01The job, and a typical day

Fiftyfive5 is a qualitative research agency — words and feelings rather than numbers, behavioural shifts, and the human side of the consumer. It was an independent agency and has since been acquired. The client list spans commercial, government, education, tourism, fast-moving consumer goods and alcohol, including RTDs in New Zealand.

The work has one foot in the boardroom and one in the street, and the researcher has to code-switch between the two.

• Qual is a team sport. The questions are always “what have we learnt” and “what does this mean for our client’s business.”
• Insights-into-action workshops exist because findings on their own don’t change anything — the application is the deliverable.
• Clients come from across the business — product, innovation, R&D, consumer strategy and consumer insights teams.

02How market research helps businesses grow

Three buckets, and they map onto the marketing process in order.

1. Identify growth strategies — where to play

• Demand frameworks and segmentation to identify, size and prioritise growth opportunities
• Market, cultural and category exploration to identify growth platforms
• Implications for acquisition, category drivers, portfolio planning, positioning, pricing and innovation

2. Execute against growth strategies — how to win in market

• Defining an insight-led customer value proposition (CVP), positioning and creative strategy — then developing and testing it
• Identification and sizing of innovation platforms; ideation and concept development
• Co-creation, development and validation of executional product, service and channel blueprints
• Customer experience strategy and design
• Pricing strategy
• Shopper, channel and retail strategy

3. Evaluate performance — metrics that matter

• Integrated performance-monitoring programs covering CX, category, brand and comms, and sentiment and reputation

03The three gaps generative AI can’t close

The tempting move is to “just add Gen AI.” The more useful framing is human in the lead, human in the loop — deciding which parts need a person driving and which only need a person checking.

What versus why

Behavioural data will tell you the what. Qualitative data tells you the why.

The example given: the data shows people are not drinking as much. It cannot tell you why — and the why is what determines what the business should do about it.

The same gap shows up in what people report about themselves. A consumer says “I want something cheaper,” but the real driver may be value for money, convenience, saving time or reducing effort. What people say is not always the reason behind their behaviour, so you keep asking why.

04The qualitative toolkit

The researcher’s job is to design the most effective solution against the brand and business objectives — a bespoke method for System 1 and System 2 thinking, drawing on behavioural, motivational, ethnographic and digital approaches.

05The disciplines behind the research

Good qualitative work is not just interviewing. It combines deep qualitative experience with complementary disciplines, pulled in and co-ordinated to solve the client’s problem — for businesses, but also for government and social enterprise.

And it isn’t only consumers

Audiences include consumers from all walks of life, B2B buyers, trades, healthcare professionals, and culturally and linguistically diverse Australians.

06Four projects

Creative effectiveness

The problem. Brands spend millions filming an ad campaign, and want to know before they spend whether it will work, and where. An effective campaign has to do several things at once: stand out, deliver a clear message, engage its specific audience emotionally, and announce a product or build brand love.

The solution. A simple global scorecard against effectiveness criteria, nuanced by market; optimisation recommendations for the creative ideas; and detailed, agnostic identification of script problems in specific markets. In the campaign discussed, the ad relied on jokes — which is hard to make work across seven cultures. Increasingly enabled by AI moderation.

Mobile ethnography — baristas and plant-based milk

The problem. Consumer needs are often subconscious. Baristas working in a blur serving customers are not consciously thinking about packaging pain points.

The solution. Wearable body cameras. The work identified the truths, needs and tensions for professional baristas using plant-based milks; unpicked opening, storage, usage and disposal issues; trialled new packaging prototypes; and developed innovation platforms over Zoom — watching the footage back with the baristas and talking through their thoughts and feelings.

Cross-cultural analysis — a tea brand across seven markets

The problem. How does a company position a brand as one coherent story across multiple global markets when each market has a different set of competitors and a different retail environment? Markets included India, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines.

The solution. Qualitative research to uncover needs, brand perceptions and competitor perceptions, with cross-cultural analysis across the multi-market work. Running the markets together saves the company money — you are looking for the similarities, so you don’t end up making three separate campaigns.

Demand prediction tool — what will students want to study?

The problem. Universities need to respond quickly to shifts in student demand and competition, but insight today is fragmented and lagged, which makes emerging opportunities and demand gaps hard to see.

The solution. A single trusted view of education product demand, built by connecting data sources into a unified modelling layer.

The output is two maps. For existing programs — university performance against attractiveness — to see what is still worth doing. For new programs — momentum against size — to see what should be brought out.

The point made about this one: you cannot read it off demographics and numbers alone. Cultural drivers, social factors, values, motivations and psychology explain why students make the education choices they do.

07Activating research with generative AI

Ubersight

Their own tool — a way to supercharge existing frameworks with more data, integrate different data sources into the work, and ensure new knowledge compounds rather than being lost at the end of each project. Used for data synthesis, competitor scoping, cultural intelligence and trend analysis.

Dynamic personas

Their proprietary take on synthetic personas: customer segments loaded into an interactive, queryable interface, where the researcher controls the data set. A client might say “strip out everyone except the indulgent escapers” — and the persona is built from that client’s own qualitative research, journey mapping and survey data sitting in their knowledge bank. You can then ask it questions: if I did X, how would this segment respond?

What makes the approach different is the foundation — built on the right data and insight for that business specifically, and able to integrate multiple data sources into a single customer view.

Online task boards

Bespoke tasks designed for participants to complete — “getting to know you” exercises, weekday food diary entries. Often used when a client says “this is my target market, but I feel like I don’t really know them.”

Dovetail

A video platform with transcription, insight tagging and downloadable showreels. Video comes in, transcripts and clips come out, and an insight board supports the analysis — with on-platform AI tools now built in.

