Navigating 100 years of marketing and advertising evolution

Stephen Woodford  0:00  
It's the battle for public trust, the impact of new technology. So when radio came, or when television advertising came, or when colour print advertising, these big technological advances, and of course, now with digital and now with AI, so the industry has always been an industry that's massively impacted by whatever the latest technologies are, in particular,

Ben Walker  0:22  
media, hello everybody, and welcome to the CIM Marketing podcast. And today we have got a very, very special guest with us, Mr. Stephen Woodford, who is CEO of the advertising Association. And it's not just any old day or any old year, because the advertising Association, believe it or not, is now celebrating its centenary. Stephen, welcome to you and congratulations. Thank you very much. We're delighted to be 100 100 years old. I mean, that's an extraordinary achievement for any organisation, and you know, not least for the advertising Association.

You CEO there, but you actually started life as an economist. Well, I was one, so I did

Stephen Woodford  1:12  
an economics degree. I had a passion for economics when I was at school, but I also had a passion for art. So they were my two favourite subjects, and so advertising was a sort of natural home, because it's that blend of creativity and commerce. Yeah. So I always, I knew, pretty much from my teens that I wanted to go into advertising, but I was never quite sure whether I could. Was, frankly, I didn't think I was talented enough to be a creative person, but and also loved economics, so I thought I would go into advertising, but I'll be on the business account management side. How did it work out for you? Good choice out. All right, I think I like to say I've travelled the world. I've worked in four postcodes in central London over the past 40 years. Why go on advertising? So, yeah, so w1 w2 you know, I know. I know pretty much everywhere.

Ben Walker  1:57  
Perfect, perfect. You've in your sort of tour of central London over the years, you've worked in many, many big agencies, haven't you? You go to Leo, Burdett, WCRS, Adam and Eve. What lessons about creativity, which, of course, is the theme of our season on the show. Did you learn during that period of agency? I think the

Stephen Woodford  2:19  
probably the biggest lesson that I've learned is that that really great creativity can be summed up really quickly. You know, if you can sum up the idea, I love end lines as an example, if you can sum up the idea in in an end line, the campaign, the big thought in a great end line, or an image, or a thought around the brand or the business, and because at the end of the day, it's simple. You've got to communicate with people in very short period of time. It's got to be simple. And so if anybody needs to spend, you know, a paragraph explaining the idea, it's probably not a good

Ben Walker  2:48  
enough idea. Was it? Reagan said? Ronald Reagan said, if you're explaining, you're losing,

Stephen Woodford  2:53  
yes, yeah. Well, I think that's very true in advertising, because, you know, it does have to connect immediately. So an idea that connects immediately, and you see it the whole time when you were going through reviews and things like that, there's always something that just jumps out. Come on, then, what are your

Ben Walker  3:07  
best campaigns that you've worked on over the years?

Stephen Woodford  3:09  
The two were two, if I was going to choose maybe my top three of campaigns I've worked on over the years. So a campaign I was hugely proud of in the sort of height of the lager walls in the in the 90s, it

Ben Walker  3:22  
was like for our younger audience, you may need to explain the lager walls.

Stephen Woodford  3:26  
So in the 90s, particularly 80s and 90s, beer advertising was one of the most competitive sectors of advertising. Huge amounts of money were spent because there was a sort of cliche that you drank the advertising. And there were brands like Carling and fosters and Carlsberg and castlemay forex and so on, all fighting out. And I worked on Carling Black Label, right? So famous campaign. I bet he drinks Carling Black Label. And I think it was voted by the son of one of Britain's all time top 10 ads, which an ad called Dam Busters, which, if, if you haven't seen it, go look at it on YouTube. I think it's a classic of the lager wars, a sort of second world war spoof, which I thought was a brilliant example of the campaign. So I love calling back label. I also worked on the just after the launch of orange, I joined, rejoined WSS I'd left and then came back. I worked on orange. And again, younger viewers may not remember the future's bright, the future's orange.

Ben Walker  4:23  
This is now. Ee, other brands are, of course, available, yes, now.

Stephen Woodford  4:27  
Ee, but so the orange brand is still exists in France, right? But it's gone in the UK. Orange was an amazing, amazing brand, and that line, the future's bright, the future's orange, summed up an ethos about the brand at a time when people were very afraid of technology. And mobiles were actually people were worried about technology is going to take their job, sort of like we're going through the worries on AI now. But this idea of this confident future vision of a sort of much better world with and they had a fantastic line where you call people, not places, and you cut the wires, and all this incredible imagery at the time. So futures by. The future's orange. And then I think hard to choose those two would be my my top two. The final one I'm going to choose is, again, a brand that doesn't exist anymore, but a very populist brand, a brand of travel agents called lun

Ben Walker  5:13  
Polly, yes, yes, yes.

Stephen Woodford  5:14  
And it was a real mainstream, everyday brand, and it was a sort of slapstick comedy, but it was an incredibly successful campaign. It took that brand of travel agents for about 100 to about 600 with a campaign called getaway and again, very populous mainstream advertising, but great fun to do. And I think whenever you're working in advertising agencies, particularly, you love being part of success. You said

Ben Walker  5:39  
something interesting about a great campaign at the start, which is that it has to have a good payoff. Has to have a good end line. I bet he drinks garland about labour. The future's bright, the future's orange. Any one of my vintage can remember those campaigns like they were yesterday. Those lines still resonate today and are memorable. You also said something about you when you were talking about the lagerbars, that people were not drinking the beer, they were drinking the advertising. Sort of meaner man than me might suggest that the beers tasted quite similar, and we don't want to cast aspersions on those particular beverages, but someone might say that they buy they drink the advertising. They're actually drinking the advertising. And that sort of leads on to this question about the craft of advertising and the interplay between logic and emotion, you know, and where we sit as advertisers, where we sit as creatives, on that interplay, how do you view that balance

Stephen Woodford  6:33  
which is more important, logic, emotion, emotion, hands down, right, Hands down, emotion. Emotion beats logic every time. And I remember there's some, I mean, there's been so much research on this over the years, but there was some brilliant research that showed across category, across time, that emotion beats rational emotional messaging beats rational messaging. Apart from, I think it was something like car insurance renewal. You take a very specific niche like the price of the car insurance, yeah, then you want to know the price, yeah. But pretty much emotion wins, and that's because of the way our brains work. You know, we there's a sort of an old fashioned logic that used to be, you think, and then you feel, and then you act. But actually it's, it's, feel, act, think,

