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Why Marketing Doesn’t Require Endless Data, Just the Right Signals. Episode featuring Paul Wright from UBER

Brilliant marketing doesn’t happen when we target devices; it happens when we engage people. In this episode, Fiona Davis is joined by Paul Wright, Director and Head of EMEA at Uber Advertising.
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Why Marketing Doesn’t Require Endless Data, Just the Right Signals. Episode featuring Paul Wright from UBER

“We've built a whole advertising digital ecosystem based on targeting devices rather than people, and I think we've got to get a reset back to people because advertising needs to engage with people in the right way.” - Paul Wright, Director and Head of EMEA at Uber Advertising.

TFAR has had a little break this summer, but we’re now back and delighted to bring you this episode with Paul Wright, Director and Head of EMEA at Uber Advertising, for a candid conversation about why it's time to reset the way we think about marketing, from tracking devices to truly understanding people.

Paul draws on his experience at AOL, Sky, Apple, OMD, and now Uber to demonstrate how leading brands are shifting their focus from data overload to contextual relevance, cultural connection, and genuine human attention.

In this episode you will learn:

  • How Uber measures genuine consumer attention, and hits 6.6 seconds of it
  • What makes cultural context more powerful than raw targeting data
  • How to balance personalization with privacy and trust
  • Why fraud-free, native environments deliver stronger ROI
  • What it means to create journey-based, brand-safe advertising
  • How retail media can elevate brand engagement beyond the basics
  • And why the fundamentals of marketing matter more than ever in an automated world

This one’s for marketers ready to pivot from solely a device-centric to a more human-centric approach to marketing. 
Paul Wright is the Director and Head of EMEA at Uber Advertising, where he leads the company’s rapidly growing billion-dollar ad business. With a career spanning global giants like AOL, Sky, Apple, and OMD, Paul has been at the forefront of driving the digital agenda. A former entrepreneur and executive leader, Paul is a passionate advocate for the power of digital advertising to connect brands with consumers. He is also a firm believer in diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

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[00:00:01]  Paul Wright: It’s a historical problem. We’ve built a whole advertising digital ecosystem based on targeting devices rather than people. And I think we’ve gotta get a reset back to people because I think advertising needs to engage with people in the right way. 20% of advertising goes to fraudulent activations, and those activations are only gonna get worse with AI, Sloth, and all the other stuff that’s going on. And that doesn’t help anyone in the ecosystem because we’re basically handing money over to organized crime and god knows what else. But if we actually focused on people and targeting people and engaging with those people. I think we might be in a much better place.

[00:00:35] Intro: Welcome to the Time for a Reset marketing podcast. I Each episode dives deep into the minds of senior marketing leaders from around the world. [00:01:04] Fiona Davis: Hi. Welcome back to Time for a Reset. I’m Fiona, your host from Overline. And with me today, I have Paul Wright from Uber Advertising. Welcome, Paul. Lovely to have you on.

[00:01:12] Paul Wright: Great to be here. Thank you, Fiona.

[00:01:14] Fiona Davis: So we recently had you on a panel, Paul, in Cannes, which was fantastic, where we were talking about the future of advertising and its impact on retail media. For those of you who’ve not met Paul before from the podcast, he has a very broad background. Right, Paul? You started your career at Sky, then you moved over from TV sales into commercial web. You’ve worked on a sports-focused ad network. You’ve had roles at Bauer, AOL, chief digital officer at OMD Group, and then over to Omnicom. Then you joined Apple’s first ad business and ran that. Also, you did a bit of time at Seismic and then Amazon as well. So you’ve seen it from all sides, I would say. Would that be a fair assessment?

[00:01:52] Paul Wright: Yeah. It’s been a good ride. It’s good fun.

[00:01:55] Fiona Davis: We know that you’ve always been a pretty passionate advocate of the power of digital advertising to connect brands to consumers. So, really, what we wanted to talk to you about today was you’ve been in the advertising business for quite a while. What would you hit the reset button on if you had a giant red button today to change what’s happening in brand advertising?

