Arthur: [00:00:00] Welcome listeners. We have a very special guest today, Ollie Marlow-Thomas. A man who has gone on a very unique journey, the whole point of this podcast, Pitching Fashion, is to, learn from people, get inspired uncover things that we didn't expect to learn, and every episode seems to do that one way or another.
Ollie, to give an introduction, sold his business for over $100 million to Smartly, a leading ad tech business, and has so much to, share in terms of what he's been through. Smartly is an AI-AI-powered digital advertising platform that unifies media buying, cre-creative production, and campaign optimization across major social and web channels.
When we get told about businesses, we think, where are they? Are they big? B-b- just to give you a sort of sense and flavor of this business, they have customers including Foot Locker, Spotify, Samsung.
Oli: Warner Brothers Disney Uber they tend to be technology companies who are pretty advanced in the digital advertising space, focused on, acquisition, so driving [00:01:00] new users.
But yeah, we've got all the big brands you guys know and love and probably use every day on your phone.
Arthur: . Amazing. We can't wait to steer into that. And before that, you studied in the UK. You had a brief period working as a volunteer with the police.
Oli: True,
Arthur: and then spent thirteen years at Google. Is that correct?
Oli: Yeah, a bit less. I think in the end, it was about seven years, actually. Okay. Yeah, before I started. I think I'm, on my LinkedIn, it still says I work there. I probably need to change that. I think my whole working career has only been about fifteen years, but yeah.
Arthur: Oli, long was it before setting up Adlib to exit for you?
Oli: Yeah. Hey, firstly thanks so much for having me on the podcast. I've watched a couple of the episodes, and what you're doing here is really great.
And hey, inspiring people to think about business opportunities and get going with stuff is really important. So yeah, great work doing the podcast, to answer your your question I started Adlib. I was actually a sole founder in 2017.
I'd done about five, six years at Google before that, and before that I was, as you rightly [00:02:00]mentioned, I was in the police. So it's quite a random career journey. But once we started Adlib, actually from the day we started, which was October 2017, we exited in January 2022. So it took just over five years which is pretty rapid, as a general rule for business.
The business life cycle, generally, on average, it actually.. It's eight years, right? So on average, businesses either, And that takes into consideration, by the way, all of those kind of companies that fail in the first year, of which there are many.
So the average cycle is eight years and so we were... I was really super pleased to get the acquisition done within five years. I think as all founders probably you've spoken to have said, it was extremely hard and challenging, and I was very tired. So it was a great great time to, to exit.
It had been particularly tough 'cause it was just after COVID, obviously, which was a tough time for everyone to keep businesses connected and keep employees happy and keep customers happy. It was, , quite a tricky time. So yeah, it was a short journey in many ways. But we were right on the cusp of some [00:03:00] pretty interesting AI technology capabilities, and that was the main reason the company was acquired.
Oli,
Arthur: y- someone says, "Oh, what's Oli got-- Oli like?" A few words spring to mind. You are a ferocious hard worker. You are a man of serious dedication And, clearly what you've done really shows that you enjoy making things happen, but can also do that. What has it taught you on your journey of setting up a business and exiting that about being human?
Oli: one thing that I often talk about with founders is there's no doubt about it that when you become a founder, you have to dial up some pretty unattractive character traits. This is me being very honest now. You have to be very direct. You have to be very ruthless.
You have to slightly fabricate the truth because a lot of the time you're learning from the customer, or from a potential customer, like what they're gonna buy, right? The best businesses are built-- Th-there's this analogy that, you're building the plane and putting it down as you've gone off the side of a cliff.
You're pulling in the wings, you're ratcheting them on, you're [00:04:00] ratcheting the engine, you're trying to start the propeller, and, you know- Dialing up those unattractive traits is not something that is appropriate for everyone. A really important part of scaling a business is almost always, as a founder, you have a team that you start with.
And, within a couple of years, that team of like very scrappy but capable people needs to be replaced by more management, right? So if you're scaling correctly, you then need to find a different kind of person who's gonna help you with the next stage of the business. You also need to manage out underperforming talent.
Obviously, that can be quite challenging. And make sure you've got the right people for the job in place, and that constant evolution is tricky. So what I would say, firstly, is, being a founder does require some tough choices, and one of those is being a, a more difficult person.
