[Podcast] Brand & Performance Marketing with Tom Roach

In this episode of JUST Branding, we are thrilled to welcome Tom Roach, Vice President of Brand Strategy at Jellyfish and one of the most respected figures in the advertising world.

With over 20 years of experience at top agencies like BBH, Leo Burnett, and AMV BBDO, Tom has become a leading voice in the fusion of brand and performance marketing.

Join us as Tom shares his journey from traditional agencies to his current role at Jellyfish, where he’s reshaping the future of branding in a digital-first landscape.

We’ll dive deep into his unique approach to bridging the often-divisive gap between brand strategy and performance marketing, explore the power of creativity for long-term brand growth, and hear his vision for the future of brand planning.

Whether you’re in branding, marketing, or advertising, this episode is packed with valuable insights for anyone looking to build sustainable, high-performing brands. Tune in!

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Transcript (Auto-Generated)

Hello and welcome to JUST Branding. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Tom Roach, who is a true leader in the world of branding and advertising. With over 20 years experience at top agencies like BBH, Leo Burnett and Amv Bbdo, so many abbreviations.

Tom has earned a reputation as one of the most awarded and respected strategists in the industry. Now, the vice president of brand strategy at Jellyfish, Tom is known for his ability to bridge the gap between brand and performance marketing, driving sustainable growth for brands. In this episode, we’re going to explore Tom’s journey, his unique approach to brand strategy and how he’s shaping the future of branding in a digital first world.

So welcome to the show, Tom.

Thanks very much for having me.

So we’re going to start at your journey. I’d love to know what led you to become the VP of brand strategy at Jellyfish.

Wow. Do you want to go right back? I mean, so I started in advertising in 98, I think, at a small little agency that was tiny, but it had Media and Creative, which I think is instructive because that was the back end of the time when Media and Creative was still together in some places.

The split was happening, this big kind of divergence. Then I moved to Amv Bbdo, where I was lucky enough to be working on it. I worked on loads of Mars brands, actually as an account person, as an account exec.

I was noticed for being not especially great at that job, but that I had a slightly greater proficiency in some of the data and some of the consumer research, and some of the more writing briefs and that kind of thing, which I was given a go out on some of those brands. So I was plucked out and moved into what was called planning, or account planning at that time, and then had a great time working on brands like Sainsbury’s. On Sainsbury’s, we had quite a lot of success with a campaign called Try Something New Today, loads of creative and particularly effectiveness awards.

It was then that I started writing case studies, writing, getting into effectiveness, which is another part of one of the quivers in my, what do you say? Well, the arrows in my quiver, is that the thing? So I started doing more and more case study writing, talking and writing about effectiveness, which is of course a really important part of the brand or communication strategist job.

That got me into going to Leo Burnett to work on McDonald’s, because they were really keen on not only creativity, but also effectiveness. I won some awards on that, and then that got me to BBH, where they were really keen on re-establishing themselves as an effectiveness force in their strategy department. That did a lot of work on that, won a lot of IPA awards with that agency.

Can I just interrupt you there around the word effectiveness, just for our listeners? We’re used to brand and it’s a term we don’t often hear as often on here. So when you say effectiveness, what does that mean in this context?

So I guess it’s a concept or a word that will be talked a lot about in advertising agencies, both on the media and creative side. And really it is your work, is your communications achieving its objectives, whatever they may be. And it often gets confused with efficiency.

And there’s a big discussion around effectiveness and efficiency, both of those two things being really important. But essentially it’s what incremental revenue or profit, if that’s your goal, is your advertising or communication bringing in for the brand or the client. So it’s a bit more about the delivery than I guess a lot of brand strategy can be about, which tends to be a more permanent kind of foundational component of a brand or a business’s marketing and communications effectiveness is much more at the, at the kind of end of evaluating the communications that’s coming out as a result of that brand strategy.

So yeah, so I was getting involved in more and more of the effectiveness stuff. And that took me to Adam and Eve DDB, where I was very lucky to work with Leo Burnett, who is regarded as, he’s actually called one of the godfathers of effectiveness. He’s a great guy, works with a guy called Peter Field.

