Episode 145 / Craig Fenton / Google UK & Ireland / Director, Strategy & Operations
Stepping Into Quantum Computing to Aggregate Advertising Data
Craig Fenton is the Director of Strategy & Operations at Google UK & Ireland, working with the leadership team to set and manage the plan for Google’s local operations in the two countries. With a passion for exploring his interests inside and outside of work, however, Craig also manages a number of “side hustles” including a record label and a film company.
Both of Craig’s creative companies are driven by social purpose and aim to offer a stage for those from less privileged backgrounds. They’ve also served as an opportunity for him to live a customer experience himself and get some true insights into what’s needed to run a successful brand.
As he was on his second appearance on the podcast, I asked Craig what new belief or behaviour he’s developed recently. We talked about the importance of mindfulness and meditation, especially after the Covid-19 imposed changes on us all. Craig shared the benefits of devoting time to being grateful for the sources that drive joy in his life, such as his family and friends.
Craig’s Shiny New Object is quantum AI – explained as the use of quantum computing, a much more powerful machine processing than traditional binary computing, to analyse large batches of data. In advertising, this may not appear immediately necessary, but if you consider the need to learn from people’s behaviours and preferences from a more ambient approach, without use of cookies and third-party data, the need for being able to crunch large numbers becomes clearer.
At the moment, quantum computing is used in areas like simulating climate, analysing vast amounts of weather data or optimising battery performance. But how will marketers benefit from it? In the more privacy-conscious world we are moving into, where cookies will disappear and consumers will need to opt in to giving away first-party data for personalised services, there is an argument for using large-scale data from consumers’ environment to deduce their preferences and develop the right services and products. This journey is, however, just at the beginning.
To find out more about ways to adopt mindfulness, how to learn about what consumers really need and how quantum computing can be used for the future of marketing, listen to the podcast.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
om Ollerton 0:00
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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 podcast about the future of marketing. Every week or so I interview one of the industry's leaders about their vision for the future of the industry. And this week is no different. I'm on a call with Craig Fenton, who leads strategy and operations for Google in the UK and Ireland. Craig, for those listeners who didn't hear your first appearance on this podcast. Can you give everyone just a little bit of background about who you are? And what you do?
Craig Fenton 1:23
Hi, Tom, nice to be with you again. Yeah, sure. So I'm at Google, been there coming up on five years now. And I lead strategy and operations, as you rightly said, names pretty descriptive. So with the leadership team, we define the plan for the business in this region, and then hopefully operate to that plan. It's about as simple as that, really.
Tom Ollerton 1:48
So let's jump into the questions straight away. So what has been the best investment of your time, energy and money in the last few years?
Craig Fenton 2:01
Well, one of the things that I'm very passionate about is the idea of exploring interests, outside work as well as inside work. And for me, that's manifested in a number of what most people would call side hustles. So I have a record label called Community records. That was both time investment of money, as well as a lot of sort of heart and passion that went in there. I've just started a little film company called Community productions. Do you see the thing there? Both of these are social purpose enterprises, which have the ear to surface and celebrates great creative talent from less privileged backgrounds and give them the first stage to shine, whether that's in music, or in film, or TV. And those keep me really motivated. I'm a pretty active angel investor. So I invest in small startups, generally seed stage, and have just started a venture capital company with a couple of angel investor partners of mine that we've been doing some business with. And that gives me some amazing exposure to fantastic entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas out to disrupt the world. And you know, that these things are differently investments, they're definitely investments of time and energy and money. But I think they're great investments in wellbeing as well. And they just keep me balanced, and ensure that, you know, all of my passions are served both those at work and those outside.
Tom Ollerton 3:41
And so what have you brought back from big community into your day job, what has been the thing that you've been directly built to learn or apply outside of the just the obvious well being things that you mentioned?
Craig Fenton 3:57
Well, I suppose, you know, when you start a company, you become a small business owner. And whatever the nature of that business, it's about reaching customers, or audience in my case, in a way that they find interesting and valuable. And figuring out the best way of doing that both organically, you know, in ways that don't cost money, but also inorganically, in the form of, you know, paid for marketing, advertising, PR, this sort of thing. So I've kind of become a customer of the digital ecosystem, in a sense, and a practitioner, you know, using those tools, and I think that's tremendously valuable to bring back into a leadership position at one of these platforms because you kind of feel what it's like to be a consumer of it. You understand the benefits, the complications. And I think that just drives a sense of empathy and insight.