You need to be very motivated, as I say, very dedicated, working very hard, and unfortunately, you need to expect that of your team. Otherwise you won't be successful. I'm yet to see a company where work-life [00:05:00] balance from a founder early-stage startup perspective is something that anyone ever talks about.
So that's the first thing. The second thing is you asked about being human. I think through that journey, I learnt a lot about myself, and some of those things you mentioned are super important. But I think the most important thing or perhaps the most important skill I've got is being able to get shit done, right?
One of the ways that Barack Obama talked a lot about, how he could have plenty of people in his team who could strategize, plenty of people in his team could decide and present different options. But at the end of the day, the people who are able to get stuff done, that was a s-very small number of people.
And that is the skill that is so important for a founder, is to be able to jump from, getting the marketing plan done in the morning to getting the sales, leads closed in the afternoon to being in a dinner with customers in the evening and being able to do all those things and trying to switch, between them is super important part of the role of the founder and the skill set that a founder needs.
Arthur: One of the smartest people I know [00:06:00] said to me how he has four ways of measuring people in a work capacity. One is EQ, two is IQ three is, someone's morals.
Are they gonna operate in the right way when, no one's looking so you do need that. And then the final one is the ability to get shit done. So and it's, you are, you're an operator and it just makes me think of that saying, if you want someone to do something for you, find someone busy 'cause they're gonna find a way to get it done. Now- On that note of getting stuff done, talked to me a bit in the past about how you comet-compartmentalize your time. What are your straight three points to people about how to get shit done?
Oli: Yeah. I think this is probably the most important thing actually, and it's that you don't obviously have unlimited time, but you need to be very thoughtful about how you use your time. In your nine-to-five day, I believe very strongly in a new business you should be focused on revenue-driving activity,
a lot of the time when you're a startup founder, you can be pulled [00:07:00] across many different tasks and roles and responsibilities. You need to try and bundle all the things that aren't revenue driving into out-of-hours work, right? So what I'm talking about is billing, the cap table one-to-ones even,
so that should all sit outside of nine-to-five. Nine-to-five, to keep you focused, should be, "I'm selling. I'm in the market." I may be doing marketing. Marketing would sit in that bucket, but you need to basically be creating customer opportunities to drive business value,
so that's the first thing. The second thing is it's team selection. And one of the things I realized about two years in, is that I wasn't good at most things. I was pretty good at talking to customers. I was pretty good at the big vision.
But as far as managing the team like keeping the customer up to date with progress making sure that we had our finances under control, et cetera, et cetera. I was like rubbish at all of those things. And I remember someone saying to me, and it was a good piece of advice.
He was like, "Oh, I found someone who's way better than me at most [00:08:00] things, and I started to get her to do all of this stuff." And the, the moral of the story is it took me like two years to realize basically that there was probably a lot of people out there who are way better than me at most things, and so finding those people is really important.
I had a lady called Stacey, who was basically way better than me at everything. And so what I learned from this guy, he was like, "Hey, when I employed this person I realized that, I could farm out all the tasks to her." And I did the same with Stacey. So a good example would be , employees would come to me and say "Oh, I need a pay rise."
Old Oli would've been like, "Oh, that sounds great. Let's just do it. Whatever. Fuck it." But I didn't really wanna do the pay rise because obviously that impacted the revenue, and I was trying to be a good guy and support the staff.
When I got Stacey involved, I would just be like: "Oh, that sounds like a really good idea. You should definitely get a pay rise. But why don't you go and talk to Stacey about that, right? 'Cause she's probably the one who's gonna make the decision." And it really helped me remain the leader and founder of the company, the guy with the good energy, the guy who's able to mobilize the troops, [00:09:00] but let Stacey play the administrative side in the business.
And so I think the second thing is team. And making sure you've got the right delegation. And then the third thing about spending your time, is just be thoughtful about your customers, right? It's very easy to get internal and, not be dedicating time to customers.
That's probably the thing which even now, you know, as I'm more senior, so Smartly is a business of over a thousand people. We have a six-person leadership team, which I'm on. I've learned from, all my time in the industry that making sure you spend a lot of time with customers is really important, particularly in a time now where is changing everything, and ways and workflows and processes are all being disrupted.