And they write some of the sort of seminal works on this topic of advertising effectiveness. And so well with him. And then after my time at Adam and Eve, I moved to Jellyfish.

And there’s a whole kind of story behind that, which we can get into. But essentially, I think I realized that the creative agency world, I’d spent 20 odd years purely in pretty much above the line, upper funnel creative agencies. And I was needing to kind of spread my wings a bit, learn more about that, you know, through the funnel, more about digital advertising and particularly thinking about how you bridge the gap between upper middle and lower funnel communications, particularly in the digital world.

And Jellyfish came knocking and they were pretty much still are at the forefront of that world of connecting up brand and performance and thinking about your communications in its entirety, as opposed to this division, which I’d noticed and had been pretty kind of baffled by or slightly pissed off by this sort of, what is this brand world and this performance world? Why don’t these people speak to each other? Who are these performance people?

And I’ve sort of met Jellyfish at a time when they were thinking much more about connecting the journey up through the full funnel. And I was, I guess, and I’ve described it before as being I was kind of heading down the funnel, they were heading up it and we sort of met in the middle.

Like a jellyfish.

Thanks for that, Tom. That’s really great. I think that is an interesting conversation, like perhaps to at some point to get it into that, that tracing of above the line to below the line and what technology now allows us to do.

Because I just want to ask you a quick question, because that is so hard, right? In today’s world, because there’s so many channels, so many places somebody can be exposed to a brand above the line. What’s your sort of general philosophy on that?

Like, how do you sort of approach that thinking? I was super interested to hear from you.

Well, firstly, I just found it really, really complicated and confusing because of the world you describe. The multiplicity of platforms we now have, the huge variety of different formats both within each platform and across them, the very different kinds of specialists who are working within each platform or across them, and the different specialisms. I think there’d been some people who’d probably never been taught or read or understood the fundamentals just as in the above the line or upper funnel world, there’s people who really have a total blind spot to what’s going on down there at the lower end of the funnel.

So there’s a misunderstanding or a mistrust maybe of these two or even three worlds.

I hear what you’re saying because I often come across it as well. So above the line is very much, you know, awareness driven, let’s get the brand out there. Let’s just kind of get in front of people’s faces.

And then below the lines, like for at least my understanding, and you can educate me if I’ve got this wrong, but it’s like, how do we then draw those people down as now that we know that they are ideal customers, how do we then get them across the consideration and decision lines? It’s tough, those two worlds, and as one approaches, one sort of scattergun, one’s a bit more refined.

Yeah, scattergun is, if Byron Sharp were to hear that word, he’d probably wince. You talk about reach and the importance of reaching as many of your target audience as often as possible, or at least continuously. The very best people who I’ve seen doing this, and often we’ve got media people and creative people at Jellyfish, it’s another distinguishing feature of what we’re about, because we’re both brand and performance, media and creative, all of it.

When I think about the media people who are really getting this right, they are very cognizant of the fundamentals. They are reading Byron Sharp, they’re reading all the Burnett and Field stuff, they’re making sure they absorb all the fundamental principles of brand building communication. And as best they can, they’re applying those to their more targeted communication that they’re in charge of.

And that is about, I guess, being more respectful of creativity, not just kind of don’t go into the lowest common denominator. It’s about understanding the importance of reach as best they can, not over targeting. It’s about understanding the importance of attention in the execution and the channels that they’re in.

It’s about the right kind of measurement, not getting seduced by some of the short term direct response measurements, which is important, but not the only thing. And really thinking about what effectiveness means. So thinking about incrementality, which is making sure that you’re removing the sales or revenue you would have got anyway from your calculations and understanding what is extra that you’re delivering here.

And so it’s really about looking up. It’s about not being too seduced by the spreadsheets. It’s about looking up and around and seeing, being aware of the creative.

You’d be surprised how very often the people in the sort of lower funnel performance world are not as aware of the creative that’s running. They’re just kind of taking it. The very best ones are looking at it sometimes, and they might receive, literally receive it and go, this isn’t going to fit, this isn’t going to work.