[00:02:11] Paul Wright: Well, I think it’s a historical problem. We’ve built a whole advertising digital ecosystem based on targeting devices rather than people. And I think we’ve got to get a reset back to people because I think advertising needs to engage with people in the right way rather than just do numbers and IDs and things like that. It just seems a bit confused in many ways. And I think it’s also the reflection of the fact that, well, they reckon that, what, 20% of advertising goes to fraudulent activations, and those activations are only gonna get worse with AI, Sloth, and all the other stuff that’s going on. And that doesn’t help anyone in the ecosystem because we’re basically handing money over to organized crime and god knows what else. But if we actually focused on people and targeting people and engaging with those people, I think we might be in a much better place.

[00:02:54] Fiona Davis: Yeah. Interesting you say that because one of the things I took away from Cannes was the whole place is now dedicated to data-drivendata driven marketing, which is a great thing that you now have the technology to be able to do that in a succinct way. But at the same time, I mean, it is the festival of creativity, and it’s almost like people have forgotten to talk about the creative side of it and the emotional connection side of it.

[00:03:15] Paul Wright: Yeah. I mean, even with the debate about AI and stuff is, like, AI can suddenly create great creative, well, fine. But if it’s not going to a person, it doesn’t really matter. Now some people may argue that AI to AI marketing is gonna be another thing, but that’s a different conversation. Right?

[00:03:28] Fiona Davis: Yeah. Quite a different conversation

[00:03:29] Paul Wright: Different podcast! But I think we’ve gotta get back to some of the fundamentals of how we influence people to do things, and that’s what comes down to people. It’s not a device thing.

[00:03:38] Fiona Davis: And so in the vein of that, how does Uber internally use data and signals to understand that customer journey, that customer experience? And then how do you strategically balance the need to personalize and talk to a consumer or a customer, I should say, without compromising that data privacy side of the house.

[00:03:56] Paul Wright: So I think the way to think about us, our business is, obviously, we are engaging with people when they’re actually looking at their device, ordering an Uber, or ordering food from us. Right? So our starting point is always with the person and the engagement from there. And then I think there’s two things we do to make it work effectively for the consumer. Firstly, the ad formats are pretty native to the platform, so they’re not interrupted to the platform experience, which I think is really important. Therefore, whether it’s on the right side of the house when we’re doing ads to people, always if we’re able to pick them up, that type of thing, or whether it’s on the side of the house, same thing. None of the ad units are there to be interrupted. And then we’re very careful with the data in terms of what we use, because what we’re really trying to do is just capture some signals from that data that’s relevant to an advertiser. So the best example is we know people are traveling to Oasis concerts this week. Right? We actually have an advertiser who’s targeting that group of people because they know they’re going to Oasis concerts. They don’t actually need to know any more data than that. Just the location, just the waypoint, or whether it’s work we’re doing with brands around Wimbledon as well. Same thing. There’s a person there. That person is interested because their intent is built into the data point, and then off you go. And the same is true, I guess, for if people wanna target on the inside, there’s two ways. There’s sponsored listings, which is activation by restaurant partners to make sure that you’re in the feed so that you can choose that brand that’s nearby you or whatever with that pizza restaurant that’s nearby you. Or on the post checkout experience, when you’ve ordered something, a post checkout app pops up, and then that can go, oh, what are you gonna do next? Like, we work with companies who wanna drive people to go and make a purchase or to actually go and view a new piece of content or whatever, you know, watch TV. So a lot of those things are built together. Now we can do much more sophisticated audience targeting as well where we match data across both eats and rides. But, you know, essentially, what we always find is the best things is recognize the context of the user and using the data appropriately for that, and the user responds well to that.

[00:06:01] Fiona Davis: Paul Well, you guys have built a pretty successful business. It’s scaled pretty rapidly. Like, you’re over a billion dollars now, and that’s come from that journey ads type of product. If you look out into the future, you’ve got a multi touch ecosystem now, right, because you’ve integrated so many things. You’ve got rides, eats, groceries, all that stuff. How do you integrate those sponsored journey moments into broader brand campaigns? Because that must be something that’s being more demanded of from you now from brands because they can see the success of that and potentially looking at your guys’ potential to not just be a performance ad campaign type of network. How do you think about that now, and what sort of impact are the campaigns you’re running having more on, like, brand equity, brand awareness?

