Episode Description
Simon Dell is the CEO of Cemoh, the Australian platform connecting businesses with expert marketing consultants. In this episode, Simon and McGrath trace how marketing has been transformed by the rise of platforms like YouTube, eBay and Facebook. They also look ahead to AI’s growing role in marketing, from accelerating ideation to reshaping how creative work gets done.
About Interviewee(s)
As CEO of Cemoh, Simon Bell guides Australia’s leading fractional marketing business that works to connect companies with expert marketers who work inside their teams to drive growth. With 15+ years of mentoring and over 300 businesses advised, he sits at the nexus of marketing strategy, talent, and business growth.
Simon’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamsimondell/
Transcript
Michael McGrath: 0:06
Mike, welcome to the troubleshooters podcast with me. Your host, Mike McGrath, now today’s guest, Simon Dell is a sales and marketing man through and through, among other things, he’s the CEO of the world’s largest fractional marketing platform, CMO, today, we unpack the world of marketing, looking back at the good old days, and then getting current and chatting about the digital revolution, before finally having a look at the world of AI and what it might mean for business and marketing in the future. So sit back and enjoy my back and forth knock about session with Simon. Simon Dell, welcome to the troubleshooters podcast.
Simon Dell: 0:48
Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me. Michael. Look Simon.
Michael McGrath: 0:51
I’m looking forward to this. I thought we’d have a little tour through marketing, starting back perhaps when I came of age in the early 80s in terms of business. So that is a while ago. Now, you are the founder of CMO. You are the largest fractional network business in the world. So tell us what Simo stands for. Tell us what you what you do now,
Simon Dell: 1:18
fractional marketing network. So and look, when I say we’re the largest in the world, I’ve, no, I’ve absolutely zero proof of that. Michael, I just keep saying that to people.
Michael McGrath: 1:28
No, well, I suppose there’s a lesson there for all of us, yeah. So tell us a bit about it.
Simon Dell: 1:37
So essentially, we operate very similar to how Airbnb operates. We collect up all these fantastic consultants and freelancers, and then we sort of resell them back to the market. Who needs somebody? It’s the same operating pattern as something, as I said, like Airbnb or Upwork or freelancer.com except the difference between us, between us and say, Upwork. It’s normally they’re slightly higher ticket people, and we are very sort of geographically, or largely, 80% of the time we’re geographically, trying to match people with businesses in the same city or the same area as them so they can actually go in and be part of the team, sit in meetings and that sort of thing. So it’s all people in marketing space, anything from senior strategists all the way down to social media managers, videographers, anything in marketing.
Michael McGrath: 2:36
So it’s a platform effectively to put support businesses in touch with, with with, with the talent,
Simon Dell: 2:44
yeah, yeah. Look, that’s that’s where we are. That’s where we are taking it into that platform format. The perhaps the difference with us is that we recognize that marketing is quite obviously. We’ll talk about that today, but marketing is quite a sensitive topic for a lot of businesses, and they do really want to understand who they’re getting, who they’re getting, and whether that person has the right skill sets, and so on and so forth. So there’s a little bit more, there’s a little bit more of an intimate relationship, rather than just being a sort of a cold click and click and buy platform,
Michael McGrath: 3:23
yeah, so it’s interesting. So we’ll touch on this today, because, you know, marketing, when I came of age, you know, operated and happened in a certain way. There were certain rules to the game. And then I think there was a big change, you know, around the around the smartphone, and that, big digital there was, you know, was the technology lads were threatening for a long time. If you remember that we were going to be doing buying and purchasing, doing everything online, didn’t have for a long time, but it did happen fairly quickly when that smartphone got into everybody’s hands, and then the whole game began to change. If you remember, with YouTube, no one could figure out how they were going to make any money. But they only, well, sorted that out, didn’t they? So, so there was some big changes there, which I’m I’m going to dive in and get your perspective and thoughts on. And then obviously there’s, you know, just when you thought, couldn’t get any worse, I guess, in terms of the fractional nature and the sort of the splintering of marketing and the disciplines we’re now looking at AI, which I think is having a significant impact. I mean, I read the the other day that that that the marketing is kind of, you know, bit like the airline business did in covid. Marketing is really getting a big brunt of AI, and what’s happening there, we’ve seen, you know, significant consolidation already, from an m&a point of view, in the ad. Ties the agency world. Globally, we’re seeing layoffs here in Australia, so there’s definitely a reset going on. And we can perhaps chat about that. But before we get into that, I want to, I want to take us back to the early 80s. And when I came of age, we had, it’s interesting brands in this I mean, I remember in the 70s brands, there were big brands like Heinz Cadbury’s Hoover Purcell was a very famous washing, washing, cleaning kind of thing that, in fact, I remember Victoria Beckham said when she joined the Spice Girls, that she wanted to be bigger than Purcell. So that’s how big personal was at the time. She may have achieved it, but, but those big brands and they used to dominate the television with advertising. So you only had two channels, you know, Coronation Street, or the Two Ronnies, or whatever they get like 20 million audiences, right? And I can sing you, I won’t, because I’ve got a terrible voice, but I can sing you all the ditties that Cadbury’s were putting out and Heinz were putting out, because we kind of, you know, you either watched ITV or BBC. We