Featuring Zaid Al-Qassab, Laura Hogan and Andi Jarvis.
C4 CMO 4U… the titles of these episodes are getting worse. Sorry.
Zaid Al-Qassab is the Chief Marketing Officer of Channel 4, where he leads the marketing and digital teams, and 4creative, Channel 4’s award-winning in-house creative agency.
Channel 4 is a publicly-owned and commercially-funded UK public service broadcaster, with a statutory remit to deliver high-quality, innovative, alternative content that challenges the status quo.
We talk brand management, building teams, education the P&G way, being authentic with diversity and inclusion and discuss the bight future that Channel 4 has – even in a world where streaming dominates the discussion.
We’ve got a T.O.P.T.I.P from Laura Hogan aimed at account managers and people in client facing roles. Short, but with a lot of impact!
As always, a big thanks to our sponsor, Moyee Coffee. I’m a big fan of the coffee and the work they’re doing to help farmers in Ethiopia and Kenya achieve a living income. Please check them out.
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Show Notes
Zaid Al-Qassab
Zaid is also a Director and Council member of the Advertising Standards Authority, and a Board Trustee of WaterAid.
He was previously the Chief Brand & Marketing Officer of BT plc, where he led the BT, EE, Plusnet & Openreach brands. Zaid was educated at Oxford University, where he read PPE (Philosophy, Politics & Economics), and has also completed the Financial Times Non-Executive Director Diploma.
He spent 20 years at Procter & Gamble, in marketing & commercial roles, including as Managing Director of the Health & Beauty division for the UK & Ireland. Following that, he was Chief Marketing Officer of HouseTrip, a digital start-up which was bought by TripAdvisor in 2016. He is committed to diversity and inclusion.
Zaid’s book recommendations were:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
The Perils of Perception: Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything by Bobby Duffy
The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies by Les Binet and Peter Field you can find the best charts from the research here: https://effworks.co.uk/ten-best-charts-binet-field/
The award winning C4 Complaints Welcome campaign is worth 90 seconds of your time.
T.O.P.T.I.P from Laura Hogan
Laura is a dog fanatic who runs Jelly Bean, an agency based in Birmingham delivering sweet results (geddid?!)
Find Laura on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Andi Jarvis
I’m hosting another live podcast for agency owners and directors on Monday 7 September.
Following on from the great discussion with Carrie Rose (Rise At Seven) and Tom Etherington (Evolved Search), I’ll be chatting to Stacey MacNaught (MacNaught Digital) and Paddy Moogan (Aira).
We’re discussing how to grow an agency, what its like leading an organisation through a global pandemic and what the secret is to a great agency/client relationship.
This live podcasts takes place from 12.00 – 1.00pm on Monday 7th September. It’s free but you do need to sign up for a ticket.
Register for your ticket today.
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on Twitter or LinkedIn.
If you don’t get the podcast emailed to you (and a monthly newsletter) you can sign up for it on the Eximo Marketing website.
Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast every fortnight and if you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating.
Andi Jarvis, Eximo Marketing.
Podcast Transcript
This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.
[00:00:05.02] – Andi J
Eyup, my name’s Andi Jarvis. I am your host of the Strategy Sessions. Thank you for coming along today, episode 9, 18 weeks of podcasting. I’m amazed I’m still here. I’m glad you’re still here. So let’s get on with today’s episode. Before we get started, I just want to say thanks once again to Moyee Coffee. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can have a look at the beautiful pink packaging. If you’re not watching on YouTube, that’s what a couple of kilos of coffee sounds like. Moyee Park coffee, M-O-Y-E-E, do what they call Fair Chain coffee, where they use blockchain to connect customers to growers, and they make some amazing coffee products which help to leave more money in the country where they buy their coffee from. So please do check them out online, M-O-Y-E-E coffee. Ie or. Co. Uk, depending on where you are, or follow them on social media. You’ll get a real feel for what the company is about. Thank you very much to Moyee and the team there. Today’s episode, two brilliant guests. Laura Hogan from Jellybean Agency is doing the T-O-P-T-I-P. And Zaid Al-Qassab, the Chief Marketing Officer of channel 4, is doing the main interview.
[00:01:13.04] – Andi J
So let’s get straight into Laura’s top tip, because this is brilliant and it’s something that I believe in wholeheartedly. Laura, tell everybody what the T-O-P-T-I-P is today.
[00:01:24.08] – Laura H
Hi, my name is Laura Hogan and I’m the owner of Jellybean Agency in Birmingham. My top tip is aimed at account managers and client-facing workers within agencies. My top tip is to ditch email when things go wrong. When sometimes when we’re working on our campaigns, whether it’s an SEO campaign, PR, PPC, things don’t quite go the way that we envision that they would go. And there’s nothing worse that you can do than to try and resolve this via email. To help retain that trust with your clients, take the time to pick up the phone to them. Video call, if you prefer, or if possible, see them face to face, and I know that’s difficult right now with the current situation. You really want to build that personal connexion with them when you’re talking through issues. And it’s key that you come to the conversation with a very clear outline of where things haven’t worked and why, what your next steps are to resolve that, and also those checking points that you’re going to have with the client to give them those continual updates of what you’ve done to change the things that haven’t quite worked out and the reangle you’ve done potentially so that they know when they’re going to get those updates from you.
[00:02:39.02] – Laura H
You’ve then flipped to the switch on the fact that things haven’t worked and you’ve come to them with a plan B. So they rebuild that confidence in you in knowing that you’re not just brushing it under the carpet and pretending that it didn’t happen. You’re taking full ownership of the issues, but you’re coming to them with a plan. Clarity, honesty, and full transparency. That’s my tip.
[00:03:01.28] – Andi J
Laura, thank you very much. Ditch email. I mean, brilliant. Yes, I just agree with it. That’s all. I was asked when I was a guest on another podcast recently, what skills do you think most marketers are missing? And my answer was the ability to use the telephone. I think with the abundance of Slacks, emails, WhatsApp, whatever it is to contact people, we just miss this ability to sometimes pick the phone up and ask a tough question, ask an obvious question, or build a relationship with somebody. So is it the superpower? Yes, I think it is. Pick the telephone up and talk to people somewhere else. So Laura, thank you very much for the T-O-P-T-I-P. And I want to follow on in that vein. Just very quickly, I want to talk about the live podcast that I’ve been running. So I’ve done one already with Cari Rose from Rise at Seven and Tom Etherington from Evolved Search. And I’ve got another one coming up on the seventh of September, which has Stacey Mcnaught from Mcnaught Digital and Paddy Mugen from Aira. These are based at people who work in agencies. Now, if you don’t work in an agency, stick with me.