Making sure you're listening to the customer, spending time with the customer is extremely important. And so that would be the third thing that I would say is super critical to how you allocate your time.
What have you learned about backing people that are different to you, that have skills and think in a different way to you?
Yeah. So look, I think there are some people out there who are just quite [00:10:00] good at a lot of things. I'm not one of them, by the way. I think that, particularly in business, there are, like, these amazing people and our chief operating officer was one of them. She could just do a lot of different things.
Never wanted to speak to the customers, but pretty much everything else she had, wrapped up. Funnily, I think the, the early team you put together is super important. With all the things I mentioned earlier, in mind, the early team isn't always the team that you'll exit with.
In my instance, we had lots of changes and evolutions between day one in October twenty seventeen and, day whatever in, January twenty twenty-two. But I think, what's really important is that you continue to try and attract talent that is different to yourself and, that's why diversity is very important.
That does bring, a different flavor, a different energy, a different perspective into the room, and all of that will help you understand your customers, who are very diverse. Your team, who is also very diverse better. So that's really been important for me.
Funnily enough, I learnt very quickly because [00:11:00] the person I, you know, I started the business in twenty seventeen, with a friend who was a teacher. And he wasn't a founder because he was not from the industry, but he was, the first employee, and him and me were actually very similar. We got on extremely well. We thought it was fantastic. Agreeing on everything, and every day was a ride, but it was wonderful 'cause, we're basically both the same. And although we're still, great mates basically because we're the same, we're like a hopeless team.
We didn't compliment each other. And we just were both on the same, it was okay. It worked well for a year, but, he stayed till the end, by the way. But he, wasn't right to be alongside me as the kind of founding energy, just 'cause he was too similar
Ollie, looking at your university days and after university you've always had this sort of desire to build and and create. Yeah. Where does that come from? I don't know. It's a good question. So you're right. And just taking a step back, I've been involved in a few different businesses, and they were completely random, but I have learned a lot from each of them.
After uni I was involved in starting a car sharing company, so it allowed people [00:12:00] to sell out their empty car seats. So if you're driving from like London to Leeds back to uni, you could sell like your three seats in your car. It's a very common mode of transport in France and actually in the US.
Ride sharing they call it here in the US. I'm based in New York now. But it's not something that happens really in England. And in fact, it was pretty interesting 'cause it was in like the early days of Facebook, so we could pull in people's interests and their friends, and we could like say, "Hey, this is an interest you guys have in common, so you can listen to Coldplay or whatever," if they really want to, in the drive over.
So that was kinda cool. And that got me into the sort of tech space, but hey, like what I learned there was that marketplaces are very hard and selling to the consumer is very hard. So if you're trying to do anything where, you've gotta generate demand and supply, which is what we had to do with car sharing, we had to say "Okay, these are the people with the cars available and these are the people looking for the car journeys."
It was really hard and so ultimately that business wasn't successful. And then I built an app with sort of a similar premise, which is called iTaxishare. Now it'd be called [00:13:00] Uber, but it was allowing people to basically find people to share ta- black cabs with after a night out.
So you could, I'd say, "Oh, I'm in the blue shirt," and you'd say, "Oh, I'm in the black jacket." And this was way before like location capabilities and let's meet outside, Cost- Cafe Nero or whatever, and we're both going into Leicester Square. So that was like an interesting business.
And what I learned from that is that the consumers don't wanna pay for anything. When I provided it for free on the App Store, got eighty thousand downloads, and then I made it like sixty-nine p and it got four over the next four years or something crazy.
So people just don't-- consumer doesn't pay for anything, right? And that kind of made me realize that probably I want to do a business, like a B2B company. Actually I did one more business at the same time as doing iTaxishare. I also built a company called Big Boat Week, which is , a yachting holiday company.
This was a bit before the yacht week really took off. So we had these big gullets that were in Turkey and we took a hundred and fifty people one year. But it was young people getting drunk on boats. It wasn't a very [00:14:00] sensible idea with hindsight and we had one go to the police station and I thought "Oh, this is going to be a disaster."