And that’s an issue of probably the creative people or the agencies who are often more used to working at the upper end of the funnel, who are not being as kind of platform native in their execution. And they may be, and I’ve been as guilty of this as anybody, that they’re thinking very, very deeply about the big idea, the sort of bigger, more hero executions. And they’re not thinking as much as they should about the executions being fit for platform.

And that’s just vital. It’s kind of hygiene. And often that’s about, is the video the right length?

Is the branding in the right place? Is it going to grab people? Or is it just a cut down of a TV ad, which is a real problem?

So it’s still a problem today. It surprised me how often that’s an issue, even though we’ve had some of these video platforms for pushing 20 years actually.

So question, why do you think there’s such a big divide between brand and performance marketing?

Well, first of all, I think it is narrowing. I think there’s much more acknowledgement now than there probably was initially about the needs to connect things up. So I don’t want to over-dramatize the separation.

I think there has been a separation. It still exists. I think it’s probably a really historic one.

So you can go right back to the early 20th century and you can distinguish between advertising people who were obsessed with discounts and coupons and direct response and getting an immediate response and advertising people who were a bit more interested in image and memory and creating lasting impressions of a brand and you can trace that back to some of the very early writings in the early mid 20th century and I think that division probably was at its height in the kind of direct response DM world versus the, and that was when above the line, below the line, I think, were kind of in terms of concepts and language were mostly being used. And those two worlds, so they were kind of, they had always been a part. And then when digital arrived, you get some of those direct response agencies becoming digital agencies, learning how to use the new tools, beginning and some new kinds of agencies who were, search SEO type agencies, PPC agencies who were really at the forefront of performance marketing.

And so there were, and I think it goes, this kind of newer division is both an extension of this historical division, but also the arrival of some of these new platforms, which were originally just better. It’s not surprising when a new platform arrives on the scene, it’s often initially used for direct response. And that’s, it’s a kind of default setting, I think, for new platforms.

It’s easier to see an impact. It’s easier for the platform to sell their inventory, sell their warehouse, sell their proposition to new clients to say, look, if you put a pound in, you’re going to pound 50 back. And so it’s very appealing from that perspective.

And I think it’s only as the platforms have developed, video has developed as a format within various platforms, new platforms, which are video first have come along, mobile first platforms like TikTok, where all of those trends are combining. And you actually, I think, see probably in TikTok, you see one of the quickest arrivals of brand advertising in the context of a new digital platform than we’ve ever had. And I think we’re about to go through the next phase of this kind of direct response through to brand and through the full picture kind of journey with the arrival of AI in serious and big ways in advertising.

So we’re going to see initially Gen.AI being used more at the lower end of the funnel. And as the technology develops, as its creative powers develop, as its power to do video develops, we’re going to see its ability to be deployed for not only performance, but also brand advertising. And so we’ll see the full picture probably quite quickly, probably quicker than we saw with the arrival of the original digital platforms.

So I have questions around Gen. We’ll get there. But I want to talk a little bit about, I guess, your role at Jellyfish, because as far as I understand, you’re kind of bridging the gap between brand and performance marketing there.

Is that kind of like your role?

It was, that’s the intention. The brand’s trashy team that I’m lucky enough to lead. We’re a small unit of people.

We’re global. We are working both on a few different roles, and I’ll try and cover them. We’re pitching for business.

We are on existing creative and where there’s brand creativity happening. We’re doing what any other brand strategy or creative strategy person would be doing, and writing creative briefs, seeing the creative process through, trying to partner with creative people to develop good concepts and executions. When it’s more of a media strategy or media accounts, we’re more in the background.

We might be helping on a more of an advisory basis, because we’ll have a media strategist who’s doing most of the work. We might help out on certain things when required. If there’s a sudden need for a creative brief on something, we may jump in and help out.

When we’re pitching for stuff because of the shape of Jellyfish, which is, I wouldn’t say it’s unique, but because lots of people talk about being integrated these days, but we are genuinely bringing media, creative data and technology together. What that can mean is we have loads of different specialists in different fields, through the funnel, different capabilities, with different skill sets. What we try and do wherever possible is try and join those things up into a more coherent narrative.