didn’t even have BBC Two, I don’t think and, and we would basically be brainwashed with with these brand ditties, if you like, and, and so that was my understanding of branding, but it it really exploded in The late 70s, 80s. I remember being at school in the fifth year and Ian Fleming, who claimed his dad got the bond job, but turned it down. Nobody believed me. But anyway, I used to. I was telling my mom and dad that once I was only 14, and I bought it from him that his dad was going but anyway, his name was Ian flem. He was a good footballer and and he came back from Germany, interestingly, that his parents were divorced. His dad lived in Germany. He was the only divorced kid in the school. I mean that. I mean that this is the mid 70s, and he came back with some Adidas football boots, and he opened them up in the changing room, because we were mad on football and he brought these boots out, which were green and gold. And we were like, it was like, he just was showing us a spaceship. And we’re like, wow, because at that point, football boots were just that football boots. So there was no like, you know, this type versus that type. And that was the beginning of from 75 the beginning of us waking up to the sports brands Nike. I remember Nike basically sponsored John McEnroe and John macros at will, Wimbledon acting out. And if you read the Nike founder Phil Knight’s autobiography, he talks about how good that was for their brand. John macaro acting out. And he used to ring him and say, keep on. Keep it up, right? Because it was clearly having a big impact on, on selling their trainers and stuff, so, so that was, you know, and then when I got into business, you basically hired an advertising agency. So when you got to a certain scale, and they pretty much did everything, you know, you wanted. You wanted an advert, they got you an advert. You wanted some print done, they got you the print done. And it was a sort of one stop shop, if you like. And I suppose that’s the way it was for quite a while. If you had enough money, you hired an advertising agency, and they got to work for you. And I remember my first business was called Geno’s, which was a pizza business and pizza home delivery. And I remember us brainstorming one day at this advertising agency in Manchester, and we decided that we needed a jingle, and because we’re doing a lot of radio advertising, so I said, Well, what about the dex is Midnight Runners tune, because that was a number one. It was called Gino and so, so anyway, so they reached out to they reached out to the Kevin, I can’t remember his other name, but they reached out to the guy who’d written this song. And he said, No, he didn’t, he didn’t want to do it. So they said, Look, don’t worry. All we’ve got to do. Do is drop one bar every six notes, and we can get around the copyright. So they did, and they got to work on this jingle. Completely butchered it, but somehow they worked the words, piping up pizza delivered direct to your door. Oh, gi knows. And having but. It and then smashing the airways with it. It was such a successful little jingle for us. But again, we never paid him a cent in royalty because they got ran it. But they would take care of us, and they would walk us through this kind of stuff and and now, coming up to date, we’ve we’ve got this, we had this digital revolution where we’ve now got, I don’t know how many, but we’ve got 18 or 20 different disciplines in the marketing arena. So tell us a bit about that digital what happened with the smartphone and how that’s affected marketing and evolved effectively and led to this fractional marketing solution that you’ve provided.
Simon Dell: 10:47
Look, I just very quickly harp back on the 80s, because I grew up in the 80s, and one of the most memorable campaigns I still remember to this day was all the silk cut adverts. And I wasn’t a smoker. My dad wasn’t a smoker. My mum, nobody smoked in my household. My my grandfather did. But I just remember all the incredibly clever silk cut adverts because they couldn’t use the name. They couldn’t put the cigarette names on the actual billboards. So you just had this piece of silk with a cut through it. But of course, everybody then knew what it was. So there was, I think there was some incredibly, incredibly clever, clever ideas back then. And I think, you know, when you watch old episodes of Mad Men and stuff like that, and watch that happening, you know, in a fictional environment, you you kind of understand how it all worked and the power that those creative people had, but you’re absolutely right. It all changed. Well, it all changed with with two things was, you know, the iPhone, which was 2007 and then Facebook, and Facebook wasn’t the first, first social network, but that was because that was Facebook was three years before the iPhone, so that was 2000 2004 but it didn’t. It took a good two or three years, and those kind of things both happening at the same time. Suddenly just exploded. The opportunities for people, for people, for basic human communication. All of a sudden you were dealing with this capacity that you could one to one without needing to, you know, pick up a phone or, you know, it just, it just blew that opportunity for communication completely into 1000 pieces. And it took a lot of time to settle down, for people to understand how it was going to work, and for, you know, Facebook, to understand how they were going to monetize and everything but that 2007 to 2010 was just like, revolutionary,
Michael McGrath: 13:07
yeah, yeah, I suppose what, what I’d seen, I’d come through that early digital period where everyone had a website and and then, you know that originally, you know, we, we, it was slow, And it was effectively a brochure online, and they were threatening that commerce would be done. But for years and years, it never imagined. All of a sudden, for some reason, over the space of two or three years, we became comfortable with with doing business online and buying stuff online, and now you know that that has evolved to Yeah, I mean, the last podcast we did, we talked about a guy we talked with a logistics business in the US that’s doing last mile and the speed of delivery now that you’re getting deliveries within two hours of pretty much whatever You want in the US at the moment, it’s just sped up dramatically.
