AI, Agility & Growth: The new agency playbook

Speaker 0 · 0:01

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the latest edition of Media and Filtered, with myself Ian Whittaker and Justin Lebonne. We're very, very delighted to have Ali Reid on today. She's the chief growth officer of Brainlabs EMEA. So thank you very much for coming on, Ali. Pleasure to have you here. And, we've got a few questions for you, if that's okay.

Speaker 1 · 0:29

Absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for asking me.

Speaker 0 · 0:32

No. Not at not at all. Not at all. It's great that you actually are. So, yeah, if may kick off, you've had twenty five years of media. So, you know, looking at your background, you've had over fifteen years within the whole coast. You then moved over to BRAIN Labs around eighteen months ago. Just to just to clarify, I wonder if you can just walk through in your own words. What was the actual trigger for Cross to go over into the indie space?

Speaker 1 · 1:01

Yeah. There were a few, both personal and professional, I'd say. If we start with the personal side of things, I was the CEO of a top five UK media agency, PhD UK, and that requires a lot from you. Right? That's it's a lot of great stuff, but there's also a lot of sacrifice. And, I mean, I remember something like twenty days holiday were canceled in the final year that I worked there, and I was already commuting from Malta, which is where my husband's job had taken us to London, weekly for the role. So I wanted to take a step back and spend a bit of time with my family. The kids were entering their mid teens, and they were getting older. They needed more of my time, which I didn't feel I was able to give them, and I didn't wanna miss them growing up. So there was a real personal edge to it. But professionally, I just wasn't really happy with the direction of where the whole codes were going. I resigned before the merger before between, Omnicom and IPG coming together, so I didn't know that was coming per se. But I felt there was an increasing lack of identity and autonomy of the brands in the whole coast, and I felt we were being a bit left behind, if I'm honest, from an agility point of view to really do that cutting edge work with AI coming over the horizon and automation, obviously, being really important. And these were big drivers of my decision as well. I would say indies are not having to really manage that legacy infrastructure across dozens of acquired businesses. So from from a BrainLabs or an indie perspective, we can build these new capabilities, AI driven capabilities, much more cleanly rather than retrofitting onto something which has got a lot of technical debt. And, actually, I'm really excited by that opportunity, and and Brainlabs has really delivered on that when I've arrived.

Speaker 2 · 2:40

Ali, it's interesting what you say. I've met a lot of senior individuals around the world in your position, not just because of the merger, but leaving HoldCo's and joining Indi's for the agility, to be able to work directly with clients and and perhaps not have corporate HQ, you know, dictate some terms that perhaps you're not comfortable with. And you mentioned that in your intro. You said that they were there was a direction of travel for the whole coast that you weren't comfortable with. Can you be a bit more specific about what you weren't comfortable with that that led you to leave the business?

Speaker 1 · 3:14

I think some of the people that become CEOs in whole coasts, they're ex planners, ex, ex kind of strategist, client people, people that love media that have worked very hard to get there, but have also gone on a on a journey which, you know, is really about being able to make those decisions that is gonna have the best impact for their clients and the best impact for the work and really make a difference from an advertising point of view. And I I felt when I got to got to the the level I got to after twenty plus years of of working in media, that actually all the things that I thought I really cared about and that I was gonna get to do, it was it was much more shuffling bits of spreadsheets around, if I'm being brutally honest. And I I kinda felt like that was a waste of my talent. That wasn't why I got into the industry. And by the time, I was able to have more influence, I thought, actually, that influence was taken away. And it was much more about managing different parts of the system rather than influencing the system that that was actually gonna have the best results for clients. And that was frustrating, if I'm honest. And and I don't get me wrong. I I I owe a lot to the whole coast that I've worked in over the years, and they have been part of the best parts of my career. And I've done amazing work, But I felt like there was something else out there that actually it was time for a change and that there was an opportunity to make a jump at this point in my career that was gonna give me the same kind of excitement and energy around having a real impact that I didn't feel like I could do so much at that point.

