James Hurman on Building Future Demand: Creativity, Brand and Escaping the Performance Trap

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer Podcast.

I'm here today with James Herman. James, welcome to the pod.

James Hurman: Thanks, man. It's great to be here.

James Lawrence: Many listeners to the pod will know James, but I'll do a quick introduction for those that don't. James is one of the world's leading experts on marketing and advertising effectiveness. He grew up in the advertising industry as a strategic planner, and during his career, won over 50 advertising effectiveness awards.

James was named the world's number one strategic planning director in 2013, 20 Cannes Lions are linked to your strategy war, James. Since that time, you've kinda moved into different directions. You've co-founded several high-profile startups, including Tracksuit, which many listeners to this pod either use or are aware of.

You're currently senior advisor at Lions Advisory, the consulting offering of Cannes Lions. You're a program director at the Master of Advertising Effectiveness, and you've just published a book. And we were chatting off air, and I was actually gonna start the conversation in a different direction, but I was saying to James

I wouldn't be saying this of everyone, but I completely love the book. I was given an advance copy on the condition that I'd give feedback, and I gave feedback. And when I was reading it, I was like, this is an awesome book. As a marketer, I love it, and I can see how in-house marketers and agency side marketers would get tremendous value.

But I think for me, I was like, "I don't think I've ever read a better marketing book which would be perfect for non-marketers." And that was not where I was gonna start the conversation, but I thought it was quite interesting how you started to go off on a direction which I think would be interesting for listeners to also be privy to.

Don't leave it just talking to me off air.

James Hurman: Yeah. Firstly, thank you for that glowing review. I really appreciate it. The thing is I reckon if anyone can understand it, then all marketers can understand it, right? And I think that what I try to do with all of the work that I do is present, potentially complicated concepts in a way that is simple enough for anyone to understand.

And I think that sort of probably dates back to my experience as a planning leader. I would really challenge my team to, when they've got a strategic direction in mind, figure out how they'd explain it to a child And the reason for that is twofold. A, I think it's not until you really understand things really thoroughly that you can put them in simple terms.

So it tests your own, knowledge of your own thinking. It really hones that. And secondly, , when your job is to inspire work from creative people the last thing that they want is complication and jargon, and they want real clarity. And the best way to get to clarity is to get to, a point where you can say things that a child or a normal person would understand.

And so I think I carried that through into my sort of later career as an effectiveness researcher. There's a lot of really excellent marketing science and effectiveness research around us. And my contribution to the canon would be to try and put all of that in a form that can be understood and also applied.

And I think sometimes, the huge brains that have done this work on the research and the science side they're really good at other things, not putting things in really simple ways and really applicable ways. And so as someone who's been both a practitioner and a researcher I guess I've got a sense of the value and the need to, to give people stuff that they can actually use rather than just learn and know.

So yeah. So that's a really big part of my craft is taking the fundamental concepts and explaining them in a way that anyone can understand.

James Lawrence: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Reading through, , it just explains how marketing works, which I know sounds like a big deal, right?

But it's in plain language. I was reading it going, "Yeah, like this is just, this is it, right?" And it is an interesting journey. You've worked agency side doing you know, after that research, you've founded your own businesses. You're an author. Like , it's an interesting perspective from different sides of the fence.

And I think so often in marketing we come at it from our own side of the fence, which can be a bit of a challenge.

James Hurman: Yeah, very much all the different things that I do feed into each other, in interesting ways. And being able to apply You know, what we know, to companies and watching them grow, at least in part because of that is super exciting, and it gives you a lot more faith and confidence in what you know, right?

When you can see it actually working and building value as a company grows, it's really cool. I'd encourage anyone to do it. And I think having the perspective of the agency, I was a creative and I was a planner in my years in advertising, and then as an entrepreneur and as an investor it really does round out your perspective a lot and makes you a kind of better thinker when you've got so many, different points of view that you can hold in your head at the same time.