Simon Dell: 14:04
But in terms of E commerce, I don’t think a lot of us realize that eBay turned 30 years old this year. So you know when we when we you know when we think of eBay or the last time we bought something on, you know, Amazon, you kind of, you don’t necessarily think that back that far and just go platforms, that eBay platform, which I think was one, again, one of the very first ones out there in terms of, you know, e Commerce and the change of the model direct to consumer. But that’s, that’s 30 years old. This year was 1919, 95 Yeah.
Michael McGrath: 14:43
No. It’s interesting. When you look at the top five companies in the world that might buy market cap, and they’re all those digital global giants, which, although they’ve been around for 40 years, they weren’t here 50 years ago. If you look at the top 540, or 50 years ago, they’ve taken a. 150 years to get to the top five status. So there’s been a massive revolution. And, you know, we in business. We’re just, we’re wrestling with, well, what do we do with this, you know, and how does a typical small business have put some context on this? So there’s a million businesses in Australia that operate, and about 700 and odd 1000 of them employ between one and four staff. About 300,000 employ between four and 200 staff, and only 5000 employ more than 200 people. And so that’s the context, and your average mid sized businesses turning over 6 million and making 10% and they are, you know, they’re having to get very creative around marketing. So I mean that, just on that point alone, I did a quick Oxford English dictionary definition of marketing, which says the activity, or busiest business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. It’s interesting, the corporates, the big lads, have separated marketing and sales years ago, effectively, to the point where a lot of the buyers companies we’re dealing with, they don’t even talk to each other. Sales and marketing. It’s just like two disparate disciplines, but most of us in the in the humbler real world, are seeing sales and marketing as very much needing to be aligned and needing to work together.
Simon Dell: 16:36
Yeah, and, and I would I say this to everybody? Sales, good sales, people make marketing easier. Good marketing makes sales easier, right? That is, is, it’s a symbiotic relationship. Sometimes you need more marketing and less sales, and sometimes you need sales more sales and less marketing. But they both, if they’re both done well, they both make each easier. And by easier, I mean better return on investment, quicker conversions, so on. So it they have to exist in parallel with each other.
Michael McGrath: 17:11
Yeah, the old days, it used to be, you know, the the old adage was, you know, only 50% of your marketing budget works, but no one knows which 50% whereas we’ve moved into this hyper intensity around trying to measure everything, how do you think we’re going on the measuring front?
Simon Dell: 17:31
I absolutely terrible. And I think this is one of those things that marketing lets itself down with, incredibly badly, even just the basics of I work with a law firm, and we do some work with a wealth management company. Now, both of them are generating leads every day, but the law firm logs every single lead, irrespective of where it comes from. They log it in a register full details, who it is, what they’re asking for, etc, etc, etc. The wealth management company don’t do that. And I’ve been trying to explain to the wealth management company that they should do that so we can understand what’s happening and where leads are coming from. But with the law firm doing that, we can sit there and go straight away, they sort of go, Hey, we’re getting they’re getting in 10 leads a day. It’s absolutely insane. But they’ll go, let’s put more money into marketing, you know. Let’s do that because they see the value in it. Because they see better, you know. And for them, the job then becomes refining the spend. Okay, yes, spend some more. But also, let’s spend let’s change the messaging. Let’s try and get a few less tire kickers. Let’s get some higher value clients with the marketing spend. But that’s working for them. The wealth management company don’t have that ability to track they’re not tracking anything. So we can’t sit there and go, Hey, this is what your money this is what your money delivered. And I think without that, irrespective of whether you’re a company of three people, or 300 people, you should, you should essentially be recording how many new clients, how many new inquiries you get every week.