Tom Ollerton 5:05
Yeah, it's a small trend from this podcast that I've interviewed a few people that want to leap to mind sort of John Hall at Whirlpool. His advice was, you know, learn how to make a website, learn how to drive traffic to it, learn how analytics work, and it just absolutely changes your ability to be a marketer into into brief teams, and be able to have empathy for the for the process and that Pollyanna Ward, who was our client at Wickes who's set up a coffee business online. And I think it's such a great, great point, like, do you see it from both sides of the coin? So next question is, outside of these, these investments in these, these great projects, what what kind of new belief or new behavior is had the biggest benefit on your work life in recent years?
Craig Fenton 5:59
I think probably most of us have been through somewhat of a metamorphosis during COVID. And lockdown. Whether you're in the UK or in other countries, it kind of really shines a light, I think, on what you find valuable. And, you know, I, I sort of think about that every day. I'm, I'm a meditator, I meditate in the morning. And it's a great opportunity to sort of just develop this sense of mindfulness, where you're picking out the joy in the moment, wherever you are, in whatever circumstances and being grateful about the things that that drive their choice. For most people, and certainly for me, that's family. And friends, even if you're interacting with friends, over zoom, or whatever your favorite video platform is, you know, there's a, there's a connection there that fulfills us in many ways. My wife and I talk to going for a walk we live in West London, we started walking most days in Wimbledon common. I know, every every part of Wimbledon common now, it's an incredible Park and facility and just being out there, albeit in the middle of a big city, but in nature in appreciating what's what's around and the beauty of that. So I think this sort of sense of, of mindfulness, of taking what's great in the moment, and really naming it and appreciating it.
Tom Ollerton 7:44
So I'm curious to know, about how you make that happen. Like you're, as you mentioned, a busy guy, you've got emails to get through, you mentioned your approach to email on holiday, which you can share if you want. But how do you make sure that you meditate? Because the benefits and I don't think anyone's gonna argue with you, but I struggle just to get it done? I know, like, five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever. But how do you make sure that your practice is a consistent one
Craig Fenton 8:11
It was tough, you know, and I'm certainly not, not the high watermark. So I'd say I'm probably fairly mediocre at it. But, you know, there's a lot of research and writing on the topic of happiness and happiness, you know, that sort of current of that the mood music goes something like this. Happiness is a behavior. And it's a habit. It's something that can be self fulfilling, in a way I mean, if you can choose to be happy, or you can choose to be unhappy. And there are various tips and techniques. And you know, I think it's a, it's about being, again, I use the word mindful, but about recognizing the things that are around you. And, you know, having that positive mental attitude, that spots the good stuff, rather than getting overwhelmed by the bad. And I think this has really come to come to the fore in in the context of COVID, you know, where there's a lot of shade in life, you tend to notice the light a lot better.
Tom Ollerton 9:34
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot recently about organization and trying to fit in things like meditation. And my pet theory at the minute is if you have to write it down on a list, or put it in your calendar, you don't really want to do it that much. Whereas this something you really want to do, you'll just do it right. Like you know, you put alone in your diet. Yeah, go for a run like that doesn't that's not gonna make you do it right. You ever got that? not believing that drive to do it. So what I'm trying to do at the minute is, is the people on my team will laugh about this. But I've been trying to kind of step away from being dependent on lists and triggers and nudges and trying to just be true to the thing that I want and then remembering to do it. Does that make any sense?
Craig Fenton 10:19
It makes, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I kind of know where you're coming from this is a counterargument or account is called a thought that would say that, you know, the, the process is a is a deliberate one that requires some structure. I was on a call with an interesting fellow earlier on this week called near al and he wrote, he wrote a book called indestructible in the title kind of says that all right, how do you become in distractible one of his theses is, is that you need to, you need to be quite structured, and very deliberate. It's also true in this is brain science or human science, connected with anthropological science, I suppose you'd say that if you repeat somebody, something 66 times it becomes a habit, a habit in the sense that you don't any longer sort of seed as a task or a thing to do, it's just part of the part of the daily routine. So it may require a little bit of thoughtfulness and discipline, even less writing to begin with. But once you develop the rhythm, it becomes just a part of your daily rhythm, right?
Tom Ollerton 11:33
Right, writes a list as he as he speaks.
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Right. Okay, so we were loosely at the halfway stage now. So we're going to talk about your shiny new object, which I'm quite intimidated by for a bunch of reasons, but your shiny new object is quantum AI. Now I have a beginning understanding of what that is. So could you please explain to me on the audience, exactly how you see quantum AI and why that's an exciting opportunity for marketing. If not now, or at some point in the future?
