Episode 247 / Jeremy Nye / Just Eat Takeaway.com / Senior Insight Manager, Global
Getting Offline: Why Talking to People is Marketing's "Shiny New Object"
Jeremy Nye, the Senior Insight Manager, Global, at Just Eat Takeaway.com, believes in understanding human behaviour from a qualitative standpoint to better illustrate data points. This is why, although it’s not new per se, he feels that the Shiny New Object in data driven marketing is old-fashioned “talking to people.”
Truly understanding consumers and their motivations, rather than just observing clicks and data points, is key to connecting with people. It’s just like watching really good TV dramas: when viewers get a glimpse into characters’ backgrounds, they can connect with them and understand why they’re doing what we see them doing.
Going Beyond Data and Metrics
Jeremy argues that qualitative research and in-person interactions have decreased as technology has become more prevalent. As he notes, "[we’re still] observing people, but not in a way that actually matters." He advocates getting "out of the office and meeting people" to understand behaviours and motivations rather than just relying on measurable data. Although data and all the new insights we can get from platforms and dashboards are useful, he feels that too many marketers have associated focus groups and talking to “regular people” with distrust and simply don’t use this additional way to illustrate information for decision making.
Preparing for the Future
Looking ahead, Jeremy aims to increase unfiltered time with customers to 1% of the work week at Just Eat to better understand their real experiences. He is encouraging his team to get "off screens and into the streets" to see beyond databases. As technology and data continue to evolve, Jeremy's insights emphasise that truly knowing people and their motivations will remain critical for meaningful marketing. As Jeremy stated, "If you don't really understand them, then you don't care for them."
Get the full insights and find out Jeremy’s top advice for students looking to get into the marketing industry in the full episode.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Jeremy Nye 0:00
Observing your clicks, that sort of observation. Well, I don't think that is that isn't genuine observation. It's observing people but not in a way that actually matters.
Tom Ollerton 0:14
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, the creative effectiveness attic platform. And this is a weekly podcast about the future of data driven marketing. Every week or so I have the absolute pleasure and privilege to interview one of our industry's leaders. And this week is certainly no different. I'm on a call with Jeremy Nye who is senior insight manager global at Just eat takeaway, Jeremy, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do. Can you give us a bit of background?
Jeremy Nye 0:43
Yeah, hello, everybody. Hello, Tom. Yes, so I work at Just Eat takeaway. And before that I had a career in television, I started off at CBS in New York, did an MBA there and then worked at MTV, Star TV, BBC for many years, ITV basically ran out of Channel 4 three times, I think I reached the point where I went to so many TV stations, there weren't any left and managed to leap out of that into the world of food. And, but I'm from Sussex, I've got a couple of kids and a dog. And that's probably the most important things you need to know about me.
Tom Ollerton 1:23
Good to know, on the pet front, vital for this interview. So what advice would you give to someone trying to get in to this industry? following your footsteps? Where would you think would be a good place to start for someone who's doing all the right things already? So working on building their reputation, their profile, and so on? What advice would you give to a student?
Jeremy Nye 1:40
Well, I when I interview people to join the team, I often ask them about more than standard questions you have to have to get through to talk about somebody they really like, or something they've read recently that has inspired them. And I've often they don't really have a very good answer. And I think people should, the advice I would give is to read as widely as you can and to look for inspiration from things that fall outside your, your main area of work. So if you define yourself too narrowly, as as, as an expert in one particular area, I think you miss the chance to bring in wisdom from from other areas. I once worked at the Financial Times going wild, and we were trying to work out what what made the financial times better than the Wall Street Journal. And so I had a meeting with Gillian Tett who was looking after American side of things at the time, and she said, the difference was that the Wall Street Journal, people are real specialists at what they do, they will have spent their entire time working on oil, for instance, or one or the other particular specialism. The people they hire at the Financial Times have come to come to pep studying energy or oil, but from somewhere else, so they could bring an understanding of oil by by seeing how it related to other other areas. And she she called that smart, and I think you become smarter when you just have a breadth to your interests. And rather than narrowing yourself down to tighter specialism, that would be my advice.