Because when you’ve got 10 specialists in a room, you need a center point. So the intention would be in that case to try and bring a bit of a North Star or a narrative to the, let’s call it the marketing strategy that we’re putting forward to a client. That’s often a kind of consultative advisory role.

There might be an SEO account with a premium retailer. Normally, a brand strategist wouldn’t have much of a role to play in that, but Jellyfish will be there in the background helping out, trying to make sure that the content that’s been created is going to be effective, is going to be leading to right outcomes for the client. So we’re kind of Swiss Army knives in a way, but I think we’re a rare example of a capability in an integrated agency like ourselves where you need somebody to be the glue, to bridge the gap between different capabilities.

So that’s a very long answer.

That’s a good metaphor there.

Is there any sort of general way you can walk us through, in effect, how that bridge might typically take place, let’s say, on an average day at Jellyfish?

Let’s take a household appliances brand, Global, doing lots of work in various markets, and it’s got a very, very wide range of products, and we’re running the media accounts on it and the creative, and we are delivering, I mean, in this instance, I’m thinking it’s probably thousands of pieces of creative assets a year, something in every shape and size and every platform across a very wide range of products, and they may not be doing very much what you’d call brand advertising or they may be about to launch a big new product and the brand campaign gets polled. So we’re like, okay, we’ve got to somehow fill the gap here. I’m looking at a lot of the creative and working with creative teams thinking, we’re doing too many small pieces here, we’re going to need to tie them together.

Some of the creative assets are not as memorable as they should be. They may be a bit samey. We may be falling into a bit of a sea of sameness.

We may see a new brief every week, for example, or sometimes even every day a new thing comes in. So you’re trying to work with creative people and producers to group things together, to try and add something of the… When I look at the brand book for this client, it’s actually full of really wonderful, emotional, an emotional vision for the brand, but I’m not seeing that in the creative work.

I’m just trying to take pieces and threads of DNA from that beautiful piece of brand strategy that was probably created somewhere else, but by clearly a very gifted agency or individual. But I’m not seeing it in our creative. So we’re trying to inject some of the DNA of that into it.

So it’s really quite a practical exercise of how can we make these small, quite ephemeral little videos, which I think are probably just going to fall on deaf ears, not be noticed. How can we make them stand out and get a bit more attention, move people a little bit more? What in the brand’s armory do we have?

Is there any insights relating to the audience and their needs? How can we make sure we’re not too product-focused? How can we make sure we’re really going to connect with human beings?

It’s so hard without saying what the brand is or what the examples are, but you can hear, I hope, just the sense of trying to inject some of the basic principles that as a brand structure is working on creative accounts, you’re used to dealing with, but into places, into teams that are maybe, to use the phrase, churning creative assets out. How can we slow down the process a little bit to make sure we’re injecting some creativity and humanity and insight into those?

You’re a big advocate for commercial creativity. Like why do you think creativity is so crucial for long-term brand growth?

Well, let’s think about what creativity really does. So creativity, and it’s quite a fat term and people kind of go, well, it’s ill-defined and it can get you into trouble. My perspective is if creativity is about getting more attention, it’s about getting your message to be attended to for longer, and therefore encoded in the memory for a bit longer.

It’s about moving people so that that message has an emotional thing attached, which gets it ingested more and encoded more. So your communication lasts longer in the memory. If you can do that, then you’ve got a chance of over the longer term, adding to people’s memory structures of your brand, and you just create more hooks and little bits of Velcro, a stronger network of brand associations with your brand.

If you think about McDonald’s and the network of associations they’ve created around all of their different iconic products, different packaging, their visual identity. McDonald’s at its best when it’s advertising communication, is playing with its brand codes, it’s being very emotional, often quite witty with it. There’s a campaign called Razor Arches, where playing on the notion that when people see each other in an office, you can raise your eyebrows, raise your arches, that is a trigger to other people going, oh, I fancy McDonald’s too.

