Abba Newbery of Habito talks to Eric about how truly unique and disruptive campaigns create memorable advertising for this modern, groundbreaking mortgage broker, mortgage lender and home buying platform.
Abba came to this fintech start-up from a background in media and is now proud to make “batshit crazy mortgage ads” that speak to Habito’s strong purpose of setting people free from the hell of getting a mortgage. Abba explains that everything they do creatively comes from customer insights and admits that they do it “in a ludicrous manner.” There are, for example, TV ads showing animated characters being gruesomely killed by their mortgages, and the admittedly gorgeous print campaign depicting the mortgage kama sutra, and the erotic novel called The Road to Completion that promises “to put the moans back into your mortgage.”
Abba is a “huge evangelist” of purposeful marketing but admits that telling people about doing the right thing can be really boring. It’s a big challenge to make purpose interesting. If you can get people to engage in your ads so much that they complain about them, she maintains, you’re doing a good job. “Every moment of making a Habito ad is terrifying”. She talks about some huge risks they’ve taken, and some they’ve had to reject.
Abba discusses her approach to Habito’s relationship with its creative agency, Uncommon. She is “inherently biased” in favor of agencies as that’s her background, and she trusts the creativity that comes out of agencies. They would constantly share the work as it was being produced even in the roughest state, so there were no surprises or disappointments. She finishes up by talking about how they test their ads once they’re finished to make sure they’re doing exactly what they want to do and then they tweak them based on people’s reactions.
Scratch is made in partnership with Attest, a consumer research platform with access to over 110 million consumers across 50 markets.
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Transcript
Abba: Probably one of my career highlights was having our work described as batshit crazy mortgage ads.
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler. And this is scratch, bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rulebook from scratch for the world of today.
Really excited to share today's episode and today's guests with you if you're in the UK marketing scene, definitely the UK financial services marketing scene you probably already know Abba and the work she's doing with Habito brand and business. If not, I feel privileged to introduce you to her. She is someone who I'm always interested to see what they're up to. And it was great to hear a little bit more about how she thinks about things. She and the Habito are behind some of the most provocative work out there in the UK market. In my opinion, right now they're doing some things that you'll hear about that, you know, really push the envelope, we talk a lot about how one of the biggest risks in modern marketing is just being ignored. Because what you're saying is interesting, they do not have that problem. I will put it that way. So it was really interesting to hear her take on. How do you be provocative in the right way? How do you tie that to brand purpose. And then the real meat of the conversation that I wanted to get into with her was around how she creates a productive and effective creative process, both internally and then with the agency partners that she works with. She has this great relationship with an agency that she's used for a while. And so I wanted to dig into that and hear you know, how she briefs them, how she works with them how she gets the most out of the creative process and steers that in the right direction for the brand and business. So, really hope you enjoyed today's episode. I certainly did. Let me know what you think. After you hear cheers.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of scratch. I am really excited about this episode have gotten to know today's guests a little bit over the last few months, I guess. I think we started crossing paths as I was leaving the FinTech and financial services world. And obviously, that's something that you are getting deeper and deeper into with all the work that you're doing. But allow me to briefly introduce and then let her do her introduction proper justice about her role, her story and what she's up to these days. Abba Newbery, Chief Marketing Officer of Habito
Abba, how you doing?
Abba: Thanks so much for joining us today. All right, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, so I'm on the CMO of Habito. And if you've never heard of Habito a I'm doing quite a bad job. But we are a UK based FinTech in the world of mortgages, which is probably the most difficult part of financial services to disrupt. And we're most definitely trying to do that. So we are, what in the UK is called a mortgage broker, but also a mortgage lender. So we invent mortgages, for the kind of the squiggly careers and the different view that we have on the future then we maybe did 100 years ago. And we're also a home buying platform. So we'll do everything associated with buying your house all the boring stuff like the legal work and the surveys and, and all of that.
Eric: It's funny I was my sister also lives here in London, and I was at her place for dinner last night. And she's in the process of hopefully buying a home here in London and she was on the chat with Habito. So funny, small world but so far, she's loved the experience. Hopefully she gets the place. And that all works out. So Abba, before we get into kind of the meat of the conversation today, maybe you can just tell people, the kind of one to two minute origin story of Abba Newbery how you got to where you are. And kind of what your career progression has looked like in the world of marketing.
