Tom Darlington – PHD Global Business

Tom Darlington is Global Group Strategy Director at PHD Global Business, a global media network and part of the Omnicom Media Group. Founded in London in 1990, PHD was amongst the first media agencies to offer strategic and creative media planning at a time when the industry was about buying cheaply and quickly. Since then, the agency has grown into a global network with over 100 offices in 74 countries. “We have a long history of strategic rigour and championing creative media thinking, and work with a broad spread of brands from Volkswagen Group and Diageo, through to challenger brands like Oatly”, Tom shared.

‘data is the new oil’

In his role, Tom spends half of his time working with some of PHD’s key clients, and the other half building the insight and measurement practice at PHD Global: “We believe that measurement should come as standard on every plan. We build in measurement at the start and the end of our process. This allows us to understand the impact of our work and ensures our clients can make the case for new investment decisions in terms of their brand and advertising activity. It is key to helping us make sense of an ever-changing world.

The other component to our insight offering is internally focussed – we’re trying to ensure our teams ask better questions of the briefs that they are receiving. Today there is no shortage of data available, and it is increasingly more important to ask better questions of the data available and know where to look for answers. Andy Nairn framed it nicely in his book ‘Go luck yourself’, where he criticizes the ‘data is the new oil’-mantra. On the first day of the pandemic, oil prices turned negative for the first time in history, and demand fell off a cliff. Nairn wrote that it made more sense of the ‘data is the new oil’-analogy: we were sitting on tons of this stuff which we often have no real application for. Instead, it is costing us money to store it. I thought that was a nice reframing and highlights the challenge we face when thinking about data and what we do with it. There is huge value in the data we have available to us but we have to become more selective and focus on how we synthesise it into something useful.”

different key moments

According to Tom, there isn’t a single definition for the Moment of Truth from a client’s perspective: “Each of our clients works in a different category or business. Therefore, there are different key moments within their consumers’ buying journeys that represent the crucial ‘moment or moments of truth’. I am a big subscriber to Paul Feldwick’s definition of a brand: that they are ‘a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer’. Those perceptions live in the minds of the customers like an equation.  This equation is constantly being reconciled. People are implicitly working out if the physical cost required to transact with a brand equates to an amount that is greater or lower than the perceived value that the branded perceptions create.  I like to think about the moment of truth as the bit after the equal sign. If at a key moment, a brand encounter turns out a disappointment, you get a negative value. If it exceeds it, the sum becomes positive, and people will feel that transacting with that brand provides them with value in excess of what it costs them financially.”

“The reason that Jeremy Bullmore and Stephen King still represent the guides of our industry is that there aren’t really new problems, there are only new solutions.”

fragmented landscape

“In the past, paid advertising was far more dominant in its role in building brands”, Tom continues. “The commercial landscape was much simpler. People would go to the shop, buy the product, go home, consume the product. Nowadays, branded touchpoints are far more numerous and fragmented, brands are showing up in the lives of consumers in more places than ever before. Essentially, more micro-moments of truths.  So, there are far more opportunities for a brand to impress and add value. Conversely, there are also more moments where brands can fail. Organisationally, marketing no longer lives solely in the marketing department. As retail channels and social media have proliferated, and owned channels and disciplines such as CRM have become more important, the ‘control and command’ of brand management has become fragmented. Ensuring that things are consistent and aligned is a serious organisational challenge.

There is far more opportunity and similarly, far more hazard facing marketers today. As an industry, we are consistently operating at the intersection of the fundamental and the novel. A lot of what you would consider strategy hasn’t really changed, whereas our options in terms of execution are evolving rapidly. The reason that Jeremy Bullmore and Stephen King still represent some of the most important thinking in our industry is that there aren’t really new problems, there are only new solutions. So, whilst the landscape may be fragmented into more disciplines, it remains important to organise your marketing around a coherent brand strategy that sets the direction of travel over the long term, rather than obsessing about short term tactics”

