Oliver sits down with Orlando Wood, Chief Innovation Officer at System1 Group and author of Lemon and Look Out, to unpack how advertising has shifted from right-brain showmanship to left-brain salesmanship, and why that’s costing brands attention, memorability, and growth.

From Yorkshire Tea’s witty, character-led “Everything’s Done Proper” to the unsettling “stare” creeping into modern branding, Orlando shows how right-brain showmanship, story, character, humor, and music consistently outperform left-brain salesmanship, tight close-ups, on-screen commands, and cut-heavy edits. He explains how rebalancing the two can boost emotional connection, embed memories, and make both brand building and performance work harder across B2C and B2B.

With billions wasted on dull ads, the stakes are real: emotionally engaging creative amplifies extra-share-of-voice returns, reduces price sensitivity, and strengthens brand salience. 

For marketers, creatives, and business leaders, this episode delivers actionable insights on anchoring ideas in brand purpose, stress-testing creative through iterative sprints, and using automation to amplify, not replace, emotional storytelling.

 

11:16 The Cultural Shift from Showmanship to Salesmanship Advertising

23:08 Left Brain vs Right Brain Processing and Its Impact on Creative Work

32:30 The Star Rating System and Measuring Creative Effectiveness

50:51 Yorkshire Tea Campaign as Perfect Right-Brain Advertising

55:58 Why Humor Works: Attention, Memory, and Emotional Reward 

 

00:02:32:16 - 00:02:38:04
Olly
Well, Orlando, welcome to the audience connection. It's great to have you here.

00:02:38:06 - 00:02:49:07
Olly
before I hand over to you to do a bit of an introduction to your work and your
audience, and how you connect with them. I just want to talk a little bit about
how I found out about your work.

So I was speaking to someone at channel four about how to improve the creativity in our work.
Casual. And he mentioned your book, Lemon. And so I had a read of that. And I
would say it sort of changed everything for me. And now whenever I'm walking
along seeing print ads or out of home or, any really creative content, I'm
constantly assessing whether it's left or right balance.

00:03:14:16 - 00:03:17:03
Olly
It's fascinating. So it's completely changed how I see

00:03:17:03 - 00:03:18:15
Orlando
well, I'm sorry about that. Yeah.

00:03:18:15 - 00:03:30:08
Olly
I'm fascinated to dive into this and unpack it with you. So
please, if you could, give us a brief introduction to your work, and who you
speaking to every day?

00:03:30:08 - 00:03:35:06
Orlando
Well, first of all, lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me on.

I'm I guess, a researcher on advertising. What makes advertising work? So my
audience is anyone in marketing or who touches marketing. So the C-suite,
also, advertising agencies, media agencies, media owners, anyone interested
in improving the effectiveness of their advertising. And that's really, what I'm
about. I've written a couple of books for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising
called lemon, the one you mentioned, and lookout more recently. And I've also
launched a course on creative effectiveness with Sir John Hegarty called
Advertising Principles Explained, or AIP for short and

the company I work for is called system one, and I'm the chief
innovation officer there.  And I have really shaped the tools that they use to measure advertising and to
measure its likely effectiveness, and have created some tools that help  advertisers to get towards better,

more engaging work that connects with audiences. More effective work.

00:04:41:14 - 00:04:47:11
Olly
Yeah, that. And that's something we've always talked about at casual in terms
of how do you measure the even though, you know, I guess measuring.

00:04:48:21 - 00:04:49:20
Orlando
The magic, how do you do.

00:04:49:20 - 00:04:51:07
Olly
It? Yeah, actually, if it's a it's like a dark art. Right. So and there's a star rating system, one to it. Can you talk us
through a little bit around how you do actually measure the effectiveness

00:04:58:01 - 00:05:32:17
Orlando
we do. Well we show people advertising and we ask them, you know, large
numbers, quantitative numbers, how they feel about what they've seen and
how they feel about it during the ad as well. And from these things and
comparing these, you know, results of many, many tests with effectiveness
data in the real world, we've created a star rating, a bit like a, you know, the
stars on a, on a Hollywood poster, you know, sort of five stars being the best.

That tells, the advertiser very quickly and easily, you know, how likely it is to
engage the audience and how likely it is to drive growth, because emotion is an
extremely good predictor of salience, because it sort of captures attention,
helps to put things in memory. And then, you know, it's also something that
draws us towards the thing in question. So, you know, it helps to
give you a sense of whether you're creating preference in the audience and
that's as well as salience. And so that's extremely important. So it's a measure
for what I describe as showmanship advertising. And and we have another
measure as well called spike, which is all about your short term, effects.

But but showmanship is, is measured through a star rating system. So I've
helped to develop that over the years. I mean, that 20 years now. So, that's, that's,

00:06:29:08 - 00:06:31:11
Olly
so you have a huge amount of data there.

00:06:31:11 - 00:06:39:21
Orlando
Yeah, we do. I mean, we have we tested something like 100 and 670,000 ads
now, and, I'm growing, you know, all the time.

00:06:39:21 - 00:06:44:19
Olly
So let's you're back in terms of lemon, when you you wrote this book a number
of years ago. Now, and you talk about the cultural and creative shift in work over the years, really,
it goes right back through history, this, this going back and forth. Was there a
moment where there was a tipping point for you where you realized really sort of hang on a
minute, Something's wrong.

00:06:58:20 - 00:07:08:09
Orlando
Yeah, yeah. Well, perhaps I should just start by explaining the basic premise of
the book, which is. Which is that, and it was written in 2019,  and it was that advertising had changed

quite markedly in style over the preceding sort of 15 years  towards ever from advertising that had narrative and character
that was more showmanship, like, if you like, towards advertising that had
become very direct and very, close up and lots of short, sharp cuts that felt very rhythmic, that, had words on the
screen telling you what to do, you know. And that this shift in advertising style was
impeding advertising, the ability to, to create an emotional connection in the
audience. And that was actually a shift towards this kind of salesmanship,
towards this direct response kind of advertising that had come about really
through changes in media, you know, the ability to target people more, ever
more narrowly, the, ability to measure quickly the response, the immediate
response that's given in engagement or clicks or clicks through, you know, to advertising. And you know that this was
the advertising tech world had sort of resulted in a change in advertising style,
and that was damaging effectiveness. And it was helping to explain the fall in effectiveness that my IPA colleague piece of field had observed. You
know, previously, and he wrote about the crisis in creative effectiveness, that same year.

00:08:40:04 - 00:08:45:14
Orlando
So, so I was helping to explain, well, why why is advertising
less effective now and it's less effective partly and in no small part, down to
that shift in advertising style. So I, how did I come across this? Well,
a number of lucky coincidences, really, I suppose, the first being that I'd done
some work, actually, with Pisa in the years before, trying to understand what had happened to characters in advertising.

And I, came up with a term called the fluent Device, which was,
my way of describing, well, a kind of character or a repeatedly used scenario.
So, like, should have gone to Specsavers, for instance, or, you know, a
character like, I don't know, the meerkats, you know, the competitive
market.com and what I showed using the IPA effectiveness data and, and with
Peter as well was that certainly that kind of character fluent device had been disappearing over a
previous, you know, ten, 20 years.

And not only that, but what we found was that it was much more effective and
than long running campaigns that didn't have a repeatedly used character,
repeatedly used, you know, scenario, and that actually we should be bringing
them back. So, you know, whereas once we used to see things like smash
Martians, you know, or the Hofmeister bear, I mean, John Webster, a great
creative, you know, invented many, many of the long running characters that I
certainly grew up with as a, as a child.