Abba: Wow, that the brand without anybody. Yeah. So I am not a classically trained marketeer at all. I studied classics at university couldn't get a job. So stumbled into the world of media and worked for I guess 15 or so years in media agencies. So investing clients advertising budgets, I managed to create myself a little bit of a hybrid role between I guess traditionally what you called account planning and, and media planning. And then very randomly went to go work for Rupert Murdoch at News Corp. Starting by running his in house ad agency and then becoming head of strategy there, which is really the ultimate jack of all trades. Job. And then yeah, stumbled across Dan Haggerty who's the founder of Habito. Very, you know, underwhelmed by Even the prospect of entering FinTech, I met Dan, he blew me away. I begged him for a job, and I'm still there for years.
Eric: Amazing. So I know that we we talked about focusing in on, you know, kind of creative process, and particularly the partnership of the creative process. You know, you've had a great relationship with uncommon, the agency you're working at, working with and Habito, but also have worked with in the past. And so I'm really curious to get your thoughts on that. But maybe to kind of set the scene for people who haven't heard of Habito, and just to call out some of the outputs, that the partnership in the process that you've created, has produced? Can you talk a little bit about some of the highlights or some of the work that you're really proud of? That you've done and Habito? Since you've been there?
Abba: Yeah, I guess if you if you haven't seen any of our work, do head to Habito on YouTube. It's all there. And yeah, I think I think probably one of my career highlights was having our work described as batshit crazy mortgage ads. And I guess that's pretty much what we what we do. So they're very strong, we have a very strong kind of purpose about setting people free from the hell of mortgages. And that's kind of what our creative platform does. It describes the kind of deepest, truest, how that customers have told us about what it's like to get a mortgage. And then we kind of resolve that. And we do it in a ludicrous manner. So it's not, we do kill people. In our ads, they are animated the deaths, the deaths are gruesome. think Rick and Morty for mortgages. But it very much resonates in customers heads, maybe like your sister, Eric, where your head is like exploding in the process of getting a mortgage, and you just wish it could all go away. The other thing we do, is also like, explore human truths in the mortgage process that are a bit less, less obvious. So I guess one of our most successful creative platforms is sex. You can't get a mortgage unless you are over 18. So we get to explore that world a little bit. And one in 10 of our customers told us that they stopped having sex as a result of their previous mortgage process like it associated with so stressful. And so yeah, we've exploded that into one of our most successful creative platform. So we've created a mortgage Kama Sutra, literally a Kama Sutra for mortgages. And we've also created a erotic novel with a guy called Bucky Flintstone. If you've ever listened to the podcast, my Dad Wrote A Porno, which was a mega hit in the UK. And he is the eponymous dad of porno fame, and he wrote us an erotic novel.
Eric:It's amazing. It's, you know, it's such a crowded space, all these mortgage lenders talking about sex, how did you manage to carve out your niche within that?
Abba: Very funny.
Eric: But I'm actually curious. So brand purpose gets talked about a lot. And actually Habito is one of the examples, particularly from speaking to a UK audience that I use a lot of here is a brand that from an outsider's perspective, seems and is very purpose driven, they've identified a pain point within the world of their customer, and they are striving to solve it. So it's not just about the product, or even the experience, it's about the bigger picture. problem they're trying to solve or change that they're trying to create in the world. Well, I'm curious to get your thoughts on brand purpose, because I think it's one of those things that everybody talks about, but few people actually do well, from your perspective, either at Habito or just your general perspective on the industry. What are the things that contribute to being able to do brand purpose?
Abba: Well, I mean, it's such a good question, why it's the hottest topic and, you know, marketing at the moment, and you know, purposeful marketing, I'm a huge evangelist of purposeful marketing and purposeful businesses and, and doing the right thing, problem is doing the right thing can be really, really, really boring, or telling people that you're doing the right thing can be equally boring. And I think that's the real kind of art of a marketing director or CMO or any kind of brand manager and, and working closely with your agency is how do you make what you care about? Something that is exciting, funny, interesting, stimulating, so other people care about it. I mean, we've got a very interesting moment right now, which is you know, climate change being so like front and centre and unreal, but most businesses who talk about you know, their equal status or their kind of climate change activism. They do it in a way that's like very hard to, to love. It's a bit like charity. Habitat, you feel like guilty for not choosing them. But it doesn't mean that you're going to be a passionate advocate. So I think it's a really big challenge to make purpose. Interesting.