James Lawrence: That's cool. So You'd already coined the term future demand. That's been on the radar for a few years. I suspect many listeners are aware of the concept, some won't be. What was the, I guess the rationale for turning it into a book? I'd be interested to unpack that, and secondly to that, I think it'd just be good to introduce at a high level what is future demand?

James Hurman: Yeah, great. So The easiest way to explain it is probably through by describing an exercise that I do with audiences when I talk to them, and I ask them a question. "I want you to put up your hand if you are currently in the process of buying a new mobile phone or think you will do in the next couple of weeks."

And say I'm in an audience of 100 people, one or two hands will go up. And then I say, "Okay, put your hands down. I want you to put your hand up if you think you'll buy a new mobile phone in the next two years." And almost everyone's hands go up. And then I tell the audience I do that to show a really fundamental principle that in any market there's two types of demand.

There's the people that are in the market and are ready to buy right now, which is the one or two hands that went up, and that's what I call current demand. And then there's people who aren't in the market at the moment, but will definitely come into the market at some point in the relatively near future, and that's what I call future demand.

And once you understand that sort of fundamental of how markets work a lot of other stuff becomes really clear. We've got a, obviously we've got a job to convert those two people that put their hands up and get them to buy our mobile phone and not our competitor's. That's one part of marketing.

It's a really important part. And then there's another part which is talking to all of those other people who are gonna come into the market later and make sure we prime them and bias them towards us and make them familiar with us and make them like us so that when they come into the market they're more likely to purchase from us.

And that's the fundamental idea and then what we've learned subsequent to that is, really how people make decisions when they come into market, what kind of creative work works great for, capturing the attention and priming people who aren't in market yet, versus what works really well for converting people when they are in market.

Those are two really different types of advertising. So that's the basic concept. Where it all came from, the history is, goes back to, it was probably 2020 or something like that and Walk were talking to me about how to explain the need for brand to more modern companies, and they were, at the time they were talking about kind of e-commerce retailers and, digital companies like that.

And , I guess that they were experiencing that brand and brand building was pretty out of fashion in those sorts of companies. They were quite skeptical of the need to do brand building. And so they'd asked me to think about how would we explain brand in a way that made sense to those companies?

And I can't remember exactly what the thought process was, but I think I was just thinking like, how do I explain to someone who's absolutely not native to any of this -

...

James Hurman: And in my mind, I had like our venture capital partners who are like, really finance-y b- people, right?

And they don't really care much for brand either, or they didn't back then. Or the technical founders and the startups that we are investing in, how do you explain it to them? And I guess just thinking about like my own behavior, I'm sometimes in the market to buy a certain thing, and then I'm, for most of the time I'm not.

And that sort of translates to any category really. We cycle in and out of categories and that's where it came from, this idea that if we only focus on the people that are in the market and are already likely to buy what we've got to sell, then we grow to a point, but then we plateau 'cause we run out of customers, and it's not until we continue building up the familiarity and the emotional connection with our brand that we create new demand to be converted as we grow.

So yeah, that's where it started. It came out in a paper called Rethinking Brand for the Digital Age, or something like that it was called way back then, and then I spun that into the first book called Future Demand, which was I've confusingly written two books with the same name.

But the first book I just wrote really for the companies that we were investing in, the startups, the venture capital folks that we were working with, to take that language and build it out a little, teach it to them so the VCs were, encouraging their companies to think a bit more about brand-building and allocate a bit more of the funding that they were given to building their brand and make sure that the companies that we were investing in would prioritize investment in their brand so they didn't do what startups often do, which is grow really fast in, in the first couple of years and then plateau out and have a really hard time from then on in.

So yeah, that's how it started. That book was Only meant to be something that we printed a couple of hundred copies for kind of the people around our company. But then it took on a life of its own a bit and and marketers around the world really enjoyed the concept and could see how it applied to them and their larger organizations and so that kind of prompted me to start thinking a couple of years ago, okay, we need to write a version of this for marketers and medium to large organizations and teach them this stuff 'cause it's just as applicable to them and what they're doing.