00:10:20:20 - 00:10:22:12
Orlando
You know, those things that disappeared and they disappeared in this tech age, in this, you know, advertising tech age.
And you could, you know, it's almost as one goes down, you know, as people
using social media for their advertising. You know, increasingly the the fluent
device have been disappearing. So I, I couldn't quite put my finger on why, you
know, why is it why is the fluent device just, you know, disappearing this
character.

00:10:49:14 - 00:11:12:05
Orlando
And it was only a little while later that I came across the work of Ian Gilchrist
and actually, it was, my colleague John Kieran, who had been to an event that
Ian was at with Rory Sutherland, and Rory actually introduced me to Ian, a
Gilchrist and I read his work and it was just like, almost like scales falling from your eyes,
you know? I mean, it sounds sounds silly to say, but it was, you know, and and what Ian
describes in his work is, I mean, he's a he's a neuropsychologist. He's a psychiatrist. I mean, he's a
philosopher. Really. And what he talks about through his work, looking at, brain
injuries, brain scans, patients, you know, he's had.

00:11:40:10 - 00:11:51:08
Orlando
Is that the two hemispheres of the brain look at the world or bring a different
kind of attention to bear on the world, and that the right hemisphere sort of presents the world to us.

00:11:54:17 - 00:12:10:09
Orlando
And it's it is what gives us this sort of broad vigilance, alertness, this always on
kind of vigilance. So it's sort of alert to things that are just happening slightly
off stage, you know, just at the edge of our awareness and anything of interest. It passes to the left hemisphere for this sort of much
more narrow beam attention to be brought to bear.

And the the two hemispheres. It doesn't stop there because, you know, the
mark differences between the way that they and partly down to the the way
that they're structured by the way. But the right hemisphere

00:12:32:07 - 00:12:42:18
Orlando
is interested in the living. It's interested in context, social context, it can
understand, you know, it's sort of it gives us theory of mind.

So, you know, it helps me to understand what you might be thinking about,
what I might be saying type thing, you know, so empathy and it also helps,
therefore it helps us to understandnbodily expression, emotion through the, through the face and body voice,
accents, you know, emphasize all the things that wrap around the words, the
implicit, if you like.

00:13:07:22 - 00:13:16:20
Orlando
It was very good at picking up on those cues. And it's helps us to understand
narrative and helps us to understand metaphor. And you know that
something on two levels. You know, it might the two opposing thoughts might
actually both be true at the same time, you know, and it helps us to understand
ambiguity therefore, or appreciate ambiguity.

00:13:28:13 - 00:13:30:07
Orlando
It helps us also to understand and appreciate music. Things happening and lift time helps us to
appreciate, humor, particular I mean, like metaphor, humor, metaphor, narrative,
music, all of those things or different kinds of language, if you like. And they,
they require a different kind of way of thinking. Anyway, the right hemisphere is
very good at those things.

00:13:58:11 - 00:14:03:14
Orlando
So we'll come up to explain why that's important for advertising in a minute.
But the left hemisphere is quite different. So the left hand is not very good at
those things. It's not is pretty awful with people actually can't really understand
these two. Sees them as an assemblage of parts, you know, an eye and ear,
you know, a.

00:14:16:09 - 00:14:18:00
Olly
think I know a few people who I left brain to

00:14:18:00 - 00:14:33:15

Orlando
I mean, it may be true, but, so it likes things to be direct. It can't be doing with
ambiguity or anything that is not sort of black or white, you know, there's this
thing or that and it's very, prone to breaking things up into smaller parts so that it can
manipulate them. I mean, this is really what sort of science generally tends to
do not all the way, not all kinds of science, but, you know, breaking things up into
component parts to reconstruct them. And then and then, you know, and
manipulate the world it likes. It's quite controlling the left hemisphere as well.
So, it likes tools and things with which to manipulate the world.
And it can't do with music any basic rhythm.

00:15:04:22 - 00:15:20:04
Orlando
It's more it's not principally involved in the processing of language, but
language is certainly something that the left hemisphere, excels in. And so you
get you sort of build up this picture of, you know, two very different  ways of attending to the world. And I was reading Ian's work. I done this work
on fluent devices with Peter, and I was sitting there one evening watching television.
And it was a particularly, abstracted car. I had. And I just thought, hang on a
minute, what we seem to be creating advertising that feels a bit more like it's suited to the left hemispheres preferences. And so
I, I thought about this a bit longer and I did some preliminary research looking
at, you know, what's the sorts of features of, advertising on film, you could say,
that are more likely to appeal to the right hemisphere.

So narrative, people connecting with each other, knowing glances between people, you
know, the unexpected. I mean, there are all sorts of things I looked at and the
sorts of things that might be more, you know, suited to the left hemispheres,
preferences. So abstraction, things close up, short, sharp cuts, words on the
screen, that kind of thing.

And what I found by looking at System One's data was that it was the it was
advertising which had these right hemisphere features that was much more
likely to connect with people. So surprise, surprise, narrative movement,  relationships between people, music, that kind of thing.

And this left hemisphere orientated advertising was very, very poor at creating an emotional
response. It just creates an emotional response.

So, then, you know, I did this historical analysis that looked back over 30 years or so. It's quite difficult to get back to
ads, you know, going back that far and found that over time, there'd been this
kind of swing starting in around 2006, away from advertising, with narrative, with movement, with drama towards
advertising t hat was very left brained, if you put it that way. That was trying to nudge the
sale, really.

So we'd moved from showmanship to salesmanship, and that, was
one of the many things behind the fall in effectiveness that Peter Field had
observed in and about the same time, but a very crucial and important factor.
So that's what the book lemon was about.

And it was in a way, I think pretty well received at the time. And people sort of felt,
you know, you sort of articulated something that we've all felt, but we can't we
couldn't really put it into words. And Onion's work, you know, was extremely
helpful in, in putting it into words, really because the right hemisphere generally
doesn't speak very much.

00:18:23:04 - 00:18:27:23
Orlando
It's the left hemisphere that does all the talking, and the right hemisphere gives
you  it sort of senses what's going on, but, you know, probably can't, can't, can't
explain it very well. And so what I was doing was giving a language to
creatives, giving a language to marketeers, actually to explain the kind of
advertising to kind of what kind of films actually, that are going to connect with
people, and the sort that isn't.  So that was lemon that was the that was the start of it.

And in lemon, of course, I talk about different times in history where you can see these sort of swings between a
kind of, generally a culture that's not accepting of the right hemisphere. And
those times where you, you know, you sort of see in art things going a little bit more towards the left
hemisphere. And I, I delve into that a little bit more and look out my next book.

00:19:17:11 - 00:19:32:18
Olly
Yeah. And I think that's so interesting about the, the scientific side of the left
hemisphere and how, you know, when, when you've got something, a
technological or industrial revolution going on that seems to dominate. And
then you get this more left brain swing that's  going on at that.

00:19:33:09 - 00:19:54:15
Orlando
Yeah, I think so. And that's what that's what I was that's what I really tried to
tackle and look out the next book I wrote and that looked at detention in a bit
more detail and looked at the the relationship between these two types of
advertising and the kind of business effect that they end up creating. And so in
that book,

00:19:54:15 - 00:20:09:17
Orlando
You know, I talked about these other periods in history where you get this
swing towards and culture towards a very, you know, hierarchical, controlling,
left brain kind of period. And I talked a bit about the Reformation, and what happened
following the invention of the printing presses and how the printing presses, I
mean, you have to look back that far, really, to encounter anything like the
invention of the internet, because it gave people the ability to, you know,
publicize what they were thinking and talk about things.