Eric: Yeah. And the other element of it is, often if you're doing it right, and definitely, if you're doing it in a differentiated way, like Habito is, and there's other brands you could throw out there as examples. You're resonating with a lot of people, but you're probably also, you know, maybe turning some people off, no pun intended. How do you think about that, when it comes to brand purpose, and particularly having such a, let's say, pointed, brand purpose, and then breakthrough or differentiated way that you go to market communicating that purpose? Do you consciously think about, well, maybe this will alienate some people? Or maybe this will, you know, get some people not interested in us? Because I think that, you know, you think of an example, like Nike and what they did with Colin Kaepernick Kaepernick a couple years back, which people always talk about, they definitely alienated some people. Do you think about that consciously? Or, you know, what's your thought process around both sides of the purpose and differentiation equation?
Abba: I never consciously tried to get people to hate us. I actually view not liking our ads, a kind of litmus test of how successful they're being in terms of like impacting people. If you think most of advertising just like washes over us, we seen it, we don't give a shit. We're not going to complain about it. We're not going to talk about it. The fact that people will complain that they don't like our ads, I'm like, yes. Because for all the people that complain, there's, you know, one one complaint is 20 others who, who love and the people who love are less likely to tell you they love than the people who hate are likely to tell you they hate. So yeah, like if you can get people to engage in your ads so much as they say, I really don't like your ads. That's quite, quite good.
Eric: To get some complaints. I'd say where do I send customer service emails
Abba: in 2021 We were the most complained about AD. But we've been overtaken by Tesco.
Eric: Wow
Abba: This this year with that Christmas ad? Hearing of a loss of anti vaxxers Complaining about Father Christmas, showing his COVID passport.
Eric: Oh, wow.
Abba: To enter Heathrow Airport to give the children the presents. It was supposed to is supposed to be funny, but you know, anti vaxxers are are pretty pretty vehement in their cause. Right.
Eric: I haven't seen that yet. It's it.
Abba: love it. It's a great ad. It's it sets a queen. And yeah, it's all about like, not letting you know, we've had two bad Christmases. Let's go for it this Christmas. I think it's a great piece of creative work.
Eric: Yeah. Cool. It's interesting what you said of, you don't intentionally try to get people to hate you. But in a way, maybe not. Maybe not defined that way. But in a way, what you're talking about is you do need to do something that is going to piss some people off in order for it to matter. And in order for it to break through, which I totally agree with in today's day and age, there's so much noise and there's so much advertising that is it's just page I call it like it's just like it just kind of is out there. And nobody pays attention to it unless they're forced to. And certainly nobody talks about it or takes the time to say they love it or that they hate it. So in a way that's actually an interesting an interesting prompt for people to think about I had a client at one point, who used to say, in every creative pitch, I want to see one idea that makes me uncomfortable. And I always like that and I throw that out there because I think that's a good actionable thing that people can do is you need something that stands out and if it stands out, it's probably going to make you a little bit uncomfortable. So whether you say it explicitly or not, I think that's a good thing to work into the modern marketers tool book of if you're comfortable all the time, you're probably producing beige advertising, which might feel okay when it's going out but it's not going to it's not going to deliver the differentiation or the marketing results that you're looking for.