And then finally I ended up when I was at Google, realizing there's this gap in the market. And the ability to see a gap is much easier when you're in the space. So I always advise people before they start any business, just really understand the space you're in.
If you wanna start a burger van, go and work at McDonald's. If you wanna build a legal company, go and be a lawyer. It sounds obvious, but it's super hard to start a business in something you know nothing about. There are some founders who do it, but mostly, the most successful founders I know are people who've, who are already in the industry and they've built something adjacent to what they were doing previously. Stripping it back, not many people build things.
I really wanna strip into why does Oli Marlow-Thomas do these things? I think there's a few things. Obviously there's lots of failure there. I've tried lots of different things.
They're pretty random. But there was a relatively consistent theme, which is they're all in technology. And, I've-- I felt that, there was a lot of opportunity in technology, particularly in the UK. I felt like all these [00:15:00] like amazing businesses were coming out of Silicon Valley, out of the US, and no one was really building tech in the UK.
The second thing was I basically just got bored at Google, right? I'd been at Google for six or seven years, as I said earlier. I'd been doing like a similar thing. And I remember talking to my boss about it, who was great, and I said, "Oh, look, I'm thinking of this idea."
And he said, "Hey, why don't you incubate it here at Google, and we can help and talk about it, and I can, guide you. And then we can launch it when you're ready." And that was super helpful. And he also said, if I, fucked it all up, I could come back to Google, which was pretty helpful.
So I suddenly had this safety net. So part of it was boredom at Google, but also this super valuable safety net that he had provided to me, which made me think "Okay, if I go and do this, it's not the end of the world. I can always return if it doesn't work out."
And that ability to have a get out of jail free card, was super valuable and one of the reasons which enabled me to do the bigger business, which was Adlib. And then the, the third and final reason is, I'm just a hungry guy. I like to keep busy. I like to get stuff done.
As we talked about [00:16:00] earlier, I don't sit too much on my ass. I'm always thinking of the next thing and plotting and planning a new big idea. And that energy is something unfortunately, and I'm sure you've talked to lots of founders, it's not something that really goes away.
You sort of-- you always have this desire to build stuff and try and create the next idea. There's something very fulfilling about, being able to come up with an idea and create and execute against that idea. And you get people talking about your idea, that's always pretty cool.
It's always super fun. As I said, I'm now based in New York and I go into these meetings and, I'm saying, "Oh, I'm the founder of, a company that Smartly acquired and it's called Adlib." And people are like, "Oh, I know Adlib." And you're like, "Wow, okay, I didn't even-- I wasn't based in the US, so I didn't even know this whole thing was going on in America when I was building the company," and that's a pretty special feeling to know that people, appreciate what you built and, saw the value in it and still remember it. Has your relationship changed with yourself or what you want from the world post exit?
a good question. I think there's a few things that the exit has [00:17:00] given me. It's definitely given me a peace of mind. I'm not speaking about anyone in particular, but it's a very stressful time for a lot of my peers right now. So whether those be colleagues or friends or whatever, I'm thirty-nine now, your life starts to accelerate very quickly.
Suddenly you've got a mortgage, and you've got kids and all that kind of stuff, and there's lots of stresses which come with all of that. And, I'm very fortunate that I don't have a lot of that traditional stress. I think also, you can't really deny that there is a competitiveness.
We're all brought up in a competitive life and, people wanna win and, in some ways I've been very fortunate 'cause I won fairly early, so I don't feel part of that sort of competitiveness to do well. I've already done that thing and, enjoyed doing it.
Took some big risks when I was younger and, to fund Adjub by the way, I sold my flat, which was a big shout. It did fund it. And I think that competitiveness, as I say is definitely-- or not having that competitiveness has definitely helped me have more of a chill approach to life.
There is, to the point I ended on last time, there is a [00:18:00] hunger in a, in an entrepreneur which can be like quite unsettling. So there's always this like burning desire for the next idea or to start the next thing. There's also some level of expectation. It's quite interesting.
Like I started with Smarly, I think I've been there three or four years now, and the amount of times I get asked, "Oh, what's next?" Is really interesting. And actually what I say is "I'm quite enjoying what I'm doing." I'm learning in a bigger business. My boss is like phenomenal.