00:20:29:00 - 00:20:42:07
Orlando
Yeah, yeah. And you had, you know, conspiracy theories and all sorts of things
going on there and as well and, and people were fearful and anxious and it was
around 1500 that you start to see this kind of rigidity come through in art and this sort of, the sort of stare that,
you know, in and in quite a lot of the art of the period.

But in particular, you see this, that same stare in work of modern, modernist,
avant garde artists around 1905, 1910. That was a feature of modernism. It was this sort of just sort of blank stare, you
know, people in, portraits of people just staring and that, of course, followed
another period of of, enormous upheaval, you know, technological change,
invention of, you know, I suppose, well, what the x ray photography, film, the
car, you know, airplanes, all these things were happening at the time.

00:21:34:00 - 00:21:38:00
Orlando
And there was also, you know, with increased manufacturing,
more people working in factories, these sort of repetitive conditions. And you
get this rise in schizophrenia at the time, actually, which has a lot in common
with left hemisphere dominance. So, mirrors in quite, quite closely and you get
in, in art this sort of, you know, this sort of abstraction, Picasso, you know, was,
was, someone who deliberately went out of his way to make art scientific.

You know, science was the thing. And so everything started to be abstracted or
atomized, and you just get bits of things. I very much like the way the left hemisphere would look at the world, actually,

if you got the left hemisphere and  you can do this to sort of draw a person, it would just all be bits of eyes and legs and noses
and that sort of thing.

So, so you get this shift in art then, and it would have been a time very much
like our own in the last 10 or 15 years of a kind of creeping rigidity, fearfulness
and loss of humor. You know, are you everyone a bit on edge? And that is,
that's what I was really trying to capture in look out and how this had  manifested itself in advertising, because advertising is a barometer for culture.
You know, it leads but it also echoes and what's going on in the world. 
one of the things I talked about in that book was this was the stair and how you
could see it a lot in advertising and how it's sort of a controlling, coercive kind
of, you know, it's like when you're it's either you're fixing your prey, you know,
the left hemisphere is all about grasping and with the right hand, and it's sort of
fixing your prey, but it's also, you know, look of helplessness from the prey up
to the up to the predator, you know, and so there's this sort of stare that's very,
very disconcerting in advertising and people  look away from it. So I was trying to show that that was another, yet another
feature that push people away. but what I really did in that book was show how showmanship, narrative,
humor, character, emotional expression, all those things, drove broad and
lasting effects. And that this salesmanship, which was which was very close up words on the
screen, a bit more direct, you know, was actually driving a different kind of
direct response effect, not as lasting, more of a one trick pony, really.

Whereas, you know, the showmanship is is solidifying the all the business
fundamentals as well as driving growth and sales. And we were moving
towards this salesmanship and everything that we were doing. And that is
dangerous for businesses because they soon run out of runway and things
don't seem to work anymore, you know, and you've got to keep leaning on the
showmanship. You got to keep pushing the showmanship. 
because the showmanship actually also helps the salesmanship.

00:24:52:17 - 00:24:55:21
Olly
Because you do something you both you need, but consequently you move
away from it.

00:24:55:23 - 00:24:58:02
Orlando
You need both. You need both.

00:24:58:04 - 00:24:59:09
Olly
But it's lend to far, but.

00:24:59:09 - 00:25:16:14
Orlando
It's gone too, too far towards the salesmanship. And, you know, we got to kind
of first of all, we got to refine the art, we got to refine the show, and we've got
to, you know, create work that people actually want to watch. Like they actually
quite enjoy watching.

00:25:16:16 - 00:25:28:02
Olly
If, if this. So if we have this swing towards the left and I think it's so interesting
about the stare, and I think from one of your books you talk about or one of
your podcasts, I've listened to you talk about the BBC one. I don't it's

00:25:28:02 - 00:25:29:11
Olly
Oh yes. Yes. and, seek them out. Impartial by Martin

00:25:32:07 - 00:25:33:12
Orlando
Right. Yes, yes.

00:25:33:12 - 00:25:33:23
Olly
He and everybody's sort of like boxing. And then they all turn and look at the character.

00:25:37:15 - 00:25:38:15
Orlando
Absolutely.

00:25:38:15 - 00:25:40:05
Olly
And it's a very fixed style.

00:25:40:05 - 00:25:55:12
Orlando
Oh, God. It's terrifying. You know, there's one, there's one. I think it's set in
Digbeth in Birmingham with the boxers. They're all sort of like that. They're all
sort of boxing each other. And then and then they stop, put their gloves down
and just turn to the camera and they're all staring at you. It's like, what are you
trying to say here?  You know, come on then. Yeah, exactly. It's exactly that.

00:25:58:23 - 00:26:00:10
Olly
Yeah, yeah, I think.

00:26:00:12 - 00:26:19:19
Orlando
Why what how is this, you know, elevating culture. How is it elevating? You
know, anything. You know, it's sort of it's quite aggressive, but it's something
that we just sort of some reason we slipped into, other thing and it was asking,
well, why are we doing that? You know.

00:26:19:19 - 00:26:29:13
Olly
What when you've seen these obviously there's periods of left brain
dominance. And then, then there's a more right brain accepting culture. What's
the swing that brings it back towards the right.

00:26:29:16 - 00:26:59:12
Orlando
Well, What? Other than war? Gradually. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I think
there's gradually. Well, sometimes it does, unfortunately end in revolution or
conflict or something, but I think really people ultimately get bored. They get
bored of it. And I had enough of it. And and, you know, there is somehow it, you
know, humanity comes back, you know, it swings back.

Because people rather enjoy it, you know, they enjoy the narrative, they enjoy
and, and connect with it better, you know, I mean, look back and look back at
history, you know, the Reformation finally came to an end probably 180 years
after it all started. It it will happen more quickly for us because, you know, to
communicate science being better and more immediate.

But that took quite a while and eventually, you know, so sort of new pragmatism
sort of came through, particularly in the Low Countries, you know, commerce.
And you get a, a really sort of something else express starts to express itself.
And in the Baroque era, it's quite interesting. I took the bits about in my books,
architecture, you know, became all about it was sort of human proportions,
flourishes, beauty, frankly, and and not symmetry, but a slight, slight
asymmetry because symmetries is, you know, something right.

00:28:01:07 - 00:28:18:18
Orlando
For, you know, argues is a thing of the left hemisphere. But asymmetry sort of
incorporates symmetry but gives you something else as well, you know, and
that's more interesting to the human eye. In fact, a recent study I was I was,
looking at I think it was, Sussex University, they showed babies, some brutalist
architecture, pictures of it and pictures of Baroque architecture.

And they looked at the Baroque architecture, and it's like four week old babies
or something. And a very, very really young, really young, and they looked at
the, they were looking for, you know, like ten times longer, the Baroque
architecture with its human forms, it's it's, you know, it was the it was and the
art at the time as well.
It was all about human body. It was about movement, expression, humor as
well. And that period, I mean, that was a popular art, you know, it was an art
that peop people connected. But naturally, the Catholic Church sort of
sponsored it because it was a way of communicating, you know, the stories of
the church in visual form, in an arresting visual form.
And note how the Reformation and, you know, Protestantism was all about the
word, you know, so very different. And actually those two things you can see through
the history of advertising, too, you can see it in, you know, the original posters
of the 1880s, 1890s were color. A color came in, in printing methods, and it was
all about the show.