And yeah, fast-forward two years from there, and here we are with the what I call the proper Future De-Demand book. It's a lot bigger than the than the previous book and just has a much fuller ex-exploration of the concept.

James Lawrence: I caught your session at South by Southwest, and I've been misattributing this quote to you 'cause I went back through my notes and realized you actually given someone else the credit for it, but it's,

"Marketers have done a bad job of marketing."

Yeah.

And it stayed with me, and it's just so true, and I encourage all listeners to the pod to get a copy of the book. And I think it's useful to talk around the book at the same time. And the book traces the journey of the growth of digital marketing and this kind of performance culture and dollar in, dollar out, and everything can be measured, and that's my personal journey, right?

I started in this industry in the 2000s in Google Ads, and then I was SEO and built a performance agency. And hand on heart, at the time, I was like, "What is all this brand stuff?" "It's all nonsense." . Everything can be measured. Everything should be measured. The old adage of, I know half my budget's wasted, I just don't know which half is gone.

Yeah. That's solved. And it wasn't until, I think like the 2010s and maybe midway through the decade where I was like, hang on, like there's a missing piece here, right? And this brand stuff actually is real and multi-touch and all that kind of stuff. But it's, the word brand has got a vexed kind of connotation both with marketers and with non-marketers.

And- Yeah ... it does have that connotation of it's shiny, and it's pretty, and it's fashion, and it's whatever else. But the idea of future demand is a term that I think marketers can understand, finance people can understand, business people can understand. And the book does such a great job of then building in a lot of the science around it, just in terms of the likelihood to convert to a brand you're already aware of when you come into market, pricing power- all those types of concepts. It's just the way marketing works.

, , Brand

James Hurman: has a really shit brand. ... so it was Dara Treseder who was, who used to be, when I spoke to her, she was the CMO of Peloton, and now she's the CMO of Autodesk and she had said to me, "Marketing has not done a great job of marketing."

And we do have a communication problem in terms of explaining what we do to people that aren't in marketing or even explaining to people who are in marketing like you were back in your early years, right? No one had explained brand to you in a way that made any sense to you, and that's completely...

I think I just put myself in the position of someone who's not a marketer, and I would be the same. I'd be like, "What is this?" "What is this sort of like party that you wanna have that doesn't seem to have any real effect on anything?" And you can't really explain what a brand is or what its commercial value is.

And I think that I would feel the same way. I'd just be like, "No, I don't get this." So I don't blame the people that have a difficult time understanding the commercial value of brand at all, 'cause it hasn't been explained to them, very well. it's a bit like when I wrote my first book, which was called The Case for Creativity, it was the same thing, like clients were asking should we really be doing creative stuff and trying to win creative awards and doing work like that?

Is that really in the interests of our business?" And as someone in a creative agency, you could respond to that in a sort of offended way or you could go, "Okay, that's a really fair question to ask. Why don't I go and figure it out? Why don't I find the data and see if creativity really is more effective and then show you that stuff?"

And so I did this whole project which was about going out and asking the question, is creative work any more effective than uncreative work? And when I started to ask that question, I had no idea what I'd find. I thought I might find that it's actually less effective, right? In which case I probably wouldn't have written a book but, I was prepared to find out that there wasn't a case for creativity but I just wanted to get to the bottom of it.

Anyway, it turned out that there was a very hard commercial case for creativity. But I think the, my position tends to be if you don't understand marketing concepts, that's a problem of marketing not communicating to you, not a problem of you being an idiot, right?

And so why don't we try and serve you better with reframing things in different ways or providing you with the evidence that you rightly need to invest and make decisions in the way that we'd like you to make. Let's try and explain things.

James Lawrence: So why do well-run businesses, smart businesses, good people in them keep making short-term marketing decisions, investing in the short term when the evidence says that there needs to be a better balance between the two?