Michael McGrath: 19:09
Yeah, yeah. Look, I agree. I mean, I’ve done a fair amount of consulting and strategy work over the years, and you know, I can tell you that 90% of business problems are typically sold by more sales. The difficulty with that is that if you don’t put a process, a sales process in place, which includes a kind of, some kind of marketing machine that analyzes and measures you’re you’re really just, it’s a hidden hope. And we see professional service firms are terrible at this that, you know, they’re, they used to referral. They used to, you know, they used to, you know, not really having to worry too much about sales. But, you know, you talk about marketing being affected by AI, certainly, accountants have been massively affected by AI, which can do a really good job of crunching numbers, by the way. And so I think you know that ability to measure, monitor, figure out, have a strategy and a process and and then begin to get into the psychology, you know what, what we’re dealing with. But the other thing is, is that discipline of running a pipeline and then running clothes lost. I mean, the amount of businesses I’ve been into where the, you know, we get older, if they’ve got a CRM and they’ve spent a lot of money on it, often it’s full of junk, and no one’s kept it clean. And then there’s a pipeline which has got stuff in that’s years old. Well, it’s not effectively, a pipeline at that point. So that that lack of rigor around that sales, marketing area, I think, is a is a big problem for for many small businesses. And I think, you know, there, there is an opportunity to tidy that stuff up, I think, and make it happen. And you, you know, the law firms are classic, if there sounds like they’re across, they’re across.
Simon Dell: 21:04
It look before I was in marketing, I spent 10 years in sales and, you know, from largely in the FM, FMCG space, so I kind of understand both sides and the importance of both things there. But you’re absolutely right. Is that is data. Data is the lifeblood of a lot of businesses, and good data is, you know, is what makes businesses strong. And again, a good example of that. We started, this is a good six, seven years ago. We worked with a manufacturing business here in Brisbane that manufactured confectionery and she just got a new factory, she was starting to really scale up her operation. And for the previous two or three years, she’d been operating in like, pop up stores. And I said to her, I said, Well, how many sales have you made in the last two or three years? And she’s like, hundreds and hundreds. We get people that are coming back all the time. They love our products. You know, we’ve been doing really well. And I said, okay, so where’s the, where’s the data of all your customers for the past three years? And she just looked at me blankly, and we’re like, Well, we haven’t recorded anything. And I was like, you know, look, and I’m good friends with her, and we have a we joke about that, you know, but I’m like to not, to not do the basics. Michael, of recording the data of the people that are buying from you properly, I think is still a massive problem across and that goes for whether you’re making chocolate or whether you’re an accountant. I just, I just don’t think they do it well enough.
Michael McGrath: 22:43
And look, you know, it’s never been cheaper to collect data in terms of, we’ve got the technology and we’ve got the digital so the, you know, it really is time to, you know, sort that out. If you haven’t sorted out in terms of, just bring yourself today, if you look at advertising agency the market in Australia, it’s, it’s worth about 3.9 billion and it employs 20,000 staff. Interestingly, they pay about 1.8 billion out in wages, which is about 46% of revenue. That’s that’s going in wages, and they make about 11% which is pretty much the average. The average is about 10 and a half percent for that mid market. Most of the agencies are mid market. There’s some big guys, but most agencies are sub 50 people, or if you look at them by numbers, I mean, what do you say to a young marketing graduate these days? I mean, what you know that’s either studying or finishing their studying, the amount of change that’s lightly in the next five years. What do you tell them to
Simon Dell: 23:47
my thought is, I think there’s two types of Mark. I think when you’re at that marketing graduate level, you need you go in one of two directions, right? Number one is, you go, you become a generalist, and you understand the whole marketing sphere that’s online, offline, advertising, everything, right? Because I think those people are so extremely valuable for people that can look at the that look and can look at a problem from top down, and sit there and go, Okay, here’s your here’s your strategic solution. Now, is chat GPT going to replace some of that? Yes, quite possibly. But that doesn’t mean to say these people still aren’t hugely important for helping strategies become implemented. So getting someone that sits there and go, Hey, we’re making sure these things are happening in the timescales that they’re supposed to be happening. So I think that’s that’s one conversation I would have with a graduate. The other thing I would say is, go and really specialize in something that you’re passionate about, right? Be that Google ads, be that copywriting, be that graphic design. Design be, and if you are really, really good at that, you can still be using AI to help speed your work up, produce some ideas and things like that. But taking a deep dive in a particular sector of marketing, I think, will still be extremely valuable. You know, we still, we still need, we still need bookkeepers. We thought 10 years ago, everyone thought zero was going to make every bookkeeper redundant, right? And it’s simply not the case. What happened was the terrible bookkeepers got made redundant, and the good bookkeepers made more money and got more clients.