08Guardrails for AI in qualitative research

The residual worry, in her words: feeling like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes — everyone agreeing the output is good when it may not be. Watch for preconception and bias, in the tool and in yourself.

09Key takeaways

• Data tells you what happened; qualitative research explains why.
• Research is about understanding people, not collecting data.
• What consumers say isn’t always what they do — which is why observation, ethnography and shopping safaris earn their place.
• Keep asking why. Curiosity is the core skill.
• Insight is not the end goal. The research has to help the business make a decision.
• Culture and context matter, especially across markets.
• AI is a tool, not a replacement. Human judgement and interpretation still do the analysis.

I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the right question.

Where the name Fiftyfive5 comes from

01The core argument

Three claims sat underneath everything else in the lecture.

• Marketing is persuasion. At the end of the day, that is the job — changing what people believe and prefer before they reach the point of choice.
• Marketing is a growth engine, and brands are the economic engine inside it. Brands exist to drive commercial value.
• Brand is a commercial asset. The framing throughout was the commercial view: a brand is something you build in order to extract value from it.

02What a brand actually is

Where the word comes from

“Brand” originally meant to burn — to mark. What the mark signifies has shifted through four stages since.

How the experts define a brand

The deck put seven definitions side by side. Each emphasises something different — memory, association, emotion, story, or the moment of choice.

A collection of beliefs and perceptions that create a positive predisposition at the point of choice.

Justin Papps — the definition to memorise

Two things follow from that. First, a brand lives in the customer’s head, not in your brand guidelines. Second, “positive predisposition” is the operative phrase — the work happens before the moment of purchase, not during it.

Brand associations

When people think of a brand they recall the experience they had with it and the associations attached to it. Associations cluster around three things:

• The leader or founder — and this cuts both ways (Tesla vs. Elon Musk is the live example)
• What the company actually does
• Adjectives — the descriptive shorthand people reach for

03Why brands matter now more than ever

The argument is about supply versus capacity. Brand exposures per day have exploded across four centuries; the human brain has stayed exactly the same size.

In a time of mass fragmentation of media and consumer attention, standing out in a sea of sameness has never been more important.

A brand is a lighthouse in a sea of sameness.

Steve Jobs

The battleground has moved

The old battleground was the supermarket aisle — shelf position, packaging, point of sale. The new one is a phone screen full of app icons, where the competitive set is broader and the moment of choice is faster. Same principles, different terrain.

04The five reasons brands matter

1. Brands are economic engines

BRANDS = MARGIN = POWER. A strong brand lets you charge more for a comparable — sometimes objectively inferior — product, and consumers still choose it. That price gap is the margin, and the margin is the power.

Exhibit A — the backpack test

Note which column wins on the spec sheet. The cheaper bag has more compartments, a bigger laptop sleeve and a lifetime warranty. Every logical measure is weaker than a strong name plus loyalty.

Exhibit B — the iPhone 16 economics

The deck also ran four head-to-head pairs where brand, not specification, explains the price and preference gap: Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Hyundai vs. BMW, Qantas vs. Virgin, and iPhone vs. Samsung Galaxy.

Tangible assets depreciate. Brand equity can grow indefinitely. Brand equity carries a value on the balance sheet and has no natural ceiling — a point made with a quote from the CEO of an ASX200 company: supply chains can be optimised, the organisation right-sized, functions outsourced, but the only real way to drive growth is by investing in current and new brands.

2. Brands are behavioural shortcuts

A really strong brand means the customer doesn’t have to think much. Humans run on heuristics, and brands are one of the most efficient heuristics available. The underlying model is Daniel Kahneman’s.

The four core parts of a brand strategy

These sit inside the hierarchy: Business Strategy above, with Brand Strategy and Marketing Strategy underneath it.

A bottle so distinct that it could be recognised by touch in the dark, or when lying broken on the ground.

Coca-Cola bottle design brief, 1915

Per the lecture, the only symbol in the world more widely recognised than the Coke bottle is the cross.

Not all assets are equal — and a logo isn’t a hook

A SYSTEM1 study plotted distinctive assets on two axes: attention driven, and early brand recognition. The pattern is counter-intuitive.

The DBA paradox — the most effective assets are the least used

Ipsos, The Power of You, across 2,000 video ads. Usage is what marketers actually do; effectiveness is what works. They run almost exactly opposite.

The chain that makes it work: use of distinctive brand assets → drives brand salience → drives recall, connection and recognition → creates System 1 shortcuts.

3. Brands are strategy in action

Brands are how you connect your strategy to the customer. The deck was emphatic that these are business decisions, not marketing decorations.

All three require informed and deliberate choices — and trade-offs. Get them right and you drive a positive Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).

4. Brands shape culture

Brands reflect and shape the culture in which they exist.

Good brands are culturally relevant and know what role they are entitled to play. You want to tap into culture and shape it — but the line between relevant and overstepping is thin, and crossing it is expensive.

Warning sign: a brand that keeps changing its logo is telling you something is wrong underneath.

5. Brands are volatility moats

The stronger the brand, the better you survive turbulence. The moat is built from three things working together: brand equity + reputation + crisis response.

Byron Sharp’s point in How Brands Grow underpins this: brands with high mental and physical availability are already embedded in purchase routines, so they absorb disruption better and recover faster.

05Brands in the AI and agentic era

The deck asked directly: do distinctive brand assets still matter when AI is doing the searching for me? It answered with a mocked-up assistant response recommending laptops — MacBook Air as the top pick, then Dell, Lenovo and Microsoft, and then a fictional “Vranya M6,” new to market, claiming double the features at half the price.