James Hurman: Yeah. So I think, The evidence is not widely distributed or evenly distributed. So there are a lot of companies that are very kind of short-term focused who actually haven't seen any of the evidence or at least haven't had it presented to them in a way that sort of clicks into place in their heads.

So I think that's one thing and I guess that's part of the reason for the book is let's try and put this information in front of people in in a way that they can get it and apply it. So I think that's one part of it. I think, the classic old quarterly reporting cycles and all that kind of stuff, there's a lot of structural reasons why we're heavily incentivized to focus on a short term.

And we tend to feel, it is in our human nature , there's that experiment they do with the kids where it's like, you can have one marshmallow now or you can have two marshmallows in half an hour and the kids take the one marshmallow now. And we're just wired that way, right?

Like we do perversely and irrationally take a smaller win now than a bigger one a bit later. And so I think it's a problem of human nature. It's a structural problem in business and the economy. And it's also a communication problem. People haven't been taught the gains that can be made over a long term.

And when I say long term, just slightly longer term. Yeah. People keep saying to me like what if marketers are only in their job for two years? Why do, why would they want to create future demand and look after the business over the long term?" I'm like if a marketer starts and they've got two years, if they start and they just double down on the short term they're gonna make next year really hard for themselves and then they're gonna go out on a low because they might have done a great job at the start of harvesting a bunch of the demand that was there.

If a marketer comes in at the start of their two years and starts doing a real balanced job, they'll make year two really a lot better for themselves and they'll leave on a high. So it's actually in your interest even if you are only gonna spend 18 months or two years in a job to do the right things because you'll leave looking like a hero if you do and you'll leave looking pretty average if you don't.

James Lawrence: You've always got that lead in, right? I think you do have that tolerance in the first part of any role to get to find your feet and whatever else. I don't know if it's different- depending on the organization. The book talks about the performance trap and introduces that as a concept.

Could we just explore that a little bit?

James Hurman: Yeah, totally. So the performance trap, basically if you believe that advertising's role is to drive immediate visible, measurable sales if that's your mental model for how advertising works, then it is totally rational then to stack rank all of your activity and go what delivers the best short-term ROAS, and let's put all of our money into that?"

That seems completely logical, completely rational, the right thing to do. If we do that, what happens is we stop all of the stuff that builds demand over the, a longer period, and we will drive really good results for a while, like a few weeks, and then those will start to plateau, and we'll see poorer and poorer results as we go forward in time.

So the performance trap is basically the trap of seeing advertising through that lens, right? It means that if we take a, absolute kind of short-term ROAS point of view, we pour all of our money into that, then we end up with worse results, even though we were really trying for better results because we believed that's what advertising was all about.

So the book's really about challenging that mental model and saying, "Look, Advertising doesn't work in that way. It's, it doesn't cause people to go out and buy things." It does help us win a greater share of the sales that happen in the market but to do that consistently, profitably, sustainably over time, we need to balance these two types of activity.

One is very short-term measurable. One is not, takes a longer period to measure. But if we're not doing both of those things, it's like a farmer that, harvests all their corn and then doesn't plant any new plants, you've got lots of corn at the start, but then all of a sudden, you're going hungry in year two.

So yeah, that's the performance trap, being led to believe that advertising works in that way, and therefore pouring all of our money into that stuff, and therefore neglecting the planting of the new plants that we're gonna harvest next year.

James Lawrence: In, our experience in the agency it's so easy for us to make- Results and campaigns look hyper effective in the short term, right?

If it's the high hanging fruit is always harder to get. So if you want us to get numbers on a dashboard looking good, we can move budget into bottom of the funnel search, branded campaigns, remarketing- ... building off of existing kind of customer lists and whatever else. But you can't get growth from that.

And over time, as they start to deteriorate, you then get degrading performance. And like it, it is just the truth. Our clients that invest in brand, and it doesn't even like we're a digital marketing agency, so it's not always necessarily often you're doing investments in brand offline, different types of channels.