Tom Ollerton 3:24
I struggle with that actually, because I listen to books a lot when I run, and I'm always trying to decide do I like read outside of the category or outside of my specialism and I have a specialism within automated creative like sales and marketing is my function. Do I just niche down on that? Or do I niche down on data driven marketing? Or do I just read about something completely different? I often find it difficult to know what to read to work draw inspiration from I guess a mix is the best but do you have any other advice to maybe not a student but just some advice to become a better data driven marketer? Do you have something that you find yourself sharing most often with your teams?
Jeremy Nye 4:04
So I really love drama. My brother Simon writes, TV shows and so on, and I didn't know why my mum had been an actress as a young woman. And so I have this I love watching plays and the quote I use most often at work to encourage people comes from the world of drama and how caring for people comes from understanding human motivations. So John York talks about why the characters in soap operas, say things like it's all about family when they're going to bump somebody off or do something they shouldn't. And they say something like that because it gives them it animates them. You know what they're doing this for. A same thing applies to the guy in Breaking Bad, Walter White is protecting his family. So once you understand what the motivation is of the character you're watching when you watch a drama And then they're your person, you will support them, even if they're doing something bad because you can relate to their motivation. And I think, in the world of where I work at the moment in food, but before that in television, I think we often thought that their motivations, the motivations of customers, or viewers with different from their actual motivation. So at all times, it's important to look for that deeper understanding of why people do what they do. If you don't know that, then they're dead to you. You can't relate to them, and you need to, you need to care for these people. So that's, and I think a lot of what we do we're working on is about customer closeness and feeling something for, for your consumer and not just not just observing them, I think that that's really important.
Tom Ollerton 5:55
So moving on now to your shiny new object, which is massively related, which is talking to people, which isn't particularly shiny or new. But in the run up to the recording, you felt that this was quite a new thing, because people stopped doing it. Can you tell us a bit more about why talking to people is your shiny new objects and why you think we need to do more of it when it comes to data driven marketing?
Jeremy Nye 6:16
Well, I think my this is, this is a sort of post COVID observation, but it's not just me, I mean, that there's, there's, there's a whole sub genre of books about the way in which society is becoming more atomized and lonely. The Lonely century by Noreena Hertz is one example. But I've got, you know, there's myriad books that talk about this phenomenon where our circles are getting narrower. And I think a lot of the research that we do is also very focused on individuals and talking to them as if they are individuals and not as people who sit within a within a community or a group of people. So I'm, I'm often asking when we, when we commission projects, this not be about what individuals are doing, but about how they, how they interact with other people. And I think that that applies more widely to the way in which we, we operate. The challenge of getting out and talking to somebody directly, observing them interacting with them, rather than simply looking at databases. I think as we become more... as everything's become more technologically driven, that in person interaction with people seems to have gone down. And, and it may be that that's, that's not a new thing. I mean, it's, it's ethnographic research has been around for decades, but it's still something I think, has been forgotten. And you do actually forget things. There's lots of examples of, of techniques that have fallen out of favor, and people have to recover them. And so they become new where they where they aren't, really.
Tom Ollerton 8:03
So how much of this do you think is due to the big tech players in the space? Right? You know, the Metas and the Googles of this world. So dominant commanding such a big spend, that's not their gig, right? They're not there to go, Hey, you should definitely go out and talk people do. So you should look at your your AdWords dashboard, or whatever it is. Are we been bullied here? Are we being muscled out of doing the soft stuff. That's your point around acting to understanding what actually drives people? Or is it laziness? Like why are we in this position where we've forgotten the core value of listening?
Jeremy Nye 8:34
Well, I suspect that there's been a long term trend towards debt use of databases, there's this suspicion actually of, of qualitative research. People are very rude about focus groups. And believe that the say do gap means that you can't believe anything people actually tell you and that what matters is, is observation. Well, I started out of observing, observing clicks, and that sort of that sort of observation. Well, I don't think that is genuine. That isn't genuine observation. It's observing people, but not in a way that actually matters. So yes, I mean, you have to be suspicious of what people say. I mean, that's, that's really important. Body language. tiny details of how people interact are truths about them that are important, but still, I think, yeah, I think I think there's a genuine general push from people like Google and others towards measuring everything and not from the value of one to one interaction and getting out of the office and meeting people. And I think that I think it is shiny. I mean, they're also in people's lives. People sit within particular bubbles, particular subgroups of people, and that is that's a bad idea because Is it means you, you have a completely miss misconception about your customers. And the quote I gave earlier is part of this, if you don't really understand them, then you don't care for them. And if you don't care for them, you're nowhere. You've got to care for, for somebody or population that exists on a spreadsheet. Because that's, that's not who they really are.