00:29:39:04 - 00:29:47:12
Orlando
It was more March to Paris and everything was happening then.
Toulouse-Lautrec and others share a about ten, 15, 20 years later, go to North America, you find the original
salesmanship in print, sort of thinkers Claude Hopkins, Albert Lasker, you know,
they're all about the word, you know, that they. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And how,
you know, nobody patronized the clown and it's all about, you know, giving
people a reason why they should buy and that that what that was sort of
became salesmanship, advertising, direct response, what it might call
performance today.
And then, you know, this showmanship which predated it, you know, it was doing actually a different job because the showmanship is
there to capture your attention large through emotion, you know, a memory,
and make your brand salient. Some prefer salient and preferred, you know, in
the future. And it works on people who are in the buying window now, but also
works for people in the future as well.

So, you know, helps you to grow over long periods immediately and in long,
over long periods. Whereas salesmanship really is only speaking to those in the
buying window. That's the 5% of people who are ready to buy right now.

And so it's much more targeted. It has to be more targeted for it to work. You
know, you're already speaking to the half interested.
And we've seen that swing, you know, because they they looked at the original
salesmanship, people who looked returns from coupons in magazine advertising. So it's the original kind of split
test really, you know, and and which one is going to drive the greater direct
response, whereas showmanship was there to capture people in the street, you
know, and, and, and everyone and so but you've had that I think you've got that
same thing happening in the last 20, 30 years with us as we've moved from a
period of showmanship following the creative revolution in the 60s, 70s, 80s,
90s towards, you know, in this digital world, this ability to target the half
interested,  give them a reason why they should buy a nudge, nudge the sale. And that's,
that's that pattern. You know, we see it again and again. It's this swing partly
down to the the media changes, the media,  improvements, inverted commas, you know, as they happen. 

00:32:09:06 - 00:32:19:22
Olly
And you can just feel it in yourself as well. Can you like when you think back to
the well for personally, when I think back to those ads in the 90s or, you know,
the, the, the there's a Weetabix one with a black beauty one and it's

00:32:19:22 - 00:32:21:04
Orlando
Yes, yes, yeah.

00:32:21:05 - 00:32:21:23
Olly
And then at the same time next week, you know.
You know that that just still resonates with me and
I can't think of any ads,

00:32:27:04 - 00:32:30:07
Orlando
Know, playful, interesting. You know,

00:32:30:07 - 00:32:36:02
Olly
There are obviously some exceptions there. But thinking about B2B specifically,
I think often there's the B2C environment where it's like, you know, you do have
that advertising, creative that's going out. And often it's it's the
counterargument to doing that type of work in B2B as well, where you need to
explain what we're doing here. It's, you know, that this maybe it's in tech and
you need to explain the product.

00:32:55:23 - 00:33:04:05
Olly
What would you say to those brands that have drifted into more of a left brain?
But it's B2B and they just think this is what we need to explain everything,
because that's a problem. I think we often come up against.

00:33:06:03 - 00:33:08:06
Orlando
That's right. Well, you, you know, you the same principles apply in B2B as they do in BC. First of all first thing to say,
But in B2B, you also need to think about the 95% of people who aren't in your
in your buying window right now, and it's actually you probably got some quite
long purchase cycles in B2B depending on the category sector.

So you need to be talking to people who aren't immediately ready to buy from
you now. But the who might be ready to buy from you in 2 or 3 years time,
because if you're at the top of the list automatically at that point, then you're in
a very strong position you're most likely going to be, you know, they're going to
come to you. 
So you've got to you've got to think, think ahead a little bit. And one of the one
of the hallmarks of Salesmanship, I suppose, all this sort of left brain, kind of advertising is that it
tends to be seeking to demonstrate superiority in some way. Whereas
showmanship, its main goal other than to create mental availability, salience, is
to create preference.

And I think that's a very different way of thinking about about, you know, what's
needed. And by the way, in convey and creating preference, it also does the
superiority job in a sort of more oblique way. At the same time. So what
happens in, in B2B is there is this automatic sort of feeling that, you know, no
one's going to you're not going to get fired for creating salesmanship,
advertising or, you know, in, or performance advertising in, in B2B because,
you know, you basically it's, it's from the companies pushing out why its
product is good and why you should buy it, giving you the reason why you
should buy.

00:35:06:09 - 00:35:31:03
Orlando
But and everyone internally thinks, well, of course, this is, this is
marvelous, you know, and yes, our product is better than anyone else is. And,
of course, that's right. But you know what it's not doing and what showmanship
does is it sort of turns the telescope round the other way. And it looks at your
company, your product, through the audiences eyes.
And this is what Bill Burback did really in the 1960s. Turn it around the other
way and spoke. And it speaks to people as if in a sort of more everyday, human
way, you know, way that connects with people, that respects their intelligence,
that they'll get it. You know, that they'll they'll understand the joke, that they'll
understand if you're a bit self-deprecating about what you do, you know that
actually this shows a sense of humility.

00:36:02:01 - 00:36:31:08
Orlando
And actually, I might quite like to buy from them because they're not shooting
their mouth off. It's relatable and and it's human, and it projects a personality.
And that's really important in showmanship. And it also, puts things in terms
you understand, you know, rather than starting with the tech solution. And, you
know, assuming that, you know, people are going to be interested in why your
tech solution is marginally better than the other person's, you know it.
00:36:31:10 - 00:37:00:22
Orlando
If you can connect with people in that human way, understand human
motivation. Tell in a through narrative, you know, find the magic in your
product, basically. Then you're in a much stronger position. And and the other
way, I mean, you know, so so that is important. I in B2B this can be done
through advertising, but it can also be done through other things, through
thought leadership, through interesting.
Through podcasting can be done. You know, it can be done through, writing
books. It can be done through creating partnerships with people, which comes

from some of that thought leadership. And it can also come, through just, you
know, important relationship building. So it's it's sort of all the things that B2C
does, but with a few other things that you need to do as well.

00:37:28:15 - 00:37:33:21
Orlando
And, really, it's just projecting a human side of yourself, of your company.

00:37:34:03 - 00:37:45:19
Olly
Because that will bring that fame, as you say, won't it, if you if you kind of have
that awareness and rightly stated before, when, when a brand suddenly comes
to produce that work your your front of mind because you produce something
that.

00:37:46:04 - 00:37:52:14
Orlando
That's right, that's right. You've done something memorable watchable
worthwhile.

00:37:52:14 - 00:38:07:11
Olly
what are the signs? If there's a team that's drifting into left brain work, what are
there? Are there any kind of watch outs? Is there anything you could have as a
CMO or someone leading a team where you kind of you can catch it before it's
too late?

00:38:07:22 - 00:38:33:02
Orlando
Yeah. Well, you could read my books first of all. Yes. That they give you a few
pointers, go on the course. That would be very helpful. And it's why I created
the course, actually, because, you know, I wanted to sort of explain to a a new
generation of marketeers who've grown up in the performance world, you
know, the difference between these two schools of advertising, how to tell the
difference? Because if you can't tell the difference between the how can you brief, how
can you receive the work, how can you judge it? How can you sell it in to your
to your business if you don't have the evidence or the or the or the language
really to describe it? But, no. Apart from my, my published works and, and
indeed my, my course, I think you can sort of tell in the way that, you know, you might have had a character before, but suddenly
your character has disappeared or, you know, you're not using it anymore. You
know, you're moving from advertising that might, as I put it, have character
incidents in place towards advertising that's much more abstract. Short, sharp
cuts. That's, close up on the product you know, that there's just words telling you what to think. And one of the great
things about showmanship, important things about showmanship, is you've got
to give the audience something to do. So they've got to sort of draw out leave
space. So if when baiting the trap with cheese, always leave room for the
mouse, great creative Howard Gossage once put it.