Craig Fenton 12:49
I should play that question back to you, Tom, you've got a beginning understanding. So let's build from that base. What do you think it is?
Tom Ollerton 12:56
Oh, right. That is a tough question. I was not expecting it. So my understanding of quantum quantum computing is that normal computing, you'd have two different states on a raffle binary, which is the kind of foundation of all digital, and that the concept of quantum eyes, you can have a state which is both on and off, it is both one or zero. And that's where my brain starts to melt. And I don't really understand it. So I don't want to fall into the trap of being one of those people, that just kind of underlines it as being Oh, just more complex computing that I don't understand. So that that's the last time I talked about it.
Craig Fenton 13:36
You're amazing. That's a very good explanation. So traditional computing, you know, in the supercomputers that we all use every day, including our smartphones, indeed, are made up of ones and zeros. And there's just lots of ones and zeros that operate applications really fast, but boils down to those two binary units. What's different about quantum computing is that it's operating using pulling from a quantum physics principle called superposition, which is what you just described. So the calculating units, if you like, which in a quantum computer are called qubits are able to occupy a state of one zero, or any combination in between. And what that means if you combine them together, clump them together, if you like, is that you set up massive parallelism, and that exponentially increases the computing power at our disposal. The complication is quantum computers, at least at the moment, require absolute zero to operate. So it's a very contract controlled, contained environment. It's quite difficult to maintain stability around and the maybe some advances more recently. Actually, that that Google teams been working on called a time crystal, which is a method for containing and maintaining this quantum physics state in a more sustainable way. Now, what that means it just sort of real practical terms is that if you take a really hard mathematical problem, for example, simulating climate, or understanding the different states of a battery, in order to optimize the battery's performance, a quantum computer can just do it much better and faster than a traditional one. And the team at Google did this, I think it was October, year before last, so it's been around for a bit. And they took a big mathematical equation that would have taken the most powerful traditional supercomputer, which is an IBM, I believe, available in the world today, 10,000 years to solve. And the the quantum computer solves this equation in 200 seconds. So 10,000 years versus 200 seconds. And we know how impressive and fast and amazing supercomputers are today. This is why we've got AI at all, because we can we've got the compute power to take petabytes of information processor in a way that's practical and useful and spots the patterns and and produces useful applications from but if you if you increase that in exponential orders of magnitude in, you know, the this is amazing things that are possible, including, for example, simulating climate and and in simulating the natural world, conquering some of the imponderables that have vexed medical doctors for years, about conditions, like Alzheimer's, for example, in drug discovery, and this sort of thing, and indeed and in sustainable energy applications, like like batteries, and so on sustainable energy sources. So there's really interesting practical applications. Of course, all of that comes back to powerful machines that can do better stuff more quickly. And, you know, marketing, like many disciplines these days is essentially a data driven science. So the more powerful the tools that you've got available, the better you can do that job, and hopefully the more valuable to the end consumer you can become.
Tom Ollerton 17:39
So there's a really interesting industry tension right there. Okay, so just to play that back to understand it, it's an increased computing power by having this slight infinite number of points between zero and one. That's a really nice explanation. That's really clear. So yes, if you're looking at weather systems, batteries, medical data, that is a lot of data. And that's datasets where, well, whether they you don't need anyone's permission for that medical data, I assume that there is some permission granted or anonymity. But with advertising, we're moving into this world where privacy is going to be everything, and it's going to opt in. And we're actually one of the things that we're struggling with as an industry is will, the data is not going to be what it was. And yes, the first party data is a thing. But even so, an advertising level, even at a complete Google level or a complete Facebook level, you're still only going to be able to compute an aggregate. Even if you do have a computer that's 10 million times faster than its predecessor. So how, how do you see quantum computing helping out advertising, even in a purely theoretical level? Because I don't think anyone can afford to have a quantum computer working it, you know, minus 270 degrees or whatever it is for their Christmas e-comm campaign?