Tom shares how there is an interesting marriage between customer journeys and moments of truth: “With so many potential moments of truth needing to be considered, thinking about the consumer journey becomes incredibly important. These are more complicated and varied than ever before. I think there is an interesting opportunity for research to conceptualize moments of truths across a journey. It feels like an interesting counterpoint to the work of Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp, who have popularised the concept of category entry points. What are the things that bring people into market? How well associated is a brand with those CEPs? Are there any you aren’t well associated with, but represent a large audience opportunity? Could we do the same for moments of truth? Could we quantify the volume opportunity and the influence that those different moments have within the journey? It would allow us to understand where the greatest risk and greatest opportunity is.”

philosophical moment of truth

In terms of getting it wrong, Tom shares how the industry’s obsession with brand purpose sets an impossibly high bar for many brands and organisations to look up to: “When done properly, purpose is an interesting device. But for many brands adopting it as an evolution of brand positioning, the opportunity for failure is significant if you don’t truly believe and act on that purpose. The brands which activate purpose properly do so with commitment, credibility and authenticity. A great example is Oatly, a Swedish food company that produces alternatives to dairy products. They sell oat-based products because the scientists who founded the company realised oat milk was the most nutritional replacement to dairy. They are a sustainable company by design. They are trying to provide an alternative to consuming dairy, which they see as a ruthless tax on the resources of the planet. Oatly rebranded in 2012 – they realised they risked looking bland and generic if they behaved as the rest of the brands in their category did. Instead, they adopted an approach which saw them try to create a much cooler, consumer-facing brand aimed at a youth audience. I think they have established a style of doing ‘purpose’ which many other challenger brands have started to copy. They know if they sell more products, drive penetration, and change behaviour, they will deliver on their purpose. They don’t have to be worthy or performative where purpose is concerned.” Tom states how brand purpose can also be considered a moment of truth: “As Bill Bernbach said: ‘A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something’. Purpose has given us a more philosophical moment of truth that sits away from the physical product- or retail experience. With the way digital and social allows us to get a window into how organisations work We’re starting to see lots of examples of brands failing to meet the impossibly high standards that their stated purpose creates for them. If you’re going to position yourself as a company with strong beliefs, you have to be prepared to live by those. Consumers have a very low tolerance for bullshit.”.

context is king

When it comes to the success of brands, Tom believes in the principle of media-neutral planning: “it is important to be idea orientated, creating answers that meet the specific outcomes of a challenge rather than just focusing on a set of predetermined outputs. Everything communicates with the customer. The brand isn’t just delivered through brand communication. The instruction manual is just as important as the advert on TV. It is best to think of a brand as an iceberg with a little bit poking above the waterline, and a lot that sits below the water. The temptation is to focus too much on those things above the surface, as those are the most easily controlled. Media and communications planners – as experts in context – need to adopt a broader definition of what we consider to be media.

A lot of what is happening in media at the moment focuses on the way messages get between A and B, rather than thinking about what happens at the other end. A good example is when I was researching a stationary purchase recently. Afterward, I was re-targeted heavily – with nearly every web page I visited containing numerous adverts for the pens I’d been researching. Whilst the brand’s own website was trying to get me to spend hundreds of pounds on a pen, their retargeting and programmatic approach was undermining and detracting from their premium position. To go back to the idea of the equation in the mind of the consumer, this experience turned the value exchange negative.  I contend that increasingly a lot of media planning is overly obsessed with how the message will get to where it’s going, rather than how those messages feel for the customer when they encounter the communication in the wild. It will be interesting to see what happens in the cookie-less world where we will have to get back to thinking about context much more stringently than we do at the moment.”

Looking ahead, Tom shares that it will be objectively harder to communicate through paid media: “The bit that pokes above the water line is changing in its influence and its ability to shape the entire brand experience. Media inflation is a real concern at the moment. It feels like owned media and owned touchpoints are becoming more important in the overall mix, therefore, the emphasis becomes much more on how businesses and organisations integrate marketing throughout their organisation, rather than just being expert at producing assets that live in broadcast channels. That kind of integration – and the willingness to get one’s hands dirty to deliver it – is going to be one of the more important skills that live in marketing departments.”