Speaker 2 · 4:47

K. Fair enough.

Speaker 0 · 4:50

And I think, you know, one thing that yeah. If you look at the whole thing around sort of you know, people often talk about, you know, the independence, you know, the more sort of agile and so forth. I mean, it's very it it sort of a lot of points, I think, will resonate amongst many of the listeners for what for what you said. For those who perhaps, you know, haven't been in a in an Indian so forth, can you just actually sort of go through what it actually means for you on a, you know, on a normal day? I mean, what would be the comparison you or the difference you notice the most between actually being in that sort of of hold call and being in Brainlabs?

Speaker 1 · 5:31

So I wouldn't say there's a normal kind of day in in a HoldCo or an indie. The the real difference for me, I guess, is the focus on the work which that particular agency is known for and is being rewarded for and, you know, ultimately is is making making money from. I think from a whole perspective, they're they're much more set up to do the big brand work and the partnerships given their legacy relationships with the more traditional media partners. So, you know, a normal day there might be working on those kinds of projects, the stuff that campaign and media week would would celebrate an annual awards do. Right? And don't get me wrong. I love that kind of work. It's kind of the work I got into the industry for. And I do miss that creative creativity side of it, if I'm honest, which a performance agency, we kind of look at creativity in a different way. But but at Brainlabs, there is or, you know, from an indie perspective, there is a real energy around making sure that we are embracing the newest technology and kinda going all in. We don't have those legacy structures That means that we have to have multiple layers of approval and multiple layers of, sometimes politics or that we have to think about all the different type of tech platforms it has to work across and, create barriers that get in our own way. You know, we we have partnered with Claude and Notion at an enterprise level. And in the last four months, five months since we since we we took on that partnership, we've published over 700 skills, across our whole our whole team, across the the 1,100 BRAINLab globally. And it allows us to move much faster and deliver what I think is actually better solutions for our clients for the kinds of solutions that our clients are asking for, you know, thinking that we are a performance agency. And this directly plugs into Cortex AI, which is our tech platform, our tech stack, and it means we're activating campaigns much more effectively and much more quickly. So, you know, a typical day for us might be Vibe co training. It might be a tech demo with a new client that we're pitching for where we actually build the tool in the room together with them. And we have a really decentralized approach to tech development as well, which basically means we are all building new exciting tools to help us with both internal agency challenges and and friction and external client solutions as well. So it doesn't matter if you sit in the dev team or whether you're in the SEO practice or in my team, in the growth and new business team. Everybody is being encouraged to really lean into this new tech and into the AI opportunities, which I just I think is a real differentiating factor for for the indie platform.

Speaker 2 · 8:09

That's very interesting about about tech there and some of the things that you're saying about HoldCo. So I've got a little bit of an unfair question here. Do you think that as they focus their business, HoldCo, is on on media, which is where they make most of their money or if not all of their money, they move away from creative because creative is actually incredibly challenging to make any money from. Do you think that their businesses, in your view, are in a bit of trouble?

Speaker 1 · 8:34

I think we've been seeing a lot of change since COVID. Right? I don't think there has been a the right amount of focus on the things the clients have been asking for. And clients are also under a huge amount of pressure, but there's also different types of clients. There's all sorts of different brands that are now asking for support from agencies that would never been able to before because of the access of the platform technology and being able to go to market much more quickly. So, yes, I think creative has suffered as a result of that. And and, you know, I don't wanna get into untransparent, you know, proprietary buying or anything like that. Right? We we've got we've all got different ways of making money, as Mhmm. As part of the agency ecosystem. Do I think that it's gonna continue to go this way? I I do unless I think something changes in terms of how we, as an industry, really stand up for ourselves in terms of what we value, and we we sort of stop the race to the bottom around commoditization of what we deliver and the value that we bring to clients. And I think that's more of a whole coat problem than I think it is an indie problem. But Okay. It it is something that has been talked about widely. And I think, you know, Ian, I know you've talked about this as well most recently. Mhmm. The the we have given away too much for free, and we have created part of the mess, I think, that we're in. But Mhmm. I do think the only people that are gonna get us out of this is the smartest people in the whole coast and in these. It doesn't matter where you work. We're passionate about this industry, and we do wanna do great work, and we do wanna get paid well for the work that we do and be recognized that that, you know, the power of the brand, the power of the results that we get from a performance agency, whichever side of the fence that you sit on. And, I mean, you're sort of, you're now in a firm that's I mean, obviously, you just might sort of, said with many of the hold codes,

