Episode 230 / Sorin Patilinet / Mars / Senior Director, Marketing Effectiveness
How Neuroscience Can Help Increase Marketing Effectiveness
As the Senior Director for Marketing Effectiveness at Mars, Sorin Patilinet gets to combine his interest in data (as a trained engineer) with his love of advertising (which he developed in the early 1990s in post-communist Romania). His Shiny New Object is neuro marketing - using neuroscience learnings to understand what makes creative its most effective possible.
For Sorin, advertising was a window to the Western world in the early 1990s. Having grown up in communist Romania, the first few years of free access to international advertising represented a huge contrast and an opportunity to learn about the world, while discovering a completely new passion.
After training as an engineer, Sorin decided to switch to working in marketing and never looked back. He looks after marketing effectiveness at Mars, where he has begun to use more and more learnings from neuroscience in evaluating how well the brand’s ads are doing.
His best investment of time and energy has been writing his own blog - the Marketing Engineer. It’s offered him an opportunity to crystallise his own thoughts and to network with fantastic people beyond Mars, and even within the company.
On the podcast, find out how neuroscience can be used to increase marketing effectiveness and hear how Sorin developed his love of ads with all-night ad-watching festivals. And, if you want to check out the Night of the Ad Eaters, it’s here: https://adeater.com/
Concerned about hitting those Q4 marketing goals?
Most marketers are feeling an increase in pressure to deliver marketing efficiency by the end of the year. Your budgets for 2024 depend on it, and so does this and next year’s success. At Automated Creative, we’ve got solutions to help you take control of your end-of-year campaigns.
Developed together with the World Federation of Advertisers and our clients at Brown-Forman and Mars, our white paper “Compounding Creative: An Urgent Q4 Wake-up Call” sets out the biggest mistakes marketers might be making with their Q4 campaigns and shows you actionable steps you can take today to boost results by the end of the year.
Read it here and get in touch to see how we can help increase creative effectiveness.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Sorin Patilinet 0:00
The average person doesn't care about you and your constant internal debates about the color of the background of your six second Bumper ads get over this the moment you realize that you'll be a better marketeer.
Tom Ollerton 0:19
Jobs in ad tech. Are you looking for a new role in the industry? Head over to jobsinadtech.com. Today, employers attract top talent for as little as 50 pounds per open job role. Jobs in AD tech.com supporting the ad tech industry because people matter.
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of the creative effectiveness ad tech platform, automated creative, and it is my absolute pleasure and privilege to record this podcast and this week is no different. I'm on a call with Sorin Patilinet, who is senior director of marketing effectiveness at Mars. Sorin, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do. Could you give us a bit of background?
Speaker 1 1:09
Certainly. Thank you, Tom, for the intro. It's an honor to be here. And thank you for the invite. Who is Sorin, I'm a Romanian I was born in Bucharest, back in the 80s. I studied engineering, I'm very proud of my engineering academic background. And from day one of my career, I started working in marketing, because I love advertising. So this, this has taken me to first to British American Tobacco, where I I lead brands from a brand marketing position. And then following a career in marketing, I decided that I needed to get a little bit more under the hood, bringing my analytical thinking into the marketing space. So I took over, I would say a CMI, or an insights role that that's all about marketing effectiveness at Mars, doing a global role across all our divisions, Mars Petcare Mars snacking and Mars food, currently based in Brussels in Belgium for the last 13 years, happily married, two amazing kids. And very happy life I would say.
Tom Ollerton 2:29
And they're both sick at the minute. So we wish your kids to be very much recovered by the time this podcast goes out.
Sorin Patilinet 2:36
They will get better, they will get better. Yeah.
Tom Ollerton 2:39
So you said something that not very many people say on this podcast, which is I love advertising, which is fantastic. What do you love about advertising? Because that sounds like it goes beyond your day job. Is that right?
Sorin Patilinet 2:49
I think I have my dream job. I think I don't think I've ever imagined going to work. Watching ads, talking about ads, measuring the effectiveness of ads, and then guiding people how to make better ads. And from a position of an engineer that's a little bit strange, but I can back why I love advertising. I was, as I said before, I was born in communist Romania, where for those of you that were not born in under the, let's say, the Soviet umbrella. Our TV schedules were about two hours per night, we had only one TV station and the advertising that you could get in those in the 80s was absolutely ridiculous. I mean, the kind of products they were advertising, the limited assortment of everything that we had, there were no western goods, there was nothing really shiny, there was no shiny object there. So as I grew up my, my experience with advertising was water poor. Now fast forward to 1989 when the revolution arrived, immediately after there was an explosion of advertising in Romania, advertising became a window to the Western world. Global and Western brands started to come in. And we were super thirsty to drink from that Kool Aid. And we are so thirsty that my favorite event at that time was a and night in a cinema where you start watching ads. It's called the night of ad eaters from Jean Marie Boursicot, a French guy that basically selected all amazing ads from all over the world. And you go into a cinema at 9pm and you're there in the morning watching ads eating popcorn and basically enjoying this window to the Western world.