Abba: Totally and Habito are created platform and I remember very vividly we were in uncommon our creative agencies I'm gonna say meeting room but they were a start up a as as we were basically so when I say meeting room it was like a sort of it wasn't meeting room but you know, there were too many of us crammed in there and all a bit crazy and they presented us this idea and we all left Romney who is VP marketing at Habito, Dan the founder and me, we left and we basically all just turn around to each other when when Shit. I mean, I think we're gonna have to do this, but like, it was a Friday afternoon. So we kind of went home and reflected over the weekend and then came back to each other and went, I think we're gonna have to, I think we're gonna have to do this. And we were all terrified. And it was also one of those ideas, which was always going to live or die in the execution, like the craft of it if it didn't make people laugh. And if you if you do look at our ads, like the first ad in this series, is a guy where his mortgage basically comes and steals all his money and it starts like ripping the wallet out of his, you know, another credit card out of his wallet, it rips a gold tooth out of his mouth. And then it rips his soul from his body. So we always say to ourselves, we've got like a matrix, which is like, is it a serious issue? Like feeling like you're being robbed blind by a mortgage, she has tick? Like, is it super provocative to actually go to people? Do you think you've been robbed blind by your mortgage? I don't say yes. And then we take it to ludicrous, which is clearly no one gets their soul stolen from their body by their mortgage. So it's got to get to that level of people going, Oh, yeah. They're taking the piss. They're not like, they're not trying to scare us. This is this is this is funny. And that's all in execution and pace, and like comedic timing. And as a little startup, doing anything in animation is terrifying, because you're like, basically sticking out into the ether. For the animation team, to like work on it for a week, which you know, is kind of costing you 10-1000. And then it comes back and you're like, what if I hate it? I mean, we luckily, we have Andy Baker, who's part of the adult swim team, who is the brains behind Rick and Morty. So we're in good hands. But yeah, like every moment of making a Habito is is constantly terrified
Eric: Here at rival, we've partnered with the test a powerful consumer research platform to produce our own proprietary research on challenger marketing trends, and you'll hear more about that soon. But in the meantime, each week, we're going to highlight a report from a test that adds context to each episode and the guests that we have on. So for today's conversation with Abba, we wanted to highlight a tests report on UK mortgage and moving trends. And in this report, a test is found then in 2021, home moving hit its highest rate since 2007. And the pace doesn't look likely to let up anytime soon. This trend is driven by younger demographics, with one in 5, 18 to 40 year olds currently planning to move home and saving up for a downpayment. To find out more from this report, head on over to ask a test.com. Here, you can also run a free survey to access 110 million consumers in 49 markets to remove the guesswork from your business growth.
Sounds like a really good segue into talking about the creative partnership, creative process that you've built. But I want to ask you one question before we go in there, because I think it'll be really relevant to the people listening, you have in Dan, as a founder, CEO, and I've only met him once. But I think organisations take on the DNA of their CEO. So you can kind of tell what he's about just by seeing what happens, though does, you have someone who is seem seemingly willing to back and support doing this type of thing, he walked it out meeting and felt the same way that you did, I think a lot of people listening, especially if they're in a bigger organisation, or maybe aren't in the CMO seat where they can walk into a CEO and say, hey, I want to do this and get it. Yes. How would you? How should people think about trying to push the envelope a little bit do things that are more provocative? If it's not as easy for them or not as natural for them to get that buy in from their boss or C suite?
Abba: I mean, that's, I mean, that's such a good question. I'm incredibly lucky with with Dan, as you say, Eric, that I think there's two reasons why I'm incredibly lucky with Dan. One is he's an ex musician. So he understands the power of brand. There's no such concept as the best band the best music. It's the best kind of package of the whole the best live concert, the best album cover. So if you're in that world, I think you kind of understand the role of brands within that. And I guess the other thing I'm really lucky with is Dan came from Wonga and whatever you think about one grow as a business and there were many obviously things in the last days of Wonga were not good. That that was a one of the pioneering brands of FinTech, certainly in the UK, but also a also they began they began with brands and found themselves like very fast growing very successfully with an like a brand that literally went from naught to 100 in, you know, nine months, and he saw he certainly had kind of recognised the sort of power of like winning hearts and minds as a FinTech business. And that said, which is to answer your real question. We're a VC backed businesses, a business and VCs, no disrespect, they do not like marketeers who want to spend on TV campaigns, they do not want like marketers who want to buy, you know, a big agencies, fantastic creative campaign, they want you to hack your way to growth. So my board are as anti, what I'm doing is, as Dan is Pro, and I think what we've managed to do is because every single thing that we do is based on a customer insight to customers tell us they've been they've been robbed blind, customers say that they're so you know, they're so bamboozled by juggler, their heads are going to explode. You know, they tell us that, you know, they feel so beaten up by the process, they feel like a human pin Yatta. Like, we're expressing what people really think. And we're doing it very creatively and very artistically. And yeah, so what you know, when I, when I go and present to the board, we're gonna make a mortgage Kama Sutra, and like, you've, you've lost it again, Abba, but then when you show them the work, and you tell them that one in 10 of our customers stopped having sex and their previous mortgage application, and you tell it, tell them it's been done by Noma by one of the greatest graphic designers in the world, and you show them its artistic beauty, they kind of like, oh, not get behind you. So the art of the sale? Is, is it is it is a lot of what I think we have to work on as marketers, and I think a lot of us are guilty of sitting behind the numbers, what's the return on investment gonna be? What's the cost per lead, you know, blah, blah, blah, no one's gonna win. You can't possibly evaluate a great creative idea, or the projected cost per lead, you got to sell the story first
Eric: Yep. Yep. I love that. And I specifically love the idea of rooting the concept in it in a customer insight, because that's not, that's not debatable. It's like, Hey, this is a problem that our customers have that we can relate to, through the advertising that we do. So yeah, that's a topic that comes up. So I wanted to make sure that I asked you that question. Alright, so let's talk about the creative process, and particularly, how to build an effective fruitful partnership with agencies or with creative partners. So I'd love to hear the story of I know you brought uncommon with you into habit toe, but let's kind of take it from the top. How do you think about finding and working with a creative partner? If that's a creative agency, or somebody externally? Or potentially, I guess it could even be people within your business? But where does your Where does your head start with that, with that process, what matters most within it?