[00:04:10.10] – Andi J
This is only going to last a minute or two. And there’s also some things in there that are relevant to other businesses. But in the first one, I asked Carrie and Tom about their growth plans and about how they’ve managed to hit that great growth. And there was a lot of interesting things in there. But the thing that stood out that is a real challenge and real thing that helps them grow is getting the right people. And they talk about relationships with clients, and they talk about getting the right people to work in the agency. Now, I’m sick of telling people that I think marketing is a people discipline. It’s about understanding our audience and customers. It’s also about understanding your clients. So if you’re in an organisation in-house, it’s about being able to influence and work with the teams that you’ve got there to bring things to life. So marketing is a people discipline. That really came out for me there, and it really came through from Laura’s top tip as well. Next up, Stacey and Paddy. Paddy sent him in an email and said, I think I’m going to treat this like therapy.
[00:05:05.05] – Andi J
Aira, fantastic agency, does brilliant work for their clients, was hit, I think, relatively hard by the coronavirus pandemic. So we’re going to talk about how they grew, how they’ve been impacted, and what their plans are coming back. But we’re also going to look at how agencies can grow and what you might learn for your agency, too. So if you are interested, go to the website. There’s a link somewhere around wherever it is you’re watching or listening. But my website is eximomarketingstrategy. Ca. Com and go to /live and you can sign up for a ticket there. Completely free, but you do need to register for a ticket. Monday, the seventh of September, 12: 00 till 1: 00 PM. Get your sandwiches, get your coffee, whatever it is. Come and sit and have a listen. It’ll be fun. It’ll be entertaining. It’ll be live. It’ll be a bit bumpy. There might be some swearing. Who knows? Just tune in. It’ll be great fun. Right. Onward to what you came for. This is the interview with channel 4’s Chief Marketing Officer, Zaid Al-Qassab. I’m not going to give him a big intro. I don’t think he needs one.
[00:06:03.24] – Andi J
And we talk a little bit about his background and where he’s worked and some of the other stuff he’s been involved in. Let’s just start listening to Zaid because most things that come out of his mouth are worth listening to. So here we go.
[00:06:15.03] – Andi J
Today on the Strategy Sessions, I am joined by Zaid Al-Qassab. Zaid is the CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer at channel 4. Zaid, welcome to the show.
[00:06:23.28] – Zaid A-Q
Hello, Andi. How are you doing?
[00:06:25.10] – Andi J
I’m not bad at all. Thank you. Not bad. How are you surviving lockdown?
[00:06:30.00] – Zaid A-Q
Well, I’m lucky enough to live in a nice house with a garden, so I’ve got it a lot easier than other people. I feel really sorry for people stuck in high-rise apartments in the centre of the city not being able to get out, but I’m surviving.
[00:06:42.19] – Andi J
Yeah, surviving and going through. How’s channel 4 doing during lockdown? It’s been a time of huge increased TV viewership in certain times and places. How’s it going at work?
[00:06:53.05] – Zaid A-Q
Well, I mean, it’s a story of two parts, really. On the one hand, viewing of TV broadcasting is massively, and channel 4 is leading the way in that with huge rising in viewers, especially young viewers. So we’re really happy about that. On the other hand, like most businesses, we’ve gone through a period when revenue took a bit of a dip because our revenue is nearly all from advertising, and a lot of advertisers didn’t know what the state of the world was and slightly reduced their advertising for a while, but that’s coming back down. So hopefully, we’ve got a rosy road ahead.
[00:07:27.14] – Andi J
Brilliant. Tell me a little bit more about channel 4. It’s a public service broadcaster, which some people may or may not know what that means. So can you explain that for me? And after that, what role does a PSB have in a world where everybody seems to be talking about Netflix or YouTube or Disney Plus? Does channel 4 still have a role to play?
[00:07:48.05] – Zaid A-Q
Great questions. Well, the technical answer on what a public service broadcaster is, is essentially the government, or on a day-to-day basis, the regulator, which is Ofcom, has an agreement to give some of the spectrum, some of the ability to broadcast to certain organisations in return for them fulfilling some obligations for the public. The most obvious of those is providing news services. So if you think of BBC News or channel 4 News, those are part of an obligation we’ve got as public service broadcasters. We are allowed to broadcast and do all the wonderful things we do in return for doing some things for the country. In the case of channel 4, specifically, What we do is a little bit more than just that. We’ve also got an obligation to do challenging material, in particular, content that is not of the mainstream. We’ve got an obligation to feature and to promote things for what we tend to call unheard voices. In other words, minorities, minority opinions, different opinions in society. That’s part of what we are required to do in return for being allowed to broadcast all the lovely shows everyone enjoys. So I think that just understanding that and the importance that PSBs have had during lockdown when people have turned to our news in droves to find out what’s going on, proves why PSBs have a future.
[00:09:15.12] – Zaid A-Q
Because we saw that the trust in something like channel 4 News or all the news of the other big PSBs went through the roof. The viewing figures went through the roof. The trust of what people were reading on social media or hearing on other platforms went through floor because people realised they couldn’t afford to hear that disinformation on such an important topic. So if anything, 2020 has proven to people the value of public service broadcasting. Actually, we’ve got a great role to play in the future because channel 4 is what we call a publisher broadcaster. We are essentially a curator, a tastemaker of what people might like to see in that area. So we think that brand is incredibly important. It stands as a mark of quality, a mark of taste, a mark of if it’s on channel 4 and you like this stuff, you’ll probably like the other stuff that channel 4 brings you as well. And that’s a really powerful tool in the world of content.
[00:10:10.29] – Andi J
And when you look at the off-com research, the communications market report that tells you about how people are viewing. It’s not just TV, it talks about radio, how people are using mobile phones, various other bits. I love it. I think it’s one of my favourite pieces of research that I see. But the younger audiences, particularly, are moving away from linear, traditional TV, BBC One, Two, Three, channel Four. Bbc Three? That went. Itv, channel Four, and moving more into YouTube. Now, YouTube has some of the deepest pockets in the world, being part of the Google Empire. Netflix, It seems to have a business model that involves burning large amounts of cash and not making any money. How do you, as the plucky little British broadcaster, fight for the eyeballs of younger audience, which is where your focus is? How do you fight for those eyeballs calls? How do you keep that brand relevant to them?
[00:11:02.16] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah, and the first thing to say is we don’t think of ourselves as just a linear broadcaster. We think of ourselves as a brand and a content proposition, and we’re pretty agnostic about where people find that content. So we have a VOD player, a video on demand player, which has got more than 23 million subscribers in the UK. So it’s massive. It doesn’t take much of a calculation to realise that that is most of the homes of the UK. And we are some of the most viewed social channels in the UK landscape, not just in media, actually. In any walk of life, we have some of the highest numbers of views of our content on social media, so a billion views a month on social, which is an incredible reach. So we are quite happy for people to reach us and engage with our content in lots of different places. That’s more complex than the world used to be, but that’s absolutely fine.