The clients that do that work just drive better digital performance than the ones that don't.

And I think there is this real, I was gonna say confusion. I don't know if necessarily think it's confusion, but this difference, like this lack of understanding between marketing measurement and marketing effectiveness, and that it is the fault of the digital marketing industry in many ways, which is we can measure all these things really easily, clicks and conversions- and all these types of things. But then the bigger piece around effectiveness and the stuff that actually grows a business and the value of brand, and then what happens to when customers come into market in an area where you've got a strong brand, your likelihood to close, your likelihood to charge more has actual- kind of business growth around it as well.

James Hurman: Yeah. Yeah, and it is harder to track and measure those things. And because again, it's human nature to manage what we can measure we do manage to the things that we can measure really easily. And because it's essentially free to measure all of the bottom of funnel stuff, and then it costs money to track the brand, now, thanks to Tracksuit, it costs a lot less than it used to cost. But it still costs some money to do that. And then to do a full, econometric analysis costs a lot more money. But now thanks to companies like Mutinex, that cost has definitely come down a lot as well. But I think, most companies, especially when they start out, they're measuring the stuff that's free to measure.

They don't have the money to do the costly measurement of things, and so that gives them a real blind spot And it's tough. And that was why we created Tracksuit, frankly we wanted the companies that we were investing in to have some insight into how well they were gonna go next year not just be left with that blind spot.

James Lawrence: And what advice would you have for in-house marketers out there? And I think often a marketer's, not always, but I think generally marketers do understand future demand, current demand- ... brand versus performance, but often it's the pushback when they then go in to, to get more budget or to push budget into those longer term activities.

What are the things you've seen work in terms of to get businesses actually thinking around balancing future demand, current demand?

James Hurman: So a couple of answers to that. One is going back to Dara's point, , we've not done a good job of marketing.

If you're a marketer for better or for worse, part of your job is marketing. It's educating your non-marketing stakeholders on how this stuff works. And So what's really important is to share all of this knowledge with those folks, regularly and just find ways to do that.

Just share the stuff that's in my book or from the IPA or from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute or from any of these wonderful sources of knowledge. Share that stuff with your non-marketing stakeholders. What I'm doing with the new book is, I don't know if you know about this yet, but there's an app that I've built, which is basically a way to chat to the book, and so you can ask the book any question.

It will give you an answer complete with the charts and everything. You can then turn that into a mini white paper PDF, which is a nicely kind of formatted little white paper- ... that you can pass on to someone else in your organization to say, "Hey, read this. This is what I'm trying to get across to you."

Or you can turn it into a PowerPoint presentation, download it, edit it, or blah, blah, blah. And so what I'm trying to think of is ways to make that passing on of knowledge a little bit easier for marketers. So that's one resource that that you can check out if you read the book or or go to futuredemand.com . The other thing is I'm collecting up playbooks of marketers that have gone on that journey. So it wasn't in the book that you read because you read the the sort of draft, and one of the main points of feedback, to the one that you read was, "This is great, but how do I do it in an organization that's pretty anti or a bit, allergic to all of this kind of stuff?"

So I called my friend Laura Jones, who's the CMO at Instacart, and she's an amazing marketer, super smart, and she joined Instacart a few years ago when they were, like, 100% performance and has turned them into one of the best brand builders in Silicon Valley. And so I basically talked to her for a long time and got her playbook of what the steps were that she took to take the organization on that journey.

And so when you read the book, the final book, there's that whole process, and it starts with education. It starts with firstly getting the sort of brand strategy in place. If we're gonna build familiarity of our brand, if we're gonna go out there and talk to people, we better know what we kinda stand for.

So there's that piece. There's building a kind of financial case, like based on what we know from all of the evidence, like Here's a projection of revenues and cash flows based on, what the data tells us. Shopping that with her COO and people in the finance team, and then take it, getting critique of that, taking that to the CEO and the CFO, then taking that to the board and then moving up the funnel.