To be successful in the agentic era, a brand needs to be machine readable + human loveable. Machine readable so agents can find, parse and recommend you. Human loveable so a person still asks for you by name once the agent presents the options. The framing comes from James Hurman’s Future Demand.

• The sameness problem intensifies. Everyone can now generate the same thing with AI. If output is commoditised, the differentiator moves back to brand.
• The risk for marketers is AI slop. Overreliance and laziness produce work that is fluent, on-brief and completely undifferentiated.
• The narrow-minded take is that AI simply takes over marketing jobs. The work shifts toward judgement, difference and taste.

06A note on B2B

Asked whether branding matters in B2B, the answer was that the principles are the same as B2C — with a shift of emphasis:

• Lean more on the rational case and on how you help the buyer succeed in their market.
• Make clear promises — and then actually deliver on them. Reputation compounds faster and travels further in a small buyer universe.

07Practical takeaways

• Marketing is a long game. Results often don’t show up inside two to three years.
• Sampling breaks the uncertainty barrier. New customers are blocked by uncertainty; product sampling gets them to a first trial.
• The shortcut into someone’s mind is perceived quality and reliability. Which means a good product strategy and relentless consistency — not clever advertising alone.
• Establishing difference and relevance is the biggest challenge for anyone new entering brand — and the same challenge that makes rebranding risky.
• Audit your assets before you spend. The DBA paradox says the thing you’re over-using is probably returning least.

Attention is cheap. Memory is expensive. Preference is priceless.

The closing slide

08Read, follow, watch

Follow on LinkedIn

Mark Ritson · Rory Sutherland · Scott Galloway · Byron Sharp · Zoe Scaman · James Hurman · Mi3 Publishing

Watch / listen

Uncensored CMO (Jon Evans) · Admission (Russel Howcroft and Freddie Young) · Behavioural Science for Brands · On Strategy Showcase · Mumbrellacast

01Why creativity matters

The attention problem

• Too much content, not enough time. Most content simply doesn’t get watched.
• The competitive set has changed. You are not competing with other brands in your category — you are competing with how people choose to spend their time.
• It has never been harder to stand out, and most things don’t. Cars look the same. Smartphones look the same. Bottled water is a clear bottle and an alpine stream, every time, because the whole category signals purity the same way.
• Liquid Death is the counter-example: it broke every code of the water category and became the fastest-growing water brand in the world.

Creativity is measurable, not just a matter of taste

Creative effectiveness can be measured by benchmarking award-winning work against the average ad in a category. On that basis:

Three times he has proven it

The biggest risk is taking no risk

If it’s not bold, it’s dumb.

Brent Smart

The obstacle is human nature: we are frightened of things that are different. And when an idea is genuinely new, there is no data to support it — which is exactly when conviction has to do the work instead.

02Job number one: make the brand memorable

Marketing is a battle for memory. People see thousands of ads and remember almost none of them, so memorability is not one objective among several — it is the first job of brand management.

Where Telstra started

• Corporate reputation ranked barely above the Australian Taxation Office
• Carl Barron had a stand-up bit built around the brand — it was a national punchline
• The advertising was boring, transactional and rational: product-led, offer-led, multicoloured with no ownable brand colour

The critical insight: reputation is an emotional judgement, not a rational one. It is about how people feel, not what they think.

The ethnographic research

Rather than a large quantitative study, they spoke to a small number of people and went deep — in their homes, at the pub, at the sporting club. The key exercise was to ask people to draw how the Telstra brand feels.

03Current demand vs. future demand

At any moment only around 15% of a category’s buyers are in market and ready to purchase. The other 85% are not — but almost all of them will be eventually. Most marketing talks only to the 15%.

Don’t just talk to the four hands in the room that are up right now.

Brent Smart

Someone planning to buy a phone within the next three years is worth reaching today, because if the memory is already built they will come to you when they are ready. This connects directly to James Hurman’s Future Demand — the same book recommended in Week 3.

04The long and the short of it

From Les Binet and Peter Field. Marketing runs at two speeds, and they behave completely differently.

The ratio

• 60 long / 40 short is the benchmark from Binet and Field’s research.
• Telstra was 20 brand / 80 trading when he arrived — almost the inverse.
• His first move was to shift it to 50/50, not straight to 60/40. A staged correction, not a leap.

05A magnet, not a mirror

To change how people feel about a brand, change how the brand feels.

Brent Smart

Almost every large Australian brand feels the same: real people being real people, very little storytelling. That is holding a mirror up to the audience and showing them their own reflection. The alternative is to be a magnet — something distinctive enough that people are drawn toward it.

The worst offender is Olympics advertising, where every brand ends up advertising the Olympics rather than themselves.

What Telstra did instead

• 26 separate 15-second stop-motion spots rather than one hero film — so every time you saw the Olympics you saw a different ad and never got sick of it
• A different Australian animal matched to a different real place
• 42 different voices, using actual people from those places with their own accents
• Real stop-motion puppets, made by hand — roughly seven months of work
• The scale of the campaign was itself an argument about the scale of the business

It looked nothing like anything else running at the time, and won a Grand Prix.

06Write the brand on one page

“Wherever we go” works on two levels — network coverage, and the future the brand is heading toward. The word “we” is doing a lot of work: it includes the customer.

“Always crafted with a human hand” is not decorative. It is an explicit strategic position against AI slop, written into the brand definition.

07The whistling ad and the Telstra walk

The brave choices

• Animation, in a category that films real people
• No phones anywhere in the ad — a technology ad that never shows the product
• Metaphor rather than demonstration
• Optimistic and positive in tone

What happened next

08Distinctive assets and craft

If you want to be memorable, you need distinctive brand assets.