Ben Walker  7:18  
you know, thinking comes last. Thinking, of

Stephen Woodford  7:20  
it, we post rationalise what we want to do, interesting, and I think a lot of advertising. Another classic campaign from my agency's days. I didn't work on it, but I was CEO of the agency for a lot of the time, was BMW with the ultimate driving machine. And those ads were really hard. Nose focused on German technology and engineering with lots of copy and lots of really detailed technology. The ads, people didn't really read the copy, but they were just reassured by the fact that they had all this Teutonic excellence in it, and it was the headline and a very great image of a car that they buy. So you sort of post rationalise what you've bought. A lot of car advertising often works to actually keep the person loyal to the brand that they've already chosen, and just they've chosen with their heart, and then they use the

Ben Walker  8:07  
technical data, the spec to justify that.

Stephen Woodford  8:09  
Yeah, it's a six cylinder engine, not a four cylinder engine, whatever it happens to be,

Ben Walker  8:12  
yeah, yeah. But that's not really the reason

Stephen Woodford  8:14  
they No, they buy it because they want a BMW.

Ben Walker  8:17  
Yeah. Interesting. So to that point, how was do you advise our audience, or anyone listening to this, anyone listening to the show, about creating that emotional cut through when you're going into devising a campaign, when you're thinking about how to deliver one of these great campaigns, what are you thinking about in terms of getting that emotional cut through?

Stephen Woodford  8:37  
Well, I think great creative starts with great strategy. So having brilliant strategic planners on on whatever the problem is is the absolute first step. Yes, creative people can jump to a solution, and they can be brilliant strategists, and strategists can be brilliant creatives, but, but it's the it's the thinking that you do up front, where you look at about, you know, you take the car market or the beer market or shampoo, whatever market you're in, the strategic position that this brand, the place where we're going to win from, that is absolutely critical. And you may not express that in a particularly it doesn't need to be expressed in a particularly powerful, creative way, but it needs to be clear, choose, choose us. Because dot, dot, dot. And once and there's a fantastic process, again, that was been talked about many, many times. But you think about the process of advertising, it starts wide and comes down to a point of a thought about a brand, and that's the point where the strategic planning people get from the complexities of the market down to this is the thing we're going to say. And then from there, it's a process of exploding out from that thought in terms of the creative expression, particularly now, when you're looking at creative expressions and different different nuances and that and different interpretations that according to all the different channels. But whether it's an influencer talking about a brand or it's a TV commercial or a poster, you want that sense of consistency that. Consistent thought about the brand that hopefully is simple and connects emotionally with people

Ben Walker  10:05  
when you're going through that process. We spoke, we spoke earlier about, you know, your background in agent an agency side, and as a leader an agency side, when you're going through that process and you're trying to lead a team to go through that process, to start off with this big come down to the middle and then explode out. How and where do you start? Do you get those?

Stephen Woodford  10:25  
Why I've always loved working in agencies is that that it's It's the joy of collaboration, of bringing together different sets of skills, creative people, production people, account handlers, strategists, media planners. It's the blend, and the ideas can often come from anywhere, but it's that blend of skills. It's the collaboration those different skills coming together to crack a problem. And I used to love that those sort of moments where you all come together to try and solve a problem that a business may have been struggling with, or repositioning of a brand or a business that's losing out to its competitors. How can you get them back on the front foot, those those moments? And it's that, it's that blend of skills that I think is absolutely key, and that's what agencies. Agencies are sort of fantastic factories of all these different skills that can come together and recombine. And you know, when you're working across different brands, you have different sets of people. One of the things that I think that really benefits agency, the strengths of agencies, is that you might have, if you're a marketer, you're working on one brand in one market, and that's your world, but you might be working with a strategist who's working on four brands across four completely different markets, so they have a more then they're not in the Necessarily, in the weeds, but they can perhaps see the wood for the trees interesting.

Ben Walker  11:42  
So that diversity of experience, diversity

Stephen Woodford  11:44  
of experience, that diversity of skills, and the blending of those things, I think, are the magic that agencies have. The advertising Society

Ben Walker  11:51  
was founded 100 years ago to actually build confidence in advertising itself. And 100 years on, we're now in an age where scams, very, very, sometimes very impressive. Scams are fairly prevalent. Fake News, of course, we talk about a lot is prevalent as well. A large degree of public scepticism is built into what they're being fed. So how's that mission changed in 100 years? Or is it the same mission with different contexts?

Stephen Woodford  12:19  
That's a great way of putting it. It's the same mission, yeah. But the context when, when you look across the 100 years, the context is changing currently, constantly. So in the 1920s post the First World War, there was a mini consumer boom. So the economy was doing very well. Advertising spend rocketed up. And the bulk of advertising then was in newspapers. So the big publishers were, the were the sort of dominant media owners of the day, and there were no rules. You could say what you liked. Now, there's a great old adage, you know, nothing kills off a bad product better than a good ad, you know, so. But the there was, the industry was rife with quack medicine, claims, financial you know, sort of you get rich schemes and so on so forth. There was no sense of you needed to tell the truth. Now, of course, you know, big advertisers knew that they had to otherwise, if they want to build a long term business and customers come back, they've got to be honest about their about their their brand and their business. But there was a sense of a wild west, yeah, and the sort of great and good of the ad industry at that time. So that big advertisers, the big publishers, and they were called then the advertising agents, who were the intermediaries between the publishers and the advertisers, got together through their trade bodies. So the forerunners of, well, ISBA still represents the advertisers, the IPA and the big newspaper publishers got together to, in effect, form a shared interest trade association that would look think about the totality of advertising. So it would look at the challenges that all of them faced. And one of the key one was, everybody benefits if there's confidence in advertising. You know, the publishers have more successful campaigns, so they'll have more advertisers buying the space. Obviously, the brands benefit if people trust advertising, and the advertising agencies have to focus on some of the things that we were talking about earlier on, is finding that truth about the brand and something that will build a business. So it was in everybody's self interest, and the AI was formed to, in effect, work on behalf of the whole industry on that, and that's what we do today.