Speaker 0 · 10:23

they are sort of publicly listed. So, yeah, the market's actually valued them and and, yeah, sort of wouldn't say the market valuation at the moment for many of them is particularly sort of positive, so certainly in terms of investment sentiment. But, obviously, BrainLabs sort of your private equity owned. And private equity does have that reputation for being maybe perhaps even more numbers obsessed than public markets just sort of operating differently. I know, again, it might be sort of a slightly sort of a difficult question or or might be slightly unfair. But from your standpoint, you know, from what you've seen, is private equity ownership do you think it it's sort of generally better for an agency or really what you get is you really face a different kind of pressure?

Speaker 1 · 11:13

So I I think you're right, Ian. I don't think it's better or worse per se. I think it's just different. The pros are that we are, like, hyper focused on the agency priorities that are really gonna pay back. And because of that, we we aren't afraid to abandon things which don't serve us and and don't serve our bottom line. So I really do think we are much more decisive as a result, and we can sunset or pivot or what where go where we need to go from a new capability, perspective much, much quicker, which is exciting. Again, we can jump on things. I guess the cons, though, and you you've kind of hinted at this, is that we are very, very numbers focused. And then and I it wasn't like I wasn't numbers focused in my previous role. They are important, and we do need to be able to track where we are and be able to report back to the business. But I do think, you know, for example, I think it was quarterly that we really focused at it previously in in when I was working, at a whole co, but now it is monthly. And even monthly, I still get a check-in every couple of weeks. And, actually, that takes a big chunk of my time because, obviously, the way that we report the numbers and how that then flows up the chain can be you know, there's a lot of interrogation on that, and that that does take quite a bit of time. So I you know, I'd like to tell my boss, you don't fatten the pig by weighing it, and I'd much rather be in pitches in those meetings with clients rather than talking about the numbers that might get us, to to those those pitch wins. So, yeah, it it's a bit of both, to be honest. Yeah. No. No. That, that all makes sense.

Speaker 2 · 12:47

Ali, you you say you're really numbers focused, and, you've got the pressure of a PE firm behind you. I've seen that before with with ad tech firms and stuff. How how can you constantly do what's right and in the best interest of clients, grow brand, be with them for the long term, but still make the margins that's demanded by, you know, by senior management, though. Isn't isn't there a a conflict there? And also, I find it interesting, by the way, that you call yourself a performance agency. I've got nothing wrong with that, but I think all agencies are performance based. I mean, advertising is performance based. You know, otherwise, what are we doing? So does that mean when you say you're performance based, does that mean you just you you are all in digital? What does that actually mean? And and how and how can you the original question, how can you ensure that you're you're looking after clients in the long term if you've got these financial these sort of short term financial KPIs that you have to adhere to?

Speaker 1 · 13:39

Okay. So two questions. I'll take them in reverse of of how you did them. So Yeah. When I talk about performance, I'm using it as a shorthand. Of course, all advertising has to deliver whether it's in the long term or the short term. Right? And therefore, it is all performance. But I think for the listeners and for more just, you know, a heuristic for people to be able to understand what Brainlabs is and isn't, you know, we don't do more traditional media. And, obviously, all media is gonna be served through an ad server eventually. We're getting there. And and, you know, most of our clients' budgets are sixty, seventy, 80% digital or a 100% digital. When we need to partner with more traditional, agencies to buy linear TV, we do that. Right? Mhmm. But that's not our specialism. So if you think about, again, where I came from from PhD, there's a lot around the big ideas, the big culture denting stuff, the things that people remember, you know, ten or fifteen years on, like Allego ad take, ad break takeover or, the eclipse with the with the Oreo. Like, these are award winning ideas which absolutely do shape culture and and drive conversations. The work that we do at Brainlabs drive conversations, but in a in a moment, in a way that is paying back in a way that a marketer and a CMO can see much more easily. It's much more trackable. Now I'm both sides are important and that you know, I I definitely believe that as a marketer, you need to be able to balance the long and short term, the brand and performance, and even if you wanna call brand being performing, etcetera. What I think is interesting, and this is slightly going, you know, slightly off topic or in a different different direction, is we have been asking agencies to do both of these things really, really well, but, actually, they are culturally and technology driven quite differently. And we we expect a whole co to do everything, a one stop shop, but it is very different. And it's not just being at Brainlabs. I used to work at Essence, and Essence was very different before the merger with Mediacom. And the way that we think about media, the way we think about advertising, measurement, data science, being a you know, Essence used to talk about being a data science and measurement agency that happens to plan and buy media. Right? Like, the the way that people think about things, the the tools that we use, the the conversations that we have with clients are very different when you think about them from a brand or performance perspective, I I believe. You have to bring them together, but agencies have different special superpowers. And I think what's interesting for me is how do we get to a future where clients are okay operating models don't have to look like what they've looked like in the past. We can be braver. We can invite different solutions from different partners knowing that this one is really great at this, and this one really loves the other. And and it's about bringing those two things together is is when the magic happens, when you get to see that total overall grade. No. I was gonna say, I mean, it's interesting what you're saying there. I mean, it's because,