Brent Smart

• Out-of-home reduced to the codes: just the legs and arms of the characters — and every poster made by hand from paper.
• Why bother? Because people genuinely can tell the difference between something made and something generated.
• Young people find out-of-home relaxing. It sits there without jumping at you — an underrated channel in a world of always-on digital advertising.

Craft as a strategic choice

If you take the time to make something feel special, the brand feels special. The audience reads the effort as a signal: this brand takes care, so it will probably take care of me. Research feedback landed exactly there — people described the brand as premium, inferred the service would be good, and were more accepting of paying more.

Consistency without sameness

• Consistent does not mean identical. Consistent brand idea, voice, branding and level of craft — while still turning up in different ways.
• If people already dislike your brand and you turn up in exactly the predictable way, you have no chance. You will simply confirm what they already think.
• Why bore people to death consistently? Consistency is not a licence to be dull.

09Proof that building brand builds the business

Four years to transform the brand both creatively and commercially — and they spent less on marketing while doing it.

That last line is the proof point worth remembering: brand building did not compete with performance marketing, it made performance marketing work better.

Crisis resilience: a brand strong on emotion rather than price earns trust, and trust is what holds when something goes wrong that marketing does not control. The response still has to be fast — react in time, contain the damage, then start rebuilding.

10Optimism: creativity in the age of AI

AI is not the answer. You need an idea first — AI is not the idea.

Brent Smart

11Creative culture and kindness

Human creativity thrives on kindness.

Referencing the Governor of Illinois on kindness: cruelty means you have failed the first test — the test of overcoming your own instinctual fear. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest one, and the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have, they have in spades.

Kindness plus intellectual honesty

• Psychological safety so that bringing an idea forward is not a risk.
• But not false praise. If it is a bad idea you do not want people saying “yeah, that’s great.” Kind to the person, hard on the work.
• High standards, clearly articulated, so everyone knows what good looks like.

12Advice for starting out

Be useful. Be prepared.

• Be prepared to help, do more, go deeper. “I’ll take someone low talent and high culture” — they become crucial to the team.
• Starting a job is an advantage. You see the organisation fresh, so you spot opportunities the people already there have stopped noticing.
• However small the task, make it great, then take it to your boss with a clear and passionate reason why it should be.
• When something has never been done, there is no data. Conviction is powerful — you have to actually believe it.
• If you are going to fail, fail fast. Don’t be defensive, be adaptable, and don’t try to control the creative process.
• Go in to work. Don’t be at home.
• People are smart — don’t make dumb advertising.

13The seven takeaways

01Four pieces of advice

She opened with career advice rather than brand theory, and every set of notes recorded the same four points.

• Be deeply interested in the unfamiliar. Stop always writing marketing pitches for yourself.
• Know what’s important to you — your values, and what you actually need from work. For her that is being intellectually stimulated and doing work that has an impact.
• Curiosity and tenacity go very, very far. Curiosity is asking how something works and watching how people shop. Tenacity is doing something with what you noticed.
• Be a good person. Smart but evil is a no-go, and the industry is very small — people will hear about you.

02Two brands, two different problems

The lecture ran on two case studies, chosen because they face opposite versions of the long-term question.

03What KitKat stands for

KitKat is more than 90 years old, and what it stands for is a break.

Where that came from

• The company listened to consumer suggestions early in the brand’s history and built the meaning from there.
• The bar was made as a treat for workers to enjoy on their break. The name is tied to a union movement about people having a well-earned rest.
• It was also positioned as an alternative to cigarettes.
• The bar takes two hands to break apart, so the product itself makes you stop what you are doing.

Have a break, have a KitKat.

The line, essentially unchanged for decades

04Break equity

The most dangerous person in marketing is the bored brand manager.

Shannon Wright

The bored brand manager comes in guns blazing, feels like they are doing a great deal, and changes things that did not need changing. The point is not that change is bad — it is that you have to be clear about what you are changing and whether that change actually matters. Don’t just do stuff. Have a strategy.

The tension has evolved, even though the need hasn’t

Breaks are as relevant as they have ever been. What has changed is what a break now feels like.

• Gen Z know that breaks are what keep them going.
• They do take breaks — 63% say they need one.
• But their breaks are broken. 64% cannot switch off while taking a break because their mind is still overactive.
• Doom-scrolling is the mechanism, and the “right to disconnect” is the cultural conversation around it.

So the brand’s job is unchanged but the obstacle is new: the emotional break, not just the physical one. One activation used a magnet device where things stayed stuck to you until you took a bite of the KitKat.

05Break ritual: distinctive brand assets

The second question is which assets to protect and keep building. Distinctive brand assets shortcut the audience to you — they give a brand instant meaning and let people link a piece of content or advertising back to the brand without being told.

What counts as an asset

Logos, colours, fonts, packaging and physical product cues, music and sonic cues, slogans, celebrities, and distinctive creative styles.

These become powerful through repetition over time. Even when everyone already knows them, you have to keep using them — if you don’t use them, you lose them.

06Breaks in culture

If the bored brand manager is the first danger, the second is the brand manager with no ambition — the one who protects the assets and does nothing with them.

Advertising impact does not always follow marketers’ instincts. The three biggest drivers of brand impact recorded in the lecture were:

1. Brand size
2. Creative quality
3. Budget setting across geographies

The algorithm thirsts for new content, and feeding it takes highly distinctive, original communications that consumers would actually bother to watch inside their feeds. For KitKat that means content that is more entertaining and better suited to the break moment — not simply more content.