[00:06:42] Paul Wright: Yes. So we do a lot of brand work in what we do in the rides business because that’s the obvious place for it. If you think, the average Uber ride is, say, in the UK, it’s about twenty five minutes. Your time spent in the app where the ad is visible, two, three minutes depending on your experience. And you think about it. There’s three moments. There’s the first moment where you open the Uber app and you say, I want a car. We serve an ad in that. We call that the dispatch screen. And the next screen is when the car is on its way to you and you’re looking at the map. There’s an ad unit there. And the third one is when most people wanna check when they’re gonna arrive. They look at the map. They go back into the app and look at the map and see how far away it’s gonna be before they get dropped off. There’s an ad unit there. So what we’ve always worked on the principle was that this is quite an engaging moment for advertising, and it fits the very brand execution. It’s a single advertiser per trip, so you’re the only person in the trip. That brand experience is slightly different to what you get elsewhere because you could be interrupted. But because your attention to the Uber app is so strong, that’s important. And we went off and talked to our friends at Lumen and did a eye tracking study on it and said, okay, well, fine, we know that there’s probably about I mean, exposures of up to ninety to a hundred and twenty seconds generally for the ads that are there, but what’s the actual attentive seconds? Because we were measuring very strong brand lift gains from this thing because it’s clean. It’s clear. You’d expect it, I guess, because you haven’t got any other competing brand things.

[00:08:09] Fiona Davis: Also, not really interruptive either.

[00:08:11] Paul Wright: No. Not really interruptive, but we also thought, well, hang on a minute. If you’ve got all this time where this is exposed, then the attention time should be quite strong as well. And we did this thing with Lumen, and Lumen basically did eye tracking and looked at the amount of the attentive seconds we got, which was six point six attentive seconds. Now that may not sound like a massive amount, but it makes a huge difference to brand recall because anything over two and a half seconds is actually quite impactful. And we found that our journey ad unit was second only to YouTube pre roll. Now with YouTube pre roll, you’ve got an ad and then there’s a consumer benefit because there’s other content you’re waiting for. So you sort of know you that the transaction you have to do content was slightly different with us is, obviously, we’re giving you the service regardless of the ad. So we were pretty pleased with that because we thought, well, okay that makes a difference. But it then also the more you dive into it, the more you realize that brand lift and brand favorability, which we’d seen positive results from in all surveys we’ve done with a bunch of companies, actually is improved by the length of time, this six point six seconds or whichever measure you wanna look at, but it it’s a really interesting area. So we’re not the only retail commerce media platform to start looking at attention either. 

[00:09:21] Fiona Davis: Yeah, absolutely, we’re seeing that a lot across the whole industry at the moment. Right?

[00:09:26] Paul Wright: Yeah. Again, back to our point about people rather than devices, in a world where there’s so many options to reach people, those opportunities that actually capture people in a moment are actually gonna be very much more important. And I think that we’ll carry on working out what we do in this area. This is early stages, but it looks very positive for app based environments where you’ve got consumers with clear intent that are getting those messages across. And we’re now starting to see people using the brand activations along with performance activations across the platform. So that brand awareness activation then linking through to a transaction at the other end, which is also pretty powerful.

[00:10:04] Fiona Davis: In that vein as well, you’ve gone down the path with Uber of creating
in- house creative studio. Because, obviously, once you’ve got the attention, you wanna make sure that the right creative’s getting in front of them because if it’s not, it can be a worse experience. They talked a lot about leveraging cultural moments and hyperlocal storytelling, which I think is something that’s quite unique to the type of service you’re providing. How do you guys measure that by the emotional connection brand equity through those experiences? You talked a bit about the lift study stuff, but you must have multiple ways to look at that.