Michael McGrath: 25:36
I mean, you, you’re talking into some extent about these soft skills, or what we’re always known as soft skills, right? This emotional intelligence and humans understanding human psychology and that, I mean that AI is not good at that. It’s not good at strategy. It’s not good at, you know, how do you influence stakeholders? How do you walk into a room and figure out what’s actually going on? And I think that, you know, we’re definitely seeing in the professional service world, those skills are going to come to the like, they’re already at the top. Like, if you, if you track any, any accounting business, any accounting career, the guys with the EQ rose up the chain because, and, you know, I IQ. I mean, that’s AI in a lot of ways. AI’s figuring out technically what what to do. But it’s interesting. I was with a CEO. I had coffee with a CEO, a former CEO of a large international advertising agency. He’s now just got re skilled, but effectively he got made redundant through a recent merger. And he said to me, I was just having a coffee with him, and he said, Mike, everything we do in marketing can now be done by AI, and if it can’t be done that, well, it’s going to be done well, very quickly. He said, All we’ve got his soft skills. He said, All we’ve got is socializing strategy. And I thought that was a bit over the top, but since I’ve spoken to him a few weeks ago, I’m beginning to see that being reinforced. So it’s interesting, you said about getting a good breadth of knowledge and then drilling into some things and getting really good at one or two things that you love, seems to be that’s what I’m reading. It’s saying
Simon Dell: 27:27
because, because you’re still going to need somebody to explain the results to somebody at the other end, right? And it’s somebody that can empathize with the client and sit there and go, Yep, this is what we did, or this is what the AI tool did. Yeah, we can improve on that and those kind of things. So it still need, it still need that you’re spot on. EQ is the, I think, is certainly in the marketing space, is the, is the currency moving forward, right? And I think that, and the other thing that I try and teach my kids, bear in mind, they’re seven and nine. So it’s, it’s like, you know, flogging a dead horse sometimes. But to me, it’s, it’s the leadership. It’s and leadership, not necessarily, hey, I’m in charge of a team, but it’s leading, leading change, leading an implementation, leading a strategy. Because that AI won’t do that. Ai won’t lead. AI is a tool for implementation. So I think if you’re in marketing today, become, become that leader, and that’s what I think a CEO, or, you know, a business owner, will look for when it comes to employing someone and paying someone in the next 10 years.
Michael McGrath: 28:45
I mean, you know, I speak to a lot of owners. I mean, we’ve got, we got, you My day job is running an M and A practice, and we’re, well, what we see a lot of in our world is that owners are looking for problem solvers. They’re looking for troubleshooters. They’re looking for people with initiative that none of that’s changed. You know, as a 10 year old kid delivering bread around Solio, the streets of Solio in Birmingham, I’d figured out that there was a problem. The problem was the baker had bad legs, and my legs were great, right? And and I went to work, and then I smiled at everyone, and I was pleasant, and then I got tips and I got encouragement. So it’s no different. Now, you know, I looked to owners, and they’re they’re desperate for leaders. Like you’re right, the leader is not always the guys in charge. Actually, the best leaders are often good followers, and what they do is they anticipate what might need doing, and they get busy with that. And that’s often just a positive psychological mindset that says, I. Okay, how can I be useful and constructive? Anyone can go over the problems, but there’s a much smaller group that can say, right, what can we do? What can we do about this? I think that’s going to be true of marketing. It’s going to be true of everything.
Simon Dell: 30:12
Here’s another little story, a friend of mine who’s a dad at the same school as where my kids are, he jacked in his, I think, software, job, management job, about six months ago to go and become a to become a gardener, right? He wanted just to be outside more. He just didn’t want to sit in an office. He’s got four kids. His wife thought he was mad. He is absolutely inundated with work right now, because he does one thing better than 95% of the rest of the market out there is, he communicates with the customer better, right? He calls them back within an hour. He emails them back when they are when they email him, he’s quoting them within 24 hours, he’s turning up to the jobs on time. If you’re going to be a success out there, irrespective of whether you’re going to be a success in marketing or M and A or delivering pizzas, right? It all boils down to you doing doing that job really well, okay, and doing it as you said you would do it, or the client wanted you to do it. And I think those people will continue to succeed, even in the days of AI and advancement and all those kind of things.