So she did this really cool journey where she went, "Okay, We're a hundred percent performance. What if we go first we can go to online video? So online video gives us a lot of the measurement, but it also allows us to tell more of an emotional creative story. So let's go there and prove the incremental lift from that.

And then once we've done that, let's take a step up, and maybe we'll go to linear television, and we'll measure the incremental lift on that. Let's do counterfactuals, like we're gonna do a Super Bowl." We know from eleven years of sort of history in Instacart what normally happens over that period.

We can run a Super Bowl thing, show the lift that's comparative against all of their history. So really get them understanding, yes, this is really obviously driving up lift and obviously working. So she's taken a bunch of steps to really take , her CFO partner, but also the whole organization on the journey to get them into it.

And that's been for her, that's been a two to three-year journey of doing all of that stuff. But it's a really excellent example of someone who's, worked within a very big, right-

A really big Silicon Valley tech company to change. And if she can do it there, you can do it anywhere.

And so what I wanna do is more of these playbooks as well, and so I'm building a community around Future Demand. There'll be a community site where I keep it updated with new research that comes in that sort of adds to the Future Demand case and also these playbooks so we can help marketers get there and convince their organizations, 'cause that is pretty much the number one problem in marketing right now.

How do I convince my non-marketing stakeholders to let me do my job?

James Lawrence: I'm so glad I asked that question. I didn't know about the app, 'cause , I think there's... That from the outside looking in is such a good example of bringing people along on the journey, and it is the role of the s- most senior person in marketing in an organization to educate the rest of the organization around how marketing works.

And the thing I loved about your book and how we kinda kicked off the call today is prior to it, I've always said that to clients or on webinars, it's buy a copy of The Long and the Short of It and give it to your CEO, give it to the head of finance. Don't give it to them when they've come to you and said, "We need leads in the next three months," in his budget.

You've gotta give them, give it to them at a time when they've actually got time to sit back, read it, and start to go, "Huh that makes sense to me." Yeah, that's it. And you kinda have and you gotta speak their language, right? We're so mired in our acronyms and the way that we think things work.

But you've gotta speak the language of non-marketing.

James Hurman: Yeah. And it's interesting, 'cause I was talking to someone else about this today , that is right, we do need to speak, the language of the CFO. We're told all of that all the time, but we're not told what that language actually is.

And so I'm doing a big study at the moment with Google and the Financial Times, which will come out in July, and and it really is a piece to turn all of these con- concepts into actual CFO language. And so working with an organization like the FT obviously they are very fluent in that language, right?

And come with a sort of stamp of approval that CEOs respect. And so we're gonna do the a, basically an argument to CFOs all around the world that, look, you're, A, you're under-investing in advertising because it's one of the actually the best performing assets that you've got on your balance sheet if you were to look at it in that way.

And also you're allocating, that budget wrong. You're putting too much of it towards these shorter term activities. So we'll do that, but then what I also wanna do is another document that's alongside that for marketers that explains what the CFO language is and translates so that marketers can go, "Oh, I now s- I see what the...

hurdle rate, that's what... I understand what that means now. What does a discounted cashflow mean? And how do I relate that to my kind of the long-term impacts of the marketing that I do?" And so I hope to be able to close that gap a little bit for marketers too.

I think it's a two-way thing. I think marketers need to speak a bit more finance, but finance need to listen a bit more marketing as well. And so hopefully we can meet in the middle somewhere.

James Lawrence: Can't wait for that, those resources to come out along with the book.

You briefly touched on earlier around the research you did into creative. Does it does great creative, does emotional creative actually kinda make a difference? It is talked about in the book as well. I think if you could just talk a little bit around the connection between- I was gonna say excellent or awesome creative, but successful creative or award-winning creative Yeah And how that then translates into effectiveness and does it actually make a difference?