00:39:43:18 - 00:40:21:01
Orlando
And, so that's because then if they're joining the dots, then they're, they're
going to remember it better. And and it's going to work on them better. But a lot
of, salesmanship advertising is just about, you know, tell you tell you what you
need to know, you know, and why. We better type thing. But showmanship is,
is, is is more charming, is more delicate than that, in a way, and so much more
powerful because of it, because you're encouraging the audience to come in
and you'll rewarding them by getting them to do some of the work.

00:40:21:01 - 00:40:29:01
Orlando
And then they they get it and they, they might smile or they might laugh and it's
sort of that's clever, you know. And I've got it

00:40:29:01 - 00:40:34:17
Olly
and you can see it registering on someone's face when they're talking about,
they're talking to my wife about ads that she's like from when she was a child.
Like, you know, again, it's really, brilliant conversation and it's Sparky and it's
like you can see people smiling.

00:40:42:10 - 00:40:44:07
Orlando
Faces light up, their eyes light up.

00:40:44:08 - 00:40:44:18
Olly
Yeah,

00:40:44:18 - 00:40:45:08
Orlando
Yeah.

00:40:45:08 - 00:40:59:14
Olly
So in terms of the, the that's what's great about the creative side of it, but in
terms of the business risk or benefit to this, you've measured the actual the
gain you could have by doing more of this, type of content. Right. People embraced. Yes,
extra share a voice for example. Can you talk a little bit

00:41:04:03 - 00:41:27:09
Orlando
Yes. So, so one of the principles of, I suppose the about media investment is
this notion of extra share of voice that, you know, if you're spending in line with
your size, you will, you know, your share of market will remain steady. But if
you spend more than your share of market so above your size, if you like,
you're more likely to grow.

00:41:27:11 - 00:41:58:10
Orlando
And the work that I've done with Peter Field, and that we've subsequently
repeated many times across many categories. System one shows that, you
know, if you've got more emotionally engaging work, then the amount by which
you can expect to grow with that extra share of voice, you know, is far greater
with, you know, with, with that high emotional, highly emotional work.

00:41:58:12 - 00:42:33:18
Orlando
And so it's a way of amplifying your media spend if you've got highly engaging
emotional work because emotion helps to orientate our attention, but it also
helps to put things in memory and those that that's pretty important. And
communication and it and it brings about I mean emotion is a psychological
change in the viewer. You know it is we are creating a psychological change
and shifting the way that people might think or feel about you at the same time.

00:42:33:18 - 00:43:08:15
Orlando
So emotion is extremely important. In fact, we we recently did some work. My
colleague, John Evans with, Adam Morgan did something called The Cost of
Dull and they looked at, you know, just how expensive doing Dole advertising
is. And, you know, I think the figures in the UK, well, you know, about about a
billion, pounds worth, I think it was 10 billion in the US or thereabouts of
advertising, you know, on, on TV is, is dull.

00:43:08:17 - 00:43:30:23
Orlando
And then, you know, when you factor in how much sort of money is wasted on
that, I mean, how much you'd have to spend on that to make it as effective as
that, as, as engaging advertising. Then you know, you can you can sort of
multiply that by ten again, you know, so it's sort of, the cost of dole.

00:43:30:23 - 00:43:44:11
Orlando
Why are we doing things that are great? That's a dole in the first place, and
they're costing us more money. Yeah. You know, people talk about the risks
associated with showmanship. Well, the risk is actually so not doing the
showmanship really.

00:43:44:11 - 00:44:03:22
Olly
Okay. So I can imagine some of our listeners being I will this is above the line.
This is advertising this the big budget. So that you know you can do all the
testing. You can create these really creative ideas. If we think about that from a
sort of corporate comms angle people are doing or recruitment in their day or
those types of areas, their budgets are going to be smaller.
But this is still a case for doing this type of work

.
00:44:06:23 - 00:44:28:17
Orlando
There is absolutely. Yeah. I mean in I mean really it's a way of it's how you
approach things isn't it. You know, it's, you know, going back to those modes of
attention, are we oe in the grasping mode, which is the, the left hemisphere

stalking people to try to get, you know, a sale and which is what I mean.

00:44:28:22 - 00:44:58:11
Orlando
And that is the temptation. You know, I use the word stalking. I mean, John
Haggerty, it's the John Haggerty talks about, you know, we become an industry
of stalkers. You know, I mean, as far as I know, that's illegal, you know, but
that's kind of how we how we've set up, you know, the things, or are we there
to perform and charm and beguile and bring people towards us and that this it
is so much more powerful and, and it's what kind of attention do you want to
bring to bear on, on things so that,
broad beam, human narrative, all of those things are hugely

00:45:05:23 - 00:45:10:14
Orlando
important. And in, in any business trying to even if you haven't got huge
budgets for, you know, TV advertising, then there are other ways in which you
can do it. As I said, podcasting is a very good one. I think you are influencing in
that in that sense, creating content, creating,
films, writing books, partnering with others to write books, showing a human
side to keep your brand before the public.

00:45:41:10 - 00:46:08:03
Orlando
That's that's what that's what it's about. And so can we find ways in which to
do that and what what we've found actually in pretty much every above the line
type, environment, media environment is that these two schools of advertising
exist wherever you look, and they give you similar kinds of effect, not same,
same scale of effect, that similar kinds of effect.
wherever you look, whether it's TikTok or TV, you know, you've got
showmanship, driving trust, salience.

00:46:18:10 - 00:46:44:18
Orlando
Reducing price sensitivity, strengthening the fundamentals of the business so
leading to greater profit and leading to growth as well. Sales growth, profit gain,
share gain. And then you got salesmanship, which is really about the here and
now. You know, either people respond to it immediately or they don't, at all. And
that's the sort of direct response route.

00:46:44:20 - 00:46:58:17
Orlando
And it makes sense, therefore, doesn't it, that, you know, if you're doing the
showmanship really well, then the the diet response will work better for you
and harder for you. Because it is. Yes, it is, it is, it is, it is. Yeah,

00:46:59:07 - 00:47:15:09
Olly
I'd like to talk a little bit more about, the fluent devices, if that's okay. And
character and the thing, you know, when, when you're talking about how it can
work in different areas, it reminds me of a project we've done recently for a
tech brand over in the States, and they're doing an internal learning and
development piece.

00:47:15:09 - 00:47:37:05
Olly
And what would normally happen is you'd have maybe people interacting with
these other employees and very, maybe great performing, perhaps. And
instead they did it with puppets and they lose Muppet style characters, lots of
comedy in there. And it's it's a fantastic campaign because of it, and it really
stands out. However, there's an issue there in terms of maybe the humor
element.
Sometimes brands pull back from that because it feels like a risk. So let's talk a
bit about humor and how, okay, we can convince senior stakeholder C-suite to go with these, what we'd see in
their minds to be more risky,

00:47:50:23 - 00:47:52:21
Olly
Rates. Right. So slowly and sometimes it's really hard to get past that, that level of approval.