They will head off down to McDonald’s. That becomes an association with the brand, a stronger association. So you’re looking to build stronger, more longer lasting associations.

The more people have a wider, richer variety of associations with your brand, and a greater set of what Bar and Shop would call category entry points. So associations that are reasons why you might go there, or people you might use the brand with, or different reasons to get into the brand. Then you’ve got more hooks, and you can appeal to a greater number of people for a wider range of occasions.

And that almost by definition means you’re going to grow, because you just have a greater universal appeal. And the brands that I’ve seen do best have always had quite a strong universal appeal, and they’ve sought to not only reinforce the use cases, if you like that kind of term, that they’re good for, but also extending and developing new use cases for new users. And that’s how you grow.

So, creativity is not an end in itself. It’s a means by which you build memory and you get attention.

That’s a great answer. Please excuse the interruption to your scheduled podcast. It’s Matt Davies here.

It can be lonely out there when we’re building brands, and having a support network around us can be very valuable. About four years ago, I started my Mastermind Group. It’s a group of global brand builders.

We meet once a month virtually. We discuss all the latest topics in brand building, and we offer support to one another as we progress. As well as the monthly meetups, you have access to our Mastermind platform.

You’ll have over three years worth of past recordings, and access to message boards where you can get support from the group. To apply, go to my website, mrmattdavies.me forward slash mastermind. If you mention that you are a JUST Branding listener, you will be eligible for two free months per year as part of the group.

So if you want to level up, grow and be supported every step of the way, check out the Matt Davies Mastermind group. I’ll see you there. Can I just come in here?

Because I just think there’s something so interesting here which circles back on what you said before, which ultimately is this tension, isn’t it, between long-term thinking and short-term thinking. I work with a lot of businesses and in their marketing teams, they’re very focused on the short-term because often that’s how people are targeted, that’s how they justify their existence and their wage, because they can show from their numbers that those activities generated whatever amount of leads or sales. But the problem with that, the flaw in that is, as you’ve rightly said, is what about the long-term?

How are we building the reputation of the brand and the associations that connect with it? So there’s always this tension, I feel. So how do you get over that?

If someone said to you, yeah, but Tom, it’s lovely that you talk about this creativity stuff and long-term. So prove it to us. Conceptually, it makes sense, but in reality, I want my money, I want to hit my figures.

How do you deal with that?

Let’s not forget, there are some businesses which really do need immediately now to make this pound, they need to turn that pound into one, two, three pounds. Sometimes those businesses, they don’t have much time. So you can find yourself, if you’re completely dogmatic about this long-term thing, you can find yourself proposing to a business that actually doesn’t have enough runway.

Maybe they’ve only got six months money left, and you’re proposing a solution that’s going to really start paying back in one, two, three years. That’s not great. I’ve seen an example of that.

There’s somebody, again, it’s probably a brand I should mention, but it went under. They admitted that they were spending money on things, sponsorships and other things which were, for another brand might have been very successful, but in their case were not because they didn’t have enough time. So you can be long-term, short-termism gets a bad rap, long-termism can be bad too.

That’s kind of extreme case. You get lots of brands. There’s been a few examples recently, let’s say ASOS and Airbnb, who’ve been too short-termist, they’ve learned the hard way that they were spending too much on overfishing in a limited pool of people, hitting them too often with short-term performance marketing type stuff.

And actually what they needed to be doing was doing something a bit more balanced to both build the brand and then also drive conversion. So that balance is really important. And so it’s really, but the fundamental question is how do you persuade a client to get things right?

It’s very, very hard. And if you’re starting from the position of having to persuade, sadly, I think you’re often, you kind of lost to start with. And I’ve been in that situation actually with the brand I’ve already mentioned, where trying to work with a kind of, with a marketing team or brand team who really like evangelical about the stuff, but were in an organization that just didn’t believe.

And it’s really weird that we’ve got this situation where we, it’s almost sort of faith-based or belief-based. It can be slightly religious in some of the language you use. And you do find sometimes a CMO or a marketing team who are incredibly performance-driven, cannot get themselves off the short-term drugs.

