Nasser: 

Welcome to Shift Happens. My name is Nasser Sahlool. I lead Strategy at DAC. A little while ago, my producer here, asked me to incorporate some, pop culture references, which, when you’re 51 years old, makes you question your decisions in your life and your career. 

But thankfully, I have somebody here who – I’m not actually sure how old you are, Luke, but you certainly look about the same age as I am. But, joining us today is Luke Regan, he is our UK VP and Managing partner. Luke brings an enormous amount of experience in strategic planning, in running media programs, and working directly with clients at the enterprise level, both in the UK as well as across Europe. Welcome to the show, Luke.  

Luke: 

Thank you Nasser. Great to be here. If you are asking my age, exceptional vintage 1981. Which is a particularly great vintage I think, for the UK. So, that’s where I’m from. And yeah, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years in the UK. 

I did start with quite a lot of hair and that gradually disappeared, from working in the maelstrom of marketing and how it’s been changing over the years. And obviously now more change and disruption than ever. So, luckily there’s no more hair to pull out, so here I am.  

Nasser: 

All right. Well, as a man of that specific vintage and as a favorite son of Manchester, I think the closest we can get to are some Oasis references, because we can probably work with something like that. Right?  

Luke: 

We can. And, being in here in Toronto in January, there’s not much sunshine, as we say in Manchester. So, that’s certainly something I’ve experienced in this brutal winter that you have in here.  

Nasser: 

Well, you just got to roll with it, right?  

Luke:  

That’s very good. Yeah, some might say.  

Nasser:  

All right. So, one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about today is just around planning, right? And planning for clients. Planning for customers. We know the budgets are tight. We know the channels are all over the place, and leadership wants results now. But with all the AI hype, is it actually helping or adding more noise? How are marketing teams supposed to navigate in this environment? So I think if I were to ask you just how disrupted is the current landscape in your perspective? 

Luke: 

It’s hugely disrupted. I think it’s probably, it’s as good as it is difficult. So, for the biggest time, I think for, for many, many years, it feels like advertising and marketing are really, really integrated now with everything that a business does. And we can’t really just go off in a corner and run media, we now need to be integrated with our clients, both from the media team that we deal with, of course, but increasingly finance, pricing, operations, CRM, all these departments, even through to C-suite owners. Everybody has to be kind of aligned with the plan and what we do doing both from an expectations perspective, but also a tactics perspective for it to be successful. 

I was going to say what we’re finding is there’s a lot of pressure, as you say, both from a budget standpoint. So budgets are not growing anywhere in line with what the growth that’s required for brands. So it’s about doing more with less. And AI obviously is a big part of that. 

So you know the talk on Wall Street, you know, in the UK from a, from an investor perspective is all about what are you doing with AI? Where are the efficiencies coming from? I’m not going to be giving you the budgets in line with the expectations of where the brand needs to get to. So that pressure is real. 

And also, how are you innovating with AI? What channels are you using? How are you embracing social short form video TikTok-ification of everything? So there’s a lot of challenges, for marketers to be faster, to be more agile, to do more. But at the same time, there’s constraints. So how do you manage through that and make sure you’re doing the right things in the right quantities to be more effective than you ever have had to be before? 

Nasser: 

So in that understated British way of yours, where you run the emotional gamut, from at one end – yeah, it’s all right actually, to it’s a little rubbish, isn’t it? Where do things sit right now?  

Luke: 

Well, I think it’s a great opportunity, frankly, because there’s the opportunity to use all these tools that have never been really accessible to us before. And to embrace those challenges and say, right, actually, we can get all the organization moving together. So, if you think about it, if you run media and at the same time you have a feedback loop into operations, you have pricing and finance along for the measurement journey. And you have everybody pulling in the same direction. You can create a compounding flywheel of performance within marketing where everybody’s pushing. 

 Whereas, you know, in previous years you’ve often felt marketing advertising is in a bit of a silo, often gets the brush of, you know, right, do more, do more, bring us more sales. But actually sitting outside of the organization. But the change that we’re seeing at the moment of bringing marketing back into the picture and more and more departments working with us to create that compounding flywheel. 

Nasser: 

So a forward looking flywheel that moves the organization forward and tells them not to look back in anger, right? 

Luke: 

Exactly. Yeah. You know, and then the end of the year, you might have a champagne supernova to celebrate.  

Nasser: 

Beautiful. So with all of this change, what hasn’t changed?  

Luke: 

What hasn’t changed? Well, I think clients have always valued, agility. Agencies and partners who are able to immerse themselves in the brand and also roll with the punches, feel that the nature of their business, the way that’s changing, you know, they’ll hit turbulence from time to time. They need support in that, they don’t want to be hit with, well, that’s not in our SLA, that’s not the right way we respond to things. You have to work with clients to accept, that their businesses are being changed and disrupted, and the old ways of thinking and working maybe don’t apply anymore. That kind of works okay for us because we’ve always been that kind of agile partner. But, you know, a lot of the people who we used to work in, in a more traditional way, finding it difficult because things are moving at an almost real time now. 

There’s daily optimization required. There’s daily response to trends and social and content requirements that are fragmented. And you really need to be at that speed of work to be able to respond to that world.  

Nasser: 

So talk a little bit more about this idea of data and agility. Where are you seeing it’s, truly start to impact things?  

Luke: 

I think when you’re thinking about something that is simple as call tracking. In call tracking, we get access to the calls that are being made into our clients businesses, people inquiring about services. 