00:47:57:11 - 00:47:58:21
Orlando
Absolutely. Yeah.

00:47:59:01 - 00:47:59:12
Olly
So you say? Like, let's go on to the human a bit, but I guess in terms of like how, how how
would you convince the C-suite or someone to, to produce more right brained

00:48:09:13 - 00:48:32:05
Orlando
Okay. Well, I think there's I mean, there's quite a lot of evidence, just just to
show, you know, we've been collecting it over the last 20 years, I would say I
work in at in the fields work, you know, many others. The way that we think
about advertising is improved a lot. We're not saying that we're doing it any
more than we were.

00:48:32:05 - 00:49:02:16
Orlando
We thought we'd probably doing it less. The more we get to know about it, the
less we're doing it. But I think you're right. It is quite difficult to bring people
with you, and they've got to sort of feel it somehow. And so, I mean, that's
again, one of the reasons I created my course. But I think there's a, there's
sufficient evidence and, and people now to show that it really is important that
really does work.

00:49:02:18 - 00:49:27:08
Orlando
And, you know, I mean, I've been into boardrooms to talk about this and, you
know, you have to you have to be something of the showman to do it, but you
have to do it in a way that that is that feel that, you know, is grounded in, in, in
the evidence, you know, and there are lots of case studies, you know, as well
that we can look at there might be a, a company in your sector or category that is doing something
a bit differently, something a bit more emotion emotional, and you're noticing
that something's, something's changing here.
And why are they doing so. Well suddenly that can that can often spur
movement as well. So I think anyone interested, you know, anyone at the
C-suite level, the CFO, the CEO should be thinking about longer term, you
know, plays. And they've got to that, you know, you need some vision there to
create that kind of growth.

00:50:07:23 - 00:50:15:20
Orlando
And if you're only doing the same thing, nothing's really going to change, is it?
And and you to stick your neck out.

00:50:15:22 - 00:50:17:03
Olly
I'm afraid. Yeah. That's it. It's risk, isn't it?

00:50:19:03 - 00:50:36:09
Orlando
But it needn't be. It needn't, you know, I mean, I, I don't like using the term risk
because as John Hegarty says, you know, one gets up in the morning, says,
oh, I think I'll have a risky breakfast this morning, maybe I'll have a risky cup of
coffee and then have some risky lunch later. And you know, so I don't think it is.
I think it's it the risk is not is not doing it really is not embracing it. And you
know, you you go nowhere, really go nowhere very fast if you don't.

00:50:48:10 - 00:50:56:00
Olly
you have any campaigns or examples where you're like, that is a the perfect
example of a right brained approach.

00:50:56:10 - 00:51:28:10
Orlando
Well, yeah, a good one, a good one I think. UK example is Yorkshire Tea. So
Yorkshire Tea have been doing this campaign since 2017 where everything's
done proper and it is, a campaign that takes celebrities from Yorkshire where
Ghost Company is based, to demonstrate the lengths that this tea company
goes to, to make to bring you the perfect cup of tea, a proper brew.

And, each of these is, you know, it's like a sort of it's like a little story of, you know,
so, you know, you've got you've got Sean Bean doing the welcome, to the new
starters. You know, it. There's a drawing is pointed like a sword. I mean, you
know, you've got all of these, the Kaiser Chiefs, you know, doing the sort of the
hold music, you know, I mean, it's, marvelous, stuff, really.

00:51:55:08 - 00:52:36:05
Orlando
And it's funny, you know, and it's engaging, and people just sort of get it, you
know? And now it's just a established. It's sort of. Well, of course, it's sort of
this is the only thing about showmanship. It works on a sort of bigger meta
level in a way that salesmanship is quite small and narrow. But, you know, this,

this sort of big idea, as David Ogilvy would have put it, or fluent device, as I put
it in this case, it, you know, people just get and since they've been doing that,
you know, the, the spontaneous awareness is just kept growing as, as others in
the category have been, you know, sort of falling.

00:52:36:07 - 00:53:02:14
Orlando
And if you look at their market share, it's pretty much doubled since 2017 while
others have been, you know, deteriorating. Yeah. And this is an A category that
is pretty I, you know, it's fair to say it's declining tea drinking, which is makes it
even more impressive. You know, that it could do this. So, you know, that's the
kind of growth that showmanship can create.

00:53:02:19 - 00:53:24:03
Orlando
That's the kind of, growth that marketeers can create. You know, they're not
just not just there to create some content. They're there to drive the growth
business. Absolutely. And, you know, that's the kind of growth that you
shareholders will thank you for. So, you know, and it's not you know, it's not just
tea. It's everywhere you look. It's fun. Course it's fun. It's funny, you know, makes you smile and and
that's the thing about, you know, we don't buy products from, you know,
people we don't like another. I don't know if it's quite that. Quite how John, Sir
John puts it that that is, you know, true that, you know, we we buy things from
people we like, really. And so how do you how are you going to get light.

00:53:48:10 - 00:53:51:13
Olly
Yeah. And that's that self-deprecating humor element to it as well

00:53:51:14 - 00:54:02:16
Orlando
Yeah. And with that without being, you know, sort of boorish about it and look
at me and I'm brilliant. You know, it's sort of how do you do it in a way that's
charming, that's interesting. It makes people smile.

00:54:03:10 - 00:54:12:03
Olly
Which segues nicely into the humor, segments. So in your book, you've got
some great examples like Heineken's Windermere,

00:54:13:12 - 00:54:22:04
Orlando
I wandered lonely. One. No was how does it go? I wondered about a bit on my
own. No, no, no.

00:54:23:07 - 00:54:31:23
Olly
And then the tango texting example, which I also love, which is the fancy a
quickie and then say, quick, change that case.
Can you explain why humor works from a behavioral standpoint for us?

00:54:35:14 - 00:54:41:08
Orlando
Well, humor does three important things. First of all, it normally presents.
00:54:41:08 - 00:54:58:10
Orlando
If, you know, if you're aiming for humor, you're normally presenting a scene of
some kind that has an incongruity in it that seems not quite right, you know,
and therefore it's good at holding your attention because you're trying to work
out what's going on here, what's what's happening.

00:54:58:10 - 00:55:23:21
Orlando
Hang on. No, that's not how it works. Was famous poem goes, is it? And then,
you know, so attention first of all. Secondly, it forces the, the viewer or
encourages the viewer, I should say to, to join the dots, to fill in, to fill the gaps
and therefore it and to make the connection themselves.

00:55:23:21 - 00:55:42:07
Orlando
So it's back to the, you know, the, the man baiting, the trap, which is always
waiting for the mouse. And then what that does, of course, is it puts things into
memory. So it's, it's, you know, creating a connection that perhaps wasn't there
before, you know, so you're creating a mental association. And the third thing is you're giving people a little reward
because people are saying, laughing and this sort of thing.

00:55:52:10 - 00:56:35:20
Orlando
Oh, clever. You know, that's funny, I like that. That's why we smile, you know,
I've got it. So it's sort of attention, memory and effect. Why wouldn't you do
something humorous if it does those three things? I mean, it's, you know, surely
that's got to be helpful. And all the data suggests I've looked at the IPA's
effectiveness database, you know, and the relationship between humor and
emotional response that we've done a system, one that humorous advertising
drives, you know, growth, business effects in a way that not humorous doesn't,
you know, it's a wonderful quote.

00:56:35:22 - 00:56:45:02
Orlando
G.K. Chesterton says something like, you know, humor gets in under the door
while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.