And there are certain, by drugs, it’s often a particular kind of metric, and ROAS is one that they can get hooked on. And what is really hard because they are incentivized to deliver a certain number to a finance team often. And if they were to reallocate some of their spend onto something a bit, you know, that’s going to pay back over a slightly longer term or have an impact over a slightly longer term, they might actually reduce that efficiency number or that ROAS number, and they’re not able to do that.

So it actually always comes down to not only measurement and putting the right measurement in place, but you’ve got to convince often a team and their leadership that they’re doing things wrong. And that’s very difficult. The best way is often get some really good data and measurement people in to show them what they could have won and show them the things they’re losing out on and certain measurement and analytics kind of approaches that you can use to unpick that.

But I think you probably do need to go about it by showing them the numbers and talking about what they’re missing out and what’s the kind of missing value if they were to be thinking more long term. And that’s a process and it’s also expensive. At least, you know, it requires budget to get some people in to really think about this stuff, to think about ideal budget setting and then budget allocation within the budget to see where you, how you could split it.

What one way is to do some experiments and tests, you do geographical tests to explore different budget levels or different channels or different creative approaches. That’s kind of a lower risk way of doing it. So you find a small region or a city and you develop a campaign, and it’s going to be more balanced or more brand building in it.

That term brand building doesn’t, I think, help particularly. I mean, it has some, for certain marketers can sound like it’s fluff or it can sound like it’s money wasted. It’s not my belief, but some people think that and that doesn’t help.

So there’s language problems as well. Often you have to find new words to describe things, which is kind of ridiculous.

There’s so many words. There’s different things.

Yeah.

Well, thank you for sharing that. I do want to loop back to creativity and gen AI. We kind of brushed on it before.

Like how you see the future with strategy, creativity and gen AI coming into the picture. What are your thoughts?

First of all, I think we’re still in the foothills. So it’s really hard and I’m not big on making predictions about where things are going. It’s really hard to see exactly what’s going to happen.

Where are we all going to be in five years time is impossible. But there is very, very rapid adoption of certain gen AI tools across, not only across advertising and then broader than that, marketing, but across business in general. So it’s here to stay and it’s going to change things.

How much is going to change things is really hard to know. Some people, of course, predict massive, total change and it’s going to remove 95% of jobs, whatever the status is. I don’t know whether that’s the case.

I doubt it’ll be that dramatic. I suspect there’s a lot of hype involved in terms of some of those doom mongers. But it is going to change the way we work.

When I’m more optimistic about it, I’m thinking these are tools that we use, their assistants, their co-pilots, and you can see a lot of the language that people are using in the discussions about this to talk about the tools in this way. We are seeing a very quick adoption of some of the things that we’re using. Initially on the production and creative end of things, and also our strategists are using, obviously informally using some of the publicly available tools.

But there’s some very good new platforms being developed, which are assistants for people in all sorts of jobs that are very helpful. You can see AI as an assistant to strategists, as a way of aspiring partner to develop new platforms, or new propositions, it’s a way to inject some new thinking into what can sometimes be a solitary job. If you’re the only strategist in a mid-sized agency somewhere in the States, it’s quite good to have a partner like that, if you don’t have a human partner, to inject some new thinking.

I think it’s got tremendous utility. You can see that by how quickly it’s being adopted. On the strategy side, using it to interrogate clients’ research, their data, to summarize things, to help develop briefs and platforms, it’s here to stay.

Really interesting tools have been developed to create new audience segmentations. There’s a platform called Evidenza, which looks really interesting on that perspective, which has been particularly used in the B2B space, where there’s less easy for B2B business to get hold of audience data, so it kind of fills a real need there. On the creative side of things, you know, we see it practically always slightly less rapid at the moment, but every week or every month, you’re seeing a new issue, a new iteration of a range of different production type platforms, and the film is beginning to be quite impressive.