She's on the board of Adobe and, very high-powered individual in the US. I've got amazing exposure to her learning a lot from her. And, I'm not rushing to do anything next to be honest. I also think the AI stuff will settle and then the opportunities will really appear.
You want to wait for the first wave of excitement and enthusiasm just to calm a bit, and then you can start to see the real gaps in my view, that appear in the space. But yeah, so I think that last thing is important. People have an expectation that I'm gonna do something immediately or start another company straight away or come up with a big idea, and that can put a bit [00:19:00] of pressure on.
But I've kinda found ways to deal with that and just say "Oh no, I'm happy what I'm doing at the moment," and, probably will do something but not right now. You're in a city with, with big dreamers hard workers. What do you really like to see from the people , that you spend time with? I'm fortunate enough to be able to work with a lot of my friends. So that's an amazing, opportunity.
The last few years, w-we've been on a journey. The people who were at Adlib with me, and something that's super cool actually is all of them have stayed. So I don't think anyone who was in the leadership team... Oh there's one person, but e-everyone else has left and is still part of the business that acquired us, which is quite cool.
I'm very lucky that I get to work with all my friends every day. That is a real pleasure. We spend a lot of time working, but, to be able to work alongside all my pals is a really special thing. I still, love and get energized by new ideas, right?
And a lot of the time, in my current job, I [00:20:00] spend time thinking about what the, the next shift in the industry is and how AI is gonna disrupt this specific workflow or what the opportunity is with creative, digital creative, which is something that, obviously I've spent a lot of time on.
So I think like still looking for people who are gonna challenge me and and wanna talk shop around ideas. I'm always super interested with that. In fact, you asked me earlier about, what is important in, in someone looking to start a company. The get shit done thing is really important.
The other thing that's really important and, gets bashed out of people as you get more senior is to come with ideas. At the top of a business, actually what you need is ideas. There's plenty of middle managers who can execute. You need-
different ideas, different ways of thinking about things so you can pivot and weave and adjust the business to continue grow. I was talking to a founder the other day
His business IPO'd, he's no longer involved in it. And he talked about this book called The Second Mountain, mountain one for him was, financially getting secure. Now he's super involved in funding the [00:21:00] arts. Is there a world that you'd like to commit to outside of the ad tech environment?
Yeah. And Maybe that's on a just a family level where you're just really supporting those that are really dear to you. Or maybe, , you have a real niche obsession about some hobby and you're actually diving into helping become more accessible.
This sort of very niche Yeah ... working card game yeah. No, look definitely got some niche hobbies. But right now, I, I don't know how old the guy was but I'm still pretty young, and I think to... I'm not gonna say sign off, I'm gonna say to pivot.
I think to pivot to something that was solely about fulfilling my dreams and desires w- would not be timed quite right. I'm still in an industry that is exploding. I'm in an industry that is innovating very quickly. It's probably the most disruptive time for our industry in 20 years.
There was the internet, then there was the mobile phone, and now there's AI, and in technology, that opportunity is one not to be [00:22:00] missed. I'm not saying that, at some point I won't become ex- interested in card games or something or, build my own Monopoly game.
I probably will. But for now, there's so much going on in my industry, I'm quite happy in the space, and I'm young enough, to still capitalize on it I still enjoy it a lot. Let's jump into this because, taking a step back, ad tech, really it's about, how can people spend their advertising in a more clever way to achieve their goals, acquire customers, get, people hyped about a brand.
So many amazing things and brands cover every single bracket of consumer spend, is there something counterintuitive that's true around good content firstly, just taking a step back 'cause I think sometimes advertising is deemed a bit of a dirty word, but at the moment, every single experience you have online is funded by advertising.
So whether that be videos that you watch on YouTube, whether that be articles you read [00:23:00] on
, your online experience is funded through advertising. The advertising has a huge part to play in the free web. So it is a very critical part of how we all live our lives today.
As far as like what makes a good advert, there's a few things. So- the first is, memorability, the language that we use in the industry is ad recall. Can you remember the ad that you saw? The amazing thing about AI is that, we do have the ability to build models around what is memorable.
And the way you can do that is you can train models based on, different elements of an image or different elements of a video, and you can identify things that are consistently memorable. So for example, a face is more memorable than the product, which is why increasingly you'll see like people hold the product next to a face, right?