Tom Ollerton 10:32
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So you've created quite a difficult situation for the insight professional from a marketing perspective, because on one hand, you've got a focus group and they say and do the gap, you mentioned there. So you can get 20 people in a room and they can say stuff, but what will they actually do isn't the same. But on the flip side of things, you've got your spreadsheet or your database, and you've got clicks, and my favorite quote about data is data is the shadows of people and I can't remember who said it, but it's like, yes, someone clicked on this ad and bought a thing or didn't buy a thing or registered or whatever it was, but you don't understand anything about their motivation. Generally speaking, not always the case. But most of the time, if you're just running a straight PPC campaign or something like that, you're not going to get much more than volume of clicks. And what happened after that click. So you've got this kind of distrust between, say and do and then you've got this vagueness sometimes of ones and zeros data. So how do you bring those two things together?
Jeremy Nye 12:00
Well, I think you can often use the singular examples to tell the story that you've got on the on the data. I mean, we I'm trying to think of exactly. I remember, ages ago, I was working in India, and we were struggling to understand why people wouldn't watch our TV output. And I worked for Star Plus or Star TV. And, and we we knew that we had small audiences and everybody that we met, seemed to talk about the programs we watched. And then we we sat in a focus group, and this is sort of old fashioned projective technique is to, but sometimes it works. I'm not always using such old ideas. But anyway, so tell us what this TV channel would be like if it was an animal. And I remember them saying, you know, we're expecting this is a family entertainment church channel, by the way, we're expecting people to say, oh, a cat or a dog, whatever. And they said, it's a tiger. And that seeing the person say, in the way, they said it, you suddenly feel okay, our perception of this channel as a warm, friendly thing actually isn't true, people see, see the material that we're showing, as being quite threatening. And, and that was a cultural difference that emerged from that focus groups that you wouldn't have got from putting together a questionnaire. And it wasn't it wasn't explained by the data we were getting, it was something that you heard when you ask the most traditional projective technique, I think those that sort of response is very powerful. If you can get people to, to see that at the office, then that really helps in these days, you need to get you need to get video of things, because if you just have it as a quote on a on a deck, it doesn't work so much. So being able to observe people directly. And I would actually, the power of, of the explosion of zoom calls and other video conversations, has rapidly expanded the amount of visibility that you can give to your consumers customers. And that that's a relatively shiny new that's that started, I suppose during COVID, this sudden expansion. It existed before, but now, anybody everybody feels comfortable talking on video, and so you're not reduced to talking to the people that feel most comfortable doing it.
Tom Ollerton 14:37
Can you tell me a bit more about the Star story? They said you were like a tiger. And then what happened? What did you do with that? And so how does it play out?
Jeremy Nye 14:44
It told us that what we had been scheduling was not something that would ever be viewed by a family sitting together. So in India, and this is going back a while, 30 years ago, or not quite, but that sort of stretch of time. But we were sitting, we were sitting there in Hong Kong in our sort of middle class type of situation with between televisions, and you watch whatever you want to watch. In India at the time people had multi Gen households, generation households with a grandmother, who would be also watching the same program and the idea that they would watch something that had fathers, like simply show The Simpsons, and Bart being rude to Homer was something that would upset a traditional Indian household and be sufficient to put people off even putting your channel on. And that was a sort of cultural insight that that emerged after we probed about this, this tiger issue. We also ended up completely changing the language of the of the channel, because it was putting it in English had the same effect we would have not appreciated from the people that we talked to that being an English was a limitation. As soon as you start talking to people, you begin to begin to understand why even if they spoke English, they weren't going to walk through it if we're given the households shot. So that's, that's quite a long answer. But it's often little small things that capture a situation that's that you've sort of known about, but not hasn't crystallize it before.
