Episode 174 / Jeremy King / Attest / CEO and Founder
Podcast: Schooling Young Generations: A Marketing Challenge
Podcast: Schooling Young Generations: A Marketing Challenge
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Jeremy King 0:00
We talk about the worst news first. We never hide bad things, we share what are the absolute apocalypses and things that could kill us and what we're doing about it.
Tom Ollerton 0:13
This week, we are brought to you by Attest. Attest is a consumer research platform that enables brands to make customer understanding a competitive advantage with continuous insights by combining unparalleled speed and data quality with on demand research guidance, the platform makes it simple and fast to uncover opportunities with consumer data and grow without guesswork.
Hello, and welcome to the Shiny New Object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative. And this is a weekly show where I get to speak to really lovely brainy people from the industry about the future of marketing and advertising. An absolute treat and this week is no different. I'm on a call with Jeremy King who is CEO and founder at Attest. Jeremy, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do. Could you give us a bit of background bit of an overview?
Jeremy King 1:07
Sure, delighted to be here and excited to share and talk about stuff. I'm Jeremy, CEO and founder of Attest. Originally I was a scientist, I worked in genetics and synthetic biology and mathematical modeling of animal behavior. So I love science, empiricism, using data to make decisions. I spent nine years working at McKinsey, which is a big strategy consulting company, worked in many different countries, on many different interesting problems and was in lots of unusual situations and learnt a lot doing that. And then six years ago, started Attest and Attest basically makes doing really great powerful research ridiculously easy and simple and accessible for anybody, so that you can use research and data continuously to inform whatever you need to know about your target customers, market audiences, new products, innovations, competitors, all the things you wish you knew as a marketer or b2c company, we help make those things real. And we call it continuous insights. And we do that in your browser. In software, we tried to make it so easy, you can start it in 90 seconds and use it every day. And that's quite fun to see what people use it for. But that's what we do.
Tom Ollerton 2:11
That's a very tidy pitch, Jeremy. Excellent. But I need to pull you back, you say scientist, and then a consultant, what was your "aha, eureka!" moment where you're like, right, I'm gonna go build this online tool where people can do in depth research in a quick and easy way?
Jeremy King 2:26
Well it sort of combines those two things plus secret third, that maybe is a part of many different companies, early stages. So first part being as a scientist, I really believe more companies, more businesses, more people should use data to make decisions. Deep down, everybody knows that they should know their target customers better and everyone wants to be data driven. And in science, you're basically obliged to do that. So when I got into the world of business with McKinsey, I was quite disappointed, even angry, disgusted, that people didn't use data and found even people in big companies who should have all the data and all of the information guessing what consumers wanted and massively fucking it up. It was really bad and embarrassing. And as a scientist, it made me feel that it was completely wrong. And then in those nine years at McKinsey, more than 25 different countries, I saw the same problem everywhere: big companies, small companies, new products, all products, people were being forced to guess what their target market wanted. You have Steve Jobs can do that accurately, again, and again and again. But there's very few people like that and most product launches failed. 95% of product launches failed. According to Clay Christensen at Harvard Business School, customer data is the most valuable form of data, the most valuable customer data is about the customers you don't have yet. Somehow, we all know that that's really valuable. And we should use it all the time. But it's really hard to get and no one does anything about it. And so it seems to be a big business problem that existed everywhere. And the third part is kind of the investor story, which is a bit boring, but needs to exist, particularly for big expensive SAS companies $80 billion total addressable market for market research and data, everything from Qualtrics to Qantar. To Medallia to Forrester and Gartner that's an $80 billion market. So 35% larger than the hamburgers, more than twice as large as video games, big chunky market. But to my point earlier, it doesn't really serve most people, most people don't use it. Most people can't buy from that, most people are forced to guess. And if only we could make doing that really powerful and valuable and useful thing much easier. More people will do it for more things more often. And that's what Attest is all about. And that's how we started. And we packaged it up neatly as saying you should use continuous insights all the time, because you've wanted to all along. And we've made that easy for you. But deep down, it's a huge business problem that exists everywhere, that's also a personal passion.
Tom Ollerton 4:41
So why is there still situations where people aren't using data to make sensible decisions about their target audience?
