I could write one. The only twists were Harvey kitel making sure it was more West Coast than East Coast and all the other way around, and a few nuances. Ultimately it didn't get changed from that moment of creative genius and parallel thinking from Paul in a lift after hearing Richard being mugged in Vietnam. Those things I don't maybe those things do happen in finance and procurement, but probably less so. One of the side stories of the great work that Sarchi produced for Wolf campaign was that we'd had four agencies in that particular boat and all four chemistry sessions were basically really flat, a bit dull, a bit safe.  

 
28:07 
Mark Evans 
Here were with a brief which said, revolution, we're kind of screwed and we need to be dramatic and bold and brave. Yet what was coming back was really safe and none of the agencies had asked in advance. Whites of the eyes, do you really mean it? They'd all assumed that we didn't have the gumption for it. It was only in that fourth chemistry meeting when it was, again a bit pedestrian, and this is probably my main value add, which was to say, right, where I think we should stop this meeting. I was resigned to the fact that weren't going to find an agency that was going to be prepared to do this. I said, we've had three meetings like this where you've not believed our intent in the brie. It's been a bit boring. Now tell us what you really think. This is when Richard launched into his mugging experiences.  

 
28:51 
Mark Evans 
It raises that question to be having the conversation about what worked, you really weren't do you want it to be iconoclastic? Do you want it to be really daring? Do you want it to not feel like it's advertising in an ad break? Do you want it to scare? Do you want it to entertain? Do you want it to and there's no line on a brief which says what do you really care about? Because you'll have KPIs and business objectives and context. I think that's the bit where there often doesn't come through in chemistry, which is what you really dream about. Otherwise, often briefs get completely misinterpreted.  

 
29:25 
Dominic Hawes 
We've talked a lot about Wolf and how good the campaign is, and you made the decision to change it almost when it was at its peak. You could see why you needed to do that, obviously, because you're running the marketing business. How do you go about persuading your other stakeholders who might not have such instinct and understanding of why you're doing that you need to quit when it's working?  

 
29:44 
Mark Evans 
Well, yeah, I mean, we could make a case that we could anticipate long term wear out. So that's one thing. Conceptually, it was clear that we didn't have a foil that were beating to really demonstrate superiority with a bit more dimension. There's the bit which, like, well, we think we can get Bumblebee and maybe Valkyrie and we can work with Marvel. This is when all the stuff we'd done about distinctive brand assets and Erinburg Bass and System One and System Two, it was very obvious that this was famous advertising. I think it wasn't a single silver bullet, but a combination of things meant that I never lacked confidence that we wouldn't sell it, I never had any doubt at all that we'd be able to sell it in because of the foundations that we'd laid. In a way, it was another tangential creative treatment, but it was a logical extension of all the steps that we've taken up to that point.  

 
30:37 
Mark Evans 
So, again, keep coming back to tenure. It's really boring, isn't it? I don't think somebody coming in new would have found it half as easy or maybe had half as much success creating that inversion from one campaign to another. So it's unfortunately, many things. Multifaceted takes time based on trust. Not single silver bullet stuff, but very disruptive.  

 
30:59 
Dominic Hawes 
Do you disrupt your own campaign when it's working and then see, as you say, not just an extension, but a magnification also, of results?  

 
31:06 
Mark Evans 
Yeah, and to be honest, I loved that story, I loved anticipating that in a couple of years time, I'd be able to say what I said earlier, which is we didn't change debris, we didn't change the client, we didn't change the agency, went in search of better. This is partly my ego talking, but I thought, I'd bloody love to be able to say that. Now, of course, I'm not going to do something reckless. I also had to be convinced that the campaign would work, but based on instinct and the pretesting data, I had, again had no doubts.  

 
31:30 
Ian Henderson 
Just before we finish, Mark, out of interest, what would you say to somebody who listens to what you've been saying about the brands you've created, the difference you've made, the way that you've gone about your career, to somebody who's maybe starting out and thinking about, well, how do I get to doing what he's done?  

 
31:47 
Mark Evans 
Well, this is a really easy question, specifically because my daughter is 20 and has just started her marketing career and it's the easiest piece of advice. It's the advice I was given by Bruce McColl, who was global CMO at Mars and probably the best boss, certainly the best marketing boss I ever had. He said the number one facet or tool in any decent marketers toolbox is curiosity. Around every corner, there is an amazing insight lurking, waiting to be found just out of you, and you just got to be curious enough to go and find it and used to say it repeatedly with some drama as well. And it really stuck with me. I think it is so true that what differentiates marketers in the C suite and makes great marketers is curiosity. That's curiosity for those insights that are hiding in plain sight, like the Fixer insight.  