[00:10:31] Paul Wright: This is something we’re asked at Cannes NASA can. So CreativeStudio is new to us in terms of diving deeper into what’s the best creative execution, but also can you go beyond the ad execution and go into other areas? And we’ve done activations with people with car wraps in some places. We’ve done a Squid Game activation, which involved a shuffle where you could get in and Squid Game shuffle. This goes back to this cultural point. I think that a lot of what we see is cultural moments for consumers, like the Oasis one, the activation we got running this week, and with the one we had with Wimbledon last week. Those are big cultural moments. People are going there, and in some cases, people are going by Ubers to those destinations. So we know we’ve got that cultural moment. I think then it’s just a question of making sure we extend it as far as we can take it with advertisers according to what they wanna do. There’s several things we’ve got, some basic. We know the creative, what we need to do creative wise. Creative is all about context. Right? The context with message. And I think consumers are very smart. If they realize that someone’s been smart with them getting a great creative message, then that’s good. It’s like I mean, some of the tourist campaigns we’ve done in London, people have got messages like, welcome to London on the first creative screen. Now it’s not the most creative execution, but it’s just that contextual recognition. You as an advertiser recognize the consumer’s position in that moment.

[00:11:50] Fiona Davis: The cultural experience you’re talking about are like moments of fun in people’s life as well. So if you can do something that’s even more fun around that, then it stays with people a lot more than if you’re just running a regular ad.

[00:12:01] Paul Wright: Yes. Exactly. And I think that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s like it goes back to this whole point devices are just people recognizing these are people doing things that are important to them. If they’re going to the bar, they’re going to a restaurant, they’re going to celebrate something, they’re going to there’s Halloween. I mean, we know, for example, that the number of rides we do will always go up around Halloween weekend because more people take Ubers and all that type of stuff because they’re going to parties. Yes. We can see the cultural signal, not only the cultural moments we know they’re happening, but also there’s cultural signals in terms of how people then behave using our platform.

[00:12:32] Fiona Davis: You’ve had a career spanning all sorts of facets of digital marketing. In your experience, what have been the most significant obstacles brands face today in shifting from that algorithm driven interruption type approach to a contextually aware engagement? Like, what do you think are the biggest obstacles for people?

[00:12:51] Paul Wright: I think it depends. We’ve sold a lot of digital marketing just on scale and one size fits all. And, ultimately, a lot of programmatic platforms, DSPs, very much did that. Oh, you can buy across 20 web thousand websites, and you can buy the same banner across 20,000 websites. I’m not sure that was ever a good idea. It was just we just felt efficient. Right? Because it gave you this feeling that you could reach as many people as possible. And it was often driven a lot more by performance metrics than perhaps anything else. So I think a lot of marketers can be rather hooked on that sort of programmatic solution to everything, but it’s missing the point. I mean, I remember the early days of Multi Channel TV, and people were like, oh my god. We got eight channels. That’s terrible. And no one quite knew how to cope with it. So I think there’s always been, for marketers, this challenged that they wanna try and cover everything, and they have to find solutions to cover everything. I think what you need is very strong marketers who can go right, there are different roles for different channels, and those things need to be recognized properly rather than a one-size-fits-allone size fits all planning mechanism, which just goes for reach and here’s some programmatic to throw in as well. We certainly see that from the engagements we have with clients where they start to see different roles for maybe for us relative to other platforms they might be using.

[00:14:02] Fiona Davis: Yeah. I agree with you with that because we do a lot of that work with clients where, actually, the ones that need large reach and frequency are more like your classic CPGs where you’re selling a washing powder or something like that, that everyone is your customer. And so there’s a role for that, but, actually, for a lot of brands, what they find even large CPGs will still find their niche where you have to do a lot of testing across lots of different channels, and then eventually, you’ll find the ones that work best for you. And it’s not the same for any brand, and the audience for different products is different as well. So what might work for one line of business isn’t working for another line of business and getting that nuance right. I think you’re right. The technology is there to be able to pretty much do in whatevert whenever you want. The secret sauce is in finding but where are they really interacting with me? Where have I got their engagement? That’s where I need to be advertising, and it’s different tactics for different channels, which is classic good media planning. Right? But I think now you have more data than ever to be able to figure out where is the right place to find them.