Michael McGrath: 31:23
Yes, it’s a very good point that that you know, the delivery, the execution, just doing that from a customer’s point of view, like one of the things that we’re seeing, it’s easy to put the boot into the corporates, and I quite enjoy it, to be honest with you, but, but, but, you know, the one thing that a small business, so one thing a small business has, a mid sized business has in the market, is it’s flexible and it’s it can be very responsive. Whereas, if you look at the, you know, I’m deal with Westpac, my bank, they’re completely dysfunctional from a customer point of view, and have no recognition of that, right? So are the other three, by the way, like moving banks is a bit like changing from Coles to oasis. It’s the same, same, really, but, but that challenge of you know, you know, I have to wonder why the senior guys at Westpac or NAB or whoever don’t get on the phone and see what it’s like to solve a problem for themselves. Because if they would, there’s no way they could be happy with what’s being delivered. Whereas, I think, as a small to medium sized enterprise, if you get customer centric, which is what you’re talking about. You’re going, what does this feel like for them? How can I make it better? Because if you do, you make friends. Because whatever the consumer, whatever product or service they’re looking for, they’re absolutely desperate for good service.
Simon Dell: 32:58
And going off on a tangent. Here is i? When I went to university, I did a I did a degree. Well, I did two degrees, one in politics and one in law. When you, when you talk about the definition, I’m going to get deep here, when you talk about the proper definition of capitalism, right? It was all about making the best product that you could make for the market, right? So if you were making a sandwich, it was about using the best bread, the best ham, the best salad, the best sauce, the best salt, right? That’s what core basic capitalism is. Was producing the best product, and in return, the consumer would pay you the best price for it. Okay, what? What’s happened? I think, in the last 2030, years, that we’ve got this bastardized version of capitalism, which you which, as you said, you can see, you can see so obviously in the banks, is that their main concern is delivering the value to the shareholders rather than delivering the best service. So when you’re a small business, when you’re a medium sized business, your priority is service to your customer. You don’t give a shit about there. You don’t have shareholders. So that’s why I think so many mid sized businesses do so well, because their focus is completely customer centric in the in the true original sense of what capitalism was supposed to be, you know, and not getting diverted by going, what dividends are we paying out to the shareholders this year?
Michael McGrath: 34:30
Yeah, if you look at the top reasons for the failure of any business, and the stats vary, but it’s as high as 80% in the first five years that 80% businesses don’t survive the first five years. But if you look at the number one reoccurring reason for that is there was no proper evaluation of the market done in terms of the customer. What you know, what does the customer want? What does the customer need? And what will they. Like, what will they pay for it? And can I produce it? And so that idea is really at the heart of what you’re talking about, which is what you know, what does the world need right now? You know, what does the market need, and can I provide that in a way that’s eloquent and effective and he’s going to produce a return. And I think that that’s one of the critical roles of marketing, is to figure out, okay, what, what’s the context here, and and then operate within the broader context. So if you look at my business, I got into m&a 17 years ago, the context for that was that of those 300,000 companies that are in the mid market that employ between five and 200 staff, 20% of them were owned by the baby boomers. Are going to exit over the next 15 or 20 years. That’s just that’s like the tide rising. That’s just a fact. So the question then is, how do you, how do you, how do you get mobilize to be of certain genuine service to those people that clearly, you know, Oh, Father Time, you know you can run, but you can’t hide. And there’s the biggest shift of wealth going on in the M A market in terms of the transfer of ownership that we’ve ever seen and and that was, that’s the curl of it. So whatever you’re doing, what’s the context, what’s actually happening? And, you know, you look at marketing now, you know going forward now, with AI, certainly there’s going to be some change for marketing, but there will be winners and losers, and the winners are going to figure out what the market needs.
Simon Dell: 36:46
Yeah, it’s to that exact point. My, my, my business partner had a quote that he made, I’m going to say, about five years ago, and I often repeat this all the time. It’s the it’s the only smart thing he’s ever said. Let’s hope he doesn’t listen to this. He said, People don’t buy the cheapest product. They buy the product that they understand the quickest, right? So when I look at, you know, like a business like yours, if the if your if your target market understands what you do quickly, they’ll buy from you if you’re if your messaging is confusing, if they can’t see the value, they don’t understand if they’re dealing with the right person, they not quite sure who they’re talking to, all those kind of things they don’t buy from you. But if you can succinctly, and this is any business, if you can succinctly, get your message across to people quickly, and that’s important, quickly, easily, and clearly, they’ll buy from you, and they won’t give a shit about the price.
Michael McGrath: 37:49
Look, I think that that the natural default is is to be verbose and confusing, right, particularly in professional services, right? And the use of bid world, one of our values is Simplexity, because if you’re going to explain something simply, it’s not necessarily simplistic. You’ve got to actually be a master of what you’re doing to be able to explain it simply. So it’s not a dumbing down. It’s actually an ability to communicate something that’s quite complex, very simply. And I think that’s one of the definitions for me of good marketing, is to cut through the clutter, be less verbose. What is it that you’re trying to say? And I think that’s, you know, I think that’s where the value is in. I mean, you know, the objectivity of an agency, or the objectivity of a of a practitioner that’s good at what they do can absolutely transform a business and its messaging.