[00:12:09.13] – Andi J
That leads me into a question about one of my favourite subjects, about brand management. It almost feels like brand management must have been really simple 25 years ago. I know it wasn’t, but it feels like it must have been. You had the channel, and you had a few newspapers, and a few radio, and a bit of billboard, and that was it. How do you ensure that the channel for brand and the consistency of the brand sticks when you are delivering over Facebook, Snapchat, different channels at different places to different people, possibly even to people who aren’t in the UK and maybe don’t even know what channel four is? How do you manage that brand?
[00:12:45.20] – Zaid A-Q
Well, firstly, brand management certainly was easier 20, 30 years ago when I started. I remember starting off and being able to have my entire year’s marketing plan on one piece of A4 paper. I basically had the months along the top and the places I could advertise down the sides. And that was it. That was the whole budget.
[00:13:06.19] – Andi J
Those were the days.
[00:13:08.10] – Zaid A-Q
So, yeah, it’s a much more complex world than it used to be. But, yeah, I guess the answer I think the brand management question is understanding your audience and being very deliberate in who you’re targeting so that you can have a coherent brand. I think the first mistake that lots of people make is to assume that the audience they want is everyone. It’s a lovely idea, and I’ve heard people say it who work in marketing. Well, I don’t want to restrict myself. I’d like to sell that product to everyone. It’s a lovely concept, but unless you’re selling bread or milk, it’s pretty hard to do that because you need to have a proposition that people understand so that they want you or come to you, or in our case, seek you out to watch you. So understand who your audience is and then understand what your brand stands for in their eyes. Channel 4 is all about challenge. It’s all about alternatives to the mainstream, and it’s all about diversity, but diversity of the people who appear in it and diversity of the thoughts and the concepts and the programming that it brings up. It’s got a certain youthfulness.
[00:14:18.08] – Zaid A-Q
It might appeal to people of all ages, but it’s got a youthfulness about it. So we’re quite clear on what channel 4 is and stands for. And then, of course, you turn that into some executional things you’re consistent in. You choose what they are. I often give the example that if you go in a Morrisons supermarket, you’re always confronted with this area when you first walk in called Market Street, it has all the fresh food, fresh vegetables, like a little fishmongers and so on. That’s a key part of their execution of their brand. So you’re reminded that they’re about freshness. It isn’t in itself their brand, but it’s a lovely example of bringing it to life in execution.
[00:14:56.29] – Andi J
I’m going to come back to talk about diversity and inclusion I’ll come back later on, because channel 4 has taken a really strong position on Black Lives Matter and various other issues, pride and things like that. So I’ll come back to that later on. I want to stick on brand for the moment because your career includes managing not just one national treasure, in channel 4, but two, you were at BT before this, which included, well, maybe not just two, because that included EE, the BT brand, Plusnet, Openreach. Most of those are brands that everybody knows in the UK anyway. Everybody knows of them. Most people probably feel like they have some connexion to them, or at least in the case of channel 4 and BT, have some ownership of them. Is that a curse or is that the best part of the job?
[00:15:43.17] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah, you did right. Bt and channel 4 are both brands that people in Britain think they own. They’re right in the case of channel 4, because actually it’s owned by the public. It’s entirely commercially funded. We don’t get a licence fee, we don’t get taxes for it. We fund it through advertising, but it’s owned by you and me. Bt, of course, once upon a time was owned by the public, and it isn’t anymore. It hasn’t been for many decades. But people still act like it is. They expect BT to do whatever they want because they feel like they own BT. It’s a British institution. And yeah, it can cut both ways. It’s a millstone around your neck when people are making demands of you and feel like they own you when they don’t or feel like they ought to be able to direct what you do when they don’t even work for company. But it’s a wonderful attribute when you’re talking about the connexion you have with people. So the example I gave earlier when COVID struck and people needed information, they immediately turned to channel 4 News because they knew what we would be saying was true and trustworthy and based on the science, and we wouldn’t be saying something that was going to be bad for them.
[00:16:56.14] – Zaid A-Q
And that’s fantastic. I mean, that’s like being being someone’s best friend and best teacher at the same time. It’s an amazing thing to be able to be. So I think you have to accept that you get some rough with the smooth and enjoy the fact that these national institutions are really important in people’s lives and really close to their hearts.
[00:17:17.05] – Andi J
I think there are very similarities, because I look at BT and channel 4, and channel 4 has a very, so that you’ve focused. Its whole being is about challenging and doing different things. Bt feels almost like a pipe and slippers type of brand. I may be misselling it there, but they’re both national treasures. But are there any similarities between managing both brands, or does it feel like you’ve jumped out of a Range Rover and got into a sports car? Is that how it feels?
[00:17:49.10] – Zaid A-Q
Well, listen, I’ve managed a lot of brands in my time, and many of them are a lot smaller and less glamorous than channel 4. And I’ve always found that the the way you manage them is the same, right? You understand your audience really well, you define your brand really clearly, and then you stick to it. You try to do new products and communication and orient everything that you have. I mean, you might have retail or you might have online estate, or you might be a business that’s in a constantly changing mode of new innovation. It doesn’t matter. It’s all got to fit with the target audience the brand positioning you’ve chosen. And that’s how you build a brand over time. So in terms of what I do as a CMO, I could say it’s not terribly different what I do. I try to get an organisation to understand that and operate that way. In terms of the positioning of the brands, I don’t think there are that many brand positionings in the world, really. And yes, you’re right. These two great British brands have some things in common, the level of trust in them and the level of ownership people feel.
[00:19:00.14] – Zaid A-Q
But in terms of some of the other attributes, they’re almost opposites. Bt is trusted because it’s massive an establishment and everyone knows everything about it. And channel 4 is trusted because it’s known to be a challenger and youthful and trying to change what the establishment thinks. And so in that sense, they’re opposites.
[00:19:21.29] – Andi J
I want to just dig in about what you said there about there’s not that many brand positionings in the world because I think it feels like we’re in a time now where every second company to come out of, particularly the States, but anyway, really, has the word disruptive or disrupter somewhere in their mission statement or their vision statement or whatever it is. And it feels like everybody’s trying to find a particular position or create a new market so they can then position themselves as the only people that can serve this new market and move their brand into a slightly different space. Is that just re-badging stuff that’s already happened in your view, or is it really disruption going on?
[00:20:02.29] – Zaid A-Q
I hate that. Yeah, and having spent some time working in a startup environment as well, I have come to the conclusion that most of the genuine disruption is either a It’s a little technology breakthrough that no one else could have envisioned and suddenly puts you ahead of everyone else, which, by the way, even if you patent it, eventually people find ways of catching up. Or it’s a distribution disruption, really. It’s certainly not a brand positioning disruption. If you look at what Amazon is, it’s a distribution disruption. If you look at what Uber is, it’s a distribution disruption. It’s still got the same men or women driving little cars down the street to take you from A to B, but it’s changed the way it distributes that service. Amazon is selling you exactly the same products, but it’s changed the way it distributes them. So I think the technology leaps do happen, but most of what you see out there with people claiming to be disrupted is either smoke and mirrors, they’re not disruptive at all. We work, for example, is not disruptive in any way. It’s selling your office space, and it’s the same office space in the same places that other people sell your office space re-badged.