Tom Ollerton 4:56
Just adverts all night?
Sorin Patilinet 4:58
Just ads all night, no movie.
Tom Ollerton 5:00
You're joking.
Sorin Patilinet 5:00
No. And I think it's still going on. I mean, I a couple of years ago, I saw it on my Instagram feed that they were doing it in Brussels. I tried it after I started working in advertising. And it felt a little bit different. I think everything has a time and space. For me it was at the right moment of time, it made me fall in love with advertising. And I don't know how. I'll actually searchfor it. And I'll try to see whether I can send you a link.
Tom Ollerton 5:30
I've never heard of that, sounds like amazing and awful at the same time.
Sorin Patilinet 5:36
Awful? No, it wasn't awful.
Tom Ollerton 5:39
Now if someone said you could tell me going to sit in cinema and watch DFS ads from 9pm to 9am. I don't think I could deal with it. But it's I'm sure... that is absolutely fascinating. So moving on what has been the best investment of your own time, your own energy or your own money and your career.
Sorin Patilinet 5:58
I don't need to think twice here. Without a doubt, launching my marketing, blog, engineering marketing, where you which you can check at sorinp.com, was the best investment of my time, energy and very little money that I did in the last three years, three to four years. It helped me a lot. It helped me It helped me get on this podcast. First of all, it helped me crystallize how I think about marketing and the topics I talk on a daily basis by by doing writing about those topics. It helped me connect with fantastic people outside of my company in the industry, but also it helped me meet people in Mars that I would have not had the chance to meet otherwise. Some call it an outside in strategy being you're, you're present outside the company, and then there are some benefits and some internal benefits to that strategy. So So yeah, I think that's my biggest investment. And I'm certain that my next professional challenge will arrive because I started writing this blog. So we'll call you in a couple of years to let you know.
Tom Ollerton 7:11
I'm just flicking through right now. So tell me about the process because this fascinates me: anyone that can write a huge amount of respect for but anybody can find the time to write I just I don't know how you do it. So I mean, like how often do you publish? It's not obvious from this do you give it a you like, right, I'm gonna do a blog every week or every month like you've done a couple three since April or something like that.
Sorin Patilinet 7:34
Yeah, like like every blog that I sort of started following in marketing, it started in the COVID pandemic times I mean, everybody was publishing, doing something different. I decided to write a blog and I set myself the goal to write a post per week. I think I did it for the first 30 weeks but then slowly life took over. My daughter was born in the first day of the lockdown so that....
Tom Ollerton 8:03
That will do it.
Sorin Patilinet 8:06
But I'm envious of me two years ago when I was able to write on a weekly basis today I struggle with with actually coming up with the right topics there's a lot of temptation to go to Chad GPT and then come up with a list of topics to write about, but I'm trying to not not really go that way because I...
Tom Ollerton 8:35
Why not?
Sorin Patilinet 8:36
I'm not doing this for clicks for likes, for any kind of let's say monetization I'm just doing this as a window to myself into how I think and I don't think that Chat GPT knows me, Sorin Patilinet, as well.
Tom Ollerton 8:53
Well you can train it now it's got that new feature where you give it like 5000 words about yourself I find it quite good actually you can you go like I, on the leadership team of our business called Automated Creative if we do this creative effectiveness and so then when it gives you the answers you don't need to keep on telling it which I quite like but anyway it's not it's far from perfect. Anyway, so we're derailing ourselves here so that is great work and I'm looking forward to digging into the blog some of the titles look right up my street.
So we talked about an investment of your time, energy and then some money but from a marketing advice perspective from a marketing tip, what is that golden nugget of advice that you find yourself sharing most often?
Sorin Patilinet 9:40
So when it comes to marketing, this is something I always tell my colleagues in marketing and also outside marketing. The average person doesn't care about you and your constant internal debates about the color of the background of your six second Bumper ads. So, get over this, I think the moment you realize that you will be a better marketeer, the moment you realize that people out there aren't thinking about you or your brand, you will be in a better spot.