The challenge

How do you create talkability throughout the year and keep driving love and brand equity for KitKat?

One answer arrived on its own: the debate over the correct way to eat a KitKat, which generated around 27 million social engagements. A debate about your brand is a jackpot. It means being willing to be divisive, and sometimes fanning the flames rather than shutting the argument down.

07The principles

Four principles for what works in the world of brand conversations. Every set of notes recorded these four, in this order.

08Allen’s: what happens when macro trends shift

Allen’s has very good brand health. People love it. The problem is not the brand — it is that the macro trends underneath it are changing how people eat.

We want to be a playground, not a museum.

Shannon Wright, on where Allen’s needs to sit

09Trend one: the intense flavour world of Gen Z

• Intense sensory attributes — explosive flavours and unexpected textures.
• Multi-sensorial play — 45% of Australians say texture appeals to them in food and drink.
• Experiential and social moments — sweets become social currency through sharing and discovery.

In practice that looks like over-packaged, intense experiences with an element of play — playing with your food. Lolly salads are the clearest example: people combine what they find at Kmart, then post it. The value is the connection and the shared discovery, not the confectionery.

One counterweight recorded in the notes: younger consumers may also carry stronger concerns about artificiality.

10Trend two: GLP-1s and additive wellness

15% of Australians will be using GLP-1s by the end of the year — described in the lecture as a lowball estimate. Self-injection is currently the barrier, and a pill is coming. There are two groups using them: people with a genuine medical need, and people obtaining them in less official ways for appearance reasons.

11Trend three: the changing ethnic mix

India has now overtaken England as a source of migration to Australia, and food preferences travel with people.

• Food is deeply anchored to cultural heritage. It is one of the most retained traits for migrants and their children — nearly as much as religion.
• Snacks are the category people are most willing to change, and kids’ lunchboxes are where they are most willing to swap in Western alternatives.
• Australian lollies are largely unfamiliar to these consumers.

A cautionary tale for heritage brands

Arnott’s changed four Shapes varieties, moving the flavouring to both sides of the cracker rather than one. The changes were small, but consumers were given no choice, and the outrage was about having something they already liked taken away. The same thing happened when Black Cats were discontinued.

12Know your consumers, and know your brand

The answer to “where do you go from here” came back to three things, and every set of notes recorded them.

• Know your current consumers deeply.
• Know your potential consumers deeply.
• Know your brand deeply.

For Allen’s, the third one is the question: what makes Allen’s, Allen’s? The personality recorded was easy-going, cheeky and fun-loving. Any evolution has to stay consistent with that, or it stops being the brand people already love.

Two ways to cut the audience

• Consumer typology — who people are and how they behave.
• Demand spaces — the occasion, and the micro-trend attached to it.

13The five brand stretch considerations

Mapping the stretch

Extensions sit in bands running out from the brand’s core, across two dimensions: how far you move in category or occasion, and how far you move in consumer or age. The bands recorded were core, near adjacency, credible stretch, and exception or no-go.

Using Heinz as the worked example: soup is a near adjacency, pasta sauce is a credible stretch, and vodka is the exception — which only worked because of the cultural moment around vodka pasta.

Risk versus reward

14You don’t have to do it all yourself

Innovation is expensive, and you do not always have to build a new product or enter a new category on your own. Collaborations grow equity and let you test how far the brand can stretch before committing the investment.

Allen’s collaborations recorded from this year: Pepsi, and Mountain Dew with an artist partnership. A beauty collaboration was also mentioned — see the note below on which partner.

15The recap

When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.

Howard Schultz, Starbucks — the quote she opened on

01Welcome to the sector

The Australian charity sector is extremely saturated and, on the numbers she showed, getting harder.

What is happening to fundraising

• Funding across the sector is rising about 3% a year.
• The number of people donating has declined slightly over the last year.
• So: fewer donors, each giving more.

The sector is also unusually collaborative. The benchmarking project compares organisations against each other every year, so charities have an external read on their own performance that most commercial categories never get.

02We have a trust problem

The Edelman Trust Barometer is a global study of consumer trust in organisations and institutions. The 2025 data gave four headline insights.

1. Trust inequality is growing between high and low income households.
2. Business holds the highest trust, and carries greater expectations to lead.
3. A lack of credible information sows division.
4. Political and economic polarisation.

Grievance is doing the damage

• Trust has not recovered since 2021 — recorded in the notes as a net −4 over 2021 to 2025.
• 61% of Australians hold grievances against media, government, organisations and the rich.
• The mechanism is belief: when people think an institution is not serving their interests, trust falls. Perceived marginalisation erodes it further.
• There is a vast difference in the experience and perspective that high and low income Australians bring to this. Lower income respondents view government as much less ethical and competent — and NGOs and business too, but government most of all.

Why this matters to a brand

Trust and brand performance correlate, and that shows up in purchase behaviour. For a charity competing for a shrinking donor pool, the trust problem is not a reputational side-issue — it is the growth problem. Put simply: it is already hard enough, so we need to fix the trust problem.

03Fuzzy awareness and the need to be known

UNICEF is the United Nations Children’s Fund, and it exists to uphold children’s rights across prenatal to adolescent pathways. The problem was that Australians did not know that.

• 40% of people did not know who UNICEF was.
• 29% associated them with children.
• Many people did not realise UNICEF was a charity at all.
• In 2019 UNICEF Australia ranked 40th on the reputation score.

Where the money was going

Spend was concentrated at the bottom of the funnel: roughly 95% on conversion and retention, and only 5% on consideration and awareness. The organisation was optimising the part of the funnel that only works if the top of it is full.