Ben Walker  14:25  
It's interesting. You've been like quack medicine ads, you know, 100 years ago. You can see them in your mind's eye. You know, you can probably get this rag out, from, from, from, from the internet, but you can see them in your mind's eye, you know, this is the tonic cure all. Tonic, cure all tonics. Yes, all this sort of, have you gone

Stephen Woodford  14:41  
back there? Well, very interesting example. You still some of the big risk areas are vitamins, dodgy supplements. There's a huge, huge amount of advertising for sort of diet supplements, things that are going to build body strength or whatever. Yeah, and there's obviously a lot of scam advertising around financial, crypto and things like that. So some of these things are eternal. The difference is now that we've got a regulatory system, whereas back then there was no regulatory system. So the ad Association formed something called the vigilance committee, right? She was very 1920s and the vigilance committee started looking at these ads, and they would issue notices to the publishers do not take this ad. You know, it's a scam. It's either it's a tonic that doesn't work, or it's a financial scam. Now we have the ASA, and one of the interesting things, where you the sort of then and now. So what were notices that would go around on cards to publishers to keep an index of dodgy advertisers? The ASA is using AI to proactively scan, to scan online ads, and it particularly focuses that AI on high risk areas like supplements and financial and crypto and things like that. So same things, but massive, massively different technology. And I think the ASA scanned something like 20 million ads in 2024 and I think it might be up to nearly 60 million in 2025 so the ability to scan the market using AI has changed that exponentially. And is it catching

Ben Walker  16:14  
more people? Is it make it easier to catch perpetrators and then

Stephen Woodford  16:19  
catch the perpetrator? Notify the platforms and publishers taking the ads, get in touch with the advertisers. You know, if they're if they're not bona fide advertisers, then you can do things to take them down, make sure people don't take their ads. But it's a constant battle, particularly with scams, because, yeah, behind a lot of these scam schemes, there's crypto and all the other things are criminal gangs. Yeah, yeah. So it's organised crime, and it's often from overseas and very sophisticated. So it's a real battle of technology.

Ben Walker  16:44  
It's interesting, isn't they say there's nothing new under the sun. The mediums changed. It was on paper.

Stephen Woodford  16:49  
Yeah. We've actually written the history of the which we have published later this year. The same things come up time and time again. Yeah. So it's the battle for public trust, the impact of new technology. So when radio came, or when television advertising came, or when colour print advertising these big technological advances, and of course, now with digital and now with AI. So the industry has always been an industry that's massively impacted by whatever the latest technologies are, in particular

Ben Walker  17:17  
media interesting, but it does mean you've got the credentials, you've got the experience and the stripes of battling, regardless of the changing medium, yeah, and over

Stephen Woodford  17:25  
the years, the organisation has learned how to deal with these things. Convening power is incredibly important. Something that our members talk about, that they value about the air, is that you have all the key players around the table. So convening power getting, rather, going back to what I was saying about agency, getting all the interests around the table to work on a problem of collective importance is a great way to solve problems. Interesting.

Ben Walker  17:46  
What do you think the biggest wins in the 100 years that you know about? Of course you

Stephen Woodford  17:50  
doubt the biggest win is that from that initial Vigilance Committee, then there was something called the advertising investigation department, and that gradually grip but it was never properly resourced. And in the 1960s the ad Association formed the advertising status authority. So the ASA was was founded, and then gradually its funding was increased and so on. And it was, it was, in effect, split away to become an independent regulator. And that, I think, is the most significant achievement of the AA across that time, and ensuring that that remains well funded a key thing, if it's going to be independent of the industry, but it's in effect, funded by the industry, making sure the governance around that, making sure the funding is in place, making sure it has the money to invest in things like AI and it's a superb regulator. It's one of you know around the world. If you're in the UK market, you wouldn't think about what the equivalent organisations are in France or Germany or Spain or wherever. There are lots of different models around the world, but there are a lot of very good regulators. But the ASA is probably seen as maybe the original and best, and still was very good regard for the essay around the world.

Ben Walker  18:57  
Interesting for the ASA is a real high line. That's 1960

Stephen Woodford  19:00  
or that was in the 60s, yeah, yeah. And then graduate took on more responsibilities. It took on responsibilities for regulating broadcast advertising. It took on responsibilities for regulating claims on websites. So claims that any advertiser makes on the website are covered by the ASA. So that's the

Ben Walker  19:16  
regulatory background and the commercial backbone. Yeah, the AA has also been a major player. It pays to advertise is something that people be familiar with. And actually you've got the Advertising Pays report that you, that you undertake, and shows the value of advertising to the economy. The numbers I have is that it's contributed 109 billion of gross value added in 2024 with the most recent numbers, it's a huge amount of money. And so in a way, the work it's doing has helped, over the years, shift perception, if you like, of what advertising is, from a piece of expenditure to a piece of investment.

Stephen Woodford  19:57  
Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you think about. Well, not just the UK market, most most highly developed markets, they're ultra competitive, you know. And when, when I, when I was sort of growing up, you know, there were, there were cars that were reliable and or cars that were much less reliable. And those tended to be that British Leyland cars, you know, German cars were reliable. British cars were unreliable. You couldn't sell an unreliable car. You could not exist in the marketplace if your car had a reputation for being unreliable. So the standard and the sort of level of competition in every single sector is much, much higher. So then you know, how do you compete in those things? And when there's not also, particularly for financial crisis, in the 28 nine, there's been very little real growth in the economy. Yeah. So if you're looking to grow you want to grow by out competing. So if you're going to grow your business further ahead of the market that you're in, you have got to win share. How do businesses look to win share? They look to win share through there, amongst other things, making the products better, making them more available, making them better value, but also how they compete through advertising. So we've seen, although economic growth in real terms has been very sluggish, real terms, growth in advertising has been way ahead of that because of the intensely competitive nature of the markets. That plus the fact that in effect, digital technology now permeates digital is part of retail now. So we buy so much more online. We're the UK is one of the world's most advanced online shopping markets. You know, when you look at the international data, US, China, the UK, are exceptions in terms of online shopping. You know, we said we're much more and that, that when you look at the growth of online shopping, that the line almost mirrors the growth of online advertising. Yeah. So, because we're big online shoppers, we're big on online advertising as well. Because obviously the two things go hand in glove. So we're very we're an exceptional market in many, many ways, but an ultra competitive one. And ultimately, when people talk about, you know, is that, is that good for the consumer? Well, it is good for the consumer because they get better value. You know, when you look at studies of how advertising affects prices, for instance, but whether, where there's intense advertising and intense competition, prices are lower. There's probably a myth a few decades ago that advertising pushes up prices. Well, actually, where there's intense competition, prices are lower, so the consumer benefits higher quality products, lower prices where there's intense competition supported by advertising, is that one of the