[00:21:13.10] – Zaid A-Q
That’s my personal opinion. Or it’s some distribution change.
[00:21:23.18] – Andi J
Talk about your startup days. You worked at Housetrip as CMO there, coming from big companies, BT, Procter & Gamble, and places like that, and we’ll talk about P&G shortly. What was it like moving into the startup world?
[00:21:40.09] – Zaid A-Q
People always said, When you come out of Procter & Gamble, where I’ve been for 20 years and you move into a startup, it must have been a seismic change. I mean, chalk and cheese. And I always said, not really. What I’ve done when I get up in the morning and go to work is fairly much the same in a big environment or in a small environment, in a great big multinational corporation like BT or in a much smaller and UK-based organisation like channel 4. It’s pretty much the same because all of those jobs I’ve been in the area of marketing or product or sales. And what you wake up in the morning and do is fairly much the same. Now, the scale of it’s different. The amount of time you have to spend on building teams in a little fast-growing startup is a bigger part of your time. The amount of time you have to spend on operational stuff and getting it right and you’re setting up a new business. Yeah, it’s more because it’s not already there. But really, the fundamentals of the job aren’t that different. And culturally, I’ve always looked for places that felt collegiate, that felt agile, that felt like you had a a lot of ownership, that you could lead new things, that valued innovation, that put the customer at the heart of things or wanted to.
[00:23:07.14] – Zaid A-Q
And so the attributes I’ve looked for mean that the places I’ve worked all feel fairly similar, whatever size they are, whatever industry they’re in.
[00:23:15.06] – Andi J
I always get the feeling about a P&G that despite it being a beast, and it is a beast of a company, but it breaks it down into much more manageable bite-sized chunks products by geographies or however they’re put together and run with small team, multifunctional teams. Correct me if I’m getting this wrong, but it feels like almost it’s not overly different from that startup mentality in the little bubble that you’re in within the company.
[00:23:43.17] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah, the clever thing P&G does and always did was give fantastic amounts of entrepreneurial ownership to people, even when they’re relatively junior in the company. And that has been a very powerful way of keeping them agile for more than 100 years, keeping them at the top of their markets despite competitors coming in with new products. Because if you give people that ownership and let them make those decisions, then as soon as they see a threat, they’ll work out how to respond to it. As soon as they see a new market opportunity, they’ll find some innovation to fill that gap. And P&G is exceptionally good at that, at saying, Listen, you’re in charge of the business. Everyone around the world in in the large factories they’ve got or in R&D is there to support you doing what’s right for the customer. So you just tell us what’s right for the customer and we’ll get it out there to market. And that’s a very, very powerful mindset.
[00:24:42.00] – Andi J
We had Dan Rubel on episode 2, I think it was, which we, hilarious, they called P and G tips. We’ll have to find a new name for this show. But he told us a story of when, I think he was two days in or one day in, he was sent on a flight to sign off the whole campaign for the brand, having only just started work on that. Do you have any war stories like that or examples of throwing in of new talent? Or do you bring that with you into your roles now?
[00:25:13.02] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah, listen, what P ENG believes is that you look for raw talent, and then you accept that if they’re raw talent, you throw them in and let them do it and accept that they’ll make the odd mistake. But that across time, the fact that they’re talented and hardworking and willing learn means they’ll be better than picking up someone who’s jaded and has done it forever and doesn’t know how to do it differently. And that philosophy has served them very well for many years. Not least, you can recruit lots of young graduates who are fairly cheap to hire. So it’s not a bad business model. I think rather than a grand example of what I did, I’d give you the almost opposite. Almost the first thing I did as a new intern at P&G, which was a tiny little project to create some stickers that were going to go on some products on the shelf to tell you that there was a promotion. And I was left to my own devices to go and do it. And I ordered all these stickers, and when they arrived at the warehouse to be stuck on the products, they realised because I’ve never ordered stickers before and didn’t know what I was doing.
[00:26:18.15] – Zaid A-Q
I’d ordered them all in something that couldn’t be pealed off. So there weren’t stickers, basically. There were bits of paper that you couldn’t stick on anything. And it’s quite a scale at P&G. Those The useless stickers probably cost a few tens of thousands of pounds. And to me, as the new intern, that felt like the end of my world. I basically screwed up my first ever project, and I got called into my boss’s office and assumed I’d get fired, and that was the end of it. And my boss said to me, Hey, listen, mate, you can make any mistake around here, but just don’t make it twice. And that was it. That was the lecture. And if anything, that first experience is probably a microcosm of the whole attitude at P&G, which is, yeah, just get good people in and let them go at it, and they make the odd mistake, but it doesn’t matter because in the end, you’ll get more out of them. They got 20 more years out of me and quite a lot of service on a lot of different brands. So it worked out okay.
[00:27:17.16] – Andi J
On the last podcast, I talked about a mistake, something I got wrong when I worked at Durham County Cricket Club back in the days. And this podcast is going to turn into a series of cockups I made at the cricket club. But we once sent out… It was my first mailing I was in charge of, and it only went to, say, 50,000 people. But when we sorted the data by last name, we didn’t sort the whole spreadsheet. We just sorted the last name column into alphabetical order. So everybody got… 50,000 people got the right first name and the wrong last name. Gordon, the Commercial Director, my boss at the time, Gordon Holland, sat me down and had a similar discussion. It was like, Well, it’s gone now. Let’s back you. Let’s get this right. So that lesson stinks me. To go back to P&G, is that why so many P&G people do really well when they leave there? I think Sainsbury’s new CMO is on the board is ex-P&G. Whenever you look around big companies, once you start digging in a little bit, you go, Oh, they worked at Procter & Gamble. They worked at Procter & Gamble.
[00:28:21.05] – Andi J
Is that why they do so well? Because of the training.
[00:28:23.20] – Zaid A-Q
It doesn’t matter where you look. My ex-bosses today are Running Ralph Lauren, running Salesforce, running at the time I joined BT, all over the place ex-B&G people, because it doesn’t try to teach you how to market or run a business in P&G. It tries to teach you how to think for yourself and run any business. And since it lets you do it from their graduate programme, bringing in people are 21, 22, 23 years old, by the time you’re churning them out in their 30s, they’ve got a decade of experience of doing that. And other companies haven’t even started to give you a responsibility beyond making the tea. So I think there’s a reason why not just P&G, but a lot of those old blue-chip consumer companies that really put the customer at the heart of what they do and then allow you to build innovation around the customer. So I put Unilever in that bucket. I put the Diageos and the Mars in that bucket. These are great places to start your career to learn the skills of customer-oriented. We used to call it marketing, but nowadays you’ll find chief customer officer, chief growth officer.