Yeah, I mean, great marketers have intuition and good research and good data informs your intuition. Great marketers also have doubts, you know, what if I'm getting this wrong, what, you know, I've got 30 different ideas, and I've chosen idea 17, what if it was idea 18? That would be slightly more successful? Is this gonna work equally well in Mexico and Germany? It doesn't feel right to take the same approach in both markets. But that's what I think I should do. So great marketing is the combination of intuition and data and doubt and commitment and risk taking. So we, we say Attest exists to help inform your intuition and dissolve any doubt. We aren't here to tell marketers what to do. We don't think data is the sole answer. Data's information, it's there to help you inform the intuition and dissolve the doubt so that you can make bold moves and increase your search space and be right more often. So I think true alchemy, particularly in marketing, or in any aspect of b2c is when you combine our view of the market which is unique and our stance and our brand and what we can do in our products, and what makes us special with unique new views of the market that other people don't have that tell you where to go next, what's most likely to succeed, whereas the highest predisposition or likelihood of success, but those two things together, that's where Great Alchemy comes from. And therefore, where that goes wrong is when people are just guessing and have no data and their intuition is weak, and they still have doubt and they're not doing about it. And that's why we tried to make Attest so easy.
Jeremy, you're frustratingly articulate, so I'm really keen to know, when have you got it wrong? What has been that biggest screw up in your career to date, this point where you're facepalming horribly, but you're kind of glad it happened anyway?
Jeremy King 6:28
So many screw ups. You know, if bad defines good, it's good to experience some bad time as well. I think the most, I mean, I could name hundreds of things over the years that I've screwed up personally or been in and around and probably caused, the one that was most pivotal for me was at time very early on in my career at McKinsey, I was working in Chicago, it was a brand new client to McKinsey, it was also my first time managing a person. So you know, big step up for me being in interesting new place, a whole new sector, completely new thing, really cool, hot new industry. And we were working on this model that basically, I can't talk about exactly what it was about. But it was basically building an entirely new business within one that already existed and then creating a whole new independent entity out of that which would become something very, very large. I, we had a team from all over the world, people from Brazil, UK, Israel, Chicago, West Coast, US, Seattle, Miami, etc. Everyone had gone home. On Thursday afternoon, as we would do at McKinsey, my girlfriend was flying in from the UK to visit for the weekend. Fridays are kind of a day off. And we spent all Friday working on the model making sure that you know what we were going to say was exactly spot on everything lined up perfectly. 4pm rolls around on Thursday, declare victory, done, we're ready to set this for the Monday morning first thing meeting and to say this is what you should do with this meeting idea. And here's how we've made it real, aren't we geniuses. It comes to about 5.30. And I spot this very simple error in the Excel model. And it's, it's my fault, it was created by me and this other person who I was managing for the first time working on this model. And I had a decision to make: it was not particularly material that it moved the number around a little bit, but it didn't change the overall result. And I had a choice to make. Do I hide this? Do I bury it, does it really matter? Or do I basically ruin everyone's weekend by saying, hey, people who've gone home to their families, one person was helping their sister move to a new university, all these things I knew were going on, like, do I pull the alarm bell and say, everyone you need to stop what you're doing and we need to change all the slides or the Excel model or decision making. It's an immaterial change. But accuracy, we're going we're at zero right now. And it takes us to 100. And I decided that I was going to ruin everyone's weekend to do the hard thing. Put everyone back everyone, you know, some people were understanding. So people were furious, I said, I found this, it's also my fault. I'm going to quarterback this thing, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ruin my weekend most and I'm going to give, I'm going to call on you each for three hours to do your bit. And I'm going to guide you through it. And you need to tell me what's wrong. But I will quarterback this thing, and I'm going to minimize the time I take away from your weekends, but I'm gonna need your help. And when I call you need to answer. And since then, that moment where it would have been easy to not do that, but ended up being the right thing to do. People hated me at the time. But we looked back two weeks later, like that was that was actually worth doing. And you know, we believed in it. And that really showed when what came through. And I've tried to kind of use that same philosophy of that decision across all sorts of things that we do now. So at Attest we are very transparent as a company with our teams, with our investors, we talk about the worst news first. We never hide bad things, we share what are the absolute apocalypses and things that could kill us and what we're doing about it. People can ask pretty much anything in the company and we probably share too much and every now and then little bits come back and we get back an engineer saying it's taken me a year to understand all the SAS metrics we're talking about but you should know I've kind of realized I'm the only engineer in my cohort from my uni where I do understand those things and just wanted to say thanks. I'm like, oh my god, it's working. It's so good. But that was a massive fuckup. For me, that turned into kind of a pivotal life decision. But then it's become a bit of a fingerprint and Hallmark, but it all dates back down to that Chicago model, 4:30 and then pulling the alarm bell and trying to do the right thing rather than the wrong thing. And a lot of what we do today comes from that moment.