Ben Walker  22:18  
surprises you got from the research that actually this price is down where there's something else in there, I think, I think there's,

Stephen Woodford  22:25  
in a way, it's a sort of, you know, at a superficial level, it sounds surprising, but when you think about advertising as the as a key component of competition, and competition and innovation are things that, in a for improve products and improve their value and improve their performance and so on. So on. So in a way, it makes complete sense, going back to my sort of, you know, economics background, it fits absolutely with an economist view of the way that markets work. So I think that's I don't think it's surprising. I think there are the surprising things I think about advertising today are really how sort of pervasive it is in our lives. And how it funds so much, the technologies that we take for granted. You know, without advertising, is obviously there right at the heart of all the digital technologies that we use. But then we think, then you think about how, how our lives have changed because of those things, both in the way that we live our lives, the way we work, the way we shop, the way businesses reach their consumers. You know, these are enormous shifts that we've been through that advertising has been a key component in

Ben Walker  23:29  
interesting we talked about, we're world leaders in E shopping, yes, which is, you know, some people will take as a feather in our cap somewhere, but it's an interesting stat. We are certainly world leaders in advertising, in creative, in creativity. We're second only to the United States in terms of creative exports in this country. So we've punched way above our weights in terms of population and whatnot, and even economic strength. Why is that? What is it? There's there's a number,

Stephen Woodford  23:58  
there's a number of factors. So just think about the numbers. I think the US exports about 26 billion pounds worth of advertising services. Yeah, the UK, it's about 18 billion. It's actually not that far, and the gap has been closing, right? But when you think about the size of the economy, the US economy, I think is about eight times the size of the UK economy, yeah, and has grown at a much faster rate than the UK so yeah, when on a per capita basis, way, way ahead. And the factors behind that, we've done research on this and talked to international buyers. And there are, there are some, there are some, you know, lucky breaks of geography and history. You know, obviously English language economy, that's the Global Language of Business. Time Zone we're convenient for everywhere. So if you look for where you're going to locate a global hub or an international team, Europe is obviously a logical place, but London or the UK is an obvious place because of international language and time zone. But the thing that those sort of things are sort of helpful, supportive factors, but you could equally go to base in Amsterdam and get the same sort. Advantages. There are some things that the UK is recognised for creativity Absolutely, but beyond the creativity is also recognised for strategic excellence, and it's almost like a triangle of things that reinforce each other, also recognised for being world leaders in evaluating advertising effectiveness. And I would point to the IPAS advertising effectiveness awards as the exemplar of that. That's the world's biggest database of how advertising drives proper business effects in terms of profitability, growth, share, value, whatever. So business effects driven by advertising. That is the best database. And the IPA effectiveness awards have been running for more than 40 years now, and that, that, that, that, I mean, the awards data bank is an incredibly powerful thing in its own right, but there's a culture in the industry and an excellence around strategic planning that goes hand in hand with creativity, and I think, though, and then the evaluating, the evaluation of that in terms of business effects. So that, that those three things, we did some global research with PwC a few years ago. In fact, we did a lot of work on this post Brexit because we were worried about this growth was going to stall post Brexit. Actually, it didn't stall post Brexit. And the interesting thing is, when the when we look back at where the growth began to really pick pick up, it was like it was 2012 so it had been growing steadily, and then to post 2012 it grew at much sharper rate. And we think that was partly the London Olympics effect that showcasing that opening ceremony the whole London games put Britain's creativity on a global stage in a way that had never been done before. That opening ceremony was like a four hour ad for how amazing British creativity is. And so out of that, that really helped, I think. Plus Britain's reputation in film, music, fashion, architecture, you look across the creative industries, we have a phenomenally high profile. We are a creative superpower, and advertising is part of that. I think it's interesting.

Ben Walker  26:55  
The stat you came up with the comparator between the United States and the UK. I think I found it mind blowing. And I'm in the industry. I think a lot of people wouldn't be aware. Wouldn't be aware that they were that close. And actually, when you do it by per capita or by economic unit, if you like, we're way, way, way ahead. We did it.

Stephen Woodford  27:11  
We did a really interesting piece of work. But again, it host Brexit with LinkedIn, and we looked at the profile of people working in advertising, marketing, all the all the affiliated industries on the LinkedIn database. And then we looked at some key cities around the world. And no surprise, there were two cities in the world where there was a big chunk of the workforce, about one in 18 jobs, one in 19 jobs, something like that. Broadly in our business, if you took a wide definition of our business, London, New York, way, way ahead in terms of numbers of Paris and Amsterdam and other other parts of the world, so two dominant cities. We then looked at the makeup of through the LinkedIn data of the people working in industries in London and New York. And the way you can tell, you know, LinkedIn doesn't record nationality, but you can look at it. They looked it by Where were you educated? So if you were educated at a Polish school in the Polish University, chances are you're polish you know? So they so they profile the data, and we found that the London workforce similar size to the New York workforce. New York workforce is primarily American, and you'd assume for that primarily serving American businesses, because it was massive scale of the London workforce massively diverse in terms of nationalities, because not just serving the UK market, but serving the global market. And because London's much more of a global hub than perhaps New York is the centre for the US business.