[00:29:37.21] – Zaid A-Q
They’re all the same thing. They all mean people who understand customers and know how to grow businesses as a result.
[00:29:44.13] – Andi J
It really irritates me. Growth hacking is the thing that if I don’t think… In fact, I’ll say, I’m never having a growth hacker on the podcast. I just hate the phrase. But yeah, we love to re badge things in marketing, don’t we? It’s the same thing. We’ll just give it a new shiny name because we think it sounds cool. But you’ve finished your time at PNG as Managing Director of the Health and Beauty division for the UK and Ireland, which sounds like a grand job and sounds like it’s not very marketing-focused. Was it a marketing role because it’s a marketing company? Or how had your daily life changed?
[00:30:19.17] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I used to say to people who asked me about the job, if you could look inside, if I did time sheets, if I was paid by the hour, which, thankfully, I wasn’t, and I did time sheets, you would have looked at them and thought, this person is spending almost all of their time on people. They’re probably in HR, aren’t they? And there would be a little bit of process re-engineering thrown in. So maybe I’m in the supply chain or running a factory or something. And you wouldn’t have thought for a minute that much of it was about marketing or sales and marketing, which is the core of what it is. But the truth is that the P&G believed in investing in people and getting the processes right so that people can just be liberated to get on and do stuff, and it will happen automatically, and they can change direction and achieve what they need. And so by the time you’re running one of those big groups, you are spending most of your time helping people, advising people, reorganising departments, changing the processes for things so that everything happens faster or quicker or more reliably or at less cost.
[00:31:27.16] – Zaid A-Q
So, yeah, it’s a funny old world, but at the heart of it was still we’re doing this to do whatever is right for the customer, whatever the insight or the data says people want or need and will pay for or will pay more for. That’s what we’re doing it for.
[00:31:43.14] – Andi J
How do you deal with that promotional element? Not promotional marketing, promotion in terms of growing up through a company? Because I know something I struggled with as my career was growing, that I felt every time I got promoted, I was leaving behind some of the job that I really loved and picking up lots of things which felt a little bit like shuffling paper. I’ve grown a little bit and can appreciate whys and wherefores, but when I was in my 20s and you just said, I want to do that, and this is really boring. How did you cope with that?
[00:32:14.00] – Zaid A-Q
When I do career advice to someone or a bit of mentoring or something like that, I always say, Listen, be really careful what you wish for, because a lot of young people start out going, What do you want? I want to get to the top. And I say, Do you really want to get to the top? Do you understand what people at the top do? Because if you’re working in a small business and you get to the top, that person is struggling to get the revenue in and pay the bills every single day. And that is what they’re focused on. They might have started in marketing or started in sales or somewhere else, but I can tell you what they’re doing right now is making sure that the revenue that comes in this month is slightly higher than the bills. That’s what they’re doing. If you get to the top of a big company, let’s say a footsy company, Well, what are you doing? You’re managing a board, you’re doing external relations, you’re talking to regulators in some companies to make sure that your company continue to offer you. Having conversations with the taxman doesn’t matter that you started in marketing or in sales.
[00:33:16.00] – Zaid A-Q
That’s what you’re doing. So be careful what you wish for when you say you want to have a career and grow up. I always say, Listen, we’re blessed now. The world has a lot of specialist jobs in marketing in particular. You don’t have to go direct really up to get a more fulfilling job, you can go and get a job in the thing you like doing. And even if it might pay a little less, which isn’t always the case, by the way, because there’s a lot of digital expertise today that people pay a lot for. But even if it does pay a little bit less, you will be a hell of a lot happier doing the thing that you love than trying to be something that you never wanted to be. Now, there are people who enjoy that general management. I’ve always pretty much enjoyed it. There are people who like some of that budget firefighting and some of that process work and some of that organisational design and all of that stuff. And great, that’s for them. But if you’re someone who just loves marketing, loves creation, in terms of innovation, in terms of making ads and communication, well, think pretty carefully about whether your ultimate objective really is to be the person at the top because it doesn’t involve much of that.
[00:34:24.11] – Andi J
There’s an agency in Milton Keynes called Aera Digital, I know of in the it’s in Philadelphia, called Ceea, and Mos, who make SEO products. They have twin tracks, basically. So you can go on the management track. I think they call it the individual contributor track. So if you’re just an expert in SEO or whatever it is, your career doesn’t have to stall because you don’t want to start managing teams. So your pay and your benefits can all grow with that, which I thought was a really interesting way of doing that because not everybody does want to manage people.
[00:34:55.20] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah. And a lot of the big agencies have plenty of those roles now. So have a real think about where you want to get to. That’s my philosophy on it.
[00:35:06.17] – Andi J
And looking on that skills track and zooming into the teams you run, you run marketing across digital as well. You’ve also got the creative team within your brief. You’ve got different people, different skill sets.
[00:35:20.00] – Zaid A-Q
How do you manage and try and bring the best out of all of those different skills? Well, I think the first thing about managing people is having a clear vision of what you’re there to do. That’s the thing that brings people together, brings teams together on a mission. The second thing, it sounds like the opposite, is treating everyone as an individual. So it’s one vision, but recognising that what motivates people is not all the same. It’s utterly different. Some people are there for the in the moment, deep thinking work, getting it done. Some people get the reward from seeing their product later. If you’re a marketer and you see it on the telly or you see it on the billboard, some people get their kicks out of the creative process itself. But once that’s done, they don’t care what happens. Some people are there just waiting for the results. Did it bring the money in or did it bring the eyeballs in? And some people need a lot of pats on the back, and some people aren’t in it for that at all. And you’ve got to try and get under the skin of what motivates people as individuals, but galvanise them all with a common goal, so at least you’re working towards the same thing.
[00:36:27.16] – Andi J
More about training those people. So when you treat them as individuals, you then have to look at training needs and support for that. Are you finding… A, do you do that? I’m assuming you do. And B, are you finding that there’s different gaps in teams now than there would have been 10, 15 years ago? Are you coming across different sorts of marketers than you would have done 10 years ago?
[00:36:47.14] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah. Well, there’s two questions there. The first one about training. Another of the good things that I got from starting my career at Procter & Gamble was that it deeply believes in investing in people. To the extent that it would do your annual personnel review and base your results and your reward 50% on the business results and 50 % on what it called the organisation results, which was how much you’d invested in growing yourself, how much you’d invested in growing your team, how much you’d improve the ability of your team, how much you’d thought about the training and the future of your team. So it’s putting a massive focus on personal development of people and teamwork because it just has a philosophy that if you develop brilliant people, they’ll do brilliant things, and they’ll need, in the long run, a lot less close inspection and a lot less cross-examination because they’ll all be brilliant, right? And they’ll just fly, let them go. And it’s a really good philosophy. So I’ve taken that with me everywhere I’ve gone and said, look, the first thing I’ll try and do is look at the capabilities of the team and the individuals and the capabilities we’re going to need to win in the modern world and try and close any gaps.