Abba: I didn't, I didn't bring on, I did work with uncommon, who was an agency called grey when I was at News Corp, so I didn't kind of bring on common with me to have a say, we already had a creative agency, we had a creative campaign, and I call it a lot of creative agencies around London. And I, I would, I would very highly recommend doing that. Like, just as part of your job on like a, an annual basis, just go and see some people and get their opinion on your brand, because most people have got quite strong opinions on your brand able you know, take a 20 minute coffee with you. And you never know where that inspiration is going to come from. And I think I obviously come from creative agencies and kind of an agency background. So I'm inherently biassed as the talent of an agency and I truly believe in in the craft of a great ever creative agency. So I haven't like a horror attack. When people say, Well, we're making a first TV, we're doing it internally. And I'm like just because, you know, agencies are really good at their job. I think you've got to find the right agency, and you're gonna have to kiss a few frogs. And ultimately, you need to have a team that you can trust. And yes, I'm very lucky that like, the founding team at uncommon with the team I'd worked with previously at NUS and I knew that they were going to be uncompromising. I didn't expect them to be quite as brilliant as they ended up being but I kind of like knew I was going to get something that was going to really scare me, which I think is really empowering. wasn't, and I guess a lot of what I learned in an agency and like, you'll hear this from agencies all the time clients can't brief. Clients can't brief, you know, we need a better brief. And I think that if I have one scale, it's briefing the agency, because I'm used to being briefed myself. And the loss of a good brief is to give them enough direction, enough guardrails to not they go totally off the rails, but also give them total creative freedom. And I guess one more thing that was really helpful and the CSO uncommon is the very brilliant Lucy Jamison, she asked a really amazing question of Dan, when we started the process, which doesn't sound like it on reflection, but she asked him what is his favourite ad of all time? You know, in a classic, you know, SEO answer is I don't watch that, like, come on, like, no one has not seen an ad in their whole life. Right. So you sent them away for a weekend. And I guess like founders of startup businesses are more inherently linked, as you described it to the, to the DNA of the brand than the maybe, you know, a classic footsie 100 CEO who's thinking more about the numbers, Dan came back with this ad. And again, go and google it, because it's, it's possibly one of the most inappropriate ads ever shown on British TV only been shown 10 times. So kind of extraordinary that he picked it. And it's also like, very Zeitgeist Day, because it's, it's sort of a precursor to Brexit. So it's a CEO of BlackBerry Tango gets a letter from a French exchange student who says, I tried to blackcurrant Tygo didn't like it that much. The CEO, basically goes nuts, he strips off his shirt. You know, he marches to the White Cliffs of Dover, he declares war with brands. There's Harrier Jump Jet. It's pretty awesome. Pretty awesome. The inappropriate. They told me a lot about Dan said that we could get angry, we could use the anger, the emotion of anger, which is incredibly powerful in advertising, and not something that not lever that many people have the courage to pulse?