It’s only a matter of time before the text to video is going to be here very, very soon and will change how creative people work. I’m not a do-monger about the role of humans in this process. I think human creativity is currently unsurpassed in terms of its ability to generate new ideas, but the way that AI develops new ideas is, I think, we can overstate the need for originality in idea generation.

Actually, originality has always been, whether it’s human or machines doing it, the crashing together, the combination of existing strands of DNA, existing ideas, and AI is actually very, very good at that. I think that’s where you will see gen AI not only in the production process as we’ve got it currently, but also in the generation of new concepts, and of course, it’s able to iterate very rapidly. I think that we still need human eyes over things to select and to go, oh, that’s the good idea here.

That’s a classic creative direction tool or skill, and having great tastes is a thing that humans are really good at. I think that particular role is here to stay. Eventually, you hear people talking about having an entirely autonomous marketing content generation process.

I think there will be humans needed in that process, too. We talk about humans in the loop at Jellyfish and within the brand set group. That human in the loop is still really, really important and will be for quite some time, I think.

So I’m not a doom monger, but I don’t want to be hyperbolic about the change it’s going to create. I think I always sit on the fence in these things, but I think somewhere in the middle of doom and gloom versus hyperbole is where I like to be. I hope that’s reflected in the answer.

That’s a great insight and I appreciate what you’re saying now.

I was curious, have you got it in your process at Jellyfish? Here’s a point that you would use AI, or what are your restrictions with a company of that size? Who can use what and when, and is there any protocols around AI and so forth?

We have our own tools. So with Brandtech, with a group that they bought Jellyfish last year, I think, and also a company called Pencil. Pencil is our core creative gen AI tool used across the Brandtech group.

We are rapidly developing workflows and processes and teams around Pencil and how we deploy it. Pencil Pro is the version we use for enterprise clients. Pencil has been around since 2018 for SMEs and small businesses who have less need for controls and are less concerned about, I guess, let’s call it the quality of creativity.

But an enterprise client, if you’re a major multinational, you want to be certain you’re doing things right, you’re doing things legally right, that corporate issues are fine and ethics around, things are fine and biases are ironed out. Necessarily, there are, I guess, almost bureaucracy around it and that’s the right thing. Because if you’re a big client, you don’t want to be putting things out which could be risky.

There’s no point, I mean, it could be dangerous. So we’re very cognizant of all of those things. And Pencil Pro is particularly geared up to those kinds of clients with those kinds of concerns.

So yeah, we have the way that we’ve kind of reconfigured our creative capability, all of our creative people are encouraged to use it in different kinds of forms. We have the Creative Collective who are, I guess, are creative humans who are using AI as tool. And we have the AI studios, which is predominantly AI with kind of human intervention.

So there’s two levels at the moment. And we’re hiring for kind of GenAI creative directors and GenAI creatives who are-

That’s crazy.

More skilled in this stuff. And that’s part of the brand set group’s sort of way forward is developing new roles and job descriptions. So that’s absolutely at the heart of what we’re doing.

A GenAI creative director.

Yeah.

How cool is that? I was just gonna say, Tom, just so that perhaps folks that haven’t really explored this and are still in the early, as you say, in the foothills of even what you’ve talked about there, just explain how that works then. So as a creative, you have your visual identity, don’t you?

You teach the AI, the basics. This is what’s on the brand. These are the colors.

This is the type of, almost like give it the brand book, as we usually do.

You’re training your tool to know your brand. And you need really good ingredients. There’s no replacement for a fantastic brand book, some great brand guidelines, really clear visual identity, consistency, and all of the things you would look for as a brand strategist who cares about these things, pencil needs.

So I don’t see any ethical, moral issues with that. It’s technology that is just really good at understanding brands and reading them and then iterating. The way I’ve seen it on, take an airline that we work with, who they have a brilliant creative agency who develop fantastic brand guidelines and an amazing brand campaign and great master assets.

But this client also have a studio which is small, a kind of in-house studio which is too small, cannot cope with the sheer quantity of assets that are needed to be created today to fulfill the need that the platforms have for hundreds, sometimes thousands of assets by campaign. And so a JNAI tool in this case, and a team around it is very, very helpful in unblocking that process, in helping generate the adaptations and variations that are needed so that that team can respond to that business’ need for and the platform’s need for assets. That’s a fantastic development that is making things quicker and faster, cheaper.