Speaker 0 · 16:38

you know, what you're effectively saying I mean, in one hand, what you're effectively saying is, look. You know, we have this whole dichotomy where people talk about, okay. We don't talk about big ideas sort of of anymore. Now it's all about it seems to be about operational efficiency, ROAS, payback, etcetera. And what you're really saying is that, actually, you know, the two conversations still very much exist. But, you know, as you say, you know, people will have different strengths. It's like in economics, sort of competitive advantage. So the most nations, one nation will have a a more competitive advantage than another in a particular product. Yeah. The you said that in terms of the agencies, the way the agencies sort of work in the future will will perhaps have to change. Yeah. And again, sort of recognizing that one agency has a particular skill set and another has sort of another. What do you think will will need to be the mindset change from the client perspective?

Speaker 1 · 17:30

System like that. Yeah. So that that's what I actually meant. I I think it's less about agencies. I think it's more about clients. I I can give you a specific example. We've we you know, I can't say which client it was, but we were asked to, they called it a flirt. So it they said it was not an agency process. The there is no pitch. We're not inviting you to a pitch. They are currently they're a $350,000,000 global brand, and they still, you know, do a lot of TV, a lot more traditional media. Very big ideas drove, you know, focus, but there is a big need for them to be able to show again from the performance side. And I I know I'm using these these terms kind of a bit more kind of binary, and they're not. But they they know that they're not guessing what they needed that especially from an innovation and test and learn mindset from their whole co. There was gonna be a big, pitch later on this summer, and they said, we can't invite you to do that. We can't we we you would not be our agency of record because you haven't got the global footprint, and you don't have the offline, like, planning and buying that we that we need. And that's fine by us. And we're we're like, we're when we wouldn't wanna try and go for that anyway. But what we want to get from this flight, what we want to get from this meeting is for them to see us not as a threat or another, you know, a complication in an operating model where you have two agencies vying for different scopes of work, which we all know has happened, and I've been there on both sides. But there there's actually there is an opportunity for clients to say, let's all play nice. Let's all find our our own place in where you can work together, and you use your strengths, and nobody has to get cross that someone else is, you know, better or or not at something which, you know, the whole coast claim that they can do everything, and and that's, you know, not always true in my experience. And so we positioned ourselves as an innovation and and a test and learn partner. We would find those opportunities in small testing control, you know, hypothesis driven tests, see where it worked, you know, whether it was in CTV, whether it was in search, or, you know, in programmatic. And then we would we would sort of be that incubator. And for those tests that worked, we would then hand over to the whole co for them to be able to scale it across the markets. So we have a very defined role, and it means that, you know, that the stable you know, slightly more slower moving because they have to be because they've got the big global contract. They've got the big TV deals that they need to make sure they're managing from a value perspective. That all continues moving exactly in the way that a very big brand needs them to, really stable. But they've also got us slightly more like a flywheel, a bit more agile, a bit quicker, doing these tests and learn, doing these these hypotheses and experiments that we can then hand over and say, okay. Now you can now we've worked out which works and which is important and which isn't. You can then take that into into the wider markets and kinda scale it. And that was a really interesting conversation for them because I think they were trying to work work out, do they have to choose either or? And we were telling them you can have the best of both. But that does also require agencies to play nice together as well, which is, you know, the harder nut to crack sometimes, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 2 · 20:39

Does that happen, Ally? Do you guys play nice together?