Tom Ollerton 10:25
So a regular question we ask on this podcast is what is your top marketing tip, which seems incredibly kind of lowbrow after what you just told me? But you know, I'm gonna ask you this question. So I'm curious to know, in amongst all of this market research, you've done, what is that bit of marketing, you spotted from someone else or with your clients or one that you have used yourself with your own marketing function?
Jeremy King 10:45
There's one that sticks with me again, and again and again. And I remembered someone early in my career, I was talking about ads, and you know, ads we like, ads we don't like. It's quite fun to play that game. And someone said, None of the ads are for you. Like every consumer is in some sort of normal distribution. None of these ads are for you. They're just trying to hit parts of a normal distribution of different demographics and spectrums. And it got me thinking about bias and subjectivity and projection and all of those things. And here's one that really stuck with me. We did an exercise when I was at business school. First thing this marketing professor did was he sent around a two question survey to the entire class of 900 people. There were two questions. Question one. What percentage of the Harvard Business School population has an iPhone? And you could put in a number any number zero to 100%? Second question, do you own an iPhone? The year is 2008. And iPhones were quite new and cool. Personally, I had a Blackberry for typing and speed purposes, least cool thing, but it was super lame. And you'll never guess what happened. People who had an iPhone, their guess was that 57% of the business school population had an iPhone, people who don't have an iPhone, thought that number was 28% of the business school population had an iPhone. Actual number 38%. No one has a fucking clue about anything. Your bias, even on the simplest and most observable issue takes you in completely the wrong direction constantly. So every time I think about what is the right answer? Should we use data? Where do I have bias? Like we all have bias constantly, every single thing we do, and even on the simplest task, when you can read straight through that question, or like, Aha, you're going for some kind of subjective bias and projection thing here. I'm going to lower my answer about how many people I think have an iPhone from 65 to 57. No, no one has a clue completely wrong. Everyone's wrong. No ads are for us. No one has the right idea except Steve Jobs, obviously, and projection. And just thinking about these biases that we bring to every decision and every campaign in every marketing decision is everywhere. So that's one that really sticks with me, and it was such a simple example, but really brought it to life.
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Tom Ollerton 13:33
So we are going to move on to your shiny new object now, which is education as in schooling. So I'm curious to know why this is your shiny new object and why you think it represents the future of marketing.
Jeremy King 13:46
Yeah, let me be really clear. Because I hold a hold a role in this that what I'm about to say all views are my own and I'm in no way endorsing or defending any specific public policy including anything recently about UK education system. Education is a big passion of mine and I've for a long time been involved in a charity, which helps turn around the most challenged state to primary schools across the UK. So the organization's called REAch2, it's a multi Academy trust, we basically help the most challenged schools in difficult contexts, figure out how to become good or outstanding on the Ofsted gradient scale. Sometimes in a year or two, sometimes it takes five, seven years longer. So far 60 schools and my favorite stat is when these schools joined us at different times, 17% were Ofsted good or outstanding, today that number is 87%. Where this gets interesting is in the UK, we have this sort of fascinating quandary. There is absolutely no reason why every state primary school cannot be good or outstanding. The UK funding formula that means that every child has a revenue number in a sort of level of N, I'm sure support attached to them with that it is possible if any school can be good or outstanding on the Ofsted scale. With that same funding, it's possible for every school to be good or outstanding, it's not a forced curve. It's just a simple absolute standard. And my personal belief is that when it comes to issues of social mobility, social inclusion, getting more STEM subjects at earlier ages, having you know, greater tolerance of different ethnic characteristics or diversity characteristics, or different backgrounds of how we end up in primary school, primary schools, particularly the early years are where we can have the widest possible impact for positive change. And all of those issues. If we want more engineers and software engineers, where does that start primary schools, if we want to make society more inclusive and have greater opportunity and mobility for historically disadvantaged communities, the best place, we can start that - primary schools again, and again, primary schools, and we have this funding formula where that can happen consistently. And for some reason it doesn't. Where this gets interesting is the opportunities to change that. And this is where we make the connection to business and to marketing. It's actually really simple things that help improve education. It's things like heating and lighting, it's things like having a payroll system, it's things like having the right overall positioning and branding for the school making school a good thing making free school meals and how children receive them. A destigmatized and a positive experience rather than something to in many contexts hide from society. These are material benefits that help different populations receive a better education, and applying business and marketing skills to those contexts can help that work out better. All of these things can be affected at huge scale in primary schools, and it's simple business challenges and problems and experiences and applying them to an education sector, often in at times for the first time could have really, really big impacts, as we saw in those results. And that, you know, for a long time has been my shiny new object, trying to get more business skills into education, particularly state primary schools, because the impact is so vast across 10s of 1000s of children who were in good or outstanding education experiences, when otherwise they wouldn't have been. And that's a lasting impact. And it's very simple business and marketing experiences and tools that get to work there and have that impact. And for me, that's shiny, new, exciting, also important, fun, practical, and almost has a sense of obligation.