 
32:34 
Mark Evans 
That's curiosity for what's happening in the world and with customers and trends and so on. Also, and this is the paradox, that curiosity about what makes stakeholders tick. Shouldn't marketers be the very best stakeholder managers in town because they're curious about what makes people tick, including their C Suite peers? Yeah, just stay as curious and open minded as possible and everything else follows from there. That leads to better self awareness, to richer things in so many ways. I think it's a very general point, but it's something you can lean into. It's not necessarily innate. You have to have intent to be curious and it kind of all follows and flows from there.  

 
33:10 
Ian Henderson 
That's a great answer. Thank you. I'll make sure my kids listen to this.  

 
33:14 
Dominic Hawes 
Mark, tell me, if people want to get in touch with you because they need your help, how do they contact you?  

 
33:18 
Mark Evans 
Well, LinkedIn is probably the very best bet you'll find me on there. As I said, looking to combine coaching, consultancy and nonexec roles, particularly if, as I said, any CMO or aspiring CMO or CMO going through transition wants to supercharge, then I'll be very happy to talk.  

 
33:34 
Dominic Hawes 
Fabulous. Well, thank you so much for your time and maybe we can get you back in one day.  

 
33:39 
Mark Evans 
I'll be delighted to come back when I've got something more interesting to stay again. It might take a couple of years, but you never know.  

 
33:44 
Dominic Hawes 
Fab, thanks so much.  

 
33:45 
Mark Evans 
Thank you.  

 
33:45 
Ian Henderson 
Thank you.  

 
33:48 
Dominic Hawes 
Well, that's the end of the show. And what a show it was. Thank you so much, Mark, for coming onto the show. And, of course, thank you to my excellent co host Ian for joining us in the studio. I've really enjoyed this one and there's so much we can pluck from the conversation and reflect on. I want to focus on Mark's closing words about curiosity. The great American advertiser Leo Burnett once said, curiosity about life in all of its aspects is the secret of great creative people. It really doesn't surprise me that Mark shares that perspective, because curious minds are hungry minds. Curiosity, it pulls our imagination towards new and exciting possibilities. It shows us a glimpse of what's possible. It helps us take risks. It makes us hungrier learners. The amazing David Bowie once described malevolent curiosity as being behind everything he made. That kind of reminds me, little bit of Mark, because it took huge amounts of bravery and creativity to even conceptualize a Winston Wolf campaign.  

 
34:48 
Dominic Hawes 
Then, like, how much guts does it take to move on before a campaign gets stale, like when it's in full swing? But I suppose that's what curiosity does. It pulls you to a new and exciting place, a place where you can capture more of people's imagination, where you can tell better stories, where you can spread messages much more potently. That's the art of great advertising. In next week's episode of Unicorny, I'm joined by Georgia Gilmore and B, two B marketing's Joel Harrison, and we talk about how senior marketing leaders in B, two B organizations, are being excluded from strategically important corporate initiatives. Specifically, we're going to dive into the world of mergers and acquisitions and look at why marketing leaders should be included in origination and certainly in due diligence. That's a subject very close to my heart and it is a really good conversation.  

 
35:40 
Dominic Hawes 
So I hope you tune in then. Thank you for listening today's show. Together, we're building a body of reference to make marketing work better for business. Now, it takes us eight to 10 hours to produce each and every episode of Unicorny. Please take the time to share, rate and review us, help us get found, and help yourself at the same time. Because Unicorny is far more than a podcast. It's a community of leading marketing minds. Pretty soon, we're going to be running events too. If you're interested in joining our community, please get in touch by following the Unicorny page on LinkedIn or connecting to me on LinkedIn. My name is Dom Horse. H-A-W-E-S. You've been listening to Unicorny with me, dom Horse. Powered by Selby Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future, unicorn is conceived and produced by Selby Anderson with creative support from One Fine Play.  

 
36:33 
Dominic Hawes 
Nicola Fairley is the executive producer, connor Foley is the series producer, CASRA Farusia is the superb audio engineer and editor, and the episode is recorded at Terminalstudios Co UK. Thank you for listening and we will see you in the next one.