Ben Walker  28:35  
I've heard it described now, it's the only real world city. I don't know if that's where you like to think next. We're in London, but there's some truth

Stephen Woodford  28:40  
in that. I think there's some truth in that, yeah, and I think it's one of the things that obviously the the in our industry, many other industries worried about post Brexit, in terms of what the immigration policy was, the UK did, had has done very well in many ways, in our industry and various others. Through freedom of movement attracted the brightest and best of the EU, particularly, to come and work here. So, you know, we were very worried that that was going to be shut down post post Brexit, in a way, it's changed. The immigration patterns have changed completely. And not to get into how all the policies there, but that was a real concern for the industry, because it was seen as a real strength. Yeah, we actually ran some ads post Brexit were and they were pictures of people who are working in the UK, who work, who were foreign, been born in Italy or US or Australia, wherever. And the line was, they're a great advert for Britain, yeah. And it was all about the our ad industry has really benefited from the blend of international talent.

Ben Walker  29:36  
Here it has. I mean, you mentioned a couple of great campaigns that you remember fondly at start, I bet he drinks calling back label, the future's bright. The future is orange. Any other campaigns, particularly quintessential British campaigns, or British international campaigns, fed out of Britain that you really remembered friendless over well, that's a campaign

Stephen Woodford  29:57  
which I think over the years, has just been superb. Verbally, global and compelling and motivating, but also quintessentially British. No surprise, British Airways. Oh yeah. I love the British. I remember the and again, younger listeners may not remember it, but it was an ad that was done by saatjis, which was with a brilliant piece of music, I think, by Malcolm McLaren, fantastic director. I think Tony Kay was the director who was a visionary director. And it was basically this whole series of surreal images. And it came together and formed a face. And again, look at YouTube, the BA face added him, and it launched the line that British Airways were the world's favourite airline, yeah. And they came up with this fantastic line because they realised that they flew more people to more places than any other airline, and out of that, they created the world's favourite airline. And I thought that was just, it was, it was an incredibly inspiring ad, but that sense, it really elevated British Airways as a brand. And if I look at the work that uncommon are doing now for British Airways, I think there's that similarly, that sense of, it's beautiful creative work. It's very, very thought provoking. It makes you want to, you know, the picture of a kid looking down from the plane and that sort of thing. It's beautiful. And it sells flying, yeah, to an extent, it sells the generic benefits of flying, the excitement and so on. But, but what it really makes you think, if I'm going to fly, I'm going to there's a sort of, sort of subconscious thing I'm going to fly with the best and where you just you just might see part of the logo on the, you know, the poster where the kid is looking down from the window, and you just see the s and the H from British Airways, or something like that. Fantastic advertising. So highest creative quality. I presume it's performing well, because British airways are staying with it. And I think hats off to uncommon and hats off to Saatchi's and various embassy Saatchi and all the people over the years that worked on that brand.

Ben Walker  31:45  
Is it is interesting. It is interesting, isn't it? How it is just elevated that brand, yeah, the conscious, in the consciousness as something that you

Stephen Woodford  31:52  
want to use. I used to feel, I used to do a lot of business travel, much less now, and I always used to, I remember coming, spending a lot of time going back forth to China on a project, I remember going into the British Airways lounge at Shanghai airport and just saying, Ah, that feeling of not quite I'm home, but I'm nearly home. Yeah, and that power of the brand, I thought was extraordinary. I really, you know, you've you felt it emotionally.

Ben Walker  32:18  
Yes, it is, is put the flag carrier back into the flag carrier? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Let's talk about the bodies and professional bodies themselves. CIM, hosting this podcast, is, is another the advertising Association has been around 100 years. CIM has been around even longer as professional bodies working in the advertising and marketing sphere, in the same sort of sphere. How do you see those sorts of bodies evolving in the years to come in terms of the new context that we're operating in?

Stephen Woodford  32:48  
Well, I think you you you live or die by your relevance. And you know the marketplace that you're in, if you're a trade association, nobody has to be a member of ours. You know you have to provide value for those members. As a training organisation, you have to provide value otherwise the organization's famous. There's been training organisations that have faded away in the marketing and communications sector. So the fact that sim has been going that time and reaching globally, and those qualifications are recognised around the world. You know, you don't get you can. You can't hold that decision by being complacent. The same for any trade association, like any business, you know, and if you're, if you ever think we're here, we've always been here, people will just want to be our members. You know that that's, that's when the rot sets in. So you can never be complacent. You've always got to be thinking about the value that you provide for your members. And you know that is about, in effect, what's happening now in the market, what's happening next in the market, what are the things that are concerning the members? What can we do to solve them? And trust in advertising is a really good example. So we've been working really, really hard on how we can improve trust in advertising, rather than just accept it. It was in long term decline. It's now. It's now growing again. I won't go into the reasons why, particularly, but there's a lot of concerted effort to make you know, to help the public trust advertising more. So you know, you have to always be working on the challenges right in front of you, and those longer term challenges to stay relevant.

Ben Walker  34:27  
Your colleagues, Matt ball and James best have actually recently released a book on this topic trusted advertising, the idea that you say that trust is not a nice to have, it's almost a currency within advertising, within marketing, particularly as we're going into this age where there's lots of scams around, and we've talked about the sort of proliferation of mistrust. Yeah, I mean,

Stephen Woodford  34:48  
trust is never been more important because, because exactly in a world where there's fakes, the scams, you know, who do you trust? And one of the things that I think very interesting. Seen things like the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in business has gone up because businesses tend to be consistent. They deliver year in, year out. Governments come and go. Some are successful. Most are not, seemingly not terribly successful in terms of changing things businesses deliver, and they are very conscious of the trust they have. The trust of their customers is the most valuable asset they have. So I think the focus on the extraordinary thing about writing that book, because obviously about trust in advertising, but actually it was a story about trust in business, and why that's so important, and why that's the most valuable asset that that you can have. There's a great phrase that 19th century diplomat had that was, trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback. So very hard to win it,

Ben Walker  35:51  
very quick to lose it.

Stephen Woodford  35:52  
So you know that and people, particularly in a world where communication is instant if something goes wrong, how do you know every you can't run a business and not have a crisis or some dramas at some point, how you handle them. You see businesses that are really confident and sure footed in crises. It might be something that's quite damaging, like a product recall or whatever it happens to be, but how they handle it can even can build trust. So every business is now so conscious of the need to keep that, maintain and build that trust, because that's the foundation of long term success.