So you'll see that a lot in advertising. That's because it's deemed to be more memorable if there's a face in it. So that's the, the first thing is memorability. Great example, oh, good. The second is attention, the other super cool thing about attention is you can also build models about [00:24:00] a-attention, right?
So you'll see in advertising, you very rarely have a white background in an advert because that isn't as cut through from an attention-grabbing perspective as, say, a pink, a red, a blue background. So almost always in a video, except in beauty ads where they try and be a bit cleaner, they'll focus on the product, it's the face.
But generally, you'll see the background color will be a different bold color to try and capture attention. 'Cause the first thing that an advertiser has to do is, is capture the eyeball, right? You sit on TikTok, you sit on Instagram, how do you make sure that you stop the scroll and you're able to capture the attention of the consumer.
Attention is super important. And then the third thing, I would say, is really important in advertising is I do believe that this idea that social, so the time you spend on TikTok, Snapchat et cetera entertainment , Netflix and Prime Video and commerce, the Amazon experience, they're all colliding for the consumer,
There's no differentiation anymore between how that time is spent. Those used to be [00:25:00] very siloed things for marketers. They would say "Oh, there's a social campaign over here. There's a big TV campaign over here." And then there's a lower funnel, product feed, let's buy the product on Amazon campaign.
And I think all of that is merging into something much more dynamic and, that's led by the influencer trait, right? So influencers who not only shop using the product, they also entertain the consumer with the way they use the product, and then you can buy the product all through that influencer experience and channel.
So I think this idea of memorability, attention, and then the consumer wanting to be entertained, wanting to shop, and wanting to have a social experience all in one space are the big shifts and the big ways you make advertising, valuable right now. value proposition products are trying to, show they've got a value prop that's bigger and better than, their competition.
But it can be truly hard to do that. Do you have any views or thoughts around how that challenge can be steered well? , Those visual plays I just [00:26:00] spoke about are like super important to cut through.
But, fundamentally, it's about re-repeating your message. Grabbing attention of the consumer is very tricky. You need to be present at the right time. And so that's why advertisers talk about what we call frequency capping. So how many times should we show someone an advert before they get sick of it?
A-and the answer is for the consumer, it's still very high. It's fifteen to eighteen times, something crazy like that. Actually, do you know, Oliver, how many ads you're exposed to every day in the UK? Yeah, I'm gonna guess which will either be edited out or not.
I reckon we see a thousand ads a day. So it's actually close to ten thousand. Oh. Which is crazy, right? The number of ads everyone's exposed to is very high, and that can be the, several hours. I think it's three and a half hours, on average, people are on social media a day, an hour on TV.
On the commute, you're exposed to huge amount of advertising on the tube and up the escalator. The actual advertising you're [00:27:00] exposed to is endless. And so y-you're hitting on something really important, which is, what advertisers spend a lot of time thinking about is, "How do I cut through?
How do I land my message, and how do I make it, something that people are gonna take an action on?" 'Cause it's not useful unless people take an action with it. So I think, the stuff I talked about earlier, plus just being thoughtful about the placement. Do you know, the placement is where you actually show up as an ad.
So is it on Instagram? Is it on, connected television, on Amazon Prime? Meta? Is it out of home, like those tube ads? All of that is extremely important as part of the strategy. And there's lots of different things to take into consideration, and that's why something that seems maybe quite simple at first suddenly becomes very complicated, as you start to scale.
talked about how quickly the advertising industry is changing. And with that, you will certainly as a business as a leader in that business and that industry, you will be getting a flavor of where things are heading short term, medium term, and long term. For the consumer, how do you see people interacting with brands in not the [00:28:00] medium and short term, but in the long run? 'Cause I get a sense ads that do well are ads that are linked to the right people. And if they're linked to the right people, ultimately , they're useful, right?
You're like, "Oh, shoot, that pair of trainers looks great. I actually want them." Therefore, I'm gonna buy them and, the business is getting a return on their ad spend. I know that, Smartly have got a partnership with OpenAI, for example, which maybe you wanna touch on, maybe you don't.