Speaker 1 · 20:42

We do, actually. We we are I I think because of our size and because we are quite specialist in what we do, I don't think we are threatening in that way. No. I think we are recognized to be slightly different, and and we've been doing it you know, we've got two or three very, very big clients that we we do this with already, and we were able to show those as case studies in this flat. And I think it got the clients thinking in a different way, which is Yeah. Which is all we're trying to do at this point to kind of think about BRAIN Labs as, you know, an innovation partner as much as a media agency.

Speaker 2 · 21:13

But you're able to nix some of their business, and you're suggesting that you guys still play nice in the sandbox. I mean, I I, I'd love that to be the case, but I find that hard to believe.

Speaker 1 · 21:22

But like I say, we can't nick the things that we can't do. And I think if you try and do that, that's when it all goes goes wrong. And and being being really clear around what what is the value that we bring, like, we we aren't we aren't in the same position, I think, as a whole co, which is which is potentially quite defensive and thinking, well, you know, we can't let them in because they'll start taking it. We you know, there's things that we can't and wouldn't take anyway, so that's fine.

Speaker 0 · 21:52

I mean, one thing that actually I mean, look. Every agency is doing it. Every agency talks about it. Every holds go talks about it. AI. Right? And, you know, that is the hot topic obviously at the moment. I mean, you're rolling out a Brainlab sort of AI tooling across the agency this year. I guess from your standpoint, from what you're seeing from the inside, so the of how are people using it, sort of and I think also as well, I mean, how is how is it you then seeing that delivered through to value for clients?

Speaker 1 · 22:20

So as I said earlier, we have we've gone all in. So I don't know if you've seen some of the, some of the blog posts and some of the marketing around Dan Gilbert's kind of, you know, huge excitement and fervor for for AI, for Claude, for Notion. We have been building this in a way which is, I guess, not bolting it on, which I think is a lot about what he talks about. And, actually, almost starting from scratch, Like, if you could build an agency which was AI enabled and you could build that infrastructure, what would it look like, and how would you almost have to go backwards to go forwards? And and that's what we've been doing. So we've kind of been building and using this technology in two modes that operate together. So Cortex, which existed before we kind of started working with with with Claude and and, Notion, is what I call the centralized mode. It's the shared platform. It has those deep tools that every client receives. But then we've now built, you know, powered by AI, what we call Cortex Labs, and this is the decentralized mode. So this is where we can start to build these purpose built tools and skills made on demand by the people inside in each practice, which is really important. It's not made by a dev team. It's made by the account director on SEO. It's made by my team in growth, for example. It's then shared. It's tested. It's deployed within days, not months. And both modes exist to do one thing, which is to really put the ability to build the right answer into the hands of the people that are closest to the client's problem. Like, I I believe that innovation happens all innovation happens at the edge. So you've got you've got a team member who's never built a tool before but can now build one that a client actually needs, and they can ship it while it still matters. And behind every person, you kind of you've got this set of agents that takes on all the operational and analytical work that used to take ages, used to take days and days, and it gives that time back for judgment, and and makes that routine work faster and more consistent. But ahead of everyone, this is the fun bit, is a set of agents that lets them build things that didn't exist before and build bespoke tools for client specific problems, but one that used to have to take a specialist team to deliver, and now it can actually be built by anyone in the agency. So, you know, all of these things are doing are doing the the grunt work, but they're also doing all the the shiny work that clients can really see the uplift from from in terms of the the revenue that they can get. And it's the combination of those two things that I think is moving us faster and is is super exciting.

Speaker 2 · 24:48

So the narrative around AI, which Ian and I have discussed before, is is is, you know, efficiency. It gets a lot of headlines, cost cutting, and all the rest of it. And it seems like you're you're looking at more innovation. Like, where does Brainlab sort of land on that? Is it are you seeing it as a way of of reducing headcount and therefore improving efficiency, or are you seeing it more as a innovation for clients who are who are desperate for these sort of data driven models that you guys are producing?