Ben Walker  36:29  
You mentioned. Advertising on the upward curve is actually at a five year high, isn't it, the trust level in advertising itself as an industry. What do you think has been the main catalyst for that?

Stephen Woodford  36:39  
Well, one of the catalysts has been, there's a number of factors, but one of the one of the catalysts, has been that we've been running, we work with the ASA very closely and the big commercial media owners to run a campaign, a public awareness campaign, telling the public that advertising in all media is regulated by the ASA. Now, people are familiar with the ASA, but they tend to read about the essay when there's been a complaint upheld against a big brand. X told to withdraw ads for greenwashing or whatever happens to be or for misleadingness. So what we what the campaign does is remind people that all year round in all media, essay is checking that ads are legal, decent, honest and truthful. Well, going back to that sort of end lines, what an amazing end line for the essay. Lads are going to be legal, decent, honest, truthful, and if you're not, the ASA will be down on you like a tonne of bricks. Yeah, and your ads will be withdrawn, and you have all that negative publicity over the years, I've worked on campaigns where ASA complaints have been upheld against us, against the ad that we've run. And, you know, all hell breaks loose. Yeah, you know, because the negative publicity you're in the news, you've offered on breakfast television. You know, it's a really, the board of the company are very engaged in the issue and why it went wrong and so on. So there's the sanction the essay has, of in effect, forcing an advertiser to withdraw an ad because it's been misleading or the factual justification for the ad is not, isn't, doesn't, doesn't stand up to scratch. Is really, really a powerful sanction. But by the flip side of that is the overwhelming majority of ads are legal, decent, honest and truthful. Yeah, they're compliant, yeah. And the campaign, if you haven't seen it, uses famous British advertising icons. So it has the meerkats. It has Tesco very little helps. It has love it or hate it for Marmite. So ads that people love and it just plays off that, that, that the essay is there to regulate all ads, simple, certainly have the Meerkat or something like that. So just yeah, a gentle nod towards these incredible, popular advertising icons, and linking that to the essays. Supervision of advertising has been a really powerful factor. So by creating

Ben Walker  38:55  
that I in framework, legal, honest, decent and truthful, yep, it creates a platform for those that fall into that component to shine. But there are buddies out there. There are, you know, we're seeing this paradox. We can't go through a show these days without mentioning AI, so I'm going to mention AI. We are seeing a paradox with artificial intelligence. It is seen as this sort of automated creative superpower, on one hand, and an essential tool for marketers to enhance productivity and efficiency and whatnot. Yet on the other hand, we alluded to it earlier. It's being used to sort of industrialise at great scale fraud and scam and the quack medicine adverts of the modern age. And it's non trivial. You actually, I'm going to quote you here. You actually recently referred to this illegal content as the $1.2 trillion global scourge. Quite a quite a billing. What's the industry solution to this?

Stephen Woodford  39:59  
Well. It. I think, if you think about AI as a neutral force, but you know, it's it's there to be used for good, it's there to be used for ill. The scale of AI, and the deployment of AI is enormous against preventing frauds and scams. And then the use of AI by by very expert, you know, in effect, criminal organisations to try and perpetrate those things is equally so it's like, it's like a an arms race between the two. Yeah. So luckily, it's not on one side. It's not on the side of the of the bad guys. It's also on the side of the good guys. So there's a constant battle between those two things I mentioned about the ASA now scanning 60 million ads without AI, that wouldn't be possible, and there would have been no wave, no human based organisation could have ever achieved anything on that sort of scale. So it's both. It's a weapon for both, in a sense, and an asset for both. I think when it comes to thinking about there's a lot of, obviously, discussion about creativity and how media is deployed in AI and so on. There's, you know, without doubt, it's superpower combination. Is humans augmented by AI. Yeah, you know, if you can just turn it over to the AI and get a certain distance, or you can just, if you want it to be, just say, we'll just do it, just using people, but bring the two together, and that's where success lies.

Ben Walker  41:21  
Yeah. So it's interesting, Arthur, just bears repeating that you're saying that AI is in almost equal balance of good versus evil. It's neither good nor evil. It's a tool used for good, yeah. And when

Stephen Woodford  41:35  
you look at the you know, who would you bet on on the long term? Well, you bet on the good, right? Because there's more resource and there's, obviously, there's much more aligned against, you know, from law enforcement, governments, you know, big technology companies, big advertisers. There's many more forces aligned to reduce it and to use it for good than there are to use it for ill. Interesting, that's quite optimistic. I'm very optimistic about it. Good, good.

Ben Walker  42:00  
We like a bit of optimism on this show. Let's talk about talent. This is slightly less optimistic. This is real numbers. This is a report that we found the European marketing Confederation that 89% so nearly nine in 10 of marketing and sales professionals lack a framework for building their own capacity. And I'm going to read you a quote by non other than Chris Daly, who you will know is Chief Executive of CIM. He said, building marketing capability is not simply a financial investment or a nice to have. It is a strategic necessity. It's a strategic necessity. According to the EMC, we're not doing

Stephen Woodford  42:42  
well, I would, I would, yeah, I think there's we're at the very think about three years ago, we weren't talking about AI. It's only the last three years, and it feels like it's changing the world. Is changing the world. The thing I would point to, and it was so topical for this conversation, I was listening to Today programme this morning, and there was the Vice Chancellor of Manchester University, University of Manchester, on the radio, and he was talking about how, in effect, all undergraduate students are now using AI, and they've just and they basically for if you're a student at University of Manchester, they provide you with copilot, the Microsoft platform, so And presumably a pro licence on copilot so that you can use it, and it can store your work and so on and keep it secure. So what they're teaching them is how to think with AI, but the way describes it, AI doesn't think it processes. You know, humans think humans create and what they can use is the AI to help them do that faster, do that better, to check it further, to to, you know, to use it as a sounding board to collaborate more quickly. But it's it. Ultimately, you have to have the human oversight, and you have to have that human insight and but, but of course, you know, writing an essay is changed completely by AI, yeah. And then how you evaluate an essay, if you're, if you're a lecturer, has to change completely by AI. So you've got to look for the original thinking and look for the, you know, how well the student prompted and how well the student deployed and and, you know, in effect, had that interchange with AI. I think the same is absolutely true in business. You have, you know, marketers and people in agencies and people throughout every business are going to have to think differently about about how they deploy. I was talking to somebody the other day who was talking about how the industry he was in was being massively disrupted. He said, he said, Yeah, my brother's a roofer. His industry is not disrupted. And he said, but the downside for him is his back is terrible, and it's a physically hard job. And I said, Well, imagine AI for a roofer. We'll tell him how to lay the roof and lay the tire, do his job in a way that isn't going to distress his back, etc. So every you know, in a way, every bit. This will be changed by that, but it's always going to be at its best people augmented by AI interesting