But, thinking kinda big picture where... how do you really see things changing? Let me talk about the long term at the moment, advertising is orientated towards people, right? How do we capture their attention? How do we make the ad memorable? How do we show them something that they wanna buy? If you think about how your habits are changing, and maybe you're spending time on Claude or on OpenAI, as we talked about the, the thing that's actually happening when you're writing a prompt like, "Oh, look, I need some trainers for next weekend," what's happening there is a load of agents are actually going out and, identifying the [00:29:00] trainers that might be of interest for you.
And so the future of marketing is not one of engaging with the consumer. It's one of being able to influence agents, when someone prompts a, "I need trainers for next weekend," it's how can the agent understand that it was representing your brand, what's being asked in the prompt, and how can it respond with something that, OpenAI or Anthropic are gonna surface to you as a product that you should buy.
And that's like a really important evolution in our industry. Of course there'll still be times when you're gonna search for a very specific product, but product search will be much more broad-based. It'll be like, "Hey, I want a pair of trainers. I want this to go with my green trousers, and I wanna look super slick when I turn up next Friday."
And all of those decisions behind the scenes are being made by agents. None of them are being made by you what is presented in the ultimate response to the prompt. And so that ability for, agents to understand, for example, the different products on a [00:30:00] website or agents to understand the price of those specific products or the colors of those different products, that is gonna be a very disruptive theme over the next few years.
And so if I was to talk longer term, I'd be thinking about how does marketing evolve to market to agents? Because that's gonna be the future of the purchase funnel. Can you see adverts being more linked to the consumer?
Creative instances of connection between people and product. Where does that go and that recognition of knowing exactly who people are? Personalization for some time has been like the holy grail of marketing. Do you remember when Coke did that thing where they put their name on the can?
Do you remember that? Ev-every big brand's been obsessed with it. And it is a very powerful tool. There's a data point out there that if you personalize an ad, it's three times more likely to be memorable and all the stuff I talked about earlier capture attention.
So there's definitely something there. The thing I think, is probably more likely though, is that actually we'll go through that cycle and that's been the cycle of the last few years where brands have tried to personalize and connect the dots to a world where the [00:31:00] most important thing is that brands can allow all of their content, their collateral, their imagery, their pricing to be reviewed by these agents.
So that if people are living their whole lives in ChatGPT, which I do think will be the future or Claude, then they're not interested in visiting specific websites, right? They're not interested in going to Nike to review the shoes. What they actually want is Claude or their own agent to select three trainers across Adidas, Nike, Reebok or whatever, to show them and then suggest one that they think is best based on price point and color, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think the future is, being able to respond effectively to that prompt and make sure that the different crawlers, within the AI tools can actually really understand your content collateral and price point. Different world. - let's say you want a shirt for, and you're thinking you want a quite a fun shirt.
You go on Yuk's or a business. Often the problem is the product user journey can be so average, right? Like such a huge selection. You're filtering- Yeah. Even filtering for houses, right? You want a house with a, balcony or a [00:32:00] rooftop in Rightmove. Rightmove I would have thought is the biggest platform for, searching property.
And the search criteria are pretty appalling. If you look at and you consider surely how technology can understand what we want and how the search criteria just doesn't match at all. Yeah. Do you feel connected to that frustration and excited about that going into user journeys?
I know you're pointing towards sort of all of this being done in prompts rather than websites, but does that point connect you to anything relevant? Yeah, for sure. I really believe the website will be dead quite soon, right? We'll be building websites for agents to crawl, there'll be one point of entry to the internet, which will be through, Gemini, for example, still could be through Google.
Claude, OpenAI. And all of that... I don't know whether you've tried searching through Claude, for example, for a property, you should try that and see how much better the answer engine optimization will deliver results to you.
Because if you're to put, "I need a balcony, and I need it to be two bedrooms with a bathroom, and I need my bathroom to have a bath," [00:33:00] et cetera, et cetera, they'll be able to scrape much more effectively now than any website will. So it's just worth trying that out for sure.
But yeah, I can totally relate to the, the, the shitness of these websites. They haven't improved in a long time. Yeah. And O-Ollie, hot takes from with, you with AI, what else are we gonna see? How else is the world gonna change? Yeah. So there's lots. So websites are gonna go away.