[00:15:02] Paul Wright: Yes. But it’s having the time to find the right data. I think that’s the thing, or recognize the right data. I mean, we have lots of conversations with clients where they go, oh, we can have this data, this data, and I’m like, you don’t need all of that.

[00:15:12] Fiona Davis: Yeah. Exactly. You just need this one signal. 

[00:15:15] Paul Wright: Two signals is enough. Right? You don’t need to try and track them down to social level where you end up trying to chasing one person zipping around London because that doesn’t really work for anybody.

[00:15:23] Fiona Davis: Exactly. And I think now the beauty of AI is that it kind of delivers on the promise of that really personalized marketing without being uber creepy, which has put people off for so long. But I think the danger is that people will get sucked into that same trap of being able to target individual people and obsessing about it rather than thinking about the bigger picture of, I don’t actually need to know that much about that person to serve them a relevant ad. Just one or two signals is enough to get to the meat of what they’re doing in that moment as opposed to I need to know absolutely everything there is to know about that person.

[00:15:53] Paul Wright: Exactly. I mean, the ones we always use is people taking trips to airports. Right? Everyone has the same airport experience pretty much. You go through security, and then you go through duty-freeduty free. Now that is the only data point you really need to know because everyone’s gonna go through that experience. It doesn’t matter whether they’re 16 to 34 or 25 to 54, whatever. The experience is the same. The likelihood that they will purchase is probably similar. So you don’t need any more profile data than that, really. You just need to try and understand what’s the message you’re gonna get across to encourage them to do a purchase.

[00:16:25] Fiona Davis: So we’ve talked about the technical side and the capabilities available now. Beyond the technical shift, what are the organizational resets you think are needed within marketing team to embrace that more human centric approach to customer journey and brand building, moving beyond just retargeting individuals based on their devices?

[00:16:45] Paul Wright: Well, I guess you would hope that some usage of AI would drive efficiencies into the business so they could focus on the things that matter. I think there’s also equally a risk that AI just encourages you to do more and more.

[00:16:56] Fiona Davis: More bad behavior. More.

[00:16:58] Paul Wright: bad behavior. But you would hope that a deeper understanding of consumers rather than devices would come from the AI generation. You’ve also gotta remember that a lot of current marketers have come through this sort of digital revolution phase and are probably quite wedded to older models, perhaps a little bit, and maybe now need to rethink some of that. So I think you need some organizational challenges to say, well, actually, are we still doing the same that we were doing ten years ago? Because I always remember agency side that there were so many plans that were the same plans for ten years. That’s why. Yeah. I always remember going in to see our client, and they hadn’t changed their plan for ten years. And I’m like, did you notice that anything had changed with you?

[00:17:40] Fiona Davis: They had interns in the industry.

[00:17:42] Paul Wright: Yeah. Now I’m not saying that’s still the case, but I’m sure there is an element of rinse and repeat, which I think we should probably challenge. And I think both agencies and clients have a responsibility to look at that as AI should make some of it more efficient. So, therefore, you should have more time to spend on the other things.

[00:18:00] Fiona Davis: Funny you say that, Paul. We had one particular client who will remain unnamed that were using the same demo data for ten years, wondering why they weren’t reaching their customer anymore. I feel like and it’s not like people aged out of the product. The same people were still buying the product, but they were only targeting people in the same age category. So simple stuff like that where you’re like, they got ten years older as well. It’s like, you’re excluding them from your ad campaign at this point.

[00:18:23] Paul Wright: Well yeah. And you also have this vanity metrics thing about audiences, which is still there to some degree where I always remember one time at a previous place, we were told the target audience was women 16 to 34, and it actually turned out to be women 55 plus. The client just didn’t really wanna accept the fact that it wasn’t the audience that they thought they would like to target.