And then so you're doing you're talking to people approach, and you've said it's opened up a lot with the likes of Zoom, and so on. So people who don't feel comfortable selling the room could do it. And you can expose your questions to a larger group of people. So then once you've spoken to someone, how do you then bring that into the digital world of marketing? Right? So how are you taking the soft stuff and as you say, changes in body language, subtle shifts in tonality that you know, the soft stuff that you're talking about? At some point, someone's got to do something in digital, right? Someone's got to film something, make something build an audience, how do you tie it up with the realities of the platforms and how they deliver content today?
It's about convincing colleagues that something is really important. I remember, many years later, I was at the BBC. And we were doing a project in Siberia and went to a focus group. And they talked about whether they thought the BBC was biased at the time and afterwards, we picked a couple of the participants and I went to one of their homes, and he was picked almost at random, but he he showed me on his computer, the way in which the broadcasts that was showing something different in Russian versus its its international service. And he pointed this up as something that he had a real problem with, it felt that it wasn't honest. Now, nowadays, you would have taken what he was saying, and videotaped it and shared that with people as a powerful example of how people aren't just consuming news, but actually challenging it and doing their own research to sort of verify things. And so I think it's more, it's not that you've, you've found something that didn't exist before, it's about having something in a format that will convince people so where I work, now we share clips, every day of engagements we've had with consumers, we're trying to, we're trying to boost the amount of unfiltered time people spend with consumers. I had this ambition that colleagues across the business would spend 1% of their time in unfiltered time with consumers, or other people that we that matter for our business 1% of a week, of a 37 and a half hour working week is 22 minutes. Most people don't have anything getting anywhere near that. And that's just 1% of your time. So a lot of it is pure exposure is trying to get people who live or spend their entire time staring at screens to get out and, or even if it's on a screen to sort of get beyond the databases and, and so on and just to see people's faces and hear something different.
Tom Ollerton 19:36
So you go for the 1% mission, where you are now how close you got to that?
Jeremy Nye 19:41
Nowhere near.
Tom Ollerton 19:43
1% of 1% or how's that?
Jeremy Nye 19:46
Well, I don't want to assume that other people aren't having conversation, getting out there. I have been told off before for accusing people of being in a bubble. They say, we're not in a bubble, we meet lots of different people. Well this morning, I'm sitting in a, I live in Judd Street, which is near Kings Cross in centre of London and I've been here for a year, my partner and I moved here about a year before I realized that Judd street sounds just like Just Eat, which is the company where I work and I, ever since I've been, I've been on a mission to, to encourage the whole business to, to have a sort of just street campaign and getting off screens and getting into into streets. And, and because that's, that's the real world that our customers are in, that's where the food is that they have delivered and so on. So that's become a sort of mantra. But no, nowhere near 1%. I think people are sort of surprised that that 1% is 22 minutes, I was actually it's 22 and a half minutes. In 2022 I was saying: in 2022 spend 22 minutes a week. And then I upgraded that as it's 22 and a half minutes to 1% is 23 minutes anyways, it's less than 1%. Now we'll be we'll be represented by the year that we're in 2024. I'm rambling, but you get the idea. Now we got we got to boost it far more than we than we have at the moment. It's it's a fraction of that.
Tom Ollerton 21:17
Jeremy, I love that you market your own insight initiatives inside a marketing team. Just Street and you know, moving from minutes to percent is something that is it's hilarious. Unfortunately, we are at the end now. I have so many more questions to ask you maybe another time. But if someone wants to get in touch with you about talking to people, or anything else that we've talked about, how would you like them to do that? Where would you like them to do that? And what makes a message that you will actually reply to?
Jeremy Nye 21:47
Even you can email me, that's probably the easiest route. I'm occasionally on Twitter, but I'd rather not, people access me that way. So Jeremy dot Nye at justeattakeaway.com. Really, it's not the most snappy, we call ourselves jet internally, but I think we probably don't own the rights to use that for our email addresses. So jeremy.nye@justeattakeaway.com.
Tom Ollerton 22:11
Jeremy, thank you so much for your time.
Jeremy Nye 22:13
You're welcome. Thank you, Tom.
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