I think all of us will have much more of a support infrastructure from AI. I don't think we'll get to the stage where like I met a guy who'd built a company where you have a, thing on your chest which records everything that you're talking about, and he was like, "Oh, this is, this thing's my best friend," and stuff like that.
I was like, look, I don't think it's gonna go that way. But I do think our lives will be captured, documented, stored in technology very soon. I think probably it's more likely that will come via our phones, if I'm being honest. So our phones will provide a gateway to an always-on memory layer of the conversations that we've had and things we've agreed to, because that'll be important to inform how [00:34:00] basically AI takes over our...
the decisions in our lives. And that can be what we order in the shop to which restaurant we want to go to the conversation we had last week about television show that we want to watch. All of that stuff is gonna be captured and logged and stored in a memory layer, which will inform like decisions.
I think that, at the moment AI is very prompt and response-based. Quite soon we'll start to see the consumer getting much more comfortable with, activities happening in an always-on environment. Not the requirement to prompt and respond, review that response, and approve it.
At the moment, if you go into Claude or now they ask you to approve, for example, a simple task like, "Can you review all my emails and write their responses?" And all of that will go away. That'll just be happening and always on. Saying that, to bring this back to advertising, as we've talked about, we talked to ten thousand consumers this year about what they wanna see in advertising, and the thing that came up top.
Do you know what it was? Second was personalization. Do you wanna take a guess at what was the most important thing , to a consumer to see in advertising? [00:35:00] Authenticity. Very good. Yeah, exactly. Bang on. And with that in mind, like a whole load of AI slop or generative engine creative isn't gonna be the thing that's gonna cut through.
So all of this stuff is super important, but the human side is really gonna matter, and a good idea is something still that, is often not something a generative engine would come up with because they look for themes and trends and consistencies and... do you remember those You've Been Tangoed ads?
Do you remember those ads? No. Maybe you're a bit young, they're kinda crazy. It was like someone would open a can of Tango, it's like an orange drink, and then , the person would get blown away by orange froth or something like that, and it was like, "You've been Tangoed."
And they're like crazy memorable ads. But like no AI engine would ever come up with that, right? The greatest ad in the world or the ad that was voted the best in the world was the Guinness ad, where, there's these guys surfers who are like surfing on a wave. It's basically about how you wave your Guinness pint.
And they're waiting for the wave, and they surf the wave dah. It's got an [00:36:00] amazing soundtrack. No AI capability would have ever come up with that idea, right? So there's still a lot to be said for human the human input, and I think particularly in the creative industries.
How you come up with an idea is gonna become more valuable than ever. To the point I said earlier about making sure that you have ideas, that's a really important part of this. And Arthur, you're brilliant at always having lots of ideas, so you'll be grand with it. Fingers crossed.
Where are you in terms of the broader direction of AI and society I think it's too late to have that discussion. You may have seen last night OpenAI were pretty vocal about a project that they're running.
And basically, the models had trained themselves to infiltrate a competitor's database. And, this is the direction of the industry. This is not gonna be a, one and done thing. I-in my view, AI is extremely powerful and quite dangerous. So I do think that it's something that governments and, businesses are gonna have a responsibility to get hold of and [00:37:00] manage.
But I also think any idea that this isn't happening is just not the case, right? So this is happening. . We're way past the period where this could be very effectively managed. So now it's about, how do we put, appropriate guardrails around these capabilities and make sure that, the example like what happened last night with OpenAI don't happen again.
But I'm afraid the role of AI is gonna be to improve our lives in the same way the internet did, the mobile phone did, and the television did. It's gonna be very powerful and improvable. With all of those things comes some risks, and I think those risks n- it's required that they're properly, understood, validated, and governed.
But we're a long way off, off that for now. I don't think governments have a very good hold on a lot of this stuff. I did notice that, they just appointed an AI minister, in the UK, but he seems to be basically a politician all his life. So I think his understanding of AI probably is fairly limited.
They need people who can really understand this stuff and support [00:38:00] and partner to build governance and guardrails around the capabilities.
Ollie, thanks so much for your time today. We're lucky to get you for so many different reasons, no, it's great.
Thanks very much for having me on. I enjoyed it.