Tom Ollerton 17:21
So being a young parent myself, you hear a lot of people with strong views about education, and then hear teachers saying that everyone judges teachers, because they've all had one and and yet every adult seems to have an idea for how to improve education, based on their worldview. But yet these two worlds seem very separate, the idea of their reality of being a teacher, the reality of delivering a curriculum, and, you know, the hours and effort that's involved in versus the kind of, you know, man on the street woman on the street, who thinks that, you know, sort of by adding in this thing, or taking this thing out, like, why is there such a gulf between those two mindsets, and why aren't all schools achieving at the level they are? If they all have the same funding?
Jeremy King 18:08
Yeah, let me answer the second question first, then I'll, I'll try and hit the first one. So why aren't all schools achieving the same standards, it's a, it's a matter of a execution simply in that we will receive the same funding for the same sort of services, getting execution right to the right balance of resources, the right attraction and retention of the right teachers, the right relationships with parents, the right resourcing of different curriculum programs, the school building itself, all of the funding and support is there, every school can with sufficient time and sort of input and awareness of the right ideas become good or outstanding over time. So it's all there for the taking. And the barrier is execution. And for many schools, it's knowing what good looks like is the biggest problem. Let me try and sort of make it real from a marketing context. So here's a real example. We had a school, I shouldn't name the school for obvious reasons. But we had a school that was in a very challenged context where for two even three generations, the school had really failed the local community. If you were a parent who went to the school, you would expect that your kids would have a very negative school experience too. This is known to be a very challenged and troublesome school and no one has had a good experience there for generations. Suddenly, we made a number of simple changes and that school became a good school. The thing is reputation really, it's not good as a parent in the area school was not good to you and particularly this name was not a particularly good place to be as a yet as as the operator of the school you want the school to be full of happy pupils. That's where you get more revenue, more pupils brings more revenue, which means you can make more investments in more teachers across more scale, make more investments in systems to make those improvements stick. So there's a bit of a vicious circle between the perception of the school which is that it's bad, the reality that it's now good and in many areas outstanding. And what helps make that stick is that we have more pupils in children in the school and more happy parents who believe this school is a good thing. And that's a marketing challenge. It's convincing people that there's a change in this product this brand has evolved, the reason you should believe in it is different than it used to be, and how to get that message out to parents and grandparents and get them to change their viewpoints about what school is this specific school and what you should expect from it, why it's changed, why school is now a good thing and how to really connect to it and what you can do and how, and then also to learn from those people in the community, what the school can do for them better. That's a marketing challenge. Teachers, head teachers, school business managers, teaching assistants, people that other people in the school have no idea how to do that, they've never worked in marketing, they don't know how to think about brands or positioning, they don't know how to run a local PR, or social media campaign to get this message out there, even at the simplest level in many cases. So that's where, you know, very, very simple marketing tactics. Pretty sure everyone listening while I've been talking, I hope you've come up with a view about how you do that. That's exactly what they need. It's these things that help the school become better change the perceptions of the school, of education itself, that helps us bring in changes, the societal norms, stem inclusion, what school can be for you and how that's different now than it was maybe for your own parents or your own experience, that's marketing of schools and changing in brand awareness and perception. And that's where very, very simple marketing skills can have a very material impact on a large part of society and changes we want to see in the world around us.
Tom Ollerton 21:33
Jeremy, that is a incredibly refreshing view. And really beautifully put, I enjoyed our conversation so much, but we're at the end of it, unfortunately. So if someone would like to reach out to you to talk about education, or market research, or all of the things you've talked about, where would you like to do that? And what makes a really great outreach message to you.
Jeremy King 21:55
Oh, wow. So it's easy to guess my email. So I'll just read it out. Jeremy.King@askattest.com. Find me on LinkedIn, I'm easy to find. A good outreach to me... Very simple says exactly what you'd like to do like, hey, wanted to get in touch, here's what I'd like, go straight down the middle. Let's keep it original flavor and obvious, always the best way. Nothing cryptic please. And always happy to talk about all of these things, Attest, education, weird things to do with marine life, exotic sports around the world to interesting niche food items. Those are my things, especially tortilla chips. That's my that's my advice.
Tom Ollerton 22:42
What a finish! Thank you again.
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