Put a rocket under it and go and do things differently.

The CEO, on the brief

04Zero to hero

They ran research on people who were not already donors — awareness of UNICEF, and intention to donate. Both qualitative and quantitative, as all good research should be.

Prompted versus unprompted

Unprompted awareness is what you name without being given a list. Top of mind is the first few charities someone names. In 2020 UNICEF Australia had effectively zero unprompted awareness — people recognised the name once shown it, and not before.

Which facts to lead with

They plotted candidate facts about UNICEF on two axes — how much a fact improved opinion of UNICEF, against how well known it already was. The three worth investing in:

• Saves more lives than any other organisation.
• Is the world’s largest organisation working for children’s rights.
• Brings lifesaving help to children.

Of the statements tested, “works to protect every child in danger” resonated most strongly.

05Polycrisis

A polycrisis is a situation where multiple serious problems happen at the same time and interact so the overall damage is worse than the sum of the parts. Bushfires, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine — concurrent and overlapping.

It matters for positioning because decisions are made at a point in time, contextual to what is happening then. UNICEF USA had run work in this space — unreasonable, determined, a thousand problems, keeps going, never gives up until the rights of every child are met. Effective there, but too chest-beating for an Australian audience.

06Bound by strategy

UNICEF inspires Australians with the determination it takes to protect and care for every child, no matter what.

The positioning

Determination is the operative word, and the phrase “no matter what” is doing deliberate work: the brand does not shy away from hard work. The positioning then drove the plan rather than sitting in a document.

The proof points

A positioning needs evidence behind it. Theirs: a global responder to humanitarian emergencies that has saved more lives than any other organisation.

• On the ground in 190+ countries.
• There before, during and after — not only at the moment of crisis.
• Lifesaving help within 48 hours.
• 100% donor funded — included specifically because people did not know UNICEF was a charity.

Which produced the message: “Always there.” In emergencies, children need someone there.

07A journey of consistency

They reset the brand and built a brand book, launched in 2022. Before that there was no consistency — everything looked different, across both brand elements and the language used.

A single-minded proposition repeated does more than several messages competing for the same attention.

08Earned media

Earned media should not be treated as separate from marketing or brand building. It was the cornerstone of how UNICEF Australia built awareness.

• Innovating in the ambassador space to reach media — a range of ambassadors, matched to the moment.
• Right people, right content.
• Knowing when they are relevant in the news cycle. Follow the stories, and work out where the organisation has a genuine contribution to make rather than pushing into every conversation.

What the word cloud showed

They tracked the language in media articles referencing UNICEF, which is a way of checking whether what people associate with you matches what you actually do.

• 2019: people, children, Smith Family, World Vision, Helen.
• 2024: children by a wide margin, with global issues shifting around it.

One point worth holding onto: the growth lifted the presence of children’s issues in media as a whole, rather than taking attention from other children’s organisations. And it converts — 21% of people said they had learnt about UNICEF’s work from the news, with coverage playing a key role in prompting donations.

09Perfected by people

Brand building at UNICEF Australia was set up as a whole-of-organisation strategy, not a marketing project. Two pillars mattered most.

Relentless in emergencies and crises

The organisational goal is to be recognised for UNICEF’s role in emergencies and crises, maximising support for children when they need it most. That gives marketing a specific job rather than a general one.

The right skills for the job

• The team was reformed — from generalists to experts in their fields, particularly brand and digital.
• Democratising digital: they got rid of the digital marketing team so that everyone across the organisation could do digital, rather than routing it through one group.
• A strong look to the future, now embedding AI into the way they work.

10Did it work?

Two core metrics, measured twice a year. Both grew significantly.

• People who know UNICEF works with children.
• Mentions of UNICEF as a first responder to emergencies.

Those two are brand salience — the specific things people need to say about you before they will trust you.

But does it turn into donations?

Top-of-mind awareness tracks alongside income and revenue growth. Not one lever pulling the result, but the sum of all the parts working together.

11A journey, not a destination

Some of the metrics have fallen backwards since 2024, top of mind among them. The creative was tiring and effectiveness was declining. They looked at ad diagnostics to work out what was fatiguing rather than guessing.

There’s no such thing as a tired brand — just a bored brand manager.

Libby Hogson

Evolution, not revolution

Working with their agency, the answer was an evolution of the brand platform rather than a wholesale pivot. The positioning moved from “Always there” to “Let’s be there”.

Campaign evaluation had it performing significantly stronger across several ad diagnostics.

12Brand stretch, and where UNICEF can go

You can stretch a brand as long as the core idea holds. UNICEF can talk about climate change because climate change is changing childhood — the subject is new, the reason for being there is not.

The resulting campaign, climate change is changing childhood, help us save it, was targeted at a specific audience and was braver than their usual work.

13Lessons learned

The things she would do again.

• It’s a whole-of-organisation task. Not a marketing project.
• Stay the course. Building a brand is a journey, not a destination.
• Measure everything. You cannot tell what is working otherwise.
• Highly skilled people really matter. Specialists over generalists.
• Trust the data, but still take some risks. Learn and improve from it without letting it make every decision.

An aside he opened on: some research shows that by far the best way to learn is writing by hand, not typing on a laptop. And the reason any of this holds up over time — the world changes a lot, but people don’t.

01What a planner actually does

The job has an unhelpful number of names. Planner, strategist, brand planner, account planning, solutions architect — all the same role.

That last clause is the one that separates the job from account management. Everyone else in the room represents the client or the work. The strategist is the only person whose job is to speak for the person the advertising is aimed at.

If you want to see the shape of it dramatised, he said: watch Mad Men.