Speaker 1 · 25:17

I think at the beginning, it was it was a lot around seeing what we could do to drive that efficiency, and I I think any agency would say that. There's so much stuff that we need to do, so many hours that we waste in in more traditional knowledge work that being able to find those shortcuts absolutely frees up that time. But what do you do you'd kind of therefore gonna do with that time? So Brainlabs has kind of, you know, moved and framed AI as a a force, multiplier for more output, more clients, more revenue, and in the end, not a mechanism for reducing headcount. And and this means that we wanna work with clients that want more for the same, not clients that want, you know, more for less. Right? And and, obviously, everyone always says that that's the kind of client we want to work with. But finding those conversations where they understand that there is a direct connection between the quality of output we can do, the results that we can do for clients, the amount of, you know, that that we we can they would therefore invest with us and the number of clients that we can take on. That gives us a really simple choice between doing the same amount of work with few people or doing more work with more people, and and we're choosing the latter. So it's not it's not about the the headcount reduction. And as platforms, I think, automate the buying layer, performance more often is is won or lost at the creative and the first party data layer and and the speed to market, and it's where we are building those tools that help us generate that for our clients and their client, their revenue uplift. That that obviously delivers for us as well. So it it moves out of being a cost story in that way.

Speaker 0 · 26:50

And that's really important point because, you know, one of the points that that I've often made is that, actually, when it comes to AI, the the as you say, the cost efficiency story is very much baked into every investor's analyst's expectations. I mean, that's the sort of let's call it the default in terms of how AI see. But it will actually be those firms that can show the AI generates extra revenues that then we'll see an uplift in evaluation. And it and it feels very much from what you're saying that you can already see that demonstrable effect effect already.

Speaker 1 · 27:27

Yeah. For sure. So, you know, I I can talk about two sides of the coin. So the there's the there's the efficiency, and I'll talk about it for I thought about the different ones that I might talk about today, but, actually, personal experience is always better. Right? And I run the growth team. We've built a growth agent, which now acts as a a version of one of our my growth team. I've got, you know, nine people in the work in my team. There's some pictures that are just too small for us to work on, but they're still worth doing, especially if we're trying to grow a practice in whether it's retail media or programmatic or whatever it might be. And we've built this this agent now. We've actually called him Ralph. I like to give all of our agents names. And Ralph now can become an outside eye. He can look at the brief. He can look at the quality of the work that's coming out of that team as part of that pitch. I can really push back and say, well, you haven't done this bit or you haven't and that would normally be a human sitting in the room. But, actually, the way that this agent works, it can take all of the different information that we've got across all of Notion, across all of our different touch points, and start to help smaller pitches get over the line where we just don't have the time to be able to put onto that, which is which is really exciting. The, you know, the other side of it, which is less around the efficiency and and a kind of an internal agent is, a tool I'll I'll walk you through now. It's it's called Proteus, which is a a creative variation tool. So it's it's quite quite an old one, but I do love the concept behind it and how it was made. So, as the image generation model started to get better, from an AR perspective, there was a lot of chat in the industry about how creative campaigns in the future, the kind of big leap, new new brand or creative platforms would be so much easier to deliver. But like I've said before, you know, Brainlabs isn't really about those big creative ideas in that way. We're a performance agency. So, you know, someone internally, a guy called Will, started to look at this problem differently. And and he said instead of sort of saying that every creative change in concept needed to be big, we've we got really interested in small variations where micro adjustments to creative to evolve, a client provided, what we call c creative, through time is actually a good performance mechanism as well. And the the hypothesis was that it it wasn't just big creative changes, the one that everyone was thinking about that that AI might enable, but really high volume and small incremental improvements which might drive performance in the creative in the future. So that's how Protos was born. So Protos is the shape shifting god of the sea. That's why we named it that. And it lets us take a a client provider creative and turn it into 20 different small changes and then put them on the platforms to test and let the algorithm push it out. And then we find the best ones, and we, like, optimize on that one and optimize on that one and on and on and on. And the results have been really, really great. Right? We we've we've got two clients, one of which we've just published in a case study, which is now showing they've got three times the revenue on Meta alone by using Proteus to be allowing us to look at creative variation. So there it can work on both sides, both taking time back for us and helping us pitch better, but also taking a client's creative and allowing the creative variation to to be able to be almost infinite.