Eric: Well, I have to include that in the show notes. And I've got my homework, I've got the Christmas ads, I need to watch and definitely that one as well. So getting down into kind of the nitty gritty, I'm curious, is there anything that you do differently with uncommon as a creative partner, either in the process, or how you work with them, or, you know, you mentioned, and I love that approach of how to brief because, you know, actually, that I haven't thought about it as much on the creative agency side, but it comes up a lot when we're talking to clients about how to use influencers, because I think sometimes with influencers, the natural pull from the client side is to will tell them exactly what you want them to say about your product. And I'm like, the whole reason of why you're getting them on involved is because they know the audience, they know the platform, give them the opportunity to tell the most effective story as long as it's within the guardrails of what needs to be said. But actually a better way to think about it as as long as it doesn't, you know, go to the extreme of what can't be said. And much like that, with a creative agency, they're there for a reason. They're there to bring the creativity, a different perspective, new ideas, so give them as much of that playing field as possible. But what else what else you do differently? In working with uncommon as a creative agency, be curious to hear a little bit more about the day to day, week to week or within a campaign development? What it looks like.
Abba: Oh, gosh, I mean, we are very lucky with them. Come on, we have a very open relationship with them. So as I described, like doing animation for a small business without a big marketing budget is terrifying. So we started from the outset, all they showed me every piece of work the moment that they got it through, so from character design, all the way through obviously, very, very rough. Work almost on a on a nightly basis, because we were working with a team in New York, or you know, kind of first thing in the morning. And so we were always kind of fee doing feedback all the time. So there was never that thing which a lot of agencies do, which is like four weeks of work and then you go reveal and then you're like, I hate it. And I guess also what I did with that and I can never think uncommon enough for letting me do this. Dan still thinks I'm mad for doing it but it are all hands every week. I also showed all the business. So whatever I saw the business or Um, because everyone that habitat is a, it's a, it's a shareholder in the business. So like the marketing campaign is, you know, is pretty fundamental to the future share price of the business, everyone had an input, everyone had a view. And it yeah, we've just kind of got into a very open source way of doing things, which I think builds trust, a huge amount of trust, trust that we're going to give them honest feedback. Trust that we're not going to like we don't micro do our feedback. It's like, oh, we will only kind of feedback, anything that we feel like is truly fundamental. And likewise, they then do that don't do that set piece with us. That goes, you know, the client is stupid, they don't understand creative work, keep them away from it until we go. Tada. And I think that's been the secret of our success. I should, I should, you should talk to Sam from uncommon, he won't be here. But they've just, they've just won the British Airways account, which as a small startup agency, is keeping them super
Eric: Sure, they've got a lot to do. I mean, that's an interesting dynamic in itself, you know, now they've got a big client. And I'm sure habit toe is still important to them. But you know, how it goes in terms of resources and attention and stuff like that? I'm curious, this might be a tough question to answer. But do you have any advice for people if they feel like they're not getting the creativity that they want to see out of their agency? I mean, I know you mentioned at the beginning, I love the idea of just going to get coffee with different agencies just to see what's out there and see what people have to say, and that sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs. But if you've chosen your prince, and you're kind of in with them, but you're feel like you're not getting what you need, are there options for how you can shake that up, or try to generate more creativity besides just hey, maybe you need another agency.
Abba: Okay, so let me answer that question for from not working habitat from being in an agency. If you're not loving the work that your agency is producing, the chances are your agency aren't loving it to working in an agency, all you want to do is produce amazing work, motivating works, you know, work that's going to drive a client's business and yeah, sure work that's going to win awards. So, you know, speaking, honestly, I would always much preferred a client to come to me and going and not loving it. And be honest with me, then, you know, do the dramatic relationship break up for the pitch? Nightmare nightmare? So I think, yeah, I've just, I would always be honest with your agency. And if they don't respond well to that, then you're definitely heading for a relationship breakup?
Eric: Yeah. It's amazing how often the answer to how do you solve this people problem is, just be honest with them, just have the open and honest conversation, especially, especially if you got a relationship already. Because that means people's intent is going to be in the right place, they're going to want to work it out. So I love that answer. So what are you working on now? Anything interesting and exciting that you can talk about? It's a bit of a smile. So I know the answer is yes. Just a question of whether you can talk about it.
Abba: I briefed on next Valentine's Day campaign yesterday. So I'm genuinely terrified about what I'm going to get back. Before Christmas, we did reject a campaign a year ago, which was to make a sex toy called the Habito Rabito. So there, there are ideas that
Eric: who did you reject it? Or did the board reject it? who rejected it?