02Where it sits in the process

Three steps, and the strategist owns the middle one. The client arrives with a business problem; the creative team needs something that will hold attention. Strategy is the translation between the two.

03Where planning came from

The whole thought process was invented by Stephen King at JWT London, who published the Planning Guide in March 1974. That document is the birth of planning, and Tim’s view is that it is still pretty much the definitive guide.

A systematic approach to planning advertising has to do more than simply control and discipline. It must actively stimulate imagination and creativity.

Stephen King, Planning Guide, 1974

The tension it was written to solve: advertising is a long series of unique things, and each one needs to be creative in its own way. So any method that makes the work repeatable risks making it dull — which is the opposite of the job.

The four rules a planning method has to satisfy

04Three flavours of planner

What Stephen King invented has since split into three jobs, and they sit at different distances from the creative work.

One thing he was clear about: if you do strategy, you do strategy. It isn’t tied to one type of media, and it is used across every kind of agency.

05What the job involves

06How he got here

He grew up in Cronulla and wanted to be a graphic designer for General Pants. He ended up on work experience in their marketing team instead — partly because it looked less chained to a desk — and never worked in one of the stores.

The through-line he drew: people who get jobs know people. Have relationships. Talk to people.

07An aside on social media

If you are a business using social media, stop thinking like a user.

Tim Collier

• Media inside social is very cheap. If you can leverage scale, the advertising is powerful.
• Word of mouth — people talking inside social — is just as good.
• Don’t try to blend in with the algorithm. Your job is to stand out.
• Don’t try to scam the algorithm either. It’s a black box.
• Get to a number that is mathematically relevant to the size of your company, or it isn’t worth doing.

08The campaign process

Nine stages from kickoff to report.

And the strategist’s four steps

Running underneath that, the strategist’s own sequence: discover, synthesis, plan, instruct.

09The 5Cs

The framework for the discover stage — the elements that will influence whether the work succeeds. Largely desk research.

Beyond desk research, the primary work: focus groups, and sometimes an online survey. He still gets to sit in on groups occasionally.

10Insight: what compulsions drive a man

At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature — what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him.

Bill Bernbach

Every set of notes recorded this quote, which tells you how much weight he put on it. The work is to observe, analyse and understand people and their strange behaviours — and to be entertained by how strange people are. He mentioned dating a psychologist as an occupational advantage.

For the Bernbach work itself, he pointed at the Volkswagen ads — the snowman one, and Lemon.

11The brief frameworks

GET / WHO / TO / BY

The basic outline of a creative brief. His worked example:

Two sets of notes recorded the last slot as “buy” rather than “by”. The worked example only makes sense with by — it’s the mechanism, not the purchase — so that’s what is used here.

Opportunity / Challenge / Truths / Answer

The more analytical of the two. Tim used to work for the person who built this framework and wrote a textbook on it.

12The single-minded proposition

The most classic output on a brief, the hardest thing to get right, and the most misunderstood.

Which is why a statement of fact fails the test. “Our chocolate is the richest” is a claim, not an invitation. The proposition is what the richest chocolate tastes like — and this is ours.

One test recorded in the notes: what is the first thing that comes to mind? New York, the Statue of Liberty. Sydney, the Opera House. That is what single-minded looks like from the outside.

13How to write a brief

Four steps, attributed in one set of notes to the BBH planning department.

1. Gather everything.
2. Write the task as plainly as possible.
3. Get to a point of view — take a distinct, opinionated strategic stance.
4. Rewrite and recap.

Step three is where the opinionated half of “be curious and be opinionated” earns its place. A brief without a point of view is a summary, and a summary doesn’t stimulate anything.

14The cycle continues

The planning cycle, which comes from the same Stephen King lineage:

• Where are we?
• Why are we there?
• Where could we be?
• How could we get there?

15Why you should care

Marketing science

All the ways that have been studied and proved that marketing works on people. The point of knowing it is that it is what separates an argument from an opinion when you are in the room.

The Effie

The award strategists win. His view of the creative awards was blunt — this is the only one that matters.

• To win one you have to write a 4,000-word essay proving your campaign worked.
• Hard to win, but it matters to clients, because strategy leads to profit.
• Profit is the only thing clients care about.

We owe our clients — and everyone they work with

So what is owed, in his list: our effort, our expertise, objectivity, rigour and thought, insight, and creativity.

16How to actually get effective

Three words, in order: learn, process, apply.

Which brings it back to where he started. Be curious — and be opinionated.

Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them; and sometimes it’s an ad.

Howard Gossage

01Six companies, then a portfolio career

He has worked for six companies:

• Gillette
• Y&R — now VML, owned by WPP
• Advertising Associates
• Ogilvy — ran it nationally
• Publicis — ran that too
• KPMG — consultants edging into the agency space

He met Ange as the client, at Colgate, while he was on the agency side. He called advertising a young person’s game — it runs on energy and vibe, and agencies are a bit ageist about letting older people go, though mostly that comes down to cost.

Now it is boards and advisory roles. The ones recorded in the notes:

He also runs three podcasts: Next on the Menu (for Australian Pork, with someone from The Block), Creative Comeback and The Marketing Commute. Joe’s notes also list “24 hour business plan” among the advisory work. His site is andrewbillybaxter.com.au.

02A short history of advertising

The word comes from the Latin ad vertere — “to turn the mind toward”. Teach people about something and convince them to buy it: advertising as a way of changing behaviour.

• The oldest evidence is at Pompeii — signs pointing to shops, written in Latin. Poster advertising has been found there from the 1st century, and in India from around 2000 BC.
• Modern advertising started in the 1920s, when mass advertising arrived alongside printing, window shopping and photography.
• The channels since: the town crier, posters and billboards, flyers, newspapers, radio, TV, the internet and social media.