Ben Walker  45:06  
actually, just to blend the conversation with talent and trust is the most one of the most striking finds. I find it the most striking finding, or one of the most striking findings from your research, is that trust in advertising is actually highest amongst the young of the 18 to 30 fours, or the demographic. They're the cohort that trust advertising the most is well trusted threat, but they trust it the most because there's an irony there, because that's exactly the same cohort, exactly the same generation, that are under the greatest threat for or feel, at least feel under the greatest threat from Ai because of it's the way it's reshaping, or, in fact, removing entry level job roles. How as an industry do we make sure that we look after that generation now, because it's the right thing to do, but also protect our industry pipeline, because the good makes good commercial sense. Well, we're thinking about why?

Stephen Woodford  46:01  
Why Why do they? Why do they? Why is the highest level of trust highest amongst that, that that cohort? Because they are the most digitally native, right? So if you look at where trust is lowest, it's the over 50 fives, and they have very, very low levels of trust in digital media because they didn't grow up with it. You know, they're not familiar with it. They're not so confident with it. It's not, you know, I'm not trying to make a sweeping generalisation, that they're not techie, but they haven't grown up in that world. If you're 18 or 25 or 28 that's the world you've grown up in. So you feel very, very fluent at home, confident you live your life. You know, the way you connect with your friends and your work colleagues and whatever, is a sort of blend of real life and digital life. So it's the way life's lives are lived now. So they're very confident in that world. Obviously, a lot of the advertising they're consuming is in that world too, because they'll be consuming less of the media that perhaps older people are spending more time with, where I think the challenges and it was great to go back to that university example. It's great to hear that that, of course, what they'll be doing is learning in this world now. So there'll be the best prompters. They'll have most expertise in just integrating the technology into their own into their own lives. You know, the sort of amount of, if I think about my children, about the way they use AI, you know, to, in effect, simplify or streamline things or whatever, they're completely fluent in it. So, and I think that's where that said that that you can't just rely on that, you've got to also think about the way roles are going to change, yeah, and we're probably, you know, given this is a three year old disruption of enormous, you know, profound impact there's going to, as there often is with technology, new technologies there is, there is a process of disruption and sort of dislocation. And then, you know, new roles are created, new ways of working are created. And hopefully, you know, if, if the optimist view is right, the increase in productivity that this technology will deliver will raise our growth rate. Why the UK government so keen to keep the UK as the number three place in the world for AI, because they're putting a huge amount of store in it as being the thing that's going to transform our woeful record in terms of growing productivity, yeah, if we can be leaders in AI, you know, and get a higher growth rate like underpinning our economy, then that could be the thing that that that sort of finally turns the corner on, on this sort of British underperformance.

Ben Walker  48:31  
So is it mostly about reassurance while we're in this dislocation period? Then do you think that naturally, I'll take, I'll take your point, by the way, that all new technologies have a dip and then an upcut of you could say the same about the printing press, you know, which is a hugely disruptive technology, similar in impact 100 years ago. Is it just about reassurance? Now, in this, while we're in that dip, while we're in that what, or what is perceived by the youngest to be a dislocation or period, is it just about reassurance or are there things we have to do, practical things we have to do now?

Stephen Woodford  49:04  
Well, I think, I think we have to, we have to get through whatever the process of dislocation and disruption as quickly as possible. And, you know, and particularly training people of every age, frankly, into into using this. We did some, we run a survey called all in every two years, which looks at has about 15 to 18,000 people from across the industry fill out this survey, and we look at all sorts of aspects of them as people, how they identify and so on. And we ask questions. This we did in 2025 we asked questions about use of AI, and what we saw was across every level in in the businesses we survey, surveyed, people were using AI from C suite down to entry level. Everybody was using AI. The people are going to use it probably most confidently and fluently are younger people, because of that technological fluency. But it's, it's imperative for everybody you know, the. It. I use it every day. I'm sure use it, but I'm sure everybody in the room every single day, I'm using it, and I'm finding incredibly helpful in terms of the work that we're doing. But I'm sure I'll look back in two or three years time and think, oh, my god, yeah, I had no idea what I could do. So I think we I think we're going, we next year, 235, years, I hope and think we're going to go through this extraordinary curve where we're going to realise we're going to get confident and fluent with using this technology, and it's going to allow us to do the things that previously took days or weeks to do in hours and much shorter period of time, produce better quality work more quickly, and then, in effect, that time can be released to do other, more productive things. So if you can write a report on something in a day as opposed to a week, or do something, you know, do something in an hour that would have taken a day, you've got five or six hours to do something else. Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's something else is thinking about whether you're in a if you're in a service business, thinking about your clients. If you're in a manufacturing business, thinking about how you can improve it releases time to do potentially more valuable things. It's interesting.

Ben Walker  51:13  
I mean, I agree with that. I'm on record on this show of saying that we've talked about the fact that it does offer liberty and latitude to do other things which were taken up by the routine of mundane Nevertheless, there has been tests about how creative in the sort of wider centre of the word AIS can be. There's a recent lead summit the industry discussed an experiment referred to which is almost an AI, a creativity Turing test, in which an AI only team was pitted, was pitted against a human and AI team and and a human team and a

Stephen Woodford  51:50  
human team. There were three. It was a three test. Is a three way test, and it was done by Lloyd's bank in their agency. Yeah. So humans only, AI only, humans and AI. And no surprise, the human plus AI one hands down, when, easily. Yeah. So what did better? Work, creative work, more on every, on every, every school they did, they did better. What was the inspiration

Ben Walker  52:15  
for doing the experiment in the first place?