We have a health care client, and they’ve recently implemented AI call tracking, it enables them to understand what are people looking for? Where do they need help? What kind of conditions are they seeking support for? And that then helps us inform things like content that’s going to help for GEO and discovery in LLMs and AI. So, actually using something as previously seen as quite prosaic, like tracking calls and seeing how many leads you’re getting through calls through AI and the feedback loop into GEO and then also into operations within that client. This thing that was quite tactical becomes very strategic. 

And I think embracing that and realizing how transformational some of this stuff is, is going to see some clients really succeeding, some brands take a step forward and then other brands, not be able to keep up with that pace and have a decline. 

Nasser: 

So that those that succeed would help them live forever really. 

Luke: 

They will live forever, yeah of course. 

Nasser:

All right, there you go. But that doesn’t define most brands and how they operate. So, for those brands that don’t use that level of data and agility and are used to more traditional ways of planning, what does it mean for them in this type of an environment?  

Luke: 

I think obviously the larger the brand, the more change management is going to be required. You don’t just all of a sudden go to being a super agile, really innovative, responsive brand with low risk tolerance, with high risk tolerance… 

Nasser: 

A rock and roll star, you could say. 

Luke: 

A rock and roll star, yeah exactly. So, yeah, you need to think about incremental shifts and pilots and proofs of concepts, and experiments to say, right, let’s dip our toe into this area, prove that it works with established KPIs, and then see how that goes. 

And then if it works, then you gain the confidence of the business, of your investors, your C-suite, to do a little bit more next time and start to scale that out. It might be across multiple locations within your brand, maybe across multiple markets. It might be part of a channel that works as a pilot that you can now roll out and have it as an always on. So I think again, it’s all about gaining confidence and having buy-in across the client’s organization.  

Nasser: 

Alright. So, let’s ground this in some real-world practical terms. If I’m leading media or marketing today, where should I focus to build real agility? And if you could illustrate that with a couple of real-world examples. 

Luke: 

Yeah. Perfect. So, I think there’s a there’s a few things. So obviously, you know, we are a brand to local / enterprise to local agency. So for us, it is important to look at the brand from a national or international level as it is to look at what’s going on locally. So, for some of our clients, we started to look at things like brand metrics, reputation, performance at a local level. 

It could be branch, it could be business location and start to group that across. So, we know that brands, for example, might not have the funds to run full upper funnel in every market and every location that they operate in. But if you start to look at some of these insights and say, where is our brand really, really, strong? Where do we have really high competitive pressure and where do we have going great guns and we can just harvest demand. You start to get nuanced and segmented media plans by these different locations. So instead of having one national media plan, you have a media plan that’s broken down by right, we’ve got locations where we just want to harvest demand, and that’s all we need to do, and we can go great guns. 

Then we have other locations where we’ve got this super competitive pressure. We need high attentive media. We need brand media. We need to invest in these areas because we are in a super competitive environment. So having that nuance, and that ability, it gives you a chance to get positive results and understand, okay, we don’t have to have just one media plan anymore. 

We can have that agility within our business to say, we want a slightly different plan depending on conditions on the ground. 

Nasser: 

And what’s the impact of these types of, media plans like in real terms on a business?  

Luke: 

Significant. We’ve seen it with some of our clients. So a ledger client of ours, for example, we’ve put these kind of changes through. And what we see is, great efficiency in performance, improvements in brand metrics on a local level, but also savings that can be reinvested where you’re not having to invest in the same channel nationwide. 

But you can run these kind of regional pilots, where the money’s going to have the most impact. 

Nasser: 

So this is the beauty of a cross-cultural exchange because that has to be the vaguest, most English answer I’ve ever heard. What do you mean specifically about the impact?  

Luke: 

So I guess you don’t want any kind of beautiful Shakespearean subtlety. You want me to spit facts and drop truth bombs?   

Nasser: 

Punch me in the face with this.  

Luke: 

Okay. Fair enough. So what we found is, with this focus on brand to local and not just having one plan for everywhere, what we see is significant incrementality. Because we started to challenge the fact that you need to know, where are you deploying the marketing spend? 

Is it incremental in terms of is it driving your base performance from a sales perspective up? And are you generating brand uplift where you need to and are maintaining your brand everywhere else? And in a nutshell, what that means is a more efficient performance, engine for your marketing. And that’s resulted in like the best Q1 we’ve ever seen, for this client. 

So both from a yield perspective in terms of the actual performance at generating from a sales standpoint, but also the efficiency of the marketing spend is better than it’s ever been. And we’re seeing that for multiple clients now, just deploying that approach has a transformational impact on efficiency.  

Nasser: 

So if I were to translate it back into British English – “Yeah, it’s all right, actually.” 

Luke: 

Yeah, it’s not bad. Yeah.   

Nasser: 

Great. Thank you. 

So for anyone who’s paying attention, who’s listening today, check out the blog on our website with more information on this topic, including the cases. And you can also go there directly to the website or see the link in your podcast platform. 

So here’s the shift:  Agility isn’t about chasing every new tactic. With tighter budgets and more pressure, the brands that win are the ones with strong data foundations and a clear link between media and business outcomes. Get the fundamentals right today and you’re ready to adapt to whatever comes next. 

Now make it happen. Follow Shift Happens. Leave us a review and share this episode with your team. If you have any questions for the podcast, please email us at shifthappens@DACgroup.com. We’d love to hear from you.  

Thank you Luke. Thank you for taking the time and being a good sport.   

Luke: 

Thank you, Nasser, I’ve been a good sport I would say. And you know, I would also say, what’s the story of morning glory? 

Nasser: 

There you go. All right, guys, take care and we’ll see you next time on Shift Happens. I’m Nasser Sahlool. 

Luke: 

And I’m Luke Regan.