Tom Ollerton 10:14
So that seems obvious and evident to me. Why do people struggle with that?
Sorin Patilinet 10:20
I don't know, I, I sometimes feel we've, we take our jobs too seriously. I mean, we, we we're not here really to save the world. I mean, we are here to make people smile, laugh, feel better at the end, at the end of watching a piece of content than they felt at the beginning. And we should treat we should treat that process with humbleness. We we've created this kind of bubble in which we live. I mean, we, we we go to Cannes and if you ask my friends, they have no clue what Cannes is. And we think that Cannes is the best thing since bread came sliced, we we read adage and drum as if people would read those magazines they don't. And, and then LinkedIn helps us create that bubble even further. Sometimes it's, it's nice, it could help you in your career and so on. But it's not really it creates a different perspective than the real world perspective, I would say. So I would say be humble.
Tom Ollerton 11:26
So we are at the halfway stage. And we're going to talk now about your shiny new object which is neuro marketing. So I have a beginner's understanding of what neuro marketing is, can you help explain to the audience what your marketing actually is and why it is your shiny new object?
Sorin Patilinet 11:46
Definitely. But first disclaimer, I mean, I'm not a neuroscientist, I'm not trained in the study of the brain. And while I have been exposed to techniques, amazing people professors about the topic, I don't consider myself an expert in the field, because it's a field that so, so broad. So, neuro marketing is basically applied neuro sciences, to, to the decisions that you have to make in the marketing process and neurosciences is simply the study of the brain, how different areas of the brain get triggered, and how different areas of the brain represent different kinds of emotions states of the brain and so on. Neurosciences is not there to basically support neuro marketing, neuroscience is, is there as a medical kind of field of study. But the applications to neuro marketing have have fascinated me, ever since I, I've been exposed to them in, in a Nielsen lab, I still remember that moment, eight years ago, when we did our first ad test, which looked different than asking people whether they like our ad, it really looked at the, at the way their brains were perceiving different changes in in visual sound and, and branding. So that's kind of what got me hooked and I tried ever since to understand more about neuro marketing and to, to make it more to break to engineer it and to make it more scalable to our needs in the ad testing work.
Tom Ollerton 13:43
This episode of the shiny new object podcast is brought to you in partnership with MAD//Fest whether it's live in London or streamed online to the global marketing community, you can always expect the distinctive and daring blend of fast paced content startup innovation pitches and unconventional entertainment from MAD//fest events, you'll find me causing trouble on stage recording live versions of this podcast and sharing a beer with the nicest and most influential people in marketing, check it out at www.madfestlondon.com.
Tell me about that scalable piece. So I've always been a bit skeptical about locking 12 people in an FMRI machine and showing them some ads and making decisions off the back of it like, how do you make sure you've got a big enough sample set and get the scale that you need to be confident that it's telling you the right thing?
Sorin Patilinet 14:37
So I think you're right, I think in lab neuro marketing studies have not really taken off because the model doesn't really work. I mean, you're right, you need to bring 30 people because that was the sample size that we we thought is the right one. But of course I mean getting 100 people or 300, people would have exploded your budget. So we settled on 30 into a lab, make them make them watch content without knowing that they watch ads and then observe their, their brain response was not something easy to do. And the industry had to be transformed by something. And COVID was the thing that transformed that industry. All of a sudden, we've, we had no more access to the labs, we had no way to basically continue our research and the thing that we've been asking for our research partners to do basically to look at mobile to look at digital first small screens on the go in at home became a necessity. So when people when when academics talk about neuro marketing approaches to advertising, yes, they talk mostly about EEG skin conductivity. I don't know if you want to go too in depth into the techniques, but I could I could geek out about this, but it's EEG skin conductivity, facial tracking, and various others. With if you have to go only on mobile, if you have to get out of the lab, you're basically reliant on either in house devices or your webcam, which is a good window to part of the response you can have to advertising.
Tom Ollerton 16:34
So what was the solution? I'm kind of guessing here that it's webcam based stuff, as you say, is it showing people because one thing you said that was so obvious, but makes total sense is show people ads when they don't think they're watching ads. And I know there's some solutions out there where they create a false environment of what Instagram might be like. And here's a ton of just flick through this feed and ads get shown. And then you track the response to those ads. But that's a that's an unreal environment, because obviously, it's a sample size of people just watching a fake version of the internet. Is that the best solution or what have been the innovations recently?