Abba: I have to say it was like, one of those moments where I was like, I literally have gotten No, I just don't know whether it's a good idea. And I tried to like imagine like being a journalist or someone like opening your habito, a rabbit out in your office. And I just I don't know whether it's funny or not. So I actually called Dan's wife, Jenny, and said, like, pitched her the idea and say, What do you think? She's like, Are you like a teenage boy? No, no. Okay. Yeah, that's not it's not a good idea. So sometimes actually, like going to your mom, or like somebody who doesn't work in your world to pitch an idea for is like, helpful because we can all get caught. Caught up in that.
Eric: It is interesting, though, you know, where do you draw the line? You need to be provocative and not too provocative. And that's not a black and white. thinking that's a grey, and oftentimes being on the inside, especially if you're a creative role at an agency or on the client side, you might not have the best perspective on it. And also tie this back to what you said about human insight to ground the idea for a campaign. I think, you know, having those gut checks if it is your mom, if it if it's your boss's wife, maybe depending on what the idea is of the situation that you're in, like real world, people that don't get excited about the marketing idea for the marketing idea. They get excited about the idea for how it represents the brand, or what it means to them as a consumer slash normal human being decentralised hack, and yeah
Abba: Hair loss. That's shit, right? Yeah.
Eric: Do you do any testing of the creative ideas? Actually, this is a whole other conversation we get into that we don't have time. But I don't know why it just occurred to me to ask today because I'm fascinated by how data is starting to play more of a role in the creative process. And there's obviously that tension of it all comes back to that Henry Ford quote of yes, if you ask people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse instead of a car. So you need to be able to take those leaps that I think are wooden wouldn't be supported by the testing, necessarily. But I'm curious. I'm really curious actually, to hear your response to this question. How do you use testing or data in the creative process at habito?
Abba: Good question. So we constantly research customers to get to those insights, that then become the jumping off point for their creative platform. We will research scripts, in focus groups, broadly to kind of gauge whether it's resonating with that insight, about you know, stress or money or etc. We never research storyboards, or creative development in that sense. And then we do a lot of post campaign testing or in flight testing once the ad is finished. So we use neuroscience. To understand how campaigns are working, we use system one, to understand what responses were triggering. So system one or research agency, you have kind of eight emotional responses that kind of create powerful memories in people. So we use that approach deliberately use that approach, because they're pre, they're predisposed to love John Lewis Christmas ads. So they're like the harshest test, we can get for kind of death by mortgage. So we never test to prove ourselves, right, we kind of test to kind of destroy what we've done and see if we can do it better. Does that? Does that? answer your question, and we make all sorts of changes, like, like, we actually liked her, we recorded our voiceover for Hello Habito and turns the sound of hell down, just because it was making people sit, sit back too much. Like, oh, and so that they were getting as much memory recalled Habito as they possibly could we dial that down a bit. And then like, we saw, like Habito recall, kind of jump up by 50%.
Eric: So interesting that I mean, it's such a, it's such a tough one. Like, I honestly don't even really know what my answer would be. Because there's so much insight that can come from the data, and from the testing, but at the same time, it can lead you in the direction of doing more Bayes work, if you just give people more of what they expect, which tends to be more of the same. But I think if I'm, if I'm getting this right, let me make sure I understand it and maybe frame it up for the people listening. So the platform for the concepts comes from deep dive research, really strong human insights from your customers. The concepts, though, those are creative. Those are based on like, okay, cool. And then the first iteration of like the script, you test to see how that goes across, but not as much the visual component. And then you mentioned with the sound, so there are there is some testing that you're doing once you have an initial, but an initial piece of work
Abba: we have a final film. Okay, well, I guess like my little bit of kind of past experience on this. It's from an incredibly brilliant marketing director, a guy called Andy Fennell, who I worked with at Diageo, who was marketing director of Guinness. And if you remember quite a long time ago, got some I'm showing my age 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, I guess embarked on this campaign called Good things come to those who wait. I guess the most iconic add in that series was you know that Surf are waiting for the wave. And the white horse is amazing at 98 Probably. And I was sat in a meeting room for the first ad of that campaign, which was an app called swim duck, which was a guy who did a swimming race every single year. And his brother poured the Guinness more slowly, every single year, so we could always make it round the boy to get his goodness and time. It's the worst ad I passed, I think I've ever seen. I think Miller Brown who are now cantar, I think they may have actually said that in the meeting. But this singularly the worst ad they've ever tested. Yeah, it was an ad that like grew sales by 50%, spawn some of the most creative campaigns that Guinness has ever created. So a lot of what I think go back to what we said originally, which is like, complaints can show you that your ad is really working. Sometimes like a very polarised response to ad testing means that you're onto something listen to the naysayers. Not always the people who say that they really like it.