00:56:45:04 - 00:56:47:00
Olly
Yeah.

00:56:47:02 - 00:56:52:21
Orlando
And it's, it's a wonderful, wonderful way of putting it. And it's it's it's so true,
you know,

00:56:52:21 - 00:57:09:10
Orlando
what humor does in, in attention terms is it broadens your attention in a way
that hunger will narrow your attention. Humor broadens it. And that's what
showmanship is really there for to do.

It's to open people up to possibility. Salesmanship is there to narrow things
down to a certainty. And that's what the two hemispheres of the brain are
about. The right hemisphere is more exploratory. It's they're opening people up
to possibility, a possibility of what's around them, what's going on in the world.
And the left hemisphere is to narrow things down to a certainty, to manipulate
the world, you know, to, to, to our own ends.

And that's that's what that's what they do. And humor, therefore, you know, it
draws people in and it opens people up to the notion of of you.

00:57:43:12 - 00:57:46:19
Orlando
Yeah, yeah.

00:57:46:21 - 00:58:02:03
Olly
So I wanted to address the, I obviously can't go through a podcast without
talking about AI. But the, the part of your course I was watching at one point
where you've got a clip from Bill Byrne back doing an open letter to his boss
around. Oh, yes, a technical. And, you know, this obsession with and the modern day terms
obsession with clicks and measurement and the scientific approach with
advertising and how persuasion is more of an art.

00:58:13:16 - 00:58:15:01
Olly
And we need to

00:58:15:01 - 00:58:17:08
Orlando
That's right. That's what is. As we said.

00:58:17:08 - 00:58:37:12
Olly
We're going into a new age with AI, and we're in it right now. Do you think that a
well, Ian Gilchrist also said that I could if we're not careful? I mean, I'm
paraphrasing a bit here, but we could it could be the worst version of humanity
if we're not careful. Would you say that's the same? Do you have the same fears for creative
content and advertising, or you're slightly more optimistic?

00:58:44:19 - 00:59:11:04
Orlando
Conceit, you know, I mean, really again, it depends on, on, motives and the way
that we the, you know, the two modes of attention again, do we want to use it
to control and manipulate and, and, and, you know, seek people out and grasp,
you know, or do we want to use it as a sort of exploratory, collaborative,
creative partner?

And the more right brain way of thinking about it, and I think probably the big
tech companies will automatically go towards the, you know, a genetic I, where
it's like salesmanship on steroids, really. You know, you sort of create a path for
people to go down. Well, if you like that, then try this and then maybe you
should go there.

And then I had a book. Here, let me book that for you. Okay. It's booked. It's
done. You know, so there is a sort of pathway that will be created to, to do that
and that might be fine, you know, probably quite useful in many cases if you
don't want to spend forever, you know, researching your next purchase or
holiday or whatever it is.

But that is the way I think that the, the advertising big tech, you know, will
probably go. But, you know, there's also, you know, you could course creatives
if that. But if you're thinking about how to create showmanship advertising will
be using and are using it to, you know, and you can use it in different ways, you
know, you can use more than just a tool.

I think it's a it's a it is a sort of collaborator. So you can feed it something and it
will probably tell you what it thinks. Or have you thought of this. So it is a sort of
two way. It's a two way thing. You know, you bounce ideas off it. You can sort
of tell it, you know, you can work out also what the obvious thing might be if it's
if it's sort of feed something back to you or gives you options, you rule things
out.

I think there's, there are ways what it really helps you to do. I think cutting to
the chase is, prototype quite rapidly, and idea, it can probably help you to get
to something that looks a bit like the finished thing quite quickly without all the
associated production costs. So you can start to present something that is
almost, you know, that looks like it, you know, is relatable, to put it that way.

And that might help showmanship might help showmanship.

01:01:27:14 - 01:01:35:15
Olly
A to a slight challenge to that, though, because in your book you say that like
the mood film has actually made us drift towards more left

01:01:35:15 - 01:02:02:18
Orlando
I think that I think that's right. I think that's right. Well, it depends how you how
you know where you're going with it. If you if you're creating a mood film, then
yes. Because someone will say, yeah, well we'll just go with that, you know. But
if you're actually creating something that has, as I put it, character incidents
and place and movements and drama and, you know, something happening,
which I think you can do to a certain extent, then it allows you to play with
possibility.

01:02:02:18 - 01:02:47:07
Orlando
And that's, that's really what, what I think we that's what creativity is about
really isn't. It's bringing it to being a new whole. And it's playing with possibility
and that, that so could it could be helpful. You know, certainly when I, I did
some work recently with ITV, so ITV were have got a team and they've, they've
announced this, and this, this way of working where, you know, if you're new to
TV advertiser, perhaps you don't have the budgets of the established, you
know, advertisers, they will help you to create an ad using AI.

01:02:47:09 - 01:03:18:14
Orlando
And, you know, so you don't spend the money on the, the, the making of the
work, but you put it instead on the media, on the buying of the media. Now,
what the work that we've seen like this, you know, normally involves a
character or someone doing something and actually we've tested it and it
performs, by and large, quite well, quite well compared with, certainly the
categories we looked at.

01:03:18:16 - 01:03:51:21
Orlando
So I don't know, it could be sofas or beds or, you know, something that usually
gravitates towards salesmanship. You know, that actually you're getting better
schools doing that as a new to TV advertiser than you might be if you're, you
know, an established player. Right. And so it gives you a head start in a way.
And the the danger, I think ultimately with, with this is that everything might
start to look quite similar.

01:03:51:21 - 01:03:58:05
Orlando

So you do need to know a little bit about principles of advertising, how to stand
out sorts of things that connect with people.

Because otherwise you might, you know, you might miss.

01:04:01:15 - 01:04:23:14
Orlando
And so this, this term isn't there, the great flattening which I mean, I talked
about flat land and in lemon, but but that, you know, if everyone's using the
same AI tools, it ultimately comes back to the user and the question and the
brief, you know, that that they're going to they're going to, to create.

01:04:23:14 - 01:04:49:00
Orlando
But, you know, it could be that things start to look the same unless they look a
bit, I mean, not particularly compelling because, you know, you sort of seen
this sort of thing 100 now a thousand times. So, you know, the original image is
quite a novel. Image is quite important in filmmaking and advertising. Yeah. For
arresting attention.

01:04:49:11 - 01:05:13:07
Olly
And that could be a way to use either couldn't or you could. I mean, we created
a, an AI tool that interrogates a brief and says whether it's going to perform
well once, you know. Well, compared to we've made thousands of films and we
assess it, you know, and how effective we think that will be. And so maybe that
stage instead could be helpful of sort of, you know, trying to push you in a
different direction.

01:05:13:12 - 01:05:34:21
Orlando
It could, it could now it could be, could I mean, what ways of surfacing
unexpected, sort of ideas. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I mean, I'd, I'd be keen for
AI to, to take away some of the administrative, chores that AI that I have, you
know, that that, that use it for that.

01:05:34:22 - 01:05:37:23
Olly
To better my friend next say he wants his eye to do as well.

01:05:37:23 - 01:06:07:09
Orlando
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so let me do the good stuff. That's right. And, and,
you know, the other thing is that AI has never really lived other than vicariously
through others. So it doesn't really and I don't think it truly understood, you
know, it's not like it. As I often say, it's never got drunk on a Saturday night, you
know, whereas you probably have, you know, and there so that visceral,
embodied understanding of the world it doesn't have.