[00:38:10.02] – Zaid A-Q
So either by hiring in, if it’s a totally new skill and no one’s got it or interested in it, or growing it, if it’s a skill some people have got, but they need to be better at it, or just improving it, if it’s something that’s always changing, you just got to keep on top of the world and everyone’s got to improve all the time. So that’s the attitude to training and capabilities. In terms of marketers, I think that the divide, the false divide of talking about digital like it’s not marketing has been a great pain in the neck, really, because digital is just a channel of reaching people. All it means is that this piece of communication, in the marketing context, obviously, what digital means is this piece of communication was transmitted using ones and zeros and appeared in some on some device, right? That’s what it means. But I’m always saying we didn’t used to have a department called the Paper Department because you were printing it in a magazine or a newspaper or on a billboard. Well, they’re all paper, but you didn’t have a paper marketer, right? And you don’t need a digital marketer.
[00:39:17.02] – Zaid A-Q
You need a marketer who understands that in today’s world, a lot of the ways you reach people are digital. I’m not saying there aren’t specialisms in digital. Don’t get me wrong. Please don’t write in. Of Of course there are. There are specialisms in everything. But the art of marketing is not about digital. It’s about understanding your customer, understanding your brand, finding the right way to reach them. It’s the same old skills, right? Now, that has caused a problem in the talent that’s out there Because there are people out there who think of themselves as digital marketers who know one thing really well. I’m brilliant to SEO, or I’m brilliant to paid for a search. And that is a nice skill at junior levels that you need, but that is not a way to grow yourself or run a business or end up running a department because you need to start by understanding the fundamentals, not start with the specialism when you’re running a department. And that has made it difficult. And I’m not saying that the old-world marketers who don’t understand digital are any better. They’re at least as bad, right? If you understand how to do the old-world, but you haven’t realised that the rules of the game are reaching people wherever they want to be reached, however, whatever device they’re using, then you’ve missed a big piece of the puzzle as well.
[00:40:38.18] – Zaid A-Q
And I think that divide between the left brain and the right brain marketers is a problem. Them, because the truth is human beings are both left and right brain. You need to reach them in the right way at the right time with the right message creatively so that they’re engaged by it. You need all of it to be successful.
[00:40:57.15] – Andi J
I’m going to take that whole segment. And when I do lecture in at some universities, I’m going to play it. I’m just going to shut up and play that because you say it much more eloquently than I do. I think, did I get death threats? Probably not, but I got some fairly chosen words sent to me when I did a podcast for somebody else. And I think I said something like, Anyone who has digital marketing in their title, all it says to me is they have no idea about marketing. And I got some fairly pointed hate mail from people about that. But I think it narrows too quickly, doesn’t it? When people say, Oh, I’m digital. You’re like, Yeah. So you’ve decided the answer before you’ve asked the question.
[00:41:35.20] – Zaid A-Q
Exactly that. Yeah.
[00:41:38.24] – Andi J
So this divide is causing problems. But do you think it’s going, though? I feel like we’ve crested the wave and people are starting to wake up to that.
[00:41:49.08] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah, I think so. Part of the reason it’s going is so much of the output you need today to be a successful marketer is digital, that the idea that there was a marketing department in a digital department is starting to be ridiculous because you could say, Oh, the digital guys have taken over. But actually, in fact, when you look at what’s happened, they haven’t, because they didn’t have those fundamental skills of insight or customer understanding or all of those things. What’s happened is the good people from both departments have taken over because they’re the ones who understand both sides of the coin.
[00:42:24.05] – Andi J
Yeah, brilliant. No, I really enjoyed that. I think it’s just true, isn’t it? We go through phases in marketing where things are hot and things are cool and trendy and interesting, and then they go out of fashion and then they come back. And it’s just all cyclical, isn’t it? And the good people always rise to the top.
[00:42:39.11] – Zaid A-Q
Well, I’m told that 100 years ago, companies, when they started to become electrified in factories and big companies, manufacturers, rather than using steam and old-fashioned ways of manufacturing, started what they call the electricity Department within their companies. And lo and behold, to my knowledge, no large manufacturer still has a department called the Electric Department because it was just a way of manufacturing, and digital is just a way of marketing.
[00:43:09.16] – Andi J
Let’s hope there’s no Electric Department, otherwise they’ve got bigger issues.
[00:43:13.05] – Zaid A-Q
And they’re going to write into us as well.
[00:43:15.09] – Andi J
Definitely. That’s okay. So while we’re on people, I want to talk about diversity and inclusion because you are the lead for that at channel 4, would that be right? Yeah, that’s perfect. And I’ve talked a lot recently about Black Lives Matter. It was important It’s important to me to do that and use the podcast as a platform for that. I saw you were shared on LinkedIn by Mark Ritson for a company doing D&I correctly and taking a stand against Black Lives Matter. And the CEO released a six-point statement, which I’m just reading in the background here, that you are committed to. Why do you think people saw you as getting the tone right for coming out as being anti-racist in a Black Lives Matter movement?
[00:43:59.05] – Zaid A-Q
Well, the first thing I should admit is that channel 4 has a long history in this area, and so in some respects has it a little bit easier, and people are a little bit more expecting of us to do the right thing. You could say that’s a high bar, but we’ve got a long history of it. So partly that’s because it’s in our DNA. As I explained, part of our purpose, our remit, as it’s officially called as a public service broadcaster, is to make sure we surface unheard voices and create content for minorities, essentially. And so if you look back in history, the first Lesbian Kiss was on channel 4 in Brookside. The first black sitcom was on channel 4 It was Desmond’s.
[00:44:46.08] – Andi J
I remember Desmond’s growing up. It was essential viewing.
[00:44:49.08] – Zaid A-Q
It was wonderful. We’re the Paralympic broadcaster, and they’ve done a lot in terms of disability broadcasting. I guess the first channel brave enough to do a comedy show that’s about disability, The Last Leg. So we have a lot of credibility in this area. Yes, it causes people to have very high expectations of us, but we have credibility because it’s woven into our purpose and what we do as a business. And I think that made it a little more credible for us to use that moment in time, not to what I criticised some others for jumping on a bandwagon, but to to reconfirm and refresh what we were saying. So when we came out and said, We’ve got six anti-racism commitments, people didn’t say bandwagon jumping. They said, Yeah, those are a refreshment of what channel 4 as a brand already stands for. It makes sense that channel 4 is committing to those things. It’s not just a bunch of words that you’re going to write on the wall and no one’s going to do anything about. Now, we have to deliver on all of those now, and that’s no mean feat, but it feels like it fits with our purpose.