[00:18:43] Fiona Davis: But this is the funny thing. We had to actually prove it to the clients. They didn’t believe us. So we actually did some side by side testing for them to prove and exactly to I was like, no. No. No. That’s not who your audience is. This is who your audience is. The entire strategy around that was just wrong for that audience. So I think it’s constantly questioning and testing to make sure that you are actually hitting the people you think you’re hitting and that maybe your customer’s not who you think it was. 

[00:19:08] Paul Wright: And also that I think to some degree, audiences naturally, I think I remember when I first started in the industry, audiences were much more clearly defined perhaps than they are now because what’s an Oasis audience? I mean, it’s everybody from anybody. Right? Whereas if it was in the eighties or nineties, you probably would have defined a music audience probably a bit tighter than what an Oasis audience is now. So there is some challenges with, I think, some of the assumptions we’ve built into the media buying model that is, are we gonna define a target market? And that target market is all the audience. It never is  that is not the case anymore.

[00:19:41] Fiona Davis: Exactly. I like to use the Squid Game example. Who’s the audience for that? It literally was everyone in every country around the world. You can’t target based on that. Demographic is a very dangerous thing to apply because it can always change. And I’m used to that during COVID, right, where those buying behaviors changed overnight, and no one really adjusted fast enough to the changes.

[00:20:02] Paul Wright: No. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s true.

[00:20:04] Fiona Davis: If brands adopted that more nuanced approach to human related rather than just purely data driven automation, what do you think the impact would be on the future of marketing?

[00:20:13] Paul Wright: Two things. One is you’d probably end up with better creative, generally. Creative related to the user. And I think the big thing is, how do you reduce fraud? Ad fraud is a massive problem. AI is gonna make it worse. We thought we had made problems we made for advertising websites. What you can do with AI is gonna make it worse. And the ad ecosystem doesn’t need to be spending money that no one’s seeing anything of. I mean, it’s crazy. I mean, if it’s any other industry, I’m sure there’ll be a much bigger hoo ha about ad fraud. 

[00:20:47] Fiona Davis: More regulation around it for sure. Yeah.

[00:20:50] Paul Wright: So I think it’d only benefit the whole industry if we actually cut out some of this stuff and just stopped doing this generic targeting and hoping it’s gonna work and then just shifted it back to targeting humans.

[00:21:02] Fiona Davis: Well, you’ve started to see that now. With retail media coming in, actually, what we’ve seen is a move more back towards audience curation, so directly doing partnerships with known publishers that have all the controls in place for a brand’s safe environment. So it’s I feel like it’s a real opportunity for premium publishers to kinda claw some of the losses over the last since programmatic, really, for that reason because it’s people knowig that what they’re getting, a, that it works, b, that it’s contextually relevant because they can see the context themselves. And with the introduction of LLMs, actually, that helps them if they’re working directly with the LLM models so that they’re really only indexing content that’s certified that people know is real rather than just grabbing a hold of anything. There is opportunity there. To your point, it doesn’t always work out like that in our industry, but you would hope that we would have learned the lessons from programmatic the first time around, wouldn’t you?

[00:21:53] Paul Wright: Well, you’d hope so. Yeah. I think you’re right. There is a change coming because of retail commerce media and all those platforms.

[00:21:59]

Fiona Davis: Yeah. I mean, you’ve definitely seen it. Like, their broadcasters got much wiser. And when CTV took off, they had a handle on that pretty close. Kept a control of that rather than letting it just be a free for all, and it’s worked. So you would hope that this time around, people would be a little bit wiser about where they put their investments.

[00:22:17] Paul Wright: Yes. I think so. And I think the smart marketers will lead from the front, hopefully, and that will help everyone else follow.

[00:22:23] Fiona Davis: Yeah. Bit of a segway into sort of broader marketing questions. Paul, I wanted to ask you, in your opinion, what’s the most important attributes for a senior marketer for the future?