Eric: Yeah. It's so interesting. I mean, I, I think good marketing is a blend of art and science. And really the magic or the things that go well, versus the things that don't tend to come down to how you mix those two things together. And when you decide to follow one, follow your intuition about an idea or follow the data about what customers or market research is actually saying, you know, there's no, there's no answer that you can kind of package up and put in a box with a bow on it of like, you need to do this every time. Because if you could, then there would be no value to creativity, because everybody could do it. So I think it comes down to depending on where you are on the spectrum, like there's a lot of marketers that are way on the science side, and maybe they need to get a little bit more comfortable with the art side. And then there are some that on the that are on the art side and need to get a little bit more comfortable with the science side. So I think it's about that awareness, that self awareness, but also the organisational awareness, some brands and some teams are more art than science. And there's so much benefit in both, especially now you mentioned was IT systems, one that you didn't? Yeah, I'm fascinated by the neuro marketing neuroscience space, because we just understand so little about how the brain works overall, but then connecting it to marketing and perception and behaviour change. There's so much that's going to change, I think, over the next 10 years. And a lot of companies and a lot of technology is actually already out there. It's just not really distributed within most agencies or most brands. So we'll definitely include that in the show notes. And I would highly recommend people spend a little bit of time just researching what's out there, even if you're not going to use it right now. Because there's a tonne a tonne to learn. Great, anything that you wanted to touch on that we didn't talk about today. Any other No, I just like thoughts or perspectives to share.
Abba: My one piece of advice. If you want to know whether you're on the art or science side, as a marketing team, is count how many times your your team's use the word content. Content isn't a thing. writers write books, editors, great newspapers, filmmakers, quick movies, TV producers, great, brilliant Netflix series. They're not talking about content. They're talking about stories that are going to inspire delight, terrify, amaze, engage. How many times do you say content and you'll know which side you're on. If you say if your team is saying it every day. You're a science based marketing team. And you've lost that idea of great storytelling that said equally, like if no one in your team is is talking metrics and how well did this engage and you know, then you've gone too far. The other way, but content isn't interesting words. Interesting.
Eric: It's interesting, I, I use the word content all the time. And I'm not sure that at least for me, personally, that correlates to how much science I am. But what I think it does do, and something I'm going to take away from this conversation and definitely think about differently is content is not a human like, that's not about the real world impact that you're having. I'm not saying this exactly the right way. But I think you know what I mean, like content is just the package of it all like what's inside? How does it make people feel? How does it get them thinking differently about your brand? How does it get them behaving differently about your business? And so I think the more that people can focus on whether it's through an art direction or a science direction, actually the impact that they want to have the storytelling, the emotional response, the provocative nature of the ad. I think that we should all be trying to elevate how we think about what we do to that level.
Abba: Yeah, I love what Adele is just done with Spotify. Not a big Get alhfam Musically, but the fact that she said no, don't let people shuffle my album. It's beautifully and perfectly created as like two and a half hours of music that I want people to enjoy in the sequence. I'm presenting it to them. Probably data is the are just going to keep on playing. Yeah, the most popular song and it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
Eric: Yep. Cool. On that note, maybe we'll stitch in some Adele music for this outro we definitely don't have the rights for that. Have a thank you so much. It's always great to chat with you and hear your perspective on things. Where can people find out more about you and the great work you're doing and Habito
Abba: Yeah, you can follow us on Instagram HabitoMortgages. I'm on LinkedIn as Abba Newbury or Twitter as Peckham79
Eric: One of those is not like the other. Great, Abba Thanks so much again, talk soon.
Abba: Thank you.
Eric Scratch is a production of rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us check out we are rivals.com If you want to connect with me, email me at Eric at we are rivals.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it. And please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