[00:45:57.26] – Andi J
I don’t mind some brands coming out and saying, Look, we’ve got this wrong so far. Here’s our black tile on Blackout Tuesday, but this is what we’re going to do to live that. I think what irritated me with some brands was, in the immortal words of Homer J. Simpson, Quick, everybody, to the bandwagon. And that was it. Somebody posted one, so everybody had to post a black tile, which imitated me somewhat. But I think, like I said, being authentic to your values is the important part there.
[00:46:25.29] – Zaid A-Q
I wouldn’t want people to think that I’m saying we’re paragons of virtue. We’re not. We’ve got a lot to do, but we are authentic and truthful about it. So for example, we publish our pay gaps. We’re legally obliged, like big companies in the UK to publish our gender pay gap, but we go further than that. We publish our ethnic pay gap. We publish our LGBT pay gap, we publish our disability pay gap. We have gaps, right? We’re not saying we’re perfect, but we’re not pretending to be. We’re just focused on taking steps to close those gaps and being honest about it, educating people, and going on a journey to improve those things. And I think that’s important. You’ve got to be authentic, to borrow the word you used. And for us, it is authentic. It is meaningful. It is a genuine part of what we are and what we’re doing.
[00:47:25.27] – Andi J
If you don’t mind me asking on a personal level, what I’ve realised over the last few weeks is that there are many people who see me as a black marketer, and something I’ve never really seen myself as I’ve just seen myself as a marketer. What do you find in your position as an ethnic minority? Do people look at you and go, Well, we’re all right. We’ve got an ethnic minority in the CMO. How does that feel? Do you feel people look at you and treat you differently? Or what’s your experience of that?
[00:47:52.16] – Zaid A-Q
I honestly don’t know, because I think one of the most important things in this whole debate is that everyone has a different lived experience, to use the phrase at the moment, and you can’t really get inside someone else’s. You can do a good job of listening to them and hearing how they’ve been treated. I say obviously, although some people seem blind to it, I’ve been subject to racial abuse. I think pretty much any one of a minority ethnicity growing up has. But I haven’t let it define me. I don’t look at it that way, and I don’t look at myself as an ethnic marketer. I look at myself as a marketer who, like everyone, happens to have an ethnicity, I happen to have a sexuality, I happen to be a gender. We all have them. I can’t do anything about the fact that I’ve got them. So I don’t look at it that way. And I’m very conscious that we use a lot of shorthands. So the most prevalent one in the ethnicity and race discussions being Bame, Black, Asian, and minority ethnic, nick, which is the UK nomenclature of the moment for describing it.
[00:49:06.08] – Zaid A-Q
It’s a really imperfect phrase because it doesn’t really summarise the massive variation of experiences and races and ethnicities in that bucket. But it serves a purpose to sensitise people to the fact that not everyone in this country is white and that some of the people who aren’t white might have had slightly different experiences and not all of those experiences are pleasant.
[00:49:32.19] – Andi J
I do love the grouping. The black community is my favourite phrase at the minute. I think of me, my brother, and my dad as all. We’re all in this black community, and we couldn’t agree on the colour of the wall behind me. We have such different views on so many different subjects. Yet people go, Oh, the black community says this. Do we? Really?
[00:49:53.06] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah. And it’s funny to define people in such a single dimensional way, isn’t it? Because you might have something in common with a black person in London who’s 70 years old and nothing in common with a black person in Liverpool who’s 25. It’s not because of their age or their colour or where they live. It’s just because we’re all different and have different attitudes. It’s a really funny thing to bucket you together.
[00:50:22.18] – Andi J
Definitely. And speaking of backgrounds as well, we’re moving off ethnicity slightly, but I spotted in your bio, you studied at Oxford University, and I read that you studied personal protective equipment, and I was looking at, really? And then I looked again, and it was philosophy, politics, and economics. Do you feel that you missed out not studying marketing at university, or did you get enough of a grounding once you got into it to P and G that that wasn’t the problem.
[00:50:48.27] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah. And I’ve noticed a lot that people think my degree in PPE is incredibly confusing since we all learned the new meaning of it in COVID. Actually, it would be a lot more useful, wouldn’t it, today? But no, I mean, I’ve worked with marketers from all different backgrounds. P and G took the philosophy that it would hire anyone who was keen on doing the job and who was clever and good, and it didn’t matter what they’d done. So consequently, they had engineers and historians and mathematicians and English students doing marketing, and it really didn’t matter. And I’ve always had that philosophy ever since, which is, no, it matters if you understand how to put customers at the heart of things, if you understand creativity in the creative process and you’re really into it, and if you understand running businesses, that’s enough for me. I don’t care what you studied. And I think most of us find that what you studied at college has fairly little airing on most of your day-to-day job anyway.
[00:51:54.23] – Andi J
I’m aware of the time, and we’re running out fairly quickly, but there’s a couple of things I wanted to ask you. Firstly, you sit on a couple of boards. You are on one of my favourite organisations, the Advertising Standards Authority, who I think do tremendous work, and you’re also on the board of trustees at Waterhead. The ASA have been doing their work for over 50 years now, isn’t it? And legal, honest, decent, and truthful, which I don’t think is officially used anymore, but is still one of those phrases that is just the best. Legal, honest, decent, truth, covers it. I love it. What’s that like? Do you still sit with the ASA? And how does that change? What’s the pressures you get from doing that?
[00:52:32.23] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah, I mean, that’s probably the most rewarding thing I do in life because it combines my love of advertising with a chance to do some good for society in ensuring that the industry I work in and care about is kept honest and does the right thing by people. And that’s everything from making sure people don’t make claims that are untruthful, that mislead people who can’t afford it into spending money on products that they never needed. That’s important. But also some of the more proactive stuff we’ve done. So last year, changing the gender stereotyping rules so that harmful stereotypes aren’t permitted in advertising, so as not to reinforce some of the negatives in society. So you’re doing some good whilst contributing to the industry that we work in.
[00:53:24.26] – Andi J
It was interesting. I have a little Facebook group for clients, and that change was probably one of the most debated things that we had about, does marketing lead or does it reflect what happens in society? Certainly on an advertising perspective. So it was interesting to hear that you were part of that, but it’s been seen as a broadly positive move, has it?
[00:53:43.18] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah, I think it’s been seen broadly positively. I think it caused a lot more controversy than it need because people failed to realise the word harmful in the sentence, saying that we wouldn’t have harmful stereotypes. It didn’t say you can’t show a man doing DIY, which is fairly stereotypical. It only said you couldn’t do it if it was done in a harmful way. So if that man was doing DIY because he said to his wife, Oh, I’m sorry, because you’re a woman, you can’t do this, that wouldn’t be allowed, right? Actually, when you explain to people that’s what the change was, most people go, Well, that’s right, because although advertising reflects society, we don’t want advertising being used to reflect the ills in society all the time. That’s not such a big deal when you think of it like that. Yeah, brilliant.