And in Pencil’s case, because it’s able to predict which assets are going to perform best, it’s able to say use these ones, not these ones. And so you can de-prioritize and take out the loop, anything that may not perform in Pencil’s view. And that actually lifts the performance on average of the assets.

Now, at the moment, this is short-term performance, so back to the long short-term conversation. But in time, AI tools will get good at also spotting what’s going to work in the longer term. And that’s, to me, quite exciting because that’s something we’ve not yet seen.

We’re talking about the future here, right? Like what do you see as the future of brand strategy or brand planning? Do you call this brand strategy or brand planning?

Historically, I started out, as I said, as an account exec, was an account planner, brand planner, then a strategist, then a brand strategist. I think that evolution of terms somehow tells its own story. But yeah, we’re loose with terminology.

Put that aside. Talking about the future of brand strategy.

The future of brand strategy. Oh, I’m not very good with crystal balls, but I… And of course, I’m biased.

So I would love to believe that there will always be human brand strategists in helping develop these assets assisted by AI in the process. I don’t see any… Like, humans aren’t changing in terms of their need for brands that they recognize, brands that are kind of distinctive and are going to feel recognizable and easy choices for them.

So I don’t think that there’s going to be any change in the human need for brands. There may be a change in the way that… Certainly, there’s a change in agency models and the role of brand strategy within those agencies, the numbers of brand strategists you need if you’ve got really good tools and that kind of thing.

So I’m optimistic that there is a role in the future. I suppose, realistic about the likelihood that… Will we have…

Just as there was a time when there were several 500 people, agencies in the west of London and central London, it’s not the case anymore. They’ve shrunk. That’s just the nature of running accounts these days.

You just don’t need so many people. So I suspect that will be an impact. But I don’t think we need to be worried about…

If you’ve got the skills, if you’re learning, if you’re adapting to the future, there will always be opportunities that develop. I mean, look at the conversation we just had about new creative roles. There are new roles springing up all the time.

So I think in the short term, I guess my advice to a brand strategist would be learn as much as you can about these new tools and get to use them and experiment with them and play with them, and that will set you up for who knows what in the future. But there’s no reason to be pessimistic about what the future holds for us.

Okay, well, talking about advice, is there any other piece of advice you would give to up-and-coming strategists in today’s world?

I’m a big believer in both the kind of learning and reading the fundamentals and learning from the past so you can apply it to the future. So that would be my basic thing is understand the past to help you understand and unpick the future and where things are going to set yourself up. So I think that would be my basic advice.

Well, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom around strategy and so much more. Where can people connect with you online?

These days, slightly more on LinkedIn than I used to be. So I think I’m Tom Roach on LinkedIn, I’m at Tom Roach on Twitter slash X. I tweet less than I used to, like many people.

I think that debate about where people are going to go to from Twitter seems to, a few years back, it used to be, oh, let’s try Macedon or other things. And LinkedIn seems to be winning that debate at the moment. I have a blog, which is thetomroach.com, where most of my stuff ends up.

I write in marketing week an irregular column, kind of whenever, you know, probably three or four times a year or something. And jellyfish.com is where I guess my day job is, and I should plug them. But I also do stuff for the APG, which I’m a big advocate for.

That’s the account planning group. I’m occasionally on stages with them, and also the IPA, which is the UK’s official advertising body. I do stuff with them.

So yeah, a lot of different places, but probably primarily my blog and LinkedIn.

Thank you, Tom. Matt, did you have any closing words?

No, I think it’s been a super conversation. I think the top of funnel, bottom of the funnel, you know, glue is required, isn’t it? And you know, it’s amazing as we enter this new era of AI, as you say, to keep exploring how some of this stuff is going to develop.

I just want to thank you, Tom, for carving out the time for us. It’s been a super interesting conversation.

Thanks very much for having me.

It’s been a pleasure.