Speaker 2 · 30:44

Ali, I've got I've got two questions here and then, then Ian's gonna gonna wrap up with with a final one. The first one is gonna be just a quick yes, no, because just in the spirit of time. So you talked a lot about, row you know, ROAS, spot with funnel metrics and data, improving your worth and stuff. Obviously, you've talked a lot about creative too, you know, big ideas and culture. Just very quickly, do you think do you think yes or no. Do you think brand building is dead, or is it just the language has changed? Just yes or no on this one.

Speaker 1 · 31:13

No. I don't think brand building is dead.

Speaker 2 · 31:16

Okay. So in a lot of the performance stuff that you mentioned, you know, the platforms are incredible at going direct to clients and press the button, easy performance. And they they even do creative optimization. They have great engagements with clients direct. It's a real problem for our industry. Right? You know, we looked at the numbers and something like 90% of all new media spend is going to these three platforms. Much of that is direct. So surely as an agency, you're looking at this and thinking this is a this is probably a problem for your business. So what can you guys do that generally adds value, beyond what the platforms sort of cannot cannot deliver to a client?

Speaker 1 · 31:53

I think it's a couple of things. I think it is right. So so advertisers are are no longer managing that system. As you said, the platform does that. But Mhmm. What is now really gonna make the difference is the quality of what goes into it, the creative that we've talked about, but also the first party signals, the conversion data. And and I think that's where, you know, those those opportunities are won or lost. And whether it's, you know, TikTok's MCP ecosystem, Google's AI brief, they're all pointing in the same direction, and it's the interface between marketer and platform is being redesigned around judgment. And what we call you know, we talk about at BrainLabs around intention and strategy, not just the execution, and this where I think agencies can add value. I would also argue that we still have those relationships with the platforms that others, a level more individual brands, you know, don't or can't reach independently. So we have access to the product still in development before they come available to everyone else. I think that is something that the agencies still kind of hold, plus all of the test and learn, and the memory and the the muscle memory around all of that test and learn that you have from having lots and lots of people working together very closely and collaboratively, again, within an agency environment. So all of those things, I think, are really adding value beyond pressing a button.

Speaker 0 · 33:10

K. And we're gonna we're we're gonna close because, we're just over the thirty minute mark. So and, Ali, this has been fantastic. So in terms of things, I mean, if you so sort of a question for you. If you wanna make your brand's major view tomorrow, what was the what what would be the one question you would ask every agency sort of on that pitch that you don't think anyone at the moment is currently asking?

Speaker 1 · 33:42

So I thought about this question. I tried to think of something clever. But then I just thought, actually, if I I tried to put myself in I used to be a client very, very briefly. And there's a lot around the agency saying why they want to work with, you know, all the promises that we make and we you know, there's a lot of, hyperbole, I think. But I the question that I would like to ask as a client is, if we didn't award you the business, what would be the one thing that you would regret from this process? What was the one thing that you didn't think that you you quite got there? Because I think that's really telling. Like, we we go all in on these promises and these things that we're really brilliant at, but I think sometimes reflecting back on what your weaknesses are and being honest about that with a client, I think that can create a vulnerability and create a conversation where you're not just selling a story and that there is a a reality to it and that we all kind of we all understand that we can't all be brilliant at everything. And clients sometimes need to hear that because they just get loads and loads of pitch presentations where we say we're amazing at everything. And I think those agencies that probably are a little bit more honest about what they are and aren't great at would go a long way in terms of the partnership if they were appointed.

Speaker 0 · 34:57

And that, I think, is a great sort of way to end this. Look, Ali, thanks very much. That's been absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 2 · 35:04

I'm sure Justin sort of feels the same as well. Ali, you met. Very good. Very eloquent. And, it's very interesting to see your business. It'll be it'll be fun to see, see how well you guys do. I really do appreciate your time. Like you say, honesty in this industry is, very hard to come by. So, don't have high hope hopes for that, but, I do appreciate the fact that this industry still remains very much a relationship driven one. I think that's the part of the point that you were making there as well. Audience, thank you for listening. As usual, Ian, this is not Oh, come on. As usual, this is not investment advice. Thank you.

Speaker 1 · 35:39

Thank you.