[00:54:27.27] – Andi J
Well, as we get to there, there’s a couple of questions I always ask every guest. The first one is about reading and books, our blogs or places you go for staying on top of marketing or just business, generally. Any recommendations for the listeners?
[00:54:42.29] – Zaid A-Q
Oh, yeah. I love recommending books. So what I always say to anyone who wants to be a successful marketer is that for a start, they need to understand the principles that are in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s a difficult book to wade through because it’s actually quite an academic book, and although it’s written in a nice Penguin paperback, but if you start it and get the principles, and at the point you get bored, you can put it down, that’s fine. By then, you’ll have understood how people make decisions, and that’s really critical Michael. If you want a more pop science version of that to think about human beings and their behaviour, then Daniel Arrieli, whose book, which I think is called Predictably Irrational, is a much more populist version of some of the same stuff and taking you into behavioural science and behavioural theory and how people make decisions and the things that really drive people. I think that’s really important in the modern world to understand in marketing. And if you want to understand society and culture around at the moment and the state of the world, I think Factfulness, which is a very popular best seller, is a great place to start.
[00:56:00.28] – Zaid A-Q
And Bobby Duffy’s take on that, which is called The Perils of Perception. Those are four books that were all loosely in the area of behavioural science, behavioural theory, understanding how human beings behave and make decisions. If you then want to get into, Okay, but that’s all insight basics. How do you really understand how advertising works? Then, of course, the long and the short of it, field in it, which is a very famous IPA-backed paper explaining how advertising works. It’s a few years old. It’s often been revised. There are some newer versions of it, and there are some new papers that added on top. But you’ve got to start with the long and the short of it, because if you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand anything about how brands are built and advertising works.
[00:56:52.05] – Andi J
I love the long and the short of it. I think it’s actually behind a paywall to get the whole bit of research, but there’s a website with various bits. So I put links to all of those in the show notes so you can look around wherever you’re listening or watching, and there’ll be a link there. You can click it and take it from there. So the last question I always ask is, what question were you expecting me to ask that I haven’t?
[00:57:16.04] – Zaid A-Q
Yeah, you’re not going to ask me about my desert island disques?
[00:57:19.23] – Andi J
What would your desert island discs be?
[00:57:22.17] – Zaid A-Q
I’ve always wanted the opportunity to tell people that if I went to a desert island, I’d like to take Stevie Wonders’ superstition with me. Is that okay? Can I make that You can certainly make that request because it’s an absolute banger.
[00:57:33.02] – Andi J
So in that case, that’s fine.
[00:57:34.28] – Zaid A-Q
I think that’s a good place to end.
[00:57:36.24] – Andi J
I absolutely love that. I’ve just remembered one question I was supposed to ask you and I’ve forgotten. I’m sorry, I know we’re running out of time, but just tell me about the Compliance Welcome Award, because it’s just won a stack of awards, and I was supposed to ask you so you could shout out the team who were behind that.
[00:57:54.01] – Zaid A-Q
Well, that is lovely to have the opportunity. So yeah, channel 4 at Eirda A very brand-orientated piece of advertising last year called Complaints Welcome, which essentially highlighted all the challenging and diverse things we do, and the fact that you get viewer complaints about every time you do something like that, using those complaints to show how important the stuff we do is to different groups, to different parts of society, to different protected characteristics and so on. And that’s one, a DNA deep pencil and a webby And I can’t remember. More than I can even remember everything. It’s won loads of awards, which is fantastic.
[00:58:35.26] – Andi J
Brilliant. Again, that will be in the links in the show notes so you can have a look at it there. So Zaid, thank you very much for your time. It’s been great to chat. And thank you for giving It’s your time today.
[00:58:45.28] – Zaid A-Q
My pleasure, Andi.
[00:58:48.20] – Andi J
Once again, Zaid, thank you very much for giving me your time and being so open and honest in that interview. Some really, really interesting things. I mean, listen to people all the time and they will tell you TV’s dead. And if you listen to Zaid and you look at channel 4 and what they’ve done and what they are doing, that’s far from the truth. They know their market, they know their customer, they know what their brand’s about, and they relentlessly use that. I mean, a billion views, was it, a month on social media platforms? That’s huge. But also they still keep churning up great quality programmes. But then if you look at the team that Zaid manages as well, the award-winning content that they’re putting out. I mean, We mentioned it at the end of the interview. There’s a promo piece that won award after award after award. Why? Because it stuck to what channel 4 brands about. He did make me laugh talking about getting his whole year’s marketing plan on one sheet of A4. I dream about doing that now. I think three pages is probably the quickest I can do it or the shortest I can do it.
[00:59:49.05] – Andi J
But look, times have changed and things have moved on. But some things haven’t. Understanding your brand, understanding what it’s about. Some really interesting stuff there about skills and lessons learned. The story that really stuck with me about Zetra PNG, where he ordered the stickers and he got them all wrong, but was supported in that. And think about what I was saying earlier about people, about getting your people. What message does that give to somebody who’s in your organisation who tries something and gets it wrong? They learn from that and they grow and develop. And that was a really important message. When I worked at Durham County Cricket Club, Yvette Thompson. Hi, Yvette. We maybe got a couple of things I might have spoken about that before, but we had a thing called the Wall of Shame, where we would celebrate some of these things and we would just pop them on the wall. People said, Oh, you should take that down. It’s a bit negative. But it was actually lessons learned for us. We called it the Wall of Shame because it was funny. But it was about learning lessons and not forgetting those lessons.
[01:00:47.00] – Andi J
And that’s why we put them up on the wall. And we had a culture where we could celebrate that and learn from them and move on, which we really, really liked. And look, I look back on my time at the cricket club incredibly fondly because of moments like that. So that’s it for today’s episode. Episode nine is done and dusted. If you enjoyed it, please do share it with your friends. Please do share it with your colleagues. I’d love to hear your feedback. What guests would you like it on next? What do you think of the format? We could nine episodes in. Next one, April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome and a consultant on Positioning is the guest. It’s a good time to stop and go, okay, where do we go next? What guests do we want on? What do people think of the show? Please do tell me. If you don’t like it, if you’ve listened the first time and you’re thinking, I’m never coming back to this, drop me an email, get in touch, and tell me why, because I really would be interested in the feedback. You can find me at eximomarketingstrategy.
[01:01:42.04] – Andi J
Com or on Twitter, I’m at Andi Jarvis. And that’s Andi with an I, because it’s cool and trendy and it’s got nothing to do with that. Don’t worry. Thank you very much for your time. See you all again in two weeks time. We’ve got April Dunford on episode 10.