[00:22:33] Paul Wright: I mean, the key thing always comes back to instinctive understanding of your consumers. I think that if you look at great creatives and great ads activations, they’ve always got, at the heart of it, really cool understanding of the consumer and how to message that consumer. So I don’t think it’s changed. I think the challenge is, obviously, there’s a lot more data and distraction out there to try and take you away from the core, perhaps. But I think if you keep going back to what’s our core consumer, then it doesn’t really matter whether it’s LLMs or these are just other data points. The danger is for marketers is they can get wowed by the platforms and technology rather than understanding of consumer. And then you end up with people just doing AI for AI’s sake or whatever and not really getting stuff. If you look at all the great creatives and stuff, it still comes down to great storytelling to an audience.

[00:23:23] Fiona Davis: Yeah. I see people like Mark Pritchard talking about that all the time. Marketing is marketing. It doesn’t matter, like, the tools may change, contact points, and the way you reach those consumers may change, but the fundamentals of how you market to a person have not changed in a hundred years. And if you lose sight of, is this in service to the consumer, the ad doesn’t land. So it’s really the tactics might change, but you still need to be thinking about the consumer all the time. 

[00:23:48] Paul Wright: And I think you need to recognize that I think you have to be reasonably authentic as well. And, like, these days, I don’t think you can get away with generic phrases easily and to be good you have to be authentic to your customers. But that has always been the case to some degree. Nothing’s changed on that, really. So, yeah, I just think the problem is always that the shiny new thing sometimes encourages people to give up the basics because they think the shiny new thing’s gonna change everything. And Yes. Absolutely. It doesn’t. And as you saw at Cannes, it can. I mean, there was so much conversation about AI. I mean, it’s like, well, yes. And? But the three decades of the mobile or whatever it is, I used to go to Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress waiting for the year of the mobile to finish, but it never did.

[00:24:27] Fiona Davis: It never did.

[00:24:28] Paul Wright: No. But I think, yeah, there’s this thing that we as an industry do have a habit of jumping on new things and just assuming that it’s gonna upend everything. We’ll change things. We never know quite how it’ll upend. I don’t think anyone knew in the mobile, the year of the mobile, whenever that was. Was the iPhone gonna change things that much? Well, it did. It changed things in ways perhaps none of us actually saw at the time. Social media came at the same time as the mobile. That probably worked in social media’s favor. There’s a lot of this stuff, but I think we just gotta get back to it, understand your consumer, and communicate with them well in the right context, and then you’re halfway there.

[00:25:04] Fiona Davis: Yeah. Absolutely. One last question for you, Paul, around we always like to ask for our listeners’ benefit. Being vulnerable, what are the things that you would wanna work on more to improve yourself to be a better marketer?

[00:25:16] Paul Wright: Well, I’m dyslexic, so I have a lot of little challenges I have to deal with all the time anyway. Just sometimes more time is the only thing I really want, because the world is so frantic, and we work at such a pace, I think it’d just be nice to have a bit more time just to think things through and do things and test things better.

[00:25:33] Fiona Davis: A bit more strategy thinking.

[00:25:35] Paul Wright: Yeah. A bit more strategy thinking time, but, you know, that’s just a privilege that when I do have it, it’s really good.

[00:25:41] Fiona Davis: Yeah. I think we’d all like to have that, wouldn’t we?

[00:25:43] Paul Wright: Yeah we would. I mean, I’m still learning. I will keep learning about things like AI and understanding that, and I think that’s just my sort of approach to life is always just to keep learning. And as long as I keep learning, I’m pretty happy.

[00:25:53] Fiona Davis: I think that’s a great piece of advice for would be marketers is if there’s one thing that’s constant about marketing is that change is constant, and it’s you gotta stay up to date or you’re gonna be left behind, and that’s always been true. Right?

[00:26:05] Paul Wright: Yeah. Always.

[00:26:06] Fiona Davis: Okay. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Paul. It’s been great chatting.

[00:26:10] Paul Wright: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

[00:26:11] Outro: Thank you. We hope that you enjoyed this episode of Time for a Reset. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll be back talking to another senior marketer very soon. Make sure to leave a review, an

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