Simon Dell: 38:55
There’s no the quote as a British, I’ve just looked it up. It was a British economist, EF Schumacher, German name, British economist. His quote is, any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot more courage to move in the opposite direction. And I think that’s a key thing, is there is the courage, courage to make things simpler, right? We all sit there and go, if we add more features and if we add more messaging and we add more colors and more pictures, that’s going to appeal to a bigger market, but it’s there’s a there’s a courage in saying, No, that’s our market. That little thin sliver there is our market. We’ve got a single message, and that’s who we’re going to go after. And I’ve made that mistake in the past, where you go, hey, I want to be all things to all people. You know, you can’t be that. It, it’s courage that you need to take to go. I’m just going to focus on that.
Michael McGrath: 39:55
It’s interesting. In those 17 years, we’ve rebranded twice. We’ve changed our. Name twice, albeit fairly modestly the last year, but, and that was the second time, was in early covid in 20 and it’s probably time to rebrand and reposition again like it’s never once and done like it’s it’s never is. And now to do that? Well, we have to put money aside, we have to get people in, and we have to do it properly, because it’s so tempting to half ass it. Yeah, absolutely. And to cut corners, and, and, and, you know, one of the traits of the advertising agencies in the 80s, when I was in business, was they would always agree with you, because you paid the bills. And in the end, I was looking for people who were contrarian, who were prepared to go into bat and say, No, you’re wrong, because it was no good having people agree with me. There’s no point. Yeah, that’s just silly, right?
Simon Dell: 40:54
Yeah, well, again, there’s that Steve Jobs quote about you don’t, you don’t employ people and tell them what to do. You employ people and get them to tell you what to do that. Yeah. You know, I’ve paraphrased that terribly, but it was something along those lines,
Michael McGrath: 41:07
yeah, look, just perhaps finish on a positive note. I mean, we see enormous potential for AI to help us do what we’re doing better. Like, unbelievable. Like it’s almost heaven sent from our as was covid. By the way, covid completely transformed our business from a productivity point of view. We would never have guessed it right, what we were able to do online that we’d never really imagined prior to covid. So I remember us doing a transaction, our first transaction in the middle of covid, with a buyer from Dublin, a client in Melbourne, and us in Sydney, and we were all in lockdown, and that deal got done. And and then the idea of business development, none of us believe we could do business development remotely, and now we can very effectively, right? Not 100% but 90 plus percent. No problem now we it. Covid taught us that. Now what AI is going to do for us is we’ve got lots of Intel. We’ve measured everything for 17 years. I’ve got a digital guy who was involved at the beginning we were developing and measuring when we couldn’t even afford it, and but what we’ve got is a lot of lost Intel in the system that AI is is beginning to just transform real time through the language model. It’s we were used to be restricted to objects and fields, and now with the language model, it can sweep real time, and that data is is dynamic, and we’re we’re now figuring out, okay, how can we find it, how can we get it, how can we use it, how can we put it in front of the people that need it? And without AI, we couldn’t, we couldn’t contemplate that. Yeah, so tell us about some of the advantages of AI from a marketing point of view.
Simon Dell: 43:06
Yeah. I mean, well, I’ll tell you that. I’ll tell you the pros and the cons. So the pros for me, I think Id, ideation, ideation and copywriting, the idea of saying to I mean, I’ve come up with tag lines for businesses using chat GPT that I would have never come up with. So that’s not to say that every idea that chat GPT comes up with is good, but it all boils down to this idea of taste. It’s about you as a professional, as someone in marketing, the ability to filter through the dross of what chat GPT can produce and go, actually, that’s quite and it’s the same for you with data. You know, chat GPT could throw you, you know, sheets and sheets of data. But to a degree, it’s still got you to sit there and go Hold on. What’s the important data here? What are the things that I still that I need that are actually going to influence my ongoing decisions. So I think data analysis, content creation, ideation, I think those are the huge opportunities with with AI in marketing space that said, I look at, I still do a lot of work with Google ads. It’s one of the things that I still sort of get myself involved in. I watch Google ads, try and write a a description for a business, and it fails miserably. The AI just fails miserably, right? It doesn’t produce anything that’s even close to understanding what the business is about. The other thing is, when you leave those systems to then try and generate your business on their own at the moment, they send you a lot of pointless traffic, a lot of clicks and things that you’re paying for but aren’t necessarily valuable. All to you. So you do still have to stay on top of those kind of things. Will that change in the next couple of years? Quite possibly, quite possibly, they’ll just get better and better at it. Mark Zuckerberg is talking about meta going you won’t ever need to set up any ads anymore. Meta will just do it all for you, because it knows what customers you want and it knows how to target them. So there’s, there’s pros and cons, but I think really that if we were saying one fundamental aspect of AI that I think is is fantastic for marketing, is just ideas. It’s the capacity, the capacity to produce just a whole range of ideas. Again, I would say that’s not to say they’re going to get every idea. I think there’s still some left field ideas that come from the human brain that that chat GPT isn’t going to get. But those are the, those are the sort of pros and cons that I see for marketing and AI at the moment.