Stephen Woodford  52:17  
Well, I think, I think, I think it was, I think it was led by the Lloyds team, right? Because, like every big business at the moment, is thinking about how they deploy, how they use this, how they the governance around it. How do you set the right guardrails around it? We've just published a best practice guide on the use of AI in advertising under the auspices of something called the online advertising Task Force, which is a government industry collaboration looking at all different sorts of different aspects of particularly digital technology and and making sure that you know that harms are reduced and that the potential is realised. So we put that guide out, and that was a synthesis of lots of people's thinking to, in effect, give people some guidance on how to use AI responsibly, how to make sure you're using it safely, how to make sure you've got the right levels of governance around it. These are all things that businesses are wrestling with at the moment. So the more that we can sort of share best practice and share ideas for that, the better.

Ben Walker  53:14  
Interesting. Yeah, I think that'll be a welcome finding. The results will be welcomed by our audience. Yes, certainly. So fascinating to see that. And it wasn't close. It was the Yeah, the hybrid team went very easily. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And then look to the future. There's other trends which are interesting and that, you know, there's been a structural shift in investment from moving towards influencer led strategies even, sort of, even sort of, sort of household brands like Unilever and shifting large proportions of their budget from sort of traditional advertising to social and creative, creative channels. It's a big and notable shift. Are we witnessing? Do you think the death for the big brand advert?

Stephen Woodford  53:59  
No, no, it's a fast growing channel. Is an incredibly important it's incredible. Important it's incredibly effective. One of it's done well, but I think it's always been the case that the beauty is in the blend. In a sense, it's the mix. And really successful brands and businesses know it's about, you know about using the right tools for the right for the right task. And I'm sure if I went back to my British Airways sort of pin of praise that I gave for the British Airways campaign, I bet they're using travel influences brilliantly, and they're doing fantastic television. They're doing fantastic outdoor, they're doing fantastic digital across the board, they will be doing really interesting, good work. And so I think it's about the combination, I think one of the big, interesting trends, and I think McKinsey did a report, various other surveys, have shown this, is that that a lot of big advertisers are talking about 2026, being the year to shift back to building the brand right interesting, and thinking out you can build a brand through any media. You can build a brand through an influencer. You can build so it's not about saying. That's a shift back to traditional brand building media, but it's about the messaging that you're using. So that that shift of back, you know, building the brand, maybe the, you know, maybe there has been a sort of over, over investment in using marketing sort of, sort of jargon towards the bottom of the funnel, the funnel, the middle of the funnel, rather than the top of the funnel. Yeah. And I think it's really important to recognise that actually it's the way you use the whole. The whole is always more than some of the parts. If you're only using it part of the mix, you're not getting those synergies. Great brand communication drives, great performance marketing. We had a fantastic president called Alessandra Bellini, who's the Chief Customer Officer of Tesco. And she said, she said, I just do not buy that. The difference between a great brand drives brilliant performance and brilliant performance builds up a great brand. So you shouldn't sort of think about one at the expense of the other. It's about the how the two work together.

Ben Walker  55:57  
Does it ever worry you with the advertising spend going to go past we think 50 billion, yeah, is 50 billion pounds this year. Does it ever worry that the larger, larger and larger proportion is going on sort of search and find advertising, and that actually, we could end up with a situation where that stuff is dominating too much and becomes sort of oversaturated, and then people get bored of it, and sort of the joy and sort of the art of advertising that we've seen in the past may get lost.

Stephen Woodford  56:30  
No, it doesn't worry me, because ultimately, businesses will do what, what works for their business, and time and time again, what delivers the best returns is using that full spectrum. Call it of marketing. And going back to the point I made right at the very start, about it's engaging emotionally with your customers. So whether you're using an influence to do that, or whether you're using a hard to engage emotionally through a search ad, it's fair to say, but search is an incredibly effective medium for what it does, but search will do better. You know, there's been, again, lots of research that shows this. If you want to really drive the performance on search, put your brand on posters, yeah, you know, or you use a complimentary medium. So I think, I think that's so it doesn't, it doesn't worry me. And of course, we're another frontier now about how do brands show up in AI, so the whole way that in effect, that brands are gonna have to rethink about the way that AI surfaces them, isn't because search itself

Ben Walker  57:27  
is falling because of the advent of

Stephen Woodford  57:29  
AI, these, all of these things I think end up being complementary search now you have ai, ai enabled search, yeah. So you know how, how do, how do brands, how the media owners, how to advertisers, how do the public adjust to these new technologies? Ultimately, whatever only it only works if it works for the customer.

Ben Walker  57:49  
So we're not going to be the fears of a sort of search based very utilitarian advertising sector are unfounded. The magic is still going to be there. Magic is still going to be in and I'd

Stephen Woodford  57:59  
go back to the point about every market being incredibly competitive and so on, is you could? You could? Yes, you can make progress at some levels by just being so let's say you were being a very rational proposition that was price based, or something like that. You can win to a certain level, but it'll only take you so far. And I think when you look at the businesses that really succeed over the long term, they are businesses that have this full spectrum of engagement with their customers, and they mean things to people. And why do we go back to the supermarket? I like every week because, yes, it's convenient, the prices are good, the quality is good, service, all those things. But you know, most towns will have two or three supermarkets to choose, you know, so you choose one that you like. It might be the loyalty scheme. It could be any number of different factors, but ultimately that that that it's, it's the whole spectrum of values and feelings and associations that you have with the business that mark out the winners. And I think a key part of that is, how do what do I when I hear the word, you know, if I hear Tesco, I hear Sainsbury's, Waitrose, what do I feel? Which one do I want to go to? Which one would I rather shop from? And that will be, you know, a whole, whole basket of different attributes that some are functional, some are about geography, some are about price perception or whatever. But it'll also be a lot of it will be about about how do I feel about it?

Ben Walker  59:25  
Stephen Woodford, thank you very much indeed.

Stephen Woodford  59:27  
Thank you, pleasure.

Ben Walker  59:28  
Thanks. So that concludes this season. Thank you for listening. We'll be back soon in the late spring to discuss all things about leadership in marketing. That's going to be our topic for the next season, so we'll see you then on the CIM Marketing podcast.