Sorin Patilinet 17:12
I think that's a good enough solution. On the other flip of the coin, bringing people into a lab and telling them to watch something that's really skewed mean, or putting them in FMRI machine, it's really really introducing a lot of different biases. But what how we approach it at Mars is that we've tested hundreds of ads in labs, and tried to understand what correlates with sales, out of the numerous signals that you can get from the brain. And I think we were lucky because we got a lot of trust in, engaged attention in distraction and in positive emotions, because they were quite good predictors from the for sales impact or for business outcome impact. And luckily enough, those KPIs can be measured through through facial you didn't really need the a, an EEG or something more sophisticated to do that. You just needed to up the sample, you just needed to basically accept some lower, let's say, parameters of quality, because there's a lot of noise when you move from a lab to mobile webcam. But the solution that we came up with is I would say it's great for Mars, and it's good enough for testing our content.
Tom Ollerton 18:43
So what do you test is it scamps or fully made TVCs? Or, or different variants? What are you obviously can't give away the crown jewels here, but what are you able to test and then what do you do with that data specifically?
Sorin Patilinet 18:59
So we've been building our own ad testing solution called Ace on the back of our history with neurosciences or neuro marketing and Ace is measuring what I said before: attention, distraction and emotions. And over the last three years, my team has tested over 1800 finished ads or almost finished ads providing input second by second recommendation on how to improve responses to have a better chance of success. It takes days is index relatively expensive. And I would say half of the time it was used as a check the box exercise which is not really my intent, and half the time it was used to basically improve further a video creative asset that goes on TV goes on YouTube goes on various other digital platforms.
Tom Ollerton 20:08
What is the data that you give in order to improve? Are you like that copy line's terrible, or there's not enough dogs in this first five seconds? So what are there? What are the levers that you could go back to the creative and say your creative didn't drive enough attention or the right kind of emotion, because help me understand how you would feed back to a creative who probably doesn't want to hear it?
Sorin Patilinet 20:30
Yeah, the most common feedback that we get is, ads have a high confusion or high distraction. Because we're trying to cram too many objects in a scene or we're trying to tell too many storylines in six seconds, or in 10 seconds. So and we see that watching the second by second attention and distraction curves. People don't get it, they basically lost. They're basically looking at the ad through the facial data, and they have no emotion basic, they're blank faced. And our main recommendation is make it simple. Reduce, I don't know, show just the feeling scene rather than showing the feeding scene and the dog jumping around. So those kinds of, I would say, simple things would would be our some of our recommendation. But it's of course, it's different case by case. But, again, it's not rocket science. For me, advertising doesn't have a template. But we often overcomplicated the thing.
Tom Ollerton 21:36
And are you able to feed back on messaging? Or is it visual? Because you're saying they just show the feeling seen and not the dog jumping? That strikes me is like people are responding to that visually? Whereas how do you isolate whether the voiceover was the thing that was confusing or not?
Sorin Patilinet 21:55
That's a good point. I don't think we at the end of the day, I think research is a is a tool that helps the marketer, make decisions, there's nothing more than that. I think any research that tries to basically give you on the plate, everything you need to do, is probably lying a little bit. So we don't I don't want to discourage my colleagues to think and to make judgments. So therefore, you will not have all the answers and going back to the neurosciences, because I think that's the topic you wanted to explore. It was fascinating for me ever since I went into this field, how little we know about neurosciences and how little we know about the brain. I've started a partnership with the Wharton Neuroscience Institute, that my professor Michael Platt, to basically get at the edge of the research on on neurosciences. And we put our we basically now attempting to run brand equity, just to read brain signals related to brand equity, studying studies, how the brains are how are brands perceived in the brain of people. And what impressed me is that, yes, you get a good read, you get different areas of the brain lighting up and so on. But the interpretation of those signals is still not there yet, we still are not 100% sure that if some certain area of the brain lights up or is more used, that precisely means exactly that thing. So it's a it's a work in progress field, I would say,
Tom Ollerton 23:47
Sorin, unfortunately, we are at the end of the podcast. So if someone wants to reach out to you to discuss any of the things that we've covered today, where would you like them to do that and what makes a great outreach message to you?
Sorin Patilinet 24:01
My first idea was they should reach out on LinkedIn. And they should try to be genuine and not try to sell me a solution to a problem I don't have. But if they probably mentioned something around neurosciences, something about advertising in communist times or the night of ad eaters. They will get my attention.
Tom Ollerton 24:27
Fantastic. Sorry. Thank you so much for your time.
Sorin Patilinet 24:29
Thank you, Tom. Thank you for inviting me.
Subscribe to the ‘Shiny New Object’ Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and Soundcloud.