Michael McGrath: 45:59
No, I mean, certainly that the technical, creative output, campaign execution that that’s probably under threat, you know, I look at, you know, I look at the wage bill for marketing agencies at 1.8 bill on revenues of 3.9 that’s 46% I imagine the opportunity for them is to reduce the wages and maintain their try and try and maintain their revenue, which
Simon Dell: 46:26
is, here’s the contrasting opinion, Michael, is that Coca Cola did their Christmas advert this year, entirely on AI, right, entirely with AI, okay, it’s the classic truck driving through the snow scene, blah, blah, blah, the one that We’ve all seen 1000 times, right? It’s entirely done by AI. It took six people, 30,000 prompts, 30,000 prompts into the video creation tool. The argument that a lot of people in. And when you watch this video, you just go, this is not this is not great, right? The argument is, is that, yes, there’s less people in this but there’s also this undercurrent of things now, I think Amazon and Microsoft were in the news in the last couple of days by saying that their AI systems are now costing more than the people that they sacked. So I would say we’re at this really interesting turning point where we sit there and go, which is better for us, the people or the AI. And I think we’ve gone too far in one direction.
Michael McGrath: 47:36
I think you’re right. I don’t think anyone knows yet. I think that. I definitely think, in fact, you know, my my youngest daughter, I’ve got five kids. My youngest daughter, Emma, is contemplating uni next year. She’s 18, and she’s been looking at marketing. She’s looked at counseling and psychotherapy. She’s looked at a few things. And one of the things that she’s been thinking about, we’ve been chatting about, is how AI is going to anticipate, or, you know, what’s the anticipation of AI in these sectors? And there’s plenty out there, but I don’t think anybody really knows yet. And I think we’re going to be surprised. I think we’re going to be surprised on what happens to employment ultimately. And I certainly think we’re going to be surprised. You know, I think the opportunity is the young people in our organization, they’re getting, they’re being elevated through AI so we’re, we’ve been inundated by graduates who want to do their undergraduates, who are looking for internships? Well, we’ve always been inundated, and we’re now, we’re now trying to find a way to accommodate them, and because they’re smart and they’re all over this in a way that the senior guys aren’t. And so we’re trying to find a way to harness that and say, Okay, how can we give them some exposure as an intern? And how can they, how can we tap into their their tech savvy, frankly, and they’re, they’re native, you know, they’re kind of digital native. It you can’t reproduce that, even if you’re 40. They’ve never not had a screen, many of them in front of them. Now, there’s plenty of drawbacks and all the rest of it, but certainly from a business point of view, we’re not sure where we’re going. We do know it will be organic. We do know we’re going to have to be nimble, and we do know we’re going to have to figure out as we go, like it’s not going to be a bureaucratic process this. It’s, I think it’s going to be quite nimble. So anyway, that’s been a fantastic discussion, Simon, I’m very grateful for your time today.
Simon Dell: 49:53
Absolutely, my pleasure mate. It’s I, you know, I could talk about these things to the cows come home. And so yes, thank.
Michael McGrath: 50:00
You look, we wish you well with CMO, we were, we wish you well in what you’re doing in fractional marketing, we’ll make sure that your details in the show notes. If there’s any owners out there that are looking to try and navigate marketing, then you’ve heard about Simon bright smart. Just to declare an interest, we have begun to use Simo and we’ve, in fact, I think it’s our first week we’re using one of your digital creatives. So anyway, I’ve declared my interest once again. Thank you, Simon.
Simon Dell: 50:30
My pleasure. Michael, thank you.
Michael McGrath: 50:37
Well, there you have it. I hope you got something out of our look at marketing and AI today. Now if you want to talk to Simon Dell, the details will be in the show notes. Quick shout out to our sponsors, Oasis partners, corporate advice with a practical bias, over 500 deals done since 1984 if it’s time for you to look at your exit options, be sure to reach out to the guys at Oasis partners. We’ll be happy to chat with you about your options. Now, if you like this content, be sure to tell your friends, and if you’d like to leave us a comment, only nice ones, please. As you know, we’re very sensitive until next time, stay safe. You. You.