James Hurman: Yeah, sure. I'll go back to like when I wrote The Case for Creativity we didn't yet have the concept of future demand, and it's interesting how my sort of point of view on this has enriched over the years. But if we go back to 2011 when I wrote that book, if we look at the let's say the market share performance at the same relative level of spend of work that's creatively awarded versus work that's not creatively awarded, the creatively awarded work performs about seven times better which is an enormous delta.

And so we started to, back then, it was Peter Field who did that original study, and then and then I collected up for that book, like all of the other academic research that had been done into creativity and all the industry research that had been done, and there was quite a bit of it, and every study showed the same thing, that, more creative work created, an advantage in terms of sales growth, base sales growth market share growth, profitability growth, all of these things, the creative work performed better.

Now back then I didn't know why as well as I do now. So now that, we understand that there are a lot of people who aren't in the market but will come into it in future, that group of people they don't care about your brand and your category until they come into it, right? If you're one of the people that put your hand up to say, "I'm gonna buy a mobile phone sometime in the next two years," you are fundamentally not interested in mobile phones, unless you're weirdly interested in mobile phones, right?

You're fundamentally, you're not gonna sit down and read a comparison of the Samsung Galaxy and the Apple iPhone, right? You're not gonna consume a bunch of functional information. If you're not in the market for a new mobile phone right now, I'd challenge you to try and remember a mobile phone ad from the last week.

Chances are you won't be able to, and that's not because you haven't been exposed to them. You're surrounded by them. The mobile phone companies, manufacturers advertise aggressively. The telcos advertise aggressively. Your life is full of mobile phone ads but you block them all out. You filter them all out because your human brain has evolved to focus on the stuff that's important right now and filter everything else out.

If we want to engage with people that aren't yet in our market, right? We have to earn their attention. They're not just gonna give it to us. They're just gonna filter us out. If we earn their attention then they might pay attention to what we're trying to sell them. So the example that I use in the book, and that I often use, is the Volvo trucks Jean-Claude Van Damme epic split ad.

We all watched that ad when it came out and very few of us are in the market for a commercial truck or will ever be in the market for a commercial truck. So from a purely kind of rational perspective, it is fundamentally irrational to even watch that ad, right? We're never gonna buy a commercial truck.

That's just a waste of 60 seconds of our time. But we did watch that ad because the creativity of the ad earned our attention even though we weren't fundamentally interested in the category. It earned our attention, people who are never gonna buy a commercial truck, it also earned the attention of all the people who would come into the commercial truck category over the next five or 10 years and gravitate towards Volvo as they have, and which Volvo's market share data shows very clearly.

So that's the real role for creativity. Creativity earns the attention of people who aren't yet in the market. And that's why it's so important. It's not so important when people are in the market. You can give them something pretty uncreative and they'll respond to it because they're fundamentally interested in it.

People don't Pay attention to advertising. They pay attention to things they're interested in, and sometimes it happens to be advertising. That was what Hal Gossage said back in the 1950s, and it's still absolutely true today. So people will pay attention to your uncreative, rational, functional advertising if they're in the market.

But if you wanna speak to the other 80, 90% of people that are gonna come into the market next week, next month, in six months' time, you have to earn their attention with creativity. Creativity is the only way to do that. So that is really the kind of my 2026 case for creativity

Which was missing from my 2011 case for creativity.

James Lawrence: Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? It's a kind of such a simple principle, but it's so well articulated. And When I was stress testing it when you were talking, in my head trying to think, 'cause I'm in the market for a phone, right? I think my plan expires in September, and the only phone advertisement I can remember is on Parramatta Road, which is where I drive to work every day.

There's shot with an iPhone, whatever, 17. Yes. And it's just a beautiful image, right? Yeah. It's not there. It's not pixels on the camera. It's not specs.

James Hurman: No.

James Lawrence: It's not whatever- Yes ... whatever it might be. And I do find for non-marketers particularly I don't actually, I don't think particularly in digital, I suspect it's also an above the line, but it's very much an above the line, this concept that my media...