Craig Fenton 19:08
Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting inflection points in many ways. And let me be really clear privacy. And giving the user choice is at the heart of everything that we do in Google, in very much has guided the company from the answer. And that's why if you've got a Google account, you have the ability to be everything from completely anonymous, and incognito, all the way up to, you know, opting to share information that hopefully then gives you in return a more relevant, personalized experience. But you can be either end of that spectrum and anywhere in between. and the the other sort of precept or central principle that Larry and Sergey founded the company on is To be obsessive about the user experience, you know, the reason that Google products we feel used widely is because they're good, you know, they're useful to people. And that just has to be the central tenet. Now, if you put those two together and sort of take it into the marketing world, what's marketing? Well, marketing is, is finding and helping customers learn about a product or service that you do, which delivers value to them. So it's about reach, and it's about relevance. And it's about value. So, in a world where, you know, in a cookieless world, let's, let's put it simply like that we we don't have these personalized identifiers to operate on, you know, what does relevance and customer value look like, in a privacy in a privacy safe world in the sort of different type of environment where cookies are no longer the norm? Well, exactly, as you say, time, you need to look at different signals, more ambient signals, and probably more numerous signals that don't, you know, come down to the atomic unit of the individual, but collectively, will enable a brand to accurately you know, reach the people that may be most interested in their product or service. By, you know, providing the providing the sort of the, the spotlight, if you like through the, through the morass. And for consumers, right, I don't think anyone like I, I enjoy my privacy, and as most people do, and I don't particularly, you know, want want my information, you know, to be sort of harvested, and explore, exploited. What I do want, however, is stuff that I value, and I find relevant to my moments that matter my moments of need. And that's I that's I think, of constant. So what's changed here, and I think it's a very positive change, we at Google, embrace it, and we think it's a very positive development is that we've moved on, we've moved to a state of the market where brands should be capable of delivering relevant, well targeted and valuable experiences to customers who want those services and products and enjoy using them in a way that that is a lot more subtle and ambient, but then the sort of primordial phase of the internet, which was driven by by these sort of little cookie, cookie identifiers. But I wonder,
Tom Ollerton 23:09
Is there ever gonna be a dataset big enough, that requires quantum computing, you know, the example between 200 seconds versus 10,000 years? I mean, that, like, it's so ginormous in scale, that you almost be that you'd have to pull in, like, transport data, whether they are song lyrics from Spotify, what was popular on Netflix and Amazon Prime or, or whatever, you know, Google Play? Would that ever be enough data to to require that much crunching? I wonder? That's a fairly rhetorical question. But, you know, I think your weather data is massive. But is advertising data ever going to be that big? I wonder?
Craig Fenton 23:52
Well, I think advertising data, perhaps, I mean, what you're modeling is, is human behavior and need and so on. And there are lots of humans in the world, about 8 billion of them, and you know, and they behave unseen. But they, yeah, I mean, I think the evidence is in front of us, the answer to your question is absolutely, yes. You know, there are many diseases, for example, that in spite of incredible medical advances remain insoluble. Right with the technology that we have at the moment, there are vast elements of nature, certainly in the marriage between quantum physics and the physics of the of the large objects that we simply don't understand. We haven't been able to, to simulate and in understanding how, what happens at the center of a black hole, you know, we we have a fair idea that there's a there's a building climate crisis, right. It's it's the A movement of our age and it's it's urgent, boy, would it be useful to be able to have a little bit more fidelity and granularity, around understanding the elements of that and, and what parts will affect it more than others. You know, electric vehicles and electric, you know, other things, houses and so on are coming to the fore. But battery life remains an issue. So there are many, many examples, I think, Tom of, of modern problems that we don't fully understand. But we have an opportunity to get there. In the same way, as we have, you know, in the last 50 years, if you wind the clock back using the technology that's, that's, that's blessed us in that period.
Tom Ollerton 25:54
So Craig, unfortunately, we're coming to the end of a podcast where we talked about plumbing the depths of dark holes, as well as launching record labels, and time crystals. So my, my brain is spinning at them. So Craig, thank you so much. If someone who's listening to this podcast wanted to get in touch with you what's the best way to do that?
Craig Fenton 26:14
Hit me up on LinkedIn. That's my platform of choice on everything that I do in my work.
Tom Ollerton 26:21
And what makes a killer, LinkedIn outreach message to Craig?
Craig Fenton 26:28
I get a few of them these days. I mean, I think, you know, I'm really interested in meeting new people, I find it quite alluring to think that somebody sort of thought about a message before sending it. I think increasingly, most of us received messages that feel like sort of templates and haven't really thought, you know, thought it through or thought about the person that they're speaking to. So I think it's just, you know, common human courtesy. Know your audience. Think about the, the things that might matter to them, as well as what you might want from them and and figure out how to express that message.
Tom Ollerton 27:10
Fantastic. Craig, thanks so much for your time.
Craig Fenton 27:12
My pleasure, Tom.
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