01:06:07:09 - 01:06:28:05
Orlando
And that's important if you're creating films, because the way people interact
with each other, the, the way that their faces move, all of those things really,
really important, and otherwise things and things probably get over this, but
sometimes it can feel a bit uncanny at the moment.

01:06:28:05 - 01:06:39:12
Olly
Yeah, I must say, like when I look through your book and all of the, your left
brain, like Hieronymus Bosch or some of those paintings, and then you look at
what the generative AI has come up with. Obviously, it's improved significantly
before it started coming was all deformed.

01:06:40:07 - 01:06:41:14
Orlando
Very, very, very deformed.

01:06:41:14 - 01:06:41:23
Olly
Life. bizarre like that. But obviously that's that's that's yeah, going to

01:06:45:13 - 01:06:59:05
Orlando
I was, I was using was it Dali the other day. I don't know which one it was, I was
just playing with it anyway. But in tellingly use of hands was terrible. You know,
it would twisted wonderful an illustrator.

01:06:59:06 - 01:07:00:11
Olly
Yeah. And really, you can always tell if someone's really good by the hands.

01:07:03:18 - 01:07:04:12
Orlando
The hands.

01:07:04:12 - 01:07:06:05
Olly
The hands is the key. Absolute.

01:07:06:05 - 01:07:30:14
Orlando
That's what artists are. Great artists. Yeah. It was sketch hands. I mean, the
eyes, the mouth, the hands. You know, these are the features by which the soul
of another is made known to us. You know, to paraphrase Roger Scruton. And
that is true, you know, these are things that we use to express ourselves. And
so the right hemisphere is much better connected.

01:07:30:16 - 01:07:50:16
Orlando
You know, it's more embodied, better connected with the body, and therefore
the expression of emotion and the understanding of emotion, both those things
associated with the right hemisphere. So hands, you know, the eyes in
particular the mouth to some extent, you know, these are things that are
important in art and in communication.

01:07:50:19 - 01:07:58:17
Olly
So you mentioned ape and I'd like to touch on that a bit. So this is, you know,
with lemon you've described as a sense of loss and t his was it was years of
anxiety would look out like around the pandemic.

01:08:02:05 - 01:08:03:16
Orlando
Yeah. It was written around the that.

01:08:03:16 - 01:08:04:00
Olly
It was seen as a way forward.

01:08:05:12 - 01:08:07:16
Orlando
I well I like to think so. Yes.

01:08:07:17 - 01:08:08:03
Olly
I mean tell us a bit about the course, how it's

01:08:10:02 - 01:08:57:10
Orlando
Yes of course, of course. So so it's a course from, from marketeers. But for
advertising agencies, I mean anyone to be honest, who's involved in and
advertising to understand, these two schools of advertising, their history, how
they come about to understand attention and how it and attention underpins
these two schools of advertising. And I talk to in my Gilchrist's course, a talk,
by the way, to lots of people lesbian that Peter Field, Paul Feld, which, John
Hegarty, Adrian Holmes and me, lots of lots of, wonderful people throughout.

01:08:57:12 - 01:09:16:15
Orlando
But I talk about these two schools. I talk about tension, I talk about modes of
attention. Relate this to the sort of business effect that you're you're likely to
see as a result. And I talk about what's changed in advertising. So shifts in, in
creative style. But also, you know, what

01:09:16:15 - 01:09:23:04
Orlando
we need to be doing in today's modern media world to, to create showmanship.

And then I talk about various principles, you know, so how to stand out talking
at up top thanks to, Debbie, have some great footage of, Bill Byrne back talking
about what he believed was important. So I draw out various principles from his
writing, in his speeches, to talk about how you stand out. I talk about, one of
the things he said was, only art makes you feel.

Only feeling makes you act. So I spent, a whole, class on on the importance of
art and what we can learn from art in expressing emotion through the body,
creating a psychological transformation in the viewer. Motivation is the
baroque. Artists might have, referred to it as. Come back to that perhaps in a
minute. And then, talk about the fluent device.

So repeated use characters. So we talk about how people have created
characters in the past, the importance of character, the importance of
repeatedly scenarios. So consistency and and novelty all in one sort of thing.
And, and I talk about humor as well. And how to use humor is sort of five ways
of thinking about humor to structure your campaign, your campaign idea that,
you know, needn't be risky.

01:10:48:02 - 01:11:16:05
Orlando
You know, we've got this idea that humorous is terrifying, you know? But, you
know, I mean, you think about exaggeration, inversion, you know, these sorts of
things. What's what's dangerous about that, you know, so, so, so ways of
thinking about about humor and, and using it to your advantage. And then I talk
a bit about finally, the creative process and how to set yourself up for success.

01:11:16:07 - 01:11:36:22
Orlando
You know, the idea is, is not to, avoid failure at all costs, but to give triumph for
chances. So Hugh Weldon wants put it so. So, what do we have to do? How do
you get the best out of your agency? And, you know how and if you're going to
do testing what not to do?

01:11:36:22 - 01:12:04:20
Orlando
Because a lot of testing methods really are designed for salesmanship. And if
you're trying to create showmanship, how do you, you know, create how do
you use testing to support what you're doing rather than undermine change it
in some way. So it's a it's an eight week course. It starts 22nd of September, as
our third cohort for some fantastic feedback and reviews.

And we're, you know, looking forward to going again. So advertising principles
explained E-comm. Is where it's at. So, throughout you, you know, we have
some, wonderful Q&A sessions. People ask the questions, I answer them, and,
you get a certificate at the end.

01:12:23:18 - 01:12:50:07
Olly
While I'm signed up. So I'm very much looking forward to it. So thank you very
much for joining us. I just want to end with, fluent device, I guess, our last
question that we ask all our guests, which is, an audience of one question, and
it's about when you're creating a piece of content. And I know you speak to lots

of people, but is there one person when you're writing, when you're trying to
communicate some to, to, something?

Who do you think of? Who's that person that you would have in your mind
when you're writing? That might change how you would

01:12:56:08 - 01:13:39:05
Orlando
That's a really good question because, you know, most I've drawn on so many
and influences influences on my work and in my life. But perhaps the, the
person who made me, you know, originally sort of put me on this path, I think is
probably my, the founder of US system one, John Kieran and, he just made me
think a bit differently about things and, and the importance of telling a story and
engaging people up front.

01:13:39:07 - 01:14:00:14
Orlando
And I think he's probably I mean, it's been so many, but, you know, Jonas
Johnson out there work with him for 20 years and, you know, we've we've
worked closely together in that time, you know, so, so him but, you know, there
have been so many people, I mean, Paul failed. Rick failed weeks. John.

01:14:00:14 - 01:14:21:03
Orlando
So John Haggerty, Adrian Holmes, who did The Wonderful Water and the orca,
do remember, and the covers of my books, his colleagues seem so feral. I
mean, you know, the list goes on. And, they've all been important. They've all
been important. And then you drew. You draw on all of them?

01:14:21:03 - 01:14:21:16
Orlando
Yeah.

01:14:21:18 - 01:14:39:00
Olly
Oh, what a list. Well, look, thank you very much for joining us. It's been really
insightful to to hear all of this. And, if you want to buy one of, Orlando's books
or sign up to his course, we'll put all of that information in the show notes. But
yeah, I just want to say thanks so much for coming on and hopefully we'll see
you again

01:14:39:00 - 01:14:41:07
Orlando
Absolute pleasure. Ollie. Thanks for having me.