I want my media to go further. So instead of investing 20 grand and 80K in media, let's put 10 into the creative and 90 'cause then I'm getting more value out of the media. And the book talks around the the Dollar Shave ad kind of- Yeah ... the famous one, right?

And how can you rationally think that creative versus just a really boring ad for, Philips or whatever it might be, will perform the same- ... with the same level of media. It's the power of the creativity- Yeah ... not the-

James Hurman: Yeah, that's right ... not

James Lawrence: always the media buy.

James Hurman: It's really interesting. In the case of both Dollar Shave Club and Volvo Epic Split, they spent 100% on the creative and 0% of, on the media. At least at the start for Dollar Shave Club, they may have run that ad on TV at some point later on, but at least at the start, they didn't pay anything for media.

It was just a viral ad. Same with the Volvo Trucks Ad. Now- You gotta be careful with this because you can't just ask for a viral ad, sometimes they go and sometimes they don't. And it's very bad strategy to go we're gonna put no media money behind things and just hope the creativity is good enough to go that far."

But in principle, what the data shows us is that, if we're converting current demand, if we're speaking to people who are currently in the market and we just wanna convert them actually skimping on the production spend is a really good idea. 'Cause again, you don't need that level of kind of craft and idea and emotion when you're talking to people in the market.

, You can communicate with them pretty functionally. So my advice would be actually to spend, as little as possible in that case. When we're creating future demand, it's the opposite. So we see the campaigns that spent 30 to 50% on the production of the ad and the rest on media that performed the best by far, much better than the ones that spent 5% on production and 95% on media.

When we're talking to people who aren't yet in the market a big creative idea, communicating emotionally, reaching the potential to reach a big, broad audience and craft quality is really important in, in reaching those future buyers. And so that's again, the future demand mental model gives us a really simple framework to go, but in this case, you actually can.

You should push for as much media as possible. But in this other case, actually we need to think about it in a completely different way.

James Lawrence: So it's awesome. Loved having you onto the pod. Where are things at with the book? How was the reception? And when's it being launched in Australia and New Zealand?

James Hurman: So it's a bit of a staged launch, partially because we've had some delays with the printing of the book.

So we've done a very small print run, which I took on a quick book tour that I did a couple of weeks ago. But the full production run is not due to be available to purchase until the middle of August. But what we're doing is we're doing a digital version. So you'll get, essentially a PDF and a Kindle version.

Then we'll have an audio book that's a couple of weeks after that. And then we'll have the the paperback, physical book sometime around the beginning to middle of August.

And so yeah, that's the rollout. And if you go to futuredemand.com you can participate in all of that. And then the tour that I just did, I went to Helsinki, New York, Chicago, Toronto, and then back to New York for another one. The reception was wild. I've never had such positive feedback from audiences as I had on that tour which

made me feel really good obviously. But also just gave me a lot of confidence in the quality and the usefulness of what's in the book. So yeah, I had just an amazing reception at all of the events that I did. So yeah I'm feeling really positive about, the usefulness of the book.

I try and write useful books, and that's my sort of gauge of, is it successful? Is it useful? Do people get it? Do they want to apply it? Do they understand how to?

James Lawrence: Yeah, and as I think, as I said to you off-air, I promise you I'm not just saying this, like it is... it's an excellent book, and I would recommend any listener to go to the futuredemand.com website, buy a copy, and I think reading through it, I've been doing this for a reasonably long amount of time, and a lot of it was just confirming stuff, but encapsulating it in a really nice way- probably bringing a lot of concepts together in a way that maybe hasn't been done before, but the whole thing was just nodding, nodding, and going, "This is the book to give to non-marketers as well to say this is how this stuff works." Yeah. It's nice, kind of data-backed. There's research in it. So yeah, I think you should be very proud of it, and really glad you took the time to have a chat to us today on the Smarter Marketer Podcast.

James Hurman: Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.

James Lawrence: Thanks, James.