The goal, mostly, is to get the brand in front of as many people as you can. A niche brand maybe not — but if you are big, go big. And that means asking where the most eyeballs are right now. It used to be TVs. Now it is phones.

03Science or art?

Creativity is an art and is seen as subjective — Zea’s notes record a sunset painting as his example. Its job is to create an emotion and draw people into something they remember. But asked whether advertising is science or art, his answer was probably 80% science and 20% art nowadays.

Creativity is still a big part of it. “Creative thinking has sparked successful global concepts” — Disneyland, McDonald’s and Starbucks were the examples.

04All advertising has to be truthful

The one category where you can lie is politics. In 2000 someone took a political party to court for misleading and false advertising, and the court ruled there had to be a financial outcome. Political advertising has no financial implication, so false claims aren’t caught. His example was Clive Palmer running ads claiming the Liberals and Labor were trying to sell airports to the CCP.

05Kahneman: we buy on intuition

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel prize for his work in behavioural economics — how consumer behaviour produces economic outcomes. His subject was the biases of our intuition and decision making: understanding what makes people buy things, and finding that biases are what make our decisions.

Three sets of notes recorded 95%; one recorded 96%. The takeaway is the same either way: emotion beats reason, so advertising should lean emotional to drive the emotional decision.

The intuitive system is more influential than you think…

Daniel Kahneman

06The Effies, and the lamb problem

Under the history of creativity and creative thinking, he pointed to the Effie awards — reliable, global, and the best direct link between advertising and sales. Share a Coke, with names on the bottles, was one example recorded.

And one from closer to his current job: every year lamb sales go up around Australia Day. The advertising worked so well that people now think lamb is only for Australia Day — so lamb sales at other times go down.

07Advertising is simple

The example: KFC and McDonald’s change their screens at different times depending on who is coming in. 3pm targets tradies; 6pm is family meals. Right person often means the audience on their own channels — the followers of the brand’s Instagram, for instance.

The same simplicity applied to the process:

08Advertising is complex

Behind each of the four steps sits a whole set of roles.

Strategy is the smallest part of an agency and the part everyone wants to work in.

09Fifteen words or less

You have 15 words or less to convince someone. A billboard gets a two-second flash as someone drives past, and the best billboards use six words or fewer. Which means understanding the audience’s habits — how they actually meet the message.

A good exercise online: what’s the most powerful first sentence you can write in six words?

And the things that work last. “Lucky you’re with AAMI” was made about 30 years ago, and the jingle is still very relevant.

10Client and agency: one message

The question to keep asking: what is the most powerful single message?

11The funnel, and reach

An aside on the middle row: branding comes from branding animals, and the perception that those animals were better.

Three sets of notes recorded 65%; one recorded 60%.

12Creating advertising: Kraft Easy Mac

The worked example was the Kraft Easy Mac TVC from 2010, a product Ange launched. It was targeted at young boys getting home from school hungry.

Then the storyboard:

A hungry teenage boy wanders the suburbs in search of food. He yanks the wall off a bakery…

The challenge now is rolling one idea out in different forms, not just TV — different sizes for TikTok, Instagram and so on. Managing multiple channels is the modern problem.

13What the most effective advertising is

From research by a UK advertising body into what the most effective campaigns have in common:

• Famous — 72% of famous campaigns outsell their competitors. Make it good and it stays there for years.
• Emotional — emotional campaigns are successful 62% of the time.
• Single-minded — super single-minded.
• Memorable — through storyline, vernacular, music (the ear worm), colour, tagline, logo, and media. New media comes out and you use it for the first time — like the Goodyear blimp.

14Differentiation, and John Lewis

Of the four brand drivers, differentiation is the most important — then relevance, then esteem, then knowledge. Differentiation is what makes you stand out, gets the single-minded proposition into the customer’s mind, and is critical to driving margin.

The case: until recently, all Christmas ads looked the same — product and price, daily promotional offers, tagline and website, catalogue, newspaper, TV, red, green, silver, snow, Santa. Losing relevance, and highly competitive.

John Lewis tapped into emotion instead, changing the message to gifts to dream of — give someone the Christmas they’ve been dreaming of — and bringing the emotion of Christmas back into advertising.

They followed it with the 2018 piano ad featuring Elton John — some gifts are more than just a gift. The point: create famous work that works.

15The art of storytelling

Branding leads to storytelling, and storytelling starts with understanding what the brand’s values are. Campaigners should realise they have a good story to tell.

16The role of AI

• Research — so fast to find information.
• Market context and competitive analysis — a complete intranet-style site you could read for half a day.
• Synthetic audiences — a digital twin of the audience.
• Marketing content — multiple versions, test and learn. Useful for retail clients who need lots of different formats, and used heavily in tourism.
• Smart video — AI editing, CRM and distribution.

17The rise of ROI

Marketing mix models: you plug all your information in, and the model predicts which combination of channels came together to produce the outcome. The question it answers is what mix of media brings the highest return.

The average number of channels behind a successful campaign is 10.2.

18The rise of digital media

Digital is now about 60% of media spend, leaving only 40% on the older forms — so less room for agencies in that space.

Who makes the most from advertising, top to bottom: Google, Meta, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, X, Pinterest, Netflix. That is where the eyeballs are — you can put a banner on Amazon.

19Advertising exists to sell — mostly

Advertising exists to sell.

John Singleton

But not always. Sometimes it exists to change behaviour. The ad recorded as an example: DrinkWise’s Kids Absorb Your Drinking.